Today's Slate includes an intriguing report of the non-traditional application process for Bard College. Rebecca Shuman presents the new elective small-college alternative:
Bard College,
a highly selective liberal-arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, New
York, is about to enter the second year of a revolutionary
college-admissions experiment: four wickedly challenging essays, 2,500 words each, reviewed by Bard faculty (who, I assume, enjoy grading papers). All four essays get a B+ or higher? You’re in, period. No standardized test, no GPA, no CV inflated with disingenuous volunteer work.
How cool is that?!
There are some additional safeguards; incoming freshmen take a pre-matriculation language and thinking workshop. If their work there doesn't seem to measure up to (read "come from the same person as") their admissions essays, their entrance into the freshman class just doesn't happen.
The program is not huge at this point-- only forty-some prospective freshmen took the essay route last year. But it is a great example of what can happen when a college decides to create an authentic measure of the skills they want for their incoming students, instead of simply processing some off-the-shelf data points gathered by third parties whose main interest is their own business and not the interests of either the college or the students.
It is, of course, the opposite of where we're headed. The pull quote from the article is:
It’s preposterous to determine a young person’s entire future based on her choices as a 14-year-old.
If Shuman thinks that is preposterous, she's going to love the brave new world in which we tell seven year olds whether or not they are "on track" for college.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Takeaways from Layton's Gates Interview
If you have not yet read Lyndsey Layton's extraordinary piece about How Gates Did It, or watched the video of the interview itself, you must do so. (And when you're done, also take a look at Mercedes Schneider's simple question-- why is the interview being published three months after it actually happened?)
The article is a nice piece of work, and I'm not going to rehash it here. But I am going to underline just a few of the pieces that jumped out at me.
Money and Connections
The article underlines what many of us have said many times-- if the money dried up today, support for Common Core would dry up tomorrow. Every step of the process, every bit of spreading of support has been a function of money.
I actually agree with Gates when he says that he doesn't pay people to agree with him. I don't how that is how it works. If I were rich, I wouldn't say, "Agree with me and I'll give you money." But I would look to give my money to people who agree with me, or at least fake it well enough to convince me.
But the entire story of Common Core's success is a combination of "We got a grant" and "I know a guy." The CCSS world is a tight, incestuous community of likeminded people who call on each other when a job needs to be done. Reformsters used connection in Kentucky to get them on board, and they used connections in the business community to get on board, and money gave it all a slick, glossy, well-backed look, as well as making all the leg work, paper work, and meeting work free!
This article notes, as many have, that the onset of CCSS was quiet, initially unnoticed. That's because CCSS never made its way through the marketplace of ideas. It never had to sweep through the public, nor was it ever run by people in the education community. Money, power and connections allowed it to leapfrog right past all of that.
Federal Program
Raise your hand is you're surprised to read that Race to the Top almost included a Common Core requirement until someone realized that would be illegal. Yeah, me neither.
The notion that this is state-led is one of the most transparently ridiculous fictions of the whole reformster movement. It's nice to see that laid out in print.
Gates Is Human
Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe I'm compensating (disclosure-- a member of my family works for Microsoft). But it seems that Gates shares a completely ordinary perception problem-- once he has bought into a certain view, he does not modify it.
When he says, "There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good," I don't get the sense he's deliberately lying. I get the impression that he's a guy who has convinced himself that it's so. I think he's developed a mental image of how these worked, how they arrived, what they do, and what they will accomplish, and now it's just a matter of exercising will (and money and power) to make it so.
I get that. It's how you turn Windows into the OS that rules most of the computer world. Unfortunately, it is also how you end up spending millions producing the Zune.
So Gates has invested huge amounts of time and money into a process and product that is fundamentally flawed and terminally wrong-- so wrong that its continued survival depends on continued financial support. And on top of being already dead wrong, the process has been co-opted and twisted by profiteers who see their chance-- outfits like Pearson and the Data Overlords and hedge fund charter operators who see helping the great Gates as a way to get a free pass on the gravy train. One way of viewing our current mess is that Common Core is the disease and the rest is a mass of opportunistic infections.
