Clinton-Induced Charter Freakout Continues

Man, just thirty little words can cause sooooo much fuss.

Most charter schools – I don’t want to say every one – but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.

These have been quoted over and over and over again. Sometimes they are quoted by folks who are excited that Clinton said something supportive of public schools. But they've also been quoted by charter supporters who are absolutely freaking out.

Reformsters Robert Pondiscio and Richard Whitmire also made attempts to raise some dudgeon high over Clinton's thirty-word assault, and while I think they're wrong, they at least showed a little rhetorical and intellectual rigor. Not so some of the other defenders of the charter cause.

The Washington Post editorial board scolded her by citing bogus data from a report written by the Center for Education Reform, a group that exists strictly to push charter schools and crush teacher unions. That's high order journalistic sloppiness, like turning to the Tobacco Institute for your "facts" about smoking. The Wall Street Journal also rushed to the defense of the hedge fundies who profit from charter schools, citing more fact-free facts.

But nobody has leaned on the Panic Button with hands any heavier than Juan Williams today on The Hill. Williams is a Fox News "Analyst," a position he moved into after being fired by NPR for either A) some impolitic remarks about Muslims on planes or B) because he was buddying up to Fox. Take your pick of explanations.

All the features of the High State of Charter Dismay are here in this piece.

It starts with the headline (which, it should be noted, is probably not Williams' call)-- "Hillary betrays charter schools." Betrays?? As in double-crosses? Did they have some claim to her? Are they offended because they thought Clinton was their BFF, or because their ethical standards say that when a politician is bought, she should stay bought?

Next, Williams opens by invoking children:

My 5-year-old grandson goes to a big city charter school. But Eli and his classmates do not belong to a union. They do not give money to politicians. They can’t vote.

That is unquestionably true of Eli and his classmates. It is probably not true of the people who own and operate Eli's school. I bet those people have plenty of money to give to politicians.

Williams throws in the word "flip-flop." He calls her thirty word backstab an act of "political expediency." He accuses her of running over Eli. He says her words sound like a script written by the teachers union (to whom? and what exactly is that sound?) And then he starts in with some of the same old non-fact facts.

By law, almost all charter schools get their students from a lottery. They do not cherry-pick their students.

Yeah, no. The very act of a lottery is a creaming process, as it automatically selects out those parents who are able to navigate the lottery system and are willing to do so. When charters start taking randomly selected students from the public school system-- including students who didn't even express interest in attending a charter-- then you'll have a point. And the widespread evidence of push-outs, as exemplified by Success Academy's got-to-go list, is one more example of how charters make sure they are working with a select group of students-- unlike public schools.

Williams says he has talked to parents who see charters as "a great stride towards improving public education by providing competition and pioneering teaching techniques that offer a model for all schools." And yet, charters have done none of those things. Name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough that has come from a charter.

Williams quotes the Washington Post quoting the Center for Education Reform in saying that charters take on a higher percentage of poor and minority students than public schools. No, that's not true, either, unless I suppose you are comparing charter schools to all the public schools in the country, including all the public schools that serve very white communities. But if we start looking city by city, we find things like the charter schools of Massachusetts that serve no non-English speaking students at all. Or you can check out some of the legitimate actual research done in New Jersey about exactly what populations charters serve. Or you can just keep reading copy from the ad fliers put out by the Center for Education Reform.

The Post also cited research that shows “charter schools produce greater student learning gains than traditional public schools, particularly for poor and minority students.”

It takes an extraordinary amount of laziness not to locate the research that shows that charters do no better than public schools, and often do worse. Heck, the writers at the Washington Post could have just looked through the reporting in the Washington Post to see that they were missing a point or two.

Williams moves on to a recounting of Clinton's flip-floppery, and then, of course, we have to spend some time indicting the Evil Unions.

The unions do not appreciate the Obama administration’s effort to have public school districts compete for grants given to districts with improved student achievement. They opposed holding teachers accountable for their students’ success or failure. 

