Micro-Credentials for Fun and Profit (In which Relay certifies your hand)

Part of the new wave of competency based education for teachers is the vogue of micro-credentials. Micro-credentials, sometimes linked to little badges, are an attempt to break down teaching into verrrrrry small competencies, and not coincidentally, monetize the certification of them. How micro can we get? Oh, you have no idea.

Meet Relay Graduate School of Education's micro-credential for Checking for Understanding Using Gestures. Relay is a charter-created fake school for teaching teachers, and this is some of their more spectacular work, presented by way of the good folks at Digital Promise.

You may look at the name of this micro-credential and think, "Can that be what it looks like? Surely there's some deeper, more clever technique that they're selling." Well, here's the full description.

Gestures are a CFU method in which the teacher asks a question and students signal their answers using some sort of visual sign (for instance, holding up a number of fingers, sign language, colored index cards). Unlike many other CFU methods in which teachers make inferences about student learning from a sample of students, with Gestures, the teacher visually records answers from the entire class. Generally, Gestures are most effective when the question is posed in a selected-response format (e.g., multiple choice, agree or disagree, or yes/no). 

So, yes. The people at Relay really are that ridiculous. But not as scary ridiculous as whatever proto-teacher needs actual instruction on how to ask students a question and have them raise their hands. We should also note that this technique dovetails nicely with the charter philosophy that emphasizes keeping students voices as silent as possible.

Now, granted, there are layers of dumb here. The suggestion that this method is different because teachers don't have to make inferences-- are we to assume that in this method, the teacher does not need to be able to tell this difference between a confident student, an uncertain student and a just-plain-guessing student. And what do you mean, "visually record answers"-- am I going to whip out my phone and take a picture? But thanks for the tip about selected-response format; I was going to go ahead and have my students answer "So what are some of the major contributing factors to the start of the Great European War?" with hand gestures.

But Relay is not done providing dumb instructions about this technique.

You should only use it "to check for understanding of important content." And you should use "visually distinct" gestures. For example-- and I swear that I am not making this up-- you should not use thumbs up and thumbs down because they are hard to tell apart. The teacher should also give "crisp, in-cue signals" about when to make the gesture, for example saying "Show me your answer when I say three-- one, two..." Also, ask follow-up questions, and make appropriate adjustments in instruction depending on what happens when you do your check for understanding.

To earn this micro-credential, you need to submit two videos and a write up, and the handy guide and rubric is here, and one cannot help wonder in what hollow village of the damned is any of this necessary? If you actually have to be taught how to do this, is there the remotest possibility that you will be fit to work in a classroom with live small humans? But this micro-credential carries a December 2014 copyright, so no doubt your school is loaded with people who are officially credentialed to ask student questions like "Who thinks the answer is A?" and then have students raise their hands.

Here are some of the other excellent micro-credentials being made available for teachers:

Calling Students By Name

Research indicates that students are more responsive when the teacher uses their name. This micro-credential will certify that you can learn a student's name and insert it in a spoken sentence. (Note: Making eye contact is a separate micro-credential).

Acronyming

Why talk about "check for understanding," a phrase that anyone can understand, when you can say CFU instead and sound really special. This micro-credential (MC) will train the teacher to create acronyms for any occasion (AFAO) so that you can credential obvious versions of educational reality (COVER) when you align school standards (ASS). Once you have mastered educational habits everyone already does (HEAD) , you can increase your bazillion useless teacher trainings (BUTT) as well as wield a zillion obnoxious obsfucatory trainings (WAZOOT) and have a million minor educational revelations (HAMMER). So as you COVER your ASS and with HEAD, up your BUTT, you can MC HAMMER your way to excellence out the WAZOOT.

Walking and Talking

Teachers are sometimes called upon to both walk and talk at the same time in a classroom. This micro-credential certifies that the teacher is able to both speak words and move feet nearly simultaneously. A companion credential to our popular Walk and Chew Gum micro-credential.

Passing Out Papers

Teachers will focus on how to spot the student name on the paper and then identify the student who has that name in the classroom. Teacher will then grasp the paper with her own hand and extend that hand toward the identified student. This micro-credential can become more powerful when combined with the Calling Students By Name micro-credential.

Eating Lunch

Teacher will be certified in the use of all three major utensils and demonstrate the ability to divide food into smaller pieces that can reasonably be expected to fit in the teacher's mouth, inserting those pieces, chewing, and swallowing. Note: Solids only. Eating Soup for Lunch is a separate micro-credential.

Breathing

Research suggests that teachers who breathe are generally more effective in increasing student achievement. We considered creating Inhaling and Exhaling as separate micro-credentials, but eventually you reach a point where it foolish to keep breaking down ordinary actions regularly performed by sentient beings into tiny micro-credentials.

Note

There have been requests for credentials centered around interacting with young carbon-based life forms as if both they and the teachers are thinking, feeling human beings who can enter into a teacher-student relationship that allows for communication and understanding that is enhanced by the teacher's professional knowledge, training and experience. We repeat our position that such an approach is far too broad and messy to ever be offered as a micro-credential. We'll just stick with classics like How To Have Your Students Raise Their Hands When You Ask a Question.

