Weighing the pig does not make it fatter.
This is not news, and yet the recent push-back by supporters of the Big Standardized Tests have included, among their various paeans to testing, the repeated assertion that testing leads to improved achievement. Take Valerie Strauss's piece written by a Pearson executive
Tests are a means to an end – showing what individual young people have
learned and how schools are preparing them for their next step in
college or their careers. New annual state tests, supported by Pearson
and other testing companies, will help students and teachers in those
crucial life choices. Strong accountability and assessment systems are
pivotal to ensuring equity for all students. We share a common goal with
the teachers, parents and students we serve – to ensure that every
single child graduates from school ready for success in life on her or
his own terms.
If you want a more protracted version of the same thing, read the New York Times conversation between Kevin Welner and Patricia Levesque, which reminds me of conversations about personal responsibility that I've had with my chocolate lab. Some people are just deeply committed to Not Understanding.
The connection between Taking Tests and Getting Better Educational Results is always shrouded in mystery. On twitter this week, someone tried hard to show that BS Tests lead to better education. Or scores. Or something. Somehow.
The Somehow part is always left out. I don't think this is because reformsters don't know what it is, but because they understand that it doesn't play well. The closest they come to explaining is the magically vague word "accountability." And the process that they believe in, but are reluctant to describe, goes like this.
* Students take BS Test
* Results come back
* We catch the lazy sonsabitches who are doing a crappy job
* We punish them so they will get off their asses and do better next time
* Start next round of testing by reminding everyone that they better do well, or else
The backbone of the BS Test narrative is not the actual tests; the policy stands on the strong two legs of Threats and Punishment.
Hell, the tests barely matter. Look at how little time the reformsters have spent making damned sure that those tests are excellent and accurate and valid and reliable. Look at how little time and effort they have spent holding test manufacturers accountable for the contents of those tests. Look how little discussion there has been about making sure that the BS Tests are not loaded with cultural bias, that they are in fact a fair measure for poor and minority students. Now compare that to the amount of time reformsters have spent arguing, lobbying, angling for and pursuing the policies that will properly punish teachers and schools that bring in low scores.
We have entire bodies of regulation on state and federal level discussing how to properly punish, retool, transform, and otherwise beat into submission "low-performing schools." Compare that to the amount of government oversight brought to bear on making absolutely certain that the indicators of Low Performance are accurate and valid and reliable and true.
It's like we've set up a cancer hospital and spent gazzillions of dollars staffing it and filling it with machinery and tools and treatment plans, but at the admissions desk all you have to do is walk in and say, "Hey, yeah, I think my neighbor has cancer" and they'll grab your neighbor and go to town on him. (Of course, our system is also like a cancer hospital that treats your cancer by beating you with pointy sticks and throwing you in a cage with angry badgers.)
Nobody has tried to deliver a great BS Test, because nobody asked for one. Leaders like Duncan and Cuomo and Bush just wanted something to generate "proof" that a bunch of public schools suck so that we could all start leveraging threats and punishment to make them shape up. Lately folks Peter Cunningham and the ed reform universe's angriest citizen have been pretty explicit about their diagnosis-- teachers and their unions are deliberately doing a crappy job so that they can be guaranteed lucrative cushy jobs while simultaneously keeping minorities beaten down.
They don't need or want a great BS Test-- they just need proof that public schools suck so that they can holler "gotcha" and start punishing and replacing.
Weighing the pig to make it fatter does make sense if you think that A) the farmer is starving the pig on purpose and B) once you have proof, you can use threats and punishment to make the farmer feed the pig properly (or just take the pig away and make the farmer pay somebody else to raise it).
This model says a great deal about what its adherents think of teachers in particular and human nature in general. We don't have to tell them that tests don't improve student learning-- they know that. But the tests give them a hook on which to hang the true transformative force in education-- threats and punishment.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
How the Rich Folks Live
If you don't peruse the real estate or lifestyle section of the Washington Post, you probably missed the elegant Potomac estate of Joe and Cynthia Bruno.
Enter through a custom gate, past an Italian-style fountain. When you step into the home you'll stand on a diamond-inlaid marble floor under "a colorful two-story crystal chandelier hand-carried home from Venice."
It took seven years to create the 20,000 square for estate, complete with seven fireplaces, four kitchens, and more chandeliers than the owners can keep track of. And, you know, it's still a warm, homey place. "Gathering the sculptures, sconces and swag for the dozens of rooms in the Bruno home generated years of happy memories and laughter."
They even dug out space for a grotto underneath the estate, accessible through a secret door in the media room. Fountains, statuary, and a totally swell juxtaposition of modern and classical-- the game room is furnished with a16th-century liturgical cabinet from an Italian cathedral. Wine cellars, tasting room, grand living rooms, libraries, signed Steinway piano, Swedish grandfather clock from 1823, lanterns from London, and a portrait of Joe Bruno as the Godfather. Professionally finished basketball court.
The Bruno's are actually planning on downsizing now that their twenty-something daughters have grown. Don't fret for them-- "they have a near-replica of the property, although about half the size, in a condominium in Florida."
The article helps put the "scene" in "obscene." You can see plenty of pictures with the article.
Why am I sharing all this? Would you like to know what business Joe Bruno is in?
Joe Bruno has "since 2004 has served as president of Building Hope, a nonprofit that provides business, technical and financial assistance to public charter schools." So bookmark the article, and the next time somebody is talking about the charter school industry as champions of the underclass in America, just click on over to this profile so you can remember just how well the champions of the underclass, paid with our tax dollars, manage to live.
Enter through a custom gate, past an Italian-style fountain. When you step into the home you'll stand on a diamond-inlaid marble floor under "a colorful two-story crystal chandelier hand-carried home from Venice."
It took seven years to create the 20,000 square for estate, complete with seven fireplaces, four kitchens, and more chandeliers than the owners can keep track of. And, you know, it's still a warm, homey place. "Gathering the sculptures, sconces and swag for the dozens of rooms in the Bruno home generated years of happy memories and laughter."
They even dug out space for a grotto underneath the estate, accessible through a secret door in the media room. Fountains, statuary, and a totally swell juxtaposition of modern and classical-- the game room is furnished with a16th-century liturgical cabinet from an Italian cathedral. Wine cellars, tasting room, grand living rooms, libraries, signed Steinway piano, Swedish grandfather clock from 1823, lanterns from London, and a portrait of Joe Bruno as the Godfather. Professionally finished basketball court.
The Bruno's are actually planning on downsizing now that their twenty-something daughters have grown. Don't fret for them-- "they have a near-replica of the property, although about half the size, in a condominium in Florida."
The article helps put the "scene" in "obscene." You can see plenty of pictures with the article.
Why am I sharing all this? Would you like to know what business Joe Bruno is in?
