Dear Michael Magee: I'll Bite

Dear Michael Magee, PhD:

Last week you posted in Education Post to call for a better conversation, and I'm always a fan of conversation. You even used a controlling image of divorcing parents, and I'm a divorced parent myself. So I am going to take you up on our offer. Let's see if this could work.

First, some ground rules

If we're going to have this conversation, you'll need to stop trying to control the narrative. You tried to do that immediately in your piece with this: "Over a period of 20 years, tens of thousands of teachers left our traditional public school systems for new, more autonomous public schools." You just slipped in the highly debatable claim that charters are public schools, which you have to know is a point of disagreement.

Your premise also glosses over the question of the origin of the argument. It takes two people to make a marriage, but it only takes one person to make a divorce. The folks who wanted choice and charters tried to launch their industry by attacking public schools, public school teachers, and their unions. Those of us on the traditional public school side of this didn't start pointing out the problems with choice and charter on some sort of whim.

That said, there's nothing useful about saying, "Hey, he hit me first" if you are older than five. But there is also something non-trust inspiring about someone who punches you in the face and then says, "Hey, let's let bygones be bygones." The best opener when you're the one who started making a mess out of your marriage is not, "Let's start with a clean slate." The appropriate opener is, "I'm sorry. I screwed up." You can trust me on this one.

So let's look at your rules for a conversation.

1) Stop using words that make each other see red.

You offer "union" and "charter" as examples, noting that they mean so many things that they mean nothing. That's fair, though it can also help if, when listening, you hear what the other person is trying to say, and not what you yourself associate with the word. Having a better conversation is about listening, not just word choice.

Word choice also goes back to narrative control-- words have meaning, and it is helpful to a conversation if neither party tries to shade or cheat those meanings as a means of manipulating the conversation. We all understand that controlling the narrative and the language in a conversation equals controlling the outcome (folks at Education Post are, literally, professionals at doing so). A positive conversation requires honest use of language.

2) Put the cards on the table.

You mean, "Be honest"?

Some teachers sign individual contracts and some teachers’ contracts are collectively bargained. Whether that distinction matters is entirely dependent on what those contracts empower teachers to do or restrict them from doing.

No, not really. The contracts also determine how competitive the school will be in hiring my future colleagues. The contracts will also affect my relationships with my colleagues. And they will make a major statement about how fair, consistent, and reasonable management's treatment of teachers will be. There's much to discuss here, but your limited proposal of what matters in the contract only puts two or three cards out of the entire deck on the table.

3) Talk about how schools should be led, managed, and governed.

Who should get to open a public school and under what conditions. This is a conversation I'd be delighted to have. In fact, I've addressed it multiple times on this blog. I am not automatically anti-charter, but I do think the modern charter industry operates under fundamentally dishonest and unfair premises. But it doesn't have to be that way. You may not like my answers to these questions, but I'd be happy to talk about them.

Short answer-- a public school must be directly accountable to taxpayers, fully funded without draining pre-existing public schools, full transparent, primarily devoted to educational concerns (not business concerns), open to all students in the community they serve, and committed to stay open for the long haul regardless of the business picture. Happy to talk about it at greater length.

4) Talk about your feelings.

You specify feelings about how politics have messed with the classroom. Can that include how political maneuvering has fostered, protected and fed the charter industry at the expense of traditional public schools, or how reformsters have used political connections and power to deprofessionalize and disempower teaching? But yeah- I love conversations that focus on the work.

5) Talk about the students.

Sigh. You do understand, don't you, that it's reformsters that created the rhetorical flourish that responded to every concern expressed by teachers with, "You're putting ourselves ahead of the students." And that charter boosters are the ones who keep using the rhetoric of business and investment in the education world.

I mean, yes, definitely, let's talk about the students. But those of us who have spent our whole adult lives in the classroom-- we never stopped talking about the students. Plenty of reformsters have claimed we stopped, but I tell you-- we have never stopped for a single day. We have been talking about the students all along; you are certainly welcome to join that conversation, which would be far more productive than pretending that we're going to start a new one just so that you can feel you've initiated the whole thing.

