I wrote a post yesterday and planned to post it at this hour. It was a brief recapitulation of an opinion piece that Kevin Huffman wrote yesterday in the Washington Post, in which he boldly stated that the current reliance on distance learning would hurt students and set back their learning.
Kevin Huffman is one of the leaders of the corporate reform movement. He worked for Teach for America, was married to Michelle Rhee, served as Commissioner of Education in Tennessee, where he pushed charters and vouchers and standardized testing. But when he tried to lose the state’s lowest performing school, the Tennessee Virtual Academy, he ran into a blank wall. It couldn’t be done. The TVA had friends in the legislature and it was impossible to close it down.
So in this article, he warned that the necessary emphasis on distance learning would not end well. In the post I planned to publish (but didn’t), I noted that he plugged the “no-excuses” Achievement First charter chain and Jeb Bush’s accountability-obsessed Chiefs for Change. I was not planning to mention that the “expert” he quotes is Hoover economist Erik Hanushek, who has a devout belief in testing and VAM and has predicted that increasing test scores would add trillions to the nation’s GNP. He has promoted the theory that teachers who can’t get their students’ scores up should be fired. Clean the ranks every year and—voila!—test scores will rise.
But unlike gullible me, Jan Resseger understood that Huffman’s article was a coded propaganda piece for the corporate reformers’ favorite organizations and remedies. Not only did he plug Achievement First and Chiefs for Change, he also cited the billionaire-funded City Fund, where he works. He did not note that it was created to subvert local school board elections by pumping money into the campaigns of charter-friendly candidates.
Resseger writes:
Kevin Huffman begins his recent Washington Post column with a warning about problems he expects to result from the widespread, coronavirus-driven school closures: “As the coronavirus pandemic closes schools, in some cases until September, American children this month met their new English, math, science and homeroom teachers: their iPads and their parents. Classes are going online, if they exist at all. The United States is embarking on a massive, months-long virtual-pedagogy experiment, and it is not likely to end well.”
This is pretty harsh. While in many places teachers are going to enormous lengths to create interesting projects to challenge children and keep them engaged, virtual schooling is a challenge. Online efforts school districts are undertaking to meet children’s needs during this long break are likely to be uneven. Huffman describes Stanford University research on the problems with virtual schooling, problems that are being exacerbated today by inequitable access to technology.
But what Kevin Huffman neglects to tell readers is that his purpose is not entirely to analyze his subject—the ongoing shutdown of schools. At the same time as he discusses the widespread school closure, he also manages to share the agenda of his current employer, The City Fund, a relatively new national group that finances the election campaigns of of charter school advocates running for seats on local school boards, supports the rapid expansion of charter schools, and promotes portfolio school reform. And when the Washington Post tells readers that Huffman, “a former education commissioner of Tennessee, is a partner at the City Fund, a national education nonprofit,” the Post neglects to explain The City Fund’s agenda.
Worse, Huffman proposes that schools should administer standardized tests to students when they return to school in September! Good grief, the results are not available for months. Of what value are such tests? I suppose we can now expect the testing corporations to begin losing for tests on the first day of school.
Resseger read the subtext: students, teachers, and schools can’t possibly survive without standardized testing. Be grateful for the charter chains who offer to help struggling school districts, which do not have the charters’ freedom to push out the kids they don’t want and do not have billionaire money to keep them afloat.
I read Huffman’s article and appreciated that he was wary of distance learning and unprepared parents struggling to teach their children.
Jan Resseger read it and exposed the hidden agenda: praising the billionaire agenda of charters and high-stakes testing. She correctly notes that this agenda failed when Huffman was Commissioner of Education in Tennessee. Some people learn from failure. Some don’t.
Member the story of the Three Little Pigs
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in”
I’m rough and I’m tough and my name is Huffman
Huffman: Public school, public school, let me come in!
Public: Not by the flair of your spinny spin spin
Huffman: Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and i’ll blow your school in
Preach for America
Preach for Americ:
Charter is best
Preach for America
Better than rest
Preach for America
Train for 5 weeks
Preach for America
Hire the geeks
Preach for America
Teach like a Rhee
Preach for America
Swallow a bee
Preach for America
Gary’s a liar
Preach for America
Union for hire
Preach for America
Testing is great
Preach for America
This is our fate
saddest line: union for hire….
Great stuff SDP! I despised Huffman so much when he was commissioner of education in TN, I wrote a song about him myself.
“Our Commissioner is a Phallus.”
I think that Valerie Strauss is the only Washington Post journalist who is really well informed, has not been a sell-out, and offers trustworthy reports of education.
We should be grateful that she his there.
Jan Resseger nailed the promotions built into the column by propagandist Kevin Huffman. This is important work and she does it with exceptional thoroughness.
