Drive

The competitive impulse is often the ONLY drive for success.

So wrote reader Foreverman (side note: not only is there a PhD somewhere in a study of self-naming behavior on the internet, but what, I wonder, would happen if we had all of our students choose classroom names?) in a response to my post about defending music education. He has plenty of company, folks who are sure that the only reason the human race isn't still riding in buggies and living in caves is because, competition!

Me? I'm not so sure. I think a case could be made that competition isn't the drive for success often -- in fact, it's probably rarely the drive for success. Cue the video that everyone on the internet has seen at least once and which I have linked to roughly a zillion times:




Dan Pink's talk is one more reminder that many of the things we're sure we know seem absolutely right until somebody makes us think about it. And Pink, unlike certain bloggers, has science on his side. You should watch this. Here are some of my favorite moments.

We are not as easily manipulable and predictable as you would think.

This is bad news for all educational approaches that assume that humans are basically vending machines-- put in the right change, press a button, a can of Dr. Pepper comes out.

The MIT study

Performed by economists and funded by the Federal Reserve. Stack-ranking performers so that you can give bonuses to the winners and ignore the losers-- that works only as long as you're talking about simple mechanical tasks, tasks where you just follow the steps. But if there were any cognitive skills at all, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

This has been replicated over and over, from MIT to rural India by scientists in many different disciplines.

This sort of stack ranking (hit the top step, win a prize) would be the epitome of competition. But it doesn't work. It also explains, in a backwards way, why schools can so easily drift into a dumbed-down position-- because when we give students simple mechanical procedural tasks and offer rewards, they do well. They are successful and we feel successful. But when we start trying to get them to do cognitive work-- well, if we have nothing to use for motivation but competition for the best rewards, we get worse results, and we all feel like failures. It's no wonder that schools may drift back to doing what works-- offering students rewards (grades) for doing simple tasks.

Three Factors Lead to Better Performance (and Personal Satisfaction)

The factors are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy has been steadily stripped away from teaching, and it has never exactly been the hallmark of the Life of a Student. So there's one thing that we don't always have going for us in schools. And competition doesn't put it back. In fact, when competition is implemented in a very narrow manner, like, say, let's all compete to get students to get good grades on these tests, or let's all compete to get the most students to buy our marketing, we're making schools worse, not better.

Compliance is the opposite of autonomy. But all of ed reform is organized about making schools comply.

Mastery is about getting good at doing things, and this may be where competition has a place, because competition against other people with mastery is a good way to measure just how well you've mastered the skill. The best measures of mastery are not necessarily external, which is why so many people are happy to pursue their hobbies and avocations in private on their own time. But there's no question that some people like to measure their mastery against others. This is where competition can make sense.

Purpose is where competition can be the most corrosive and toxic. If the purpose is to win, to beat the other guy, to get the most money, you end up doing bad things. How many many many many MANY examples do we have of individuals and corporations whose only purpose was winning, and so they were willing to do anything to win, and they did, and it was bad. Enron, the banksters that sank the economy, the guys who are currently running my dad's old company into the ground-- these are all people who competed just to win without any better sense of purpose than that.

A company that competes to be the most money-making car company will (and did, for those of us who remember the seventies) make crappy cars. Companies that compete to turn the most profit by finding the cheapest, most screw-over-able workers, do not make the world a better place.

I believe that some advocates of competition say, "Competition really fuels greatness" when they mean "Competition tempered by a sense of ethics and a decent regard for human beings and the community fuels excellence." I believe they do not understand that the various charter frauds and scandals that we've seen over the last decade are not aberrations, but the result of people who say "Competing to win is good" and that's all end everything that they mean.

People imagine, say, a race, in which there's a track and officials and of course some behavior that is Not Allowed. But in modern corporate competition the push is always to get the government to back off and hire fewer referees and make fewer rules and after a certain point, we find people running down the track swinging clubs at the competition while sneaking scooters into their own lane.

So no

Success and excellence are not the result of simple competition any more than a great marriage is the result just of kissing. There are lots of ways to win a competition that have nothing at all to do with being the best-- and if you only care about winning, and not about being the best, you will not stumble upon excellence. And if you can't tell the difference between being the winner and being the best, then you have no business entering the race at all.

Competition vs. Quality

It is an oft-stated truism-- competition creates excellence.

If you are running a race, you will run faster and harder to beat people who are also running fast. If you are playing football, you will train to be better than the team facing you on the field. It seems sensible.

There are some problems with this model just on its face. The people in the front of the pack, the winners, will get stronger perhaps, but the race will also separate out some losers, who will either have to either accept losing as their lot in life. Or they'll figure out ways to cheat. After all, if the definition of winning too narrow, like "being first to cross the finish line"-- well, there are plenty of ways to accomplish that without having to run the whole race faster than anyone else.

If we really believe that every student in America should get to attend a school that's a winner, then a competition that only a few can win seems like a poor model.

Competition may deliver excellence for a few, but it will not deliver excellence for everyone.

But there are other issues. If we make the reward for winning something important like, say, your food, then by losing, racers lose the very thing they need to compete. Competition will make them weak and hungry, the very opposite of breeding excellence.

But competition often does not breed excellence at all-- in fact, it can create the opposite effect.

Consider a market competition this way-- that vendors are competing for the chance to sell their wares. When prime customers are scare, competition favors those who lower their standards-- not those who raise them.

Colleges, for instance. As reformsters often point out while decrying the proliferation of remedial college coursework, colleges have responding to shrinking pol of college prospects by lowering their standards. They have competed for customers by admitting folks who would not have been considered customers at all in an earlier day, and since a college's customers are also part of their process and "product," they've competed by running away from excellence.

Wal-Mart did not conquer the retail world by pursuing excellence. "I want the very best product on the market, so let's go to Wal-Mart," said no consumer ever. Getting the greatest number of customers means lowering the bar as much as possible, both for the products on sale and the customers welcomed through the door.

The very term "exclusive" is associated with high quality. Clubs bill themselves as "exclusive" because everyone hears "selective" and "the best." Private schools and charter schools have long understood that "excellence" is achieved by being careful about who gets in your front door. Other charters have understood that "success" (as in "enriching the bottom line") can be achieved by lowering the bar as you open the front door.

In a system with too few resources, competition eats excellence and spits it out. In a city education ecosystem that contains many charter schools, where there are 200,000 seats for 100,000 students, competition for customers will be fierce, and schools will compete with whatever strength they have. If they can't compete for the academically oriented crowd, they will compete for the folks who want a convenient school or an easy school or a school without Those People in it. They will compete by using creative advertising that ignores the truth. They will worry more and more about getting people in the door and less and less about what is waiting for them inside. And while Wal-Mart can't afford to disappoint customers into never coming back, a school doesn't have repeat customers-- its customer base is always aging out every couple of years.

"Competition creates excellence" only seems true to people used to being in the front of the pack and setting the rules. For everyone else, competition is a reason to game the system, change the rules, move the finish line, or just lower the standards.

The goal of public education is excellence for everyone, but competition produces excellence for only a few, and sometimes not even that. It's a lousy metaphorical framework for education. Better, say, to talk about a garden on which we focus the full resources of the community to plant and water and tend living things to grow and mature without worrying about which one is tallest, sweetest or most vibrantly colored, or how we could best deprive one flower of water so that another can win a greenery contest. Education is not a race, and competition will not improve it.

Dear Jeb Bush:

Today you put in an appearance at Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, a group very much in tune with your goals in education. I can see why you and DeVos have always gotten along-- wealthy children of privilege who feel a righteous need to remake your home state according to your own beliefs in competition and battle and a system that sorts people into their proper places.

Reporter Matt Barnum tweeted this quote from you this afternoon:

The simple fact is when you create a marketplace of school choice ...the children do better ... It defies logic to suggest otherwise.

That's consistent with things you've said in the past. Just a month ago you sent an op-ed out to New Hampshire newspapers in which you wrote

When public schools face increased competition, they get better and kids learn more.

Now, your assertions don't really hold up to any sort of scrutiny (Politifacts ruled your NH line "mostly false") and I've burned many bloggy bytes arguing that. If you like, you can amble through this blog, but I'm not going to wade into that argument here.

