The Trouble With The College Board's New Adversity Score

The College Board has for years been trying to rescue its floundering flagship, the SAT. The newly announced adversity score is just the latest unforced error from the testing giant. 

Just keep telling yourself that

For almost a decade, the company has been fighting for market share. In 2012, it hired David Coleman, fresh from his work as architect of the language portion of the Common Core Standards. The theory was that Coleman could lead a redesign of the test that would bring it in line with the Common Core, so that students steeped in the new standards would be well-prepared for the SAT. The alignment would also be a selling point for states looking for a high school exit exam, and within a few years, the College Board was lining up states to make the SAT their official test, giving the company a captive market. On top of that, Coleman proudly announced that his new, improved test would be a tool for eradicating social injustice; the test would be a great leveler.  

But a critical part of Coleman’s strategy was to get the new test to market quickly. The new test was well under way by the beginning of 2014. It launched in the 2015-2016 school year.  

There were problems. PSAT scores from the fall of 2015 were late. Test prep experts were advising students not to take the new SAT at all. In an attempt to clamp down on cheating, the College Board implemented some last minute measures for the March 2015 test that added to the confusion and chaos. By 2016, a former employee was publishing concerns about the test, including flawed items and an inadequate development process. Reuters reported on how the rush to redesign had brought Coleman into immediate conflict with some of College Board’s test designers. That report followed a five-part Reuters series in March of 2016 that laid out a whole series of problems, focusing particularly on terrible security problems. 

Meanwhile, colleges are increasingly dropping the SAT requirement, and research continues to suggest that high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than SAT scores.  

Coleman’s notion of the SAT as a means of opening college to all wasn’t working out. A stinging report showed that the SAT redesign had made it harder for female students to score in the higher bands. And after being dogged for years by charges of racial and economic bias, the College Board’s own data (most recently reported in the Wall Street Journal) shows that when you break out the scores by racial subgroups, there are obvious gaps. As a group, white students still score higher on the test than black kids.  

The College Board has tried to level the playing field by partnering with Khan Academy to provide high quality free test prep. This is meant to counteract the test prep advantage that students from wealthy families receive. For example, in Pittsburgh, you can purchase a thirty-two-hour test prep package--for $4,800. Success Academy, the charter chain based in New York City, is currently looking to hire a P/SAT Curriculum Developer to create a full PSAT and SAT curriculum. And of course recent news has highlighted how far some parents will go to bring up those SAT scores. 

The free Khan Academy test prep is supposed to counterbalance all that, promising SAT score gains of 200 points. The problem is that the offer all but acknowledges that what the SAT measures is neither scholastic aptitude nor intellectual ability, but how good the student’s test prep was. If the SAT is only a measure of test coaching, what real purpose does it serve? 

Now the College Board has announced its Adversity Score, and it promises to be another unforced error by the testing company. 

The score promises to incorporate a dozen factors, divided into neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment; it does not include race. It could as easily be called a privilege score as an adversity score—on the 0 to 100 scale, over 50 is disadvantaged and under 50 is privileged. A scan of reactions over the last two days suggests that the score has few fans. Bob Schaeffer of FairTest says the adversity score is an admission by the College Board that the SAT is not a “common yardstick” but is “really a measure of accumulated advantage.” Some conservative commentators have been quick to note the David Coleman connection between the College Board and the hated Common Core. Heather MacDonald (Manhattan Institute) appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to “slam” the score and decry how it upends the proper meritocratic system.  

Most of the critics have a point. If the test is supposed to be a level playing field, and it actually isn’t, then why not rewrite the test instead of creating a new measure to travel with it (and in so doing, suggest that the SAT score itself cannot be entirely trusted)? The score is to be kept secret from everyone but college admissions offices. What is the purpose of doing that, and what reasons will admissions offices have to keep the scores secret—and what will happen when they inevitably don’t? Is the College Board using information that they've collected from students, and does the adversity score thereby violate student FERPA privacy? How will certain high schools react to knowing their privilege rating? The score is supposedly “steeped in research.” Can the College Board even give a hint at what research base is being used to set their secret proprietary formula for computing the student score? And if this is a “scientific” measure, why not fold it into SAT score computations; why hand it to colleges and say, “Just kind of use it as you think best"? I reached out to the College Board for answers, but they did not reply. 

