Anthony Cody recognizes that “reformers” are back-pedaling from test-test-test because 1) the results have been disappointing; and 2) the anti-testing backlash is turning into a mighty roar.
So, of course, they need a new paradigm that redefines accountability. In this post, Cody reviews the latest effort to make accountability palatable and concludes that any paradigm that preserves high-stakes testing will preserve the flaws and misguided incentives of the current system.
He writes that every effort to shift to a new paradigm is trapped in the stale thinking of the old paradigm:
“We are stuck in a model that says learning must be measured to be managed, and management is the overriding systemic imperative. This necessitates top-down systems, even as those systems are incapable of delivering the sort of change advocates insist upon….
“A truly new paradigm would invest confidence in students and teachers, rather than constantly require them to demonstrate their adherence to standards and predetermined curricula and assessments. A new paradigm would refocus our schools on the needs of local communities, and require educators to work closely with parents and community leaders to set goals and share evidence of student progress. Accountability invested in centralized authority is inherently top-down. New paradigm? Not there yet.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They play a shell game and call it a “paradigm shift”. I would call it a ‘paradigm shit’!
Now you’re talking my lingo, john a!!
Duane, it ain’t easy to talk your language, no matter how hard I try. But, i must ” keep on keepin’ on” 🙂
Shell game indeed: ‘pair-a-dimes shift”
That’s the goal, get two coins to rub together.
they wouldn’t know a “paradigm shift” if it hit them smack in the face.
When the corporatists are done with us, we’ll be lucky to have that much.
I was the sole ESL teacher in a small suburban NYC school district. When my advanced students reached 4th grade, they had to take the NYS Social Studies test. Rather than equally dividing students among three classes, I found a great colleague that was willing to take about seven advanced ESL students, and she and I collaborated to prepare them both in English and social studies. We used a “push in” model rather than “pullout” because these students were ready to exit ESL,and we wanted to make instruction coherent. We co-taught and bounced ideas off each other. It worked great! While this might not be a “paradigm shift,” it was an innovative way to deliver what the students needed. This would be impossible today! I would never find collaborating teacher to take an ESL cluster because this teacher would be too intimidated to step outside the box in the toxic, punitive testing environment of today. High stakes testing is killing innovation, and it’s the students that will suffer.
retired teacher: well put.
I have cited this article before, but let me provide a very short new excerpt that shows you wouldn’t lasted at the Microsoft of Bill Gates either:
[start quote]
The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.
By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success.
[end quote]
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
*Caveat: I would change a few words in the above. For example, change “unintentionally” to “intentionally” and “pitfalls of success” to “pitfalls of management by the numbers and fear.”*
And the guy most responsible for the above, subsumed under the label “stack ranking” [aka forced ranking/rank-and-yank/burn-and-churn]? Bill Gates, the de facto Secretary of Education of the USofA, who is literally trying to do to public education what he did to his own company.
Read the entire article. And then ponder all the parallels to what the self-styled “education reformers” do and say.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Thanks for the link. Oppression reduces creativity and innovation. Maybe this is why the Chinese have to steal ideas from other countries since they fail to produce many divergent thinkers.
“oppression’ kills the body and the mind.
“Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; ”
the stack ranking might have caused a “lost decade” an Microsoft, but I’ve dealt with their particular brand of (crappy) “excellence” (programs and OS’s) for along time and I can honestly say that I don’t recall that MS ever had a “common goal of excellence”. In fact, I find that claim fairly hilarious.
For as long as i can remember, MS has been focused on “good enough to sell” software and often, what was good enough to them amounted to a bug-riddled product that caused computer crashes on a regular basis.
Their software development cycle has always been “release some bug riddled software just to get it out there, let the public and or programmers who work with it inform you of what’s wrong and then release patch after patch after patch to ‘fix’ it”.
of course, now they have automated the process so you get a convenient little message box asking you if you want to send a bug report off to Microsoft so they can fix problems that they should have fixed before they ever made a release. Needless to say, that’s not a recipe for “excellence”.
It’s actually kind of humorous. The way Common Core has been handled seems to have Bill Gates fingerprints all over it. It’s the same hack “process” where you release a half-baked (if that) potato and then let people (in this case teachers) tell you it’s no t cooked (which you actually already knew).
I’ve actually dealt with Microsoft software as a programmer going back to the early 90’s, so I have a special place in my heart for their brand of “excellence”.
I want to express my deepest thanks to some dam poet for debunking the BS Microsoft origin myth. Gates hates and despises engineers as much as he does teachers, and his “genius” is about getting away with illegal capture and control monopolies that degrade the industries he touches.
The poison that paralysed the World Health Foundation is the worst and deadliest recent example. Stop legitimizing this sociopath!
Bean counters prevail. They have no respect for the concept of intrinsic motivation in teaching or in learning.
The economic models that dominate “accountability” polices do not even work in the world of business. They are so alien to educational thinking that they have to be sold, literally marketed, and so we are seeing the contortions in trying to “reframe” the message, but no real change in the policies or the underlying values that support them.
