No Child Left Behind

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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  The vision of learning from the standards has been replaced by the spectacle of being disgraced by the standards.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.

 

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A Necessary Optimism

 We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to
register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people
what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually
come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with
our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them
down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now
we — and our students — are paying the price. We could have been
prophets but failed the test.
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/08/31/no-child-left-behind-a-conspiracy-against-public-education-that-too-few-called-out/

In a bitter reflection on the consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB),  Jim Arnold reprimands educators for standing by while the hurricane of so-called  “educational reform” swept through our classrooms. The dire consequences of blaming the victims, canonizing standardized tests, and allowing schools to be branded and euthanized are well-known to those who have taught for the past decade. But this kind of breast-beating over a massive federal initiative gone wrong oversimplifies what has happened since 2001, the Decade of Standards.

Arnold argues that we saw it coming and stood by and let it happen.  True enough, but what did we see coming? It was not like the hurricane coming up the coast in the sense that we could foresee its path and knew it was an ill-wind that would “blow no good.” Well, we knew that anything that relied on standardized tests as its exclusive measuring stick was ill-fated, but there were some promising high-pressure fronts moving in alongside it.

First of all,  someone in Washington was paying attention to the public schools. The federal funding surge that came with NCLB was a welcome transfusion for schools struggling to hire new teachers and make classrooms smaller.  Public education was a national priority all of a sudden. Unprecedented bipartisanship emerged on this bill, which has never been seen again, unless you want to count the invasion of  Iraq. (You might call that a “fatal bipartisanship”).  Even in the Obama administration Congressional representatives have crossed the aisles to support federal school reform, although even that good will appears to have ended.

Second, education was making headlines daily and becoming a universal concern. The amount of ink and megabytes devoted to education has skyrocketed over the past decade.  Education in the K-12 schools was finally on the public radar, right alongside the economy and political intrigue.  It’s hard to recall that, in earlier decades, public schooling was usually buried in the back pages, if mentioned at all.  As many public relations directors will claim, “All publicity is good publicity,” because being seen in print and heard on the airwaves is half the battle.

Third, accountability was promoted as a tool of reform. Although this should have raised giant red pennants, there is a strong desire for proving performance in public education.  Teachers want to be recognized for their hard work as much as anyone else. The problem is figures lie, and we have struggled for generations to make them tell a true story.  Testing has always been our measuring stick.  Perhaps this time they would show authentic progress.  Perhaps this time it would somehow reflect the hard work we invested in the most disadvantaged children in our classes.

Mark Twain said, “Teaching is the most acute form of optimism,” and probably optimism is also teaching’s fatal flaw.  We believe the conditions of schooling will somehow improve every year and that students will come eager to learn after the long summer break. How else do we psyche ourselves up for another school year? We believe we can make a difference, even when the cards are stacked against us. We even believe that our best efforts in the classroom will be reflected in the next round of test scores.  Or at least we believe someone will recognize our small victories, if the test scores do not.

Now that investigations have revealed teachers complicit in altering the results of standardized tests, perhaps even that optimism is endangered.  But the vast majority of teachers are incurable optimists, and they hoped that accountability for student performance would reflect their hard work and their zeal for the struggling student. Hoped against all reason and experience.

Was  “No Child Left Behind” a malignant conspiracy? Can we accept it as well-intentioned school reform, regardless of the intrigues of testing companies and curriculum publishers and the heavy-handedness of school administrators warping and scripting the curriculum? To read it this way is to understand why more educators did not rise up and shout against it.  It put education in the spotlight and on the national conscience.  It made Washington pay attention as never before. It made private foundations re-deploy their support to education. It made teachers critical to the success of schools. How could that be bad?

Sadly the last two administrations have shown how testing and accountability can destroy schools and optimism, regardless of good intentions and stimulus dollars.  What might have been the decade of the teacher has become the decade of inquisition, of branding and purging failure in the schools.  Arnold’s verdict on the demise of real school reform is tragically fair.

But I don’t accept the reprimand of teachers, the incurably optimistic profession that thrives on the renewal in every school year. Teachers will be fooled over and over again by the craft of Washington and the Council of State School Officers, because they expect better from them as they expect it from their students.  Teachers are near-sighted about education; they see mostly the students in their classrooms and plan how to maximize what the district and Department of Education hand them. Perhaps they need more cynicism about school reform, but would that make them better teachers?

In the decade of NCLB hindsight is 20-20. Teaching is always about the next decade.

 

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The Mustard Tree

The kingdom of heaven  is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches. (Matt 13:31-32)

The notion of productivity is hard to define in education. Should schools be measured by the number of graduates, by the advanced degrees of their teachers, by the scores achieved by students on standardized tests, by independent observations of accrediting agencies?  None of this really captures the productivity of schools.

But the National Writing Project, a federally funded professional development network, has a simple formula for productivity. Invest in the professional growth of individual teachers with an aptitude for leadership and then support their growth and dissemination of effective teaching practices in local schools. The investment begins every summer with a 4-week institute for the development of writing teachers and continues with the graduates (called “teacher consultants”) developing their skills as writers, consultants, and teacher researchers both as an organic group and as coaches and workshop providers in local schools. The investment is $25 million, a mustard seed in the enormous dissemination of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Currently there are 7,000 active teacher consultants disseminating the mustard seed of “effective practices in the teaching of writing” in the schools they serve and in other local districts. These consultants of the National Writing Project reach 120,000 other teachers in a given year and teach 1.4 million students.  This is the definition of productivity: 7,000 teachers reach 17 times their number through professional exchanges and reach 200 times their number in students.

Is the instruction any good? The Local Sites Research Initiative has made eight studies of the writing of students in Writing Project classrooms with the following aggregate results:

The results, taken across sites and across years, indicate a consistent pattern favoring the NWP. For every measured attribute in every site, the improvement of students taught by NWP-participating teachers exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants. Moreover in 36 of the 70 contrasts (51%) the differences between NWP participants’ students and the comparison students were statistically significant” (LSRI 3)

By every measure, the seeds of the National Writing Project’s investment in teacher leaders have been super-producers, and the production has consistently grown from its modest beginnings in 1974 in Berkeley, California to a 200-site network today.  This is the nation’s longest enduring professional network, a network that has leveraged federal support for the past twenty years to yield this gratifying fruit.

In the weeks that follow, the funding of the National Writing Project, a pittance at $25 million dollars, will be in jeopardy as Congress swings its reckless budget axe.   It is easy to overlook the brilliant success of the tiny mustard tree, overshadowed by the immense orchard of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Not every seed out of that orchard has been productive.

When the axe swings in the neighborhood of the professional development of teacher leaders, let it pause before the mustard tree of the National Writing Project.  That tree is home to teachers, students, and even their families (through the grafted programs of family literacy), and it is one of the great over-producers in American education.