Bicycling, Daily Kos, Incentives, Martin Luther King Jr.

Daily Kos: Armstrong and Woods: Capitalism’s Poster Boys

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Daily Kos: Armstrong and Woods: Capitalism’s Poster Boys.

Between parts I and II of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Lance Armstrong, an ad ran on OWN that included a clip of Armstrong acknowledging losing 75 million dollars in one day due to sponsors abandoning him followed by Armstrong noting his lowest moment. The sequence suggests that Armstrong was saying his loss of millions was his lowest moment, but when the full part II ran, Armstrong, in fact, identified removing himself from LIVESTRONG as the low moment.

But the point of an ad is to tease, not reflect truth.

For many cycling enthusiasts like me, the dark underbelly of professional cycling and Armstrong have been no revelation. For the many innocent people trampled by the Armstrong stampede—such as cycling journalist Neil Browne and the well publicized Frankie and Betsy Andreu—the Armstrong confession has opened the door for some vindication of their honesty, but unlikely is that the tremendous damage done to their livelihoods can ever be repaid.

Within hours of the Armstrong interview being aired, details of a book on Armstrong’s disgraceful fall were announced for a June 2013 publication, to be followed by a film.

And herein lies one thing that is receiving almost no public discussion: As long as the media, the USADA, and the public keep the gaze on Armstrong alone, the culture within which Armstrong flourished, the culture within which Armstrong was created will remain unexamined, unscathed, and free to consume.

Today among the rubble of Armstrong’s machine, Capitalism remains unchecked, and many now line up once again to profit off Armstrong as they did during his rise to false King of Cycling.

continue reading at Daily Kos

Teacher Evaluation, VAM

VAM: A Primer

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Education reform has existed at some policy and public levels since at least the 1890s in the U.S. The current reform movement grounded in state-based accountability began in the early 1980s with a Nation at Risk, and then was nationalized in 2001 with No Child Left Behind.

In the first decades of the recent accountability era, standards and high-stakes testing were implemented and periodically revised at the state level with the primary focus being on student and school accountability. The current cycle, however, has seen an increase in policies and practices aimed at teacher accountability and increasing teacher quality—despite a solid research base showing that teacher quality constitutes only 10-15% of measurable student outcomes (test data).

The focus on increasing teacher quality and accountability has included both experiments and policies with value added methods (VAM) of determining teacher quality in order to label, rank, sort, and retain or dismiss teachers. VAM claims to isolate teacher quality through pre- and post-testing methods that seek to identify teacher quality and isolate that from the other factors reflected in test scores.

Before policy-makers and stakeholders in education commit to reforming teacher evaluation and retention, foundational questions must be addressed, and then the current facts about VAM must be acknowledged.

First, the foundational questions:

(1) What evidence exists identifying teacher quality as a primary or significant problem facing a school or district? Where, then, does teacher quality rank as a priority for a school, district, or state in terms of cost effectiveness in committing funding to the reform?

(2) Are all elements of implementing VAM at any percentage to the revised teacher evaluation process valid for determining teacher quality? In other words, what measures are taken to account for using student test scores (designed to reflect student learning, and not designed to reflect teacher quality) as data points for teacher quality?

(3) Have the teaching and learning environments for students’ home and schools been addressed to insure equitable teaching and learning environments in which determining teacher quality becomes valid?

Next, what is the current knowledge base about VAM*?:

(1) Including VAM at any percentage in reformed teacher evaluation models is currently in the experimental phase. Data and the validity of including VAM are being tested, but almost no researchers currently claim VAM (at any percentage but certainly at high percentages such as 40-50%) to be ready for widespread implementation.

(2) VAM models for labeling teacher quality are highly unstable. Teacher rankings tend to shift with new populations of students.

(3) Researchers agree that VAM is unlikely ever to be completely stable; thus, it is possible that VAM will never be a practical or fair element in teacher evaluation, particularly at the individual teacher level or in any single year.

(4) The statistical and practical requirements to isolate teacher quality in student test scores pose tremendous costs in time and funding that also may prove to be not cost effective in the context of most school systems’ priorities. In order to implement a fair and equitable teacher evaluation system that includes VAM at any percentage, states must create and implement pre- and post-tests to all students in all teachers’ courses, creating a new and costly commitment to education funding.

(5) Decades of research on high-stakes testing have shown many negative unintended consequences to accountability measures focusing on students and schools; including VAM in high-stakes accountability policies focusing on teachers is likely to have similar unintended negative consequences such as discouraging high-quality teachers from working with high-needs populations of students.

Thus, policy-makes and stakeholders are strongly cautioned to consider education reform priorities, the experimental nature of VAM, and the current knowledge base on VAM before committing tax dollars to either field testing or implementing new teacher evaluation policies built in any way on VAM.

