The Twisty Path of Top-Down Policy

From Outcome Based Education (remember the 90s?) to Common Core to ESSA to a hundred policy initiatives on the state level, the story is usually the same: Policymakers create a policy for K-12 education, it rolls out into the real world, and before too long those same policymakers are declaring, "That's not what we meant at all." Explanations generally include "You're doing it wrong" or "Maybe we should have put a bigger PR push behind it" or "The teachers union thwarted us." Common Core fans still claim that all Common Core problems are because of trouble with the implementation.

Somehow policymakers never land on another possibility-- that the policy they created was lousy. But good or bad, education policy follows a twisty path from the Halls of Power where it's created to Actual Classrooms where teachers have to live with it. Here are all the twists that can lead to trouble.

Good luck with this

It begins with the policy generators, who might be legislators, or they might be thinky tank lobby policy wonkists who have an idea they want to push. The important detail is that the policy starts with just a handful of people who actually understand it. But the policy's first obstacle is a larger group of legislators, some of whom have absolutely no idea what we're talking about, and worse yet, some who don't even know what they don't know, but have some thoughts about how the policy could be tweaked. Let's say for our example that the group doesn't fiddle too much, and we end up with a simple policy:



Students will learn about how to produce excellence in widgets.

"Excellence" is one of those words that legislators use to get past the fact that they can't agree on what an excellent widget is. But to implement the policy, teachers will have to know what the expectation is, so the Department of Education next has to "interpret" what the regulation means.
(John King and Lamar Alexander had some spirited disagreements about ESSA on just this point).

If we're talking about federal regulations, they'll pass through both federal and state departments of education. Reports, notes, letters, and other guidance tools will be issued by state bureaucrats who have some ideas about what widget excellence should look like and some other ideas about what the policy goals really are here.

Meanwhile, school districts are scrambling to figure out what, exactly, the new policy will mean to them. This creates a cottage industry of consultants. Those will usually include university professors, each of whom has their own ideas about widget excellence and who will therefor staple some of those ideas onto the policy. "This new widget policy provides the perfect opportunity for schools to implement the two-flange widget approach that my hopefully-soon-to-be-published research will detail." There will also be a flood of consultants from the textbook and ed tech industries, who have been sitting back at the corporate offices trying to answer the question, "How do we make a case that the product which we already have ready for market will be an excellent tool for meeting the new widget standards?" (This would be the part where, during the Common Core walkup, textbook publishers slapped "Common Core Ready" stickers on their materials.)

School district superintendents start to wade through these materials, but those administrators will come in several different varieties including 1) hates the new widget rules, 2) has always felt passionate about widgets, and 3) resigned to having to make the state happy somehow. The superintendent may be interested in minimum compliance requirements, or how to game the paperwork (just look like they're complying), or tossing a few ideas of their own into the mix. They will hand the policy off to building principals, who come in the same varieties.

And at every level, many people will look at what has been handed to them and think, "That can't be right" and "fix" the flaws they see in the policy. This process is tough on good policy, but it absolutely chews up policies that were no good in the first place.

After all these levels of pass the policy games, we finally arrive at the classroom teacher. The teacher is exposed to some professional development, which will provide a view of the policy from the perspective of one of the bureaucrats, professors, or vendors mentioned above. The more professional development sessions the teacher attends, the less certain she will be about what the policy requires, because no two presenters will say exactly the same thing.

But eventually, the teacher will take the policy into the classroom. She'll use a book published by a company with one set of ideas about widget excellence to try to implement the bureaucrat's or professor's ideas in a manner that is satisfactory to both of her immediate superiors. She may think, "I'll be a good soldier and do as I'm told" or she may think, "What I was told never did make sense, so I'll just interpret it as best I can," or, after a few lessons, she may think, "This is not working for these students at all-- I'm going to scrap all of this and design my own approach."

You can think of policy implementation as a giant Plinko board with a million slots at the bottom. The policymakers can drop the chip, and not only will it not go exactly where they want, but if they drop a hundred chips at once, they will all end up in a different place. Education policy isn't just a game of telephone-- it's a game of telephone in which each player whispers to ten other players, until a million people have completely different messages.

This is what some folks are talking about when they demand vociferously that policies and materials be implanted "with fidelity," which means roughly "do what I tell you and stop thinking for yourself." But the critical problem is that actual classroom teachers are not involved until the final step. If government insists on a top-down model of education policy, they are never going to get what they think they're asking for.

Originally posted at Forbes

How To Buy a School System

For many Reformsters, education is just too valuable to be left to democratically-elected citizens.

When Washington state voters rejected charter schools three times, charter backer Nick Hanauer put a call out to his billionaires, and a great wave of money washed the 2012 charter bill over the finish line-- because when the voters have spoken, it's important to get enough money to speak louder. Reed Hastings (Netflix) famously believes that democratically-elected school boards need to be pushed aside, and has said that part of "the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits."

We're at a place where a small group of Very Rich Individuals are intent on commandeering many parts of society-- including education.

In Newark, charter advocates tried to buy a mayoral election so that charter-friendly policies would stay in place.

In Los Angeles, charter advocates threw money at school board elections and packed half the seats of the board with their own buddies.

In New York, hedge fundies spent huge dollars to earn the charter loyalty of the governor.

Even tiny Perth Amboy saw huge outside spending on a local board race.

Occasionally the curtain is pulled back. Families for Excellent Schools joined other rich funders in a losing battle to advance the charter cause in Massachusetts. Then, in an additional defeat, the group was forced to pay a huge fine and in the process had to reveal its donors.

Often these stories are revealed one small piece at a time, or stretched over the interminable length of a modern political campaign. But now the Network for Public Education has done the homework, gathered the information, completed the research, and released a report that tells the stories of elections swamped in billionaires' money. The new report, "Hijacked by Billionaires," is available on line at the excellent cost of Free.

