This weekend features the major festival of the year in my town, and as my wife and I walked back from yesterday's round of festivating, we noticed a sign posted many times along the street. It was a no parking sign, boldly lettered "Temporary Police Order," and we made a quick joke about why temporary police would be allowed to issue orders about parking.
But it got me to thinking.
The preferred method for teaching and testing reading in the [Insert Name Here] Core Standards is to treat reading as a discrete set of skills, completely unrelated to any prior knowledge. David Coleman famously admonishes us to stay within the four corners of the text.
A really great reader, Coleman and his acolytes suggest, can read anything in his native tongue, even without prior background knowledge or contextual knowledge from outside those four corners.
And yet here is a simple text, a text so short and sweet that it fits on a tiny sign. And without prior knowledge, without information from outside the four corners, we can't understand it. We can't "read" it.
Does it announce a order issued by police who are only hired for a short period of time? Is it an order issued by the regular police that will be in effect only for a short period of time? In truth, the former seems more likely if I stay within the four corners-- wouldn't the latter be better expressed by "Police Temporary Order," as awkward and ungainly as that sounds?
Of course, the perceived awkwardness is a function of my prior knowledge of how those three words are best arranged. So using that prior knowledge is cheating.
In fact, I'm already cheating by being aware of the context of the text, which is a sign stapled to a piece of wood driven into the ground beside parking places. If I did not have the "no parking" portion of the sign in front of me, I would have no way of knowing if "order" meant a command or directive as opposed to the absence of chaos or a particular arranged sequence of police. So "temporary police order" could be a reference to the sequence in which some part-time police officers might be standing in line, or it could mean that police have quelled ongoing chaos, but that chaos can be expected to erupt again at any moment. Without the context of the sign, I might imagine that the text originally appeared on a pizza shop takeout form, and now a whole new set of possibilities open up.
The clarification can further depend on my knowledge of local history. Is the use of temporary police pretty standard fare here, or does this town depend on a standing police force? Have I encountered rent-a-cops in municipalities often enough for me to think of them as common, or am I unacquainted with that police hiring technique? My own understanding will influence my ideas about which reading of the text seems more probable.
My understanding of the text rests firmly on my prior knowledge and the context in which it appears. In fact, without employing prior knowledge and context, I cannot reach a definitive reading of the text.
My point? Folks like Coleman whose conception of reading is that it is a simple decoding exercise (like dialing in the combination of a safe) or a set of skills that can be simply exercised cut off from any prior knowledge or understanding outside the four corners-- those folks have a poor understanding of just how complex the act of reading actually is and just how difficult it is to measure. You will find it nearly impossible to create a reliable measure of reading that would cut out prior knowledge, restrict readers to the four corners, and still somehow meaningfully measure reading skills. I'm not sure you could do it at all-- not even with a temporary police order.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Driven By Parent Choice
That's the dream for some reformsters-- a school system that is driven not by regulation or government edict and certainly not by the professional educators who work there, but a system that is driven by parent choice.
I believe there are probably idealistic purists among the visionaries who really do believe that we'd have a system where parents peruse sets of pure and transparent data and then make informed choices based on that data, allowing schools to compete and improve by responding to how their data plays out in the marketplace. These purists are sweet, like delightful five year olds who still wait breathlessly for Christmas morning and the proof of Santa's arrival.
But there are also advocates of choice who are less idealistic and less pure. They understand what having a system "driven by parent choice" really means. I'll give you a hint-- it doesn't mean a system driven by parent choice.
Idealists talk about parent choice as if it occurs in some sort of iron-clad vacuum, influenced by nothing by clean data and clear thinking.
That's silly. Parent choice is malleable, shapeable, bendable, and open to influence. Yes, technically, in a choice system, the ultimate decision is theoretically made by parent choice. But that parent choice does not begin and end with parents-- it is molded and directed by a hundred other forces.
Purists imagine parents poring over spreadsheets, consuming mounds of impartial school information with a tasty topping of crunched data. But as we have already seen, charters take a strong hand in what data gets to the public, spinning and angling for a good marketing picture. They direct marketing toward particular parents, and they offer benefits that go far beyond any data that can be crunched (I'm remembering Pennsylvania cyber-school ads that suggested cyber-school would make your child happier than public school).
To get money out of the tightish fist of a government agency can be tricky, what with all those rules and regulations. But to get money out of a parent (especially if it isn't actually the parent's personal money), you can appeal to emotions and prejudices with slanted, incomplete and just-plain-false pitches.
Saying that such a system would be driven by parent choice is like saying the fast food, soft drink and automotive industries are driven by consumer choice. They are-- but that consumer choice is driven by marketing that involves everything from emotional appeals that have nothing to do with product quality, to manipulating the market to do things like buy up all the shelf space in the store, to simply carpet-bombing the airways so that your product is best-known. And that at least is a market in which you aren't allowed to offer battery-acid cola or brakeless automobiles; some states (looking at you, Ohio) have not yet figured out how to keep flat-out charlatans from bilking parents with built-to-fail charter flim flams.
"Driven by parent choice" just means "run on the free market," and the free market runs on marketing. "Driven by parent choice" just means opening parents up to every marketing maneuver and sales shenanigans in the book.
Greene's Law of the Free Market: The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Am I saying that parents are just too dumb to navigate a free marketty education system? Not at all. But I am saying that parents, like most US consumers in today's marketplace, are people who are bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. I am saying that parents who have their hands full with the daily business of holding a home and family together may have trouble doing the full-time research work necessary to cut through the fog and smoke and the lies and half-truths and spun baloney of charter marketing. I am saying that schools should not have "caveat emptor" stamped on their front doors.
And I'm saying that folks who say "driven by parent choice" as if that is a pure, clear, clean solution are either fooling themselves or trying to fool everyone else.
I believe there are probably idealistic purists among the visionaries who really do believe that we'd have a system where parents peruse sets of pure and transparent data and then make informed choices based on that data, allowing schools to compete and improve by responding to how their data plays out in the marketplace. These purists are sweet, like delightful five year olds who still wait breathlessly for Christmas morning and the proof of Santa's arrival.
But there are also advocates of choice who are less idealistic and less pure. They understand what having a system "driven by parent choice" really means. I'll give you a hint-- it doesn't mean a system driven by parent choice.
Idealists talk about parent choice as if it occurs in some sort of iron-clad vacuum, influenced by nothing by clean data and clear thinking.
That's silly. Parent choice is malleable, shapeable, bendable, and open to influence. Yes, technically, in a choice system, the ultimate decision is theoretically made by parent choice. But that parent choice does not begin and end with parents-- it is molded and directed by a hundred other forces.
Purists imagine parents poring over spreadsheets, consuming mounds of impartial school information with a tasty topping of crunched data. But as we have already seen, charters take a strong hand in what data gets to the public, spinning and angling for a good marketing picture. They direct marketing toward particular parents, and they offer benefits that go far beyond any data that can be crunched (I'm remembering Pennsylvania cyber-school ads that suggested cyber-school would make your child happier than public school).
To get money out of the tightish fist of a government agency can be tricky, what with all those rules and regulations. But to get money out of a parent (especially if it isn't actually the parent's personal money), you can appeal to emotions and prejudices with slanted, incomplete and just-plain-false pitches.
Saying that such a system would be driven by parent choice is like saying the fast food, soft drink and automotive industries are driven by consumer choice. They are-- but that consumer choice is driven by marketing that involves everything from emotional appeals that have nothing to do with product quality, to manipulating the market to do things like buy up all the shelf space in the store, to simply carpet-bombing the airways so that your product is best-known. And that at least is a market in which you aren't allowed to offer battery-acid cola or brakeless automobiles; some states (looking at you, Ohio) have not yet figured out how to keep flat-out charlatans from bilking parents with built-to-fail charter flim flams.
"Driven by parent choice" just means "run on the free market," and the free market runs on marketing. "Driven by parent choice" just means opening parents up to every marketing maneuver and sales shenanigans in the book.
Greene's Law of the Free Market: The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Am I saying that parents are just too dumb to navigate a free marketty education system? Not at all. But I am saying that parents, like most US consumers in today's marketplace, are people who are bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. I am saying that parents who have their hands full with the daily business of holding a home and family together may have trouble doing the full-time research work necessary to cut through the fog and smoke and the lies and half-truths and spun baloney of charter marketing. I am saying that schools should not have "caveat emptor" stamped on their front doors.
And I'm saying that folks who say "driven by parent choice" as if that is a pure, clear, clean solution are either fooling themselves or trying to fool everyone else.
ICYMI: This Week's Edubloggery Sampler
Well, this has been a week. I will leave you to find your own pieces about John King failing upward and the NEA deciding to shove a Hillary recommendation down membership's throat. In fact, maybe you'll enjoy some reading to take your mind off all of that.
Highlighting Websites and Blogs
Nancy Bailey offers a great, mostly-organized list of some of the folks writing about the Great Public Education Debate. I include this not because she says nice things about me, but because it's always good to expand your reading horizons
Does Subject Matter Knowledge Matter As Much As We Think?
