When something changes the world, do we recognize what is happening at the time?

When did you buy your first cell phone? If your purchase was ten or more years ago, on that day did you imagine a future when the entire world would be cellular? Did you envision all of the applications that could be spawned from a telephone in your pocket? Cell phones not only changed the ways in which we communicate, cell phones changed the ways we live.

Now and again we experience an event or a product or a person and that experience seems to be just a passing moment in time. Sputnik. Desk top computing. Steve Jobs. 9/11. Genetic engineering. Martin Luther King. Repeat any of these six to another person and they readily will identify the year, the event, the model and make and the life story or signature work of the individual. Spend a bit longer in the conversation and you will be into a more lengthy description of the effects of a world changer.

In the universe of public education, the adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards is that kind of a seminal event. On their own, the Core represents a groundbreaking list of educational standards in reading/English language arts and mathematics education. Initially, they are derived from an intriguing ménage a trois comprised of the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers (state superintendents of education), and a group of Fortune 500 executives. As an event/product, the Core will cause a reform of classroom instruction greater than New Math, phonics or whole language.

However, as a game changer, the Core is not THE reform, as in a one-trick pony. The real changes in K-12 education are blossoming everywhere as a result OF the Core. The Core is driving changes, just as the cell phone caused industrial, cultural, and political changes.

Sean Cavanaugh, assistant editor for Education Week, writes, “The market for testing products and services is booming and could continue to surge over the next few years, according to industry analysts and company officials, who say that growth is being fueled by the shift toward common-core tests across states and the use of new classroom assessments designed to provide timely and precise feedback for teachers and students.

Demand for testing resources tends to be driven by major changes in state or federal policy affecting schools, and the current environment is reflective of that connection.

Changes in testing policy with nationwide implications are invariably ‘good for any provider of testing materials,’ said Scott Marion, the associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a Dover, N.H.-based nonprofit organization that consults with states on assessments. ‘You knew the common core was going to be a big change from what [we] had before.’”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/02/06testing_ep.h33.html?tkn=PSVFKHcN8KakBJQr1YgONoG3PmkTwT2wVDR%2F&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS1

The educational assessment market is not limited to the summative tests being written by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or the Partnership for Assessment Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The greater demand will be for diagnostic, formative assessments that will help teachers to measure short term gains in student learning – what is working and what is not. These will be needed by every K-12 school district, in multiple languages, and adapted to multiple learning modalities.

One of the characteristics of a world changer is that it causes people to look more deeply into what the changer (the Core) means, how it works, and its effects upon the world. “Common-Core Rollout Ripe for Studying, Experts Say” appeared in Education Week (10/8/2013). http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/09/07core.h33.html?tkn=ONQF0ED54LaTmusvQK4lV%2BLqz6Oa0VZ%2BQqeY&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS2

“The creators of the Common Core State Standards purposely set out what students should know in mathematics and reading without laying out how teachers should meet those requirements. That creates a rare opportunity—but also requires a massive lift—for K-12 education research to fill in the blanks.

‘Standards are necessary but they aren’t sufficient to improve student learning,’ said Pascal D. “Pat” Forgione Jr., the executive director of the K-12 Center at the Educational Testing Service, during a meeting on research in the common core held here by the Center on Education Policy and George Washington University. ‘We need significant R&D work.’

‘There’s a consensus that research as a whole has to be research for improvement; it can’t just be documentation of what worked and what didn’t,’ said John Q. Easton, the IES’ director. ‘There’s ‘no grand [randomized controlled trial] that anyone will conduct that will give us yes or no in eight years.’

Janice M. Earle, a senior program director for K-12 STEM education at the NSF predicted there may be staged cycles of research to support the standards in their first years of implementation, with deeper studies and evaluations six and 10 years out. If researchers and educators begin developing partnerships to implement the standards now, they will be in a better position to collect information and understand earlier indicators of problems or success.”

