For Retiring Teachers

I've been out here in the retiree pasture for a few years now (it's a lovely place upstate, with many frolicking dogs) and as some teachers are staring down the last few weeks of their teaching careers, let me offer them some advice. Here's what's waiting for you.

First, make some noise on your way out.

My regret is that I didn't throw a bigger party. Seriously. Some combination of not wanting to be That Hey Look At Me Guy and survivor's guilt (this hits hard for some folks, because when retiring from teaching is like leaping off a train barreling full speed down the tracks, and you are leaving behind others to continue work that you didn't finish--because teaching is never finished)-- anyway, I should have invited every other teacher in the building and every other person I could think of and made some noise, but I didn't want to be a bother. 

Have a project.

Everyone tells you this. Some of us go at it a bit more aggressively than others, but I don't think a teacher brain can shift easily to simply idling. The teacher brain is generally running 147 different threads all at once, and suddenly running 0 can cause the brain to just lock up. You may think you can handle a life of leisure because you went on vacation during the summer that one time, but be honest-- you were lying on the inflatable turtle in the middle of the pool and one little corner of your brain was still figuring out how to tweak that one unit for September and maybe you could rearrange the seating in your room and did you remember to order those posters yet? 

Volunteer. Start working through your pile of unread books. Travel. Take a cooking class. Find something for your brain to chew on. It took me a while to get past the feeling that there was something I was supposed to be doing, but wasn't. Being a stay-at-home dad for a couple of small children helped with that, but I don't recommend it as a solution for everyone.

Time is different on the outside.

At some point in retirement, you will think, "How did I get all this done and work full-time, too?" The answer is that teacher time is different than retiree time.

Teacher: I have a two-minute break at 10:03, so I can get some copies made, get another fifty grades in the grade book, and go pee.

Retiree: I volunteered to sit in the booth from 10:00 to 10:30, so I guess my whole morning is filled up.

The rhythms of dealing with people

For decades you have been dealing with other humans on a large scale, working to deliberately engage with dozens (elementary) or hundreds (secondary) of students and family members. They become a major factor of how you go through your days, and then, after nine months or so, they leave. 

This is not a natural rhythm for human interactions. I hope your own social and emotional health was anchored outside the classroom, but even so, retirement is a whole new game. If you're an extrovert, you may find yourself craving new sources of human interaction. If you're an introvert, you may find that the part of you that engages with other humans is screaming for a major break. At the beginning of my career, I replaced a guy whose retirement plan was to sit on the porch, read books, drink beer, and talk to nobody. 

Weeks full of Fridays

Other retirees may joke about how every day is Saturday, but teachers know that special Friday afternoon feeling, like you've been dragging a loaded semi with a chain for five days, and you just got to set the chain down. For the first year or two, it felt like Friday afternoon a lot. 

Have your support system

Another one of my retirement secrets was to be married to an exceptionally excellent woman. So I had that going for me, as well as the many connections that come from being active in many small-town activities like theater and band. A church home can be nice, too.

But you may fine that maintaining your web of humans may take more deliberate work on your part. Being at work put you in natural connection with your web of workplace proximity associates, and you aren't going to have that. If you want to stay connected, you will have to reach out. As far as the school itself goes, you will be a ghost in 3-5 years. Your work friends will be busy in the dailiness of the work, and you will not, so maintaining those relationships will take deliberate effort.

Share

You have a wealth of knowledge and experience, both in terms of content knowledge and educational expertise. You know how to organize large groups of cat-like humans. You know how to manage an undersized budget. You know how to help people understand stuff. You know what life in a classroom is actually like. 

There are people and organizations out there that would benefit from what you know. Maybe you can be some sort of activist or communicator about education, or maybe your skills can be put to work in a non-education space. Maybe it is individual humans rather than organizations that can benefit from what you know. 

Whatever the case, you still have plenty to contribute to the world. Teachers are too often reluctant to get involved, to push themselves out into the world. The "just" in "I'm just a teacher" keeps a lot of smart, capable people from making as much noise as they could. And I get it-- when you're dealing with the dailiness of your classroom, it's hard to find the bandwidth for wading into other ponds. But you don't have to deal with the dailiness any more, and you are not "just a retired teacher." You are an experienced education professional with a wealth of experience and knowledge. Somebody can use that.

Finally

People still ask if I miss it, and the truth is that, in many ways, I do. The actual teaching parts were, mostly, great, though there is a tendency as a retiree to remember the best parts and not, say, the class that sat there like bumps on a log despite your best efforts. If you've taught more than six months, you have acquired a list of failures, moments when you just didn't get things to fall the way you wanted them to, and I can report that those haunt you a bit less in retirement.

Mostly I miss the actual teaching (when it goes well). I opposite-of-miss the bureaucracy, the stupid paperwork, the stultifying compliance culture, the bosses who were way more worried about stuff that didn't help me do my job, the time wasted on junk like the Big Standardized Test and BS Test prep, the-- well, it's not a short list. But the work itself? That was golden, and I'll never regret a second of it.