A look at some research about what has impact in the classroom. The most powerful part is seeing what does have an impact
A Charter Place Parable
Short and sweet tale of why charters are a bad idea, from the superintendent of Chapel Hill schools (so you really might have missed it)
AP Classes Are a Scam
This article from the Atlantic is actually three years old, but it's still worth a read now that the PSAT is more directly set up as a marketing tool for AP courses.
A Look Back at DeVos
Links to three videos of reformsters gabillionaire Richard DeVos talking about how public education needs to be the next frontier of trashing democracy for fun and profit. Oh, and the videos go back to 2002.
The Reformy Arguments Are Getting Worserer
This week the Jazzman got himself into an argument with one of the crack writers over at Education Post. This is the final piece of the series-- you can backtrack if you like, but this captures the Jazzman at his fact-wielding best.
Class Is In Session With Jose Luis Vilson
Vilson was profiled this week, and actually, sadly, it would be notable enough that any publication decided to profile an actual working teacher, Vilson is also an accomplished author and activist, so this profile is doubly rewarding. Lift yourself up by reading about one of the good guys who is actually making his voice heard from inside the profession.
Highlighting Websites and Blogs
Nancy Bailey offers a great, mostly-organized list of some of the folks writing about the Great Public Education Debate. I include this not because she says nice things about me, but because it's always good to expand your reading horizons
Does Subject Matter Knowledge Matter As Much As We Think?
A look at some research about what has impact in the classroom. The most powerful part is seeing what does have an impact
A Charter Place Parable
Short and sweet tale of why charters are a bad idea, from the superintendent of Chapel Hill schools (so you really might have missed it)
AP Classes Are a Scam
This article from the Atlantic is actually three years old, but it's still worth a read now that the PSAT is more directly set up as a marketing tool for AP courses.
A Look Back at DeVos
Links to three videos of reformsters gabillionaire Richard DeVos talking about how public education needs to be the next frontier of trashing democracy for fun and profit. Oh, and the videos go back to 2002.
The Reformy Arguments Are Getting Worserer
This week the Jazzman got himself into an argument with one of the crack writers over at Education Post. This is the final piece of the series-- you can backtrack if you like, but this captures the Jazzman at his fact-wielding best.
Class Is In Session With Jose Luis Vilson
Vilson was profiled this week, and actually, sadly, it would be notable enough that any publication decided to profile an actual working teacher, Vilson is also an accomplished author and activist, so this profile is doubly rewarding. Lift yourself up by reading about one of the good guys who is actually making his voice heard from inside the profession.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
An Open Letter to Jerry Oleksiak (PSEA President)
Dear Jerry:
It has been a disappointing couple of days, what with the announcement of the announcement that the terrible Arne Duncan will be replaced with the even-worse John King. On top of that, we get the NEA's announcement of the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Now, today, on Facebook, I find your rationalized spin for that endorsement. I am beyond disappointed, but rather than simply stomp off angrily without saying anything except, "Cancel my membership," I want to address your comments, despite the fact that this endorsement fiasco drives home the fact that nobody in the state or local union is paying the slightest damn attention to the members. I am in my thirty seventh year of teaching in a classroom. I'm a registered Democrat who votes in every single election, and I'm a past local president of my union. So understand that I am not just some random crank, but an experienced and long-involved crank.
After presenting the background of your involvement in NEA's decision, you ask this question.
As you make your own decisions about whom you will support, I would encourage you to ask yourself this question: "Does this candidate support public education, our schools, and our students?"
It is an excellent question to ask, and one that I have asked myself. In fact, it's in asking this question that I arrive at my personal decision not to support Clinton. But before I talk about my own data on the issue, I want to see how that question leads you and NEA to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. So let's look at what you've got.
I have spoken to many PSEA members over the past year, and one concern I hear again and again is that public education in the United States is at a crossroads. Our colleagues you elected to the NEA board have heard similar sentiments, as have their NEA Board colleagues in other states. That is why they felt it was so important to act early and decisively to recommend someone for president who is the right person to take our country in the right direction.
Do not talk to us as if we are children. First of all, the NEA higher-ups did not get together to endorse "somebody" as the right person. You got together to consider endorsing Hillary Clinton, and you did it in hopes that by stepping in to save her flagging candidacy at the point it's beginning to circle the drain, the NEA would earn some favors, or at least some standing with a possible Clinton administration. If Clinton were not starting to worry about Bernie Sanders, the NEA would never have been having this conversation.
Secretary Clinton is a longtime supporter of public education and a longtime friend of NEA. She has worked throughout her career to make sure every child has access to preschool, and every child has access to quality healthcare through the CHIP program.
Those two examples mean nothing in terms of supporting public education. And if you want to convince me she's a friend of NEA, you'd better get specific, because while it's hard to prove a negative, I'm damned if I can think of a single time she's done something for the union.
She opposes over-testing of students, and has fought for greater resources for our schools.
When? How? You follow with a quote in which she says something nice about public education, but general platitudes are not reassuring, particularly when we're talking about someone who praised Jeb Bush's work on education in Florida.
Secretary Clinton will also be a voice for our professions. She supports higher salaries for educators and collective bargaining rights. Secretary Clinton has said, "It's time to stand up to efforts across our country to undermine worker bargaining power, which has been proven again and again to drive up wages."
Surely the NEA leadership is not that obtuse. Higher salaries for teachers is popular talking point among many education reformers, who see higher pay-- for some-- as a useful tool in de-professionalizing teaching. Some like the idea of higher pay--linked to test results. Others like the idea of well-paid super-sardinemasters, with teachers handling hundreds of students in a single class.
And if Senator Clinton feels strongly about bargaining rights, why has she not spoken out strongly about any of the direct attacks on those rights.
She will listen to our ideas, be sensitive to our policy recommendations, and appoint a secretary of education who will do what's right for our schools and students.
Who do you mean by "our" exactly? Because apparently I can't even get my own union to listen to my ideas, so I'm not thinking members concerns will get passed on. "Be sensitive to" is the weakest kind of weasel language, as is the line about the secretary of education.
I mean, part of my issue here is that this is a bunch of weak-sauced general pablum at a time in which we face very specific, very direct attacks on our profession. If the candidate can't talk about specifics, I'm going to assume that the candidate is either ignorant of them or chooses not to address them because the candidate thinks I wouldn't like what she/he has to say. If soldiers from East Bottlevania were landing on the beaches of New Jersey, slaughtering civilians and blowing up cities, I would not be looking for a President who says, "In general, we are sensitive to the idea that foreign nationals should not be entering our nation's mainland and doing things that make our citizens upset."
There has been speculation out there that NEA has not followed its prescribed process in making this recommendation.
Again, you can't be this obtuse. The speculation has not been that NEA is not following its process-- the speculation is that NEA's process sucks. I can think you can find plenty of members who have always thought it sucked, but generally felt that A) they couldn't do anything about it and B) it didn't usually involve really damaging decisions. This time is different. This time teachers are feeling really, really pushed into a corner and attacked, and meanwhile, their state and national unions aren't hearing them or addressing the problem. The proscribed process is one more way in which rank and file members are left feeling unheard and ignored by their own leadership. I don't care if you followed the letter of the rules that you set up for yourselves. The rules stink.
Additionally, as I've written before, this was exact;y the wrong for this type of political maneuvering. Democratic processes are under attack in this country, and to take action that makes a blatant lie out of Eskelsen-Garcia's "This is what democracy looks like" statement is exactly the wrong action at the wrong time. I don't care if it follows the policy and procedures manual or not.
Over the recent summer and into the fall, we have watched the presidential campaign kick into high gear. We have witnessed several candidates stake out positions of support for:
- Cutting funding to public schools;
- Linking educator pay to student test scores;
- Expanding private school vouchers;
- Weakening collective bargaining rights; and
- Testing kids even more than we do now.
Some candidates even want to go so far as to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education!
The subtext here is supposed to be, "But the GOP is really, really worse," I suppose, and I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly deeply completely utterly sick I am of having my union leadership tell me, "Well, we have to support the guy who will cut off our legs, because the other guy will cut off our legs and arms both." I have had this argument with your predecessors, because this is a stupid, self-defeating line of reasoning, and we have suffered decades of misery because of it. The appropriate response to two candidates who each want to hurt us severely is to support NONE of them.
But your list is particularly galling because some of the things listed here are much-beloved by Hillary Clinton. She is a long-time fan of vouchers and privatizing schools through charters. The Center for American Progress has close ties to the Clinton campaign (John Podesta, previous CAP head and current Clinton campaign chief is just one example), and CAP has pushed for charters, high stakes testing, Common Core, and teacher evaluations tied to testing.
Faced with these grim realities, the NEA board chose to support a candidate who can win this election and will be a champion for our schools, our students, and our professions.
Yes, ultimately, this is about NEA leadership's belief in Clinton's ability to win-- at least, if she's not too bloodied by Sanders. But for the love of God-- if there is a credible reason to believe that Clinton will be a champion for any of those things, you had better share it with us, because I'll be damned if I've seen it.
