Unsurprisingly, the adoption of common educational standards is opposed by some hard-liners on the educational left. The Common Core’s call for coherent, content-based math and literacy standards threatens to undo the watered-down version of progressive education thinking that has dominated the public schools over the past half-century… Much more puzzling has been the fervid opposition to the Common Core by some conservatives, including tea party activists, several free-market think tanks and, most recently, the Republican National Committee. The most frequently repeated complaint from the right is that states were pressured (or bribed) by the Obama administration to sign on to the Common Core through the billions of dollars handed out by the administration’s Race to The Top competition. (Common Core was one of the education reforms that helped states qualify for Race to the Top grants.) Conservative critics say this was an unlawful federal intrusion into a policy area reserved to the states by the Constitution.

These claims do not stand up to close scrutiny. The Common Core Standards were not written by the federal government, but by a committee selected by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The committee’s efforts were backed financially by several private foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is constitutional federalism at its best. The five states that declined to adopt the standards were not punished or sanctioned by the federal government. Conservative Gov. Mitch Daniels in Indiana, for example, refused to apply for Race to the Top funds, but he supported the Common Core because he understood they were the right thing to do for school children.

For most states—which have lacked demanding standards for years—the Common Core represents a remarkable advance in rigor and academic content. Since the standards call for a coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum, those states that have signed on to the Common Core are now having a serious discussion about the specific subject matter that must be taught in the classroom. This is a discussion that’s been neglected for almost half a century. Some conservatives want to continue trying to bring down the whole edifice of the Common Core, thereby returning public education to the curricular wasteland that has prevailed up to now. Wouldn’t it be more constructive to participate in the conversation about how to make the standards and the academic content taught in American classrooms even better?

Sol Stern and former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, in the Wall Street Journal, calling out movement conservatives who complain about low-quality education, yet oppose the implementation of Common Core standards. Not that many of them are offering compelling (or honest) reasons against doing so.

When your primary contribution to urban education is the explanation as to why our kids can’t be educated it’s time for you to retire… When all is said and done, we will be judged by what we’ve done for kids not what we said kids can’t do.

Dr. Steve Perry, on Twitter, reminding all of us to be fire walkers for our children, the subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast.

A lot of students thought if they don’t pass [graduate from ROADS Charter School 2 in New York City] that’s OK, I’ll just get my GED. I said guys, a GED is four years of high school crammed into a two-day test. If you’re at a fourth-grade reading level, you’re not going to pass. They’re not going to get angry if someone says you need support that isn’t high school work. They’re tired of people lying to them and giving them work that just keeps them busy in class.

Seth Litt, Principal of ROADS Charter School 2 in the South Bronx section of the Big Apple (which is profiled on GothamSchools), pointing out the need for teachers and school leaders to do more than damn children with low expectations.

Districts only improve if their own leaders are determined to make that happen, and that’s far too rare a situation in American education. They only respond to competition—that is, respond constructively to competition—if they’re well led, not brain-dead, and not completely entangled in their own bureaucratics, contracts, and governance malfunctions. Let’s assume that most bad districts are going to stay bad. Then the job of serious reformers… is to give kids every possible exit from them into something better. Helping an entire school to extricate itself from the dysfunctional system is surely one such strategy. Instead of pooh-poohing it, how about we put it on the list of possibilities, wish it well, and do our damnedest to help it succeed as often as possible?

Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Checker Finn, imploring fellow Beltway school reformers to ditch their myopia and embrace Parent Trigger laws that allow families to transform failing schools (and expand school choice) within their own neighborhoods.

What does a great teacher have in common with Kobe Bryant? They’re both always doing the work to become even better.

One of biggest problems with the nation’s system for recruiting, training, compensating, and evaluation teachers is that it does little to actually identify who is a high quality teacher and what makes them do so well in helping kids succeed. The current approach to teacher credentialing, in particular, does little to assure districts and other school operators that the teachers coming into classrooms are capable of improving student achievement and is not geared toward identifying or rewarding good and great instruction. And while new teacher evaluation systems using objective student test score growth data will help identify good and great teachers (as well as separate low-quality instructors from the pack), they are only one step in learning more about what makes high-quality teachers what they are. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Los Angeles teacher Peter D. Ford III offers a few insights on what makes high-quality teachers what they are. Read, consider, and offer your own perspectives.