Amen to that!!!! Ms. Straus is a GREAT journalist. Courageous. Truthful.
cx: Strauss
True. But how did it happen that parents – and even teachers – need to search online for something that should be in a textbook? The answer is simple: in the last decade schools have been getting rid of textbooks, which provided de-facto curricula. Instead, teachers were “empowered” to build their own courses, and only standardized testing kept their forced inventiveness in check. Parents saw few sheets with homework at best and had no clue what their kids we studying.
This means these students have not been taught reading. If after four years of teaching students cannot read, the system is using does not work.
This would be really evil. Schoolkids barely have two months of summer break, now they are going to have even less.
Most of all, the results should be available within a week, along with full list of questions and answer keys. But watering down curricula for a whole class would be a slap in the face to those who continued studying at home. This will accelerate outflow of these students from public schools.
“de facto curricula” is a good thing? “forced inventiveness”? Quite a way with words.
Your caricature of teaching and how to “fix” the profession are noted. And filed.
GregB, the classic method of make oneself invaluable is to be the only bearer of knowledge and skills in an area crucial for business. Fire this person and the business disintegrates. Which is why businesses always strive to have several people working on the same stuff, they have design meetings and paper trail.
A teacher planning her own lessons without anyone else knowing what exactly she is doing (sure, sure, there are guidelines, but they are vague and broad) is trying to be irreplaceable and therefore un-fireable. Only public school system insists on this modus operandi. This makes teachers unique. This makes teachers valuable.
This also makes knowing what kids learn in different schools an unsurmountable task. “Teacher empowerment” makes mass schooling inefficient. Now everyone can see how the system relying on individual teachers cobbling up their own programs breaks down when kids do not go to school.
This would not happen if the students were issued traditional textbooks with clearly defined progression from topic to topic, with explanations, examples, exercises and answer keys. Yes, a textbook for every subject, what a novel idea. Maybe it will catch on.
We have quite divergent views about education. Your summary above kind of scares me because I fear that is the dominant view of the system where my sons are supposedly educated. I have a far different view of an ideal education, probably because I attended 9 different schools in different places by the time I graduated high school (I certainly didn’t have anyone “planning out” my curriculum) and I taught briefly at two of the best independent schools around. The biggest mistake you make is underestimating children, who are a lot more resilient than you give them credit for. The second biggest mistake you make is underestimating teachers, especially good ones.
Here’s my vision of a good education: small, community-based schools; small class sizes; limited number of students teachers can teach per year with a goal of no more than 80 per year; a mix of master and young, snot-nosed teachers and everything in between; different styles of teaching, old by-the-book sticklers, dreamy English poetry lovers, pacifist history teachers and marine veterans somewhere in the mix, long-haired impractical types, and one of the types who hangs around here; students who are poor, rich, middle-class, black, Nepalese, whatever; teacher autonomy to teach what they feel is right based on their education, instincts, and professionalism; engaged principals and master teachers to nurture younger teachers. Oh, and NO textbooks and NO testing. Communication among and between educators, parents and students determines if what is being taught is acceptable. The reason I wish they could have an education like that is because that’s what awaiting them out there. And they need to get along in it. On their own. And with others.
Also, you need to figure out a way to package the feeling induced by reading your second paragraph above. I’m glad I was sitting down when I read it. You’d put most dispensaries around the nation out of business and probably become a billionaire yourself!
Even without lockdown this would produce a system where teachers with disparate levels of education, professionalism and instincts delivered vastly different lessons, and no one but them knew what they taught and how well their students learned it. No accountability, no transparency, just letter grades at best.
And now with lockdown in place you have kids, stuck in their homes without textbooks with their parents either googling for problems or for answers to disparate exercises sent by their local school once a week.
Thank you for validating my argument.
ColorFermat, are you an advocate for turning the public school over to all those incredibly brilliant, powerful autocratic billionaires that have had so many FAILED ideas for programming other people’s children — NOT!
I’m not quite sure who you are talking about when you say, “No accountability, no transparency, just letter grades at best.”
But if you are talking about public school teachers, I was one of those teachers for thirty years in California’s public schools (1975 – 2005), and every teacher was held accountable.
Before the testing mania forced on the nation by a gang of delusional power-hungry alt-right/libertarian billionaires, there was always a system in place holding teachers accountable for the quality of their teaching.
But using the results of secretive, profitable, high stakes tests (that are so secretive teachers and students have no idea what on them before being tested) was not one of the methods used.
Note that the “…” in answer to my message left out “engaged principals and master teachers to nurture younger teachers.”
That’s a pretty significant omission. They’re not to be left out there willy-nilly. What is it about the words “engaged” and “nurture” that scares you so much? Add the word “context” to your next lesson plan.
Lloyd Lofthouse, by accountability I mean ensuring that every teacher follows a specific – known to students and parents beforehand – program and delivers the content of the program during a school year in a way that the students absorb it, which usually means testing. I wonder what exactly did accountability encompass in your case?
I agree that tests should be transparent to students and their parents, and should be given by their teachers, with full list of questions and correct answers provided as well as the answers given by students after they have been graded. A student should be able to discuss the result of a test with the teacher. The results should be ready in less then a week, and should meaningfully affect and correct the student’s learning.
