IDEA: The Unfunded Mandate

In a piece of non-news news this week, Senator Chuck Schumer called for full (or at least fuller) federal funding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

IDEA started out in 1975 as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act (EHA) which at a minimum made for a lousy acronym. In 1990 it was retooled as IDEA, which comes with six main "pillars"

• Individualized Education Program (IEP)
• Free Appropriate Public Education
• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)
• Appropriate Evaluation
• Parent and Teacher Participation
• Procedural Safeguards

These are all admirable and worthy goals. They are also expensive as all get out.

So why is Schumer calling for full funding? Because Congress has never provided close to what they promised. In 1975, Congress committed to funding 40% of the cost of implementing EHA. That didn't happen, and when EHA became IDEA, it happened some more. IDEA is the grand mac daddy of unfunded mandates, a case of the government saying to citizens, "You absolutely must buy a pony. But you'll have to buy it with your own money."

How unfunded is IDEA? Congress currently contributes (by some counts) about 16% of the total cost. All other costs fall on the state and local district.

This massive funding shortfall influences plenty of other policy discussions. It's certainly responsible for some portion of the "education spending has been increasing mightily since the seventies" discussion. And here's Bruce Baker (Rutgers school finance guru) arguing that spending on students with special needs is driving spending gaps between districts ( and is consequently an important unacknowledged part of the current debate between Ed Secretary John King and Senator Lamar Alexander). I'm also wondering if this funding gap is exacerbating the effect of making students with special needs more unattractive to charters-- they each bring their spending gap with them.

"UNfunded mandate" is a familiar phrase, so familiar that we may forget what it really means. But 16%?!

Sixteen percent.

That's how little help the feds provide in meeting the complex of laws that they created.

So God bless Chuck Schumer for bringing the matter up for what must be about the umpty-gazzillionth time. I'm not optimistic that anything will change, but it's still good to be reminded that the feds ordered us all to go buy ponies and didn't even kick in enough money for hay.

Eva Moskowitz Fights Back

Eva Moskowitz, well-paid queen of the Success Academy charter chain, just won the Savas Award from the Reason Foundation. The award is given in honor of City University of New York Presidential Professor and privatization research pioneer E.S. "Steve" Savas, and it recognizes public-private partnership, though since what we're really honoring is privatization, these are partnerships in the same way that mugging is a criminal-pedestrian partnership.

Apparently one of the prizes that comes with the Savas Award is a very friendly and gentle video interview, and ReasonTV delivered an interview for Moskowitz that is softer than a baby's bottom. I have watched it so that you don't have to and, really, unless you have a tub of blood pressure medicine handy, you probably should not watch this.

The Warm Fuzzy Open

As opposed to a cold open. The piece begins with nice close shots of Success Academy students working hard and studying intensely. The voice-over notes that the halls are quiet and orderly, and it calls the SA schools both successful and controversial.


We toss out a graph that shows just how mightily the school beats other NYC schools on the Big Standardized Test, and you will be not so surprised that these charts are not accompanied by charts showing how Success Academy has a huge attrition rate. The video also does not mention that SA doesn't replace the many students that leave. In other words, SA students may very well get good results on the BS Tests-- but any public school could achieve the same results by pushing out all but its best test-takers.

The voice-over tells us the story of how city councilwoman Moskowitz "sank her political career by speaking out about" how unions were stifling schools (insert stock footage of Randi Weingarten, looking, I guess, amazed at the brave councilwoman calling her on her evil union baloney). So she started a charter, which became a chain, which is "often hailed as a shining example" of what school choice is achieved. Which is a great construction. I myself am often hailed as an educational genius and the inventor of modern rap music. Hey-- you don't know I'm not often hailed as that. You weren't there.

So anyway, Reason Foundation gave her this swell award, and then sat down with her to chat. Here we go!

One of the core ideas of a charter school is that it's partially insulated from politics...?

The interviewer does that sort of vocal lift that turns any string of words into a question. Moskowitz is game.

"Oh. Well," she scoffs. That's probably not reality. There's a cutaway to the interviewer as the next bit starts, a telltale sign of a frankenquote where we cut away from the speaker to cover slicing up the quote, so I think she probably didn't launch into this next part as abruptly as the video makes it seem. But anyway-- the unions have been after her constantly-- the unions keep suing her, the unions blockaded the entrance to her schools, the mayor "threw out" three of her schools. These are all the vicious political crosses that she must bear.

