It's a response that comes frequently to the charge that modern charter schools have become all about grabbing large piles of money for their backers and operators.
"I don't care if they are making a pile of money," is the response. "If they're getting the results, what difference does it make?"
It's a response that bugs me, and it has taken me a while to figure out exactly why. You know I love a good illustrative analogy. I'm going to give you the following analogy instead.
That response makes the same sense as saying, "I don't care if I'm going to bed with a person who's committed to a loving, long-lasting relationship or if I'm going to be with a hundred dollar an hour hooker. As long as the sex is good, what difference does it make?"
I might argue that it ultimately makes a difference because sex is better within a committed relationship with someone you love than a stranger paid to fake affection. I might also argue that absent a more stable relationships, you don't really know what other factors, concerns, agendas and second-hand biological effluvium are in bed with you.
But even those arguments assume that you're using the right metric, and maybe comparing the quality of the sex is not the only way to weigh the relative merits of a long term committed relationship versus the merits of hiring a hundred dollar hooker. Maybe we should be comparing on the basis of other, deeper, ultimately more important considerations. I mean, if the quality of the sex is the only thing you care about, then maybe the hundred dollar hooker is the best choice for you. But I'm pretty sure that is not the prevailing metric for most people.
In particular, I would argue about the "long term commitment" part. Your hundred dollar hooker will only be around as long as you can come up with a hundred dollars, whereas in a long term committed relationship, the idea is to stick around for the long term. The hundred dollar an hour hooker is not worried about your needs or concerned; the hooker is just watching the clock and the money, and not because the hooker is a wretched evil awful human being but because that's just the nature of the transaction. Yes, many LTR and marriages are miserable or unsuccessful or fall apart. Even then, I don't believe the most commonly suggested solution is hundred dollar hookers.
Yes, yes, yes. I'm aware that this analogy is imperfect, and I don't mean to suggest that all charter school operators are prostitutes (some classic charters are like, I don't know, Mother Teresa), and I certainly don't mean to suggest that standardized tests and the results thereof are like sex. And, no, I haven't really figured out where charter teachers or students themselves would fit in this analogy.
My point remains. "Who cares if charters make money as long as they get results" fails for the following reasons:
1) "Results" inevitably means "test scores." Test scores are the not the ultimate measure of student achievement, teacher effectiveness, or school quality. You might as well tell me "I don't care if charters make a profit as long as they have pretty door jambs." If by "results" you mean something other than "test scores," we might be able to have a real conversation here. (And if you mean test scores, you need to look at what charter results actually are.)
2) Charters make more money by spending less on students. Charters will always only be able to get more money by taking it away from students. They are not worrying about student needs; they are just watching the money. That is not because they are evil or terrible human beings, but because that is the nature of the transaction.
3) Charter schools will be there only as long as it makes good business sense to be there. If they aren't making enough money, they will close up shop. A public school starts with the premise that the community, through its school, must provide an education. A charter school starts with the premise that it must bank enough money to be viable. Just because a charter school has good (test) results today doesn't mean it won't be a MegaMart parking lot next week. Is that hard on students and the community? See #2.
Public education, like other important relationships in life, is not best served by being re-interpreted as a simple retail transaction. That's my answer to "so what?"
Showing posts with label Profiteering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Profiteering. Show all posts
Friday, November 21, 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Camp Philos! Take Me Away!!
You may have seen the ad for this. Maybe you even received an invitation (but I bet you didn't). It's Camp Philos, "a philosopher's camp on education reform," the first ever, and it looks absolutely awesome!!
Embark on three spring days of fun, fellowship and strategy with the nation's thought leaders on education reform. The exquisite and secluded Whiteface Lodge, which ranks among North America's top luxury destinations, is nestled in the majestic woods of our country's largest wilderness park.
Embark on three spring days of fun, fellowship and strategy with the nation's thought leaders on education reform. The exquisite and secluded Whiteface Lodge, which ranks among North America's top luxury destinations, is nestled in the majestic woods of our country's largest wilderness park.
I have got to go to this thing! It says right here that it's just like in 1858, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowes retreated to the mountains "for respite in kindred company." Okay, they probably meant James Russell Lowell, but these are big important people and they can't be troubled with picky details like spelling. That's not how their kindred company rolls.
These are thought leaders. Thought leaders!!
Who are these thought leaders? Well, Andy Cuomo is the honorary chairman big cheese of these philosophical thought leaders, and you know he's going to be pumped because he just scored a major philosophical victory by getting the NY legislators to vote to make NYC Mayor DeBlasio kiss Eva's charter school ring and hand her the keys to whatever she wants. So Cuomo is seeing first hand what a few million dollars' worth of philosophy can buy you!
And Joe Williams-- the big guy from DERP (see-- I can spell philosophically, too). And Senator Mary Landrieu and Mayor Michael Hancock and Mayor Kevin Johnson and Russlynn Ali and--- OMGZ!! that great and awesomely wise educational philosopher M. Night Shyamalan! I hear he's proposing a new school program where at the end of the year the students discover their teacher was actually dead and they've been instructed by angry trees all year, or something.
The Whiteface Lodge is-- wait. Really??!! White face?? Could they not book the Wealthy Patricians Spa, or Camp Ogliarch? Boys, you have really got to think this stuff through. Thank goodness you invited Shyamalan. Do you suppose they have special screens to keep out black flies? Anyway, the Lake Placid lodge is uber-fancy. You can check it out here. And it's not just a lodge-- it's a spa, too. Get yourself a philosophical education thought leader hot towel while you're there.
The schedule of the conference looks promising. On the first day (Sunday, May 4) there will be a three-hour opening dinner followed by two-and-a-half hours of "open networking." This sounds more fun than when I chaperone Prom!
On Monday, the heavy-duty philosophizing day, we have "Up, Down and Sideway: Building an Effective School Reform Coalition." Cool. I always wanted to build a school reform coalition, but don't seem to be able to do it with simple objects I can find around the house. And there's also "Tight-Loose Models for Ensuring All Kids Have Access to a Great Education." Here I could make about being a crack about being tight with your own money and loose with tax dollars, but I recognize the tight-loose thing as a favorite line of The Fordham Institution Thinky Tank crowd. So there's one more hint about what sorts of philosophizing will be discussed. (Although if Mike Petrilli is going to dance for the assembled philosophers, that would be an extra treat.)
Later on Monday (well, 3:30-- a day of philosophy is apparently not quite as jam-packed as a teacher professional development day), we have "break and optional outdoor activities" which seems wise as the outdoors is always more appealing when it's optional.
Tuesday wraps it up with breakfast and a closing session. The scheduling is fortuitous as Sunday evening the weekenders will be clearing out and by Tuesday the long-weekers will only just be showing up. So the resort should be clear of the plebes for the conference. And of course running it on Monday insures that no actual teachers will actually attend. Nothing messes up a reformy stuff philosophy session than actual teachers.
Unfortunately, there is more keeping me away than just the scheduling. Attendance is $1,000 a head. Unless you have a VIP head, in which case it will cost you $2,500. That's just the event fee; I suppose I could cut corners by sleeping in my car for those two nights. My head is not really important enough to wrap itself around either of those numbers for any sleepover situation not involving my wife, some champagne, and a hot tub made of gold.
Still, I believe that in the interests of pursuing educational reform philosophy, I could round up some of the kindred company to attend this. I'm thinking of putting together a kickstarter to send a couple of the edublogoverse's finest journalists. I would particularly like to take a female colleague, because I think it would go over like the mouse in the circus elephant tent in Dumbo. (I'm thinking that between the two of us, Edushyster and I could cover this with all the seriousness it deserves).
