Rick Hess Beats Me to the Punch

Rick Hess:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about.

I also wonder how the low performing southern states will react, although there is more variation within the between states, so maybe it won't be very noticeable.

I've been kind of amazed at how everyone just assumes the NECAP 11th grade math cut scores are just fine, even though it seems to be twice as hard to pass as the MCAS, so who knows.

Maybe the Problem is Your Policies are Unpopular and Ineffective

Ben Wieder:

Speaking in Washington, D.C. at the fifth annual Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform Tuesday (November 27), John Podesta said that major electoral defeats in Indiana, Idaho and South Dakota showed the folly of painting unions as the enemy.

I don't think the unions did anything different this time around, it is just that people are starting to understand what the "reform" agenda actually is, and in particular, that it is only appealing when applied in the abstract to other people's children/schools. Try to apply it state-wide and people start to look more closely.

M-What?

Roger Schank:

A few years ago I was asked for my annual prediction my e-learning magazine and I predicted the death of m-learning. I was attacked by everyone. Funny we don’t hear so much about m-learning any more. Learning is a field that is very trendy. There is always the latest greatest that everyone must do. Today this is “social learning” and “on the job learning.”

There is one problem with this. None of this stuff is ever new in any way. Learning hasn't changed in a million years. Did I say a million? Too conservative. How do chimp babies learn? Socially? Of course. They copy what their mothers do and what their playmates do. (Amazingly they do this without Facebook.)

Test Scores for Teacher Effectiveness SCREENING

Douglas N. Harris:

But they also made one decision that I think was a mistake. They encouraged—or required, depending on your vantage point—states to lump value-added or other growth model estimates together with other measures. The raging debate since then has been over what percentage of teachers’ final ratings should be given to value-added versus the other measures. I believe there is a better way to approach this issue, one that focuses on teacher evaluations not as a measure, but rather as a process.

This is depressingly obvious. Too bad we're ruled by malicious idiots.

What Exactly is Not STEAM?

So the cool kids have decided to add the Arts to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to make STEAM. Who could be against that? Indeed, what does it leave out? Literacy? I presume not. Literature? Isn't that an Art?

It seems like the only thing left out is History & Social Studies, which is already the red-headed stepchild of American education, so... ?

STEAM = more of everything? More of what we already do? Just adding Engineering?

Flogging a Dead Horse

Stephen Downes:

Content (under whatever license) is 'enclosed' when it is contained behind a barrier such as proprietary encryption, a digital lock or a paywall. Enclosure does not restrict the content itself, but restricts access to the content; access is granted (typically under some other name) only via some concession, such as payment, or provision of personal information.

To my understanding, all of Flat World's content will now be enclosed behind a paywall. OERu assessments enclose assessment content. This mailing list (OER-community) encloses content behind a subscription requirement (I can't even link to discussions in my newsletter; all non-subscribers see is a barrier).

Enclosure is an important concept because it leads to 'conversion'. The process of conversion is one where what was once a resource that could be freely accessed is (for all practical purposes) accessible only through a barrier of some sort; in other words, the content is free, but has been effectively completely enclosed. This is what happened (for example) to many UseNet newsgroups. It almost happened to Wikipedia, and would have happened, has Google not intervened.

It seems to me that this is only a problem insofar as the cost of making and publishing a copy of "enclosed" but openly licensed material outweighs the value of doing so for each person in the world. It must be a problem on both ends.

There is a lot with format, etc., you can do to make copying a pain in the ass, and I don't think you are required to provide access to the "source code" in the same way you are with software, despite the fact that an educational resource may use a lot of software.

But I also suspect that OER's just aren't seen as that valuable. Is there an open educational resource as important as, say, BASH? Not that I'm aware of.

Also, the possibility of commercially re-distributing free content would be one of the main incentives to un-enclosing it. If Pearson is charging you $10 to access an OER, maybe I should copy it and offer it for $1. That might not be exactly what Stephen has in mind, but its a step.

I suspect a big part of the problem is just cultural at this point. It is well established that I can take a Red Hat Linux CD, change the name and try to sell it to you, or just give it away. I wouldn't win a lot of praise for that, but it is accepted. Would the same apply in the OER world if I was just copying openly licensed resources from behind paywalls?

I would note that it would be pretty easy for, say, Gates or Hewlett, to fund a project to just copy all OER's from behind paywalls and publish them.

Two Perspectives from the Urban Hellhole (Philly)

Chris Lehmann:

But the thing is – whether it is Michelle Rhee or Rahm Emmanuel or <-Insert Corporate Ed-Reformer Here->, they don’t hate the kids.

Atrios:

They really do want to starve your granny.

