CURMUDGUCATION:
Not One Size Fits All
I often criticize the core (and other standards-- while I know some decent, intelligent people like the idea of some sort of national standards, I do not) by calling it a "one size fits all" solution.But I'm wrong.It's a handy shorthand phrase-- just four words and everybody knows what you mean. But it's not precisely correct."One size fits all" imagines a world where tailors m
Pearson Eats PARCC
Relax and stop resisting. You will be assimilated.Yesterday PARCC, one of the two giant consortia of high stakes standardized testing, announced that they will become part of the giant corporate beast that is Pearson. PARCC's negotiator described the contract as having "unprecedented scale." Pearson has promised a price cut ($24 per student, marked down from $29.50) but the scale of this
YESTERDAY
Is This CCSS Criticism Fair?
The supporters of Common Core have eaten so much cheese with their whine that we may have to call a whaaaambulance.Their complaints have been percolating for a while, but the heat of the Louis C.K. flame-up has brought their big bowl of treacly tears to a roiling boil. The criticisms are not fair. Those stupid examples of bad assignments have nothing to do with the Core, and the terrible tests are
Petrilli's Shovel At Work Again
I have a confession to make-- I kind of like Mike Petrilli. I've never met him. I've never met any of the big names in the ed biz, because I'm a high school English teacher in small town USA (isn't the internet cool), so I depend on long-distance close-reading of all these folks, and while many of the Reformsters seem lost or confused or walking in that kind of dull cloud that people fall into wh
Another Plutocrat for USDOE
Alyson Klein at EdWeek reports that Robert Gordon has been chosen to serve as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the US DOE.Gordon's previous work credits include the Office of Management and Budget, where he seems to have been a man behind the scenes for the various Fiscal Cliff negotiations. More recently he's been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute, a
MAY 01
Sorry, Newsweek, But You're wrong About Louis C. K.
My first thought when I read Alexander Nazaryan's response to Louis C. K.'s Common Core tirade was, "Wow! What an ass!"This is not an insult. Readers of this blog know that the what-an-ass writing style is one of my favorites, and I have been an ass frequently. I don't have the luxury of being an ass for a national newsmaga-- well, newsthingy. But it's a skill I respect.Unfortunately, th
Teacher Merit Badges
Earlier this week, Metro Nashville Public Schools unveiled a new virtual merit badge system to reward teachers who take on extras. The idea was facing resistance about fifteen seconds after it was introduced. Kelly Henderson, the districts executive director of instruction, compared the system to Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Jill Speering of the school board responded, "I'm sorry-- that doesn'
Throwing Away
It seems like some kind of joke to call a movement "un-American," but I think the Reformy Status Quo has earned that adjective.Here's the thing about us as a country, as a culture. We fight. We struggle. We have sometimes extremely violent, deadly battles among the many smaller tribes that make up this country. But as a nation we are built to accommodate all these differences, and so eve
APR 30
Getting Stupical In NY
It seems that some state legislatures are competing to pass the worst education laws. Whether it's Kansas deciding to strengthen education by destroying teaching as a career or Florida beating up on disabled children and grieving mothers, there seems to be a race going on, and if it is to the top of something, that's a mountain I don't ever want to see.New York has most recently made its bid for t
Computer Writer Vs. Computer Grader
Les Perelman is a hero of mine. The former director of undergraduate writing at MIT has been one of the smartest, sanest voices in the seemingly-endless debate about the use of computers to assess student writing. And now he has a new tool.Babel (the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator) was created by Perelman with a team of students from MIT and Harvard, and it's pretty awesome as laid
Is There No Common Ground? Well.....
I sympathize with Peter DeWitt, the former K-5 principal who has morphed into a pundit/trainer. In his blog at EdWeek he can often be found trying to chart a course between the Scylla of the CCSS-based Reformsters and the Charybdis of rabid opposition to any changey things in school while sailing under the Pigpen's Black Cloud of corporate deceitfulness with the Pebble of rhetorical purity tests i
APR 29
Malloy: I Didn't Bring That Ugly Girl to the Prom
Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy has joined the parade of politicians working to backpedal like a boss away from the Common Core.On the CTMonitor site, Jacqueline Rabe Thomas recaps Malloy's Monday interview on NPR.Malloy does his best to create fear and trepidation for anybody considering an opt-out for testing, and his best includes raising the specter of the feds cracking down. "If to
The New Enemies List
The Tea Party threat is over. Well, over-ish.I've been writing about this in the context of other topics, but I believe it deserves its own attention. Over the past ten days, the narrative about the Enemies of the Core has shifted.On April 21, The Daily Beast attributed attacks on the Core to "an unholy alliance between the Tea Party and the teachers' unions." That article got some play
Petrelli Warns of the Day After
Fordham has deployed the Damage Control team of Michael Petrelli to put up an article at the Governing website. Petrelli and his sidekick Michael Brickman (who, sadly, did not even get his picture on this article for which he's billed as co-writer) have a warning for Common Core foes:Like a dog that finally catches the bus he'd been chasing forever, what happens when opponents of the Common Core
APR 28
Branding Education
What if we were serious about treating education like a business?I recently finished an advance copy of What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn. It is a book that has absolutely nothing to do with education. Instead, Yohn looks at how brands from Kodak to Nike fail or succeed, and how building a brand leads to a higher level of real success. Yohn has been around through several decades of corporat
The Gates Wants Us To Take a Stand
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Dan Greenstein and Vicki Phillips are making yet another pitch for the Core on behalf of the Gates Foundation (Greenstein is director of postsecondary success and Pillips is director of education). I would love to tell you that they have shiny new talking points to offer, but no-- it's the same old fluffernuttery. Here's the breakdown.They begin with a mystery-- why, the
APR 27
Steve Kornacki & The New Narrative
The old narrative attributed Common Core opposition to the Tin Hat Wing of the Tea Party Wing of the GOP. Arne Duncan was fond of claiming that opponents were just a fringe group of (probably racist) looney tunes who could be easily dismissed. Good dependable conservatives, like, say, Jeb Bush, were those who distanced themselves from the crazypants wing of their party. Hey-- if those crazy tin ha
Brookings Research Reveals Teachers Are the Problem
Brookings will release a new book this week with the charming title Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How To Fix Them.And yes-- that title tells us where we're going right off the bat-- teachers really are the problem. In fact, teachers aren't just the opposition-- teachers aren't even American. Perhaps we are all bused in from Outer Slobovia?The blurb promises tha
APR 26
MSNBC Re-affirms Its Uselessness in Education Coverage
Over at MSNBC, you can watch Andrea Mitchell interview Arne Duncan with all the hard-hitting journalistic thoroughness displayed by Arne's Rent-a-Teacher interviews produced by the DOE. It's four and a half minutes of blood-pressurizing fluffernuttery. And I'm going to break it down for you so you don't have to watch it. Once again, you owe me, reader.Andrea starts out in front of a pretty pictur
US DOE Revives Truly Terrible Proposal
President Obama has brushed the mothballs off one of the worst, dumbest proposals in Arne Duncan's USDOE toolbox (and that is not an easy bar to clear). As reported by Reuters, Duncan is poised to revive the plan for test-based evaluation of college teacher prep programs.There are already many dumb plans in place, from the content specific Praxis tests (because if you can pass a computerized bubbl