Is Educational Philanthropy Jumbo Shrimp?

The announcement that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife intend to give away $45 billion in Facebook stock raises all sorts of questions, including this one:

Does anybody even understand what philanthropy is any more?

The word means "love of humanity," and the idea goes back-- way back. Early philanthropic efforts often cited include Plato's bequest of a farm to support students and faculty at his school, and Pliny (the Younger, not the old guy) giving one-third the cost of a school for Roman students. So yes-- philanthropy has been mucking around schools forever. (Said Pliny, arguing for Roman schools for Roman students, "You cannot make your children a more handsome present than this, nor can you do your native place a better turn. Let those who are born here be brought up here, and from their earliest days accustom them to love and know every foot of their native soil.")

We've had philanthropy in this country as long as we've had a country, often synonymous with "charity" and the idea of giving money to people who need it, either directly or through some do-gooding church or charitable organization.

We generally consider John. D. Rockefeller the grand-daddy of modern philanthropy (and to his credit, Rockefeller was a philanthropist before he was a rich guy). Once he became a rich guy, he hired people and started organizations to help him manage the giving away of money "scientifically." (One group led in 1928 to the Brookings Foundation). Rockefeller's system became one of finding smart people who could figure out how to solve an issue, giving them a bunch of money, and leaving them alone.

Rich Guy Philanthropy has always been a bit subject to... cognitive dissonance. Like many Carnegie biographies, this one by David Nasaw juxtaposes Andrew Carnegie's advice to his workers that they pursue learning and leisure activities and read more-- even as he demanded that they work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Carnegie's generous gift of libraries to communities across the country stands side by side with his iron-fisted refusal to pay his workers decent wages.

Rich Guy Philanthropy has always struggled with a central contradiction: If rich guys want to make life better for ordinary folks, they could start with the ordinary folks who work to make them rich.

Rockefeller's idea of business-style scientific philanthropy grew and evolved, but somewhere along the way, we completely lost the idea of philanthropy at all.

If you give an organization like a school or a hospital or a sports team a whole bunch of money in order to build a facility with your name on it, that's not philanthropy. That's advertising. Nobody looks at a building with TRUMP in huge gold letters on the side and thinks, "Wow, what a great, giving humanitarian." Why should that work differently if, instead of building the big TRUMP building himself, he gave someone else money to do it for him?

In fact, modern philanthropists have strangely confused "giving money to improve the life of human beings" with "hiring some people to do work that you want to have done."

This 2006 article about Philanthrocapitalism lays out many of the principles that the new breed feels need to take the place of the old Rockefeller-style foundations. Invest IN something. Set up infrastructure. Add value.

Hacker Philanthropy (as laid out by Sean Parker, napster co-founder), isn't really philanthropy at all. It's a process of putting yourself in charge of something and then imposing your idea of a solution on the problem, confident that your outsider mindset allows you to see what the weakness is and "disrupt" it.

The classic view of philanthropy, the one most commonly shared by givers who aren't filthy rich, is that you find people who are doing something worthwhile, and you help them do it. But in current Rich Guy Philanthropy, you decide the solution you want to implement, and then you hire people direct your giving toward that goal.

Classic philanthropy was a gift. Modern philanthropy is "impact investment." Classic philanthropy was a gift, free and clear. Modern philanthropy comes with many, many strings attached. I will give you money-- to do what I want in the manner I direct. That's not a gift. That's hire and salary.

Michael Massing looks at Bill Gates as an example of this new giving style, leaning on the book No Such Thing As A Free Gift by Linsey McGoey. And we know how that's gone-- Bill Gates decided that schools should be smaller, so he used funding to grow a bunch of organizations to implement and study that solution. Then he became convinced that Common Core would fix schools, so he threw a bunch of money at that, creating organizations to implement and promote his preferred solution. (Also, I love McGoey for her coinage "philanthrocapitalist")

What makes this philanthropy?

