ICYMI: Back To Class Edition (9/13)

Yesterday I spent a day talking about writing for a local literary group, and it was interesting. It's always cool to work with actual grownups-- definite change of pace for me. 

Some real must -reads in this week's list, so if you usually just kind of skim and run, I encourage you to sample some of this week's assortment (if, in fact, you missed these when they appeared this week). Remember to share.

SPECIAL REPORT: My So-Called Alpha School

Many of us have been poking around the Alpha School grift, but Ben Riley went and committed some real journalism in digging into the outfit and its students. Don't miss this story or the follow-up, in which Alpha students respond to his piece. 

Florida’s New Education Commissioner Doesn’t Want Government to Run Schools

Sue Kingery Woltanski thinks Floridians should pay attention to the new Commissioner of Education, who is saying the quiet part out loud-- let's just do away with public schools.

An education plan for Democratic governors

Josh Cowen makes the case for an actual education plan for Democratic governors, which would certainly be a change of pace.

The Backlash Against Too Much Tech in Schools is Good for Democracy

Anne Lutz Fernandez hist some of the highlights in the battle against ed tech, and why that backlash is good for the country.

Who Will Enforce the New A.I. Rules? Probably Teachers.

James Barron at the New York Times with the unsurprising news that New York's new AI policy will probably end up being one more burden on teachers.

Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality.

Jennifer Berry Hawes and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica explain that vouchers are actually really lousy at providing education opportunity for students with special needs. It's schools' choice. This is a great, well-sourced piece about the illusion of choice. 

More than 1 in 10 Ohio Charter Schools suspected of “testing anomalies”

Stephen Dyer continues to dig into the news about "testing anomalies" (aka "cheating") in Ohio schools. One more way charters are just like public schools.

Success Academy Sues NYSED For Inadvertently Exposing That They Have Been Gaming The US News & World Report Rankings For Years

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking Success Academy shenanigans for a long time. Here's the newest one-- they're upset that their technique for gaming the US News rankings has been undercut by the state.

The Edu-Optimists, Part II: CREDO, the Pro-Charter Research Shop That Won’t Take No Effect for an Answer

I've explained before how CREDO's "days of learning" is a bullshit metric, but Freddie deBoer offers a really detailed explanation of some of the data massaging that CREDO uses to make charter schools look way more effective than they actually are.

Steady Education Privatization Advancing in California

Thomas Ultican takes a look at the big picture of privatization in California. 

Yes, the Youth-Sports Industrial Complex Is Bad for the Kids in It. It’s Even Worse for the Kids Left Behind.

At Slate, Rebecca Onion takes a look at the youth-sports industry (currently being strip-mined by private equity. And while travel sports have begun making absurd demands on young athletes, Onion also notes that these demands get in the way of ordinary socializing and connection-building. Can't hang out with your friends-- or even make friends-- if you've got Soccer every single night and all weekend.

Federal Vouchers Mean Federal Control

Andy Spears amplifies and extends a point I made here at the Institute

Charters As Well As Vouchers Continue to Threaten Public Education in Ohio

Jan Resseger reminds us that vouchers aren't the only major threat to public education in Ohio.

The Charter Money Trail

Education funding expert Bruce Baker lays out how to trace the money that goes to, and through, charter schools. Especially useful if you have been trying to figure all this out for your local charter school. 

Former Tucson charter school director charged with theft and forgery

Yes, this kind of stuff is still going on. Noor Haghighi reports for AZPM news.

“Eye-dology”

Steve Nuzum explains how standards about "ideology" make great cover for discriminating against art (and policies and people) that you just don't like. 

Labor Day. Happy Birthday to Me.

Friend of the Institute Nancy Flanagan just had a birthday, and as always, she finds the connections between the personal and the larger picture.

I've spent most of my life in or near the marching band world, but this is another thing entirely. Humans are really something else.

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Milton Friedman's Ghost

We've discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman's ideas for education, pretty simply described as "burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education." Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation's education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman's free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don't you get it, we have brayed lustily-- A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large. 

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, "Don't threaten me with a good time."

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is-- and ideally ought to be-- filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, "Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned," without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society). 

Friedman often expresses a remarkably simpleminded view of society and commerce. He liked the example of Marlena Dietrich's legs and Muhammed Ali's fighting skills, arguing that they were gifted and therefor entitled to get rich from these gifts. But as Kim Phillips-Fein points out in Country of Lords (we'll be talking about this book soon), Friedman doesn't say anything about Dietrich's agents or managers or the people who created her movies, nor does he discuss Ali's managers, or the fight promoters and networks that helped make him rich. 

