National Test Refusal for Pre-Teens

If you are up on your various privacy acts, you might already know about COPPA. The idea behind COPPA is that we all need to be extra-cautious about what sort of on line information people try to collect from pre-teens (twelve and under).

It was a fairly unassuming and sensible piece of legislation when it was passed by Congress back in 1998. We just wanted to protect children from unscrupulous data collectors on line. Those were simpler days, more cyber-fearful days, days when we couldn't imagine that the government would require five-year-olds to sit at a computer and answer questions about themselves.

When it comes to student privacy, mostly we've been talking about FERPA, and all the ways that the Department of Education has tied its shoelaces together to better allow corporations to hoover up valuable data to better serve the educational needs of America's youth, somehow.

But COPPA isn't under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education. COPPA is the FTC's baby, and that means it's still fully functional. And it could be a real game changer for the test-crazy wing of the reformster movement, because it arms every parent with what looks to be a hefty monkey wrench.

The reading by the folks at United Opt Out and Student Privacy Matters is pretty simple. If your pre-teen child's schools is having them take any sort of test that involves entering any sort of personal information on line, you are entitled to full information about it, and you are entitled to have them not participate. (COPPA does not apply to any program where an adult collects the information and enters it into the program.)

United Opt Out has a site with a template for a letter that you can send to your school. This has the potential for a nation-wide action that could really gum up the works for the computer-based PARCC and SBA tests (unless you're in Pennsylvania, where we do all our testing the way God intended, with paper and pencil). It would also be interesting to see, when push comes to shove, what exactly qualifies as "personal information." Sure, that covers explicitly asking about address, family income, and household composition. But would "personal information" also describe, say, test questions aimed at evaluating the elusive non-cognitive areas-- questions designed to measure the child's personality. Personally, as far as I'm concerned, the question of "How good is this kid at math" is also personal information that ought to be covered by this. But baby steps.

If you are the parent of a pre-teen, and you've been itching for a way to get your child out the way of the testing juggernaut, here's your path. Check out United Opt Out for more details.

Ed Lessons from Athletics

Mark McClusky started out as at Sports Illustrated as a writer, then editor. He moved to Wired, and now is the editor of Wired.com, but his interest in the intersection of athletics and science has stayed with him, and so he just released a book: Faster, Higher, Stronger: How sports science is creating a new generation of superathletes-- and what we can learn from them.  The book is a highly accessible, thoroughly researched, and filled with wit and sharp-eared high quality journalism. McClusky is an enormously engaging writer. He's also one of my former students.

I don't take any credit for Mark-- there are some students who are going to excel even if they're taught by wolves-- but that connection moved me to pick up his book, where I discovered many interesting things, several of which have real implications for education. Allow me to share.

Timing

Nearly three-quarters of the best athletes in the world at the senior level weren't among the best in the world when they were younger.

Displaying skills (or the lack thereof) at a young age doesn't necessarily mean much when it comes to predicting future excellence. Oddly enough, a good predictor of future performance is being a younger sibling. There's a great deal of research to indicate that young athletes get an edge by constantly reaching just beyond their current ability (but not too far).

The beloved 10,000 hour rule? Probably bunk. The desire to start athletes young and push them hard has unfortunate consequences. 3.5 million children under fourteen are injured annually playing sports, and almost half of those injuries are from overuse. So taking young children and pushing them in hopes of forcing excellence is both unproductive and bad for the child. So maybe teaching three-year-olds to recite quadratic equations and flunking third graders who can't yet pass a standardized reading test is not such a great idea!

Blocked Practice

Coaches have often been big fans of blocked practice--training a series of discrete skills. So a basketball team might drill passing, then drill shooting foul shots, and so on, skill after skill. It makes for neat, orderly, purposeful practice sessions. But a body of research says it's not the best way to prepare a team.

McClusky notes an experiment performed by John Shea and Robyn Morgan at University of Colorado in 1979. Students were given three tasks to repeat. One group practiced in blocked and orderly manner. The other practiced in a random chaotic manner. The orderly practices were better at learning and practicing, but even after as little as ten minutes, the chaotic practices had better retention.

