Confusing Elite Consensus and Consensus

Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, January 9, 2009, WaPo op-ed:

Second, perhaps the single greatest lever for raising expectations and achievement for all children in America would be the creation of national learning standards and assessments. With KIPP schools operating in 19 states, we have seen how the maze of state standards and tests keeps great teachers from sharing ideas, inhibits innovation, and prevents meaningful comparison of student, teacher and school performance. Rather than there being 50 different standards, Obama could unify the country around a common vision for the kind of teaching and learning we need to prepare our children for the future.

Randi Weingarten, February 16, 2009, WaPo op-ed:

Education is a local issue, but there is a body of knowledge about what children should know and be able to do that should guide decisions about curriculum and testing. I propose that a broad-based group -- made up of educators, elected officials, community leaders, and experts in pedagogy and particular content -- come together to take the best academic standards and make them available as a national model. Teachers then would need the professional development, and the teaching and learning conditions, to make the standards more than mere words.

I'm not so naive as to think that it would be easy to reach consensus on national standards, but I believe that most people would agree that there is academic content that all students in America's public schools should be taught, and be taught to high standards. And I would expect near-consensus on the fact that, today, we are failing in that important mission. A national agreement about certain aspects of what every well-educated child in every American public school should learn won't be easy to arrive at, but that is no reason to give up before we even try.

What could possibly go wrong? Everyone, from the center-right to the center is totally on board for whatever, blah-blah, oh snap don't call them "national standards" next time!

Meanwhile, I cautioned:

Yes, good luck selling Alabama, Utah, Texas, Kansas, Alaska, etc. on the idea that they should take the advice of the head of the teachers' union and model their curriculum on Massachusetts and Minnesota. That's going to go over really well. The reality of our current political situation is that we have a socially conservative, obstructionist Southern regional party and everyone else. I don't see how we're going to get to national standards in that climate. The problem is, however, a good distraction though for people who might otherwise find more effective ways to screw up public education.

My Government Spent $350 Million Dollars and All I Got Was This Mis-Coded Crap

OK, let's move on to the second question in the 9th grade PARCC ELA/Literacy practice test:

Part A: In paragraph 1, how does Oppenheimer structure the opening of his speech to advance his argument?

• A. He praises the accomplishments of the members of the audience in order to deflect their potential dismissal of the subject of his speech.
• B. He positions himself as a colleague of the members of the audience in order to increase a feeling of fellowship and community.
• C. He criticizes some unpopular authority figures in order to gain the sympathy of the members of the audience.
• D. He sets forth his credentials as an expert on the subject of his speech in order to gain the respect of the members of the audience.

Here's the paragraph in question.

I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight -- if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified -- as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment. I don't have anything to say that will be of an immense encouragement. In some ways I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date -- but I couldn't talk to you as a Director. I could not talk, and will not tonight talk, too much about the practical political problems which are involved. There is one good reason for that -- I don't know very much about practical politics. And there is another reason, which has to some extent restrained me in the past. As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President. In the course of this we have naturally discussed things that were on our minds and have been made, often very willingly, the recipient of confidences; it is not possible to speak in detail about what Mr. A thinks and Mr. B doesn't think, or what is going to happen next week, without violating these confidences. I don't think that's important. I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists -- involve us more, perhaps than any other group in the world. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is -- at what has happened to us -- and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead. I would like to take it as deep and serious as I know how, and then perhaps come to more immediate questions in the course of the discussion later. I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so.

The answer is clearly B. For the follow up in Part B, you just have to pick "...which involve us as a group of scientists..." from four brief supporting excerpts. I don't love the questions, but whatever.

I do have a problem with Part A's supposed alignment with the Common Core standards. This is meant to be aligned with RH.5, specifically (I guess):

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.5 Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.

I'm not buying that. Oppenheimer's text is neither "using structure" or "emphasizing key points," nor "advancing an explanation or analysis" at that point.

The closest relevant standard would be:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.

You'd have to re-phrase the question slightly, but then it would align perfectly well to standard 6.

This is the point in the writing process when I leave my computer and rant bug-eyed in front of my patiently bemused spouse. "Does anybody actually read this stuff? Anyone? How does this even happen?"

If you believe at all in "data driven instruction" based on standards, you have to be mortified by this kind of thing. If PARCC is essentially mis-coding questions, it's going to screw up any attempt to do anything innovative or subtle with these test results.

I'm also disturbed by PARCC's mixing of "informational text" standards and "history and social studies texts" standards in this sequence. Question 1 is "informational" and two and three are "history." The entire premise of disciplinary literacy is that a reader must change the way he or she reads based on the academic context in which he or she is working in at the time. You read a text differently in history class than English class. This was considered such an important aspect of the standards that they essentially discarded their original goals of "fewer, clearer" standards in favor of an explosion of overlapping, redundant disciplinary literacy standards.

If PARCC really believes in disciplinary literacy standards, they should give some cue to the reader whether they should be approaching the text from and English or History/Social Studies context (or science, etc.), or at least they should approach each text consistently. Flip flopping back and forth just makes a mockery of the entire concept.

The Most Ridiculous Words Ever Posted on Common Core Watch

Checker Finn:

For no current-affairs commentator do I have greater respect than Peggy Noonan, whose sagacity, common sense, plain-spokenness, and “big picture” view of things are as welcome—and rare—as the clarity and persuasiveness of her prose.

The Cornerstone of the Cornerstone of School Reform

Here's Part A first question of the 9th grade PARCC ELA/Literacy practice test:

In paragraph 1 of Robert Oppenheimer's speech, what does the phrase recipient of confidences mean?

• A. The speaker has won numerous awards.
• B. The speaker feels sure of his own abilities.
• C. People have told the speaker their secrets.
• D. People have given the speaker their support.

Here is the paragraph, with the sentence containing the phrase in bold.

I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight -- if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified -- as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment. I don't have anything to say that will be of an immense encouragement. In some ways I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date -- but I couldn't talk to you as a Director. I could not talk, and will not tonight talk, too much about the practical political problems which are involved. There is one good reason for that -- I don't know very much about practical politics. And there is another reason, which has to some extent restrained me in the past. As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President. In the course of this we have naturally discussed things that were on our minds and have been made, often very willingly, the recipient of confidences; it is not possible to speak in detail about what Mr. A thinks and Mr. B doesn't think, or what is going to happen next week, without violating these confidences. I don't think that's important. I think there are issues which are quite simple and quite deep, and which involve us as a group of scientists -- involve us more, perhaps than any other group in the world. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is -- at what has happened to us -- and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead. I would like to take it as deep and serious as I know how, and then perhaps come to more immediate questions in the course of the discussion later. I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so.

That's a tidy 393 word paragraph.

Regarding the answer to the first question, it is clearly C. It is a good representative of the new approach to vocabulary: fewer obscure SAT words, more obscure alternate definitions of more common words, used in combination. That's probably a win, but let's face it: a small one. A more extreme example someone reported from the recent PARCC pilot tests required kids to figure out the meaning of "impression" in the naval context. That's not much better than having to guess the antonym of "syzygy." In the end, you just get a vocab list with fewer words and more definitions. But, whatever, it is fine.

Part B:

Besides the sentence that contains the phrase mentioned in Part A, select the other sentence in paragraph 1 that helps the reader understand the meaning of recipient of confidences.

For starters, what earthly reason could there be to exclude the rest of the sentence as the source of context clues? There are 23 words preceding the phrase in that sentence, a thirty word independent clause completes the sentence. That sentence has the best context for understanding the phrase.

To cut to the chase, the correct answer according to the key is "I want anyone who feels like it to ask me a question and if I can't answer it, as will often be the case, I will just have to say so." I had quickly eliminated this one because it is obvious that there are lots of reasons Oppenheimer might not be able to answer a question an atomic physicist might ask in 1945. He points out earlier in the paragraph that he doesn't know enough about "practical politics" to answer questions about that. Other questions that would be relevant that he can't answer might include, "Are we going to hell for this?" "Can we really create a League of Nations that works?" or "Exactly how deep should I dig my bomb shelter?"

