There's an interesting and fairly well-balanced article in February's Forbes about Pearson, focusing on CEO John Fallon. "Everybody Hates Pearson" is worth a read, but I'm going to pull a pair of quotes from it today.
At one point, writer Jennifer Reingold says this about Fallon:
He emphasizes that the company’s goal is to help students succeed...
That's not entirely true. Part of Pearson's job as the international behemoth of education is to define what "succeed" means. Which is precisely why an international behemoth of education poses a danger to education. Earlier in the article, Reingold offers this quote:
“It doesn’t matter to us whether our customers are hundreds of thousands of individual students and their parents in China, or thousands of school districts in America,” says Fallon. “What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.”
There's your problem. If you're trying to do "the same thing," for a a student in the US and a student in China, and if "it doesn't matter" to you which is which, then something is wrong.
A Pearson fan is going to protest, "Well, not exactly the same thing. No, obviously not that." And I'm sure that Pearson makes sure to change the language of the test and adjust the price for the local currency. But if your focus is on a fundamental sameness, if you are looking to create a uniform approach to education that can be used all across the globe, then you're doing it wrong.
What we're talking about is uniformity, standardization-- and uniformity is the enemy of excellence.
Jack Teagarden, George Brunis, and J. J. Johnson were great jazz trombone players, and it takes me about two seconds of listening to a recording to know which one I'm hearing play, because they are completely different. All excellent. All different.
Now, I could say that they're all essentially doing the same thing-- playing jazz trombone. But as soon as I try to come up with an "objective" measure of good jazz trombone playing, one that would fit all three of them plus Miff Mole or Urbie Green or some guy in China that I don't even know about, I would choose one of two options.
A) Declare that one behavior is defined as success, in which case I could end up declaring that Teagarden is not a great jazz trombonist because he doesn't use Johnson's be-bop licks. Any system that calls Teagarden a failure as a jazz player is patently absurd.
B) Select a definition of success that includes only traits that all jazz trombonists share. Or to put it another way, come up with a definition of success that deliberately excludes all the traits that make particular jazz trombonists great. This is also deeply backwards.
Uniformity and standardization do not just fail to embrace excellence; they actively reject it. Excellence, difference, variation, individuality-- all must be marked as failure because all violate the standard of uniformity.
When a cook at a McFastfood McRestaurant cooks a stunning chicken cordon bleu, he doesn't get a commndation. He gets fired. When a flight attendant shows up for work in uniform clothing that she has torn up and resewn into a stylish gown, she doesn't get a special prize.
There's only one way to create an educational system that can be marketed all around the globe, only one way to create a system that doesn't care whether you're using it in Nanking or Omaha. The only way to create such a system is to define success as something uniform, bland, and mediocre. The only way to create such a system is to use a definition of success that rejects excellence or any other sort of difference.
You can have an educational system that is good, or one that is uniform. You can't have both.
Showing posts with label Forbes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forbes. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Monday, December 1, 2014
Forbes Fab Five by Five (Part II)
In our last installment, Forbes called a summit of Many Very Rich People to lay out what it would cost to fulfill the Must Have list for remaking American education. Now, we're going to sit around with some alleged representatives of education stakeholders. And we should note that it's happening in the department of Forbes.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
Paul Tudor Jones (founder of the Robin Hood Foundation) will be directing traffic as Andy Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Kay Henderson (DC school chancellor) jaw about this. I should note that I'll be walking you through the Short and Marginally Sweeter transcript; apparently there is a longer version, but I just can't bring myself to go there.
You can read the account of what Forbes decided US education Really Needed at this post. The basic list of five critical elements of an educational overhaul are:
1) Teacher efficacy-- recruit best and brightest
2) Universal Pre-K-- because childhood is too long
3) School leadership-- give principals greater power over staff
4) Blended learning-- broadband and computers for everybody
5) Common Core/ College Readiness-- insert all classic baloney arguments here
So, let's begin.
Jones: "We have literally, the pillars of education in the US" here today. Our first question is a request to comment on the five...well, I guess we're going to call them Big Ideas. Which is biggest?
Weingarten goes first. Sigh. She thinks the five big ideas are really big and must all get done together. She sticks up for the Common Core some more, as if the whole foundational assumption of Common Core is that Weingarten's constituents can't do their jobs. I've made the same complaint about my own NEA many times-- would it be too much to ask that the head of a teachers' union stick up for teachers. Today, apparently, it is.
Henderson thinks that control of teaching staff and Common Core are the secret of DC's imaginary leap forward.
