John White Has LA Teachers' Backs

Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana had barely finished joining the crowd of politicians dancing rapidly away from various aspects of Common Core when State Superintendent of Education John White continued his streak of bad wrong no-good comments by sticking up by the people who will be most hurt by something as wild and crazy as dumping the PARCC testing. White wanted to speak up on behalf of the people whose interests have always been at the forefront of his policy decisions in the past.

Teachers.

White had previously offered the fanciful notion that the PARCC test would be a money-saver, or at least break even. Did he not know that the PARCC tests are not free? Mercedes Schneider told him.

But in today's Advocate, White is quoted expressing his concern over the probable ship jumpification of Jindal.

Just from a teacher’s perspective, it is deeply confusing and probably troubling that they now go into the remainder of the school year with leadership across state government not giving them the clarity they need and deserve and they have had for several years.

White's education training comes courtesy of a stint in TFA and training from the Broad Academy, so you know he really gets where teachers are coming from. He worries about teachers getting what they deserve, and clarity has always been his guiding principle, and does my internet connection now access some alternate universe, because from out here in the cheap seats it has been clear for years that Louisiana is one of the poster children for how the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools can get pretty much everything they want and yet have no actual success to show for it.

White jumped into the Core a year sooner than needed, and rolled out PARCC practice without actually saying that's what was up. He got caught lying about the exposure of student data, and he presided over a busticated version of VAM even worse than the "original." And then there's the ongoing loot-and-pillage by charter interests going on under his watch.

But he is worried about the poor confused teachers, God bless them.

It's an impressive pivot. The more standard MoRONS move is to invoke the children and how they will suffer without the benefits of the super-duper awesome tests, tests whose magical powers automatically cause knowledge to bloom within the brains of even the dullest young person.

But no. White doesn't want to make things confusing for the teachers.

“I think it is just a shame from the teacher’s perspective,” White said of the debate over test plans. “You really have no idea whether to go right or go left.”

Yes, that's sweet. Because I am sure that the teachers of Louisiana have known exactly where they were going previously, much like Thelma and Louise knew exactly where they were going at the end of their adventure.

But reading this article, I don't so much smell as I catch the faint whiff of panic sweat.

“What would we do? We don’t have a test for next year. We have been planning for years, it is no secret, to purchase this test,” he said of PARCC.

I had plans. I had backers. I had money lined up. I made promises to people who are expecting me to deliver.

No, White is not sounding like someone who at long last is worried about the care and feeding, the health welfare and safety of teachers. He sounds like a guy who is in to his bookie-- his big, burly bookie with the enforcer with arms like tree trunks and a pierced eyeball-- for a whole bunch of money, and he just saw snake eyes roll up on his last big bet.

But I wouldn't worry about him. He's Bobby Jindal's boy, his pushed-for-hire, and I'm sure that even if Jindal queers White's PARCC deal, he'll still have White's back. Just like White is looking out for all of Louisiana's teachers.

[with a big hat tip to the reporting of Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish]

John White Remains Confused

Last week the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) network held its annual meeting, this time in New Orleans. It's a jolly gathering of all our reform friends, and this year it featured a speech from Louisiana school chief John White, the test of which was run by Fordham's Flypaper blog. I'll warn you-- this starts out just sort of ill-formed, and ends up pretty awful. But it is a window, once again, on how fully lost some reformsters are.

White has a hefty reform pedigree-- Teach for America, TFA director, Joel Klein's team in NYC, Broad Academy of Faux Superintendency). The headline that gave this piece some legs and attention was White's observation that education is no longer a political winner, which is only slightly more insightful than suggesting that Barack Obama will probably win the Democratic nomination over Hilary Clinton. Or as I've commented elsewhere, 2018-- the year I run out of new ways to say "And you just figured this out now..."

White does note that the 2016 election put paid to the notion that education would be an important political issue. Jeb! Bush tried to make education a chunk of his campaign foundation, and Campbell Brown tried to set up a website that would position her as arbiter of the education discussion (remember when she staged education summits and nobody came). In 2016, people who banked on education as an issue were like folks who speculated in real estate, but the railroad went through some other town.

But White believes this lack of political interest in education is a serious problem. I don't disagree with that basic point-- it sucks that politicians, leaders, media outlets, and strangers on the street aren't more interested in what goes on in the world of education. But beyond that-- well, I find White's analysis suspect at best.

Education reform has made positive gains in this country for the people whom it’s set out to serve without question.

Yes, "without question" probably belongs somewhere else in that sentence, but it's a sentence that should be stricken, anyway, without question. Unless he means that the people ed reform set out to serve were profiteers and privatizers, in which case he may have a point. If he meant actual children, I don't think he does.

Nor does he offer much to back it up:

And whereas, when I started out my career in the 1990s and people ask you, “Point me to a set of schools where large groups of students are beating the odds, and are achieving some semblance of hope in the American dream in spite of challenging conditions as a child,” you could count on your hand how many schools met those criteria. Today, there are hundreds of them.

How many times do miracle schools have to be debunked? Roughly a zillion, I guess. What are miracles based one? Extra resources. Careful attention to which students they let in the door. Depending on a lousy measure of students achievement to make pretty numbers. None of that is particularly miraculous. Where are the thousands upon thousands of students who, by now, should have swelled the college ranks with success and gone on to richer, happier lives? And what do we know about the cost of those "miracles"? How many students had to be left behind in schools with even fewer resources so that some charter operator could stage a "miracle"?

And yet for some reason, today we have a political climate in which—whatever side of the Common Core issue you are on, whatever your take on school vouchers, wherever you come out on standardized testing or what have you—you cannot question the fact that politicians are running from education and not toward it. They are running from our elementary schools, our middle schools, and our high schools. And where they are even remotely interested in our education, it is in thin solutions for our postsecondary education and thin solutions for early childhood education. Somehow it’s the thirteen years, the thirteen deeply formative years, of school that they seem to want nothing to do with.

This is a great paragraph, capturing both the current state of politics vs. reformsterism and also capturing the confusion and cluelessness of some Reformsters. It's as important, in its own way, as Arne Duncan's sweetly oblivious memoir.

Politicians have decided to shy away from those thirteen years because virtually everything reformsters have talked them into in the last couple of decades has been a mess. Common Core turned out to be a nightmare, a disaster. Test-centered schools-- disaster. Charters-- looked like they might not be a disaster, but now stalled out. To the extent that White is correct, politicians have learned that many policy wonks are not very wise about schools, and that their ideas are often laced with kryptonite.

Of course, they have also learned to keep a lower profile. They've learned that you can get away with Common Core if you just call it something else. And they've learned that the next round of privatizing profiteering (personalized learning, competency based education, techno-data-everything, etc) can be better played close to the vest.

I'd also like to think that they've learned that education does not boil down very effectively to a sound bite on the stump. And that many people are very invested in education, so when you say something stupid, they will make a fuss.

White is missing one other puzzle piece. I'd argue that a huge reason that education wasn't a big deal in 2016 is because everyone, from corporate GOP candidates to corporate Democrats, agreed on one basic education policy-- "those smart guys with all that money should get to call the shots." You can't have much of a debate between people who are all on the same side.

Having missed that, White has also missed that something is changing right now. Teachers are running for office. And in several major races, education is actually a big issue. The problem for White and his PIE cronies is that the political noise about education is coming in opposition to reformsters and their legacy of educational vandalism. And with the election of Trump, reformsters had to learn another lesson that is coming back to haunt them this cycle-- when people are your allies only because it's politically and financially expedient to be so, then when it's no longer expedient, they will no longer be your allies.

