Peter Greene: Which Part of the Reform Hydra-Headed Monster is Worst?

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1. janinelargent says:

   June 10, 2014 at 8:54 am

   High stakes testing. If it goes, everything else follows.

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   • Bob Shepherd says:

     June 10, 2014 at 10:43 am

     You get what you measure, the deformers love to say.

     Well, we are measuring conformity to a backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, list, the product of the worst sort of groupthink.

     And what we are getting, there, is conformity, regimentation, standardization, mediocrity, the death of innovation and intrinsic motivation.

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2. Jonathan says:

   June 10, 2014 at 9:06 am

   without having looked at the article (or other comments) I would have to say the high stakes testing. A close second is the chronic underfunding of the highest need schools. Another close second is the unequal distribution of wealth, close to half (46%) being owned and managed by 1% of the us.

   Now I’ll go read the post.

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3. moosesnsquirrels says:

   June 10, 2014 at 9:16 am

   I agree completely that the testing is the Achilles’ Heel of the reform movement. My colleages at No Common Core Maine identified that months ago, and we’ve been working hard to educate the public and legislators about the connection bewteen standards, testing, data collection, and VAM as a package deal.

   But I have to add that this current mess is the culmination of the original reforms set by the original Robber Barons just over a century ago. The idea that public schools could be organized and managed as businesses, with a goal of “efficient” education started then and has continued since. This insanity has left us with an anemic definition of “education” that utlimately satisfies no one, except possibly those who want a population that is only functionally literate, a view of teaching as little more than the practice of pedagogical techniques, and academic élite charlatans who make millions by peddling “reforms” and “programs” that try to provide the impossible.

   Such has been the driving idea that what is really schooling more than education can be engineered like an assembly line or steel mill has been the dream of the educational establishment. And just like modern production processes, the dream can be fulfilled only when the few managers have instant information on everything and everyone at every moment. In fact this obsession with God-like omnipresence, which is needed for God-like omnipotence, is so powerful, that the élites are again re-defining education further downard by trying convince everyone that education is synonymous with what can be delivered and measured and controlled by computer.

   The fact that all previous attempts to create this dystopia have failed miserably means nothing to these people. They are a mix of true believers and charatans who will not take failure for an answer. The only way to stop this insanity is to return to a definition of education that has worked historically and then set out the expectations and resources in terms of that definition. In other words, we won’t have a rational public education until we start acting rationally.

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4. KrazyTA says:

   June 10, 2014 at 9:17 am

   I agree with Peter Greene and the owner of this blog.

   I don’t want to give anything away yet, so perhaps a further comment after this thread has been active for a while.

   😎

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5. Bob Shepherd says:

   June 10, 2014 at 10:16 am

   Long, long ago, the first textbook appeared on these shores. It was called The New England Primer. It contained an alphabet. The following will give you a taste of it:

   B
   Tell B for the Beast at the end of the wood
   Who ate all the children when they wouldn’t be good.

   F
   The idle Fool
   Is whip’t in school.

   The great evil in all this is a habit of thought. People are ruled by the metaphors that they adopt unconsciously, without examination. Education deform’s central metaphor is that of Judgment. You get what you measure. Evaluate, command, and control. Whip those kids, those teachers, those schools into shape.

   Ultimately, it is this backward view that extrinsic punishment and reward systems bring about the best results that is the Beast devouring our children. I say backward because both science and common sense tell us that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like high-stakes summative standardized tests, VAM, and school letter grading are CRUDE, ABUSIVE, INVALID, and DEMOTIVATING FOR COGNITIVE TASKS.

   We have no shortage of villains in Ed Deform. Is Mr. “All your base are belong to us” Bill Gates the ultimate bad guy here because his billions are financing this? Is Lord Coleman, whose puerile, unimaginative, hackneyed list is the ultimate basis of all this judging? How about the edupundits and educonsultants who should know better? Certainly, of all these, it is those people for whom I have the most contempt. Anyone who looks at Lord Coleman’s list and thinks that it instantiates “higher” standards for instruction in the English language arts should go work in a field that he or she actually knows something about. Are the villains here all who have acquiesced from fear–who have remained silent though they know better? Without their cowardice, deform would be impossible.

   I always enjoy reading Peter Greene. It will be interesting to see what he has to say on this subject.

   But I think that the ultimate spring of this evil is a bad metaphor. Judgment Day.

   Here’s a better one: A garden with many, many paths, and teachers as stewards and guides.

   We were given a garden.

   Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.

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   • KrazyTA says:

     June 10, 2014 at 11:05 am

     C’mon, when you hand it to me on a silver platter:

     Robert Frost, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

     Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
     And sorry I could not travel both
     And be one traveler, long I stood
     And looked down one as far as I could
     To where it bent in the undergrowth;

     Then took the other, as just as fair,
     And having perhaps the better claim,
     Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
     Though as for that the passing there
     Had worn them really about the same,

     And both that morning equally lay
     In leaves no step had trodden black.
     Oh, I kept the first for another day!
     Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
     I doubted if I should ever come back.

