Andy Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Partners and a senior fellow at Fordham Institute, two reliably reformy right-leaning thinky tanks, so it's safe to say that he favors the reformster view of the education debates. But I also find him to be thoughtful and intellectually honest, particularly when it comes to considering the role of conservatism in the reform movement.
I've been saving a Smarick piece from last week's Weekly Standard to mull over (it's show week, and my close reading time has been replaced by rehearsal time). In "Don't Scoff," Smarick considers the possibility of collaboration between conservatives and unions, particularly in light of two events-- the passage of ESSA and the Friedrich's case. Granted, the Friedrich case is not looking quite so game-changing now that Scalia has shuffled off this mortal coil, but Smarick's points are still worth considering. I do recommend that if you want a fuller understanding of his argument, you read his piece.
Where he sees the "key overlap in the conservative/union Venn diagram is a respect for local custom and knowledge." Both conservatives and teachers wanted the feds out of the education business, and so ESSA-- a sort-of rejection of Big Government and a extra-rare example of a federal agency being stripped of powers.
The corollary is that cocksure D.C.-dwellers not only lack the right answers; they also inadvertently warp local practice by concocting policies that serve the purposes of central administrators. The cognoscenti may view the local leader as helplessly parochial, but conservatives and unions can recognize her as informed, no-nonsense, and prudent.
Smarick sees this as a larger trend. In a term that I fully intend to steal, he refers to our recent past as The Decade of Mistakes by Experts. The failure of bankers, the economy, the border patrol, "even the New Orleans levees" has provided example after example, alarming folks all across the spectrum. "We were told ISIS was a JV team, that we could keep our health care if we liked it, that Iraqi WMDs were a slam-dunk." You may disagree with some of the failures on Smarick's list, but that's kind of the point-- no matter what your political inclination, the experts have screwed up something that you care about. While we may disagree on the particulars, all Americans have shared the experience of seeing federal experts and bureaucrats make a hash out of something important.
Smarick believe that this trend feeds directly the traditional conservative desire for decentralized, local government, and I agree with that notion even as I question just how much traditional conservatism is still alive in America. Just hold that thought for a few paragraphs.
Smarick sees Friedrich as a catalyst for what he views as a useful change-- unions dropping their political focus for a more tradespersonlike approach, a union more focused on strengthening the practices and craft of the field, thereby helping more clearly establish teachers as Local Experts who are better positioned to take the reins of local control. He does acknowledge other possible outcomes, but it looks like we don't really need to discuss the possible effects of the plaintiffs winning the appeal, so I'm going to stick to his vision of a less-politicized union.
I see a couple of problems with Smarick's vision.
First, I remain skeptical of how much traditional conservatism, the conservatism of my father and grandfather, is still a force in the world. I don't, for instance, think that Trump is a rejection of the conservative GOP establishment, but the miscalculated-but-all-too-predictable outcome of it. The right has been trying to panic voters with a long list of Terrible Things That The Government Must Put a Stop To Right Now; they simply failed to realize how effective the panic would be and how completely successful a candidate shameless enough to give the subtext voice would be. Trump is not a revolt against the GOP-- he has simply put his money where their mouth has been.
Meanwhile, Trump's Democrat counterpart is not Sanders, but Clinton, who is also a fully-manufactured product of the establishment. In her case, it's just a fulfillment of the establishment big-money purchase of politicians. They are both exactly what one could expect from the system as it stands.
At any rate, I don't see any real candidate for much of anything who actually represents the traditional small-government, trust people with local control conservative.
Nor do I think that education reform as practiced has much to do with conservative, liberal or progressive philosophies. What we have is an establishment sleight-of-hand designed to make everybody happy. "Look," say faux conservatives. "We will starve the government schools and get the centralized education monopoly out of schools." Meanwhile, liberals announce, "We will make sure that the needs of various constituencies like the non-wealthy and the non-white are thoroughly met."
And what all this actually means is that we will starve the central government into the business of being essentially a contractor who hands tax dollars over to various subcontractors. I find it telling that this ed reform pattern is repeated with Republicans, Democrats, conservatives and liberals. It's not about a political philosophy; it's just about the politics of directing public tax dollars to private corporate pockets. The beauty of it is that it can be dressed up with the rhetoric of the left ("Helping the poor"), the traditional right ("Getting government out of the X business"), or the corporate right ("Letting the free market's invisible hand sort things out"). Folks who really believe those things can and do sign up to be part of the journey, but I'm not sure they ever get to actually drive the bus.
Meanwhile, the teacher unions, even in a parallel universe where Friedrich was settled against them, can never leave politics alone, because politics can never leave education alone.
Back in the early years of my career, I subscribed to the notion that I should just do my job, teach my students, and leave politics alone. But the more I paid attention, the more I realized that every dumb rule that got in my way and even the occasional smart rule that helped me do my job-- every single one of them had been birthed by politicians working with other politicians to do some political stuff. If there's a family of angry badgers living in your house, you can tell yourself, "Well, they're not actually members of our family, and I don't really know anything about badgers or badger control," but after they keep busting up the furniture and eating the food and pooping the living room, you eventually understand that you have to get involved in the badger game. Politicians are the badgers in the house of education, and the only hope education has is for some to work badger control. Nobody in the political world has the interests of schools, students, or teachers very high on their priority list; teachers cannot afford to sit silent while other disinterested uninformed parties decide our fates.
This has created its own set of issues. Union leadership and union membership interests are not always perfectly aligned, and leadership's desire to have a seat at the proverbial table often puts union leadership out of step. Union leaders were all in on Common Core and Arne Duncan while members were still not so enamored of either, just as both NEA and AFT leaders threw their weight behind Hillary Clinton to the distaste of many, many members. And that's before we get to the many teachers who are happily registered Republicans.
So the fracture between conservatives and teacher unions is, for me, overlaid with dozens of other fractures-- traditional conservatives vs. values voters, rand and file vs. leadership, establishment vs. upstarts, corporate interests vs. public interests, centralized power vs. local control, and the unending debates about who should get to make mistakes and who should get to judge whether or not they are mistakes. No matter what labels we're playing with or what tribes we're identifying, I remain convinced that there's almost always somebody Over There who shares some of your values and you are going to have to decide whether you follow your labels or your values.
I think Smarick's idea that teacher unions could become depoliticized tradesperson groups is unlikely given where the controls of the education biz lie-- but they can certainly focus more on the craft and profession of teaching. I think Smarick gives traditional conservatives more credit for power and, well, existence than is supported by reality-- but there are such people out there. I think it's possible to reach agreement that DC should not be running the show, but I think that agreement evaporates about the moment we start discussing what should be driving the bus. I have zero faith in the Free Market's ability to improve education for many reasons, but I have great faith that it would open the door to renewed federal meddling (all free markets are "maintained" by government). I am perfectly okay with true local control with little or no provision for being able to compare schools from state to state, but I'm pretty sure Smarick is not excited about that idea.
At root, the education debate always runs into the same snag-- as a country, we have no shared vision of what a school is supposed to do, what excellence looks like, or how to achieve any of those things. We have fundamental disagreements about how the world works and what that means to teachers in a classroom. I have no doubt that for specific issues, we can all find unlikely allies in unexpected places if we're just willing to look. But I don't think we get much further than that.
Showing posts with label Andy Smarick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andy Smarick. Show all posts
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Saturday, December 12, 2015
NCLB Revisionism
Well, that didn't take long.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Some folks are already getting misty-eyed over the halcyon days of No Child Left Behind and grumbling about what has been lost in the newly-minted Every Student Succeeds Or Else Act. The problem with getting misty-eyed is that it seriously impairs your vision.
Take Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) in yesterday's Washington Post, who wants us to know what wonderful things we've lost now that No Child Left Behind has been left behind.
In Aldeman's story, NCLB put pressure on schools to improve, and the more pressure it created, the more people fought back.
Over time, as expectations rose, so too did the number of schools failing to meet them. At the law’s peak, more than 19,000 schools — about two-fifths of schools receiving federal funds and one-fifth of all public schools nationally — were placed on lists of schools “in need of improvement” and subject to consequences built into the law...
As the law aged and those consequences rose, it became less and less politically acceptable to tell so many schools to improve, let alone expect states or districts to have the technical capacity to help them do it.
What Aldeman fails to mention is that the increased failure rate was directly related to NCLB's bizarrely unrealistic and innumerate goal of having 100% of American students score above average on the Big Standardized Test.
[Update: Aldeman disagrees that "proficient" is the same as "above average," and there was some argument at the time about what "proficient" really meant and whether it was "just good enough" or "ready for college." Here's what the state of PA was saying in 2006:
Students are identified as performing in one of four levels: advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced – meaning that they have mastered Pennsylvania’s assessment anchor content standards at their grade level.
"At grade level" is a tricky construct, but "grade level" frequently means "average."]
NCLB guaranteed that as we approached 2014, we would have only two types of schools in this country-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating. Success was literally impossible. And that guaranteed that the number of failing schools would increase and that the public, as they saw the failure label hit schools that they knew damn well were good schools-- that public was going to push back and politicians were going to join in.
Aldeman notes the history of Obama waivers. And he notes the irony of the GOP's love of federal intrusion when it came to education policy.
But Aldeman is also bleary-eyed when it comes to the history of intervention in "failing" schools.
Perhaps worst of all, a strategy focused on fixing the toughest problems hinges on the desire and ability to actually do something about poor performance. The Obama administration, to its credit, did allocate significant resources to chronically low-performing schools through its School Improvement Grants program. And in exchange, it required tough and aggressive interventions in those schools. Although the results of those efforts are still uncertain, they represent a real attempt to shake up persistently poor-performing schools.
No, the results of the SIG program are not uncertain. They're a full-on failure, and all Aldeman has to do is walk across the hall to his Bellwether colleague Andy Smarick hear about it.
Aldeman is unhappy that ESSA is not draconian enough in its approach to "failing" schools. He misses the bigger problem with his aims. Neither NCLB nor the Obama Waiver program had a clue of how to accurately locate failing schools, nor do policy-makers have a clue about how to fix a failing school once they find it. All we've gotten from the last fifteen years of reformsterism is a means of using "failed" schools as a means for creating markets for charter operators and ed-related corporate money grabs.
Like many victims of nostalgia, Aldeman is sad to lose things that we never had. I can think of plenty of reasons not to love ESSA, but a belief that we actually lost some things that NCLB got right-- that does not make the list of objections.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Which Choosey Choosers Choose the Choices?
I respect reform advocate Andy Smarick for his willingness to consider some of the problems that come with the reformster movement in education. Yes, he steadfastly advocates for choice and charters, and yes, I think he's wrong about many things. But he wrote a long series of posts about the inherent tension between conservative values and conservative support for reformy stuff (here's my response to one of them), and he was a practitioner of respectful and reasonable dialogue before reformsters decided that it would be a good PR move.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Charter Laboratory Is Failing
President Obama has called charter schools "incubators of innovation" and "laboratories of innovation," and he has done so for several years, despite the fact that, so far, the laboratories have yielded nothing.
One of the standard justifications for the modern charter movement is that these laboratories of innovation will develop new techniques and programs that will then be transported out to public schools. Each charter school will be Patient Zero in a spreading viral infection of educational excellence.
Yet, after years-- no viral infection. No bouncing baby miracle cure from the incubator. The laboratory has shown us nothing.
Here's my challenge for charter fans-- name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough, that started at a charter school and has since spread throughout the country to all sorts of public schools.
After all these years of getting everything they wanted, modern charter schools have nothing to teach the public schools of the US.
Both this profile from the New York Times and a teacher interview with Diane Ravitch show that the widely-lauded Success Academy model of New York is based on the emotional brutalization of children and tunnel-vision focus on The Test. This is justified by an ugly lie-- that if poor kids can get the same kind of test scores as rich kids, the doors will open to the same kind of success.
Put all that together with a mission to weed out those students who just can't cut it the SA way, and you have a model that cannot, and should not, be exported to public schools. Success Academy demonstrates that charters don't necessarily need to cream for the best and the brightest, but just for the students who can withstand their particular narrow techniques.
