David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America

David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.

David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (because "let's solve America's social problems" is so often associated with "let's go to Aspen") on Coleman's "conversation" with Jane Stoddard Williams of Bloomberg EDU, and the excerpts presented give us a picture of how Coleman plans to boost the College Board's bottom line bring educational equality to the US.

He is sure to tout his free test prep deal with Kahn Academy, by which the College Board will get a foot firmly in every door of the market make test preparation available to every student in America. (Perhaps the new SAT will include references to pieces of 21st Century wisdom such as the new idea that when it comes to websites, if you're not paying for it, the product is you.)

But Coleman's not here primarily to tout the new means of amassing data on every college-bound student in America free SAT prep, though he says it's an example of how the College Board is "leaning into" challenges. There's also a hefty chunk of conversation where Coleman artfully inserts himself in an imaginary conversation between imaginary test critics and imaginary test proponents; it's a pretty clever way to position himself as a perfectly reasonable guy trying to find a middle way in the midst of this contentious and imaginary debate. But that's not why he's here. He's here to talk about AP.


When we worry, perhaps rightly, that assessment can discriminate, let's remember that there's another thing that we know ... that can discriminate more, which is adults.

Yup. That's the problem. Because Coleman says he has learned from "my work in K-12" that we've got to change our game. And that test anxiety is bad. And, using one of his new marketing slogans educational insights, American students don't need more tests, they need more opportunities.

And let's give Coleman credit-- he hasn't said anything that's particularly wrong. What the most capable of reformsters understand is this simple process:

       1) Say something true as a premise
       2) Do something awful that does not actually follow from #1 at all

Coleman's genius marketing idea solution to educational inequality is to take human bias out of the equation and replace it with hidden human bias and testing.

See, he's worried that African-Americans and women and Latinos are missing out on the chance to give College Board their money the opportunity to take AP courses. But it turns out that a great predictor of AP success is the PSAT!! So let's use the previously maligned and increasingly skipped-over PSAT as a marketing booster for AP a means of finding worthy students. AP, we are to understand, is a massive cash cow for the College Board a doorway to opportunity, and if we get more students into AP courses it will be a great payday for the College Board step forward for America.

So let's use the PSAT to generate sales leads AP course recommendations. Let's send letters to parents and lists to guidance departments and let's get students moved into those courses by the carload.

Look, the lack of minorities and women in certain fields is a legitimate problem, and it's a problem the education world should be addressing, and addressing aggressively. But the fact that Coleman can correctly diagnose the disease does not mean we should keep listening when he says, "So you should buy a bottle of Dr. Coleman's Miracle Cure, made of oil squeezed from the finest snakes in Arabia."

We knew this was coming. The Coleman College Board is a business that has leveraged some genius marketing strategies; who else has found the giant brass balls to get their product made part of state policy (well, other than Common Core-- one more reason Coleman's new job makes sense). And if AP were as great as it says, or at least benign, that would be swell. But even as the College Board struggles to regain market share, they are also working feverishly to mess with their products. The SAT has been redesigned to match the Core, and AP courses have begun a transition from loosely structured high-quality courses to CCSS-aligned tightly structured products in a box.

But Coleman's recasting of the College Board quest for new markets as a drive for social justice is the work of a master salesman. Coleman may not know jack about education, but he can sling bullshit like a pro probably change the world with his audacious plan to sell the solution to reviving College Board's revenue stream social and economic justice.

The Limits of Data

There was a moment during a presentation at last weeks' Professional Learning Communities training (institute? gathering? big thingy?) that really illustrated, I think a bit unintentionally, the nuts-and-bolts problems with using data to "analyze" teacher effectiveness.

A chart of data from three classes broken down by three skills was on the screen, presented in student by student format. First, we looked at properly parsing the scores-- count the number of students who don't make the cut score rather than looking at averages for the class. Looked at that was, it was clear that one class had excellent results, one class had middlin' results, and one had lousy results.

