Billboard ran the news yesterday: A company is trying to get the funding to create a hologram version of the murdered Tejano singer Selena.
The company is Acrovirt, a company that is intent in creating digital versions of people. Not simply like the image of Tupac that was hologrammed at Coachella 2012, but one that could perform music-- even new music.
Granted, it's expensive as all get out and extraordinarily difficult to program. But that's now.
I have always joked to my students that I will teach until I'm ancient and die with a piece of chalk in my hand, with instructions to my estate that I be stuffed, mounted, and animatronically installed in the front of a classroom where I can just keep doing my thing. But this seems so much more.... elegant.
A hologram would be better than a robot, particularly if combined with a full-room scanning system that can watch and analyze the behavior of students. Holo-me would have eyes in the back of my head and then some. True, that could be combined with robot tech, but a hologram would have fewer moving parts to be damaged by age or aggressive spitball assault. The thought of a version of me that can automatically adjust opacity is rather entertaining. Could it be programmed so that I'm a better dancer? Will my joke delivery be improved? Could I float in mid-air for extra scary effect?
Would a teacher hologram solve the eternal teaching machine problem-- a mechanistic view of content delivery that lacks any human touch and so becomes ultimately as uncompelling as a ballpoint pen. Would it allow for adaptive and supportive learning by modulating teacher performance in response to the subtle cues like wrinkled brows and upturned answer-as-question responses? Could it be programmed with the sort of peculiar quirks that make it possible for students to do lunch-room imitations and work-book caricatures? Selena 2.0's handlers promise that she'll be able to sing new songs. Will holo-me be interesting?
It is always a little remarkable to consider how little the march of technology has affected teaching. Rocketship charter chains have reminded us once again that computers are able to transform everyday life better than they can effectively transform a classroom.
Could that be because we simply don't have the right technology yet? Is teaching such a human activity that only as tech approaches human simulation, can it hope to help? Is trying to create a teaching machine the same order of difficulty as creating a satisfactory robot spouse?
I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but the possibility of a holographic computer-driven chanteuse reminds us that the questions are there to be asked. Can it be done? Should it be done? And can we program my hologram memorial teacher-in-perpetuity to have the same amount of hair I had thirty years ago?
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Charters, the Core, and the Changing Attack on Public Ed
The attack on public ed has come from many directions over the past decade, and not always with the same intensity from all sides.
For instance, remember not so long ago when one of the leading issues was data gathering? Now it's a less visible issue in the ed debate, probably for a combination of two reason-- 1) some notable public defeats (bye-bye, inBloom) and 2) because the Data Overlords have learned to go about their business more quietly (I think it's entirely possible that they did not initially realize that not everyone would share their enthusiasm for data gathering).
Attack of the Common Core
And, of course, Common Core. CCSS was the one-size-fits-all, top-down, imposed, test-driving monstrosity that looked to many folks like one of the greatest threats to public education out there. We wrote, we talked, we complained, we made uncomfortable alliances, we created facebook groups, all to battle the Biggest Edumonster of All.
But now, after a few years, the fearsome Core is starting to look like the Abominable Snow Monster of the North after Hermie the dentist-elf performs an emergency chomperectomy.
Both its defeats and victories have worked against it. The brand name (Common Core) is firmly ensconced in the public consciousness, but the brand itself is hopelessly hollowed out. People know it when they see it, but everybody sees something different. Kind of like pornography.
I've made this point at length elsewhere, but the short form is that between books and programs and local interpretations and tested versions and the general arble garble of its supporters, Common Core as a national set of standards uniting all US schools on the Same Page simply doesn't exist. And the teacher-supporters haven't helped their cause with their ridiculous attributions to the Core of everything form the discovery of critical thinking to fundamental teaching skills. Together with the loons blaming Core for Communist aggression and fluoridated water, they've shown us the way, and I wish I had seen it sooner-- whatever it is you're doing in your classroom, just nod and say, "Yes, this is totally a Common Core thing!" Nobody anywhere is on solid footing to call you a liar.
Common Core is still the one-size-fits-all product of dabbling educational amateurs. but you know what happens to a one-size-fits-all sweater when it gets worn and passed around by hundreds of human beings with hundreds of different builds? It gets all stretched out of shape until you can barely tell it's a sweater.
