The Common Core and the Teacher

Jenifer Fox, author of the book Your Child's Strengths, talks about the benefits of asking a child questions about who they are and what they love by digging more deeply with each question. To narrow in on the answer, an adult will ask "Why?" several times in a row, perhaps in different ways, prompting the child to think more deeply with each repetition. Fox is good at it; she gave many examples of conversations she has had, and how it enabled a child to figure stuff out that maybe he/she had not known before. I tried it with my daughter with no success at all; there is a skill to be learned, there.

I was on the receiving end of this kind of questioning recently, on Facebook. In a conversation about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), I was asked four or five times, why my vision of education cannot happen under the Common Core. Each time I was asked, I dug a little deeper. As a result, a fact about the modern education reform movement became clearer in my head. I'd call it an epiphany, except that it was something I'd known all along. I just understood the impact more clearly; the evolution of an idea that has taken hold of the body politic:

The problems of public education lie in the teachers.

No, of course I don't believe that; but I do believe more than ever that the discrediting of public education has begun with the discrediting of teachers, and its success rests on this strategy.

Let's take on the role of conspiracy-theorist for a minute. Let's say that George W. Bush pushed through NCLB with the nefarious intent of producing evidence that the public school system is failing. He may not have had that exact intent; but the idea that testing and the subsequent punishment for not producing the right data was going to improve teaching and learning is so wrongheaded that you have to figure he didn't go too far out of his way to consult people who knew what would happen. Stating that his interests was that of of making all schools of equal quality, NCLB was made law.

Well, anyone could have predicted what happened, and many did. Public education took a dive. Narrowing the curriculum down to only that which is measurable on tests, children were left behind in droves. People demanded to know why, and the answer came: teachers.

Bad teachers. Lazy teachers. Teachers who were mailing it in. Teachers who were mean and uncaring. Teachers who were in it for the vacations and the retirement. Teachers who refused to change their dinosaur ways.

Unions. Unions that made teachers powerful, unions who were self-interested and self-perpetuating.

The only way forward was to institute a better system of standards that dictated what teachers did, and how,  when, and why. We needed to make public education teacher-proof. And new tests would catch teachers who weren't doing it right. State laws, plus Race to the Top requirements, would take those scores and put them where they would do the most good: in teachers' evaluations.

In the course of the conversation, I started thinking about how I learned grammar. My English teacher knew what to teach and how to teach it. How did she know? Because she was a professional; she studied this stuff! She did it, year after year, learning from her experiences, thinking, processing, talking to other teachers.  There is also the collective knowledge of all the teachers who may have spent their lives in the classroom.There is nothing in the Common Core that good teachers don't already know from their own education and experience; and there is a negative impact felt when you dictate what a teacher does. Teachers see student faces; the Common Core does not.

To quote myself from the original conversation: "Kids can learn nouns while working through their own projects and work. You maintain that this can happen with the Common Core and you are probably right; but who needs the Common Core to tell us how to write with correct English?  The important thing is for kids to work on stuff they find meaningful; and that the importance of the work to the kids is what dictates progress, content -- and quality. Reliance on an outside measure isn't what is making that process happen. It's the relationship between teacher and student; the level of enthusiasm from the student for what he/she is doing, and the dedication of the teacher to helping the student fulfill a vision, that is the important part."

What I learned by digging deeply into my beliefs about the Common Core is that those standards are, in effect, replacing a critical human element of the education process.

To use a somewhat indelicate analogy...when I was in labor the first time, I had a terrible labor nurse who was watching the contraction monitor instead of me, and when a contraction would come, I would be bearing down and my husband helping and after a minute she would say, "Ready set go push!" Her face was in the machine instead of on me, so her information was late and unhelpful.

If you have a Common Core as a guide, that means you're looking at that instead of the child. And I think that makes a big difference. For public schools to do their best to prepare students for the 21st century, they have to do better than deliver standards. Free teachers to turn away from the machinery of imposed standards; ask them to help students find their interests, goals and passions, and arrange their education around the most meaningful learning possible; meaningful, that is, to students.

