Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute tweeted that I was wrong in my recent assertion that a school choice system costs more than a single public system. I asked him for an example of a place with a choice system that had lowered the cost of schooling, and he referred me to a couple of articles, the most thorough of which is a 2005 paper from Cato, "Saving Money and Improving Education: How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs."
James Shuls cites some of the same studies in the smackdown he administered to me over at the Friedman Foundation blog. Shuls also proves I am not a Jedi, which strikes me as an easier sell than convincing me that choice saves money.
What May Be The Heart of the Matter
What we're going to learn here is that McClusky, Shuls, and I disagree in part because we are using the same words to mean different things.
The Cato report, for instance, says "reducing the cost of education" when it really means "reducing the amount of money spent on education by government." Can it be that just as some liberals think that government money is basically free and doesn't have to be factored into cost, some conservatives think that only government money counts.
The paper looks at several studies of school district (though on district studied is DC, which is never an example of anything) as examples of how this magic trick works. In an earlier draft I tried to walk you through each report with responses and parallelllllzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... Yeah, it was like that. So although the following is not exactly a point-by-point response to Cato's research, I think it better captures why several favorite examples of how choice saves money are simply false.
It's About Capacity, Not Output
A school is like an airplane, not a factory. Flying that 747 from PIT to LAX costs almost exactly the same for five passengers as it does for a full flight. The idea that having one less student reduces the school's costs by-- well, by anything at all-- is just insupportable (nor, in fairness, does the Cato paper try to support it). At most, if we move twenty-some students who are all the same grade out of the district, we might be able to lose a teacher.
Cost-per-pupil figures are meaningless. It's a statistical construct, like saying someone dies in a car accident every twelve minutes. If I reduce the number of pupils in my district, my cost per pupil just goes up. There will be occasional break points, where I can shed a teacher, an administrator, or in extreme cases, a building. But if my cost-per-pupil is $10K, that doesn't remotely mean that reducing my pupil population to one student would mean I could run the district for $10K.
So let's say my school district serves 100 students at $1 million total budget. You take ten students to your charter. My district is still spending, say, $980,000, and your charter is spending, say, $200,000 to educate your ten. Total cost-- the actual amount of money being paid by somebody-- to educate the 100 students has gone up $180,000.
Where Does the Extra Money Come From?
"Not from the taxpayer-by-way-of-the-government" is the important answer that we're looking for.
The real answer varies with situation. In many communities, private school means parochial school. Catholic school tuition is generally way below the cost-per-pupil in a public school. But the tuition cost is also not sufficient to keep the school running. Hence the fund-raising fairs and sports ticket raffles and slice of the collection plates that all help fund the parochial school systems.
If we're talking fancy-shmancy private school, the answer is Mumsy and Dad. If Lillywhite Academy will even accept your voucher, the voucher will only make a small chink in tuition costs. Tuition at the exclusive Ivy Preps like Philips Exeter will cost you four times the public school cost-per-pupil. Onviously not everybody is in the Ivy Prep league, but nobody out there is making a serious attempt to run a top-notch private school on $4 K a head.
No, the OTHER Extra Money
The public school money. Because, in my example, the public district still needed $980,000 to run, but they were down to $900 K because of the lost ten students. The public schools will recoup that same way as always-- increased local taxes.
And If The Extra Money Doesn't Appear
There is a scenario in which the choice set-up does reduce total costs, but that's not truly a function of choice-- it's a function of slashing a school district's budget thereby forcing it to cut programs. So having school choice can have the side-effect of reducing educational offerings for the community as well.
Concrete Example: Pennsylvania Paves the Road To Hell
Regrettably, I am neither a Jedi nor a thinky tank (just a guy with a blog), so my access to big baskets of facts and data is limited. Given that the Cato Institute's best reading recommendation to me was a paper from ten years ago, I'm not sure anybody else is actually loaded with real data on this issue, either. It would be nice if someone filled that gap, because I can even entertain the notion that there is a combination of numbers and price points that might make these mythical savings actually appear.
But in the meantime, I'm reduced to what I've seen and researched first hand in Pennsylvania.
In PA, we loves us some cyber-charters. And we have a funding formula that sends pretty much the full cost-per-pupil figure to the charters. In two local district, in one school year, a loss of about seventy-some students to charters resulted in a loss of about $800,000 in school revenue. In my own district, with about 1,500 students K-12, that was a brutal chunk of money, and the only way to make up that kind of shortfall (which a school cannot budget or plan for because it does not know how many charter students it must pay for until the students make the move) was to do some massive slashing-- in our case, closing neighborhood elementary schools.
Losing those students did not significantly reduce the costs of running our district at all; it simply forced us to offer fewer educational opportunities to our students.
Bottom Line
There are many many arguments to have about choice, and it's good at times to focus on just parts (I am not even annoyed that the Cato paper is all about choice cutting costs with nary a word to consider the educational effects-- sometimes you just have to focus). But the argument that choice makes education cheaper is a loser, and the fact that some very smart people with access to lots of resources have failed to throw anything convincing at me only makes me more secure in my own Jediless findings.
Running several school districts is more expensive in toto than running just one. The savings that keep being touted are really only about savings of tax dollars, and keeping taxes low. Why would I want to keep my taxes low if that just means that I'm going to be spending more of my own money on my children's education? There's an ugly conclusion at the end of this line of inquiry-- I can afford to pay big bucks for my own children to get a good education, but if we keep public schools low-budget and tax support down, I won't have to spend my money educating the children of Those People. Choice doesn't reduce the total cost that we as a country pay for education-- it just moves the cost around a little, and reduces still more of the requirement for Some of Us to spend our perfectly good money supporting Those People.
