Opting Options

.@rweingarten Including the right to opt their kids out of public schools (and take the public dollars with them)?

— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) June 18, 2015

Language is funny-- it sometimes creates the illusion of parallels and conections when none, in fact, exist. I could say, for instance, that the fact that you order Chicken McNuggets is proof that you are lacking in bravery, that you are too chicken to stand up for what you believe in, or maybe that you are showing that you are rushing towards consequences, since you are paying for the chance to have the chickens come home to roost.

More than a few folks have observed that opting children out of the Big Standardized Test and opting children out of public school are two things that can be described by using the phrase"opting out." But there are some fairly important differences between the two options for opting.

First, the BS Test and public school are not equivalent. Public education, provided by and paid for by the community, is one of the greater goods upon which this country is built. The door swings both ways. In order for our democracy to function, our citizens have to possess some level of education. Also, as a democracy, we recognize every citizen's right to a full education-- we do not operate on the assumption that some people deserve a good education and other lesser people do not.

A BS Test, on the other hand, is not one of the greater goods at the foundation of this country. There is not even evidence that it is a lesser good, or even a fair-to-middlin' good. There's no indication that it is good at all. Certainly there is no argument to be made that, in order to participate in democracy, every citizen ought to take a standardized test. Nor is there no case to be made that every citizen needs to be tested in order to receive all their rights. "I could have really gone somewhere in life, if only I'd had the chance to take the PARCC," said nobody ever.

Public education is provided for the benefit of the individuals being educated, and it is provided for the benefit of society as a whole. BS Testing benefits test manufacturers.

Furthermore, opting out of the BS Test does not take anything away from anyone else. As currently structured, choice systems always strip resources from the public school for every student who "opts out." The loss to the public school is always in excess of the actual reduction in the public school's costs; ten students fewer does not equate fewer building expenses, fewer teachers, or less heat and light in the building.

I can actually imagine a system with multiple schools to choose from-- but that system only works if every school is fully funded. As long as we insist that we can fund one public school and three charters for the same total cost as one public school, choice will be a zero sum game, and public schools will be the losers. This means that every child who opts out of public school leaves the students in the public school with fewer resources. If Chris opts out, Pat is left in a worsening public school situation-- and Pat has no say in the matter.

Opting out of the BS Tests, however, affects nobody except the opt-outer. The testing experience of the students who are left behind is not affected. If Chris opts out, it doesn't change Pat's testing adventure in the slightest.

Finally, Petrilli is correct in saying that those are public dollars-- and a choice-charter system denies the public any say in how those dollars are spent. Granted, the democracy of elected school boards is sometimes problematic, and as with all political situations, some voices have to work extra hard to be heard. But that is still better than a choice-charter system where decisions are made by folks who don't answer to anybody.

So, no-- these opt outs are not the same. 

Sweden vs. Nevada

Folks who are excited about Nevada's joyful embrace of choice-on-steroids might want to take a look at Sweden.

As my esteemed colleague Edushyster reminds us, the all-choice system experiment has been tried. Sweden has been creating an all-choice, all-privatized system for decades, and it has not gone well.

"It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing." Andreas Schleicher, OECD.

I am going to keep repeating this line until it starts to sink in:

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

We have our own free-market education laboratory-- post-secondary education. As you may have heard, the cost of college has expanded like a hamster clamped onto a helium tank. There are a variety of suspects, all instructive.

One theory is that costs are driven up by the amount of money people have to spend. Student aid has been climbing, which has had the same effect on costs that you could expect if you went to a used car lot and announced, "Oh, I though I only had ten grand to spend on a car, but it turns out I actually have fifteen." (Hint: the salesman does not say, "Oh, put that extra five K away-- you won't need it for anything.")

Some analysts blame frills, like Schleicher's "shiny school buildings." Parents who drop their children off at schools far nicer than their own add anecdotal punch to this idea. Why do schools add frills? Because a frill is good, easy marketing, and because not all customers in the marketplace are driven by rational consideration of educational quality.

Other analysts have noted the increase in administrators. More money, more students, more facilities, more marketing = more people in charge.