* See a recent review of teacher evaluation reform for links and citations to numerous research studies on VAM.

Education, Equity, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., No Excuses Reform, Ralph Ellison, Social Context Reform

MLK Day Readings [updated]

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“The Drum Major Instinct,” Martin Luther King Jr. [AUDIO]

“Final Words of Advice,” “Where Do We Go From Here?” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“The MLK Imperative in an Era of ‘No Excuses'” — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Censored

“‘They’re All Our Children'” — P. L. Thomas @ AlterNet

“The Polonius Chronicles: The Invisible Hand and the King Imperative” — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Censored

“Organizations, No, Community, Yes: MLK Jr. Day 2012” — P. L. Thomas @ Daily Kos

“21st Century Segregation: Inverting King’s Dream” — P. L. Thomas @ Truthout

“Diversity and the Rise of Majority-Minority Schools” — P. L. Thomas @ Truthout

James Baldwin on Education (video)

“What These Children Are Like” — Ralph Ellison

“A Talk to Teachers” — James Baldwin

CCSS, Education, Educational Research, No Excuses Reform, Rhee, Social Context Reform, Standards, Teacher Evaluation, VAM

Assembled Pieces Reveal Disturbing Reform Picture

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Every time I write about Michelle Rhee, as I noted in a recent post, I feel like I should reenact the shower and wire-brush scene in Silkwood to purge myself of participating in the ceaseless media attention disproportionately afforded Rhee while the voices, daily efforts, and expertise of K-12 practitioners are not just ignored, but marginalized and even demonized.

So it is with a shared reservation (see Jose Vilson’s excellent post) that I once again wade into the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) debate—not to rehash my unequivocal opposition to the CCSS movement, but to offer a brief look at the picture revealed once all the pieces of the corporate/ “no excuses” reform movement puzzle are assembled. First, then, let me identify the primary pieces of that puzzle:

CCSS

National high-stakes tests built on CCSS

Reformed teacher evaluation driven by VAM-based teacher ranking

Teach for America

Charter schools

These various pieces are an effective strategy with a common thread because separately each reform element creates a focal point of debate; for an educator or researcher to challenge any one of these policies is a seemingly endless task since the reform agenda is being set by those with political and financial power. Refuting the need for new standards, much less the flaws with implementing those new standards, immediately positions educators as reactionary and allows the self-appointed reformers to characterize those challenges as being for the status quo and against reform and accountability.

For example, teachers in my home state of South Carolina who have spoken against VAM-style teacher evaluation reform have been publicly labeled by the state superintendent of education, Mick Zais, as trying to avoid being held accountable for their work.

The picture these reform pieces show is not a patchwork of evidence-based and innovative strategies for improving public education, but a carefully unified process of infusing even more deeply the power of high-stakes standardized testing into the fabric of public schools. Look beneath any of the elements listed above and find the allure of new and better tests, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2010) celebrated himself:

Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time–and so have America’s teachers, parents, students, and school leaders. Today is the day that marks the beginning of the development of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America’s schoolchildren. Today marks the start of Assessments 2.0. And today marks one more milestone, testifying to the transformational change now taking hold in our nation’s schools under the courageous leadership and vision of state and district officials.

Duncan’s entusiasm doesn’t stop there:

This new generation of mathematics and English language arts assessments will cover all students in grades three through eight and be used at least once in high school in every state that chooses to use them. In addition, the PARCC consortium will develop optional performance tasks to inform teachers about the development of literacy and mathematics knowledge and skills in kindergarten through second grade.

I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education. For the first time, millions of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers will know if students are on-track for colleges and careers–and if they are ready to enter college without the need for remedial instruction. Yet that fundamental shift–re-orienting K-12 education to extend beyond high school graduation to college and career-readiness–will not be the only first here.

For the first time, many teachers will have the state assessments they have longed for– tests of critical thinking skills and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills but support good teaching in the classroom.

And what provides the basis upon which Duncan makes these claims?:

Yet existing assessments are only part of the problem. An assessment system and curriculum can only be as good as the academic standards to which the assessments and curriculum are pegged. We want teachers to teach to standards–if the standards are rigorous, globally competitive, and consistent across states. Unfortunately, in the last decade, numerous states dummied down their academic standards and assessments. In effect, they lied to parents and students. They told students they were proficient and on track to college success, when they were not even close.

The Common Core standards developed by the states, coupled with the new generation of assessments, will help put an end to the insidious practice of establishing 50 different goalposts for educational success. In the years ahead, a child in Mississippi will be measured against the same standard of success as a child in Massachusetts.

Even if we account for the sort of soaring rhetoric associated with political discourse, Duncan clearly envisions policy that must include a staggering and unprecedented commitment to testing that rises to the level of parody. But for all stakeholders in public education, the results of all the policies linked to standardized testing must include a brave new world of testing that boggles the mind in terms of the amount of time and funding required to design, field test, implement, and manage pre- and post-tests aligned with CCSS for every single course and teacher year after year after year.