Because there's a problem with a program that survives only because of money. It ends up being pushed and supported by people who believe, not in the program, but in money. It's money that they're faithful to, and money that they follow, and if it comes down to a choice between making some more money and staying faithful to Gates's vision of a better educational world, they'll choose the money every time. It only makes matters worse that the vision is so wrong to begin with.
I don't believe that Gates is some sort of Evil Genius, and I don't think he really cares if he makes more money on all of this. I do think he is a rich and powerful guy who is used to being right and used to getting his way, and he's is uniquely and specially blind to how completely wrong he is on Common Core and all the evil to which it has opened the door. IOW, I don't think it's greed; I think it's hubris.
It's hubris that makes humans stop paying attention. It's hubris that makes humans say, "I don't need any new information. I just need to preserve my vision of what I know is right. Any challenge to that is a challenge to me, and I will fight it just like an attack on my person." Add a ton of money, and people will fall over themselves telling you just how right you are.
Best Quote in the Article
The best quote for me in the article comes from Jay P. Greene.
"Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not,” Greene said.
That's the big takeaway. CCSS is not about education, it's not about research, it's not about educational experts, it's not about actual results in school, it's not about looking out for the rights of students--
It's about money and power.
The article is a nice piece of work, and I'm not going to rehash it here. But I am going to underline just a few of the pieces that jumped out at me.
Money and Connections
The article underlines what many of us have said many times-- if the money dried up today, support for Common Core would dry up tomorrow. Every step of the process, every bit of spreading of support has been a function of money.
I actually agree with Gates when he says that he doesn't pay people to agree with him. I don't how that is how it works. If I were rich, I wouldn't say, "Agree with me and I'll give you money." But I would look to give my money to people who agree with me, or at least fake it well enough to convince me.
But the entire story of Common Core's success is a combination of "We got a grant" and "I know a guy." The CCSS world is a tight, incestuous community of likeminded people who call on each other when a job needs to be done. Reformsters used connection in Kentucky to get them on board, and they used connections in the business community to get on board, and money gave it all a slick, glossy, well-backed look, as well as making all the leg work, paper work, and meeting work free!
This article notes, as many have, that the onset of CCSS was quiet, initially unnoticed. That's because CCSS never made its way through the marketplace of ideas. It never had to sweep through the public, nor was it ever run by people in the education community. Money, power and connections allowed it to leapfrog right past all of that.
Federal Program
Raise your hand is you're surprised to read that Race to the Top almost included a Common Core requirement until someone realized that would be illegal. Yeah, me neither.
The notion that this is state-led is one of the most transparently ridiculous fictions of the whole reformster movement. It's nice to see that laid out in print.
Gates Is Human
Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe I'm compensating (disclosure-- a member of my family works for Microsoft). But it seems that Gates shares a completely ordinary perception problem-- once he has bought into a certain view, he does not modify it.
When he says, "There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good," I don't get the sense he's deliberately lying. I get the impression that he's a guy who has convinced himself that it's so. I think he's developed a mental image of how these worked, how they arrived, what they do, and what they will accomplish, and now it's just a matter of exercising will (and money and power) to make it so.
I get that. It's how you turn Windows into the OS that rules most of the computer world. Unfortunately, it is also how you end up spending millions producing the Zune.
So Gates has invested huge amounts of time and money into a process and product that is fundamentally flawed and terminally wrong-- so wrong that its continued survival depends on continued financial support. And on top of being already dead wrong, the process has been co-opted and twisted by profiteers who see their chance-- outfits like Pearson and the Data Overlords and hedge fund charter operators who see helping the great Gates as a way to get a free pass on the gravy train. One way of viewing our current mess is that Common Core is the disease and the rest is a mass of opportunistic infections.
Because there's a problem with a program that survives only because of money. It ends up being pushed and supported by people who believe, not in the program, but in money. It's money that they're faithful to, and money that they follow, and if it comes down to a choice between making some more money and staying faithful to Gates's vision of a better educational world, they'll choose the money every time. It only makes matters worse that the vision is so wrong to begin with.
I don't believe that Gates is some sort of Evil Genius, and I don't think he really cares if he makes more money on all of this. I do think he is a rich and powerful guy who is used to being right and used to getting his way, and he's is uniquely and specially blind to how completely wrong he is on Common Core and all the evil to which it has opened the door. IOW, I don't think it's greed; I think it's hubris.
