I've long said that the Common Core strikes me as an intriguing effort that could do much good. So, why am I not on board? Because I think the effort has a good chance of stalling out over the next four or five years. And, because standards and assessments are the backbone of pretty much everything else in K-12 schooling, that could tear down all manner of promising efforts on teacher quality, school improvement, and the rest.

This all leaves me feeling a lot like a kid watching a scary movie through crossed fingers. The past couple weeks, I've been struck by how fragile the effort is starting to seem and how clumsily the Common Core'ites seem to be responding to challenges. In the spirit of public service, here's some advice shouted at the screen. Today, I'll offer my two cents on why things stand where they do; on Thursday, I'll offer a few thoughts on what the Common Core'ites can do about it.

The flame jumped the "firebreak": The giant strategic error for the Common Core advocates was their refusal, from 2009 through much of 2012, to actually take the critics seriously. They treated concerns as a fringe phenomenon, dismissing or ridiculing questions of federal involvement, the quality of the standards, and the rest. Whoops. A politically savvy observer would note that -- like opposition to the Iraq War, health care reform, or NCLB -- complaints always start at the "fringe." Like sparks thrown off by a fire, these complaints by themselves are ineffectual. What matters is whether those sparks cross the clearing around the campfire and ignite the forest of more mainstream sentiment. That happened back in mid-2012. Common Core proponents could have reduced the likelihood of the fire jumping by hosing down the firebreak -- e.g. by responding concretely to misconceptions, acknowledging concerns, and working hard to reassure those most exposed to the flames. They did none of this until the fire crossed and was burning fiercely on the other side.

Nature abhors a vacuum: Surprising, given the nature of their enterprise, the Common Core advocates have long shown remarkably little interest in taking the time and energy to discuss their exercise with those outside the education policy bubble. (I've been given all kinds of good reasons for this -- from a dearth of manpower to the need to focus on technical issues -- but they don't change the reality.) Instead, Common Core'ites seemed eager to pocket their Race to the Top-aided wins and just move on to implementation. The problem is that adopting the Common Core doesn't end the political and popular discussion; instead, it prompts questions about spending, accountability, teacher preparation, governance, and the rest. And it's now clear that lots of parents, policymakers, and educators never really understood the Common Core, and certainly don't feel obliged to do what it'll take to implement it. The paucity of public discussion created a vacuum, and we're now seeing it filled. Cato's Neal McCluskey captured this dynamic last week in a public email exchange, explaining: "I'd note that many of the new Common Core opponents are just finding out about Common Core as it hits their schools, unlike supporters who have been working on this for several years. They may simply not have the necessary information, which is likely in part due to the rushed adoption catalyzed by Race to the Top. And a lot of people, from what I can tell, mistakenly attribute things to Common Core - such as data-mining - that should be attributed to Race to the Top. But all those things are intentionally connected, so while the facts may be wrong, the concerns and message are often far from nutty." Having realized late in the game that changing K-12 standards and assessments for more than 40 million students in more than 40 states might prove controversial, Common Core advocates have opted primarily to ridicule and dismiss skeptics. Not so surprisingly, the Tea Partiers and anti-Common Core'ites haven't been persuaded.

The Marco Rubio strategy: One problem for the Common Core'ites, at this point, is none of their champions carry much credibility with the Tea Partiers (or with the anti-testing left). This may seem kind of surprising, given the support of prominent conservatives like Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett. But people only accept leadership from leaders who they believe are watching out for their concerns. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has worked double-time to do this when it comes to the immigration bill. There, he's taken great pains throughout to suggest that he's the Tea Party's ambassador to the Gang of Eight, and not vice versa. The problem for Bush et al. is that they've appeared throughout the Common Core scrap to be Common Core'ites wooing the right, rather than conservatives making sure the Common Core doesn't get hijacked by Obama partisans. The other week, for instance, Bush's foundation issued a document that challenged a number of misperceptions about the Common Core. Fair enough, but it would've been a terrific chance to acknowledge some of the legitimate concerns that conservatives have raised and tell 'em, "I'm keeping an eye on these things."

Policy is like a funhouse mirror: This stuff matters because the advocates have a real problem -- things they regard as sensible and unexceptional are much more disconcerting to many conservatives. Policy is often like a funhouse mirror. Concerns that strike one side as baseless or silly can seem very real to another. The fact that few education reformers or edu-reporters are conservatives (and fewer still see Tea Partiers as anything more than caricatures) makes it easy for them to dismiss concerns. Federal inducements to adopt the Common Core through Race to the Top or waivers are dismissed as modest nudges that don't compromise the Core's "voluntary" nature. Complaints about the $350 million in federal funds for SBAC and PARCC are dismissed as bellyaching about a dollop of critical federal seed money. President Obama bragging in the State of the Union that he pushed states to adopt the Common Core is dismissed as irrelevant bombast. Fears of intrusive data collection are dismissed as paranoia (though these are a bit tougher to dismiss than they were a month ago). Advocates don't even seem able to process the complaint that standards constructed by CCSSO, NGA, and affiliated technocrats are less a state-led endeavor than an E.U.-like exercise in sprawling, unaccountable bureaucratic gestation.

