Bill Gates popped up once again, spicing up a Politico interview with some of his standard educational wrongness.
First, he proposes that Common Core is simply a technocratic solution for education. He then compares the standards to the standardized railroad gauge or standardized plugs for appliances. Let me take a deep breath and see if I can put in words (beyond the obvious "children are not toasters") why this analogy is simply wrong.
Railroad gauges and plug configurations are, within certain engineering requirements, fairly arbitrary choices. Had railroad gauges been set a few inches wider or a few inches, it would not matter. The purpose of setting a standard is not to impose a choice that's a better choice for the rails, but to impose a choice that makes all the rails work as parts of a larger whole. Within certain extremes, there's no bad choice for gauge width; the actual width of the gauge matters less than the uniformity.
Decisions about educational standards are not arbitrary. Some educational choices are better than others, and those choices matter in and of themselves. The choice of standards matters far more than the uniformity. Human children are not in school for the primary purpose of being fitted to become part of a larger whole. Imposing a bad standards choice simply to have uniformity is a disastrous choice, but that is what the Common Core has done-- sacrificed good standards in order to have uniformity, which is not even a desirable goal for human children in the first place.
(There's an irony here-- the computer biz has been messing with the standards for powering equipment for years. Manufacturers have been forced to rig up a variety of adaptations because they are stuck with a world of outlets locked into old standards, but we also have power-by-USB cords, allowing tech equipment to circumvent the old standards.)
Gates has some intellectual blind spots, and they shine through in this interview.
First, it appears from out here in the cheap seats that he's simply been a boss far too long.
The idea that what you should know at various grades … should be well
structured and you should really insist on kids knowing something so you
can build on that.
Because that's how education happens? You just "insist" that kids know something at a particular stage of their development. This is the language of someone who's used to simply being a boss, and not having to deal with people who hold onto their own preferences or demand that their individuality be recognized.
Gates also describes the previous fifty standards as a "cacophony," which is an interesting word choice. A cacophony is a big bunch of noise, disorderly. It's what you call the Rolling Stones if you'd rather listen to Bach. With this word, Gates is not suggesting that the previous standards were ineffective or bad or destructive-- he's just saying they were messy and bothersome. This is Cult of Order talk. This is demanding that all the pencils on every desk are lined up just so, not because there's any proof that it's more effective, but because the mess just makes his fingers itch and his head hurt.
And charters. He loves charters. Which-- more irony-- is an odd thing to be in favor of when your other goal is to make all schools essentially the same, anyway.
Monday, September 29, 2014
The Market Hates Losers
Fans of market forces for education simply don't understand how market forces actually work.
What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.
Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.
The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.
But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"
There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.
The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.
Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.
In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.
The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.
For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.
The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.
To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.
Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.
What they like to say is that free market competition breeds excellence. It does not, and it never has.
Free market competition breeds excellent marketing. McDonald's did not become successful by creating the most excellent food. Coke and Pepsi are not that outstandingly superior to RC or any store brand. Betamax was actually technically superior to VHS, but VHS had a better marketing plan.
The market loves winners. It loves winners even if they aren't winning-- Amazon has yet to turn an actual profit, ever, but investors think that Bezos is a winner, so they keep shoveling money on top of him. And when we enter the area of crony capitalism, which likes to pretend it's the free market, picking winners becomes even less related to success. Charter schools were once a great idea with some real promise, but the whole business has become so toxically polluted with crony capitalism that it has no hope of producing educational excellence in its present form.
But then, the market has only one measure for winning, and that is the production of money. The heart of a business plan is not "Can I build a really excellent mousetrap?" The heart of a business plan is "Can I sell this mousetrap and make money doing it?"
There is nothing about that question that is compatible with pursuing excellence in public education.
The most incompatible part of market-driven education is not its love of money-making winner, but its attitude about losers. Because the market hates losers. The market has no plan for dealing with losers. It simply wants all losers to go away.
Here's the problem. I teach plenty of students whom the market would consider losers. They take too long to learn. They have developmental obstacles to learning. They have disciplinary issues. They may be learning disabled. They have families of origin who create obstacles rather than providing support. What this means to a market-driven education system is that these loser students are too costly, offer too little profit margin, and, in their failures, hurt the numbers that are so critical to marketing the school.
In PA, we already know how the market-driven sector feels about these students. It loves to recruit them by promising a free computer and a happy land of success where nobody ever hounds you about attendance and all homework can be completed by whoever is sitting by the computer. But sooner or later, those students are sloughed off and sent back to public schools. And by "sooner or later," I mean some time after the cyber-charter has collected the money for that student.
The market sheds its losers, its failures (well, unless they can convince some patron or crony that they are just winners who are suffering a minor setback). Schools cannot.
For the free market, failure is not only an option, but a necessity. Losers must fail, be defeated, go away. For a public school system, that is not an option. Only with due process and extraordinary circumstances should a student be refused a public education. And certainly no traditional respectable public school system can simply declare that it has too many loser kids, so it's going to shut down.
The free market approach to schools must inevitably turn them upside down. In a free market system, the school does not exist to serve the student, but the student exists to serve the interests of the school by bringing in money and by generating the kinds of numbers that make good marketing (so that the school can bring in more money). And that means that students who do not serve the interests of the free-market school must be dumped, tossed out, discarded.
To label students losers, to abandon them, to toss them aside, and to do all that to the students who are in most need of an education-- that is the very antithesis of American public education. The free market approach to schools will no more unleash innovation and excellence than did 500 channels on cable TV. What it will do is chew up and spit out large numbers of students for being business liabilities.
Free market forces will not save US education; they will destroy it. To suggest that entrepreneurs should have the chance to profit at the cost of young lives is not simply bad policy-- it's immoral. It's wrong.
Data Dopiness Survives in Indiana
You may recall that back in the day, one of the items on our List of Terrible Things About Reformy Stuff was data mining. Featured in RttT and RttT Lite Waivers, the mandate to hoover up giant mounds of data was one of the great hated evils of reformsterdom, loathed by conservatives and liberals alike.
The Leonie Haimson led a fight against InBloom in New York, and won.
Since then, we've dialed back the data fretting considerably.
That's a mistake. The federal requirements for massive data management have not gone away. None of the advocates for cradle-to-career data tracking have stepped forward to say, "Gee, we now realize that's a horrifying idea that out-Big-Brothers George Orwell." The Data Overlords do not sleep, and a reminder of that comes through Shaina Cavazos at Chalkbeat's Indiana bureau.
Steve Braun would like to use oceans of data to match up students and jobs, and that suits Governor Mike Pence fine-- he's been pushing the connection between education and workforce development since his days as a state representative. He would now like to see a new state office for a data czar created to manage an ocean of K-12 and college data, along with coordinating with an outside company to "identify trends and opportunities."
It's a dopey idea for several reasons.
First, it further enshrines the reformster notion that "education" actually means "job training." It's a small-minded meager vision of education which vastly shortchanges our students in the short term and our culture, country and society in the long term.
Second, it requires a level of prescience not generally associated with government in general or actual human beings in particular. Do you think you can say today, right now, what a six-year-old's career ought to be? Our students will be employed in jobs that don't exist yet. Hell-- in the late 1970s I correctly deduced that computer knowledge would be good to have, so kudos to me-- except that my ground-floor computer training consisted of learning to program in BASIC, so, never mind my kudos.
Third, it turns students into fodder for corporate interests. My standard response to "Your school needs to produce more people who are employable as widget twiddlers" is "I'm comfortable preparing 100 students to be widget twiddlers if you're prepared to guarantee that all 100 will have jobs waiting for them at your company when they graduate." But if you want me to produce 100 twiddle ready widgeters so that you can pick the best ten and leave ninety others to twist in the wind, I'd say you are deeply confused about the purpose of public education.
