The Education Doctor

David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor

"Maybe there’s something in all of us that aspires to greatness; that wants to save whole planets."

(Dedicated to those Whovians who have had a really emotional day today)

I’ve been trying to avoid this -- an education blog post about Doctor Who. But face it, my summer has been all about the Doctor.  And today was Doctor Who's Big Reveal of the identity of the Twelfth Doctor. So here’s one of my own.

See, I have to put education activism on hold every late-spring through the end of summer to concentrate on producing jewelry inventory enough to last through show season. This year it was particularly difficult; I have a dozen-odd education projects going, and have to simply put them aside to do some work that might actually have some chance of making us some money. I had to have something to hold me to the work.

So I propped my son’s Ipod close enough to see but out of the way of torch flames and made my way through the 9th, 10th and 11th doctors while making my usual fabulous beadies.

Now, the true confession comes when I reveal that I’ve fallen into my first major movie-star crush since getting married 18 years ago. I’ve been gobbling everything actor David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor) has done that’s available for viewing, legally or illegally. (By “illegally” I mean on YouTube, of course. Ya gotta believe me.) It sparked an emotional spiral similar to the one I went through in the Fall of 1984 when Derek Jacobi came to New York with the Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac.

I was 23 years old, everything before me; just recently returned to the city of my birth with plans to become a playwright and join the circles of New York City theater. Nothing brought me flat down to earth like seeing those shows. And I saw them each twice! Got on line in the wee hours waiting for the cheap tickets, four times. And what I got from it was heartsick because I knew I would never be that good At. Anything. Ever. With an embarrassing intensity -- and not a little drama -- I was both deeply moved and violently cast down.

DT did it to me again (real fans do that. We call him DT). Funny that one of his own acting inspirations was Derek Jacobi. And for the first time since that year, I felt like I was blundering about in the world of the mundane, destined never to transcend.

Until these words came to me. “I’m the Education Doctor.”

Maybe there’s something in all of us that aspires to greatness; that wants to save planets (“I had to reboot the universe,” says Matt Smith sometime in Season 6). Sometimes a fictional character can make us look inside ourselves to try to find what greatness might be there. The Doctor makes many mistakes but he goes for it full-tilt anyway. He’s a hero.

I’m sure of my footing: 

• The first priority in public education should be to provide the support, resources and time.needed for every student to be able to pursue his/her passions and interests. 
• Give kids the freedom to do work that matters to them and to the world. 
• Get rid of standardized testing. 
• The only good curriculum standards are the ones derived from a student’s goals and interests. 

I’m an advocate of the rights of children; I call for building relationships with children based on mutual respect and trust.

I play devil’s advocate with myself more than most people do. (The part of me that must try to understand every side of any argument is part of what makes me an almost decent playwright.) I have enough folks who believe what I believe that I don’t feel I’m out on a limb. I’ve done my homework and when all’s said and done....I’m really quite cock-sure that I’m right about education.

A little humility is called for...even the Doctor, when he chose to die for Wilf, an ordinary man, said “It would be my honor.” 

While not everyone has done the homework I’ve done, I have not had their experiences in life. Everyone deserves to be listened to. Nobody’s experience should be dismissed. I get very excited by the possibilities I’ve been exposed to; great ideas that yield great results for kids, and I want everyone to see what I see. And I get impatient with people -- I don’t want another generation to have to live under the heel of the education industrial complex. So my emotions get in the way of a discipline of careful listening to what others have to contribute, when it runs counter to my own ideas. That's why the Doctor's companions are there -- to bring him up short, and back down to earth.

I work on that. I can’t help who I am. High passion, high intensity, constant work.

I want to be great at doing good. Truth, justice, fairness. A better life for children. A better future for us all. 

We can do it. Trust me. I’m the Doctor.

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Extreme?

by Lisa Cooley and Lindy Davies

I’m sure there are a lot of folks around me who wonder why I stick to views on education that  seem so extreme. It is the most unlikely eventuality that I will ever see my vision of education become reality. So why fight for what seems so far afield from the mainstream? Why not stick to what is do-able, and maybe makes life a little better for students?

It just doesn’t make any sense to me to be in this fight for anything but what is right.  

Does an “extreme” viewpoint only seem that way because the way things are is so skewed that you don’t notice how wrong it is?