All of this is predictable by the what I'm going to call the Jobs Effect, from an interview with Steve Jobs in which he observed that past a certain point, improving your product does not make you more money and at that point, the people who make a difference in the bottom line are the bean counters and marketters, and so those are the people who start rising through the ranks to run the business, leading to the point where product quality stops mattering and the company loses its way.

This seems to match what we find in Sweden. As a result of all-choice system, test scores plummet and gaps between the class-- well, Edushyster offers this quote from the Swedish education minister:

Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.

 It's kind of amazing-- here's an entire country that has done exactly what charter-choice advocates want to do in this country, and they've been doing it for years, and the results are clearly visible and visibly crappy. Yes, you could argue that Sweden is a different country with a different culture, but that sort of concern certainly hasn't kept reformsters from loving on China and Finland and Estonia. 

So let's not call Nevada's choice system an experiment, because it's no more an experiment than saying, "Hmm, I wonder if anything bad will happen if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for the next four decades." No, Nevada's new system is the same sort of willful denial as "I'm sure he'll really leave his wife this time" or "Clicking on the button the five-hundred-and-first time will make all the difference." And when it fails, the entire country of Sweden will be able to say, "We told you so."

Monsters

When somebody does something awful, my most immediate response is to wonder what was going on in their head that made that action seem okay. See, I believe that the vast majority of people try to do what they believe is right, what is in line with the rules for how the world is supposed to work. Even the most horrible acts are somehow, in their perpetrator's mind, okay.

Sometimes it's because that person's mind really is broken. When someone starts taking orders from the voice of Satan speaking through a dog, his perception of reality is so twisted that it's hard to imagine how he ended up in that dark and distorted place where it's okay to kill people you don't even know. But Son of Sam type killers are not the norm.

I don't think I believe in monsters. At least, I don't believe that monsters are somehow fundamentally different from the rest of the non-monstrous population. I think monsters are people who have found a way to see doing something monstrous as okay. And while I believe that each of us is ultimately responsible for our own choices, I also believe that as a culture, we grease the downward path to certain dark conclusions.

Humans are hardwired against killing other humans, and so the first step toward killing someone else is to see that person as not-a-person, not really human. A person, of course, is someone like me, someone who thinks, feels, reacts, believes as I do. Not-persons act out of some other set of impulses and motivations that I cannot comprehend.

Our culture is depressingly adept at labeling not-persons. Our entertainment narratives repeatedly hammer home that persons are white guys, and women and not-white guys are persons to the extent that they come close to the white guy. Our politics have become heavily infected with the idea of Betters and Lessers, and the notion that poverty is simply proof that some persons are less person-like, less possessed of the qualities that Real Persons have for rising above. "If I had been born into poverty," goes the formulation, "I would have just worked hard and pulled myself out of it. The way Those People are acting just goes to show that they lack some of the basic qualities of Personhood."

But when we add the view of not-person to a sense of grievance, bad stuff happens.

Slate's Jamelle Bouie has a piece about the history of rape accusations as justification for racist violence, both inside and outside the halls of justice. But while grievance can attach itself to the belief that there is some clear and present threat, it can also attach itself to the idea that I'm being kept form getting what I deserve.

Murder by Angry White Guy has its own set of common characteristics. And it's worse than you think, because even as various outlets are putting up galleries of White Guy Murderers from the past few decades, there are I-don't-even-want-to-think-about-how-many more.

You've probably don't recognize the name George Sodini, but in 2009, he walked into an LA Fitness in a Pittsburgh neighborhood and killed three women, including one of my former students. Jody was in my honors class as a junior. She was a standout basketball player, smart, and very personable. She could have been a standard-issue high school Queen Bee, but she had a warmth and kindness that most people responded to. She played ball in college, became first a physical therapist, then a medical equipment saleswoman. She was 37 when Sodini ended her life.

Sodini killed himself that same morning. Afterwards, his online journal was discovered, and it was the same old damn shit. On Obama's election, he wrote "Amerika has chosen The Black Man" and bemoaned how "dem young white hoez dig da bruthrz." He complained how he hadn't had sex in nineteen years and women just kept rejecting him, which was their fault. He planned the shooting for months, but kept losing his nerve. There was a life he was supposed to have, but somehow these Not-Persons were keeping him from it. So he went to the gym and killed three of them.

