From the right to the left, from testing to charters, we've got stirring perspectives from a wide variety of observation posts this week. Enjoy!
PARCC Pusher
A look at Opt Out in New Jersey-- and some of the baloney that testocrats are spreading in an attempt to keep those numbers up
Solving the Mystery of the Schools
In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch takes a look at Russakoff's The Prize and Rizag's book about Mission High. And because it's Ravitch, you get a sharp, clear, pithy look at some of the relevant education history.
Rejecting Charter Takeover of Public Schools
Paul Thomas is a gentleman and a scholar, and one of the great services of his blog is the occasional reading list for a particular issue. This is a great resource for building a serious argument against public school takeovers, with some great links on his list.
On Wisconsin
Well, here's what the destruction of tenure looks like on the ground in higher education. Outspoken scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab talks about why she's leaving the university that she has loved and served, and how the assault on tenure is actually an assault on free speech.
Hubris Core
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you are perhaps not a regular reader of Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute. I pretty much never agree with McClusky when it comes to charter schools and the free market in education, but the man is a great representative of the non-loony right-leaning opposition to Common Core.
The Case for a Broader Approach to Education
Another conservative ed reform fan, Jay Greene (no relation) has always shown a willingness to resolve. Here's his piece about how and why he realized he was wrong to think that a narrow focus on math and reading would be good for education.
Easter and Testing
The Rev. Dr. Hope Lee has written a moving and passionate piece about opposition to the testing culture. It was bouncing all over the interwebs yesterday, but if you missed it then, read it now. It's a powerful testament.
Tech Ed
Alfie Kohn is one of the most articulate advocates for human-centered education around. This recent brief look at the role of tech in education is well worth your time.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Saturday, March 12, 2016
What Do You Pay Me To Do?
All job evaluation systems answer the same question for employers-- Are these employees doing what we pay them to do?
In some sectors, this is an easy enough process. If I'm paying you to sell a certain amount of product, I can run the numbers and see if you sold that much product. Anyone who has worked in some version of retail knows how this goes-- did you hit your numbers this week, this month, this year?
But the tricky thing about employee evaluation systems is that they force employers to answer a question-- what do we pay these people to do? In fact, employers answer that question whether they mean to or not, and employers have to be careful.
For instance, if you run a catalog call center, a phone bank that takes the orders that customers call in, you might decide to evaluate your employees on how many orders they take per shift. That might seem to make sense. But as some such companies have learned, there's a problem with this evaluation system. One of my many part-time jobs was at just such a call center. The folks who call in are generally older; they may speak slowly or unclearly, and in some cases you are the only human voice they have spoken to all day. But if your evaluations are based on calls-per-hour, then your call center employee is sitting there thinking, as some nice old person tries to chat pleasantly, "Lady, I am not paid to be nice to you. I am paid to take your money and get you off this phone as quickly as possible." The company that I worked for had long since figured out that this was a bad plan, that one of the things you had to pay your employees to do was, in fact, to treat the customer well. And they had to tweak their employee evaluation system to do that.
A good evaluation system is hard to develop for precisely this reason-- because when you create the system, you define the employee's job. You answer the question, "What exactly do we pay you to do, anyway?"
Which brings us to teacher evaluation systems.
You're a taxpayer. What do you think you're paying teachers to do? Maintain a safe environment? Help your child become more confident, more wise, better adjusted, happier? Help your child discover her strengths? Prepare your child to succeed as an adult? Give your child the tools for a successful career, whatever that child might choose? Maintain a personal bank of knowledge and competence that guarantees the teacher is an up-to-date knowledgeable professional? Develop your child into a well-rounded individual? Model how to develop and maintain healthy relationships? Plan, prepare, and evaluate lessons with a wise, professional focus? Support the child's growth? Nurture the child as a special individual? Push the child to learn a wide range of skills and acquire a full body of knowledge? Not waste your child's time? Develop a set of skills and growth that are unique to your child? Plus a whole long list of other things that would make this paragraph too damn long to list?
But the ed reform model reduces that list to just one item.
Get the child to score well on the Big Standardized Test.
Imagine if you were upset about something that happened with your child. She was bullied and nobody did anything about it. She wanted to do have a class to draw in, and nobody would let her. She wanted to go outside and play. The teacher had been cold and unkind to her. She was having trouble with her science experiment and nobody would help her.
You call the school. You schedule a meeting. You sit down with the principal and teacher, express your concern, and they look you in the eye and say, "Look. We appreciate your concern, but we aren't paid to do that. We're paid to make sure your child gets a good test score, and that's it. That's all you pay us to do."
Nobody would be okay with that. Nobody should be okay with that.
Yet, if we have a system that pays teachers for getting good student scores on the BS Tests, what we're saying is, "Never mind the rest of that stuff. We pay you to get good student test scores. That's what we pay you to do." Everything else is extra, unimportant, not really part of the job.
The biggest problem with linking teacher evaluation to student test results is not that it's inaccurate and invalid. The biggest problem is that these VAMmy test-driven systems redefine the job. They say to teachers, "Get in there and get test scores up. That's what we pay you to do. That's all we pay you to do."
The big sell for recruiting teachers was always, "Come touch the future. Come help mold and support young minds. Come help young people find themselves and grasp their future. Come create a love of learning as you hold up young people and help set them on a path to become more fully human, more fully themselves, ready to take their place as adults in the world." If we change that pitch to, "Come help children get better standardized test scores," can we really be surprised that fewer people feel drawn to teaching as a career?
An evaluation system must answer-- cannot help but answer-- the question, "What do you pay me to do?" Students, teachers, the entire education system-- all need a better answer than, "To get good test scores."
In some sectors, this is an easy enough process. If I'm paying you to sell a certain amount of product, I can run the numbers and see if you sold that much product. Anyone who has worked in some version of retail knows how this goes-- did you hit your numbers this week, this month, this year?
But the tricky thing about employee evaluation systems is that they force employers to answer a question-- what do we pay these people to do? In fact, employers answer that question whether they mean to or not, and employers have to be careful.
For instance, if you run a catalog call center, a phone bank that takes the orders that customers call in, you might decide to evaluate your employees on how many orders they take per shift. That might seem to make sense. But as some such companies have learned, there's a problem with this evaluation system. One of my many part-time jobs was at just such a call center. The folks who call in are generally older; they may speak slowly or unclearly, and in some cases you are the only human voice they have spoken to all day. But if your evaluations are based on calls-per-hour, then your call center employee is sitting there thinking, as some nice old person tries to chat pleasantly, "Lady, I am not paid to be nice to you. I am paid to take your money and get you off this phone as quickly as possible." The company that I worked for had long since figured out that this was a bad plan, that one of the things you had to pay your employees to do was, in fact, to treat the customer well. And they had to tweak their employee evaluation system to do that.
A good evaluation system is hard to develop for precisely this reason-- because when you create the system, you define the employee's job. You answer the question, "What exactly do we pay you to do, anyway?"
Which brings us to teacher evaluation systems.