So unfortunately, I must concede that from such a point of view, there are certainly some conservatives who can get behind that.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Democrats: "We Suck Less Than That Other Guy"
Every election and primary cycle brings the same question back around-- do we support the lesser of two evils, or throw support to a non-viable third party candidate?
This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bush would have been proud to call his own ( I was one of those vocalizers). But the Democratic party responded with a fairly clear policy of, "Screw 'em. They're never going to vote for Mitt Romney, so we'll do exactly what we have to do to keep their votes, which is jack squat." And they weren't wrong; I, too, held my nose and voted for Obama.
I'm pretty sure that I'd like to have that vote back.
Democrats have gotten lazy and abusive. Every election we trot out scary pictures of reactionary right-wingers (and a handful of GOP candidates always oblige by acting like cartoons). "You know you're going to vote for us," they barely bother to say. "We're not as bad as those other guys."
If we make noises about voting for an RC Cola candidate (someone not from the two major marketeers), we get a guilt trip about how that will spoil the election for somebody, and we won't end up with our preferred lesser of two evils. Don't throw your vote away on a non-viable candidate.
And then they go back to sucking up to Hoi Polloi Posteriors.
But every cycle, the challenge to the status quo gets a bit more real.
For a while this week, it looked like Working Families Party might actually back somebody other than Andy Cuomo. It looked enough like it that the establishment Dems were required to go cut a deal, and even then the vote came in at 58.66% to 41.34%, which is not exactly a nailbiter, but it's not nothing, either. Meanwhile, de Blasio fished the Cuomo knife out of his own back, cleaned it, and knelt before Cuomo to present it hilt first while saying, "My liege." The result of all this is not good news-- Cuomo is no more a liberal Democrat than a Twinkie is a great source of protein-- but it is certainly one more clear sign of how completely the Democratic establishment has abandoned anything remotely its principles.
Up in Connecticut, Jonathan Pelto is mounting a third-party challenge to pretend-Democrat governor Dannel Malloy, which will inevitably be dismissed in language suggesting a vote for Pelto is just a wasted vote. And hey-- third party challenges work out almost never
And so Democratic voters in those states and in other locations around the country face the same question again-- do we vote for someone who is arguably the lesser of two evils? If you're facing the question, here's a couple of questions to ask yourself.
1) If you are always going to vote Democratic no matter what, what reason does the party have to ever listen to you ever? If you cannot imagine circumstances under which you would deny the Democratic party your vote, then you also cannot imagine circumstances under which the party would listen to you. (Unless you're really rich, in which case they will totally listen to you.)
2) How much worse would the other guy be, really? Yes, he's probably some GOP tool that you don't like, but really honestly truly, how much worse would he be?
Because this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The Democratic party will not turn on a dime, and it will not turn at all until it perceives that Democrats in general and teachers in particular have really had enough, enough to actually change election results. A third party candidate who loses, but who steals a sizeable chunk of the vote, sends a message. It may well take a bit for the message to sink in, but no message will even be sent if teachers keep going back to the Democratic party, nursing our black eyes and saying, "Well, it was my fault he got upset and punched me, and besides, he's so much better than anyone else who would have me."
Important political pro tip: It does not matter how upset people are with you. As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to win elections, you don't have to pay it the slightest bit of attention.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. For Democrat teachers (particularly the ones in NY) it might be time to stop voting for an evil and to start using the vote to make a statement about what is good.
This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bush would have been proud to call his own ( I was one of those vocalizers). But the Democratic party responded with a fairly clear policy of, "Screw 'em. They're never going to vote for Mitt Romney, so we'll do exactly what we have to do to keep their votes, which is jack squat." And they weren't wrong; I, too, held my nose and voted for Obama.
I'm pretty sure that I'd like to have that vote back.
Democrats have gotten lazy and abusive. Every election we trot out scary pictures of reactionary right-wingers (and a handful of GOP candidates always oblige by acting like cartoons). "You know you're going to vote for us," they barely bother to say. "We're not as bad as those other guys."
If we make noises about voting for an RC Cola candidate (someone not from the two major marketeers), we get a guilt trip about how that will spoil the election for somebody, and we won't end up with our preferred lesser of two evils. Don't throw your vote away on a non-viable candidate.
And then they go back to sucking up to Hoi Polloi Posteriors.
But every cycle, the challenge to the status quo gets a bit more real.
For a while this week, it looked like Working Families Party might actually back somebody other than Andy Cuomo. It looked enough like it that the establishment Dems were required to go cut a deal, and even then the vote came in at 58.66% to 41.34%, which is not exactly a nailbiter, but it's not nothing, either. Meanwhile, de Blasio fished the Cuomo knife out of his own back, cleaned it, and knelt before Cuomo to present it hilt first while saying, "My liege." The result of all this is not good news-- Cuomo is no more a liberal Democrat than a Twinkie is a great source of protein-- but it is certainly one more clear sign of how completely the Democratic establishment has abandoned anything remotely its principles.
Up in Connecticut, Jonathan Pelto is mounting a third-party challenge to pretend-Democrat governor Dannel Malloy, which will inevitably be dismissed in language suggesting a vote for Pelto is just a wasted vote. And hey-- third party challenges work out almost never
And so Democratic voters in those states and in other locations around the country face the same question again-- do we vote for someone who is arguably the lesser of two evils? If you're facing the question, here's a couple of questions to ask yourself.
1) If you are always going to vote Democratic no matter what, what reason does the party have to ever listen to you ever? If you cannot imagine circumstances under which you would deny the Democratic party your vote, then you also cannot imagine circumstances under which the party would listen to you. (Unless you're really rich, in which case they will totally listen to you.)
2) How much worse would the other guy be, really? Yes, he's probably some GOP tool that you don't like, but really honestly truly, how much worse would he be?