As the year draws to a close, and I read articles about teacher quality, I ask myself constantly, “What makes a great teacher?” In California the credentialing process has become a procedural marathon; there either isn’t enough, or the right data gathered to determine if it raises student learning for all children. Yet, there are obviously credentialed teachers in classrooms who are not serving children, so there must be other factors that determine teacher quality that the credential process neither identifies nor requires. When I think of the great teachers with whom I’ve worked, there are three key things I have seen.

Great teachers have unconditional commitment to children. They commit themselves to children as if they were their own. A great parent is not a child’s friend in the peer sense, but indeed is someone who does not lead a child to danger and devotes themselves totally to that child’s welfare. When a child accepts that commitment they will either perform their best or at least appreciate the effort, and in time respect you even more. As long as there are people, young people particularly, you cannot treat teaching as ‘just a job’ or students as ‘data points.’ Often, the best people for judging this commitment are the students themselves.

High quality teachers also have subject matter passion. Knowing your subject is a given; great teachers breath, eat, and sleep their subject in all they do. They can find it in all aspects of life, and infuse that into their curriculum. When you can turn a faux pas into a poem, a social conversation into a math problem, or connect a student’s endeavor to an historical moment or person, students will learn in your classroom, and learn better when they leave your classroom.

Finally, great teachers engage in continuous improvement. W. Edwards Deming  was the father of it, the Japanese have a wonderful word for it: Kaizen. Great teachers are never satisfied, always seeking to improve their pedagogy. Two of the greatest Los Angeles Lakers and NBA basketball players, Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant, as they matured their games evolved to remain competitive; continuously improving is why partly they have 10 rings between them. While teachers may have certain curricular activities they do all the time – the same way a great orchestra will always perform Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – a great teacher will work to make even that repetitive event a better learning experience for students.

I don’t think there’s a teacher evaluation rubric or teacher credentialing process anywhere that can capture the full extent of these qualities. Just like an NFL rookie, you’d need to sign a new teacher to a 3-5 year contract and assess 3-5 years of their work to even get a glimpse of these qualities. Ultimately it’s the ‘customer’ who’s the best judge of a teacher’s effort and performance. Some of them won’t recognize it until they have left their class. Personally the best affirmation of my effort has been former students who come to recognize and thank me for my effort long after leaving my class; it’s not the ‘A’ or ‘B’ students whose words I appreciate most, but that ‘C’ or less student in whom that seed finally blossomed.

Teaching is hard; identifying, developing, and nurturing great ones for the students who need them most is even harder.

One of the few questions that never get considered in efforts to advance the reform of American public education is the importance of building long-lasting connections between children and schools — especially with teachers and school leaders. Such ties can help our children stay on the track to graduation and to fulfilling their economic and social destinies long after they left individual classrooms in a particular school. At the same time, those children can help their peers by helping teachers and school leaders recognize what they have done well in improving student achievement, as well as what challenges they need to address to help more kids down the road. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Steve Evangelista, the cofounder of the Harlem Link Charter School in New York City, explains his own challenges in building those connections, and explains why overcoming them matters for our kids. Read, consider, and take action. 

Since I became an educator about 15 years ago, I have had a sinking feeling every time I have heard the famous West African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”  I’ve actually felt sick to my stomach hearing it while immersed in the culture of our school system.  I could never pin down exactly why until I had the opposite feeling on October 18—the night of our first alumni reunion.

I’ve had that sinking feeling because I’ve known that the box we put ourselves in when we think about “school” doesn’t create the environment we mean when we talk about a village.  In terms of school life, our reunion was counter-cultural   Three years—middle school, practically a lifetime—had gone by, but there were our babies, all growing up.  Reveling in their individuality, they told us how proud they were of where and who they were, and how prepared they felt after graduating from Harlem Link.

And there we were for the strugglers, playing the role of critical friend now that we don’t have to be the enforcer.  Because we are no longer in a position of authority, we can engage in a safe, different and productive way those few children who reject seemingly all behavioral interventions.

