Avoiding Teacher Compensation

Erik Hanushek has been at this for a while, and his shtick is pretty well polished. With Raj Chetty, he's been making the assertion that having a good teacher will make a student wealthier. While he can occasionally seem like a champion of teachers and teaching, he also lapses often into the old reform whinge that teachers don't really want to be held accountable for their performance, and that such strict, measurable accountability is possible because teaching's not really any different than any other job. What he mostly means is good old value-added test scores. Hanushek, it turns out, also helped cook up the idea of "days of learning" aka "change in test score" which was popularized by CREDO (Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank housed at Stanford, while CREDO is an ed reform-tilted research group at Stanford; it is also run by Hanushek's wife).

Did I mention that Hanushek is an economist? I'm not sure what strange attraction the world of education holds for economists, but Hanushek most often seems to be trying to solve a problem popular with economists-- how can we get more education and pay less for it.

Hanushek often turns up on op-ed pages, but this time he's issuing a full-on policy analysis from the Hoover Education Success Initiative-- "The Unavoidable: Tomorrow's Teacher Compensation." The Initiative is a gathering of the usual suspects-- the executive committee is Hanushek, Chester Finn (Fordham Institute boss-emeritus), Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond (CREDO chief and Hanushek's wife). It's a good solid summary of Hanushek's policy ideas, and so I am unsurprised to find that I disagree with almost all of it. But let's take a look.

He opens with some classic Chicken Littling (the NAEP scores!! Oh nooss!) and uses that to set up the scary idea that being behind on test scores means our economy will be overtaken any day now, a threat that Reformsters have been trumpeting since A Nation at Risk. Thirty-seven years later and we're still being told we're in danger of being economically dominated any day now.

Hanushek, as is his wont, can lead teachers to think he's a supporter. He notes that teachers pay an economic penalty, that they could have made more by entering different fields. He notes that teacher pay has been stagnant for too long. And he touts teachers as super-important to what happens in schools. He goes out of his way not to blame teachers for school issues-- "Teachers are not to be blamed for the current shortcomings of US schools."

The "unavoidable" seems to refer to a need to pay teachers more, but Hanushek is, as usual, looking for a way to pay teachers more without paying teachers more. He suggests that existing research provides some "clear guidelines," but much of the research he cites is actually his own, while other sources include articles from Education Next. At any rate, the clear guidelines include the following ideas for dealing with the unavoidable.

* Scrap pay policies that are unrelated to "educator effectiveness."  Longevity and advanced degrees aren't proven to raise test scores, so nerts to those things.

* So, obviously, we'll want to pay based on "educator effectiveness." He's concerned that some policies under consideration will give teachers raises before they can prove they've got the stuff to raise test scores. That seems a bad way to attract new teachers to the fold.

* Shift compensation from retirement to current salary. This is idea is floating around in reform circles, particularly over at Bellwether with Chad Aldeman. This seems part of a larger movement to privatize pensions and just generally save businesses the expense. And maybe you can con some twenty-two year old recent grad into thinking that he can do his own investing and cleverly beat the results that a pension fund would have provided. But mostly the dodge seems to be about cutting costs for something that is so far down the road that privatizers are betting that most young teachers won't think about it. This is also a reform that is cynical as hell because by the time the nation is awash in old people with no retirement safety net, the people who sold the safety net will be dead and gone.

Hanushek does get one thing right here. Defined-benefits programs, the best of the best (old PA teachers have them, but young PA teachers don't), encourages older teachers to retire. For my last few years of teaching, it was literally costing me money to stay in the classroom. He suggests big bonuses--but only for the teachers who are keeping those test scores up.

* Teacher shortages need to be addressed "explicitly, not generally." I think he might mean "specifically." His point is that just because you're short a bunch of math teachers is no reason to run off and start offering lots of money to everybody. He makes the bold assertion that "there are not shortages in terms of total numbers of teachers," and an assertion is all it is because he doesn't have any research data to back it up. He also tosses out the "fix" that the best teachers (check them test scores again) could be paid extra to take on larger classes. Because a teacher who's effective with twenty students will be equally effective with 75? This is a really dumb idea.

* Local districts need flexibility. In other words, when you hand out money that is all tied up in rules and regulations, you tie the hands of the local people who probably know best how the money should be used. This is not a bad point, but sadly he uses the super-sizing of classes as an example, reminding me that local flexibility could be used for really dumb reasons.

