NC: Covering Charter Butts

This week, reporter Ann Doss Helms of the Charlotte Observer and Lynn Bonner of the News & Observer both offered accounts of a striking example of 'how the sausage is made" and how public officials make sure that the sausage carries a nice chartery taste.

Wednesday was the day to present the state department of public instruction's report on charter schools to the State Board of Education. They were supposed to accept the report on Thursday, but Lt. Governor Dan Forest had a problem. Per Bonner:

Lt. Gov. Dan Forest argued that the report, intended for the legislature and full of data on charter school enrollment, demographics and costs, was too negative. 

“The report, to me, did not have a lot of positive things to say,” he said.

And just in case you're thinking maybe Forest is just concerned that charters aren't getting the job done and he wants to shape them up and that's what he's responding to...

Once the board issues reports, Forest said, “that is the fuel the media uses for the next year to criticize whatever we’re doing.”

And so Forest sent the report back to the drawing board, even though the deadline for acceptance of the report is January 15. Forest said that he would "run interference" with the legislature if anyone complained about the missed deadline. Helms offered her own analysis:

I was among the reporters present. The brief discussion struck me as an unusually blunt demand to make data more politically palatable. 

Will you be surprised to learn that Forest is a big-time fan of the charter industry? His General Counsel and Policy Director, Steven Walker, who sits on NC's Charter School Advisory Board and was presented the Charter School Champion Award last summer from the Charter School Initiative of North Carolina.

What did Forest not like about the report? Well, as it turns out, since the report was submitted to a public meeting, a copy (what I guess we must now consider the rough draft) is online for the reading. Let's take a look! The report has three main sections, and I'm sure Forest is over-reacting. Surely this report will create a rosy picture of charter life in North Carolina!

Current State of Charter Schools in NC

Once the previous cap of 100 charters was removed back in 2011, the charter gold rush has been on, though more charter requests have been denied than approved. Currently there are 187 charters operating in NC.

The report notes that charters can draw from any geographic location, and while they are encouraged to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of their location, "There is no mechanism by which schools can guarantee racial and ethnic balance, however, nor is there an official consequence for not achieving it."

That might explain why charters in NC are more white and less Hispanic than public schools. Charters student populations are 57% white, compared to 49% for public schools. Public schools are 16% Hispanic, while charters are 8%. Black population is about the same. This statistic is problematic for all those charter fans who insist that charter opponents are trying to deny Black families a choice for a better life.

But the report digs beyond these raw statistics and finds that, well, things are actually worse. The report finds that individual charters are highly segregated, and that the trend over time has been for fewer and fewer non-white students to make it into charters. Public schools have remained a pretty evenly segregated mix over that same time. They refer here to a working paper by Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University, tracking the growing "segmentation" of charters in NC. That paper is pretty striking read, and it provides this pair of charts to bluntly illustrate the problem:

North Carolina charters have also consistently served fewer economically disadvantaged students. The numbers fluctuate over three years, but the ratio remains consistent-- public school Ed population has been at 50, 61, and 55 percent of student population. In charters, it has been 40, 37, and 36. And once again, it's worse than it looks, because that's an average, and looking closer reveals that a third of NC charters keep their ED student numbers below 20% (and half of those are below 10%).

The news about "exceptional children" is a little more complicated and nuanced, but for the most part, charters are on the same page as public schools.

How do these schools perform? North Carolina is one of those states that now gives its schools grades. The public school grades are distributed in a pretty bell-curvy manner, but charters are more spread out to the A/B and D/F end of the scale than public schools.

Charters do generally perform better than their home LEA, though about a third can't be compared to their home LEA. These data seem incomplete in many ways-- for instance, what about a comparison to the home LEA of the students, rather than that of the building. The data could mean that NC charters are producing amazing results, or that they are creaming top students, or students from more upscale neighborhoods are attending a charter in the poor part of town.

Inadequate charters? There are such things. When the cap was lifted, legislators also created a definition of a crappy charter that included low academic performance (aka "test scores"). In 2012, one charter ran afoul of this. For 2012-2013, the state moved the goalposts so that test results wouldn't count against charters. In 2014-2015, sixteen charters got warning letters for academic suckiness. They could be in trouble. Maybe.