Political adventures that Moskowitz does not mention include closing her schools and busing her students, parents and staff to Albany to lobby on behalf of her charter empire. Nor does she mention that she got Governor Cuomo and the legislature to do an end run around Mayor DeBlasio in order to get her charters what they wanted. She might also have mentioned that she also spent time in court making sure the state could not audit her.

But her basic assertion is true-- it would be silly to pretend that Success Academy is insulated from politics.

Over the past months, SA has been "rocked by a barrage of negative stories" (see, it's the stories that are negative, and not the information that they revealed about SA). Cue the clip of the teacher berating a six year old.

That video was "a low point." It was 'surreptitiously recorded" by a "former" employee. Do we understand yet that this was just an evil hatchet job, and not a concerned teacher's aide finally deciding to record what she saw all too often?

Cut to press conference with outraged Moskowitz refusing to stand by while the NYT uses "selective video" and "gotcha" tactics. I am trying to imagine a context in which the video wouldn't be upsetting, but I'm coming up blank.

"You said that the paper had failed to give Success Academy a fair shake," says the interviewer, who then lobs this across the plate-- "Why would the New York Times not be giving Success Academy a fair shake?"

It's a softball, but Moskowitz goes after it with a chainsaw. Sure, the teacher did those things that are in the video, but it seems like a double standard because in New York City schools "you have teachers engaging in physical abuse of students, teachers engaged in sexual abuse of students, and yet somehow that was not front page New York Times." It's okay to be bad as long as someone out there is worse.

So why was this person making the video in the first place?

Because she was angry at the teacher. But she didn't come forward with the video right away, so she must not have been that concerned about the child.

The video was troubling, but it has forced us to have an honest conversation about what kinds of practices are ineffective. Not all teachers see the guardrails, and now we have an example of what not to do.

So, I guess it's great that the video was released, because otherwise Success Academy would be continuing to use bad practices, or would have all sorts of loose cannon teachers going off in classrooms, or nobody in the charter chain would have been talking about how best to teach children? The video was bad and unfair, but it has saved SA from continuing to suck? Honestly, there's a level of pretzel logic here that is hard to track.

Cut to tearful principal mea culpa for the Got To Go list. That major controversy was last October.

Moskowitz totally spanked that guy before the story even leaked, and they responded "incredibly quickly, incredibly swiftly, and incredibly thoughtfully."


But then in January, parents filed a complaint with the USED claiming SA pushed their kids, who had some severe challenges, right out the door. 

Oh, here comes Robert Pondiscio, and I feel bad, because I kind of like Pondiscio, but what he says here is bunk. "Let's just say the worst allegations are true. She is counseling out the hardest to teach, she's creating this poor man's private school. Why is that a bad thing?"

Well, it's a bad thing first of all because it shows that her supposed miraculous success is an easily-replicated lie. Any school that's allowed to dump its worst students can get great results with the ones they choose to keep. It's also a bad thing because that is not how US public school works. The vision for US public school is to educate all students, no matter how challenging. That, of course, is why it would be a poor man's private school. Private. And if we are going to admit that Success Academy is really a private school, then next we must ask why it makes sense to give it public tax dollars-- in particular when those public tax dollars come at the expense of the students who are not chosen, but who are dumped into the public school system.

So that's why it's a bad thing. But he's going to push on with an argument more often made by Mike Petrilli (they're both Fordham Institute guys)-- that charters should be for strivers, and that the strivers deserve a disruption-free school. There's some merit in this argument, but you can't have it both ways-- you can't have a system where you say, "okay, we're going to collect all the students we consider strivers over here and we're going to leave all the disruptors in those schools over there" AND at the same time say, "Well, these striver schools are very successful and if the disruptor schools can't be equally successful, those schools are failing and need to have budgets slashed and resources removed." You can't have both systems at once, and you also can't pretend that a system in which the schools get to choose which strivers they prefer to keep-- you cannot pretend that such a system is any sort of school choice system. It's not.

The interviewer has now dropped all pretense of objectivity and asks Moskowitz the same thing-- why can't you go ahead and cream?

