NJ waves its magic data wand and makes poverty disappear

When New Jersey Monthly magazine releases its biennial high school rankings, everyone from school administrators to real estate agents eagerly scan the list to see how it can help [or hurt] them. But quite possibly, what's most important here is not what's on the chart, but what isn't.

The 2012 chart included a category called DFG, which stands for District Factor Grouping, a letter ranking assigned by the state to each school district indicating the socioeconomic status of district residents, from poorest [A] to wealthiest [J]. You could easily skim down the list and see that nearly all the top high schools were in the wealthiest districts. [Other than McNair Academic, a Jersey City magnet school in the number 2 slot in a B district, you have to go down to number 50 just to get to an F district; there are a very few Cs and Ds in the whole top 100.]

But the 2014 chart? DFG disappears. Why? Because in 2013, the state stopped reporting DFG in its “school reports cards,” replacing it with something called peer group rankings , which are not at all the same thing [more on that stupidity from Jersey Jazzman here].

Now, why would the Christie administration, which is heavily invested in blaming teachers and their unions for low test scores and poor outcomes, make such a change? Could it possibly be an attempt to obscure the otherwise obvious fact that low test scores and poor academic outcomes are closely correlated to high poverty? Could they be trying to bury the truth about this lockstep relationship in order to advance their stupid reformy idea that charters, high-stakes testing and accountability will fix what ails school districts located in pockets of deep poverty?

Worse yet, why are we allowing a change in data reporting to distort the conversation, instead of focusing on the devastating effects of economic inequality on public education?

Eliminate tenure and it gets a little chilly at school

Without tenure, every teacher is the pawn and puppet of whoever happens to be the most powerful person in the building today. Without tenure, anybody can shoulder his way into the classroom and declare, ‘You're going to do things my way, or else.’

That’s from the wonderful blog Curmudgucation, written by Peter Greene [if you’re appalled by the attacks on public education that pass for reform these days, you really should follow his blog].  His point is that tenure gives teachers the freedom to do their jobs right, without the threat of dismissal hanging over their heads.

This reminded me of an incident related to me by a math teacher I know. I’m sharing it because I think it illustrates perfectly how tenure’s guarantee of due process empowers good teachers to do the right thing.

The state of New Jersey had recently introduced a required algebra test, and the administration in our district hadn’t been very pleased with the results. So they decided to bring a consultant into the high school to make recommendations on boosting the test scores. The thing is, many students don’t take algebra in high school, where it’s a ninth-grade course. Some take it in middle school. In fact, in our district, many students take algebra in eighth grade, and a smaller number in seventh.

So the consultant came in, did his thing, and presented his recommendations to the high school. But the district, presumably in an effort to get its money’s worth out of this consultant, decided that his recommendations should be adopted in the middle school as well. So the fellow was duly trotted out at a meeting of the middle school math faculty, where  he proceeded to repeat his dog and pony show.

The thing is, there’s one obvious difference between teaching algebra in high school and teaching it in middle school. Generally, kids taking algebra in ninth grade are not the strongest math students; kids taking it in middle school are. This math teacher, who’d been teaching the middle school’s top math students for years, was appalled by the recommendations being offered. It was obvious to a teacher with a wealth of experience that the methods being proposed would be a real turn-off to strong math students who learn the subject more quickly and easily.

So the teacher spoke up and forcefully challenged the recommendations – persuasively enough so that they were not adopted in the middle school.

“Good thing I have tenure,” the teacher added as the story drew to a close. “I would never have spoken up otherwise.”

This little tale is the perfect illustration of tenure’s role in the delicate public school ecosystem. On one side, you have an administration that’s understandably concerned with the results on a state-mandated test. They decide to throw some money at the problem in the form of a paid outside consultant, who may or may not have some great ideas on improving algebra performance in high school. But once the decision has been made to spend money, the administrators seek to maximize the return on their dollar, as administrators are wont to do. They assume that they’ve purchased a one-size-fits-all solution, and the more widely it’s implemented, the greater their test-points-per-dollar return on investment. After all, algebra is algebra, right?