Richard Schmidt, an expert on motor learning, asks volleyball coaches, "Are you practicing for practice, or are you practicing for performance?" John Kessel, director of sport development of USA Volleyball, says, "Practice shouldn't look good." Studies of hammer throw practice techniques concluded that the best way to improve was to throw the hammer. Kessel also says, "The game teaches the game. "Experts have concluded that the best way to learn for performance is to do something that's a close to performance and performance conditions as possible.

We can teach writing, for instance, in a manner that is blocked and orderly and tests well-- but will that produce writers who can actually write usefully in the real world?

Sleep Is Huge

It was a small study, but a striking one. A basketball team agreed to be subjects in a sleep experiment. After being measured under their usual sleep patterns, they switched to "extra" sleep. With extra sleep, they improved 11.4% on free throws and 13.7% on three point shots.

Data

It is no news that sports folks love to track data. But the history of data crunching in sports, particularly in the past decade or two, is instructive.

Baseball started out tracking batting averages, in no small part because they were "easy to calculate and understand." But baseball stats dorks have since found better things to measure. Basketball has been revolutionized by a cartographer who has mapped 700,000 shots taken in basketball games to come up with data pictures more rich and valuable than ever available than ever before.

One of the things that draw many to sports is that final evaluation of your performance is clear-cut-- just look at the scoreboard or the results sheet. Every day most of us go to work and do our jobs the best way we know how. But there's no immediate sense of how well we've done...

Sport has the opposite problem: the focus  on the competitive outcome can sometimes overshadow real progress and improvement.

The contrast between the mountains of data now being collected and analyzed to tell which sports figures are really excelling and the tiny little molehill of data produced by a standardized test is striking. What sports are learning to do reminds me of what classroom teachers do every day-- miles away from a standardized snapshot of one moment. It's also a reminder of how important it is to measure the right thing. Basketball is being reshaped as coaches and players learn to focus on the data that makes a difference, rather than the old data that might not have been important, but was easily measurable.


There's lots more in the book that will be interesting to coaches and athletes and anybody at all interested in sporty stuff. It's a good read, even if you're not being hugely gratified by the fact that it was written by a guy who once sat in your classroom.

Nobody Owns the Beach

In Hawaii, nobody owns the beach.

Nobody can own the beach. Lots of people and hotels own land right next to the beach, but they can't own the beach. There are sections of waterfront in Hawaii that are rather isolated and rugged, like a beautiful blasted moonscape. A private investor, given the chance, could probably make something cool out of them. And there are periodically flaps in Hawaii when some private property owner tries to interfere with access to the beach (military bases feel the need, as one might expect, to control access to the beaches that are part of the base). But nobody owns the beach in Hawaii.

That's because your government recognizes that certain resources are a public good and need to be maintained as public goods. So even when somebody offers to "manage" that public good for you, just for a cut of the take, that doesn't happen. Because as soon as a public resource becomes a way of enriching private interests, the public interest in that resource takes a back seat.

So nobody owns the beach.

Oddly enough, by keeping the beach a public good, lots of private interests can benefit. Hundreds and hundreds of businesses set up within arm's reach of the water, many and varied in size and style. Development in Hawaii is a tricky thing-- businesses jockey for position and an old friend told me that the International Market in Honolulu was finally going to be squeezed out by big money. When that kind of rapacious development gets going, the battle for marketable square feet gets fierce, and small players get pushed aside by the people with the big money and power. And of course the more money and power you have, the more money and power you get.

But nobody can own the beach.

Suppose the state starting slicing up the beach, offering special charters to private beach operators. Would that make the beaches better? Would the public be served by charter operators scrambling to get the best sand? Or would they be reduced to marketing themselves as the beach where you found the kind of people you like, but none of Those People? Would charter operators scramble to buy each other out, to raise the stakes so that small operators with good ideas could never get involved? Would the public good be pushed back by operators who were irritated and resentful every time these customers Wanted Something, cutting into the charter beach's profits? Think about resort areas where nobody can so much as look at the ocean without paying somebody to do it. How well does that serve the public?

Thank goodness nobody can own the beach.

