Which Choosey Choosers Choose the Choices?

I respect reform advocate Andy Smarick for his willingness to consider some of the problems that come with the reformster movement in education. Yes, he steadfastly advocates for choice and charters, and yes, I think he's wrong about many things. But he wrote a long series of posts about the inherent tension between conservative values and conservative support for reformy stuff (here's my response to one of them), and he was a practitioner of respectful and reasonable dialogue before reformsters decided that it would be a good PR move.

So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.

Democracy vs. School Choice

Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.

The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.

In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it

In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools.  Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?

Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.

I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.

Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.

You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?

The School Governance Question

In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?

The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.

We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.

It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system. 

Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart 

If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).

Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:

...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.

But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.

The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other. 

The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate. 

Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.

When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).

Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.

One last great moment from the interview

Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?

Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics. 

 
 

Reading Is Good For You

Above the door to the chamber in which King Ramses II of Egypt kept his books was written what is, apparently, considered to be the world's oldest library motto:

House of Healing for the Soul

Now here comes the New Yorker this week to remind us that bibliotherapy is a thing.

The article hangs itself on the hook of Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, a pair of bibliotherapists associated with the School of Life, a school headquartered in London that is...well, not traditional in its focus but does not appear to be run by a bunch of wastrelly hippies, either. The article's author, Ceridwen Dovey, describes being given a session with Berthoud as a gift and the ensuing email conversations that led to Berthoud recommending a list that ran from The Guide by R. K. Narayan to Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.

The notion that reading can be therapeutic is not a new one, and its practice goes back to pretty much as long as we've been able to write down words. The 1800s saw it adopted as a more common treatment approach, and the term "bibliotherapy" was coined in an article for the Atlantic in 1916. Within the next decade, there were training programs for it at Western Reserve University and the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. Reading was a prescribed treatment for veterans of the Great European War.

The fact that reading can make you feel better, can help you sort through issues, can provide a perspective that enlarges and strengthen your mind and spirit-- this is not exactly news to those of us who, as Dovey puts it, self-medicate with reading. Most of us can point to a person in our lives who directed us to the right book at the right time to get us over a particular bump in the road, or who found a work that just opened up our brain in new and exciting ways. I can point to certain corners in my life and identify them by a work that helped me navigate the fork in the road, and I have a shelf of books that I reread as a means of sort or recalibrating myself. It's all very personal and touchy-feely, I suppose, but its real.

But look through the reference section of the Wikipedia entry, and you see entire scholarly books about it (Rubin, R.J. (1978). Using bibliotherapy: A guide to theory and practice. Phoenix, Oryx Press.) along with scholarly articles, including at least one published in the Journal of Poetry Therapy.

Is there science behind any of this? There is some evidence that bibliotherapy helps in treating self-harm, OCD, drug abuse, and (unsurprisingly) insomnia. The article gets very excited about mirror neurons, brain cells that have probably been seriously overhyped, but which suggest a mechanism by which humans can "learn" from experiences they only observe. And we have several recent studies to suggest that show a connection between reading fiction and a strengthened sense of empathy. 

It's further proof that we've arrived someplace strange and a little sad that it takes all this noise to argue that reading is good for you, that a good book can broaden the mind, deepen the heart, and lift the spirit. But it's still nice to read something in the popular press that doesn't see reading as an act performed by students in small bites on standardized tests.

 

Pearson Wants To Check Your Glasses

You just can't make this stuff up.

Pearson VUE is the division of the massive corporation that actually delivers tests to a computer screen near you. They are, for instance, the folks who handle the actually administration of the GED, but they also handle nursing exams and many financial industry clients.

But you don't stay on top of that industry without being on top of things. So here's a new policy that came out in a February circular from Pearson VUE:

Pearson VUE upholds a high level of security for safeguarding the testing programs offered by our exam sponsors. To maintain this high level, we are continually evaluating our technology and processes to ensure that we are adequately addressing existing and emerging security threats. New technology advancements in eyewear, such as Google Glass, camera glasses and spy glasses,and the availability of this technology have been identified as security risks. 

As a result, we conducted a pilot to improve our processes to visually inspect candidate eyeglasses during the admissions process and created specific training on how to identify eyeglasses with built-in technology. The purpose of the pilot was to field test the change in process for visually inspecting all candidate glasses for built-in technology.

