Monday, September 8, 2014

The College Bias

It's not new and it's not hard to explain. After all, virtually all teachers are college educated. We're pre-disposed to a collegiate bias.

Add to that the correlation between more education and more money, and add to that the manner in which DC (by way of CCSS) has institutionalized college as The Goal, and it's no surprise that in education, we have a decidedly pro-college bias.

In many high schools, it's built into the curriculum. College prep courses are for the smart kids. Non-college prep courses are for the not-so-smart ones. Non-college prep courses are not supposed to be anybody's deliberate choice, but a sort of academic safety net one falls into if one is not capable enough to hack it in the college prep classes. Sometimes we are extremely explicit about this. In her article for NEA (Ten Soul Saving Tips for New Teachers), Susan Anglada Bartley offers this tip:

8. Start with the assumption that all students wish to pursue a college or post-high school education. If you walk into your room assuming that some kids can make it to college, while others can never walk that path, they will know. Resentments will build. They will feel discriminated against and they won’t listen to you. You will lose their trust. But if you chose to empower them all by sharing resources and encouraging them all toward college, they will appreciate the opportunity. Shine the light. If you are in a high poverty environment, remember this second mantra: As a teacher, I am a guide toward a brighter future. 

Well, no. Bartley, like way too many people, has conflated "won't go to college" with "be a big dumb loser at life."

I teach an honors class at my school, but I also teach our non-college prep class. I do not start the year by telling them that they can totally go to college (and thereby imply that they should want to); what I tell them is that they are in the class designed for people headed toward life "out there" and other students in that other class are headed for college. And both are equally valid and valuable.

I know, I know. All those charts showing that the more education you get, the more money you have (of course, articles touting that data rarely ask if it might be the other way around). And my President exhorts students to dream big and shoot for college. And I sent my own kids to college, and felt strongly enough about it that I'll be paying for it for years to come.

But at the same time, I am troubled by our attitude about blue collar work, our tendency to treat good solid labor as if it's some sort of bronze medal, proof that you weren't good enough to come in first place.

As Mike Rowe said repeatedly, these are the people who make civilized life possible for the rest of us. We devalue them with our low regard and with our lack of honor and attention. And we especially devalue them by telling our young people, "Oh, gracious, no. You don't want to become one of those."

We try to justify it as steering students away from types of work that are drying up and disappearing, and yet while we are still cranking out a gazillion college professor wannabe's for the two remaining college teaching jobs (part time) left in the country, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a ten million person shortfall in trained laborers by 2020. If you prefer anecdotal support, I can tell you that my brother, who manages a medium-sized industrial operation, is always looking for welders, because there aren't enough. I'd rather we didn't, but if you must measure success in dollars, I can tell you that good welders make good money.

And job (and money) prospects aside, we are perfectly willing to tell students to pursue their dreams no matter what. We tell them to go for it-- unless their dream is working at a modest labor job and hunting and fishing and sitting on the front porch.

It's not just that we have to stop pushing the notion that getting some sort of post-secondary degree is the only way to make a living. We have got to stop pushing the notion that people who get a college education are somehow better people, people more likely to win at life. My non-college classes over the years have included their share of students who are smart, hard-working, and decent men and women of considerable integrity. I have watched them grow up and take their places as productive citizens, loving parents, and fine members of this community. I would never, ever, tell them that they failed to "dream big" by going to college, and consequently their lives are meager and small.

And yes-- there are children who need to escape their circumstances, grow bigger than the world that grew them. But college is not the only worthy escape hatch.

In education, we need to walk a fine line between equipping students to follow their dreams and helping them aspire to greater dreams than they may come up with on their own. We need to do our best to give our students the tools to pursue the dreams they choose for themselves, whatever those might be. It seems so obvious, and yet the umpty-bazzillion dollars in college debt now being carried by twenty-somethings (and their parents) suggests that it is not-- not all roads to a happy and productive future lead through a college campus.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

TFA 4.0 & Minority Teachers

Teach for America is nothing if not flexible.

In the oft-told tale, TFA was a targeted response to a specific problem-- inner-city schools that could not find enough qualified staff to fill their teacher positions. TFA would create an American teacher version of the Peace Corps, making it cool to put in a couple of years in a classroom before heading on to your real job.

