Here's one for the Has To Be Seen To Be Believed file, or perhaps the Ugly manhandling of English Language file, or most especially, the Why Regular People Don't Listen To Academics file.
The University of Texas is launching a... well, to be honest, I'm not sure. Some kind of MOOC. A newly tech-based instructional delivery system. Probably a version of Competency Based Education. But Marni Baker Stein, Chief Innovation Officer of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning, is at Inside Higher Ed to plug the... whatever it is.
The entry is entitled "The Future Is Now." Treasure that phrase, because it's the last thing in the piece that will make plain sense (and was probably written by the IHE editor and not Stein). Can we figure it out?
UT is onto something new, and they've launched an initiative to "envisage" new models of delivery for a college education. For the first couple of paragraphs, one can almost make out some sense in the fog, some notion that a new workplace calls for new modes of preparation, and the UT campuses have been working on this in conjunction with certain disciplines and programs. But then we hit this...
These experimental sites disaggregate the post-secondary pathway as we know it into scalable and affordable verticals of connected educational experiences that can begin in high school and persist throughout a lifetime. In order to drive exponential increases in student engagement, retention and post-program success, our future models reinvent every facet of the learning experience, from the way that curricula and educational experiences are designed, developed, and delivered, to the services that support students along their educational journey, to how student learning is monitored and assessed.
You know, there's nothing I like better than a scalable and affordable vertical, though now that I think about it, that could also refer to an inexpensive rock-climbing wall at a gym, so maybe there are things I like better. But boy-- little old UT is going to reinvent every single part of the education process. How smart are they!?
What are some of the features of this Brave New Exponentially Disaggregated Cosmos of Educational Implementational Experientation?
Outcome focused. Well, you knew that was coming. And that outcomes focus will be, um, based on, um, "on the definition of the graph or scaffold of assessable outcomes that underlies each programming trajectory."
These graphs are complex and dynamic, often sketching out hundreds of outcomes across multiple levels of competency, and serve as the master blueprint over which we can then trace (and over time as the field evolves re-trace) the outlines of flexible program “packages” including foundational instruction, stand-alone modules, micro-certificates, stackable credentials, and degrees.
An atomic approach to design. This, sadly, will not involve plutonium or nuclear power plants. Instead, "atomic" refers to the high level of granularity in the pathway. Because the units will be extremely granular, they can be extremely personalized. Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.
The approach also allows for more efficient management, updating, and expansion of learning experiences as we analyze object-specific impacts on student behavior or performance and as the targeted learning outcomes graph continues to evolve.
Commitment to high-impact pedagogies.
High impact pedagogies such as problem-, project-, and team-based learning underlie the better part of instruction across every learning experience, presenting students with authentic assessments and driving challenges that need to be actively investigated and that are social by design.
I am beginning to suspect that we have moved beyond buzzword bingo and are in some sort of dimension of jargon-infused slam poetry, a world where Sarah Palin actually finished a college education but only learned the words.
A focus on personalization and gamification. Oh, hey! This part makes sense, and is the worse for it. "As learners make progress toward short-term and long-term goals, they earn points and are credited for a wide range of academic, co-curricular, and professional accomplishments." So, your education will be a video game which you will keep paying until you level up into a degree of some sort.
A persistent progressive profile that builds a universal transcript. This will go on your permanent record, young man. And when we say permanent, we mean permanent.
A next generation digital learning platform. Good gravy. The sun will come out tomorrow. Stop talking about next-generation software because if you actually had it, if you could actually do all the things you say you want to do, it would be THIS-generation stuff. "Next-generation" means "available only in my dreams." Which is useless. Oh, but they have it-- and it has a cute name.
Among TEx’s distinctive features is its ability to collect and integrate data from a variety of silos (including the Student Information System, Learning Management System, content services, and a broad array of learning and assessment applications) that offer real-time actionable insights into student pace, engagement, persistence, and performance, as well as measures of self-efficacy. This infrastructure empowers faculty and staff to provide high-touch services to those students most in need of encouragement and to personalize support and instructional development efforts as never before possible.
Software that can measure "self-efficacy"!! And it will offer real-time actionables (unlike say, a next-generation software platform which would, by definition, be offering tomorrow-time hope-to-actionables). And I have't told you the best part-- this will be a mobile app!! That's right-- play your UT Bachelor's Videogame on your phone! Is that cool, or what!?
A commitment to research. And that appears to be the most creative way to say, "While you are playing your TEx Earn-a-Bachelor's videogame, we will be data-mining the living daylights out of you. Why, in TEx's first season, it collected over two million data events. I was invited to a data event once, but I wasn't sure what to wear. I had to settle for the data after-party.
This data collection will involve many partners. "This is a strategy that rests on strong partnerships between campuses and the university system, between the System and best-in-breed application developers and analytics service providers, and between solver teams of faculty and curriculum and instructional designers, educational technologies, assessment specialists, and data scientists. " I cannot wait to find out how solver-teams are chosen, though I imagine it must be hard to be the kid who gets chosen last for a solver team. Probably makes you want to just sit in the corner and play TEx games on your phone.
At the end, Stein allows herself to get a little verklempt and personal:
The work is fascinating, complex, and rife with both opportunities and challenges.
Well, it is certainly rife with something. I've been concerned what will be coming down the pike marketed as personalized, digitized learning, but if this is how they're going to sell it, I'm less concerned, because this is more likely to induce giggles than fear. An e-mail sitting here tells me that UT is offering all manner of MEd's on-line; maybe this is part of that, in which case heaven help the teacher who has to get through it with a straight face.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Monday, January 25, 2016
Vouchers: Why Do Conservatives Love 'Em?
If the plaintiffs in Friedrichs vs. California Teachers (or the people for whom they're sock puppeting) don't like paying union fees (they already don't have to pay dues) because the union will spend their money on activities with which they do not agree, boy, they would really hate school vouchers.
The rhetoric of pro-voucher folks (who at this point are the most long-twitching of the various undead unsuccessful reformster species) is to frame the decision about those tax dollars in a very specific way. "These tax dollars belong to the students and their families, not the bureaucracy of government schools" or some equivalent is the usual construction. This money belongs to the deserving child, not the money-grubbing public school system. It's a clear choice. And it's a false choice.