“I don’t have to tell you what to do anymore,” I told one scholar who had been asked to leave two schools since graduating from ours.  “I’m still going to tell you the same things I used to, but now you can be sure it’s because I care about you and not just because I am doing my job and bossing you around.”  She smiled—sheepishly.

Not only do our peer schools not keep up with alumni, but legal interpretations of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act actively discourage us from being involved in the lives of our students once they leave. Under current federal regulations of FERPA, former schools are no longer “interested parties” with a right to access student contact information.  More important, and I think one reason for this regulation, staying in touch and staying involved are not values of the school system.

I’ve never been to a West African village (the proverb is generally attributed to the Igbo people of Nigeria). But because of my own experience living among a swarm of relatives as a child, I’m going to guess that those villages are organized sort of like my own Italian immigrant family.

Let me focus on one aspect of my childhood: inter generational relations.  In my family, old people continue to be part of the fabric.  When their kids have grown up and moved on, when their careers have come to an end, when they don’t need as much living space as they used to, they don’t go off to a nursing home to die.  They move in with their children.

My grandfather lived with my aunt and her husband for the last 15 years of his life.  Discharged from intensive care in a hospital when a medical storm seemed to have passed, he died at home, sleeping on an easy chair, as peaceful as the breeze.  I was 10 years old.

Nonno wasn’t some distant old man whom we made special trips to visit; he was as much a part of the family as the aunt and uncle he lived with, or another aunt and uncle who lived next door to me.

He transmitted faith in a way no religion possibly could.  I knew that Nonno prayed to his wife’s memory and for her peace, while looking up at an old, brown photograph of her hanging in his small room, every night from when she died suddenly in 1956 until his last days more than 30 years later.

He was the genial, appreciative father figure who watched cartoons with me every Saturday morning while my older sister was off doing activities.  He didn’t understand English, but he understood joy and love, and he gave them even more than he received them.

When he died I didn’t understand shock, so I wasn’t sure why I didn’t cry for three days, but then I couldn’t stop.  We were at my aunt and uncle’s house when it hit me that he wasn’t coming back.  My cousin took me to her room and laid me down on the bed.  “I’m not a baby,” I thought, “but, okay, I will lay down and cry.”

My mother had had a zia, an aunt in Astoria who lived with her daughter and son-in-law until she died not long before Nonno did.  So the concept of death wasn’t new to me when Nonno died.  But there we all were, in mourning in our own ways together, unsure how we could deal with life without him.

Nonno was important to each of us in a different way.  Whether he was giving guidance to his children, handing out orange Tic Tacs to his 11 grandchildren, making funny attempts at broken English or showing the example of a life faithfully and earnestly lived to everyone, he gave something to everyone in our family.

I do not see this in our school system.  In fact, I don’t see anything even remotely like it.  The impulse of most adults in the school system seems to be to care, just not too much.  I was told about this boundary over and over again when I started teaching.

This is the advice I heard: Don’t get too involved in the lives of your students, because you are bound to be disappointed.  And anyway, who knows where they are going to end up?  What could you, their third grade teacher, do to keep them out of prison?  Their home life is such a mess.  And don’t go visit to learn about it first-hand; take my word for it. Besides, it’s probably dangerous.

I hope it is self-evident how destructive these words are.

But it isn’t just the attitude that’s the problem.  It’s the structure—or, rather, the lack of structures that encourage longitudinal thinking about children and meaningful, ongoing relationships with them. Thanks to Value-Added analysis of student test score growth, we no longer have to act as if Johnny walked into my classroom as a blank slate. By calculating where Johnny was the prior year and how far his teacher had moved him, Value-Added acknowledges that children have actually had prior experiences with other teachers. This is an important start. But it does nothing to address the future relationship between today’s teacher and tomorrow’s alumnus.

As a school leader, I want us to re-frame our thinking about the outcome of “school.”  It’s not only about this year’s test, or this year’s graduates, or this year’s teaching and learning.  It’s about the impact of our work and our relationships on the lives of the children in our care.  And those lives extend far into the future, rather than coming to a full stop at the end of June.

