Speaking of that CCSS devil

From a teacher in Delaware, commenting at the WaPo’s Answer Sheet, a concrete example of the recent topic, “… compliance with delivery of [CCSS] curriculum as a significant part of the data that will be used to monitor and control teachers.”

“Teacher slams scripted Common Core lessons that must be taught ‘word for word’”:

…What has changed is Common Core State Standards.  I was given a curriculum and told by my administration to teach it “word-for-word.”  In a meeting with my administration, I was reprimanded with “Don’t forget, standards drive our instruction.”

Judging the effectiveness of a teacher on only quantifiable data reduces the art of teaching children to a mathematical algorithm can that be performed more effectively by a hologram projected on the Smart board than by an old-fashioned, caring, humanly flawed teacher.

Retiree watching teachers being watched

With the guarantee of repeating myself while repeating Ian Welsh:

“High surveillance societies produce conformity, because we are what we do… If you are constantly under your boss’s thumb, you learn to reflexively act in ways that will satisfy your boss.”

It was the kiss-ass, go-along-to-get-along attitude of some co-workers that enraged me during my three pre-retirement years as union rep in a large urban high school. Union members regularly accused me of making labor-management mountains out of personality quirk molehills. (Molehill example: So the principal suddenly requires on-the-dot morning sign in, then starts highlighting the names of the not completely compliant: what’s the big deal? People should arrive to work on time, right? Well, most people. The counseling staff gets cut some slack. After all, they stay late sometimes. ((Yeah, yeah, teachers stay late too, but teachers have students waiting at their doors when the bell rings. Counselors don’t.)) And of course teachers with childcare issues should be given a pass if they make a special deal with the principal. And sport team coaches. And assistant principals. And deans. Special deals can be worked out on a one-to-one, non-contractual basis, espeically if you’re someone who has a friendly relationship with the boss. And yeah, sometimes the wrong classroom teacher name is highlighted as “not signed in” due to clerical error, but if you know you didn’t do anything wrong, and you and the boss are friends, why worry about being publicly reprimanded for doing something wrong?) I was told to chill out.

I am much cooler in retirement.

That admitted, I didn’t, IMO, overreact in recognizing and calling out the signs of a new regime of patrician administrators and their toadies monitoring and punishing teachers into plebeian compliance.

Last week, Anthony Cody offered a concise take-down of CCSS here: Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors – Living in Dialogue – Education Week Teacher. Error #8:

 “The Common Core is associated with an attempt to collect more student and teacher data than ever before.”

Cody focused on student data in his description of error #8 and didn’t describe the possible results of teacher data collection. With the dawning realization that Common Core is indeed common curriculum (see Common Core Is Curriculum, Contrary to Advocates’ Claims), it’s not much of a stretch to foresee compliance with delivery of that curriculum as a significant part of the data that will be used to monitor and control teachers. The freedom of craft and artistry that made teaching such a rewarding career will diminish for most.

Stubborn, independent types might be able to preserve some autonomy. If I was in a humanities high school classroom these days, I’d focus on debate and make rational skepticism the goal of everything I taught.

Data-less predictions?

It looks like Duncan and the federal DOE won’t penalize California for opting out of useless 2014 testing. From SI&A Cabinet Report : “A survey of experts – many of whom have participated in similar disputes with the Department of Education in the past – say there’s virtually no chance of a drastic rollback in funding.”

But what are the implications of the statewide opt-out for the CORE confederacy? In the Sacto Bee yesterday, CORE president [sic] Michael Hanson writes: “The 10 CORE districts representing 20 percent of California’s students urge the governor to sign AB 484, but only if he adds resources to ensure that every student in California can take both these new assessments, giving all of California the opportunity to learn from the result…The California state budget included more than a billion dollars to help districts transition to the Common Core State Standards, and districts can use the money for new computers or other needed technology. It just makes sense to empower schools so they can make informed choices about how to spend these resources.”

I bet the CORE districts need their cut of that billion to pay for testing required by their waiver. Both Option 1 and Option 2 in the waiver’s School Quality Improvement System require “student achievement results.” At my old high school, the principal and staff from the SFUSD Research, Planning and Accountability office are directing department chairs to provide written “predictions” about student and grade level performances for 2013-204. Not much point to making predictions of test score gains if there aren’t going to be any test scores, and somebody has to foot the bill for the testing.

