The bipartisan proposal from the Senate Education Committee is settled and ready to see the light of day. There's some good news for public education and some bad news for the Obama administration.
Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and
Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) expressed a big ole bi-partisan hug of support for this baby, un-euphoniously entitled The Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 (just once I would like to send a poet to DC). Let's look under the hood (you can find a handy summary of the bill here).
The (Partial) Defanging of Testing
Tests are still mandated entirely too often (every grade 3-8 and once in high school), but the bill leaves it to the states to decide what to do with the "data" that tests generate. States must use them in their accountability system, somehow, but it's up to the state to decide how. States will also be given flexibility "to pilot innovative assessment systems." The dream of a single national test, which was already for all intents and purposes dead-- that dream now has a fork in it.
States must keep parents informed and disaggregate data so that subgroups are not lost, so critics who are afraid that nobody would know that poor urban schools are in trouble without test results can now relax. But states must design their own system for intervening in failing schools, and as long as those systems fall within federal parameters, the states can do as they please. In fact, the feds are forbidden to interfere in the whole process. "The federal government is prohibited from determining or approving state standards."
Suck It, Arne
That "Hands off, feds" attitude runs throughout the bill. State plans are acceptable unless proven naught by the USED, and the feds only have 90 days to do so. The Secretary must approve a state plan within the 90 days unless the department "can present substantial evidence that clearly demonstrates that such State plan does not meet the bill's requirements." To whom will such evidence be presented? A peer review board composed of "experts and practitioners with school-level and classroom experience."
Yes, unlike the waiver system that requires state bureaucrats to bow and scrape for Duncan's official okey-dokey, now the secretary must go before actual educators and prove to their satisfaction that a state plan is not acceptable. And if they say it's not, the state still gets to appeal and resubmit. This strikes me a huge shift of the balance of power.
Also, "the bill affirms that states decide what academic standards they will adopt, without interference from Washington." The feds can't mandate a set of standards, and they can't "incentivize" one, either. "States will be free to decide what academic standards they will maintain in their states."
And! The bill does away with any federal requirement for states to develop and implement a teacher evaluation system. It even axes the definition of a highly qualified teacher.
State May Not Slack
The Title IV section appears to say, in brief, that this federal hands-offiness is not license for states to do a half-assed job providing education to their citizens.
Charter Chain Christmas
While the ECAA does include some language encouraging strong charter laws and strong charter transparency and strong charter community connection, the cheers in charter headquarters have to be for the strong and unequivocal endorsement of charters as part of the education landscape. It puts three charter grant programs into law.
Two endorse the launching of charters, with particular attention to "replicating" the successes of "high-quality" charter schools, which of course means that charter chains are hearing the merry ka-ching-a-ling-a-ling of Christmas morning.
The third grant program is also awesome if you are a charter profiteer-- the feds would like a grant program to help pay for the buildings that charters squat in. No word on whether Senators Alexander and Murray considered a bill to cut up charter operators food for them or hire federal agents to wipe the charter CEO's chin when he's drooling with glee.
Oh, Also, Bite Me, Arne
Down among the less-exciting Titles we find support for rural schools (basically releasing them from spending requirements that don't make sense in rural schools). Under Title IX we have additional assurance that states use federal money to help shore up state and local spending.
Also under Title IX, this:
This bill prohibits the Secretary from mandating additional requirements for states or school districts seeking waivers from federal law. The bill also limits the Secretary’s authority to disapprove a waiver request.
And For the Children
An extra point-- federal money may be used for early childhood education. So any and all of the above can be applied to Early Childhood education. So not the requirement for Pre-K that some folks were hoping for, but full permission to turn the federal money hose on the little ones.
So, What Do We Think?
All in all, this is a more pointed rebuke of the Obama administration's ed farfegnugen than I might have expected, but while it still keeps those stupid, worthless Big Standardized Tests enshrined, it frees states to make their own peace with them (and that testing requirement might reduce the possibility that the test manufacturers would loose their lobbying dogs to oppose the bill-- they can rest happy now because their payday is intact). Now, that will mean different things in different states-- I'm pretty sure Andrew Cuomo will be a giant ass to education whether the feds are pushing him to or not.
And while Common Core is all but dead, this certainly frees everyone up to slap it around some more. This bill wouldn't end the ongoing education debate, but it would break it up into fifty little arguments and if that doesn't do anything more than divide up the reformsters money and forces, that's a good thing.
Of course, we still have the onslaught of amendments and the bill from the House and the President's desk to get past. And the enshrinement of the rapacious charter school industry is not good news. So this is by no means perfect.
But most of all, a new ESEA completely chops the back-door lawmaking of USED waivers off at the knees. If Congress can actually pull this off, it will be a gamechanger. There's much to hate about the new game, but there are some pieces of hope as well. Let's just see what happens next.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Charter Laboratory Is Failing
President Obama has called charter schools "incubators of innovation" and "laboratories of innovation," and he has done so for several years, despite the fact that, so far, the laboratories have yielded nothing.
One of the standard justifications for the modern charter movement is that these laboratories of innovation will develop new techniques and programs that will then be transported out to public schools. Each charter school will be Patient Zero in a spreading viral infection of educational excellence.
Yet, after years-- no viral infection. No bouncing baby miracle cure from the incubator. The laboratory has shown us nothing.
Here's my challenge for charter fans-- name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough, that started at a charter school and has since spread throughout the country to all sorts of public schools.
After all these years of getting everything they wanted, modern charter schools have nothing to teach the public schools of the US.
Both this profile from the New York Times and a teacher interview with Diane Ravitch show that the widely-lauded Success Academy model of New York is based on the emotional brutalization of children and tunnel-vision focus on The Test. This is justified by an ugly lie-- that if poor kids can get the same kind of test scores as rich kids, the doors will open to the same kind of success.
