Curmudgucation Week
I've Launched at EdWeek
As noted a while ago, I have taken on blogging for Education Week, and the new blog launched a few days ago.The EdWeek blog will be called "View from the Cheap Seats," and I'll be posting there at least weekly. I even get a cool graphicky thing for the header!I am excited about the potential for reaching a new audience. The first post is about the absence of the teacher voice from educat
Superintendents Speak Up
On the first day of school, my wife's superintendent got choked up.He was delivering the usual kick-off speech, and she said he started to talk about testing and numbers and the students. He reminded his staff that students were not just test scores, not just a number, and that the work they did as teachers was so much more than could be measured by numbers. It looked, she said, as if he was on th
YESTERDAY
Vermont BOE Hammers Fed-Style Testing
With states like North Carolina and Florida doing their best to bury public education and dance on its grave, it's nice to see some states can still stand up for their schools.Earlier this week, the Vermont State Board of Education adopted a statement and resolution on assessment and accountability. It's worth a read, but let me hit the highlights for you.The Board starts by recognizing that unifo
Another Solution: ESEA
There is, of course, another way out of this.The tightly wound spring that keeps Race to the Top and waivers (RttR Lite) ticking away is the ESEA. Instead of dealing with the federal mandate-ish sort-of-regulations that have made Common Core and high stakes testing and data collection the kind-of-law of the land, we could address the underlying mess.The ESEA was first passed in 1965, and periodica
AUG 21
Duncan Tries To Hear Teachers
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is here with some back-to-school blogging to assure folks that he is totes listening to somebody. His back-to-school conversation comes with two messages.First, he wants to send out a big thank you to all the folks who helped create some super-duper data points last year-- specifically, the high school graduation rate and the college enrollment rate. I might b
More Bad Polling News For CCSS
While we're making note of how Common Core is tanking in the Education Next and PDK/Gallup polls, let's pull out one other poll from earlier in the summer. This one also used the word "plummets," which has become a serious contender for leading the Common Core Headline Word Bank.Conducted and released in June of 2014, the Rasmussen Reports national phone survey checked the support for th
AUG 20
Making a Difference
How can I make a difference?In millions of situations millions of people have asked that single question.There are plenty of inspirational answers for it. A thousand single persons working together can move the world. Your single action can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, the action that inspires others. Cue violins.Personally, I think it's actually the wrong question.See, we don't have
Lily E. Garcia Will Break My Heart
It is clear that my relationship with the new NEA president will be fraught with ups and downs.I have expressed my willingness to be courted. And she has definitely had her moments.Back on August 11, Valerie Strauss unveiled an interview with LEG that had many folks cheering. Plainspoken and direct, LEG, provided a brace of great quotes:Arne Duncan is a very nice man. I actually believe he is a ve
Patronizing Teachers for the Core
When you read this sentence at the start of a blog post, you know things are about to head south rapidly:One of the most frequent questions I get from coaches is about how to coach teachers in the Common Core (CCSS).This is the lede from "Coaching Towards the Common Core State Standards" over at Ed Week. Our coaching...um...coach is Elena Aguilar. More about her in a second. First, let's
The Five Steps to Killing Universities
In August of 2012, the website The Homeless Adjunct ran the post "How the American University Was Killed, in Five Easy Steps." While "kill" might be a bit of an overstatement, the post definitely gives a picture of how US colleges and universities have been clobbered, and clobbered hard. Let's see if any of these steps look familiar two years later.Here are the HA's five steps.
AUG 19
Why Did the Core Have a Bad Year?