As Yong Zhao has detailed carefully in an exchange with Marc Tucker, commitments to education reform policy linked to CCSS and the high-stakes tests built on these new standards are not anything new, are not justified by any clearly identified problems or needs, and are not consistent with the larger democratic goals of universal public education:

[L]et me restate my main point: it is impossible, unnecessary, and harmful for a small group of individuals to predetermine and impose upon all students the same set of knowledge and skills and expect all students progress at the same pace (if the students don’t, it is the teachers’ and schools’ fault). I am not against standards per se for good standards can serve as a useful guide. What I am against is Common and Core, that is, the same standards for all students and a few subjects (currently math and English language arts) as the core of all children’s education diet. I might even love the Common Core if they were not common or core.

Classroom teachers, educational researchers, and educational historians have offered and continue to offer a clear and valid voice that Duncan’s claims and the resulting policies are deeply flawed, but as Brian Jones asks, “If all of this testing is so bad for teaching and learning, why is it spreading?” According to Jones, the answer detailed in the full picture is clear:

As the tests spread and the consequences associated with them rise, absurdities abound….

The shift toward using student data to evaluate teachers is part of a larger trend of restructuring public education to align it with the rest of the economy. As one of the last heavily unionized groups of workers in the country, teachers stand in the way of privatization. And to the extent that they are self-governed, self-motivated and enjoy professional autonomy, teachers are a ‘bad’ example for other workers.

Even though it may not make for great teaching or genuine learning, high-stakes standardized testing is spreading because it is the perfect tool for controlling and disciplining teachers–and for training the next generation to internalize the priorities of the system.

The attempt to quantify and track every aspect of an employee’s ‘performance’ is not new.

Standardized testing—the inevitable consequence of commitments to CCSS, reformed teacher evaluation, and each piece of the corporate reform puzzle—combines the veneer of objectivity with the power of perpetual control over schools, teachers, and students, what Foucault characterized as “…entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification” (p. 200):

The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible….

[T]he art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor precisely at repression….It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum toward which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals….The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institution compares, differentiates, hierachizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes….

The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish….

In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of their being constantly seen…that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power…holds them in a mechanism of objectification. (pp. 177, 170, 197, 199)

Now, in the context of whether or not the U.S. is committed to universal public education as a central element of a commitment to democracy and individual liberty, and then whether or not education reform is seeking that foundational goal, time has come to set aside the puzzle-piece-by-puzzle-piece dismantling of the corporate reform agenda and confront directly the central flaw with the picture itself, as Jones acknowledges:

The solution to this dilemma is not to develop better tests, but to tear down the whole enterprise of high-stakes standardized assessment and replace it with authentic assessments that are organic to the process of real teaching and learning.

In sum, the attempt to quantify learning and teaching in a standardized manner is extremely expensive; takes up weeks and, in some places, months of time in school; narrows the curriculum; undermines the intrinsic joy of learning; and leads to a culture of corruption and cheating. As a measure of student learning, standardized tests are an extremely limited instrument. As a measure of teacher effectiveness, they are even more flawed.

Measuring, labeling, ranking, and then sorting students, teachers, and schools is an anti-democratic process, a dehumanizing process, and a mechanism for control. At the center of this process being antithetical to both our democracy and our faith in education is the fundamental flaw of high-stakes standardized testing.

Do many of the puzzle pieces of the corporate reform puzzle misuse standardized tests and the data drawn from those tests? Yes.

But we must not fall prey to the simplistic claim that the problem is how tests are used and not the tests themselves.

The ugly full picture of corporate reform shows that the problem is testing. Period.

Teaching

Teaching Not Brain Surgery

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Teaching is not brain surgery.

Teaching is far more complex and daunting than brain surgery.

Brain surgeons are rightfully well paid and genuinely respected by our culture. Brain surgeons also command a great deal of professional autonomy.

Brain surgeons work one-on-one with their patients, and then conduct their brain surgery in highly controlled conditions that support well their ability to perform their surgery effectively. During that surgery, their patients are sedated, and thus completely compliant.

Brain surgeons are often successful because of their expertise, but if that surgery fails due to conditions beyond the surgeon’s control (genetics, disease, etc.), the surgeon is not held accountable.

Teachers, however, receive modest incomes, but have seen that income shrink recently through no fault of their own. Teachers are currently being battered publicly, although many teachers do receive genuine appreciation from many students and their parents. Historically, teachers have had little professional autonomy and that has been eroded significantly during the past thirty years of standards and high-stakes testing accountability.

Teaching and learning conditions vary widely across the U.S. with the schools serving the highest needs students having the teaching and learning conditions least conducive to education.