Moskowitz agrees that it's just another version of choosing schools by choosing your upscale apartment, ignoring that these are opposite things. There is a fundamental difference between parental choice and having the choosing done by the school. But she plows on, with the interviewer chiming in with "absolutely" and "you go girl" and "hallelujah" (okay, maybe not all of those), saying that selectivity can be all about income.


The interviewer points out that rich neighborhoods have schools with high scores and "everybody knows" that demographics are a huge factor in BS Test scores. Why can't poor brown kids at SA have a classroom free of disruptors, and I'm not sure, but I think we just suggested that rich kids aren't disruptive, which will come as news to many teachers in this country.

But after all that philosophical discussion, Moskowitz is going to go with "We are following the rules of random lottery," and I think I would have respected her more if she had just taken Pondiscio's line on this instead of pretending that the lottery, with its forms and bureaucratic hoops, doesn't do its own job of filtering. And of course, we've just sort of sidled away from the issue of the Got To Go list and the oft-reported SA practice of pushing some students out.


Interviewer asks "are you working within the confines of that [lottery] rule" nudge nudge wink wink and Moskowitz isn't having it. "Yes, yes we are."

But Interview Man is excited about creaming. Couldn't some of these other methods of selectivity serve your kids? "I mean, it's like one of the pieties of education that every classroom can serve every kid, but actually a really disruptive kid steals time and attention away from the other kids in that class" because, you know, kids are either good or bad and they are good or bad 24/7, and so the bad ones should just be, I don't know, sent to an island somewhere. And I feel Interview Man has some strong emotions around this issue, like he would have gotten that A in algebra, but damn Chris Grumblefoot kept giving him noogies and monopolizing the teachers.

And oh my God, it has come to this-- Moskowitz is actually saying something valid, which is that the anti-disruptor approach can lead to "pernicious effects" where the school is in the business of deciding which kids can and can't succeed. And she says that her mission is not to be a gifted and talented program, but to serve a broad range of students. "Our mission is to be an old-fashioned public school where you serve the community," she says. Which is a really, really great line, but not as great as if it were reflected in the reality of actual Success Academy schools.

More noise about applications and how many SA gets-- but noting that this year, for the first time, application numbers fell. Does that have anything to do with some of the negative press?

Moskowitz thinks not. Different neighborhoods are different. Things have gone up and down. Interview Man pushes-- seeing the video, reading the stories, that wasn't it? That's not her impression. Parents mostly come from other parents, and her parents think SA is swell. Do those parents like the more disciplined, orderly, safer environment than they might get at their district school? Moskowitz redirects-- most of our parents find then schools incredibly joyful.

Cue clip from Slam the Exam pep rally. Kids cheer and get trophies because BS Tests are important.

Illuminating quote-- Moskowitz at pep rally saying "The difference between successful people and less successful people is that they don't shut down-- they power through."

So what's the idea behind the (not at all opt outy) pep rally?

Why should we just have pep rallies for sports. Why not celebrate growth? Which, again, sounds swell except that we're talking about the BS Tests which don't measure much except test taking scores, and which do not benefit the students nearly as much as those scores benefit Success Academy marketing.

Interview Man says that he doesn't get the sense of kids who feel ostracized for doing well in school, and again I can't help wondering if he's working through some issues of his own.

Now let's move on to Moskowitz's political aspirations. Because she's evolving in how she sees herself politically.

In 2014, she called herself a liberal because "I think liberals care about the little guy. Liberals care about social justice." I wonder how many little guys you can take care of with a half-million dollar salary.

But at the beginning of the month when she was receiving this award, she had evolved into something else. She had once called herself an FDR liberal who believed in big government, but she didn't like it so much when she met it up close and personal. Which- really? Because I'm thinking that being able to meet the governor and the legislators and get their help in writing laws, setting caps, and raising money to keep Success Academy on top seems to have worked out pretty well for Moskowitz. If she is trying to play the little guy, stomped under the heel of big government, she should stop spending so much time using political insider plays to make big government work for her and tilt the table for her.

Nope- now she rather thinks she's a libertarian. Well, mostly only when it comes to school choice. She doesn't know enough about those other areas. Interview Man is disappointed.

Does she still want to be the mayor of NYC? Yes, she might run in the future, and Interview Man seems to be gently suggesting that if she wants to be mayor, she'll need to know about things other than education policy. So she bounces back and hey, she totally sat on some committees when she was on city council, so, yeah, she knows stuff.