And that's just one of the however-many of such Angry White Men that didn't quite score big national press.

Should we call them terrorists? The word itself has a relatively short history. Run a search on google ngram, and the word barely appears before World War I, takes a small jump at World War II, then starts to climb through the sixties until it leaps upward in the late seventies, drops in the early eighties, and then begins a roar to prominence in the late nineties.

We haven't really had a lot of time to think about what we mean when we use the word. The connotation is often something along the lines of "A not-person who wants to hurt me for no good reason." Which would explain why we rarely call Angry White Men murderers terrorists. But if a terrorist is someone who strikes out at members of a group, treating them as proxies for the larger group-- particularly if his goal is for the members of the larger group to live in fear-- then these guys qualify. Dylann Roof is a terrorist.

I'm not sure what that designation gets us, exactly, other than forcing folks to question why some killers are "troubled" and others are "evil" or "thugs."

I don't mind if we want to call them "monsters" as long as we ask ourselves some questions about what laboratory hatched them. This does not not not NOT excuse someone like Roof from responsibility for his actions. But in the wake of this terrible act, we need to ask about "the system, the way of life, and the philosophy" that made these murders seem okay to Roof. Ironically, that requires us to see him as a person in the same way that he evidently would not see Black persons.

As teachers going forward, this is a reminder of why we have to call out any and all actions and attitudes that foster a view of some human beings as not-persons. We have to charge our students to see other people as fully human. It is one of the most fundamental purposes of education-- to become fully human ourselves and in doing so, to see what is fully human in the folks we share the planet with. Where the system treats anybody, any group of people, any category of human as less-than-human, that system must be called out. Treating people as not-persons is not wrong just because it opens the door to murder-- it's wrong for so many more reasons-- but the fact that it opens the door to murder is a sign of just how wrong it is.

PA: Assault on Public Ed Advances

You may recall that State Senator Lloyd Smucker has been trying to sell the idea of an Achievement School District, and that he even brought some charter-choice advocates to town to help push the idea. Well, his initiative has made it out of the concept-and-hearings stage and is now an actual bill.

Senate Bill 6, the Educational Oppportunity and Accountability Act, would amend the school code to establish an Achievement School District, a state-run body that would take over local school districts. If you're wondering if this process would be politicized, here's how the seven ASD board members would be selected-- One by the Governor, two by President Pro Tempore, two by the Speaker of the House, one by Minority Leader of the Senate and one by Minority Leader of the Senate.

The ASD board would appoint an executive director who would have the power to "transfer an eligible school" to the ASD as well as the ability to authorize a charter school.

It gets worse.

The ASD has the power to convert any school under its jurisdiction to a charter school. It has to establish criteria for such conversions "consistent with national standards" which-- what? What national standards? Exactly what national standards for public-to-charter school conversion are we talking about here?

Every year the ASD must do at least one of the following to at least five (but no more than fifteen) schools in its jurisdiction:

     * Replace the principal and at least 50% of the staff
     * Contract with a nonprofit or for-profit management entity to operate the school
     * Convert the school to a charter
     * Close the school and transfer the students to some high-performing school
     * Open a new charter school and give priority to students in the area

How can schools become "eligible" for this great treatment? Three ways:

     * Ranking in the lowest 1%  SPP rating for two consecutive years starting in 2013-2014
     * A school that qualifies as an "intervention" school for three straight years starting 2013-2014
     * Or 50% of the parents can pull the trigger

The first is particularly tasty, because there will always be someone in the bottom 1%. Pennsylvania could have the most awesome schools in the world, and there will still be a bottom 1%. Ka0ching, charter operators! And for those of you non-Pennsylvanians, the SPP rating is a tasty goulash of test results, VAM-soaked baloney, and fun pay-for-play features like Number of Students Who Take the SAT. If you do the math, though, the SPP is about 90% test results, and could easily be replaced by simple running the poverty numbers for the district.

Pennsylvania School Boards Association put out a position paper at the beginning of the week. They have a pretty good grasp of the situation:

PSBA strongly opposes Senate Bill 6. Not only does it entirely remove the elected school board from operational decisions of a district school, but it requires the district to pay the bill for charter tuition costs for resident students that are transferred to new privately-operated charter schools converted or created by the ASD.