Because this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The Democratic party will not turn on a dime, and it will not turn at all until it perceives that Democrats in general and teachers in particular have really had enough, enough to actually change election results. A third party candidate who loses, but who steals a sizeable chunk of the vote, sends a message. It may well take a bit for the message to sink in, but no message will even be sent if teachers keep going back to the Democratic party, nursing our black eyes and saying, "Well, it was my fault he got upset and punched me, and besides, he's so much better than anyone else who would have me."
Important political pro tip: It does not matter how upset people are with you. As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to win elections, you don't have to pay it the slightest bit of attention.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. For Democrat teachers (particularly the ones in NY) it might be time to stop voting for an evil and to start using the vote to make a statement about what is good.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Welcome to Common Core Hospital
Nurse Duncan: Welcome to Common Core Hospital. How may I assist you?
Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arm seems to be broken in about three places.
Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood pressure. Let me just put the blood pressure cuff on your arm here...
Chris: Ow! Owwww!! Hey!! Holly mother of God! I told that arm's broken!!
Nurse Duncan: Sir, our standard procedure is to take the blood pressure with the right arm. Stop whining. Show a little grit.
Chris: Aaaaaaiiieeeeeeee!
Nurse Duncan: Goodness. Your blood pressure numbers are quite bad. Quite bad. We are going to have to address that with an immediate treatment plan. Bad blood pressure numbers are a sign of poor health. Often they are related to excess weight. Are you fat?
Chris: Do I look fat? Look, do you want to just weigh me?
Nurse Duncan: Oh, we don't have any scales here. We find that the blood pressure measure is all we need to determine patient health quality. Let's just continue with my questions. Are you suffering from any stress or anxiety over the last few weeks that might have elevated your blood pressure?
Chris: Well, my frickin' arm is broken!! But that only happened today.
Nurse Duncan: I think we must conclude that your blood pressure problems are the result of a sedentary lifestyle. Please answer the following multiple choice question. Which strikes you as the most likely cause of your sedentary lifestyle. A) Your apartment does not have a gym, B) Your apartment is too small to offer room for exercise, C) You only socialize by drinking at bars, or D) Meal selections at your regular restaurant are high caloric content.
Chris: What? What??!! Those don't even make sense. And I live on a farm.
Nurse Duncan: We'll just write down A.
Chris: What hell is wrong with you?!!
Nurse Duncan: Let me consult my individualized treatment options chart. (Fiddles with iPad). According to our individualized treatment chart, your personalized treatment program is a regular series of push-ups to be performed daily. Could you drop and give me ten right now, please?
Chris: Are you insane? Can you not see that my arm has extra bends in it?
Nurse Duncan: The use of my own senses for diagnosis is strictly against hospital policy. By the way, if you could give me your drivers license, credit cards, and on line passwords, we'd like to copy those for our records.
Chris: Why do you need that information for anything? What are you going to do with it, anyway?
Nurse Duncan: Well, that's not really any of your business now, is it? And I must say, Chris, that this is a charter hospital, and if you are going to be difficult to work with or require additional treatment options or indicate that you are likely to yield poor results that would hurt our ratings, I will be counseling you out.
Chris: You mean I won't get any treatment?
Nurse Duncan: Oh no. You will still be able to seek treatment at the public hospital. You passed it on your way in-- that gentleman in the back of the pick-up truck out in the parking lot.
Chris: Man. Will he take my insurance?
Nurse Duncan: Well, he can have what's left of your coverage payment. We'll still be keeping our full fee here. Now, about those pushups...
Chris: Oh look!! Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg in the hall? Is that a check he's holding?
Nurse Duncan: What? Where?? (Runs out of room. Returns shortly, confused and sad). I guess I must have missed him. Now then, about those push-ups...
Chris: Oh, I totally did them while you were in the hall. Can I have a pain pill at least?
Nurse Duncan: We're happy to hand out pills, particularly if it will make you more co-operative. As soon as we've finished our consultation here. I need to give you a final blood pressure check to measure your progress during our visit.
Chris: Here, give me the cuff. I'll put it on myself.
Nurse Duncan: But you've put it on your foot, outside your boot.
Chris: Just get your data.
Nurse Duncan: Very well..........Hmm
Chris: Yes?
Nurse Duncan: (Picks up phone). Maintenance? Yes, the patient I'm seeing is apparently dead. Get someone down here to process the patient out before it counts against us.
Chris: Oh for the love of God.
Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arm seems to be broken in about three places.
Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood pressure. Let me just put the blood pressure cuff on your arm here...
Chris: Ow! Owwww!! Hey!! Holly mother of God! I told that arm's broken!!
Nurse Duncan: Sir, our standard procedure is to take the blood pressure with the right arm. Stop whining. Show a little grit.
Chris: Aaaaaaiiieeeeeeee!
Nurse Duncan: Goodness. Your blood pressure numbers are quite bad. Quite bad. We are going to have to address that with an immediate treatment plan. Bad blood pressure numbers are a sign of poor health. Often they are related to excess weight. Are you fat?
Chris: Do I look fat? Look, do you want to just weigh me?
Nurse Duncan: Oh, we don't have any scales here. We find that the blood pressure measure is all we need to determine patient health quality. Let's just continue with my questions. Are you suffering from any stress or anxiety over the last few weeks that might have elevated your blood pressure?
Chris: Well, my frickin' arm is broken!! But that only happened today.
Nurse Duncan: I think we must conclude that your blood pressure problems are the result of a sedentary lifestyle. Please answer the following multiple choice question. Which strikes you as the most likely cause of your sedentary lifestyle. A) Your apartment does not have a gym, B) Your apartment is too small to offer room for exercise, C) You only socialize by drinking at bars, or D) Meal selections at your regular restaurant are high caloric content.
