Booking.com and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Ad

The folks at booking.com put out this advertisement.



I've never established a Hall of Fame here, but if I did, this letter would go into it:

After watching your ad several times I am moved to do something I've never done before- write a company to complain of the image they are portraying of my profession. As a 15 year veteran teacher, I can assure you that my stress does NOT come from the students in my classroom. My stress comes from endless meetings forcing me to enact tactics that do not help my students learn and achieve; my stress comes from not getting a cost of living raise in 10 years; my stress comes from national figures who know nothing of public education working to destabilize our system in favor of private, religious, and for-profit charter schools that are free to discriminate against differently-abled children with no penalties. 

Isn't there enough teacher bashing without you adding to the myth of the inattentive, non-caring, child-hating teacher? 

If you want to show a teacher needing a vacation, how about showing one burnt out on caring too much? Giving of her own time and money to her kids while an uncaring administration makes ridiculous demands on her? That would be relatable and not turn off the 3.1 million public school teachers in the US. 

Thank you,

That letter is from Alana Milich, God bless her.

Because, yes, it's absolutely hilarious how this teacher is apparently incapable of doing her job is not very interested in trying, because children are awful wild malevolent creatures and teachers would certainly be doing anything else if they possibly could.

"There's nothing more important to me than my vacation"??!! Really? I'm pretty sure that teachers have a long list of things that are far more important to them than their vacation. "Now I can start relaxing before the vacation begins." Sure-- that's what teachers want to do. Anything except our jobs.

Do not tell me that it's "just a joke" and I shouldn't take it so seriously. Passive-aggressive attacks masquerading as humor are never funny. "Hey, honey-- move your fat ass! Oh, don't give me that look-- I'm just kidding." Hi-larious.

I'm not sure what makes this okay. If this were a bored, incompetent, slack-eyed housewife dreaming of getting away from her kids, or a husband dreaming of getting away from the wife he hates, or a doctor standing over an open patient on the table while the doctor absently severs organs and dreams of getting away from stupid sick people or a minister who can't stand his congregation or a national elected politician who can't stand his job and dreams of going golfing every weekend-- well, you get the idea. I know as Americans we get yuks out of people who hate their jobs or their lives or the people around them, but damn-- do we really need one more suggestion that teachers really just suck? And if someone were telling you that's how they see your children, would that be okay with you?

Booking.com sent Milich (and apparently a few other complainants) a tepidly generic response:

Thanks for your feedback.

We’ll be sure to pass it on to those relevant. At Booking.com we value all professions, including teachers, and this ad was only intended as a light-hearted bit of fun. We are passionate about connecting our customers with great stays, empowering them to experience the world in the easiest, most seamless ways possible, which this advert aimed to convey.

Kind regards,

Those relevant what, exactly? "Light-hearted" doesn't really fit, I'm afraid, unless you're the kind of person who considers Ann Coulter books a wacky romp. "We were just teasing" is, unfortunately, a whole long distance away from "We are sorry. We respect teachers and should not have treated them so insultingly."

If you'd like to add to the chorus of unamused audience members, here are some places to try.

Booking.com has a Facebook page. Their twitter handle is @booking.com. You may also be interested to know that they are part of the Priceline group, along with Kayak, Agoda, and Open Table. And while none of the categories is exactly "Complain about our insulting advert," you can find many customer service contact options here-- why not use, well, many?

Join the many folks already complaining. While this is certainly not on the order of, say, threats to gut public education and destroy the teaching profession, these folks deserve to be part of a flap-- maybe even a kerfuffle. It would be nice if advert-makers would think two seconds before they used shots at teachers for cheap punchlines. Do better, booking.com.

MD: University Privatization

The University of Maryland University College is pioneering a new business model, and not everyone thinks it's a very good idea.

