I write a lot about what I oppose, so as a sort of thought experiment, today I'll try to imagine if there are ways to accomplish reformster goals that I could live happily with. The posts in the series include Imagining Charters, Imagining Teach for America, Imagining National Standards, Imagining Vouchers and Choice, Imagining Teacher Evaluation, and Imagining National Assessments.
Modern charters are emerging as one of the most full-frontal assaults on public education, stripping public schools of financial resources, students, and in the worst cases, the very buildings they used to occupy. And since charters must market heavily to get students away from public schools and lobby relentlessly to keep the playing field favorably tilted, charter school operators make a huge volume contribution to the relentless refrain of "Public schools are failing." Nor will I accept the Saving One Starfish argument-- for each child a charter "saves," it makes things worse for twenty others (and that's before we get to all the charters who aren't actually saving anybody at all).
So can I imagine a charter set-up that I wouldn't think wasn't a pimple on the butt of public education?
Well, first it would have to be fully funded. Our current systems are founded on the fiction that multiple school systems can be run for the same cost as one. They can't. If legislators or mayors believe charter schools are a necessity, they need to go to the taxpayers, make their case, and raise the tax money necessary to make it work. This business of saying, "We can open six more schools and it won't cost a cent," is the worst kind of dishonesty.
It would have to be community based. That means operated by and answerable to the taxpayers and citizens in the community, not suits in some far-away boardroom.
That means it would also have to be available to all the students of that community. The correct follow-up to "The children of this zip code are trapped in a failing school" is "therefor we are making this great school available to all of the children in this zip code" and not "therefor we are shipping charter students in from some other less-sucky zip code."
If the charter is to be a public school, it must take all of the public that wish to attend. Does that mean they have to come up with programs for the special needs students? Yes, that's exactly what it means. That's what public schools do. Can a specialized magnet school dedicated to music turn away a kid who's tone-deaf and terrible? I'm going to say "no," but I'm not going to complain if that student flunks.
It must be non-profit. And truly non-profit, not sliding past non-profit rules by clever use of shell companies and contracted services. And all finances must be transparent and open to all taxpayers and their representatives; no going to court to keep your records hidden.
In fact, it must be accountable to the state government in all the same ways that all public schools are. If your argument is, "But the widget school laws are stupid" then go get those rules changed for everybody.
Finally, it needs to be able to explain what it's doing that can't be done in the already-existing public schools. The answer to this can not be some version of "sucking less." If charter founders claim to know the secret of hiring super-duper uber-excellent teachers, then just apply that secret to the public school. Specialized programs, specialized focus, extra enrichment stuff that won't easily fit into a more traditional school-- that sort of thing is what a charter school is for. A charter is not supposed to be directly competing with public schools by saying, "We're just like a regular public school, but you won't have to go to class with Those People."
A charter that meets these requirements (and they do exist) is a welcome addition to the public education scene. Those that don't I would gladly see shut down tomorrow.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Can You Become Better?
One factor that shapes a person's approach to education is that person's answer to a simple question:
Can a person become better?
For many people, the world is separated into two sorts of humans. Some humans are wise and virtuous and imbued with most of the graces a human being can have, while other humans are foolish makers of poor choices, lesser beings with lesser grace, upright bipeds who are just Less Than. Not only do some people believe in this division of humans, but they also believe that this division is immutable and permanent.
Maybe you're born as a Lesser, or maybe you're raised that way (because, you know, your parents were lesser). Maybe your environment shaped you as a Lesser. But if you're a Lesser, that's fundamentally who you are and who you will always be. And the same is true for the Betters.
Starting from those assumptions, we arrive at two completely different approaches to education.
For the Betters, we need a system that nurtures and coaxes their Higher Qualities to the surface, that simply lets the seeds already planted blossom forth. Betters need to be loved and fed and watered and supported, so that they can more easily become the Better Person that we know is inside. If they falter and show a moment of bad judgment or bad behavior, well, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but doesn't change our understanding of the Better Person they fundamentally are. It's just a stumble on their road to Awesome. We need to support them and build them up so that they feel the Better Person inside. For Betters, the whole system is about helping them embrace and embody their Better nature.
But for the Lessers, we need a different system. Their fundamental Lesser nature must be stomped down, repressed, smothered, buried. Mind you, they will never be Better People. Our goal with them is to teach them to at least pretend to act like a Better, even though that is counter to their very nature. So they need discipline-- lots and lots of discipline, so that they understand that if they let their Lesser nature rise, they will suffer consequences for it.
This strictness is not just about repressing their Lesser nature. Part of the constellation of Lesser character is a laziness, a lack of grit and prudence and ambition. They can never be Better, but they can do better if they will just try harder, and so we must hammer them with high expectations, accept no excuses and just demand that they perform better. If they falter and show a moment of bad judgment or bad behavior, that's their true Lesser nature rising and they need to feel the consequences like a ton of bricks on a loathsome snake. It can be useful to remind them repeatedly that they are Less Than, so that they never forget the Lesser nature that they must never express. For Lessers, the whole system is about helping them repress and reject their Lesser nature while trying to do their best to fake acceptable behavior instead.
Good-hearted Betters are always looking for ways to improve life for Lessers (because, poor dears, they're not capable of even understanding what a better life would really be). Betters like to believe that their success is the result of certain qualities they possess as part of their Better Nature, and they advise Lessers to try adopting some of these qualities as a way of rising above their Lesser nature. And such programs, including schools, can't simply have funds and resources pumped into them, because the Lessers wouldn't handle them properly; Lessers can have resources only if those resources stay under control of the Betters. After all, if the Lessers deserved to have more resources, they would have them, wouldn't they.
Betters will have success because they deserve it. Lessers can earn success, but they will not become Betters.
Oh, but what if we viewed Lesser and Better as fluid states. What if we even went so far as to view individual human beings as complexes of complicated and varying behaviors, with good and bad behaviors emerging over time and circumstances in a wide variety of ways? What if we decided that stack-ranking human beings based on markers of success such as money and cars and "nice" neighborhoods and social status was not useful in education? In fact, what if we decided that ranking human beings was not useful in education at all??
What if we built the education system on the assumption that each child is a Better? What if we started with the assumption that each child had value and importance and the potential for some sort of growth and accomplishment that could fulfill that child's aspirations and hopes for a future?
I'm not a Pollyanna (nor do I play one on tv). I know that some students will disappoint us, thwart us, and rebuff our best efforts. I remember all too well that every murderer, drug dealer, rapacious CEO, and ignorant, horrible human being once sat in some teacher's classroom.
But if we don't believe that people can become better and stronger and wiser and more decent-- really become those things and not fake it as some sort of camouflage for their immutable inadequacy-- then why have an educational system at all? Most especially, why teach at all?
The biggest failing of those who believe in the immutable categories of Lessers and Betters is that they cannot see possibilities. They imagine a system that can stamp Lesser children with a new brand and polish them up real nice, but they do not imagine a system in which all children have what they need to transform themselves and, with the assistance and guidance and expertise of trained, caring professionals, become the adults they aspire to be.
The largest tragedy is not that some people believe they are Betters and so they design reform programs around this world view. The largest tragedy is that people who have been cast as Lessers can come to believe it, too.
Can a person become better?
For many people, the world is separated into two sorts of humans. Some humans are wise and virtuous and imbued with most of the graces a human being can have, while other humans are foolish makers of poor choices, lesser beings with lesser grace, upright bipeds who are just Less Than. Not only do some people believe in this division of humans, but they also believe that this division is immutable and permanent.