* Disadvantaged schools need directed teacher quality programs. This has been a reform dream for years; in fact, Race to the Toppers had to promise to find a way to make it happen. Ste One: use VAM sauce to find your bestest teachers. Step Two: convince them to go teach at your most disadvantaged schools. There are a variety of problems with this concept (beyond the fact that rendering teachers is largely frowned on. The bigger problem is that we already know that test scores mostly represent the socio-economic level of the students, meaning that whoever teaches those students will be rated ineffective. So you have on school with a roof, and one school with no roof, and it's raining, and your solution is, "Let's find the driest teachers and send them to the school with no roof-- maybe they will be bring dryness to the wet school." Nope.

* Evaluation systems can be flexible, but they must be used to be effective. This section contains the rightest sentence that Hanushek has ever written. He even italicizes it:

Without a workable evaluation system, none of the policy proposals built on teacher effectiveness are possible.

Which is, of course, pretty much where we are as a nation. He cites IMPACT from DC, but IMPACT has been changed big time, repeatedly, and is currently being viewed as a problem, not a success.  He cites Dallas-- also not exactly a huge hit. He even brings up NMTEACH, the New Mexico model that is notoriously lousy. And he makes an oblique reference to other options, "some more sophisticated than others," but that footnote leads to a 2017 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group whose record on evaluating teacher evaluation is just flat-out bad.

In the end, Hanushek is simply arguing for test-driven compensation policies. He does offer one other intriguing observation in his wrap-up:

No decisions about school policy are more important than personnel decisions.

That's one to really chew on. Are curriculum and content more important? Is school climate and culture more important? Is having an administration that supports and develops teachers so they can continue to improve and do their best work--is that important, or is it a personnel decision?

But it's just a way-station on the path to summing up. Hanushek says that "improved compensation policies" are a win for everyone, but by "improved" he means more money "accompanied by a tilt in compensation toward the more effective teachers."

There are so many problems here-- more than I'm going to address in detail. But first, this assumes that "effective teacher" is a constant, solid state, that a good teacher is good for all students on all days in all settings every year. That is not how human beings work, especially human beings whose entire work rests on a foundation of relationships. Finding all the "good" teachers is not like finding all the blue-eyed teachers or all the teachers taller than six feet or all the teachers who speak French.

That fuzzy human quality continues to thwart reform efforts to come up with a evaluation tool that actually works, and in the vast majority of school districts, teachers are currently evaluated by a tool based heavily on a measurement that we already know does not work-- a single two-subject standardized test run through some VAM sauce. And as Hanushek himself says, if you can't start with an evaluation that is actually valid, none of the rest of these ideas even make sense.

But the dream remains alive. If we could just sort out the good teachers from the bad teachers, then we could pay good teachers really well and the rest really mediocre (and  somehow the lesser-paid teachers would stick around for it and the teacher pool would be happy never knowing from year to year what their pay would be) and the test scores would go up and we would finally kick  Estonia's butt on the PISA scores and rising NAEP scores would usher in an era of awesome prosperity (because if NAEPs went up, employers would pay their workers more, for reasons) and China and Russia would yield to us because, you know, test scores and the best part would be that none of this would require us to raise taxes or spend more on public education, because avoiding spending more on teachers and schools would be awesome.

Shoving Babies Into The Pipeline

I knew I was going to be cranky after the very first sentence:

The workforce pipeline begins with quality early education.

This is Gil Minor, a retired CEO of a Fortune 200 company; he's also the chair of the Virginia Higher Education Council and vice-chairman of the group he's plugging in this op-ed, E3: Elevate Early Education. And not everything he has to say is odious claptrap, but that first sentence really sets the wrong tone.

This attitude pops up from business guys with depressing regularity. In 2013, it was Allan Golston of the Gates Foundation writing, "Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools..." Back in 2014, Rex Tillerson, then Enron chief, said, "I'm not sure public schools understand that we're their customer--that we, the business community, are your customer. What they don't understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation."

Yes, that looks like a great place for a child

This too-pervasive belief that the main purpose of public education is to run human capital through a pipeline so that meat widgets pop out the other end, ready for the consumption of business is bunk. Public education does not exist to serve the needs of business; it exists to serve the students, their families, the community, and society as a whole. Absolutely, part of serving students is to help them become self-supporting and employable-- but the idea is to serve the needs of the students, not the needs of the businesses.

But Minor is going to take this belief about education's purpose and marry it to another line of bunk that grabs me by the nerve endings:

Sadly, this fall, according to the Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program (VKRP), 44% of Virginia’s children entered kindergarten not ready in one or more critical areas of literacy, math, self-regulation and social skills.

Once again, Minor has things backwards. If a vast number of littles are not "ready" for your kindergarten program, that is an indictment of your kindergarten program, period, full stop.