No, what I want to do is ask a question, addressing your belief in the power of competition and the marketplace. This is going to sound like a snotty gotcha question, but it's really not. I find that all of us do better at grappling with these kinds of abstract ideas if we look at how they really play out in our own lives, and so I'm going to ask you this--

Do you think that marketplace-style competition for the job of President of the United States created a better outcome?

Do you think competition among the many candidates made each one better, resulting in the very best one being elevated to the White House? Do you think that competition got us the most excellent President that we could ever hope for?

Do you feel that you personally became a better man, a better person, a better candidate, a better politician through your competition with the other GOP candidates, including and especially the eventual winner of the office?

Can you imagine yourself calling the White House to say, "Mr. President, I want to thank you for making me a better person by competing so well with me?"

I suspect that your answer to all of these questions would be something other than "yes," and I would actually agree with you. You might be inclined to explain that all sorts of extraneous factors like a tilted playing field or a hugely imperfect transmission of information to the voters interfered with the "proper" outcome, and I would say to you, how do you imagine that the marketplace of schools would be any different?

I truly am not trying to rub your defeat in your face. But I do want to point out that while your imagined version of competition in the marketplace may work flawlessly to bring about awesome outcomes, the Presidential election that ate years of your life is a far better real-world example of how a competitive marketplace can actually work, particularly when applied to something that is supposed to be a service for the public good and not just a chance for personal profiteering.

See, I believe that the Bush family, in its own way, really does have a heritage of service and a sense of responsibility to the country as a whole. But you got smoked by a scam artist, a huckster who's far more interested in personal profiteering than the good of the community at large. And that is about as perfect a real-life metaphor as we could find for how school choice and competition is working in the real world. Charters and choice are the Trump family of the education world.

So I'm hoping that you can take a step back, clear your head, and see that your logic is confused-- competition and the marketplace, particularly in matters of public service, does not get us excellence. There is no reason to believe that it will improve schools, and even less reason to believe it will provide good results for students. Of all the conservative fans of this philosophy, your unique personal experience makes you especially positioned to see this. I hope some day you will open your eyes and stop spouting nonsense about the wonders of competition and the marketplace. Feel free to give me a call when you're ready to see the light.

Music vs. Sports

Among the various ways to divide Americans into two groups, I like my brother's model. He has long argued that everyone is either a band geek or a sports geek. 

Band is a cooperative venture (yes, this would include chorus, too). You work together with the other people in the group; the trombones don't try to "beat" the clarinets--okay, sometimes they do, but they generally stop because for the group to succeed, everyone has to do their part. Everyone has to work together and put the achievement of the group first. 

Sports are a competitive venture. You're there to beat the other side, not to work along with them. Your success requires their defeat. You get better by learning how to defeat strong opponents.

Bands are not zero sum. If four bands play in a single concert, they can all be excellent and successful. There is an infinite supply of audience applause.

Sports are zero sum. Somebody can only win if somebody else loses. 

There are occasional attempts to bring elements of one into the other. There are, for instance, actual band competitions in which bands play "against" each other and some band wins. These are stupid. Why should a band that delivered a great performance be told that they're losers (those of you who are sports geeks are right now saying "because that's how the world works"). These competitions inflict a more subtle harm; there is a whole body of band composition that is designed not around a great musical idea, but around elements that a band would need to demonstrate to win a competition. These compositions are kind of lousy.

Meanwhile, it's the band geeks of the world that invented participation trophies and other ways to try to convince people who clearly lost the competition that they are somehow winners (you band geeks are saying "But why should someone who played their guts out be told they suck"). But if we tell folks involved in a competitive situation that they didn't lose when they clearly did, that's no help in dealing with reality, nor in improving.

Each has elements of the other. Sports teams have to cooperate within themselves in order to win. Not only that, but in the competitive world, the people who can best understand, appreciate, and respect   what you're doing are your opponents. Band members, sometimes openly and sometimes subtly, jockey and compete for leadership positions within the group. We may be working together in this band, but we also know who the best players are.

There's some complexity and nuance here, but we're still talking about two fundamentally different ways of viewing how the world works. People steeped in the competitive model can be dumbfounded, frustrated, or even dismissive of people who don't seem to understand that it's a dog-eat-dog world. People steeped in the cooperative view can be dumfounded, frustrated, or even dismissive of people who insist that battling is the only path forward.

In education, the folks who insist that a competitive marketplace is the only way to get better are speaking a foreign language to those who believe in the cooperative model. Meanwhile, those competitive folks can't figure out why so many educators don't understand that it's impossible to get better if you aren't trying to beat someone. And both suspect that the other side is just pretending to believe in a model that, dammit, no rational human being who can actually see the world would honestly believe.

The model you see depends a lot on how the world was revealed to you when you were young. But I think the big trick is to grow past that model so that you can see the value of both. There are times when the competitive model is the way to go, and times when cooperation is the secret.

When considering competition, consider what the terms of engagement will be--what will the basis of the competition be? My town has an annual America's Got Talent style singing competition where the actual terms of the competition are getting audience support, and so the context actually measure which contestant is best able to get the most supporters to come sit in the audience. So it's not really a vocal competition (which is a mystery anyway, because how does one objectively measure the "best" singer); it's a popularity competition. In any competition, you have to ask if you're really competing over what you say you're competing over.

In education, leaders keep trying to set up competitions between schools and districts based on educational excellence, only instead they're really competitions to see who can get students to get the highest scores on a single math and reading test given once a year. The competition is not really about what it pretends to be about.

Cooperation has its own pitfalls. I play in a community band, and we long ago made the conscious decision that we were more interested in being an inclusive community activity than the most awesomest band in the state. So we have welcomed (and continue to do so) players who don't bring a lot of musical aptitude to the table. That's an appropriate choice; we're a community volunteer organization making music, not a professional team trying to get to the Super Bowl. But you can worry so much about avoiding competitiveness that you stop paying any attention to relative achievement at all.

But in education it's possible to lose the plot, to worry so much about not subjecting students to competition that you stop subjecting them to any meaningful evaluation. I get the impulse to eliminate gifted and talented program, especially when the competition for spots is based on dubious measures (my own district for years appeared to base the program on the student's parents' job). But that doesn't really help anyone. 

Policy and politics folks seem to skew to the sports side. You can certainly see it in moments like the Moms For Liberty professional coms advice to never apologize, because it shows weakness. And you can't beat people that way. The mindset, so very common in the public-facing world of politics and policy, is at odds with teachers, who are largely cooperative model types, and often have trouble dealing with the various actors currently trying to beat teachers, beat public education. 

It's not a perfect model, but it's another way to understand some of the gulfs that energize some of our debates. As always, the solution is moderation, balance, and bridges built by grownups who are willing to live with nuance and complexity. 

Nevada Abandons Public Education

Nevada has made its bid for a gold medal in the race to the bottom of the barrel for public education. The state's GOP legislature, with help from Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (a name that belongs in Orwellian annals right next to "Peacekeeper Missile"), has created an all-state voucher system.

This is the full deal. No foot-in-the-door program for poor, disabled, or trapped-in-failing-school students. Next fall every single student in Nevada gets a taxpayer-funded voucher to spend at the school whose marketing most appeals to that student's parents.

The backers of the bill are as delighted as they are divorced from reality. Here's bill sponsor Senator Scott Hammond, quoted in the Washington Post:

Nothing works better than competition.

This statement belongs in the annals of baseless expressions of faith, right next to "I'm sure that he'll leave his wife soon" or "Everything should be fine now that the government guy is here to help us" or "Go ahead and hand me that basket of vipers; I'm sure God will protect me."

In point of fact, not only do many things work better than competition, but competition doesn't really work all that well. And competition certainly does not work well when we're talking about providing an important public service to all people-- not just the ones who win the competition. It's true that when it comes to winning the race or getting the VP job or convincing that hot human to marry you, there can be only one. But what does that have to do with public education? Does Senator Hammond believe there should only be one great school in Nevada and only some students should get to succeed?