If Gates hired a bunch of computer programmers to form a work group that designed a new music storage-and-playing device, nobody would call that philanthropy. But if Gates hires a bunch of thought leaders and PR specialists to promote CCSS, that's philanthropy? How?

Is it because there's no obvious profit involved, or is it because Gates has taken charge of a portion of the public sector?

Zuckerberg's "gift" has folks looking back at his previous foray into philanthropy-- his ill-fated attempt to help fix Newark. Jordan Weissman at Slate is "optomistic that Mark Zuckerberg won't mess up this philanthropy thing." His optimism is based in I'm-not-sure-what, but he seems to believe that after Z's adventures in Newark, the cyber-mogul would have learned a thing or two. His evidence is that Zuckerberg's huge donation to Bay Area schools was more incremental and focused-- but it was once again framed as, "Here are the solutions we're hiring you to implement." [Update. Several critics have noted that Zuckerberg's generosity isn't all that generous anyway.]

But David Auerbach at Slate takes a more measured look, also noting that Gates's attempt to make himself the unelected School Board Chairman of America has not logged many (or even any) successes. Auerbach does make one point in philanthrocapitalism's favor-- it at least is not more of the Let's Buy Ourselves Some Senators investment strategy of Ken Griffin or the Koch Brothers.

Except. Except that, slowly but surely, the two are becoming the same thing. Charters have become a magnet for philanthrocapitalists who can do well while doing good. "I'm building a school and making a bundle," is the new -- well, can we even call it philanthropy at this point? And those philanthropists are willing to go the Koch route with their giving. Consider the news from LA, where a PAC was used to hide the investment of charter backers in getting three charter-friendly school board candidates elected. Among those on the list are "philanthropist Eli Broad," whose "philanthropy" seems to consist entirely of hiring people to push his personal agenda and build his personal power.

So we finally arrive at a point where the word "philanthropy" means absolutely nothing at all. Hell, Donald Trump is a philanthropist. Vladamir Putin is a philanthropist. Every time I pay my phone bill, I'm a philanthropist. Apparently any time you give anybody any money for any reason, you're a philanthropist.

Look-- here's the rule. If you are giving money to somebody with the expectation that they will carry out your instructions, further your agenda, owe you compliance and assistance, or complete a project you've assigned them-- you're not a philanthropist. If your giving is designed to give you power or control over an aspect of public life in our country-- you're not a philanthropist.

You know what else happened over the weekend? A couple dropped a check for $500,000 in a Salvation Army kettle. And then when news outlets wanted to follow up on the story, they insisted on remaining anonymous. And they didn't tell the Salvation Army how to spend it, what to spend it on, or where to put their name on the side of the building. They just remembered how hard life was when they couldn't get enough to eat, so they were hoping they could help other humans in similar dire straits. I may or may not love the Salvation Army, but I know an anonymous philanthropist when I see one or two.

I wish there were more of them.

Blog Commenting Changes

Okay, we're going to try modulated comments for a while.

While I enjoy a spirited debate and discussion in the comments section, at the end of the day, this blog is something that I maintain with time that I would otherwise spend eating and sleeping and from which and for which I do not make a cent. I have no problem with people who disagree with me or each other, but I'm really not maintaining this blog just to give people the opportunity to spit in my face.

I continue to welcome and pursue dialogue with intelligent, well-informed, or fun members of the loyal opposition (any one of the three qualifications is sufficient to qualify) but if you can't manage any of those AND you insist monopolizing huge chunks of conversation with the repeated use of insults against me or my guests-- well, I am not running Mr. Greene's Home For Wayward Trolls.

Unfortunately, blogspot does not provide the opportunity to block individual accounts, so for the time being, all comments will be subject to review and approval, and we'll see how that goes.

The New ESEA: Sturm or Drang?

The new version of ESEA is called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is a fine sine of the sort of aspirational nonsense that legislators are capable of. Why not the Every Child Gets a Pony Act, or the Every Child Is Smart, Good-Looking and Above Average Act?

