CSotD: Rotten (nearly) to the Core
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Phil Hands gets right to the point with this one. He's mostly right, and he's a little wrong, but if we grade on the curve, he'll be the guy who sets the level for an "A."
Regular readers are probably tired of my analogy that people who think that, because they went to school, they understand education are like people who think that, because they've eaten in a restaurant, they are qualified to be chefs. I'll admit that, while apt, it oversimplifies things.
That's how analogies work.
So here's another one: Every once in awhile at summer camp, one of the horses would manage to back out of his stall while he was being unsaddled.
Horses can be pretty intimidating when they are running around in (literally) unbridled joy, but the stable boys knew that horses will pretty much do anything to avoid hurting people, so they would stand in the horse's way holding out their arms and the horse would gallop up and then sort of stop and snort and things would become anticlimactic.
This means of stopping a runaway horse works best when the horse is alone, and when he's running around 'cause he can and not because he's freaked out. And horses panic over imaginary things; their startle reflex is as inexplicable as that of a cat, the difference being roughly a thousand pounds.
So when six panicked horses are running away with a stagecoach, standing in front of them is neither wise nor effective.
The Common Core horses are not only panicked over nothing, but are all harnessed together and have a great deal of momentum.
My quibble with Phil's cartoon is that, yes, the Common Core itself — the basic concepts in it — actually was put together by an "educated elite," where "educated" means knowing what you're doing and "elite" means knowing more even than other people who have a rough idea.
It's the application that has been fouled up, at least in the states I've heard from. Phil is in Wisconsin and their situation may be different, but the cure generally would be to apply the actual Core rather than the odd, bureaucratic, tone-deaf misinterpretations that have been laid upon it.
I doubt we actually differ, and, dear lord, I certainly agree that letting the legislators stick in their oars is a very, very bad idea. I've sat through too many school board meetings to fall for that foolish idea.
To drag out one more helpless metaphor, the people who came up with the Common Core described a parachute, and now the people in charge of regulating education have ordered all the teachers up onto the barn roof with umbrellas.
Parachutes are very expensive, but you can get umbrellas at a very reasonable price, after all.
We need to stop things before they are forced to jump, but not simply in order to give them different colored umbrellas.
And, unfortunately, that's been the story of the past decade.
I don't know of any teachers — outside of a few really fringey Summerhill types — who object to testing or to standards. What they object to are foolish, irrelevant standards that don't measure anything useful, and testing that becomes the goal rather than the measure.
Here's what I do know:
1. Replacing "No Child Left Behind" with "Race to the Top" and/or "Common Core" is simply changing the color of the umbrellas. "Waiting for Superman" was a well-financed, highly-promoted fairy tale, and the supporting pillars of the central government's reform movement appear to be fraudulent, by which I mean this and this and this.
2. Testing methods are often nonsensical. In Maine, schools can — and do — use SATs to assess how well students are learning. SATs don't even do what they are supposed to do all that well, but using them to assess achievement is like evaluating the basketball team by average height rather than by won/loss record, and then firing the coach if his players this year are shorter than last year's team.
3. In all but the very largest metro schools, comparing test scores from one year to the next is pointless. Unless grade levels are immense, it is not statistically valid to compare scores of this year's fifth grade against scores of last year's fifth grade. It would make more sense to compare the year-to-year scores of the Class of 2021 as they progress through school, but virtually nobody does that.
4. Comparing scores from country to country is dubious at best, because not every country has the same policy on who gets to go to school, on drop outs or on who gets tested for these comparisons. If only upper middle class kids are taking the tests, they'll likely score higher than kids in a country where everybody goes to school and everyone is tested.
5. Most developed nations have a university track and a vocational track, but that is somewhat deceptive. It might be better described as an "arts and letters track" versus a "pragmatic track." If some nation's kids do better in math, perhaps it's because the kids are taught the subject based on their skills and talents, some learning it as an intellectual discipline and others in terms of how it works in practical applications. We refuse to do this and, in fact, try to "reform" education by making the cookie cutters more uniform.
6. Schools in the US grew up as community resources, in which neighbors helped to educate the next generation of citizens. Today, due to both urbanization and changes in social structure, we don't have that grassroots level of social contract at work. But school budgets remain one of the few places where people can exercise direct control of spending, as a result of which they bear the burden of voter fury.
So here's what I've encountered:
I went to a statewide convention of reading teachers in New York this past fall and what should have been a fun, joyous occasion was more like standing at the bedside of a terminally ill patient. Their dismay and despair over the over-arching, ignorant imposition of New York's version of the Common Core was well beyond discouraging.
The New York State Union of Teachers has helped persuade legislators to throw the brakes on this lumbering monstrosity, but that may, indeed, be a case of standing in front of a runaway stagecoach.
Meanwhile, a twice-told story from several years ago: I had been lecturing juniors and seniors on political cartoons at a rural K-12 and, after dismissal, was talking with some of the fifth and sixth grade teachers in the parkinglot.
I was saying that, while I could go in and do my one good lesson, I was intimidated by the idea of having to prepare 183 good lessons for every class I taught and then deliver them in a fresh, engaging manner each time. Teaching is, to a very great degree, a performance art, and it takes a lot of talent and energy to be consistently effective in the classroom.
"People complain about teachers only working half the year," I said, "but I don't hear people complaining that Frank Sinatra 'only' does 183 concerts a year."
"No," one of them agreed. "And we don't get to do it with a glass of bourbon in our hands, either."
Nor do they get to drive up in an XKE, but you can dream, can't you?
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