Sunday, October 11, 2015

ICYMI: Some Edubloggery Highlights

The Common Core Can't Speed up Child Development

The Baltimore Sun ran this piece last summer, but it's a good reminder now that we're entering test results season. Students are not getting dumber.

NEA PAC vote breakdown

If you're still cranky about the Clinton endorsement, here's the breakdown of who voted which way-- and why the abstentions from the two biggest states made a difference,

Five Questions To Ask a CEO Before a District Take Over

The always-reasonable Peter DeWitt takes a look at Undercover Boss, the Youngstown Schools takeover, and the questions that should be on a school CEO interview.

Bill Gates Education Speech Detached from Reality

There were plenty of reactions to the Bill Gates State of the Education Speech, but this was one of my favorites, looking at some of the specific areas in which Gates was a bit off the mark

Jersey Jazzman Trifecta

If you aren't following Jersey Jazzman, then what's wrong with you? Get to it. His work is always indispensable and, unlike certain other bloggists, based on actual facts and data and stuff. This week he had three must-reads--

John King Is the King of Suspension

Many folks scratched their heads over the anointing of failed New York Ed Head John King as Sort-of-Secretary of Education, but the Jazzman had a very thorough explanation of just what in King's record suggests he's not the man for the job (and why his touted charter "success" is just baloney).

Who Tanked Campbell Brown's Forum?

A look at how Brown failed to set herself up as an arbiter of education stuff.

Chris Cerf Sees the Light

How do you get a reformster to stop saying, "Money doesn't make any difference and school districts shouldn't get any more." You put him in charge of a school district, where he can discover he doesn't have enough money to do his job.

The Social Justice Argument

Charter and choice fans continue to refine their argument about charters as a tool of social justice, as exemplified by an exchange with charter fan Dmitri Melhorn that quickly expanded to a conversation still puttering along this morning. Melhorn started in the reformster biz at McKinsey and Co, and moved on to co-found StudentsFirst, but his day job is venture capitalist. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss this argument (shared by many reformy folks) out of hand. Tne first part of their argument is solid; the second part is shot full of holes.

The First Part 

The linkage between real estate and schools has resulted in public schools that are crippled by the effects of racism and poverty. We can talk about patterns of forced settlement as in Chicago, where blacks coming north during the Great Migration were herded into certain neighborhoods. We can talk about white flight in the 50s and 60s, and we can talk about the negative and segregating effects of public housing. In Our Children, Robert Putnam notes that the sorting of America has continued until today, pushing the non-wealthy and the non-white into neighborhoods that are mired in poverty and its effects, while the rich escape to gated communities, where the poor literally cannot follow them.

Housing costs, available jobs, patterns of open and subtle racism-- there's a whole lifetime of research there, but the end results is a highly heterogeneous pattern of settling in America, and since we have tied school attendance and funding to geography, schools are doomed reflect the socio-economic reality of the neighborhoods to which they are tied.

The argument says that we have school choice, but it is choice that is directly linked to wealth-- if you are rich enough to buy whatever house you like in whatever neighborhood you like, then you can, by choosing a house, choose a school. Put another way, escaping a bad school is often synonymous with escaping a bad neighborhood.

The Second Part

Reformsters start here with the premise that non-wealthy non-white students must be rescued from the terrible schools that are inextricably tied to poor support, poor resources, poor staffing, poor neighborhoods, and the lousy local control that leads to all of these poor inputs.

They see local control as an obstacle because particularly in large urban districts, "local control" means "control by board of rich jerks who don't give a rat's ass about schools in poor neighborhoods." They see "fix the school and fund it properly" as not-an-option because the schools are too broken, and because the teacher union stands in the way-- the union just wants more money for the school so that they can pay more terrible teachers. They would like to see all the terrible teachers fired, because they believe terrible teachers are at the root of terrible schools, but That Damned Union won't let them do it.

Because so many of these guys come from the corporate and financial investment world, they tend not just to believe that the system is broken, but that it is built wrong in the first place. Teacher lockstep pay and its lack of ties to performance data, funding based on what you want to do instead of how well you've done it, the utter tying of management's hands by government regulation and union agreements, the lack of enlightened profit-and-loss motivation anywhere in the system-- these things don't bother the reformsters merely in their particulars, but because, to them, these are just terrible ways to run a business in the first place. For them, it is like watching someone try to build a car with square tires and a rubber-band engine-- there's just no way anyone could ever succeed trying to what those guys are doing!