Zombie Core

The Common Core State (ha!) Standards have seen better days. By now, actually, they really ought to be dead-- stabbed in the back by their former politician BFFs, torn up by a constant barrage of criticism, knocked about the sconce by angry parents, repeatedly done in by their own deep flaws, and just generally bearing a whole lot of slings and arrows (plus, of course, all the problems that happened to them because of bad implementation).

Now they just shamble around the education landscape, broken and twisted and barely able to stumble in any direction, but absolutely unwilling to lie down and die. The Core is now a zombie, a walking dead policy. And the signs are everywhere.

We still get a steady trickle of teacher-written pieces about How The Core Made My Classroom Awesome! Here's an interview from Louisiana with two teachers who love the Core very much. Rhea-Claire Richard and Bailey Debardelen teach fourth grade in the Lafayette Parish, where the whole staff is "past the point of opposition" and "All of our teachers love Common Core." The two do admit that at first teachers were resistant, but they blame that on teachers' fears that students and teachers would not be able to live up to rigorous standards and not, say, a concern that the standards were amateur hour junk.

Have we found at last a colony where the Core roams whole and happy? Not likely-- look at this explanation of how Lafayette handles the ELA standards.

I see rich discussion in my classroom. I see deep thinking about what they’re reading or concepts that they’re learning, and I see that they are able to form their own validated opinions based off of what they read. They can articulate their thinking using evidence, and I’ll give you an example. One of our old GLEs used to be “identify a main character in a story.” That’s a very low-level thinking standard to just identify something, whereas now, I may ask my students, “How do the actions of the main character affect the plot of the story?” Well, they’re going so much deeper. They’re having to look at the author’s craft, how the author wrote what they did and why they chose the words they used. 

Here's the thing. "How do the actions of the main character affect the plot of the story" has nothing to do with the Fourth Grade Literacy Standards. It's a perfectly good question. It was a perfectly good question under the old standards, and it's a perfectly good question under the Zombie Core, and it would be a perfectly good question if Lafayette Parish threw all the standards out the window. There isn't a reason in the world to think that any set of standards, and most especially not the zombie core, would be needed to prompt a teacher to ask this question.

The two are being interviewed to argue against Louisiana's threatened jettisoning of the Zombie Core, and Debardelen has this to say:

I think that within our school and within the four walls of my classroom and Rhea-Claire’s classroom, there are aspects of the Common Core that I don’t feel like I will ever stray away from. 

In other words, these two (who are relative newbs) will do what all professional educators do-- they follow their own best judgment and ignore whatever paperwork instructions they've been handed. They didn't need the core to think of good ways to teach, and they won't lose those ideas if the core goes away.

This is what we're seeing again and again and again. Teachers have "adapted to" and "adjusted to" and "become numb to" the zombie core by simply using their own best professional judgment and disregarding everything about the core they don't like (and are allowed to ignore). Experienced teachers know how this works. The easiest way to "align instruction" to a set of standards is to do what you were going to do anyway and check off whatever alignment paperwork your district has given you to play with. And for every local teacher, the only version of the core that you really need to understand and acknowledge is the version that your district adheres to, which is probably the original core with a few fingers and toes chopped off.

While that process is knocking some of the flesh off the zombie core, states help out by chiseling off the common core brand name, or by rewriting portions of the standards into some other messy version. In some part of the zombie core's remaining brain matter, it thinks fondly of the days when states had to promise not to change a word of the standards and add no more than 15% of new material. That very quickly became, "Do whatever you want. Nobody will stop you."

And testing has chewed several organs out of the zombie core's guts. Core fans can talk all day about how the core promote critical thinking; they may be full of it, but there's no point having that argument because the Big Standardized Tests don't have the faintest breath of critical thinking anywhere on them, and if it's not on the test, it doesn't matter. Every part of the zombie core that isn't on the test has been reamed out and discarded.

What are we left with? A shambling tattered husk that some still call common core, but has long since its identity and only vaguely resembles its original ugly self. Folks like the Lafayette teachers or the many groups still trying to make a buck from the core can all praise the core, but they are talking about a memory, a phantom, a tottering doddering hollowed-out hulk that nobody really, truly embraces. Zombie core can still cause some damage and hurt people, but mostly it stumbles along in slow steady decay, looking less and less like its early self and more and more like a slow monster searching for brraaaaaaainnnss. Maybe there will be a final kill shot, or maybe it will just keep wasting away into nothingness. Either way, the zombie core is on its last brittle fleshless legs.

Charter Barrier Baloney

In today's US News, Rachel Campos-Duffy of the Libre Initiative is busily deploying tired charter talking points against Hillary Clinton.

Campos-Duffy is a journalist who got her start on MTV's The Real World, and has since graduated to Fox News, The View, and other guest pop-ups. She authored a book in praise of stay-at-home mothering, and she's married to Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin congressman and fellow Real World alumnus. He got some attention a few years ago for talking about how hard it was to make it on his $174K Congressional salary.