It's hubris that makes humans stop paying attention. It's hubris that makes humans say, "I don't need any new information. I just need to preserve my vision of what I know is right. Any challenge to that is a challenge to me, and I will fight it just like an attack on my person." Add a ton of money, and people will fall over themselves telling you just how right you are.
Best Quote in the Article
The best quote for me in the article comes from Jay P. Greene.
"Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not,” Greene said.
That's the big takeaway. CCSS is not about education, it's not about research, it's not about educational experts, it's not about actual results in school, it's not about looking out for the rights of students--
It's about money and power.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
If Competition Is So Great...
Reformsters love competition. Love it.
Our students should be competitive. Our measure of success is how well our students can compete with workers in Shanghai and India and China (we never discuss that a good way to compete would be to learn how to live on ten bucks a week pay, but never mind that-- competition!).
Our schools should be competitive. We should let everybody who wants to open up a school and then let them all compete and that would lead to awesome super-duper excellence in schools. Public schools are lazy and terrible because they don't have to compete with anybody (because devoting resources to marketing instead of teaching makes educational sense).
Our teachers should be competitive. They should not ever have job security; they should come to work every day watching their back for an attack from the next hot young teacher to enter the building. Fear of losing their jobs will totally keep them on their A-game (and having a collegial atmosphere in schools is totally over-rated).
So if competition is so awesome--
If competition is so awesome, why is the backbone of the Common Core revolution a system for making all states do the same thing?
Why are reformsters not saying, "The states should compete! By having each try to come up with their own standards, we will spark a great competition that will produce the greatest educational standards ever seen!"
Why are reformsters promoting and defending a system that has its basic policy that all states must do the same thing and never, ever fall out of lockstep. Whatever the states do, they must NOT compete.
Maybe competition is not always so awesome after all?
Our students should be competitive. Our measure of success is how well our students can compete with workers in Shanghai and India and China (we never discuss that a good way to compete would be to learn how to live on ten bucks a week pay, but never mind that-- competition!).
Our schools should be competitive. We should let everybody who wants to open up a school and then let them all compete and that would lead to awesome super-duper excellence in schools. Public schools are lazy and terrible because they don't have to compete with anybody (because devoting resources to marketing instead of teaching makes educational sense).
Our teachers should be competitive. They should not ever have job security; they should come to work every day watching their back for an attack from the next hot young teacher to enter the building. Fear of losing their jobs will totally keep them on their A-game (and having a collegial atmosphere in schools is totally over-rated).
So if competition is so awesome--
If competition is so awesome, why is the backbone of the Common Core revolution a system for making all states do the same thing?
Why are reformsters not saying, "The states should compete! By having each try to come up with their own standards, we will spark a great competition that will produce the greatest educational standards ever seen!"
Why are reformsters promoting and defending a system that has its basic policy that all states must do the same thing and never, ever fall out of lockstep. Whatever the states do, they must NOT compete.
Maybe competition is not always so awesome after all?
CCSS: Schooling for Wretched People in a Miserable World
The Council of the Great City Schools (yet another group apparently set up to make money by shilling for the Core) has created a marvelous promotional video for the Core. Done in the style of those high-speed marker-drawing videos that the interwebs love, and narrated by a possible-non-caucasian lady narrator, it does a fabulous job of distilling the world view embedded in the Common Core complex.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
PA Joins Assault On Teaching Profession
This week the PA House Education Committee pushed forward the latest assault on the teaching profession in Pennsylvania.
Following the template pushed by StudentsFirst (a piece of naming genius right up there with "Peacekeeper Missile" and "jumbo Shrimp"), House Bill 1722 proposes stripping teachers of most meaningful job protections and seeks to line PA up with North Carolina on the list of States Where Teaching Is Not A Viable Career.
The bill is in line with what we've seen proposed across the country. Allow school districts to furlough teachers for economic reasons based on job evaluation. That seems reasonable, right? Why am I making all this noise about the destruction of teaching as a career?
Economic Reasons
The bill, like its brethren across the country, proposes that the only school districts that may drop seniority considerations when furloughing are school districts with economic problems. In other words, all of them.
