The Oregon Department of Education has broken a fundamental rule: when deploying smoke and mirrors, don't skimp on the smoke. Mirrors present the clear danger of catching a glimpse of oneself, and that can be a jolting experience.
In this case, the image is not a pleasant one.
ODE is scrambling about like a gaggle of characters in a Buster Keaton movie, pushing, pulling, and hoping against hope to so situate a mobile goal post in the path of an errant kick that they can throw both arms toward the heavens and shout "Field Goal!!!" And their exuberance is, so far as I can judge, real. They are, it appears, authentically mistaken.
The State of Oregon has made no significant progress on student achievement in a decade. They have provided no evidence that they know how. Yet they insist that they can and that their lead is one that we ought all to follow. (And all the while, they are only jumping on every national fad, hoping that whoever started it knows what they are doing). And now this.
They are evidently so desperate to produce the illusion of improvement that they have decided to take what are currently the 10th grade assessments and magically transform them (though with no transformation) to the 11th grade assessments. Will this help students better prepare for life after high school? No. Will passing rates improve? Possibly. Why? More students who would have failed the 10th grade assessments will have dropped out prior to taking the same assessments in 11th grade. Sound cynical? I'm not sure. They don't show much evidence of thinking that far ahead.
And 'riddle me this': with the current ODE leadership having been in place for the better part of a decade, how did the discovery that the 10th grade assessments were misplaced by an entire calendar year somehow escape their attention until now? Shouldn't this intellectual sluggishness disqualify those responsible from further involvement? (or at least result in a good long time-out?)
And riddle me further: if the problem with the 10th grade assessments is that students don't see the requisite curriculum until 11th grade, how is it that over half of the 10th graders in the state will pass the assessments this year? Are over 50% of our students somehow accelerated by a year? Are two-thirds of our 10th graders accelerated in reading? That's how many Oregon students will pass the reading assessment this year. (In Corbett, it will be 90%. It boggles the mind what that implies...our curriculum is clearly misaligned!)
On one level, all of this is fine with me. After all, they got elected. But they don't stop at exercising horrific judgment in high places. They talk. They fill the press and the public discourse with silly notions that get in the way of real conversations about education. They flood entire statewide conferences with failed strategies that are obstacles to student achievement. They have the bully pulpit yet lack the imagination to reach all the way to the 'y'. They repeat every empty cliche that comes down from the national organizations without regard to the fact that their pet programs never produce results. They make judgments about the work of those who actually do the work, and they make them publicly.
So what's wrong with moving the goal post...again? Why not, after all, make the assessments easier? To do so undermines the work of those who insist that real achievement is possible. It puts the lie to those who claim that our children are not being served as well as they could be and that it's the fault of the adults. They give quarter to those who have sat in their desks for years and insisted that Oregon's students just aren't up to the goal of high achievement.
They have taken sides against hope.
More smoke. Really. You don't want to see this.
