TeachStrong's Nine Steps (To Teacher Awesomeness)

We've already discussed who and what the new #TeachStrong campaign might be. But I still think it's only fair to look at their nine points, their nine steps to building a better teacher, and consider their validity.

Yes, it starts with the premise that teaching needs to be modernized and elevated. Teachers have certainly been beaten down over the 1.5 decades. But modernized? A bad sign that once again, some policymaker is operating under the assumption that schools haven't changed since before they were in one. There's not any real evidence for that, but let's ignore it for the moment so we can move on to our nine steps on the pathway to awesome!

1. Recruitment

Identify and recruit more diverse teacher candidates with great potential to succeed, with a deliberate emphasis on diversifying the teacher workforce.

Diversity in the teacher workforce is a critical need, although the research tends to suggest that the problem is less about recruitment and more about retention (of course the general tanking of college teacher programs means we have recruitment issues across the board). But teacher diversity is a critical problem. The racial makeup of the teacher pool is wildly out of whack with that of the student pool. So, yes-- this is a critical need, though the devil is absolutely in the details, and in the recognition of the retention issue.

2. Teacher Prep

Reimagine teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice and a professional knowledge base, with universal high standards for all candidates.

Again, what details? Universal standards is probably a dumb idea-- exactly which universal standards would fit both a high school biology teacher and a first grade teacher? Just how vague and meaningless would standards have to be in order to cover both?

Also, "more rooted in classroom practice" than what? Here the group of TeachStrong partners starts to color my perception because I know, for instance, that when it comes to teacher preparation, neither NCTQ nor TFA know what the hell they're talking about. Classroom practice and professional knowledge base are absolutely essential, it's true-- but if you believe, as some of the partner groups do, that Common Core represents a critical piece of professional knowledge, then you are chock full of baloney.

So here the details make all the difference between a useful piece of teacher building and an utter waste of time.

3. Licensure

Raise the bar for licensure so it is a meaningful measure of readiness to teach.

Sure. How about we start by declaring that people with five weeks of training, no meaningful classroom practice, and no background in the professional knowledge base be allowed to set foot in a classroom? Because I like that idea, but I'm betting partner groups TFA and TNTP would not support it.

Exactly how will we raise the bar. Because if we're talking about something like edTPA, a high-cost profit-generating "exam" process operated by non-teaching corporate stooges, that's not raising the bar-- it's taking the bar and bludgeoning future teachers about the head and shoulders with it. Here's the problem with this idea-- nobody at all knows what a meaningful measure of readiness to teach looks like, exactly, so anybody who says they do is selling snake oil.

I have heard the claim that lawyers and doctors have to pass licensure exams, and I see a slight bit of value in that-- if such exams were developed and administered by working teachers, selected by other working teachers and not policy makers or bureaucrats or corporate lobbyists. In fact, let's have an accrediting board for college teacher programs also run by teachers without any input at all from policy makers and bureaucrats or corporations. Do I think that's what TeachStrong has in mind? No, I do not.

4. More Pay

Increase compensation in order to attract and reward teachers as professionals.

Oh, that word "reward." I'm dubious, because I know many of the partner groups like the idea of scrapping the traditional teacher pay ladder and replacing it with a system that only gives you a raise when they decide you've earned it. That way they can still fund schools cheaply by giving big pay to some few teachers and tiny, little pay for the rest. Again, I would be more impressed if we were talking about retention or supporting the idea of teachers who are supported in a lifelong dedication to a teaching career. But there is no language like that anywhere in TeachStrong.


5. Support for Newbies

Provide support for new teachers through induction or residency programs.

Almost spot on. The great missing link in the teaching profession is some sort of support, development, and mentorship for beginning teachers. That said, "residency" in reformsterspeak means, again, low paid positions that help offset the better-paid master teacher spots. The concept directly contradicts the idea of better pay for recruiting, but hey-- I didn't write it.

Also, this would be a good place to step up and say something like, "Judging a new teacher or 'resident' based on high-stakes assessment would be silly, so let's make sure that such nonsense is not part of the program." And who wants to take a newby under your wing when your wings depend on test scores to keep you from getting plucked? The use of test scores to evaluate teachers poisons everything it touches, but arguably nothing is more poisoned then beginning stages of teaching careers.

If TeachStrong isn't prepared to call for the end of all evaluation-by-student-scores, then all nine points are hollow vessels filed with stale, hot air.

6. Tenure

Ensure tenure is a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment.

In other words, keep tenure, but make it harder to get. Because reasons. Seriously-- there isn't a lick of evidence to suggest that such a tough tenure system would improve anything (though it certainly would give prospective teachers one more reason to consider a different career). Of course, many of the TeachStrong partners don't see teaching as a lifelong career in the first place, so who cares about tenure?

