Learning from Mr. Singh

I first heard about Mr. Singh (not his real name) the first week at my school, working through a modeling problem with a student.

“Come on, you know the perimeter formula for a rectangle, don’t you?”

“No. I had Singh last year for geometry,” the kid says matter-of-factly. A nearby student rolls her eyes.

“Oh, I had him two years ago! He flunked me. He was making mistakes all the time, everyone told him, he said no, they were wrong.”

I was taken aback. I had never run into students who called teachers incompetent before. But then up to that point, I’d taught at much tougher schools, where the “bad teachers” were the ones who couldn’t control their classrooms full of kids who didn’t give a damn. (We have difficult kids here, but the ratio is something approaching a fair fight.) I was not in any way used to kids complaining that teachers didn’t know their subject.

I forget which student this was—it’s been almost eighteen months, and the whole pattern had yet to form. But I remember distinctly the kid wasn’t a math rock star. Just an ordinary student in algebra II, telling me he knew more than a math teacher, enough to realize the teacher was ignorant. I shrugged it off at the time, but I heard it routinely through the next semester. Occasionally, I’d get it from parents, “Well, my son had Mr. Singh two years ago and told me the man had no idea what he was doing.”

When I started teaching pre-calc, the occasional comments became a constant. I began with my usual response: state it’s unacceptable to criticize one teacher in front of another, whatever the reason. But at a certain point I flat out banned that anti-Singh jokes.

I don’t know Mr. Singh well; math teachers aren’t a chummy crew. He did not and does not strike me as incompetent in any way. Like at least half my colleagues, he privately thinks I’m a pushover, too willing to give kids passing grades. But when some members of the department pushed for a higher fail rate to ensure that we only had qualified kids in advanced math, he was on the side of the demurrers (I did more than demur, of course, because I’m an idiot). He is younger than I am, Asian, speaks English well, with only a slight inflection. I don’t know if the kids are openly disparaging him to other math teachers, and haven’t asked.

Last fall semester (for newcomers, we teach a year in a semester, then do the whole thing again, four classes at a time), I had a handful of very bright seniors who were refusing to go on to Calculus the next semester, because “Mr. Singh’s an idiot”. I got fed up and told the crew in no uncertain terms that they should all have taken honors pre-calc anyway, that I was tired of them not challenging themselves and using teachers as scapegoats, and they were to get their butts into Calculus. They gulped and obeyed, “but we’ll show you that he doesn’t have a clue; he’s just using the book as a guide!”

So the whole passel of them, along with a number of my precalc students from the previous spring, would occasionally drop by during lunch to tell me about how Mr. Singh was wrong, how everyone was telling him he was wrong, but he kept insisting he was right. What the hell is going on in these classes, that he’s arguing, I’d wonder, and tell the kids I didn’t believe them, that I found it incredibly hard to believe Mr. Singh was wrong and certainly wouldn’t take their word for it. If they were so sure, bring me a specific example.

A couple months ago, Jake came rushing into my room, triumphant. Very bright kid, Korean American (grandparents immigrated), and if you want to know how white folk world might change Asians over the generations, he’s a good place to start: refused to take honors pre-calc “because of Mr. Singh”, took Calculus at my orders only, and is going to a junior college (where he easily qualified to start in Calculus).

“I can prove it. I took a picture of the board!” This incident happened long before I’d thought of writing about it, and I can’t remember the specific problem. It was a piece-wise function, a complicated one, and he sketched out the graph he’d captured on his smartphone. “See? He’s saying it’s negative for x < -1, and it can’t be, because [math reason I don’t remember].

I frowned at the board. “Hang on, let me think. I see what you’re saying, but I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with that approach, like a mistake I’ve made before but can’t remember why.” Frowned some more. “Look, Mr. Singh knows way more math than I do. Why don’t you go ask him about this?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“No, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Oh, wait. Duh.” and I turned back to my computer and brought up Desmos to graph the function. Desmos agreed entirely with Mr. Singh.

“Wow.” Jake is utterly gobsmacked. A world view shattered. “But how the hell does [technical math question I don’t remember anymore]?”