White's confusion is as great as ever. When trying to explain "the brilliance represented in this room and in your organizations" is not about their ideas, but  instead

it has to do with the fact that over two or three decades, some of the nations most committed, invigorated, finest people, rich and poor, from west and east, from all racial backgrounds, have actually come together to focus on public education, or publicly-funded education. They have brought tremendous and uncommon energy to this issue, Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike. And we have achieved the gains we have, not because we are smarter than everybody else, but because we have great people who saw this as an issue to which they wanted to dedicate their life.

It occurs to me at this point that among his problems, White is a policy guy, defining "the spectrum" as a bunch of policy and political operatives (but not any actual teachers or people who work in the field), and that "success" in this context means issued some position papers and schmoozed some statehouse allies and got some laws passed here and there, and that John White neither knows nor cares how any of that played out for actual children in actual classrooms.

Sure enough. He defines the biggest crisis facing education reform and it has nothing to do with the lack of perceptible positive life effects for students or the state of actual learning or the problems of poverty and racism as they affect students' ability to be their most excellent selves-- no, the "crisis" is "the relevance of our issue, and therefore the attractiveness of our issue, for the next generation of activists, advocates, philanthropists, and politicians." John White isn't even worried about a teacher shortage-- it's the politician shortage that he thinks is the biggest crisis.

And as he outlines the problem and possible solutions, he talks about how he used to think that the solution was better PR (I'm paraphrasing here) as in a set of issues that would play better, or some billionaire who could kick them loose from a tired message or, well, "finding value in things that offer more value to a more diverse audience." He's just not so sure any more.

But here comes the big finish-- if reformsters are going to grow more reformsters like Bill Haslam or Mike Bloomberg, who can "create newness" or invent, they will have to reinvent, "be new." He wants the PIE folks to appreciate how rare and precious it is for folks to join across party lines. So think about how to "remain relevant" and "remain on the front page." Because PR.

Just when I think he will manage to discuss education without mentioning a single human being who's actually involved in doing it, as if the whole "do it for the children" mantra is only for the public and not something reformsters say to each other when they're the only ones in the room, he busts out the children-- and it's even worse.

I believe it’s possible because the good news is, whether you are in New Orleans or New York or anywhere in this country, there is one force that we can harness, that no other issue can harness, and that is the love of Americans for their children. Everyone knows that children are our most precious assets, and therefore we have a tremendous platform from which to get advocates. 

So don't forget-- people love their damn children and we should be able to leverage that love into political capital. Think I'm being harsh? Here's the very next, and final, two sentences:

But for some reason we are not converting that into attention, into political capital, and into new ideas. And that has to change.

Well, something has to change. Perhaps the cluelessness of reformsters like White could change. I would recommend less time schmoozing with the members of PIE and more time in an actual classroom, because this is a stunning display of reform disconnect, of a focus on policy winning (at whatever policy, as he seems none too attached to any particular policy-- just one that could get them winning again) at the complete neglect, ignorance, dismissal and obliviating of the children. It's a world in which education policy looms large, but actual schools and classrooms and teachers and children are virtually invisible.

And, yeah-- that has to change.

Okay. Let's Not Talk About Guns

I know there are earlier examples, but it really starts for me with Jody Billingsley.

Jody was one of my former students, part of a class of students that I really enjoyed for their spark, their joy, their bravery, their curiosity. She was a star athlete, smart, kind-- the sort of decent human being you want your own children to grow up to be.

When she was only 38, she was murdered near Pittsburgh in an LA Fitness Center, gunned down by an angry white guy.

It was 2009, so nobody was talking about InCels yet, but this guy (I'm not printing the son of a bitch's name) fit the description. Angry that life had not delivered the money and female attention that he believed he deserved, he kept a journal of his grievances (because, of course, some day the world would listen to him and pay attention to what he had to say) and made several false starts at his little murder spree (four dead-- barely noteworthy by our current standards). All three of his victims were women; he then killed himself.

And now we have the most recent shooting in Santa Fe, where a student killed ten, despite the school's fully-rehearsed plan and fully-armed officers. The shooter was not a sad loner, but he had been rejected by one of the girls that he murdered, and had pursued her so relentlessly that she ultimately had to publicly embarrass him to get hi m to back off. Only, I guess, he maybe didn't.

So as we look at the long string of deaths and mass murders including the school shootings of the past two decades, we can draw-- and have drawn-- a line between all of these and the use, usually, of America's all-too-plentiful guns.

But this is America, and we don't want to talk about guns.

Fine.

If we're not going to talk about guns, let's talk about the other pattern that is increasingly noticeable.

Let's talk about angry white guys.

Lots of folks have made the observation, usually after whatever the most recent shooting was. Here's Elle after the Las Vegas shooting:

Stephen Paddock was an angry white man with a gun. Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people and injured nine at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, was an angry white man with a gun. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people and injured one at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was an angry white man with a gun. Adam Lanza, who killed 28 people including 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary, was an angry white man with a gun. Hell, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 15 people and injured 24 at Columbine High School, were two angry white boys with guns. The Columbine massacre, which sparked a national conversation about the need for better gun control, was in 1999. It’s been 18 years of angry white men with guns appearing next to ever-more-enormous body counts, every few weeks, ever since.

We've also had plenty of discussion of why these white guys are angry. And, in fairness, we have had the contrarian "maybe it's not that bad" takes as well. But even if we've got a proportionately appropriate number of angry white guys killing people, the sheer numbers seem to demand some attention.

At a minimum, we need to learn from the pattern. School shooters are usually guys with a specific grievance. Some folks argue that if we "harden the target" and make schools less easily shoot-uppable, shooters will go shoot up something else, something softer. But shooters like last week's murderer do not pick schools because schools are soft targets-- the pick schools because they want to shoot the people who are at the school. Hardening the target will not deter them into some other pursuit.

The Toronto attacker prompted a look into the InCel world, and that's pretty chilling all by itself. These are angry white guys who, like the SOB who gunned down Jody, believe they have been cheated out of what they deserve, as if the world is a vending machine into which they have pumped quarters only to get nothing in return. They are the terrifying realization of the line that men worry about women laughing at them and women worry about men killing them.

As a culture, we've asked for this. My students know that if they bring up the Twilight book series, they'll get a rant out of me, not because of the laughably bad writing, but because of the romanticizing of stalker behavior. Edward ticks off every single item on the "your boyfriend may be a future abuser" checklist. And that has been marketed as the Great Romance of the 21st century.

That's not a new thing-- from the Phantom of the Opera to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers to John Cusack standing in the rain with that damn boom box, the message is that men need to wear women down, be persistent. For young men, romance is supposed to be a simple formula-- make the correct moves, and it should unlock a girl's heart like a video-game achievement. And, at least in the halls of my school, girls buy into this-- I have lost count of how many girls I have heard explain that they "have to" go out with this guy they don't really want to go out with because he did X.