Put all that together with a mission to weed out those students who just can't cut it the SA way, and you have a model that cannot, and should not, be exported to public schools. Success Academy demonstrates that charters don't necessarily need to cream for the best and the brightest, but just for the students who can withstand their particular narrow techniques.
But then, most modern charters are fundamentally incompatible with the core mission of public schools, which is to teach every single child. Examination of charters show over and over and over again that they have developed techniques which work-- as long as they get to choose which students to apply them to. New Jersey has been rather fully examined in this light, and the lesson of New Jersey charters is clear-- if you get to pick and choose the students you teach, you can get better results.
This is the equivalent of a laboratory that announces, "We can show you a drug that produces fabulous hair growth, as long as you don't make us demonstrate it on any bald guys."
Modern charters have tried to shift the conversation, to back away from the "laboratory" narrative. Nowadays, they just like to talk about how they have been successful. These "successes" are frequently debatable and often minute, but they all lack one key ingredient for legitimate laboratory work-- replication by independent researchers.
Replication is the backbone of science. Legit scientists do not declare, "This machine will show you the power of cold fusion, but only when I'm in the room with it." The proof is in replicating results by other researchers whose fame and income does not depend on making sure the cold fusion reactor succeeds.
If your charter has really discovered the Secret of Success, here's what comes next. You hand over your policies and procedures manual, your teaching materials, your super-duper training techniques to some public school to use with their already-there student body. If they get the excellent results, results that exceed the kind of results they've been getting previously, results measured by their own measures of success, then you may be on to something.
But if you only ever get results in your own lab with your own researchers working on your own selected subjects measured with your own instruments, you have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Andy Smarick recently charted up some charter results, looking at how they relate to CREDO and NACSA ratings. He did not make any wild or crazy claims for what he found, but he did note and chart correlations. The more CREDO likes a city (it offers more opportunities for chartering), the higher its charter testing results. The more NACSA thinks charters are regulated in a city, the lower the testing results. There are many possible explanations, but here are two that occur to me: the more charters you let open, the more they can set the rules and collect the students that they want, and the more that regulations force charters to play by the same rules as public schools, the more their results look just like public school results.
Maybe, as Mike Petrilli suggested, it's time to stop talking about charters as laboratories and stop pretending that they're discovering anything other than "If you get to pick which students you're going to teach, you can get stuff done" (which as discoveries go is on the order of discovering that water is wet). There may well be an argument to make about charters as a means of providing special salvation for one or two special starfish. But if that's the argument we're going to have, let's just drop the whole pretense that charters are discovering anything new or creating new educational methods that will benefit all schools, and start talking about the real issue-- the establishment of a two-tier schools system to separate the worthy from the rabble.
One of the standard justifications for the modern charter movement is that these laboratories of innovation will develop new techniques and programs that will then be transported out to public schools. Each charter school will be Patient Zero in a spreading viral infection of educational excellence.
Yet, after years-- no viral infection. No bouncing baby miracle cure from the incubator. The laboratory has shown us nothing.
Here's my challenge for charter fans-- name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough, that started at a charter school and has since spread throughout the country to all sorts of public schools.
After all these years of getting everything they wanted, modern charter schools have nothing to teach the public schools of the US.
Both this profile from the New York Times and a teacher interview with Diane Ravitch show that the widely-lauded Success Academy model of New York is based on the emotional brutalization of children and tunnel-vision focus on The Test. This is justified by an ugly lie-- that if poor kids can get the same kind of test scores as rich kids, the doors will open to the same kind of success.
Put all that together with a mission to weed out those students who just can't cut it the SA way, and you have a model that cannot, and should not, be exported to public schools. Success Academy demonstrates that charters don't necessarily need to cream for the best and the brightest, but just for the students who can withstand their particular narrow techniques.
But then, most modern charters are fundamentally incompatible with the core mission of public schools, which is to teach every single child. Examination of charters show over and over and over again that they have developed techniques which work-- as long as they get to choose which students to apply them to. New Jersey has been rather fully examined in this light, and the lesson of New Jersey charters is clear-- if you get to pick and choose the students you teach, you can get better results.
This is the equivalent of a laboratory that announces, "We can show you a drug that produces fabulous hair growth, as long as you don't make us demonstrate it on any bald guys."
Modern charters have tried to shift the conversation, to back away from the "laboratory" narrative. Nowadays, they just like to talk about how they have been successful. These "successes" are frequently debatable and often minute, but they all lack one key ingredient for legitimate laboratory work-- replication by independent researchers.
Replication is the backbone of science. Legit scientists do not declare, "This machine will show you the power of cold fusion, but only when I'm in the room with it." The proof is in replicating results by other researchers whose fame and income does not depend on making sure the cold fusion reactor succeeds.
If your charter has really discovered the Secret of Success, here's what comes next. You hand over your policies and procedures manual, your teaching materials, your super-duper training techniques to some public school to use with their already-there student body. If they get the excellent results, results that exceed the kind of results they've been getting previously, results measured by their own measures of success, then you may be on to something.
But if you only ever get results in your own lab with your own researchers working on your own selected subjects measured with your own instruments, you have nothing to teach the rest of us.
Andy Smarick recently charted up some charter results, looking at how they relate to CREDO and NACSA ratings. He did not make any wild or crazy claims for what he found, but he did note and chart correlations. The more CREDO likes a city (it offers more opportunities for chartering), the higher its charter testing results. The more NACSA thinks charters are regulated in a city, the lower the testing results. There are many possible explanations, but here are two that occur to me: the more charters you let open, the more they can set the rules and collect the students that they want, and the more that regulations force charters to play by the same rules as public schools, the more their results look just like public school results.
Maybe, as Mike Petrilli suggested, it's time to stop talking about charters as laboratories and stop pretending that they're discovering anything other than "If you get to pick which students you're going to teach, you can get stuff done" (which as discoveries go is on the order of discovering that water is wet). There may well be an argument to make about charters as a means of providing special salvation for one or two special starfish. But if that's the argument we're going to have, let's just drop the whole pretense that charters are discovering anything new or creating new educational methods that will benefit all schools, and start talking about the real issue-- the establishment of a two-tier schools system to separate the worthy from the rabble.