I am not a proponent of highly centralized secretive tests, in fact I abhor them. In this regard, tests given to schoolkids are worse than SAT or ACT, because one can pay extra $10 or $20 to receive the full list of SAT/ACT questions, answers, and correct answer keys. Try getting this info for, say, an NWEA test. The result comes several months later and it is not actionable – what’s the point whether one has score of 500 or 600?
In grade school tests given by a teacher is enough, but they should cover the material that the teacher is supposed to deliver.
“I mean ensuring that every teacher follows a specific – known to students and parents beforehand – program and delivers the content of the program during a school year in a way that the students absorb it, which usually means testing.”
There is no country on the planet that does this, that followed a specific program where every teacher in the country for each subject area and grade level is doing the same thing at the same time during a school year.
During my thirty years as a teacher, we were held accountable to teach and demonstrate that we could teach in our subject area. According to the ed-code in California, administrators and other teachers observed us teaching a lesson even after ten, twenty and thirty years. Some observations were scheduled. Some were a surprise and unexpected. I few times over the years, without any warning, an elected school board member would show up with one of the district administrators and drop by to watch a lesson.
Later, for the accountability observations, teachers would be called in for a consultation of what was observed. If the observer thought improvement was needed, there would be a plan to help the teacher improve.
I do not remember the year, but it was before NCLB. California came out with a list of skills in a thick book that we were required to teach our students at each grade level for each academic subject area. A week before a school year started, the teachers met in their department teams and went over the results of standardized tests conducted near the end of the previous year. Each teacher was given the data for the new students we hadn’t even met yet and we spent more than one day for a five-day week meeting and going over this data to determine where our students were weak so we could plan lessons accordingly. We usually met in the mornings and worked in our classrooms in the afternoons getting them ready.
Teachers were free to plan their own lessons to teach these skills, because we knew our students better than anyone else.
Testing students to discover if they learned what a teacher teaches is Super BS, and “anyone” that thinks these secretive, profitable high stakes, rank-and-punish tests reveals if a teacher can teach or not is incredibly ignorant.
California also required teachers to keep taking workshops, classes, attend lectures in areas that would help us grow and keep up to date with the latest stuff. We had to prove we spent a given number of hours outside of school taking these training exercises or lose our credentials.
Each week, I worked 60 to 100 hours and only 25 of that was teaching. The rest was planning lessons, contacting parents, correcting student work, et al.
What I want to do is call you an ignoramus when it comes to teaching and learning, but I won’t.
You wrote, “In grade school tests given by a teacher is enough, but they should cover the material that the teacher is supposed to deliver.”
Tests (even teacher made tests for only the teacher to use) do not measure what a student learned from what a teacher taught. All a test does is determine what the student remembered.
Early in my career as a teacher, I attended classes and workshops that taught me how children learn and how the mind works. Teachers cannot be held responsible for what a child remembers because the mind doesn’t work that way. What a child is taught can be forgotten in short order no matter how powerful a teacher’s lessons are. What a child thinks, or remembers what he or she was taught can be altered when a child is sleeping.
Have you ever read Oliver Sacks? If not, you should.
For instance, a crime is committed and there are twenty witnesses and when the police question those witnesses, what the witness remembered often does not match exactly what all the other witnesses saw and/or heard.
Only teacher made tests should be used and the results should only be used by the teacher to determine what was learned by the average number of students the teacher taught. No one else but the teacher, the students, and the parents should be able to see those tests and the results of those tests should not be used for anything else.
“There is no country on the planet that does this, that followed a specific program where every teacher in the country for each subject area and grade level is doing the same thing at the same time during a school year.” — You would be surprised when you find out how many countries have rigid programs for all schools in the nation, and nationally approved textbooks.
“we were held accountable to teach and demonstrate that we could teach in our subject area” — knowledge of one’s subject as well as proper usage of pedagogical devices is simply a mark of a teacher. I am talking about delivering a full yearful of stuff instead of just a half of it, and having means to prove it.
You substitute memorizing things for the idea that learning can be measured, then you are trying to prove that memorizing cannot be trusted. I am not engaging in straw man’s argument. A well-done test (do you want to call it assessment?) can, of course, test (check, assess) what students have learned. For example, you can tell them that the Earth is a sphere (well, sort of). You can also tell in a different class the theorem of Pythagoras. Then your assessment may include a problem like this: Imagine you are standing at an elevation of h meters above the ocean and looking out across the water. Your pocket radar measured L km to a vessel far away in the ocean just before it disappeared. What is the radius of the Earth?
The above would be a more meaningful test than two dozen mind-numbing multiple choice bubbles.
I never said anything about memorizing anything. I have no idea what you are trying to say.
To be clear, the only tests that make any sense are teacher-made tests designed to determine what students learned from a lesson.
Everything we learn and keep ends up in our memory and has nothing to do with rote memory drills for anything.