Start by taking skeptics seriously: Tea Partiers are frustrated when liberals describe support for balanced budgets, limited government, Second Amendment rights, and the repeal of health care reform as racist, violent, xenophobic, callous, and uncaring. Yet, whether or not Tea Partiers feel misunderstood, pundits and journalists repeatedly explain that they need to grow up, start compromising, and get over themselves. That same advice would come in handy for Common Core'ites. They'd do well to push past their impatience with skeptics and disdain for talk of compromise around timelines, implementation, and the rest. Especially with something like the Common Core, where success will turn on the willingness of state boards, legislatures, governors, and educators to follow through, it's time to start taking the political challenges seriously.

I'll offer some thoughts as to what proponents might do about all this on Thursday. Meantime, here are three good resources for those who are interested in taking these issues seriously.

1] Check out my colleague Mike McShane's thoughtful ten-part series on the implementation challenges of the Common Core here.

2] Check out the recent set of extensive AEI white papers on the same topic here.

3] And check out what Fordham's Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn have been writing on this score, as they've spent the past couple years operating as pretty much the only Common Core enthusiasts willing to publicly call out Obama overreach or talk frankly about problems and missteps (as with Fordham's tough new analysis of the Next Generation Science Standards).

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Was recently sent a slender new book by 2009 California Teacher of the Year Alex Kajitani (a hugely interesting guy who is well worth getting to know). Kajitani's The Teacher of the Year Handbook spells it all out in the subtitle: "The ultimate guide to making the most of your teacher-leader role." Katijani takes the unusual step of providing a wealth of concrete, practical advice on how teachers can go about making their voice heard beyond the walls of the schoolhouse.

While there are plenty of books calling for teachers to have more influence on policy, offering collections of classroom tips, exhorting teachers to speak up, and relating inspirational stories about influential teachers, one has to look long and hard to find much that tells teachers how to influence policy or speak up effectively.

In a pithy, low-key, and highly skimmable format, Kajitani offers advice on giving speeches, dealing with media, making conference presentations, using blogs and social media... you know, all the stuff that can help teachers contribute effectively to the public debate on schools and schooling. Because the dirty secret is that, even as teachers are frustrated that they don't have a more influential voice on decision-making, I rarely encounter classroom educators who have a sense of how to acquire or wield that influence. (The exception here are the small networks of teachers involved with TeachPlus, Educators for Excellence, the Center for Teaching Quality, and so on -- but I think they too would find the volume more than a little helpful.) What's more generally visible are strident spokespeople, angry blog comments, and the occasional rally -- none of which is especially likely to win allies, change minds, or alter policy.

Now, let's be clear. This state of affairs isn't anybody's fault per se. Teacher preparation does little or nothing on this score, nor does most professional development. And few teachers have much experience outside of classroom and school settings, so it's not like they'd have a lot of opportunities to cultivate those skills. So observing the problem is more of a diagnosis than an exercise in assigning blame. And that's where Kajitani comes in. He offers practical advice on how to productively engage community leaders, journalists, and policymakers. The advice he offers may be familiar to those who spend a lot of time speaking publicly and talking to media, but it'll be enormously useful to folks who've been too busy actually teaching kids to worry about such things.

When it comes to interviews, Kajitani explains the import of anticipating questions and polishing key anecdotes. He explains why teacher leaders should have business cards, what they should say, and how to use them. He offers a bunch of strategies for how to craft and deliver a great speech -- from the value of telling stories to the importance of focusing on what your audience cares about. He tells a terrific story about being interviewed by Katie Couric, offers advice on how to survive cocktail parties, and provides suggestions on how to pen blogs that will make a difference. He even offers some hugely needed advice on how to make conference attendance useful and how teacher leaders should deal with the question of being compensated for appearances and contributions.

Featuring a bunch of anecdotes and observations from other teachers of the year, the book can be easily read in an hour. Are you an educator wishing to have more impact beyond the schoolhouse? If so, I think you'll find it an hour really well spent.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Hey, so I stumbled across an interesting paper by SuHua Huang, Phillip Jeffrey Blacklock, and Matthew Capps, of Texas's Midwestern State University: "Reading Habits of College Students in the United States." (A good write-up is available here in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) They find that college students are spending less than eight hours a week on academic reading, and that nearly half of their "reading" time consists of perusing Facebook updates...or devouring 140 characters at a time.