Joe Bruno has "since 2004 has served as president of Building Hope, a nonprofit that provides business, technical and financial assistance to public charter schools." So bookmark the article, and the next time somebody is talking about the charter school industry as champions of the underclass in America, just click on over to this profile so you can remember just how well the champions of the underclass, paid with our tax dollars, manage to live.
Can Test Boosters Reboot?
Andy Smarick has half of a great post at the Fordham Institute blog.
Smarick suggests that the opt-out movement is testing the ed reform movement, and that the movement is not achieving a Proficient in humility. He catalogues many of the dismissive, condescending responses that have been written to opting out, seeing them as analogous to the dismissive responses to common-core standards pushback all those year ago.
But I'm concerned that education reform's propensity for pride may have taken an even more unfortunate turn with opt-out. One emerging narrative is that we should be suspicious when certain groups of people question our policy preferences.
That's a fair read. From Amanda Ripley to Merryl Tisch, the message being broadcast is that people who question the awesomeness of the Big Standardized Test are fools, racists, and hysteria-addled loons. Smarick suggests that this is not conducive to dialogue (though many reformsters like Tisch don't seem particularly interested in dialogue), and there might be a better response.
We could disparage them. But that would only serve to insult and incite.
Or we could humbly listen, respectfully argue our case, and make the necessary course corrections.
And up to that point, he's really onto something. But I'd like to suggest something more. I think the opt-out explosion suggests that more is needed than a tweaking. I'd like to suggest a reboot.
Policy reboots are great things. I reboot some portion of my classroom every year. Instead of just getting out last year's materials, I go back to the beginning and ask, "What do I want to accomplish? What would be the best way to do that?" Sometimes I reach the exact same conclusion that I did in previous years; sometimes I do not. Often I now know things that I didn't know when I first chose my approach, and so rebooting helps me find a better path. I use this as a teaching thing, but in general I think it's a bad life principle to do something today just because you did it yesterday.
So I'm going to pretend for a moment that I accept all of the stated goals of the high-stakes testing regimen, and I'm just going to go back to the beginning for each. If this is my goal, what would be the best way to pursue it?
Inform Instruction
The idea here is that data will help me decide in my classroom how best to change what I do. Data will also help my building principal and superintendent decide how to adjust and improve curriculum.
Right off the bat, I notice that I need two different data streams. My classroom data needs to be swift and granular. I need to know how all my students did today so that I can plan what to do tomorrow. But the school and district data don't need to be so granular—in fact, too much detail will make it too easy to lose the forest while staring at the hairs on an aphid's back. The school and district also need to decide whether they A) want to fine-tune the instruction for a particular cohort of students and adjust to meet their needs, essentially creating instructional change that follows those students like a wave or B) fine-tune a system that sits in place as each cohort passes through it. One requires data for customization while the other requires data for One Size Fits All.
So a large-scale, national-level test may not be my best choice for informing instruction at all.
This is particularly true when you remember that one policy change that absolutely nobody has suggested is shortening the school year. Yet by using a testing system that eats up days and weeks of time, that is exactly what we've done. I would look for assessment methods that would not require us to reduce instructional time.
Making Failure Visible
One of our goals is to find failing schools and rescue them. To do that, we'd need to agree on what "failing" and "rescue" mean. Until we can agree on what success is supposed to look like in a school, we have no idea how to collect that information.
However, here's one thing I believe is true about failing schools; none of them are a secret. In 10-plus years of test-driven accountability, have we ever found a school that turned out to be terrible, but nobody knew it until the test results came out? Some activists welcome the tests from a belief that the government will have to listen to them when they say poor schools are in need of resources and assistance. Maybe we could just work it out so the government listened to them.
The best way to get a picture of a school is to listen to the people who know the school--parents, teachers, alumni, community members. If I wanted to know how a school was doing, I'd talk to those people--not just look at the narrow results of a standardized test. I don't believe that failing schools and the students struggling through them are invisible;I just don't think people in power were ever really looking (not until there was money to be made by "rescuing" them).
Evaluating Teachers
I've mapped out a system for evaluating teachers; you can find a fuller picture of my plan here. What I definitely would not do is try to evaluate some teachers by testing students they don't have in subjects they don't teach.
Provide Parents With Information About Student Achievement
Why would I look for a proxy to tell me how my child is doing in school when I can look directly at how my child is doing in school. I would call for all manner of transparency, from public access to data about the district to opening avenues for parent-teacher communication, from the high tech of cyber-communications to the low tech of evening office hours for working parents. Transparency is not achieved by an extra test unrelated to the usual business of the school, particularly not when the contents of that test are a secret.
Taxpayer Accountability
Again, we first need to know what the taxpayers want the school system to do. Ask 100 citizens what they consider most important in a school, and I don't believe that any number will answer, "I don't care what else you do as long as those kids score well on a Big Standardized Test." Taxpayers should expect and receive accountability, but coming up with the instrument will be difficult. Again, the cheapest and most direct means would be transparency;let people see as much as possible of what's going on behind the walls (without violating student privacy).
It occurs to me that pro-test folks might think I'm engaging in some sort of rhetorical ju-jitsu here, but let me assure you, I am not. One thing that continues to amaze and intrigue me about the test-driven accountability movement is that these folks have a list of Very Important Things they want to accomplish, and they have somehow focused on an instrument that is a lousy way to accomplish any of them. It's like watching someone who says, "You must prepare me a gourmet meal or else!" and then hands the cook a can of Spam, a hammer, and a box of matches.
There are discussions worth having about the value of some of these goals, but if these really are your goals, in high-stakes standardized tests you have chosen the exactly wrong instrument.
Educators have been telling you this for over a decade. Parents and students are now telling you as well. It is time to step back and consider what would truly be the best ways to achieve your stated goals. Because Big Standardized Tests are not it.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Smarick suggests that the opt-out movement is testing the ed reform movement, and that the movement is not achieving a Proficient in humility. He catalogues many of the dismissive, condescending responses that have been written to opting out, seeing them as analogous to the dismissive responses to common-core standards pushback all those year ago.
But I'm concerned that education reform's propensity for pride may have taken an even more unfortunate turn with opt-out. One emerging narrative is that we should be suspicious when certain groups of people question our policy preferences.
That's a fair read. From Amanda Ripley to Merryl Tisch, the message being broadcast is that people who question the awesomeness of the Big Standardized Test are fools, racists, and hysteria-addled loons. Smarick suggests that this is not conducive to dialogue (though many reformsters like Tisch don't seem particularly interested in dialogue), and there might be a better response.
We could disparage them. But that would only serve to insult and incite.
Or we could humbly listen, respectfully argue our case, and make the necessary course corrections.
And up to that point, he's really onto something. But I'd like to suggest something more. I think the opt-out explosion suggests that more is needed than a tweaking. I'd like to suggest a reboot.