The other red flag here is "professional accomplishment." If this is going to be more of that "you can have tenure if your student test scores look good" then you can just wrap it up in VAM rags and bury it in the backyard next to the dead turtles and the rotting leaves, because that is some anti-teacher, junk sciency baloney. The use of "accomplishment" is an oddity-- we won't give you tenure based on your quality as a teacher, but on what you accomplished. Test prep or perish, junior.

I'll say it again-- tying teacher evaluation to student assessment results is disastrous and wrong and if TeachStrong can't say so, I can't take them seriously.

7. More Time and Tools

Provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed, including through planning, collaboration, and development.

How, exactly? Will you create more hours in the day? Will you hire one million more teachers to reduce the workload on those that are already working? If so, how will you manage that when you can't even fill the openings you have now?

And who will decide what "succeed" looks like? And who will decide what tools and support are needed? Because the pattern so far has been for reformsters to swoop in and say, "We've decided that you need this," without listening to teachers for five seconds. Hell, many TeachStrong partners decided that one tool needed by teachers was the Common Core. This item is completely useless, pointless, and worthless without something else that is notably missing from the nine-step program-- listening to actual working teachers.

Saying "Here's the tool I think you'll need to accomplish the goals I'm setting for you in the way I want them accomplished," that is not help. It's just micromanagement. 

8. Professional Development

Design professional learning to better address student and teacher needs, and to foster feedback and improvement.

Again-- who's doing the designing? The problem with PD is not the content or quality so much as it is the underlying assumption that PD is something done to teachers by people who know better than they what should be happening in their classrooms. Or that PD is an opportunity for vendors to make a case for their wares. You want to fix PD? Give us some days to ourselves, a personal PD budget, access to people who know the things we want to find out, and then leave us alone.

9. Career Pathways

Create career pathways that give teachers opportunities to lead and grow professionally.

Again, what this generally means in reformsterspeak is this:

Rather than start at the level you are currently and just staying there, what we'd like to do is dig a hole and start you at the bottom of that. Then by the time you climb up to your current level, it will feel like a real step up in the world. In the meantime, it will let us pay everyone who's starting out down in that hole much less money.

What it generally doesn't mean is that we'll give you increasing control over your professional direction, with more and more control over what goes on in your school and your classroom so that you, in fact, have less and less need to listen to what reformsters and policy makers and bureaucrats and corporate stooges tell you you must do. No, that is not what it means.

The "career pathways" shtick also often masks a belief that of course, nobody would want to be "just a teacher" for an entire career. Surely once you've put in some years as a teacher, you'd want to move on to something better. And why should I take advice about teaching from people who can't understand why I would want to spend my entire adult life in the classroom?

So What Do I Think? 

Many of these are perfectly good goals. A couple are even laudable.

Depending.

Because the devil is in the details, and all nine of these are items that have been used as reformster dog whistles, as ways of saying what folks will assume means one thing when the plan is something else entirely. And given that the TeachStrong partners are mostly a big pile of reformsters, I'm not inclined to trust their intentions.

So my question for the Hillary Campaign TeachStrong Team is, "What exactly do you mean? How exactly do you plan to do any of this? Because if this is all about cutting costs by linking pay to student test results while stripping teachers of autonomy in the classroom and eroding job protections, then I'm unimpressed."

It all sounds like more corporate reform drivel. Or the education platform of a corporate candidate. And it's as notable for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

It doesn't call for an end to the test-driven school and profession. It doesn't call for building the profession by empowering teachers. It doesn't call for investing the kind of resources needed to make all schools appealing places to teach, or for elevating community voices over outsidecontrol. It doesn't call for putting professional education under the control of people who know what they're doing. It doesn't recognize the vast pool of knowledge and expertise that exists right now among the seven million experienced teachers in this country (but instead suggests we're all behind the times). It doesn't call for listening to teachers. It doesn't call for an end to micromanagement and punitive control by bureaucrats and corporate stooges who don't know what the hell they're talking about. It doesn't call for preserving education as a public trust instead of a private investment opportunity.

Until somebody with the campaign fills in the blanks, I have to assume this is just deep-fried baloney.

Teach Strong: Real Wrong

By now the interwebs are just abuzz with the lastest reformster super-group, a PR push called #TeachStrong (it's a hashtag, because all the kids are using the twitters these days).

TeachStrong comes with all the reformy accoutrements, including a fancy website and a snappy mission statement, and a launch piece in the Washington Post. And it comes with a truly impressive group of reformster shysters signed on for the mission. (it does not come, as Daniel Katz noted, with an explanation for why they chose branding with the unfortunate echo of the doping-disgraced #Livestrong.) They are all about changing policy, and I have a theory about what this is really about, but I'll get back to that later.

