No Zip Code Tyranny

A John Hopkins researcher says that the wealthy do not choose choice.

The conclusion comes from research by Julia Burdick-Will who has a joint appointment in Sociology and the School of Education. "Neighbors but not Classmates" has just been published, and while the conclusions we can draw from it are pretty narrow, it offers an interesting tidbit of anti-conventional wisdom.

Burdick-Will took a look at 24,000 rising ninth graders in Chicago. In neighborhoods with median income over $75,000, the students attended one of two or three schools. In neighborhoods with median income under $25,000, students were divied up among around thirteen different schools. This chart from the news release about the report pretty well gets the idea:

I find the travel distance most notable-- the more wealthy students get to stay close to home. The non-wealthy get to tromp all over the city. The average travel distance in wealthy neighborhoods was 1.7 miles, and in non-wealthy neighborhoods it was 2.7.

Burdick-Will gets in a couple of good quotes:

We think of children in poor neighborhoods as ‘stuck.’ But they’re not stuck in one geographic place. They’re stuck navigating a complicated and far-flung school system.

I see a couple of caveats for this report. One is that we're only looking at one high school grade, and only in Chicago. The much larger one is that we're looking at 2009. On the one hand, the landscape may have changed in some significant ways in the six years since then. On the other hand, as Burdick-Will notes, that also means that all the talk we've been subjected to about how the poor are "trapped" in their "failing" neighborhood schools has been, at least in Chicago, high grade baloney.

Burdick-Will notes the costs in social capital (something that poor neighborhoods already lack) that come with students who have to navigate cross town, often alone, to schools where they know few folks. And she also underlines the obvious-- what the wealthy really want, and get, is a good school in their neighborhood.

“We think of choice as a thing of privilege,” she said. “But what we see is that there is a privilege of not having to choose.”

River To Classroom

I've finished off my first two weeks with students, and as usual I'm pushing back against a combination of general chaos, the inertia that has to be overcome to get students moving again, and my own sense of urgency about What Must Be Done (in the time I don't have to do it).

So it's this time of year that I particularly appreciate my kayak.

I live in a small town, and my back yard butts right up against a river. I will throw in some pictures of the view at the end here so that you can be appropriately jealous. I'm also a short walk from a rails-to-trail bike path, but it's kayaking on the river that I find head-clearing.

Because I put in and take out in my back yard, and because I'm not crazy about physically and psychologically punishing myself, I always start by heading upriver. And at this time of year, every stroke reminds me of teaching and the work that I'm starting again.

I've done the trip a hundred times over now, and yet every trip is different. It's different both because, of course, the waters in a river are always new, so the river is never the same in that kind of deep thinky kind of way. But the river is also never the same from year to year in more specific ways-- sand bars appear and disappear, trees rise further above or collapse into the water. And the river changes from day to day as well, levels rising and dropping with the weather. This passage may be deep enough to move through today, but next week the water may be too low and the rough bottom bed will bar the way.

Because my small journey will be affected by the river and the weather and the wind, it's pointless to plan in any exactlingly careful way. Certainly the path is predictable in a general sort of way. I know I'm going that way, upriver. But hug the right bank, tack across the center, pass up the left bank and slip up in the quiet space below the island--?  I can't predict any of the steps with accuracy until I'm there, on the river. I may have a rough idea, and then change it when I see a barrier of rough ripples thrown up in my path.

I may take some side trips. When the water is high enough, I can cut up behind the big island and into a series of channels and lagoons that are sweet and quiet and beautiful. I may encounter herons or a flock of geese or deer on the bank and decide to stay and look before pressing on.

The hardest, zenniest part for me is staying focused on where I am. About a half mile up river is a small island, and there the current squeezes through to become both fast and rough, and pushing up past that is always tough-- I know a half dozen paths to slip past the island, and it's always hard to know which one will work (sometimes it comes down to something as simple as a small series of rocks in the wrong place). But if I clear the island, about a mile up the water piles up, waiting to shoot into the narrows, and there is what amounts to a mile-long lake in the middle of the river. If I can make it there, then the next part of the trip is easy going.

But I can't think about any of that. Particularly in the rough places, my focus has to be on the next several feet of river, not the next half mile. I can't suddenly jump ahead, skip forward. I have to put my energy and focus into where I am. For the same reason, it's not always a good idea to start the journey with a specific upriver destination in mind. If I set a goal of two miles upriver, and I can't make it, I turn whatever I do accomplish into failure. Instead, I commit to keep going as long as I can, and then I go goal by goal-- to that next tree, to that next rock, to that ripple. Sure, I have a direction and a purpose, but I have to focus my energy on where I am, not some place far out ahead. I cannot force it. I cannot bend the river to my will, but I can listen to it, pay attention, make use of its particular currents and eddies.

Eventually, I've gone far enough. I usually don't know where that will be ahead of time, but I know it when I get there. I've been out on the river long enough and it's time to get home. I'm out of energy for another big push. The wind is not on my side today and it's kicking my ass.

So I turn around and finish the trip-- still focusing on where I am. There's no way to skip over the space between me and home-- I have to travel that stroke by stroke just as I did upstream. I'm never not aware of the big picture, the stretch of the valley, the green spread across the hills, the silky sliding surface of the water, the river winding out before me and behind me. But my focus has to be on the next stroke, the next obstacle, the river bed sliding past me, a foot or two at a time.

Every trip is different. Every trip brings its own set of circumstances, its own issues and opportunities, and each time, the river and I work out today's definition of success. No matter my hopes and dreams, on any given day, I can only accomplish what I can accomplish, but if I keep my focus, I often find myself traveling farther than I imagined I would.

That all feels like the work of teaching. Focus on the here and now. Know where I am. Know where we're headed. Be patient but push hard. Hear and see what my students bring into my classroom. Remember that I cannot dictate, cannot force the exact journey; the trip we take this year is one that we'll work out together.

Why Dyett Still Matters

First, just in case you missed it in the PR flurry-- no, the Dyett hunger strikers did not "win," and yes, the hunger strike is still going on.

The twelve parents and community members who began going without solid foods over three weeks ago are still standing up for the same issues they were standing up for when this began. The Chicago school system, run by the mayor and not by any sort of elected school board, would like to close the school and replace it with one more privatized education. Or maybe they would really just like to replace it with a nice parking lot for the Coming Someday Obama Presidential Library.

What they don't want to do is listen to the community. So last week they announced that Dyett would stay open as a "compromise" school in a process that would continue to lock out community voices (which was aptly symbolized at the big press conference when the strikers were literally locked outside). This is a loose definition of "compromise," like a mugger who says, "Well, if you don't want to give me all your money, let's compromise and you can just give me most of your money."

The hope was that the public would listen as far as "Dyett will remain open..." and then just stop paying attention, which is the kind of cynical bullshit that gives Chicago politics a bad name. But it was at least marginally successful for five or ten minutes. Supporters were posting links to the news and tagging them "Victory." Eric Zorn, who unleashed a Trib column's worth of asshattery on the strikers, followed up with a non-retraction retraction that declared the strikers victorious and advising them to enjoy their big win and go home, which pretty well exemplified the reaction that Chicago Big Cheeses were angling for.

In retrospect, it seems likely that school chief's hint earlier that Dyett wasn't even necessary was a bargaining tactic, a set-up so that taking the school away from the community instead of flat-out closing it would seem like a generous concession by CPS, and not simply what they had intended to do (and what the organizers had been striking about) in the first place.

So why should those of us around the rest of the country be paying attention? Because this is a bald-faced, shameless display of everything wrong with the reformster privatization movement. It's not simply that non-educators will hand over a public school to other non-educators to commit amateur-hour educational malpractice. The handling of Dyett also displays plainly how the privatization movement is not just an attack on education, but an attack on the democratic rights of people who are not white, not wealthy, and not well-connected.

This is about shutting the community out of the process, about making sure that the people of Bronzeville have no say in any of this, about a political process so devoted to locking community members outside that it considers giving them half-assed lip service as a major concession.

Peter Cunningham, former Arne Duncan mouthpiece and an old Chicago hand, took to his $12 million website to tut-tut at the strikers, suggesting that they "honor the public process," a variation on the old "why don't these protesters just work within the system." But that's what's particularly notable about the Dyett community members-- they have done absolutely everything that the system asked of them. They have played by the rules for years and years, from developing a solid plan backed by community members, respectable institutions, and capable professionals. They submitted a formal proposal (and they did it on time) and they waited patiently while Chicago Public Schools hemmed and hawed and stalled (in a process that wasn't very public at all). Even when the Dyett strikers finally took action, it was not disruptive or destructive to anything but their own bodies.

If anybody can offer advice about what the Dyett folks could have done better, differently, I'd be thrilled to hear it. But the only other option that folks seem to want them to exercise is "Shut up, go home, and let your Betters decide the fate of your neighborhood school without all your yammering in the background."

Dyett cuts straight to the central question of turnovers, takeovers, achievement school districts, charterization, and privatization-- why, exactly, should rich and powerful people with no real ties to the community have more say in how the community's schools are run than the people who actually live there?

Jitu Brown put it pretty plainly--

You are not better than us. You are not smarter than us. And you do not love these children more than we do.

And so we have to ask reformsters: Do you want to argue one of those three point? Because that should be an interesting conversation. And if you don't contest any of those assertions, then on what basis are you taking over the community's school? Even if we let the assertion that the school is failing slide, the question remains-- why are you stripping the community of a voice in its own school? Because you're better, you're smarter, or you love the students more? And if it's not one of those three, then what is it?

What gives you the right to suspend democracy for a community?

Dyett still matters because the issue is not resolved and the strikers have not yet won. Dyett still matters because the fate of Dyett will have a huge impact on that community. And Dyett still matters because the issues being battled there are the same issues faced by every community in this country where the rich and powerful have decided to suspend democracy for certain communities.

Follow #FightForDyett on twitter. Check in with websites like this one. You can donate to the organization here. You can get a national perspective from articles like this one. And if you're in the area, there's a Labor Day rally at 5:00 PM. Spread the word. Speak out. Dyett matters, and the folks who are standing up for that school are standing up for all of us.

Nobody Really Wants Choice

Families need a choice. Parents want a choice. Poor students deserve a choice. We hear the rhetoric over and over again, but I remain convinced that it's baloney.

People do not want choice.

When I sit down in a restaurant and order my favorite meal, the one I've been craving all day, I don't sit there eating it thinking, "Oh, if only there were more choices. If only, in addition to the meal I'm eating, there was a wider variety of other meals for me to not eat."

When I look across the room at my wife, as my heart fills up with love, I don't think, "If only there were an assortment of women that I could have married, but didn't. That would make my marriage way better."

If I'm watching a movie in a multiplex, my enjoyment is not enhanced by knowledge that there are many swell movies playing on the other screens that I am not watching.

And if my child is in a great school, I don't think, "Oh, if only there were other excellent schools that she wasn't attending."

Furthermore, the corporate guys who tout choice as a value don't believe it, either.

No business says, "It's really important that the consumers have a choice. Let's get one of our competitors into this neighborhood." Ronald McDonald does not give the Burger King a stack of money and say, "Hey, come open a store across the street from me so the consumers can have a choice." No group of suits sits in a boardroom and says, "Boy, if all the consumers became our customers, that would be awful because it would wipe out choice."

When corporate types extol choice, what they always mean is "We want more customers to choose us."

But nobody wants choice.

What do people actually want? They want to have what they want to have.

"I want more choices," never means, "I have chosen what I want, but I want to know that the options I didn't choose are all great."

"I want choice," really means "I do not like the available options. I want to be offered the option of having what I actually want." If my favorite restaurant has my favorite meal, I don't care if the entire rest of the menu is blank. But if I look at a menu and see nothing that interests me, I'd like more choice. Either way, at the end of the day, I am only going to eat one meal. What difference does it make if the meals that I don't eat are appealing or unappealing to me?

Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. Maybe there are some folks who want to know that while their child is in a great school, there are other schools she could be going to instead. But I'm doubtful.

Do parents want school choice? I doubt it. What parents want is for their child to be in a great school, and if their child is in a great school, they aren't going to care if that school is the only school or one school out of a thousand. Some are going to say that choice will drive excellence, but again-- what's the real goal? Would you really be unhappy if your child were in an outstanding school that didn't get that way through competition? I don't think so.

Why do lots of parents in poor, neglected school districts like the idea of choice? It's not because they love the idea of choices. It's because their local menu offers the prospect of a terrible meal. They want more choices because they are hoping that one of those choices, finally, will be an excellent education for their children.

Nobody really wants choice. What people want is to have what they want. What they want from education is for their children to be in good schools.

But focusing on choice instead of school quality leads to focusing on the wrong thing, sometimes to the detriment of the real goal. Providing choice on a thin budget makes excellence that much harder to achieve. And it completely blinds us to the reformy option that charter/choice fans never want to talk about:

What would happen if we took all the time and energy and money poured into pushing charter/choice and focused it on turning the local schools into schools of excellence.

Some reformsters are going to claim we tried that. I don't believe that's true, for a variety of reasons that would stretch this post from Too Long to Way Too Long.

Some folks have decided that our model for school reform should be like a guy who finds his car filled up with fast food wrappers and in need of new tires-- so instead of working on the car, he goes out and buys three new cars. It's a waste of resources-- and he can only drive one car, anyway. School choice and charter systems have turned out to be hella expensive, costing not only money but community ties and stability, and only rarely delivering excellence-- and that only for a small percentage of students.

People want excellence (or at least their idea of excellence). Some people push choice as a way to get there. But what if it isn't? What if there are better ways to get to excellence?

Look, we know why some people love the idea of choice-- because it is a great way for them to get their hands on bundles of that sweet sweet public tax money. But for people who have a sincere interest in school choice, my request is that they step back and ask themselves what their real goal is, and if it's having each child in the nation in an excellent school, let's talk about that. If you think that choice is a path to that goal, well, you and I have some serious disagreements ahead of us. But the discussion will be much more useful and productive if we focus on the real goal and not get distracted by mistaking means for an end.

ICYMI: Good reads from the eduverse

School closings seemed to be the topic of the week. With that in mind, if you're not following the news from the Dyett Hunger Strike, you should be. Here are some other reads for your Sunday edification.

Out of Control

I highlighted this report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools earlier in the week, but it deserves a long, thoughtful look. The report examines the systematic disenfranchisement of African American and Latino communities through the mechanism of school takeovers.

What's Really at Stake When a School Closes?

This New Yorker piece from Jelani Cobb examines the fate of Jamaica High School in Queens, and the long, difficult history that led from a school producing three Pullitzer prize winners to being pushed out of its own auditorium for graduation. Here is what the starving, gutting and closing of a school looks like up close.

How Far We Have Fallen

A simple but artful graphic presentation highlights just how badly public education has been attacked and damaged in North Carolina.

School Closures- A National Look at a Failed Strategy

It was a mighty fine day when the Network for Public Education hired Carol Burris. Here on NPE's site she has put together a look at how school closing has failed as a strategy all across the nation (well, at least as a strategy for improving education). 

We're going the wrong way in trying to get teacher evaluations right

Columnist Lloyd E. Schaeffer does a pretty good job of explaining one reason that the teacher evaluation system in Pennsylvania (and many other states) is wrong, and dumb.

WA: I Have the Charter Solution

The Washington State supreme court has spoken, and charter supporters are freaking out.

There's a #saveWAcharterschools tag on twitter (a little lonely, but it's there), along with several feisty charteristas who are finding ways to express their outrage.

And on Huffington Post, the heads both the national and state charter associations (each, of course, is not called "president" or "chairman," but "CEO") wrote an expression of something between panic, outrage and feistiness about the closing of charter schools. Thomas Franta and Nina Rees are concerned for the 1,200 Washington students who are suddenly school-less for next week, and I have to agree that the court's decision to sit on this ruling until the last days of summer vacation was just plain mean. At the same time, I hope that Rees, as CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, displays some of this same outrage the next time some charter school decides to cut its losses and close up shop in the middle of a school year.

Charteristas are calling for some way to Save Charter Schools. Washington state legislator Drew Stokesbary on twitter proposes three possible solutions:

So, find ways to rewrite the law so that charter money can stay in its own little lock box in its own big silo. This seems a bit overthought and overwrought. The court's decision, as I understand it, is based on the idea that charter schools cannot receive "common school" public funds because they are not overseen by an elected school board. And if that's the case, charters can fix this very easily. Are you paying attention, charter operators? I have your solution right here.

Just submit to being overseen by an elected school board.

Act like the public schools you claim to be. Make your finances and operation completely transparent to the public.

And allow yourselves to be overseen by an elected school board instead of a collection of individuals who are not answerable to the voters or the taxpayers.

I mean-- what's more important to you? Providing a strong educational alternative for those 1,200 students, or holding on your ability to do whatever you want without having to answer to the public? Is it so important to you that you not be accountable to the public that you would rather engage in timeconsuming rewrites of state law, or even just close your doors, rather than let yourself submit to transparent and open oversight by a group of citizens elected by the very taxpayers whose money you use to run your school?

Many eyes are on Washington right now. One of the things we'll be watching to see is what charter operators do next, because their next move will be one more sign of what they really care about.

FL: Testing Swamp

Since the 1920's boom in swampland sales, Florida has a been a land of Things Too Good To Be True. There is no state in the union that has pulled off the Big Standardized Testing piece of the Common Core-related Reformsterama, but Florida has brought a special "panache" and "je ne sais quoi le hell I'm doing" to the deployment of Le Gran Test.

Florida was on the testing bus early, rolling out the FCAT in 1998. They were members of the PARCC club, until it became clear that all things Common Core were going to be liabilities for politicians. So Florida jumped ship and eventually awarded its testing contract to American Institutes for Research, a test manufacturer that has been a perennial runner up in the testing contract beauty pageants.

According to various published reports, this may have led to the odd sidetrack of Florida buying into an alternative test that Utah had commissioned and then thrown out. But you won't find many Florida officials talking about the reported $5 million they paid for that test, perhaps because they've been too busy dealing with all the testing fallout. 

Le rolloutte was not tres bien. Reports came rolling in that the technological infrastructure could not manage the job, leading an editorial writer at the Tampa Bay Times to give the state an F for testing, noting Buzzfeed had managed to let 41 million people vote on what color that damn dress was, with peak traffic of 670K viewers. Why, with months to prepare, could the testing computers not handle a smaller load, well known ahead of time?

Well, apparently the Tampa Bay writer choice a particularly apt analogy, because we have now arrived at a moment that is just as unclear as the color of the fabled dress.

See, the Florida legislature decided that the best way to quiet the din of criticism next logical step was a $600K study of the BS Test. They hired Alpine Testing Solutions, a company that specializes in "psychometric and test development services." The company was well at it this summer, working to complete their study by the end of August. Because you definitely want to make sure your test is valid before you give it a second time.

But now the report has emerged and-- well, is it blue or gold or brown or what? That seems to be a bit of a contratemps regarding this point.

The State of Florida thinks that the reports says that the test is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. They point out things like how this year more tests were given than last year, and the test is totally safe from cyberattack. The big headline, though, is that despite a long, long list of issues, the test is still "valid in judging students' skills"

This is not exactly a home run. It's more, "We've talked to Mrs. Lincoln and we're pretty sure that she thought the play was swell."

You can read the report here. Well, you can try to read the report; it's written in fluent test manufacturer jargon, and would probably be easier to follow even in my pidgin French. You can go for the executive summary, but it's only shorter-- not clearer.

But digging out some specifics does not help the test's cause.

Some are simply practical, like the idea that the Utah items should be more Floridified. Because apparently around a third of the test questions are not even connected to Florida's standards. Without digging more deeply than I'm going to on a Saturday afternoon, it's hard to know just how bad that really is-- Utah and Florida are both states that faux-dropped the Common Core so that they could adopt some faux-local standards that are not too terribly different from CCSS. But there are other issues of deeper concern raised by the report.

With respect to student level decisions, the evidence for the paper and pencil delivered exams support the use of the FSA at the student level. For the CBT FSA, the FSA scores for some students will be suspect. Although the percentage of students in the aggregate may appear small, it still represents a significant number of students for whom critical decisions need to be made. Therefore, test scores should not be used as a sole determinant in decisions such as the prevention of advancement to the next grade, graduation eligibility, or placement into a remedial course.

So, the individual scores for students who took the computer version of the test shouldn't be used to make any decisions about the student, because it's entirely possible that they're wrong.

The interim passing scores were not established through a formal standard setting process and therefore do not represent a criterion-based measure of student knowledge and skills. The limitations regarding the meaning of these interim passing scores should be communicated to stakeholders.

We really need to talk about this more often. The BS Tests are not measuring students against any standard; they're just being used to stack rank students. Your child could only miss one question on the test, but if most of the other students miss zero questions, your child is still a failure. Well, assuming she actually missed the question.

The spring 2015 FSA administration was problematic. Problems were encountered on just about every aspect of the administration, from the initial training and preparation to the delivery of the tests themselves.

Test administration was a giant cluster-farfegnugen. Everything that could go wrong did.

If we take a step back and look at the larger picture, things don't look any better for this report.

First of all, while the state did hire "independent third party" to examine its test, they were only independent in the sense that they aren't directly involved in sales and marketing for this particular computer-based BS Test. But since they are in the industry, they are not going to ask some of the other necessary questions, like "Is it ever a good idea to try to give eight-year-olds a test on a computer." The report is filled with language about how aspects of FSA fell "within industry standards." There was never going to be any question about whether or not industry standards are a big pile of baloney.

Nor could these independent third party fail to notice that the people paying them $600,000 were hoping for a particular answer. Nobody in the state capital wanted to hear about having wasted a gazzillion dollars on a big pile of useless crap. There was always going to be a limit to just how much bad news Alpine could slip into the report.

Despite the unveiling of this $600K PR package, the hub-bub doesn't seem to be subsiding. A few counties are still making noise about getting away from the test, nor has there been a great upswell of parents declaring, "Tres jolie! All of my concerns have been addressed, and I know welcome the FSA as a beloved and trusted friend." In fact, if we go back and look at the concerns that were being voiced last spring, we can't help but notice that they are largely unaddressed by the Alpine report. And the Tampa Bay Times still gives the test an F. It's safe to assume that a great many Floridians would still like to bid the test, "Bon voyage!" Even if education commissioner Pam Stewart declares the report "welcome news," it seems to be fairly unconvincing. Too bad, taxpayers who forked over $600 K for nothing. C'est la vie.