Huang and her colleagues asked 1,265 students at a four-year liberal arts college (presumably theirs) to fill out surveys describing their weekly schedule--including working, sleeping, socializing, and engaging in different kinds of reading. The authors also interviewed a dozen students and observed them reading in three education classes (yeah, that part didn't wow me either).

The authors report that students spent just over 20 hours a week reading: 8.9 hours on the internet, 7.7 hours on academic reading, and 4.2 hours on extracurricular reading. Now, it turns out that all that internet "reading", which accounts for about 45% of reading time, is mostly on social media and includes chiefly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

(Given that the National Endowment for the Arts reports that Americans aged 15-24 spend just 7 minutes of their daily leisure time on reading, there are three ways to read this data. The optimistic take is that these students are pursuing extracurricular reading at several times the national average. The technical take is that "extracurricular" reading means something different from "leisure" reading. The pessimistic take is that these students are, ahem, exaggerating in their journals--and that these college students still aren't even bothering to claim 45 minutes a day of extracurricular reading.)

In a not-so-reassuring observation, Huang reports that student attachment to their cellphones in class apparently "reached the point of obsession" and that the students observed rarely followed instructions, took notes, or brought textbooks to class. It's one thing to celebrate the potential of new technologies to enrich learning and reshape teaching. It's another thing to allow bite-sized, gossipy social media to displace serious reading of extended texts. And it's still another if our enthusiasm for devices and tablets impedes the ability of the next generation to learn from or talk to a, you know, person.

There are a bunch of prescriptions for policy and practice one can draw from all this. But, for me, the main one is the reminder that--for decades now, and despite any number of celebrated ideas--we've done a horrific job of finding ways to get K-12 or college students to spend much time reading anything of substance. Heck, twenty-five years ago, the question was: How do we get students to read Camus rather than Cosmo? Now, the question is whether we're educating college students with enough attention span for the latter. So, my question for the day (and it's real, not rhetorical): Do you feel okay about a 21st century college student who fares well academically but spends little downtime reading anything that isn't a wallpost or a tweet?

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I spend a lot of time at various national, state, and local edu-conferences. It seems that that, no matter how thoughtful the organizers and no matter the gathering's politics or point of view, they all tend to feature a lot of really long stretches of tedium.

Now, let me make three things abundantly clear. First, I'm confident that most conferences in most fields are tedious. Second, I admittedly have an awful attention span and get bored way too easily. Third, I'm as guilty of putting together boring conferences as anyone else, so this is intended more as a public service announcement than as any kind of soapbox exercise.

(Quick note: If you don't think most edu-conferences are painful, you really need to share your tips with me, or else you've got a much higher tolerance for tedium. Either way, you're excused from reading further.)

Anyway, five quick observations and suggestions:

First, speakers frequently aren't all that good. For one thing (and lord knows I've been hugely guilty of this), it's easy for speakers to focus on making sure that they say their piece rather than helping the audience learn. That's bad. After all, a sleepy, tuned-out audience neither hears nor learns. This is beyond bad when it's a featured or keynote speaker.

Second, way too many panels amount to some version of a dog-and-pony show, where each academic or leader touts their wares, filibustering and leaving little time for meaningful discussion. Organizers would do well to create forums where the conversation is more challenging, allowing moderators and audience members to press participants in more focused, pointed, and penetrating ways.

Third, moderators tend to be weak-kneed. Frequently, I'm not sure they actually want to be moderating. Rather than push the conversation forward, challenge speakers, or cultivate illuminating back-and-forth, they seem to limply wait for time to expire.

Fourth, audience members have a disconcerting tendency to ask "questions" that amount to extended, disjointed, and off-point soliloquies. Too many moderators blinkingly, passively watch this. Look, it's true that many audience members would themselves make good panelists. But the path to learning is not a jumbled assemblage of back-of-room comments, but an audience and moderator pushing those who happen to be on the panel to reveal something (whether intentionally or no).

Fifth, audience members need to take more ownership. I've been in rooms marked by widespread yawning, eye-glazing, and phone-checking (sometimes I'm the cause of all this), and yet heard audience members swap half-hearted, well-intentioned niceties about the talk afterwards. And I've seen a lot of wildly inflated feedback on some really painful sessions. Audiences should give tougher feedback, demand more interactivity, and expect more disciplined moderating and more engaging speakers.