That question (do you miss it) is not always asked in good faith; sometimes it's asked in the same way that some people encourage a newly-married couple to smash the wedding cake into each others' faces. They just want to see someone else be miserable, so while the DYMI question is complicated and nuanced, I don't want to cater to anyone who just wants to hear me smash cake in the profession's face. I can tell them truthfully that it was the best job in the world, and if I had it to do over again, I would, and I'm still a tiny bit jealous of my former colleagues who are still in the classroom doing the work. 

ICYMI: Essay Contest Edition (5/3)

 Once a year, I'm the director of a local writing competition for high school students in the various school districts of the county. The competition is in honor of one of the giants of English teaching in our area; she graduated from here, worked in the original OSS, became a lady CEO, taught English, and left the classroom only because there was such a thing as a mandatory retirement age (you can read about her here). 

The contest has run for thirty-some years, and it is precisely the sort of thing that cheatbots make challenging, though historically our winners write way better than bots do, and I work hard to design a bot-resistant prompt. But it's a fun time for me-- part of my duties include being first reader and culling the hundreds of entries down to a manageable stack for table judges. 

So that has been my week. But I still have a reading list for you. 

The Atlantic Platforms Charter School Propaganda: Anti-Woke Edition

Paul Thomas responds to the Atlantic piece about how awesome charters are and how anti-racism is killing public schools. 

Oligarchs and Christian Nationalists Aim to Plunder Massachusetts Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham peels back the masks on another Massachusetts assault on public education, and reminds us that National Parents Union is none of those three things.

AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students

Lots of implications to mull over in this finding, written up by Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report.

Most School Vouchers Go To Students Who Never Attended Public Schools

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nifty bar chart that lays out in quick and simple manner where the taxpayer-funded vouchers are actually going.

Epic founders Harris, Chaney bound for criminal trial as 2-year preliminary hearing ends

One of the nation's major charter school scams might actually result in jail time for the scammers who pocketed $22 million of taxpayer dollars in their massive fraud.

Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

It's not just that the Office of Civil Rights in the Education Department has decided only the civil rights of white guys are being threatened-- it's that they're being anti-transparent about what they are and are not doing. ProPublica has sued, and here explains why.

What Will It Take To Get AI Out of Schools?

Don't know how I missed this last week, but this New Yorker piece from Jessica Winter is well worth the read (if you can get to it).

The Big Tech Backlash

Jennifer Berkshire looks at some of the pushback against ed tech, including some of the surprising places it's turning up.

We Created the Lotus Eaters

Matt Brady writes about the students who are comfortable non-starters, and how to get them back into work.

I Write the Songs

On songwriting, music teaching, and mistakes. From Nancy Flanagan.

Broken Record

Audrey Watters finds herself writing about the same stuff, again, again. And yet, it is stuff that needs to be said, again, again.

Seniors and Kids as Profit Centers: Medicare Advantage and School Vouchers Exploit Both

Bruce Lesley explains how Medicare Advantage and school vouchers are manifesting the same philosophy to harvest profits (and provide minimum service).

Ohioans: Please Do Not Sign Petition to Get Referendum to End Property Taxes on the November Ballot

Jan Resseger has an important message for folks in Ohio.

Standardized testing and scripted lessons are failing both teachers and students

Johnathan Kantrowitz is talking about Australia in this post, but some of the description sure sounds familiar (including panic over declining test scores).

The Testing Ritual and the Steakhouse Reality

Testing, staffing, and working lunches-- TC Weber looks at it all with one raised eyebrow and more than a few questions.

Problems with the DOE's AI Guidance

There has been a lot of noise and wrestling about with the New York City schools' attempt to craft AI guidance, and while I don't generally look to NYC for guidance on anything, these five objections from Leonie Haimson are an excellent guide to the sort of questions you should be asking about your local school district's attempt to cope with AI. If you want more, Chalkbeat covers the parent rebellion here.

Kent State President claps back at Vivek. It's about damn time.

A university leader actually calls out a politician's dumb ideas. More of this, please. Stephen Dyer has the details.

At Forbes.com this week, I wrote about some important characteristics of rural schools. 

I don't love the Black Eyed Peas, but I do like an unexpected team-up.

ICYMI: Soccer Edition (4/26)

The Board of Directors is trying soccer this spring and their first match was yesterday, in the rain. They have not yet revealed any special aptitude for the game, but it does involve a lot of running hard up and down a field, and that is their preferred sporty activity. It gets us all outside and moving around while breathing air and touching grass and just generally interacting with real things and other humans, and that seems like rather a huge win. 

We have been a low-screen household since they boys were born. They have no phone, no tablet, little tech at all, and watch only a tiny bit of tv. Most of their screen time happens, as you might guess, at school. I'm at peace with that, for now, because they do need some basic computer literacy to deal with the world, and confining it to school seems like an easy way to put guardrails around it. We'll see if my old district (where the board attends school) will get more restrictive about this stuff.

The hard part of a school's tech policy is parents, so I am hoping that we don't-give-my-kid-a-phone parents will be growing in numbers (because if you want your child's school to have a policy restricting smart phone use, you could help by not giving your kid a smart phone). 

Here's the reading list for the week. Enjoy it in good health.