So why was it so important to to set these events in motion? The discrediting of the teacher has played a very big role in the advancing the corporate takeover of education. So many opportunities open up!  When you have standards, you can have standards-aligned curriculum! Curriculum guides! CCSS-aligned textbooks! CCSS consultants!

Testing! New tests, new technology needed for tests! Data management systems! Data analysis consulting firms!

And all of the above is charged to the public dollar.

There you have it. Game, set, match. Teachers lose. And when teachers lose, children lose.

Let’s bring the power of the relationship back to education; bring it back and make it better than ever. Use all the means in our power to connect students to their world by the promotion of teaching. It can be a wholly new profession; it may be very different from what we have experienced in the past. Teachers may take on new roles: mentor, guide, consultant, advisor, connector, in addition to plain old explainer. They may even learn Jenifer Fox’s skill of focused questioning in helping kids figure themselves out.

But it is, has been, and will continue to be, a most honorable profession.

That is, if we all take our eyes off the monitor and turn it back to children.

Pessimist? Or optimist?

It is possible to read what I've written  and conclude that I am a pessimist about what is happening in public education. If you believe that, you really couldn't be more wrong.

I'm a total optimist about what education can be. No high-stakes testing or imposed standards; teachers who are given the time, resources and autonomy to focus on the identities of children, support them as they work toward their goals, whatever they may be. It can happen. It certainly can happen without increasing the amount of money that currently goes into education! In fact, think of the huge expense of testing, and implementation of the Common Core!

I'm told time and time again that the Mass Customized Learning system is "better" and therefore "best." I don't accept it; I can't accept it. Is that because I'm a pessimist?

Or are those who are pushing me to "settle" the ones who are the pessimists?

We are too afraid to envision an education system that is truly great! Don't give up your ideals because you doubt that they'll ever be implemented. It's your doubt that holds us back. Keep your eyes on the prize, like the man said, and hold on.

Does “Mass Customized Learning” Represent Real Education Change?

There are big changes taking place in some Maine school districts. These districts have joined a group called the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning, and have embraced principles of what is called, “Mass Customized Learning” (MCL), or the Proficiency-Based System (PBS). 

What is the framework behind these changes? The excerpt, below, outlines the important points

Time is the Variable

• Learners advance (progression) to the next performance level in a content area once proficiency or better has been achieved and validated.  There are no traditional grade levels.
• Progression can occur at any point during the course of the year for any content area.
• At the beginning of the traditional school year, learners resume their learning at the point where they left off the previous year (continuous flow). There is no social promotion.
• Learners are typically in different performance levels for different content areas.
• Multiage classrooms are the norm not the exception.

  
  

Learning is the Constant

• Learners are placed at their appropriate developmental instructional level in each of ten content areas based on demonstrated performance.
• Curriculum is “guaranteed and viable” where the standards and supporting materials are made explicit and available to teachers, students and parents.
• Evidence toward proficiency for all learning targets is measured and recorded over time where the learner must score proficient or better prior to beginning the next performance level.
• Learning progress is scored and reported on a proficiency scale from 0.0 through 4.0. There are no traditional letter grades.

Simply put, children can now grapple with the learning targets (curricula) developed by the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning (MCCL), and aligned to the Common Core, in their own way, and at their own pace.

Districts who have embraced this change have taken on a huge task. They have undertaken to change curricula, teaching methods, assessment, grading, and the reorganization of student levels, all in the interests of creating a system that  attempts to adapt to the learning needs of individual children and is wrapped around the Common Core State Standards.

For many, it is a purpose that seemed worth the disruption it would create in the districts that opted to go for it.  Some see the benefits taking place already...but in some school districts it has created turmoil, bitterness and mistrust among parents, teachers, school board members and administrators.

Why?

If this system is supposed to be a truly customized to each learner, why is it controversial? Personalized education; isn’t that what we want?

The Pros

Those who advocate for PBS claim that there will always be controversy when an institution is changed at its foundations. The advantages to be gained from this disruption outweigh the problems, say supporters. Kids would be released from “seat time,” opening up opportunities to learn and become involved in their interests and their passions; to take advantages of learning opportunities, instead of being stuck inside a curriculum that was fixed in time and space.  The choices they will be given in how they learn and at what pace will potentially put them in greater control of their learning.

