The Terrible Choice

For much of our history, Americans have operated under a simple premise-- we will educate other people's children.

Educating your own offspring is an old idea; human beings have done it for most of history. This has had many implications. You can't teach your own children things you don't know. If you're not wealthy (or even wealthy-ish), you can't hire people smarter than yourself to teach your offspring; if you are well-to-do, you can hire those smarter people-- and since they're your personal employees, you can tell them what sorts of things you want your children to be taught.

But from the beginning, some American communities provided schools for all their children. The system was not remotely perfect from Day One (for one thing, it was only for children with white penises  correction-- white girls were also included in early common schools). But the idea was established-- as members of the community, we join to educate all children. We join to educate other people's children.

This commitment was part of a long, slow-motion argument. Only educated folks should be full citizens. No, every person should be a full citizen. Therefor all folks should be educated. It's a simple progression, but it took us a couple of centuries to work our way through it.

It is a point of American pride that we have set that task for ourselves. It is a point of American shame that we have tried to weasel out of it.

Our commitment to educating other people's children has collided with the class divide and the racial divide, like an Evel Education Knievel who can't quite clear the row of school buses, stacked too high and wrapped in a big sign that says, "I've got mine, Jack."

If I've got to spend money educating other people's children, can't I just buy them the absolute minimum? I don't really want to spend the money to educate Those Peoples' Children. What-- you want to take my tax dollars to educate Black Peoples' Children?!

Over the past several decades, our unwillingness to educate other peoples' children has stretched and trained the system. Well, parts of the system. Just as the rich have made sure they have good security and fine infrastructure in their isolated communities, they have also made sure that their own children are well-educated. But as the public system  (you know-- the one for educating other peoples' children) has cracked and strained under the weight that fewer and fewer people help carry, and solutions have been proposed and mandated, we're still trying to weasel out of the deal.

"Well, if I have to educate Other Peoples' Children," say corporate reformsters, "can we at least guarantee that I'll get something back for my costs, like a compliant and job-trained workforce? If I'm going to pay to educate Other Peoples' Children, I should be paying into a system that is organized around my needs, not theirs."

"Well, if I have to educate Other Peoples' Children," say the standards architects, "can we at least establish a clear definition of what's the absolute least I have to pay for. I'm not going to buy Those People a Cadillac when all they really need is a used Yugo."

"Look, only some of Those Peoples' Children are worth educating," say the privatizers. "I'd pay to educate the worthy ones, but not Those Other Children."

"I don't want to pay to educate black kids or brown kids or poor kids," say some folks, quietly, in private. "They're takers, not makers. They don't have the grit, the ambition, the skill, the background to really pay us back. Oh, sure, a few do. I'd help one or two of those. But the rest don't really matter. I don't want to pay to educate Those Peoples' Children."

Viewed from this angle, the last fifteen years of education reform look like a big fat attempt by the wealthier folks to get out of paying to educate other peoples' children, or, at a minimum, to do so with minimum cost but maximum service to their self-interest.

All this is why I find parental embrace of modern charter schools troubling.

I do get the parental impulse to pull a child out of a public school that has been starved of resources and pushed to its breaking point. As a parent, you do whatever you can to get your child the best possible shot.

But the conversation here looks a lot like the Powers That Be saying, "We will only pay to educate your child if you put your child in a charter. If you are worthy." And parents say, "Yeah, I'll take that deal."

Again, I understand the impulse to save one's own child. But this puts charter parents in the camp of those saying, "I am not going to pay to educate Other Peoples' Children."

Every argument built around the idea that the money should follow the child, that the tax dollars belong to the family and not the school (or the taxpayers who paid them)-- these are all ways of dressing up, "I should not have to pay to educate Other Peoples' Children."

Parents are given Sophie's choice. "We're going to burn down this building with all these children inside," say reformsters. "We're willing to save yours, but you have to take this can of gasoline and box of matches and help us start the blaze."

