A new report from Achieve.org doesn't provide a lot of information, but it has opened up a great talking point Gap-- ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce the Honesty Gap!
The report, "Proficient vs. Prepared: Disparities between State Tests and the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)" -- well, actually, that title pretty well covers it. Achieve compared Big Standardized Test results to NAEP results.
Achieve, you may recall, was one of the groups instrumental in creating Common Core and foisting it on American schools. So we can't be surprised when their stance is somewhat less than objective.
Today’s economy demands that all young people develop high-level literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills, all grounded in a rigorous and content-rich K-12 curriculum. Acquiring these skills ensures that high school graduates are academically prepared to pursue the future of their choosing.
Two sentences. The first one sounds lovely, if rather limited, and is an opinion that I'm sure many folks share (at least in part). The second is another iteration of the unproven belief that such a list of qualities will lead to academic preparation. But then, in the next sentence, in bold typeface-- we make a huge, huge leap.
Many state tests, however, continue to mislead the public about whether students are proficient. Parents, students, and teachers deserve transparency and accuracy in public reporting.
This statement assumes and implies that "proficient" is a measure of students development of the list above. It is not. It is a score from one badly designed, non-validated Big Standardized Test that does not have a hope of measuring any of those high function skills (not to mention "collaboration," which is of course expressly forbidden).
I do like the call for transparency. Does this mean that Achieve is going to call for an end to the Giant Cone of Secrecy around the test, and that states should no longer be required to serve as enforcement arms for protecting the proprietary rights of test manufacturers over the educational interests of students? No, I didn't think so.
BS Tests are measuring tools that have never been checked. It's like somebody holds up a length of string and says, "Yeah, that is what I imagine a yard should be, more or less" without ever grabbing a yardstick. Now, Achieve is shocked-- shocked!!-- to discover that the various states' pieces of string aren't exactly a yard long.
But their framing of it is, well, exquisite. States that have BS Test scores that come (somehow) in line with their NAEP scores are called the Top Truth-Tellers. The big gap states are not called Top Dirty Rotten Liars, but hey, if the shoe fits. This raises a few questions, such as how one compares the state-level BS Tests with the NAEP (maybe, it seems, just by counting the number who pass or fail).
More importantly, it raises this question: if the NAEP is the gold standard for measuring all that cool stuff about student achievement, why don't we just use it and scrap all the state-level BS Tests?
Reformsters are skipping right past that to The Honesty Gap. It's a more formal version of the old assertion that schools and teachers are just lying to their students and ed reform has to include telling parents and students that they and their schools and their teachers all suck.
Not surprisingly, the Honesty Gap has shown up in pieces by Mike Petrilli at Fordham and at the Reformster Website To Which I Will Not Link. And those pieces are not a surprise because the Honesty Gap has recently launched its very own website!! Woo hoo!! That website was launched by The Collaborative for Student Success, an advocacy group with most excellently reformy partners,
including the Fordham Foundation, the US Chamber, and even-- oh, look! Also Achievethecore.org. All of which explains why Honesty Gap uses much of the same rhetoric to highlight the data from the Achieve.org report.
[Update: Oh, wow. The full-scale product rollout includes a new hashtag #HonestyGap on twitter, where you can find all your favorite reformy hucksters tweeting about how parents deserve the truth!]
Man-- it's like the group is so loaded with money that every time they wan t to launch a new talking point, they give it its own glitzy website. Meanwhile, I am typing about it while eating my convenience store fiesta chicken wrap at lunch. It's an amazing world.
So what's the end game of this particular self-supporting PR blitz? Maybe the secret is here in the third of the Achieve report's "findings"--
A number of states have been working to address proficiency gaps; this year, even more will do so by administering the college- and career-ready-aligned Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessments.
The dream of a national assessment, a BS Test that waves its flag from shore to shore-- that dream still lives! See, states? You insisted on launching your own test and dropping out of PARCC/SBA and that's just cause you're lying liars who lie the giant big lies. Come back home to the warm bosom of a giant, national scale test!
Here's one funny thing about the Achieve report. There's a term that does turn up on the Honesty Gap website, but in twelve pages of the original Achieve report about being prepared and proficient etc etc, these words do not appear once-- Common Core.
It's funny. Even a year ago, I hated the Core pretty passionately. But I start to feel sorry for it-- given the need to choose between Core and charters, Core and political advantage, or Core and testing, people keep picking the Core last. Poor orphaned useless piece of junk.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Welcome Aboard Big Test Airlines
This week is Big Standardized Test week in Pennsylvania high schools. I have the great good fortune to be a proctor, which means of course that I earned my Super-Secret High Security Test Guardian Certificate. And that means I can't tell you anything about the test itself.
Technically speaking, I'm not even supposed to look at it, though the state seems to recognize that my proctoring duties would be more challenging were I blindfolded. But I am not supposed to retain, remember, in part or in whole, any test items-- not even the general idea of a test item. You might think that the results of unseen test questions to inform instruction might be challenging or impossible or just plain stupid, but that is why you are sitting there reading some silly teacher blog and not making either policy decisions in a capitol or big piles of money in a test manufacturing company.
Yes, we now live in a world where I may well be risking legal penalties for saying that the test includes old-fashioned vocab questions where the student must match a semi-unfamiliar word with its synonym among four other semi-unfamiliar odds. Or that there are interpretation questions with at least three equally correct answers, only one of which will be accepted by the state.
By saying that, I may have said too much. I'm certain that if I tell you more, I have to kill both you and myself.
But I can, as near as I can tell, talk about giving instructions.
BS Test instructions are a unique piece of tone-setting, the classroom equivalent of pre-flight safety instructions on any airline that is not Southwest. These instructions accomplish many goals, none of which are desirable in a classroom.
Right off the bat, the scripting sets a tone. The usual tone (or should I say mood?) of a classroom recognizes that we are all human beings, and that I am an adult human being here to help you manage our next challenge. But the script establishes that I am not here to help you-- in fact, I am not even supposed to interact with you in the same manner as we would any other place in the universe.
