Shannon Sevier, vice-president for advocacy of the National PTA, took to the Huffinmgton Post this week to shill for the testing industry. It was not a particularly artful defense, with Sevier parroting most of the talking points put forth by test manufacturers and their hired government guns.
Sevier starts out by reminiscing about when her children took their Big Standardized Tests, and while there was fear and trepidation, she also claims to remembers "the importance of the assessments in helping my children's teachers and school better support their success through data-driven planning and decision-making."
I'm a little fuzzy on what time frame we'd be talking about, because Sevier's LinkedIN profile seems to indicate that she was working in Europe from 2009-2014. Pre-2009 tests would be a different animal than the current crop. But even if she was commuting, or her children were here in the states, that line is a load of bull.
"Support their success through data-driven planning and decision-making" is fancy talk for "helped design more targeted test prep in order to make sure that test scores went up." No BS Tests help teachers teach. Not one of them. There is no useful educational feedback. There is no detailed educational breakdown of educational goals provided to teachers on a timely basis, and, in fact, in most cases no such feedback is possible because teachers are forbidden to know what questions and answers are on the test.
So, no, Ms. Sevier. That never happened anywhere except in the feverishly excited PR materials of test manufacturers.
Mass opt-out comes at a real cost to the goals of educational equity and individual student achievement while leaving the question of assessment quality unanswered.
Like most of Sevier's piece, this is fuzzier than a year-old gumball from under the bed. Exactly what are the costs to equity and individual student achievement? In what universe can we expect to find sad, unemployed men and women sitting in their van down by the river saying ruefully, "If only I had taken that big standardized test in school. Then my life would have turned out differently."
The consequences of non-participation in state assessments can have detrimental impacts on students and schools. Non-participation can result in a loss of funding, diminished resources and decreased interventions for students. Such ramifications would impact minorities and students with special needs disparately, thereby widening the achievement gap.
Did I mention that Sevier is a lawyer? This is some mighty fine word salad, but its Croutons of Truth are sad, soggy and sucky. While it is true that theoretically, the capacity to withhold some funding from schools is there in the law, it has never happened, ever (though Sevier does point out that some schools in New York got a letter. A letter! Possibly even a strongly worded letter! Horrors!! Did it go on their permanent record??) The number of schools punished for low participation rates is zero, which is roughly the same number as the number of politicians willing to tell parents that their school is going to lose funding because they exercised their legal rights.
And when we talk about the "achievement gap," always remember that this is reformster-speak for "difference in test scores" and nobody has tied test scores to anything except test scores.
More to the point, while test advocates repeatedly insist that test results are an important way of getting needed assistance and support to struggling students in struggling schools, it has never worked that way. Low test scores don't target students for assistance-- they target schools for takeover, turnaround, or termination.
The Sevier segues into the National PTA's position, which is exactly like the administration's position-- that maybe there are too many tests, and we should totally get rid of redundant and unnecessary tests and look at keeping other tests out of the classroom as well, by which they mean every test other than the BS Tests. They agree that we should get rid of bad tests, "while protecting the vital role that good assessments play in measuring
student progress so parents and educators have the best information to
support teaching and learning, improve outcomes and ensure equity for
all children."
But BS Tests don't provide "the best information." The best information is provided by teacher-created, day-to-day, formal and informal classroom assessments. Tests such as PARCC, SBA, etc do not provide any useful information except to measure how well students do on the PARCC, SBA, etc-- and there is not a lick of evidence that good performance on the BS Tests is indicative of anything at all.
I'll give Sevier credit for stopping just sort of the usual assertion that teachers and parents are all thick headed ninnimuggins who cannot tell how students are doing unless they have access to revelatory standardized test scores. But PTA's stalwart and unwavering support seems to be for some imaginary set of tests that don't exist. Their policy statement on testing, says Sevier, advocates for tests that (1) ensure appropriate development; (2) guarantee reliability and
implementation of high quality assessments; (3) clearly articulate to
parents the assessment and accountability system in place at their
child's school and (4) bring schools and families together to use the
data to support student growth and learning.
BS Tests like the PARCC don't actually do any of these things. What's even more notable about the PTA policies is that in its full version, it's pretty much a cut and paste of the Obama administrations dreadful Test Action Plan which is in turn basically a marketing reboot for test manufacturers.
Did the PTA cave because they get a boatload of money from Bill Gates? Who knows. But what is clear is that when Sevier writes "National PTA strongly advocates for and continues to support increased
inclusion of the parent voice in educational decision making at all
levels," what she means is that parents should play nice, follow the government's rules, and count on policy makers to Do The Right Thing.
That's a foolish plan. Over a decade of reformy policy shows us that what reformsters want from parents, teachers and students is compliance, and that as long as they get that, they are happy to stay the course. The Opt Out movement arguably forced what little accommodation is marked by the Test Action Plan and ESSA's assertion of a parent's legal right to opt out. Cheerful obedience in hopes of a Seat at the Table has not accomplished jack, and the National PTA should be ashamed of itself for insisting that parents should stay home, submit their children to the tyranny of time-wasting testing, and just hope that Important People will spontaneously improve the tests. Instead, the National PTA should be joining the chorus of voices demanding that the whole premise of BS Testing should be questioned, challenged, and ultimately rejected so that students can get back to learning and teachers can get back to teaching.
Sevier and the PTA have failed on two levels. First, they have failed in insisting that quiet compliance is the way to get policymakers to tweak and improve test-driven education policies. Second, they have failed in refusing to challenge the very notion of re-organizing America's schools around standardized testing.
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Is Educational Philanthropy Jumbo Shrimp?
The announcement that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife intend to give away $45 billion in Facebook stock raises all sorts of questions, including this one:
Does anybody even understand what philanthropy is any more?
The word means "love of humanity," and the idea goes back-- way back. Early philanthropic efforts often cited include Plato's bequest of a farm to support students and faculty at his school, and Pliny (the Younger, not the old guy) giving one-third the cost of a school for Roman students. So yes-- philanthropy has been mucking around schools forever. (Said Pliny, arguing for Roman schools for Roman students, "You cannot make your children a more handsome present than this, nor can you do your native place a better turn. Let those who are born here be brought up here, and from their earliest days accustom them to love and know every foot of their native soil.")
We've had philanthropy in this country as long as we've had a country, often synonymous with "charity" and the idea of giving money to people who need it, either directly or through some do-gooding church or charitable organization.
We generally consider John. D. Rockefeller the grand-daddy of modern philanthropy (and to his credit, Rockefeller was a philanthropist before he was a rich guy). Once he became a rich guy, he hired people and started organizations to help him manage the giving away of money "scientifically." (One group led in 1928 to the Brookings Foundation). Rockefeller's system became one of finding smart people who could figure out how to solve an issue, giving them a bunch of money, and leaving them alone.
Rich Guy Philanthropy has always been a bit subject to... cognitive dissonance. Like many Carnegie biographies, this one by David Nasaw juxtaposes Andrew Carnegie's advice to his workers that they pursue learning and leisure activities and read more-- even as he demanded that they work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Carnegie's generous gift of libraries to communities across the country stands side by side with his iron-fisted refusal to pay his workers decent wages.
Rich Guy Philanthropy has always struggled with a central contradiction: If rich guys want to make life better for ordinary folks, they could start with the ordinary folks who work to make them rich.
Rockefeller's idea of business-style scientific philanthropy grew and evolved, but somewhere along the way, we completely lost the idea of philanthropy at all.
If you give an organization like a school or a hospital or a sports team a whole bunch of money in order to build a facility with your name on it, that's not philanthropy. That's advertising. Nobody looks at a building with TRUMP in huge gold letters on the side and thinks, "Wow, what a great, giving humanitarian." Why should that work differently if, instead of building the big TRUMP building himself, he gave someone else money to do it for him?
In fact, modern philanthropists have strangely confused "giving money to improve the life of human beings" with "hiring some people to do work that you want to have done."
This 2006 article about Philanthrocapitalism lays out many of the principles that the new breed feels need to take the place of the old Rockefeller-style foundations. Invest IN something. Set up infrastructure. Add value.