Pre-cap-lifting, 57 charters closed, including 14 that never opened. 35 of those closures were because of financial problems. Since the cap was lifted, 13 charters have closed

Impact of Charter Schools on the Public School System

Charters currently pull $366 million in funding. The report notes that while in theory this is simply money redirected from public schools, since charters also pull in former home or private school students, they are actually adding to the state student population, and since the state doesn't increase school funding proportional to student numbers, this is actually a net loss. In other words, when Pat stops home-schooling or attending Lilywhite Private Academy, Pat's Regular Public High School loses money-- even though Pat never attended RPHS in the first place.

This is actually a financial wrinkle I've not seen brought up often. I'm doubting that charter supporters are happy to see it turn up in this state-level report.

The report brings up the issue of specific economic impact on specific districts-- and then notes that the state stopped asking local districts about this in 2013, because...:? Don't ask, don't tell? What you don't know can't hurt your charter PR?

And then the report actually tries to say some nice things about charters, like how competition might help (though all options aren't really available to all students) and parents might become more engaged as they try to figure out what's going on. No, really. When I first read the paragraph, it seemed sort of favorable to charters. But now-- damn you, close reading!

Best Practices Resulting from Charter School Operations

Oh, charter laboratories of education! What genius educational ideas have you brewed up in North Carolina? And, um, why is this part of the thirty-page report only two pages long?

Back in June of 2015, NC set up standards to rate a charter as "high quality." The standards involved academic, operational and financial domains. And of the 146 charters in operation last year, a whopping nine earned the high quality seal of approval. There's a list. Next year they're going to tweak the standards.

Well, how about EVAAS, NC's preferred junk science measure for effectiveness? Did any charters manage high EVAAS scores with high populations of economically disadvantaged students? There were eight, with two way out in front of everybody (Henderson Collegiate and Maureen Joy Charter). The report does not offer any clues to the secret of their success.

Other Stuff

The remainder of the report is a compendium of updates and structures (here's some services the NC Department of Public Instruction offers charter folks, here's some of the pending legislation, and here's an update on some ongoing stuff, like North Carolina's pilot program to enter the wildly unsuccessful cyber-school business). 

Good Luck on That Rewrite

So the department now has its marching orders from the Lt. Governor-- "Go make this thing less sad, and don't make charters look so much like a resegregate NC schools while draining taxpayer dollars."

Forest meanwhile felt some pressure to explain exactly what he meant by, "Go rewrite that report so it doesn't make me sad." In an interview with Pete Kaliner of WWNC, he indicated that he saw the negative view of charters as part of a pattern, that positive news was withheld on purpose.

In the interview Forest said he objects to the way the state report compares demographics and letter grades at charter and district schools. And he said a section that details increased state spending on charter schools and concludes that most of that money would otherwise have gone to school districts is “an opinion piece.”

And if the department is unsure about how they can "fix" the report, Forest knows where they can get help.

Forest said said there should be an opportunity for “charter schools themselves to be able to read it and look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t painting our picture.’ There’s a lot of great positive things going on with charter schools in the state. Let’s tell that story, too.”

Meanwhile, since the original draft is right there on line, we'll be able to compare the final product to see exactly how many coats of whitewash have been applied to the big charter barn. Let's hope they do a good job, because facts and the truth are nice and all, but not when they come at the expense of good charter PR. Carry on, North Carolina.

The Test-Centered School

While politicians and policy-makers have made mouth noises about the amount of time spent on the Big Standardized Test and the prep therefor, those elements only scratch the surface of how test-and-punish policy has messed with American schools.

At various times in ed history we have talked about teacher-centered schools, community-centered schools, and student-centered schools. What we have seen over the past decade is the rise of the test-centered school.

In the test-centered school, regardless of what its mission or vision statement may say, test results are the guiding force.

In the test-centered school, there are remediation courses, but these are not remedial courses in the classic sense of trying to help students who are behind in their comprehension of content. These are test prep courses, in which students' time and attention is devoted to practicing the skills of test-taking. Perhaps the school uses a program package so that students can work independently on computers, drilling multiple choice responses to test-style questions, over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after mind-numbing day, until the students have been taught that English and/or Math (because these remedial courses are never required in non-tested departments) are miserable disciplines filled with nothing but drudgery and boredom.