Arne thinks all five are swell, and all must be done at the same time and at scale. There are days when I think Arne is just a life-sized See 'N Say-- pull a string and some combination of his usual word salad comes out. Name checks his favorite Places Where Things Are Going Great (DC, Indiana, Tennessee). Thinks what's needed are leaders who will buck their own party orthodoxy-- so, Republicans who will cheerfully welcome federal control and Democrats who will screw teachers and public schools. Which brings us to
Cuomo agrees that we need all five. He decries the dual system of good schools for some and bad schools for others, as if he hasn't been working hard to spread that two-tier system. Andy says the big problem is that we're moving too slow and we're okay with that. Guess that's one more hint about what NY teachers can look forward to, and soon.
Jones asks which of the five can be controlled, and which can't. Weingarten makes noises about co-operating on local level, and Henderson allows that she has great power but she Gets Things Done when she works with her union partners, gets money from her government partners, and gets even more money from philanthropists.
Duncan goes with great teachers, great principals, high standards. Then someone pulls his string and something comes out from some alternate universe:
We found obviously that federal mandates don’t work well. Where we’ve had the most success is around incentives. And lots of carrots. Not mandate, not have sticks, but put money out there where we can to reward excellence–and that’s a hard sell on both sides in Congress. They’d much prefer straight formula funding. So we’re always fighting to have just a little bit of money to put out there as carrots.
Wait! What? I'm pretty sure the entire foundation of the waiver-based RttT system is sticks. Sticks to thump on states, evaluatory sticks to thump teachers, mandated testing, mandated school closings, do what we tell you or we'll let the wratch of NCLB rain down on your head-- maybe Arne just doesn't know what the difference is between a carrot and a stick. I mean, they're both shaped about the same. Maybe he's just completely confused.
Cuomo observes that he didn't get anything done by being nice, so he made everybody's money contingent on how well they follow his orders and he hasn't had any problems since. Money buys compliance! He has it all figured out, except maybe the part where purchasing compliance gets you nice paperwork and reports and people who are undercutting you every single chance they get. It gets you a mandate that never arrives because you were only able to buy just enough support to win, but not enough to win in a Presidential timbre manner.
Jones wants to know how philanthropists. Randi says "we're starting to learn what works" and this whole sad performance is one more example of how it's useless to get a seat at the table if you're not going to say anything useful once you get there. Honestly-- if you erased the names and titles, you would never read this article and guess that one of the participants was the head of the second-biggest teacher's union in the US.
Henderson gives Arne some strokes for being the only government guy who will fund innovation, and I think we can all agree that using a bureaucratic waiver maneuver to create new laws without the benefit of Congress is pretty innovative. The guillotine was also hot new stuff in its day.
Arne will now deliver more History from an Alternative Universe:
Having a common way of measuring success is just so basic and fundamental to all of your businesses–that’s a radical concept in education. We need to get to that point of having a high bar and having clear ways of measuring how everybody is stacking up against that bar. Under No Child Left Behind, about 20 states dummied-down their standards, they reduced their standards. Why? To make politicians of both parties look good. It was terrible for children. Not one person challenged those politicians. Until [philanthropic leaders] and the broader citizenry hold politicians accountable, we’ll continue to be mired in mediocrity.
It's true. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I have never measured success in any manner. Just throw darts at a board and call it a day. But states did not dummy down under NCLB to make politicians look good. They did it to save their states' school from punishment under the heavy brainless hand of top-down federal mandates. They did it to avoid an unavoidable punishment that was inevitable because the feds set standards that nobody believed could be met, but they set them anyway. The dummying down was a completely predictable result of the perverse incentives built into a unsustainable punishment-based test-driven system created by educational amateurs in Washington DC. Dammit, Arne, if you want to learn a lesson from NCLB, learn that one, and learn it in some manner other than repeating the same damn mistakes.
As I said, there's a longer version of this somewhere. But as much as I love you all, that is a hit I'm not ready to take for the team.
Forbes Fab Five By Five (Part I)
The philanthropic fiduciary phenoms at Forbes brought together some eduwhizes to play Pimp My Ride with the US education system. They started with the basic questions-- How much money would it take for a complete refurbishing of the US education system, what would the priorities for such a rebuild be, and how much benefit would accrue from such a redo?
They followed this unicorn-fueled analysis with a roundtable of Educational Leaders; they put that discussion in a separate article, and I'm going to do the same. Part I will look just at their master plan, because it's kind of interesting when the Masters of the Universe stop with the soft lights and champagne and Johnny Mathis records and just say straight out what they want to do.
So, first-- let's set our standards really, really low:
We set out to determine the costs and benefits of taking U.S. schoolkids from their middling global rankings to top five in the world, as measured by math scores and rates for high school graduation, college entry and four-year college completion.
