Hunger Strike in Chicago

Education reformsters have a selective deafness problem when it comes to not-white, not-wealthy citizens, and that is on display again in Chicago, where community activists are staging a hunger strike this week in an attempt to get Chicago Public Schools to actually pay attention to them.

Members of the Bronzeville community have been fighting for Dyett High School since it was marked for phaseout in 2012; CPS cited academic failure. CPS stretched the closing over four years to allow students already enrolled to finish their careers there; that resulted in just twelve seniors being enrolled last year. Supporters of the school say that CPS pressured those remaining students to transfer out; CPS says it was just "gauging interest." Certainly Dyett hasn't enjoyed a great deal of support from CPS-- no infusion of resources or attempt to actually fix the alleged academic shortcomings.

Instead of talking about how to revitalize the school, CPS has been entertaining proposals about what to replace it with, including a proposal from the principal brought in to shut the place down-- that particular proposal has been considered even though it was handed in late. But the school seems marked to be one more victim of the mayor's wholesale slashing of neighborhood schools.

But here's what you need to know about the community activists of Dyett High School-- they have done everything that you're supposed to do in such a situation. They put together a proposal for a school focusing on green and leadership studies, complete with partners and support, that would have allowed the area to keep its last open-enrollment high school. CPS has hemmed and hawed and at one point said, okay, you can keep the school under this plan as long as we still hire someone to run it.

Activist Jitu Brown had some thoughts about that, as reported by Edushyster:

"Why can’t we have public schools? Why do low-income minority students need to have their schools run by private contractors?" As Brown sees it, handing the school to a private operator isn’t much better than closing it. "We want this school to anchor the community for the next 75 years. We’re not interested in a short-term contract that can be broken."

So while CPS has twiddled their thumbs and stalled, the supporters of Dyett have organized and petitioned and called and done what people do when they are ignored-- steadily escalated. They held a rally. They held a sit-in and got themselves arrested. And CPS has folded its arms, dawdled, postponed, and generally tried to avoid making an actual decision about the fate of what used to be Dyett.

Point being-- these folks didn't arrive at hunger strike quickly, lightly, or thoughtlessly. 

This website has much of the current information, links, eddresses, and pictures. There are hashtags to follow if you are twitter literate. Jesse Jackson has shown up, and that gets them some extra eyeballs (but he's not new to this particular fight). Check in. Send messages of support. This is not an easy thing, but it's an important thing. 

It's a sign of how messed up we are when it comes to letting local voices be heard-- that people have to starve themselves just to have some kind of say in what happens in their own community school. I hope someone listens, and soon.

CAP Flubs Again

I'm pretty sure that CAP has lost its collective mind. This months has been marked by a pair of CAP offerings (here and here) that seem to indicate the august allegedly lefty thinky tank is running its PR wing out of a time machine parked in 2013.

Now they are touting the result of a poll they commissioned from Public Policy Polling under the Lesley Knope-ish press release headline:

New PPP Poll Shows that the Development and Aims of the Common Core Are More Popular Than Baseball, Kittens, and Bacon—But Misinformation About the Common Core Pervades

It is hard to know how to take the last part of that header, since the press release that follows it champions a brace of undead misinformation that apparently did not die the last sixty gazillion times it was put to rest. No, here it is, still searching for brains. Let's go shambling down memory lane, shall we?

It's Just the Brand

Remember this one? People totes love the ideas behind Common Core-- they've just been turned off to the branding. Why, 90% (of the 675 people we asked) love the idea of higher standards that would make us competitive in the world, 82% think we should develop standards with teachers and states, 79% think we should have high quality English and math standards while letting local schools set curriculum, and 78% love the annual test idea.

So what? This is a lovely rhetorical trick that assumes the sale, begs the question, cheats the answer, and screws the pooch. Yes, I love baseball, kittens, and bacon, but if you offer me a baseball game between a team of six year olds and a wheelchair team, a kitten that has been dead and lying beside the road for a month, and uncooked bacon wrapped around Greek yogurt, I will not thank you!

I love my wife. She's named Amanda. It does not follow that I will love any woman named Amanda. I love lunch. It does not follow that I will love any crap you stick on a plate and call lunch. I love the idea of having all my hair back. It does not follow that I will buy whatever snake oil you pitch as hair restorant.

