The afternoon is only half over, but the sun is riding a little low in the sky. Within a few hours, it's going to get dark outside. That's because we switched the clocks last night.
Here's the thing-- it will get precisely as dark as it got yesterday, just as the sun rose just as high today as it rises every single day. The distribution of light and dark through the day, the distribution of the sun's high points and low points-- it will be pretty much the same today as it was yesterday.
What changed over night is not the distribution of light and dark, but the labels that we put on it. Yesterday we labeled this position of the sun 4:00. Today we are labeling it 3:00.
For those who don't get it, this is a fine way to explain cut scores. The distribution of student scores, the lights and darks, the highs and lows-- that stays pretty much the same. What changes is how people chose to label them. We can take the highest point of the curve and we can call it "on level" or "above expectations" or "below expectations." And the labels we use are reality-- it's not true to say that right now it is "really" 4:00. It's 3:00, today.
The position of the sun, just like the number of students who got a certain number of questions correct on a test-- that's a piece of raw data. But what we label it, whether we label it 12:30 AM or "Exceeds expectations," is just a label, even an arbitrary label, that we have slapped on the raw data to give it meaning. And we can give it any meaning we want.
Many folks make fun of daylight savings time because it doesn't really change a thing. Sun is still up for the same number of hours, and we stumble around in the dark for the same number of hours. Nothing really changes except the label we install. If I have the authority, I can make this moment 3:00 or 4:00 or 9:00 or 13:00. It won't change the reality of the moment-- just what we call it. Standardized test results, predictably draped across the bell curve, are the same. If I have the authority, I can label the parts of the curve anything I like. But it won't change reality a bit.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
ICYMI: This Week's Notable Bloggery
Here are some bloggy highlights from this week.
Damaging the Charter School Brand
John Merrow doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's powerful stuff. Here's a look at the charter school Hall of Shame, complete with historical perspective and some links to egregious actors.
Moscowitz, Petrilli, and the Hard Truth about America's Schools
This is an absolute must-read. Jersey Jazzman has managed to synthesize most of the big news of the week, from Moscowitz's meltdown to the student assault in South Carolina. Read this.
Now, I hear a lot about the quantity of my output, but for the past little bit, Mercedes Schneider has been quietly cranking out at least one post a day (or, perhaps more accurately, one post a night, because it looks like maybe she's staying up till the wee hours to write these). That is far more impressive than my output because Schneider does actual research, whereas I just remove the filter from my brain and start typing. But if you are used to checking Schneider just every now and then, you may have missed some of the gems she's been putting out there. You should save yourself the trouble and just subscribe to her blog, but ICYMI...
Louisiana's High School Letter Grades
Just when you think you've seen every way to game an evaluation system, LA comes up with yet another data dodge.
The Waltons Set Out To Promote a Choice Ecosystem
Schneider dug up a piece of paperwork in which the Waltons lay out their plan for the next five years of educational reforminess, and it's not pretty. You need to see this.
“Fund for Louisiana’s Future” is a DC Super PAC Devoted to David Vitter
One more tale of how reformy carpetbaggers are trying to buy themselves some influence.
Commentary on Mathematica’s “First Study of Its Kind” of PARCC
Mathematica performed a study on PARCC testing. Schneider pulls that apart to find the real conclusions we can reach.
Finally, from Paul Thomas, a piece that reflects his usual thoughful and nuanced view of a difficult issue.
Resisting Good/Bad Teacher/Police Frame and Confronting Systemic Flaws in Education, Law Enforcement
Damaging the Charter School Brand
John Merrow doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's powerful stuff. Here's a look at the charter school Hall of Shame, complete with historical perspective and some links to egregious actors.
Moscowitz, Petrilli, and the Hard Truth about America's Schools
This is an absolute must-read. Jersey Jazzman has managed to synthesize most of the big news of the week, from Moscowitz's meltdown to the student assault in South Carolina. Read this.
Now, I hear a lot about the quantity of my output, but for the past little bit, Mercedes Schneider has been quietly cranking out at least one post a day (or, perhaps more accurately, one post a night, because it looks like maybe she's staying up till the wee hours to write these). That is far more impressive than my output because Schneider does actual research, whereas I just remove the filter from my brain and start typing. But if you are used to checking Schneider just every now and then, you may have missed some of the gems she's been putting out there. You should save yourself the trouble and just subscribe to her blog, but ICYMI...
Louisiana's High School Letter Grades
Just when you think you've seen every way to game an evaluation system, LA comes up with yet another data dodge.
The Waltons Set Out To Promote a Choice Ecosystem
Schneider dug up a piece of paperwork in which the Waltons lay out their plan for the next five years of educational reforminess, and it's not pretty. You need to see this.
“Fund for Louisiana’s Future” is a DC Super PAC Devoted to David Vitter
One more tale of how reformy carpetbaggers are trying to buy themselves some influence.
Commentary on Mathematica’s “First Study of Its Kind” of PARCC
Mathematica performed a study on PARCC testing. Schneider pulls that apart to find the real conclusions we can reach.
Finally, from Paul Thomas, a piece that reflects his usual thoughful and nuanced view of a difficult issue.