Common Core is a meaningless hash, and there isn't a soul in a position of real power willing to stand up and defend it at this point. It can still do real damage to the extent that state or local authorities will try to enforce one stupid piece of educational malpractice or another by hoisting it under the name of Common Core. The Core is still lurking around and doing harm, but the Core of New York State is not the Core of Arizona, which is also not the Core of the PARCC nor the Core of your Pearson textbook series. There will still be hundreds or thousands of terrible ideas ramping about the countryside with the name of CCSS, but the Core's days as The Single Most Serious Threat To Public Education are passing. Common Core has gone from being the name of a very specific large threat to being a name like "Kleenex," used generically to describe many different products.
So, Where Did the Spotlight Go?
I first noted the space opening between charter and core folks last November.
Originally, the Core was going to make a great marketing tool. The Core would be the basis for the tests that would provide the proof that public schools are failing, failing FAILING OMGZ!! and that would open the charter school floodgates. But two things happened.
One was that Core-o-philes frantically called for decoupling the Core from the Big Standardized Tests, thinking that reaction against the BS Test would hurt the Core. Turns out that the tests are pretty resilient. The opt out movement is powerful and gaining strength, but lets be honest-- in the majority of the country, it turns out that if you plunk down something and call it a standardized test, most people will roll over and have their kids take it. Only now and only in certain regions is the opt-out movement gathering real steam.
It also turned out that if you bathed the BS Tests in rosy rhetoric about making sure that students are college and career ready, you don't actually need the standards. In fact, you never needed the standards, because the tests drive instruction all by themselves.
Meanwhile, charter operators embraced a simple truth-- the Core is not necessary for creating a narrative about failing public schools. In fact, in some areas, the Core is part of the proof that public schools are failing (Get your kid into a charter and away from evil Obamacore).
The Hammer and the Broom
The national standards fans and the charter choice crowd were never natural allies. But reformsters of many stripes needed the Big Hammer of Common Core Standards to crack the hard rock shell of public education, to open up that institution to private enterprise. But once the Hammer has done its work, it's not really needed any more.
Common Core's stated purpose was to be the cement that bound together fifty-one higgledy-piggledy educational markets into what would function essentially like one national school district. The Data Overlords liked that idea. The Social Engineers liked that idea. The Profiteers used to like that idea, but it doesn't really matter any more. Corporations like Pearson now have the best of both worlds-- anything with "Common Core" on it can be sold anywhere, but what's between the covers can be any old thing and nobody can really tell the difference.
But the Charter & Choice crowd were never going to want a national school district. They just needed "proof" that Noname Local School is failing so they can rush in to save the poor children trapped in the zip code. Once the Standards Hammer had broken up the public school system into crumbly chunks, the Charter Choice Brrom could come in to sweep up the tasty crumbs.
ESEA
You can see the new emphasis reflected in the proposed Senate rewrite of ESEA.
The proposed law does less than nothing to protect the idea of a Common Core Standards-based national curriculum; in fact, it explicitly ties federal hands so that pursuing such a vision becomes nearly impossible. I suppose you could still try to sell the standards to fifty states based on the merits of common core; you could also open a facility for training unicorns.
What the proposal does do is enshrine the other reformsters True Loves-- testing and charters.
It doesn't actually enshrine testing for any real purpose, seeming to settle for the weird construction that states must continue to give the BS Test, but it's up to the states themselves to figure out exactly why they are giving the BS Test. That's okay-- that's all the legislation necessary to keep the steady revenue stream flowing toward the test manufacturing corporations.
But the Senate ESEA absolutely loves it some charter schools. Money, help with financing, federal strong-arming to get more opened-- the Senate bill is ready to make it rain buckets of cash on the charter sector. This is just one more piece of writing on the wall-- charters are coming to eat punlic schools' lunch, and they are coming hard.
How Does This Change the Debate?
First of all, don't underestimate inertia. One of the reasons that no reformsters have to spend too much juice on CCSS or testing is that inertia is now on their side. Test-and-punish accountability, measuring education in test scores, aligning to amateur-hour bad standards, operating systems intended to create public school failure, ongoing crushing of the teaching profession-- these are the status quo. They have been how US schools work for at least a decade. All those high school grads who aren't going into teaching? Their entire school experience has told them that test prep and teacher bashing and mandated malpractice and teacher-as-dontent-delivery-system-- all these things are not some temporary aberration, but the SOP of how schools function.