You're a taxpayer. What do you think you're paying teachers to do? Maintain a safe environment? Help your child become more confident, more wise, better adjusted, happier? Help your child discover her strengths? Prepare your child to succeed as an adult? Give your child the tools for a successful career, whatever that child might choose? Maintain a personal bank of knowledge and competence that guarantees the teacher is an up-to-date knowledgeable professional? Develop your child into a well-rounded individual? Model how to develop and maintain healthy relationships? Plan, prepare, and evaluate lessons with a wise, professional focus? Support the child's growth? Nurture the child as a special individual? Push the child to learn a wide range of skills and acquire a full body of knowledge? Not waste your child's time? Develop a set of skills and growth that are unique to your child? Plus a whole long list of other things that would make this paragraph too damn long to list?
But the ed reform model reduces that list to just one item.
Get the child to score well on the Big Standardized Test.
Imagine if you were upset about something that happened with your child. She was bullied and nobody did anything about it. She wanted to do have a class to draw in, and nobody would let her. She wanted to go outside and play. The teacher had been cold and unkind to her. She was having trouble with her science experiment and nobody would help her.
You call the school. You schedule a meeting. You sit down with the principal and teacher, express your concern, and they look you in the eye and say, "Look. We appreciate your concern, but we aren't paid to do that. We're paid to make sure your child gets a good test score, and that's it. That's all you pay us to do."
Nobody would be okay with that. Nobody should be okay with that.
Yet, if we have a system that pays teachers for getting good student scores on the BS Tests, what we're saying is, "Never mind the rest of that stuff. We pay you to get good student test scores. That's what we pay you to do." Everything else is extra, unimportant, not really part of the job.
The biggest problem with linking teacher evaluation to student test results is not that it's inaccurate and invalid. The biggest problem is that these VAMmy test-driven systems redefine the job. They say to teachers, "Get in there and get test scores up. That's what we pay you to do. That's all we pay you to do."
The big sell for recruiting teachers was always, "Come touch the future. Come help mold and support young minds. Come help young people find themselves and grasp their future. Come create a love of learning as you hold up young people and help set them on a path to become more fully human, more fully themselves, ready to take their place as adults in the world." If we change that pitch to, "Come help children get better standardized test scores," can we really be surprised that fewer people feel drawn to teaching as a career?
An evaluation system must answer-- cannot help but answer-- the question, "What do you pay me to do?" Students, teachers, the entire education system-- all need a better answer than, "To get good test scores."
Ben Carson Is a Dope
So now, as political reality itself circles a reason-eating soul-sucking black hole of doom, we are forced to contemplate the idea of Dr. Ben Carson as the nation's official Leader of Education, because when Donald Trump is Supreme Leader, he has promised to Make It So.
It is on days like this that I'm glad to be a mere blogger. As a legitimate journalist, I would be obliged to consider this development with thoughtful, reasoned tones, but in our current political cycle, that makes as much sense as sending an ivy league philosophy professor to cover a death match cock fight. No polite and thoughtful considerations in even-tempered tones are enough when what is really called for is a loud, incredulous, "Holy mother of God-- did you see him take a bite out of that wing!? And look at all the damn blood!"
Valerie Strauss has written professional, responsible, and relatively restrained consideration of Ben Carson as High Tsar of Education, and I recommend you read it. But I'm going to be more direct, because when it comes to education, one thing is clear.
Ben Carson is a dope.
When it comes to building American STEM education, Ben Carson is right there, arguing that we need to push math and science, particularly by use of virtual reality classrooms:
"They’re running around the Egyptian pyramids through the virtual reality classroom,” Carson said. “They could actually go to the Egyptian pyramids and explore the chambers."
Of course, pushing science will be a singular challenge for a guy who utterly rejects evolution.
Candidate Carson addressed education in his materials. You can look at the quick website material about his position, check out the summary version (which is the website version in a nicer font) or the full version (which is the summary version plus some nice graphics and full-page pictures of Carson). They all boil down to the same five-point sort-of-a-plan. And because Carson is, you know, a surgeon, the plan is laid out with some medical terminology. Because fixing schools is just like brain surgery.
His diagnosis is that A) we have low scores on the PISA and the B) even after Common Core, we have an achievement gap. But we have had low scores on the PISA score as long as there have been PISA scores, including the Grand Old Days that Carson wants to return to. Tell me Dr. Carson-- if a monitor in your OR says that the patient is dead, but the patient is having a spirited, alert conversation with you, do you bury the patient, or scrap the monitor equipment? And since "achievement gap" is a fancy-ish name for "test score gaps," of course the Common Core wasn't going to fix it.
His five solutions? Here we go.
1) School choice, and lots of it. Although I'm literally uncertain that Carson knows what he's advocating.
It is our moral imperative as Americans to lay the foundation for a world-class education for every student not simply to those in the best neighborhoods or with the money to buy the educational support they need.
That's a powerful and eloquent argument-- for fully funding our public school system. It has absolutely nothing to do with supporting school choice, which as currently practiced does not even attempt to serve every student, but "rescues" a handful at the cost of making things worse for the rest.
But Carson imagines that choice is magical. "When choice exists, the best schools will thrive and attract students from all locations, while failing schools and “dropout factories” will be incentivized to institute real, effective changes to compete." We've had charter choice systems for a while now-- the process that Carson has described has happened exactly nowhere. And even if something like that did happen, Carson has betrayed his own vision, because he's describing system that works fine from POV of the free market winners concerned-- but it ignores the question of how such a system will serve ALL students (spoiler alert-- it won't. it will serve only the "desirable" customers).
And remember-- one of the two problems we're trying to solve is the "achievement gap," and after years of charter-choice, such systems have closed the achievement gap nowhere (pro tip-- collecting a bunch of students at the top of the gap in one charter and leaving all those at the bottom is NOT "closing the gap")
2) Empower parents, teachers, local school districts, states-- anybody except the federal government.
But not teachers unions. Teachers unions are evil obstacles to progress.
Carson is particularly bothered by all the money the feds have "thrown at" education over the years (his time frame is hard to pin down-- he talks a lot about the"past seven years" but rails against NCLB and occasionally invokes "for generations" as a descriptor of bad policies.) So maybe he's advocating for local control, or maybe he's advocating for local financing, as in, local districts should be freed of all that federal support and allowed to pursue excellence with all the financial support that a poverty-stricken community can muster. Yay, freedom!
Local authorities should decide what to do with Common Core. States should make sure communities get the funds they need (though remember, that shouldn't be much because money is unimportant and I wonder how often Dr. Carson told a hospital to slash the OR budget in half because throwing money at the problem is pointless).
Do I have to point out the bizarre irony of a black American arguing for states rights? Carson is not a young man; does he really not remember how things play out when certain states are given free rein to decide how to regulate their own educational system? I am a huge advocate for community schools and local control, but even I get that history suggests that local control can be used to crush certain ethnic and racial groups.
3) Encourage innovation.
He has no idea what he's talking about, and so he says nothing. Technological advances. New stuff, of some sort. Because that would be great. "Educators, scientists and web designers" should be free to innovate. Damn, that would have been a great Ben Carson poster-- "Free the Web Designers, and Free the Future of Education"
4) Reward good teachers.