Meanwhile, the Libre Initiative is an astroturf group standing up for "the principles and values of economic freedom" in the US Hispanic community. You'd better sit down as I tell you that they got a huge pike of their funding from the Koch brothers, that they are run by veteran GOP staffers, and that Fox News thinks they are swell (and real).

So that is Campos-Duffy's context as she pops up to lecture Clinton on the need for charter schools.

As is typical for charteristas, Campos-Duffy characterizes the private school funded with public dollars as "the surest way to give children the best shot as a better life." She throws in her qualifications (mother of seven children) and notes that she has "taken advantage of educational options" for her own kids, which I'm sure is a challenge for a family trying to get by on a the money made by being a Congressman and being a media figure.

But Campos-Duffy is interested in commentary, and not actual evidence. She notes that charter-choice has "clearly worked for Hispanic families in Florida, Nevada, Arizona and elsewhere," and I'd like to ask her how she arrives at that "clearly." Florida charters have a variety of problems, including a 30% failure rate. And while Florida's school letter grades are a bogus joke, it's the game reformsters wanted to play, and in that game charters are pulling failing grades at three times the rate of public schools. And that's before we get to the many ways that Florida's mostly-unsupervised charter industry has bilked the taxpayers.

Campos-Duffy quotes Clinton from last year: "I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system – not outside of it."

Campos-Duffy forgets the correct charterista talking response, which is that charter schools are public schools, but she can be forgiven for forgetting that talking point because it's not actually true. But she certainly remembers the rest of the charter fan theme song:

 As a mother myself, I cannot imagine a more heartless response to the millions of children whose lives depend on access to charter schools. No child's future should ever be dictated by what zip code they were born in. Yet with their families lacking the resources for a private school education, they are left with no choice but to carry on in despair. 

These all seem like great arguments in support of other things? Charters are life-saving? Then why not a call for better regulation and some sort of protection for the many students who are left high and dry when charters suddenly close. No child's future should be determined by zip code? That sounds like a call for more aggressive approaches to systemic poverty and racism. Which is why the last sentence is also baloney. No choice? There's a choice. There has always been a choice-- and the choice is for state and federal leaders to demand that schools in poor communities have the same sort of resources that wealthier districts have. Parents don't want a variety of choices nearly as much as they want their child in one good school.

Campos-Duffy follows up with more baloney. She touts higher test scores for charters and larger waiting lists, sourcing various pro-charter "research" groups. She makes the claim that charters achieve their mediocre results with less public money, which is a two-part equivocation. First, charters supplement that money with private contributions, meaning they do not know the secret of providing a cheaper education. Second, the local taxpayers will still pay more, because taxes must be raised to replace some of the money that charters have sucked out of the public schools.

And third, charter results depend on selective student bodies. Campos-Duffy calls that "simply untrue," which is simply untrue. Charters have a variety of techniques for being selective, from ad campaigns that make it clear which students are welcome and which are not, to "random lottery" processes that require a certain level of savvy and smarts to navigate. And that's before we get to techniques like the Success Academy infamous "got to go" list. And all of that is before we get to the more complicated business of using charters to gentrification in certain neighborhoods, pushing out the local poor folk and bringing in a Better Class of folks.

Campos-Duffy tsk-tsks the "special interests" involved in this debate, but the debate is only happening because the special interests behind the modern charter industry have pushed so hard for their access to the charter gravy train. She calls charters "extraordinarily successful nearly everywhere they've been tried, which is just not true.

She does correctly note that Clinton used to be a charter industry BFF, and as a pro-public ed guy, I have to say that Campos-Duffy is probably way too worried for no good reason-- I fully expect that if elected, Clinton will continue to serve the big-money interests that back charter schools. So Campos-Duffy's argument is largely bogus, but it's also largely unnecessary. Maybe those two things cancel each other out.

After the Teachers Are Gone

Does it seem some days as if ed reform is intent on ending teaching as a profession? Well, some reformy folks are not only considering that possibility-- they are positively counting on it and planning for it.

Meet Knowledgeworks. I wrote about them a while back, and it wasn't pretty.

They were founded in Ohio in 1998, with an initial mission of "increasing access" to educational opportunities mostly for poor students and poor working class adults. In 2004 they got on the Gates Small School gravy train and helped create some of those smaller high schools that were Gates' previous theory about how to fix education. In 2009, they switched nimbly to the new Gates gravy train-- college and career readiness; at that time, they also glommed up Napa Valley company New Tech Networks (at least one source says KnowdgeWorks founder built it), a group specializing in transforming schools through blah blah argle bargle my lord in heaven, but these guys soak all of their materials in some sort of corporate word soup that drowns a lot of sense.