That's it. Math scores, grad rates, and college success. Imagine what our education system would look like if those-- and nothing else-- became the goal of US schools. (Spoiler alert-- it wouldn't look much like an actual education system.)
But while our standards may be low, the stakes are really, really high:
The resulting numbers were big. Really big. The investment required to implement all five would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 trillion, spread over 20 years. Or $310 billion a year in today’s dollars. And the payoff, as calculated by factoring in all those additional, better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP? Almost $225 trillion, spread over an 80-year time horizon, which incorporates an entire generation’s professional achievement.
Where did those numbers come from? But in case you wonder, the cost analysis was overseen by David Steiner, the dean of Hunter College’s School of Education and New York State’s former education commissioner, and Ashley Berner, who works there, too, I guess? They consulted experts in the field (top experts! spared no expense!) For the benefits side of the projection, they used "a formula based on complex modeling by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek that correlates the effect each policy would have on math scores to long-term economic performance and structural economic changes." Then all the numbers were written in unicorn blood on the wings of a gryphon who flew to Narnia and had the figures processed by an army of Jabberwockies. Let's just say that Forbes "projects" that it would cost A Lot of Money, but pay off in Even More Money.
The article also notes that the researchers made many assumptions and skipped over others (e.g. they assumed only recruiting great teachers and not firing crappy ones). So, unicorn blood taken only from unicorns who are left-handed and speak esperanto.
This giant educational pimpage requires, in Forbes' opinion, five major initiatives. Do these, and the US will have oodles of students graduating from our math academies to go finish college. Here we go! And each one comes with a few words from-- well, sponsors? interested rich guys?
Teacher Efficacy
We need to attract the best and the brightest to teaching. We will do it by throwing money at them. That's the plan, backed up by a McKinsey study that estimates (wait-- can you do that? Because I'm thinking scientists could have a lot more fun doing studies if they could just estimate their findings instead of having to find facts and stuff) that a 50% salary increase would result in teachers coming from the top third of college grads (which would be good, because everybody knows that doing well in college and being able to teach in a classroom are exactly the same skill sets).
Each of these categories also comes with numbers about cost and returns and I'm not going to report them because, unicorn's blood. Suffice it to say that each would supposedly cost an incredible amount of money but would return a ridiculously incredible amount of money. Seriously-- is this how rich guys convince other rich guys to invest money, because I'm suddenly feeling even less confident about the underpinnings of our economy.
Our commenter is Larry Robbins, a hedge fund billionaire who wants his kids to have good teachers and thinks the "blunt instrument" of paying everyone more would be swell. Though he also proposes the really interesting idea of exempting top teachers from income tax. Says Robbins, "That would cost less than our subsidies to agriculture, excluding food stamps. It would cost one-third of that which we are spending on wars. Should there not be a war for teachers?"
Universal Pre-K
Get pre-K for every kid in the country. But we need to do more than just add pre-K to schools. For some reason, we'd also need to mess with teacher observation, and of course connecting to the curricular requirements of kindergarten. Because play is for babies. No, seriously. Only infants should be allowed to play.
Comments from J. B. Pritzker, who inherited his billions and who runs Pritzker Children's Initiative and Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development (because philanthropy needs good branding). His comments can be summarized as, "I do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. If a four year old learns more words, he'll stop being poor." Did I mention that Pritzker inherited his money?
School Leadership
Empower principals. Attract higher-level talent by raising salaries 26% (seriously, that's the number, because, you know, 25% wouldn't be enough and 27% would be overkill). "Reform" state laws so that principals have the powers of business leaders and can hire and fire and cook books and sacrifice long-term success for short-term flash. Create principal-training academies, presumably where they can be taught cool business management stuff and not have their heads filled with education nonsense. And not that Forbes loves them some business sense or anything, but they predict a ROI of 5,551x the original investment.
There does not seem to be any question of how giving a principal Icahn-like power might affect that whole recruitment thing. Our guest commenter is John Fisher, who inherited his money and used it to buy the Oakland A's. His educational involvement is a mess of charter baloney. Fun fact about Fisher: the money he inherited was money his father made running the Gap. KIPP founders approached him and said, "It's all about replicating leaders like us," and that sounded about right to the guy who made his millions creating a chain devoted to fashion excellence and quality, so now the Fisher Foundation is a big KIPP financial partner. All of this is so interesting that I completely forgot to pay any attention to anything Fisher has to say about education.
Blended Learning
This is "arming students with computers and delivering rote lessons in part through digital media, personalized and optimized to individual needs and pace, allowing teachers more value-added." Which is great because I end every day thinking, damn, if only I had had more value-added today. I wish it came in a can, like V-8.
This will require broadband everywhere, as well as coaching schools and teachers on how toimplement lesson plan B when the technology fails once again integrate technology in lessons, because computers are magical.
