Cuomo's Dumb Schools Initiative Meets Later In The Week

From State of Politics:

At 1 p.m., the first meeting about the broadband availability enhancement component of the Smart Schools Initiative will be held, Blue Room, second floor, state Capitol.

Seems like Cuomo's "Smart Schools Initiative" could have made Frederick Hess' 10 School Reform Phrases That Should Trigger Your BS Detector list:

Education is filled with jargon, buzzwords, and BS. I've had a lot of fun over the years skewering the inanity that gets bandied about in education research and professional development. Education policy and school reform are rife with their own vapid vocabulary.

It's worth flagging this stuff. Doing so reminds us that fatuous phrases don't make problems go away.  It helps puncture sugarplum visions fueled by hot air. Left unchallenged, pat phrases allow wishful thinking to stand in for messy realities. After all, these fatuous phrases are pervasive. Here are 10 phrases that, when heard, should cause listeners to ask the speaker to explain what he or she means, using words that actually mean something.

"Smart" as applied to "regulation" made it to #8 on the list:

8. "Smart regulation." (You know, as opposed to those championing "dumb regulation." A similar caution also applies to calls for "smart accountability," "smart teacher evaluation," or "smart" anything else. Attaching an adjective doesn't make problems go away.)

Let's add a similar caution to calls for a "Smart Schools Initiative." 

As Hess noted, education is filled with jargon, buzzwords and bullshit.

I would add, education in New York during the Cuomo/Tisch/King Era is REALLY filled with jargon, buzzwords and bullshit.

Rick Hess: Ed Reformers Overreached, Reform Backlash Resulted

Rick Hess in the Daily News today:

Those who follow New York City schools have been witnessing a time-honored ritual — pro-testing school reformers have mightily overreached, inviting pushback that’s now poised to dismantle much of their useful handiwork.

Mayor de Blasio has said that he and his new chancellor, Carmen Fariña, will “do everything in our power to reduce focus on high-stakes testing.” At the press conference where he introduced Fariña, de Blasio said, “[Testing] has taken us down the wrong road and, within limits of state and federal law, we will do all we can to roll back that focus.”

This strident stance is misguided and likely to yield unfortunate results. There’s good reason to regularly test students in reading and math, and to use those results to inform judgments about how well schools and teachers are doing. When it comes to key skills, such tests can illuminate important truths and make it clear if some schools or classrooms are failing certain students.

 ...

All that said, de Blasio and Fariña have tapped into real concerns and raised valid criticisms. However well-intentioned, testing advocates have managed to take a common-sense intuition and pushed it with such reflexive enthusiasm that they’ve created a caricature.

Instead of using reading and math tests as one useful tool, many reformers have made these results the defining measure of school quality. That stance alienates parents and educators who see such an emphasis as narrowing the curriculum and providing a distorted view of school quality.

Last year, Gallup’s annual national survey on education reported that 22% of respondents thought the increased use of testing over the past decade has helped school performance and 36% thought it had hurt. In 2007, the same survey found the public split, 28%-28%.

Meanwhile, reformers have long been hampered by a tendency to overpromise. After suggesting that accountability, charter schooling or now the Common Core standards will spur rapid, profound improvement in schools, they’ve been stuck trying to put a happy face — at best — on much more modest, gradual gains.

All of this has been complicated by reformers’ habit of leaning heavily on federal pressure, first through the No Child Left Behind Act and more recently on the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, to force states and cities to move — even if that meant that policies were pushed forward while still half-baked.

These forces have all combined to transform a promising approach to heightened transparency and accountability into a self-parody that was ripe for blowback. How bad have things gotten? When she accepted the chancellorship, Fariña said, “There are things that need to happen, but they need to happen with people — not to people.”

This unexceptional sentiment was widely regarded as a break with the Bloomberg reforms. Meaning, reformers have seemingly convinced a large swath of the public that they think change happens outside the classroom, and that they believe in doing things “to” people rather than with them.