Seriously. Pennsylvania is the land of educational budget cuttery, the state where charters are allowed to suck the blood out of public schools without restraint. Where in Pennsylvania is there a school district that is not facing economic stress? Where is the school district whose elected school board has turned to the voters and said, "We're just going to tax you a smidge more than we think we need, just so we don't feel any economic stress."
But let me have a ringside seat for the hearing in which a teacher tries to fight his firing by proving that the district is too economically well off to invoke the "economic problems" clause of the law. I am sure that will go well.
The Commonwealth could use the economic travails of its districts as motivation to buck up and do a better job of financing schools, but that doesn't seem to be where we're headed. The "economic reasons" clause might as well say "all school districts."
Uniform Evaluation
Rep.Timothy Krieger, the bill's chief salesman (I'm not sure I'd say he wrote it, exactly) says "No one can argue the best teachers get good results." And since that's more of a definition than a correlation, like saying "No one can argue that a convertible is a car with a top that goes down," I'm going to agree with him. But that's not the problem. The problem is in identifying the best teachers.
Observers say this bill (which died the death of a thousand cuts a few years ago) has legs this time because this time we can totally tell who the good teachers are. Unfortunately, that system is kind of crazy crap, based in part on an observation that is not terrible, but not perfect, and certainly not immune to administrative malfeasance. The other part is based on a wacky quilt of bureaucratic horse patooty.
PA has PVAAS, a cousin of TVAAS, a bastard child of VAM, and all largely discredited by most everybody who actually understands how these things work (which is a small club, actually, because PVAAS is made with a special super-secret data sauce that nobody can really explain). Our evaluations also fold in school ratings, which include things like "How many AP classes are there?" Turns out you can now pay the College Board people to improve your school rating, which is an impressive state-level protection racket indeed.
PA's rating system also includes a healthy dose of stack ranking, the system that trains evaluators to not give outstanding rankings often. What's important is that there be a distribution so that there is always a Bottom 10% (or so) that is always poised and ready to be fired in case of a day of financial problems, and that day is-- hey, look!-- today!
There is still some debate among PA teachers about which is worse-- to be the teacher of tested students and thereby have a huger chunk of your evaluation based on test scores, or to be all other teachers and have a still-notable chunk of evaluation based on tests of material that you don't even teach. Pennsylvania administers the Keystone exams, which are essentially a paper PARCC (we had a traumatic encounter with on line testing a few years ago). These tests are, to use a technical term, inexcusably terrible crap. Of course, I can't show you examples because then I would have to kill you and then kill myself, because the tests must be kept under super-secret double-swear security. Otherwise people would notice that they are crap.
One other cool feature. My teacher evaluation won't actually be done till some time in the fall, because this year's test scores won't be released till then. So if I'm going to be fired for my egregiously inadequate teacherly behavior this year, it won't happen until at least another full year has gone by.
StudentsFirst Has One Complaint
StudentsFirst is unhappy with the current bill because the legislators did strike the part about making teachers go five years before they get tenure. StudentsFirst, noble crusaders for educational excellence that they pretend to be, thinks teachers should have a proven track record of excellence before receiving the tenure that will be rendered moot by the rest of this bill. Seriously-- since we're gutting and bypassing all other job protections, the only possible reason to want a longer tenure trial period is to extend the period during which a school can fire a teacher without even pretending to show cause. It seems likely here that StudentsFirst wants everyone to have a TFA-sized career of just two or three years.
Gutting Teaching Careers
So the bottom line of this bill would be that any district can fire teachers at any time, based on an evaluation system that rests on bad data generated by bad tests using a formula repudiated by the statistics experts, combined with observations that are still largely subjective. Under rules like this, it would simply be foolish to go into teaching as a career. At best, it presents the standard choice as best written into law by North Carolina's education-hating legislature-- you can either keep your job indefinitely as long as you don't ever make yourself too expensive, or you can get a raise and make yourself a more attractive target for firing.
It's as if these folks are really committed to discouraging people from going into teaching.
The bill has bipartisan backing (can teachers please stop automatically voting Democrat) and of course the big fat love of Governor Tom Corbett. It's not a done deal yet; if you are a Pennsylvania teacher, a good summer project would be to start contacting your representatives on a regular basis and encouraging them to say no to this dumb bill.