• Individuality or intrinsic differences between students should play little or no role in their educations. This will best prepare them for a future world that needs great ideas, creativity and innovation.
• An approved, standard course of study.is the  best preparation for success in a constantly-changing global community.
• A regimented, authority-driven school experience will yield connected, intelligent and compassionate kids.
• With the new technological horizons that are now open to us, it is especially important to limit student connectivity.
• The best use of the knowledge, experience and instincts of teachers is to make sure that measurable quanta of knowledge are efficiently installed in each student.

These statements represent the status quo in education today. Rejection is the only appropriate response. Once we target a reasonable and appropriate destination, we can chuck the solutions that don’t get us there.

• Want innovative kids? That requires freedom of exploration and creativity.
• Want critical thinking? Allow kids to create their own challenges and follow them through.
• Problem-solving your priority? Let kids grapple with the messy world of real-life situations and difficulties.
• Worried about our ability to compete in a global economy? Want to see them collaborate and cooperate? Use our robust technology to get kids talking to and learning from folks following similar interests all over the world.
• Want compassionate kids? Create an environment where kids are in control of their lives, not under the thumb of the constant, inappropriate authority of adults. Connect them to the world through their passions and give them your permission to try to make the world a better place. They’ll take you up on it, every time.
• Want to see our teachers succeed in helping students succeed? Don’t stand between them and their students; let the relationships develop without grinding the gears on test-prep and enforcement of standards.

As Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia says, “If you challenge kids to do real work that matters, you better be prepared to get out of their way.”

Who’s in charge here?

Someone always benefits from new approaches, new ideas about education. Companies latch onto them, like parasites, bleeding a system for what it’s worth until the next idea comes along. They grab hold of the national education narrative (“the problem in education is that you can’t fire bad teachers” is one) and milk it dry.

The current non-solution solutions are no exception. We read words that seem right and seem to take education in the right direction. Take these words for example:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

Carefully crafted, yes? Pushing all the right buttons? Of course. But the Common Core Standards are not only very expensive to implement....they are also very far afield from what our kids really need. (One glance at the impact that the Common Core Standards and the culture of testing has on special-needs students and English-language learners reveals how extreme -- and inhumane -- we have allowed our education system to become. How do we raise compassionate kids when they observe harshness around them?)

Ordinary people don’t always look under the hood; they don’t see that these “solutions” make a bad situation worse. And publishing companies, testing firms, consultancies, educational data management systems, often represented by honest, well-intentioned educators who seem to know what they’re doing, are all making a tidy profit from not unearthing the real trouble. But like scavengers on roadkill, the profit-makers are always circling public education. We have to look very closely at what they are offering when they take our money.

A simple shift in the workings of a school district, such as to a “standards-based” system of grading, can’t dig out the problems either, even when the shift takes an incredible amount of professional development, structural reorganizing, curricular revamping and money. It's still pushing content at children whether they want it or not, regardless of what really turns their engines on -- and measuring, measuring, measuring.

It still deprives kids of the right to take their own ideas and create something great.

And that system is still subject to high-stakes testing and all the negative pressures that brings to schools. There is no innoculation against that particular disease.

Be extreme. It’s easier than ever!

Extreme is the new normal. Be extreme in response. Accept no solution that doesn’t put students fully in charge of their learning. Insist on a system where kids choose their own goals, their own challenges, and create their own curriculum.

There are always examples of a school or teacher getting it right; but we have to fashion a system where this happens all the time, not by serendipity or happenstance.  It is known that children from well-off, active and involved households are more likely to respond to any educational approach. We need to design a system that isn’t tailor-made to those students who are "easy to teach," but to all students. Even those who are compliant, curious and trustworthy would be better served by an approach to education that wraps itself around the needs of each student.

A top-down, traditional environment is the one we have all experienced; it seems organic; grown from a naturally-existing need. Not so: the current way of organizing schools was imported from Prussia around the turn of the last century and designed to create good factory workers. The fact that this framework still exists is what we all expect to see; it just seems sensible. But it isn’t; it’s extreme.

How do you teach a class full of kids all different things? The logistics alone seem extreme, but it isn’t. It’s possible, it’s do-able, and in the schools that are doing it, it is successful.

What our kids live with every day is so far off-kilter as to make the reasonable seem extreme. It is wrong to accept the sight of kids who have not themselves chosen their educational direction based on who they are and what they themselves most need to learn. It is wrong for the kids, but it is also wrong for a world that needs creative solutions to problems that seem impossible. 

See this, and you can begin to see what might create an education system full of happy learning children.

"Do we want to get to the Moon or not?"