“Here’s a thought, Jake: go ask Mr. Singh.”

“He hates me.”

“I can’t think why. You’re just this punky jerk who disrupts classes with arguments because the possibility that the teacher might just know more than you hasn’t crossed your peabrain.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I’d hate me, too.”

“So go up to him and say ‘Hey, Mr. Singh, I’ve been reviewing this function and I can’t figure out why the graph looks like this when x is less than negative one. Can you help me figure it out?’ He will like you for this. I promise.”

Jake had the conversation, reported back, explained to me why we both thought it should be something else (and the minute he mentioned the reason, which I still can’t remember, I went “yeah, that was it! I made that mistake before!”)

This happened periodically over the next two months, but Jake grew increasingly tentative, uncertain of his own certainty. Rather than rolling in confident he held evidence that would convince me of Singh’s stupidity, he was now doublechecking with me. Mr. Singh said this, but I think that, what do you think? Sometimes I knew the answer, in others I’d look it up, but I would always send him back to Mr. Singh for either more information or confirmation. Eventually, he started going to Mr. Singh first and then reporting the results to me.

His new data points had an impact. Now, when Jake and the others came in to say hi, they don’t have any tales of Mr. Singh’s errors but instead have all sorts of stories about how they pwned a classmate with their awesome math skills.

(Does this seem weird? Remember that at my school, Calculus is third tier from the top—AB and BC Calc are ahead of it. They’re all bright but not quite nerds. Many of them are my favorite sort of kid—more interested in learning than good grades. But they’re boys, so posture they will.)

Last Thursday Tom, a white junior who’d taken my precalc class as a sophomore, came by during our “advisory” (brief tutorial period after lunch).

“Do you know anything about L’Hopital’s Rule?”

“Vaguely. Something to do with limits. I have a Stewart Calculus text, and can inquire. Why?”

“Because he marked me wrong on a test. I got the right answer! But when I asked him about it, he said that I couldn’t use the Quotient Rule, that I had to use L’Hopital, and that it was a fluke I got the right answer.”

I looked up L’Hopital’s Rule, page 289. “If I understand this correctly, L’Hopital’s Rule is intended at least in part for cases where you can’t use the Quotient rule. If you have an indeterminate result, like dividing zero by zero or infinity by infinity, the Quotient rule won’t apply.”

Tom looked aghast. “It doesn’t?”

“Not according to this book and, I’m betting, not according to Mr. Singh.”

“It was a limit of sin(2x)/sin(3x).”

“Well, I know the limit of sine isn’t infinity, so I’m guessing it’s…”

“Zero. Oh, I can’t divide by zero. So he was right. It was just a fluke I got the answer.”

“Looks like it.”

“It’s so weird. There’s always like fifteen ways to do something in calculus, then sometimes, only one way.”

“Hah. But look. I don’t know much about this. I want you to go back to Mr. Singh. My guess is this test question was specifically designed to assess your understanding of the cases for L’Hopital’s Rule. But you need some clarity, and he’s the guy to explain.”

“Okay.”

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This story began nearly two years ago, and not until a few days ago, when I read this piece of utter Campbell Brown crap, did I think of writing about Mr. Singh, me, and his students. But at one point Brown quotes a student who said ““There were certain teachers that you knew, if you got stuck in their class, you wouldn’t learn a thing. That year would be a lost year” and I realized how often I had read that sentiment. Kids know who the bad teachers are. Parents know who the bad teachers are. They just know. Word gets around.

Well, no. They don’t. Students are, I think, the best judge of teacher quality in classroom management. They know when a teacher can’t control the kids. But they are usually incapable of evaluating teacher content knowledge. I hope this story shows that students can form fundamental received wisdoms that are simply false. From average to excellent, Mr. Singh’s students all thought they knew more than he did. And they didn’t. I’m pleased that I now have a knowledge base that allows me to do more than just tell the kids not to discuss Mr. Singh. I can laugh at them—“Yeah, I heard that before. Every time someone tells me Mr. Singh’s wrong, I ask for proof. Turns out the student doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You want to play?”