About that framing metaphor

The choice of divorce as a controlling image is, you realize, another attempt to control the narrative, part of the ongoing spin of treating the charter-choice business as equivalent, partners in a marriage of equals. But from my side of things, a more accurate picture would be of the charter industry as a squatter who broke into public education's home, the home where public education had lived for decades,. The squatter comes in uninvited saying, "Well, you weren't doing it right" and starts helping himself to the silverware and food in the fridge and when they were being pushed to get out, the squatters say, "Well, hey. Let's come up with a reasonable division of the contents of this house."

There may be a better image, one that captures the way that some districts failed in ways that opened the door to "creative disruption," but then we also have to factor in the ways that government failed those schools by starving them of the support and resources they needed to succeed.

But you have picked an image and proposal that elevates the charter industry and minimalizes the degree to which public education has been deliberately undermined.

Granted, the question of "how did we get here" is in some ways moot. But history also speaks to motivations and goals, and past experience is the best predictor of future performance. Agreeing on what actually happened, and what is actually happening, is a good foundation for any productive conversation. We can't change the past, exactly, but it still matters, and how we talk about it and understand it matters. But I get your point-- we are where we are, and that's where we have to move forward from, whether we think we should be there or not.

So feel free to drop me a line, stop by my small town, or otherwise chat me up. As I said, I'm always up for a conversation. We can start by talking about what the ground rules really need to be.

School in a Can: A Bridge Too Far

News of Liberia's plan to outsource its entire public education system has brought attention once again to Bridge Academies, an international privatization business that has perfected the art of school in a can.

Bridge is not new to this business; they've been at this mission of uber-standardization for a while. Jay Kimmelman graduated from Harvard in 1999, launched an edu-business (Edusoft), sold it, and decided to make his mark in education more globally, opening the first Bridge Academy in 2009.

Kimmelman communicates his vision pretty clearly. On his LInkedIN page, the description of Bridge includes this: "Bridge disrupts the education status quo by ensuring that every child, regardless
of parental income, has access to the education he or she deserves." But that word "deserves" cuts several directions, and it raises the question-- who decides what these children deserve?

Whatever it is, they all deserve exactly the same thing. In the NPR piece, the reporter talks to Bridge's co-founder Shannon May (Kimmelman is her husband).

The exact same lesson being taught in this classroom is being taught in every other sixth-grade class at Bridge schools across the country, says Bridge co-founder Shannon May.

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

Bridge's work has drawn press attention before. Both NPR and Wired took a look at Bridge school-in-a-box operations in Kenya back in November of 2013 (NPR covered it as an All Things Considered Social Entrepreneurs Taking on World Problems segment, while Wired's story appeared in its Design section). The Economist did some wholehearted cheerleading for Bridge just last year.

The picture that emerges from these portraits is-- well. I keep worrying about that word "deserves."

On the one hand, Bridge is bringing education into some areas where resources are lower than low and the sheer infrastructure problem of creating and staffing so many schools would be daunting.

On the other hand, I feel certain that Kimmelman and his many wealthy backers (including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson and some venture capital groups) would never in a million years put their own children in such a school. The privatizing of Kenya and Liberia is the ultimate Other Peoples' Children educational reform. Not my kids and not on my continent. But those Other Kids in those Really Poor Other Countries-- a half-baked educational system will be fine for them.

How half-baked? The backbone of the school is the computer network. On one end of the network is the "teacher," who logs in and follows a the script to the letter. Because the teacher is following the e-script as delivered by networked tablet, central monitoring software knows exactly where the teacher is in the lesson. Sync up fifteen minutes late, says the Wired profile, and a call goes out to see what's going wrong in that particular school. Says May of her "teachers," "They are not content producers."

Bridge's teachers are trained in seven weeks, which is plausible considering that they don't need to be trained in their content knowledge-- just in how to deliver the scripted lessons. From the Wired article:

Bridge’s CEO, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Jay Kimmelman, compares his company to Starbucks and McDonald’s — organizations that offer a consistent experience no matter where in the world you encounter them. Beyond its 212 branded academies in Kenya, Bridge has set its sights on Nigeria, Uganda, and India. The founders intend to be serving half a million children in 30 countries by 2015, and 10 million by 2025. “We’ve systematized every aspect of how you run a school,” Kimmelman says. “How you manage it. How you interact with parents. How you teach. How you check on school managers, and how you support them.” 