Coleman has offered several outlets versions of this comment: 

“Since it is identifying strengths in students, it’s showing this resourcefulness that the test alone cannot measure,” Mr. Coleman, the College Board CEO, said. “These students do well, they succeed in college.” 

That’s pretty clear. The SAT cannot predict if a student will succeed in college.  

You go to the grocery store and buy a box of macaroni and cheese, and as you check out, the clerk says, “You know, that box doesn’t actually have any cheese in it. Let me give you this.” And they hand you a plastic bag with some cheese in it.  

You ask, “What kind of cheese is this? How was it made? Where did it come from? How much do I add? And what do you mean the box of macaroni and cheese doesn’t actually contain macaroni and cheese?” 

The clerk ignores most of your questions. “Just use the amount that seems right. You know—just kind of eyeball it.” 

You would not go back to that store for macaroni and cheese. The SAT is in trouble, and no amount of adversity score is going to help.  

Originally posted at Forbes

PA: Voucher Expansion Goes To Governor

The Pennsylvania GOP-controlled legislature is continuing its assault on public education, this time taking a page from the Betsy DeVos Big Book of Voucher Love.

HB 800 worked its way through the House a while back, and it has just cleared the Senate. The bill is a big wet kiss to the business community and to private schools, particularly religious ones. The Catholic Church loves this bill, as does ACSIPA, a network of Christian schools advocating for school choice. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Council of Churches is opposed.

The bill expands the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC), a version of the same tax credit scholarship that is behind DeVos's $5 billion scheme. Tax credit scholarships exist in order to circumvent the law which says that thou shalt not give public tax dollars to private religious institutions. Here's how it works.

1) Mr. and Mrs. McGotbux gives a pile of money to Pat's Very Legit Scholarship Organization.

2) The state lets the McGotbux family count their contribution, in whole or in part (depending on the law) as payment on their taxes.

3) Pat's Very Legit Scholarship Organization gives some student at So Much Jesus School a scholarship (in some states, the McGotbux get to decide which school gets the money). 

4) Meanwhile, the state now has a tax revenue shortfall equal to the tax credit that the McGotbux received.

Put another way-- let's say I'm the state. If I collect tax money from the McGotbux and hand that money to So Much Jesus School, I'm in trouble with the law. But if I tell the McGotbux, "Look, instead of handing that money to me, hand it to this guy, and this guy can hand it to the So Much Jesus School, and I will consider your debt to me square." It should be noted that "this guy" will take a cut for his middle manning.

This cynical shell game generally comes with some sort of cap; that number is the amount of tax revenue that the state is willing to let be cut. If the state gives a bunch of folks credit for handing over $1 million of taxes when in fact those folks handed over $0 of taxes, the state is now short $1 million.  Previously the PA version (EITC) had a cap of $110; HB 800 increases that cap to $210. More alarming still, HB 800 lets that cap grow automatically by 10% per year. 

Remember, the cap amount is the size of the hole that the program blows in the state budget. Theoretically, the state could make up that shortfall by, say, cutting legislator salaries. But mostly what happens is that the money is cut from education funding. That's a tough push for Pennsylvania, which ranks close to the bottom for state funding of local school districts. That means that local districts pick up most of the tab, which means that how well-funded a district is depends largely on local taxpayers, which is why Pennsylvania has a gaping chasm between rich and poor districts. (You'll see some folks talk about how high PA ranks in per-pupil funding; what you need to remember is that the figure is an average, and that most of that money is coming from local taxpayers, not the state). The point is, anything that further undercuts state spending puts more weight on local funding, which some districts are in no position to significantly improve (not to mention that PA has a cap on how far school taxes can be raised each year). 

Pennsylvania currently offers a tax credit of 90-100% of your contribution (this is actually less generous states that will let you turn a profit on your contribution). 