But I don't want you to think that I am only mocking this ridiculous exercise in self-important over-inflated language-based bloviation weakly masking the venal money grabbing corporate destruction of public education. In fact, right on the front of the promotional site is a bold, three word slogan that I rather fancy.
REFORM
RELAX
RETREAT
I totally support reform, although these guys probably don't realize that at this point they are the champions of the status quo, and those fighting to reclaim the promise of American public education are the real reformers. Still, thumbs up on reform. Then if these guys would actually relax they might be better people. And I'm sure if they would just call a collective retreat, US public education would be all the better for it.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Pearson's Vision for the World
Mercedes Schneider recently directed the blogosphere's attention to a Pearson paper from February of 2014, "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education." If you're wondering just what Pearson (and by extension, the various government bodies that they own) envisions for our collective future, this document sheds plenty of light.
There are 44 pages, and I'm not going to address them all at once for a variety of reasons, not the leas of which is that the document is exceptionally depressing. Let's just look at the front end today.
The intro page lists the actual authors (we'll get to them another day), a paragraph "About Pearson" ("the world's leading learning company") and an introduction to the series. "Sir Michael Barber, on behalf of Pearson, is commissioning a series of independent, open, and practical publications containing new ideas and evidence about what works in education." Since both authors of this paper work for Pearson, I'm not sure what "independent" means in this context. There is also a Creative Commons license.
After acknowledgements and a table of contents, we arrive at the Foreword by Sir Michael Barber. If you don't know about Barber, you should. A top honcho at Pearson, he has also worked as head of global education practice at McKinsey and was an advisor to PM Tony Blair. Three Moms Against Common Core ranked him #7 of the Ten Scariest People in Education Reform.
Here's Barber's opening paragraph:
The "digital ocean" that this paper introduces is coming. Just as "big data" is transforming other industries such as insurance, finance, retail, and professional sport, in time, it will transform education. And when it does, it will resolve long-standing dilemmas for educators and enable that long-term aspiration for evidence-informed policy at every level, from classroom to the whole system, to be realized.
Got that? Big data is coming, and it will save us all.The "dilemmas," Barber explains, are the limits of formal testing in gathering data.
Barber reminisces about his time in the UK DOE and the groundbreaking national data system he pioneered there. But that was then. The now offers more data-riffic promises of aweomeness:
Once much of teaching and learning becomes digital, data will be available not just from once-a-year tests, but also from the wide-ranging daily activities of individual students. Teachers will be able to see what students can and cannot do, what they have learned and what they have not,which sequences of teaching have worked well and which haven’t - and they will be able to do so in real time.
Seriously? Barber's promise is that we will be able to observe our students in real time working at a variety of tasks and see what they can and can't do. Really?? Am I living in some magical land because THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I DO RIGHT NOW!!
Maybe I'm extra fortunate. Maybe somewhere there are teachers who work from some bunker in the back of the room where they can neither see nor hear the students in their classrooms. Or maybe they are asking the students questions but the students record their answers in special lockboxes that can't be opened for 126 hours. Or maybe the only way these poor benighted teachers can collect data is by giving one or two mammoth tests per year that provide results without specifics and not until a year later oh no wait, that's what Pearson's various acolytes are trying to get us to do NOW!
Barber assures us that personalized learning at scale will be possible, and again I want to point out that we already have a system that can totally do that (though of course the present system does not provide corporations such as Pearson nearly enough money). I will not pretend that the traditional US public ed system always provides the personalized learning it should, but when reformy types suggest that's a reason to scrap the whole system, I wonder if they also buy a new car every time the old car runs out of gas (plus, in that metaphor, government is repeatedly pouring sand into the gas tank).
But no. There will have to be revolution:
...schools will need to have digital materials of high quality, teachers will have to change how they teach and how they themselves learn...
This shtick I recognize, because it is as old as education technology. Every software salesman who ever set foot in a school used this one-- "This will be really great tool if you just change everything about how you work." No. No, no, no. You do not tell a carpenter, "Hey, newspaper is a great building material as long as you change your expectations about how strong and protective a house is supposed to be."
You pick a tool because it can help you do the job. You do not change the job so that it will fit the tool. This backward thinking is the heart of what's wrong with the CCSS. The Core are not about defining what are the most critical qualities of an excellent education. The Core are about codifying the qualities of education that will most work with our measuring tools.
Barber praises the authors of the paper for their "aspirational vision" of what success in schools would look like.
They see teaching,learning and assessment as different aspects of one integrated process, complementing each other at all times, in real time;
To which I reply, "Wow! Amazing! Do they also envision water that is wet? Wheels that are round? That is some real visionary shit there!" (To be clear, this is what every competent teacher already does!) Of course, they also see this:
sophisticated student profiles allowing teachers and students to make informed and precise decisions about next steps
So bring on that Big Brother stuff. Oh, and they see this, too
more complex educational outcomes, such as inter- and intra-personal skills, becoming assessable, teachable, and learnable
So in the Brave New Pearson World, we will not only turn you into our idea of an educated person, but our idea of a good and sociable person. We will let you know which interpersonal skills you must learn, and we will tell you whether you are an acceptable human being or not. Well, actually, not tell YOU so much-- the people who really want to know are your future employers and landlords and bank officers and health insurers.
Barber acknowledges that there's much to do to make this "a reality across education systems." Science, data, validity, knowledge processes, plus structural and cultural changes at systemic and pedagogical levels. Barber admits that this will be difficult, but there's this:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Make no mistake-- Pearson's aspiration is to remake the world and the people who live in it into the form they believe is Right. It's at this point that Pearson and its acolytes appear to cross the line from simply trying to sell a profitable program of educational malpractice to resemble an immoral crusade to circumvent the governments, institutions, and freedoms of the human beings who live on this planet.
There are 44 pages, and I'm not going to address them all at once for a variety of reasons, not the leas of which is that the document is exceptionally depressing. Let's just look at the front end today.
The intro page lists the actual authors (we'll get to them another day), a paragraph "About Pearson" ("the world's leading learning company") and an introduction to the series. "Sir Michael Barber, on behalf of Pearson, is commissioning a series of independent, open, and practical publications containing new ideas and evidence about what works in education." Since both authors of this paper work for Pearson, I'm not sure what "independent" means in this context. There is also a Creative Commons license.
After acknowledgements and a table of contents, we arrive at the Foreword by Sir Michael Barber. If you don't know about Barber, you should. A top honcho at Pearson, he has also worked as head of global education practice at McKinsey and was an advisor to PM Tony Blair. Three Moms Against Common Core ranked him #7 of the Ten Scariest People in Education Reform.
Here's Barber's opening paragraph:
The "digital ocean" that this paper introduces is coming. Just as "big data" is transforming other industries such as insurance, finance, retail, and professional sport, in time, it will transform education. And when it does, it will resolve long-standing dilemmas for educators and enable that long-term aspiration for evidence-informed policy at every level, from classroom to the whole system, to be realized.
Got that? Big data is coming, and it will save us all.The "dilemmas," Barber explains, are the limits of formal testing in gathering data.
Barber reminisces about his time in the UK DOE and the groundbreaking national data system he pioneered there. But that was then. The now offers more data-riffic promises of aweomeness:
Once much of teaching and learning becomes digital, data will be available not just from once-a-year tests, but also from the wide-ranging daily activities of individual students. Teachers will be able to see what students can and cannot do, what they have learned and what they have not,which sequences of teaching have worked well and which haven’t - and they will be able to do so in real time.
Seriously? Barber's promise is that we will be able to observe our students in real time working at a variety of tasks and see what they can and can't do. Really?? Am I living in some magical land because THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I DO RIGHT NOW!!