We have a whole generation of people who do not know how schools could be any other way.
Second, alliances are going to shift. People who fight the Core will also find themselves more and more fighting a local battle against whatever version of the Core has raised its stupid head. There are plenty of people who hate the Common Core, but they kind of hate public schools, too, and they would be perfectly happy to see traditional public ed replaced with charters and homeschools and twelve kinds of choice. There are lots of folks who think a charter choice system is the perfect antidote to federal overreach.
The whole battle for the soul of public education is going to become more diverse. more spread out across many fronts. Lots of people thought that promoting CCSS was the path to riches and power through their favorite reformy idea, but the last few years have shown that many of them can pursue a more direct path. Common Core was the flashlight that could illuminate the path to privatizing education; now lots of folks can see that path clearly without any help.
If you want another analogy, try this. Common Core was like the breach in the fortress wall, but now the wall is breached, the barbarians are inside the barricades, and they are spreading out to loot whatever castle target they'd always had their eyes on.
CCSS is still worthy of mockery, still deserving of resistance, still an impediment to actual education.
But our problems now are more direct:
* the steady financial starving of public schools to bring on failure
* the use of testing to create a narrative of failure and target schools for acquisition
* breaking down the teaching profession to make it cheaper and more compliant
* the redirecting of public tax dollars from public education to private corporations
* the steady drumbeat to redefine the definition and purpose of public education
* the creation of two systems-- one for haves, one for have-nots
If Common Core evaporated tomorrow, these issues wouldn't flinch an inch. I won't stop taking potshots at the Core, and I support those that wish to do so. But I think the heart of the debate is shifting. When it comes to the assault on public education, we have bigger fish to fry than the CCSS.
For instance, remember not so long ago when one of the leading issues was data gathering? Now it's a less visible issue in the ed debate, probably for a combination of two reason-- 1) some notable public defeats (bye-bye, inBloom) and 2) because the Data Overlords have learned to go about their business more quietly (I think it's entirely possible that they did not initially realize that not everyone would share their enthusiasm for data gathering).
Attack of the Common Core
And, of course, Common Core. CCSS was the one-size-fits-all, top-down, imposed, test-driving monstrosity that looked to many folks like one of the greatest threats to public education out there. We wrote, we talked, we complained, we made uncomfortable alliances, we created facebook groups, all to battle the Biggest Edumonster of All.
But now, after a few years, the fearsome Core is starting to look like the Abominable Snow Monster of the North after Hermie the dentist-elf performs an emergency chomperectomy.
Both its defeats and victories have worked against it. The brand name (Common Core) is firmly ensconced in the public consciousness, but the brand itself is hopelessly hollowed out. People know it when they see it, but everybody sees something different. Kind of like pornography.
I've made this point at length elsewhere, but the short form is that between books and programs and local interpretations and tested versions and the general arble garble of its supporters, Common Core as a national set of standards uniting all US schools on the Same Page simply doesn't exist. And the teacher-supporters haven't helped their cause with their ridiculous attributions to the Core of everything form the discovery of critical thinking to fundamental teaching skills. Together with the loons blaming Core for Communist aggression and fluoridated water, they've shown us the way, and I wish I had seen it sooner-- whatever it is you're doing in your classroom, just nod and say, "Yes, this is totally a Common Core thing!" Nobody anywhere is on solid footing to call you a liar.
Common Core is still the one-size-fits-all product of dabbling educational amateurs. but you know what happens to a one-size-fits-all sweater when it gets worn and passed around by hundreds of human beings with hundreds of different builds? It gets all stretched out of shape until you can barely tell it's a sweater.
Common Core is a meaningless hash, and there isn't a soul in a position of real power willing to stand up and defend it at this point. It can still do real damage to the extent that state or local authorities will try to enforce one stupid piece of educational malpractice or another by hoisting it under the name of Common Core. The Core is still lurking around and doing harm, but the Core of New York State is not the Core of Arizona, which is also not the Core of the PARCC nor the Core of your Pearson textbook series. There will still be hundreds or thousands of terrible ideas ramping about the countryside with the name of CCSS, but the Core's days as The Single Most Serious Threat To Public Education are passing. Common Core has gone from being the name of a very specific large threat to being a name like "Kleenex," used generically to describe many different products.