There is no pedagogy related to the Core. In order for all children to successfully achieve the content, skills and processing expectations of the Core, there will be hundreds of studies of the cause and effect dynamics of instructional strategies. The Core are not aligned to a specific textbook or publisher; publishers are rushing to align their products with the Core. Every school will be examining publisher samples to find materials appropriate for grade levels and the variety of learning needs of children at every grade level.

A third arena for enlarged industry lies in the need to expand every school’s technological infrastructure. Instruction as well as assessment will require every school district and school building to beef up.

“Widespread technical failures and interruptions of recent online testing in a number of states have shaken the confidence of educators and policymakers in high-tech assessment methods and raised serious concerns about schools’ technological readiness for the coming common-core online tests.

The glitches arose as many districts in the 46 states that have signed on to the Common Core State Standards are trying to ramp up their technological infrastructure to prepare for the requirement that students take online assessments starting in 2014-15.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/05/08/30testing-2.h32.html

“Districts need to have a punch list and make sure they have everything they need to be ready,” said Keith R. Krueger, the CEO of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, or COSN, a professional association for school district technology leaders. “But they also have to understand that high-stakes testing is a complicated environment. They’re not going to be able to control everything.”

“Though more breakdowns likely are inevitable given online testing’s relatively new place in schools, the ability to protect the validity, integrity, and security of the process is increasingly crucial as districts in 46 states—those that have adopted the Common Core State Standards—gear up for mandatory online assessments starting in 2014-15.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/02/06el-assess.h33.html?tkn=NLUFB5kVoocreDs3kDDXp5Z9JQsOnci3j5tO&cmp=ENL-CCO-NEWS2

Research, instructional material development, and technological support pale to the great demand the Core will cause for the professional development of classroom teachers.

“The implementation clock is ticking,” says a Center on Education Policy report, which was released yesterday. “If changes in instruction are to occur on schedule and if students are to be well prepared to master the standards, then teachers and principals must receive effective professional development to aid them through this transition.”

“And that doesn’t mean drive-by PD, either, according to the CEP.”

“One of the most urgent challenges is to not only provide an adequate amount of CCSS-related professional development, but also ensure these services are of high quality,” the report says.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/08/many_teachers_need_common_core_professional_development.html?qs=common+core+and+professional+development

It would be wonderful to “beam” ten years into the future to learn what educators and the public in general will be saying about the Common Core and the many peripheral changes the Core will have caused in public education across its first decade. I can only speculate that, like Sputnik or laptop computing and the cell phone, the Core will have blossomed fully from a set of standards into a powerful engine for far-reaching educational reform.

Superintendents and school boards, regarding how well children are achieving in your schools today, you are as fully clothed as the undressed emperor who walked down the village street in his skivvies believing that he was regally garbed. (Read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson to refresh the image.)

The terms and reality of “informational transparency” are applied to almost all school data today. The public has relatively easy access to the educational performance of the school district as a whole as well as each school individually. The informational display of achievements of children at specified grade levels focuses the expose’ from district to school to the classroom and even to clusters of teachers. If a school district has a small enrollment, transparency can be an expose’ of each teacher’s instructional effectiveness.

Is this new? You bet it is. For decades, too many decades in fact, the work of effective teachers masked the ineffective instruction of other teachers whose employment was maintained because the poorly performing teacher coached a sport or directed a play or was a favorite friend of children and parents. Or, the status quo was maintained because the legal system and union contracts made disciplining an ineffective teacher a monumental ordeal. Just as the emperor had a very sobering moment when he learned that he was not clothed, school leaders are having sobering moments as they learn that disaggregated data strips the luster from what was believed to be a school district or school where all children were successful learners.

School data transparency starts with public access to school information. In Wisconsin, transparency is accessed through the Department of Public Instruction’s new public portal. This web site (http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/portalHome.jsp) opens WISEdash, the new Data Dashboard for driving through the layers of information. Data can be “mined” to understand the performance of children in each school within a school district and to compare performances school to school and school district to school district.

