CityArts! in the Neighborhood

I attended my first of what will likely be many end of semester "teachbacks" at the award winning CityArts! program. It is both free and two blocks from our house, so as soon as Vivian was old enough (8), we got her on board with a twice a week arts class. There's also a palpable sense of Providence's larger youth arts pipeline (CityArts -> AS220 Youth, for example).

One thing that was particularly nice is that it gave Vivian a chance to meet some kids in the immediate neighborhood. The biggest problem with our part of Elmwood is the absence of any social spaces. You have to really try to meet anyone, and you then you simply never casually run into people. We've barely interacted at all with most of the young kids in the houses immediately around us. We barely see them at all. The requirement that everyone have off-street parking even contributes to this. Some people never seem to set foot on the sidewalk. We started to feel like maybe it was just us, but after a few months in Stirling I couldn't go anywhere without seeing someone I knew. It is basically just a problem of urban design and infrastructure investment.

Anyhow, I digress. So Vivian became pretty good friends with a girl who it turns out lives about a block away and is homeschooled. She also got to know a boy who lives a couple doors down and goes to Paul Cuffee charter school. We're glad we were able to choose a public school which is considered a "neighborhood" school by distance if not sociology, and by no means the closest to us.

But let's be clear here, ultimately it just sucks to have all the kids in a neighborhood going to different schools, and it is in some ways worse for urban youth that it would be for kids in the suburbs.

On the other hand, yay for CityArts! Great to have some neighborhood resources for kids.

One Way High Performing Teachers Improve Lifetime Earnings

Susana Morris:

Only students in the advanced classes could attend workshops where you could learn about the magnet high schools anyone could apply for. If I hadn’t been in pre-Algebra, I would not have learned about the International Baccalaureate program that I would later attend and kick ass in.

There has been too little discussion of the actual mechanism by which having a "high performing" math teacher twenty years ago would have had an effect on your later earnings. Math was widely tracked back when Chetty et al were doing their research, getting bumped up or down made a big difference and as noted above, could have many knock-on effects.

In a sense, Chetty's research may have as much to say about tracking as it does testing. We don't know!

See also.

Missing the Stirling Crew

Plus they have way better weather right now!

Chipping Away

While a lot of anti-PARCC/SBAC/Common Core testing argument justifiably is attacking the roots of the testing problem, I do think an effective line of attack is to ask again and again why -- exactly -- we need to give third graders significantly longer tests than the SAT or college placement exams. The SAT is 3 hours and 45 minutes. Accuplacer, the "college readiness" test used by actual colleges to place kids in regular or remedial courses is untimed, but the College Board notes that each of the 6 English and math sections generally takes 15 to 30 minutes, so an hour and a half to three hours for most kids in total.

In particular, I'd strongly encourage anyone who has been spending time with the PARCC, SBAC or any other Common Core sample tests, to look at the Accuplacer sample questions. I'm not saying Accuplacer is great, but a lot of the questions look as easy or easier than many middle school Common Core questions. I'd love to see a comparison by someone who has been spending more time with the Common Core sample items.

Of course, the risk is we'd win the argument and just get shorter high-stakes tests or, god forbid, and 8 hour SAT. I think it is good ground for us to fight on, however, and helps to undermine the credibility of the entire testing regime. Seriously, if 3-4 hours of testing is enough to classify an 18 year old going to college, why is it not enough for a 9 year old? I don't think there is a good answer to that question.

Post-band Practice Snack

Understanding Internet Discourse in 2015

Scott Alexander:

But as it is, even if many journalists are interested in raising awareness of police brutality, given their total lack of coordination there’s not much they can do. An editor can publish a story on Eric Garner, but in the absence of a divisive hook, the only reason people will care about it is that caring about it is the right thing and helps people. But that’s “charity”, and we already know from my blog tags that charity doesn’t sell. A few people mumble something something deeply distressed, but neither black people nor white people get interested, in the “keep tuning to their local news channel to get the latest developments on the case” sense.

The idea of liberal strategists sitting down and choosing “a flagship case for the campaign against police brutality” is poppycock. Moloch - the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives - will publicize whatever he feels like publicizing. And if they want viewers and ad money, the media will go along with him.

Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistably incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistably incentivized to help them.

Lost is the ability to agree on simple things like fighting factory farming or rape. Lost is the ability to even talk about the things we all want. Ending corporate welfare. Ungerrymandering political districts. Defrocking pedophile priests. Stopping prison rape. Punishing government corruption and waste. Feeding starving children. Simplifying the tax code.

But also lost is our ability to treat each other with solidarity and respect.

Similarly, this is a at best borderline example of doxxing, since at most it exposes a locally prominent public official through their official contact information. It is much more annoying as an example of sexism expressed through using an informal picture of a female public official instead of her official one. But if it is someone's introduction to the idea of doxxing, you're immediately leading them in the wrong direction.

It is also a confusing example because unless I'm missing something, the people who would be most upset by the memo would be Pearson and NJDOE, who presumably already know how to get a district superintendent on the phone.

A second post by Bob Braun is a better example of inappropriately including someone's personal information in a post, and, unless I'm missing something, Braun has removed the relevant address, so... lesson learned, at least by Braun? Was an apology required? The larger problem with the post is that he's barking up the wrong tree entirely due to a mis-understanding of how the economics of open source licensing works, which is understandable.

The controversy around Braun's posts is a good example of what Alexander calls "The Toxoplasma of Rage." I highly recommend his post.

Could We Have a Token School Board Member WIthout Direct Charter School Ties?

Via Elisabeth Harrison, we have two new school board members and one reappointed. One "formerly worked at the State Department of Education in the office of charter schools and now heads the admissions department at the Rhode Island Nurses Institute Middle College Charter School. The second "has children in Providence public schools, serves on the Highlander Charter School Parent Teacher Organization." I don't know how that works... is he a Highlander parent too? The third has a child in a charter school. To be fair, #3's policy views are probably as close to mine as you could get, overall. But still even he has a kid pulling money out of the district he's going to be overseeing.

The idea that this is a fair competition between systems is a joke. The game is obviously rigged. And it goes without saying that Elorza is on the board of the charter schools which represent the greatest fiscal threat to the city.

Raimondo Proposes Cutting Out-Of-District Transport & Textbook Obligations

Linda Borg:

The proposal would also allow public school districts to eliminate busing of private and parochial school students for a savings of $2 million. Raimondo’s plan would remove the requirement that districts provide transportation to out-of-district students. ...

The governor’s budget also ends the requirement that districts have to “loan” textbooks to private and parochial school students.

The state currently sets aside $115,745 to reimburse districts for this expense, which the budget would eliminate. Duffy said the biggest savings to the districts will be the cost of administering the program, which involves tracking the books and getting them back to the district.

It is unclear whether non-district charter students are considered "out-of-district" for transportation purposes. I tend to doubt whether this will make it through to the final budget, but it is definitely good to have it on the table, and a sign that Raimondo is not going to go full-bore for privatization. This isn't some kind of dog whistle, it is proposing to remove a subsidy to private schools.

The Individualistic Fascism of Ed Reformers

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy:

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged (terms like vision, quality, stakeholder, leadership, excellence, or best practices) insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism.

Retaining First Graders at Achievement First

Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy Boards of Directors Retreat Thursday, July 24, 2014:

Brian (Gallogly) asked whether families are leaving

Three families leaving. Two kids, from one family, are going to Iowa. One kid leaving because of retention (few literacy skills for this scholar when she arrived in 1st grade, almost made it to the goal, but parent pulled her, AFPMA is calling throughout the summer but it seems they’re out)

This student had almost more growth than any other scholar. She started below kindergarten and made it almost to the proficiency level to be advanced to 2nd grade.

AFPMA recommends to her new school that she be retained. She’s going to a neighborhood school. Slight chance she’ll show up in August.

