Teaching To the Test Is Not Okay

Last week US News, a reliably reformy news outlet, gave some space to Michael Hansen of Brookings Institution, a reliable outlet for bone-headed education analysis, and he used that space to declare that Teaching To the Test Is Okay, thereby preserving Brookings' record of  getting almost everything about education dead wrong. But stick around, because this article has one of the best closing lines ever.

Hansen starts out by stating the problem in terms that set the stage for the answer Hanson likes. Since No Child Left Behind kicked off the "springtime ritual" (well, that sounds pleasant, like a Maypole or Senior Prom) Hanson notes that "many have wrung their hands" (rhetoric only slightly less dismissive than "clutched their pearls") about testing crowding out other instruction. And he formulates the questions by aiming straight at teachers. How do teachers respond to these conflicting goals? "Are they teaching to the test to the detriment of authentic instruction? And how do their choices affect our kids?"

Got it? If testing is crowding out authentic instruction, that's because of teacher choices. It's on us, colleagues, and not on policies that link the futures of our schools schools, our students, and our careers to the test results.

Hansen calls these "important questions" and ties them to the rise of the opt-out movement. Then this

And perhaps to counter the narrative that teachers may be at fault and to protest the encroachment of test-driven evaluation on teachers' autonomy, teacher unions have also joined in condemning policy's overemphasis on standardized tests. 

Got it? We teachers oppose the Big Standardized Tests because we're hiding our own blame for the narrowing of education and to keep our crowns of mighty power in our classrooms. Couldn't possibly be because as  education professionals, we can see and understand that the tests are bad policy and bad tests, bringing no educational benefits and in many cases plenty of damage to our students. No-- there's no chance that teacher and teacher union objections to the tests are grounded in legitimate problems.


Hansen believes, in fact, that the parent and teacher objections are rooted in a false perception about the effects of testing on teaching. Here comes his explanation.

First, he thinks we should "actually embrace teaching to the test from a policy perspective," which I guess is one more way of dismissing the teaching perspective. He points out that a "classic economics paper likens test-based accountability for teachers (and their students) to speed traps monitoring drivers" because random arrests encourage everyone to drive slower and "curbing individual teachers' autonomy for the good of all students in the system is, in fact, an important and intended function of tests." I am not going to pay $42 to read all of this 2006 classic from Edward P. Lazear, but the abstract doesn't make any more sense than Hanson's synopsis. At a minimum, we're suggesting yet another purpose for the omni-purposefuil BS Tests, that purpose being To Scare Teachers Into Behaving. Other than that, Lazear just seems to have hit upon a senseless analogy.

Second, Hansen says something that's sort of correct--  "concerns about nefarious teaching to the test should be inversely related to the quality of tests." Teaching to the test, he acknowledges, would be a problem if you were teaching to crappy tests that were aligned to crappy standards. But he would like you to know the great good news-- the Common Core aligned assessments are super-duper awesome, as recently demonstrated by this totally-legit researchish paper from the Fordham. You can follow this link for my explanation of why this study is exceptionally unconvincing. Bottom line-- as "proof" that we don't worry about teaching being driven by a bad test, he offers a single piece of reformster-financed PR, and no explanation of why so many, many, many, many, MANY people who have seen the tests have declared them terrible.

Third, Hansen thinks that teachers aren't moved to teach to the test much, anyway. He notes that pay for performance incentives don't seem to have much effect on teacher behavior, or at least that's how some folks interpret some researchy-type stuff.

It's not clear why teachers are so unresponsive, but their small responses to individual bonuses implies they are unlikely coerced by even weaker distinctions in the specifics of tests.

Sure. It's also possible that when you offer teachers just a few bucks to commit educational malpractice, they balk.

Hansen has done an artful job of dancing around several points here.

First, by laying all the blame for narrowing of curriculum at the teachers' feet, he has avoided having to discuss the ways that teaching to the test is promoted by policy and edict at the district level. When the superintendent says, "We will buy these test prep materials and you will teach from them according to the following schedule," that's testing driving the school bus. When the school policy becomes that all students who are on the bubble will be pulled from any and all non-tested subjects so that they can sit in extra math and reading classes all day, that's the testing cart before the education horse. When school districts reorganize their building structure so that high-scoring sixth graders can go under the same roof as low-scoring eighth graders in order to raise building scores, that's the testing tail wagging the teaching dog.