Following the template pushed by StudentsFirst (a piece of naming genius right up there with "Peacekeeper Missile" and "jumbo Shrimp"), House Bill 1722 proposes stripping teachers of most meaningful job protections and seeks to line PA up with North Carolina on the list of States Where Teaching Is Not A Viable Career.
The bill is in line with what we've seen proposed across the country. Allow school districts to furlough teachers for economic reasons based on job evaluation. That seems reasonable, right? Why am I making all this noise about the destruction of teaching as a career?
Economic Reasons
The bill, like its brethren across the country, proposes that the only school districts that may drop seniority considerations when furloughing are school districts with economic problems. In other words, all of them.
Seriously. Pennsylvania is the land of educational budget cuttery, the state where charters are allowed to suck the blood out of public schools without restraint. Where in Pennsylvania is there a school district that is not facing economic stress? Where is the school district whose elected school board has turned to the voters and said, "We're just going to tax you a smidge more than we think we need, just so we don't feel any economic stress."
But let me have a ringside seat for the hearing in which a teacher tries to fight his firing by proving that the district is too economically well off to invoke the "economic problems" clause of the law. I am sure that will go well.
The Commonwealth could use the economic travails of its districts as motivation to buck up and do a better job of financing schools, but that doesn't seem to be where we're headed. The "economic reasons" clause might as well say "all school districts."
Uniform Evaluation
Rep.Timothy Krieger, the bill's chief salesman (I'm not sure I'd say he wrote it, exactly) says "No one can argue the best teachers get good results." And since that's more of a definition than a correlation, like saying "No one can argue that a convertible is a car with a top that goes down," I'm going to agree with him. But that's not the problem. The problem is in identifying the best teachers.
Observers say this bill (which died the death of a thousand cuts a few years ago) has legs this time because this time we can totally tell who the good teachers are. Unfortunately, that system is kind of crazy crap, based in part on an observation that is not terrible, but not perfect, and certainly not immune to administrative malfeasance. The other part is based on a wacky quilt of bureaucratic horse patooty.
PA has PVAAS, a cousin of TVAAS, a bastard child of VAM, and all largely discredited by most everybody who actually understands how these things work (which is a small club, actually, because PVAAS is made with a special super-secret data sauce that nobody can really explain). Our evaluations also fold in school ratings, which include things like "How many AP classes are there?" Turns out you can now pay the College Board people to improve your school rating, which is an impressive state-level protection racket indeed.
PA's rating system also includes a healthy dose of stack ranking, the system that trains evaluators to not give outstanding rankings often. What's important is that there be a distribution so that there is always a Bottom 10% (or so) that is always poised and ready to be fired in case of a day of financial problems, and that day is-- hey, look!-- today!
There is still some debate among PA teachers about which is worse-- to be the teacher of tested students and thereby have a huger chunk of your evaluation based on test scores, or to be all other teachers and have a still-notable chunk of evaluation based on tests of material that you don't even teach. Pennsylvania administers the Keystone exams, which are essentially a paper PARCC (we had a traumatic encounter with on line testing a few years ago). These tests are, to use a technical term, inexcusably terrible crap. Of course, I can't show you examples because then I would have to kill you and then kill myself, because the tests must be kept under super-secret double-swear security. Otherwise people would notice that they are crap.
One other cool feature. My teacher evaluation won't actually be done till some time in the fall, because this year's test scores won't be released till then. So if I'm going to be fired for my egregiously inadequate teacherly behavior this year, it won't happen until at least another full year has gone by.
StudentsFirst Has One Complaint
StudentsFirst is unhappy with the current bill because the legislators did strike the part about making teachers go five years before they get tenure. StudentsFirst, noble crusaders for educational excellence that they pretend to be, thinks teachers should have a proven track record of excellence before receiving the tenure that will be rendered moot by the rest of this bill. Seriously-- since we're gutting and bypassing all other job protections, the only possible reason to want a longer tenure trial period is to extend the period during which a school can fire a teacher without even pretending to show cause. It seems likely here that StudentsFirst wants everyone to have a TFA-sized career of just two or three years.