Look-- beyond individual candidates, PSEA and NEA need to take a good hard look at their relationship with the Democratic party. In Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell was a disaster for public education, and nationally, the Obama-Duncan administration has been the most destructive ever. Like good little soldiers, we teachers keep sending our support, and our elected Democratic politicians keep stabbing us in the back. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only teacher who's had enough, and now I see us pushing a Clinton Presidency, which for education looks like more Obama Presidency, which simply doubled down on the worst policy choices of the Bush Presidency.
Other states found the backbone to stand up to the national union on this. It would have been heartening to see Pennsylvania do the same. Instead, once again, here comes the union leadership with carefully crafted spin and PR designed to manage the members and get them to fall into line. Honestly, I suppose I'll stew over quitting the union for a while and ultimately not do it, for a variety of unrelated reasons. But it's a union affiliation that am now ashamed of. This was a bad choice, divisive and destructive of NEA bargaining strength and dismissive of members at a time when we really don't need to be ignored by one more national organization, as well as supportive of a politician who we have no reason to believe will have our backs, ever. All the more ironic when NEA leadership has admitted that another candidate is much more in tune with our concerns.
PSEA has been trying to address the questions of 1) how to get more young teachers into the union and 2) how to get better PACE participation. Pretty sure this will not help. "Hey, young teacher, please join PSEA. We would love to have your dues, and we will be happy to tell you what you think." Not a winner. Also, "Give us money to support politicians who will only stomp on you a little," is not a great sales pitch.
This was a bad call, and your attempt to justify it only made it sting worse. Feel free to contact me with any information that would help me better understand. In the meantime, I'm just going to continue being pissed off.
Sincerely,
Peter Greene
It has been a disappointing couple of days, what with the announcement of the announcement that the terrible Arne Duncan will be replaced with the even-worse John King. On top of that, we get the NEA's announcement of the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Now, today, on Facebook, I find your rationalized spin for that endorsement. I am beyond disappointed, but rather than simply stomp off angrily without saying anything except, "Cancel my membership," I want to address your comments, despite the fact that this endorsement fiasco drives home the fact that nobody in the state or local union is paying the slightest damn attention to the members. I am in my thirty seventh year of teaching in a classroom. I'm a registered Democrat who votes in every single election, and I'm a past local president of my union. So understand that I am not just some random crank, but an experienced and long-involved crank.
After presenting the background of your involvement in NEA's decision, you ask this question.
As you make your own decisions about whom you will support, I would encourage you to ask yourself this question: "Does this candidate support public education, our schools, and our students?"
It is an excellent question to ask, and one that I have asked myself. In fact, it's in asking this question that I arrive at my personal decision not to support Clinton. But before I talk about my own data on the issue, I want to see how that question leads you and NEA to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. So let's look at what you've got.
I have spoken to many PSEA members over the past year, and one concern I hear again and again is that public education in the United States is at a crossroads. Our colleagues you elected to the NEA board have heard similar sentiments, as have their NEA Board colleagues in other states. That is why they felt it was so important to act early and decisively to recommend someone for president who is the right person to take our country in the right direction.
Do not talk to us as if we are children. First of all, the NEA higher-ups did not get together to endorse "somebody" as the right person. You got together to consider endorsing Hillary Clinton, and you did it in hopes that by stepping in to save her flagging candidacy at the point it's beginning to circle the drain, the NEA would earn some favors, or at least some standing with a possible Clinton administration. If Clinton were not starting to worry about Bernie Sanders, the NEA would never have been having this conversation.
Secretary Clinton is a longtime supporter of public education and a longtime friend of NEA. She has worked throughout her career to make sure every child has access to preschool, and every child has access to quality healthcare through the CHIP program.
Those two examples mean nothing in terms of supporting public education. And if you want to convince me she's a friend of NEA, you'd better get specific, because while it's hard to prove a negative, I'm damned if I can think of a single time she's done something for the union.
She opposes over-testing of students, and has fought for greater resources for our schools.
When? How? You follow with a quote in which she says something nice about public education, but general platitudes are not reassuring, particularly when we're talking about someone who praised Jeb Bush's work on education in Florida.
Secretary Clinton will also be a voice for our professions. She supports higher salaries for educators and collective bargaining rights. Secretary Clinton has said, "It's time to stand up to efforts across our country to undermine worker bargaining power, which has been proven again and again to drive up wages."
Surely the NEA leadership is not that obtuse. Higher salaries for teachers is popular talking point among many education reformers, who see higher pay-- for some-- as a useful tool in de-professionalizing teaching. Some like the idea of higher pay--linked to test results. Others like the idea of well-paid super-sardinemasters, with teachers handling hundreds of students in a single class.
And if Senator Clinton feels strongly about bargaining rights, why has she not spoken out strongly about any of the direct attacks on those rights.
She will listen to our ideas, be sensitive to our policy recommendations, and appoint a secretary of education who will do what's right for our schools and students.
Who do you mean by "our" exactly? Because apparently I can't even get my own union to listen to my ideas, so I'm not thinking members concerns will get passed on. "Be sensitive to" is the weakest kind of weasel language, as is the line about the secretary of education.
I mean, part of my issue here is that this is a bunch of weak-sauced general pablum at a time in which we face very specific, very direct attacks on our profession. If the candidate can't talk about specifics, I'm going to assume that the candidate is either ignorant of them or chooses not to address them because the candidate thinks I wouldn't like what she/he has to say. If soldiers from East Bottlevania were landing on the beaches of New Jersey, slaughtering civilians and blowing up cities, I would not be looking for a President who says, "In general, we are sensitive to the idea that foreign nationals should not be entering our nation's mainland and doing things that make our citizens upset."
There has been speculation out there that NEA has not followed its prescribed process in making this recommendation.
Again, you can't be this obtuse. The speculation has not been that NEA is not following its process-- the speculation is that NEA's process sucks. I can think you can find plenty of members who have always thought it sucked, but generally felt that A) they couldn't do anything about it and B) it didn't usually involve really damaging decisions. This time is different. This time teachers are feeling really, really pushed into a corner and attacked, and meanwhile, their state and national unions aren't hearing them or addressing the problem. The proscribed process is one more way in which rank and file members are left feeling unheard and ignored by their own leadership. I don't care if you followed the letter of the rules that you set up for yourselves. The rules stink.
Additionally, as I've written before, this was exact;y the wrong for this type of political maneuvering. Democratic processes are under attack in this country, and to take action that makes a blatant lie out of Eskelsen-Garcia's "This is what democracy looks like" statement is exactly the wrong action at the wrong time. I don't care if it follows the policy and procedures manual or not.
Over the recent summer and into the fall, we have watched the presidential campaign kick into high gear. We have witnessed several candidates stake out positions of support for:
- Cutting funding to public schools;
- Linking educator pay to student test scores;
- Expanding private school vouchers;
- Weakening collective bargaining rights; and
- Testing kids even more than we do now.
Some candidates even want to go so far as to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education!
The subtext here is supposed to be, "But the GOP is really, really worse," I suppose, and I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly deeply completely utterly sick I am of having my union leadership tell me, "Well, we have to support the guy who will cut off our legs, because the other guy will cut off our legs and arms both." I have had this argument with your predecessors, because this is a stupid, self-defeating line of reasoning, and we have suffered decades of misery because of it. The appropriate response to two candidates who each want to hurt us severely is to support NONE of them.
But your list is particularly galling because some of the things listed here are much-beloved by Hillary Clinton. She is a long-time fan of vouchers and privatizing schools through charters. The Center for American Progress has close ties to the Clinton campaign (John Podesta, previous CAP head and current Clinton campaign chief is just one example), and CAP has pushed for charters, high stakes testing, Common Core, and teacher evaluations tied to testing.
Faced with these grim realities, the NEA board chose to support a candidate who can win this election and will be a champion for our schools, our students, and our professions.
Yes, ultimately, this is about NEA leadership's belief in Clinton's ability to win-- at least, if she's not too bloodied by Sanders. But for the love of God-- if there is a credible reason to believe that Clinton will be a champion for any of those things, you had better share it with us, because I'll be damned if I've seen it.
Look-- beyond individual candidates, PSEA and NEA need to take a good hard look at their relationship with the Democratic party. In Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell was a disaster for public education, and nationally, the Obama-Duncan administration has been the most destructive ever. Like good little soldiers, we teachers keep sending our support, and our elected Democratic politicians keep stabbing us in the back. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only teacher who's had enough, and now I see us pushing a Clinton Presidency, which for education looks like more Obama Presidency, which simply doubled down on the worst policy choices of the Bush Presidency.