These remediation courses will have two other side effects. First, they will fill up the student's schedule, so that students who have not Done Well Enough on the test must take Remediation 101 instead of shop or art or band or accounting. These will be the students whose strengths are NOT English and Math, but they will not be able to fully pursue their strengths, but must instead spend their school day focusing on their weakness, their area of failure. If you have never spent your days being bad at something, you may not understand just how corrosive to the spirit it is.

If you want to get a sense of how this is, just imagine switching the classes involved. "Sorry, pat, but no Junior Honors English class for you until you can finally play a decent B-flat scale on trumpet," said no school ever. "Sorry, Mrs. Bagswatter, but Chris can't sign up for AP Calculus until that physical fitness test is passed in PE."

The other side effect will be on what the school can offer. Your English and Math teachers will have to make room in their schedule for Test Prep 101, which means that they don't have time to teach any elective courses.

In fact, running a test-centered school system doesn't just affect how time in school is used, but how the school is actually structured. Middle schools in particular may feel the push in test-centered districts (though I had a hard time finding current research about middle school structure trends, and I've folded in anecdotal through-the-grapevine stuff here). One tradition of middle schools is for 7th and 8th grade, but that leaves the whole school ranking based on the results of eighth grade testing. So districts may feel test-based pressure to move sixth and even fifth graders under the middle school roof to help with school ratings, or shift to old school K-8 schools, sidestepping the middle school rating issue entirely.

Bottom line-- we have districts that are looking at structural changes based not on what's best for the students or even what works best with the available physical plants. They are looking at structural changes primarily based on what will have the best effect on their test-based accountability measures.

In a test-based school, it comes down to the test scores and accountability measures. In Pennsylvania, AP test results can count toward a school's ranking. Many states are now moving toward using SAT's as the BS Test for high school ranking. Consequently, where decisions about students taking college entrance exams might have been based on what the student needs (Will the AP credit be any use to her at her chosen school? Does he even intend to go to college?), they are now based on how the student's choice affects the school. This spring, somewhere in America, a high school principal is going to say, "I don't care if the credit isn't going to be any use at Pat's school in Pat's program-- that kid's the strongest student we have in that department. You get Pat in there to take that damn AP test, whether Pat wants to or not."

And that ultimately is the problem with test-centered schools; the relationship between the school and the student is turned upside down. Instead of asking, "How does this help us meet the educational needs of our students," administrators ask, "How will this affect our test scores?" In a test-centered school, the school is not there to serve the students-- the students are there to meet the needs of the school. And no-- there isn't a scintilla of evidence that test prep serves student needs, nor that test results are an important indicator of their education.

Maybe we offer bribes. Maybe we restructure school. Maybe we drill forever. Maybe we make it clear that we will accept no excuses. It doesn't matter. The students are there to crank out the scores the school wants, and policies are measured by that metric-- will this get students to give us the scores we need from them? That's separated from the question of "Does this meet the students' educational needs" by a chasm so large that you could lose the entire US education system in it.

Sure, much is riding on test-driven policies these days. But at some point administrators and leaders and parents and classroom teachers have to step up and stand for the needs of the students before all else. Because if we aren't going to stand up for our students, what are we going to stand up for?

Another Bad NCLB Apologia

At FiveThirtyEight, economics writer Ben Casselman has concocted one of the saddest revisionary apologias for No Child Left Behind.

Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.

Casselman buries the lede about four paragraphs down:

Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gaps remain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.

And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."

The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little previously-ignored pockets of failure." Casselman even opens with the story of an affluent suburban Massachusetts school that was shocked to "discover" through test results that they were a failure (who knows-- maybe this neighborhood was the home of Arne Duncan's storied white moms)

This is the narrative that helps maintain support for test-and-punish as education policy. But there are several problems with it.

First of all-- nobody is surprised by test results. No local school district in this country has ever, in the last decade-plus of NCLB and NCLB Jr., gotten test results back and said, "Holy smokes! We had no idea that this batch of students was doing poorly!!" Not once. The Big Standardized Tests have told us nothing we didn't know, unless it was that we occasionally discovered that some otherwise great students were lousy test takers.