Maybe I'm extra fortunate. Maybe somewhere there are teachers who work from some bunker in the back of the room where they can neither see nor hear the students in their classrooms. Or maybe they are asking the students questions but the students record their answers in special lockboxes that can't be opened for 126 hours. Or maybe the only way these poor benighted teachers can collect data is by giving one or two mammoth tests per year that provide results without specifics and not until a year later oh no wait, that's what Pearson's various acolytes are trying to get us to do NOW!
Barber assures us that personalized learning at scale will be possible, and again I want to point out that we already have a system that can totally do that (though of course the present system does not provide corporations such as Pearson nearly enough money). I will not pretend that the traditional US public ed system always provides the personalized learning it should, but when reformy types suggest that's a reason to scrap the whole system, I wonder if they also buy a new car every time the old car runs out of gas (plus, in that metaphor, government is repeatedly pouring sand into the gas tank).
But no. There will have to be revolution:
...schools will need to have digital materials of high quality, teachers will have to change how they teach and how they themselves learn...
This shtick I recognize, because it is as old as education technology. Every software salesman who ever set foot in a school used this one-- "This will be really great tool if you just change everything about how you work." No. No, no, no. You do not tell a carpenter, "Hey, newspaper is a great building material as long as you change your expectations about how strong and protective a house is supposed to be."
You pick a tool because it can help you do the job. You do not change the job so that it will fit the tool. This backward thinking is the heart of what's wrong with the CCSS. The Core are not about defining what are the most critical qualities of an excellent education. The Core are about codifying the qualities of education that will most work with our measuring tools.
Barber praises the authors of the paper for their "aspirational vision" of what success in schools would look like.
They see teaching,learning and assessment as different aspects of one integrated process, complementing each other at all times, in real time;
To which I reply, "Wow! Amazing! Do they also envision water that is wet? Wheels that are round? That is some real visionary shit there!" (To be clear, this is what every competent teacher already does!) Of course, they also see this:
sophisticated student profiles allowing teachers and students to make informed and precise decisions about next steps
So bring on that Big Brother stuff. Oh, and they see this, too
more complex educational outcomes, such as inter- and intra-personal skills, becoming assessable, teachable, and learnable
So in the Brave New Pearson World, we will not only turn you into our idea of an educated person, but our idea of a good and sociable person. We will let you know which interpersonal skills you must learn, and we will tell you whether you are an acceptable human being or not. Well, actually, not tell YOU so much-- the people who really want to know are your future employers and landlords and bank officers and health insurers.
Barber acknowledges that there's much to do to make this "a reality across education systems." Science, data, validity, knowledge processes, plus structural and cultural changes at systemic and pedagogical levels. Barber admits that this will be difficult, but there's this:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Make no mistake-- Pearson's aspiration is to remake the world and the people who live in it into the form they believe is Right. It's at this point that Pearson and its acolytes appear to cross the line from simply trying to sell a profitable program of educational malpractice to resemble an immoral crusade to circumvent the governments, institutions, and freedoms of the human beings who live on this planet.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Another Style of CCSS Profiteering
Common Core profiteers are becoming wise to the ways of the interwebs.
There at the top of my search results was a paid ad-- in large letters "Blame Common Core" with the link to the blamecommoncore.com website and the single line of copy "What's wrong with Common Core? Is it as bad as you have heard?"
Interesting point #1. My google search terms were "common core standards." Nothing negative. Just a search based on those three terms. Yet this ad was primed to attract my attention by playing to my imagined dislike and distrust of the CCSS. Even the website name and address is set to appeal to CCSS non-fans. This tells me that even the market knows that the prevailing winds are not blowing in a CCSSesterly direction.
So where does blamecommoncore.com take us? Well, it's not a place that wants to blame the Core for much of anything.
The site is actually entitled "Blame Common Core? Common Sense for the Common Core." And once we get past that, it's koolaid all the way. The site is basically a blog, and its articles are deeply devoted to serving up all the standard talking points that we've all come to know and love.
Are you smarter than a 2nd grader? Bert Zahniser is disgusted when adults use children as pawns. And by that he means the people who take pictures of weeping children struggling with CCSS homework. No word about how he feels when charter school operators ship all their students to the state capital to lobby for privatization.
Confusing the curriculum with the Common Core. Steve Klugewicz says shame on people who conflate the standards with the materials used to push them. CCSS is totally not a curriculum.
Common Core and the big picture. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is pretty sure that people who object to the ELA standards have no idea what the standards say. CCSS is not content, peoples.
Dr. Kevin T. Brady is also the author of my favorite title on the site: Common Core destroys "creativity"? The so-called "creativity" is that of the teacher. He's responding to Matthew Altieri, a thirty-year teacher in Wallingfor CT who is, for some reason, a favorite target of Dr. Brady. "Pshaw," says Dr. Brady. "CCSS doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it. You can pretend to be as fake creative as you want to be." (I'm paraphrasing).
So who is this working so hard to not blame the Common Core?
It's Cicero Systems, a group in Swedesboro, NJ, and they have some services they'd like to sell you. Specifically, Common Core Professional Development, Curricula Services (including audits and alignments), a monthly webinar (Talking Common Core), online beyond-the-textbook resources, and even field study trips for teachers which seem to focus on historical sites.
That emphasis makes sense because these guys used to be the American Institute for History Education. The Cicero name is a nod to Important Ancient Dead White Guy Cicero, just one example of the important pieces of classic education going unappreciated today. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is the founder and president, and with Steve Klugewicz has gotten in on the ground floor of the growing Trying To Sell CCSS to Conservatives Movement.
At "The Imaginative Conservative," Brady and Klugewicz make their case for a conservative embrace of CCSS.* Their argument, severely summarized, goes as follows:
CCSS is wide open in terms of content. Conservatives who are afraid CCSS will be used to push a liberal agenda are short-sighted, because schools are chock-full of agenda-pushing liberals already. "There exists, then, an opportunity for conservatives to bring substantive content knowledge to teachers who so desperately need it." With CCSS, conservatives have a chance to finally teach liberals all the classics that they are so ignorant of.
This is not a new drum for Dr. Brady to beat. Old editions of the AIHE newsletter often return to the refrain of history being under-appreciated, inadequately taught, and insufficiently tested. "American history is not a core-content subject tested under the No Child Left Behind Law," wrote Dr. Brady in 2010. "That alone shows us that American history is not as highly valued in America as other core-content subjects that are mandatorily tested." And I feel his pain-- history is a hugely important discipline that is getting unjustly short-changed by the standards movement.
Well, history is no more tested now than it ever was, but somehow Dr. Brady has transformed his group into a go-to CCSS resource with special history topping. This opportunism is not a new phenomenon. Every time The Next Big Thing shows up in education, it is accompanied by a host of people who are sure that their personal pet project dovetails perfectly with The Thing. Cicero has seen a way to make a buck AND push their own favorite snake oil flavor, and I guess we can't really blame them. But we should remember not to focus so closely on the big sharks that we fail to notice the little piranhas.
*Hat tip to Adam Laats at the awesomely named "I Love You But You're Going To Hell"
There at the top of my search results was a paid ad-- in large letters "Blame Common Core" with the link to the blamecommoncore.com website and the single line of copy "What's wrong with Common Core? Is it as bad as you have heard?"
Interesting point #1. My google search terms were "common core standards." Nothing negative. Just a search based on those three terms. Yet this ad was primed to attract my attention by playing to my imagined dislike and distrust of the CCSS. Even the website name and address is set to appeal to CCSS non-fans. This tells me that even the market knows that the prevailing winds are not blowing in a CCSSesterly direction.