Are we in a new peak of angry guy-ness? I'm not sure; it may just seem worse because the pinnacle of angry white guyness is our President (seriously-- President of the United States of America and he is still perpetually pissed off and aggrieved). I'm sure it's not the whole picture, but I'm equally sure that angry white guyness is part of what got him elected. It's also why things like "p***y grabber" comments and stiffing subcontractors and barely-concealed racism help rather than hurt him-- he has been and is still living the angry white guy dream, where you say or do or grab what you want and people don't keep telling you no, people don't insist that you don't have the power to do that. Angry white guys hate feeling like someone has taken away their power. Hell, isn't that the root of the whole gun argument as forwarded by that army of angry white guys, the NRA-- you can't take our guns because then we lose the power to really hurt bad people who might want to take away our power.



Can we get rid of all the angry white guys? Of course not-- there will always be outliers. Could we do a better job raising young men? Yes. Yes, we could. We could teach them to respect women (and not just as a complex part of getting women to do what we want them to). We really could explain the whole "no" and "yes" thing better, because men have to own women with confusing signals because too many women have grown up in a world where a blunt, clear "no" dangerous. We could, as men, hold each other accountable

As schools, we could intervene more aggressively in abusive relationships. We can create an environment where toxic masculinity does not work-- and we can and must explicitly teach alternatives. And for the love of God, can we please teach our young men how to cope with their feelings by some means other than releasing them in occasional burst of maladptive rage and violence.

If we won't talk about guns, then let's talk about the rest of this. If we want to pitch Social and Emotional Learning for schools, let's talk about creating a more emotionally healthy environment for young men. Not only could we maybe save a few lives, but we could definitely make a whole lot of lives better. We would certainly make schools better environments for learning.

I know this wouldn't be magical, and it is damned hard to get a culture to shift direction. But it would certainly be a more useful conversation than talking about making schools more like prisons or locking students behind a single door (and praying for no fires, ever) or all the other foolish things that are proposed just so we won't talk about guns.

Content Matters (or "Yet Another Reformster Has an Epiphany")

NAEP report time is just around the corner, and states are positioning themselves to withstand the hits they're about to take. This has led to even more special moments in reformster revelation.

Here's John White in The Hill, explaining why NAEP is not a good reading test. White, you will recall, is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education, arriving there as a Broad-trained TFA-produced reformster (you can see his timeline laid out here) and a big fan of Common Core. In short, he's always been completely unqualified for his job, but has the right friends in the right places. None of that prepared me for what he wrote in the Hill opinion piece.

He opens by setting the stakes high-- "A literate citizenry is a matter of national defense" -- and so, he reasons, we have to change every reading test in America.

Why? Well, he notes that while fourth grade scores have climbed, scores for older students have not. And the problem could be, he thinks, that the tests are not an accurate measure of reading.

As with children, a literate adult can read individual words and can connect them into sentences. But literate adults also have the background knowledge necessary to make sense of the words they encounter. When we read that a player rounded the bases, for example, we know that means more than just running around a baseball field — someone hit a home run. Or when we read there was a meeting at 10 Downing St., we know it wasn’t just tea time in London — something important happened in Great Britain at the home of the prime minister. We comprehend what we read because we have prior knowledge of the subject

Imagine, then, taking a reading test and encountering a passage on the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing much about the Cold War or President Kennedy. Or, try it yourself by reading an academic study on a subject you know nothing about. You may be able to decipher the words, but making sense of the text will be tedious. And good luck with a test of how well you comprehended and retained the knowledge.

On today’s reading tests, students read articles and stories they’ve not encountered before on topics they don’t necessarily know anything about. This may explain why older students struggle more on these tests; there is simply more that older students have to know to be sure they will comprehend an article written for an older audience.

And I know that's a lot of quoting, but this next graph is crucial:

The trouble is that by not requiring knowledge of any specific book or facts, reading tests have contributed to the false impression that reading is mainly about having skills such as being able to summarize, and not about background knowledge. Walk into many English classrooms today and you will see students capably identifying an article’s main idea. But you’re less likely to find students learning the historical context for a novel or discussing the novel’s broader meaning. By not requiring knowledge, tests create no incentive for particular knowledge to be taught.

Emphasis mine. White is absolutely dead on correct here-- the attempt to reduce reading to a set of discrete content-free skills has been misguided and dopey. How did we arrive at such a place? White ignores that question, as well he might, as he's one of the people who worked hard to get us there. The content-starved skill-focused vision of reading was promoted by Common Core and backed up by Common Core testing. That would be the same Common Core that White encouraged Louisiana to embrace. And hey- remember that time that White openly defied the governor who hired him in order to keep the Core and the PARCC test in place? Fun times.

White apparently wants to pretend it's not so, but his Hill piece directly contradicts reformster orthodoxy. It was David Coleman, CCSS ELA architect who told us to boldly teach the Gettysburg Address without any historical context or discussion of the broader meaning. It's the Common Core linked Big Standardized Tests that have accustomed us to the notion that reading is always done in bits and pieces and excerpts, snatches of reading plucked loose from the context of the larger work. In fairness, not all reformsters have bought this idea-- the importance of content for reading is a point on which Robert Pondiscio and I are in complete agreement. But White has been toeing the Common Core content-free reading line all along.

So why the shift? Did something happen to make White realize that the Common Core approach to reading is baloney? That seems unlikely, as witnessed by the fact that his opinion piece nowhere mentions Common Core, nor does it include the words "I was wrong."

No, the more likely cause is the knowledge that NAEP scores are about to punch his state in the face, and as Mercedes Schneider correctly notes, these are not scores he fudge, delay, or hide. Instead, he has to scramble for a way to lessen the impact. When doing the wrong thing is about to bite you in the butt, one strategy is, surprisingly, to start advocating for the right thing.

So while I agree whole-heartedly with everything White said, I don't believe he believes it. His unwillingness to fess up for his own complicity in this mess is also not an encouraging sign. He's just the dog standing next to the broken tree saying, "Hey, somebody broke this. I don't know who it was, but you should really do something about it." He's not entirely wrong, but I'm not going to trust him around trees any time soon.

Changing Chiefs for Change

Pity the Chiefs for Change. They were destined to be part of the superstructure of educational reforminess that would help sweep Jeb! Bush into power, then be poised to cash in on uplift US education once he got into the White House. But now the Jebster's Presidential hopes have gone the way of Betamax tapes and the Zune, and Chiefs for Change is on the last leg of a long, downhill slide.

CFC was originally spun off of Jeb's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), a group that lobbied hard for Common Core, school A-F ratings, test-based evaluation, and mountains of money thrown at charter schools. FEE started up CFC because they thought that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the group that holds the Common Core copyright and was the figurehead guiding force behind the core's creation-- that group wasn't aggressively reformy enough for the Jebster.

Initially, the group was to be a new nexus of reform, but they were immediately beset by problems. And I'm not counting the naming problem-- did they think that change would never come, or once the change was the status quo, were they going to just disband? I mean, if your brand is that you favor change, does that mean you just keep trying to change the change that you just implemented? Do you ever say, "Well, hell, no-- we don't worked hard to install that policy and we surely don't want to change that!" I'm just saying-- doesn't seem like a very well thought out name.

At any rate, by the time Jeb's 2013 Reformster Convention rolled around (incidentally, the 2016 National Education Summit is scheduled for end of November in DC-- I wonder how that's going to go), the Chiefs were already in rather a mess. Chief Tony Bennett had already had to change jobs because of that whole lying and cheating thing. And Jennifer Berkshire provides a great account of Rahm Emmanuel's speech, a weathervane moment that showed the Winds of Change no longer at CFC's back.