Both are right, and you have to be able to hold both ideas in your head at the same time. In part they're both right because there is a wide range of people in each camp. There are plenty of people who hate kids, and some of them support school reform. There is a punitive, sadistic streak in American politics and economic life. There's a lot of hubris and ambition. Also, too, racism.

On the other hand, "they're wrong because they don't care about kids as much as we do" isn't going to win the argument, because privatizers have invested heavily in turning that argument against "the teachers' unions." It might never carry the day, but right now it is like a frontal assault on the Maginot Line.

It is important though, to not approach this situation as if both sides can come together over a common concern for kids. Or that, once the other side sees the damage their policies are doing in the lives of real kids, they'll reconsider. That's not going to happen. They're way, way, way past getting the benefit of the doubt on anything like that.

And at bottom, it isn't really about ideology. The kernel of this thing is tribal, getting the right kind of people in charge of schools and schools' money. Their people. I just see too many cases where one year they close something down only to replace it a few years later with the same damn thing, just run by their people.

It's a Good Thing Checker Finn Hasn't Read the Common Core ELA Standards

Chester E. Finn, Jr., commenting on the CCSSO's "Vision for the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Inquiry in Social Studies State Standards," aka Common Core for Social Studies:

Did you spot the missing words? I’ll bet you did. They are the verb “know” and the noun “knowledge.”

If he checks, Mr. Finn might find that the CCSS ELA/Literacy standards make rather light use of "know" and "knowledge" as well, particularly in the standards themselves.

My biggest concern about this initial draft is that it just overlaps the CCSS Literacy Standards for History/Social Studies so much:

At the heart of the C3 Framework is an inquiry arc — a set of interlocking and mutually supportive ideas that feature the four dimensions of informed inquiry in social studies: 1) developing questions and planning investigations; 2) applying disciplinary concepts and tools; 3) gathering, evaluating, and using evidence; and 4) working collaboratively and communicating conclusions.

It would be nice if someone was actually coordinating this process so we don't end up with two redundant sets of standards.

Stand Up. Live Better.

Natasha Lennard:

Employees at 1,000 Walmart stores across the country are planning to strike on Black Friday. The holiday period industrial action comes in the wake of a string of strikes by Walmart workers in several states and involving employees throughout the retailer’s supply chain.

Looks like right now the closest planned solidarity demonstration is in Seekonk.

Woonsocket Voted for Mayoral Control, btw

Rob Borkowski:

Come November 2013, new Woonsocket School Committee members will get appointed to the board instead of elected.

City voters agreed to make the switch, casting approve votes on Question 8 — Amendments to the Woonsocket Home Rule Charter:"Shall the City of Woonsocket Home Rule Charter, Chapter XIV, be amended to provide for an appointed School Committee?"

Did You Say TWENTY DOLLARS AN HOUR?

The Mustache of Understanding:

Tapani eventually found a welder from another firm who had passed the American Welding Society Certified Welding Inspector exam, the industry’s gold standard, and he trained her welders — some of whom took several tries to pass the exam — so she could finish the job. Since then, Tapani trained a woman from Stacy, who had originally learned welding to make ends meet as a single mom. She took on the challenge of becoming a certified welding inspector, passed the exam and Tapani made her the company’s own in-house instructor, no longer relying on the local schools.

“She knows how to read a weld code. She can write work instructions and make sure that the people on the floor can weld to that instruction,” so “we solved the problem by training our own people,” said Tapani, adding that while schools are trying hard, training your own workers is often the only way for many employers to adapt to “the quick response time” demanded for “changing skills.” But even getting the right raw recruits is not easy. Welding “is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits,” said Tapani, but “you have to have science and math. I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.”

Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.

Applying my STEM skills, $20/hr x 40 hrs x 52 weeks = $41,600, which is nice, I suppose, but for a specialized array of physical and mental skills, couldn't they just pay more? $20/hr. might sound like a lot if you haven't been paid an hourly wage since a summer job 20 years ago, but it doesn't go so far today.

What's particularly aggravating about this case is that it is in the defense industry. How many other people with fewer and more commonly held skills are making way more money off this Humvee armor? Pretty much everyone else probably. It isn't like they have to shave off pennies here to compete with Walmart Humvee armor.

Also, note that they "solved the problem by training our own people," anyhow. So why was this article even necessary?

A Realistic View of the Impact of Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies

Marc Brasov:

As policymakers move forward with the implementation of the Common Core, it is important to ensure that schools have the freedom to balance instruction and assessment with a high-quality curriculum, in history classes especially. But I fear that the Common Core's requirement for literacy skills in both history and English classrooms could have a very different effect.

