Katrina Is Headed for Atlanta

Over the weekend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an advertisement for article about New Orleans charterfied school district, because the Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia would like to get rid of his own public school system. He's just not fortunate enough to have a major hurricane tear up his state. But don't worry, Georgians-- you, too, can have your own disaster area.

The article, among other things, shows that charter marketing is improving. For instance, they've learned that they need to talk more about being connected to the community and less about escaping the tyranny of zip codes. This helps them conceal that charter schools are not neighborhood schools, disconnected from any particular community (if you want to read a scholarly look at this in New Orleans, here's Brian Beabout's "Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts.") Sarrio says that unnamed Louisiana educators recommend making the community part of the decisions, which seems to conflict with this NPR coverage of the district entitled "The End of Neighborhood Schools."

But the basic sales pitch is the same as always. Talking about the Arthur Ashe charter, Jaime Sarrio writes:

Advocates of the model say Ashe and schools like it show what’s possible when elected school boards, unions and poorly run school systems get out of the way and let school leaders decide how to educate students.

How exactly does one square getting rid of locally elected school boards with being connected to your community? "We are happy to work with members of the community just so long as they never get to make any decisions"? It's that damned democracy-- it so cramps a "school leader's" style.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal wants voters to create a state-run district to take over struggling schools.

This sort of thing must give hard-core conservatives a fit. Replace schools with a state-run system?! Who runs the current system? Keebler elves? But of course, Deal means to cut local control out of the loop, so that state-level bureaucrats can apply their higher levels of wisdom, because local school boards are all tied up in elections and regulations and such. Also, it's easier for charter operators to have one stop shopping.

The "freedom from rules" argument is an old one for charters, and after all these years it still makes zero sense. The government has tied public schools' hands with all these terrible rules, so we need new schools, say the legislators who tied schools' hands in the first place. Couldn't we just, I don't know, untie some hands? This is like locking a bunch of people in a room, throwing a molotov cocktail in there with them, then standing outside the door with the keys and saying, "Well, I guess we have to build another set of doors." Use the damn keys (and stop throwing molotov cocktails)!

Sarrio's article includes a short history of NOLA's Recovery School District. I've read a lot about the district; this history seems like the version you would get only by reading the press releases of the charter boosters. Here's state board member and charter cheerleader Leslie Jacobs:

“The philosophy behind the recovery school district is very simple: Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better,” Jacobs said. They wanted to make “the risk of doing nothing in the face of failure more painful than the risk of trying something that doesn’t work.”

Let's be honest-- we're talking about sub-contracting a government function to a money-making entity. And unless I missed something, this "same building, same kids" stuff is high grade baloney.

Sarrio's article includes the same old charter dog whistles:

“You have to have people who believe all kids can learn regardless of where they come from, and we believe that,” said Erin Hames, education policy advisor for Gov. Nathan Deal.

Right. Because teachers don't believe any such thing. If you want people who really believe in the educational promise of children, you don't want adults who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching-- you want businessmen and bureaucrats.

Sarrio visits a KIPP school and takes a hard-hitting guided tour and discovers that-- surprise-- KIPP school is awesome! Computers! And most importantly, autonomy-- KIPP school leaders can do whatever the hell they want! Because democracy is a drag, and accountability is for lesser operations tied to that foolish democracy model.

The article also talks to "consultant" Paul Pastorek, former LA state superintendent now cashing in as an "expert" in how to charterize a school system. He indicates that such a system isn't a good fit for just any state (only the special ones, I guess). He notes that Georgia has the advantage of a "strong accountability system," which in privatization-speak means "good system for labeling schools failures so that they can be targeted for takeover."

Unnamed Louisiana school leader types also note that Georgia would need to grow itself some more school leaders, which in charter-speak usually seems to mean "people who are prepared to operate like CEOs rather than professional educators." I recommend a system like the one being launched in Ohio, which will give candidates one year of interning resulting in an MBA and a principal's certificate.

Did Sarrio discover anything in New Orleans that would suggest that the charterization was anything less than awesome. Well, she did note that some folks claimed that charters were " unevenly expelling or threatening to expel problem students in an attempt to inflate test scores." But we can relax, because "the district has made changes to address these concerns." Oh, and that lawsuit brought by parents of students with disabilities was totally settled, so that's okay now.