I can't blame the parents facing that choice. My children are grown, and our schools were good while they were there, so I didn't face any such hard choices. I know that the choice is a complex difficult territory, that some parents make it for the best reasons (My child is going to get the best education I can find), and some make it for the worst (If my kid's in cyber-school, I won't have to deal with truancy court any more). I understand that, for instance, the parents who chose cyber-charters in my district did not do so with the intent to close a district elementary school-- but that was the effect, and so the choice of forty families also made a choice for hundreds of other families and taxpayers.

I can-- and will, and do-- blame the people who manufactured the situation, all because they simply don't want to pay to educate other peoples' children.

We talk about this like it's difficult. It isn't. When the nation's leaders decided that we would go into Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how long and expensive it would be, we just did it. We ran up enormous debt, stood up to enormous political backlash, and spent a mountain of money that scraped the sky.

We could have said-- and could still say at any time-- that this country has a long-standing commitment to educating every child, all children, other peoples' children, and we will spend every cent needed to do it.

Instead, we keep trying to tweak the system so that we don't really have to pay to educate Other Peoples' Children. Just the children that matter. But that leaves us with a terrible choice, a terrible judgment about which children matter. Instead of choosing to provide a great school for every student, we provide "access" or "choice," like a sinking ocean liner that only has only enough lifeboats for a few but, hey, everyone on board has "access" to them.

Not only is it not difficult, it's not complicated.

1) Stop pretending that some schools are failing when they aren't.

2) Stop trying to force schools into failure by starving and stripping them.

3) Provide resources and support for all schools that need them.

You can say this is hard or expensive, but it's only expensive if you've decided that we shouldn't have to pay to educate other people's children. That's the choice-- to educate other peoples' children, or to dismiss them as a problem that is costly and not-mine. That's the choice-- and we can choose better.

The L Word

We talk about teaching as an act of pedagogy or inquiry or coaching or guidance. We talk about data and programs and techniques and the words of experts to the point that we can, at times, sound like mechanics talking about how to work on cars. And there are plenty of people who want to talk about teaching as if it's a science, a series of data-driven stimuli designed to elicit a certain response and build certain competencies, as if our students are lab rats.

But we should also talk about teaching as an act of love.

Yes, it's difficult, mostly because "love" is a word that tries to encompass many words, many ideas, many emotions, many impulses.

But the intentional action of meeting our students where they are, seeing them as they are, hearing them as they speak, helping them drive toward what they would become-- that's love. To engage with students as human beings while trying to focus on who they are, what they want, what they need, to shut up and listen, to open eyes and really see, to build a classroom around what they need and not what we want, to teach them and not just cover material by throwing it at them-- if that's not a form of love, what is it?

Yes, it's awkward to say so, both because of the sense that our words could be misconstrued and because, really, it feels a little like bragging. That's why I admire walking man Jesse Turner and his unapologetic act of love. And it's one reason I admire Jose Vilson and what he says in this short video. I've now watched it multiple times and you should, too:

ICYMI: Top Eduposts of the Week (7/19)

Once again, it's your Sunday reading digest, a not-all-inclusive listing of recommendations from the week.

Mercedes Schneider 

As the ESEA rewrites and votes and amendments have been flying thick and fast, Schneider has been following and explaining the action swiftly and thoroughly. So this isn't a link to a particular post-- just work your way back through the week to get a clearer sense of what Congress is up to with education legislation.

We Definitely Don't Need a National Education Plan

Rick Hess dismantles the argument for a national education policy. He may be a reformster, but he's no dummy.

The Common Core and Democratic Education

Johann Neem takes a long, thoughtful look at Common Core in general and David Coleman's writing about reading in particular. It's a good clear look at why, exactly, Common Core is a bad, hollow idea.

Six Education Policies a 2016 Presidential Candidate Must Embrace


Lots of folks are writing pieces of this nature, but Cynthia Liu has produced one of the best. Clear, concise and thought-provoking.


K & Preschool Teachers: Last Stand in War on Childhood?

Peter Gray continues his series in Psychology Today looking at those who teach the youngest students and the battle to keep pre-school and kindergarten from turning into developmentally inappropriate menaces to childhood.


Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests

Paul Thomas takes a look at the use of technology to catch college writers at plagiarism. Except when it doesn't. Or when it catches a false positive.

A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling


Want yet another reference to bring up when debunking VAM to someone. Here's a research study that shows, once again, that VAM is neither valid nor reliable.

The Walking Man Walks

If you don't know about Dr. Jesse "The Walking Man" Turner, it's about time you did.

Turner has embarked on a shoeleather sojourn, traveling from Connecticut to DC in forty-two days. He's a professor of reading and language arts, and like many of us, he's been pushed out of his comfort zone by the need to get people's attention about what is happening in the world of education. You can hear some of his story from him right here:



He's a man loaded with good questions-- "When does the Department of Education stop calling their programs reforms?"

He's a poet, a speaker and a guy who actually got out of his home, onto his feet, and out into the world. The trip would scare the crap out of me, taking him as it does right down the BosWash East Coast corridor. But he's doing it.

Do I think that Arne Duncan will wake up this week and declare, "Well, heck. Jesse Turner walked all this way, so we'd better change our policies!" No, I don't think that's how these things work. But I think an action like Turner's does a couple of things.

First of all, it answers the question, "Just how much do you care?" Lots of people bitch about lots of things. The measure that matters is how much they care. I can say I don't like you sitting up against me on the couch, but if I don't even get up and move, that tells you I don't really care. I can complain about what's on tv, but if I don't pick up the remote, my complaints are hollow words.

When it comes to the challenges to public education, there are far too many people who will bitch and moan and shrug and wish somebody somewhere would do something. The big question is, just how far out of your comfort zone would you step, how much would you inconvenience your self, how much would you risk to stand up for what you care about.

It's the premise of He's Not That Into You-- if a man says he loves you, but won't actually do anything about it, he doesn't really love you all that much.

Well, Jesse Turner loves the cause of public education that much. He cares that much. He's willing to make himself vulnerable, to literally put himself out there that much. Politicians know talk is cheap. They hear cheap talk all the time. Their question is not "What are people saying," but "How deeply and passionately do they care about it."

So walking answers that question, and it gives other people to answer the question, too. Maybe you have the chance to speak up in support. Maybe you still have a chance to walk with him. maybe you will there to meet him when he walks into DC in time for the BATs Congress. Or maybe you can give up some of your own hard-earned cash in support of him. He has a gofundme page to help raise the money needed for an adventure like this (he's already kicked in three grand of his own). So do that, and tell people you've done that, and tell them why.

Because that's the other value in an act like this. It attracts attention. It gets people talking because it gives them something to talk about. And that's a valuable part of a movement as well. Turner has put it out there for all of us, and he's on the home stretch this week. At the end of a big foot race, you'll find a big crowd cheering the runners in, helping them finish strong for that last leg of the challenge. Let's help Turner finish strong this week.

Coleman's Double Disconnect

If you'd like to read a long, thoughtful and erudite consideration of Common Core, I'm not sure what you're doing on this blog. But this piece by Johann Neem at the Hedgehog Review provides all that and also provides an answer the oft-asked question, "So what exactly don't you like about Common Core."

There's a lot to chew on in the piece, but I was particular struck by a criticism of Common Core Creator David Coleman's reading approach that I have generally missed.

My most common observation about Coleman's reading concept is that it's not anchored in anything. When I looked at his long essay on reading, I saw the Coleman who wants to read works in a vaccuum-- let's look at the Gettysburg Address without talking about the Civil War, or the Sun Also Rises without considering the Great European War or Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail without looking at what he was doing in the jail in the first place. How, I wonder, do you consider a work of literature out of time, out of context. How does it make sense to read the poetry of Anne Bradstreet without knowing anything about the Puritan faith that informed her every word?

Coleman's twisted version of Close Reading 2.0 has its practical approach. He'd like students to read short sections intensely, staying within the four corners of the text and not getting any preparation ahead of time. In short, David Coleman thinks that the kind of reading that's done on a standardized test is the Real McCoy.

In Coleman's world, we land in a piece of reading without anything to anchor us to the world we're coming from.