Hacker Philanthropy (as laid out by Sean Parker, napster co-founder), isn't really philanthropy at all. It's a process of putting yourself in charge of something and then imposing your idea of a solution on the problem, confident that your outsider mindset allows you to see what the weakness is and "disrupt" it.
The classic view of philanthropy, the one most commonly shared by givers who aren't filthy rich, is that you find people who are doing something worthwhile, and you help them do it. But in current Rich Guy Philanthropy, you decide the solution you want to implement, and then youhire people direct your giving toward that goal.
Classic philanthropy was a gift. Modern philanthropy is "impact investment." Classic philanthropy was a gift, free and clear. Modern philanthropy comes with many, many strings attached. I will give you money-- to do what I want in the manner I direct. That's not a gift. That's hire and salary.
Michael Massing looks at Bill Gates as an example of this new giving style, leaning on the book No Such Thing As A Free Gift by Linsey McGoey. And we know how that's gone-- Bill Gates decided that schools should be smaller, so he used funding to grow a bunch of organizations to implement and study that solution. Then he became convinced that Common Core would fix schools, so he threw a bunch of money at that, creating organizations to implement and promote his preferred solution. (Also, I love McGoey for her coinage "philanthrocapitalist")
What makes this philanthropy?
If Gates hired a bunch of computer programmers to form a work group that designed a new music storage-and-playing device, nobody would call that philanthropy. But if Gates hires a bunch of thought leaders and PR specialists to promote CCSS, that's philanthropy? How?
Is it because there's no obvious profit involved, or is it because Gates has taken charge of a portion of the public sector?
Zuckerberg's "gift" has folks looking back at his previous foray into philanthropy-- his ill-fated attempt to help fix Newark. Jordan Weissman at Slate is "optomistic that Mark Zuckerberg won't mess up this philanthropy thing." His optimism is based in I'm-not-sure-what, but he seems to believe that after Z's adventures in Newark, the cyber-mogul would have learned a thing or two. His evidence is that Zuckerberg's huge donation to Bay Area schools was more incremental and focused-- but it was once again framed as, "Here are the solutions we're hiring you to implement." [Update. Several critics have noted that Zuckerberg's generosity isn't all that generous anyway.]
But David Auerbach at Slate takes a more measured look, also noting that Gates's attempt to make himself the unelected School Board Chairman of America has not logged many (or even any) successes. Auerbach does make one point in philanthrocapitalism's favor-- it at least is not more of the Let's Buy Ourselves Some Senators investment strategy of Ken Griffin or the Koch Brothers.
Except. Except that, slowly but surely, the two are becoming the same thing. Charters have become a magnet for philanthrocapitalists who can do well while doing good. "I'm building a school and making a bundle," is the new -- well, can we even call it philanthropy at this point? And those philanthropists are willing to go the Koch route with their giving. Consider the news from LA, where a PAC was used to hide the investment of charter backers in getting three charter-friendly school board candidates elected. Among those on the list are "philanthropist Eli Broad," whose "philanthropy" seems to consist entirely of hiring people to push his personal agenda and build his personal power.
So we finally arrive at a point where the word "philanthropy" means absolutely nothing at all. Hell, Donald Trump is a philanthropist. Vladamir Putin is a philanthropist. Every time I pay my phone bill, I'm a philanthropist. Apparently any time you give anybody any money for any reason, you're a philanthropist.
Look-- here's the rule. If you are giving money to somebody with the expectation that they will carry out your instructions, further your agenda, owe you compliance and assistance, or complete a project you've assigned them-- you're not a philanthropist. If your giving is designed to give you power or control over an aspect of public life in our country-- you're not a philanthropist.
You know what else happened over the weekend? A couple dropped a check for $500,000 in a Salvation Army kettle. And then when news outlets wanted to follow up on the story, they insisted on remaining anonymous. And they didn't tell the Salvation Army how to spend it, what to spend it on, or where to put their name on the side of the building. They just remembered how hard life was when they couldn't get enough to eat, so they were hoping they could help other humans in similar dire straits. I may or may not love the Salvation Army, but I know an anonymous philanthropist when I see one or two.
I wish there were more of them.
Does anybody even understand what philanthropy is any more?
The word means "love of humanity," and the idea goes back-- way back. Early philanthropic efforts often cited include Plato's bequest of a farm to support students and faculty at his school, and Pliny (the Younger, not the old guy) giving one-third the cost of a school for Roman students. So yes-- philanthropy has been mucking around schools forever. (Said Pliny, arguing for Roman schools for Roman students, "You cannot make your children a more handsome present than this, nor can you do your native place a better turn. Let those who are born here be brought up here, and from their earliest days accustom them to love and know every foot of their native soil.")
We've had philanthropy in this country as long as we've had a country, often synonymous with "charity" and the idea of giving money to people who need it, either directly or through some do-gooding church or charitable organization.
We generally consider John. D. Rockefeller the grand-daddy of modern philanthropy (and to his credit, Rockefeller was a philanthropist before he was a rich guy). Once he became a rich guy, he hired people and started organizations to help him manage the giving away of money "scientifically." (One group led in 1928 to the Brookings Foundation). Rockefeller's system became one of finding smart people who could figure out how to solve an issue, giving them a bunch of money, and leaving them alone.
Rich Guy Philanthropy has always been a bit subject to... cognitive dissonance. Like many Carnegie biographies, this one by David Nasaw juxtaposes Andrew Carnegie's advice to his workers that they pursue learning and leisure activities and read more-- even as he demanded that they work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Carnegie's generous gift of libraries to communities across the country stands side by side with his iron-fisted refusal to pay his workers decent wages.
Rich Guy Philanthropy has always struggled with a central contradiction: If rich guys want to make life better for ordinary folks, they could start with the ordinary folks who work to make them rich.
Rockefeller's idea of business-style scientific philanthropy grew and evolved, but somewhere along the way, we completely lost the idea of philanthropy at all.
If you give an organization like a school or a hospital or a sports team a whole bunch of money in order to build a facility with your name on it, that's not philanthropy. That's advertising. Nobody looks at a building with TRUMP in huge gold letters on the side and thinks, "Wow, what a great, giving humanitarian." Why should that work differently if, instead of building the big TRUMP building himself, he gave someone else money to do it for him?
In fact, modern philanthropists have strangely confused "giving money to improve the life of human beings" with "hiring some people to do work that you want to have done."
This 2006 article about Philanthrocapitalism lays out many of the principles that the new breed feels need to take the place of the old Rockefeller-style foundations. Invest IN something. Set up infrastructure. Add value.
Hacker Philanthropy (as laid out by Sean Parker, napster co-founder), isn't really philanthropy at all. It's a process of putting yourself in charge of something and then imposing your idea of a solution on the problem, confident that your outsider mindset allows you to see what the weakness is and "disrupt" it.
The classic view of philanthropy, the one most commonly shared by givers who aren't filthy rich, is that you find people who are doing something worthwhile, and you help them do it. But in current Rich Guy Philanthropy, you decide the solution you want to implement, and then you
Classic philanthropy was a gift. Modern philanthropy is "impact investment." Classic philanthropy was a gift, free and clear. Modern philanthropy comes with many, many strings attached. I will give you money-- to do what I want in the manner I direct. That's not a gift. That's hire and salary.
Michael Massing looks at Bill Gates as an example of this new giving style, leaning on the book No Such Thing As A Free Gift by Linsey McGoey. And we know how that's gone-- Bill Gates decided that schools should be smaller, so he used funding to grow a bunch of organizations to implement and study that solution. Then he became convinced that Common Core would fix schools, so he threw a bunch of money at that, creating organizations to implement and promote his preferred solution. (Also, I love McGoey for her coinage "philanthrocapitalist")
What makes this philanthropy?
If Gates hired a bunch of computer programmers to form a work group that designed a new music storage-and-playing device, nobody would call that philanthropy. But if Gates hires a bunch of thought leaders and PR specialists to promote CCSS, that's philanthropy? How?
Is it because there's no obvious profit involved, or is it because Gates has taken charge of a portion of the public sector?