At over 100 pages, the report is rich with well-sourced details, including nine case studies, each showing what happens when Reformsters decide they'd rather just spend money to take control of schools systems.

There's a lot to chew on. There's a list of the billionaires who appear in more than three of the nine stories, and just scanning that list creates a picture of people who are dropping millions of dollars into political races-- school board races!-- hundreds of miles away. Reed Hastings has spent over nine and a half million dollars just to disrupt and attempt to control the outcome of elections. There are eighteen entries on the list, including full families like the Walton and the Bloomberg family (yes, of course Bill Gates is on the list). The sheer volume of money involved is staggering.

Each of the nine stories is striking in its own way. Remember when Shaver Jeffries, now head of DFER, ran for mayor of Newark against Ras Baraka? There was sooooooooo much money spent on that race to back Jeffries, much of it raised by Whitney Tilson and DFER.

The contributions are laid out in charts-- sometimes very long charts-- along with well-researched tales of the campaigns themselves. There's a lot to take in, and the report is a little depressing to read all in one sitting. But it is well worth seeing what's behind these rich folks who like to complain about union influence in elections, or how badly picked on they are by independent bloggers. This is just one more tentacle of the privatization octopus, and as distasteful as it is to see, we can't afford to look away. Read this report.

The 100th Day

I have been counting my days of retirement on Facebook.

I started innocently enough, marking Day One and Day Two. My brother thought this was entertaining and challenged me to keep it up. The posts have been short and sweet (one day I made my first smoothie) and I've embraced it as part of my social media chill-the-eff-out regimen (I'm not allowed to post in the morning until I post a music video, which keeps me from spending the night brooding about how I want to tell someone off first thing when I wake up-- then at the end of the day, I have to post some simple statement about my day. It helps keep my relationship with social media marginally more healthy). Oddly enough, folks seem to like them.

When I hit ninety days of retirement, someone commented that they were looking forward to what I would do for 100. I was not, because I had already figured out that Day 100 of my retirement would be today, September 11.

The confluence of these two things brings a couple of thoughts to mind.

One is the different special days that we humans like to observe. We love making up special occasions. We just sailed past the first day of school. We like to make up holidays, or make up dates to observe holidays and pretend things like Jesus was born on December 25th. We get excited about particular birthdays that end in 0, and we freak the hell out over changing into a new decade, century or millennium.

Most of what sets these days off is completely made up. "It's the first day of your fiftieth year," someone will say. "You should make the most of it, because this day only comes once." Well, yeah. The third Tuesday of your second month of being married only comes once. The 133rd day of this year's school year only comes once. Every day only comes once.

There are days that have weight and significance because do our human best to staple weight and significance to them. And there are days that carry weight and significance because history freights them with it.

And even the weight of history fades, lessens, erodes with time. None of the students in school this year have any memory of the attack on the towers. To them it's just one more piece of history, albeit one that they may have connections to through other humans. The Challenger explosion. John F. Kennedy's assassination. The Vietnam war. Korea. World War II. When we live through these moments, we imagine that the weight will never come off those days. But we're humans. We pass and our memories pass with us, and the ability to understand and grasp and really feel history is a rare one. We're fortunate to be born in a literate age, when the weight of days can be transferred to paper, to screen, raising the possibility of other humans not yet born will be able to feel the weight of these days across the years.

This is, in part, why it is such an awful thing to be cavalier with the truth, to just make shit up for no reason other than to acquire power or erase evil or just because it gives you a little thrill of power. There are few things more immoral than a lie, and to lie for the record, to deny the weight of days is to lie to a million fellow humans not yet born.

Writing matters. Honesty matters. The truth, as best as we can grasp it in our clumsy human hands, matters.

We give days weight they may not have truly earned because playing with the heft of days is a human pursuit, a way of practicing and building mental muscle for the days that really matter. And because it's important not to give our attention only to those days weighed down with huge and almost unbearable cargo. But it's also good to know the difference.

So this is Day 100 of my retirement, a day that has no more real significance than Day 67 or Day 109, except that we like round numbers. It arrives on the anniversary of a day so weighted down that in just seventeen years we have, many of us, mostly forgotten what it really felt like when it arrived, just as a growing number of us have no idea at all and never did. Every day comes only once, and then it fades like a call across a vast valley or a speck in a hall of mirrors. That is why we should pay attention, do better than yesterday, and not just screw around, purposefully trying not to see what is in front of us, deliberately twisting reality to suit some other purpose, as if there were any higher purpose than being true and present.

This day, every day, will come just come once. Try not to screw it up.

Stop Calling It Philanthropy

Last week, Matt Barnum and Sarah Darville ran a piece about "Chan Zuckerberg's $300 million push to reshape schools." The piece qualifies as newsy because they had an actual number for how much Mark Zuckerberg and his wife had pumped through their initiative (CZI); Barnum and Darville were almost able to report on where about a third of that money went.

"Yeah, I don't know much about education, either."

This comes on the heels of the Gates announcement of a "new direction" fueled by a new pile of money. This new push comes packaged differently for different markets. In California it was about some major non-profit grants, while in other markets the emphasis was on lifting up poor schools,
and other coverage focused on a "local school" emphasis. This is of course roughly the forty-third time Gates has set out to redesign US education.

And don't forget-- here's Politico boosting again the Laurene Jobs XQ school reinvention competition, because if you wave enough money at some people, they'll let you experiment on them.

It's good to cover all this stuff, but I have a request-- can we please stop calling it philanthropy.

Let's say I'm a rich guy, and by some bizarre quirk of fate, I'm living next to a lower-middle class family. They have a couple of kids, a beat-up old car, both work, and clearly struggle to make ends meet. I can see through the window that their meals are meager, their clothes are worn, and their furniture is a little beat up. Let me propose two scenarios.

In Scenario 1, I visit the family. I say, "Here's a wheelbarrow full of money. Make yourselves a better life. I'll be over on Saturdays to mow your lawn and make sure that everyone's doing okay."