Life is too short and time is too valuable to turn a blind eye to all this. Let's raise our expectations, and our game.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Late last week, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, my shop at AEI released briefs by eight of the most interesting thinkers around when it comes to rethinking the contours of K-12 schooling (you can find them all here). In these pieces, which together offer up a bold, interlocking strategy, the authors sketch out the practical system design suggestions that often get set aside as we focus alternately on big concepts or on implementation tactics. The pieces all embrace a "sector agnostic" approach; they focus on figuring out how educational, municipal, and state leaders can support schools, cultivate great teaching, and police quality whether we're talking about district schools, charter schools, online providers, or schools participating in publicly funded scholarship programs.

The briefs include pieces by NSNO's Neerav Kingsland on what it takes to do a turnaround system right; Harvard Center for Education Policy Research honcho Jon Fullerton on how to build a dynamic data infrastructure; Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, on how to rethink professional development delivery; Fordham VP Mike Petrilli on how to do quality control for various kinds of current and emerging school models; and so on.

The papers were authored with an eye to how they could be pursued by decision-makers in a particular community. We asked our authors to suggest how their insights might apply to Milwaukee, for reasons that my project co-director, Seton Hall's Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, and I explained recently in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel op-ed. We observed: "As much as any city in America, Milwaukee has played a pioneering role in educational choice. More than two decades after establishing the nation's first urban school voucher program, Milwaukee offers families a raft of options, including district schools, charter schools and publicly funded private school scholarships. Yet, this dramatic expansion of options has not yet translated into dramatic improvement... This should be cause for renewed energy, not despair."

We noted, "After all, the Milwaukee Public Schools district has displayed a willingness to find ways to turn around struggling schools and to tackle long-standing fiscal challenges. Milwaukee's charter school authorizers have shown themselves willing to hold low-performing schools accountable. Schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program increasingly have embraced accountability for performance. Across all three sectors, there are instances of high-performing schools where even Milwaukee's most challenged pupils can excel."

The point of the road map exercise is to push beyond the familiar "reform" conventions, eschewing familiar enthusiasms that can color the world of school reform. Reformers, for instance, can wax enthusiastic about merit pay, while leaving intact notions of the teacher's job description, school staffing and the organization of instruction. These efforts ignore the fact that yesterday's structures are ill-suited for today's ambitions.

Our contributors adopt a different mind-set: that transformation requires revisiting the basic building blocks of schooling. Together, they consider the interlocking pieces of any city's educational ecosystem, including teaching, management, new school formation, technology, resource allocation, quality control, research and data collection, and explore how this might be rethought. They explain how all the interested parties, from state officials to city hall to private philanthropies, can help do their part.

What's notable and different about this effort, we hope and suggest, is that we are offering neither an airy vision nor sugarplum promises. The recommendations offer no miracle cures. They can, though, help to create the kinds of schools where great educators thrive, get the support they need and are held accountable in more sensible and appropriate ways. Civic and educational leaders can help make that happen.

We think the contributors here have directions that can help guide them along the way.

Posted by Rick Hess at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So, looks like we're getting back into NCLB reauthorization mode. I laid out some of the broad context on Monday. While nobody is thrilled with NCLB, there are concerns that the Senate Republicans are going to go too far in "retreating" from the appropriate federal role. Today, I want to set aside for the moment philosophical arguments about the federal role, and talk about the design problems of NCLB, and why it's essential that any vision for reauth steer clear of repeating those.

Checker Finn and I argued six years ago in Education Next that NCLB's critical flaw was its pie-eyed, overwrought ambition. As we wrote, "NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a shaky basis for policymaking, rather as if Congress asserted in the name of energy reform that America will no longer need to import oil after 2014 or fought crime by declaring that by that date all U.S. cities would be peaceable kingdoms."

All the same, we were not unsympathetic. We wrote at the time: "NCLB's backers can legitimately argue that they had already spent nearly two decades asking state and local officials and education leaders to address mediocre school performance and stubborn race- and class-linked inequities... In that light, the passion-drenched unseriousness infusing NCLB is forgivable, even honorable. And NCLB indeed has virtues: it produced long-overdue school transparency, focused unprecedented attention on achievement, [and] created urgency where lethargy had ruled."

That said, the design failings of NCLB were notable. Unaddressed, they infused the Harkin-Enzi bill that emerged in 2011, and will continue to haunt the Democratic proposal. Checker and I pointed out that NCLB sought to do three different things -- each sensible enough in its own right, but a Rube Goldbergesque hodge-podge when combined. As we wrote:

"Embedded within NCLB's accountability system are three distinct, discernible models of educational change that have been awkwardly welded together.