EITC (and Opportunity Scholarships, yet another albeit smaller voucher program in PA) are sold as lifelines for poor families. The cap for family income is $95,000. The median Pennsylvania household income in 2017 was $59,195. 

The mechanism of an educational tax credit allows the state to pretend that it is not spending tax dollars, but of course it is. If you owe me a hundred dollars, but you give $100 to a bookie because I say it's okay, then I'm out $100 just as surely as if I'd handed it to the bookie myself. The Pennsylvania legislature proposes to spend another $100 million, not on infrastructure or fixing PA's pension mess or trying to equalize PA's screwed-up funding system, but instead to spend that money on private schools that operate without oversight or accountability, and which remain free to reject students for virtually any reason. 

The governor has said that he will veto the bill, but he also has the option of sitting quietly and letting it become law. If you're in Pennsylvania, call or write and encourage him to drop the ax on this money-laundering, law-mocking, theft of pub lic tax dollars. 

FCC To Throttle School Internet

It looks like a bunch of kerfluffling about more of those oddly-named, obscure gummint programs, but the news from the FCC is ominous for schools.

According to edscoop, the FCC has filed a notice of proposed rulemaking intending to cap the FCC's Universal Service Fund. That fund subsidizes broadband infrastructure and access for schools, libraries, and rural communities. It includes the E-Rate program, which helps get wireless internet into schools.

Yeah, that looks speedy.

E-Rate is not without its controversial features. Not everyone likes the funding mechanism, and in the tradition of the finest government programs, it somehow stands accused of coming wrapped in too much red tape AND lacking sufficient oversight and accountability. People smell free federal money, and so we have examples of schools that grab E-Rate money and use it improperly, as well as internet service providers who overcharge the schools they're serving. And that's before we get to the problems that arise with attempting to implement the filtering requirements.

So E-Rate would undoubtedly benefit from an overhaul. But that's not what the FCC is proposing. What they are proposing is a ceiling on USF growth. It wouldn't hit tomorrow-- the suggested cap is $11.42 billion and the 2018 spending for the fund was $8.2 billion. So this is not an immediate assault so much as a ticking delayed choke.

There's another problematic feature of the proposal. There has already been some capping of the individual USF programs (there are four), but this would remove the individual caps and make one single cap for the collective. Meaning that the four programs can go ahead and fight with each other over a limited pie. The other three programs are Lifeline (broadband subsidies for low-income residents), Rural Health Care (supports for rural health care institutions) and Connect America (internet for rural communities).

These are all valuable programs. Lack of internet connection is a serious rural challenge (and I'm talking about areas where there isn't even a smart phone signal to piggyback on). And that goes double for rural health care and the rural poor. You can make jokes about how those folks can just go without Instagram and YouTube, and we certainly need to talk about properly managing the amount of screen time that students get, but for rural teachers, there's a real concern with sending students out into the world who cannot boot up a word processing program or figure out how to do a simple search. I've had the following conversation too many times:

Other Person: Well, the rich folks don't let their kids use screens. And there's no reason for schools to have students in front of a computer screen ever.

Me: But what about students who don't know how to do a search or use basic programs like word processing or presentation programs? What about students how have no sense about or context for privacy and data protection on line?

Other Person: Well, sure, but isn't that stuff that everybody already just kind of knows?

No, it isn't. One of the signs of privilege is that you imagine that some of what you've got just naturally falls like rain on everyone. Computers cost money. Internet access costs money. And in some places, no amount of money will get you a connection, which doubles the pressure on schools that serve students who have no decent internet access at home.

The USF is funded by the various tech companies, who mostly just pass the cost on to customers, and the GOP-led FCC wants to be "fiscally responsible" aka "not taking money away from those hardworking corporations." It also seems to have forgotten its big talk about closing the digital divide in the US. Meanwhile, a not-entirely-trustworthy Microsoft study says that 162 million Americans do not use an internet connection better than 25 mbps download and 3 mbps upload. Yeah, Microsoft has a vested interest in those results, but even if they're fudging a bit, the takeaway is that many, many people are still peddling a tricycle on the information highway. The FCC is signaling they don't want to help.