Can we expect 100 schools within the decade?

Yes. She won't promise she'll be leading SA a decade from now, but for the foreseeable future, sure. It's an "enormous project" and it will take "tremendous leadership" to get it done and she has an "incredibly talented team of people"

She does not anticipate moving to other cities-- "there's a lot of lousy schools right here in New York."

Oh, and only now do I see that Interview Man has a name-- Jim Epstein, who has been at Reason since 2010, and before that was an award-winning producer at NYC's PBS station.

So there you have it

Well, there you have some of it. Epstein decided to completely skip over the big flap over John Merrow's story about suspending five year olds at SA and Moskowitz's subsequent publishing of private student data to defend herself. Nor do we get into the steady drip-drip-drip of former SA teachers and their unsettling stories from inside. Nor the question of why exactly Moskowitz is paid a half-million when she oversees only 11,000 or so students. And we never did get to talking about the attrition rate or no-backfill policy at all.

So I guess what we actually have is a nice puff piece in which Moskowitz gets to say her piece without being challenged on any of her policies or practices, and without having to deal with any of those nasty unions, reporters, or government officials who have just made it so hard to be Eva.

Oklahoma Boots VAM

Along with the welcome news that Hawaii has removed student test scores as a required portion of teacher evaluation, we happily note that Oklahoma has also given VAM scores the old heave-ho.

VAM, for those of you who somehow missed this higher math con game, is a technique by which test scores are run through a model which creates a mathematical alternate universe in which students float in vacuums, unaffected by anything. Test scores from this planet are compared to those from the alternate universe to see if teachers Added Value to the students in question (suggesting that the only important value a student has is her ability to score well on a Big Standardized Test). It looks remarkably like made-up baloney, and has been rejected by all sorts of folks, including National Association of Secondary School Principals and the American Statistical Association. Most recently VAM took a beating in NY courts, where a judge called it capricious and arbitrary.

Oklahoma watchers have been cheering on House Bill 2957 for a while. Notice how they sold this. Here's Rep. Michael Rogers,R-Broken Arrow, HB 2957’s House author:

This legislation will return flexibility back to the districts on their evaluations, while developing an individualized professional development program that will help all our teachers and administrators.

"VAM is a lousy way to evaluate teachers" has had limited traction. But "local control" is always a winner, particularly in red states. And that is a major feature of VAMmy systems-- local authorities lose control of the entire process. The principal, parents, students and other teachers can all know that Mrs. Chalkwhacker is a great teacher, but if the magic VAM equation spits out a low score, nobody can save Mrs. Chalkwhacker from that judgment.

So, yes, that's bad and unfair for Mrs. Chalkwhacker , but it is also bad and unfair for her bosses, students, and parents, because they get less say than they should. So it is with most of the teacher evaluation systems rolled out to comply with Race To The Top and Waiverpallooza-- the feds required the states to take control of teacher evaluations away from local districts.

The bill's supporters also sold the bill as relief from what is essentially an unfunded mandate, because the RTTT/Waiver teacher eval systems involved time and expense to implement, all of which had to come out of local pockets.

The bill also reduces time and money pressure by reducing the frequency of evaluation for teachers who rate "superior" or "highly effective." Yes, under a VAM system, it was always possible that those teachers would vary in effectiveness wildly from year to year. But on our planet, teachers who do really good work are not generally in danger of turning into terrible teachers if we take our eyes off them for six or seven months, and administrators probably have better things to do than watching their best teachers as if they're a pack of weeping angels. 

Do two states constitute a serious erosion of the test-driven teacher evaluation movement? Probably not. And it's also true that if we';re sweeping aside the tests in order to make room for Competency Based Education as a means of evaluating teachers, there may be bigger fights down the road.

So rate this development "cautiously optimistic" or maybe "one step in the right direction, but only one." But the first sign of a breaking dam is a few little holes. This may not be the best news this year, but it certainly isn't bad.

The Gates Doubles Down

Yesterday it was time for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellman to roll out an annual letter trumpeting the foundation's Good Works. The missive covers several of the foundation's areas of interest, and it devotes a whole section to education.

She opens with the observation that K-12 edcation has been "our greatest area of learning." So has Gates gotten any smarter or wiser about education? Have they learned from the contentious and problematic attempt to reconfigure US pubic education?