Secretive, high-security, high-stakes, rank and punish tests created by private sector companies and/or nonprofits serve no purpose but to make a profit from the public dollar.
I think part of the disconnect here is the ColorFermat seems to be a math teacher. In that case, I’m more open to textbook-like formats, but with the teacher as the one who decides. And have the teacher mentored. I could see the same in the sciences. But when you’re talking history, literature, government, and similar courses, the tangents one go off on are much greater. That is where the so-called science of teaching goes haywire. Good teachers know. Yes, all these courses can and should be taught without textbooks. Teachers should not be fit into “one size fits all” curricula. Actually, no teachers should, math and the sciences included. I’m sure we still disagree, but perhaps we can agree on some things?
GregB, if you want to create your own course, become a college professor. Grade school is supposed to provide comprehensive and consistent education that colleges and businesses can rely on.
Other countries have the baccalauréat or baccalaureus or bachillerato or abitur or maturità that confirms a rounded secondary education. The closest thing the U.S. has is SAT/ACT, which are despised on this blog, but at least they provide a consistent platform for all high school students across the nation and even from overseas.
As long as teachers continue spitting at “the so-called science of teaching” pushing their own courses “taught without textbooks,” the importance of SAT/ACT as the final arbiter and college gatekeeper will remain unshakeable, at least for better colleges. Too bad that many students find out they’ve been fed stale sauerkraut with hotdogs instead of fresh greens and steak only one year before graduation.
ColorFermat, you have no idea what it means to be a professional teacher. You’d rather teachers were all cookie-cutter clones.
Good thing Finland doesn’t agree with you. Finland lets their teachers decide what to teach and how to teach it.
That’s what I did for thirty years and what I did as a teacher worked. When the district where I taught compared the state standardized test results for years of test results, they discovered that my students who were not taught to a script excelled way beyond all the other students in the district in that grade level and subject area year after year after year.
But you aren’t alone because no one in district administration weren’t interested, except in the test scores, from a teacher who refused to teach to the test. They left me alone and forced all the other teachers to become clones. Meanwhile, my students continued to outperform the students who had teachers following directions from someone like you.
ColorFermat, do you have cites supporting the claim that “in the last decade schools have been getting rid of textbooks, which provided de-facto curricula. Instead, teachers were “empowered” to build their own courses” Is this a national phenomenon, or an extrapolation from observations of your district?
It’s an odd comment, in that pubsch teachers have ever– & I mean ever [ my ’50’s rural teachers had to work with ’30’s-era “primers”] had to make do with whatever textbooks their state or district chose, often replenished only when way beyond their expiration date.
Many are awful, some are great. I can speak only for my own field of world langs: the pop run of WL texts for the last 10 yrs are trash. They seem to be trying to compete with adhd-inspired internet sites, changing the topic every 3/4 page, rife w/ gaudy-colored pop-up-ad-style off-topic distractions. Only the teacher’s version tells you what they’re trying to instill, & reveals the madness of their organization [e.g., breaking up basic verb conjugation into 56 chapter-fragments, w/ no summarizing appendix]. Any teacher is forced to invent his/ her own curriculum of goals & sequence, using the text where they can, & supplementing heavily with online resources.
The WL example may be extreme [ ?– teachers in other fields, tell me], but it illustrates the point that textbooks provide “de-facto curriculum” only catch-as-catch-can. Teachers at midsch & hisch level generally majored (some master’d) in their subject fields, & have a sense of how their grade’s piece fits into a larger picture; they also learn through experience what works best re: sequence & pedagogy. Their perspective usually beats that of a publishing co, whose raison d’être is convincing you to scrap what you’ve got for their latest “thing,” a re-scrambling of data points in a whole new wrapper.
As to stdzd testing keeping teachers’ [reckless, off-the-wall?] inventiveness in check, I suggest you do some research on the nature & quality of state-stdzd testing.
ColorFermat is simply wrong about this. Teachers are now more scripted than ever, much to the detriment of our schools, and our schools are better when we had school-level autonomy. A very strong argument can be made that our schools have declined as power was wrested from building-level teachers and administrators and placed in the hands first of districts, then of states, and then of the feds. Having these curricular Thought Police hasn’t been good for U.S. education. I could go on and on about this. But that’s the gist.
bethree5, these are observations from my own district plus reading the news. Websites like teacherspayteachers did not pop up just because some teachers wanted to share a cool project. Isn’t it what charter schools were supposed to do – to try out new methods and curricula so that other schools could then re-use it? But seems that teachers are bent on reuse thing, seems like they rather create their own, or so we are told to believe. Maybe instead one should ask teachers how much time they spend creating their own course instead of simply re-using a standard one?
I agree, textbooks are getting worse with each decade. I’d say the last decent decade was 1980s, I have several textbooks from this time. They are not perfect, the algebra and calculus books are took thick and heavy, they have everything and a kitchen sink, so students still need directions from their teacher which chapters to study and which to omit.