The People

Taking point on this initiative is the Center for American Progress, a group that has championed reformy ideas for years and which has been relentless in its stumping for the Common Core (here and here and here and here, for a few examples). But look at this rogue's gallery of old favorites. There are forty in all, but I'm just hitting the highlights:

Alliance for Excellent Education-- a DC reformster lobbying group

CCSSO-- of course, our old friends who helped bring us CCSS

Deans for Impact-- a group of RelayGSE and Broad-style "deans" who are education leaders because they say so

Education Post-- the reformster PR rapid-response war room site run by former Duncan staffer

Educators 4 Excellence-- the astroturf group created to provide the illusion that teachers love reformy ideas

National Council on Teacher Quality-- these are the guys who evaluate college teacher ed programs based on brochures and graduation programs (including programs that don't exist)

RelayGSE-- no surprise here, since their "dean" is a member of "deans for impact"

Teach for America-- dedicated to building resumes and providing temp solutions for charter operators

TNTP-- TFA's big brother

This list alone is enough to convince me that the whole initiative is some sort of bizarre practical joke that cannot possibly be taken seriously. And that's not the worst, the most discouraging part of the list, because the list also includes:

AFT and NEA.

Well, hey. Maybe even though this is a terrible collection of organizations, they have some great ideas. Let's check their vision.

The Program 

Sigh. Well, let's start with the assumption that teaching is in trouble. Teachers, apparently, need to "modernized and elevated." And we are also fans of having an excellent teacher in each classroom. And we have nine-step program for getting it done.

(1) Recruit more diverse candidates for (2) more strenuous preparation. (3) Make it harder to get a license, but (4) pay more and (5) provide support in residency programs. (6) Keep tenure, but make it a meaningful signal of professional accomplishment (i.e. harder to get). (7) Give teachers more time and tools (so, what? a twenty-five hour day and an extra hand?) (8) Better PD (please, now you're just making shit up). (9) Career pathways.

So, mostly the same old stuff. Make life harder for teachers in concrete ways (licensure, tenure) but try to offset it in vague ways (more time, and tools, and PD). And as always-- absolutely nothing about giving teachers a strong voice in the direction of their profession.

No, the promise here is that we will ask more of you and do more to you.

And yet there are some odd features here. For instance, much of this is not exactly in tune with the TFA five-weeks, no-real-license plan. But in her WaPo piece, Lyndsey Layton reports that TFA basically has no intention of changing what they do, they just thought this seemed like a cool initiative to join. Really? Why would they sign on to this if they didn't support the stated goals? Hmmm...

The Purpose 

So what's really going on here? I have a thought, and I'll go ahead and type it out now. If I'm wrong, we can all make fun of me later.

Let's look at the clues.

The initiative is led by CAP, a thinky tank that has also served as a holding pen for Clinton staffers since Bill stepped out of the White House. Carmel Martin, who has so far been the point person on this for CAP,  has served in both Clinton and Obama administrations.

The list has many reformster groups-- but not all. Who's missing? Well, Campbell Brown, the Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's FEE folks. You know-- the conservative/GOP wing.

What does the group say it's up  to? Per Layton:

Martin, of the Center for American Progress, said the campaign will include events in early presidential primary states and important swing states, as well as Twitter town halls, online events and social media outreach. The think tank expects to spend $1 million, she said.

 #TeachStrong says it wants to influence policy discussions through the primary and election season. I hereby predict that one candidate is going to be heavily influenced by this initiative and is going to stand up for this important teacher-supporting thing. I hereby predict that #TeachStrong is an organization created to help guard and support Hillary Clinton's education flank in the run-up to 2016.

I think we're looking at the eventual education plank of HRC's platform.

The Straight Poop

If I'm right, it's just one more sign that America's teachers are political orphans. The premise of this campaign (that is what they call it) is that teacher training sucks, teachers are stuck in the dark ages, and that the whole profession needs to be overhauled (because, again, the sucking).

The campaign makes no noise about listening to teachers or students or communities, and it is jam packed with organizations that have a history of listening to nobody except their donors. Why is it so hard to imagine that if you want "to build a better teacher," you might want to talk to actual teachers.

As for NEA and AFT? I don't even know how to wrap my brain around their willingness to break bread with charlatans like NCTQ or the TFA folks who have conducted a frontal assault on the profession for years. If this is the seat at the table that we've been angling for-- well, the table is a lousy table, and we should probably not be sitting at it so much as throwing it over.

The #TeachStrong launch party is today, and I'm sure we'll be learning more in the weeks and months ahead. But mostly this looks like a big steaming pile of manure. 

God Bless Vermont

This has been extensively covered, but there are some stories that just can't get too much coverage.

In an era of weaselly lobbyist-hugging education-crumpling behavior in our states, Vermont has been a breath of fresh air.