Fred Wilson is a venture capital guy who thinks that blended learning will kill one size fits all learning and give us personalized teaching for each and every kid. And he thinks the FCC E-rate program will totally pay for all this. I hope he does a bit more due diligence when he's managing his venture capital fund.
Common Core/College Readiness
Wonder how CCSS is still hanging in there? One likely answer is that rich guys just love it. "While Common Core has critics on both extremes of the political spectrum, those in the sensible center rightly view high national standards, coupled with tools to achieve success, as a no-brainer." This is unintentionally hilarious to me because I do indeed believe that Common Core makes the most sense if you do in fact have no brain. The Forbes Factoid Squad projects that it will cost $185.4 billion to make CCSS fully happen, but will yield returns of $27.9 trillion. Do you suppose that rich guys smoke really, really good drugs. Laced with unicorn blood?
Michael Bloomberg's daughter Emma (another inheritance billionaire) offers this observation:
Essentially, Common Core is bringing our education system in line with the way the world works today standards intended to help address America’s lagging international tech scores, our inability to produce college and career-ready graduates and the growing inequality in educational opportunity, not just among socioeconomic classes but among states.
It's awesome in its almost complete lack of facts, since CCSS doesn't address most of these things, isn't aligned to anything else in the world, and won't fix some of these problems because they don't exist. But if you get in trouble supporting the Core, don't worry, because Ms. Bloomberg makes a promise:
We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.
And with the kind of money these guys have available, that's no empty promise.
So those are the five pillars of magical refurbishing on the nation's education system. And to discuss how awesome all this is, Forbes has asked Paul Tudor Jones (Robin Hood Foundation) to sit down with Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, Andy Cuomo, and DC public schools chancellor Kay Henderson. You know this is going to be awesome (even more awesome if you read it while high on unicorn blood).
They followed this unicorn-fueled analysis with a roundtable of Educational Leaders; they put that discussion in a separate article, and I'm going to do the same. Part I will look just at their master plan, because it's kind of interesting when the Masters of the Universe stop with the soft lights and champagne and Johnny Mathis records and just say straight out what they want to do.
So, first-- let's set our standards really, really low:
We set out to determine the costs and benefits of taking U.S. schoolkids from their middling global rankings to top five in the world, as measured by math scores and rates for high school graduation, college entry and four-year college completion.
That's it. Math scores, grad rates, and college success. Imagine what our education system would look like if those-- and nothing else-- became the goal of US schools. (Spoiler alert-- it wouldn't look much like an actual education system.)
But while our standards may be low, the stakes are really, really high:
The resulting numbers were big. Really big. The investment required to implement all five would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 trillion, spread over 20 years. Or $310 billion a year in today’s dollars. And the payoff, as calculated by factoring in all those additional, better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP? Almost $225 trillion, spread over an 80-year time horizon, which incorporates an entire generation’s professional achievement.
Where did those numbers come from? But in case you wonder, the cost analysis was overseen by David Steiner, the dean of Hunter College’s School of Education and New York State’s former education commissioner, and Ashley Berner, who works there, too, I guess? They consulted experts in the field (top experts! spared no expense!) For the benefits side of the projection, they used "a formula based on complex modeling by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek that correlates the effect each policy would have on math scores to long-term economic performance and structural economic changes." Then all the numbers were written in unicorn blood on the wings of a gryphon who flew to Narnia and had the figures processed by an army of Jabberwockies. Let's just say that Forbes "projects" that it would cost A Lot of Money, but pay off in Even More Money.
The article also notes that the researchers made many assumptions and skipped over others (e.g. they assumed only recruiting great teachers and not firing crappy ones). So, unicorn blood taken only from unicorns who are left-handed and speak esperanto.
This giant educational pimpage requires, in Forbes' opinion, five major initiatives. Do these, and the US will have oodles of students graduating from our math academies to go finish college. Here we go! And each one comes with a few words from-- well, sponsors? interested rich guys?
Teacher Efficacy
We need to attract the best and the brightest to teaching. We will do it by throwing money at them. That's the plan, backed up by a McKinsey study that estimates (wait-- can you do that? Because I'm thinking scientists could have a lot more fun doing studies if they could just estimate their findings instead of having to find facts and stuff) that a 50% salary increase would result in teachers coming from the top third of college grads (which would be good, because everybody knows that doing well in college and being able to teach in a classroom are exactly the same skill sets).
Each of these categories also comes with numbers about cost and returns and I'm not going to report them because, unicorn's blood. Suffice it to say that each would supposedly cost an incredible amount of money but would return a ridiculously incredible amount of money. Seriously-- is this how rich guys convince other rich guys to invest money, because I'm suddenly feeling even less confident about the underpinnings of our economy.