George Kroner is a UMUC graduate and a former employee who worked on the tech side of things as UMUC developed a variety of on-line education and analytics programs (he is also, I should note, a former student of mine). But in the nine months since Kroner has left UMUC, he has noticed some disturbing trends.

For one thing, there has been a large administrative turn over-- and not just of personnel as some old school positions like "VP of Academic Affairs" are replaced with new-fangled jobs like "VP, Strategic Partnerships." These business-sounding titles seem to be in keeping with a new model being followed by the university:

As of the time that I left, my impression is that the university was beginning to struggle with finding a balance between its core mission focused on academics and the business aspects of focusing on future innovation. The noted shifts in the Cabinet membership seem to reflect these changes in priority and focus.  As much respect as I have for the university President, he seemed quite enamored with finding ways to use public resources to found private educational technology startup companies – instead of with the core academic mission of the university. The thinking was that the university might use excess income from these startups, or the proceeds from selling them off, to fund scholarships. This is a noble goal, but the business of edtech is extremely risky at best and can result in losing hundreds of millions of dollars for even the largest and most successful educational technology companies.

Inside Higher Ed writes about the "unbundling" university. UMUC has been a pioneer in distance and on-line learning (Kroner himself earned an advanced degree while still being able to hold down a regular job thanks to evening and online classes at UMUC). The university did big business with students attached to the military, including those on active duty.

But times are a-changin' and UMUC was looking for a way to be more sustainable. President Javier Miyares (who left Cuba after his father was taken prisoner in the Bay of Pigs invasion-- so there's another person for your immigration list) took over the office in 2012 with no intent to instigate drastic changes.

Now Miyares thinks its time to pare UMUC down to its "core mission" and part of that has turned out to be "spinning off" departments into private businesses. So the Office of Analytics became the company HelioCampus. This joined other spun-off units under a UMUC non-profit umbrella holding company. UMUC used various departments to raise money two ways-- either outright selling them off, or spinning them into private businesses. And the hiring them to do what they used to do-- so spinning off and outsourcing, all at once.

Either way, say critics, it's a dubious use of public money and the products of that public money. Eyebrows wet up when the university decided to spin off/outsource its entire IT department under the UMUC ventures brand. But outsourcing without a bidding process because they're hiring a business that they are still sort of attached to. That's a lot of spin.

Supporters say it can grow the endowment for the university. Critics point out that it puts UMUC in the business of being in business. That may be why Miyares has been making a bunch of noises that translate to, "No, really-- we're most concerned with the whole academics and teaching and students thing." But there's no getting around it-- the taxpayers of Maryland are now financing both a university and a large-scale business enterprise. And the university and the business now do business with each other:

“For the regents, it was important that there was a really clear line of control,” Miyares said. “We are very satisfied that what we are getting from [HelioCampus] in terms of analytics services is what we were getting before, but that involved very well-crafted service-level agreements. The same thing will have to be done with IT … to make sure we continue to get what we need. At the end of the day, if we don’t, well, I can appoint new directors at any time.”

Which is a bizarre conversation to have. "Let's make sure that these people who used to work for us directly still give us the service they would have given us as a matter of course if they were still working for us." It's like a divorcee saying to their ex as they leave divorce court, "But we'll still get together and the sex will be just as good as ever, right?"


The ins and outs of public-private university partnerships are always a complicated web, whether you're talking health care research or might-as-well-be-pro sports. But UMUC seems determined to push right up to the edge of the question, "When does a public university stop being a public university?" And that question lives right next door to, "If a public university is really a private business, should it be paid with public tax dollars?"

Netflix and the Myth of Personalization

Today Slate has an analysis of how Netflix began the process of personalizing marketing, of using "algorithms to micromanage distribution, not production" in particular in the multi-pronged marketing of House of Cards by creating multiple trailers to appeal to particular slices of the Netflix customer pool, based on their "likes."

