Consider this formulation, proposed in a variety of forms, especially by reformsters of the past few decades. I give you, the Infallible Conditional of Education:
If every teacher does X, then all students will learn Y.
It is wrong, every single time. Doesn't matter what you plug into X and Y, it's always wrong. Doesn't matter if you're applying scientific research. Doesn't matter if you're scaling up a program that has worked for small groups of students with a particular teacher.
It is wrong, every time.
There are predictable results for trying to implement a program requiring all teachers to do X.
Some students will, in fact, learn Y. Some students will not, but since the program is premised on the proposition that teachers doing X must infallibly lead to students learning Y, people in charge will declare that either A) the teacher (either willfully or out of incompetence) is not implementing X with fidelity or B) the student is defective in some way. Thus the Infallible Conditional of Education leads to placing a high value on compliance-- if everyone would just behave the way they are supposed to, declare frustrated leaders, this would totally work!
There are lots of reasons to fall for the fallacious ICE. Someone looks at research and says "This is how masters of this skill do it, so this is how learners must learn it" or maybe "This worked for a group of ten college sophomores, so it should work for a hundred high school freshmen." Sometimes the leaps are huge-- like the leap from "tutoring of small group of students by human tutors produced theoretical and highly dubious results, so clearly giving many students a computer program to sort-of-tutor them will yield great results."
But mostly I blame the continued attractiveness of ICE on the general public's failure to move out of the Newtonian world and into the modern world of chaos theory and quantum mechanics.
(Note: I am now going to grossly over-simplify complicated stuff. Don't @ me over details.)
The Newtonian world loves nice, linear equations. X + Y = Z. Push this lever with this amount of force and the load lifts that amount of weight. Actions have consequences, and given enough data, we can always predict exactly what will happen. Complex systems may require more data, but the idea is the same. We could, for instance (the Newtonian imagines), collect every necessary piece of data about an individual human being and that would allow us to predict exactly what job that particular human is perfectly suited for. Or, as now-failed Knewton once promised, if we had enough data about a student, we could tell her what to eat for breakfast on the day of a test.
That's the linear premise-- if we could collect information about all the inputs, then we could predict all outputs.
But everything we've learned in the post-Newtonian world of chaos theory says that is not true for any complex system.
Complex systems are subject to a million tiny and unpredictable variables. The popular notion of chaos is the Butterfly Effect-- a butterfly flaps its wings in China and then it rains in California. Minute differences make huge differences further down the line. One of the granddaddies of chaos theory is Edward Lorenz who was actually a meteorologist. His big aha moment came when he needed to rerun a computer model weather simulation, but to save time he just took the numbers from a midpoint and started from there. He entered 0.506 as a condition instead of the full 0.506127, and the result was completely different. A minute effect resulted in a massive difference.
Tiny differences have huge effects in complex systems, and virtually all systems built around human behavior are complex. You can have godlike knowledge of all the inputs and still not be able to predict exactly what the outputs will be. Likewise, you cannot design the inputs to create the exact outputs that you want.
Does this mean complex systems are obviously random? Of course not. With chaos theory we get the idea of strange attractors. The results of a complex system will not graph perfectly onto a single line, but they may cluster around some central shape or area. There will be some wild outliers, but results within certain ranges will be more likely than others. One of the Lorenz strange attractor? It looks a lot like a fuzzy butterfly. (If you want to read more, I always recommend James Gleick's Chaos.)
I often think of Russell Barkley and a five minute video of him offering advice to parents. "You are not engineers," he points out. Further:
So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:
Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.
So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.
Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.
...The better view is that your child is a genetic mosaic of your extended family. Which means this is a unique combination of the traits that run in your family line.
Be a shepherd, Barkley suggests. "Let them grow, let them prosper, please design appropriate environments around them, but you don't get to design them."
We can't design or engineer children, and the notion that we could, given enough data or enough science-flavored policies or enough making every teacher do X, is just wrong. We can absolutely implement pedagogy that improves the odds and increases the likelihood of outcomes we desire, but we cannot control the myriad of tiny details that have profound effects on this (or any other) complex system.
We cannot treat students and teachers like machines, engineering outputs by controlling inputs. What we have learned (or should have learned) in the last half-century or so tells us that the world does not work that way. You strive in the direction of certain goals, and as a living human being you make a million judgements and adjustments along the way, never knowing for certain which will turn out to have massive effect somewhere down the road.
It is human to tell ourselves (and others) that if one does X just as one is Supposed To, one will without fail arrive at Y (unless some evil party thwarts you). We like to make up rules and insist that everyone comply because then the world would work more smoothly.
It works just often enough to seduce us into believing "If X, Then Y" is a true and dependable rule of the universe, and it makes us feel very safe and secure to think it so. It is not. Nature, the world, our fellow humans-- none of them comply with our desires just because we insist we have discovered a formula that must result in our desired outputs.
And in education, where we are working with a sample of 4 million teachers and basically every single young human, the formula is certain to fail (followed, too often, by all the wrong reactions to that failure). That does not mean we jettison every possible X or ignore any evidence we can collect about X's likely outcomes. But the Infallible Conditional of Education is a lie.
Teachers should collect the best tools, the best Xs, that they can, and lean on those most likely to produce the most desired results. But they should also be prepared to adapt, improvise, read the room, change course, and just generally try to be the best butterfly shepherds they can be.
We finally got some serious cold here. It will inevitably bounce back, but it is finally sinking in that autumn is here, and I am delighted. It's my favorite season.
A reminder that you can do your part by sharing pieces (particularly from their original source). It's a tough world out there on the interwebs and it takes a lot of sharing to break through the noise and the algorithm, so please take the time to pass on some of these excellent pieces.
Tevor Aleo and Nick Covington have a very useful and illuminating conversation about the first few episodes of Emily Hanford's newest foray into the world of educational haranguing. Read them before you listen to her.