“So?” may be the response of yesterday’s educational leader. Today’s leader understands that in the era of accountability, low performance indicators must be investigated and strategies must be found to improve those performances. Interestingly, low reading scores in 3rd grade usually have two dimensions. There is a need to improve instruction in Kindergarten, first and/or second grade. There also is a need to remediate reading abilities of children in third and fourth grade.

Once upon a time, causation for low performance scores was attached to individual students or a group of students in a grade level and shrugged off year after year until those children graduated or left the school(s). Accountability today has no shrugs.

If school was professional baseball and the shortstop made chronic fielding errors, a general manager would schedule a lot of extra fielding practice until the shortstop became “sure gloved.” If the shortstop could not stop bobbling the ball, the GM would look for a new shortstop, because the team’s overall performance cannot abide the chronic errors of a regular player. In school, the education of children cannot abide the chronic ineffective instruction of a teacher for a full school year. High performing school districts and schools are the result of all teachers providing effective instruction that causes all children to learn successfully.

Greatness is in demand these days. World Series contenders are looking for great pitching. Starters. Short relievers. Mid-relievers. Closers. You don’t have to throw more than a couple of innings, maybe 20 pitches at most, but if you have “great stuff”, major league baseball general managers want your phone number. Wide-bottomed offensive linemen, tall and mean defensive ends, and wide receivers with 40 inches of vertical lift command attention in the NFL. Children idolize those that play with skill and abandon. These are game changers. Their presence on the field tilts the outcome in favor of their teams.

I read Mary Amato’s article entitled “What Are We Doing to Support Great Teachers?” in the October 8th issue of Education Week. I appreciated Ms. Amato’s recognition of teachers she has observed over many years whose passion and command of the classroom consistently incite their students to engage in daily instruction. In contrast, she acknowledges that other teachers appear to be barren of the capacity to exude any contagious excitement and simply occupy their classrooms. She wonders what we can do to support these great, impassioned teachers and believes that burdening “great” teachers with professional development in the Common Core State Standards is a waste of their time and talent. “A set of official common-core standards isn’t necessary to achieve a high-quality education; great teachers are,” she writes.

I read on wanting to learn how Ms. Amato developed the picture of these teachers as “game changers” of great talent. She did not satisfy my inquiry. Many stars of stage, screen and television, many enlightened and inspired parents and grandparents, and a lesser number of people informed by the exampling of their great teachers may fill Ms. Amato’s billing for what is great in the classroom. But, none of these are game changers.

As much as passion and energy and interpersonal relationship engage children in learning, I offer that passion alone does not change the game of causing children to achieve a world class education or even a grade level education. There are too many children without either to simplify great teaching to characteristics of the teacher. Once excited and engaged, the question is “to what end will the children’s passionate instruction take them?” It is the light of the candle not the lighting of the candle that is of interest. Hence, what do game changing teachers do that makes them really great?

Add two qualifications to the characteristic of passion and teachers can become game changers: adeptness with a curriculum of knowledge, skills and dispositions that will prepare a child for a lifetime of learning and the capacity to find a way through their future world, and, pedagogical skills that can cause every child, regardless of distractors, to become a successful achiever of that curriculum. Now we have a more complete description of a teacher with the disposition, knowledge, and skills to approach greatness.

So, imagine the teacher of eight year olds who can cause children, those without a single book in their home and those without a home as well as those with a dyslexia or neuroses that stands as a barrier to most instruction to read at or greater than a grade level and understand and resolve complex arithmetic problems.

Imagine the teacher who excites a child to learn and then gives that child a lesson that causes all other children to learn but this child. Less than great teachers might truck on to the next lesson and take pleasure in the high percentage of initial learners. A great teacher circles the student with alternative and adaptive instruction again and again using all the teacher’s pedagogical skills until this student, the last student to learn, has done so.

Imagine the teacher who lifts most the efficient learners past promotional or graduation requirements and causes these students to surpass the required benchmarks. And, who mentors gifted children through personalized and personally crafted experiences and causes these children to live up to the potential of their talents.