It was a little over a year ago that the Vermont Board of Education let standardized testing have a piece of their collective minds. 

While the federal government continues to require the use of subjectively determined cut-off score, employing such metrics lacks scientific foundation. The skills needed for success in society are rich and diverse. Consequently, there is no single point on a testing scale that has proven accurate in measuring the success of a school or in measuring the talents of an individual. Claims to the contrary are technically indefensible and their application would be unethical.

And their "whereas..." portion of the testing resolution contained one of my favorite phrases ever in a government document about education:

WHEREAS, the culture and structure of the systems in which students learn must change in order to foster engaging school experiences that provide joy in learning, depth of thought and breadth of knowledge for students...

Joy in learning, depth of thought, and breadth of knowledge-- man, that is a mission statement I could get behind every single morning.

And now, in the wake of SBA scores, the state Board of Education has once again made bold, clear assertions about what truly matters in education. You can find a full copy of the letter here, but some of my favorite parts--

After telling parents that they have received test results in the national consortium's format. "We are working on a friendlier and more appropriate presentation for next year." Imagine. "Friendlier." As if real humans are going to be reading it.

"Do not let results wrongly discourage your child from pursuing his or her talents, ambitions, hopes or dreams."

"These tests are based on a narrow definition of 'college and career ready.' In truth, there are many different careers and colleges and there are just as many different definitions of essential skills."

"As a parent, encourage your child to reach as high as he or she can. Let her or him know that they are worthy and capable."

"We must give every student a thorough and comprehensive education, and provide the nurturing and support that each child needs to grow into an effective, productive and self-directed citizen."

I don't know who does the actual writing for the Vermont B of E, but my hat is all the way off to that person. Simple, direct and clear-- who knew that the announcement of SBA scores would lead to a great, straightforward explanation of what education should mean for each child and for the community. It is easy to rant about what is wrong-headed and foolish about reform policies like the SBA (I should know)-- but it takes a cool head and clear vision in the midst of that baloney to keep your eye on the real goal.

God bless Vermont.

Let's Play Teacher

No other profession sees anything quite like it.

Sure, we occasionally see stories about a guy who declares himself a doctor and sets up a practice with no real qualifications. Or a person who just opens a law office without benefit of a legal degree. Or a person who finds ordination documents on line and declares himself a preacher.

We have names for these people. Charlatan. Faker. Con artist. And they generally keep a low profile because everyone understands that such behavior is wrong.

But not in education.

Consider, for instance, the Relay Graduate School of Education. Back in 2007, three charter school operators decided they needed a better pipeline for staffing, a wider pool of teachers to chose from. So they figured out a way to "make" their own "teachers." Hunter College (CUNY) agreed to partner with them, they decided what they thought teachers should know, and they proceeded to crank out "teachers." Who did they work with? Who would sign up for teacher training pioneered by amateurs with no real background in public education. Here's a sentence from a glowing 2012 tribute to Relay on Education Next:

Its students are full-time elementary- and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree.

In effect, Relay filled a special market niche of Teach for America workers who, once in the classroom, realized that their virtually-none training was not sufficient to help them do the work of teaching with real live students.

But Relay served another market as well-- the market for Content Delivery Specialists who would implement the reformster model of teacher-proof classrooms, where "teaching" would consist of simple clerical tasks that any trained CDS could perform. Scripted lessons. Large chunks of video-fed content. And all of it built around the Common Core, the biggest Amateur's Guide To Education ever foisted on the country.

It was a simple model. Fresh-out-of-school rookie "teachers" would teach other fresh-out-of-school amateurs how to teach the reformster way, and give them actual degrees to certify them as teachers. And Mayme Hostetter came out of Harvard's Reformy Education Grad school in 2001, put in a few years in a KIPP charter classroom, and is now called the "dean." There is no research done at this "graduate school," no scholars teaching, and no apparent course of study beyond  learning how to implement scripted lessons, align with the CCSS, and get test scores raised.

Relay also positions itself on the cutting edge of teacher program evaluation, declaring that the swellness of their "teachers" will be measure by how well those Content Delivery Specialists manage to get grades up (a feat made somewhat simpler by placing their "graduates" and "fellows" in charter schools where low performing students are always encouraged to head curb-ward). Relay is now expressing interest in moving into actual public schools; we'll see how their system holds up then.

It is, in fact, one of those aspects of reformsterism that we could call a reverse illusion-- a thing that is so unbelievable when you look at it that you assume that surely there's something you're just not seeing correctly.

But no. A bunch of education field amateurs with no teaching career experience got together, made a list of things they think teachers ought to be doing (based on the work of other non-professional amateurs) and opened a school, where they award teaching degrees based on their own unsupported ideas. It is as if I opened a school in my garage to teach people to be surgeons, based on my ideas about what surgery ought to be like, and then gave them certificates "proving" they're all surgeons.