Monday, April 6, 2015
The School Funding Gap Is Worse
Over at the Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay has been crunching school funding numbers, and while her news is not really news for anyone who's been paying attention, it now comes with numbers and charts and color-coded maps.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor schools has been growing in at least thirty states. In 2001-2002, rich schools were getting 10.8% more state and local resources than poor schools. A decade later that gap was 15.6%, an increase of about 44%.
Barshay has made some handy interactive maps to break this down by states. The prize-winning Very Worst States for school funding gaps in 2011-2012 include Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Barshay says that once you add federal dollars, the gaps almost disappear. I have some doubts about that (if it's true in PA, it's true in some way that's largely invisible to people on the ground), but she also indicates that this is a problem, and she quotes an anonymous USED source:
“Federal dollars were never intended to act as an equalizer for an unfair playing field set by state and local dollars,” said a U.S. Department of Education official, who said she was required to speak anonymously. “They are explicitly intended to supplement.”
As explained by education historian Diane Ravitch:
ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty.
But since ESEA became No Child Left Behind, it has become the crowbar used by the feds to force state mouths open so they will take their medicine, whatever medicine currently believe that states must take. This is not an unusual trajectory for federal money-- first it's given to address a problem, but sooner or later the feds want to know if they're getting bang for their buck, which invariably leads to federal kibbitzing about how said bang can be best achieved. Then once the feds have put themselves in charge of bang measurement and enforcement, lobbyists and corporations are drawn like moths to the flame, offering their expertise and assistance in developing bangological measures and programs and other Wise Methods to spend all those sweet, sweet bang-directed bucks. And that's about where we are now.
But I digress.
Barshay crunches numbers a few different ways, with maps to boot. One shows the 2001-2002 gaps. There's one that shows the change in spending gaps over the decade, and some states have actually gotten better-- there are such places. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Missouri, look terrible every time.
She acknowledges that computing cost-per-pupil is a fuzzy science at best and that some states have changed their accounting methods. But while the specifics of her compiled numbers may be arguable, the overall trend is not. She also points out that a low spending gap for schools can be achieved by just giving all schools lousy funding (she's looking at you, California). Nor does she think (it is an opinion piece) that there's any reason for poor schools to play catch-up with Rich Kid Academy and its heated tennis courts and cappucino service.
She finishes with an unexpected thought-- "It kind of makes you wish for a federal takeover of the educational financing system." Well, no, it doesn't (see above buck/bang discussion). But it does provide more context for the ongoing discussions of funding tied up in ESEA rewrite negotiations.
Since 2000, the gap between rich and poor schools has been growing in at least thirty states. In 2001-2002, rich schools were getting 10.8% more state and local resources than poor schools. A decade later that gap was 15.6%, an increase of about 44%.
Barshay has made some handy interactive maps to break this down by states. The prize-winning Very Worst States for school funding gaps in 2011-2012 include Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Barshay says that once you add federal dollars, the gaps almost disappear. I have some doubts about that (if it's true in PA, it's true in some way that's largely invisible to people on the ground), but she also indicates that this is a problem, and she quotes an anonymous USED source:
“Federal dollars were never intended to act as an equalizer for an unfair playing field set by state and local dollars,” said a U.S. Department of Education official, who said she was required to speak anonymously. “They are explicitly intended to supplement.”
As explained by education historian Diane Ravitch:
ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty.
But since ESEA became No Child Left Behind, it has become the crowbar used by the feds to force state mouths open so they will take their medicine, whatever medicine currently believe that states must take. This is not an unusual trajectory for federal money-- first it's given to address a problem, but sooner or later the feds want to know if they're getting bang for their buck, which invariably leads to federal kibbitzing about how said bang can be best achieved. Then once the feds have put themselves in charge of bang measurement and enforcement, lobbyists and corporations are drawn like moths to the flame, offering their expertise and assistance in developing bangological measures and programs and other Wise Methods to spend all those sweet, sweet bang-directed bucks. And that's about where we are now.
But I digress.
Barshay crunches numbers a few different ways, with maps to boot. One shows the 2001-2002 gaps. There's one that shows the change in spending gaps over the decade, and some states have actually gotten better-- there are such places. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Missouri, look terrible every time.
She acknowledges that computing cost-per-pupil is a fuzzy science at best and that some states have changed their accounting methods. But while the specifics of her compiled numbers may be arguable, the overall trend is not. She also points out that a low spending gap for schools can be achieved by just giving all schools lousy funding (she's looking at you, California). Nor does she think (it is an opinion piece) that there's any reason for poor schools to play catch-up with Rich Kid Academy and its heated tennis courts and cappucino service.
She finishes with an unexpected thought-- "It kind of makes you wish for a federal takeover of the educational financing system." Well, no, it doesn't (see above buck/bang discussion). But it does provide more context for the ongoing discussions of funding tied up in ESEA rewrite negotiations.
Lab Rat High and Public Risk
The irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has a sharp, tough piece this morning about profiteer Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, that is one more reminder of why schools are not businesses.
Steve Barr has a good story (you can read the approved version on a Wikipedia page that is waiting to be edited by someone who doesn't already love Steve Barr). Single mom, working class background, former teamster, career as political operative, dabbling in TV production. Barr's younger brother did not rise up, but instead struggled with getting his act together before dying in a motorcycle accident. Barr asked himself why his brother followed a different trajectory than he did, and concluded "schools," and so took the insurance money from his brother's death to help launch Green Dot.
Bottom line: Barr is not a typical riches to riches success story, but he is typical of the business-politics approach to life-building, and therefor a good example of why that approach is ill-suited to education.