Can SEL Learn From Common Core

At the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael McShane (EdChoice) recently took a look at what the nascent social-emotional learning movement for education could learn from studying the checkered history of the Common Core. It's an interesting paper both for what it says about SEL and for what it gleans from the story of the Common Core, operating as it does from the reliably free-market loving reformy point of view of AEI. Plus it includes one of my new most favorite Arne Duncan quotes.

The paper opens with a history of the Core and then goes on to draw four lessons. Let's take a look.

Common Core History

McShane takes a good, honest look at the downward trajectory of the Core's popularity with everyone, and notes "It's fair to say that the implementation of Common Core did not live up to advocates' expectations." He notes the phenomenon of how Race to the Top "turbocharged" adoption of the standards, in some cases before they were even finished (he does not talk about how Bill Gates helped drive the whole process). He notes also that the standards came hand in hand with the Big Standardized Tests, and reminds us all of some of the grotesque over-promising that Duncan offered up regarding the BS Tests. McShane takes us back to Duncan's speech announcing the grants for the PARCC and SBA tests:

In that same  speech, he set a pretty high bar for these two tests. He said they would "be an absolute game-changer in public education ," "make widespread use of smart technology," and "provide students with realistic, complex performance tasks, immediate feedback, computer adptive testing, and incorporate accommodations for a range of students." He harped on new testing technology that would allow students "to design products or experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests and record data." He  said tests would be able to "incorporate audio and video" and situate problems "in real world environments, where students perform tasks or include multi-stage scenarios and extended essays."

As McShane dryly notes, "neither the standards nor their assessments lived up to advocates' hopes or promises."

And here comes Duncan to sum up the whole mess with a quote that I don't remember hearing before, but which is just kind of awesome. Speaking to the American Society of News Editors in 2013:

Traditionally, this event has been an opportunity for federal leaders to talk about touchy subjects. For example, you asked President Kennedy to talk about the Bay of Pigs. So, thanks for having me here to talk about the Common Core State Standards.

Perfect.

So what lessons does McShane see in the Bay of Pigs calibre debacle that was (and unfortunately still is) the Common Core, and how solid are those lessons?

First Lesson: Advocates should clearly define what they mean by SEL, and they should focus on getting stakeholders to support it.

Close. I think the unwillingness to fully and precisely define what SEL (and personalized [sic] learning) are in part a reaction to a different lesson of the Core (we'll get there in a bit). It's also a side effect of so many vendors rushing to market with their own products, each built on their own definition of SEL.

I think the second lesson is off the mark. It wasn't just that stakeholders didn't support the Core (as McShane shows in the earlier part of the paper, initial support was actually pretty solid). It's that the whole business was implemented top-down, which meant that it took a while for folks in the field to find out what was really going on. Top-down implementation is always problematic, because it always involves stakeholders after the fact. Everybody goes to that leadership class that says you have to get buy-in from the stakeholders, but nobody pays attention to the part about how you get buy-in by letting the stakeholders actually build the thing. Put another way, you can get buy-in for your program, or you can get a program that looks exactly the way you want it to, but you can't have both.

McShane gets at this by pointing out that advocates can't use a strategy of talking to only a few key people, and this is a useful insight for many education businesses (like the tech company that sells its product to the superintendent, but not the teachers). If you want it to take root, you have to work with a whole lot of people, not just a handful of "key" ones.  For instance, if you are tech billionaire with a new set of educational standards to push, it's a mistake to decide that all you have to do is sell them to the secretary of education and you can just ignore everyone else.

But all of this misses one other crucial point. The best way to get buy-in and support is to have a program that doesn't suck. The Core was horribly and sloppily implemented and just generally mismanaged top to bottom, but if they had been awesome standards, teachers would have found a way around the rest.

This is the worst kind of business logic--  the quality of the product doesn't matter as long as we market it well. People didn't reject the Core because of poor marketing or clumsy implementation; they rejected the  Core standards because they are lousy. They rejected the BS Tests because they stink.

Do you want buy-in for your SEL programs? Step One is to develop programs that don't stink.