Retaining first graders is disturbing on a number of levels, particularly if students are actually progressing fast enough to catch up over the next year or two. But getting down to brass tacks, its damned expensive! Under the current funding formula, charters have no financial disincentive to retain students at great cost to the city and state, with the only clear benefit being to their test scores. We really need more data on the rate of grade retention in charters.

Changes: My New Role at Common Ground

One reason it has been a bit quiet here is I've been in a somewhat transitional phase in my life. Mark Shuttleworth's generous funding of SchoolTool wound down at the end of 2014, and Douglas Cerna and I have been successful so far in bringing in more funding through our company, SIELibre, but some additional income is necessary.

So I did extensive market research, futurology, watched TED talks until my eyes bled, and everything kept coming back to two sure thing high-growth sectors: organized labor and newspaper publishing.

As of the April issue, I'm taking over as editor of Common Ground, a little RI labor monthly primarily distributed through union halls. As a part-time gig, it is interesting. A chance to reach out to a different audience. We're going to re-vamp the (virtually non-existent) web presence and sharpen the editorial focus and design up a bit. I'm also going to be learning how to put together a newspaper, which I've not done before... Like most free-lancy writing gigs, exactly how well this pays depends on how quickly I get finished. If I'm fast it is pretty decent, but it might take me a while to get fast. Regardless, it is very much a part-time job.

It is going to cut into my blogging time -- having a big paid writing deadline every month tends to cut down on the writing for fun. I will also be pushing more stuff into a Common Ground twitter feed and some Facebooking at a certain point. I'll keep you posted on how all that stuff shakes out.

Epistemology for Second Graders

Justin P. McBrayer:

But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both. For example, I asked my son about this distinction after his open house. He confidently explained that facts were things that were true whereas opinions are things that are believed. We then had this conversation:

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all.

I noticed a variation of this on one of Vivian's infamous weekly Pearson reading quizzes. There was a sentence in an "informational text" that stated (roughly):

Amelia Earhart is the most famous woman in the world.

The relevant question was: is that a fact or opinion? with "opinion" being the correct answer. But it is no more or less an opinion as any of the other assertions of fact that make up most of any "informational text" aimed at an 8 year old, e.g., Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897. Pearson is calling it "opinion" because it is an incorrect assertion of fact. That's different than an opinion.

I don't buy McBrayer's larger argument about kids today "not believing in moral facts" as a result of the Common Core, but he is absolutely right that the Common Core encourages teaching an incomplete and truncated epistemology.

The Best Way to Ensure Kids are Ready to Read in First Grade is to Require Them to Read in Kindergarten

Robert Pondiscio:

The broad thrust of Common Core for kindergarten is ensuring kids are ready to read by the first grade.

Many years ago, I took one look at the Common Core kindergarten standards and immediately resolved to stay away from them, because they made no sense, and I didn't know whether or not that was just the way kindergarten standards are written, or what. I'm not an early childhood person, so what the hell do I know? I'm sure this is the way 95% of people react to the standards as a whole.

In the intervening years, I've concluded that the kindergarten standards just don't make sense, period. Not just pedagogically, but as standards. For example, does the text of the standards support Pondiscio's claim? I would say not really, that the standards mostly emphasize what they emphasize all along -- textual analysis.

Also a narrow range of academic writing. They also have foundational reading standards at this level. Are the foundational reading standards "the broad thrust" of the standards here? Nobody can say definitively, because the intellectual midgets behind the 20 year "standards" project in American education didn't manage to create a formal system for indicating relative emphasis.

And beyond that, the standards certainly do require kindergarteners to read:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.4
Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.

Surprisingly "emergent-reader texts" is actually defined in Appendix A:

Emergent reader texts - Texts consisting of short sentences comprised of learned sight words and CVC words; may also include rebuses to represent words that cannot yet be decoded or recognized; see also rebus

But then in Appendix B, there are no specific examples of kindergarten texts except a few like this:

DePaola, Tomie. Pancakes for Breakfast. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. (1978)
This is a wordless book appropriate for kindergarten.

OK... Also, every other similar kindergarten standard pointedly does not require independent reading:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.10
Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.

So... ??? To quote Audrey Watters, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

School Reform == Financialization of Government Services

Charlie Stross:

12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2). ...

14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

My Take on Six Kindergarten ELA Standards

I've posted my first long-form Common Core piece in a while on Medium:

Much of the concern over the kindergarten standards revolves around the question of whether they are “developmentally appropriate.” I would argue that in addition to this issue, the kindergarten standards are fatally difficult to interpret due to the flawed design of Common Core ELA/Literacy standards as a whole. It is a fundamental premise of the Common Core that we can think of learning in kindergarten as part of a single continuum of skills and tasks stretching backward from college.

In fact, the standards and assessment paradigm designed for secondary school breaks down when applied to six year olds. This is why all high performing countries, the ones we are supposedly trying to compete with, have separate curricular documents for primary and secondary schools, reflecting the goals and demands of each level.

The DEY report cited six examples of kindergarten standards for which “there is no evidence that mastering these standards in kindergarten rather than in first grade brings lasting gains.” Gentry defends each one in turn, and I shall point out how this discussion illuminates flaws in the design of the standards as a whole.

Wait, What's a Standard Again?

Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin:

We know that the CCSS has led to a shift in reading assessments that have been around for a long time. For example, reading experts Fountas and Pinnell used to suggest that ending kindergarten in the A-C of books range was okay. Now, with the CCSS-informed shift, if a student has not progressed past level B by the beginning of first grade, he is designated as requiring “Intensive Intervention.”

One reason even the most cold-blooded, cost/benefit analysis-driven, technocratic discussions of the Common Core are so ungrounded is that not enough attention is paid to the point McLaughlin makes at the end here: that failure to meet a standard should by definition be regarded as something that requires fairly specific, directed intervention. Or... perhaps not?

Recent standards tend to be aspirational in their drive for more "rigor." They delineate things which are demonstrably possible for some students, and perhaps desirable for all. But particularly at the early elementary level, what we don't know is if they are so necessary that a failure to meet the standard indicates a deficit with serious long-term implications. We don't know if we're investing untold millions in "remediating" students unnecessarily, particularly when considering the opportunity cost in not spending money on, say enrichment for the same children (without even getting into the web of related issues like the psychological effects of unnecessarily telling a student they are "behind").

Think of FedWiki as Desktop Application

I'm doing the Thinking Machines FedWiki Happening, trying to wrap my head around the federated wiki concept. At this early point, the first breakthrough is to realize that my mental map of the thing makes more sense if I think of "FedWiki" as an application rather than a webpage. Like, if you want to do FedWiki stuff on other people's sites, you need to start by "launching" your own FedWiki (i.e., navigate to it). Sometimes it saves files locally, like a desktop application.

Basically, it is enough unlike "surfing the web" as we know it that you have to shift your perspective a bit. It is a shift from how regular wikis work but also a shift from how the web in general conventionally works.

It Depends On What You Mean By Accountable

Chad Alderman:

To see how a move away from annual testing would affect subgroup accountability in other cities, I pulled data from Providence, Rhode Island and Richmond, Virginia. The results confirm that a move away from annual testing would leave many subgroups and more than 1 million students functionally “invisible” to state accountability systems.

As a reminder, No Child Left Behind focuses attention on the progress of groups of students within schools. To be confident that the test results aren’t pulled up or down by a few students and to minimize year-to-year variability, states usually imposed minimum group sizes of 30 or 40 students.

Both Rhode Island and Virginia used relatively high group sizes under NCLB-Rhode Island used a group size of 45 and Virginia used 50. As part of the NCLB waiver process, which allowed states to use relative ranking school accountability systems as opposed to more of a relative ranking system and less of a formulaic trigger, both Rhode Island and Virginia lowered their group sizes. Rhode Island lowered its group size all the way down to 20, and Virginia dropped its group size to 30 students. After these changes, both Virginia and Rhode Island estimated that far more students and subgroups would “count” under their new rules. ...