And then  Dick DuFour started anticipating the explanations.

The classes might have different compositions of students. The classes might include students with learning disabilities. The classes might be at different times of day. Every possible reason you or I might give. And each one, for our example, was explained away. I honestly don't remember whether this was a real case study or a hypothetical example, but the classes were, for all intents and purposes, identical in composition.

The progression of his example was clear. After you have eliminated all other factors as an explanation, only one factor remains. The teacher.

After you have eliminated all other factors.

To make his point, he had to explain away all other variables. And this remains one of the huge limitations of student data. It's basic experimental design-- you have to control for all variables. Otherwise your data tells you nothing. If we design an experiment where plants growing in every different climate of the globe with every possible variation in light exposure, soil types, and types of plants, and then we treat each plant with a different fertilizer, the data we develop will tell us virtually nothing useful about the efficacy of the various fertilizers.

Reformsters have tried to manage the variables in several ways. They insist, for instance, that poverty, language barriers, and learning disabilities are not meaningful variables, that they make no more difference than the color of the wrapper on the fertilizer. They have tried to insist that what we think of as differences between students are not significant differences at all.

The various versions of VAM claim to be able to correct mathematically for the variables. We supposedly know that Level 3.2 squared of poverty affects student achievement by a degree of X sigma over the sine of Y and a half. My question has always been, if we know that precisely what the effects of poverty (or other factors) on student achievement, why can't we design instructional techniques to compensate for that factor. But it doesn't matter-- after we run all students through the VAMinator, they will come out the other side equalized, exactly the same.

PLCs can deal with the data gap simply, because given a good administration, the only people who have to sort out the data are the teachers in the PLC. First, they get to design the data instruments themselves, so they know what the data is supposed to mean-- its not badly written Mystery Crap in a Box. They they get to be the people who crunch the data. They have the power, authority and responsibility to say, "What we have here are apples and oranges, but we know these kids, and we can factor in their differences using our best professional judgment. We know there is more going on here than just pedagogical differences between the four of us."

But on the state and national scale, this insistence that we can explain away all differences between students becomes a large-scale farce handled by people far removed from the actual teachers and the actual students. Under the PLC model, the teachers are the data gatherers, and they are accountable to each other. You don't look your co-worker in the eye and try to sell her some made-up baloney to her face. Under the reformster model, teachers are removed from every single part of the process except the Getting Blamed For Everything part. They get to force-feed their baloney without looking anybody, anywhere in the eye.

TNTP Lost on Search for Truth

Any time TNTP writes a blog piece with "truth" in the title, you know we are about to go down the rabbit hole. But not surprisingly, an unnamed contributor over at TNTP has decided to clue us in on "The Truth About Teacher Pay." How can that possibly end badly? Let's see what truths they have uncovered!

Fact: Most districts now have multiple high quality options beyond experience and credentials for making pay decisions.

At first they start out well:


Setting teachers’ pay strictly on factors like experience or academic credentials may have been the only option before most districts had tools in place to assess teachers’ performance.

Unfortunately, they immediately head into the weeds. The correct next sentence is "We still don't have any other reliable measures of teacher performance in place, but when someone comes up with those some day, we should jump right on those. Anybody working on a real teacher eval system? Anybody?"

Instead, they compare "lockstep pay" (which is emerging as the preferred reformster term for the traditional system) to paying basketball players by height. This could have been fun if they had gone to explain how their idea (evaluating teachers for "talent, hard work, and performance") resembles the way basketball players are actually paid, but, no. Also, shed a tear for all those students who had great young teachers untimely ripped away from them.

Which is a hard drum to keep beating, since one-year-experience teachers are the largest sector of the teaching pool, and also the section mostly likely to quit the profession. If we worried about that loss of bright young things, perhaps we could talk about retention, or at least see what the numbers are when we stack the Number of Teachers Who Are Unjustly Laid Off next to the Number of Teachers Who Get Out of Dodge Early. Do you have those Numbers of Truth handy, TNTP?