Our commenter is Larry Robbins, a hedge fund billionaire who wants his kids to have good teachers and thinks the "blunt instrument" of paying everyone more would be swell. Though he also proposes the really interesting idea of exempting top teachers from income tax. Says Robbins, "That would cost less than our subsidies to agriculture, excluding food stamps. It would cost one-third of that which we are spending on wars. Should there not be a war for teachers?"
Universal Pre-K
Get pre-K for every kid in the country. But we need to do more than just add pre-K to schools. For some reason, we'd also need to mess with teacher observation, and of course connecting to the curricular requirements of kindergarten. Because play is for babies. No, seriously. Only infants should be allowed to play.
Comments from J. B. Pritzker, who inherited his billions and who runs Pritzker Children's Initiative and Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development (because philanthropy needs good branding). His comments can be summarized as, "I do not understand the difference between correlation and causation. If a four year old learns more words, he'll stop being poor." Did I mention that Pritzker inherited his money?
School Leadership
Empower principals. Attract higher-level talent by raising salaries 26% (seriously, that's the number, because, you know, 25% wouldn't be enough and 27% would be overkill). "Reform" state laws so that principals have the powers of business leaders and can hire and fire and cook books and sacrifice long-term success for short-term flash. Create principal-training academies, presumably where they can be taught cool business management stuff and not have their heads filled with education nonsense. And not that Forbes loves them some business sense or anything, but they predict a ROI of 5,551x the original investment.
There does not seem to be any question of how giving a principal Icahn-like power might affect that whole recruitment thing. Our guest commenter is John Fisher, who inherited his money and used it to buy the Oakland A's. His educational involvement is a mess of charter baloney. Fun fact about Fisher: the money he inherited was money his father made running the Gap. KIPP founders approached him and said, "It's all about replicating leaders like us," and that sounded about right to the guy who made his millions creating a chain devoted to fashion excellence and quality, so now the Fisher Foundation is a big KIPP financial partner. All of this is so interesting that I completely forgot to pay any attention to anything Fisher has to say about education.
Blended Learning
This is "arming students with computers and delivering rote lessons in part through digital media, personalized and optimized to individual needs and pace, allowing teachers more value-added." Which is great because I end every day thinking, damn, if only I had had more value-added today. I wish it came in a can, like V-8.
This will require broadband everywhere, as well as coaching schools and teachers on how to
Fred Wilson is a venture capital guy who thinks that blended learning will kill one size fits all learning and give us personalized teaching for each and every kid. And he thinks the FCC E-rate program will totally pay for all this. I hope he does a bit more due diligence when he's managing his venture capital fund.
Common Core/College Readiness
Wonder how CCSS is still hanging in there? One likely answer is that rich guys just love it. "While Common Core has critics on both extremes of the political spectrum, those in the sensible center rightly view high national standards, coupled with tools to achieve success, as a no-brainer." This is unintentionally hilarious to me because I do indeed believe that Common Core makes the most sense if you do in fact have no brain. The Forbes Factoid Squad projects that it will cost $185.4 billion to make CCSS fully happen, but will yield returns of $27.9 trillion. Do you suppose that rich guys smoke really, really good drugs. Laced with unicorn blood?
Michael Bloomberg's daughter Emma (another inheritance billionaire) offers this observation:
Essentially, Common Core is bringing our education system in line with the way the world works today standards intended to help address America’s lagging international tech scores, our inability to produce college and career-ready graduates and the growing inequality in educational opportunity, not just among socioeconomic classes but among states.
It's awesome in its almost complete lack of facts, since CCSS doesn't address most of these things, isn't aligned to anything else in the world, and won't fix some of these problems because they don't exist. But if you get in trouble supporting the Core, don't worry, because Ms. Bloomberg makes a promise:
We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.
And with the kind of money these guys have available, that's no empty promise.
So those are the five pillars of magical refurbishing on the nation's education system. And to discuss how awesome all this is, Forbes has asked Paul Tudor Jones (Robin Hood Foundation) to sit down with Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, Andy Cuomo, and DC public schools chancellor Kay Henderson. You know this is going to be awesome (even more awesome if you read it while high on unicorn blood).
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Charter Conversations
Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Andy Smarick dissects and critiques the current state of dialogue regarding charter schools.
What's the problem?
He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.
The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle-free conversations are worthwhile, but undervalued and insufficiently publicized. That's because of the second conversation.
The second, about philosophy and politics, is essentially about whether chartering is good or bad. Participants are interested in basic questions such as, “Should charters exist?” and “What does chartering mean for public education?” This conversation, which typically emanates from deeply held principles and big ideas, seems to attract the scholarly, the idealistic, and the impassioned—but also the certain and the dismissive.