So their main impulse remains to scrap the square wheel system and replace it with one that follows the rules they know and understand. And that gets us to charters and choice. Charters will free students from their zip codes, bust up the tyranny of geography so that families who can't afford to live in East Gotrox can still send their kids to an East Gotrox calibre school.

The newest nuance to the choice argument is to point out that vouchers and voucher-like programs provide non-wealthy families the same kind of choice that wealthy folks can exercise by choosing where to buy a house. They believe that a free market in education will exert a cleansing influence, that competition will create excellence.

Reformsters are not very good at articulating why charters should be a good idea because they neither know nor speak the language of educators, nor do they really feel a need to-- after all, those are the people who tried to build the square-wheel car. To bridge that gap, they've tried through every means from Teach for America to the Broad Academy of Fake School Administration to create educators who speak the language of business and investment.

But when educators and reformsters try to talk about schools, certain points of contention always emerge.

Public education supporters-- sometimes angrily-- point out that charter schools and choice systems seriously damage the public systems to which they are attached. Reformsters observe-- sometimes angrily-- ask if poor students are supposed to simply sit and wait in crumbling, failing schools while public ed advocates try to tinker their system back to health. If they can save even a few students, isn't that worthwhile?

And let's not forget to have the argument about educational transformation. Reformsters routinely charge that public school supporters use poverty as an excuse for not teaching poor kids well; public school supporters charge that reformsters believe that happy, positive thoughts will somehow overcome real educational challenges.

A Mystery

In some cases, reformsters end up charging that public ed folks are denying Part One of this argument. But I think most people who are serious about these issues all see Part One pretty clearly. The big disconnects come when we get to Part Two-- the What Do We Do About All This part. Reformsters are inclined to argue that since the problems are real problems, their solutions must be real solutions. They are wrong.

So let me lay out where I think they get things wrong.

Local Control

I have to point out up front that we supporters of public education can sometimes fetishize local control just as badly as reformsters fetishize the Free Market.

Local control can be disastrous. The story of how five Pinellas County, Florida elementary schools in black neighborhoods were turned into the worst in the state in just eight years is one more reminder that elected school boards can do horrible, stupid, racist things. Elections do not turn racist asshats into crusaders for social justice.

Of course, the free market does not guarantee action for social justice, either-- anybody is free to open Racist Asshat Academy, or a charter school where students learn to follow orders, stay in line, and never speak unless given permission.

Any system can be used for or against the interests of social justice by people who want to fight for or against those interests. The difference is that a public school system must answer to the public. They are not allowed to meet in secret, keep their financial dealings secret, or make major decisions in secret. When they make decisions that the taxpayers don't like, they are required to sit there and listen to people complain to them (yes, many boards are trying to get rid of this feature of meetings, but they have to fight the laws about public comment, while charter operators can just go ahead and ignore the public at will).

The Pinellas County school board is going to have to deal with the voters and answer to the taxpayers. Eva Moskowitz doesn't have to answer to anybody.

Do People Want Choice?

Do you want a good marriage, or do you want a bunch of possible partners to choose from? Do you want a good meal for lunch, or do you want the choice of a bunch of lunches?

People don't want choice. They want a good school. The distinction is important for many reasons, not the least of which is economic-- do we need to prepare and maintain five possible school seats for Chris, or just one good one? Because one is cheaper than five. 

Charter Quality

Are students actually escaping poor neighborhoods for high quality schools. The research says, mostly not. Or maybe sometimes. Mostly what the research says is that we could use some research done by somebody who wasn't, say, paid by the charter industry. There's very little research that looks at charter schools that are working with identical student populations as the local public schools.

The better question would be, how do we know? Virtually all of the studies of the question center on Big Standardized Test scores, and that's a terrible measure of school quality-- especially when we're focusing on social justice. Privileged kids don't get their privilege by scoring well on BS Tests, and nobody ever escaped poverty by getting really good at taking standardized tests. I don't notice any ivy league schools saying, "We're looking to reach out to some non-white non-wealthy students with good PARCC scores."

The focus on testing in US education has been toxic in the extreme, and the people who have the wealth and privilege to make educational choices for kids choose to move their kids to schools where nobody worries about the PARCC. Conversely, when folks are talking about how terrible a notoriously failing school is, "And their SBA scores are so low!!" does not come at the top of the list. But charters are perhaps even more vulnerable to the toxic testing plague because right now, when it comes to "proving" that you are a high-quality schools, the only game in town is BS Test scores. A charter that starts drilling test prep in November is not a high quality school, regardless of what the test scores indicate. We need to stop perpetuating the fiction that good PARCC or SBA scores are the doorway to a successful life.