Immediately, we are both stripped of agency. You are not to do the simplest action-- not even turn a page-- until I read the instructions to do so. And because I must announce even my simplest action ("I will now pass out pieces of scratch paper"), it is clear I have no agency, either. We are both just subject to a Greater Power-- the Power of the Test.
We then move into a ridiculous dance. I say turn to page two and read the paragraph (the one threatening you with vague, ominous punishment if you dare to violate test security), and you of course do not. Certainly not the fourth time you've been told to read it in two days. Again, we are establishing a tone, delivering a message.
In six modules of testing, you will be told to sign a Code of Test Taker Ethics Pledge (don't cheat or violate security) three times. You will be told to read the section about test security six times. Test security gets a paragraph, all on its own page. Encouragement ("do your best") gets eighteen words over six modules. How many times will we tell you something encouraging, affirming, reminding you of your value as a student and a human being. None times. The allocation of space in the script makes it clear what is most important here, and it's not the students.
I will read the directions out loud as you read them silently just about as much as air travelers read the card in the seat-back pocket. I will ask you repeatedly if you have any questions, but of course by the time we get to those, it's clear that none of us is supposed to say or do anything that's not in the script.
I am supposed to tell you one bald-faced lie-- when looking at the scoring guides, the script makes reference to "professional scorers." That is a lie. There are no such people.
Sometimes I will use vocal inflection or facial expression to indicate that I am, in fact, a live human being and not a Borg-trained flight attendant. I don't know if that makes things better or worse-- is it sadder just to see the bars of a cage, or to see the face of the person shut in behind them?
It is hard to imagine an atmosphere more artificial and offputting. I imagine that for the youngest students it is the saddest, most alienating experience they have ever had. For some very young students I'll bet it is the first time in their lives they've found themselves in a difficult place with no friendly face to be found. When I was little I had nightmares about being lost in a store, unable to find my parents and surrounding by cold, distant strangers. If I were that young today, would I have nightmares about BS Tests instead?
It is all just one more reason that I doubt the validity of the test. Is this really the situation under which we think students will demonstrate their very best? Did test manufacturers stop just short of saying, "What if we left a Slim Whitman album playing full blast the whole time, and every fifteen minutes the proctor had to punch each kid in the face?"
I am not saying that the poor, fragile children need to be coddled through every test. But if I were setting out to discover exactly what my students knew and could do, this is not the first, or even the one thousandth, way I would think of going about it. The direction script is just one more indicator that there are many priorities in play here, and finding out what our students really know is far from the top of the list.
Technically speaking, I'm not even supposed to look at it, though the state seems to recognize that my proctoring duties would be more challenging were I blindfolded. But I am not supposed to retain, remember, in part or in whole, any test items-- not even the general idea of a test item. You might think that the results of unseen test questions to inform instruction might be challenging or impossible or just plain stupid, but that is why you are sitting there reading some silly teacher blog and not making either policy decisions in a capitol or big piles of money in a test manufacturing company.
Yes, we now live in a world where I may well be risking legal penalties for saying that the test includes old-fashioned vocab questions where the student must match a semi-unfamiliar word with its synonym among four other semi-unfamiliar odds. Or that there are interpretation questions with at least three equally correct answers, only one of which will be accepted by the state.
By saying that, I may have said too much. I'm certain that if I tell you more, I have to kill both you and myself.
But I can, as near as I can tell, talk about giving instructions.
BS Test instructions are a unique piece of tone-setting, the classroom equivalent of pre-flight safety instructions on any airline that is not Southwest. These instructions accomplish many goals, none of which are desirable in a classroom.
Right off the bat, the scripting sets a tone. The usual tone (or should I say mood?) of a classroom recognizes that we are all human beings, and that I am an adult human being here to help you manage our next challenge. But the script establishes that I am not here to help you-- in fact, I am not even supposed to interact with you in the same manner as we would any other place in the universe.
Immediately, we are both stripped of agency. You are not to do the simplest action-- not even turn a page-- until I read the instructions to do so. And because I must announce even my simplest action ("I will now pass out pieces of scratch paper"), it is clear I have no agency, either. We are both just subject to a Greater Power-- the Power of the Test.
We then move into a ridiculous dance. I say turn to page two and read the paragraph (the one threatening you with vague, ominous punishment if you dare to violate test security), and you of course do not. Certainly not the fourth time you've been told to read it in two days. Again, we are establishing a tone, delivering a message.
In six modules of testing, you will be told to sign a Code of Test Taker Ethics Pledge (don't cheat or violate security) three times. You will be told to read the section about test security six times. Test security gets a paragraph, all on its own page. Encouragement ("do your best") gets eighteen words over six modules. How many times will we tell you something encouraging, affirming, reminding you of your value as a student and a human being. None times. The allocation of space in the script makes it clear what is most important here, and it's not the students.
I will read the directions out loud as you read them silently just about as much as air travelers read the card in the seat-back pocket. I will ask you repeatedly if you have any questions, but of course by the time we get to those, it's clear that none of us is supposed to say or do anything that's not in the script.
I am supposed to tell you one bald-faced lie-- when looking at the scoring guides, the script makes reference to "professional scorers." That is a lie. There are no such people.
Sometimes I will use vocal inflection or facial expression to indicate that I am, in fact, a live human being and not a Borg-trained flight attendant. I don't know if that makes things better or worse-- is it sadder just to see the bars of a cage, or to see the face of the person shut in behind them?
It is hard to imagine an atmosphere more artificial and offputting. I imagine that for the youngest students it is the saddest, most alienating experience they have ever had. For some very young students I'll bet it is the first time in their lives they've found themselves in a difficult place with no friendly face to be found. When I was little I had nightmares about being lost in a store, unable to find my parents and surrounding by cold, distant strangers. If I were that young today, would I have nightmares about BS Tests instead?
It is all just one more reason that I doubt the validity of the test. Is this really the situation under which we think students will demonstrate their very best? Did test manufacturers stop just short of saying, "What if we left a Slim Whitman album playing full blast the whole time, and every fifteen minutes the proctor had to punch each kid in the face?"