But my tale has a few more object lessons. First, teachers and parents, please note what I am proudest of. I sent the kids back to learn from Mr. Singh.

We want kids to form trusted networks. We want them to find resources when they feel lost or doubtful about education, so they don’t lose hope or quit because they feel isolated. And when they do come to their trusted resource, it’s incredibly tempting for that resource, whether teachers and parents, to regard the kids’ trust as an ego feed—see, I’m the one they really need, the safe place, the wise soul. This is particularly tempting for teachers, because it’s practically a job requirement that our personality type value trust and respect over pay. However, when a kid is using you as a resource not just to get more information or clarity, but as a substitute for the teaching process, you send him back. He or she has to learn how to use the educational process as it’s intended, to push the teacher for more information, to make sense of the unfamiliar. Ideally, students must learn not to just do what feels safe—complain to another teacher—but what feels terrifying, and ask for help. Sure, sometimes it won’t work. That’s a lesson, too. You’ll be there to help them figure it out, if needed.

Then please note what I have used everything short of neon signs to highlight: Mr. Singh knows far more math than I do (see the comments if you have issues with my description of L’Hopital’s Rule). The kids know this. I make it clear to them. Yet they still came to me for help.

And that, readers, is an important takeaway from this little essay, a truism people mouth without really thinking about what it means. Teaching involves trust. You can’t just have content knowledge and run a fair classroom. Your students have to trust your ability and your judgment. Your students’ parents have to believe that you have their interests at heart.

Reformers might do well to remember that, as they wonder what went wrong in Newark, in DC, in Chicago and Indiana. It’s not enough to tell everyone you want excellent schools. They have to believe you.

Yes, sometimes that trust will be misplaced. That is a huge reason why the charter market doesn’t work, in fact, because parents are taking schools they trust to keep their kids safe over the schools the charters want them to demand. No doubt, reformers in general think that misplaced trust is why teachers and their unions continually win the long game. But regardless, reformers aren’t trusted by the very populations they say they want to help. And alas, trust has nothing to do with test scores.

Finally, please note: in no way am I suggesting that I am a superior teacher to Mr. Singh. When I am tempted to that conclusion, I remind myself of the occasional students of mine who go running to other teachers (including, no doubt, Mr. Singh) to get a straightforward lecture or template. When I learn that students have done this, I always remind them that they can ask me, that if they need more structure, see me and I’ll give it to them. I wish those teachers would let me know when students come to them for help with my class. And then I remember that I haven’t said a word of this to Mr. Singh.

___________________________________________

Postscript: The comments have been revealing of the way people are filling in gaps. First, my kids are doing well in Singh’s class. Most of them are getting As, the occasional B. They understand the math. Second, this is NOT a case of a teacher refusing to allow students to point out errors. Third, my students drop by for many reasons—it’s not like this is all a constant bitchfest about Singh. I’m just pulling out representative moments.

Advanced Placement Test Preferences: Asians and Whites

I just finished my AP US History survey course, and a glorious time it was. But I will save the specifics of my three to four hour lectures, and whether or not this is a good way to teach history for another post. I will also, hopefully, weigh in some time on what value add I think I bring to history. (If you’re curious, in public school I taught history of Elizabethan theater and a truly awesome 50s science fiction film course, in which students were to analyze the movie’s foreign policy approach by Walter Russell Mead’s paradigm.)

I always end my AP class by discussing the students’ course selections for next year. APUSH is a junior course, and I have about ten kids in this particular class, and the conversation is always the same.

“What are you taking?”

“Calc BC, AP Physics C, AP Bio, AP Gov.”

“You?

“AP Chem, AP Stats, AP Psych,…”

“So you’ve already taken BC?”

“Yeah, just took the test. Piece of cake. I’m taking intro to MVC.”

“What about AP English?”

All the heads shake. “God, no. Way too hard.”

One kid says “I’m taking AP Gov, I heard it’s easy.”

“I’m taking Macro Econ, one of our teachers has all the info you need to pass the tests.”

I laugh. “Jesus. Embrace the stereotype.”

They all get it and laugh, shamefacedly.

