A Voucher By Any Other Name

The New York legislature is getting ready to look at Education Tax Credits again. I know this because advocates are busy pushing it on twitter, including and most especially the Catholic Schools of New York. "We need your help to pass the education tax credit," they declare.

How does a education tax credit work? (These things have been around forever.) Simple, actually-- say we're giving a tax credit of $500 and you owe $2,000 in taxes this year. You send your child to an approved private school. Voila-- you owe $1,500. The government is going to give you $500 to help pay for your child's private schooling.

If you're thinking, "Well, that sounds pretty much like a voucher," you are correct. It is pretty much like a voucher. Here's Andy LeFevre, director of ALEC's education task force back in 2008.

"Tax credits have become popular in many states and are looked at in a little more favorable light in states than vouchers," said LeFevre. "And it's something that unions have a much harder time fighting against than a voucher program. I think they realize that the end goal is the same as a voucher; it's just a different way to come about it."

Catholic Schools of New York concur. They like how things worked out with a similar program in Florida, where the program now generates half a billion dollars in revenue for Catholic and private schools--er, I mean, a half a billion in scholarships for the students.

New York's initiative is so exciting it has its very own website at investined.org. (No doubt they meant to get "investinpubliced.org" but it just wasn't handy). The site declares boldly that "every child deserves a quality education" because that's a pretty controversial position to take. There's a nice Cuomo-centric video reminding us that ETC provides scholarships for "low and middle-income students." So many glowing happy pictures that you would think thousands and thousands of poor kids will finally get to attend private school.

Let me predict how many poor students will get to attend private schools because of ETC.

None.

That $500 figure above in my example? That's not hypothetical. That's the proposed credit. Five hundred dollars. Enough money to buy a couple of books or a uniform or two. It is not enough to make private school a possibility for families that could not otherwise afford it. However, if every family already attending a private school gets $500 and kicks it into the private school kitty-- ka-CHING!

In a crazily cynical charmingly conciliatory gesture, the architects of the bill have also included tax credits for public school teachers who buy supplies ($200 max, or as elementary teachers like to call it, "September").

Oh wait-- did I mention this:

Individuals and businesses can receive a tax credit for up to 75 percent of their donations made to not-for-profit organizations that award scholarships to private and out-of-district public schools based on financial need of the students’ families.

So tax credits to support rich folks who funnel money to private schools.


Clearly this is a bill that is All About The Kids and not in any way a method of diverting tax dollars to private and religious schools-- it's a way to divert tax dollars to people who divert dollars to private and religious schools, which is a totally different thing. I may not be able to give you twenty dollars to run down and buy me some beer, but I can give twenty dollars to my buddy who can give you twenty dollars to run down and buy me some beer. Totally different thing.

The website investined.org is not just informational. It is an advocacy site, with tools for emailing your legislator to push the bill. I would never tell you to go gum up that process with off-message emails. But if you want to tell a buddy to do it, I'm totally cool with that.

The First Hurdle

Watching a roomful of students slog through Pennsylvania's algebra-flavored Big Standardized Test today, I'm reminded of one of the many flawed assumptions of test promoters.

Before you can compile the test answers, before you can crunch the numbers and sift the data and build your house of test-driven cards-- before you can do all that, you have a first hurdle to fling yourself over.

The students taking the test have to care.

Of all the bizarre, imaginary scenarios that test-promoters believe, this is perhaps the most reality impaired: a room full of sixteen year olds coming to school and thinking, "Boy, I cannot wait to do my very best on these. I can think of nothing more important to me right now than making sure that the state and federal government have accurate data about the kind of job my school is doing."



All discussions of test-generated data start with the assumption that the students were really trying, that they really wanted to do the very best that they could. I do not know where that assumption comes from. I can't help noticing that while many reformsters are parents, very few are parents of teenagers.

People often act as if teenagers are mysterious, otherworldly creatures. I've spent my entire life around teens, and I can tell you the secret to understanding them-- they are human beings. That's it. Teens are essentially rough cut version of their adult selves with some impulse control and long-term vision issues. But they're just people.