There are so many ways in which competition does not belong in public education. Building is a better metaphor than racing. Competition doesn't even foster traditional conservative values. The free market often resists quality rather than fostering it. The market doesn't know what to do with "losers." Charter school competition does not create pressure for excellence. Market competition creates perverse incentives to game the system, and tends to put the wrong people in charge. Choice twists the product in an involuntary market. Voucher system disenfranchise the taxpayers, literally creating taxation without representation and pitting taxpayers against parents. The whole inefficient system depends on lies and fantasies for financing. And if you think competition fosters excellence, just go take a look at your cable tv. Or take a look at how it has worked out in the college market. Finally, don't forget that time that Dr. Raymond of CREDO (charter and choice fans par excellence) declared that the free market doesn't work in education.

Like many school choice programs, Nevada's will actually be a school's choice program. The vouchers will provide poor students with a whopping $5,700. Want to go to Shiny Rich Prep Academy, high-poverty students? So sorry. It turns out your voucher just doesn't quite bring in enough money. Are you a student with issues, problems, or a disability? Sorry-- it's too hard to make money educating you, so we're going to find some means of making you go away.

Though it should be noted-- in one potential windfall for families that aren't all that into the whole edumacation thing, the voucher can be spent on home school supplies.

All of you who can't get into a Really Nice School? You are all welcome to go back to a public school. You know-- the public school that had to cut pretty much everything because it lost a ton of money to vouchers. Have a great time, you reject, but take comfort in knowing that the voucher program made it possible for rich families who were going to send their kids to SRPA anyway to have a bit more money to finance that trip to Paris this summer.

Of course, no piece about FEE's devotion to helping states screw over poor students would be complete without a quote from the reformsters own Dolores Umbridge:

“This is the wave of the future,” said Levesque, whose foundation helped Nevada legislators draft the measure while its nonprofit sister organization, Excel National, lobbied to get it passed. “In all aspects of our [meaning we deserving wealthy folks] life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals [who are the right kind of people] more control over their path and destiny [while freeing them from any requirement to help Those People]. . . . This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education [in the sense that we are allowing the Right People more choice and taking choices and resources away from Those People who really don't deserve them].”

I edited her quote slightly to make sure her meaning was a little more clear.

Nevada was already well-positioned for the Race to the Bottom prize, consistently ranking among the bottom ten states for education funding. With this bold step, they have insured that even that little bit of money will be spent in the most in efficient, wasteful manner possible. Not only will they be duplicating services (can you run two households with the same money it takes to run one?), but by draining funds away from public schools, they can guarantee that those public schools will struggle with fewer resources than ever.

This is not out of character for Nevada. Las Vegas has long been notorious as a place where folks want their tourist industry to be well staffed with lots of cheap labor, but they don't want those workers to be able to actually live in Vegas. Many would prefer that workers simply vanish after they punch out. We want Those People to be in the casinos, serving us drinks, showing skin, and looking happy-- but we don't want Those People to live in our shiny city. While what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, those who make it happen are not.

Levesque is correct in one respect-- this really is a fundamental shift in how Nevada handles public education, in the sense that this is Nevada throwing up its hands and saying, "Screw it. We're not even going to pretend to try to provide a quality public education for all children in the state."

Why the Hell Are We Racing Anywhere?

Race to the Top had been rather quiet as a brand until President Obama revived it in his new budget proposal. Unfortunately, the new iteration underlines the metaphorical problems with the nom de regulation. For a guy who launched his career by being a moving speaker, Obama has hit on a real tone-deaf clunker here.

This time, we are racing for equity, which means, I guess, that we are going to Race To The Top To The Middle. Seriously, how does this metaphor even sort of work? How does a race for equality work, exactly?

My first thought is that we are about to see a real-life Diana Moon Glampers to preside over a race in which the swift are properly held back. But no-- we're clearly supposed to be competing for excellence. Excellence in...not being any more or less excellent than anybody else??

But the metaphorical muddle that is Race To The Top To The Middle only raises a more important question which is-- why were we ever racing anywhere?

Competition in pursuit of excellence is highly overrated.

First of all, we only compete with other teams. The five members of a basketball team do not compete with each other to score the most baskets; if they did, they would be a terrible team and they would lose very much, and nobody would say, "Wow, those guys are really excellent!" Not even if they competed with great rigor.

So who is supposed to be the other team in this race? Other schools? We are supposed to beat other schools and teachers and students and leaving them whipped and beaten and in this way we will achieve excellence?

Or is it just possible that, in the education game, every American public school that uses teachers to educate American children-- that every one of those schools is on the same team and not in competition at all?

Second of all, even in economics and business, competition is really great until it isn't. Rockefeller created Standard Oil by absorbing competition, by buying up every last one of his competitors. At no point did he say, "You know what? For me to be really excellent, I need to have some competition." No-- he said, "In order for me to be really excellent, I need to control and organize most of this big, messy industry. Competition must go away." You know who else thought ending competition would be a good business strategy? Bill Gates.

Granted, Gates and a few others toyed with making their workers compete with each other. They stopped doing it, because it was bad for the team.

So don't tell me the business world loves competition, because they don't. At best, the people who are losing pay it lip service which lasts right up until they aren't losing any more.

And they aren't wrong. Rockefeller and Gates both brought order to industries that were messy and wasteful, industries that were throwing away valuable resources and opportunities fighting against each other. Competition did not improve the industry; it made it sloppy and inefficient.

Obama et al seem to believe that races advance all racers, just like Reagan's rising tide raised all boats (or trickled down on submarines, or something). They remain convinced that the folks in the back of the pack are only there because they are slackers, lazy, unmotivated, and that somehow the shame of losing will spur them to finally get their acts together. We've heard about compassionate conservatives. Here we see loveless liberals, compassion-free with a Nietzschian disregard for the under-menschen.

"But," they are going to protest, "we can't keep giving medals to everybody no matter what." And you know what? I agree. The self-esteemy movement to reward students just for having a pulse was a mistake. But our mistake was not giving medals to everyone. Our mistake was giving unearned medals to everyone.

"But," they are going to mansplain, "in the race of life, there are winners and losers." And I am going to say, not in school there aren't.

This is the problem with people who play too many sports. I'm a musician. You know what happens when you go to a concert and everybody plays their very very best? We don't declare one a winner and one a loser no matter what. We applaud like crazy, because when everybody does a great job, it's freakin' awesome!

In my classroom, there is no useful purpose for having a race. There is no useful purpose in declaring winners and losers. If all my students learn today, today everybody wins. And we don't have to race for that to happen.

Racing is a terrible awful no good very bad metaphor for what should be happening in schools. It is a stupid way to frame the whole business and cheap besides. Competition will not improve education-- not on the macro-national scale, not on the district scale, not on the building scale, not on the classroom scale.

We are not racers. We are builders. And building takes time and care and attention. It takes an understanding of your materials and the place in which you are building. It requires time and care and harmony and craft and attention. And every beam, every bolt, every square inch of surface matters. Every aspect of the building rests on and supports other aspects. And if you build a great building next to mine, it does not diminish me, but adds to my work.

Mr. President, I reject the language of scarcity, the language that says we will only support those who finish the race first, the language says that we are not a team, but a country of competitors in a dog-eat-dog world where there is only enough to support a chosen few. I am not going to race to any damn where.

FL: What Competition Gets You

Florida is supposed to be the Great Exemplar of ed reform. Charters, vouchers, ESAs-- every brand of reform under the sun runs free and unfettered under the bright Florida sun.

There may be no state that has more effectively set loose the Invisible Hand or market forces and competition. And what does that get you?

Well, it gets you unqualified scam artists like Eagle Arts Academy charter school hovering up tax dollars for their owners. You get thieves like the recently-convicted Marcus May, who stole over five million dollars of taxpayer money to finance his glitzy lifestyle. You get legislators who write the laws from which they themselves profit. You get tax dollars being spent just to advertise. You get schools appearing and disappearing and public schools barely surviving as their financial support is stripped. You get schools focused on their A-F grade and the test-centered culture that turns schools upside down-- if the school culture is not strong enough and resistant enough, they stop worrying about how to serve students by meeting their needs and start worrying about how to get students to serve the school by generating A-worthy data. You get schools that bar six-year-olds for wearing dreadlocks, because they have to protect their brand and make it clear to their potential customers exactly what kind of students aren't tolerated there.

It creates an atmosphere of mistrust and fear. And mistrust and fear do not make people behave better.

