Reader Art Seagal comments on the latest, most destructive fads in American education–destructive because they are mandatory and do not permit teacher judgment or professionalism.
Seagal writes:
I just read a telling article in an alumni magazine all about one man’s (Clayton Christensen) business concept – “disruptive innovation”. Sadly, our nation’s children and teachers have become pawns in a corporate-centric world being constantly moved over the chessboard so that opponent’s kings can be check-mated. “Edupreneurs” .. you pick from a string of them – the latest being David Coleman – are trying to play Christensen’s concept (which really is a statement of the obvious put through marketing and given a “brand”) to become the KING – the last man standing – the American Idol – the Survivor – the Bachelorette – you name it and the corporate world is going to find that “ONE PROFIT MAKING IDEAL that is going to be ON TOP (henceforth profitable) rendering everything before it useless. This may work for products??? Think cell phone and landline. But it certainly is not working for the basics of humanity – our quest to learn. Just the mere attempt to try to be the “disruptive innovator” is destroying public education (well there is a lot more contributing to this destruction too like poverty and a failing democratic process on a national level).
I mentioned before.. this era of “guru-ization”. Ravitch totally nails it in this recent article with the revolving door of “next best” and “this way or the highway” style public education that has taken professional control from teachers totally away and put it into the hands of what I will say are wanna be “disruptive innovators”. I am thankful for her existence on a daily basis!!!
We need to bring back teacher control. Yes, teachers who constantly keep updated and read about various education ideas and actually pick and choose those components they professionally feel will merit use in their particular classrooms. When you get a program like Balanced Literacy developed by someone with a lot of ed experience but it suddenly becomes THE ONE PROGRAM in NYC… it serves not to benefit but to disenfranchise because it is expected (no demanded by authorities) to be implemented in a one-size-fits all kind of way. The business model has perpetuated “guruization” by dangling the potential for enormous profit off of “that one idea” that goes forcefully viral. Let’s keep these ideas but not let the corporate world co-opt them!
Coleman’s theories need a good looking at by people who actually have education (not testing experience). Teachers are perfectly capable of looking at his ideas and tossing out everything that does not work. But this is not how it works. They must follow ALL OF IT despite their experience telling them otherwise. Dare I say this but if teachers were allowed to choose from their readings what and how to implement various components of various education ideas… success might be a lot more prevalent. And yes, most teachers I work with WANT TO GO TO PD’s that are not PR brainwashing events but one’s of their choosing that actually help them in the classroom. One fabulous teacher I know, paid on her own dime (as we usually do when we want REAL PD’s) and could not talk enough about a “brain and the young child” conference she attended (led by a neurologist). Instead we are forced to attend conferences where non educators are trained specifically to teach educators and their bosses are getting heaps of money to inflict nonsense on these teachers. These trainers never can answer the nitty gritty real questions that teachers ask because they have not had the requisite classroom experience. And quite often they are charged with selling their company’s “brand”. The superintendents meanwhile get to “check off” that their county’s teachers have been provided “essential training” from their superintendent’s “check-list” that satisfies likely a govt entity that provides funding to their county! Junk food PD’s.
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I feel sorry for our “down under” friends… their govt.’s willingness to follow the US public education model truly will put their nation’s most valuable (their young) “down and under”.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More like the Empty-Barrel-ization …
It’s embarrassing to me how many lawmakers and others in public policy follow business fads.
I don’t know why they’re so vulnerable to this stuff. I can pick out whole phrases in speeches and entire paragraphs in written materials that were lifted whole from one or another private sector theory.
It just makes me cringe. I don’t know why anything that comes with the stamp of “private sector” receives such deference and so little critical analysis.
It’s like we have a public sector filled with people who actually wanted to run companies rather than government. Why not work in the private sector instead of jamming the public sector into a business frame? Stop calling yourselves CEO’s with a public job and go be a real CEO!
Chiara,
Business, especially Silicon Valley business, has excessively high prestige in America today. Government bureaucrats and teachers, even erudite ones, are scorned. Interestingly, in Golden Age China, this hierarchy was reversed: businessmen were scorned as parasites and erudite scholar-bureaucrats were the most esteemed members of society.