She did get a quote from parent advocate Karen Harper Royal suggesting that there are better ways to improve "as opposed to this game we’re playing with school roulette, closing schools and opening schools." Which is just confusing because I thought charters were totes community schools now.

Sarrio also talked to Erika McConduit-Diggs, president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, who "said the speed of the changes and the the dismissal of almost 7,000 Orleans Parish teachers, which courts later ruled unlawful, left a scar on the community that hasn’t healed."

The overall tone, however, is to suggest that the RSD is a success. Sarrio and her sources are careful not to call it a miracle, but settle for the impression that it's a modest success that is ever-so-much-better than what it replaced, and surely it will be a great idea for Georgia. I would recommend that before the next time she writes about New Orleans, Sarrio read through the works of Mercedes Schneider, Crazy Crawfish and Geauxteacher, just for starters.

Sarrio has missed a lot. A lot. In fact, if you are only going to read one other account of what's going on in NOLA, I recommend that NPR article mentioned above. In that article you can read about just how cut off these schools are from any community. You can read about the horrific process of trying to get your child into a school (and the hope that you won't be putting your child on a bus at 6 AM for a hour-plus ride). You can read about Douglass Harris and Beth Sondel and their findings that what tiny test improvements shown by RSD are the result of a narrowing of curriculum, a growing skill in teaching to the test. You can read about the hyper-repressive test-prep atmosphere of a KIPP school. You can read about how counseling out students helps grow test scores. You can read about the system's dependence on outside money to support its higher-than-state-average per pupil spending.

And this is NPR, which has not proven to be particularly loyal to the traditional public school model. And yet it seems clear that Leslie Jacobs characterization of the NOLA plan given a close-to-lede spot in Sarrio's article-- Take the same kids, the same building, the same amount of money, give it to someone else to operate to prove we can do better-- is incorrect on all counts. They sorted the kids, closed the buildings, and spent more money to hire charter operators who have not, as yet, shown any great measure of success.

The business interests who want to take a big bite of Georgia peach did a nice job with this coverage, but the voters, taxpayers, parents, children, and community members of Georgia deserve a better, clearer, more accurate look at the public education disaster headed their way.

Not-So-Bright Future for Ohio

In the Mocking Education Reformsters business, it is hard to stay ahead of the curve. I thought I was being pretty sassy last summer when I concocted a "Memo to Three Year Old Slackers" in which I suggested that it was time for toddlers to get off their butts and start the serious business of Pre-Pre-K, or when I suggested that since we were checking to see if five-year-olds were ready for college, we might as well have them fill out applications. but my mockery has been left in the dust by reality. Sometimes real live reformsters can create programs far dumber than anything we could imagine.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to BRIGHT.

BRIGHT (previously "New Leaders for Ohio Schools")is "a bold effort to recruit, train and place committed leaders to head high-poverty public schools" across Ohio. It's a partnership between the Ohio Department of Education, the Ohio Business Roundtable, and the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. Oversight of the program is proudly provided by a board including Ohio's senate and house leaders, the Ohio state superintendent, and Ohio's great man-child of a governor. Which is only right, because it would take more than just one large organization to come up with a plan this dumb.

The website credits the 2012 report "Failure Is not an Option" from Public Agenda. This report was reviewed by Mark Paige for the National Education Policy Center, and I'm not going to work through that whole review for you. The basic executive summary of the Public Agenda paper is this: if you have a really super-duper principal with awesometastic programs in place, you can totally fix poor kids and their poor school without having to actually spend money doing it. The basic summary of the NEPC review is... well, they gave it one of their coveted Bunkum Awards. Specifically, the "Do You Believe in Miracles" award. Will you be surprised if I tell you Public Agenda's funders include the Joyce Fundation, the Broad Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates?

So that little piece of unicorn farming is the basis for this shiny new program. So how does BRIGHT work?