But beyond that, what is the message here pedagogically? What is it saying about reading? That if you encounter a puzzling phrase you should keep reading and perhaps 146 words later you'll come to a sentence that will help you understand its meaning? I guess that explains the emphasis on re-reading, cause you're going to be doing a lot of it if you try to read that way.

For the record, I thought "As you know, some of us have been asked to be technical advisors to the Secretary of War, and through him to the President." was probably the best answer, although not a very good one. Also, the answer key cryptically has the phrase "discussion later" highlighted in blue next to the answer, with no indication of what it might refer to. Did they note internally that the question was flawed but put it in the practice test anyhow? Or is there a explanation somewhere in the vaults that explains why theirs is the right answer?

These questions are representative of the cornerstone of the PARCC ELA/Liteacy test, which is the cornerstone of the entire test-driven reform agenda in a big chunk of the country. In this section of the test, you read a prompt and then answer three two part questions, the first is always a vocab question of this type, covering standard 4 ostensibly. The other two questions address standards 2, 3, or 5, but you always get a vocab question in this form, whether you're reading Beatrix Potter in 3rd grade or Oppenheimer in 9th.

Similarly, half of the multiple choice questions are of the "identify the evidence for your previous answer" form.

So basically, whether or not your school will be burned down is dependent on figuring out how to get these kinds of questions answered "correctly." At the end of the day, that's your "reform."

Welcome to the future.

Oppenheimer for 9th Graders

I've started to try to grok the PARCC tests, or at least the practice tests. I'm afraid they are as much of a sixteen dimensional clusterfuck as the Common Core Standards themselves.

I started by looking at the 9th grade Performance Based Assessment (PBA) in ELA/Literacy, because most of my experience is with high school, and one pays a lot of attention to the freshman year in general (or you should!), so I felt like I had relatively good intuition about this one.

OK, so the first sentence you read is a real forehead slapper from the start:

Today you will research the development and one-time use of the atomic bomb.

I trust you see the problem there. I think that should be sufficient to throw the whole damn thing out, if they can't proof-read the first sentence of the practice test.

Anyhow, moving on, the first text in the PBA is Robert Oppenheimer's farewell speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, or at least the first 40% or so (up to "It is clear to me that wars have changed."). I ran the first 1000 words through the scoring doo-hickey on the Lexile website, and it came up with 1270, which would be the top of "college and career ready" according to the official Common Core commentary. Beyond that, you're basically dropping kids directly into an ongoing conversation between atomic scientists in 1945. Oppenheimer's purpose in the speech is to take advantage of his leaving the directorship of the Manhattan Project to speak a little more freely about his opinions, so a lot of it is in the form "Concerning issue X, some people have been saying Y, others Z, I think it is important to consider K..." and then on to the next thing.

There isn't a lot of technical detail, which I suppose might make it seem somewhat accessible, but there just isn't much detail at all. Oppenheimer can't start throwing out details and anecdotes because it's the Manhattan Project. He can't say "I remember well the morning in April 1944 when General Whatever invited Niels Bohr and I over for lunch..." or any of the sort of anecdotes which would usually give a little life and context to a farewell speech.

Nor does he particularly want to linger on exactly why this discussion is even taking place. He doesn't point out, for example, that "The work of the people in this room lead directly to the death of at least 150,000 people."

Also, the first part is mostly throat clearing and setup, and the excerpt ends before it gets to the more interesting parts of the talk.

Even if you assume you want some Oppenheimer in the test, it is just a lousy choice of a text, and the idea that this can be considered a text at the 9th grade level defies common sense. Atomic scientists do not discuss among themselves profound moral and political issues of great personal weight at a 9th grade level. Any definition of textual complexity that claims they do does not pass the laugh test.

One big question though is whether this text is intentionally way above 9th grade complexity because these tests have to measure growth of advanced students. At least that would explain its presence, although then one has to ask about the impact of starting a test with a section way above the grade level expectation. I did a little Googling on the impact of question sequencing, and on the whole it is somewhat inconclusive, but there's pretty good reason to think the common sense expectation that this would be disproportionately hard on a range of disadvantaged students, including those with high test anxiety.

And I haven't even started on the questions yet. That'll have to wait for later posts.

On the whole though, this is what I was afraid of when I first read about the Common Core's emphasis on textual complexity: choosing texts because they are difficult to understand, perhaps ones that are difficult in some specific way.

Ug.

Economists are also Better Teachers, Principals, Superintendents and Parents

Thomas Frank:

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. Economists, the myth goes, make better historians, better sociologists, better anthropologists than people who are actually trained in those disciplines. One believable but possibly apocryphal tale I heard as a graduate student in the ’90s was that economists at a prestigious Midwestern university had actually taken to wearing white lab coats—because they supposedly were the real scientific deal, unlike their colleagues in all those soft disciplines.

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first. In the book’s Introduction this man who is now the most famous economist in the world accuses his professional colleagues of a “childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation”; he laughs at “their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.” In a shocking reversal, he calls on the imperial legions of economic pseudo-science to lay down their arms, to “avail ourselves of the methods of historians, sociologists, and political scientists”; the six-hundred-page book that follows, Piketty declares, is to be “as much a work of history as of economics.”

Admittedly, I stalled out about 25% of the way into Capital in the 21st Century, but it is an extraordinary "informational text."

The Supply of Good Jobs Does Not Automatically Expand to Match the Number of Educated Citizens

Matt Bruenig nails it:

Education boosters bizarrely think that providing everyone a high-quality education will somehow magically result in them all having good-paying jobs. But, as Finland shows, this turns out not to be true. Apparently, it’s not possible for everyone to simultaneously hold jobs as well-paid upper-class professionals because at least some people have to actually do real work. A modern economy requires a whole army of lesser-skilled jobs that just don’t pay that well and the necessity of those jobs doesn’t go away simply because people are well-educated.

The reason Finland’s ultimate distribution of income is so equal is not because its great education system has made everyone receive high paychecks (an impossible task), but because Finland has put in place distributive policies that make sure its national income is shared broadly. In 2010, Finland’s tax level was 42.5 percent of its GDP, which was nearly double the tax level of the U.S. By strategically spreading that tax money around through a host of cash transfer and benefit programs, Finland’s high market poverty rate of 32.2 percent fell to just 7.3 percent. Its child poverty rate, which Finland focuses extra attention on, fell down to 3.9 percent. Overall economic inequality took a similar dive.

This is so obvious that it is hard to figure out how so many apparently smart people can't grasp it. The only explanation that I can come up with is that for a lot of prominent commentators, wonks and politicians, low paying jobs and the people who hold them are simply an abstraction.

There are a Couple Ways to Interpret this Quote

Chris Cerf:

My specialty is system reform—micro-politics, selfishness, corruption, old customs unmoored from any clear objectives.

One Thing to Look Forward to in Providence

They expanded the skatepark.

Now we only need about five more that size, but at least I don't have to feel like returning to the original home of the X Games from a city of 36,000 in central Scotland is going to entail a major downgrade in skate infrastructure.

It is Almost Like Teachers had a Hand in Writing This

I particularly like this one, from the CTU:

WHEREAS, the Common Core State Standards emphasize pedagogical techniques, such as close reading, out of proportion to the actual value of these methods - and as a result distort instruction and remove instructional materials from their social context;

The Speedup

Me, in comments:

One problem with stories like this is that the teaching load is not directly questioned. Twenty years ago it was axiomatic in US school reform that 80 students was the maximum load a teacher should have (see the Coalition of Essential Schools Common Principles). Three different preps for a developing teacher is nearly impossible. High performing countries do not drive their teachers this way.

Teaching IS uniquely demanding, but we are also simply overworking our teachers.

I'm Sure Philanthropy will Save Us in the End

Sara Reardon:

Ultimately, the report's most surprising finding may be the lack of global data on antimicrobial resistance. “Despite the fact we've known the potential of this going cataclysmic for ten years, as a global unit we haven't managed to get our act together,” says Walsh. Just 22 of the 129 WHO member states that contributed to the report had data on the nine antibiotic-bacteria pairs of greatest concern.