That’s a clear sign that they’ve driven what was a sensible agenda right off the rails.

Alas, reformers at the New York State level - on the Board of Regents, at the State Education Department, and in the governor's office - continue to do things "to" people rather than with them.

That sentiment was crystallized last week when SED Commissioner John King told the State Senate Education Committee that the the New York State Assembly and Senate have no power to pull the state out of the Common Core State Standards - that's completely in the "purview" of the SED and Regents.

King's arrogance - whether it's talking smack to the Senate Education Committee, calling parents who oppose his reform agenda "special interests" or refusing to do anything with the rising opposition to his reforms other than pay lip service to "flexibility" - is another emblem of the arrogance of the education reform movement and another example of why there is so much growing "blowback" to the reform movement.

Arne Duncan Insults White Suburban Moms, Says Kids Aren't "As Brilliant As They Thought"

I wrote this morning how US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan shows us daily with every word he says how he is an exemplar of the "Best and Brightest" this country has to offer.

Duncan underscored that with this doozy from a speech he gave to state superintendents yesterday:

.@arneduncan says foes of Common Core = white suburban moms who find their "child isn’t as brilliant as they thought" & "that's pretty scary
— Stephanie Simon (@StephanieSimon_) November 15, 2013

And this:

.@arneduncan: backlash over Common Core b/c scores plummet, white suburban moms realize local schools not 'as good as they thought'....
— Stephanie Simon (@StephanieSimon_) November 15, 2013

Do not fear, however - Uncle Arne has a solution for all of this:

to get suburban moms on board w/ Common Core, @arneduncan says remind them their kids are competing globally, need higher standards
— Stephanie Simon (@StephanieSimon_) November 15, 2013

Duncan is playing directly from the Common Core corporate education deformer playbook that Rick Hess exposed to us last year:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action. This will apparently entail three steps:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about.

And this brings us to the crux of the matter. After failing miserably to convince suburban and middle-class voters that reforms designed for dysfunctional urban systems and at-risk kids are good for their children and their schools, Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda. And this conviction has become the happy Kool-Aid that allows would-be reformers to ignore the fact that they're not actually offering to tackle the things (like access to exam-style schools, world language mastery, music and arts instruction, and so on) that suburban parents are passionate about.

Here's the problem Duncan and his merry men and women in corporate reform are facing with this task of convincing suburban moms their kids' schools suck and their kids aren't as smart as mommy and daddy think they are - most people in the suburbs and elsewhere aren't buying it.

That's what NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch are discovering as they go on their Common Core listening tour from Syracuse to East Setauket and meet crowds that are overwhelmingly anti-Common Core and not convinced in the least that the plummeting Common Core test scores in NY State are emblematic of anything other than that the test scores were rigged to plummet.

Duncan can spew his ed deform playbook propaganda to state superintendents and his fellow ed deformers all he wants.

I'm sure he gets plenty of assurances from these folks that he's right and parents in the suburbs will come around soon enough to his way of thinking.

But the evidence is in already as the anti-Common Core movement grows and grows by the month - parents aren't buying the ed deform snake oil Uncle Arne and his fellow corporate ed deformers are selling and I just don't think insulting "white suburban moms" to get on board with the Core is going to save the sinking ed deform ship.

Quite frankly, the Duncan quote that white suburban moms are shocked to find out that their kids aren't "as brilliant as they thought" can be applied to Arne Duncan and his fellow men and women in corporate ed deform.

They are the "Best and Brightest" this country has to offer and they continue to show that with each delusional statement they make and each delusional program or proposal they put into place.

What Happens After Parents Get Their Children's Common Core Test Scores?

Two weeks ago, NYSED Commissioner John King And Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch gleefully released the scores on their vaunted new Common Core tests.

They had been bragging for months that the scores would plummet and, sure enough, they did.

That's what happens when you rig the cut results to show a 30% fall in test scores, which is what the Merry Men and Women in Reform at NYSED and the Regents did.

