Who’s Fickle?

March 19, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The new Gadfly opens with Mike Petrilli’s article “Fickle on Federalism.” At the head of the article he juxtaposes these two quotes:

“[This plan] will fundamentally change the federal role in education. We will move from being a compliance monitor to being an engine for innovation.”

–Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 17, 2010, before the House Education and Labor Committee

 

“In coming weeks and months…we will be announcing a number of compliance reviews to ensure that all students have equal access to educational opportunities.”

–Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 8, 2010, at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama

Good one!

But I’ve got a better one. Scroll down to the next article in the Gadfly and you’ll find Checker’s NRO piece, in which he twists himself into even tighter pretzel knots on the new national standards train wreck. Here’s what he was writing about that on Feb. 23:

This is enormously risky and, frankly, hubristic, since nobody yet has any idea whether these standards will be solid, whether the tests supposed to be aligned with them will be up to the challenge, or whether the “passing scores” on those tests will be high or low, much less how this entire apparatus will be sustained over the long haul.

But in the March 10 New York Times, he was singing a different tune:

I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education… Now we have the possibility that, for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.

Now, in the new Gadfly, he’s careful to weasel around without actually taking a clear position. He opens by saying “conservatives should take seriously the potential” of the standards. “Take seriously the potential”? What does that even mean? Should we support or oppose?

And at the end he concludes that the standards are “light years better than we had any right to expect.” So’s the health care monstrosity currently winding its tortuous way through the House; compared to what I thought they’d get, I’m shocked at how little they’ve ended up with. But that doesn’t mean passing it wouldn’t be a huge disaster; it just means it wouldn’t be as huge a disaster as I had feared (or, more likely, that the huge disaster will be longer in coming to fruition).

In between, he lists five surprisingly weak reasons to support the standards – and then four even weaker warnings about “risks” involved in the enterprise. Check out this howler:

Third, they emerged not from the federal government but from a voluntary coming together of (most) states, and the states’ decision whether or not to adopt them will remain voluntary. Each state will determine whether the new standards represent an improvement over what it’s now using.

Riiiiiiiiiight.

Or take the example of hijacking. The Dr. Jekyll Checker from February sounded warnings that the standards, once imposed, could subsequently be hijacked by the Dark Side. The Mr. Hyde Checker in the Times seems to have forgotten all about this. Here’s the new, pretzel Checker in the Gadfly:

Third, the long-term governance of these standards–and of the assessments to follow–is unknown. Something more durable will need to be found or created than the consortium of states that produced the present draft. (Fordham is developing ideas and options for this, and others will surely weigh in as well.)

So yes, hijacking is a danger. But don’t worry, Checker’s clarion call for somebody to do some sort of something that will do something about this problem will no doubt be heeded and acted upon with dispatch!

What really galled me was the closing line:

Remember, it’s liberals who believe that people should be held to different standards.

Right. Because if Johnny learns long division in fourth grade and Suzy learns it in third grade, that’s the moral equivalent of a racial quota.

Let’s be clear. Conservatives believe that everybody should play by the same rules. That’s different from saying everybody should be forced to conform to the same model of life. It’s liberals who believe that – as Jonah Goldberg has shown so clearly in Liberal Fascism.

Personally, I agree with Checker that too many children have not had access to a solid academic education. The solution to that is not to impose the One Right Way on every child, but to smash the oppressive power structure that has stood in the schoolhouse door for a hundred and fifty years, preventing those children from getting the education they need. Checker wants to make the oppressor even bigger and more powerful, in the hope that he can bend it to his will. Good luck.

5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Jay Interviewed on National Standards

March 17, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Jay was interviewed on EducationNews today on National Standards. Strangely enough, the talk quickly turned to movies and awesomely bad pop culture! I can’t imagine how that happened…we take ourselves very seriously around here at JPGB, and indulge in such frivolity with only the most profound reluctance.

Btw Jay- where is this week’s LOST post?

2 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Radical Customization – One Size Fits None

March 12, 2010

Nationally mandated standard pants – because it’s horribly inefficient to have everyone wear a different size

Building on the debate Jay started the other day, Neal’s got a nice column on Pajamas Media today about subject-based ability grouping. The idea that all children progress at the same rate is nonsense, but the idea that they all progress at the same rate across all subjects at the same time is nonsense on stilts.

I see this in my own daughter’s education. She’s behind in speech and fine motor skills and needs extra help, which she’s not getting in her current school, where everyone does the same thing, on the assumption that kids the same age are all at the same place in their education and have the same needs. But she’s way ahead in anything dealing with symbol recognition – letters, numbers, colors – so she has to sit there bored out of her mind while her classmates slowly and laboriously learn how to count to ten when she can count to thirty.