I am not saying that the poor, fragile children need to be coddled through every test. But if I were setting out to discover exactly what my students knew and could do, this is not the first, or even the one thousandth, way I would think of going about it. The direction script is just one more indicator that there are many priorities in play here, and finding out what our students really know is far from the top of the list.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
I Should Support Charters
I'm a big fan of the opt-out movement when it comes to testing. I believe, in general, that it's better for people to have a choice, to be free to consider options. It would make a certain amount of sense for me to be a supporter of school choice in general and charter schools as an expression of that choice.
And yet, I am not a supporter of either-- at least not as currently proposed and practiced.
But I think any time one finds inconsistencies rattling around in one's head, intellectual honesty and a desire to live with as much integrity as one can muster demand that one considers what that inconsistency means.
So-- why am I a fan of choice, except when it comes to school.
Dishonesty about the cost
Choice and charter systems are currently constructed as a zero-sum game. In many districts, the charter system forces multiple schools to finance multiple systems with a pot of money that isn't even sufficient to finance a single system. This means that one school must be the loser, and charter policies are written so that the loser is always the public school. This system creates several problems.
There's a problem with rampant inequity-- students who most need extra support are left behind in public schools that have the least per-pupil ability to support them. Challenging application processes, targeted marketing, counseling out, and non-backfilling can all help insure that the public school becomes the holding ground for the students who most need help even as charters strip away the public school's financial ability to deal with them. And that's before we start to consider how a school climate is affected by the absence of the top-tier students.
The system is also unsustainable. Taxpayers funding multiple systems are essentially footing the bill for excess capacity spread over several schools. Schools have to cut programs so that they can have seats for students who may or may not show up on their doorstep. Furthermore, initial stages of a charter system work on a simple dynamic-- all charters drain their money from the public system. But as the market saturates, the charters begin stripping resources from each other. That adds to
System instability and impermanence
Market-driven systems pretty much demand a cycle of growing too much capacity followed by shucking off that capacity. In other words, a choice system is going to have closing schools as a regular feature. This never seems to stop surprising people, particularly when the closing is mid-year and unannounced.
A school should be a permanent feature of a community, not a temporary business venture. A school should not be a store in a strip mall, but a pillar of the community that is, in fact, paying taxes to provide exactly that. A commitment to operate a school should be "until the community decides to close it" and not "until the business owners decide it's not to their advantage to stay open." Schools should be married to their community for a lifetime, not hooking up for a hot weekend in Vegas.
Students
I actually can imagine a system that provided a selection of different school environments and emphases. Arts schools and science schools. Highly structured schools and loosely organized schools. I can imagine some cool systems built on schools that provided different sorts of fits.
But I don't imagine any of those schools having the ability to refuse or reject students. And I don't imagine any of those schools being allowed to short-change programs for students with special needs or English Language Learners.
The American public education system must never, ever, require students to settle for a second-class school, and our current charter system does exactly that. In fact, by giving Student A access to a supposed first-class school, most choice system condemn Students B through K to a second-class school in order to finance Student A's shiny education. One of the most damaging and ungenerous problems of the traditional system has been well-to-do parents who take the position, "I've got mine, Jack." Our new charter systems haven't changed that a bit; they've just created a new mechanism for indulging selfishness. Warren Buffet called this one exactly right-- if wealthier parents hadn't opted out of public schools, we'd have a far better public school system.
All schools must be ready, willing and able to take any student. Period. Our current charters by and large are not. Charter schools should provide unique and different educational experiences. Current charters are set up to do exactly what public schools do-- just with a more carefully-selected student body.
Marketing
Marketing eats everything, to the point that students are there to serve the school by getting scores that will help the school market. Plus, marketing wastes a ton of precious tax dollars.
Marketing will do to a choice and charter system what it did to cable TV-- drive every vendor to the middle in search for a broad and profitable customer base (leaving niche markets and low-wealth markets ignored and underserved). And any attempt to reduce the salient characteristics of a school to an easy ad slogan will yield no true or useful information to consumers anyway. Marketing leads us to things like schools that focus all their energy on test prep so that they can get high scores so that they can advertise high scores. That's not a good school, but it's a nice clear marketing strategy.
No chains
Local governance only. Local taxpayer accountability only. No schools where all policy decisions are made by people in an office in some other city. All taxpayers who have a concern about a school should be able to pick up a phone, dial a local number, and start a sentence with, "If you want my vote in the next election..."
No profits
Including not-for-profit profits. Never. No school should be pitting the educational interests of students against the financial interests of the operators. No school operator should be figuring out how to cut a theater program so that he can buy a second house in Boca.
Could I Support Charters
I have said on many occasions that I could support a charter system. But it would look far different than the system we have. Most fundamentally, it would be fully funded so that schools were not locked in wasteful stupid zero-sum battles over table scraps. But it would also be set up in order to provide the best, richest, deepest, widest education for all students-- not set up to provide maximum Return On Investment for hedge funders.
We got the system we have by answering the wrong question. This system does not answer the question, "How could we provide a better, richer, more effective education for all students in the community." It answers the question "How can we get our kids away from Those People?" and "How can we get our hands on a slice of that massive education tax dollar pie."
I have no doubt that a great charter system is theoretically possible. But that's not the system we got because it's not the system we tried to build. And that's why, right now, I am not a charter fan.
And yet, I am not a supporter of either-- at least not as currently proposed and practiced.
But I think any time one finds inconsistencies rattling around in one's head, intellectual honesty and a desire to live with as much integrity as one can muster demand that one considers what that inconsistency means.
So-- why am I a fan of choice, except when it comes to school.
Dishonesty about the cost
Choice and charter systems are currently constructed as a zero-sum game. In many districts, the charter system forces multiple schools to finance multiple systems with a pot of money that isn't even sufficient to finance a single system. This means that one school must be the loser, and charter policies are written so that the loser is always the public school. This system creates several problems.