Second, he never really explains what he thinks test prep might be. This is a bad place to get vague, because many people assume that test prep is simply plain old drill and kill-- keep drilling the times table and then spit them out on the test. But modern test prep is much more insidious. Students who are going to take a Common Core aligned BS Test of reading must learn to understand that for every piece of reading, there is only one correct way to understand it. They must learn that their own opinions and ideas are never important, and that their job is to figure out what the faceless test manufacturer wants them to say. Test prep means learning how to think like that faceless test manufacturer, to anticipate his tricks and slippery answer designed to fool them into saying something else. This is not only not authentic reading instruction, but it creates a warped and just-plain-wrong picture of what reading is even about, what purpose it serves. Test prep for the BS Tests is not simply drill and kill-- it is learning to hold onto a messed up counterproductive toxic view of the whole academic discipline.

Third, teaching to the test isn't just about narrowing curriculum and instruction-- it is about preparing students to complete just one task, and only that task. At the end of the day, BS Tests show one thing-- how well the students can do at taking the BS Test. All other tasks, all other educational outcomes fade into unimportance, and we are teaching students to do just one thing. And since the students who will do that thing well on their own are the well-to-do ones (because that's the other thing BS Tests do-- reconfirm socio-economic standing), that means the students who need to devote more time to learning that one task are also the ones who would most benefit from learning many other things. Getting a good score on a BS Test is not a useful life skill. It will not increase your class mobility. But it will suck up all the time you could be using to get a real education, to learn more than how to do just that one thing. Because when you prepare a child to take a BS Test, that is all you are preparing her to do.

Hansen notes that sometimes bubble kids may get extra resources at the expense of lower (aka "no chance") students, but he does not follow this issue to the necessary of question of whether or not the BS Tests what it says it tests, nor the question of where the performance floors and ceilings are on these tests.

And he notes that there have been well-publicized (and well-hidden) cases of cheating, but he thinks the magic of technology will totally wipe this problem out. Is there anyone who would like to sell this guy a bridge?

In the end, he calls objections to teaching to the test "hysteria" and not a real danger. And here comes his best reassurance, the last line of the piece:

This is not to say caution is not warranted, but the notion that standardized tests in general are corrupting our public schools does not square with what I know about the teaching profession.

Got it? You can just take his word for it, because he just knows how it is out there in the teaching trenches. How does he know? Well, as the bio with the article notes, he was trained as a labor economist. And as his Brookings bio notes, before he came to Brookings (apparently a year ago), he worked for American Institutes for Research-- the company that produces the SBA.

Yes-- disclosed nowhere in the US News article is the little detail that the article is written by someone who worked in the very industry that the article lauds.

It could very well be true that the notion that standardized tests in general are corrupting our public schools does not square with what Hansen knows about the teaching profession. Unfortunately, that tells us a lot more about what Hansen knows about the teaching profession than it does about the dangers of teaching to the test.

Solving the Pension Problem

Teacher pensions are a mess. Actually, teacher pensions are twenty-some different kinds of messes, depending on how your particular state has decided to skin that particular cat.

Chad Aldeman at Bellwether Partners has been on this particular case for several years. Bellwether is a right-tilted thinky tank co-founded by Kim Smith, who also helped start up Teach for America and NewSchools Venture Fund. Other co-founders include Andrew Rotherham (contributing editor at US News, former special assistant in Clinton White House), Monisha Lozier (former ed reform headhunter), and Mary K. Wells (former manager at Bain). Bellwether has several key partners, including NewsSchools Venture Fund, Stand for Children and, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, the reforminess is strong with this group.

Aldeman himself works in the Policy and Thought Leadership department, and previously worked at the US Department of Education where he worked on ESEA waivers, teacher preparation, and the Teacher Incentive Fund.

One on Aldeman's projects at Bellwether has been teacherpensions.org and all the issues it connects to (here he is writing about it almost exactly two years ago). But he's back with a new report called "What Do Pac-Man and Pensions Have in Common?" It's a handy title, telegraphing as it does exactly where he's headed.

Warning. Pensions are complicated and confusing and heavy on the mathiness and economics. My stock in trade is reducing complicated ideas to simple strokes, but I'm telling you up front that I may cut some critical corner in the paragraphs ahead, including part of Aldeman's argument. But I'm going to give it my best shot because this is serious stuff in serious need of some solutions, and we need to talk about both what should be done and what can be done. So, take a deep breath, and here we go.

Traditionally, pensions fall into two types-- defined contributions and defined benefits. For defined contributions, I put a bunch of money into a fund for years (maybe my employer agrees to put some in, too) and it sits there gathering money, or not, and when I retire, whatever has the pile of money has grown (or shrunken) into is what I get.