“Who’s taking AP English this year?” Two hands rose. “AP English next year?” No hands.

“So here’s what I don’t understand. You are all trying to get into college, and the reason you are taking these tough classes is to make yourself look good for colleges.”

“Sure.”

“And I see only Chinese, Korean, and Indian Americans in front of me, all either FOB or citizens with parents who lived most of their lives in China, Korea, or India. Moreover, as I imagine you’ve heard, and certainly your parents have heard, universities often engage in some form of discrimination against Asians.”

“Wow,” one of the students laugh-gasped. “I never thought I’d hear an American admit that.”

“An American, or a white person?”

“They aren’t the same?”

“You born here?” Pause, as I see that datapoint register. Yes. She’s an American. (We’ll leave aside the fact that they don’t consider blacks and Hispanics American, either. I’ve written about this before; it’s still weird to see.)

“Anyway. All of you avoid classes that involve reading literature or written analysis because they would be too difficult.”

“Well, yeah.”

“So the stereotype is all wrong.”

“What, the stereotype that says we’re good at science and math?”

“No, the stereotype that says you work hard, that you take on challenges.”

“Oooooh, SNAP.”

I smiled, too. “Look, there’s a serious point here. You’re a college admissions officer, reading through approximately 16 billion Asian resumes that all read exactly the same: 4.2 GPA, BC calculus as a sophomore ( with the occasional underachiever waiting until junior year), several AP science courses, APUSH for those of you who can string a sentence together, AP Chinese for those of you lucky enough to win the language lottery, and so on. What’s going to stand out? Not one more STEM course.”

“Yeah, but I hate reading.”

“You think the universities don’t know that? Oh, look, one more Asian kid who’s a machine at math and can memorize all the facts in AP Bio but uses Cliff notes for Hamlet. College admissions is a numbers game anyway, and I’m not pretending anything is going to make a huge difference,, but…”

“My dad says colleges are reducing Asians born here…American Asians [score!] for Chinese and Koreans.”

“Your dad’s right. So given all the work you’re putting in clearly to just get that last inch of consideration, may I suggest that the path to differentiation lies in showing the admissions reviewer that you take on challenges in all subjects, as opposed to taking classes you know you’ll get an A in.”

***********************************************

I was going to just post this little anecdote, but then I got to wondering just how prevalent the behavior is—it is exclusive to my little corner of the country, or are the recent Asian immigrants showing up in national data?

One of the problems with AP data is that you simply can’t make too many assumptions. For example, much has been written about the fact that the mode AP score for blacks is 1. Not only do most blacks fail the AP test, people wail, but they fail it completely! Twice as many blacks get a failing score as get a passing score! Our teachers are failing black children!

Yeah, no. The black AP population is a combination of at least three different groups. First, the group of genuinely qualified, academically prepared black students. Small group, I know, but each year hundreds of African American students take and pass the BC Calculus test, many with a score of 5 (however, 1 is still the mode for BC Calc). Second, the group of average or higher ability blacks with relatively little interest in academic success, who have nonetheless been put in AP classes by desperate suburban school officians who are under fire from the feds for their “opportunity gap” numbers. These are kids who could, with good teaching, achieve a respectable “3” on a number of tests, and probably do.

The problem, alas, is that a teacher can focus on getting middle achievers over the hump, or on challenging a bunch of smart kids. Can’t do both in the same room, not easily and probably not at all. Thus bringing in more marginal black students and coaxing them to a three occasionally has a depressing effect on suburban AP scores, as the top white kids aren’t being taught at the top of their ability. But I digress.

The third group, and it’s huge, are low income urban and charter schools gaming the GPA and Jay Mathews Challenge Index. These are kids who are barely literate, often aren’t even taught the course material, but boy, by golly if they get the butts in the seats they’ll show up on Jay’s list somewhere. All at taxpayer expense.

While the AP tests results disaggregate Mexicans and Puerto Ricans from the rest of Hispanics, Mexican performance has the same conflation of three groups as black results do, and are equally useless. The Hispanic mode score is also one.

Asian scores aren’t disaggregated, but the Big Three (Chinese, Koreans, and Indians) dominate.

