NYSED Commissioner John King Vows To Bring The Chaos, Confusion & Anxiety Of New York's Common Core Roll-Out To A National Audience

From Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY:

ALBANY—Outgoing state education commissioner John King hopes to help school leaders in other states navigate the difficult transition to the Common Core standards and related standardized testing in his new position as the second-highest ranking official in the U.S. Department of Education.

Two years ago, under King’s leadership, New York became the second state to begin testing students on material aligned to the more difficult math and English language arts standards. New York launched the new assessments years ahead of most other states, which will begin administering the tougher exams this spring.

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“In some ways, the hardest part of the transition is when you’ve given that first set of assessments that reflect higher standards and the state has to confront lower scores and the reality that there’s such a large gap between where we are and where we need to be,” King said during an exclusive interview with Capital. “I’ve encouraged my colleagues to do the best they can to prepare parents, communities, the public for those lower scores. We certainly tried to do that in New York and most importantly pointed to what it means: It isn’t to say that students learned less during that school year but rather to say that this is a realistic picture of where we are relative to college and career readiness.

 “It is a place where I hope that I can be helpful, certainly to my colleagues around the country,” he said.

Oh, yeah, John, you'll be extremely helpful to your colleagues around the country as they see what NOT to do as they rollout out Common Core and the attendant tests that come with the standards.

It was Governor Cuomo who characterized the implementation of Common Core by John King's NYSED as "massive confusion, massive anxiety and massive chaos all across the state."

Parents and teachers across the state criticized King and his NYSED, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and her Board of Regents, over the mess that is Common Core and the Common Core tests in New York.

King refused to accept any of the criticism and responded with his own passive aggressive hostility, first canceling future town halls with parents, then sitting stone-faced through rescheduled ones after Regents Chancellor Tisch forced him to attend them.

The LoHud editorial board described King's engagement with parents and teachers at these forums:

For many in the Lower Hudson Valley, a lasting image of outgoing Education Commissioner John King will be of him sitting impassively at Port Chester Middle School in late 2013. The school auditorium was packed with hundreds of parents, teachers and others. Speaker after speaker stood up to decry the rapid rollout of the Common Core standards and new state tests. King appeared to listen, but said little and gave no ground. Most importantly, he didn't show a pinch of interest in connecting with parents, acknowledging their concerns or even making them feel as if they had been heard.

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The Port Chester forum came shortly after King had canceled another series of statewide forums, claiming they had been co-opted by "special interests." To John King, anyone who questions or criticizes the state's top-down education "reform" agenda is an outsider who is not committed to seeing kids learn. Parents and educators who find flaws in sweeping curriculum and teacher evaluation changes are portrayed as lazy, excuse-making haters.

 This isn't the case, of course. Many parents and educators in this region have offered reasonable, passionate and often convincing arguments against the growing state focus on testing, data-crunching, and evaluating teachers with a formula that is easily picked apart. But King has not been willing to engage his critics. This position has enraged many and created a bizarre stare-down between the state Education Department and many school districts that are supposed to be part of the same team.

Given his track record of failure here in New York State as education commissioner, the only "help" King can provide other education leaders around the state is as a symbol of hubris, overreach and incompetence.

That is, unless the rest of the country wants the "massive confusion, massive anxiety and massive chaos all across the state" that King brought here to New York.

And that's pro-Common Core, pro-testing Andrew Cuomo characterizing King's CCSS implementation that way, not some member of the opt-out movement or other critic of education reform policy.

The Arrogance, Hubris And Pathology Of The Education Reform Movement

I want to play a game.

I'm going to list education reformers from different professions.

See if you can figure out what they all have in common:

Oligarchs: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, various members of the Walton Family, Merryl Tisch, hedge fundies backing DFER, StudentsFirst, etc.

Politicians: Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, George W Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, Cory Booker, Kevin Johnson

Political functionaries: Joel Klein, John King, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Kaya Henderson, Cami Anderson, John White, David Coleman, Chris Cerf, Tony Bennett, John Deasy

Charter entrepreneurs: Eva Moskowitz, Steve Perry, David Levin, Andre Agassi, Pitbull

Celebrities who publicly identify as education reformers: Bill Cosby, John Legend, Isiah Thomas

Media members who publicly identify as education reformers: Joe Scarborough and the entire cast of the Morning Joe Clown Show, a good part of the NY Times columnist corner (Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Bruni), Jonathan Alter, Campbell Brown

That's just a partial list above - I know there are a whole host of names of reformers from all the categories I've missed (you can add the names in the comments section of the post.)

They are all different people with different personalities and different experiences from different walks of life.

But they all share one thing besides an interest in education reform.

And that's hubris, arrogance and certitude that they are RIGHT.

What is it about education reformers that they can't ever admit to being wrong?

John King never makes mistakes at NYSED, nor Merryl Tisch at the Board of Regents, even when they hand over a charter school to a con man who has lied about everything on his resume except for his birthday.

Andrew Cuomo never makes mistakes either, not with Common Core (which he assures us is great if only the NYSED and Regents would implement it better) nor with his APPR teacher evaluation (which only needs to be "strengthened" to ensure more teachers are fired to make it better.)