I'm plenty hard on charter schools, but the most massive, terrible failure of a school belongs to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and the public school system of which it is a part.

It's not just that they dropped the ball with a student who went on to murder seventeen members of that school community. That they dropped it is self-evident, both in how they ignored warning signs and in how they shuffled Cruz around. We may never know exactly how the system failed; many teachers read the list of warning signs and feel a chill thinking of many of those signs they've seen in students of their own. The task that fell into their school was not an easy one, but seventeen people are dead-- there is no question that the system failed, but we can legitimately question whether any school system could have saved Nikolas Cruz or his victims.

What is absolutely inexcusable is how the school district has handled everything since the murders.

As this report from the Sun-Sentinel shows, Broward County district has tried to "hide, deny, spin, threaten" its way forward. They have dropped tons of taxpayer money on lawyers to fight information requests, PR firms to massage the message, and consultants to tell administrators and staff to keep their mouths shut. They have put forth a huge effort to keep their own hands clean of any blame in this tragic murder of seventeen innocents.

The handling of Cruz as a student was obviously flawed. The handling of his murderous rampage has been an inexcusable indefensible disaster, a display of epic wrong-headedness, a massive display of how badly a public school district can lose their way.

I want to be clear on this point-- I don't think anything excuses what Broward district officials have done. Nothing.

I don't think that, under some better circumstances the district officials might have handled this so much better. You don't make this kind of disastrously bad response unless you had already long since lost the thread. But I have to wonder how much Florida's atmosphere of distrust and fear contribute. I have to wonder how badly it breaks down the management of a district when administrators must be most concerned about the competition, about how getting caught in a single misstep could leave them in dire circumstances.

After all, isn't this what competition also gets you-- an atmosphere in which people don't dare to show vulnerability or admit a mistake because one false move and the competition will Get You. And so seriously messed up students aren't a call for extra help and support for the child, but instead represent a potential liability to the district. It's not "how do we help this children" but "how do we manage this liability." And if, God forbid, the situation blows up, you don't dare say, "We screwed up and we want to sit down with everyone and figure out what went wrong so we can do better." Instead, you stonewall and stall and defend so that your mistakes don't cause you to lose a step in the competition.

Institutions are prone to self-preservation anyway, even in the best of times. Add an atmosphere of zero-sum dog-eat-dog competition, and the institutions Number One Priority becomes not the students it serves or the taxpayers that it serves, but its own survival.

It's no excuse. Professional educators should be better, should shrug off the invisible hand of competition and stick to doing what's right. We should always expect people to do the right thing. But we should also create policy that pushes them toward the right thing-- and competition pushes schools away from it. We can do better.

Jurassic Education World

Like apparently over half the world's population, we saw Jurrasic World last weekend. Fun film, and we always love the Chris Pratt at our house.

But as with last year's Lego Movie, I could not help noticing that the film underlines how much of popular culture is actually NOT aligned with the values and ideals of reformsters.

Data Driven Control

We know that our female lead is in need of rehabilitation because she is devoted to data. She calls the animals "assets" and cannot bring herself to see them as living, breathing beings. When asked by the owner if the park's visitors and the park's animals are happy, she replied with a customer satisfaction index for the visitors and, flustered, notes that they don't have an instrument for measuring the contentedness of the dinosaurs. The owner says one has to look the creatures in the eyes-- she doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Her unfit nature is further underlined by her inability to relate to her nephews. The character's moral journey involves learning to empathize, to relate, to connect to the children and the animals through something other than data and monitors and spreadsheets.

Beyond that character's journey, we have the usual moral of everything ever written by or based on works of Michael Chrichton-- that human beings invariably put way too much faith in their tools and control (seriously-- it's in everything he's ever written). The data control dream is that if we know everything, we can control everything, and if we control everything, we can make everything turn out exactly the way we want to. The film underlines the inherent falsehood in every clause of that sentence: we can't know enough, knowledge does not bring control, and the chaos inherent in any complex system guarantees unexpected and unplanned for outcomes.

Our unfit, morally adrift park manager is just like a data-driven school reformster, certain that spreadsheets and data are sufficient to turn a school into a factory that creates perfect products (aka students). And the pop culture sees that character as one who must be reformed.

Competition

The closest thing to a villain in the piece is Vincent D'Onofrio's military stooge, the guy who wants to use the barely-trained raptors as a military weapon. But the filmmakers don't position him as an actual official soldier. That would be perhaps unclear to the audience, so they leave him in civilian dress, and rather than talking about power, the writers give him a speech about competition.

The speech strikes all the notes we know-- competition will bring excellence, it pushes folks to greatness, it kills off and weeds out the weak and unfit. And the audience knows he is absolutely a bad guy (also, that he will be eaten by a dinosaur before we're done).

The idea that competition is to be worshiped as a means of Making Things Better, even if people must be sacrificed along the way. We understand that this is glorifying a system over individual creatures, and the character's death is not just a sort of narrative revenge on a bad guy, but an earned irony-- the character is so blind to the human cost of such a competitive that it never really occurs to him that he might be part of that cost.

Competition fans always like the view from a thousand feet up. It's when competition gets up close and personal that it becomes ugly.

Pop Culture Love

It's not like this movie is the only one to include these ideas, but it certainly is going to be one of the biggest ones in a while. And there on the billion dollar, the pop culture underscoring accents what everybody already knows-- deifying data and competition over basic humanity is bad. Not just bad, but the mark of a bad person who needs to be either redeemed or eaten.

Many people really are on the side of public education. They're just slow to realize that charter-choice data and competition fans are selling the same baloney that the movies reject.

What Is the Charter Difference?

What exactly makes a charter school a charter school? What is it that charter supporters expect to get from a charter school that they cannot get from a public one?

Variety and choice? 

Some advocates say that parents and students need choices, a variety, a plethora, a cornucopia of educational options from which to choose. We should have a sciency school for science students and a musicky school for musicians and a welding school for welders.

But we have that. In smaller districts, the possibility of magnet schools and specialty schools is lessened, but even in my mostly-rural county, districts have a co-operative vocational school that prepares welders and auto mechanics and security guards. Large urban districts can have all manner of specialty magnet schools that give students plenty of variety and choice. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Quality?

As I've argued before, people don't really want choice, anyway-- they want their children to go to one good school. Being "trapped in a zip code" never comes up when people have a school they like.

There's no arguing that some schools fail to live up to the promise of public education. But if you don't like the color of your house, do you paint the house, or do you buy a second house? If the school that I'm providing for my community's children is not doing a great job, sending some kids elsewhere will leave Sore Thumb High School still right where it is, doing poorly.

If I want it to be a better school, I can make it into a better school. This is what many communities have done over the years-- remade and reconfigured their local school to better reflect their desires at the time. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Regulations?

Charter fans say, "Well, we can create schools that don't have to work under the weight of bad government regulations."

I say, "If we know they are bad regulations, why don't we lift them for all schools?" And if it's a bad idea to lift them for all schools, exactly why are they bad regulations? If there are regulations that are not good for education, let's get rid of them for everybody, and if they are good for everybody, then let's have everybody follow them.

We can fix stupid laws on the legislative level. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Staffing?

Charter fans like the idea of schools that are non-union, non-professionally-trained teachers who can be paid by whatever mechanism and salary schedule. But in many locations, advocates have successfully imposed such ideas on the public system, with the dismantling of tenure, collective bargaining, and professional requirements to be a teacher. And local school districts are always free to negotiate whatever contracts the local market will bear. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Competition?

Free marketteers believe that if schools have to compete, that will drive them into paroxysms of excellence. But we already have competition between school districts-- in fact, competition between school districts is often a single factor in larger competition between communities. One of the ways that communities distinguish themselves as Better (and the houses therein more valuable and the neighborhood more desirable) is by making sure that the schools in East Egg are way better than the ones in West Egg. It is competition that has produced the very tyranny of the zip code that reformsters so hate. Because a feature of free market competition is that it has winners and losers, both in terms of producers and consumers.


We already have a school system handcuffed to a free market system of real estate. Schools already compete-- as best they can, given whatever local limitations they wrestle with. We don't need charter schools to establish a system of competition.

Doing more with less?