School Vouchers Fail the Civil Rights Test. The Federal Program Is No Exception

The 74 invited some folks to write a response to a Derrell Bradford piece plugging the federal voucher program. Jenny Muniz, Nicole Fuller, Ashley Harrington, and Hal Smith replied with this piece that absolutely nails the point contained in this sentence--

“Choice” is a compelling slogan, but with private school vouchers, it’s the school’s choice, not the families.

The Blue State Voucher Express

Jennifer Berkshire notes that Arne Duncan and the usual gang of reform-loving nominally-Democrat privatizers have decided to shill for Donald Trump's federal voucher program. Shame on the lot of them. She writes, "Ten years later, they’re back, armed with another pig and plenty of lipstick."

Public Schools Form Democratic Citizens

Jan Resseger looks at a paper from education and law scholar Derek Black.

 

The America We Choose: Reclaiming the Promise of K–12 Public Education

Greg Wyman examines some of the classic pendulum swings and what the pendulum is doing to public education right now. 

Anti-Property Tax Issue Proponents are either extremely dumb or extremely deceitful

Well, Stephen Dyer is pretty sure they're dumb as rocks, and he uses some colorful language to explain why the guys trying to get rid of Ohio's property tax are absolutely and spectacularly in the wrong.

What’s Behind the Push to Make Schools Adopt the Science of Reading?

Rachael Gabriel is a professor of Literacy Education at U of Connecticut and co-editor-in-chief of The Reading Teacher, so it's likely that she knows what the heck she is talking about, which puts her ahead of so many people pushing the science of reading these days. So go ahead- read one more piece about SoR. This one's at The Progressive.

Privatizers Hijack Indianapolis Public Schools

I did cover this story, but let Shawgi Tell zero in on it from another angle.

Local entrepreneurs cashing in on state funds from homeschool parents

Oh so many ways to cash in on Florida's voucher program.

‘Schools of Hope’ charter operator is moving into 5 Miami-Dade high schools

Speaking of Floridian grift, don't forget Schools of Hope, the program that allows charters schools to just take buildings from the public school system. It was supposed to only affect the low-achieving public schools, but-- surprise!

If It's About Volcanoes, Teach Volcanoes

Lauren Brown offers ideas about favoring content over the vagueness of teaching "reading skills." Not sure I agree with every single word of this, but it's worth thinking about.

Bloodbath at Mark Zuckerberg-backed California school as tech titan and his wife strip funding

Well, there's no actual bloodbath, but this is the New York Post coverage of Episode #1,659,437 of Why Education Should Not Depend Upon The Kindness of Rich Guys.

Tennessee rolls back testing requirements in early voucher program

Look, no school should be held "accountable" via Big Standardized Testing. But Tennessee lawmakers decided that since tests weren't showing voucher schools to be doing better than, or even as well as, public schools, the solution was to just not make voucher schools take the test. So much for accountability via an informed free market.

A school program got millions in welfare linked dollars and now officials want answers

Hats off to Star Academy, a for-profit company run by John Alvendia. They figured out how to run an education scam and a welfare scam simultaneously!

No Need Rushing for AI in Education

Thomas Ultican talks about the need to avoid AI, and quotes some other folks, including Benjamin Riley, a "uniquely free thinker."

Pivoting Edtech Towards Humanity

Dan Meyer writes about the misalignment between humanity and edtech companies, as well as the misalignments between people who want to teach and people who want to learn.

Scott Alexander is Wrong About Lying

George Evans reached out to me to say that he had written something I might like to read and by damn he was right. This is a layered essay about the reach of teachers and the ways things come back to us later. I am always happy to find new writers that I hadn't previously found and wish more folks would send me recommendations, self- or otherwise. One thing about the interwebs and the people who write about education on them is that those writers tend to cycle through quickly. Of the people I was reading and sharing with umpty-ump years ago, only a handful are still at it. So I'm always excited to meet new folks.

The Silent Surrender of Moms for Liberty Anchorage

Mathew Beck reports that one more Moms for Liberty chapter has quietly expired, this time in Anchorage, Alaska. Thoughts and prayers.

Why Is Lower Merion School District Ignoring Its Own Technology Policy?

James Horn reports on the Pennsylvania school district that has decided that students may not opt out of screens-- even though they have an opt-out policy.

How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition

Paul Thomas shows us how to make everyone freak out with a chart (even if the chart isn't really very freak outable). With pictures.

Why are we holding third graders back in school?

Steve Nuzum looks at the problems with third grade retention, a policy that won't go away no matter how many times the problems are demonstrated.

America’s Students Need Great Public Schools for Science!

Wasn't it cool when the astronauts did that astronaut stuff? Nancy Bailey reminds us that those astronauts didn't just fall of an astronaut tree.

Kids don’t use augmented reality like adults, raising concerns for classrooms

Jonathan Kantrowitz reminds us that having small humans use devices designed for grown humans opens the door to all sorts of problems. So maybe let's rethink using those AR headsets with third graders.

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

Have you heard of Emily Hart, the nurse who loves God, guns, and making "illegals" go away? She's a darling of the MAGA crowd, with a huge online following. And she doesn't exist, but she is helping put through school the 22-year-old med student who created her. From EJ Dickson at Wired.

What I Learned About Millionaires At Jeff Bezos's Private Retreat

Noah Hawley writing for The Atlantic tells of his strange encounter with the very rich. And while it's all worth reading, there is this--

It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

This week at Forbes.com I looked to Ohio, where one more school board wants folks to understand that hate does, in fact, have a home in their district. And they're getting sued for it.  