The most notable thing about the act is that it is 1,061 pages long. It is the Moby Dick Travels to Middle Earth of regulation. The second most-notable thing is that it has been spit out by committee on a fast track that allows pretty much nobody to actually look at the thing, including the people who are poised to vote on it. Make a note of this fast-track legislative prestidigitation the next time some some pundit ponders how politics got so tangled in education. Once again, politics have been hardwired into public education's dna.

I am not exactly a low-information voter on these issues, and I have not a chance to really check out those 1,061 pages. But some folks have been doing super work with it. The folks at EdWeek's K-12 have been doing super work (here, here, or here for starters) and Mercedes Schneider has apparently doing without sleep to work on this (here and here). Daniel Katz has put together a good compendium of what's out there as well.

There are things to hate. TFA, charter schools, and the folks who love social impact bonds have gotten good value from their lobbyists. The path has been leveled for Competency Based Education. And probably most hateable of all, the damned stupid Big Standardized Test is all its yearly waste-of-timeliness has been enshrined in law once again.

There are things to love. Most notably, in what may really be an historic moment, a federal agency has had power taken away. USED is told to go sit in the corner and shut up. Although there are also opportunities for it to weasel its way back into power again.

Which is part of the wonder and terror of a bill like this. Nobody knows what all is in it. And even when they figure out what's in it, nobody knows what that means. Bills like this are an exercise in committee style compromise, which is all about letting every person get in a piece of language that makes them (or their favorite lobbyists) happy-- and not at all about figuring out what the resulting language will actually mean to the people who have to live by it.

Some of this law is going to end up in court. And some of it will be... well, who knows. It's worth remembering that states have long been mandated, by law, to develop and execute a plan by which the most highly effective teachers would be moved to the most troubled schools. That law has never been enforced in any meaningful way at all. Over the years ahead, it will not just be what the law says, but what the authorities think the law says, what the courts think the law says, and what laws the People In Charge want to bother enforcing.

Bodies of regulation like this are rewritten on the ground all the time. What changes under the New ESEA is the USED's power to unilaterally write whatever laws tickle their fancy this week.

A huge number of people are deeply pissed about the bill. BATs are accused on their Facebook page of being sellouts, and conservative commentators are up in arms because the new law doesn't go far enough toward actually dissolving the Department of Education. Neither of these is the position of a grown-up who lives in a nominal democracy.

At times like this, I remind myself that this is a marathon. It is a journey of a million steps. To imagine that a legislative package can be crafted that will set public education On The Right Path or Fix All Our Problems is to engage in the same sort of magical thinking that lead reformsters to think that Common Core would "fix" schools.

The corporate interest in public education is never going away. There's a lot of money in education, and it will always draw those people as surely as cow poop draws flies. There will always be powerful amateurs who think they know the secrets of education. There will always be politicians who would like to please as many voters and well-financed election backers as they possibly can. There will always be bad ideas that become popular in education. The current struggles will always be going on.

The goal cannot be to find and fight that one big apocalyptic battle that will End It All, because that's just not happening. Those of us who are standing up for public education will win the current arguments because the reformsters are wrong, their ideas are failures, and eventually they will get bored with losing and move on-- but there will be other messes to take their place. If your thought was that we'd somehow get a great New ESEA and you'd be able to relax and stop worrying about the assault on public education-- well, I have a bridge that runs over some Florida swampland to sell you.

In the meantime, we need to speak up against what we see that is wrong and argue against what will make matters worse. I've been busy emailing my representatives and I hope you have been, too, telling them what parts of the new bill need to be improved or removed (as well as arguing for a period of actually looking at the damn thing before passing it). I'm not excited about the New ESEA, but I don't oppose its passage because on the matter of stripping power from the USED alone it is an improvement over the current arrangement. It has been handled badly, it has many terrible parts, and it sets the stage for more problems with privatizing public ed. But at the moment I see it as a small step in the right direction, and in the journey of a million steps, one step in the right direction is okay. We've still got a million more steps to go.