We need more competition in the realm of values. Right now, heartless, selfish, myopic business-centrism has a monopoly. We need to put business back in its proper place.
Ponderosa… I had a bit of hope for a restoration of putting “the humanity” back in our world this summer when I read about a grocery business in MA and what had occurred. An entire company of employees backed off the job because their long time owner/boss was sold under the bus by his power and money-seeking cousin/partner. Did you hear about this story at a grocery business called DeMoula’s Market Basket in MA? The business had been a success and profitable under these employee’s original boss and there were workers there for 30 plus years. These were grocery stores usually in underserved areas that kept prices down and quality up. All workers were involved in the business. Then the “cousin/owner” wrested control and immediately read the “ed reform” style playbook. And all “heck” broke loose. Looks like the cousin’s “style” is not a winning business style after all.
Reading this story gave me hope that at some point decency and humanistic values will prevail in public education. At some point the PR machine for “ed reform” will have to face the music and reveal its true nature – a sham. Children must once again be able to make discoveries, ask genuine questions and do genuine research not based on some scripted “Coleman” plan but on the child’s own curiosity (with the teacher aiding and assisting). How many of us do not long for the day when you as teacher could totally choose the pace of a particular lesson.. you could stop it and do something else because a butterfly landed on a desk or you could continue the lesson much longer than planned because engagement was high and interesting conversation was happening? Education has got to come back to this time. Children need to feel at ease and need to be part of the classroom learning experience. Is it not the most ultimately ironic point that NEITHER TEACHERS NOR STUDENTS ARE PART OF THE LEARNING DIALOGUE/EXPERIENCE in today’s classrooms???? There is something so seriously crazy about that thought!
Art, I heard a long piece on public radio about MarketBasket. It was described as a struggle between two forms of capitalism: one in which maximizing shareholder returns trumps all, vs. one in which it doesn’t. The latter seems to be more common in Germany, where –from what I understand –labor, by law, has a seat at the table in corporate decision making, so certain moves that would hurt labor, e.g. outsourcing, don’t occur even though they might maximize shareholder value. This model doesn’t seem to have sunk the German economy. Maybe myopic capitalism doesn’t bring forth the best of all possible worlds, as its many apologists insist.
I absolutely agree with your last point, if I understand it correctly: it IS crazy that teachers are not part of the conversation about how best to teach.
Ponderosa: Robert Reich has been writing about that for a couple of weeks now…
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/robert_reich_down_with_shareholder_capitalism_partner/
Ponderosa.. I think the Market Basket situation represents an ideal in that the owner actually was invested in the well being of his employees and the employees were loyal, given living wages and the company thrived. I am not sure if the NPR version of two forms of capitalism addresses the fact that the shareholders actually do well when the employees do well. It does not seem to have to be a “one or the other” proposition. Maybe the issue is shareholder ability to “delay gratification” for long term goals!
Market Basket was without unions and truly represents an ideal which is ever-so-rare. If all businesses were run with the well being of all of the workers from high to low, it might look like Market Basket. But this is not human nature and unions clearly are needed in that businesses like the Market Basket ARE FAR AND FEW!!!!!!!!!
On my last point, yes you understood it perfectly. It would be like going to a doctor for a consultation on your medical diagnosis. The doctor examined you and diagnosed you but the hospital hires an auto mechanic to dictate how the treatment will proceed!
“I feel sorry for our “down under” friends… their govt.’s willingness to follow the US public education model truly will put their nation’s most valuable (their young) “down and under”.
Yep, and they’ve had ample warning from a fellow Aussie, Noel Wilson back in 1997 with his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
It has always been interesting to attend Professional Development sessions and to watch the presenters squirm when asked questions that they simply cannot answer. A teacher doesn’t even have to seek to “set up” the presenter, since it is par for the course.