Resisting Good/Bad Teacher/Police Frame and Confronting Systemic Flaws in Education, Law Enforcement
Return of the Data Overlords
When the President and Arne Duncan took to all manner of media to pretend to stand up against standardized testing (but only, you know, the bad redundant not-so-good standardized testing), the New Testing Plan included some odd language and offers of assistance, and it all struck a chord of recognition for Peggy Robertson, an education activist who blogs at Peg with Pen.
For her, the signs point toward Competency Based Education. CPE has been floating around for a while, a kind of fig leaf for the educational dream of the Data Overlords. She has written pretty compelling and researched pieces about the whole business. Emily Talmage thinks the whole anti-test spin is a trojan horse. I don't think they're over-reacting.
We haven't heard from our data overlords in a while. When Leonie Haimson et al shut down inBloom and its dreams of hoovering up every speck of student data, too many folks heaved a sigh of relief and shrugged their shoulders. "Sure glad we're done with that." Well, we're not, and we never were.
If you doubt me, take a look at "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education." It's from Pearson way back in February of 2014, and it is one of many documents out there underlining the unique Pearson vision for students in the world. In fact, the textbooks, the instructional programs, the standardized tests, the huge mountains of profit-- all of those serve a central vision of swimming in the digital ocean. Here's a quote from that paper from Sir Michael Barber, the biggest Pearson Data Overlord of them all:
Once much of teaching and learning becomes digital, data will be available not just from once-a-year tests, but also from the wide-ranging daily activities of individual students. Teachers will be able to see what students can and cannot do, what they have learned and what they have not,which sequences of teaching have worked well and which haven’t - and they will be able to do so in real time.
Got it? Even Pearson understands that Big Standardized Tests don't really get the job done, that what we really need to do is collect every piece of data from every piece of work that students do. You might argue (as I did) that teachers already do this every single day. But the Data Overlords have two problems with that. 1) Meat widgets like teachers don't record data as purely and beautifully as technology and 2) the data in teachers' heads is not easily accessible to the Data Overlords. They are more than happy to talk about getting rid of tests that will not fit in with the system they have in mind. In fact, testing isn't all that important to them if they can just capture ALL student activity data 24/7.
You can read more of the same in Pearson's eighty-eight page opus about the coming "renaissance in assessment" (or you can plough through the five posts I wrote about it after I read it. You're welcome). Again, here's just one pertinent excerpt:
Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles.
Pearson is okay extending this collecting work to all aspects of the child, including "non-cognitive skills," so that the Data Overlords will not only know how good your child is at math, but how good a human being they are as well.
How would all of this work? I had a thought a few years back-- what if Common Core is not standards at all, but just a system of data tags? All the time teachers are spending "aligning" every lesson, every test, and even, in some cases, every item on every worksheet and assessment-- that's so that the results can be tagged and bagged and sorted to create a more easily crunched by the Data Overlords.
Look at this article from 2013, explaining how a symbiotic relationship between Pearson, their buddies/underlings at Knewton, and a school, would work. I can give you the gist of it in one image from the article.
Or check out this video from a Knewton honcho
That video is from 2012, at an event presented by the Department of Education.
The basic ideas here have cropped up in the world of adaptive testing, personalized learning, and anything that involves putting a computer in front of a student. The idea of competency based "badges" for students is out there (and has also been floated for teachers).
After reading pages and pages of this stuff, I think the Dream of the Data Overlords looks something like this:
From early in a child's life (maybe even their fetal days), every interaction between the child and the world is collected and cataloged. By the time the child gets to school, we already know much about her, and she is met by a computerized education program shaped by what we know about her. And every exercise, practice, comment, sentence, comma or sneeze that she completes becomes part of her fully digitized record as well as being instantly used to direct her educational program to suit her. By the time she's twelve or thirteen, we know where she should best be positioned in life, and we can shape her educational program accordingly. By the time she finishes high school (or whatever sort of teen-years education program the software deems most appropriate for her), we know all about her intellectual capabilities and skills in rich detail, as well as a picture of her soft skills (aka her personality and character). This will allow us to perfectly match her with the best vocational/career fit.
Data Overlords believe that if we know everything, we can control everything. Data Overlords are in some ways the scariest of the reformster tribes because they are mostly True Believers who don't ask two critical questions-- 1) is it really possible to do all this and 2) is it a good thing to do. Personally, I go with "no" for both. Data Overlords know that they face some obstacles (if you thought Common Core was federal overreach, Knewton will totally freak you out). But I'll finish with a Barber quote I frequently trot out, because I think it's his most scary statement.
Barber recognizes that there are systemic, logistic and human obstacles to his grand design of a Data Overlord world. He recognizes that there are so very many details to work out. But--
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
At the end of the day, the Data Overlords believe that remaking the world in their own image is not merely a business plan or a great way to make a buck. They believe it is a moral imperative to impose their vision on the rest of the world. And that is scary as hell.