Schneider takes Barr to task for his dalliance with and abandonment of John McDonogh High School is New Orleans. Barr thought he'd give a long-distance takeover of that school a try in 2012, and he thought he'd just dump the whole project in 2014. Not his kids, not his community, and, not his problem. As Schneider puts it, "Just a long-distance business deal that did not pan out."
And that's the thing. If this were an entrepreneur trying a tentative launch of a new left-handed widget production facility, that would be fine. Taking chances, experimenting, trying something even when you know going in that it might not pan out-- that's a perfectly legitimate way to do business. If entrepreneurs never took a flier on new ventures, we would be far poorer for it.
That is what business people, investors, entrepreneurs do-- they take risks. If they win, then society is often better off and the investors reap the rewards of shouldering the risk. If they lose, then they're out some money and life goes on. They have risked investor money, maybe reputation, and the lives of those who worked on the enterprise.
None of this is wrong or bad. It's how business ventures work. But it should not, can not be how schools work.
For one thing, the reformster movement is another part of a larger trend-- shifting risk to the public while privatizing rewards. Too often reformsters get to finance their ideas while they get to keep the rewards. We've spent a lot of time looking at the many, many ways in which charter operators can get rich (yes, even the non-profit ones). But at the other end, we'll find that when charters collapse, nobody has lost money except the taxpayers. When Barr's Future Is Now group bowed out of operating John McDonogh, there were no wails about how much of their own money they had sunk into the place. This is one other thing that is appealing about charter operation-- the state gives you money and, if you have the right connections, even buildings. Start-up costs and investment expense is minimal, and personal financial risk is negligible-to-non-existent.
But there's another reason that schools cannot be businesses.
Students are not lab rats.
Barr's little experiment with John McDonogh High School lasted about two years, or about the half of the high school years of students at that school. Those years were taken from them, and nothing will ever get that time back.
Schools are not businesses for the same reason that so much education research is bunk-- because students are not lab rats, and it's not okay for adults to sacrifice students' education, well-being and lives on the altar of Let's Find Out If This Works.
Steve Barr's story is a recognizable American success story, and it involves plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and failure followed by rebounding. And those are all great qualities to apply to your own story. Gambling with your own life, your own future is both admirable and, occasionally, necessary. But gambling with other peoples' futures is foolhardy and irresponsible. Gambling with the futures of children is unconscionable.
Reformsters make a lot of noise about how the education sector is inertia-filled, conservative, extra-careful about change. Well, of course we are-- these are the lives of children we're talking about.
An edupreneur may think, "Hey, we could totally upend kindergarten with this new approach. Let's give it a try for a year or two and if that doesn't work out, no biggie. We'll move on to another idea." A year in business experimenting doesn't seem like so much. But we're talking about taking away a year from five year olds, tiny humans who will never be five again, and for whom that experiment will forever be part of their lives and history.
When we futz with the system, we can spot problems and change the system. But we can't change what we did to the students in the system while we were futzing.
So, yes-- we're conservative and we change carefully and slowly. It's fine to take big risks with private money. It's less fine to use public money to finance private risk. It's not remotely fine to take big risks with the education of young humans.
If there's one thing that marks the worst of the reformsters, it's a complete disregard for the tiny humans whose lives are shaped in schools. Reformsters are great at invoking children and using the well-worn talking points about putting the interests of children ahead of the interests of adults. But in practice, reformsters treat children like widgets or sweat-shop employees. When businessmen determine the fate of a factory or business enterprise, they don't worry about the stock, the soon-to-be-unemployed, or their former customers.
When we talk about the close of a business, the end of a venture, there is no analogy in which children come out looking like valued human beings whose concerns are central to how the end is handled. Schools are not businesses, because businesses fail and vanish like vaporware, but children never do. Schools are not businesses, because businesses must sometimes be experiments, and students are not lab rats.
Steve Barr has a good story (you can read the approved version on a Wikipedia page that is waiting to be edited by someone who doesn't already love Steve Barr). Single mom, working class background, former teamster, career as political operative, dabbling in TV production. Barr's younger brother did not rise up, but instead struggled with getting his act together before dying in a motorcycle accident. Barr asked himself why his brother followed a different trajectory than he did, and concluded "schools," and so took the insurance money from his brother's death to help launch Green Dot.
Bottom line: Barr is not a typical riches to riches success story, but he is typical of the business-politics approach to life-building, and therefor a good example of why that approach is ill-suited to education.
Schneider takes Barr to task for his dalliance with and abandonment of John McDonogh High School is New Orleans. Barr thought he'd give a long-distance takeover of that school a try in 2012, and he thought he'd just dump the whole project in 2014. Not his kids, not his community, and, not his problem. As Schneider puts it, "Just a long-distance business deal that did not pan out."
And that's the thing. If this were an entrepreneur trying a tentative launch of a new left-handed widget production facility, that would be fine. Taking chances, experimenting, trying something even when you know going in that it might not pan out-- that's a perfectly legitimate way to do business. If entrepreneurs never took a flier on new ventures, we would be far poorer for it.
That is what business people, investors, entrepreneurs do-- they take risks. If they win, then society is often better off and the investors reap the rewards of shouldering the risk. If they lose, then they're out some money and life goes on. They have risked investor money, maybe reputation, and the lives of those who worked on the enterprise.
None of this is wrong or bad. It's how business ventures work. But it should not, can not be how schools work.
For one thing, the reformster movement is another part of a larger trend-- shifting risk to the public while privatizing rewards. Too often reformsters get to finance their ideas while they get to keep the rewards. We've spent a lot of time looking at the many, many ways in which charter operators can get rich (yes, even the non-profit ones). But at the other end, we'll find that when charters collapse, nobody has lost money except the taxpayers. When Barr's Future Is Now group bowed out of operating John McDonogh, there were no wails about how much of their own money they had sunk into the place. This is one other thing that is appealing about charter operation-- the state gives you money and, if you have the right connections, even buildings. Start-up costs and investment expense is minimal, and personal financial risk is negligible-to-non-existent.