Outstanding look at the federal voucher program from Jon Valant at Brookings. Share it with someone who thinks these things are a good idea (including your favorite governor).
Florida's work for defunding public education is going just super-duper, with more state money going to vouchers than to public schools. Austin Horn covers this for the Miami Herald and even quotes friend of the institute Sue Woltanski.
Crystal Etienne has the nerve to call out Erika Donalds, Florida's privatization queen, as she tried to fend off any sort of basic accountability for Florida voucher schools.
Lots to unpack here, but come for Paul Thomas's explanation of how people are using Bloom's Taxonomy incorrectly (and how he knows what Bloom actually had in mind).
Powerful and thorough argument from Anne Lutz Fernandez that just as US consumerism is becoming a mess, privatizers are trying to extend that mess to education. Another must-read on the list this week.
Florida's school funding formula is a mess. I know-- shocking! Sue Kingery Woltanski offers some details about the twists and turns of the process that is over a half-century old.
Intriguing and sometimes-technical-in-a-biology-sort-of-way essay by Melanie Challenger that looks at the effects of technology on our body's ability to do stuff (and why it may matter more than you think).
Ted Gioia is writing about the tech overlords who want to control all media, but since these are the same tech overlords who want to control education, it's worth including here.
Rhiannon Gibbons and Silkwood Ensemble have been finding some fascinating overlap between Black roots music and Chinese musical traditions. Just kind of let this wash over you.
Subscribe to this newsletter and get regular updates on what I've been writing. Totally free!
Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan are caught in some sort of black hole, a time loop that will not let them escape their dreams about federally-driven test-centered education reform. And they're back again at EdWeek with the same old baloney, pretending that agreeing with each other represents some sort of bipartisan landmark.
Why now? Well, the opening franken-sentence tries to construct a current events hook for the tired rehash.
With students back in school and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ first person account of her struggles with the education system lighting up social media, education is back at the top of the national conversation.
Yeah, some AI agent told them that NHJ's piece was spurring all sorts of responses, so hop on that bandwagon! And pivot immediately to some classic reformster chicken littling:
What remains clear is that parents and educators are experiencing unprecedented confusion about our education performance and direction while millions of students are unprepared to face a rapidly changing economy.
"Unprecedented confusion"!! Wow, that sounds bad.
They note that the nation has been "adrift on education policy for a decade," and I'd argue that Trumpism hasn't been so much adrift as ploughing aggressively through the weeds and toward a sheer cliff, but metaphors aside, I can agree that the last decade has not been great for education policy. But their implication that education policy was super-duper prior to the last decade is just self-serving fantasizing baloney.
They point to a "false argument" about who's in charge-- feds, states or parents-- and it is a false argument, but only because the feds want to stay in charge, just in an inefficient spread-over-several-departments privatize public education way. But Spellings and Duncan have to parse their criticism of the current administration carefully, because when it comes to privatizing education, there's not much space between Spellings/Duncan and DeVos/McMahon.
Spellings/Duncan offer one of the more breezy arguments for federal control I've yet seen:
However, Washington can’t simply send dollars to states and call its job done.
Well, it totally could.
But Spellings/Duncan think the feds should "reestablish" a commitment to "education excellence—setting ambitious goals for student outcomes, investing in research, preserving measurement, and ensuring parents and taxpayers can see whether students are on track."
"We've done it before," they claim, invoking No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which is the part where I yell loudly at my screen, "No, you have not."
But this is the cherished fantasy of the corporate privatizer wing of reformsterdom-- the fairy tale that under these two testophiliac programs were some sort of golden age of educational progress.
Based on that fantasy, Spellings/Duncan argue for third-grade reading proficiency, financial and technical literacy, and just generally "clear federal goals and strong accountability." China's beating us! The duo call for putting "student achievement back at the center of the nation's agenda." And "back" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Look, some of what they call for is perfectly lovely a reasonable. But their blind spot is, as always, a total, unquestioning faith in the Big Standardized Test. That faith allows them to completely skip over one of the most challenging questions in education-- how can we effectively measure actual student knowledge and skill? How do we measure the parts of learning that require time and reflection (like reading a whole novel and mulling it over to draw conclusions and insights)? How do we measure that habits of mind that pay off both now and ten, twenty, thirty years from now? How do we measure a student's ability to apply critical thinking to a body of knowledge from science or history or literature? How do we measure their ability to incorporate an appreciation for the arts into their lives? How do we measure the breadth and depth of their content knowledge across multiple disciplines, and further measure their ability to build connections between different parts of that body of knowledge? How do we measure their ability to communicate effectively with written or spoken word? How do we measure their ability to fully integrate their acquired knowledge and skills into a holistic view of the world and what it means to be fully human in it? And how do we adapt any of these measures to reflect the individual achievement of a student who has chosen to pursue achievements along their own particular individual path?
To all of this, Spellings/Duncan say, "Give the kid a single multiple-choice math and reading test. That'll tell us everything we need to know."
NCLB/RttT were extended experiments in proving Campbell's and Goodhart's Laws. Attach high stakes to a narrow measure and pursue those scores, and you distort everything and measure nothing. And under NCLB/RttT, policy leaders exacerbated the problems by using lousy tests.
Every piece of their preferred policy rests on the groundless belief that the Big Standardized Test accurately measures what they want it to measure. The whole business is a process of deciding we want to measure something, inventing a proxy for that measurement, then practicing getting better at the proxy instead of the thing itself.
Spellings/Duncan also want us to worry about impending doom. The future of the US economy and your child's employment will be threatened unless we get education fixed. And lord knows I believe that education is important, but corporate reformsters have been ringing this bell since they manufactured A Nation at Risk forty-some years ago. And yet, the disaster hasn't quite manifest. Yes, our economy is stuttering in some areas, but the fingerprints on that mess look a lot more like the greasy handprints of Donald Trump and not any failures of education. And NCLB and RttT both made big promises to the economy and students; if they were such a fabulous success, that should be manifest in a generation of students who were able to reach new economic heights, even lift themselves out of poverty, thanks to those programs. If Spellings/Duncan want to pretend their programs were successful, that's what they should be pointing to-- not BS Test results.