The man cannot make up his mind. A few policy points ago, he was solidly in the "no new money should be thrown at education" camp, but here he is saying teachers are too often required to accomplish Great Things with "inadequate resources and little pay." He wants to free up block grant money for teacher bonuses based on evaluation systems from somewhere. Also, recruit teachers when they're in high school and give them mentors. Really cutting edge stuff here.
5) A better student loan process. Which seems swell but-- wait a minute? How is this related to the achievement gap? Or fixing PISA scores?
Napping through History
As several commentators have noted, one other striking feature of Carson's "plan," released in January, is that Carson seems to have napped through the discussion and passage of ESSA-- the new education law that actually does some of the Get The Feds Outta Here things that he called for. Who knows. If Carson had stayed in the race, he would have come out in favor of giving women the vote and repealing Prohibition.
In fact, Carson's policy brief appears to be a huge cut-and-paste job, void of anything new or interesting and lacking even basic internal consistency. It's the work of a seventh-grader who was kind of half-listening at the dinner table when his parents were talking about what they'd heard that someone had read about education policy.
Other choice quotes
Strauss noted this choice nugget from the Carson library:
He wrote in his book “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great” that Americans were better educated in the 1830s than they are now. He wrote about “an example of questions in a sixth grade exit exam from the 1830s. I doubt most college graduates could even come close to passing it today.” The questions he uses aren’t actually from an 1830s test but from an 1895 test, which most students who took it flunked. (You can see more on this, plus the actual questions, here.)
Pick the 1830s or the 1890s-- in both cases, US education was reserved for only a select few. The mission-- particularly in the 1830s-- was pretty much the opposite of the one Carson was touting in his plan.
But Carson loves the golden past. Here he is in April of 2013:
Our public schools used to be the envy of the world in the pre-1930s time. But remember in those times we spent a lot of emphasis on very basic education and we also taught values in our school system.
Yes, indeedy. Values like "People who are non-white or non-wealthy don't deserve an education. And if they don't have a penis, they probably don't need an education either." What the hell alternative timeline does Carson come from. No wonder he always seems so tired-- the sheer effort of holding cognitive dissonance at bay while staying anchored in this time line must be exhausting.
And then there's this from November of 2015:
We know that the best education is homeschool, the next is private schools, the next is charter schools, the next is public schools.
So even though the generation of parents mostly got their education from the vastly inferior public schools, those parents are the best qualified to educate their own children? How does that happen? How do people go from being the product of vastly inferior educators to becoming the people most qualified to educate the next generation? Because that's impressive, and whatever happened to those folks-- we should be trying to get that to happen to everybody.
Did you need one more reason not to vote for Trump?
Well, this would count. Anybody who thinks that Ben Carson is a good choice to be Grand Poohbah or whatever else we'll call government officials under a Trump emperorship is Very Confused. I suspect that Carson is a nice man who will continue to enjoy a career as something, but he has no more business playing at education policy than I do performing brain surgery.
It is on days like this that I'm glad to be a mere blogger. As a legitimate journalist, I would be obliged to consider this development with thoughtful, reasoned tones, but in our current political cycle, that makes as much sense as sending an ivy league philosophy professor to cover a death match cock fight. No polite and thoughtful considerations in even-tempered tones are enough when what is really called for is a loud, incredulous, "Holy mother of God-- did you see him take a bite out of that wing!? And look at all the damn blood!"
Valerie Strauss has written professional, responsible, and relatively restrained consideration of Ben Carson as High Tsar of Education, and I recommend you read it. But I'm going to be more direct, because when it comes to education, one thing is clear.
Ben Carson is a dope.
When it comes to building American STEM education, Ben Carson is right there, arguing that we need to push math and science, particularly by use of virtual reality classrooms:
"They’re running around the Egyptian pyramids through the virtual reality classroom,” Carson said. “They could actually go to the Egyptian pyramids and explore the chambers."
Of course, pushing science will be a singular challenge for a guy who utterly rejects evolution.
Candidate Carson addressed education in his materials. You can look at the quick website material about his position, check out the summary version (which is the website version in a nicer font) or the full version (which is the summary version plus some nice graphics and full-page pictures of Carson). They all boil down to the same five-point sort-of-a-plan. And because Carson is, you know, a surgeon, the plan is laid out with some medical terminology. Because fixing schools is just like brain surgery.
His diagnosis is that A) we have low scores on the PISA and the B) even after Common Core, we have an achievement gap. But we have had low scores on the PISA score as long as there have been PISA scores, including the Grand Old Days that Carson wants to return to. Tell me Dr. Carson-- if a monitor in your OR says that the patient is dead, but the patient is having a spirited, alert conversation with you, do you bury the patient, or scrap the monitor equipment? And since "achievement gap" is a fancy-ish name for "test score gaps," of course the Common Core wasn't going to fix it.
His five solutions? Here we go.
1) School choice, and lots of it. Although I'm literally uncertain that Carson knows what he's advocating.
It is our moral imperative as Americans to lay the foundation for a world-class education for every student not simply to those in the best neighborhoods or with the money to buy the educational support they need.
That's a powerful and eloquent argument-- for fully funding our public school system. It has absolutely nothing to do with supporting school choice, which as currently practiced does not even attempt to serve every student, but "rescues" a handful at the cost of making things worse for the rest.
But Carson imagines that choice is magical. "When choice exists, the best schools will thrive and attract students from all locations, while failing schools and “dropout factories” will be incentivized to institute real, effective changes to compete." We've had charter choice systems for a while now-- the process that Carson has described has happened exactly nowhere. And even if something like that did happen, Carson has betrayed his own vision, because he's describing system that works fine from POV of the free market winners concerned-- but it ignores the question of how such a system will serve ALL students (spoiler alert-- it won't. it will serve only the "desirable" customers).
And remember-- one of the two problems we're trying to solve is the "achievement gap," and after years of charter-choice, such systems have closed the achievement gap nowhere (pro tip-- collecting a bunch of students at the top of the gap in one charter and leaving all those at the bottom is NOT "closing the gap")
2) Empower parents, teachers, local school districts, states-- anybody except the federal government.
But not teachers unions. Teachers unions are evil obstacles to progress.
Carson is particularly bothered by all the money the feds have "thrown at" education over the years (his time frame is hard to pin down-- he talks a lot about the"past seven years" but rails against NCLB and occasionally invokes "for generations" as a descriptor of bad policies.) So maybe he's advocating for local control, or maybe he's advocating for local financing, as in, local districts should be freed of all that federal support and allowed to pursue excellence with all the financial support that a poverty-stricken community can muster. Yay, freedom!
Local authorities should decide what to do with Common Core. States should make sure communities get the funds they need (though remember, that shouldn't be much because money is unimportant and I wonder how often Dr. Carson told a hospital to slash the OR budget in half because throwing money at the problem is pointless).