Do we need charters to show us how to do more with less? This is a non-starter. Plenty of public schools already have to do more with less every year, while charters frequently decide that the secret of success is more money. Next?

Laboratories of Innovation?

There is nothing to keep public schools from innovating and no signs that charters have discovered heretofore undiscovered revolutionary ideas in education. There is also nothing to indicate that public schools are not already filled with educators intent on finding new and better ways to do educate students. If you want to see more innovation, then by all means, rewrite the rules and regulations of public schools to reward or spur more such innovation.

But we don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Selective enrollment?

All right, this isn't even an advantage that charters claim they want, but it's one they're often accused of-- creating a school with carefully selected student body, with undesirable low-performing high cost students pushed out and desirable high-performing low cost students gathered in.

But this, too, is something we already do in public schools. Districts with magnet or specialty schools require students to move through an admissions process. And systems have an alternate education placement with students whose more severe issues, from autism to social maladjustment to developmental disability, make them a poor fit for the mainstream classroom.

We don't like to admit that we don't always take all comers in public schools, but we know how to be selective about who gets in the door and stays in the building. Some charters go much further, but the basic principle is the same-- public schools just don't fess up. Not that we should be proud of it, but we don't need charter schools to accomplish this goal.

So, really-- what do we need charters for?

Improvements in quality, choice, innovation, instruction, programs-- all of it can be accomplished in a public school system. All of these ideas for improving education could be applied to public schools, which would have the additional advantage of bringing the improvements to ALL students instead of a small group.

Of course, part of the challenge would be that changes and reforms would have to be discussed, debated and deployed publicly. A person who wanted, say, to subject non-wealthy non-white students to boot camp style No Excuses education would have to convince the taxpayers that it was a good idea. It's possible that only charters can provide an opportunity for one driven visionary to impose his or her ideas on a school without being answerable to anyone. But that would be less like a democratic institution and more like a small-scale dictatorship. It's not a very admirable goal-- and anyway, the invention of mayoral control has once again made it possible to establish small scholastic dictatorships without resorting to charters. This, too, we can accomplish without charter schools.

There isn't anything on this list of goals that we actually need charter skills to accomplish.

Is there any other goal I'm forgetting to-- oh, wait a minute.

Redirecting Tax Dollars

Charter schools do accomplish one goal that can't be achieved by public schools-- they manage to redirect public tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations, charter operating companies, corporate shareholders, and guys who just figured they'd make some money in the charter biz.

For everything else on the list, no charters are necessary. For everything else on the list-- well, imagine this: your car needs a new bulb for the headlight, has a flat spare tire, and is filled with discarded beer cans and McDonald's wrappers, and your mechanic says, "Well, obviously you have no choice but to buy a new car." And that makes no sense until you discover that the used car salesman is your mechanic's business partner.

The charter purpose that cannot be achieved by public schools is to move public tax dollars into private pockets. The one true difference between public schools and charter schools as currently envisioned is that only charter schools are making people wealthy. And if that's the only true thing different about charters, maybe we should stop talking about charters and start talking about fixing the issues-- the education-related issues-- that we really want to work on.

If Competition Is So Great...

Reformsters love competition. Love it.

Our students should be competitive. Our measure of success is how well our students can compete with workers in Shanghai and India and China (we never discuss that a good way to compete would be to learn how to live on ten bucks a week pay, but never mind that-- competition!).

Our schools should be competitive. We should let everybody who wants to open up a school and then let them all compete and that would lead to awesome super-duper excellence in schools. Public schools are lazy and terrible because they don't have to compete with anybody (because devoting resources to marketing instead of teaching makes educational sense).

Our teachers should be competitive. They should not ever have job security; they should come to work every day watching their back for an attack from the next hot young teacher to enter the building. Fear of losing their jobs will totally keep them on their A-game (and having a collegial atmosphere in schools is totally over-rated).

So if competition is so awesome--

If competition is so awesome, why is the backbone of the Common Core revolution a system for making all states do the same thing?

Why are reformsters not saying, "The states should compete! By having each try to come up with their own standards, we will spark a great competition that will produce the greatest educational standards ever seen!"

Why are reformsters promoting and defending a system that has its basic policy that all states must do the same thing and never, ever fall out of lockstep. Whatever the states do, they must NOT compete.

Maybe competition is not always so awesome after all?

Nevada's Voucher Fail

Back in 2015, Nevada decided to go all-in on vouchers, establishing the voucheriest of voucher programs-- the education savings account. With ESA's the state just hands every parent a check or a debit card (in Nevada's case, $5,700 for poor families and $5,100 for not-so-poor families) and families can spend that money on private school tuition, tutors, homeschool supplies, a case of Lisa Frank trapper-keepers-- whatever trips their educational triggers.

An ESA system is supposed to unleash the magical power of the free market and therefor cause All The Excellence to come busting out of a robusting out charter school sector. The sponsor of the bill, Senator Scott Hammond, was quoted in the Washington Post laying out his simple theory of action:

Nothing works better than competition. 

Let me quote from my own response at the time.

There are so many ways in which competition does not belong in public education. Building is a better metaphor than racing. Competition doesn't even foster traditional conservative values. The free market often resists quality rather than fostering it. The market doesn't know what to do with "losers." Charter school competition does not create pressure for excellence. Market competition creates perverse incentives to game the system, and tends to put the wrong people in charge. Choice twists the product in an involuntary market. Voucher system disenfranchise the taxpayers, literally creating taxation without representation and pitting taxpayers against parents. The whole inefficient system depends on lies and fantasies for financing. And if you think competition fosters excellence, just go take a look at your cable tv. Or take a look at how it has worked out in the college market. Finally, don't forget that time that Dr. Raymond of CREDO (charter and choice fans par excellence) declared that the free market doesn't work in education.


I suggested there were at least five reasons that the program was doomed. But the Las Vegas Sun has been taking a look at how things have been working out. So maybe it turns out I was wrong, and the Nevada ESA program has actually been working awesomely.


The program has proven to be hugely popular with wealthy and upper-middle-class families. Poor families-- not so much. In the suburbs, the Sun reports, applications for the program are running one out of every 100 students; in the inner city, it's one out of every 1000.


There are many possible explanations. The Sun notes there are few-to-none high-rated schools in poor areas, meaning those students would face a transportation issue. But of course there would also be a Getting The School To Accept Your Child issue as well-- particularly since private and charter school tuition generally runs well above that $5,7000 voucher. The Sun also notes that "it could be true that there simply hasn’t been enough outreach by the state in low-income neighborhoods." Almost as if getting poor kids into upscale schools is not the real objective of the program.

Treasurer Dan Schwartz, a conservative acolyte in the cult of the free market, says that we should all ignore the business about class in the use of the ESAa:

“This is not an issue of rich or poor,” he said in a statement. “This is about empowering thousands of Nevada families who are trapped in mediocrity as Nevada struggles with a K-12 education system that is ranked 51st in the nation.”

Which would make a lot more sense if Nevada hadn't gone with a system that empowers ALL parents to bank some tax dollars whether they are "trapped" in a bad school or not. And, as the Sun reports, the majority of ESA applicants live within walking distance of the highest-ranked schools in the state.

The program has hit some snags here and there. Most notably, the courts told the state that it couldn't finance the program with tax dollars meant to finance public education. This cuts to the heart of an ESA program-- the way these are supposed to work is the state hands you your 'cut" of the education tax dollars and says, "Go get yourself an education somehow and don't ever bother us about education stuff ever again." Nevada is still working on it.

In the meantime, if Nevada really wants to get out of 51st place, their leaders might consider focusing on how to actually help schools be better instead of trying to figure out ways that education tax dollars can be used to enrich businesses and absolve the state of any responsibility for its school system.

Free market fans were excited about this system. Nevada was going to be a proof-of-concept case, and folks like the Fordham Foundation and Jeb Bush's FEE were positively giddy with the prospects. But so far all Nevada has to show is a system that takes from the taxpayer, gives to the rich, and leaves the poor stuck right where they've always been, all while making no attempt to actually improve their education system at all. Call this voucher program a big fat fail.

Did FCC Just Damage School Internet

In the wonky alphabet soup depths of policy, this thing happened in April-- the FCC decided to uncap BDS pricing, because free market competition.