Policy reboots are great things. I reboot some portion of my classroom every year. Instead of just getting out last year's materials, I go back to the beginning and ask, "What do I want to accomplish? What would be the best way to do that?" Sometimes I reach the exact same conclusion that I did in previous years; sometimes I do not. Often I now know things that I didn't know when I first chose my approach, and so rebooting helps me find a better path. I use this as a teaching thing, but in general I think it's a bad life principle to do something today just because you did it yesterday.
So I'm going to pretend for a moment that I accept all of the stated goals of the high-stakes testing regimen, and I'm just going to go back to the beginning for each. If this is my goal, what would be the best way to pursue it?
Inform Instruction
The idea here is that data will help me decide in my classroom how best to change what I do. Data will also help my building principal and superintendent decide how to adjust and improve curriculum.
Right off the bat, I notice that I need two different data streams. My classroom data needs to be swift and granular. I need to know how all my students did today so that I can plan what to do tomorrow. But the school and district data don't need to be so granular—in fact, too much detail will make it too easy to lose the forest while staring at the hairs on an aphid's back. The school and district also need to decide whether they A) want to fine-tune the instruction for a particular cohort of students and adjust to meet their needs, essentially creating instructional change that follows those students like a wave or B) fine-tune a system that sits in place as each cohort passes through it. One requires data for customization while the other requires data for One Size Fits All.
So a large-scale, national-level test may not be my best choice for informing instruction at all.
This is particularly true when you remember that one policy change that absolutely nobody has suggested is shortening the school year. Yet by using a testing system that eats up days and weeks of time, that is exactly what we've done. I would look for assessment methods that would not require us to reduce instructional time.
Making Failure Visible
One of our goals is to find failing schools and rescue them. To do that, we'd need to agree on what "failing" and "rescue" mean. Until we can agree on what success is supposed to look like in a school, we have no idea how to collect that information.
However, here's one thing I believe is true about failing schools; none of them are a secret. In 10-plus years of test-driven accountability, have we ever found a school that turned out to be terrible, but nobody knew it until the test results came out? Some activists welcome the tests from a belief that the government will have to listen to them when they say poor schools are in need of resources and assistance. Maybe we could just work it out so the government listened to them.
The best way to get a picture of a school is to listen to the people who know the school--parents, teachers, alumni, community members. If I wanted to know how a school was doing, I'd talk to those people--not just look at the narrow results of a standardized test. I don't believe that failing schools and the students struggling through them are invisible;I just don't think people in power were ever really looking (not until there was money to be made by "rescuing" them).
Evaluating Teachers
I've mapped out a system for evaluating teachers; you can find a fuller picture of my plan here. What I definitely would not do is try to evaluate some teachers by testing students they don't have in subjects they don't teach.
Provide Parents With Information About Student Achievement
Why would I look for a proxy to tell me how my child is doing in school when I can look directly at how my child is doing in school. I would call for all manner of transparency, from public access to data about the district to opening avenues for parent-teacher communication, from the high tech of cyber-communications to the low tech of evening office hours for working parents. Transparency is not achieved by an extra test unrelated to the usual business of the school, particularly not when the contents of that test are a secret.
Taxpayer Accountability
Again, we first need to know what the taxpayers want the school system to do. Ask 100 citizens what they consider most important in a school, and I don't believe that any number will answer, "I don't care what else you do as long as those kids score well on a Big Standardized Test." Taxpayers should expect and receive accountability, but coming up with the instrument will be difficult. Again, the cheapest and most direct means would be transparency;let people see as much as possible of what's going on behind the walls (without violating student privacy).
It occurs to me that pro-test folks might think I'm engaging in some sort of rhetorical ju-jitsu here, but let me assure you, I am not. One thing that continues to amaze and intrigue me about the test-driven accountability movement is that these folks have a list of Very Important Things they want to accomplish, and they have somehow focused on an instrument that is a lousy way to accomplish any of them. It's like watching someone who says, "You must prepare me a gourmet meal or else!" and then hands the cook a can of Spam, a hammer, and a box of matches.
There are discussions worth having about the value of some of these goals, but if these really are your goals, in high-stakes standardized tests you have chosen the exactly wrong instrument.
Educators have been telling you this for over a decade. Parents and students are now telling you as well. It is time to step back and consider what would truly be the best ways to achieve your stated goals. Because Big Standardized Tests are not it.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Who Has Been Saved?
The supporters of high stakes testing are pushing back.
Peter Cunningham, at the Website Which Shall Not Be Linked, takes a swipe at John Oliver's piece (which he describes as "tedious") and suggests that teachers unions and middle-class white folks are involved in a clear conspiracy to keep poor minority folks trapped and beaten down (I'm not sure how his rhetoric fits into the quest for "better conversations")
Meanwhile, a coalition of civil rights groups has released a statement of support for the testing regimen, ending with this line:
But we cannot fix what we cannot measure. And abolishing the tests or sabotaging the validity of their results only makes it harder to identify and fix the deep-seated problems in our schools.
There's much to discuss, but I want to ask just one question.
Who has been saved?
We have had this regimen of testing, this revenue-generating stream of dis-aggregated data collection for over a decade. For over ten years we have been collecting test scores so that, having measured, we can then fix. So again I ask.
Who has been saved?
Where is the urban school system where the state has said, "Damn-- this school is in trouble. Get some resources and help and support in there stat. Divert tax dollars and raise more. Hire the best educational experts to help." And then, having sent the educational marines, the state could then watch their efforts pay off and declare, "Thank God for the test results. We have saved this school system."
Where is that school? Who has been saved?
Now, we've identified plenty of "failing systems." But from New Orleans to Newark, from Detroit to Little Rock to Holyoke, the response has not been to help the school or community. The response has been to cancel democracy, shut down the duly-elected school board, and effectively silence the parents, students and taxpayers of the community. Then, once governance of the school system has been stripped from the community and handed over to other interests, the schools have not been repaired, but replaced. Charter operators have been handed the keys to the candy store and allowed to reap profits while "rescuing" some small percentage of the students while leaving the rest to stew in public schools that now have-- well, not MORE resources than before their problems were "discovered," but LESS.
The community members are disenfranchised. The public schools are stripped of resources, not assisted. And some students (only those found worthy) are allowed to "escape" to charters that may not be in their community, may not be doing anything different than the public school except carefully skimming students, may be rolling back the clock on segregation, may not even be getting results any better than the public school.
Who has been saved? What has been fixed?
Cunningham's piece also runs the litany of problems in failing schools. Low graduation rates. Achievement (aka test score) gaps. Low-income students with low college completion rates. These are just a few of the absolutely true, absolutely critical issues that we need to be addressing. Cunningham does not explain how taking a standardized test will help.
Here's a suggestion. Speak honestly.