So are Asians showing a preference for science and math over the humanities AP tests?

AP testing populations by race–mostly. It would have been a huge hassle to add up all the URM categories, so I just subtracted whites and Asians from the total. So “Decline to state” is categorized as a URM, when it’s probably mostly white. I checked a couple values, it wasn’t a big difference. These are the top 20 tests by popularity, in order from left to right¹.

The visual display is useful—look for big green, little blue, or a relatively high number of URMs, fewer Asians. See? Asians live the stereotype. Don’t assume that blacks and Hispanics are drawn to the Humanities courses—it’s just easier for schools to shove unprepared kids into English, Geography, and History classes than it is to science and math courses. Fewer prerequisites.

Here’s the same data in table form. I added one column, Asians as a percentage of the Asian/white total, to clear away the URM noise. Then I highlighted the tests for each column that were more than one average deviation away from the mean, both higher and lower (I used average deviation because I don’t want outliers emphasized. Just wanted to show spread.) I bolded any values that were more than two average deviations away from mean.

Whites are the most tightly clustered, URMs next. Asians tilt strongly towards and against.

There’s a lot more to explore here, and I hope to do that soon. But for now, I wanted to stay focused on Asian vs. white preferences. So I next compared the top 20 Asian test preferences to those of whites. (Actually, I did 22 for Asians because I thought #22 was revealing.)

AP totals include many multiple testers, so I took the number of testers for any given test as a percentage of the total for that race. This is not a perfect measure, for obvious reasons. Or maybe not so obvious. Say, for example, that an entirely different group of Asians take the English Lit test than take the Calc AB test, but the white students have a significant overlap. In that case, the percentage of testers would be saying something entirely different about each group than if both Asians and whites had overlapping testers.

However, in either case, it would be revealing. If more whites than Asians took both math and English tests, or if one group of Asians took math tests and another group took English (or the same case of whites), the percentages are still showing a preference. I think. I’m sure there’s a way to describe this more technically, but it’s late, the school year’s almost over, so put the correct text in comments and I’ll change it.

Anyway.

And here it is graphically, ranked again by test popularity. The blue and green columns are the percentage of white or Asian testers taking that test. The graph above was percent of each test population that was white/Asian/URM. These columns show the percent of white or Asian population taking that particular test (the blue column “% of total” in the tables immediately above). The line graph is the percent of each group that scored a 5 on that test.

(You notice something weird? Spanish is the tenth most popular test–but it barely makes the top 20 for either whites or Asians. How could that be? Who on earth is taking all those Spanish tests?)

So again, I want to write more about these results but I thought I’d put them out there and let people chew on them. Here’s a few preliminary observations:

• Whites appear to be the utility players, good in a number of subjects and not expressing huge preferences. They are stretching more into STEM than Asians stretch into writing.
• Asians appear to be avoiding writing-intensive tests relative to whites, no matter how you interpret the data.
• Asians tend to choose tests that are more likely to yield high scores, and avoid tests that give out fewer 5s. Until recently, AP Bio doled out 5 scores like candy; they clearly changed scoring in some significant way this year (without announcing it, I guess). Environmental Science, which has a deservedly crappy rep, is actually pretty hard to get a high score on, so Asians avoid.
• The real difference between Asians and whites in both preferences and scores is in the science tests, not math. Asians have higher scores in all tests—and while that’s probably a reflection of cognitive ability, you really can’t understand the difference in preparation and grinding until you see it—but the real gaps are in the sciences. AP Science courses are, in my opinion, pretty horrible to begin with. Yes. It’s the subject I don’t teach. Bias alert.

TL, DR: Asians across the land reflect the same biases. They may or may not be working hard, but they appear to be avoiding subjects that are more difficult for them, and don’t yield as high a score. This may also be why they avoid the ACT. Or not.

More on this later. Let me know what you think and of course, point out any errors.

¹I actually did this work from the bottom up. So in the first chart, which was actually the last one I did, there are only 19 tests. Guess which one I left off, and why. The other charts all have 20 tests.

