Building a Bridge To Nowhere

So now we get the Building Bridges Initiative. What is it? The short answer is the same old reformy stuff in a pretty new wrapper. The long answer follows. I apologize in advance for how much inside baseball this is. But let's wade through together. 

Who put this together?

The year-long initiative was headed up by the Fordham Institute and Democrats for Education Reform, and the website says repeatedly that it collected a group of education advocates from Left, Right and Center. 

This is probably a good time to bring up the old quote from a DFER founder about why they used "Democrats" in their name:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Between the original participants and the signatories of their work, I'm hard pressed to find anyone from the Center or the Left. There are faux liberals like DFER and Keri Rodriguez, but actual center or lefties? Not so much. 

We could argue about who amongst this crew represents the Left or Center, but getting into that actually created such a huge digression here that I'm just going to discuss politics and public schools in a separate post. The short version is that education privatization--the three Ds of disinvest, discredit, and dismantle-- has always been a project of the right.

This initiative runs the full gamut of education advocates from A to B. There isn't a single traditional public education advocate here. It['s an impressive roster of reformsters--50CAN, PAVE, E4E, New Schools Venture Fund, NPU, CRPE, PIE-- the list goes on, and we haven't even gotten to the folks who signed on to the finished product. There are, of course, no actual educators in sight.

The report says that the participants "shared, debated, disagreed, and ultimately found common ground" and I'm not entirely clear on what they would have disagreed about. The report does have many camel (horse by committee) moments where they've taken the same old reform idea and translated it into other less-triggering language, or created one of those formulations where the door is open for people whom like the policy but plausibly deniable for those who don't.

This may represent an attempt to mend fences with the social justice wing of school reform? Rebranding reform? Reclaiming some ground for the grownups in the reformster ranks who are getting worried about the far-right burn-it-all-down shenanigans of dudebros like Rufo, DeAngelis and Walters (none of whom show up here)? That would be an interesting development.

So what's in the report?

The report is entitled "A Generation at Risk." Get it? Like "A Nation at Risk" It starts right out chicken littling pandemic Learning Loss, including that baloney about how today's students will make less money because their test scores are lower. Also, mental health issues are up, which is at least a real issue.

A few years back (approximately 2016), the free market reform wing split up with the social justice wing. School choice was good in and of itself, even if the results were lousy for marginalized communities, they suggested. Also, with Dems out of power, they no longer needed a liberal (or at least neo-liberal) friendly pitch about choice would lift up marginalized communities. They did not say that part out loud.

But now here we are, declaring in bold blue font

And we are not doing nearly enough, especially for students from marginalized communities.

The list of "key values" also seems aimed at the social justice wing. 

The fundamental belief that every student has a right to fulfill their utmost potential and a conviction that our schools and society should be doing much more to make this aspiration a reality.

A belief in public education as a critical player in preparing citizens to effectively participate in our democracy and as a critical engine of social and economic mobility in America.

Deep respect for the role that educators and parents play in supporting student success.

No so much deep respect for educators that they are invited to the conversation.

So this report is going to be aimed at addressing current student needs and building a better system for the future, which is an admirable pair of goals that pretty much everyone agrees with. However, the devil is driving the details bus, so let's see what exactly they want.

Building a more responsive educational system for the future.

The current system is old and calcified and unable to react to change, they say, and not built for the purposes for which it now is needed. A claim made mostly by people who don't actually work in schools. How can we make the system more responsive?

Be student centered! Give parents and families "true information, power, and agency to understand, support, choose, and advocate for their children’s education in a real and actionable way." AKA more school choice. Also, define success more broadly, which sounds great--let's scrap the Big Standardized Test--and "enable a broader set of providers—inside and outside of schools—to play a role in meeting our students’ needs." So, let students get badges of learning any old where and let vendors offer education piecemeal and let children work and count it as education.

There's some juiced-up language that just restates the old "competition will push schools to do better" idea. And--alert! alert!--a note that some choice policies like magnet schools and charter schools don't go far enough.

Building the conditions for the system of the future.

School boundaries are often tied to segregation practices like redlining let's redraw school district boundaries to fix that. Ha! Just kidding. The report suggests allowing choice across those boundaries. 

Get rid of "seat time" model, but use mastery learning instead. And not just old school mastery, but giving students credits for "work, internships, caregiving, outside courses" because ed reform has taken the position of being in favor of child labor.

This next one is a good example of how this report reads. What they actually wrote is "Modernizing school-finance arrangements and enacting weighted student-funding formulas and other systems that empower families with financial resources to drive extra dollars to the students who need them most and allowing flexibility for resources to be spent inside and outside of schools in ways that best meet the needs of students" which is a fancy long-ass sentence way to say "the money should follow the child" with a tiny modification to suggest that maybe some children should be followed by more money.