For her, the signs point toward Competency Based Education. CPE has been floating around for a while, a kind of fig leaf for the educational dream of the Data Overlords. She has written pretty compelling and researched pieces about the whole business. Emily Talmage thinks the whole anti-test spin is a trojan horse. I don't think they're over-reacting.
We haven't heard from our data overlords in a while. When Leonie Haimson et al shut down inBloom and its dreams of hoovering up every speck of student data, too many folks heaved a sigh of relief and shrugged their shoulders. "Sure glad we're done with that." Well, we're not, and we never were.
If you doubt me, take a look at "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education." It's from Pearson way back in February of 2014, and it is one of many documents out there underlining the unique Pearson vision for students in the world. In fact, the textbooks, the instructional programs, the standardized tests, the huge mountains of profit-- all of those serve a central vision of swimming in the digital ocean. Here's a quote from that paper from Sir Michael Barber, the biggest Pearson Data Overlord of them all:
Once much of teaching and learning becomes digital, data will be available not just from once-a-year tests, but also from the wide-ranging daily activities of individual students. Teachers will be able to see what students can and cannot do, what they have learned and what they have not,which sequences of teaching have worked well and which haven’t - and they will be able to do so in real time.
Got it? Even Pearson understands that Big Standardized Tests don't really get the job done, that what we really need to do is collect every piece of data from every piece of work that students do. You might argue (as I did) that teachers already do this every single day. But the Data Overlords have two problems with that. 1) Meat widgets like teachers don't record data as purely and beautifully as technology and 2) the data in teachers' heads is not easily accessible to the Data Overlords. They are more than happy to talk about getting rid of tests that will not fit in with the system they have in mind. In fact, testing isn't all that important to them if they can just capture ALL student activity data 24/7.
You can read more of the same in Pearson's eighty-eight page opus about the coming "renaissance in assessment" (or you can plough through the five posts I wrote about it after I read it. You're welcome). Again, here's just one pertinent excerpt:
Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles.
Pearson is okay extending this collecting work to all aspects of the child, including "non-cognitive skills," so that the Data Overlords will not only know how good your child is at math, but how good a human being they are as well.
How would all of this work? I had a thought a few years back-- what if Common Core is not standards at all, but just a system of data tags? All the time teachers are spending "aligning" every lesson, every test, and even, in some cases, every item on every worksheet and assessment-- that's so that the results can be tagged and bagged and sorted to create a more easily crunched by the Data Overlords.
Look at this article from 2013, explaining how a symbiotic relationship between Pearson, their buddies/underlings at Knewton, and a school, would work. I can give you the gist of it in one image from the article.
Or check out this video from a Knewton honcho
The basic ideas here have cropped up in the world of adaptive testing, personalized learning, and anything that involves putting a computer in front of a student. The idea of competency based "badges" for students is out there (and has also been floated for teachers).
After reading pages and pages of this stuff, I think the Dream of the Data Overlords looks something like this:
From early in a child's life (maybe even their fetal days), every interaction between the child and the world is collected and cataloged. By the time the child gets to school, we already know much about her, and she is met by a computerized education program shaped by what we know about her. And every exercise, practice, comment, sentence, comma or sneeze that she completes becomes part of her fully digitized record as well as being instantly used to direct her educational program to suit her. By the time she's twelve or thirteen, we know where she should best be positioned in life, and we can shape her educational program accordingly. By the time she finishes high school (or whatever sort of teen-years education program the software deems most appropriate for her), we know all about her intellectual capabilities and skills in rich detail, as well as a picture of her soft skills (aka her personality and character). This will allow us to perfectly match her with the best vocational/career fit.
Data Overlords believe that if we know everything, we can control everything. Data Overlords are in some ways the scariest of the reformster tribes because they are mostly True Believers who don't ask two critical questions-- 1) is it really possible to do all this and 2) is it a good thing to do. Personally, I go with "no" for both. Data Overlords know that they face some obstacles (if you thought Common Core was federal overreach, Knewton will totally freak you out). But I'll finish with a Barber quote I frequently trot out, because I think it's his most scary statement.
Barber recognizes that there are systemic, logistic and human obstacles to his grand design of a Data Overlord world. He recognizes that there are so very many details to work out. But--
Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right
At the end of the day, the Data Overlords believe that remaking the world in their own image is not merely a business plan or a great way to make a buck. They believe it is a moral imperative to impose their vision on the rest of the world. And that is scary as hell.
PA: GOP Walks Away from Funding Crisis
As I've outlined elsewhere, Pennsylvania suffers from long-standing school funding issues. In recent years these have been exacerbated by pension funding issues and policies that allow charter schools to suck the blood right out of public systems. Put it all together, and Pennsylvania has the widest gap between rich and poor schools in the country.
But on top of all that, Pennsylvania is suffering from the flare-up of whatever chronic problem it is that has led to five budget impasses in the past ten years. We are on day one-hundred-and-oh-hell-you-have-GOT-to-be-kidding-me of Life without Budget. And in Pennsylvania, when we don't have a budget, people don't get paid. (Well, most people. In some manner that literally nobody is prepared to explain, the state has spent $27 billion of some money on some thing.)