Second of all-- and Casselman acknowledges this one-- test-and-punish was definitely not test-and-rescue or test-and-assist. NCLB told districts, "Hey, you have a problem right here. Good luck fixing it!" And where test-and-punish turned into test-and-send-students-off-to-charters, the message was "Fix your problems with fewer resources than you had when you got into them in the first place."

Casselman has read up on this-- he devotes a few paragraphs to the research showing that the penalties of NCLB made it harder for schools to get better. Economist-researcher Jacob Vigdor compared the ever-ratcheting punishments to yelling at a failing kid: "You might succeed in scaring the Dickens out of the kid, but you’re not going to help them pass algebra."

So, in other words, NCLB's "success" was to tell districts what they already knew and to offer punishment without assistance.

Casselman also wants to make a case for the "success" of transparent data.

But for all its failures, No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. The law may not have achieved the promise of its title, but it did force schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public. 

Well, the "collect and use" data is true-- schools now collect a bunch of test data that is useful for doing test prep so that we can collect more data. It's a change in the sense that professional baseball would be changed if, between each inning, one team dug holes on the field and then the other team filled them in. It's a waste of everybody's time, but boy are they busy Doing Something (and the shovel companies make a mint).

And no school in the country needed help finding out who was left behind, but then, that's not really the point, is it. It's the "make the information public," because test-and-punish also includes test-and-shame. Because a premise of both NCLB and NCLB 2.0 (Duncan-Obama) was always that schools are big fat lying liars who lie. And it would only be natural that Casselman would pick up that idea, because now many paragraphs in, we discover who one of his his "experts" is. CAP.

“There’s a very long history of states and school districts and schools essentially hiding behind the average performance of their students,” said Scott Sargrad, a former Education Department official in the Obama administration who is now a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “That masks really significant differences between kids who are more affluent, who are white, who don’t have disabilities, whatever it is, and their peers who are more disadvantaged.”

What a swell quote. First, of districts were "hiding," one might ask what they were hiding from and why (I'm going with "dumb, punitive federal and state policies that get in the way of doing the actual work of educating students"). Second, please notice that even this CAP tool doesn't talk about this in terms of achievement or education or learning or skill and ability levels, but in terms of affluence, race and disabilities. Even he doesn't think that test-and-punish has an educational purpose or reveal educational results. Testing is all about race and class, and nothing about actual education. Which evokes a hilarious scene in a district office somewhere with administrators poring over test results and exclaiming, "Hey, I think some of these kids might be poor-- in fact, I think some of them are poor and black! man, I'm glad we got these test results so we could figure this out."

Ultimately, Casselman is left with "we handle data differently" and that, by the end of the article, is whittled down to "we can track individual student data year to year" (not everyone's idea of a Good Thing) and "we use specific figures instead of averages." I'm pretty sure we could have moved away from averages on our government reports without up-ending the entire education system with untested, unproven educational malpractice baloney. If that's the best we can offer, I think we can keep right on saying that No Child Left Behind was a complete and utter failure.

Fired for Competence

You may have heard this story already. You're going to hear it again, and you should. And that's the point. Because one of the things we need to understand about the world is that it includes people who do bad things for stupid reasons.

Jeena Lee-Walker is bringing a lawsuit in federal court because, she says, she was fired from her job teaching English in an Upper West Side high school for teaching a unit that administrators feared would "rile up" students.

Lee-Walker's unit was about the Central Park Five case,a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice. If you've forgotten the 1989 case, it began with the savage assault and rape of a 28-year-old investment banker in Central Park on a night during which widespread attacks were occurring throughout the park. The police pinned it on a group of five juveniles, whose confessions were taken under circumstances less-than-consistent with any kind of proper procedure. Their stories did not match and there was no physical evidence to tie them to the assault, but they were none of them exactly model citizens, and so they were convicted, serving from six to thirteen years for the crime. Then, in 2002, a career rapist already in prison confessed to the attack. DNA evidence, physical evidence, his account of the attack-- they all confirmed the confession. Oh, and he declared that he had acted alone. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated. In 2003, they sued the city for malicious prosecution, but the city under Mayor Bloomberg refused to settle, and in fact still had not settled in 2013, when Lee-Walker was teaching her unit. That settlement didn't happen until 2014, under Mayor de Blasio.