People may well love all those things you listed, CAP. It does not follow that Common Core is any of those things. Standards don't make nations competitive. The Core were not developed by teachers. The implementation of the Core that we got takes most local curricular control away. The annual tests that we got are crap.

Politics! Eww!!

Unfortunately, opponents of the Common Core have embarked on misinformation campaigns in order to create widespread confusion among voters or to score political points.

That's from Catherine Brown, Vice President of Education Policy at CAP, a group of political operatives, many of whom aren't currently on duty because they have gone back to their real jobs-- working as political operatives for Hillary Clinton. The standards were born of politics, hatched by politics, pushed on states by politics, and promoted by politics. You don't get to disown politics now.

The Central Lie

“These survey results show that the goals of the Common Core are quite popular when tested piece by piece,” said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling. “People aren’t exactly sure what’s in the Common Core, but when asked about its provisions, they wholeheartedly support them across demographic lines.”

Emphasis mine. Because what he meant to say was "when asked about things that we claim are provisions of Common Core..."

Other Lies

Just 4 percent of voters know that teachers helped develop the Common Core

Well, yes. For the same reason only 4% of Americans know that Barack Obama is actually an alien lizard king. Only 4% of voters know this because IT IS NOT ACTUALLY TRUE!


Nearly half of voters think that the Common Core prescribes a specific curriculum,

And they're not really wrong. Well, this is technically not true, but practically speaking, CCSS was pitched as a the exact steps to follow to come up with a curriculum. The kit for building a pole barn is not a pole barn, but you are not going to build a Lamborghini out of it.

But hey-- lots of us were talking about this a lot-- over a year ago.

72 percent of voters believe that standardized tests take up more time than they actually do. A recent CAP report showed that students spend, on average, 1.6 percent of instructional time or less taking tests.

Again, voters are perhaps "confused" because they base their ideas on reality and not reformster press releases. And in reality, students are spending huge amounts of time on practice tests, pre tests and classes in which the curriculum has been bent toward test prep. (See also here and here for old posts where we were all talking about this a year ago).

Running out of Headlines

Seriously. I am running out of titles to use on pieces about how CAP has put out talking points that were debunked, gutted, and buried ages ago. I am straining my noggin trying to imagine what audience they imagine for these PR blasts? People who have been in a coma for a year or two? People who live under rocks?

Are the people running CAP lost because all the grownups are all busy helping Clinton run for office? Are they confused, ballsy or lazy? Whatever the case, they have got to do better, because this baloney is not advancing anybody's conversation with anybody.

Doctor VAM

Periodically you will hear teachers complain about VAM and similar test-and-punish versions of evaluation by saying, "Imagine how ridiculous it would be if they did this to doctors. That would be so stupid they'd never even consider it." These are teachers who don't have friends and family in the medical field. Because (bad news alert) the Powers That Be have totally been doing the same crap to doctors that they've been doing to us.

The idea has been kicking around since the eighties, but one backbone of the Affordable Care Act (and many other proposed health care reforms) is an informed customer base that is able to choose physicians based on solid ratings. This would also, not coincidentally, allow the behemoths who manage the highly-profitable non-profit health care providers to have a data-based means of deciding which doctors to keep and which to boot.

Of course, the key here is coming up with a metric-- or metrics-- to determine which doctors are effective and which are not effective. And that turns out to be hard.

You know the arguments-- you've already made them. Can we judge a doctor on how effective he is with a patient who is high risk and who insists on engaging in risky behavior? Is it fair to give a lower score to a physician who works with more difficult patients-- and will she keep taking more difficult patients if they will make her rating look bad?

Well, we may not know how to measure physician effectiveness, but we know what happens when we try to measure effectiveness with a crappy instrument.

The New York Times ran a piece referring us to some of the research done on the effects of mandatory surgeon report cards that are based on patient outcomes. You will be Not Shocked to discover that it makes things worse. The top surgeons focus on low-risk patients, and innovation and risk-taking are squelched. Top surgeons who took the tough cases, the patients who had no other hope, sometimes found themselves with low ratings and a loss of operating privileges.