Second Lesson: Develop capacity or implementation.

States and districts were not ready to put the standards in classrooms. Publishers were not ready to put the standards in everyone's texts. Hence the widespread phenomenon of slapping "Common Core ready" stickers on covers of texts that had come off the press before the Common Core was even a speck David Coleman's eyeball. Regular readers know I have no love for the Core at all, but the Core was blamed for a lot of crazy classroom baloney that was never the fault of the standards at all.

McShane says that before any states roll out SEL, they need to make sure that there is space for it, which is dead-on. If you are going to give a teacher one more thing to do, you owe it to her to tell her what thing she now will cut from class, because there is no "extra" time in which she can implement your latest new add-on.

Also, have you trained and prepared teachers to do the SEL thing? And do you have resources to use that are actual legit resources. And how will SEL fit with the other policies you're already following. Common Core absolutely failed on every one of these questions.

Third Lesson: Watch out for opportunistic bandwagon jumpers.

I've disagreed with McShane on a variety of ideas over the years, but boy does he get this right:

Common Core was a windfall for cranks, charlatan s and con artists.

As I often complained, the Core had no "infrastructure" or organization minding the store. The creators peaced out to their next big gigs immediately, leaving absolutely nobody in a position to say, "No, that's just a pile of snake oil and not legitimate Common Core stuff at all." Hundreds of scam artists smelled a chance to cash in, and they took it.

Now, where McShane and I may disagree is on this: I'd argue that Common Core was charlatans and con artists all the way down to the creators of the program. It was meant to crack open a stubborn market and provide profitable opportunities for anyone quick enough to cash in by selling a product or getting in on the data mining, and it was the people who sincerely thought it would improve education who were the anomalies, not the opportunistic scammers.

But the lesson remains the same for SEL, in fact, even more so. Common Core opened up a market, and now there's a whole bunch of money grubbers sitting, waiting, and salivating over whatever Next Big Thing is about to appear. SEL advocates had better come up with ways to police their ranks and to help schools distinguish between worthwhile programs and costly baloney.

McShane offers an interesting model for navigating issues of dissent, with a scale that runs from Proponents and Allies to Critical Friends to Skeptics to Wedgers to Con Artists and Nutjobs. To someone who is too defensive or not very discerning, the Con Artists look more like allies than your critical friends, and again, Duncan provides a useful example as someone who rejected (and still rejects) anything critical about the Core. Wedgers would be the people who try to force their own ideas into the movement, which is such a real thing-- "I think that this kind of pedagogy is what everyone should be doing, so therefor it must be part of this new policy." Teachers know this one from  all the times they sit in professional development sessions asking, "But why are we required to do Y in conjunction with policy Z? What do those have to do with each other??"

Fourth Lesson: Watch your branding.

Common Core was so thoroughly branded that when people got to hating it, that brand became a big fat target, to the point that many states and Core advocates stopped using the words, and the Policy That Dared Not Say Its Name became "college and career ready standards." States scribbled out Common Core and wrote in their own state name. And every big policy developed since has avoided coming up with a catchy title. Is it personalized learning or competency based education or one of the other dozen names given to this Next Big Thing? We'll probably never know, because nobody ants to brand it clearly enough to connect it with specific expectations or to risk directing backlash.

So SEL fans-- brand it well enough that people know what you're talking about, but not so well that you take a big hit if it all blows up in your face.

These are not bad lessons, though I might add one more-- when the stakeholders hear what you have to say and they tell you that your great new educational idea is a lousy one and, no, you're not saying it needs to be done better, you're saying it needs to be done not at all, then just give up quietly and move along.

ICYMI: Time For Summer Edition (6/9)

Summer break has arrived in my neck of the woods, which means the Board of Directors will no longer have me outnumbered!. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week. Remember-- sharing is how you amplify the voices that you think need to be heard. Bloggers and journalists can write all day, but we all depend on readers to help put us in front of our audience.

Robots Are Not Coming For Your Job-- Management Is  

Great piece not directly about education, but a reminder that automation is not some sort of mysterious natural process.