Teachers face 25, 35, 45, and more students at a time, and never have any guarantee that students are fully engaged with their learning. When conditions beyond the control of the teacher and students outside and inside the school make learning nearly impossible, teachers and students are still held solely responsibly for learning outcomes.

So it is quite obvious that teaching is not brain surgery.

But it is also obvious that if we genuinely valued teaching and learning, and then addressed the conditions of teaching and learning that would make both possible, teaching may someday be as manageable as brain surgery.

Educational Research, EduSanity, NEPC, No Excuses Reform, Social Context Reform

Beware Reports Claiming “No Excuses”

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As compelling as “miracle” schools and “no excuses” ideologies remain in political and public discourse, careful and evidence-based examinations of both repeatedly show that the rhetoric is a mask for corporate-style reform agendas that ignore and perpetuate inequity—instead of confronting inequity.

See this review from NEPC [see press release at Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice]:

REVIEW OF FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION
Reviewed By
Mark Paige
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
January 2013

Summary of Review

This Public Agenda report profiles nine high-poverty schools in Ohio that the authors believe have exhibited “sustained success.” It first lists 11 commonly accepted attributes they assert are demonstrated across the profiled schools. The report then offer s six general recommendations for other schools to achieve and sustain success, although the connection between the attributes and the recommendations is unclear. How these “key attributes” and subsequent recommendations were derived from the interviews is not specified. The school selection criteria suggests sample bias. Six of the nine schools were from a state “schools of promise” list and three were not. Four of the schools’ poverty levels were near the state average, belying the high-poverty claim in the report’s title. The report’s biggest deficiency is that, while it is presented as addressing equity needs, and the interviewees pointed out that poverty related factors must be addressed, the recommendations fail to propose remedies or explicitly address these factors. This omission puts the report precariously close to the discredited “no excuses” genre. The common sense nature of the recommendations will likely be found acceptable to many readers, but the proposals are not sufficiently grounded in either the study’s own data or in the larger body of research. In sum, these shortcomings marginalize the work’s usefulness in advancing school reform and educational equity.

Note “The Delusional Contradictions of ‘No Excuses’ Reform and Poverty,” P. L. Thomas, EduSanity

October 10, 2012

EduSanity is pleased to share a piece from our first invited guest writer, Dr. P.L. Thomas from Furman University. Thomas’ writing has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Times, and pretty much everywhere else. He will lecture at the University of Arkansas on October 18th and brings an important message about poverty and education and how specifically, the concepts are intertwined.

***

There’s a haunting lyrics in The National’s “Daughters of the Soho Riots” (Alligator): “How can anybody know/How they got to be this way.”

The question speaks, although not intentionally or directly, to the arrogance at the core of the “No Excuses” education reform claim as it addresses poverty. Like the failed two-party political system in the U.S., the education reform agenda is mired in delusion and negligence—delusion from the “No Excuses” Reformers (NER) and negligence by the progressive status quo of public education. The critical and radical Social Context Reform (SCR) voice remains primarily marginalized and silenced.

Social Context Reform, in fact, is captured succinctly by Martin Luther King Jr. in hisFinal Words of Advice: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”

And this represents as well the foundational source of the delusion perpetuated by NER who hold the political power (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan), the wealth (Bill Gates), and the media spotlight (Michelle Rhee) that overwhelm SCR. Let’s, then, consider NER delusions.

• Is the U.S. a meritocracy? For the NER, the answer is yes, but the evidence reveals otherwise. In society and in schools, people and children tend to remain in the disadvantage or advantage of their births. The U.S. is distinctly not a country that rewards merit, but the NER speak with and to this myth in order, ironically, to maintain the status quo of privilege and austerity in the country and its schools.

• Is poverty destiny? A rallying slogan for NER is “poverty is not destiny,” but again this saying ignores that poverty is destiny, just as affluence is destiny. Further, NER have directly claimed that a child’s ZIP code does not determine that child’s opportunity to learn—despite the overwhelming evidence children are trapped by the accident of where they are born. The home, community, and school any child happens to experience due to factors that child has not determined are powerfully linked to the opportunities and outcomes of that child’s learning.

• Should we aspire to the template of the rugged individual? The Ayn Rand cartoon version of rugged individualism is compelling for Americans, trapped in a belief culture, and NER manipulate that delusional faith in the rugged individual to perpetuate the harsh and judgmental tenets of “no excuses” school practices—such as extended school days, extensive homework, test-based accountability for students and teachers, zero tolerance discipline policies, and contract-based admissions to selective charter schools. Though compelling, no one actually succeeds without some (or a great deal) communal support, some accident of privilege, or the disregarded and trivialized advantages offered by the commons (see Malcolm Gladwell’s unmasking of the rugged individualism myth in Outliers).