Enter the classroom teacher, who has taught algebra to enough different groups of students to realize that, while algebra is algebra, not every student learns algebra the same way. The solution being imposed from on high is not one-size-fits-all and will be a disaster in the honors and accelerated math classrooms at the middle school, into which kids have been placed precisely because they are adept math learners.

With tenure, that teacher can take a chance. Pushing back on administrators is risky business, after all. It’s not easy to tell the boss he’s wrong. But with the knowledge that respectful dissent cannot be a firing offense – because of tenure – the teacher can go out on a limb, challenge the powers that be, and make the case against adopting a pedagogical strategy doomed to fail.

But without tenure, the teacher sitting in the back of the room at that meeting has to wonder: “Is it worth risking my job to fight this? Clearly, the principal and superintendent are already convinced that this is the way to go. If they wanted the teachers’ opinions, they would have asked us. Maybe I can change their minds. But what if I can’t? What if my opposition is taken as insubordination? Do I really want to take that chance?”

That’s the chilling effect of job insecurity. Without tenure, the voice of the experienced teacher is muffled; kids lose out.

The obvious objection is going to be, “But that’s how it works everywhere else. In most workplaces, people don’t have a guarantee of a high level of due process. Why should schools be any different?”

The answer, of course, is that not all jobs are created equal. If your business makes widgets, and some consultant recommends a stupid change to the process, the chilling effect will at worst result in the business’s diminished profitability. So what? If the company chooses to keep in management someone who takes bad advice and creates a climate where employees are afraid to speak up, so be it. If they eventually go out of business because of their unresponsive management style, someone else will make widgets.

But – let’s say it all together, now – children are not widgets. We can't just flush this batch and hope to do better with the next one. For their sake, the bar must be set higher. Tenure is part of the checks-and-balances system that allows teachers in the classrooms to be assertive advocates for good pedagogical practices. It’s no guarantee – and yes, tenure might sometimes serve as an obstacle [though not an insurmountable one] to dismissing a bad teacher. But tenure can be modified to streamline the dismissal process for the small percentage of bad teachers. Abolishing tenure outright, on the other hand, would silence all teachers.

This cool illustration comes from here.

Five reasons my kid's still in Israel

I am one of those parents they’ve been talking about on the news who has a teenager on a trip in Israel as the Gaza violence drags on and on. Well, that’s life. We often get what we didn’t ask for, and we get handed difficult decisions we’d rather not make.

So here are five reasons a Ramaz-graduate-turned-lefty-Reform Jewish mother from New Jersey kept her kid in Israel when the rockets started falling. (Spoiler alert: It’s complicated.)

1. I didn’t drink the blue Kool Aid. I know that Israel isn’t some goldene medina where Jews till the land all day and dance the hora all night, or whatever the 21st century equivalent of that myth might be (program smartphone apps all day and go clubbing in Tel Aviv all night?). The blue Kool Aid of good old-fashioned Zionist propaganda makes Israel seem too easy. But I don’t  believe that everything will be easy because some divine destiny gives us ultimate right to the land, or because the Jews are the good guys and the Arabs are the bad guys, or because the IDF is a cross between the Avengers and the Transformers. I know that if I want my kid to learn about Israel, understand Israel, even love Israel, he had better be prepared to deal with one big goddamn unholy mess. There will be no easy answers, no idyllic safe haven. I sent my kid to a place perched on a razor’s edge among hostile neighbors, angry refugees, arrogant theocrats, intransigent ideologues, hopeless bigots, and deluded religious extremists. But it’s also a diamond in the rough, a place that makes one giddy with the heady mixture of history, art, culture, natural beauty, spirituality, and more Jews than he’s ever imagined existed. And that matters.