Fact: Very few districts have tried true performance-based pay, but where it’s been tried it seems to be working.

Who knew?  DC schools have made it possible to earn 100K in year four, and so teacher pay has dropped as a leading reason to get the hell out of DC schools. Wait. Doesn't that help prove that performance pay doesn't help retain teachers? And supposedly it's really helping in Tennessee, where this big report that, frankly, I'm still too jet-lagged to read in its entirety, but check out the abstract:

We report findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation of the recently implemented $5000 retention bonus program for effective teachers in Tennessee’s priority schools. We estimate the impact of the program on teacher retention using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of treatment conditional on the composite teacher effectiveness rating that assigns bonus eligibility. Point estimates for the main effect of the bonuses are consistently positive across all specifications, and for teachers of tested subjects the program appears to have an effect that is generally both statistically and substantively significant. Implementation concerns, including the timing of application process and observed noncompliance in bonus distribution, present obstacles for both the program’s effectiveness and its evaluation

Oh, guys, stop. You had me at "fuzzy regression discontinuity design."

Fact: Performance-based pay can easily be structured to value experience when it is accompanied by strong performance.

Hey! It's an actual fact. Way to go, TNTP!


Fact: The research base has become much stronger in recent years on the question of distinguishing levels of teacher performance. Evaluation systems that use multiple measures to rate teacher performance can help school systems recognize and reward those who are getting the best results in the classroom.

So much for facty stuff. Our single link of "proof" here takes us to that golden oldie, the Gates Foundation MET study. TNTP tells us that we need multiple measures (a phrase they use so often that I imagine it cropping up in odd contexts, like a reformy version of "that's what she said.") and to check with the community and make sure that administrators know what they're doing and give teachers a way to up their game and, hey, I already have that system finished. When is my gazillion dollar grant coming, anyway?

Fact: Teachers in the same school won’t be competing with one another for slices of a static pay pie because performance-based pay isn’t a zero-sum game.

Oh, TNTP. Mostly this blog of your has been an exercise of fuzzy discontinuity with the truth, but this is just a lie. Or you are dumb as rocks. One of those two. Your explanation is so short that I suspect you figured you'd better get out quick before you started laughing.

TNTP says "There is no cap." I look forward to watching them explain that to taxpayers. I want TNTP to come to a school district and stand before taxpayers to say, "There are so many awesome teachers in your district that you have no choice but to raise taxes ten mills to fund their performance-based pay levels." In referendum states, that will be particularly entertaining.

Or maybe we'll get to enjoy watching TNTP explain to a district, "We had to cut the arts program because the English teachers all get super-huge capless performance based pay."

Of course performance-based pay is a zero-sum game. School districts do not make more money when they do well. The pie is fixed by the tax rate. Performance-based pay means we must all get out the knives, either for the pie or each other.

Fact: School systems can implement performance-based pay by re-allocating existing funds.

See above.

This does get closer to the real motivation behind the new fix-the-pay initiative. See, we move to evaluation-based employment decisions. We up pay at the lowest levels. We rig the system to favor people who don't want to have a teaching career, because it reduces overall costs both in obvious and unobvious ways.

When we look at the spread of TFA, we tend to focus on how cheap they are to hire. Sometimes we forget the ticking time bomb in many states that is teacher pensions. Teaching temps aren't just cheap now-- they're cheap later, because No Pension Costs!

See, TNTP, when you say stuff like this:

School systems that decide to pay for great teaching can afford to do it because they will no longer be constrained by the rigid boundaries of lockstep compensation. 

It's hard to take you seriously. We're going to get rid of all the imaginary legions of allegedly crappy teachers and replace them with the best and the brightest, and we're going to pay all the best and brightest top dollar no matter how long they've been there.

IOW, it would be like a district under the current system where all teachers are long-timers who are on the top step.