Zuckerberg's "gift" has folks looking back at his previous foray into philanthropy-- his ill-fated attempt to help fix Newark. Jordan Weissman at Slate is "optomistic that Mark Zuckerberg won't mess up this philanthropy thing." His optimism is based in I'm-not-sure-what, but he seems to believe that after Z's adventures in Newark, the cyber-mogul would have learned a thing or two. His evidence is that Zuckerberg's huge donation to Bay Area schools was more incremental and focused-- but it was once again framed as, "Here are the solutions we're hiring you to implement." [Update. Several critics have noted that Zuckerberg's generosity isn't all that generous anyway.]
But David Auerbach at Slate takes a more measured look, also noting that Gates's attempt to make himself the unelected School Board Chairman of America has not logged many (or even any) successes. Auerbach does make one point in philanthrocapitalism's favor-- it at least is not more of the Let's Buy Ourselves Some Senators investment strategy of Ken Griffin or the Koch Brothers.
Except. Except that, slowly but surely, the two are becoming the same thing. Charters have become a magnet for philanthrocapitalists who can do well while doing good. "I'm building a school and making a bundle," is the new -- well, can we even call it philanthropy at this point? And those philanthropists are willing to go the Koch route with their giving. Consider the news from LA, where a PAC was used to hide the investment of charter backers in getting three charter-friendly school board candidates elected. Among those on the list are "philanthropist Eli Broad," whose "philanthropy" seems to consist entirely of hiring people to push his personal agenda and build his personal power.
So we finally arrive at a point where the word "philanthropy" means absolutely nothing at all. Hell, Donald Trump is a philanthropist. Vladamir Putin is a philanthropist. Every time I pay my phone bill, I'm a philanthropist. Apparently any time you give anybody any money for any reason, you're a philanthropist.
Look-- here's the rule. If you are giving money to somebody with the expectation that they will carry out your instructions, further your agenda, owe you compliance and assistance, or complete a project you've assigned them-- you're not a philanthropist. If your giving is designed to give you power or control over an aspect of public life in our country-- you're not a philanthropist.
You know what else happened over the weekend? A couple dropped a check for $500,000 in a Salvation Army kettle. And then when news outlets wanted to follow up on the story, they insisted on remaining anonymous. And they didn't tell the Salvation Army how to spend it, what to spend it on, or where to put their name on the side of the building. They just remembered how hard life was when they couldn't get enough to eat, so they were hoping they could help other humans in similar dire straits. I may or may not love the Salvation Army, but I know an anonymous philanthropist when I see one or two.
I wish there were more of them.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Gates Takes Aim at Teacher Education
As noted today at Education Week, the Gates Foundation has fastened its aim on teacher preparation programs. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to drop $34 million cool ones on "cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs' overall effectiveness."
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
So what does that mean? Good news? Bad news?
The three year grants are based on four principles:
* developing strong partnerships with school districts
* giving teacher-candidates opportunities to refine a specific set of teaching skills
* using data for improvement and accountability
* ensuring that faculty mentors are effective at guiding novices into the profession
The first sounds great. The second sounds... well, I don't know. Exactly what specific set are we talking about, and what does that even mean? Becoming an interrogatory specialist? Learning to be excellent at teaching fractions? I'm worried that the Gates tendency to believe that all complex activities can be broken down into disconnected, context-free skills is at play here, in which case I'm doubting this will be useful.
Third? Well, if I thought "data" meant what I mean by "data, I'd think this was fine. I use data every minute of every day. But since this is Gates, I'm afraid that "data" means "results from a computer-based bunch of competency-based-baloney" or even "more of the useless data from those dreadful Big Standardized Tests."
Fourth point. Yes, excellent idea, if in fact you have any idea of how to tell that mentors are effective at guiding etc etc. Which I'm betting you don't, or worse, you have some sort of "based on student test scores VAM sauce baloney," which won't do anyone any good.
But hey, maybe the recipients of the Gates money will give us a clue about where this is headed.
Grantee #1 is TeacherSquared (you know-- a place that makes teacher teachers) which is mostly "nontraditional" preparation programs. In fact, it's mostly RelayGSE, a fake teacher school set up by charters so that non-teachers with a little experience could teach non-teachers with no experience how to be teachers. So that is not a good sign.
#2 Texas Tech University, "which will head the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation National Center" which is six Southern universities welded together. Lord only knows what that will look like.
#3 Massachusetts Department of Education, which will head up an EPIC (Elevate Preparation, Impact Children) center to work with all the teacher ed programs in the state. This is just going to be confusing, because the EPIC acronym has been used before-- including by charter schools in Massachusetts (Effective Practice Incentive Community). But the Massachusetts DoE has a mixed track record on reformy issues, so we'll see.
#4 National Center for Teacher Residencies, which is promoting a full-year residency model which has been popping up around the country and which I think could actually be a great idea.
TeachingWorks at University of Michigan will be a coordinating hub for all the cool things these other grantees will come up with.
According to EdWeek's Stephen Sawchuk, Gates wants each of these "centers" to crank out 2,500 teachers per year which is-- well, that is huge. I'm pretty sure that's more than most entire states produce. It is a grand total of 10,000 teachers. Per year. At a time when enrollment in teacher education programs is plummeting. The USPREPNC would have to get upwards of 600 teacher-grads per year out of its six member universities. I mean, we can turn this number around many ways, and from every angle, it's a huge number. Of the four grantees, only the state of Massachusetts seems likely to handle that kind of capacity.
Want more bad signs? Here's a quote from Vicki Phillips:
“The timing is great because of having great consistent, high standards in the country and more meaningful, actionable teacher-feedback systems and some clear definitions about what excellence in teaching looks like,” said Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of college-ready programs.
In other words, this is way to drive Common Core up into teacher education programs, where it can do more damage.
Anissa Listak of the NCTR points out that making sure clinical faculty (i.e. co-operating teachers) are top notch will be a game changer, and I don't disagree. But it sidesteps the question of how the top notch faculty will be identified, and it really side steps the issue of how the program will find 10,000 master teachers who want to share their classes with a student teacher for a whole year-- especially in locations where test scores will reflect on their own teacher ratings (including, perhaps, the ratings that marked them as "qualified" to host a teacher-resident in the first place).
The Gates has identified a need here-- evaluating teacher preparation programs. Nobody is doing it (well, nobody except the scam artists at NCTQ who do it by reading commencement programs and syllabi), and if we had a legitimate method of measuring program quality, it could be helpful to aspiring teachers. But we don't, and it's not clear that any of these grantees have a clue, either.
It all rests on knowing exactly how to measure and quantify teacher excellence. With data. And boy, there's no way that can end badly.
Will the Gates money be well-spent? I'm not optimistic-- particularly not with an outfit like Relay GSE on the list of recipients. And the Gates has a bad history of using grants to push a narrow and unbending agenda that it has already formed rather than truly exploring an issue or trying to get ideas from people who might know something. In other words, if this is all just a way for Gates to impose his own ideas of what teacher training should look like, then it's likely to be as wasteful and destructive as his championing of Common Core.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Gates & Feedback
When Bill Gates says, "Give Teachers What They Deserve," I think many of us can be forgiven for flinching. But over at his blog, His Royal Gateness has done just that. It might seem redundant for me to respond, because the piece is a bit of a teaser for Gates' Big Talk about education, which I've already responded to. But I find this sort of piece instructive, because when somebody has to edit down his own work, he tells you what he thinks the crucial, important parts were.
The crucial important part here is that after all this time monkeying around with education, Gates still doesn't know what he's taking about.
He opens with a wide-eyed tale of how a teacher he talked to begins the year by drawing a line on a piece of paper that aims up and to the right. The bottom-most point is labeled "birth" and then "Fourth Grade" further up the line and still further up the line the teacher puts himself. This is called the learning line, and I can see its value as a construct for fourth graders. But Gates-- a grown man-- apparently found this image inspirational when working on his big education speech, and not for the first time I'm wondering how much real thought Gates has actually put into this education stuff. If I walked into a corporate board meeting and unveiled my chart with a line spearing up from the bottom left corner, and I marked the origin point "birth" and a little way up put "guy working at McDonalds" and a little further up put "Microsoft" and announced proudly that this I called this the Revenue Line, would board members be thinking about that for months? Or would they point out that my chart had showed something that was both obvious and yet still missing so many deeper complexities of the actual truth? I'm just saying.