The idea is to collect long-term data from three state agencies — The Indiana Department of Education, Department of Workforce Development and Commission on Higher Education — and, hopefully, merge it with data tracked by private employers. Four other states — Washington, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Maryland — have similar data systems but none have yet harnessed the information in the way Indiana envisions.
Of course, one of the most common concerns about the Great Data Mines is privacy. Exactly who will be poking through student records, and how safe will they actually be. But Braun says those concerns "should not come into play." The network will just study trends, not individuals. No word yet on whether or not the network would like to sell you a bridge.
When it’s operational, state officials hope Indiana can use the network to be a national trailblazer for using data and collaborating with business.
“There is big social and economic value if we do better,” Braun said.
One would hope that some educational value would appear as well.
There's more ridiculousness. Braun says that data is so far just snapshots of the past; he would like to...I don't know? Take snapshots of the future? Is there a TARDIS in this plan? No-- he would like to align educational processes around workforce analytics. Cavazos notes that "thinking of education that way is sometimes hard for teachers." Perhaps in the same way that is hard for doctors to think of medical treatment as only fixing broken legs.
Accountability? Indiana has dopey ideas for that, too.
Braun thinks the Indiana’s forecasting can be good enough that training kids to assure they get jobs should be more than a goal. It should be expected. In the future, he said, that state should consider tying data about how many graduates earn good jobs to its school accountability system.
Super idea. Perhaps we could also link economic performance to jobs for politicians and bureaucrats-- if the employment rate drops too low, governors and their appointees can be automatically ejected from office, and their failures can be noted in their permanent data records as we try to counsel them into new jobs.
The Leonie Haimson led a fight against InBloom in New York, and won.
Since then, we've dialed back the data fretting considerably.
That's a mistake. The federal requirements for massive data management have not gone away. None of the advocates for cradle-to-career data tracking have stepped forward to say, "Gee, we now realize that's a horrifying idea that out-Big-Brothers George Orwell." The Data Overlords do not sleep, and a reminder of that comes through Shaina Cavazos at Chalkbeat's Indiana bureau.
Steve Braun would like to use oceans of data to match up students and jobs, and that suits Governor Mike Pence fine-- he's been pushing the connection between education and workforce development since his days as a state representative. He would now like to see a new state office for a data czar created to manage an ocean of K-12 and college data, along with coordinating with an outside company to "identify trends and opportunities."
It's a dopey idea for several reasons.
First, it further enshrines the reformster notion that "education" actually means "job training." It's a small-minded meager vision of education which vastly shortchanges our students in the short term and our culture, country and society in the long term.
Second, it requires a level of prescience not generally associated with government in general or actual human beings in particular. Do you think you can say today, right now, what a six-year-old's career ought to be? Our students will be employed in jobs that don't exist yet. Hell-- in the late 1970s I correctly deduced that computer knowledge would be good to have, so kudos to me-- except that my ground-floor computer training consisted of learning to program in BASIC, so, never mind my kudos.
Third, it turns students into fodder for corporate interests. My standard response to "Your school needs to produce more people who are employable as widget twiddlers" is "I'm comfortable preparing 100 students to be widget twiddlers if you're prepared to guarantee that all 100 will have jobs waiting for them at your company when they graduate." But if you want me to produce 100 twiddle ready widgeters so that you can pick the best ten and leave ninety others to twist in the wind, I'd say you are deeply confused about the purpose of public education.
The idea is to collect long-term data from three state agencies — The Indiana Department of Education, Department of Workforce Development and Commission on Higher Education — and, hopefully, merge it with data tracked by private employers. Four other states — Washington, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Maryland — have similar data systems but none have yet harnessed the information in the way Indiana envisions.
Of course, one of the most common concerns about the Great Data Mines is privacy. Exactly who will be poking through student records, and how safe will they actually be. But Braun says those concerns "should not come into play." The network will just study trends, not individuals. No word yet on whether or not the network would like to sell you a bridge.
When it’s operational, state officials hope Indiana can use the network to be a national trailblazer for using data and collaborating with business.
“There is big social and economic value if we do better,” Braun said.
One would hope that some educational value would appear as well.
There's more ridiculousness. Braun says that data is so far just snapshots of the past; he would like to...I don't know? Take snapshots of the future? Is there a TARDIS in this plan? No-- he would like to align educational processes around workforce analytics. Cavazos notes that "thinking of education that way is sometimes hard for teachers." Perhaps in the same way that is hard for doctors to think of medical treatment as only fixing broken legs.
Accountability? Indiana has dopey ideas for that, too.
Braun thinks the Indiana’s forecasting can be good enough that training kids to assure they get jobs should be more than a goal. It should be expected. In the future, he said, that state should consider tying data about how many graduates earn good jobs to its school accountability system.
Super idea. Perhaps we could also link economic performance to jobs for politicians and bureaucrats-- if the employment rate drops too low, governors and their appointees can be automatically ejected from office, and their failures can be noted in their permanent data records as we try to counsel them into new jobs.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
One More Way To Kill Public Schools
AEI has a new video about education. It's slick and well-produced, featuring Muchael McShane walking through a school while telling us how things should be. He has a three-point program which features, among other things, school choice on steroids. It also has numbers and facts, and I'm not even going to address whether they're accurate or not, because even if they are, the arguments attached are full of holes.
You can watch it here if you must. I've hit the salient points below.
The Haves and Have-Nots
McShane opens with the usual business about how Americans without high school diplomas end up having crappy lives, and those with diplomas don't do much better. He introduces Hypothetical Child Jennifer, born into the bottom 20%. He notes that without a college diploma, it's likely she will not get off that bottom rung.
The problem with this argument has been, and will always be, that it confuses correlation with causation. Jennifer is poor. Because she is poor, there is a high likelihood that her life will include certain features, and somewhere on that list will be lower level of education and later success in life. What reformsters want to do is take one of those outcomes (lower educational prospects) and assign it the role of cause.
We could make the same argument about nutrition or clothing. Jennifer probably doesn't eat as well or dress as well as a child from the top 20%. Does it follow that we need a program to get her better food or better clothing because if we do that, she will escape poverty?
McShane says that with a college degree, Jennifer is more likely to make it out of poverty. Is it not equally likely that if she has the qualities to make it out of poverty, those qualities will lead her to pursue a college degree? It's not that I don't see value in a college degree, but the case that simply having a college degree causes an escape from poverty hasn't been made.
Choices and Price Per Pupil
McShane says Jennifer's big hurdle is a lack of choices; wealthy kids have options that she does not.Well, yes.
McShane says the poor-schools-in-poor-neighborhoods is not a spending problem, citing stats about how some of the poorer districts actually spend more per pupil. That may be a stat that can be challenged, but I don't care. It could well be true, because when we talk about Cost Per Pupil, we are talking about an incomplete stat.
What rich kids have going for them is a hugely larger expenditure per pupil-- just not in direct tax dollars to school district. Buffy and Chip may cost $10K apiece for the taxpayers, but they are also taking tennis lessons and SAT coaching and dance class and a hundred other enrichment opportunities that are not paid taxpayer. Part of being a poor kid is not having your total education subsidized by family and friends.
In other words, a rich kid's education costs more than a poor kid's. Let me try an example. Poor Pat and Comfy Chris both need to buy a car. Each gets a stipend of $10K, but Chris's folks chip in another $10K. So Chris ends up driving a nice new fully loaded Ford Focus, and Pat ends up in a used Yugo. What reformsters want to argue is that Pat is driving a lousier car because Pat shops at a crappy car dealership, and if there were only more competition, Pat could have a fully loaded new Focus, too. They are pretending that Chris bought a new Focus with the $10K.