Campbell Brown's Friends

Weekly Standard writer Mark Hemingway is in the December issue sticking up for Campbell Brown with the kind of PR fluff that usually costs big bucks. It's clear that Campbell Brown doesn't need friends. But it appears she's looking for something else.

In "Who's Afraid of Campbell Brown? (Teachers' unions, and for good reason)" Hemingway provides a dispatch from an alternate universe where teacher unions rule and Brown is a unjustly victimized humanitarian. It's not nearly as interesting as it could have been had Hemingway also checked out some of the recordings from the corruption trial of disgraced NY Senate Leader Dean Skelos, because those recordings give us a bit more information about Brown's friends. But we'll get back to that-- first, a look at Hemingway's piece.

He opens with a look at Brown's modest office arrangements, and as will be the case throughout the piece, uses a bit of misdirection to avoid including some details. For instance, after describing Brown's low-rent office, he writes "But don't let this modest arrangement fool you" but the next part of that sentence is not "Brown has been given a $4 million budget to run her website." Nor (spoiler alert) is he ever going to mention that Brown's site requires a reportorial commitment to never run anti-charter stories. Instead, he wants us to know that Brown is parked on the moral high road.

Brown has promised that the site won’t shy away from advocacy and opinion—which it labels “opinion”—but at the same time she insists that her mission is not political. “My whole point about school reform is it’s not partisan. It’s not,” she says. “It’s a moral issue.”

And who is standing in the way of her righteous crusade? Three guesses

The trouble is, the last thing America’s teachers’ unions want is real reform, and they certainly don’t want Campbell Brown leading the charge. Far from making education a moral issue, they’re counting on it remaining a partisan one.

Exactly what reform charge is Brown leading? So far it appears that mostly she is leading the charge to establish herself as an important player, and she's not doing well. Hemingway will offer his warmed-over claim that the union "got to" the Democratic candidates who skipped Brown's Education Summit in Iowa, but he doesn't address who "got to" the eight GOP candidates who skipped her similar session in New Hampshire (the six who showed up were Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, Christie, Jindal and Walker so she didn't squeeze much juice out of that group). Brown keeps trying to sell the "I'm so important the unions want to silence me" narrative, but it seems more likely that Brown just isn't that important. And her desire to inject education into the campaign would be admirable, if it were not so clearly attached to her privatization and teacher-busting agenda).

But in Hemingway's alternate universe, the unions' reach is long and strong.  In his universe, even Obama has "appeased" unions (by killing off DC's choice program). This is because "all meaningful education reforms hinge on greater accountability and erosion of the ironclad union protections that keep bad, even criminal, teachers in classrooms" and so unions are all about the status quo (except that the status quo these days is the reformster agenda of high-stakes testing and free-range charters). But again, our narrative brings us back to Campbell Brown, Education's Joan of Arc:

Given that teachers’ unions are used to making some of the most powerful politicians in the country dance on a string, they’re not happy about the emergence of Campbell Brown as a politically influential voice in education reform. She’s well-connected, independent, and has deep pockets. Perhaps most important, she’s a former A-list broadcast journalist, and her communication skills are superb. Consequently, union leaders don’t just disagree with Brown—they feel intense personal hatred.

This is the kind of writing that's hard to respond to because I don't even recognize the reality Hemingway speaks of. In my reality, there is not a single national-stage politician who clearly stands for public education, teachers or teachers unions. In my reality, rank and file teachers are repeatedly complaining about national union leaders who gladly tie themselves up so that they can dance to whatever tune the politicians pipe. Are there people who "intensely hate" Brown personally? I don't know. She tweeted at me once. It wasn't unpleasant. But mostly I don't think much about her. In the reformster landscape, she's one more well-funded pro-charter anti-teacher shill, probably a little less effective than many.

