Exercises in Stifling Initiative

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Imagine that you wanted to slowly kill public education underfund schools so that they can’t keep up with operational costs, will struggle to meet educational mandates, and will have to reduce personnel (bonus: fewer union members!) maintain claims about ‘fiscal accountability’ and future revenue concerns, even when they require ignoring strong revenue generation and projections reduce existing revenue streams in order to bolster claims of fiscal hardship (bonus: less government!) employ bait-and-switch funding mechanisms that supplant rather than supplement and/or disappear at the last minute ignore legal requirements to timely establish school funding levels that would allow districts to adequately plan and budget frequently change state standards and assessments and/or make them more difficult so that educators and students struggle to keep up and have less chance of hitting the moving targets use selective data (say, NAEP scores) to manufacture educational crises that feed your rhetoric of public school failure create school grading and ranking schemes that shame struggling schools, demoralize the educators within them, and alarm parents implement teacher evaluation schemes that are guaranteed to be unfair, demoralize educators, and confuse the public Constantly Worried About How Others Perceive Us Everyone is trying to look good in the eyes of others. Everyone stresses out about how they look, how they’re perceived, whether people think they’re awesome or good people.   This constant worry about how we’re perceived in the eyes of others can cause us to struggle. We worry about having the right clothes, about how our bodies look, how our hair looks (or the lack of hair, in my case), whether people will laugh at our writing, whether someone will “like” our photos or posts. We can tell ourselves that “other people’s opinions don’t matter” or “no one is really thinking about us” but it won’t stop our brains from worrying about it. Things I wonder after reading Governor Terry Branstad’s recent comments on teacher leadership I wonder how many actual examples the Governor can provide of teacher leaders “revolutionizing what’s happening in classrooms across Iowa.” I wonder if the Governor realizes that helping “Iowa again [to] be a national leader, known for giving our students a globally competitive education” probably isn’t going to happen with reduced school district and AEA budgets, declining educator morale, and top-down leadership that fails to reflect both the voice and expertise of the front-line educators who are charged with returning Iowa to greatness. ( Revolutionizing cuts both ways - pun intended ) Why Ohio can’t reduce student testing load The Obama administration is trying to have it both ways. It wants fewer tests but isn’t willing to give up on test-based teacher evaluations. Meaning that, alas, it has failed this test. There’s no diagnostic value in locked-down summative assessments  Children today in third grade are taking eight hours of testing. They’re spending more time taking tests than people taking the bar exam.  Results of the test come back four to six months later.  All they get is a score and a ranking. The teachers can’t see the item analysis. They can’t see what the kids got wrong. They’re getting no instructional gain, no possibility of improvement for the kids, because there’s no value to the test. They have no diagnostic value. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/10-year-old-i-want-to-know-why-after-vacation-i-have-to-take-test-after-test-after-test/2012/04/10/gIQA1sOz8S_blog.html ( Be quiet and take your punishment ) Assessing messy learning  We focus in schools on that which is quantifiable when, I think, our real value as places of learning rests in that messy stuff that isn’t.