The organization was founded by Chad P. Wick (age 72) who has been a CEO of various commercial banks in and around Cincinnati, served on some insurance company boards, and had his hand in Ohio politics one way or another. He seems well-connected to both important people and money, and that has dovetailed nicely with a philanthropic (in the modern sense) career. Wick also co-founded MAYWIC Select Investments, an investment group that bases a lot of its work on "deep relationships" and includes in its portfolio Abe's Market, goldieblox, and One Hope. Over the past several years, Wick has transitioned out of running KnowledgeWorks and into running ACT (yes, the test people).

KnowledgeWorks is networked with EDWorks (who "optimized the school improvement models behind this success by providing curriculum and instruction, supportive high school culture, aligned assessments and comprehensive student support") and StriveTogether ("Every child. Cradle to career." is either their slogan, or maybe just a threat).

If KnowledgeWork's singular talent is reading the prevailing winds of ed reform (and grabbing their share of the Gates money that fills the sails of the ship of reformsterism), then we can assume that competency based education is on its way, because KnowledgeWorks is all in on this Next Big Thing: their "vision" these days is "Every student experiences meaningful personalized learning that enables him or her to thrive in college, career, and civic life."

In fact, their vision is even greater than that, because it involves the end of teaching as a profession, replaced by an "expanding learning ecosystem." They have a whole "report" about this Brave New World (or, as I suppose we must put it these days, BraveNewWorld), and I have read through it so you don't have to.

"Exploring the Future Education Workforce" is all about envisioning about what education will ook like after the teachers are gone. In fact, it focuses on seven new "roles" in the "learning ecosystem." So brush off your resume and get ready for the WorldofTomorrow!

The Preliminary Visionary Filled-with-hot-airy Windup 

Every reformy group has its own special style, and KnowledgeWorks' style is all about high-calibre blather. Here's how they elaborate on the notion that the learning ecosystem is expanding.

It is rapidly becoming more diverse and more personalized as accelerated technological change, increasingly sophisticated data systems, and changing social expectations make it possible for learners and their families to renegotiate their relationships with traditional; education institutions, and, in some cases, to end them entirely. As part of this expansion, new forms of "school" are proliferating in both place-based and virtual settings, and the boundaries between formal and informal learning are melding. Competency based education is spreading. Learning playlists that curate learning resources are gaining sway as a means of organizing and giving students some degree of choice over their learning journey.   

It's an awesome word salad, tossing together unsubstantiated assertions (what changing social expectations, exactly) and meaning-deficient phraseology (how does one meld boundaries, exactly). But later we arrive at something more like a point:

Education stakeholders cannot cultivate vibrant learning ecosystems that work well for all learners without thinking anew, not just about ther structures and cultures, but also about people working in them.

In other words, we have seen the future of education, and it doesn't have teachers in it. Well, maybe not. The authors acknowledge that some things could screw with their vision. There are other possible futures, but they all suck (there's a whole other paper about this, but we'll not go there today).

So let's look at what the BraveNewWorld of education offers for employment opportunities.

1) Learning Pathway Designer

Works with students, parents and learning journey mentors to set learning goals, track students' progress and pacing, and model potential sequence of activities that support learning experiences aligned with competencies.

So, curriculum writer, if you want to imagine a curriculum written like a Choose Your Own Adventure. But "curator of learning journeys" sounds sooooo much cooler than "curriculum director."

2) Competency Tracker

Tags and maps community-based learning opportunities by the competencies they address...

It's been two years since I made the argument that the Common Core aren't really standards, but are actually data tags for all tests, quizzes, worksheets, etc etc etc. Now we're creating a job for somebody who just sits around and tags every single thing that might come in contact with the student so that every step of the "learning journey" can be tagged and bagged and monitored and recorded. King of like Big Brother's Little Brother.

3) Pop-Up Reality Producer

This champion of whiz-bangery is supposed to work with everyone under the sun to produce "pervasive learning extravaganzas that engage learners in flow states and help them develop relevant skills, academic competencies, and knowhow."

I'm not going to lie-- my new professional goal is to provide a pervasive learning extravaganzas every day. When students ask, "What are we doing today?" I am so answering, "Why, a pervasive learning extravaganza, of course." I will use it on every lesson plan. And my planned outcome will be to measure my learners' flow states, probably with a new flowstateomometer, which I will create by my use of knowhow.

4) Social Innovation Portfolio Director

When I dig past the excessive language extravaganza, this appears to be a person who hooks students up with community organizations that will use students as free labor with the excuse that it's a learning experience for those students. This is driven by the "use of collective impact metrics" and should "support students in become transformative agents in their own communities," which I guess means that KnowledgeWorks would consider the Boston student protests an awesome learning extravaganza.

5) Learning Naturalist

Designs and deploys assessment protocols that capture evidence of learning in students’ diverse learning environments and contexts.

This brings to mind Altschool, where teachers constantly make videos of the moments they catch students displaying understanding and competence. Of course, it also brings to mind Steve Irwin, tracking the elusive teen-age ELA student in the wilds of their natural habitat. Although this is driven by "expansion in data capture methods" as well as "increasing neuropsychological understanding of memory, attention, focus, and other aspects of cognition," perhaps we are not so much tracking wild students as we are trying to capture wild data.