How can that not be expensive as hell? Only if the top step becomes lower than it is under the current system, or if the school cuts programs, or raises taxes, or hires fewer teachers, or has no pension funding liabilities because all teachers leave within five years.

So thank you, nameless TNTP functionary, for searching for the truth for us. But I suggest you get back out there are search some more, because what you have brought back looks kind of old and dead and also smells funny.

Joy and Pain in PLC-land

Oh, if only we could easily sort all education ideas into perfectly embraceable and easily rejectable. But it's rarely that simple; we have to use the Power of Actual Thinking to separate the usable from the risible.

Last week I spent two and a half days in the arms of PLC with colleagues from my school. Our administration is looking longingly at taking the PLC plunge and had shipped us to Seattle for some training. This was a triple-win for me-- I've been interested in learning more about Professional Learning Communities, I've always wanted to see Seattle, and my daughter and son-in-law live there. So I extended my stay and added family time to my education.

For you, reader, I'm here to answer this question:

What is the PLC stuff about, and is it one more reformy poop sandwich, or can it be useful for supporters of public education?

Those of you who have gone swimming in the PLC pool are welcome to chime in in the comments. I'll providing first impressions, which include the impression that the PLC journey goes in many different directions depending on your local choices.

A first-rate show

We have all sat through PD cobbled together by amateur-hour road show groups, organizations that thought they had something to sell but were intent on selling it as cheaply as possible. That is not Solution Tree. Solution Tree bills themselves as a publishing company, but they've mastered the business of corporate-style training. If you've never been inside Seattle's conference center, here's a shot of the main room we met in.

There were about 1400 attendees. At something over $600 a pop, this was not a low-budget affair. The use of media and tech was flawless and slick, and the speakers were all as polished as the brass on Air Force 1.

The business is headed up by Richard and Rebecca DuFour (and that's a bit more Dick than Becky on that top line) with a cadre of "faculty" at the "institute" who have a visible pecking order. Everybody is on point, starts and ends on time (well, starts, anyway) and nobody is fumbling around like they're not sure what happens next. All of the "faculty" are available pretty much all the time; they aren't lounging around like they have nothing to do, but if you want to talk to them or ask a question, all you have to do is walk up to them and open your mouth.

Little Red Flags

Since my virtual bread and imaginary butter here in bloggistan is made keeping a close eye on language, I was naturally alert for signs of reforminess in the DuFours' world. They were not hard to spot. The institute was bookended by the moral imperative of making schools better in order to save students from poverty. I'm not a fan, personally, but as I've explained elsewhere, I don't need to be.

PLC's are also very big on the whole tight-loose thing so beloved by thinky tanks like Fordham, and DuFour goes back often to research by Marzana, a name that conjures up plenty of angst for some folks.

On the Other Hand

The PLC concept goes back to 1998, so obviously pre-Common Core, and they have not made many concession to the kool-ade of the month. There were a couple of break-out sessions that addressed some CCSS concerns, but mostly it was rarely mentioned. When reformster ideas were addressed, it was usually by Richard DuFour himself. While Becky DuFour has a sweetish Southern Sissy Spacek thing going on, Chicagolander Richard has an interesting edge of sass and snark happening, and while mostly he was somewhere between avuncular and direct, that sass occasionally breaks out. I'm pretty sure that he let loose many zingers that sailed right over the crowd (I don't think I got them because of superior intellect, but because of my New Hampshire background).

DuFour referred to CCSS as curriculum, and pointedly observed that pushing down paper lists from above has not worked and is not working now. In response to a question about meshing PLCs with centralized planning and scripted lessons, DuFour was very direct.

"You don't. A scripted school is not a PLC and never will be." Such centralized control "might give the illusion of consistency," but it costs you the real expertise of your teachers. He also expressed disapproval of "draconian" reforms that base teacher evaluations on test results, then use those evaluations to drive hiring, firing and pay decisions.