To see the effects in Rhode Island, I applied Rhode Island’s group size of 20 students to the city of Providence. Providence is relatively poor and has a large number of Hispanic students, and even under a grade-span approach where schools were only accountable for the performance of, say, 5th graders, all schools in the district had enough low-income and Hispanic 5th grade students for the groups to count. But only six out of 22 schools would be accountable for black students, only eight would be accountable for English Learners, five for students with disabilities, and only one for white students.

Without annual test results and under Rhode Island’s old group size of 45, 0 Providence schools would have been accountable for black, white, or students with disabilities.

This all sounds pretty dire, unless you understand that by "invisible" Alderman means "not plugged into the algorithm that spits out a school rating." If you look at publicly reported NECAP scores, you'll see that RI reports groups sizes down to 10 and has for years. The data is not invisible, in fact, it has always been even more visible than the subgroup size Alderman recommends.

Alderman's argument only holds up or is even relevant insofar as you believe "accountability" must be an externally imposed, automated, algorithmic process, as opposed to, say, a system of periodic and ongoing review and inspection by stakeholders at the school, district and state level.

I Don't Even...

Karl Herchenroeder:

On education, Bloomberg said the U.S. should deliver the kind of schooling that will help people become self-sustainable and increase a sense of dignity. If a person has the option of going to Harvard or becoming a plumber, he said he would suggest thinking about the plumbing career.

“The Harvard graduate on average will never catch up to a plumber,” Bloomberg said. “Partially because the first four years — instead of spending $60,000, you make $60,000

Finally My Story Can Be Told

Grinders (2014) "TRAILER" from Nick Genova on Vimeo.

There Are No Parking Spaces in Providence

For years, Providence had an overnight street parking ban for most of the city. Basically every house and apartment had to have off street parking. This is, of course, insane and has been loosened up in recent years.

As a result, the parking situation after heavy snowfall is a little different than in other cities. In the neighborhoods, instead of having to dig your car out of its plowed in parking space and perhaps putting a chair on it to discourage someone from taking your cleared it immediately after you leave for work, everyone digs out their driveway/lot and then nobody touches any of the parking spaces.

Nor has the city plowed them out this year (I think they have occasionally in the past). I'm sure if they did, people would be pissed about having to dig their driveway and possibly sidewalk out again.

But in the meantime, in the vast majority of the city you can't park on the street without leaving your car at least a third of the way out in traffic.

And don't even get me started on the sidewalk situation. Residences around here have actually been doing a lot better, but there's barely any pretense of the city managing to even clear bottleneck sidewalks like overpasses and bridges, and seemingly no enforcement of businesses with very long frontages in key places (used car lots, etc). Is it a violation of the first amendment to fine churches for not shoveling? I mean, when a church across the street from a school only shovels up to their door and leaves 2/3rds unshoveled?

And aaaagh, I wish the parents at our school could appreciate that causing traffic to back up out into the left turn lane of a stroad so that you can watch your child walk all the way across the schoolyard and enter the building is not increasing your or anyone else's safety.

It is Worse than This, Actually

Robert Bruno:

First a clarification. The phrase “right to work” is a misnomer that has little to do with the right of a person to seek and accept gainful employment. Anti-union proponents use “right to work” to refer to an option under federal labor law that allows workers employed by a unionized employer to receive the full benefits of a labor contract without paying for any of the cost to gain those benefits. In fact, no employee anywhere in the country has to join a union and no employer has to sign a labor agreement.

As Tom Geoghegan explains clearly in his new book, it isn't just that workers not paying union dues work under the same contract, but that non-union workers in a "right to work" shop receive the same services from the union, including legal representation.

In Europe, if you decide you aren't going to join the union at a site where there is a union-negotiated contract, your employer will probably give you the same benefits as the union members, for a variety of practical reasons, and no dues go to the union. But the union has no obligation to non-union workers whatsoever. On the other hand, they do have a financial incentive to be responsive to and actively serve the membership. It is hard to deny that the European system results in a stronger labor movement.

Of course, this is mostly an abstract argument. Switching to the European model isn't exactly on the table as a political option in 2015.

Ed Reform's Other Achilles Heel

Without slack labor markets, particularly for those with bachelors degrees but no non-teaching professional training, the whole ed reform edifice falls apart. Everyone leaves teaching, and that's that! For the past, what, seven years, the idea that someone with a BA in English, History or education was generally employable has seemed increasingly fanciful. I'm not betting on a tight labor market, but it is at least conceivable now. TFA is the canary in the coal mine for this phenomenon.

The first Achilles heel of course is just kids, with parental support, refusing to take the damn tests. I'd note that the whole "opt-out" conversation is still quite moderate. Once you hear "strike" and "sabotage" (And let's be clear, sabotage is real easy here. Kick out the plugs. Tear the test, etc. Answer everything "A.") displacing "opt-out," things will be getting real.

A Success Never Equalled by Educational Technology

Patrick Reusse:

And then the world changed in 1983, when the TRS-80 Model 100 portable was released for sale. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack … the developer and the outlets where you could buy one.

Everyone called it the “Trash 80.’’ They were so reasonably priced that we could buy them ourselves if the newspaper balked. They weighed 3.1 pounds and could run for hours with four AA batteries.

There was no longer a class structure in the press box. The Portabubbles were gone (except for a few holdouts such as Roe). The Silent Writers were sent crashing to a well-earned graveyard.

We all were carrying Trash 80s. The question among the former underclass in the press box went from, “Hey, do you have an extra roll of paper for this piece of bleep?’’ to “Hey, do you have any extra batteries for our little buddy here?’’

Somebody surely is working on a printable Raspberry Pi laptop for schools? Yes? I'm afraid to look, tbh.

Wikipedia, Sigh

Mark Bernstein:

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

The optics are terrible: of the 14 arbitrators in the case, between 11 and 13 are men.

Some All-Nude Zoopraxography While You Wait for Spring Training

Rob Edelman:

Of the 781 images in Animal Locomotion, 16 relate to baseball. Their plate numbers are 273-288. The first is labeled “Base-ball; pitching.” Five are “Base-ball; batting.” One is “Base-ball; batting (low ball).” One is “Base-ball; catching.” Five are “Base-ball; catching and throwing.” One is “Base-ball; throwing.” One is: “Base-ball; running and picking up ball.” The final plate is “Base-ball; error.”

All the models are identified only by three different numbers: 25, 26, and 30. According to the prospectus, the “greater number of [human models] engaged in walking, running, jumping, and other athletic games are students or graduates of The University of Pennsylvania—young men aged from eighteen to twenty-four—each one of whom has a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.” With this in mind, the most likely “baseball models” are in fact ballplayers. The most noteworthy is Thomas Love Latta (1865-1961), a catcher and captain of the varsity nine. The other two are Robert Edward Glendinning (1867-1936) and Morris Hacker Jr. (1866-1947).

STEM It Up, Kids!

John Skylar:

"I hate science." In six years of graduate school, this has to be the phrase I’ve heard most frequently from my colleagues.

People who have dedicated their lives to science.

People who made a decision when they were about 16 years old to focus on science, who went through four years of undergrad and an average 6 years of graduate school, and 4-10 more years of training.

People who’ve spent every moment since 2000 entirely dedicated to making new facts using the scientific process.

"I hate science." Why this instead of, "I love science?"

Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

You'd think it would be a bit easier to find science teachers among all the people bailing out of academic science careers.