But Gates thinks the learning line is "a great metaphor for the work we're doing with teachers." And here we go with his thoughts about that work.
Just about every teacher I have ever met is dying to get useful feedback and tools that help them improve their work in the classroom. Unfortunately, they rarely get either one.
This is one of Gates' foundational beliefs-- that the whole educational world, from teachers to parents to students to community members, are all flying blind without data that look the way Gates thinks data should look. Are teachers dying for useful feedback? Well, sure-- that's why most of us live in a perpetual feedback loop. I've designed a lesson, and I wonder if it will work. I watch student reaction as I deliver the lesson. Feedback. I listen to the questions they do, or don't, ask. Feedback. I take an informal assessment of their understanding by asking questions. Feedback. I give a formal assessment of their learning. Feedback. In the interests of teaching reflection, I may even ask directly for their thoughts about how they think it went. Feedback. And I may run all or part of this past my colleagues, asking what they think. Feedback.
But the very next sentence from Gates is about a survey that showed that most teachers don't find professional development sessions useful. Which is kind of a non-sequitor. I also find my lunch period and my parking lot assignment don't help me much in providing feedback.
Gates notes that in some places, the teacher evaluation system doesn't even help teachers become better, but is just used for hiring and firing. He's right-- that's what evaluation should be good for. But Gates might want to talk to some of the groups he pours money into, like TNTP or Bellwether, who really want evaluation to be driven by test scores and to in turn drive "employment decisions."
In other words, most teachers have to move up the learning line on their own. So they proceed slowly.
And a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. There are so many unproven assumptions in these nineteen words. Most teachers develop on their own? All teachers develop slowly? And that word "so"-- we know that the first is the cause of the second? Teachers may arguably develop alone in the sense that most teachers work alone. But teacher development over the first few years in the classroom is, I'd argue, rapid and often dramatic-- again, because a classroom full of students provide real-time high-impact feedback. But then teacher change slows down for (me arguing again) two main reasons. One is that doing the actual work of teaching doesn't leave time for extensive R & D. We read up, pay attention, watch what's happening, and we adjust and change and grow-- but at the same time, we have to keep showing up and doing our jobs. The second is that you don't need to make radical rapid changes each year if most of what you're doing works. Ice cream hasn't changed very much or very rapidly over the last century because it does its job pretty well.
Now let's chop some logic.
And it’s a big loss for their students, because the evidence shows that having an effective teacher is the single most important in-school factor in student achievement.
This is an urgent problem. Right now, only 25 percent of Hispanic students and 10 percent of African-American students graduate from high school ready for college.
First of all, the 25% and 10% figures come from... where? Because if, as I would suspect, they come from reading the tea leaves of Big Standardized Test results, they are bunk because at this point, nobody has showed any link at all between a good PARCC score and being "ready for college." Second, notice how we made that classic reformster jump from "teachers are the most important in-school factor" to "teachers are fully responsible for all student achievement."
But we know that the correlation between socio-economics and test scores is huge. Gates might as easily say that this "urgent problem" means that the feds must make some serious policy decisions to attack systemic poverty in this country. But no-- of all the factors that affect "ready for college" test scores, we'll zero in on teachers. Mind you, we'll readily accept our role on the front lines of this fight-- just don't pretend that there aren't other people who should be on the front lines with us.
If we’re going to solve this problem, we have to create outstanding feedback and improvement systems for teachers. We need to help all teachers move up the learning line faster, and together with their colleagues, so they can help far more students graduate ready for college.
This doesn't sound unreasonable. But what if the learning line looks more like a big, expansive tree with hundreds of wide-ranging branches? And what if the purpose of schools and teaching is more than just to get students ready for college?
Gates goes on to cite some places where success is happening, once again equating test scores with measures of success. He gets a point or two for talking about supporting teachers, then loses some for including "classroom tools aligned to the Common Core standards" on the list of supportive things. And he underlines the crucialness of focusing teacher evaluations on improving teacher skillls, repeating the Common Core's error of focusing strictly on skills and ignoring content. By Gates' measure, taking a class about early American literature or reading current biographies of important literary figures is not a useful activity because it's not skill-related.
Gates is worried that the process is fragile, and that where teacher evaluation is punitive and disconnected from any resources for improvement, teachers are resisting. This emphasis is also in the full speech, and I want to point out that Gates is only concerned that the bad evaluation process will deprive students of test-beating instruction-- not that bad evaluation is destructive of teachers, teaching and the school. Gates simply can't close the circle-- bad evaluation leads to teacher pushback which hinders implementation of the evaluation, but we never mention that teachers push back because the bad evaluation is destructive and toxic. Consequently, the implication here is that the measure of an evaluation system is not how good it is, but whether or not teachers will push back and get in the way. By this reasoning, we should avoid feeding children poison not because the poison is bad for them, but because they will fight back and make it harder to feed them.
So we have to find ways to take what’s working in a few places and spread it much more widely. In my speech last week I encouraged teachers to demand excellent feedback and improvement systems, and I urged state and local leaders to deliver them.
Again with the scaling up and the flat rejection of local solutions for local issues. For Gates and friends, if it can't be mass-marketed, it's not good.
But I'm glad Gates made a speech about these issues and is urging state and local leaders to get on it. I myself recently delivered a speech in which I called for the federal government to reject John King's appointment as secretary of education, another speech in which I called for the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a budget finally, and a speech in which I demanded that Firefox stop crashing every time it ran into a site with flash.
Anybody can deliver a speech. What I find continually astonishing about Bill Gates is that he has no more knowledge, understanding or expertise about schooling and education than any average American pulled in off the street. He has not been appointed or elected to the position of Grand High Arbiter of US Education, and nobody ever said, "Hey, we need to call Bill Gates and get his thoughts on public education in America." His ideas are no more well-supported or well-developed than any other kind-of-interested amateur. (Watch reformy Jay Greene tear Gates a new one for his mangling of ed research.)
In short, if Bill Gates' thoughts about education had to live or die strictly on their merits, we would not be talking about any of this. The ideas laid out in this blog piece are not unspeakably terrible or remarkably extra-awful. They're just kind of dumb half-baked meh, the sort of thing you'd expect from somebody who only kind of sort of knows what he's talking about. That's the hugest mystery to me-- how is it that somehow, Gates is some sort of voice in the US discussion of public education? It's not the power of his insights, and it's not the usefulness of his ideas. But because he has money and connections, he can pretend that he's way up the learning line, where he need not search for any feedback from people who actually work in the field.
The crucial important part here is that after all this time monkeying around with education, Gates still doesn't know what he's taking about.
He opens with a wide-eyed tale of how a teacher he talked to begins the year by drawing a line on a piece of paper that aims up and to the right. The bottom-most point is labeled "birth" and then "Fourth Grade" further up the line and still further up the line the teacher puts himself. This is called the learning line, and I can see its value as a construct for fourth graders. But Gates-- a grown man-- apparently found this image inspirational when working on his big education speech, and not for the first time I'm wondering how much real thought Gates has actually put into this education stuff. If I walked into a corporate board meeting and unveiled my chart with a line spearing up from the bottom left corner, and I marked the origin point "birth" and a little way up put "guy working at McDonalds" and a little further up put "Microsoft" and announced proudly that this I called this the Revenue Line, would board members be thinking about that for months? Or would they point out that my chart had showed something that was both obvious and yet still missing so many deeper complexities of the actual truth? I'm just saying.
But Gates thinks the learning line is "a great metaphor for the work we're doing with teachers." And here we go with his thoughts about that work.
Just about every teacher I have ever met is dying to get useful feedback and tools that help them improve their work in the classroom. Unfortunately, they rarely get either one.