Although the report calls for the establishment of a global monitoring network, it is unlikely that any extra money is forthcoming. “It’s a huge problem and I'm not sure the resources are available,” says Keith Klugman, an epidemiologist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. (emphasis added)

I'll be Happy to Tell You What I Don't Like

Erik Palmer:

For some time now, I have been asking haters to tell me exactly which standard they don’t like. You don’t like “Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea?” You don’t like “Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, using search terms effectively; assess the credibility and accuracy of each source; and quote or paraphrase the data and conclusions of others while avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation?” You don’t like “Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate?” Well then, tell me exactly which ones need to be tossed out? NOT ONE PERSON HAS EVER ANSWERED THIS QUESTION. Only a fool sees things in black and white; all good or all bad; everything or nothing. Aren’t there some good ideas here?

My response is here. Whether or not I'll be able to coax the ASCD blog into letting me leave a comment, I don't know.

Advanced Common Core Kremlinology

Me, in comments:

A few points, Mercedes.

I think the copyright to the standards angle is a red herring. Standards shouldn’t be controlled by private copyright, I agree, but the way NGA & CCSSO set this up — including splitting control over two politically complicated organizations, and using a sort of, almost open license — does not indicate at all that they intended to aggressively enforce their copyright control. Certainly if they were going to, Indiana would be on its way to court already, and as far as I know they are not.

I still think you’ve got ADP’s role in the sequence flipped. The important and pointed question is more “Why *didn’t* they use ADP?” Common Core isn’t based on ADP, despite the fact that Achieve literally published a set of “Common Core” standards based on ADP in July 2008 — http://achieve.org/OutofManyOne Knowing exactly what happened between 2008 and 2009 to write that document out of history would tell us a lot. What was thought to be wrong with the ADP Common Core?

I’ve always thought that we needed new standards because the powers that be wanted new *tests* and more numbers for VAM. The standards are just a formality. If they could write new tests without writing standards at all, they would. So the standards were written to fit the way they wanted to write tests and provide at least tidier looking VAM numbers (by having everything in K-12 ELA based around the same skill based anchor standards, mostly).

Anyhow, these are relatively obscure points of Kremlinology.

Chaos Favors Pearson

Robert Shepherd:

When I started in the educational publishing business years ago, there were 30 companies competing with one another. When the teachers at a school got together to decide what book they wanted to use, there were many, many options. Now, there are three big providers that have almost the entire market. What were previously competing companies are now separate imprints from one company.

And the CC$$ creates ENORMOUS economies of scale for those few remaining publishers, making it almost impossible for any other publisher to compete with them.

And inBloom creates a single monopolistic gateway through which computer-adaptive online materials must pass. A private monopoly created by the state.

Are people OK with this? Where are the articles and essays and speeches about these issues from those opposed to Education Deform? One can understand the silence from the deformers-they created these deforms precisely in order to ensure their monopoly positions. But . . . but . . . why the deafening silence from the other side?

Me, in comments:

I would argue that the crux of the problem in this facet is not the Common Core -- or national standards as a concept -- but the power and resources of Pearson and the other big players in the context of constant, rapid policy churn and manufactured crisis.

In the *long run*, in a stable policy environment, with the internet as a distribution and composition platform, stable national standards, particularly if they were of the quality of some of the better national or provincial curriculum frameworks used elsewhere, would tend to favor innovation and smaller players. Particularly if standardized testing was not central.

That's the opposite of where we are right now of course, so Pearson wins the day. If nothing else, we're very much in "nobody ever lost their job for buying IBM, I mean, Microsoft, I mean Pearson" territory.

I'm not trying to make this point to defend Common Core, Pearson, etc. But at this point, chaos and shock doctrine policy favors Pearson more than the Common Core does. If the Common Core goes away, a whole bunch of startup potential market rivals will die a sudden death (I don't care if they die, I'm just pointing this out). Pearson will *still* be in a better chance to react to the next thing than their commercial competitors for the foreseeable future.

Essentially, every time you have to deliver a new curriculum yesterday, or else, the more likely you're just going to buy it from Pearson.

Welcome to Livingston

Meanwhile, on the Saving the World Front

Joe Romm:

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just issued its third of four planned reports. This one is on “mitigation” — “human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.”

The first two reports laid out humanity’s choice as depicted in the figure above, which appeared in both reports. The first report warned that continued inaction would lead to 9°F warming (or higher) for most of the U.S. and Northern Hemisphere landmass, resulting in faster sea level rise, more extreme weather, and collapse of the permafrost sink, which would further accelerate warming. The second report warned that this in turn would lead to a “breakdown of food systems,” more violent conflicts, and ultimately threaten to make some currently habited and arable land virtually unlivable for parts of the year.

Now you might think it would be a no-brainer that humanity would be willing to pay a very high cost to avoid such catastrophes and achieve the low emission “2°C” (3.6°F) pathway in the left figure above (RCP2.6 — which is a total greenhouse gas level in 2100 equivalent to roughly 450 parts per million of CO2). But the third report finds that the “cost” of doing so is to reduce the median annual growth of consumption over this century by a mere 0.06%.

You read that right, the annual growth loss to preserve a livable climate is 0.06% — and that’s “relative to annualized consumption growth in the baseline that is between 1.6% and 3% per year.” So we’re talking annual growth of, say 2.24% rather than 2.30% to save billions and billions of people from needless suffering for decades if not centuries. As always, every word of the report was signed off on by every major government in the world.

Getting Back to the Core of Common Core ELA

This is the generic form of the essay question in the new SAT:

Write an essay in which you explain how THE AUTHOR builds an argument to persuade his audience. In your essay, analyze how THE AUTHOR uses one or more of the features listed in the box above (or features of your own choice) to strengthen the logic and persuasiveness of his argument. Be sure that your analysis focuses on the most relevant features of the passage. Your essay should not explain whether you agree with THE AUTHOR'S claims, but rather explain how THE AUTHOR builds an argument to persuade his audience.

The "features in the box" might change, and of course the text will, but that's the prompt, full stop. One of the distinctive features of the Common Core is that essentially all the reading standards can be applied that way and turned into generic writing prompts that could be applied directly to arbitrary texts. This is a very unusual feature for a set of standards. It didn't happen accidentally.

On the other hand, Common Core implementation hasn't followed this path of least resistance, but its reappearance in the SAT indicates that it is a pattern David Coleman likes (or maybe we should credit The College Board, since that organization had a big footprint in the Common Core design process), and probably expected the Common Core to follow.

Uh... Yeah, I Can Think of How to Prep for This

The College Board:

The Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section of the redesigned SAT® embodies the College Board’s firm commitment to the idea that all students should be asked routinely to engage with texts worthy of close attention and careful analysis — works that explore challenging ideas, offer important insights, reveal new discoveries, and build deep knowledge in numerous disciplines. While this commitment is apparent throughout the whole exam — which calls on students to read and analyze rich texts in the fields of U.S. and world literature, history/social studies, and science and on career-related topics — nowhere is it more evident than in the Reading Test’s inclusion of U.S. founding documents and texts from the Great Global Conversation.

Over the centuries, the founding documents — a body of works that includes the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers — have moved, influenced, and inspired countless individuals and groups at home and abroad. The vital issues central to these documents — freedom, justice, and human dignity among them — have also motivated numerous people in the United States and around the globe to take up the pen to engage in an ongoing dialogue on these and similar matters. Those participating in this Great Global Conversation, including Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Martin Luther King Jr., are notable in part for the diversity of perspectives and life experiences they represent. Though their works inevitably reflect the particulars of the places and times in which they lived, these writers are united by their profound engagement with the issues and ideas that are at the heart of civic life. The texts they have produced — spanning many nations and years — have served to build on, broaden, and enrich the “conversation” that took place in the British American colonies and the early U.S. republic. ...

(example question) The stance Jordan takes in the passage is best described as that of

• A) an idealist setting forth principles.
• B) an advocate seeking a compromise position.
• C) an observer striving for neutrality.
• D) a scholar researching a historical controversy.

OK, this is just a draft, but once a kid recognizes that he or she is reading a Great Global Conversation text, that's going to eliminate a lot of potential answers. You should be able to guess the correct answer above based on no more than that meta-context.