It is not a five-year-old's job to be ready for school; it is the school's job to be ready for the five-year-old.

This is doubly true now that we have entered an era in which too many people have decided that human development can somehow be hurried along, that we can turn kindergarten into first opr second grade by just pushing the littles to sit dowen and study. Again, there is a germ of truth attached to this movement-- children who grow up in homes that provide a richer learning environment get an extra boost in learning. I can't help noticing, however, that these council of busi8ness types never sit down to say, "What we need to do is provide young families the kind of income and freedom that helps foster a richer environment for children."

In short, these groups could treat young parents like humans trying to raise little humans instead of meat widgets tasked with producing little meat widgets.

If they must approach low-income families with deficit thinking (and, really, they don't have to), they could at a bare minimum get out some mirrors and ask themselves how they, as business and community leaders, contribute to that "deficit." The only thing these guys ever get right is increasing access to pre-school, and in too many cases, that is botched because their idea of a quality pre-school is one that gets three-year-olds to sit down and do worksheets to work on academics.

E3's "three-prong strategy" focused on coming up with a tool to define the readiness gap, pushing for a study with which to drive "investments in quality" and setting up a proof-of-concept model in Norfolk. Now they're helping advocate for a budget package that, they believe, will close access gaps for pre-schoolers from low-income families. juice the Virginia Preschool Initiative, adopt uniform measurement and improvement systems so parents can shop better, support early childhood educators, and get the pre-K system put under the VA department of education.

Look, these aren't the most terrible ideas in the world, but neither are they awesome. In particular, the quest for a unified standard measure invariably results in an emphasis on certain aspects because they can be measured, and not because they are necessarily important. And I'm not excited about touting education as an "investment opportunity," as if each child has an obligation to provide some ROI. Nor is there much value in identifying a three or four year old by her deficits rather than her strengths, desires, and general joys in life (well, no benefit unless you think the purpose of the education system is to run a pipeline that helps you sort out the useful meat widgets from the ones you would rather toss aside).

In other words, meet the littles where they are instead of identifying them based on how far away they are from where you want them to be.

And if business types want to help out in getting a good start for all children, particularly those from low-income families, let me make some suggestions:

* Lobby for paid parental leave policy that allows families with new babies a chance to get off to a good start. We have the worst parental leave policies in the industrialized world, in large part because those policies can't be discussed without business complaining that it would cost them too much.

* Pay your low-wage workers more money. Make it possible for the low-income families who depend on your business to create a richer learning environment for their children. Put them in the position of being able to buy lot of books, instead of having to make decisions between things like medicine and food.

* Give your low-wage workers reliable and predictable work schedules so that child care is not such a constant challenge of fire fighting.

* Provide your low-wage workers with decent health insurance.

* Build million-dollar playgrounds in neighborhoods and at preschools. Make it possible for the littles to run and play.

* Take a good hard look at the kinds of programs you're advocating to get littles shoved into the feeder end of a worker-bee pipeline and ask yourself if you would place your own child or grandchild in such a program. If not, advocate for a better program. And if your thought is, "Well, I wouldn't put my kids in there, but for children from that class in that neighborhood, this program would be a great benefit, then go away and never get involved in any sort of education advocacy ever again.

In short, if you see that the children of low-income families start out behind, then offer something more than a pre-K program with some worksheets.

If your view of education is that it is just taxpayer-funded vocational training and its only purpose is to get worker-bees ready to meat widget their way through life, then you make me sad. Well, first you make me angry-- but then I'm sad. It's a meager, tiny cramped view of what education--hell, of being human. It's like thinking marriage is just about having someone around who is reasonably attractive and who can help you make babies. And take a larger view of the universe, because, business leader, educating the country's children is not about you-- it's about them.

Pipeline is such an apt image. When you're in a pipeline, you are closed in with no view of the world and no choices about where to go. Let's not shove littles into a pipeline, please. Pick any other image-- a garden, a forest, an ocean of the possible with the vessel that we help them build. A pipeline is like a long metal straightjacket; it's not meant for humans and certainly not meant for small children.

How To Improve The Quality Of Teaching With Tools Districts Already Have At Hand (And How To Mess It Up)

There is never a shortage of ideas about how to improve the quality of teaching in U.S. classrooms. From the intrusive and convoluted (“Let’s give every student a test and then run the test through a complex mathematical formula and use it to identify the strongest and weakest teachers and then fire the weak ones and replace them with strong ones, somehow”) to the traditional and banal (“Time for a day of professional development sessions that most of you will find boring and useless”), tied to either threats (“We’ll fire you!”) or rewards (“Merit pay!”), school systems and policy makers have come up with a wide variety of approaches that don’t do a bit of good. 