But Neem, looking at Coleman and the Common Core, sees something else going on as well. Here he is talking about Coleman's imperative to look only within the four corners:

Such an approach ought to elevate, even ennoble, texts. But Coleman seems to care little about the impact that a good, close reading might have on students as people and citizens. Reading King is important because it develops, as Coleman puts it at the beginning of his lesson, “a college- and career-ready skill”—not because of King’s insights into the human condition, Christianity, or American history. From the perspective of college- and career-readiness, the content is arbitrary.
Coleman’s invitation to engage texts is undermined by his presumption that instrumental skills matter more than the particular ends to which they are devoted.

 By ensuring that King’s letter is read in isolation from its historical context or larger conversations, Coleman does not allow students to learn much from King’s message. Far from ennobling the text, Coleman has dismissed what the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might teach us.

In Coleman's Common Core, literature has no purpose except as a conduit for certain reading skills that will one day be useful to an employer.

I often argue that the purpose of education is to make each of us more fully human, to make each of
us more fully who we are to be. But Coleman has cut the literature off at both ends-- it is not attached to anything that the reader brings to it, and it will not carry over to anything meaningful in the reader's future. The reader is not to bring anything to it, nor carry anything away from it. As Coleman has famously said, nobody gives a shit what you think or feel out there in what he thinks of as the real world.

Reading Neem, I realize that for Coleman, literature is an empty ship adrift at sea and as readers, our students are simply to be flown in by helicopter, deposited on the deck, left on board long enough to retrieve some small piece of cargo from the hold, and then fly back out again. Are there signs of human life on board? Was the ship traveling from some place interesting, or headed for some place intriguing? Doesn't matter. It's adrift, not connected to any part of the reader's life, existence or humanity.

"The Common Core offers students instrumental skills divorced from the purposes for which those skills might be used," says Neem. That's as short, sweet and clear criticism of the Core as any I've read. Coleman's Core is like someone who's determined to be the very best as kissing another human being, but has no idea why they might want to.

PA: Monster Equity Plan Report Study Thingy (Part 2)

In Part One, we took a look at how PA diagnosed the issues that it is legally obligated to-- well, the states don't have to solve their problems. They just have to submit a report on how they're going to pretend to solve them. Other states kept it short and sweet, but PA cranked out a massive 200 page monstrosity. We still have 100 to go, so I'm just going to hit the highlights.

We're now going to look at how PA proposes to Fix Everything.

Fixing the lack of high quality personnel

What kind of hose do we need to fill up the teacher pool?

* Develop and hand out programs and guides to teach administrators how to better select teachers.

* Better marketing. No mention if this would include "reduce amount of time we spend talking crap about teachers and teaching profession.

* I kid you not-- give all poor and minority school leaders a copy of The Chicago Public Education Fund's School Turnaround Leaders.

* Get human resources department to tell colleges what they want.

* Get schools to use the proven program Philly Plus. Um, yeah. Right.

* Help poor schools from using so many emergency certifications by having more meetings with them. Really.

* Work on better certificate reciprocity with other states, the better to poach them.

There's another category about creating a deeper pool further down the page, but the bottom line is that these folks have not the slightest idea why the teacher pipeline is drying up. Even a simple questionnaire for college freshmen (Why aren't you an education major?) would tell them more than they know now.

Getting student test scores up in poor schools

* Get great professional development to teachers in poor schools. Because nothing makes us better teachers than more PD. Also, remind poor schools that PD is really, really important, just in case they forgot. Or were too busy trying to do their jobs to remember how much they love pointless meetings with strangers who have no idea what they deal with.

* To help with this, the plan lists a bunch of specific topics that schools should get for their PD. Because identifying their own needs and priorities would be silly. Harrisburg knows what you need to be learning, teachers.

Fixing inequitable funding of PA schools

* Pass a budget that funds schools equitably. Is that all it takes? Well, heck. Piece of cake!

Not enough data about teachers

* Collect more. Because  who doesn't want to help the state know more and more about their professional life. As a bonus, all this extra love and attention will undoubtedly make the profession more appealing.