2. I didn’t drink the red Kool Aid, either. I  want my kid to know that Israel isn’t South Africa, some artifact of Eurocentric colonialism created by people whose main goal was to build empire and wealth. It wasn’t established by racists who saw the locals as animals whose existence could be ignored, or better yet, exploited for profit. Those who’ve drunk the red Kool Aid are quick to dismiss the whole project of Israel as a banal evil. But I want my kid to know that the modern state of Israel exists because the bloody, broken survivors of Europe’s greatest man-made catastrophe limped across the world to a place that called to them and spoke to their hearts; they were drawn to a hope they desperately wanted to believe in. Then they opened the door wide for their extended family the world over, and they simply counted on the idea that somehow it would all work out in the end, despite the inevitable displacement of people who were there first, because how could the world shit on the Jews any more than Hitler already had? So was the whole thing a winning proposition? Well, no, but it was what it was. History happens. I hope my kid comes to believe that the Jews who flocked to Israel had much more compelling, humane reasons than the Boers or the Puritans. I want my kid to understand that the fruit of that desperate 20th-century Jewish migration is bittersweet, not evil or murderous. And I hope he does not shy away from confronting the bitter irony in starting a trip in the vanished Jewish centers and preserved death camps of Eastern Europe, and finishing it in a war-torn land created as a Jewish refuge from unspeakable violence.

3. Like so many other experiences we give our kids, travel requires us to find the courage to accept some risk so that they can grow. Hell, everything in life requires us to accept some risk so that our kids can grow. If I wanted my kid to learn about the Middle East from a completely safe vantage point, I would have taken him to the library instead of the airport. When I was young, my parents took me to Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Budapest, Berlin, then Israel – and this was in the 1970s, when few Westerners dared set foot behind the Iron Curtain. I learned then that travel, when it is not easy, opens the eyes and the mind.

4. With that said, it’s all about risk assessment. Look, I have ideals, sure, but I’m not looking to sacrifice my kid’s life just to make a point. But I can read a map and a newspaper. Much of Israel is out of range of Gaza rockets. The nice folks at NFTY aren’t looking to create martyrs, and they’re going to do their damnedest to keep the kids in their care far from where the rockets fall. There was a point in this conflict when I was worried about a northern front, but that didn’t materialize. I have no doubt if it had, NFTY would have pulled the plug.

5. I look forward to the day when my kid comes home with stories, ideas and opinions about Israel that were formed by reality, not by the dumbed down utopian version on display in American Hebrew schools and Yeshivas, or by the shrill anti-Semitism that seems to be proliferating everywhere else. Yes, I know that a NFTY trip has a pro-Israel agenda. And contrary to what my more right-wing Orthodox friends might think, I don't actually mind, within limits. I have a pro-Israel agenda, too -- just not one that relies on myth, propaganda, or wishful thinking. More importantly, my kid has a good yiddishe kopf. He thinks for himself. I had hoped that the progressive penchant of liberal Reform Judaism would bring some balance to a NFTY trip; I have no doubt that the bloody conflict in Gaza forced difficult issues to the fore. How could I bring my kid home because the difficult, nuanced, complex reality I’m always going on about was getting a little too difficult and real?

As I write this, I’ve just learned that flights from Israel have been suspended and NFTY is working on alternatives. I don’t know when my kid will get home. The saga continues, and my nerves fray more with each passing day…

FRIDAY UPDATE: There's good news, and other less good news.

The good news is that, after some back and forth (flight cancelled, new flight arranged, original flight uncancelled), it looks like my kid is coming home on schedule.

The other news is that, during the 24 hours during which it looked like the group would be spending a few extra days in Israel, a program was put together for them that included an opportunity to discuss the current situation in Gaza with someone described in the email from NFTY as "an expert on the Middle East conflict." I was really happy to see that. I thought it was a brilliant use of the time, and a great opportunity for the kids. Until I looked up the "expert," Neil Lazarus. It turns out that what he's an expert at is hasbara, i.e. pro-Israel PR, i.e. propaganda. In other words, he serves blue Kool Aid. I was really disappointed in NFTY, though by now, I really shouldn't be surprised. See for yourself.