Much Depends on the Efficacy of Slightly Elaborated Multiple Choice Questions

Caralee Adams:

The (new SAT) reading test drills down, more specifically, asking students to answer questions based on what is stated and implied in texts across a range of content areas and determine which portion of a text best supports the answer to a given question.

Let me just say that I totally get the genesis of the role of citing evidence in college preparedness. I took a number of literature courses with undergraduates at Brown, well, 15 years ago (not long at all!) while getting my MAT in English, thus while quite conscious of what was going on around me pedagogically, and YES! indeed, many of my professors would get quite peevish about constantly having to ask students to cite evidence for their opinions during a comparative literature seminar!

Yet, as our new deeply intertwined systems of curriculum, assessment and accountability roll out, it is hard not to feel like far too much is resting on the premise that adding a ubiquitous "determine which portion of a text best supports the answer to a given question" step to basically every reading task or test a student will undertake as a primary or secondary school student is going to trigger some sort of substantive improvement in American education.

That is, when this process started, I don't think reformers would have predicted that this particular point would be a centerpiece of their agenda, but from my perspective, it has turned out that way.

Efficiency For Whom

Paul Krugman points us to a short paper by Thomas Philippon, Finance vs. Wal-Mart: Why are Financial Services so Expensive? which I would recommend to anyone working in ed tech:

Historically, the unit cost of intermediation has been somewhere between 1.3% and 2.3% of assets. However, this unit cost has been trending upward since 1970 and is now significantly higher than in the past. In other words, the finance industry of 1900 was just as able as the finance industry of 2010 to produce loans, bonds and stocks, and it was certainly doing it more cheaply. This is counter-intuitive, to say the least. How is it possible for today's finance industry not to be significantly more efficient than the finance industry of John Pierpont Morgan?

This paper in particular gives you something to throw in the face of anyone -- particularly in finance -- who brings up the old trope about every industry in the country but education having been transformed by technology.

The Wal-Mart vs. banks comparison is particularly nuts. For all the many, many important and well documented downsides of Wal-Mart, they do at the end of the day deliver everyday low prices, whereas our financiers can't even do that.

A Little Context on the OpenSSL and GnuTLS Bugs

If I'm getting confused, you probably are too, so for a little historical perspective, here's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from last month:

According to some reports you'd think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source "secure" communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone's favorite open-source security library of choice.

Red Hat discovered the latest in a long-series of GnuTLS bugs .

Latest? Yes, latest.

You see, GnuTLS has long been regarded as being a poor SSL/TLS security library. A 2008 message on the OpenLDAP mailing list had "GnuTLS considered harmful" as its subject — which summed it up nicely. 

In it, Howard Chu, chief architect for the OpenLDAP, the open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), wrote, "In short, the code is fundamentally broken; most of its external and internal APIs are incapable of passing binary data without mangling it. The code is completely unsafe for handling binary data, and yet the nature of TLS processing is almost entirely dependent on secure handling of binary data. I strongly recommend that GnuTLS not be used. All of its APIs would need to be overhauled to correct its flaws and it's clear that the developers there are too naive and inexperienced to even understand that it's broken." 

With GnuTLS's most recent and perhaps biggest failure to date, Red Hat found that GnuTLS, when shown a specially rigged kind of bogus SSL certificate, would fail to see that the certificate was a fake.

What we learned this week is that OpenSSL had a vastly worse vulnerability, known as Heartbleed.

So... well, one thing is for sure, if two gaping holes in the security backbone of the open source internet architecture had come out six months after The Cathedral and Bazaar was published, we might be living in a completely different, even more proprietary technological world where, say, your Sun Microsystems stock might be worth something. At this point, the overall role of open source processes is well established, and it is clear that switching to proprietary security software isn't going to protect us from prying eyes. Still, what happened to the open source mantra that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?" Well, as Timothy B. Lee put it:

The Heartbleed story highlights just how central to online security the OpenSSL library has become. Thousands of organizations use it to protect the privacy of millions of users. Yet the software is developed by a small, volunteer-driven organization. The project lists just 15 developers as responsible for maintaining the software. As one security expert puts it, the team does "a hard job with essentially no pay."

With so many organizations depending on a small, under-resourced project, mistakes were inevitable. It will cost companies and governments millions of dollars to clean up the mess created by Heartbleed. It would be good if some of those deep-pocketed organizations invested resources in helping to improve the OpenSSL code so it's less likely to happen again.

Unfortunately, there's a huge collective action problem. The risk of any specific company or policymaker being blamed for a security breach is low, so everyone assumes that someone else will do something about it.

Right now, we have a "National Security Agency" dedicated to making the internet insecure. We need the opposite.

Perhaps I Should Write an Op-Ed Demanding an End to Tenure for NY Times Reporters

Andrew O'Hehir:

There were plenty of signs of trouble, too: Blair had been in rehab for cocaine and alcohol abuse, and well before the plagiarism scandal broke, his work was often seen as dubious and full of mistakes. The number of corrections his stories required was three times higher than average; he had received a strongly negative performance review, and one mid-level editor had written a stern memo urging that “we have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times.” In Grant’s film, Howell Raines says the memo never reached his desk, and other editors say that a combination of complacency and bureaucracy kept Blair on the staff, rather than any desire to protect one of the paper’s few African-American reporters.

This is Certainly the Way I Look at Living in Elmwood

Daniel Jose Older:

The dominant narrative of the endangered white person barely making it out of the hood alive is, of course, a myth. No one is safer in communities of color than white folks. White privilege provides an invisible force field around them, powered by the historically grounded assurance that the state and media will prosecute any untoward event they may face.

I'd Like to See these Numbers for Rhode Island

Doug Livingston:

Ohio’s public school buses are traveling farther each year to pick up fewer kids, and it’s costing taxpayers more money.

It’s an unintended consequence of school choice. State officials have forced traditional public schools to crisscross their cities to pick up and deliver children to privately run charter schools, often while cutting transportation to their own kids.

The cost for the door-to-door service is significant: About 44 percent more per child, according to an analysis of statewide data.

A child attending a traditional public school and transported on a district bus cost on average $4.30 per day in 2012. The average cost for a charter-school student: $6.18, or $1.88 more per day.

Since then, 22,000 more children have enrolled in charter schools, the state has stopped helping school districts buy new buses and other state transportation assistance has failed to keep pace with costs.

The Most Depressing Thing I've Read in a While

Dan Alexander:

In the two days since he hosted the Republican Jewish Coalition’s meeting with several possible 2016 Republican candidates at his Venetian Resort and Hotel, Adelson personally made $2.1 billion — 21 times the $100 million he reported giving away during the 2012 presidential election.

We've got a School of Sport at Stirling

John Lombardi:

It’s time for the sports performance degree. As anyone who watches the college sports enterprise knows, the profession of sports performance (i.e., being a professional athlete, whether on a golf tour or in professional baseball) is demanding, highly technical, and requires a combination of talent, skill, training, preparation, and dedication.

One only needs to observe the increasingly sophisticated methods and techniques required of baseball and football players, or the careful analysis that goes into learning golf techniques or tennis strategy, to understand that we should provide our students interested in sports performance with similar opportunities to those we provide students seeking a career as a violinist or operatic tenor.

To be sure, academic programs in music, or theater, or dance, with courses in theory and history, as well as performance, have been with us for a long time, and have well-established traditions and curriculums. Sports performance, with its tradition of amateur participation and a long-standing existence outside the academic program as an extracurricular activity, does not have the benefit of an academic tradition.

University of Stirling School of Sport:

Our mission is to be the first choice for anyone with an interest in sport - step onto our campus and you’ll discover it is the perfect setting to study and participate in sport.

The School of Sport is at the heart of the University’s sporting life, with experts in areas such as coaching, psychology, management and science.

There are extensive sports science research and teaching laboratories and one of the best collections of sports facilities in the country including a 50m swimming pool and indoor tennis centre.

Sports scholarships support talented athletes and partnerships with the sports industry ensure students have every opportunity to prepare for careers of their choice.

We've even got an American football team -- the Clansmen!

Seriously though, it makes sense. Sports is a business and an important part of the culture.