But then, most modern charters are fundamentally incompatible with the core mission of public schools, which is to teach every single child. Examination of charters show over and over and over again that they have developed techniques which work-- as long as they get to choose which students to apply them to. New Jersey has been rather fully examined in this light, and the lesson of New Jersey charters is clear-- if you get to pick and choose the students you teach, you can get better results.
This is the equivalent of a laboratory that announces, "We can show you a drug that produces fabulous hair growth, as long as you don't make us demonstrate it on any bald guys."
Modern charters have tried to shift the conversation, to back away from the "laboratory" narrative. Nowadays, they just like to talk about how they have been successful. These "successes" are frequently debatable and often minute, but they all lack one key ingredient for legitimate laboratory work-- replication by independent researchers.
Replication is the backbone of science. Legit scientists do not declare, "This machine will show you the power of cold fusion, but only when I'm in the room with it." The proof is in replicating results by other researchers whose fame and income does not depend on making sure the cold fusion reactor succeeds.
If your charter has really discovered the Secret of Success, here's what comes next. You hand over your policies and procedures manual, your teaching materials, your super-duper training techniques to some public school to use with their already-there student body. If they get the excellent results, results that exceed the kind of results they've been getting previously, results measured by their own measures of success, then you may be on to something.
But if you only ever get results in your own lab with your own researchers working on your own selected subjects measured with your own instruments, you have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Andy Smarick recently charted up some charter results, looking at how they relate to CREDO and NACSA ratings. He did not make any wild or crazy claims for what he found, but he did note and chart correlations. The more CREDO likes a city (it offers more opportunities for chartering), the higher its charter testing results. The more NACSA thinks charters are regulated in a city, the lower the testing results. There are many possible explanations, but here are two that occur to me: the more charters you let open, the more they can set the rules and collect the students that they want, and the more that regulations force charters to play by the same rules as public schools, the more their results look just like public school results.
Maybe, as Mike Petrilli suggested, it's time to stop talking about charters as laboratories and stop pretending that they're discovering anything other than "If you get to pick which students you're going to teach, you can get stuff done" (which as discoveries go is on the order of discovering that water is wet). There may well be an argument to make about charters as a means of providing special salvation for one or two special starfish. But if that's the argument we're going to have, let's just drop the whole pretense that charters are discovering anything new or creating new educational methods that will benefit all schools, and start talking about the real issue-- the establishment of a two-tier schools system to separate the worthy from the rabble.
One of the standard justifications for the modern charter movement is that these laboratories of innovation will develop new techniques and programs that will then be transported out to public schools. Each charter school will be Patient Zero in a spreading viral infection of educational excellence.
Yet, after years-- no viral infection. No bouncing baby miracle cure from the incubator. The laboratory has shown us nothing.
Here's my challenge for charter fans-- name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough, that started at a charter school and has since spread throughout the country to all sorts of public schools.
After all these years of getting everything they wanted, modern charter schools have nothing to teach the public schools of the US.
Both this profile from the New York Times and a teacher interview with Diane Ravitch show that the widely-lauded Success Academy model of New York is based on the emotional brutalization of children and tunnel-vision focus on The Test. This is justified by an ugly lie-- that if poor kids can get the same kind of test scores as rich kids, the doors will open to the same kind of success.
Put all that together with a mission to weed out those students who just can't cut it the SA way, and you have a model that cannot, and should not, be exported to public schools. Success Academy demonstrates that charters don't necessarily need to cream for the best and the brightest, but just for the students who can withstand their particular narrow techniques.
But then, most modern charters are fundamentally incompatible with the core mission of public schools, which is to teach every single child. Examination of charters show over and over and over again that they have developed techniques which work-- as long as they get to choose which students to apply them to. New Jersey has been rather fully examined in this light, and the lesson of New Jersey charters is clear-- if you get to pick and choose the students you teach, you can get better results.
This is the equivalent of a laboratory that announces, "We can show you a drug that produces fabulous hair growth, as long as you don't make us demonstrate it on any bald guys."
Modern charters have tried to shift the conversation, to back away from the "laboratory" narrative. Nowadays, they just like to talk about how they have been successful. These "successes" are frequently debatable and often minute, but they all lack one key ingredient for legitimate laboratory work-- replication by independent researchers.
Replication is the backbone of science. Legit scientists do not declare, "This machine will show you the power of cold fusion, but only when I'm in the room with it." The proof is in replicating results by other researchers whose fame and income does not depend on making sure the cold fusion reactor succeeds.
If your charter has really discovered the Secret of Success, here's what comes next. You hand over your policies and procedures manual, your teaching materials, your super-duper training techniques to some public school to use with their already-there student body. If they get the excellent results, results that exceed the kind of results they've been getting previously, results measured by their own measures of success, then you may be on to something.
But if you only ever get results in your own lab with your own researchers working on your own selected subjects measured with your own instruments, you have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Andy Smarick recently charted up some charter results, looking at how they relate to CREDO and NACSA ratings. He did not make any wild or crazy claims for what he found, but he did note and chart correlations. The more CREDO likes a city (it offers more opportunities for chartering), the higher its charter testing results. The more NACSA thinks charters are regulated in a city, the lower the testing results. There are many possible explanations, but here are two that occur to me: the more charters you let open, the more they can set the rules and collect the students that they want, and the more that regulations force charters to play by the same rules as public schools, the more their results look just like public school results.
Maybe, as Mike Petrilli suggested, it's time to stop talking about charters as laboratories and stop pretending that they're discovering anything other than "If you get to pick which students you're going to teach, you can get stuff done" (which as discoveries go is on the order of discovering that water is wet). There may well be an argument to make about charters as a means of providing special salvation for one or two special starfish. But if that's the argument we're going to have, let's just drop the whole pretense that charters are discovering anything new or creating new educational methods that will benefit all schools, and start talking about the real issue-- the establishment of a two-tier schools system to separate the worthy from the rabble.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Conservative Brake Shoes
Andy Smarick just rolled out Part VII in his series of thoughtful considerations of the role of conservatism in education reform. It has been a carefully crafted series as Smarick strikes a careful balance as Smarick surveys many sides of the public education debates then turns to the folks on his own side of the rhetorical ravine and says, gently and carefully, "Some of you guys really aren't any better than some of the yahoos over there."
In this installment, Smarick considers how conservatives (meaning, as he hinted in earlier installments, real conservatives) can be a benefit in revolution by serving as a set of brakes. Some conservatives in those times may seem like wet blankets, but when a fire is threatening to burn our of control, a wet blanket can be just the thing.
But when a group is of one opinion and convinced of the righteousness of its cause, virtues can distort into vices. Unified becomes monolithic; principled becomes doctrinaire; daring becomes rash; confident becomes unrepentant; progressive becomes unrestrained.
Accordingly, opponents can actually aid reformers. They can serve as a ballast helping to ground the reformer, serving as a moderating influence on his proclivity for excess. A reasonable opponent helps reveal the location of the middle and the fringe; her centripetal force pulls the reformer back from the latter.
It's an interesting extension of the idea-- opposition actually serves the cause of conservatism simply by slowing down the race to, well, anything.
Smarick spins this from the book The Founding Conservatives (which I have not read myself) that apparently argues that some of the quiet conservative figures of our own revolution were the necessary wet blankets that kept our revolution from descending into the crazy-pants bloodthirsty excess of the French revolution. He underlines the all-too-often ignored point that the Founding Fathers disagreed tremendously on a great many things. I wish more people remembered this piece of history-- anyone who talks about "what the framers intended" is historically illiterate. The only thing the framers absolutely agreed on was that certain other framers ought to smacked upside the head.
As usual in these pieces, Smarick makes sure his readers know he hasn't defected by being sure to indict the opponents of reformsterism for their own excesses. Those examples show how thinly drawn is the line he's trying to define.
For instance, he offers "You want to destroy public education" as one overstatement, and that is in my estimation just a hair over the line-- some reformsters may not want to destroy public education, or may use words like "transform" or "disrupt," but the end effect of the policies they pursue would, in fact, destroy public education. When one considers the attempt to hand the entire York, PA public school system over to a private for-profit charter operator, it's hard to see that as anything other than the destruction of a public school system.
But he moves on to mark the excesses of reformsters as well (it's probable that Condoleezza Rice is over the line when she claims that charter opponents are the true racists).
Ultimately, he argues that it's the conservatives who keep movements from spinning out of control by offering internal brakes.
Education reform is fantastic at articulating eternal principles, acting with urgency, and speaking in lofty rhetoric. But—as we consider huge federal programs, value-added algorithms, national standards and tests, and other “game changers”—it is worth considering whether we prize prudence, respect experience, or preserve time-tested institutions.
Smarick doesn't offer any names of people who exert such a conservative restraining effect upon the reformster movement. I can think of some reasons they may be hard to find on both sides.
Ben Franklin was one such example. Franklin did not become a radical overnight. He was for years a strong voice for unity with Britain and for retaining the traditional bonds that held the colonies tightly to the empire. Franklin, by many accounts, bowed under his final straw when on a diplomatic mission to Parliament, where he came to understand that there would be no compromise, no recognition of colonial rights.
Franklin could have been a voice for moderation and peace. He could have been an ally of the British. Instead, they made him into a radical enemy.
Likewise, I didn't start out as a hammerfingered blogger. Even a few years ago, I would not have envisioned myself routinely calling out the United States Secretary of Education. Now, I'm more radical than I ever was before. By some standards, I'm not particularly radical at all, and some days I'm actually pretty reasonable. But I didn't get here because of any new impulse within myself. I got here because the more I saw and read and listened to, the more I realized that there are people in this country using their power and money to remake public education, to use the force of law to require me to commit educational malpractice, to trample on the professional expertise and personal commitment of me and my fellow teachers, to put profits and power above the best interests of my students. Some are thoughtlessly destructive, some are maliciously destructive, and some sincerely believe that they are wielding a sledgehammer in a good cause. But the end result is much the same.
Franklin became radicalized because he faced men who believed their authority and power meant they did not have to bend, listen or care about what the lesser humans living in the colonies knew or felt or wanted.
There's an oft-overlooked irony at the heart of our country's revolution. The taxes that we so quickly grew to hate were not capricious or pointless-- not at first. The fighting of what we call the French and Indian War had run up a huge bill, and the British felt that since the bill had been run up protecting us, it was not unreasonable to try to collect from us some of the money that they had spent saving our colonial posteriors. You lend your brother-in-law your car for an emergency and he uses all your gas and dents your fender; it doesn't seem like such a stretch to ask him to help chip in.
But it all descended quickly into an assertion of power. The colonies would do as their betters told them to. They would behave. They would fall in line, or else Parliament would punish them harder until they finally broke and knelt before their rightful masters.
We can argue that eventually more conservative voices gathered enough power on both sides to cool things down. But that was not until after a decade in which no voices could provide enough ballast to offset the pressures that gave rise to radical moves all around.
The biggest issue that Smarick doesn't really address is that all sides in some disputes are not created equal. People on a particular side of an issue might not be evil, malicious, purposefully malignant monsters of ill intent-- but that doesn't mean they aren't wrong. The British Parliament may have had their reasons; they may not have intended to start or war or abuse their own brothers and sisters across the sea, and it may have been unfair to ascribe malicious intent to them-- but they were still wrong.
Conservative voices could have tempered their behavior, but would it really have mattered if they had been dead wrong in a more slow, well-considered, thoughtful manner?
Ultimately, I believe that many reformster programs and policies are dead wrong. I believe the current unregulated spread of money-sucking charters does not need to be modulated; it needs to be stopped cold. I believe that Common Core and the testing to which it is stapled are not policies that can be slowed down and carefully managed; they just need to stop. I believe the attempts to convert schools to a business-style model where a CEO can hire and fire and set pay at will are woefully wrong and destructive to education. I could go on; you get the idea.
It's generally a bad idea to slam the gas pedal down and drive hell bent for angry leather into the dark. But if you are headed straight for a cliff that beetles o'er its base into the sea, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of difference if you drive more slowly.
Oddly enough, Smarick's piece dovetails nicely with Rick Hess's piece this week suggesting that real education debates are going to require much more than a circus-style desire to smack down the opponent.