Maybe you're born as a Lesser, or maybe you're raised that way (because, you know, your parents were lesser). Maybe your environment shaped you as a Lesser. But if you're a Lesser, that's fundamentally who you are and who you will always be. And the same is true for the Betters.
Starting from those assumptions, we arrive at two completely different approaches to education.
For the Betters, we need a system that nurtures and coaxes their Higher Qualities to the surface, that simply lets the seeds already planted blossom forth. Betters need to be loved and fed and watered and supported, so that they can more easily become the Better Person that we know is inside. If they falter and show a moment of bad judgment or bad behavior, well, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but doesn't change our understanding of the Better Person they fundamentally are. It's just a stumble on their road to Awesome. We need to support them and build them up so that they feel the Better Person inside. For Betters, the whole system is about helping them embrace and embody their Better nature.
But for the Lessers, we need a different system. Their fundamental Lesser nature must be stomped down, repressed, smothered, buried. Mind you, they will never be Better People. Our goal with them is to teach them to at least pretend to act like a Better, even though that is counter to their very nature. So they need discipline-- lots and lots of discipline, so that they understand that if they let their Lesser nature rise, they will suffer consequences for it.
This strictness is not just about repressing their Lesser nature. Part of the constellation of Lesser character is a laziness, a lack of grit and prudence and ambition. They can never be Better, but they can do better if they will just try harder, and so we must hammer them with high expectations, accept no excuses and just demand that they perform better. If they falter and show a moment of bad judgment or bad behavior, that's their true Lesser nature rising and they need to feel the consequences like a ton of bricks on a loathsome snake. It can be useful to remind them repeatedly that they are Less Than, so that they never forget the Lesser nature that they must never express. For Lessers, the whole system is about helping them repress and reject their Lesser nature while trying to do their best to fake acceptable behavior instead.
Good-hearted Betters are always looking for ways to improve life for Lessers (because, poor dears, they're not capable of even understanding what a better life would really be). Betters like to believe that their success is the result of certain qualities they possess as part of their Better Nature, and they advise Lessers to try adopting some of these qualities as a way of rising above their Lesser nature. And such programs, including schools, can't simply have funds and resources pumped into them, because the Lessers wouldn't handle them properly; Lessers can have resources only if those resources stay under control of the Betters. After all, if the Lessers deserved to have more resources, they would have them, wouldn't they.
Betters will have success because they deserve it. Lessers can earn success, but they will not become Betters.
Oh, but what if we viewed Lesser and Better as fluid states. What if we even went so far as to view individual human beings as complexes of complicated and varying behaviors, with good and bad behaviors emerging over time and circumstances in a wide variety of ways? What if we decided that stack-ranking human beings based on markers of success such as money and cars and "nice" neighborhoods and social status was not useful in education? In fact, what if we decided that ranking human beings was not useful in education at all??
What if we built the education system on the assumption that each child is a Better? What if we started with the assumption that each child had value and importance and the potential for some sort of growth and accomplishment that could fulfill that child's aspirations and hopes for a future?
I'm not a Pollyanna (nor do I play one on tv). I know that some students will disappoint us, thwart us, and rebuff our best efforts. I remember all too well that every murderer, drug dealer, rapacious CEO, and ignorant, horrible human being once sat in some teacher's classroom.
But if we don't believe that people can become better and stronger and wiser and more decent-- really become those things and not fake it as some sort of camouflage for their immutable inadequacy-- then why have an educational system at all? Most especially, why teach at all?
The biggest failing of those who believe in the immutable categories of Lessers and Betters is that they cannot see possibilities. They imagine a system that can stamp Lesser children with a new brand and polish them up real nice, but they do not imagine a system in which all children have what they need to transform themselves and, with the assistance and guidance and expertise of trained, caring professionals, become the adults they aspire to be.
The largest tragedy is not that some people believe they are Betters and so they design reform programs around this world view. The largest tragedy is that people who have been cast as Lessers can come to believe it, too.
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Join NPE in Chicago
I don't get out much. I'm a high school English teacher in a small town, and kind of homebody by nature. When I leave town, it's for family or work. But in just over a month, on the weekend of April 25-26, I am taking a trip to Chicago for neither.
The Network for Public Education is the closest thing to an actual formal organization of the many and varied people standing up for public education in this modern era of privatizing test-driven corporate education reform. NPE held a conference last year, and they're doing it again this year-- a gathering of many of the strongest voices for public education in America today. Last year I followed along on line-- this year I will be there.
It's an adventure. On the one hand, I am excited to have the chance to meet the many people I have come to know through their writings face to face. On the other hand, I'm painfully aware that I am personally far more dull and uninteresting in person than I am on your computer screen. Jennifer Berkshire (of Edushyster fame) have agreed to provide some manner of witty banter at a fund-raising luncheon; it remains to be seen whether we hew closer to Myrna Loy and William Powell, Lucy and Ethel, or Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker. I also, in a moment of weakness, pitched presenting a session about teaching writing like a writer and not like a content delivery specialist; in a moment of weakness, the NPE took me up on it.
But here's the reason you should come-- just look at this list:
I mean-- where else are you going to have a chance to encounter a group like that?
You can register for the conference itself here and you can reserve a room at the Drake Hotel here. There are a limited number of rooms set aside for the conference and a special rate as well, but that rate expires ON MIDNIGHT OF SUNDAY MARCH 22 so you really need to get on this now.
There are many reasons to attend. I'm going because it's a chance to see some of the people who have become heroes to me live and in the flesh, and it's a chance to have a powerful, personal reminder that those of us who are standing up for public education are not crazy, and not alone.
There are also opportunities available to contribute funds to help folks afford to get there (because NPE, unlike most reformster groups, is not rolling in corporate sponsorship money).
This is a chance to connect with some of the strongest advocates for public education, to really stand up for the besieged system. Be part of the network, and help make some noise for public education.
The Network for Public Education is the closest thing to an actual formal organization of the many and varied people standing up for public education in this modern era of privatizing test-driven corporate education reform. NPE held a conference last year, and they're doing it again this year-- a gathering of many of the strongest voices for public education in America today. Last year I followed along on line-- this year I will be there.
It's an adventure. On the one hand, I am excited to have the chance to meet the many people I have come to know through their writings face to face. On the other hand, I'm painfully aware that I am personally far more dull and uninteresting in person than I am on your computer screen. Jennifer Berkshire (of Edushyster fame) have agreed to provide some manner of witty banter at a fund-raising luncheon; it remains to be seen whether we hew closer to Myrna Loy and William Powell, Lucy and Ethel, or Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker. I also, in a moment of weakness, pitched presenting a session about teaching writing like a writer and not like a content delivery specialist; in a moment of weakness, the NPE took me up on it.
But here's the reason you should come-- just look at this list:
I mean-- where else are you going to have a chance to encounter a group like that?
You can register for the conference itself here and you can reserve a room at the Drake Hotel here. There are a limited number of rooms set aside for the conference and a special rate as well, but that rate expires ON MIDNIGHT OF SUNDAY MARCH 22 so you really need to get on this now.
There are many reasons to attend. I'm going because it's a chance to see some of the people who have become heroes to me live and in the flesh, and it's a chance to have a powerful, personal reminder that those of us who are standing up for public education are not crazy, and not alone.
There are also opportunities available to contribute funds to help folks afford to get there (because NPE, unlike most reformster groups, is not rolling in corporate sponsorship money).