Ohio Needs To Abandoned Failed High Stakes Tests   

The League of Women Voters comes down hard against high stakes testing as a measure of educational quality. Always nice to see people outside the classroom get it.

Schools Should Serve Humans, Not "The Economy"\

Lois Weiner makes her pitch for Bernie Sanders to reject the language of business when discussing schools. Never mind Bernie-- can we get everyone to do this?

Is Charlie Butt the New Eli Broad?

Not that we need one for anything, but her comes another deep-pocketed educational amateur with big ideas.

Millions of Kids Take Standardized Tests Just To Help The Testing Companies  

Oh, the business of field testing, wasting everybody's time.

Tennessee Achievement School District At a Crossroads  

"Crossroads" is generous, but here's the OG ASD still not getting its job done.

Let's Hear It For The Average Child  

From the New York Times.

An Anti-Racist Reading List  

Powerful and handy resources from Ibram X. Kendi.

7 Reasons We're Seeing More Challenging Behavior in Early Childhood Settings  

Rae Pica looks at some of those things that we continue to get wrong when it comes to the littles.

The Twins Are Two

The Board of Directors celebrated its birthday this week. Okay, they're two, so "celebrate" might be a bit of a stretch, because they didn't really know what exactly was happening other than it involved cake and ice cream and some new toys. 

This is not my first parenting rodeo; I have two older children and a trio of grandchildren who are, in my completely unbiased opinion, geniuses. You know they'll be different-- different roll of the genetic dice, different life experiences. But this is my first go-round with twins. The boys are identical twins, carrying exactly the same genetic code in every cell. The boys have come as close to identical life experience as anyone could. It is absolutely fascinating to me to see what variation is possible within that genetic and experience framework.

Resting up in preparation for birthday shenanigans

They are physically distinct; Baby A is a little leaner, and you can definitely tell the difference when you heft them. It's not super-hard to tell them apart, especially if you can see both of them. Baby B is more tender-hearted; when he cries big and ugly, it's about disappointment and sadness. Baby A is more prone to an ugly cry out of ragey frustration. Baby A is more likely to fling himself off a cliff or up a wall; Baby B is more likely to want to stop and think about whether or not to go down the slide. 

In other words, despite everything being stacked in favor of these two children being two versions of the same person, they are two distinct and separate individuals. To motivate them, to soothe them, to encourage them, to clothe them, to guide them past a physical obstruction-- all these activities require two distinct approaches, two different sorts of sensitivities. 

I think of this every time I see someone touting a teaching approach that supposedly works every time for every child. "This is evidence-based science," they declare. "Therefor you just use this exact method and every single child will produce exactly the same successful result," they imply. Folks who still love their Common Core (whether under the original banner or under one the various assumed names that the Core has adopted as, I don't know, part of some bad policy protection program) have a solid commitment to the notion that if you tailor it just right, one size really will fit all. And there are still classrooms out there where someone is reading a damned script to her students, as if those scripted lessons are some sort of magic incantation that will cause learning to bloom in every single student.

Human beings are distinctly individual. Yes, there are all manner of aspects that we share in some important and fundamental way, but how we express those aspects, how we express ourselves, how we find our way to be fully human in the world-- those many differences result in an infinite variation in how humans can be human. 

Part of the corporate "be more like a business" push in education has been a push to clean education up, make it less messy, to get it all to function like a shiny industrial technocracy, and that impulse to create order out of chaos is itself a deeply human impulse. There have been days in my stay-at-home-dad career when I begged the universe to help the twins just stop acting like agents of chaos and destruction. I am quite sure the boys have hit the million-word advantage point if I'm allowed to count repeating "no" and "stop" 500,000 times as part of the million. So I get it. I do. 

But order and enforced standardization and impeccable one-size-fits-all neatness are not how education works, because that is not how humans, particularly young growing humans, work. Human beings are messy and complex, and all complex systems are inherently chaotic, and while chaos always lives in tension with order, imposing too much order is damaging to the system.