More Pointedly on NYS/Pearson

New York state's strategy vis a vis Pearson has been to attack Pearson's core business by paying non-profits to develop open curriculum for the state (and beyond), while turning over to Pearson the decisive point in the process -- the tests -- in fact going out on a limb to do so instead of joining one of the two new multi-state consortiums. If the Common Core fails in New York, even if Pearson's tests are a leading cause, Core Knowledge, Expeditionary Learning, Common Core, Inc., and the other upstart curriculum writers have a lot more to lose than Pearson.

NECAP vs. Common Core at RIFuture

me:

Is one of these clearly intellectually stronger than the other? Why should we think they would be, since the NECAP standards were published in 2006 and closely aligned to Achieve’s American Diploma Project standards, which were a direct precursor to the Common Core standards? There was no breakthrough in our understanding of high school or collegiate English in the intervening three years.

In terms of writing, it depends on if you believe that being “intellectually stronger” requires an almost singular focus on one particular type of formal, logical, academic argument. If you believe that writing for self-expression or aesthetic reasons makes you intellectually weak, you may agree with Dr. Adams and Common Core proponents. On the whole, though, at the high school level Rhode Island’s old and new writing standards are more similar than different.

People don’t trust the Common Core because most of what what we have been told about the standards is obviously not true. Some people are a bit confused about exactly which bits are the lies, but it is no wonder given the context.

Is Pearson Sabotaging the Common Core?

After a quick perusal of Testing Talk (kudos to the remarkably broad range of backers), the little feedback there is about the PARCC and Smarter, Balanced tests is relatively restrained and technology focused, compared to the response to Pearson's New York state test.

e.g., Lucy Caulkins:

Last year, the NYS ELA-a test that was described as bran new and aligned to the CCSS-was bad. We complained, we gave feedback, we worked to improve things-and I think many of us actually believed that the State would try to make a better test this year. But from what we are hearing, this year’s test was worse. The finest principals in the State are all saying that the best thing they could have done was to tell teachers and children to go home. The people I am hearing from are all agreeing the tests will tell nothing of value-that they were not testing anything close to what kids should be able to do in language arts.

I did not see the tests-I am not allowed to do so-therefore I rely on reports, as do all the parents across the State. I’m sympathizing with those parents, wondering what they have heard. What I have heard includes stories about some of the very strongest, most resolute third graders coming up to their teachers with tears welling, saying, “I can’t write anything here. I don’t understand what it is asking.” There are stories of brilliant teachers and principals trying to take the test themselves and finding that too many questions were obscure and confusing, too many had many possible answers. Teachers who are my heroes report their hearts were breaking, they do not know if they can continue to teach. Passages for third grades (on their first standardized test ever) at level X, three-part questions requiring a whole sequence of abstract steps, passages in archaic old English… And always, the kids are being asked to look between paragraphs, back and forth, back and forth, noting structures of paragraphs and intuiting author’s purposes…The work that people describe as being required on the Ela seems to me to be utterly unlike what reading and writing should be like for youngsters.

On the other hand, here's some detailed PARCC observations from RI.

I'm not saying PARCC and Smarter Balanced are fine, I have no idea, really. But as someone who has spent plenty of time talking to teachers and administrators about the problems of garden-variety US standardized testing, the response to the NY Pearson tests was quantitatively and qualitatively off the charts. There was never any reason for Common Core aligned tests to be that different than what preceded them -- and in turn no real reason to think the forthcoming consortium tests would be that much different from the status quo, for better or worse, either.

You have to ask yourself exactly how Pearson screwed up such a pivotal contract so badly. You can see CC as an opportunity to lock up the whole country, but you can also see it as an opportunity for new players to get into the game and grow much more quickly. Either could happen. Pearson has done fine with a fragmented and turbulent state-based system, and the entire Common Core syndicate is so tightly interwoven, interlocking, and justifiably worried about the whole edifice collapsing that it is difficult for anyone to pointedly and publicly critique anyone else.

Consider, for example, the damage to one of College Board's biggest competitors that David Coleman could have done with a few offhand public comments (or some extended formal ones) about the problems with Pearson's NY tests last year. One suspects that the fear of turning the Common Core coalition into a circular firing squad keeps any of them from critiquing the rest, publicly at least.

The Problems of the Century are This and Climate Change

Charlie Stross:

We can still produce enough food and stuff to feed and house and clothe everybody. We can still run a growth economy. But we don't seem to know how to allocate resources to people for whom there are no jobs. There's a pervasive cultural assumption that people who don't work are shirkers or failures, rather than victims of technological change, and this is an enabler for populist politicians who campaign for support from the frightened (because embattled) working majority by punishing the unlucky, rather than admitting that the core assumption—that we must starve if we can't find work—is simply invalid.

I tend to evaluate the things around me using a number of rules of thumb, one of which is that the success of a social system can be measured by how well it supports those at the bottom of the pile—the poor, the unlucky, the non-neurotypical—rather than by how it pampers its billionaires and aristocrats. By that rule of thumb, western capitalism did really well throughout the middle of the 20th century, especially in the hybrid social democratic form: but it's now failing, increasingly clearly, as the focus of the large capital aggregates at the top (mostly corporate hive entities rather than individuals) becomes wealth concentration rather than wealth production. And a huge part of the reason it's failing is because our social system is set up to provide validation and rewards on the basis of an extrinsic attribute (what people do) which is subject to external pressures and manipulation: and for the winners it creates incentives to perpetuate and extend this system rather than to dismantle it and replace it with something more humane.

Pointedly, the problem is not "preparing kids for jobs that don't exist yet." There will be many jobs that don't exist yet, but there will not be enough of them to employ everyone, full stop.

What then?

Just to be clear, in the medium term, we could get back to more or less full employment with higher government infrastructure and public service spending, but the longer term problem only becomes more clear.

Of Course, Then You Need Democrats Who Act Differently Than Republicans

David Atkins:

But there's one other thing that Democrats can do that she doesn't mention: get aggressive about progressive policy at a state level. If Democrats in blue states prove what is possible when Republicans aren't in the way, that would serve as a way to counter cynicism and bring a broader electorate to the polls. It would also emphasize the importance of voting in every race all the way down the ballot.

*cough*

Light blogging lately due mostly to a spring cold I can't shake. This is the problem with relying on multiple bike trips every day to move children and food around, but I'd managed to avoid it until now. I'm fine but just lacking the bursts of mental energy that result in completed blog posts.

Still Working Out the Kinks

So... I can get a month of mlb.tv for $19.99, which would get me through the initial baseball watching enthusiasm that then subsides for a while. But opening day (today) is the last day of the month, so if I order on opening day is it $20 for one game? I actually tried to read the terms and conditions (perhaps a first for me in the entire internet era), and still have no clue.

"Common Core" Licensing and Trademark

There has been a bit of hubub recently over the licensing of the Common Core Standards, and how it might be used to enforce "alignment." Here's my quick "I'm not a lawyer" analysis.

According to their "public license," which grants "a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to copy, publish, distribute, and display the Common Core State Standards for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative." So this means that theoretically there is some range of uses with is neither fair use, nor allowed by the license. In practice, this is a thin, unimportant slice, since most uses are likely to be educational and would not affect the "market" for the standards themselves.

The real question is whether the NGA and CCSSO hold any trademarks associated with "Common Core." What would stop someone from calling their product "Common Core Aligned" is trademark law. I can't stamp "Microsoft Certified" on whatever I want not because of Microsoft's copyrights, but because of its trademarks. Nothing on the Common Core Standards site indicates that they hold any trademarks, while the other Common Core (the curriculum) clearly does assert a trademark on the phrase. Nor does anything show up from NGA and CCSSO show up on a naive trademark search.

Presumably they could pursue a certification mark at some point. That would at least give them control over a specific "Common Core Aligned" or maybe "CCSSI Aligned" logo.

My Uncle's Penultimate Post

George Cornelius:

Next week I’ll be sharing my final post. It will take the form of a letter to my fictional grandson John David, who will soon be commencing his search for the “right” college. Basically, it will be a summary of the college-selection criteria I’ve come to believe are important, although with a personal albeit subjective slant (since, hypothetically, I’ll be writing to family).