6) Micro-Credential Analyst

Provides trusted, research-based evaluations and audits of micro-credential options and digital portfolio platforms in order to provide learners and institutions with comparative quality assurance metrics

An almost palatable start before it veers off into collecting this data not to be certain that students are learning and competent, but in order to do stack ranking and QA oversight. This also brings us back to the idea that not only are we getting rid of teachers, but we're getting rid of schools, with each micro-credential coming from a different learning extravaganza provider. Your education will come from potentialy hundreds of vendors, creating a need for someone who has to "determine whether credential issuers have complied with assessment protocols and whether those protocols are sufficient to reflect and determine mastery." So, some sort of third party overseer of all the various programs and providers. That shouldn't be a bureaucratic nightmare at all!

7) Data Steward

Acts as a third-party information trustee to ensure responsible and ethical use of personal data and to maintain broader education data system integrity and effective application through purposeful analytics.

 Well, if you think the rest of these were a heaping pile of bovine byproduct, then you'll love this one. Data brokers stewards aren't just supposed to oversee the use of the vast data mine created by the rest of this approach, but are supposed to "grow the value of learner's personal data" by looking at the larger connections and helping to manage the ecosystem to the benefit of the community and the learners (I don't know if you've noticed, but there are no students in this BraveNewWorld). The stewards will manage data warehouses and sharing systems "as a sustainable public asset."

Yes, we will collect and endless pile of data about your child, and then we will manage and share it for the good of the community, and to better serve your child, presumably by helping her find her rightful place in the community.

Honest to goodness, this is some of the creepiest crap I've come across, and if you page back through this blog, you'll see I've encountered a lot. The fact that this intrusive Big Brotherliness is dressed up in such florid and flopping language just makes it creepier, like a serial killer dressed as a clown.

Good News & Bad News

So the report will wrap up by considering the "promises and pitfalls" of BraveNewWorld.

Saving the Poor Teachers

The "diversification" of roles will help "alleviate the burden of supporting many of the core functions of learning from today's often overloaded teachers and administrators." Yes, poor teachers. It's just all too hard for them, so lets send them home and replace with them with a bunch of lower-skill corporate functionaries in jobs that will be easier to fill because the training requirements will be less like a trained professional and more like a trained fry cook.

Personalized Learning

Oh, the personalization. The ecosystem will be rife with it, from "transmedia learning assets" on the "learning journeys." Each learner will be served by a bevy of these para-professionals, and the learning will be oh so personalized, as the ecosystem works on their social, emotional and cognitive capacities. We're just going to build a whole person.

Foster Ecosystem Interconnection

Here's where they say something that is flat out dumb. By breaking the job of teaching down into many different jobs and multiplying the number of people working in the ecosystem, we will improve ecosystem communication. No. No, you won't. Adding more people with more functions in more places in the chain of the learning journey will not improve communication. It will certainly increase dramatically the NEED for communication, but systems people often fall into the mistaken belief that because a system demands something, the system will get it.

Extending Partnership and Authority

I really can't overstate just how much gilded word salad fills this report. For instance, these new roles will demonstrate the ways in which "new data streams and sensemaking tools promise to augment human contributions to teaching and learning." I have a sensemaking tool I'd like to use on the authors right now. There's a lot more florid textographical legerdemain in this bullet point, but as I read it, the point appears to be that this ecosystem will help wrest control of the education system away from professional educators and let other organizations get their hands on that sweet sweet cash the pervasive learning extravaganzas.

Ensuring Rigor and Quality

Hard to be certain, but I think this actually means "redefining quality to suit our corporate needs." Also, with the education providing business spread out over so many providers, so0mebody had better keep an eye on quality assurance. That is true. See above point about how just because a system really needs something, that doesn't mean the system will get it.

Reimagining Educator Preparation and Career Pathways

Yeah, that's a bit of an understatement. The "broadening of authority and blurring of boundaries" will mean that anybody will be an "educator" or at least an individual "contributing to learning." New training will be needed and old training will be scrapped. Oh, and then there's this:

Lastly, an expansion of educator roles will call into question current employment structures and labor relations. Some educators may focus on emerging uncertainty about job security as new kinds of career pathways are forged and tenure and retirement systems adapt. 

Educators will have "more options" about how they negotiate job security and how they are "renumerated," as long as they understand that none of those options will include either job security or particularly good wages. Unions will have the "opportunity" to provide new leadership for these new jobs. Ha.

Annd we're out of patience

There are a few final points, but I already feel like I need a pervasive showering extravaganza.

This is a fairly awesome display of the use of language to obscure rather than to clarify. These guys are good. Appreciate, for instance, the use of "ecosystem" when we are really talking about a new system. But people don't like the word "system," which sounds cold and mechanistic and belittling to human beings. On the other hand, everything sounds better with "eco-" in front, and an ecosystem sounds all natural and pretty. System evokes machines and robots. Ecosystem evokes bunnies and butterflies.