Model one would make transparent the performance of students across the nation, providing an X-ray to show parents, educators, and policymakers how different schools and groups are performing in key subjects. Model two would deploy "behavior modification" accountability methods, refined through decades of public sector reform, to force low-performing schools and districts to set goals, assess effectiveness, and do better. And model three would set "shoot-the-moon" targets and use the federal bully pulpit to exhort leaders in states and districts to improve.

Each of these approaches is plausible on its own terms. And each has a place in federal policy. But they cannot reasonably be linked to one another, as NCLB tries to do. They entail discrepant views of the federal role in education and employ discordant mechanisms. The result isn't working."

We pointed out, "The value of an 'X-ray' of the nation's school performance has long been recognized. NCLB's dictate that all states regularly test students in key subjects marked a historic success. The accuracy of the picture is compromised, however, when this cross-sectional look at student achievement becomes the basis for gauging the performance of schools and educators, much less for triggering interventions or remedies. We don't judge doctors based on whether their patients are sick today but by how much patient health improves under their care. Judging professional performance on the basis of a one-moment-in-time X-ray encourages questionable behavior, leads states to play games with standards, and threatens to discredit the X-ray itself."

Similarly, when it came to the idea that the feds needed to force states to act, we wrote "Prodding public sector institutions to set goals, monitor performance, and then reward excellence and address mediocrity has been a signal success for reformers on both the left and the right... Sensibly structured accountability systems encourage self-interested workers to take goals seriously, focus on outcomes, and employ all the levers at their disposal to produce those outcomes. But we compromise such 'behavior modification' when those on the ground view the targets as unattainable. If workers know they are unlikely to succeed, the goal becomes to avoid trouble when they fail. By making failure inevitable, unrealistic goals have the perverse effect of focusing employees on compliance."

What to do about all this? It requires teasing apart these three roles. The federal government can and should insist on transparency in return for federal funds. It's fine for the Secretary of Education to be a cheerleader and appropriate for the SecEd to use moral suasion. But it's a mistake to tie artificial goals to pleasing sentiments. And it's a mistake for Uncle Sam to try and get into the business of fixing schools, no matter how much he distrusts state and system leaders. After all, Uncle Sam can't fix schools. All he can do is pass laws, which makes ED write regulations, ordering states or districts to alter policies, in the hope that these change practices in schools and classrooms.

Now, for instance, the feds requiring states to set performance targets instead of setting a national 100% by 2014 target is an invitation to repeat some of these same problems, just with a new wrinkle. States will be pressed by the Secretary of Education to set pie-in-the-sky growth expectations for gap-closing... and then all the pathologies of NCLB repeat. Unless and until someone proffers workable suggestions here, such a proposal tells me that the lessons of NCLB haven't really been learned.

A decision to focus NCLB reauthorization on promoting transparency, honest measurements of spending and achievement, and on ensuring that constitutional protections are respected ought not be seen as a retreat from NCLB but as an attempt to have the feds do what they can do sensibly and well.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Word has it that the Democrats on the Senate HELP Committee will be bringing forth their proposal for NCLB/ESEA reauthorization this week. Thus we'll return to a favorite Beltway edu-pastime: discussing whether reauthorization will pass, whether there will be a bipartisan bill, and what might change.

The bottom line: There will be no reauthorization in 2013 or 2014. There will be no bipartisan Senate bill. Expect the majority Democratic bill to look a lot like the 2011 Harkin-Enzi bill that made it out of committee, and Republicans to sketch a far more modest federal role.

The longer version: There are four key things to keep in mind as the reauthorization discussion plays out. First, the context has been reset by the ESEA waivers that the Department of Education has issued. That provides the new status quo, and it's a stable one for now. Sec. Duncan and the President have no incentive to do anything that's less palatable to them, and most states have addressed their most pressing concerns. Absent actual demand for change, assembling a coalition to get a bill done becomes really tough.

Second, there's no money. You can't adjust formulas or meaningfully alter funding streams in the U.S. Senate unless you can hold states harmless (i.e. make sure they get as much money as they would've under the old rules), and you can't do that without new money. Simple calculus: no money, no change.

Third, writing a partisan bill makes it easier for the majority Dems to hold all of their committee members. And given the fascinating lineup of Dems on HELP--from former superintendent Michael Bennet to newbie firebrands Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin and socialist Bernie Sanders--that'll be no small challenge. Whether they stick together matters, though, because the D's have the thinnest of margins on HELP, and will need all their votes to move a partisan bill out of committee. Meanwhile, the really interesting thing is that the R's theoretically have a better chance of picking off a Baldwin than a Bennet--because it's the union-friendly progressives who are now closer to the GOP call for less federal intervention. Conversely, it will be interesting to see how Sen. Alexander manages the tensions on the GOP side--with tea partiers Rand Paul and Tim Scott ready to see ED close up shop but about half the R's on HELP more supportive of a federal role. Given the climate and symbolic nature of the coming debate, I don't see much chance of the D's poaching a Murkowski or a Kirk, but it'll be interesting to see them try.