Textbooks should return to their normal form and function, and that they should again become a de-facto curricula. As of now, my district uses only a couple of textbooks across elementary and middle school, mostly for social studies. No math textbooks. No English textbooks. Grammar? You got to be kidding. Science? It comes cobbled and printed from multiple websites, full of errors.
Maybe the teachers known to Bob Shepherd are being pushed to use scripted lessons, still scripted lessons that only a teacher can see and use is not the same as a textbook that students and parents can see and use and figure out what should be studied half a year later.
Delivering a specific course is not a scripted lesson. To avoid repetitions and omissions things from A to E should be studied this year, from F to K the next year, and from L to P the year after that, and the L to P stuff is based on A to E stuff, so everything that has to be covered is covered. This is impossible without full K-12 course with year-to-year and subject-to-subject integration. Call it Thought Police if you like, I call it comprehensive education system.
ColorFermat,
The textbooks of the 1980s were horrible, and they have gotten progressively worse.
I have studied the history of textbooks and read textbooks from different eras.
The time when they were at their best was when the textbook had an author–one or at most two authors.
For decades, textbooks have been written by committees to match state standards, a checklist for each state, especially the biggest ones.
They may have names on them, but the “authors” had nothing to do with the writing inside the books.
The books typically weigh 7 pounds.
They typically have large amounts of space devoted to graphics, which may or may not have any relation to the text.
Textbooks today are garbage. Read my book “The Language Police,” where I reported on my reading of every single high school textbook in English and history then in use.
What did I do with the English Lit textbooks that I used in my classrooms with my students over three decades?
I selected some of the stories in those textbooks and seldom had my students do any of the work that came with the books.
Why?
I thought most of the exercises were meaningless and a waste of time. My term for most of the textbook exercises was busywork designed to fill time.
Instead, I created teacher-made assignments that were designed to support critical thinking, problem solving and creativity with a focus on writing, lots of writing, lots of essays, poetry, short stories, lots of reports, lots of research papers with class visits to the library to do research.
Wow, Colorfermat, I wonder how widespread that no-textbook phenomenon is. Could this be about CCSS? The time you mention (a decade) matches. So do the subject areas. ELA pushes analyzing snippets from non-fiction articles, stories, & novels, which essentially forces teachers into designing on the fly from random tidbits. Not sure if that relates for math, but it could be about teaching to the test, thus using CCSS-Math as curriculum guide, w/o a corresponding textbook… Of which I assume there are none. I’ll bet a publishing houses would go cross-eyed actually, cogently organizing/ sequencing/ fleshing out the stds for one grade level (e.g. 3rdgr’s 40 “be able to do”‘s [more than 1/wk] spread across 5 categories.
Perhaps others will disagree, but I’m thinking elemsch especially is the place to experience the sense of proceeding gradually, over the course of a school year, through… a BOOK.
For most of my thirty years in the classroom, I taught English Lit, and books and short stories were the foundation for lesson plans.
Early on, back in the 1970s, I wanted to know how children learn. Since children are unique individuals and not coming off of some assembly line imaged by someone like Bill Gates, I focused on strategies that would reach all the different learning modalities in each of my lessons.
Here is a piece dated 2017 that explains what I am talking about. There wasn’t that much information on these modalities back in the 1970s.
“Read Write Think also notes the power of reaching students in different ways using varied instructional approaches. By asking students to talk about their learning, create visual representations, utilize new media, and write in many modes, they are given more ways to build new skills and actively apply learning to deepen understanding.”
https://blog.edmentum.com/kinesthetic-visual-auditory-tactile-oh-my-what-are-learning-modalities-and-how-can-you-incorporate
With no models back then, I had to write lesson plans from scratch that focused on “Read Write Think,” something I never found in textbook lessons back then. And I didn’t know any other teachers that were doing what I was doing.
I also think that with the focus from the billionaire-funded disrupters to standardize the entire education system with a Common Core style scripted curricula with material and tests designed to support this assembly-line education system, there will be no way for a professional and/or creative teacher to have the freedom to focus on something like “Read Write Think” to improve a child’s ability to understand what they read.
The goal of English Lit teachers in my day was to engage our students with books and stories and encourage them to become avid readers that loved to read. From there it was a simple, short step to become lifelong learners.
The only thing to measure would be how much each child improved their reading and writing abilities from year to year.
To determine if what I was doing worked, each year, I had my students take the Flesch-Kincaid Readability test (one that was available to use for free) at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year. The results encourage me to keep moving in that direction.
ColorFermat and responders: Thanks for a good conversation. The combination of civility and grace displayed by opponents in a argument here should be a model for the fractious society we live in.
Naturally, I have a few comments as well. Color, your textbook commentary I found interesting in light of the trends I have been seeing in textbooks during my 33 years teaching first math, then history. I felt that textbooks in general were pretty good when I started in 1987. There were problems, but you could generally assign the problems you needed for the kids to practice. By the time I quit math and went to history 29 years later, textbooks had begun to hide the basic practice exercise in sheets you could self publish and make their exercises more of a mixture of very easy and very challenging problems. I was having trouble using the text as it existed.