They set an unreachable benchmark of where they wanted the scores first, then when the tests came back in April, they ensured those tests would hit that benchmark.

The goal was to say that public schools all across the state, in cities and suburbs and rural areas, were failing.

As Rick Hess explained at his Education Week blog, erstwhile education reformers have this dream that they can do to the nation's school districts what they've done to many urban school districts - get the public to believe they are "failing" and call for "reforms" to disrupt the status quo and bring about radical change, the privatization of the school system.

Hess revealed the reformer blueprint in his Education Week post:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action.

This will apparently entail three steps: First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."

And so King and Tisch set about working on step one of the reformer blueprint.

After the RttT legislation gave them their Common Core implementation, they gave tests with cut scores so "rigorous" that they knew what the failing rates were going to be months before they actually gave the tests.

Now they're on to step two - trying to convince the public and especially the parents of children in the school system that schools all over the state are failing and need radical disruptions to solve the myriad problems facing them.

They've brought in the US Secretary of Education to sell their snake oil and gotten some "business leaders" to start a public relations movement to continue the Common Core implementation (not surprisingly, some of those "business leaders" in that p.r. movement stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars off Common Core.)

They're working hard to get to step three, the radical dismantling of one of the last parts of the commons that hasn't yet been privatized - the public school system.

But after years of pushing through their reforms with little opposition other than a few lonely voices protesting that these radical changes to curriculum and teacher evaluations are untested, untried and unpiloted and may do more damage than harm, the reform movement in New York State is starting to get pushback - and not just from the usual progressive educator groups.

As NYC Educator posted yesterday, 25 Republican Assembly members have introduced a bill to withdraw New York State from both the Common Core curriculum movement and Race to the Top mandates.

In addition, the education committee in the State Senate will be holding five hearings around New York to hear the public's response to the radical education reform agenda pushed by John King and NYSED and Merryl Tisch and the Regents.

John Flanagan (R), the chair of that committee, is holding these hearings because he says as a parent he is concerned about some of these reforms, including data collection of student information, the consequences of tying teacher evaluations to test scores, and how the Common Core test scores came about among other things.

Just as opposition to the Common Core movement is rising all around the country on the right, opposition to the Common Core movement here in NY State is rising on the right as well.

Kati Haycock of the Education Trust told the NY Times that education reformers are "terrified" that those on the right and and those on the left will join together to destroy their Common Core curriculum and assessment movement.

That very thing is starting to happen here in NY.

The week after next we will get a big boost to the movement to withdraw the state from Common Core and the Race to the Top mandates when schools release the individual tests scores of students to their parents.

While there has been much hand-wringing and hullabaloo over the plummeting test scores the last few weeks, much of this hand-wringing and hullabaloo has been in the abstract - parents do not know what their own children's scores are yet, they only know how their children's schools and school districts stacked up on the new tests.

Just wait until parents all across the state get the notice that their Little Susies fell from a "4" last time around on the ELA exam to a "2" this time around.

I bet some of those parents are going to remember how Little Susie came home after the tests back in April and said she didn't have enough time to finish the tests and how the questions were so confusing, and they made her feel sick in her stomach because there was a lot of stuff on that test she had never seen before.

Now maybe those parents will buy into the King/Tisch/reformer line that the problem is with schools and teachers and we need radical and disruptive change IMMEDIATELY to solve the education problems these tests scores are emblematic of.

Maybe.

But I'm going to bet that quite a few of those parents are going to instead wonder about the quality of those tests and just how the cut scores got cut the way they did and are going to call their legislators with those very questions.

Diane Ravitch called for NYSED Commissioner King's removal the other day and suggested parents and teachers contact the Regents to demand his removal.

I know of one person who contacted a Regent and heard some jive back about how he isn't ready to support such a radical move - even though this Regent is opposed to many of the reforms currently pushed by King.