So I'm calling the relative quality question a non-starter, because we still don't know how to measure school quality. Charter fans will cite demand as a measure of how great a school is, but waiting lists have been repeatedly debunked, and they provide no measure of what families are running from or toward.

Stability

One of the biggest problems with free market ideology in education is that the free market sorts businesses into winners and losers. That may be fine for coffee shops, but it's not okay for schools. Between 2000 and 2013, 2,500 charters closed. That represents a huge number of students whose education was uprooted and destabilized-- and it just keeps happening.

Students in East Gotrox don't just benefit from having a great school. They benefit from having a great school in their neighborhood that they attend with their friends and neighbors and which they know without question will be open every day of every school year.

Robert Putnam in Our Children talks about how important stabilizing influences are, how a stable setting helps them build the social capital that will help make them successful. Schools that will come and go and may or may not survive or which have good advertising to mask incompetent leadership-- these are exactly the wrong solution for non-wealthy students, who very much need something dependable and reliable.

The Zero-Sum Problem

"Well, isn't it worth it if we can rescue even a few students from a failing school?"

I'd agree-- if "rescuing" the handful of students didn't make things worse for the students left behind. But because policy makers want to have school choice without paying for it, we have a huge problem.

The biggest fallacy of school choice and charter systems is that we can have multiple school systems for the price of one. This is just insane. Let's say you have 100 students to educate. Which is cheaper? Educating them in ten different separately-administered and separately managed facilities, or educating all 100 in a single building?

The notion that the per-capita cost of a student is money that belongs to that student is an absurdist fiction, both in the notion of computing such a figure and in transforming it from taxpayer money into a student grant. But if 5% of the students leave a school, that school does not become 5% less costly to run. For that matter, the money that moves out with the charter students isn't enough to operate the charter, either-- hence the need for contributions from well-heeled donors and big-ticket fundraisers.

This problem is even more damaging in schools that are already underfunded and under-resourced. Losing money to charter-choice systems just makes the troubled school that much more financially distressed. So to "rescue" these ten kids, we are going to make things even worse for the ones left behind.

Let's say we have ten starving children, faced with a small, meager meal. So we take some food away from nine of them so that the tenth one can have a full plate. Does that feel like social justice? Not to me.

Free Market Motivations

There's a difference between asking "How do we solve this problem of social justice" and asking "How do we make money addressing this problem of social justice." 

So What's The Solution Today?

"So, what," choice fans will say. "Are we supposed to let all ten of them keep starving while we wait for someone to fix the food supply system?"

There's a selective urgency that comes with the charter argument-- things are dire and we must act right now, but charter schools deserve three or five years to prove themselves and we have to wait for the market to sort itself out. I agree there's some urgency here-- a child's childhood goes past quickly. But to me urgency means being careful, because we have limited slack to work with (this too, is one of the differences between poverty and wealth-- wealthy folks can make mistakes and recover, while the poor make one false move and pay for it forever).

So I don't want to let failing schools fail a minute longer than we have to-- but I don't want to see us bulldoze the system in haste and then realize we can't build anything decent to replace it after all. And while the massive issues of poverty are a definite obstacle to better education for the poor, I don't want to wait for those to be solved, either.

So What's The Solution Ever?

We already know most of what works. Charters have, ironically, "discovered" many things we already knew-- plenty of resources and support applied to the right assortment of students gets results. We know that letting buildings fall down around students is Not Good or Helpful. We know that filling a building with beginning teachers doesn't help. We know that getting good leaders into schools matters. We know that having strong connections to the community matters, and is, in fact, part of the point. I love this quote from Andre Perry:

Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools.

Of course, in order to do that, we would have to involve the community in the development and growth of schools. We would have to stop conceiving social justice and education as gifts bestowed by drive-by do-gooders. It can't happen as something we do to people; it has to be done with them. And that is a problem for folks on both sides of this debate, but especially so for schools-should-be-run-like-a-business charter CEO's.