So, Where Did the Spotlight Go?
I first noted the space opening between charter and core folks last November.
Originally, the Core was going to make a great marketing tool. The Core would be the basis for the tests that would provide the proof that public schools are failing, failing FAILING OMGZ!! and that would open the charter school floodgates. But two things happened.
One was that Core-o-philes frantically called for decoupling the Core from the Big Standardized Tests, thinking that reaction against the BS Test would hurt the Core. Turns out that the tests are pretty resilient. The opt out movement is powerful and gaining strength, but lets be honest-- in the majority of the country, it turns out that if you plunk down something and call it a standardized test, most people will roll over and have their kids take it. Only now and only in certain regions is the opt-out movement gathering real steam.
It also turned out that if you bathed the BS Tests in rosy rhetoric about making sure that students are college and career ready, you don't actually need the standards. In fact, you never needed the standards, because the tests drive instruction all by themselves.
Meanwhile, charter operators embraced a simple truth-- the Core is not necessary for creating a narrative about failing public schools. In fact, in some areas, the Core is part of the proof that public schools are failing (Get your kid into a charter and away from evil Obamacore).
The Hammer and the Broom
The national standards fans and the charter choice crowd were never natural allies. But reformsters of many stripes needed the Big Hammer of Common Core Standards to crack the hard rock shell of public education, to open up that institution to private enterprise. But once the Hammer has done its work, it's not really needed any more.
Common Core's stated purpose was to be the cement that bound together fifty-one higgledy-piggledy educational markets into what would function essentially like one national school district. The Data Overlords liked that idea. The Social Engineers liked that idea. The Profiteers used to like that idea, but it doesn't really matter any more. Corporations like Pearson now have the best of both worlds-- anything with "Common Core" on it can be sold anywhere, but what's between the covers can be any old thing and nobody can really tell the difference.
But the Charter & Choice crowd were never going to want a national school district. They just needed "proof" that Noname Local School is failing so they can rush in to save the poor children trapped in the zip code. Once the Standards Hammer had broken up the public school system into crumbly chunks, the Charter Choice Brrom could come in to sweep up the tasty crumbs.
ESEA
You can see the new emphasis reflected in the proposed Senate rewrite of ESEA.
The proposed law does less than nothing to protect the idea of a Common Core Standards-based national curriculum; in fact, it explicitly ties federal hands so that pursuing such a vision becomes nearly impossible. I suppose you could still try to sell the standards to fifty states based on the merits of common core; you could also open a facility for training unicorns.
What the proposal does do is enshrine the other reformsters True Loves-- testing and charters.
It doesn't actually enshrine testing for any real purpose, seeming to settle for the weird construction that states must continue to give the BS Test, but it's up to the states themselves to figure out exactly why they are giving the BS Test. That's okay-- that's all the legislation necessary to keep the steady revenue stream flowing toward the test manufacturing corporations.
But the Senate ESEA absolutely loves it some charter schools. Money, help with financing, federal strong-arming to get more opened-- the Senate bill is ready to make it rain buckets of cash on the charter sector. This is just one more piece of writing on the wall-- charters are coming to eat punlic schools' lunch, and they are coming hard.
How Does This Change the Debate?
First of all, don't underestimate inertia. One of the reasons that no reformsters have to spend too much juice on CCSS or testing is that inertia is now on their side. Test-and-punish accountability, measuring education in test scores, aligning to amateur-hour bad standards, operating systems intended to create public school failure, ongoing crushing of the teaching profession-- these are the status quo. They have been how US schools work for at least a decade. All those high school grads who aren't going into teaching? Their entire school experience has told them that test prep and teacher bashing and mandated malpractice and teacher-as-dontent-delivery-system-- all these things are not some temporary aberration, but the SOP of how schools function.
We have a whole generation of people who do not know how schools could be any other way.
Second, alliances are going to shift. People who fight the Core will also find themselves more and more fighting a local battle against whatever version of the Core has raised its stupid head. There are plenty of people who hate the Common Core, but they kind of hate public schools, too, and they would be perfectly happy to see traditional public ed replaced with charters and homeschools and twelve kinds of choice. There are lots of folks who think a charter choice system is the perfect antidote to federal overreach.
