Tom's Common Core Reading Remix

Apparently we're going to start talking about re-writing the Common Core. Given that the last thing most Common Core critics want is a new and improved Common Core, the reaction to this is likely to be ambivalent at best, including from me.

On the other hand, I've found myself trying to categorize the various structural flaws in the Common Core standards, in yet another attempt to distill my analysis, and I ended up feeling yesterday morning like I would have to create an example of the CC standards that avoided it structural faults. So... I ended up with this list, which, I would hasten to note, is meant to simply be a better organized version of the Common Core anchor standards for reading, limited to their current (insufficient) scope and philosophy.

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1. Determine what the text says explicitly.
2. Determine the central ideas or themes of the text.
3. Summarize the text.
4. Determine or infer the point of view of the author.
5. Determine or infer the purpose of the text.
6. Describe the style of the text.
7. Analyze how the central ideas or themes of the text are developed.
8. Analyze how specific parts of the text relate to each other and the whole.
9. Assess how well the text achieves its purpose.
10. Interpret the text, in part and in whole.
11. Perform standards 7, 8, 9 and 10, comparing multiple texts.

Range of texts for assessment:
Reading standards must be assessed using grade level texts.
Assessment must emphasize reading arguments.
Assessment must include texts from diverse media, formats and academic disciplines.

Note: Citation is a writing or speaking task.

Also included would be detailed performance standards for grades 3, 5, 8, 10 and graduation. Each anchor standard would not have to have performance standards at all grade spans. Where appropriate there may be separate performance standards for different types of texts, but complete duplication of standards across text types is not necessary.

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I imagine the primary complaints would be that this version does not emphasize the same "shifts" as the Common Core. The problem is that the Common Core uses redundancy and repetition to create emphasis, which makes their structure an overlapping mess.

Anyhow, I'd be interested in any feedback about my remix. Don't worry, a response does not imply endorsement of the AFT's Common Core position.

1 More Month

The Answer is Always "Close More Public Schools"

Reihan Salam:

Yet recently, as Mayor Bill de Blasio, state lawmakers in Albany, and the United Federation of Teachers have called for scrapping Stuyvesant’s current admissions formula, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that Stuyvesant should close its doors. The same goes for elite public high schools like it across the country.

I'm not a fan of this type of school, and critics of RI's school ratings should probably spend more time asking proponents why exactly Classical gets higher ratings than the rest of Providence's high schools, if those ratings are supposed to reflect anything other than the profile of the students attending the school. But it is even more depressing that "Oh, close the damn school," rolls off the lips so easily these days.

The Most Important Syllable in "Personalized Learning" is "ize"

That "personalized learning" is transparently phoney is given away by the use of "ize." It is post hoc fakery -- "Let's make this seem personal." As marketing, it is barely even trying.

No Shit, Sherlock

Elisabeth Harrison:

Speaking Tuesday night at a special edition of RIPR's Political Roundtable, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras said he made "a very public mistake" when he fired every Providence public school teacher early on in his tenure as mayor.

Beware Managing Chains of Public Schools in Foreign Countries Because You Might Trigger Xenophobia

Stephen Dyer calmly suggests Beware Xenophobia with Embattled Gulen Charters, citing examples of reasonable international educational collaboration:

It would be incredibly difficult for the Campus International School in Cleveland to find the four Mandarin teachers they currently have if they couldn't recruit in China. I just spent two weeks in Chinese schools that couldn't wait to bring over American teachers to teach in their schools and send their teachers to America in exchange. What better way to foster a cooperative, peaceful world than the free exchange of intellectual capital?

If the Sorbonne wanted to set up an experimental French language school in Columbus, would we want to prevent that? Or how about bringing over an education expert from Oxford or Cambridge to help run a new, innovative school in Dayton? Would we really not want them educating our kids because they spoke a weird form of English? Of course not.

My senior year of High School, Gareth Morrell, who was the chorus master at the Cleveland Orchestra at the time and a British citizen, came in and taught some of our choral classes. Would we want to deprive children of that experience?

The problem is that the Gulen schools aren't like those examples at all. If you're in favor of international collaboration, you should be horrified by the idea of a political group within one country running a network of schools funded by public money, drawing students away from the existing local, democratically governed system. Especially if the countries in question are so distant that essentially nobody in the country hosting the schools is capable of analyzing the context and motives of the foreign managers.

The Islamic connection is actually beside the point. The whole idea of running public schools in foreign countries is, as far as I know, unprecedented. It isn't even like a colonial system -- it makes less sense than a colonial system -- which is at least an open and comprehensive system of control, for better or worse. I suspect that one reason the Gulen system has thrived is that it is just non sequitur.

billg is Tired of Being Your Punching Bag

Bill Gates:

...the one thing we have a lot of in the United States is unmotivated students.

He is so over it.

Football is Basically Unwatchable

Let me just say that I've been watching a variety of sports this year that I'm relatively unfamiliar with, from India Premier League Cricket to World Cup Rugby and even some shinty, and I just have to say that the most un-watchable, ill-designed, totally unappealing of all sports is football. Seriously. I have no reason to dislike soccer in particular, compared to anything else but it is just crap to watch.

Televised darts, on the other hand, is quite entertaining.

Riding My Favorite Mayoral Hobby Horse Over to RI Future

Me, on RIFuture.org:

The bottom line is that either BVP and the proposed RISE Academy are running an illegal enrollment lottery, or AFPMA and the Hope Academy are, with RIDE and the Board of Education’s approval. The four schools are working under at least two incompatible interpretations of the charter school statute. They cannot all be correct.

Before the Board of Education approves another mayoral academy, they must first make RIDE do its job and publish clear, complete, public guidance on the legal requirements for mayoral academy enrollment and ensure consistent application across existing mayoral academies

This post got a bit lost in the end of legislative year shuffle, but is up now.

Never Mind the Popery

Booman:

It looks more like five Catholic Justices just made the Catholic Church's position on birth control the law of the land and told us that it was all in the interest of our religious liberty.