Yes, Smucker's legislation privatizes everything except the bill for all this privatizing poopfest-- that bill is still delivered directly to the taxpayers who no longer have any say over what happens with their tax dollars or their school system. But if the ASD sets up a charter in their town, they still have to pay for it even as they have no say over how that charter operates.

Smucker ran a construction company before entering politics and heading to Harrisburg. Some of what he's said about the bill doesn't match up with the official summary-- most notably he's said that help and resources would first be available for the bottom 5% of schools, which matches up with the 5% number popular with ASD fans.

This is privatization at its most naked, an undisguised plan for removing local control and replacing it with taxpayer-funded profiteering. This bill should offend lefties (corporate profiteering and abandoning commitment to public education) and righties (complete loss of local control). It's just bad.

As of June 15, the bill has been passed by the education committee and has been re-referred to the Appropriations committee. Feel free to contact Senator Smucker, and if you are PA resident, please contact your elected representative. This bill is a direct assault on public education, and it should never, ever become law.

Summer Opportunity

It's time for the beginning of summer break. That means a time of opportunity for teachers, ranging from the personal to the professional. But the greater availability of teachers also means that summer is a time of opportunity for policy makers and education deep thinkers.

Even policymakers and edubiz advocates who want to involve teachers in the Ed Conversation (yes, I think there are such people) can find it challenging to do so during the school year, because those of us who teach are busy doing our jobs. Simple ways of connecting and conversing that work in the private and government sectors ("I'll just pop in to your office for an hour or so tomorrow afternoon to go over the details") do not translate at all to the teaching world ("I think I can take five minutes out of lunch to run those forms up to the office"). Lobbyists and thinky tank types take long working lunches while first grade teachers go seven hours without peeing because they don't have the time. Legislators hold hearings about education, but no teachers are there because they are working (and if they do take a personal day to be there, they may wait in vain an entire day to speak).

Much has been made of the Media Matter study showing that only 9% of evening cable shows about education included educators as guests. I have no doubt that the 9% reflects a common belief that teachers are not worthy experts when it comes to speaking about education. But I also wonder how much the 9% is influenced by the need to tape segments during the day, or the need for a guest to be in a studio at a late hour on a school night. I've had that conversation and had to tell a booker that, no, I can't even do a quick fifteen minute phone segment because at that time I will be helping fourteen-year-olds tell the difference between adjective and adverb clauses.

This has always been the disadvantage for teachers with legislators and policy makers. While a teacher is busy doing her job in a classroom, a lobbyist is being paid to be available to talk to Important People on any day at any time. Perhaps this is part of why so many policy makers don't seem to love us-- they hear, "I don't have time to talk to you because I'm doing more important things, like collecting lunch money from seven-year-olds." It's possible that teachers are accidentally triggering legislators' sad memories of withholding parents who were always "too busy."

But summer is different. Summer offers opportunity for communicating across the gap between teachers and the creators and pushers of policy.

Teachers can (and should) channel time and effort into contacting their elected representatives. Tell them what you think about the various assaults of testing and evaluation and charter takeovers and the rest of the mess of reformsterism. Do it on a regular basis. If it's hard to get everything you want to say into one email or letter, write twelve. Call them up. Make sure that policy makers have every opportunity to hear your voice.

Teachers can (and should) take the time to read up on issues and learn about the policy discussions going on. I am still astonished at the number of teachers who just don't know much about what's happening, who know that something's going on that is making their job harder, but they don't know what's being done, by whom it's being done, or where it's being done. The days when teachers could ignore policy and politics and stay happily cocooned in their classrooms are gone. If we're going to advocate for our students, we have to understand the forces arrayed against them and us.

Meanwhile, reformy advocates could reach out to teachers. Not carefully vetted, pre-selected, chosen for their willingness to agree with policymakers teachers, but actual working teachers who aren't necessarily fans. Read the blogs. You don't have to agree with them, and you don't have to like them.