In fact, TFA 2.0 came fairly quickly on the heels of Original Flavor-- logging some time in a classroom as a TFAer was a good stepping stone into the education management industry, a nice supplement to your business degree and a nice resume builder for people headed for government work or the ever-growing field of edubusinesses (charters, etc).

But that Fill in the Classroom Blanks mission was over. In Vox last week, Dana Goldstein was even giving Wendy Kopp credit for helping solve the teachers shortage crisis. You remember the teacher shortage crisis that happened...um... some time?

At any rate, the crisis was averted. But TFA did not announce "Mission Accomplished" and head off. No, instead they morphed into TFA 3.0, which on reflection was probably their least nimble move. The organization was already losing its pretty shine as people realized that, in places like Chicago and New Orleans, TFA wasn't merely filling teaching positions, but shoving the original actually-trained-in-teacher-school occupants of those positions aside.

The message of TFA 3.0 was that they were here to save education. The crisis was no longer a shortage of teachers, but a shortage of teachers who didn't suck. In ways that began to leak regularly as disenchanted recruits dropped out of TFA, the organization was pushing the message that public school teachers had just failed miserably to do their jobs and what was needed was a cadre of the Best and the Brightest to get in there, to rescue the children that nobody but TFA teachers could rescue.

TFA 3.0 was not a winning marketing strategy. The organization looked like a bunch of drive-by do-gooders, at best charity tourists heading uptown for a resume and self-esteem boost, at worst condescending White Man's Burden colonizers. TFA 3.0 was what the Onion famously lampooned in a piece that continues to be passed around on twitter.

TFA read the writing on the wall and started morphing into TFA 4.0.

They would try to be less arrogant. They would entertain the possibility that five weeks of summer camp were not sufficient for prepping inner city teachers. And they would identify a new problem to address-- minority teachers.

Somebody did their homework on this one. This is the year that white students make up less than half the student population nation wide, and yet, the makeup of teaching staffs have headed in the other direction. Some of the stats are mind-boggling-- California has a 73% non-white student population, but teachers are only 29% non-white. And no state comes close to coming close.
This counts as a real issue. Students ought to see some people who look like them in their school buildings (and the issue extends to gender-- the US teaching force is now overwhelmingly female).

And so TFA 4.0 is now a group devoted to the mission of getting non-white teachers into the classroom. They have promoted the new version of themselves well. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center Teaching Tolerance project has hired on a TFA grad to praise the new TFA. You can read the article here, but read the comments as well to see just how spirited the defense of TFA 4.0 gets.

Teacher diversity is not a bad cause to fight for. But it underlines the true nature of TFA. This kind of shifting about is not what a service organization does. If cancer is cured today, the American Cancer Society does not announce tomorrow that they will now lead the fight against obesity. No, this kind of shift is what a business does. If the product stream from our old merchandise starts to dry up, we find a new thing to sell so we can stay in business. If TFA wants to be a business, that's fine. Just don't pretend to be anything else.

The other problem with TFA and its spirited recruitment of non-white people to teach is that it addresses the wrong part of the problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the profession at a higher rate than white teachers-- but they are also leaving at a far higher rate. Nobody really knows why, though guesses include the idea that non-white teachers choose poverty-affected schools and the general chaos, lack of resources, and absence of autonomy to deal with their work all combine to chase them away.

But the big takeaway? Recruitment is not the problem. Retention is.

Unfortunately, retention issues have never been part of TFA's business model, which is centered on the Just A Few Years model of a teaching career. Given their model, TFA would be the absolute last people we would want working on the problem of retaining minority teachers. Emily Chiariello, the Teaching Tolerance TFA hire says this

More recently, TFA has focused on diversity and made deliberate changes to its recruiting techniques. First on their “who we look for” list as characteristic of successful teachers and desirable in applicants is “[a] deep belief in the potential of all kids and a commitment to do whatever it takes to expand opportunities for students, often informed by experience in low-income communities and an understanding of the systemic challenges of poverty and racism.” 

But changing recruiting isn't the issue, other than it might help to start tweaking the system so that it's checking for people who will be lifetime teachers instead of two-year temps. And that's teachers-- not educational paper pushers of some sort.

If TFA wants to really make a go of helping to solve this problem, they need to look at preparing and supporting those teachers so that they can build a foundation of success that will carry them into a teaching career. But that would make the distance from TFA 1.0 to TFA 4.0 an awfully huge gap.