There's a problem with rampant inequity-- students who most need extra support are left behind in public schools that have the least per-pupil ability to support them. Challenging application processes, targeted marketing, counseling out, and non-backfilling can all help insure that the public school becomes the holding ground for the students who most need help even as charters strip away the public school's financial ability to deal with them. And that's before we start to consider how a school climate is affected by the absence of the top-tier students.
The system is also unsustainable. Taxpayers funding multiple systems are essentially footing the bill for excess capacity spread over several schools. Schools have to cut programs so that they can have seats for students who may or may not show up on their doorstep. Furthermore, initial stages of a charter system work on a simple dynamic-- all charters drain their money from the public system. But as the market saturates, the charters begin stripping resources from each other. That adds to
System instability and impermanence
Market-driven systems pretty much demand a cycle of growing too much capacity followed by shucking off that capacity. In other words, a choice system is going to have closing schools as a regular feature. This never seems to stop surprising people, particularly when the closing is mid-year and unannounced.
A school should be a permanent feature of a community, not a temporary business venture. A school should not be a store in a strip mall, but a pillar of the community that is, in fact, paying taxes to provide exactly that. A commitment to operate a school should be "until the community decides to close it" and not "until the business owners decide it's not to their advantage to stay open." Schools should be married to their community for a lifetime, not hooking up for a hot weekend in Vegas.
Students
I actually can imagine a system that provided a selection of different school environments and emphases. Arts schools and science schools. Highly structured schools and loosely organized schools. I can imagine some cool systems built on schools that provided different sorts of fits.
But I don't imagine any of those schools having the ability to refuse or reject students. And I don't imagine any of those schools being allowed to short-change programs for students with special needs or English Language Learners.
The American public education system must never, ever, require students to settle for a second-class school, and our current charter system does exactly that. In fact, by giving Student A access to a supposed first-class school, most choice system condemn Students B through K to a second-class school in order to finance Student A's shiny education. One of the most damaging and ungenerous problems of the traditional system has been well-to-do parents who take the position, "I've got mine, Jack." Our new charter systems haven't changed that a bit; they've just created a new mechanism for indulging selfishness. Warren Buffet called this one exactly right-- if wealthier parents hadn't opted out of public schools, we'd have a far better public school system.
All schools must be ready, willing and able to take any student. Period. Our current charters by and large are not. Charter schools should provide unique and different educational experiences. Current charters are set up to do exactly what public schools do-- just with a more carefully-selected student body.
Marketing
Marketing eats everything, to the point that students are there to serve the school by getting scores that will help the school market. Plus, marketing wastes a ton of precious tax dollars.
Marketing will do to a choice and charter system what it did to cable TV-- drive every vendor to the middle in search for a broad and profitable customer base (leaving niche markets and low-wealth markets ignored and underserved). And any attempt to reduce the salient characteristics of a school to an easy ad slogan will yield no true or useful information to consumers anyway. Marketing leads us to things like schools that focus all their energy on test prep so that they can get high scores so that they can advertise high scores. That's not a good school, but it's a nice clear marketing strategy.
No chains
Local governance only. Local taxpayer accountability only. No schools where all policy decisions are made by people in an office in some other city. All taxpayers who have a concern about a school should be able to pick up a phone, dial a local number, and start a sentence with, "If you want my vote in the next election..."
No profits
Including not-for-profit profits. Never. No school should be pitting the educational interests of students against the financial interests of the operators. No school operator should be figuring out how to cut a theater program so that he can buy a second house in Boca.
Could I Support Charters
I have said on many occasions that I could support a charter system. But it would look far different than the system we have. Most fundamentally, it would be fully funded so that schools were not locked in wasteful stupid zero-sum battles over table scraps. But it would also be set up in order to provide the best, richest, deepest, widest education for all students-- not set up to provide maximum Return On Investment for hedge funders.
We got the system we have by answering the wrong question. This system does not answer the question, "How could we provide a better, richer, more effective education for all students in the community." It answers the question "How can we get our kids away from Those People?" and "How can we get our hands on a slice of that massive education tax dollar pie."
I have no doubt that a great charter system is theoretically possible. But that's not the system we got because it's not the system we tried to build. And that's why, right now, I am not a charter fan.
Whose Voice Is Heard?
The "ed reform" crowd has been working hard at dressing its corporate wolves up in the clothing of civil rights sheep. Charter schools, high stakes testing, and the destruction of teacher job protections have all been billed as some version of the New Civil Rights battle.
This is a wise and powerful PR shift for the reformsters. Unlike the sky-is-falling crises of other reformy sales pitches ("OMGZ! Our failing schools will soon make the USA economically subservient to Estonia!!"), civil rights issue are real. The problems of systemic racism and social injustice are real. The needs of poor and minority students and their communities-- those issues are real.
But as post-Katrina New Orleans has thoroughly demonstrated, you can use a real problem to promote a fake solution.
So how do we sort the policies and proposals, the reformsters and the shysters. How do we know if people work as true reformers and not, as Jitu Brown put it in Chicago at this year's NPE convention, simply colonizers.
The key question is simple: whose voice is being heard?
I don't mean whose voice is used to provide cover and camouflage. I don't mean the pretend plaintiffs for groups like Students Matter or the Partnership for Educational Justice; I mean the voices who are truly speaking, who are making the decisions, whose concerns are guiding the ship and calling the shots.
We can see the same old pattern playing out again and again. In Arkansas, Little Rock has become one more school system stripped of a democratically-elected school board by the state. In Massachusetts, the state ignored the voices of citizens in order to strip democracy from the Holyoke school system. I could get into the details, but at this point we have seen this story over and over and over again, from New Jersey to Chicago. In city after city, "reformers" have arrived to "help" by silencing the voice of democracy and community.
We use the Big Standardized Test to "prove" that a school system is "failing." Here are all the things we don't do next.
We do not offer this failure as proof that the state has failed to properly support and supply the school. We do not release additional funds and resources from the state to the local district so that duly elected school board members and local community members can best decide how to use the new support.
We do not bring together a group of stakeholders to ask them what they need to turn their school around.
We do not launch a drive to make sure that local stakeholders have the tools necessary to steer their schools to the solutions the community desires.