In Scenario 2, I visit the family. I say, "Hi. I can see you could use some help, so here's my offer. I see you could use some help with your food budget. As it happens, I have it in my head that a diet entirely of squid and scallops would be really healthy for people, so I'll pay for all your food if you'll eat nothing but squid and scallops. I can see that your car is on its last legs-- I'll give you $50K to spend on a car if you buy it off the lot at a dealership a buddy of mine owns. Also, you look a little run down. I've designed an exercise program-- no, I don't have any medical or health care background-- and I'll give you guys a couple of hundred a week as long as you keep doing these exercises. And I'll double that if you spend an afternoon or two every week passing out fliers and telling people who awesome the program is. Also, I have some thoughts about fireplaces, so I'llk give you a few thousand dollars to build a fire in the middle of your hardwood living room floor, because that should be interesting. Oh, and one more thing-- the Mrs. is very attractive, but she wears such frumpy clothes. I have some much more attractive stuff designed that I would like to see her in. I'll cover your clothing budget if she'll wear my clothes and pose on the back porch every morning."

Scenario 1 is philanthropy. Scenario 2 is something else. Something intrusive and creepy.

Modern fauxlanthropy is not about helping people; it's about buying control, about hiring people to promote your own program and ideas. It's about doing an end run around the entire democratic process, even creating positions that never existed, like Curriculum Director of the United States, and then using sheer force of money to appoint yourself to that position. It's about buying compliance.

It is privatization. It is about taking a section of the public sector and buying control of it so that you can run it as if it was your own personal possession.

Yes, philanthropy has always been at least a little bit about using money to impose your values on others. Andrew Carnegie paid for over 2500 libraries, and that certainly reflected his values, but he didn't dictate what books could be included, nor did he create fake civic groups to promote them, and he didn't personally try to manage them. Philanthropic money has always come with some strings attached ("I'll buy the university a new science hall if you put my name on it"). But what we're seeing nowadays is different.

Gates is not saying, "Find people who are doing good work in education and fund them." He's saying "Find people who are doing the work I want to see done. In fact, encourage people to form new groups to do the work I want to see done, and fund them." That's not philanthropy-- that's just hiring someone to work for you.

It is somehow not so obvious because most of these projects do not directly profit the fauxlanthropists involved, but they are still essentially business transactions. Hire some people to promote Common Core. Find a school system that will let us pay them to implement our will in place of their judgment. Find a school system that is willing to accept money in return for letting us use their students as lab rats.

How is this any different than hiring somebody to paint the house or mow the lawn or do the accounting for us? The difference is supposed to be that the work fauxlanthropists are hiring for will somehow benefit society rather than benefitting themselves. But modern philanthropists don't do their homework well enough to know whether they'll doing any good or not (e.g Bill Gates and "we'll have to wait ten years to see if this stuff works"). And of course they do benefit-- they get to feel like philosopher kings and queens without having to do any of the hard parts. And they get to avoid the part where someone of lower stature says, "Your ideas are bad and destructive and dangerous." It lets them have control without responsibility or consequences for their bad choices.

So let's find something else to call this. I don't really like "fauxlanthropy" because there is real money involved, and "paying to impose their personal will on society" is a little wordy. For the time being I'll go with "allegedly benign privatization," but the floor is still open for suggestions. As long as we stop calling it philanthropy.

ICYMI: Rainy Fall Sunday Edition (9/9)

In much of country, the weather is grumpy today. Perfect chance to sit inside and read some good stuff that you may have missed. Remember to share what speaks to you-- you too can help amplify important voices in the debate.

Education Jargon Generator

As the new year starts, you'll want to be to spice up your professional reports, lesson plans, and professional development conversation with outstanding education jargon. Go ahead. Embrace evidenced-based functionalities. Synergize performance-based manipulatives. Do it yourself or use the site's jargon sentence generator. And follow the link to EduBabble Bingo.

The Education of Betsy DeVos

Why can't she get much done? Could it be a lack of experience or people skills? Take a look.

Who Allowed ECOT To Scam Taxpayers for Seventeen Years

Jan Resseger looks at some of the details of Ohio's biggest charter scandal-- and how it could affect the election.

How I Survive

The Guardian offers a photo essay on teachers and their second jobs. So many people are so much tougher than I ever was.

Class Action Problems for College Board

The latest testing screwup could land David Coleman's College Board in court. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Lawmakers Must Pass Charter School Reforms

From Arizona, where charter fraud and waste has gotten so bad the some folks want something done about it.

Are Early Childhood Assessments Necessary for Good Instruction or Irreparably Harmed by Toxic Test Based Accountability?

Defending the Early Years with a fair look at an important question.

10 Tips for New Teachers

Nancy Flanagan is so damned good, but this is even better than usual. Ten real tips for new teachers, including the one I needed to hear 40 years ago-- "Stuff is not teaching."

Life on the Ledger  

We've talked about the actual Ledger here in the past, but Wrench in Gears has created a video that helps explain why a blockchain-based permanent record is a big deal. And if you'd rather read than watch, here's where you can find links to slide version or a pdf of the script.

A Layman's Guide to the Destroy Public Education Movement 

Thomas Ultican with a measured but thorough look at who's behind the push to take over public education.

 

Still Pushing the PARCC

These days Laura Slover is the Big Cheese at CenterPoint Education, a nonprofit organization that's pushing its own brand of ed reform. Not getting too deeply into this outfit at the moment, but it includes team members like Tony Bennett, who lost his education job in Florida over his misbehavior at his previous reform job in Indiana; and Emily Alvarez, one of several folks who migrated here from PARCC where she was working after leaving lobbyist work. The head of the board is Paul Pastorak, formerly reformy boss of Louisiana and now an ed reform "transformation" consultant. Advisors include folks from Teach Plus and KIPP, plus admittedly some actual teachers. And they are generously supported by the reform-friendly William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Look! It's a river in Egypt!