If your argument for the tests is, "We need to find and label the schools that must be closed. We must find the communities that are not fit to have a voice in their own governance so that we can take democracy away from them because their test scores suck and that is why they can't have nice things--" Even if what you should really be saying is, "Look, we're not going to try to save all the kids; some just aren't worth it. We'll save a select few and dump the rest like ballast on an over-burdened balloon--" If that's the true purpose of the Big Standardized Test, then just say so. Let's have an honest conversation about that. Let's talk about what the BS Test can actually tell us. Let's talk about what the "data" from the test can tell us, and what we can do about it.
Because this story about how the tests are like a big diagnostic medical test and the doctors are just waiting to whisk the worst patients to an operating room where they will receive the best care that modern science and top dollar can buy-- well, that story is getting old. We have been doing this for over a decade, and we keep watching patients get whisked away to that magical operating room, and yet not one of them has emerged alive and healthy. Most have not emerged at all. And in the meantime, more patients keep showing up, suffering from diseases spawned by inequity and injustice.
Maybe test results could be used to fix education. I tend to doubt it, but let's say it's possible. That's not how the data has been used for the past decade-plus.
If you are going to insist on this story of how we need the data in order to save students or schools or communities, then, please, answer just one question.
Who has been saved?
Read the NPE statement on testing, test-resistance, and inequity.
Peter Cunningham, at the Website Which Shall Not Be Linked, takes a swipe at John Oliver's piece (which he describes as "tedious") and suggests that teachers unions and middle-class white folks are involved in a clear conspiracy to keep poor minority folks trapped and beaten down (I'm not sure how his rhetoric fits into the quest for "better conversations")
Meanwhile, a coalition of civil rights groups has released a statement of support for the testing regimen, ending with this line:
But we cannot fix what we cannot measure. And abolishing the tests or sabotaging the validity of their results only makes it harder to identify and fix the deep-seated problems in our schools.
There's much to discuss, but I want to ask just one question.
Who has been saved?
We have had this regimen of testing, this revenue-generating stream of dis-aggregated data collection for over a decade. For over ten years we have been collecting test scores so that, having measured, we can then fix. So again I ask.
Who has been saved?
Where is the urban school system where the state has said, "Damn-- this school is in trouble. Get some resources and help and support in there stat. Divert tax dollars and raise more. Hire the best educational experts to help." And then, having sent the educational marines, the state could then watch their efforts pay off and declare, "Thank God for the test results. We have saved this school system."
Where is that school? Who has been saved?
Now, we've identified plenty of "failing systems." But from New Orleans to Newark, from Detroit to Little Rock to Holyoke, the response has not been to help the school or community. The response has been to cancel democracy, shut down the duly-elected school board, and effectively silence the parents, students and taxpayers of the community. Then, once governance of the school system has been stripped from the community and handed over to other interests, the schools have not been repaired, but replaced. Charter operators have been handed the keys to the candy store and allowed to reap profits while "rescuing" some small percentage of the students while leaving the rest to stew in public schools that now have-- well, not MORE resources than before their problems were "discovered," but LESS.
The community members are disenfranchised. The public schools are stripped of resources, not assisted. And some students (only those found worthy) are allowed to "escape" to charters that may not be in their community, may not be doing anything different than the public school except carefully skimming students, may be rolling back the clock on segregation, may not even be getting results any better than the public school.
Who has been saved? What has been fixed?
Cunningham's piece also runs the litany of problems in failing schools. Low graduation rates. Achievement (aka test score) gaps. Low-income students with low college completion rates. These are just a few of the absolutely true, absolutely critical issues that we need to be addressing. Cunningham does not explain how taking a standardized test will help.
Here's a suggestion. Speak honestly.
If your argument for the tests is, "We need to find and label the schools that must be closed. We must find the communities that are not fit to have a voice in their own governance so that we can take democracy away from them because their test scores suck and that is why they can't have nice things--" Even if what you should really be saying is, "Look, we're not going to try to save all the kids; some just aren't worth it. We'll save a select few and dump the rest like ballast on an over-burdened balloon--" If that's the true purpose of the Big Standardized Test, then just say so. Let's have an honest conversation about that. Let's talk about what the BS Test can actually tell us. Let's talk about what the "data" from the test can tell us, and what we can do about it.
Because this story about how the tests are like a big diagnostic medical test and the doctors are just waiting to whisk the worst patients to an operating room where they will receive the best care that modern science and top dollar can buy-- well, that story is getting old. We have been doing this for over a decade, and we keep watching patients get whisked away to that magical operating room, and yet not one of them has emerged alive and healthy. Most have not emerged at all. And in the meantime, more patients keep showing up, suffering from diseases spawned by inequity and injustice.
Maybe test results could be used to fix education. I tend to doubt it, but let's say it's possible. That's not how the data has been used for the past decade-plus.
If you are going to insist on this story of how we need the data in order to save students or schools or communities, then, please, answer just one question.
Who has been saved?
Read the NPE statement on testing, test-resistance, and inequity.
Silicon Valley's Miracle School
Before I even start to talk about AltSchool's educational program, let me express my admiration for their PR machine. In just 24 hours the Silicon Valley Wunderschool has been covered by Kevin Carey in the Pacific Standard, Natasha Singer in the New York Times, and Issie Lapowski at WIRED.com. And USAToday and techcrunch and Forbes.
The occasion seems to be a $100 million payday courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, news that might be tempered by noting that the last time Zuckerberg decided to change the face of education, he was snookered into throwing money at reformster efforts in Newark, an effort that has gone from "it's complicated" to "I'm going to pretend that I never even met you."
The NYT piece is brief. The WIRED piece is by a business beat reporter. Kevin Carey works for the New American Foundation, members of the US Public Schools Suck club. Most other coverage is along the lines of "OMGZ!! Zuckerberg haz give the moneys!!"
But the central thread is that AltSchool is revolutionary and Fixes Everything! So, is it all that and a bag of baked organic sliced potatoes?
I have to say that some of this idea is actually pretty cool. School founder Max Ventilla, former Google guy (he worked as head of personalization and is somehow connect to Google Now), calls the school Montessori 2.0 (so you know we're working with the usual level of Silicon Valley humility).
If you remember the sixties, you remember open schools, which were little resource-rich environments in which children were supposed to pursue learning and knowledge as the mood struck them. My Aunt Evie actually opened one in Connecticut, and eventually closed it because, as many fans learned, small children can be content not learning much of anything for a really long time-- a much longer time than even their most laid-back parents can withstand.
The problem with public schools, these folks conclude, is the need to standardize students. We decide to shove 25 kids in a room and now, just to get things done, stay sane, and keep order in the school, we have to start imposing order and regimentation, changing classes at the bell, doing the same tasks so the clerically-challenged teacher can complete her tasks.