Fourth, no bill is going to make it to the President's desk. Even if the full Senate passed a bill this fall (not too likely) and the House passed all its requisite pieces (not too likely), can you imagine the House-Senate conference on NCLB? Can't see a bill emerging. Despite all these hurdles, what happens this year will still matter a lot, because the competing proposals are likely to be the baseline from which the winning Presidential candidate will start in 2017 (when reauth will have a real chance to get done).

In response to the what Democrats are going to propose, expect the Senate Republicans to craft a hard-hitting bill, producing a debate that will help clarify where the two sides agree -- and disagree. Most importantly, there's a fundamental difference of opinion on whether the federal role should consist primarily of an insistence on reporting and transparency (because that's what the feds can do well and are uniquely positioned to do) or whether the federal role ought to also include, as under NCLB, an effort to compel states to do something about persistently "failing" schools (because otherwise too many states won't act). Today, in the U.S. Senate, Republicans favor the first approach, Democrats the second.

That honest difference of opinion will be at the heart of the debate. However, because most education "reformers" tend to side with the Dems on this -- and because the Obama administration and folks at ED obviously prefer a more activist stance -- we can expect that a more modest federal role will be characterized as a "retreat". I find this peculiar, given that some of the same people lamenting a "retreat" have noted real flaws in NCLB. But they chalk these problems up to this or that "implementation" problem, rather than to the feds trying to do too much, too crudely.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On Tuesday, CCSSO waded into the Common Core "hiatus" discussion, issuing a thoughtful paper which argued that states should proceed with sensible flexibility and called on Secretary Duncan to exercise restraint when interpreting promises coerced by ED as a condition for ESEA waivers. The CCSSO rejected calls for an accountability "hiatus" but pointed to a need for states to have discretion in deciding when to start using tests for high-stakes teacher evaluation, how to make accountability determinations during the transition to Common Core, and whether to use their old tests or the new assessments in 2013-14. This was all a useful start towards a conversation that might help reduce the likelihood of a massive Common Core-inspired train wreck in 2014.

Unfortunately, my good friends at Chiefs for Change pretty much skipped the flexibility question and instead used this release as a chance to double down on their sloganeering letter from last week which essentially said, "No hiatus, no way. We're done here." The Chiefs responded to the CCSSO with a brief release that embraced CCSSO's "firm stand against the call for a moratorium on accountability" and, well...that was about it. Now, let me be clear. I get it. The folks in Chiefs for Change are tough-minded leaders who've fought hard, taken some cheap shots, see the perils of taking their foot off the gas, and are (reasonably) concerned that trying to address complaints will only bring forth new ones.

I get all that. Still, I'd been underwhelmed by the Chiefs' response to the challenges until a source shared with me the secret transcript of a recent Chiefs conference call. Then, the strategy became much clearer. [Note: For the easily confused, the following is entirely made up].

CUT INTO CONFERENCE RECORDING AT 12:48 MARK.

Voice 1: So, we've got these AFT complaints. Weingarten is worried that teachers are going to be treated unfairly, the tests won't be validated, and results will be distorted by reliability issues. She says we have to be careful, since the results will matter for pay and tenure in a lot of places.

Voice 2: Excuses. We're leaders. So let's lead. We need world-class standards, measured with rigorous assessments, and used to hold educators and schools accountable. That's what works.

Voice 1: Okay. The pro-hiatus doubters are also asking about whether the technology and devices will be ready to support the assessments. I guess they've seen some of the glitches and problems with technology infrastructure and they're asking whether we can be confident the test administrations will be competent and fair.

Voice 3: More excuses. We're going to have results from rigorous assessments, based on world-class standards. We need to use those to hold educators and schools accountable. It's been proven to work. Let's move on already.

Voice 1: Okay, let's see. Some doubters are apparently saying that holding too tightly to an artificial timeline didn't turn out so well for NCLB and that we don't want to make that same mistake again. They say that the aftermath permanently damaged support for and the efficacy of NCLB.

Voice 2: Are we a debating society or are we doing this for the kids? We don't have time to pontificate all day. We've got children to save.

Voice 4: Yeah, I'm here for the kids. I'm not here to worry about fancy, how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions about test validity. We've got scores. We've got kids to save. Let's go.