As throughout the reformy world, results are advertised in test scores. Bridge has its own battery of in house tests which prove, unsurprisingly, that Bridge does great. They also contract with someone to do a reading and math test every year. Again, they do swell.

Of course, there are other measures of success as well.

The winning idea — basic education as a business — sounds counterintuitive, but it was central to planning for the couple and their cofounder, Phil Frei. For parents hovering around $2 in income per day, a potentially transformative education for their kids was just one of many things they couldn’t afford. The demand, however, remains enormous — the global market for low-cost private education is $51 billion annually. To meet the demand, May says, “we drive the price point low enough so parents can become consumers.”

So maybe the word isn't so much "deserve" as it is "afford." Sure, this isn't much like the kind of school most first-world well-to-do parents would want, but these are third-world poor folks, and if we can make a buck selling them a bargain basement stripped-down knock-off version of an education, why not? And I have to admit-- there's a legitimate argument to be made that as militaristic and below-basic as Bridge schools may seem, they are probably the best alternative available to some parents.

Of course, that raises the question of what could be done to create better alternatives. What hope do Liberians have if their government says, "Aw, screw it. Just let the corporate Americans have the business and then we don;t even have to try to create public education for our nation's children." And if the Chinese came to DC and said, "Look-- for a few million bucks, we will go ahead and handle all the schooling for your poor people," how would that play.

Not everyone in Liberia is keen on the idea of selling off their children's education, either.

International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.

Many Liberian officials are pushing back. It remains to be seen if they can be successful in resisting this unprecedented move to privatize an entire nation's education system. We will have to pay close attention, because if Bridge is successful in this new endeavor, you can bet that Liberia will not be the last country to take bids on their education system.

8 Reasons To Opt Out

My children are grown now. If I had school age children, they would not be taking the Big Standardized Test. Here's why.

Burden of proof.

If your senator calls you into the office and says he wants you to have your doctor cut off both your legs, you are entitled to demand convincing proof that the amputation will be good for you.  "There's a big problem with widget production in America" is not proof unless it is accompanied by evidence that your loss of legs will fix the widget problem. You certainly have no obligation to answer questions like, "What limbs do you want to get cut off instead" or "Don't you care about widgets."

The burden of proof is not on you. It is on the people who say your child "must" take the test, and after years of this testing, they still have not met that burden.

No actual benefits to teachers. 

Your child's test results will not help me. I am not allowed to know what questions were asked, which questions she missed, or how she answered them. Depending on the state, I may not see anything except one word and one number. It doesn't really get much better than that. Depending on the state, I will probably not see these "results" until next fall-- for students whom I have only just met, and so have no context in which to put the limited information.

No actual benefit to students.

What will your student get out of taking the test? Nothing. Well, perhaps fear and anxiety. But in terms of analyzing her strengths and weaknesses, there is not enough data returned from the test to mean a single thing, particularly since that data was collected by a single standardized test. Even multiple standardized tests will not tell as much as daily contact with a live, trained human being who sees the student as a real, live, multifaceted human being.

This is not life.

Standardized testing is not an important part of regular life. There's no standardized testing in finding your mate, loving and caring for your children, worshipping in the church of your choice, collaborating with your co-workers, being an important member of your community. There are certainly people who think that standardized tests should be a regular part of life, and they are working hard to inject standardized testing into places it does not belong. This is one of those places.

It's tiny.

I know it takes up a lot of time and care and worry, but the BS Test measures just a narrow sliver of the entire child. It's like creating an entire profile and evaluation of your entire child based on your child's toenail clippings.

Be heard.

Were you bothered by how much of your child's year has been devoted to testing preparation and the test itself? Your local school administration may be committed to the BS Test, or they may just be running scared. You can certainly try to talk to them and to the politicians and bureaucrats in your state, but the most powerful message you can send is for the opt out numbers to get bigger and bigger. The parents of New York made themselves heard last year, resulting in state government pretending to address their concerns. True, the state did not actually address those concerns, but the attempt at PR gloss represented at least an acknowledgement that parents need to see change. Now, when this year's opt out numbers go up, the state will have to realize that this is an issue they can't PR their way out of.