Excitement in the classroom is wonderful, but analytical and prescriptive instruction that incrementally builds student learning concept and skill and understanding upon concept and skill and understanding until great learning challenges are overcome and all children are successful learners – that is the description of a great teacher who is a game changer.

September is a great month to tour the United States. The crowds of summer are thinned after most children are back in school and their parents have returned to work. Just fellow geezers and international tourists and occasional newly-weds.

Most children are back in school but not all. Children and their folks stood around Old Faithful and hiked the ancient volcanic slopes of Mount Rainier. They walked the trails in the coastal rain forests of Lake Quinnault in Washington and took pictures of Half Dome in Yosemite. Through parental choice, these children were in their in non-traditional classrooms.

Touring can provide wonderfully, rich educational opportunities. Park rangers provided we tourists with expert information about how mountains are formed and how some mountains are caused by tectonic action and others are volcanic. They talked about the history of the western United States and the preservation of natural resources, including national parks. A corporate naturalist, one of the best non-certified Biology teachers I have encountered, made a hike in the rain forest into a supernal of a seminar. What opportunities to not only see these natural wonders in person but to breathe them and feel them! Better than photographs. Better than videos. Better than virtual touring. Some parts of home schooling beat traditional schooling all to heck.

I was ecstatic. As an adult, and an educator to boot, I looked, I experienced, I asked questions of others and of myself, and I learned a great deal from my month on the road. I was a self-learner in a rich learning environment. Looking at the children on tour, I wondered about the richness of their learning. If they are not self-learners, who is Socrates for these children in the splendor of their first-hand education? Who asks the important questions that build the concepts and generalizations with which the great mounds of information they experience can make sense? Who assists children to sort out the rich detail that forms the background knowledge for a lifetime to come from the unimportant?

Asking questions, what’s the big deal about that? When touring in Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, who needs someone nagging with questions? Learners do. The right question at the right time makes the difference between seeing the Golden Gate or just another bridge over a lot of water. Hello, Socrates, one of history’s great teachers who taught through questioning. So, I wonder who is Socrates for children whose classroom is our natural world?

When children saw a banana slug at work on bear scat on a forest trail did they see a very specialized organism cleaning up the environment or was it just a fat, yellow worm eating crap? When they looked at Mount St. Helens from the heights of Rainier, did the Volcano Evacuation signs along the highways downslope into the suburbs of Seattle make any sense to them? Did they see a problem with so many people living in the shadow of an active volcano? Or, when they saw the remains of the Rim Fire northwest of Yosemite and later heard a Park Ranger talk about using managed fires to prevent future Rim Fires, did they think about the mix of political and economic and ecological problems inherent in managing natural resources? When they heard German and Japanese being spoken by internationals looking at Mount Rushmore, did they try to use the context of place and time to consider what was being said? Did they wonder what descendants of soldiers and civilians from three warring nations would think when looking together at Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln? These and thousands of other questions jump up and bite a tourist at every turn.

Learning begets questions and questions beget learning and children are natural learning machines. So, I answer my initial question. Socrates in absentia, to speak of the Greek in Latin.

We use imprecise language when talking about the time between the first and last days of the annual school calendar. I hesitate to use the words “school year” because a school year is not a year. It is not even close. To paraphrase the message at the bottom of the passenger side mirror of your vehicle, “on the first day of school the last of day of learning is closer than you think.”

PI 8.01(2)(f) of the Wisconsin Administrative Rules states that a school year shall be a minimum of 180 days. Because time is money and school money is largely payroll, school boards seldom seek DPI permission to exceed 180 days. Hence a school year begins with 180 days, fewer than half of the days in a calendar year (365).

The advent of the digital age makes school calendars very visible. One need only tap into a school’s web site to find a display of the annual school calendar. School boards approve an annual school calendar, however this calendar always is constructed using the days instruction is to be provided. “Provided” is a hypothetically legal number and is not close to the number of days of actual instruction.