Wires competing for space on free market pole

Business Data Services refers to the kind of bulk internet access sold by providers like Verizon and ATT to business and other institutional buyers. Like small businesses or hospitals or libraries or schools.

And while there is no limit on what providers can charge you for home internet, the BDS sector has always been highly regulated, based on the argument that schools and libraries and mom-and-pop businesses should not be priced out of the market.

The end of the cap allows service providers to charge whatever they think the market can bear (or even employ the time-honored practice of jacking up prices in order to drive away customers you don't want to serve). The cap removal is conditional-- it can only happen in counties where there is competition. Competition in this case is defined as "any other isp provider within a half mile of fifty percent of the buildings being served." Estimates are that about a third of the coountry will consequently stay under the old cap.

Some Democrats are not happy about this move by the FCC:

Many politicians have talked in recent months "about protecting our nation's small businesses -- the backbone of the American economy," said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat. "Yet it is these very businesses -- the mom-and-pop hardware store, the family-owned wireless provider, and the small rural hospital, that just drew the short straw."

Instead of looking out for "millions of little guys," the Republican majority at the FCC has sided with the interests of huge telecom providers, she added. Clyburn predicted "immediate price hikes," especially in rural areas.

"Just where does the buck stop? At the wallets of every American consumer," she said.

Can you guess who thinks this is a good idea?

"Price regulation—that is, the government setting the rates, terms, and conditions for special access services—is seductive," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, said. "Who can possibly resist the promise of forcing prices lower right now? But in reality, price regulation threatens competition and investment."

My emphasis. Yup. Just in case you missed that one in the flurry-ish wave of appointments, Trump put a former Verizon counsel in charge of the FCC. But before you get too mad(der) at Trump, note that one reason you may have missed this appointment is because Pai left Verizon in 2003, went to work at the Department of Justice for a few years, and then started working at the FCC in 2007. In 2011, Obama nominated him for the Republican commissioner spot on the FCC and the Senate approved him unanimously. So while Pai keeps getting "Trump-appointed" appended to his name, all Trump did this time was just continue a bipartisan institutional process that has been going on for a while. Now we have Pai, spearheading the attack on net neutrality and this BPS thing.

Will this ultimately make internet access more expensive for your school? Probably. Then again, the intense free market competition may drive your costs relentlessly down (if you are among the 24% of BDS customers in a two-server market). Because, see, price competition really kicks in when providers are free to charge more. Because... wait-- are we saying that because they weren't free to charge more before, they couldn't compete by charging less? I could swear that's not how the free market is actually supposed to work.

Reformsters and Dinosaurs

Last night my wife and I watched our newly acquired copy of Jurassic World, a movie that doesn't have an original idea in its head, but is still plenty of fun to watch. Even more than when we saw it in the theater, I'm struck by how the themes of education reform are laced through the film, and though I wrote about the movie at the time, I want a do-over, to expand on what I originally noticed.

Virtually every reformster foible is on display in this movie.

Our leading lady is introduced with a big Marked for Redemption sign on her forehead. She refers to the animals in the park as "assets," things rather than living beings, and she prefers to manage based on data and spreadsheets-- management by screen. She follows procedure rather than listening to her expert.

The movies baddest human is Vincent D'Onofrio's ex-military corporate tool. He's most immediately marked as a bad guy with his speech about competition, and how that's the road to improvement. What I noticed more clearly this time through is that he likes the idea of competition because he believes that he will come out on top-- competition is important because it's how other things are brought up to snuff.

Paired with that belief in competition is yet another rejection of expertise. Chris Pratt (playing what we affectionately refer to as Bert Macklin, Dinosaur Hunter) tries to explain to D'Onofrio all of the specifics and understanding needed to handle the almost-trained raptors, but D'Onofrio brushes him off because D'Onofrio believes that he just has a gut-level understanding that is greater than Pratt's actual knowledge and experience. D'Onofrio is so sure that he just knows how things go that he will prevail-- right up to the moment the raptor chomps down on his arm.

Also worth noting-- the billionaire backer of the park. He seems to be a voice concerned about the right things (Are the customers happy? Are the animals happy?) but he also suffers from a hubris problem. As he climbs aboard a helicopter that he intends to pilot, another character asks if there is anyone else who can pilot the copter. The billionaire replies, "We don't need anybody else." Again he believes in his own awesomeness over any needed expertise, and the result is death and destruction for himself and others.

Add--of course-- the scientist who has met the demands for a bigger, badder dinosaur without regard for the moral and ethical issues involved. Park management needs newer, scarier "assets" to keep their numbers up, and the scientist has delivered. Had the character ever read any Michael Crichton book, he might have paused to consider Crichton's favorite idea-- that human beings always underestimate the problems that come with their technological solutions.

All of these factors-- the focus on keeping numbers up, the impersonal data focus, the creation of artificial solutions, the belief in competition, the hubristic disregard for expertise-- combine to produce a monster. The monster was supposed to be the best, the creation that would save the park. Instead, it destroys it before being itself destroyed. It's all very, very reminiscent of the education debates, of the drive by powerful people whose faith is in their own rightness and not in expertise and experience to create something that is supposed to fix everything. But their values are warped and instead of trying to do what is best for the animals or the human guests of the park, they are really driving to create weapons, to create profits that will prove they are the best. What they create is meant to be the best, a savior, but because their values and goals are wrong, their creation is a destructive monster.

I suppose I might have spoiled a few details, but in truth there are no spoilers for this film because absolutely nothing happens that comes as a real surprise. And that's what's really interesting to me-- the characters who display the coldness, the detachment, the self-importance, the hubris that we associate with reformsters, are all immediately recognizable as characters who will be dealt either redemption or destruction. I venture a guess that nobody who watches the film sees D'Onofrio's character, hears him talk about how the raptors can be used, how competition makes the world work, how expertise can be ignored because he just knows-- nobody sees all this and thinks, "Yeah, that guy is going to be the hero."

Yes, the parallels aren't perfect. I'm happy to think of Chris Pratt as a proxy for teachers, but the dinosaurs end up as proxies for students and/or traditional public ed, which is less flattering. 

So public ed fans can enjoy the movie because the good guys win and the bad guys, mostly, get their comeuppance. And public ed fans can take heart from the fact that the good guys are readily recognizable by just about anybody, that our struggle does include recognizable archetypes. Maybe that will help the public really understand what is happening to public ed.

One thing, though, that might get missed in the Big Finale-- the scientist and his engineered embryos escape unscathed.

Conservatives Don't Really Like School Choice

Conservatives often claim they are big fans of school choice. I think they're wrong. I don't mean that I want to disagree with them using fluffy progressive liberal arguments. I mean that in the world of conservative values and goals, school choice really doesn't fit. Let me explain.

Resources and Inefficiency

One of the assumptions of every choice system is that a choice system can operate for the same amount of money-- or less-- than the current system. This is clearly false.

Which will be more inexpensive and efficient-- educating 100 students in one school , or educating them in ten separate ten-student schools, each with its own group of administrative employees and each with its own physical plant and infrastructure. "We're in serious financial trouble, so let's take our set of elementary schools and break them into even more elementary schools," said no school board ever.

There are some functions that government can perform more efficiently. Nobody suggests that we open the door to any contractor who wants to set up a competing system of interstate highways. Nor do we open up each new war to bids from any private army that wants to go in there. Okay, actually that one does happen a little, and you'll notice that when it does, things get even more expensive really quickly. And when government does allow a spirit of competition, it doesn't work out all that well. We are still trying to fix the massive disconnect between competing intelligence agencies that made it easy to pull off the 9/11 attacks.

I agree that given infinite resources, a multiple service provider system would look a lot different. But that's not what we've got and it's not what we're ever going to have. School choice requires multiple school systems to live as cheaply as one, and they can't. Yes, there are charters who claim they can do it. So far, they are all liars; any lower operating costs they purport to achieve are the result of simply tossing high-cost students out of the system, and if we're willing to throw away the expensive children, we can make public schools run way cheaper tomorrow.

No, a school choice system is no financial winner. We end up with waste and inefficiency and duplication of services, and we end up with school systems that either don't have enough resources, or we simply soak the taxpayers for more money.