Second, the measure of one's seriousness ought to be one's willingness to presume the goodwill of those who disagree, forego the insults and boilerplate, and seek principled points of agreement. This means not just citing evidence that one happens to like and dismissing studies that don't help one's cause. It means recognizing that big, complicated policy questions involve winners and losers, values, and unanticipated consequences; they are never simple questions of "what works" and are hardly ever going to be settled by a series of academic studies. It means acknowledging how incredibly complex these issues are, abandoning the search for pat answers, and recognizing that we're inevitably making fraught judgments about what policies are more likely to do more good for more children--and about which of tens of millions of youth deserve priority (and how much more of a priority they should be than their peers) when it comes to a given decision at a given point in time. If we're being the least bit honest with ourselves and each other, we're inevitably going to disagree about a lot of this. And it seems to me that we need to see that as okay--and not as prima facie evidence of someone else's broken moral compass.
As with Smarick's piece, I mostly agree-- but...
In this case, the but is that some participants in the education debates (circus division) have shown other evidence beyond their policy positions that their moral compass is, if not broke, at least tuned to something other than True North. My default position is to assume that other human beings are well-intentioned and can be taken seriously. Some folks wearing the Reformster team uniform have convinced me that they cannot and should not be taken seriously at all, like a uninspired debater who simply beats his shoe on the lectern and tells repeated and baldfaced lies.
No amount of conservative tempering is going to fix that. Nor can tempering and assumption of good will easily bridge the gaps created by completely different values. There are folks, for instance, who believe that orderly standardization of education across all fifty states is a thing that in and of itself has value and virtue. I don't agree. There are people who believe that free market competition makes everything better. I think they operate from a fundamental misunderstanding of How the World Works.
I'm not an ideologue, and if there's anything I've learned in fifty-seven years, it's that I am completely capable of being wrong. But at the same time, I know what I know, and everything I know about the field I've dedicated my professional life to tells me that the reformster agenda is fundamentally destructive to the things I value most. It is as if a physician insisted that she must inject Drano into my daughter's veins; her intentions don't matter all that much, because the Drano injection things is not happening as long as I'm capable of standing up to it, and I'm not sure what reasonable discussion will get us.
I share Hess and Smarick's sense that there is a gulf in the education debates that is keeping us from having discussions that need to be had and which have led people to say a lot of foolish things and often treat other human beings in less-than-exemplary manners. But I see a really huge gulf between the sides, and I don't see it being bridged in any substantial way.
I don't know. Maybe if the conservative brakes get thrown, we can have Hess's honest and difficult conversations. I'm not sure what that will get us.
Years ago, when I was the president of a striking union, while the strike was actually going on, I had regular breakfast meetings with the school board president (in total violation of our respective counsel's advice, so we just didn't tell them). We commiserated, including shaking our heads over the old saying that you can sometimes choose your enemies, but you don't always get to choose your friends, and God save you from some of those friends. We talked only a little about the contractual issues, and we never did a thing that really affected the ultimate shape of the contract. But I think it reminded us regularly that we were both real, live human beings, and probably led us to encourage our own allies to remember the same thing. Even if it didn't actually solve any of the real problems we were facing, it probably kept us all a little more decent and human in a difficult time. Maybe tha5t was enough.
In this installment, Smarick considers how conservatives (meaning, as he hinted in earlier installments, real conservatives) can be a benefit in revolution by serving as a set of brakes. Some conservatives in those times may seem like wet blankets, but when a fire is threatening to burn our of control, a wet blanket can be just the thing.
But when a group is of one opinion and convinced of the righteousness of its cause, virtues can distort into vices. Unified becomes monolithic; principled becomes doctrinaire; daring becomes rash; confident becomes unrepentant; progressive becomes unrestrained.
Accordingly, opponents can actually aid reformers. They can serve as a ballast helping to ground the reformer, serving as a moderating influence on his proclivity for excess. A reasonable opponent helps reveal the location of the middle and the fringe; her centripetal force pulls the reformer back from the latter.
It's an interesting extension of the idea-- opposition actually serves the cause of conservatism simply by slowing down the race to, well, anything.
Smarick spins this from the book The Founding Conservatives (which I have not read myself) that apparently argues that some of the quiet conservative figures of our own revolution were the necessary wet blankets that kept our revolution from descending into the crazy-pants bloodthirsty excess of the French revolution. He underlines the all-too-often ignored point that the Founding Fathers disagreed tremendously on a great many things. I wish more people remembered this piece of history-- anyone who talks about "what the framers intended" is historically illiterate. The only thing the framers absolutely agreed on was that certain other framers ought to smacked upside the head.
As usual in these pieces, Smarick makes sure his readers know he hasn't defected by being sure to indict the opponents of reformsterism for their own excesses. Those examples show how thinly drawn is the line he's trying to define.
For instance, he offers "You want to destroy public education" as one overstatement, and that is in my estimation just a hair over the line-- some reformsters may not want to destroy public education, or may use words like "transform" or "disrupt," but the end effect of the policies they pursue would, in fact, destroy public education. When one considers the attempt to hand the entire York, PA public school system over to a private for-profit charter operator, it's hard to see that as anything other than the destruction of a public school system.
But he moves on to mark the excesses of reformsters as well (it's probable that Condoleezza Rice is over the line when she claims that charter opponents are the true racists).
Ultimately, he argues that it's the conservatives who keep movements from spinning out of control by offering internal brakes.
Education reform is fantastic at articulating eternal principles, acting with urgency, and speaking in lofty rhetoric. But—as we consider huge federal programs, value-added algorithms, national standards and tests, and other “game changers”—it is worth considering whether we prize prudence, respect experience, or preserve time-tested institutions.
Smarick doesn't offer any names of people who exert such a conservative restraining effect upon the reformster movement. I can think of some reasons they may be hard to find on both sides.
Ben Franklin was one such example. Franklin did not become a radical overnight. He was for years a strong voice for unity with Britain and for retaining the traditional bonds that held the colonies tightly to the empire. Franklin, by many accounts, bowed under his final straw when on a diplomatic mission to Parliament, where he came to understand that there would be no compromise, no recognition of colonial rights.
Franklin could have been a voice for moderation and peace. He could have been an ally of the British. Instead, they made him into a radical enemy.
Likewise, I didn't start out as a hammerfingered blogger. Even a few years ago, I would not have envisioned myself routinely calling out the United States Secretary of Education. Now, I'm more radical than I ever was before. By some standards, I'm not particularly radical at all, and some days I'm actually pretty reasonable. But I didn't get here because of any new impulse within myself. I got here because the more I saw and read and listened to, the more I realized that there are people in this country using their power and money to remake public education, to use the force of law to require me to commit educational malpractice, to trample on the professional expertise and personal commitment of me and my fellow teachers, to put profits and power above the best interests of my students. Some are thoughtlessly destructive, some are maliciously destructive, and some sincerely believe that they are wielding a sledgehammer in a good cause. But the end result is much the same.
Franklin became radicalized because he faced men who believed their authority and power meant they did not have to bend, listen or care about what the lesser humans living in the colonies knew or felt or wanted.
There's an oft-overlooked irony at the heart of our country's revolution. The taxes that we so quickly grew to hate were not capricious or pointless-- not at first. The fighting of what we call the French and Indian War had run up a huge bill, and the British felt that since the bill had been run up protecting us, it was not unreasonable to try to collect from us some of the money that they had spent saving our colonial posteriors. You lend your brother-in-law your car for an emergency and he uses all your gas and dents your fender; it doesn't seem like such a stretch to ask him to help chip in.
But it all descended quickly into an assertion of power. The colonies would do as their betters told them to. They would behave. They would fall in line, or else Parliament would punish them harder until they finally broke and knelt before their rightful masters.
We can argue that eventually more conservative voices gathered enough power on both sides to cool things down. But that was not until after a decade in which no voices could provide enough ballast to offset the pressures that gave rise to radical moves all around.
The biggest issue that Smarick doesn't really address is that all sides in some disputes are not created equal. People on a particular side of an issue might not be evil, malicious, purposefully malignant monsters of ill intent-- but that doesn't mean they aren't wrong. The British Parliament may have had their reasons; they may not have intended to start or war or abuse their own brothers and sisters across the sea, and it may have been unfair to ascribe malicious intent to them-- but they were still wrong.
Conservative voices could have tempered their behavior, but would it really have mattered if they had been dead wrong in a more slow, well-considered, thoughtful manner?
Ultimately, I believe that many reformster programs and policies are dead wrong. I believe the current unregulated spread of money-sucking charters does not need to be modulated; it needs to be stopped cold. I believe that Common Core and the testing to which it is stapled are not policies that can be slowed down and carefully managed; they just need to stop. I believe the attempts to convert schools to a business-style model where a CEO can hire and fire and set pay at will are woefully wrong and destructive to education. I could go on; you get the idea.
It's generally a bad idea to slam the gas pedal down and drive hell bent for angry leather into the dark. But if you are headed straight for a cliff that beetles o'er its base into the sea, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of difference if you drive more slowly.
Oddly enough, Smarick's piece dovetails nicely with Rick Hess's piece this week suggesting that real education debates are going to require much more than a circus-style desire to smack down the opponent.
Second, the measure of one's seriousness ought to be one's willingness to presume the goodwill of those who disagree, forego the insults and boilerplate, and seek principled points of agreement. This means not just citing evidence that one happens to like and dismissing studies that don't help one's cause. It means recognizing that big, complicated policy questions involve winners and losers, values, and unanticipated consequences; they are never simple questions of "what works" and are hardly ever going to be settled by a series of academic studies. It means acknowledging how incredibly complex these issues are, abandoning the search for pat answers, and recognizing that we're inevitably making fraught judgments about what policies are more likely to do more good for more children--and about which of tens of millions of youth deserve priority (and how much more of a priority they should be than their peers) when it comes to a given decision at a given point in time. If we're being the least bit honest with ourselves and each other, we're inevitably going to disagree about a lot of this. And it seems to me that we need to see that as okay--and not as prima facie evidence of someone else's broken moral compass.
As with Smarick's piece, I mostly agree-- but...
In this case, the but is that some participants in the education debates (circus division) have shown other evidence beyond their policy positions that their moral compass is, if not broke, at least tuned to something other than True North. My default position is to assume that other human beings are well-intentioned and can be taken seriously. Some folks wearing the Reformster team uniform have convinced me that they cannot and should not be taken seriously at all, like a uninspired debater who simply beats his shoe on the lectern and tells repeated and baldfaced lies.
No amount of conservative tempering is going to fix that. Nor can tempering and assumption of good will easily bridge the gaps created by completely different values. There are folks, for instance, who believe that orderly standardization of education across all fifty states is a thing that in and of itself has value and virtue. I don't agree. There are people who believe that free market competition makes everything better. I think they operate from a fundamental misunderstanding of How the World Works.
I'm not an ideologue, and if there's anything I've learned in fifty-seven years, it's that I am completely capable of being wrong. But at the same time, I know what I know, and everything I know about the field I've dedicated my professional life to tells me that the reformster agenda is fundamentally destructive to the things I value most. It is as if a physician insisted that she must inject Drano into my daughter's veins; her intentions don't matter all that much, because the Drano injection things is not happening as long as I'm capable of standing up to it, and I'm not sure what reasonable discussion will get us.
I share Hess and Smarick's sense that there is a gulf in the education debates that is keeping us from having discussions that need to be had and which have led people to say a lot of foolish things and often treat other human beings in less-than-exemplary manners. But I see a really huge gulf between the sides, and I don't see it being bridged in any substantial way.
I don't know. Maybe if the conservative brakes get thrown, we can have Hess's honest and difficult conversations. I'm not sure what that will get us.
Years ago, when I was the president of a striking union, while the strike was actually going on, I had regular breakfast meetings with the school board president (in total violation of our respective counsel's advice, so we just didn't tell them). We commiserated, including shaking our heads over the old saying that you can sometimes choose your enemies, but you don't always get to choose your friends, and God save you from some of those friends. We talked only a little about the contractual issues, and we never did a thing that really affected the ultimate shape of the contract. But I think it reminded us regularly that we were both real, live human beings, and probably led us to encourage our own allies to remember the same thing. Even if it didn't actually solve any of the real problems we were facing, it probably kept us all a little more decent and human in a difficult time. Maybe tha5t was enough.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Will 2015 Be Another Rough Year For the Core?
