No Grad Exams for PA?

Pennsylvania, where I live and teach, has been steadily moving toward a full array of graduation exams.

Currently we have what we call the Keystone exams for math and reading. We are one of the last states to do our examing on paper; this may be related to an attempt a few years back to do our 4Sights (test prep tests for the old exam, known as the PSSA's, which we still give to elementary students because--) well , anyway, we tried to do the testing online and it was a massive clusterfinagle that wasted a week of school and resulted in zero actual scoreable tests. When it comes to online testing, we haven't been all the way around the block because we got in a ten-car pileup on the way.

The math and reading Keystones are exams that you would recognize even if you were from out of state. I attended a state-mounted training last year and the presenter used all PARCC materials, and the message was that it was perfectly comparable to the Keystones.

Our Class of 2017 has to pass math algebra, reading literature, and biology Keystones in order to graduate. Depending on who's talking, there are as many as seven more subject-specific tests coming, just as soon as Harrisburg can scrape together the money to get them made.

Students are already taking the Keystones every year, partly as a way of meeting federal testing requirements and partly as a way to warm up for 2017 (everyone just tries not to tell the students that the Keystones currently mean nothing at all to them). So our students have been taking the tests, and we can see how they're doing. And as 2017 gets closer and closer, one thing becomes increasingly clear-- many students are about to have huge problems getting out of high school.

Students get two tries, and then they move onto a project-based assessment, known to my students as The Binder (or, out of my earshot, that Bigass Stupid Binder) which is essentially an independent study course in looseleaf form. There are now adapted or modified forms for students with special needs. And things could be worse-- you should have been around for the first concept for the science test which was to test all science disciplines, forcing high schools to implement a bio-chem-physics-physiology sequence for ninth and tenth grade.

But it's going to be ugly, and lawmakers are starting to take note.

State Senator Andrew Dinneman (D-Chester County) has been trying to de-testify us for a while. But most recently a group of Republicans have gotten on the Get Off The Testing Bandwagon bandwagon.

Over at newsworks, Kevin McCorry reports about a new bill proposed by state Rep. Mike Tobash (R- Dauphin County) to flat-out repeal the state graduation test mandate.

"The children of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they need to learn, they need to be assessed, but when we've gone so far that we end up handcuffing our educational system with really an overwhelming amount of standardized assessment, we need to stop and put the brakes on here, take a look at it," said Tobash.

Much of the conversation has centered on the tests as unfunded mandates-- schools are required to get the students through them, but have not been given the resources to meet the challenge. And that's not untrue, but it's beside the real problem.

The real problem is that the Keystone exams aren't very good.

As this discussion ramps up, many supporters of the testing are going to make an obvious comment-- if the students aren't doing well on the tests, can't teachers just fix that by doing their jobs better?

McCorry catches Tobash having close to the right thought in response.

Tobash, who testified on the matter at a hearing at Philadelphia City Hall in November, is skeptical that the tests are actually judging students on material that's applicable to modern workforce.

The Keystones are like every other standardized test-- what they measure best is the student's ability to take a standardized test.


So we play the test prep game-- how much can we do in order to get test results without sacrificing the students' actual education? In reading, the Keystones require a particular vocabulary so that we teach the words they want to have covered with the meanings they prefer. This is part of the standard technique of using tests to dictate local curriculum.

More problematic is the whole approach to reading required by the test. Every selection on the test can be read only one way; there's only one acceptable response to the work. The Keystone also has a keen interest in student's psychic powers, regularly asking them to reach conclusions about what the author intended. Some of the interpretive questions, like the author's intent questions, really are topics that are generally considered fair game in an English classroom-- but we have those discussions as open-ended inquiries, where many ideas can be proposed and supported, but no absolute truth can be known. The exam requires the reverse.

And so the exam requires one more reading skill-- the ability to read a standardized test question and figure out what the exam writer wants you to say. This has nothing to do with learning how to be an active, capable reader of literature, and everything to do with being a compliant tool who can take instructions.