In short, we don't have a problem of knowledge. We have a problem of money and political will. We have states currently under court orders to fund their schools properly-- and they aren't doing it. Attracting and retaining top teachers is also Not A Mystery-- but all attempts to do so are done on the cheap, and many locations have simply abandoned the attempt, believing that we can have a system in which any warm body will work in a classroom. Hell, a working charter-choice system is not impossible-- it would just require more regulation and more money.

I know none of it is instantaneous or sexy, but here's the thing about the charter-choice approach-- it isn't working, isn't set up to work, and will likely never work. It can't do the things that its supporters want it to do. Unless your idea of social justice is a handful of families saying, "Well, I got mine, Jack. Good luck to the rest of you," this is not how you get social justice.

The charter-choice system, as currently conceived and executed, promises a possible maybe rescue for some students while making the vast majority of non-white non-wealthy students pay for it, while simultaneously lulling policy makers into thinking that the problem is actually being solved, all in a system that allows charter operators to conduct business without being answerable to anyone. 

The problem (see First Part) is real. The solution being inflicted on public education is making things worse, not better. It is making some folks rich and providing excellent ROI for hedge funders, but neither of those outcomes exactly equals a leap forward in social justice. There's a whole argument to be had about charter booster motives; I figure that some are in it because they believe it will work better and some are in it because they believe it's the last great untapped well-spring of tax dollars. Ultimately, their motivation isn't as important as this: their solution will not actually solve anything.

No, Seriously. Solutions?

Warren Buffet actually suggested one of the best solutions that will never happen-- No Choice At All.

If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.

The point is valid. Far too much of reformsterism looks like an attempt to weasel out of having to pay for education for Those People. If the rich were trapped in schools with Those People, we would have so many resources focused on public school that it would make a scholar's head swim. If charter operators focused all their energy and resources on demanding that public schools be fully funded and completely supported, we'd be in a different situation. Some would most likely say that such solutions are not possible because entrenched bureaucracies and teacher unions and the Big Institutional Blob stand in their way, and as someone who has spent his adult life within just a small-town version of that BIB, I won't pretend that public education doesn't suffer from all sorts of bureaucratically generated nonsense inertia.

But what the reformsters are also complaining about is that when they walk into the room and say, "This is what you should do," the folks in education don't slap their heads and yell, "My God, you're right! We've been so foolish. Here, inexperienced amateur, please tell us what to do!"

They are so absolutely certain that they are right, and that people working in the education field should just listen to them, right now. And that certainty in their own righteous rightness has also stopped progress on the pursuit of social justice.

As rich and powerful people with an interest in education and social justice, they could have gathered together summits of stakeholders, talked to educational experts, brought together people who have worked on these problems their whole lives-- and then listened to all of those folks. They didn't. And now they've largely lost the ability to tell the difference between factors that are part of the actual problem, and factors that just piss off the wealthy and well-connected by thwarting their will.

Yes, the army is losing the battle for educational social justice on many fronts. The solution is not to try to raise an entirely new army, but to support and supply the army you already have in the field. That doesn't mean you just encourage them to keep doing what hasn't worked, but you have to talk to them to understand what's really happening and what they really need.

I'm a high school English teacher. I'm not wise enough to know the solution for an educational social justice solution in this country, and I'm not powerful enough to gather together all the people who could help work it all out. But I know enough to know that A) an increasing gap between rich and poor has exacerbated existing problems of social justice in our country, with those problems being reflected, expressed and sometimes amplified in our schools and that B) the charter choice system currently being foisted on many parts of the country doesn't fix any of those problems.

To charter choice advocates: Your problem is a real problem, but your solution is not a solution. Whether you're blinded by devotion to your ideology or your intent to make a buck or just your lack of understanding, your vision is impaired. You need to clean your glasses, take a step back, and look again.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Utah's Brave New Pre-K World

Utah has decided that pre-school can be delivered as a software package.

As reported Emma Brown in yesterday's Washington Post, the state has decided-- with the generous financial assistance of the federal government-- to try shrinking the entire pre-school experience into fifteen minutes a day of computer time.

You get an idea of the kind of thinking involved here when you see the name-- Utah Preparing Students Today for a Rewarding Tomorrow! UPSTART!! In it, children will deal with a series of games, songs and lessons, aided by two cartoon raccoons named Rosy and Rusty (fun fact: Utah is one of the few states in the US where raccoons do not live). [Update: One of the hundreds of new things I've learned this week is that while all sorts of sources say that raccoons are not a US Southwest thing, raccoons are totally alive and well in Utah and other nearby places. There's a lesson there about raccoons and authoritative sources.]