Short answer? Nope.

Desmond-Hellman is a biotechnologist, which rather fits with the Gates model of bad education as a disease that just needs aggressive treatment. She notes that "education is a bridge to opportunity in America" (which kind of ignores all the bigger, wider bridges like being born into wealth and privilege) and cites a speech by Allan Golston, a Gates Foundation mucky-muck who once wrote a sentence that I called "the wrongest sentence ever in the CCSS debate." So we're off to a bad start. And that leads us to this one sentence paragraph:

However, we’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change. 

That's the fact we're facing-- that system change is hard. Not that, say, our basic assumptions about the system are flawed, or our theory of action hasn't held up to real world application, or we haven't paid enough attention to the real experts in the field, or the programs and policies that we have pushed might not actually be very good.


No. It's that damned change-resistant system.

This, as Joanne Barkan so ably chronicles, is the plutocrat's lament. My vision is so awesome, and I am so rich, and I am so used to having things go the way I direct them to, I cannot for the life of me figure out why my brilliant square peg will not go into this round hole. If people would just behave...

Desmond-Hellman continues with a fake statistic-- "only 40 percent of students met three of the four college-readiness standards across English, reading, math, and science." This is a problem both because of the basis for saying that in the first place (a study by test manufacturer ACT-- so it's kind of like a study by Ford Motor Company on whether or not Americans have enough cars) and the implication that you're not really ready for college unless you have the knowledge base of both a science major and an English major ("Sorry, Chris. We were going to give you a full music scholarship, but your biology scores were too low").

However, I’m optimistic that all students can thrive when they are held to high standards. And when educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of each year, the bridge to opportunity opens. The Common Core State Standards help set those expectations.

So, apparently, nobody ever held students to high standards before (and apparently few people even thought of it). But we've discussed the magical power of expectations, and my advice to folks in the private sector remains the same-- if expectations of high standards are the key to making every student succeed, then I suggest Microsoft just start hiring people at random and then expecting them to meet high standards. What's that you say? Only some people can meet those standards, and so "hold to high standards" in industry means "sorting the wheat from the chaff, and only employing the wheat"? If that's so, then where do we send the students who are chaff in public education?

Also. "When educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of the year," that almost certainly means that we have narrowed those expectations into a one-size-fits-all model that serves few students well.

Desmond-Hellman says that we have "begun to see signs of improvement," and goes on to cite Kentucky, which is a bold choice considering recent reports that after years of Common Core, Kentucky has widened the achievement gap. Granted, I think the "achievement gap" (aka "standardized test score gap") is a lousy measure, but it's the yardstick the reformsters asked to use, and it shows them failing. So, maybe Kentucky isn't actually a sign of improvement.

Desmond-Hellman includes a nifty graphic listing the "value of Common Core," except that it includes the same old baloney like "a deeper dive into subjects" and "focus on critical thinking," though at this stage of the game, there is still no evidence that Common Core actually promotes these things. The graphic also touts that "teachers have consistent and clear expectations" of what students should be able to do at the end of the grade level, and I suppose she doesn't mean "expect to get a good score on a Big Standardized Test," but this also skips over a big big huge ginormous question  because while it's lovely that expectations are clear and consistent, they also have to be developmentally appropriate and just plain correct. I can be clear and consistent in my expectation that a two-year-old run a six-minute mile, but that expectation is still a lousy one.

Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

No. No no no no no NO no nope nope nopity nope no. No.

It was not the implementation, stupid. The standards have not crashed and burned and morphed and changed into a shapeless mass of meaningless mulch because people did it wrong. The Core don't have an image problem because people don't understand them properly; they have an image problem for the same reason nobody likes your bad boyfriend-- they're bad.

Desmond-Hallman says that "this" has been a tough lesson to absorb, but what this? Because they don't seem to have learned any lesson at all, except the same old one, which is when your square peg won't fit into a big hole, you blame it on the hole and grab a bigger hammer. And so many failures. So many! Here's just a partial listing from Anthony Cody, who has watched Gates for a while, and is, in fact, an actual teacher that tried to get the Gates to hear him. Gates Common Core based reforms continue to be the Zune of education-- and yet somehow, it's not time to pull the plug?