But up until last year, Slover was the CEO at PARCC, and as evidenced by her piece at FutureEd (and reprinted at Education Next), she is still pushing for the Big Standardized Test that the Common Core tried to launch. Her co-author, Lesley Muldoon, is a former PARCC founder who also migrated to CenterPoint. And their article reads mostly like ad copy for the PARCC, with so many details spun and stretched that the article begins to resemble a big sticky ball of cotton candy. Like Arne Duncan, Slover and Muldoon want to try rewriting history. Let's see how they did.

When the U.S. Department of Education awarded $350 million to two consortia of states in September 2010 to develop new assessments measuring performance of the Common Core State Standards, state commissioners of education called it a milestone in American education.

That is true for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the government spent $350 million on a product and then allowed a private company to take ownership of it and profit from it.

"By working together, states can make greater—and faster—progress than we can if we go it alone," said Mitchell Chester...

Chester was the Massachusetts ed commissioner who headed up the PARCC board from 2010 to 2015. Slover once called him the "Johnny Appleseed of US education policy," a comparison she probably wouldn't have made if she'd known more about Johnny Appleseed (he was a Swedenborgian who believed that he would have a brace of virgins waiting for him in heaven-- in my town, we know our Johnny Appleseed lore).

I'll give Slover and Muldoon one thing-- they don't flinch from some facts. They note participation in the two state consortia dropped from 44 to 16. "The reasons for leaving vary," they write, "but the decrease in participation makes it easy for some to declare the program a failure." Well, yes. That's true. It's easy to declare the program a failure because it has failed. Its goal was to make all states (and schools within them) comparable because  they would all be measure by the same instrument. That goal has not been achieved.

But in ed reform, as in all political endeavors, when you've failed, there's only one thing to do-- admit failure, listen to your critics, examine the cold hard facts of how you failed, reflect on what you've done, admit your mistakes, and do better next time. Ha! No, just kidding. The only thing to do is move the goalposts, and Slover and Muldoon have their backhoe all revved up and ready to go.

A closer look, however, suggests that Commissioner Chester’s optimism was not misplaced. Indeed, the testing landscape today is much improved. In many states, assessments have advanced considerably over the previous generation of assessments, which were generally regarded as narrowly focused, unengaging for students, and pegged at low levels of rigor that drove some educators to lower expectations for students.

This then is our new story. Common Core and the testing regimen that was attached to it have made the testing world better, an analysis that is rather like the flip side of the repeated promise over the last decade that a new generation of Really Great Tests was just around the corner.

So much baloney is needed to sell this story. Previous tests had "low levels of rigor that drove some educators to lower expectations for students"? First of all, I'm not going to attempt to count the number of qualifiers-- many, some-- that hedge every statement Slover and Muldoon make. Second, I dare you to find me five classroom teachers in the entire country who ever, ever said, "This single Big Standardized Test that they give at the end of the year isn't very rigorous, so I'm just going to slack off." I'm not surprised that Slover and Muldoon suggest otherwise-- part of the point of the BS Test has always been to create leverage so that the judgment of test manufacturers could override the judgment of classroom teachers, and the excuse for doing so was always that classroom teachers had lousy judgment and weren't trying very hard. "But if we hit them with this big, hard test at the end of the year, they'll have to do a good job of teaching what we want them to teach." The PARCC and SBA were always an insult to classroom teachers.

Today, many state assessments measure more ambitious content like critical thinking and writing...

No. No, they don't. They really, truly don't. Standardized tests, which by their very nature block out divergent and deep thinking, are incapable of measuring critical thinking. Heck, the mere fact that students must come up with an answer RIGHT NOW without chance to reflect, research, and just plain think, guarantees that they cannot "measure" critical thinking. Nor has a standardized test yet been invented that can do a decent job of assessing writing. We have taught our students to beat the writing test, and the tricks are-- restate the prompt, write a lot (even if it's repetitious), use some big words (even if you use them incorrectly), and never ever worry whether your content is correct or not.

But now these women who deeply believe in the PARCC's success, but who have gotten out of Dodge themselves, will give reflections on how the PARCC and SBA changed the testing landscape. Spoiler alert: they will not mention that the landscape has been changed by the billions of dollars now spent on BS Tests across the country.

One of the most important features of state tests today is their focus on college and career readiness. Unlike in the past, tests now measure a broad range of knowledge and skills that are essential to readiness and report students’ progress toward that goal. Tests of old, like the standards undergirding them, often fell short of measuring the most important knowledge and skills that are critical for being prepared for college and for work.

Three sentences, and only one is correct. Tests of old did fall short. Tests of new are not any better. First, we still have no idea what qualities are needed for college and career readiness. Nobody anywhere has a proven checklist of those qualities, particularly not a checklist that covers qualities common to every single major at every single college plus every single career option. And since we don't know what the qualities are, we certainly don't know how to test for them on a BS Test. So the first sentence in the above paragraph is false.

Second, the current BS Tests do not measure a "broad range of knowledge and skills." They cover reading and math. And not only do they cover a narrow range of disciplines, but they are deliberately designed not to cover knowledge. Reading tests are based on the (false) assumption that reading is a set of skills that exist independent of any prior knowledge. Despite claims to the contrary, test manufacturers still include questions that are essentially vocabulary questions. But are any of these tests covering knowledge of any content, like the plot of Hamlet or the invention of algebra or how to balance a checkbook? And once again, we have no clear idea of what knowledge and skills are "critical for being prepared for college and for work," so there's no way to include them on a test.

PARCC and Smarter Balanced set these advances in motion by establishing common performance levels for the assessments across the states in their consortia...

Do they? Because in practice it seems that states set their own performance levels-- in fact, that was one of the reasons many left the consortium. Slover and Muldoon cite several pieces of "research" throughout, but since they frequently turn to the Fordham Institute, and Fordham is well paid to promote Common Core and testing, I'm prepared to be unmoved by those citations.\

The fact that these common performance levels are shared by multiple states means that for the first time at this scale, states are able to compare individual student results. 