Culinary Incubator

If Providence doesn't have one of these, we totally should:

Dash is 550 sq ft commercial kitchen available for hire on an hourly or monthly basis. Our commissary style kitchen allows food creative's, bakers, chefs, butchers, cart owners, or anyone involved in a food start-up, to prep their wares in a well appointed new kitchen. Dash is also available for cooking classes, recipe development, pop-up and tasting events, or private dinner parties.

In 2015, good food is one of our greatest economic development assets.

Also, tasty!

The Open Source SIS Market

I've been working on, essentially, a 10 year report on SchoolTool's development. This is one of the things which has been deterring me from blogging lately.

Anyhow, I did some retrospective research on the open source SIS "market," over the past decade, and it is somewhat of a cautionary tale for open source advocates.

Through the whole decade, there was a family of PHP open source SIS's in a more or less "complete" form, being used at some schools in America and elsewhere. We took a fairly brief look at the code early on, and it was pretty obviously terrible PHP. Like most early PHP, the code wasn't much more than a bunch of templates turning a database into web pages. If the templates are badly written, there is just not much to redeem the application. My snap judgement was that, if you wanted a good PHP SIS, to do anything other than start over from scratch would be a massive waste of time.

Instead, over the past decade, a succession of people have tried to redeem this codebase, forking the project in multiple directions, some investing non-trivial amounts of time and money in the process. I haven't followed these projects closely, spent any more time looking at how they work internally or externally. All I know is that none of them have become as popular as they should have. None of them turned into the Moodle of SIS's and seized a dominant position, even though they had every opportunity to. One reason I'm not naming names here is that I don't have any specific argument about quality other than something is wrong because they should have taken over six years ago but didn't.

This is a case of first mover advantage in open source, not just in terms of the application category, but language. Creating a new PHP SIS from scratch with superior architecture to the existing family would not be very hard. Gaining mindshare vs. the existing player is a big hurdle. "I'm going to solve the problems in the package you already know about" is an easier sell than "Move to this thing I've started from scratch, and by the way, I'm just some guy on the internet." Even starting a new SIS on a newer or perhaps more sophisticated language or platform is a clearer sell. This is an area (open source SIS) where the small profit isn't worth a lot of investment, marketing and advertising.

Essentially, there is a serious path dependency in a given product category based on the quality of the first mover. If latecomers are trying to redeem a faulty core instead of building on a solid foundation, the whole sector suffers.

One branch of this tree (at least) has become a successful commercial product.

One big challenger emerged from India: Fedena. It is based on Ruby on Rails and generally was built from scratch using modern web technologies. It might have swept the field except the prospect of making real money overcame whatever the initial rationale for open sourcing the project was, and they forked away and essentially abandoned the open source version two years ago from their ongoing commercial development. So that's that. As SIS's move more and more to cloud hosting, there's even less reason to try to market one as open source.

Shout out to Open Admin for Schools, a Perl-based open source SIS Les Richardson has maintained for schools in Alberta for probably 15 years or so, from which he probably makes some nice side income while saving schools in the region time and money.

Many, many people have written local SIS's and offered them as open source. This is a lovely idea but so far never works. It is just too much time to generalize, complete, package and market (even minimally) the product, particularly if all those tricky steps are seen as a side-light to a project which is probably the side-light of your actual job. They multiply the time involved by whole numbers, not fractions.

Finally, what about SchoolTool? Why didn't we take over 5 years ago, especially with relatively generous and consistent philanthropic backing? Well, I'll go into that more in the full report, and to be sure, I wish we had moved more quickly. But yes, we helped to clog up the market too. There were several years there where we seemed just around the corner from being "done" and having a "complete" SIS product, and with some influential backing, maybe we'd be a bad product to compete with.

Really just got to "complete" a year or two ago. And then growth can be very slow if you're talking school by school. You've only got one buying cycle a year, and people are waiting around to see if it works for other schools around them, so... it takes a while. We're starting to grow in earnest now. Hopefully it is not too late.

Or Maybe They'll Hold Their Breath Until They Turn Blue

Joe Weisenthal:

It's getting harder and harder for employers to fill jobs. In this environment, the balance of power should begin to tip more toward workers.

They could do that, or they could demand that the Fed increase interest rates to slow overall economic growth, so that they don't have to hire people at higher wages. It is the official policy of the nation, after all.

Common Core Carrot

One fundamental problem with Obama-era reform is the premise that one should not be eligible to receive a high school diploma until one proves he or she is ready for college. That was never the presumption before. You would not ask a student who barely squeaked out of high school with a C- GPA and the minimum number of credits where they were going to college, as if they had just punched their ticket to higher education.

On the other hand, I think the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards are decent at determining if a student possesses college level "literacy," that is, as such things go. It seems to me to be a decent template for a new SAT, but woefully inadequate as the basis of a K-12 curriculum.

Having said that, it makes way more sense to say "OK, if you pass this Common Core test you can go to community college for free," than it does to say "You must pass this college-readiness test to graduate from high school at all.

So... we'll see if the Common Core becomes part of the debate on the issue.

Sorry for the Light Posting...

I've been busy.

Bringing in the Connecticut Mob

Elisabeth Harrison:

Governor-Elect Gina Raimondo announced her plan Tuesday to nominate Stefan Pryor for Rhode Island’s newly created Secretary of Commerce post.

The outgoing Education Commissioner in Connecticut, Pryor chose not to seek a second term, a move political observers saw as evidence he had become a liability for Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy, who faced a close battle for re-election.

If anyone had the slightest doubt about the depth of Raimondo's connections to the Connecticut school reform keiretsu, it should be now dispelled. This is wingnut welfare for Democats.

Incompetency

As far as I can tell, and I've looked, nobody in ed reform is working from a set of formal, rigorous definitions of "curriculum," "standards," "outcomes," or "competencies" sufficient to distinguish between these things consistently. As in "X is an outcome but NOT a competency/standard/outcome/curriculum because it meets criteria A, B and C and fails to meet criteria D."

I'm not even saying there are competing models. There don't seem to be any models at all.

I don't see any reason to think outcomes-based, standards-based, and competency-based systems have not been a 25 year continuous project with slight re-branding.

PROFITSHIP!

The Problem With Close Reading Is How Few Texts Merit It

David Coleman's essay, Cultivating Wonder? (via, via), features an example centered around a short piece by Martha Graham from what was apparently the original This I Believe Edgar R. Murrow radio series in the 1950s. It begins:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated, precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, the sense of one’s being, the satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. Practice means to perform over and over again, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Coleman's wonder cultivating questions is:

How does the idea of practice unfold in Martha Graham’s “An Athlete of God”?

The first paragraph, and the text as a whole, sounds pretty good the first couple times through, especially if you approach it as the work of a Great American Genius. But really, it is kind of a mess. It is a short, popular text, penned to be read aloud once, written by someone not known for writing such things.

Graham's piece never resolves the basic question of whether "practice" is something undertaken by only an elite through specific actions, by everyone just by living, or some combination of those. If we learn by practice do we not learn by not practicing? If we practice nothing do we learn nothing? Can we not learn by something we experience once?

The more you dig into the text, the less it makes sense and hangs together. It does not address that when she says "dance" she really only means a very specific kind of dance, probably. She says dance holds an "ageless magic for the world," but that's highly contingent on context. She ends by praising the smile of the acrobat, but the acrobat smiles because it is his job. He is not an artist, he is an entertainer. To closely read this text you have to conclude Martha Graham knows or cares little about the world outside of dance.

It wasn't meant to be re-read and doesn't stand up to it.

Coleman seems uncertain as well about Graham's meaning and ultimately states, "The mystery of what Graham means can be illuminated only by further reading," which could be translated as "finding a better text on the subject." But then again, what is the subject? Why would one read this in the first place? Where would it fit into the curriculum other than as a moral exemplar of hard work and grit?

Does Smarter Balanced Think 15% of 5th Graders are "College and Career Ready" in English?