So the biggest problem with the Keystones is not that there are too many of them or they take up too much time, though that's a huge problem. The biggest problem is not that they are unfunded mandates, though that's a problem, particularly in a state that as a matter of policy rips the guts out of public school budgets so that charter and cybercharter operators get rich.

No, the biggest problem is that the Keystones twist instruction and education all out of shape, foster educational malpractice, and ultimately don't provide any of the data that their supporters think they're supposed to provide. The Keystones don't tell Harrisburg how well we're doing. They are supposed to provide all sorts of information to teachers to help us address student needs, and that's baloney as well. There's only one thing we find out from test results-- which sorts of questions our students found most tricky. Keystone results are good for refining test prep, and nothing else.The Keystone exams tell one thing and one thing only-- how well students did on the Keystone exams.

McCorry offers this quote from a rep of our new governor:

Gov. Wolf knows we need tools to measure students' progress and ensure they are equipped the skills needed to flourish in the 21st century, but testing should not be the only measurement.

And there's our continuing problem. Not only should testing be the single measurement, but it shouldn't be any measurement.

Even if standardized testing didn't heap unnecessary stress on young students, even if it didn't require wasting time on test prep that has no educational value, even if it didn't put unfunded financial demands on already-strapped districts-- even if it didn't do any of those things, the Keystone exam would still be a bad idea because it simply doesn't tell anyone what they want to know. Repealing state requirements for a graduation exam is the right choice. We'll see if Harrisburg actually makes it.

Cuomo to Teachers: Get the Hell Out

I'll give Andrew Cuomo this-- when he makes threats to come after someone, they aren't just empty political promises. He said he would try to break the public schools, and he appears to be determined to make it happen.

Cuomo's assault has started with a lesson in how data can serve as a mirror to reflect the biases of whoever is gazing into it.

Mangling data

Cuomo's talking points and reformy agenda have started with a simple set of data. The proficiency rate for 3rd-8th graders is 35.8% for math and 31.4% for reading. Over 90% of New York teachers received effective ratings. There are three possible explanations for why these numbers don't fit together.

1) The teacher effectiveness ratings are wrong.
2) The student proficiency numbers are wrong.
3) There is no connection between student test results and teacher effectiveness.

#3 is by far the most likely. At the very least, there isn't a shred of documentation, study or much of anything else to support the notion that test results have anything to do with teacher effectiveness. Let's also remember that we're talking about math and reading scores for 3rd through 8th graders-- exactly what should tell us about, say, 11th grade history teachers?

#3 is also affected by #2-- if the student scores don't actually mean anything, they can hardly be connected to teacher scores. And since student cut scores weren't set by any particular supportable academic standard, it's highly unlikely that they are really telling us anything about how many students are "proficient" (a term that doesn't have any actual meaning in this context).

Cuomo has, like a student who fails to check all options on a standardized multiple-choice test, simply stopped at answer #1 because that's the one he likes. He has not even pretended to consider the other two options. It would certainly appear that he is less interested in figuring out what's actually going on and more interested in using test results to draw a target on New York's teachers.

And what a target. 

Cuomo proposes that fifty percent of a teacher's evaluations be based on test scores. (This fun starts on page 229 of his Opportunity Agenda Book.) In the case of non-tested subjects or grades, "a student growth measure that measures one year of academic growth." Whatever that is supposed to mean and wherever those are supposed to come from (since the stated goal here is clear-- "We will eliminate the local measure."

Thirty-five percent of the teacher's evaluation must come from an "independent observer" who can be either 1) a principal from within or without the district, 2) an observer from the state-approved list of "entities" that can do that sort of thing or 3) a faculty member from an education program at a state university of New York (and I am imagining college ed professors across the state slapping their heads and saying, "Why, yes, thanks, that's exactly what I want to spend half my year doing!")

The remaining fifteen percent can come from a local administrator.

And that's it. Screw the whole "multiple measures" idea, and nerts to evaluations by people who know the territory, the teacher, the students, the local lay of the land.

