CURMUDGUCATION: Administrators Must Choose

CURMUDGUCATION: Administrators Must Choose:

Administrators Must Choose

Classroom teachers are experiencing the effects of reformsterism to widely varying degrees. In some classrooms, data fetishism, aligning to the standards, and chasing test scores create a powerful cacophony that drowns out actual attempts to educate students. In other classrooms, education remains the main focus and the sturm and drang of education reforminess remain a background, like stray dogs playing in the garbage cans out behind the school.

What makes the difference?

Not state or federal policy. Not the Big Standardized Test. Not even the wise arguments of thinky tanks and bloggers.

Administration.



It's an administrator who says, "Just do your job well. I've got your back." Or it's an administrator who says, "If it's Tuesday, you'd better be on page twelve, paragraph six of the content delivery script."

The administrator's role has change over the past fifteen years. Under No Child Left Behind, many administrators just stalled for time. In many schools, the opening staff meeting was built around the phrase, "Let's just get through this year..." The year-by-year series-of-bandaids approach made sense then. Everyone knew that NCLB could not last, that the requirement that 100% of students be above average would either have to be averted or it would crash the whole system. Either way, something new would happen. "Sooner or later this has to go away," the reasoning went, "so let's just hold on and hope that day comes tomorrow."

But under the Obama-Duncan Common Core banner, the end game has been less clear, even as the choice has become clearer.

Schools can strictly follow the CCSS test-and-punish mandate designed to bring about forced failure CURMUDGUCATION: Administrators Must Choose:

FEE Draws a Circle

One of the larger mysteries of the education debates is why major journalistic outlets keep publishing "research" that is so transparently crap.

Some of this has become a regular thing, like US News' symbiotic relationship with NCTQ, a group that regularly publishes ratings for college programs that don't exist and once "researched" college teacher prep programs by looking through college commencement programs.

But in yesterday's Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton, a real reporter who usually covers actual education news, wasted a chunk of space on a new "report" from Jeb Bush's Families for Excellence in Education. She does identify FEE as am "advocacy" group, but that glosses over the fact that people who want to place advertisements for their business in a major newspaper ought to be paying for advertising space, not having their "advocacy" presented as if it's actual news.

FEE, a group that lives and breathes to see public schools replaced with a more profitable and selective charter system, has announced yet another attempt to flay the dead horse of a talking point that good teachers make all the difference, and that students on the bottom of the poverty and achievement curve get the worst teachers.

How can anyone measure such a thing, you ask? Simple.

You use teacher ratings to "find" the bad teachers. Teacher ratings are based primarily on test 

FEE Draws a Circle