Indeed the landscape in Ohio and across the country is replete with examples, going back twenty years, of "traditional" leadership training programs – some have worked; most have not. Recent pension reforms enacted by the Ohio General Assembly are triggering the retirements of scores of school administrators across Ohio, creating a unique opportunity for Ohio to attract the best and the brightest as school principals.

Yes, all our traditional training methods suck (but we have no ideas about how to fix them, or what is wrong, really). But we have a great opportunity because our stupid reformster ideas in Ohio are driving our school leaders right out of the profession. This is totally not a sign that our reformy ideas are dopey failures; all those departing leaders just don't get how awesome we are.

Who should be signing up to work the miracles? Well, the inaugural class will be selected from "diverse professions." If you've got a bachelor's degree and any sort of leadership experience, step right up. This job is tough but (and, yes, I am quoting here) it's "the toughest job you'll ever love." So, this is just like Peace Corps work, I guess. I have had friends and former students serve with the Peace Corps, so I'm a bit torn about who's being insulted by this appropriation of the old slogan, but at the very least this does not speak well of a bold, innovative new program that somehow couldn't come up with original ad copy.

How will it work? Well, this first group will be placed in a third world country Ohio public school for a twelve-month internship, "working and learning under the mentorship of an accomplished school principal and an executive-level business leader." Why business leader? Because the program isn't just about fast-tracking your way to a principalship, but simultaneously earning an MBA!!

Seriously. BRIGHT's own copy calls principalling a 24/7 life, but apparently somewhere between the 24 and the 7 there's room to do coursework (sixteen of them, in four modules) for the Fisher School's program, which requires three days on campus a month.

What cool things will you do while you're learning how to principal and becoming a certified Master of the Universe? Well, there will be "intensive personal assessment and development experiences such as team-building exercises; 360 feedback surveys; site visits to high-poverty, high-minority, high achieving schools across the country; and learnings from your assigned master principal and outside business mentor – all focused on reinforcing the leadership competencies to be instilled in all BRIGHT Fellows." I am particularly excited about the learnings. I think one of the best things about my teaching job is the many learnings I give to my students. But still-- the chance to actually visit a high-poverty school, all full of minority students! Doesn't that sound ecxiting?

Oh, but what are these leadership competencies of which you speak?

That particular list is hosted on the Ohio Business Roundtable site, which makes sense considering it includes things like Change Leadership and Drive for Results. In fairness, it also includes Caring for Children. I'm intrigued by the Instructional Leadership item, which is explained as "Is able to recognize and coach teachers in constructive efforts to improve teaching effectiveness." First, I do hope that a principal will be able to recognize teachers when he sees them. Second, I'm wondering how this super principal will be able to provide instructional coaching when he has never done a day of teaching in his life, nor taken an education course, either. I think I should drop by the Business Roundtable and offer to tell them how to do their jobs, too.

BRIGHT has just hired a president, Dr. Thomas G. Maridada, formerly a Michigan Superintendent of the Year and more recently working for the Children's Defense Fund. BRIGHT also has several partners including the Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus school systems, as well as New Leaders and (you knew this was coming) TFA.

When all is said and done, our insta-principal will emerge with a fast-tracked certificate and a shiny MBA. He will owe the state of Ohio two years of work as a principal-- it is not entirely clear whether he will have to find his own job or if he will be placed. The state prefers that the insta-principal go to work at a high-poverty school, but it appears that any Ohio public school will meet the requirements.

So, to recap-- we're going to take somebody with a bachelors degree and no experience, let them intern at a school for a year while simultaneously doing grad school work, and at the end of the year, he will go be a principal at some troubled school, where his awesome leadership skills and great MBA-ness will allow him to turn every student into a success without having to spend more money.

I suppose this was inevitable. TFA was providing us with insta-teachers and the Broad Foundation has been cranking out insta-superintendents. There was a real market niche for people to quickly become principals without having to mess around with all that actual experience or training (or actually committing themselves to principalling as their lifetime career). After all, who better to supervise undertrained, inexperienced TFA temps than an undertrained, inexperienced pretend principal. Ohio has stepped into the gap to fill that need.