For the children.

I'm not even talking about the horror stories of vomiting or children with disabilities forced to take the test.

What does it do to raise a generation to think that "educated person" means "someone who scores well on Big Standardized Tests." What does it do to a generation to be raised thinking that the central purpose of school is the BS Testing. Even children who can take the tests calmly and do reasonably well need to know that there are things far more important to their education, to their lives, than the BS Test. 

Sometimes enough is enough

Here is a practice that has produced no benefits, helped no students, and improved no schools. At the same time, it has sucked up mountains of tax dollars, taken time away from actual education, and damaged schools across the country by narrowing their focus to only what is On The Test.

To insist that Big Standardized Testing is somehow a critical part of education is nonsense. It is way past time to say so, and nothing says so like refusing the test. 

ICYMI: This Week in Edubloggery

The blogging news of the week is actual twitter news-- the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is on twitter at last. Catch her at @deutsch29blog. Now for your reading...

The Weird Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Case Against Unions

At The Week, Jeff Spross looks at the peculiar attempt to redefine what qualifies as "political activity" in the Friedrichs case.

Campbell Brown: The New Leader of the Propaganda Arm of School Privatization

Kali Holloway takes a long, detailed look at just how thoroughly the forces of school privatization have lined up the media behind them. This is very complete and kind of discouraging, but if you only read one thing I recommend to you, read this.

Chicago Is Everytown USA

Daniel Katz takes a look at the Chicago strike and asks why it isn't happening in more cities-- and looks at just how bad things have gotten in some cities.

Proposed Pennsylvania School Code Is Massive Giveaway to Charter Schools

I was going to write about this, but tireless blogger Steven Singer already is on the case. Pennsylvania is just barely emerging from the mess that was our nine-month budget fiasco, and now here comes a revised school code that looks like a big fat Christmas party for PA charters (including our chronically sucky cyber charters).

Does Harlem Need Diddy or Educational Equity

Jose Luis Vilson reacts to the news that Diddy and Steve Perry are going to team up to fix education in Harlem.

10 Reading Instruction Non-Negotiables

Russ Walsh is an experienced reading instruction expert who has a gift for making education policies and programs comprehensible for regular civilians. This is a great example of Russ in action-- plain words about what a reading program has to have in place.

It's 2016 and PARCC Still Sucks 

Sarah Blaine with some plain language about opting out in 2016. Good luck, testing folks, in the week ahead.

Classics and Trash

My apologies to anyone who clicked on this for an informative or splenetic rant about some education issue. But my niece has a writing question, and I hate posting long notes on Facebook, so I'm just going to put it here. This is far more than she asked for and certainly not what anyone not-my-niece signed up for. TL;DR.

So Paige-- here's the question you asked.

Very serious question- what distinguishes a classic/timeless romance novel from a nicholas sparks, or a harlequin romance?...what are examples of books that I should read to maybe find that more obvious difference? Or is it just the right marketing and publisher?

This is my niece.  Doesn't she look like someone you should hire as a super-vp of marketing or some other equally zillion dollar job?












Categories of Written Stuff

I learned this from Mike Eichholtz, and with some modifications, I've used it ever since. I have no idea if he borrowed it from somewhere else.

There are three four categories of writing.  Good trash, bad trash, and classics. I add great works to that list.

Trash is written to make a buck and pay the bills, and it is meant to be commercial. But there is good trash and bad trash, and the difference between good and bad trash is the level of craft, skill, and quality (I will get back to that). Twilight is a good example of bad trash-- actually, terrible awful no-good very bad trash. It's poorly written on every level, from the badly constructed sentences to the artless images and plot to the flat and unbelievable characters all the way up to the romantization of behavior that checks off every item on the "Are you hooked up with an abuser" checklist. So, bad,  but clearly highly lucrative.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, is good trash. Well constructed, well-written, well-drawn characters, compelling stories. Stephen King- good trash. John Green- arguably good trash. Hunger Games- arguably bad trash.