The lack of non-white, male teachers in the teaching force is a real issue, and it demands attention. But TFA 4.0 is not the answer.

No, Education Post Is Not About Conversation

Twelve million dollars buys you a big splash. Many of us have launched blogs; very few of us have had heavy press coverage of the launch.

When Anthony Cody, a nationally known education writer and activist left the nest at Education Week to launch Living in Dialogue, a website that features work from many of the top writers in education policy today, the Washington Post did not dispatch Lindsey Layton to cover the new addition to the education conversation. But when Education Post, a site with a similar format (multiple writers cover education issues) and a similar stated mission (further the education conversation), launched last week, it got the royal treatment in other media outlets.

It's telling that Education Post's logo is a bullhorn. Its intention of providing a new education conversation vanishes immediately in its press coverage. In the Washington Post coverage, Bloomberg guy Howard Wolfson said

There hasn’t really been an organization dedicated to sharing the successes of education reform around the country. You have local success, but it isn’t amplified elsewhere.

Bruce Reed, from the Broad Foundation, is even clearer. 

One of the goals of Education Post is to publicize what works in public education.

Reed also offers this characterization of the problem voices in the debate

Most of the people in the organizations we work with are too busy starting schools or teaching kids to spend much time to take part in a policy debate about what they do. They're showing up at 7 in the morning to run a school and grading papers late into the night. They're not blogging vicious comments at the bottom of every education news story that gets written. [emphasis mine]

Just for the record, I get to school at 7 AM and grade papers late into the night and a few other things besides. I still make time to burn bandwidth because education is important to me. Just sayin'.

Education Post is not just about its own website. In Mark Walsh's EdWeek piece on the launch, we find this tidbit

Cunningha, said some of the group's work will be behind the scenes, drafting op-ed articles for policymakers, educators, and others, as well as providing strategic advice. But a more public effort
will involve writing blog posts and responding to public misconceptions.

In the Washington Post piece, it comes out like this   


Education Post also will have a “rapid response” capacity to “knock down false narratives” and will focus on “hot spots” around the country where conflicts with national implications are playing out, Cunningham said.


So, not conversation. Now, if reformsters want to put together a site devoted to getting out their message, that fine. When I go to Anthony Cody's site, I expect that I'll find a certain point of view represented, and my policy here at this blog is that I stick to saying things that I believe are true.

But Education Post goes a step beyond a simple bloggy point of view. It's looking a lot more like a well-financed, well-populated political PR rapid response team. And it has already shown its rapid response skills. When I wrote my initial take on the site, I had two twitter accounts associated with the group challenging me by the end of the afternoon, talking points at the ready. The second round of blogs include, along with pieces in praise of standardized testing and the new teacher evaluation models, a piece entitled "I'm All Ears, Jose." It's a response to Jose Luis Vilson, one of the A-list ed bloggers to take an early look at EP, and it reads a little like Peter Cunningham's version of "Was there something you wanted to tell the whole class?"

Again, there's nothing wrong with having a point of view, and  nothing wrong with being assertive about it. But these guys are not exploring or conversing; they're selling something, and they are defining "toxic" conversation as words that interfere with their sales pitch. This is not an attempt to have a conversation, but an attempt to shape and control one.

Controlling the narrative is all the rage in these issues. Mercedes Schneider and Paul Thomas have both written recent pieces that show this subtle and powerful technique in action. I say, "So there we were, winning the game with superior skills, when some people got upset, apparently about some foul in the third quarter. We are totally open to discussing that third quarter foul situation," and if you want to engage in the argument about the foul, that's fine with me because we've now sold the notion that my team was winning and that we have superior skill.

EdPost's narrative is that we were all just sitting around, talking pleasantly about how to accomplish great things with these really successful ed reforms, and suddenly the conversation turned ugly and unpleasantly toxic. Now we just need people to calm down so that we can talk about all the great successes of ed reform.

This is disingenuous on two levels. First, it's what people who believe in marketing way too much do. When their Big Poop Sandwich is selling poorly, they work with the assumption that's there's a problem with their messaging and not a problem with trying sell a sandwich filled with poop. Second, they already know when the conversation turned ugly. It was back a few years ago when reformsters refused to listen to any dissenting voices and proceeded to dismiss all critics as cranks and fringe elements and hysterically deluded suburban white moms. Back then a combative tone was okay because they thought they would win that conversation. Now they would like a new choice, please.