As Jimmy Rising writes in "Inequality in and beyond Friedman." the capitalist ethic Friedman describes is 

“to each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces”. Property rights are absolute and complete. If the instrument is a factory, and he manages to convince workers to work for him for less than their work might otherwise be considered “worth”, the better for the factory owner, and the laborer gets exactly what he deserves.

Friedman's view of the free market is that it rewards those who deserve to be rewarded, and leaves behind those who deserve to be left behind, and that this dynamic is natural, normal, and desirable for society. To try to interfere would be "inefficient."

So despite the insistence of some choicers that the free market would unleash competitive energy that will lift all boats, Friedman didn't believe that's how the free market actually does or should work. Society should have hierarchies, and the free market is a mechanism to establish and maintain those hierarchies-- in the opinion of Friedman's ghost, a particularly efficient one. 

So when Friedman's ghost says that schools should operate under a free market, they are calling for tiers, for hierarchy, for a society that follows the principle that some people deserve a full, rich, what-we-used-to-call-good education, and some deserve basic vocational training so they can take their proper place as meat widgets serving their Betters. Friedman's ghost says we should let everyone buy the education they can afford, which, says the free market, is the education they deserve. They're free to try to make a million dollars, thereby proving they deserve more, but all in all, it will be better for everyone if they just accept the status, the tier, the class to which they rightfully belong.

And schools? Schools are just there to start the sorting process early on. Don't waste people's time trying to get schools to do anything else, and don't waste peoples' money trying to help Those Peoples' Children try to escape their proper place. That's the free market education that Friedman's ghost favors.

 

Five Great Questions For "Evidence-Based" Programs

At EdWeek, Larry Ferlazzo ran a guest post by Rene Grimes that focused on the "science of math" and the programs that are supposed to be based on it. Between the EdWeek part and the "math" part, some folks may have missed the really good set of questions that Grimes proposes at the end of the piece:

*What question did the original research actually investigate?
*Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?
*Does the evidence directly support this recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?
*What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?
*What evidence will show whether this approach is working for our students?

What a great batch of questions.

Imagine, for instance, if anyone backing Common Core had tried to answer these questions. Blanks all around.

What question did the original research actually investigate?

So much education "research" asks only one question-- if we do this thing, will students get a higher score on the Big Standardized Test this year? Lots of folks really want to use that as a proxy for asking questions like "Will students have a higher level of reading comprehension" or "Will students be able to have an increased ability to solve complex problems." But those aren't the same question at all. Sloppy and inexact questions lead to sloppy conclusions.

Which students, settings, and outcomes were studied?

I remember the days when it seemed like every time you peeled back a piece of education research that said "this is how students learn" you found a "study" performed on a dozen college sophomores at a private university. This has always been a problem for education because educators are correctly reluctant to use students as guinea pigs. 

Some private and charter schools make claims about their effectiveness, but these are once again bits of research done on a very select group of students. That research isn't nothing, but it doesn't apply to a general student population.

Does the evidence support this sales pitch recommendation, or is the recommendation partly an interpretation?    

Boy is this one an issue. Every single piece of evidence based on Big Standardized Test scores involves interpreting those test scores to mean all sorts of things that they don't necessarily mean.

What limitations or unanswered questions should shape its use?

It is always a red flag when neither limitations nor unanswered questions are even mentioned. One of the Common Core red flags was that there was no mechanism at all in place for talking about limitations or questions arising from classroom deployment. 

There is no bit of legitimate science or evidence-gathering that declares "This question is now definitively solved and we don't need to look at it or question it ever again." And yet how rare is it that a new program is launched in a school and the Powers That Be say, "Now, here are some issues we want you to keep an eye on, and some questions that we are still looking to answer." In education, it's far more likely that every great new program is meant to be the end of the conversation, and uppity teachers who want to ask questions get a big round of administrative stinkeye.

What evidence will show that this is working for our students?

Again, the all-too-common default is that evidence will not be collected because it might not provide the evidence the Powers That Be want to find. No administrator wants to hear, "We've been trying your new program for a year and we have no evidence that it is working for our students." Should any teacher make that comment to admin, or any educator make that comment to a policy maker who mandated the Great New Thing, and they will get that old familiar refrain-- "You're implementing it wrong."

I love these five questions, and I hope more educators will use them more often-- including for every damned AI doodad that comes down the pike.  

                                                                

Does AI Tutoring Help?