Are public beaches a perfect metaphor for public schools? I'm going to say no before I have to explain which part of the beach I am. But Hawaiian beaches are a good example of the challenges of preserving and protecting a public resource, a trust that exists for the public good. And that idea of a public resources, public service and public trust-- that's not a metaphor for public education. It is public education.

Administration Wants To Lock in Testing Forever

The US Department of Education this week released the guidelines for states getting ready to fill out those waiver applications. Just add this to my "I Told You So" list regarding last months supposed signal of a change in direction by education leaders and Arne Duncan. Once again, what we're seeing is not so much Change of Direction as it is Jam Foot Down On Gas Pedal.

The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."

The feds have tightened up the old sub-group requirements. We all remember this from the NCLB days-- a subgroup of twenty-or-so students (depending on your location) will carry the fate of the entire building in their test scores. Students who belong to subgroups may once again look forward to Special schedules featuring five hours of steady test prep. Congratulations, subgroup students.

The new waivers also feature a super-extended feature which will allow states to exist in whatever extra-legal limbo the waivers create well past President Obama's expiration date. This is a really novel stretch of a really novel idea. There is already some debate about whether the waivers are legal in the first place; now we get to ask if they can be made binding on a subsequent administration. I suppose we're fortunate that they didn't try to lock testing in until the tri-centennial.

Perhaps it's an attempt to weight state's consideration about whether to bother or not ("We could just skip the waiver application, and by the time the feds had gotten around to actually doing anything, we'd already be getting new rules from a new President anyway"). Or it could just be a mark of how deeply committed this administration is to the idea that an untested child is a wasted young life. maybe they're sincerely dedicated to making sure that every test maker gets to sell lots of product every child gets to experience the joys of soulcrushing standardized testing. Maybe they are trying to further confirm that it will make no difference how we cast our votes in 2016.

Or maybe they're just trying to give extra inspiration to movements like the one that rendered testing of seniors in Colorado completely moot. Imagine that-- students smart enough to figure out that the testing is a complete waste of time! I guess we're doing something right.

Whatever the case, this new set of waiver guidelines is great news for testing companies and terrible news for everyone who actually cares about public educations and the students who attend public schools. So, thanks a lot, Department of Education.

Washington: Disabilities Aren't Real

Following in the footsteps of one of the dumbest initiatives to come out of the US Department of Education, Washington state has arrived at some destructive fact-free findings regarding the education of students with special needs.

The Governor's Office of the Education Ombuds has created and released a report that...well, I will let the conclusion speak for itself:

The evidence is clear that disabilities do not cause disparate outcomes, but that the system itself perpetuates limitations in expectations and false belief systems about who children with disabilities can be and how much they can achieve in their lifetime.

So there you have it-- as previously suggested by the federal Department of Education, the disabilities that students claim to possess do not actually exist in any meaningful way. Any limitations that they appear to have are simply the result of the system's (i.e. teachers) low expectations:

But the vast majority of children  in special education do not have disabilities that prevent them from tackling the same rigorous academic subjects as general education students if they get the proper support, so those low numbers reflect shortcomings in the system, not the students.

You might think that link takes you to some research that supports this rather startling assertion. It doesn't. It takes you to the US ED statement on the subject, and that is supported by-- nothing. I addressed this before ("Quite Possibly the Stupidest Thing To Come Out of the US DOE"), but it hasn't gotten any less bizarre since last June.

I'm not sure which reading is more bizarre-- do they mean that schools take perfectly normal students and arbitrarily turn them into special needs students, or that schools could completely cure students of their disabilities if we just tried harder and expected more? I'm a big believer in expectations, but no matter how hard I expect my hair to grow back, it doesn't happen. Expecting a student to do the best she can is good teacher behavior; expecting a student to do what she cannot is just mean.

Nancy Bailey has written a fiery and pointed reaction to this "news," and sees it as one step in the abolition of special ed programs entirely. After all, the one size fits all nature of Common Core and the Core testing regimen will work so much more smoothly once we make every student the same, and the easiest and fastest way to do that is to just say it's so. This certainly fits in with the philosophy that the way to get all students to read at grade level is to just, you know, make them do it. Insist real hard. If we believe that we can get a student with a second grade reading skill read at the fifth grade level by just somehow making him do it, why can't we make a dyslexic student or student with other processing difficulties read at level by just expecting her to? "Stop pretending you're blind, Jimmy, and read this book right now!"