There's a frequent use of adjectival extravaganzas, with the piled-up modifiers obscuring rather than clarifying the terms to which they're attached.

So what's the actual plan?

Basically, to chop education up into a million little bits, sell of the rights to each one, hoovering up tax dollars with one hand and a mountain of data with the other.

What's most strikingly ironic about this is that this system requires a huge host of various edu-drones, and to actually provide the level of service would be-- well, we're talking about a personal learning journey concierge who would help hook your child up with dozens of certified-by-somebody micro-credential providers while someone else collected and massaged all your child's data while other people managed connections to the community and your pop-up reality producer monitored and created all the learning modules trotted out just for your child. Go back to the Altschool example-- it is expensive as hell. Only the wealthy and privileged could afford to really do this, and this kind of systematic data-gobblng big-brothering education-in-a-hundred-cans system is the last thing that the wealthy and privileged would send their children to. But with the kind of financing that it would take to install this system in a poor, urban district we could build and staff the Taj Mahal of traditional schools.

Roughly five minutes after a district decided to go this route, the trimming to meet the budget would begin, and we would end up with a "personalized" system with very little or no personalization, but a whole lot of data grabbing and a whole lot of profiteering from companies selling the bits and pieces.

This report is beautiful junk, the unreal, manufactured picture of a product that will never exist, photoshopped and spun so that its inherently ugly parts are not immediately visible. It is the some reformsters favorite wet dream-- a happy future with no unions, no teachers, no schools, no barriers to entrepreneurs who want to make a buck selling edu-crap and who don't have to waste a cent on high-priced well-trained professionals. It is literally education without the teachers, the students, the school buildings, and the education. If this is the future, our whole culture is in huge trouble.

Who Is Being Served

The issues of tech in education are a mixed and mottled bag. Some folks are driven and excited to get any tech into a classroom no matter what, and other folks automatically rise up in revolt when education technology darkens their door. I fall into neither camp.

Modern ed tech can be hugely helpful and enormously valuable. It can open up a whole world of possibilities. But like most magic, it comes with a price, and sometimes the price is too high and the benefits too small. 

When someone wants to drop some tech on us, it's time to ask some questions, and boy, are there many questions to ask. How do we distinguish between tech that can enhance education and tech that needs to be avoided? I think we can cut to the heart of the matter with one question.

Who is being served?

Some software serves students, helping them work better and smarter. A collaboration-enabling software like Google Docs lets students who live far from each other still work together on a project without having the additional hurdle of managing transportation and schedules.

But there is plenty of software that does not serve students at all. For instance, putting a simple test of algebraic functions or elementary grammar on a computer doesn't serve the students a bit. The test isn't any easier to take (in fact, for many students it is harder), and the test doesn't measure anything more accurately. What the software does is make it easier to report the student's results to Other Parties. The software doesn't make it easier for the students to see how they're doing, and it doesn't make it easier for the teachers to see how they're doing-- it makes it easier for Other Parties to see how they're doing.


The computerized Big Standardized Tests do not serve students. They could theoretically help by providing near-instantaneous results-- except that the testocrats insist that the tests must be scored before anyone determines what a passing score will be. But the computerized BS Tests don't make it easier for students or teachers or parents to see how the students are doing-- the tests make it easier for Other Parties to see how students are doing.

As part of the Great Alignment of the Age of Core, many teachers have found themselves creating lesson plans on a computer platform that allows them to link standards to plans, lessons, activities, worksheets, tests and anything else that moves and breathes. This does not serve the teacher, and it certainly does not serve the student. It serves people who want to be able to more easily monitor what the teacher is doing.

Competency based education could be a useful approach to education, but as currently packaged and promoted, it is welded to technology, and that technology is not there to serve the students. It does not make it easier for the students to learn; it makes it easier for Other Parties to monitor student learning. It does not make it easier for teachers to teach-- it makes it easier for Other Parties to monitor what is happening in the classroom.

There will always be people agitating for the Next Big Thing-- we should get this tech for students because then students will have this tech! There will be people agitating for magical tech-- if we put this on a computer, then it will magically transform into a Super Effective Teaching Thing. This is tech that is purchased just to meet somebody's need to feel cool, up to date, and keeping up with the Jones Area School District.

Sure, there are other issues. Are Other Parties collecting data that actually tells them how students are doing, or are they collecting junk? Who will these Other Parties be, and what do they want to do with everything that they collect? Is the price of this magic actually worth the magic that will be performed? Those are legitimate questions, huge questions, important questions.

But the question that matters, the question that tells us whether the technology should be welcomed into the classroom or run out of town on a rail-- that question is the one we started with.

Who is being served?

Because if the answer is not "the students," then we don't even need to move on to the other questions. If the promise of the technology is not to serve the needs of the students, then the conversation should be over. And that promise can't be some sort of indirect quid pro quo-- you scratch our backs and we might do something to help out the students.