Do I have to point out the bizarre irony of a black American arguing for states rights? Carson is not a young man; does he really not remember how things play out when certain states are given free rein to decide how to regulate their own educational system? I am a huge advocate for community schools and local control, but even I get that history suggests that local control can be used to crush certain ethnic and racial groups.
3) Encourage innovation.
He has no idea what he's talking about, and so he says nothing. Technological advances. New stuff, of some sort. Because that would be great. "Educators, scientists and web designers" should be free to innovate. Damn, that would have been a great Ben Carson poster-- "Free the Web Designers, and Free the Future of Education"
4) Reward good teachers.
The man cannot make up his mind. A few policy points ago, he was solidly in the "no new money should be thrown at education" camp, but here he is saying teachers are too often required to accomplish Great Things with "inadequate resources and little pay." He wants to free up block grant money for teacher bonuses based on evaluation systems from somewhere. Also, recruit teachers when they're in high school and give them mentors. Really cutting edge stuff here.
5) A better student loan process. Which seems swell but-- wait a minute? How is this related to the achievement gap? Or fixing PISA scores?
Napping through History
As several commentators have noted, one other striking feature of Carson's "plan," released in January, is that Carson seems to have napped through the discussion and passage of ESSA-- the new education law that actually does some of the Get The Feds Outta Here things that he called for. Who knows. If Carson had stayed in the race, he would have come out in favor of giving women the vote and repealing Prohibition.
In fact, Carson's policy brief appears to be a huge cut-and-paste job, void of anything new or interesting and lacking even basic internal consistency. It's the work of a seventh-grader who was kind of half-listening at the dinner table when his parents were talking about what they'd heard that someone had read about education policy.
Other choice quotes
Strauss noted this choice nugget from the Carson library:
He wrote in his book “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great” that Americans were better educated in the 1830s than they are now. He wrote about “an example of questions in a sixth grade exit exam from the 1830s. I doubt most college graduates could even come close to passing it today.” The questions he uses aren’t actually from an 1830s test but from an 1895 test, which most students who took it flunked. (You can see more on this, plus the actual questions, here.)
Pick the 1830s or the 1890s-- in both cases, US education was reserved for only a select few. The mission-- particularly in the 1830s-- was pretty much the opposite of the one Carson was touting in his plan.
But Carson loves the golden past. Here he is in April of 2013:
Our public schools used to be the envy of the world in the pre-1930s time. But remember in those times we spent a lot of emphasis on very basic education and we also taught values in our school system.
Yes, indeedy. Values like "People who are non-white or non-wealthy don't deserve an education. And if they don't have a penis, they probably don't need an education either." What the hell alternative timeline does Carson come from. No wonder he always seems so tired-- the sheer effort of holding cognitive dissonance at bay while staying anchored in this time line must be exhausting.
And then there's this from November of 2015:
We know that the best education is homeschool, the next is private schools, the next is charter schools, the next is public schools.
So even though the generation of parents mostly got their education from the vastly inferior public schools, those parents are the best qualified to educate their own children? How does that happen? How do people go from being the product of vastly inferior educators to becoming the people most qualified to educate the next generation? Because that's impressive, and whatever happened to those folks-- we should be trying to get that to happen to everybody.
Did you need one more reason not to vote for Trump?
Well, this would count. Anybody who thinks that Ben Carson is a good choice to be Grand Poohbah or whatever else we'll call government officials under a Trump emperorship is Very Confused. I suspect that Carson is a nice man who will continue to enjoy a career as something, but he has no more business playing at education policy than I do performing brain surgery.
Friday, March 11, 2016
Charter Health Checkup
It's that time of year again, I guess, for the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools to issue its annual report of the Health of the Charter Public [sic] School Movement. they're scoring and ranking states, because remember-- when you go to the doctor, it doesn't matter how healthy you are, only whether you are more or less healthy than the other patients in the office.
There is some interesting-ish information to be gleaned from the report, but the report is 180 pages long, so if you want the full effect, you are going to have to read it all yourself. This time I'm not doing it for you.
What Are We Doing, and How Are We Doing It?
To make the report's List O'Charter Swellness, states had to meet a few criteria: At least 2% of public school students had to be charter-enrolled in 2014-2015, the state had to have participated in the CREDO study, and it had to have a system for "categorizing" schools.
Eighteen schools made that cut and were then judged by four criteria. Two "quality measures" come from the CREDO 2013 report, which in turn uses data from 2011. So be warned-- a whole lot of the basis for this report's findings is not actually current stuff. In fact, unless I'm missing something, it will be exactly the same data used in last year's Charter Health Report. So to get past that, NAPCS has added two new data criteria-- has the number of top-rated charters increased, and has the number of bottom-rated charters decreased?
They also wanted to come up with a way to include innovation, because innovation is a primo quality of charters, and yet oddly enough, they have found it's to measure innovation in a standardized way. This is not the last time I'll feel as if the NAPSC had a chance to Learn An Important Lesson but just breezed on by. Yes, measuring innovative creative divergent thinking in a standardized way is basically impossible-- but we will still base most of our findings on student test scores from Big Standardized Tests. Sigh.
And, oh, look-- they're going to do it again--
Last, we acknowledge that our definition of a healthy movement is limited by what data we can collect across states. Several other elements of a healthy movement are not included here because we cannot measure them. But that doesn’t mean they are not important. For example, quality beyond test scores can be determined several ways, some of which are more qualitative in nature. A healthy movement needs to have charter schools that are not only succeeding on state tests but also knocking it out of the park on these other determinants of quality.
And so they go on to acknowledge that the whole basis of their rating system and all of NCLB/RTTT reforminess is a foundation built of rotting timbers and sifting sand, and they announce we should stop pretending that these junk ratings mean anything, and then they go on to fill the rest of the report with adult coloring book pages! Ha!! Just kidding. They say, "Well, yes, this system ignores most of the important parts of being a school, but we'll go ahead and use it anyway." That sound you just heard was my palm hitting my forehead.
Here's the weighting system they will use to rate things:
Items 1-8 are for Growth, 10-13 are for Quality, and poor little 9 with its measly two weight must represent for Innovation. So innovation, apparently not all that important after all. And we'll later learn that "innovations" include arts schools and Montessori/Waldorf schools and vocational schools and STEM schools and, for the love of God, No Excuses schools. So "innovation" can include ideas that have been around for decades, or which have quickly established themselves as bad ideas. And despite their concerns, they did manage to fit all the innovations into some standardized categories. Yay, innovation.
I'm also going to point out, as always, that the measuring of learning in days is bogus and a little bit silly. "Mrs. Bogwaller, we're happy to tell you that Chris is a full five days ahead, though we suspect all of those days are Fridays, so it may not be that great news." Is that learning-per-average day? Do we think some days are more learny than others, or is this a constant? Does a child learn the same amount on a birthday as on, say, a Sunday? How did anybody ever break learning down into days? Did somebody study a few thousand children and test them at the end of every single day to get an average learn-per-day figure? And exactly how did that researcher measure quantities of learning? Do you measure out learning by the gram, or by the liter, or by the meter, or do we measure out their lives in coffee spoons (and could we then--please-- name the learn-per-day units "prufrocks"?) Can we talk about single days of learning, or must they travel in a pack? And if we can measure that a student is a single day of learning ahead, how much further can we break that down? Hours? Minutes? Seconds?