Trombones and Danny Elfman-- what else could a person need. 

Subscriptions are free now and forever. Well, probably not forever. But as long as I'm alive and doing this. 

Schools' Unpaid Labor Pains

So this week, I was the asshat.

A local school district shared a digital poster advertising some job openings. I shared it with a glib comment on Facebook, and then other folks piled on. And then the person who made it joined in, and she was hurt. The poster was something she had put together over the weekend, on her own time. And she is someone who has been a professional colleague of my wife. So I know that she's a dedicated educator. So, yeah. I had forgotten Rule $1. 

I had also forgotten the rule about being clear, because I never meant to shame her. I meant to shame her district, because while I didn't know who exactly had created the poster, I was pretty sure I knew that it was a person who was not specifically hired to do that work, nor given the time, support or pay to do it. And I was correct. 

But isn't that the dynamic in education way too often. Some educator takes on a task they feel needs to be done. Administration provides no time to do the work, no serious compensation for the work, no support or resources for that work, and then somehow, when the results are less than perfect, everyone including the person who was trying to do the job, assumes that any critiques of the result should be and are directed at the person who did the work rather than the district that sent them out to try to get it done. The district tapes a pair of paper wings onto an educator's back, shoves her off the top of the building, and then folks gather around to critique her crumpled form. Or--almost worse--give her an award and a heartwarming news profile focusing on her heroic work flapping those paper wings. But nobody asks the district, "Why the hell were you making her try to fly off the building with paper wings??!!"

You can see it in every single discussion of every single school-related issue. 

We have umpty-zillion studies and anecdotes to tell us that time needed for administrative stuff is a big issue for teachers, a major stresser in the work. We dither and discuss as if the solution is some mystery. Restructure the profession? Or maybe magical AI assistants! But the obvious solution is to provide teachers with the amount of time required to do the amount of work they're given. 

EdWeek's 2022 survey found that the median number of hours per week worked by teachers was 54 ish. There isn't a school in the country that wouldn't grind to a halt if teachers worked to the contract-- in other words, only worked the hours for which they're actually paid.

And there's the other extra unofficial duties that teachers take on. Every building has lead teachers, whether they are titled and paid or not. There are the people in the building who coordinate things like cards for birthdays and getting well and condolences. There are the people who are the unofficial It helpers. For years I was The Guy Who Runs Graduation Rehearsal and Ceremony, and I had the job because I inherited it from the last person who had it. It wasn't official or compensated, but there I was because somebody had to do it, and I didn't mind because I loved my school and the traditions connected to it. 

And that's all on top of the extra classroom work itself. Special Ed teachers and their mountains of paperwork. English teachers up till late because they have a stack of papers to grade. The most fundamental hard part of teaching is that you do not have enough paid time to get the job done; to do the job even sort of the way you know it needs to be done, you will have to volunteer hours.

Schools function on all those volunteered hours. It keeps things cheap, and administrators like it because it takes one more flaming possum off their desk. But if you are one of the people providing this unpaid labor, you really need to be motivated by your love for the school because otherwise you'll start to wonder about how unimportant this job must be if nobody is providing resources or support to get it done.

The digital era has provided more new examples. Your district should have an active and professional online and social media presence-- and the district should be both paying someone and also proving that person with hours in which to do the job. Some staff member shouldn't be left to do it for free during lunchtime or on weekend afternoons. (Odds are that the charters, cyber charters, and voucher-accepting schools you're competing with have hired someone to do the job.)

What I should have posted was something like "Well, this is a good try, but why hasn't the district hired someone to handle this kind of work?" We should be yea-anding these discussions. "Yes, Mrs. McTeachlady did a fine job on that project, and what is the district going to do to provide her with resources, time, and support to do it next time?" God bless the people who try, and shame on the people who let them struggle on their own .

The answer to all of this will always be A) money and B) convenience. "We could do this the right way, but it would be hard, and cost money!" Meanwhile, in the background, we have the usual chorus of folks saying, "Well we spend more and more on education, and yet test scores don't go up, so we should spend no more." I have a response for all these people, but I have already broken Rule #1 once this week, so it will have to wait. 

Sal Khan Still Clueless

Matt Barnum's piece for Chalkbeat in which Sal Khan unsuccessfully reflects on his latest education misfire, has opened the door for plenty of folks to take a swipe at Khan and his consistently bad ideas, but lordy, the man deserves all of it. Probably only Bill Gates has managed to be so consistently wrong about education and yet so often hailed as a visionary thought-leading wizard of golly-whiz-bangery. 

Khan deserves to be examined and dissected every time he pokes his head out, because he so consistently embodies what the Ed Tech Overlords get wrong, over and over and over and over and over again.

Sometimes he gets so close. Early on, Barnum offers this quote about the flop of Khanmigo, the Khan Academy chatbot that was supposed to be a tutor:

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Good first step. Lord knows that lots of ed tech salesmen didn't even get this far in looking at the fate of their shiny product. But Khan can't get to the crucial next step, which is to make a serious inquiry into why his targeted customers didn't want to use his product.