• Is anyone defending the public school status quo? Strawman arguments are common among NER with the status quo slur being central to that tactic. Progressives are clearly a part of the status quo, but the arguments coming from the SCR movement are voices that have long called for significant and even radical education reform. While the NER policies entrench inequity by directly mentioning poverty, the SCR calls for reform seek to change society and schools for democracy, equity, and agency.

• Is anyone using poverty as an excuse? By implication and even directly, NER perpetuate this strawman argument to reinforce the status quo charge; yet, I have yet to witness any SCR teacher or scholar who moves from offering the fact of poverty overwhelmingly impacting student outcomes to seeing that reality as fatalistic, and thus an excuse for slovenly teaching or inequitable schools. More common, I have found, is that teachers maintain their genuine commitment to teaching despite the tremendous evidence that they rarely make a measurable impact on their students (since numbers mean far less to most educators than to NER).

• Are teacher quality and union influence the primary roadblocks to education overcoming the weight of poverty in student learning? NER narratives are embedded in many layers of the media—from uncritical journalism to partisan political discourse to popular media such as Waiting for “Superman” and Don’t Back Down. Two elements of that narrative have been the myth of the bad teacher and the corruption of unions and tenure. The teacher quality strawman is a mask for the real teacher quality issue facing schools: Affluent children receive the best and most experienced teachers while impoverished children, children of color, ELL students, and special needs students disproportionately are assigned to un-/under-certified and inexperienced teachers (increasingly Teach for America recruits). The union/tenure charade is also a mask that hides the more powerful correlation with student outcomes—poverty. Unionized states have higher test scores than right-to-work states, but that data hide the deeper connections to poverty entrenched in those non-union states. As long as NER can keep the public and political leaders gazing at “bad” teachers, lazy tenured teachers, and corrupt unions, poverty and inequity remain untouched and the privileged status quo intact.

• Have choice broadly and charter schools narrowly revealed effective alternatives for addressing poverty and inequity? Market forces respond to capital, and thus are ill-suited to address inequity; market forces, in fact, appear to fail despite the NER faith in parental choice. Charter schools also have produced few differences when compared to public schools (or even private schools), but are re-segregating education.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” she presents an allegory of privilege, a narrative that exposes how privilege exists upon the back of oppression:

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” (Le Guin, 1975, p. 282)

NER in education maintains the delusion that privilege can somehow be separated from inequity. SCR, however, seeks to pull aside the myth in order to pursue the dream of King in which we continue to seek equity in society and schools in the U.S.—by genuine social reform then wedded to educational reform.

****

suggested citation:

Thomas, P.L. (2012, October 9). The delusional contradictions of “no excuses” reform and poverty. EduSanity. Retrieved from http://www.edusanity.com/2012/10/10/the-delusional-contradictions-of-no-excuses-reform-and-poverty/ ‎

No Excuses Reform, Statistics, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, VAM

Teacher Quality Mania: Backward by Design

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Let’s return to the allegory of the river.

Throughout the Land, people discovered babies floating in the river. A few were chosen to save those babies. While many survived, too many babies perished.

Technocrats, Economists, and Statisticians gathered all the Data that they could and discovered that at least 60% of the reason the babies survived or perished in the river was due to babies being tossed in the river; about 10-15% of the reason babies survived or perished was due to the quality of those trying to save babies in the river.

So the Leaders of the Land decided to focus exclusively on increasing the quality of those trying to save the babies floating in the river, saying, “There is nothing we can do about babies being tossed in the river, and there are no excuses for not saving these babies!”

And so it goes…

•

While this altered tale above reads like a dystopian allegory, it is a fair and accurate portrayal of the current mania to address teacher quality—a mania that simply has the entire reform process backward.

First, the body of research shows a clear statistical pattern about the array of factors influencing measurable student outcomes, as summarized by Di Carlo:

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

When educators and education researchers note that teacher quality is dwarfed by other factors, primarily out-of-school factors associated with affluence and poverty, Corporate and “No Excuses” Reformers respond with straw man arguments that quoting statistical facts is somehow saying teachers cannot have an impact on students or that quoting those facts is simply an excuse for not trying to educate all students (see Larry Ferlazzo and Anthony Cody for examples of this phenomenon in the debate over teacher quality).

To be clear, however, the problem is not that teacher quality doesn’t matter or that teachers do not want to be evaluated or held accountable. The problem is that addressing in a single-minded way teacher quality is self-defeating since (as the altered allegory above shows) it has the priorities of reform backward.

Teacher quality reform should occur, but it must come after the primary factors impacting learning and teaching conditions are addressed, thus making it possible to make valid and reliable evaluations of teacher quality. That process should be:

(1) Address first and directly the inequity of opportunity in the lives of children to create the conditions within which schools/teachers can succeed and thus school and teacher quality can be better evaluated and supported. As stated in a recent review of misleading “no excuses” and “miracle” school claims: “Addressing out-of-school factors is primary and fundamental to resolving education inequality” (Paige, 2013, January).