Lee-Walker says her bosses were concerned that her unit was not balanced enough. I am not sure how one works balance into an account of these events. The most common defense of the wrongful conviction is that the Five were all Bad Actors, but the "Well, I'm Sure They Were Guilty of Something" approach to criminal justice is just, well, stupid and wrong. The response to a crime, even one as awful as this (and it was a truly brutal assault), is not to round up some bad actor Black and Hispanic kids and call it a day. There is no legal principle of "If you commit a crime of any sort, you are thereafter criminally liable for all crimes that occur in your general vicinity." I don't know what kind of balance you bring to a study of this event, or what Lee-Walker's bosses felt she was missing. And in all fairness, at this point we have only heard her side, so maybe she was depicting police as evil demons who ate babies while interrogating the Five. But that wouldn't be a problem with balance so much as with accuracy.

But as Lee-Walker says, "The facts are the facts." She refers to "the documentary" which I'm guessing is the film by Ken Burns, a film-maker not exactly known for his slipshod ways or sensationalizing style. In other words, Lee-Walker didn't just pull this unit out of her butt, but leaned on the work of respected sources.

The court documents indicate she was fired for "insubordination" which generally means "we ordered you to do X and you said no," and that ended a six-year teaching career.

Lee-Walker allows that some of her Black students became riled up, and all I can say is Good For Them. I wish students would become riled up more often, particularly when confronting the notion that injustice still rears its head in the world on a regular basis. American history is filled with things that people ought to get riled up about. Getting riled up is the first step toward learning more and coming to some understanding of why the injustice occurs, and that, with luck and effort, leads to actually doing something effective about the problem.

Of course, that involves connecting students to the real world, and education is filled with administrators who want to cut all connections between the classroom and the world, studying everything as a cloud-wrapped abstraction. It is one of our most self-defeating impulse in education-- and then we're surprised that our students don't see any relevant value in what we are trying to teahc them.

That's our job. A competent teacher connects the learning to the world, or the world to the learning, and this can and should include the business of getting riled up. We should be teaching students what to do when they get riled up about something. And we should be showing them things that are worth getting riled up about. Any time students are riled up-- that is a teachable moment.

So while I'm reluctant to wade into these stories where we've only heard one side, it's hard for me to imagine how Lee-Walker was doing anything but her job. She was teaching at the ironically-named High School for the Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, and I'm forced to wonder if that name isn't short for High School for Some of the Arts, A Bit of Imagination, and Just Enough Inquiry. There are so many lessons for young residents of New York City to learn from the story of the Central Park Five; it makes no sense to fire a teacher willing to approach them.

Metrics and Behaviorism

Mark Garrison is a helluva guy. He lists scholar, activist, evaluator and artist as his businesses, and lists two books and three albums among his achievements. He has clearly put a whole lot of thought into the current state of education policy, with a particular sharp eye for the problems of Trying To Measure Stuff. Garrison says many things I agree with, but he says it all smarter.

In "Metric Morality," Garrison addresses the issue of just what can be measured, and why the current educational measurements are doomed to fail. I love this stuff, because it cuts to why the whole concept of educational metrics is, as he puts it, "fraudulent."

"They confound properties of individuals, individual schools and individual school systems with the relations those individuals, individual schools and individual school systems have with their social contexts." In other words, they talk about qualities like "wetness" as being properties of the individual and not as they are related to whether one is standing inside, under an umbrella, or outside naked in a monsoon.

They "follow the long discredited practice of defining the object of measurement 'operationally'; that is, things and phenomena are defined by how they are 'measured'." Garrison's example is perfect-- the definition of "intelligence" is the ability to do well on an intelligence test. Yay, tautology.

They use the "flawed definition" of measurement which is the process of assigning numbers according to some rule. This, Garrison says, ties directly to the notion that everything that exists must exist in some amount. "This would mean, for example, that we accept the proposition that humans exist in their degree of human-ness. Some of us are more human than others. Thankfully, the testers will select the chosen ones!"

They confuse ranking with measurement. Garrison seems to attribute this to confusion; I'm inclined to think reformsters do it on purpose. As noted a gazzillion times-- the fact that a school falls in that fatal bottom 5% does not mean it's a bad school-- just that it is ranked below the other 95%. The best rock band in Uraguay may still be a lousy rock band. Rank is not measurement.