The report also concludes that special ed programs are too expensive and don't produce enough magical results, plus they have too much procedure and regulation as well as putting parents in adversarial positions (and, boy, isn't that a whole chapter of a book).

Bailey thinks Seattle is clearing the ground to cut special ed as a budget savings for the state. I can see one other impetus for removing special ed rules-- charters. Charters don't like students with special needs because they bring extra costs, and they bring special costs because of regulations that mandate services for them. But remove the mandated services and replace them with something cheap, like High Expectations, and a whole new market sector opens up.

Washington is concerned about the long term effects of this lack of magical high expectations. The report says that the failure of schools to erase all effects of the disabilities results in lives of "unemployment, poverty and dependence."

Good news!! I totally know how to fix this!

High expectations!!

After all-- these students are probably not getting hired for jobs like store manager or nuclear plant engineer or government ombudsperson because the employers don't expect they'll be able to do the job. Low expectations!

So we just mandate that employers must hire the first people who show up for a job. After all, if education results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of the school system, then employment results are just the product of randomly applied low and high expectations of employers. If I can get all students to be awesome in my classroom just by expecting it, then an employer can get awesome results from any and all employees just by expecting them!

So all Washington (either one) has to say is, "Employers, you must hire blindly. Take whoever you get and make it work with the power of high expectations!" And excellence will rain down like manna from heaven. You're welcome.

100% Charter Fail

Writer-researcher Mark Weber published a piece about charters on NJSpotlight this week that deals with charter schools in New Jersey, but which has implications for the charter movement all across the US.

Weber is perhaps better known in the edubloggoverse as Jersey Jazzman, and his research prowess (coupled with that of Julia Sass Rubin of Ruthers) is highly respected. This piece brings together much work that he's published in the past; a trip through the pages of his blog will reveal considerable more detail for those who want it.

The bottom line is that New Jersey charters do not serve the same population as the districts that house them. Specifically, they serve a smaller percentage of poor students and students with extra learning challenges.

As Weber reports, even Cami Anderson has admitted this in public. And the numbers, readily available from public sources, fully support this conclusion. There really are no grounds on which to dispute it. And yet many charteristas continue to do so.

Why? The most obvious reason would be that the numbers explain away what little success some charters can claim. It raises the bar of expectations of charters-- if you've creamed all the better students, why aren't you doing any better than you are?

But more importantly, it reveals the limits of the charter business model.

New Jersey can never be a 100% charter state system. At least not with the current charter operating system. Let's sort students into two groups-- let's call students who come from better economic backgrounds and have no special needs Low Cost Students, and students from lower economic backgrounds or with special needs will be called High Cost Students. If the state wide ratio of LCS to HCS is 3:1, but the ratio inside charters is 12:1, we cannot get all the students in New Jersey into a charter school. Somewhere we're going to have a big old pile of leftover High Cost Students.

In the meantime, it would also be nice to have Condoleeza Rice visit NJ and see how charters provide the machinery for de facto segregation. Charter opponents are racist, my ass.

Plenty of folks have always assumed that this was the end game: a private system for the best and the-- well, if not brightest, at least the least poor and problematic-- and an underfunded remnant of the public system to warehouse the students that the charter system didn't want.

But those folks may have underestimated the greed, ambition and delusions of some charter backers. "Why stop at the icing," operators say, "when we can have the whole cake?" And chartercrats like Arne Duncan, with dreams of scaleability dancing in their sugarplum heads, may really think that full-scale charter systems can work because A) they don't understand that most charter "success" is illusory and B) they don't know why.

It's telling that while chartercrats are cheering on complete charter conversions for cities from York, PA to Memphis, TN, no charter chains have (as far as I know) expressed a desire to have a whole city to themselves. The preferred model is an urban broker like Tennessee's ASD or the bureaucratic clusterfarfegnugen that is Philadelphia schools-- charter operators can jostle for the juiciest slice of the steak and try to leave the gristle for some other poor sucker.