Big Government

Because there are not enough resources to go around, we will need some Wise and Powerful Wizard to divvy them all up. That wizard is going to be the state or federal government. For better or worse, under current market conditions starting a new competing school system to compete with the public system will be like starting a new software company to compete with Microsoft Windows. The cost of admission is way too high unless Big Government gets involved.

The only way to extend the reach of choice schools will be to extend the reach of big government. And since the choice schools will be accepting government money, they will be accepting government oversight. Yes, I know they've battled it back for now, but they will lose that war. The government will declare, as it has with public schools, that it has a responsibility to see that it's money was spent appropriately. Some choice school will get caught doing something spectacularly egregiously stupid, and big gummint will have its opening.

You know what a good example of small, local government is? Locally elected school boards. Yes, many are less than perfect. But at what point did conservatives join the chorus of, "We need to just tell the electorate what to do. It's for their own good."

Competition Does Not Foster Quality Products

I've written about this before, comparing charter schools to cable channels. The big money is in the big markets, so the big players compete for the muddled middle. Education has two particular problems-- there's not much product differentiation, and a big chunk of your market is people who don't really want your product.

The lack of product differentiation (particularly if all schools are using the same CCSS to teach to the same Big Tests) means that the game will belong to the person with the best marketing. Trot out your own examples here (I like Betamax vs. VHS) of superior products that did NOT win the marketplace because they were out-marketed by somebody else.

In a choice system, schools will compete, but not by being the highest quality educators. They'll offer programs that appeal to students who don't find school appealing ("Welcome to No Homework High!!"), and they will offer really cool and glitzy marketing. You may say, "Fine. Let the jerks send their kids to crappy schools and that will just leave my kids at Really Quality High with the other cool kids."

Except. First of all, Really Quality High has to accept you. Every admission's decision will be a marketing decision. If your child is too expensive, we don't want him. If he is going to screw with our scores, we're sending him back to you. Here's your competition-- you will compete with other parents to pull strings, make it rain, and otherwise score your kid a seat at Exclusive High (pro tip: you won't compete by making your kid suddenly smarter or a better student, because you can't do much about those things, and I bet you won't say, "Oh well, you're just not as smart as the Smith kid, so we'll settle for Average Shmoe High.")

And second of all, Really Quality High has to exist. In the early days of cable, there were some really classy channels. I liked Bravo for broadway shows and Arts&Entertainment for its highbrow culture offerings. But there wasn't enough of me to make those approaches profitable, so now Bravo and A&E broadcast the same basic sort of dreck as every other channel.

Competition Does Not Foster Competition

One of my favorite history books is The Robber Barons, a history of the great money-grubbers of the 19th century written by a 1930s-era socialist. Matthew Josephson really wants to hate these guys, but at the same time, he clearly admires them because they are economic collectivists. Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al didn't really have a beef with centralized control of an entire industry, as long as they were the people in charge.

Unbridled competition leads to centralized control. Let, say, the phone company just suck up every other phone company, and you get the telephone monopoly of the 1970s, run by a corporation just as impersonal, uncaring, inefficient, unresponsive and insulated from competition as any sector ever run by Big Gummint. What does it take to keep such monopolistic centralization from happening? Why, hello there Big Gummint!

You think this won't happen in choice schools? Of course it will-- it already is. Pearson is already assembling a vertically integrated powerhouse of Rockefellerian proportions (and do I need to remind you that they aren't even American, that as upset as we were when the Chinese were buying up America bit by bit, Pearson has already done much the same with American education), and in may states, the only charter players are the big players. And like every power centralizer before them, they did not conquer their world simply by being so much better than everyone else. They use money and influence and, when necessary, the tool of Big Government to get their way.

This is not meritocracy in action. This is corporations and big government teaming up to display exactly why conservatives who rail against Big Government have a point.

Caveats and Etc

Are there pockets of charter schools who have avoided all these pitfalls? Absolutely. But look at today's corporate-dominated landscape and tell me if you really think there's room for a small, creative edupreneur.

Do I have ideas for alternatives? You know I do, but this is already running long. But conservatives-- you need to stop promoting school choice, because you don't really want it. You just haven't figured that out yet.

The Search For Computerized Essay Grading Continues

It is the dream that will not die. For some reason, there are still people who think the world would be a better place if student essays could be evaluated by software, because reasons. The problem has remained the same--for decades companies have searched for a software algorithm that can do the job, but other than deciding to call the algorithms "AI," progress has been slim to none.

And yet, the dream will not die. So now we get a competition, mounted by Georgia State University has teamed up with The Learning Agency Lab (a "sister organization" with The Learning Agency).

The Feedback Prize is a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal is to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results. Why? Well, they open their case with a sentence that deserves its own award for understatement.

There are currently numerous automated writing feedback tools, but they all have limitations. 

Well, yes. Primarily they are limited because they don't work very well. The contest says the current automated feedback programs is that "many often fail to identify writing structures" like thesis statements of support for claims. Well, yes, because--and I cannot say this hard enough--computer algorithms do not understand anything in the sense that we mean the word. Computer language processing is just weather forecasting--looking at some bank of previous language examples and checking to see if the sample they're examining has superficial characteristics that match what the bank of samples would lead one to expect. But no computer algorithm can, for instance, understand whether or not your supporting evidence provides good, er even accurate, support.

The competition also notes that most current software is proprietary so that A) you don't even know what it's trying to do, or how and B) you can't afford it for your school, particularly if your school is resource-strapped, meaning that poor kids have to depend on regular old humans to grade their writing.

For extra juice, they note that according to NAEP, only a third of students are proficient (without noting that "proficient" on NAEP is a high bar). They do not cite any data showing that automated essay grading helps students write better, because they can't. 

But if you enter this competition, you get access to a large dataset of student writing "in order to test your skills in natural language processing, a fast-growing area of data science."

If successful, you'll make it easier for students to receive feedback on their writing and increase opportunities to improve writing outcomes. Virtual writing tutors and automated writing systems can leverage these algorithms while teachers may use them to reduce grading time. The open-sourced algorithms you come up with will allow any educational organization to better help young writers develop.

902 teams have already entered; you can actually check their current status on a public leader board. There are lots of fun team names like Feedforward, Pomegranate, Zoltan and Fork is all you need. Plus many that are not in English. Poking through the site, you can see how much the writing samples are referred to ad discussed as data rather than writing; many of these folks are conceptualizing the whole process as analyzing data rather than assessing writing, and in fact there don't seem to be any actual writing or teaching experts in sight, which is pretty symptomatic of the whole field of automated essay evaluation. 

Who is in sight?

Well, you'll be unsurprised to find that the competition thanks The Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative for their support. Schmidt Futures, the name you might not recognize here, was founded by Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, to technologize the future.

And if we look at the Learning Agency and the Learning Agency Lab, it's more of the same. The Agency is "part consultancy, part service provider," so a consulting outfit that works to "improve education delivery systems." They tout a team of "former academics, technologists, journalists and teachers." Sure. We'll see.

The outfit was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and one woman who used toi teach English at a private K-12 school. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.

I'm going out on a limb to predict that this competition, due to wrap up in a couple of months, is not going to revolutionize writing assessment in any way. But the dream won't die, particularly as long as some folks believe that data crunching machines can uplift young humans. 

Competitive Baloney & Rehabilitating RTTT

At the Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION Review (I don't know why the yell the middle of their name), Joanne Weiss has unleashed an astonishing stack of deep-fried baloney that attempts to retro-actively legitimize the destructive power-and-money test-and-punish legacy of Race to the Top. "Competing Principles" is truly audacious.

Joanne Who??

Weiss has a powerful pedigree. She put in years as an ed tech honcho before going to work for NewSchools Venture Fund, an investment firm for hedge fundies to get their paws in the education biz and that sweet, sweet mountain of public tax dollars. In conjunction with that gig, she served on the boards of Aspire, Green Dot, Rocketship and Leadership charter outfits, to name just a few.

All of this made her perfectly positioned to become Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff and the lead dog for Race to the Top. Are you starting to understand why that program was such a mess?

But when Weiss looks at RttT, she does not see mess, and in this article, she paints with rosy hues the many fine lessons to be learned from the administration's signature education program.

