ICYMI: Blue Screen of Death Edition (3/14)

 So the main desktop computer here at the institute is in a state, and we're working from the mobile office, which guarantees a 150% increase in typo frequency. But meanwhile, there are things to read.

First, a reminder that NPE's Blog of the Day now provides a daily sampling of the best public education posts on the web. Click on over and subscribe, and get a daily dose of some quality curating.

Voters actually like new taxes for schools

It's always a good day when Andrea Gabor puts out a new piece. Here she is at Bloomberg talking about how support for taxation to support schools is turning up in surprising places (like Arizona).

Democrats split over Biden plan for academic testing during pandemic

Politico has noticed that some Democrats have decided to buck the testocratic bent of party leaders. 

The gig economy for teachers

Andy Spears has a substack. On this post, he talks about some of the ideas rising in popularity that spell bad news for the teaching profession.

Educators in office on the pandemic, teachers, and students

Mariel Padilla at the 19th talked to eight women legislators who are/were teachers and got their perspective on the current pandemess.

Standardized testing amid Covid-19 pandemic will do kids and teachers more harm than good

David DeMatthews is in USA Today adding one more well-informed voice to the chorus of people pointing out that the whole testing 2021 idea is a bad one. 

America's Covid spring shouldn't include standardized tests for any students

Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Randi Weingarten team up for this NBC News piece that says what cannot be said too much. Here's hoping that the USED email servers are drowning in these links, sent over and over again.

Clearview AI uses your online photos to id you. Now there's a lawsuit.

Clearview AI has scraped over 3 billion photos to build its database so that its surveillance equipment can pick you out of a crowd. What could possibly go wrong. The LA Times has a story about the lawsuit brought by four civil liberties groups.

Stuyvesant students and mental health

For Chalkbeat, Amy Zimmer looks at what happened when Stuy students started to open up about the mental health issues of a high pressure high school.

What 'learning loss' really means

You know I'm going to love an essay that starts with "There is no such thing as learning loss." Rachael Gabriel guest posts at Valerie Strauss's Washington Post blog to offer one more explanation of what we're really talking about.

We need an FDA for educational assessments

Les Perelman, friend of the Institute and one of my personal heroes, offered up yet another look at just how bad computer assessments are at their jobs, via Diane Ravitch's blog.

Private schools have become truly obscene

Caitlin Flanagan is at the Atlantic drawing a vivd and horrifying picture of the world of the big league private schools. She gets a couple of things wrong about public schools, but this is a long, worthwhile read.

School boards push back against voucher expansions

Indiana's GOP legislators are on the voucher expansion bus, and public school boards are pushing back, God bless them. And the Associated Press has noticed (this particular link goes to the WNDU website).

Addressing learning loss in one easy lesson

At te Fordham's blog, Robert Pondiscio speaks up in favor of good old fashioned direct instruction and talks about a forty year old reading instruction book. Agree or disagree, this is something to start a discussion.

Thingmaker featuring creepy crawlers

If you are of a Certain Age, you know exactly what Teacher Tom is talking about here. (Personally, I favored the ones that let your pencil into a monster).

From girls high school basketball to the 'Eyes of Texas,' racism still permeates education system

A USA Today op-ed looks at some of the Racism In The News moments of the week and looks at what they tell us about the education system.

Constructing unicorn barns

TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild talks about learning loss and testing and who has a reason to promote these supposed crises

John White and Co: What Are They Up To Now

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with another well-researched tale of ed reformsters who just keep failing upwards.

'Test and punish system': Parents can opt children out of statewide testing

If there was ever a time for parents to opt out of testing, this is it. The Opt Out Florida network has some information (and if you're not in Florida, this may give you some ideas of what to look at).

An Open Letter to My Son's Recorder

Julie Scagell at McSweeney's with your fun read for the week. 

FL: Let's Assess Four Year Olds

We have been down this road before, but I will beat this drum till my knuckles bleed (and the older my children and my grandchildren get, the harder I'll drum). 

Florida is once again reporting that 40% of Florida kindergartners are "not ready for kindergarten." Rep. Erin Grall (R) told a House early learning subcommittee "That's on us," as part of her pitch for HB 419, a bill intended to restructure Florida's early learning "system."

Florida has been spent a few years giving five year olds their own version of the Big Standardized Test to measure kindergarten readiness, and it has consistently found that nearly half of Florida's littles "are not ready" for kindergarten.

Clearly there is a problem, and the Florida legislature has been steadfast about looking for that problem in the wrong place.

If half of your five year olds are "not ready" for kindergarten, the problem is with either A) your instrument for measuring readiness and/or B) your expectations for what "readiness" looks like.