More partnerships with private sector, including letting experts come in to teach.

New approaches to attracting diverse teacher force (Sharif El-Mekki of Center for Black Educator Development was on this committee) and "redesign" of teacher and principal roles, all of which could mean anything.

Lots of R & D to figure out what works. Collect lots of student data. 

The report says that lots of places are already doing a lot of this, so I guess this part was not written by the same person who, in the last section, called public schools old and calcified and unable to change.

Building for the current generation of students.

Back to pandemic panic. Did you know that the pandemic revealed there are inequities in the system? Yes, surely nobody was pointing out such things before 2020. Also, this baloney: "the very nature of the pandemic response revealed how the current system is centered on adult issues, not student and family needs." The response showed "how rarely evidence- and data-driven decision-making are used." Also, the system was revealed to be "rigid and unresponsive to individual students needs and family preferences." 

That is a lot of bullshit to cram into one paragraph. Schools and teachers killed themselves-- figuratively and literally-- finding ways to respond to a pandemic, with limited data and guidance from authorities. Schools fed students, delivered lessons by computer and by hand, and generally made decisions based on what the community wanted. Which may be why parents were largely happy with how their schools managed the whole thing. 

As always, the false narrative being hinted at here (those damn teachers closed the schools even though we all knew they didn't need to and then they sat on their hands while the learning just fell out of students' heads) is useful to make one more pitch for choicier choice.

The report pitches five ideas for "addressing immediate needs." 

Set goals for recovery and report on them clearly and accurately. The set goals part every educator already knew, thanks. The clear and accurate reporting? Sure. We've never yet come up with a way to data-ify learning that policymakers and actual educators agree means anything useful, but sure, let's just do that some more harder.

Make sure schools use "evidence-based strategies and interventions." First, "evidence-based" isn't nearly as clear cut as one might thing. Also, they suggest more PD. Also, more tutoring. Just get some money off the money tree, then go to the tutor tree and hire a bunch of tutors.

Rethink how time and staff are used. Again, precisely the sort of thing that a bunch of people who don't actually work in schools are ill-prepared to address. They offer the North Carolina plan as an example, which is a bad sign because the North Carolina plan is a pile of hot junk. Really. 

Evaluate emerging innovations. Check new stuff to see if it works. Not a radical idea. All that's missing is who and how and where the money will come from.

Make it easier for students to drop back in, if they dropped out. Fair enough.

Building together.

This is the uplifting wrap-up, addressed to "you," which begs the question of what audience is intended for this report. There is a call for less shouting and more dialog, a call that reformsters have been issuing periodically for at least a decade.

For too many years now, the education debate has been taking place inside echo chambers, in shouting matches, or not at all. It’s our intention to interrupt that dynamic.

Maybe so. I have certainly had numerous useful conversations with people on the other side of the education debates. But this document, like most of reformy discourse, does not involve a very wide range of opinions, and no meaningful representation of a classroom perspective. 

The report ends with a call to "find someone in the education sector" particularly someone with whom you disagree, and invite them to talk. It even offers some suggested questions, which in the spirit of dialog, I will answer:

How can we do right by this generation of students?

Teachers ask this question every day.

What might these ideas look like in our given state, district, or school?

It's an excellent question--but actual educators have been trying to tell reformsters the answers for years and have been roundly ignored and dismissed.

How can we get the education conversation unstuck?

Real answer? Examine your premises and values. Also, offering the same old ideas in new language won't help. Also (you already know this), stop talking to the same people. Also, stop treating the conversation as a messaging opportunity. Also--and right now this matters a whole lot-- your edududebros and their Moms for Liberty friends have no interest in getting any sort of dialog unstuck. 

How can we work together to spark bold and lasting action and change?

See, there you are operating from an unproven premise. Are bold and lasting action and change what's called for? Any teacher who's been in the classroom for more than five years will tell you that one of the ongoing problems in education is that every other year (or every single year if you've got an overzealous administration) someone tells you that you have to change everything to implement this hot new silver bullet that will change and fix everything. Until the next one. 

So are we at the end?

Still here? Good for you. You can check out the signatories list, which is entirely populated with all the usual reformster and choicer folks (though, again, absent the firebreathing wing). 

But the report itself is a polished-up version of the same old reformster ideas, some of which are in danger of becoming just as "old" and "calcified" as any public school. This report is pretty, and maybe it is going to patch up some of the reformy alliances, but I doubt that it will advance the education conversation much. It's a fine, shiny addition to the stacks of attempts to leverage pandemic panic into some kind of education policy initiative. Also, these days one can appreciate reformsters who are acting like grownups, though I'm not sure they can be heard over all the hollering from the kids' table.