Other states found the backbone to stand up to the national union on this. It would have been heartening to see Pennsylvania do the same. Instead, once again, here comes the union leadership with carefully crafted spin and PR designed to manage the members and get them to fall into line. Honestly, I suppose I'll stew over quitting the union for a while and ultimately not do it, for a variety of unrelated reasons. But it's a union affiliation that am now ashamed of. This was a bad choice, divisive and destructive of NEA bargaining strength and dismissive of members at a time when we really don't need to be ignored by one more national organization, as well as supportive of a politician who we have no reason to believe will have our backs, ever. All the more ironic when NEA leadership has admitted that another candidate is much more in tune with our concerns.
PSEA has been trying to address the questions of 1) how to get more young teachers into the union and 2) how to get better PACE participation. Pretty sure this will not help. "Hey, young teacher, please join PSEA. We would love to have your dues, and we will be happy to tell you what you think." Not a winner. Also, "Give us money to support politicians who will only stomp on you a little," is not a great sales pitch.
This was a bad call, and your attempt to justify it only made it sting worse. Feel free to contact me with any information that would help me better understand. In the meantime, I'm just going to continue being pissed off.
Sincerely,
Peter Greene
Friday, October 2, 2015
The Future for Duncan and King
Let me join the sixty gazillion people who will have something to say about the news from the US Education Department. I'll make my comments in the form of predictions.
Duncan will spend his last couple of months doing what he's been doing for years-- making statements that sound pretty good, connecting them to terrible policies, and generally being ignored by Congress.
Some people will be really excited that he is leaving. These will be the same people who felt certain that Duncan was some sort of rogue agent, sneaking off to implement terrible policies behind the President's back, instead of the President's Guy, a cabinet bro who did just what Obama wanted him to. There have been fewer and fewer of these people over the years, but they still exist, and they still think that when Duncan leaves USED, things will get better. These folks should try investing in Floridian swampland.
Everyone east of the Mississippi who has been paying attention will express horror that former New York state ed chief John King had been names Duncan's replacement. In terms of policy, these two are cut from the same cloth. King loves him some Big Standardized Tests, test-based teacher evaluations, Common Core, and a whole world of privatization via barely-regulated charters. King has a hell of a personal story, from which he has failed to learn some critical lessons (a teacher changed his life, and he would like to install a system that would strap such a teacher to a giant steamrolling lemon). King does not suffer from a great deal of humility (he once astonishingly invoked both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln as supporters of Common Core and other reformy nonsense).
John King will make people actually miss Arne Duncan. King has a deft touch with the public. His biggest PR coup was to set up a series of meetings to educate the public about the awesomeness of his programs, and when they refused to sit quietly and be hectored, but instead actually talked back to him, King simply canceled the meetings. King never met a corporate reformy idea he didn't like, or a person objecting to such ideas that he thought was worth listening to. Duncan at least knew how to pay lip service to the concerns of stakeholders in public education; King will be so dismissive and obnoxious that folks will beg for Duncan to come back and tell us all pretty, pretty lies.
John King will most likely take office. There has been a lot of hopeful speculation that since he never went before Congress to take his "special advisor" position with USED, he somehow won't be eligible to act as secretary of the department. I can't think of any reason that would be true. And since he is a huge proponent of the reformy ideas beloved by republicans and democrats alike, I can't imagine who's going to stop him. Yes, he'll be terrible at it, but you may have noticed that competence is not necessary for gummint work.
John King will give a boost to national opt out. Remember, this is the guy who sowed the seeds of New York's opt out movement by being an intransigent asshat. There's no reason to think he won't scale that behavior up to the national level, allowing NY's highly successful opt outers to point and say, "See? See what we're talking about??"
King will also help convince Congress that any finished version of ESEA should keep the USED Secretary No Touching Anything clause.
Arne Duncan will get a nice cushy job somewhere, most likely working as a lobbyist or consultant or corporate hood ornament. He'll occasionally make a speech or a post somewhere, but nobody will be heavily influenced. If he is patient enough long enough, his stock will rise steadily as people forget what a disaster he was while they simultaneously build a huge storehouse of anger in reaction to Secretary King.
Fun times ahead, indeed.
Duncan will spend his last couple of months doing what he's been doing for years-- making statements that sound pretty good, connecting them to terrible policies, and generally being ignored by Congress.
Some people will be really excited that he is leaving. These will be the same people who felt certain that Duncan was some sort of rogue agent, sneaking off to implement terrible policies behind the President's back, instead of the President's Guy, a cabinet bro who did just what Obama wanted him to. There have been fewer and fewer of these people over the years, but they still exist, and they still think that when Duncan leaves USED, things will get better. These folks should try investing in Floridian swampland.
Everyone east of the Mississippi who has been paying attention will express horror that former New York state ed chief John King had been names Duncan's replacement. In terms of policy, these two are cut from the same cloth. King loves him some Big Standardized Tests, test-based teacher evaluations, Common Core, and a whole world of privatization via barely-regulated charters. King has a hell of a personal story, from which he has failed to learn some critical lessons (a teacher changed his life, and he would like to install a system that would strap such a teacher to a giant steamrolling lemon). King does not suffer from a great deal of humility (he once astonishingly invoked both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln as supporters of Common Core and other reformy nonsense).
John King will make people actually miss Arne Duncan. King has a deft touch with the public. His biggest PR coup was to set up a series of meetings to educate the public about the awesomeness of his programs, and when they refused to sit quietly and be hectored, but instead actually talked back to him, King simply canceled the meetings. King never met a corporate reformy idea he didn't like, or a person objecting to such ideas that he thought was worth listening to. Duncan at least knew how to pay lip service to the concerns of stakeholders in public education; King will be so dismissive and obnoxious that folks will beg for Duncan to come back and tell us all pretty, pretty lies.
John King will most likely take office. There has been a lot of hopeful speculation that since he never went before Congress to take his "special advisor" position with USED, he somehow won't be eligible to act as secretary of the department. I can't think of any reason that would be true. And since he is a huge proponent of the reformy ideas beloved by republicans and democrats alike, I can't imagine who's going to stop him. Yes, he'll be terrible at it, but you may have noticed that competence is not necessary for gummint work.
John King will give a boost to national opt out. Remember, this is the guy who sowed the seeds of New York's opt out movement by being an intransigent asshat. There's no reason to think he won't scale that behavior up to the national level, allowing NY's highly successful opt outers to point and say, "See? See what we're talking about??"
King will also help convince Congress that any finished version of ESEA should keep the USED Secretary No Touching Anything clause.
Arne Duncan will get a nice cushy job somewhere, most likely working as a lobbyist or consultant or corporate hood ornament. He'll occasionally make a speech or a post somewhere, but nobody will be heavily influenced. If he is patient enough long enough, his stock will rise steadily as people forget what a disaster he was while they simultaneously build a huge storehouse of anger in reaction to Secretary King.
Fun times ahead, indeed.
Dammit, NEA
The national leadership of the NEA today is one step closer to ramming the endorsement of Hillary Clinton down its members throats.
Steven Singer zeroed in on the maximum-irony quote from NEA president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia:
“We are what Democracy looks like.”
With those words, Lily Eskelsen Garcia took the reigns of the National Education Association (NEA) as President in 2014.
Well, no. This is not what democracy looks like. Not even if you squint real hard and tilt your head.
This is not what a recruitment drive looks like, as NEA continues to wish that it could take a stronger hold among younger members. In my corner of the world, the state called some local union leaders together to talk about the secret of getting more contributions for the political action committee. This does not look like how you do that, either.
You do not build a union by going to young professionals and saying, "Hey, we'd like you to give us some dues. In return, we'll tell you what we want you to think about national issues without ever checking with you to get your opinion." You do not build a union by telling your members, "Hey, we know what's best for you. Shut up and sit down."
Democracy is under attack in this country. In Alabama, where the system is now rigged to deny poor, black voters the ID now required to vote. In city after city where the model for running schools has become to silence local voters and taxpayers.
Now more than ever, the union should be standing up for democracy, modeling for the world how it works. But a union that acts like this simply throws away whatever moral authority it might have had. It turns the declaration "We are what democracy looks like" into a cynical joke.
And in return, we get what? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Has Clinton made even an empty politician's vow to come out in support of public education? Nope-- not a peep, not a sound, not a word. And we did not so much as demand that she court us, not even a little.
There is a special kind of anger that comes when you have tried to defend someone and they insist on doing something indefensible, and that's the anger I'm feeling right now. At a time when so many people are punching holes in the ship, NEA shows up with buckets of water.
On what principle will this early endorsement of Clinton be defended? We figured it might get us more power, maybe? It might earn us a seat at the fabled table? It can't be defended as an expression of the will of the members, because NEA's leaders have no idea what the membership wants. It can't be defended as a stand on principle. And it certainly can't be defended as a rush to stand up for a friend of public education, because Clinton, who has long ties with Broad and praise for Bush's work on education in Florida, has not shown us one reason to be trusted.
In fact, the Clinton campaign has tried to establish its bona fides by sticking to safe issues around the edges-- pre-school and college availability. On public K-12 education, where there is plenty of room to come thundering out in favor of traditional public ed, in favor of preserving the voice of communities, in favor of preserving one of basic pillars of democratic process, Clinton has offered nothing.