But, they aren't. 34 states aren't using consortium tests, so we're still comparing apples and oranges and mangos and hamburgers. They toss out an NCES study that shows... something? States have raised cut scores compared to the NAEP, which proves... what?

Taken together, this research is clear that the consortia assessments, particularly PARCC, set a higher standard for student proficiency and that most other states—whether administering a consortium test or not—raised the bar as well. These new, shared expectations of what students should know and be able to do reflect the expectations of the world of college and the workforce much more fully than did their predecessors.

And so, after almost a decade of this, where's the payoff. If these new expectations do reflect college and workforce preparation (and we should believe they do based on what, exactly-- what research helped you know and measure the unknowable and unmeasurable) then where's the payoff. Where are the mobs of high school graduates now sailing through college because they are so ready? Where are the colleges saying, "We've just stopped offering remedial classes for freshmen because nobody needs them"? Where are the businessmen saying, "We're thriving because today's high school grads are so totally ready for us?" Even reformer Jay Greene has been pointing out that raising BS Test scores doesn't appear to reflect any reality in the actual world.

For many years, large-scale assessments have been a black box for educators, providing limited opportunities for them to participate in test development and little information on what's assessed, how it will be scored, and what to do with the results. While many states have historically had a representative set of teachers review test items, the consortia were able to foster a depth and breadth of educator engagement that set a new bar for the industry. Indeed, the consortia engaged thousands of classroom educators to review items and offer insights on development of key policies such as accessibility and accommodations and performance-level setting.

BS Tests have remained firmly sealed in the black box. PARCC has been aggressive in monitoring and tracking down students and teachers who violate the requirement for test secrecy. Teachers are not even supposed to look at the test, and when students or teachers leak even a general description of test items, PARCC has tracked them down. In 2016, when a set of items leaked, PARCC had Google take down every blog post that provided even a vague general description of the items (I know, because one of the posts taken down was mine). Nobody is ever supposed to discuss the contents of the test, ever. Teachers and students get test scores back, but they may never know exactly what questions were missed. None of this has to do with test quality; it is strictly to control costs for the test manufacturers. If items are never leaked, they can be recycled, because making an actual new test would cut into company profits.

As long as the top secret requirements for test contents are in place, claims of transparency are a joke. Allowing a small group of handpicked educators to "review items" does not change the fact that under the new testing regime, teachers have even less information about "what's assessed [and] how it will be scored." Nor can PARCC, which is in the business of selling testing and not actual teaching, offer useful advice about what to do with the scores, and since teachers aren't allowed to know where exactly the score came from, it remains a useless piece of data. The release of old items is of little use, and the claim that "engagement from teachers and administrators helped align the assessments with instructional practices effective teachers use in the classroom" is a fancy way of saying that some folks have figured out some effective test prep techniques. Just in case I haven't been clear on this before, test prep is not education.

The design of the assessments has also helped push the education field in important ways by sending signals about the critical knowledge and skills for students to master at each grade level.

It is not admirable to use testing as backdoor method of taking control of curriculum. Particular because large scale standardized testing has pushed curriculum in the direction of test prep.

Writing is a prime example: The consortia assessments include more extensive measurement of writing than most previous state assessments, and include a strong focus on evidence-based writing.

Writing is a prime example of how these tests have failed. The "evidence-based writing" questions are a grotesque parody of actual writing; these questions start with the assumption that everyone would respond to the prompt with the exact same paragraph, and instead of doing actual writing, requires students to select from among pre-written sentences, or to choose which piece of "evidence" they are supposed to use. These writing tests require huge amounts of test prep, because they don't reflect anything that actual writers in the real world do-- they just reflect what test manufacturers are able to do (at low cost and maximum standardization) to pretend to test writing.

Slover and Muldoon to back this up by offering that "we have heard from educators" that this has really helped with writing across the curriculum. But if we're going to talk "evidence-based", then saying "we have heard from educators" is glaringly weak evidence.

But keep your hand on your jaws, because more droppage is on the way. In talking about how PARCC and SBA helped pioneer the use of computers to deliver assessments, Slover and Muldoon offer this claim:

Technology-enhanced items allowed for measuring knowledge and skills that paper and pencil tests could not assess, typically deeper learning concepts; computer-delivered tests could also allow for more efficient test administration technology and improve access to the assessments for students with disabilities and English learners.

Chew on that. Computer tests can measure knowledge and skills that paper tests cannot. Really? Name one. Okay, there are actually several, all related to being able to operate a computer-- hence standardized tests in which student score hinges on their ability to deal with the software and hardware of the interface. Is the student comfortable with a mouse? Are they able to read selections through those tiny windows that only show a few lines of text at a time? Can they deal with scrolling within scrolling? These can all end up mattering, and the cure is simple-- more test prep on operating a computerized testing environment.

But if the suggestion here is that computers can test reading skills or math knowledge that paper cannot, I'm stumped as to what those skills and knowledge could actually be. What "deeper learning concepts" are only accessed by computer?

I will give them the improved access for some students. That one I believe.

Slover and Muldoon are also mostly correct to say that computer based tests can be scored faster and are cheaper than paper (a savings that may or may not be passed on to schools). But they also require tests that only ask the questions that a computer can score. This is why test manufacturers dream of software that can score writing samples, but despite their frequent claims, they have still failed to do so, and computer based tests still require questions with simple answers. Even then, students have to learn to think like the programmers. As a Study Island student once told me, "I know the answer. I just can't figure out how the program wants me to say it."

Slover and Muldoon find it "remarkable" that so many states have transitioned to online testing, sidestepping the more important question of whether or not that's a good thing. And of course they completely ignore the question of data mining and the security and uses of that data.