So starting next year we’re putting her in a private school that uses exactly the approach Neal recommends on the basis of other countries’ experience – each child gets the challenge he or she needs, at the level he or she needs it, determined separately in each subject.

The squishy-wishies will object that “ability grouping” makes the kids who are ahead vain while demoralizing the kids who are behind. The first answer is that this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if public schools were allowed to teach good moral character in addition to academics. And the second answer is that it’s not smart in the long term to deal with people’s emotional and psychological problems by encouraging them to live a lie.

But I think the third answer is that ability grouping wouldn’t have this effect if you did it by subject. You’re not singling out the person as such as superior, you’re tracking particular abilities in each subject.

3 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

National Standards Nonsense

March 10, 2010

The national standards train-wreck is pulling into the station, again.  This time it is a completely voluntary set of national standards in the same way that complying with a 21-year-old drinking age is completely voluntary for states to receive federal highway money.  States had to commit to a rushed and largely secretive national standard setting process as part of the Race to the Top application.

Well, now the draft standards have been released for a hurried public comment period before they try to cram them into place.  In the end they’ll probably fail to get all the states on board for anything meaningful, but it won’t be for lack of arm-twisting.  The Gates Foundation has sprinkled money on just about every education policy organization to ensure their support or at least muted opposition.

Even people and groups that should have no interest in these national standards and even expressed skepticism of them in the recent past are now embracing them.  Barely two weeks ago Checker Finn wrote:

This is enormously risky and, frankly, hubristic, since nobody yet has any idea whether these standards will be solid, whether the tests supposed to be aligned with them will be up to the challenge, or whether the “passing scores” on those tests will be high or low, much less how this entire apparatus will be sustained over the long haul.

But today he is quoted in the New York Times expressing his enthusiastic support:

I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education… Now we have the possibility that, for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.

What gives?  Nothing in the draft standards should have put Checker at ease about their rigor.  And nothing has happened that has addressed his earlier concerns about aligning tests, setting high cut scores, or sustaining rigor over time.

Similarly the folks over at Core Knowledge have decided to drink the Kool-Aid.  Just a few months ago I expressed frustration with national standards advocates:

Every decade or so we have to debate the desirability of adopting national standards for education.  People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards.  But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards.  What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.  There’d be no more laboratory of the states, just uniform banality.  Of course, some people always hope that they’ll somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place without having to go through the meat grinder.

At the time Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio linked to that post and added “I’m inclined to agree.”  But today he is the press contact for a statement from Core Knowledge declaring that the new draft national standards are a “not-to be-missed opportunity for American education.”

What’s even more amazing is that the draft national standards are being guided by the same 21st Century Skills nonsense articulated by Tony Wagner.  Core Knowledge supporters should recoil in horror at this approach unless they fantasize that they will “somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place” without the edublob noticing and blocking them.  Good luck.

I’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.  The standards will inevitably be diluted and made even more 21st century skill-like to gain sufficiently broad support.  The standards-based reformers at Fordham and Core Knowledge will end up renouncing the final product, but will continue to believe that if only the right standards were adopted all would be well.  And we’ll start this all over again in about a decade.

Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

30 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Checker’s Journey toward Enlightenment Begins

February 24, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I see Checker is belatedly starting to realize that any national standards for curricular content will be produced by a horribly politicized sausage-making process that will inevitably be hijacked by the Dark Side and produce a result that does more to serve political agendas hostile to students’ interests than to promote better curricula.

He’s only just starting to realize the truth. He still thinks the process can be gotten back on track if only people would just be reasonable and work together and keep the good of the children in mind. So clearly he remains in the Vale of Illusion. But his journey on the path to Enlightenment has begun.

5 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Stop the National Standards Train

November 16, 2009

As I’ve said before (here, here, and elsewhere), I can’t understand the enthusiasm of education reformers for national standards and testing.  Advocates for the status quo and/or pure nonsense are much better positioned to control the process of national standard-setting and test-writing than are advocates for meaningful reform grounded in evidence-based approaches.

In case you had any doubts, the current round of national standards and testing craze is once again being hijacked by the Dark Side.  My colleague, Sandra Stotsky, has an excellent piece in the current issue of City Journal ringing the alarm bells:

A distinct lack of interest in allowing mathematicians a major voice in determining the content of the high school mathematics curriculum isn’t confined to educational research publications or presentations. A new effort is under way to develop national math standards for K–12. The two organizations running the effort—the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with support from both the Department of Education and the National Education Association—have not yet invited a single mathematical or science society to ensure that the high school mathematics standards and “college-readiness” standards they propose in fact prepare American high school students for the freshman calculus courses that serve as the basis for undergraduate majors in engineering, science, and mathematics (as well as other mathematics-dependent majors and technical/occupational programs). The effort, which is being pushed very quickly, seems determined to do an end run around the country’s mathematical and scientific organizations and the panel’s recommendations on the major topics for school algebra.