(BTW, it is indeed 10 districts now. Garden Grove and Clovis appear to be in the mix with Fresno, Oakland, Sanger, Sacramento, Santa Ana, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Francisco.)

Hoping for complicating factors in educational reform

Bruce Sterling with a surprisingly optimistic, or at least smile-inducing, piece on Assange, Manning and Snowden. I find faint connections to confrontations with the tech-enabled, continually failing Big Lie of the educational reform cabal:

“The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.” (Winston Smith is a Pain in the Ass via Tuttle SVC.)

One in ten – best of luck

Vacation here in NYC ends tomorrow.  Weather as lovely as it could be, except for the thunderstorm rainout of the Shakespeare in the Parks performance I scored tickets for on-line. An old NWP colleague, teaching here with 30 years tenure, tells me that such a score is rare luck. After a breakfast discussing the interview and selection process used in his current job search, I think  the Shakespeare tickets are the least of my “out of towner” luck. The process used to push me out seems benign in comparison to  the machinations NYDOE uses to demoralize and marginzlize their experienced employees. (I know now for a fact that nothing NYC Educator says is an exaggeration: “… Teachers are in the ATR pool because of a corporate scheme to ‘restructure schools’ and cut the budget by excessing senior teachers who receive higher salaries. Under the new budget formulas, teacher salaries are paid for by each principal, which gives them a financial interest in lowering ‘personnel costs…'”) His stubborn willingness to hang on, though, inspires me to look for ways to stay in the fray.

And in that regard, Diane R. today posted a thoughtful piece by Robert Shepherd re: the CCSS ELA standards. It includes this take-home:

We need to return to reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—to focusing on this poem, this essay, this novel, and what it communicates, and we need to retreat from having our students read to practice their inferencing skills or their identifying the main idea or context clues skills. We read because we are interested in Hedda Gabler or Madame Bovery and the plights they are in, not because we wish to hone our understanding of the structure of the novel IN GENERAL. That will come, but it can come ONLY as a result of first READING the novels. In our rush to make ELA education scientific, in our emphasis on abstract form over content, we’ve forgotten why we read. We don’t read to hone our inferencing skills. We don’t read because we are fascinated by where, in this essay, the author has placed the main idea. Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental.

A clear analysis and argument, though I doubt it will persuade. In 10 years of high school library work, I relentlessly advocated for Stephen Krashen’s Free Voluntary Reading, for the idea that providing choice was the best way to motivate reading. I didn’t argue against any other curricular goals or classroom practices, against NCLB or CCSS; I simply suggested that choice was key. In 10 years, I encountered only one  English teacher who committed to a thorough try-out of the concept. One teacher after 10 years of demonstrating, recruiting, cajoling, cornering, proselytizing, advocating, arguing, and (occassionally) begging.

That one teacher now spends one period a week with 2 of her 4 classes implementing her version of FVR. The students love it. Year-end evaluations inevitably include students’ testimonies to rediscovered (or FINALLY discovered) love of reading. With the library program cut by 40% for next year, with SFUSD’s embrace of CCSS professional development this summer, and with the arrival of the Smarter Balanced Consortium pilot in 2014, there will be greater pressure on that one teacher to lead students “to get what will be measured.” Measures, after all, provide data, and data drawn from CCSS implementation will undoubtedly “…diminish the predictive power of demographics….” [PDF, p. 10] in San Francisco and everywhere else.

Shepherd recognizes the legitmacy of challenges to his lack of outrage, but outraged or calm, argument doesn’t seem to have much effect.  I don’t see how anything can prevent public school teaching from becoming the pursuit of Jack Gerson’s predicted “target work norms.”

Another nail in the leaky coffin I leave behind

Word is out at a comprehensive high school near the bay that next year those lazy, disorganized, standard-less teachers (even the word-weak math and science types) must display a “daily language objective” (DLO?) on their blackboards, or green boards, or white boards, or websites, or weblogs, or projection screens, or interactive projection screens, or maybe just on their foreheads.