Once we had a person come to enlighten us about the Chicago math program upgrades that we were to use … ALL of it was necessary … she claimed. We watched her have an internal “brain explosion” when we told her that we only found we needed the Book 1 (if any of it) and to supplement a few other items. We simply didn’t have time in the day required to implement everything they suggested. That woman was absolutely angry with our district staff for suggesting that there were flaws in that program. She was supposed to return to answer questions at a later date. It never happened.
We had other sessions that were to enlighten us as to the benefits of computer driven learning. However, we were to use the computers at the high school to learn the techniques. Those were pc computers. Our building has ALL Macs. They hadn’t yet developed the program for Macs since it was a Gates funded endeavor. They told us they were “working on” on Mac versions. So, why did our district adopt this stuff? Why did they train us to use something that we couldn’t implement? Why did it take asking the IT about it for 5 or 6 months only to find that it wouldn’t apply until NEXT year? By the time things were available, people would forget what they had “learned” in their pseudo-training. It is so absurd to waste our time “learning” nothing. Interestingly, if we complained, we were considered to be balking on the progress that was necessary for our district to prove it was “the” district that could come out on top, despite the fact that we have the lowest per pupil expenditure in the county and in our comparison groups throughout the state. The goal was about test results, nothing else. Now, we got the results they wanted, but not by using the Professional Development strategies they demanded but by working as TEACHERS to figure out what REALLY needed to be done.
Our teachers were never good at “following scripts”. For example, we were sent to “observe” another district’s implementation of a rigid Lucy Calkins writing session. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t remotely individualized. And, we found the scripted nonsense that Lucy provided to be awkward and unhelpful. Our teachers couldn’t “plow through” the timed presentation lessons as if ALL kids were on task or even remotely interested in what we were doing. We reduced the number of books from 6 to 4 to coordinate with our curriculum and the state standards that were creeping in, with their eye on CCSS (which wasn’t really presented to us at the time as a national set of standards). We just took training in CORE and everyone wondered what in the heck “CORE” meant.
We did find Stephanie Harvey’s approach to teaching reading to be beneficial and applicable to fiction as well as nonfiction. That was one success story.
However, another brainchild we were forced to use was “Words Their Way” with multiple pages (two 3″ binders) of sorting cards of all sorts, tests, and grouping methods that were supposed to be individualized for spelling success. My principal, who jumped on all this stuff, asked me to create lessons where the spelling groups were used within the reading groupings. Guess what? The kids in every reading group had students with different spelling skills. Planning a manner of coordinating those within all 5 reading groups with 7 inclusive spelling groups was a nightmare. It took hours of planning and juggling and finally creating assignments that could be used with any group to reinforce their particular skills and incorporating it within a guided reading group lesson. It was a nightmare. No one has ever come up with a sensible, non-labor intensive manner in which to do this. It is absolutely exhausting to get through the day with this much constant energy output by everyone.
And, we reduced recess time to 20 minutes … at 2:30 every day. There were no breaks during the day. This was aided by the forced self-contained classrooms that undermined years of working in departmentalized classes that utilized the strengths of the teachers who were hired. I was hired as a math teacher and didn’t teach any reading from 1998-2005. I then had to begin applying all these new approaches to reading without having attended any classes concerning reading in all that time … and for years before. It was nuts.
Results: Excellent with Distinction ratings for the district, most teachers retired as soon as they could, many teachers had near nervous breakdowns from the cognitive dissonance of what we were doing, teachers were always tired, morale was so low (great scores were NOT our motivation to teach … teaching whole persons was our motivation), fighting to keep our jobs was important because we had mortgages to pay and children to put through college … and, for some of us, terrible health issues from the stress. All the while the teachers put up a good face for the students … and in the community … we were REQUIRED to keep our frustrations to ourselves or suffer from the consequences of being insubordinate.
Some people here act as if it is some character flaw if people can’t “do as they please” despite what their administration demands. But, that doesn’t work if you want to keep a job. You silently march to their drum, dying a little inside each day. Is that really what education should be about? I mean … really? Why?