This is a chance to connect with some of the strongest advocates for public education, to really stand up for the besieged system. Be part of the network, and help make some noise for public education.
Beyond Performance Assessment
Performance is on my mind lately. Two weekends ago was the high school musical (Legally Blonde) that a neighboring district runs as a co-op program with my school; I serve as assistant director for an old friend and great teacher. This weekend I'm wrapping up my own school's annual variety show (been happening since 1930 and it's a Big Deal). Both productions held auditions way back in December, so this has been a long marathon run of rehearsals and preparation.
I have played trombone in every kind of band that will put up with a trombone player since I was about nine. I've been a church choir director and worked community theater productions of everything from Annie and Sound of Music to Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Chicago.
Point being, I spend a lot of time in the world of performance, and I carry that experience with me into any discussion of performance-based assessment. Yes, they're not exactly the same kind of performance, but I think the parallels are close enough to be instructive.
Performance can be a great measure of achievement and understanding and skill-- or it can be a terrible measure.
Let's consider a high school band director. She always has a performance-based assessment built right into her course, but whether it means anything or not will depend on how she prepares her students for the performance task.
Let's say she programs a march by Henry Fillmore.
In the rehearsal process, she could teach the students about the context of marches during the era of the Big Three composers (Fillmore, Karl King, and John Philip Sousa). She could talk about how musicians made a living (or didn't) in that time period. She could trace Fillmore's own career through live performance into his development of a radio show, which in turn opens up a discussion of how media affect performers and performance, and all of it opens up a discussion of how business considerations affect what works and performers make it into mass media.
If she didn't want to wander down too many side roads, she could focus on technical issues for the musicians. What's an appropriate style for playing marches? How are staccatos and accents played differently than they're played in other styles? For younger musicians, the work might even occasion a discussion of repeat signs and dynamic markings. What sections typically occur in march composition? She could teach them a variety of musical information that would serve them if they ever again play a march.
Or she could teach them just how to play that one march.
This is the problem with performance tasks as a basis for assessment. If you know what the task is going to be before you start (like, say, perform a piece of music that is already completely written down), then you can prepare only and exactly the skills required to complete that task.
There are choirs and even bands in schools across the country where students don't even learn to read music-- they just learn to repeat the notes of particular songs by rote. That's not nothing-- but it's not everything an educational music program can provide or hope to aspire, and it certainly doesn't provide students with much that they can carry away after the concert is over.
Performance based assessment can be excellent; it makes way more sense to have my students write essays that to take tests about how to write essays. But if we aren't careful, we can narrow the breadth and focus of the assessment so tightly that very little true teaching actually occurs in the run-up to the assessment.
Just one more reason that assessment should follow instruction and not the other way around. If I teach first and then design an assessment, I'll come up with an assessment that I think captures the depth and breadth of what my students have learned. If I have the test in front of me before I even start to teach, I'll direct everything toward that final product.
So when I close out a show, especially a school show, I don't just ask if it was a good show. I ask myself if the cast and crew learned something, if they developed and grew in ways that will benefit the next performance they're involved in.
This subheading is an apology because I just realized this will be a longer piece than I thought it would be when I started it.
What I've been talking about is, of course, teaching to the test. It is teaching that has a short, limited trajectory.
What do we teach to if not the test? We've been saying that we should teach to the student. I have another idea.
When we teach a student how to perform just one specific work, one song, one arrangement, one single play, one musical, then we have prepared for a specific moment in time, and once that moment is over, the usefulness, the value, the meaning of that learning is gone.
But when, in the process of preparing a student for a performance, we increase their skill and their knowledge and their technique, we give them a host of skills that they can carry on into life. If I teach a student by rote how to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose," that's a skill he'll only ever use if he finds himself in a situation where he wants to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose." If I teach him how to read and interpret and appreciate and enjoy music, that will be useful to him until the day he dies. Not only that but he will have the chance to pass those same skills on to other people, so that what he's learned will actually outlive him. I know this because I'm a link in just such a chain, inspired and trained by men and women who made it possible for me to inspire and train others.
When I look back at a production, sometimes the quality of the actual show is not as important as the growth that I saw. The show is not the end of the line, the destination of the performers, but just a stop-and-check point on a larger journey, and it's the trajectory of that larger journey that is far more important than how awesome this particular rest stop turned out.
Though here's the Big Ironic Thing-- by taking this long view, I think we actually produce really good shows. Better than those produced by people who just focus on this performance as the and of the line, the whole purpose.
I like the analogy of a golf swing. Golfers work endlessly on follow-through, because somehow, the way you hit the ball depends a great deal on what you do (and intend to do) after you actually hit the ball.
What do we teach to if we don't teach to the test?
We teach to the possibilities. We teach to the strengths and weaknesses and aspirations that students have for the adults they will one day become. Our teaching is not a short arc that extends from a hand to a dartboard, but a long unending arc, like a rocket launched at the heart of the universe.
Don't teach to the test.
Teach to the future.
I have played trombone in every kind of band that will put up with a trombone player since I was about nine. I've been a church choir director and worked community theater productions of everything from Annie and Sound of Music to Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Chicago.
Point being, I spend a lot of time in the world of performance, and I carry that experience with me into any discussion of performance-based assessment. Yes, they're not exactly the same kind of performance, but I think the parallels are close enough to be instructive.
Performance can be a great measure of achievement and understanding and skill-- or it can be a terrible measure.
Let's consider a high school band director. She always has a performance-based assessment built right into her course, but whether it means anything or not will depend on how she prepares her students for the performance task.
Let's say she programs a march by Henry Fillmore.
In the rehearsal process, she could teach the students about the context of marches during the era of the Big Three composers (Fillmore, Karl King, and John Philip Sousa). She could talk about how musicians made a living (or didn't) in that time period. She could trace Fillmore's own career through live performance into his development of a radio show, which in turn opens up a discussion of how media affect performers and performance, and all of it opens up a discussion of how business considerations affect what works and performers make it into mass media.
If she didn't want to wander down too many side roads, she could focus on technical issues for the musicians. What's an appropriate style for playing marches? How are staccatos and accents played differently than they're played in other styles? For younger musicians, the work might even occasion a discussion of repeat signs and dynamic markings. What sections typically occur in march composition? She could teach them a variety of musical information that would serve them if they ever again play a march.
Or she could teach them just how to play that one march.
This is the problem with performance tasks as a basis for assessment. If you know what the task is going to be before you start (like, say, perform a piece of music that is already completely written down), then you can prepare only and exactly the skills required to complete that task.
There are choirs and even bands in schools across the country where students don't even learn to read music-- they just learn to repeat the notes of particular songs by rote. That's not nothing-- but it's not everything an educational music program can provide or hope to aspire, and it certainly doesn't provide students with much that they can carry away after the concert is over.
Performance based assessment can be excellent; it makes way more sense to have my students write essays that to take tests about how to write essays. But if we aren't careful, we can narrow the breadth and focus of the assessment so tightly that very little true teaching actually occurs in the run-up to the assessment.
Just one more reason that assessment should follow instruction and not the other way around. If I teach first and then design an assessment, I'll come up with an assessment that I think captures the depth and breadth of what my students have learned. If I have the test in front of me before I even start to teach, I'll direct everything toward that final product.
So when I close out a show, especially a school show, I don't just ask if it was a good show. I ask myself if the cast and crew learned something, if they developed and grew in ways that will benefit the next performance they're involved in.