This is one of Gates' foundational beliefs-- that the whole educational world, from teachers to parents to students to community members, are all flying blind without data that look the way Gates thinks data should look. Are teachers dying for useful feedback? Well, sure-- that's why most of us live in a perpetual feedback loop. I've designed a lesson, and I wonder if it will work. I watch student reaction as I deliver the lesson. Feedback. I listen to the questions they do, or don't, ask. Feedback. I take an informal assessment of their understanding by asking questions. Feedback. I give a formal assessment of their learning. Feedback. In the interests of teaching reflection, I may even ask directly for their thoughts about how they think it went. Feedback. And I may run all or part of this past my colleagues, asking what they think. Feedback.
But the very next sentence from Gates is about a survey that showed that most teachers don't find professional development sessions useful. Which is kind of a non-sequitor. I also find my lunch period and my parking lot assignment don't help me much in providing feedback.
Gates notes that in some places, the teacher evaluation system doesn't even help teachers become better, but is just used for hiring and firing. He's right-- that's what evaluation should be good for. But Gates might want to talk to some of the groups he pours money into, like TNTP or Bellwether, who really want evaluation to be driven by test scores and to in turn drive "employment decisions."
In other words, most teachers have to move up the learning line on their own. So they proceed slowly.
And a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. There are so many unproven assumptions in these nineteen words. Most teachers develop on their own? All teachers develop slowly? And that word "so"-- we know that the first is the cause of the second? Teachers may arguably develop alone in the sense that most teachers work alone. But teacher development over the first few years in the classroom is, I'd argue, rapid and often dramatic-- again, because a classroom full of students provide real-time high-impact feedback. But then teacher change slows down for (me arguing again) two main reasons. One is that doing the actual work of teaching doesn't leave time for extensive R & D. We read up, pay attention, watch what's happening, and we adjust and change and grow-- but at the same time, we have to keep showing up and doing our jobs. The second is that you don't need to make radical rapid changes each year if most of what you're doing works. Ice cream hasn't changed very much or very rapidly over the last century because it does its job pretty well.
Now let's chop some logic.
And it’s a big loss for their students, because the evidence shows that having an effective teacher is the single most important in-school factor in student achievement.
This is an urgent problem. Right now, only 25 percent of Hispanic students and 10 percent of African-American students graduate from high school ready for college.
First of all, the 25% and 10% figures come from... where? Because if, as I would suspect, they come from reading the tea leaves of Big Standardized Test results, they are bunk because at this point, nobody has showed any link at all between a good PARCC score and being "ready for college." Second, notice how we made that classic reformster jump from "teachers are the most important in-school factor" to "teachers are fully responsible for all student achievement."
But we know that the correlation between socio-economics and test scores is huge. Gates might as easily say that this "urgent problem" means that the feds must make some serious policy decisions to attack systemic poverty in this country. But no-- of all the factors that affect "ready for college" test scores, we'll zero in on teachers. Mind you, we'll readily accept our role on the front lines of this fight-- just don't pretend that there aren't other people who should be on the front lines with us.
If we’re going to solve this problem, we have to create outstanding feedback and improvement systems for teachers. We need to help all teachers move up the learning line faster, and together with their colleagues, so they can help far more students graduate ready for college.
This doesn't sound unreasonable. But what if the learning line looks more like a big, expansive tree with hundreds of wide-ranging branches? And what if the purpose of schools and teaching is more than just to get students ready for college?
Gates goes on to cite some places where success is happening, once again equating test scores with measures of success. He gets a point or two for talking about supporting teachers, then loses some for including "classroom tools aligned to the Common Core standards" on the list of supportive things. And he underlines the crucialness of focusing teacher evaluations on improving teacher skillls, repeating the Common Core's error of focusing strictly on skills and ignoring content. By Gates' measure, taking a class about early American literature or reading current biographies of important literary figures is not a useful activity because it's not skill-related.
Gates is worried that the process is fragile, and that where teacher evaluation is punitive and disconnected from any resources for improvement, teachers are resisting. This emphasis is also in the full speech, and I want to point out that Gates is only concerned that the bad evaluation process will deprive students of test-beating instruction-- not that bad evaluation is destructive of teachers, teaching and the school. Gates simply can't close the circle-- bad evaluation leads to teacher pushback which hinders implementation of the evaluation, but we never mention that teachers push back because the bad evaluation is destructive and toxic. Consequently, the implication here is that the measure of an evaluation system is not how good it is, but whether or not teachers will push back and get in the way. By this reasoning, we should avoid feeding children poison not because the poison is bad for them, but because they will fight back and make it harder to feed them.
So we have to find ways to take what’s working in a few places and spread it much more widely. In my speech last week I encouraged teachers to demand excellent feedback and improvement systems, and I urged state and local leaders to deliver them.
Again with the scaling up and the flat rejection of local solutions for local issues. For Gates and friends, if it can't be mass-marketed, it's not good.
But I'm glad Gates made a speech about these issues and is urging state and local leaders to get on it. I myself recently delivered a speech in which I called for the federal government to reject John King's appointment as secretary of education, another speech in which I called for the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a budget finally, and a speech in which I demanded that Firefox stop crashing every time it ran into a site with flash.
Anybody can deliver a speech. What I find continually astonishing about Bill Gates is that he has no more knowledge, understanding or expertise about schooling and education than any average American pulled in off the street. He has not been appointed or elected to the position of Grand High Arbiter of US Education, and nobody ever said, "Hey, we need to call Bill Gates and get his thoughts on public education in America." His ideas are no more well-supported or well-developed than any other kind-of-interested amateur. (Watch reformy Jay Greene tear Gates a new one for his mangling of ed research.)
In short, if Bill Gates' thoughts about education had to live or die strictly on their merits, we would not be talking about any of this. The ideas laid out in this blog piece are not unspeakably terrible or remarkably extra-awful. They're just kind of dumb half-baked meh, the sort of thing you'd expect from somebody who only kind of sort of knows what he's talking about. That's the hugest mystery to me-- how is it that somehow, Gates is some sort of voice in the US discussion of public education? It's not the power of his insights, and it's not the usefulness of his ideas. But because he has money and connections, he can pretend that he's way up the learning line, where he need not search for any feedback from people who actually work in the field.
Saturday, May 9, 2015
CNBC: Gates Needs a Burger
I am writing this with a rag in one hand so I can wipe my apoplectic spit off the computer screen. I am watching a "Squawk Box" clip. That's a show on CNBC, which is, they say "the ultimate 'pre-market' morning news and talk program, where the biggest names in business and politics tell their most important stories."And apparently yesterday's important story included letting Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger shoot off their amateur hour mouths about public education. If you want a more measured and grown-up take on this, I recommend Valerie Stauss, an actual journalist at the Washington Post.
I don't get it. After years of this, I still don't get it. Was Bill Gates elected to some education-related office? Was he appointed by somebody who was elected? Did he develop a reputation for educational expertise based on his experience, knowledge, research, demonstrated success-- anything? So why the hell are we still listening to him? I mean-- I'll give him this. While other rich guys are busy buying elections, so they can have power over the people who have power, Gates has simply skipped ahead and bought the power.
But after examining the clip, I think it's possible that Buffett and Gates had a bet-- "Let's see who can make the most insupportable statements about education in under eight minutes. Winner gets Rhode Island."
Gah. The clip is over at Strauss's blog, and other places. I'm going to watch it for you. I recommend you not watch it yourself, because it's a beautiful weekend and there's no reason to ruin it.
"One piece of good news is that the charter schools are doing a very good job," says Gates, and I have to take my first swipe at the screen, though that was just a spit take, because it's things like this that make me wonder-- is Gates bullshitting us, or is he so insulated from doing real research himself that he doesn't know he's full of baloney?
But on he goes. The inner cities have high drop-out rates and not many on-to-college students, "but the good charters have overcome that." The secret? Long school day, long school year, different way of working with the teachers (which-- what??) has totally fixed the problem. Gates skips over "managing to only serve the students that make you look successful" as a secret of success, nor does he get into what the growth of money-sucking charters does to the health of the public schools where all the other non-success-making students still attend.
Gates acknowledges that charters only account for a small percent, so we have to spread those best practices to get real change.