Why? Corporate decisions to make schools resemble businesses that grow on profits. The ONLY profits in education should be the production of students who are able to progress at their own pace, not at some prescribed pace that only works for 10% of students. This garbage about ALL students being “college ready” is possible for some students if they have extra years to absorb what they need to know to put the bigger picture together.
To me, this is all about a push for teacher evaluation, regimentation of pedagogy and outcomes, the reverse of individualization, and undermining the research and proven records of established professors of education and their publications. It demeans everyone who went into this underpaid profession with altruistic goals of contributing to a better world and enduring self-sacrifice. Using that intrinsic value system of the educator, putting the screws to those very people creates levels of stress that are not doubled but geometrically worse than those of someone in business. Elementary teachers not only care about their own jobs and families, but about the individual stories of every child they teach each day. This is true for some secondary teachers, but since they may have 150 kids per year or per semester, it is more difficult to attend to all those needs.
I feel that this is the plight of many veteran educators. Maybe those just coming out of college who don’t have any previous experience will be able to cope. I don’t know. But, I don’t see this “change” as having created better students. I know that the students that I taught in the 1990s v the students who have endured this patchwork of changing expectations were more knowledgeable and better prepared to attend college in the early 2000s than the students who are now graduating seem to be.
“It has always been interesting to attend Professional Development sessions . . . ”
Yep, being professionally developed falls into the 2 RILE* category.
*risibly righteous, insanely inane, laughably ludicrous and extraneous excrement.
Duane.. gee I always thought PD stood for “Posterior Development” in which case “extraneous excrement” would be perfectly suited to the occasion!
Deb: thank you very much for all the details. I hope many people read your comments.
The beginning of your penultimate paragraph can also be stated: the tail of standardized testing—which thrives on one-size-fits-all—is wagging the dog of genuine teaching and learning.
The indissoluble tie between CCSS and the “hard data” of test scores that give life to VAMania was revealed in as many words by Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute at the end of last year:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
See the blog of deutsch29 of 12/28/2013 for the source of the above and more info.
And what happens when those fighting tooth and nail for CCSS and its conjoined one-size-fits-all testing twin find themselves on the, er, other side of the education divide?
From a blog posting here, 3/23/2014, entitled “Common Core for Commoners, Not My Schools!”
The entire posting: “This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of the Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the states’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
Again, thank you for your comments.
😎
KrazyTA,
My reason for posting such things is to put “reality” to the otherwise research driven and theoretical posts. I know that the links to such serve a purpose. They provide some clarity in the form of documented studies. I also know that anecdotal accounts of experience can only carry so much weight.
There are many, many teachers who have jumped on or off the wagon …depending on the delivery system of their local school district and the administrative demands made upon them. There are all kinds of attitudes among union members, locally, statewide, and nationally that support or don’t support CCSS, Pearson, or some form of the complete takeover of local control and teacher drive and altruism.
My account is only our district’s … and some teachers may not even agree. There are always a small percentage who just follow the leader and never rock the boat. And, that is the way it goes. It seems that being quietly compliant is preferable to speaking the truth. But, again, it is about outcomes.
I, for one, don’t have a huge desire for our district to grow. We don’t have the space for more classrooms. All that happens here is that teachers get more and more kids in classrooms. 30 kids in elementary classrooms is absurd. 25 kids in kindergarten is awful. (Yet, thankfully, we don’t have 100-150 like the experiment in Detroit).
It is interesting to note that all across the nation, this is playing out in ways that no one could have predicted. I know that in our district, most people thought NCLB would not last, that it would fall of its own weight. Unfortunately the paltry professional development money that we received from RttT was enough to entice leaders into signing on. I find it to be sickening. But, I am just exhausted with the fight. How many careers will be ruined, college loans unpaid due to unemployment of the educators, teachers retiring early in order to retain sanity, students left to figure out what will become of their futures? How many? How many?
Deb, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you! And may I comment on the craziness on top of the insanity of holding teachers accountable for invalid test scores is telling teachers how they have to teach. If it’s the districts script, it should be the superintendent’s scores, right?