Who controls this process?  Advocates of “constructivism” and  “cultural-historical activity theory” do.  If you don’t know what this gobbledy-gook means, Sandy helpfully explains: 

Two theories lie behind the educators’ new approach to math teaching: “cultural-historical activity theory” and “constructivism.” According to cultural-historical activity theory, schooling as it exists today reinforces an illegitimate social order. Typical of this mindset is Brian Greer, a mathematics educator at Portland State University, who argues “against the goal of ‘algebra for all’ on the grounds that . . . most individuals in our society do not need to have studied algebra.” According to Greer, the proper approach to teaching math “now questions whether mathematics as a school subject should continue to be dominated by mathematics as an academic discipline or should reflect more fully the range of mathematical activities in which humans engage.” The primary role of math teachers, constructivists say in turn, shouldn’t be to explain or otherwise try to “transfer” their mathematical knowledge to students; that would be ineffective. Instead, they must help the students construct their own understanding of mathematics and find their own math solutions.

We need to stop this national standards train before we all go off the rails.

12 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Now She Tells Us

February 18, 2009

randi-weingarten-at-obama-rally

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Randi Weingarten explained this week that, contrary to the outrageous slander that the unions are against education reform, she’s actually in favor of having the federal government create rigorous national academic standards for public schools, and will remain in favor of it as long as the Democrats are in power. (I’m paraphrasing.)

She writes: “Should fate, as determined by a student’s Zip code, dictate how much algebra he or she is taught?”

So the AFT now endorses the principle that a child’s education should not be determined by Zip code? When did that happen?

And if a child’s Zip code shouldn’t determine how much algebra he or she is taught, why should that determination be made in Washington instead? Apparently the amount of algebra you learn should be determined not by your Zip code, but by your international dialing code.

At least with Zip codes, some families can exercise school choice by moving to a different neighborhood. Yes, it’s an unfair system, since not all families are equally mobile; apparently Weingarten thinks the fair thing to do is to take away the freedom now enjoyed by some parents, so that there will be an equality of unfreedom.

Here we see the real modus operandi of the Left – achieve equality by leveling downward.

1 Comment | politics, residential school choice, school accountability, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Jeb for National School Grades

January 23, 2009

BUSH EDUCATION SUMMIT

“Everybody do the FCAT! Yeah!”

HT Orlando Sentinel

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

This morning, Jeb Bush comes out for a national school grading system on NRO.

What he’s proposing is a federal grade A to F for each school, based on both performance level and improvement – kind of the way Florida schools are graded under the A+ system (though Jeb doesn’t propose federal sanctions for poorly performing schools, just a grading system). He justifies the move on grounds that the NCLB system encourages states to lower standards.

Jeb doesn’t discuss this in the article, but readers of JBGB know that a clash has been brewing between Florida’s A+ program and NCLB. Florida, which has had success with the A+ program (where improvement in performance is a factor alongside performance level), is going to run into the 2014 “everybody must be proficient” wall along with everyone else.

No doubt our own Matt Ladner, chronicler of the looming conflict in the posts linked above, will have more to say about this (hopefully including some more classy artistic illustrations), but just to put my own two cents in, I’m not clear on why there needs to be a national grade.

For that matter, I’m not even convinced we need a national test, since that sacrifices the merits of interstate competition. At both the state and federal levels, the test is being developed and implemented by a bureaucracy that is heavily colonized by the defenders of the status quo and thus will be looking for opportunities to dumb down the test or manipulate the scoring to make schools look better. But if one state dumbs down while another (under political pressure from reformers) stays the course and makes real improvement, that creates pressure on the dumb state to get with it.

The impetus for a single national test, it seems to me, is because federal rewards and punishments create an incentive to dumb down. If we’re not going to have rewards and punishments based on the scores, what’s the need for a single national test? Why not just require each state to maintain a transparent testing system of its own devising – or, if that’s not good enough, require each state to purchase and use one of the major privately developed national tests?

But we can leave that aside. Let’s stipulate the case for a national test. Still, if you’re not going to hold schools accountable with rewards and penalties, then why issue grades along with the test scores? Why not just give a test and report the results numerically, and let private organizations put together their own grading systems? That way people can decide for themselves what aspects of performance measurement matter most, rather than turning the job over to a federal bureaucracy that has an incentive to make schools look better.

3 Comments | NCLB, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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