Yes, school financing is way more complicated, and my analogy is imperfect. But my point is still, I believe, valid. These comparisons of schools are invalid because we are not counting the true costs of a wealthier student's education. And the assertion that spending money on schools doesn't help has been debunked more times than Sasquatch.
McShane would also like us to know that school staffing has mushroomed since the seventies, which is undoubtedly true for a myriad of reasons. It's just not immediately obvious what his point is, except maybe "look at all this money wasted on personnel costs," a favorite refrain of the profiteer reform crowd.
The problem
McShane says the system does not foster innovative and entrepreneurial solutions. Do not expect him to tell us why or how entrepreneurial solutions would help education. For privateers, that question makes no more sense than being asked to prove that water is wet.
Schools stifle creativity. Principals spend more time on reports than leading. Teachers are stuck in narrowed curriculum directed at passing tests. "It's demoralizing, it's dehumanizing, and it hurts kids like Jennifer." The AEI folks are not blithering idiots. These are true things. What is not at all clear is how entrepreneurial solutions would fix any of that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's the innovative entrepreneurial spirit that brought us some of those stifling reforms in the first place.
But McShane does have three solutions to propose.
1) You think you know choice and vouchers? You ain't seen nothing yet.
McShane starts out with the old victims of geography argument, where students flow to schools and the money follows them, whether the schools suck or not. This is a nice rhetorical trick, because it presents schools as objects that just appear, like barnacles or crop circles, and not as community institutions created and maintained by the local taxpayers in order to provide education for their local children.
McShane says vouchers would be better, and I've already burned up bandwidth addressing why he's simply wrong. But let's not stop for that argument because this is not your father's school voucher concept. This is choice hopped up on steroids.
McShane wants choice on the course level. Giving one school, any school, Jennifer's block of money in order to arrange her whole education is a fail. Better, in his opinion, is an educational account for Jennifer that she can use to buy/hire specific courses.
This is a pretty stunning vision. It allows content-providing companies to specialize to make their profits, and it puts all the responsibility on the parents, many of whom will pay dearly for advice on how manage Jennifer's account. It is the educational version of the idea to abolish social security and let/make everyone manage their own retirement fund.
The most obvious implication that McShane doesn't flat out state-- under this system, we can get rid of schools as institutions entirely. McShane's out not just to cut personnel costs, but to get rid of many other overhead costs involved in operating schools. Hear that sound? Ka-ching, baby.
2) Better regulatory approach.
Using "scores and formulas" to hold schools and teachers accountable for a "one size fits all definition of success" is sucky. Can't disagree with that a bit.
Oh, wait. Yes, I can. Because McShane says it sucks because it stifles competition, and we need to let parents vote with their feet. He also says that we need a "flexible, market-based system that relies on performance contracts, inspectors and accreditors to hold educators responsible to many kinds of results." It's hard to be certain what he has in mind other than scores and formulas, though "performance contracts" suggests deliverables. But that means concrete number results, which means data, which invariably means test scores. It would seem that McShane has something else in mind, but it's really not clear what.
3) Freedom to slash
Okay, that's not how McShane puts it. He wants the people who provide these new services to have access to financial and human capital. "They would need the freedom to rethink the roles and compensations of teachers and leaders." "Rethink" is such a harmless word. It sounds much nicer than "freedom to squeeze money out of every corner of the company without regard for the human beings involved."
He'd also like to be able to retrain teachers for "unique environments," and these companies need the flexibility to search out private and public funds.
Behind that curtain
The system that McShane envisions would be extraordinarily cumbersome, with dozens of independent operators jostling for their market share of Jennifers while thousands of parents try to sort through the marketplace. It seems that the inevitable result would be the rise of contractors-- businesses that operate as clearinghouses for content providers and shopping centers for parents.
Some charter operators are close enough to the model to jump on it quickly. Jennifer's Not-Actually-A-School could hire independent contractors for low pay and no benefits, easily replaceable. Not-Actually-A-School would be most efficient if it had programs in a box and just had to hire some content delivery specialists to unpack the box (a job requiring no real expertise). The education services would basically be go-betweens, connecting audience-students with content deliverypersons. In effect, these innovative entrepreneurs would re-invent the recording industry.
Wrap it up
McShane wants to unleash the innovators and entrepreneurs so that they can help Jennifer, who is sweet and well-scrubbed and bright-looking and who walks compliantly beside McShane as he brings it on home. He wants a vibrant marketplace that will compete for her dollar (it is apparently not the taxpayers' money once we hand it to Jennifer). These businesses would compete by showing "better results for her futures" so I guess there is a time machine or a crystal ball in there somewhere.
McShane says nothing at all about how this vibrant "ecosystem" would respond to Jennifer's classmate-- the one who has disabilities and behavior problems and is more expensive to teach. McShane says nothing at all about how this nimble marketplace would treat "customers" who were not attractive or optimal for use of human and financial capital.
McShane asserts that his ideas are pro-teacher, pro-principal, pro-family and pro-children, and I'd assert that they aren't any of those things. He would like to reduce teachers and principals to at-will subcontractors, children to walking piles of money (bring us your voucher!), and families to advertising targets.
Would the education system he envisions be any good? Would it honor the American ideal of educating every single student? Would it in any way honor the tradition of community based and supported schools?
Or would it just make somebody a big pile of money? Ka-ching. Yes, I'm doing a lot of conjecturing here. I look forward to being shown how I'm wrong, because in this instance, I really don't want to be right.
The Haves and Have-Nots
McShane opens with the usual business about how Americans without high school diplomas end up having crappy lives, and those with diplomas don't do much better. He introduces Hypothetical Child Jennifer, born into the bottom 20%. He notes that without a college diploma, it's likely she will not get off that bottom rung.
The problem with this argument has been, and will always be, that it confuses correlation with causation. Jennifer is poor. Because she is poor, there is a high likelihood that her life will include certain features, and somewhere on that list will be lower level of education and later success in life. What reformsters want to do is take one of those outcomes (lower educational prospects) and assign it the role of cause.
We could make the same argument about nutrition or clothing. Jennifer probably doesn't eat as well or dress as well as a child from the top 20%. Does it follow that we need a program to get her better food or better clothing because if we do that, she will escape poverty?
McShane says that with a college degree, Jennifer is more likely to make it out of poverty. Is it not equally likely that if she has the qualities to make it out of poverty, those qualities will lead her to pursue a college degree? It's not that I don't see value in a college degree, but the case that simply having a college degree causes an escape from poverty hasn't been made.
Choices and Price Per Pupil
McShane says Jennifer's big hurdle is a lack of choices; wealthy kids have options that she does not.Well, yes.
McShane says the poor-schools-in-poor-neighborhoods is not a spending problem, citing stats about how some of the poorer districts actually spend more per pupil. That may be a stat that can be challenged, but I don't care. It could well be true, because when we talk about Cost Per Pupil, we are talking about an incomplete stat.
What rich kids have going for them is a hugely larger expenditure per pupil-- just not in direct tax dollars to school district. Buffy and Chip may cost $10K apiece for the taxpayers, but they are also taking tennis lessons and SAT coaching and dance class and a hundred other enrichment opportunities that are not paid taxpayer. Part of being a poor kid is not having your total education subsidized by family and friends.
In other words, a rich kid's education costs more than a poor kid's. Let me try an example. Poor Pat and Comfy Chris both need to buy a car. Each gets a stipend of $10K, but Chris's folks chip in another $10K. So Chris ends up driving a nice new fully loaded Ford Focus, and Pat ends up in a used Yugo. What reformsters want to argue is that Pat is driving a lousier car because Pat shops at a crappy car dealership, and if there were only more competition, Pat could have a fully loaded new Focus, too. They are pretending that Chris bought a new Focus with the $10K.