The older residents of the village, it turns out, aren’t the people you picture when you think about a school community.  I’m not talking about the gray-haired principal, or the wizened special education teacher, or the grandfather who volunteers with the PTA.  I’m talking about the alumni, who are now downright invisible.

In a time when schools and communities are clamoring for more support, alumni are a powerful untapped resource for our school system.  And they are continually ignored, because to many members of our school communities, they seem irrelevant—or, worse, threatening.

I believe alumni are also ignored because it’s so darn hard to pin them down.  How would you evaluate the impact of a teacher and a school on a child 20 or 30 years into the future?  That task is even more confounding when we live in a time when a third or even half of a school’s teachers might have moved on to other schools or careers by next year.

If it truly “takes a village” then why does our definition of village end in June?  How can we preserve the relationships that teachers form with their students longitudinally at a time of so much change and movement?

I don’t care about the difficulty of answering these questions.  Even a cursory examination of them reveals that they raise all sorts of interesting questions about assumptions we are making. The problem is that no one seems to be asking them.

There has long been a troubling attitude in our society about low-income parents. Put bluntly, it goes like this: Poor people make poor parents. Of course, folks in proper circles usually don’t come right out and say it, which is what made the recent comments by state Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, so stunning.

When asked by the media about the parent empowerment bill (Senate Bill 862, House Bill 867), Sen. Simmons responded: “Let’s face it, the parents are the very people who haven’t been involved in their own children’s lives so as to cause the school to improve. What kind of credibility do you give to the parents in those kinds of circumstances?” Everybody knows who he is talking about, because the bill is meant to address consistently failing schools in low-income neighborhoods.

Forget about the historic neglect of these schools. Forget that school districts and unions have used them as out-of-sight, out-of-mind depositories for ineffective personnel. Forget about the long history of promoting illiterate children to certain failure just to move them through the system. Forget that many of these parents are working two minimum-wage jobs to support their children and don’t have time to form a PTA or lobby in Tallahassee. It’s all the parents’ fault. Let’s face it.

If a school fails year after year, the judgment of those running the school should not be challenged by the parents of the children the school is failing. The people responsible for the failure are competent, but the parents are not…

Maybe I would expect this out of union leaders, politicians beholden to their campaign contributions, education bureaucracies and parents who send their children to high-performing schools and see only that side of public education. But it disturbs me to see black legislators tacitly give their approval through their silence and their votes.

I have devoted the past 25 years to ensuring that poor minority children have access to an equal education. In this effort, I do not pledge allegiance to traditional public schools, charter schools or voucher schools. I don’t care about the vehicle. I care about the result. And I’ve found the result is much better when parents are allowed to make choices.

Urban League of Greater Miami President T. Willard Fair, taking rightful umbrage at the move by the Florida state senate majority leader (with the shameful and implicit backing of Gov. Rick Scott) to gut the proposed Parent Trigger law — and at the willingness of black politicians to do the will of NEA and AFT affiliates instead of working on behalf of black children and their families. Scott, Simmons, and black politicians in the Sunshine State deserve scorn from all reformers for this. And Scott, along with his colleagues, deserve to be voted out of office for this, along with signing a “reform” measure that further weakens Florida’s successful two-decades long effort at overhauling public education.

You almost have to follow the whole chain… Is [the California Teachers Association] telling President Obama he isn’t a Democrat? Is CTA at a point of desperation knowing that education reform is embraced by important Democrats? Are they so desperate?

Former California state senator (and Democrats for Education Reform honcho) Gloria Romero, in L.A. Weekly, taking aim at fellow Democrats for doing the bidding of the National Education Association’s Golden State affiliate in opposing systemic reform. That move is one more reminder of why reformers in California and the rest of the nation must continue to work in a bipartisan manner to transform American public education.

So, how did the Steubenville school board decide to punish Steubenville High football coach Reno Saccocia after he did what he could sweep the sexual assault that was committed and filmed by several of his players under the rug? He got a contract extension!… We’ve already gone over all the reasons why this ——- should be fired… The decision is also a curious one, as Saccocia could still be on the hook for criminal charges if a grand jury finds that he failed to report the assault to authorities despite having direct knowledge of it. But if Saccocia comes out of that investigation clean, it looks like Big Red will get to hang on to its legendary head coach. Hurray for them.