(2) Address next equity and opportunity within schools. Teaching conditions must be equitable in all school and for all students. Currently, affluent and successful students have the most experienced certified teachers and also sit in AP and IB classes with low student/teacher ratios while poor and struggling students have new and un-/under-certified teachers, sitting in high student/teacher ratios classes that are primarily test-prep. Inequitable teaching/learning conditions actually mask our ability to identify quality teachers.

(3) And then, once out-of-school equity is addressed and then in-school equity is addressed focusing on teaching and learning conditions, teachers must be afforded autonomy; and finally, we can gather credible evidence to begin identifying valid teacher quality metrics to inform evaluating, supporting, and retaining teachers.

The first and second priorities can be implemented simultaneously and immediately, with the third priority delayed until conditions are equitable enough to make authentic assessments of teacher impact on student learning. [And regardless, everyone involved in teaching and learning can and must continue to teach as well as possible; that is a given.]

Current arguments that only teacher quality matters are neither statistically accurate nor an effective reform priority.

Current arguments that only teacher quality matters are a frantic effort to save the babies floating in the river while ignoring the real crisis of babies being thrown in the river in the first place.

CCSS, Commons, Standards

“Expect Nothing, Get Nothing”: Common v. Standard

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In Chapter 7 (a “hard-boiled wonderland” section) of Haruki Murakami‘s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the narrator details:

I wound up my purchases and pulled into my convenient neighborhood fast-food restaurant. I ordered shrimp salad, onion rings, and a beer. The shrimp was straight out of the freezer, the onion rings soggy. Looking around the place, though, I failed to spot a single customer banging on a tray or complaining to a waitress. So I shut up and finished my food. Expect nothing, get nothing. (p. 72)

As an English teacher, my mind immediately thought of Meursault in Albert Camus’s existential classic The Stranger:

Soon after this I had a letter from [Marie]. And it was then that the things I’ve never liked to talk about began. Not that they were particularly terrible; I’ve no wish to exaggerate and I suffered less than others. Still, there was one thing in those early days that was really irksome: my habit of thinking like a free man. For instance, I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave brought home still more cruelly the narrowness of my cell.

Still, that phase lasted a few months only. Afterward, I had prisoner’s thoughts. I waited for the daily walk in the courtyard or a visit from my lawyer. As for the rest of the time, I managed quite well, really. I’ve often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I’d have got used to it by degrees. I’d have learned to watch for the passing of birds or drifting clouds, as I had come to watch for my lawyer’s odd neckties, or, in another world, to wait patiently till Sunday for a spell of love-making with Marie. Well, here, anyhow, I wasn’t penned in a hollow tree trunk. There were others in the world worse off than I. I remembered it had been one of Mother’s pet ideas—she was always voicing it—that in the long run one gets used to anything.

The corporate education reform machine (think the machine of justice within which Meursault finds himself and comes to get used to, just as he would living in the trunk of a dead tree) demands a standard curriculum and then a series of standardized tests to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable for the passive transmission and acquisition of state (and corporate) endorsed content.

CCSS and the tests to follow, then, are simply the dead tree we are being told to live in, and like the narrator in the Murakami novel, to shut up and do as we are told:

Expect nothing, get nothing.

Content in this corporate ideology is a fixed (dead) set of knowledge to be ingested, uncritically, passively, compliantly.

In a free society, one dedicated to democracy and individual freedom, such a process serves the needs of the corporate world, seeking as it does the compliant worker.

Education as a central aspect of the Commons and a mechanism for democracy must offer content as something to be confronted and challenged, not something to acquire.

A class may have a text in common, but the reading, studying, and discussions must be about wrestling with the text and the wide array of interpretations of that text.

Trying to raise the test scores of students in order to evaluate teachers (all driven by the new CCSS) is an act of living in a dead tree, asking for nothing, and getting nothing.

And this may be why the CCSS advocates (Coleman, et al.) are so eager to shift the classroom texts to non-fiction instead of fiction.

Imagine their horror, among the ruling elite, at the thought of teachers making decisions and students confronting Murakami or Camus to realize that the shrimp is straight out of the freezer, the onion rings are soggy, and it is past time to bang their trays on the table and complain to the waitress.

Democracy, Equity, Incentives, Merit Pay

Welcome, Doctors, to the Brave New World of Corporate Reform!

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What are the problems?

What is the evidence the problems exist?

What is the quality of that evidence?

Who are the stakeholders in the problems and solutions?

What are the perspectives of those stakeholders?

What are the perspectives of the stakeholders with experience and expertise in the problems and solutions?

Who stands to gain personally, professionally, and financially from the problems and solutions?