Chris: What? What??!! Those don't even make sense. And I live on a farm.
Nurse Duncan: We'll just write down A.
Chris: What hell is wrong with you?!!
Nurse Duncan: Let me consult my individualized treatment options chart. (Fiddles with iPad). According to our individualized treatment chart, your personalized treatment program is a regular series of push-ups to be performed daily. Could you drop and give me ten right now, please?
Chris: Are you insane? Can you not see that my arm has extra bends in it?
Nurse Duncan: The use of my own senses for diagnosis is strictly against hospital policy. By the way, if you could give me your drivers license, credit cards, and on line passwords, we'd like to copy those for our records.
Chris: Why do you need that information for anything? What are you going to do with it, anyway?
Nurse Duncan: Well, that's not really any of your business now, is it? And I must say, Chris, that this is a charter hospital, and if you are going to be difficult to work with or require additional treatment options or indicate that you are likely to yield poor results that would hurt our ratings, I will be counseling you out.
Chris: You mean I won't get any treatment?
Nurse Duncan: Oh no. You will still be able to seek treatment at the public hospital. You passed it on your way in-- that gentleman in the back of the pick-up truck out in the parking lot.
Chris: Man. Will he take my insurance?
Nurse Duncan: Well, he can have what's left of your coverage payment. We'll still be keeping our full fee here. Now, about those pushups...
Chris: Oh look!! Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg in the hall? Is that a check he's holding?
Nurse Duncan: What? Where?? (Runs out of room. Returns shortly, confused and sad). I guess I must have missed him. Now then, about those push-ups...
Chris: Oh, I totally did them while you were in the hall. Can I have a pain pill at least?
Nurse Duncan: We're happy to hand out pills, particularly if it will make you more co-operative. As soon as we've finished our consultation here. I need to give you a final blood pressure check to measure your progress during our visit.
Chris: Here, give me the cuff. I'll put it on myself.
Nurse Duncan: But you've put it on your foot, outside your boot.
Chris: Just get your data.
Nurse Duncan: Very well..........Hmm
Chris: Yes?
Nurse Duncan: (Picks up phone). Maintenance? Yes, the patient I'm seeing is apparently dead. Get someone down here to process the patient out before it counts against us.
Chris: Oh for the love of God.
Quarter Million Served
Some time this week, this blog passed the 250K mark. A quarter million.
I've been up and running since August of last year, but it took me a couple of months to figure out what I was doing, and not till January of this year did my writer's gland really kick in. So I've done a huge amount of business in a short amount of time.
There are several takeaways from this, I think. Because I don't think the story is that I am an awesome writer or a person with an unusually compelling story to tell. I can slap words together okay on a good day, and in the classroom I am neither God's gift to teaching nor a pedagogical disaster. I think I'm a pretty representative sample of American public educatorhood. Nor am I an outstanding example of of educational bloggery-- given my numbers and my reach, I'm maybe one of the C list bloggers. I haven't met anybody in the movement face to face, haven't spoken at any rallies, haven't been offered a seat at any of those tables, haven't done anything to raise the profile of my brand.
So what that tells me is that there is a powerful need out there for the message. There's a powerful need among teachers and parents and the other people who care about public education, a need to know that what looks crazy and wrong really is crazy and wrong, a collective need to stand next to people looking at some incredible disaster unfolding and to turn to the person next to you and say. "You see that, too, right? I'm not crazy, right?"
There's a powerful need for words. What I hear over and over again is some version of, "I knew something was wrong, but it was wrong in such a fundamentally bizarre way that I couldn't even find the words to explain. My gut just knew something was horribly wrong." Followed closely by, "Thank God it's not just me. I was afraid it was just me." There's a powerful need for clarity and understanding and a sense of connection to other people who share a belief in the promise and importance of public education.
I am always struck by the huge contrast between the Reformsters and the Resistance. On the Reformster side we find almost exclusively people who are making a buck from all this mess. We find glossy sites and paid consultant work and huge efforts (and expense) to push the carefully spun and crafted message out there. On the Resistance side, we find...well, we find a herd of cats. A big unpaid volunteer DIY widespread pay-your-own-expenses herd of cats. If Reformsters were working on the Resistance's collective budget, with the Resistance's expectation of monetary reward in their future, the battle would be over today, because they would have about three people left fighting for their cause.
My readership is not about me. It's about a cause that matters. It's about a value for our culture that is important, in which we believe, not because we're paid to believe, but because it really matters. Blogging is funny-- you can't get people to read you except by writing a message that resonates, that speaks to an audience.
So I'm grateful that an audience has found me, and that what I'm saying has some meaning and value to them. I am so thoroughly heartened to discover such a nationwide web of people who care so deeply about public education, an institution that I believe is one of the most important and powerful to ever step forth on the stage of human history.
I'm grateful to Diane Ravitch and the Bad Ass Teachers, both of whom helped an audience find me, and I am grateful to the literally hundreds of other bloggers who keep this fight going, and I am grateful to the fans of this space who have been such big boosters of my writing. It is an amazing world in which people with no resources by a computer and their own spare time can sit down and reach out to others, where a network of people can share their concerns and information and understanding and strength across the miles.
Those of us who love public education are many, and we're committed, and we're connected, and we're not going away, and we're not giving up, and we're not alone, and we're not dependent on the kindness of corporate sponsors. And if a C list blogger can gather a quarter-million reads in a little over six months, let that be a sign of just how huge we are in number. The Reformsters had better check their resources, because they are in for a long hard fight.
I've been up and running since August of last year, but it took me a couple of months to figure out what I was doing, and not till January of this year did my writer's gland really kick in. So I've done a huge amount of business in a short amount of time.