This subheading is an apology because I just realized this will be a longer piece than I thought it would be when I started it.
What I've been talking about is, of course, teaching to the test. It is teaching that has a short, limited trajectory.
What do we teach to if not the test? We've been saying that we should teach to the student. I have another idea.
When we teach a student how to perform just one specific work, one song, one arrangement, one single play, one musical, then we have prepared for a specific moment in time, and once that moment is over, the usefulness, the value, the meaning of that learning is gone.
But when, in the process of preparing a student for a performance, we increase their skill and their knowledge and their technique, we give them a host of skills that they can carry on into life. If I teach a student by rote how to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose," that's a skill he'll only ever use if he finds himself in a situation where he wants to sing the tenor part to "My Wild Irish Rose." If I teach him how to read and interpret and appreciate and enjoy music, that will be useful to him until the day he dies. Not only that but he will have the chance to pass those same skills on to other people, so that what he's learned will actually outlive him. I know this because I'm a link in just such a chain, inspired and trained by men and women who made it possible for me to inspire and train others.
When I look back at a production, sometimes the quality of the actual show is not as important as the growth that I saw. The show is not the end of the line, the destination of the performers, but just a stop-and-check point on a larger journey, and it's the trajectory of that larger journey that is far more important than how awesome this particular rest stop turned out.
Though here's the Big Ironic Thing-- by taking this long view, I think we actually produce really good shows. Better than those produced by people who just focus on this performance as the and of the line, the whole purpose.
I like the analogy of a golf swing. Golfers work endlessly on follow-through, because somehow, the way you hit the ball depends a great deal on what you do (and intend to do) after you actually hit the ball.
What do we teach to if we don't teach to the test?
We teach to the possibilities. We teach to the strengths and weaknesses and aspirations that students have for the adults they will one day become. Our teaching is not a short arc that extends from a hand to a dartboard, but a long unending arc, like a rocket launched at the heart of the universe.
Don't teach to the test.
Teach to the future.
Charter Leeches Call for Help in PA
When the Center for Education Reform sends out a call to action, you can be sure of one thing-- somewhere, charter school legislation is in trouble.
The Center is one of the oldest charter action-lobbying groups in the country, tracing its roots all the way back to 1993.
It is the mission of the Center for Education Reform to accelerate the growth of the education reform movement in ways that make available to families new and meaningful choices, give parents fundamental power over their children’s education, and allow teachers and schools to innovate in ways that transform student learning.
What that actually means is that they push charters like Swiss athletes push bobsleds. Their stock in trade is state-by-state charter ratings which award a letter grade based on the ease with which a charter operator can make a bundle in that state. And this week they sent out an email to let everybody know that Pennsylvania was being downgraded to a C.
What's the problem? The problem is that Pennsylvania's new governor Tom Wolf has a budget proposal on the table that aims to slow the speed and severity of public education's charter leech problem.
Pennsylvania's approach to charters has never seriously claimed that it was going to save taxpayers money, which is a good thing because then charters would be guilty of both leeching and lying. In PA, we prefer the approach that comes up with a bogus cost-per-pupil figure and then just ports it over to the charter.
Running a cyber-charter in PA is like printing money. While the per-pupil figure varies by district, $10K for a student without special needs is a good ballpark (students with special needs carry a higher figure). So the cyber enrolls the student, send him a $400 "free" computer, and adds him to the bank of 200 students being handled by a single teacher. The cyber takes the thousands of dollars it didn't spend on anything, uses some of it for snazzy advertising and hiring lobbyists, and banks the rest. And the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't even demand a careful accounting of where it all went.
The financial strain on school districts is tremendous. The district next to mine has about forty cyber-school students and they lost around a half a million dollars from their budget. My own district, the last year I looked, had sent 76 students to cybers at a cost of about $800K. That's coming close to 10% of our total budget.
Back in the day, the state reimbursed local districts for some of the public tax dollars that they handed over to charter schools. Our previous governor discontinued that practice, leading to even tougher financial squeezes for local districts. Our new governor (who has already shown himself not overly concerned about charter happiness) proposes to audit charter books, and have them to return a chunk of the public tax dollars they didn't actually use to operate their schools to the public school system from whence they came.
Charter operators are not happy. Lehigh Valley Live quotes Keystone Alliance for Public Charter Schools Executive Director Tim Eller: "What the governor proposed today is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania Independent also has a high dudgeon Eller quote: “What the governor proposed is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania.”
What we've run up again is the same old Giant Charter Central Fallacy-- you cannot run multiple school districts for the same cost as a single district. The model that PA (and many other states) settled on was one in which the extra costs of multiple districts were transferred to taxpayers, but done in such a way that local districts would have to look like the bad guy.
But PA's system is particularly insidious because there is a legislative cap on tax increases. Charter leeches, general inflation of costs, and the impact of the state's badly botched teacher pension system can often raise the costs of a district far beyond that district's ability to balance with new taxes. Therefor, many districts are being driven into austerity and even bankruptcy.
The argument about PA charters is about how big a slice of the pie the charters are entitled to. It's a difficult argument for them to have, because they have never really presented a convincing argument about how much money it takes them to do their jobs, nor why taxpayers should foot the bill for a duplication of the services already provided by public schools.
And frankly, I'm not sure how much the governor's proposal really moves the discussion forward. First, Wolf's budget has to get past the heavily GOP charter-loving legislature. Second, is there anybody who works with money and budgets who doesn't understand what "Use this money by end of fiscal year or you'll lose it" means? Wolf's proposal may mean a boost for lawyers and accountants, but I'm not sure that it will fix Pennsylvania's charter problems-- it will just provide the not unwelcome spectacle of charters having to fight a little harder for their slab of bacon.
The Center is one of the oldest charter action-lobbying groups in the country, tracing its roots all the way back to 1993.
It is the mission of the Center for Education Reform to accelerate the growth of the education reform movement in ways that make available to families new and meaningful choices, give parents fundamental power over their children’s education, and allow teachers and schools to innovate in ways that transform student learning.
What that actually means is that they push charters like Swiss athletes push bobsleds. Their stock in trade is state-by-state charter ratings which award a letter grade based on the ease with which a charter operator can make a bundle in that state. And this week they sent out an email to let everybody know that Pennsylvania was being downgraded to a C.
What's the problem? The problem is that Pennsylvania's new governor Tom Wolf has a budget proposal on the table that aims to slow the speed and severity of public education's charter leech problem.
Pennsylvania's approach to charters has never seriously claimed that it was going to save taxpayers money, which is a good thing because then charters would be guilty of both leeching and lying. In PA, we prefer the approach that comes up with a bogus cost-per-pupil figure and then just ports it over to the charter.
Running a cyber-charter in PA is like printing money. While the per-pupil figure varies by district, $10K for a student without special needs is a good ballpark (students with special needs carry a higher figure). So the cyber enrolls the student, send him a $400 "free" computer, and adds him to the bank of 200 students being handled by a single teacher. The cyber takes the thousands of dollars it didn't spend on anything, uses some of it for snazzy advertising and hiring lobbyists, and banks the rest. And the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't even demand a careful accounting of where it all went.
The financial strain on school districts is tremendous. The district next to mine has about forty cyber-school students and they lost around a half a million dollars from their budget. My own district, the last year I looked, had sent 76 students to cybers at a cost of about $800K. That's coming close to 10% of our total budget.