Why has Utah decided to launch this brave new world in which fifteen minutes of computer-and-mouse-time (because if there's anything three- and four-year-olds are great at, it's operating a computer mouse)? Well, Utah is one of ten states that doesn't fund pre-school, and it is at the bottom of the barrel for per-student funding in K-12. So you could explain the appeal of this idea as the sponsor of the bill, State Senator Howard A. Stephenson,  does:

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being smart.”

Or you might go with this theory:

“It’s wishful thinking by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the director of the National ­Institute for Early Education ­Research at Rutgers University. “We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t actually want to spend the money.”

Yeah, why provide expensive high-quality preschool when you can just sign everyone up for some software?

On the one hand, the whole idea is horrifyingly dumb, presuming that fifteen minutes with a computer will reap the same benefits as a program with social interactions and human-based playtime. On the other hand-- did these guys just re-invent Sesame Street? Brown takes an extraordinarily gentle hand in her article, she notes that many early-childhood experts say that interaction and socialization, particularly through play, are critical elements in a pre-school program, to which Brown says this:

It is not clear whether or how an online learning program can teach those kinds of skills; evaluations of Upstart have not measured what children learn in that realm.

Yeah, that's an easy one. What the UPSTART program teaches small children about social skills is absolutely nothing at all. And while UPSTART claims to address the issue a little, mostly they don't really care:

Claudia Miner, a Waterford vice president, said Upstart officials teach parents how they can bolster their children’s social skills. But she said that lawmakers are most interested in the program’s potential effect on literacy. “You don’t measure social skills in third grade; you measure reading skills,” she said in an e-mail.

Let's go look.

From the moment you hit the UPSTART website, things do not look good. There are a couple of demo videos, right up there in the corner by the picture of a nine-year-old boy happily sitting at a computer. Let's look at the one about the alphabet and--oh, boy. Where Sesame Street always had the wisdom to sell us the alphabet one letter at a time, this song hits the whole list. It uses "small" letters instead of caps, and it references iguanas, valentines and flapjacks. And the tune is not exactly catchy.


On youtube, this is an "early reading" resource. The math demo is a bit better, with undead seagulls (the animation, almost five years old, is a little sad) singing about zero to the tune of the Banana Boat Song, a tune often used to great effect.


There's also a testimonial reel featuring a whole bunch of very happy white moms (okay, it's Utah, but seriously-- no men or non-white folks care about their kids education?) The theme here is that having children who can complete academic tasks at a young age is really awesome. Feel free to insert the entire discussion about how having your child recite the alphabet at age two has no long term benefits at all. Plus you get the classic "I was clueless" thread, where mothers had no idea what to do with their child until the programmed opened up their world. I'm more interested in the mom who says her child is now addicted to learning, which may be true albeit alarming, but I'd lay odds that what the child is addicted to is playing video games on the computer.


The entire program is the creation of Waterford Learning, a Salt Lake City company that has been in the education materials K-2 game for about thirty years, so I'm sure this expansion seems like a natural to them. But the idea of plunking kids as young as two in front of a computer screen strikes me as just such a bad idea, particularly when the benefits are so tenuous and probably non-existent. On the other hand, all we're really talking about is a little around-the-house tutoring program, so parent judgment will have to rule. Letting a screen get your kid ready for school really is as old as Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (with the exception that Sesame Street and Fred Rogers really did try to address socialization issues with kids).

There are some potential side benefits. Brown reports that Waterford has supplied some parents with laptop computers, internet hookups, and in the case of some very isolated families, solar panels to power the whole business. That's not nothing,

But to do all this and claim that you are providing pre-school for students in your state is just silly. Why not hand out coupons for discounts at MacDonalds and call that your school lunch program, or set up log-ins for all high school students on Sparknotes and call that your high school English program? Maybe every Utah high school grad could be given a copy of Animal House and that could count as going to college.

What prompted Utah to try this, beyond their epic cheapness when it comes to education? Well, along with missing the habitat information about raccoons (sloppy, WaPo-- sloppy), and failing to actually look at the program's website, Brown also forgot to mention that State Senator Stepehnson's district includes Salt Lake City, home of Waterford HQ. So the senator is fulfilling a good traditional legislative duty-- bringing home the bacon for the good folks who helped put him in office. Utah is going to pay about $5.3 million this year. That should be more than enough to help the good folks at Waterford Learning enroll their own kids in a high quality pre-school where live humans interact with small humans in a rich, socialized, play-filled environment.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Career Ready

Today, as I do every year, I took a half of a professional day to take to of my yearbook staffers up to the county Tech Center-- what we used to call a vocational-technical school.