And yet, there is a very effective method that not only improves the quality of teaching in classrooms, but increases the chances of retaining good teachers in a district. Best of all, every district in the country already has every resource it needs to implement the technique. Some are even required to do it, though many mess it up badly. What’s the magic technique?

Mentors. 

The only resource needed is a good, experienced teacher to mentor a new teacher for a year, or even two or three.

In the old days, new teachers found their mentors through happenstance. Like many beginning teachers, I found my first mentors in the staff room during lunch. If I had eaten a different shift, I might not have met them at all. I also had the good fortune to be in an unconventional education program; the same professor who supervised me during my student teaching also visited my classroom during my first year, and I met monthly with other first year teachers in the program. But in my second job, I was in a department whose member motto was, “Live and let live, and leave me alone.” In that job, I made needless mistakes because I was fumbling in the dark.

There is so much for a new teacher to learn. There are the official policies and procedures of the school, and then there are all the unofficial policies and procedures that aren’t written down anywhere (but heaven help you if you violate them). Then comes the real fun—figuring out how to use everything you’ve learned about pedagogy and content in an actual classroom with live human students.

Making mentorship an official paid position has many advantages, not the least of which is that the new teacher doesn’t have to feel as if she’s bothering someone, and the mentor doesn’t have to feel as if she’s intruding. Face to face feedback from a live human who is intimately—and successfully—familiar with the job you’re trying to do is priceless. It not only builds confidence and capability, but it keeps the new teacher from feeling isolated in her classroom, supported rather than abandoned. And it helps the school build culture and quality with something more deliberate than a hope that new teachers just happen to run into the right staff members. 

According to a 2016 report from the New Teacher Center, 29 states have some sort of mentoring requirement for new teachers. Of those, only 15 required mentoring beyond one year. 

If your state has no mentoring requirement, your district can—and should—implement mentoring anyway. And unfortunately even if your state does require mentoring, there are several ways that a school district can make the program ineffective:

Assign mentors by convenience. In some districts, administration just checks to see whose non-teaching period lines up with the new teacher’s non-teaching period, even if the mentor teaches a different subject or is otherwise a poor match for the new teacher. The best mentoring gets down to nuts and bolts (“Let me walk you through what I did when I taught this exact unit”). The very best mentoring matches a new teacher with an experienced teacher who can appreciate and nurture the newby’s personal approach to the work. 

Don’t provide release time for mentoring. Mentor and mentee should have a period in their schedule set aside for the mentoring process. To expect them to just somehow squeeze in a few minutes every day on top of their regular duties is unproductive (particularly for the new teacher who is likely already battling the clock). This is important work; make time in their day for it. Bonus points if you actually give the mentor the opportunity to observe the mentee at work in classes.

Try to do it on the cheap. This goes hand in hand with the other two. It’s not just a matter of paying the mentor a more-than-token sum. Release time is necessary to do the job well, and in a school, time is money. You can implement mentoring with tools you already have, but you should be prepared to invest some money in it, too. In the long run, it will pay off.

Studies and a wealth of teacher anecdotes show that mentoring works. If you want a study to show that it helps raise test scores, those exist. There’s plenty of evidence that mentoring helps retain teachers. And it is the rare education policy idea that doesn’t start arguments between parties in the education reform debates. 

While mentoring can be mandated by the state, it has to be implemented locally, and it has to be implemented well. It’s not flashy. It’s not even game changing. But done well, it will improve the quality of teaching in your school.

Previously posted at Forbes.com

Choice, Parents, Power, Caveat Emptor, and Stupid

Here's an opening sentence from a recent piece of charter advocacy from the74:

But charter schools and the new, more consumer-oriented public education landscape they represent are here to stay.

Well, no. I'm going to skip past the "here to stay" part, because what caught my attention was the "consumer-oriented pub lic education landscape" bit.

Because that's not what choicers have been pushing. What they have pushed, and established to a greater or lesser degree in many cities, is a business-oriented landscape for folks who want to sell an education-flavored product.

The rhetoric is relentlessly focused on the buyer. Let the money follow the child. Let the parents decide. They know the student's needs better than anyone. They should be empowered to make the educational decisions.

What this means is, "Give them the money and let them fend for themselves." Got a complaint, parents? Too bad-- we gave you your education voucher freedom savings scholarship account money. Everything after that was all on you. Caveat emptor.