How does this happen? Three reasons.

First-- the reformster network has spread like kudzu, and with it, the cult of the well-meaning amateur. But in addition to Relay GSE, we have Teach for America and its program of "Anybody who is pure of heart can be a teacher and rescue our children from poverty." And in addition to that, we have Broad "You're a superintendent because you say so" Academy. And all of them are members of the "Traditional Teachers Don't Really Know What They're Doing, But We Can Reshape Education Into Something Beautiful" Club, and when gets a foothold, she looks for other members of the club to some transform education. TFA in particular has been hugely effective in creating "education leaders" out of temporary stints in the classroom, opening the gates all across the country for club members. There are enough of these folks out there at this point to create entire shadow education systems, and they're working on the chance to step in and replace the traditional public system (and dreaming of post-Katrina New Orleans as their perfect storm).

In other words, it would be hard to get one of my garage-certified surgeons hired in a hospital-- unless I could somehow get one of my garage-certified surgeons in charge of hiring, or surgery, or on the board. It would be a tough protective shell to crack-- but just one crack is all I would need. The reformster movement has a thousand cracks all over the nation, ready to hire unqualified amateurs and never bat an eye.

Second-- we do not know how to simply and clearly measure educational success. Myself, I'm pretty sure it can't be done. That's a problem because of the First Law of Snake Oil Marketing: when there is no simple answer to a problem, that always creates the opportunity for someone to sell a fake simple answer. There is no simple cure for cancer, so there will always be a market for fake cancer cures. Ditto for weight loss. Ditto for mass shooters in schools. People really want simple answers to complex questions. Quality education, and measuring quality education-- those are very complex issues, and they cannot be solved with simple solutions, which means there is a big market for fake simple solutions. Give students a test and use the results to measure everything so that we can fix everything is a neat, simple, sweet, absolutely bullshit solution to the problem-- but it sells better than snake oil in a leper colony.

When my garage-trained surgeon starts to kill all his patients, folks will catch on to his lack of qualifications. But reformsters can plug no excuses and teaching only a few select students and a cramped tiny view of what an education even is by just waving test scores around. They don't even have to sell the snake oil to the students and parents-- just to the policy makers and philanthropists.

In other words, because there are no simple, clear measures in education, it's not as easy to see that the reformsters have not achieved success in any of their reformy ideas-- and it's easier for them to distract the customers from their widespread failure.

Third-- well, yes. Somewhere many paragraphs ago any reformsters still reading concluded that I'm just one more hide-bound dinosaur standing up for the teacher-training status quo for no good reason. But I am no fan of teacher education as handled by some schools.

So I get angry at both sides of this. I get angry at the people who waltz into the education arena with their made-up credentials and their amateur-hour ideas about how to "fix" education. But I also get angry with some colleges and universities that left the arena door wide open for anyone to waltz through. There are two important differences, however, between the pretend teacher programs and traditional ed programs-- the people who enter teacher education programs mostly actually intend to have a teaching career, and the people running these programs mostly know what they should be doing, even if they aren't. The folks at RelayGSE and TFA may very well be doing the best they know how-- it's just not very good, and it's not designed to create lifelong career educators.

These folks want to play teacher without understanding what it actually means. Being a teacher does not mean delivering a script, it does not mean focusing on BS Tests as a measure of success, it does not mean sensing the weakest "teachers" into the neediest classrooms, and it does not mean aligning slavishly to a set of mediocre amateur-hour national standards.

Relay wants to expand, which isn't good news for anybody, except maybe charter operators who want easily managed, compliant, low-cost, easily replaced Content Delivery Specialists. Their proposed move into public schools is also Not Good News, particularly if they bring with them their pre-broken measure-by-student-test-results model.

Here are two arguments I don't want to have in response to this piece. I don't want to argue about whether the Relays and the TFAs and even the Broadies are fine people with good intentions, nor did I write anything here with the intent to attack their intentions, their brains, or their character. But if my mom is on the operating table, I want a dedicated professional and not a well-intentioned amateur.

Second, I don't want to have an argument about the problems we have in public education. I have not and will not assert that the current version of the system is working perfectly, nor will I claim that we have no problems to solve. But the severity of the problem is not a reason to leap forward with a non-solution that will not help anyone. "We have to do something" does not mean "We have to let clueless amateurs have their way." If anything, it means the opposite-- that the severity of the issues and the lack of slack means we need to choose our path carefully and thoughtfully.

If my mom is really sick, that is so not the time for me to let you play doctor. And now is not the time to let these folks play teacher.


 

ICYMI: This Week's Sunday Reading

Here's some reading for your Sunday afternoon.