     I shall be telling this with a sigh
     Somewhere ages and ages hence:
     Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
     I took the one less traveled by,
     And that has made all the difference.

     [END OF POEM]

     And then there’s Bob Shepherd: “Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.”

     Let everyone be afforded, nay, encouraged, to take the road less traveled.

     In other words, a “better education for all” in a well-resourced public school.

     Just my dos centavitos worth…

     😎

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6. Bob Shepherd says:

   June 10, 2014 at 10:19 am

   Applying the Pareto principle–which accounts for the lion’s share of the damage?–I must agree with Peter.

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7. Bob Shepherd says:

   June 10, 2014 at 10:28 am

   I overlooked, in my short list, the junta–the group of old men (mostly) and young men who think like hidebound old ones who gathered in backrooms to cook all this crap up to begin with–the folks from Achieve, the NGA, and the CCSSO, financed by Gates and Pearson–who created NCLB II–a fait accompli before any of the rest of us ever heard of it. The origin tale of the creation of this monster is told in the emails of a few twisted old men with very, very backward notions: top-down, extrinsic command and control, centralization and regimentation, the school as factory, education as the competition, the race to the top.

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8. Alan says:

   June 10, 2014 at 10:30 am

   Eliminating high stakes testing would effectively neuter the rest of the folderol; without the tests, CCSS can be ignored and VAM disappears.

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   • Bob Shepherd says:

     June 10, 2014 at 10:38 am

     Eliminating the invalid testing is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The CCSS runs the testing juggernaut, certainly, but it also dramatically narrows and distorts pedagogy and curricula, establishing prior restraints on innovation in both. Every educational publisher in the country, God help us, is now starting every project by making as spreadsheet with Lord Coleman’s puerile list in the first column and the places where this junk is “covered” in the next.

     When you paint by numbers, don’t expect to produce any masterpieces.

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9. deutsch29 says:

   June 10, 2014 at 10:36 am

   So long as CC exists, your monster will regrow its high-stakes assessment head. Guaranteed.

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   • Michael Fiorillo says:

     June 10, 2014 at 10:38 am

     Yes, Mercedes, there is an evil symbiosis between CCSS and high stakes exams, with one being the vehicle for the other.

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   • Bob Shepherd says:

     June 10, 2014 at 10:39 am

     Exactly, Mercedes!

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   • 2old2teach says:

     June 10, 2014 at 6:29 pm

     It’s a matter of where we concentrate our resources. The testing touches every aspect of the reform juggernaut in some way, and is generating the most ire among the general population. If we hamstring the high stakes testing component, then we eliminate the damaging judgements made solely on the basis of rankings of one kind or another. You are right that we cannot ignore CCSS until we eliminate the testing because we may lose that sense of urgency that the testing has fostered, but I want the big guns focused on the testing.

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     • janinelargent says:

       June 10, 2014 at 8:06 pm

       The deformers are already on damage control against the grassroots reaction to high stakes testing. Promising to delay testing as a way to put the lid on public outrage yet preserve their baby. Actually Common Core itself is just a head of an even bigger Goliath: UNESCO and World Core curriculum.

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10. Dienne says:

    June 10, 2014 at 10:42 am

    Money in politics is the head that controls them all. Good luck slaying that one though. There’s any number of weapons that could potentially slay that head, but the hydra controls them all. We have to find a way to make the hydra fear us. Currently it’s laughing.

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    • Duane Swacker says:

      June 10, 2014 at 3:10 pm

      TAGO!

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11. Bob Shepherd says:

    June 10, 2014 at 10:49 am

    I would have hoped that our education leaders would have been wise enough to have laughed the CCSS and its proponents off the national stage at the very beginning. But there is a boiled frog phenomenon occurring here. People have gotten used to these puerile lists of backward, unimaginative standards being used micromanage curriculum development and teaching. Even without the tests, it matters that there is one centralized, invariant, hackneyed, unimaginative list to which all must conform or die.

    We need competing, voluntary frameworks, continually developed and refined learning progressions, lesson templates, curricula, pedagogical approaches, developed by many, many voices within the vast community of education researchers, scholars, classroom practitioners, and curriculum developers. And our teachers at the building level need the freedom to choose from among these.

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    • Duane Swacker says:

      June 10, 2014 at 3:10 pm

      Bob,

      How did you get the bold lettering?