I'm working on a longer piece trying to decipher what Common Core and Smarter Balanced are saying about growth in ELA/Literacy after 8th grade.

Specifically, Smarter Balanced (one of the two big Common Core testing consortia) recently released their achievement level recommendations for grades 3-11. This is particularly noteworthy because the achievement levels are on a continuous vertical scale. That is, all grades are scored on the same scale. As I understand it, these scores should be comparable across grades. That is, if a 4th grader gets a 2560 and an 11th grader gets a 2560, they are at the same level as far as Smarter Balanced and their interpretation of the Common Core are concerned.

Here's what it looks like for ELA/Literacy:

Notice how the expected/required growth levels off after 8th grade, when there is a two year gap in testing (apparently?). Essentially the same amount of growth is expected in grades 9, 10, and 11 as in 8th, and considerably less than the elementary grades.

And notice how the cut score for a "4" in 5th grade is virtually the same as a passing "3" in 11th grade. Smarter Balanced thinks 15% of 5th graders will achieve this level.

Thus, consulting their estimated percentage of students at each achievement level graphs, we see that Smarter Balanced thinks that 15% of 5th graders will be college ready in ELA/Literacy, and 41% of 11th graders will be. The 5th grade rate of actual college readiness as 10 year olds, not just being on track for it eventually, is over a third of the 11th grade total.

I noticed a while ago that the 8th grade standards were extremely close to the "college and career readiness" anchor standards, and wondered how it would play out over time. Turns out they're sticking to that idea.

At the end of the day, these "rigorous" standards think you're pretty much set with your learning in ELA/Literacy if you're meeting the 8th grade standard. You've got a little to learn about reading, writing and literature the next four years, but not much.

I... just don't get it. The harm is that "rigor" is being pushed down to the lowest grade levels, but for not much benefit in high school. Am I missing something here?

Why is Common Core More Precise About College Readiness in Kindergarten than 11th Grade?

Smarter Balanced:

...a score at or above "Level 3" in 11th grade is meant to suggest conditional readiness for entry-level, transferable, credit-bearing college courses.

I've looked at some of the supporting materials, and I think the 11th grade test is considered at the level of college readiness. It is "conditional" insofar as you might literally backslide so much in the 12th grade year as to be not ready at graduation time after initially passing the test in 11th grade. But if you don't pass in 11th grade, you'd take the 11th grade test in 12th grade to try so show your college readiness. I think! It is clear as mud.

Just the fact that it is ambiguous at all is bizarre. I mean, I'm sure in the logic of American post-NCLB accountability there is a good reason, but in the larger world it is just... crazy. If it is an end of school test it isn't reasonable to present it as an 11th grade assessment. It just isn't. If you want to give the end of 12th grade test to 11th graders fine. Or if it is really an 11th grade test, you should be able to clearly specify how it is different from the final college readiness standards, right?

This is particularly disorienting coming back from spending some time with the K and grade 1 math standards. There it is totally different. You need to learn to count to 100 in K because you need to be able to add within 100 in 1st grade, and it takes some time to learn the numbers in English so you aren't tripping up trying to add threety-four to fivety-seven (or at least that's the argument, as I understand it).

The wacky way this plays out in practice though is that we act as if we know in great detail what a student has to learn when in early elementary school to be on track for college, but once we get to high school, especially in English, it is basically shrugs and hand waving. You would think it would get more specific later.

I suspect the explanation for this is an overload of early literacy experts on the various panels.

It is Sociology, not Physics

Fred Clark:

We should note that this Internet “entropy” isn’t random. The downward spiral always leads to the same place: racist, misogynist and homophobic slurs. That’s not really entropy — it’s a concerted attempt to impose order.

About a decade ago, I was briefly considered an expert (as much as anyone was) on social media. I gave some talks at influential conferences (not that I was influential), talked on BBC America radio once. That kind of thing.

I definitely leaned toward systems that would make it easy for people to create decentralized peer to peer conversations within trusted groups, and discourage open-ended commenting. For example, when Gary Hart became the first well-known politician to start blogging, I remember immediately leaving a comment (ironically) arguing that he shouldn't have open comments, that no good would come of it, and he should use trackbacks to other blogs, which is the way geeks thought (hoped) things were going in 2003.

Needless to say, when Twitter took off, it was a major move in the opposite direction. I guess my reaction was, "Apparently I don't know anything about what people want from social media, but there is no way this ends well," and I pretty much stopped talking about the subject.

I'm starting to feel like I was right all along.

OK, Let's Look at This Counting to 100 Issue

Longtime readers know I avoid getting into math discussions, but I got sucked into this one, partly because my 5-year old spent a few dinnertimes recently proudly counting to 100, so I can relate.

Jason Zimba:

While it is true that many of the oldest state standards only asked kindergarten students to count to 20, more recent standards went higher, to “at least 20” or “at least 31” or up to 100 (see Washington D.C., Georgia, Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington). One reason older standards were limited to 20 was that those standards didn’t distinguish clearly between rote-counting (saying the number words) and cardinal-counting (telling how many). CCSS makes this crucial distinction evident. The National Research Council’s report “Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity” is also clear that counting to 100 is appropriate in kindergarten.

This is in response to Carol Burris referring to counting to 100 as "developmentally inappropriate" and citing the previous Massachusetts curriculum which only required counting to 20 in kindergarten.

The Common Core standard we're discussing is:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.K.CC.A.1 Count to 100 by ones and by tens.

Getting caught up in what more recent state standards said is a waste of time. What does it prove? Besides, I looked up Minnesota's sandards, since I think they're the highest achieving of the lot Zimbra refers to, and their 2007 standards only required "Count, with and without objects, forward and backward to at least 20," so...? Virginia's SOL's, for what it is worth, are more rigorous than Common Core:

The student will
a) count forward to 100 and backward from 10;
b) identify one more than a number and one less than a number; and
c) count by fives and tens to 100.

Again, so...?

I would note that it looks like the NECAP GLE's do not include any specific expectations for counting in kindergarten at all, which would seem to be a serious oversight.

In terms of international comparison, it seems like most high performing countries do not require counting to 100 in the equivalent grade, but ultimately it is a little hazy from this distance because at this grade level (kindergarten), the exact start age becomes rather important, and it is hard to feel too authoritative about that from wikipedia and some web searches.

Anyhow, moving on, the line about earlier standards not distinguishing between rote and cardinal counting is beside the point if we're taking Massachusetts as the starting point, as it seems clear on the matter:

K.N.1 Count by ones to at least 20.
K.N.2 Match quantities up to at least 10 with numerals and words.

All this standards comparison is inconclusive. The only thing that would be convincing is if there was a consensus among the standards and curricula of high performing systems about counting in kindergarten, and there is not.

Finally in the last sentence, we get at least a reference to something substantial, a National Research Council report. Now this is an interesting read! They actually try to explain the rationale and refer to peer reviewed academic research! And, upon closer examination, insofar as I can follow everything up, it seems consistent in arguing that yes, five year olds can be taught to count to 100. Indeed, they argue that pre-school students can count to 39 at age four. So... this is a considerable outlier compared to the existing curricula of high performing countries.

They do discuss important international differences in counting based on the language. Asian languages handle counting more systematically, putting particularly young children at an advantage.

There is a strong equity angle in the report, emphasizing that because English counting is so irregular, less familiarity with the quirks of counting in English puts some populations at an immediate disadvantage, which should be remediated as soon as possible.

I found this convincing that kindergarten students can count to 100. This is not a huge leap anyhow because, as I mentioned, my kindergartener daughter just learned that in school.

There is one more point I would quote from the Common Core, from the introduction to the math section, which I think is telling about the course of this debate:

Standards define what students should understand and be able to do.