There's a whole wing of the edu-wonk world pre-occupied with "high-impact tutoring," whatever that is presumed to be. The field serves as a successor to the notion of "accelerated learning," the idea that learning gaps could be closed by teaching the students who were behind by teaching them more, faster, than the other students-- an idea that stunk for a variety of reasons.

"High-impact tutoring" is also a successor for "two-sigma tutoring," another idea that rested on a single very small, narrow, and largely debunked study. 

What all of these ideas have in common is that they are super-appealing to techbros anxious to sell some version of AI tutoring. Lauraine Langreo over at EdWeek took a look at some studies about the various ways AI can be deployed for tutoring, and she opens with what has been the guiding principle for all of these operations. 

High-impact tutoring has been heralded as an evidenced-backed solution for addressing the significant academic gaps that schools are facing. But scaling and sustaining these programs are challenging for schools because they require a lot of human tutors, time, and money.

"Has been heralded" is doing a lot of work here, but the idea that it takes a lot of humans spending a lot of time (and wanting to be paid for it) is spot on. That crucial fact about tutoring smells a lot like money to AI companies. "However," as she notes, "research on the effectiveness of AI tutoring models is limited and still emerging."

Well, that's kind. Sal Khan has taken a good hard look at his own products and discovered that-- surprise--when you plunk a young human in front of a screen and say, "Go ahead and use this program to teach yourself math," by far the most common response is "I wonder if I can get regular Youtube on this thing." Students simply don't use it.

Langreo is looking at a "brief" from Stanford that considers how AI might be used.

SCALE, part of Stanford's Accelerator for Learning (yes, that again), has a brief out that looks at the ways AI can be used, and well...tutoring by a human has a "robust evidence base." After that, every evidence base is "emergent," a research term that means roughly "there is no actual evidence of this in sight, but we kind of smell the possible concept of a piece of the beginning of a sprig of evidence just about to appear, but it's not here yet."

SCALE likes a human tutor with AI supporting the tutor behind the scenes, which they call "potentially as effective, or more effective" as an actual unaided human. This would, of course, depend on the human. But if Human plus AI gets you the same results as Human alone, that suggests at the very least that the extra cost of AI is a waste of money. If the problem your leaders are trying to solve is "How do we incorporate AI into our program," maybe this looks not so bad, but if the problem you're trying to solve is "How do we best tutor these young humans," then adding AI seems like a non-starter (even before we start considering, as SCALE does not, the various negatives associated with AI.

"AI tutoring with human support," which has been the model of computer-powered schools, from Summit to Altschool to Alpha School-- the emergent evident here suggests that implementation matters, because it's only a shade removed from AI-only tutoring, which SCALE declares has "unknown effectiveness." Sad news for everyone who thought they could just swap out an actual human tutor for some AI program and get "high impact" results.

Look, we know the most effective means of tutoring-- one teacher, one or two young humans, repeated a few times a week. It's not a mystery. But there are two longstanding responses to this. One is the eternal education response from leaders and taxpayers: "That sounds nice and I can see it would make education better, but I don't want to pay for it." The other is corporations looking at it and thinking, "I bet we could make money pretending to fix this problem."

But if you want to get some actual tutoring done, you are going to have to hire a knowledgeable human being to do it, not a bot. 

One More Reason for States to Avoid Federal Vouchers

The Trump administration has ratcheted up its attack on discrimination in schools-- by which they mean, of course, discrimination against white guys.

They have hung their interpretation on Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, arguing that it means that there can be no programs or benefits that white guys can't have. This has been the rationale for a widespread attack on all manner of college and university DEI wokitude.

Now they would like to come after high schools. Here's the opening paragraph from the IRS press release:

The Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have issued proposed regulations to end federal tax-exempt status for private schools that engage in racial discrimination, delivering on President Trump's Executive Orders ending discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.

But they are also coming after elite public high schools, as covered by Liam Knox and Erin Hudson for Bloomberg. The threat here is to come after admissions practices that discriminate based on race (i.e. preferences to anyone but white guys). 

The threatened punishment is to cut off federal funding if the school is found to be violating the administration's funhouse mirror of civil rights law. 

But there's a problem with that. As Knox and Hudson point out:

But public high schools receive far less federal money than most colleges, giving the administration less leverage over their admissions practices without action from the courts. Bronx Science, for instance, received around $44,000 from the federal government last year, and Stuyvesant got a little more than $160,000 — less than 1% of the budget at both schools.

To really get leverage over public schools, the feds need strings to pull. Specifically, purse strings. For "regular" schools, Title I and IDEA provide an opportunity (though not if they successfully convert them all to state block grants) to control local schools, particularly those who serve many non-wealthy or special needs students. 