The fact that a student, in pursuing interdisciplinary learning, can get credit for work done in both disciplines (i.e. music and physics) has the potential of breaking students out of the single-subject restriction.

When fully implemented and when teachers are trained and comfortable with the methods and techniques, struggling students will get the support they need, and more the advanced students will not have to be bored or frustrated. There will be a stamp of individuality about their learning. This is a positive advantage; there is no question.

The Cons

But for many around the State, PBS has turned out to lack the promise it advertised.

• It is questionable that the progression of a student through predetermined learning targets will yield greater student achievement; it is still, in effect, as scripted as the old-school curricula. Student “voice and choice” over the least important parts of learning will have a nebulous impact on students’ long-term engagement;
• The nature and quality of those learning targets, put together by MCCL, are the subject of debate;
• It is questionable how the “unpacking” of a "measurement topic," the determination of how each child will learn that topic and of how the learning will be assessed, and the moving on to the next target once the learning has been measured will result in better, more valuable learning experiences for kids. Sometimes letting kids dive into material that is too advanced to completely grasp is a great way to motivate and engage them. But by following these measurement targets, one after another, kids are confined to baby-steps.
• The focus on the ideas, interests and passions of children -- if they don’t happen to correspond with the learning targets -- is absent.
• While the manner of the constant measurement of learning is different from the old way the impact is the same....or worse. “Will this be on the test?” has been replaced by, “Will this be part of my measurement target?” And in a system built around the possibility that EVERY aspect of their learning can be measured, there is no longer value for learning that is not. Does a child learn about musical dynamics so that they can better appreciate or even create more beautiful music....or because they can tick a word off a vocabulary list on the way to achieving a learning target?

I go to educator Gary Stager for my final word on the impact of assessment on learning:

“Assessment has nothing to do with learning. Without a school system, the term assessment would never be used. It would have no meaning. Indeed, assessment is something done to others. Learners learn, think -- perhaps even reflect, but they don’t assess themselves UNLESS coerced to do so. Learning is a natural act. Assessment is not.”

In a system that values student learning over the documentation of a student’s long-march through standards, assessment is invisible; hardly seen, embedded in student accomplishments.

Most critical of all is that MCL falls far short of its name: if all children are expected to master the same measurement topics, then the system is not customized. Nor is it personalized, or individualized, or any other kind of -ized.

The change that has the greatest potential for changing student lives moves away from a system that pushes content and measurement, and toward the support and encouragement of student passions and interests; individual students derive their curriculum from their goals.

We need to create the change that gives students the best chance of success by allowing them to determine their own direction.

But those tests!
Changing from one test-based system to another, while having a potentially positive effect on students in some senses, will not change the most critical factors in the work of school districts:

• that the assessment of learning is the most important part of the work of a classroom;
• that standards like the Common Core are the basis for student learning;
• that state standardized testing will continue to be the yardstick by which a school’s value is determined.

There are many reasons why the industrial model of top-down teaching and learning no longer serves our kids well. The PBS system understands to a degree that children have to construct their own learning; but this philosophy can’t truly succeed if it is superimposed upon a system that teaches standards instead of students; and is evaluated through high-stakes testing.

One big leap forward for the PBS system would be to institute a system which allows students to determine their learning direction, and choose their own learning targets according to their interests. This would still not be ideal; a system like that, while possible under the Common Core standards, is definitely better off without it.

And there will still be those tests.

A little history always helps

Public education has been so manipulated by political winds, corporate greed, and the quest for power and influence that we hardly know what it really looks like. It’s as if the institution is functioning in a deep fog; we know life is difficult and we might even think we know why, but we can only see ten feet in any direction.

When the No Child Left Behind law first attached school funding to the results of testing, public education took a dive. There are few educators, politicians and education profiteers who would deny it in the face of overwhelming evidence. The curriculum contracted and narrowed; test results reigned supreme, and Campbell’s Law came into action:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

According to education historian and activist Diane Ravitch: “Campbell’s Law explains why high-stakes testing promotes cheating, narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and other negative behaviors.” The culture of schools changed radically in the ten years that followed, and the cry-out for change to a broken system increased. But the testing was the baseball bat that broke the system!