It's not even that charters are worried about how successful they will look. The business model is still evolving, and charters are learning how to spin and market almost anything that comes out in their numbers. They do need good numbers, and they have gotten better at getting them. But the numbers that they are most attentive to are the ones on the bottom line, and that's why no charter operators in their right minds would want a 100% charter system that they had to be responsible for.

I sorted students into High Cost and Low Cost because that's how charter operators see them. It's not that it's easier to get good numbers out of a smart, rich kid. It's that it's cheaper. Students with special needs, students from poor backgrounds, students who have behavioral issues-- these students cost more money. And never forget-- every dollar that a charter operator has to spend on s student is a dollar the charter operator doesn't get to put in his pocket.

Here's one more reason that free market economics do not belong in public education-- in the free market, all customers are NOT created equal. All customers are NOT equally desirable to businesses. And the free market deals with these undesirable customers very simply-- it doesn't serve them. (This is why, for instance, when you hire FEDex or UPS to deliver a package to your uncle on some back road in Bumfargel, PA, FEDex and UPS turn around and hire the United States Postal Service to deliver it for them.) In a charter system, those High Cost Students become human hot potatoes.

"Well, we'll just require charters to serve a certain segment of the population in our 100% charter system," you say. And I will remind you of one other critical difference between charters and true public schools. True traditional public schools do not say, "It's too hard to turn a profit in this business environment, so we are just going to close our doors." Traditional public schools are in it for the long haul. Charter operators are in it as long as it makes business sense to be in it. If they don't like the deal you're offering them, they don't have to stay.

A effective total charter system is not going to happen. If you're not convinced by the ongoing slow-motion disaster in New Orleans, just look at the number from New Jersey. It's unsustainable and unscaleable.

Voice, Hypocrisy and Rashomon at AEI

On Thursday, Cami Anderson was supposed to speak at the American Enterprise Institute. Things did not go quite as planned. How they did go is, well, open to interpretation. We now present, "Rashomon at AEI"

One angry voice.

Bob Braun, hard-hitting journalist and defender of public education in New Jersey, recounted the events in his blog post "Cami Anderson: A National Embarassment."

Anderson, already an embarrassment to herself and the state of New Jersey, never did speak, at least not publicly. She canceled her PUBLIC speech. Why? Because a busload of 40 students, parents, and other community residents showed up to hear what she had to say and, perhaps, to ask her a few questions.  They had to go to Washington because Cami Anderson won’t talk to them in Newark. Won’t attend public board meetings. Hasn’t since January. The Hermit Queen of Newark.
So those 40 people who yesterday followed her to Washington literally scared her speechless, poor dear.

The Newark folks had registered to the event (all accounts agree pretty much on that point). But one of Anderson's aids spotted familiar crankypants faces and told AEI event organizers that barbarians were already inside the gates. Security did not evict them, but the "event" was moved, and somebody decided that a good way to roust the Jerseyites would be to turn out the lights in the room, which led to some angry chanting.

Braun notes the irony of a think tank devoted to freedom, open debate, and individual liberty deciding that some people needed to be forcibly barred from this particular conversation.

A historical voice

Over at the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton covered both the non-event and the background of anger and contentiousness that preceded it. The people of Newark have been agitated about the state-selected school boss who has become their school tsar, to rule their schools and ignore their voices as she sees fit. Anderson claims it's a small fringe group, but somehow a new mayor of Newark was elected as an agent of that small fringe, which suggests they are correct when they say they're not a finge at all.

An aggrieved voice

Rick Hess of the AEI has a somewhat different take on the events. As with Braun, his point of view is loaded right up front in the title: "Cami Anderson and the Forces of Unreason."

Hess points out the irony that this event was the end result of Anderson's exception-taking to a Hess piece earlier this year that was indirectly critical of Newarks non-achievements. He was giving her a platform on which to discuss the many great things she's accomplished that nobody has heard about. (And she still got the platform-- just as a closed room videoed infomercial)

The event was to be an examination of Newark and the lessons it holds--not a celebration of Anderson's effort. As per usual, the session was to include a presentation by Anderson on her "One Newark" strategy, and then more than an hour of conversation and questions. Is Newark's strategy the right one? Is it working? That's what discussions like this are for. Should the governor control Newark's schools? Is Anderson the right person to be superintendent? Good questions, all. Well worth discussing and debating in the nation's capital.