When Spellings/Duncan say that we need to get education fixed, I don't disagree. But since they led much of the breaking, I'm not ready to take advice from on the fixing. Given a magic wand to wave at education policy, the very first thing I would do is end test-centered accountability and send policy leaders back to the accountability drawing board. We do not need to move backward to the failed policies of the past.
Yes, I've said all this many times before, but if Spellings/Duncan are going to keep repeating their same old baloney, I can repeat myself, too, to rail against their failed and damaging ideas. But I'd rather move forward, and I wish they could leave their testophilia behind.
Emily Hanford is back with another story to sell about a story someone's been sold. This time is apparently pumping direct instruction, and in talking to Alexander Russo, she pitched this frame:
This season, which is about teaching and about direct teaching in particular, just taps into a lot of questions about fears that certain kinds of teaching or teaching kids in a very direct way is somehow gonna squash their independence or not allow them to be independent.
Sigh. So we're going to try to reopen one of the fauxest debates in education-- the direct instruction vs. discovery debate. Let's hit a couple of points here.
1) I call this a faux debate because I have never encountered, in person or otherwise, a single capable teacher who believed that they needed to use all of one or the other. It's strictly mix and match, depending on the content. I have never so much as heard of, for instance, an elementary teacher who thinks that students should just sort of discover the multiplication table. OTOH, there are people in leadership positions, thought leaders, administrators on local and state levels, and various edupreneurs who adhere to one side or the other, but actual teachers in the field are in general more practical than ideological.
2) Direct instruction covers a wide range of possibilities, from super-strict scripting to handing out a times table and telling students to commit it to memory to explicitly instructing a student after face-to-face analysis of what brick is missing in the student's building.
Look-- both direct and discovery instruction have very definite limits.
Students have a limited ability to discover things about subjects of which they are ignorant. And when the question at hand has a clear, known answer, it's just annoying as hell for someone to demand that you "discover" the answer and wait for them to tell you whether you're right or not (which is, in fact, just a twisty way of delivering delayed direct instruction). Make me go look it up? That's just having me get direct instruction from a book.
And lord knows we need knowledgeable filters. Have we not seen a universe of people who "did their own research" in a flurry of internet-based discovery self-instruction and thereby arrived at utter and complete baloney? Never tell me you "learned more from the kids" than they did from you-- if you, the certified teacher, are not the most knowledgeable expert in your classroom, then why are you there? You're no more useful than one of those "guides" at an AI school.
But direct instruction can't do it all, either. It's not so much that endless direct instruction robs students of agency and autonomy; it's that you, the adult teacher, are not going to enjoy the ways that your supremely bored students find to exercise their agency and autonomy.
Students are not simply buckets into which information is easily poured, and "thinking" is not simply the act of retrieving little data chunks from the bucket. And I am frankly suspicious of folks who think everything is a settled Truth that needs only be collected and repeated (looking at you, classical education folks).
And when we enter the world of interpretation and analysis, direct instruction simply doesn't cut it. There is no reason for students to have to "discover" the dates of major events in The Great European War, but direct instruction is inadequate for learning about the causes of the war. There is no reason for students to "discover" the setting and characters of Hamlet, but direct instruction is inadequate for grappling with just how mad Hamlet may or may not be.
Too much direct instruction in a classroom and students zone out, learning that their only task is to collect and retrieve whatever the teacher wants them to collect and retrieve. Too much discovery in a classroom and students feel aimless and abandoned by an adult who is somewhat useless. To guide students successfully through the learning landscape, you don't make them follow in your exact footsteps, step by step, and you don't just turn them loose with a "Good luck, hope to see you on the other side."
At this point in the debate, some advocates of either school are going to pipe up and object that I have mis-described their preferred mode of teaching, and they will proceed to describe the "true" version of discovery or direct instruction, and they will describe a mode that is, in fact, a blend of both, at which point I will grasp at one of my remaining hairs because that is my frickin' point.
I sometimes look at back at my 39 years in the classroom and try to decide where my teaching lands in this dichotomy, and I land on a third possibility-- exploration and examination.
To explore the learning landscape of whatever content you're dealing with, the student needs both some direct instruction about the fundamentals of the landscape and some freedom to range about it. We can't get to a useful and enriching conversation about the themes of Hamlet without some hard foundation in what the text does and does not say-- but we can't stop there. It's hard to examine what we don't know, but once we have that knowledge, we need some freedom to sift through it, turn it over, see what we can find in it. It's hard to grapple with advanced math if you haven't memorized your times tables, but you can't memorize your way through every math problem you ever encounter.
I don't know what the new season of Hanford's work will bring, though I'm sure that once again a whole world of education amateurs, journalists, thought leaders, policy wonks, politicians, etc etc etc will have many discussions about it. No doubt various teacher examples of one failure or another will be unearthed (because in a group of 4 million, you can find a couple of examples of anything). Meanwhile, I expect that the rest of the actual teachers in actual classrooms will continue to continue working on a balanced blend of what actually works for them.
Guide on the side or sage on the stage? How about a guide who is knowledgeable enough to periodically stop and deliver some sage advice, and who is wise enough to know when to lead and when to get out of the way? It won’t sell many stories, but it will get the job done.
In the midst of their current summit (cleverly scheduled for the end of Banned Books Week), Moms for Liberty unveiled a new AI tool. M4L AWARE (a name that looks much like MAL-AWARE which is a little on the nose) will flag "DEI contracts, gender policies and curriculum changes every 12 hours to mobilize parents," says Fox News, which was the first outlet to share the scoop.
AWARE is supposed to stand for Agenda Watch, Alert, Response, and Engage. Sure. M4L itself announced "school boards put on notice," as if school boards do not already operate under laws that require transparency, including things like publishing the agendas of future meetings.