Stop Dancing Around the Issue: We Need to Hire More Teachers, and Cut Classroom Hours

Linda Darling-Hammond:

Along with these challenges, U.S. teachers must cope with larger class sizes (27 versus the TALIS average of 24). They also spend many more hours than teachers in any other country directly instructing children each week (27 versus the TALIS average of 19). And they work more hours in total each week than their global counterparts (45 versus the TALIS average of 38), with much less time in their schedules for planning, collaboration, and professional development. This schedule — a leftover of factory-model school designs of the early 1900s — makes it harder for our teachers to find time to work with their colleagues on creating great curriculum and learning new methods, to mark papers, to work individually with students, and to reach out to parents.

LDH follows this up with some sound policy prescriptions, but when it comes to the question of workload and staffing, flinches:

The TALIS data show that U.S. schools generally hire many fewer teachers and many other non-teaching personnel than schools in other countries. We need to rethink how we invest in and organize schools, so that time for extended professional learning and collaboration become the norm rather than the exception.

If we can't yet even bring ourselves to say out loud that we need to hire a lot more teachers, it ain't gonna happen. Look how quickly a specific demand for a $15 minimum wage moved the conversation.

Given that we have an employment crisis in this country, and generally depressed demand stretching out into the indefinite future, hiring more teachers is sound economic policy as well.

Math Reform Advocates Should Cut the Homework

If I wanted to make math reform stick in the USA, I'd take it as a basic design constraint that homework would have to be as minimal and non-threatening as possible. American parents have a long and well established track record of freaking out over math homework. So just don't send much work home, and what you do send home has to be in part designed for an audience of cranky parents. That's just the way it is. If you don't like it, do something else with your life.

Of course, because we've decided that it is necessary or desirable to decouple standards and curriculum (instead of considering them an integrated whole), nobody in particular has any control over the whole process. The standards writers have only indirect influence over the whole curriculum writing process. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that basic structure works.

Bipartisan Cult/Coalition of Efficiency

Barry Lynn:

Well, part of the reason that liberals have such a hard time is that we still share a party with real corporatists, people whose basic thinking about economics traces back to Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism rather than Brandeisian or Jeffersonian democracy. We’ve got a lot of old-fashioned “small d” democrats, “small r” republicans in our party, people who believe in community based democracy and industrial liberty. That’s probably the great bulk of us, probably 90% of the members of the Democratic party believe in a Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, Brandeisian political economics. And that’s probably true for the majority of Republicans too. But then in our party you have this overlay of the old-fashioned Progressives, of people who still really believe that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency, and these people wield real power in the party. And then in the Republican Party you’ve got a leadership controlled by a weird amalgam of straight up feudalists and insane libertarians, who live entirely in a realm of theory and myth, and who also say that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency.

This may be the best explanation of the politics of school reform I've read (in an interview on monopoly).

If Only There Were Schools Not Ruled by Tenure and Seniority For Comparison

Alice Mercer:

In the aftermath of the initial Vergara decision, there are lots of questions about effects. Having taught in a public school under a turn-around model, where hiring and being retained, was based solely on the discretion of the site administrator, I think I already have a pretty good idea of what that will look like, and it’s not good for kids or the communities they live in.

We have plenty of similar examples in Rhode Island too. You would think "Actually, we just tried what you are proposing will solve the 'civil rights crisis' and here are the meagre results," would be a pretty good argument, but what do I know about the law.

Coleman and Occam's Razor

Mark at West Coast Stat Views:

One of the challenges that management consultants often face is trying to sell a very expensive product or service to a company that is capable of providing something similar internally at a much lower cost. For this reason, firms like McKinsey are very good at driving a wedge between top level management and the rest of the company. If you can convince high level executives that the people two or three tiers below them are incompetent and/or untrustworthy, you can justify charging exorbitant fees for things could that which can be done cheaply and quickly in-house.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Coleman approach to Common Core follow this template exactly. He had a set of radical (and by some standards rather flaky) changes he wanted to make in American education. Instead of building support through research or grassroots lobbying, he approached one of the world's richest and most powerful former CEOs and, having secured his support, mounted a tremendously effective charm offensive on the press.

I'm coming around to this view as the simplest and most likely explanation of the origin of the Common Core standards, that Coleman somehow managed to convince, well, everyone, more or less, that they should let him manage the writing of the standards, and they just reflect his amateur understanding of the problem domain.

We Have This at Stirling, Except it is More Like $125 a Month

Jane Hu:

Another place we find children to test is the university’s preschools, where the kids are even WEIRDer than those who visit our lab. (The edamame kid went to preschool here.) Monthly tuition costs between $1,500 and $2,000, and the parents are highly educated, university-affiliated faculty, staff, researchers, or students. These kids know the drill with grad students’ studies: When a new person comes to class and asks if you want to “play a game,” that person is a researcher. While other children play “House” or “Doctor,” these Berkeley kids have been known to play a game called “Research.” One child holds a clipboard and asks other children to “play a game” while the child observes them and pretends to jot down notes. Some of these children have told me about their international travels, and several of the 3-year-olds have told me they can read.

Growth Model Browsing

Gary Rubenstein:

The most controversial thing about Johnston’s education politics is his firm belief in the accuracy of the Colorado Growth Model. This model is used to compare different schools based on ‘growth’ rather than just ‘achievement.’ Colorado has quite a good website for exploring data like this. So I thought I’d see how the Odyssey School did on their ‘growth.’

As it turns out, Rhode Island uses the same "growth browser." It is good for looking up a school's scores, but not much else, despite its apparent sophistication.

First off, just go have a poke around. If you're interested in data, it'll hold your attention for a while.

My main takeaway is that year over year growth data at the school level and below is quite volatile. The system makes it easy to, say, select a cluster of 10 schools within a few points for growth in one subject/year, and then see how they redistribute themselves in other subjects/years. More often than not, in any other subject/year, the schools are scattered across at least a 20% range, which seems like a lot since almost all the schools are within 30% of each other growth-wise. Is that good or bad? Seems bad to my eyeballs.

On the other hand, the data doesn't seem completely random. You just need a big enough sample size. I get the feeling that at the school level, a three year average would be fairly stable. On the other hand, that stability would make it relatively useless for the kind of accountability schemes reformers want. Changes happen too slow for them then.