But wait. There's more. Cuomo proposes that all cut-off scores be set at the state level. And if the teacher fails either portion of the evaluation, she fails the whole thing. In other words, if the live human says, "I watched her work and she is a great teacher" and the test scores come in low, the live human observer is over-ruled.

Can we make a teaching career less viable?

Tenure? Screw that, too. It was for 19th century college profs so they could resist political pressure, and of course there are no politics associated with teaching in New York public schools. I wonder how long it took the governor's typist to stop giggling before he could finish this part.

Now tenure requires five straight years of effective ratings. Until you hit those five straight years, you are probationary, and as long as you're probationary, you can be fired at any time for any reason.

Cuomo could not be more clear if he required every college education department to put a giant banner over its doors saying, in huge bold letters, "Get the hell out of New York."

What sane person would try to start a teaching career under these conditions. You must have five straight years of good test scores, which means that taking a job in a high-poverty school would simply be the kiss of death. In fact, if the cut scores are going to be kept the same so that almost seventy percent of New York students are failing The Big Test-- well, that means that most of the classrooms in New York will be the kiss of death to a teaching career. You would be better off betting the state of New York that you can roll snake eyes five times in a row.

Best and brightest

And yet Cuomo's plan blithers on, as if it's not obvious that he's telling future teachers to Get the Hell Out! The teacher beatdown section of the Opportunity Agenda starts with some noise about setting up a doctor-style interning program for training teachers, and I actually support that, having come from a similar residency program myself-- except that, with the stakes of testing so incredibly high, who in their right mind would let a teacher trainee into their school? The residency idea is probably necessary, because under the new, highly punitive evaluation system, what teacher would agree to host a student teacher? The residency idea begs all sorts of questions (how will the state possibly have enough capacity to handle the number of teachers they need to train) but it doesn't really matter, because given the impossible hurdles placed in the path of becoming a tenured teacher with anything remotely resembling job security, who is going to want to invest the time and effort to start on a path that can at any time, through random factors outside of your control, be yanked out from under you?

But after five sections of flipping the middle finger to every future teacher in New York, the Agenda starts its next section with this sentence:

Once we can attract and recognize the best teachers, we need to keep them in our schools.

First of all, this new system defines "best teacher" as "teacher who has class of good standardized test takers." This idea fails twice-- once by basing teacher evaluations on the results of bad invalid tests and again by removing all other considerations of quality from teaching. Nothing matters in this system but test prep. Nothing.

The Agenda goes on to say that we don't want to lose great teachers to other "more lucrative" professions. It does not say anything about losing future great teachers to other professions where they have greater work to do than spend all their days preparing children to take a pointless standardized tests. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where they are treated like professionals. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where job security is not based on a random roll of the dice.

Sigh. Cuomo proposes to set aside $2 million for incentive payments of up to $20K to encourage great teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools. Do you know how many payments of $20K you can get out of $2 million? 100. What do you think, Andy? Will 100 teachers take care of all the hard-to-staff schools in New York?

I can answer that. No-- no they will not, because those hard to staff schools will become SUPER hard to staff once you implement a system under which teaching at high-poverty low-achievement schools is an excellent way to never get to start your teaching career.

But just in case, Cuomo also wants to streamline the firing process, and since all non-tenured teachers will be fireable at any time for any reason, I think he's got that covered. Also, no more trying to rehab incompetent teachers, because under this new system, New York will be up to their collective tuchus in eager new educators.

The kisses of death

What's next? Well, back in the first section, Cuomo allowed as how teacher traineess need less theory and more real-world classroom training and experience. However, in this next section, he wants to make sure the new teachers are Good Enough by giving them some standardized tests, which I was going to mock, but you know, since in Cuomo's New York a teacher's job is to prepare students to take a standardized test, it does make sense that taking a standardized test should be the basis of teacher training. So prospective teachers will have to pass some standardized tests, and if too many of them fail, their college program will be shut down. So congratulations, future New York teachers, and welcome to four college years of test prep. Wow. I bet that will attract even more of the best and the brightest to teaching.