Yes, school financing is way more complicated, and my analogy is imperfect. But my point is still, I believe, valid. These comparisons of schools are invalid because we are not counting the true costs of a wealthier student's education. And the assertion that spending money on schools doesn't help has been debunked more times than Sasquatch.
McShane would also like us to know that school staffing has mushroomed since the seventies, which is undoubtedly true for a myriad of reasons. It's just not immediately obvious what his point is, except maybe "look at all this money wasted on personnel costs," a favorite refrain of the profiteer reform crowd.
The problem
McShane says the system does not foster innovative and entrepreneurial solutions. Do not expect him to tell us why or how entrepreneurial solutions would help education. For privateers, that question makes no more sense than being asked to prove that water is wet.
Schools stifle creativity. Principals spend more time on reports than leading. Teachers are stuck in narrowed curriculum directed at passing tests. "It's demoralizing, it's dehumanizing, and it hurts kids like Jennifer." The AEI folks are not blithering idiots. These are true things. What is not at all clear is how entrepreneurial solutions would fix any of that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's the innovative entrepreneurial spirit that brought us some of those stifling reforms in the first place.
But McShane does have three solutions to propose.
1) You think you know choice and vouchers? You ain't seen nothing yet.
McShane starts out with the old victims of geography argument, where students flow to schools and the money follows them, whether the schools suck or not. This is a nice rhetorical trick, because it presents schools as objects that just appear, like barnacles or crop circles, and not as community institutions created and maintained by the local taxpayers in order to provide education for their local children.
McShane says vouchers would be better, and I've already burned up bandwidth addressing why he's simply wrong. But let's not stop for that argument because this is not your father's school voucher concept. This is choice hopped up on steroids.
McShane wants choice on the course level. Giving one school, any school, Jennifer's block of money in order to arrange her whole education is a fail. Better, in his opinion, is an educational account for Jennifer that she can use to buy/hire specific courses.
This is a pretty stunning vision. It allows content-providing companies to specialize to make their profits, and it puts all the responsibility on the parents, many of whom will pay dearly for advice on how manage Jennifer's account. It is the educational version of the idea to abolish social security and let/make everyone manage their own retirement fund.
The most obvious implication that McShane doesn't flat out state-- under this system, we can get rid of schools as institutions entirely. McShane's out not just to cut personnel costs, but to get rid of many other overhead costs involved in operating schools. Hear that sound? Ka-ching, baby.
2) Better regulatory approach.
Using "scores and formulas" to hold schools and teachers accountable for a "one size fits all definition of success" is sucky. Can't disagree with that a bit.
Oh, wait. Yes, I can. Because McShane says it sucks because it stifles competition, and we need to let parents vote with their feet. He also says that we need a "flexible, market-based system that relies on performance contracts, inspectors and accreditors to hold educators responsible to many kinds of results." It's hard to be certain what he has in mind other than scores and formulas, though "performance contracts" suggests deliverables. But that means concrete number results, which means data, which invariably means test scores. It would seem that McShane has something else in mind, but it's really not clear what.
3) Freedom to slash
Okay, that's not how McShane puts it. He wants the people who provide these new services to have access to financial and human capital. "They would need the freedom to rethink the roles and compensations of teachers and leaders." "Rethink" is such a harmless word. It sounds much nicer than "freedom to squeeze money out of every corner of the company without regard for the human beings involved."
He'd also like to be able to retrain teachers for "unique environments," and these companies need the flexibility to search out private and public funds.
Behind that curtain
The system that McShane envisions would be extraordinarily cumbersome, with dozens of independent operators jostling for their market share of Jennifers while thousands of parents try to sort through the marketplace. It seems that the inevitable result would be the rise of contractors-- businesses that operate as clearinghouses for content providers and shopping centers for parents.
Some charter operators are close enough to the model to jump on it quickly. Jennifer's Not-Actually-A-School could hire independent contractors for low pay and no benefits, easily replaceable. Not-Actually-A-School would be most efficient if it had programs in a box and just had to hire some content delivery specialists to unpack the box (a job requiring no real expertise). The education services would basically be go-betweens, connecting audience-students with content deliverypersons. In effect, these innovative entrepreneurs would re-invent the recording industry.
Wrap it up
McShane wants to unleash the innovators and entrepreneurs so that they can help Jennifer, who is sweet and well-scrubbed and bright-looking and who walks compliantly beside McShane as he brings it on home. He wants a vibrant marketplace that will compete for her dollar (it is apparently not the taxpayers' money once we hand it to Jennifer). These businesses would compete by showing "better results for her futures" so I guess there is a time machine or a crystal ball in there somewhere.
McShane says nothing at all about how this vibrant "ecosystem" would respond to Jennifer's classmate-- the one who has disabilities and behavior problems and is more expensive to teach. McShane says nothing at all about how this nimble marketplace would treat "customers" who were not attractive or optimal for use of human and financial capital.
McShane asserts that his ideas are pro-teacher, pro-principal, pro-family and pro-children, and I'd assert that they aren't any of those things. He would like to reduce teachers and principals to at-will subcontractors, children to walking piles of money (bring us your voucher!), and families to advertising targets.
Would the education system he envisions be any good? Would it honor the American ideal of educating every single student? Would it in any way honor the tradition of community based and supported schools?
Or would it just make somebody a big pile of money? Ka-ching. Yes, I'm doing a lot of conjecturing here. I look forward to being shown how I'm wrong, because in this instance, I really don't want to be right.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Corbett, Wolf, Money, and Schools in PA
My own governor, Tom Corbett of PA, is looking at an uphill battle in his effort to get re-elected for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is his education record.
Pennsylvania is a complicated state, and this is a complicated race for teachers. Corbett is opposed by Tom Wolf, a sort-of Democrat who comes from York (location of the latest rapacious charter incursion) and whose main qualification for the governor's office is that he's a rich businessman. His previous government experience was working for Governor "Smilin' Ed" Rendell, a Democrat who viewed teachers about as fondly as he viewed the gum stuck to the bottom of old gym shoes. The Pennsylvania State Education Association endorsed Wolf's opponent in the primary but is now solidly backing Wolf, because politics.
Wolf's York connection turns out to be doubly important, because many of his buddies (including his campaign treasurer, who also works for the family business) are directly involved in the report that recommended converting York schools to a 100% charter. Activist Colleen Kennedy put that together back in May. David Meckley, the Corbett-picked "recovery officer" heading up the push to replace an entire public school system with charters (yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's so hard to believe that I want you to be sure I didn't suffer a massive typo) is also part of a multigenerational successful York family, and a friend of Wolf's.
Now Wolf has finally come out to specifically reject that plan. Maybe it's just good politics, and maybe it's a quid pro quo for the PSEA endorsement, but you'll excuse me if I don't get out my checkbook and start putting "Wolf for Governor" signs in my yard. The PSEA liked Ed Rendell, too, but once in office he was a lousy governor for education. PSEA likes to play the "let's earn a seat at the table" game, a point I've bitched about to PSEA officials, and I generally get a response of "Well, it could have been so much worse." Which is true, I suppose. I mean, you can add "and then I was diagnosed with cancer and hit by a truck" to the end of any news and make it worse. Doesn't mean I want to be friends with someone just because he punches me in the face slightly less hard than my enemies.
All of which is a way of saying that I'm not pre-disposed to automatically accept anybody's rhetoric about education in this election.
The big talking point is the $1 billion that Corbett took out of education spending. You would think that sort of accusation would involve pretty cut and dried facts. You would be wrong.