It also would help if the system included error bars (circles) for selected schools. Or perhaps a way to either change the y-axis or add some color coding to discern how schools with different rates of free and reduced lunch or other disadvantages are doing system-wide.

This bit of self-praise by the designers focuses my criticism:

The SchoolVIEW data visualization application is head and shoulders above what any other governmental education organization has created. Administrators can look at “big picture” summary data for their district or school, while principals and teachers can focus on individual students and show parents information about their child’s growth. In this way, SchoolVIEW enables everyone to make better decisions on where to invest in education.

I would argue that SchoolVIEW's data visualization tool isn't even the best way of looking at Colorado's growth data. Their tabular Growth Summary Reports provide in one page information that otherwise would take dozens of clicks on the visualization tool, with limited direct comparison year over year or between different categories of data.

What the view is good at is showing how schools compare in a specific year and subject, but it is clear that is of limited value as soon as you take advantage of the ability to shift that comparison into different years and subjects and you see how fleeting and volatile those comparisons are.

Reformers Get Back to their Roots

Screw this Common Core stuff, let's get back to the red meat.

Stephanie Simon:

Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.

The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead role in the public relations initiative.

While I would prefer this wasn't happening, and it might work, which would be bad, this strikes me as a fairly lame, long-shot strategy.

The Phonics Tribe is Getting Restless

Diane Ravitch points us to an interview from January with Dr. Louisa Moats:

Dr. Moats: Marilyn Adams and I were the team of writers, recruited in 2009 by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who drafted the Foundational Reading Skills section of the CCSS and closely reviewed the whole ELA (English Language Arts) section for K-5. We drafted sections on Language and Writing Foundations that were not incorporated into the document as originally drafted. I am the author of the Reading Foundational Skills section of Appendix A. ...

Dr. Moats: I never imagined when we were drafting standards in 2010 that major financial support would be funneled immediately into the development of standards-related tests. How naïve I was. The CCSS represent lofty aspirational goals for students aiming for four year, highly selective colleges. Realistically, at least half, if not the majority, of students are not going to meet those standards as written, although the students deserve to be well prepared for career and work through meaningful and rigorous education.

Our lofty standards are appropriate for the most academically able, but what are we going to do for the huge numbers of kids that are going to “fail” the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test? We need to create a wide range of educational choices and pathways to high school graduation, employment, and citizenship. The Europeans got this right a long time ago. ...

Dr. Moats: What is good for older students (e.g., the emphasis on text complexity, comprehension of difficult text, written composition, use of internet resources) is not necessarily good for younger students who need to acquire the basic skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Novice readers (typically through grade 3) need a stronger emphasis on the foundational skills of reading, language, and writing than on the “higher level” academic activities that depend on those foundations, until they are fluent readers.

Our CCSS guidelines, conferences, publishers’ materials, and books have turned away from critical, research-based methodologies on how to develop the basic underlying skills of literacy. Systematic, cumulative skill development and code-emphasis instruction is getting short shrift all around, even though we have consensus reports from the 1920’s onward that show it is more effective than comprehension-focused instruction.

The CC was marketed as being neutral on the "reading wars" issue of Phonics v. Whole Language, but typically, this was a crock. The Reading Foundations standards Dr. Moats worked on were very explicit about phonics, and the corresponding appendix was very specific compared to the rest of the standards.

In practice -- the rhetoric around the standards and, I gather, the design of the tests -- the Reading standards have trumped the Reading Foundations standards. What the standards actually say just isn't that important.

To me the most interesting thing here is just getting a sense of how the various parts of the CC were drafted. Just knowing who wrote which parts would make it all much easier to interpret.

That Was Some Serious Kabuki

Elisabeth Harrison:

In a move that seemed almost unthinkable before a change in leadership at the House of Representatives, Rhode Island lawmakers have suspended the use of standardized test scores as part of a high school diploma until at least 2017. Lawmakers have also approved legislation that limits the frequency of teacher evaluations for most teachers.

The teacher evaluation bill, in its final form, requires highly rated teachers to undergo in-depth evaluations just once every two to three years. The original bill said every four years for teachers ranked as "highly effective," but lawmakers agreed to a compromise.

Both these policies were just stupid. Evaluating high performing teachers every year is actually the dumber of the two. It was always just a way to waste time and flush money down the toilet.

Never Forget

Scott Timberg:

There certainly were lively and eclectic strains in music back then, many from urban or college-town scenes, but “American Top 40″ tended to be the absolute last place where you would hear them. So in the early ‘80s, while the show was (like the rest of the radio dial) playing a lot of Captain and Tennille and Kenny Rogers and Air Supply and REO Speedwagon and Survivor and Billy Joel’s heart attack-ack-ack and Christopher Cross’ “Sailing,” there were actually smart, vivid songs you probably didn’t hear. The Clash’s “London Calling” came out in the States in 1980, the same year Elvis Costello put out “Get Happy,” The Jam released “Sound Effects,” and the Pretenders dropped their debut. It was the era of the Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” U2′s “Boy,” Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kaleidoscope,” Kate Bush’s “Never For Ever” and “The Dreaming,” of the Cocteau Twins and King Sunny Ade, the English Beat and the Cure and the Funky Four Plus One. Not to mention what was happening in jazz or old-time music or the better singer-songwriters; Lucinda Williams’ second record came out in 1980 and made no impression on the radio or the charts.

None of this stuff would catch on much in “American Top 40.” But you sure got to hear a lot of “Eye of the Tiger.”

I would add that Damaged and Minor Threat also came out in 1981, and could go on for a while in that vein.

While the Top 40 has mostly sucked for at least 40 years, it is hard to remember just how horrific that, for example, the Billboard Top 100 from 1981 truly was. I don't spend a lot of time being a pedantic indie rocker any more, for a variety of reasons, but there is an element of "indie rock" which is completely lost on anyone younger than 40 -- those youngsters never experienced the complete and utter failure of the major record labels in the early 80's.