We've had ample time to collect the education predictions for the coming year, and it's an interesting batch. Most of them follow a fairly simple format:
"I love hammers. I predict that in 2015, everything will be a nail!"
Arne Duncan's list is modest-- more kids in pre-school, more graduates from high school, more students with internet access, more students getting pulled into college. It all boils down to, "I predict that our more modest policy initiatives will actually work."
NPR ran an entire list of people predicting that in 2015, those people would turn out to be right. People who like data think there will be data in abundance. People who like school choice think there will be school choice. People who run corporations devoted to certain initiatives such as game-based learning or "snackable" learning predict those things will be doing great.
Of course, with ESEA renewal on the line, people are lining up to make predictions about Common Core. Foes of CCSS are belatedly coming to grips with ESEA's roles in standards adoption. No Child Left Behind (the current version of ESEA) is still the law of the land, and it's a law that virtually every state is currently violating. Only the magic power of Duncan's Magical Waivers is keeping the hammer of NCLB from falling on 50 scofflaw states, and Common Core is one of the ingredients needed to make the magical waiver potion. Take away the hammer and you can arrange it so that nobody actually needs Common Core any more. Add this to the people who want to take a bite out of the Core on the state level, and it becomes clear that the legislation will be worked on this year. Probably.
Anthony Rebora and Ross Brenneman did their own tea leaf meta-analysis this week, and came up with what is undoubtedly the safest summation:
So, in 2015, something is definitely going to happen with the common core ... but it's hard figure out what that might be.
The fate of Common Core is becoming harder to track because the actual words "Common Core" are being abandoned by supporters. Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan have both stopped using brand name publicly, and in general "Common Core" is joining the ranks of "politically correct" as a term that is always used to smear someone else, and never claimed as a brag ("I am proud to be just as politically correct as possible," said nobody ever in the last decade).
Yet some supporters still have hope. In the NPR round-up, Carmel Martin of the Center for American Progress allows that this is the year that legislators lose their interest in CCSS and simply let it be. And while many politicians have abandoned the brand, they will still be pushing a no-name version, calling for high college-and-career-ready standards.
The Common Core battle is further confused by the fact that nobody can tell which side is which. Both political parties are fractured between Pro-Core and Anti-Core, and when you drill down it gets even more confusing (some people hate the Core because they love public education and some people hate the Core because they hate "government schools").
I agree with Andy Smarick's prediction of rough waters ahead, though I think he misses some of the opposition. He points out that many schools of conservatives still feel little love for the standards. Some resent distant technocrats who have pushed aside time-tested standards and approaches on a local scale. Free-market conservatives dislike a one-size-fits-all imposed single system. And small government conservatives are Very Unhappy about the federal overreach involved in CCSS.
And Smarick doesn't even get to the people on the Left who, well, hate many of the same things, including the substitution of government control for democracy while imposing unproven standards. Go figure.
And this is all just the frontal assault on Common Core. There is a huge storm a-brewin' for High Stakes Testing, despite the attempt to mollify critics. From the mockery of Rick Hess's own predictions list ("In a stunning development, the researchers will discover that much school time is not devoted to reading or math--and that many parents aren't even all that focused on reading and math scores") to scathing testimony by local parents like Sarah Blaine, the full court press is on for testing. While folks may like to pretend that tests like the PARCC and SBA are separate issues from the core, these test are the Core's teeth, spine and testicles. Without the tests, the Core standards are suggestions that have to win compliance based on their actual educational merit, and few people are ready to take that bet. Without The Big Test, CCSS is a paper tiger, and not even a good heavy glossy bond, but more like a thin recycled tissue paper.
The Core still has rich and powerful supporters. It also has attackers who undermine the opposition to the Core with crazy-pants "this incomprehensible common core math is trying to turn my son into a communist dupe" arguments. And the "let's just re-name the damn thing" approach has been, so far, pretty successful.
So I'm not going to predict 2015 as the Year That Common Core Goes To That Great Filing Cabinet In The Sky. But I do believe that those supporters who imagine the bumpiest waters are behind are kidding themselves, and should probably grab an oar, because win or lose, they are about to have a very bumpy ride.
"I love hammers. I predict that in 2015, everything will be a nail!"
Arne Duncan's list is modest-- more kids in pre-school, more graduates from high school, more students with internet access, more students getting pulled into college. It all boils down to, "I predict that our more modest policy initiatives will actually work."
NPR ran an entire list of people predicting that in 2015, those people would turn out to be right. People who like data think there will be data in abundance. People who like school choice think there will be school choice. People who run corporations devoted to certain initiatives such as game-based learning or "snackable" learning predict those things will be doing great.
Of course, with ESEA renewal on the line, people are lining up to make predictions about Common Core. Foes of CCSS are belatedly coming to grips with ESEA's roles in standards adoption. No Child Left Behind (the current version of ESEA) is still the law of the land, and it's a law that virtually every state is currently violating. Only the magic power of Duncan's Magical Waivers is keeping the hammer of NCLB from falling on 50 scofflaw states, and Common Core is one of the ingredients needed to make the magical waiver potion. Take away the hammer and you can arrange it so that nobody actually needs Common Core any more. Add this to the people who want to take a bite out of the Core on the state level, and it becomes clear that the legislation will be worked on this year. Probably.
Anthony Rebora and Ross Brenneman did their own tea leaf meta-analysis this week, and came up with what is undoubtedly the safest summation:
So, in 2015, something is definitely going to happen with the common core ... but it's hard figure out what that might be.
The fate of Common Core is becoming harder to track because the actual words "Common Core" are being abandoned by supporters. Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan have both stopped using brand name publicly, and in general "Common Core" is joining the ranks of "politically correct" as a term that is always used to smear someone else, and never claimed as a brag ("I am proud to be just as politically correct as possible," said nobody ever in the last decade).
Yet some supporters still have hope. In the NPR round-up, Carmel Martin of the Center for American Progress allows that this is the year that legislators lose their interest in CCSS and simply let it be. And while many politicians have abandoned the brand, they will still be pushing a no-name version, calling for high college-and-career-ready standards.
The Common Core battle is further confused by the fact that nobody can tell which side is which. Both political parties are fractured between Pro-Core and Anti-Core, and when you drill down it gets even more confusing (some people hate the Core because they love public education and some people hate the Core because they hate "government schools").
I agree with Andy Smarick's prediction of rough waters ahead, though I think he misses some of the opposition. He points out that many schools of conservatives still feel little love for the standards. Some resent distant technocrats who have pushed aside time-tested standards and approaches on a local scale. Free-market conservatives dislike a one-size-fits-all imposed single system. And small government conservatives are Very Unhappy about the federal overreach involved in CCSS.
And Smarick doesn't even get to the people on the Left who, well, hate many of the same things, including the substitution of government control for democracy while imposing unproven standards. Go figure.
And this is all just the frontal assault on Common Core. There is a huge storm a-brewin' for High Stakes Testing, despite the attempt to mollify critics. From the mockery of Rick Hess's own predictions list ("In a stunning development, the researchers will discover that much school time is not devoted to reading or math--and that many parents aren't even all that focused on reading and math scores") to scathing testimony by local parents like Sarah Blaine, the full court press is on for testing. While folks may like to pretend that tests like the PARCC and SBA are separate issues from the core, these test are the Core's teeth, spine and testicles. Without the tests, the Core standards are suggestions that have to win compliance based on their actual educational merit, and few people are ready to take that bet. Without The Big Test, CCSS is a paper tiger, and not even a good heavy glossy bond, but more like a thin recycled tissue paper.
The Core still has rich and powerful supporters. It also has attackers who undermine the opposition to the Core with crazy-pants "this incomprehensible common core math is trying to turn my son into a communist dupe" arguments. And the "let's just re-name the damn thing" approach has been, so far, pretty successful.
So I'm not going to predict 2015 as the Year That Common Core Goes To That Great Filing Cabinet In The Sky. But I do believe that those supporters who imagine the bumpiest waters are behind are kidding themselves, and should probably grab an oar, because win or lose, they are about to have a very bumpy ride.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
What Do We Do About NCLB
The return of a GOP majority to DC has renewed talk of the Great White Whale of education reform-- completing the long-overdue rewrite of ESEA, currently commonly known as No Child Left Behind.
Lest we forget, NCLB is an actual law, and every state in the union is in violation. At this point the early predictions about the law are true-- every school is either failing or cheating. It's that universal violation that makes the extra-legal legerdemain of Race to the Top/waivers possible. Change the law so that it no longer requires 100% of US students to be above average, and the waivers become unnecessary, and the current administration's legisltion-free rewrite of US education collapses. If I were cynical, I might conclude that it's that chance to hand the President a policy defeat, and not a desire to restore the promise of public education, that motivates some GOPpers on this issue.
But an ESEA rewrite brings us up against the same obstacle that has been clogging the pipes since 2007-- what to put in its place? Nobody has yet found the proper education enema to get things moving.
Recently Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider took on the question, and while they are both bright and learned men, I find that I disagree with both of them in some substantial ways.
Smarick, both in the EdWeek piece and in his writing elsewhere, has recognized that education now falls into a classic conservative conundrum-- on the one hand, conservatives want government to leave people alone and stop telling them what to do, but on the other hand, when government leaves people alone, they often run out and start doing things conservatives think they ought not to.
Smarick writes that "when states made virtually all K-12 decisions absent federal accountability rules--call this the "pre-NCLB" era--our nation didn't get the results we wanted." Schneider questions whether that's actually true. I'd like to ask who "we" are.
Smarick is concerned that "too many disadvantaged kids were not well-served" in pre-NCLB America. That's a legitimate concern, but at this stage of the game, there's no sign that NCLB/RttT made anything better.
And while I get his concern that a government that hands over giant honking bales of cash can reasonably expected to hear the banging of its bucks, all that gets us is an influx of companies that are good at filling out accountability paperwork.
This is part of what Schneider likes about NCLB-- transparent school accountability, and disaggregation of data. I'm not convinced, because the "data" we're talking about are inevitably test scores. The breaking out of sub-groups has had some deeply unpleasant side effects. For instance, the common practice of pre-testing students and targetting the failures. This gives us a two-tier system; pre-test winners get a full, rich day of varied class offerings, while pre-test losers (or last year's test losers) get a day filled with math and English and math and English and test prep and more test prep.
In my area, where our most common sub-groups are low-income students, we would be further ahead to hire enough of those parents at well-paying jobs doing anything at all, so that their children were no longer part of the subgroup and we could make the sub-group small enough not to destroy our numbers.
So here's my rewrite of NCLB:
The federal government will distribute its giant mountain of imaginary education-cash in a manner designed to offset the varied levels of poverty across the US.
Somebody can punch up the language. But that's it. In all other respects, the federal government will butt out of the education biz.
Oh, I know I'm fantasizing. If they rewrite it, it will be yet again a labyrinthian mess of federal overrreach and mandated malpractice. Here's why--
Any federal law about education will be written not by people who are good at education, but by people who are good at the business of politics and regulation. Accountability will continue to be based on a politically-favored business model, which will reward people who are good at business and government accountability paperwork. At no point will the rewrite be under the control or direction of people who will be primarily concerned with the educational aspects of the bill.
Look at NCLB. The insane Lake Woebegone clause (that all students will be made above average) was all about politics, and even today, Smarick was trotting out the old "If you don't want it to be 100%, then you go ahead and pick out which students will be left behind" which is all about political leverage and not one iota about education. The politicians who put it there created a time bomb that they never expected to go off. The steep climb of the AYP wasn't scheduled to start until 2008, after Pres. Bush was done and after Congress was supposed to rewrite the bill. But 2007 came and they couldn't get the job done.
When Congress set that reality-impaired goal, they weren't over-estimating teachers. They were over-estimating themselves. Politics stuck us with an idea that was political gold, but educationally impossible (and the only support ever offered is essentially a political dare-- "go ahead and say something that can be used against you.")
Revise ESEA? The feds can't do this job right (and maybe not even at all). The best solution, the solution that would actually take US education forward, is for the feds to back up and get out of the business of doing anything except trying to level the financial playing field.