Barnum, God bless him, knows the issues here:

Khan’s comments are an acknowledgement that AI has not quickly allowed for the creation of an effective super-tutor, as some initially hoped. It’s an early indication of the limits of AI to drive massive learning gains, long an unrealized goal of various technologies. While Khan remains optimistic about various uses of AI in education, he’s also come to see its limits.

But rather than examine the question, or the assumptions behind his use case, Khan indulges in another classic ed tech behavior-- moving the goalposts.

“I just view it as part of the solution; I don’t view it as the end-all and be-all,” says Khan, the guy who literally wrote a book about how AI "will revolutionize education" thereby being a be-all and end-all. 

It is, as Audrey Watters has laid out a zillion times, fundamental to ed tech wizardry to be fully ignorant of the history of failed ed tech. Khan launched Khanmigo citing Benjamin Bloom's 1984 essay about "Two Sigma" tutoring, a magical kind of tutoring that would leapfrog student learning, except that folks like Khan who like to trot this out don't seem to have looked at it very carefully. Education Next ran a new piece by Paul T. von Hippel breaks it down effectively. I recommend it as an antidote to folks trying to sell you 2 Sigma tutoring, but here are just a few facts about the article that Khan skimmed over. The chart that Khan and others like to use to illustrate Bloom's "findings" is not an illustration of actual data, but Bloom's hard-drawn illustration of "this is what it would look like." The actual data comes from work of two grad students who worked with a small number of subjects, tutoring them to prepare for a very narrow, specific test. Oh-- and the tutors were humans. 

But ed tech whiz guys don't just ignore the past. They also are committed to ignoring evidence from the present. It was Barnum who went back to one of the early adopters of Khanmigo to see how that was going. It's not. She found "that students didn't really care for the bot" and that "If students don’t engage with the material enough to know what they’re looking for, then an AI like Khanmigo doesn’t necessarily help." In a really key observation, she notes that "there's more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers."

When ed tech overlords do encounter evidence that their shiny thing is not working out well, they inevitably fall back on one of two explanations. Kristin DiCerbo is the Chief Learning Officer for Khan with zero hours in a classroom-- she worked two years as an elementary school psychologist, then worked for Cisco, Pearson, and now Khan Academy. She explains to Barnum that Khanmigo can only respond to what students ask, and students are bad at asking questions. This time, nobody tried to blame teachers as well. This is the ed tech pitch since the dawn of time-- "This tool is great, but you need to change yourself to fit how it works rather than expecting it to fit the way you work." We have redesigned hammers, and these will be great hammers if carpenters will just replace their hands with spiral bungee cords.

Khan is disappointed that students don't seek out more help from Khanmigo, but doesn't seem to reach the obvious conclusion that students do not find it useful, and so cannot move on to the question, "How could we make this more useful?" Instead, they are just going to try force feeding Khanmigo to students by incorporating it in Khan Academy. It's the same AI business model that keeps shoving AI into every app and software that we use, like someone who thinks that if they keep setting pieces of cold liver all around the house in hopes that the kids will finally pick it up and eat it and love it. 

Ignorant of the past, ignoring the present, and dedicated to making the products they want to make first and trying to figure out what use the product could be to actual humans second-- it's the same old ed tech hustle, even for the rich and famous. 

Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors. 

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops. 

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure). 

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops. 

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not. 

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.  

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas. 

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing. 

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.  

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling. 

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

ICYMI: Swearing Not Procrastinate More Edition (3/29)

I swear I am going to get my taxes done today, ignoring the semi-decent weather outside and every other thing that attracts my attention. In the meantime, I'm going to throw this week's reading list at you. Remember, sharing is always helpful.

Education is the Enemy

Jess Piper looks at more anti-education policy in Missouri, where a policy penalizing colleges for giving students low-earning degrees would end up penalizing any school that trains teachers.

Penn has an AI problem

The student newspaper at University of Pennsylvania says the school's leaders are making an AI-addled mess.

Telling Your Story and Our Story

Greg Wyman looks at the importance of telling your story-- particularly when you are a public school facing charter and private school competition.

Belleville parents outraged after students invited to do community service at ice detention facility

A New Jersey school's 11th graders get a surprise invitation from an unwelcome facility.

What ICE Detention Does to a Child

Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez looks at the impact of the regime's detention camps on the children. This is a rough story to read, but a necessary one.

Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading

This piece if by Daniel Willingham and E.D. Hirsch at Education Next, so you will probably disagree with some of what's here, but there are also a few points worth thinking about. Content knowledge does indeed provide a foundation for reading comprehension.

How Can You Tell If a Curriculum Truly Builds Knowledge?

I'm not always a Wexler fan, but this post offers some useful ideas about telling whether a not a curriculum is really building knowledge or is just farting around with a topic.

Proposal to relax voucher program’s testing mandate advances in Tennessee House

Voucher programs repeatedly run into hard truth that voucher students do poorly on the BS Test. That could be a call for them to do a better job teaching students, but the Tennessee GOP would prefer to go in a different direction. Melissa Brown at Chalkbeat.

How Will Trump’s Supporters React To Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?