The tax dollars associated with public schools belong to neither the child nor the school system.
Those tax dollars belong to the tax payers.
The foundation of public education is pretty simple. "Hey," said the members of various communities. "Let's put some money together and get the kids an education, because if they grow up stupid, we'll have to live with and depend on a bunch of stupid adults, and that seems like a bad idea."
Oh, "and we'll elect some of us to keep an eye on the school and the money we pooled to run it."
In fact, one the weird things about voucher-choice systems pushed by conservatives is how very un-conservative these concepts are.
Those communities did not say, "Let's collect a bunch of money, give it to the parents, and they can spend it on their kids however they like." That would be another entitlement, and conservatives are not huge fans of the E word. In fact, conservatives have been pretty vocally unfriendly to the idea of "free" college for any who want to attend, because it would just be another entitlement by which students would feel entitled to attend college paid for by tax dollars ripped from the public's wallets.
But how is a voucher-choice system anything other than an entitlement for children to attend private school with tax dollars ripped from public wallets?
Conservatives also dislike it when publicly funded universities use public tax dollars to pay professors who say things with which some conservative taxpayers deeply disagree. How is a voucher-choice system any different-- particularly in a place like Ohio where I can set up a charter based in Sharia Law or White Supremacy or Flat Earth Cosmology?
Because one thing is certain under a voucher-choice system-- taxpayers without school age children have no voice in how education is managed in their community. Yes, public schools can make choices that the taxpayers hate-- and then the taxpayers can come tell the elected school board how much they hate those choices, and the taxpayers can replace the board members with more amenable ones. In a voucher-choice system, if you have no child, you have no voice.
Conservative support for vouchers continues to mystify me. It's a new entitlement. It's taxation without representation. It's also expensive-- because as the public system loses money through vouchers, they have no choice but to raise taxes. Okay, that's not entirely true-- a community with a large majority of childless taxpayers could elect a board that gives everybody a huge tax cut and tells the voucherfied system, "Screw you. Go find the money for schools somewhere else." And then the system would either collapse or need a government bailout.
So tell me again why conservatives love vouchers and choice?
The rhetoric of pro-voucher folks (who at this point are the most long-twitching of the various undead unsuccessful reformster species) is to frame the decision about those tax dollars in a very specific way. "These tax dollars belong to the students and their families, not the bureaucracy of government schools" or some equivalent is the usual construction. This money belongs to the deserving child, not the money-grubbing public school system. It's a clear choice. And it's a false choice.
The tax dollars associated with public schools belong to neither the child nor the school system.
Those tax dollars belong to the tax payers.
The foundation of public education is pretty simple. "Hey," said the members of various communities. "Let's put some money together and get the kids an education, because if they grow up stupid, we'll have to live with and depend on a bunch of stupid adults, and that seems like a bad idea."
Oh, "and we'll elect some of us to keep an eye on the school and the money we pooled to run it."
In fact, one the weird things about voucher-choice systems pushed by conservatives is how very un-conservative these concepts are.
Those communities did not say, "Let's collect a bunch of money, give it to the parents, and they can spend it on their kids however they like." That would be another entitlement, and conservatives are not huge fans of the E word. In fact, conservatives have been pretty vocally unfriendly to the idea of "free" college for any who want to attend, because it would just be another entitlement by which students would feel entitled to attend college paid for by tax dollars ripped from the public's wallets.
But how is a voucher-choice system anything other than an entitlement for children to attend private school with tax dollars ripped from public wallets?
Conservatives also dislike it when publicly funded universities use public tax dollars to pay professors who say things with which some conservative taxpayers deeply disagree. How is a voucher-choice system any different-- particularly in a place like Ohio where I can set up a charter based in Sharia Law or White Supremacy or Flat Earth Cosmology?
Because one thing is certain under a voucher-choice system-- taxpayers without school age children have no voice in how education is managed in their community. Yes, public schools can make choices that the taxpayers hate-- and then the taxpayers can come tell the elected school board how much they hate those choices, and the taxpayers can replace the board members with more amenable ones. In a voucher-choice system, if you have no child, you have no voice.
Conservative support for vouchers continues to mystify me. It's a new entitlement. It's taxation without representation. It's also expensive-- because as the public system loses money through vouchers, they have no choice but to raise taxes. Okay, that's not entirely true-- a community with a large majority of childless taxpayers could elect a board that gives everybody a huge tax cut and tells the voucherfied system, "Screw you. Go find the money for schools somewhere else." And then the system would either collapse or need a government bailout.
So tell me again why conservatives love vouchers and choice?
Counting on Superman
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist... I was like what do you mean he's not real. And she thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real and I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.
-- Geoffrey Canada (Harlem Children's Zone)
That's the quote used to set up the 2010 edu-propa-mentary film Waiting for Superman. Like many parts of the education reform movement, it's an inspired piece of misdirection, because reformsters have not only been waiting for Superman-- they've been counting on him.
The Flint and Detroit school disasters have focused national attention on Michigan's emergency manager law. That law has been percolating in Michigan for years, heated up by the folks at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy , a right-wing thinky tank that loves the idea of privatizing government and which has been funded by the usual suspects (Koch, Walton, DeVos). They started pushing for a new, powerful Czar-ship in 2005 and finally sold it in 2012 (You can read a more detailed account of the rise of the Emergency Manager in Michigan in this piece.) The adoption of the law was contentious, but the leaders of Michigan were determined that Superman would come, and when he came, they would be ready.
Because the emergency manager model doesn't just believe that Superman is coming-- it depends on it. Superman is coming, and we must prepare a place for him.
The emergency management system we see in Michigan is just one way of expressing the Superman Theory of Change-- there are Supermen among us, and they could save the lesser beings, if only we stopped holding them back. Superman could bring us excellence, but the enemy of excellence is bureaucracy and regulation and rules and, most of all, democracy.
Counting on Superman has led to a variety of initiatives. The various attempts to break tenure (like Vergara and Reed before it) have come from the belief that when Superman takes over a school district, he must (like a CEO) be free to hire and fire based on what he alone can see with his super vision. (And schools would work so much better if every classroom was taught by another Superman).
The need to break unions is part of the same trend. Unions tie Superman down, forcing him to follow a bunch of stupid rules every time he wants to strap on his cape and take to the skies.