Federal involvement in education has not solved a single problem, or fixed a single broken thing. If you think the states do a lousy job of handling education, please note that federal involvement has only made things worse. The problems of big city schools are problems of politics and money; NCLB and RttT have simply injected more money-fueled politics into state-level education, and it has gotten us nothing good. Nothing. Urban schools are a problem in search of a solution, but the solution does not lie in ESEA. Nor has the unending, ever-growing mountain of reporting to the federal government helped anybody fix anything, with the possible exception of increased employment for administrators and administrative assistants hired by school districts to cope with government reporting requirements.
My solution is both radical and reactionary. The cry of fans of federalism is, "Without accountability and reporting to the federal government, how will we know that schools are doing well." My response is-- who needs to know? Who, beyond the teachers and administrators and local taxpayers and parents, needs to know how a particular school is doing, and what could the federal government do to inform them? My answers-- nobody, and nothing. It is, in fact, the system that allowed us the robust freedom and flexibility that coincided with the 20th century rise of the US as a world power.
All I want to do with NCLB is blow it up. I realize I'm dreaming, but so is anyone who thinks we can have 100% above average students or who thinks that free market forces could possibly help education. I like my dream better.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Lest we forget, NCLB is an actual law, and every state in the union is in violation. At this point the early predictions about the law are true-- every school is either failing or cheating. It's that universal violation that makes the extra-legal legerdemain of Race to the Top/waivers possible. Change the law so that it no longer requires 100% of US students to be above average, and the waivers become unnecessary, and the current administration's legisltion-free rewrite of US education collapses. If I were cynical, I might conclude that it's that chance to hand the President a policy defeat, and not a desire to restore the promise of public education, that motivates some GOPpers on this issue.
But an ESEA rewrite brings us up against the same obstacle that has been clogging the pipes since 2007-- what to put in its place? Nobody has yet found the proper education enema to get things moving.
Recently Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider took on the question, and while they are both bright and learned men, I find that I disagree with both of them in some substantial ways.
Smarick, both in the EdWeek piece and in his writing elsewhere, has recognized that education now falls into a classic conservative conundrum-- on the one hand, conservatives want government to leave people alone and stop telling them what to do, but on the other hand, when government leaves people alone, they often run out and start doing things conservatives think they ought not to.
Smarick writes that "when states made virtually all K-12 decisions absent federal accountability rules--call this the "pre-NCLB" era--our nation didn't get the results we wanted." Schneider questions whether that's actually true. I'd like to ask who "we" are.
Smarick is concerned that "too many disadvantaged kids were not well-served" in pre-NCLB America. That's a legitimate concern, but at this stage of the game, there's no sign that NCLB/RttT made anything better.
And while I get his concern that a government that hands over giant honking bales of cash can reasonably expected to hear the banging of its bucks, all that gets us is an influx of companies that are good at filling out accountability paperwork.
This is part of what Schneider likes about NCLB-- transparent school accountability, and disaggregation of data. I'm not convinced, because the "data" we're talking about are inevitably test scores. The breaking out of sub-groups has had some deeply unpleasant side effects. For instance, the common practice of pre-testing students and targetting the failures. This gives us a two-tier system; pre-test winners get a full, rich day of varied class offerings, while pre-test losers (or last year's test losers) get a day filled with math and English and math and English and test prep and more test prep.
In my area, where our most common sub-groups are low-income students, we would be further ahead to hire enough of those parents at well-paying jobs doing anything at all, so that their children were no longer part of the subgroup and we could make the sub-group small enough not to destroy our numbers.
So here's my rewrite of NCLB:
The federal government will distribute its giant mountain of imaginary education-cash in a manner designed to offset the varied levels of poverty across the US.
Somebody can punch up the language. But that's it. In all other respects, the federal government will butt out of the education biz.
Oh, I know I'm fantasizing. If they rewrite it, it will be yet again a labyrinthian mess of federal overrreach and mandated malpractice. Here's why--
Any federal law about education will be written not by people who are good at education, but by people who are good at the business of politics and regulation. Accountability will continue to be based on a politically-favored business model, which will reward people who are good at business and government accountability paperwork. At no point will the rewrite be under the control or direction of people who will be primarily concerned with the educational aspects of the bill.
Look at NCLB. The insane Lake Woebegone clause (that all students will be made above average) was all about politics, and even today, Smarick was trotting out the old "If you don't want it to be 100%, then you go ahead and pick out which students will be left behind" which is all about political leverage and not one iota about education. The politicians who put it there created a time bomb that they never expected to go off. The steep climb of the AYP wasn't scheduled to start until 2008, after Pres. Bush was done and after Congress was supposed to rewrite the bill. But 2007 came and they couldn't get the job done.
When Congress set that reality-impaired goal, they weren't over-estimating teachers. They were over-estimating themselves. Politics stuck us with an idea that was political gold, but educationally impossible (and the only support ever offered is essentially a political dare-- "go ahead and say something that can be used against you.")
Revise ESEA? The feds can't do this job right (and maybe not even at all). The best solution, the solution that would actually take US education forward, is for the feds to back up and get out of the business of doing anything except trying to level the financial playing field.
Federal involvement in education has not solved a single problem, or fixed a single broken thing. If you think the states do a lousy job of handling education, please note that federal involvement has only made things worse. The problems of big city schools are problems of politics and money; NCLB and RttT have simply injected more money-fueled politics into state-level education, and it has gotten us nothing good. Nothing. Urban schools are a problem in search of a solution, but the solution does not lie in ESEA. Nor has the unending, ever-growing mountain of reporting to the federal government helped anybody fix anything, with the possible exception of increased employment for administrators and administrative assistants hired by school districts to cope with government reporting requirements.
My solution is both radical and reactionary. The cry of fans of federalism is, "Without accountability and reporting to the federal government, how will we know that schools are doing well." My response is-- who needs to know? Who, beyond the teachers and administrators and local taxpayers and parents, needs to know how a particular school is doing, and what could the federal government do to inform them? My answers-- nobody, and nothing. It is, in fact, the system that allowed us the robust freedom and flexibility that coincided with the 20th century rise of the US as a world power.
All I want to do with NCLB is blow it up. I realize I'm dreaming, but so is anyone who thinks we can have 100% above average students or who thinks that free market forces could possibly help education. I like my dream better.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Defending The Test
Feeling feisty after a successful election run, Republicans are reportedly gunning for various limbs of the reformster octopus, and reformsters are circling the wagons for strategic defense of those sucker-covered limbs.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
People are finally remembering that it's the ESEA, due to be transformed from No Child Left Behind into something new since 2007, which gives current reformster wave of waivers its power. Fix the ESEA properly and you cut the legs out from under the current non-laws governing K-12 education in this country. At Ed Week, Klein and Camera report that some GOP aides are already drafting a version of an ESEA rewrite that removes the federal testing mandate. I'm a fan of the idea; months ago, I picked high stakes testing as the reformy thing I'd most like to see die.
Massive high stakes testing is at the center of the reformster program, but it's also one of the most visible and widely hated features of reformsterism. Duncan and other bureaucrats have been issuing word salads aimed at changing the optics since last summer, but nothing of substance has been done to lessen the impact of high stakes testing. Duncan saying, "Schools shouldn't focus on testing so much" without changing any of the policies related to testing is like a mugger saying, "Don't be so pre-occupied with my gun" while he continues to take your wallet.
Our current system is positively Kafkaesque, or possibly Dilbertesque. Schools have literally stopped doing our jobs full time so that we can devote more time to generating reports on how well we're doing our job. Even if the Big Test were an accurate measure of how well we're doing our job (which they are most certainly not), the current set-up is unequivocally absolutely stupid. It is like having welders spend half as many hours welding so that they can write up reports on output of the welding unit in the factory. It's like having your boyfriend go on half as many dates so that he can stay home and write notes about how much he misses you. It's like feeding your baby half as many meals because you need to keep him on the scale to check if he's gaining enough weight.
Actually-- it's worse than all of those. It is supervisory bureaucrats believing that their part of the process-- checking on how the work is going-- is more important than actually doing the work.
Objections to cutting testing all fall into that category. They are all variations on, "But if testing is cut, how will my office know what is going on in classrooms." Well, dipstick, we are trying to tell you what is going on in classrooms-- teachers regularly stop doing actual teaching so that they can prepare for and take your damn tests.
People propose local tests. Reformsters complain that local people just don't know how to make sexy, rigorous tests as well as corporate sponsors like Pearson. People propose staggering the tests, taking only one a year, or one every couple of years. Reformsters claim that this would make it easier to game the system, as if the testing system is not one giant game right now.
In his defense of testing, Andy Smarick offers this list of benefits of annual testing:
- It makes clear that every student matters.
- It makes clear that the standards associated with every tested grade and subject matter.
- It forces us to continuously track all students, preventing our claiming surprise when scores are below expectations.
- It gives us the information needed to tailor interventions to the grades, subjects, and students in need.
- It gives families the information needed to make the case for necessary changes.
- It enables us to calculate student achievement growth, so schools and educators get credit for progress.
- It forces us to acknowledge that achievement gaps exist, persist, and grow over time.
- It prevents schools and districts from “hiding” less effective educators and programs in untested grades.
Smarick shares with Andrew Saultz and others the belief that testing is also necessary in order to target failing schools. I call baloney on this. Smarick has been a critic of lousy urban schooling for a while; I don't believe for a second that he needed standardized test scores to conclude that some poor urban schools were doing a lousy job. If my hand is resting on a red-hot electric range, and the flesh is sizzling and smoke is curling up from my hand, I'm not standing there saying, "Hey, could someone bring me a thermometer so I could check this temp? I might have a problem here."
The one argument I can concede is that terrible test scores might allow activists to light a fire under the butts of non-responsive politicians (who would not notice a burning hand unless it was holding a thick stack of $100 bills). But we've had time for that to work, and it isn't happening. Lousy scores in poor urban schools are not being used to funnel resources, make infrastructure improvements or otherwise improve poor urban schools-- results are just being used to turn poor urban schools into investment and money-making opportunities for charter operators and investors, and after a few years those outfits have no successes to point to that aren't the result of creaming or creative number-crunching. So this pro-test argument is also invalid.
Mike Petrilli has also stepped up to defend testing. Responding to the reported rewrite initiatives he asks,
Do Republicans really want to scrap the transparency that comes from measuring student (and school and district) progress from year to year and go back to the Stone Age of judging schools based on a snapshot in time? Or worse, based on inputs, promises, and claims? Are they seriously proposing to eliminate the data that are powering great studies and new findings every day on topics from vouchers to charters to teacher effectiveness and more?
The biggest problem with Petrilli's defense is that the current battery of bad standardized tests are not accomplishing any of those things. They are not providing transparency; they are just providing more frequent bad data than the "stone age" technique. The current Big Tests get their own authority and power from nothing more than "inputs, promises and claims." For-profit corporations are really good at creating that kind of marketing copy, but that doesn't make it so. And if data from the Big Tests are powering great studies and new findings, I'd like to see just one of them, because I read up pretty extensively, and I haven't seen a thing that would match that description.
Petrilli does, however, have one interesting idea-- "kill the federal mandate around teacher evaluation and much of the over-testing will go away."
I've always said that Petrilli is no dummy (I"m sure he feels better knowing I've said it). Tying teacher (and therefore school, and, soon, the college from which the teachers graduated) evaluation to both The Test and to the teachers' career prospects guarantees that schools will be highly motivated to center much of everything around that test. This is an aspect of the testing biz that Arne either doesn't understand or is purposefully ignoring. I tend toward the latter; if we go back to the Race to the Top program, we see that teacher evaluation linked to test results is the top policy goal.
If the test result mandate didn't come from the feds, each state would come up with its own version. It might not be any better than the current situation, but we'd have fifty interesting fights instead of one big smothering federal blanket. And each state would still have to come up with some sort of answer to the question of how to evaluate a fifth grade art teacher with third grade math test results.
Of course, there's a trade-off with reducing pressure to do all testing, all the time. The less pressure associated with The Big Test, the more students will not even pretend to take the tests a little bit seriously, and the less valid the results will be (and as invalid as the results are now, there's plenty of room left for that to go further south).