Yes, the next time you go to take the GED, you'll have to present your eyeglasses for inspection (though the test administrator is not to actually touch them) to determine that you are not using any spywear. 

No sign yet that we'll be imposing similar security measures on students taking the PARCC, but I am now officially not going to be shocked when it happens. Because when you're protecting something as precious as proprietary test information, you just can't be too careful.

Walker's Education Fairy Tale

Yesterday, Presidential Candidate and Occasional Governor Scott Walker took to the pages of the Des Moines Register to pat himself on the back. His arm was not the only thing getting twisted.

Walker opens with one of the standards of the anti-teacher movement-- the story of a fine young teacher who won a first-year-teacher-of-the-year award and was then furloughed at the end of the year.

Why would they get rid of a new teacher like Sampson — especially in Milwaukee, which was one of the most troubled urban school districts in the nation? Well, under the old union contracts, the last hired was first fired.

In 2011, we changed that broken system in Wisconsin. Today, the requirements for seniority and tenure are gone. Schools can hire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means they can keep the best and the brightest in the classroom

Sigh. First of all, as the husband of an excellent teacher who has just been furloughed because she's the one of the least senior teachers at her district, I think I have a good grasp of just how much that royally sucks. (A lot, is the answer. It sucks with the suckage of a thousand black holes.) But there are three things wrong with Walker's "solution."

First, Sampson (and my wife) didn't lose her job because she was last hired. She lost her job because the state failed to adequately fund her school district, so they decided they'd solve the problem by cutting teaching staff.

Second, the whole empty two-part premise of Walker's solution is the existence of an instrument for measuring which teachers are best and brightest-- and that administrators will use it. But we have no such instrument. VAM and its various forms have been debunked long after the cows came home, ate supper, and turned in for the night. Walker's tiny stack of lost-their-job youngsters is a molehill next to the mountain of tales about excellent teachers whose ratings were crappy.

But of course the efficacy of the measuring stick only matters if someone picks it up. In Walker's universe, teachers can be fired for any reason and paid whatever you feel like paying them. Which means even the best and the brightest can be fired at any time. Which means that--

Third, what good does it tell a young teacher, "Don't worry. You won't be fired just for being the newest," when the next part of that conversation is, "But you could be fired at any time during the entire rest of your career, for any reason. In fact, every raise you get will draw a slightly bigger target on your back. And if you cross the wrong administrator, you'll learn what a (career) killer schedule looks like."

But Walker wants you to know that crushing the unions and destroying teaching as a lifetime profession is totally working. "Scores are going up," he says. "At pretty much the same rate they're going up everywhere else, which is about the same rate they were going up before the current round of reformy foolishness," says anybody who can read the data.

Walker winds up with a plug for choice and local control. As always this is an interesting one-two punch since more choice always seems to equal less local control, because choice is composed of charters that are not controlled by or accountable to the local community. Newark and New Orleans are loaded with choice-ish programs, and yet there is also zero local control.

But mostly Walker wants you to know that he's agin Common Core. This, too, makes an interesting combo with the whole "best and brightest" teacher rating business, since every big teacher-sorting system we have at the moment rests on a big Common Core test. Perhaps Walker is following Chris Christie in demanding that all students be tested on the standards that they are forbidden to be taught.

Walker also supports "moving the money out of Washington," whatever that means. And more vouchers.

It's easy to dismiss Walker as a Koch tool, a bland slice of public-education hating white bread. It's easy to dismiss him until you look around and what he's up against in the GOP. And when we stack him up against the dems-- well, he's more overtly anti-teacher than Hillary, but on choice and charters, I'm not sure I see a heck of a lot of difference between them. This fall's Presidential election is looking worse and worse for public education every day. (Oops-- correction: I mean NEXT fall. It's just that the campaign feels like it's already really in gear.)

Showing Up

Teaching is a relationship, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up.
Take it from a previously-divorced guy. You cannot maintain a relationship through proxies, in absentia, on autopilot, or by wearing a big, thick mask. You have to be present. You have to be honest. You have to show up.

Many teacher-reforming ideas trip over this simple truth.