The one mystery I was not able to solve-- BRIGHT certainly looks like an acronym, but I can't discover what it stands for. Big Reformy Initiative for Getting Highplaced Temps? Business Revenue Interests Getting Hard on Teachers? Whatever it is, I'm sure it will be a great stepping stone for some future business whiz, and a disaster for some poor school.

Looking for Good

One of my recent posts here led to an extended outbreak of good conversation in the comments section. There were several good points made, but one in particular prompted me to think, and now that I've had a bagel that tasted pretty good and am enjoying the view of a good-looking day out my window, I'm going unwind some thoughts.

I was arguing against the necessity of having standardized tests in order to tell parents whether their children were getting a good education. I wrote:

Do I need to compare my performance as a husband to that of other husbands to know whether I have a good marriage or not, or can my wife and I depend on our own judgment of our own circumstances. Every student should get a good education, and that means something different in every situation. Comparison has nothing to do with it.

The author of the piece to which I was responding, Christine Duncan Evans, responded with this:


Most wife beaters will say that they have pretty good marriages too. I’m not saying you’re a wife beater, but I’m saying that not all definitions of ‘good’ – in marriage and in education – are equally valid. (I’ve met history teachers who argue that using the textbook as their only instructional resource is ‘good’ history teaching.) If you’re going to disagree with someone about what constitutes ‘good’ you need a common definition of what ‘good’ is so that you can compare that marriage/education to the common definition.

It's a good point. I've written before about how hard it is to measure merit and how it's much harder than we think to settle on what it means to be an educated person, but Evans is correct to note that not all definitions of "good" are equally good. So how do we distinguish between the good good and the not-so-good? Evans is correct to say that abusive husbands often self-evaluate positively. They're wrong. So what measure could we use that would tell us they were wrong.

First, it wouldn't be a standardized bubble-check test. It wouldn't be a marital checklist that somebody in government whipped up and shipped out to all the married couples in the country. Marriage is complicated and complex. A complex assessment system that could account for all the variety would be nearly impossible to create and use. A simple assessment would be too easy to game.

The true assessment emerges from community. If husband and wife both think they have a good marriage, it seems more likely they're correct. If their children and extended family also think it's a good marriage, that means something. If their extended family and friends and neighbors think they have a good marriage, that means something. Can any assessment of their marriage be perfect? No, never. But can we do a better job by deploying a government functionary with a questionnaire? No, never.

But couldn't we do better with an objective measure of what a good marriage is?

No, because there is no such thing as an objective measure. I believe that something which is destructive and harmful is not good-- but even I have to admit that this judgment represents a moral and ethical judgment on my part. Every single human being has a set of biases, beliefs, values and perspectives that contribute to their subjective view. By the time you factor in all the possible elements, you will not have a sharp, clear straight line graph. Instead, you'll be looking at a blast of scattered points. Will they be completely random and meaningless? No-- you'll have a strange attractor, a fuzzy shape around which the points cluster.

The more data points you have, the clearer the strange attractor will become. This applies both to evaluating the individual child and defining "good" for all students. The more data points you gather, the clearer the shape will become, but you will never reach a point of being able to draw a clear and inarguable line between good and not-good.


So it takes a whole community to develop an idea of what 'good" means in that community. As hokey as it sounds, it really does take a village to raise a child, not a bureaucrat with a clipboard.It takes a wide variety of points of view, perspectives, insights and relationships, all of them informed by the person's experience (an expert is someone who has seen more examples than the average human).

Part of what's wrong with reformster initiatives is that they are based on limited points of view. Common Core was developed by very carefully excluding a variety of viewpoints. And in the reformster narrative, a teacher who has seen thousands of examples of the educational ideas being discussed has no more weight than a reformster who has seen two or one or none.

Judgment is hard. Humans have always wanted to find a shortcut, a checklist, a simple connect-the-dots model that will make it easy. It never works, because it doesn't exist. The mark, the target, the standard shifts and changes every day, depending on the people, the setting, the history, the context, and the only way to make a judgment is to be there, involved, connected and close. The model of having every student accompanied through the year, day in and day out, by a trained, experienced, committed, concerned, experienced teacher-- it is the only model that can possibly answer the question "How is that student doing," and even then it can only give an approximate answer. To have two such professionals speak to each other about comparing their charges would likewise provide a rough approximation for an answer.