But Hemingway marshals a list of articles that were inspired by some mysterious teacher union memo. People keep asking who is funding her! People keep bringing up that her husband is a "Wall Street figure" and neocon who helped put positive spin on a war from which he allegedly profited. Hemingway lists all these unfun questions about Brown-- but he answers none of them. This is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest moment in a piece that is not exactly awash in rigor-- if Brown, who is pushing charters like crazy, is funded by people who stand to profit from charters, that matters. If it doesn't matter, then it also doesn't matter which politicians get teacher union money and support. Hemingway cannot have it both ways, but that's what he is demanding.

Then back to Brown's crusade against tenure, which is old news at this point (as is the lawsuit that was going to make her a player, but didn't). Hemingway also re-fries the old beans of a Diane Ravitch prettiness quote (calling her a union spokesperson, which is, again from some alternate universe).

Brown bemoans the lack of someone to engage with her, and again, this does not seem to be so much about the need to fix education as the need for Brown to find someone who will give her stature by treating her like she's a Big Deal. She wants someone from the opposition to debate her thoughtfully, and Hemingway neener-neeners that they're all afraid (she should take a page from the former failed chancellor of DC schools, who became a household ed reform name while steadfastly refusing to debate anybody). I believe there are many public education advocates who fit the bill of knowledgeable and interested in progress; I'm just not sure why they should feel the need to debate a self-appointed charter advocate, any more than I can think of a reason that the Secretary of Education should give me a call just because I'm a self-appointed education blogger.

Brown via Hemingway wades into other issues like testing and Common Core, but it's clear that's not her area of passion (or at least not one where it's clear which way the wind is blowing). But then she winds back around to choice, and heats up again.

Again, Hemingway lives in some alternate universe where Obama and the unions have fought school choice. In my universe, the Obama administration has thrown plenty of money and support at charters, and the unions have been exceptionally mild-mannered in doing anything that might resemble opposition of it. In fact, the problem with much of Hemingway's narrative is that it pictures the NEA and AFT as staunch defenders of traditional public schools at the same time that rank and file members have had to repeatedly try to force their unions to do things like call out Duncan (who was only implementing Obama policies, but the unions would never, ever say anything bad about an Obama policy). In other words, there are plenty of us who wish that the union had as much power and will to oppose ed reform as he imagines it does.

Hemingway lists some of the big failures in the ed reform biz, like Gates and Zuckerberg (and even, wierdly, Shyamalan), and asks how little old Campbell Brown can hope to succeed where they have failed.

Well, a little self-awareness goes a long way. Campbell Brown understands the roadblocks thrown in front of all of the wealthy dilettantes who came before her, and she intends to defy expectations. For one thing, far from trading on her celebrity, she’d already said goodbye to her high-flying career in broadcast journalism years before starting the Partnership for Educational Justice and the Seventy Four.

Not trading on her celebrity? I'm not faulting her for it-- she is who she is-- but pretending that her celebrity isn't a thing that factors into her new line of work is just silly. In fact, let's ask someone else to chime in on Campbell Brown's celebrity:

DEAN SKELOS:  "I'm going into the city, meeting with some billionaires ... on school tax credit stuff - "

ADAM SKELOS:  "Who are you meeting with?

DEAN SKELOS:  " Campbell Brown."

ADAM SKELOS:  "Ohhh... "

DEAN SKELOS:  "Okay."

ADAM SKELOS:  "Any financial ... people?"

DEAN SKELOS:  "Yeah, you know the ... uhh ...the reporter, former reporter ...a whole bunch of them(i.e. billionaire charter promoters) and I'm having lunch with a bunch of them. Then I'm going to - "

ADAM SKELOS:  "Dad, you’ve gotta ...you've gotta take these names down for me.”

DEAN SKELOS:  "I got 'em all.  I got 'em."

ADAM SKELOS:  "All right."

That's a transcript from some of the government wiretaps collected for the corruption trial of Dean Skelos who, at the time of this conversation, was hunting for a job for his son (you can listen to the recordings at the link). And so he set up a meeting with Campbell Brown and some billionaire charter backers.

