“One of the consequences of the current reform emphasis is that it’s taken the focus away from one of the central roles of schooling in a diverse society, and that is as places that produce citizens with a deep commitment to democratic ideals.

In the 1920s, our schools were places that forged this common identity in a diverse society and we need to return our schools to being places of forging a complex American identity with a commitment to the things that make us a country, which are *ideas*, not blood.”

Thanks again for putting together the video and the slides.

– Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeysf)

I think you read those posts accurately, but any post with an ID in the double- or even triple-digits was written nearly ten years ago. There are other posts I’ve thought about deleting but which I leave around a) to illustrate one teacher’s process of change and b) to remind myself to chill out a little bit and remember that ten years from now I may regard my most cherished ideas as more jackassery.

My current state of mind:

• The CCSS for math are quite a lot better than the standards I labored under in California for six years. I’m glad we adopted them. (See Andrew Stadel’s comparison.)
• I’m convinced by existing research on merit pay that it won’t achieve its goals while also having negative knock-on effects.
• I want good assessments that measure things we should care about. The current SBAC preview test looks encouraging.
• Those tests shouldn’t account for more than a small fraction (say 20%) of the decision to retain or fire a teacher. They’re too unstable, with teachers ranking great one year and ranking terrible the next. I don’t trust them.

Might change my mind tomorrow, though.

This is my mental picture as of now:

There is a controversial “accountability” issue diving the education world into two camps. I’m not entirely sure yet who I agree with.

The first camp liked the message of “Waiting for Superman,” and they believe in a Michelle-Rhee-like approach to dealing with bad teachers and bad schools. That is, carry out standardized testing to see how everyone is doing, then pay them accordingly – and if they do very badly, fire the teacher or close the school. This way teachers and schools are held accountable for doing their jobs, and lazy/awful teachers can’t get away with getting paid while their kids suffer.

The second camp includes people like Diane Ravitch and Pasi Sahlberg, and the entire nation of Finland. They believe that the way to improve teaching is to try to make it a more attractive and respected profession (with higher pay, union membership, lots of teacher support, and higher barriers to entry), and then more young, smart, motivated people will try to become teachers, for the same reason they try to become doctors now. This camp opposes merit pay and high-stakes tests, on the basis that having to “teach to the test” impairs teaching, and that teachers will do better if they are trusted rather than subjected to frequent evaluation.

I had mentally placed you in Camp One because of these posts from years past:

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(Although, upon further review, that second one is about an *opt-in* merit pay system.)

I put Uri Treisman in Camp Two because of the slide with “Campbell’s Law,” where he said, “High-stakes assessment produces compulsive focus on narrow parts of schooling.” Also, his claim that poverty rather than teaching is the biggest cause of kids’ academic failure seemed characteristic of the second camp, who frequently blame No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top for using high-stakes testing to justify taking money away from poor schools.

But in reality, people’s positions on this are probably too complex to be expressed in a single bit, and I shouldn’t be pasting Camp One and Camp Two labels on people right and left. What’s your actual stance?

(The answer will not affect my high level of respect for you – not that you should care about how much an unknown internet person respects you, because that’s not healthy.)

+10 Levelheaded, Nonpartisan Cool Person Points for you!