Gutting Teaching Careers
So the bottom line of this bill would be that any district can fire teachers at any time, based on an evaluation system that rests on bad data generated by bad tests using a formula repudiated by the statistics experts, combined with observations that are still largely subjective. Under rules like this, it would simply be foolish to go into teaching as a career. At best, it presents the standard choice as best written into law by North Carolina's education-hating legislature-- you can either keep your job indefinitely as long as you don't ever make yourself too expensive, or you can get a raise and make yourself a more attractive target for firing.
It's as if these folks are really committed to discouraging people from going into teaching.
The bill has bipartisan backing (can teachers please stop automatically voting Democrat) and of course the big fat love of Governor Tom Corbett. It's not a done deal yet; if you are a Pennsylvania teacher, a good summer project would be to start contacting your representatives on a regular basis and encouraging them to say no to this dumb bill.
Friday, June 6, 2014
Data-Driven Discrimination
If you needed any more reason to be wary of the massive upsuck of student data from the education system, The Weekly Wonk offers more reason to fear our Data Overlords.
"reduce caseloads in an increasingly black box manner."
But even if a system is well-designed,
it can be “garbage (data) in, discrimination out.” A transportation agency may pledge to open public transit data to inspire the creation of applications like “Next Bus,” which simplify how we plan trips and save time. But poorer localities often lack the resources to produce or share transit data, meaning some neighborhoods become dead zones—places your smart phone won’t tell you to travel to or through, isolating these areas into islands of poverty.
It's the linkages that can be the real killers. The criminal justice system now routinely collects DNA from arrested individuals. But your DNA doesn't just identify you like a fingerprint-- it links you to all your relatives. And then there's all the computer devices we use.
Homes come outfitted with appliances that sense our everyday activities, “speak” to other appliances, and report information to a provider, like an electric utility company. While it’s presumptuous to say that retailers or utility companies are destined to abuse data, there’s a chance that information could be sold down the data supply chain to third parties with grand plans to market predatory products to low-income populations or, worse yet, use data to shape rental terms or housing opportunities. What it boils down to is a lack of meaningful control over where information travels, which makes it more troublesome to intervene if and when a problem arises in the future.
Gangadharan and Woolley do not address the data mining of education, but the implications aren't hard to imagine, particularly in a system that not only admits the possibility of data linkage, but embraces it. From way back in the infamous Marc Tucker "Dear Hillary" letter through the Bush/Obama cradle-to-career tracking program, our Data Overlords have said that a fully-integrated data trail is a Good Thing.
But as Gangadharan and Woolley's article suggests, what happens
-- if the data cloud determines that an infant has a genetic marker present in earlier generations who are linked to criminal behavior or recurrent disease or susceptibility to alcoholism?
-- if a corporation decides to use predatory marketing carefully aimed at "low information" customers who are identified by their elementary and high school academic records?
-- if an algorithm selects out groups who can be identified by genetic, family and school records and targets them for discriminatory practices?
-- if you apply for a job and the program sees that you used to do lots of googling for bong suppliers and that your grades and test scores dipped precipitously about the same time, thereby deciding you were a teenage pothead?
-- if a program puts together your genetic record, your googling for "HIV treatments" and your repeated trips to the guidance counselor in high school, and decides you are too high risk to be hired?
It's been just a couple years since Target famously announced to a father that his daughter was pregnant, and we are still only scratching the surface for all the many ways that data trails can be used to jump to conclusions about people and then discriminate against them on that basis. And that's just looking at the accidental discrimination.
Remember when we decided that it is illegal to ask someone they're race on all sorts of job and financial application paperwork? Well, now it will never be necessary again. Remember how juvenile court records are supposed to remain sealed so that a youthful mistake doesn't ruin the rest of someone's life? Well, that's pretty much a joke now.
We don't even know yet all the ways that this data monster can screw with peoples' lives, destroy any semblance of privacy, and make them victims of discrimination carried out by programs that can't even be questioned. Imagine what could happen if we fed that monster everything we know about a person's youth and childhood?
"reduce caseloads in an increasingly black box manner."