But when people are being honestly and sincerely critical of you, the very least you can learn from them is how your work is coming across. Communication is not just about what you said; it's about what they heard. Reformsters have the opportunity to get a very clear picture of what public school advocates hear them saying. All that's necessary is some listening.

Folks can even reach out across the gulf. As my esteemed colleague Jennifer Berkshire has noted, some public ed advocates and some reformy folks do share some things-- a passion about education, a frustration with large lumpen bureaucracy, even an inability to shut up about the topics. It is always a mistake to assume that the people who disagree with you do so because they are greedy, stupid, or evil. In this day and age, it is child's play to reach across the divide with a tweet or an email. During the summer, teachers have the time for that sort of thing. People who are sincerely interested in doing something about US education should take advantage of a chance to contact real experts in the field.

Every summer of my career, I've made it my business to try to Learn Stuff. It is a great opportunity, a real privilege that I have as a teacher. Now more than ever, it's an opportunity that all of us should be taking advantage of.

Jurassic Education World

Like apparently over half the world's population, we saw Jurrasic World last weekend. Fun film, and we always love the Chris Pratt at our house.

But as with last year's Lego Movie, I could not help noticing that the film underlines how much of popular culture is actually NOT aligned with the values and ideals of reformsters.

Data Driven Control

We know that our female lead is in need of rehabilitation because she is devoted to data. She calls the animals "assets" and cannot bring herself to see them as living, breathing beings. When asked by the owner if the park's visitors and the park's animals are happy, she replied with a customer satisfaction index for the visitors and, flustered, notes that they don't have an instrument for measuring the contentedness of the dinosaurs. The owner says one has to look the creatures in the eyes-- she doesn't understand what he's talking about.

Her unfit nature is further underlined by her inability to relate to her nephews. The character's moral journey involves learning to empathize, to relate, to connect to the children and the animals through something other than data and monitors and spreadsheets.

Beyond that character's journey, we have the usual moral of everything ever written by or based on works of Michael Chrichton-- that human beings invariably put way too much faith in their tools and control (seriously-- it's in everything he's ever written). The data control dream is that if we know everything, we can control everything, and if we control everything, we can make everything turn out exactly the way we want to. The film underlines the inherent falsehood in every clause of that sentence: we can't know enough, knowledge does not bring control, and the chaos inherent in any complex system guarantees unexpected and unplanned for outcomes.

Our unfit, morally adrift park manager is just like a data-driven school reformster, certain that spreadsheets and data are sufficient to turn a school into a factory that creates perfect products (aka students). And the pop culture sees that character as one who must be reformed.

Competition

The closest thing to a villain in the piece is Vincent D'Onofrio's military stooge, the guy who wants to use the barely-trained raptors as a military weapon. But the filmmakers don't position him as an actual official soldier. That would be perhaps unclear to the audience, so they leave him in civilian dress, and rather than talking about power, the writers give him a speech about competition.

The speech strikes all the notes we know-- competition will bring excellence, it pushes folks to greatness, it kills off and weeds out the weak and unfit. And the audience knows he is absolutely a bad guy (also, that he will be eaten by a dinosaur before we're done).

The idea that competition is to be worshiped as a means of Making Things Better, even if people must be sacrificed along the way. We understand that this is glorifying a system over individual creatures, and the character's death is not just a sort of narrative revenge on a bad guy, but an earned irony-- the character is so blind to the human cost of such a competitive that it never really occurs to him that he might be part of that cost.

Competition fans always like the view from a thousand feet up. It's when competition gets up close and personal that it becomes ugly.

Pop Culture Love

It's not like this movie is the only one to include these ideas, but it certainly is going to be one of the biggest ones in a while. And there on the billion dollar, the pop culture underscoring accents what everybody already knows-- deifying data and competition over basic humanity is bad. Not just bad, but the mark of a bad person who needs to be either redeemed or eaten.

Many people really are on the side of public education. They're just slow to realize that charter-choice data and competition fans are selling the same baloney that the movies reject.

Magical Magical Standardized Tests

We have become accustomed to teacher essay about magical Common Core Standards. "I used to stumble about my classroom drooling and pummeling my students with rote reading rocks until I discovered Common Core, and now I use reading and writing and thinking in the classroom which is awesome because no teacher ever thought of that before ever."