This is not just a school issue. Right now you can't swing a cat in the commonwealth without whacking it into a service organization or government program that's having trouble meeting payroll and taking care of the citizens it was set up to serve. Senior citizens, the disabled, the unemployed-- all are looking at a patchwork of supports that appears to have been gnawed on by some very angry goat.
But every single school district in the state is getting hit. Back in August the teachers in Chester Uplands* made headlines by offering to work for free, but they were just the canary in this particular coal mine. Districts across the state are looking for ways to beg, borrow, and steal enough money to stay in business. Some have been pretty direct in their commentary-- the Erie School District asked the state to float them an interest-free loan of $47mill to keep the lights on. Districts have felt the need to announce how long they can last on cash reserves (fun fact-- in the last decade the state has passed regulations limiting how much money a district can park in its general reserve fund). Word on the street is that the state will NOT be reimbursing districts for the money they will be spending on the millions and millions of dollars they'll be borrowing to tide them over. Okay, it's actually about half a billion dollars.
In other words, on top of interfering with the stable operation of basic government services, this budgetary cockfight will end up costing taxpayers real money. Because if there's anything that taxpayers want to do, it's finance legislative logjams.
So this week, the legislature took some real action.
They went on vacation.
I'm not kidding.
Even as the State Auditor was holding a press conference about just how awful the budget crisis has become, the legislature was voting along party lines to take their two week vaca. And because our legislature is GOP-controlled, that means that our legislators have headed home to fiddle while the state burns (it also means our Democratic legislators could vote against vacation knowing that it wouldn't change anything except how they looked to the public). Or would burn, if anyone could afford matches and firewood.
Folks are loaded with creative ideas. Let's all refuse to pay taxes for the same number of days the budget is late. Let's cut legislator pay (the second-highest in the country) by a pro-rated daily amount for all the hundred-and-what-the-hell days they don't get their job done.
It is impossible from out here in the cheap seats to tell what is really happening, or not, because what plays out here is various acts of political gamesmanship. The legislature offers a "stopgap" measure which is essentially their original budget ideas for a shorter period of time. The governor vetoes it. All done with fanfare and an eye on the press releases. Pennsylvania residents can be excused for concluding that their elected leadership sucks.
And yes, I get that sometimes when negotiations are going badly, it's good to step back and clear heads. But this billion-dollar crisis is well past that point. Arguing about Titanic deck chairs is a waste of time, and "Let's take a second to clear our heads" is inappropriate when the burning house is collapsing around you.
But if you are a Pennsylvanian and this bugs you, I suggest you let your elected representative know about your displeasure. He should be easy to find. He'll be home for the next two weeks.
*corrected- I originally gave the incorrect district name here
But on top of all that, Pennsylvania is suffering from the flare-up of whatever chronic problem it is that has led to five budget impasses in the past ten years. We are on day one-hundred-and-oh-hell-you-have-GOT-to-be-kidding-me of Life without Budget. And in Pennsylvania, when we don't have a budget, people don't get paid. (Well, most people. In some manner that literally nobody is prepared to explain, the state has spent $27 billion of some money on some thing.)
This is not just a school issue. Right now you can't swing a cat in the commonwealth without whacking it into a service organization or government program that's having trouble meeting payroll and taking care of the citizens it was set up to serve. Senior citizens, the disabled, the unemployed-- all are looking at a patchwork of supports that appears to have been gnawed on by some very angry goat.
But every single school district in the state is getting hit. Back in August the teachers in Chester Uplands* made headlines by offering to work for free, but they were just the canary in this particular coal mine. Districts across the state are looking for ways to beg, borrow, and steal enough money to stay in business. Some have been pretty direct in their commentary-- the Erie School District asked the state to float them an interest-free loan of $47mill to keep the lights on. Districts have felt the need to announce how long they can last on cash reserves (fun fact-- in the last decade the state has passed regulations limiting how much money a district can park in its general reserve fund). Word on the street is that the state will NOT be reimbursing districts for the money they will be spending on the millions and millions of dollars they'll be borrowing to tide them over. Okay, it's actually about half a billion dollars.
In other words, on top of interfering with the stable operation of basic government services, this budgetary cockfight will end up costing taxpayers real money. Because if there's anything that taxpayers want to do, it's finance legislative logjams.
So this week, the legislature took some real action.
They went on vacation.
I'm not kidding.
Even as the State Auditor was holding a press conference about just how awful the budget crisis has become, the legislature was voting along party lines to take their two week vaca. And because our legislature is GOP-controlled, that means that our legislators have headed home to fiddle while the state burns (it also means our Democratic legislators could vote against vacation knowing that it wouldn't change anything except how they looked to the public). Or would burn, if anyone could afford matches and firewood.
Folks are loaded with creative ideas. Let's all refuse to pay taxes for the same number of days the budget is late. Let's cut legislator pay (the second-highest in the country) by a pro-rated daily amount for all the hundred-and-what-the-hell days they don't get their job done.
It is impossible from out here in the cheap seats to tell what is really happening, or not, because what plays out here is various acts of political gamesmanship. The legislature offers a "stopgap" measure which is essentially their original budget ideas for a shorter period of time. The governor vetoes it. All done with fanfare and an eye on the press releases. Pennsylvania residents can be excused for concluding that their elected leadership sucks.