I know this is running long, but I want you to get the full grandeur of Cuomo's public school-crushing plans.

We'll make it harder to get into grad school. We'll make your certificate dependent on getting continuing ed hours, but we'll put all of those programs under the direct control of the state education department.

This next one is genius. Cuomo wants to guarantee that not student will have an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Let's think this through. An ineffective teacher is one who is put in a room with the low-scoring students. Whatever teacher we send those students on to will likely also "become" ineffective. Some schools can look forward to small packs of teacher-crushing students, moving like kryptonite through the system. Depending on the VAM sauce that's being brewed, those packs could be composed of low-ability- high-poverty, or even highly gifted students. This schedule shuffling will also guarantee that teachers can't easily develop a specialty, and that administrators can't schedule based on what they know about teacher strengths and weaknesses. And those young teachers trying to get their five straight years of good test scores in? It just became even harder. What, I wonder, does Cuomo propose if a grade level or subject are in a school runs out of teachers who were rated effective this year?

Once again, the message is clear-- whatever you do, don't get a job in a high-poverty low-achievement school.

Finishing touches

Cuomo commits to the Bottom 5% model of school failure, guaranteeing that there are always failing schools. Lucky for them he has decided to scrap time-consuming turnaround plans and just implement receivership, a nifty technique for privatizing a school and handing it over to a specialist for carving up.

Carving up for whom? Well, the very next item is the abolition of caps on charter authorization, so that charters can bloom across the land like a thousand flowers. This comes attached to a meaningless provision that is hilariously called an "anti-creaming provision" because what fun are these long government documents if you can't slip some mildly obscene easter eggs in there? Cuomo also wants to establish educational tax credits, aka vouchers by another name.

Final touches? Let's expand the market for Pre-K providers by pumping more money into that, along with a rating system. The term "high-quality" let's you know that it's nothing but the best, spared no expense. It also lets you know that the state will require assessment so that presumably parents will know how well their four-year-olds are learning to take standardized tests. Oh, wait-- did I say four-year-olds? Let's up the ante and extend this to three-year-olds. Opening up new markets is always good for entrepreneurs, and those three year olds have all been slacking anyway.

So you see? When Andrew Cuomo says he wants to bust up the public ed monopoly, he's not just generating sound bites for the evening news-- he means it. The program is bold and audacious in the same way that pushing a carload of nuns and puppies into the East River is bold and audacious. In particular, it reduces teaching to a job that people would be less likely to want, and then makes it nearly impossible for them to hold onto it anyway. I try to stay away from reaching conclusions about character, but looking at this, I have to figure that Andrew Cuomo is an incredible dolt or a giant prick. I will leave it to my brothers and sister in New York to decide.

My ESEA Letter

(Well, one of them. I've sent several.)

I am concerned first of all with the speed with which this is being done. The pattern of the last decade's worth of education reform is to put new rules and regulations in place, to mandate standards and approaches before any real work has been done to determine whether the right choices are being made. It is true that we have been laboring under the bad choices of No Child Left Behind for too long. Replacing old bad choices with new bad choices is not really an improvement.

Let's take our time and get it right.

The reauthorization of ESEA represents a perfect opportunity to do what folks have declared cannot be done-- for the federal government to actually let go of some of the power that it has gathered to itself and send that power back to the states. It needs to be done, not because of some ideological or political stance, but because trying to control local education from DC simply does not work.

Controlling local education from DC is like trying to use a piece of gum and a ten foot pole to pick up a dime. DC is simply too far removed from the nation's classrooms to be able to effective aid the teachers who work there. Trying to set standards, establish a definition of success, and impose a vision of what every single child in the nation should want to be-- these are beyond the scope of any single body, federal or otherwise.

Give us financial support. Give us a list of do-nots (do not discriminate based on gender, race or anything else). Require us to function in a transparent manner so that folks can see how we're doing just by looking. And stop supporting the creation of means by which public schools can be undercut and stripped of resources.