Tom Ley of Deadspin, pointing at another case of school leaders who couldn’t even hold a job checking coats at Ruth’s Chris, allowing another school leader to continue perpetuating criminal and immoral behavior — and ultimately, a culture of spiritual death — that essentially condemns the lives and futures of children. Ridding American public education of such unbecoming leaders is critical to building civilizations of love that nurture all of our kids.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, from his 1986 acceptance speech. [Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Gwen Samuel mentioned it.] Reformers should heed Wiesel’s statement and never be silent in their efforts. It only aids and abets policies and practices that have harmed far too many of our kids for far too long.

One can easily surmise that the role of standardized testing — especially in using longitudinal test score growth data in evaluating teacher performance — is increasingly the biggest fault line between reformers and traditionalists. For some traditionalists, most-notably Diane Ravitch, testing (especially so-called high stakes testing used for accountability purposes) is in their minds the “most damaging things happening today”. [Editor’s Note: It is even at the heart of the opposition among some hardcore traditionalists and movement conservatives to the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards, which will involve phasing in new assessments developed by two coalitions of states and ACT.] As both a teacher and a reformer, I have to admit that I’m baffled by the belief because it doesn’t bear out to be true either objectively or in my own experience.

I”ll start with my experience. I taught in a school district that was very reform-minded. We were regularly evaluated by principals and half of our evaluation was based on student performance from as much as five standardized assessments a year for each subject. In fact, the district’s former superintendent, F. Mike Miles (now chief executive of the Dallas Independent School District) even wrote a report for the Fordham Institute on the evaluation system used. Certainly I have issues with the district’s evaluation system, and I’ve written about them elsewhere. But the amount of testing done every year was, in my view, a good thing. As teachers, we knew where we stood in terms of performance, and so did our students.

Again, this is my experience. But what surprises me most about the opposition among traditionalists to testing (and the backlash against testing by some parents and others) is that there is little research to back up their arguments. Folks such as Gary Rubinstein say that they don’t “put a lot of stake into standardized tests“. But what evidence do they offer for this other than their intuition and personal experiences?

Take a look at the research. The well-known study by Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University, found that increased standardized test scores correlated with better life outcomes. The Scholastic Aptitude Test has been a powerful predictor of students’ first-year college grade point average, correlating about as well as high-school GPA, which is pretty impressive in my view. There’s also strong evidence that the SAT is a good predictor of a student’s likelihood of graduating college. Standardized tests aren’t perfect metrics, but they are useful ones. [Editor‘s Note: There’s also the decades of evidence that shows that student test score growth data over time indicates how well or poorly teachers are doing in improving student achievement, as well as revealing that, in general, a teacher is no more successful in improving student achievement after 25 years of teaching than an instructor working for four years, according to a report by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen of the Center for Reinventing Public Education.]

Traditionalists sometimes act as if preparing for a standardized test is a useless activity. Not so. Whether you like it or not, if you want to enter a profession, you will have to be successful at taking some form of standardized test. As a teacher, I had to pass a test to become certified as a teacher in Colorado; I’m now in law school and had to take the LSAT and will have to take the bar. Sure, there’s an argument that test prep has gone too far – and I would guess that that’s true in some schools and districts –but there should also be an acknowledgement that the ability to take a test has many real-world uses. [Editor’s Note: Testing is also critical in helping students achieve mastery in their subjects by helping students learn from and improve on their mistakes, as well as helps teachers and schools diagnose and address learning issues. If anything, students actually benefit from taking more tests than fewer of them, especially in online and blended learning environments in which more of our children will be learning.] 