      Thanks,
      Duane

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      • Bob Shepherd says:

        June 10, 2014 at 3:11 pm

        magic html tags

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      • Bob Shepherd says:

        June 10, 2014 at 3:13 pm

        less than sign, the letter b, greater than sign, text to be boldfaced, less than sign, backslash, the letter b, greater than sign

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12. Bob Shepherd says:

    June 10, 2014 at 10:58 am

    When Ed Deform finally dies–when we finally put a stake in NCLB and Son of NCLB–there will be a great renaissance of creativity activity in K-12 education.

    One of the oldest of motifs in traditional oratures is that of the blighted land, the waste land, under a curse or spell. It was this that Eliot drew upon for his great poem. Think Mordor, in Tolkein, with the Dark Tower rising above it.

    Ed Deform is turning PreK-12 education in that waste land.

    Oh, for the day when the curse is lifted!!!

    “Three bling for the educrats under the sky,
    Seven for the edubullies who on teachers throw stones,
    Nine for mere teachers doomed to die,
    One for the Snark Lord on his dark throne
    In the Centres of EduExcellence where the shadows lie.
    One BlingRing to rule them all, One BlingRing to find them,
    One BlingRing to bring them and in the darkness bind them
    In the Board Room of Gates where the shadows lie.”

    Song from “The Lord of the Blingring,” from book DCLXVI of the Blingringelungenlied. Song redacted by KrazyTA from various performances at eduinvestor coven meetings.

    For more Rheeformish songs and spells, see “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry” in “Grimoires and Other Rheeformish Literature,” Appendix 10 of the Rheeformish Lexicon.

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    • Bob Shepherd says:

      June 10, 2014 at 10:59 am

      cx: When Ed Deform finally dies–when we finally put a stake in NCLB and Son of NCLB–there will be a great renaissance of creative activity in K-12 education.

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13. Alabama teacher says:

    June 10, 2014 at 11:10 am

    Good article. As for my opinion, get rid of high stakes testing, then CCSS. Without those items, the rest will likely disappear as well. Without the high stakes testing, teachers can’t be evaluated by their students’ test scores. Schools couldn’t be deemed as failing. There would be no “need’ to replace public schools with charters or to allow for vouchers and tax credit and scholarships for children to attend private schools. States could and should go back to local courses of study/objectives for each subject that are developmentally appropriate and allow for true teaching and learning to take place.

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14. susannunes says:

    June 10, 2014 at 11:13 am

    None of those “choices” addresses the issue. The problem is neoliberalism, without which the current “reform” attempts would exist.

    You can’t separate the attack on public education from the attacks on the public sector as a whole. Period.

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    • susannunes says:

      June 10, 2014 at 11:14 am

      “would cease to exist.”

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    • Janine Largent says:

      June 10, 2014 at 4:24 pm

      You are absolutely spot on.

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15. Bob Shepherd says:

    June 10, 2014 at 11:31 am

    We had a ten+-year trial of the high-stakes testing idea. It was an UTTER FAILURE. And now we have ramped up the same failed approach.

    Enough!

    Put a stake in high stakes testing.

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16. Professor Smartass says:

    June 10, 2014 at 11:38 am

    Get rid of every possible way to make a profit, and all the other stuff will wither away.

    If they want national standards, great. Get teachers and scholars in all the states to work on it cooperatively and open source, not top down, copyrighted, and for-profit.

    Got an idea for a better way to run a school? Great. Do it as part of the public school system with the same contract for faculty and administrators as any other public school and no outside contractors delivering education or running things.

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    • Duane Swacker says:

      June 10, 2014 at 3:07 pm

      “Get rid of every possible way to make a profit. . . ”

      Spoken like a true socialist/communist public school teacher. (Ow, get out of my fingertips HU!)

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      • janinelargent says:

        June 10, 2014 at 3:47 pm

        Is that irony?

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      • Duane Swacker says:

        June 10, 2014 at 7:03 pm

        Naw, just HU talk, right HU?

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17. Duane Swacker says:

    June 10, 2014 at 3:05 pm

    Without reading the post nor the comments I say to hell with the head, we know as you lop off one many more grow back. Go straight for the heart which, when it is taken out, the beast dies. That “heart” is educational standards which embody the falsehood that the teaching and learning process can be quantified.

    Noel Wilson has already taken that heart out.

    To understand why the educational malpractice that is “educational standards” (and the accompanying standardized tests) please read his never refuted nor rebutted “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 quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional 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 we are lacking much information about said interactions.

    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. As 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 measures “’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.

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    • janinelargent says:

      June 10, 2014 at 3:49 pm

      To hell with the heart. Go for the roots; the DOE.

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      • Duane Swacker says:

        June 10, 2014 at 7:04 pm

        Interesting concept but I see the DOE as one of the many heads of the hydra.

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      • janinelargent says:

        June 10, 2014 at 7:53 pm

        Yeah, the education head, but it is a start.

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