If you want a long, thorough, fact-laden unraveling of the issue, with lots of interactive charts, I recommend this piece (oddly enough, from the York Daily Record). But we can get the rough cut from this article and its attendant chart at factcheck.org.
Pennsylvania is a complicated state, and this is a complicated race for teachers. Corbett is opposed by Tom Wolf, a sort-of Democrat who comes from York (location of the latest rapacious charter incursion) and whose main qualification for the governor's office is that he's a rich businessman. His previous government experience was working for Governor "Smilin' Ed" Rendell, a Democrat who viewed teachers about as fondly as he viewed the gum stuck to the bottom of old gym shoes. The Pennsylvania State Education Association endorsed Wolf's opponent in the primary but is now solidly backing Wolf, because politics.
Wolf's York connection turns out to be doubly important, because many of his buddies (including his campaign treasurer, who also works for the family business) are directly involved in the report that recommended converting York schools to a 100% charter. Activist Colleen Kennedy put that together back in May. David Meckley, the Corbett-picked "recovery officer" heading up the push to replace an entire public school system with charters (yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's so hard to believe that I want you to be sure I didn't suffer a massive typo) is also part of a multigenerational successful York family, and a friend of Wolf's.
Now Wolf has finally come out to specifically reject that plan. Maybe it's just good politics, and maybe it's a quid pro quo for the PSEA endorsement, but you'll excuse me if I don't get out my checkbook and start putting "Wolf for Governor" signs in my yard. The PSEA liked Ed Rendell, too, but once in office he was a lousy governor for education. PSEA likes to play the "let's earn a seat at the table" game, a point I've bitched about to PSEA officials, and I generally get a response of "Well, it could have been so much worse." Which is true, I suppose. I mean, you can add "and then I was diagnosed with cancer and hit by a truck" to the end of any news and make it worse. Doesn't mean I want to be friends with someone just because he punches me in the face slightly less hard than my enemies.
All of which is a way of saying that I'm not pre-disposed to automatically accept anybody's rhetoric about education in this election.
The big talking point is the $1 billion that Corbett took out of education spending. You would think that sort of accusation would involve pretty cut and dried facts. You would be wrong.
If you want a long, thorough, fact-laden unraveling of the issue, with lots of interactive charts, I recommend this piece (oddly enough, from the York Daily Record). But we can get the rough cut from this article and its attendant chart at factcheck.org.
The yellow pieces of bar would be the part where Smilin' Ed decided to use stimulus money to finance cuts to the education budget. The light blue part would be the part where we try to rescue PA education pensions from the economically disastrously incompetent skullduggery of the banksters. The short explanation of the argument is that Corbett would like voters to notice the yellow parts; he would also like voters to count the pension spending as education spending. This is deliciously ironic, as it involves an elected official officially arguing that anything that is for the good of teachers is also for the good of schools and education. (Do not hold your breath waiting for this argument to be applied anywhere else.)
Meanwhile, Wolf would rather that voters not notice the yellow parts, but would like them to NOT count pension costs as education costs.
Each campaign is actually peddling its own slightly massaged version of the truth. Because, politics.
There are other financial issue adding to the murk. It used to be that after a student switched to charter schools, some of the money that followed him there was shuttled back to his real public school. Under Corbett, that shuttling stopped. Add the complete lack of cyber-charter oversight in PA, and you get a state where running a cyber-school is faster, easier, and safer than just printing money in your garage. Meanwhile, the funding formula is bleeding public schools dry.
Not that public schools can do much about it. Under Smilin' Ed (who was all about property tax relief), school districts lost the ability to raises taxes in any given year by more than a smidge without a referendum. (Among other unintended consequences, this means that I am filling out my budget for the 2015-2016 right now). And because of a decade of can-kicking (maybe if we just wait, the market will suck less again), all of these districts have staggering pension bills coming due soon.
Let
me also throw this in-- we have one of the hugest ranges of district
types in the country. We have super-urban Philly and Pittsburgh, but we
also have West Forest County schools, where half the geographical area
of the county is served by a single building that includes about 400
students, K-12. Our funding system sucks, but I guarantee you that
whatever system you devise, it will be royally shafting some district
somewhere in the state.
The past two administrations in PA-- one GOP and one Dem-- have been disastrous for education. As noted by Factchecker.org, PA ranks 13th in spending per pupil, but 21st in per pupil spending that comes from the state. Local distracts are hurting.
I wish I could paint a clearer, more pleasant picture of good guys and bad guys, but Pennsylvania is another state facing some difficult choices. Make no mistake-- Corbett is dreadful in general and terrible for education in particular. But it would take a hell of a whiz to get us sorted out, and I'm disinclined to see Wolf as that whiz. We're in trouble, and we're going to have an election, and afterwards, we're still going to be in trouble. That's about all I'm sure of.
Why Teachers Can't Have a Seat at the Table
This month has been declared New Conversation Month by reformsters. Teachers are being offered (in vaguely non-specific ways) some sort of seats at various tables. Unfortunately, this largesse underlines just how much teachers have not been included in conversations about public education. Every step of the way, every part of the discussion, teachers have not been included.
I got to wondering-- why not? I mean, there are only so many possible explanations. Knowing why teacher voices have not been pursued or included would tell us something about reformster attitudes about teachers and illuminate the relationships at the heart of how public education works in this country.
So let's consider the possible reasons that teachers are not, and have not been, at the infamous table. What are the reformsters thinking?
Teachers would sidetrack the process.
If we're going to get things done, we must begin with the end in mind. The conversation is not, for instance, whether charters would be a good solution or how to make charters a good solution. We're talking tactics and strategy, not inquiry and philosophy. So it's not "How could charters most effectively enhance education in a community" but "We know we want to get charters into this area. How do we make that happen?" Ditto for high stakes tests, Common Core, data mining, tenure stripping, teacher evaluations and evaluation-driven (aka less) pay.
Teachers might want to question those premises, try to open up for discussion things we just don't need to discuss.
Teachers lack our shared vision.
We need people who see the same things, who share the same vision for remaking Amerucan public education. Teachers by and large lack that vision and would detract from the focused unity we need to do What Must Be Done. We certainly don't need to waste time and energy arguing about what must be done or why it must be done. Teachers are way too attached to traditional models; it's almost as if they think traditional public education in this country actually works instead of recognizing that our premise of total educational failure is Totally Truthy. Proof shmoof. If they won't get on the bus with us, leave 'em behind.
In a proper society, one does not bargain with the help.
It was a sad day when the Captains of Industry and Commerce were forced to start dealing with unions. Yuck! The proper order of things is that the People in Charge determine the best action to take, and then the employees do as they're told. Bill Gates does not have to sit down and talk corporate policy with the Microsoft janitorial staff, General Patton did not consult with privates about military strategy, and the People In Charge of Education should not have to sit down and talk with teachers. It's true that teacher's unions sometimes become such a nuisance that they have to be listened to, but we're working on that.
Teachers are beneath us.
Arne Duncan plays basketball with the Reformster-in-Chief. The corporate titans of reformsterdom hobnob with the rich and famous. The hedge fund operators of reformsterdom deal with heads of state and juggle millions of dollars. We reformsters are big, important, rich, powerful people. Why the heck would we want to sit down with a bunch of women who make thirty-five grand a year and who manage milk money for a roomful of seven-year-olds?
Look, these policy decisions have to be made at very high levels. Teachers just don't belong there. After all, they're just... teachers.
We aren't friends with any teachers.
We like to work with people we know and like and trust. We don't know any teachers. It nothing personal. There isn't anybody at the table whom we don't already know and like and trust. Don't call them cronies. They're just people who Are On The Same Page.
Teachers suck.