Since those not-so-halcyon days, CFC has decided to implement a little mission creep. Last year they dropped their connection to FEE, which was more than financial, but also structural and organizational. They also decided to change their definition of "chief." Previously that had meant a state-level education chief, but they had already developed a problem in that department. If we scan the list of the current seventeen CFC members, we find these:

Chris Barbic: Former Superintendent of the Achievement School District, Tennessee
Dale Erquiaga: Former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Nevada
Kevin Huffman: Former Commissioner of Education, Tennessee; Chief-in-
Residence, Chiefs for Change
Mike Miles: Former Superintendent of Dallas Independent School District, Texas
Mark Murphy: Former Secretary of Education, Delaware
Brad Smith: Former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Utah

The other eleven members include Chis Cerf who is currently a superintendent, but is the former New Jersey Chief. The list also includes Hanna Skandera (New Mexico) and John White (Louisiana), neither of whom is exactly packing heavy political clout these days. The Glorious League of Washed-up Education Reformers  doesn't really reek of political power and influence, so GLOWER CFC has opened its doors to lowly superintendents. The six newest members, announced just this month, are

Robert Avossa: Superintendent of Palm Beach County Schools, Florida
Desmond Blackburn: Superintendent of Brevard County Schools, Florida
Tom Boasberg: Superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Colorado
Chris Cerf: Superintendent of Newark Public Schools, New Jersey
Barbara Jenkins: Superintendent of Orange County Public Schools, Florida
Antwan Wilson: Superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, California

In fact, among the seventeen members, in addition to White and Skandera, the only members who are state ed chiefs are-- oops. Hansuel Kang, state superintendent of DC schools. And Veronica Conforme, head of the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan, which has troubles of its own and is marked for termination.

Oh, and let's not forget Deborah Gist, who used to be the Ed Chieftain for Rhode Island, who was last year hired as superintendent of Tulsa, OK schools, an appointment so unpopular that teachers walked out of the board meeting where Gist was hired.

So that means the Chiefs are now a group of seven school district superintendents allied with some former state chiefs and a handful of barely-in-power education leaders. John White, the hood ornament on this busted-down bus, says that the CFC now has a new mission:

The turnover in Chief roles is incredibly high, and we know that education leadership is not diverse enough. The work we are doing together to build a pipeline of diverse Future Chiefs, and to envision new systems to support students and teachers under ESSA, is essential and exciting.

It's like they made a half-hearted attempt to crib some copy from the last couple of Teach for America reboots. "What are we doing now? Something something diversity? Fine. I'll put that down."

Chiefs for Change were going to be Educational Masters of the Universe. Now they're more like one of those padded ghost band versions of some sixties rock group playing county fairs and mall openings. Such big dreams. They coulda been contenders. Now, like many folks who were depending on the Jeb! Bush political machine, they are going to have to find a new path.

Impersonating A Teacher

In a John White valedictory piece, he's called "a former English teacher in New Jersey." I have twice this week come across a reformster who says he "started out as a teacher." Regular students of ed reform have seen similar pattern over and over-- the reformy whiz who has been busy at the ed reform or ed leadership or ed consulting or even ed leadership biz for a while, but who claims to have been a teacher. Sometimes you have to dig hard, and sometimes it's just right there in the LinkedIN profile, but the answer is invariably the same.

Teach for America.

My hackles raise right up, all by themselves. If you clerked for a year before you went to work as a welder, you are not a former lawyer who's now qualified to sit as a federal judge. If you were pre-med in college and spent a summer working as a hospital orderly before you started managing a Piggly Wiggly, you are not a former doctor who's now qualified to serve as head of surgery for a major hospital. And if you spent two years in a classroom after five weeks of training and before you started law school and went into practice doing corporate acquisitions for hedge funders, you are not a former teacher who is now qualified to run an entire school district.

There are lots of complicated policy issues and intricate nuances to analyze about the last few decades of education reform. But one of the biggest problems with the modern ed reform is actually pretty simple-- ed reform has put a whole lot of unqualified amateurs in positions of responsibility that they lacked the knowledge or experience to manage well. John White, Kevin Huffman, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Chris Barbic, David Coleman-- unqualified amateurs all. And that's just the national stage-- it would be a herculean task to track all the regional amateurs, guys like David Hardy, Jr., who have trashed a local district after finding themselves in leadership positions they weren't qualified for. The graduates of the Broad Academy. Most of the Chiefs for Change. The rich guys like Gates and Zuckerberg who decide they should steer national education policy. All amateurs. Almost every boneheaded policy idea that made teachers shake their heads and roll their eyes-- produced by some unqualified amateur.

We can talk about the deep details of the last thirty years, but at heart it's as simple as a whole lot of important decisions made by people in charge who didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

And so many of these amateurs proudly touted "former teacher" on their resume, based on their two years with Teach for America.

Two years is nothing in teacher years. A second year teacher is still a teaching baby. Particularly if they started out behind and having to learn things that other beginning teachers had already learned before they arrived in the classroom. Particularly if, instead of asking questions like "How can I better grasp and develop this technique so it will serve my students better for the rest of my career" they are thinking things like, "Well, this is good enough to get me to the end of the year and then I'll never have to worry about it again."

Five to seven years is what it takes to get most folks up to speed. If you've got at least five years in in a classroom, I'll agree that you are a former teacher. At two years, you're just somebody who tried teaching and bailed. You are not a "former teacher" or someone who "started out as a teacher." I'd buy "tried teaching for a bit," but then, that wouldn't provide the kind of resume-enhancing, virtue-signaling, expertise-claiming punch you're looking for.

Are the Teach for America folks who were really sincere about their interest in teaching, or some who really meant to give it a shot but fund it wasn't for them? Sure. You can spot them because they kept teaching, or they got out and didn't try to pass themselves off as education experts for the rest of their career.

Can people develop expertise in education without having spent five years in the classroom? Sure-- mostly by doing a lot of listening to people who have.

Is this kind of snotty and elitist? Yes, I'll own that. Not everybody can teach, and not everybody who can teach can do it really, really well. I get that it's a club lots of people want to belong to, for a variety of reasons, but not everyone can. If you want a membership, then earn it.

I'll give David Coleman credit-- he at least proudly admitted to being an unqualified amateur. But I do wish that the rest of these folks would stop impersonating teachers. It demeans the profession and enables their claim to expertise that they simply don't possess. The world has always been filled with people who were sure they were education experts because they went to school, but now some of them have found a way to formalize that baloney.

One of the hallmarks of modern ed reform is language that is at best imprecise and at worst deliberately misleading. It's the score on a single two-subject standardized test-- it's "student achievement"! Well, memo to education journalists-- John White is not a former teacher, and neither are any of the rest of these impersonators running around trying to make a brief bout of edutourism look like a previous career choice.

CCSSO & CGCS Offer No Useful Change on Testing

The big news on the street is that the CCSSO and CGCS (state ed leaders and big city school folks respectively) have announced an intention to rein in the testing juggernaut. 

I'm not impressed. To begin with, they put front and center NY State's John King, Louisiana's John White, and DC Public's Kaya Henderson-- three big fresh faces of the anti-public school reformster movement (two TFA temps and a charter profiteer). That's a big fat signal that this not about changing course, but about protecting the current high-stakes test-driven status quo.