Reporting on success

Once these solid and specific plans start to pay off-- no, I can't type the rest of this sentence. The state is proposing more professional development, more marketing, and lots of meetings. This will somehow bring our non-wealthy non-white students up to the same level of educational achievement as the white and wealthy ones. In my considered professional opinion, this is a dumb and inadequate plan that avoids asking or answering any hard questions at all.

Despite all that, the state has a plan for sharing the news of success when such news arrives. Executive summaries will be sent to stakeholders, who should share them. The state is going to set up a website! They will even share information on twitter and their facebook page!! If any new cool social media turns up, they'll use that, too. My state government has the same plan for sharing the success of a major mandated federal program that I use to get my family to our annual Fourth of July picnic.

Ephemera and Surprise Ending

In the first part of my look at this, I posited that the state is actually trolling the feds. I'd like to resubmit that theory.

Because next up in this report we have mailing lists and contact information, as well as a chart showing the various dates at which Stuff Happened , plus meeting agendas. The meeting stuff further suggests that either 1) the stakeholders pulled this report completely out of their butts with little thought or 2) the stakeholder organizations sent representatives who had no actual work responsibilities and so could fart around on this report all day or 3) the report was whipped up by some Department of Ed interns and the stakeholders just signed off on it. I suppose we could consider 4) these stakeholders are just the fastest, smartest, most efficient worker bees ever. But that's not the one I'm leaning toward.

But I'm cheating because I can see Appendix E, a report dated April 2015 that reads like a rough outline of the finished report, but without any authors.

This report is about 85 pages long, and a real journalist would plough through and check to see what, if anything, was actually changed by the stakeholders (who, you will recall, started meeting in April). A quick spot check suggests the answer is "not much of anything."

So somebody at PDE whipped this up, grabbed some reps of various groups to get together and pretend they were writing the report, and then somebody attached every single piece of paper they could find, creating a 200-plus page monstrosity. I like to imagine this feisty intern sealing the envelope or pressing send while he smiled and said, "Suck on that, Arne." Of course at the other end of the process was some other federal USED intern who took one look and shook his head and called our Pennsylvania intern a bad name.

What ultimately emerges from looking at reports like this is a sense of low-level government functionaries passing around pieces of paper that allow their bosses to make one claim or another while the paperwork itself never enters the sphere of the people who actually do the work.

But now the state and federal departments of education can both pretend that they have Taken Bold Steps to address the problems of equity and poverty and race in our country, thanks to a report that nobody will ever read and which will never have an actual real positive effect on anything. It is truly kafkaesque.

In a few months, the House and Senate may hammer out a shared version of an ESEA rewrite. Will it include the requirement for this stupid, pointless exercise? I don't know, and it won't matter.

PA: Monster Equity Plan Study Report Thingy (Part I)

This summer, all states were supposed to get their education equity affairs in order. I'm sitting in Pennsylvania, so their plan was of the most interest to me, which is my bad fortune because Pennsylvania's plan (Pennsylvania's State Plan for Ensuring Equitable Access to Excellent Educators) is over 200 pages long. Also, the title suggests that maybe we are all being trolled. It is possible that I'm not going to get through the whole thing, but I'd still like to mine some highlights. Which will still be a bunch verbage. I will not think less of you for deciding this is a post you can just go ahead and skip this whole wonkfest.

I'm going to break this into two posts. In Part One, we'll look at what PA thinks its equity problems are. In Part Two, we'll take a look at what it thinks the solutions are.

Theory of Action 

Pennsylvania's Theory of Action to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators for All Children. Pennsylvania's theory of action is built around strategically improving the management of Pennsylvania's human capital in our schools-- especially in the poorest and highest minority schools-- to enable them to recruit, hire, retain, and support a pool of highly effective, qualified, fully certified teachers, principals, and other school staff. Pennsylvania's activities are organized around four strategies: human capital management; ongoing professional learning; teacher and principal preparation; and fiscal equity...


Oh, yeah. This is going to be some choice bureaucratic word salad. There's a chart next which shows the four strategies as little bubbles circling the main idea, connected by two-headed arrows. Very evocative.