Sorry. But the whole days of learning thing is just so silly, and proof once again that when education commentators want to be able to measure something, and can't, they will come up with all manner of solemn baloney to fake it.
So How Did the States Do?
The weights add up to thirty-three with four possible points for each, for a grand total of 132 possible points. Each state gets a score and a rank, and congratulations, Washington DC-- you are first with 106 points, leaving Indiana a distant second with a mere 88. From there we plummet down to last-place Oregon, with a skimpy 45 points. There are some interesting details here. Massachusetts, which is still enduring a wrestling match between charter-loving leaders and the entire actual public school system-- Mass comes in ahead of charter-lovin' Louisianna and Reformster Jeb! Paradise Florida. Ohio, which is either a dreamy charter wild west or a nightmarish charter trainwreck depending on who's assessing-- Ohio is way down at #13.
The report also spends some time holding the Health Checkup rankings against the State Charter Public [sic] School Law Ranking, but there's nothing earth-shattering there and watching a group looking for a correlation between their made-up ranking system and their other made-up ranking system turns out to be as much fun as watching the ink on a charter contract dry. So let's move on.
Pennsylvania-- An Example of a Health Report
The report uses the vast bulk of its pages to take a state-by-state look at charter health, and that includes the other states beside the 18 that didn't make the cut (which is not all fifty-- if you don't even have a charter law in place yet, you're not in this report. Sorry, Kentucky. Also, if your charter law was thrown out by your Supreme Court. Sorry, Washington.)
I'm going to walk through the report on Pennsylvania, because that's where I am. This will give you an idea of some of the pitfalls in the report. You can decide on your own whether you want to sneak a peek underneath your state's charter hospital gown.
I'll tell you up front that Pennsylvania's data will reflect that we are a haven for crappy cyber-charters. I'm betting that is why, for instance, the percentage of charters on the state's naughty list went from 60% to 66%. Why the state doesn't just shut down these cyber-cesspools of educational malpractice is a mystery for another day.
There are other bullet points about the Keystone state, but the report writers also have some nicely designed charts for your perusal, covering the same data in a more graphically delightful manner and following the layout of the chart above. They really have done a good job of formatting things so that it's easy to follow the same ideas all the way through.
PA has 7% of our students in charters, and those are 6% of our schools.
The comparison breakdown of race and ethnicity is, well, kind of useless. They compare the charters against the state, but in any state where the population varies as much as ours, that's meaningless. Pennsylvania is very rural except for the parts that are very urban, and very non-white except for the parts that are very white. In other words, while the state student population may be 73% white, 13% black, and 9% hispanic as a whole, I'd be surprised if you could find any community in the state that matches that demographic breakdown. So comparing charter demographics to that means nothing- the only comparison that really matters is whether or not charters are educating the same population as the local school, and one of the secrets to charter success continues to be making sure that they do NOT try to educate the same population as local schools.
Fun factoid- PA charters are far more centered in cities and suburbs than public schools. 25% of our schools are rural (a nearby district educates about 400 students in one K-12 building serving half of the entire county-- that rural) and no charters other than the cybers have figured out how to make bank serving that population. And because local districts are still the main authorizers, volunteers willing to slit their own financial throats are few and far between.
The rate of charters opening has been slowing down. The rate of closing is a little more stable, but overall rising. About 50% of PA charters have an "innovative" special focus.
Remember the report about how cyber-charters move students backwards? That figures in this report and undoubtedly really hurt charter numbers for "number of days of learning" for charters, which are hugely negative. And while the numbers for charters in the top and bottom categories of PA's school rating system are also dismal, I will give them a pass because our school evaluation system is a hot, ugly mess.
Oh, and we finish with some unscored data, including the data that 27% of our charter students are cyber-students, which is lower than I would have guessed. Now I should probably go back and remove all the places where I blamed crappy charter results on the cybers-- apparently plenty of those Philly charters are able to stink up the place all on their own.
Bottom Line
I give NAPSC credit for reporting data without trying to hide it, spin it, or obscure it behind too many piles of smoke and mirrors, just as I give some folks in the charter movement credit for having figured out that if they don't clean up their own bad actors, the whole industry is going to look worse and worse (I think "worse and worse" is inevitable for the current incarnation of the charter industry, but that's another conversation). This report has some interesting-ish data collected in one handy spot, and it's worth a few minutes to check out the picture of your state and see just how diseased you are.
There is some interesting-ish information to be gleaned from the report, but the report is 180 pages long, so if you want the full effect, you are going to have to read it all yourself. This time I'm not doing it for you.
What Are We Doing, and How Are We Doing It?
To make the report's List O'Charter Swellness, states had to meet a few criteria: At least 2% of public school students had to be charter-enrolled in 2014-2015, the state had to have participated in the CREDO study, and it had to have a system for "categorizing" schools.
Eighteen schools made that cut and were then judged by four criteria. Two "quality measures" come from the CREDO 2013 report, which in turn uses data from 2011. So be warned-- a whole lot of the basis for this report's findings is not actually current stuff. In fact, unless I'm missing something, it will be exactly the same data used in last year's Charter Health Report. So to get past that, NAPCS has added two new data criteria-- has the number of top-rated charters increased, and has the number of bottom-rated charters decreased?
They also wanted to come up with a way to include innovation, because innovation is a primo quality of charters, and yet oddly enough, they have found it's to measure innovation in a standardized way. This is not the last time I'll feel as if the NAPSC had a chance to Learn An Important Lesson but just breezed on by. Yes, measuring innovative creative divergent thinking in a standardized way is basically impossible-- but we will still base most of our findings on student test scores from Big Standardized Tests. Sigh.
And, oh, look-- they're going to do it again--
Last, we acknowledge that our definition of a healthy movement is limited by what data we can collect across states. Several other elements of a healthy movement are not included here because we cannot measure them. But that doesn’t mean they are not important. For example, quality beyond test scores can be determined several ways, some of which are more qualitative in nature. A healthy movement needs to have charter schools that are not only succeeding on state tests but also knocking it out of the park on these other determinants of quality.
And so they go on to acknowledge that the whole basis of their rating system and all of NCLB/RTTT reforminess is a foundation built of rotting timbers and sifting sand, and they announce we should stop pretending that these junk ratings mean anything, and then they go on to fill the rest of the report with adult coloring book pages! Ha!! Just kidding. They say, "Well, yes, this system ignores most of the important parts of being a school, but we'll go ahead and use it anyway." That sound you just heard was my palm hitting my forehead.
Here's the weighting system they will use to rate things:
Items 1-8 are for Growth, 10-13 are for Quality, and poor little 9 with its measly two weight must represent for Innovation. So innovation, apparently not all that important after all. And we'll later learn that "innovations" include arts schools and Montessori/Waldorf schools and vocational schools and STEM schools and, for the love of God, No Excuses schools. So "innovation" can include ideas that have been around for decades, or which have quickly established themselves as bad ideas. And despite their concerns, they did manage to fit all the innovations into some standardized categories. Yay, innovation.