I’ll be discontinuing this blog for two reasons. First, I don’t think I have anything left to say on the subject. Second, I think there is already too much being said and written about it and far too little action. I’m starting to feel complicit in the delaying tactics so skillfully employed by our entrenched system of higher education.

I guess to keep up my Cornelius blog quota I'll have to switch over to cousin David's development blog for his apparently quite successful bracket generating site, Challonge.

How You Can Tell Common Core ELA/Literacy Advocates Actually Hate the Damn Things

Following Kathleen Porter-Magee's advice, as I always do, I checked out Louisiana's new Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool for Alignment in ELA Grades 3 -12 (IMET). What's bizarre about it is that there is essentially nothing requiring alignment to specific enumerated standards, eg:

• Does the text illustrate and require "strong and thorough textual evidence" at the 9th grade level?

I'm pretty sure every major Common Core advocate I've run into would scoff at the very idea of such a thing and mock it as an example of how not to use the standards. So narrow and pedantic! Can't you see the big shifts? That's where the action is!

Yeah, ok, but... that's the way the standards are written, and I thought standards were important?

So the rubric is mostly about whether you have the right kinds of texts in the right percentages and right difficulty and the right kind of questions, scaffolding, assessment, etc. They like that stuff. Not those tedious old standards, which are for losers.

Bear that in mind when you read about what is and is not "aligned" to the Common Core.

The Problem with this Post is He Doesn't Cite Achieve RFC0122

Grant Wiggins:

There are three different aspects to a so-called standard; a standard is not just one demand. Whether stated or implied in standards documents, when we talk about students “meeting standards,” there are three aspects involved: content, process, and performance. The content standard says what they must know. The process standard says what they should be able to do (in terms of a discrete skill or process). A performance standard says how well they must do it and in what kind of complex performance.

Here is a simple example, using track and field:

• Content = know the techniques and rules of jumping
• Process = be able to make technically sound jumps
• Performance = be able to high jump six feet

Modern computer and information technology is built on formal standards. Specific protocols are defined of course. But also, the way those protocols are to interact with each other, how to create a standards-setting work group, and how the specifications are supposed to be written.

One of the deep mysteries of the whole Common Core cycle is why Bill Frickin' Gates and company didn't think it was necessary to really approach educational standards in a more rigorous way, especially if you're trying to build a big data edifice on top of the whole damn thing. Was billg afraid it would be too expensive? I guess there might be some fear that it might slow down the process, after all look at how slowly the internet grew.

Essentially, none of the key terms in this debate are clearly defined. I'm sure people have written this stuff down occasionally, but you never see any citation of a full rigorous explanation. I don't mean that in the sense that there are opposing definitions. It is all just handwaving and opinion.

To be clear, I basically like Wiggins post, but in the end it is just floating around in the same ether as everything else.

Toward Rigorous Common Core Standards From the Ground Up

The next time someone wonders what we would go back to instead of the Common Core, I'm going to suggest Achieve's Common Core circa 2008. It is a bit dull, but the ELA standards are shorter (22 ELA standards!) clearer, less provocative, and in general it is more truly a common core than what we got a year and a half later.

Who knows why it got tossed?

Grant Wiggins Actually Kind of Nailed the CC in 2011

Grant Wiggins:

I know, this is a little dry - but it matters greatly. The poor quality of local assessment and the mismatch with state tests is explained by it. The locally-designed items/questions/tasks used are often too low level and not valid measures of the goals in question. (This has been shown for decades using Bloom’s Taxonomy). So, students and teachers are often shocked when test scores come back; ironically, state tests are much harder than typical school tests. This issue can only be solved by clarity about the performance deamnds stated and implied in the Standards - typically via verbs and adverbs - as well as by sample valid (and invalid) performance indicators and performance tasks being added to the Standards.

So, what do we find in the Common Core? Not much help at all: no glossary or discussion of why those verbs were chosen; and we see inconsistency in how the verbs are used across grade levels. And zero help on performance standards from the math group. ...

And that’s the point:rhetoric seems to be driving the work not intellectual clarity. This lack of attention to clarity and precision completely undermines the idea of Standards. You can bet dollars to doughnuts that some well-intentioned local educators are going to misread the Standard not because they read poorly but because the Standards are too vague and arbitrary in their language, especially across grade levels. (Yes, I know Standards are inherently general; that’s no excuse for shoddy language use or unclear terms and no Glossary).

As I mentioned above, I do not even understand why there have to be grade-level differences at all as long as there is a degree-of-difficulty of text standard - which there is - AND if there are rubrics and anchors for the scoring of work against the Standard over time on a continuum of sophistication. Why not just use only the Anchor Standards, then show samples of work to show what increasingly-sophisticated work against that same Standard looks like? That would greatly simply the whole enterprise and clarify that the point is increased rigor on the ‘same’ standard rather than spurious changes in the same Standard.

I know the answer, alas: the writers of the Standards and their guides didn’t think through the relationship between content standards, process standards, and performance standards. Good Lord, at least the ELA document included an Appendix with sample performance tasks. The math people provided us with absolutely no guidance as to what counts as appropriate performance tasks and appropriate levels of performance in terms of meeting the Standards.

All of this is fixable. But who, now, is in charge of these Standards? How will needed edits get done, and on a timely basis? Beats me. How will the 2 assessment consortia develop a valid test of these Standards without such clarification? Beats me. Write your local state people and demand better.

Nonetheless, he was and is now a fan. This is what makes my head explode.

Let's Try This Again

Signal and Noise in the Common Core ELA/Literacy Standards.

State of the Debate

Nothing new here, but if you read this post by TFA-er Juice Fong, then this post by Marc Tucker, you should feel good about which side has the rhetorical and factual momentum at this point. Most pointedly, Fong manages to write a rather long post about the need to continue ed reform without actually citing any recent successes. Not that he couldn't come up with some (kinda... DC! New Orleans! Some charters!), but this far down the road, that needs to be the core of the reform argument.

Multiple Measures of the Same Thing

My understanding of the SAT growing up was that it was meant to identify kids with potential who didn't necessarily have good grades, live in the places one expects successful people to live, or perhaps look like one expects good students to look. There seems to be a broad consensus at this point across the spectrum of educational politics that the SAT does not do this. The response is to align the test to K-12 and college and career readiness standards. But if we do all this correctly, a student's grades in school, her K-12 standardized test scores, her performance portfolio (ha!), and her SAT scores should all say exactly the same thing. So why do we need the SAT?

Who Else Publishes School-Level Student Self-Reported Mental Health Data?

It was pointed out to me last weekend that RIDE's student survey last year included a set of mental health questions, including questions about depression and suicide. There is also a quite detailed taxonomy of bullying, and various risk factors (smoking, drugs, etc.). These are published with school-level data on InfoWorks! (emphasis in the original).

Let's just say for now there are some fascinating and disturbing tidbits there, particularly in the mental health questions. These questions were not in the 2011-2012 survey, and I can't find any of the earlier SALT surveys online -- there are a lot of dead links -- so I'm not sure what the complete history is at this point.

My question for my broader readership is, have you ever heard of anything else like this, in your state in particular? My sense is that some states have "climate" questions, but as it turns out, just because many students in a school feel "safe," and like their teachers care about them, it does not mean there is not also a distressingly large minority of kids who are failing to thrive and will write that down if someone asks them.

If you could leave a quick comment on how this is handled in your state -- particularly in terms of school-level data, I'd appreciate it.

We have a legislative problem more than a messaging problem

David Atkins:

It's an old complaint: the Left just doesn't get its message through. You'll often hear progressives complain that the Democrats don't phrase their ideas well enough, or that the media is against us, or that the American people are too distracted by their electronic devices, etc.

But that's actually not true. There may be some failure in terms of deeper narrative framing, but at a policy level most Americans agree strongly with most progressive positions.

This is becoming more and more true in education. One of the bigger problems at this point is simply getting pro-public education candidates to run against people like Rahm Emmanuel, Andrew Cuomo or for that matter, Hillary Clinton.

School Reformers Design Hubris

A dozen years ago or so I had the opportunity to sit in on a series of regular meetings of a heterogeneous group of leading experts on various aspects of education. These were all people who had impressive records of successful pilot programs, publication, and local successes, and who were focused on bringing together theory and practice (I represented "practice" at that point), and "scaling up" their work.