The Regents are only subject to public pressure when it comes from legislators, and so it behooves us all to contact our legislators and let them know what we think of the Common Core and the Common Core tests and the APPR teacher evaluation system tied to those tests and all the other radical reforms being pushed out of Albany by John King and Merryl Tisch.

With 25 Republican Assembly members already co-sponsoring a bill to pull New York out of the RttT mandates and the Core, with John Flanagan feeling the need to hold hearings across the state about NYSED's reform agenda, you can bet your legislators are going to listen to what you have to say.

For a long while now, both elected officials and education functionaries have promoted their reform agendas wholly unconcerned with what the public thinks about those agendas.

But as opposition to the Common Core and other radical education reforms ratchets up from both the left and the right, they are more susceptible to public pressure than they have been in the past.

As Haycock said, they're "terrified" right and left will join together to give them a fight they cannot handle - something that is starting to happen in this state.

So what happens to King and Tisch and their reforms in Albany after the state test scores are released to parents in a week and a half?

Well, I doubt they will be removed or resign in disgrace or anything like that, but you can bet parents are going to be outraged over their kids' scores and some of those parents are going to contact their legislators to complain about the state's testing and legislators are going to let NYSED and the Regents know that political pressure from the public is increasing.

The reformers think the release of these test scores is their moment to finally convince the public the system is "failing" and radical changes are needed.

I think they're wrong about that.

I think when parents get the test scores of their own children in a few weeks and see how far the scores have fallen from the year before, they're going to question the education policy of the state and wonder how these tests got developed and scored and they're going to contact their legislators with those questions.

I think when those test scores get released and parents get really angry at their own children's scores, Tisch and King and the rest of the Merry Men and Women in Reform in Albany are going to face a counterattack to their reform movement like they've never seen before.

You can start the ball rolling by contacting your legislators and letting them know what you think about Merryl Tisch, John King, the Common Core curriculum, the test scores King and Tisch rigged and the teacher evaluations tied to those scores.

Here are some contacts:

http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Sheldon-Silver/contact/

http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/

http://www.nysenate.gov/senators

The reformers think this is their time to finish off the public school system.

Let's disabuse them of that fantasy.

Joining together, parents and teachers, people on the right and people on the left, we can do just that.

NYC Passing Rates: 26% ELA, 30% Math

When you rig the exams to give you these kind of outcomes, well, these are the stats you get:

Large numbers of New York students failed reading and math exams last school year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers, and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards. 

Across the city, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the state exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.

...

Under the old exams last year, the city fared better: 47 percent of students passed in English, and 60 percent passed in math. 

Statewide, 31 percent of students passed the exams in reading and math. Last year, 55 percent passed in reading, and 65 percent in math. 

Some educators were taken aback by the steep decline and said they worried the figures would rattle the confidence of students and teachers. 

Chrystina Russell, principal of Global Technology Preparatory in East Harlem, said she did not know what she would tell parents, who will receive scores for their children in late August. At her middle school, which serves a large population of students from poor families, 6.8 percent of students were rated proficient in English, and 9.5 percent in math. Last year, those numbers were 31 percent and 44 percent, respectively. 

“Now we’re going to come out and tell everybody that they’ve accomplished nothing this year and we’ve been peddling backward?” Ms. Russell said. “It’s depressing.”

The purveyors of the Common Core gospel say these tests required deeper analysis and more creative problem-solving skills than the old exams, but as was shown back in April, really what they did is add a whole lot more questions and cut the time given to students to complete the exams.

This is why I have called for the NYSED and the Regents to release the state's 3rd-8th grade ELA and math exams, in their entirety, with the grading rubrics and scoring charts and other methodology, so that parents and the public can see for themselves how the game was rigged.

The education reform establishment in this state, indeed in the nation, wants to blow up the public school system as it is currently constituted and usher in a new era of charterization and privatization.

Raising the standards beyond what is developmentally appropriate for children, then giving more difficult exams with shorter time allotments based upon those standards before teachers were even given the curriculum to try and prepare students, are two of the tools the reformers are using to bring about their Ayn Randian future.