Suggest that a choice system needs oversight and accountability, and you'll get the next round of rhetoric-- you think parents are stupid, you think poor people can't make smart decisions, you think people of color need to be kept powerless or they'll screw things up, that the government is going to make decisions for them.

It's a bizarre argument. If you want to treat education as a consumer good, why make it the only consumer good that is unregulated, the only consumer good for which there is no oversight. Should we let auto manufacturers make and sell vehicles that are defective death traps, or shut down the USDA and let meat packers sell us whatever they deem a good choice, and just assume that smart consumers will vote with their feet and wallets to put these folks out of business before too many people are killed? Is the Flint, Michigan water supply actually suffering from too much government oversight? That damn government-- taking away peoples' right to consume poisonous food and drink.

As I said, it's a bizarre argument. But then, that's because it's dishonest one.

Stupid is not the problem, and nobody thinks it is. The lack of accountability and protections for everyone except the businesses trying to make a buck-- that's the problem.

Here's one of a gazillion examples. Some folks who seem to have been nice people with pure intent set out to create a charter school in Detroit. But it was one damned thing after another. Too many authorizers authorized too many charters-- more than the market could support. They shopped for a company to operate the school. They borrowed aspirational goals from Success Academy. They got swamped with too many new students when other charters folded mid-year. They were struggling with staggering disciplinary and attendance issues. And three weeks into a new year, they shut down, leaving parents shocked, surprised and high and dry. (And maybe-- just maybe-- the market is not enhanced if customers have to check to see if accredited schools even actually exist!)

Nobody in this story was stupid. Parents were making the best decisions they could. But they ended up screwed over in a Michigan's privatized unregulated unaccountable choice system.

Parents don't need protection, regulation and oversight of a school system because they're stupid. They need those things because they are on the short end of a power imbalance stick. School choice, whether charter or voucher, has been engineered to be an asymmetrical market, a marketplace where families have access to only the information that the vendors want them to have. In fact, in seriously unregulated systems like Michigan or Ohio or Florida, the necessary information may be buried levels deep, with even the charters themselves not having necessary information that authorizers or charter management organizations have.

Asymmetric information is a free market feature; if I'm selling, it's to my advantage to have information that you don't. The actual problems of my product, the relative virtues of other products, details of pricing. Think of how airlines obscure the real cost of their service. Think of how the internet completely leveled pricing in markets like used cars by crushing information gap that had previously fueled the business. Marketing is not about providing potential customers with clear, complete, full information; it's about getting them to focus only on the information you want them to see, spun the way you want them to see it. (And, occasionally, it's about just plain lying, because maketing is about many things, but radical honesty is not one of them.)

Too many school choice fans want to pit a well-financed marketing machine against parents who are already strapped for time and attention and are now required to find the time a resources to ferret out all the pertinent information about a dozen different charter schools, all hidden behind an opaque unregulated curtain marketing woven out of promises that may or may not be related to reality.

If this were really a consumer-oriented system, we would be awash in regulations and rules designed to protect the interests of the consumers, instead of a system in which choice advocates demand like Betsy DeVos demand that businesses be free to operate without rules or restrictions. "We set out some choices, but we offer no guarantees about any of them. You sort it out yourselves," is not the motto of a consumer-oriented system.

This rhetoric relies on another falsehood-- that parents are the "consumers" of education. But the consumers include the students, their future employers, their future neighbors, their future society as a whole. Their interests are not served by a school that teaches that the earth is flat or that certain races are inferior.

Someone has to look out for the interests of the students. Yes, the vast majority of parents are committed to their child's best interests. But a small non-zero number of those parents are not well equipped to do that , and an even smaller non-zero number are not committed to their children's interests at all. Every teacher has stories. The father who decided that now that he had a new family and a new child, he could abandon the old one. The parent who sent hi daughter to school exhausted because she couldn't sleep in a home that was unheated because the utility money went to buy beer. The parent who tried to kill her child by hitting her with a car. These stories are not common, but they are not n on -existent either. Any system that does not provide a means of watching out for those children is a dangerous system.

Yes, the public schools at times can fail miserably in some of these respects. But it is not clear to me how it's an improvement to implement a system that doesn't even try to deal with it, that just shrugs and says, "The parents will sort it all out."

Nor are parents empowered in a choice system. "Vote with your feet" is a crock; hundreds of people vote against Success Academy with their feet every year, and Eva Moskowitz is not wringing her hands and trying to find out how to lure them back.

And yes-- it's worth acknowledging that yes, rules and regulations and "protections" can go way, too far. You don't really have to clarify that for people who work in the red-tape-draped halls of public education. That tension between regulation and freedom, between protection and liberty, has always been present in our society. Such issues are like piano strings; the instrument of society only functions if the tension is there.