The standards, as of now, suggest that more non-fiction texts be examined in English classes, while requiring history classes to increase their focus on reading and writing skills. Although such collaboration between subjects at first may seem like progress, recent history with NCLB and high-stakes testing suggests another possible outcome: more focus on literacy, less focus on history.

While specifying some examples of great primary texts that students should read and learn to analyze, the Common Core standards do not actually require that any history content be taught. Students might read history texts but fail to receive history instruction. It may very well be that English classes be mandated to act as history classes.

In other words, at some future point, will history and civic education classes be replaced with longer English classes in low-performing schools in order to improve test scores?

We Need New Ideas for Secure Digital Testing

Maybe we could use something like the Cotton Candy. Basically it is a little computer running Android or Ubuntu in a USB stick, with its own wireless network connection, that you can plug into a pc. With some client software on a Mac, PC or Linux, it will essentially take over the host computer's screen, keyboard and mouse, with all the software running on the stick. Or you can run it off a TV with a USB or Bluetooth mouse or PC.

At testing time, HQ would ship out the testing sticks to schools, with as much of the bandwidth-intensive media files as might be needed by the tests already loaded to cut down on network requirements. Every student could have an identical, secure testing environment regardless of the vagaries of the local PC stock.

Presumably people paid to think about this kind of thing are already doing so. I don't know.

Too Bad Everything isn't Like Math

Strategic Data Project:

Generally, we do not present ELA results in this report for two reasons. First, the variation in effects among ELA teachers is substantially smaller than that among math teachers. This finding is consistent with other research on teacher effects and may suggest that other factors outside of the classroom have a larger influence on children’s ELA performance than is the case in other subjects. Current research also suggests that ELA state tests may also be less sensitive to instruction. Second, we do not present results among ELA teachers because, in most instances, they are very similar to our findings concerning math teachers (though some are smaller in magnitude). We explicitly make note of instances where ELA and math results diverge.

That's a big asterisk. History, social studies, science (esp. elementary school science), the arts, and pretty much everything else you want to teach is more like ELA than math.

My Years of Posthumous PR Finally Pay Off

Dana Goldstein:

The whole saga at Crenshaw reminds me of the sad story of another creative public high school that bucked the prevailing reform winds of the day: Feinstein High, in Providence, Rhode Island. Feinstein was founded as a Ted Sizer-inspired “Essential School” organized around the principles of civic engagement and volunteer work. Serving just 360 students, Feinstein was highly nontraditional: It stressed long-form writing, not test scores, and there were no sports teams, class periods, or even grades. Every student had every teacher’s cell phone number, as well as a laptop they could carry between home and school. Although test scores were uneven, Feinstein demonstrated consistently impressive graduation and college-going rates compared to other high-poverty high schools in Rhode Island. For awhile, the school was recognized as a rare success story within an otherwise failing district. In 1999, the Gates Foundation gifted Providence $13.5 million to experiment with creating more small neighborhood high schools, using Feinstein as one model.

Over time, however, Gates, disappointed with stagnant test scores and graduation rates at some Foundation-funded small schools, decided to change his focus. In 2005, he stopped funding non-charter small schools and began investing heavily in school choice and standards-and-accountability reforms, such as charter schools and data-driven teacher evaluation. As the largest private foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation’s priorities are powerfully influential over the entire non-profit sector, and certainly help shape federal and state education agendas, too -- in part through the seeding of Foundation alumni, like Deasy, in important policy-making jobs. It didn’t take long for Feinstein to fall out of favor with Rhode Island’s political and philanthropic elite, and in 2010, despite emotional protests from students and teachers, the Providence school district shut Feinstein down.

Pick One or the Other, Please

Erik Robelsen:

Under revisions to South Carolina's social studies standards finalized last year, Mr. Huffman said, one addition was a suggested set of social studies literacy skills, some of which were derived from the common core.

Look, if you're going to adopt the Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies, that at least excludes you from having to repeat them in the social studies subject area standards. You don't have to put the chocolate in your peanut butter and the peanut butter in your chocolate.

Also:

One big change, she said, is that students are expected to tackle a higher level of text complexity than before. "You're basically bumping up things by two years in a lot of cases," she said.

That's what led her to introduce Einstein's article for Science Illustrated magazine, "E=MC²: The Most Urgent Problem of Our Time."

Using the text is "one of the best ways that we have found" to address content goals in a unit on nuclear chemistry, Ms. Poeppelman said, while also "incorporating and weaving in common-core-standards goals." In particular, she identified two reading standards, one on analyzing text structure, the other on author's purpose.

That's nice, but if you're really concerned with "college and career readiness" it makes no damn sense to turn away from reading your textbook to analyze a magazine article, even one by Einstein. Correct me if I'm wrong, but STEM majors and professionals will primarily read textbooks, technical manuals and journal articles, which have a very standard text structure and a couple utilitarian purposes.