I am, as you might have guessed, pissed. Pissed like I was when Dennis Van Roekel implicity accepted the notion that we needed Common Core because America's teachers were falling down on the job.
What the hell does my national union stand for? At what point will my national union leaders actually demand something from politicians in the name of public education and the teachers who work there? And what is the point of belonging to an organization that does not appear to value any of the things that I value?
How many times can I enter a conversation with my non-union friends about the union where I have to wade in with a sheepish, "Well, yeah, but--" when I am running out of things to put after the"but"?
Steven Singer zeroed in on the maximum-irony quote from NEA president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia:
“We are what Democracy looks like.”
With those words, Lily Eskelsen Garcia took the reigns of the National Education Association (NEA) as President in 2014.
Well, no. This is not what democracy looks like. Not even if you squint real hard and tilt your head.
This is not what a recruitment drive looks like, as NEA continues to wish that it could take a stronger hold among younger members. In my corner of the world, the state called some local union leaders together to talk about the secret of getting more contributions for the political action committee. This does not look like how you do that, either.
You do not build a union by going to young professionals and saying, "Hey, we'd like you to give us some dues. In return, we'll tell you what we want you to think about national issues without ever checking with you to get your opinion." You do not build a union by telling your members, "Hey, we know what's best for you. Shut up and sit down."
Democracy is under attack in this country. In Alabama, where the system is now rigged to deny poor, black voters the ID now required to vote. In city after city where the model for running schools has become to silence local voters and taxpayers.
Now more than ever, the union should be standing up for democracy, modeling for the world how it works. But a union that acts like this simply throws away whatever moral authority it might have had. It turns the declaration "We are what democracy looks like" into a cynical joke.
And in return, we get what? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Has Clinton made even an empty politician's vow to come out in support of public education? Nope-- not a peep, not a sound, not a word. And we did not so much as demand that she court us, not even a little.
There is a special kind of anger that comes when you have tried to defend someone and they insist on doing something indefensible, and that's the anger I'm feeling right now. At a time when so many people are punching holes in the ship, NEA shows up with buckets of water.
On what principle will this early endorsement of Clinton be defended? We figured it might get us more power, maybe? It might earn us a seat at the fabled table? It can't be defended as an expression of the will of the members, because NEA's leaders have no idea what the membership wants. It can't be defended as a stand on principle. And it certainly can't be defended as a rush to stand up for a friend of public education, because Clinton, who has long ties with Broad and praise for Bush's work on education in Florida, has not shown us one reason to be trusted.
In fact, the Clinton campaign has tried to establish its bona fides by sticking to safe issues around the edges-- pre-school and college availability. On public K-12 education, where there is plenty of room to come thundering out in favor of traditional public ed, in favor of preserving the voice of communities, in favor of preserving one of basic pillars of democratic process, Clinton has offered nothing.
I am, as you might have guessed, pissed. Pissed like I was when Dennis Van Roekel implicity accepted the notion that we needed Common Core because America's teachers were falling down on the job.
What the hell does my national union stand for? At what point will my national union leaders actually demand something from politicians in the name of public education and the teachers who work there? And what is the point of belonging to an organization that does not appear to value any of the things that I value?
How many times can I enter a conversation with my non-union friends about the union where I have to wade in with a sheepish, "Well, yeah, but--" when I am running out of things to put after the"but"?
Thursday, October 1, 2015
What Happens After You Blow It All Up
At the Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch last week, Jonas Persson unearthed some footage from a panel in New Orleans posted last June, sponsored by the American Federation for Children, a group associated with Betsy DeVos.
Persson's coverage zeroed in on a minute's worth of talk-noises from Rebecca Sibilia from EdBuild, in which Sibilia appears to rather gleefully celebrate just how awesome the bankruptcy of major school districts would be, allowing the new operators to dump legacy debts like building and pension costs.
Sibilia charges that the post "blatantly (and bizarrely) mischarecterizes" what EdBuild is about, and so I figured, what the hell, I'll just watch the whole thing and see if her somewhat awful comments improve with context.
The clip has not been played much (fifty times when I got there), but it's actually pretty good viewing, featuring some familiar reformy names like Andy Smarick, Mike McShane and moderator Derrell Bradford, plus some folks I didn't know, like Jaime Casap and Katie Beck. We have thirty-five minutes of discussion to get through, and much of it requires some thoughtful consideration, so if you were hoping for a short blog post, you should probably just abandon hope here. So here we go (the whole clip is at the bottom, in case you want to check my work).
Knocking It Out and Tone
The actual title of the panel is "Knocking Out Yesterday's Education Models," though Persson reports that Bradford makes a joke about the working title being "What Happens After You Blow It All Up." If you watch it, I will warn you that the most disconcerting thing about the whole discussion is the jaunty, breezy, jolly, jokey tone of the whole business. As a teacher, it is beyond disconcerting about watching people discuss blowing up the work that you've devoted your life to while they laugh and smile and yuk it up like the whole destruction of traditional public education is hi-larious.
I am trying hard not to hold it against them. I've been around enough to get it-- you're in a room where "we're all friends here" and it's a fun conference in a fun place and you're seeing a lot of friends you don't always get to see and it's easy to forget the grimmer reality of what you're talking about. However, some of the jokes that get cracked tell us a bit about where these folks are coming from.
Mostly the panelists go one at a time, so we'll take this person by person.
Andy Smarick
Bradford teases Smarick about the terrible acronym associated with his work in urban schools of the future, then notes his history of working in government. I've tweeted and written back and forth with Smarick many times, but this is the first time I've seen him in action, and he has a sort of corn-fed aw-shucks quality that suits him well.
Bradford asks a pretty direct question: "What lives and what dies in a system of choice schools? More importantly, why should anything live" in the transition to a system of "disperse governance driven by parent choice." And I think that's a good question, but I also think that the notion that a choice system would be driven by parent choice is either naive or disingenuous, like insisting that the soft drink industry or fast food biz are driven purely by customer choice. But we'll go there another day.
Smarick, after some banter, has to stop and think, saying "I've never thought of it in those terms before." So.
What should live? Democratic control. "It's something we think too little about...with systems of choice." But Smarick believes there's some way that the community at large should be able to "control the contours of the system." It probably should not look like a traditional school board (that owns and operates all the stuff), but there should be something that gives the locals control. Well said, Andy!
What should die? The notion of a school existing in perpetuity, and the right of government to tell parents where to send their kids based on where they live. Assigning low income families to neighborhood schools, even if they suck, "has got to go away." We should be agnostic about who runs schools as long as they're good.
For 100 years, we had a single provider system, and we told students where to go to school based on where they live--bzzt! This is what I think reformsters get wrong, over and over. In Smarick's narrative, one would think the federal and state government started schools. But community schools were started by communities, just as communities started their own police and fire departments. Schools had geographical boundaries for the same reason that when there's a fire in the Bronx, they don't call the fire department in Newark.
You can watch the same thing happening in homeschool co-ops. Groups of homeschoolers go in together, set up a meeting place, buy/hire resources, and use them for their kids in their community. That's how schools grow-- not by the feds saying, "We're going to open a bunch of schools and tell you which ones you have to go to." I think there's a discussion to be had about how state and federal gummint got more and more entwined in this, but the narrative of top-down school creation is fundamentally flawed.
But Smarick is still going, and saying better things. We broke the old system, he says, and now we have to buy it. And the old choice fan notion that we could just set up charters and give parents choice and let them go and everything would be awesome-- it's much more complicated than that. He rattles off some nuts and bolts issues-- who owns the building, who runs the registration, what about backfilling. It's more fun to talk about empowering parents, but the detaily tech wonky stuff matters. Which we haven't addressed enough.
Michael Q. McShane
The Q is for Quentin, because chatty buds. McShane is a research fellow at AEI, and snappily dressed. He is also, as I've always seen him, tightly wound and intense, like a guy who's had his twenty cups of coffee, but hasn't yet run his daily ten miles to take the edge off. Bradford hits him with a much vaguer question about what the outcomes of choice kind of look like.
So McShane starts on free markets and thinking about supply and demand. McShane has focusd more on supply-- how to encourage more new better schools. McShane thinks choice has three mechanisms for the ultimate goal of "getting a child a seat in a high quality school." Anyway, what can the market do-- 1) it can fill space in existing high quality schools, 2) encourage HQS to scale up, and 3) actually create new HSQ. McShane argues that 1 is going great, 2 and 3 not so much, because of "choke points" in the marketplace. I would argue maybe not so much "choke points" as "nobody in the reformy business really has any idea how to do 2 or 3." And maybe McShane sort of agrees because he says the choke points are in the "pipeline of human capital." Then blah blah something about understanding what they're doing and why.
Bradford follows up by tossing out a McShanian "bon mot"-- "institutional isomorphism" which is his phrase for the tendency of the new thing to look like the old thing, which is a really valid idea. For free, I will offer McShane the observation that movies initially just recorded staged plays and records initially captured live performances, and it took a while for them to start capturing things that could only be captured in the new medium.