Co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich handled the rollout herself. Co-founder Tiffany Justice recently finished her brief fling with the Heritage Foundation; her linkedin now says she's self-employed as a "conservative activist, strategist, and donor advisor," so I guess the "ordinary mom at the kitchen table selling t-shirts" mask is fully off now. Meanwhile, co-founder Bridget Ziegler hasn't been very busy since her own bi-sex scandal (other than suing the city) and chose not to run for re-election to the Sarasota School Board this year (her husband was booted from his party chairmanship gig).
There was a time when, if you squinted hard, M4L looked like a conservative parental activism group. These days they're just an unabashed estrogen wing of MAGA. So of course Descovich, when rolling out the new surveillance AI, invoked Joe Biden. "The Biden admin targeted our parents for showing up to school board meetings," Descovich claimed, echoing a new report from Trump's Weaponization Working Group, part of Dear Leaders use of the Department of Justice to target and push back on anyone who was ever mean to him or his allies. Back in 2022, when M4L and other MAGAs were aggressively attacking school boards, the National School Board Association asked law enforcement at every level for some help for its members and used the phrase "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" in their letter, which has been a PR gift to the MAGA crowd ever since.
M4L's AI agent will, apparently, scan school board agendas looking for any particular words or phrases that indicate Naughty Policies "buried deep within school board agendas." Because "it's incredibly time-consuming to sift through thousands of pages in agendas each week," says Descovich, "and school districts count on that." Because school boards are the enemy. Do any school boards have thousand-page agendas? Or is it the main M4L office that's scanning them, in which case, can't local M4L chapters scan local agendas? Is this initiative lazy, or is it trying to weaponize roving bands of MAGA moms to be deployed to whatever district the AI says needs spanking?
So MALAWARE promises at least some instances of a bunch of angry MAGAs showing up to protest a high school auto shop unit on transmissions because ChatGPT reported a lesson on trans stuff, which would be entertaining if anyone in MAGA world was capable of saying, "Ooops, we made a mistake" and not "Let's just keep repeating our original story even though it has no more evidence than the stories about litter boxes in schools."
Maybe the main idea here is to use technology to make up for M4L's flagging membership in some areas.
At any rate, one more way for MAGA moms to agitate the base while facilitating the harassment of school boards across the country, whose members are elected from their own communities and, in most cases, paid little or nothing for their trouble. Look, I'm all for local taxpayers speaking up about the actions of their school boards, but there is something lazy about this approach, which does not encourage people to pay attention to what their school board is doing all the time, but to wake up and squawk only when the AI tells them something is happening they might not like, with no context or background provided. MALAWARE is not here to facilitate involvement-- just attacks. Not involvement or engagement— just intimidation and undermining.
I have deliberately waited until after Banned Books Week this year to talk about banned books because it's a topic I hate to see relegated to just one week where we all wring our hands with concern and then, come Sunday, sigh "Well, now that's over with" and move on. But the attempts to curtail reading of certain Naughty Texts is a 52 week project for those who are determined to try to keep certain ideas away from human brains, so let's stay alert all the time.
Plenty of reading from the week. Remember to share the pieces that speak to you.
The federal voucher program is ripe for profiteering and discrimination, but some states are signing on anyway. Jacob Goodwin explains the issues at The Progressive.
Jessica Grose at the New York Times starts to catch up to Jennifer Berkshire, noting that the Texas GOP is having trouble because they sold out public schools. (Should be a gift link)
I really appreciate Bruce Baker's ability to render school finance comprehensible, and I recommend his blog. Here's a quick tutorial in how to chart "efficiency" in non-garbage ways (as well as a debunking some garbage charting).
Steve Nuzum is trying to get information out of the South Carolina Department of Education regarding the state's voucher program. It's not going great.
The Downstage Center blog has been tracking the censorship of high school theater productions. In New Jersey, administration has axed a production of The Wave, a play about that famous classroom experiment about the rise of fascism.
Gary Rubinstein went to Teach for America's 35th birthday party and brought us all an account of the events. Things I learned include that TFA is still tight with reformsters, that they can command quite the roster of entertainers, and that Michelle Rhee is still full of it. Fascinating read.
Ohio, like many other choice states, gives taxpayer money to some Islamic schools, and yet MAGA voices insist that such a thing is Very Bad and money should only go to religions they personally agree with. Stephen Dyer reports.
Saurabh Anand published a piece at JSTOR last month that has been an open tab on my desktop ever since, even as I have added it to my file of Things I Would Totally Steal If I Were Still Teaching.
The piece is "Teaching Students to Follow an Idea," and Anand is talking about an assignment that he uses with first-year academic writing students at the University of Georgia.
I developed this activity because students often perceive research writing as a series of requirements: finding scholarly sources, writing an annotated bibliography, citing sources, and producing a literature review. These requirements are useful, but they can also make scholarship seem like a collection of finished objects. Articles appear in databases, then students download them, extract information, and cite them. I wanted students to see something different: scholarship as a conversation that changes over time.
Yes! The "collection of finished objects" really strikes a chord with me, and the rationale parallels my thinking when I designed an assignment around having students research local history mostly from primary sources.
But Anand lands in a different place, and it is also cool. He asks students to take a scholarly article, pick an idea from it, and trace that idea's history. Where did it come from? What were the responses to it? Who built on it? Who disagreed with it?
What is the biography of that idea?
Anand is working in scholarly materials, but the possibilities here-- especially when applied to chunks of history--are considerable.
It also reminds me of teaching high school juniors about the various intellectual and social waves in US history. Because-- and some folks seem to have lost track of this-- we can talk about ideas in a classroom without actually "indoctrinating" anyone. Every year I had to talk about American attitudes, throughout history, about race and gender and religion and society itself. And I opened each new wave with a version of this speech:
I am not asking you to decide that these folks were right or that they were wrong. I am not here to convince you to agree with them, but I am going to present, as clearly as I can, how they viewed the world and the human beings in it. You can agree or disagree-- that's entirely your decision-- but I want you to understand where they were coming from.