I'm also going to point out, as always, that the measuring of learning in days is bogus and a little bit silly. "Mrs. Bogwaller, we're happy to tell you that Chris is a full five days ahead, though we suspect all of those days are Fridays, so it may not be that great news." Is that learning-per-average day? Do we think some days are more learny than others, or is this a constant? Does a child learn the same amount on a birthday as on, say, a Sunday? How did anybody ever break learning down into days? Did somebody study a few thousand children and test them at the end of every single day to get an average learn-per-day figure? And exactly how did that researcher measure quantities of learning? Do you measure out learning by the gram, or by the liter, or by the meter, or do we measure out their lives in coffee spoons (and could we then--please-- name the learn-per-day units "prufrocks"?) Can we talk about single days of learning, or must they travel in a pack? And if we can measure that a student is a single day of learning ahead, how much further can we break that down? Hours? Minutes? Seconds?
Sorry. But the whole days of learning thing is just so silly, and proof once again that when education commentators want to be able to measure something, and can't, they will come up with all manner of solemn baloney to fake it.
So How Did the States Do?
The weights add up to thirty-three with four possible points for each, for a grand total of 132 possible points. Each state gets a score and a rank, and congratulations, Washington DC-- you are first with 106 points, leaving Indiana a distant second with a mere 88. From there we plummet down to last-place Oregon, with a skimpy 45 points. There are some interesting details here. Massachusetts, which is still enduring a wrestling match between charter-loving leaders and the entire actual public school system-- Mass comes in ahead of charter-lovin' Louisianna and Reformster Jeb! Paradise Florida. Ohio, which is either a dreamy charter wild west or a nightmarish charter trainwreck depending on who's assessing-- Ohio is way down at #13.
The report also spends some time holding the Health Checkup rankings against the State Charter Public [sic] School Law Ranking, but there's nothing earth-shattering there and watching a group looking for a correlation between their made-up ranking system and their other made-up ranking system turns out to be as much fun as watching the ink on a charter contract dry. So let's move on.
Pennsylvania-- An Example of a Health Report
The report uses the vast bulk of its pages to take a state-by-state look at charter health, and that includes the other states beside the 18 that didn't make the cut (which is not all fifty-- if you don't even have a charter law in place yet, you're not in this report. Sorry, Kentucky. Also, if your charter law was thrown out by your Supreme Court. Sorry, Washington.)
I'm going to walk through the report on Pennsylvania, because that's where I am. This will give you an idea of some of the pitfalls in the report. You can decide on your own whether you want to sneak a peek underneath your state's charter hospital gown.
I'll tell you up front that Pennsylvania's data will reflect that we are a haven for crappy cyber-charters. I'm betting that is why, for instance, the percentage of charters on the state's naughty list went from 60% to 66%. Why the state doesn't just shut down these cyber-cesspools of educational malpractice is a mystery for another day.
There are other bullet points about the Keystone state, but the report writers also have some nicely designed charts for your perusal, covering the same data in a more graphically delightful manner and following the layout of the chart above. They really have done a good job of formatting things so that it's easy to follow the same ideas all the way through.
PA has 7% of our students in charters, and those are 6% of our schools.
The comparison breakdown of race and ethnicity is, well, kind of useless. They compare the charters against the state, but in any state where the population varies as much as ours, that's meaningless. Pennsylvania is very rural except for the parts that are very urban, and very non-white except for the parts that are very white. In other words, while the state student population may be 73% white, 13% black, and 9% hispanic as a whole, I'd be surprised if you could find any community in the state that matches that demographic breakdown. So comparing charter demographics to that means nothing- the only comparison that really matters is whether or not charters are educating the same population as the local school, and one of the secrets to charter success continues to be making sure that they do NOT try to educate the same population as local schools.
Fun factoid- PA charters are far more centered in cities and suburbs than public schools. 25% of our schools are rural (a nearby district educates about 400 students in one K-12 building serving half of the entire county-- that rural) and no charters other than the cybers have figured out how to make bank serving that population. And because local districts are still the main authorizers, volunteers willing to slit their own financial throats are few and far between.
The rate of charters opening has been slowing down. The rate of closing is a little more stable, but overall rising. About 50% of PA charters have an "innovative" special focus.
Remember the report about how cyber-charters move students backwards? That figures in this report and undoubtedly really hurt charter numbers for "number of days of learning" for charters, which are hugely negative. And while the numbers for charters in the top and bottom categories of PA's school rating system are also dismal, I will give them a pass because our school evaluation system is a hot, ugly mess.
Oh, and we finish with some unscored data, including the data that 27% of our charter students are cyber-students, which is lower than I would have guessed. Now I should probably go back and remove all the places where I blamed crappy charter results on the cybers-- apparently plenty of those Philly charters are able to stink up the place all on their own.
Bottom Line
I give NAPSC credit for reporting data without trying to hide it, spin it, or obscure it behind too many piles of smoke and mirrors, just as I give some folks in the charter movement credit for having figured out that if they don't clean up their own bad actors, the whole industry is going to look worse and worse (I think "worse and worse" is inevitable for the current incarnation of the charter industry, but that's another conversation). This report has some interesting-ish data collected in one handy spot, and it's worth a few minutes to check out the picture of your state and see just how diseased you are.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
WA: Yet Another Charter Solution
Washington State has been scrambling to solve its charter school problem, leading to some creative solutions indeed.
The Washington courts found the charter school law (pushed through the state with a giant ramrod made of tightly wrapped charter fan money) unconstitutional, because charter schools spend pubic tax dollars with absolutely no oversight from taxpayer-elected officials. A public school is not a public school if the only thing public about it is the public dollars given to private organizations to run it (ironically, this is a variation on the argument used by Eva Moskowitz to successfully argue that the state could not audit her charters).
Despite the ruling that they were essentially operating illegally, the nine charter schools of Washington state went ahead and opened anyway.
That led to a solution that danced around both the spirit and the letter of the court decision. In a maybe-not-technically-illegal-but-certainly-shady mechanism (described in well-documented and painstaking detail by Dora Taylor at Seattle Education), the Gates Foundation enlisted the Mary Walker School District and the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to launder both private and public money and keep it flowing to the charter schools. It helped that Mary Walker's superintendent is Kevin Jacka, former Washington State Charter Commission member.
Meanwhile, charter fans like Robin Lake kept beating the drum for a rules change so that these outstanding schools (because the charters had somehow managed to prove their awesomeness in just five months) could stay open.
Please note-- the court ruling had made the route for charter rescue clear. The court ruled the charter law unconstitutional because charters fail the definition of public, or common, schools by having no elected public official oversight. Charters in Washington could be saved instantly just by instituting oversight by a publicly elected representatives of the taxpayers whose money is being spent.
But that, apparently, is a bridge too far for charter fans. Slap charters with whatever regulations you like, but don't ever suggest that they should be accountable to the taxpayers for how they spend taxpayer money.