Well, now we're getting Magic of Standardized Tests Essay. Huffington Post has an essay from Teach Plus KIPPster Chris Hoffman about how deeply invaluable standardized tests are to his classroom practice, because with ESEA being discussed we need to remember how important Big Standardized Tests are for every student, every year in order for corporate profiteers to keep pulling in that sweet sweet tax money students to learn. (It should be noted that this was back in March, but somehow I missed it. It still cries for response.)

Hoffman's piece is short on words but long on baloney.

He begins with the story of Alex, a student that Hoffman saved by the power of testing. Alex was actually pumped full of two years worth of learning in just one year, and that reminds us once again that you can't actually measure learning in years, but okay. How did testing help Hoffman perform this feat?

Well, before Alex even entered the classroom, Hoffman checked out his standardized test results.* This means one of a couple of things:

1) Hoffman is playing fast and loose with the term "standardized test," because no BS Test that I low of gets results back to teachers before the next school year starts. So Hoffman is talking about some in-house standardized test, which is not at all what ESEA reauthorizers are talking about.

2) California, where Hoffman works, has a speedier turnaround on BS Tests than anyone else I've heard about which, hey, would not be the first time I didn't know something.

3) KIPP schools start in November.

Now, Hoffman acknowledges some limitations:

While these tests never paint a complete picture, they give me a great start. I am able to identify struggling students and make immediate efforts to remedy their skill and knowledge gaps. In the case of Alex, I was able to meet with his parents before the start of the school year to ensure support at home.

Seriously-- you need BS Tests for this? Do you not identify struggling students by talking to their previous teacher, who has  whole year's worth of data and personal first-hand information. Is KIPP's grade reporting so weak that it won't identify struggling students? How can that even be? Do the grades tell you what you need to know ("Hey, Alex got a 75 last year-- Alex must be struggling") or do they not reflect anything important ("Hey, Alex got a 95 last year, but the test shows Alex is struggling"). I mean, this is a KIPP school-- I thought you guys had a coherent carefully integrated program. Does it not give you consistent and reliable information about students? Is your school not small enough to allow teachers to communicate directly? And are you telling me that if not for the standardized test results, you would not have bothered to contact Alex's parents?

Hoffman says that talking to the parents clued him in to Alex's need to have a low-distraction seat in the classroom, and that's great-- but how do we give the standardized test credit for that. And once again, wouldn't that sort of information come easily through staff communication? Don't KIPP teachers talk to each other?

Hoffman makes the case for "every year" by admitting that a single test is just a single data point, so it could be an outlier. But hey-- three data points going into fourth grade. That would totally clarify the picture.

I fear that without yearly testing teachers would lose the perspective provided by a longitudinal view of their students.

Longitudinal picture my Aunt Fanny. Do KIPP teachers not give assignments and grades and stuff? Do they not talk to each other?

It looks like they do, because Hoffman's next paragraph paints a pictures of KIPP teachers in team meetings poring over BS Test results to find blind spots in their curriculum. So KIPP teachers do talk to each other.

Identifying a student's strengths and weaknesses, tweaking individual instruction, getting holes in the program filled in-- these are all perfectly good goals. What Hoffman and the other acolytes of BS Testing consistently fail to do is show why standardized testing is the best way to accomplish any of these goals. Even if I accepted that the tiny little sliver of bad data generated by these lousy tests did have some actual utility, I can still think of a dozen easier, cheaper, more accurate, just plain better ways to accomplish these goals.

But there are two problems with a solution as simple as having teachers talk to each other and share their regular classroom data from the year (because, yes, classroom teachers generate and collect and analyze their own data every minute of every day-- not just one time a year).

Problem number 1: Testing companies don't make money from teacher-generated data

Problem number 2: It's hard to keep teacher-generated data consistently available when your business plan depends on burning and churning staff every year.

But Hoffman's piece (which was apparently part of a weeklong onslaught) is a reminder that the test manufacturers are still working hard to get their product cemented into school law. Those of us who know better need to keep speaking up.

*Okay. In the comments section we learn that yes, CA does get tests back before school starts, but that schools haven't been giving tests long or consistently enough for his point to make sense.