Likewise, government regulations get in Superman's way, keeping him earthbound in a web of red tape. For a Superman believer like Jeb! Bush, it makes perfect sense to say that Flint's crisis was caused by too much regulation-- if the Supermen who emergency manage Flint and Detroit hadn't had to deal with local and federal authorities at all, they would have avoided this whole mess.
Superman also needs to be un-hampered by "politics." Reed Hastings (Netflix) famously supported the idea of doing away with elected school boards entirely, because they are too unstable, too susceptible to the will and whims of the public. This distaste for politics gives, in hindsight, a new understanding to the common complaint from reformsters a few years ago, who kept bemoaning how ed reform ideas like Common Core were being tripped up by "politics," meaning, we can now see, that people were trying to keep Superman from exerting his full powers.
Hastings saw a solution, and he wasn't the only one, in the steady replacement of public schools and their kryptonite mountains of rules and unions and regulations and democracy-- replacing all that with charter schools which are, after all, simply schools run by Superman as a permanent emergency manager from Day One. You can see it on Eva Moskowitz's bemused face every time someone tries to argue with her- "Why are you questioning me? Do you not see that I am Superman, come to save the less fortunate? Nobody tells me what to do."
Superman will save our schools. Well, not all our schools. The Ubermensch is most needed where the cities and schools are filled with Those People, those Lesser Humans who can't be trusted to vote properly, act properly, learn properly, and certainly not to chart their own course properly. No, it is Superman's burden to rescue those lesser beings.
Of course, those lesser beings are rarely found in rich communities. No, it's the poor, the brown, the black that need to be rescued by Superman, and anybody who stands in Superman's way is a racist on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, which is, apparently, that poor black and brown people deserve the opportunity to be rescued by Superman. Of course Those People should be silently grateful that Superman will choose for them what choices they are desperately in need of, which often includes training in how to be properly compliant, how to be happy in their proper place.
So across the country, some are not just waiting for Superman, but counting on him. Banking on him. Michigan needs Superman to come run many of its cities ( particularly the mostly-black ones). States across the nation need Superman to come run their school districts (particularly the mostly not white ones). Superman somehow knows the secret of running a city. Superman somehow knows the secret of educating children.
Some folks, folks who have been paying attention, have seen this coming for a while. The old emergency manager model was like a nurse, a FEMA or Red Cross coming to town to help stem the tide of disaster until folks could get back on their feet. But the new emergency managers are here to deal with the crisis that never ends because the Crisis is democratic local control. The crisis is that The Wrong People are in charge. We can work the problem slowly by setting obstacles to keep The Wrong People from voting, but it's even easier in a city like Detroit or a school district like Philadelphia to simply remove the need to vote, to strip democratically elected officials of any actual power.
Peoples' willingness to go along with this is at times frightening. What is the Friedrich case except a group of teachers saying, "We really ought to know our place and stop tugging on Superman's cape." And what kind of dark road have we traveled down to find so many people who think that Donald Trump is the ubermensch who will Save America (from all those non-white Those People) ?
There are people who believe that Superman really will come to actually save us, that he will do Really Good Things and therefor it's okay to prepare his throne. We give up democracy for nothing but the very best reasons. Scratch an NEA or AFT leader and I believe you'll find a sincere argument about why the union must back Clinton no matter what union members think they want. Scratch some reformsters and you will find a sincere argument about how some of the poor and downtrodden really must be saved by Superman.
And some of the crisis are real (and some have been manufactured-- but are still real). Detroit was no sunny paradise before an emergency manager was installed. Democracy can indeed be twisted to create unjust, unfair, oppressive outcomes. Democracy is not magical.
But here's the thing. Democracy may not be perfect. But Superman is not real.
The Superman plan is no plan. The Superman plan is, "We have a bunch of problems and challenges, so we will install Superman as an emergency manager of the city or the school district, or we will build a school district from scratch with Superman as the CEO, or bring Superman into a turnaround school, and Superman will just fix all the problems. That's our plan!" That's not a plan.
Look at the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) slide show about Detroit schools. GLEP is a charter-favoring group started up by Dick and Betsy DeVos (Amway billionaires), and they are currently pushing for Detroit Public Schools to just be shut down. The slides collect a litany of DPS wrongdoing, screw-ups and failures, and it's a pretty horrifying litany. But at the end of this long list of DPS inadequacies, the "plan" is "close down DPS and replace it with a bunch of charters, so Superman can come save the children, somehow." That's not a plan, but it's not the first time a similar proposal has been made in this country.
Superman is not real. Superman is not waiting out there with deep, complete knowledge of how to make a school or a city successful and healthy in a single bound. I know this because if a Superman with such knowledge existed, we would have heard about him or her, and that ubermensch would be famous, and probably rich. Not only that, a real Superman with real answers would be convincing millions of people to follow those answers.
Superman is not real, but democracy is. The genius of this country has never been a single superbeing who provided the answer for an entire system or city or even corporation. There may have been people who were the face of a system or city or corporation, but they had an army of collaborators behind them, every single time. Superman comes equipped with powers bestowed at birth which he then proceeds to use as he best sees fit, but our nation's genius is to understand that the powers belong to the people, that government is created by the people, deriving its powers "from the consent of the governed." And, of course, there's that all people are created equal thing.
The people counting on Superman don't believe in democracy because they don't believe in equality. In their model of the universe, some people are just better than others. Some people should be in charge, and some people should not have a say. Some of the people who believe in Betterocracy or Rule by Superman are clearly evil and amoral, believing that it's okay to bilk those Lesser People for every penny ("If they didn't want to be treated like crap, they shouldn't have chosen to be poor.") Some Bettercrats are not destructive thieves; they feel an obligation to look out for the Lesser People, to provide those Lessers with what Superman decides they should have. These Bettercrats may even occasionally lessen the suffering in the world. But at the end of the day, they still believe that they are better than the poor and downtrodden, that they know best, that they are right to substitute their own voices and judgment for the voice and judgment of the people they take care of.