Teachers are, in the main, not drawn to teaching because it is as easy as pie–as pictured in the stereotype of three month vacations and home from work at 4 pm, instead 5pm, and loafing in the faculty room.
This is not to say that these working conditions, including some promise of job security, played no role in the decision to teach, but that interest, curiosity, the delights and challenges of being in the orbit of students as they learn, spurring that on, and being perpetually surprised when the “spark” of “I got it” ignited even more interest in learning–that is the “stuff” that the bean counters do not care about or get.
Unfortunately, almost all of the human-to-human occupations are being eroded by the same cost/efficiency metrics and the drive to put profits ahead of people and what happens them. What happens to people–including teachers fired from flawed metrics–is just a bit of collateral damage.
Now a whole generation of students and teachers is being endangered by the “comply or else” ethos in federal policies and the dominance of economic thought, and the unrelenting takeover of public schools and the public square–witness the voter supression laws and the unrestricted flows of money–accelerating even in school-board races.
Protest is needed, legitimate, and the more creative the better.
Anthony Cody’s analysis is stunning. What particularly struck home in his piece were the comments he uses from teachers in Massachusetts, teachers who have had to endure that state’s unique brand of teacher mis-evaluation. I finished reading the teachers’ comments and thought, my God, this country has gone insane. How can our government do this to our children and the people who care for them? I don’t know what’s worse….the people who cooked up this insanity or the people who are going about their jobs, knowing it’s so bad and pretending not to see.
What struck me most was this comment:
“One of the big problems we have is that a lot of the Primary Evaluators have never had training or done the jobs of the people they are evaluating. We have a person in our school who has never been a classroom teacher responsible for evaluating teachers. We have a person who has never worked in a library or received any training in librarianship evaluating the librarians. We also have administrators with one or two years experience in the classroom, or with no degrees in the subjects they are evaluating the teachers of, serving as Primary Evaluators. The only qualification to be a Primary Evaluator is to hold an administrative degree.”
Teachers should not put up with this nonsense for a single second.
In most professions, this kind of stuff would simply not be accepted.
In fact, the “evaluators” would be laughed — and ushered — right out of the building. And rightly so.
Imagine a surgeon being evaluated by someone who had never done surgery.
or a mechanical engineer being evaluated by someone who had never done any mechanical engineering.
It would be absurd.
So why does anyone think it is Ok when it is done to teachers?
It’s not only incredibly ignorant but it is also incredibly arrogant.
Who do these “evaluators’ think they are anyway?
I would ask that supporters of public education be careful what you wish for. Our current dystopic reality in Massachusetts is hanging somewhere between 1984 and The Monkey’s Paw.
Cody approves some aspects of Linda Darling Hammond’s call for a new paradigm that would, ostensibly, “require educators to work closely with parents and community leaders to set goals and share evidence of student progress.”
LDH points to Massachusetts as an example of such a system. It requires us to embrace ADMINISTRATIVE INITIATIVES that purport to work closely with parents and designated community leaders. It requires us to set goals by checking a DDM off a list, and filling in the number of points our students scores will rise as a result. It requires us to upload reams of “evidence” to a cloud based instrument that nobody reads.
It requires, and requires, and requires. As long as LDH or anybody else has laws on the books declaring teachers subject to any uniform system of accountability, that’s the only paradigm that matters. Linda Darling Hammond and her new coalition are the new face of the same enemy, not new allies. Yes, of course Randi Weingarten is on board, duh.
Any effort that includes Rani Weingarten should be “shunned like the gates of hell”. Weingarten had amply demonstrated that she is no friend of her own constituents: she is no enemy of the ‘deformers’; and she cannot, by any sleight of hand, be our ally.. We should look behind our backs any time she makes a move to throw her weight behind any opposition to the status quo. She is the status quo.
“A truly new paradigm would invest confidence in students and teachers, rather than constantly require them to demonstrate their adherence to standards and predetermined curricula and assessments.”
This is, actually, pretty close to what I was seeing when I first started teaching in the ’90s. It was special ed and we were seeing a very large influx of kids born with addiction to crack and fetal alcohol syndrome. Nobody knew how to deal with them, so it was a wide open field. It allowed for a lot of creativity in the classroom.
All that changed, starting around ’96. We were told to use general ed curriculum and “fit in” the “other stuff”. Bloomberg was the capper and he lasted 12 very long years.
I would love to see this new paradigm, but I worry that too much time has passed and the “Big Data” model with it’s emphasis on accountability has become entrenched and the norm. I hope my concerns are unfounded…but the system has been rigged for quite some time, now.
One of the recurring problems in education is the tendencies of academics to go along with state power — educators should insist that researchers in education disclose the financial rewards of their participation. In the physical and medical sciences such disclosures are commonplace. In education academics working for state and coporate interests receive lucrative consulting fees. Both teachers and parents should know what money was paid to academics to come up with a new “state favorable paradigm” or a new “assessment model” that favors the private sector.