Race to the Trough as political stupidity

So I guess something like 40 states put in the effort to send in their troughside applications in round 1.  And you just know it was a big pain in the butt for them, and hopes are riding high.  So here's how it's gonna turn out:

As with most things in nature, the quality of the applications (according to whatever criteria DOE comes up with) is going to be distributed along a bell curve.  There's going to one really outstanding, a few pretty good, a whole bunch of so-so, and some real stinkers.  And they're all going to have to be graded, and Arne Duncan is going to have to set  a cut score.

What a miserable job.  

Of course, he repeatedly said that there are going to losers, but nobody who went to all the trouble to complete the application was sitting around thinking, "Geez, I bet I'm a loser."  So Arne had 3 choices.  He sets the cut score really high and awards grants to the indisputably superior applications, but then he makes lots of enemies, lots of disgruntled governors phoning in and whining and complaining about how in these cash-strapped times Duncan made overworked state ed depts waste their time.  That would probably be a bad move.

Or he sets the bar somewhere in the middle, in which case you'd be hard-pressed to find a hair's-breadth difference between some of the winning applications and some of the losing ones.  Then Duncan wouldn't make a lot of enemies, but the few he made would be extremely vocal and annoyed.  It will be like trying to explain to Mr & Mrs Smith why you gave Johnny at 89 on his history paper instead of the 90 he needed to get into the gifted program.  "You've gotta be kidding me!  You're telling me he lost by a misplaced comma?!?  But you said yourself he was a wonderful writer!"

Or Dunc is going to do what he has repeatedly said he won't do and make almost everybody happy by giving them a little taste.

Given Obama's current political fortunes, I'm betting on option 3.

Race to the Trough as stealth policy

Mike Klonsky provided a link to a KCRW Public Radio show featuring Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education reporter and co-author of the important book Grading Education, and Peter Cunningham, chief flack for the US Department of Education.  As Klonsky notes, it was like punching a marshmellow (for Rothstein), because Cunningham came across as a nitwit with nothing coherent to say in defense of the Race to the Trough.  Cunningham basically says, yeah, most state's standardized tests suck and the NCLB accountability scheme sucks, but to change those, we'd have to change the law, and we have to spend this money quick, so we don't have time to change the law yet.  You could charitably say that his argument amounts to a pathetic version of "When you're stuck with lemons, make lemonade," although it comes across more like, "We're stuck with PCBs, so we we're making pickles."

Although Rothstein communicates very well, most of critical points he raises (and this is not meant as a dig at him) about the stultifying, curriculum-narrowing, damaging effects of ever-greater reliance on standardized testing are not really new.  (It was surprising that Cunningham hadn't seen these criticisms coming and prepared to address them better -- after all, that is his job -- but he's a nitwit.)

One point Rothstein brought up that hadn't occurred to me (around minute 39 of the show) was that Race to the Trough really should not even exist.  RttT was part of the ARRA economic stimulus/jobs creation bill.  An objection of ARRA opponents to the bill was that it would be used as an underhanded means of pushing Obama's preferred policies.  And RttT is certainly that.  Oh, yes, it is providing jobs for plenty of  educational snake-oil salesmen, but they probably rank only slightly below bankers and lawyers in popular esteem.  Now admittedly, $3.5 billion does not seem like a whole lot of money in comparison to the bank bailout -- but I would think it could be used to create quite a few jobs. 

And Cunningham, of course, simply missed Rothstein's point and said  that using ARRA funds to drive policy was a fine and noble thing to do.  That sentiment should make him an honored guest at a Tea Party or two.

There may be some hope, after all

After Scott Brown's election to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, there was lots of chatter about how Obama would need to move to the center to shore up flagging support from independents.   That didn't seem right to me.  Clearly, that election was an early referendum on Obama's leadership, but the problem was not that he was too leftist.  Instead, it seemed like BO had long neglected what might be fundamental law of politics: Dance with the one that brung ya.  In BO's case, that meant energetic youngsters as well as older, less robust progressives like myself who made up for what we lacked in energy by dropping dollars into BO's warchest like we'd never done for any candidate before.  Barack had charmed us all and we were swooning to glide away in his arms.

The Tea Partiers are livid about Obama and healthcare, sure, but he ain't never gonna make them happy anyway.  Heck, they voted for Palin.  What he's sorely missing is any enthuthiasm in his base.  Massachusetts voters, like many of us, have failed to see the change we could believe in. So I suspect good numbers of progressives sat on their hands.  You certainly didn't see them rocking the streets, knocking on doors, dialing the phones, to rouse up support for Obama's girl.  If they had, there's no question Scott Brown would have been a brief, unmemorable flash. 

So today's NY Times story about Obama finally taking on the banks, promoting Volcker and sidelining Geithner and Summers, comes as wonderful good news.  I especially liked the hints about how Geithner and Summers might soon be shown the door. 

Maybe, just maybe, with all the bad news coming out of Chicago about Arne Duncan's failure, universal disparagement of the Race to the Trough, Bloomberg faced with parents protesting outside his house, Michelle Rhee's luster noticeably tarnished -- BO might come to realize that those 3 million teacher votes and voices and energy and 30 million fingers and 6 million feet could be more useful to his political longevity than all Broad's bucks.  And Flunkin Duncan will maybe start looking for a job doing something he could do well -- coaching high school basketball somewhere.