But even if a system is well-designed,
it can be “garbage (data) in, discrimination out.” A transportation agency may pledge to open public transit data to inspire the creation of applications like “Next Bus,” which simplify how we plan trips and save time. But poorer localities often lack the resources to produce or share transit data, meaning some neighborhoods become dead zones—places your smart phone won’t tell you to travel to or through, isolating these areas into islands of poverty.
It's the linkages that can be the real killers. The criminal justice system now routinely collects DNA from arrested individuals. But your DNA doesn't just identify you like a fingerprint-- it links you to all your relatives. And then there's all the computer devices we use.
Homes come outfitted with appliances that sense our everyday activities, “speak” to other appliances, and report information to a provider, like an electric utility company. While it’s presumptuous to say that retailers or utility companies are destined to abuse data, there’s a chance that information could be sold down the data supply chain to third parties with grand plans to market predatory products to low-income populations or, worse yet, use data to shape rental terms or housing opportunities. What it boils down to is a lack of meaningful control over where information travels, which makes it more troublesome to intervene if and when a problem arises in the future.
Gangadharan and Woolley do not address the data mining of education, but the implications aren't hard to imagine, particularly in a system that not only admits the possibility of data linkage, but embraces it. From way back in the infamous Marc Tucker "Dear Hillary" letter through the Bush/Obama cradle-to-career tracking program, our Data Overlords have said that a fully-integrated data trail is a Good Thing.
But as Gangadharan and Woolley's article suggests, what happens
-- if the data cloud determines that an infant has a genetic marker present in earlier generations who are linked to criminal behavior or recurrent disease or susceptibility to alcoholism?
-- if a corporation decides to use predatory marketing carefully aimed at "low information" customers who are identified by their elementary and high school academic records?
-- if an algorithm selects out groups who can be identified by genetic, family and school records and targets them for discriminatory practices?
-- if you apply for a job and the program sees that you used to do lots of googling for bong suppliers and that your grades and test scores dipped precipitously about the same time, thereby deciding you were a teenage pothead?
-- if a program puts together your genetic record, your googling for "HIV treatments" and your repeated trips to the guidance counselor in high school, and decides you are too high risk to be hired?
It's been just a couple years since Target famously announced to a father that his daughter was pregnant, and we are still only scratching the surface for all the many ways that data trails can be used to jump to conclusions about people and then discriminate against them on that basis. And that's just looking at the accidental discrimination.
Remember when we decided that it is illegal to ask someone they're race on all sorts of job and financial application paperwork? Well, now it will never be necessary again. Remember how juvenile court records are supposed to remain sealed so that a youthful mistake doesn't ruin the rest of someone's life? Well, that's pretty much a joke now.
We don't even know yet all the ways that this data monster can screw with peoples' lives, destroy any semblance of privacy, and make them victims of discrimination carried out by programs that can't even be questioned. Imagine what could happen if we fed that monster everything we know about a person's youth and childhood?
Louisiana Showcases Utter Failure of School "Reform"
The New Orleans Recovery School District has proven (again) that Reformsters cannot deliver on a single one of their promises.
What I'm reporting today has been reported elsewhere-- in particular I recommend Michael Deshotels' report on his blog Louisiana Educator-- but there are some pieces of news that need to be repeated over and over and over again, and this is one of those. The grand experiment that is the New Orleans Recovery School District is complete failure an consequently represents a failure of virtually every piece of Reformster policy wisdom.
Remember-- in New Orleans, the reformsters got every single thing they wanted. With a little help from a natural disaster (aka Hurricane Katrina, aka "the best thing that happened"), reformsters were able to sweep the board clear of all public schools and open the field to free market forces of charter schools.
They were able to get rid of all those terribly awful no good (and also expensive) public school teachers and replace them with pliable TFA temps who would A) implement whatever harebrained school program they were told and would also B) go away before they could become a problem. (Granted, the mass firings turned out to be illegal, but the RSD still got to do it).
They have had years, a full generation of students, to make their reforms pay off. They had, until recently, enthusiastic state government support for all these reforms on top of a spirited implementation of Common Core and its attendant high stakes testing.
NOLA was reformster Christmas, a reformster land of do-as-you-please, a happy place where they could fully test every single thing they ever claimed would fix American public education. And they even got to set the terms by which success would be measured.