We have been living with the ramped-up version of ESEA for over a decade. Has anybody gotten what they wanted? Have we closed the achievement gap or provided better educational opportunities for poor and minority children? Do legislators and bureaucrats believe that they now have a clearer picture of how well students are doing across the nation? Do teachers and local districts feel that they have better guidance or information to do their jobs?

The answer for everybody is no. Over a decade of more centralized control, accountability and oversight, and we have nothing to show for it.

This experiment has failed. It's time to end it.

Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History

How many hard lessons in charter operation can we have? As many as there are incompetent charter operators in the field.

Here's the meat of the story from DC's ABC affiliate:

Yes, so bizarre it's hard to believe, the principal at the middle school operated on the campus of one of America's historic African-American universities reportedly dropped the hammer on teachers who insisted on teaching African-American history.

The school was launched in 2005 as an attempt at innovation, and seemed to do good work for a while. More recently things have been rough at the school. Here's an anonymous review of the school from the Great Schools website:

I am a current student at Howard University Middle School (MS)2 and am happy this is my final year. The school has changed from my first year here. My 6th grade year was fun and I enjoyed it. 7th grade is when things started going downhill. We got a new principal and she left after about a month on the job. We went the rest of the year without a principal. This year we have a new principal and I don't think she knows what she's doing. So far this year we've lost at least 8 teachers and they were the ones that cared the most. They haven't filled the spots and it doesn't look like they are trying to. Now we have lost our 3 favorite teachers which makes 11 teachers gone. This has been a terrible year and once again, am glad that I am leaving. If you are a parent interested in sending your child here, I hope you find this helpful.

Focus of the story and reactions to it has been on the firing of the teachers, and it's hard to express just how totally bad and wrong and stupid it was to have police escort them out of the building in front of their students, as if they had just been arrested for some crime.

Principal Angelicque Blackmon's LinkdIn account is... well, confusing. She lists the principalship of Howard University Middle School of Mathematics and Science as a "previous" job and lists her current employment as the President and CEO of Innovative Learning Concepts, LLC. ILC is a "full service premier Georgia STEM education coaching, consulting, and tutorial." According to the profile, she lives in Georgia. Previous work experience includes a stint with the National Science Foundation and has done some work as a research chemist with Dow and the US Geological survey. After her science training, she also completed some post-grad work in cultural anthropology.

An essay that she posted on LinkedIn last summer includes this:

Therefore, we leave people who do not truly understand diversity with the perception that although they have the same skin tone as another in the room that they, in some way, are absolved from being diverse. This is not at all true. We should discontinue the practice of pretending that when people have the same skin color that they have so much more in common with that person than with someone of a different hue. This has never been the case and I am befuddled in trying to understand why in our 21 century context we still perpetuate such myths.

Nothing in her profile suggests that she has the background or experience to handle a leadership role at a middle school, and the exodus of teachers from the school doesn't speak well of her leadership skills. What strikes me most about the firing of the three social studies teachers is that they had already quit! If her goal was simply to stop them form teaching African-American studies in her school, she had already won. To fire them in such a public and demeaning manner, with no regard or concern for the students, suggests a grown-up tantrum.

And so the story leads to parents standing on the sidewalk outside the school, because what else can they do? If this were a public school, board members would be fielding a ton of phone calls and parents would be pressuring them to do something, and they would be facing the fallout. But because this is a charter, there's nobody to call, nobody to pressure, nobody to demand answers from. Instead, the charter will likely continue its apparent downward spiral, wasting critical years of the students and creating extra worry and mess for the parents. Would things be any better in the mess that is DC public schools? I don't know; it's a system with many, many problems. But this mess certainly doesn't deliver on a promise for a school that is responsive, sensitive, and permanent.

Charter Sales

There's a great Steve Jobs clip I've used before. In it, Jobs offers his explanation of how the bean counters end up in charge of a company.

The basic principle is simple. Initially, a business prospers based on its ability to make stuff or provide a service, and the better they do stuff, the more money they make. And for a while, doing stuff better pays the bills and makes the profits.