And yes, I get that sometimes when negotiations are going badly, it's good to step back and clear heads. But this billion-dollar crisis is well past that point. Arguing about Titanic deck chairs is a waste of time, and "Let's take a second to clear our heads" is inappropriate when the burning house is collapsing around you.
But if you are a Pennsylvanian and this bugs you, I suggest you let your elected representative know about your displeasure. He should be easy to find. He'll be home for the next two weeks.
*corrected- I originally gave the incorrect district name here
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Eva's Very Bad Month
It has not been a fun couple of weeks for Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy chain of test score workshops. I just want to collect all these high points in one spot.
First, she found herself the subject of a John Merrow PBS piece on the use of discipline to push students out and raise the collective scores of her schools. It's worth watching the clip to see her performance:
This is what happens when you get too used to only appearing in media settings that you totally control.
But Eva fought back quickly, demanding an apology in a letter that I won't link to because, incredibly, Moskowitz included the easily-identifiable disciplinary record of a then six year old student. Because when your charter business is under attack, you fight back with whatever weapons are at your disposal against whoever stands in your way. Talk about putting adult interests ahead of the needs of children.
Does that sound like a violation of the law? The child's mother thinks so, and has filed suit against Moskowitz.
That was two weeks ago. Then this week, Moskowitz found herself facing off against the city. City Controller Scott Stringer put it plainly:
If an organization wants to be paid New York City taxpayer dollars, they need to follow New York City rules.
Moskowitz wants those sweet sweet Pre-K tax dollars, but as she has periodically reminded the State of New York, school regulations are for little people, and she is not a public school when it comes to accountability (only when it comes to collecting checks). Moskowitz held a press event to declare her right not to listen to Stringer, featuring parents as props and a closed setting where only those she wanted present could attend.
But even as Moskowitz was standing up for her right to take public tax dollars without having to be accountable for them, she was getting questions about an article by Kate Taylor in the New York Times laying out just how determined Success Academies can get about pushing out students that they don't want to teach. This piece includes the damning story of one SA locations "Got To Go" list in which, incredibly, a principal actually wrote out a list of students that were marked for pushing out. Stories of Moskowitz's determined work in pushing out students (and teachers) she didn't want to teach has been widely documented, but the school hit list added a new level of awfulness.
Moskowitz tried to put out that fire yesterday (twittering public ed advocates noted that admission to the event was once again carefully controlled). The offending principal apologized, complete with tears and early departure, but Moskowitz said he would not be fired:
At Success, we simply don't believe in throwing people on the trash heap for the sake of public relations.
She also released an e-mail in which she called the principal "stubborn" and "dense." She indicated that she was too cool to take PR advice, and she insisted repeatedly that this instance was an anomaly. She also tried to provide evidence that she had been all over this way back when it came to her attention.
She did not indicate that Success Academy would be making any policy changes to avoid similar events in the future.
Politico's full report on the press event is worth reading, especially such dry observations as noting that after the NYT piece ran, "other charter advocates declined to come to Success' defense." I'm not surprised. Mike Petrilli, however, did run a piece in the Daily News defending Moskowitz's right to do what she says she doesn't do. So there's that.
All in all, the fiction of Success Academy's great achievements is taking a beating. We shall see if things start looking up once November rolls around.
First, she found herself the subject of a John Merrow PBS piece on the use of discipline to push students out and raise the collective scores of her schools. It's worth watching the clip to see her performance:
This is what happens when you get too used to only appearing in media settings that you totally control.
But Eva fought back quickly, demanding an apology in a letter that I won't link to because, incredibly, Moskowitz included the easily-identifiable disciplinary record of a then six year old student. Because when your charter business is under attack, you fight back with whatever weapons are at your disposal against whoever stands in your way. Talk about putting adult interests ahead of the needs of children.
Does that sound like a violation of the law? The child's mother thinks so, and has filed suit against Moskowitz.
That was two weeks ago. Then this week, Moskowitz found herself facing off against the city. City Controller Scott Stringer put it plainly:
If an organization wants to be paid New York City taxpayer dollars, they need to follow New York City rules.
Moskowitz wants those sweet sweet Pre-K tax dollars, but as she has periodically reminded the State of New York, school regulations are for little people, and she is not a public school when it comes to accountability (only when it comes to collecting checks). Moskowitz held a press event to declare her right not to listen to Stringer, featuring parents as props and a closed setting where only those she wanted present could attend.
But even as Moskowitz was standing up for her right to take public tax dollars without having to be accountable for them, she was getting questions about an article by Kate Taylor in the New York Times laying out just how determined Success Academies can get about pushing out students that they don't want to teach. This piece includes the damning story of one SA locations "Got To Go" list in which, incredibly, a principal actually wrote out a list of students that were marked for pushing out. Stories of Moskowitz's determined work in pushing out students (and teachers) she didn't want to teach has been widely documented, but the school hit list added a new level of awfulness.