Yes, some tech will fail to fulfill its promise, and yes, some tech may fall into a bit of a grey area. But when considering a new tech-based computer-driven slice of whiz-bangery, it is still the most important question:

Who is being served?

Bernie's Charter Lesson

No, not a lesson for Bernie. A lesson from Bernie for the rest of us.

Lots of folks have been trying hard to parse exactly what Bernie Sanders at that Ohio town meeting that gave so much hope and joy to DFER. Does he stand up for public education? Does he think charters are swell? Having poked through his statements on the subject, I'm inclined to conclude what is, really, the obvious-- Sanders doesn't really know or understand much about modern charter schools.

This is not a huge surprise. The modern charter industry has spent millions and millions of dollars to make sure that the public does not really understand charter schools. Sanders's offhand comment is a reminder to the rest of us that those charter efforts have been very successful.

This is easy to forget. Like advocates involved in any issue, public school advocates spend so much time staring straight at the face of reformsterism that we can forget that many ordinary folks are not all that up-to-date on the issues. If we're not careful, we run the risk of being that crazy person in the room hollering, "But look!! It's hoorrrrrrible!!" while our audience turns in genuine confusion to say, "What? That little spider in the corner?"

Bernie Sanders is no dummy, and he doesn't live with his head in the sand. But charter schools and public ed and the rest of the mess have not been on his radar all that much and so, presumably, his knowledge of some issues comes from the ether, the background chatter, the conventional wisdom. And charter school promoters have done a good job of getting their message into the ether. If Sanders doesn't get it, neither do a whole lot of other people.

That is the charter lesson from Bernie-- we public education advocates still got some 'splainin' to do.

I wish I had a direct line to Sanders. I wish my union hadn't squandered an opportunity to build some bridges to his campaign. Both he and the other folks who don't know the charter school score need to get some basic stuff.

Why charter schools are not public schools.

Here's the shortest, simplest list of talking points I can craft.

1) Charter schools use public tax dollars, but are not accountable for how those dollars are spent. 

Charters don't have to tell how they spend public tax dollars. Not a cent of it. In fact, they have gone to court to defend their right to stay unaccountable to elected officials.

2) Charter schools are run by unelected persons who are unaccountable to the voters.

Charter school boards are not elected. Charter corporation executives may not even live in the community where the schools operate. Charter boards do not have to open their meetings to the public-- ever. If you are a parent with a child in the charter, your only "voice" is to pull the child out. If you are a taxpayer without a child, you have no voice at all.

3) Charter schools do not have to accept all students.

The most basic promise of public schools in the US is that they must take every child in their community. Charters do not have any such requirement. Besides pushing students out, charters can use targeted advertisement and demanding application processes that push away the less desirable students.

4) Charter schools are business-centered, not child-centered.

Charter advocates will claim that only a small percentage of charters are for-profits, but a noon-profit charter is just a charter that doesn't have to share its profits with shareholders. Yes, teachers and educators in public schools make money from working there. But if a teacher wants a raise, she must bargain for it with elected representatives of the taxpayers. Because of 1 and 2 above, charter leaders can give themselves as much of a raise as they like. For charter operators, every dollar spent on a child's education is one less dollar they get to pocket.

The Lesson

Charter schools are not public schools. Many members of the public do not get this. In fact, many members of the public have looked this truth right in the eyes and walked on, thinking, "Well, that can't be right. I must just not fully understand things." And charter pushers just keep putting the word "public" in front of "charter schools," because if the word's there, it must be true, right?

We do need to educate Sanders, but we need to educate a whole lot of other folks as well. We don't need to explain anything complicated or confusing. The lesson is pretty simple.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

CBE & The One True Path

Competency Works is a one stop shop for all your Competency Based Education PR needs, with a variety of ways to enhance the CBE narrative.

On the website, I came across a piece that, for me, really captures one of the problems I have with the current CBE initiative on a pretty fundamental basis. I'll link us back to the original source of the piece by Courtney Belolan about goal setting.

Belolan is an instructional coach and teachery consultant up in Maine, a state that somehow drew the short straw in the Who Wants To Be a CBE Pilot State contest. Belolan started out in education as a middle school teacher, but then moved on to working with the Maine International Center for Digital Learning which is "a non-profit organization that provides professional development and support for middle and high school leaders and teachers (both in-service and pre-service) regarding student-centered learning and teaching practices in 1-to-1 digital environments for the purpose of fostering student creativity, engagement, empowerment, well-being, and readiness for citizenship, college, and careers in a rapidly changing global society."