I bolded that because all caps would just be rude. But nobody in power in Florida seems to be looking at this answer.

There's the Children's Movement of Florida that wants to get to 100% kindergarten readiness by 2030. The group is a real cross-section of Florida's education policy-makers. Founded by David Lawrence, a former newspaper guy whose memoir comes with a Jeb Bush forward. The founding board also included the president of Publix charities, a bunch of former legislators, and the ever-reformy Manny Diaz. The CEO is Vance Aloupis, a lawyer by trade, who helped run Volunteer Florida for Rick Scott and who got some American Enterprise Institute leadership training. The president is Madeline Thakur who was polished up by the Miami Foundation and appears to have spent one year as a teacher's assistant in an ESL classroom, which is about as close as anyone in this outfit comes to having actual classroom education background.

Thakur had this to offer in her own op-ed on Florida's readiness "crisis." 

So what does it mean to be ready for kindergarten? For our 5 year olds, social-emotional skills are far more important than mastering letters, numbers and shapes. Children who are “ready” can listen, communicate and cooperate. They can hold a pencil and focus on a task. They have a foundation for critical thinking and curiosity and they have an eagerness to learn.

As if these qualities need to somehow be train ed into the children instead of allowed to emerge on their individual, natural developmental growth.. Now, note the ultimate objective of all pre-K chicken littling:

Twenty years on, we’ll get higher earners, more innovative employees and more thoughtful citizens.

First, the persistence of Raj Chetty's sexy-but-highly-debatable claims is really irritating, but "a good kindergarten class will affect your lifetime earnings" dies hard, because it makes for great alarm bell ringing. Second, yes, by all means, we want better meat widgets who will please their employers. Never mind happier human beings with better lives. 

Grall's solution to this mis-diagnosed problem is --surprise--more tests sooner. This, among other things, demonstrates mission creep--the original point of the VPK tests, given to littles at the beginning of kindergarten (because what a great way to introduce littles to school) was to measure the effectiveness of Florida's various pre-K programs. Now Grall wants it to provide readiness feedback for parents, but to do that, we need to do more assessment sooner. 

It's all backwards, like a suit maker who discovers that half of their suits fit really, really badly and so, somehow, concludes that human beings have to be engineered into a different shape that better fits the suits they make. 

It cannot be said often enough--if you discover that a huge percentage of five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, that is an indictment of your program, not of the five year olds, their parents, their teachers, or their breakfast cereal. 

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article234052997.html#storylink=cpy

Dear Mike Bloomberg: No

Michael Bloomberg, former NYC mayor, failed Presidential candidate, and rich guy, took to the pages of the Washington Post to argue that Joe Biden should keep schools open this summer. 

Bloomberg says that we are facing "the greatest challenge to public education" since schools defied Brown v. Board of Education. He says that "the evidence that remote learning has been disastrous for children, especially those from low-income families, could not be clearer." Well, yes, it could. There aren't many teachers, students or parents saying, "This remote stuff is great--we should do it all the time." But we don't have much actual evidence about how disastrous any of this has or has not been (and no, the "research" about Learning Loss doesn't fill that bill). Bloomberg also seems to be nodding at Raj Chetty's highly debatable work when he declares that the "harmful effects" will be "worsening racial income and wealth gaps" for generations.

Bloomberg says to follow the science, which "strongly supports reopening schools," which is not that strong an endorsement, but that's beside the point anyway, because Bloomberg here sorts himself with the folks who always stop that sentence before they get to the subordinate "if" clause-- "science strongly supports reopening schools IF PROPER MITIGATION STEPS ARE TAKE." Sorry. I hate to shout, but some folks just keep skipping that part, and unfortunately, some of those folks are in charge of school districts. 

If that omission isn't enough to clarifying where Bloomberg is coming from, we can also take his note that it's good that Biden prioritized vaccinations for teachers because it "will help persuade more of them to return to the classroom." The vaccination won't provide protection for them--just leverage to push them back. 

He should make it clear to states and districts that the time for excuses is over.

Excuses. This thread keeps emerging, that teachers are just making excuses to avoid going back into the building. What they are trying to make excuses for is never clear. Excuses for wanting to avoid death and disability for themselves and loved ones? Maybe, but is that really something a person needs to make excuses for? Some folks hint darkly that the union is plotting to get twice as much money for doing no work, as if teachers don't actually want to teach, but just got into education as part of a long con to be fat, rich, and lazy. I have an awfully hard time believing this. Well, whatever it is schools are trying to excuse, Mayor Mike says it's time to knock it off.