So McShane talks about charter school authorizers and references one of his papers which I addressed at the time. McShane starts talking about the many weird things that charter authorizers require, which causes this exchange:
McShane: To operate a charter school in Colorado, you have to demonstrate you know what's going to happen if a child forgets his or her lunch-
Bradord: (interrupting jokily): They get hungry.
In a crowd of people who regularly deal with plenty of poor kids who "forget" lunch or lunch money all the time, this would not be particularly hilarious, and it does not get a big laugh here. But it does tell us something about the setting.
Anyway, McShane wants to observe that filling out the applications can be daunting, and that the requirements of the application can shape the school. Which is kind of the same way student applications for charter schools affect what students get in. McShane notes that authorizers have an absolute duty to make sure that charlatans don't operate schools (wake up, Ohio).
Jaime Casap
This guy is the chief "education evangelist" for Google. He gets "What's the internet's role in all this?"
Casap starts with the importance of where you were born in your academic success. He notes that he was born in Hell's Kitchen, and he wants you to know he means the scary, ugly Hell's Kitchen of the seventies and not the breezy upscale version of today, thereby driving right past the issue of gentrification and how neighborhoods "improve" themselves by chasing out poor people and bringing in not-poor people. Because when you blow that system up, you also throw away the people that inhabited it and replace them with "better" people. Could we talk about how that relates to the charter movement? Probably not. I'm not trying to pick, but there's a theme running through discussion of a strange disconnect between these swell ideas and how peoples' lives are actually connected to them.
He was a "typical urban kid" who grew up on food stamps and welfare (and non-English speaking). The Columbus library was his big source of information, cue story about how research sucked back then (preach it). But now we have the internet, but classrooms look the same. Don't use technology just to make "bad education...faster and more efficient."
Casap says there are three things happening with technology. 1) We have evidence about what learning can look like (autonomy + purpose + mastery) and technology can help us do that. Somehow? 2) Technology has wrapped itself around the core of our own lives. 3) Kids who "don't know any better." They take tech for granted and they don't know to think that tech doesn't belong in education.
Now he goes way wrong. "Nobody looks at a great work of architecture and wonders what hammer they used." Well, no-- unless they are a builder or an architect. Casap wants to focus on outcomes, which is great if you're an amateur and a consumer. But I'll bet Google pays plenty of attention to how they do what they do. Technique and tools can and probably should be invisible-- but not to the people who are trying to get the job done.
Katie Beck
COO of 4.0 Schools, Beck has a Teach for America pedigree, and went through the Harvard College. She gets "how do you turn education into a more entrepreneurial space" as a question, so I guess we're skipping over "why the hell would you want to do that?"
Her outfit likes to work with people who are "obsessed" with a problem and who want to make money from the solution. Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not loving her message, and she does that thing where every sentence ends like a question? Anyway, her term for institutional isomorphism is "the hairball" because, you know, traditional public school is just a disgusting mess. So, for instance, instead of starting with a charter that will spend $2 million and look like "an iteration of" existing schools, they help little boutique start-ups. Because anything that looks like the old way is obviously bad. I had the hardest time wading through Beck, who is so clearly focused on developing business without much interest in the education side of things. All of her ideas deal with the best way to get a business started up, with no concern expressed for the students who become the guinea pigs for these start-ups.
Bradford asks if for-profit people are any different to work with that the other altruistic folks. But she doesn't work with "bad actors" who are in it to make a buck. And being for-profit helps those people keep themselves honest because when you're obsessed with solving a problem, you have to ask "is this solving it enough that someone's willing to pay for it." Which I wouldn't call "keeping honest" so much as "missing the entire point of running a school."
Rebecca Sibilia
So here comes the lady who's quote got us interested in this panel in the first place. If we want all of her comments will it, as she suggests, make her sound better. Well, no. The whole thing is even worse than the quoted portion, which tells us a little something about how she sees herself.
Bradford asks her how we pay for all this innovation. And she opens with, "The problem is, we can't." Which is a remarkably honest answer [insert my usual complaint about trying to run charter systems without being honest about the true cost.] She will now break down the three problems that EdBuild is trying to solve.
First, the way that we're funding schools is "largely arbitrary" and "doesn't make any sense." And Sibilia seems far too smart to believe that baloney, but just in case, here goes: People set up schools in their community, for the students who live in their community, so they funded them by collecting money from everyone who lives in the community. Later on, state governments got involved in trying to even out the differences in funding inherent in a local-based system. There are lots of things to hate about how this is all playing out, but it's silly to pretend that the system just fell from the sky for no reason at all. Her criticism about uneven funding outcomes seems to be that by favoring one district over another financially, you're creating an artificial market bias. One might complain that some students are getting fewer resources than they deserve, but that doesn't seem to be her concern. It;s the savage and unwarranted abuse of the free market that's the issue.
Second, she doesn't like the borders that are created by property taxes, which seems exactly backwards. Municipal borders exist, and folks who live within them are taxed. Not the other way around. She thinks this leads to a mistake-- trying to get resources into those borders instead of "focusing on how we can break those borders" which is a less objectionable way to say "how we can get some students out." Because "breaking the borders" instead of "getting resources into the borders" has to mean that we are going to just let some areas collapse in unmitigated poverty. Which, as we'll see, is exactly her plan.
See, many states fund schools with property taxes, and in many states property taxes can't go to schools of choice. "We've had charter schools for a quarter of a century, but we're still treating them like an experiment. And so that's a problem and we have to fix it."
So, there is a ton of Wrong packed into that. First of all, the modern corporate charters these guys are talking about haven't been around for twenty-five years. Second, they are experiments, and not very successful ones, at that, having not yet figured out how to stop some charters from being Ohio-style nests of incompetence and corruption. Third, charters have used their fledgling nature as part of their excuse to avoid the same oversight and accountability that public schools enjoy. Every time a charter wants to set up a new rule for itself, its argument is, "We're a charter. We should be free to experiment and Try Stuff."
Sibilia's argument is that charters should get lots of sweet, sweet public tax money. Neither she nor other charter advocates make a convincing case for that.
But she's going on about the evils of property taxes being linked to public schools, and she and Bradford share a laugh at how it's still called millage, which apparently proves that it's just so antiquated and uncool. Har. And she goes on to try to make a point that funding is based on the teacher, and not the student and their needs, but somehow property tax locks this in, and so places where the charters are getting a new teacher corps (young? cheap? unprofessional? she doesn't explain the critical differences) are locked in. But until we can bust up the whole funding system (she also does not say what she wants to replace it with), none of the cool reforms being discussed here will be sustainable. And that much is probably true.
Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble and he would argue most can't afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system. And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its "legacy debt" so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just-- I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw. "Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids," is a statement that in the best of contexts is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia's discussion of how to blow up public schools so we can has charters, it's even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.
And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.
Andy Smarick
And here's why you should watch the whole clip-- because now Andy Smarick steps in to represent, as he frequently does, the point of view of an actual conservative. What he offers next is a welcome balance to the panel's delighted contemplation of destruction and ruin. Also, you have to love an answer that works in "Burkean conservative" and "accretion of policies."
What he says is, yes, we've got an old hide-bound system, and we might want to blow it up and replace it, but when you do that you break a lot of systems and policies that are tied to it. "When you tug on that thread, you see a lot of the fabric start to warp. This is not to say we shouldn't pull on that thread--"
But.
There is a downside to all this that should not be ignored. And he brings up Chesterton's fence. Which is an old British notion that you don't take down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.
So, some of the worst changes to the revolutionary evolutionary point are when we, with great hubris, with great certainty, look at something and we think is messy, untidy, inefficient, and we don't see the wisdom, we don't see the long-standing virtue, value, that is in it that has been tested over time, that has evolved, and we technocratically with great brilliance the best and brightest among us decide we're going to change that thing.
He tells a story about forest management and mistakes made in the name of commoditized lumber. Or knocking down swamps and then discovering we'd made a mess. Or the human social capital destroyed with high rise public housing. So, he says, as we tinker with all the pieces parts of schools, "let's at least have a little humility and recognize that with that change comes a casualty." And that those casualties often are the least advantaged.
So, first time I ever wanted to give a certified reformster a round of applause. And I'll add that I've known actual conservatives my whole life, and as I have watched ed reform unfold, I don't understand why more alleged conservatives do not share Smarick's point of view.
Last Bits
Casap wants to add something about poor kids. He throws out the question of whether kids should want to go to college or not and tosses off a joke about how that question is usually brought up by people whose kids did go to college, which, no, not in my neck of the woods. But basically he says that Smarick is full of it and current systems don't need to be safeguarded- just bulldozed.
Smarick replies that he's been on this for fifteen years, paid his revolutionary dues, and he is torn on the subject. He doesn't want to be at the revolutionary commemorative picnic in thirty years as they look back on their revolutionary changes and say, "Oh my God, what did we do!"