She opens with a brief fantasy-filled recap of RttT's impact (43 states now have super-magical tests that can measure critical thinking), and then moves on to the Eight Big Design Lessons of Race to the Trough.

Create a Real Competition

The administration was not sure that the initiative would be "compelling." But golly gee, 46 states ponied up to give it a try. Weiss believes that the secret was "our decision to leverage the spirit of competition." How, one may ask, does one harness this mysterious and mystical force?

First, they set a very high bar, allowed for very few winners, and offered very big rewards. She forgets to mention another important step-- launch your competition when states have just been hammered by an economically debilitating recession and are desperate for money. Weiss's spirit of competition can also be leveraged by starving some people for two weeks, throwing them in a pit, and waving juicy steaks while announcing that only one person who climbs out of the pit gets to eat.

Second, she writes, they kept politics out of the process, and I am wondering (not for the last time) whether Weiss is incredibly cynical or incredibly dense. There was a review panel of experts. No politics. Nosirree. Just a score indicating how well the states matched the definition of "excellence" created by politicians in DC.

Third, they "placed governors at the center of the application process." So, the top politicians were invited "to use their political capital." As God is my witness "no politics" and "use top politicians political muscle" appear within two adjacent paragraphs.

Weiss acknowledges, sort of, the problem near the center of this aspect-- that RttT promoted competition in an arena that should be collaborative. Weiss addresses this by saying, essentially, no, we didn't, and also, we were right to do so.

She completely ignores the huge issue at the center of the competitive aspect of the program-- a declaration of the federal government that they will only provide help and support to some states. This is like saying to your family, "I know you've all been hungry and undernourished, and we're going to fix that. We're going to feed some of you, most likely the strongest ones who least need it. For those of you who are too weakened to compete, screw you. You get nothing." The competitive grant nature of Race to the Top was an absolute abdication of federal responsibility, and the Obama administration should be ashamed of the program for that reason alone.

Pursue Clear Goals (in a Flexible Way)

Weiss admits to flubbing this one, producing a program with so many goals that no state could successfully address all of them. With a do-over, she'd recommend "leaner, more focused rules."

Tomato, tomahto. The effect is the same. If I give my students vague instructions, they'll say, "Can you give an example." Once I provide an example, they'll give me work exactly like it, because thanks to my vague instructions, my example is the only thing they know is safe to try. Ditto RttT and features like, say, Common Core.

This section does feature one more reality-defying side note. In suggesting that this really was successful because states really bought in to their new plans, Weiss writes:

In fact, even many states that did not win the competition proceeded with the reform efforts that they had laid out in their application. 

Do you suppose the explanation was that states were staring down the barrel of NCLB's punitive sanctions and hoping the feds promised waiver program was their chance to avoid trouble?

Drive Alignment Through the System

The overall goal of the competition was to promote approaches to education reform that would be coherent, systemic, and statewide.

That's why we drove each state to have all its main players sign Memos of Understanding, pledging their allegiance and compliance to what, as folks who remember those years may recall, was a fuzzy and undefined set of requirements. We just kept waving money at them.

I do remember that time in PA. The state hollering "sign these agreements" and folks like teacher unions and local administrators saying "But what the heck are we agreeing to?" and the state saying "But look! Money!! You must sign!" It was a long conversation. PA did not win any RttT bux.

Encourage Broad Stakeholder Buy-in 

Weiss has a funny idea about what "encourage" means:

First, we forced alignment among the top three education leaders in each participating state—the governor, the chief state school officer, and the president of the state board of education—by requiring each of them to sign their state’s Race to the Top application. In doing so, they attested that their office fully supported the state’s reform proposal.

 Second, they asked for signatures from district officials. Third, they waved more piles of money "tangible incentives" at community leaders. Fourth, we made state leaders come submit to personal interviews.

We imposed this requirement largely to verify that those in charge of implementing their state's plan were knowledgeable about the plan and fully committed to it.

It's funny, but none of this sounds like "encourage buy-in," so much as it sounds like "required obeisance and pledges of compliance because we couldn't trust any of these bastards." I find it oddly soothing that the administration had no more faith in governors than it had in teachers.

Promote Change from the Start

We were really pleased at how quickly states starting auditioning and sucking up for our money from even before Day One. We were particularly gratified that many actually changed their laws just for us. Yay, us.

Enable Transparency

From its earliest days, Race to the Top received a high degree of scrutiny and faced pressure to be above reproach. We decided that the best way to handle this pressure was to keep a firewall between our decisions and any of the rabble who wanted to cause trouble, in hopes that we could get the whole thing up and running before anybody had a chance to pry too much.

Ha ha. Okay, I rewrote part of that quote. Weiss is really going to try to sell her audience on the idea that transparency had anything to do with Race to the Top. And that "commitment to transparency" brought all sorts of benefits.

First, everyone did super-high-quality work because it would be under public scrutiny. Hey, have I mentioned that I have not seen Common Core mentioned once in this article? Boy, there was a piece of high quality totally transparent work that rode the coattails of Race to the Top. Well, except for how everyone was lying about it being teacher-written and internationally benchmarked. Or maybe that's the high-quality work involved in selling untested teacher evaluation based on unvalid (and at the time non-existent) testing.

Second, "participants developed a common vocabulary for talking about education reform" because nothing promotes transparency like specialized insider jargon.

Third, the Race to the Top website became a-- wait! what?? There was such a thing? Does she mean this place, with all the government PR?

Fourth, the information about RttT became "crowdsourced" (those are her air quotes) with all sorts of folks checking out and critiquing applications. Researcher "will be mining this trove of data for years to come." I'm pretty sure she's just making shit up now.

Build a Climate of Support

Yes, nothing builds a climate of support like a battle royale over zero-sum monetary rewards.

Her point is that the government was supportive of applying states, and I kind of think she means that this all created an atmosphere in which many helpful consultants and think tanks and publishers and other edubizpreneurs could descend upon states to start hoovering up some of that aforementioned sweet sweet money.

Ensure Accountability

Turns out that people in a life-or-death competition will over-promise, and while the department did its best to rein that in (including requiring a note from State Attorney Generals that the "proof" was accurate-- seriously), it was still an issue. So in the future, the agencies managing the grant money should never take their hands entirely off of it.

And that's eight.

I Need To Sit Down

Once again, reformsters provide a glimpse of some alternate reality. This is certainly a different picture of Race to the Top than, say, "We used a big pile of money to get states to actually compete for the privilege of giving us control of their pubic education systems" or "We went out and bought a bunch of friends for Common Core while bribing states to implement untested, unproven half-baked ideas about evaluating teachers."

But others have already hit the comments section of this piece of retroactive fluffernuttery.

Leonie Haimson points out that another super-duper effect of RttT was to create such a huge backlash that all versions of the ESEA rewrite include sections that tell the Secretary of Education to go sit in the corner and think about what he's done.

Christopher Chase just rips the living daylights, from secretly produced standards to the use of this all as cover for privatizing and charterizing schools. Chase's response is worth reading even if you can't bear to read Weiss's article.

At the end, Weiss writes "We will not know the full impact of Race to the Top for several more years." And that's probably true, but we can take a shot at the broad strokes.

Race to the Top kick-started the process of foisting an unproven, unsupportable standards created by amateurs, test manufacturers, and book publishers on an unsuspecting public.

Race to the Top gave the test-and-punish policies of No Child Left Behind a giant shot of steroids, promising a level of testing quality that has still not been delivered while simultaneously chaining the professional future of teachers to that unproven testing system.

Race to the Top set out to create winners and losers among the states, declaring that the federal government only needed to help some American students be educated. At the same time, it gave a jolt of support to the process of declaring individual schools losers and turning those schools into profit-making opportunities for charter privateers who echoed the new mission-- educate only some of the students, but do it with everyone's public tax dollars.

Race to the Top created a huge backlash that damaged the political careers of many individuals who realized only too late what a giant load of underthought overreaching baloney it was.

It's true we'll not find out just how much damage was done for years, but we've got a general sense of the impact of RttT on US public education, but we already know that it was similar to the impact of an falling elephant on a wounded eagle. It wasn't good, and all the pretty PR in the world won't change that.