So Campbell Brown doesn't need any more friends. She has friends who give her $4 million a year to run a charter advocacy website and very rich friends who help her meet with influential New York politicians and friends with deep pockets and even friends who write hugely complimentary profiles for conservative magazines.

No, what Brown needs is some enemies. She needs someone to take her on in public debate, or attack her on some high-profile platform. She needs to fight the Obama administration, maybe, she thinks, except that they are for pretty much most of the things she's for. She needs the unions to really come at her (she took a weakish swipe at them this weekend, about which I'll write elsewhere) and really draw some public blood so that people can see her really fighting hard, but the national unions are kind of soft and flabby and haven't shown much inclination to really fight reformy programs and in fact have cozied up to the Clinton campaign which will probably usher in even more programs that Brown actually agrees with.

Brown has unwittingly underlined our problem. She needs somebody with Stature and Importance to be her enemy, but there are very few people with Stature and Importance who are standing up for public education and teachers, and those few people don't seem to have the time or inclination to waste energy on an ed reform bit player.

Maybe Brown can start by going toe to toe with some C-level bloggers. Or maybe the next time she's having a backroom meeting with her billionaire charter buddies, she can ask them to buy her a sparring partner.

Naughty Union Spending

Campbell Brown's pet PR project went after some union blood this weekend with revelations about AFT, NEA and UFT spending. 

The lead is that between 2011 and 2014, the unions spent $5.7 on travel and hotel expenses. That's a lot of money.

Now, when we start breaking it down, there are some line items that seem a bit of a stretch in the outrage department. For instance, the AFT spent $6,700 at Walt Disney World, which is one day's admission for about 65 adults (who don't plan to eat during that day).

But the list also includes cruise tickets, international air travel, and fancy shmancy hotels. The 74 admits that the spending amounts to a small sliver of the total disbursements by the union, and that some of the travel and expense is an outgrowth of international union connections and even some humanitarian work.

The narrative here is a predictable one for the74-- those dollars are dues dollars and union members don't want their money spent on all this foolishness. Writer Naomi Nix has a nifty quote from Jade Thompson, an anti-"mandatory"-dues activist about how much the $800 of dues would mean to a working family. "It's our money," says Thompson, who probably meant to say, "It's our money that we only received in the first place because a union helped us negotiate a fair contract." And we should go back to the sliver. The article, for instance, marks NEA as spending $2.2 million over four years on "luxury travel and hotels." At three million members, that comes to about 18 cents a year in dues money.

But my absolute favorite nominee for Journalistic Insightfulness would be this part of Nix's article:

“They might have very good explanations for this. They might not,” Stanford University politics professor Terry Moe said of the spending on hotels and travel.

Well, you know. I think that just about covers it.

Moe also claims that "if you listen to them." the unions claim they are spending it all on collective bargaining. I don't know. I've been listening to them a long time, and I never got that impression. Moe claims that union spending on politics is like some kind of secret. I'm pretty sure he's wrong.

Look, I'm the last person to defend union spending patterns. As a local president, I went to region meetings that came complete with meals. I've sat through the arguments about whether to spend local dues money on things like retirement dinners and social gatherings. And I've been the teacher grumbling over state-level union people who wear suits that are nicer than anything I'll ever wear ever. There are some items in this article that do make me cringe.

I wish the unions operated on a shoestring and everyone traveled coach and stayed in a yurt. But I also understand that teachers give up time and effort to serve, and if the only time they can meet is during mealtime, then they should eat. I understand that maintaining a stable of experts who can be sent out to any local in need costs money, bot for maintaining and sending. I understand that if I want someone to go represent me in the big leagues, it helps if they look as if they belong in the big leagues. I understand all that, and I'll still vote for Bernie and not Hillary, because I want to believe in a world where it doesn't cost money to play in the big leagues. Of course, I also want to believe in a world in which you don't really need a union because the People In Charge already listen to employees and make sure those employees are treated well. 