So federal school vouchers provide another opportunity for the feds to get tighter control over local schools, including those that aren't so dependent on Title I or IDEA funds. Particularly if they adopt some of the ideas of Marguerite Rozas and use those voucher funds to finance important programs. Imagine if Bronx Science was used to taking in a couple million in federal voucher funds.

And for the MAGA crowd that thinks this would be just swell, I ask you to imagine what the power of that program might do in the hands of President Hilary Clinton or President Zohran Mamdani. You didn't like how the feds used federal purse strings to push Common Core (neither did I)-- do you really want to see that movie again?

Federal vouchers represent, among their many shortcomings, a real chance for the federal government to gain more leverage for controlling local school districts. It's a bad idea.

ICYMI: Oh, September Edition (9/6)

I can always see the big May crunch coming from a mile away, but September usually just sneaks up on me and suddenly--BAM-- I am up to my ears in One Damn Thing After Another. A show. A presentation at a writing festival. The Board of Directors' cross-country season. A friend I haven't seen in roughly fifty years coming to town. The ramp up to the biggest festival in my community. And this year, a conference that I usually never miss that I will have to miss (the Network for Public Education gathering in Texas) that includes a lot of great stuff and some good people I usually only get to see once a year. Also, the lawn needs mowing, but it has rained a gazillion days in a row. Retirement was supposed to be quieter than this.

But there is still reading to do. Anyway, here we go.

Parents Demanding Tech Opt Outs Take Their Fight to Federal Court

Lawsuits are after tech opt-outs for parents. I'll be curious to see where this one lands.

Butts on Fire

Phillip Maciak at City Chicken has been watching the robots crash and burn at the robot olympics, and it has made him feel better about his AI-in-school stance.

‘Kids literally disappeared’: Minnesota schools lost at least 1,700 students following Operation Metro Surge

Becky Dernbach and Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal take a look at just how badly the ICE attacks disrupted education in Minnesota.

Books Can Help Teens Navigate Tough Topics in Ways Their Parents Can’t

Rebecca Stafford in People, of all places, explains why even books about Naughty Topics are important for children.

I Spent Three Days Inside Ryan Walters' Fake National Teachers Union

You may recall that Oklahoma's education dudebro-in-chief left the state for a gig leading the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a project of the union-busting Freedom Foundation. They held a confab this summer, and teacher Micah Cash was there, skeptical but open to listening. He has written a long deep dive into the event for The Pickup, and it is every second it takes to read it. 

The Nation’s Public Schools Endure Threatened and Turbulent Federal Funding

Jan Resseger explains some of the many ways that the Trump administration is screwing with funding streams, and how they may cause trouble for schools.

The Five Questions You Should Ask Before Believing the ‘Science of Math’

Larry Ferlazzo offers a guest post from Rene Grimes, and even if you just skip to the five questions at the end, it's worth burning a free visit to EdWeek.

Dan Patrick's book ban isn't dumb. It's worse than that. 

Loren Steffy points out the dumb (including Patrick's call to ban a work on the new Texas mandatory reading list). Houston Chronicle.

Private school tuitions seeing huge jump across Florida with voucher expansion

Surprise, surprise. Vouchers make windfall revenue for private schools. In other news, sun rises in West tomorrow.

Decades of Poor Transparency and Accountability in the Charter School Sector

Shawgi Tell looks at the many ways that charter schools have proven untrustworthy.

Unsubstantiated Things People Say about Public Education

Nancy Flanagan takes on a baloney-filled article written a politician.

Move Slow, Remake Things

Audrey Watters on what meaningful change looks like.

A Child’s Citizenship Does Not Depend on a Parent’s Paperwork

The administration's latest attempt to chase Black and Brown children out of the country. Bruce Lesley explains.

More than 1 in 10 Ohio Charter Schools suspected of “testing anomalies”

Ohio has a problem with "testing anomalies," and the problem is turning up in a high proportion of charter schools. Stephen Dyer breaks down some numbers.

No One Was Blaming Parents

Sue Kingery Woltanski published column from the Orlando Sentinel, entering a debate about where the money goes in Florida's multi-tiered education system.

Report: Public Libraries Face ‘Existential Threat,’ Putting Books, Information and People at Risk

A new report from PEN America details how the attack on books has extended to public libraries.

At Forbes.com, I look at a new report that suggests using AI to edit writing is a bad idea.

Here's your reflection on the end of summer.

    

Subscribe! It's free and always will be. 