There are several takeaways from this, I think. Because I don't think the story is that I am an awesome writer or a person with an unusually compelling story to tell. I can slap words together okay on a good day, and in the classroom I am neither God's gift to teaching nor a pedagogical disaster. I think I'm a pretty representative sample of American public educatorhood. Nor am I an outstanding example of of educational bloggery-- given my numbers and my reach, I'm maybe one of the C list bloggers. I haven't met anybody in the movement face to face, haven't spoken at any rallies, haven't been offered a seat at any of those tables, haven't done anything to raise the profile of my brand.
So what that tells me is that there is a powerful need out there for the message. There's a powerful need among teachers and parents and the other people who care about public education, a need to know that what looks crazy and wrong really is crazy and wrong, a collective need to stand next to people looking at some incredible disaster unfolding and to turn to the person next to you and say. "You see that, too, right? I'm not crazy, right?"
There's a powerful need for words. What I hear over and over again is some version of, "I knew something was wrong, but it was wrong in such a fundamentally bizarre way that I couldn't even find the words to explain. My gut just knew something was horribly wrong." Followed closely by, "Thank God it's not just me. I was afraid it was just me." There's a powerful need for clarity and understanding and a sense of connection to other people who share a belief in the promise and importance of public education.
I am always struck by the huge contrast between the Reformsters and the Resistance. On the Reformster side we find almost exclusively people who are making a buck from all this mess. We find glossy sites and paid consultant work and huge efforts (and expense) to push the carefully spun and crafted message out there. On the Resistance side, we find...well, we find a herd of cats. A big unpaid volunteer DIY widespread pay-your-own-expenses herd of cats. If Reformsters were working on the Resistance's collective budget, with the Resistance's expectation of monetary reward in their future, the battle would be over today, because they would have about three people left fighting for their cause.
My readership is not about me. It's about a cause that matters. It's about a value for our culture that is important, in which we believe, not because we're paid to believe, but because it really matters. Blogging is funny-- you can't get people to read you except by writing a message that resonates, that speaks to an audience.
So I'm grateful that an audience has found me, and that what I'm saying has some meaning and value to them. I am so thoroughly heartened to discover such a nationwide web of people who care so deeply about public education, an institution that I believe is one of the most important and powerful to ever step forth on the stage of human history.
I'm grateful to Diane Ravitch and the Bad Ass Teachers, both of whom helped an audience find me, and I am grateful to the literally hundreds of other bloggers who keep this fight going, and I am grateful to the fans of this space who have been such big boosters of my writing. It is an amazing world in which people with no resources by a computer and their own spare time can sit down and reach out to others, where a network of people can share their concerns and information and understanding and strength across the miles.
Those of us who love public education are many, and we're committed, and we're connected, and we're not going away, and we're not giving up, and we're not alone, and we're not dependent on the kindness of corporate sponsors. And if a C list blogger can gather a quarter-million reads in a little over six months, let that be a sign of just how huge we are in number. The Reformsters had better check their resources, because they are in for a long hard fight.
Friday, May 30, 2014
North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off"
There are several state legislatures that are working hard to earn the "Worst Legislature in America" medal. Florida, where it's cool to use terminally ill children as political tools and their families as punching bags, has always been a strong contender. New York State staked its claim by taking the extraordinary measure of overruling local government because they didn't like its decision. Several states have worked to promote the teaching profession by stripping it of any professional trappings like decent pay and job security.
But when it comes to suck, North Carolina is a tough state to beat.
The legislature tried to make tenure go away entirely, but was frustrated to discover that they could not legally revoke tenure for people who already had it. But the wily legislators realized that they had a unique piece of leverage in a state where teachers' real-dollar wages have dropped every year for seven years.
The proposal is simple. NC teachers can have a raise, or they can have job security. They cannot have both.
They may have a raise. And who knows. Some day they might get another one. But they can also be fired for being too expensive. Or they can have job security, but Senate Leader Phil Berger warns that they will probably never see another raise again.
The message is as clear as it is simple:
North Carolina legislators do not want teaching to be a career in their state.
If you want to devote your career, your lifetime of work, to teaching, you cannot do it in North Carolina.
If you want to support a family, live like a grown-up, experience a lifetime of success teaching students, you cannot do it in North Carolina.
We often talk about how a state "destroys" or "ruins" teaching as a profession, but often that's a bit of exaggeration and what we really mean is that they make it very, very hard to stay in teaching. But North Carolina proposes to actually do it-- to actually make teaching untenable as a career for self-supporting grown-ups. This goes past disrespect; this is demolition.
There is no upside in this for North Carolina. None. There is no benefit for a state that drives the most qualified teachers away. There is no benefit for a state system that becomes the system of last resort (Motto: Come see us if nobody else will hire you for a real job). There is no plus in telling new job applicants, "We intend to screw you over as a matter of policy." There is no benefit to students being taught by teachers who are working three jobs to make ends meet ("Sorry, but I won't be grading your papers until I get a night off from Piggly Wiggly"). There is no benefit to school environments when a state tells students, "Nobody needs to treat teachers with respect." There is no benefit for a state to tell its young people, "Hey, if you want to be a teacher when you grow up, y'all are gonna need to get the hell out of here."
There's plenty of benefit for other folks, kind of like the benefit of having one less hungry family show up for buffet night at Pizza Hut. Virginia can continue its teacher recruitment program ("Hey teachers! We're not great, but we sure as hell aren't North Carolina"). And I suppose this makes North Carolina a perfect staging area for TFA bodies
My heart goes out to people in North Carolina. If it were the place I was born and bred, I would be sadder than words can say, sad that my own people wanted to trash our state, sad that they want to actively discourage good teachers from working there, sad that they had zero interest in trying to get the best possible system in place for their children. Hell, I'm not from NC and it still makes me pretty sad.