Attempts to "teacher-proof" classrooms by using carefully constructed lessons and word-for-word scripting are attempts to make showing up irrelevant. Whoever shows up in the classroom, the reasoning goes, the lesson will go on exactly the same. But teacher-proofing a classroom is like husband-proofing a marriage, trying to come up with some set of rules so that it won't matter who shows up to fill the husband role, the marriage will work just fine. That's crazy talk. If the teacher doesn't really show up as a living, breathing human being, students cannot be engaged.

Likewise, I doubt the usefulness of computer-based learning. Certainly for limited amounts of drill or simple instruction, a computer screen works as well as a book. But if there is no context of a relationship to go with it, nothing happens. I can imagine a day when something might-- after all, readers enter relationships with the works that they read. But that's because the authors enter their own works as living human voices. The default in computerland is still to create an inhuman, person-free voice, and when it comes to relationship, that will always make a better barrier than a door.

I don't mean to suggest that we show up in the classroom like a raw exposed nerve or searching to have our own needs met. It is still a teacher's role to be a responsible, professional adult.
But we have to be honest. We have to be available. We have to be present. We cannot be effective with messages such as "I would be honest with you, but we have to move on with this lesson plan" or "I'm not going to be open to what you have to say because it's not on my script."

Showing up, really listening, really looking, speaking honestly-- these are all the most fundamental way we show that we care. To follow the script or the mandated pacing plan is to send the message, intentional or not, that we don't really care about our students or what is going on in our classroom.

This is the scary challenge that some teacher wanna-be's can't bring themselves to face. I remember still the moment during student teaching when I realized that I could not just keep the important parts of myself locked safely away from the classroom, only to be used when I was out of school. Not if I ever wanted to be any good. I would have to listen-- not just pretend to listen or try to construct some proper but artificial response. This is one of the reasons that we can all use the down time of summer-- it is hard to be in a classroom when you aren't sure how to be in the world.

One of the fatal flaws of almost every teacher reform program is an soul-strangling inauthenticity, a desire to have the teacher perform certain tasks almost by remote control, without actually showing up in the classroom.

But by showing up, by being our actual selves (still, mind you, grown up professionals), and by being present with our students, we actually model for them a whole approach to life. And we model courage. Because hiding behind a mask sends a message of, "Don't go out there-- it's not safe," but walking out into the world, head up, eyes wide, tells them that the world (even this little classroom corner of it) is a place where they can thrive and grow and more fully be themselves. The most fundamental thing we all teach is how to be more fully human in the world, and to do that we must be present, in a relationship with the world and the people in it.

We must show up.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Atlanta Superintendent Deeply Confused

Dr. Meria Castarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, thinks everyone is completely misunderstanding the situation.

APS has just announced the slashing of eighteen band and orchestra teachers from the elementary school system, and possibly the funding for those programs as well (the reportage on the latter is a little fuzzy).

That news spread pretty quickly, and Dr. Castarphen took to her personal blog to offer an explanation. Kind of.

Yes, eighteen positions were cut. That was just part of a district "right-sizing" (lordy, but I just live for the day that some boss announces "right-sizing" as an explanation for hiring more people). This right-sizing included cutting 368 positions, including a chunk from the central office. But cutting music?! No!! Well, maybe. Sort of. Yes.

In our cluster planning and our move to a new operating system, APS has given clusters and schools more freedom and flexibility to choose how they staff their schools in order to meet the specific needs of their students. This includes the decision about which arts and music instruction to offer students.

For example, if principal A observed high interest in band over orchestra in their elementary school, that principal could choose to enhance the band program and remove the orchestra program. If principal B saw a growing interest in visual arts, principal B could decide to invest more in visual arts, eliminating band and orchestra. If principal C was interested in enhancing band and orchestra programs, principal C could choose to increase school class sizes in order to offer a more robust fine arts program.

See, even if the school doesn't have a band program. It could be taught by, I don't know, pixies, or regular classroom teachers on their lunch hours, or traveling street musicians who were coaxed into the building. Because students can be taught to play instruments, particularly as beginners, by pretty much anybody.

Maybe students will get really interested in a band, which I suppose could happen despite the fact that they have no band or band teacher in the building to pique that interest-- maybe they'll read about bands in books or see some compelling band music on tv or those same instrument-teaching pixies will visit them in their sleep.