Bloomberg also notes that there is plenty of unspent CARES money for schools lying around. Biden should have used that and the new money to force schools open, but that ignores the local conditions on the ground, where we find a large number of parents are getting exactly what they want, whatever that happens to be.

But all of this is just a warm-up to Bloombertg's main proposal:

To have any hope of catching up, the school year cannot end in May or June. Canceling summer vacation may not be a popular idea, but it is a national imperative during a historic crisis.

Biden should push states to run a universal summer school. The stimulus funding will help states pay teachers to work over the summer, and to make facility upgrades as needed to ensure socially distanced classrooms and properly ventilated buildings. Buy fans, open the windows, set up tents and serve lots of water — whatever it takes to prevent children from falling further behind. We cannot let a little heat and humidity doom their futures and devastate our country’s.

The grandiosity here is, well, epic. Without summer school, students are doomed. Just buy some fans and open some windows. Buildings with ventilation problems? Just, you know, call in some contractors and renovate them, presumably over some weekend while school is not in session. Bloomberg writes with all the sense of a guy who hasn't met an actual child in years, who is upset that a bunch of widget assembly line workers have been off the line while the corporation falls behind on its quotas of deliverables. Certainly not like young humans in desperate need of a chance to play and run with friends and find their way back to something like a normal life.

As for teachers, Bloomberg gets into scolding mode, much like Matt Bai and his stern reminder to teachers that they are servants and had damned well better start acting like it. 

His first responsibility is to the citizens and children, not the teachers’ unions, and that means it is time for him to say publicly what has been gone mostly unspoken for far too long: Teachers are essential workers. Our children need them in classrooms, and so does our whole country — not just this spring, but this summer, too.

Taxpayers, says Bloomberg, have been footing the bill for "unproductive stay-at-home instruction" (because "productivity" is a thing in education, just as it is in widget assembly lines). 

When it comes to education, Bloomberg stays well-stuck in the neoliberal past. He decries the "achievement gaps that consign so many Black and Hispanic students to dim career prospects," as if economic inequity is solely the result of disparate scores on a single Big Standardized Test. Adn while he demands that those test score gaps be closed, he does not offer any insight into how that feat can now be achieved after twenty-some years of failure to do so.

So Bloomberg wants us to stick students in summer school so we can boost test scores. This is a view of students as test-score generators and not human beings. Those who are actually talking to students are hearing a desperate need to get back to some sort of human normalcy again--not summer school. As laid out by Nicholas Tampio (also in the Washington Post), what students really need is to play.

Or if you prefer a more "grown up" explanation of what's needed, turn to Abraham Lincoln, who famously observed "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." For a full year we have been trying to cut down a tree with an increasingly blunted axe. Mike Bloomberg wants us to keep whacking away with the busted stump of an axe, because if we aren't out there swinging the by-God axe, then no work is being done, no widgets being made, no deliverables coming off the line. But Bloomberg is wrong; what students need this summer is a chance to stop and sharpen their axes. 

The Greatest Testing Stories Never Told

As testocrats continue their full court press to back up the Biden  edict that 2021 Big Standardized Tests must occur, it's worth remembering that we have been doing this for twenty-ish years.

That means that we are long past the point when tests should be sold based on the wonderful things they are going to do; instead, we should be hearing about all the wonderful things they have done.

For instance, instead of arguing that the BS Tests are a necessary tool for addressing pandemic-exacerbated inequity, testocrats ought to be telling the story of how BS Test data has helped erase inequity in the past. 

We should be hearing the story of East Egg High School where, armed with BS Test data, the school closed the achievement gap. "We crunched that data," says Principal Hiram Pothetical, "and within just a few years, our achievement gap and equity issues had disappeared."

Or maybe the "we need tests to target resources" crowd could be telling us the stories of schools across the country where, armed with BS Test data, state legislatures raced resources and support to those schools that looked as if they were in trouble, and within a few years, the school was totally recreated as a high-achieving model. Hell, even in states where "target for resources" actually turned out to mean "targeted for resources and take-over by privatizers," there are no success stories to point at. (Spoiler alert: "By creaming the better students, we were able to create a school with better test results" is not a success story.)

Nor have we heard the story of the teachers who depend on the BS Test results to figure out how their students are doing. As NEA and AFT argue against 2021 testing, we aren't hearing the story of how member teachers are hollering, "The hell you say. We need those tests!" (And if you think the rank and file aren't capable of that kind of uproar, I'll refer you back to the huge pushback on union leader support for Common Core and the push to oppose Arne Duncan). But in fact, the one thing that the many voices pushing for 2021 testing have in common is that they are almost exclusively not teachers.