The dream for too many choice advocates is a system built around unfettered businesses, unrestrained by voters or the government or unions or rules and regulations. But to sell this they must keep retreating behind parents as a shield, deflecting all criticism of their system as an attack on those parents. And all the slogans in the world about parent power don't change that in a choice system, parents have far less power than the private businesses hoping to profit from them. Vouchers, the preferred DeVosian choice, are the worst. The news about LGBTQ discrimination among Florida voucher schools is alarming for many reasons, but it most especially underlines one big truth about voucher systems-- parents are n ot "empowered" to choose. The choice remains with the operators of the private schools.

The biggest irony is that it doesn't have to be this way. Charters do not have to represent or embody a business-oriented approach to education. They do not need aa foundation in free-market business-style approach to exist, and would be far more beneficial if they did not (vouchers are another level of problem, and likely could never be implemented in a way that wasn't destructive to public education).  There is no need to replace the promise that every child in America should get a good free education with the promise that every entrepreneur should get the chance to make a buck from education. Parents should not be abandoned by the education system, nor is it an improvement to suggest that they be given a voucher in exchange for ever laying a claim to the quality education that their children are owed.

ICYMI: Discount Chocolate Edition (2/16)

Well, sure-- what else does one do after Valentines Day except shop for deep discounts on chocolate! While you're eating irresponsibly, here's some reading from the week. Remember to share.

School choice detrimental to public schools

A guest op-ed from a state senator in the Sun Prairie Star suggesting that choice is bad for Wisconsin.

Privatizing Oakland Schools  

The Black Agenda Report takes a look back at Eli Broad's plan to privatize Oakland schools. It's  not pretty.

Coaching and Parent Politics

From a blog called Friday Night Wives, a look at the problems parents are causing in the world of school sports coaching.

Crumbling Schools, Dismal Outcomes  

Alexander v. Holmes was supposed to change everything for Southern black children; this article looks at how that isn't happen.

Ed department calls charter backers "desperate"  

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat outlines the blowback from charter boosters who, it turns out, can be just as ugly to their former allies as they are to the rest of us. They are not taking the new budget proposal well, and the ed department is not saying "sorry."

Male teachers of color make a difference at Memphis schools  

USA today looks at how-- well, the headline tells it. A good look at how the isue is playing out in one city.

"If we don't learn from this one, shame on us"

The story of a Detroit charter that was set up to aio. A good explanation of why charter advocates ought to want regulation, and how DeVos-backed policies hurt students in Michigan.

The neoliberal misrepresentation of Indianapolis K-12 history

At Cloaking Inequity, a rebuttal to the recent reformy tale of Indianapolis ed history.

The temptation of training teachers

Adam Laats has another history lesson, looking at the history of the notion that we can train teachers in one effective teaching system and all will be well.

NJ Charters can't have it both ways

Charter history includes a lot of time spent in courtrooms arguing that charters are whatever it's most expedient for them to be. (Public? Private? Which one lets us kep our money?) Jersey Jazzman looks at the most recent version of the Both Ways argument, currently being put forward by New Jersey charters

Redefining reading achievement creates problems

Nancy Bailey looks at the odd assertion that, these days, children need to be taught to read sooner. For some reason.

The effective classroom. Do you know it when you see it?

Nancy Flanagan looks at the notion that just looking at a classroom will tell you everything you need to know about it.

FL: BEST Standards To Roll Back The Calendar

Somewhere Jeb! Bush is drowning his tears in his sarsparilla. His beloved Florida, the state that launched a thousand bad ed reform ideas, has tried to roll back one-- the Common Core./ Governor Ron Desantis  dispatched a task force to drive a stake through the heart of the unbeloved standards and replaced them with B.E.S.T.-- Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking. No, it's not a name whose natural poetry inspires trust.

Ten Selling Points

I haven't ploughed through the entire many-paged actual standards yet. I will. I promise. But for the moment, let's just peruse the state's announcement trumpeting the major Points Of Awesometude, because they are plenty to digest, and they help give an overall impression (spoiler alert:.the impression is that Florida wants to go back several decades in time).  There are two Top Ten lists (one for ELA and one for math), but I'm going to stick to the ELA list. Here are the Top Ten reasons that the new ELA standards are BEST. (Get it? Get used to it, because apparently the plan is to milk that BEST thing until all the swampland in Florida is developed.)