This game was rigged from the start to get to this day - as Rick Hess noted at his blog on Ed Week:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action.

This will apparently entail three steps:

First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing.

Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.)

Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."

Getting parents and the public to embrace "reform" in the suburbs would give reformers the tools they crave to close schools, fire unionized teachers, open charter schools, hire non-unionized at-will employees, and bring all the free market education goodness Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and parts of New York City are enjoying.

But in order to get suburban parents to embrace "reform," they have to convince parents the current state of these schools is abysmal and the current crop of teachers are "failures."

Today is the day that they start that argument, hawking these Common Core tests scores as evidence that drastic and disruptive solutions are needed to fix the problems in the system.

But really, they engineered this crisis and the drop in scores themselves.

You won't see that story in the NY Times or the other corporate-owned media (except for Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post, but that may soon end now that ed deformer Jeff Bezos owns the paper.)

But it is the truth.

Alas, in America, truth matters little.

Money, public relations, and power are what matter - and the deformers have all three on their side.

Daily News Reveals Fifth Grade NY State Test

They really set students, teachers and schools up with these tests:

A concerned educator leaked the Daily News a copy of a new, more challenging state reading exam for fifth-graders, and it’s as much of a doozy as it is controversial.

It’s full of long, dense, off-the-wall nonfiction passages on making wind tunnels, soil formation and studying whales. There are two short stories, both set overseas. And there’s a vague selection from a poem about loneliness that students must interpret before choosing among four answers that contain two arguably correct selections.

Students got 90 minutes to complete the 32-page test, which contained 42 questions based on six written passages.

The News asked testing experts, teachers and parents to analyze the test, which state and city education officials have kept under lock and key. Everyone who saw it was left dumbfounded by the killer questions.

“You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam,” said Tracy Woodall, a stay-at-home mom whose son is a fifth-grader at Public School 1 in the Bronx. “There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

...

The questions on the fifth-grade reading test, designed to test comprehension, were enough to stump a city high-school teacher who reviewed it.

“Have these students had an opportunity to build up to that complexity? The answer is no,” said the teacher, who asked for anonymity for fear of getting sacked. “This test is coming at them like an anvil to their face.”

The problem here is not that the tests have gotten more difficult and complex.

 

The problem is that they have gotten more difficult and complex overnight, without the support for teachers and schools to help students master this material or level of difficulty and complexity.

 

The tests got difficult overnight without the added supports because there is a political agenda behind the tests.

 

The corporate education reformers are trying to use this tests to show how "failing" all the schools in the state are - not just schools in inner cities, which have been their favorite targets so far, but also schools in far wealthier suburbs like Scarsdale and Garden City.

 

When the dramatically lower scores from these tests come in, they're going to go on an extended p.r. campaign to convince parents and voters around the state that we need drastic changes to the public schools all over the state.

 

Rick Hess laid out the blueprint for this agenda in his  Common Core Kool Aid blog post at Education Week:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action. This will apparently entail three steps:

 First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about.

And this brings us to the crux of the matter. After failing miserably to convince suburban and middle-class voters that reforms designed for dysfunctional urban systems and at-risk kids are good for their children and their schools, Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda.

All of these New York State Common Core tests need to be made public so that when these scores come down and they're as bad as Merryl Tisch and John King and the rest of education reform true believers want them to be, we can analyze just how accurate a gauge of student, teacher and school performance they are.

Because it is both unfair and unethical to raise test levels by two or three grade levels overnight without the needed supports and use those scores as a bludgeon against students, teachers and schools.

 

Parents know this as well as teachers, even if the education reformers in the political, education and media worlds refuse to acknowledge this.

And that's the last point I want to hit on here.

The media has hammered people who point out the problems with these tests as "whiners" who are afraid of accountability, teachers worried about having their performances exposed as lacking, parents worried that their "little darlings" (as one Daily News editorial termed children) will be exposed as not as "smart" as the parents think they are.