In the middle of the article, we find this paragraph:

House of Cards thus embodies one of the most seductive myths of the algorithmic age: the ideal of personalization, of bespoke content assembled especially for each one of us. In fact, the content, or at least the costly, aesthetically rich content we care about, like Fincher’s show, is still fairly limited. There is only one House of Cards, but there are as many ways to market the show as there are to target Netflix viewers. This is what information theorist Christian Sandvig calls “corrupt personalization”: the ways that algorithmic culture blurs the lines between our genuine interests and a set of commodities that may or may not be genuinely relevant, such as products “liked” by our friends on Facebook even if they did not knowingly endorse them.

The piece on corrupt personalization is worth the side trip, but it's a bit much to squeeze in here. But let me toss out three context-free quotes that may ring bells.

It’s as if on Facebook, people were using the yellow pages but they thought they were using the white pages. 

In sum this is again a scheme that does not serve your goals, it serves Facebook’s goals at your expense.

Money is used as a proxy for “best” and it does not work. That is, those with the most money to spend can prevail over those with the most useful information. The creation of a salable audience takes priority over your authentic interests.


And I will bring back Greene's Law-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Personalized learning, whether we're talking about a tailored-for-you learning program on your computer screen or a choose the school you'd like to go to with your voucher, is not about actual personalization. It's about another path for marketing, a way of personalizing the marketing of the product, the edu-commodity that someone is already trying to make money from.

We're being sold (and in many cases are arguing against) an AI that spits out just the digitized worksheet that Student 12-5452 needs to continue studies, but that's not where we're headed. Look, for instance, at the new, improved PSAT that returns both a score and some recommendations. "Looks like you need to log in to Khan Academy's lesson series for calculus." Or "You would really benefit from the AP Calculus course-- talk to your guidance counselor today."

That's the personalized learning dream-- students with vouchers paying for education one course or micro-credential at a time, and each exercise on the "parent" program ends with, "Good job! You should probably sign up for Edubizwang Corp's Intro to Pre-Pre-Calculus next-- just enter your edu-voucher account number." Marketing that can be directed with laser-like precision at each individual consumer. Marketing that can tell the consumer, "Yeah, this-- this is what you really want."

It's not a personalized product, but the personalized marketing will make you think it's just what you want. Netflix is just the beginning. 

IN: Vouchers and Changing the System

Indy Ed is a website devoted to exploring one idea-- "There are so many changes swirling around our schools that it’s hard to get straight answers." Their focus is Indianapolis, one more urban center suffering from a plethora of education problems, not the lest of which is a government that doesn't want to spend too many tax dollars on Those People. But Indy Ed seems to prefer focusing on that most magical of solutions-- vouchers and choice.

There's no big scam or fraud or misbehavior here. But in one simple piece, Indy Ed gives us a picture of many of the ways that vouchers open up the market and let profiteers and religious ed folks get past the system that has stood in their way for so long.

"Vouchers May Not Be a Panacea But They Are Really Working for Some Families" is the headline for this piece highlighting Oaks Academy, an example of vouchers working for some people.

So before we read the piece, what do we know about Oaks Academy? Well, here's the pitch at the top of their website:

The Oaks Academy is a Christ-centered school that exists to provide a rich, classical education to children of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, preparing them to succeed in a rigorous secondary educational program and to demonstrate spiritual, social and emotional maturity.

Indy Ed tells us that the student population of Indianapolis is three-quarters black and brown, but the header photo for OA (which Indy Ed also uses for its piece)shows a group of students who are two-thirds white.