We jump past the Q&A portion. Bradford gets in two more cents, including the notion that democratic control is a lie and people think that by having school board elections they have some control, but they don't. "They're not in control of anything" and he lands on "anything" hard, like the whole idea really pisses him off. The whole business is just a "ruse." He did not elaborate, though this sounds a little like the old line that teacher unions really control school boards. Sure. Either unions or the illuminati.
Bottom Line
There's a great deal to unpack here, and I've already gone on and on. But it's worth seeing what these folks are thinking, which in some cases is all about money and business models and conceiving of schools as bloodless systems rather than a web of relationships between live human beings. In some cases, this panel presents disaster capitalism at its most distasteful, demonstrating a real joy in the destruction of the traditional public school system. Only Smarick displays a real sense of the serious nature of what's being discussed.
For folks whose stock in trade is all about how schools should be about student concerns, there was remarkably little talk about what can be done to keep students from becoming collateral damage after traditional public are all blown up. That's unfortunate, because one of the hugest problem with charters so far is that when disaster strikes, they only save some students and leave the rest behind in the middle of a disaster that the charters themselves have made even worse.
And because it's long already, I'll avoid touring the festival of unquestioned assumptions contained. But could we please ask "should we" before we ask "how do we"?
Finally, the video left me wishing that Andy Smarick were named King of the Reformsters, because while I disagree with many of his reformy ideas, I salute his respect for tradition and history, and I really, really wish that reformsters were hearing him on the whole hubris thing. If reformsters wonder why those of us in traditional public schools don't give them more respect, here's one reason-- while they have learned some lessons here and there, every single lesson has been a thing that we already knew, but they are so steadfastly certain of their rightness, they feel no need to listen (e.g Chris Barbic leaving the Tennessee Achievement School District with the insight that teaching poor children is hard). It wouldn't hurt them a bit to pause before blowing up Chesterton's fence.
Persson's coverage zeroed in on a minute's worth of talk-noises from Rebecca Sibilia from EdBuild, in which Sibilia appears to rather gleefully celebrate just how awesome the bankruptcy of major school districts would be, allowing the new operators to dump legacy debts like building and pension costs.
Sibilia charges that the post "blatantly (and bizarrely) mischarecterizes" what EdBuild is about, and so I figured, what the hell, I'll just watch the whole thing and see if her somewhat awful comments improve with context.
The clip has not been played much (fifty times when I got there), but it's actually pretty good viewing, featuring some familiar reformy names like Andy Smarick, Mike McShane and moderator Derrell Bradford, plus some folks I didn't know, like Jaime Casap and Katie Beck. We have thirty-five minutes of discussion to get through, and much of it requires some thoughtful consideration, so if you were hoping for a short blog post, you should probably just abandon hope here. So here we go (the whole clip is at the bottom, in case you want to check my work).
Knocking It Out and Tone
The actual title of the panel is "Knocking Out Yesterday's Education Models," though Persson reports that Bradford makes a joke about the working title being "What Happens After You Blow It All Up." If you watch it, I will warn you that the most disconcerting thing about the whole discussion is the jaunty, breezy, jolly, jokey tone of the whole business. As a teacher, it is beyond disconcerting about watching people discuss blowing up the work that you've devoted your life to while they laugh and smile and yuk it up like the whole destruction of traditional public education is hi-larious.
I am trying hard not to hold it against them. I've been around enough to get it-- you're in a room where "we're all friends here" and it's a fun conference in a fun place and you're seeing a lot of friends you don't always get to see and it's easy to forget the grimmer reality of what you're talking about. However, some of the jokes that get cracked tell us a bit about where these folks are coming from.
Mostly the panelists go one at a time, so we'll take this person by person.
Andy Smarick
Bradford teases Smarick about the terrible acronym associated with his work in urban schools of the future, then notes his history of working in government. I've tweeted and written back and forth with Smarick many times, but this is the first time I've seen him in action, and he has a sort of corn-fed aw-shucks quality that suits him well.
Bradford asks a pretty direct question: "What lives and what dies in a system of choice schools? More importantly, why should anything live" in the transition to a system of "disperse governance driven by parent choice." And I think that's a good question, but I also think that the notion that a choice system would be driven by parent choice is either naive or disingenuous, like insisting that the soft drink industry or fast food biz are driven purely by customer choice. But we'll go there another day.
Smarick, after some banter, has to stop and think, saying "I've never thought of it in those terms before." So.
What should live? Democratic control. "It's something we think too little about...with systems of choice." But Smarick believes there's some way that the community at large should be able to "control the contours of the system." It probably should not look like a traditional school board (that owns and operates all the stuff), but there should be something that gives the locals control. Well said, Andy!
What should die? The notion of a school existing in perpetuity, and the right of government to tell parents where to send their kids based on where they live. Assigning low income families to neighborhood schools, even if they suck, "has got to go away." We should be agnostic about who runs schools as long as they're good.
For 100 years, we had a single provider system, and we told students where to go to school based on where they live--bzzt! This is what I think reformsters get wrong, over and over. In Smarick's narrative, one would think the federal and state government started schools. But community schools were started by communities, just as communities started their own police and fire departments. Schools had geographical boundaries for the same reason that when there's a fire in the Bronx, they don't call the fire department in Newark.
You can watch the same thing happening in homeschool co-ops. Groups of homeschoolers go in together, set up a meeting place, buy/hire resources, and use them for their kids in their community. That's how schools grow-- not by the feds saying, "We're going to open a bunch of schools and tell you which ones you have to go to." I think there's a discussion to be had about how state and federal gummint got more and more entwined in this, but the narrative of top-down school creation is fundamentally flawed.
But Smarick is still going, and saying better things. We broke the old system, he says, and now we have to buy it. And the old choice fan notion that we could just set up charters and give parents choice and let them go and everything would be awesome-- it's much more complicated than that. He rattles off some nuts and bolts issues-- who owns the building, who runs the registration, what about backfilling. It's more fun to talk about empowering parents, but the detaily tech wonky stuff matters. Which we haven't addressed enough.
Michael Q. McShane
The Q is for Quentin, because chatty buds. McShane is a research fellow at AEI, and snappily dressed. He is also, as I've always seen him, tightly wound and intense, like a guy who's had his twenty cups of coffee, but hasn't yet run his daily ten miles to take the edge off. Bradford hits him with a much vaguer question about what the outcomes of choice kind of look like.
So McShane starts on free markets and thinking about supply and demand. McShane has focusd more on supply-- how to encourage more new better schools. McShane thinks choice has three mechanisms for the ultimate goal of "getting a child a seat in a high quality school." Anyway, what can the market do-- 1) it can fill space in existing high quality schools, 2) encourage HQS to scale up, and 3) actually create new HSQ. McShane argues that 1 is going great, 2 and 3 not so much, because of "choke points" in the marketplace. I would argue maybe not so much "choke points" as "nobody in the reformy business really has any idea how to do 2 or 3." And maybe McShane sort of agrees because he says the choke points are in the "pipeline of human capital." Then blah blah something about understanding what they're doing and why.
Bradford follows up by tossing out a McShanian "bon mot"-- "institutional isomorphism" which is his phrase for the tendency of the new thing to look like the old thing, which is a really valid idea. For free, I will offer McShane the observation that movies initially just recorded staged plays and records initially captured live performances, and it took a while for them to start capturing things that could only be captured in the new medium.
So McShane talks about charter school authorizers and references one of his papers which I addressed at the time. McShane starts talking about the many weird things that charter authorizers require, which causes this exchange:
McShane: To operate a charter school in Colorado, you have to demonstrate you know what's going to happen if a child forgets his or her lunch-
Bradord: (interrupting jokily): They get hungry.
In a crowd of people who regularly deal with plenty of poor kids who "forget" lunch or lunch money all the time, this would not be particularly hilarious, and it does not get a big laugh here. But it does tell us something about the setting.
Anyway, McShane wants to observe that filling out the applications can be daunting, and that the requirements of the application can shape the school. Which is kind of the same way student applications for charter schools affect what students get in. McShane notes that authorizers have an absolute duty to make sure that charlatans don't operate schools (wake up, Ohio).
Jaime Casap
This guy is the chief "education evangelist" for Google. He gets "What's the internet's role in all this?"
Casap starts with the importance of where you were born in your academic success. He notes that he was born in Hell's Kitchen, and he wants you to know he means the scary, ugly Hell's Kitchen of the seventies and not the breezy upscale version of today, thereby driving right past the issue of gentrification and how neighborhoods "improve" themselves by chasing out poor people and bringing in not-poor people. Because when you blow that system up, you also throw away the people that inhabited it and replace them with "better" people. Could we talk about how that relates to the charter movement? Probably not. I'm not trying to pick, but there's a theme running through discussion of a strange disconnect between these swell ideas and how peoples' lives are actually connected to them.
He was a "typical urban kid" who grew up on food stamps and welfare (and non-English speaking). The Columbus library was his big source of information, cue story about how research sucked back then (preach it). But now we have the internet, but classrooms look the same. Don't use technology just to make "bad education...faster and more efficient."