But eventually doing the stuff doesn't increase the revenue stream, because you've pretty well hit all of the market you can hit. The product has attracted all the money it can-- on its own.

At that point it's up to the sales force and the bean counters. To keep the revenue stream thriving, you need people who can push sales in new markets and fiddle with the money. You need marketeers and accountants to run the company. The people who create the product are not so important, because making the product better will not make the business more profitable. Put another way, you can only drive so many sales by being good at your product. After that, you can only drive more sales by being good at selling.

It puts the sales people in charge, and that immediately starts to destroy the product, because the sales-oriented management turns to the people who actually create the product and says, "Never mind making products that work well-- I want a product that we can sell. Our market research says that people really want pink flying weasels as pets, so stop whining and get in there with that pink spray paint and staple some wings on those weasels. Of course it's bad for the weasels and the customers, but we have sales to make today. We'll worry about tomorrow the next time the sun rises."

It's a model worth understanding when considering charter schools. A company that makes computers or cheese-curlers or hamster shoes will take a while to get to sales-over-product stage, but a charter is bean counter ready from day one. From the moment it opens, the modern charter's main business is not education-- it's sales.

We've seen this repeatedly. The K12 cyber chain has been plagued by lawsuits that turn up former employees who complain of a company that is focused primarily on making sales any way it can. K12 has been particularly notorious for churn-- just trying to get new names on the roster faster than the old ones struggle and give up. At one point, K12 operations in Ohio were posting a staggering 51% rate of churn.

K12's mission creep was so great that even cyberschool supporters were bothered. Houston Tucker was the company's marketing director, and he left saying, "The K12 I joined isn't the one I left."

K12 is a striking example of the charter's need to market above all else, but they're hardly an anomaly. A public school without a marketing department is like a weasel without wings, but a modern charter without a marketing department is like a weasel without food

Just google "charter school marketing vp"-- Charter Schools USA, KIPP, Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools-- over a million hits come back and even if we assume that only 2% of those are actual charter school marketing jobs, that's still a huge number of people in charter school sales. And that's before we get to people like Eva Moskowitz-- would you say that Moskowitz is more about providing pedagogical leadership for Success Academy, or about fundraising and marketing for the chain. Certainly the budget for marketing at these schools is stunningly large. A similar quick-and-dirty search for public school marketing officers came up empty.

When modern charter and choice advocates extol the virtues of competition, they're really demanding that public schools meet them on the field of combat where marketing and advertising are the tools of battle. And if public schools go to meet them there, schools lose regardless of the outcome. It's the triumph of the sales department and bean counters over product people, the rise of an education system that thinks of itself as an industry and which is far more concerned about marketing than educating and which thinks nothing of stapling onto weasels.

Liberation & Cain's Problem

In Wisconsin, Governor (and presumptive entrant in the GOP Presidential rat race) Scott Walker has proposed to give the state university system freedom and independence. Specifically, he wants to liberate them from the oppression of about $300 million of state support over the next two years. He's also getting rid of many government mandates and statutes governing the university system, so they are free to innovatively slash whatever they like to make up for the shortfall.

This is solid conservative principle in action. Also in Wisconsin, we just saw a proposal for zones in Milwaukee's poorest areas that would "unleash" the power of individuals by getting them off welfare, a refrain that has been heard in virtually every state in the union. This has become a modern moebius version of the social program-- the best way to help the poor is to cut their government support.

The independence argument has crept into education as well, with the repeated assertion that throwing money at schools just won't help, the idea that schools are too dependent on financial assistance and that support should be trimmed back to make them more nimble, robust, flexible, innovative. The basic premise of school choice is that by taking resources away from public schools, we will force the public schools to become better by making better use of their newly-reduced resources.

I suspect that there are people who truly believe this, and I can even see why. but I don't believe for a second that any of the leaders and politicians who espouse it actually believe it at all. Not a bit. Here's why. They never bring it up in reference to anything except social services programs.