You've already heard the doubling down quote from many reactions to the missive, but you should see the paragraph-sized non sequitor that is its context--

One of the best parts of my job is getting to hear from educators. And no one knows teaching like teachers. So, we’re doubling down on our efforts to make sure teachers have what they need to make the most of their unique capabilities.

Boy, those teachers really know all about teaching. That's why we are going to work even harder to force our top-down non-educator-created standards system down their collective throats.

She wraps up with a focus on materials, reminding us of awesome products like LearnZillion and EngageNY, plus the work of EdReports.org to review all this stuff. These are somehow going to drive a national demand for high quality materials, because presumably teachers were never before interested in high quality teaching materials.

Had enough of the hubris yet? Let's wind up for the big finish:

Our learning journey in U.S. education is far from over, but we are in it for the long haul. I’m optimistic that the lessons we learn from our partners – and, crucially, from educators – will help the American school system once again become the powerful engine of equity we all believe it should be.

What lessons??!! What lessons?? What lesson have you learned from educators, exactly, because so far it sounds like the lesson learned "from educators" is "we've watched these educators work with our awesome stuff and we've concluded that their system is too resistant to change, too slow to recognize that we know better than they do."

And "once again become the powerful engine of equity"??!! Once again?? When was that, exactly? I confess to wanting this to be true, that there was actually some golden age when public schools leveled the playing field between wealthy white kids and non-wealthy non-white kids. But while we've held that out as an ideal, it has been a long steady slog. Public schools reflect the culture they're part of, and that means every piece of classism, racism, sexism, and other ugly isms have been woven right into the fabric of our educational system.

We have to do better. We must do better. That, to me, is the best American goal-- not to recapture some dream of a golden time that never existed, but to unflinchingly see how we are coming up short and to strive, always, to get better.

The Gates likes the classic reformster formulation. There is a big problem, so you should embrace our solution, and if you ask me to explain how my proposed solution really helps anything, I will just keep telling you how awful the problem is. But the Gates remains convinced that their vision of a national education system re-organized around a top-down imposed set of one-size-fits-all standards-- that, somehow, despite all the objections, all the arguments, all the words from actual trained and experienced professional educators, all the lousy results, and all of that, let's not forget, the fact that nobody chose, elected, asked or otherwise enlisted Bill Gates to take on this project in the first place-- despite all of that, the Gates intends to keep plugging away, hitting the square peg with larger hammers, over and over, blaming everything in the world for the damage inflicted by their relentless failure except, of course, themselves.

The Future Ready Pledge

Has your superintendent taken the pledge?

Probably not-- the Future Ready Schools pledge is yet another one of those federal bully pulpit PR initiatives that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but refused to go viral.

But the pledge, whipped up in October of 2014, is worth a look because it tells us what the USED thought the future would look like back in those halcyon days of Almost Two Years Ago.

FRS got tangled up with the Alliance for Excellence in Education in 2015. A4EE is one of those groups that exists in a magic land, the place where the revolving door between government agencies, private interests, and "advocacy" groups is spinning so fast that it looks like all three types of organizations are really just the same people wearing different party hats. A4EE is headed by former WV governor Bob Wise and includes Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford), Frederick Frelow (from the Ford Foundation), N. Gerry House (former superintendent, current big cheese at Educational Testing Services), some tech guys (amazon), and some policy wonks. A4EE loves it some reformy stew, from Common Core to digital learning.

The Alliance "partnered" with the USED to push Future Ready Schools through the first half of 2015. They sold the pledge hard, along with the various policies attached to it. What is the pledge, you ask? Let's take a look.

The opening is simple enough:

I, _______________________, Superintendent of _________________________ do hereby affirm the commitment of this district to work with students, educators, families, and members of our community to become Future Ready by engaging in a wide range of activities such as:

And then we get to the List of Goodies. 

Fostering and Leading a Culture of Digital Learning Within Our Schools.

The language here is plenty familiar. Leaders are supposed to use "the power of technology to help drive continuous improvement."

Helping Schools and Families Transition to High-speed Connectivity.

The pledging district is supposed to do analysis of tech connections, which is not a biggy. I regularly analyze my students' access to high-speed connectivity by a technique I like to call "Asking them." FRS are supposed to "work with community partners to leverage local, state, and federal resources to support home Internet access outside of traditional school hours." What do you mean, "leverage?" High speed internet connections cost money, both to pay for the connection as well as the equipment needed to connect. That equipment will have to be upgraded, maintained and replaced on a regular basis. Again, this is not rocket science-- it takes money. In rural areas like mine, a big pile of money that nobody here has to invest.