If your goal is to get kids ready to survive freshman chemistry on their own, you'd be better off just making them read their high school chemistry textbook and skip the literary analysis, right?

And actually taking a look at the Einstein text, it is arguably more interesting as a primary source document in history than a science text. This is pretty cool but not the kind of thing you have to be able to parse to pass freshman Physics:

‘What takes place can be illustrated with the help of our rich man. The atom M is a rich miser who, during his life, gives away no money (energy). But in his will he bequeaths his fortune to his sons MÅå and MÅç, on condition that they give to the community a small amount, less than one thousandth of the whole estate (energy or mass). The sons together have somewhat less than the father had (the mass sum MÅå+ MÅç is somewhat smaller than the mass M of the radioactive atom). But the part given to the community, though relatively small, is still so enormously large (considered as kinetic energy) that it brings with it a great threat of evil. Averting that threat has become the most urgent problem of our time.”‘

If this reminds you of the current influence of ed reform philanthropy, it is not my fault.

Depends on What You Mean by "Leading Indicator"

The most insightful line in CAP's new report Teacher Absence as a Leading Indicator of Student Achievement is surely:

Yet very little is known about the properties of this new school-level measure.

If, for example, teacher absence is a leading indicator of student achievement, you might expect the state with the lowest rate (Utah, 21% absent more than 10 days) to have significantly higher 8th grade NAEP scores than the state with the highest (RI, 50%). Alas, they don't.

This is the kind of think tank report where nobody really disputes the basic points -- a lot of teacher absences aren't good and they're influenced by direct policy choices (rules about taking absences) but also an indicator of problems with the culture of a school -- but you know in the end it is just going to be a hammer used to make teaching a worse job.

Also, there's pretty obviously a lot of potential slop in the data (e.g., If a teacher quits after two weeks, how many days of absence is it? If their long-term sub misses 10 days, is that two absent teachers for one job? etc...) and not a lot of explanation of its rigor.

The Blended Learning Product That Cannot Be Named

Michael Horn:

On the one hand, several blended-learning programs are continuing to use curriculum from one online provider, and although it doesn’t give them the customization they may prefer ideally, its simplicity and reliability are worth the tradeoff. Carpe Diem schools and the Flex Academies exemplify this–and neither seems to be complaining nearly as much about the technology.

Horn's post as a whole is a handwavy cop-out, but I'd say the above paragraph illustrates just how fucked K-12 ed-tech is. Which products, exactly, is Horn referring to? You will never know in ed-tech, because that might upset somebody actually important. God forbid educators might have a drop of honest opinion even accidentally fall on their lap regarding a Holy Vendor.

Paying for Modern Industrial Labor

Kevin Drum:

Companies like this all like to say that American manufacturing is too competitive with anyone in the world. But look. If you can't afford to train workers, and you can't afford to pay the wages it takes to attract good workers, then by definition that means you aren't competitive. You're only competitive if a recession has made people desperate and the government helps you out with training. And who knows? Maybe that's a good use of taxpayer money. Wall Street certainly benefits from the training provided by state universities. But it's still a subsidy no matter how you slice it. Without it, apparently, American manufacturing just isn't very competitive.

Part of the reason US unions eventually made progress in steel and other heavy manufacturing is that labor costs were a relatively small percentage of the companies costs. You can give out raises and benefits (and in the medium term especially retirement benfits!) without cutting into the bottom line too much.

You'd think that in high tech manufacturing, since you'd have fewer, higher skilled workers and a lot of investment in equipment, you'd also be able to pay the remaining workers more, but apparently not. Or maybe management would just prefer not to.

It is the Fall of 2015, Common Core Shows Seven Years of Reform Have Failed, Now What?

This is the central question of education policy in Obama's second term. Everyone expects that a switch to new Common Core-based tests will show in the fall of 2015 that more students than ever are failing. That is, as we're rolling up toward the first presidential primaries and caucuses, we'll have a freshly (re-)created crisis, in which seven years of Obama's policies and 15 or so years of intensive national reform efforts will be shown decisively to have failed.

This is a foregone conclusion for at least three reasons:

1. the aim of primary and secondary education has been changed to require more academic rigor than ever before;
2. scores always go down when you change standards and tests, as it takes several iterations to optimize the system;
3. making scores go down is clearly a design goal for Common Core advocates and accountability hawks in general. They have no language or conceptual framework that can possibly explain why scores going up could be anything but a sellout failure. Anyone who tries to set the cutscores at a point where proficiency goes up will be relentlessly attacked.

So the scores are going to go down, the question is, what now?