Not a Koolaid Party

You know the type of PD that is really, really creepy. This "institute" had moments of that. A working-way-too-hard emcee. A contest to write a song about PLC stuff. Ending the institute calling up any audience members who wished to to join in the electric slide to "Celebrate." (Honestly, how anybody can stand to do a dance that doesn't come in 8-beat increments is beyond me).

But mostly, it was cool, calm, and professional. The presenters in the big sessions seemed acutely aware that it was just sit-and-listen in the audience, so they managed pace and elements of the presentation well, and while there was definitely an emotional element to what they presented, I never had the sense that they were trying to evoke a wash of emotions to drown my brain. Nobody at any point reminded me of an evangelist. The general tone was "This is really important, and you need to get it right, but to do that you need to understand it well."

So what is the idea of a Professional Learning Community exactly?

Here come the grotesque oversimplifications.

PLCs appear to be the education grandchildren of business-world work groups, particularly the interdependent ones. A group of teachers get together regular to set SMART goals (which take us all the way back to Management By Objectives, which also spawned an educational offspring) and then collect data to determine if they're meeting the goals. "Collect data" in PLC-land means "give teacher-designed common formative performance-based assessments."

Once that data is gathered, the PLC members get crunching and determine which teachers seem to know the secret to teaching the targeted skill, and if they can bottle that for everybody else, or take the remedial group, or however they choose to manage their stragglers.

There are assumptions about which the PLC folks are "tight."

All children can learn at high levels.

All teachers must play. Collaboration by invitation is an automatic fail.

Focus must be on what students are learning, not what teachers are teaching.

Decisions must be based on local data, local decisions. No teaching out of the book.

Deja Vu All Over Again

If you are of a certain age (say, mine), you begin to suspect that Richard DuFour figured out how to synthesize many of the major education Next Big Things of the last thirty years. What makes it interesting is that it includes the parts that directly conflict with the current reformster movement. The DuFours are leading a large, successful educational movement that flies in the face of the push for centrally controlled, teacher-crushing corporate reform of the last decade-- and they're doing it right in plain sight.

Weaknesses? The Cultural Challenges of PLCs.

There are some aspects of the PLC approach that are either built-in bugs or vulnerabilities.

* Culture before structure. Solution Tree recognizes that successful implementation requires a particular culture in the school. Your school may or may not be able to pull that off.

* The Solution Tree folks are very careful to say that if Teacher A's students have mostly succeeded on the unit and Teacher B's students have not, we don't say Teacher B has failed, but that Teacher A just has the successful technique that Teacher B needs to borrow. While I can buy that to a limited extent, it runs the risk of reducing teachers to widgets. Many of my colleagues use techniques that I cannot because we are different human beings who establish different sorts of relationships with our students. We can certainly learn and share with each other, but teachers are not just interchangeable mannequins who can have different teacher clothes strapped on to change our effect.

* Every teacher empowerment team-committee-group-department work always comes down to the same thing-- administrative support. Will they provide the time and resources necessary (PLCs require a good chunk of in-school time regularly)? Will they have a pre-determined conclusion that the group is supposed to reach (in which case, we're wasting everyone's time)?

* Sharing the kids. The sessions returned repeatedly to the idea that teachers must not work in isolation, and that everybody shares responsibility for all the kids-- no more "my kids" and "your kids," but only "our kids." This puts PLCs on a collision course with current reformster trends, which say that "my kids" are "my kids" and also "the kids who will determine whether I get to keep my job." Will a teacher in a district facing evaluation-based layoffs be ready to help his next-door neighbors raise scores and thereby damage his own employment security? PLCs are all about collaboration, but reformsters think we all need more intra-teacher competition.

So, Good Idea or Not So Much

I like structures that are locally directed and teacher driven, and PLCs done right appear to be both. Lots of folks appear to be using the program with success. The Solution Tree folks say frankly that many schools are half-assing PLCs and kidding themselves, but the clear implication in those discussions ("that's their problem") is oddly encouraging.