So imagine the following scenario. At work, you are periodically required to complete a series of tasks. These tasks are not really related to your usual job, and what connection they do have is only to a very small sliver of your total job. Performing these tasks does not help you do your job better, nor does it help your supervisor lead you. The tasks themselves are long and boring and require your actual work to come to a halt for days at a time. There's no benefit at all to doing really well; you just need to do well enough so that you can be done and get back to your regular work.

I would present you with a clearer analogy, but there really isn't anything like BS Testing in the adult world. Maybe when you have to go on line and watch one of those workplace slide shows and take an idiot quiz at the end (True or False: Stealing equipment from the office is okay.)

In that situation, do you imagine that you are trying your hardest, doing your best, or caring at all?
Test promoters have spent so much time pushing PR about the high noble valuable purposes of the BS Test that they've convinced themselves that students believe it, too. They do not.

In fact, getting older students to take any test seriously has always been one of the challenges of school (for the littler ones, who would eat fried weasel brains just to make the beloved Miss Othmar happy, motivation is less of a challenge). The entire institution is organized to coerce students into telling us what we want to know. You can't "pass" this course unless you try on this test. You can't "pass" this grade until you "pass" the course. This is why that smart-ass smart kid drives some of her teachers into a rage-- they all know she's not trying at all, but they don't have enough leverage to get her to really care about doing her best.

A small sub-industry of BS Testing has sprung up. Pep rallies. Bribes. Threats. Up the road, an administrator hauled all of students into an auditorium just to berate them for their lackluster test efforts. Occasionally, there's success-- the SAT and ACT command fear and attention because students are convinced that Big Things are riding on the test results. This is why BS Tests are destined to be high stakes-- because it's the only way we can think of to make students at least pretend to care.

And if the students don't care, the data aren't there.

Behind the test results are not students intent on showing The State what they know, but students with a hundred other thoughts in their mind, and not one of them was "Boy, this is really important."

The BS Tests offer nothing relevant or beneficial to students, and our older students are perfectly capable of seeing that. The flop-sweaty pep rallies and super-secret swears of silence just underline that the whole exercise is a waste of their time, and guess what-- teenagers don't react any better to having their time wasted than anyone else.

You can say that it's my job to fix that, my job to convince them that the BS Test is Valuable and Important and they should totally care, that because I have the classroom relationship with them, I have the juice to make it happen. But the very first step in that relationship with my students came last fall on Day One, when I promised them several things including 1) I would never willingly waste their time and 2) I would never lie to them.

So here we sit, stuck at the first hurdle, a room full of teens calculating just how much effort and care they can afford to throw at what appears to be a pointless waste of their time. I wish very test-touting reformster who ever tried to sell the data as being True and Real and Valuable had to sit here with me and actually watch these students take the test. Better yet, I wish those reformsters had to apologize to my students for wasting their time.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Joy, Data and Jumbo Shrimp

Sir Michael Barber is the Big Cheese of Pearson (Motto: All Your School Are Belong To Us), and he recently decided to celebrate Oxymoron Day by delivering a speech entitled "Joy and Data."

While that speech spurred some twitter snark, nobody who wasn't actually in the room ever got to hear it. Barber is like that; he doesn't seem to feel any impulse to get people to like him, agree with him, or praise him. It's hard and foolish to judge from out here in Ordinary Shmoe Land, but don't think that will stop me-- Barber seems like a man who is so powerful, and so sure he's right, that he's not going to waste time trying to justify his ways to anybody who doesn't actually matter.

And Barber's ways are big. Big. His premise, as unloaded in a few different papers, is that if we could collect all the data, we would know everything, and we could predict everything and control everything. We just need all the data.

We do not, however, have all the data about his speech. So we have to depend on what slipped through the tweeterverse.

Barber is aware that not everybody sees the beauty in this relentless cataloging of everything. Quotes the tweeterverse:

There's a tendency to see data and evidence...in conflict with joy and spontaneity.

Well, yes. When Knewton, a Pearson data-grabbing group, describes how collecting data would let them tell you what breakfast you should eat on test day, that seems like a spontaneity-killer.