For defined benefits, my employer and I agree that if I retire when I'm X years old (as someone born in 1957, I've come to expect that once I pass 60, the formula for X will always be X= My Age + 4 years), a certain sum of money will be waiting for me, generally based on my best annual earnings in the last years before I retire.

Defined benefits requires some smart economics guys to figure out what will have to be paid in over my thirty-plus years of service in order to yield, through wise investment, the agreed-upon final amount. That's the deal many teachers in many states have always had, only things aren't going so well.

Some of the problems are ethical in nature, because a pension fund is a huge pile of money just kind of lying there, and politicians are eternally tempted to "borrow" from that pile with every intention of paying it back, someday. But even if politicians keep their itchy hands in check, well, if you check that last paragraph, you'll see the phrase "through wise investment." Over the last decade that has been a huge problem. Take for instance, my state of Pennsylvania, which back in the early 2000s said, "Let's go ahead and let school boards slack on their local contribution to the pension fund because we have got some genius investments going in this can't-miss housing market and we'll make such a killing in the market that the state won't have to put in as much money to keep the pensions solvent. It's a win-win for everyone! What could possibly go wrong??"

The state, like lots of other folks, figured out in 2008 exactly what could go wrong, and districts now have run out of road down which to kick the can. Pension payments are mushroom like a nightmare balloon payment, with districts facing payments of one third of their payroll costs going to plug the gaping hole in the pension fund.

Different versions of this scenario are playing out around the country, creating a big political mess. On the one hand, pensions are a promise that states made to their teachers. On the other hand, promises and moral imperatives do not make money grow on trees. Teachers did not make this mess, but this is probably one of those situations where assigning culpability doesn't get us any closer to an actual solution.

Aldeman's argument is that increased pension costs are eating everything else, that if districts didn't have to pump so much money into pensions, they could spend that money elsewhere, like salaries or health care or ice cream every Tuesday in the teachers' lounge (okay, that last one was mine, but I'm feeling a little hungry).

But what's really crimping into school budgets are the debt costs. States and districts are now contributing an average of 12 percent of teacher salaries every year just to pay down large unfunded liabilities, a result of politicians over-promising and under-saving. For the average American teacher, that's equivalent to $6,800 a year in money that could be going in their pockets but instead must be put into preserving inequitable pension systems. 

It's worth noting that some authorities take exception to Aldeman's use of the "debt" here, and prefer "unfunded liability." From an article about the report in the Atlantic:

How to characterize state’s outstanding pension obligations is a matter of debate. Aldeman calls it debt. Others don’t like the term. “​​The unfunded liability is not debt,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor on retirement security at The New School, in an email. Rather, the investments made for the pension fund have not yielded the amount needed to pay the retirement money to everyone, she said, pinning the blame on pension managers and state lawmakers for investing poorly or not putting enough money into the fund to keep it afloat.

Aldeman also asserts that the current structure of teacher pensions is bad because few teachers actually benefit from it. His figures suggest that only one in five teachers actually remain until the official retirement age (you can find the data in Figure 2 in this report, along with the explanation of methodology in the appendix). On top of that, teachers can lose pension benefits when changing states or by taking career breaks that put them under the necessary number of years. In short, Aldeman calls it a "system that creates a small number of winners at the expense of a large number of losers."

Some of the usual objections to teacher pension systems are not that compelling. Some folks don't like the number of years required to vest, but vestment periods for a decent pension are not that unusual-- after all, it takes time to make money with your money. Underlying the debate about how long it should take to build a pension is the debate about how long we want teaching careers to be. If your dream is a teacher pool that is churned and turned over regularly, then you don't need or even want to incentivize sticking around for the long haul. But if you think stability and quality are enhanced by having a school staffed primarily by career teachers-- lifers-- then it makes sense to encourage and reward that kind of career. If the pension debate is really about making the profession more attractive and rewarding for people who only want to spend a couple of years teaching, then that's the conversation we should be having (because turning teaching into a couple-years profession is a terrible, terrible idea).


It's certainly possible that the solution to the various pensions crises is actually quite simple-- fully fund the pensions and stop whining.