For many players in this public education game, the era of high-stakes testing and the cry-out about those broken schools opened up a world of opportunity. Our schools are doing badly, they said, for lack of Real Good Rigorous Standards. Bill Gates gave several million on pocket change to the National Governor’s Association, and the Association of Chief State Education Officers, and under their wing, the Common Core State Standards were born. Now we have a real national curriculum that will raise the bar and make sure our country Stays Competitive.  The Smarter Balanced assessments, aligned to these Standards are coming next.

“But! But! But!” splutter those who have been following along, “It’s the tests that broke the system in the first place!”

So what ought Maine to do?

The high-minded claims of the proponents of  PBS just don’t matter. They are swimming in deep waters.  The "old model," since NCLB is governed by testing; so is the "new model."

It is, in the most critical senses, the same model. PBS districts are taking a different path at a different pace to the same destination. We can’t look for real change that charges up kids’ interest in learning -- because that begins with who they are and what they love. We can’t allow kids to explore, to discover, to create, to change the world, if tests loom over them. “Rigor” (even in kindergarten!) will continue to be a word that means, “To make harder for no apparent reason,” rather than, the production of high-quality work that can be expected when kids are excited to learn; when they are engaged and passionate.

Look at it this way. A guy is in a prison cell. Ratty blanket and flat mattress. Someone decides to make this guy happier by replacing it with a Sealy Posturepedic mattress, sheets with bajillion thread counts and goose down pillows. The guy sleeps great. But when he wakes up, he is still in prison.

I leave it up to you to decide if you think the chance of a more comfortable prison cell will really happen under PBS, and also, whether it is change worth fighting for; or if we’d serve our children better if we stand up and insist that the Common Core State Standards and the associated high-stakes testing be removed from the Maine landscape completely.

Dive-into-Deep-Water Learning

"Can you make matter out of energy?"

I was sitting with a small group of middle-school kids celebrating the end of the school year when one of them asked that.

"I mean, you can make energy out of matter, but can you reverse it?"

I had no idea, and neither did anyone else, but the question was tossed around awhile. The subject moved to E=mc2. What did that mean? An attempt was made to explain it. I didn't jump in because as an adult, I know quite well that I can't possibly understand General Relativity. But nobody told these kids that.

This morning I saw one of those animated videos where a hand with a marker illustrates what a voice-over is talking about. This one was about the Common Core Standards. It explained how learning is step-by-step, and kids have to learn the bottom step before going up to the more complicated steps in a discipline.

But what these kids really want to know is...why does E=mc2?

Sure, lots of people will roll their eyes and say I'm off on a tangent again. What we really need to do is make sure those kids take those steps and get to the top effectively. Then they'll be ready for Einstein. Maybe.

But what bad things can possibly happen if we let kids pursue the understanding of General Relativity? I'm not saying, pursue it in the spare time you can carve out of the important business of "learning the basics"; I'm saying, let them learn General Relativity.

Drop kids into the deep water of concepts that seem to be too big for them and will they sink? Maybe they won't get every bit of it. But they will love that they are swimming into areas of advanced learning; and maybe they will learn that advanced topics aren't so advanced that they can't grapple with them, take what they get, and leave the rest for later.

And maybe they'll come to understand that, in this case, physics is a fantastic world of natural laws and weird, inexplicable things that happen. And maybe they'll say, "I want to understand that stuff, and I want to be able to explain it to other people."

And maybe they won't grow up like me: a person who understands perfectly well that there's no way she will ever understand General Relativity.

What's better -- instructing people to start with what they can accomplish to mastery? Or telling them, "You have an extraordinary brain. Use it and be amazed?"

Education "Reform" in Maine, Part 3: Can we change the ending?

Governor LePage’s spokesperson, Adrienne Bennett, thinks poverty is no barrier to education.  “Overcoming poverty himself, Gov. LePage’s own personal story shows that income barriers do not define destiny.”