Also, cut scores are baloney, and nobody even pretends to understand what "validity" and "reliability" mean -- or used to mean-- in the testing world.

Garrison considers the way in which leaders like Elia of New York have equated allegiance to the testing regime with morality and ethic. He might as easily noted Pennsylvania, where our test administration instructions are called "Ethical Standards of Test Administration," as if our role in overseeing the holy test is one founded on ethical principles rather than compliance to power and money.

But this takes him right to our old buddy, behaviorism.

In "The Behaviorist Origin of Close Reading," Garrison travels back to the twenties and the roots of the original close reading. Garrison sides with the critics who assert that close reading founding father I. A. Richards was directly tied to the behaviorist work of John Watson.

Some of us were learning all about behaviorism in teacher school back in the seventies, but it's not a popular term these days, so we can talk about personalized learning and game-based learning without ever noting the similarity to a big, computerized Skinner box. And just as sure as TSWBAT means "the student will be able to display an observable behavior that will be the entire basis for measuring the educational results," behaviorism has made a comeback.

Common Core reading is all about observable skills, and what we cannot see or measure does not count. One of Garrison's very best lines is actually a subheading from this essay:

Behaviorism: Yearning for Skill Without Consciousness

Garrison explains the disregard for consciousness in behaviorism:

A key tenet is this: Behaviorists have in common disregard for or denial of human consciousness. Because consciousness is not something one “does”, it is not “observable”; its existence or importance is denied in favor of fixing attention on behavior itself. 

Or as David Coleman put it, "Nobody gives a shit what you think or feel." Or, he might have added, what you know. Just what you can do.

The behaviorists didn't much care for words like "consciousness" or "intent." They can't be seen or measured, and as I heard repeatedly in more than one college course, you don't need them to explain human behavior. Somewhere in my house, I still have my copy of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity(1971) in which Skinner makes the case that our devotion to these tired old notions of free will and individual moral agency are keeping us from using scientific techniques like operant conditioning to modify behavior so that we can have a happier and more orderly society. Skinner's idea was a form of determinism, the notion that human behavior was just a collection of behavioral tics created by conditioning, and with the proper conditioning, we could get people to have the proper tics.

"Skill" is a nice term for a particular tic, a tic that humans are trained to perform when given the appropriate stimulus.

So. Is any of this sounding familiar?

Close Reading, says Garrison, adopted much of the behaviorist creed. First, treat the text as a behavior. It is, in fact, a perfect example, since the page has no consciousness or intent, and we are instructed to deliberately ignore the author's intent. The reader's response is a reaction to the behavior-- the behavior that the behavior elicits. In this model, there is nothing to analyze (and certainly nothing to understand, since understanding is all about consciousness and intent and moral agency) except how exactly the behavior elicited the response. It's simply figuring out what about the hot stove made you holler and yank your hand away; there is nothing more to reading Shakespeare or Morrison than setting your hand on a stove and seeing what you do next.

As Garrison puts it:

For Richards, “all mental events — including literature — occur in the course of processes of adaptation somewhere between stimulus and response”. Thus we have the basis for a method that renders the skill of reading necessarily devoid of consciousness.

My friends and I were not fans of behaviorism in college. It has its initial charm-- the surprise of a simple and clear explanation for much messiness of human existence-- but it's just so dehumanizing, cold, and ethically empty. It certainly has its place; there is much human behavior that becomes more comprehensible through the behaviorist lens. Ultimately it's too inhuman and inhumane, while suffering from a serious "if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. I could never understand why behaviorists didn't just say, "We can explain some aspects of human behavior, but beyond certain points we don't have enough tools in our box." (And don't even get me started on Walden Two, Skinner's 1948 big middle finger to Thoreau and the very concept of a human soul).

Garrison has done a good job of illuminating the connection between bad metrics, bad behaviorism, and the hollow futility of some current reformster ideals. And he affirms what many folks had already figured out for themselves-- that much of the current reformster regime feels counter-intuitive and anti-human because it is.

Getting Low Income Students to College

The issue was raised again last summer in Hechinger's in a story that in turn called back to a book from 2014, so this is not a new issue. But as Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page noted in Summer Melt, we don't just have a problem getting low-income students to aspire to college or apply to college-- we have a problem getting them to show up once they're in.