Jeff Bryant takes a closer look at some of the groups looking to cash in on the federal voucher program, and why the right wingers who support the vouchers might have some problems with the profiteers lining up to benefit from it. Forward this to your favorite GOP state lawmaker who thinks free federal voucher money would be great.

What It Takes to Flip a Seat

Jennifer Berkshire reports on yet another Democrat who won in part by standing up for public education.

A Federal Court Blocks RFK Jr.'s Anti-Vaccine Agenda – But the Threat to Children Is Not Over

Bruce Lesley looks at a successful court challenge to one of the bananapants policies that RFK Jr. imposed on us. That may keep your students slightly safer, but the fight is not over yet.

Claremont in the Crosshairs

New Hampshire has a court decision on the books that, as in other states, says it has to fix its shabby damned school funding system. Now some folks are trying to make that decision go away. Andru Volinsky, lawyer from the original decision, explains what's going on now.

Cutting State Funding while Intensifying Test-and-Punish Won’t Improve Public Schools

Hard to believe we are still trying to make this point after decades, but Jan Resseger is here to do the work.

Stephen Miller Pushes States to Pass Laws Denying Public Education for Undocumented Students

Jan Resseger is doing double duty this week by looking at reactions to Stephen Miller's call for Texas to bar undocumented immigrants from education.

Grade Retention is Bad Education Policy

Thomas Ultican takes a look at just some of the evidence that third grade retention policies do more harm than good (and the good is not for students, but for the district).

A Bill to Prohibit Changes to SC Monuments

I can't imagine what it's like to try teaching history in one of these confederate states that require folks to not just avoid badmouthing confederate figures, but also to actually revere these traitors. But here comes South Carolina with a "hands off our rebel statuary" bill. Steve Nuzum has the story.

You Do Not, In Fact, Have to Hand It to Them

Audrey Watters is here to remind you that, among other things, tech billionaires make predictions that are marketing baloney and also very wrong.

OpenAI's slop machine Sora is dead. We're all better off without it

True that. Sora was a blight, and now it's gone. Cross your fingers that nothing worse springs up to replace it.

The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic (this should be a gift article). The tag line says it-- "Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours."

AI is not superhuman

Benjamin Riley continues to be one of my favorite AI growlers. Here he looks for a good metaphor for AI.

This week at Forbes.com I looked at a study that suggests that computer tutors work better when they aren't lying about how human they are. 

Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens worked for a couple of decades starting in the thirties; they played their last gig in 1962. They were out of Lancaster, PA and made a yearly appearance at Hersheypark. That hardworking bass player was out of Hershey. The woman next to the maraca player was Reg's wife. 

You can sign up to my newsletter for free. 

Plyler for Dummies

You're going to see the Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe coming up a bunch these days, and if you are not up on your SCOTUS cases, let me provide you with the basic info about what the case was, why its decision matters, and why some folks are looking to get it overturned. This is about immigrants and education and, as is often the case these, a whole lot more.

Why did the case happen in the first place?

Texas. In 1975, they passed a law prohibiting "the use of state funds for the education of children who had not been legally admitted to the U.S." In 1977, Tyler Independent School District adopted a policy requiring students who were not "legally admitted" to pay tuition ("legally admitted" included having documents saying they were legally present or in the process of getting such documents).

A group of students who couldn't produce such documents sued the district. The district court ruled the policy (and therefor the state law on which it rested) was unconstitutional. The federal appeals court agreed, and the district pursued appeals all the way to the Supremes, who handed down a decision in June of 1982.

What did SCOTUS say?

SCOTUS was 5-4 against the policy.

The majority opinion, written by Justice William J. Brenan. found that the law was aimed squarely at children and discriminated against them for a characteristic that they could not control. The ruling also asserted that there is a state and national interest in educating these children, regardless of immigration status, because denying them an education would lead to "the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare, and crime."

The majority argument also rested heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment, which should ring a bell because that is also the amendment that establishes birthright citizenship, which Donald Trump would very much like to get rid of. The arguments in Plyler rested on the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Lewis Powell (a Nixon appointee) argued in his concurring opinion that the children were being kept from schools because their parents broke the law. "A legislative classification that threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents cannot be reconciled with one of the fundamental purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Even the dissent, written by Chief Justice Warren Berger, actually agreed with the majority that it would be a bad idea to "tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons." But they asserted that this was an issue to be settled by lawmakers and not the court.

One notable argument raised by Texas officials was that the phrase "within the jurisdiction" in the Equal Protection Clause did not cover illegal aliens. Both the majority opinion and the dissent disagreed, arguing that illegal aliens are, in fact, persons, and they are here. 

Why do we care?

Many pieces of this case have re-emerged in recent years, in part because conservatives have a bone to pick with the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause was, for instance, instrumental in Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that established same-gender marriage as Constitutional.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been itching to revive that 1975 anti-child law since SCOTUS struck down Roe, arguing that the Dobbs decision draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito (the one that was leaked) was based on the idea that abortion rights are not specifically protected by the Constitution and neither does it mention education rights for undocumented immigrants.

And if SCOTUS can be convinced to take another look at that "within the jurisdiction" language, so that the court no longer recognizes being a person and being here as enough, we could be looking the wholesale creation of all sorts of second-class tiers in America, people who are not protected by the Equal Protection Clause. 