That's because "improved student achievement" just means "higher test scores on a crappy standardized math and reading test." Do you, Mr. Williams, have any hopes for Ele beyond that he just learn to do well on a Big Standardized Test on math and reading? I'll bet you do. Welcome to the club.

And for the gazillionth time-- teachers do not oppose being held accountable for what we actually do. Let me put it this way-- would it have pissed you off if NPR had fired you over something to do with the actual quality of your reporting instead of some baloney about saying the wrong thing whiel talking to the wrong people? Do you think it was fair that your job security suffered for something unrelated to your job performance? Because-- again-- welcome to the club.

You want to evaluate me, come on ahead. I welcome it. But evaluate me on my actual teaching skills, and not some random trumped up fake-science VAM baloney that is neither valid nor reliable.

But Williams is not done unloading his big truck full of bovine fecal matter. This next sentence is sitting all by itself, just for impact.

In the name of protecting failing teachers and bad schools, they are the number one opponents of school reform.

Bullshit, sir. Bull. Shit. We have opposed "school reform" because it is and has been bad for education and bad for children, and because, after over a decade, it hasn't produced a single success.

The Wall Street Journal fears that  future Clinton ed department will be a wholly-owned union subsidiary, which brings me to what I find most hilariously ironic about all this Clintonian pearl clutching.

The charter folks take Clinton's words far more seriously than I do. Clinton has always been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and I fully expect her to behave as such should she be elected (which, if it happens, won't be because I voted for her). So Clinton said something vaguely mean (and painfully accurate) about charter schools, one time. Hell, Clinton says a lot of things. And since both unions threw support to her without making her so much as curtsy in their direction, I don't think there's much of a deal there. Nor do I think that union coffers will, this one time, outweigh the vast mountains of money that Wall Street has thrown at her over the years. And since it is Wall Street that ultimately backs the charter industry, I don't think charters have the slightest thing to worry about.

Heck-- almost immediately, a Clinton staffer walked back the terribly ouchy thirty words and re-assured charters that Clinton still thinks of them as Very Important Public Schools.

So the irony here is that while charter fans are freaking out because they think Clinton might start telling the truth about them and they might not be able to hoover up tax dollars with impunity any more, I'm thinking those thirty words are pretty meaningless. You guys really need to take a deep breath and get your blood pressure down; this is going to be a long haul.

OH: Raking in Consultant Money

Education reform has spawned a variety of new money-making opportunities, including a burgeoning field of education consultants.

That's because one of the new steady drumbeats is that superintendents, principals, and most especially teachers-- in short, all the people who have devoted their professional lives to education-- don't know what they're doing and possess no expertise in education whatsoever. No, for real expertise, we must call in the High Priests of Reformsterdom.

That takes us to Cleveland, Ohio. I love Cleveland; I did my student teacher at a Cleveland Heights middle school while living in an apartment at the corner of East 9th and Superior, and those, indeed, were the days. But Cleveland schools have a long history of difficulty. Back in the day, Ohio schools had to submit all tax increases to voter referendum; Cleveland voters routinely said no, and Cleveland schools repeatedly shut down around October when they ran out of money.

Now, in the reform era, Cleveland schools have embraced charters and privatization with a plan that stops just short of saying, "We don't know what the hell we're doing or how to run a school district, so we're just going to open it up to anybody who thinks they can run a school or has an opinion about how to run a school. Except for teachers and professional educators-- they can continue to shut the hell up." This is Ohio, a state that has developed a reputation the charter school wild west, where even people who make their living in the charter biz say, "Oh, come on. You've got to regulate something here!"

Given this climate, it seems only likely that Cleveland schools would call on a consulting firm like SchoolWorks. If the mashed-together name makes you think of other reformy all-stars like StudentsFirst and TeachPlus, you can go with the feeling. SchoolWorks started out helping charter schools get up and running and had a close relationship with KIPP schools. Their CEO's bio starts with this:

Spencer Blasdale considers himself a “teacher by nature,” but found early on in his career that his passion was having an impact beyond the four walls of one school.