Teachers have totally screwed up American education. Some huge percentage of them are grossly incompetent (and as soon as we tweak up the right evaluation process, we'll chase them out). They don't know a thing about how to educate children, and a huge percentage of them don't even want to. They just want to hand out worksheets and sit on their big fat tenure-enhanced butts. Everything that's wrong about public education is their fault. We're cleaning up their mess. Have them help us? No, thank you-- they've done enough already.
Okay, maybe they don't suck. But they lack expertise.
Teachers don't have expertise in dealing with educational theory and policy. They're just teachers. They sit around and run off worksheet copies and drill students in math facts and make sure that kids line up for recess. They help teenagers put up crepe paper for school dances. Teachers simply don't know enough about education to be involved in education policy discussions.
Okay, maybe they have some educational expertise, but this isn't about education.
This isn't about education. It's about how things really get done, and that comes down to politics, power, and money. Teachers don't know anything about how those work. Just sit out in the hall, honey, while the big boys take care of business.
Teachers will try to protect their careers at the cost of our goals.
Our goals include redefining teaching as a job that people only do for a couple of years, for middling pay with no retirement benefits. To make school finance more "nimble" and to provide better ROI, we need to transform teaching from a lifetime profession into a short time job. It would also be great if we could neuter their damn union. There's a ton of money tied up in education, and we want it, and some of that money is tied up in personnel costs. We need to get money away from the schools in general and the teachers in particular, and in our experience, nobody likes having money taken away (lord knows, we don't). We expect that a lot of teachers and a lot of union people will object to this, and we don't want to listen to their damn whining all the time.
Teachers will harsh our buzz.
It is just such a huge bummer when you think up a cool idea for how schools should work and teachers chime in with "That's a stupid idea that will never work blah blah facts blah blah blah research" or "Yes, that's a good idea which is why we've been doing it for the past twenty years." How can we enjoy feeling like great thought-leaders and education revolutionaries when people keep interrupting with that shit?
We totally included teachers.
We searched all over for teachers who agreed with everything we have to say and were totally willing to go along with us every step of the way. We have included those teachers. Well, at least, we've allowed those teachers to be spokespersons for us. They've been great and have given us no trouble at all. What else did you want?
You didn't get your invitation? Hmm. It must have gotten lost in the mail.
We totally meant to invite you guys. Did you check your spam filters? Our secretary must have messed up. Man, we wondered why you weren't here.
Are there any other possible explanations? In particular, are there any that don't smell of disrespect or disregard for public school teachers? I'm stumped. Maybe We knew you were busy with Real Important Stuff and we didn't want to bother you is a possibility, but I don't think I've ever read anything that would suggest it.
No, to really have a new conversation, there's a message that reformsters are somehow going to have to get out. It would go something like this:
You know what? We made a mistake. We now realize that teachers are deeply committed to educating our country's children, and as America's leading education professionals, they need to be not just part of this conversation, but leading it. After a few years of trying to reshape public education, we realize we need to change our stance. So we are here to listen to you, teachers. How can we help you achieve the best results for our public school students?
To their credit, some reformsters have picked up on pieces of that. But we're not there yet.
I got to wondering-- why not? I mean, there are only so many possible explanations. Knowing why teacher voices have not been pursued or included would tell us something about reformster attitudes about teachers and illuminate the relationships at the heart of how public education works in this country.
So let's consider the possible reasons that teachers are not, and have not been, at the infamous table. What are the reformsters thinking?
Teachers would sidetrack the process.
If we're going to get things done, we must begin with the end in mind. The conversation is not, for instance, whether charters would be a good solution or how to make charters a good solution. We're talking tactics and strategy, not inquiry and philosophy. So it's not "How could charters most effectively enhance education in a community" but "We know we want to get charters into this area. How do we make that happen?" Ditto for high stakes tests, Common Core, data mining, tenure stripping, teacher evaluations and evaluation-driven (aka less) pay.
Teachers might want to question those premises, try to open up for discussion things we just don't need to discuss.
Teachers lack our shared vision.
We need people who see the same things, who share the same vision for remaking Amerucan public education. Teachers by and large lack that vision and would detract from the focused unity we need to do What Must Be Done. We certainly don't need to waste time and energy arguing about what must be done or why it must be done. Teachers are way too attached to traditional models; it's almost as if they think traditional public education in this country actually works instead of recognizing that our premise of total educational failure is Totally Truthy. Proof shmoof. If they won't get on the bus with us, leave 'em behind.
In a proper society, one does not bargain with the help.
It was a sad day when the Captains of Industry and Commerce were forced to start dealing with unions. Yuck! The proper order of things is that the People in Charge determine the best action to take, and then the employees do as they're told. Bill Gates does not have to sit down and talk corporate policy with the Microsoft janitorial staff, General Patton did not consult with privates about military strategy, and the People In Charge of Education should not have to sit down and talk with teachers. It's true that teacher's unions sometimes become such a nuisance that they have to be listened to, but we're working on that.
Teachers are beneath us.
Arne Duncan plays basketball with the Reformster-in-Chief. The corporate titans of reformsterdom hobnob with the rich and famous. The hedge fund operators of reformsterdom deal with heads of state and juggle millions of dollars. We reformsters are big, important, rich, powerful people. Why the heck would we want to sit down with a bunch of women who make thirty-five grand a year and who manage milk money for a roomful of seven-year-olds?
Look, these policy decisions have to be made at very high levels. Teachers just don't belong there. After all, they're just... teachers.
We aren't friends with any teachers.
We like to work with people we know and like and trust. We don't know any teachers. It nothing personal. There isn't anybody at the table whom we don't already know and like and trust. Don't call them cronies. They're just people who Are On The Same Page.
Teachers suck.
Teachers have totally screwed up American education. Some huge percentage of them are grossly incompetent (and as soon as we tweak up the right evaluation process, we'll chase them out). They don't know a thing about how to educate children, and a huge percentage of them don't even want to. They just want to hand out worksheets and sit on their big fat tenure-enhanced butts. Everything that's wrong about public education is their fault. We're cleaning up their mess. Have them help us? No, thank you-- they've done enough already.
Okay, maybe they don't suck. But they lack expertise.
Teachers don't have expertise in dealing with educational theory and policy. They're just teachers. They sit around and run off worksheet copies and drill students in math facts and make sure that kids line up for recess. They help teenagers put up crepe paper for school dances. Teachers simply don't know enough about education to be involved in education policy discussions.
Okay, maybe they have some educational expertise, but this isn't about education.
This isn't about education. It's about how things really get done, and that comes down to politics, power, and money. Teachers don't know anything about how those work. Just sit out in the hall, honey, while the big boys take care of business.
Teachers will try to protect their careers at the cost of our goals.
Our goals include redefining teaching as a job that people only do for a couple of years, for middling pay with no retirement benefits. To make school finance more "nimble" and to provide better ROI, we need to transform teaching from a lifetime profession into a short time job. It would also be great if we could neuter their damn union. There's a ton of money tied up in education, and we want it, and some of that money is tied up in personnel costs. We need to get money away from the schools in general and the teachers in particular, and in our experience, nobody likes having money taken away (lord knows, we don't). We expect that a lot of teachers and a lot of union people will object to this, and we don't want to listen to their damn whining all the time.
Teachers will harsh our buzz.
It is just such a huge bummer when you think up a cool idea for how schools should work and teachers chime in with "That's a stupid idea that will never work blah blah facts blah blah blah research" or "Yes, that's a good idea which is why we've been doing it for the past twenty years." How can we enjoy feeling like great thought-leaders and education revolutionaries when people keep interrupting with that shit?
We totally included teachers.