And in fact these folks were not there to say, "We realize something is wrong and we're committed to fixing it." They were there to say, "We recognize that we're taking some PR heat on this, so we're going to see if we can't tweak the optics enough to get everyone to shut up while we stay the course." They're going to "look at" testing. Maybe "audit" the number.

Andy Smarick broke the non-event down into Ten Big Takeaways. He tries to sell this as a "smart 'third-way' approach," but it certainly looks like the same old spam to me. Smarick tries to sell the new ... well, "plan" seems like an overstatement. Maybe "expression of a general new inclination"? At any rate, he tries to paint this as a compromise, but it's not.

The whole trick of this new position is that it carefully avoids the most important question. And so we're having a conversation about having less testing without discussing the quality of testing and its role in driving education. We're going to combine tests and streamline tests, but we're not going to discuss the value of the tests or the uses of their results. It's as if we discovered that students were getting arsenic on their school lunch every day and the compromise response was, "Well, let's just look at putting a little less on there." It's like living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and being told, "Good news! The muggers have gotten together and decided that they will coordinate more carefully so that you only get robbed once a day."

John White earns the Dumbest Statement award for the phone conference. He suggests that most of the daily testing is from the everyday work in schools, and characterized local testing as "nonessential." According to the Washington Post, he said, "We believe we can work together with our districts to make sure the testing we have in our states at the state and local level is the minimum necessary to inform our decisionmaking."

So the kind of daily assessments that teachers do in order to know, right now, how well students are grasping the material-- that's what White thinks is nonessential??!! Meanwhile, we need to keep our commitment to standardized testing programs that are no instructional help to classroom teachers at all.

No, the announcement is nothing more than a sort-of-commitment to make testing more efficient, which is about as comforting as knowing that the guy who's planning to punch you in the face is getting a nice manicure.

I am not surprised that reformsters are circling the wagons and figuring out how to protect the testing industrial complex. But I am bum-foggled that people are reporting this under headlines that talk about vows and changes.

The fundamental problem remains-- a systematically toxic dependency on tests that do not measure what they purport to measure in order to use data that is not true to prove things that the data cannot prove, while at the same time reducing public education to a test prep process that steals time and resources from the real process of actual education in order to feed a process bent on reducing students to trained circus animals and teachers to clerical workers.

This is not a step forward. In fact, to the extent that it convinces people we're taking steps forward, it's a step backwards.

ICYMI: Packing Edition (7/17)

The staff here at the institute will be traveling soon to visit some of our field offices. That will be an adventure, no doubt, but as we prep for that adventure, here is your reading list for the week. Remember--if there's something here you like, share the post from its original site. You, too, van be an amplifier.

"Critical race theory" is being weaponized. What's the fuss about?

From the Economist, here's one of the better pieces I've read for providing a level-headed summary of what the fuss is, in fact, all about.

The supreme court has ushered in a new era of religious school

Adam Laats, historian of school-related religious culture warfare, has another great explainer up, this time at The Atlantic. Now that the church state wall is in shambles, he says the country is not ready for what comes next.

The supreme court is unraveling the separation of church and state

Shelly Balik is a history professor; at the Washington Posr, she offers up a history of that much-hammered wall.

The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harassing teachers on social media

Tanya Basu in the MIT Technology Review. This is scary stuff. 

The world of high dose tutoring has become a land grab

In Edsurge, Daniel Mollenkamp notes that now that there's big money in tutoring, some of the folks getting involved aren't offering anything actually useful or proven. I know--what a shock!

Students need teachers NOT tutors! Who's pushing tutors and why.

Nancy Bailey has more about the rise of tutoring as a "solution" in teaching.

John White now sells Eureka math

John White was once education chief in Louisiana. Now he's one more salesman hawking questionable edu-wares. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has the full story. 

We don't need no education

Warm body laws make an appearance in Arizona, and Kathryn Joyce is at Salon with the story of the latest move in the nation's most public education-hating state.

Florida's civic education and religion

At The74, Florida Phoenix takes a look at allegations that Ron DeSantis is trying to put the Jesus back in Florida civics education.

College Board no longer disclosing AP test results by ethnicity, state

What to do when your own data shows a bias in your test? Maybe stop publishing the data. K-12 Dive has the story. 

Community Schools: What are they and how do they work

"Community Schools" are defined roughly six trillion different ways. Teen Vogue takes a look at the way they ought to work.

The state took children from their parents--then failed to give them a real education

A heartbreaking failure of the system. These foster kids in Michigan thought they were gaining credits towards graduation. Turns out they were wrong. NBC News. 

The New York Times visits Croydon, NH

The NYT sent Dan Barry to cover the story of the small town where a libertarian tried to get the school budget cut in half. Includes some details not brought up in previous coverage of the story.

School funding lawsuits

Rachel Cohen anchors this look at the long difficult lawsuits filed to get school funding up to par with a look at the lawsuit currently winding up in Pennsylvania. At Vox. 

Nation's overthinkers convene to determine what that's supposed to mean

A little Onion to cleanse the palate. 

This week at Forbes, I took a look at the new grant rules for charter schools and looked at what happened to the Lemon Test for determining if the church-state wall has been breached.

ICYMI: I'm a Grandfather Again Edition (3/15)

Beware the Ides of March, indeed. It's been a busy week and I've been a little behind on my own reading, so the list might be a little short today (and late, too). But my new grandson is beautiful.

Texas Takeover in Shepherd

A school takeover in Texas turns into a big fat mess, and the courts aren't much help.

Adios, John White

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider bids adieu to John White, who is now officially finally not in charge of education in Louisiana.

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online

Rebecca Barrett-Fox offers a perspective on the virus-induced move to online schooling. Maybe there are a few other things that are more important.

The Vicious Attack on Sweetwater Union District

Thomas Ultican has done all the homework on this tale of a California district that has been under continuous attack by privatizers.

Once Again, Teachers Are First Responders  

Nancy Flanagan reflects on how teachers often end up on the front lines when it's crunch time.

Audrey Watters and Ed Tech crisis response

If you aren't a subscriber to Watters' newsletter, you're missing important stuff. Here are some thoughts about what can go wrong with the virus-induced school closings.

Penguin Cam

Edinburgh Zoo has a live penguin cam. When you need a break from all the stress and worry--well, it's penguins!

Ohio's Charter War Fallout

10th period blog notes that Ohio has so many cyber-school students, the transition during the shutdown ought to be easily tapping into that expertise. Why isn't it?

Doubts Raised About Active Shooter Drills  

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes a look at a report questioning the effects of active shooter drills in schools.

ICYMI: Final Stretch Edition (8/13)

Final stretch for the summer, and I can't say I'm sad about it because this has been a less-than-optimal summer here at the institute. But we have your reading for the week. I'll remind you that if you find something in the weekly compendium that strikes you as valuable, you can support the writers by sharing them on whatever social media platforms you're using these days. Cutting through the online fog is hard, and you help by amplifying the things that you think should get through that fog.

School choice debate not over as Nevada’s governor has a plan to fund private school scholarships

The AP looks at the Nevada governor's latest attempt to make vouchers happen in his state.

Staff sues Woodland Park school district over new 'punitive' media policy

From the Gallery of Bad Policies, we have Woodland Park schools in Colorado, where the district has declared that teachers and staff can't post anything about the district without superintendent approval. 

Idaho Professors Sue Over Law Threatening Prison for Teaching About Abortion

Meanwhile, college professors in Idaho are pushing back against a "don't mention abortion" law. Kylie Chung reports at Jezebel.