Also, please note that middle school and high school band and orchestra are not being cut. Nosirree. They will still be there, thriving despite the fact that students will arrive from the elementary school without any knowledge of playing in a music ensemble or playing an instrument. Because middle and high school programs don't depend on feeder programs in the elementary at all.

She tried to clarify her position in other interviews

"That doesn't mean you eliminate programming because you eliminated a positon. You can still do the programming with one person instead of two people," said Carstarphen. "We allow those teachers and those principals to still offer band and orchestra as part of their design if they are able to do it with what they have as a student population, available resources and the interest of the school."

See? They can have a music program. Just not with enough qualified teachers or resources. We aren't taking the puppy to the pound-- we just aren't going to feed it ever, and you can still keep it once it's a dog.

Oh, yeah. And she's in charge of converting Atlanta to an all-charter system. You can read their whole presentation and application for charter status here.

Reading her plaintive pleas for understanding, I could only think of one question--

Is this woman really that clueless?

It doesn't seem possible; in her blog post, she identifies herself as an oboe player. An oboe. The kind of advanced (and expensive) instrument that students generally move onto only in high school after they have mastered a more standard instrument in elementary and middle school.

I mean, there are only two possibilities here. Either she doesn't understand the implications of these cuts, or she understands and she's trying to lie and bluff her way past this.

There are limited clues. Castarphen was hired just a year ago, to replace the superintendent who replaced the superintendent who presided over the Atlanta cheating scandal. When Castarphen was hired, "embattled" turned up often as a descriptor of APS. Previously Castarphen led the Austin school system for five years, a system twice as big as Atlanta's. According to some sources, Atlanta pursued her; but her Austin contract had not been renewed and would be running out now. In 2012, district leaders "admonished" her to build better relationships with staff, parents and community. In fact, she was the only candidate the board brought forward after a process some called "opaque."

In Austin, Castarphen came under fire for a "closed leadership style" and "there are those who believe Carstarphen's hard-charging methods are aimed at bullying people to get her way." That stood in contrast to her defense of No Child Left Behind as a program providing necessary transparency. "And that's at the heart of what the spirit of the law is about: Transparency. Are we doing the job or not?

Before Austin, Castarphen was head of St. Paul Public Schools, where critics accused her of a combative style (the word "bullying" turns up again) and over half the administrators there in 2006 when she arrived left before her departure three years later.

Castarphen's teaching routes go back to teaching middle school Spanish. Studied at Tulane, Harvard. Affiliated with ETS, Council of Great City Schools.

I don't see it. Maybe it's just not her style to say, "We are strapped for cash, and as much as I hate to cut any program off at the knees, I've decided that instrumental music is going to take a gut shot so we can try to save the district." That might have been more honest, but I suppose it would have invited debate, and Castarphen doesn't seem to be a fan. Of course, she now finds herself embroiled in a debate about whether or not musical yetis riding on unicorns will keep Atlanta's music program alive and well. She probably should just stick to a debate about reality.  

Upon arriving in Atlanta, she told staff, "You're going to work harder than you ever have before. But we'll try to make it fun, we'll try to make it exciting and we'll try to make it rewarding."

My Question for Hillary

I'll keep it brief.

Candidate Clinton has indicated in talks with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia that she will absolutely listen to teachers. That's a great promise, but let me pare that down to a more direct question.

Last year, after years of failed administration education policies, the NEA general membership called for the resignation of Arne Duncan.  So here's my question:

If you had been President, would you have required the resignation of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education?

Okay, I realize that's a little in-your-face and involves some hypotheticals (such as, would you have ever appointed the guy in the first place), so let me ask a question, because I really want to understand how your administration would represent a break from the destructive policies of the past two administrations:

If you had been President for the past eight years, and knowing what you know now, how would your education policies have been different from the policies that we've actually had?

Please, please please please PLEASE, be specific. Talk about the ESEA rewrite or Common Core or financial incentives for states. But tell us something. If you had been our President for the past eight years, how would US education have been different. Because-- and again, I'm not sure if you get this-- education policy for the last sixteen years has not been good for public education in this country.

I await your response.