Moskowitz tried to put out that fire yesterday (twittering public ed advocates noted that admission to the event was once again carefully controlled). The offending principal apologized, complete with tears and early departure, but Moskowitz said he would not be fired:
At Success, we simply don't believe in throwing people on the trash heap for the sake of public relations.
She also released an e-mail in which she called the principal "stubborn" and "dense." She indicated that she was too cool to take PR advice, and she insisted repeatedly that this instance was an anomaly. She also tried to provide evidence that she had been all over this way back when it came to her attention.
She did not indicate that Success Academy would be making any policy changes to avoid similar events in the future.
Politico's full report on the press event is worth reading, especially such dry observations as noting that after the NYT piece ran, "other charter advocates declined to come to Success' defense." I'm not surprised. Mike Petrilli, however, did run a piece in the Daily News defending Moskowitz's right to do what she says she doesn't do. So there's that.
All in all, the fiction of Success Academy's great achievements is taking a beating. We shall see if things start looking up once November rolls around.
Petrilli: Creaming Is a Feature
You have to give Mike Petrilli, Head Honcho of the Very Reformy Fordham Foundation, credit. He will say what many charter supporters will not.
The standard charter claim is that charters can do what public schools cannot-- take the same kids andget them to score well on standardized tests raise their achievement levels. They have been hemming and hawing all week over the revelation that Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy was caught keeping a "Got To Go" list of students who were to be driven out of their Very Special Test Score Factory. Success Academy has thrown that principal under the bus, and then had him publicly drive the bus over himself, and then underline it with a classic Moskowitz quote:
At Success, we simply don't believe in throwing people on the trash heap for the sake of public relations.
Success Academy simply doesn't just toss human beings aside because those people don't serve Moskowitz's purpose. Of course, that still leaves the mystery of how SA loses half of each cohort on the way to graduation. But all those parents talking about their experience of being pushed out? Liars or deluded or something.
Mike Petrilli calls "bullshit." In fact, he calls bullshit on everybody, including the people who have been howling at the Success Academy revelations, in particular taking a shot at Randi Weingarten of AFT:
What makes this sort of demagoguery more disappointing than usual is the nature of the issue at hand. As Weingarten’s own members know all too well, classroom disruption is a major problem. In a Public Agenda survey, 85% of public school teachers said that the experience of most students suffers because of a few chronic offenders.
Petrilli's position has been consistent and clear for years-- some students are a Big Problem, and schools should be able to make those students go away, so that the deserving, worthy students can have an education untroubled by troublemakers. I have a couple of problems with Petrilli's position:
1) After we get rid of trouble students, where do they go?
2) It's a mistake to assume that being a problem student is a static, immutable, hardwired, consistent condition.
3) The whole American public education deal is that we educate everybody, not just the "deserving."
For Petrilli, the whole point of charters is to give a space where "strivers" can stop being held back by all those Other Students who create disruption and trouble. And instead of yelling at people like Eva Moskowitz who are doing such a good job of winnowing out the non-strivers, we should give public schools the same sorts of powers.
This is exactly the wrong approach. Rather than piling old restrictions on charter schools, we should be working to reduce the restrictions on traditional public schools.
Well, sort of. Though I have to ask-- if we actually did that, why would we need charters at all? But when you say it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. But then, as his closer, Petrilli says it this way.
By all means, we should work to serve all kids well, including the serial disrupters, but not necessarily in the same classrooms or schools.
Rather than blast Moskowitz, Weingarten and others should ask that district teachers have the ability to prioritize the vast majority of their students, too. That would be worth crowing about.
Prioritize our students? Like, decide which students deserve how much education?
Petrilli's point is not completely without merit, and as teachers often lack sufficient time and resources, many do perform a certain amount of educational triage by considering which students need us most. And every teacher knows the frustration of having a classroom tyrannized by one serial disrupter. But "prioritize" students? That sounds like a level of judgmental school administration that I'm not comfy with, and I suspect would provide an avenue for biases and concerns for compliance to run roughshod over actual care and concerns for the well-being of students.
Look-- Success Academy is not nobly rescuing the top strivers from difficult situations. They are picking winners and losers based on the school's preferences and the school's convenience, based on Moskowitz's two guiding values-- compliance and test scores. When a six year old cracks under that sort of misguided pressure, that's not revealing some sort of character deficiency or lack of striverness. It's revealing an institutional incompetence in dealing with six year olds.
But I appreciate Petrilli's willingness to just say it-- charters are only for the chosen few, those that the school finds deserving. What I'd really like to know next is how a system in which a school is the final arbiter of what level of education a child deserves fits together with the reformy ideals of school choice?
The standard charter claim is that charters can do what public schools cannot-- take the same kids and
At Success, we simply don't believe in throwing people on the trash heap for the sake of public relations.
Success Academy simply doesn't just toss human beings aside because those people don't serve Moskowitz's purpose. Of course, that still leaves the mystery of how SA loses half of each cohort on the way to graduation. But all those parents talking about their experience of being pushed out? Liars or deluded or something.