Reading in the Gulag of Common Core

(if you’re here to see KPM’s bio scrub, scroll down to the bottom)

I have five other pieces going and a serious case of writer’s ADD, but Kathleen Porter Magee just really annoyed me.

Porter Magee works part-time at Fordham Foundation, recently tasked with churning out paeans to or defenses of Common Core, and also at the College Board, where she works for the guy who wrote the Common Core, and I’ve yet to see the media inquire as to whether this might be a conflict.

KPM, as she is often called, has been singing the praises of Teach Like a Champion Doug Lemov for a couple years now, which is inconvenient because Lemov pushes prior knowledge, and her new boss Coleman spits upon it. But anyway, she’s trying to thread both needles here—push Lemov and the Common Core insistence that all students be forced to read “grade level books”.

The money quote bolded:

And the pushback against this particular CCSS directive is growing. For example, self-described “small-town English teacher” Peter Greene likened assigning texts based on grade level “without regard for the student’s reading level” to “educational malpractice.” This pushback is backstopped by an entire industry built up over decades on the premise that students should be kept away from complex texts at all costs.

Really? Are you kidding me? There’s an industry devoted to keeping students away from complex texts? Cite, please? The organization that says “my god, we can’t have kids reading hard words!”

That’s insane, but so is her position that teachers should ignore their students’ actual reading ability and insist on assigning books the polite kids just pretend to understand and the impolite kids just ignore entirely. That opinion is very North Korea, frankly, although NK and the chubby new Leader would be much tougher on the impolite kids.

For the record, there is in fact no industry dedicated to keeping kids from reading Metamorphosis. More immediately relevant, KPM is wrong in insisting that teachers should ignore reading ability when assigning texts.

I was interested to realize that Common Core standards differ by subject in their willingness to acknowledge the below-level student.

So the math standards include some advice on what to do with kids who are behind and , like NCLB, has nothing new to offer: tutoring, algebra support, summer school. Yeah, thanks for the tip. None of them worked last time, either.

But the ELA standards largely refuse to acknowledge the reality of struggling readers—not even, I was a bit stunned to see, much recognition for English Language Learners, flatly rejecting the notion that they might struggle a bit and leaving any support to the states to figure out. Common Core’s refusal to placate the massive ELL lobby is telling, because in that case there’s going to be no recognition of native English speakers who simply aren’t smart enough to read at grade level, so English teachers, you’re screwed. Just kidding, because as we all know, standards throughout history have always called for kids to read at grade level, and teachers have and undoubtedly will continue to pick texts targeted to student ability whenever possible (it isn’t always). They’ve always done that, which begs the question why Fordham Foundation is acting like a wild hair has intruded someplace uncomfortable on the subject.

My conclusion: the big focus on “grade appropriate texts” and emphasis on teachers’ refusal to use the Common Core “exemplars” is just strategy. Common Core’s going to fail, so why not build the terrain for the inevitable blame game that’s coming by arguing that even now, at the beginning, teachers are ignoring Common Core by assigning texts their kids can understand, instead of grade-level texts. KPM’s broadside insult to teachers or an unspecified “industry” desperately working to keep kids away from “sedulous” and “balkanization”—and remind me why, again, she’d go work for the guy who’s planning to scrub the SAT of these words?—is, in my view, part of an effort to position the foundation for the standards’ inevitable failure.

And so, their demand that teachers pretend that all kids from kindergarten on have equivalent reading abilities. Yes, some kids don’t read as well, but that’s because they go to the low income schools that have bad teachers who assign some students Dr. Seuss in second grade instead of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. In this way, the seven year olds are denied the ability to debate whether the speaker was referring to his eventual death or his desired but delayed suicide, thus preventing them from being excellent readers on their way to college readiness.

I haven’t opined on the totality of the ELA standards yet, but on this one point I have been consistently shocked ever since Fordham released the study in which it declared, with a straight face, their horror that English teachers were using their students’ reading abilities to assign texts. Usually reformers insist on behavior that at least logically makes sense if you don’t have a clue about the reality of education. But the stance on this is absurd. Why would anyone insist on forcing kids to read books they can’t understand?