But there's another reason that schools cannot be businesses.
Students are not lab rats.
Barr's little experiment with John McDonogh High School lasted about two years, or about the half of the high school years of students at that school. Those years were taken from them, and nothing will ever get that time back.
Schools are not businesses for the same reason that so much education research is bunk-- because students are not lab rats, and it's not okay for adults to sacrifice students' education, well-being and lives on the altar of Let's Find Out If This Works.
Steve Barr's story is a recognizable American success story, and it involves plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and failure followed by rebounding. And those are all great qualities to apply to your own story. Gambling with your own life, your own future is both admirable and, occasionally, necessary. But gambling with other peoples' futures is foolhardy and irresponsible. Gambling with the futures of children is unconscionable.
Reformsters make a lot of noise about how the education sector is inertia-filled, conservative, extra-careful about change. Well, of course we are-- these are the lives of children we're talking about.
An edupreneur may think, "Hey, we could totally upend kindergarten with this new approach. Let's give it a try for a year or two and if that doesn't work out, no biggie. We'll move on to another idea." A year in business experimenting doesn't seem like so much. But we're talking about taking away a year from five year olds, tiny humans who will never be five again, and for whom that experiment will forever be part of their lives and history.
When we futz with the system, we can spot problems and change the system. But we can't change what we did to the students in the system while we were futzing.
So, yes-- we're conservative and we change carefully and slowly. It's fine to take big risks with private money. It's less fine to use public money to finance private risk. It's not remotely fine to take big risks with the education of young humans.
If there's one thing that marks the worst of the reformsters, it's a complete disregard for the tiny humans whose lives are shaped in schools. Reformsters are great at invoking children and using the well-worn talking points about putting the interests of children ahead of the interests of adults. But in practice, reformsters treat children like widgets or sweat-shop employees. When businessmen determine the fate of a factory or business enterprise, they don't worry about the stock, the soon-to-be-unemployed, or their former customers.
When we talk about the close of a business, the end of a venture, there is no analogy in which children come out looking like valued human beings whose concerns are central to how the end is handled. Schools are not businesses, because businesses fail and vanish like vaporware, but children never do. Schools are not businesses, because businesses must sometimes be experiments, and students are not lab rats.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Easter and the Free Market
I grew up Methodist (United Methodist, actually), went through a long Between Churches spell, and eventually settled back into a sort of relationship with the local Episcopalian church. My religious faith has stayed fairly steady (though, as a good born New Englander, I am not going to talk to you about it), but if the Christian Church were on Facebook, I would mark our relationship "it's complicated."
But I still love Easter. I have always loved Easter far more than Christmas, and the years have only strengthened those feelings.
It is the tritest of cliches to point out that Christmas is overly commercialized, but that commercialization is instructive, because in it we can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on a crazed, drunken rampage. In the three months of the season, there is absolutely nothing that can happen in stores, malls, back alleys or any other temple of commerce that could shock or surprise me.
This is the untethered free market in action, the rudderless, anchor-deficient free market that has long since stopped asking "What is the real point and purpose of this activity" and instead asks "How can this activity be leveraged to create a revenue stream?" With most free marketified activities, we can at least take comfort in the notion that injection of free market profit-driven innovation will bring us to a higher better pursuit of our main goal.
But Christmas can't even try to pretend that the proliferation of holiday tchotchkes and corporate advertising somehow aids in the worship and honoring of the Great I Am. The Creator of All That Is and Will Be is not honored by special beer steins. No, the vast majority seasonal tie-ins have lost the plot, descending into some sad Godless money-grubbing romp.
Easter, however, stays relatively impervious to the seduction of the Invisible Hand. Perhaps it's that Christmas reduces to simple charming ideas-- babies are sweet and people should be nice to others-- but Easter is harsh and dark an then, for many folks, metaphysically improbable.
It may be a matter of how easy it is to keep up appearances. In other words, I can sell you Christmas stuff and still pretend that it has something to do with the central message of Christmas. But the crucifixion does not play well on t-shirts and halftime advertising.
A unmoored free market doesn't just subvert the virtue and purpose of an activity-- it twists and distorts everything into a fun-house shadow if its true self. Folks who have a childlike faith in the free market and believe that an unleashed market will automatically breathe virtue into whatever it comes near-- those folks need only look at Christmas, a holiday that has literally had the virtue beaten out of it by the club-wielding invisible hand.
Compare and contrast with Easter. Easter is not broadly celebrated; it is not culturally required for every single person of whatever faith to observe it, and so there was no need to water it down for mass marketing. Nor has it bee infused with the Great Money Chase, and so other aspects can stay in place.
Easter is about renewal, rebirth, and resurrection; it's about finding a path forward in even the darkest of moments. It's about finding direction and guidance from a higher power. It's about somehow seeing beyond the limited boundaries of our lives into something so infinite and beautiful that we can barely grasp it.
It does not cry out to be fixed. It does not need corporate interests to come in and say, "This holiday is a national disgrace, a sad failure. We must not let people condemned to this lame holiday because their prospects are controlled by their calendar." Easter does not need somebody to come up with National Holiday Standards so that it can be measured against them (to prove it's failing). Easter does not need a shot of Holiday Reform. There may indeed be great potential depths of untapped riches in the holiday, but there is no value to the holiday in trying to tap those riches.
There are some things the Free Market should just leave alone, because the Free Market too easily loses track of the Actual Point of the things it tries to "fix."
I had a good Easter morning. I get up and go out to eat with all my family in the area, and I play a brass instrument in church. This year as a bonus my grandson was baptised. I can't think of anything that would lead me to think, "If only corporate interests could get their hands on this and turn it into the same great holiday that they made Christmas."
But I still love Easter. I have always loved Easter far more than Christmas, and the years have only strengthened those feelings.