Also, I forgot just how big Blondie was for a while. "Rapture" was #15 in 1981, which confirms to me that pretty much every explanation I've seen of the spread of hip hop to the white masses greatly underestimates the exposure that even white small town middle school nerds had. Robbie Daum even had a copy of the Sugar Hill Gang cassette!

No, This Is Not Disruptive Innovation

Davin O'Dwyer

That brings us back to reigning World Cup champion Spain, which suffered shock back-to-back defeats against the Netherlands and Chile. To describe Spain merely as the reigning champion is to do the team's recent achievements a disservice. La Roja had established an unprecedented hegemony at the top of the international game, winning two consecutive European Championships on either side of the 2010 World Cup. They have defined soccer’s modern international era, playing an irrepressible brand of tiki-taka, a strategy pioneered by Barcelona involving short, sharp passing designed to maintain huge amounts of possession before incisively cutting through rival defenses once they had been stretched apart. At its best, Spain’s brand of tiki-taka was dizzyingly brilliant and simply unbeatable. Their dominance was awesome and complete.

But that very dominance presented national team coach Vicente del Bosque with soccer’s equivalent of the innovator’s dilemma. Like the CEO of an industrial giant that dominates its market and is wedded to the business model that guarantees its revenues, del Bosque was tied to the players and system that had guaranteed so much success even as Spain faced fresh threats to that dominance.

The first symptoms were evident in the 3–0 defeat to Brazil in last year’s Confederations Cup final—one of the warning signs that tiki-taka’s era of pre-eminence was coming to a close. Months before, Barcelona experienced a humiliating 7–0 Champions League aggregate semifinal defeat to a finely honed, counter-attacking Bayern Munich side, bringing an abrupt end to their dominance. This year, with Bayern Munich now playing a Teutonic variation on the Spanish style under the former Barcelona coach and high priest of tiki-taka Pep Guardiola, the German champions experienced a similarly emphatic 5–0 drubbing at the hands of counterattacking Real Madrid. As the great soccer tactics writer Jonathan Wilson put it, these results showed that “radical possession football could be defeated by radical non-possession football.” Patient possession can be a liability when faced with reactive teams content to strike fast.

How is counter-attacking not a sustaining innovation?

Sports analogies don't work for disruptive innovation because on the rare occasion they come up in sport, they tend to be nullified by rules changes very quickly.

Setting the Scene

Dumyat in the background, a Pictish megalith in the foreground. Our flat is just behind the trees at the edge of the rugby pitch.

Alistair Moffat:

At the western end of the Ochils, Dumyat was a fire-hill and also once a place of power. Its unusual name is from the Dun or Fortress of Maeatae, an early Pictish kindred whose kings defied the might of Rome. In 208 A.D., the warrior-emperor Septimius Severus marched north with a vast army of 40,000 legionaries and auxiliaries to destroy them and devastate their homelands. It was and remains the largest army ever seen beyond the Tweed, but it failed to humble the Maetae. The name of the western summit, Castle Law, recalls the defiance of the Pictish kinds and the traces of their fort can still be clearly seen.

From the eastern summit of Dumyat proper, an immense vista opens up to the south and east. In the half-dark of the night of 23 and 24 June 1314, those who gathered in the needfire will have been able to make out the distant glint of the River Forth as it looped and meandered across the flat carseland on its way to the widening horizon of the firth and the North Sea beyond. On the far side of the lazy river, the Roman road that brought the tramp of Severus' legions runs from the line of the Antonine Wall northwards past the foot of Dumyat to the outpost forts of the Gask Ridge and on to Bertha, Perth. In 208 and 1314, it was a vital artery, threading a way between the Forth and its marshy floodplane on one side and the wild hill country in the west.

Now marked on a modern map as the Gargunnock and Fintry Hills, the watershed ridges of the Carron Water and the Bannock Burn, this range of rolling hills across the waist of Scotland was seen as a frontier for many centuries. Known as Bannauc, it appears in the tale of the sixth-century wandering of a mystical Welsh monk, St Cadoc, and in the roll of British Celtic warriors mustered for battle with the insurgent Angles in the south in 600 A.D., men came from 'beyond Bannuac.' Composed by the far-famed bard Aneurin in Edinburgh for the kings of the Gododdin, the epic poem sang of the rumble of war below Dumyat and the jingle of Dark Ages cavalry moving along the road by the Forth.

Legionaries and the warriors of half-forgotten kings passed below the glowering rock of Stirling. Singular and dramatic it rises above the flat carseland like a sentinel. Flanked by the floodplains to the east and the Bannauc and the treacherous Flanders Moss to the west, the fortress on the rock guarded the north road, the only road to Scotland beyond the Forth.

Watchers on the fire-hill of Dumyat could see something else, something that will have hollowed out their bellies with fear. Far in the distance, they could make out the clustered pinpricks of hundreds of fires beyond the dark silhouette of Stirling Castle rock. None had been lit to celebrate the solstice. On either side of the Bannock Burn, as it slid through the carse toward the Forth, a vast army was attempting to make camp. Perhaps the echoes of thousands of voices, the shouts of sergeants, the creak and squeal of cartwheels and the shrieking neigh of horses carried as far as the dark heads of the hills.

Cosmos: Mostly Wrong

Andrew O'Hehir:

One mistake Druyan never makes, either in “Cosmos” or anywhere else, is the arrogant historicism sometimes displayed by Richard Dawkins and other prominent scientific atheists. By that I mean the quasi-religious assumption that we stand at a uniquely privileged position of near-perfect scientific knowledge, with just a few blanks to fill in before we understand everything about the universe. “I’m sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment,” Druyan has said, “will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality.” Science as a process, as “the never-ending search for truth,” is sacred. But what we now know, or think we know, is always a matter for humility and doubt.

I have a very clear memory of arguing with my parents about a sixth grade oral report on quasars based mostly on my copy of Cosmos. I wanted to say, for example, "Quasars are 4 to 6 billion years old," and that was not acceptable. I had to say "scientists currently believe..." At the time that seemed quite tedious and pedantic. Of course Carl Sagan had to be right!