Not even the story of how a generation raised with omnitesting went and pushed the NAEP scores right through the roof.

These stories aren't told for the same reason you can't go to the circus and see yetis riding on unicorns while playing bagpipes built out of skittles. Test-centric score-driven education has had decades to show the wonders it could accomplish. Back in the earlier days, the excuse was "states aren't doing it right" and "we have fifty different testing systems." But NCLB and RttT were supposed to fix all that. And yet, testocrats still have no signature successes to point to. Test-driven education has been tested, and it has failed. Not only has it failed, but it has turned out to be hugely expensive, financially, educationally, and psychologically. 

We don't need the tests this year, and part of the proof lies in all the great test success stories that after all this time are still not being told.

ICYMI: In Like A Turducken Edition (3/7)

So it's March, and we're beginning the celebration of the one-year anniversary of the Last Time We Did That Normal Thing. Really looking forward to that.

In the meantime, I am continuing to work out the balance between all my old gigs and the new one handling the Hey Look At This blog for the Network for Public Education, which you should definitely check out, but which will definitely share some overlap with this regular Sunday piece (and my Twitter account) but you can decide how you want to stay caught up on stuff. I'm just going to keep flinging it out into the void.

So here we go.

The Brief Distressed Life of a Virtual School

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with the tale of one more cyber-school that didn't quite make it.

A Half-dozen Things You (Could Have) Learned in School: Lessons from a Pandemic

Nancy Flanagan has some thoughts about the real hard lessons of the pandemic when it comes to schools (and not the ones we thought we were going to learn a year ago).

Using Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Algorithms to Guide Education Choice

Here's Accountabaloney with what I think is a really important piece of the growing push for choiciness and its marriage with technofaith in AI. 

Divides? We Got 'Em!

From Eduwonk, not a usual source here, this uncredited piece (probably Andrew Rotherham) is one of those things that is worth a thought, even if you decide to argue with it.

Civility and the Steady Retreat from Truth

Not sure how I missed this a week or so ago, but better late than never for this insightful essay from Paul Thomas about the tension between civility, truth, and the general ugliness we're all soaking in these days.

Three Leaders Defending the Schoolhouse Door

If you were not able to catch the on-line chat between Diane Ravitch, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, Fourth Generation Teacher's blog has a good summary of the talk. Also, if you haven't bought Schneider and Berkshire's book yet, get on that.

Biden Administration's push for standardized tests irks teachers union

Politico has a half-decent summation of the many reactions to the testing decree. Plus the headline is handy for sharing with all those people who were certain that Biden would be in the union's pocket.

Biden and Cardona see light at the end of the tunnel for education

This week FLOTUS and the USED secretary visited a school just up the road from me. It was an interesting choice--rural and in the heart of Trump country, You probably didn't hear about it because now we're back to a country where the USED secretary doesn't say something awful every time they step outside the office. But here's how local-ish media covered it, complete with video.

Idaho Republican votes against early childhood education because--oh no! Really?

In incredible news of the week, we have this guy who thinks early childhood ed is bad because it makes women get all uppity.

A college president worried about the risks of dorm isolation. So he moved in.

From the New York Times, an unusual story of college leadership.

Student Online Speech Case

Easy to lose in the shuffle, but the Supreme Court is looking at a case that will test just how much reach a school has when it comes to students on social media. The Biden administration and various other groups have chimed in. Mark Walsh is reporting at EdWeek.

I am Not a Good Teacher

From the blog Your First Black Friend, a thoughtful meditation from someone who is eight years in. 

Group that approved South Dakota college without students rebuked

You may recall the college that was getting federal aid, but had no actual students. Looks like something may finally happen with that mess that Betsy DeVos didn't help at all with. (Why does it exist? Probably as a visa mill.)

Better Writing Assessment: Do Something Right

If you aren't ready to take the no-grade plunge (or your particular corner of the pool will never support that choice), there are still ways to shift your thinking about assessing student writing. 

One of the biggest is to move away from focusing on deficits and mistakes.

Avoiding mistakes is not a useful focus for writing. For one thing, not making mistakes is an easy path to mediocrity. You can play the game without making any mistakes and still lose. You can perform the piece of music without a single wrong note or missed entrance and still be boring and bland. You can step out on stage, remember every line, hit every mark, and still be forgotten five seconds after the final curtain falls.

It is not enough to not do something wrong. You have to do something right. We've reached the point where software can write mediocre essays, and we've been stuck for years at the point where software can tell if a student has produced, at best, a mediocre piece of writing (though it also may fail to notice if the essay is far worse than mediocre). That's because all software can do is sample a gazillion chunks of what has been written before and kind of mush together and spit out a homogenized version of it. 