Classics, of course, are works that stand the test of time. They have a universal quality, something recognizable and relateable over time. Nobody knows whether something is a classic or not until a few decades have passed.

The dirty secret of classics is that they mostly started out as good trash. Take Shakespeare-- he was not trying to create genius work for the ages, but was just trying to make a buck and do his job. He just happened to do it very, very well, with genius command of the language and a full understanding of how human beings work, so that centuries later we can recognize his characters as real people and the themes and concerns of his work as still with us.

Good vs. Bad

Characters that are  recognizable as human beings. Concerns that connect to deepest human motivators. Themes that offer ideas and insights that are both specific and broad. Good command of the language. Good control of organization, structure and materials of the work. Does the writer say what she has to say effectively.

Great Works

Works that have large or important qualities but for one reason or another, can't quite transcend their time and place, and may, in fact, have value because they are a window on their time rather than having a universal, timeless quality. Moby Dick. Maybe the Great Gatsby. Their characters are recognizable and real in the sense that you can think, "Yeah, if I was shoehorned into the societal boxes of those specific circumstances in that particular time and place, I might turn out like that."

I suspect that Austen is at least partly a Great Work writer-- her characters are recognizable and human, but they live in a world that is so strictly defined by its rules that it's hard to relate to some features of it. On the other hand, great fantasy and SF creates entire worlds that nobody lives in and still manages to create legit classics.

So, Romance

Your aunt wondered if romance and classic are mutually exclusive, and that might be a good question-- "romance" is so culturally defined, along with the gender roles that feed into it, that it might be a super challenge to come up with something that's universal. Romance itself is arguably pretty specific-- that your dream relationship is specific to you, and then how that plays out in the actual world is very specific to your own situation. But I have to believe there are universal elements in there that somebody ought to be able to capture in literature.

Romance novels seem similar because (at least this used to be true) the publishers literally handed writers a chapter-by-chapter outline of how the romance would play out. Nicholas Sparks is the king of recycling certain story elements in different ways ("Where will I insert the tragically dead character this time?") but these kinds of writing, whether they're good or bad trash, are aiming to evoke emotions rather than explain or explore anything. In other words, instead of saying, "Let me show you something about how the world works," the writers are saying, "I want to show you something that will make you cry." Maybe there's an argument for calculated emotional manipulation as a worthy literary goal, but I'm doubtful.

The really challenge about romance writing is that while the story may seem to be about a couple, it is almost always one person's story. Titanic the movie is Rose's story; Jack is just a prop for her growth. Your beloved OC was Ryan's story and Seth's story. Romance can be a critical element of how the character changes and grows, but ultimately it's all about how the character changes and grows, not about the romance. Writers of continuing fiction like soap operas, tv series, and comic books have all struggled with showing how a character can grow within a relationship-- generally speaking, when the couple finally get together, the writers can't figure out how to not be boring and show characters that continue to change and grow, and do so as part of a couple.

The need to have a narrative center (a point of view character) is also problematic for writing about romance because it makes the romance appear one way-- we look at what the relationship means just to the main character, which feeds some people's desire to see their prospective partner in terms of "What that person means to me and what I get out of this" instead of a more complicated two-person thing. Now you've got me wondering about how well any literature portrays relationships at all. 

So as with a travel novel or a fantasy adventure novel or a war novel, the "genre" is not so much the thing as it is the bucket that the thing is carried in.

So can you be a trashy romance novelist without hurting your brand? I'm no expert in branding, but I do think you can probably write trashy romance novels that are also great pieces of writing. I would imagine you do it by honoring both the tropes and traditions of the romance novel while filling it up with real characters, well-observed behavior, and a world that is real and recognizable. And it doesn't hurt to have sold something-- book publishers seem to ask "Is this a great work of literature" far less often than they ask "Can we get a bunch of people to give us money for copies of this?"

Your great grandmother did indeed say on more than one occasion that she liked Harlequin romances because she could fall asleep reading them and they were so light that they wouldn't wake her up when they fell on her. As readers, we might want something more, but maybe not a a great romance novel so much as a great novel about a character who finds a way to be in the world and as part of that finds a way to be with another person. If I were trying to write a romance novel, I would try to write that.