There is another secondary story here-- the tale of the former Obama administration figures who have become field operatives for hard-edged reformster promotion. From this PR initiative to the East Coast Vergara lawsuit of Campbell Brown, we're seeing former Obama/Duncan folks resurface as reformster warriors. At the very least, a reminder that it's a mistake to assume that a Democrat is on the side of public education.

Look, I'm all for civil conversation. I count a large number of reformster types with whom I have had plenty of civil exchanges. But those exchanges include honesty and listening and an intention to understand what the other person is saying. Education Post and its extremely well-funded megaphone appear to come up a bit short.

Put another way-- if your neighbor drives a tank into his driveway and parks it next to a few cases of ammo, and then he tells you, "Look! I got a great new sailboat! Pretty soon we'll all be heading out onto the lake together," you'd be right to have a few doubts. Education Post may want to promote itself as a sailboat, but it sure looks like a tank to me.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

The Other Conservative Reform Argument

If you've been scratching your head and wondering why several prominent conservative ed writers and thinky tankists have been turning on the Common Core lately, we have an reminder of where a new argument could be headed.

Over at SFGate, we find Vicki E. Alger, a thinky tankist from the Independent Institute (libertarian) in Oakland, presenting this article-- "American Education Needs Competition, Not Common Core."

The title pretty well says it all. The article is loaded with baloney. Did you know that the CCSS standards writers compromised on real toughness in the standards in order to get buy in from teachers' unions? Of course you didn't, for much the same reason that you weren't aware that the flames on the sun are maintained by dancing fairies.

There's more in a general Glen Becky way-- federal overreach, data gathering, feds many broken education promises. But here's the pin on which the argument pivots.

Ultimately, Common Core rests on the faulty premise that a single, centralized entity knows what's best for all 55 million students nationwide. Raising the education bar starts with putting the real experts in charge: students' parents.

For much of the new wave of reformy goodness, choice, privatization and the Core have traveled hand in hand. The premise was that CCSS would be a yardstick by which all schools could be measured, and by using it (by way of super-awesome tests) we would find out that public schools were sucky and needed to be escaped by sending students (and their money) to charter/choice/private schools.

In this newer argument, the Core is no longer a yardstick of excellence, but a straightjacket of government naughtiness. The Core used to be a tool for helping students escape terrible government schools; now it's a symbol of why government schools are terrible. This is not a new argument; it's just one that we haven't always clearly associated with the conservative fans of reforminess.

Bottom line: Reformsters who are fans of privatization and free-market voucherish solutions for the dismantling and monetization of public education-- these folks do not really need the Common Core to push their agenda, and can easily move from fighting for it to fighting against it without having to drop any other piece of their program. Alger has been beating this drum for a while; who knows when her band might suddenly get bigger.


Out Standing In Our Field

It's something that every teacher can do for all teachers. Get out into the community

I've heard the speech from fellow teachers-- "When I walk out of here at the end of the day, I don't want to see any students again until I walk back into school tomorrow." I have known teachers who deliberately bought homes well outside the district limits so that their home life would never, ever intersect with their school life.

We can't do that any more. We cannot hold ourselves separate from the communities where we serve.

I teach in a small town, so I know plenty of teachers who stay active and connected. they sing in church choirs. The coach little league. They paint houses in the summer. They work with the Humane Society. One teacher in my building was the town mayor for years. Me? I play in a town band, write for the local newspaper, and stay involved in local community theater (right now I'm directing a production of Chicago-- stop by if you're in the neighborhood in three or four weeks).

I shop at local businesses where my students and their parents and my former students all work. My students see me in the grocery store. Buying food!! In jeans!!!

Yes, there are down sides. When I was president of the striking local years ago, people knew right where to find me. And when my first marriage blew up and I became a divorced single male in a small town, there were plenty of entertaining stories told about me.

But teachers who are out in the community, who are visible and active, are teachers whose students can recognize them as actual human beings. When we are visibly connected to the communities we serve, we are real stakeholders and participants and not just drive-by do-gooders who vanish at 3:45 to some other place that is apparently a better place. And when educational issues arise in our world (as they do these days roughly every twelve minutes), members of our community do not think about Those Darn Teachers, but the actual live human beings they know who also happen to be teachers.