A daily Language Objective is important … Please consider how the four domains (listening,speaking, reading, writing) are integrated in [sic] your lesson. By articulating what language skills students are expected to use in this lesson, you will be able to break down the steps so more students will be able to access the content. In this example, asking students to compare and contrast is a common skill required by various content areas. By teaching students the words which signal comparison (similarly, in addition, moreover,…) or contrast (although, however, but,…), they will be able to identify these words and concepts while reading, and also use them when writing.

The new DLO requirement will appear in the bay-side school’s Prince_Of_Pals’ expectations for 2013-2014. Like all royal expectations, it may lead to some disappointment when the Prince and his court enter DLO-less classrooms within their four domains. What to do about disappointment? Ah-hah! The palace decree includes integration of the DLO requirement into (in?) the lazy, disorganized, standard-less teachers’ summative evaluations. The disorganized dismissed, disappointment will be assuaged.

Worth repeating this:

“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” Jack Gerson, “The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in  The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.

CalSTRS as a “devious-cruising Rachel’

That last post deserves a (possibly final) update. The grievance, the request for information, the unfair labor practice filing, and the civil law case are all prepared. There’s little chance of winning, but “no battle is ever won,” right? I’ll lose  $4K+ a year by pensioning out six months earlier than planned. These days, that’s cheap for a satisfying taste of integrity. The fiercely pro-union, wisely secretive librarian I’d headhunted to replace me will keep his (or her) full-time employment elsewhere. The school’s 50 years+ run of full-time librarian staffing will end. Its management-favored non-classroom classified and certificated staffing will increase.  The Potemkin village of “democratic” site-based decision making bodies will continue to camouflage destructive staffing and budget policies.  And finally, teachers already so disposed will find new reason to close their classroom doors and “shelter in place.” A valid choice. If the bosses’ and their factotums’ repeated response to potential and real violations of the contract is, “Well, go ahead and file a grievance!”, what exactly are teachers supposed to do? What building representative has the damn time to identify, investigate, research, write, and file that number of grievances? And how the hell can the union stay effective when grievances just pile up with no resolutions?

Public education has been sailed dangerously off course and, sadly, most teachers don’t see themselves as shipmates. Some will mutiny against petty tyrants and their pandering and Starbuck-loyal first mates. Bravo!  But solo defiance won’t accomplish what fierce solidarity might. Ferocity frightens most teachers. (What have we come to if boo-ing a horribly ignorant and union-busting secretary of education is considered cause for apology? Who the fuck does Jennings think Duncan is? I boo opera singers, forchrissakes.) And fear leads even able-bodied union members to collude with the crazy captains of their school and district vessels. 

Advice to the number crunchers, and word smiths and data dancers among the enablers of the search for the white whale of “school reform” –  If Ahab surrounds himself with quisling officers, it’s probably best not to help any of them in any way. Better to spend time building a bouyant coffin to share.

Following Bartleby’s lead

You’ve got to wonder what it means for teachers and students when one of SFUSD’s big data toys “achievement management systems” actually struts a positive reference from crazy Tom Friedman, the One True Wanker of the Decade (the vid is priceless):

On schoolLoop.com you can track your kid’s homework assignments and daily progress in every K-12 class. A most e-mailed list is coming to a job near you.

Such high praise from a Very Serious Person will probably inspire a SchoolLoop offshoot (pun intended), a body-count management system for deployment on drones.

Who else’s “data” will SchoolSnoop track? Not mine. Folllowing Melville’s scrivener, “I would prefer not to.” Retirement has its advantages.

“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” Jack Gerson in “The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in  The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.

Workplace discipline rampant

Chomsky at Alternet, Part 1 leading to Part 2 focused on education. He describes a visit to Mexico, followed by a visit to California: “From Mexico, I went on to California, to the Bay Area. That’s one of the richest regions on earth. They are destroying the greatest public education system in the world, systematically. The major universities are practically being privatized for the rich, becoming like Ivy League colleges. And educational opportunities in the rest of the public system are slowly being modified to provide some kind of technical training.”

From the front lines of a San Francisco high school where teacher autonomy gets assaulted daily, I predict this is how it will play out in the k-12 world:

“When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.”  The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.