And so the legislature is floating yet another solution.
The bill "aiming to fix" charter funding is actually a bill aiming to give charters a completely different funding source. According to the SeattlePI:
The proposal would re-establish a statewide charter authorizing commission and use lottery money to pay for the schools. But it would not give them access to local levy dollars.
The bill (Senate Bill 6194) that passed the House on Wednesday is close to the original Senate bill which also passed. Now they just have to iron out the bumps.
Of course, critics point out that one bump is that the bill doesn't actually address the findings of the court, since it still leaves the charter schools in the control of unelected boards. It does leave the state funding and operating two entirely separate schools systems which is a really inefficient and wasteful creative choice.
One has to admire the massive ballsiness of Washington state charter pushers. They shoved through a law that was ruled unconstitutional, and then thumbed their noses at the court by opening their charters anyway, claiming that keeping the illegal charters open was everyone else's problem, while at the same time running a money-laundering scheme to fund the schools.
Now they will find more state money to fund the schools, which would be only medium ballsy except don't forget this-- the Washington Supreme Court last summer hit the state government with a fine because they refused to fully fund the public school system they already have. So Washington state is kind of like a guy who won't make his mortgage payments, but sells off the furniture so he can buy a second house.
But for the profiteers of Washington, the most important thing is to get that charter industry up and running. Their standing argument is that they need the charters (currently serving about 1,200 students) to meet the individual needs of the students, because obviously a large school with a large staff and a wide variety of different programs is just a "one-size-fits-all" school, while a small school with a small staff if perfectly poised to meet a wide variety of needs. But charter pushers in Washington will not rest until they can meet the most important needs of all-- the needs of charter operators to be able to set up shop and collect public money without having to answer to anyone.
The Washington courts found the charter school law (pushed through the state with a giant ramrod made of tightly wrapped charter fan money) unconstitutional, because charter schools spend pubic tax dollars with absolutely no oversight from taxpayer-elected officials. A public school is not a public school if the only thing public about it is the public dollars given to private organizations to run it (ironically, this is a variation on the argument used by Eva Moskowitz to successfully argue that the state could not audit her charters).
Despite the ruling that they were essentially operating illegally, the nine charter schools of Washington state went ahead and opened anyway.
That led to a solution that danced around both the spirit and the letter of the court decision. In a maybe-not-technically-illegal-but-certainly-shady mechanism (described in well-documented and painstaking detail by Dora Taylor at Seattle Education), the Gates Foundation enlisted the Mary Walker School District and the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to launder both private and public money and keep it flowing to the charter schools. It helped that Mary Walker's superintendent is Kevin Jacka, former Washington State Charter Commission member.
Meanwhile, charter fans like Robin Lake kept beating the drum for a rules change so that these outstanding schools (because the charters had somehow managed to prove their awesomeness in just five months) could stay open.
Please note-- the court ruling had made the route for charter rescue clear. The court ruled the charter law unconstitutional because charters fail the definition of public, or common, schools by having no elected public official oversight. Charters in Washington could be saved instantly just by instituting oversight by a publicly elected representatives of the taxpayers whose money is being spent.
But that, apparently, is a bridge too far for charter fans. Slap charters with whatever regulations you like, but don't ever suggest that they should be accountable to the taxpayers for how they spend taxpayer money.
And so the legislature is floating yet another solution.
The bill "aiming to fix" charter funding is actually a bill aiming to give charters a completely different funding source. According to the SeattlePI:
The proposal would re-establish a statewide charter authorizing commission and use lottery money to pay for the schools. But it would not give them access to local levy dollars.
The bill (Senate Bill 6194) that passed the House on Wednesday is close to the original Senate bill which also passed. Now they just have to iron out the bumps.
Of course, critics point out that one bump is that the bill doesn't actually address the findings of the court, since it still leaves the charter schools in the control of unelected boards. It does leave the state funding and operating two entirely separate schools systems which is a r
One has to admire the massive ballsiness of Washington state charter pushers. They shoved through a law that was ruled unconstitutional, and then thumbed their noses at the court by opening their charters anyway, claiming that keeping the illegal charters open was everyone else's problem, while at the same time running a money-laundering scheme to fund the schools.
Now they will find more state money to fund the schools, which would be only medium ballsy except don't forget this-- the Washington Supreme Court last summer hit the state government with a fine because they refused to fully fund the public school system they already have. So Washington state is kind of like a guy who won't make his mortgage payments, but sells off the furniture so he can buy a second house.
But for the profiteers of Washington, the most important thing is to get that charter industry up and running. Their standing argument is that they need the charters (currently serving about 1,200 students) to meet the individual needs of the students, because obviously a large school with a large staff and a wide variety of different programs is just a "one-size-fits-all" school, while a small school with a small staff if perfectly poised to meet a wide variety of needs. But charter pushers in Washington will not rest until they can meet the most important needs of all-- the needs of charter operators to be able to set up shop and collect public money without having to answer to anyone.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Camus's Teacher (Evaluate That)
I cam across this story on Maria Popova's unendingly swell website, Brain Pickings.
French philosopher and writer Albert Camus did not consider himself an existentialist (even though that's what my high school English teacher taught me he was); he was, however, a fairly relentless force for meaning, beauty and absurdity, arguing for "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction." Life may be hopeless, but that doesn't mean it has to suck.
Camus was rendered fatherless before he was even one year old, thanks to the Great European War, and that left him at the mercy of a mother and grandmother who were decidedly Not Awesome. But there was a teacher. As Popova puts it
In a testament to what happens when education lives up to its highest potential to ennoble the human spirit, a teacher named Louis Germaine saw in young Albert something special
In 1957, Camus became the second-youngest to receive the Nobel Prize. Within days, he sent off this letter:
Is there any teacher who wouldn't be moved by such a letter from an accomplished former student who has just received one of human-kind's highest honors? Is there any teacher who thinks that such a letter would be inspired by diligently preparing students to get a good score on a pointless standardized test?
Never doubt that teachers make a positive difference, and a difference far beyond simply preparing students to successfully complete some pointless bureaucratic tasks.
French philosopher and writer Albert Camus did not consider himself an existentialist (even though that's what my high school English teacher taught me he was); he was, however, a fairly relentless force for meaning, beauty and absurdity, arguing for "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction." Life may be hopeless, but that doesn't mean it has to suck.
Camus was rendered fatherless before he was even one year old, thanks to the Great European War, and that left him at the mercy of a mother and grandmother who were decidedly Not Awesome. But there was a teacher. As Popova puts it
In a testament to what happens when education lives up to its highest potential to ennoble the human spirit, a teacher named Louis Germaine saw in young Albert something special
In 1957, Camus became the second-youngest to receive the Nobel Prize. Within days, he sent off this letter:
19 November 1957
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honor. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Albert Camus
Is there any teacher who wouldn't be moved by such a letter from an accomplished former student who has just received one of human-kind's highest honors? Is there any teacher who thinks that such a letter would be inspired by diligently preparing students to get a good score on a pointless standardized test?