That is not the popular option. In Pennsylvania, our legislators repeatedly propose a two-tier system in which the currently-employed get our defined benefits pension and new employees get a nifty 401(k) so they can do their own investing (or end up paying someone to do it for them, because when you're struggling to get all your papers graded and your lesson plans written, you really want to devote a bunch of time to becoming an investment whiz). There are numerous problems with this idea, ranging from the eventual crisis when the new generation of teachers find they have no money to retire with to the more immediate crisis when the lack of any new funds going into the old pension system hastens its complete collapse. More aggressive politicians have tried to find ways to just chuck the whole system, but in the Atlantic piece, Aldeman takes a less destructive position:

"We don't recommend that states go after the pensions of existing retirees or people in the workforce now,” Aldeman said. "That doesn't mean we can’t design a better system going forward for new workers. It's not about dismantling; it's preserving promises you’ve already made while moving to something better."

Aldeman has some ideas about what something better might be, and in the Pac-Man report throws attention at something called a cash balance pension, which is, um, this thing where, you, um, with the money, and, uh... Yeah, this is where I had to turn back to my research assistant, Dr. Google.

Wikipedia says that a cash balance plan "works much like a defined contribution plan, [but] it is actually a defined benefit plan for legal purposes." You've got an individually-maintained account, hypothetically.

Investopedia also underlines the fact that the benefits are defined, meaning that the growth or tanking of the market won't affect the pay-out at retirement. And they wrap that up with this interesting line: "the company solely bears all ownership of profits and losses in the portfolio." Does that mean that if the state can beat the return they promised me on my retirement fund, they (or the company running the fund for them) get to keep the extra?

Aldeman's other ideas are not really new ones. Some kind of personal investment set-up, which means the district gives you more money and you go play with it on your own. This has been around forever and it has never been clear to me why this is a good deal unless I am a genius investment manager, want to take on managing my retirement fund as a part-time job, or want to help make some investment manager a little more wealthy, all the while still risking my entire retirement on the whims and fancies of Wall Street and, seriously, when have they ever steered any of us wrong before?

And some of the problems that Aldeman wants to solve are not actually problems. Is it "inequitable" that I'll get a better pension return when I retire after forty-some years than some TFAer will get for leaving teaching before she even hits four years of service? I don't think so.

The current defined benefit system is also essentially a deferred benefit system, with states and districts saying basically, "We're going to take part of the money we could pay you now and set it aside for when you're done." But bad economies and bad decisions mean that states have also deferred setting aside the pension money. So now they're saying, "Well, not only do we need to hold back money for now, but we need to hold back money from the last ten years, so we'd like to use a time machine, but we can't, so we're going to time machine our way into your paycheck instead."

When Aldeman says that the unfunded mandates are eating current benefits and in effect reducing districts' financial flexibility, he's not wrong. In fact, he's not even showing the whole picture which, in my part of the world, includes school closings and staff furloughs as districts stagger under several financial issues of which pension costs are one huge example (cyber school costs are another; incompetent state legislatures that can't pass a budget are another).

But how do we move forward when we're behind. If I said to the state right now, "Hand me the contributions I'm supposed to have in my pension account so I can just go invest in pork belly futures or oranges or beanie babies," they couldn't do it. So where does that leave us. How do we even change horses in mid-stream when our horse is still on the bank.

His point is that teachers should really welcome some messing with how pensions are done, and yet that tends to make us nervous, and Aldeman and the company he keeps are not exactly the people who inspire trust in those of us who have been following the path of ed reform. I would frankly feel more comfortable if he just flat out said what is in this for reformsters. I can see pieces of standard reform agenda peeking through (short teaching "careers" are great, let's find ways to cut costs and spend less on public ed) but I don't imagine that this is all about just making life better for teachers. I don't think Bellwether has an Altruistic Bleeding Heart division. (Update: and as an alert reader noted, the report was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation-- that would be the Enron millionaire John Arnold, who has spent a lot of time and money, according to some, "on a nationwide effort to gut retirement security.")

Have I run in enough circles yet? I'm almost done, I promise. Like many folks, I'm a bit stymied by the pension mess. I don't trust people who want to just take my money and perform magic tricks. But the system we've got is a tottering mess held together with duct tape and warm thoughts, and I don't know that any policy leaders have the wit and will to hold things together. And I don't know anybody who sells pork bellies. Let's hope someone can sort this out soon.
 

ICYMI: Many Edu-Reads For the Week

I was not in a position to write often this week, so I read instead. Here's just some of what I cam across that you should be checking out.

Yes, I Did Say That Knewton Was Selling Snake Oil

An oldy but a goody, with a quick comment about why Knewton (the data-collecting arm of Pearson) should not be taken seriously.