So where does blamecommoncore.com take us? Well, it's not a place that wants to blame the Core for much of anything.
The site is actually entitled "Blame Common Core? Common Sense for the Common Core." And once we get past that, it's koolaid all the way. The site is basically a blog, and its articles are deeply devoted to serving up all the standard talking points that we've all come to know and love.
Are you smarter than a 2nd grader? Bert Zahniser is disgusted when adults use children as pawns. And by that he means the people who take pictures of weeping children struggling with CCSS homework. No word about how he feels when charter school operators ship all their students to the state capital to lobby for privatization.
Confusing the curriculum with the Common Core. Steve Klugewicz says shame on people who conflate the standards with the materials used to push them. CCSS is totally not a curriculum.
Common Core and the big picture. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is pretty sure that people who object to the ELA standards have no idea what the standards say. CCSS is not content, peoples.
Dr. Kevin T. Brady is also the author of my favorite title on the site: Common Core destroys "creativity"? The so-called "creativity" is that of the teacher. He's responding to Matthew Altieri, a thirty-year teacher in Wallingfor CT who is, for some reason, a favorite target of Dr. Brady. "Pshaw," says Dr. Brady. "CCSS doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it. You can pretend to be as fake creative as you want to be." (I'm paraphrasing).
So who is this working so hard to not blame the Common Core?
It's Cicero Systems, a group in Swedesboro, NJ, and they have some services they'd like to sell you. Specifically, Common Core Professional Development, Curricula Services (including audits and alignments), a monthly webinar (Talking Common Core), online beyond-the-textbook resources, and even field study trips for teachers which seem to focus on historical sites.
That emphasis makes sense because these guys used to be the American Institute for History Education. The Cicero name is a nod to Important Ancient Dead White Guy Cicero, just one example of the important pieces of classic education going unappreciated today. Dr. Kevin T. Brady is the founder and president, and with Steve Klugewicz has gotten in on the ground floor of the growing Trying To Sell CCSS to Conservatives Movement.
At "The Imaginative Conservative," Brady and Klugewicz make their case for a conservative embrace of CCSS.* Their argument, severely summarized, goes as follows:
CCSS is wide open in terms of content. Conservatives who are afraid CCSS will be used to push a liberal agenda are short-sighted, because schools are chock-full of agenda-pushing liberals already. "There exists, then, an opportunity for conservatives to bring substantive content knowledge to teachers who so desperately need it." With CCSS, conservatives have a chance to finally teach liberals all the classics that they are so ignorant of.
This is not a new drum for Dr. Brady to beat. Old editions of the AIHE newsletter often return to the refrain of history being under-appreciated, inadequately taught, and insufficiently tested. "American history is not a core-content subject tested under the No Child Left Behind Law," wrote Dr. Brady in 2010. "That alone shows us that American history is not as highly valued in America as other core-content subjects that are mandatorily tested." And I feel his pain-- history is a hugely important discipline that is getting unjustly short-changed by the standards movement.
Well, history is no more tested now than it ever was, but somehow Dr. Brady has transformed his group into a go-to CCSS resource with special history topping. This opportunism is not a new phenomenon. Every time The Next Big Thing shows up in education, it is accompanied by a host of people who are sure that their personal pet project dovetails perfectly with The Thing. Cicero has seen a way to make a buck AND push their own favorite snake oil flavor, and I guess we can't really blame them. But we should remember not to focus so closely on the big sharks that we fail to notice the little piranhas.
*Hat tip to Adam Laats at the awesomely named "I Love You But You're Going To Hell"
Saturday, March 8, 2014
College Loan Sharks
President Obama is stumping for FAFSA again, the ubiquitous all-purpose college loan/family finances proctological exam that is the gateway to college financial aid.
In a White House PR piece about the President's visit to Florida on Friday, Obama is quoted being concerned that we still need to get more students in college. “Unfortunately, there are still a lot of young people all across the country who say the cost of college is holding them back,”he said. There are families worrying about how to find the money. FAFSA is the answer, says the President, as he challenges every single child in America to fill out a FAFSA whether they think they're going to college or not.
It's natural that the big FAFSA push should come this time of year-- it's paperwork time. The theme this year seems to be "money on the table," as in "many students didn't get government loans last year and left a bunch of money on the table." I would personally like to see this table, with its prodigious piles of money. I also can't help wondering if this is the same table at which Bill Gates allegedly doesn't have a seat.
But mostly the renewed hard sell on college loans reminds me of this news from last November: that in 2013, the US Government cleared $41.3 billion in profits from student loans. If government student loans were a corporation, it would have been the third most profitable in the world, behind only Exxon and Apple.
So the feds being sad that more students can't afford college is kind of like a used car salesman expressing disappointment that more people can't afford his great cars as he settles into his giant mansion and washes his dogs with gold-encrusted champagne.
If you are setting the price for a service so that you make massive profit, you can't convincingly puzzle over how that service might be provided more inexpensively.
If the President and Arne are worried about the high cost of college-- well, the government is helping decide set that cost. Message to the White House and USDOE: If you're worried about students affording college, you guys don't need a federal investigation or a better sales pitch- you just need a mirror. If you are concerned about the loan sharks who are holding onto the massive amount of student debt in this country, you can reach them through federal inter-office mail.
Duncan's USDOE did respond to these numbers, sort of, back when they were released. The responses seem to have been:
1) We are charging less than many high priced loan sharks, so families are still winning.
2) There are many types of accounting systems and they are very confusing. We would rather use one that says we didn't make a profit on these loans.
3) "It's actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit," said Duncan. So, you know, that settles it.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren suggested that student loan rates be set near the borrowing rates paid to the Federal Reserve by giant banks (you know, the ones where the criminals who trashed our economy still work at their own tables of money). As of today, the administration does not seem to be considering that proposal. (Periodically we also hear a proposal to just forgive student loans; even I think that's dumb.)
So, lip service aside, it seems that college loans are one more economic sector where the administration is fighting hard for the interests of the big guys. That money on the table is money that students will have to give back, with more money, so it can sit on a huge banquet table of cash somewhere in the back where ordinary citizens don't get to see.
There are many reason, complicated reasons, that college has become so fantastically expensive. None of those issues are addressed by an administration that encourages students to rack up more debt while ignoring its own role in the ever-spiraling costs.
In a White House PR piece about the President's visit to Florida on Friday, Obama is quoted being concerned that we still need to get more students in college. “Unfortunately, there are still a lot of young people all across the country who say the cost of college is holding them back,”he said. There are families worrying about how to find the money. FAFSA is the answer, says the President, as he challenges every single child in America to fill out a FAFSA whether they think they're going to college or not.
It's natural that the big FAFSA push should come this time of year-- it's paperwork time. The theme this year seems to be "money on the table," as in "many students didn't get government loans last year and left a bunch of money on the table." I would personally like to see this table, with its prodigious piles of money. I also can't help wondering if this is the same table at which Bill Gates allegedly doesn't have a seat.
But mostly the renewed hard sell on college loans reminds me of this news from last November: that in 2013, the US Government cleared $41.3 billion in profits from student loans. If government student loans were a corporation, it would have been the third most profitable in the world, behind only Exxon and Apple.
So the feds being sad that more students can't afford college is kind of like a used car salesman expressing disappointment that more people can't afford his great cars as he settles into his giant mansion and washes his dogs with gold-encrusted champagne.
If you are setting the price for a service so that you make massive profit, you can't convincingly puzzle over how that service might be provided more inexpensively.