1) Florida-Created. Okay, I think it's cute that Florida thinks they're the best at this sort of thing, but I get that the selling point here is the "created by Florida teachers for Florida students" part. The task force used edcredible to help do thew work, plus listening tours. The committee member listing has so far evaded me, but given the administrations lack of love for actual public school teachers, I have my doubts here.

2) Skills for Lifelong Learning. This is exceptionally vague. Create great thinkers, communicator and researches. Bolder, brighter future! A booklist. "Skills," it should be noted, is a Common Core buzzword. And foundations for struggling readers. We'll get back to that.

3) Embedded civics. Florida is going to lead the nation in establishing civics literacy, including a civics reading list of foundational documents, with the Constitution introduced in 5th grade. The program will include civic knowledge, historical context, vocabulary, reasoning and debate-- the whole thing will "result in a complete understanding of American history," which, if rue, would put Florida's students ahead of every single adult in the country.

4) Content-rich. With an emphasis on classic literature (I am really waiting for a moment when I am rested and ready to peruse that list, because folks who's lives are built around literature can't decide what the necessary classics are, so when politicians strep in to settle the argument-- well, there's juts no way that can not end badly). The Common Core, they remind us, didn't focus on content, and that was/is indeed a problem, but it also didn't include ominous sentences like this one:

The inclusion of literary content enables students to learn and understand the full concept of cause and effect, the progression of a story, character development, heritage and much more.

Heritage? Uh-oh.

5) The Art of Reason and Debate. Rhetoric will be introduced in 6th grade. "This is because it teaches students the art and science of writing," says the promotional material, and I am here to tell you that the "science of writing" is not a thing. Even if you go looking for people purportng to write about it, they are really talking about reading. There is no science of writing.

6) Clear and concise language. These standards are easy to follow and understand, says the promo. The Core was wordy, detailed, and sometimes shoved multiple standards into one standard. Florida's not going to do that. They won't be confusing at all.

7) Cursive writing. Students need it to read the Declaration in its original form. It stimulates the bain in special ways. Fine motor skills. Increased retention. As a side note, this example shows hat BEST calls "benchmark clarifications" which appear to be the standards expressed as specific performance objectives. "Students will..."

8) Foundations for literacy. Florid will enforce by-God phonics. Also reading grade-level texts (including reading them aloud, apparently). And in keeping with the clear and concise language goal, "analyze the impact of various poetic forms on meaning and style," because the science of writing tells us that when you get really concise you might also end up being really vague. And there's a list of works to go with each standard and its benchmarks. What are the odds that BEST will stick with the Common Core philosophy that there's only one correct way to read each work? Also, what are the odds that Florida will scrap its I-can't-type-the-word-stupid-enough third grade reading retention rule?

9) Elevating he progression of English Language Arts expectations. They were shooting for both vertical and horizontal alignments, and there is a "clear progression from one year to the next." Plus more consistency within levels. I don't know what the sample standards are supposed to prove, but as samples, they do reveal more vagueness problems. Here's standard ELA.K12.EE.6.1--"Use appropriate voice and tone when speaking or writing." Yeah, that's helpful.

10) Integrated resources and clarifications. Each standard comes with benchmarks and explanations and texts that are for use with that standard.

Bonus-- We've also got Five Big Wins when it comes to testing. Let's check those out:

1) Reducing the actual time students and teachers spend on state tests. I'm betting this is simply not true. The major time suck in testing is not the test, but the test prep. If you want to reduce the time spent on testing, you have to reduce the high stakes.

2) Reducing unnecessary, duplicative testing. Unnecessary according to whom? Do you really think there are tests being given and the people who decided to give them were thinking, "Well, this is unnecessary, but what the hell..."?

3) Replacing state tests with SAT or ACT. This is a dumb idea. First, that's not what those tests are designed for, and second, there's a mountain of research showing they aren't even good at their purported purpose-- GPA is still a better predictor of college success. But if I were the cynical type, I might think that forcing schools to have all their students--including the non-college bound ones-- take the SAT or ACT would be a good way to get more public schools to "fail."

4) Better aligning state tests, via SAT and ACT, to college readiness. Nope. See above research about how SAT and ACT are poor predictors of college readiness.

5) Everyone has to take the Florida Civics Literacy Test.

Two Major Takeaways

First, you remember when Common Core apologists kept sputtering, "It's not a curriculum-- it's just a set of standards." I don't anticipate any such argument in Florida, because BEST is pretty clearly most of a curriculum, complete with scope and sequence, a list of performance objectives, and a list of approved texts. All that seems missing is a specific date on which each standard is supposed to be covered. I'm not a huge fan of centralized standards, and I am even less a fan of centralized curriculum.