I taught humanities for one year in public school, to freshman with reading abilities ranging from sixth grade to college level, and I can state with confidence that the low ability kids did not benefit in any way from being forced to pretend to read Twelfth Night. They liked the movie, though. As I describe in that post, I gave up SSR with my students because they simply stared at books they didn’t want to read. When I took away their choice and gave the weaker students enrichment activities designed for bright fifth graders, they engaged and acquired content knowledge. Why would anyone seriously argue against that?

For the past eight plus years, I’ve taught reading enrichment to a mostly Asian crowd of freshmen, with abilities ranging from FOB to reasonably competent (rarely do I have a stupendous reader and writer, but it does happen). Here, too, I have not seen them benefit from reading texts they don’t understand because, despite their outstanding test scores, the kids I teach have mediocre reading abilities thanks to dismal active vocabularies and weak content knowledge. Much of my teaching time is spent, again, assigning them reading they can understand and demonstrating the importance of remembering content knowledge.

So while I haven’t taught a lot of English in public school, my experience with early high school readers is extensive, and Fordham’s position is flatly ludicrous.

On a slightly different note, I’m getting a bit tired of KPM pushing her teaching experience. Her Linked In profile shows clearly that not only has she avoided anything approaching students for over a decade, but that she was only at the Washington Archdiocese, a prominent mention in all her bios, for ten months. She didn’t leave an impression. Likewise at Achievement First, her title may have been impressive but she still worked part-time, according to her husband, and the only document I can find with her name on it suggests she was basically HR. Achievement First is known primarily for its questionable application of “No Excuses” discipline, not its great curriculum.

She was probably a teacher for some period of time from 1997 through 2000, the three years after she graduated from Holy Cross with a degree in French and Political Science before she started her master’s degree. Maybe she just doesn’t list her credential education. More plausibly, she taught for a year or so at a Catholic school, maybe language, maybe French.

Back when she married Marc Magee, teaching was such an important part of her bio that she never mentioned it, only listing her work at Progressive Policy Institute, Hoover, and Fordham. Her footprint at every place but Fordham is non-existent.

I have mentioned before that very few education policy people on either side have any extensive teaching experience, but better to just plead out than pretend.

Maybe she’s got more experience than I can find, or slipped in some teaching while working at Fordham part time. Maybe a reporter will ask her to be specific, produce documents of her curriculum work and her lesson plans. Hahahahaha!

Anyway. If it comes down to a choice between an reticent Kathleen Porter Magee and me, an anonymous teacher blogger….wait. Never mind.

Look, I’m not expecting you to take my word for anything. But if you still accept policy hack bios at face value, think again.

As for the Common Core Reading Gulag, where everyone must read at or above grade level because the Great Leader says so, I’ll leave you with a simple application of logic.

On one side, you have an education reform organization, dependent on the will of its funders, insisting that English teachers everywhere are failing their students by assigning them texts that will be more likely to engage them and thus increase content knowledge, rather than texts randomly declared “grade level” by wishful thinkers. On the other side, you have the majority of English teachers, insisting through their actions that students are best served by reading words they can understand.

Michael Petrilli has tacitly admitted (and said so explicitly on the Gadfly show, as I recall) that he never believed in the NCLB goals of getting all students to proficiency, but he had a boss, and that was the party line. Now, he’s pushing the Common Core party line.

You can believe that Petrilli and KPM are pushing a party line because they get paid to, or you can believe that teachers are part of a gigantic industry dedicated to ensuring that students are never exposed to complex text.

It’s up to you.

PS–I just liked the title; don’t take it too seriously.

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Addendum, June 12

I am delighted to see that KPM’s bio at Fordham has been thoroughly scrubbed.

Here’s how it appeared when I wrote this piece, on May 17th. It was in place through May 30th, at least, as you can see by the dates of the articles.

And here’s what it looks like now. A lot shorter. All the company names gone, no mention of her teaching, just “working directly in schools”. Still a bit squiffy, but hey, they had to save face.

Think it was me? I hope it was me. It’d be fun if it was me. It probably was me.