Our hostess asks, "How do you do that...um(shrug) in the public school system?" with a tone of voice and expression that would also fit "How do you get that little fat girl to win Miss America when she's also ugly and stupid?" I mean, God, you know, it's the public school system-- how do you get them to do anything well, ever, amiright? (Pause for wiping off screen.)
School boards have power, so they need to be convinced. Teachers unions have a lot of power, so they need to see the models that are working and I'm thinking, "Hey, Bill!! Right there is your problem because to do that you would need a model that works!" and he acknowledges glory hallellujah that teachers want to be part of a model that's working and we need more conversations-- and here he lists the three "entities" that I guess matter which are "government, school boards, unions" so parents and students, too bad for you. It is also not clear if Gates distinguishes between unions and teachers. He has to have noticed by now that his attempt to finance compliance from the national union leadership did not lead to everybody falling in line. He does look a tiny bit sad in this clip; that is probably because he is so depressed that Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten pledged not to take any more of his money at the NPE convention. He's probably all broken up about that. Then there's just argle bargle wrapup word salad.
Munger (they guy you probably haven't heard of) then gets to expound on his Theory of McEducation:
It’s fun by the elite academic types in America to say McDonald’s is the wrong kind of food and its the wrong kind of this, and the jobs don’t pay very much and so forth. I have quite a very different view. I think McDonald’s is one of the most successful educational institutions in the United States. They take people and give them a first job which enables them to get a second job. They do a very, very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens. And they are probably more successful than charter schools. (This elicits a hearty chuckle from everyone)
My emphasis. So there you have it. Close all the inner-city schools and just open more McDonald's. Because if you are a troubled poor kid, everything you'll ever need to know in life you can learn at Micky D's. Why, I'll bet the minute this segment was over, Gates called his wife and said, "Pull the kids out of school--we're just going to send them to work at McDonald's. And grab an Arby's application, too, so that we can have a safety school."
(Wipe screen repeatedly). Seriously-- would any wealthy parent in this country tell his kid to go work at McDonald's because that's the best education he could hope for?? No, what Munger is saying is that, for the lower classes, the lessers, the not-so-white and not-so-well-off students, McDonald's is plenty. It's the best that Those People could aspire to.
Buffett chimes in with tales of a McDonald's where he apparently starts his day so often that they know him by name. "Those people are learning very good habits" like showing up on time and, as God is my witness, he includes "they have to learn how to count money" and "they have to learn how to smile at people" and now Gates is giggling a little bit, thinking perhaps, "I took the time to put on a sweater instead of a tie and we still look like rich, patrician asshats up here. Isn't life funny. If it mattered in the slightest what people thought of me, this would be a trainwreck. Thank God this is just CNBC and nobody who isn't One Of Us is actually watching."
Buffett now gets his turn to be pretend education czar (that's really the question). He allows as "we're spending the money" so the resources are clearly there, and I just drape the rag over the screen while I ask if it's his experience in say manufacturing or other businesses, is it his experience that cost is determined by what people want to pay. When he stops at his favorite McDonalds, does he say, "Look, seventy-three cents ought to be enough for my sausage McMuffin. I'm certainly spending the money, so give me my food." Does he shop for cars by saying, "I think ten grand should be enough for that Benz, so hand it over." In what world do you get to say, "I haven't researched this, but I only feel like paying so much, so give me the product for that price." Nor--NOR-- does the fact that we've spent a whole pile of money nationally mean that the pile of money is being properly distributed among the umpty-thousand individual schools. (Take off rag, wring out, continue.)
Now he says something that is actually interesting:
If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.
His point is that the wealthy have opted out, and so the very people who would have the power and juice to demand system improvements no longer have any skin in the game. We end up with two systems. The rich get the education they want for their kids, and some help out, out of conscience, but they don't make sure that public schools provide the education they'd demand if their kids were there.
It's an interesting point, but our hostess redirects back to the We Haz Moneys point, saying, "But it's not an issue of money," so what is public ed losing from defecting rich folks and Buffett is on the question of how much money and now we'll all agree that it's a buttload of money per child, almost as much money as Buffett made while he was speaking that sentence. And then he's back on point-- when rich folks don't have kids in public school, they don't engage with intensity.
The ball is tossed back to Gates, who fumbles for a bit and then lands on "You want in every community the top people to really be aware of what is the dropout rate--" So wherever you are, look up your Bureau of Top People, because if there's any continuing theme about the reformster approach to education it is that the world is made up of Betters and Lessers and the world would be a better place if the Betters had the power to Run Things Properly and shower noblesse oblige on the Lessers. And, oh wait, here's the rest of the sentence "-- and why these inner city schools do such a poor job." Because the drop out rate in inner city neighborhoods can be traced entirely and completely to the schools and nowhere else. And there's some noise about "this" being an important issue (dropout rate, maybe) and then "We're not making as much progress as I'd like." Because the ultimate metric of success here will be whether or not Bill Gates is satisfied.
This has been the toughest area of everything the foundation has worked in. Hostess asks, "Why do you think that is" and I just hold the cloth in front of my face because I can feel the apoplexy rising.
Gates figures it's entrenched interests, a very big system, over $600 billion a year being spent (what?), and it's very resistant to change and I'm thinking, well, yes. It's crazy how some systems like, say, my local hospital won't just let me walk in off the street and tell them how the whole system should be rearranged and how the money should be spent and how the doctors should operate. They are so entrenched and resistant to listening to me just because of some foolishness about how I have no experience, training, expertise or knowledge of how their system works.
Remember that stuff about convincing school boards and showing teachers? Gates says the best results are where the mayor has just taken over and cut everyone out of the decision-making process, because democracy is such a huge pain in the ass. Gates thinks it's best with just "one executive" in charge, but I am still stuck on that "best results" part because I can't think of any city where that's true, but he ticks off New York, Chicago, and as it turns out, those are the only cities he meant and so I'm wishing the interviewer would ask, "So what in God's name do you mean by 'best results,' because there's no reformy success stories to point to in either city" but I'm betting that's not happening.
Munger gets a non-question-- "What do you think about higher education at this point?" He says our system is "the best in the world," though he does not clarify whether he's think of Harvard or Hamburger U. That is why he works with higher education, because he doesn't do well with constant failure ("I tire easily" he says and we all have a good chuckle about that, and I will just shove the rag in my mouth for now). Therefor he doesn't try to fix the public schools in our worst neighborhoods. "You have to be a saint or a Gates to do that," and my apoplectic spit rag bounces off the screen as I yell, "Or one of the millions of public school teachers who have devoted their entire adult lives to working there, you unctuous twit!" And that gets a huge laugh from our hostess and the others because, yeah, how hilarious is it that anybody would try to help poor public schools because that's just not something that ordinary mortals can do EXCEPT FOR THE MILLIONS OF TEACHERS WHO KEEP TRYING TO DO IT WHILE BEING INCREASINGLY HAMPERED BY MEDDLING AMATEURS LIKE YOU RICH SELF-IMPORTANT ASSHATS!! And now we will have a great laugh about how he said saint OR Gates, because it's hilarious to suggest that Bill Gates is not a saint.
Munger circles around to clarify that he works with universities because "I really like-- I'm better at making the top better than at fixing insoluble problems" and our context clues would suggest that poor inner city schools are an insoluble problem. Dude, do you even hear yourself??
It appears we're just trying to run out the clock now. Buffett takes another shot at his point, observing that he and Charlie went to public schools because there were no private alternatives, and Buffett's dad cared so much about the schools that he ran for school board (and, you know, you don't even get paid for that), and that intensity of interest makes a difference. But in too many cities, the rich have opted out of the public school system (once again, it's not clear if Gates has a reaction to that). I know he said that already, but as I sit here feeling a little dehydrated, that strikes me as the one useful observation here, particularly as the reformster movement can be seen as a way not to improve public school, but to make it easier for the Betters to opt out of going to school with the Lessers.
It's an exhausting 7:35 minute clip, highlighting to what an astonishing degree that Gates in particular is just living on some other planet. I hope they have a Hamburger U branch campus there.