AltSchool, however, hopes to harness the power of technology and personalization. To their credit, they don't mean personalization in the same way that most tech-based programs (you can personally move along the exact same path as everyone else at a personally determined speed). Their teachers create individualized programs composed of "cards," little mini-lesson-modules that can be deployed in any sort of order and configuration. A playlist (that's what they call it) of pedagogy for each child, to work on with teacher guidance on a schedule that fits to address the strengths and weaknesses of that particular student.
Meanwhile, the tech and software is being developed to track all of this learning, all of these diverse students, and all the strengths and weaknesses at play. Again, I like some of how they do this-- not just dropping the tech on teachers and saying "Make it work" or "Hope it works" or "This will totally be useful if you just change your whole purpose and direction to fit the software." Instead, as journalists describe it, the tech team is in the next room, watching the school, watching how their software works, watching how students react, and taking feedback and tech tickets from the teachers. One compelling example was the tech team watching how much time teachers were wasting waiting for software to boot up and deciding they needed to do better.
Imagine-- a school with an IT department that thought of themselves as support for the teachers, and the support is so good that you literally don't do anything all day but teach, because other folks are taking care of all the clerical work. Sit back so you don't drool on your keyboard.
So there are plenty of things to love about AltSchool. But is it scaleable? Can the rest of us learn anything from it? From the WIRED article, quoting Ventilla (who is quoted in all of these pieces-- he must have been a very busy press-accessible guy):
“If you told us that we’re only ever going to impact wealthy private school students, I don’t think any of us would be doing what we’re doing,” he explains. “But we do believe this is the right place to start.”
Well, maybe. It certainly seems that the lesson to be learned here is, "Be rich. Very, very rich."
This is what school looks like when people with a lot of money relocate that money to their place where their mouth is located. One picture shows a beaming teacher and indicates in the caption that he teaches twelve kids. Twelve kids.
So we've got a dreamworld teacher-student ratio, with a full tech team in the next room with nothing to do all day except make sure the school is running well. Plus teachers with the time and resources to make all those cards (very time intensive at first, but once they're in the library and making schools work well and --hey, wait-- this is a for-profit school! are those teachers creating entire curricula for free so someone else can make money from them?) No gym; that and other extras are pulled in from the community (note: build school close to safe, clean, rich person's park). Nobody here has read the research that "proves" that money doesn't make any difference. Nor does anybody here think that a standardized test is the best measure of learning.
There is a creepy massive-data-gathering aspect to the school which has that software tracking pretty much every detail of the child's existence. Ventilla envisions assessing language acquisition through video monitoring student behavior. On the one hand, it's a sensible idea-- tell how the student uses language by watching the student use language. On the other hand, it is A) big brothery and B) is someone going to watch all this video footage, or is it going to be assessed by software, in which case, see A.
Mostly the articles make me want to go visit the place. Because absolutely none of the writers who covered the story really know anything about education, we find them trying to put this in the context of individualized education (quoting, for instance, Larry Miller of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, reformstery thinky advocates, or, God help us, Joel Klein). This model has nothing to do with the single-track personalized pace model that reformsters have been pushing.
But mostly what the school is is expensive as hell. It is never going to be scaleable-- or rather it would be scaleable if we ever as a country decided that educating every single child was just as important as blowing up every square inch of Afghanistan. If we had the national will to invest this kind of money on every child's education, we would already be there.
Nor is it clear what happens to this model when you try to fold in students who aren't as highly motivated as AltSchool's current clientele. And how the heck to you coordinate a million micro-schools on a large urban scale?
It's possible that some of the software developed will be useful in the larger world, and that's not a bad thing, given the kind of crap that is routinely pushed at us. But it would appear that this brand of artisanal micro-schoolery will mostly be a great new private option for the well-to-do.
The occasion seems to be a $100 million payday courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg, news that might be tempered by noting that the last time Zuckerberg decided to change the face of education, he was snookered into throwing money at reformster efforts in Newark, an effort that has gone from "it's complicated" to "I'm going to pretend that I never even met you."
The NYT piece is brief. The WIRED piece is by a business beat reporter. Kevin Carey works for the New American Foundation, members of the US Public Schools Suck club. Most other coverage is along the lines of "OMGZ!! Zuckerberg haz give the moneys!!"
But the central thread is that AltSchool is revolutionary and Fixes Everything! So, is it all that and a bag of baked organic sliced potatoes?
I have to say that some of this idea is actually pretty cool. School founder Max Ventilla, former Google guy (he worked as head of personalization and is somehow connect to Google Now), calls the school Montessori 2.0 (so you know we're working with the usual level of Silicon Valley humility).
If you remember the sixties, you remember open schools, which were little resource-rich environments in which children were supposed to pursue learning and knowledge as the mood struck them. My Aunt Evie actually opened one in Connecticut, and eventually closed it because, as many fans learned, small children can be content not learning much of anything for a really long time-- a much longer time than even their most laid-back parents can withstand.
The problem with public schools, these folks conclude, is the need to standardize students. We decide to shove 25 kids in a room and now, just to get things done, stay sane, and keep order in the school, we have to start imposing order and regimentation, changing classes at the bell, doing the same tasks so the clerically-challenged teacher can complete her tasks.
AltSchool, however, hopes to harness the power of technology and personalization. To their credit, they don't mean personalization in the same way that most tech-based programs (you can personally move along the exact same path as everyone else at a personally determined speed). Their teachers create individualized programs composed of "cards," little mini-lesson-modules that can be deployed in any sort of order and configuration. A playlist (that's what they call it) of pedagogy for each child, to work on with teacher guidance on a schedule that fits to address the strengths and weaknesses of that particular student.
Meanwhile, the tech and software is being developed to track all of this learning, all of these diverse students, and all the strengths and weaknesses at play. Again, I like some of how they do this-- not just dropping the tech on teachers and saying "Make it work" or "Hope it works" or "This will totally be useful if you just change your whole purpose and direction to fit the software." Instead, as journalists describe it, the tech team is in the next room, watching the school, watching how their software works, watching how students react, and taking feedback and tech tickets from the teachers. One compelling example was the tech team watching how much time teachers were wasting waiting for software to boot up and deciding they needed to do better.
Imagine-- a school with an IT department that thought of themselves as support for the teachers, and the support is so good that you literally don't do anything all day but teach, because other folks are taking care of all the clerical work. Sit back so you don't drool on your keyboard.
So there are plenty of things to love about AltSchool. But is it scaleable? Can the rest of us learn anything from it? From the WIRED article, quoting Ventilla (who is quoted in all of these pieces-- he must have been a very busy press-accessible guy):
“If you told us that we’re only ever going to impact wealthy private school students, I don’t think any of us would be doing what we’re doing,” he explains. “But we do believe this is the right place to start.”