And may I just pause to note how well that captures the reformy attitude about teaching-- you are just born with a teachery nature, and you don't need training or experience and you certainly don't need to prove yourself to any of those fancy-pants teacher colleges or other professional educators. The entry to the teaching profession is by revelation, and once you "consider yourself" a teacher, well then, what else do you need?

You will be unsurprised to learn that Blasdale's "career" consists being a charter founding teacher, rising to charter administration, and then deciding to jump to charter policy. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he did teach a couple of years at a private day school back in the nineties. He has never taught in a public school. He's a product of the Harvard Ed grad school. Based on all that, he and his company are prepared to come tell you what you're doing wrong at your school; you can sign up for just an evaluation, or they will provide coaching as well.

Which brings us back to Cleveland.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that SchoolWorks has already been to the district. They visited ten schools. They visited each school for three days. Based on three whole days at the school, they evaluated the school in nine areas.

For this they were paid $ 219,000. Seriously.

The reports were not pretty. "Not all educators convey shared commitments and mutual responsibility," they said (which strikes me as a pretty incredible insight to glean in just three days). Another school was slammed for "rarely -– only 11 percent of the time –- letting students know what the goals were for class." This would be more troubling if there were, in fact, a shred of evidence that sharing the goals had any educational benefits. Security officers were careless and the schools were messy and unclean. Good thing they hired a consultant-- I bet nobody in the district is qualified to tell if a school is messy or not.

The whole SchoolWorks package is like that. They come in to give one of four ratings on nine questions.

1. Do classroom interactions and organization ensure a supportive, highly structured learning climate?
2. Is classroom instruction intentional, engaging, and challenging for all students?
3. Has the school created a performance-driven culture, where the teachers effectively use data to make decisions about instruction and the organization of students?
4. Does the school identify and support special education students, English language learners, and students who are struggling or at risk?
5. Does the school's culture reflect high levels of both academic expectation and support?
6. Does the school design professional development and collaborative supports to sustain a focus on instructional improvement?
7. Does the school's culture indicate high levels of collective responsibility, trust and efficacy?
8. Do school leaders guide instructional staff in the central processes of improving teaching and learning?
9. Does the principal effectively orchestrate the school's operations?

Now, some of these are crap, like #3's focus on data-driven instruction and decision-making. And many of them are really good goals in general, but it's going to come down to, for instance, exactly what we think "intentional, engaging and challenging" instruction looks like.

But on what planet are any of these-- even the iffy ones-- better checked by strangers with no public education expertise in the course of a three-day drive-by then by your own in-house experts? Do your superintendents and principals check none of this? We can take care of item #7 before the consultants even get to the school. Does the school's culture indicate high levels of collective responsibility, trust and efficacy? If you have just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come look at what your own people can see with their own eyes, the answer is "no," or maybe "hell, no."

But Cleveland schools say, "May we have some more." SchoolWorks will be driving by twenty-five more schools for a price tag of $667,000. Which-- wait a minute. Ten schools for $219,000 is $21,900 per school. And twenty-five times $21,900 is $547,500. Apparently the additional cost is so that SchoolWorks will provide a "toolbox of solutions."

If this seems pricey, SchoolWorks also offered Cleveland a one-day drive-by package which would have covered the thirty-five schools for $219,000.

If there's a bright spot anywhere in this picture, it's that Cleveland school leaders recognize that simply soaking test scores in VAM sauce won't give them a picture of their schools' effectiveness. But if I were a Cleveland taxpayer, I'd be wondering why I was forking over a million dollars so that some out-of-town consultants could come do the job I thought I was already paying educational professionals in my district to do.

ICYMI: Some weekend eduwebs reading

Here's some edureading for the weekend.

Five Cynical Observationa about Teacher Leadership

I mean to include Nancy Flanagan's insightful list about how teacher leadership isn't happening last week, and then, somehow, I didn't. But here it is. These days Flanagan is one of the consistently rewarding bloggers for Ed Week-- save your limited freebie reads for her.

Educators Release Updates VAM Score for Secretary Duncan

Educators for Shared Responsibility have come up with a VAM formula for evaluating Education Secretaries. Not entirely a joke.