The whole battle for the soul of public education is going to become more diverse. more spread out across many fronts. Lots of people thought that promoting CCSS was the path to riches and power through their favorite reformy idea, but the last few years have shown that many of them can pursue a more direct path. Common Core was the flashlight that could illuminate the path to privatizing education; now lots of folks can see that path clearly without any help.
If you want another analogy, try this. Common Core was like the breach in the fortress wall, but now the wall is breached, the barbarians are inside the barricades, and they are spreading out to loot whatever castle target they'd always had their eyes on.
CCSS is still worthy of mockery, still deserving of resistance, still an impediment to actual education.
But our problems now are more direct:
* the steady financial starving of public schools to bring on failure
* the use of testing to create a narrative of failure and target schools for acquisition
* breaking down the teaching profession to make it cheaper and more compliant
* the redirecting of public tax dollars from public education to private corporations
* the steady drumbeat to redefine the definition and purpose of public education
* the creation of two systems-- one for haves, one for have-nots
If Common Core evaporated tomorrow, these issues wouldn't flinch an inch. I won't stop taking potshots at the Core, and I support those that wish to do so. But I think the heart of the debate is shifting. When it comes to the assault on public education, we have bigger fish to fry than the CCSS.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Hatchet Jobs By Video
One of the achingly stupid portions of Andrew Cuomo's budgetary assault on education is the mandated use of outside evaluators.
There has been some spirited discussion of how exactly that would work, or not. Carol Burris looked at it. Daniel Katz broke down all the ways it won't work. The folks at South Bronx School put fake ads for outside evaluators on Craigslist-- and got responses. But it was realitybasededucator at Perdido Street Schools who spotted tweets from a Cuomo flack that hinted at another solution to this boldly baldfaced bowl of balderdash.
The trail of tweetage leads us to an article New York Daily News article by Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor who has carried a lot of water for Bill Gates in his day.
Kane uses a metaphor that he's been milking for quite a while now-- the idea that you can't diet successfully without a mirror and a bathroom scale. I've addressed his use of this monumentally ill-considered and mis-constructed analogy before-- it's a simple image with a whole lot of wrong packed into it, and you can follow the link for the full treatment if you like. The short answer is this: if you need a mirror and a bathroom scale to tell whether or not you're getting healthier, you are either a dope or the kind of technocratic tool who believes that machine-generated data is more valuable than human sensory input.
Kane also uses Cuomo's own talking point to call for "better" evaluations-- too many teachers were evaluated well last year. In other words, we will be ruled by data, but only data that matches our pre-concieved biases about teacher quality in NY. If the data doesn't match our biases (NY teachers mostly suck) then we will keep tweaking the system until it gives us the "right" data.
Cuomo has done his best to tweak the system by expressly forbidding input from parents, community, students, or the teacher's actual boss-- in other words, anybody who's actually familiar with how the teacher does her job. But Kane acknowledges that the outside evaluator requirement presents some logistical challenges. He has a solution.
A lot of time could be wasted as observers travel from school to school. One alternative would be to allow teachers to submit videos to external observers (and, possibly, to their principals as well).
On the one hand, there is some value in watching yourself work on camera. It takes roughly thirty seconds to spot whatever annoying tic you had carefully blocked from your own consciousness, but which your students use to mock you when you're not around.
On the other hand, handing that video over to a stranger as a means of evaluation is just stupid.
First, the camera can only cover so much of the classroom. So the video observer will only see a portion of what was going on and catch only a fraction of the teaching environment.
Because of that, and because of time lag (shoot video, send video, find time to watch video), the feedback will be less useful to the teacher. And how about that, anyway-- if the observer is going to make the trip to have a post-viewing feedback session with the teacher, how much time and hassle have we actually saved, anyway? Of course, we could save more time and hassle if the "feedback" just came in the form of written comments on a form, or a swift e-mail.
That sort of feedback would be considerably less useful. And you know what else it would do?
It would remove the need for the outside observer to look a teacher in the eye when he's scuttling her career. As an outsider, the observer already has zero skin in this game, absolutely no stake on the line at all. Add the video, and the observer doesn't even have the minimal human stake involved in talking to someone face to face.