What do we mean by "should," when we are talking about five year olds? If we were reading an IETF specification (for example), we would know:

In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. Authors who follow these guidelines should incorporate this phrase near the beginning of their document:

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Note that the force of these words is modified by the requirement level of the document in which they are used.

1. MUST This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.
2. MUST NOT This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", mean that the definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.
3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

Why can't learning standards be written this way? Because the entire field is sloppy and immature.

As it stands, we never really know if we are arguing about whether all students "should" or "MUST" do something when we are talking about the Common Core, particularly down at the kindergarten level. In practice, it means MUST. To argue that it is appropriate to act as if students "can" do something at five is not the same as proving that they MUST.

And ultimately we slide back around to the question of curriculum vs. standards. The NRC report does a good job of arguing that counting to 100 should be a goal of the curriculum in kindergarten, but whether this MUST be achieved by the end of the year is not addressed. Indeed, first grade picks right up with "See, Say, Count, and Write Tens-Units and Ones-Units from 1 to 100" as a major goal and makes clear that this is an ongoing process throughout these years with students progressing at different rates.

My problem with the standard as written is simply that to me, to the extent you're going to have standards for kindergarten, they should reflect not what you want to include in the curriculum, but benchmarks that if not met would represent an issue that required immediate remediation. I am not convinced that not counting to 100 in kindergarten meets that test, but I suspect not counting to 20 would. But maybe that's not the right test? Who the hell knows? It isn't defined.

We simply don't have the language to speak clearly about these issues. It is a disaster.

In Case You're Looking for the Kindergarten Curriculum in Singapore

Here it is: Nurturing Early Learners: A Curriculum Framework for Kindergartens in Singapore.

In case you're wondering, for example, if in Singapore kindergartners are required to count to 100. For better or worse, they aren't. Just up to 10!

Depression at Blackstone Valley Prep

I've got a story in the new issue of Common Ground on student survey data on depression and suicide at Blackstone Valley middle schools, focusing on Blackstone Valley Prep. The centerpiece is this table of 2013 SurveyWorks! data from RIDE:

Read the whole thing, but here are some additional thoughts on the piece:

• This was a lot tougher to write than the standard test score snark. Much more sensitive, and frankly, greater opportunity to look like an ignorant jerk if you get it wrong.
• The data set is weird. First, there is no way to determine the validity (i.e., whether the kids really did feel sad or hopeless for two weeks in the past year). The completion rate is very high for a survey and the question, so if this was a random sample the margin of error would be extremely low. But it is not a random sample, it may be very biased, and the bias may vary by site. A large percentage of non-responders may be depressed.
• On the other hand, this may be the only school level depression data ever published for a "high-expectations, high-support" or "no excuses" charter school, so it is worth a look!

• There have been anecdotal reports about stress and depression at "no excuses" charters. For example:

  Hello. My name is Katie Osgood and I am a teacher at a psychiatric hospital here in Chicago. I am here today as a concerned citizen and an educator.

  In my hospital, we are seeing a disturbing pattern among patients coming from the Noble St Charter School Network of schools. We’ve seen an alarming number of students being admitted to the hospital with depression, severe anxiety, and increasingly with actual suicide attempts all directly tied to these schools’ discipline, academic, and retention policies.

• I just focused on the Blackstone Valley schools for four reasons:
  1. Most of the schools with the highest reported depression scores were there.
  2. The completion rates were relatively consistent and high across those schools (10% or more above most PPSD schools, for example).
  3. It is treated as a discrete market for school choice.
  4. The number of schools is small enough that you don't have to rely on what would be extremely complex statistical analysis (you'd have to try to correct for participation rate and selection bias at each school) to make sense of the entire state data set. With 10 schools, you can just look at all the numbers and draw your own conclusions.
• If having non-experts look at all the data and draw their own conclusions is not sufficient, then data-driven parental and student choice can't work.
• This data has been consistent over the past three years. It isn't an anomaly. I actually sat on this for over six months waiting for the 2013 data to come out.

Ultimately, all the caveats about this data only apply to comparison. The survey data about student reports of depression and suicidal thoughts among students at BVP (and Segue, at least) is clear, consistent, complete and disturbing. We don't know why -- what collection of out of school factors, in school factors, and selection bias among students choosing the school -- but the fundamental issue cannot be dismissed without explanation, especially if the schools in question are considered models to be emulated and expanded.

Pearson's Indigestible Potato Word Salad

Pearson's Weekly Test 8 for second graders:

Potatoes

Potatoes are one of the foods we eat. People eat potatoes for lunch and dinner. They also eat them for breakfast. They are not fruits or vegetables. They are part of the plant's roots.

It is very easy to grow potatoes in a garden. A potato grows from its "eyes." These are dark marks on the potato. Have you ever left one in your kitchen for too long? It will start to grow. You will see little green bumps. These bumps will grow into a new potato plant. But the plant will not do well in the kitchen. A potato needs to grow in the ground.

In the past, some people only have had potatoes to eat. One of these places was Ireland in the early 1900s. One year the potato crop did not do well. People had nothing to eat. Many of them came to America at that time. They hoped to find a better life.

The Irish found many ways to cook potatoes. That way no one got tired of eating them. Today, some of our favorite snacks come from potatoes. Who does not love potato chips and French fries?

There are a number of specific flaming issues here:

• Mis-dating the Irish potato famine by nearly a century and misrepresenting its length.
• Blandly asserting that potatoes are not fruits or vegetables with no explanation. What are they then and why?
• Confusing green spots and eyes.
• Weird, obviously false non sequiturs like "no one got tired of eating (potatoes)" for every meal.
• The lack of distinction between the potato tuber and the entire plant.
• This should be written specifically as if it was explaining a potato to a student who had never actually seen a potato, just potato products.
• Complete lack of a "main idea" or coherent focus.

At this point, we have to seriously ask whether or not this essay was written by a human or a computer program. It could be explained by a sequence of indifferent editors chopping apart some other text(s), but it is almost impossible to imagine this as even a caffeine (or meth) fueled stream of consciousness from a single author.

You can't really blame the Common Core for this mess, although you can question the premise of the whole Common Core process -- that having the same players that wrote our supposedly bad old curricula our entire ELA curricula all at once in a big hurry to meet an equally rushed, vague yet over-specific, set of new standards would have a positive result.

The big, BIG problem here is that teachers should know that Pearson is also likely writing the tests which will be used to assess their students, their own performance, as well as the performance of their school, their supervisors, their district, the state, and perhaps the program which certified them to teach. While "multiple measures" will come into play, those additional measures will be either derived from the test scores (e.g., growth measures) or be considered valid insofar as they correlate strongly to the test scores.

Not only can the teacher not easily ignore these exercises, there is tangible risk in teaching students to question or critique them too closely, as this would be likely to lead to students answering questions "incorrectly" on standardized tests.

Pearson is committing educational malpractice right out in the open, and we need to get a little more bold about shining light on it. This is not a doctrinal or philosophical dispute, it is just negligence. This is worse than just giving kids Fun with Dick and Jane.

RIP Herb Neumann

Peter Verdone:

On Sunday, November 9th 2014, Herb Neumann died. It was cancer that took him down. He was one of the toughest guys there was but just one thing was tougher.

I never met Herb in person. Over the years I learned a lot about him. He was a legend in the New Jersey/NYC area. He skated and rode bikes and did it all his way. He was the guy who would go bigger and go faster. He published his ‘zine Geek Attack back in the day when zines mattered. He skated vert and down hills, he rode road and mountain bikes. He designed his own skate trucks and numerous other parts for skates and bikes. He owned a skate shop, Skate Werks, and passed his passion on to the next generation. He was a special part of his community. Many people are in mourning today.