Implicit in that approach was holding the ideas themselves at arm's length, studying them as things in themselves. The idea was to look at how they grew and spread and how the affected the people who embraced them, not to try to decide whether or not they were True. In doing so, my hope was that students would learn to recognize pieces of those ideas still floating around in our cultural soup today. (Also, if I'm honest, to help students develop the habits of mind that made it possible to examine their own beliefs and scan them for integrated consistency).
So I can see a version of Anand's assignment working on a large scale (Where did the critical realists start? What were they reacting to? How did different writers try to articulate or dramatize their ideas, and which pieces of the ideas did particular authors favor? Did they fall from favor, and if so, why? What ideas pushed them aside? Damn, but I am just itching to go back in time and use some of this approach.). The assignment can also work on smaller scale (Where did the story about litter boxes in schools start? How did it spread? Who helped spread it? Has it peaked yet?)
Ideas and beliefs have their own lives, growing, changing, both responding to and shaping the world around them. They are not set in concrete, unchanged and unaltered by time, and they can be studied by questions so much more interesting and useful than, "Is this correct?" This, for me, is one of the fundamental problems of the those who are fighting "culture wars"-- their insistence that for most questions, there is one True Answer and it has never changed and will never change-- which is itself an idea that has shifted and ebbed and flowed and changed over the centuries.
Humans and human society shift and change and rise and fall and regularly re-assess the world around them and their place in it. That process, that life of ideas, is fascinating and useful. I am glad that subtext was part of my teaching, but right now I would love a little bit of a do-over.
So let's take a second to talk about disparate impact and why anyone should care that the feds no longer pay any attention to it.
The principle of disparate impact starts with the understanding that 1) not all discrimination is intentional and 2) not all intentional discrimination is announced as such.
Disparate impact allows us to bypass an argument about whether or not someone in charge had prejudice in his heart which he deliberately enacted through policy.
For the last several decades, everyone has understood that you cannot write down in official policy, "We will not hire Black people." But if you have hired 100 people in the last six months and 50% of the applicants were women and 0% of the actual hires were women, there is reason to suspect that perhaps your organization has a civil rights problem.
In education, a common disparate impact argument has centered on discipline, the argument being that if Black students composed 20% of your student body and 90% of your discipline referrals, maybe something is going on.
The effect of the principle of disparate impact is that many employers and schools have been super-careful because they're afraid they might be doing a racism without even trying. The principle of disparate impact has launched thousands of implicit bias PD sessions and made folks examine more carefully how they might be discriminating without even meaning to.
But that same effect makes reactionary snowflakes sad. You can't just let every discriminatory thought fall out of your mouth without someone making a fuss! Even Supreme Court Justices aren't immune; “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Sam Alito said at a Federalist Society event in 2020. “Until recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now, it’s considered bigotry.”
So for MAGA, already accepting the premise that white men are the most oppressed and downtrodden group in the country, disparate impact is one more way that they are held down.
Ther is no doubt that parsing out disparate impact is an inexact art, and there is absolutely no doubt that public schools do not suffer from a shortage of people looking over their shoulder, waiting to catch them doing Something Wrong.
But the loss of the principle of disparate impact means that discrimination can only be called out when some school administrator or staff member is stupid enough to announce, "I am taking this action in order to discriminate against this group of people, a group that I personally hate." It may take a while for some districts or states to feel free enough to start doing terrible things, but they've got at least two years to get comfortable with the idea. In the meantime, families of female or minority or LGBTQ students will have to start looking for another means to protect themselves.
Noah Smith is an "econ blogger" who mostly does econ stuff, but a week ago he decided to take a swipe at education. Yes, it's always super-awesome when economists try to talk about education, but this particular post caught my attention because Smith would like to explain why smaller classes are a snare and a delusion, and his argument highlights one of the major problems with education research over the past several decades.
Smith starts out commenting on the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece (I believe at this point there are three grown adults on the planet who have not expressed an opinion about the piece, and two of them are stuck under rocks) and then wades into a round of "do schools need more money" as a way of introducing his gripe, which is that when schools get more money, they spend it on teachers to try to reduce class size.
"I’ve been hearing all my life that smaller classes will improve the quality of education," he opines, then goes on to cite some contemporary praise for smaller class size. He cites a 2014 study and a 2013 program in Tennessee (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio or STAR) and digs into a study of the entire country of Israel, where due to a rabbinical rule, class sizes were capped at 40 (like 40 students somehow qualifies as a small class in any year since about 1957).
The initial study showed "gains" but then a follow-up study showed no class size effect. Then he pulls up a couple of meta-analyses (a study of studies, for those of you who skipped this day in college). He quotes a study from Filges et. al.:
Overall, the evidence suggests at best a small effect on reading achievement. There is a negative, but statistically insignificant, effect on mathematics. For the non-STAR studies the primary study effect sizes for reading were close to zero but the weighted average was positive and statistically significant.
And more of the same, all looking at the effects of smaller class size on "student achievement."
Student achievement.
Here we go again. Hundreds of studies that accept Big Standardized Test scores as accurate, reliable, and valid proxies for the desired outcome of an education.
Do researchers use the proxy because they truly believe BS Tests are a valid proxy, because BS Tests are the easiest thing to find that comes in nice numbers, or because they know on some level that publishing a study that examines the effects of X on the scores from a single multiple-choice reading and math test given once a year would cause too many people to respond, "Well, who cares?" Or are they simply implicitly arguing that BS Test scores are, in fact, the whole point and object of education and nothing else matters?