OA has a whole page devoted to Teacher Support which highlights such great features as their outstanding professional development (so much better than public schools). One might think they are really working at recruiting and retaining teachers (you can also do Americorps or VISTA work there). Their student profile shows a blend of socio-economic backgrounds and a racial breakdown closer to 50-50 than 25-75 (Britt actually cites a 30% black population in the school, which is smaller than what the school's own graph shows). But they do great on that ISTEP (Indiana's version of the Big Standardized Test). And they've been thriving-- in the 1998-1999 year they opened with 53 students enrolled. This year they have 732 (pre-K through 8). The material is quiet about students with special needs, but that would seem to be one more area in which The Oaks does not resemble the Indianapolis student population. Reader ocg in the comments below offered this background:

The IDOE's Compass website tracks demographics, test scores, etc. for every school corporation in the Indiana, public or private. Their data shows that all three Oaks Academy campuses have far fewer rates of students on free or reduced lunch (ranging from 23.6% to 34.4%) as compared to both Indianapolis Public Schools (68.3%) and the state as a whole (45.7%).
Although lunch status is a very rough way of looking at whether a population is “low income” or not, those numbers do make me scratch my head.
Their racial demographics are also not reflective of Indianapolis schools. All three Oaks Academy campuses are about 50-55% white, 30% black, and 15-20% Asian/Hispanic/multiracial. Indianapolis Public Schools have slightly different demographics.
And then there's special ed numbers. The Oaks Academy with the highest rate of special ed students is their Fall Creek campus, at 8.1%. The other two campuses have special ed rates of 4.1% and 4.7%. The entire state has a rate of 14.5%. IPS's rate is 17%. Hmm.**

But back to our Indy Ed profile. The writer, Baratto Britt, wants to argue that vouchers are actually a "liberal, almost socialist" thing with the mission of providing poor families with the same choices that rich families enjoy. About half of the students at Oaks are voucher students. 83% get some sort of tuition assistance (the toll is $10,300-- so now I'm a little confused because Indiana vouchers only provide about $5K). Board policy reportedly says that 50% of the student body must be from poor families.  But Britt also says that the school attracts hefty philanthropy ("juggernaut" is the word he uses); their website promises "an unmatched philanthropic experience." Almost 40% of the budget comes from donations; voucher money provides about 20%. Also, Oaks "acquired" a public middle school that had been "underutilized".

The school was profiled by Ebony last fall as an example of diversity in action as an educational tool, and while The Oaks is diverse, it is far whiter than the Indianapolis public system. According to school CEO Andrew Hart, that takes some deliberate work:

We want to be diligent about maintaining this tricky balance. It’s something so unique to this place but very fragile. “The admissions pool is dominated by white families, who are moving back into the neighborhoods,” Hart added. “It would totally relieve our philanthropic burden, which would be great, but we want to make sure this unique proposition that Oaks is maintained over time

Hart graduated from UNC at Chapel Hill with an MBA, put in four years at Eli Lilly, then came to The Oaks.

Britt wants to suggest that Oaks does not cream or pick only the most-likely-to-be-successful students, but on top of the whole Christ-centered approach (about which the school is not shy, nor should they be) the school also has another requirement that Britt lays out

Additionally, parental involvement is not optional for all Oaks Families, but mandatory as a caring, committed adult must participate in various activities during the admissions cycle and school year to ensure all stakeholders have skin in the game.  

So, Jesus, plus a supportive family both willing and able to contribute work to the school, which is itself supported by extra funding from philanthropists. Is there any school, public or private, that could not achieve success with those advantages?

The Oaks is a private Christian school that self-selects for families with a commitment to their children's education, all of which is perfectly fine-- for a private school. But under Indiana's system, public tax dollars are being sent to this religious private school (and some of the taxpayers' buildings as well).

I decided to write about this precisely because The Oaks shows no signs of fraud or scandal or the kinds of egregious abuse of the system that we often see with vouchers. Except, of course, that the vouchers are completely flouting the separation of church and state by sending public dollars to a private Christian school, and that school has shown us nothing about education that we didn't already know. With a different student body than the parent district, supportive families, free labor, and extra funding you can get good results?! Do tell!

The Oaks' own history page and several press accounts note that the school was started by neighbors and concerned citizens who wanted an urban alternative, and their first school was in a less-than-stellar neighborhood. Voucher supporters can and do point to The Oaks as the sort of school that can save students. They seem like Very Nice People, and not crooks at all-- and yet, they have completely changed the rules of public education, to the point that it's not public education at all.