What It's Like To Be a Principal of Color Dealing with White Parents

The title is a narrow representation of the piece, which looks at some of the broader issues of being a principal of color.

9 Ways We Can Make Social Justice Movements Less Elitist and More Accessible

Not directly connected to education at all, but one of those interesting discussion-starters of a post that raises some issues that certainly matter in the education debates.

How a Stubborn Student's Secret Recording Led To Calls for School Board Resignations

I've been following this story and haven't had the time to do it justice, but this is a pretty good look at a pair of Colorado (infamous Douglass County) school board members decided to respond to student protests by strong-arming the student leader.

Five Reasons Your Team May Be Dysfunctional

Recognize anybody in this breakdown from Peter DeWitt?

Hedge Funds Underwrite Political Networks to Privatize K-12 Public Education

An exceptionally clear and thorough story of how hedge funders got into the education biz, with a particularly good look at Whitney Tilson and DFER. If you've been trying to figure out exactly how those guys fit in this big mess, or you just want to raise your blood pressure a bit this morning, this will do the trick.

The Vulture's Vulture

And now the sequel to the previous piece. How a new brand of vulture fund is running DC. Particularly chilling in how completely principle-free this movement is-- we'll back anything as long as it makes us a buck.

Arbitrary and Capricious

Sheri and Bruce Lederman won their case against VAM, and while there are many great summaries of the case and the results, this quick look from Aubrey Amrein-Beardsley at Vamboozled is a great one (she's one of the experts whose testimony was used in the trial). Some good news for us all.

Good Schools, Bad Schools, and More Codes That Blind 

I have huge respect for how Paul Thomas can pull apart the language that helps us hide agendas and justify actions. Don't miss his piece this very morning about labeling schools "good" and "bad."

And for further reading--

If you want to peek over my shoulder as I try to keep up with everything that's going on, you can find me collecting pieces both at the Curmudgucation Tumblr and in the Curmudgucation "magazine" at Flipboard. Follow either or both and get some help following developments in the education debates.

FL: Teacher Purge (or, Why Schools Needs Tenure, Pt. 23,617)

Here's a story of how not to solve problems at a troubled school, and why tenure is a good idea.

The first thing you have to remember is that in 2011, the Florida legislature and Governor Rick Scott killed teacher tenure. In Florida, a teacher is now hired a year at a time. Nobody is ever actually fired-- they're just not asked back for next year. This is a particularly clever end run around any sort of employment protections, because it means no teacher is actually fired, and therefor no district ever has to give a justifiable reason for firing any teacher.

Now let's travel to Palm Beach Lakes High School to see just how bad an idea that law is, and remind ourselves why due process protections of teachers are not just a scheme to fatten union bank accounts.

Palm Beach Lakes High School is poor and low-achieving. They were once pretty huge, but FL went through a school-minimizing phase; current enrollment 9-12 is listed around 2K (in a district of 183K total students). They have a reported 80% poverty rate, and a 68% graduation rate.

They also have trouble hiring. The school kicked off the year with trouble hiring an Honors Algebra teacher. They finally filled the position in November, but that teacher bailed shortly thereafter, citing "behavioral concerns." Two other candidates each subbed for a day and said "No, thanks."

By March, the situation had only deterioriated, with a series of substitutes in the class. Parents made phone calls and were put off. But PBL is a law magnet, intended as a training ground for future lawyers, and some students in a law class discussion of contracts and negligence had a lightbulb moment about the district's failure to provide an actual teacher for the class. And five of the students decided to take their concern to the school board. The students were freshmen and sophomores; they took their law teacher (and practicing lawyer) Malik Leigh with them. They told a fairly harrowing tale-- instruction by youtube videos, made-up grades, offers by subs to raise grades in exchange for candy and treats, and a sub who said, "I'm just here to babysit and fill in grades."

The school's response was alarming. Principal Cheryl McKeever and Superintendent Robert Avossa immediately went to work on the problem, if by 'the problem" you mean "students popping off in public."

Both Avossa and McKeever are new hires. Robert Avossa was hired by Palm Beach County Schools in June of 2015 after four years as Super in Fulton County. Before that he had been a superintendent and chief  strategy and accountability officer at Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, and before that a principal, and a teacher before that. He also holds a certificate from the Broad Fake Superintendent Academy, and he's a newly-minted member of Chiefs for Change. 

McKeever is not just a career educator, but a decorated one. She was Florida's Elementary Principal of the Year back in 2009 and followed that up with national recognition. She enjoyed success at both or her previous principal gigs, and her only public problems seem to be that when she changed jobs, she used a credit card from her old school to buy some tote bags and an office chair (total expenditure: $902.50) for her new school.