Well, maybe. It certainly seems that the lesson to be learned here is, "Be rich. Very, very rich."
This is what school looks like when people with a lot of money relocate that money to their place where their mouth is located. One picture shows a beaming teacher and indicates in the caption that he teaches twelve kids. Twelve kids.
So we've got a dreamworld teacher-student ratio, with a full tech team in the next room with nothing to do all day except make sure the school is running well. Plus teachers with the time and resources to make all those cards (very time intensive at first, but once they're in the library and making schools work well and --hey, wait-- this is a for-profit school! are those teachers creating entire curricula for free so someone else can make money from them?) No gym; that and other extras are pulled in from the community (note: build school close to safe, clean, rich person's park). Nobody here has read the research that "proves" that money doesn't make any difference. Nor does anybody here think that a standardized test is the best measure of learning.
There is a creepy massive-data-gathering aspect to the school which has that software tracking pretty much every detail of the child's existence. Ventilla envisions assessing language acquisition through video monitoring student behavior. On the one hand, it's a sensible idea-- tell how the student uses language by watching the student use language. On the other hand, it is A) big brothery and B) is someone going to watch all this video footage, or is it going to be assessed by software, in which case, see A.
Mostly the articles make me want to go visit the place. Because absolutely none of the writers who covered the story really know anything about education, we find them trying to put this in the context of individualized education (quoting, for instance, Larry Miller of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, reformstery thinky advocates, or, God help us, Joel Klein). This model has nothing to do with the single-track personalized pace model that reformsters have been pushing.
But mostly what the school is is expensive as hell. It is never going to be scaleable-- or rather it would be scaleable if we ever as a country decided that educating every single child was just as important as blowing up every square inch of Afghanistan. If we had the national will to invest this kind of money on every child's education, we would already be there.
Nor is it clear what happens to this model when you try to fold in students who aren't as highly motivated as AltSchool's current clientele. And how the heck to you coordinate a million micro-schools on a large urban scale?
It's possible that some of the software developed will be useful in the larger world, and that's not a bad thing, given the kind of crap that is routinely pushed at us. But it would appear that this brand of artisanal micro-schoolery will mostly be a great new private option for the well-to-do.
Corinthian Bought Many Good Friends
While Corinthian Colleges appear to finally be out of the Create Huge Student Debt in Exchange for No Marketable Skill business, the autopsy on this wreck of a for-profit edupreneurial ship is not yet complete. And yet, the post-mortem is already showing more signs of the advanced disease which not only afflicted Corinthian, but apparently infected some influential friends as well.
Lee Fang, at Unofficial Sources, scored a look at Corinthian's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forms, and they are illuminating. Corinthian was apparently spreading plenty of money around in the form of "secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups."
Corinthian gave money to Crossroads G.P.S., a Karl Rove group which helps elect candidates with money from undisclosed donors. Corinthians creditors include a full range of consulting firms from a former Obama election staffer to a veteran of the Reagan administration. And while they registered some of the lobbyists they hired, it appears that there were some undeclared lobbyists in their pay as well.
Two high profile groups now linked to Corinthian include ALEC, everyone's favorite corporate-legislation match-making group, and the American Enterprise Institute. Both of those groups used up plenty of ink and bandwidth arguing that for-profit colleges should not have to prove that their graduates actually landed jobs.
Last October, Andrew Kelly, AEI’s resident scholar on higher education reform, specifically defended Corinthian and criticized the “Obama administration’s bloodlust for such schools.”
There are also payments made to members of the Corinthian board.
It's particularly swell to consider that since Corinthian depended almost exclusively on government-backed student loans to survive, they were paying to maintain powerful friendships mostly with our tax dollars. Click on over and read the full report.
Lee Fang, at Unofficial Sources, scored a look at Corinthian's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing forms, and they are illuminating. Corinthian was apparently spreading plenty of money around in the form of "secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups."
Corinthian gave money to Crossroads G.P.S., a Karl Rove group which helps elect candidates with money from undisclosed donors. Corinthians creditors include a full range of consulting firms from a former Obama election staffer to a veteran of the Reagan administration. And while they registered some of the lobbyists they hired, it appears that there were some undeclared lobbyists in their pay as well.
Two high profile groups now linked to Corinthian include ALEC, everyone's favorite corporate-legislation match-making group, and the American Enterprise Institute. Both of those groups used up plenty of ink and bandwidth arguing that for-profit colleges should not have to prove that their graduates actually landed jobs.
Last October, Andrew Kelly, AEI’s resident scholar on higher education reform, specifically defended Corinthian and criticized the “Obama administration’s bloodlust for such schools.”
There are also payments made to members of the Corinthian board.
It's particularly swell to consider that since Corinthian depended almost exclusively on government-backed student loans to survive, they were paying to maintain powerful friendships mostly with our tax dollars. Click on over and read the full report.
Fishman: Rural Doom and Gloom
At the NPE luncheon, I asked this room full of people how many worked in a small town school setting.
Only a few hands went up. Since then, I've been thinking about how to address the unique concerns of small town and rural schools in this space.
Then this morning an article from Dan Fishman popped up. Writing for Education Next (the more journally outlet for the Fordham-Harvard Kennedy School- Hoover Institution axis of reforminess), Fishman directly addressed "School Reform for Rural America." In some respects, he hit the nail on the head. In others, he didn't even hit the board.
Fishman starts by painting a picture of rural horror and despair. More meth abuse. Of the fifty counties with the highest child-poverty rates, forty-eight are rural. Rural people between 10 and 24 are twice as likely to kill themselves as their urban counterparts. And rural folks are more depressed. Fishman doesn't offer sources for these factoids, but he does have a chart for showing that the further you get from large population centers, the worse your NAEP scores look.
Such complex and socially entrenched ills require a proportionate educational response. Owing to a number of factors, such a response rarely occurs.
Well, yes. Fishman has a list, and it's partly correct. Let's check it out.
Paperwork
For every federal and state regulation, there is an equal and onerous report that has to be filed. Large urban districts can hire Assistant Administrative Assistant to the Director of Inane State Paperwork. In a small rural, these duties fall on administration desks. Just to meet the state requirements for full-on teacher evaluation process would take my building principal half of the school year. Meanwhile, he has a variety of other reports to file, meetings to attend, mandates to follow and, oh yeah, a couple of kids got in a fight on the bus this morning and it will take all day just to sort that out and head off any possible repercussions.
So yes-- this is a dead on thing. School rules and regulations are created by people with staffs who imagine the rules being implemented by people with staffs. A rural principal's staff is, if he's lucky, one secretary.
Teacher certification
Fishman asserts that rural schools have trouble hiring staff. But this is just another way of asserting that certification requirements should be dropped so that schools can hire anybody off the street.