Greg: The vision of small schools of the community with a teacher seeing no more that 80 kids a year taught by dedicated teachers from the community fundamentally parallels my own.
Color: Standardization is a shibboleth, a siren call. The attempt to decide in your own imagination is difficult at best in math, and well nigh impossible in history. For some, standards are a restriction that holds a glass ceiling over their head. For others, standards seem far-off and impossible, like asking a first year piano pupil to play Lizst’s Hungarian Rhaposody. In school, we need mechanisms to understand students and their widely varying abilities.
It struck me last night that it is likely that not a single person who has commented on this blog was subjected to an education like the one ColorFermat praises. Not one. Yet we seem to have learned. I was also reminded of a line from one of my favorite books, A Confederacy of Dunces that kind sums this up from my point of view: “You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”
Nice summary RT, & GregB, agree w/your comment.
But I wasn’t done yet!
Have added a general comment on textbook vs no-textbook under general comments way down there.
The whole test and punish agenda is not essential to the functioning of public schools. Public schools did their jobs long before test and punish was imposed. Teachers have been doing formative assessments for as long as I can remember. Such assessments are far more useful to teachers and students. The results are readily available, and they provide opportunities for academic growth. Standardized assessments provide little useful information. All they do is generally rank students which correlate to the socioeconomic status of the students’ families.
A profound sufferer from Standardized Testing Delusion Syndrome, or STDs.
It is, of course, entirely predictable that this distance “learning” experiment will be a total fiasco, for reasons too numerous and obvious to bear repeating. The breathtaking thing is that so many education professionals are thinking this important or necessary. Bring on the online gerunds worksheets!!!
This is very like buying cartloads of toilet paper. It gives people the illusion that they are addressing the problem.
This is using axle grease to polish to brightwork when there is a hole in the hull of the sailboat. It won’t work, and there are more important matters to attend to now.
Hear ye, hear ye! Bring out your dead. And make sure your gerunds worksheets are submitted by Thursday!
“During the coronavirus-driven school closures, Huffman encourages public school leaders to join in a virtual, online forum to be hosted by Chiefs for Change, where “school districts can share how they are collaborating with charter schools during this crisis.” Chiefs for Change is the state school superintendents’ organization founded by Jeb Bush to promote entrepreneurial and business-driven school accountability. Huffman enthuses that charter school-public school collaboration—the ideology behind portfolio school reform—will support children while the schools are closed: “Hopefully, in the coming weeks, those jurisdictions struggling to support online coursework will catch up and find workarounds for students without access to technology, learning from the more entrepreneurial players.”
The whole echo chamber are using the crisis to promote charters- they have not a shred of proof, but they all believe charters are handling this well and public schools are handling it poorly.
They believe that because those are the beliefs they came in with- it’s ideological.
Of course they all believe charters are handling the crisis better- they all came into it believing charters were better.
Public schools and students are at a huge disadvantage when evaluated by ed reformers- the bias against them is baked in to the echo chamber.
& seriously, have you ever seen tradl pubschs & charters “collaborating”? You’re on the ground in Ohio & would have heard of it. Is it even a thing? How would it even happen? Unless the charters were actually part of/ run by the district, where’s the mechanism?
Has ed reform offered a single practical aid of any kind to any public school or public school student in the country?
Useless. They contribute nothing to public school students or families other than their ideologically-driven opinions about how schools should operate.
A superb example of this: Mike Petrilli just wrote a piece for the Fordham Gadfly Droppings newsletter in which he said that the state standardized tests should given immediately when kids return to school so that we can find out “precisely” (his word) what they missed. Now, here’s a guy who is paid to pontificate continually about the value of these high-stakes standardized tests (and VAM and charters and vouchers and depersonalized learning and every other stupid deformist notion), but his comment makes quite clear that he is UTTERLY UNFAMILIAR WITH THESE TESTS, that he either has never read any of them or didn’t have a clue, if he did, how to evaluate what he was reading. Of course, the tests do not validly measure what they purport to measure, and they don’t do this with the granularity he’s suggesting. So, this “thought leader” (or so his bio on the Fordham website used to describe him) about standardized testing clearly has no knowledge of the actual tests that he writes about all the time and on which his whole deformy Weltanschauung is based.
Ignorance and arrogance is a toxic cocktail.
I think someone should give Mike Petrilli an 8th grade ELA and Math exam — monitored so no cheating — immediately, and if he does not achieve a perfect score (ok he can miss one question), he should be banned from the education industry until he goes back and spends a year sitting in his favorite 8th grade charter school’s class every single day, hands still, answering every question the teacher asks to her full satisfaction and if he does not he will be publicly humiliated and made to stand in the corner. And any time he isn’t sitting perfectly straight with his pencil correctly placed on his desk, he is awarded an “infraction” and if he gets to 10 he should be banned from commenting on education entirely.