Today's big headline from the new Education Next poll is "Teachers No Longer Love CCSS."Support for the Core among teachers dropped like a stone, from 76% in 2013 to 46% in 2014. That's a lot of love lost. Now, as we move from the "Holy schneikies!" phase into the "Got some splainin' to do" phase, we'll start to ask the big question.Why?Over at The Fordham, Mike Petri
Whatever Happened to Affordable College Education
I enjoy the blog Curmudgeon Central not just because the name makes us some sort of internet cousins, but because the writer, a college professor in Texas, makes me look like Little Mary Sunshine.Recently, he published a post that jumps off from this internet meme If you are of a Certain Age (say, mine) then you recognize this is more-or-less accurate. I graduated from college in 1979, but it was
Survey Shows CCSS Support Plummeting
Support for the Core among teachers has been cut almost in half. That is just one of the findings in a survey released today by Michael Henderson, Paul Peterson and Martin West in Education Next. The survey, administered in May and June of this year to 5000 adults, provides info on several issues. With charts and graphs! All of this has to be viewed through a careful filter-- EdNext is a reformst
AUG 18
CCSS & the Men Behind the Curtain
Starr Sackstein is over at Education Week trying to make a case for the Core once again. And I'm going to disagree with her, once again.Sackstein has apparently evolved. The last time I responded to her, she was espousing the old "teach to the standards and the tests will take care of themselves" line. She has now moved on to "Well, yes, the tests are not good, but the Core is still
Sanders's Charter School Not Ready for Prime Time
The problem of athletic academies that push sports and ignore academics is not a new one.One recent growth industry has been the post-grad prep school, schools set up so that athletes who failed to make the necessary scores to qualify for NCAA play can take another year to make their numbers while still maintaining their sports edge. That tightening in standards grows out of repeated "discove
Accountability in the Age of the High Stakes Test
We've marched steadily toward accountability for over a decade now. Teachers must be held accountable. Schools must be held accountable.And not just in some fuzzy, non-specific manner. This accountability must come with real, hard consequences, say reformsters. Accountability means real consequences, financial consequences. If teachers aren't doing a great job, they should not get paid more. If th
AUG 17
The Opposite of Excellence
It's not really news, and it has certainly been commented on a million times, but I don't think we can be reminded too many times. We've heard it, but it's a slippery well-greased pig of a fact, a detail so unbelievably stupid that it literally numbs the mind and slips away like a half-remembered dream. Unconsciously, our brain's filter says, "Well, that can't be right," and we go back t
Local vs. Global
One of the advantages that the reformsters have in the ongoing debate is that their POV is one-size-fits-all large scale national by its very nature, while those of us in the resistance are fighting largely local battles. And each one of those is different. It's a single ocean on one side and a million Dutch boys and girls on the other, each with a finger in a different hole in a different part of
The Non-fiction vs. Fiction Issue
Since Common Core first shambled onto the education stage, teachers (particularly language teachers) have sounded the alarm about the infamous 70/30 split between fiction and non-fiction. "We'll have to drop studying Shakespeare to make room for reading instructions for IKEA shelving assembly," goes the complaint.As a high school English teacher, I'm not very concerned about this require
AUG 16
A Curmudgucation Birthday
I made my first post here one year ago today (this is post #485). Several, in fact. Do us both a favor and don't go read them; it was a month or so before I started to figure out what the hell I was doing. Still working on it.I was fortunate to find some audience fairly quickly. I joined BATs back when there were around 1600 members, and the responses I garnered there were encouraging. I was fortu
Can We Enter Phase Three?
Reading Paul Thomas always makes me feel smarter (and yet we have also shared some great cyber-conversation about comics). A recent post on his blog is both smart and challenging. In it, he addresses the phases of the current education debates.Phase I goes back to the accountability fever of the 1980s and takes us right up through NCLB and its steroidified sibling, Race to the Top (and waiver-
Teachers in Thunderdome
One of the dreams of reformsters is a school system in which teacher employment is shaped by neither tenure nor seniority. When the time comes for cutting staff, administrators will just grab their Big Spreadsheet of Teacher Effectiveness Data, look down at the bottom of list, point at the name next to the lowest rating number and declare, "Okay-- that's who's getting laid off."We've tal