“Betsy DeVos Was a Disaster. I Think Erika Donalds Could Be Worse.”

Kiera Butler at Mother Jones with a well-detailed look at Erika Donalds, the queen of school privatization in Florida. The hook (that she could be Trump's next education secretary) is a stretch, but the rest of this is excellent. Bonus: at last, a mainstream outlet covers the actual origins of Moms For America.

Next frontier in Fla. education wars: Climate

Arianna Skibell at Politico looks at one of the effects of letting PragerU into Florida classrooms.

Florida says it doesn’t want indoctrination in schools — but look at the materials it just approved

If you can use an introduction to PragerU and their propaganda machine, Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post has you covered.

AI Chatbot ‘Ed’ Will Be L.A. Unified’s Newest Student Adviser, Superintendent Says

EdWeek picks up a piece from the LA Times about the newest step forward in the dehumanizing of student care.

A new AI app lets users ‘text’ with Jesus. Some call it blasphemy.

Fiona Andre at Washington Post writes about one more awesome use of AI, which could not possibly end terribly I'm sure.

Arkansas education department nixes AP African American Studies course at last minute

Well, hell. Allegedly the state has said that students can take the course--they just won't get graduation credits from it. We'll see.

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Steven Singer looks at TFA and the teacher exodus and how the bad ideas of one hjelped feed the other.

Big-City Mayors Are Getting Kicked Out of Schools

Interesting take from Alan Greenblatt at Governing-- are we finally getting mayors out of the school-running business (at which they mostly sucked)?

John White, “Chief Success Officer”(?)

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the highly dispensable, and yet somehow still failing upwards, John White

Critical thinking education trumps banning and censorship in battle against disinformation, study suggests

What's most effective way to combat misinformation? Probably not banning the source. From PsyPost, a look at a study on the topic.

Progressives Are Defeating Conservatives in School Board Elections—Even in Ohio

Some folks have been saying this all along (I see you, Jennifer Berkshire)--being a far right book-banning anti-LGBTQ right winger is not a winning strategy on the local level. From David Pepper in Washington Monthly.

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings

Jill Filipovic at the Atlantic questions trigger warnings and whether they might have had the opposite of their intended effect.

Democratic lawmakers attend ALEC meeting to see what might be on the Legislature’s agenda

What a fun piece. A couple of Democratic lawmakers report from inside a gathering of the corporate right-wing bill mill. It is... illuminating.

Banned in Boston (Globe) II: the Barr Foundation/Hostetter 2021 Political Team

Maurice Cunningham with more view inside the dark money machinery that the Boston Globe carefully avoids noticing.

The Case for Vouchers Collapses

At Carolina Forward, an explanation of why voucher programs are a bad idea for education policy.

Grand jury investigating bid-rigging involving DeSantis’ education department

Billy Townsend was following this story forever, but now the feds are involved in the wacky story of that time that competing corrupt officials got in each others' way. Because Florida.

The Education Policies Governor Ron DeSantis Has Enacted in Florida Are Just Plain Scary

These things hit the fan one at a time, so it helps every so often to back up and look at a slightly bigger picture. Jan Resseger is here to help do that.

HISD Suffers With ‘New Education System’ Turnaround Plan

Speaking of summing up a barrage of bad policy ideas, Gary Rubinstein takes a look at the junk that's hitting Houston schools after the state takeover.

Middle Schoolers: The Myth and the Reality

Should officials loosen work requirements so that 14 year olds can work in bars? Should officials have their heads examined? Nancy Flanagan with some reality checks about middle schoolers.

Ron DeSantis Announces He Will Live As Slave For One Year To Prove It Not Bad

The Onion. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, at Forbes. com, I look at a study that shows social-emotional development really matters. 

Join me on substack. It's free!

Yes, It's That Bad

We have the first names of the Trump administration, and people are worked up. The choice of Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff is one more sign that folks who wanted Trump to completely turn his back on the establishment and drain the swamp-- well, that is going to be the first of many disappointments for them.

But the choice of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist is bad news. Exceptionally bad news.

Bannon was the previous head of the white supremacist alt-right website Breitbart. Senator Jeff Merkley released a statement today condemning the choice. Petitions have popped up opposing the choice. Many people have spoken out against this choice for a job previously associated with folks like Karl Rove, John Podesta and David Axelrod.

After the last year of campaigning, it is easy to dismiss all this as hyperbole. Some of you are telling yourselves, "Oh, surely it's not that bad. Folks on the left are just blowing this whole nazi aryan nation thing out of proportion." And it is true that it is now SOP for folks on both sides to cherry pick factoids, polish them, spin them, add a side of fake baloney, and release them in hopes of creating maximum outrage.

That's why I'm going to suggest that, if we want to get a real sense of Bannon, we not search our sources on the left, but our sources on the right. Let's not look at the people that the Left calls nazis-- let's look at the people who call themselves nazis. No tricky "gotcha" hidden cameras; just look at what they have to say. I've done it. And, yes, it's that bad.

Let me warn you right up front-- I am about to publish some vile and hateful stuff. For some of us, it's no shock, because we already know this kind of thing is out there. For some of us it will be a shock because we really, really, really like to believe that in this day and age, people just don't talk like this, think like this any more. And that's why it's all the more important that you see this-- because you have to see that this is real. You have to see this is real so that you can really understand what all those people who aren't gifted with a white penis are freaking out about. Folks are not marching in the street because they're pouty election losers. They're marching in the street because the highest office in the land has been won by a guy who is BFF's with a movement that wants to drive them away, stomp them silent, kill them.

And second, you have to see this because this, despite all our belief that we were done with this shit-- this is what we're going to be fighting for the next however-many years.

I'm going to show you a piece from a website called Infostormer, and this sentence is the last non-ugly thing I'm going to write for a bit. You've been warned.

"Stormer" is a popular suffix in the US racist movements. This particular site is not the very top of the heap, but they are plenty successful. Alexa rates them around 65,000th in the US, with a huge growth in traffic over the past month. Oh, and their subheading is "Destroying Jewish Tyranny."

I am going to link to them so you can confirm I'm not making this up, but it's not for the weak of stomach. Here are some headlines from just the past couple of weeks:

STFU CUCKOLD: Paul Ryan Claims That No Deportation Forces Will Be Formed By President Trump

Retarded Climate Scientists Claim That Donald Trump's Win Will Cause a Planetary Disaster

A Message to the SJW Faggots Shedding Endless Tears Over Trump's Victory

Jew Media Falsely Claiming Trump Is Walking back Promise To Repeal Obamacare

As I write this, the newest story opens with this lede:

Good news here. It looks like we will be seeing a new alliance formed between the United States and Russia to destroy ISIS. Donald Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin about this and the outcome sounds like it was a positive one.

But let's get back to Steve Bannon. We know that liberals are freaking out about him. What about the white supremacists? Infostormer just ran a piece about the two appointments. They're not happy about Priebus, but after explaining that Chief of Staff is really a nothing job anyway, writer "Marcus Cicero" has this to say:

The whole idea of this individual [the Chief of Staff] being a kingmaker or chancellor can only be valid if one is dealing with a weak-willed President, and we can rest assured that the current Leader is nothing of the sort.

The Chief Counselor, on the other hand, usually has the ear of the President from day to day (and often moment to moment), and in the case of Steve Bannon, probably second to second due to a personality that is almost a carbon copy of the President’s.