Back in the day, the state reimbursed local districts for some of the public tax dollars that they handed over to charter schools. Our previous governor discontinued that practice, leading to even tougher financial squeezes for local districts. Our new governor (who has already shown himself not overly concerned about charter happiness) proposes to audit charter books, and have them to return a chunk of the public tax dollars they didn't actually use to operate their schools to the public school system from whence they came.
Charter operators are not happy. Lehigh Valley Live quotes Keystone Alliance for Public Charter Schools Executive Director Tim Eller: "What the governor proposed today is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania Independent also has a high dudgeon Eller quote: “What the governor proposed is a budget that would effectively shut down charter schools across Pennsylvania.”
What we've run up again is the same old Giant Charter Central Fallacy-- you cannot run multiple school districts for the same cost as a single district. The model that PA (and many other states) settled on was one in which the extra costs of multiple districts were transferred to taxpayers, but done in such a way that local districts would have to look like the bad guy.
But PA's system is particularly insidious because there is a legislative cap on tax increases. Charter leeches, general inflation of costs, and the impact of the state's badly botched teacher pension system can often raise the costs of a district far beyond that district's ability to balance with new taxes. Therefor, many districts are being driven into austerity and even bankruptcy.
The argument about PA charters is about how big a slice of the pie the charters are entitled to. It's a difficult argument for them to have, because they have never really presented a convincing argument about how much money it takes them to do their jobs, nor why taxpayers should foot the bill for a duplication of the services already provided by public schools.
And frankly, I'm not sure how much the governor's proposal really moves the discussion forward. First, Wolf's budget has to get past the heavily GOP charter-loving legislature. Second, is there anybody who works with money and budgets who doesn't understand what "Use this money by end of fiscal year or you'll lose it" means? Wolf's proposal may mean a boost for lawyers and accountants, but I'm not sure that it will fix Pennsylvania's charter problems-- it will just provide the not unwelcome spectacle of charters having to fight a little harder for their slab of bacon.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Whitney Tilson Is Better Than You
When we're talking about the kind of hedge-fund managing, faux-Democrat, rich fat cat, anti-public ed reformsters who are driving much of the modern ed reform agenda, we're talking about guys like Whitney Tilson.
The Tilson Story
Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.
Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.
He recently surfaced in an article by The Nation about how the billionaire boys club is remaking the New York City Schools in their own chartery profit-generating image. Tilson, in his weekly-ish ed reform newsletter, dismissed the article as "a silly hatchet job" and told his own version of how a bunch of Very Rich White Guys have commandeered the biggest apple of them all.
The true story here is very simple and the opposite of sinister – it’s inspiring to me: a number of very successful New Yorkers – believing in the power of education and that every kid deserves a fair shot at the American dream, and disgusted with an educational system that does just the opposite, in which the color of your skin and your zip code pretty much determine the quality of public school a kid gets, an unjust reality that goes on, year in and year out, not because the system is broken, but because it operates just the way it’s supposed to, to serve the economic interests of the adults in the system and the political interests of the gutless weasel politicians who kowtow to them – decided to donate millions of dollars, despite having absolutely nothing to gain personally, to create a counter-weight to the status quo, in which the unions historically said “Jump!” and the governor and legislature would respond, “How high?!”
Tilson likes to characterize himself as a scrappy underdog.
I’m very proud to say that we’ve been enormously successful. Despite being outmanned, outspent, and outgunned 100:1, a small group of incredible people – in part the funders, but more importantly the people on the ground – have turned the tables on the entrenched powers, in part by, yes, finding and strongly supporting a courageous ally in Gov. Cuomo.
I am not sure in which alternate reality these billionaires have been outspent or outgunned, but it is a standard part of the reformster narrative that they are heroic fighters, fearlessly taking on entrenched and powerful forces who are bent on imprisoning students everywhere in dark dungeons of desperation and failure.
It's not about the greed
I have long believed that those who explain reformster motivation by resorting to greed are likely wrong. From techno-system guys like Gates to value investors like Tilson, there's something else working. Here's a quote from that same Tilson letter
We are winning this titanic struggle (albeit in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back way), not because we’re all-powerful billionaires, but because, to quote MLK, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Or this quote from Sir Michael Barber, head of Pearson, commenting on the challenge of remaking education into a global digitized system:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Or the Lyndsay Layton interview with Bill Gates, in which Gates is truly thrown by the mere suggestion that he's in this for the bucks.
These are all people who believe they are serving a higher moral purpose, that they personally understand how the world should be reshaped in a way that other people simply don't. And they have an obligation to circumvent democratic institutions, traditional systems and the disagreeing humans who stand in their way because they know better.
They are armed with vast fortunes and wide-ranging connections, and just like the robber barons before them, they sense that these powers are not the result of random good fortune, but the validation and proof that they really are better than other people, that they have some better, wiser grasp of the world and how it does, and should, work. They do not necessarily revel in the power; in fact, they often use the language of obligation-- it's a thing they have to do. It's, you know, a burden that this rich white guys must pick up.
Will their reforms bring them more money and power? Sure. But that's not the goal-- it's just the proof that they were right. After all, if they weren't smart and strong and better than the average person, they wouldn't be so rich and powerful.
Now, does greed help drive the ed reform engines? Certainly. But that's because once these super-powered elite form their vision of how to remake the world, there is a ton of money to be made by helping them do it, and so a whole swarm of people interested in that money travel in their wake. Philosophically, it really does mirror the symbiosis of 19th century European colonialism. Nobody could sell conquering Africa as baldfaced conquest and exploitation-- but once that colonization was sold as a way to give lesser people the benefits of superior European culture, knowledge, worldview, pants, and religion, the profiteers could adopt the proper language and spread over the continent like locusts.
In the "meritocratic" universe, there are The Right Sort of People and The Wrong Sort of People. The Betters are successful and wise, and this is evident in their success and wealth and innate superior character. They should run things. The Wrong Sort of People need accountability to keep them in line, to guide them to do the correct thing (you will note that we never call for accountability for the Betters-- they don't need it, and their success proves they don't need it).
So what's does Tilson really think?
Tilson's education views seem to have coalesced fairly early in the current ed reform cycle; in 2009 he gave a presentation in DC that was his attempt to create An Inconvenient Truth for the education biz. "A Right Denied" exists as a website, a set of power point slides, and a documentary. I worked my way through the slide show, which I think is an excellent summary (although, at 292 slides, not a very brief one) of the DFER corporate Democrat point of view.
The problem
Tilson starts by documenting the correlation between education and employment, earnings, and long-term health. I don't think many people dispute the correlation-- the argument is about what it means. The DFER/Duncan position is that education is the cause of everything else. I think it's far more likely that lower educational results come from the same place as the other issues-- poverty.
Tilson also notes that scores on some tests have stagnated, and there's lots to argue about there (can you really compare SAT results when the population taking the test has been steadily changing as we try to convince every student that she must go to college), as well as the question of what standardized tests actually measure. But it is a critical element of the DFER view that schools must be accountable, by which they mean the Help must show their Betters what they are up to.
Tilson also wants us to know that we've been spending more and more on education (he does not address the question of "on what," and consider issues such as increased mandates for more special ed teachers in schools). That's okay-- his basic point is clear. We've been spending tons of money on education and not getting bang for our buck.
Tilson knows why-- three reasons:
1) Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades.
2) Our school systems have become more dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and unaccountable.
3) As a nation, we have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching tv, listening to iPods, playing video games.