The rule goes on to say that a maximum of five (5) days of the 180 may be counted to meet the required 180 even if children are not in school. These five days may be used for parent-teacher conferences or be days in which school is cancelled due to inclement weather, the proverbial snow days. Even before school begins, the instructional calendar contains only 175 days.

From this point of 175 days, the school calendar falls victim to the realities of public education. Educational accountability calls for testing and testing takes time. Wisconsin requires all children in grades 3 through 8 plus 10 to complete an annual statewide academic assessment. Most schools use three to four days for mandated fall testing. Secondary schools also use the equivalency of one day each semester for final exams. High school children take the PLAN, AccuPlacer, PSAT and ASVAB tests on school days. Testing usually reduces another five days from the instructional calendar. Now, there are 170 days for instruction.

Just because the web site calendar shows that all other days are available for instruction does not necessarily make it so. Schools are required to conduct safety drills. Most schools conduct one fire drill each month and one tornado/weather emergency drill in the fall and one in the spring. Because schools have been the sites of tragic violence, security drills also are conducted. Some of these are “secure and hide” rehearsals and others practice school evacuation procedures. Public confidence in child safety at school requires these drills and rehearsals. Good school administrative practices distribute these events across the hours of a school day so that children know what to do wherever they are in the school house. Good practices also distribute the distraction these events create. Drills will account for an aggregate of two days of instruction. Now, there are 168 days.

School assemblies are distributed across the annual calendar. Some are connected with specific dates. Veterans Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day are examples of an annual historical, cultural observance involving children in school. In-school rehearsals for school musicals, concerts and plays reduce instructional time. In elementary schools, instructional focus wears thin in the days before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as those events become in-school class room themes. In Wisconsin, many high school boys are absent in the fall for the opening day of deer hunting season. It is Wisconsin culture!

Class field trips use and lose time for instruction. History teachers make good use of time dedicated for a trip to a regional museum. However, the time required for the history event takes children out of their math and science and language arts instruction as well as art, health, music and physical education.

Assume that two or three days of the calendar are used for school assemblies and field trips and now there are less than 165 days for instruction.

Good and continuous teaching causes children to learn. Good teaching requires the continuous presence of a good teacher. Even though a teacher prepares lesson plans for a substitute teacher to follow in the regular teacher’s absence, the absence of the child’s regular teacher disrupts the continuity of instruction. This does not denigrate the work of substitute teachers. Children, however, respond differently to a substitute teacher and a substitute teacher responds differently to each child. Teacher absences for personal illness and emergencies average five to eight days each school year. Absences for professional training average four to six days each school year. Teacher absence reduces the number of effective teacher-student instructional days to 154.

Equal to a teacher’s absence, if a child is absent from school, the child is absent from instruction. While it is true that class instruction continues in the absence of children every day, the absent child does not receive that instruction until she returns to school. It used to be that when a child was not in school it was because the child was ill. Not true today. Wisconsin Rules allow a parent to excuse a child from school for up to ten (10) days each school year without providing a reason for the absences. The frequency of absences varies greatly child to child, however, perfect attendance is a rarity and most children are absent an average of seven to fifteen days annually.

The number of days for teacher-child instruction now is less than 150. Fewer than 150 is the number of effective instructional days for most children. So, let’s put this calendar and instructional intent into propositional statements.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to add a grade level of reading achievement.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to learn Algebra or Chemistry or World History or Spanish 1.

A teacher has less than 150 learning episodes in which to cause a child to learn the designated Common Core Standards for the child’s grade level.

Together, teacher and child have less than 150 learning episodes to cause the child to perform at a competent level on the next annual state assessments.

Ouch! One hundred fifty is not very many. In fact, 150 episodes is the equivalency of 124 hours of instruction because a school’s class periods typically are 50 minutes in duration. Double ouch!

Only in school can less than 150 days or less than 124 hours be called a year.