Tests are going stay under the gun because they are at once both the most visible and most senseless part of reformsterism. They are an even easier target for Republicans that the Common Core itself because unlike CCSS, everybody knows exactly what they are and whether or not they've been rolled back, and their supporters can't point at a single concrete benefit to offset the anxiety, counter-intuitive results, and massive waste of school time. And tests have reached into millions of American homes to personally insult families ("You may think your child is bright and worthy, but I'm an official gummint test here to tell you that your kid is a big loser").
But tests will be vigorously defended because-- Good God!! Look at that mountain of money!! The business plan of Pearson et al is about way more testing, not less. Test data is important to create charter marketing and support voucher programs. And because technocrats need data to drive their vision of reform, so they can never admit that the emperor not only has no clothes, but also is not actually an emperor but rather a large hairless rat that has learned to walk on its hind legs.
In short, The Big Test may turn out to be the front line, the divider between people who are worried about actual live human children and people who are worried about programs and policies and -- Good God!! That mountain of money is sooooo huge!!! You can bet that as we speak, lobbyists and their ilk are being dispatched toot suite to do some 'splaining to those GOP politicians who are after the bread and butter. Keep your eyes peeled as we enter the new year to see how this plays out.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Homeostasis, Tourists, Stability and the Feds
Over at the Fordham, Andy Smarick is expressing concern over three converging threads that signal to him an impending triumph of homeostasis, nature's tendency to snap back to its original position. Or, more specifically, the tendency of large institutions to shake off disruptive influences and return to their original state.
The three trends that concern Smarick are
1) The exodus of many reformster chiefs.
2) The replacing of those chiefs with less-reformy-minded individuals
3) Reform backlash leading to an ESEA rewrite that fails to hold the reformy line
Put them all together, and Smarick fears a return to the bad old pre-NCLB days:
Prior to this period of reform, the K–12 equilibrium was marked by establishment-oriented chiefs, an insufficient focus on student outcomes, state-level insularity, and no federal accountability. Homeostasis may be bringing this heady era of reform disequilibrium to an end.
I'm going to set aside the question of how bad the bad old days actually were. I'm pretty sure I don't believe they were at all the vast disaster that reformsters claim they were, but I am not going to argue it was a land of milk and honey where unicorns danced and played, either. The question of history is a whole other conversation, and an only marginally useful one at that.
Instead, I'm going to argue that what Smarick is noticing is not so much homeostasis as tourism.
The reformsters, from state chiefs and federal bureaucrats all the way down through TFA temp staff, have always been tourists. They've be praised as investors and criticized as colonialists, but they were never really either. With few exceptions, they were just passing through, grabbing and going.
You can see it even in their signature product-- the Common Core. The creators of the Core did not invest time and effort in launching it, nor did they stick around to nurture it, oversee it, and guide it through the early stages of adoption. Before the ink had even dried, they were in the limo being whisked off to their next job opportunity.
The architects of the Common Core simply did not behave like people whose hopes and dreams were that the Core would survive to change the face of education.
Charter operators? More of the same. Charter groups have not committed to bring quality education to communities for the long haul, and in just a couple of years, charters have been evaporating like gasoline. Government bureaucrats like the chiefs? Many of them got their start with TFA, and they have continued to follow that model-- come in, make a mark, rewrite your resume, move on to the next job prospect. We can see their future in the food industries and the military-industrial complex, where folks make a bundle moving back and forth between government offices and corporate boardrooms, back and forth, collecting another pile of money with each spin of the revolving door.
The reformsters did not do the heavy lifting of building careful stable sustainable structures built to last. "I pledge to you-- we are going to create a system that will stand the test of time, I will be right here side by side with you to see it through over the decades ahead," said no reformster ever. This is one of the great frustrations of teachers in this reformy climate-- these guys swoop in, declaim about being agents of change, and make a mess, but in five years they'll be gone and we'll still be here.
If reformsters want to resist homeostasis, the solution is simple. Stay. Create new structures that are built around stability, sustainability, sense, instead of reforms built on flash, impact, and speedy ROI. Build structures that are built to last. Commit to staying and seeing the building all the way through. It's as simple as that.
I asked Smarick on twitter what benefit there could be in federal oversight, and he replied "Accountability for federal funds and focus on the most disadvantaged kids." Those are tricky goals-- "accountability" isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean everything from "make sure states don't spend ed money on beer and pretzels" to "make sure that states spend no more than $1.95 per child per correct answer bubbled in on standardized test of federal choosing."
But what federal and state education leaders can provide, whether infected with reformsterism, or not, is stability. But that quality has been completely lacking from reformsters every step of the way. They did not come to stay, or make a difference, or build a new system that would stand the test of time, or commit to staying in place to really see things through. They just pitched a quick tent and barely pegged it down because they knew they weren't going to be living in it; they cannot be surprised that those of us who do choose to live in it decide to take it back down as soon as they leave.
This has always been the story of education reform. Teachers are out plowing the fields, and some Bright Person will show up and start ordering everyone around and explaining how the fields can best be plowed. They don't ask the people who have been plowing for years, and their "help" takes the form of everything from suggestions to order at gun point. Do they tell teachers, "I am going to put my shoulder to the plow with you, and work beside you until together, we have brought this field to years and years of bounty'? Almost never. Instead, we teachers just bite our lips and keep plowing, knowing that as sure as the sun rises, the Bright Person will soon move on to some other field, and we'll still be here, shoulders still to the plow.
Homeostasis can be viewed as resistance to change, I suppose, but I think of it as simply a clear, natural sign of how much effort it takes to really make a change. Think of it as a free market mechanism. Offering you a penny is not enough to change to homeostatic state of you owning your hat. Nature and the free market demand that I offer enough investment to disturb your hat's homeostatic state. Complaining that your are just too resistant to change because you won't sell me your hat for a penny is dopey.
Reformsters want to change education, but they only want to invest a penny's worth of their lives in doing it. Do not be surprised that those of us who are all in remain unimpressed. And don't try to fix it by using the government to tilt the market in favor of your one-penny buy offer.
The three trends that concern Smarick are
1) The exodus of many reformster chiefs.
2) The replacing of those chiefs with less-reformy-minded individuals
3) Reform backlash leading to an ESEA rewrite that fails to hold the reformy line
Put them all together, and Smarick fears a return to the bad old pre-NCLB days:
Prior to this period of reform, the K–12 equilibrium was marked by establishment-oriented chiefs, an insufficient focus on student outcomes, state-level insularity, and no federal accountability. Homeostasis may be bringing this heady era of reform disequilibrium to an end.
I'm going to set aside the question of how bad the bad old days actually were. I'm pretty sure I don't believe they were at all the vast disaster that reformsters claim they were, but I am not going to argue it was a land of milk and honey where unicorns danced and played, either. The question of history is a whole other conversation, and an only marginally useful one at that.
Instead, I'm going to argue that what Smarick is noticing is not so much homeostasis as tourism.
The reformsters, from state chiefs and federal bureaucrats all the way down through TFA temp staff, have always been tourists. They've be praised as investors and criticized as colonialists, but they were never really either. With few exceptions, they were just passing through, grabbing and going.
You can see it even in their signature product-- the Common Core. The creators of the Core did not invest time and effort in launching it, nor did they stick around to nurture it, oversee it, and guide it through the early stages of adoption. Before the ink had even dried, they were in the limo being whisked off to their next job opportunity.
The architects of the Common Core simply did not behave like people whose hopes and dreams were that the Core would survive to change the face of education.
Charter operators? More of the same. Charter groups have not committed to bring quality education to communities for the long haul, and in just a couple of years, charters have been evaporating like gasoline. Government bureaucrats like the chiefs? Many of them got their start with TFA, and they have continued to follow that model-- come in, make a mark, rewrite your resume, move on to the next job prospect. We can see their future in the food industries and the military-industrial complex, where folks make a bundle moving back and forth between government offices and corporate boardrooms, back and forth, collecting another pile of money with each spin of the revolving door.
The reformsters did not do the heavy lifting of building careful stable sustainable structures built to last. "I pledge to you-- we are going to create a system that will stand the test of time, I will be right here side by side with you to see it through over the decades ahead," said no reformster ever. This is one of the great frustrations of teachers in this reformy climate-- these guys swoop in, declaim about being agents of change, and make a mess, but in five years they'll be gone and we'll still be here.
If reformsters want to resist homeostasis, the solution is simple. Stay. Create new structures that are built around stability, sustainability, sense, instead of reforms built on flash, impact, and speedy ROI. Build structures that are built to last. Commit to staying and seeing the building all the way through. It's as simple as that.
I asked Smarick on twitter what benefit there could be in federal oversight, and he replied "Accountability for federal funds and focus on the most disadvantaged kids." Those are tricky goals-- "accountability" isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean everything from "make sure states don't spend ed money on beer and pretzels" to "make sure that states spend no more than $1.95 per child per correct answer bubbled in on standardized test of federal choosing."
But what federal and state education leaders can provide, whether infected with reformsterism, or not, is stability. But that quality has been completely lacking from reformsters every step of the way. They did not come to stay, or make a difference, or build a new system that would stand the test of time, or commit to staying in place to really see things through. They just pitched a quick tent and barely pegged it down because they knew they weren't going to be living in it; they cannot be surprised that those of us who do choose to live in it decide to take it back down as soon as they leave.
This has always been the story of education reform. Teachers are out plowing the fields, and some Bright Person will show up and start ordering everyone around and explaining how the fields can best be plowed. They don't ask the people who have been plowing for years, and their "help" takes the form of everything from suggestions to order at gun point. Do they tell teachers, "I am going to put my shoulder to the plow with you, and work beside you until together, we have brought this field to years and years of bounty'? Almost never. Instead, we teachers just bite our lips and keep plowing, knowing that as sure as the sun rises, the Bright Person will soon move on to some other field, and we'll still be here, shoulders still to the plow.
Homeostasis can be viewed as resistance to change, I suppose, but I think of it as simply a clear, natural sign of how much effort it takes to really make a change. Think of it as a free market mechanism. Offering you a penny is not enough to change to homeostatic state of you owning your hat. Nature and the free market demand that I offer enough investment to disturb your hat's homeostatic state. Complaining that your are just too resistant to change because you won't sell me your hat for a penny is dopey.
Reformsters want to change education, but they only want to invest a penny's worth of their lives in doing it. Do not be surprised that those of us who are all in remain unimpressed. And don't try to fix it by using the government to tilt the market in favor of your one-penny buy offer.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Schools and Social Capital
Andy Smarick has continued his series of meditations on how modern education reform and classic conservatism have fallen out of alignment. It's a thoughtful series and worth exploring, but I found his latest particularly striking.
In "Ed reform's blind spot: Catholic schools and social capital" Smarick considers once more the question of what conservatives should want to preserve, and he focuses particularly on social capital.
Social capital describes the “benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.” When people are connected, they (and even those outside the network) gain, thanks to sharing, interdependence, joint learning, collective action, solidarity, and more.
In case you're not a link-follower, I'll note that the first link leads to Bowling Alone, one of the more indispensable examinations of social connections in our world. Kudos for that reference.
Smarick uses the concept of social capital mostly to talk about Catholic schools, and how they exert a positive influence on neighborhoods stricken by poverty. That reminds me of John Hopkins' longitudinal study in Baltimore; the headline on that study was that family and money are destiny, but it also suggests that neighborhood (not entirely disconnected form the other two) is destiny as well.
But it also resonates for me in the context of my own corner of the world. In fact, I think that in small town and rural areas like mine, the social capital aspect of the schools may be the aspect that folks value most.
I live in an area where High School of Origin is still considered important information about grown adults. It's an area where school sports are a Big Deal, a source of identity and community pride. I live in a county where four separate school districts serve a shrinking student population. My own district and the closest neighbor system now serve fewer students together than my own district held by itself just twenty years ago. We now share sports teams, marching bands, and school play programs. But nobody thinks a merger is going to happen any time soon, and I could explain that by saying that the residents, particularly in the smaller district, do not want to sacrifice the generations of social capital they have invested in their schools.
Districts also find, over and over, that a simple appeal to economic reality, however harsh, rarely moves residents and taxpayers to shut down a school. My district, like many others, has had to essentially confront the question: "How much is this social capital worth to you in cold, hard tax dollars?" The answer repeatedly turns out to be, "A great deal."