Valerie Strauss has collected some tweets from Jenny Luca highlighting some of the key points. None of them are encouraging.

The future of education will be more joyful with the embrace of data. Also, don't get things wrong-- the data does not undermine creativity and inspiration, nor does it tell us what to do, nor does it replace professional judgment. And I don't even know how to link to all the places where Pearson has contradicted all of this. I would be further ahead to find links to Jeb Bush condemning charter schools and Common Core. But you can try here and here and here and here.

If we lump all of Pearson's visionary writing together, the picture that emerges is a Brave New World in which every single student's action is tagged, collected, and run through a computer program that spits out an exact picture of the student's intellectual, emotional and social development as well as specific instructions on exactly what the teacher (and, in this Brave New World, we're using that term pretty loosely) should do next with/for/to the student to achieve the results desired by our data overlords.

And here's the scariest thing about Barber. One idea keeps popping up, as in this closing thought from Pearson's 2014 paper on the digital ocean--

Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right.

What I see every time I read Barber is a man who is not following a business plan or a power grabbing plan or even just a money-making scam-- this is guy who seems to feel he is following a moral imperative to Make the World a Better Place. That's what's scary-- you cannot reason with a religious fanatic who is intent on remaking the world according to his own vision.

Yeah, the worst thing about a Barber speech centered on Joy and Data is not that he might be making some cynical marketing ploy or a cheap PR bid, but that for him, those two things really do go together.  

A Great Teacher Story

The Sunday Theater section of the New York Times featured a fun angle on the Kristin Cheneworth vs. Kelli O'Hara competition for this year's Tony-- a visit from the woman who taught both of them in college.

The Oklahoma City University website lists Florence Birdwell as "a force of nature." She has been teaching voice-- musical theater and opera-- for decades. The woman started teaching in 1946. She is 90 years old.

The NYT writer watched some teaching sessions. Birdwell is a great source of quotes.

She turned and addressed the class. “Anytime you make your voice more important than the words, you lose it and the audience knows it,” she said. “They don’t understand why, but they’re just waiting for it to be over.”

A 2008 interview says this about her:

Drawing on the disciplines of metaphysics, philosophy, math, technique and practical insight, Birdwell is a professor of voice who shapes students into stars. 

But a thread that seems to run through Birdwell's teaching is the idea of getting out of your own way. Her own path was not clear, nor did it unfold according to plan. In that same 2008 interview, she talks about finding her passion at age 8, screaming wordlessly into a canyon. But when she was 24, an infection in her pharynx ended her dreams of being a singer. In the NYT, here's how that story goes:

“I had a wonderful voice, and I lost it,” she said. “My teacher said, ‘You can’t sing, but you sure can talk.’ ”

Birdwell talks a great deal about honesty. When telling the Times about her teaching philosphy: “Be more honest!” she said. “You have to open up a little bit of your insides. You have to learn about yourself as a person.” When speaking to NewsOK:

The hardest thing is absolute honesty. You have to work it out and think about it and deal with it. Which things are you going to put first? Who do you want to please? What are you trying to achieve in life? It has to be your own inner power that takes you and decides these questions. You have to do it for yourself and not for anybody else, otherwise you give too much in too many different ways and you cheat yourself.

Cheneworth, talking about Birdwell in an interview with ChicagoPride:

She not only taught me to sing technically, but taught me to sing from the soul about what a song actually means.

Don't sing it if ya can't mean it!

Yes, Birdwell teaches the technique, the breathing, the control. But like all good and great teachers, she teaches her students how to be more fully themselves, how to be in the world, how to connect to something that both fulfills and transcends who they are. The NYT focuses on her star pupils, but I have to believe that there are a whole raft of non-famous non-Tony-nominee former students out there who are enjoying richer, fuller lives because they crossed paths with this force of nature. Isn't that the kind of teacher we would all like to be?

Standards: Agreements and Assurances

When we talk about standards, we are really talking about two different things-- and only one of them is real.

Agreements

For a while it was in vogue to compare educational standards to manufacturing standards like the standards for electrical outlets.