None of these corporate Masters of the Universe say, "We need to spark some creativity in the widget division, so let's cut their budget." Nor do they say, "The bumswagger division has done some great work, so lets reward them by cutting off their financial support."

None of these political whiz kids says, "Wall Street corporations have become too dependent on the largess of the federal government. We must help them out by pushing them off the federal teat. That way we can unleash them and their innovative creativity."

No-- in the corporate world, you go see a some Master of the Universe and make your pitch that you plan to be, hope to be, expect to be creative and innovative. Then the Master of the Universe helps unleash the innovation by handing over a pile of money.

I mean, look at the Gates Foundation. They have unleashed a hundred different cheerleaders for the common core and charters and other reformster fun zones by throwing money at them and there certainly doesn't seem to have been great concern that groups like TFA or CAP or any of the dozens of astroturf groups that have bloomed in the last decade-- nobody seems to be sitting back at the main office shaking their heads in serious and mournful tones saying, "Guys, I'm afraid that we have just made these groups too dependent on us. We should liberate them and unleash them so they can do great things."

No-- in these cases they do the opposite. Let's liberate innovation by supporting it; let's unleash innovation by funding it.

I expect they see a distinction between the two types of liberation-- liberating some folks by giving them money and liberating other folks cutting them off, making them do without support.

I suspect that they are following the simplest human impulse. Let's take care of Our People.

It is Cain's problem. The difficult question is not, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We all know the answer to that. The hard question is, "Who is my brother?"

The human inclination is to limit our compassion to members of our own tribe. My brother is a person like me. Those people over there who are not like ought to shape up; the ways in which they are different are probably part of their problem in the first place. We know on some level that it's wrong, but we can't help it. And yes-- we are just as bad when we assume that those damn reformsters must be friendless terrible people whose own mothers probably hate them.

I'm inclined to believe that one of the reasons that we're here is to take care of each other (and yes, I also believe that in the event there is no reason we're here, that only makes taking care of each other a greater imperative). I'm pretty sure it's a simple as that. Each of us is uniquely positioned to take care of a particular batch of people for a particular period of time.

I am not a puppies and rainbows guy, so I absolutely believe that sometimes taking care of people looks more like a kick in the butt than a pat on the head. But I also believe that step one means recognizing and honoring a person's own aspirations for him- or her-self.

I believe that to liberate persons, you have to respect them, listen to them, probably even love them. And I see no respect or honoring or love in policies that say, "I don't want to give Those People money because they are The Wrong Type of People, and so I am going to try to make them hurt instead."

The root of far too many policy ideas is a simple one-- it's the belief that Those Kinds of People are making the wrong choices, and they should be suffering because of them. Anything that interferes with that suffering is interfering with cosmic justice, and if it's interfering by using my money, it's a double interference.

Too much of this thinking has seeped into education policy. If those kids don't want crappy schools, they shouldn't be poor. But if you're That Kind of Person, you end up poor and you should end up poor and you should suffer the effects of being poor. We'll set up better schools for some of those poor kids, but only the ones who show their willingness to be the Right Kind of Person.

That is not liberation. It is subjugation. That is not unleashing. It is leashing.

We cannot support schools with infinite resources that we don't have, and it doesn't help anyone to be given free ponies and ice cream every day just for drawing breath. But we have got to stop this ridiculous language of liberation, insisting that we can best help people become unleashed and free by turning our backs on them, making sure they feel the full sting of need, and ignoring our own moral imperative to help and support whoever we can.

Boston Consulting Group: Another Dark Horseman

Word went out today that immediately after Arkansas decided to make Little Rock Schools non-public, the Walton family called a "focus group" meeting "in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. This is worse than finding the slender man in the back of your family portrait. For a public school system, this is finding the grim reaper at your front door. And he's not selling cookies.