Classroom Surveillance and Testing

At the 21st Century Principal, John Robinson makes the striking observation that our classroom data collection bears a striking resemblance to the tools of surveillance and, well, spying.

Drinking Charter Kool-Aid? Here Is Evidence.

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig has provided an essential resource. You may not read through it all today, but you'll want to bookmark it somewhere. Here's a very thorough listing of legitimate peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of charter schools. Handling of special populations, segregation, competition, creaming-- it's all here, and all the real deal. You will want to keep this resource handy.

Stop, Start, Continue

Not always a fan of things I find at Edutopia, but this is a short simple piece focused on three things teachers should stop doing, three things we should start doing, and three things to continue doing. A good piece for sparking a little mental focus.

Resume Bombs

Here's the problem. You can't build a resume with the following:

I took over a program that was doing pretty well, so I just kept things humming along in the same general direction. I may have tweaked a few things here and there, but basically I just left well enough alone.

No, to really put some beef on the old resume, you need a sentence that starts with "Implemented..."

And so, the resume bomb.

Someone moves into a new administrative position and starts looking for a way to Make a Splash, Leave Their Mark, or Show They Are a Dynamic Change Agent.

They may consolidate power by taking over functions previously performed by staff or other offices. They will certainly create a new program. And they will develop and start the implementation of the policies and procedures needed to support the new program. Congratulations. You have your brand new resume bomb, and your new administrator will grab his brightly polished resume and get out the door to his next job before the bomb ever goes off.

Some bombs have a long fuse. The program gets up and running without too much incident, and it is only once you get further down the road that serious problems begin to emerge, that the new program begins to create some real problems for the district. But by then, the one person who knows exactly how it's supposed to work and how to keep it functioning and can answer questions about it-- that person is at his next job.

Some bombs have a short fuse, or are set off by the administrative departure itself. "We just need to rip up this system here, and I'm going to create a new policy with software support over here, and we'll just reassign those functions to my office and then we'll be able to-- oh, look at the time! I need to get to my next job." The short-fuse quick-departure resume bomb is the contractor who does the demolition on your porch and then never comes back to build it.

Is every new program and agent of change the sign of an impending resume bomb? Of course not. Many times you'll get an administrator who has a real vision for change and forward motion, and she puts new programs in place, and then she sticks around and sees them through until they are running smoothly on their own. That person is not building a resume bomb. If your administrator is more concerned about the program's success than his own, he's not building a resume bomb.

But if you are standing in the middle of a mess, and the person responsible is nowhere to be seen because they have moved on to bigger, better things-- congratulations. You are the victim of a resume bomb.

Common Core is arguably the largest resume bomb ever-- Coleman and company built it, lit the fuse, and let their "success" pave the way to big money gigs. The revolving door world of government gig and private enterprise is run on resume bombs. But even on the small scale, in little school districts, resume bombs happen and cause unending mess. Almost every district has some piece of related shrapnel stuck in a policy handbook somewhere.

Consequently, change resistance isn't always about being conservative or stodgy or lazy. Sometimes it's just shell shock. You say you're an agent of change, and I wonder, what is going to blow up now, and how much will I feel the impact. But don't expect the people who set the resume bombs to feel too bad about it. Explosions always look prettier from far away.

St. Louis Schools Continue To Crumble

St. Louis teachers are currently caught at the epicenter of just about every kind of assault on public education going on these days.

Their immediate concern is easy enough to spot. St. Louis teachers have remained frozen in time, sitting on the same step of the salary schedule for six years. In other words, if you were hired as a first-year teacher for St. Louis schools back in 2009, you are still making a first-year teacher's salary today. The school district's salary schedule shows that the steps have been adjusted once in that time span. So if you started in 2009 at $38,250, you're now making $39,270. This is of course problematic because it would take $42,404 just to keep pave with inflation. Meanwhile, as of two years ago, the mean wage for an elementary teacher in Missouri was $48,460. The union did reject the offer, but there's not much more they can do-- teacher strikes are illegal in Missouri.