Above all, the experience of the consortia demonstrated that collective state action on complex work is doable. It can improve quality significantly, and it can leverage economies of scale to make better use of public dollars. Indeed, states that left the consortia to go it alone, ended up spending millions of dollars to develop their new tests from scratch.

Does it prove that kind of work is doable? Because at the moment, that work remains undone. States may have found that "going it alone" was expensive-- and yet, that didn't move any of them to say to the consortium, "We want to come back!" In fact, one of the things that didn't happen is for a state to switch teams-- nobody said, "We'd like to back out of PARCC so that we can join up with SBA." All of this would suggest that vast majority of states found "collective state action" not very appealing or effective. The myth of "improved quality" sounds nice, but it's not an evidence-based statement; it's simply a piece of marketing fluff.

Slover and Muldoon claim there is more to do, and like Arne Duncan, they blame the failure to achieve certain Grand Goals on politics.

For example, concerns about testing time caused the PARCC states to move away from their initial bold vision of embedding the assessments into courses and distributing them throughout the year. This was an innovative design that would have more closely connected assessment to classrooms, but states ultimately determined it was too challenging to implement at scale.

Yes, that was a terrible idea that nobody wanted to pursue, in no small part because it boiled down to letting PARCC and SBA design your entire local scope and sequence. This is a bad idea for several reasons. One is that involves essentially privatizing public schools and leaving local curriculum design in the hands of a test manufacturing business. And if you can get past that, there's the part where the tests aren't very good, and designing a course around the multiple bad tests over the course of the year yields a bad course. And finally-- who the heck thinks that more standardized tests would be a good idea. Slover and Muldoon seem truly oblivious to the degree to which testing has shortened the teaching year. And testing is not teaching. Test prep is not education. They say that "luckily" ESSA opens the door to this foolishness. States would be better off opening the door to a candygram from a land shark.

And Slover and Muldoon are still sad that all these individual tests get in the way of compare test results across state lines. "Parents and policymakers" are supposedly sad about this, because all the time parents say, "Well, I can see Pat's results, but how does his school compare to one that's seven hundred miles away?" What about the NAEP?

In contrast, NAEP—which is administered once every two years to a sample of students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades—serves as an important high-level barometer of student progress in the nation, but doesn’t provide information to school systems that can be used to inform academic programming, supports and interventions, or professional learning.

Holy shniekies where are my blood pressure pills!? The PARCC and SBA do not, do not, do not, DO NOT provide actionable data that can be used to "inform academic programming, supports and interventions, or professional learning." They just don't. They provide numbers that are the data equivalent of saying, "This kid did well, this kid did not so well, this kid did very well, this kid sucked, etc etc etc And no, you may not know what exactly they did well or poorly." Lacking any real actionable data, schools have been reduced to trying various test prep programs, and that's it.

Slover and Muldoon are sad that opt outs in some states have made the data "not as useful" because they didn't reflect all the students. The data were never useful.

And-- oh, Lordy, here we go--

Finally, we learned that leaders taking on an ambitious reform agenda should not give short shrift to the communications and outreach required to build support for and understanding of the work—including building strong relationships with stakeholders and seeking to form coalitions of supporters. Reform leaders should not assume that good work on its own will win the day, especially if key stakeholders don’t know about or support it.

It's the last resort of every failed reformster-- "We didn't fail. The PR just wasn't good enough. People just didn't understand."

It is true that Common Core and the related testing regimen were rolled out like a steamroller, with an antagonistic attitude of "we know you public schools and public school teachers all suck and we're going to force you to shape up" that didn't help matters. But do Reformsters want to argue that this wasn't really their attitude and they were just faking it to motivate us? I mean, the "public ed sucks and is filled with bad teachers who must be forced to do their jobs as we see fit" was offensive, but I think it was at least honest.

And what pitch would have been better? "We'd like to roll out a battery of unproven tests, and we'd like to use them as a means of finding and punishing bad schools, and maybe bad teachers, too. And we'd like to take up a chunk of your 180 days of school to administer it. And we'd like to keep everything in the test a secret so that you never know exactly what your students messed up on. And the best predictor of how students will do on these tests will be their socio-economic background. And while we're at it, we'd like to tell you what should be teaching, because any professional expertise you might have doesn't mean squat to us."

How exactly could that have been rephrased to better win hearts and minds?

Come on. You guys sought really hard to build coalitions of supporters by doing things like having guys like Bill Gates write huge checks to astroturf test advocacy and Common Core groups. You sold the national unions on it. Support didn't erode because people didn't understand what was going on. It was the exact opposite; the more people on the ground saw how this reformster idea played out, the less they liked it.

While some Reformsters like Jay Greene are looking at the evidence and honestly reflecting on how this all failed, Slover and Muldoon are saying "good works on its own" won't necessarily win the day. And while that may be true, it's also true (and any classroom teacher can tell you) that when something really doesn't succeed, you might want to question your assumptions about how good it was in the first place and not just start blaming politics and bad attitudes and everything except the crappiness of your idea.

That is not going to happen here. Slover and Muldoon will wrap up by saying, again, that "the quality of state testing has improved substantially in recent years," having provided no evidence that this is actually true. I don't know if Slover and Muldoon are cynical publicists for the cause or simply deep in denial, but it is long past time to keep trying to sell the PARCC as a success. I'll grant you this-- it has been part of a testing program that has successfully paved the way for Competency Based Education and Personalized [sic] Learning-- but that is nothing to be proud of. Better to just get off that river in Egypt.

Challenging the Legitimacy of Public Education

We're into the next level of the choice and charter school challenge to public education. The old selling points-- charters can do it better, charters can do it cheaper, charters are public schools-- are fading away and a newer approach is emerging: if we care about freedom, public education  as we know it has no legitimate right to exist.

You won't find a clearer expression of this new sales pitch than this piece in the74 by James V. Shuls. The editors have given it the title "Shuls: Do Charter Schools Take Districts Money? Only If You Think Children, and the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property?" It's not very punchy, but it certainly captures the way that Shuls and other Reformsters are trying to reframe the argument. (There's also a minor irony attached-- this is written in response to an EWA article, and EWA is not exactly solidly in the public school system camp.)