Mike Petrilli calls "bullshit." In fact, he calls bullshit on everybody, including the people who have been howling at the Success Academy revelations, in particular taking a shot at Randi Weingarten of AFT:
What makes this sort of demagoguery more disappointing than usual is the nature of the issue at hand. As Weingarten’s own members know all too well, classroom disruption is a major problem. In a Public Agenda survey, 85% of public school teachers said that the experience of most students suffers because of a few chronic offenders.
Petrilli's position has been consistent and clear for years-- some students are a Big Problem, and schools should be able to make those students go away, so that the deserving, worthy students can have an education untroubled by troublemakers. I have a couple of problems with Petrilli's position:
1) After we get rid of trouble students, where do they go?
2) It's a mistake to assume that being a problem student is a static, immutable, hardwired, consistent condition.
3) The whole American public education deal is that we educate everybody, not just the "deserving."
For Petrilli, the whole point of charters is to give a space where "strivers" can stop being held back by all those Other Students who create disruption and trouble. And instead of yelling at people like Eva Moskowitz who are doing such a good job of winnowing out the non-strivers, we should give public schools the same sorts of powers.
This is exactly the wrong approach. Rather than piling old restrictions on charter schools, we should be working to reduce the restrictions on traditional public schools.
Well, sort of. Though I have to ask-- if we actually did that, why would we need charters at all? But when you say it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. But then, as his closer, Petrilli says it this way.
By all means, we should work to serve all kids well, including the serial disrupters, but not necessarily in the same classrooms or schools.
Rather than blast Moskowitz, Weingarten and others should ask that district teachers have the ability to prioritize the vast majority of their students, too. That would be worth crowing about.
Prioritize our students? Like, decide which students deserve how much education?
Petrilli's point is not completely without merit, and as teachers often lack sufficient time and resources, many do perform a certain amount of educational triage by considering which students need us most. And every teacher knows the frustration of having a classroom tyrannized by one serial disrupter. But "prioritize" students? That sounds like a level of judgmental school administration that I'm not comfy with, and I suspect would provide an avenue for biases and concerns for compliance to run roughshod over actual care and concerns for the well-being of students.
Look-- Success Academy is not nobly rescuing the top strivers from difficult situations. They are picking winners and losers based on the school's preferences and the school's convenience, based on Moskowitz's two guiding values-- compliance and test scores. When a six year old cracks under that sort of misguided pressure, that's not revealing some sort of character deficiency or lack of striverness. It's revealing an institutional incompetence in dealing with six year olds.
But I appreciate Petrilli's willingness to just say it-- charters are only for the chosen few, those that the school finds deserving. What I'd really like to know next is how a system in which a school is the final arbiter of what level of education a child deserves fits together with the reformy ideals of school choice?
Reformsters and Dinosaurs
Last night my wife and I watched our newly acquired copy of Jurassic World, a movie that doesn't have an original idea in its head, but is still plenty of fun to watch. Even more than when we saw it in the theater, I'm struck by how the themes of education reform are laced through the film, and though I wrote about the movie at the time, I want a do-over, to expand on what I originally noticed.
Virtually every reformster foible is on display in this movie.
Our leading lady is introduced with a big Marked for Redemption sign on her forehead. She refers to the animals in the park as "assets," things rather than living beings, and she prefers to manage based on data and spreadsheets-- management by screen. She follows procedure rather than listening to her expert.
The movies baddest human is Vincent D'Onofrio's ex-military corporate tool. He's most immediately marked as a bad guy with his speech about competition, and how that's the road to improvement. What I noticed more clearly this time through is that he likes the idea of competition because he believes that he will come out on top-- competition is important because it's how other things are brought up to snuff.
Paired with that belief in competition is yet another rejection of expertise. Chris Pratt (playing what we affectionately refer to as Bert Macklin, Dinosaur Hunter) tries to explain to D'Onofrio all of the specifics and understanding needed to handle the almost-trained raptors, but D'Onofrio brushes him off because D'Onofrio believes that he just has a gut-level understanding that is greater than Pratt's actual knowledge and experience. D'Onofrio is so sure that he just knows how things go that he will prevail-- right up to the moment the raptor chomps down on his arm.
Also worth noting-- the billionaire backer of the park. He seems to be a voice concerned about the right things (Are the customers happy? Are the animals happy?) but he also suffers from a hubris problem. As he climbs aboard a helicopter that he intends to pilot, another character asks if there is anyone else who can pilot the copter. The billionaire replies, "We don't need anybody else." Again he believes in his own awesomeness over any needed expertise, and the result is death and destruction for himself and others.
Add--of course-- the scientist who has met the demands for a bigger, badder dinosaur without regard for the moral and ethical issues involved. Park management needs newer, scarier "assets" to keep their numbers up, and the scientist has delivered. Had the character ever read any Michael Crichton book, he might have paused to consider Crichton's favorite idea-- that human beings always underestimate the problems that come with their technological solutions.