Smarick's concern is that the impassioned side of the conversation attracts too much name-calling and sensationalism. If you want attention and press, he says, use name calling like "privateers" or “corporate interests, hedge fund managers and billionaires starve public schools and services of resources and suck up as much profit as they can." He's also not fond of long-form pieces like the New Jersey article that focused on the web of corruption and general misbehavior that characterizes the charterward shift of New Jersey schools. He thinks the Detroit Free-Press series on corruption and general misbehavior in the Michigan charter missed a chance to examine charter relations to public school and instead focused on scandal and intrigue.
There's a faint smell of flop-sweat around Smarick's complaints, like a Nixon aide complaining that Watergate coverage is failing to mention all the great things the President did in China. But Smarick is generally a serious guy, so I'm going to address his concern seriously here.
What does he want to see?
Here’s my request. If you think chartering is, at root, a threat to public education and believe that it must be brought to an end, please make that case publicly and straightforwardly, with conviction and tact. You’ll find a more receptive audience than you might suspect. If you aren’t obdurately anti-charter but think there are aspects of chartering that need serious improvement, marshal the data and make your case.
I think there a couple of problems with this request.
Smarick's two-conversations model misses a third conversation that's going on. That's the conversation not about charters in the abstract large-scale policy sense, but in the specific let's-talk-about-the-charter-in-my-neighborhood sense.
Many of the people who have found themselves embroiled in charter debates are there because, like folks in NOLA or Detroit or Chicago or NYC etc etc etc are there because they are dealing with the very specific behavior surrounding very specific charters. The stories he cites about Camden and Michigan are not policy stories-- they are local news stories.
The charter movement's problem is not a policy-and-philosophy problem. It's a too-many-instances-of-specific-crooked-behavior problem. That problem points to some policy and philosophy issues, but those aren't what are driving press coverage and public crankiness.
What's driving the bad press?
Inside Philanthropy ran a piece Friday looking at how Charles Schwab is heavily into charter school investing.
A $1 million gift to the Charter School Growth Fund in 2011 stands out, not only because of the size of the gift but also because of its destination. Founded in 2005, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a bit like the mother ship of the charter school movement, working to grow and professionalize this alternative ed sector. A lot of the major players in the charter school funding world have given to CSGF, including Walton, Gates, Dell, Bradley, and Fisher.
It is no mystery why so many finance guys are interested in the charter movement. Forbes (not exactly liberal tools of the public school establishment) reported back in September of 2013 that investors were flocking to charters because Clinton-era tax laws made such investments very attractive, possibly allowing investors to double their money in seven years (and that includes plenty of foreign investors, which is its own kind of troubling).
Charter schools are not new at all. But the influx of hedge fund managers and rock stars and all manner of people whose motivation is not quality education but ROI is a recent development that has shaped the charter movement, and not in a good way. In state after state, money has greased the wheels of charter regulation (or lack thereof) and the results are fairly predictable.
But people are not waking up to these issues because of some burning interest in educational philosophy or public-private education policy. They are waking up because their own neighborhood schools are being shuttered and replaced by charters that handle them with the same kindness and consideration as the phone company or the DMV.
In my own small ruralish town, people used to not care about PA's cyber-charter laws. Then our school district shuttered two elementary schools to save around 800K in the same year that they had to pay out about 800K for seventy-some students to attend cyber-charters. That, not some philosophical interest in policy-wonkery, is what had taxpayers saying, "Well, that can't be right" and a school board president saying, "You all need to call your congressman today."
Three days after Smarick posted his piece, the Hartford Courant was reporting on the FBI serving subpoenas to FUSE, a Connecticut charter operator. Reporters who went to FUSE offices found a receptionist shredding papers. This sort of story has reached the level of "dog bites man" for its shock and surprise value, so in that sense, Smarick is correct in saying these stories might get too much attention.
But his straining to suggest that coverage of charter misbehavior is exaggerated is off base. For instance, the coverage of Tony Bennett's misbehavior was consistent with the level of misbehavior he displayed and was, again, a local story, particularly for the schools that might have stayed open had they received the same largesse Bennett extended to others. His "exoneration"is not particularly credible nor convincing.
When all is said and done, I'm not sure exactly what Smarick wants. Facts? The stories that he objects to are all loaded with carefully and responsibly researched facts. Make the anti-charter case with tact? Personally, I've made the case both with tact and without. But there are more gifted writers than I who have made the charts and graphs and fact-based arguments about charters in their neck of the woods (Jersey Jazzman pulls off that trick regularly).