It’s a common view. Washington D.C.’s controversial former chancellor Michelle Rhee has made similar statements. “Our schools can't fix all of society's problems,” says Rhee in a 2012 article on Huffington Post, “but what happens in classrooms everyday can make a huge difference in the life outcomes of all children. As such, our schools can and should be held accountable for ensuring all students are learning.”

She makes it sounds so simple, but that’s why her statement is so dangerous. Kids bring problems through the doors of school that cannot be solved by the education system alone. Saying that it can trivializes the reality these kids live with.

Diane Ravitch counters such opinions: “They never explain how a great teacher overcomes homelessness, hunger, poor health, and other conditions associated with poverty. Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965 that you can’t put two people in a race at the same starting line and assume it’s a fair race if one of them is shackled. LBJ knew then what the reformers today never learned.”

How can you pay attention if you don’t know where you’ll be sleeping that night? Or if your dad will show up at home? The horrors attendant upon the lives of poor children are too many to list, and are out of reach of the impact of a really good teacher.

What is a more realistic way to address the education of children growing in poverty?

We might consider the kind of wrap-around services in Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. Health care, counseling, family services, parenting education, all the services children and their families might need so that they might stand a chance of dreaming a dream for themselves.

Let’s fund an initiative wherein low-income school districts can partner with local services to provide in-school services to students in stressful circumstances. Let’s focus on the whole family, because that unit is the most important to the success of the child. This way, we can make sure each student’s needs are being cared for.

With what money? Well, I don’t know what the exact figure is in Maine, but I sure would start with the money that’s going into the implementation of the CCSS and the Smarter Balanced assessments.  

Once you’ve eliminated those toxic influences on learning (and then count up the millions in education dollars saved -- go here for a summary under "the money problem"), whole avenues of opportunity open up. None of the items listed below are easy or cheap, but we’ll be rolling in dough once we get rid of the testing juggernaut.

• Magnify the voices of the educators here in Maine who have devoted their lives to doing what’s best for children.
• Bring in a new vision of education. Take this opportunity to truly envision a system of learning that brings out the best in every child. Bring in the voices of people we can learn from and can help us move in the right direction.
  
  

  • Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor of Big Picture Learning.
  • Chris Lehman of the Science Leadership Academy.
  • Angela Maiers of Quest2Matter.
  • Deborah Meier, founder of the Mission Hill School in Boston and the Central Park East schools in Manhattan.
  • Gary Stager of Constructing Modern Knowledge.
  • Joe Renzulli of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model.
  • Jenifer Fox, author of Your Child’s Strengths.
  • Many, many more!

• Put in place a system of public accountability that does not interfere with student learning or the culture of school.

The list goes on and on; there are no lack of brilliant resources both in and outside Maine who would help us re-imagine our schools and reinvest our hard-earned dollars in something that helps children -- rather than a system that hurts them. Overthrow the dictatorship of testing and standardization. This opens up a world of options that would make our kids’ eyes light up.

We the people did not make these financial decisions. They were made for us. They will continue to be made for us. And they are made with profits, not the best interests of our children, in mind.

Maine, we need to get control of the future of our schools before we wake up and realize that that education has left the building.

(I know I promised a three-part series, but I think the next section, "What You Can Do?" deserves its own post, so stay tuned!)

Part One

Part Two

Education "Reform" in Maine, Part 2: How did we get here?

Read Part 1 here

How did we get here?

Let’s look at a prescient statement made by Alfie Kohn  back in 2004:

I try to imagine myself as a privatizer. How would I proceed? If my objective were to dismantle public schools, I would begin by trying to discredit them. I would probably refer to them as “government” schools, hoping to tap into a vein of libertarian resentment. I would never miss an opportunity to sneer at researchers and teacher educators as out-of-touch “educationists.” Recognizing that it’s politically unwise to attack teachers, I would do so obliquely, bashing the unions to which most of them belong. Most important, if I had the power, I would ratchet up the number and difficulty of standardized tests that students had to take, in order that I could then point to the predictably pitiful results. I would then defy my opponents to defend the schools that had produced students who did so poorly.

