Paul Karrer, who teaches in California, says it is time for accountability. Taxpayers need it. The public demands it. And they are right!
Unfortunately, the search for accountability is upside-down. True accountability rests with those who design and lead the big systems, not with the front-line workers trying to make muddled ideas work.
“Accountability needs to be placed on the shoulders of those who created the education programs foisted on the education system. It is the programs which ultimately have the greatest impact. It is not just or even hardly ever the soldiers themselves fighting street-to-street, city-to-city, state-to-state, who win or lose wars. It is the plan. The education plans need to be evaluated and field-tested before they are implemented.
“For example — it was the plan to invade Iraq which was faulty and resulted in the war being lost. It was not the poor patriotic, highly motivated, well-equipped, well-trained folks who kicked in doors, ate desert dust for years, and lost life, limb, and mental health.
“And so it is with education. Teachers are the front-liners. They are in the trenches. They are fighting house-to-house, street-to-street, city-to-city.
“But the plan, well, the plan keeps on changing. First it was No Child Left Behind, like the invasion of Iraq, based on false information. In Iraq it was weapons of mass destruction, with NCLB it was fraudulent data manipulation in the bogus inception of its success in Texas. (High graduation rates actually were a product of massive numbers of low performing kids quitting school in ninth and 10th grade. Then the remaining higher-performing kids who stayed were pointed to as successful due to NCLB).
“Then President Barack Obama inflicted his Race To The Top on the foot soldiers in the teaching trenches. The plan: Evaluate teachers according to tests. Reward good ones based on testing. Hammer schools which couldn’t do this. Privatize, charterize, dissect the now-failing schools. Problem is, teachers don’t take the tests, kids with a zillion influences take the tests.
“Currently, teachers are fighting the war with a brand-new shiny plan. It is called Common Core. This plan requires massive computer use, new standards, and of course more testing of teachers, standardization and lots of untested optimistic bravado.”
In wartime, battles are lost by the planners, not the men and women in the trenches following the plan.
If you want to know what’s wrong with No Child left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core, do some serious evaluation, not just political preening. When big educational ideas fail, don’t blame the teachers, blame the politicians and honchos who imposed their plans on the schools without full investigation of their feasibility.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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But it’s so unfair to hold the policymakers accountable when so much is out of their control! [[Sarcasm…in case anyone can’t tell]]
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Of course, he’s absolutely right, and yet, you rarely see editorials making this point. Great to read this.
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Cheers to that!
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I appreciate the observations, especially since this and recent administrations have ramped up top down control of pre K-12 education and higher education under the guise of “federalism.”
Instead of generals, we have CEOs and managers who think the nation’s teachers and students should be racing to the top while guaranteeing that no child is left behind.
Arne and his staff and collaborators will never be held accountable for doing serious damage to public education including public institutions of higher education.
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“Instead of generals, we have CEOs and managers who think the nation’s teachers and students should be racing to the top while guaranteeing that no child is left behind.”
I see a cartoon of the Youtube variety in here somewhere…
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The new “Florida” Standards Assessment (Common Core rebranded) will be administered in March and teachers have not had any training on the new tests or the new standards. This is the first year that merit pay kicks in and every course in Florida must have an End of Course exam for the purposes of evaluating the teachers. The FLDOE passed the burden onto the districts to create the exams and now the district is passing the burden onto the teachers. If you teach certain electives you get to create your own EOC and even administer the tests to your own students! Meanwhile, your peers are being evaluated on tests they are never allowed to see. Sound fair? These test results count for 50% of our evaluation and merit pay bonuses. You can read more about it here http://kafkateach.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/florida-merit-pay-a-lesson-in-lunacy/
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Insanity thy name is Florida public education-think the Jebster.
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OF COURSE, WHEN WE START COMPARING SHOOLS AND ARMIES we note an interesting thing. Soldiers are intended to obey. That’s first and foremost. Are teachers? And, i so, is that a healthy setting for teaching tough intellectual habits of mind, exploring difficult concepts, and nourishing creativity. ot to mention the habits of a democatic citizenry. Of course not.
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Good point.
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debmeier: as some of the HS students I worked with might have said—
“Miss M, you da bomb!”
😉
You don’t comment often on this blog, but when you do, you make your words count. Apparently folks like you were around when those very old, very dead and very Greek guys were busy figuring things out:
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” [Plato]
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
As for the fools…
Well, what can one think when Arne Duncan gleefully quotes one of his favorite Marxist aphorisms to “Dr.” Ted Morris:
“I’ve got the brain of a four year old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.”
¿? Yes, Groucho, the famous Marx.
😎
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The oligarchs and plutocrats do not want nor do they value an informed and engaged citizenry. The comodification of the entire labor force is their hearts desire.
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In non-union states, soldiering up is the norm. Gadflies must always be cautious.
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No obedience? No discipline in the ranks?
What about students? What happens to them when they don’t obey or when they have no self-discipline? What happens when the soldier in the field, or the athlete in the arena, fail to perform their individual duties in combat or while running a play? Of course, we know the answer to that: the campaign, the battle, the play–they’re a bust!
The recipe in public education is “allow self-destruction.” The battle cry of the teaching Left centers on ideology rather than instruction. “Democracy requires….” If political ideology is so important, then where is the Founding Fathers’ principle of “limited government” today? Who here wants to write about that? It’s gone, until the Feds come in to repair the damage to education and then we suddenly hear people citing the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution.