Because, after all, if Superman can come save the day, if Superman can replace mere mortal judgment with his own, if Superman can be given the freedom and power to take run a corporation or a school or an entire city, what better system could we have? Why simply wait for Superman when we can plow the road for him, remove the obstacles, silence the opponents (and for that matter the allies or beneficiaries) that might get in his way? Whether he has "emergency manager" on a business card or a big S on his chest, Superman will save the day.
They are counting on it.
-- Geoffrey Canada (Harlem Children's Zone)
That's the quote used to set up the 2010 edu-propa-mentary film Waiting for Superman. Like many parts of the education reform movement, it's an inspired piece of misdirection, because reformsters have not only been waiting for Superman-- they've been counting on him.
The Flint and Detroit school disasters have focused national attention on Michigan's emergency manager law. That law has been percolating in Michigan for years, heated up by the folks at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy , a right-wing thinky tank that loves the idea of privatizing government and which has been funded by the usual suspects (Koch, Walton, DeVos). They started pushing for a new, powerful Czar-ship in 2005 and finally sold it in 2012 (You can read a more detailed account of the rise of the Emergency Manager in Michigan in this piece.) The adoption of the law was contentious, but the leaders of Michigan were determined that Superman would come, and when he came, they would be ready.
Because the emergency manager model doesn't just believe that Superman is coming-- it depends on it. Superman is coming, and we must prepare a place for him.
The emergency management system we see in Michigan is just one way of expressing the Superman Theory of Change-- there are Supermen among us, and they could save the lesser beings, if only we stopped holding them back. Superman could bring us excellence, but the enemy of excellence is bureaucracy and regulation and rules and, most of all, democracy.
Counting on Superman has led to a variety of initiatives. The various attempts to break tenure (like Vergara and Reed before it) have come from the belief that when Superman takes over a school district, he must (like a CEO) be free to hire and fire based on what he alone can see with his super vision. (And schools would work so much better if every classroom was taught by another Superman).
The need to break unions is part of the same trend. Unions tie Superman down, forcing him to follow a bunch of stupid rules every time he wants to strap on his cape and take to the skies.
Likewise, government regulations get in Superman's way, keeping him earthbound in a web of red tape. For a Superman believer like Jeb! Bush, it makes perfect sense to say that Flint's crisis was caused by too much regulation-- if the Supermen who emergency manage Flint and Detroit hadn't had to deal with local and federal authorities at all, they would have avoided this whole mess.
Superman also needs to be un-hampered by "politics." Reed Hastings (Netflix) famously supported the idea of doing away with elected school boards entirely, because they are too unstable, too susceptible to the will and whims of the public. This distaste for politics gives, in hindsight, a new understanding to the common complaint from reformsters a few years ago, who kept bemoaning how ed reform ideas like Common Core were being tripped up by "politics," meaning, we can now see, that people were trying to keep Superman from exerting his full powers.
Hastings saw a solution, and he wasn't the only one, in the steady replacement of public schools and their kryptonite mountains of rules and unions and regulations and democracy-- replacing all that with charter schools which are, after all, simply schools run by Superman as a permanent emergency manager from Day One. You can see it on Eva Moskowitz's bemused face every time someone tries to argue with her- "Why are you questioning me? Do you not see that I am Superman, come to save the less fortunate? Nobody tells me what to do."
Superman will save our schools. Well, not all our schools. The Ubermensch is most needed where the cities and schools are filled with Those People, those Lesser Humans who can't be trusted to vote properly, act properly, learn properly, and certainly not to chart their own course properly. No, it is Superman's burden to rescue those lesser beings.
Of course, those lesser beings are rarely found in rich communities. No, it's the poor, the brown, the black that need to be rescued by Superman, and anybody who stands in Superman's way is a racist on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, which is, apparently, that poor black and brown people deserve the opportunity to be rescued by Superman. Of course Those People should be silently grateful that Superman will choose for them what choices they are desperately in need of, which often includes training in how to be properly compliant, how to be happy in their proper place.
So across the country, some are not just waiting for Superman, but counting on him. Banking on him. Michigan needs Superman to come run many of its cities ( particularly the mostly-black ones). States across the nation need Superman to come run their school districts (particularly the mostly not white ones). Superman somehow knows the secret of running a city. Superman somehow knows the secret of educating children.
Some folks, folks who have been paying attention, have seen this coming for a while. The old emergency manager model was like a nurse, a FEMA or Red Cross coming to town to help stem the tide of disaster until folks could get back on their feet. But the new emergency managers are here to deal with the crisis that never ends because the Crisis is democratic local control. The crisis is that The Wrong People are in charge. We can work the problem slowly by setting obstacles to keep The Wrong People from voting, but it's even easier in a city like Detroit or a school district like Philadelphia to simply remove the need to vote, to strip democratically elected officials of any actual power.
Peoples' willingness to go along with this is at times frightening. What is the Friedrich case except a group of teachers saying, "We really ought to know our place and stop tugging on Superman's cape." And what kind of dark road have we traveled down to find so many people who think that Donald Trump is the ubermensch who will Save America (from all those non-white Those People) ?
There are people who believe that Superman really will come to actually save us, that he will do Really Good Things and therefor it's okay to prepare his throne. We give up democracy for nothing but the very best reasons. Scratch an NEA or AFT leader and I believe you'll find a sincere argument about why the union must back Clinton no matter what union members think they want. Scratch some reformsters and you will find a sincere argument about how some of the poor and downtrodden really must be saved by Superman.
And some of the crisis are real (and some have been manufactured-- but are still real). Detroit was no sunny paradise before an emergency manager was installed. Democracy can indeed be twisted to create unjust, unfair, oppressive outcomes. Democracy is not magical.
But here's the thing. Democracy may not be perfect. But Superman is not real.
The Superman plan is no plan. The Superman plan is, "We have a bunch of problems and challenges, so we will install Superman as an emergency manager of the city or the school district, or we will build a school district from scratch with Superman as the CEO, or bring Superman into a turnaround school, and Superman will just fix all the problems. That's our plan!" That's not a plan.
Look at the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) slide show about Detroit schools. GLEP is a charter-favoring group started up by Dick and Betsy DeVos (Amway billionaires), and they are currently pushing for Detroit Public Schools to just be shut down. The slides collect a litany of DPS wrongdoing, screw-ups and failures, and it's a pretty horrifying litany. But at the end of this long list of DPS inadequacies, the "plan" is "close down DPS and replace it with a bunch of charters, so Superman can come save the children, somehow." That's not a plan, but it's not the first time a similar proposal has been made in this country.