The whole story is completely recognizable to those of us in the education world, the major difference being that nobody-- yet-- is forcing doctors to treat patients that will hurt their numbers in order to force those physicians out so that they can be replaced by low-cost under-trained temps. But the principle is the same-- when you set up a system that punishes professionals for trying to help the most needy, you get crappy results. 

Is New Orleans a Success?

With the release of the latest bundle of number crunching, Doug Harris and the Education Research Alliance have once again launched the Debate of the Decade-- is the New Orleans privatization experiment a success or a failure?

The Argument for Success

The ERA is a project of Tulane University where Harris is a professor of economics, and I want not to hold that against him, but the number of economists who have declared themselves educational experts over the past couple of decades is staggering and worthy of its own study.

Harris's argument for success is fairly simple. Before Katrina, test scores in NOLA were really low. Now they are performing at the level they "ought to be" performing as compared to models of imaginary similar students.

So. Test scores were low. Now they're not. Success!

What else?

No, that's it. That's the whole argument. Students in NOLA are getting better scores on standardized math and reading tests. That's the whole thing.

So. Any reasons we shouldn't be excited about this news?

Glad you asked. We could get into a long and involved discussion of ERA's data and the crunching thereof. But if that's your cup of tea, I recommend the work of Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish, just for starters.

But for the sake or argument, let's go ahead and accept Harris's numbers as accurate and move on. Can we still call the Great NOLA Privatization Experiment a success?

Yes, even if we accept that the numbers are correct, Harris acknowledges that the pursuit of test scores has led to some dicey practices, and NOLA does seem rife with tales of push-outs and creaming, as school principals strive to make their data points.

But there's a bigger question (though no less important) than whether or the numbers are legit. The bigger question is, even if the numbers are legit, are they worth the cost?

Disenfranchised public

Journalist Jennifer Berkshire's recent trip to New Orleans provides a vivid picture of how thoroughly NOLA reformsters have pushed locals aside-- even locals who agree with the charterfication agenda. Parents, community leaders, and, of course, the 7,000 teachers who used to work in the system.
It's not just that this leads to the bizarre spectacle of a predominantly brown and black local communities having their "public" schools run by mostly white outsiders. It's that the entire democratic structure has been tossed out, suspended as surely as if New Orleans were some 18th century island nation where a foreign power had landed, planted its flag, and declared itself the new local government.

Berkshire quotes New Orleans parent advocate Ashana Bigard: "It's like there is no place for New Orleanians at the table."

Destablizing the community

The 7,000 local teachers, middle class members of community, have been replaced by edutourists, modern-day classroom carpetbaggers, often Teach for America temps. They may very well have the best of intentions-- but those intentions too rarely include "move to New Orleans and make it my home for the rest of my life." 

More insidiously, New Orleans communities no longer have community schools. What serves as a central anchor, a tie that helps connect the people who live near each other-- that anchor is gone. Students disperse each morning in a crazy web of bus routes and come home, late in the day, to a neighborhood of strangers. And the parents associated with a particular school can no longer gather easily to share concerns and take action, because they too are spread across the city.

And of course the charters themselves come and go as they rise and fall. A true public school is a long term commitment that a community makes to its children. Charters commit to stay only as long as it make business sense.

Personal enrichment

Head over to twitter and look at the hashtag #NOLAedwarning. There's an awful lot to absorb, but the tales include school leaders and charter operators who are being paid truckloads of money.
NOLA is often discussed as a charter experiment, but I think it's more accurate to think of it as a privatization experiment. NOLA answers the question, "What would a school system look like if every single decision were a business decision?" 

I will never argue business is automatically evil. But if schools are businesses, then they must have an adversarial relationship with their students-- every dollar spent on a student is a dollar that doesn't go into the business's bank account.

Repurposing education


When reformsters swept in and took over the New Orleans school system, they didn't just decide how the system would be run-- the decided what the purpose of the system would be.

The role of schools in building community, schools as a democratic expression of a local community's goals for its children, schools as a broad tapestry of possibilities and enrichment for individual students, schools as institutions that enriched the life of a neighborhood, schools as a hothouse in which to grow local leaders, schools as the most fundamental expression of our democratic values in a pluralistic society, schools as a path for students to pursue their own self-directed broad range of personal life goals, schools as institutions of support and growth cenetered around the needs of the child-- those roles were all jettisoned, tossed out the window.
Instead, reformsters remade NOLA schools around one roles-- the purpose of schools is to get students to score well on a standardized math and reading test.

The real question

As the fooferaw over the ERA report continues, arguments will center around whether or not the report is accurate, trustworthy, believable. In other states, it will feed the continued push to export the NOLA model by declaring that the model was successful.

But the real question, the important question, the question that must be asked again and again, is whether the NOLA concept of success-- pursuing test scores by sacrificing every single value we traditionally associate with public schools-- whether that success is even worth pursuing in the first place.

Let's not spend so much time discussing whether or not NOLA won the race that we forget to ask whether the race was ever worth running in the first place.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

What Failing Schools?

Education Next is trotting out its Big Fat Survey of Educational Stuff for 2015, and for eduwonks it's twenty-three pages of interesting stuff. I'm sure many of us will be parsing, mining and massaging the results, as well as discussing how much the reform-loving sponsors of the survey can be trusted. But as I poked through it, two results jumped out at me immediately.

So, where are the failing schools?

The whole premise of our ongoing onslaught of reformy forces against public education is that we are awash in a sea of terrible schools. So where are they? Where are all the people saying, "Yes, my school is failing."

Even the folks grading Other People's Schools-- it's a regular thing in these surveys that folks think their own schools are better than the national picture, but the difference here is a blip (the only interesting blip is that more African-Americans think their local schools are failing than think the nation's are).

I mean, we can expect a certain percentage of people to think schools are failing for the usual cranky reasons-- school doesn't teach cursive, or it let's pregnant ladies teach, or it didn't play Chris enough on first string, or school officials kept fining them for truancy, or teachers kept flunking Chris just cause Chris never did assigned work and flunked all the tests. Add to that the constant barrage over the last fifteen years that US public schools are terrible, that they must be reformed, that students must be rescued from these deep pits of failing failure.

So why aren't more people convinced? Why aren't more people giving schools a failing grade?

What about teachers?

This, unfortunately, is a less clear data set. Note that the question is different, so I'm not sure how to read the chart. Does the 9% F rating under parents mean that 9% of the parents would give F's, or that on average, parents would give 9% of the teachers in their school an F? Either way, the numbers are higher than you'd like them to be (although once again we find that the teachers people don't know are worse than the ones they do). But they are way lower than the numbers generated by the theory, favored by Andrew Cuomo and others, that if 70% of students get low test scores, 70% of the teachers must suck.

There are certainly aspects of these data that are unbragworthy. But it is still worth noting that the reformsters narrative of terrible schools staffed with horrible teachers is not what most folks see-- certainly not the level of disaster needed to really jumpstart a good round of disaster capitalist roulette. Perhaps that's why some folks have to work so very hard to create the impression of educational disaster.

Watts: Presence, Present and Future

Near the top of my list of not-exactly-education sites is Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, a site that consistently provides great writing and insights about how to be fully human in the world-- which of course means it really is about education after all.

Here's a post that lifts from the work of Alan Watts (1915-1973), the writer who helped bring much Asian philosophy thought into our part of the world. In particular, you'll find his work tied closely to the idea of presence or mindfulness. It is of course a concept that has often taken root in the US, even back with the calls of Emerson and Thoreau to live deliberately and simply.

Watts wrote The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for the Age of Anxiety way back in 1951, but boy does it have some things to say to us today, particularly for those of us in education.

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

And yet, we are enmeshed in an educational system that wants to be able to predict the future with certainty. "If your eight year old makes the score on this standardized test, we can assure you that she's on her way to college," claim our reformy liberators.

Here's another way of understanding why the current reformster ideals are so wrong-- they are devoted to predicting and insuring a particular future for students, instead of preparing them for whatever future may come. "Score well on the test," we want to promise, "and college, a good job, all of it will just fall into place." Instead of arming students with a whole toolbox full of varied and wonderful implements, we hand them a screwdriver and say, "We guarantee that with this in your hand, nothing bad will ever happen and you'll never need anything else."

And we reduce school to a period in which students are not actually present and living their lives, but simply absently preparing for a future, forfeiting today for the promise of a guaranteed tomorrow. And so along with all the other things we don't teach our students, we don't teach them to be present in the moment, to be aware, to be alive.