The Gaps

PA lists eight gaps. Or they say they're listing eight, but they want to include a ninth. And then there's a chart that shows six. My trolling theory is gathering strength.

The listed gaps are: students in poor schools are not growing scores on state tests, lack of quality professional development stuff, new teachers and principals aren't prepared for poor/minority schools, fiscal equity, and missing data. There's another list which adds these items to the first list: Philly schools are loaded with unqualified teachers, as are many poor/minority schools, there's high turnover, and all sorts of people in all sorts of jobs in poor/minority schools don't have proper certifications.

Background and context

PA's kind of a mess, data wise. Our VAM system (we call it PVAAS) requires three years of data to work, which we don't have yet. Also, any kind of plan would require financial stuff, but it's only June and our state leaders are locked in their annual competition with all past legislatures to see which group of bold PA leaders can bring in the latest budget. It's only July. That's not going to get fixed any time soon.

Stakeholders and Meetings

A list of groups that, apparently, were part of this adventure. It includes several school districts, poor and not, rural and urban (in PA, while we are famous for Philly-style poverty, the state has some hugely rural areas that are also pretty poor). One poor charter school and one rich one. Some teacher prep programs, including Grove City College which is interesting to me because GCC regularly sends us student teachers; GCC turns out students who know their content, but in many cases have never set foot in a public school ever. There are some professional organizations (including PSEA and PFT) and a state charter group as well. One more sign that the government is committed to continuing the failed charter experiment as if there's no reason to reconsider. Add on the Human Rights Commission, the YMCA, and the PTA, among others, and you have your stakeholders group.

These guys started meeting in-- April!!?? They cranked this report out in less than two months??!! Well, that's almost.... unbelievable.

Some Data and Interesting Point #1

The group started breaking down schools, dividing them by poverty level and by minority population (separately for public and charter achools). In search of staffing issues, they went in search of Emergency 01 certs, certifications that the state gives you when you swear up and down you can't hire a real chemistry teacher, so can we please just stick this nice lady certified to teach Home Ec in there? I am surprised to see that the number of such certificates issued has been dropping steadily for fifteen years. Oh, wait-- no I'm not. The Highly Qualified Teacher requirement of NCLB really strangled the emergency cert.

But here's our first interesting data point. The groups leading in using the most emergency certs? The highest number of emergency certs were found in the poorest public schools and the wealthiest charter schools.

Spanish, high school English, high school math, and special ed were the most common areas for emergency certs. Suggesting that the subjects getting hardest hit by high-stakes testing are also the first to feel the coming teacher shortage. Well, not Spanish. It's just hard to find people who want to teach Spanish. The champ? School nurses.

There's a more detailed charter, and PK-4 is also up there, though in all cases we're talking about numbers lower than 50 for the entire state. 21 principals had emergency certs.

When we break down teachers using the old high quality teacher standard, we find that rich schools have more HQT's than poor schools.

Interesting Point #2

When it comes to years of experience, wealthy schools have a greater percentage of newby (one year) teachers than poor schools. You can find the chart on page 30. Good luck.

I'm not sure what to make of some of these numbers. Our breakdown on schools by wealth left 697 in the top quartile and 701 buildings in the bottom. But this teacher chart says that the wealthy quartile has 33,544 teachers and the poorest quartile has 26,391. Which seems like its own kind of equity gap. Going to keep an eye peeled to see if this beast addresses that.

Salaries 

Hmm, said the committee, or staff, or someone. I wonder if there's a big pay differential between rich and poor districts. The short answer appears to be, no, not much difference if you look at wealthiness of the district, but when it comes to minority schools, we are making a modest attempt to entice teachers to work there. Starting salaries are pretty easy to suss out here, but the other data is fuddling because we're using averages of all more-than-one-year teachers' salaries which would be heavily effected by how old and experienced the staff is. This next charter may be a bit more helpful.

You can see that wealthy districts are recruiting hard with starting money. We should note that nothing here tells us how quickly teachers arrive at the top of the scale, which has a huge effect on career earnings. This data also doesn't include benefits and health insurance, which can have huge financial impact as well.  But now look what happens if we break it down by minority population.