The development of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) was a key breakthrough in the huge task of designing a way to get astronauts to the Moon. For a long time, however, the engineer  who championed the idea -- Dr. John Houbolt -- had a hard time getting anyone to listen to him. Finally, he did what NASA staff were not supposed to do: he jumped ahead in the hierarchy chain. He wrote to George Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator and made his case.

See, he knew that none of the methods for getting to the Moon that were under consideration would work. They would require too much weight in the rocket. He knew the it wouldn’t get off the ground unless it had a lightweight, detachable vehicle designed only for landing on the Moon and taking off again to rendezvous with the Command/Service Module in Lunar orbit.

But the idea of a critical rendezvous so far from Earth was, for a long time, so unthinkable to the NASA guys making the decisions that Houbolt chose to go up the food chain and write a now-famous letter to Seamans.

“Do we want to get to the Moon or not?” he asked. It must have been with some chagrin that Seamans first read this letter. Um, duh? Who is this guy? But Houbolt knew, as Seamans did not, that LOR was the only answer.

Eventually Houbolt’s risky action bore fruit and various characters in the NASA playlist began, one by one, to adopt the idea. We all know how it ended: the bottom half of six different Lunar Modules are now parked on the Moon.

“Do we want to get to the Moon or not?”

It’s a great story; the story of someone who understood something that others could not. People were tying themselves into knots trying to figure this problem out, ignoring the way that would actually get them where they needed to go.

“Do we want to get to the Moon or not?”

A combination of factors might have contributed to the lack of foresight on the part of very smart engineers. The first sentence they heard describing LOR might have violated so many preconceived notions that they felt it would be fruitless to listen to the second or third, and definitely didn’t make it down to the end of the third paragraph, by which they would understand that the first sentence did not, after all, violate anything.

Maybe too many people had a treasured solution that they were trying to make fit into place. Maybe it was ego; maybe everyone wanted to be the one who solved the problem.

Houbolt’s difficulty is similar to that which some education advocates experience -- only the problem becomes greater, and harder to overcome, when there is no clear idea of what our destination is. Increase those test scores, some say; that is the most objective measure of student achievement. For others, the destination is wrapped in jargon: "critical thinking." “Rigor.” “Problem-solving.” “Collaboration.” All those things that come under the nebulous tent of “21st Century Skills:” those attributes in students that we need to develop in order to “stay competitive in a global economy.”

But neither the health and vitality of children’s minds nor bodies are taken into consideration when education is planned in terms of test scores and some ill-defined notion of our future national economic health.

So what is the most desired destination for our education system? My answer is simple: a system where children are given the time, resources and support to pursue their interests and develop their passions; where we see as a result young adults who are intelligent, engaged, and compassionate.

“Do we want to get to the Moon, or not?” was an obnoxious question asked by a low-level engineer. My question is, “Do we want educated kids, or not?”

A rocket equipped for direct ascent to the Moon might never get there. Similarly, if we ignore the ways in which children best learn, we will not get learned humans. But the most popular ideas about education violate what is known about learning, children, neuroscience and motivation.

Children must engage in learning that is most meaningful to them. The simplest way of achieving that is to have them choose their own goals, their own challenges, and create their own curriculum

There is a chance that many readers are already shaking their heads at that statement, crediting the author with naivete or plain old ignorance.

For learning to take place, the motivation must come from inside the mind of the learner; indeed, if it starts anywhere else, we are sacrificing something that is too important: the creative ideas of childhood that will develop into mature intelligence. We are also squandering the greatest asset to learning: innate curiosity. Ideas develop in play; they grow into passion; and develop into purpose. The development of those ideas results in accomplishment, which yields self-respect: the pride of a job well done, the knowledge that one is capable of more, and confidence that is based on real, tangible evidence of ability. It makes use of the genius in all people instead of wasting that genius on learning activities that have no meaning to the learner.

Trusting and respecting kids’ right to open their own doors, choose their own challenges and drive their own learning is not only the best way to get to the Moon, but will result in students who, after 12 years of active learning, have a base of knowledge that is both broad and deep, a connection to the world that is positive and meaningful, and a sense of optimism and hopefulness that is exactly what is needed by future generations. In short, everything that we as adults and parents desperately hope to bring to our children.

It took a daring person to see the solution to the problem of getting to the Moon, and stick to it through dismissal and derision. But Houbolt succeeded, and if we fight for what we know to be true about children and learning, we can do the same.

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.