Back in August, Meredith Kolodner wrote the piece "Why are low income students not showing up to college, even though they have been accepted?" but August is not the time to think about the problem because by August, it's too late.

Students are applying. Students are being accepted. And then, Castleman and Page report, 40% of the accepted students just don't show up at campus in the fall.

This is a problem.

Kolodner reports that financial issues are often a leading culprit. Financial issues can be more than simply not having the money. Navigating the FAFSA is hard. Figuring out the loan system is hard. For a first generation college student, college loans can add up to the biggest amount of money the family has borrowed ever, and that can be scary as hell.

Financial issues for poor families also include just about anything unexpected. An unanticipated medical bill is enough to trash a family's finances and make borrowing five figure amounts seem irresponsible.

And as often noted, many poor and first-time-college families just don't know how to navigate the bureaucratic highways and byways of attending college. Meeting deadlines, knowing what fees are necessary and which are optional, knowing what to expect-- these may all seem like second nature to families with a history and knowledge of higher education, but can leave other families as confused as a yacht club member at a NASCAR rally.

And that's just when things go as they should. Kolodner tells stories of students who get caught up in and frustrated by bureaucratic screw-ups. It takes institutional comfort to deal with these-- in other words, someone who's not used to dealing with this kind of screw-up might accidentally assume that the college admissions office or financial aid office or any other sort of college knows what it's doing all the time. More savvy and experienced parents will tell tales of having to repeatedly call and push and call again until some paperwork snafu is finally fixed. It is the kind of Kafka-esque nightmare that can be hugely irritating for some (the school my nephews attended had better never call my sister and ask for a contribution if they know what's good for them) but completely demoralizing for others. And low-income families that are used to being on the powerless end of the stick can be especially susceptible to just giving up.

Are there things we can do?

Kolodner reports that some colleges and universities have created coaching models and/or peer-to-peer network models that provide a native guide for low-income enrollees. That seems like a good idea, though even better would be work by those of us in high schools. It is easy as college-educated grown-ups who work with plenty of college-bound and college-savvy students and families to stop keeping an eye out for students who just don't know what to do or how to do it. Too much information about the process is framed in a "this makes sense if you already know it" manner.

Listening, watching, paying attention, asking-- we need to be doing all those things. It's January, and in the next month or two, there will be students sitting, looking in frustration at college applications they can't figure out and hearing announcements about things they don't understand. This is not because they're stupid, but because the Going To College culture is one they aren't familiar with. They are no more stupid for not knowing how to navigate the artifacts of college culture than my mother is stupid for not knowing the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap.

It starts today, because yesterday the e-mails went out for PSAT scores, which means that many students are now smack in the center of powerful marketing cross-hairs. This is the other challenge of prepping students for the college transition, one that Kolodner doesn't address-- the vast amount of information aimed at students is aimed at them by people with something to sell. It's like having consumers get all of their information about housing loans from companies that profit housing loans (and that's never ended badly).


It's not our job as high schools to just launch students in the general; direction of college by pulling the slingshot back and blindly letting it rip, then brushing off our hands and saying, "Well, we did our part." And it's definitely not useful to educate them in a no-excuses, follow-orders, keep -quiet-and-do-as-you're-told environment that gives them zero preparation for the independent college life they will have to navigate. We need to give them all the information and guidance, paired with strength and confidence, that we can to increase the odds that next fall, students who want and need to be on college campuses will be there.

Rules for Tools

Tom Vander Ark is as prolific as hell, so I have to admire his tenacity and energy, but every time I read his stuff, I'm driven to conclude that he's kind of a tool.

I don't intend to make a personal judgment-- for all I know, he's a delightful gentleman. But he often seems to achieve the near-perfect expression of the corporate tool approach to the education biz. This is unsurprising-- Vander Ark has been the executive director of education for the Gates Foundation, an education venture capitalist, and the head of a retail chain start-up.

If you want a taste of Vander Ark's corporate tool approach to education, you can check out his latest thoughts at Huffington Post-- "21 Things Education Leaders Should Do Right Now"

Well, actually, twenty-one things ed leaders should do in the next 180 days or so. Vander Ark has broken the Things into three groups of seven.