SATURDAY UPDATE: Just spoke at length with my kid on his last day in Israel (probably). As I expected, he said the Gaza conflict pretty much undermined NFTY's blue Kool Aid agenda, and there's been a lot of discussion of the situation among the kids and counselors. In particular, he said, they've had the opportunity to hear a wide range of opinions, left, right, and center, from the Israeli teens who joined the group for part of the trip. And, like much of Israel, events in Gaza have not affected his day-to-day experience very much. In fact, he's had a blast. I'm sure he realizes how much more fortunate he is than those who don't have an Iron Dome, or who fill the boots on the ground. Maybe someday, when the jet lag is gone, he'll write his own update, which I'll post here.

I’m not making this up

The New York Times informs me that not wearing makeup is in. I would like to jump on this opportunity to declare myself the progenitor of this trend, as I have been way out ahead of it pretty much since birth (with a few lapses here and there, which I chalk up to the wild experimentation of youth and the occasional flare-up of middle-aged insecurity. Also weddings and bar mitzvahs. And hypocrisy.).

Anyway, you’re welcome.

Ten thoughts on not wearing makeup in America:

1. Since I seem to be so good at predicting fashion, having spotted the no-makeup trend so very early, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict its speedy demise. Little-known fact: I’m also incredibly business savvy. I know that, if they can’t make money off of something, the fashion industry is not likely to stand by it for more than…oh, a nanosecond, maybe?

2. Not wearing makeup as a feminist statement and not wearing makeup as a matter of comfort and convenience are not mutually exclusive. In fact, being more concerned about comfort and convenience than about conformity and appearance IS a feminist statement.

3. A person who insists that not wearing makeup isn't a feminist statement either doesn’t know what feminism is or can't admit to it because she's afraid of the word. Okay, okay. I'm willing to entertain other possibilities as well. But I've cleverly confused the issue by putting so many negatives into one sentence that no one even knows exactly what I meant. We feminists fight dirty.

4. Women who always wear makeup are not necessarily unenlightened or anti-feminist. Unless, deep down, they really, really feel they have to wear it because they look terrible without it and people will think they’re ugly. Which, I suspect, is probably most women who always wear it. Anyway, you know who you are. I may be confusing insecurity with the internalization of conventional sexist values. Or I may be pointing out the that the former is the inevitable result of the latter. Yup. That’s it.

5. Even as I type, hundreds of new cosmetics ad campaigns that use words like “fresh,” “bare,” “natural,” and “nude” are undoubtedly being prepared in agencies up and down Madison Avenue. Their message: Now, you too can look like you have the confidence not to wear makeup without having the confidence not to wear makeup.

6. Think about this: Somewhere out there, some woman is kicking herself because she actually had makeup tattooed onto her face. (Yes, that’s a thing.) Not that she’d be the only one ever to regret a tattoo, but at least the woman who got a rose on her butt when she was 16 and drunk can say she was 16 and drunk, not middle-aged and deeply insecure.

7. Is anyone who has always worn makeup on a daily basis really going to stop because the New York Times says so? I guess, probably, for a little while, if they’re young enough. At least until the next zit.

8. Next thing you know, the fashion pages will be telling us it’s okay to wear sweats and sneakers. OUTSIDE. But don’t worry, that won’t last either. Pretty soon, fashionistas will once again be admonishing us that we must not “let ourselves go.” (Go where, one wonders? I guess, if it’s where one goes when one wears sweats, sneakers and no makeup, I already live there. I’d better clean out the guest room for when the rest of the degenerates arrive.)

9. Do I sound just a little sarcastic? Maybe even scornful? Bitter, even? Why, yes. Yes I do. No punchline here. Just, yes.

10. So what will be the next big thing after the no-makeup look becomes history? I’m going with full latex face masks. After all, we burned our bras, and now we have Spanx.