Superman is not real. Superman is not waiting out there with deep, complete knowledge of how to make a school or a city successful and healthy in a single bound. I know this because if a Superman with such knowledge existed, we would have heard about him or her, and that ubermensch would be famous, and probably rich. Not only that, a real Superman with real answers would be convincing millions of people to follow those answers.
Superman is not real, but democracy is. The genius of this country has never been a single superbeing who provided the answer for an entire system or city or even corporation. There may have been people who were the face of a system or city or corporation, but they had an army of collaborators behind them, every single time. Superman comes equipped with powers bestowed at birth which he then proceeds to use as he best sees fit, but our nation's genius is to understand that the powers belong to the people, that government is created by the people, deriving its powers "from the consent of the governed." And, of course, there's that all people are created equal thing.
The people counting on Superman don't believe in democracy because they don't believe in equality. In their model of the universe, some people are just better than others. Some people should be in charge, and some people should not have a say. Some of the people who believe in Betterocracy or Rule by Superman are clearly evil and amoral, believing that it's okay to bilk those Lesser People for every penny ("If they didn't want to be treated like crap, they shouldn't have chosen to be poor.") Some Bettercrats are not destructive thieves; they feel an obligation to look out for the Lesser People, to provide those Lessers with what Superman decides they should have. These Bettercrats may even occasionally lessen the suffering in the world. But at the end of the day, they still believe that they are better than the poor and downtrodden, that they know best, that they are right to substitute their own voices and judgment for the voice and judgment of the people they take care of.
Because, after all, if Superman can come save the day, if Superman can replace mere mortal judgment with his own, if Superman can be given the freedom and power to take run a corporation or a school or an entire city, what better system could we have? Why simply wait for Superman when we can plow the road for him, remove the obstacles, silence the opponents (and for that matter the allies or beneficiaries) that might get in his way? Whether he has "emergency manager" on a business card or a big S on his chest, Superman will save the day.
They are counting on it.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Transactions and Transformations
My wife is taking a professional development course this weekend, and one of her classmates (a football coach) brought up one the truly genius models of distinguishing between types of coaching. If you're active in the world of coaching, you may know these terms, but for the rest of us, let's talk about transactional and transformational coaching.
The transactional coach is trying to make a deal. The athlete has a skill, a power, a strength that the coach needs to win games, so the coach works hard to get that game-winning something out of the athlete. The work between athlete and coach is about developing a particular skill out of the athlete with the goal of wining. If the athlete loses the ability to produce, then the coach no longer needs the athlete, discards the athlete, replaces the athlete, moves on. If the athlete has no ability to produce, that athlete can ride the bench or just get off the team. If the athlete can't help get a W, the athlete is of no use to the transactional coach. For the transactional coach, the athlete is like a vending machine-- you put in money (time, attention) and out comes a treat (victory).
The transformational coach has a broader view. The transformational coach is there to transform the entire athlete, or as one site puts it "by giving individual consideration to all aspects of an athlete’s performance - skills and techniques, motivation and behavior, work ethic and sportsmanship - the transformational coach has the ability to positively affect, and to positively produce, the optimal sports performance of the entire team." The transformational coach looks to transform every athlete on the team (even those who cannot help get the W or have no future in athletics) into their best selves, to build up their strengths and overcome their weaknesses, and in the process teach them how to be their best selves not just in the midst of the contest, but in the larger world.
The transactional coach only needs to check the wins-losses numbers. The transformational coach looks at what kind of people the athletes are when they emerge from the program. For that same reason, it's very easy for a transactional coach to measure "success" with a clear, simple metric, while for the transformational coach, it's much harder to reduce "success" to a quick number.
And yet, most parents want their child to have a transformational coach, and most arguments about the value of athletics-- how it develops character, teaches life skills, strengthens athletes as people-- rest on the presence of a transformational coach.
The terminology was borrowed from the business world, and it transfers nicely to the classroom as well. Most of us went into teaching precisely because we imagined becoming transformational teachers, making a difference in students' lives by helping them become their best selves, helping them transform themselves into more fully whole and human persons.
But advocates of education reform have, intentionally or not, worked to redefine teachers as transactional coaches. We are supposed to be there just to get that good test score out of each kid. We should use test prep, rewards, threats-- whatever works to get the student to make the right marks on the Big Standardized Test so that we can have that easily measured, numerically-coded win. Charter schools have the additional freedom to sort students based on which ones can best complete the transaction and which ones need to be benched. And since the transaction is a fairly simple, we have no shortage of ideas about how to have it broken into short, simple competency-based transactions that can be handled by a computer.
Transactional coaching is simple, clear and can provide distinct short-term rewards. It is also narrow, shallow, and ultimately subordinates humanity and the value of individuals to an artificial and ultimately meaningless excuse for a life purpose. Transformational coaching is way to see the pursuit of athletic excellence as a means of pursuing human excellence and giving an athlete the tools to pursue whatever goals they might set for themselves. A transformational approach puts humanity at the center, setting goals that recognize higher values than the simple pursuits in front of us. A transactional approach sets up an artificial goal and holds it up as a god to be worshipped and pursued at the expense of any human beings who stand in the way. Can there be any doubt that education should be transformational?
The transactional coach is trying to make a deal. The athlete has a skill, a power, a strength that the coach needs to win games, so the coach works hard to get that game-winning something out of the athlete. The work between athlete and coach is about developing a particular skill out of the athlete with the goal of wining. If the athlete loses the ability to produce, then the coach no longer needs the athlete, discards the athlete, replaces the athlete, moves on. If the athlete has no ability to produce, that athlete can ride the bench or just get off the team. If the athlete can't help get a W, the athlete is of no use to the transactional coach. For the transactional coach, the athlete is like a vending machine-- you put in money (time, attention) and out comes a treat (victory).