I know some folks want more. They can't have it, any more than we can set a standard for judging whether smoke is doing a good job of curling up along the right path from a fire.

Being human is hard. Becoming better at it is hard. That's why we have a whole system set up that pairs young humans up with older humans to help them grow and learn and become. There will always be people who want to make that system codified and standardized, but they will always be frustrated and they will always be wrong.

Tennessee's New CCSS Astroturf

Tennessee has birthed one of the newest astroturf reformster groups in the country, the bright and shiny Tennesseans for Student Success.

Why does need this influx of shiny green? It could be that the state is playing with joining those that have jumped off the Common Core bandwagon. Last week the house subcommittee that watches over academic standards was all set to discuss House Bill 3, a bill that would scrap the Common Core and require the state to start over by developing its own standards in a process that would involve (gasp) teachers.

The bill was proposed by Republic John Forgety, a former teacher and superintendent. Reported Chalkbeat, 

“I’m of the opinion that this body (the legislature) should not be in the business of telling a third-grade teacher how to teach,” said Forgety, a former teacher and school superintendent.

The discussion of the bill has been postponed (according to Chalkbeat, another GOP representative asked for a postponement citing, I kid you not, an epiphany). But Tennesseans for Student Success had shown up in force, ready to stand up for the Core.

TSS has been busy other places, as one would respect from any self-respecting well-bankrolled astro-turf group. They have had a facebook page for a month now, with a bit over 1200 likes as I write this. Tennesseans probably got to know them through their television spots, like this one

You can see that the Core is supported by moms and teachers. Clearly this is the kind of group that, even though it reportedly first formed in October and hired an executive director in January, managed to raise enough money to run the above ad during the Super-Bowl. I am sure they had several really awesome bake sales, and maybe a car wash. It could have happened. Well, no. Reportedly the Tennessee Association of Business Foundation helped fund it; the foundation is an offshoot of the TN Chamber of Commerce, which has received grants from the Gates Foundation to help promote Common Core. But these moms still look very determined and stern, particularly about the prospect of being "dragged" back to the bad old days.

TSS is fond of the point that Tennessee has the fastest-improving test scores in the country, which is better if you think test scores are super important and easier if you start out with test scores deep in the toilet.

The actual website is somewhat sparse, but you can sign up for a newsletter. They do list some of their staff. including executive director Jeremy Harrell (ran campaigns for both Gov Bill Haslam and Lamar Alexander, plus other political credits), Ashley Elizabeth Graham (was deputy communications director for Marsha Blackburn), and Weston Burleson (was account exec with Stoneridge Group). All of the listed personnel have connections to GOP lawmakers and campaign work (they also make sure to include a cheer for Tennessee sports teams). The Tennessean reports that the group also employs four lobbyists.

In short, this looks like a team selected for its political campaigning savvy; there appear to be no educators in sight except as props in tv ads and government hearings.

The whole business plays out like a complicated political circus balancing act. Governor Haslam was a for the common Core before he was against it, sort of. Haslam led the early adoption of the Core, but in the last year, the standards are not feeling loved. Anti-core politicians won big in some counties, and a Vanderbilt poll showed that teachers are not fans. So last September, Haslam decided that maybe Common Core needed to be carefully reviewed by a review board that he would set up and , well, you know those movies where the good guy is undercover and his buddy is about get offed by the bad guy so he steps in and punches his buddy first, just to keep both his buddy and his cover story alive...? This looks kind of like that.

So we've got Haslam's review of the Core and a separate rewrite of the Core proposed by a GOP legislator and backed by teachers. Now we have an astro-turf rather transparently run by a handful of Haslam's political operatives agitating to reject Forgety's review and stick with the Governor's. Some pols are apparently asking if the two reviews of standards can be put together. Want to place your bets?

In the meantime, the main event in Tennessee is not the battle over standards, but the push to scrap public education and replace it with a World O'Charters. So this astro-turf sideshow is not necessarily even getting everyone's full attention.