We teachers are pretty noisy these days about our dislike of top-down pronouncements. But when we rarely descend from Mount School except to deliver pronouncements on how Pat is doing in class or what the parent should be doing to help Chris, are we not rather top-downy ourselves?

Connecting to our communities helps us do our jobs better. We better understand our students, and they better understand us. We serve as examples of how adults are active in many aspects of their lives. We better represent the profession; this was always a good idea, but in times like these in which the profession is under constant attack, it's essential. People are most likely to stick up for human beings they know, not faceless functionaries who are only slightly more human than a clerk at the DMV. And connecting to communities helps us avoid incredibly tone-deaf acts of insensitivity like wearing police-supporting t-shirts at a moment and in a place where the police are not trusted.

There are certainly some practical barriers. For highly mobile teachers, moving for every job change would be silly. And married teachers have to balance two sets of needs. Not everybody can live right in the district where she teaches. But every teacher can spend time in that district after school hours for any purpose, even something as simple as shopping.

In times like these, teachers cannot simply hide in their caves. We have to be out in the field, visible, active, using our talents, connecting with our students and their families. We need to be loud and proud, local and vocal.

Efficiency Report Is Only Mostly That Bad

The edublogonewsphere buzzed a bit this week about a report from GEMS Education Solutions regarding educational efficiency and the fact that it finds the US somewhat lacking. It is, however, a large report, and some reporters made the mistake of skipping through to just the shiny, sexy parts. I'm not sure that the report has anything useful to tell us, but I don't think it's quite as outrageous as some folks have painted it.

GEMS Education Solutions is the consulting wing of GEMS Education. This is the gigantic multi-national education corporation that American privateers dream of becoming when they grow up. Started by a pair of teachers in 1959, the company now has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Delhi, with headquarters in Dubai. Would anyone like to guess what office space costs in Dubai look like. You can get the quick company tour in this video:

Despite the incredibly creep title frame that youtube has selected, this is a slick and impressive video-- one that presents the international ed biz as a big, corporate business. Should the US education market ever be really, truly opened to outfits beyond hamfisted amateurs with crony connections, this is the company that will eat many private school operators' lunch. Star Trek got one thing wrong-- when the BORG come, they will be pretty.

Like any good multinational corporation, they do their homework, and they look at how governments are functioning. The study and consult side of the business (in addition to this and the school-running side, there is also a philanthropic side) is called GEMS Solutions, and those are the folks who cranked out that efficiency report.

If you want to see the highlights, go here. Hell, go there anyway. I read a lot of these reports, and nobody has created a prettier, slicker on-line presentation format than this group. Every thinky tank putting their "research" projects in lame pdf format should take a look at this. Then, when you want to go look at the full report (also in a slick package), go to this link.

I'm not going to get into great detail, because at the end of the day, the report is kind of a waste of time. The concept is not entirely ridiculous, but the foundation is rotten.

The concept? Let's look at sixty-some factors that could affect a nation's educational program and see which ones make a difference. Turns out, they say, that only class size and teacher pay matter. So then they do a basic efficiency study-- whose results come at the best price for their situation? Who is getting the most bang for the buck? At one point they compare it to studying the fuel efficiency of a vehicle, and that's not unfair.

Unfortunately, all of this is built on a bad foundation. Their measure for the bang, the How Well Is The Nation Doing in Education piece, is PISA scores. Even if we accept that PISA scores are a good measure of anything (and that's a debate for another day), do we want to say that good PISA scores are the point and purpose of a nation's education system?

The reports authors acknowledge that might not be the case:

...some [countries] are in the fortunate position to be able to focus on outcomes, because resources are plentiful. Customers buying luxury sports cars are not likely to be concerned with fuel efficiency; they can choose to prioritise other highly desirable features and are prepared to pay higher fuel costs for the privilege. It is very possible that some educational systems are similarly paying a premium for additional outcomes beyond PISA scores. Although providing an excellent method of comparing educational attainment across borders, they cannot measure every output of the system. In such cases, inefficiency may not be considered a problem, but these additional outcomes must be known and desired.

The report suggests that the US would be more efficient if it paid teachers less and had larger class sizes, but what does that even mean in this context?