We do not hear politicians or policymakers or reformy astroturf groups say things like "We have no way of knowing what solutions are needed here, and we look to the community to take the lead and set priorities" or "It's most important that we develop a strategy that honors the democratic process and involves community members" or even "We want to be very careful to share resources with the community without trying to sell them something. These are human beings, families, and children-- not potential market fodder."
Instead, people from outside the community bring in other people from outside the community, and the voices inside the community are dismissed, ignored, silenced. Occasionally local folks are allowed to speak-- as long as they're the Right Kind of People and they stay on message.
"We are here to get you your civil rights, but you're going to have to shut up and do as we say." There is no context in which that is not some kind of absurdist baloney, and yet that is repeatedly the message of reformy "civil rights" activists. "The tests are a civil rights issue. The charters are a civil rights issue. We are here to help, but to get our help, you will have to stay silent, because we know better than you. We ARE better than you."
Any real reform will involve the vigorous pursuit of democratic processes and the active involvement of local voices. Any real reform will be driven by decisions made by the people there in the community. Any real reform will be focused on engaging, involving, and amplifying the members of the community-- not finding ways to commandeer or cancel elected school boards and other home-grown local leaders.
Giving people permission to speak is not an act of reform; recognizing their right to speak is. Treating them as honored guests is not an act of reform; recognizing that you are a guest in their home is. Here's a hint-- if the students of your community have to stage a sit-in to get a meeting with you, you are not a reformer.
"Shut up while I fix this for you. I will tell you what you need," is not the motto of the civil rights activist. It's the language of the colonizer, and it has no place in true education reform.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats.
This is a wise and powerful PR shift for the reformsters. Unlike the sky-is-falling crises of other reformy sales pitches ("OMGZ! Our failing schools will soon make the USA economically subservient to Estonia!!"), civil rights issue are real. The problems of systemic racism and social injustice are real. The needs of poor and minority students and their communities-- those issues are real.
But as post-Katrina New Orleans has thoroughly demonstrated, you can use a real problem to promote a fake solution.
So how do we sort the policies and proposals, the reformsters and the shysters. How do we know if people work as true reformers and not, as Jitu Brown put it in Chicago at this year's NPE convention, simply colonizers.
The key question is simple: whose voice is being heard?
I don't mean whose voice is used to provide cover and camouflage. I don't mean the pretend plaintiffs for groups like Students Matter or the Partnership for Educational Justice; I mean the voices who are truly speaking, who are making the decisions, whose concerns are guiding the ship and calling the shots.
We can see the same old pattern playing out again and again. In Arkansas, Little Rock has become one more school system stripped of a democratically-elected school board by the state. In Massachusetts, the state ignored the voices of citizens in order to strip democracy from the Holyoke school system. I could get into the details, but at this point we have seen this story over and over and over again, from New Jersey to Chicago. In city after city, "reformers" have arrived to "help" by silencing the voice of democracy and community.
We use the Big Standardized Test to "prove" that a school system is "failing." Here are all the things we don't do next.
We do not offer this failure as proof that the state has failed to properly support and supply the school. We do not release additional funds and resources from the state to the local district so that duly elected school board members and local community members can best decide how to use the new support.
We do not bring together a group of stakeholders to ask them what they need to turn their school around.
We do not launch a drive to make sure that local stakeholders have the tools necessary to steer their schools to the solutions the community desires.
We do not hear politicians or policymakers or reformy astroturf groups say things like "We have no way of knowing what solutions are needed here, and we look to the community to take the lead and set priorities" or "It's most important that we develop a strategy that honors the democratic process and involves community members" or even "We want to be very careful to share resources with the community without trying to sell them something. These are human beings, families, and children-- not potential market fodder."
Instead, people from outside the community bring in other people from outside the community, and the voices inside the community are dismissed, ignored, silenced. Occasionally local folks are allowed to speak-- as long as they're the Right Kind of People and they stay on message.
"We are here to get you your civil rights, but you're going to have to shut up and do as we say." There is no context in which that is not some kind of absurdist baloney, and yet that is repeatedly the message of reformy "civil rights" activists. "The tests are a civil rights issue. The charters are a civil rights issue. We are here to help, but to get our help, you will have to stay silent, because we know better than you. We ARE better than you."
Any real reform will involve the vigorous pursuit of democratic processes and the active involvement of local voices. Any real reform will be driven by decisions made by the people there in the community. Any real reform will be focused on engaging, involving, and amplifying the members of the community-- not finding ways to commandeer or cancel elected school boards and other home-grown local leaders.
Giving people permission to speak is not an act of reform; recognizing their right to speak is. Treating them as honored guests is not an act of reform; recognizing that you are a guest in their home is. Here's a hint-- if the students of your community have to stage a sit-in to get a meeting with you, you are not a reformer.
"Shut up while I fix this for you. I will tell you what you need," is not the motto of the civil rights activist. It's the language of the colonizer, and it has no place in true education reform.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
We Have To Do Something
You are walking down the street with a loved one when suddenly, a stranger in a white lab coat runs up hollering. "Oh my God!! You've got it!!" and shaking your loved one by the shoulders.
"What? What!??" you reply, slightly panic stricken.
"The disease!! The disease!!!" White lab coat replies. The hands now grab your loved one roughly and fling your loved on to the street. "We have to treat this right away," screams WLC. "Also, look at the terrible concussion," pointing to the spot where your loved one's head has smacked into the pavement and blood is now visible. Your loved one is now unconscious.
WLC kneels and starts pulling things out of a satchel. "Here! Quick! Shove these in there!" WLC is instructing you to shove bananas in your loved one's ears. "I"ll get started over here," says WLC, who then pulls out a hacksaw and starts to saw on your loved one's elbow.
"Wait at minute," you yell. "How is any of this going to help? Isn't it dangerous and stupid? Are you even a doctor?"
"Look," says WLC earnestly. "No, I'm not a doctor, and this probably isn't the best course of treatment, and I'm sure we can improve upon it later, but we have to do something!"
Or try this...