In reading your comments Deb, I sadly shake my head completely understanding this “PD experience” you describe and having been through similar experiences (the last useless PD being the day before school ended… yes.. we were required to attend a PD run by a corporation on our next to last day of school).
One principal I know allowed teachers to give PD’s and there were a few really good PD’s because the teachers leading them chose a topic that they had researched, implemented and found interesting. We were allowed to choose from several of these PD’s. This principal had been a teacher for many years before becoming an assistant principal and then principal. This principal totally got the value of the PD. But sadly, even this veteran principal’s hands are tied these days due to all the top down policy and cookie cutter programming.
Reblogged this on The Feducator and commented:
I see it happening in teacher professional development tracks all over. Yeah, some of these theories and practices are sound and beneficial, but at least give teachers the time and resources to choose for themselves. What fits mathematics courses doesn’t necessarily work for an orchestra elective, yet districts across the country are chiseling away teacher creativity in favor of the “edupreneur,” and forcing fads into every crevice of their curriculum.
This top-down, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all “forced fads into every crevice” curriculum (and lessons too) ironically is supposed to be DIFFERENTIATED? Love that latter over used word as it totally flies in the face of “ed reform”. A teacher being forced to teach in a style not suitable to him/her… where is the differentiation? A child being forced to take high stakes tests and their education advancement depends on it (even though they do not show their knowledge well through tests)… where is the differentiation there? Having to break a lesson down into strict timed components??? Where is the differentiation there? What if an English language learner takes more time to ask a question or there are many questions? Oops must move on the 15 minutes are up! Really?????
Yes, Art, you hit the nail on the head. We differentiate because we must and because they put all levels of kids in all classes to avoid “labeling” and to provide a “least restrictive environment” for the child in need of extra attention. The classroom teacher with 30 kids has to divide her time among 5-6 groups, often with one group having 1 or 2 kids in it, and taking MORE time than the other groups combined because we must fit this into a time slot. But, on the day the tests arrive, BINGO, everyone is lumped into the same basket, given the same test, and … oh, well, if they can’t succeed because they need to modifications of their previous differentiated learning, it is just “too bad” for them and for the teacher. Except, only in 3rd grade are they possibly retained. They may go ahead unable to succeed, but since it is the teacher’s fault … well, they just get rid of the teacher.
“Guru-ization” is an excellent term for at least two reasons.
First, it points to people’s willingness to to be led down the garden path and, the second and related point, those doing the leading are usually frauds.
and thirdly,
those frauds usually are in it for great profit!
Indeed, and they almost always screw -sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, sometimes both – their marks.
quote: ” alumni magazine all about one man’s (Clayton Christensen) business concept – “disruptive innovation”. this is the ideology held by peterson at the PEPG and he is turning out leaders (principals, superintendents, policy wonks” with this attitude. They have a major influence at Fordham Institute, Education Next, and Fordham Institute has a direct pipeline to the Governing Board of the NAEP…. spells trouble …. they are “blue skying” how to measure your child’s personality all the time using Peterson’s disruptive innovation stance.
Well, perhaps it’s time to use the privatizer’s tactics against them, and cause some “innovative disruption” of our own, in the name of democracy and the public good.
We might start by identifying a vulnerable Democratic politician who is closely identified with so-called education reform, and go all out to destroy them, as an object lesson to others.
The next, and most important, disruptive innovation is to bring democracy to the UFT/AFT.
Why people who have never taught should not be in charge of ed reform:
Administrative reform. Yes! Nail hit squarely on head
The gurus depend upon the bureaucratic teacher micromanagers who carry out their hare-brained schemes.
It’s extraordinarily important to the future of our country that teachers take back their profession. We’ve had far too much micromanagement by know-nothings. Often, the know-nothings have the best of intentions. There often are rational goals informing what they are requiring, but the best-laid plans o’ mice and education bureaucrats gang aft agley.