Is Mike Petrilli smarter than an 8th grader? Could he last even a day sitting perfectly straight with hands folded with a teacher eyeing him every second to make sure he does not make one wrong move so she can give him his public humiliation and punishment and eventually fail him so he has to repeat the year all over again before being allowed to comment on education publicly?
I would wager his ability to get a perfect score on the 8th grade ELA and Math tests is about 20%.
He’s a smart guy. Just deluded. And it’s easy to be deluded when you are paid very well to be so.
Best post ever, nycpsp. Love it.
Imagine a list of facts:
Asunción is the capital of Paraguay.
2 + 2 = 4
Tolstoy wrote War and Peace.
A Mangalica is a type of pig.
A C-major triad consists of C, E, and G.
Stippling is an art technique in which many dots or specks are applied to a surface.
There’s a “t” in the name “Ravitch.”
and so on.
It would be child’s play, of course, to put together a multiple-choice test to find out whether people know these things.
Sufferers from Standardized Testing Delusion Syndrome, or STDs, are under the delusion that what is tested by these tests consists of such things–a list of concrete things that can be easily enumerated (in standards) and tested (on high-stakes tests). This is the fundamental STDs delusion, and it’s completely crazy, but read anything that these people write, and you will see that this is what they think is going on when these tests are given.
It isn’t.
If x is the be testable, then it must be something that can be operationalized validly in a test question. The ELA “standards” bullet list funded by Gates and hacked together by Lord Coleman and his minions is not a list of such operationalizable items.
cx: If x is to be testable
Now imagine a different sort of list:
Student x is resourceful.
Student x can read with comprehension.
Student x is creative.
Student x understands the meaning of life.
Student x is kind.
And imagine having to write ONE or TWO multiple-choice questions to test, validly, whether students meet these “standards.” Well, our high-stakes standardized ELA tests are like that. Validly testing, by means of multiple-choice questions and short writing prompts, for standards this broad and vague is literally impossible or absurd. It’s squaring the circle, building a perpetual motion machine, dividing by zero.
All this should be obvious enough. And that’s one of many reasons why the Gates/Coleman “standards” and the tests based on them should have been laughed off the national stage when they first appeared. That they weren’t is shocking, and indictment of our profession (and of a lot of self-appointed edupundits who collaborated with the deformers, cheered them on, and enriched themselves by doing so).
Here’s another I should have added to that list:
What do people want today?
The “standards” are like this–astonishingly broad. Well, Yolanda wants a new stand mixer. Mark wants his stimulus check because the rent is due. Larissa wants her dog to have puppies. No one or two multiple-choice questions can test whether people know the answer to that question. The question is, for all practical purposes, unanswerable. Can a student make inferences from text? Same sort of question. Not operationalizable in one or two multiple-choice questions.
I would not want to be given the task of finding someone smarter than Diane Ravitch is. LOL. That’s on the order of, “Retrieve the golden apples that grow on the tree east of the sun and west of the moon,” “Go and catch a falling star,” “Chronicle the wit and wisdom of Arne Duncan,” and “Find an accurate statement in a speech by Donald Trump.”
“Chronicle the wit and wisdom of Arne Duncan,” Bob, thank you for the best laugh I had today.
I stole that one from Diane Ravitch, so thank her.
If I recall her comment correctly, it was this: “World’s Shortest Book–The Wit and Wisdom of Arne Duncan.”
Please read ed reform criticisms of public schools during the crisis with a huge grain of salt.
They came into this believing that all public schools are failing and all charter/private schools are superior to public schools and they are obviously using the crisis to push this narrative.
It’s just not a worthwhile use of time for public school leaders.
You can’t win this competition. Don’t play.
When will an anti-hero with the skills of a Julio Santana appear to target “only” the billionare disrupters of chaos?
https://nypost.com/2019/04/27/meet-julio-santana-the-worlds-deadliest-hitman-with-500-kills/
Name is can be broken down into appropriate word–Huffman–all huff (as referred to by SDP) but no man there.
Resseger: “This is pretty harsh. While in many places teachers are going to enormous lengths to create interesting projects to challenge children and keep them engaged, virtual schooling is a challenge.”
I AGREE. Just now nursing my back after two hours gathering props/ crib sheets & filming [at my laptop] a grand total of 12 mins’ worth of video clips for my 3y.o.-5y.o. Spanish students. It’ll take another 3 hrs of prep/ filming, & hopefully the editing won’t be too onerous for this low-techie. Eventually I’ll have 5 versions of a 20-min video, each containing a personalized segment made for the individuals in each class. That’s for this week– and that may be it. Only half my classes signed up, and parents are already balking about whether they really want to do this.