 This is a yurt







I wish my union didn't spend big bucks on fancy hotels, especially because when they do, it makes it possible for outfits like the74 to do union hit pieces that throw around big numbers to make the union look bad. But this article was a fishing expedition, looking for a way to slam unions and support the narrative that unions need to be stripped of their ability to collect dues and gain members.

 

CBE & The Data Bottleneck

Can you tell I've been doing a lot of reading about Competency Based Education lately?

While some proponents like to point to more human-friendly versions of CBE such as a personalized district in rural Alaska, the more common picture of CBE is of a huge data-mining monstrosity. And while CBE has been rolling steadily at us under various aliases for a few decades now, it is computer technology that has made it look like both achievable and profitable.

In fact, CBE on the ground really does look like one more variation of the old and failed teaching machines, an intent to convert the entire ed system to the failed model of Rocketship Academy or the very failed model of on-line schooling.

You don't have to dig very far for hints about where CBE is headed. One of the flagship groups leading the charge is iNACOL -- which stands for "International Association for K-12 Online Learning." You can find their logo on works like the report presented by CompetencyWorks (what the hell is it with these guys and smooshedtogether group names?) entitled Re-Engineering Information Technology, a report all about how to redesign your IT systems to accommodate CBE.

Like many CBE fans, these guys are wrestling with the challenge of collecting tons of data, crunching it, making it transparent to students and teachers, and using it to make quick decisions about what should happen next in the student's education.

I'm hearing and reading the stories from teachers on the ground, in classrooms that are in part or in full running CBE, and they all seem to be about getting data through the bottleneck. Teachers who spend hours plugging test/quiz/worksheet scores into their platform. Teachers who maintain data walls on steroids so that students can walk into the room and first thing in the morning see where they are on the standards matrix and task completion matrix. Teachers who are directed to keep the students on those iPads for a significant portion of the day.

Computers become attractive in a CBE approach not because they do a better job of teaching (they don't) or because they are more engaging for students (they aren't) but because nothing else can compare for the speed and efficiency of gathering up the data. To wait for a human to process, score, record, and do data entry on class sets of papers-- that's just too long, too inefficient (plus, if those teachers haven't been properly freed from the tyranny of a union, they might balk at being required to put in fourteen hour days just so they can handle their hours of data entry).

So once again, the technology isn't there to serve education or the students, but to serve the people who think their program is magical. Only computers can clear the data bottleneck and get that sweet, sweet data flowing, and if that means we have to design all tests and worksheets and lessons and objectives so that they are the kind of thing that a computer can easily handle as opposed to, say, the kind of things that actually educate students-- well, the needs of the system outweigh the needs of the humans involved in it.

That's why CBE is destined to be nothing but OBE dressed up as the biggest cyber-school ever. It may not be great education, but at least the data trains run on time.

Chugach, Alaska

As reformy advocacy shifts toward promotion of Competency Based Education (or Proficiency Based Learning-- they have really got to settle on the set of buzzwords they want to use), we are going to hear now and then about a magical place in Alaska-- the Chugach School District.

Back in the nineties, when Objective Based Education (the previous iteration of CBE) was all the rage, Chugach signed up in a big way. They developed an OBE system that is now bills itself as the first competency based school district in the country.When edutopia visited in 2007, they found a system that was the pinnacle of performance-based learning. The district had over a thousand standards, and students had to achieve mastery of each before moving on to the next. Students also design their own projects and a "school-to-life" plan. And the Voyage to Excellence program is a self-directed process with a big vocational-technical flavor. The leader of the district during the switch repeated one of the mantras of OBE:

"Time was the constant and learning was the variable -- that's the old model," says Roger Sampson, president of the Education Commission of the States, who led Chugach's transformation as district superintendent in the 1990s. "We switched. What's constant is learning. Time is the variable."