Look, measuring education and student achievement and growth is really hard, because what we want for our children includes a whole lot of hard-to-measure stuff, not to mention things that don't really kick in or pay off until years later. Plus all the things that require a slow approach; can you measure how well a student can read and reflect and dive into a full novel by giving them a series of multiple choice questions about a 500-word excerpt? No, you cannot. But somehow many folks have come to accept that a tiny, not-very-valid measure of a tiny sliver of a tiny part of a whole human's education can be treated as a proxy for the whole big picture. And that leads to all sorts of bad conclusions.
This particular instance stands out because I don't think there's a single human being who remembers being in a K-12 classroom who does not understand that smaller class size is a plus. It guarantees students more attention, makes the teacher's job easier (both in teaching and management), and provides the student with a more human experience. There isn't a parent on the planet who, given the choice, would say "Don't put my child in the class with fifteen students-- I want her in the class with 45." There isn't a teacher on the planet who would say, "Yeah, could you just jam ten more students into each of my classes, because that will make my job easier." Need more? There's a whole organization (Class Size Matters) that can provide more.
You can line up studies that "prove" that class size doesn't matter from here to the moon and the eyerolls and muttered comments of "bullshit" will far outnumber the responses of, "Oh, well, I see. I guess I don't care how big the class is after all." Because no sensible human being would believe that class size doesn't matter. And when research is based on bad and incomplete data that causes it to arrive at literally unbelievable conclusions, it does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Smith goes on to make some valid points. Like good teachers are better than bad teachers, and there is not an infinite supply of good teachers. So if we hire a bunch more teachers in order to reduce class size, we will end up hiring less-than-great teachers. Fair enough. Though I will point out that putting a mediocre teacher in front of a small class gives you a better chance of success than putting them in front of a large class.
Maybe we could use the money to raise salaries and attract more good teachers rather than reduce class sizes, Smith suggests, and boy have we been here before. In 2015, Marguerite Roza and the Georgetown Edunomics Lab were trying to make a case for the Super Sardinemaster-- one great teacher in front of a couple hundred students. Way back in 2010, Bill Gates (who, I will remind you, has never been right about education) thought it sounded like a great idea. Reformsters like the idea because it's cheap. For a while, the Super Sardinemaster was imagined as a great teacher working over the internet with many students, but we ran a large scale experiment about that kind of teaching back in 2020, and mostly everyone hated it.
What many economists understand about education could be spread out on the head of a pin and still leave room for a flock of angels to hold a good-sized square dance. But they ought to understand that using bad data leads to bad results, and this is a particularly dramatic demonstration of that principle. Too much education research rests on a foundation of junk, no more reliably stable than a pile of sardines
This is the weekend of Applefest in Franklin, an annual festival hung on the thin hook of Johnny Appleseed's residence in the are for fifteen minutes a couple hundred years ago. John Chapman is a fascinating story, and so is the story of how he became a story, and I recommend Johnny Appleseed: The Man, The Myth, The American Story by Howard Meansfor reading about all that. As for Applefest, we have a few hundred booths, a car show, a lot of food, a show at the theater (this year-- Mean Girls), and a race from one end of town to the other; the board of directors and the CMO will be running again this year.
But the most exciting thing this week was that the board of directors had their first instrumental music lessons. One board member is pursuing percussion, and the other aspires to trumpeting. They have their instruments, their method books, and the privilege of attending a school with a full time music teacher who will see them once a week as we begin this adventure. Tooting and bonking abound at the institute, loaded with potential and promise. We shall see.
In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.
There are a plethora of statements out there now that the rules are out, but Jessica Levin is a smart lawyer and I find her comments particularly valuable, because much of what's being said just isn't accurate.
Many folks have thoughts about Ben Riley's reporting about Alpha School, but this piece by Matt Seybold is one of the better ones for capturing the wider implications of this upscale snake oil emporium.
Bruce Baker, the noted education funding expert, has made a long-time habit of cleaning up after Marguerite Roza (whose name you may not work but whose economic apologetics for reformsters you have almost certainly encountered). Here's an overview of her greatest hits (and why they're baloney).
Larry Ferlazzo offers a reaction to the NYT piece that asked thirty education "experts" how to improve schools-- but he gets beyond the eyerolls hat most of us offered to get to some more practical matters.
Sue Kingery Woltanski has made many correct calls about vouchers in Florida. Now she has some predictions for the federal voucher program. They all look correct to me.
I love good cross-genre cover. It can open up a song in ways you just never thought of. Here's Lake Street Drive doing a completely other cover of "I Want You Back"
Carl Hendrix is on Elon's cyber-sewer this week arguing that teachers who were trained over the last fifty years have been taught that "knowing stuff is the least important part of thinking," offering a diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy as evidence.
I'm not going to get into an argument about the taxonomy's virtues or lack thereof, and in the thread, Hendrix acknowledges the idea of knowledge at the bottom of the taxonomy because it's foundational, not least important.
But I will agree that the tide has run away from Knowing Stuff in education. for which we can blame a confluence of ideas.
One is the foolish "we don't need know stuff cuz we has google" argument, which was always without foundation. It's hard to look things up when you don't know enough to ask questions. And storing information outside your brain just means that it's not available to power your thinking or insights. The ugly cousin of this argument is that AI can just know stuff for us, which is even worse because AI cannot be trusted to get things right, and if you know nothing yourself, you cannot judge when AI is feeding you baloney. The cherry on top is that AI and enshittification have worsened Google and the internet so badly that it is even less useful as a repository of knowledge than it used to be. It is not a safe or accurate place for outsourcing your responsibility to know stuff.
The other is the modern reform movement, especially Common Core. The emphasis has been skills, skills, skills. Never mind knowing what Hemmingway had to say in The Sun Also Rises-- it's time to work on using context clues and inferences. This has always been a crock-- you cannot practice skills like critical thinking without some content to think about. It's not useful to practice chewing with your mouth empty. You can't generate waves without some medium through which the waves move. Knowing Stuff has to come before "skills."