First Ninety Days

1. Make good first impressions. Visit every school.

2. Check out your leadership team. Get rid of anybody necessary in order to build a "high trust, high capacity team."

3. Hone your personal narrative. (Seriously-- this is how Vander Ark writes). "You'll have a hundred opportunities to share your story during your first ninety days," particularly if you don't waste time listening to people.

4. Open your political capital bank account and make initial deposits. He's talking about making political connections outside the school. You know-- with important people.

5. Create transparency and candor. Get people to talk about what's working or not. "Let the community experience you as a learner."

6. Put some heavy thinks into "a couple of symbolic acts that let the community know who you are and what you're about."

7. Signal priorities early while remaining open. "Address obvious inequities. Don't wait to harvest low hanging fruit."

But enough about me. Let's talk about me. Notice that this language is largely indistinguishable from instructions on how to launch yourself as the CEO of any corporation, This is one of the views that has been carried into the "education leader" world from the corporate world, where it has become usual to assert that a great CEO will be a great CEO whether he's in charge of an oil company, a toy company, or a soup company. Why not just add "school district" to the list of companies you can run? Expertise in the company's work is not needed-- an awesome EO can run anything.

Second Ninety Days

8. Build on "as much of the old stuff as possible." Assuming, I guess, that you have any ability to evaluate the old stuff. "Continuity counts."

9. Clarify roles and goals for staff members.

10. Hold community conversations. "Balance improvement and innovation."

11. Communicate "twice as much as you think you need to." Interesting idea here-- if "you're missing the empathy gene" get someone internal to "preview your messaging." I have other advice. If you're missing the empathy gene, get out of education.

12. Well, this is creepy. "Find and leverage teacher leaders" and "use management of strategic projects to reward and test emerging leaders."

13. Don't just use test scores to measure. "Measure what matters even if it's hard." No word on what to do if you have no clue how to measure it.

14. And when you're hit by "inevitable barrage of criticism., remember it's probably not about you, it's about the job." Hmmm, no. It's probably about you.

I always have the same reach ton to reading Vander Ark's stuff-- who talks like this with a straight face. When I worked for a mining machinery manufacturer manual production department, we used to create lampoon versions of corporate baloney-speak. They sounded a lot like Vander Ark.

Transformation

Now Vander Ark will give us seven quick steps for transforming a school or district.

1. Do a mindset check. Make sure you believe in a growth mindset. "If leaders want teachers and students to develop an innovation mindset, they should start by examining their own approach to the work." I can't help feeling that Vander Ark has substituted "students" for "engineer" or "worker" or "drone" or "meat widget" in some copy-and-pasted CEO training manual.

2. Share your next generation vision. This seems to mean "personalized learning," and Vander Ark offers Denver and Harlem Success Academy as exemplars.

3. Develop talent. Not human beings, apparently. Just talent. Also personalized learning. Badges!

Competency based! Micro-credentials! So, literally, develop some talents, and hire the right mat widgets to carry those talents around.

4. Plan for access. Blended learning! Digital conversions for every district! Get all meat widgets plugged into talent development stations.

5. Supported school models, because reasons. Fine new school models can be found by consulting New Schools Venture Fund and other capitalists who may not know a damn thing about schools and education, but they know all about moving money around  in useful ways. KA-ching!

6. Partnering for progress. "Schools can't do this work alone." Really? Because schools got us through most of the 20th century, including becoming an emerging world power and putting a man on the moon without having to call for help because we just couldn't hack it without a helpful corporate partner to further education by sucking Return on Investment out of schools.

7. Stick around! After Vander Ark transformed from CEO to superintendent (you can get a look at how disastrously and quickly that went right here), he acquired the phrase "served as public school superintendent" in all his bio material. Yet, that doesn't seem to have been a lifetime career move. How long does he mean? Well, "real equity producing progress takes time-- a broad web of leadership maintained over a decade." Wow! A whole decade!! So, a third of a regular teaching career. Suddenly I'm hugely impressed by the many people who have taught their entire adult lives in the same school.

So if it ever seems as if ed reform involves a bunch of aliens coming from some other planet to occupy our schools, just read some Tom Vander Ark-- it will help confirm that you are absolutely correct.