Tilson illustrates this with two photos-- one showing neat, well-dressed Chinese youngsters politely lined up, and the other an unruly crowd of shirtless frat boys. Kids these days! He then shows some data to support his last point. Points 1 and 2 get no supporting evidence at all right now.
Some critical gaps
Gap #1. We don't send enough students to college, and too few of those finish. No idea why that completion rate is low. It would be interesting to see the numbers on students who drop out of college because they can't afford to finish it.
Gap #2. The achievement gap, by race and poverty. Starting in kindergarten and through college (this is where he shows some numbers about college affordability). But the bottom line here is that "the color of your skin and your zip code are almost entirely determinative of the quality of public education this nation provides. This is deeply, profoundly wrong." I have no beef with Tilson on this point.
The solutions
Here's where it just gets very weird, random, and profoundly intellectually sloppy.
There are too many systems "dominated by the Three Pillars of Mediocrity." Quick-- before you scroll down, can you think of three policies that make it hard to improve poor schools. Did you guess systemic underfunding, lack of support, or absence of fundamental infrastructure and resources? Incorrect. It's those damn teachers. They have tenure, a pay scale, and seniority.
Tilson says if you want to fix any broken system (because how different could schools be from any other system), you take these four steps:
1) Adopt the right strategy and tactics
2) Hire and train great leaders and then empower them
3) Measure results
4) Hold people accountable
A patronizing patrician approach is embedded here, too. Note that there is no step for consulting with the people who are already in the system. Our assumption, once again, is that some people are better than others, and you need to put those who are better in charge.
Tilson holds up Florida as an example of this type of system overhaul. And it's here that we hit a point that the Nation article really did get wrong. They accused Tilson of not wanting to spend any money on schools, but in slide #90, he makes it clear that spending more money is not a solution-- unless the money is tied to reforms. It's the fetal form of the reformster adage "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and test publishers is awesome."
Of course, you might not be able to reform the system, in which case you need to replace it, and here come a slew of slides about the miraculous miracle that is New Orleans, featuring the usual selective slices of data (incidentally, we also get the prediction that by 2016 there will be almost no failing schools in NOLA. So that's a win).
And now for a word...
Next up-- an advertisement for charters, especially the KIPP system for which Tilson sits on the board.
Those damn teachers
Did you know that teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (aka test scores)? Well, here come a bunch of pull quotes from the infamous (and unsupportable) Chetty study to tell you so. And we'll throw in some Eric Hanushek baloney about firing our way to excellence as well.
Tilson boils the teacher problem down to two factors-- teacher quality has been declining for decades, and talent is unfairly distributed.
So here we are back at one of the fundamental assumptions of the DFER/Duncan worldview-- some people are just better than others, and that betterness reveals itself in All the Right Places. They will be better at school, they will get better jobs, they will do better on standardized tests, and ultimately they will make more money. So when we look for these markers, we aren't really measuring anything in particular-- we're just looking for the markers of success that signal one of the Chosen Few (and yes-- astute readers will note that modern corporate meritocrats have a great deal in common with our Puritan forebears).
So-- we "know" that we aren't getting the Right People into teaching because they don't mostly graduate at the top of their class or get the best SAT scores. Meanwhile, the schools of education lack accountability-- and in the meritocratic view of the world, accountability is what we need in order to make the Lesser Humans behave properly.
Implicit in this world view is that being a Better or a Lesser is fairly hard to change. It's wired in, like good breeding. That's why Lessers need "accountability," because only carrots and sticks (and mostly sticks) will get them to overcome their fundamental Lesser nature. This is also the rationale behind testing for students (no fourth grade for you until you pass this reading test, kid)-- only by strong actions can we force them to overcome their inherently lesser natures.
In the meantime, we need to sort out the Right Sort of People from the Wrong Sort of People in teaching and fire our way to excellence (by removing the Wrong Sort of People). This is why DFER types love Teach for America-- it selects teachers by using the markers of true excellence (wealth, good grades, the Right Schools) so that The Right Sort of People will be put in the classroom. TFA even systematically addresses one of the inherent contradictions of the DFER view-- if you really are the Right Kind of Person, you'll be doing something more successful and wealth-making than merely being a teacher, so it's okay if you only do it for a while.
Unfair distribution is more of the same. We know that the Bad Teachers are ending up in poor schools because none of the markers of Being Better are there. No high tests scores, degrees from the Right Sort of School.
And behind it all-- the damn unions, which are composed of the Wrong Sort of Person and try to protect the Wrong Sort of Person from having to be accountable to their Betters.
Goofus and Gallant
Tilson finishes with some action items, some things that you should or should not do.
You should join DFER. Ask questions of the ignorant, gutless politicians (clearly the Wrong Sort of People who have been elected by the Wrong Sort of People-- stupid democracy, anyway).
Don't allow reform opponents to define the debate (I have to tell you-- viewing myself through Tilson's eyes, I am a freaking giant). Also, don't think advocacy is cheap.
And stay positive, and don't get lost in fantasy:
It's nice to fantasize about an 18-day, Egypt-style revolution that throws out the old order, that's not going to happen. The system is much too big, too entrenched, and too decentralized to fix quickly.
Is it really nice to fantasize about public education being completely removed in a violent revolution? Interesting thought, that.
Here's one thing that is not on Tilson's to-do list-- empower the people who actually live in poor and minority neighborhoods by getting systemic barriers out of their way so that they can better have a voice in their own governance and local education. In fact, even listening to those voices is not on the list.
Tilson and the Worst Kind of Democrat Caricature
So what's the real problem? The Wrong Sort of People are in charge, and Kids These Days have turned into miserable slackers. Poor and minority students are being abandoned in the mess that comes from letting The Wrong Sort of People be in charge. We need to put the Right Sort of People in charge through any means possible, so that they can take care of the Lesser Folks who need their largesse and assistance. Having things like a Race to the Top make sense because we can then separate out the Right Kind of People from the Wrong Kind of People. The Betters will raise expectations, hold peoples' feet to the fire, and get a warm glow of satisfaction from knowing that they made life better for people who were, of course, incapable of making life better for themselves. And in doing so, they will be acting as a force for good and justice and truth in the universe (and they will be richly rewarded because virtue always leads to great rewards).
Yes, this all dovetails beautifully with the goals and aims of profiteers, the folks who just want a chance to crack open the golden egg of education and feed on the giant omelet of money that can be made from it. But when you separate the DFER-style agenda from the profiteering, you can see the kind of paternalistic elitist we-know-better-than-you cartoon Democrat that Tea Partiers and other hard-right folks deeply hate.
This is what you get when you cross real needs, real issues and real concerns (like the need to provide better schooling to poor and minority students in this country) with a particular wacky worldview that is more old-world aristocratic than American. But I'll remind you that Tilson's slides are from 2009, and they contain pretty much every single talking point we've heard from the current administration since Race to the Top was launched. While I may have Whitney Tilson outnumbered and outgunned, I'm just a high school English teacher with a blog and he's an investment whiz with the ear of world leaders. I'm pretty sure I don't represent a very big threat to him, but without ever having met me or knowing who I am, he's ready to kick my ass.
The Tilson Story
Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.
Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.
He recently surfaced in an article by The Nation about how the billionaire boys club is remaking the New York City Schools in their own chartery profit-generating image. Tilson, in his weekly-ish ed reform newsletter, dismissed the article as "a silly hatchet job" and told his own version of how a bunch of Very Rich White Guys have commandeered the biggest apple of them all.