Jazzman-Melhorn Dialogue 

If you have not been following this discussion, here's your chance to catch up before the final round wraps up. Dmitri Melhorn made the offer to take some, um, spirited conversations off of twitter and into a greater-than-140 medium. One result has been this rigorous and data-packed discussion with Jersey Jazzman about charters. It's ballsy (in a good way) of Melhorn to guest-write for a blog that is not his home turf, and the whole exchange is a great example of how folks in the ed debates can argue humanely but without giving up an inch. Read them all:

Part I: Melhorn opens up

Part II: JJ looks at the alleged positive effects of charters. With data! And in English!

Part III: Do charters have positive effect, and who should carry the burden of proof?

Part IV: The burden of proof, and how to read the data.

Part V is up and features some pointed questions. Read up and be ready for the finale.


The Frightening Implications of School Choice

Julie Vassilatos gets to one of the most troubling parts of the charter school movement.

The Brave New World of Teacher Evaluation

An icky new piece of tech just came out of Utah. Right now it's being sold as a training tech for teachers, but how long before it's part of evaluation. 

Charter Schools Shrink Bostonm's Vision for Public Education

Over at the Progressive, Jennifer (Edushyster) Berkshire looks at how the rise of charters leads to a failure of the Pledge of Allegiance test for schools.

Paul Thomas on Writing

One of my favorite bloggers is Paul Thomas, and my favorite subject of his is writing (okay, second favorite, right behind comics). Reading Thomas always makes me feel as if I've gotten just a little smarter just by looking at his words, and his ideas about writing instruction really resonate with me. Here are some of my favorites:

Who Can, Who Should Teach Writing?

Oh, yeah. Hard to talk about this in some buildings, but the answer to both questions is, "Not just anybody."

Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests

The pitfalls of technological tools in writing

O, Genre, What Art Thou?

Oh, come on. You know you want to read it just for the title alone.

Writing, Unteachable or Mistaught?

I'll leave you with this one, which I think needs to be taken out and passed around every few months or so. 

TN: A Broadie Amateur Takes Over ASD

Imagine a hospital where the very toughest cases, the most inoperable cancers, the most stubborn infections, the most complicated reconstructive surgeries, and the most challenging diagnoses-- those are all handed over to someone who works in the personnel office and who has no medical training at all.

Now imagine that you're the state of Tennessee. You've come up with a system for identifying your most challenging and troubled schools, the schools that require the ablest educational leadership, the deepest understanding of how to make student learning happen under the most challenging of circumstances. The last person you put in charge set audacious goals for himself-- and he failed. Then he quit. On his way out the door, he said, "Hey, this turns out to be a lot harder than we thought."

And so the state of Tennessee called upon-- Malika Anderson.

Anderson has Tennessee roots, and a family background in civil rights work, from grandfather Kelly Smith (a Tennessee civil rights heavyweight with a bridge named after him in Nashville) and an aunt who was one of the first black students to integrate Nashville public schools. So when she writes, "Creating great neighborhood schools here is personal for me," we should take her seriously.

But does Malika Anderson have the qualifications to lead Tennessee's Achievement School District?

Her LinkedIn account seems to have been abandoned six years ago. But after graduating from Spelman College in 1997, she spent two years as a senior business analyst at A T Kearney, four years as a manager of corporate planning and projects at Crystal Stairs, one year as VP of Business Strategy and Development at the National Health Foundation, two years as an owner-partner of mobileSPA, a management consulting firm in Atlanta. After that, she started 2007 as VP at WrightWay consulting.

Anderson lists as her specialties, "Strategic planning, data analysis and reporting, organizational assessment, board development, program and project management, and the development of human resources management systems." Her profile also includes a warm recommendation of her human resource services.

So after a decade, no work with or expressed interest in, education.

But in 2009 she landed the job of director of “school turnaround” for the District of Columbia Public Schools as part of the team under Chancellor She Who Will Not Be Named. And by 2012, she was in Tennessee, working as the chief portfolio officer of the ASD to farm out "failing" schools to charter operators.

So how did someone with no background in anything but management consulting and human resources end up on track to become an administrator of a major school system?

What else but the Broad Academy. Anderson is part of the 2009-2011 "residency class."

The Broad Academy is a testament to just what one can accomplish with giant brass cojones. Los Angeles Gazillionaire Eli Board decided that schools did not have an education problem, but a management problem, and so he would set up his own superintendent school, certified by nobody but Eli Broad to provide up-and-coming corporate managers with superintendent certification, also accredited by nobody but Eli Broad. It is like Teach for America, but worse. It is literally as if I set up a "school" in the shed in my backyard and declared that I was training "superintendents" and started issuing certificates. The only difference is that I am not rich and powerful and well-connected.