It is the tritest of cliches to point out that Christmas is overly commercialized, but that commercialization is instructive, because in it we can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on a crazed, drunken rampage. In the three months of the season, there is absolutely nothing that can happen in stores, malls, back alleys or any other temple of commerce that could shock or surprise me.
This is the untethered free market in action, the rudderless, anchor-deficient free market that has long since stopped asking "What is the real point and purpose of this activity" and instead asks "How can this activity be leveraged to create a revenue stream?" With most free marketified activities, we can at least take comfort in the notion that injection of free market profit-driven innovation will bring us to a higher better pursuit of our main goal.
But Christmas can't even try to pretend that the proliferation of holiday tchotchkes and corporate advertising somehow aids in the worship and honoring of the Great I Am. The Creator of All That Is and Will Be is not honored by special beer steins. No, the vast majority seasonal tie-ins have lost the plot, descending into some sad Godless money-grubbing romp.
Easter, however, stays relatively impervious to the seduction of the Invisible Hand. Perhaps it's that Christmas reduces to simple charming ideas-- babies are sweet and people should be nice to others-- but Easter is harsh and dark an then, for many folks, metaphysically improbable.
It may be a matter of how easy it is to keep up appearances. In other words, I can sell you Christmas stuff and still pretend that it has something to do with the central message of Christmas. But the crucifixion does not play well on t-shirts and halftime advertising.
A unmoored free market doesn't just subvert the virtue and purpose of an activity-- it twists and distorts everything into a fun-house shadow if its true self. Folks who have a childlike faith in the free market and believe that an unleashed market will automatically breathe virtue into whatever it comes near-- those folks need only look at Christmas, a holiday that has literally had the virtue beaten out of it by the club-wielding invisible hand.
Compare and contrast with Easter. Easter is not broadly celebrated; it is not culturally required for every single person of whatever faith to observe it, and so there was no need to water it down for mass marketing. Nor has it bee infused with the Great Money Chase, and so other aspects can stay in place.
Easter is about renewal, rebirth, and resurrection; it's about finding a path forward in even the darkest of moments. It's about finding direction and guidance from a higher power. It's about somehow seeing beyond the limited boundaries of our lives into something so infinite and beautiful that we can barely grasp it.
It does not cry out to be fixed. It does not need corporate interests to come in and say, "This holiday is a national disgrace, a sad failure. We must not let people condemned to this lame holiday because their prospects are controlled by their calendar." Easter does not need somebody to come up with National Holiday Standards so that it can be measured against them (to prove it's failing). Easter does not need a shot of Holiday Reform. There may indeed be great potential depths of untapped riches in the holiday, but there is no value to the holiday in trying to tap those riches.
There are some things the Free Market should just leave alone, because the Free Market too easily loses track of the Actual Point of the things it tries to "fix."
I had a good Easter morning. I get up and go out to eat with all my family in the area, and I play a brass instrument in church. This year as a bonus my grandson was baptised. I can't think of anything that would lead me to think, "If only corporate interests could get their hands on this and turn it into the same great holiday that they made Christmas."
Saturday, April 4, 2015
The Rewards of Teaching
Many reformsters have built their confused, misguided and just plain bad ideas on one very big misconception, a gap in their belief system that informs a hundred other flawed ideas.
Many reformsters do not believe that teaching is intrinsically rewarding.
This has always been there in the worst denigrations of teacher-haters. Teachers are just in it for the paycheck, for the summer vacation, for the cushy ease of the job. You can only believe this if you also believe that there is nothing rewarding about the job itself, if there is nothing to enjoy about working with students and helping them grow and understand and become more fully themselves, more fully human.
It's also there in so-called teacher supporters. We need raise pay. We need to offer financial incentives, merit pay, just higher pay levels across the board. Those are all lovely things, but don't think those have to be there because there's no other reason we'd be in the classroom.
Even Teach for America, a group that more than any other has mastered the rhetoric of teacher idealism about changing the world and touching children-- TFA may laud teaching in its ad copy, but their actions belie their pretty words. "Come be a teacher. Touch the future. Change a life. But for God's sake get the hell out of there and on to a real job." It's nice to touch lives for a year or two, but that couldn't possibly sustain you for an entire career.
Virtually every reformy program now comes with one form of incentivization or another, seemingly borrowed from the world of business cogs, grey flannel suits passing through a series of offices chasing ever-increasing stacks of cash.
If we want teachers to follow one program or another, we must incentivize it with money. Why else would teachers teach?
Mind you, I don't want to roll back to the more traditional argument for keeping teachers poor-- "If you were really doing it for the kids and the good warm feeling you get, then we shouldn't need to pay you more than minimum wage."
But the constant waving about of money is a sign that many reformsters have a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and the people who do it.
For example, lots of reformsters like the idea of setting up a system, because the way you get people to do work is you line them up in various coggy functions, allowing them to work their way up to higher levels of cogsmanship, which they'll do because each cog level offers new incentives (with lots of structure and direction). This is what you do with work that has no intrinsic motivation. Incentives, because why else would people pursue doing it right, and structure, because we don't believe that there's any natural feedback that tells the cog whether it's doing well or not.
This is dumb. It's like assuming that kissing does not have any natural feedback loop, so we need a system to let people know if they're kissing correctly or not. That same thinking says that a teacher can't tell whether a class is going well or poorly because there's no intrinsically rewarding feedback loop. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a classroom works.
For another example, we return frequently to the problem of getting super-duper teachers to go work in America's most hard-to-staff schools, and we always return with a discussion of how we could create some financial incentives for teachers to go work there. But teachers do not go to work at Shiny New High School because the pay is great (often the cost of living in SNHS's neighborhood eats up the higher pay). Teachers go to work at SNHS because it's a great place to work.
I could try to lay out all the specifics of what makes a school or district a great place to work, but I think I can simplify it--
A great school to work in is one where there are the fewest possible obstacles between the teachers and the intrinsic rewards of teaching.And the intrinsic rewards of teaching are, most simply stated, using your skills, knowledge, judgment and efforts to help your students learn and grow, and getting to see the real life results of that growth.