It remains to be seen how this will play out in my own district, but if you are in a district that is considering PLCs, it's probably not necessary to put on your bomb suit and head for your bunker. You'll need to run what you hear through the filter of your own professional judgment (which you should always be doing anyway), but at a bare minimum, PLC materials are a challenge to think about what you do as a teacher and why you do it and how you could do it better.

Tracking

Not a fan of heterogeneous grouping. Never have been. It's a purely personal choice; I experienced it as a high school student and it was miserable.

But while I believe that tracking is the way to go, I believe there are a couple of ways we do it wrong.

Most commonly we track by the destination. We let students know that Bus A runs to college and Bus B runs to a trade. Each bus runs its own route, and only that route. If students want to ride Bus A, they have to get themselves to the bus stop. Once they meet they bus, the bus can drive them pretty reliably to their destination, but they've got to get themselves from their home to the bus stop, and some students get lost on the way.

Sometimes we track by the students' transportation. This student drives a Porsche, so we put that student on a wide, open highway. This student drives a Yugo with bald tires, so we put that student on a road that is flat and straight. This student drives a rugged SUV, so we send the student up a grinding rough rocky road. And this student is walking, so we put the student on a footpath beside the river. This can seem like a great way to customize the student's travels, but it often fails to consider either where the student starts or where the path leads. We still require the students to find their own way to the starting point, and we don't even think about where the path leads-- just how well the student can travel it.

We often talk about personalizing or individualizing a student's track, but what we really mean is that we make allowances for students to get on the path at different points. Instead of catching the bus at the very beginning of the trail, the student can catch the bus at many different points--along that one route. The students still have to get themselves to the bus stop, and every student is still riding along exactly the same route-- the only difference is how much of the route they travel.

What should we do? Pick up each student at home, meeting each student where he/she lives, drive the student around until the student is ready. Then give each one a gps, a map, and the keys to the car.

Tracking has to consider not just where the trail ends, but where it begins, and how the student is going to travel it. These days, at our best, we tend to just go two out of three. We need three out of three to get really individualized education in place.

Teacher Time

Every profession measures time differently. Doctors and lawyers measure time in hours or vague lumps. Teachers measure time in minutes, even seconds.

If a doctor (or his office) tell you that something is going to happen "at nine o'clock," that means sometime between 9:30 and Noon. Lawyers, at least in my neck of the woods, can rarely be nailed down to an actual time. Anything that's not a scheduled appointment is "sometime this afternoon." Even a summons to jury duty will list a particular time which just represents the approximate time at which things will start to prepare to begin happening. Further up the Relaxed Time Scale, we find the delivery and installation guys for whom "Between 8 AM and 3 PM Tuesday," means "Not at all on Tuesday."

Meanwhile, in teacher land, 9:00 means exactly 9:00. Other professionals may round off, saying 9:00 when they really mean 8:57 or 9:08, but we mean what we say. If a class starts at 9:00 and ends at 9:51, we are getting our fifty-one minutes of class.

This is one of those things that non-teachers don't entirely get. If you work in an office, time is pretty flexy. If a meeting can benefit by running an extra ten or fifteen minutes, you just do it. But in most schools, when the bell rings, you're done. There is no little extra bit of time you can just throw into the work.

Consequently we tend to measure out our time in coffee spoons. One minute and forty-three seconds left in class? Okay, I can totally get three more practice sentences about participial phrases in before I remind them of tomorrow's assignment. Which is better than realizing that you've got two minutes and twenty seconds left for a three-and-a-half minute piece of business.

Nobody in the business world feels any real difference between a forty-two minute meeting and a fifty-one minute meeting, but most teachers feel a whole world of difference in that nine-minute gap. That's why the phrase "It'll just a take a couple of minutes," doesn't mean a thing to civilians, but makes a teacher's heart sink. I think it's also part of why civilians don't really understand what they're asking when they request or require that teachers add "just one more little" thing to the teaching day.