If the President and Arne are worried about the high cost of college-- well, the government is helping decide set that cost. Message to the White House and USDOE: If you're worried about students affording college, you guys don't need a federal investigation or a better sales pitch- you just need a mirror. If you are concerned about the loan sharks who are holding onto the massive amount of student debt in this country, you can reach them through federal inter-office mail.
Duncan's USDOE did respond to these numbers, sort of, back when they were released. The responses seem to have been:
1) We are charging less than many high priced loan sharks, so families are still winning.
2) There are many types of accounting systems and they are very confusing. We would rather use one that says we didn't make a profit on these loans.
3) "It's actually neither accurate nor fair to characterize the student loan program as making a profit," said Duncan. So, you know, that settles it.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren suggested that student loan rates be set near the borrowing rates paid to the Federal Reserve by giant banks (you know, the ones where the criminals who trashed our economy still work at their own tables of money). As of today, the administration does not seem to be considering that proposal. (Periodically we also hear a proposal to just forgive student loans; even I think that's dumb.)
So, lip service aside, it seems that college loans are one more economic sector where the administration is fighting hard for the interests of the big guys. That money on the table is money that students will have to give back, with more money, so it can sit on a huge banquet table of cash somewhere in the back where ordinary citizens don't get to see.
There are many reason, complicated reasons, that college has become so fantastically expensive. None of those issues are addressed by an administration that encourages students to rack up more debt while ignoring its own role in the ever-spiraling costs.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
How Green Are Your Roots?
The world of reformy stuff has altered my life; specifically, it has changed my daily routine. In the morning before school, I read. At lunch, I read. And sometimes in the evening, I read. And when I need a break from reading, I write.
There are soooooo many powerful writers out there covering the world of education, the high stakes test-driven status quo, and the many fronts in the ongoing battle to reclaim public education. The long list to the right of this column only scratches the surface. And to stay fully informed, I also read the work of the corporate champions of the high stakes test-driven status quo, the various organizations that fight and claw to keep the dream of educorporate schooling alive. So I've had plenty of opportunity to see what separates the two groups, what distinguishes the Network for Public Education from, say, StudentsFirst or TFA or any of the groups that shoehorn "Education" and "Quality" into their names.
The difference is money.
So many of the supporters of Reformy Stuff are bought and paid for. So many of the opponents are not.
If the Gates Foundation woke up tomorrow and discovered that all its money had turned into, I don't know, expired gift certificates for a free breakfast at Denny's, support for CCSS would collapse. If the Common Core and Teach for America and the Charter Movement had to survive on actual merit, this whole fight would be over in a week. If rich white guys couldn't buy studies and then buy other groups to study the studies and then buy organizations to praise the studies, the support for Reformy Stuff would evaporate.
You would think that the acolytes of meritocracy would want to say, "Look, if our concepts cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas strictly on their merit, then they don't deserve to live." But they are fans of another sort of meritocracy, one in which money proves one is a virtuous person, and therefor one's every idea must have merit and deserve to be rolled up in twenty dollar bills that are then shoved down less virtuous throats.
I watched and read about the Network for Public Education conference, and I can't help noticing that it does not include any people who are getting rich off fighting reformy stuff. In fact, I see quite a lot of people spending their own money and uncompensated time to fight this fight.
In the meantime, "I completely waived my speakers fee today and traveled at my own expense because I really believe in my message," said no Michelle Rhee ever. "Fixing schools" is making some people wealthy.
Time after time, Gates Foundation and other sources like it plant money in the ground and a group springs forth, ready to say whatever they are paid to say. People are making very good livings pushing this stuff.
But others of us are fighting it for free. I'd love to say something moving about how our righteous virtue in the support of a good cause gives us a homespun Davidian strength that no Goliath-like corporate heartless hucksters can overcome, but I don't think so.
I think Diane Ravitch has it right. They have to lose. The Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools are like farmers who have had to fill their field with plants that they bought at the store and transplanted on their own. When those plants die, they go back to the store and buy more. But every plant they buy and transplant fails.
They have bought (and bought and rebought and bought again) the illusion that they know how to raise those crops, but the truth is that they haven't a clue and every thing they have tried has failed, turned dry and dusty in the hard sun of reality. The successes they have enjoyed depend on nothing but a large supply of money, and eventually they will either run out or simply tire of spending it. What success can they point to that they did not prop up with money-based illusion? What words of support can they point to that haven't been paid for? What would happen to it all if the money went away?
The Reformy Stuff movement has no roots. Where roots should be there is only a large and impressive supply of money. But for those of us on the other side, there are roots that go deep, roots that were already planted by our love and passion for education and that have driven deep long before the fake foundation farmers came along. They can only keep this up as long as they can afford to pay for it. We can only keep this up as long as we have breath and brains, fingers to type, voices to speak.
It's not that their dependence on money makes them evil or dirty. Their dependence on money makes their movement unsustainable. But those of us fighting back and teaching and blogging and talking? We can keep this up all day, every day.
There are soooooo many powerful writers out there covering the world of education, the high stakes test-driven status quo, and the many fronts in the ongoing battle to reclaim public education. The long list to the right of this column only scratches the surface. And to stay fully informed, I also read the work of the corporate champions of the high stakes test-driven status quo, the various organizations that fight and claw to keep the dream of educorporate schooling alive. So I've had plenty of opportunity to see what separates the two groups, what distinguishes the Network for Public Education from, say, StudentsFirst or TFA or any of the groups that shoehorn "Education" and "Quality" into their names.
The difference is money.
So many of the supporters of Reformy Stuff are bought and paid for. So many of the opponents are not.
If the Gates Foundation woke up tomorrow and discovered that all its money had turned into, I don't know, expired gift certificates for a free breakfast at Denny's, support for CCSS would collapse. If the Common Core and Teach for America and the Charter Movement had to survive on actual merit, this whole fight would be over in a week. If rich white guys couldn't buy studies and then buy other groups to study the studies and then buy organizations to praise the studies, the support for Reformy Stuff would evaporate.
You would think that the acolytes of meritocracy would want to say, "Look, if our concepts cannot survive in the marketplace of ideas strictly on their merit, then they don't deserve to live." But they are fans of another sort of meritocracy, one in which money proves one is a virtuous person, and therefor one's every idea must have merit and deserve to be rolled up in twenty dollar bills that are then shoved down less virtuous throats.
I watched and read about the Network for Public Education conference, and I can't help noticing that it does not include any people who are getting rich off fighting reformy stuff. In fact, I see quite a lot of people spending their own money and uncompensated time to fight this fight.
In the meantime, "I completely waived my speakers fee today and traveled at my own expense because I really believe in my message," said no Michelle Rhee ever. "Fixing schools" is making some people wealthy.
Time after time, Gates Foundation and other sources like it plant money in the ground and a group springs forth, ready to say whatever they are paid to say. People are making very good livings pushing this stuff.
But others of us are fighting it for free. I'd love to say something moving about how our righteous virtue in the support of a good cause gives us a homespun Davidian strength that no Goliath-like corporate heartless hucksters can overcome, but I don't think so.
I think Diane Ravitch has it right. They have to lose. The Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools are like farmers who have had to fill their field with plants that they bought at the store and transplanted on their own. When those plants die, they go back to the store and buy more. But every plant they buy and transplant fails.
They have bought (and bought and rebought and bought again) the illusion that they know how to raise those crops, but the truth is that they haven't a clue and every thing they have tried has failed, turned dry and dusty in the hard sun of reality. The successes they have enjoyed depend on nothing but a large supply of money, and eventually they will either run out or simply tire of spending it. What success can they point to that they did not prop up with money-based illusion? What words of support can they point to that haven't been paid for? What would happen to it all if the money went away?