But at some point we have to decide if saving only some students (and only those we consider deserving) is good enough. A nationwide voucher system will not be about providing choices for poor families, but about changing the entire purpose of education in this country. Vouchers will shift us from a system whose mission is to do its best for all students-- ALL students, no matter what-- to a system whose mission is to save some students, the right students, the students with the right kind of families, who belong to the correct faith. Like it or not, it's a huge mission shift for the country, and the end of public education as we know it. We should be talking about that.

** I'm copying the rest of the reader comments here to preserve the links (which blogger does not do-- man, if I had had any idea what this blog was going to be lieke when it grew up, I would have picked a different platform). Here you go::

Finally, their claim that 85% of their students receive tuition assistance is pretty worthless in this state. Another choice school in Indiana, Delaware Christian Academy (godawful website, I know - somehow this school stays open), could not even open its doors in a timely manner last year, and yet they claim that 95% of their students got full scholarships. Either they're lying, or getting tuition assistance to attend a choice school in this state is, um, extremely easy.

Anyway, the choice climate here in Indiana has very clearly hobbled certain school corporations (like IPS, and especially Gary, whose enrollment has gone from ~16,000 students to ~6,000 students in 12 years). It has also led to some very interesting data sets, like this choice school's graduate rate trend (look at the bar graph). Wonder what happened there.

The Map of the World

Boston Public Schools just caused a stir by adopting a new map of the world.

"Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion"reads the headline in the The Guardian, and "amend" is a good choice of words, because BPS decided to replace one set of distortions with another.

Boston had been using the Mercator Projection (1569), a version that we're all pretty familiar with.

Mercator distorts by spreading out the world as it approaches the poles, so that by the time we get to Greenland or Alaska, the land masses are looking much larger than they actually are. Mercator was mostly trying to help with navigation, and this map was fine for that. And since his audience/customers were mostly starting from Europe, his map reinforces the idea that Europe is the center of the world. And it makes Africa and South America look relatively smaller.

This is many people's mental map of the world, complete with its built-in distortions.

BPS decided to switch to the Gall-Peters projection (1855/1967) a map that sets out to render each land mass equally, so that the relative sizes of the land masses are accurate.

But because the projection is still onto a rectangle, Gall-Peters combats one distortion with another distortion. The Marcator inflates land area by stretching it out at the bottom and the top; Gall-Peters fixes that by squishing the map in at the top and the bottom until the land areas are comparable and "correct."

This version is not necessarily very useful for navigation, but in the late 20th century it stirred up a bit of a mess. Arno Peters was actually duplicating the 100-year-old work of James Gall, and he promoted it as a more just and socially aware map than the Mercator, annoying the crap out of the cartographic community, which had been trying to downplay, improve upon, and replace Mercator for a couple of centuries. But Peters managed to build a cottage industry around his map (and even eventually acknowledged that Gall had gotten there a century earlier). The Brits use the map, and UNESCO has based some of its mappery on it, the argument in favor of it being that it shows nations in their proper relative size, even if shapes and distances are distorted.

Are there other options? You bet there are.

Try, for instance, the Cassini projection (1745), which keeps its distances somewhat standard and lets you see the poles.














Or how about the various Eckert projections (1906) that avoid lots of distortion by not trying to fit the surface of the globe on a rectangle.

And once we've chucked the whole rectangular map thing, we can get the equal-area maps right and show every land mass in proper proportion to the others. Here's the Goode homolosine projection (1923).

And cartographers haven't stopped playing. This Bottomley (that's the guy's name) equal-area projection from 2003:

We'll stop now, but there are even freakier versions of the earth in existence. There are many, many maps of the world out there-- some good for navigation, some good for figuring distances, some for showing proper relationships between land masses, some focused on ocean shaped and depths. But here's one thing we know about all of them--

They are all wrong. They are all incomplete. They are all distorted in some fairly major way.