So kudos to you, NC legislature. Tomorrow may bring new assaults on education from a different assortment of political twits, but for today, you are, in fact, the worst legislature in all of America.
But when it comes to suck, North Carolina is a tough state to beat.
The legislature tried to make tenure go away entirely, but was frustrated to discover that they could not legally revoke tenure for people who already had it. But the wily legislators realized that they had a unique piece of leverage in a state where teachers' real-dollar wages have dropped every year for seven years.
The proposal is simple. NC teachers can have a raise, or they can have job security. They cannot have both.
They may have a raise. And who knows. Some day they might get another one. But they can also be fired for being too expensive. Or they can have job security, but Senate Leader Phil Berger warns that they will probably never see another raise again.
The message is as clear as it is simple:
North Carolina legislators do not want teaching to be a career in their state.
If you want to devote your career, your lifetime of work, to teaching, you cannot do it in North Carolina.
If you want to support a family, live like a grown-up, experience a lifetime of success teaching students, you cannot do it in North Carolina.
We often talk about how a state "destroys" or "ruins" teaching as a profession, but often that's a bit of exaggeration and what we really mean is that they make it very, very hard to stay in teaching. But North Carolina proposes to actually do it-- to actually make teaching untenable as a career for self-supporting grown-ups. This goes past disrespect; this is demolition.
There is no upside in this for North Carolina. None. There is no benefit for a state that drives the most qualified teachers away. There is no benefit for a state system that becomes the system of last resort (Motto: Come see us if nobody else will hire you for a real job). There is no plus in telling new job applicants, "We intend to screw you over as a matter of policy." There is no benefit to students being taught by teachers who are working three jobs to make ends meet ("Sorry, but I won't be grading your papers until I get a night off from Piggly Wiggly"). There is no benefit to school environments when a state tells students, "Nobody needs to treat teachers with respect." There is no benefit for a state to tell its young people, "Hey, if you want to be a teacher when you grow up, y'all are gonna need to get the hell out of here."
There's plenty of benefit for other folks, kind of like the benefit of having one less hungry family show up for buffet night at Pizza Hut. Virginia can continue its teacher recruitment program ("Hey teachers! We're not great, but we sure as hell aren't North Carolina"). And I suppose this makes North Carolina a perfect staging area for TFA bodies
My heart goes out to people in North Carolina. If it were the place I was born and bred, I would be sadder than words can say, sad that my own people wanted to trash our state, sad that they want to actively discourage good teachers from working there, sad that they had zero interest in trying to get the best possible system in place for their children. Hell, I'm not from NC and it still makes me pretty sad.
So kudos to you, NC legislature. Tomorrow may bring new assaults on education from a different assortment of political twits, but for today, you are, in fact, the worst legislature in all of America.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Transparency For Reals
Reformsters loves them some transparency. However, by "transparency" what they means is "we want to show your school scores and teacher VAM scores and other fun data-ish stuff to the whole world." But if that's transparency, then Phyllis Schlafly is a stripper. "Transparency" means that the man behind the curtain will pass out some numbers and we will treat them as revelation.
Well, bullocks to that. Here's how we could have some real transparency.
Test Transparency
Along with the score, all parents will receive the completed version of their child's test. A complete copy of the test, with their child's answers marked, plus a brief explanation of why the correct answer is correct.
Parents will receive a complete guide to correlating questions to test areas. IOW, "Question 5 measures the student's ability to make inferences from text." Both these and the tests will be available to any member of the public.
Scoring Transparency
If there is any sort of conversion process to turn a raw score into a final score, that process will be made public. Also available in print and on the net will be an explanation of how the cut scores were set. It should be in the kind of English used by actual human beings.
For tests that involve human scorers, that facility will be open to tours by any interested members of the public. The training manual for those scorers will also be published on paper and net. Scorers names and qualifications will also be available upon request. None of those workers will be under any sort of gag order whatsoever-- they can talk to anybody about any aspect of their work at any time. They can write operas about it and perform them on street corners.
If the test is assessed by computer, that will, first of all, not be a secret. Second of all, any documentation necessary to establish that the program is more dependable than a hamster in a box will be readily available.
Validity Transparency
All data supporting the assertion that the test is valid and reliable will be published in their entirety. Honestly, I don't know why these people are scared of this-- there won't be three people in the country who can bear to read through it. Likewise all data about the field testing of tests will be available for anybody who can stand it.
Data Transparency
All federal, state and local school entities will publish clearly and publicly what other entities will be using test data. All of them.
I actually like the idea of a requirement that every time a piece of your child's data changes hands (so to speak) or is used, the parents are emailed a notification. I balk on this only because I suspect everybody's email would quickly become unusable.
Financial Transparency
Every test will come with a clear indication of who is making money for it. The price per unit of the test will be printed on the front cover, just like a magazine. ("Hey Mom! We took a fifty dollar test today!")
All not-for-profit schools will publish in big bold letters how much they pay their various officials. Maybe on numbers across the back of a jersey that said officials must wear to work every day.
VAM Transparency
All VAM systems must publish their computing formulas in full. With a complete explanation. If the explanation cannot be understood by an average college-educated 22-year-old, the system must be thrown out and started over. All VAM systems must also publish any and all studies done to create the impression that VAM works.
In short, stop throwing numbers around an insisting that if they're numbers they must be True. If you want to be transparent, then stop hiding the heart and spine of this bogus data system in a dark black box.
Well, bullocks to that. Here's how we could have some real transparency.
Test Transparency
Along with the score, all parents will receive the completed version of their child's test. A complete copy of the test, with their child's answers marked, plus a brief explanation of why the correct answer is correct.
Parents will receive a complete guide to correlating questions to test areas. IOW, "Question 5 measures the student's ability to make inferences from text." Both these and the tests will be available to any member of the public.