The Broad Academy has many distinguished alumni, like John Deasy, Chris Cerf and-- well, look!-- Chris Barbic, the former boss who plugged Anderson to be his replacement at ASD.

Broad most infamously wrote the book on how to break and dismantle a public school. And they are pretty resolute in their beliefs that A) schools should be run like businesses and B) trained education professionals don't have a clue about how to run schools properly.

Of course, it's arguable that the Achievement School District doesn't need to be run by educators because it is nothing more than a broker, a government office charged with busting up public schools and handing them over to charter operators. "Take over" and "turn around" seem to mean "farm out in general privatization move." The ASD has experienced some mission shift. For instance, their page with their mission statement used to say this:

The Achievement School District was created to catapult the bottom 5% of schools in Tennessee straight to the to 25% in the state. In doing so, we dramatically expand our students' life and career options, engage parents and community members in new and exciting ways, and ensure a bright future for the state of Tennessee.

Now that pages says this:

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I did find a mission statement on a power point slide. It now says this:

Through mutually enriching relationships with the communities we serve, we will build joyful, college-preparatory neighborhood schools that empower students to know their full possibility, to understand the path to pursue it, and to have the academic and social skills to realize it.

Anderson's letter to the public reflects the new, vaguely-focused ASD. 

Going forward, we will continue to hold ourselves and our school operators accountable to the highest levels of student achievement and growth. We will continue to go where need is concentrated, ensuring every Priority School in Tennessee is improving because we believe that families and students in these schools deserve nothing but the best. And we will continue to ensure that the power in our district is placed in the hands of local parents, educators and leaders in the neighborhoods and communities we serve because they are the ones who best know how to serve our students. We will do so with even greater transparency and deeper levels of partnership than during the ASD’s initial years. 

Anderson faces a variety of problems, not the least of which is that finding buyers for the Tennessee Failed School Yard Sale is getting harder (fun fact-- now that Race to the Top money is gone, charters have to pay the ASD central office an administrative fee).

Meanwhile, ASD's definition of "failing school" as "any school in the bottom 5% of Big Standardized Tests scores soaked in VAM sauce" guarantees that there will always be failing schools in Tennessee, and while it may have seemed to reformsters as if they were planting a money tree, I wonder if they aren't starting to see that they sorcerer's apprenticed themselves into a corner. They're like the kid who enjoyed some popularity because he threatened to kick that big guy's ass after school, but now it's after school and the big guy has shown up with ten of his friends.

Tennessee has suffered for a while from the effects of a school system run by amateurs, starting back with state ed honcho Kevin "All I Know Is What I Learned in TFA" Huffman. These folks may very well have been and continue to be well-intentioned amateurs, but they don't understand how schools work, they don't understand why VAM doesn't work, they don't understand the uses and abuses of standardized testing, and they don't understand how to make troubled schools better. They get as far as "every child of every race and background deserves a good education" and then everything that comes after that, they get wrong.

The continued existence of the failed Achievement School District and the appointment of Malika Anderson to its unnecessary head position is just one more sign that Tennessee's leaders have not wised up yet. The guy from human resources who comes in to operate on my mother's heart may have the best intentions in the world-- but I want somebody with real training, real experience, real expertise, and real knowledge of what needs to be done, and not someone who will do massive destruction because they don't know what the hell they're doing.

Social Impact Bonds for Dummies

We've been hearing about Social Impact Bonds, or "Pay for Success" programs for a few years now, but only recently have they entered the world of public education. Chicago, for example, launched one $17 million program last year for Pre-K, and last month Utah's United Way was happy to announce that Goldman-Sachs' Pay for Success program in Utah had yielded dividends.

The spread of Social Impact Bonds to the education sector raises all sorts of questions like "How are the fiduciary interests of a private investment firm balanced against social demands of education" or "What overseeing groups can best evaluate programs with a balanced view toward all involved interests."

Or, "What the hell is a social impact bond?"

On the ground, it looks kind of ridiculous, like a program that pays a Wall Street firm a bonus every time a kid is taken off of special ed rolls.

But how does that even work? How does the Wall Street firm get paid? With what money? How do you make money on an investment in something that creates no profit?

An Oversimplified Example

Here's the basic structure of a Social Impact Bond. Note: I am not an economist, banker, or investment counselor, nor do I play one on TV, so I may cut a few corners here.

My house is drafty. My windows leak and my heating bill is $10,000 a year.

My landlord goes to the bank. She says, "Banker, I would like a bond of $4,000 for new storm windows. I think they would reduce my annual heating bill by $3,000."

And the investor issues a bond for the program costs, in return for which he gets a healthy cut of the $3K saved by installing the new windows. My landlord's savings from the successful Stop Freezing My Butt Off Social Program become the bond holder's profit-- but only if our goals are met.