Who Is Shuls?

James V. Shuls is assistant professor and the graduate program director of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri- St. Louis. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in elementary education and a PhD in ed policy from University of Arkansas (a well-established reformster educator). He's a fellow at some like-minded groups, including the Show-Me Institute ("Where liberty comes first"). To his credit, he has apparently seen the inside of a classroom as a teacher.

He's written old-fashioned "charters do it better" pieces (because they give teachers a noble vision and not just the chance to make a buck) and he has argued in favor of right-to-work legislation. And back when he was a Campus Crusade for Christ college boy, he got the "come on down" for The Price Is Right  (he played Cliff Hanger). Whatever I think of his ed reform ideas, that's pretty cool.

So What's The New Frame?

Shuls lays out the framework pretty succinctly in his first paragraph:

How would you respond if you stumbled across a headline that asked, “How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?” It’s a ridiculous question. It presupposes that the customer belongs to Walmart; that any time the individual chooses to buy cucumbers from a local grower or salsa from an aspiring entrepreneur, he or she is “robbing” the dominant grocer. That’s just absurd. Yet this is the standard frame we use when talking about education. We blithely assume that education is wholly different from any other field.

It's a sharp choice by the writer-- nobody likes Walmart (imagine if he had framed it around a headline that people have seen-- "Walmart drives local merchants out of business"). If you want an even shorter restatement, he delivers that a few graphs later:

It is only in education that we presume the customer is the rightful property of a specific supplier and therefore “costs” the supplier when he or she goes somewhere else.

Yeah, there are all sorts of things wrong with that statement, but I'm going to give Shuls his say before I argue with his larger ideas here.

Shuls also dismantles some of the old-school charter arguments.

If, heaven forbid, parents want to use those educational funds at a charter or a private school, they must prove that "choice" works.

Again, game recognizes game-- "heaven forbid" adds nothing of substance here except to paint those how object to choice as pearl-clutching weenies. But this point is weak-- it is choice advocates who sold charters with the argument that they would work better, that charters would trade "autonomy for accountability" and do a better job than the public system. Shuls' argument here is "How dare you ask that we show you the proof that we always said we should show you." This new argument (which, to be fair, has been made by some Libertarians all along) is "If I want to send my child to Flat Earth White Supremacist Academy, that's my right."

He also drags out a 2013 piece from Slate editor Allison Bernedikt about liberal guilt over the privileged exercise of sending kids to private school instead of public and extracts, free of all context, the notion that you are a bad person if you send your child to private school. It is, I suppose, a way to drag morality backwards onto the stage, as this argument he's hefting often attaches school choice to a sort of moral imperative.

Shuls concludes by once again framing public education as a business.

We can’t presume, as the author of the Education Writers Association piece did, that children and their funding inherently belong to the public school system. Do public school districts have less money when a student goes to a charter school or a private school? Absolutely — as they should. This is what happens in any industry when customers choose to spend their dollars at one place instead of another.

The Myth of the Hostage Children

The rhetoric of charter fans used to favor the phrase "students trapped in failing schools" or students who were "trapped" in the school just because of their zip code. The new rhetoric now ups the ante. The children are no longer "trapped"-- they are captured or held hostage by public schools.

This shift fits the schools-as-business paradigm. Customers aren't trapped in a particular business, but businesses do talk about capturing part of the market. So the "capture" rhetoric does double duty-- it not only casts public schools as nefarious kidnappers, but it's more consistent with the marketplace framing that this argument favors.

It's still baloney.

Charters will not liberate all of these children (more on that in a moment). Some will still be "trapped" in public schools; heck, some will find themselves "trapped" in a charter school that does not fit them but which for various reasons (transportation, special needs, time of year and its effect on their ability to change schools) they cannot escape.

Nor are any students held captive in public schools. It's true that many, many public schools have invested a great deal of money in security systems, video monitors, security officers, key-card locked doors, even hardened structures. But not one of these security measures has been deployed to keep students in. It's true that there such things as truancy officers and truancy fines, but with the exception of bad actor charter schools (the kinds with ghost students), charters don't change any of that.

It strikes me that charter supporters are not arguing against public schools so much as they're arguing against mandatory attendance laws. If you don't want students to be "trapped" in schools, that's the ticket. Just don't make anybody attend.

Also, just so we're clear-- there is no district anywhere in the United States that thinks the students are its possessions. Nowhere. It's an absurd exaggeration.

The Myth of the Education Business Model

Education is not a business. Nor should it be. I know some progressive supporters of public ed are also not huge fans of the free market system, but I like it just fine. However, while the free market is good at a great many things, but it is ill suited for running education.

There are many reasons for this.

First, a school doesn't make money. Properly run, it spends every cent it receives on educating students. The minute you reframe it as a business, you acquire a whole new set of expenses, particularly as charters have been practiced in the last twenty years. Advertising. Administrators who are paid vastly more than their public counterparts. In the cases of the many shady operators that current charter laws allow, a whole host of other pay-outs. And because a school's revenues are fixed, none of these expenses can be "passed on to the consumer." In any school run as a business, the interests of the students and the interests of the business are in direct opposition. Charter fans are going to say, "Public schools do that, too, neener neener," but A) that's not really true-- no teacher or principal gets an annual bonus for cutting classroom expenses and B) when that tension does arise, say during contract negotiations, the issue is settled by elected representatives of the taxpayers (who are all able to be informed because all financials are public and transparent).

Second, no business has ever undertaken a similar mission. As Shuls himself says, "Our commitment to educating every child, regardless of wealth or ability, is a reflection of our highest and noblest ideals." Our mission, as a country, is to educate every single child. There is no business, or even business sector, that has ever undertake such a mission. The auto industry has no binding commitment to get every single citizen in his or her own car. McDonald's has no binding commitment to feed every citizen a Big Mac. There is no business that has a commitment to serving everybody. In fact, an important part of running any business is deciding which customers you will not serve, either because they are too expensive or too difficult to deal with.