So St. Louis teachers have been taking an inflation-created pay cut every year, along with the added insult of remaining in the same place on the salary scale. The district has offered a 3.5% raise over a year and a half, with no prospect of advancing. (Also, just in case that's not insulting enough, I just discovered that Missouri allows anyone to look up individual teacher salaries.)

You'll be unshocked to learn that St. Louis teachers have been heading out the door in record numbers-- in many cases within their very first week of school. This is not just a St. Louis thing-- Missouri has been battling an inability to attract and retain teachers for years, to the point that they actually put together a group to study on the problem. It's enough of a problem that a "non-profit" group is on the scene trying to help. Even TFA has been in St. Louis, but has not even met its own goals for putting faux teachers in St. Louis classrooms. And while there's no reason to think that St. Louis teachers are mercenary and money-grubbing, when you are having trouble feeding your family and another district will offer you over $20K more to work there-- well, who wants to tell their own children, "Sorry, no meat this week because I want to keep being noble."

Meanwhile, there are folks who claim that St. Louis schools are extra tough because of discipline problems, and there is clearly some sort of problem with the administration of discipline in Missouri school. A report released last spring shows that Missouri suspends African-American youths at a higher rate than any other state in the nation.

Other problems? St. Louis schools are losing students rapidly. The district is down another 1,500 this year.

But the school system's population problems are part of the city's problems, and the city's problems include white flight. St. Louis is discredited with "the highest thirty-year rate of building and neighborhood abandonment in North American history." The 2010 census revealed a loss of 29,000 residents since the previous head count.

Schools have been standing empty, and the public system has been in trouble going back to at least 2007, when the state stripped it of its accreditation and took it over, stripping local control from the elected school board. The school district is run by a three-person Special Administrative Board; they hire the superintendent and are themselves political appointees.

This big bunch of troubles has made St. Louis a prime target for charters, a confluence of sincerely concerned parents who wanted to get their children out of a struggling public system and charteristas who smelled a market ripe for profit overseen by a charter-friendly mayor. The newspapers and city leaders don't seem to like to mention it much, but on top of everything else, the St. Louis schools suffer from the charter effect-- students leave for charters, but there is no proportionate lessening of expenses in the schools they leave, and so they leave many students behind in an already troubled public school that now has that much less money with which to work.

And so last spring, charters were predicting a banner year with great enrollment. This even though the charter schools of St. Louis have not been anything to write home about, either; at one point the city shut down the chain of six Imagine Charters (containing a third of the city's charter students) for academic failure and financial shadiness.

Meanwhile, Missouri is one of those magical states where the government has a funding formula in place-- which it simply ignores. At the beginning of 2015, Missouri schools were being underfunded by nearly a whopping half billion-with-a-b dollars.

St. Louis Schools have suffered from the financial drain of a plummeting population as well as being financially hollowed out by a series of mostly-failed charter experiments. And the end result is that St. Louis can't figure out how to pay the teachers it has or attract the additional teachers it needs.

I don't know how you compute the effects of a situation like this. How does it affect students to be in a classroom with a teacher who is exhausted from working a second job and stressed because she doesn't know how she's going to pay her own bills. How does it affect students to see one more teacher say, "I'm sorry, but I can't stay here." How does it affect to see this piled on top of the experience of watching your neighborhood empty out because the white folks don't want to live on the same block as your family.

How the state can get involved in a district like St. Louis and not take the basic steps to pump in the necessary resources is a mystery. This is like coming upon a table of starving children and declaring, "Clearly what's needed here is for these children to learn to set the table properly."

What the children of St. Louis need are quality teachers in well-maintained facilities. Leaders and politicians can shrug and hope that a magic fairy fixes things, or they can figure out how to do what needs to be done. In the meantime, St. Louis teachers face hard choices, tight wallets, and the prospect, in some cases, of being a first year teacher for the rest of their career.

6 Guidelines for Extracurricular Advisers

I have been an extracurricular activity adviser for as long as I've been a teacher. I have been the faculty adviser for class councils, student council, radio club, and a few school magazines. I have been the assistant director for the marching band and every kind of director for school plays. I am the adviser for yearbook and stage crew.