Voice 1: Now, staff tells me that some of our so-called friends are saying, "Sure, the AFT is still likely to balk at accountability, no matter how much you work with them. But if you address Weingarten's reasonable concerns, you make it clear that you're doing this carefully. Then, if she keeps complaining, it's easier to make the case that she's being unreasonable."

Voice 5: Hey, I'm here for the kids, not the adults. We've come too far to go backwards. What's right for the students are teacher and school accountability, based on rigorous assessments, backed by world-class standards.

Voice 1: Okay, glad we've got that sorted out. Let's just make sure we're on the same page regarding the message. I think we're all on board with saying, "No retreat from world-class standards, rigorous assessments, and teacher accountability. It's the right thing to do." Now, what happens if any of our friends say, "We're with you in principle, but you're making some unfortunate, avoidable missteps."

Voice 4: Look, folks are either with us, or they're against us. If they're with us, they'll shut up and fall in line.

Voice 3: Yeah, and failing that, if they're real friends, at least they'll have the decency to not say, "I told you so."

END RECORDING.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I've been friendly with Diane Ravitch for a long time. Encountering her historical work 20 years ago, I was struck by her hard-hitting, erudite analyses. She invited me to deliver my first featured talk (at Brookings, on my then-forthcoming Spinning Wheels book). When I was leaving UVA's Curry School of Education, she was one of the handful of mentors I turned to for guidance. A few years ago now, I hosted the first public event for her Death and Life book.

All of which left me enormously disappointed as I read two blog posts that Ravitch penned over the weekend. Ravitch weighed in on a situation in Los Angeles, where principal Irma Cobian was removed from her position at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts when Parent Revolution helped parents exercise California's "parent trigger" law. Ravitch started out reasonably enough, pointing out that 21 of 22 teachers requested a transfer in response to Cobian's removal, and that one third-grade teacher said that Cobian's the best principal she's had in her nine years at the school. (It's also worth noting, though, as Parent Revolution does, that the school ranks close to the bottom of all LAUSD elementary schools on California's Academic Performance Index and that scores have fallen over the past three years under Cobian.)

Ravitch then shifted gears, summoning shades of Dante's Inferno, as she wrote of Parent Revolution, "There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization." One can just picture Ravitch fastidiously consigning these folks to their proper stations in the various circles of hell.

Ravitch grew even more heated as she wrote of Parent Revolution's founder Ben Austin, "Ben Austin is loathsome. He ruined the life and career of a dedicated educator. She was devoted to the children, he is devoted to the equally culpable foundations that fund his Frankenstein organization." She continued, "Ben, you ruined the life of a good person for filthy lucre. Ben, every day when you wake up, you should think of Irma Cobian. When you look in the mirror, think Irma Cobian. Your last thought every night should be Irma Cobian. She should be on your conscience-if you have one-forever."

Now, I've got my own qualms about Parent Revolution. I've mixed feelings on the trigger and on Parent Revolution's policy recommendations. But none of this, not one iota, even begins in the tiniest way to justify Ravitch's tirade. Moreover, I know Ben Austin and will attest to just how smart, well-intentioned, passionate, humble, and nice he actually is. Indeed, last fall, when I proffered a pretty tough critique of Parent Revolution, Ben's genteel response moved me to note, "I was cheered recently by Parent Revolution's impassioned but thoughtful and courteous [tone]," and to hail their contribution to healthy civil debate.

Let's consider the supposedly horrific nature of what Parent Revolution helped the parents at Weigand to do. Cobian had been at Weigand since 2009, and there's no evidence that things were getting any better. Meanwhile, a very sympathetic L.A. Times story reported parent leader Llury Garcia describing Cobian as "inaccessible and rude." Garcia, leader of Weigand Parents United, said in a private communication, "We love the teachers at our school and don't want them to leave. However... many of the teachers have turned on us, calling us 'uneducated' and unable to make good decisions for our children. By trying to support the principal who is leaving after years of failure, the teachers are the ones now trying to divide our community."

Nonprofits, for-profits, military units, sports franchises, and even churches routinely demote, transfer, or fire executives, generals, coaches, and pastors when they deem it appropriate. Sometimes it's undoubtedly the wrong call, and good leaders sometimes unfairly get the boot. But there's a sense, and it strikes me as a reasonable one, that it can be essential to change leaders in order to give a persistently low-performing organization a fresh start.

As Ben Austin wrote to me, in response to Ravitch's attack, "Her argument (and the reporter's argument) is that the principal was on the cusp of turning things around. It's possible, but the parents didn't think so. [Cobian's] tenure has been almost as long as the academic lifetime of an elementary school kid and [Weigand] is still 15th from the bottom of all LAUSD elementary schools (out of over 500). The parents felt they had waited long enough." Oh, and complicating the question of how ardently Cobian's teachers have her back, Parent Revolution communications chief David Phelps writes, "Contrary to the Times reporting, it is our understanding the teachers who have said they are leaving have not submitted official transfer requests to the district."