The excuses point to poverty. What about the non-poor who under perform in school? You’ve given kids rights and no responsibility. You’ve taken away parental authority, teacher authority, and you deny that it has had any harmful effect on children. Authority is a bad word. Mothers sit in teacher meetings crying into their tissue while her child shrugs his shoulders when asked why he doesn’t choose to bring his grades up. Kids get to self destruct. Adults have no leverage. The number of heads in the seats is more important than filling the heads with knowledge. Knowledge is a bad word.
You’ve made your bed, and now you cry out against the reformers. You created the reformers, you gave them a platform.
The DI or the general who doesn’t believe in obedience, following orders, or discipline in the ranks doesn’t love his troops. Same with the coach who doesn’t make his players tough–and that might not look pretty. Do you know what looks worse? When his players get physically hurt in the contest, or when they walk off the field after being thoroughly beaten by a more disciplined, better coached team.
The military instills discipline and obedience in order to save the soldier, or at least to increase his survival odds.
Such truisms are anathema in public education, and sometimes in comment boxes on this blog.
Teachers are forced to teach students whether they want to be there or not, whether they choose to cooperate or not. Making obedience and discipline optional for students only puts a match in the hands of a pyromaniac. The kid will self destruct. Now that we see increasing numbers of children from dysfunctional families, the problem is compounded. More disruptions, more re-teaching and continued attendance and expense to the taxpayers.
Teachers know this.
If you don’t want to build more prisons, you might re-examine your ideology.
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W. Edwards Deming is smiling in his grave. This idea of the leadership as a proxy for the imposed system is nothing new. What may be new is the extreme lack of accountability of those at the top. Even though their lies are threadbare and wearing thinner every day, they still are insulted by the echo chamber of those lies, by the money and influence that continues to benefit from them and is committed to further increased benefits in the future, the abject failure of the system notwithstanding.
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One of Deming’s concepts that really rings true here:
“The problem is at the top; management is the problem.”
He emphasized that top-level management had to change to produce significant differences, in a long-term, continuous manner. As a consultant, he would offer advice to top-level managers, if asked repeatedly, in a continuous manner.
So appropriate in the case of the hedge-fund reformers, but so unpracticed…
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“The Buck stops
hereway down there”The buck stops at the bottom
And not at the tippy top
So smoke ’em if you lead ’em
And buck ’em till they drop
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Similar comments were made to a teacher some time ago who was so disgruntled had thought to quit teaching. Her principal said she was one of the best teachers in the school but the mandates and stupidity of the politicians, know nots, was driving her crazy. Anyway, my comment was:
In WWI, the war of the trenches, the generals did not have any idea of what to do so they just kept sending the men “over the top” into machine gun fire, barbed wire etc where they were slaughtered by the thousands. No ground was gained, it was merely mass slaughter. After a while the men revolted, refused to go and then were shot for cowardice, failure to obey orders.
Sound rather familiar?
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Yes
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I agree with all of this, but as a teacher I have no choice but to revamp my curriculum toward the new focus found in the Common Core and for myself as a science teacher the NGSS, as I am in California. I really don’t think, other than the cash cow it provides for the testing companies, that there is anything wrong with the Common Core focuses. Nevertheless we do need to get away from entirely deciding a school’s sanctions based on poorly written multiple choice tests not tied directly to curriculum and significant sub group’s rate of proficiency groups of which will never get to 100% proficiency on such poorly written tests. We shouldn’t be in the business of punishing schools and teachers. If the new tests are not tied directly to the standards and the year and grade level performance tasks that students will be taught that year then the tests will not measure anything that the teacher or students should be held accountable for.
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Break out of your standards and testing mode. Those educational malpractices should be outlawed. Why? See Noel Wilson’s work that completely destroys those to concepts:
“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.”
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Duane, lord love a duck. It’s been far too long since you trotted out your main man, Noel Wilson. Welcome back. 🙂
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Prediction: In the coming months we’ll learn that teachers AREN’T the problem after all: it’s the UNION teachers who get “high salaries”, benefits, and “costly pensions”… and the GOP will wholeheartedly agree that NCLB and RTTT are federal intrusions on education… the solution? ALEC legislation that privatizes schools so that bright, shiny teachers who need to pay off their loans get hired at discount rates to implement canned curricula that show students are improving on bright, shiny new state assessments that will make TX old assessments look like the GREs.
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One commenter says that there’s really nothing wrong with the Common Core.
What about the process by which it was developed? That process was funded almost entirely by Bill Gates, and it largely excluded teachers.
What about the fact that the core rationale for the Common Core (before it was scrubbed from the Common Core website) was that it was necessary – imperative – to improve American economic competitiveness? It’d be nice, I suppose, if this rationale were true, but it isn’t. Not even close.
What about the fact that the Common Core is supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable (among others)? These groups have supported supply-side tax cuts and trickle-down economic policies for decades, which have piled up deficits and debt and grossly enlarged income disparities.
The Common Core is not needed for educational “reform.” And the Common Core is nothing without its regimen of testing.
There’s much to dislike about the Common Core.
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Thanks for posting my Accountability op-ed. Paul Karrer
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