Smarick is correct to note that many reformsters have completely disregarded social capital invested in local schools, as well as the real world benefits that come from it. Reformsters and privatizers might do well to consider the issue of how little social capital (which takes considerable time to gather) is invested in shiny new charters, particularly those charters which are not tied to any particular neighborhood.
I've noted before that I find it strange for conservatives to chime in with the idea that students should not be "trapped" by their zip codes or neighborhoods. There is a strength and value and wealth of social capital that comes from having a school rooted in a particular place. It should not be lightly discarded. Heritage, history, community, connection-- these sorts of things have value. "Social capital" and the research that measures its effect just put a scientific face on a human value that many people already recognized.
Social capital doesn't just have implications for Cathoilic schools, but for public schools. It has implications for staffing as well-- longevity matters, and builds more capital.
Smarick wraps up with a striking and apt image:
Those who cleared old, messy “swamps” to make room for modern development severely damaged ecosystems. Those who cleared old, eyesore “slums” to make room for shiny, new public housing high-rises severely damaged communities.
This is education reform as nature conservation, focusing not on what they want to plow under, but on what should be preserved and saved. I think plenty of folks understand that urge to conserve instinctively, and I think social capital represents a huge investment that people have been loathe to sacrifice just for a few untested and allegedly magic beans. Reformsters often come across as the guys with the big bulldozers who want to pave the swamp, get rid of the noisy birds, kill off the annoying animals, and replace the plants with longlasting perfect plastic flowers. Reformsters seem to think of themselves as men of vision, but there is a whole world of value that they seem to be blind to.
In "Ed reform's blind spot: Catholic schools and social capital" Smarick considers once more the question of what conservatives should want to preserve, and he focuses particularly on social capital.
Social capital describes the “benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.” When people are connected, they (and even those outside the network) gain, thanks to sharing, interdependence, joint learning, collective action, solidarity, and more.
In case you're not a link-follower, I'll note that the first link leads to Bowling Alone, one of the more indispensable examinations of social connections in our world. Kudos for that reference.
Smarick uses the concept of social capital mostly to talk about Catholic schools, and how they exert a positive influence on neighborhoods stricken by poverty. That reminds me of John Hopkins' longitudinal study in Baltimore; the headline on that study was that family and money are destiny, but it also suggests that neighborhood (not entirely disconnected form the other two) is destiny as well.
But it also resonates for me in the context of my own corner of the world. In fact, I think that in small town and rural areas like mine, the social capital aspect of the schools may be the aspect that folks value most.
I live in an area where High School of Origin is still considered important information about grown adults. It's an area where school sports are a Big Deal, a source of identity and community pride. I live in a county where four separate school districts serve a shrinking student population. My own district and the closest neighbor system now serve fewer students together than my own district held by itself just twenty years ago. We now share sports teams, marching bands, and school play programs. But nobody thinks a merger is going to happen any time soon, and I could explain that by saying that the residents, particularly in the smaller district, do not want to sacrifice the generations of social capital they have invested in their schools.
Districts also find, over and over, that a simple appeal to economic reality, however harsh, rarely moves residents and taxpayers to shut down a school. My district, like many others, has had to essentially confront the question: "How much is this social capital worth to you in cold, hard tax dollars?" The answer repeatedly turns out to be, "A great deal."
Smarick is correct to note that many reformsters have completely disregarded social capital invested in local schools, as well as the real world benefits that come from it. Reformsters and privatizers might do well to consider the issue of how little social capital (which takes considerable time to gather) is invested in shiny new charters, particularly those charters which are not tied to any particular neighborhood.
I've noted before that I find it strange for conservatives to chime in with the idea that students should not be "trapped" by their zip codes or neighborhoods. There is a strength and value and wealth of social capital that comes from having a school rooted in a particular place. It should not be lightly discarded. Heritage, history, community, connection-- these sorts of things have value. "Social capital" and the research that measures its effect just put a scientific face on a human value that many people already recognized.
Social capital doesn't just have implications for Cathoilic schools, but for public schools. It has implications for staffing as well-- longevity matters, and builds more capital.
Smarick wraps up with a striking and apt image:
Those who cleared old, messy “swamps” to make room for modern development severely damaged ecosystems. Those who cleared old, eyesore “slums” to make room for shiny, new public housing high-rises severely damaged communities.
This is education reform as nature conservation, focusing not on what they want to plow under, but on what should be preserved and saved. I think plenty of folks understand that urge to conserve instinctively, and I think social capital represents a huge investment that people have been loathe to sacrifice just for a few untested and allegedly magic beans. Reformsters often come across as the guys with the big bulldozers who want to pave the swamp, get rid of the noisy birds, kill off the annoying animals, and replace the plants with longlasting perfect plastic flowers. Reformsters seem to think of themselves as men of vision, but there is a whole world of value that they seem to be blind to.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Honesty, Sass, and Public Ed
I have had this piece from Peter DeWitt open in a tab for days, trying to formulate a response. DeWitt, as he sometimes does, is pondering the problem of trying to be a calm centrist in the ongoing debate about American public education.
He believes there are people of good intent on both sides, but worries that they are being drowned out by strident, sarcastic voices that are dominating-- loudly-- the conversation. "Do we really have a problem without a solution?" he asks in the headline.
It's not the first time he's raised the issue, and it always resonates with me because I am someone who also generally likes a reasonable centrist approach to problems. I'm generally a peacemaker, not a fighter. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that I am one of the voices of sass and sarcasm in this conversation. And given my readership, I have to believe that my sass and sarcasm resonates with a fair number of people.
So how does that happen? How do a desire for solutions and taste for bridgemaking end up hand-in-hand with sass and spleenic venting?
Background Reading
Okay-- stay with me for a second. A few days back Andy Smarick wrote this piece asking, as Jennifer Berkshire put it on twitter, for people to use their inside voices when discussing charters:
I have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective.
I responded by suggesting that things looked a little more messy at the local level than up at the stratospheric philosophical level. And that charters could improve the conversation by behaving better:
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
Yesterday, Jersey Jazzman advanced the conversation a step by bringing up the item that addresses both Smarick and DeWitt's concerns.
Honesty.
A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools-- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today-- is anything but honest.
How important is honesty?
Critical conversations, in fact any kind of relationship, require one fundamental item-- both parties have to show up. Showing up requires honesty-- telling the truth as you see it. Not salesmanship, not spin, not trolling, not even "being nice" to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Anything other than honesty is corrosive to a conversation, a relationship. (And you can trust me on this-- I have the divorce papers from my first marriage to prove it.)
We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of "is" is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that's a lie. For me, that also explains what's wrong with lying-- it's an attempt to take away another person's ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It's wrong because it's about stealing another person's freedom to choose.
How do we react to being lied to?
Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:
* I don't care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you're stupid
* We both know I'm lying, but you're powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don't matter; I'm in charge here
* This is not a real conversation
Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.
But here's the most important thing I know about lying.
Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.
So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it's a way of saying, "Look. I want you to know that I don't believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else."
In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest-- they just don't know what they're talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven't had an honest word to say about education in years.
They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I'm not so sure, but she's met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I've got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck.
How DeWitt can feel better
Anyway. If I were talking to Peter DeWitt that the sarcasm and snark are actually part of trying to get to a real conversation, not an obstacle to it. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," is snarky, but it's also an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the truth.
Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There's no way to respond to something like "We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession" that doesn't sound like snark. There's no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there's no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn't leave him feeling naked.
To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can't be afraid to go there. We can't make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can't be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.
He believes there are people of good intent on both sides, but worries that they are being drowned out by strident, sarcastic voices that are dominating-- loudly-- the conversation. "Do we really have a problem without a solution?" he asks in the headline.
It's not the first time he's raised the issue, and it always resonates with me because I am someone who also generally likes a reasonable centrist approach to problems. I'm generally a peacemaker, not a fighter. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that I am one of the voices of sass and sarcasm in this conversation. And given my readership, I have to believe that my sass and sarcasm resonates with a fair number of people.
So how does that happen? How do a desire for solutions and taste for bridgemaking end up hand-in-hand with sass and spleenic venting?
Background Reading
Okay-- stay with me for a second. A few days back Andy Smarick wrote this piece asking, as Jennifer Berkshire put it on twitter, for people to use their inside voices when discussing charters:
I have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective, sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective.
I responded by suggesting that things looked a little more messy at the local level than up at the stratospheric philosophical level. And that charters could improve the conversation by behaving better:
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
Yesterday, Jersey Jazzman advanced the conversation a step by bringing up the item that addresses both Smarick and DeWitt's concerns.
Honesty.
A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools-- and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today-- is anything but honest.
How important is honesty?
Critical conversations, in fact any kind of relationship, require one fundamental item-- both parties have to show up. Showing up requires honesty-- telling the truth as you see it. Not salesmanship, not spin, not trolling, not even "being nice" to avoid hurting somebody's feelings. Anything other than honesty is corrosive to a conversation, a relationship. (And you can trust me on this-- I have the divorce papers from my first marriage to prove it.)
We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of "is" is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that's a lie. For me, that also explains what's wrong with lying-- it's an attempt to take away another person's ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It's wrong because it's about stealing another person's freedom to choose.
How do we react to being lied to?
Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:
* I don't care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you're stupid
* We both know I'm lying, but you're powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don't matter; I'm in charge here
* This is not a real conversation
Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.
But here's the most important thing I know about lying.
Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.
So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it's a way of saying, "Look. I want you to know that I don't believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else."
In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest-- they just don't know what they're talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven't had an honest word to say about education in years.
They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I'm not so sure, but she's met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I've got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck.
How DeWitt can feel better
Anyway. If I were talking to Peter DeWitt that the sarcasm and snark are actually part of trying to get to a real conversation, not an obstacle to it. "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," is snarky, but it's also an attempt to bring the conversation back around to the truth.
Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There's no way to respond to something like "We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession" that doesn't sound like snark. There's no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there's no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn't leave him feeling naked.
To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can't be afraid to go there. We can't make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can't be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.
A civil conversation requires honesty.
And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed,
about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and
vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on
the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf
A civil conversation requires honesty.
And the conversation these days about charter schools -- and, indeed,
about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and
vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on
the table today -- is anything but honest. - See more at:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+%28Jersey+Jazzman%29#sthash.JNiyFB0s.dpuf
have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is
that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective,
sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf
have two concerns with the way these things are trending. The first is
that our field needs someone who consistently makes earnest, objective,
sturdy philosophical arguments against chartering. With rare exceptions, when I go looking, I instead find mostly snark, ad hominem attacks, and condescension. The source I had hoped would evolve into the dispassionate voice of studied dissent has instead reliably produced invective. - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/civil-conversations-are-honest.html#sthash.rNferAvN.dpuf
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Charter Conversations
Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Andy Smarick dissects and critiques the current state of dialogue regarding charter schools.
What's the problem?
He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.
The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle-free conversations are worthwhile, but undervalued and insufficiently publicized. That's because of the second conversation.
The second, about philosophy and politics, is essentially about whether chartering is good or bad. Participants are interested in basic questions such as, “Should charters exist?” and “What does chartering mean for public education?” This conversation, which typically emanates from deeply held principles and big ideas, seems to attract the scholarly, the idealistic, and the impassioned—but also the certain and the dismissive.
Smarick's concern is that the impassioned side of the conversation attracts too much name-calling and sensationalism. If you want attention and press, he says, use name calling like "privateers" or “corporate interests, hedge fund managers and billionaires starve public schools and services of resources and suck up as much profit as they can." He's also not fond of long-form pieces like the New Jersey article that focused on the web of corruption and general misbehavior that characterizes the charterward shift of New Jersey schools. He thinks the Detroit Free-Press series on corruption and general misbehavior in the Michigan charter missed a chance to examine charter relations to public school and instead focused on scandal and intrigue.
There's a faint smell of flop-sweat around Smarick's complaints, like a Nixon aide complaining that Watergate coverage is failing to mention all the great things the President did in China. But Smarick is generally a serious guy, so I'm going to address his concern seriously here.
What does he want to see?
Here’s my request. If you think chartering is, at root, a threat to public education and believe that it must be brought to an end, please make that case publicly and straightforwardly, with conviction and tact. You’ll find a more receptive audience than you might suspect. If you aren’t obdurately anti-charter but think there are aspects of chartering that need serious improvement, marshal the data and make your case.