Often, the most qualified community members are barred from educating students by certification rules. A seasoned musician or painter in the community may be kept from teaching art or music by licensure requirements, even if no “highly qualified” teacher can be found and classrooms lie fallow.
Pennsylvania addressed this years ago in response to crisis-level shortages of substitute teachers. "Come be a guest teacher," the state said. With less training than a TFA temp, anybody with a college degree can become a substitute, and perhaps, eventually, a full-on teacher. There was a wave of substitutes who thought this sounded like a great deal. They arrived. They tried it. They ran away.
I can't speak to the state-wide figures, but locally about 60% of the guest teachers bailed within the first year. Within two years it was closer to 95%. This included ex-corporate and ex-military who were shocked and dismayed that a roomful of fifteen year olds did not automatically follow orders.
Meanwhile, rural areas are being forced to downsize by financial strains created on the state level, so most districts in my neck of the woods have few-to-none first year teachers, let alone positions that they need to have filled. When Fishman tells me that the world is filled with empty classrooms and gifted non-teachers being barred by dreadful requirements that they be trained and certified, I am unconvinced.
Federal grants
Federal grants for rural education offer jack. This is not surprising. Whether you're talking about the legislature, the union, the association of school boards, or a state principal's organization, the majority of the people in the room are there with urban concerns. And so that's what programs address, and that's how programs are designed, and every once in a while somebody tosses some crumbs to the rural folks. And as Fishman correctly notes, competitive grants are non-starters for rural schools (when, exactly, would the principal be working on that).
Fishman thinks salvation lies in the same old reformy baloney.
Online resources strike him as a good fit for rural schools, and it's true that some online resources can be helpful (though they all require reliable, powerful internet access, which is yet another rural school problem). We are a one-to-one school, and have been one for several years, and while it has been helpful, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The limits of the tech, the expense, the requirement for school filters, the fact that so much of what's available (including large chunks of the beloved Khan Academy) is just crap-- all of these limit the transformative power of technology.
Fishman thinks non-tech reforminess like KIPP and TFA can be great, and I'm disappointed here because it's hard to believe that anyone can still expect me to take TFA seriously. Fishman blames the rural problems of such initiatives on the lack of major philanthropy, which leads me to wonder how any program can be useful anywhere when its sustainability depends entirely on the kindness of rich strangers.
Fishman offers some examples of rural charters that work, but he devotes a whole section of the article to rural school choice.
Rural school choice? Can that be a thing?
It makes little sense to create additional schools of choice, and thereby add to the supply of school seats, when the population of an area can barely sustain one academic program.
That's probably the smartest sentence in the whole article. He follows it up by observing that rural schools haven't embraced charters with gusto because they fear consolidation. And that's not false-- one characteristic of rural school districts is that there's a high degree of identification with the community school. In many rural PA areas, the three pillars of the community are the local church, the local firehall, and the local school.
Fishman dances around another part of the problem-- charters financially brutalize the schools that they draw from. In Pennsylvania, much of the death and consolidation of local schools can be linked directly to the money-sucking vampires that are PA cyber-charters. If a small community can barely support one school, adding a charter simply means that one school or the other must die.
And while Fishman is dancing, let's note another step he's quietly ignoring-- the kind of charters that he's talking about would be set up, developed and run by people from outside. The number one reason that local rural communities don't open charter schools is that nobody in that community can think of any reason that they need a charter school. What Fishman is obliquely discussing here is whether or not rural communities offer growth opportunities for charter operators.
Add all this together and the charter scenario in rural communities is some slicker from the city driving up and saying, "Howdy, folks. I'm here to kill your beloved local school."
Fishman says "it would be wise to reconsider the purpose of charter schools in rural areas" though by "purpose" I think he means "rationale" or "marketing angle." But he's got nothing here. Maybe "to escape the oppressive hand of state regulations"?
I can offer him an example here. Up the road (in Tidioutte, PA) the local community school fell victim to financial issues in a larger district. So the local folks figured out they could keep a local school going if they just started it up as a charter. But it was a local idea, mounted and run by local people, and I don't think any investors are making money from it.
College and rural communities
Fishman sort of half gets this as well. Those of us who teach in small town and rural settings have a fundamental question to wrestle with daily-- are we educating students to escape this area or to come back and improve it? The correct answer is, I believe, to help them do whichever they're inclined to do, but that doesn't make the larger question go away.
There are limited opportunities here for students who return, and many of those are blue collar jobs. We have a strong vocational-technical school in our county, and many my students end up with great jobs in fields they enjoy. College really isn't the solution for everyone, and it creates problems of a sort for us in that our college-educated students often can't come back here-- not and find work. The College for All push does add to a local degreed-person drain, but if you think Lack of Degrees equals Lack of Brains, you do not spend enough time talking to welders and farmers and machinists. There's an issue in here somewhere, but Fishman does not yet have a handle on it.
Doom and gloom
Fishman leads off his conclusion with a paragraph that captures most of what he gets wrong.
Large swatches of rural America are struggling to educate children effectively, develop strong economic engines, and preserve communities. An education system that is lackluster in urban America is perhaps even more so in rural areas. It fails both to educate students for college and to prepare them for post–high school careers that allow for individual flourishing without draining out a community’s highest achievers. Under the current education system, it is not surprising that so many ambitious, talented individuals leave their hometowns in order to seek more engaging and remunerative job opportunities. This need not continue to be the case. Political, philanthropic, and education leaders should focus on creating the policy conditions, supporting the entrepreneurs, and more fully integrating the industry opportunities that can best address rural education improvement.
Let's check off the embedded mistakes
* public education is terrible
* "high achievers" are the same as "college-educated" entrepreneurs
* talent and ambition can't be fulfilled in rural areas
* leader types from outside must swoop in to fix this
And the usual huge omission-- there's no suggestion here that these philanthropic political entrepreneury education thought leaders need to involve, consult with, or amplify the voices of the people who actual live and work and lead and pursue lives that they find full, rich and rewarding in these rural spaces.
Then this morning an article from Dan Fishman popped up. Writing for Education Next (the more journally outlet for the Fordham-Harvard Kennedy School- Hoover Institution axis of reforminess), Fishman directly addressed "School Reform for Rural America." In some respects, he hit the nail on the head. In others, he didn't even hit the board.
Fishman starts by painting a picture of rural horror and despair. More meth abuse. Of the fifty counties with the highest child-poverty rates, forty-eight are rural. Rural people between 10 and 24 are twice as likely to kill themselves as their urban counterparts. And rural folks are more depressed. Fishman doesn't offer sources for these factoids, but he does have a chart for showing that the further you get from large population centers, the worse your NAEP scores look.
Such complex and socially entrenched ills require a proportionate educational response. Owing to a number of factors, such a response rarely occurs.
Well, yes. Fishman has a list, and it's partly correct. Let's check it out.