The true story here is very simple and the opposite of sinister – it’s inspiring to me: a number of very successful New Yorkers – believing in the power of education and that every kid deserves a fair shot at the American dream, and disgusted with an educational system that does just the opposite, in which the color of your skin and your zip code pretty much determine the quality of public school a kid gets, an unjust reality that goes on, year in and year out, not because the system is broken, but because it operates just the way it’s supposed to, to serve the economic interests of the adults in the system and the political interests of the gutless weasel politicians who kowtow to them – decided to donate millions of dollars, despite having absolutely nothing to gain personally, to create a counter-weight to the status quo, in which the unions historically said “Jump!” and the governor and legislature would respond, “How high?!”
Tilson likes to characterize himself as a scrappy underdog.
I’m very proud to say that we’ve been enormously successful. Despite being outmanned, outspent, and outgunned 100:1, a small group of incredible people – in part the funders, but more importantly the people on the ground – have turned the tables on the entrenched powers, in part by, yes, finding and strongly supporting a courageous ally in Gov. Cuomo.
I am not sure in which alternate reality these billionaires have been outspent or outgunned, but it is a standard part of the reformster narrative that they are heroic fighters, fearlessly taking on entrenched and powerful forces who are bent on imprisoning students everywhere in dark dungeons of desperation and failure.
It's not about the greed
I have long believed that those who explain reformster motivation by resorting to greed are likely wrong. From techno-system guys like Gates to value investors like Tilson, there's something else working. Here's a quote from that same Tilson letter
We are winning this titanic struggle (albeit in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back way), not because we’re all-powerful billionaires, but because, to quote MLK, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Or this quote from Sir Michael Barber, head of Pearson, commenting on the challenge of remaking education into a global digitized system:
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
Or the Lyndsay Layton interview with Bill Gates, in which Gates is truly thrown by the mere suggestion that he's in this for the bucks.
These are all people who believe they are serving a higher moral purpose, that they personally understand how the world should be reshaped in a way that other people simply don't. And they have an obligation to circumvent democratic institutions, traditional systems and the disagreeing humans who stand in their way because they know better.
They are armed with vast fortunes and wide-ranging connections, and just like the robber barons before them, they sense that these powers are not the result of random good fortune, but the validation and proof that they really are better than other people, that they have some better, wiser grasp of the world and how it does, and should, work. They do not necessarily revel in the power; in fact, they often use the language of obligation-- it's a thing they have to do. It's, you know, a burden that this rich white guys must pick up.
Will their reforms bring them more money and power? Sure. But that's not the goal-- it's just the proof that they were right. After all, if they weren't smart and strong and better than the average person, they wouldn't be so rich and powerful.
Now, does greed help drive the ed reform engines? Certainly. But that's because once these super-powered elite form their vision of how to remake the world, there is a ton of money to be made by helping them do it, and so a whole swarm of people interested in that money travel in their wake. Philosophically, it really does mirror the symbiosis of 19th century European colonialism. Nobody could sell conquering Africa as baldfaced conquest and exploitation-- but once that colonization was sold as a way to give lesser people the benefits of superior European culture, knowledge, worldview, pants, and religion, the profiteers could adopt the proper language and spread over the continent like locusts.
In the "meritocratic" universe, there are The Right Sort of People and The Wrong Sort of People. The Betters are successful and wise, and this is evident in their success and wealth and innate superior character. They should run things. The Wrong Sort of People need accountability to keep them in line, to guide them to do the correct thing (you will note that we never call for accountability for the Betters-- they don't need it, and their success proves they don't need it).
So what's does Tilson really think?
Tilson's education views seem to have coalesced fairly early in the current ed reform cycle; in 2009 he gave a presentation in DC that was his attempt to create An Inconvenient Truth for the education biz. "A Right Denied" exists as a website, a set of power point slides, and a documentary. I worked my way through the slide show, which I think is an excellent summary (although, at 292 slides, not a very brief one) of the DFER corporate Democrat point of view.
The problem
Tilson starts by documenting the correlation between education and employment, earnings, and long-term health. I don't think many people dispute the correlation-- the argument is about what it means. The DFER/Duncan position is that education is the cause of everything else. I think it's far more likely that lower educational results come from the same place as the other issues-- poverty.
Tilson also notes that scores on some tests have stagnated, and there's lots to argue about there (can you really compare SAT results when the population taking the test has been steadily changing as we try to convince every student that she must go to college), as well as the question of what standardized tests actually measure. But it is a critical element of the DFER view that schools must be accountable, by which they mean the Help must show their Betters what they are up to.
Tilson also wants us to know that we've been spending more and more on education (he does not address the question of "on what," and consider issues such as increased mandates for more special ed teachers in schools). That's okay-- his basic point is clear. We've been spending tons of money on education and not getting bang for our buck.
Tilson knows why-- three reasons:
1) Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades.
2) Our school systems have become more dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and unaccountable.
3) As a nation, we have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching tv, listening to iPods, playing video games.
Tilson illustrates this with two photos-- one showing neat, well-dressed Chinese youngsters politely lined up, and the other an unruly crowd of shirtless frat boys. Kids these days! He then shows some data to support his last point. Points 1 and 2 get no supporting evidence at all right now.
Some critical gaps
Gap #1. We don't send enough students to college, and too few of those finish. No idea why that completion rate is low. It would be interesting to see the numbers on students who drop out of college because they can't afford to finish it.
Gap #2. The achievement gap, by race and poverty. Starting in kindergarten and through college (this is where he shows some numbers about college affordability). But the bottom line here is that "the color of your skin and your zip code are almost entirely determinative of the quality of public education this nation provides. This is deeply, profoundly wrong." I have no beef with Tilson on this point.
The solutions
Here's where it just gets very weird, random, and profoundly intellectually sloppy.
There are too many systems "dominated by the Three Pillars of Mediocrity." Quick-- before you scroll down, can you think of three policies that make it hard to improve poor schools. Did you guess systemic underfunding, lack of support, or absence of fundamental infrastructure and resources? Incorrect. It's those damn teachers. They have tenure, a pay scale, and seniority.
Tilson says if you want to fix any broken system (because how different could schools be from any other system), you take these four steps:
1) Adopt the right strategy and tactics
2) Hire and train great leaders and then empower them
3) Measure results
4) Hold people accountable
A patronizing patrician approach is embedded here, too. Note that there is no step for consulting with the people who are already in the system. Our assumption, once again, is that some people are better than others, and you need to put those who are better in charge.
Tilson holds up Florida as an example of this type of system overhaul. And it's here that we hit a point that the Nation article really did get wrong. They accused Tilson of not wanting to spend any money on schools, but in slide #90, he makes it clear that spending more money is not a solution-- unless the money is tied to reforms. It's the fetal form of the reformster adage "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and test publishers is awesome."
Of course, you might not be able to reform the system, in which case you need to replace it, and here come a slew of slides about the miraculous miracle that is New Orleans, featuring the usual selective slices of data (incidentally, we also get the prediction that by 2016 there will be almost no failing schools in NOLA. So that's a win).
And now for a word...
Next up-- an advertisement for charters, especially the KIPP system for which Tilson sits on the board.
Those damn teachers
Did you know that teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (aka test scores)? Well, here come a bunch of pull quotes from the infamous (and unsupportable) Chetty study to tell you so. And we'll throw in some Eric Hanushek baloney about firing our way to excellence as well.