All of these factors-- the focus on keeping numbers up, the impersonal data focus, the creation of artificial solutions, the belief in competition, the hubristic disregard for expertise-- combine to produce a monster. The monster was supposed to be the best, the creation that would save the park. Instead, it destroys it before being itself destroyed. It's all very, very reminiscent of the education debates, of the drive by powerful people whose faith is in their own rightness and not in expertise and experience to create something that is supposed to fix everything. But their values are warped and instead of trying to do what is best for the animals or the human guests of the park, they are really driving to create weapons, to create profits that will prove they are the best. What they create is meant to be the best, a savior, but because their values and goals are wrong, their creation is a destructive monster.
I suppose I might have spoiled a few details, but in truth there are no spoilers for this film because absolutely nothing happens that comes as a real surprise. And that's what's really interesting to me-- the characters who display the coldness, the detachment, the self-importance, the hubris that we associate with reformsters, are all immediately recognizable as characters who will be dealt either redemption or destruction. I venture a guess that nobody who watches the film sees D'Onofrio's character, hears him talk about how the raptors can be used, how competition makes the world work, how expertise can be ignored because he just knows-- nobody sees all this and thinks, "Yeah, that guy is going to be the hero."
Yes, the parallels aren't perfect. I'm happy to think of Chris Pratt as a proxy for teachers, but the dinosaurs end up as proxies for students and/or traditional public ed, which is less flattering.
So public ed fans can enjoy the movie because the good guys win and the bad guys, mostly, get their comeuppance. And public ed fans can take heart from the fact that the good guys are readily recognizable by just about anybody, that our struggle does include recognizable archetypes. Maybe that will help the public really understand what is happening to public ed.
One thing, though, that might get missed in the Big Finale-- the scientist and his engineered embryos escape unscathed.
Virtually every reformster foible is on display in this movie.
Our leading lady is introduced with a big Marked for Redemption sign on her forehead. She refers to the animals in the park as "assets," things rather than living beings, and she prefers to manage based on data and spreadsheets-- management by screen. She follows procedure rather than listening to her expert.
The movies baddest human is Vincent D'Onofrio's ex-military corporate tool. He's most immediately marked as a bad guy with his speech about competition, and how that's the road to improvement. What I noticed more clearly this time through is that he likes the idea of competition because he believes that he will come out on top-- competition is important because it's how other things are brought up to snuff.
Paired with that belief in competition is yet another rejection of expertise. Chris Pratt (playing what we affectionately refer to as Bert Macklin, Dinosaur Hunter) tries to explain to D'Onofrio all of the specifics and understanding needed to handle the almost-trained raptors, but D'Onofrio brushes him off because D'Onofrio believes that he just has a gut-level understanding that is greater than Pratt's actual knowledge and experience. D'Onofrio is so sure that he just knows how things go that he will prevail-- right up to the moment the raptor chomps down on his arm.
Also worth noting-- the billionaire backer of the park. He seems to be a voice concerned about the right things (Are the customers happy? Are the animals happy?) but he also suffers from a hubris problem. As he climbs aboard a helicopter that he intends to pilot, another character asks if there is anyone else who can pilot the copter. The billionaire replies, "We don't need anybody else." Again he believes in his own awesomeness over any needed expertise, and the result is death and destruction for himself and others.
Add--of course-- the scientist who has met the demands for a bigger, badder dinosaur without regard for the moral and ethical issues involved. Park management needs newer, scarier "assets" to keep their numbers up, and the scientist has delivered. Had the character ever read any Michael Crichton book, he might have paused to consider Crichton's favorite idea-- that human beings always underestimate the problems that come with their technological solutions.
All of these factors-- the focus on keeping numbers up, the impersonal data focus, the creation of artificial solutions, the belief in competition, the hubristic disregard for expertise-- combine to produce a monster. The monster was supposed to be the best, the creation that would save the park. Instead, it destroys it before being itself destroyed. It's all very, very reminiscent of the education debates, of the drive by powerful people whose faith is in their own rightness and not in expertise and experience to create something that is supposed to fix everything. But their values are warped and instead of trying to do what is best for the animals or the human guests of the park, they are really driving to create weapons, to create profits that will prove they are the best. What they create is meant to be the best, a savior, but because their values and goals are wrong, their creation is a destructive monster.
I suppose I might have spoiled a few details, but in truth there are no spoilers for this film because absolutely nothing happens that comes as a real surprise. And that's what's really interesting to me-- the characters who display the coldness, the detachment, the self-importance, the hubris that we associate with reformsters, are all immediately recognizable as characters who will be dealt either redemption or destruction. I venture a guess that nobody who watches the film sees D'Onofrio's character, hears him talk about how the raptors can be used, how competition makes the world work, how expertise can be ignored because he just knows-- nobody sees all this and thinks, "Yeah, that guy is going to be the hero."
Yes, the parallels aren't perfect. I'm happy to think of Chris Pratt as a proxy for teachers, but the dinosaurs end up as proxies for students and/or traditional public ed, which is less flattering.
So public ed fans can enjoy the movie because the good guys win and the bad guys, mostly, get their comeuppance. And public ed fans can take heart from the fact that the good guys are readily recognizable by just about anybody, that our struggle does include recognizable archetypes. Maybe that will help the public really understand what is happening to public ed.
One thing, though, that might get missed in the Big Finale-- the scientist and his engineered embryos escape unscathed.
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