I do get tired of this vague blather about connectivity. It's not vague. It's simple. It costs money, and the companies that provide it expect to make money and keep making money. You want to hook everybody up? Go find a big money tree.


Empowering Educators through Professional Learning Opportunities.    

Sigh. This is one of my favorite dumb reformster ideas-- if we could just plug the right professional development into teachers, then awesome things would happen. Common Core tanked because we didn't plug in the right PD. Testing is a hard sell because we haven't "supported" it with the right PD. In this model, getting programs to work with the teachers we have is like getting the VCR to stop blinking 12:00.

This is the thinking of people who don't have much understanding of carbon based life forms. This is the guy who thinks that if he writes a poem and sends the right flowers, the girl will totally fall in love with him. This is the guy who, with a straight face, writes sentences like this:

Future Ready Schools districts provide tools to help teachers effectively leverage learning data to make better instructional decisions.  

Leverage learning data, my butt. This is the guy who leans over at the end of the date and says, "After careful study, I am prepared to leverage interpersonal interaction data to make better decisions about placing my lips up against yours."

Accelerating Progress Toward Universal Access for All Students to Quality Devices.

Again, there is absolutely no mystery here, and no amount of government blatherspeak will create one. If you want a "quality device" in every students' hands, somebody is going to have to pay for it. And then pay for it again every two or three years when the quality device has to be replaced/upgraded. But no-- the pledge has to talk about how we'll "develop tools to support a robust infrastructure for managing and optimizing safe and effective use of technology, so students have opportunities to be active learners, creating and sharing content, not just consuming it." And as much as I love computer tech, I will poop on this party enough to point out that all of those stated objectives can be achieved with the technology or pen and paper.

Providing Access to Quality Digital Content.

Future Ready Schools districts align, curate, create, and consistently improve digital materials and apps used in the support of learning. Future Ready Schools districts use carefully selected high quality digital content that is aligned to college and career ready standards as an essential part of daily teaching and learning. 

Not be redundant, but-- money. Money, money, money.

But we've slipped over another line here. Aligned to CACR standards? Daily? An "essential part"? Before we all try to round up a giant mountain of money to support your grand vision, do you have any evidence to offer that the vision will actually yield results worth the huge investment?

Offering Digital Tools to Help Students And Families #ReachHigher.

Oh, well, there's a hashtag, so you know this must be serious. Basically, we're talking about using internet tools to help get into college. Fair enough.

Mentoring Other Districts and Helping Them Transition to Digital Learning.

Kind of like a chain letter.

There's also a Five-Step Process (so, eight fewer than twelve) for implementing all this. Those steps are

1) Create a Future Ready Leadership Planning Team
2) Take the Future Ready District Leadership Self-Assessment
3) Gather Input from Stakeholders: Analyze Gaps and Strategies
4) Create Your Future Ready Action Plan
5) Export, Share, Connect, and Repeat

There seem to be at least two steps missing-- the step where you figure out how to pay for all this and the step where you look at the convincing evidence that the expense will be worth it and will actually produce better lives for all your students.

But there's not a lot of room for discussion in the future. Elsewhere on the FRS site, we're told that "this roadmap can only be accomplished through a systemic approach to change, as outlined in the Future Ready Framework." All must be assimilated, and all must be assimilated in the One Approved Method.

Piling model on model, the FRS looks at seven main gears all placed around the central hub-- personalized learning.

Some of this sounds like it could be exciting (Use of space and time!! Can we go back in time to study dinosaurs??!! Because that would be awesome.) but mostly it's the same batch of gobbledeegook. See the gear about budget and resources? Do you imagine that's where I'll finally get my explanation of how to pay for this in a world where state's are cutting education budgets and public schools are having their financial throats ripped out by charter school wolves? Nope.

The transition to digital learning will require strategic short-term and long-term budgeting and leveraging of resources. All budgets at the district and the school should be aligned to the new vision, with consistent funding streams for both recurring and non-recurring costs to ensure sustainability.

And so on. In plain English, "This will cost a lot of money. You should find the money. We think maybe the technology will save you money."