Our county's version is a shared school, shared and supported by several different school districts in the area. The school has its own staff and administration, and oversight is exercised by representatives of each of the contributing school districts. The school offers over a dozen programs, from home health care to welding to cosmetology to auto repair technician to machinist to heavy equipment. The construction shop regularly works on what we in the stodgier corners of education would call a performance task-- they build a house.

Most of the instructors are men and women who have worked the field they teach. There's a protective services track taught by retired cops, and the heavy equipment shop now has a focus on the oil industry, aided by folks who know it first-hand.

I love this day. It humbles me and reminds me of just how much is being accomplished by the same students who are not, shall we say, deeply inspired by grammar worksheets and long-form essays. It reminds me to see my classroom through their eyes-- all morning this student was operating heavy machinery that could easily kill a person, exercising responsibility and mature judgement, like a grown professional, and this student was doing heavy lifting and lugging and standing for three hours. Now these same students have to sit in a desk and ask permission to go pee. Is it any wonder they get a bit itchy in my classroom?

They all do plenty of book learning at the tech school, and most work with some version of computer technology. They learn how to gather and exercise professional expertise and judgment. They learn how to make adult choices and they learn how to see the connection between actions and consequences.

What possible benefit will they get from being drilled on how to select "correct" answers on a one-size-fits-all Common Core Big Standardized Test? How can I possibly, seriously, with a straight face, teach works of literature to them using David Coleman's approached to reading that treats every work of literature as the basis for a college English paper?

To say that any part of the Common Core Complex of reforms will help these students become more career ready is the saddest, cruelest kind of joke. My vocational students include many who are not geared for the standard academic fare. They are not any less smart, less capable, or less valuable than my college-bound hard-core honors students-- they're just using a different set of tools to travel a different sort of path (just like--surprise-- everyone else). But because they aren't so focused on playing the game of multiple choice tests and canned curriculum, they end up sacrificing time that could be spent exploring new, cool, exciting stuff to instead do more test prep and practice.

The effects of ed reform on these students are deeply unfortunate, because these are students who have historically been too-often considered less than because they are "only" going to jobs instead of college. College-educated teachers often need to check their pro-college bias at the door. Confronting these students with one more pointless task that labels them losers and makes school seem even more like an exercise in bizarre activities unrelated to the world they see-- it doesn't help. Do they need to build strong skills in reading and writing? Absolutely. Can they get just as much out of the classics as traditional college-bound students? Sure (remind me to tell you about the time that our AP seniors held a debate about MacBeth-- and it was judged by the vocational seniors, who were also MacBeth experts). But the important skills and classic works have so much value over and above just getting ready to do well in a college class.

I know what the data says about how only college-educated folks will survive and thrive in the new economy. I also know how many employers tell me that there aren't enough welders. I know that my own logitudinal anecdotal study of my former students tells me that many grow up to be not-particularly-wealthy blue collar workers who are good solid citizens, raise happy families, and live rewarding lives.

But successful on their own terms or not, I can't remember a time I've looked at a former vocational student and thought, "Damn-- if only we had given Pat more drill on answering multiple choice questions for bad standardized tests. That would have made Pat's life so much better."

Every school ought to have a full-blown vocational program, and every teacher ought to go watch their students learn in such programs. And policy makers should stop trying to jam them into a one-size-fits-all educational program that ignores their goals and skills and direction in life.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

The Central Liberal Reformster Fallacy

It crops up many places, but today it was front and center in Michael Grunwald's piece for Politico. In "Obama vs. Teacher Union: It's Still On" Grunwald lays out the ongoing beef between teachers unions and the administration, which is first in his display of lesser fallacies. Framing the conflict as one between unions and the administration isn't quite right, as the unions have been largely friendly and compliant with the administration, and most of their official squawks of disagreement have come only after considerable prodding from membership (NEA and AFT still officially think Common Core is Just Fine, Thanks).

Grunwald then goes on to posit that John King on paper looks like a great choice to bind the wounds, resorting to the John King Story, which seems to be how we're going to sell this exemplar of upward failure as a serious faux secretary of ed. Grunwald gives  a quick gloss to King's "former teacher" credential; King taught a grand total of three years, including two in a charter. The King story always includes a chapter about how his public school teachers saved him, but it never includes a thoughtful consideration of whether his favored reforms would support those kind of teachers today, or force them to stop focusing on what children need and devote more time to test scores.