Never doubt that teachers make a positive difference, and a difference far beyond simply preparing students to successfully complete some pointless bureaucratic tasks.
FL: Participation Points
When it comes to terrible education decisions, few legislatures can hold a candle to the whiz-bang elected wizards of Florida. Along with their the state's chief education minion Pam Stewart, they have raised fetishizing the Big Standardized to awesome heights.
Stewart and the legislature earned their Gold Medal in Being Awful for their treatment of Ethan Rediske. The state demanded that Ethan's parents provide plenty of proof that he needed to be excused form the Floirida BS Test because he was dying. Stewart accused Ethan's mother of trying to use Ethan's situation to make political hay,.because when a grieving mother has lost a long-suffering child to long-term debilitating illness, her first thought as she grieves is to get some political leverage out of the situation. Okay, maybe Stewart can be excused for thinking that of course someone would try to raise political capitol from the tragic death of a young child-- because that's exactly what legislators in Tallahassee proceeded to do.
Many testocrats have tried to sell the story that we are actually doing students a huge favor by wasting their time on BS Testing, but nobody has really committed to this unsupported claim like Florida's leaders. And here they are, at it again.
The law now says that all students must participate. And that means that the Rule of Stupid Laws now kicks in: when you create a stupid law, you end up looking far stupider trying to enforce it than anybody does breaking it.
There was a classic example years ago in Massachusetts at Danvers High School when the principal (I am not making this up) tried to ban the word "meep." Besides opening the school to universal ridicule, the entire business included robocalling the entire student body and (still not making this up) informing a lawyer that his "meep" infused letter to the district had been forwarded to the police. If you've spent any time at all around small humans, you know how this played out. Students tested every possible permutation of the rule. Would you get in trouble for saying "Mee" or "Peem" or "Peep" or, most awesomely, "Ni." I have often wondered how that story finally played out, but I can guarantee you it didn't end with the principal winning cheerful compliance and students solemnly determining they had seen the error of their ways.
In Florida, the word is not "meep," but "participate." And that means we now get to watch the state of Florida attempt to beat back all manner of tests of that law.
If my child signs his name to the test and then pushes the test away an answers zero questions, has he participated? Does he have to answer one question to qualify as "participating"? Ten questions? Does she have to try, or is it participating if she plays ACDC on the test?
Hilariously, the state has so far declined to answer any such questions:
"I feel like answering the type of question provides more information that could be construed as encouraging students or parents not to take the test," DOE spokeswoman Meghan Collins said. "That's just something we don't want to do."
In other words, we refuse to tell you what the minimum requirement is to avoid violating our stupid rule.
The Tampa Bay Times pressed Stewart's office for an official, legal definition of participating, but they simply referred the reporter to the actual letter of the law, which is not very helpful:
"Participation in the assessment program is mandatory for all school districts and all students attending public schools, including adult students seeking a standard high school diploma under s. 1003.4282 and students in Department of Juvenile Justice education programs, except as otherwise provided by law. If a student does not participate in the assessment program, the school district must notify the student's parent and provide the parent with information regarding the implications of such nonparticipation."
So the penalty for not participating is a note home to your parents. And nobody seems to knpow what the big bad punishment might be beyond that. But still no whiff of a definition of what "participate" actually means.
Whatever it means, lots of Florida parents don't do it. Last year over 100 Florida schools didn't get their official fake grade from the state because they fell below the 95% participation rate. Probably lots of principals and teachers and students and families crying themselves to sleep over that one.
You can't brow beat people into compliance by using a stupid rule, which is what Florida has tried to do. They now have to deal with a rule so unclear that nobody can tell when you've actually broken it or what happens to you if you do break it. I'm willing to bet that the rest of the nation's testocrats will not be looking to Florida for pointers on how to beat back opt outers.
Stewart and the legislature earned their Gold Medal in Being Awful for their treatment of Ethan Rediske. The state demanded that Ethan's parents provide plenty of proof that he needed to be excused form the Floirida BS Test because he was dying. Stewart accused Ethan's mother of trying to use Ethan's situation to make political hay,.because when a grieving mother has lost a long-suffering child to long-term debilitating illness, her first thought as she grieves is to get some political leverage out of the situation. Okay, maybe Stewart can be excused for thinking that of course someone would try to raise political capitol from the tragic death of a young child-- because that's exactly what legislators in Tallahassee proceeded to do.
Many testocrats have tried to sell the story that we are actually doing students a huge favor by wasting their time on BS Testing, but nobody has really committed to this unsupported claim like Florida's leaders. And here they are, at it again.
The law now says that all students must participate. And that means that the Rule of Stupid Laws now kicks in: when you create a stupid law, you end up looking far stupider trying to enforce it than anybody does breaking it.
There was a classic example years ago in Massachusetts at Danvers High School when the principal (I am not making this up) tried to ban the word "meep." Besides opening the school to universal ridicule, the entire business included robocalling the entire student body and (still not making this up) informing a lawyer that his "meep" infused letter to the district had been forwarded to the police. If you've spent any time at all around small humans, you know how this played out. Students tested every possible permutation of the rule. Would you get in trouble for saying "Mee" or "Peem" or "Peep" or, most awesomely, "Ni." I have often wondered how that story finally played out, but I can guarantee you it didn't end with the principal winning cheerful compliance and students solemnly determining they had seen the error of their ways.
In Florida, the word is not "meep," but "participate." And that means we now get to watch the state of Florida attempt to beat back all manner of tests of that law.
If my child signs his name to the test and then pushes the test away an answers zero questions, has he participated? Does he have to answer one question to qualify as "participating"? Ten questions? Does she have to try, or is it participating if she plays ACDC on the test?
Hilariously, the state has so far declined to answer any such questions:
"I feel like answering the type of question provides more information that could be construed as encouraging students or parents not to take the test," DOE spokeswoman Meghan Collins said. "That's just something we don't want to do."
In other words, we refuse to tell you what the minimum requirement is to avoid violating our stupid rule.
The Tampa Bay Times pressed Stewart's office for an official, legal definition of participating, but they simply referred the reporter to the actual letter of the law, which is not very helpful:
"Participation in the assessment program is mandatory for all school districts and all students attending public schools, including adult students seeking a standard high school diploma under s. 1003.4282 and students in Department of Juvenile Justice education programs, except as otherwise provided by law. If a student does not participate in the assessment program, the school district must notify the student's parent and provide the parent with information regarding the implications of such nonparticipation."
So the penalty for not participating is a note home to your parents. And nobody seems to knpow what the big bad punishment might be beyond that. But still no whiff of a definition of what "participate" actually means.
Whatever it means, lots of Florida parents don't do it. Last year over 100 Florida schools didn't get their official fake grade from the state because they fell below the 95% participation rate. Probably lots of principals and teachers and students and families crying themselves to sleep over that one.
You can't brow beat people into compliance by using a stupid rule, which is what Florida has tried to do. They now have to deal with a rule so unclear that nobody can tell when you've actually broken it or what happens to you if you do break it. I'm willing to bet that the rest of the nation's testocrats will not be looking to Florida for pointers on how to beat back opt outers.
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