But this is a straw man argument.

What critics of these tests are most pointedly saying in their criticism is that these tests have been set-ups to fail students, teachers and schools.  

The tests were given to students before the curriculum was fully developed and given to teachers, so students are being tested on material they have not seen before or a level of difficulty and complexity they are not used to.

There was no way they could do well on these tests.

As one parent told the Daily News, “You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam...There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

 

Indeed.

 

And that is the whole point of these vaunted new Common Core tests - to fail the children, the teachers, the administrators and the schools and, as Rick Hess put it, "shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action" and "scare these voters into embracing the 'reform' agenda."

 

The fix is in, the tests were rigged, and the propaganda campaign is in full swing.

 

That's why these tests need to be released by the state, if not voluntarily, then by court order.

 

There are enough high stakes attached to them that I do not see how the NYSED, the Regents, or Pearson can keep them secret.

 

Not when they start using these test scores to fire teachers and close schools.

Rick Hess Slings Some Horse@#$%

Conservative Rick Hess analyzes the president's SOTU address and says that Obama should have said that the unemployment problem could be solved by addressing "worker productivity".

Huh?

Worker productivity of the last twenty years is up way above worker pay. In addition, one of the reasons there is an unemployment problem in the first place is because worker productivity is up so much that employers have been able to get by without adding new workers because they can squeeze current ones they have for all their worth.

Don't believe me? Here's the Kaplan Test Prep Post on that:

When workers become more efficient, it's normally a good thing. But lately, it has acted as a powerful brake on job creation. And the question of whether the recent surge in productivity has run its course is the key to whether job growth is finally poised to take off.

One of the great surprises of the economic downturn that began 27 months ago is this: Businesses are producing only 3 percent fewer goods and services than they were at the end of 2007, yet Americans are working nearly 10 percent fewer hours because of a mix of layoffs and cutbacks in the workweek.

That means high-level gains in productivity -- which in the long run is the key to a higher standard of living but in the short run contributes to sky-high unemployment. So long as employers can squeeze dramatically higher output from every worker, they won't need to hire again despite the growing economy.

...

the question of what caused the burst in workers' efficiency is one of the great unanswered questions of the expansion and has huge stakes for the economy over the coming year.

"It is an episode that we're going to -- we, economists in general -- are going to want to understand better and look at for a long time," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said at a hearing last week in which he described the productivity gains as "extraordinary" and acknowledged he had not foreseen them.

Businesses have certainly not been investing in new equipment that might enable workers to be more efficient -- capital expenditures plummeted during the recession and are rebounding slowly. And the structural shifts occurring in the economy are so profound that one would expect productivity to be lower, rather than higher, as people need new training to work in parts of the economy that are growing, such as exports and the clean-energy sector.

So what's happening? As best as anyone can guess, the crisis that began in 2007 and deepened in 2008 caused both businesses and workers to panic. Companies cut even more staff than the decrease in demand for their products would warrant. They were hoarding cash, fearful that they wouldn't have access to capital down the road.

When demand for their products leveled off in the middle of last year, the companies could have stopped cutting jobs or even hired people back. But they didn't -- payrolls have continued declining.

Instead companies squeezed more work out of remaining employees, accounting for a 3.8 percent boost in worker productivity in 2009, the best in seven years. Which raises the question: Why couldn't companies have achieved those gains back when the economy was in better shape? The answer to that may lie on the other side of the equation -- employees.

Workers were in a panic of their own in 2009. Fearful of losing their jobs, people seem to have become more willing to stretch themselves to the limit to get more done in any given hour of work. And they have been tolerant of furloughs and cutbacks in hours, which in better times would drive them to find a new employer. This has given companies the leeway to cut back without the fear of losing valuable employees for good.

So tell me, Mr. Hess, how does making American workers more productive than they already are solve unemployment when part of the problem is productivity?