Now, I have no trouble with the notion that it's a mistake to fire leaders too casually, or that Cobian may have been treated unfairly. There's no clear evidence that Cobian did anything especially wrong. Indeed, Austin wrote to me, "We have gone out of our way to not personally attack the principal, or anyone else. As you can see in our media statement, we rely only on objective data to make our case and intentionally don't even mention her name." At the same time, despite Cobian's apparent popularity with the current staff, she has not been able to make a difference during nearly a half-decade as principal. In such a situation, pushing for a change hardly seems an act of malice.

I'd have loved to see Ravitch challenge the notion that replacing school principals is much of a restorative. I'd be especially open to the notion that Cobian got a raw deal if Ravitch had offered evidence that she's good at her job, and not just popular with the teachers at a persistently lousy school. But I can't focus on the merits when the arguments are swaddled in vicious, Dante-esque hyperbole that is unworthy of the author.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In the past month or two, serious voices have called for a "hiatus" in high-stakes testing as new assessments are phased in over the next few years. The most notable champions of a hiatus have been Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr and AFT president Randi Weingarten. They've found sympathy in some perhaps surprising quarters, such as with Education Trust honcho Kati Haycock.

The "hiatus" idea has been met with the withering critiques you'd expect from proponents of gap-closing accountability. On Tuesday, Chiefs for Change released a strongly worded letter flatly rejecting the idea. They declared, "Holding our schools accountable for the progress of our students is the only way we will transform education, remain internationally competitive and close achievement gaps." Among other things, the "no-hiatus" crowd is concerned that, if states once start to retreat from NCLB-style accountability systems, it'll be tough to get those systems back in place.

The no-hiatus camp seems to see that as a simple question, substantively and politically. I think they're dead wrong. I see a serious, thorny question that should elicit mixed feelings. If pushed to pick a side, though, I currently find myself closer to the Starr/Weingarten camp than to the Chiefs. Why? Three reasons, mainly:

First, substantively, while today's accountability systems have brought focus and much-needed attention to kids who had previously been overlooked, they've also come with some real costs. They've narrowed the scope of instruction and limited the scope of our ambition. Given the limited benefits, real costs, and horrific popular legacy of NCLB-style accountability, a high-stakes hiatus is not necessarily the calamity that the Chiefs envision. I've mixed feelings but would certainly be okay with some states choosing that path.

Second, there's a serious question of fairness and credibility. A (conservative, pro-accountability) state leader was recalling recently that, when his state first embraced NCLB-style accountability, it took two years for parents and educators to get comfortable with the tests. You can tell a similar tale about many places. And that was when results had little import for individual teachers. Today, states are rushing to adopt Race to the Top-style test-based teacher evaluation even as they're making drastic changes to the machinery that underlies those systems. After all, right now, today, Common Core states are using state assessments that no longer reflect the standards that teachers are asked to teach. As new standards, curricula, instructional materials, and assessments are hurriedly adopted during the next two years, with little time for validation or test-piloting, it's totally fair for Weingarten to worry that teachers will not be fairly judged. Oh, and that's before we even get into questions of how wide testing windows, kids being assessed using a mix of devices, technical hurdles and assorted glitches in online assessment, and limited bandwidth may raise questions about the fairness and accuracy of the results.

Third, the politics are far more complex than the "no hiatus" crowd allows. NCLB did severe damage to the idea of accountability, turning a broadly popular notion into a polarizing one. Some of that was the inevitable fact that few of us are crazy about being held accountable. But a lot of it is due to the fact that NCLB was crudely and incoherently designed, and created a raft of unanticipated consequences. A hurried, incoherent implementation of the Common Core doesn't do anybody any favors. One course would be to slow down implementation and actually try to get it right. That's not happening. So a savvy political strategy might work to anticipate legitimate concerns about capricious consequences, minimize their severity, and find ways to work out the kinks before the stakes get too high. Otherwise, the Common Core effort may suffer the backlash due to frustration bred by initial problems in testing, evaluation, and accountability.

Like I said, I'm mixed on this. Strikes me that the notion of allowing states to contemplate some kind of a hiatus is worth a careful hearing. Rather than trying to shout the notion down, I'd like to see the Chiefs and other proponents of the Common Core more visibly exploring strategies that address the very real problems on the horizon--and provide concerned states and communities a variety of practical paths forward.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend