NC Can't Get It Right

Hard to believe there was a time when North Carolina embarrassed the rest of the South by showing them how education could be done right. Now they just seem intent on embarrassing themselves.

North Carolina has finally settled their eleven-week budget standoff. Now, as a Pennsylvanian, I can't poke much fun at that. Our legislature's budget failures are practically annual rituals, and while North Carolina just keeps operating under the old budget terms, here in the Quaker State we let the wheels of government grind to a messy halt while our elected leaders sit around failing to fulfill their most basic responsibility.

But the budget always reflects the values of the state, and North Carolina's budget hammers home yet again their disinterest in supporting their school system and a firm commitment to driving teachers out of their state.

The legislators did bump up starting salary for teachers to $35K. This is perhaps better understood in the context of the NC state teacher salary scale.
         
          2014-2015                                                                 2013-2014

So on the left is where NC teachers were last year. It makes an interesting comparison to the previous year-- the new schedule has only six steps, so teachers get four years to slide backwards against inflation, until you hit twenty-five years, when you can just start drifting back forever. And am I reading this correctly-- did teachers with 33 years or more actually take a pay cut??

Of course, the real pay losses of the stalled steps would be offset by an increase in the whole scale, but that's not going to happen. Instead of a 2% raise for state employees, everyone gets a $750 bonus instead. So, peanuts for, as one writer put it, a tip. And you know the definition of bonus-- a pay benefit that your employer never has to give you ever again.

I have great admiration for the teachers trying to make a career in North Carolina. This sort of no-raise-for-you behavior has been the norm for too long down there, and the $750 tip is no more than a gesture, and not a very polite gesture at that. I expect that all across the state, many teachers would like to offer the legislature an impolite gesture of their own.

UPDATE: Courtesy of regular reader Anne Patrick, here's the new salary schedule

Testing: The Circular Argument

This morning, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes us on a trip to Massachusetts, where profiteers have captured many of the positions of power in the education world.

Much has been said about commissioner Mitchell Chester, who heads up the fast-evaporating PARCC test consortium, but who will also recommend to the state what Big Standardized Test they will use. This is pretty much like having the owner of a Ford dealership decide what kind of cars should be used for your municipal fleet.

But I was also struck by Schneider's look at Harvard University's EdLab, which appears to be nothing more than a college based reformy thinky tank set to cook up policy recommendations for the privatizers and profiteers while using the Harvard banner as a cover. You can read the whole thing at her blog.

But I was particularly struck by this quote from Roland Fryer, the economics guy who was speed-installed as a professor to head up EdLab. He's talking (back in 2012) about his belief that there should be a two-tier testing system:

I haven’t figured out why no one has tried a two-tiered system for standardized testing. So, I live in Concord, Massachusetts which is a wonderful suburb of Boston — my wife and I just moved there — and I actually don’t want a lot of standardized testing in Concord because it will crowd out my kids learning Shakespeare and those types of things I never really read. However, in the schools that are failing, we really do need standardized tests because at least we know where they are and that’s really, really important. Just because we don’t test them doesn’t mean they’re not failing. And so I would actually say if schools are high-performing suburban schools or high-performing schools ought to be able to say, ‘You know what? 90 percent passed the test in 2008, let’s not take the test for 2 or 3 years so that we can focus on different and more holistic types of instruction’. For schools that are in the bottom, I think they ought to test those kids every day.

The standing argument for the Big Standardized Test is that without it, we will never know which schools are failing. But Fryer argues that we only need the test for the schools that are failing. But how will we find them without the test? Hell, he had only "just moved" to Concord-- how could he know if the schools were any good if they weren't being regularly tested.

There are two clear take-aways in Fryer's statement.

As I have always maintained, we do not need tests to find the schools that are in trouble because we already know exactly where they are. Hell, we already know that we can predict test scores just with demographic information.

Second, this is one of the most bald-faced statements I've ever seen about using the tests to just beat down the "failing" schools. Knowing where the failing students are is "really, really important"? Why, exactly-- and what the hell would be the purpose of testing them every day if that means stripping away the kind of quality education that you want to preserve for your kids in the 'burbs?

This is testing advocacy at its most obvious poor-bashing worst. We don't need a two-tier system. We need a zero-tier testing system.

WSJ on Teacher Quality

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal convened a trio of educational experts to discuss the question "How Do We Raise the Quality of Teachers."

I'm not sure what got into them, exactly, but reporter Leslie Brody actually included a teacher in her trio of experts. In fact, not just a teacher, but New York teacher, activist and writer Jose Luis Vilson. I have huge respect for Vilson for a variety of reasons (the man teaches math to middle school students!), not the least of which is his calm and focus and ability not to get caught up in opposing things, but always clearly articulating what he is for. It's a skill not all of us have mastered.

Vilson is teamed up in the conversation with Daniel Weisberg, honcho of the New Teacher Project (TNTP) and Kate Walsh of the national Council on Teacher Quality. So, well. That makes one more teacher in one of these conversations than we usually get. Brody edits the conversation by topic, so we'll do the same here.

What is the main obstacle to improving teacher quality in America, and why?

Walsh leads with NCTQ's standard theory that teacher education programs are too easy to get into and too easy to succeed in. NCTQ did a big research project on this very subject, and by "research," I mean they grabbed a bunch of college commencement programs and read through them. Really. I know I exaggerate for effect sometimes, but that's what they actually did.

That said, she makes a valid point about the need to look at the supply side of the teacher pool instead of worrying about making it easier to fire the mythical legions of supposedly terrible teachers. Weisberg chimes in, then ups the ante to beat his particular expired hobbyhorse, which is that becoming a teacher should be more like being a business executive, because smart people want to have a ladder to climb. Also, he wants to make the TNTP's favorite old widget point-- we treat all teachers as interchangeable widgets when we should be treating them as interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of worthiness.

But now Walsh has a cool moment of honest insight

Lately I’ve just grown weary of us all talking about how bad it is to be a teacher. I am not talking about “teacher bashing” but “profession bashing.” We’re all guilty of this profession bashing, everyone from education reformers to union leaders—spending a lot of time talking about all the reasons why no one who is sane should consider a career in teaching.

I am worrying a lot lately that our negative portrayal of the job may be doing more to dissuade people from considering it as a career than any of the other factors we have put on the table.

For those of us in the education-reform camp, we advance our agenda by reminding everyone about how broken the system is. 

And all I have to say is, "Well, yes." She goes on to say "the unionists" do the same thing, and I'm not sure Walsh is showing a great understanding of what different camps are arrayed, but I'm awarding bonus points for her previous moment of illumination.

But Vilson is batting clean-up here with what I consider the truest answer to the question. After noting that the bar on teacher programs has been low because people are reluctant to enter the profession because of pay and working conditions, Vilson says this:

This idea of “teacher quality” would be better served if we opened the doors for teachers to have more voice in advancing our profession. 

And it is Vilson FTW on the subject of exactly what professional development teachers need:


We know chefs can prepare easy dishes, but their courses will largely depend on the restaurant, locale and the restaurant’s theme. We know basketball players should know how to shoot and dribble, but their skills will depend on their position on the court and the coach’s playbook. Teachers should have a set of researched best practices, but we would do well to help educators learn how to be nimble as well.

Given the funding constraints, how would you attract more high-quality candidates to the field?

Weisberg demonstrates, for neither the first nor last time, that he doesn't particularly understand the job of teaching. He once again touts the notion that there should be specialization. After observing that teachers have to do many different jobs from day one, he suggests that this approach is wrong:

Most professions don’t work this way. For example, I was a lawyer in a past life. That is another multifaceted job, but there is no assumption that every lawyer is expected to be great at every part of it from day one. 

The suggestion here is that the way in which teaching is different from lawyering (and other professions he mentions) is a Thing That Is Wrong with teaching, and that the profession would benefit from being broken up into various bits and pieces, like lawyering (and McDonalds). These little pieces of teaching jobs, like data cruncher and lesson planner and "parent engagement specialist" would be way stations on the way to becoming a full-fledged teacher. Except that teaching is a many-jobs-at-once gig. You can't really be the person who talks to the parents if you don't know what's going on with the student, and it's hard to teach the students if you don't have the data, and the amount of time needed to communicate between the members of these various multi-function team would be like a whole extra school day, every day.

Vilson allows as how that approach might appeal to some, mostly you have to do the whole job, and coming in to just grade papers or call parents might not exactly fire the imagination anyway. On the other hand, I agree with Vilson's notion that teaching for 2/3 of a day and training fledgling teachers the other third might be cool.

Walsh agrees that teachers need more support, and theorizes that is why the better teachers gravitate to charters schoo---insert sound of needle dragged across the grooves of a record. Dying to see the data that suggest that charters are getting all the better teachers. Seriously. But she has talked to Fishman Prize winners, who get more support but are paid less, but they are totally cool with lower pay because of the lesser stress.

Well, it's the Wall Street Journal. I'm going to call the inclusion of a real live teacher and public education activist a win this time around, and the conversation published better for it.

Should Teachers Stick Around

At Bellwether, Chad Aldeman wants us to know that the classic teacher retirement plan "shortchanges teachers."

Aldeman's entire argument rests on a curious assumption--  but let's see what he's saying, first.

His point is a two-parter, and you can follow link one and link two to read his briefs at length if you like. But I think we can hit the drift of his gist pretty quickly.

Aldeman's argument is that it takes many years-- 25 (and he adds an exclamation point, like, good lord! can you even imagine someone staying in teaching for an entire twenty-five years!)-- for a teacher to have a pension that's worth as much or more than her contributions to the fund. When Aldeman says that the program shortchanges teachers, he actually means "teachers who aren't in teaching for an entire career."

It’s commonly accepted that public-sector workers such as teachers trade lower salaries for higher job security and more generous benefits. But that trade only works well for the small minority of teachers who actually stick around until retirement. 

I would argue that the pension set-up is long-term as an incentive for teachers to be teachers for the long haul, that like seniority protections and job security and the other features of employment, it helps foster what society has traditionally wanted-- teachers who become proficient and give the community the benefit of their well-developed skills for generations, and not just a year or two. Schools have traditionally been stabilizing institutions in their communities, and having a stable teaching force is central to that goal.

Aldeman's point rests on this charter, which shows that only 25% of the teaching force sticks around to get their pension.

This is as severe an attrition rate for teachers as I've ever seen, though it initially matches up with the old 50% of teachers leaving within the first five years figure (even though that figure has been questioned). So the math in this may be very arguable.

Aldeman is not arguing that's a bad thing, but seems to feel (!) that a lifelong career in teaching is neither normal nor desirable.

That's not an unusual reformy position, though Aldeman has not been one of the vocal proponents of the Short Career Model. In the Short Career Model, we pay some teachers big money for a few years, and then cycle them out, either because they never planned to stick around in the first place, or because school management has the regulatory freedom to fire any teacher at any time for any reason-- including, "Sorry, Mrs. McTeachwell, but we want to replace you with somebody cheaper." Certainly part of the appeal of that approach is the low cost of pensions for the state and the schools.

Aldeman also seems to be leaning toward the Do-It-Yourself pension model favored by Social Security reformers-- just take some pension payments and go invest them yourself. It's popular because it's cheap and it is one more way for the rich to tell poor people, "Grab your bootstraps and leave me alone. I've got mine, Jack." And playing the market to manage your own pension seems totally safe-- I can't think of anything that's happened to the markets in the last decade that would seem like a red flag.

Personally, I would argue that the steep drop at the beginning is partly a loss of teachers, and partly a loss of people who thought they would be teachers and turned out, well, not so much. But that's both a mystery data argument and probably a bit of a linguistic leap as well.

Eventually we arrive at the bigger question-- do we want teachers to stick around for long careers? Or do we want to transition to the Short Career Model and therefor shift all of the benefits of a teaching career (well, except job security) to the front end? Do we want to keep incentives to become seasoned and experienced and to give the school system the benefit of that age and wisdom, or do we want to staff schools with an ever-churning roster of enthusiastic(ish) unseasoned newbs?

But the reports do sound a useful alarm in noting that many pension "reforms" or "rewrites" or "tweaking in hopes of avoiding one more financial screw-ups" are making the inbalance more so, and that many young teachers are becoming "net contributors," paying more into the system that they take out upon early departure.

The reports, however, report these issues as some sort of lottery-- teachers in Utah have a 50-50 chance of breaking even, while teachers in New Hampshire have a one-in-ten chance of making their pension money back. But this is not a lottery, and there's no "chance" involved-- you stay in the profession long enough to reap the full benefits of retirement, not unlike the vesting that occurs in other jobs. If you don't stick around, you don't get the full benefits.

This isn't unfair or cheating Short Term Teachers-- it's one more way that the system was built to encourage teachers to make a lifetime commitment to the profession and reward them for the choice, because once upon a time, we all agreed that such a choice was a Good Thing.

Of course, if the death of tenure and seniority ever really kick in, having a long career will be a lottery, and this will be a huge rip-off. But when the day comes that the Short Career Model is the law of the land, we'll have many things in the profession to restructure, not just pensions.

The Public Education Dream

As much time as I spend writing about what I think people get wrong, it's important to keep some focus on what I want to see done right. So let's look at the major issues in education these days and consider what the positive outcome would be in a perfect world, and what would be a hopeful outcome in the real world.

SCHOOL CHOICE

Turning schools into a competitive marketplace is toxic for education. It does not drive improvement and, as currently practiced, it does not empower parents, but instead more commonly disempowers them.

In a Perfect World...

Choice pushers like to say that no child should be trapped in a failing school just because of her zip code. I say that no child should have to leave her neighborhood just to find a decent school. People don't want choice; they want good schools.

So in my perfect world, every child is able to attend a great school in his own neighborhood, with his neighbors, near where his family lives. Every school receives the funding and support it needs to be excellent.

In this world...

No more building a well-funded, well-supported school as an excuse to abandon the school already existing school. If we must have choice, let it be between excellent schools with, perhaps different focuses, or with the goal of improving a city and community through creating a diverse learning community.

But all schools must be fully funded and fully supported. No more "Well, a thousand students are trapped in this failing school, so we're going to invest millions of dollars in creating a great school for 100 of them."

CHARTERS

I have written a ton about this, so I'll be brief (ish).

In a perfect world...

If you want to set up a charter school, it must be fully funded, but not by stripping funds from public schools-- if you want to open a charter school, you'll either have to get private funding or a tax hike to cover costs. It must be fully transparent and account for every cent of public tax dollars that it accepts. It must be locked into a binding commitment to stay open for at least two decades, whether it is losing money or not. It may not in any way limit the students that can attend there, and it must backfill every seat that opens up. It will answer to an elected board from the community it serves. The feds will undo the laws that turned charter schools into an investment slam-dunk guaranteeing that you'll make your money back even if you suck. And if you think this is too restrictive and makes it unlikely that you would ever want to be in the charter business, then good. Get the hell out of the education "business" and let those of us who are serious about it get back to work.

In this world...

Yeah, pretty much the same thing. We need to get the hedge funders and educational tourists out of the education biz. If we could get back to the original conception of charters that would be great.

But at an absolute minimum, charters that accept public tax dollars must provide wholly transparent accounting for those dollars. They must be subject, in some way, to the control of an elected school board. And the zero-sum game that insures that every charter gain means a public school loss must stop.

BIG STANDARDIZED TESTING

In a perfect world...

It just stops. It's done. We don't do it, at all, ever. Period, full stop.

In this world...

The BS Tests are uncoupled from any stakes at all. They don't affect student standings or promotion. They aren't used to evaluate teachers or to rank schools or to affect anybody's professional future. "But how will we hold teachers and schools accountable?" someone cries out. Here's the truth that some folks just refuse to see-- the BS Tests do not hold anybody accountable for anything except test scores, and they do so at a cost to the real goals that most real humans expect from their teachers and their schools.

And once you do all of that, the market pressure is on test manufacturers to come up with tests that are actually useful, and not junk.

NATIONAL STANDARDS

In a perfect world...

There are none.

Yes, I know that on this point I am a bit further out there than even some of my fellow public ed advocates. But I see no value in or use for national standards of any kind. Trying to keep all teachers "on the same page" is a fool's game-- the teachers who don't need that kind of help will only be hindered by such requirements, while the teachers who supposedly do need that kind of help will not be improved by just following a handy standards list.

So, no. I don't see any use for national standards of any sort (though I recognize that many reasonable people do). So...

In this world...

Anybody who wants to can publish sets of standards, and those standards can battle it out in the marketplace of ideas. If actual working teachers and educators say, "Hey, these are pretty handy and definitely on point. Let's adopt them for our school or district," the congrats-- your standards win. If they languish on a shelf somewhere gathering dust because nobody anywhere is impressed, then too bad.

Note: It is totally cheating to try to do an end run around schools by going to, say, legislators and saying, "Hey, there, person who doesn't know jack about schools and teaching. You should totally force all the teachers in your state to use these standards."

In other words, all standards are optional and subject to local adoption. If somebody comes up with really good ones that spread like wildfire across the state or the nation, that's super. But no forcing the standards on schools.

ACCOUNTABILITY

With no national standards or BS Test, how will schools be held accountable? Well, we really need a long conversation about "accountable to whom" and "for what," because I do question the need to be accountable to legislators far away busy cutting in deals in back rooms we're not allowed to see while being financed by rich interests were not allowed to know about. Is there some reason for me to be accountable to those guys? I have my doubts.

But accountability to the taxpayers who pay my wages and finance my classroom. Absolutely, without a doubt. For me to say, "Just hand me a chunk of money and trust me blindly," is not okay.

In a perfect world...

I actually have a plan for this. You need to first figure out what the community wants to have measured, then you have to find the least intrusive way to measure it. There are two basic ways to approach the issue of accountability-- I can look for a way that I can find out how you're doing, or I can look for a way for you to prove to me how you're doing. The second way is worse, because it requires me to stop doing my actual job in order to convince you that I'm doing my actual job.

So in a perfect world, some assortment of trained professional educators visit my classroom as much and as often as they like, watch me work, talk to me about how I work, talk to my students about how I work, and develop some informed opinion about how I'm doing. The purpose of the evaluation is, of course, to help me do better.

In this world...

A system that is focused on improvement and the lifting up of classroom teachers, and which deals with far more than how well students score on a single standardized math and reading test. I like the idea of peer review, but I'm also aware that in some places it has become a twisted mess. But let's use something that helps teachers become the best teachers they can be.

TEACH JOB SECURITY

The destruction of tenure and seniority in teaching serves no purpose in the improvement of US schools. Removing teacher job protections is about creating a more cheap and servile workforce so that school a "CEO" has fewer obstacles to making money and doing what he wants to do.

In a perfect world...

There is tenure. There is FILO. Administrators have the competence and cajones to use the tools that they already have under current tenure systems to discipline and remove teachers who are incompetent. There are no long, convoluted processes, and school boards do not negotiate away their existing management powers.

In this world...

Yeah, there's no reason that we can't live in a perfect world on this one.

TEACHER EDUCATION

In a perfect world...

All pathways into the profession are controlled by teachers (just as in professions such as law and nursing). College programs must be accredited by teachers, and those programs have far more solid basis in child development and content area knowledge than in dopey methods courses by professors who haven't set foot in classrooms for umpteen years. And we would definitely get rid of the trend of teaching teachers how to just unpack standards, download lessons, and just generally act like Content Delivery Specialists.

These pathways would require time spent in real classrooms and a period of internship at the beginning of a career, to lead to a teacher certification process that included endorsement by a panel of master teachers.

Nobody anywhere can just put up a shingle and declare themselves a "teachers trainer," so no more TFA or Relay fake teacher training schools. All teacher education must be certified and accredited by a national board of master teachers, selected by their peers and not some government bureaucracy.

In this world...

The university and government agencies who certify teachers would solicit and follow significant input from actual teachers. States would not allow their desperation for filling teaching positions to lead to "alternative" paths that dilute the profession. Of course, if we fully funded and supported all schools, and we offered teachers working conditions that followed market requirements instead of a desire to be cheap, we'd have far less trouble recruiting teachers.

THERE'S MORE

But this is plenty for starters. What do you think? What is the picture of the education system we should be trying to achieve?

A Clock?! Seriously-- a Clock!!??

This is how a public school loses the support of rational humans with brains.

On the heels of a Slate piece last week reminding us about how the juvenile justice system "eats kids for breakfast," today we get the story to go with this photo that's rocketing around the interwebs.

Because I'm only a fake journalist, I can drop any pretensions of impartiality-- everybody involved in this was a dope.

The English teacher who freaked the hell out over a home-made clock was a dope.

The police who put this 98-pound ninth grader in cuffs was a dope.

The police who was quoted as saying that Ahmed Mohamed was "less than forthcoming" was a dope. Honestly, you've just been arrested for an engineering project-- you can't possibly predict how the words out of your mouth will be interpreted. You came to school and said, "I've got a clock" and the school screamed, "He's got a bomb!" At this point, as far as you know, "I'm thirsty" will be met with "He's taking hostages and making demands!!"

The school-- MacArthur High School of Irving, Texas-- responded quickly with a letter, and whoever actually wrote the letter was also a dope.

While we do not have any threats to our school community, we want you to be aware that the Irving Police Department responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus yesterday. We are pleased to report that after the police department’s assessment, the item discovered at school did not pose a threat to your child’s safety. 

Well, there is one threat to your child's safety-- there's always the possibility that school and law enforcement officials will absolutely lose their shit because some child brought an engineering project to school.

But the letter goes on to explain where the real burden lies-- on the parents and children. "I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited." Because I'm sure that the list of prohibited items includes home made clocks!!

Seriously-- look at this kid and consider just how anybody could conclude he's a credible threat.



I hope that MacArthur High School and the local police experience a huge, burning, thorough national embarrassment. I hope they have an opportunity to look themselves in the eye and say, "Damn, we acted like a bunch of dopes."

In the meantime, MacArthur High might want to consider the high irony of touting its recognition for its use of cutting edge technology and amending its STEM initiatives to include the warning that while it's cool to invent things, you probably shouldn't show any body.

Would Ahmed have been better off with another name, heritage, and skin color. No doubt. But the whole school and community would be better off with less Just Plain Stupid behavior.

I know there will be people trying to be uber-reasonable and saying, "Well, you know. Maybe there's more to the story." I don't think so. I can't imagine any context in which the behavior of the teacher, the school, and the police is excusable. Okay, maybe if Ahmed had previously tried to blow up the school --or fake blow up the school (in some versions of the story they're now accusing him of a "hoax bomb" because handcuffs are always the best response to a prank, which this clearly wasn't and damn-- I can't even) which would clearly have been brought up by now if it were true. So, no. No, there's no circumstances that make this treatment by a school of a student in their charge okay, at all, even a little.

An English teacher. Right now I'm hugely embarrassed for my profession.

Mrs. Jobs Antes Up

Laurene Powell Jobs came out of the Wharton School of Business with an MBA and went to work for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. She started a health food business and went to Stanford's business grad school. And then she married Steve Jobs.

She's no lightweight. She's spent time working in various philanthropic undertakings, including College Track, a group that works to support "underserved" students in getting into, and through, college and they haven't done poorly. Her husband died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer at age 56, which is too young to die from such a crappy disease no matter how much money you do or don't have.

Jobs is now responsible for a huge pile of money, mostly as part of a trust that owns, in addition to a giant chunk of Apple, 7.3% of the Walt Disney Corporation.

Mrs. Jobs is rich, and powerful, and she would now like to fix schools.

The Good News

Jobs has said, “We want to make high schools back into the great equalizers they were meant to be."

Her new initiative is a huge grant competition called XQ: The Super School Project. 


The Super School Project is an open call to reimagine and design the next American high school. In towns and cities far and wide, teams will unite and take on this important work of our time: rethinking and building schools that deeply prepare our students for the rigorous challenges of college, jobs, and life.

The website is remarkably clear of even coded messages to implement a particular format or program. Teams are encouraged to self-assemble and then begin the work of figuring out what this super school would look like. "No one knows exactly how to build the next American high school."

Then the team is to start working out the details of how to manage and sustain their new concept.

The website encourages ideas like starting by looking at and talking to young people. What are their dreams and aspirations? Look, too, at the science of how children learn. Look at how to get them invested in their own learning. And nowhere did I see instructions to think about how you could scale your idea up for the whole country. Jobs was asked if she's talking about a charter school here, and she said that she doesn't know; I'm going to take that to mean she at least has an open mind on that point.

And at the end of the road, there's a fund of $50 million to help launch 5 schools. 

The Bad News

At the end of the day, is Jobs one more education tourist, dabbling with school-building, or is she one more Master of the Universe who thinks schools are just businesses?

Well, maybe.

The XQ site uses the language of business. You have to figure out how you'll manage your human capital and performance management. And part of Jobs previous experience in the education world is her membership on the board of NewSchools Venture Fund, a group specializing in helping hedge fundies make money off of the ed biz.

Her advisors in this adventure include Michelle Cahill, whose career in policy has included a stint working for Joel Klein in New York City, and Russlynn H. Ali, who was assistant secretary for civil rights at the USED and is currently head of the fiduciary board at Education Post. So, no actual teachers at the upper levels of this project. The tab for XQ has a fun rotating text feature that says alternately, "What if learning is a game?," "What if we take the desks outside," and "What if we knock down the walls," which are charmingly naive in a "Gosh, I bet nobody has ever thought of this before!" way. I wish Jobs would talk to actual teachers.

Jobs told the NYT, "The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago. Things are not working the way we want it to be working. We've seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we're saying, 'Start from scratch.'"

Start from scratch? Cool-- but the time frame on this puppy is not encouraging-- your initial concept proposal is due by November 15, with the first phases due by mid-February. I want to meet the working teachers involved in any of this, because if they're designing a school from scratch while actually teaching, I have much to learn from them about time management. But this certainly sounds like the sort of thing that a charter operation is better positioned to attempt.

There's that term "super school," as if the schools the rest of us ordinary plebes labor in are just ordinary schlubby schools. Which fits with the subtle suggestion by Jobs that no school, anywhere, is getting it right. Nowhere on the lists of things to consider do we find "Schools with successful programs." Given the requirements to put all this together, it seems certain that Jobs' super school will not be in a poor neighborhood serving poor children. That's fine. Rich kids need super schools, too.

And this is an entirely personal, subjective bias, but the whole thing smells of Palo Alto to me. I've had family living in the area, and the Silicon Valley is an odd place, filling up with newly rich tech millionaires who declare their support for social causes while simultaneously pushing their own local poor out of neighborhoods and housing and sight. I want to help the poor of the world, but if I see that raggedy poor guy on my street again, I'm calling the cops. But that's my own personal bias about the Jobs neighborhood.

So what have we got here

A very rich person with an interest in education, but no expertise or experience, who condemns the current system and turns to certified reformsters for advice on how to create a new system. Well, there's no way this can end badly.

On the other hand, I salute Jobs for using her own money and not simply coming up with a clever plan to use other people's tax dollars to fund her dream reform. I'm not optimistic, but there's no point in condemning the outcome of this competition before we see it. I'm definitely looking forward to the super school updates.