Grunwald includes the story of King's charter-founding awesomeness. He skips over the secret of King's charter success-- sky high suspension rates and the push-out of countless students. And he skips over the huge disconnect in King's story-- the man who talks about how school was a safe, nurturing place for a troubled orphan went on to establish schools where children must walk in step and speak only when allowed. One wonders how many troubled orphans King's schools have suspended or pushed out. Grunwald isn't going to ask.

Grunwald's piece is laced with other little fallacies, like uncritically observing that most states have adopted "higher standards," even though there's no basis on which to say the various mutated forms of Common Core are "higher."

But running through Grunwald's article is the Central Liberal Reform Fallacy.

But Obama has always taken the reform side of the public education wars; in The Audacity of Hope, he criticized liberals who “defend an indefensible status quo, insisting that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.”

The unions often argue that the deep problems of urban education have their roots outside the school, with impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods stripped of hope. King worries about those problems, but like Duncan and President Obama, he worries even more about using them as excuses for problems inside the schools.

“Yes, we should have better health care and housing and criminal justice reform,” King told me. “But school can save kids’ lives. It saved mine.”

This is the construction at the center of the liberal support for reformster policies:

The problem is really bad, therefor our solution will work.

Which gets us to this conversation:

Critics: Your proposed solution will not work.
Reformster: Are you saying the problem doesn't exist?

The Obama administration wants to hold teachers accountable for whether or not students learn. But it has no working instrument for measuring student learning, and it has absolutely no clue how to tell whether teachers have aided in that learning or not.

It's that simple. The administration, both under Duncan and soon under King, wants to prove its solutions work by arguing that problems are real and that education is a Good Thing. Nobody sensible is arguing about either of those points-- many, many of our students are suffering under poverty, systemic racism, and a host of other issues, and many of our public schools have failed, either by lack of will or lack of resources, to successfully fully address the needs of those students. That's the truth.

But it does not follow from that truth that Common Core (or any national standards) will help. It does not follow that making a standardized test (especially one that poorly measures a small sliver of a full education) the central point and purpose of public education will help. It does not follow that evaluating teachers with a system no more valid or reliable than a roll of dice will help. It does not follow that dismantling public education and selling the pieces to people whose primary concern is not education, but dollars-- that won't help, either.

That's the fallacy. That's the part of the equation that we need to be talking about. Or rather, that those who are so sure of their own rightness and caring and feeling need to join the ongoing conversation about.

King says at the end of the article, "Every kid deserves the kind of opportunity I had." That's a nice thought. A better thought is to explain how, exactly, you think your policies will lead to it happening. That's the great missing link of ed reform.

Campbell Brown Snubbed Again

Campbell Brown, journalist caterpillar transformed into reformster butterfly, has been snubbed again.

When Brown set up her website, one of her stated goals was to help drive the political discussion of education. With an eye toward the 2016 Presidential race, she had set up two educati0n discussions for candidates-- one in New Hampshire for the GOP, and one in Iowa for the Dems.

But this morning Politico announced that the Iowa beauty pageant has been snubbed. None of the five candidates (come on-- did you even know there were five of them) have RSVP-ed. In fact, most have not even called to say "Nothankyouverymuch."

Writer Michael Grunwald is assisting Brown in painting the snub as the result of pressure from those pernicious unions, and while it's certainly true that Brown, in her new role of Rhee Lite, has not won any union love, I'd like to offer another explanation.

The NH beauty pageant happened, but it was not exactly a rousing success. Of the something-teen GOP candidates alive and kicking at the time, Brown scored just six-- Bush, Kasich, Fiorina, Christie, Jindal, and Walker. Millions of viewers did not tune in or log on, and no news was made. And yet then-- and now-- Brown did not offer any explanation for why ten-or-more GOP candidates did not come out to play with her. But Iowa is simply not the first and only time she's been snubbed playing this Presidential job interviewer game.

I admire Brown's guts-- she has tried to make herself into a major campaign player just by insisting that she is. But her attempt failed.

Sure, "Those unions are out to get me because I'm so big and scary, so I must be really important" makes a good narrative for keeping her brand alive. It's certainly more energizing than, "No Presidential candidates want to come talk to me because I'm nobody important and they have better things to do than talk to me and help me strengthen my brand."