The transformational coach has a broader view. The transformational coach is there to transform the entire athlete, or as one site puts it "by giving individual consideration to all aspects of an athlete’s performance - skills and techniques, motivation and behavior, work ethic and sportsmanship - the transformational coach has the ability to positively affect, and to positively produce, the optimal sports performance of the entire team." The transformational coach looks to transform every athlete on the team (even those who cannot help get the W or have no future in athletics) into their best selves, to build up their strengths and overcome their weaknesses, and in the process teach them how to be their best selves not just in the midst of the contest, but in the larger world.
The transactional coach only needs to check the wins-losses numbers. The transformational coach looks at what kind of people the athletes are when they emerge from the program. For that same reason, it's very easy for a transactional coach to measure "success" with a clear, simple metric, while for the transformational coach, it's much harder to reduce "success" to a quick number.
And yet, most parents want their child to have a transformational coach, and most arguments about the value of athletics-- how it develops character, teaches life skills, strengthens athletes as people-- rest on the presence of a transformational coach.
The terminology was borrowed from the business world, and it transfers nicely to the classroom as well. Most of us went into teaching precisely because we imagined becoming transformational teachers, making a difference in students' lives by helping them become their best selves, helping them transform themselves into more fully whole and human persons.
But advocates of education reform have, intentionally or not, worked to redefine teachers as transactional coaches. We are supposed to be there just to get that good test score out of each kid. We should use test prep, rewards, threats-- whatever works to get the student to make the right marks on the Big Standardized Test so that we can have that easily measured, numerically-coded win. Charter schools have the additional freedom to sort students based on which ones can best complete the transaction and which ones need to be benched. And since the transaction is a fairly simple, we have no shortage of ideas about how to have it broken into short, simple competency-based transactions that can be handled by a computer.
Transactional coaching is simple, clear and can provide distinct short-term rewards. It is also narrow, shallow, and ultimately subordinates humanity and the value of individuals to an artificial and ultimately meaningless excuse for a life purpose. Transformational coaching is way to see the pursuit of athletic excellence as a means of pursuing human excellence and giving an athlete the tools to pursue whatever goals they might set for themselves. A transformational approach puts humanity at the center, setting goals that recognize higher values than the simple pursuits in front of us. A transactional approach sets up an artificial goal and holds it up as a god to be worshipped and pursued at the expense of any human beings who stand in the way. Can there be any doubt that education should be transformational?
ICYMI: This Week's Reading Stuff
No blizzard here, but if you are socked in, here are some things to read while you're waiting for the world to dig itself out. And for the rest of us, just some Sunday reading for our cup of cocoa.
If You're a Teacher, Say Please and Thank You
Ray Salazar with an absolutelyl bang-on response to the scourge of no-nonsense compliance demanding being advocated by some reformsters these days.
No, My Kindergartner Will Not Be Doing Y0our Homework Assignment
Okay, it's possible that you haven't missed this because it's been heavily liked and read on the book of face, but just in case, you need to catch Cara Paiuk's parental take on the ridiculousness that is academic homework for kindergartners.
Will Ethical Walls Protect Education Journalism from Billionaire Influence
If you are Eli Broad and you propose to buy half of the L.A. school district for fun and profit, it makes sense to buy a big L.A. newspaper so you can get the kind of favorable coverage you need to sell your rather audacious and horrifying idea. Anthony Cody collects and sums up the best explanations of why it's a terrible idea.
ESSA Answers
Amid the many, many posts on Diane Ravitch's blog is a unrolling-in-segments series offering answers to questions about ESSA from Lamar Alexander's chief of staff. Here's what DC thinks they did.
Eva Goes To Court
John Merrow's Eva Moskowitx interview was part of the Very Bad Month that showed many cracks in the Success Academy facade, so it seems only fair that he should report on the legal trouble she now faces for her failure to properly educate students with special needs.
The Truth about Flint
This Salon piece from Paul Rosenberg isn't just about Flint-- it looks more thoroughly at the systematic process of stripping democracy from poor, black Americans. His one mistake is ascribing the process strictly to the GOP, but otherwise this is a thorough and thoughtful look at the trend threatening US democracy.
If You're a Teacher, Say Please and Thank You
Ray Salazar with an absolutelyl bang-on response to the scourge of no-nonsense compliance demanding being advocated by some reformsters these days.
No, My Kindergartner Will Not Be Doing Y0our Homework Assignment
Okay, it's possible that you haven't missed this because it's been heavily liked and read on the book of face, but just in case, you need to catch Cara Paiuk's parental take on the ridiculousness that is academic homework for kindergartners.
Will Ethical Walls Protect Education Journalism from Billionaire Influence
If you are Eli Broad and you propose to buy half of the L.A. school district for fun and profit, it makes sense to buy a big L.A. newspaper so you can get the kind of favorable coverage you need to sell your rather audacious and horrifying idea. Anthony Cody collects and sums up the best explanations of why it's a terrible idea.
ESSA Answers
Amid the many, many posts on Diane Ravitch's blog is a unrolling-in-segments series offering answers to questions about ESSA from Lamar Alexander's chief of staff. Here's what DC thinks they did.
Eva Goes To Court
John Merrow's Eva Moskowitx interview was part of the Very Bad Month that showed many cracks in the Success Academy facade, so it seems only fair that he should report on the legal trouble she now faces for her failure to properly educate students with special needs.
The Truth about Flint
This Salon piece from Paul Rosenberg isn't just about Flint-- it looks more thoroughly at the systematic process of stripping democracy from poor, black Americans. His one mistake is ascribing the process strictly to the GOP, but otherwise this is a thorough and thoughtful look at the trend threatening US democracy.
Saturday, January 23, 2016
The Non-White Teacher Problem
And here comes yet an other piece of research to add to the stack.
New research from Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding looked for new information to explain the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted programs. It's complicated problem, but the researchers came up with one answer-- white teachers are far less likely than teachers of color to identify students of color as gifted. (Consider this the second cousin of the finding that police view young Black men as older and less innocent than whites).
Research from last spring suggests that students do better in classes taught by same-race teachers.
Common sense that says students need to see an adult in school who is like them.
And yet, the trend in education has worked the other way since the days of Brown vs. Board of Education. At a moment when the student population in the US is less than 50% white, the teacher pool is overwhelmingly white and female.
In some cases, Black educators have been pushed out of the classroom (post Katrina New Orleans went from a 71% Black teaching pool to less than 50%). But research keeps repeating the same basic finding on a larger scale-- we are failing to hold onto men and non-white teachers.