Creepy, eh? We’re seeing this roll out in Maine. Our schools have not only been discredited, they’ve been nearly destroyed. There are many successes in many classrooms; I wouldn’t say that the misery quotient is so high that no parent should send their kids to public school. I will say that testing, and its cousin, standardization, have run like a very slow bulldozer over our schools over a dozen years since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), leaving behind a quivering mass of desperation. Teachers nationwide are seeing their profession become corrupted and irrelevant. Students are ducking their heads and getting through it without a thought for how it can help them on their way to success.

The name of the game in any school today is struggle. Struggle on the part of students to get through the day, struggle by teachers to teach kids while satisfying the needs of the principals, who are beholden to superintendents, who are looking at their test numbers and shaking their heads.

What Money Problem?

The neighboring district to mine, RSU 20, is all of a dither right now over whether to break up the union that was established after Governor Baldacci’s wrongheaded attempt to consolidate school districts. Passions run very high in this conflict. It is almost as though the players in that debate believe that once their side wins, things will improve for their kids.

It’s difficult for me to watch. Nearly $16 billion are being spent by the 45 states who have adopted the Common Core State Standards, to implement those standards in the classroom, and pay for the tests from the Smarter Balanced testing cohort, which will replace the NECAPS. There are layers and layers of costs, and while one school district in this area is cutting funding for all art supplies, they are paying out $40,000 (a reduction of one Ed Tech position) for a new English curriculum that is aligned to the Common Core -- whether or not they were getting good results from the old one.

RSU 20 itself is paying out $168,000 for technological upgrades to accommodate the Smarter Balanced assessments....while laying off teachers.

We observe the money crunch in districts all over Maine (read also here and here), but there is no lack of money going into education. We’re swimming it it. We’re up to our eyeballs in it. It’s just going to the makers of tests, publishers of curriculum, developers of educational technology that will help teachers move kids through the standards and prepare for tests, and the consultants who we can’t live without, to come in and save us from drowning under the Common Core.

We could also add  to the pot the money that’s wasted on textbooks. There is a treasure-trove of open sourceware available free on the Internet, expressly for the purpose of being used by educators! Add to that the money that is spent buying computers for students who already have them. We could also take away the computerized local assessment system like NWEAs and Aimswebs. Assessments are part of learning; anything else is disruptive, so get rid of it.

Tomorrow, Part 3: Change the Ending

The Story of Education “Reform” in Maine

(Part One of a three-part series)

There is an interaction between what is happening nationally on the edu-political scene and what is going on here in Maine. When we connect the dots, what emerges is a picture worth exploring.

I. The Maine story

Governor Paul LePage has cobbled together a system of grading schools, drawing primarily from state standardized test results. The metric used to develop the grading system is faulty, according to some; the Maine Sun-Journal says, “Grading schools isn't popular with superintendents and teachers, who say some of the criteria for the grades comes from things they can't control, including poverty, a lack of parent involvement, truancy and students not showing up to take tests.”

That doesn’t diminish its impact. Once your local school has been given an F, no matter what’s really going on in that school building, no amount of protest and outcry will take that F away. So the Governor is well on the way to making his case for the next steps.  

The State of Maine will also be faced with legislation to provide for school choice in districts where there are failing schools. As goes the students, so goes the money; the per-pupil allocation will follow the students to their chosen school, private or charter.

The school they left behind will have to improve as best they can, as they still will be judged by test scores.  Although those schools will receive less money, there isn’t a proportional reduction of expenses such as heating a building or operating a kitchen. In addition, the fact that a school loses 35 students, for example, does not necessarily mean that the school will be able to cut two teachers, since the students would have been spread out over several classes and grades. So the already significant reductions of art, music, gym, field trips, special projects that have happened in the past few years of cutbacks will continue.  These subjects are irrelevant to the tests...and test results reign supreme.

Measures that will be proposed this legislative session:

• Legislation to advance school choice options for Maine students. According to the Bangor Daily News, this would “allow colleges and universities to authorize public charter schools and remove the 10-school limit on the number of charter schools that can be authorized by the Maine Public Charter School Commission.”