Let me just take a moment to note that MICDL has an extraordinarily slippery on-line footprint. This address (http://www.micdl.org/) is offered as theirs, and it looks right, but actually takes you to Gryphondale Educational Services (props for the Harry Potteresque name) which appears to a consulting firm for setting up, operating, making money from blended classrooms. Another lead took me to a site that features MICDL's name and a profile from 2014 of Bette Manchester, credited as founder of MICDL, an award-winning principal (including the middle school where Belolan taught), and a FirstMagic admin-- but the page is so incomplete that it still features body copy filled with "lorem ipsum dolor" placeholders. Manchester is also on the staff of Gryphondale. What else? Hewlett gave them a $41K grant in 2009-- "grantee website" is blank. Artopa, a web design company, boasts of the new website they made for MICDL-- but I'll be damned if I can find the thing! No news clippings. Manchester and MICDL are on a long list of Helpful People in a 2010 "report" boosting digital learning by Jeb Bush's FEE, and the group occasionally turns up in that sort of context, but a google search for their exact name turns up 852 results!


So Belolan's LinkedIn account seems up to date, and it still lists her on the board of this organization that specializes in digital education and yet has no serious online presence. So there's that. But let's get back to what Belolan actually says. Here's the heart of her point:

Goal setting is about deciding to do something and planning to get it done.  Simple as that.  Big or small, lofty or humble, anything can be a goal.  Stop and get eggs: goal.  Get a PHD: goal.  Learn to tango: goal.  Stop losing my keys: goal.  Answer emails: goal.  Walk for 20-30 minutes every day: goal.  Drink less coffee: goal.  I could go on.  The goal itself does not matter. What matters is the process, what you do between deciding to do something and doing it. 

Here's my problem. When you start with the idea that getting eggs, getting a PhD, and ceasing the regular loss of keys-- when you start with the idea that these are all pretty much the same sort of thing, you are in deep, deep trouble. And if you assert, as Belolan does, that simply planning and doing is the secret to all of this, you are in deeper still.

Now, I could craft any number of examples of what's wrong with all that, but let's just use the materials at hand. Belolan actually started out as a music major at Berklee, but then after two years moved on. Somehow the next professional stop was a middle school English teacher's job, which somehow led to consulting and belonging to a shadow organization that was started in 2008 by a woman who worked as a school principal, and THAT organization somehow ended up not exactly changing the international face of education via Maine but is instead-- what? We don't know.

Was that the plan? Did Belolan end up exactly where she planned to be by planning and executing every step of  the way? I am going to bet the answer is, "No," or "Good lord, no" or even "Are you kidding?"

Goals and plans and doing are all very nice, and they certainly have their own place in the world, but if you think that's the Secret of Life, you haven't been paying attention.

I have a lot of favorite metaphors for life-- let me trot out racquetball.

When you play raquetball, you cannot play with a plan other than "When the ball comes, I will hit it." At the moment you are flexing your arm, you may have an intent, which I suppose we can call a plan for about a half a second from now. But anyone who walks onto the raquetball court with a plan that says, "I will win today by scoring more points" followed by a list of the exact moves, swings and hits-- that person is a loon. Readiness and preparation are important. Timing is important. Focus and attention are important. Effort and passion are important. Planning? Not so important.

And since I got a bit personal with Belolan, let me get personal with myself. This is not the life I planned. True, I planned to be a teacher. But not here. And true, I planned to get married, but I was only going to do it once (the plan required me to be a lot better at it the first time). I suppose I could have made plans for my children, but by the time they came along I had begun to suspect that the whole planning thing was kind of a crock. I never planned to be a union president, let alone one leading a strike. And once I had fumbled one marriage, I certainly didn't plan to try again, and when I considered that possibility, I did not plan on the woman who gloriously upended my whole planning cart.

No, I don't mean that one should just flail away randomly. Preparation. Timing. Attention. Focus. And most of all, being aware of what the world is presenting to you. Planning is simply a way of tuning out possibilities, of saying, "Okay, my ship is going to come in, and it's going to be a schooner, and it's going to arrive at this dock." But the more possibilities you tune out, the more possibilities you miss. The more really great ships sail without you because you're sitting they're waiting for just that one.

For yourself, this is just sad. But to enforce this view on another person, a young human-- that's even worse. To say, "No, you don't want that ship. Just stay here." To tell a child, "Out of all the possibilities in the world, you only want those that are on the One True Path, and I will tell you where that One True Path lies." That's criminal. That's educational malpractice.

But it is also the core of what Belolan and other CBE fans want to sell us. Trust us! We will lay out the One True Path, with a couple of side loops and benches along the way so that students can stop and rest where they will (because-- personalization! See!!) We will pre-select the ships for you and we will pre-build the docks and we will pre-plan the voyage.

Because we know where the One True Path lies. We will be able to evaluate your child's planning and execution skills because if your child ends up where we think she should go, then her planning was excellent! We will let your child sit at a computer and step along the proscribed trail that we have set down for her. It's on a computer, so you know it's right.

If it were that simple, teachers would already be doing it. If it were that simple, it would be how most people lived their actual lives. But it's not. And anybody who thinks you can plan your way to a happy, full, rewarding life just like you plan your way to pick up eggs at the store-- that is someone who just doesn't get it, and certainly shouldn't be trying to impart what they do not get to teachers and children.

It's not about a plan. It's not about a marked path with restricting rails and a pre-chosen destination. It's about a map, and a compass, and the skills to travel where you will.