We searched all over for teachers who agreed with everything we have to say and were totally willing to go along with us every step of the way. We have included those teachers. Well, at least, we've allowed those teachers to be spokespersons for us. They've been great and have given us no trouble at all. What else did you want?
You didn't get your invitation? Hmm. It must have gotten lost in the mail.
We totally meant to invite you guys. Did you check your spam filters? Our secretary must have messed up. Man, we wondered why you weren't here.
Are there any other possible explanations? In particular, are there any that don't smell of disrespect or disregard for public school teachers? I'm stumped. Maybe We knew you were busy with Real Important Stuff and we didn't want to bother you is a possibility, but I don't think I've ever read anything that would suggest it.
No, to really have a new conversation, there's a message that reformsters are somehow going to have to get out. It would go something like this:
You know what? We made a mistake. We now realize that teachers are deeply committed to educating our country's children, and as America's leading education professionals, they need to be not just part of this conversation, but leading it. After a few years of trying to reshape public education, we realize we need to change our stance. So we are here to listen to you, teachers. How can we help you achieve the best results for our public school students?
To their credit, some reformsters have picked up on pieces of that. But we're not there yet.
Friday, September 26, 2014
The Missing Link in the Reading Debate
The debate du jour is about reading, begun in the Intelligence Squared debate, continued through Carol Burris's follow-up column, and followed up by literacy expert Russ Walsh. Okay, it's debate in the sense that disagreements between regular scientists and the Flat Earth Society are debates. Over at the Fordham, Robert Pondiscio offered his two cents which Mike Petrilli on twitter called a "debunking" of Burris, which is a generous reading of Pondiscio's work; apparently generosity is a Fordham trait, as Pondiscio says that AnnWhalen "intelligently critiqued" Burris's post, which is an extremely generous reading of a column that boils down to "neener neener, she's a big liar."
The Big Fat Question is this: should students be given reading materials that are at their actual reading level, at the reading level at which they're supposed to be, or at frustration level?
I'll cut to the chase, and give you Russ Walsh's answer which is, I believe, the correct one: all of the above, in a mixture best determined by the teacher who is working with the child.
But let me also explain why this debate is not going to go away, despite the fact that almost everyone involved is talking out of their butt, because there are some huge, Godzilla-sized gaps in our knowledge.
Reading is hard.
Our understanding of how the human brain does language is limited and inextricably bound up in questions such as how we truly connect wit other humans and know and perceive. Layer on top of that reading and writing, highly artificial and constructed versions of language living at the intersection of Knowledge Base Boulevard and Skill Set Street, and you get the most complex human activity, bar none.
So when someone says, "Chris can read," it's such an unparalleled oversimplification that even I, whose stock in trade is illustrative analogies, don't have a really good comparison. "I can play trombone" or "I can play basketball" come close-ish. But only close-ish.
This vast complexity means that whenever we talk about reading we are always either A) trying to squeeze an 800-pound gorilla into a breadbox, or B) talking about one limb of the elephant as if it's the whole African sub-continent. I'm an English teacher, not a reading specialist (the fact that such a thing exists also tells us something), but my wife is working her way to an advanced degree via reading, and looking over her shoulder confirms my belief. Folks who fall into the A trap tend to talk about reading as if unpacking the various layers of meaning in a piece of writing is as simple as unpacking a second grader's lunch box. But it's Group B that really makes a mess.
The elephant's toe
To make the unbelievably complex manageable, many folks simply stare at one tiny part. For instance, as a high school teacher, I will never get over DIBELS, a diagnostic test for which small children are told to read nonsense words, clumps of words that have no actual meaning.
But that's typical of much that goes on in the field-- we try to isolate one part of reading from the vast complex of reading behavior. So let's have students decode sounds that aren't words, or let's have students read short excerpts without any context-- better yet, let's make them boring and unrelatable so we'll know that students aren't tapping into prior knowledge or actual interest.
It's not that we can't learn useful things from the elephant's toe. But if we get so focused in the toe that we chop it off and take it back to the lab where we subsequently discover that it is bloodless and rotting-- well, we've lost the point entirely.
But we're stuck studying the elephant's toe, because that's what we're prepared to deal with. However, all this so far leads us to the hugest, most gigantic hole in all the reading discussions--
WE HAVE NO RELIABLE METHOD OF MEASURING TOTAL READING ABILITY
Look, we don't even know what it means to say, "Pat read Huckleberry Finn really well." Does it mean she could read every word out loud with correct pronunciation? Does it mean that she can recall character names and plot points? Does it mean that she can recognize the use of figurative language? Can she understand Twain's sarcasm and irony? Does she get the jokes and laugh at them? Does she recognize symbolic elements? Can she effectively discuss the final chapters and argue for their effectiveness or lack thereof? Can she understand how social, economic and racial issues in both the past and present context of the book?
All of them? Sure. Now design an assessment that measures all those. And make it something that's scaleable on a national level. And remember-- reading Huck Finn is just one type of reading.
When I started this piece, I was going to wade into all the research and fake research, but it all comes down to a line about "shows improved achievement in reading" which really means "got better scores on standardized test which measured a very narrow slice from the broad spectrum of skills." If you say to me, "We have proof that this approach leads to students who can read better," I am going to ask you what you mean by "better," because I don't think you know in any specific and quantifiable way.
Put another way, reading is a real world activity. The further you get from the real world, the less meaningful your study is going to be. If you lock an elephant up in a tiny cage, you can still learn some things about the elephant, but nothing remotely comparable to studying it in the wild.
If we are concerned about real reading by real humans in the real world as a real tool for real life, most of our research and testing data is junk.
That stuff that students have to do on standardized reading tests? It bears a superficial relationship to actual reading in the same way cybersex resembles actual sex. Some of the terminology and tools are the same, but they're used in ways that in some ways run directly counter to the real life applications.
Common Core mirages
We keep insisting that CCSS requires students to be taught in complex tests at or above grade level. I'll be damned if I can find anything in the standards that actually says that.
I believe that fans of complex frustration-level reading as an instructional technique see the Core as a great opportunity to beat their favorite drum. But I think, once again, we're seeing the phenomenon of people seeing in Common Core just what they want to see.
About those levels
When we're discussing what level of reading a student should be doing, we need to acknowledge our methods of determining levels range from Good Enough To Get By all the way down to Unspeakably Stupid. Lexiles, for example, have been deservingly ridiculed for their stupid rankings. Ernest Hemmingway is always a go-to writer for these discussions because his language is spare, sparse and simple. A Farewell to Arms has a lower lexile ranking than The Hunger Games.
This is before we even get to issues of reading motivation. Give a student a book about a subject they love, and their passion for the topic will power them through tough reading. Give them a book that completely bores them at grade level, and they will have a terrible time.
Any discussion of what level a sixth grader should be reading assumes that we have an accurate master list of what books are sixth grade level books. We don't.
So what do we do?
We are on such a wrong path right now. What we know how to do-- what we can do very, very well-- is train students to do well on tests while simultaneously insuring that they will forever think of reading as an unpleasant, unrewarding activity that they will never, ever do, unless forced. The only way we could do more effective aversion training would be to give students a painful electric shock every time they touched a book.
I don't believe this is what anybody-- not traditionalists, not reformsters, not even thinky tank guys--wants. I do believe that some folks are so invested in the reformster agenda that they simply can't see what they're doing, but I don't think it's what they want.
Reading instruction will come best from trained and dedicated educators who have developed personal relationships with the students. Some narrow testing data will be useful as a diagnostic tool, but passing a test or proving that the student can and has read-- that can never be the point of the instruction. In fact-- and this is a topic for another day-- I truly and deeply believe that meaningful reading assessment is not scaleable at all.