SAID NO DOCTOR EVER

So apparently, uber-reformy, Christie-appointed Newark schools superintendent Cami Anderson likes to compare herself to a surgeon. Her sister is a surgeon, so apparently that’s why Cami knows all about it. Surgeons, she says, get to do Big Lifesaving Things all on their own, without the hoi polloi breathing down their necks and telling them what to do. Just like school superintendents should. Makes perfect sense, right?

That’s the argument she made during a recent public appearance caught on tape (scroll to the end to see for yourself). Peter Greene does a mighty good job of skewering Anderson’s fine bit o’ reasoning in his Curmudgucation blog. He points out, among other things, that before a surgeon does her thing, she has to gain the consent of the patient: “Before she could set foot in that operating room, she had to convince people that she had a plan, that the plan was good, and that they should agree to it.” Cami Anderson’s One Newark plan, quite obviously, has convinced no one. (Other than Star-Ledger editor Tom Moran, that is. He is mystifyingly easy.)

See, the thing is, Cami Anderson is an administrator. If she were an actual teacher, then maybe her analogy might have at least made a little sense. Of course, if she were an actual teacher, she wouldn’t be doing what she’s doing to Newark schools. And that’s the whole point, really. She’s not like the doctors on the front lines, saving patients’ lives. She’s more like the hospital administrator piling on the paperwork, imposing senseless bureaucratic requirements that prevent doctors from getting their jobs done, implementing cost-cutting measures that harm patients, and doing everything she can to please her bottom-line-oriented masters rather than the patient population her institution is meant to serve.

But since Ms. Anderson seems to like to imagine herself as a godlike physician with the power of life and death, and seems to believe her One Newark plan for Newark schools is just like heart surgery, let’s just see how what she’s actually done, and what she proposes to do, compare with what doctors would want for themselves and their patients. I call this little game, SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“Let’s help patients by closing down the medical facilities that serve vulnerable populations!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“Unveiled in December, the plan calls for the relocation, consolidation and closing of one-quarter of the schools in the state-run district.” nj.com

“After we’ve closed all the neighborhood medical facilities, let’s make people travel clear across town for their care!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“School spokeswoman Chanelle Figueroa said the district “has no details yet to share” about the transportation options referenced in the letter. There is no busing in Newark, and many parents said distance to schools is a major flaw in the reorganization plan.” nj.com

“As long as we’re closing hospitals and moving patients around, let’s do it in a way that violates patients’ rights!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“The choice, based on arbitrary and capricious classification, to subject disproportionate shares of low income and minority children to substantial disruption to their schooling, shifting many to schools under private governance, may substantially alter the rights of these children, their parents and local taxpayers.” New Jersey Education Policy Forum

“Let’s evaluate doctors by patient outcome with no regard to factors completely outside the doctor’s control and no transparency in the process!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“According to Baker, his and others' research has found that the methods used to determine one of New Jersey's primary measures of student progress, student growth percentiles, ‘are particularly bad - that they merely reflect the demography of the students served because they don't try to control for anything but prior scores.’ He added, ‘As a result, in New Jersey, the schools with more low-income kids, more nonproficient special education kids and so on have significantly lower growth percentiles,’ before clarifying that it was unclear what weight the student growth percentiles played in Newark's teacher evaluations. Documentation provided by the district did not state how teachers' annual evaluations were determined beyond including observations ‘from an outside, independent, experienced organization’ based on a ‘Framework for Effective Teaching.’ When asked, the district did not provide the name of the independent evaluators.” TruthOut

“Let’s punish people who speak out against plans to close hospitals in underserved communities!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“Five Newark public school principals were suspended indefinitely on Friday, including four who spoke at a community meeting opposing proposed changes to the state-run school district.” nj.com