Human writers should do better than that. They should bring something new to the table, some piece of their own personality, some synthesis or growth that's new to them. They should strive to be more than safely bland.

For the classroom teacher, fostering the braver, better attitude means a particular mindset. It is easy, especially if you are not super-confident about your writing instruction and assessment skills, to stick with the deficits and mistakes model, to spot the student 100% to start with, and the subtract every time you find a problem. It's easy for everyone, and students recognize the model from every test they've ever taken where the teacher's role is to "correct" the test by marking everything that's "wrong." 

But the lesson here is to take no chances, attempt nothing you're not certain is okay, The lesson here is to be the person at the party who says nothing that might bother anyone, so that at the end of the evening you have offended nobody--and nobody remembers who you were. The lesson is to be a timid, mediocre writer who gets by. 

Work with a positive focus. Spot your students 50% for getting words on the paper, and then start awarding points for what they do right. Give them back papers that include circles and underlines and exclamation points next to the best parts. This gets them to stop looking for red-lined "mistakes" to avoid next time and moves them to focus on what they could strengthen, what strengths they have to build on. 

Doing so not only makes for better writers, but it more clearly turns writing assessment into writing instruction. Focusing on deficits and mistakes turns assessment into whack-a-mole, only your students are the moles and what they learn is to never stick their heads out of the hole. Focusing on strengths and growths is about feeding the plants in the garden and helping them grow.

There are other ways to implement this sort of change. I love the teacher who has her students aspire to get a "publishable" at the end of rewrites. Or "3" if it's a rough draft, "4" for the edited version, and "5" for a final copy. 

I'd also argue that this mindset is useful in classes outside of the English department, and that using this approach is what elevates written assessments above simple objective tests, no matter what the content is. 

As with all advice about writing instruction, there is nothing new here, nothing that lots of other writing teachers don't already know. Still doesn't hurt to repeat it. Also, hat tip to John Warner whose piece took my mind back to this aspect of writing instruction. 

Update: Chester Upland's Mysterious Missing Money

The Chester Upland School District frequently gets the adjective "embattled" in front of its name, and it has earned that name by suffering every hardship ever inflicted on a school district. Most recently, it has been the target of a plan to chop the district up and sell the parts off to various charter school operators.

But suddenly, this week, new issues. The story was first picked up by the Delco Times, and in that version, the FBI has descended upon the southwestern PA district. Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer's Maddie Hanna and Vinny Valla covered the story as well, and the narrative is morphing. In their version, the FBI makes no apearance and this is just an inquiry by the county DA.

But central to all versions of the story are "millions" of missing dollars.

Juan Baughn is the state's current receiver (the district has had several at this point) who moved directly to that job from the superintendent's position in the district. His explanation is, well...

Juan Baughn, the receiver overseeing the school district, said it contacted law enforcement after it didn’t receive “millions” of dollars in a subsidy payment due last week from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

“Our system, between us and Harrisburg, somehow was hacked,” Baughn said Thursday. “It’s a cyber issue.”

This is an extraordinary story, and it raises many questions. Can one really "intercept" a cyber-transfer of money, like catching a migrating sparrow in a net? And if someone has that capability, would one use it to steal from the state and a local school district? And, okay, maybe there's a unique vulnerability between the PDE and schools, but if you were going to steal from a school district, why steal from one of the poorer districts in the state? Why not steal from the very wealthy districts right next door?

And then there's this weirdly non-specific explanation from Baughn:

Baughn didn’t specify how much money the district believed had gone missing — “I’ve heard so many numbers that I don’t want to give a number” — but said it was “in the millions.”

But there has to be a number. You know how much the PDE thought they were sending. You either got all of it, some of it, or none of it. How can this be a mystery? The Inquirer says that the district solicitor reported the crime to the DA--what did thy report? "We seem to have been ripped off for some amount of money"? And then a few paragraphs later, Baughn offers that the idea that the paymebnt was hacked is his "suspicion." Based on what, exactly?

The PDE also, mysteriously, had nothing to add except they can't comment and "this matter does not any compromise of PDE systems of data." So whatever hacking may have occurred, it did not occur on their end. 

I asked a person close to the district how this was playing on the ground. Does anybody believe this. They said nobody buys this story. 

According to the Inquirer, the district has asked for an advance of funding from the state so that it can pay the bills, which will have a familiar ring to CUSD teachers who have foregone pay twice before in the last decade. 

So, to sum up, some amount of money is missing, spirited away somehow. The FBI may or may not be involved, and the district may or may not have been hacked. Stay tuned, because it appears that we still have some facts to sort out.