Other than the fact that it gives some teachers the uncanny ability to act as human egg timers, I'm not sure we benefit much from this heightened time awareness. Yes, teachers learn to be punctual, which is a virtue, I hear. But doctors and lawyers and other folks are fast and loose (well, loose) with time because for them, a task takes as long as it takes, whereas in teaching, a task takes as long as we get to do it.

It's a fantasy of mine to imagine a classroom in which I say, "Okay, class. We're going to work with dependent clauses today, and we're going to keep at it till everyone gets it." I understand that problems that go with that (Mrs. Numberwhacker is up the hall wishing I would be done with clauses so she can get started with quadratic equations), but one of the screwy things about how we're set up in this country is that the most fundamental organizing principle is The Clock. Not the students, teachers, or lessons, but The Clock. I know it's hard to think of another way to manage several hundred humans working on a hundred tasks under one roof, but a guy can dream. And if your school figured out a way to be student or task centered, I'd be fascinated to hear about it.

Poverty and the Moral Imperative of Education

We are being bombarded regularly with arguments about poverty and education that are fallaciously constructed, used to support the wrong conclusion, and, ironically, are unnecessary.

The Big Scary Facts

It usually begins with a list of assorted research factoids like these:

* Students who fail school are three times more likely to be unemployed.
* Students who fail school will make far less than what a high school grad makes, which is in turn far less than what a college grad makes.
* Students who drop out are hugely more likely to end up in jail.
* Students who fail school are more likely to end up uninsured, have poor health, a die as much as decade sooner than graduates.
* In 1970, most of the middle class had high school diplomas. In 2007, it was about a quarter.

And So, Education

The conclusion we're asked to reach from these data is always the same-- education. We must make sure that every student completes high school with a full education, because that's how we will fix all of the above problems.

This is the "education fixes poverty" mantra. If we get everybody through high school prepared for a good job (defined in many PD sessions as "a job with an above-the-poverty-line" wage) then nobody will be poor and everybody will be healthy and happy and successful.

There are two huge problems with this argument.

How Much Does a Workforce Shape An Economy, Anyway?

Let's imagine that over the next five years, every young American in the pipeline made it all the way to a bachelor's degree. Would we suddenly find ourselves in a country in which every job paid well above minimum wage (a necessity if we're all going to live above the poverty line). Would the vast service sector, the whole workforce of, say. Micky D's, get a raise, or would those jobs just disappear, the be replaced by well-paying tech jobs?

There's a huge number of twenty-something's living at home right now that suggest that having a great education does not make a job appear. "Well, that's because they got some useless liberal arts degree," say our hardnosed economics experts. "If everybody got, say, a computer degree, then we wouldn't have this problem." Because, yes, if the country were filled with trained computer guys, tech companies would just say, "Heck, hire them all!"

But more importantly...

Correlation Is Not Causation

It must be something about the age we live in. I'm an English teacher and even I am tired of pointing out the correlation-not-causation thing to people.

If A and B tend to appear together, it's always wise to look for a C that connects to both of them. It's that simple. And for the data above, C is not particularly hard to find.

Here's a group of people who tend to have bad outcomes-- low income, poor health (because no insurance and poor nutrition and lousy home situation), high rate of actual "criminal" (as defined by the dominant culture) behavior as well as high rate of navigating the justice system badly once they get hoovered up into it (almost as if they can't afford good lawyers), difficulty getting and holding jobs. What emerges as a likely cause of most of this? That's right-- poverty.

Here's another group of people. They may see no real use in education, they get the most poorly-managed and under-resourced schools, they have an unstable home life that makes school difficult, they come from a different culture than the dominant culture around which schools are organized. For these reasons and others, they often do not finish school. What do many of them have in common? Yessirreebob-- poverty.