Scoring Transparency
If there is any sort of conversion process to turn a raw score into a final score, that process will be made public. Also available in print and on the net will be an explanation of how the cut scores were set. It should be in the kind of English used by actual human beings.
For tests that involve human scorers, that facility will be open to tours by any interested members of the public. The training manual for those scorers will also be published on paper and net. Scorers names and qualifications will also be available upon request. None of those workers will be under any sort of gag order whatsoever-- they can talk to anybody about any aspect of their work at any time. They can write operas about it and perform them on street corners.
If the test is assessed by computer, that will, first of all, not be a secret. Second of all, any documentation necessary to establish that the program is more dependable than a hamster in a box will be readily available.
Validity Transparency
All data supporting the assertion that the test is valid and reliable will be published in their entirety. Honestly, I don't know why these people are scared of this-- there won't be three people in the country who can bear to read through it. Likewise all data about the field testing of tests will be available for anybody who can stand it.
Data Transparency
All federal, state and local school entities will publish clearly and publicly what other entities will be using test data. All of them.
I actually like the idea of a requirement that every time a piece of your child's data changes hands (so to speak) or is used, the parents are emailed a notification. I balk on this only because I suspect everybody's email would quickly become unusable.
Financial Transparency
Every test will come with a clear indication of who is making money for it. The price per unit of the test will be printed on the front cover, just like a magazine. ("Hey Mom! We took a fifty dollar test today!")
All not-for-profit schools will publish in big bold letters how much they pay their various officials. Maybe on numbers across the back of a jersey that said officials must wear to work every day.
VAM Transparency
All VAM systems must publish their computing formulas in full. With a complete explanation. If the explanation cannot be understood by an average college-educated 22-year-old, the system must be thrown out and started over. All VAM systems must also publish any and all studies done to create the impression that VAM works.
In short, stop throwing numbers around an insisting that if they're numbers they must be True. If you want to be transparent, then stop hiding the heart and spine of this bogus data system in a dark black box.
What Reformy Thing Most Needs To Die?
It's a fun thought experiment. If you could erase one aspect of the Reformy test-driven high-stakes privatizing Core-loving status quo, which would it be. If you had the political power to eliminate one head of the public-education-crushing hydra, which decapitation would lead your list?
Yes, this is like playing "What would you do if you won the lottery," and yes, the various parts of the beast are interdependent. But the debate about priorities often erupts in the Resistance, so it's a thought experiment worth having. So how would I rate the hydra heads on the Evil Bloodsucking Monsters That Must Be Killed Scale.
VAM
It would be less destructive to teachers if we simply divined evaluations with tea leaves. And when your entire labor force is in a state of fear and uncertainty and general beaten-downness because of an evaluation system that is unscientific, invalid, irrational, and just plain crap, that cannot be good for your institution. Sam Walton, of all people, famously said that the way you treat you employees is the way they will treat your customers (Sam is dead now). Public education is seriously damaged by this assault on its own front line troops; public education can't function when every employee and every building always live under the threat or imminent disaster.
EBMTMBK= 10
CHARTERS
It's not that charters as currently practiced don't deserve to die. They do, and they can be relied on, for the most part, to kill themselves. When hedge fund managers and investment dilettantes rushed to this market because they thought they could produce some ROI, they forgot that they wold also have to produce some results. I am truly sad that a whole boatload of students have to be chewed up by these fraud factories for the public to figure things out, but sometimes things have to break before they can be put right. I know it's harsh, but better tens of thousand of students today than millions tomorrow. But charters will mostly die on their own, sooner or later, depending on how much political capital their bought-and-paid for legislators are willing to invest in them.
EBMTMBK= 5
TFA
I look for the day when reality penetrates college campuses fully on this issue. There's a lot of good work being done to help idealistic young college students understand that if they want to be teachers, they should, you know, become teachers, and not under trained temp shock troops in the battle against having to pay professional wages in schools. But time and mission drift are starting to catch up with this decades old group, and people are even getting smart enough to ask "Is that real teaching on your CV, or just some Teach for America bullshit."
Still, they're a blot on the profession, a destabilizing influence in the schools they descend upon, and a work force that unnecessarily prolongs the life of deserve-to-die charter schools.
EBMTMBK= 7
DATA MINING
This goes beyond being a simple education issue and challenges what we want and what we will accept as a society. It has yielded the odd spectacle of adults trying to protect a generation that, when it comes to data, are making no effort to protect themselves. Its specific threat to education is that it has shaped too much of what we do. Policy and curriculum decisions are made not on educational merit, not even on "hey this is easy to do, anyway," but because we want to structure things for best data generation and collection. But its specific threat to society is that it's horrifyingly invasive and just plain wrong.
EBMTMBK= 9
COMMON CORE STANDARDS
They're the face of the reformy status quo, the name that everyone uses as shorthand for the grand complex of all these other things. But how bad are they really? The answer is pretty damn bad, and the earn a "pretty damn bad" both for content and for the package its in. I swear I will go ballistic on the next CCSS apologist who says, "Well, yeah, it's a work in progress," because it's not a work in progress any more than the Washington Monument is a work in progress. If your claim is that you like them just fine except for a few things that need to be tweaked, then you don't like them just fine, because they will never be tweaked. And the content reads, particularly on the ELA side, as if they were written by overly self-confident amateurs (and we know why).
They are used as an excuse for testing and to bolster the idea that school is just vocational training and teaching is just content delivery. However, we do know how to deal with standards. We did it under NCLB. Close the door, keep an eye on the test, ignore the standards and teach as you know best. But other people learned, too, and they've set this game up so that CCSS and tests cannot be decoupled.