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In the pursuit of any sort of reform, the right questions are essential—as is credible evidence—before solutions can be identified as valid, useful, and potentially effective. The great failure of democracy is that it appears those elected to power have neither the ability to ask the right questions nor the propensity to seek credible solutions. Those leaders are, however, eager to claim problems and support solutions that benefit them.

“In a bold experiment in performance pay, complaints from patients at New York City’s public hospitals and other measures of their care — like how long before they are discharged and how they fare afterward — will be reflected in doctors’ paychecks under a plan being negotiated by the physicians and their hospitals,” announces the lede to “New York City Ties Doctors’ Income to Quality of Care.”

“Bold” apparently means “making decisions based on ideology and not a shred of evidence.”

The article makes no case that doctor pay currently poses any sort of genuine problem—just that doctor pay is “traditional.”  Further, the article does acknowledge two important facts:

“Still, doctors are hesitant, saying they could be penalized for conditions they cannot control, including how clean the hospital floors are, the attentiveness of nurses and the availability of beds.

“And it is unclear whether performance incentives work in the medical world; studies of similar programs in other countries indicate that doctors learn to manipulate the system.”

For those of us struggling against a similar baseless current of teacher evaluation and pay reform, these details are all too familiar: (1) Concerns about accountability being linked to conditions over which a worker has no control (or autonomy), and (2) A complete disregard for the mountain of evidence that merit pay of all kinds proves to be ineffective and triggers for many negative unintended consequences:

“‘The consequences in a complex system like a hospital for giving an incentive for one little piece of behavior are virtually impossible to foresee,’ said Dr. David U. Himmelstein, professor of public health at the City University of New York and a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School, who has reviewed the literature on performance incentives. ‘There are ways of gaming it without even outright lying that distort the meaning of the measure.’ …

“Dr. Himmelstein also said doctors could try to avoid the sickest and poorest patients, who tend to have the worst outcomes and be the least satisfied. But physicians within the public hospital system have little ability to choose their patients, Mr. Aviles said. He added that he did not expect the doctors to act so cynically because, ‘in the main, physicians are here because they are attracted to that very mission of serving everybody equally.'”

The medical profession is poised to experience the complete failure of democracy that has been the fate of educators for at least three decades now. Democracy has spawned a legion of people with power but no expertise, and the result is a template for reform that ignores clearly identifying problems, fails to gather credible evidence, bypasses a wealth of experience and expertise, and imposes the mechanisms of inequity that brought those in power to that power.

As a result, buried late in this article on doctor pay reform is a cautionary tale:

“But Dr. Himmelstein said there were still hazards in the city’s plan. He said that when primary-care doctors in England were offered bonuses based on quality measures, they met virtually all of them in the first year, suggesting either that quality improved or — the more likely explanation, in his view — ‘they learned very quickly to teach to the test.'”

Educators, sound familiar?

Education, Truthout

Truthout: The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak

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Although we currently live in a world informed by George Orwell’s dystopian unmasking-as-novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, we seem unable to acknowledge that the Ministry of Peace is actually waging war.* In our current education reform debate, educators must come to terms with Orwell’s recognition of the essential nature of political speech:

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language–and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists–is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind [emphasis added]. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase…into the dustbin where it belongs.

Currently, The U.S. Department of Education is the Ministry of Peace, and from the USDOE, we are facing doublespeak that thinly masks the de-professionalizing of teachers and the dismantling of public education—all in the name of reform under the banner of “hope and change.”

“One Need Not Swallow Such Absurdities as This”

One consequence of calling for educators to be apolitical is that the education reform debate remains in the hands of the inexpert and that reform is allowed to maintain and perpetuate the status quo. Here, however, I want to call for educators to expose and reject the doublespeak driving the education agenda under President Obama and personified by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan by addressing four key areas of that debate: (1) high-stakes standardized testing, (2) Common Core State Standards (CCSS), (3) expertise in education, and (4) claims based on ends-justify-means logic.

High-stakes standardized tests. The doublespeak around high-stakes standardized testing is one of the most powerful weapons used today by Duncan. The Obama administration has produced mountains of evidence that claiming to reject and decrease testing is a cloak for the inevitability of more testing and more corrosive accountability for teachers. But that debate is masking a deeper problem with confronting high-stakes standardized tests: Many educators are quick to reject the high-stakes element while adding that standardized testing is being misused. And here is where educators are failing the debate.

The high-stakes problem is the secondary problem with standardized testing. Yes, high-stakes create inexcusable outcomes related to testing: teaching to the test, reducing all course content to what-is-tested-is-what-is-taught, reducing teacher quality to test scores, reducing student learning to test scores, and cheating. But rejecting or even calling for removing the high-stakes ignores that standardized tests are flawed themselves. Standardized tests remain primarily linked to the race, social class, and gender of students; standardized tests label and sort children overwhelmingly based on the coincidence of those children’s homes.