The Reformy Stuff movement has no roots. Where roots should be there is only a large and impressive supply of money. But for those of us on the other side, there are roots that go deep, roots that were already planted by our love and passion for education and that have driven deep long before the fake foundation farmers came along. They can only keep this up as long as they can afford to pay for it. We can only keep this up as long as we have breath and brains, fingers to type, voices to speak.
It's not that their dependence on money makes them evil or dirty. Their dependence on money makes their movement unsustainable. But those of us fighting back and teaching and blogging and talking? We can keep this up all day, every day.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Cyber-Schools Still Suck, Says NEPC Report
The National Education Policy Center announced the release of its report on virtual schooling with the hefty headline "Responsible Policymaking Still Absent for Virtual Schools, Which Continue To Proliferate Despite Scant Research Support and Lagging Quality" There's going to be plenty of scholarly discussion and parsing of the full report, but based on the press release, I feel pretty comfortable with the headline I've chosen here.
The full title of the report, garnered by examining the records of 338 cybers, is VirtualSchools in the U.S. 2014: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence, edited by University of Colorado Boulder Professor Alex Molnar, and it will be all over the place shortly. But while we're waiting for the grownup scholars to sort through the details, let me see what a hack fake journalist can tell you about it.
Enrollment is rocketing skyward, sort of. In a finding that is, well, rather an odd surprise, it turns out that cyber-schooling is mostly for white kids. Current enrollment stands at 248,000 students, which is a whopping 21.7% increase over 2011-2012. But that enrollment breaks down into around 75% non-Hispanic whites, 10% African-America, and 11% Hispanic. Given the large cyber-presence in heavily Hispanic states and a national school population of 23%, the Hispanic numbers are surprising.
Are cyberschools less appealing to non-whites, or are cybers aiming their marketing primarily at the white market? Has cyber-school become one more way to get your kids away from "Those People"? Time to take a closer look at the marketing for outfits like K12 (which has a whopping third of all the cybercustomers).
The cyber-free-or-reduced-lunch population runs 10% behind the general population (35%). Students with disabilities runs just over 7% compared to 13% nationally. I found this number surprising, since I think of students with disabilities as people for whom cyber-schooling can be a particular good alternative to bricks and mortar. Less surprising is the English Language Learners (ELL) population-- 9.6% in the real world, but less than 1% in cyberian schools.
So how well do cyber-schools serve their oddly skewed population? After sorting through various state measures of effectiveness, the researchers determined the answer is, "Crappily." (I'm paraphrasing).
30% of the schools had not been measured for effectiveness at all. Only 33.8% of the schools who had been rated did well. Cybers operated by private for-profit organizations were less likely to do well. Only 157 schools reported on-time graduation numbers; their rate was 43.8%. In other words, a student in cyberschool has a less-than-fifty-fifty chance of actually graduating from it.
The report looked through a wide variety of reports, from bureaucratic through journalistic, and wherever one looks, one sees fields and fields of cyberschool suckitude. Consistent, inexcusable, suckitude.
Funding. Apparently every state uses some version of the cockamamie system we use in PA, where the amount that the cyberschool is paid per student has nothing to do with what providing the education actually costs, thereby providing cyber operators with a profit-grabbing system that is literally easier than taking candy from a baby, because a baby cries but a legislator just asks if you want more.
In 2012 K12 made 29 million dollars profit. In 2013, that number was jacked up to 45 million. This is what it looks like when greed makes you stupid. Cybers could charge half the per-capita cost of a brick and mortar school. They would still make an obscene pile of money, and the savings to taxpayers would win cyber-operators hearts and minds from state capitols to local main streets. But since they can't pass up even one more dollar, cyber-operators now get caught both doing a lousy job of educating and price gouging for it.
They could have made allies out of all the people who hate public education, who accuse us of doing a lousy and costing us money. Instead, cyber-operators are busily demonstrating a system that is even worse, that wastes even more money and delivers even fewer results.
NEPC sticks to items that can actually be researched, so yet another report does not address some of the more obvious issues with virtual charter schools, or as some of my students like to call them, "those schools where anybody can do your homework for you, and you get a free computer." But there appears to be more than enough meat in this report to feed some well-needed discussion.
The report will hit the print media tomorrow and be available on line any minute. If you are not familiar with NEPC, you should be-- these folks do actual peer-reviewed legitimate research. Once you have digested this report, you should send off a copy to your favorite legislator (in PA, be sure to attach a note reminding them that SB 1085 is a lousy idea). It's time that cyber-schools be accountable to the taxpayers they milk and the customers they bilk.
The full title of the report, garnered by examining the records of 338 cybers, is VirtualSchools in the U.S. 2014: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence, edited by University of Colorado Boulder Professor Alex Molnar, and it will be all over the place shortly. But while we're waiting for the grownup scholars to sort through the details, let me see what a hack fake journalist can tell you about it.
Enrollment is rocketing skyward, sort of. In a finding that is, well, rather an odd surprise, it turns out that cyber-schooling is mostly for white kids. Current enrollment stands at 248,000 students, which is a whopping 21.7% increase over 2011-2012. But that enrollment breaks down into around 75% non-Hispanic whites, 10% African-America, and 11% Hispanic. Given the large cyber-presence in heavily Hispanic states and a national school population of 23%, the Hispanic numbers are surprising.
Are cyberschools less appealing to non-whites, or are cybers aiming their marketing primarily at the white market? Has cyber-school become one more way to get your kids away from "Those People"? Time to take a closer look at the marketing for outfits like K12 (which has a whopping third of all the cybercustomers).
The cyber-free-or-reduced-lunch population runs 10% behind the general population (35%). Students with disabilities runs just over 7% compared to 13% nationally. I found this number surprising, since I think of students with disabilities as people for whom cyber-schooling can be a particular good alternative to bricks and mortar. Less surprising is the English Language Learners (ELL) population-- 9.6% in the real world, but less than 1% in cyberian schools.
So how well do cyber-schools serve their oddly skewed population? After sorting through various state measures of effectiveness, the researchers determined the answer is, "Crappily." (I'm paraphrasing).
30% of the schools had not been measured for effectiveness at all. Only 33.8% of the schools who had been rated did well. Cybers operated by private for-profit organizations were less likely to do well. Only 157 schools reported on-time graduation numbers; their rate was 43.8%. In other words, a student in cyberschool has a less-than-fifty-fifty chance of actually graduating from it.
The report looked through a wide variety of reports, from bureaucratic through journalistic, and wherever one looks, one sees fields and fields of cyberschool suckitude. Consistent, inexcusable, suckitude.
Funding. Apparently every state uses some version of the cockamamie system we use in PA, where the amount that the cyberschool is paid per student has nothing to do with what providing the education actually costs, thereby providing cyber operators with a profit-grabbing system that is literally easier than taking candy from a baby, because a baby cries but a legislator just asks if you want more.
In 2012 K12 made 29 million dollars profit. In 2013, that number was jacked up to 45 million. This is what it looks like when greed makes you stupid. Cybers could charge half the per-capita cost of a brick and mortar school. They would still make an obscene pile of money, and the savings to taxpayers would win cyber-operators hearts and minds from state capitols to local main streets. But since they can't pass up even one more dollar, cyber-operators now get caught both doing a lousy job of educating and price gouging for it.
They could have made allies out of all the people who hate public education, who accuse us of doing a lousy and costing us money. Instead, cyber-operators are busily demonstrating a system that is even worse, that wastes even more money and delivers even fewer results.
NEPC sticks to items that can actually be researched, so yet another report does not address some of the more obvious issues with virtual charter schools, or as some of my students like to call them, "those schools where anybody can do your homework for you, and you get a free computer." But there appears to be more than enough meat in this report to feed some well-needed discussion.