Twenty-some years of teacher training has indeed shifted practicum to the idea of teaching to the standards and developing skills in order to do well on the Big Standardized Test. Most of the student teachers I hosted in my classroom were working from content knowledge they'd acquired in high school. It is, in fact, the teacher training mirror of the problem-- teacher prep in way too many cases focuses on the skills and techniques of teaching while ignoring the actual content knowledge that the teacher is supposed to be teaching.
This is fixable. I know, because my own teacher training fixed it, and could be a model for other teacher programs.
My undergraduate degree was not in education, but in English, because my college (Allegheny College in Meadville PA) used to run a program based on the idea that the teacher should be a content area expert. That came first. I took 1.5 education courses before I student taught (plus one English course designed specifically for teachers). That's the first part.
The second part was exceptional support during student teaching. My supervisor watched me in the classroom usually once a week, often for more than an hour. During student teaching, I took more methods courses. The college had a field office for all of us--and there were only 9--in the downtown Cleveland hotel where we all lived, and we took courses there a couple nights a week. Methods courses taught by working teachers, not college professors. One was a methods course taught by the same person who observed our teaching, so the methods course could include practical discussions of something that happened two days ago in our actual class.
The third part was an extension of that support into our first year of teaching. To the district, we were first year teachers; to the college we were interns. During that year, more classes at the field office, and more, less frequent, observations by the same person who saw us in student teaching. And then an assortment of Masters-level education courses in summers back at the college, leading to a Masters in Education.
It was a low-volume, high-cost program, so of course the college eventually killed it. But the model is still a good one. Create content-area experts-- people who Know Stuff-- and then support the heck out of them as they sharpen their teaching edge on the hard stone of actual classrooms.
Teachers should Know Stuff and be trained in the What of teaching and not just the How. Because all the technique in the world will not help you if you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And yes-- knowledgeable competence is one piece of the classroom management puzzle. Yes, a teacher needs to know some of the How as well-- lots of Hows, really. But so often the How is driven and shaped by the What; I worked with more than a few student teachers who couldn't figure out how to teach a lesson because they literally could not figure out what exactly they were trying to teach (pro tip: downloading some worksheets from an online teacher site, or having ChatGPT whip one up, will not help you solve any of these problems).
Teachers should Know Stuff so that they can Teach Stuff. Everything comes after that foundation is laid.
We lost a giant in the local music community this weekend. I don't really have the words, but I have to try.
I met Ed when I was ten years old, in his first year in the district. He was my first trombone teacher, and he would become probably the most influential person in my life not actually related to me. I will tell you some stories about Ed and me, but I want you to understand this up front-- I tell these stories not to focus on myself, but because there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who can tell similar stories, because that's who Ed was-- the guy who influenced the course of many students' lives.
From the beginning of my trombone days, Ed gave me permission to play. When I came to a lesson to demonstrate that I'd worked out a "jazzy" rendition of something from the book (nothing like a fifth grader's hot "Go Tell Aunt Rosie") or to show that I could peck out some approximation of a tune I knew, he didn't tell me to straighten up. He told me there was a name for what I was doing and that it was something lots of musicians did (and could I now please play the lesson I was supposed to have worked on). That kind of support might seem like a small thing, but it was very much Ed. "Sure, you can do that."
Some band directors can be micromanaging control freaks; Ed was the opposite. What Ed gave us in band was ownership, and with it, responsibility. "I'm not the one who's going to be out there in front of an audience," he would tell us, and we knew that wasn't strictly true, but we also got the point-- the band was our band and we should do our best not for him, but for ourselves.
We learned leadership in Ed's band. When you became a section leader, you understood that you were there to help the people in your section stay on point and do their best. An awful lot of what I learned about leadership (and which I ultimately carried into my own classroom) I learned from Ed in band. Work with your people. You can have high expectations without being a jerk.
Ed was a working musician (what a friend of mine and another of his students calls a blue collar musician) who gigged around with combos playing jazz and standards and whatever the gig needed. "Take the gig," he taught us, "Because playing always leads to more playing." And who doesn't want to keep playing?
Ed was never ego-driven. When it came to stage band (what many schools have because "swing" was too controversial), Ed started us, sometimes stopped us, but in between we were expected to play as an ensemble, holding ourselves together. He didn't need to be out there acting like the leader.
I can't begin to list all the lessons I learned from Ed. When you make a mistake, just keep going because if you stop and make a fuss, then you've made two mistakes. Suck it up and stay on point. Listen to what the rest of the group is doing. Advice for pit orchestra playing: when in doubt, leave it out.
Band was a place where I felt responsible, accomplished, capable, respected. That was thanks to Ed.
When I ended up teaching in the same high school, Ed was not done nudging me forward. After I was dragged into the musical theater program to help teach the music, Ed was the one who said, "You already know how all these songs go. You might as well direct the pit." He enlisted me as a substitute trombonist for a dance band he played in; later, after the regular guy moved away, I became a regular player. Sometimes I drove us to gigs together (he would give me grief about the turkeys riding in the back of my creaky old Open hatchback) and I enjoyed our conversations in the car together, plus moments like the New Year's Eve when he started to argue on my behalf with the cop who stopped me for turning the wrong way on a one-way street.
Ed was one of those people who never stopped growing. He took a sabbatical to walk the entire Appalachian Trail. He got himself a pilot's license. He worked as a golf course groundskeeper. He was director of the town band for thirty years and was constantly finding ways to stretch us as players. He was a linchpin of local theater pit orchestras. He sang in church choirs. He was founding member of our regional orchestra. He even overcame his less-than-fondness for traditional "dixieland" jazz to play in a band with his family and mine.
Ed could be curmudgeonly, but he was never unkind and he was always supportive. It is impossible to overstate how wide and deep his influence has been. Many of his students went on to become professional musicians or music teachers, but many of us are like me-- not a professional musician or music teacher, but busy amateurs for whom music is an important part of life (another lesson I took into the classroom-- you're not just teaching the future majors in your field).