The US education system is meant to serve everybody. Yes, some public schools ultimately turn certain students away-- but that district still shoulders the obligation to make sure that child gets an education. Yes, some public schools come up way short with certain difficult students, and they end up in court because the parents can take them to court because that school still has an obligation to make sure that child gets an education.

If you want US public education to be a business, you must change the mission. If you accept that serving all children is the mission, US public education cannot be a business.

The Myth of the Money

Charter fans like to say, as the 74 headline writer does, that the money does not belong to the district. I do not disagree. But it doesn't belong to the student, either.

It belongs to the taxpayer.

The taxpayer handed over that money for a specific purpose-- to set up and maintain a public school to educate all the children in our community. The taxpayers expect this to be done well and cheaply, but they expect it to be done. They also expect the government to report back on how the money was spent. They do not expect to have a version of this conversation:

Taxpayer: So, I gave you $100 to prepare a good wholesome meal for these 20 kids.

Government: Well, we mostly did. We gave $40 to some guys who said they were going to feed them something, somehow, and with what was left, we did what we could for the rest of the kids.

Taxpayer: You gave which guy forty bucks? What did he spend it on? Did he just drive through Micky D's, get two big macs, and pocket the rest? What the heck happened?

Taxpayers are told that they are helping fulfill the promise to provide a decent education for every child in their community. Charter fans would like the government to tell them, "Well, we mostly did that for some kids. And the rest... well, we don't know."

I sympathize with Reformsters of a Libertarian bent, because this is a narrow line to walk. On the one hand, they'll say that the families should get to pick whatever school they want, and it's not the government's damn business. But they will also say that taxation is theft, and if the government is going to steal my hard-earned money in the form of taxes, it damned well better be able to show me how that money was used and whether or not it was used well.

On this, I side with the taxpayers. We handed over our money for a specific purpose. "It belongs to the kids, so shut up," is not an adequate explanation for how it was used.

This problem is compounded by the biggest lie of the charter movement-- the lie that two or three or ten school systems can be run for the same costs as one. This is simply not so; doubly not so in districts where there isn't enough money to fund a single system. If charter fans really believe in the charter system, they should have the guts to go to the taxpayers and say, "We think this would be really awesome, but we need you to fork over more money so that some select students can get to attend a private school at your expense." If anyone ever had the guts to do this, and they succeeded in convincing the taxpayers to do it, we could stop having all these fights.

The Reality of Zero Sum

Charters and public schools are not on a level playing field. Public schools have a binding obligation to serve all students. Charter schools do not. Public schools have little-to-no control over their expenses. Charters can pull scams where they take low-cost, high-yield students, even as they cut whatever corners they feel like cutting. Public schools must take every student who shows up in their neighborhood, including the ones who left charter schools after the reimbursement cut-off date. That also means that charters can control their capacity and the costs that go with it, but public schools never get to say, "Sorry, we're not accepting registrations because we're full."

Despite the fact that charters and public schools are operating under two separate sets of rules, states have set them up to play a zero-sum game.  If one wins, the other has to lose. It doesn't have to be this way. See above "biggest lie of the charter movement."

An Explanation of Leaving

Perhaps I shouldn't have saved this till last, because this has dragged on for a bit and if you're still reading, God bless you.

However, Shuls's opening analogy is fatally flawed.

In the Walmart vs. Market example, the customer starts out at home. The customer leaves home, taking their money with them, and they drive to either Walmart or the Market.

But because public education has been the model in place, that's where the students are. And so, the "leaving." The students leave the public school because that's where they are. His analogy might work if, I don't know, the customers lived in Walmart. But they don't, so there is no leaving. Now, if one business opened up and customers who regularly shopped there suddenly stopped shopping somewhere else, the first business might notice that they have a lot less revenue, which they might express as a loss. This, of course, is the story of how Walmart has put thousands of local stores out of business.

Public schools don't inherently "possess" the students or money, but they did previously account for both, so if this year is different than last year, well, that's a change. A "gain" or "loss."

When students leave public schools, the public schools get less money. Sometimes less money comes in, and sometimes the district has to write a check to the charter school. The reduction in cost to the school is rarely equal to the loss in revenue (a loss in revenue which is often not tallied up until after the school board must complete their budget, which makes them a little touchy about the whole operation-- another example of how the charter regulations exacerbate the issues). Of course, what we've seen in some states is that when voucher programs start, voucher money goes to students who were never in public school in the first place, so the public school gets less revenue with literally $0.00 reduction in cost.

Again, if we were discussing a newly created city on a previously uninhabited island, and the public school and the charter schools were just opening for the very first time, and the taxpayers had agreed to be taxed enough to finance both a public and private system, it's possible nobody would talk about leaving or losing anything. But that's not where we are. And so, we use words like "leave" and "loss," and we do it without anyone seriously thinking they possess live human students.

Possessions and Obligations

Have I mentioned that it's insultingly absurd to say that public schools think they own their students? Because it is.

It's more accurate to say that public schools feel and obligation and a commitment to their students, that public schools feel an obligation to make good on the promise that every single student, no matter what zip code they live in, no matter what issues they do or don't have, no matter how much money their family has-- every student is entitled to a free education at a public school. No student in this country is suppose to have to try to find a school or hope that a school will take her in. No matter where the student is, no matter who the student is, there is a school somewhere that is obligated to take them in.

That has nothing to do with possessing and everything to do with promising. Yes, absolutely, some schools have failed to live up to that promise. But you can't live up to it until you make it, and the next step is to make sure the schools have the resources they need to make good on that promise-- not to say that since they fell short, we're going to reduce the resources they have and give them to someone who has made no promises at all.