Or as is noted elsewhere in the article:

Even as globalization and media propel our culture -- and our classrooms -- toward modes of production that are bigger, faster, and more alike, Chugach has refocused on an approach to education that is smaller, personalized, and variably paced. As Douglas Penn, the districtwide principal, explains, "Our kids graduate when they're ready. We're not pumping them out the door with D's on their diplomas."

And "graduate when they're ready" means just what it says. When the district won a Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 2001, the write-up noted that students might graduate when they fourteen or when they were twenty-one.

The accolades have been steady. Here's a piece from the John Hopkins School of Education, written by Wendy Battino, a teacher-principal with Chugach who went on to join the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (as well as a career as a life coach). Here's an edsurge paean. But, boy-- nobody loves Chugach like CompetencyWorks.org, which ran a five-part series in January of 2015 (here's part five).

In 2001, then-superintendent Richard DeLorenzo had this to say about the district's vision and their place in the educational firmament:

Education is in a crisis due to the fact that we must now educate all students regardless of their potential or socio-economic status to some degree of excellence. Relying on traditional methodology and practice will only lead to tinkering with mediocrity where we fail to meet the needs of individuals. In order to accomplish excellence we need to radically alter what we teach and how we teach. We at Chugach have undertaken this journey and have dismantled many of the barriers that were once thought unapproachable to reach excellence in education. We have endured many hardships and disappointments and yet we still proceed with this tiresome journey because every student deserves the chance to be successful and share the opportunity to reach their full potential.

So-- yay! Dismantling barriers. The end of "tinkering with mediocrity." I can see the appeal to reformsters. But after twenty years, the system seems to be working in Chugach Schools. Could it be a model system for the rest of us?

Well....

Here are some things to know about the Chugach School District.

* The largely rural district covers about 22,000 square miles, including some square miles which are islands.
* Number of students in the system has ranged from 150 to 300, depending. The district markets itself to students outside its geographical boundaries.
* 77% of the students are homeschooled.
* The district generally employs fewer than twenty full-time faculty.

Let's set aside the argument about "mastery learning" for a moment (at exactly what point does one declare that a student has "mastered" reading?). We'll also set aside some questions about whether Chugach really did involve all stakeholders as their Baldrige write-up suggests, or whether this researcher was correct to conclude that political maneuvering of a ham-fisted "visionary" drove the bus. Let's just check this idea for scaleability.

Let's imagine, for instance, Chicago, where students (public and charter) run around 400,000. Exactly what would a system where 400,000 students pursued 1,000 objectives independently look like? Would we, like Chugach, have 300,000 of those students home schooled, so that their families are responsible for making sure the student stays on task? Chugach requires students working on certain types of projects to contact and get advice from professionals. So if 25,000 Chicago students decide they want to do a photography project, where will all 25K turn for advice?

The system allows students to finish whenever they get there. How would that play out in a poor urban setting where there are already so many obstacles to school completion? What does a bright fourteen year old who has breezed through all the performance tasks and graduated "early" do next?

How does a staff of teachers monitor 400,000 students all working at their own pace? And how do parents react when they learn, as Chugach parents have, that at any given point, every child's report card may look different?

What does it do to the cohesion and culture of a school when students must choose between moving forward to their next standard and staying with their friends? How badly does it crush a child's confidence to be among those "left behind." I'm not asking because I'm afraid students might feel bad, but because I know these kind of blows to the ego and self really interfere with learning. With a predominantly homeschooled population, Chugach provides no window on how this kind of system affects the culture inside a building.

For reformsters who love CBE, Chugach is a model of how paradisey the competency based model can be. But to me, it's just one more example of how one size doesn't fit all, and that the continued search for a magical school approach that can be applied to any district anywhere is a fool's errand. Chugach is very unique system with very unique challenges that has landed on a very unique solution.

Chugach's approach may very well work for Chugach, a very rural district of a very few, predominantly home-schooled students.  But if someone starts telling me that Chugach is a reason to believe that CBE will be awesome everywhere, I'm going to assume that they are more interested in selling snake oil than helping schools.