And they failed. Unambiguously, completely failed.
Using the state's own figures, we fine the RSD at the 17th percentile for the state. Individual portions of the RSD have the distinction of being the worst schools in the state.
Not only did they not prove their programs academically, but they provided yet another case study of how school "choice" really works (spoiler alert: it doesn't). Parents in the RSD have no more choice about where their children go to school than if they were subjected to the terribly tyranny of having the schools chosen by student address. And their graduation rates are a sham (read about it here).
The RSD has proven one point that I once made. Market forces do not foster superior quality; market forces foster superior marketing. The one manner in which the RSD has excelled is in the application of beautiful lip gloss to its pig of a schooling failure. And news outlets are accordingly providing gentle and accommodating coverage. Deshotel included a link to this coverage which provides a fine rundown of the whole sad story, but it's about the only such reporting you'll find in the region. For an atomic level of detail in charter coverage, I can also recommend the work of Kelsey Foster in The Lens (who is, because the world is a small and strange place, a former student of mine).
We have been in the bait of making the criticism that reformsters are pushing untried policies and untested educational ideas, but in fact, that is no longer true. There is nothing that reformsters love that has not been tested, and nothing that has not failed every test. I know this piece has been repeating the work of other writers, and now I am going to repeat myself, because this message needs needs needs to be repeated,
In New Orleans, the reformsters got everything they wanted. They got to build a school district from the ground up according to their own specs. And. They. Still. Failed. Spread the word.
What I'm reporting today has been reported elsewhere-- in particular I recommend Michael Deshotels' report on his blog Louisiana Educator-- but there are some pieces of news that need to be repeated over and over and over again, and this is one of those. The grand experiment that is the New Orleans Recovery School District is complete failure an consequently represents a failure of virtually every piece of Reformster policy wisdom.
Remember-- in New Orleans, the reformsters got every single thing they wanted. With a little help from a natural disaster (aka Hurricane Katrina, aka "the best thing that happened"), reformsters were able to sweep the board clear of all public schools and open the field to free market forces of charter schools.
They were able to get rid of all those terribly awful no good (and also expensive) public school teachers and replace them with pliable TFA temps who would A) implement whatever harebrained school program they were told and would also B) go away before they could become a problem. (Granted, the mass firings turned out to be illegal, but the RSD still got to do it).
They have had years, a full generation of students, to make their reforms pay off. They had, until recently, enthusiastic state government support for all these reforms on top of a spirited implementation of Common Core and its attendant high stakes testing.
NOLA was reformster Christmas, a reformster land of do-as-you-please, a happy place where they could fully test every single thing they ever claimed would fix American public education. And they even got to set the terms by which success would be measured.
And they failed. Unambiguously, completely failed.
Using the state's own figures, we fine the RSD at the 17th percentile for the state. Individual portions of the RSD have the distinction of being the worst schools in the state.
Not only did they not prove their programs academically, but they provided yet another case study of how school "choice" really works (spoiler alert: it doesn't). Parents in the RSD have no more choice about where their children go to school than if they were subjected to the terribly tyranny of having the schools chosen by student address. And their graduation rates are a sham (read about it here).
The RSD has proven one point that I once made. Market forces do not foster superior quality; market forces foster superior marketing. The one manner in which the RSD has excelled is in the application of beautiful lip gloss to its pig of a schooling failure. And news outlets are accordingly providing gentle and accommodating coverage. Deshotel included a link to this coverage which provides a fine rundown of the whole sad story, but it's about the only such reporting you'll find in the region. For an atomic level of detail in charter coverage, I can also recommend the work of Kelsey Foster in The Lens (who is, because the world is a small and strange place, a former student of mine).
We have been in the bait of making the criticism that reformsters are pushing untried policies and untested educational ideas, but in fact, that is no longer true. There is nothing that reformsters love that has not been tested, and nothing that has not failed every test. I know this piece has been repeating the work of other writers, and now I am going to repeat myself, because this message needs needs needs to be repeated,
In New Orleans, the reformsters got everything they wanted. They got to build a school district from the ground up according to their own specs. And. They. Still. Failed. Spread the word.
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