Slackers in Arizona

So the Obama administration’s proposal to pay home health care workers the minimum wage has met with resistance from Medicaid Directors from Arizona and Tennessee, who are requesting more time to “work through” and “re-evaluate” how the the new rule works with Medicaid. In an editorial in today’s New York Times, the editors point out that the rule change has been researched and analyzed for two years prior to its presentation in September, 2013 and states were given “an ample fifteen months to comply” (May 17, 2014).

What the heck, Arizona?  In this same week you were exposed for falsifying the wait time for Veterans to receive health services, in some cases resulting in the death of patients. You are already the least hospitable state to immigrant workers, many of whom occupy these health care positions for sub-standard pay. And you are one of the prime locations for senior citizens, who are the direct beneficiaries of these services,  to retire.  What is your problem?

First, the idea that home health care workers are not worth a minimum wage is an outrage that has existed since 1974, on the pretext that these workers are “companions,” a polite term for “slaves.”  It is no coincidence that many of these jobs are occupied by immigrants and others lacking the professional skills for less arduous work.  Yet these workers are crucial to transferring the expense of nursing home expenses to the more hospitable  home environment.  With the exponential increase of the baby boom retirees, these workers are in increasing demand. Why is their work worth less than the minimum wage?

Second, Arizona’s economy depends on a disproportionate population of senior citizens.  Admittedly these are not the highest tax-payers, but they are a primary constituency of the state.  How can they treat Veterans and those in need of home health care with such disdain?

Third, Arizona has worked as hard as any other state to disenfranchise both seniors and immigrants by making it harder for them to register to vote.  The idea that these powerless groups should gain influence and vote them out of office has been repugnant to the governor and state legislators.

There is a term to identify those who freeload on the resources of tax-payers. We call them “slackers,” because they don’t contribute to the welfare of those that serve them. If a state can be nominated for this title, it has to be Arizona, because it has demonstrated contempt for the welfare of seniors and veterans this week.

 

The Common Core Standards: Reflections on the Race to Oblivion

The right says it’s a dangerous national curriculum. The left says it’s a threat to teacher autonomy.  Some states immediately devised tests to measure the “rigor” of their math and English language arts programs, while others have recently dropped the standards, considering them badly-aligned with their own curricula.  The Common Core State Standards, rather than unifying the goals of K-12 education, have become a stage for political theater. And this is the first turn onto the road to oblivion in educational reform.

Regardless of which side you take, you have to wonder whether the notion of “common” in school curricula has a future in the United States. Many teachers welcomed the notion of standards consistent from state to state (Education Week, May 12, 2014). With a mobile school population, there was a chance for continuity when families moved across the country.  There was a chance for national discussions of how the curricula would be locally implemented. And there was a new playing field where international competition looked beatable.

But when the federal government stepped in to validate the Common Core with “The Race to the Top,” it began to look like “No Child Left Behind” all over again.  Education Secretary Arne Duncan dangled millions in funding to states who would adopt the Common Core and connected the evaluation of teachers to adhering to the Standards. Immediately forty-four states adopted them and the “Race to the Top” was on.

As soon as pilot tests were developed in New York, and students performed poorly on them, it was clear that the Standards would be used against the schools, not to reform them.  Teacher evaluations were already being designed to expose the achievement gap between student performance and the Standards and to reward or punish teachers accordingly.  This short-sighted implementation is inevitably its death knell.  Since “A Nation at Risk,” when Education Secretary William Bennett tried to set states in competition over SAT scores, the popularizers of tests and accountability have doomed curriculum reform by turning it into assess-and-punish policy.  The vision of learning from the standards has been replaced by the spectacle of being disgraced by the standards.

Many teachers find it impossible to separate standards from the tests that evaluate them, because teachers have become the targets of “reform”  instead of the instruments of it.  The blunt and arbitrary instrument of multiple-choice tests is the crudest known tool of reform.  It makes teachers the problem, instead of understanding the complexity of failing schools. It turns standards into implements of punishment, rather than frameworks for improvement.

Curriculum standards, and the Common Core State Standards in particular, are not the problem when it comes to school reform.  The CCSS are general and selective when it comes to implementation.  They are “general” because they broadly address certain academic skills associated with “college readiness.” And they are selective in the sense that they don’t purport to be a comprehensive school curriculum, because they exclude the arts, the occupations, and health and physical education. None of these areas are optional components of a K-12 curriculum.

Schools should be considering the infusion of the Common Core Standards into a comprehensive curriculum, not displacing the full scope and sequence and then evaluating teachers based primarily on their students testing well on hastily-constructed assessments. School reform should not be a “Race to the Top.” It is more like cardiology rehabilitation, where the health of one organ is promoted by changes in diet, exercise, lifestyle, medication, and careful monitoring. Imagine treating cardiac patients by offering them bonuses for winning a triathalon.

As soon as citizens and tax-payers realized their children were at risk in this awkward implementation of reform, the drum-beat against the Standards began.  Politicians, with their ears always to the ground, realized the CCSS reform bandwagon was about to crash and were quick to jump off.

The same cycle began to turn with “No Child Left Behind,” when it was clear a lot of children were being left behind because of poor performances on standardized tests. And further, the “Texas Miracle” was exposed as manipulating school enrollments and teaching to the test. Most urban schools were not improving, as the early adopters had claimed.  They were merely gaming the system.

We are witnessing deja vu with the Common Core State Standards, because the testing establishment has once again seized control. State legislatures have conflated the Standards with the tests and the public outcry. Indiana and North Carolina have passed legislation to slow, if not stop implementation. Republicans have found attacking the Standards harmonizes nicely with federal de-regulation. Democrats have heard from their teacher constituencies and see the CCSS as a potential albatross in the midterm and Presidential elections.  Now it appears the Standards are descending from the zenith.

Veteran teachers are tired of “curriculum du’jour” that upsets their classrooms every ten years.  They cynically view each reform movement as a passing phase, and their predictions have proven true.  This cyclic implementation and dismantling of curricula harms students as well. They march from K to 12 as the wheels of reform halt and switch gears again and again. Reform has interrupted the growth of learning, rather than nurturing it.

There is usually something worth preserving in reform movements. Rather than sacrificing the current standards to the whim of politicians, school leaders should be salvaging the worthy parts of the Common Core.  With the Common Core there’s literacy across the curriculum; the recursive nature of the proficiencies; and the separation of proficiencies from content requirements, among its possible virtues.  These parts can grafted into new ideas for reform. Teachers understand that good practices can endure, while the bad practices can be culled and carried out back to the heap of futile expectations. Only politicians believe that reform programs must be canonized or shot, depending on what the lobbyists are saying that week.

The Common Core’s most significant contribution has been the distribution of literacy proficiencies across the curriculum. The notion that reading and writing should be taught in the context of the discipline of study is not new, but the CCSS made literacy central to academic study and charged teachers in each subject to model their practices of reading and writing in the context of their subject area. So when students would do research in U.S. History, they would learn how to cite valid historical evidence and imitate the style historians use to interpret history.  The teaching of reading and writing of all matters would no longer be relegated to one teacher, but to a team of content teachers: English, social studies, science and math.

If we could dispense with the metaphor of racing to the top, we could reflect on the baggage we’re carrying there. It would be a shame to cast away the consequential reform of literacy across the curriculum with the refuse of the Common Core, and it is hopefully not too late rescue it.  The CCSS might yet return to its 2013 glory, but just in case it doesn’t, I wanted to recognize its contribution.

Before politicians take it off to be shot or hang it from the highest tree.