Everyone has Ed stories. There isn't a musician in this area who hasn't been touched, directly or indirectly, by his work, which of course means there isn't anybody at all in this area who hasn't been touched by his life and work.
It is hard to imagine the world without Ed in it, even harder to imagine who I would be if I had not known Ed (and, as I said, I'm not the only one). He lived a full, rich life and achieved the most that a teacher can hope for-- to make the world a better place and help his students become their best selves. He leaves a teacher's legacy-- hundreds of people carrying a light out into the world with a flame he helped ignite and feed. He was giant, but he never carried himself like one. Thank you, Ed.
That's Ed on clarinet, his son on tuba, and his grandson on drums.
Fall arrived last week, along with plenty of other stuff. I'm here playing in the orchestra pit for Mean Girls and handling a bunch of other personal business, and not in Houston where I'm sure the Network for Public Education is putting on a bang-up gathering. But as I learned years ago, you can't be everywhere at once. Plenty on my mind at the moment, but let's just move on to the reading list for the week. Remember, sharing is important.
Spreading the work of one federal department over several other departments with no expertise in that area doesn't improve efficiency!! What a shocker. Jonaki Mehta and Cory Turner report for All Things Considered.
Parenting is hard. Paul Thomas points out the whole "I know my child best" refrain of the parental rights crowd might not be entirely based in complicated reality. Did your parents know you-- all of you-- when you were 16?
Mrs. Dear Leader brings some corporate-sponsored AI-flavored tools to some really young children in North Carolina, ignoring a bunch of research explaining why this is a bad idea.
Sometimes I follow up old post subjects, but this time was special. I went to follow up on a wealthy Koch-related private school in Wichita, Kansas, and what I found was a guy running for governor of Iowa.
Back in 2018, the Wonder school was launched by Charles Koch's daughter-in-law, a recognizable iteration of the Rich Person Has Big Insights About Education model of edu-preneurship.
“I’m mostly just a mom that’s passionate about education for her kids,” said Annie Koch, 33, a mother of three children, ages 5, 3 and 3 months. You start to realize, ‘Actually, my kids spend more time at school than they spend with me.’
The really wealthy Koch daughter-in-law teamed up with Zach Lahn, whose star began to rise when he was just a college student, bouncing from campaign to campaign to earn his stripes as a seasoned GOP operative. He ended up working for the Koch-backed astro-turf advocacy group Americans for Prosperity as Montana state director, where he drew press for the bone-headed move of declaring that "millions of Montanans" opposed Medicaid expansion, which is quite a claim for a state that only has a million residents.
Lahn then moved to the Koch's Youth Entrepreneurs program. How did he end up qualified to run a school? He and his then-wife had kids (ages 4 and 3). Anyway, he said, "We're not inventors. We're just parent catalysts." Lahn's "aw shucks, I'm just a regular guy" shtick compared with a certain not-from-around-here quality would turn out to be very on brand.
The Wonder school will seem familiar to anyone who has A) looked at these rich school launchers for a while or B) recently followed the deep dive into Alpha schools.
Wonder touts itself as an alternative to a strawman version of public ed, claiming that such schools are regimented and focus on memorization and "testing of rules and facts" through "worksheets just like our grandparents used." Like a factory.
But at Wonder, students will "work collaboratively like at Google or Facebook," a claim that would be a real hoot for people working under shitty conditions for those companies. But hey-- at Wonder everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. In fact, there are not actual teachers-- just "guides" (like MIT students). They are organized into four studios for different age groups (Wonder started as 3-11 but now handles ages 3-18). Enrollment, according to Niche, is 90, with 33% of graduates going on to college. But they are a bargain, with highest tuition at $10,000.
The day at Wonder starts with a morning Socratic Discussion, the morning focuses on Core Skills, and then after lunch, the afternoon is devoted to Quest-- "hands-on work, team-building challenges, sciences, coding, entrepreneurship, art & music, history."
Financially, it appears that Wonder is a disaster. It has run a deficit for five of six years, and the Lahns have plugged the gap with their own previously-Koch money to the tune of $4.5 million, as reported by Tim Carpenter at Iowa Starting Line.
Prenda, Alpha School, Altschool -- over and over we get the same tale of a wealthy education amateur who has a sudden epiphany and realizes they know how to do school so much better than the "professionals," and then proceed to re-invent the wheel with the added insight that all those wheel professionals screwed up by not making the wheel flat on one side.
But while other edu-preneurs settle for starting a business (or getting guinea pig children to start one for them) Lahn has higher aspirations.
First, let's get the tea out of the way. Many, many, many, many people on the interwebs would like to tell you a story about the working relationship between Annie Koch and Zach Lahn. What we know for certain is that around late 2019, they divorced their respective spouses and married each other. Now, it's a fool's game to pretend to know what happens between people in their personal relationships, but the divorce draws attention because Lahn didn't bring a lot of money into the new marriage, but Annie brought some Koch money with her.
Because Zach Lahn is now running for governor of Iowa.
Wichita, as you may recall, is not actually in Iowa. But Lahn has been running hard, with a $3 million war chest, $2.5 million of which he loaned to his own campaign. Lahn's campaign was endorsed by former U.S. representative Steve King actor Rob Schneider and Turning Point Action, but not Donlad Trump, whose endorsed candidate Lahn beat in the GOP primary.
Zach Lahn is not a politician but another Iowan like you. He is a father, farmer, and a businessman. He is 6th generation Iowan, his own biggest donor, and does not answer to large corporations or special interest — only to God, his family, and the people of Iowa.
His education platform opposes "indoctrination" and says the governor "must be the #1 advocate for public school kids." Make public schools "good so they are competing with private schools."
Poll averages put Lahn around 4 points behind Democrat Rob Sand, so who knows how this will play out. But it would be the first time that somebody goosed a major political career by using Koch-flavored money to start a half-baked private school.