Casap says there are three things happening with technology. 1) We have evidence about what learning can look like (autonomy + purpose + mastery) and technology can help us do that. Somehow? 2) Technology has wrapped itself around the core of our own lives. 3) Kids who "don't know any better." They take tech for granted and they don't know to think that tech doesn't belong in education.
Now he goes way wrong. "Nobody looks at a great work of architecture and wonders what hammer they used." Well, no-- unless they are a builder or an architect. Casap wants to focus on outcomes, which is great if you're an amateur and a consumer. But I'll bet Google pays plenty of attention to how they do what they do. Technique and tools can and probably should be invisible-- but not to the people who are trying to get the job done.
Katie Beck
COO of 4.0 Schools, Beck has a Teach for America pedigree, and went through the Harvard College. She gets "how do you turn education into a more entrepreneurial space" as a question, so I guess we're skipping over "why the hell would you want to do that?"
Her outfit likes to work with people who are "obsessed" with a problem and who want to make money from the solution. Okay, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not loving her message, and she does that thing where every sentence ends like a question? Anyway, her term for institutional isomorphism is "the hairball" because, you know, traditional public school is just a disgusting mess. So, for instance, instead of starting with a charter that will spend $2 million and look like "an iteration of" existing schools, they help little boutique start-ups. Because anything that looks like the old way is obviously bad. I had the hardest time wading through Beck, who is so clearly focused on developing business without much interest in the education side of things. All of her ideas deal with the best way to get a business started up, with no concern expressed for the students who become the guinea pigs for these start-ups.
Bradford asks if for-profit people are any different to work with that the other altruistic folks. But she doesn't work with "bad actors" who are in it to make a buck. And being for-profit helps those people keep themselves honest because when you're obsessed with solving a problem, you have to ask "is this solving it enough that someone's willing to pay for it." Which I wouldn't call "keeping honest" so much as "missing the entire point of running a school."
Rebecca Sibilia
So here comes the lady who's quote got us interested in this panel in the first place. If we want all of her comments will it, as she suggests, make her sound better. Well, no. The whole thing is even worse than the quoted portion, which tells us a little something about how she sees herself.
Bradford asks her how we pay for all this innovation. And she opens with, "The problem is, we can't." Which is a remarkably honest answer [insert my usual complaint about trying to run charter systems without being honest about the true cost.] She will now break down the three problems that EdBuild is trying to solve.
First, the way that we're funding schools is "largely arbitrary" and "doesn't make any sense." And Sibilia seems far too smart to believe that baloney, but just in case, here goes: People set up schools in their community, for the students who live in their community, so they funded them by collecting money from everyone who lives in the community. Later on, state governments got involved in trying to even out the differences in funding inherent in a local-based system. There are lots of things to hate about how this is all playing out, but it's silly to pretend that the system just fell from the sky for no reason at all. Her criticism about uneven funding outcomes seems to be that by favoring one district over another financially, you're creating an artificial market bias. One might complain that some students are getting fewer resources than they deserve, but that doesn't seem to be her concern. It;s the savage and unwarranted abuse of the free market that's the issue.
Second, she doesn't like the borders that are created by property taxes, which seems exactly backwards. Municipal borders exist, and folks who live within them are taxed. Not the other way around. She thinks this leads to a mistake-- trying to get resources into those borders instead of "focusing on how we can break those borders" which is a less objectionable way to say "how we can get some students out." Because "breaking the borders" instead of "getting resources into the borders" has to mean that we are going to just let some areas collapse in unmitigated poverty. Which, as we'll see, is exactly her plan.
See, many states fund schools with property taxes, and in many states property taxes can't go to schools of choice. "We've had charter schools for a quarter of a century, but we're still treating them like an experiment. And so that's a problem and we have to fix it."
So, there is a ton of Wrong packed into that. First of all, the modern corporate charters these guys are talking about haven't been around for twenty-five years. Second, they are experiments, and not very successful ones, at that, having not yet figured out how to stop some charters from being Ohio-style nests of incompetence and corruption. Third, charters have used their fledgling nature as part of their excuse to avoid the same oversight and accountability that public schools enjoy. Every time a charter wants to set up a new rule for itself, its argument is, "We're a charter. We should be free to experiment and Try Stuff."
Sibilia's argument is that charters should get lots of sweet, sweet public tax money. Neither she nor other charter advocates make a convincing case for that.
But she's going on about the evils of property taxes being linked to public schools, and she and Bradford share a laugh at how it's still called millage, which apparently proves that it's just so antiquated and uncool. Har. And she goes on to try to make a point that funding is based on the teacher, and not the student and their needs, but somehow property tax locks this in, and so places where the charters are getting a new teacher corps (young? cheap? unprofessional? she doesn't explain the critical differences) are locked in. But until we can bust up the whole funding system (she also does not say what she wants to replace it with), none of the cool reforms being discussed here will be sustainable. And that much is probably true.
Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble and he would argue most can't afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system. And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its "legacy debt" so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just-- I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw. "Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids," is a statement that in the best of contexts is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia's discussion of how to blow up public schools so we can has charters, it's even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.
And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.
Andy Smarick
And here's why you should watch the whole clip-- because now Andy Smarick steps in to represent, as he frequently does, the point of view of an actual conservative. What he offers next is a welcome balance to the panel's delighted contemplation of destruction and ruin. Also, you have to love an answer that works in "Burkean conservative" and "accretion of policies."
What he says is, yes, we've got an old hide-bound system, and we might want to blow it up and replace it, but when you do that you break a lot of systems and policies that are tied to it. "When you tug on that thread, you see a lot of the fabric start to warp. This is not to say we shouldn't pull on that thread--"
But.
There is a downside to all this that should not be ignored. And he brings up Chesterton's fence. Which is an old British notion that you don't take down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.
So, some of the worst changes to the revolutionary evolutionary point are when we, with great hubris, with great certainty, look at something and we think is messy, untidy, inefficient, and we don't see the wisdom, we don't see the long-standing virtue, value, that is in it that has been tested over time, that has evolved, and we technocratically with great brilliance the best and brightest among us decide we're going to change that thing.
He tells a story about forest management and mistakes made in the name of commoditized lumber. Or knocking down swamps and then discovering we'd made a mess. Or the human social capital destroyed with high rise public housing. So, he says, as we tinker with all the pieces parts of schools, "let's at least have a little humility and recognize that with that change comes a casualty." And that those casualties often are the least advantaged.
So, first time I ever wanted to give a certified reformster a round of applause. And I'll add that I've known actual conservatives my whole life, and as I have watched ed reform unfold, I don't understand why more alleged conservatives do not share Smarick's point of view.
Last Bits
Casap wants to add something about poor kids. He throws out the question of whether kids should want to go to college or not and tosses off a joke about how that question is usually brought up by people whose kids did go to college, which, no, not in my neck of the woods. But basically he says that Smarick is full of it and current systems don't need to be safeguarded- just bulldozed.
Smarick replies that he's been on this for fifteen years, paid his revolutionary dues, and he is torn on the subject. He doesn't want to be at the revolutionary commemorative picnic in thirty years as they look back on their revolutionary changes and say, "Oh my God, what did we do!"
We jump past the Q&A portion. Bradford gets in two more cents, including the notion that democratic control is a lie and people think that by having school board elections they have some control, but they don't. "They're not in control of anything" and he lands on "anything" hard, like the whole idea really pisses him off. The whole business is just a "ruse." He did not elaborate, though this sounds a little like the old line that teacher unions really control school boards. Sure. Either unions or the illuminati.
Bottom Line
There's a great deal to unpack here, and I've already gone on and on. But it's worth seeing what these folks are thinking, which in some cases is all about money and business models and conceiving of schools as bloodless systems rather than a web of relationships between live human beings. In some cases, this panel presents disaster capitalism at its most distasteful, demonstrating a real joy in the destruction of the traditional public school system. Only Smarick displays a real sense of the serious nature of what's being discussed.
For folks whose stock in trade is all about how schools should be about student concerns, there was remarkably little talk about what can be done to keep students from becoming collateral damage after traditional public are all blown up. That's unfortunate, because one of the hugest problem with charters so far is that when disaster strikes, they only save some students and leave the rest behind in the middle of a disaster that the charters themselves have made even worse.
And because it's long already, I'll avoid touring the festival of unquestioned assumptions contained. But could we please ask "should we" before we ask "how do we"?
Finally, the video left me wishing that Andy Smarick were named King of the Reformsters, because while I disagree with many of his reformy ideas, I salute his respect for tradition and history, and I really, really wish that reformsters were hearing him on the whole hubris thing. If reformsters wonder why those of us in traditional public schools don't give them more respect, here's one reason-- while they have learned some lessons here and there, every single lesson has been a thing that we already knew, but they are so steadfastly certain of their rightness, they feel no need to listen (e.g Chris Barbic leaving the Tennessee Achievement School District with the insight that teaching poor children is hard). It wouldn't hurt them a bit to pause before blowing up Chesterton's fence.
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