Chicago Schools Raise Baloney Bar

The managers of the Chicago Public School system (it may be too much of a stretch to call them leaders) have managed to set a new standard in high-grade baloney with their reaction to the one-day teacher strike on April 1.

CPS has filed a complaint with the Illinois Labor Relations Board against the Chicago Teachers Union for its one-day strike on April 1. CPS CEO Forrest Claypool has characterized the strike as "illegal" but mostly he wants Chicago teachers to understand who is the real boss here.

“We think it’s important that it be clearly established that whether children are in school and being educated is not subject to the whims of the Chicago Teachers Union leadership,” Claypool said during a news conference Friday afternoon. “It is subject to clear, unambiguous state law.”

There's no particular reason to think that Claypool is correct in calling the strike illegal, but that's not the ballsy part of his action. That's the part where Claypool also announced that he wants CTU to reimburse the district for the costs of the strike. This is not just bizarrely audacious in its refusal to take any responsibility for the issues in Chicago schools. It is not just strikingly wrongheaded because CPS should have been out on the street with the teachers, demanding that the state provide Chicago schools with the resources they're supposed to have. It's not just a plate of unvarnished baloney because CTU could head off its labor issues by dealing with its teachers fairly and decently.

No, what raises the baloney bar here is that April 1st is not the first "unscheduled" day off in the past several weeks, because CPS has instituted a series of three "furlough" days-- days on which it will shut down schools, dock teachers pay, and leave students and families to their own devices. In other words, a furlough day is exactly like a strike day-- only called by the district instead of the union.

The first of these furlough days was Good Friday-- exactly one week before the one-day strike.

Why call a furlough day? To save money-- about $30 million in all.

So the cut day on March 25 saved the district a bunch of money, so teachers should suck it up and take the pay cut. But the cut day on April 1st cost the district very much money, so teachers should pay them back.

CPS managers could not do a better job of displaying exactly what kind of baloney-slinging, control-freaky, honesty-impaired goons the teachers of Chicago have to deal with. No wonder they have to strike for a day just to get a point across. Yes, in labor disputes there are maneuvers and spin and ways to leverage the powers involved. But it's hard to deal with someone whose go-to move is "making ridiculous shit up." Good luck to the Chicago union leaders who have to deal with these guys.

Moskowitz Hearts the BS Test

“I really believe in the tests – I seem to be the only one left standing,” Moskowitz said Friday afternoon, immediately after addressing roughly 2,300 Success Academy students who gathered for a “slam the exam” pep rally at the City College of New York in Harlem.

Alex Zimmerman at ChalkbeatNY talked to Eva Moskowitz about her love of testing and the horrible horridness of opting out, and what ensued was a quick medley of testocrat talking points. Let's see how many she can check off the list.

Achievement gap. The rich kids have to take the test so that we can tell if the poor kids are doing as well on the test. This assumes that the test is measuring anything worth measuring, and that getting poor students to score as high as rich students will somehow erase the effects of their poverty. This seems unlikely.

Preparation. Moskowitz wants you to remember that if your child will not be able to opt out of the SAT or the Common Application. Of course, the Common Application is not a test. And you can already opt out of the SAT by applying to one of 850+ colleges and universities that don't require SAT or ACT scores. Beyond that, does anyone seriously think that taking the Big Standardized Test in elementary school is preparation for the SAT?

Zimmerman notes that Moskowitz's Success Academies have been noted for a text-centered culture as well as "draconian" discipline and pushing out of students. Moskowitz said that SA is absolutely not a test-centered culture, but making that point in the middle of a massive pep rally for testing is a long reach. SA is famed for its high BS Test scores; less widely noted (and Zimmerman doesn't note it, either) is that SA grads don't do well enough on placement tests to get into NYC top high schools.

Moskowitz needs test scores because they remain the top marketing pitch of Success Academy. She certainly can't sell the school as a school that your child may or may not be allowed to finish, or as a place run by the highest paid school administrator in NYC-- including the head of the entire NYC school system.