You and your family sit down to dinner, and the wait-staff brings out large bows filled with dirt.
"This looks like dirt," you say. "And it seems kind of sparkly. Who made this? Can I speak to the cook?"
One of the waitpersons speaks up. "Actually, I made that. I'm not actually a cook, but I've eaten a lot of food before. And the sparkles are the ground glass I put in it."
"What??!!" You exclaim. "But my family is hungry!"
"Look," says the waitperson earnestly. "I am sure that we will be making better food later and will totally improve on this. But for right now, we have to do something. So go ahead and eat your ground glass and later I'm sure we'll have figured out how to make you a juicy steak."
Or...
Adrift in a lifeboat, you notice that water is starting to leak in. You point this out to fellow traveler who immediately starts poking holes in the bottom of the boat. "What the hell are you doing?" you ask.
"Look," your fellow traveler says. "We have to do something!"
Look
The whole "Yeah, the Big Standardized Test still has some problems but I'm sure it will get better and in the meantime it's what we have and we have to do something" argument is a stupid argument.
Even if we accept "We have to do something" as a Real Thing (which it isn't, because the "crisis" is manufactured, but even if), it does not follow that an urgent Need To Do Something means that we must urgently Do Something Stupid.
If the treatment is damaging, don't use it. If the food is harmful, don't eat it. And if the test is a bad test that wastes time and money, makes the students miserable, damages the credibility of the school, and returns no useful data-- then don't give it!!
"What? What!??" you reply, slightly panic stricken.
"The disease!! The disease!!!" White lab coat replies. The hands now grab your loved one roughly and fling your loved on to the street. "We have to treat this right away," screams WLC. "Also, look at the terrible concussion," pointing to the spot where your loved one's head has smacked into the pavement and blood is now visible. Your loved one is now unconscious.
WLC kneels and starts pulling things out of a satchel. "Here! Quick! Shove these in there!" WLC is instructing you to shove bananas in your loved one's ears. "I"ll get started over here," says WLC, who then pulls out a hacksaw and starts to saw on your loved one's elbow.
"Wait at minute," you yell. "How is any of this going to help? Isn't it dangerous and stupid? Are you even a doctor?"
"Look," says WLC earnestly. "No, I'm not a doctor, and this probably isn't the best course of treatment, and I'm sure we can improve upon it later, but we have to do something!"
Or try this...
You and your family sit down to dinner, and the wait-staff brings out large bows filled with dirt.
"This looks like dirt," you say. "And it seems kind of sparkly. Who made this? Can I speak to the cook?"
One of the waitpersons speaks up. "Actually, I made that. I'm not actually a cook, but I've eaten a lot of food before. And the sparkles are the ground glass I put in it."
"What??!!" You exclaim. "But my family is hungry!"
"Look," says the waitperson earnestly. "I am sure that we will be making better food later and will totally improve on this. But for right now, we have to do something. So go ahead and eat your ground glass and later I'm sure we'll have figured out how to make you a juicy steak."
Or...
Adrift in a lifeboat, you notice that water is starting to leak in. You point this out to fellow traveler who immediately starts poking holes in the bottom of the boat. "What the hell are you doing?" you ask.
"Look," your fellow traveler says. "We have to do something!"
Look
The whole "Yeah, the Big Standardized Test still has some problems but I'm sure it will get better and in the meantime it's what we have and we have to do something" argument is a stupid argument.
Even if we accept "We have to do something" as a Real Thing (which it isn't, because the "crisis" is manufactured, but even if), it does not follow that an urgent Need To Do Something means that we must urgently Do Something Stupid.
If the treatment is damaging, don't use it. If the food is harmful, don't eat it. And if the test is a bad test that wastes time and money, makes the students miserable, damages the credibility of the school, and returns no useful data-- then don't give it!!
Monday, May 11, 2015
Arne Talks Pre-K; I Have Questions
Monday Education Secretary Arne Duncan was hanging out in a bilingual pre-school in Maryland and Lydsey Layton of the Washington Post was covering it because, reasons?
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
Duncan is unhappy with the speed of adoption of Pre-K. He has a whole shelf of the stuff, and people just aren't buying. He "unveiled" a new report (was he carrying it around prior to that all draped in a veil? what color was the veil? sorry, but sometimes I get to looking at words thinking, "What the heck." anyway, I guess that's why he was there and being covered-- so he could use children as a presser backdrop) from the National Institute for Early Education Research, a group attached to Rutgers that is not so much a research institute as an advocacy that uses research to support their position. Does anybody do research without deciding what they want the answer to be ahead of time?
Anyway, the report said only 29% of four year olds and 4% of three year olds are in pre-school.
Somehow, this is a surprise to Duncan. It has been many, many years since my children were three years old, but that's not long enough to make me imagine that I would have considered pre-school a worthwhile choice back then. Of course, as always, I am troubled by the nagging gut feeling that Arne really thinks that Those Poor Folks are the ones who need to get their children out of the home and into a pre-school ASAP.
Layton reminds us that the feds have been trying hard to get pre-K promoted to headline status in the ESEA rewrite. Duncan asked for full-out grants and got competitive grants instead (which, given the administrations previous deep wet-kissing-with-tongue love for competitive grants is some kind of poetic justice). But anyway...
And whether that bill eventually will be passed by the full Senate and the House and become law is unclear. And it is likely to make a small dent in a “tremendous, unmet need,” Duncan said.
See, here's one of my questions-- what unmet need? What exactly is the need that school for three year olds must meet? Because I'm deathly afraid that the "unmet" need is the need for three-year-olds to open their books and start studying calculus so they can take a Pearson-manufactured standardized test to measure their sentence-writing skills. In which case, there is no unmet need.
Duncan notes that it would take 75 years at this rate to kid all the children into pre-school. Arne's explanation for why things are moving slowly is, well, not a good one. “We need more resources. We need Congress to invest, to partner with states to expand access," he says. Yes, and the Edsel wasn't sold in enough car lots. And New Coke didn't have enough marketing support.