Look for Bannon to wield great power and sway in this new Government of the People, and let us hope that his stances on the migrant invasion, Moslem filth, and Black subhuman crime rises above the beta compromise attitude of Mr. Priebus.

My guess is that we are seeing the results of a brilliant chess move by Glorious Leader, which will keep mainstream Establishment cucks sated, while the real work and strategy continues behind the scenes through Mr. Bannon, who is far closer to our views than the average Republican you will see on the tubes.

Pure awesomeness.

Bannon is basically Trump, and Trump is our "Glorious Leader." I'm not going to retype the other odious bullshit contained here.

Meanwhile, the Daily Stormer, another neo-nazi site, is running headlines like "Yes, Trump Really Can Make America White Again – With or Without Cucked Congress" and congratulating Trump on "surrounding himself with all the right people."

People are not making this shit up. I have no doubt that there are many folks who voted for Trump who would or do find this sort of rhetoric appalling and disgusting, but they need to understand that these people are huge Trump supporters who see absolutely no reason not to believe that Trump is their guy, ready to establish a government that supports all of their favored goals. And if you have been just sort of letting all of that drift away in the background, America's neo-nazis have not-- and neither have the people who are targeted by these groups. 

This is why "Let's all come together for the sake of the country," doesn't quite cut it this time-- because it's really hard to unite with people who want to see you gone. 

Is it Bannon's fault these people love him? Actually, yes-- he's spent much of his career cultivating them as an audience. Is it Trump's fault these people think he's their Glorious Leader? You could argue that every President in forever has had some sort of lunatic fringe attached to him, I suppose. But even if that's true, it is absolutely Trump's fault that he has not repudiated some of the rhetoric thrown around in his name (I think of John McCain shutting down his own supporters over their fears about Obama) and it is absolutely Trump's fault that he has brought a man who leads and is revered by white supremacists in this country into the White House.

Do I want to see Trump succeed? I surely do, because his failure only brings more disaster to the country. But he will not be a "success" if he allows this festering rot to break forth and poison the air that all Americans breathe. Oddly enough, I think the possibility exists for him to turn back this mess precisely because although he is a man with no apparent convictions to be devoted to. He plays to whatever crowd is shiniest. And that means that Americans need to rise and shine.

Having a man like Bannon is a position of power is not normal, and it's not okay. Allowing nazis and virulent racists to claim they know and sit close to the heart of the President is not normal, and it's not okay. 

Yes, there is a whole complex web here, and it's being untied slowly and painfully in a thousand think pieces. How did Clinton lose, and why, and whose fault is it. Who put Trump in the White House, and what does that mean about us as a nation? Have we been growing some ugly new strain of racism, or is this just the same old stuff with the shielding ripped off? Etc etc etc-- there are a lot of complicated issues to untangle.

But this is not one of them. Should the US government be one that makes nazis really happy, or is that a sign that something is off track-- not a complicated question. Do nazis belong in positions of power in the US government-- that's not a complicated question. Is it okay for people in government position to advocate for the oppression of any group of American citizens-- that's not a complicated question either. Should we stand up, loudly and strongly to these kinds of people when they rise up-- one more of these very simple questions. But they are the questions before us, because, yes, it really is that bad.

Managing Across the Moat

Several of my friends in the business world have told me that modern management is taught to keep its distance. "You are supposed to live at least fifty miles away from the facility," one told me. The idea is to not be influenced in decision making by any personal attachments to the people who work for you.

That gulf, that moat between management and the people and facilities which they manage is a common feature of corporate life, and it explains a lot about how large companies work (or don't). Managers never have to face the people whose lives they disrupt, and they are fine with that because human beings are a distraction-- it's profits and gains and stock prices that are the true measure of good management choices. They can make the Right Choices unhampered by empathy.

The management technique reminds me of Louis C K's Conan appearance in which he explains the dynamics of bullying. Kids will try out being mean, but if they have to do it to someone's face, they see the hurt, their empathy kicks in, and they decide that being mean to someone doesn't feel good. But bullying-by-text has no such feedback loop.

When you can't see the hurt, you don't feel the hurt.

When the Let's Run Schools Like a Business crowd (like Reed Hastings) complains about school boards, that is the essence of their complaint-- these elected board members live in the community and must face the people who are affected by their decisions, leading board members to make decisions for all sorts of terrible reasons when their eyes should stay focused on Return on Investment and Bottom Line and all the markers of success that too many business types value.

And so one way of understanding the modern wave of reformsterism is a slow steady process of trying dig a moat between the people who make the decisions about schools and the people who must are there in the schools.

Let's make sure that tests are devised by people who never meet the students and administered by teachers who must, by edict, behave as if the students are strangers to them, as if they aren't even in the same room. 

Let's dismantle school boards and replace them with appointed managers who can operate by spreadsheets and "data" and never have to actually face the teachers, students, parents and community members who have to live with the decisions.

Let's put school districts under the control of people who have never been in a classroom-- that way they will make the Right Choices without being swayed by too much empathy for teachers of students.

The application of this management technique in places like Newark, where "Superintendent" Cami Anderson's concerted effort to never mix with the stakeholders of the school district would be comical, were the costs not so high to the people the district is supposed to serve. Other super-managers like John King and John White and Merryl Tisch do their best to avoid ever looking school stakeholders in the eyes.

The modern charter has a similar management approach in which the people who run the school never have to actually deal with the people whose lives are wrapped up in the school. Someone like Eva Moskowitz, who appears to spend plenty of time in the Success Academy charters that she runs, is no exception to this technique. But where someone like Cami Anderson simply hides from the public, the Moskowitz approach is to send away everyone who doesn't see things her way. If SA fits you and your child, she's happy to see you-- if not, then you are the one who needs to get out and move on and join the rest of the invisible multitudes outside the school's walls.

This management by moat is also evident on the national level. Secretary of Education rarely mixes with ordinary parents or teachers, and any teachers that do come into his orbit are carefully vetted and screened so that they will be The Right Type. Finding Duncan in an ordinary public school without advance screening and a carefully prepared program would be more exceptional than finding a family of yetis on the beach at a Disney Caribbean resort.

Distance and separation builds callousness and short-circuits empathy.

Leaders and policymakers see lobbyists every day. They regularly hang out with thinky tank experts and corporate bigwigs. I have to wonder what it would be like if Duncan or some of the other policy bigwigs spent one or two days a week in an actual school-- an ordinary school, not hand picked or carefully chosen, but just a random ordinary school.

They don't know what it's like out here in the trenches, and some of them work very hard to make sure they don't learn. That disconnect, that difficult reach across the moat, hampers much of our policy choices and is one of the worst principles that we've tried to carry over from the world of business. But it's faulty. It's dysfunctional. It's wrong.

Imagine if I tried to teach my classes without ever appearing in the room-- just check some spreadsheets from my office in another city, sent instructions to an aide via text, never met my students or their parents face to face. I would be a terrible teacher (though uncomfortably close to vision of Master Teacher touted by some reformsters).

Education is a human service, and the means its foundation is relationships, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up (take it from a guy on his second marriage). To try to conjure up a management system that not only doesn't require you to show up, but actually requires that you don't-- that is a recipe for failure and toxicity. It's bad management and terrible education.

Fill in the moat and show up. Anything else is a waste.