Those sorts of standards represent an agreement-- the interested parties come to an understanding that in order to play together successfully, we will all agree to play by the same rules. These agreements do not always come easily-- while the AC power that flows into all our homes may now seem like a no-brainer, it is, in fact, the victor of the War of Currents, a battle over whether US homes would be powered by AC or DC power. Think also VHS vs. Betamax, HD vs. Bluray, and Microsoft vs. Apple operating systems. Think about how many various charger cords you have for electronic devices; standards don't always get worked out.

When they do get worked out, it's a matter of folks saying, "Let's make it easier to play together by all driving on the right side of the road" or "Let's make it easier to make money by all using the same currency" or "Let's keep refusing to use the metric system."

Some times the terms of agreement can be dictated by power players. If I control the game, then you must agree to my rules if you want to play. "We control access to the North American continent, so if you want a piece of the action, you must build your railroad cars to our agreed-upon gauge." Microsoft and Apple have not set universal standards, but they dominate the market so effectively that they can dictate the terms of agreement for anyone who wished to play in their sandbox.

Folks who want to set the terms of agreement have two basic avenues open to them-- seduction or force. Seduction has been the preferred method in game platform wars-- "Buy our console and you will get to play the awesome new game Robotic Beavers Disembowel Ninja Cowboys" on the front end and "Create a game for our platform and you'll make a gazzillion dollars" on the back end.

Seduction works best with quality (Betamax) or opportunity to profit (VHS), but when you don't have either going for you (asbestos removal), you need brute force. That would be the part where John D. Rockefeller bludgeons the rest of the oil industry into economic submission, or the part where Wall Street makes sure that the standards for ethical and responsible behavior set by the feds do not actually forbid unethical and irresponsible behavior.

The architects of the Common Core Standards used seduction successfully with industry insiders ("Pearson, this is going to make you so rich") and tried hard to wrap their product in Robes of Excellence (Thanks, Fordham), but ultimately they had not fully reckoned with the millions and millions of end-users of their product who were unwilling to enter a standards agreement either way. That led to the use of brute force (Race to the Top, waivers, and the installation of Core-enforcing goons in state capitals). But sensing that was a long bridge to cross, the CCSS-pushing forces also tried to portray the Core as the other type of standard.

Assurances

People love standards because every standard is a promise-- Do X and you will be sure to get Y.

Do this and you will be sure to get rich. Do this and you will be sure to get a spouse. Do this and you will be sure to get great children. Do this and you will be sure to go to heaven.

There are folks out there making small mountains of money writing books that make these claims. People want to know what rules to follow to get the outcomes they want from life. The marketing genius of the Core (and all its attached education programs) is to say to parents and legislators, "If your kids do this, they are sure to go to college and get a good job."

Standards as assurances appeal to the human desire to Know What To Do. They promise a clear future, with clear choices leading to the desired outcome. And they are completely imaginary. All standards of this sort are completely imaginary. Nobody can tell you exactly what you have to do to become successful or have a happy spouse or rear perfect children. At best, people can tell what has often worked for many people of a certain type under certain conditions at some times in the past. But none of that guarantees that any person who follows those standardized steps will be certain to arrive at the same destination. Insisting that life be whittled down to just the narrow path described by such standards does guarantee that you will miss a great deal of what could have been good and rich and rewarding in your life. You will be the person throwing away diamonds because your rulebook told you to look only for gold.

Promising that following these standards will make every child college and career ready is codswallup. It's baloney. We don't even know what "college and career ready" actually means, and we certainly don't know a set of steps to follow that will bring every student to that place. Collapsing education (and life) down to a single narrow path is for cowards and fools. It's trading the richness of life for the empty promise of a guaranteed future, a promise on which no standard can deliver.

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day, there can be no doubt that I live in a small town.

I get up, put on my band uniform, and walk up town to City Hall, where my friends and I in the marching version of our 159-year-old town band grab our hats and our music and get ready to march down the main street (it's named Liberty Street in my town). My brother, sister-in-law, and wife all play in the band; some of the band members are among my oldest friends in the world, and some are former students.