The Bullying Antidote

I am not a bullying expert, but I have taught teenagers for thirty-five years, so I've had the opportunity to observe it in the field. And much of what we try to do with the goal of stopping it seems counterproductive, even as we engage in behavior that actually re-enforces bullying as an okay Thing.

Bullying is frequently not what it says it's about. Even though we associate bullying with things like "picking on a kid because he has blue hair," I've never seen a "blamed" trait like that present in only bullied kids. Attempting to address bullying by traits rarely works; I'm thinking here of all the schools that post-Columbine watched out for their own school's version of the trenchcoat mafia and tried to deal with the potential bullying problems by making those kids stop acting different.

What seems more common, at least in my part of the universe, is a person is targeted, and then some feature of the individual is used as a hook to hang the bullying on. In other words, first comes "we'll bully that guy" and second comes "we'll pick on him about his hair color."

This is a tricky dynamic because weirdness or oddness can signal weakness or a lack of confidence, and those traits do make a student a potential bullying target. (This is particularly true if the blue hair  etc is an affectation, and of course how many teens adopt one affectation or another in their search for their own special voice.)

The critical question for me is this: what makes bullying okay to the bully? I believe most people work things out in their heads so that they feel they are doing the right thing. So what does a bully tell him- or her-self that makes bullying okay.

The answer, I believe, is "He deserves it."

A bully never says he's bullying somebody. He's straightening him out. He's teaching him a lesson. He needs to be taken down a peg. The target deserves it. Bad things should happen to that person; I am just being an instrument of divine and universal judgment.

The reason the target supposedly deserves to be straightened out is also a pointless distraction. Getting in a big argument about whether Chris or Pat deserves to be pushed, punched, humiliated, or frozen out-- this is a huge side discussion that actually makes things worse. Because when we get in an argument whether or not Pat and Chris deserve to be abused, we are accepting the premise that some people do. Any time you tell students, "Chris does not deserve to be bullied," you are also sending the message "But some people DO deserve to be bullied."

And as long as you accept that in this world there are people who deserve to be treated as less-than-human, as others, as whipping posts, then there will always be bullying. You cannot stamp out bullying by trying to make the argument that bullying is only bad when you bully the wrong people.

If you want to stamp out bullying in your classroom, the policy is simple. It is not okay to treat people poorly, to treat them as less-than-human, to try to hurt them in any way on purpose, ever. Ever.

This doesn't mean everyone must hold hands and hug. There are lots of contexts in which people can disagree with each other, dislike each other, and recognize that they have no desire to spend a second more around each other than is absolutely necessary. But all of that can be done in a context that recognizes that everyone in the game is a real, live human being, and it is not okay to treat them like anything less.

It's not always an easy rule to live with; heaven knows I find it a challenge at times. But it is absolutely the best bullying antidote I know. Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it,

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Working within the College Marketplace

Looking at a Pearson employment-ish opportunity took me down a whole new rabbit hole. If you think of college campuses as a sort of oasis in our otherwise sales-obsessed culture, I have bad news for you.

The actual name of the job is Pearson Campus Ambassador. You can find the whole pitch here, but let me walk you through the highlights.

The job description is a bit fuzzy. Right up front the pitch is

We're hiring students to work part-time with Pearson on campus and help students do well in their courses. You get work experience, and we help more students succeed. It's a win-win! 

But among the touted benefits are "building valuable business and career skills like problem-solving, public speaking and communication." Ambassadors can also look forward to "working side by side with faculty, Pearson staff, and others."

Under a "Responsibilities" tab, a clearer picture begins to emerge. Here's what the job involves:


Lead Pearson technology demonstrations and/or presentations for students and faculty.
Create events, activities, and opportunities that help students best use Pearson technologies.
Collect campus feedback through focus groups, surveys, and individual interviews.
Work with professionals at Pearson to promote current products and shape future ones.
Participate in conference calls, team trainings, and regularly scheduled team meetings.

And from elsewhere in the website, another description of what the job looks like:

Pearson Campus Ambassadors are instrumental in leading classroom presentations on Pearson technologies, hosting tables at book fairs, and capturing video testimonials. They also facilitate focus groups, conduct student surveys, and create projects and events specific to the student experiences on their campuses.