Tilson boils the teacher problem down to two factors-- teacher quality has been declining for decades, and talent is unfairly distributed.
So here we are back at one of the fundamental assumptions of the DFER/Duncan worldview-- some people are just better than others, and that betterness reveals itself in All the Right Places. They will be better at school, they will get better jobs, they will do better on standardized tests, and ultimately they will make more money. So when we look for these markers, we aren't really measuring anything in particular-- we're just looking for the markers of success that signal one of the Chosen Few (and yes-- astute readers will note that modern corporate meritocrats have a great deal in common with our Puritan forebears).
So-- we "know" that we aren't getting the Right People into teaching because they don't mostly graduate at the top of their class or get the best SAT scores. Meanwhile, the schools of education lack accountability-- and in the meritocratic view of the world, accountability is what we need in order to make the Lesser Humans behave properly.
Implicit in this world view is that being a Better or a Lesser is fairly hard to change. It's wired in, like good breeding. That's why Lessers need "accountability," because only carrots and sticks (and mostly sticks) will get them to overcome their fundamental Lesser nature. This is also the rationale behind testing for students (no fourth grade for you until you pass this reading test, kid)-- only by strong actions can we force them to overcome their inherently lesser natures.
In the meantime, we need to sort out the Right Sort of People from the Wrong Sort of People in teaching and fire our way to excellence (by removing the Wrong Sort of People). This is why DFER types love Teach for America-- it selects teachers by using the markers of true excellence (wealth, good grades, the Right Schools) so that The Right Sort of People will be put in the classroom. TFA even systematically addresses one of the inherent contradictions of the DFER view-- if you really are the Right Kind of Person, you'll be doing something more successful and wealth-making than merely being a teacher, so it's okay if you only do it for a while.
Unfair distribution is more of the same. We know that the Bad Teachers are ending up in poor schools because none of the markers of Being Better are there. No high tests scores, degrees from the Right Sort of School.
And behind it all-- the damn unions, which are composed of the Wrong Sort of Person and try to protect the Wrong Sort of Person from having to be accountable to their Betters.
Goofus and Gallant
Tilson finishes with some action items, some things that you should or should not do.
You should join DFER. Ask questions of the ignorant, gutless politicians (clearly the Wrong Sort of People who have been elected by the Wrong Sort of People-- stupid democracy, anyway).
Don't allow reform opponents to define the debate (I have to tell you-- viewing myself through Tilson's eyes, I am a freaking giant). Also, don't think advocacy is cheap.
And stay positive, and don't get lost in fantasy:
It's nice to fantasize about an 18-day, Egypt-style revolution that throws out the old order, that's not going to happen. The system is much too big, too entrenched, and too decentralized to fix quickly.
Is it really nice to fantasize about public education being completely removed in a violent revolution? Interesting thought, that.
Here's one thing that is not on Tilson's to-do list-- empower the people who actually live in poor and minority neighborhoods by getting systemic barriers out of their way so that they can better have a voice in their own governance and local education. In fact, even listening to those voices is not on the list.
Tilson and the Worst Kind of Democrat Caricature
So what's the real problem? The Wrong Sort of People are in charge, and Kids These Days have turned into miserable slackers. Poor and minority students are being abandoned in the mess that comes from letting The Wrong Sort of People be in charge. We need to put the Right Sort of People in charge through any means possible, so that they can take care of the Lesser Folks who need their largesse and assistance. Having things like a Race to the Top make sense because we can then separate out the Right Kind of People from the Wrong Kind of People. The Betters will raise expectations, hold peoples' feet to the fire, and get a warm glow of satisfaction from knowing that they made life better for people who were, of course, incapable of making life better for themselves. And in doing so, they will be acting as a force for good and justice and truth in the universe (and they will be richly rewarded because virtue always leads to great rewards).
Yes, this all dovetails beautifully with the goals and aims of profiteers, the folks who just want a chance to crack open the golden egg of education and feed on the giant omelet of money that can be made from it. But when you separate the DFER-style agenda from the profiteering, you can see the kind of paternalistic elitist we-know-better-than-you cartoon Democrat that Tea Partiers and other hard-right folks deeply hate.
This is what you get when you cross real needs, real issues and real concerns (like the need to provide better schooling to poor and minority students in this country) with a particular wacky worldview that is more old-world aristocratic than American. But I'll remind you that Tilson's slides are from 2009, and they contain pretty much every single talking point we've heard from the current administration since Race to the Top was launched. While I may have Whitney Tilson outnumbered and outgunned, I'm just a high school English teacher with a blog and he's an investment whiz with the ear of world leaders. I'm pretty sure I don't represent a very big threat to him, but without ever having met me or knowing who I am, he's ready to kick my ass.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
EdReports: Almost All Publishers Fail Common Core Math
EdReports.org is a reformster non-profit set up to be the Consumer Reports of educational materials in the Age of Common Core. I wrote about them back in August of 2014, when they first hit the collective radar, and back then it looked easy to see where this was headed-- a well-connected group funded and backed by the Usual Suspects would presumably provide great "impartial" marketing cover for the major publishers.
Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.
You can get the quick view in this handy chart.
EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.
Holt McDougal. Fail.
Math in Focus. Fail.
Saxon. Fail.
And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.
The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.
EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.
The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.
Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.
This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.
Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."
So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.
Well, fast forward to now, and watch me eat my words. EdReports has stood up proud and tall and kicked the major edupublishers right where it hurts.
You can get the quick view in this handy chart.
EdReports looked at all the major publishers of math series. They checked for alignment with the Common Core and only one publisher met expectations across the board. Two partially met expectations, and McGraw-Hill was a winner in grades 4-5. All the rest failed their Common Core alignment test.
Holt McDougal. Fail.
Math in Focus. Fail.
Saxon. Fail.
And yes, Pearson's series only partially didn't fail.
The only series deemed to successfully align with Common Core was Eureka Math. From K-8, they are the only series that EdReports says will meet the requirements of Common Core.
EdReports also looked at Focus and Coherence, and again, many of the major players failed. Yes, including Pearson.
The executive director of EdReports is Eric Hirsch, and if you're guessing he's taking a few heated calls lately, you'd appear to be correct. Liana Heitin is covering this story in the latest print version of Education Week under the headline "Backlash Brews Over Critical Review of Math Materials," and that backlash appears to be from a whole bunch of grumpy parents who are upset that their pride and joy, their bouncing baby math books, are being stuck in the Remedial Group.
Methodology has been questioned and will be debated at length, but the rundown at the EdReports suggests at the very least that this is not a quick, ugly glance. At the very least, I'm figuring that if EdReports knew they were going to call out Pearson et al, they would make sure they'd done their homework.
This is kind of extraordinary because, again, this is not an anti-reform outfit. They were bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, as well as Hewlett and Hemsley money, and director Hirsch comes from the New Teacher Center and the Center for Teacher Quality. I think less of myself for experiencing a little wiggle of happiness when I see reformsters devouring each other; I'm going to start working on that tomorrow.
Diane Briars, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics thinks EdReports blew it. But Morgan Polikoff of USC and William Schmidt at Michigan State agree, according to Heitin, that "claims of common-core alignment are generally unfounded."
So if you're using Eureka Math, congratulations. If you own stock in Eureka Math, double congratulations. Everybody else-- it turns out you're not really doing the core after all. One more example of how the core standards are a botch as standards from top to bottom. And now they may stop working as even a passable marketing strategy.
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