When people aren't buying what you're selling (or in this case, trying to essentially give away), doesn't that mean you need to look at your product and the market and ask yourself if you're not trying to sell something that nobody wants?
I'll admit to mixed feelings about pre-school. I am sure that there are many ways that it could be handled that would really enrich life for children and their families, but at this point, I feel in my bones that the USED would like to do pre-school in the wrongest ways possible, for all the wrong reasons, and do it badly.
But in the meantime, what Arne is complaining about is simply all those delightful and beloved market forces doing their thing.
The piece was not a total waste, however. Layton totally got a picture of Arne roaring like a lion. I'm pretty sure that was worth the trip to Maryland all by itself.
Nashville Schools Under Attack While Journalists Sleep
Over at Dad Gone Wild, blogger norinrad10 has been chronicling the various messes in the Nashville, Tennessee school scene. The latest news is not good-- one more example of a city in which entrenched media are part of the business community that is cheerfully working to dismantle public education.
Tennessee's Grand Experiments
Tennessee has long been out in front of the reformster wave, marking such dubious achievements as being the first state put a former TFA temp guy in charge of the state education system. Kevin Huffman did also mark some time as an education lawyer, but that and the two years of TFA temping were enough to rank him as one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters) and his commitment was strong-- when Nashville failed to approve a Huffman-approved charter expansion, Huffman took $3.4 million away from the school system.
Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network ofbusiness investment opportunities private charter schools?
Hurricane ASD landed initially on Memphis, with a business plan that is a little bit genius--"The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state." There will always be a bottom 5%. In fact, given even a tiny modicum of success, ASD will eventually get its hands on almost 100% of the schools as they all cycle through that bottom slot. More recently, ASD has worked on expanding into Nashville, and that is raising its own new set of issues.
Huffman, however, has moved on, gracefully jumping ship before he could be pushed off the plank. Late in 2014, his general incompetence and gracelessness had finally turned him into a large enough political liability to end his happy time as Tennessee Educhieftain.
Can't We Just Start Over?
Lots of folks in power had loved Huffman and thought he had the right ideas. But the whole Common Core discussion had exploded in a welter of hard-right anti-gummint much dislike, and Huffman's attempt to make every Tennessee teacher just a little poorer had not exactly won a lot of backing from that community, either.
So here comes the Nashville Public Education Foundation, a coalition of civic-minded folks that would really like to make a mark on public education as long as they don't have to A) actually talk to or deal with people who work in public education or B) work through any of those democratically-elected institutions. We've seen this kind of foundation before (I ran across it most recently in York, PA, when local businessmen decided that they really wanted to dismantle public schools without actually having to run for office or convince the general public to go along.)
Watch their scrolling bank of happy quotes and you'll see supportive words from Teach for America, the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, a former governor, a parent, a CEO, the school director, the country music association foundation, and -- wait? what! really??-- Ben Folds.
The Foundation has had its fingers all over Nashville education, and that foundation has decided that what the city needs is to RESET. What the heck is that?
The mission of Project RESET (Reimagining Education Starts with Everyone at the Table) is to elevate the conversation on education as we approach a vital time in Nashville’s history. Led by the Nashville Public Education Foundation, with the support of Nashville’s Agenda and media assistance from The Tennessean, Project RESET will set the table for a larger, communitywide conversation about improving Nashville’s public schools.
The event, lauded by charter operators around Nashville, is coming up at the end of the month. How much fun will that be?
Dogs and Rocks
You know the old Will Rogers quote: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while you look for a rock." Remember this any time somebody is acting diplomatically toward you. Don't listen to what they say; watch to see if they're looking for a rock.
The rock in this case is the Parthenon Consulting Group.
Look at their website. Look at this 2009 power point presentation about educational investment. Look at this paper about investing in KSA and UAE. Check out how this publisher lists them with other examples of Strategic Consulting Firms like Bain, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.
Look at what Parthenon had to suggest in Knoxville. Their suggestions there included cutting 300 people, which would create a big pile of money if teachers were paid as well as Parthenon consultants in Memphis (4 consultants per month = $350K).
What is blindingly clear is that when it comes to education, Parthenon is only interested in one topic-- how to make money at it.
If your landlord says he's called an outfit to come work on the problems in your building, and what you see pull up in front is a Demolition Specialists truck, you are the doggie. If you are a public school system and the Parthenon Group shows up to "help" you, you are the doggie. The Parthenon Group does not specialize in helping schools systems do a better job of educating students. The Parthenon Groups helps school systems turn into pieces that can be more easily replaced with profitable charter schools. (The Momma Bears have a great post about what Broad-style slash-and-burn looks like.)
Is anybody paying attention?
Well, no.
Scroll back up to the RESET quote, the one where The Tennessean is credited with providing "media assistance." You can peruse that site for glowing PR puff pieces in support of NPEF, with a big fat RESET logo on each one. Just yesterday they ran a super-duper article about how great it is that Nashville has Pre-K's doing academic instruction with four-year-olds. A ten-second google would have turned up ample evidence that such instruction is a terrible idea, but as we've recently seen in New Jersey, sometimes it's just more fun to promote what you're supposed to promote instead of doing actual journalism.
And that brings us back around to the post that originally sparked my interest.
I personally called Tennessean reporter Jason Gonzales to discuss his article and asked him point blank if The Tennessean had a sponsorship role in Project RESET. He emphatically answered no, they are just producing a series of articles on the Nashville education system. Articles that all bear the Project RESET logo and have been a mixture of negative and calls to put aside petty politics. You know, politics that call for an equitable system for all kids.... When I asked Jason if he thought that information surrounding the group conducting the study was relevant he answered with an equally emphatically no. The data from the study is important, he said, but not the conductors.
I don't know a thing about Jason Gonzales, but I feel perfectly comfortable calling him dead wrong. When the city zoo hires a consultant who specializes in selling rare animal pelts, that information is relevant. When a local business hires a consultant who specializes in closing businesses and selling off parts, that information is relevant.
And when the unelected body that has put itself in charge of revamping local education hires a consultant who specializes in closing public schools and turning them into profit-making private enterprises, that information is relevant.