These two groups are mostly the same group. They are A and B-- poverty is our C. Failing school does not lead to all these other outcomes. Failing school is one more outcome on the list of Effects of Poverty.

Two Incorrect Conclusions

I want to absolutely clear. It is absolutely, categorically, unequivocally, dead-wrong wrong to conclude that poverty is such an obstacle to educating some children that we should just give up or pack it in or settle for doing a crappy job because, after all, poverty. Just as it is wrong to say that education is helpless before the power of poverty and therefor we should just shrug and expect that we won't do any good. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO, no, and also, no.

It is also incorrect to conclude that delivering a middle class education to poor students will turn them into middle class adults.

A Better Conclusion


Look, research may conclude that the happiest animals in the zoo are the ones that roll in the mud and eat hay with their trunks. But I would be a fool to then declare that I will make the penguins happier by feeding them straw and teaching them to roll in the mud.

Whenever a PD leaders or a politician or a reformster of some sort throws these details at me, I do not think, "Oh, man. We are failing to educate well enough to end poverty." I think, "We are delivering the wrong product to some of our students."

I think we are making a huge mistake in trying to deliver the same product to students living in poverty that we deliver to students living in comfy middle class life. What we keep proposing is that we approach a population of students with distinct needs and a distinct culture and declaring that if we just educate them real hard, we will make those differences go away. We are figuratively suggesting that students in the ELL population will become fluent speakers of English if we just teach them as if they already were. And of course the Secretary of Education has already literally suggested that students with special needs will no longer have those special needs if we just demand that they stop behaving as if they have special needs.

This is dumb.

It's Teacher 101. You meet students where they are. And what all this data says to me is that students living in systemic generational poverty are somewhere different than where we are setting up schools.

Important Clarification

I know that nobody wants to have a conversation about schools designed for areas of poverty and the students trapped there, because for decades "schools serving high-poverty populations" has been synonymous with "crappy schools that are underfunded, understaffed, chaotic and crappy." On the list if Things Anti-Reform Resistance Fighters Don't Get is just how powerful it is for people living in those areas to hear, "We are going to get you schools just as good as the ones in the 'burbs." Nobody has made that promise in a long, long time.

But we can't confuse "just the same as"  with "just as good as." Feeding my penguins straw in the mud is just the same as what I do for elephants, but its worse care, because it doesn't recognize the needs and nature of the penguins.

We are missing the boat for students living in poverty because we are not committing to finding out what resources they need. Instead of meeting their needs, we are trying to create a system that erases those needs-- not by meeting them, but by denying them. We are doing the educational equivalent of saying, "You would not be so hungry if you were wearing a polo shirt. People who wear polo shirts are never hungry."

Why The Whole Argument Is Irrelevant

The whole "we must educate students because failing school leads to all these awful things" argument is used to create a sense of urgency, to convince everyone that we must use all our educational might to bring about social justice. It's a moral imperative to teach all these students who are failing school so that our society won't have all these bad effects any more.

Maybe this is useful when addressing civilians and politicians and trying to create a sense of moral urgency, but I wish folks would stop using it with teachers. Here's why--

Teachers already have a moral imperative to teach every single student to the best of our ability and to the fullest of his or her potential.

This whole argument hits me about like someone saying, "Hey, let me explain to you some good reasons for helping people get out of a burning building." It's okay. Really- I don't really think I need a set of extra reasons, particularly ill-formed ones, to convince me of what I already know.

Every young human in America deserves a high-quality education, which will be best created in a relationship with an institution that recognizes the student's potential, abilities, needs and situation. Every young human deserves an education of the highest quality, an education that will open up a whole world of awesome possibilities. Every young human in America deserves an education that is a journey, one that begins right where the student is, and opens up a vast network of pathways that give the student infinite choices to reach the destination of his or her choosing. That's the moral imperative.

Failing school does not cause poverty. And it's not even right to say poverty causes failing school. The high level of failure among students living in poverty is a sign that our schools are not meeting the needs of those students.