From their perspective, program design to solve specific problems was essentially trivial. If they needed to design a more effective professional development program, or a new early literacy program, or a new science curriculum, they were confident that they, or someone they knew, could do it, and they had the track record to back it up.

These folks weren't on the cutting edge of "corporate reform" as we know it, but they were definitely being pulled into the New Schools Venture Fund Orbit, were certainly almost entirely dependent on Gates, Hewlett, MacArthur and other private foundation funding, and had generally come to the conclusion that the experts on scale were businesses.

Fast forwarding to today, none of these folks has, as far as I can tell, significantly expanded their influence as a result of the subsequent wave of reforms, but what is more and more clear to me is that their attitude about the trivial nature of specific problems in education became conventional wisdom to reformers, whether by coincidence or direct influence.

That is, what is really crippling reform at this point is that writing new standards turned out not to be trivial; writing whole new curricula based on those standards was not trivial, and there was never any reason to think the new tests were going to be significantly better than the old ones. Future innovation was simply assumed, as if Moore's Law applied to pedagogy.

I'm not going to try to dig up the original, but this struck me most clearly in an article about the piloting of Amplify's new tablets and software, where it was mentioned in passing that the math games on which much depended had not yet been written. Given that people have been writing math games and exercises for computers for 50 years, and I can think of none that is much more than glorified flash cards (not to say there aren't some great math tools), to just assume the "writing effective math teaching software" step seems rather foolish.

Perhaps this makes more sense if you look at it as a case of underconfidence by the reform community. That is, they've screwed up their whole agenda because of haste. The fundamental assumption was that they had to rush as much in as possible, quality be damned, before the inevitable backlash. I think they were wrong about that, and they would have been unstoppable in a grinding war of attrition, whereas their blitzkrieg has left the overextended, short on ammo, and vulnerable.

I'm Guessing Chris Franzen is Not a Fan of Rodney Mullen's TED Talk on Creativity and Innovation

Chris Franzen:

In the skate game or whatever, let’s say you’ve come up with some crazy fuckin trick nobody’s done before. You need to keep that shit a secret, clump all your footage together, and then release.

So I’m trying to get a check from Rocco and them—cause I need money; everyone wants to live the dream. There were a lot if kids—including me—that were the same as this, and they’d go and show the footage and then Rodney would go tell whatever pro what trick was going on. Then you’d look like you copied that dude. It’s kind of like a big game. So I wouldn’t necessarily say blackballed, they just made sure nobody would work with me, plus I think the drugs were another major problem.

And then—skateboarding is no place for an entrepreneur. It’s not that there’s no place for it, it’s just that the guys before you think that they deserve to control you and make money off of you because that is what happened to them. Everything we thought we weren’t—like, we’re not part of society and this and that—bullshit, man. We’re just part of a big machine to sell product. So I made the mistake of letting Rodney and them know that I had these intentions. When you say you’re going to do a company, they need to make sure you don’t get released to the public—like run ads and this and that. I made the dumbass mistake of not playing dumb.I think when I realized this, I got super depressed and started using some fuckin’ heavy drugs. It was like Breaking Bad—except I wasn’t making it. I was like that Jesse dude. ...

Jesus, Dani, and Alfonso were all trying to do the World thing at the time, but Rodney wasn’tgiving them any love because he already had a Spaniard-Enrique.

Just like me, they’d go and release some footage, show it to Rodney to try and get on, and he would show somebody else, and then that person would come out with the trick. So you’d have to come out with tricks that nobody could do—some fuckin insane shit. ...

You know, it’s funny because when I smoked glass, I’d be like “I can make this company. I can make my board company.” And then as soon as I’d run out of meth, I’d hear Rodney’s voice saying [in Rodney Mullen impression voice] “it’s impossible and a lot of work to make a board company.” I would not necessarily call this brainwashing, but when your hero tells you something face to face, it is pretty persuasive. Why should anyone be scared of hard work, anyways? Now I understand this was only a strategy to keep people from taking market share and actually rather common practice in business. I meet programmers all the time that work for major software companies that are deterred from starting the same thing because of this same practice.

Of course, it is difficult for anyone to implement their beneficent Zen master management strategies when the public face of the company is a bunch of drug addled kids.

Line Up at the Fed ATM

Ryan Cooper:

Why hasn’t the helicopter money option already been enacted? The main reason is simply that until very recently we thought we had cured chronic shortages of aggregate demand, so no one was really thinking about these issues. The other reason is that Congress has not yet gotten it together to pass a law allowing the Fed to cut checks to the American people.

But there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. Democrats should be for it because it is straight-up economic stimulus, writ large. And Republicans should be for it because it is the stimulus option that’s most in line with conservative values. To be sure, a whole lot of right-wing conservatives will object to the very notion—government checks give them the willies. And for conservatives with the strongest tendencies toward gold buggery, who are already freaked out that the Fed’s quantitative easing is debasing the currency and setting us up for hyperinflation, the idea will never be in favor. But what conservatives really objected to about the Obama stimulus and all subsequent Democratic proposals for fiscal pump priming was not so much the fiscal consequences, despite what they said—after all, they favored the Iraq War and the Bush tax cuts, which drove up the debt, and voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, which would have done the same. What really infuriates them about Democratic stimulus measures is that it is spending by government, meant to achieve government priorities, and delivered through government channels in ways that enhance the reach and influence of the government.

The helicopter money policy, by contrast, keeps government almost completely out of the picture. It distributes resources directly to citizens, with no limits on how they can spend it, thereby strengthening individual choice and the private sector, not government bureaucracies. It’s a stimulus Milton Friedman could love. And if everyone gets the same-sized check, there’s not even a concession to the god of progressivity—it’s like a flat tax in reverse! There will be a Republican president again someday, and as we’ve seen, it is highly likely that government will face the same weak growth and high unemployment we face today. This is a tool as friendly to the conservatives’ ideology as they are likely to find.

In any case, we shouldn’t forget the relative simplicity of what’s wrong with our economy right now: it’s a simple divergence between incentives for production and those for consumption. The money supply is a very powerful tool to fix that misalignment of incentives, and its power is communal. It comes from the fact that it is accepted as a medium of exchange by all 310 million Americans. We should not fear to use that tool, and to provide badly needed help to millions of people in the process.

Still Commodifying Your Dissent

Thomas Frank:

Harold Ramis was a sort of poet of the rude gesture, of the symbolic humiliation. Our reaction to his work, both now and when it was fresh, is almost mechanical: We see the square on the screen get shamed, and our mind shouts liberation. It is almost Pavlovian. Our culture-masters have been gleefully triggering this kind of reaction for nearly fifty years now—since the rude gesture first became a national pastime during the 1960s—and in that time the affluent, middle-class society that produced the Boomer generation has pretty much gone the way of the family farmer.

These two developments are not unconnected. One small reason for the big economic change, I think, is the confusion engendered by the cultural change. The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.

Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee.

PPSD Finally Standing Up to RIDE

Linda Borg:

PROVIDENCE — After much soul-searching, School Supt. Susan Lusi said she has concluded that using the NECAP test as a high school graduation requirement isn’t fair for students who already struggle with poverty and other barriers.

In testimony Wednesday before the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee, Lusi said she can no longer support a system that “disadvantages the very students in our state who are already the most disadvantaged” — those who are poor, have special learning needs and are learning English.

Lusi appears to be the first superintendent who has openly disagreed with state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist’s controversial policy linking a standardized test, the NECAP, to a diploma. The policy has come under increasing fire from teachers, union leaders and student activists but school leaders have been mum on the subject.

And more back and forth between Education Chairwoman Eva-Marie Mancuso and Providence School Board President Keith Oliveira.

We've become accustomed to the idea that urban superintendents will actively support, or at least remain prudently silent about, state and federal attacks upon institutions and employees they ostensibly lead, and corresponding threats the the welfare of students in their charge. This is not, of course, the only possible state of affairs. As the current wave of school reform loses momentum and moral authority, professional administrators and local board members will not only be able to speak and act based on their own conscience and judgement, but it may indeed become a good career move once again to show you will stick up for your own constituents. It isn't such a strange idea!