The micromanagers of teachers, following the gurus, come up with their lists of requirements that all teachers must meet, and teachers end up spending so much time meeting these requirements that there is precious little time left for, well, teaching. It’s as though a writer spent all her time sharpening pencils and documenting the sharpening of pencils and answering questions like, how many micrograms of pencil shavings am I producing each hour? Having sharpened pencils available is a rational goal for a writer, but spending all one’s writing time in the sharpening of pencils would be considered pathological, the behavior of someone who is stark raving mad.
Here’s something that every teacher and that none of these micromanagers know: There is never enough time for this job. There is always much, much more that could be done. Always. And every bit of time that teachers spend jumping through some bureaucratic hoop (Make sure your data wall is updated!) is time spent away from conceiving great lessons and interacting with and helping kids.
In addition, the micromanagers’ structures are square pegs into which all the round and triangular and corkscrew and fractal elements that make up the teacher’s day-to-day work TYPICALLY do not fit. Following the micromanagers’ mandates therefore TYPICALLY causes dramatic distortions. There is not a teacher in the country who does not understand what I have said here.
I apologize for denigrating hares by comparing them to these teacher micromanagers. Hares behave much more rationally.
>Here’s something that every teacher and that none of these micromanagers know: There is never enough time for this job. There is always much, much more that could be done. Always. And every bit of time that teachers spend jumping through some bureaucratic hoop (Make sure your data wall is updated!) is time spent away from conceiving great lessons and interacting with and helping kids.<
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. AND IF I MAY, THANKS!
I would even go as far as to say that the sharpening pencils analogy (although excellent in “pointing” to the problem of wasted time) should be one that is completely mismatched to the job of writing and bears no assistance in helping the author write… hmm.. how about documenting each time a pencil needs to be sharpened, how long it took to sharpen and how many minutes it was used before it was sharpened again, how high the hand was positioned when using the pencil, how many times the author used each of the letters in the alphabet as some letters require more effort than others and so on… and of course their would be rules in how to document this (pages long) and of course this “data” would have to be entered onto a slow computer – not to mention that the program installed to collect this data was faulty and continually crashing the computer. Oh yes, make sure you enter the data daily by 5pm. And of course there are an array of consultants who have never even used a pencil in the last decade because their bosses give them state of the art iPads who are highly paid to tell these writers how to compile data, use pencils properly and so on and so forth. And the nonsense goes on…
I taught in one of the perennial top three districts in Ohio. Living by Marzano, I was told that certain of my practices weren’t best practice. “Oh! Let’s look at what Marzano says in his book, which I have actually read!” Golly, if there weren’t three pages, with citations and studies and graphs, oh my– all pointing to my choices as best practice, short of bundling my classes off to wondrous foreign locales to experience things first hand…. Gurus can work both ways, if you’re willing to find the data to back your point. ‘Tain’t easy, but the spluttering which results is priceless!
NYT (8/19/14)Teaching Is Not a Business
By DAVID L. KIRP
AUGUST 16, 2014
TODAY’S education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
Neither strategy has lived up to its hype, and with good reason. It’s impossible to improve education by doing an end run around inherently complicated and messy human relationships. All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to make it in school. They need a champion, someone who believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the picture. The most effective approaches foster bonds of caring between teachers and their students.
Marketplace mantras dominate policy discussions. High-stakes reading and math tests are treated as the single metric of success, the counterpart to the business bottom line. Teachers whose students do poorly on those tests get pink slips, while those whose students excel receive merit pay, much as businesses pay bonuses to their star performers and fire the laggards. Just as companies shut stores that aren’t meeting their sales quotas, opening new ones in more promising territory, failing schools are closed and so-called turnaround model schools, with new teachers and administrators, take their place.
This approach might sound plausible in a think tank, but in practice it has been a flop. Firing teachers, rather than giving them the coaching they need, undermines morale. In some cases it may well discourage undergraduates from pursuing careers in teaching, and with a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers retire, that’s a recipe for disaster. Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration. Closing schools treats everyone there as guilty of causing low test scores, ignoring the difficult lives of the children in these schools — “no excuses,” say the reformers, as if poverty were an excuse..