I think there a couple of problems with this request.
Smarick's two-conversations model misses a third conversation that's going on. That's the conversation not about charters in the abstract large-scale policy sense, but in the specific let's-talk-about-the-charter-in-my-neighborhood sense.
Many of the people who have found themselves embroiled in charter debates are there because, like folks in NOLA or Detroit or Chicago or NYC etc etc etc are there because they are dealing with the very specific behavior surrounding very specific charters. The stories he cites about Camden and Michigan are not policy stories-- they are local news stories.
The charter movement's problem is not a policy-and-philosophy problem. It's a too-many-instances-of-specific-crooked-behavior problem. That problem points to some policy and philosophy issues, but those aren't what are driving press coverage and public crankiness.
What's driving the bad press?
Inside Philanthropy ran a piece Friday looking at how Charles Schwab is heavily into charter school investing.
A $1 million gift to the Charter School Growth Fund in 2011 stands out, not only because of the size of the gift but also because of its destination. Founded in 2005, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a bit like the mother ship of the charter school movement, working to grow and professionalize this alternative ed sector. A lot of the major players in the charter school funding world have given to CSGF, including Walton, Gates, Dell, Bradley, and Fisher.
It is no mystery why so many finance guys are interested in the charter movement. Forbes (not exactly liberal tools of the public school establishment) reported back in September of 2013 that investors were flocking to charters because Clinton-era tax laws made such investments very attractive, possibly allowing investors to double their money in seven years (and that includes plenty of foreign investors, which is its own kind of troubling).
Charter schools are not new at all. But the influx of hedge fund managers and rock stars and all manner of people whose motivation is not quality education but ROI is a recent development that has shaped the charter movement, and not in a good way. In state after state, money has greased the wheels of charter regulation (or lack thereof) and the results are fairly predictable.
But people are not waking up to these issues because of some burning interest in educational philosophy or public-private education policy. They are waking up because their own neighborhood schools are being shuttered and replaced by charters that handle them with the same kindness and consideration as the phone company or the DMV.
In my own small ruralish town, people used to not care about PA's cyber-charter laws. Then our school district shuttered two elementary schools to save around 800K in the same year that they had to pay out about 800K for seventy-some students to attend cyber-charters. That, not some philosophical interest in policy-wonkery, is what had taxpayers saying, "Well, that can't be right" and a school board president saying, "You all need to call your congressman today."
Three days after Smarick posted his piece, the Hartford Courant was reporting on the FBI serving subpoenas to FUSE, a Connecticut charter operator. Reporters who went to FUSE offices found a receptionist shredding papers. This sort of story has reached the level of "dog bites man" for its shock and surprise value, so in that sense, Smarick is correct in saying these stories might get too much attention.
But his straining to suggest that coverage of charter misbehavior is exaggerated is off base. For instance, the coverage of Tony Bennett's misbehavior was consistent with the level of misbehavior he displayed and was, again, a local story, particularly for the schools that might have stayed open had they received the same largesse Bennett extended to others. His "exoneration"is not particularly credible nor convincing.
When all is said and done, I'm not sure exactly what Smarick wants. Facts? The stories that he objects to are all loaded with carefully and responsibly researched facts. Make the anti-charter case with tact? Personally, I've made the case both with tact and without. But there are more gifted writers than I who have made the charts and graphs and fact-based arguments about charters in their neck of the woods (Jersey Jazzman pulls off that trick regularly).
Less inflamatory rhetoric? That's not an unreasonable request, though people who are fighting for the life of a local school district that they value are often rather inflamed. Particularly when it turns out they are being shut out of policy decisions that A) have a huge effect on them and B) turn out to have been made for financial, not educational, reasons. It only gets worse if it turns out that some sort of misbehavior is also involved.
Sometimes you have a PR problem because of perception unrelated to reality. Sometimes you have a PR problem because your client keeps doing bad things. That seems to be the plight of the modern charter. Old-school charters, the kinds started by teachers and local people and persons who were generally on an educational mission-- these charters did not give rise to large conversations about the value of charters. But the modern 500-pound-gorilla mega-chain ROI charters are a different animal.
Remember that old Ann Landers column?
Dear Ann Landers: I`m a 16-year-old girl who is a nervous wreck from getting yelled at. All I hear from morning till night is, ``Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework, clean up your room.`` How can I get them off my case?
Sick of Parents
Dear Sick: Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework and clean up your room.
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
If charters are tired of being attacked, they could stop attacking public education, as in the recent charter gathering in which the recurring theme was "Charters are great because public schools suck." I'm not a fan of "they started it" as an argument, but it's also specious to declare "all I did was keep calling him names and stealing his lunch, and then he just hit me for no reason!"
I'm not a fan of Smarick's first posited conversation (let's just assume charters are great), I think the second one is valuable (let's talk about how and if charters can work), but I think both are being drowned out by the third conversation, which is a mass of local conversations about the damage being done and the attacks on local schools that people feel they are suffering through. That conversation is, I believe, a direct result of the injection of huge amounts of money into the process. It's hard to have the conversation because the stakes on all sides are so high (ROI vs. local concerns for children).
I'm actually a fan of old-school charters, and it makes me sad that their promise has been swept aside by the current wave of money-driven charter chains. But asking people to please be more polite and reasonable and please stop pointing out where we've screwed you over is not likely to get the conversation back on track or reclaim the benefits that charter schools could provide.
What's the problem?
He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.
The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle-free conversations are worthwhile, but undervalued and insufficiently publicized. That's because of the second conversation.
The second, about philosophy and politics, is essentially about whether chartering is good or bad. Participants are interested in basic questions such as, “Should charters exist?” and “What does chartering mean for public education?” This conversation, which typically emanates from deeply held principles and big ideas, seems to attract the scholarly, the idealistic, and the impassioned—but also the certain and the dismissive.
Smarick's concern is that the impassioned side of the conversation attracts too much name-calling and sensationalism. If you want attention and press, he says, use name calling like "privateers" or “corporate interests, hedge fund managers and billionaires starve public schools and services of resources and suck up as much profit as they can." He's also not fond of long-form pieces like the New Jersey article that focused on the web of corruption and general misbehavior that characterizes the charterward shift of New Jersey schools. He thinks the Detroit Free-Press series on corruption and general misbehavior in the Michigan charter missed a chance to examine charter relations to public school and instead focused on scandal and intrigue.
There's a faint smell of flop-sweat around Smarick's complaints, like a Nixon aide complaining that Watergate coverage is failing to mention all the great things the President did in China. But Smarick is generally a serious guy, so I'm going to address his concern seriously here.
What does he want to see?
Here’s my request. If you think chartering is, at root, a threat to public education and believe that it must be brought to an end, please make that case publicly and straightforwardly, with conviction and tact. You’ll find a more receptive audience than you might suspect. If you aren’t obdurately anti-charter but think there are aspects of chartering that need serious improvement, marshal the data and make your case.
I think there a couple of problems with this request.
Smarick's two-conversations model misses a third conversation that's going on. That's the conversation not about charters in the abstract large-scale policy sense, but in the specific let's-talk-about-the-charter-in-my-neighborhood sense.
Many of the people who have found themselves embroiled in charter debates are there because, like folks in NOLA or Detroit or Chicago or NYC etc etc etc are there because they are dealing with the very specific behavior surrounding very specific charters. The stories he cites about Camden and Michigan are not policy stories-- they are local news stories.
The charter movement's problem is not a policy-and-philosophy problem. It's a too-many-instances-of-specific-crooked-behavior problem. That problem points to some policy and philosophy issues, but those aren't what are driving press coverage and public crankiness.
What's driving the bad press?
Inside Philanthropy ran a piece Friday looking at how Charles Schwab is heavily into charter school investing.
A $1 million gift to the Charter School Growth Fund in 2011 stands out, not only because of the size of the gift but also because of its destination. Founded in 2005, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a bit like the mother ship of the charter school movement, working to grow and professionalize this alternative ed sector. A lot of the major players in the charter school funding world have given to CSGF, including Walton, Gates, Dell, Bradley, and Fisher.
It is no mystery why so many finance guys are interested in the charter movement. Forbes (not exactly liberal tools of the public school establishment) reported back in September of 2013 that investors were flocking to charters because Clinton-era tax laws made such investments very attractive, possibly allowing investors to double their money in seven years (and that includes plenty of foreign investors, which is its own kind of troubling).
Charter schools are not new at all. But the influx of hedge fund managers and rock stars and all manner of people whose motivation is not quality education but ROI is a recent development that has shaped the charter movement, and not in a good way. In state after state, money has greased the wheels of charter regulation (or lack thereof) and the results are fairly predictable.
But people are not waking up to these issues because of some burning interest in educational philosophy or public-private education policy. They are waking up because their own neighborhood schools are being shuttered and replaced by charters that handle them with the same kindness and consideration as the phone company or the DMV.
In my own small ruralish town, people used to not care about PA's cyber-charter laws. Then our school district shuttered two elementary schools to save around 800K in the same year that they had to pay out about 800K for seventy-some students to attend cyber-charters. That, not some philosophical interest in policy-wonkery, is what had taxpayers saying, "Well, that can't be right" and a school board president saying, "You all need to call your congressman today."
Three days after Smarick posted his piece, the Hartford Courant was reporting on the FBI serving subpoenas to FUSE, a Connecticut charter operator. Reporters who went to FUSE offices found a receptionist shredding papers. This sort of story has reached the level of "dog bites man" for its shock and surprise value, so in that sense, Smarick is correct in saying these stories might get too much attention.
But his straining to suggest that coverage of charter misbehavior is exaggerated is off base. For instance, the coverage of Tony Bennett's misbehavior was consistent with the level of misbehavior he displayed and was, again, a local story, particularly for the schools that might have stayed open had they received the same largesse Bennett extended to others. His "exoneration"is not particularly credible nor convincing.
When all is said and done, I'm not sure exactly what Smarick wants. Facts? The stories that he objects to are all loaded with carefully and responsibly researched facts. Make the anti-charter case with tact? Personally, I've made the case both with tact and without. But there are more gifted writers than I who have made the charts and graphs and fact-based arguments about charters in their neck of the woods (Jersey Jazzman pulls off that trick regularly).
Less inflamatory rhetoric? That's not an unreasonable request, though people who are fighting for the life of a local school district that they value are often rather inflamed. Particularly when it turns out they are being shut out of policy decisions that A) have a huge effect on them and B) turn out to have been made for financial, not educational, reasons. It only gets worse if it turns out that some sort of misbehavior is also involved.
Sometimes you have a PR problem because of perception unrelated to reality. Sometimes you have a PR problem because your client keeps doing bad things. That seems to be the plight of the modern charter. Old-school charters, the kinds started by teachers and local people and persons who were generally on an educational mission-- these charters did not give rise to large conversations about the value of charters. But the modern 500-pound-gorilla mega-chain ROI charters are a different animal.
Remember that old Ann Landers column?
Dear Ann Landers: I`m a 16-year-old girl who is a nervous wreck from getting yelled at. All I hear from morning till night is, ``Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework, clean up your room.`` How can I get them off my case?
Sick of Parents
Dear Sick: Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework and clean up your room.
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
If charters are tired of being attacked, they could stop attacking public education, as in the recent charter gathering in which the recurring theme was "Charters are great because public schools suck." I'm not a fan of "they started it" as an argument, but it's also specious to declare "all I did was keep calling him names and stealing his lunch, and then he just hit me for no reason!"
I'm not a fan of Smarick's first posited conversation (let's just assume charters are great), I think the second one is valuable (let's talk about how and if charters can work), but I think both are being drowned out by the third conversation, which is a mass of local conversations about the damage being done and the attacks on local schools that people feel they are suffering through. That conversation is, I believe, a direct result of the injection of huge amounts of money into the process. It's hard to have the conversation because the stakes on all sides are so high (ROI vs. local concerns for children).
I'm actually a fan of old-school charters, and it makes me sad that their promise has been swept aside by the current wave of money-driven charter chains. But asking people to please be more polite and reasonable and please stop pointing out where we've screwed you over is not likely to get the conversation back on track or reclaim the benefits that charter schools could provide.
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