We march down the main drag and end at a tree-covered city park, where folks gather on the grass for a Memorial Day program. Wreaths are laid on crosses, one for each war. The names of all the veterans who died in the last year are read aloud, followed by an honor-guard of local vets firing off a salute, followed by taps (played by two trumpet players, standing in opposite corners of the park, one playing as an echo of the other). You can hear the last echoes of the trumpets fade into the sounds of birds and passing traffic.

There's always a speaker and a speech that may veer off into "next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth" territory, but I can't get offended by any of it. The list of the dead always includes families, and sometimes individuals, whom I know, and I can't help thinking that whether the war was fought in a good cause or a bad one, these are people who did their duty as best they could understand it, even at the risk of life and limb. 

It pops me back to a conversation I had with a teacher at an end-of-year gathering Friday night. We were talking about how younger teachers aren't so involved with union leadership, and he said that it may be in part that some people aren't fighters, that they don't want to make enemies. That may seem like a wimpy reason to my big city brethren and sistren, but here in small towns, it's a part of contract negotiations and strikes and battles over the schools-- the people we sit across a negotiating table from are also literally the people next door, the people we sing in church choir with, even the people we're related to. In small town politics there is no such thing as going at someone unrestrained with both barrels blazing as if we'll never have to face each other again. 

So I get the "let's not make enemies" concern. But I've had the same concern myself, back in my union president days, and I already knew the answer before he expressed the concern-- sometimes you already have enemies, and the only question is whether or not you are going to stand up to them.

Memorial Day, for me, is a reminder that you don't always get to choose your battles. Sometimes you battles choose you. 

After the ceremony in the park is over, my wife and I walked home, walked the dog, graded some papers, took a nap. Then we walked over to my in-laws, because I live in a small town and on a day like today, I can conduct all my business without ever getting in a car. The in-laws grilled some food, we face-timed my sister-in-law in Hawaii, we talked about Stuff, and then my wife and I headed home. 

In the end, Memorial Day also reminds me that I am extraordinarily blessed/privileged/fortunate (pick the one that suits your belief system), the recipient of many advantages and benefits that I haven't really earned. Even my battles are privileged ones--  I know that a year from now nobody is going to be talking about how I died in the service of my country or my cause, nor will I have died because I had the misfortune to be seen as threat requiring a lethal response. 

In a way, one of my privileges/blessings/fortunes is that I get at least one more year that a bunch of other folks do not. Memorial Day reminds me not to waste it, to try make good choices, to try not to sleepwalk through it. I live in a small place, a place I'm firmly rooted to, and yet in the last year, I've become more closely connected through this little box to a larger, wider world as well, and been given a chance to use my voice in that world. We are living through interesting times, as many generations before us have. Whatever gifts, battles, blessings, weaknesses, flaws, and struggles have come to me, I want to try to rise and meet them with whatever I have that might be of use. I am not a big deal, and I will not change the world. But none of the people whose names were read today were world-changing titans, either. They just did what they felt they needed to do, and I'm pretty sure that's a plenty tall order all by itself.

   

The Testing Circus: Whose Fault Is It?

Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, a reformster-filled thinky tank, took to the pages of US News last week to address the Testing Circus and shift the blame for it explain its origins.

The ridiculous pep rallies? The matching t-shirts? The general Test Prep Squeezing Out Actual Education? That's all the fault of the local districts. In fact, Rotherham notes, "a cynic might think it's a deliberate effort to sour parents on the tests." Yes, that's it-- the schools are just making all this up in an attempt to make the public think testing is stupid.

Reformsters have been doing this a lot-- trying to shift the blame for testing frenzy from the policy makers and the reformsters pushing testing policies onto the local teachers and districts. In a video that I cannot, for some reason, link, John White, education boss of Louisiana, argues that it's local tests from teachers and school districts that are muddying the testing water, and so every single test deployed in a classroom ought to come under the control and direction of the state. Or we could go back to Arne Duncan et al suggesting that we need to trim back "unnecessary" tests, which turns out to mean tests developed on the local level.

It is hard to see this working. Can we really mollify Mrs. McGrumpymom by saying, "We know that your child really hated the PARCC and found the whole experience stressful and useless, so we're going to have her teacher stop giving those weekly spelling quizzes. All better, right?"