The report will hit the print media tomorrow and be available on line any minute. If you are not familiar with NEPC, you should be-- these folks do actual peer-reviewed legitimate research. Once you have digested this report, you should send off a copy to your favorite legislator (in PA, be sure to attach a note reminding them that SB 1085 is a lousy idea). It's time that cyber-schools be accountable to the taxpayers they milk and the customers they bilk.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Teachscape: Oh, The Humanity!
Poking around on line during another snow delay led me to the wonderland that is Teachscape.
Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.
Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).
Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--
Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.
The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).
But never fear--
With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.
Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti.
Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the videosurveillance recording to build a local library. And with Venti we... well, we use all the tools in the other two systems plus some sort of rigorous fairy dust
to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.
These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.
We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?
I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.
In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.
Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.
Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).
Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--
Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.
The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).
But never fear--
With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.
Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti.
Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the video
to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.
These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.
We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?
I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.
In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Let's Drop "Privatization"
As we continue the struggle with reformy stuff, we should always keep a close eye on our vocabulary. I think we need to stop talking about "privatization."
I understand the word's appeal. It seems to speak to a movement to move schools out of the public sphere, to make education policy and financing captive to the whims of our new corporate overlords. It is also a relatively shiny new word. Google ngram shows trace elements of it from 1920 on, but it doesn't really take off until the early 1980s with a peak in the mid-90s. That would suggest a word without much baggage, but I don't think it's the word we want.
"Privatization" suggests a neat, complete takeover. It makes it sounds as if the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools just want to buy up all the schools and run them themselves. It certainly conjures up a scary picture-- slick, gleaming, soulless schools where uber-standardized children are stamped into uniform blank-eyed Stepford students.
But that picture, horrifying though it may be, is seductively wrong. It allows us to assume two comforting things-- 1) that privatized schools might be awful, but they will still be functioning which means that 2) there will still be hope of a revolution in which we recapture the front office and return the school to its rightful function. Maybe it will be like a private school, and many of those are quite fine. We imagine that the school is a big machine and privatizers will capture it and turn it to manufacturing ugly hamster cages. All we'll have to do is find a way to get the machine back and reset it to make pretty handbags.
But that's not what the MoRONS have in mind at all. From Philly to New Orleans to Chicago to LA, they've demonstrated that they no more want to privatize school than a junkyard wants to privatize your car.
What we're seeing is nothing new in the business world. One business often buys out another simply to get at inventory, a brand name, a customer base, or manufacturing capacity. They buy the company, take what they want, and discard the rest.
None of these MoRONS want public schools. In some cases, they want the branding (TFA uses the word "teacher" to help brand itself as some great humanitarian enterprise). In some cases, they want free use of real estate (e.g. the now-very-nervous charter schools of NYC). But mostly they want just one thing-- money.
Money. Government grants. Revenue streams from programs. Income from the Right Students. Money. Money moneymoneymoneymoney money MONEY!
Everything else about the public school system is unimportant to the MoRONS. The parts of the system they care about are the parts that keep the money flowing. Everything else is unimportant. It's a business decision. Anything that keeps the money coming in is good. Anything that costs money without providing ROI is bad.
So MoRONS are about dismantling the system, keeping what makes them money, throwing out the rest. Given the chance, they will gut schools like you scoop the seeds out of a cantaloupe. They are not interested in privatizing. They are interested in dismantling the machine, selling the parts, and scrapping the rest.
Teachers too expensive. Find a way to scrap 'em. Some students provide bad expense-to-income ratio? Get rid of them. Some schools too hard to get ROI from? Abandon them. Make sure that curriculum, programming, materials, and evaluation all work in a perfect circle, each buddy handing money off to the guy next to him, around and around and around. We don't need an education system; we just need a revenue transfer system.
All the MoRONS really need is enough of what looks like a school system to convince government to keep giving them money. And since they generally get to help government write the rules about how money is handed out, they can make that process completely streamlined.
And it's not just an urban fight. The big money is in urban schools, so that's where the MoRONS have focused so far. They may never turn their attention to rural schools (though in PA, cyber-charters are sucking small districts dry already), but even if they don't, they will redirect school tax dollars to the profit centers in big cities, leaving rural schools to sip fruitlessly at ever-drying pools of spare change.
"Privatization" is a seductively dangerous word because it suggests we're in a fight over who runs the public school system. I'm thinking we're actually in a fight over whether that system will continue to exist. We're not talking takeover; we're talking destruction. So let's all stop using the word "privatization." However, if you want to keep using the acronym MoRONS, you have my enthusiastic permission to do so.
I understand the word's appeal. It seems to speak to a movement to move schools out of the public sphere, to make education policy and financing captive to the whims of our new corporate overlords. It is also a relatively shiny new word. Google ngram shows trace elements of it from 1920 on, but it doesn't really take off until the early 1980s with a peak in the mid-90s. That would suggest a word without much baggage, but I don't think it's the word we want.
"Privatization" suggests a neat, complete takeover. It makes it sounds as if the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools just want to buy up all the schools and run them themselves. It certainly conjures up a scary picture-- slick, gleaming, soulless schools where uber-standardized children are stamped into uniform blank-eyed Stepford students.
But that picture, horrifying though it may be, is seductively wrong. It allows us to assume two comforting things-- 1) that privatized schools might be awful, but they will still be functioning which means that 2) there will still be hope of a revolution in which we recapture the front office and return the school to its rightful function. Maybe it will be like a private school, and many of those are quite fine. We imagine that the school is a big machine and privatizers will capture it and turn it to manufacturing ugly hamster cages. All we'll have to do is find a way to get the machine back and reset it to make pretty handbags.
But that's not what the MoRONS have in mind at all. From Philly to New Orleans to Chicago to LA, they've demonstrated that they no more want to privatize school than a junkyard wants to privatize your car.
What we're seeing is nothing new in the business world. One business often buys out another simply to get at inventory, a brand name, a customer base, or manufacturing capacity. They buy the company, take what they want, and discard the rest.
None of these MoRONS want public schools. In some cases, they want the branding (TFA uses the word "teacher" to help brand itself as some great humanitarian enterprise). In some cases, they want free use of real estate (e.g. the now-very-nervous charter schools of NYC). But mostly they want just one thing-- money.
Money. Government grants. Revenue streams from programs. Income from the Right Students. Money. Money moneymoneymoneymoney money MONEY!
Everything else about the public school system is unimportant to the MoRONS. The parts of the system they care about are the parts that keep the money flowing. Everything else is unimportant. It's a business decision. Anything that keeps the money coming in is good. Anything that costs money without providing ROI is bad.
So MoRONS are about dismantling the system, keeping what makes them money, throwing out the rest. Given the chance, they will gut schools like you scoop the seeds out of a cantaloupe. They are not interested in privatizing. They are interested in dismantling the machine, selling the parts, and scrapping the rest.
Teachers too expensive. Find a way to scrap 'em. Some students provide bad expense-to-income ratio? Get rid of them. Some schools too hard to get ROI from? Abandon them. Make sure that curriculum, programming, materials, and evaluation all work in a perfect circle, each buddy handing money off to the guy next to him, around and around and around. We don't need an education system; we just need a revenue transfer system.
All the MoRONS really need is enough of what looks like a school system to convince government to keep giving them money. And since they generally get to help government write the rules about how money is handed out, they can make that process completely streamlined.
And it's not just an urban fight. The big money is in urban schools, so that's where the MoRONS have focused so far. They may never turn their attention to rural schools (though in PA, cyber-charters are sucking small districts dry already), but even if they don't, they will redirect school tax dollars to the profit centers in big cities, leaving rural schools to sip fruitlessly at ever-drying pools of spare change.