You may think of these efforts only in terms of pubsch K-12, but just imagine our mostly-private, mostly-small-biz PreK’s, faced with losing 2.5 out of 9 mos’ revenue. Not to mention the 2-woman agency I work for, and the dozen teachers they send out to give wkly enrichment classes at about 10 of these establishments.
I have a bad feeling about this. We took a huge hit in the 2008 recession; it took 2-3 yrs to build the clientele back up. This thing is worse, the way it’s hitting all quarters at once in the midst of operations. What’s already happening as we speak to local restaurants could be our fate… A week ago, virtually all the establishments in town were blithely promising curb-pick/ delivery at least until “curfew” (8pm) & many until 10pm. Now they’re dropping like flies into “closed until further notice”– perhaps into bankruptcy– because a few hrs’ take-out biz doesn’t bring in enough to pay even a skeleton staff, let alone the rent…
My hat is off, Greg. I am going to no place near that with what I am doing. I have turned a tiny bedroom into a music room.
Beth: Should read off, Beth. Sorry, I was replying to Greg above in another spot. The thing that is wrong with responding to a blog is that it demonstrates right out in front of people all the things you can attribute to old age when you get there.
No sweat, RT. It’s not even Beth – it’s ” be three 5.” My real name is Ginny!
Postscript to the whiny entry to which you so kindly replied:
YAY! This stuff turns out to be easy-peasy. The camera part is simplicity itself. Most laptops have a built-in webcam; you just look for it in the list at the windows icon, & then choose the movie-projector icon. (Like many teachers I’m a natural performer, it just took a while to figure out the staging.). Best to make lots of short clips (quick to re-do if you goof) – the program automatically opens a folder called “Camera Roll” in your Pictures section & stores them [there you can pick the ones you like & give them a name/ sequence #]. If you have windows 10 on your laptop, the rest of the work is under “Photos” program, video projects. “Add” (import) your clips to Library, then drag & drop into Storyboard– wa-LAH!
The surprise is how long it takes to “export” (send the finished video into your regular files. Figure on 10mins for each 20-min video! Nerdy hubby informs me Mr Computer is doing complex work translating a huge file from skeletal internal language to user-friendly playable format.
Tomorrow I learn how to transmit it as a url to my boss which she can share with parents. Hubby already knows Google Drive so we’ll use that; it can be done via youtube & other free services. Essentially you’re sending it to “the cloud’, & specifying who can share/ share with others. (Hopefully THAT won’t take another hr of uploading!)
Boy, do I remember the coming of Kevin Huffman. We were terrible and he was going to change the way Tennessee was thinking. Soon he was gone, an utter failure. Bye, Kev, don’t let the door hit your back side.
Addendum to the excellent discussion sparked above by ColorFermat, re: textbook vs no textbook.
Here’s my stab at summarizing this, CF. Let’s take high school social studies. Even American history, let alone world history, is territory too vast to “cover” in two or three 180-day courses. In general, you’re going to use a skeleton chronology of key events/ movements, and delve into some key examples of how one set of circumstances led to another. A decent textbook is a good general guide – arguably, so is an index of wikipedia articles, as long as everybody’s on the same page.
As a parent, you hope your kid will end up with some key facts under his belt so he doesn’t end up like those Jay Leno interviewees who can’t find Spain on a map, or think the Boston Tea Party happened in the 1880’s. But sadly (as Bob S points out), memorized facts often don’t stick. What needs to stick is that sense of how major events are the consequence of a complex set of factors, and will have rippling or domino effect going forward — plus the interest, curiosity and know-how needed to investigate further on own’s own. How a teacher “covers” that will vary with his background knowledge, individual interests, and pedagogical skill.
Examples, 2 from my highsch ed 50 yrs ago, one from my kids’ 15 yrs ago.
World History: took it in summer school to make room for what I cared about (squeezing French IV & Latin II into sr yr). Memorized vast chron sequences direct from textbook. Retained some basic facts, but nothing more; developed curiosity & interest as an adult (research know-how was acquired thro other subjects [hisch & college]).
American History, my sr yr: this teacher focused on intellectual philosophies that informed 18thC devpts – not on chron [he leaned there on basics covered repetitively in soc stud since 7th gr] – so he was cherry-picking from text to focus on areas for us to research and discuss. This was the course [in hisch or college] that fueled my adult interest in history.
Global Events, a course my kids took soph yr: pulled from ’90’s/ 2000’s changes in Russia, Europe, Africa, et al. No textbook – all Xeroxed topical handouts – lots of lively discussions. Confusing and difficult for my kids to follow, but I credit it for inspiring their ongoing interest in world events: they keep abreast, they have opinions/ viewpoints/ regular discussions with peers; they vote without fail.
I recognize the humanities don’t fall as neatly into commonly-accepted syllabus as math, which explains some of our differences. However, as one who was poorly served by old-fashioned standard [US] math-teaching, I can’t help thinking its pedagogy could use an overhaul. I see it as similar to tradl US world-language pedagogy: we produce few who are good at it, & leave too many convinced they just don’t have a bent for it.