Barack Obama never makes mistakes, which is why he wants his education reforms enshrined into law well past the sunset of his administration (No Child Left Behind waivers are going to try and maintain the Obama deforms into 2019.)

Eva Moskowitz is so right that she refuses to allow anybody to audit her charter network if she can help it.

David Coleman knows everything about everything.

Michael Bloomberg is so egocentric he needs to put his name on everything he owns.

Go through the list - find me a reformer who isn't arrogant or hubristic.

Then go through the list and count how many narcissists and sociopaths are on it.

When the people behind the education reform movement are such an unsavory lot of sociopaths, narcissists, and pathological know-it-all's, can there be anything good that comes from that movement?

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.

How Come The UFT Takes A Hit For Backing Thompson, But Merryl Tisch Doesn't?

The UFT has been beaten up in the press for backing Bill Thompson for mayor.

Given how Michael Mulgrew bragged that the UFT doesn't "pick winners," they "make winners," and how the next mayor was going to have to go through 52 Broadway in order to reach City Hall, I can understand why he and the UFT leadership have been beaten up in the press for Thompson's loss.

But strangely enough, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who also backed Thompson for mayor and co-chaired his campaign, has not taken any flack for her support of Thompson.

I know Mulgrew's hubris has brought about much of the criticism the UFT is getting over the failure to, once again, pick a winning mayoral candidate.

Ms. Tisch did not brag about making Thompson a winner, so perhaps that's why she's being cut some slack.

But if the UFT is, once again, one of the "political losers of the week" for backing a losing candidate, shouldn't Tisch, as Thompson's campaign co-chair, be one too?

Education Reformers And Hubris

Valerie Strauss reports some members of the GOP in Florida want the state to pull out of the PARCC consortium:

Florida had joined the PARCC consortium but now, Senate President Don Gaetz and Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, both Republicans, are urging Bennett to withdraw. The letter cites numerous problems with the PARCC, including cost and security as well as these points:

*PARCC assessments will take 20 days of testing plus extra time for students to “demonstrate knowledge and skills,” eating up more instructional time than does the current testing regime in the state, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

*PARCC exams will all be given on the computer, but no district in the state yet has the required amount.

*PARCC “does not have a plan for the timely return of assessment data” that is supposed to be used to provide teachers with information on their students, to determine whether a student can be promoted or put in remedial classes, and to evaluate teachers.

(It is worth noting that critics of the process by which the Core was developed and implemented have long warned about the development of these problems, but reformers went ahead anyway without thinking through all of the ramifications of their rushed actions.)

I think reformers went along with the PARCC testing plan because they figured once the train left the station, it couldn't be brought back. 

But they were wrong.

And as the general public becomes more aware of the problems inherent in the Common Core and the testing consortia plans, the reform train is slowing down.

We're not at the point yet where it's being brought back to the station, but the half-baked job reformers did on their supposed "state of the art" CC assessments may get us back there just yet.

By pushing through so many changes so fast because they had the political muscle to do so, reformers have sowed the seeds of destruction of both the Core and the testing consortia.

There are so many problems and resistance is increasing.

Perhaps we're lucky the reform movement is as arrogant as it is.

Remember what we learn about hubris from the Greeks.

NY Daily News: John Sampson To Be Indicted In State Corruption Probe

First DFER-favorite Malcolm Smith went down on corruption charges - now the Daily News reports that another DFER-favorite, State Senator John Sampson has also been ensnared in the criminal probe:

A prominent Brooklyn state senator is the latest politician snared in a long-running federal corruption probe, with charges expected against him this week, the Daily News has learned.

Sen. John Sampson (D-Brooklyn), once among Albany’s most powerful politicians, is the senator identified in court papers as asking ex-Sen. Shirley Huntley (D-Queens) to wield her influence on behalf of a businessman holding a Kennedy Airport lease in March 2012.

The businessman wanted to expand his lease, and Huntley arranged for him to meet with Port Authority officials, according to sources familiar with the case.

She allegedly took $1,000 in bribes, court papers state — and then wore a wire to record meetings with seven elected officials while working as a federal informant.

According to the sources, the FBI is examining a $100,000 “loan” to Sampson from one of his legal clients, Queens businessman Edul Ahmad, who is charged with mortgage fraud in an unrelated case.
Ahmad also delivered a $40,000 “loan” to U.S. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-Queens) in a deal first exposed by The News.

...

One of Sampson’s allies when the Democrats briefly had control of the Senate is Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens), who was busted in April for trying to bribe his way on to the GOP line in the city’s mayoral race.

Smith has denied any wrongdoing
.
Sampson was expected in federal court later this week as the latest big catch in a political corruption probe.

We're going to take a look in just a bit at all the politicians with connections to the Democrats For Education Reform who have been indicted on criminal charges, convicted on criminal charges or had to resign their offices due to scandal.

Sampson, if the Daily News story is true, seems to be the latest.

POSTSCRIPT: I should note that the DFERs once targeted Shirley Huntley, the disgraced former state senator who seems to have helped ensnare Sampson in the probe, in a primary once because she was perceived as being "anti-charter."