They recognized that data privacy is a sore PR spot, but again, the framework's advice boils down to, "You need to collect and crunch a lot of personalized data for the personalized learning. Everybody should probably try to be careful with that stuff."

By November of 2014, the White House was happily launching a whole raft of superintendents into the future, and then in December of 2015, Phase Two was launching. On that occasion, at least, EdSurge was offering a list of actual issues that needed to be addressed (like cultural competency, equity, access, and actual training that would be useful to teachers).

But the Future Ready Pledge still seems to be a-- well, not exactly a trojan horse. You know how you buy one simple tool and it comes packed in fifteen layers of plastic and packing materials and a hard sheath that you have to break through with a hatchet. This seems kind of like that, only we're packing Computer-centered Personalized [sic] Learning in layers of bureaucratic baloney. If this is the future, I'm not ready for it yet.

ICYMI: May Winds Down

Boy, it is hard to find the time to read it all. Here are a few choice samples from the week

We Must Not Be Defeated

Jose Luis Vilson reflects on where we stand on the anniversary of Brown v. Board, with a particular eye toward what we can do in the classroom. I can't really do this justice in a capsule-- just read it.

Chris Christie Loves Segregated Schools

If you are not a regular reader of Mark Weber's Jersey Jazzman blog, you should be. His gift is for making a case with actual data. Here's his explanation of what Christie is really supporting when the gov gets out his charter school pom poms.

Great Reading Must Be Felt, Not Standardized

Steven Singer makes the case for the realm experience of literature in the classroom

Are Grades Destroying My Six Year Old Kid

William Ferriter talks about watching the real impact of policies on his own child. Time to talk about how we measure student progress.

Four Things Worse Than Not Learning To Read in Kindergarten 

Makes a nice companion piece to the previous post.

Stars Reflect on Arts Programs That Shaped Their Success

There's now a Tony for arts education. Here Playbill talks to several successful theater folks about the arts education that helped them get where they are today.

What Is a Community School 

Sarah Lahm takes a look at the definition of a community school.

Being Black at America's Elite Public High Schools

If you remember how things were going in Boston during the contentious days of busing in the seventies, this article may not shock or surprise you. But This is still worth a read-- a good, solid look at how racism is still alive and kicking at even the top tier of US public high schools. Discouraging, but necessary.

Hawaii Cuts the Testing Cord

It can be done! This week the Hawaii Board of Education removed Big Standardized Test scores as a factor in teacher evaluation.

Coverage at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald was particularly descriptive of the problem the BOE was solving.

Formerly, teachers in Hawaii were beholden to curriculum and standards developed with little or none of their input by entities HSTA Secretary-Treasurer Amy Perruso described as “corporate philanthropists.” These entities, namely the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, have had sway in setting teacher performance standards, developed testing for those standards and profiting from the system, she said.

And you'll want to note Perruso's description of what had happened under the test-driven regulations:


"Taxpayers pay for public education, but an arrangement was set up where much of what used to be provided by the public education system was outsourced to consultants,” she explained. “Public money used to be used for public institutions, now it’s going to private companies. Teachers used to develop our own standards, now we pay for them. We used to do our own tests, now we pay for them.”

The move on testing became possible thanks to the opening provided by the new federal education law (ESSA) as well as a joint BOE-Hawaii State Teachers Association committee established by the last contract. That committee originated the recommendation to the BOE. BS Tests scores may still be used, but schools are now free to use a more flexible system as needed. BOE Vice Chairman Brian De Lima noted that teachers who were already found to be excellent could waste less of their time jumping through evaluation hoops while teachers in need of mentoring could get the help they needed.

I'd be curious to know how much this change was informed by Hawaii's ongoing teacher shortages; you may recall that just a month ago, the Hawaii Department of Education was off on a mainland recruitment tour. At the time they were forecasting 1,600 openings (striking because Hawaii is not, really, very big) and talking about one of the highest turnover rates in the country. Hawaii is a beautiful place, but most of it is actually very rural, and the cost of living is crushing.

In short, getting rid of teachers is not exactly the big policy challenge in Hawaiian education. So I like to think that at least one person in charge thought, "Well, we can't pay them a ton, and we can't fix the cost of living, but we can get rid of this stupid test-centered evaluation system."

Here's hoping that other states take note, and that the Hawaiian idea spreads.