Why all this now? Nashville gets a new mayor and a new school chief very shortly; think of it as big welcome pep rally for them. Nashville schools are definitely the doggie. Let's hope somebody steps up to protect it before the rock falls.
Tennessee's Grand Experiments
Tennessee has long been out in front of the reformster wave, marking such dubious achievements as being the first state put a former TFA temp guy in charge of the state education system. Kevin Huffman did also mark some time as an education lawyer, but that and the two years of TFA temping were enough to rank him as one of Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change. Huffman was a loyal Common Core warrior and was right at the front of the line to hand the feds the keys to Tennessee education in exchange for a NCLB waiver. Huffman never met a reformster idea he didn't like (evaluation to root out bad teachers, performance based pay, charters) and his commitment was strong-- when Nashville failed to approve a Huffman-approved charter expansion, Huffman took $3.4 million away from the school system.
Huffman also recruited Chris Barbic from Houston to come run the Achievement School District. The ASD was an attempt to see if New Orleans style public-to-private education conversion could be implemented without the fortuitous advent of a hurricane. Could human beings deliver that kind of destruction without the assistance of nature and create a network of
Hurricane ASD landed initially on Memphis, with a business plan that is a little bit genius--"The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the top 25% in the state." There will always be a bottom 5%. In fact, given even a tiny modicum of success, ASD will eventually get its hands on almost 100% of the schools as they all cycle through that bottom slot. More recently, ASD has worked on expanding into Nashville, and that is raising its own new set of issues.
Huffman, however, has moved on, gracefully jumping ship before he could be pushed off the plank. Late in 2014, his general incompetence and gracelessness had finally turned him into a large enough political liability to end his happy time as Tennessee Educhieftain.
Can't We Just Start Over?
Lots of folks in power had loved Huffman and thought he had the right ideas. But the whole Common Core discussion had exploded in a welter of hard-right anti-gummint much dislike, and Huffman's attempt to make every Tennessee teacher just a little poorer had not exactly won a lot of backing from that community, either.
So here comes the Nashville Public Education Foundation, a coalition of civic-minded folks that would really like to make a mark on public education as long as they don't have to A) actually talk to or deal with people who work in public education or B) work through any of those democratically-elected institutions. We've seen this kind of foundation before (I ran across it most recently in York, PA, when local businessmen decided that they really wanted to dismantle public schools without actually having to run for office or convince the general public to go along.)
Watch their scrolling bank of happy quotes and you'll see supportive words from Teach for America, the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, a former governor, a parent, a CEO, the school director, the country music association foundation, and -- wait? what! really??-- Ben Folds.
The Foundation has had its fingers all over Nashville education, and that foundation has decided that what the city needs is to RESET. What the heck is that?
The mission of Project RESET (Reimagining Education Starts with Everyone at the Table) is to elevate the conversation on education as we approach a vital time in Nashville’s history. Led by the Nashville Public Education Foundation, with the support of Nashville’s Agenda and media assistance from The Tennessean, Project RESET will set the table for a larger, communitywide conversation about improving Nashville’s public schools.
The event, lauded by charter operators around Nashville, is coming up at the end of the month. How much fun will that be?
Dogs and Rocks
You know the old Will Rogers quote: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while you look for a rock." Remember this any time somebody is acting diplomatically toward you. Don't listen to what they say; watch to see if they're looking for a rock.
The rock in this case is the Parthenon Consulting Group.
Look at their website. Look at this 2009 power point presentation about educational investment. Look at this paper about investing in KSA and UAE. Check out how this publisher lists them with other examples of Strategic Consulting Firms like Bain, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.
Look at what Parthenon had to suggest in Knoxville. Their suggestions there included cutting 300 people, which would create a big pile of money if teachers were paid as well as Parthenon consultants in Memphis (4 consultants per month = $350K).
What is blindingly clear is that when it comes to education, Parthenon is only interested in one topic-- how to make money at it.
If your landlord says he's called an outfit to come work on the problems in your building, and what you see pull up in front is a Demolition Specialists truck, you are the doggie. If you are a public school system and the Parthenon Group shows up to "help" you, you are the doggie. The Parthenon Group does not specialize in helping schools systems do a better job of educating students. The Parthenon Groups helps school systems turn into pieces that can be more easily replaced with profitable charter schools. (The Momma Bears have a great post about what Broad-style slash-and-burn looks like.)
Is anybody paying attention?
Well, no.
Scroll back up to the RESET quote, the one where The Tennessean is credited with providing "media assistance." You can peruse that site for glowing PR puff pieces in support of NPEF, with a big fat RESET logo on each one. Just yesterday they ran a super-duper article about how great it is that Nashville has Pre-K's doing academic instruction with four-year-olds. A ten-second google would have turned up ample evidence that such instruction is a terrible idea, but as we've recently seen in New Jersey, sometimes it's just more fun to promote what you're supposed to promote instead of doing actual journalism.
And that brings us back around to the post that originally sparked my interest.
I personally called Tennessean reporter Jason Gonzales to discuss his article and asked him point blank if The Tennessean had a sponsorship role in Project RESET. He emphatically answered no, they are just producing a series of articles on the Nashville education system. Articles that all bear the Project RESET logo and have been a mixture of negative and calls to put aside petty politics. You know, politics that call for an equitable system for all kids.... When I asked Jason if he thought that information surrounding the group conducting the study was relevant he answered with an equally emphatically no. The data from the study is important, he said, but not the conductors.
I don't know a thing about Jason Gonzales, but I feel perfectly comfortable calling him dead wrong. When the city zoo hires a consultant who specializes in selling rare animal pelts, that information is relevant. When a local business hires a consultant who specializes in closing businesses and selling off parts, that information is relevant.
And when the unelected body that has put itself in charge of revamping local education hires a consultant who specializes in closing public schools and turning them into profit-making private enterprises, that information is relevant.
Why all this now? Nashville gets a new mayor and a new school chief very shortly; think of it as big welcome pep rally for them. Nashville schools are definitely the doggie. Let's hope somebody steps up to protect it before the rock falls.
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