I'm pretty committed to extracurriculars in part because they were a big influence in my own high school years. I learned plenty of things in the classroom, but I learned a lot about leadership and responsibility and working with other people and just generally how to get things done in band and on yearbook staff.

School activities can be enormously empowering for students, but they can also be an avenue for just wringing the power right out of them, and it is a real challenge for teachers to stay on the path that allows students to find and exercise their own voice.

Here are the things I try to stay mindful of when working as a faculty adviser.

1) What Are the Actual Stakes?

I have seen adults act as is getting decorations properly assembled for a school dance was going to decide the Fate of Western Civilization As We Know It. But as it turns out, almost nobody has ever died because tissue poms were not fluffy enough. Prom decorations are almost never a life or death issue.

This does not mean you set slack, half-baked standards for your students. But your most important stakes are not the dance or the class elections or the layout on pages 44-45. Your most important stakes are your students and their learning and their experience and growth as human beings.

It's important to remember that the stakes of your actual activity are not life or death because

2) This Is a Terrible Way To Do Things

There are very few projects in the world for which the best approach is to hand the work over to a bunch of teenagers. The best way for me to get a good yearbook done would be to shove the students out of the way and just do it myself, or do it myself with a few well-trained students who would work only under my direction, doing exactly what I would do. That would certainly be more efficient and yield a more uniformly good product. But what would be the point?

The best way to get a dance well-decorated is to have experienced adults do it. For that matter, your school band would probably sound better if you replaced students with trained adult musicians.

An inexperienced fourteen-year-old is not anybody's first choice for getting a job done quickly, efficiently, and well. But of course, getting the job done quickly, efficiently and well isn't the point. The point is to provide an opportunity for that inexperienced fourteen-year-old. But when you get caught up in creating a good product, it's really easy to forget that. That's when you have to remember the most important question

3) What Are the Students Learning?

This is a school activity. In a school. Are your students learning anything?

The yearbook biz has been highly technified. At this point, I could choose a bunch of pre-made page layouts, hire a local photographer to come to school and take all the pictures, and assign my students the task of plugging pictures into spots in the layout. But what would they learn? So we start with a blank page, and they learn about design principles and layout and the editors decide what the graphic elements will be for the book and they design every aspect of the book from the ground up, and when it's done, not only do we have a book that they created themselves, but they've learned some things.

I know there are schools where the teachers and/or parents basically do all the decorating for Prom. That's sweet, but what do the students learn from it?

And here's the absolute hardest part of this-- sometimes the lessons come from failure. They have to-- because if the students don't have the chance to fail, they don't have the chance to succeed. This can be a tough judgment call-- I may allow my yearbook students to make decisions that I think are kind of ugly, but I can't allow them to make decisions that might lead to the book never coming out at all.

The lessons are not always the ones you want, the way you want them. Years ago I had a class in which some guys ran for senior class president and vice-president as a goof, and students voted for them as a goof-- and they won. I know advisers who would have quietly changed those results. I didn't. The students learned a lesson in democracy ("Oh, man. Did we do that?"), the defeated officers learned a lesson in not taking positions for granted, and the elected goofballs learned about having to step up.

As an adviser I have to constantly ask that question-- what are my students learning? Because if all they're learning in my activity is how to take orders from an adult, well, I think they've already got a handle on that lesson and we don't need to reinforce it.

4) Guardrails and Railroad Tracks

So do I do anything as an adviser, or do I just let them run wild?

Anarchy is not an option. The school district has hired me to make it possible for students to pursue certain activities in a safe and responsible manner. I have a responsibility to the district to make sure the students are safe and don't make a terrible mess.

I see myself as a set of guardrails. It's my job to make sure they don't end up too far into the weeds, to set some boundaries, but to give the freedom to wander within those boundaries.

That means setting first principles. The yearbook is supposed to be representative of and supportive of all students in the school, so no, you can't put only your friends in it and no, "Most likely to die alone" can't be a senior superlative.