I hadn't actually re-located Herb online since I started skating again, or for that matter met him when I was reading his 'zine and skating in the 80's, but his perspective on skateboarding and, well, being a geek sure resonated with me at the time I was stitching together the various parts of my identity. I'd come across my cache of Geek Attack stickers while unpacking Saturday and stuck one on my current board. I guess that's in memoriam now.

Peter Greene and I have a Remarkably Similar Job History

Peter Greene:

This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.

My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.

It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.

I was also an incredibly bad farm hand for a summer.

Individualized Parental Homework

Following up my previous post, it should be possible, using the miracle of technology, to simply give parents the kind of math homework they desire for their early elementary students (with the default being "none"). Want 100 math facts every night? OK! Want a fun math puzzle of the week to discuss over dinner? We got ya' covered!

Just keep the parents happy. It has no effect on achievement anyhow. It is academic theatre.

A 7 Year Old + Intentionally Obtuse Math Homework is a Potentially Explosive Mix

My second grader had a full-on meltdown over her math homework this morning... to be sure, there were a variety of factors in play, tiredness, perhaps thrown off by having Tuesday off, etc. But this was also one of those Common Core worksheets where kids have to apply a specific math strategy, in this case, adding two digit numbers by decomposing them a bit so that you're adding groups of 10.

This is often a good idea and worth teaching, but the fact of the matter is that this particular presentation did not make it seem easier at all. It just seemed like a harder, more obtuse approach than the traditional method.

By the time I took over at the breakfast table, she was essentially done, except for howling over the last bonus question, which in the past might have been a more interesting variation on the day's theme, but today the approach seems to be to prepare kids for badly worded multiple choice questions on high stakes tests by intentionally giving them a badly worded multiple choice question at the end of every worksheet. I'm not being cute or flip when I say that, that just seems to be the strategy. In this case, Vivian was upset because she seemed to understand that since this was a bubble question she was not supposed to write the answer to the addition question in the blank in the prompt, but since the bubble answers were just about how to best decompose the addition problem not solve it, it drove her nuts to not have any place to write the "answer" to the addition problem.

This was an illuminating experience in understanding first hand why some parents get their knickers in a twist about this stuff. Put together a high-strung kid and a high-strung parent, and this'd hit critical mass real quick.

The funny part to me is that second grade math homework, in general, is just a waste of time anyhow. There is no benefit whatsoever to sending this stuff home -- even if it was of much higher quality. Unfortunately for the Common Core, most of the people who like it also like sending home homework. Make a mental note for future elementary math reformers -- cut the homework, or make up some fake palliative exercises designed exclusively to keep parents happy without screwing up the pedagogy.

The Thing About Providence

Seth Zeren:

As for me (sic), I’m looking at Providence, RI as an alternative where I can own and help create new city, while still being accessible to the Boston and Cambridge economy. Come on down Boston artists, the rent is fine!

No matter how much Providence screws itself up in the short term, the worst we can do is drive down rents and property values until our real estate starts looking appealing to a new wave of Bostonians and/or New Yorkers.

When Your Premise is that Problems Cannot Be Solved

Paul Krugman:

America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.

But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.

This is one of the big differences between Scotland and the US. The overall economic and political systems are similar, but Scots regard problems as having solutions, and don't hesitate to cook up, discuss, and implement "schemes" (which doesn't have the same negative connotation over there) to address all sorts of issues, large and small. We've basically given up on fixing anything (including education), which is somehow presented as the sensible adult approach to governance.

I'm Still Not Fully Convinced They're Supposed to be English Langage Arts Standards

Sue Pimentel:

There’s also concern that the Standards don’t reach the whole child. Indeed the Standards were designed to define the literacy and math skills and concepts students need to learn, and were never intended to encompass all of what students need to study and learn.

Remember that the first draft of the CCRS standards just called them "literacy" standards. The ELA part was and is an afterthought. That's not exactly a small issue.

Common Core Quote of the Day

Alice G. Walton:

It’s not clear exactly where the current trend - of pushing more information on kids earlier - came from...

That's precisely on-point. Where did that come from? Even less noticed is the relatively flat progression after 8th grade in ELA/Literacy (notwithstanding MOAR COMPLEXITY). It would be simple enough to revise the early year standards without changing the later years much at all, keeping the overall rigor of the output of the system the same.

I'll Be Happy to Tell You What I Don't Like About CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.6

Me, in comments:

"Take the standard that 11th and 12th grade students should be able to 'evaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence.'"

OK, let's take a look at CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.6, as Leo quotes.  The standard asks students to evaluate the points of view of several authors.  How do you "evaluate" a point of view?  Is it different than describing a point of view?  Certain points of view are to be differently valued?

The standard goes on to specify that students should make this evaluation of the authors' points of view by "assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence."  How is one to make this assessment?  That is, how does an assessment of claims, reasoning and evidence lead to an evaluation of points of view?  If you have sufficient evidence that validates your "point of view?"  Is that different than just evaluating the evidence for the argument?

This standard is just a word salad, and that's why it invites conspiratorial readings.  "Which points of view should kids positively evaluate... SOCIALIST ones?"

To put this in perspective, let's look at anchor standard six (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6):

"Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text."

The 11th and 12th grade version of this standard that Leo quotes  is meant to align to this end of 12th grade, "college and career readiness" anchor standard.  One would imagine they should be quite similar, since the "rigor" should be identical, but aren't they sort of the inverse of each other?  Assess the point of view by analyzing the text versus assess how the point of view shapes the text?  How are we supposed to interpret this difference?

Research on disciplinary literacy by Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan suggests that the Common Core is missing the point:

"...it has been shown that in history reading, author is a central construct of interpretation (Wineburg, 1991, 1998). Historians are always asking themselves who this author is and what bias this author brings to the text (somewhat analogous to the lawyer’s common probe, “What did he know and when did he know it?”). Consideration of author is deeply implicated in the process of reading history, and disciplinary literacy experts have hypothesized that “sourcing”: (thinking about the implications of author during interpretation) is an essential history reading process (Wineburg, 1991, 1998)..."

Let's look at how Deborah Meier and her colleagues addressed this in their five habits of mind:

"The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or 'Who’s speaking?'"

Putting all that together, isn't it clear that standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.6 should simply be:

"Based on historical evidence about the author, assess how the author's point of view or purpose shapes the reliability, content, and style of a text."

Isn't that better in every way, including internal consistency within the standards?  How did we end up with the mess we got?  

I could have emphasized more strongly that the standard in question is a history and social studies reading standard.

What the Copyright Discussion Tells Us About the Common Core Debate

Some Common Core critics are looking at the standards' copyright and public license and seeing things that aren't there.

It isn't unusual that the standards are copyrighted. Every example of standards written by a private group in the US -- NCTE, NCEE, NCTM, etc. -- is copyrighted, and pretty much has to be. State standards, like Massachusetts, explicitly were copyrighted in the past. In other cases, states don't clearly and consistently indicate one way or another, which is probably the worst case scenario since the default in the US is all rights reserved. The CCSSI and NGA copyright of the standards is an utter non-issue.

The standards' public license is almost a standard open content or Creative Commons-style license allowing re-distribution in whole or in part with attribution. This is one issue where it nearly is the case that any Common Core advocate should be able to authoritatively and completely dispel any concerns and show that in fact the Common Core is embracing best practices for handling intellectual property for important educational publications.

So it is notable that in 2014, this does not happen on, say Diane Ravitch's blog. It is almost an area where Common Core advocates could embarrass some prominent critics with a relatively straightforward, factual argument.

The problem is this specific passage in the license (emphasis mine):

The NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) hereby grant 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.

This stipulation makes the license not an open content license as generally defined and leads to two questions that are practically unanswerable:

1. What is a clear and legally enforceable definition of "purposes that support the CCSSI" that provides specific guidance as to what is and is not permitted?
2. Why is that there at all? Whose idea was it? What on earth were they thinking?