So, basically, the job is be a Mary Kay lady who throws Tupperware parties for Pearson on your college campus.

Pearson's been doing this for a while. Actually, everybody's been doing this for a while. Some of the obvious players like Google and Microsoft hire student "ambassadors," but I found information about ambassadors for Barnes & Noble and General Mills (trying to get your college buddies to eat breakfast strikes me as an impressive challenge).

Here's Isa Adney back in 2012 talking about her experience as a Pearson ambassador back in 2012:

I actually consult with a wonderful student ambassador program with Pearson (the leading education services company), where students are paid to be on campus to help teach students how to get the most out of their new learning materials such as Pearson's MyMathLab) through class presentations and tutoring hours. These student ambassadors get to know more people on campus, earn money to help them in school, build connections and meet mentors within the company, and gain some really great professional experience. This doesn't always happen while working at a fast-food restaurant in college. 

One can see that this works well for the company-- a low-cost low-maintenance high-impact marketing strategy that doubles as a recruitment program, while helping get young people at the very beginning of their adult careers to think of corporations as their good buddies. And you don't have to sell your soul-- just your friends.

Virginia: Let's Kneecap Public Schools

How soon they forget.

It wasn't that long ago that Virginia was taking advantage of North Carolina's terrible education policies by trying to poach NC teachers. Now, some Virginia voices are calling for their own edu-mugging.

Every state has its own set of whacky politicians who open their mouths and let the crazy fly out. Virginia has David Brat, who brings it to the national level.

Brat, you may or may not recall, is the Tea Party candidate who booted Eric Cantor out of Congress. He's an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, a small liberal arts college in Ashland. The folks who have been poring over his background since he upset Cantor suggest that he's a Randian who attributes 19th century advances in government, economics and science to Calvinism.

He has some thoughts about education as well, and has chimed in on the current budgetary debates in VA, as reported by Will Ragland at Think Progress. If you've come across this story, it was probably under the money quote which was

Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.

But Brat has ideas far more alarming than simply teaching from atop a hunk of stone.

He began his remarks by saying, “The greatest thinkers in Western civ were not products of education policy,” before mentioning Socrates and Plato. He later went on to say that he thinks the answer to improving education in this country “would be to get private sector folks into every one of our schools, get the CEOs in the schools and move beyond this just narrow policy debate and really have a revolution.”

But Virginia is not content to simply send some educational dismantlery to DC. They've got some ideas of their own.

Senator Mark D. Obenshain has introduced SJ 256, a constitutional amendment dealing with charter schools. What the bill proposes is simple-- let Virginia charter schools be authorized by the Governor-appointed state Board of Education.

I can't imagine a much better way to pit the state government against the state school system. With one constitutional amendment, the Governor becomes the overseer of a system created to put public schools out of business. With creativity, this can provide all sorts of political leverage ("Do it my way, or you'll find a dozen charter schools opening in your district, right across the street from your local public high school.") But ultimately, this is a bill that would give Virginia's governors and his hand-picked education chiefs the power to simply swamp their own public school system. If this passes, local public school teachers could be lucky to find a full-sized rock to stand on to teach.

The current system in Virginia requires local school districts to authorize charters, not unlike volunteering to have a bucket of leeches released in one's own bathwater. Unsurprisingly, charter growth has been slow under this system. Obenshain is concerned that Virginia is falling behind other charter-friendly states and that nationally there are oh-so-many moms and dads waiting in line to get junior into a lovely charter school.

The measure has passed the Virginia Senate and is expected to scoot on through the House. The vote was along party lines, though when you break it down into individuals, we are once again reminded how bizarre ed reform has made the political terrain. Senator Chap Peterson is a lawyer who is representing a charter that is fighting against a local school district that won't give them approval, but he voted against the measure because he feels it takes away the power of the local school board and destroying local control. Peterson is a Democrat, so go figure.

As a constitutional amendment, the measure has a long journey yet to travel. That means folks in Virginia have lots of time to gather rocks, whether they want them to throw, to stand and teach upon, or to check underneath for any politicians that might be hiding under them.