Why? Articles keep asking the question, but nobody seems to have an answer.
There are theories. The low pay, which can have impact on men who feel the need to support a family with their job. Richard Ingersoll, a leading researcher of the teacher pool tags working conditions, specifically lack of autonomy and input in school decisions. This first-person account slams home the degree of cultural insensitivity that teachers of color can encounter. And that's before we even get into systems and communities where just-plain-racism is a huge obstacle.
It's a problem, and it's larger problem than it was decades ago precisely because the racial balance of our students is shifting, and -- as with the article that kicked this piece off -- there are real, damaging consequences to students of color.
And yet, nobody is really working on the problem. Reformsters says next to nothing about teacher retention-- they're much more interested in tracking bad teachers down and consequently have done a lot to make teaching seem less like a stable job. Teach for America has taken a stab at it, sort of, but since TFA is in the business of creating short-term teacher tourism instead of building lifetime teaching careers.
Local districts are caught up in a variety of other issues, many of them completely legit. The non-white (male) teacher gap is not sexy, it's not headline grabbing, and it isn't costing anybody a lot of money. It intersects with race, which white America isn't often good at discussing (or even willing to try), and it tweaks the egos of white teachers who, if they don't listen carefully enough, hear, "You aren't good enough to teach students of color," which is of course beside the point.
But with every additional data point, it becomes more and more clearly a problem that we can't just ignore.
New research from Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding looked for new information to explain the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted programs. It's complicated problem, but the researchers came up with one answer-- white teachers are far less likely than teachers of color to identify students of color as gifted. (Consider this the second cousin of the finding that police view young Black men as older and less innocent than whites).
Research from last spring suggests that students do better in classes taught by same-race teachers.
Common sense that says students need to see an adult in school who is like them.
And yet, the trend in education has worked the other way since the days of Brown vs. Board of Education. At a moment when the student population in the US is less than 50% white, the teacher pool is overwhelmingly white and female.
In some cases, Black educators have been pushed out of the classroom (post Katrina New Orleans went from a 71% Black teaching pool to less than 50%). But research keeps repeating the same basic finding on a larger scale-- we are failing to hold onto men and non-white teachers.
Why? Articles keep asking the question, but nobody seems to have an answer.
There are theories. The low pay, which can have impact on men who feel the need to support a family with their job. Richard Ingersoll, a leading researcher of the teacher pool tags working conditions, specifically lack of autonomy and input in school decisions. This first-person account slams home the degree of cultural insensitivity that teachers of color can encounter. And that's before we even get into systems and communities where just-plain-racism is a huge obstacle.
It's a problem, and it's larger problem than it was decades ago precisely because the racial balance of our students is shifting, and -- as with the article that kicked this piece off -- there are real, damaging consequences to students of color.
And yet, nobody is really working on the problem. Reformsters says next to nothing about teacher retention-- they're much more interested in tracking bad teachers down and consequently have done a lot to make teaching seem less like a stable job. Teach for America has taken a stab at it, sort of, but since TFA is in the business of creating short-term teacher tourism instead of building lifetime teaching careers.
Local districts are caught up in a variety of other issues, many of them completely legit. The non-white (male) teacher gap is not sexy, it's not headline grabbing, and it isn't costing anybody a lot of money. It intersects with race, which white America isn't often good at discussing (or even willing to try), and it tweaks the egos of white teachers who, if they don't listen carefully enough, hear, "You aren't good enough to teach students of color," which is of course beside the point.
But with every additional data point, it becomes more and more clearly a problem that we can't just ignore.
Friday, January 22, 2016
The GOP, Trump and the Bear: A Parable
Once upon a time, two large hunting parties came to live in two gigantic, beautiful lodges high on a mountainside-- the red and the blue.
The red lodge was home to a wide variety of people. Upstairs in the luxury suites were the richest, most wealthy and powerful members of the party. A few floors below them were well-to-do members of the party who were only too happy to help the top floor party members out. Way down in the basement were the least well-off members, living in squallor and want.
For many years, all the red lodgers worked together to keep the giant building strong and clean and in good repair. Even the basement dwellers pitched in. "We don't want those crazy blue-lodgers to come in here and take over," they'd say.
Occasionally the basement dwellers in the red lodge would question the order of things. "Why do we live down here in the basement," they'd say. "Why can't the people on the top floor at least send down some lobster bisque and champagne?"
To help keep the peace, the penthouse dwellers would send word down, often through their assistants on the lower floor-- "We have to stay up here to keep you safe! We have a better view from these windows. We can keep an eye on the world, and we can watch out for danger-- you know there's a bear out there and we don't want him to surprise us. Trust us. We know best. Besides, if you work really hard, some day you may earn a spot up here on the top floor." And for many generations, that was good enough. Even though the penthouse dwellers chose new leaders from among their own ranks, many of those top floor dwellers were responsible and capable leaders, and those on the lower floors trusted their word.
But over the years, the top floor dwellers got sloppy and lazy. They rarely left their comfy rooms, simply luxuriating and eating all day. They and their helpers on the not-quite-floors discovered they could use the bear to get more. "What about new bedsheets for our rooms," someone on a lower floor would say, and the word would come down-- "We've seen the bear in the neighborhood; you'd better trust us so he doesn't attack." And when it came time to install new leaders, the penthouse crowd made poor choices, but kept the crowd in line by reminding them, "You don't want a bear attack, do you? You'd better support our guy because he can save you from the bear."
The more the penthouse crowd grasped for power, the more useful they found the bear. The stories grew wilder, more terrifying, more frequent. The bears are angrier and hungrier. There's a family of bears. The blue lodge has been training the bears to attack us. The bears have laser beans strapped to their heads and carry dynamite in their paws. So give us your money, your food, your furniture, your children to send out into the cold to fight the bear. A dozen bears. A thousand bears! And they're right outside our doors!!
Soon the red lodgers were in a frenzied state of panic and terror all day, every day. Occasionally a bear would actually show up at the window, angry and snarling, and that only fed the panic. At first the penthouse thought, "This is great. They will give us anything." True, the lodge was noisy and disorderly now with the constant noise of panic and despair, but it was a small price to pay.