A Straightforward Vision for Public Colleges and Universities

David Dayen:

First of all, wrangling over student loans and interest rates and refinancing obscures the long-term vision - public colleges and universities should be free to attend. Or at least as close to free as possible. Though it may take time for the majority of the public to realize it, this idea is not far-fetched. The United States currently spends enough on grant aid, tax preferences and loan subsidies to cover the cost of tuition at every public college and university.

Tuition is not the only expense, and more funding would be needed to make college free or near-free. But using existing resources - and moreover, returning them to pre-recession levels - gets us a lot of the way there. Think of it as a two-track alternative: first, a “public option,” subsidized by states and the federal government, available to students attending public institutions. If a student wants to attend a private college instead, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t benefit from public subsidies to do so. Ultimately, competition from a free college option will probably bring down the cost of private higher ed, which can be accomplished by removing the vast administrative bloat, outrageous executive compensation and unnecessary spending that characterizes far too many of these institutions.

The Meta-Reform That Would Enable All Others

Rachel Evans:

This is a not-so-complicated question. Effective teaching requires collaboration with colleagues, and in the U.S., this time is too limited. In Singapore and Shanghai, teachers work 40 hours a week—but they spend just 10 to 18 of those hours teaching. They use the remaining time to collaborate with colleagues and improve their practice. Compare that with the U.S., where educators teach 25 to 32 hours per week.

Less in class time for all teachers.

This is the Sort of Thing which Slows Down the Morning Commute to Play Group

I Leave Comments

Me:

One thing to keep in mind is that many reform critics, including myself, have worked with Gates and other big foundations in the past, and one way or another been burned by the experience. In my case, Gates gave my colleagues and I a lot of money to create a small neighborhood high school in Providence, and then after Gates decided they weren't interested in small schools, we were hung out to try and closed, even as our test scores shot up and we had the highest college enrollment and retention of any neighborhood high school in the city.

Now, you can't blame Gates directly for our school being closed, but I think it is emblematic of their particular problem. That is, how can a massive private foundation -- but still small in budget compared to overall government spending -- improve education across the country in a measurable way in a short time frame? I think the short answer is turning out to be that it is impossible or extremely difficult, but in the meantime, they're going to thrash around from one increasingly disruptive option to the next, in increasing frustration, leaving a trail of orphaned initiatives in their wake.

In this respect, Gates is different than a lot of the more ideological foundations. Gates has a definite point of view, but they aren't like Broad or Walton or many of the others, which essentially have always wanted to disassemble public education. Gates has just drifted that way over time out of frustration, and it is hard to see what will stop that process.

If You Read Charlie Stross's Post, You'll Know More About the Scottish Independence Situation Than I Did After Living Here 10 Months

Charlie Stross:

We have an SNP government. They promised, and got, a referendum that, this September 18th, will ask people like me (anyone who lives here, basically) to vote on the question "should Scotland be an independent nation?" It's a straight yes/no question. The third option, Devo Max, was ruled off the ballot by David Cameron (probably because he knew it would win by a mile—over 60% of the Scottish voting public supported it as of the last poll I saw that asked about it). Devo Max was a last mile marker for a devolved parliament short of full independence: Scotland would acquire control over all internal affairs, including taxation, but would delegate defence and foreign affairs to Westminster. It's my preferred option. Such a shame we're not allowed to vote for it ...

Anyway. A vote will be held on the 18th of September. If there is a majority for independence, then the constitutional shit will hit the fan because Westminster will be required to negotiate and enact the enabling legislation for Scottish independence ... with a UK-wide General Election coming up in June 2015. The enabling legislation can't be rushed through before the next election (it's too big and complex), so it's going to trail into the next Westminster parliament, probably completing in 2016 with independence in 2017. But the next Westminster parliament cannot be bound by the decisions of the current one—basics of the British constitutional system here—and so can't automatically be held to handle the consequences of the independence vote. It's anybody's guess what the government in Westminster will look like in July 2015. It might be a renewed Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition (unlikely), a Conservative majority or minority government (less unlikely), a Labour majority (not unlikely), a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition (possibly most likely, but still not something to bet on), a Conservative/UKIP coalition (unlikely but not impossible), or a Martian invasion. Nobody knows. Add to this, 70 Scottish MPs elected on a mandate to sit for 12-18 months while they negotiate independence, then pack their bags and go home. It'll be chaos.

Understanding Tim Shanahan

Tim Shanahan:

I'm just as amazed about the cartoon figures on the left as well. You know the ones I mean (the ones who are arguing that unemployment is a problem, but the 1 million unfilled jobs in America is not). They want equality for all sexual persuasions, races, ethnicities, languages, and legal statuses--until someone tries to do anything to shrink the educational differences among those groups. According to these geniuses, if you set high educational standards, you are doing it to emphasize existing differences.

Regarding Lyndsey Layton's Piece on Gates and the Common Core

Let's start with the video, since I just made myself sit though a half hour of Bill Gates talking, and nothing makes me feel like my life is slipping away more than listening to someone talk on the internet.

First off, billg is annoyed, and we can all be happy about that. Personal annoyance is one of the few checks the public has on the behavior of billionaire philanthropists. How long can anyone sit around thinking about how he just spent $200 million dollars to make half the country think that he is the greedy, meddling asshole that is personally responsible for making their children hate 2nd grade?

Gates wants to talk about "substance," not "politics," which is difficult given that he has chosen to step into perhaps the most deeply political facet of education -- what children should be taught and learn, and why. But I do wish Layton could then pivot and ask even some simple questions about the "substance" of the standards.

Gates repeatedly praises Massachusetts' standards. Why not ask why they are not the basis of the Common Core standards. He talks about R&D; and listening to teachers -- why did they not build the process around the experiences of master teachers in Massachusetts to refine what were already the consensus "best" standards in the country? And you know what, that's not even a fake gotcha question -- I really want to know!