Typically a third party will come in to judge the result, making sure that I didn't just turn the thermostat down or it wasn't just a warm winter or my landlord didn't actually save $6K and hide it from the bondholder. Also, it's worth noting that bonds generally come with negotiated maturity dates, at which point the original loan amount is to be paid back. And remember kids-- bond holders are different from investors. An investor owns part of the company, but a bondholder is just a fancy debtor, and as such has legal priority for being paid back.

In this example, the government is, more or less, my landlord. For a more thorough explanation, we can look here. Here's the shortened version of their explanation:

In the classic... social impact bond, a government agency sets a specific, measurable social outcome they want to see achieved within a well-defined population over a period of time. ...The government then contracts with an external organization—sometimes called an intermediary—that is in charge of achieving that outcome. ... The intermediary hires and manages service providers who perform the interventions intended to achieve the desired outcome. Because the government does not pay until and unless the outcome is achieved, the intermediary raises money from outside investors. These investors will be repaid and receive a return on their investment for taking on the performance risk of the interventions if and only if the outcome is achieved.

Okay, Watch Carefully Now

From New York Times coverage of a SIB program that failed. “Social Impact Bonds offer a strikingly different way to pay for social programs. Governments, rather than tapping taxpayers, can turn to outside investors and philanthropists for funds, and reward them only for programs that work." If the program fails, the taxpayers are off the hook. If it succeeds, the bond holders are paid off with what would have been taxpayer savings of taxpayer dollars.

But the finances get muddier because in the couple of years we've been trying this, we've learned a useful insight:

“The tool of ‘pay for success’ is much better suited to expanding an existing program,” Andrea Phillips, vice president of Goldman’s urban investment group, said in an interview on Wednesday. “That is something we’ve already learned through this.”

But issuing bonds for existing programs means we'll have public and private money swimming in the same pool.

So Is This a Good Thing for Education, or Not?

There's huge cheating potential here, on both sides. The school system could pocket the SIB money and declare, "Damn, but the goal wasn't met. Guess we'll just keep your pile of cash and you get nothing." On the other hand, when a metric is as simple as moving students off the special education rolls, it's really easy to fake the results if you are so inclined. If that happens, all the money that used to be your special ed budget is now funneled straight to Goldman Sachs or whoever is holding the bond, and this whole set-up becomes one more way to turn public tax dollars into private corporate profit.

It all comes down to the third-party evaluator. That's the entity that is supposed to keep the whole game honest and determine whether the goals of the SIB-funded program have been met-- they will determine who gets a payday.

So all that's needed to keep this system honest, fair, and above-board is an entity that has the expertise to judge the program achievement but which has no interests in either side of the transaction. An independent overseer. You know, kind of like the SEC or the firms that were responsible for making sure that big Wall Street firms weren't peddling junk investments ten years ago.

It is, of course, up to government to make sure that such above-board groups are in place. So as Chicago runs forward with its SIB program, I'm sure that Rahm Emanuel will select third-party evaluators who have no ties to or interests in the investors who laid out the money in hopes of big fat tax-funded returns on their money.

You Begin To See the Problem

This is a hugely easy system to game, in part because the whole business is byzantine and twisty that by the time you get to discussion of the proper disinterested expertise of the overseers of the metrics for judging the success of the blah blah blah and now the general public thinks you sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon.

That's not my only problem with this approach.

This is the kind of system that favors easily-measured results, so investments are liable to steered toward the program that is easier to attach to some easily moved metric, and not the program that is most necessary.

What difference does that make, you may ask. The money saved over here can be used to pump up the program over there. Except it can't be, because the money saved over here becomes financial returns for the bond-holders over there.

In the unlikely event that a Social Impact Bond program doesn't just become an exercise in cooking the books, the development of a more efficient or more effective school system, the local taxpayers reap no benefit from that because the cost of the district remains the same-- it's just that now taxpayers are paying off Goldman Sachs with their tax dollars instead of paying for an educational system.

Finally, when if this turns into an exercise in cooking the books, students pay the price. If our metric is getting 110 students off the special education rolls, we had better be damned sure that we don't end up with 100 students who are being denied the services they need so that Goldman Sachs can enjoy a healthy return on their bond. (Update: In fact, I've since found an account of how the above-mentioned Utah program did, indeed, lead to book cookery.)

I can understand the appeal of Social Impact Bonds in some situations. But every time we let the bulls and bears of Wall Street loose in the china shop of education, bad things happen. Maybe there's something magical about all this that I just don't get, in which case at a minimum, these guys are doing a lousy job of explaining themselves. But maybe I should just trust the guys on Wall Street at place like Goldman Sachs. After all, it's not like they've ever tried to screw us all over before, right?