Because small humans are messy, teachers are messy and schools are messy. They still have to be safe, and that means ordered enough that the small humans don't suffer from the weight of anxiety and fear. But if you think you can come up with a tight, orderly, system that is scientifically standardized into a perfect state of uniform one-size-fits-allness-- well, you are kidding yourself, and before long you'll be ejecting teachers and students for being "defective" because they wouldn't fit like proper meat widgets in your system. And if you think the goal of schools should be to manufacture standardized meat widgets for future employers' use, you are way off base. And if you are an employer who thinks that your business should be run on readily available cheap and interchangeable meat widgets, you are part of what's wrong with our country.

I know. You were thinking this would be just a cute blog post about my cute kids. But the tiny humans are the point, and a daily reminder to me that tiny humans do not grow to be fully realized big humans in an inhuman system.  

Humans are different. I am watching two humans grow who have every reason to be exactly the same, and they aren't. They are two entirely different people, and I would hope that every teacher they every have treats them that way. And that goes for all of my grandchildren, and every other small human person who sets foot in a classroom. 

Talking Point Update: Focus on Fit

This has been going on for a while, but just in case you've missed this rhetorical shift, I want to highlight the tweaking of a reformy talking point.

Complete this sentence: "We need school choice because____________________"

The classic answer has been "because students need to escape failing public schools." Or "because the quality of your education shouldn't be determined by your zip code."

Betsy DeVos herself used to call public education a dead end. But DeVos (who, as I keep saying, is not a dope, despite the commonly shared cartoon version of her) has been steadily tweaking language in an apparent attempt to stop pissing off and energizing her opposition. So she has a new answer to this sentence completion puzzle. You can hear it in this radio interview that Betsy DeVos did with Chris Salcedo, a conservative radio talker in Texas.

It's fit. DeVos and some other reformsters have largely stopped talking about bad failing public schools and the terrible teachers who work there. Instead, the new idea is fit. The parents should be able to choose the school that best fits the student's needs or desires or "learning style."

From the reformster POV, there are a couple of benefits to this talking point.

One is that it is less confrontational with the public school system. "We're not saying that your school sucks; we just think another school might fit Pat better." Ironically, this is a flipped version of the argument used to push some students out of private and charter schools-- "We think Pat would be happier in a school that fit his needs more."

Another is that this is a good cover for one of the DeVosian goals-- tax dollars for private Christian schools. If Pat's family thinks that the best fit would be a school that is soaked in their personal brand of religion, well, that's a feature, not a bug. Never forget-- one policy goal that does separate DeVos from reformy ed secretaries before her is the goal of getting Christian churches in charge of education.

Best of all, the fit argument helps get past the poor folks incremental foot in the door that has marked choice policy before. In other words, a common policy trick has been to say, "Well, we'll just offer vouchers and choice to students who are in failing schools because they must be rescued (but not by, say, properly funding and supporting their public schools)." But the "best fit" argument knows no bounds. Selling choice to suburbs and wealthy communities, where the public schools are well-funded and supported, or rural communities, where the public schools are a beloved community institution-- well, those roadblocks are part of what has made the charter boom slow to a crawl. But the best fit argument can be used anywhere; you don't need a disaster, real or created, to make this pitch.

Mind you, it's all still baloney used to mask the privatizing of public education. And it's weirdly backwards. Where are you most likely to find a school that offers a variety of options, a choice of education paths, and a staff of teachers who represent a broad range of styles and approaches? That would be in a public school system. Where are you most likely to find a school that requires all teachers to teach the same content in the same style, with everyone lockstepped into a set of rules and approaches that permeate every room in the building? That would be the charter sector. And, as always, let's not forget where we find schools that can reject any student for any reason, including background, religion, or just "not fitting in"? That would be the world of private schools.

If finding an education that fits a student, including a variety of options so that the student can figure out what that best fit is, all under one roof so that families don't have to start over at a whole new school every time they want a change-- well, that's a public school. As always, school choice is about school's choice; not so much about students finding a school that fits their ideas about learning, as it is about private and charter schools finding the students who fit their ideas about teaching. It's charter and private schools that offer one size meant to fit all.