Second, from cursive writing to phonics to bringing back The Classics, this looks a lot like the product of a lot of grandparents who spent a lot of time getting sidetracked by complaints about all the things that Kids These Days don't do. I suspect that only the Florida setting saved students from a requirement that they walk to school in the snow uphill both ways. This smells like a document that is all about going back to the imaginary age of great schooling, aka "How school worked when I was a pup, you young whippersnapper. Now get off my lawn." Key word: imaginary.

Maybe the math stuff is genius, and maybe the standards themselves will turn out to be awesome (and  not totally filled with bad Common Core paraphrasing), but it's hard to trust a state that is so openly intent on destroying its own public education system. I swear, I'll look at the standards at some point, but I'm not optimistic.

And most importantly, did they actually kill the Core?

Well, the proof--some of it-- is in the actual standards, but--

The short answer is if they aren't going to completely rewrite every accountability test they use, then No, they didn't get rid of the Core. They will keep teaching to the test, and the test is aligned to the Core. And the switch to SAT/ACT doesn't count, because they are Core-aligned as well.

They have, at the very least, added a full curriculum to the Core, making it more rigid and one-size-fits-all-y than the Core itself used to be. So, different-but-worse?

There will be initial parties and whoops of joy. We'll see how long those last. Like all attempts to escape the Core, like Florida's last such attempt, the main focus is PR. It has to be, because much of the hard-right objections to the Core (It will turn our children communist. It's a plot by that brown guy who snuck into the White House.) are bunk, and when people are upset about imaginary threats, you can't fix the threats-- you can only try to psyche the people into thinking you've killed the yeti, somehow. Unfortunately, as with Florida's previous attempt, that doesn't do anything about the actual problems you face with Common Core, and if you're not careful, people actually figure it out. So time will tell if the PR initiative sticks.

Stay tuned for more Florida adventures.

NC: Can Fed Money Get Charters To Accept Poor Students

North Carolina's charter schools have some issues, such as draining resources from public schools and increasing segregation in a state that has not exactly set a high standard for de-segregation. White flight segregation academies are turning into charters, and they're also looking at district secession (white flight via redrawing school district boundaries).

But the federal government has awarded North Carolina a pile of money for-- well, here it's called "a statewide initiative to help meet the needs of educationally disadvantaged students" and here it's called "federal funding to help increase enrollment in charter schools, particularly for children from low-income groups" and here it's called "$36.6 million to increase the number of 'educationally disadvantaged students' attending charter schools."

You get the idea. Federal money is supposed to get charters to accept more poor students.

This is.... odd. If the whole point of charters is to give poor students the sort of choices that are available to wealthier families, why is it that North Carolina charters are apparently not providing those choices? "Economically disadvantaged students" (I love some good bureaucratic euphemisms) are the majority of the NC pub lic school population. In charters, they are 18.8%. It makes one wonder what the barrier might be, and why federal money is needed to breach it.

NC set up a whole program called ACCESS to award grants from the grant to "increase the EDS population in charter schools," and the applicants for the grant are required to show a variety of strategies, including a marketing and recruitment plan, a school climate plan, a transportation plan, and SMART goals including how the school will eliminate barriers. There's also a requirement for a weighted lottery, which would seem to indicate that poor families make a disproportionate portion of applicants in the first place.

This doesn't really address the mystery here. Did NC charters just end up with barriers to poor students because of some  natural, organic process, or did they those barriers up themselves? Is the ACCESS grant supposed to help breach that barriers that charters found themselves surrounded by for no apparent reason, or are the grants a bribe to induce charters to take down the barriers that they created on their own. Are they suggesting that poor students are more expensive to educate and their business plans depend on not spending that sort of money on their charter students? In which case, is North Carolina just saying that all that noise about providing choices for all students is actually baloney? Or as a school board member put it:

It concerns me why there would be additional taxpayer money to remind charter schools to do the thing that they were originally intended for: to serve economically disadvantaged students.

ACCESS is not exactly setting North Carolina on fire. In the first round, a dozen charters applied fro grants. There are almost 200 charter schools in the state. This year the number is up. The charters are saying that they want to be diverse; they are not explaining why they can't just, you know, do it without grant money.

North Carolina has gotten a lot of things wrong when it comes to education, and this seems like more of that. However, there is one other wrinkle here-- the federal grant we've been talking about is from the federal charter grant program that has been zeroed out of existence and folded into a grant with twenty-some other education programs in the Trump budget. If Congress doesn't reverse that, ACCESS may find itself strapped for cash and Norh Carolina charters might have to start serving poor families without any extra federal grants to reward them.