The Boston Consulting Group is often referred to as " management consulting group." That's not entirely accurate. BCG is one of The Big Three consulting groups-- the other two are McKinsey and Bain. People love working there, and the people who work there are recruited heavily from the very toppest universities. These are the guys that Fortune 500 companies call for help making money. Forbes lists them as America's 112th largest private company. Gutting and stripping school districts does not even require a tenth of their power or attention. They are officially scary.

Read up on BCG and you find they have mainly three big claims to fame, and all of them are deeply bad news for public education.

 

This is the growth-share matrix, used to help a corporation to decide how to allocate resources (aka how to figure out which losers could be starved out). Sound familiar?

The experience curve is even simpler. The more a task is performed, the lower the cost of performing it. In other words, if you can reduce a process (manufacturing, service, whatever) to a series of simple tasks that will be repeated over and over, you can reduce the cost of the process. Sound familiar?

This advantage matrix lets us divide businesses into one of four types in order to figure out which strategy best lets us cash in. For instance, when a business is scaleable but hard to do differentiation in, the answer is volume volume volume. Sound familiar?

BCG's arrival in Little Rock is unsurprising; they've been around the education block several times. They were in the news just last week when Parents United finally won a long court case to be allowed to see BCG's super-duper secret plans for Philadelphia schools, drawn up way back when Philly was first turned into one of the nation's largest non-public school systems, run by state-appointed executives rather than an elected board.

A major feature of BCG's plan for Philly seems to be standard for them-- close this bunch of schools, and open up some nifty charters. In other words, cut off resources to the dogs. As a top consulting group, BCG doesn't come cheap-- their consulting fee in Philly was reportedly $230,000 per week. That's just under $33,000 per day. That's a little less than the starting salary for a teacher in Philly. Per day. 

BCG has proposed a similar program in Memphis. Reportedly Cleveland, Seattle, Arizona, and New Orleans have also felt the loving BCG touch. BCG also has close friends in the charter world, with several folks hopping back and forth between BCG and the board of KIPP. BCG joined up with many of the big players (Gates, Joyce) to form Advance Illionois. And they helped write North Carolina's Race to the Top bid (all these painful details and more can be found in this 2012 article at The Common Errant). Strive in Cincinnati-- that's BCG, too. And last fall, they were spotted doing development planning for Connecticut's education sector.

A year ago, BCG teamed up with the Gates Foundation and the Harvard Business School; for their first magic trick, they produced "America's Education System at a Crossroads: New Research and Insights on Business-Educator Partnerships in PreK-12 Education." (If that language sounds vaguely familiar, it could be because Arne Duncan's Big Important Speech about ESEA reauthorization was entitled "America's Educational Crossroads"). The BCG "report" put forth three recommendations:

• Laying the policy foundations for education innovation: Business action is urgently needed to ensure Common Core State Standards are actually put into practice, for example.
• Scaling up proven innovations: Business leaders can partner with educators to scale up innovations that are already showing results.
• Reinventing the local education ecosystem: Business can help educators set and implement comprehensive strategies to upgrade education in specific cities and towns. 

 Yeah, that all sounds familiar, too. Their second piece of reportage, "Partial Credit: How America's School Superintendents See Business As a Partner" (because why talk about teachers-- these kinds of important dealings don't involve The Help who will do as their told when it's time to tell them), offers some concrete advice:

“Strengthening our schools is a big challenge. To get this job done, we must all work together. From designing new classroom tools to engaging with businesses, our educators must not just be included in the process, they must help lead it,” said Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

That all reaches a fuller pitch in "Lasting Impact: A Business Leader's Playbook for Supporting America's Schools"  (another BCG-Gates-Harvard joint production). It starts with an introduction that quotes the "rising tide of mediocrity," stops at "fortunately, we don't have to settle for incrementalism any more" and barrels down to more detailed discussion of the three strategies listed above.I may take you on a more detailed tour of this twenty-seven page tome, but for the moment, I don't have the heart to add one more gloomy chapter to this dark tale. Suffice it to say that it is a veritable bible for the corporate reformster. 

Bottom line? Say a little prayer for the formerly public schools of Little Rock, because BCG is in town and they're sharpening their axe.