“Let’s fire hundreds of experienced physicians and replace them with recent college graduates with some first aid training!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“Superintendent Cami Anderson, Governor Chris Christie‘s appointee, proposed a systematic overhaul of the school district in 2013 titled “One Newark.” The reform plan includes school closures, teacher layoffs, Teach for America hirings and changes to the district’s enrollment system for both traditional and charter schools.” Ballot News

“Let’s pay some doctors more than others for doing the same job, based on arbitrary, meaningless measures!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“To achieve fairness in the merit-pay system, policymakers will attempt to adopt objective measures of student learning, usually a test. But this approach leads to major pitfalls, such as narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system through teaching to the test, and victimizing struggling students and their families through blame or worse. In addition, the literature is full of challenges to the validity of even the most highly regarded tests (Popham, 2008; Wiliam, 2010). Besides, tests are typically designed to measure student learning—not instruction or teacher effectiveness.” ASCD

“Let’s use hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated funding to pay politically connected consultants instead of helping patients!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“One of every three dollars of private money spent so far in Newark’s bid to reform its schools has gone to consultants and contractors, many with ties to Mayor Cory Booker and acting state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, records show.” nj.com

“Let’s transfer all the very sickest patients out of the nicest hospitals and into the most run-down ones, then punish the doctors there when their patient outcomes are worse!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“I’ve explained that Newark charter schools in particular, persist in having an overall cream-skimming effect in Newark, creating demographic advantage for themselves and ultimately to the detriment of the district.” School Finance 101

“Let’s work for a boss appointed by a guy who thinks we’re lazy, good-for-nothing deadbeats protecting sweet, cushy jobs doing absolutely nothing all day!” SAID NO DOCTOR EVER.

“Nov 2, 2013 - Teacher Melissa Tomlinson calls Christie out on the failure factories comment during a campaign stop in Somers Point. The two have a brief exchange, during which Tomlinson said he told her "I'm tired of you people." According to the governor, what he actually said 'It's never enough for you people. No matter how much money I give, it's never enough for you people.'" nj.com

So if Cami Anderson WERE a doctor – would you want her to be YOUR doctor?

Turns out tznius is just what it says on the tin

I remember being a self-styled feminist grappling with the whole issue of tznius, or modesty, when I was in high school in Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school. The dress code required us to wear tops that were not low-cut, with sleeves at least halfway to the elbow, and skirts to the knee. (For some mysterious reason, they allowed miniskirts in the 1960s, when I was in elementary school. I think during that period the emphasis was more on “modern,” less on “Orthodox.” But I digress. Sorta.)

When I wasn’t busy hating the dress code for keeping me out of jeans, I told myself that it was kind of cool, because it was more of an attack on the shallow vanity and materialism at the core of the Western feminine ideal than a means of oppressing women and making them culpable for male sexual appetites. We were not going to fall prey to the hypersexualized, Madison Avenue-promoted image of the perfect teenage girl. Nope. Our Jewish culture was above all that. We were too busy contemplating the nature of good and evil, or something. In fact, tznius was the most feminist thing ever.

Of course, in order to stick with that interpretation, I really had to close one eye and squint the other one. For one thing, tznius was only applied to girls. There was no equivalent concept for boys. The male dress code – button-down shirt and tie – had more to do with looking like other Upper East Side prep schools than with anything inherently Jewish, including tznius. Apparently, Judaism did not see fit to build in protections against fashion marketing for boys. And that extra eye-squint? That was to avoid noticing that plenty of Ramaz girls were serious clothes horses, which they managed quite comfortably without violating the dress code.

Which brings me to today, and this article from the desperate-to-be-relevant online Jewish publication, Tablet. It reminds me that, as one former Ramaz history teacher used to tell us, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The title really says it all: “This Fashion Week, Dress Modestly While Staying Stylish.” So much for resisting fashion hype. It turns out shallow vanity and materialism are actually okay, and we have the word of Hadar Magazine fashion editor Jessica Gugenheim on that.

But that’s not all. She also tells us: “I think modest dressing lends any woman an air of sophistication. I think modestly dressed women command more respect; they use their minds rather than sexuality to get things done.”