The more obstacles stand between a teacher and the use of those personal skills, knowledge, judgment and effort, the less rewarding it is to work there.
So a plan like, say, "We'll give you a scripted program, and you are never to use your own judgment. We have no interest in what skills and knowledge you bring to the table as an individual-- just do as your told when you're told. But we'll give you a few thousand more dollars to do it"-- well, that's not a plan. And while you may find takers for it, they are not the teachers that you want.
Likewise a plan like, "Yes, take all your passion and care and dedication into that classroom, but we're not going to give you any tools such a books or paper, and we won't give you any support to help maintain discipline, and we'll never fix that broken window. but we will give you some extra pay"-- also not a plan.
Yes, teachers need money (we have families and we like to eat food and wear clothes), but if you don't understand that there is something exciting and joyful and rewarding for us in the work we do, you will never come up with a plan or program or system that motivates us. In fact, if you don't get that we're still in the classroom because we're already motivated, then you don't understand the work situation well enough to have a positive effect on it.
Teaching is intrinsically rewarding. You know when things are going well, and it feels good. You know when things are going poorly, and that feels lousy. You also know when people are trying to help you become your best teachery self so that you can have more good days, great moments. And you know when people are not trying to help, but are just trying to take away all the tools that allow you to create the good days.
Many reformsters do not believe that teaching is intrinsically rewarding.
This has always been there in the worst denigrations of teacher-haters. Teachers are just in it for the paycheck, for the summer vacation, for the cushy ease of the job. You can only believe this if you also believe that there is nothing rewarding about the job itself, if there is nothing to enjoy about working with students and helping them grow and understand and become more fully themselves, more fully human.
It's also there in so-called teacher supporters. We need raise pay. We need to offer financial incentives, merit pay, just higher pay levels across the board. Those are all lovely things, but don't think those have to be there because there's no other reason we'd be in the classroom.
Even Teach for America, a group that more than any other has mastered the rhetoric of teacher idealism about changing the world and touching children-- TFA may laud teaching in its ad copy, but their actions belie their pretty words. "Come be a teacher. Touch the future. Change a life. But for God's sake get the hell out of there and on to a real job." It's nice to touch lives for a year or two, but that couldn't possibly sustain you for an entire career.
Virtually every reformy program now comes with one form of incentivization or another, seemingly borrowed from the world of business cogs, grey flannel suits passing through a series of offices chasing ever-increasing stacks of cash.
If we want teachers to follow one program or another, we must incentivize it with money. Why else would teachers teach?
Mind you, I don't want to roll back to the more traditional argument for keeping teachers poor-- "If you were really doing it for the kids and the good warm feeling you get, then we shouldn't need to pay you more than minimum wage."
But the constant waving about of money is a sign that many reformsters have a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and the people who do it.
For example, lots of reformsters like the idea of setting up a system, because the way you get people to do work is you line them up in various coggy functions, allowing them to work their way up to higher levels of cogsmanship, which they'll do because each cog level offers new incentives (with lots of structure and direction). This is what you do with work that has no intrinsic motivation. Incentives, because why else would people pursue doing it right, and structure, because we don't believe that there's any natural feedback that tells the cog whether it's doing well or not.
This is dumb. It's like assuming that kissing does not have any natural feedback loop, so we need a system to let people know if they're kissing correctly or not. That same thinking says that a teacher can't tell whether a class is going well or poorly because there's no intrinsically rewarding feedback loop. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a classroom works.
For another example, we return frequently to the problem of getting super-duper teachers to go work in America's most hard-to-staff schools, and we always return with a discussion of how we could create some financial incentives for teachers to go work there. But teachers do not go to work at Shiny New High School because the pay is great (often the cost of living in SNHS's neighborhood eats up the higher pay). Teachers go to work at SNHS because it's a great place to work.
I could try to lay out all the specifics of what makes a school or district a great place to work, but I think I can simplify it--
A great school to work in is one where there are the fewest possible obstacles between the teachers and the intrinsic rewards of teaching.And the intrinsic rewards of teaching are, most simply stated, using your skills, knowledge, judgment and efforts to help your students learn and grow, and getting to see the real life results of that growth.
The more obstacles stand between a teacher and the use of those personal skills, knowledge, judgment and effort, the less rewarding it is to work there.
So a plan like, say, "We'll give you a scripted program, and you are never to use your own judgment. We have no interest in what skills and knowledge you bring to the table as an individual-- just do as your told when you're told. But we'll give you a few thousand more dollars to do it"-- well, that's not a plan. And while you may find takers for it, they are not the teachers that you want.
Likewise a plan like, "Yes, take all your passion and care and dedication into that classroom, but we're not going to give you any tools such a books or paper, and we won't give you any support to help maintain discipline, and we'll never fix that broken window. but we will give you some extra pay"-- also not a plan.
Yes, teachers need money (we have families and we like to eat food and wear clothes), but if you don't understand that there is something exciting and joyful and rewarding for us in the work we do, you will never come up with a plan or program or system that motivates us. In fact, if you don't get that we're still in the classroom because we're already motivated, then you don't understand the work situation well enough to have a positive effect on it.
Teaching is intrinsically rewarding. You know when things are going well, and it feels good. You know when things are going poorly, and that feels lousy. You also know when people are trying to help you become your best teachery self so that you can have more good days, great moments. And you know when people are not trying to help, but are just trying to take away all the tools that allow you to create the good days.
Fixing Title II and PD
While we're all busy worrying about the big sexy parts ESEA rewrite, like testing, teacher evaluation, and just generally squeezing blood from the public ed turnip so that Educorporations can get their daily dose of Vitamin $$, the folks at American Institutes for Research have been taking a look at less glamorous sections of the law.
You may recognize AIR as the folks who brought us the SBA test, as well as some knockoff testing products for states with CCSS-averse electorates. But they have many, many researchy segments, and one of those has made some recommendations regarding Title II of ESEA.