This is to be expected. When you take something that is huge and complex and multidimensional and try to render it onto a small two-dimensional surface, you must sacrifice some major chunks of the truth. For that reason, you have to be fairly deliberate about and conscious of what parts of the truth you are sacrificing for whatever specific utility you wish to get from your map. And you have to keep trying, because every solution you come up with will be inadequate in some major way. And you must always remember that your map is inadequate in some major ways and not mistake the two-dimensional rendering for the real thing.

That's the lesson here, or rather the reminder, because we already knew all this but certain people prefer to pretend they don't, is that whenever you try to render, describe, display, or create a measured model of something complicated (like a school or a teacher or a student's mind or learning) you will absolutely fail in some major ways. Furthermore, if you get to thinking your map of that world is perfect, you will make terrible mistakes.

It is hard to make a map of the world. You will always fail, and if your goal is to achieve perfection, you are doomed to lose in a fool's game. If, on the other hand, you do the best you can, keep trying, and remain aware of your shortcomings so that you don't bet the farm or attach huge stakes to a map that's not True-- well, you might have a chance. If you think your Big Standardized Tests and data sets based on them and numbers kicked out by your fancy formulae are a perfect guide to what's going on in schools, you are doomed to be lost. And it would be really nice if you didn't drag the rest of us with you on your doomed journey.

ICYMI: Quiet Sunday Edition (3/19)

Here's some reading for your lazy Sunday. Remember to pass on what you find useful!

Did Betsy DeVos Just Ask States To Ignore Part of Federal Law?

Nobody did a better job this week of explaining the problem with DeVos's comments on just who gets included in ESSA work than Valerie Strauss

Damning a Student's Future with Old Data

Nancy Bailey looks at one of the big problems with the work of our Data Overlords

Joel Klein Reflects in His Legacy as NYC Schools Chancellor

Well, that's something that could use some reflecting. As you might imagine, Klein has a bit more insight about some reflections than about others.

NJ Charter School Fools Gold Rush

Jersey Jazzman has been taking a look at charters cashing in in New Jersey

Dumping ESSA Regs Is Not a Big Deal But...

Leonie Haimson takes a look at what the dumping of Obama's ESSA regs really means-- and what it doesn't.

Charter School with 38% High School Completion Rate Brags About 88% College Completion Rate

Many of us were passing around a USA Today article seemingly critical of charters. Gary Rubinstein took the time to drill down a little further down to get the evene worse parts that USA Today skipped.

To The Parents of Children Who Stare at My Disabled Daughter

You might not always read Daniel Willingham because he's not often on our side of issues, but this piece-- personal and heartfelt-- deserves your attention.

The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency

Not strictly about education, but if you want to get a better sense of the ideology moving some of the people who helped push Trump on us, this profile of Robert Mercer by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker is an important read.

Albert Camus's Letter

From the indispensable blog Brain Pickings, a piece about Camus's letter of gratitude to his teacher

Rest in Peace, EVAAS Developer William Sanders

At VAMboozled, an obituary for and recap of the developer of EVAAS, one of the widely used VAM models. If you want the incredible story of where this thing came from, here it is (with links, for advanced students). 

The Lost Years

After years of hearing how kindergarten has been turned into the new first grade, you'd think at the other end of the K-12 pipeline we would find highly advanced students. And yet-- not so much.

I am not going to report a ton of research on this, because the available research is bogus and part of the actual test-centric problem. What I can tell you is what I, as an actual real live classroom teacher who knows actual real live classroom teachers, see and hear.

This is the result of accelerated early instruction done primarily in the service of test-centric schooling ("We have to get them started early-- otherwise how will they be ready for the Big Standardized Test??")

It is lost years.