Brown and some other reformster pilot fish will gladly claim they've been put upon by the union, because that makes them important. It's an old and venerable trick-- hell, if I could get Campbell Brown to attack me in print, my bloggy street cred would go way up-- but it doesn't always work. And to pretend that the Democratic party, which just fell all over itself lionizing the departing and union un-loved Arne Duncan-- well, that party hasn't shown all that much concern about upsetting the teachers unions.

At best, Brown is just a victim of the old internet adage "Don't Feed the Trolls." But it's just as likely that her Iowa shindig failed because she's just not that important or relevant.

All the Feels

One hallmark of reformsterism has been the relentless insistence on data and research. Decisions must be data-driven, while programs must be research-based. We must make the delivery system of education just as scientific and mechanical and bloodless as a toaster assembly line.

Which is why it has been so curious to see all the reformster feelings on display. Deep feelings. Heartfelt feelings. Just the announcement of the departure of Arne Duncan and his replacement by failing-upward poster boy John King has been a feeling-fest. Just, really, all the feels.

Duncan's announcement included a whole list of things he loves. With tears. The Politico profile is just full of the feels, with Ted Mitchell tearing up, and a hammering home of a point often made about Duncan-- that he just cares so much. He cares about kids. In fact, some folks in the USED circle are certain that nobody anywhere on the planet cares about the kids as much as Duncan does. And I can actually believe that, well, he thinks so. It would frankly explain a lot-- Duncan the righteous crusader who doesn't have to listen to anybody because nobody cares like he does. And so Duncan can ignore all the research based evidence that would suggest VAM should be data-driven over a cliff-- he can ignore that. And he can keep puzzling over why schools have become so test-focused even as lots of people try to tell him. And he can keep bragging about only the United States Education Department-- not teachers or schools or even parents-- will tell the truth about how kids are doing.

All of that because Duncan just cares so much more than everyone else.

And the feels just keep on coming as we contemplate the anointing of John King, who like many beloved reformsters before him (looking at you, She Who Will Not Be Named from DC) does not have a single actual success to his name. King's track record includes charter schools that are a showcase of charter worst practices, shoving vast percentages of students out the door (in violation of USED policies) so that the few students they are willing to teach can bring in good numbers. King couldn't deal with the public, couldn't work with teachers, and had to bail out of New York as a failure in the state education leaderly post.

But King has a story, and his story is (and I say this without irony) absolutely a great one. Tough childhood, turned around by a dedicated teacher, making his way up in the world. Go over to Peter Cunningham's $12 million reformster PR site, and the headline "Because I believe in all kids, I support John King" leads to an article that is mostly John King telling his story (also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves-- what the heck does believing in children have to do with thinking John King would make a good USED sort-of-secretary). Never mind that King does not consider whether his beloved teacher could survive and save other young John Kings under current USED policies. The story gives all the feels.

And now reformsters are trying to build a groundswell for King with tactics like #ISupportJohnKing on the twitter, and the tweets (before the hashtag was hijacked by public education supporters) have been all about "believing" and "the children."

In fact, so far, I haven't seen any support for King's Congress-sidestepping appointment that are based on research or data. Nothing to say how his great policies in NY helped students, or how he has shown his ability to manage the sort of detail and policy that a USED acting-like-a-secretary must manage.

The support is all about the feels. He ran a charter school (but let's not talk about how, exactly, that worked out-- don't bring up the data because that's just mean). He has a great, touching story. He believes in all the children of the world. That is all great, and lord knows I'm not above poking readers in the feels now and again, but my dog also has a great story and loves every child he has ever met, believing that they all have godlike powers, and my dog would make a terrible part-time-pretend-secretary of education.

The folks in DC occasionally opine that they would like policy ideas judged on merit, and lots of olks in these debates ask that things not be made personal (which, despite my general tone of mockery, I actually agree with). But if you want those things, you can't also ask that players be judged on their personal qualities, and you can't claim to be making decisions based on "I know this guy and he's Good People."

Duncan and King will both have to be judged on their policies and their effectiveness in working well with stakeholders, not on their feelings. I am in no position to judge the latter, but the evidence about the former does not speak in their favor. Instead of trying to give us the feels, how about showing us some evidence? It's not tat feelings and motivation don't matter-- but when you keep punching me in the face, I'm not so interested in how you feel about it.