So there's that.

Turnover

How is PA doing with turnover. Again, let's go to the handy chart:

So poor, minority charters are churning like crazy.

Strategic Management of Human Capital

So here's the thing. They didn't have any hard data for things like school climate, and schools don't have to give human capital management data to the Department of Ed. So PDE rounded up a bunch of volunteer human resource people and administrators, and they just made a bunch of crap up. With charts and graphs. Color coded. In less than two months-- specifically the last two months of the school year. I'm going to skip this part. If you'd like more data, you can read the report, or you can read some tarot cards. I'm sure that would be equally helpful.

Educator Effectiveness

Does poverty affect value-added measures for teachers. Again, I'm going to assume that the time frame of this report means that they are just pulling things out of their butts here. Fortunately, somebody else has done this research, and we know the answer, which is that the state could skip the expense of the test and just generate test scores based on socio-economic factors and do as well.

This is worth paying attention to, because it's why the whole federal Let's Put a Great Teacher in Every Classroom program is high grade baloney-- as long as you determine a teacher's effectiveness by student test scores, every teacher you put in poor classroom in a poor school with poor students will turn out to be ineffective.

Expenditures per Pupil and Interesting Point #3

Pennsylvania has one of the highest spending gaps in the country because we have on of the worst school funding laws in the country. If you slice things up on a per pupil basis, we still look bad. Well, bad and racist-- the lowest funding in the state on a per pupil basis occurs in schools with more than 50% black student population. The writers of the report try to massage the data so that our spending gap doesn't look so bad, but they can't hide the worst data point-- while all other categories come in above national average per pupil average when adjusted for poverty blah blah blah, per pupil spending in mostly black schools is almost $800 below the national average. Might want to work on that.

Root Causes

The report will now devote a giant cartload of space to explaining why the various gaps exist in PA. I'm going to summarize, and this will still be lengthy. Are you still here? God bless you.

Philly has lousy unqualified teachers because...

Schools don't cultivate a talent pool. Schools don't have time to really think and focus and search for exactly what they want. Insufficient positive marketing and PR. Lack of effective screening, or training for management. Folks might think the schools are dangerous. And then there's this awesome gem:


Individual bias may preclude teachers from applying for vacancies in Pennsylvania's poorest and highest minority schools, especially since the school's workforce may look different than the local community.

I'm not sure, but I think they just said that middle class white kids don't want to be working in those poor black schools.

Poor minority schools have lousy unqualified teachers because...

Same as above, actually. Man, this report could have been a page shorter.

We don't have enough teachers in certain certificate areas or principals or school nurses because...

Several repeaters from above, actually. But also teacher schools just aren't producing the teachers. Nothing here about continued assault on teaching profession in ways that would make it unappealing to future might-have-been-teachers.

There is too much turnover because...

Because some administrators are lousy managers. Also, teachers don't get enough awesome professional development. And some of those same other things.

Teacher grad programs not producing enough super duper teachers in right fields because...

Human resource departments can't adequately predict future needs. Yeah, sure, that's it. Also, there aren't enough subs??!! Seriously? Once again, we will completely side step the ways in which state and federal education policy has made teaching increasingly less attractive, as well as the way that constant badgering of teachers by politicians and policymakers has reduced respect for the porofession.

We have school financial inequity because...

And here's the winner of the Opaque Criticism of Somebody Award. "Poor funding decisions have severe consequences, especially when fiscal resources are limited." You mean, like when the state reneges on its teacher pension payments and then announces a crisis a decade later? Or when the state insists on a crazy-pants blood-sucking funding system for charters?  Also, some districts are poor, and can't make up the difference when the state short changes them.

We have data gaps because...

Because the state's data systems are slow and stupid and unusable. Did they really say that? It might just have been me.


But now we've diagnosed the problems. Well, we've sort of diagnosed them. If you are still with me, you can head on over to Part Two and we'll look at the super-awesome solutions that PDE proposed to the feds and the surprise ending that comes with them.