Ultimately, Gates' view seems to still lean heavily on the premise that nothing serious was done in education before he showed up. As if before the Common Core, we just had 50 sets of slapdash, random state standards. No NCEE, no American Diploma Project, no NCTM, no NCTE/IRA, nobody thinking about connections between high school and college. He seems to really believe that the Common Core is "the most serious effort" yet to create well researched standards. Given how quickly the Common Core was slapped together, by such a small, inexperienced, homogenous team (especially the all-important initial design), I just don't see how anyone can believe that.

Switching to Layton's article, that point is only reinforced.

Layton begins:

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

Let's backtrack a minute. Coleman you should know by this point, but who is Wilhoit?

In 2008, he was head of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Prior to that, he had been Commissioner of Education in Kentucky from 2000 to 2006. He apparently also had that job in Arkansas at some point. The point is, Wilhoit had ample opportunity to influence the status quo in American standards writing in the years leading up to 2008. As commissioner in Kentucky, he had brought the state into the American Diploma Project as one of the five original partner states. Wilhoit and Gates both knew that all the research had already been done, the standards written, gap analyses run against various state standards, new versions of state standards developed to align more closely to ADP, including by Kentucky, real statewide changes had happened that could be observed in 2008 based on quantitative and qualitative data and feedback.

Then, apparently, in 2008, Wilhoit, Gates, and basically every single person other than Sandra Stotsky, James Milgram and me either forgot, pretended to forget, or never knew that the ADP ever existed and moved on into the Common Core era as if it was a bold new idea. I still just don't get this. Did Coleman somehow personally convince everyone that he could do better than ADP? Did he lay out some kind of flaw? Not compatible enough with computer-based curriculum and assessment?

That's what I'd like to understand someday.

This is Incredibly Unpersuasive

Steve Rappaport:

Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We must find ways of making this a teachable moment, seize it as an opportunity to educate stakeholders in the education community about both the myriad ways in which data are central to the mission of public education, and how we can work together to ensure--as best we can--that data can be used in the service of teaching and learning without sacrificing privacy or the security. I believe that the overwhelming majority of educators, parents, and other stakeholders would welcome that message, and that by articulating the centrality of data in administrative and academic operations, it might contribute to a much-needed change in the dynamics of the debate over the role of data in public education.

If data plays a central role in schooling, it should be controlled by the school community and district, not farmed out to vendors. If schools don't have the technical capacity to manage systems themselves, we need to invest in school and district level capacity building so they can.

Garbage In; Transparent Garbage Out

Bill Fitzgerald:

If you are building or working with a data system, it needs to have these two components:

• Student dashboard - a student should be able to see everything that is collected about them. More importantly, the application should have a mechanism that allows students to comment on, review - and in some cases, remove - data points, or assumptions based on data. More on this later.
• Parent dashboard - because many students are minors, parents have the legal right to review data collected. Additionally, rights to review some data is guaranteed under FERPA. Really, there shouldn't need to be much - if any - difference between the student and parent dashboard. If there are significant differences between a parent and student view, those differences should be grounded in clearly articulated reasons that are of direct benefit to the learner.

We can't lean on this approach too much, particularly if you're talking about big data online learning platforms. There is too much raw behavioral data, they can't practically let you check your answers without making all the questions and answers public, and their conclusions based on the data, particularly ones just used in their internal model, may just be garbage anyhow. If your online learning platform concludes you're a spatial, abstract sequential learner with a 43.2 grit quotient, who likes Dark Tearjerkers Featuring a Strong Female Lead and a high level of distortion on the electric guitar then... ?

Raising School Funding by 20% Results in a $20 Million Increase in Lifetime Earnings Per Classroom

Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff:

At age 28, the old-est age at which we currently have a sufficiently large sample size to estimate earnings impacts, a 1 SD increase in teacher quality in a single grade raises annual earnings by 1.3%. If the impact on earnings remains constant at 1.3% over the lifecycle, students would gain approximately $39,000 on average in cumulative lifetime income from a 1 SD improvement in teacher VA in a single grade.

Multiply that times 30 and you get $1,170,000 for a whole class. Wow! ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Holly Yettick:

For low-income students who spent all 12 years of school in districts that increased spending by 20 percent, graduation rates rose by 23 percentage points. Due to the measurement error or “noise” found in almost any study of this type, the effect could, very plausibly, be as low as 8.7 percentage points and as high as 37 percentage points. The estimates are based on the study’s analysis of 15,000 children born between 1955 and 1985. All account for a host of other potential explanations, such as school desegregation, War on Poverty programs, and demographic changes. ...

Between the ages of 25 and 45, these same children were 20 percentage points less likely to fall into poverty during any given year. (Estimates vary from 8 percentage points to 31 percentage points.) Their individual wages were 25 percent higher than they would have been without the changes, with estimates ranging from 3 percent to 45 percent, according to the paper. And their family incomes were 52 percent higher, with estimates ranging from 17 percent to 86 percent.

OK, let me get out the back of an envelope... 25/1.3... $22,500,000 per class/lifetime.

Yeah, that's probably baloney, but is it more or less so than the rest of this stuff?

The Chetty Mechanism

If we're back to discussing Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff again, I'll get something off my chest. I've not seen much discussion of how higher test scores translate to better long term outcomes. What's the model exactly, and in particular, how does this work per subject area?

From the perspective of ELA, and reading tests in particular, this is pretty mysterious. I mean, learning more is good! More vocabulary, better reading skills, insofar as they exist, are good, but it is hard to break it down beyond the most general handwaving.

In math, it is much more plausible and straightforward, because math is used as a gatekeeper course and presented as a linear progression. If one good teacher can bump a handful of kids up a level in math -- particularly if the school is tracked by math, as would have been common in the timeframe for Chetty's study -- that will change their opportunities, peer group, etc. in a fairly straightforward way. If you bump up a group in math, you don't need to maintain a higher rate of learning indefinitely, just one accelerated year and then you can continue at the same pace as your peers.

Or, one bad year has similar knock on effects.

Also, whether or not your math curriculum or assessment is "authentic," a standardized math test is going to be a fairly valid predictor of how you're going to do on other math tests, at least compared to, say, a reading test's assessment of how you do on all types of reading and ELA assessments in class.

I'm not going to dig back into it now, but I think at the time I looked for separate data for math and reading and did not find it.

