Thompson: The Common Core & The US Railway System

Robert Rotham's "Transcontinental Education" in the Washington Monthly's  special issue on the new wave of reforms, reached back to the 1860s for a metaphorical explanation of the potential of new Standards to accomplish what the equally good, old Standards failed to do. He claimed that setting a standard guage for railroad tracks "led to an explosion of railroad building." Rothman thus presented a history of the American West that left out steel, coal, political corruption, the Indian Wars and, yes, the workers who built the railroads.  Rothman devoted far fewer words to educational issues than he did the railroads, so it is hard to know what he meant with his brief reference to schools, "By setting common expectations, states have made it possible for students everywhere to graduate from high school similarly prepared for post-secondary education and work."  In other words, set a guage for measuring educational attainment and, magically, student achievement will take off. Gosh, I thought that improved teaching and learning might also be necessary.  By the way, the federal government that set the common guage also subsidized the building of the railroads without regulating them.  The result was the Indian Wars and an environmental catastrophe. Common Core could also backfire, but Rothman was silent about ways to prevent the unintended damage that his technological fix could unleash.- JT (@drjohnthompson) image via.

Comments

[Art]

Did you read the article? Rothman talks much more about education and education history than about railroads. And nothing Rothman said implies that he believes that standards come along and magically improve achievement. In fact he said "...standards, by themselves, do not produce higher levels of learning..." and "The steps necessary to implement the standards in classrooms, and to support that implementation through new materials and training for teachers, have been and will continue to be far more significant."

And he does problems with previous introductions of standards and problems that arise around the new ones.

[John Thompson]

Ari,

My first reaction to your comment was to ask you to go back and count the words he uses about teaching and learning and then count his words on railroads. But then I realized that you and I might count differently, with me excluding the pie-in-the-sky history of edu-politics divorced from schools. Even then, the total would be close. Yes, you quoted one line that is about educational issues, albeit issues that we teachers are likely to see as a distraction from our real world concerns.

I know you must be involved in education but I'm curious about what part of it do you see. We live in a world that already has more amazing materials for instruction than we could ever have time to use. Teachers would welcome high-quality training and support for using them. But we tend to see that training, that policy people viewing schools from 30,000 feet as liberating, as it is actually imposed on us.

Dollars to donuts, most inner city teachers will say that the professional development that is sold as liberating, turns out to be a prohibition against using the exciting materials that are already available. It designed to sell their products and thus edge out the other approaches.

But while we are at it, I should acknowledge my perspective. I was an academic historian and I taught high school social studies. The Standards we developed in the 90s were as good as anything we are going to get. They were brilliant. Historians used the word "Standards," and central offices heard the word, "standardized."

And obviously we had time to only teach a small portion of the Standards. So, we needed informed discussions on what to leave out, as well as being empowered to admit the obvious - that it would be educational malpractice to skim over them all, devoting 8 minutes to the Reformation and 8 minutes to the Cold War etc. What we got was tons of paperwork to prevent us from using the wonderful materials and practices that were offered in old-fashioned professional development sessions.

How are the new Standards' implementation, in an age of accountability, going to be different? Rothman dwells on diffferences within the wonks' world, but he sure doesn't mention teaching and learning or give a plausible scenario for them being used constructively in actual classrooms.

[Art]

Rothman does not provide lesson plans for day-to-day teaching and learning under the CCSS, but clearly that was not his purpose. Other sources, such as Ed Week, track developments along those lines. So I don't understand why you again throw up a straw man.

But on one thing I am in complete agreement with you: National policies can be defeated by poor decisions at local levels.

[John Thompson]

I don't think it was a strawman. Here's my point. When government subsidizes a private entity, sometimes we get a service or a product for that funding, and the greater good is served. Other times, like with the railroad, we get a tangible product, but because of the lack of regulation, more harm than good is done. Other times, nobody really expects anything out of the subsidy but a pyramid scheme, and that's just the way that corporate powers get paid.

So, one job of liberals, moderates, and neo-liberals is to think through the regulations and/or oversight necessary for benefits to outweigh the costs. That is especially true in education and especially true in the age of "reform" where the end product is "data" or bursts of electricity on a computer. Sometimes the data signifies some real improvements, other times not. Rothman gave no reason to believe that the past wouldn't be prologue.

[Sarah]

“that left out steel, coal, political corruption, the Indian Wars”.
Well, of course. He’s trying to glorify railroading as an example of how improved standardization improved society. It’s a convoluted metaphor in this case, probably not an apt one at that.

[Art]

John ... Can you give an example of a government subsidy that fuels a pyramid scheme? And you criticized Rothman for dealing with things at the wonk level but failing to address teaching and learning, yet you yourself bring introduce wonky themes like regulation, oversight and costs and benefits without tying these to teaching and learning. Can you do that?

[John Thompson]

Yep. Take a look at today's news, including JP Morgan Chase. Much of the educational engineering known "reform" was adopting the financial engineering methods of hedge funds and others, and applying them to teaching and learning. In schooling, it produced the "bubble" where state scores soared while NAEP and other scores remained flat.

The financial engineering sparked the Great Recession, and much of it was nothing but ponzi schemes. From tulips to Enron, from the big city machines to the good ol' boy system, from the Enclosures to the Okie movement, governments have funded industries that either produced nothing or that never made any money off of production. And yes, the railroads produced something, as did the agriculture that it prompted, but neighter made money. Profits from day one #1 came from speculating. That's US History 101.

Education today is a market for both get-rich-quick schemes and new methods that could work. Ed tech spending is equally capable of becoming socialism for entrepeneurs or a transformation that helps schools.

In teaching and learning, as in the economy and constitutional democracy, we need checks and balances. We can't move ahead without BOTH modernizing technology and rules for checking its abuse. We can't expect technology to do more good than harm without protecting the teachers who use it from fly-by-night schemes and quick fix schemes to deprofessionalize our profession.

That is Econ History 101. Yes, we need to reform due process, seniority, collectiive bargaining etc, but the goal should be replacing old-fashioned checks and balances with new ones.

[Art]

What "quick fix schemes to deprofessionalize our profession" are you thinking of?