The Trump administration has been pushing back against Plyler for a while, But in just the last week, hateful homunculus Steven Miller has pushed Texas to kick those undocumented immigrant kids out of school. Earlier this month the House held a whole hearing on "the adverse effects of Plyler v. Doe." The underlying argument is part bullshit, part chilling prediction of where these guys are headed, the argument being basically "Why spend money on anyone who is not One Of Us," an argument that is sociopathic baloney, but also alarming in how easily it can extended to anybody We Don't Like. Witness also this tweet from the official White House twitter account:

Get that? Not the worst of the worst. Not illegal or undocumented immigration. The promise made and kept is to chase all immigrants away. And if scaring them away from schools with ICE, or chasing them out of schools entirely-- well, if that gets a few more of those immigrants out of the country, then the administration thinks that's just fine.

The GOP in Tennessee has obligingly advanced a bill that would allow schools to deny, or charge tuition for, education to any children without legal immigration status. They did amend the bill so that children thrown out of school for immigrant status will not be in trouble under the state truancy laws. What big hearts! The bill exists to allow legal challenges to carry it all the way to the Supremes so they can, if so inclined, undo Plyler. 

Just imagine if SCOTUS also undoes the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizen language. America gets a large, uneducated generation of young humans who can either be deported or put to work as good old fashioned hard laborers (thank all the states that have rolled back child labor laws).

There's an extra layer of irony here. As we learn from Adam Laats in his book Mr. Lancaster's System, one of the forces behind the invention of the U.S. public school system was a concern about the number of illiterate and unschooled youths who were out on the street causing trouble and worrying their elders. 

So pay attention to what happens to Plyler next under the regime. It could spell trouble not just for undocumented immigrants, but for all of us. If leaders agree that only Certain People are entitled to an education, we'd better pay attention to who qualifies as Certain People, and who does not. 

Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out. 

Three Problems of Big Standardized Testing

Of all the various Great Ideas launched at education in the past couple of decades, none have done more damage than the Big Standardized Test, a practice that has been in place now for a generation. So on top of the other harms done by test-driven accountability, the cherry on top is that a whole crop of newbie teachers has emerged thinking that test-centric schooling is natural and normal and how the U.S. education system has always worked. Meanwhile, we are just about to enter the season in which school staffs start creating cutesy videos and holding noisy pep rallies in an attempt to convince these tests are Important and students should Do Their Best. Yuck. 

The BS Tests have been a source of toxic waste in schools for years and years, and they have created this toxic effect in three distinct ways.

High stakes for a narrow measure

A single test is used as a broad measure of educational achievement. It claims to measures reading and math and nothing else, and yet it is repeatedly used as a measure of educational quality, students achievement, and teacher/school effectiveness. States have used BS Test results to label schools as "failing" which can have consequences ranging from a loss of funding to charterization to plain old reputational damage. 

Attaching high stakes to the test has led to a twisting and warping of curriculum, with course content and even courses themselves judged by just one metric-- is it on the Test? Science, history, the arts, even recess cut from schools so that extra work can be put into getting studennts to raise those scores, because the BS Test turns schools upside down. The school doesn't exist to serve students by giving them an education; students exist to serve the school by generating test scores. The upside down school effect is particularly notable in manuy charter schools, where the scores are an important marketing tool and so students who don't help make good numbers have to be "counseled out."

Meanwhile, test scores make an easy reference point for journalists, especially when combined with such prestidigidatation as "days/months/years of learning" which is just a fun mask to slap on the increase or decrease in test scores. Or soaking test scores in VAM sauce to make them seem as if they Really Mean Something. Or the transformation of scores into a kind of stock market, rising and falling as if they are waves of data flowing through a single medium, rather than representing the scores of different students.

But, hey. If the scores represent real measures of reading and math skills, isn't all of this justfied? Isn't it?

Lousy tests

Have the Big Standardized Tests been checked for validity and reliability? Do they measure what they purport to measure? Will they produce consistent results (iow, if the same student takes the test multiple times, will he get pretty much the same score every time)? 

The most likely answer is "Nobody knows for sure, but probably not." 

Multiple choice questions are about the weakest measure of knowledge and skill we have. But written answers create an assessment challenge that is almost insurmountable at that scale (and certainly insurmountable by any bots currently available). Also, a test needs to be created for a particular purpose, while the BS Tests are sold as being useful for multiple purposes. "We will sell you," say testing companies, "a piece of string that can be used to measure the circumference of a cloud and the amount of water in a swimming pool."

If we start with the number of skills that the BS Test claims to measure and multiply it by the number of items that it would probably take to measure those skills, we arrive at a test much larger than the actual tests. 

All of this gives us ample reason to suspect that the BS Tests are less-than-awesome assessment tools, suspicions that might be quelled by extensive test testing to show validity and reliability. Except that there doesn't seem to be any such test testing out there. Meanwhile, folks keep arguing that if teachers just teach the standards, the test results will take care of themselves, despite the fact that test results vary wildly from year to year for the same teacher.

But, hey. It generates some data, and even that sketchy data should be useful for something. Shouldn't it?