Less inflamatory rhetoric? That's not an unreasonable request, though people who are fighting for the life of a local school district that they value are often rather inflamed. Particularly when it turns out they are being shut out of policy decisions that A) have a huge effect on them and B) turn out to have been made for financial, not educational, reasons. It only gets worse if it turns out that some sort of misbehavior is also involved.
Sometimes you have a PR problem because of perception unrelated to reality. Sometimes you have a PR problem because your client keeps doing bad things. That seems to be the plight of the modern charter. Old-school charters, the kinds started by teachers and local people and persons who were generally on an educational mission-- these charters did not give rise to large conversations about the value of charters. But the modern 500-pound-gorilla mega-chain ROI charters are a different animal.
Remember that old Ann Landers column?
Dear Ann Landers: I`m a 16-year-old girl who is a nervous wreck from getting yelled at. All I hear from morning till night is, ``Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework, clean up your room.`` How can I get them off my case?
Sick of Parents
Dear Sick: Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework and clean up your room.
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
If charters are tired of being attacked, they could stop attacking public education, as in the recent charter gathering in which the recurring theme was "Charters are great because public schools suck." I'm not a fan of "they started it" as an argument, but it's also specious to declare "all I did was keep calling him names and stealing his lunch, and then he just hit me for no reason!"
I'm not a fan of Smarick's first posited conversation (let's just assume charters are great), I think the second one is valuable (let's talk about how and if charters can work), but I think both are being drowned out by the third conversation, which is a mass of local conversations about the damage being done and the attacks on local schools that people feel they are suffering through. That conversation is, I believe, a direct result of the injection of huge amounts of money into the process. It's hard to have the conversation because the stakes on all sides are so high (ROI vs. local concerns for children).
I'm actually a fan of old-school charters, and it makes me sad that their promise has been swept aside by the current wave of money-driven charter chains. But asking people to please be more polite and reasonable and please stop pointing out where we've screwed you over is not likely to get the conversation back on track or reclaim the benefits that charter schools could provide.
What's the problem?
He starts by observing that there are really two conversations going on.
The first "presupposes (or, at minimum, concedes) the legitimacy of chartering and then explores how to make it better." Smarick believes that these nuts-and-bolts, sizzle-free conversations are worthwhile, but undervalued and insufficiently publicized. That's because of the second conversation.
The second, about philosophy and politics, is essentially about whether chartering is good or bad. Participants are interested in basic questions such as, “Should charters exist?” and “What does chartering mean for public education?” This conversation, which typically emanates from deeply held principles and big ideas, seems to attract the scholarly, the idealistic, and the impassioned—but also the certain and the dismissive.
Smarick's concern is that the impassioned side of the conversation attracts too much name-calling and sensationalism. If you want attention and press, he says, use name calling like "privateers" or “corporate interests, hedge fund managers and billionaires starve public schools and services of resources and suck up as much profit as they can." He's also not fond of long-form pieces like the New Jersey article that focused on the web of corruption and general misbehavior that characterizes the charterward shift of New Jersey schools. He thinks the Detroit Free-Press series on corruption and general misbehavior in the Michigan charter missed a chance to examine charter relations to public school and instead focused on scandal and intrigue.
There's a faint smell of flop-sweat around Smarick's complaints, like a Nixon aide complaining that Watergate coverage is failing to mention all the great things the President did in China. But Smarick is generally a serious guy, so I'm going to address his concern seriously here.
What does he want to see?
Here’s my request. If you think chartering is, at root, a threat to public education and believe that it must be brought to an end, please make that case publicly and straightforwardly, with conviction and tact. You’ll find a more receptive audience than you might suspect. If you aren’t obdurately anti-charter but think there are aspects of chartering that need serious improvement, marshal the data and make your case.
I think there a couple of problems with this request.
Smarick's two-conversations model misses a third conversation that's going on. That's the conversation not about charters in the abstract large-scale policy sense, but in the specific let's-talk-about-the-charter-in-my-neighborhood sense.
Many of the people who have found themselves embroiled in charter debates are there because, like folks in NOLA or Detroit or Chicago or NYC etc etc etc are there because they are dealing with the very specific behavior surrounding very specific charters. The stories he cites about Camden and Michigan are not policy stories-- they are local news stories.
The charter movement's problem is not a policy-and-philosophy problem. It's a too-many-instances-of-specific-crooked-behavior problem. That problem points to some policy and philosophy issues, but those aren't what are driving press coverage and public crankiness.
What's driving the bad press?
Inside Philanthropy ran a piece Friday looking at how Charles Schwab is heavily into charter school investing.
A $1 million gift to the Charter School Growth Fund in 2011 stands out, not only because of the size of the gift but also because of its destination. Founded in 2005, the Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a bit like the mother ship of the charter school movement, working to grow and professionalize this alternative ed sector. A lot of the major players in the charter school funding world have given to CSGF, including Walton, Gates, Dell, Bradley, and Fisher.