That means sharing experience and laying out options, particularly when students are stuck. Here are three ways I can think of to write this sketch for the talent show, and here's what happened in the past to groups that tried Option #2. Now you decide.

It does not mean being a set of railroad tracks, determining exactly where they must go. Because nobody actually needs to learn how to follow railroad tracks.

5) Know Your People

Does this all sound like a balancing act? It is, and it depends so much on the actual students involved. What they can do, what they already know, what they need to know, how willing and ready they are to use their own judgment and voices-- these are all huge factors, and you have to be able to gauge them. In every activity there are years in which you're dealing with students who are pro's and just need plenty of space. In other years, they may need plenty of support and encouragement. Sometimes it's just a building year.

6) It's Not About You

Yeah, we can type that out in forty-foot font. It's not your prom. It's not your yearbook. It's not your show. The whole enterprise, whatever it may be, is not there to express your voice, your aesthetic, your view of the world. No, you can't complete ignore those things because they are wrapped up with your experience and your professional understanding and that's what you're there to provide. But you are not the point, the goal, the purpose.

It's the vanishing test. If you disappeared tomorrow, could your students keep things running smoothly for quite a while? If the answer is "no," you are doing it wrong. If you have made yourself indispensable, you are doing it wrong. It may make you feel Really Important, but it's no help to the students.

Yes, these are hard things

Lord knows, I have failed miserably many times. But I keep working at doing better. There are few things as cool as seeing your students realize their own strength, their own voices. For them to look at a project, a performance, a Thing they have created and to realize that the Thing is them, themselves, taken form in the world and taken a form that is completely in-formed by who they are.

But every time you take a choice or decision away from them, you tell them "Well, this is a thing you can't do" or "You couldn't handle it if anything went wrong" and that message just makes them smaller. Don't give them that message. Don't lead them to suspect that their voices aren't legit, can't hold up, shouldn't speak out.

Confidence comes with competence, but students aren't always good judges of their own competence (and in some times and places they don't have much to judge). But we can help them build both by giving them support and freedom. Maybe you are a genius visionary and students will benefit immensely just by following in your wake and sweeping up the crumbs of your attention and direction. But for the rest of us mortals, giving students the safe space to figure out how they will get things done in the world and still be their best selves will just have to do.

The Free College Problem

Allison Schrager is an economist who writes about retirement and how to hedge risk in more unconventional situations. But in this article, she addresses the question of free college and whether or not it addresses the bigger problem.

Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.

The first, largest issue is college completion.

Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:

Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).

It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's like tossing students over the wall into an exclusive swimming pool without ever checking to see if they can swim.

And here's another depressing factoid. We can talk about how hard it is for poor students to finish college, but data suggests that middle class students have a lousy completion rate as well.

The second issue is just how much value a college education provides.

Folks keep discussing college degrees as if there's a direct correlation between degree and lifetime earnings. The emphasis on Common Core college and career readiness is predicated on the notion that if everyone had a college degree, everyone would be making much more money. Some of this notion is based on the work of guys like Raj Chetty, whose research is hugely doubtworthy. And it fails the common sense test-- if everyone had a college degree, what would happen to minimum wage jobs? Would McDonald's start paying big bucks to burger flippers with BA's? Would those jobs just vanish somehow?

What research suggests repeatedly is that your eventual earning power is best predicted by that of your parents. I've seen various charts for these data, but here's one that Schrager uses

In other words, a man who comes from the lowest SES level who gets a Bachelors degree will still make about a third of the lifetime earnings of a rich-kid high school grad.

I've seen various numbers associated with this argument, but the basic point remains unchanged-- college does not remotely come close to magically erasing the effects of your SES of origin.

So does all this mean that free tuition is a bust of an idea? I don't think so-- a college degree is still worth having (though good welding certification is also an excellent career move). But to suggest that free college will cure societies ills, reverse social injustice, and revitalize America's stalling social mobility-- well, it's not going to do those things. It's foolish to expect it to, and even more foolish to institute free tuition and then declare, "Mission accomplished," and stop looking for better solutions for the underlying issues.