Tortured data

When a classroom teacher uses an assessment to evaluate learning and instruction, she can dig down to a granular level. Go question by question, checking student responses against the test items to see exactly where students are going wrong (or right). 

But the BS Tests are black boxes. Policy makers have accepted the notion that a test manufacturer's proprietary material is more important than useful data for schools, so teachers are forbidden to so much as look at the questions on the test, and the results that come back to schools (in too many cases, still after too many months) are rough summaries. For years, my results for student on the BS Test were broken down into "reading fiction" and "reading nonfiction," and that was it. 

Imagine you are a parent whose child brought home a C on a major reading test, and the teacher wouldn't let you see the test and wouldn't tell you what areas your child needed help with and what areas were your child's strength. In response to the question, "What can we do to help him," the teacher replied, "Just, you know, work on his reading." That is where teachers are with BS Test results. 

This tiny sliver of data is one of the reasons that schools take to carpet-bombing students with a host of broad, unfocused "interventions." It's also why we've seen the booming cottage industry of pre-test testing, with schools giving multiple tests throughout the year in an attempt to identify students who can be dragged to a higher score and to identify the areas in which interventions for these students might help. The actual BS Test doesn't give us the information we need, so maybe a few rounds of NWEA MAP testing will tell us what the BS Test won't (spoiler alert: it won't, in part because it's hard to predict how students will do on a test that isn't very reliable or valid).

So very little useful data gets back to teachers and schools. It is almost as if policy makers are only interested in generating pass-fail labels for schools and not in providing data that would actually help improve performance.

Solutions?

Policy makers could fix any one of these three factors. They could reduce the stakes attached to the BS Test, or combine test results with other measures of education. They could simply require the tests to be better, and they could certainly require test manufacturers to provide more useful data in a more timely fashion. In fact, in some states, policy makers have taken some baby steps. But it's not nearly enough.

Underneath all of this, there are philosophical questions to be answered, like how does one distinguish between good schools and bad, can you measure the difference, and if you can, is there any benefit to trying to slap "good" and "bad" labels on schools or teachers. But I don't recommend holding your breath while waiting for policy makers to have serious philosophical conversations about education in this country.

But in the meantime, high-stakes large-scale standardized testing continues to be one of the single most destructive factors in U.S. education. If you handed me a magic wand, it is the very first thing I would disappear. Barring that, it would be great if we could just do better.

FL: Replacing Immigrants With Children

This is not actually a new story, but recent comments by Florida's attorney general have reminded us that for some folks, the solution to sticking all the immigrant labor in detention centers is to fill the empty labor market with teenagers.

Many states have been stripping child labor protections in the past few years. Much of the push has been coming from employers, part of a general desire not to have to follow stupid rules. Also, teen employees are cheap and disinclined to start unions or complain about lousy conditions.

We know that businesses are pushing much of this, even writing bills, but it turns out that there's a big fat dark money lobbying group that is "helping out" in many states.

Meet the Foundation for Government Accountability.

FGA was founded in 2011 by CEO Tarren Bragdon, who himself highlights a quote that gives us a good idea of who he is:

I greatly value the ability to provide for my wife and children and want more Americans to experience the freedom that work brings. I founded FGA to pursue good policy solutions that will free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream.

I've written a whole post about this guy, who took his show from Maine to Florida, where he helped write some legislation to give teens the freedom to be more easily exploited by employers. Yay.

It's been almost a year since Governor Ron DeSantis dropped this nugget when chatting with Border Czar Ton Homan

“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” DeSantis said last week at a panel discussion with border czar Tom Homan, as first reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

So here comes Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to add his two cents. Uthmeier was DeSantis's chief of staff as well as the guy who ran the failed presidential campaign of his boss. When appointed to the post a year ago, Uthmeier barked

We will not stand idly by as the left tries to infiltrate our institutions and use the court system to indoctrinate our kids. We will fight the activists that try to weaken our duly enacted laws, that try to challenge our constitutional order and try to harm the unborn.

This week, when the Wall Street Journal, reported that Florida employers are having a hard time filling jobs legally, Uthmeier got to go on Fox and respond. We're cranking out all sorts of meat widgets, he proudly more or less declared. And also "getting people into the workforce earlier." 

We passed legislation last year to help high school students get their hands dirty and get on job sites more quickly.

Uthmeier, it should be noted, is not getting his own hands dirty. Instead, he has landed a gig at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he will rake in $100,000 a year for teaching two hours a week. He also proposed constructing "Alligator Alcatraz," but maybe that wasn't so much a human rights abomination -- maybe he was just trying to create job opportunities for teens in concentration camp construction. He was also part of that business of shipping migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard. 

Maybe he just has different ideas about what getting your hands dirty actually means.

This represents one more step toward a multi-tier education system, a system where some folks get a full and rounded education and others, destined for a life as meat widgets, need only get enough education to make them useful to the employers who will start extracting labor from them as soon as possible. It's not a future I favor.

Are there students who are going to lead happy, useful lives as blue collar workers? Absolutely (I taught hundreds of them). But two things should be true-- 1) blue collar workers benefit from a well-rounded life-enhancing education just as much as everyone else, and 2) their path is to be chosen by them and not forced on them by policy makers. Certainly not as a way to patch over problems created by self-kneecapping xenophobic policies.