Meaningful assessment might look like "Find some way to tell or show me what this book means to you" or just "Talk to me about what you read." And because some reading can produce a myriad of legitimate interpretations, any reading assessment with a set answer key will always be looking at the elephant's toe.
Reading instruction is also personal. Only someone who knows the student to know what his interests are, how deeply he is capable of reading and understanding, what prior knowledge he brings to the text, what interests him, how much frustration he can stand before cracking, how much of a "reader" he already is, how much help he needs to decode the text-- only someone who can know and process all that personally can make the right assignment.
Every good teacher knows that you have to meet the students where she is. Every good teacher knows what combination of hand-holding and butt-kicking is needed to move the student forward.
Those who insist that every student must read [only or mainly] frustrating material are not simply wrong-- they're deeply and completely committed to staring at the elephant's toe. They need to take a step back and look at the whole sub-continent. A good place to start would be looking at what experts like Russ Walsh have to say.
The Big Fat Question is this: should students be given reading materials that are at their actual reading level, at the reading level at which they're supposed to be, or at frustration level?
I'll cut to the chase, and give you Russ Walsh's answer which is, I believe, the correct one: all of the above, in a mixture best determined by the teacher who is working with the child.
But let me also explain why this debate is not going to go away, despite the fact that almost everyone involved is talking out of their butt, because there are some huge, Godzilla-sized gaps in our knowledge.
Reading is hard.
Our understanding of how the human brain does language is limited and inextricably bound up in questions such as how we truly connect wit other humans and know and perceive. Layer on top of that reading and writing, highly artificial and constructed versions of language living at the intersection of Knowledge Base Boulevard and Skill Set Street, and you get the most complex human activity, bar none.
So when someone says, "Chris can read," it's such an unparalleled oversimplification that even I, whose stock in trade is illustrative analogies, don't have a really good comparison. "I can play trombone" or "I can play basketball" come close-ish. But only close-ish.
This vast complexity means that whenever we talk about reading we are always either A) trying to squeeze an 800-pound gorilla into a breadbox, or B) talking about one limb of the elephant as if it's the whole African sub-continent. I'm an English teacher, not a reading specialist (the fact that such a thing exists also tells us something), but my wife is working her way to an advanced degree via reading, and looking over her shoulder confirms my belief. Folks who fall into the A trap tend to talk about reading as if unpacking the various layers of meaning in a piece of writing is as simple as unpacking a second grader's lunch box. But it's Group B that really makes a mess.
The elephant's toe
To make the unbelievably complex manageable, many folks simply stare at one tiny part. For instance, as a high school teacher, I will never get over DIBELS, a diagnostic test for which small children are told to read nonsense words, clumps of words that have no actual meaning.
But that's typical of much that goes on in the field-- we try to isolate one part of reading from the vast complex of reading behavior. So let's have students decode sounds that aren't words, or let's have students read short excerpts without any context-- better yet, let's make them boring and unrelatable so we'll know that students aren't tapping into prior knowledge or actual interest.
It's not that we can't learn useful things from the elephant's toe. But if we get so focused in the toe that we chop it off and take it back to the lab where we subsequently discover that it is bloodless and rotting-- well, we've lost the point entirely.
But we're stuck studying the elephant's toe, because that's what we're prepared to deal with. However, all this so far leads us to the hugest, most gigantic hole in all the reading discussions--
WE HAVE NO RELIABLE METHOD OF MEASURING TOTAL READING ABILITY
Look, we don't even know what it means to say, "Pat read Huckleberry Finn really well." Does it mean she could read every word out loud with correct pronunciation? Does it mean that she can recall character names and plot points? Does it mean that she can recognize the use of figurative language? Can she understand Twain's sarcasm and irony? Does she get the jokes and laugh at them? Does she recognize symbolic elements? Can she effectively discuss the final chapters and argue for their effectiveness or lack thereof? Can she understand how social, economic and racial issues in both the past and present context of the book?
All of them? Sure. Now design an assessment that measures all those. And make it something that's scaleable on a national level. And remember-- reading Huck Finn is just one type of reading.
When I started this piece, I was going to wade into all the research and fake research, but it all comes down to a line about "shows improved achievement in reading" which really means "got better scores on standardized test which measured a very narrow slice from the broad spectrum of skills." If you say to me, "We have proof that this approach leads to students who can read better," I am going to ask you what you mean by "better," because I don't think you know in any specific and quantifiable way.
Put another way, reading is a real world activity. The further you get from the real world, the less meaningful your study is going to be. If you lock an elephant up in a tiny cage, you can still learn some things about the elephant, but nothing remotely comparable to studying it in the wild.
If we are concerned about real reading by real humans in the real world as a real tool for real life, most of our research and testing data is junk.
That stuff that students have to do on standardized reading tests? It bears a superficial relationship to actual reading in the same way cybersex resembles actual sex. Some of the terminology and tools are the same, but they're used in ways that in some ways run directly counter to the real life applications.
Common Core mirages
We keep insisting that CCSS requires students to be taught in complex tests at or above grade level. I'll be damned if I can find anything in the standards that actually says that.
I believe that fans of complex frustration-level reading as an instructional technique see the Core as a great opportunity to beat their favorite drum. But I think, once again, we're seeing the phenomenon of people seeing in Common Core just what they want to see.
About those levels
When we're discussing what level of reading a student should be doing, we need to acknowledge our methods of determining levels range from Good Enough To Get By all the way down to Unspeakably Stupid. Lexiles, for example, have been deservingly ridiculed for their stupid rankings. Ernest Hemmingway is always a go-to writer for these discussions because his language is spare, sparse and simple. A Farewell to Arms has a lower lexile ranking than The Hunger Games.
This is before we even get to issues of reading motivation. Give a student a book about a subject they love, and their passion for the topic will power them through tough reading. Give them a book that completely bores them at grade level, and they will have a terrible time.
Any discussion of what level a sixth grader should be reading assumes that we have an accurate master list of what books are sixth grade level books. We don't.
So what do we do?
We are on such a wrong path right now. What we know how to do-- what we can do very, very well-- is train students to do well on tests while simultaneously insuring that they will forever think of reading as an unpleasant, unrewarding activity that they will never, ever do, unless forced. The only way we could do more effective aversion training would be to give students a painful electric shock every time they touched a book.
I don't believe this is what anybody-- not traditionalists, not reformsters, not even thinky tank guys--wants. I do believe that some folks are so invested in the reformster agenda that they simply can't see what they're doing, but I don't think it's what they want.
Reading instruction will come best from trained and dedicated educators who have developed personal relationships with the students. Some narrow testing data will be useful as a diagnostic tool, but passing a test or proving that the student can and has read-- that can never be the point of the instruction. In fact-- and this is a topic for another day-- I truly and deeply believe that meaningful reading assessment is not scaleable at all.
Meaningful assessment might look like "Find some way to tell or show me what this book means to you" or just "Talk to me about what you read." And because some reading can produce a myriad of legitimate interpretations, any reading assessment with a set answer key will always be looking at the elephant's toe.
Reading instruction is also personal. Only someone who knows the student to know what his interests are, how deeply he is capable of reading and understanding, what prior knowledge he brings to the text, what interests him, how much frustration he can stand before cracking, how much of a "reader" he already is, how much help he needs to decode the text-- only someone who can know and process all that personally can make the right assignment.
Every good teacher knows that you have to meet the students where she is. Every good teacher knows what combination of hand-holding and butt-kicking is needed to move the student forward.
Those who insist that every student must read [only or mainly] frustrating material are not simply wrong-- they're deeply and completely committed to staring at the elephant's toe. They need to take a step back and look at the whole sub-continent. A good place to start would be looking at what experts like Russ Walsh have to say.
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