Should Schools Out LGBTQ Students

Donalt Trump has been spewing the baloney sex change operations in schools for years now (here he is repeating the falsehood in 2024), so lying about it a couple of weeks ago (in front of actual young humans, and aided in the lying by Linda McMahon) is par for the course (particularly for a guy who beats par on the course by lying ). Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche has declared a "pandemic" of gender transitions in schools.

The notion that schools where there aren't enough classrooms or books or staff, but somehow the reading teachers is taking time out of her class schedule to perform sex change operation in a fully functional OR is so stunningly absurd that it defies satire. Of all the things that never happened, secret sex change operations in schools didn't happen the most.

However, there's a real issue behind this absurdity, and whether Dear Leader has distorted it by passing his partial understanding through the funhouse mirrors of his brain or whether he's deliberately distorting the case, his secret school ORs run the risk of distracting people from a real issue being tossed into the courts.

Out in California, brought by a couple of teacher-parents, Mirabelli v. Bonta made it to the Supremes, and another in New Jersey, brought by Moms for Liberty was just filed. Mirabelli is probably what Trump was referring to. 

These cases get complicated, but they revolve around one basic question-- do public schools have an obligation to out LGBTQ students to their parents, or do they have an obligation NOT to do so? 

For the Parental Rights crowd, it's a simple question. They have should have complete control over all aspects of their children's lives at all times. The view of the extreme members of this crowd is that parents have rights and children have none. When they say, "My child is not the property of the government," the unspoken rest of the sentence is "My child is my property" and not, unfortunately, "My child is a living, breathing human being who does not belong to anybody."  

Cases like the New Jersey case invoke the parental right "to direct their children's religious and moral upbringing." 

I wish they would also invoke their parental responsibilities or their children's rights, but I really do understand their point. I would certainly prefer, for instance, that my children's teachers not deliver instruction on how LGBTQ persons are delusional or mentally ill. I am absolutely responsible for the upbringing in all its aspects, and I really don't want the school working against me.

If my children do encounter ideas that run counter to what I want for them, the major tool their mother and I have is an open line of communication. In fact, as they get older, that's pretty much the only real tool I have. 

If your child is using a new name at school and you don't know about it, there are two parties that are not telling you. If your child has come out as LGBTQ and you don't know about it, the only reason is because they have chosen not to tell you.

If a child comes out to a teacher or other school staff, that adult has a responsibility to encourage the child to talk to a parent about it. But they also have a responsibility to listen to a child who says their home will become unsafe if they come out there. LGBTQ children are a disproportionate part of the homeless population, more likely than their straight peers to be thrown out of the house. To insist that a school must out an LGBTQ student no matter what is irresponsible. 

Both schools and parents have a responsibility to look after the health and welfare of the child, and a child's health and welfare is best served ideally by a strong relationship with their parents. It helps if the parents and schools communicate regularly and openly. At the heart of all this should be care and concern for the education, health and welfare of the child-- not absolute authoritarian power of the parent-- or the school-- over the child.

Of course, many policy makers don't care a bit about parental rights. Witness the states, like Texas, where if the parent wants the school to recognize their child's trans identity, the state says "too bad." Sometimes these battles aren't about parental rights at all-- they are about policy makers' desire to erase LGBTQ identities, a stance that puts the health, welfare, and education of the child absolutely last. 

The group for which I have the least patience or sympathy is those teachers who don't want to call students by their chosen name. Grow up, get over yourselves, and call the student whatever the student prefers to be called. Spare me your religious objections; if your religion is defined by the people you are called to reject and deny, the students you think Jesus wants you to tell, "Your identity is not welcome here," you are following a brand of christianism I do not recognize.

The one thing we are not called to do as teachers is to tell students who they are in defiance of who they say they are. 

As a parent, I often think of the words of  Russell Barkley, who argues that we do not engineer children, but serve as shepherds. We don't beat them into the shape we prefer, but guide and support and nudge them along, and if they don't grow up exactly as we ordered them to, that is not a sign that someone has surreptitiously out-engineered us. 

If your child feels unsafe talking to you about highly personal stuff, it will not aid your cause to make sure that they can't trust any adults at school, either. It will just ensure that your child will feel very isolated at a very vulnerable and scary time, which opens them up to the kinds of problematic influences that you were worried about in the first place. 

Parental rights are real and important, but when they are "protected" and extended at the expense of children's rights, that's bad for everyone. Children deserve acceptance and guidance, support and safety, autonomy and guardrails, and providing those things requires a tricky balancing act by all the adults in their lives. It's a balancing act that's best managed by centering on the rights of the child and not hamfisted lawsuits, policy declarations, and press conference bloviating.