Paperwork
For every federal and state regulation, there is an equal and onerous report that has to be filed. Large urban districts can hire Assistant Administrative Assistant to the Director of Inane State Paperwork. In a small rural, these duties fall on administration desks. Just to meet the state requirements for full-on teacher evaluation process would take my building principal half of the school year. Meanwhile, he has a variety of other reports to file, meetings to attend, mandates to follow and, oh yeah, a couple of kids got in a fight on the bus this morning and it will take all day just to sort that out and head off any possible repercussions.
So yes-- this is a dead on thing. School rules and regulations are created by people with staffs who imagine the rules being implemented by people with staffs. A rural principal's staff is, if he's lucky, one secretary.
Teacher certification
Fishman asserts that rural schools have trouble hiring staff. But this is just another way of asserting that certification requirements should be dropped so that schools can hire anybody off the street.
Often, the most qualified community members are barred from educating students by certification rules. A seasoned musician or painter in the community may be kept from teaching art or music by licensure requirements, even if no “highly qualified” teacher can be found and classrooms lie fallow.
Pennsylvania addressed this years ago in response to crisis-level shortages of substitute teachers. "Come be a guest teacher," the state said. With less training than a TFA temp, anybody with a college degree can become a substitute, and perhaps, eventually, a full-on teacher. There was a wave of substitutes who thought this sounded like a great deal. They arrived. They tried it. They ran away.
I can't speak to the state-wide figures, but locally about 60% of the guest teachers bailed within the first year. Within two years it was closer to 95%. This included ex-corporate and ex-military who were shocked and dismayed that a roomful of fifteen year olds did not automatically follow orders.
Meanwhile, rural areas are being forced to downsize by financial strains created on the state level, so most districts in my neck of the woods have few-to-none first year teachers, let alone positions that they need to have filled. When Fishman tells me that the world is filled with empty classrooms and gifted non-teachers being barred by dreadful requirements that they be trained and certified, I am unconvinced.
Federal grants
Federal grants for rural education offer jack. This is not surprising. Whether you're talking about the legislature, the union, the association of school boards, or a state principal's organization, the majority of the people in the room are there with urban concerns. And so that's what programs address, and that's how programs are designed, and every once in a while somebody tosses some crumbs to the rural folks. And as Fishman correctly notes, competitive grants are non-starters for rural schools (when, exactly, would the principal be working on that).
Fishman thinks salvation lies in the same old reformy baloney.
Online resources strike him as a good fit for rural schools, and it's true that some online resources can be helpful (though they all require reliable, powerful internet access, which is yet another rural school problem). We are a one-to-one school, and have been one for several years, and while it has been helpful, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The limits of the tech, the expense, the requirement for school filters, the fact that so much of what's available (including large chunks of the beloved Khan Academy) is just crap-- all of these limit the transformative power of technology.
Fishman thinks non-tech reforminess like KIPP and TFA can be great, and I'm disappointed here because it's hard to believe that anyone can still expect me to take TFA seriously. Fishman blames the rural problems of such initiatives on the lack of major philanthropy, which leads me to wonder how any program can be useful anywhere when its sustainability depends entirely on the kindness of rich strangers.
Fishman offers some examples of rural charters that work, but he devotes a whole section of the article to rural school choice.
Rural school choice? Can that be a thing?
It makes little sense to create additional schools of choice, and thereby add to the supply of school seats, when the population of an area can barely sustain one academic program.
That's probably the smartest sentence in the whole article. He follows it up by observing that rural schools haven't embraced charters with gusto because they fear consolidation. And that's not false-- one characteristic of rural school districts is that there's a high degree of identification with the community school. In many rural PA areas, the three pillars of the community are the local church, the local firehall, and the local school.
Fishman dances around another part of the problem-- charters financially brutalize the schools that they draw from. In Pennsylvania, much of the death and consolidation of local schools can be linked directly to the money-sucking vampires that are PA cyber-charters. If a small community can barely support one school, adding a charter simply means that one school or the other must die.
And while Fishman is dancing, let's note another step he's quietly ignoring-- the kind of charters that he's talking about would be set up, developed and run by people from outside. The number one reason that local rural communities don't open charter schools is that nobody in that community can think of any reason that they need a charter school. What Fishman is obliquely discussing here is whether or not rural communities offer growth opportunities for charter operators.
Add all this together and the charter scenario in rural communities is some slicker from the city driving up and saying, "Howdy, folks. I'm here to kill your beloved local school."
Fishman says "it would be wise to reconsider the purpose of charter schools in rural areas" though by "purpose" I think he means "rationale" or "marketing angle." But he's got nothing here. Maybe "to escape the oppressive hand of state regulations"?
I can offer him an example here. Up the road (in Tidioutte, PA) the local community school fell victim to financial issues in a larger district. So the local folks figured out they could keep a local school going if they just started it up as a charter. But it was a local idea, mounted and run by local people, and I don't think any investors are making money from it.
College and rural communities
Fishman sort of half gets this as well. Those of us who teach in small town and rural settings have a fundamental question to wrestle with daily-- are we educating students to escape this area or to come back and improve it? The correct answer is, I believe, to help them do whichever they're inclined to do, but that doesn't make the larger question go away.
There are limited opportunities here for students who return, and many of those are blue collar jobs. We have a strong vocational-technical school in our county, and many my students end up with great jobs in fields they enjoy. College really isn't the solution for everyone, and it creates problems of a sort for us in that our college-educated students often can't come back here-- not and find work. The College for All push does add to a local degreed-person drain, but if you think Lack of Degrees equals Lack of Brains, you do not spend enough time talking to welders and farmers and machinists. There's an issue in here somewhere, but Fishman does not yet have a handle on it.
Doom and gloom
Fishman leads off his conclusion with a paragraph that captures most of what he gets wrong.
Large swatches of rural America are struggling to educate children effectively, develop strong economic engines, and preserve communities. An education system that is lackluster in urban America is perhaps even more so in rural areas. It fails both to educate students for college and to prepare them for post–high school careers that allow for individual flourishing without draining out a community’s highest achievers. Under the current education system, it is not surprising that so many ambitious, talented individuals leave their hometowns in order to seek more engaging and remunerative job opportunities. This need not continue to be the case. Political, philanthropic, and education leaders should focus on creating the policy conditions, supporting the entrepreneurs, and more fully integrating the industry opportunities that can best address rural education improvement.
Let's check off the embedded mistakes
* public education is terrible
* "high achievers" are the same as "college-educated" entrepreneurs
* talent and ambition can't be fulfilled in rural areas
* leader types from outside must swoop in to fix this
And the usual huge omission-- there's no suggestion here that these philanthropic political entrepreneury education thought leaders need to involve, consult with, or amplify the voices of the people who actual live and work and lead and pursue lives that they find full, rich and rewarding in these rural spaces.
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