On a personal level, it is not hard for me to believe that if I'd had a single "top 5%" math teacher in high school, I might not be making 1% more a year, I might be making two or three times what I make now. Over a lifetime, that'd be like two or three million, which would more than cover Chetty's predictions for a whole class. It is a lot harder to imagine a great English teacher would have made me rich.

Economists are math people, so they tend to think that math education is the standard paradigm for education in general. It isn't. It is the outlier. If you build your model of education around the subject of mathematics, you have no chance of getting it right.

Growing Up Absurd-er

David Graeber:

Well, here we go back to the question of unpaid internships again. Some years ago I wrote a piece for Harpers called “Army of Altruists” where I tried to grapple with the power of right-wing populism, especially with the way that “we hate the liberal elite” and “support the troops” seemed to have a very similar, deep resonance, even to be a way of saying the same thing. What I ended up concluding is that working class people hate the cultural elite more than they do the economic elite—and mind you, they don’t like the economic elite very much. But they hate the cultural elite because they see them as a group of people who have grabbed all the jobs where one gets paid to do good in the world. If you want a career pursuing any form of value other than monetary value—if you want to work in journalism, and pursue truth, or in the arts, and pursue beauty, or in some charity or international NGO or the UN, and pursue social justice—well, even assuming you can acquire the requisite degrees, for the first few years they won’t even pay you. So you’re supposed to live in New York or some other expensive city on no money for a few years after graduation. Who else can do that except children of the elite? So if you’re a fork-lift operator or even a florist, you know your kid is unlikely to ever become a CEO, but you also know there’s no way in a million years they’ll ever become drama critic for the New Yorker or an international human rights lawyer. The only way they could get paid a decent salary to do something noble, something that’s not just for the money, is to join the army. So saying “support the troops” is a way of saying “fuck you” to the cultural elite who think you’re a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, but who also make sure your kid would never be able to join their club of rich do-gooders even if he or she was twice as smart as any of them.

So the right wing manipulates the resentment of the bulk of the working class from being able to dedicate their lives to anything purely noble or altruistic. But at the same time—and here’s the real evil genius of right-wing populism—they also manipulate the resentment of that portion of the middle classes trapped in bullshit jobs against the bulk of the working classes, who at least get to do productive work of obvious social benefit. Think about all the popular uproar about school teachers. There’s this endless campaign of vilification against teachers, who they say are overpaid, coddled, and are blamed for everything wrong with our education system. In fact, grade school teachers undergo really grueling conditions for much less money than they’d be paid if they’d gone into almost any other profession requiring the same level of education, and almost all the problems the right-wingers are referring to aren’t created by the teachers or teachers’ unions at all but by school administrators—the ones who are paid much more, and mostly have classic bullshit jobs that seem to multiply endlessly even as the teachers themselves are squeezed and downsized. So why does no one complain about those guys? Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded. It’s hard to explain that in any other way than to say: a lot of people resent the teachers for having genuine, meaningful jobs. You get to shape young lives. You get to make a real difference for other people. And the logic seems to be: shouldn’t that be enough for them? They want that, and middle-class salaries, and job security, and vacations, and benefits, too? You even see that with auto workers. “But you get to make cars! That’s a real job! And you also want $30 an hour?”

It’s an imperfect strategy. The anti-intellectualism for instance works on many sections of the white working class, but it doesn’t work nearly so well on immigrants or African-Americans. The resentment against those who get to do meaningful labor exists alongside a resentment for having to do meaningless labor to begin with. It’s an unstable mix. But we have to recognize that in countries like the US, it’s been pretty effective.

Things I Don't Understand at All

Anya Kamenetz:

The lawsuit names students including Briana Lamb as members of the class. In the fall of 2012, when Lamb showed up for her junior year at Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles, she says her schedule was full of holes. "I had four 'home' periods, and one 'service,' " she said. A home period means just that: the student must go home. During a service period, sometimes you help teachers do photocopying or pass out papers. Lamb says that at other times it just means sitting around. That meant Lamb had actual classes for just a few hours a day—not enough to graduate on time. "It made me nervous," she said. "I knew exactly what classes I needed to be in to finish my 11th grade requirements." But it took weeks to sort them out.

This is John Deasy's LAUSD?

Jenna Harrison:

Moreover, majority of the seminars led by TFA staffers were more detrimental than helpful to my development as a first-year teacher. While I appreciated the sentiment behind the sessions on culturally responsive teaching, many a time they continued to contribute to the racist mentality I believed that TFA was perpetuating through its recruits. Majority of these sessions consisted of a person of color preaching to a room full of Corps Members that white people are the reason why our students suffer. As an individual who is very well-versed in white privilege, I believe it is downright ignorant to blame an entire country’s shortcomings in educational equity simply on race. Instead of wasting precious instructional time on essentially brainwashing its Corps Members, Teach for America should focus its efforts instead on recruiting CMs that are well-versed in ALL of the injustices individuals face in our global society - regardless of their sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious background, etc.

That just sounds like the worst case scenario all around, and pretty much the kind of time-wasting psycho-babble we've been told practical alternative certifications are needed to avoid. But, who knows?

If You Read Only One Thing This Month or Next...

Read Maciej Cegłowski's talk, The Internet with a Human Face:

Of course, for ad sellers, the crappiness of targeted ads is a feature! It means there's vast room for improvement. So many stories to tell the investors.

This ghost of a business model propels us to ever greater extremes of surveillance. If the algorithms don't work, that's a sign we need more data. If the algorithms do work, then imagine how much better they'll work with more data. There's only one outcome allowed: collect more data.

Maybe if we start calling cities a "disruptive innovation?"

Jon Geeting:

When the city was shrinking in population, city politicians were consumed with how to bribe companies to locate their headquarters here, or how to make suburban people like us and come and visit the city, using subsidized Big Culture institutions, hotels, and underpriced, oversupplied parking. But now, even though the city has been growing, the politics haven't really changed.