Project Veritas, Naughty Educators, and Choice

You've probably heard of Project Veritas, a right wing activist group that specializes in gotcha, often marked by deceptive and misleading editing aimed at making Democrats and liberals look bad. Apparently they've decided to get take aim at education for a bit, because they've released two pieces this week aimed at making some administrators look bad.

First we get an assistant principal in Connecticut revealing his anti-conservative, anti-Catholic hiring bias. And while Project Veritas is known for deceptive editing, it's hard to imagine a context in which any of the following is not problematic:

Boland dubbed Catholics “brainwashed.” When asked what Boland does when he finds out that a candidate is Catholic, he said, “You don’t hire them.”

Or, on the subject of slipping politics into the message

“Believe it or not, the open-minded, more progressive teachers are actually more savvy about delivering a Democratic message without really ever having to mention their politics,” Boland said. “They’ll never say, ‘Oh, this is a liberal or Democratic way of doing this.’ They just make that the norm.”

As I said, while this may have been twisted, I can't imagine a context in which either anti-Catholic hiring practices or selling your personal political beliefs as the norm are okay. Jeremy Boland is now on administrative leave while the district figures out what the heck to do with this. 

This, you may say, is why folks need school choice--so they can get away from this kind of public school misbehavior. But hold on just a minute-- because our second Project Veritas video comes from an administrator at Trinity School.

Trinity School is an uber-excellent private school in Manhattan. Niche rates it the #1 private high school in New York as well as the #1 Christian high school in New York. It has an impressive list of successful alumni (John McEnroe, Rudy Giulliani's daughter, Larry Hagman, the Ziff Davis heirs and, awesomely, a co-founder founder of Troma Studios). 

And they have a sneaky naughty administrator. She's on video saying she would never book a Republican guest speaker and complaining about white male students.

“Unfortunately, it’s the white boys who feel very entitled to express their opposite opinions and just push back,” Norris said. “There’s a huge contingent of them that are just horrible. And you’re like, ‘Are you always going to be horrible, or are you just going to be horrible right now?’ Don’t know.”

When asked if there was any saving Republican white guys, Norris responded: “I don’t know. I think they need to go. I think they’re really awful people. That’s kind of what I’m afraid of with my white students that are rich. I’m like — do you ever have to deal with this? They’re so protected by capitalism. It makes me sad.”

I can, in fact, imagine a context in which this would be less awful, but it's still not a good look. IOW, they may have made this look worse, but I can't imagine a world in which it doesn't look bad.

But beyond the cringe factor, this wrinkles up the whole school choice narrative. Because with school choice, everyone is supposed to enjoy the privilege of the rich, who can pick whatever school is the "best fit" for their kid. Except here is this elite, expensive school, and we're hearing (and not for the first time) that, beyond an extreme example like this one, such places can be plain old woke, biased, in the grip of political correctness, not right wing friendly, and not about to change to suit any kind of market forces, either. 

So what's a choice fan to do? Is the message here, "If you want a good education, you just have to suck it up about the other stuff?" Is it that private schools need to be regulated like public schools so that this kind of bias can be regulated into oblivion? Is that all that baloney about how public schools are a place of constant ideological battle that only school choice solve--that's actually not true?

There's only one kind of school that's allowed to chuck objectivity and balance out the window and advocate for whatever ideology it prefers, and it's not the public kind. 

I do not want to see an education system that discriminates on the basis or religious beliefs or political orientation, and we do not get there with unregulated, unaccountable school choice. 

The Conservative Argument Against DeVos

It's not just progressives who have been up in arms about the nomination of Betsy DeVos to the post of Secretary of Education. The same network of conservative parent activists that raised an effective fuss over Common Core are exceedingly unpleased about the big-money donor and lobbyist being given the reins for education. The pressure to reject DeVos won't be coming just from the left and it won't be landing on Democratic senators.

The calls started with petitions like this one, calling for Bill Evers or Larry Arnn or Sandra Stotsky as Secretary of Education. And demanding that the new USED Secretary be a warrior against Common Core.

That promised warrior is not, of course, what folks got.

Here's Joy Pullman (The Federalist) at Conservative Review hitting the ground running with the reasons that DeVos is a bad pick.

First and repeatedly foremost in conservative circles is DeVos' deep love of the Common Core. Plenty of people remain unfooled by DeVos' attempted backtrack. DeVos would have been a perfect Secretary of Education pick for Jeb Bush, with whom she has a long history of partnering and contributing to his favorite policies. And as Pullman indicates, the anti-Common-Core parent network could react to DeVos quickly because they already knew her name, having come up against her money and her astro-turfed groups and her political connections in many of the states where the standards battle raged.

Christian conservative mom Jenni White (Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment) parses this quote form the DeVos website:

I do support high standards, strong accountability, and local control. When Governors such as John Engler, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Pence were driving the conversation on voluntary high standards driven by local voices, it all made sense.

White replies:

The first sentence contains the insidious, using-buzzwords-to-make-sure-I-get-everyone-from-every-ed-camp-into-mine, rhetorical nonsense. You simply can't have "high standards" and "strong accountability" at the federal level and get LOCAL CONTROL. You just can't. That sentence alone should be deadly in the confirmation hearings for Mrs. DeVos.

That and guys like Mike Huckabee are not exactly hard critics of the Core.

White's raising of the local control issue is also a repeated conservative theme. I have waited for decades to see more conservatives get this-- you cannot have government money without government strings, and vouchers stand to be the gold-covered trojan horse that brings government regulation to private and religious schools across this country. Here's how White puts it:

The term "school choice" - like the term "education reform" - means something different to everyone, but usually encompasses the idea that a benevolent federal dictatorship should 'allow' parents to move from one education facility to another (charter schools), hopefully dragging along public money (vouchers), in order to provide their children with a better education than that offered by their failing district school.

The local control issue goes hand in hand with the issue of purchased policy. DeVos is right in there with guys like Bill Gates and Jeb Bush in using her personal fortune to do an end run around the democratic process-- in particular to turn education into a worker training program for their particular private concerns.

Then there is the whole attitude issue. Sandra Stotsky herself bemoans the lack of parent voices in the ongoing discussions about education. And here's Pullman again:

The DeVos family are part of the new-money ruling elite who look down their noses at “rubes” like Heather Crossin [Hoosiers Against Common Core], who do things like oppose Common Core and vote for Donald Trump. These are not the kind of people to whom Trump promised Americans he’d delegate our power.

Indeed, conservatives, like progressives, can recognize the problem with DeVos's utter lack of public school experience.

Bottom line: Senators should be hearing objections to DeVos from across the perspective, and when you are calling your senator (there is no if-- you should be doing it, and soon, and often), you can take into account what sort of Senator you are calling. Your GOP senator needs to hear that DeVos's nomination breaks Trump's promise to attack Common Core and to get local control back to school districts. Your GOP senator needs to hear that you are not fooled by DeVos's attempt to pretend she's not a long-time Common Core supporter.

As was the case back in the days when Common Core was being shoved down our collective throats, the DeVos nomination can bring together folks with different agendas (Pullman, for instance, would like the Department of Education to go away entirely). It's rare that Presidential cabinet picks are axed, but we've been saying lots of "it's rare..." sentences lately, and with the Democrats planning to make hearings challenging for DeVos and seven other proposed Trumpistan mini-czars, at a very minimum, the new administration could be forced to burn some political capital to get their choice in office. Who knows-- conservative anti-Common Core moms were under-estimated before.