But then the day came to install their new leader. They selected him and escorted him to the balcony where such men were traditionally introduced to the crowd, and they realized that the crowd below would not hear them, was not even paying attention. And for the first time in years, tey looked down and saw what was really going on in the red lodge.
The residents of the lodge were breaking up the furniture and setting fire to it. They were crudely nailing all the doors and windows shut. They were tearing up the floorboards and tearing down the ceilings, ripping the very cords and pipes out through huge gaping rents in the walls. Suddenly someone yelled, "He did it! He's helping the bears!!" and the crowd would suddenly turn like a roiling mob and fall upon the victim, rending him to shreds of flesh and flecks of blood.
"Good lord," said the penthouse crowd. "What in the name of God are you doing!!??"
"The bears!!" shouted the crowd. "The bears you said were coming to get us! We're just protecting ourselves from the danger you warned us about!"
"Stop!" pleaded the penthouse crowd. "Stop and listen. We have a new leader for you! He's wise and reasonable! Listen to him."
But the crowd was not listening. "No!" they roared. "We have our leader! He is strong! He is powerful! He's come down here to save us from the bear!!"
And the penthouse crowd found themselves staring down at one of their own who, when they had been busy counting money and eating caviar, had slipped downstairs amidst the havoc. "You are done," he called up to them. "You made these people so frightened and blind that they would listen to the first strong voice they heard, and you are lazy and sloppy and weak. What's more, your fear-mongering has made them unable to hear your most reasoned, intelligent arguments. But I'm strong, and I don't care what happens to the house you built. You readied them for me. When we are done, this lodge will be a pile of rubble, but I will be standing on top of it, and you will be buried beneath it. You did not understand the power of the fear and panic you stirred up, but I do, and I will reap what you have sown."
And that, boys and girls, is why an issue of National Review devoted to Anti-Trump essays will not change a damn thing, and why we're in such a mess for this election. Thanks a lot, conservatives.
The red lodge was home to a wide variety of people. Upstairs in the luxury suites were the richest, most wealthy and powerful members of the party. A few floors below them were well-to-do members of the party who were only too happy to help the top floor party members out. Way down in the basement were the least well-off members, living in squallor and want.
For many years, all the red lodgers worked together to keep the giant building strong and clean and in good repair. Even the basement dwellers pitched in. "We don't want those crazy blue-lodgers to come in here and take over," they'd say.
Occasionally the basement dwellers in the red lodge would question the order of things. "Why do we live down here in the basement," they'd say. "Why can't the people on the top floor at least send down some lobster bisque and champagne?"
To help keep the peace, the penthouse dwellers would send word down, often through their assistants on the lower floor-- "We have to stay up here to keep you safe! We have a better view from these windows. We can keep an eye on the world, and we can watch out for danger-- you know there's a bear out there and we don't want him to surprise us. Trust us. We know best. Besides, if you work really hard, some day you may earn a spot up here on the top floor." And for many generations, that was good enough. Even though the penthouse dwellers chose new leaders from among their own ranks, many of those top floor dwellers were responsible and capable leaders, and those on the lower floors trusted their word.
But over the years, the top floor dwellers got sloppy and lazy. They rarely left their comfy rooms, simply luxuriating and eating all day. They and their helpers on the not-quite-floors discovered they could use the bear to get more. "What about new bedsheets for our rooms," someone on a lower floor would say, and the word would come down-- "We've seen the bear in the neighborhood; you'd better trust us so he doesn't attack." And when it came time to install new leaders, the penthouse crowd made poor choices, but kept the crowd in line by reminding them, "You don't want a bear attack, do you? You'd better support our guy because he can save you from the bear."
The more the penthouse crowd grasped for power, the more useful they found the bear. The stories grew wilder, more terrifying, more frequent. The bears are angrier and hungrier. There's a family of bears. The blue lodge has been training the bears to attack us. The bears have laser beans strapped to their heads and carry dynamite in their paws. So give us your money, your food, your furniture, your children to send out into the cold to fight the bear. A dozen bears. A thousand bears! And they're right outside our doors!!
Soon the red lodgers were in a frenzied state of panic and terror all day, every day. Occasionally a bear would actually show up at the window, angry and snarling, and that only fed the panic. At first the penthouse thought, "This is great. They will give us anything." True, the lodge was noisy and disorderly now with the constant noise of panic and despair, but it was a small price to pay.
But then the day came to install their new leader. They selected him and escorted him to the balcony where such men were traditionally introduced to the crowd, and they realized that the crowd below would not hear them, was not even paying attention. And for the first time in years, tey looked down and saw what was really going on in the red lodge.
The residents of the lodge were breaking up the furniture and setting fire to it. They were crudely nailing all the doors and windows shut. They were tearing up the floorboards and tearing down the ceilings, ripping the very cords and pipes out through huge gaping rents in the walls. Suddenly someone yelled, "He did it! He's helping the bears!!" and the crowd would suddenly turn like a roiling mob and fall upon the victim, rending him to shreds of flesh and flecks of blood.
"Good lord," said the penthouse crowd. "What in the name of God are you doing!!??"
"The bears!!" shouted the crowd. "The bears you said were coming to get us! We're just protecting ourselves from the danger you warned us about!"
"Stop!" pleaded the penthouse crowd. "Stop and listen. We have a new leader for you! He's wise and reasonable! Listen to him."
But the crowd was not listening. "No!" they roared. "We have our leader! He is strong! He is powerful! He's come down here to save us from the bear!!"
And the penthouse crowd found themselves staring down at one of their own who, when they had been busy counting money and eating caviar, had slipped downstairs amidst the havoc. "You are done," he called up to them. "You made these people so frightened and blind that they would listen to the first strong voice they heard, and you are lazy and sloppy and weak. What's more, your fear-mongering has made them unable to hear your most reasoned, intelligent arguments. But I'm strong, and I don't care what happens to the house you built. You readied them for me. When we are done, this lodge will be a pile of rubble, but I will be standing on top of it, and you will be buried beneath it. You did not understand the power of the fear and panic you stirred up, but I do, and I will reap what you have sown."
And that, boys and girls, is why an issue of National Review devoted to Anti-Trump essays will not change a damn thing, and why we're in such a mess for this election. Thanks a lot, conservatives.
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