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Zephyr Teachout Is for Real
When the Washington Post ran an essay by Zephyr Teachout, they prefaced it by observing that she is "to say the least, not the kind of person you'd expect to run for office."
That seems fair. Teachout is a Vermont-born law professor. In profiles of her by those who know her, she comes across as humble. In her own writing and speaking, she comes across as supremely capable. And she is shaking up the race for New York's governor's seat.
While the GOP has been wrestling visibly and noisily with battles between True Believers and RINOs, the Democratic Party has quietly divided into a party of traditional Democrats and corporate operatives. Arguably, Corporatism has become a third party in American politics that has embedded itself in both Republican and Democratic camps.
Nobody typifies the Corporate Democrat brand better than Governor Andy Cuomo. The playbook is remarkably similar to the Corporate Republican playbook-- if you make the right moves on some splashy social issues, your constituents won't pay much attention to what you're doing on the wonkier issues of money and power. The down side is that every once in a while, somebody emerges who makes a clearer case to your party base, and you have to put a little more effort into looking like an actual member of your alleged political party. And so now Cuomo, who has made occasional Democrat noises while governing as a corporate conservative, finds himself running against an actual Democrat.
This wasn't how it was supposed to work. Cuomo was supposed to win in a landslide so convincing that he would emerge as a national player, maybe even a 2016 prospect. That means that Teachout doesn't have to beat him to hurt him. Even in defeat, Teachout can make Cuomo look a not-so-special governor with political liabilities both to the right and to the left.
Teachout is not some crazy old guy with a beard and a stunt candidacy. Both New York and national media are paying attention, from the Daily Kos to The Nation to David Weigel at Slate. Cuomo took her seriously enough to stage an eleventh hour bid for the support of the Working Families Party. It was an ugly deal that drew a promise-ish statement to act more or less like a Democrat (and it held up for just a few hours), but it was also a signal that Cuomo knows he has a problem.
So Teachout is a threatening candidate for Cuomo. But is she a credible candidate for the voters of New York in general and teachers in particular? What does she have going for her?
She's smart. She has an understanding of issues that is both nuanced and clear. For instance, she gets what the Supreme Court apparently does not get about corruption and the ways in which money has eroded the integrity of our political system. She gives every appearance of a person who figures out what is right to do based on core principles, rather than a politician who figures out how to make what she wants to do anyway appear to fit her alleged principles. She has, for me, some of the same appeal as Ron Paul-- regardless of how you feel about her principles, you admire that she has some and lives by them.
She's an experienced activist. She helped the Howard Dean campaign pioneer some tech methods for their groundbreaking run. She has worked with the Occupy folks. And unlike some activists (yes, even some education activists) she appears to do her work without much concern for her own ego or garnering attention. I mean, surely if you had heard her name before, you'd remember it. Her low profile and high activity suggest a person who is more concerned about results than attention.
Her running mate. Less attention has been paid to Teachout's running mate, Tim Wu. But Wu, the father of net neutrality, has a history of real activism of his own in addition to a career of tech and media scholarship. He's no lightweight.
She lacks one of the Democratic Party's less attractive qualities. At their worst, the Democratic Party embraces an attitude of "Just sit down and shut up while the best and the brightest tell you what's best for you." Reading about Teachout, one frequently encounters a thread of people empowerment-- the idea that people have been shut out. In her "Five Questions" interview on USA Today, one finds this quote:
People are out of power now, not just in their politics where they feel that their voices don't matter, but in their workplace and in the marketplace. I want to revive the old American belief -- exemplified by Jefferson (who wanted an anti-monopoly clause in the Constitution), Teddy Roosevelt and FDR -- that concentrated private power threatens democratic institutions.
She understands the big picture. Teachout certainly has something to say directly to teachers under fire from Common Core and other reformster initiatives. But in discussing these issues, she ends up here:
Bill Gates' coup is part of a larger coup we're living through today – where a few moneyed interests increasingly use their wealth to steer public policy, believing that technocratic expertise and resources alone should answer vexing political questions. Sometimes their views have merit, but the way these private interests impose their visions on the public – by overriding democratic decision-making – is a deep threat to our democracy. What's more, this private subversion of public process has come at the precise time when our common institutions, starved of funds, are most vulnerable. But by allowing private money to supplant democracy, we surrender the fate of our public institutions to the personal whims of a precious few.
Yes, Teachout is a credible candidate and a real choice for the people of New York State.
Can she win? Weeellllllllll.......... She is going to be up against a mountain of money, and she's going to be swimming in the shark-infested swimming pool that is New York politics. So it's admittedly a long shot. And yet it's a valuable long shot. Here's why.
Democrats need to learn a lesson. Lordy, lordy, lordy am I tired of a Democratic Party whose slogan is, "We may screw you over and stink to high heaven, but you know you're going to vote for us rather than a GOP candidate." The Democratic Party has taken its constituent groups for granted so long it has completely forgotten that it earned those constituencies by actually listening to them and considering their concerns. The Democratic Party-- particularly the Democratic Party of New York State-- needs a serious wake-up call.
New York State voters need to learn a lesson. You know what one of the raps on teachout is going to be, sooner or later? "How can an honest person hope to get anything done in our corrupt system?" It will be phrased as questions about her ability to "play ball" or "get things done," but with any luck, NYS will get around to asking itself the big question-- "Are we so resigned to having a corrupted system that we will only consider electing corrupt officials to work with it?" That would be a good question to think long and hard about.
Cuomo needs some help writing policy. The governor has forgotten an awful lot about being a Democrat. Even if he has to move and co-opt Teachout's platform to defang her, that's a win for the state. Granted, Cuomo has proven highly adept at making promises he won't deliver on. But he can't be held accountable for promises he doesn't make.
I think Zephyr Teachout is the real deal, a candidate who can mount a credible shot at the governor's mansion that, at a bare minimum, forces state government to address some of the issues that Cuomo has left sitting in a rolled up carpet on the back porch.
You can follow the campaign here.
More importantly, you can donate to the campaign here. You know money is going to be pouring into Cuomo's coffers from all around the country. But even for those of us not in the Empire State, Teachout's campaign is going to send a message that will resonate across the nation. So chip in. Heck, you'd spend twenty bucks just to take a date to a lousy Transformer's movie, and this campaign is going to be way more entertaining that that.
That seems fair. Teachout is a Vermont-born law professor. In profiles of her by those who know her, she comes across as humble. In her own writing and speaking, she comes across as supremely capable. And she is shaking up the race for New York's governor's seat.
While the GOP has been wrestling visibly and noisily with battles between True Believers and RINOs, the Democratic Party has quietly divided into a party of traditional Democrats and corporate operatives. Arguably, Corporatism has become a third party in American politics that has embedded itself in both Republican and Democratic camps.
Nobody typifies the Corporate Democrat brand better than Governor Andy Cuomo. The playbook is remarkably similar to the Corporate Republican playbook-- if you make the right moves on some splashy social issues, your constituents won't pay much attention to what you're doing on the wonkier issues of money and power. The down side is that every once in a while, somebody emerges who makes a clearer case to your party base, and you have to put a little more effort into looking like an actual member of your alleged political party. And so now Cuomo, who has made occasional Democrat noises while governing as a corporate conservative, finds himself running against an actual Democrat.
This wasn't how it was supposed to work. Cuomo was supposed to win in a landslide so convincing that he would emerge as a national player, maybe even a 2016 prospect. That means that Teachout doesn't have to beat him to hurt him. Even in defeat, Teachout can make Cuomo look a not-so-special governor with political liabilities both to the right and to the left.
Teachout is not some crazy old guy with a beard and a stunt candidacy. Both New York and national media are paying attention, from the Daily Kos to The Nation to David Weigel at Slate. Cuomo took her seriously enough to stage an eleventh hour bid for the support of the Working Families Party. It was an ugly deal that drew a promise-ish statement to act more or less like a Democrat (and it held up for just a few hours), but it was also a signal that Cuomo knows he has a problem.
So Teachout is a threatening candidate for Cuomo. But is she a credible candidate for the voters of New York in general and teachers in particular? What does she have going for her?