The distance created by a video version of observation removes one more relationship from the mix. The observee and the observer remain total strangers to each other. The observer need not be concerned about whether or not he's actually helping the teacher, and the teacher has no idea whether the observer is a wise mentor educator whose advice is worth heeding, or some jackass hack who just breezed through fifty videos in a day and whose advice is no more useful than that of some shmoe off the street. Heck, it might be a shmoe off the street who's just ploughing through videos in a Pearson evaluation video sweatshop. (That is, of course, before the day arrives that Pearson announces they've got software that can analyze videos to determine teacher quality).
Video observation is an almost certain guarantee that the observation process will be even less useful, less helpful, less instrumental in helping teachers improve and grow. Of course, is the only point of your observation process is to play "gotcha" with all those awful teachers that you just know are out there, then a video system should work just fine.
Look, there's no way to implement the outside observation idea that isn't bad, and dumb. But observation by video would be the baddest, dumbest method of all. Unfortunately, it would also be the most efficiently profitable for the company that lands the contract, so I'm afraid we may be onto something here. As always, best of luck and good wishes to my brothers and sisters in New York classrooms.
There has been some spirited discussion of how exactly that would work, or not. Carol Burris looked at it. Daniel Katz broke down all the ways it won't work. The folks at South Bronx School put fake ads for outside evaluators on Craigslist-- and got responses. But it was realitybasededucator at Perdido Street Schools who spotted tweets from a Cuomo flack that hinted at another solution to this boldly baldfaced bowl of balderdash.
The trail of tweetage leads us to an article New York Daily News article by Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor who has carried a lot of water for Bill Gates in his day.
Kane uses a metaphor that he's been milking for quite a while now-- the idea that you can't diet successfully without a mirror and a bathroom scale. I've addressed his use of this monumentally ill-considered and mis-constructed analogy before-- it's a simple image with a whole lot of wrong packed into it, and you can follow the link for the full treatment if you like. The short answer is this: if you need a mirror and a bathroom scale to tell whether or not you're getting healthier, you are either a dope or the kind of technocratic tool who believes that machine-generated data is more valuable than human sensory input.
Kane also uses Cuomo's own talking point to call for "better" evaluations-- too many teachers were evaluated well last year. In other words, we will be ruled by data, but only data that matches our pre-concieved biases about teacher quality in NY. If the data doesn't match our biases (NY teachers mostly suck) then we will keep tweaking the system until it gives us the "right" data.
Cuomo has done his best to tweak the system by expressly forbidding input from parents, community, students, or the teacher's actual boss-- in other words, anybody who's actually familiar with how the teacher does her job. But Kane acknowledges that the outside evaluator requirement presents some logistical challenges. He has a solution.
A lot of time could be wasted as observers travel from school to school. One alternative would be to allow teachers to submit videos to external observers (and, possibly, to their principals as well).
On the one hand, there is some value in watching yourself work on camera. It takes roughly thirty seconds to spot whatever annoying tic you had carefully blocked from your own consciousness, but which your students use to mock you when you're not around.
On the other hand, handing that video over to a stranger as a means of evaluation is just stupid.
First, the camera can only cover so much of the classroom. So the video observer will only see a portion of what was going on and catch only a fraction of the teaching environment.
Because of that, and because of time lag (shoot video, send video, find time to watch video), the feedback will be less useful to the teacher. And how about that, anyway-- if the observer is going to make the trip to have a post-viewing feedback session with the teacher, how much time and hassle have we actually saved, anyway? Of course, we could save more time and hassle if the "feedback" just came in the form of written comments on a form, or a swift e-mail.
That sort of feedback would be considerably less useful. And you know what else it would do?
It would remove the need for the outside observer to look a teacher in the eye when he's scuttling her career. As an outsider, the observer already has zero skin in this game, absolutely no stake on the line at all. Add the video, and the observer doesn't even have the minimal human stake involved in talking to someone face to face.
The distance created by a video version of observation removes one more relationship from the mix. The observee and the observer remain total strangers to each other. The observer need not be concerned about whether or not he's actually helping the teacher, and the teacher has no idea whether the observer is a wise mentor educator whose advice is worth heeding, or some jackass hack who just breezed through fifty videos in a day and whose advice is no more useful than that of some shmoe off the street. Heck, it might be a shmoe off the street who's just ploughing through videos in a Pearson evaluation video sweatshop. (That is, of course, before the day arrives that Pearson announces they've got software that can analyze videos to determine teacher quality).