"Privatization" is a seductively dangerous word because it suggests we're in a fight over who runs the public school system. I'm thinking we're actually in a fight over whether that system will continue to exist. We're not talking takeover; we're talking destruction. So let's all stop using the word "privatization." However, if you want to keep using the acronym MoRONS, you have my enthusiastic permission to do so.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Why For-Profit Schools Must Stink
There are so many reasons to object to the privatization of public education, but it all comes down to the pie.
It's the financial pie, a pie that can only be cut into so many pieces. There's a reason that we associate top-notch private schools with rich folks-- every time a Philips Academy needs a bigger pie, they just pick up the phone to their rich parents and their rich alumni and before you can say "Summer at the Hamptons," the school is awash in newer, bigger pies.
Not so in public ed. The size of the pie is set by a combination of legislators and taxpayers, and that's all the pie there is. And that means that private operators, whether they're operating a voucher school or a private charter or one of those public-private hybrid charters (public when they want money, private when anybody wants to see what they do with it), your business model has to acknowledge one fundamental fact. (This includes "noon-profits" that are really for the profit of well-paid executives.)
Every piece of pie served to the students is a piece of pie that the operators don't get to eat themselves. Every cent they spend on students is a cent they don't get to pocket.
In privatized public schools, the interests of the operators are in direct conflict with the interests of the clients.
We already have examples in the marketplace of businesses with this same pie problem-- a human service industry where profit depends on providing the least service you can get away with.
Of course there was the health insurance industry. There's a reason that Tom Batiuk made a great joke out of calling an insurance provider "Denialcare." But the rules are in flux there now that ACA has come along to guarantee thatevery insurance executive will have a Lexus and a vacation home every American will have health care coverage.
So instead, let's consider the nursing home industry. Nursing homes have always faced a pie problem-- they have to provide service for human beings while trying to fund it with blood squeezed from stones.
This interactive map from 2010 shows ratings for US nursing homes. It doesn't look too bad at first, but if you use the features to knock it down by star ratings, it starts to look pretty awful. Of course there are some great nursing homes in the country, and not just the ones that graduates of Philips Academies go to when they get on in years. But a tremendous portion of that sector is 1, 2, or 3 stars.
Way back in 2001 the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey about nursing homes. The breakdown of the info is pretty thorough, but some highlights include: For starters, 80% reported some knowledge of nursing homes. 80% believed the homes are understaffed. 65% believed the staff is undertrained, and 61% believed that there was a problem with waste and fraud in how homes were run.
Right now, polls about education routinely turn up the result, "American schools suck, but my neighborhood school is just fine." In the Kaiser poll, people who were directly familiar with nursing homes were MORE likely to believe some of the worst things about those homes.
But when you only have so much money to split up, your motive is to find ways to spend less. And if you are a service business, spending less means providing less for your clients. Cheaper service providers. Cheaper services. Fewer services. You are never asking, "What's the best possible service we could provide our clients." Instead, you are asking, "What's the cheapest possible service we can get away with? Where is there a corner we can cut?"
The problem with the profit motive in fixed-payment service industries is not JUST that those in charge can only make money by finding ways to spend less on their clients. The more toxic systemic effect is that those in charge are pushed to inevitably see their clients as their biggest obstacle rather than their primary purpose. We know that attitude is lurking just over the horizon anyway-- how many of us deal with a business manager in our district whose attitude is that it would be easy to balance the budget if we didn't have to spend money on all those damn teachers and students.
For-profit schools are powerfully inclined to stink because they must foster an adversarial relationship between the owner-operators, the clients, and the employees. All of that takes place in an atmosphere of scarcity, of "having to do without." Add merit-based pay in which teachers must compete for their piece of the pie, and you get a school "community" that is anything but supportive and collegial.
Can it be done? Sure. The map tells us the nursing home industry here and there is doing it. But entering the business is fighting a powerful tide. If you entered the business because providing the service is powerfully important to you, you will have to fight the tide, but at least you're motivated. But if you entered the business to make a buck or get good ROI, you are already swimming with a tide that is going to sweep away everything good about the schools you are running.
It's the financial pie, a pie that can only be cut into so many pieces. There's a reason that we associate top-notch private schools with rich folks-- every time a Philips Academy needs a bigger pie, they just pick up the phone to their rich parents and their rich alumni and before you can say "Summer at the Hamptons," the school is awash in newer, bigger pies.
Not so in public ed. The size of the pie is set by a combination of legislators and taxpayers, and that's all the pie there is. And that means that private operators, whether they're operating a voucher school or a private charter or one of those public-private hybrid charters (public when they want money, private when anybody wants to see what they do with it), your business model has to acknowledge one fundamental fact. (This includes "noon-profits" that are really for the profit of well-paid executives.)
Every piece of pie served to the students is a piece of pie that the operators don't get to eat themselves. Every cent they spend on students is a cent they don't get to pocket.
In privatized public schools, the interests of the operators are in direct conflict with the interests of the clients.
We already have examples in the marketplace of businesses with this same pie problem-- a human service industry where profit depends on providing the least service you can get away with.
Of course there was the health insurance industry. There's a reason that Tom Batiuk made a great joke out of calling an insurance provider "Denialcare." But the rules are in flux there now that ACA has come along to guarantee that
So instead, let's consider the nursing home industry. Nursing homes have always faced a pie problem-- they have to provide service for human beings while trying to fund it with blood squeezed from stones.
This interactive map from 2010 shows ratings for US nursing homes. It doesn't look too bad at first, but if you use the features to knock it down by star ratings, it starts to look pretty awful. Of course there are some great nursing homes in the country, and not just the ones that graduates of Philips Academies go to when they get on in years. But a tremendous portion of that sector is 1, 2, or 3 stars.
Way back in 2001 the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey about nursing homes. The breakdown of the info is pretty thorough, but some highlights include: For starters, 80% reported some knowledge of nursing homes. 80% believed the homes are understaffed. 65% believed the staff is undertrained, and 61% believed that there was a problem with waste and fraud in how homes were run.
Right now, polls about education routinely turn up the result, "American schools suck, but my neighborhood school is just fine." In the Kaiser poll, people who were directly familiar with nursing homes were MORE likely to believe some of the worst things about those homes.
But when you only have so much money to split up, your motive is to find ways to spend less. And if you are a service business, spending less means providing less for your clients. Cheaper service providers. Cheaper services. Fewer services. You are never asking, "What's the best possible service we could provide our clients." Instead, you are asking, "What's the cheapest possible service we can get away with? Where is there a corner we can cut?"
The problem with the profit motive in fixed-payment service industries is not JUST that those in charge can only make money by finding ways to spend less on their clients. The more toxic systemic effect is that those in charge are pushed to inevitably see their clients as their biggest obstacle rather than their primary purpose. We know that attitude is lurking just over the horizon anyway-- how many of us deal with a business manager in our district whose attitude is that it would be easy to balance the budget if we didn't have to spend money on all those damn teachers and students.
For-profit schools are powerfully inclined to stink because they must foster an adversarial relationship between the owner-operators, the clients, and the employees. All of that takes place in an atmosphere of scarcity, of "having to do without." Add merit-based pay in which teachers must compete for their piece of the pie, and you get a school "community" that is anything but supportive and collegial.
Can it be done? Sure. The map tells us the nursing home industry here and there is doing it. But entering the business is fighting a powerful tide. If you entered the business because providing the service is powerfully important to you, you will have to fight the tide, but at least you're motivated. But if you entered the business to make a buck or get good ROI, you are already swimming with a tide that is going to sweep away everything good about the schools you are running.
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