OK, that's not two questions, but the point is that nobody can step in and argue the side of the Common Core, because ultimately they are going to get cornered by this petty, sloppy, self-indulgent poison pill that someone slipped in the license, ruining the other positive aspects. And since it is the Common Core, there is literally nobody who is authorized to give an authoritative explanation. So the bleeding continues.

Another Try at Explaining Common Core Copyright

me:

One problem here is conflating the copyright and the license (the "public license"). Basically, every piece of text created in the US is copyrighted. Even if you want to give away your work, it is under your copyright and you allow re-use under a license. That's how Creative Commons works. That's how free and open source software works.

The legal system is NOT set up for simply releasing work into the public domain. See, for example, https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

"Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain."

Establishing copyright and providing a permissive license is the way these things are properly done. The ONLY problem with how the Common Core is *licensed* is the stipulation that reproduction is permissible only "for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative."

What this means is that under the license I could produce "Tom's Common Core Standards" (since "Common Core Standards" is not a trademark). As long as I provided attribution for the standards I directly copied from the CCSSI Common Core, I could mix in my own standards or modified standards as I saw fit.

If the NGA and/or CCSSO decided that this use did not constitute "purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative," they could charge me with breach of the license for that reason. If that went to court, it could probably go either way, especially if my version emphasized that its purpose was to propose improvements to the Common Core and to strengthen its mission.

Even if my publication of "Tom's Common Core" was found to be not supporting the CCSSI, I would still have a strong fair use argument, assuming I wasn't selling my version. My standards would be primarily non-profit and educational in purpose; standards by nature are usually based in part on existing standards, and NGA and CCSSI have no direct commercial interest in the standards.

Finally, the license is clear that current, not-in-breach licensees (users, readers) cannot have the terms of the license retrospectively changed. NGA and CCSSI could sell the copyright, they or someone else could issue the standards under a different, additional license, but they can't take away the license that has already been granted to reproduce the work, in whole or in part.

The Common Core process is controlled by the rules in Race to the Top and other federal guidelines, and by the tests. Those are sufficient for their needs.

This Prediction Holds Up Pretty Well Five Years Later

Me, September 2009:

The student is not asked to evaluate an interpretation or understanding, but merely an "assertion," which may simply be factual. For example, the assertion about the text could be "Copernicus argued that the Earth was the center of the universe." And this could be disproved by quoting "Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe."

This seemed like an obviously problematic example five years ago, a warning of where things might go with the Common Core. What is the point in just asking students to underline evidence for assertion X? I'd never heard of such a thing. Now it is pervasive in the tests and packaged curricula. People have probably forgotten that we haven't asked those questions forever.

Common Core Dad

I've been resisting the "Look at this Common Core assignment my daughter brought home" posts for a variety of reasons, including I'm sure I wouldn't have loved the pre-Common Core homework either. But... look at this Common Core assignment my daughter brought home.

Actually, it is the 2nd grade weekly quiz, which is kind of a big deal. My daughter got a 90, so everyone is happy, but still, I have to see what she missed.

Of the 20 questions, she missed one more or less appropriately difficult verb tense question -- although I don't understand why the verb tense section is labeled "phonics." Big data doesn't work folks if you can't even broadly categorize questions correctly.

The reading question she missed is:

Paragraph 6 tells mainly about:

• park benches in Spain
• towers in Australia.
• street corners in New York.

Let's be clear here: this is a counting task, not a reading task, because if you have the right paragraph -- and these are short paragraphs -- you could easily just match the country names to get the answer. There are eight un-numbered paragraphs in a one page text, double spaced, with large font. The only hard part is counting a bunch of short paragraphs -- catching the indentation.

As it turns out, there's no standard specifically for identifying the print features for paragraphs. The "distinguishing features of a sentence" is covered under print concepts in first grade, but paragraphs do not merit the same treatment for some reason (and the category of "Print Concepts" ends in 1st grade), so it is unlikely this question is supposed to measure understanding of paragraph formatting.

She did get this one right, which probably slightly more worrisome than if she'd gotten it wrong:

One of the questions that art can make you ask is,

• "Do I like art?"
• "Was that there yesterday?"
• "How do I make art?"

Of course, the right answer is "Was that there yesterday?" which you'd know if you read the text. Really the problem is just that the question does not refer specifically to the text. I guess what is creepy about this one is that I understand that part of schooling is giving banal answers to banal questions. But conditioning kids -- and I mean "conditioning" -- to bubble in "citations" as banal answers to serious, open-ended philosophical questions like "What kind of questions can art make you ask?" is... disturbing.

This is a Pearson quiz. If you're going to argue that Pearson doesn't understand the Common Core, then you're arguing that the whole premise of standards based reform doesn't work. If large, wealthy vendors that have been involved in every step in the process can't turn the standards into good curricula and tasks, then why would we expect anyone else to?

If at some point in the past, I was looking at a 20 question quiz written by a young teacher, and I didn't like some of them, I wouldn't be surprised. But I don't think they would be bad in the particular ways these questions are bad. They're rather specifically Common Core and Pearson bad; e.g., it is important to give 7 year olds practice in finding specific paragraphs, because that's what they're going to be doing more or less daily for the next decade. It is obvious.

The Common Core is Doomed by its Own Shoddiness

It is pretty much impossible to discuss the relative quality of the Common Core standards, because there is no good framework for doing so, and they are so messily constructed. Basically everyone seems to assume that all standards are awful, so whatever, and better one awful thing than 50.

In the end though, the Common Core will slowly sink into irrelevance because it is just so shoddily put together. I've spent enough time on that topic over the years, I'm not going to try to re-prove it to you now. But as support slips, it is unlikely the official debate will allow the possibility that they simply were poorly designed and written at every level of detail. On the ground, this reality has to be creeping up on people. Reporters and columnists aren't going to see it.

Previously on This American Life

Alice Mercer points a school reform angle on last weekend's This American Life, which reminds me that I've had the September 12 episode, A Not-So-Simple Majority, sitting in a tab waiting for a post for three weeks.

It is the story of the takeover of the East Ramapo, NY school board by a conservative religious faction with a strong dislike for taxation and sending their kids to the secular public schools.

Apparently since the faction is made up of Jews, and this is near New York City, this is news. In most of the country (geographically), the faction is evangelical Christian Republicans, and it is a dog bites man story. Unless I missed it while going about my business and listening to the radio, this rather significant connection to flyover America and the platform of one of our two political parties was not made.

What is most striking emotionally though, is the way the scenes at school board meetings in East Ramapo reflect the scenes in urban districts across the country -- board members without children in the schools mutely sitting through angry public comment from predominantly minority parents, before gutting programs and closing schools to be handed off to political allies. If school reformers wanted to get a peek at how others see them, they might listen to this piece. Their playbook is more similar to the religious orthodox than they might like to admit.

Finally, in the end, special ed is a central issue. It is always a central issue in American public education, like property values, but often lies just over the horizon of the debate.

A Slightly Better Brand of English Horseshit

English Education secretary Nicky Morgan:

“And when I hear of teachers working late into the night marking books, planning lessons, preparing for inspections that may or may not come, I do two things: I marvel at their dedication. But I also think, there must be a better way.

“I don’t want my child to be taught by someone too tired, too stressed and too anxious to do the job well.”

She said her first priority was to reduce the overall burden on teachers and second to ensure that teachers spend more time in the classroom teaching.

As I've said before, her first priority -- reducing teacher workloads -- should be the top one for improving US schools, as all other reforms founder when there is no capacity to implement them. So it is good on some level to hear the Conservatives in England saying something which public education advocates over here rarely say out loud.

On the other hand, it is hard to see how that goes along with more time in the classroom, so I wouldn't trust the bastards long enough to get to the end of the sentence.