Among other insightful comments on what the 2010 education priorities of the Obama administration might be, Steve Peha has offers this:

Our Secretary of Education has remarked many times that our tests are inadequate and that the language of the current ESEA encourages states to lower their standards over time. Appropriately, he calls this process, “the race to the bottom”. Mr. Duncan has the issue pegged. But fixing it doesn’t seem to be at the top of his agenda. I find that strange. Finally, someone in Washington has identified the fundamental problem with the fundamental element of reform, and yet he doesn’t seem to want to do much about it. ... I'm baffled.

Mr. Peha is right.  Not only is it nowhere near the top of Duncan's agenda, he is pushing states hard to use those same crappy tests to evaluate teachers.  To help Mr. Peha with his bafflement, I would submit that Duncan is a master of doublespeak, defined in George Orwell's 1984 as:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfullness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it ... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.

Also known as "speaking with a forked tongue," it is critical skill for high-level education policymakers and administrators.

Gales of reformist destruction

GothamSchools reports that the New York City Dept of Education has announced a new round of school closings.  Diane Ravitch has this to say ("Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0"):

What we are witnessing now is the culmination of the plans of the education entrepreneurs who are driving national education policy at the highest levels. They are not educators. They do not understand how to help or support a school, so their first instinct is to close it down and start over. I think that is called creative destruction.

This is exactly right.  One sees the paradigm shift unfolding everywhere.  Whether it truly represents a regress or not is hard to say, because it would be difficult to conclude that many bureaucratic school overlords of yore were actually much help.  So if they now admit that it is their job to destroy schools, at least they are coming clean about it.

Yet the new "reformers" whose aim is to transform our urban school district in market-like ecosystems have their own hypocrisy.  However much they admire the market mechanism as a means of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, they do not actually like how the market mechanism works when it comes to schools.  They discover that parents and children are not, in their view, sufficiently discerning consumers.  The schools that they think should disappear do not disappear.  Their favored new schools do not get the massive influx of kids.  So they have to make what they call "tough decisions" -- meaning the decisions for others who they believe are incapable of making the right ones themselves.  That ugly old school gets closed, leaving the kids nowhere to go but the new one.

The result is a top-down, bureaucracy-driven system no different in any way that matters from the one it is replacing.

Rhee takes credit for improved NAEP scores, bashes teachers

In a news conference at the National Press Club on the release of the district-level NAEP math results, Michelle Rhee took the opportunity to crow about the wonderful results for DC (big improvement in 4th grade, some improvement in 8th).  Rhee's bit comes around the 46th minute.  (It will be worth several vomit-inducing moments if you watch long enough to see Michelle choke on a question from a WaPo reporter around minute 50.)

It's a bizarre performance.  She leads with some advice she received from Warren Buffet: that the way to improve urban public education would be to eliminate private schools and assign all kids to public schools by lottery.  There's something to that, of course, although it would mostly start a stampede of well-heeled white families out of cities -- the few that are left -- and into priveleged suburban enclaves, but Rhee somehow twists into a story, not of race and class segregation, but of adults failing to cooperate.

She seques from that non-sequitur into a riff about the need for using test scores to hold teachers accountable:

[When I came to DC, it] was showing only 8 percent of students performing at grade level in mathematics, if you were to look at the performance evaluations for the adults, you would have seen that the overwhelming majority of them were rated as doing an excellent job, exceeding expectations.

How can you have that kind of disconnect — when only 8 percent of students are at grade level and the adults are running around thinking they are doing an excellent job?

Well, here's how: on the NAEP, considered the gold standard of educational assessment, DC NAEP scores have been consistently improving since 2003.  Michelle, it seems like DC teachers have been doing a great job, yet you never seem to tire of spouting off about how they suck.  How can you have that kind of disconnect?

Adults vs. Kids

The always perceptive Claus von Zastrow comments today on the common refrain of education deformers that they are doing what is in the best interests of kids, not adults. 

I was struck by that line when I first heard it after I crossed industries and got into education a few years back because, obviously, the interests of kids and the adults who work with them are not irreconciably opposed.  Common sense dictates that if you want adults to put their hearts into their jobs, you've got to treat them decently, which means compensating them fairly and treating them with respect.

I think almost everybody who gets into education does so mostly for idealistic reasons.  It's not hard to make money if that's what you mostly care about.  But it's a stupendously boring way to live one's life, which may explain why billionaires like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and  Bill Gates turn their attention to "public service" after many years of chasing the almighty buck.  What they and their ilk probably don't realize is that lots of people never saw the romance of making lots of money to begin with.

At any rate, the point is that the idea that most teachers are mostly interested in protecting themselves is ludicrous on its face.  If they weren't genuinely interested in leaving a better world behind than the one they stepped into, they'd be in a different profession.  What possible credibility can anyone give to the likes of Broad, Bloomberg, Gates, Gerstener -- who spend virtually all of their adult lives amassing their own personal fortunes -- that they somehow care more about kids than the rank-and-file teacher who actually stands in front of a classroom every day?

I'd love to hear how that crowd would squeal if the government stepped in and confiscated their billions and turned it over to programs serving underpriveleged kids.  Undoubtedly, we'd hear vocal protestations about how they were entitled to their loot.