She's smart. She has an understanding of issues that is both nuanced and clear. For instance, she gets what the Supreme Court apparently does not get about corruption and the ways in which money has eroded the integrity of our political system. She gives every appearance of a person who figures out what is right to do based on core principles, rather than a politician who figures out how to make what she wants to do anyway appear to fit her alleged principles. She has, for me, some of the same appeal as Ron Paul-- regardless of how you feel about her principles, you admire that she has some and lives by them.
She's an experienced activist. She helped the Howard Dean campaign pioneer some tech methods for their groundbreaking run. She has worked with the Occupy folks. And unlike some activists (yes, even some education activists) she appears to do her work without much concern for her own ego or garnering attention. I mean, surely if you had heard her name before, you'd remember it. Her low profile and high activity suggest a person who is more concerned about results than attention.
Her running mate. Less attention has been paid to Teachout's running mate, Tim Wu. But Wu, the father of net neutrality, has a history of real activism of his own in addition to a career of tech and media scholarship. He's no lightweight.
She lacks one of the Democratic Party's less attractive qualities. At their worst, the Democratic Party embraces an attitude of "Just sit down and shut up while the best and the brightest tell you what's best for you." Reading about Teachout, one frequently encounters a thread of people empowerment-- the idea that people have been shut out. In her "Five Questions" interview on USA Today, one finds this quote:
People are out of power now, not just in their politics where they feel that their voices don't matter, but in their workplace and in the marketplace. I want to revive the old American belief -- exemplified by Jefferson (who wanted an anti-monopoly clause in the Constitution), Teddy Roosevelt and FDR -- that concentrated private power threatens democratic institutions.
She understands the big picture. Teachout certainly has something to say directly to teachers under fire from Common Core and other reformster initiatives. But in discussing these issues, she ends up here:
Bill Gates' coup is part of a larger coup we're living through today – where a few moneyed interests increasingly use their wealth to steer public policy, believing that technocratic expertise and resources alone should answer vexing political questions. Sometimes their views have merit, but the way these private interests impose their visions on the public – by overriding democratic decision-making – is a deep threat to our democracy. What's more, this private subversion of public process has come at the precise time when our common institutions, starved of funds, are most vulnerable. But by allowing private money to supplant democracy, we surrender the fate of our public institutions to the personal whims of a precious few.
Yes, Teachout is a credible candidate and a real choice for the people of New York State.
Can she win? Weeellllllllll.......... She is going to be up against a mountain of money, and she's going to be swimming in the shark-infested swimming pool that is New York politics. So it's admittedly a long shot. And yet it's a valuable long shot. Here's why.
Democrats need to learn a lesson. Lordy, lordy, lordy am I tired of a Democratic Party whose slogan is, "We may screw you over and stink to high heaven, but you know you're going to vote for us rather than a GOP candidate." The Democratic Party has taken its constituent groups for granted so long it has completely forgotten that it earned those constituencies by actually listening to them and considering their concerns. The Democratic Party-- particularly the Democratic Party of New York State-- needs a serious wake-up call.
New York State voters need to learn a lesson. You know what one of the raps on teachout is going to be, sooner or later? "How can an honest person hope to get anything done in our corrupt system?" It will be phrased as questions about her ability to "play ball" or "get things done," but with any luck, NYS will get around to asking itself the big question-- "Are we so resigned to having a corrupted system that we will only consider electing corrupt officials to work with it?" That would be a good question to think long and hard about.
Cuomo needs some help writing policy. The governor has forgotten an awful lot about being a Democrat. Even if he has to move and co-opt Teachout's platform to defang her, that's a win for the state. Granted, Cuomo has proven highly adept at making promises he won't deliver on. But he can't be held accountable for promises he doesn't make.
I think Zephyr Teachout is the real deal, a candidate who can mount a credible shot at the governor's mansion that, at a bare minimum, forces state government to address some of the issues that Cuomo has left sitting in a rolled up carpet on the back porch.
You can follow the campaign here.
More importantly, you can donate to the campaign here. You know money is going to be pouring into Cuomo's coffers from all around the country. But even for those of us not in the Empire State, Teachout's campaign is going to send a message that will resonate across the nation. So chip in. Heck, you'd spend twenty bucks just to take a date to a lousy Transformer's movie, and this campaign is going to be way more entertaining that that.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Gates Goes Shopping
Why shouldn't Bill Gates spend his money terraforming the education landscape? Why shouldn't rich guys use their power and influence to promote the issues that they care about? Haven't rich powerful guys always done so?
These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.
How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.
Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.
This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.
Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."
From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:
Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.
There is also this:
Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?
A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization. With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment. Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.
I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.
We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.
This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.
Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"
Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."
This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."
The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.
Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.
These are not easy questions to answer. After all, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others made hugely important contributions to the American landscape, legacies that have continue to benefit Americans long after these dead white guys had moved on to Robber Baron Heaven.
How is Gates different? This post by Mercedes Schneider (whose blog you should already be following), helped me see one significant difference.
Rockefeller and Carnegie (the dead white guy philanthropists I'm most familiar with) helped invent modern philanthropy by discovering some basic issues. Mostly, they discovered that when people hear you want to give away money, the wold beats a path to your door. So they set up various entities whose job was to accept, filter and respond to the applications for big bucks that various groups sent to them, based on a set of criteria that the rich guys developed out of A) their own set of concerns and B) the opinions of knowledgeable people in their fields. That's how Rockefeller, a white guy who believed in homeopathic medicine, ended up revolutionizing the study of medical science and building a higher education system for African-Americans.
This is not how the Gates Foundation does business.
Where classic philanthropy says, "Come make your pitch and if we like your work, we will help support you," the Gates Foundation says, "We have a project we want to launch.Let's go shopping for someone to do that for us."
From the Gates Foundation Grantseeker FAQ:
Q. How do I apply for a grant from the foundation? A. We do not make grants outside our funding priorities. In general, we directly invite proposals by directly contacting organizations.
There is also this:
Q: Who makes decisions on investments and when?
A: As part of its operating model, the foundation continues delegate decision making on grants and contracts to leaders across the organization. With our new process, decision makers are identified at the early stage of an investment. Check-in points are built in to help ensure that decision makers are informed about and can raise questions during development, rather than holding all questions until the end.
I know it says "investments," but we're still on the foundations Grantseeker FAQ page, in the section that talks about how various data and progress reports will be used along the way as grant recipients complete whatever project Gates is funding.
We pick the project, we approach the people we want to have do it, we bankroll it, and we supervise it until completion. The Gates Foundation model looks less like a philanthropy and more like corporate subcontracts.
This model explains a few issues about the Gates approach.
Why do so many edu-groups funded by Gates seem to have no existence outside of doing Gates work? Because Gates isn't looking to find people already running proven programs that can use a financial boost, but instead is looking to sow money and reap groups doing exactly what Gates wants to have done. "I've got a gabillion dollars here to give to a group that will pilot and promote an unproven educational technique! I'd like to pay you guys to set that up for us?"
Occasionally Gates does work with a pre-existing group, but often this is a matter of shopping for someone who can provide brand recognition, like AFT or NEA. But those "grants" are still predicated on "I have a project I want you to do for us" and not "Let me help support the good work you're already doing."
This is far different from Rockefeller's "I've got a gabillion dollars to spend promoting Black education in the South. Find me some people who are doing good work in the field that I can help expand with this money."
The Gates Foundation model is astroturf philanthropy.
Look, if you're a rich guy who loves anchovy pizza and you want to use your clout, that's fine. If you open the door for successful anchovy pizza makers to apply for grants so they can expand, that's super. But if you decide that you are going to fund a whole new anchovy pizza plant, and hire health department inspectors to get all other pizza makers condemned, and hire consultants to flood the media with bogus reports about the healthful effects of anchovy pizza, and create other consulting firms to push legislation outlawing everything except anchovies on pizza-- if you do all that, you are not a philanthropist. You're just a guy using money and power to make people do what you want them to.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and the rest were not saints, and it's arguable whether their philanthropic benefits offset their robber baronical misbehavior. But when it came to running a corporate-based oligarchy, they were small-timers compared to the folks at the Gates.
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