But Hess is taken aback. He's surprised and disappointed. He's not yet clutching his pearls, but he does have them at the ready. AEI, he says, has hosted a wide variety of speakers from many sides of the education debates. He counts Randi Weingarten and Dennis van Roekel among the "different" (non-reformster) speakers, and by my count the reformster to resistance ratio runs about 4:1, but his point that AEI is not just playing echo chamber is still a fair-ish one.

Anyway, in all those speakers he has never encountered "a group so dead-set on trying to stop someone from simply being heard as this coterie from Newark." (I really, really love that he calls them a "coterie.") He is upset that they aren't called out more for being so vicious, but he is especially bothered by their hypocrisy. How can they demand to be heard while stifling the speech of others? And not even get ripped for it in the press?

Rick Hess is a smart guy. I often refer to him as one of my favorite writers that I usually disagree with. But I think he's missed a point or two here.

The Hypocrisy defense.

This is always a lousy defense, no matter which side is using it. The situation is usually something like this-- I punch you in the face, and you holler, "Hey, man! It's totally wrong to punch someone in the face!" But I keep punching. When you finally punch me back, I call "Hypocrite." It has two benefits. One is that it keeps the conversation away from discussing whether or not I'm punching you in the face and whether or not that's bad behavior. The other is that you can only win the hypocrisy argument by letting me punch you in the face without ever hitting back.

"Hey, you're being hypocritical" is often a rough translation of "No fair! You promised you weren't going to fight back!"

Voice and volume

Now, I think it's probably true that the Newark folks may have been a bit unruly. And if they weren't to start with, the videos on youtube suggest that they certainly got feisty once they realized that the elusive Anderson had slipped through their fingers again. And the accounts I've read from Newark suggest there has been a whole lot of raised-voice angry hollerization going on in NJ.

But instead of looking at this kind of hollering as a moral failing or a breach of etiquette (one simply doesn't holler at a think tank luncheon), let's look at it for what it really is-- the demonstration of a simple principle. I learned it years ago running committees, and confirmed it in many situations since then. It's a simple two-part principle of voice and volume.

1) People want to be heard.

2) If they do not believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume until they believe they are being heard.

I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations that I've seen defused by one side actually stopping and listening to the other. I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations I've seen made worse by one side trying to deal with dissent by silencing it.

It's Basic Leadership 101. You cannot get rid of disagreement by silencing its voice. I don't mean you shouldn't, as in a moral imperative (though I believe it is one)-- I mean you can't, as in it just doesn't work. People want to be heard. If they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume, even to the point of rude and untoward behavior at proper thinky tank luncheons.

Yes, there's always a small percentage of folks who think being heard must mean being agreed with. But listening isolates them as a small fringe group takes the wind out of their sails. Pro tip: trying to combine not listening with characterizing them as a fringe group doesn't do you a bit of good.

Cami Anderson and her crew have provided an ongoing masters class in how to get all of this dead wrong. They have tried to rule by edict. Anderson has taken Not Listening all the way to Not Even Being In Same Room With People She Refuses To Listen To. And the enlistment of Tom Moran and the Star-Ledger has further reduced the ways in which opponents of Anderson can be heard. The increasingly loud, shrill, occasionally vicious, exceedingly impolite ratcheting up of her opponents' volume is an absolutely predictable result of Anderson's incompetence as a leader. It's not just that her policies are demonstrably failures, but her unwillingness to even make a five-cent politicians fake pretense of hearing any opposing voices. She is not the first nor the last leader to try to implement bad policies, but not all of them manage to do such a terrible job as managers that people are willing to take a day out of their lives to travel all the way to DC on the off chance that they might be able to force said incompetent leader to listen to them.

Well, I could go on. But if you want the full context of how the AEI non-event is further evidence that Anderson should be out of a job, read this post from Jersey Jazzman.