It is no mystery why so many finance guys are interested in the charter movement. Forbes (not exactly liberal tools of the public school establishment) reported back in September of 2013 that investors were flocking to charters because Clinton-era tax laws made such investments very attractive, possibly allowing investors to double their money in seven years (and that includes plenty of foreign investors, which is its own kind of troubling).
Charter schools are not new at all. But the influx of hedge fund managers and rock stars and all manner of people whose motivation is not quality education but ROI is a recent development that has shaped the charter movement, and not in a good way. In state after state, money has greased the wheels of charter regulation (or lack thereof) and the results are fairly predictable.
But people are not waking up to these issues because of some burning interest in educational philosophy or public-private education policy. They are waking up because their own neighborhood schools are being shuttered and replaced by charters that handle them with the same kindness and consideration as the phone company or the DMV.
In my own small ruralish town, people used to not care about PA's cyber-charter laws. Then our school district shuttered two elementary schools to save around 800K in the same year that they had to pay out about 800K for seventy-some students to attend cyber-charters. That, not some philosophical interest in policy-wonkery, is what had taxpayers saying, "Well, that can't be right" and a school board president saying, "You all need to call your congressman today."
Three days after Smarick posted his piece, the Hartford Courant was reporting on the FBI serving subpoenas to FUSE, a Connecticut charter operator. Reporters who went to FUSE offices found a receptionist shredding papers. This sort of story has reached the level of "dog bites man" for its shock and surprise value, so in that sense, Smarick is correct in saying these stories might get too much attention.
But his straining to suggest that coverage of charter misbehavior is exaggerated is off base. For instance, the coverage of Tony Bennett's misbehavior was consistent with the level of misbehavior he displayed and was, again, a local story, particularly for the schools that might have stayed open had they received the same largesse Bennett extended to others. His "exoneration"is not particularly credible nor convincing.
When all is said and done, I'm not sure exactly what Smarick wants. Facts? The stories that he objects to are all loaded with carefully and responsibly researched facts. Make the anti-charter case with tact? Personally, I've made the case both with tact and without. But there are more gifted writers than I who have made the charts and graphs and fact-based arguments about charters in their neck of the woods (Jersey Jazzman pulls off that trick regularly).
Less inflamatory rhetoric? That's not an unreasonable request, though people who are fighting for the life of a local school district that they value are often rather inflamed. Particularly when it turns out they are being shut out of policy decisions that A) have a huge effect on them and B) turn out to have been made for financial, not educational, reasons. It only gets worse if it turns out that some sort of misbehavior is also involved.
Sometimes you have a PR problem because of perception unrelated to reality. Sometimes you have a PR problem because your client keeps doing bad things. That seems to be the plight of the modern charter. Old-school charters, the kinds started by teachers and local people and persons who were generally on an educational mission-- these charters did not give rise to large conversations about the value of charters. But the modern 500-pound-gorilla mega-chain ROI charters are a different animal.
Remember that old Ann Landers column?
Dear Ann Landers: I`m a 16-year-old girl who is a nervous wreck from getting yelled at. All I hear from morning till night is, ``Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework, clean up your room.`` How can I get them off my case?
Sick of Parents
Dear Sick: Stop smoking, get off the phone, hang up your clothes, do your homework and clean up your room.
If charters are tired of press about how they get sweetheart deals with politicians to strip resources from public schools in order to enrich themselves, if they're tired of stories about how some charter operator got caught in crooked deals, if they're tired of being raked over the coals for using politics to grease some moneyed wheels-- well, their best move would be to stop doing those things.
If charters are tired of being attacked, they could stop attacking public education, as in the recent charter gathering in which the recurring theme was "Charters are great because public schools suck." I'm not a fan of "they started it" as an argument, but it's also specious to declare "all I did was keep calling him names and stealing his lunch, and then he just hit me for no reason!"
I'm not a fan of Smarick's first posited conversation (let's just assume charters are great), I think the second one is valuable (let's talk about how and if charters can work), but I think both are being drowned out by the third conversation, which is a mass of local conversations about the damage being done and the attacks on local schools that people feel they are suffering through. That conversation is, I believe, a direct result of the injection of huge amounts of money into the process. It's hard to have the conversation because the stakes on all sides are so high (ROI vs. local concerns for children).
I'm actually a fan of old-school charters, and it makes me sad that their promise has been swept aside by the current wave of money-driven charter chains. But asking people to please be more polite and reasonable and please stop pointing out where we've screwed you over is not likely to get the conversation back on track or reclaim the benefits that charter schools could provide.
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