We're still subsidizing hotels, oversupplying parking, and spending far too much time worrying about whether suburban people will come spend their money here, rather than focusing on providing the fundamental amenities our citizens want - good schools, safe neighborhoods, clean streets, low-cost transportation choices, and nice public spaces. Why do we keep wasting money on corporate tax breaks and short-sighted get rich quick schemes instead of focusing on the fundamentals?

What is the Relationship Between Humanities and Literacy?

Valerie Strauss:

The Boston public schools district found itself in the position of having to issue a public statement denying that it was eliminating its history and social studies department after someone posted on the Web that it was and the news went viral in the education world. Historians assumed it was true and rightly flipped out.

What happened?

According to Eileen de los Reyes, deputy superintendent of academics, the school district is, for the first time in many years, reorganizing its academic departments to make them more inter-disciplinary and to help implement the Common Core State Standards. As part of the reorganization, job positions are being rewritten across the various departments and dozens of people are being asked to reapply for their jobs. People in the history department did get notices but they weren’t the only ones. Part of the online buzz was that history and social studies were being absorbed into a new uber-humanities department. In fact, the departments of history, English-Language Arts and world languages are coming under a new humanities umbrella for purposes of better coordination, she said. Likewise, a new science umbrella will include science, technology and engineering, while a new “specialized learning” umbrella will include special education and English Language Learners.

Ah yes, nothing helps a district with apparent problems with absorbing a stream of externally imposed reforms, inter-departmental rivalry, and communication than a between-superintendents reorganization hastily drawn up in response to a self-interested consultant report.

More specifically though, hacking together an interdisciplinary scheme in response to the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards is bound to go badly, because the CC does not manage to articulate a vision for English and/or Language Arts as a complete discipline.

There's definitely muddled language around this new "uber-humanities" umbrella. Is it "humanities" or "humanities and literacy," as suggested by the title of the new job description? It seems as though the "arts" will not be part of the "humanities" in this scheme, but its own cluster.

This is like creating a new cluster for math, science and technology called "STEM and Numeracy," while keeping computer science and robotics in its own separate domain.

School reform that is intellectually incoherent is just not going to work.

Off-Year, Low Turnout Elections: What Could Go Wrong?

David Atkins:

The only possible way that a party of social tolerance survives for long in this sort of economic environment is if it goes hard after the plutocrats truly responsible for the economic malaise. The social liberal/economic conservative mold of Bloomberg is a recipe for political disaster.

It is notable that the only places where the far right was brought to heel were places where a strong leftist economic argument was made. The big, big loser was cautious, austerity centrism.

When the social left throws the economic left under the bus in a time of rising inequality, they sow the seeds of their own destruction. The forces of intolerance and fascism are only a couple of hard-knocks elections away at any given time.

...it's the old The Situation Is More Nuanced Than You Liberal Naifs Believe It Is trick

tristero:

As Maxwell Smart might say, it's the old The Situation Is More Nuanced Than You Liberal Naifs Believe It Is trick.

Actually it's not. Without the moolah flowing from the Kochs or the loon whisperers at Fox News, there'd still be too much funding and exposure of rightwing extremists but there would be a lot less of it. And yes, I would be satisfied that things were flowing in a good direction if the Kochs and Fox were "beaten back."

One good thing about having Diane Ravitch on your side is that passes on her immunity to that trick.

It Doesn't Get Better When You Mix In Overconfident Educational Technocrats

Quinn Norton:

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would happen, then went to bed for about four hours. Next morning on the way to work he checked on it, and discovered he was now lord and master of about 50,000 computers. After nearly vomiting in fear he killed the whole thing and deleted all the files associated with it. In the end he said he threw the hard drive into a bonfire. I can’t tell you who he is because he doesn’t want to go to Federal prison, which is what could have happened if he’d told anyone that could do anything about the bug he’d found. Did that bug get fixed? Probably eventually, but not by my friend. This story isn’t extraordinary at all. Spend much time in the hacker and security scene, you’ll hear stories like this and worse.

It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Meg Whitman is Doing Her Part to Solve the Shortage of STEM Workers... ARE YOU?

Rick Merritt:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard will lay off another 16,000 workers on top of 34,000 layoffs it already announced. The move could save up to an additional billion dollars a year by 2016 on top of the maximum $4 billion savings previously anticipated.

At This Point, the Process Should Have Been Halted and Completely Re-thought

Cathy Kessel:

Summary

Education policy is complicated, and cross-national comparisons of education policy are even more complicated. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive account of either, but to make the following points:

• In their official documents, not all countries communicate the kind of detailed expectations for student performance that U.S. readers are accustomed to seeing in standards documents.

• Details of curriculum and expectations for student performance may occur in teacher’s guides, textbooks, and teacher’s manuals; and in findings of empirical research.

The two posts that follow comment on two comparisons of the CCSS with standards and course of study documents from other countries, adding relevant details from textbooks, teacher’s manuals, and other sources.

Another way of putting this is simply, high performing countries don't use standards, at least as we define them post-NCLB.

Tired of Non-Profits

While, no, the Common Core won't turn your children gay, the Florida tests will be written by a non-profit that supports LGBT Youth. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is a kind of weird juxtaposition. I'd rather see them drop test development than the LGBT work.

The broader question here though is, why is our massive testing industry "non-profit?"

The reason this somewhat farcical accusation about the Common Core's gay agenda came up in the first place is that AIR is a business and a social service charity jammed together. The College Board is of course a non-profit. ACT is non-profit. Measured Progress (i.e., the NECAP people) is non-profit. They're a "small" player at this point, pulling in over $100 million a year (in 2012).

These are businesses. They should be run as businesses and taxed as businesses. Pretending they're some kind of public spirited charities is pointless.

Start the Countdown

OK, we've got tickets to fly back to Boston on August 12. Seems like it is barrelling toward us, but if someone told me they were going to Scotland for 12 weeks, that'd sound like a pretty nice summer trip.

Sorry for the general lack of Scotland blogging. A lot of it is just that I work three feet from where I sleep, so I generally don't feel like doing much recreational computer time here too. I figure once I start feeling more prematurely nostalgic about our time here, I'll write a few more posts about what I'll miss.

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)