As Paul Bruno has pointed out, it is bizarre that many teachers are so opposed to testing when in fact they give quizzes and tests that are hold as many stakes for their students as standardized tests administered by states and districts do for children and teachers alike. There’s no fundamental difference between classroom tests and standardized tests. So why do traditionalists treat them that way? American Federations of Teachers’ Chicago local president Karen Lewis declared a few months ago in her opposition to standardized testing that “My students aren’t standardized!” That got some applause and head nods, but does that really make sense? When she was a teacher, did she not give all students the same tests? Every teacher gives their students the same tests regardless of differences in ability. That is standardized testing in a nutshell. This is also true if you’re a ninth-grade algebra teacher and you come together with your colleagues to design a test given to all of your ninth-grade algebra students, and used the data to judge your performances as instructors as well as find areas of your weaknesses and that of your students.

Traditionalists would find no problem with teachers coming together to do this on their own. [Editor’s Note: In fact, in some states, such tests account for a portion of teacher evaluations.]. I see standardized tests as a scaling of what we do in classrooms every day.

Yes, we need to be careful with incentives when linking pay to test scores, we need to make sure tests are fair and accurate, we need to avoid narrowing the curriculum, and we need to ensure that teachers have a part in designing the tests (which my old district did to its credit). Of course there’s a lot of work still to be done on these matters, but it is work that can be done. These are issues that can be solved, not ones that warrant trashing high-stakes, standardized tests altogether.

As Dropout Nation made clear in last week’s analysis of Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless’ report on the impact of efforts to provide introductory algebra in middle schools, few districts throughout the country have actually implemented efforts by states to help more kids learn advanced math. But the fact that few middle schoolers are taking algebra is one aspect of the low levels of numeracy among our kids. Another issue is the lack of high-quality math instruction, especially in kindergarten and the early grades. As the National Council on Teacher Quality pointed out in a 2009 reportless access to high-quality math instruction, just 10 out of 77 university schools of education it surveyed met high standards in training aspiring math teachers. Add in the fact that poor and minority kids (who are often relegated to low-level math classes and to special ed ghettos) often have even less access to high-quality math teachers than their middle class and white counterparts, and one can see why so few kids end up being put on the path to mastering algebraic equations. The legendary mathematician Leonhard Euler, who almost single-handedly  developed the mathematics lexicon we know so well today (and who was born 300 years ago today), would likely be displeased by this. 

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Los Angeles teacher Peter D. Ford III explains the underlying instructional issues that are a culprit for why so many children struggle with basic and advanced numeracy. Read, consider, and take action. 

I am a late-bloomer  in math. I didn’t take Algebra 1 in eighth grade. Instead, I took it in ninth. Yet by my senior year of high school, was in an AP Calculus class. Call me a nerd, but I think it was because I left eighth grade being able to add, subtract, multiply and divide rational numbers, and I could read. This isn’t true for many of our students — and why so many don’t ever succeed in math.

In California schools get points on the state’s Academic Performance Index for having more students take the Algebra 1 version of the California Standards Test (CST). Yet the school is dinged if students don’t score Proficient, or worse score Below Basic. Given the incentives, schools make the strategic decision of having only their top 20 percent-to-30 percent take the Algebra 1 test so as to improve their chances of raising their API.

The real issue, as always, for middle school math is getting so many students in middle school that are mathematically illiterate.

Too many middle school math teachers can share horror stories of 11- and 12-year-olds who have to think more than one second about 8×7, or worse count on their fingers to figure out 16 -7 = 9. Unless these students are remediated in third grade math skills and done so intensively, these students will struggle with Algebra in the middle grades. In fact, the struggle California’s middle grade students (and those throughout the country) with algebra and other advanced math because of weak basic numeracy.  This is a problem that starts before they reach middle school.

At the elementary level, teachers are allowed to let students use “appropriate tools” in their math work. For some teachers, the term “appropriate tools” means students adding with calculators in while in fourth grade. Punching digits on a machine to figure out 13 – 8 or 8 x 9 is far, far slower than recalling them from memory. Like a computer with insufficient RAM, students taking too long to complete simple calculations will never grasp more complex content. On the other hand, those who have mastered the fundamentals certainly will.

Where I teach in Southern California we can identify by elementary school and in some cases teacher which children coming to our middle school had either strong or weak math instruction. As I’ve mentioned before, without a continuum of quality instruction our students will not have the opportunity to succeed in high school, college, or career. Our Algebra 1 failure in the middle grades is a symptom-outcome of our mathematics failure throughout elementary and secondary education.