Efficiency is not excellence, and the report doesn't pretend otherwise. The optimum teacher pay level is not where you get the best PISA scores. It's just that beyond that part, you have to spend larger amounts of money to get smaller results. The authors also use the automotive metaphor to note that even if you have a highly fuel-efficient car, taking a long trip still requires a whole lot of gas.Co-author Adam Still acknowledged as much talking to Joy Resmovits at HuffPost

"We're not saying that the U.S. should cut salaries or should increase class sizes in order to improve quality -- it doesn't make common sense," he said.

Is it even humanly possible to figure out the things GEMS pretends to have figured out? I'm unconvinced. What does average national teacher salary even mean in this context? Would not those figures as well as the class size figures be rather wonky because of various types of outliers? And although the report corrects straight money units into purchasing power measures, that still leaves us with a national average that puts San Francisco dollars and Pittsburgh dollars and Paducah dollars all in the same bucket.

The teacher salary portion of the report says that "too low" salary means "not enough to attract the best people." How does anybody possibly compute such a thing, particularly when not taking any of the cultural or social factors into account? The more one looks at the report, the more one sees a big bunch of mostly-made-up numbers.

Many teachers have bristled at the use of "efficiency" and other biz-world jargon. It doesn't bother me so much-- if we're honest, we have to admit that we make efficiency decisions daily, though our currency is usually time. What's the most bang I can get for my five minutes left at the end of class? But we're making efficiency judgments based on actual usable data, and not sets of information so large and sweeping as to be nearly meaningless sitting on a foundation too tiny and rotten to be useful. GEMS hasn't offended me or shifted my dudgeon-mobile into high gear; they've just wasted a lot of money on this thing, and since they've clearly got plenty of money to waste, I guess that producing a report like this is okay. It just doesn't seem very efficient.


Friday, September 5, 2014

Rick Hess Joins the Resistance

This week Rick Hess took to the National Review Online to punch Common Core in the nose.

Hess has always been a well-connected reform advocate. He's the education guy at American Enterprise Institute, and an executive editor at Education Next, an outfit run by Paul Peterson and sponsored by the Thomas Fordham Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He's a conservative writer whose work is often sharp and to the point; I've called him one of my favorite writers that I disagree with. But I certainly agreed with him this time.

His critique hits the Core for five "big half-truths."

Internationally benchmarked?  "What the Common Core authors did is more 'cutting-and-pasting' than 'benchmarking.'"

Evidence-based?  "In fact, what advocates mean is that the standards take into account surveys asking professors and hiring managers what they thought high-school graduates should know, as well as examinations of which courses college-bound students usually take."

College- and career-ready? "The result adds up to something less than the recipe for excellence that the marketing suggests. "

Rigor? "More often than not, the case for the Common Core’s superiority rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the avidly pro–Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute."

Leading nations have national standards?  "Advocates have made a major point of noting that high-performing nations all have national standards. What they’re much less likely to mention is that the world’s lowest-performing nations also all have national standards."

And for a final swing. " As much as Common Core boosters celebrate 'evidence,' they ought to be able to provide something more than, 'We’re smart, and here’s what we think.'"

The small swipe at the Fordham (Hess later on twitter called it a characterization, not a criticism) is striking because Hess and Petrilli always seem (from out here in the cheap seats) like BFF's.

I agree mostly with his critique, though I think the problems with college- and career-ready are a little different than his diagnosis that they are too limp. And my criticism of rigor is that it's a dumb, vague, magical-thinking concept.

But still, it's interesting to see Hess rip into the Core with such gusto, even as he prepares to be teamed with Carol Burris to represent the Anti- side in an upcoming CCSS debate. Between this and the semi-conciliatory tone of the Petrilli-McClusky CCSS op-ed, one wonders if there's something in the air in conservative thinky tank land.

What does it all mean? Hess has never shown a tendency to go easy on people just because they're on "his side." His reformy focus has generally been on the privatizing side of the debate; one can argue that Common Core is becoming more of a liability to corporate interests than a tool for pushing privatizing.

Whatever the case, Hess left the Dark Side (and, presumably, its cookies) to join us on the Light Side for a day or two (what do we have? waffles, maybe?) Who knows? Maybe he'll stay a while.

UPDATE: Mike Petrilli responded to Hess with five questions. Greg Forster (over at Jay P Greene's blog) answers those five questions and hammers the Core even more. Read it here.