The standardized testing debate is the cigarette debate, not the alcohol debate. Alcohol can be consumed safely and even with health benefits; thus, the alcohol debate is about the use of alcohol, not alcohol itself. Cigarettes are another story; there is no healthy consumption of cigarettes so that debate is about the inherent danger of tobacco.

Educators must expose the double-speak calling for less testing while increasing the testing and the stakes for students and teachers, but we must not allow that charge to trump the need to identify standardized testing as cancerous, to state clearly there is no safe level of standardized testing.

Common Core State Standards. Few moments of double-speak can top Duncan’s recent comment about the CCSS: “The idea that the Common Core standards are nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy. The Common Core academic standards were both developed and adopted by the states, and they have widespread bipartisan support.”

Among a few others, Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen have spoken against the CCSS movement. But as with the high-stakes standardized tests debate, many educators have rushed to seek how best to implement CCSS without considering the first-level question: Why do we need national standards when the evidence shows that multiple standards movements have failed repeatedly in the past?

The current dytopian-novel-de-jure is The Hunger Games. Like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, this young adult science fiction (SF) novel offers insight into defiance against compliance to power. Before they are plunged into the Hunger Games (a horrifying reality TV show), the two main characters, Katniss and Peeta, confront their ethical dilemma:

“No, when the time comes, I’m sure I’ll kill just like everybody else. I can’t go down without a fight. Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games,” says Peeta.

“But you’re not,” I [Katniss] say[s]. “None of us are. That’s how the Games work.” (p. 142)

One of the most relevant messages of Collins’s novel is that Katniss comes to understand Peeta’s critical nature, embracing that her agency is about rising above the Hunger Games, not simply winning the Games as they are dictated for her. For educators and professional organizations to justify supporting CCSS by demanding a place at the table, they are relinquishing the essential question about whether or not that table should exist.

And this is where educators sit with the CCSS: To implement the CCSS is for the Capitol to own us, to reject CCSS for our own professional autonomy is to be more than just a piece in their Games.

Expertise in education. The Los Angeles Times has now been followed by The New York Times as pawns in the USDOE’s games designed to label, rank, and dehumanize teachers the way our education system has treated children for decades. Again, the pattern is disturbing since publishing VAM-related data on teachers creates a debate about the publishing of the data and ignores first-level issues. But in this case, another problem concerns who has the expertise to frame these debates.

As the backlash mounted against the NYT’s publishing teacher rankings, Bill Gates inexplicably rejected publishing VAM-data, and quickly all over Twitter and in blogs, educators began citing Gates’s criticism. And here is the problem.

Gates is inexpert about education; he has no credibility whether his claims are flawed (most of the time) or accurate (although only on the surface since we must ask why he makes these claims). Thus, if educators wish to claim our rightful place as the experts on education, we must not embrace the inexpert, ever. (And this overlaps with the testing dilemma; we must also stop referring to test data when it serves our purposes just as we reject test data when they are harmful.)

Doublespeak (think Doublethink and Newspeak from Orwell’s 1984) as a weapon of the political and cultural elite depends on masking the value of expertise. To expose that to sunshine requires that the expert remain steadfast in honoring who determines our discourse and where we acknowledge credibility and judiciousness.

The ends-justify-the-means logic. The ugliest and seemingly most enduring double-speak surrounds the rise of support for Teach for America (TFA) and Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charters schools—both of which promote themselves as addressing social justice and the plight of poverty. These claims often go unchallenged because both TFA and KIPP keep the debate on the metrics (the ends) and not the “no excuses” ideology (the means).

As long as TFA and KIPP keep the argument about whether or not their approaches raise test scores or graduation rates, we fail to examine the essential flaws in each: TFA creating leaders at the expense of children and schools trapped in poverty, and KIPP (and many charters) implementing “no excuses” practices that are re-segregating schools and perpetuating classist and racist stereotypes.

And this may capture the overarching issue with all of the four points I have addressed here: The ends do not justify the means.

As Orwell has warned, however, politicians craft their words regardless of political party to mask the means with the ends—”to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

It is now ours as educators to expose the double-speak of the education reform movement while also taking great care not to fall prey to the allure of that strategy ourselves.

About two-thirds into the narrative of The Hunger Games, Katniss is forced to confront the earlier discussion between her and Peeta because she has come to love one of her competitors, Rue:

It’s the Capitol I hate, for doing this to all of us….Then I remember Peeta’s words on the roof….And for the first time, I understand what he means.

I want to do something, right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can’t own. That Rue was more than a piece in their Games. And so am I. (pp. 235-236)

Universal public education and the autonomy and professionalism of teachers in America are worth this same sentiment, and it is past time for our voices to be heard and our actions to matter.

* Read at Truthout

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free