Video observation is an almost certain guarantee that the observation process will be even less useful, less helpful, less instrumental in helping teachers improve and grow. Of course, is the only point of your observation process is to play "gotcha" with all those awful teachers that you just know are out there, then a video system should work just fine.
Look, there's no way to implement the outside observation idea that isn't bad, and dumb. But observation by video would be the baddest, dumbest method of all. Unfortunately, it would also be the most efficiently profitable for the company that lands the contract, so I'm afraid we may be onto something here. As always, best of luck and good wishes to my brothers and sisters in New York classrooms.
Seniority and My Wife
From Students Matter to Campbell Brown, reformsters have been working to erode teacher job security and end the use of seniority in furlough decisions. The current system, they say, is unfairly hurting great young teachers. I have some thoughts about gifted teachers at the beginning of their careers, because I'm married to one of them. This debate, for us, is intensely personal.
My wife and I teach in two different districts in Pennsylvania, and like all districts in Pennsylvania that don't mainly serve rich folks, our districts are caught in big financial vise. Now in budgeting season, both districts are looking (once again) at some serious cuts. But my wife and I are in different situations; I am at the top of my district's seniority list, and she is at the bottom of hers. She and two co-workers have already had The Meeting-- the one where an administrator tells you that your future with the district does not look good.
My wife is good. Really good. Before she landed this full-time job, she was the go-to sub for maternity leaves, the sub always requested by teachers at all levels. She has been hugely successful with her first graders-- creative, loving, gifted, inspiring, and hugely dedicated. I know this not just because I'm married to her, but because people who work with and around her tell me, often. She does all the things you hear about dedicated elementary teachers doing-- spending tons of money on supplies, working a sixth day in the classroom every weekend, going the extra mile to get her students the support they need. If there were ever a teacher who deserved to have a job, my wife is just such a person.
Co-workers have said many things to her in attempts to be supportive. One such comment is "If only we could just find three teachers who don't deserve to be here and just fire them instead."
We've talked about this. "How would that even work," is her response to Just Fire the Worst. She wondered who would make such a decision, and how. I allowed as how lots of reformsters like the idea of doing it based on teacher ratings, but of course in a K-6 school, some of those are based on test scores and some are based on the yet-to-be-fully-explained SLOs, with a helping of school performance ratings and VAM sauce. I've yet to meet anybody in my wife's position who thinks they'd be more secure under such a system of randomly assigned test-based student-dependent numbers.
My wife also notes that the stack-rank, fire-the-bottom-5% model is for lazy managers. "They don't ever have to try to raise anybody up. They just sit in their office and wait. And if they want to get rid of somebody, they can just refuse to help make them better." How would that help a school improve?
And what about building morale. If you're competing with the teacher across the hall for a job, how do you justify lending them the great teaching idea you just came up with? My wife works at a great school, and one of the marks of its greatness is the collaboration and teamwork among the staff; how does that survive a Thunderdome fight for survival?
Morale always takes a hit from furloughs. Just the idea that they are now That School, where people can lose their job because bureaucrats and politicians can't manage finances, is depressing, stressful. My wife is living with uncertainty, sadness, strain (while still doing a kick-ass job). How would it affect a building if every budgetary crisis meant that every single teacher in the building had to live with that uncertainty?
Some PA legislators are once again trying to float anti-seniority laws that would let school districts under financial hardship handle layoffs based on teacher ratings. They would also, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "permit school districts to furlough teachers based on the economic needs of the district."
This is exactly the sort of law that would conceivably save my wife's position. Ironically, it would probably end mine. For a district in economic hardship, the most attractive layoffs would be to axe the most expensive teachers. Under an "economic hardship" rule, my career would have ended a decade ago. So in state like Pennsylvania where the legislature has been systematically underfunding schools, either my wife or I are vulnerable to furlough.
I asked her what she thought about devoting herself to a career in which every step up the ladder of success would mean one step closer to being fired. She responded with some NSFW language (my wife is quite the sassmeister when she wants to be). And that's the thing about non-seniority rules. Under the current system. it's hard to get a lifelong teaching career launched and safely under way. Under anti-seniority systems, it's impossible. The world needs more teachers like my wife, and my wife is not a dope. How do you recruit and retain her by saying, "You can have a short-term job in teaching, but you will never have a career."