As with Arne Duncan, who continually seems just oh so mystified about how schools could possibly have gotten so worked up over testing, the reformster mystery here is this: do they really not understand what they've done, or do they understand and are just unleashing the lamest PR campaign ever?

Rotherham blames the Testing Circus on three factors.

First, he thinks it's a matter of capacity. But his explanation suggests that he simply doesn't understand the problem.

What elementary schools are asked to do is daunting though not unreasonable. Getting students to a specific degree of literacy and numeracy is challenging but it can be done. 

Bzzzzrtt!! Wrong. Elementary schools were not asked to get students to a specific degree of literacy and numeracy. They were commanded (do it, or else) to raise test scores, and that is what they have devoted themselves to. Achieving a specific degree of literacy and numeracy might help with that goal, but only if the test is a good and valid measure, and that topic is open to debate. On top of achieving the specific degree etc, students have to actually care about the test to the point that they try. Test advocates love to assume this as a given, and they are fools to do so. If I walk into your workplace and assign you a difficult task that seems unrelated to your actual job and which will have no effect on your rating or performance review, exactly how hard will you try?

It is not the reading and numeracy level that is the goal. It is the test score. Test advocates can pretend those are the same thing, but they are not. Schools can hang tough and refuse to start with pep rallies for the tests-- or they can recognize that the nine-year-olds who will decide their fate will do a better job if someone convinces them to try.

Second, new tests. Rotherham repeats a version of a new talking point that makes no sense. The new tests are causing turmoil, stress, and  even low scores. These tests are more challenging because they test awesome things like critical thinking and consequently, they are impervious to Test Prep. However, students will do better as everyone gets used to the test. So, the new tests have nothing to do with Test Prep, but students will do better as they are better Prepared for the Test.

Third, new technology. One point for Rotherham, who pretty much admits that making everybody take the test on computer was a bad idea. But I'm going to take the point back because he does not acknowledge that the decision to do so was not a local or classroom foul-up, but a mandate pushed from the highest level of reformsterdom.

Rotherham is correct to argue that some schools have gone berserk on the Testing Circus and some have quietly avoided it. He would like to use this to assert that the Testing Circus is not inevitable, and there I don't think he has a point.

Some states have put more weight on the Big Standardized Test than others. On the local level, some superintendents and principals have gone whole hog on testing and some have done their best to tell teachers, "Just do your job and let the chips fall where they may.'

But Rotherham et al cannot ignore that some pretty big chips are falling. New York teachers are looking at fifty percent of their professional rating coming from test scores, and they are not alone. Nor did states decide to roll test scores into teacher evaluations on a whim-- that 's a federal mandate of Race to the Top and/or NCLB waivers. And all of us the teacher biz can hear the hounds in the not-very-great-distance calling for those same teacher ratings to be used to decide pay and job security.

Nor can Rotherham ignore that some states are invoking considerable punishment for low test scores, using low scores as an excuse to declare that a school is "failing" and must be turned around, replaced, bulldozed, or handed over to charter operators.

Reformsters seem to want the following message to come from somewhere:

"Hey, public schools and public school teachers-- your entire professional future and career rests on the results of these BS Tests. But please don't put a lot of emphasis on the tests. Your entire future is riding on these results, but whatever you do-- don't do everything you can possibly think of to get test scores up."

I have no way of knowing whether Rotherham, Duncan, et al are disingenuous, clueless, or big fat fibbers trying to paper over the bullet wound of BS Testing with the bandaid of PR. But the answer to the question "Who caused this testing circus" is as easy to figure out as it ever was.

Reformy policymakers and politicians and bureaucrats declared that test scores would be hugely important, and ever since, educators have weighed self-preservation against educational malpractice and tried to make choices they could both live with and which would allow them to have a career. And reformsters, who knew all along that the test would be their instrument to drive instruction, have pretended to be surprised testing has driven instruction and pep rallies and shirts. They said, "Get high test scores, or else," and a huge number of schools said, "Yessir!" and pitched some tents and hired some acrobats and lion tamers. Oddly enough, the clowns were already in place.