Those of you who know all about Title II can skip to the end of this paragraph, but you're probably lying. Title II has two stated purposes-- 1) raise student test scores aka "student achievement" by getting more awesome teachers and principals in schools and 2) holding local districts accountable for student test scores aka "student achievement." AIR notes that there are many fed-approved uses of Title II money, but mostly districts just spend it all on professional development. Notes AIR drily:
Sound educator learning activities and resources are critical to effective teaching and leading as well as to continuous improvement in our schools. Yet, 13 years and some $30 billion later, Title IIA has not had the effect on teacher and principal quality or student achievement its creators hoped.
So what do districts actually spend the money on. Turns out its mostly PD and class reduction.
You may recognize AIR as the folks who brought us the SBA test, as well as some knockoff testing products for states with CCSS-averse electorates. But they have many, many researchy segments, and one of those has made some recommendations regarding Title II of ESEA.
Those of you who know all about Title II can skip to the end of this paragraph, but you're probably lying. Title II has two stated purposes-- 1) raise student test scores aka "student achievement" by getting more awesome teachers and principals in schools and 2) holding local districts accountable for student test scores aka "student achievement." AIR notes that there are many fed-approved uses of Title II money, but mostly districts just spend it all on professional development. Notes AIR drily:
Sound educator learning activities and resources are critical to effective teaching and leading as well as to continuous improvement in our schools. Yet, 13 years and some $30 billion later, Title IIA has not had the effect on teacher and principal quality or student achievement its creators hoped.
So what do districts actually spend the money on. Turns out its mostly PD and class reduction.
AIR notes that after 13 years and $30 billion, problems persist. Inexperienced teachers are still in high-needs schools, hard-to-staff schools are still hard to staff, principals still burn and churn, the test score gap aka "the achievement gap" is still wide between poor and minority students and everyone else, and we still are getting beaten by Estonia on international tests. Also, instructional quality varies between classrooms and the sun continues to rise in the East.
AIR only rattles off that list to set up their next point-- of course Title II funds can't fix all that, but at the very least it could fund worthwhile professional development. Some research suggests that some local PD is okay, but mostly some AIR research from 2009 finds that "by and large, U.S. teachers have been receiving professional development that is superficial, short-lived, and incoherent."
Now, that 2009 research looked mostly at PD from 2005-2006, so I'm not so sure that-- oh, who am I kidding. "Another professional development session! Oh boy! I'll bet this will be very useful," said no teacher ever. But decade-old research is going to miss the giant increase in a gazillion sessions that could all be loosely titled, "How to do a better job of teaching to the test and getting scores up."
Fun factoid. AIR notes that neither the USED or Congress has ever commissioned post-NCLB research on how effectively the Title II money has been spent. But in 2014, the Gates funded the Boston Group, an organization that's a huge fan of privatization, to find that "although more teachers report engaging in research-based, collaborative forms of job-embedded professional development, even these richer formats leave most teachers cold." According to that report, only 30% of teachers called themselves "highly satisfied" with their PD and only 34% thought PD was getting better.
So, short answer-- Title II as an engine of professional development is a failure.
If you're teacher who has ever sat through professional development, you may have some thoughts about why PD sucks, but AIR is way ahead of all of us. Here are their Three Reasons That Title II Is Failing Miserably (I will paraphrase, translating from the heavy bureaucratese of the report):
1) PD tries to hard to work on individuals when it should be fixing the "organizational capacity for sustained and continuous performance improvement." They explain this later as emphasizing "teacher" quality instead of "teaching" quality. While AIR doesn't really Go There-- this can only have one implication-- that PD should be about making individuals function better as cogs in the machine.
2) "It contains no incentives or supports for enhancing the strategic management of educator and organizational learning" because, as always, the reformster assumption is that there is no incentive intrinsic to working with students or managing teachers who work with students.
3) It uses a bad definition of "professional development" that doesn't link directly to better test scores.
Now, not everything that AIR has to say is bone-stupid, even if it is in ivory tower gobbeldeeshmear.
Educators do not simply perform better by acquiring more knowledge or skills. They perform better when they acquire the right knowledge and the right skills and have a chance to practice these new learnings, study the effects, and adjust accordingly. They perform better when they work in an organization that takes non-mission-critical tasks off of their plates, deploys them according to their strengths, and supplies them with vetted tools and instruments that they can use to be more effective every day.
That's not wrong (I particularly like the notion of relieving teachers of "non-mission-critical" tasks. But the whole thing rests on somebody, somewhere knowing what the "right" knowledge and the "right" skills are. This is one of the precise moments where reformsters and teachers part ways. The teachers can raise their hands and say, "OOh! Pick me! I know! I can tell you what's needed," but reformsters are ignoring them and making noise about calling in lobbyists/experts and using bad standardized tests as systemic tools.
AIR has four recommendations for fixing Title II.
1) Put money into funding and fixing systems, not people. More corporate argle-bargle follows about building capacity and creating smart systems with monitoring and data analysis.
2) Fund hiring Really Good Teachers in either teaching or teacher-leader jobs in high needs districts.
3) Stop allowing Title II funds to be transferred, swapped or generally used for other things.
4) Finally spend some money studying what Title II is or isn't accomplishing.
AIR has identified a real problem. An awful lot of professional development sucks. But AIR doesn't seem to have a clue of what to do about it, including asking the teachers who actually suffer through it. For instance, AIR seems unaware of Inverse Delivery Law of PD-- the further someone has traveled and the more they have been paid to deliver the PD, the more likely it is to be deeply, terribly awful.
In particular, AIR's idea that PD should not actually address concerns of teachers, but should focus on getting them to be part of a better-functioning piece of machinery seems terribly ill-advised and unlikely to help a bit.
So, could Title II be fixed? Sure. Does AIR have a clue about how to do it? Not so much.
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