I have no idea what Mancuso and the board thinks it is standing up for at this point, as they've already gutted the NECAP requirement. All that is left is a husk of red tape which will only entangle the most vulnerable students. RIDE and the board are left with an extremely weak hand, and everyone knows it.

On the other hand, it was clear a while ago that the RI Board of Education was being manoeuvred by RIDE administration and federal policies into acting more like a large school district board, getting into decisions about individual school policies (Hope High), opening and closing individual schools, etc., which would inevitably get them tied up in what would become a highly frustrating level of small-scale political sniping and infighting. It was bound to become unpleasant.

Haven't Had a Juicy KPG Post On Common Core Watch in a While

Me, in comments:

Reading standard 9 is your example of progression across grade levels?  It seems to me that the standards are quite close and all are equally applicable at each of the grade levels.  You could certainly talk with third graders about how the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel is adapted in Tangled, or ask 10th graders to compare and contrast the themes of Henry IV part 2 and Henry V.  The sequence is essentially arbitrary.

If the standards want students to learn about Classical mythology, they should say so.  It doesn't make sense to stuff it into a vocabulary standard, and there are probably only about a dozen words for which this actually makes sense anyhow, where you're not plunging into some obscure myth to find the vocab word (e.g.,Hygieia, Panacea), or explaining back story for words which are fairly common anyhow (cereal, atlas, panic).  And many of them seem completely irrelevant to 4th grade literary reading, which this standard supposedly addresses (plutocracy, chronology).

The example "how-to" writing assignment is terrible.  I'm tempted to call it "developmentally inappropriate," but it is really much worse than that.  It is just bad technical writing advice.  You can't write good instructions by just reading some other instructions, without doing the task yourself, or at least observing other people doing the task and talking to them.  That suggestion only makes sense if the authors are trying to pre-emptively validate a lousy form of assessment (and writing).  Any competent English teacher would cut it at the first opportunity.

Finally, are we really supposed to believe that the "heart" of the Common Core or any other body of standards is not the standards themselves, but actually the introduction and appendix?  Give me a break.

Also, she makes the (rather obvious to me) quid pro quo between Common Core and Core Knowledge a little more clear than most have:

In short, the heart of the Common Core literacy standards—the elements that earned the support of education leaders like Hirsch—have been gutted from the latest Indiana draft.

How the BIG Web Works Today

Dan Rayburn:

From a technical level, Netflix has their own servers that are sitting inside third-party colocation facilities in multiple locations. To connect Netflix’s servers to ISPs, Netflix buys transit from multiple providers, which then connect their networks to the ISPs. Netflix pays the transit providers for those connections and with that, gets a certain level of capacity from the transit provider. While Cogent is one of the companies Netflix is buying transit from, they are not the only one. Netflix buys transit from multiple companies, including Cogent, Level 3, Tata, XO, Telia, and NTT, with Cogent and Level 3 being the primary providers. Transit providers like Cogent then connect their networks to ISPs like Comcast in what’s called peering. This is where a lot of the confusion starts as many are under the impression that ISPs like Comcast are suppose to allow any transit provider to push an unlimited amount of traffic into their network without any compensation. This isn’t a Comcast specific policy, but rather one that is standard for all ISPs.

ISPs have something called a peering policy (comcast.com/peering), which are rules that govern how networks connect with one another and exchange traffic. ISPs like Comcast will allow transit providers like Cogent to connect to their network, for free, in what’s called settlement-free peering. However, once the transit provider sends more traffic to the ISP then they are allowed to, per the ISPs peering policy, the transit provider pays the ISP for more capacity to get additional traffic into their network. Remember, Netflix is the one paying Cogent and Cogent is selling Netflix on the principle that it can get all of Netflix’s traffic into an ISP like Comcast. As a result, Cogent has to take all the necessary business steps to make sure Cogent has enough capacity to pass Netflix’s traffic on from Cogent’s network to Comcast. But Cogent isn’t doing that.

My Latest at RIFuture: CFHS Four Years On

Me:

Taking a longer perspective on the CFHS data, a few things seem clear:

• The school’s academic performance prior to the transformation was not as bad as reformers thought or presented it.
• Rushing the process did not “save” the students in the school. The test scores of the student cohorts in the school during the process clearly suffered. They were worse off in reading and writing achievement according to the NECAP scores.
• In the four years since RIDE named CFHS “persistently low performing,” the gap between CFHS and RI state proficiency rates has increased on all four NECAP tests.

One thing that I noticed looking at the assembled charts is that the statewide and CFHS numbers generally bounce up and down in parallel, suggesting effects of scoring/scaling/etc.

Open In All the Wrong Places

Bob Braun:

The response from Anderson to CASA’s formal request under the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) was, yes, such an algorithm exists—but, no, you can’t have it. Why? Well, because it wasn’t developed by the Newark public schools. Rather it somehow came from that private sector giant—secretly-determining so much of what is happening, and what will happen, to Newark’s children: the Foundation for Newark’s Future (FNF).

It is nice that inBloom is open source, and kind of Student Achievement Partners to offer you a curricular shit sandwich for free, but the benefit of that stuff doesn't come close to the disutility of keeping really essential processes secret.

NECAP Quickies

See also:

• The most important number is that for the second year in a row, Deborah Gist's RIDE met only one of her 33 "Performance Measures and Goals" for the state. This year the number "nearly" meeting the goal (within 2%) went from 1 to zero. Performance in 14 of the measures declined. These goals were always unrealistic, so it is sort of unfair to hold RIDE to them, but the confidence with which the goals were issued was an important rhetorical club for reformers, so they don't get a pass now.
• The one goal they did meet comfortably both years, this year by 14.3%, was for graduates enrolled in college gaining a year of college credit within two years of graduation. Of kids getting into an "institution of higher learning," apparently 82.6% are "college and career ready" right now. This suggests that all the rhetoric about college readiness distorts the true situation -- kids getting all the way to college and flunking out is not the crux of our problems.

• Providence's high schools seem to be recovering from the horrific Brady-era slump. Updating my personal benchmark of number of neighborhood high schools with over 50% in reading:

  • 2008: 3/8
  • 2009: 5/9
  • 2010: 4/8
  • 2011: 1/8
  • 2012: 1/8
  2013: 5/7

  Yeah, cutscores are bogus, but my sense is that getting more than half the kids roughly on grade level constitutes a palpable shift in a school.

  The Brady administration did great harm to Providence's high schools -- this confirms it.

• The one high-performing neighborhood high school not destroyed by Tom Brady, Deborah Gist and their minions, E-Cubed, continues to demonstrate the potential staying power of the small schools model, with 73% proficiency in reading. Wouldn't it have been nice if we could have counted on four schools in that range every year for the past half-decade?
• I wish RIDE could decide how many schools Blackstone Valley Prep is. They're still reporting it as one elementary and one middle school. That is, they don't seem to be releasing school level data consistently from BVP.

Why Isn't Sandra Fluke Running Against...

...Bill Shuster?

Time to turn Central PA BLUE!

Nobody Knows How to Raise NECAP Math Scores

I've got a new post over at RI Future.

One side note -- North Providence did see a 19% jump in students scoring higher than "1" on the 11th grade math NECAP, and we don't have the demographic breakdowns yet, but the interesting thing about their scores last year was that whites, males, and not economically disadvantaged students all underperformed in North Providence last year compared to their peers statewide, while low-income, female and minority students all outperformed their peers. I suspect that some complacent white guys were scared straight by the graduation requirements, but it took a weird demographic situation to cause that to result in a clear test score gain.

What Do the Providence Grays have to do with Black History Month?

Peter Morris and Stefan Fatsis:

So where does that leave William Edward White? Baseball pioneer or baseball footnote? When he trotted out to first base at Messer Street Grounds in Providence, White may have been the only person who knew that a black man was playing in the big leagues. And even that assumes White thought about the fact that he was black, or even partly black. In the racially bifurcated America of the times, “you were black or you were white,” Hobbs says. If no one else knew—if society couldn’t respond and react—it’s reasonable to question whether White should be recognized as the first African-American major-leaguer.