Of Course Online High Stakes Tests Are Going To Be A Mess

I don't know why anyone in power in the education world would think moving to all-online high stakes standardized tests by 2014-2015 would go smoothly.

This Education Week article says education and political officials have had their confidence shaken by a recent spate of online testing failures.

That means these people were once confident all-online testing could be carried off relatively problem-free.

Clearly these boys and girls have never used NYCDOE bandwidth to check their email at High Noon when it takes ten minutes for each screen to load.

I never develop a lesson for class that relies solely on the Internet.

I learned that lesson when I couldn't get a film I needed for one class to stream for more than 15 seconds at a time before it stopped running.

It's difficult to run a lesson about the differences between a play text and a film adaptation when you have to re-enact the film version with hand puppets.

If I, a lowly classroom teacher lacking an Ivy League degree and too stupid to have already fled the classroom and gone into policy with the TFAers, have learned that an over-reliance on technology in the classroom without a non-tech back-up is a problem, how come the geniuses running the schools systems around the country haven't learned that lesson yet?

Is it because these people believe their own pro-tech propaganda rather than the reality of their own experiences with technology?

Are they blinded by their own optimism?

Or do they figure once the online testing juggernaut starts rolling, nothing - not even a rash of online failures - can stop it?

I dunno, it's hard to get into the fevered minds of the education reform/online testing pom-pom crowd and figure out what's going on in there.

But if the reformers don't figure out a way to get these tests rolled out without major difficulties, they are going to find their vaunted new reforms - the ones they worked so hard to shove down the throats of people in 45 different states - are going to go the way of the abacus.

In fact, given how bad the online testing has been, the abacus and other implements of an age long gone just may come back:

John Althardt, a spokesman for the 30,000-student Indianapolis public schools, said students in 50 buildings experienced testing disruptions, and the district was just focusing on getting through the testing cycle before thinking about how to proceed in the future.

“Some of our folks would say they’re ready to go back and use stone tablets at this point,” Mr. Althardt said. 

I wonder who has that stone tablet contract for schools these days?

Rumsfeld Wants Kudos For Iraq War Screw-Ups

Unfreakingbelievable:

As noted earlier, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, marking a war that saw up to 134,000 Iraqi civilians killed and has cost the U.S. $2 trillion and counting, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tweeted that “all who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

So glad Gates Foundation Education Week decided to go to Rummy to get "leadership lessons".

Apparently one Rumsfeld can pass along is how to be a clueless asshole.

All those deaths, all that money wasted, the car bombs are STILL going off in Iraq - and Rumsfeld wants a pat on the back for a "job well done!"

You can't make this stuff up.

I don't know what's worse - Rumsfeld wanting a pat on the back for the Iraq war or Gates Foundation Education Week thinking he'd be a good go-to for "leadership lessons."

So Much For The Experts

Harold Meyerson on the lessons that the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe in Japan bring:

The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 killed about a fifth of the city’s 200,000 residents and leveled 85 percent of its buildings, including almost every major church — on a church holiday, when they were packed with parishioners. It also shook 18th-century philosophers to the core. “Candide,” Voltaire’s comic polemic against the belief that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, was written in the quake’s aftermath, as Voltaire was abandoning any notion of godly oversight of the world’s affairs. The young Immanuel Kant was sufficiently upset to research and write one of the first books ever on the causes of quakes, before he turned to his life’s work of creating ethical codes that functioned in both the presence and absence of God.

Today, the quake, tsunami and, most particularly, the potential of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan should weaken at least one of our own deeply rooted faiths — in our own infallibility. Consider, for a moment, all the systems that the experts said had been rendered safe, foolproof and immune to disaster, and that nonetheless crashed during the past three years. There was the financial system, an assemblage of immense wagers on all manner of things, which an array of mathematicians and economists assured us could not possibly come tumbling down. There was deep-water oil drilling, which the oil companies’ geologists, among others, insisted could not possibly result in a cataclysmic spill. And today, there are nuclear power plants, safeguarded, their engineers have told us, against the oh-so-remote possibilities of meltdowns.

These assurances — at least, most of them — were not given in bad faith. Wall Street’s quants genuinely believed that they had erected a stable system, as did the geologists and the nuclear engineers. The equations were elegant; things penciled out. At long last, humankind had triumphed over risk.

Except when it hadn’t.

What all these wizards did not factor in was that these were all just as much human and social systems as they were mathematical. Behind the equations were human and social assumptions, rooted in such human and social impulses as greed, denial and hubris.

The Great Gates tells us he has solved the riddle of teaching and education and will ensure that all students learn from "great teachers" if only the country will accept Gates Foundation-sponsored evaluation systems to rate teachers by value-added assessments.

Except that the tests are badly written, they're graded by $10 an hour temps, and the value-added systems used to grade teachers have margins of error between 12%-35%.

Just like the financial system is safe from risk, nuclear power plants are modernized and immune from major catastrophe and oil rigs never leak, the modern education reform movement has the future of students all mapped out for success - if only we would all listen to them.

Greed, denial, and hubris indeed.