Volume and Power

I want to make one other observation about this raised volume thing. It's almost always a class and/or power thing.

When people with money and power feel they aren't being heard, they also raise the volume. But because they have money and power, they can raise the volume by spending $12 million to set up slick websites, or establishing "advocacy groups" to push their agenda out through their connections, or having polite luncheon dates. If Bill Gates thinks people aren't really hearing what he has to say about education, he gets out his checkbook or makes some phone calls. If Anderson and Hess feel that they aren't going to be heard, they retire to the studio in another room to record a professional-looking video to distribute through their internet channels; meanwhile, the folks they left behind are stuck recording their chants on cell-phone videos on the hope someone might pick them up on youtube.

Ordinary folks like the citizens of Newark don't have the rich and powerful options. They can't drop a few million dollars on an ad campaign or make some quick calls to highly-placed people of power and influence. When people without money, power or status want to raise the volume to be heard, they don't have any options except literally raising the volume and getting loud and unruly and even obnoxious. And then we can cue the complaints about their tone and rudeness and general misbehavior. Why they can't just be quiet and polite and unheard? Goodness!

The fact is, civil discourse is great-- if you have money and power and connections to back it up. Wouldn't it be interesting to go back in time to, say, that meeting between David Coleman and Gene Wilhoit and Bill Gates, and to say, "Gentlemen, you may pursue your dreams of an educational overhaul of this nation. But you must do it on a budget of $1.95, and you can't call any of your powerful friends to help you out. All you can use is a free blog and talking to people you can convince to listen to you."

"Let's all calm down and try to speak nicely," are the words of the people with power. "Listen to me RIGHT NOW DAMMIT," are the words of the powerless, unheard, and frustrated.

There is a solution

I learned this ages ago. If you don't want people to scream at you, do not try to overpower them, shout them down, or force them to shut up.

Listen to them.

The formula is not, "If he calms down, I will listen to him." Or, as I used to tell my children, the only person you can control is yourself. So make yourself do the listening. Then the calm will come.

Am I saying that this dynamic resolves all individuals of responsibility for how they conduct themselves? No, it does not. In a perfect world, people should be polite and respectful most of the time. But in the immortal words of the philosopher Dr. Phil, you teach others how to treat you. And if you teach people that approaching you quietly and respectfully will get them ignored, you can't be surprised that they learn the lesson that being quiet and respectful and civil is a waste of their time. When it comes to these interactions, you can teach them whatever lesson you wish.

Look at Massachusetts. The fight over linking teacher licenses to evaluations was only going to get uglier and uglier. But then a funny thing happened-- the commissioner listened to what people were saying. Now, not so much ugliness.

Of course, Massachusetts highlights one of the tricky parts of Really Listening. Sometimes when you Really Listen, you discover that you really do need to really change your plan. At the very least, it may require you to explain yourself more clearly than you have.

You can have civil discourse and reasoned debate. But you have to go first. And you have to listen. And you also have to accept, if you're dealing with a horrific festering mess like Newark, that you are going to have to listen to huuuuuuge amounts of fairly angry stuff, because all the things that you've been refusing to listen to all this time have not gone away-- they've gone into a big escrow account and now they are going to come out with interest. You don't get to say, "Can't we start fresh? You forget all the times you didn't have a say, and I'll forget all the times I didn't let you have one, and we'll start even."

The only way to cut to the chase in a place like Newark is to fire Anderson and replace her with someone who spends her first weeks in office taking meetings, listening, and publicly disowning Anderson's work.

The first rule of civil discourse and debate and free speech is you have to extend the opportunity to everybody. What would have happened, I wonder, if AEI had said, "Tell you what. Let Cami speak, and then when she's done, we will give you the podium, and the only rules is that everybody has to let everybody else have their say" instead of "Security, get these hooligans out of here."

But in the US education landscape, we have far too many places where reformsters have decided that the route to success is to just stop listening to large chunks of the population. This is a recipe for disaster, and if wannabe leaders keep pursuing it, a few dozen cranky paid registrants at a thinky tank luncheon will be the very least of their problems.