Look, nobody has to tell me that the way this is working sucks. Sucks with a giant suckness that could out-suck the suck of the biggest darkest suckingest black hole in the universe. But as much as this sucks, every alternative proposed by reformsters sucks even more. Pennsylvania schools should be properly funded. My wife should be in a classroom for the rest of her life, and all present and future students deserve to have a teacher of her caliber and dedication. That's the world we ought to be living in; destroying seniority gets us further away from that world, not closer.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
My wife and I teach in two different districts in Pennsylvania, and like all districts in Pennsylvania that don't mainly serve rich folks, our districts are caught in big financial vise. Now in budgeting season, both districts are looking (once again) at some serious cuts. But my wife and I are in different situations; I am at the top of my district's seniority list, and she is at the bottom of hers. She and two co-workers have already had The Meeting-- the one where an administrator tells you that your future with the district does not look good.
My wife is good. Really good. Before she landed this full-time job, she was the go-to sub for maternity leaves, the sub always requested by teachers at all levels. She has been hugely successful with her first graders-- creative, loving, gifted, inspiring, and hugely dedicated. I know this not just because I'm married to her, but because people who work with and around her tell me, often. She does all the things you hear about dedicated elementary teachers doing-- spending tons of money on supplies, working a sixth day in the classroom every weekend, going the extra mile to get her students the support they need. If there were ever a teacher who deserved to have a job, my wife is just such a person.
Co-workers have said many things to her in attempts to be supportive. One such comment is "If only we could just find three teachers who don't deserve to be here and just fire them instead."
We've talked about this. "How would that even work," is her response to Just Fire the Worst. She wondered who would make such a decision, and how. I allowed as how lots of reformsters like the idea of doing it based on teacher ratings, but of course in a K-6 school, some of those are based on test scores and some are based on the yet-to-be-fully-explained SLOs, with a helping of school performance ratings and VAM sauce. I've yet to meet anybody in my wife's position who thinks they'd be more secure under such a system of randomly assigned test-based student-dependent numbers.
My wife also notes that the stack-rank, fire-the-bottom-5% model is for lazy managers. "They don't ever have to try to raise anybody up. They just sit in their office and wait. And if they want to get rid of somebody, they can just refuse to help make them better." How would that help a school improve?
And what about building morale. If you're competing with the teacher across the hall for a job, how do you justify lending them the great teaching idea you just came up with? My wife works at a great school, and one of the marks of its greatness is the collaboration and teamwork among the staff; how does that survive a Thunderdome fight for survival?
Morale always takes a hit from furloughs. Just the idea that they are now That School, where people can lose their job because bureaucrats and politicians can't manage finances, is depressing, stressful. My wife is living with uncertainty, sadness, strain (while still doing a kick-ass job). How would it affect a building if every budgetary crisis meant that every single teacher in the building had to live with that uncertainty?
Some PA legislators are once again trying to float anti-seniority laws that would let school districts under financial hardship handle layoffs based on teacher ratings. They would also, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "permit school districts to furlough teachers based on the economic needs of the district."
This is exactly the sort of law that would conceivably save my wife's position. Ironically, it would probably end mine. For a district in economic hardship, the most attractive layoffs would be to axe the most expensive teachers. Under an "economic hardship" rule, my career would have ended a decade ago. So in state like Pennsylvania where the legislature has been systematically underfunding schools, either my wife or I are vulnerable to furlough.
I asked her what she thought about devoting herself to a career in which every step up the ladder of success would mean one step closer to being fired. She responded with some NSFW language (my wife is quite the sassmeister when she wants to be). And that's the thing about non-seniority rules. Under the current system. it's hard to get a lifelong teaching career launched and safely under way. Under anti-seniority systems, it's impossible. The world needs more teachers like my wife, and my wife is not a dope. How do you recruit and retain her by saying, "You can have a short-term job in teaching, but you will never have a career."
Look, nobody has to tell me that the way this is working sucks. Sucks with a giant suckness that could out-suck the suck of the biggest darkest suckingest black hole in the universe. But as much as this sucks, every alternative proposed by reformsters sucks even more. Pennsylvania schools should be properly funded. My wife should be in a classroom for the rest of her life, and all present and future students deserve to have a teacher of her caliber and dedication. That's the world we ought to be living in; destroying seniority gets us further away from that world, not closer.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Senate Proposal Cuts Duncan Off At Knees
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.
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.
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.
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