• This legislation will also  also includes provisions “to help economically disadvantaged students gain greater school choice by providing funding for tuition and transportation to public and private schools, as well as room and board at charter schools,” according to the Bangor Daily News article.

• Legislation to calculate the number of students who need remedial math or English at public colleges, and according to the Bangor Daily News, “push the cost of remedial courses needed by higher-education students at public institutions to their home school districts.” I guess this is the “scared straight” strategy.  Threats might work!

There is already a law on the books that will mandate the attachment of test results to teacher evaluations. Regulations and procedures on this measure are now being developed.

II. The national context

But what is happening in Maine needs to be seen in the context of national edu-politics. At the root of Governor LePage’s grades is the impact of high-stakes standardized testing.

The imposition of high-stakes testing (meaning the application of punitive measures if the data doesn’t reveal the right numbers) has turned our schools into places where student identity is the least important factor in what goes on in classrooms; so students have checked out, en masse. We see it. And if we haven’t seen, it we should ask our kids; they see it and experience it every day.

• Some engaged students go for the grades, accepting the limitation on their learning in an effort to comply and please.
• Others spend elementary school looking for learning that is meaningful to them, and finding none, have checked out by middle school.
• Still others have such a difficult time fitting into the tight corners of school expectations that they are medicated into compliance.
• The ones who survive and thrive best are those who understand that school is a game; they take what they need, leave the rest, and maintain their identity throughout.

High-stakes testing and standardization are keeping our children from the learning experiences they need for future success. Writer/educator Tony Wagner, in his book Creating Innovators, tells us that what the American economy needs are people who can use their creativity and imagination, who regard failure as steps along the way to success.  The best learning experiences schools can provide are those that emphasize passion-driven learning, real-world challenges and personal success.  

The most important ingredients for student success, say Wagner, are play, passion, and purpose. (I would expand this: play, experimentation, inquiry, discovery, creation, and reflection.)

This vision of education cannot take place where test results drive school culture and purpose.

So here we are, at the threshold of another great revolution in testing. Maine has joined 44 other states in knuckling under to the Race to the Top (RttT) blackmail: adopt the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) or sacrifice your eligibility for this funding that we are dangling in front of you like a cookie to a starving child. (The price tag of CCSS implementation, it turns out, leaves the possible RttT funding in the dust -- and Maine was turned down for that funding anyway. Ah, well.)

III. If we do nothing...

Since RSU 3 has three failing schools under the Governor's grading system, I think we should consider ourselves vulnerable to the changes and shifts that he proposes.

Since Maine has passed legislation that will tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, look for teacher firings here in RSU 3 (poor communities do consistently worse on state standardized tests). If you think this could never happen here, you don’t understand the basic purpose of that legislation.

Tony Wagner again: “Who would want to teach in a system that measures your worth as an educator by how much your students can regurgitate on a two-hour multiple-choice test and that has reduced much of the curriculum to tedious test-prep exercises?"

Look for more charters to start up, especially in poor districts like ours.

Involved and active parents in areas with failing schools will embrace the new charter schools, no doubt, and nobody can blame them. Without some of the pressures and constraints that are on ordinary public schools, and because most of the students who go there are the children of those involved parents who seek out alternatives, these charters might be pretty nice places -- though still chained to test scores for proof of their value.

I acknowledge that better education for some could seem an improvement over lousy education for all.  Though I reject the Governor’s grading system as giving an accurate reflection of life in our schools, I do think that public education is in desperate need of change.  

More charter schools and choices may be a change that would satisfy many whose prime concern is the educational health of their own children. But is this the change we want in Maine? Is that worth fighting for? Pretty nice places for some of our kids? I’m a dedicated activist and I’m afraid I will never put that on a placard and walk in circles around the State House, with that phrase on my sign.

Compare that vision (“Maine Public Schools: Pretty Nice Places for Some of Our Kids!”) with that of the schools that will result from a different vision of education: play, experimentation, inquiry, discovery, creation, reflection.

Tomorrow:

How did we get here?