Yup. That’s your choice: cover up and be respected, or play the slut card.

If I hadn’t ditched the whole thing years ago, at this point I’d be shutting both eyes tight and sticking my fingers in my ears to make a go of it. That would make driving really hard.

The Orwellian Irony of Common Core

How many decades will it be before we can have a productive, reasonable conversation about national standards in education? I think many, and here’s why: The biggest, most successful push to date for national standards was co-opted by the data junkies of the current education reform movement, who married the idea of national standards to the misbegotten notion that data from standardized tests should be used to reward and punish teachers, kids and schools.

That’s incredibly unfortunate. National standards, done well, could solve certain problems that plague public education, like the influence of local and regional extremists on what happens in the classroom, or the elimination of important subjects to make room for the pedagogical flavor of the day, or the sacrifice of valuable traditional skills on the altar of new technology. When you read about a state school board modifying the social studies curriculum to include American exceptionalism, the insertion of intelligent design into the science curriculum, sex education programs that teach only abstinence, books banned from classrooms for content relating to sexual orientation or atheism, the replacement of foreign language instruction with computer programming, or the elimination of civics classes from public schools, you wonder why there isn’t a mechanism to protect kids from the stupidity of their elders. As with civil rights and the environment, national standards for education would be less easily manipulated and could be a powerful tool for progress.

I hear the objection now: What if the forces of stupid take control of the national discourse, and all those terrible things become part of the national standard to be imposed on every kid throughout the land?

Which is exactly why national standards are not a no-brainer and need to be discussed in a reasonable way. Personally, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue, though I tend to think that, as with civil rights, the tendency of the nation as a whole is more trustworthy than certain regional proclivities.

But as things stand now, we can’t even hope to have that discussion, because the education-industrial complex has gotten its mitts on the whole idea and hijacked it as a way to sell tests, testing technology and test-prep materials; to beat up the unions by predicating decisions on teacher tenure and merit pay on the results of those tests; and to privatize public education by touting magic silver-bullet charter schools that churn out better test scores through drill-and-kill practices. The name of their strategy? Common Core.

Meanwhile, parents are waking up to the data-driven nightmare their schools have become after years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, federal programs that encouraged the ballooning of high-stakes standardized testing. They're waking up, and they are not happy. They've been watching their kids become nervous wrecks over tests; seen schools scrap art, music and other subjects that don't appear on the tests; heard from teachers who are being directed to teach to the tests; and seen good schools labeled as failures because of scores on the tests. Their ire is being directed at the Common Core and the new tests being introduced under it, even though the testing problem has been upon us for quite some time.

Also contributing to the growing public animosity is the fact that, in some part of the country, knee-jerk opposition to national standards in anything has become the norm, whether it has to do with education, public health, guns, or voters' rights. That's why the Tea Party mob is breaking out the pitchforks on Common Core. Note that, despite what Tea Partiers might think, Common Core is not a federal program, but a set of standards created in the hope that all states would adopt them, making them a de facto national standard. Also note the irony of Tea Party opposition; many of the same education-industry players who stand to make a mint out of Common Core, and therefore promoted the hell out of it, are also the people who fomented the Tea Party mentality. It's a wonder the Kochs and Waltons of America didn't see this coming.

So now, for a wide variety of often contradictory reasons, the people are starting to rise up against the Common Core. In the short term, that’s a good thing, because the whole project has become more about testing and related data-driven reform than about actual standards. The pushback from parents could slow the onrushing Common Core train, stanch the hemorrhaging of teachers from a system that imposes unreasonable demands on them, and generally throw a monkey wrench into the plans of those who would use data-driven reform to dismantle government-run public education. But the unfortunate collateral damage is that the underlying notion of national standards in education is now poison. A sensible endeavor by actual educators to formulate a workable standard that could promote academic excellence uniformly throughout the nation won’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell for quite some time.