By the time these same start-em-early push-em-hard students arrive at high school classrooms, they are behind compared to the students that we saw twenty-five or fifteen or even ten years ago. They know fewer things, have fewer skills, and express lower academic aspirations.

Why? I can offer a couple of theories.

They have learned to hate reading.

They have learned that reading is this thing you do with short, disconnected, context-free selections, and when you read, you are not looking for something that sparks interest or enjoyment or curiosity or wonder or the pleasure of feeling your brain expanded and grown. You read so that, in a moment, you'll be able to answer the questions that someone else wrote-- and by "answer" we mean from the potions given the one answer that someone else has decided is "correct." There will be no expression of your own personal insights, and never the possibility that there's more than one way to understand the text. It is a stilted, cramped way to approach reading, and it means that students grow up with a stilted, cramped notion of what reading even is, or why human beings actually do it.

With some luck, some students will still discover the joy and, yes, utility of reading-- but they will discover outside of school, and they will not expect that the kind of reading that they love has anything to do with the test-centered "reading": they are required to do in school. That higher level course has additional "reading"? Then I surely don't want to sign up for that. And since the real task here, the real point of the whole exercise is not the reading, but the answering of questions about the reading-- well, I bet I can find a time-saving way to cut that corner. Because after enough years of this, many students conclude that "reading" is something to actively avoid.

There's no pleasure there, no discovery, no ideas to mull and discuss, no characters who help us pick apart the thorny questions of how to be human in the world. Just clues for answering the BS Test questions.

Their years are shorter.

The school year is now shorter. It is shorter by the number of days involved in the BS Test. It is shorter by the number of days spent on pre-testing and practice testing. It is shorter by the number of days spent on instruction that is only being implemented because it will help get them ready for the test.

By the time we've subtracted all those days, the school year is a few weeks, a month, maybe even more than a month shorter. It was only 180 days to begin with. The test-centric school has amped up a feature of education that has always frustrated teachers-- the 180 day year is a zero sum game, a bathtub full to the absolute rim with water. You cannot add something without removing something else. A really feisty or frustrated teacher might turn to an administrator who just said "Add this to your class" and say, "Fine-- what exactly do you want me to stop teaching?" But mostly we're expected to just make do, to perform some sort of miracle by which we stuff ten more rabbits into the hat.

It doesn't work. Every year students get less actual instruction than they used to, which means their teacher next year finds them a little bit behind, so the school year that used to start on Day One now starts on Day Thirty after the students are caught up-- and then it ends on Day 160 because, you know, testing. So the following year those students are that much more behind. And so on, and so on, and so on.

In the end, kindergarten may be the new first grade, but for many students, twelfth grade is the new eleventh grade.

There are certainly students who escape this effect, and there are certainly clever teachers who mitigate it. But mostly the injection of toxic testing into the bloodstream of US education has had the predictable effect-- it has weakened and damaged the entire body.

Mind you, that wasn't what we were promised. The injection of test-based accountability was going to transform the Steve Rogers of US schooling into a mighty Captain America of education. Those tests, linked to The Standards That Dare Not Speak Their Name (but which have never quite gone away, either), were going to lead to a surge in new and successful college students. Test scores would rocket upward, and we would get to be the Belle of the Ball at the next PISA Prom. We were going to have success out the wazoo.

And yet, none of that is happened. Mind you, I don't think the BS Test scores mean jack, and they have never been and will never be my measure of success. But reformsters chose the game, set the rules, picked the measurement they wanted (BS Test scores) and they STILL lost the game. We have wasted over fifteen years of education; some students have seen their entire schooling consumed by test-centric baloney.

Yet we keep plowing on, keep committing to Testing Uber Alles. We are losing students, losing education opportunities, losing the chance to awaken some young humans to what they could be and could become-- instead, we are still trying to mash their spirits flat under the heavy testing hand. We are losing years that we cannot get back, cannot give back, and this is not okay.