Or consider this quote from Watts:

The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men — so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation.  

I remind you-- Watts was writing in 1951. But now we live in times in which our policy leaders want to jam education inside the machine and reduce all teaching and learning activities to counting and measuring (and suggesting that these activities can, in fact, be managed by machines).

Popova has lifted one other great quote from Watts that, in the context of modern redformy education, hollers out to me.

If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.

Though I might suggest one revision. While it's undeniable that education is increasingly about grafting humans onto a mass of ticking machinery, maybe it's not the humans who are the parasites, but instead it's the clockwork that is the parasitic appendage.

Anti-Opt-Out Pushback

With the news that last year's Giant Wall of Big Standardized Testing in New York was shot full of holes thanks to a huge number of opt-outs, the anti-opt-folks started throwing a sackful of old baloney at the wall hoping that something would stick well enough plug a hole or two.

The New York Times led the charge, but America's newspaper of record apparently just dipped back into that record to dig out every worn out old defense of the BS Tests they could locate.

This ill-conceived boycott could damage educational reform — desperately needed in poor and rural communities — and undermine the Common Core standards adopted by New York and many other states. The standards offer the best hope for holding school districts accountable for educating all students, regardless of race or income.

This is kind of hilarious. Undermine the Common Core? Heavens to murgatroyd! Of all the nouns in this paragraph to which the modifier "ill-conceived" could be attached, "boycott" seems to least deserve it. And if the NYT is concerned about holding people accountable for educating all students, they might talk about how the state has boycotted fairly funding small city schools, finally driving those cities to file a lawsuit that the state has paid big bucks to fight.

The editorial goes on to toss other stale baloney at the wall-- parents won't know how their kids are doing in school (because, I guess, parents are dopes), the school won't be fully represented to its state overlords, excessive testing is the fault of local tests, and the feds might penalize districts financially (though, again, the state's unwillingness to fairly fund districts is not an issue). Perhaps the editorial board ran out of room before they could add, "And this could go on your permanent record."

But when all is said and done, the NYT is a bunch of ed reform amateurs. What are the reformsters floating as anti-opt-out talking points?

For that we can turn to the Collaboration for Student Success,  a group affiliated with all the usual subjects and deeply committed to the reformster agenda. And they have a nice webpage up asking whether you would opt your child out or not. Say "opt in" (which is actually an interesting idea-- what if states only administered the BS Tests to students who actively signed up for them, like the SAT or ACT) and the site delivers an attaboy. But opt out--

Choose opt out, and you're taken to this page. There's a video from a perky teacher of the year who tells us that these new tests have gone beyond bubble tests blah blah critical thinking blah problem solving. Has she actually seen the test?

CSS lists four talking points about what an opted-out family is doing:

* "Surrendering the opportunity to have an objective snapshot" of how the child is doing. So the test is just a snapshot? Not anything deeper or more useful? "Objective" snapshot. No.

* "Denying their student’s teachers, this year and next, the opportunity to measure what skills and subjects their child is adept at, and to discover where he or she needs extra help." If the student's teacher does not already know how to do this without the benefit of a BS Test, the student's teacher should not be anybody's teacher.

* The state will have an incomplete picture of the school's achievement, and that might affect what the school gets when it comes time for budgeting support, they say. Because test results are part of the funding formula. Also, remember that time a school's test results showed it was underfunded and undersupported, so the state rushed to its aid with additional funding and support? No, of course you don't, for the same reason I don't remember the time Angelina Jolie showed up at my front door begging to take her in when she left Brad Pitt for me.

* "Jeopardizing their school from receiving crucial federal funds to support your child’s school..." Yes, this page is a little confused about pronouns and general word use. But remember-- you don't want to lose those Title I funds that so far the feds haven't withheld from anyone, ever (and which are not awarded based on test results.)

CSS wraps up with the civil rights pitch, noting that letter supporting testing sent by twelve national civil rights groups. They neglected to mention the letter opposing testing signed by considerably more than twelve civil rights leaders. 

If this is the best set of arguments the pro-testing folks can muster, that would explain why New York commissioner of education MaryEllen Elia skipped straight over reasoning and winning hearts and minds and went straight to threats. If this is the best the pro-test folks can do, the BS Tests are in big trouble.