EBMTMBK = 8
THE BIG HIGH STAKES TESTS
Badly designed, badly implemented, poorly executed, and given power way beyond anything that remotely makes educational sense. The Test provides the bad data to be crunched badly for VAM. As with NCLB, The Test is also the true delivery system for dictating curriculum; your curriculum is whatever is on the test.
There is no Test Prep without The Test. There is no loss of weeks of instruction without The Test. And The Test is not so much the teeth of CCSS; it's more like the balls. Cut them off, and the standards become manageable, docile, trainable, less likely to hump your furniture. Okay, maybe not that one, but you get the idea. CCSS apologists like to say that the Standards would be fine if not for the test. No, the standards would still suck. But it would be way easier to ignore them or simply pay paper lip service to them while doing our actual jobs. And there is no arguing simply for a better test. As long as your job is to come up with a standardized test to test the educational status of every single student in the US so that they and their schools can be compared, your result is going to be ann educational abomination, every time.
The other factor here is that the Test is vulnerable, now that every parent in the country is seeing what a ridiculous fiasco it is. It is the factor in the reformy status quo that is most vulnerable, and on which so much of the rest of the worst rests on.
EBMTMBK = 11
Yes, this is like playing "What would you do if you won the lottery," and yes, the various parts of the beast are interdependent. But the debate about priorities often erupts in the Resistance, so it's a thought experiment worth having. So how would I rate the hydra heads on the Evil Bloodsucking Monsters That Must Be Killed Scale.
VAM
It would be less destructive to teachers if we simply divined evaluations with tea leaves. And when your entire labor force is in a state of fear and uncertainty and general beaten-downness because of an evaluation system that is unscientific, invalid, irrational, and just plain crap, that cannot be good for your institution. Sam Walton, of all people, famously said that the way you treat you employees is the way they will treat your customers (Sam is dead now). Public education is seriously damaged by this assault on its own front line troops; public education can't function when every employee and every building always live under the threat or imminent disaster.
EBMTMBK= 10
CHARTERS
It's not that charters as currently practiced don't deserve to die. They do, and they can be relied on, for the most part, to kill themselves. When hedge fund managers and investment dilettantes rushed to this market because they thought they could produce some ROI, they forgot that they wold also have to produce some results. I am truly sad that a whole boatload of students have to be chewed up by these fraud factories for the public to figure things out, but sometimes things have to break before they can be put right. I know it's harsh, but better tens of thousand of students today than millions tomorrow. But charters will mostly die on their own, sooner or later, depending on how much political capital their bought-and-paid for legislators are willing to invest in them.
EBMTMBK= 5
TFA
I look for the day when reality penetrates college campuses fully on this issue. There's a lot of good work being done to help idealistic young college students understand that if they want to be teachers, they should, you know, become teachers, and not under trained temp shock troops in the battle against having to pay professional wages in schools. But time and mission drift are starting to catch up with this decades old group, and people are even getting smart enough to ask "Is that real teaching on your CV, or just some Teach for America bullshit."
Still, they're a blot on the profession, a destabilizing influence in the schools they descend upon, and a work force that unnecessarily prolongs the life of deserve-to-die charter schools.
EBMTMBK= 7
DATA MINING
This goes beyond being a simple education issue and challenges what we want and what we will accept as a society. It has yielded the odd spectacle of adults trying to protect a generation that, when it comes to data, are making no effort to protect themselves. Its specific threat to education is that it has shaped too much of what we do. Policy and curriculum decisions are made not on educational merit, not even on "hey this is easy to do, anyway," but because we want to structure things for best data generation and collection. But its specific threat to society is that it's horrifyingly invasive and just plain wrong.
EBMTMBK= 9
COMMON CORE STANDARDS
They're the face of the reformy status quo, the name that everyone uses as shorthand for the grand complex of all these other things. But how bad are they really? The answer is pretty damn bad, and the earn a "pretty damn bad" both for content and for the package its in. I swear I will go ballistic on the next CCSS apologist who says, "Well, yeah, it's a work in progress," because it's not a work in progress any more than the Washington Monument is a work in progress. If your claim is that you like them just fine except for a few things that need to be tweaked, then you don't like them just fine, because they will never be tweaked. And the content reads, particularly on the ELA side, as if they were written by overly self-confident amateurs (and we know why).
They are used as an excuse for testing and to bolster the idea that school is just vocational training and teaching is just content delivery. However, we do know how to deal with standards. We did it under NCLB. Close the door, keep an eye on the test, ignore the standards and teach as you know best. But other people learned, too, and they've set this game up so that CCSS and tests cannot be decoupled.
EBMTMBK = 8
THE BIG HIGH STAKES TESTS
Badly designed, badly implemented, poorly executed, and given power way beyond anything that remotely makes educational sense. The Test provides the bad data to be crunched badly for VAM. As with NCLB, The Test is also the true delivery system for dictating curriculum; your curriculum is whatever is on the test.
There is no Test Prep without The Test. There is no loss of weeks of instruction without The Test. And The Test is not so much the teeth of CCSS; it's more like the balls. Cut them off, and the standards become manageable, docile, trainable, less likely to hump your furniture. Okay, maybe not that one, but you get the idea. CCSS apologists like to say that the Standards would be fine if not for the test. No, the standards would still suck. But it would be way easier to ignore them or simply pay paper lip service to them while doing our actual jobs. And there is no arguing simply for a better test. As long as your job is to come up with a standardized test to test the educational status of every single student in the US so that they and their schools can be compared, your result is going to be ann educational abomination, every time.
The other factor here is that the Test is vulnerable, now that every parent in the country is seeing what a ridiculous fiasco it is. It is the factor in the reformy status quo that is most vulnerable, and on which so much of the rest of the worst rests on.
EBMTMBK = 11
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)