But her previous job was an elementary school; PBL is a high school, and there were problems from the moment she arrived in 2014. Teacher leaders complained that McKeever had hurt morale and took a hostile, toxic approach to school atmosphere. She brought in her own staff, moved folks around, and in the face of complaints and conflict, warned teachers to watch out for karma. Grievances "alleged that McKeever was using a “hit list” to discourage union activity, retaliating against teachers by doing dress-code checks in their classrooms, requiring teachers to give F’s to no more than 25 percent of their students, and removing disfavored teachers from supervisory positions." All were denied by the district's labor relations manager.

But back to the story of our complaining students.

McKeever told the students they didn't have a teacher because they had run him off. And students who made the trip to the board meeting found themselves the next day in a meeting with an investigator apparently form the district human resources office who was, they say, not so interested in the problems they spoke of as other things, like how did they get to the board meeting, and who put them up to it. Within two days McKeever was meeting with parents to downplay the concerns (which included "why didn't the school tell us this was happening sooner?").

Teachers became concerned over what they saw as a pattern of intimidation and harassment of the students. One reported that a student told of being put in a room and required to sign an affidavit with no parents present. Another teacher who also is a practicing lawyer indicated at one point that their firm was considering a suit on behalf of the students.

And all of that brings us to yesterday's story in the Palm Beach Post.

What do you do when you're having trouble managing your people, when you are having trouble solving problems and settling issues within a school community? Well, PBL may not be pretty, but it's certainly not the ugliest school climate or set of labor issues any school has ever seen, so McKeever and her bosses have plenty of options. They could sit down for some long, difficult, but honest discussions. They could work out an action plan that would allow their own concerns and teacher concerns to be balanced. They could even start by acknowledging some of what is good about this-- for instance, teachers have spoken up out of concern for the well-being of students.

Or they could just fire all the teachers that are giving them headaches.

Yeah, they picked that one.

Well, not "fired," of course. Because of that 2011 rules change, the school can "not invite to return" anybody they care to.

Leigh has chosen to file suit anyway.

Head Principal, Cheryl McKeever, Area 4 Superintendent Camille Coleman, and Superintendent Robert Avossa are engaging in union busting against the Teachers Union, and applying unfair labor practices in an effort to remove “problem” union teachers.

Additionally, the suit alleges that the district has let go "are teachers who filed grievances that they were forced by an assistant principal to change grades, reported paraprofessionals for abusing special needs children or merely have been seen speaking with those teachers who have." As of yesterday, the school district had declined to comment.

There are layers of irony here. Leigh is not a trained educator and he's not a union member; he's the kind of guy Broadies like and that traditionalists like yours truly view with suspicion. And here he is underlining the need for employment protection-- and as a first year "teacher" in most states he wouldn't have it anyway. He is an example of a phenomenon that I keep meaning to write about-- for every ten people saying, "Teachers shouldn't have X because we don't have it where I work," there's at least one person looking into teaching from some other line of work and saying, "How do you teachers put up with that crap?"

This is why teachers need tenure or due process of employment protections-- call them what you like. Do you want your teachers to say to your child, "I'd like to have your back on this, but it would cost me my job." Do you want your teachers to say, "Yeah, I know something really wrong was going on, but I didn't want to say anything because it would cost me my job." Do your want your school run by somebody whose idea of conflict management is to fire everyone who disagrees with her?

This tenure-free purging will be no help to the school, either. They couldn't fill an algebra position-- how will they fill thirty more? Particularly, how will they sell a pitch of, "Hey, we really need a good math teacher for this very challenging school. Incidentally, if you ever cross us, we'll fire you immediately." Come do this very hard job, but don't ever complain about the support you don't get. And don't stand up for the students, or with the students. Who do they imagine would be excited about applying for that job?

See, tenure isn't just needed to protect teachers from bad management, or to protect students who need teachers to stand up for them or with them. Tenure can also protect district management from themselves, from making boneheaded mistakes that just dig them deeper into a hole. Of course, the super-cynical take here is that driving a troubled school further into the ground is just a way to set it up for closure or takeover. Goodbye community school, hello charter. Let's hope that's not it.

Good luck, PBL. The school leaders had nothing to say Friday-- let's hope they come up with something useful over the weekend.

Reset, Innovation and Ed Reform

You might owe me, this time. 

The Center for Education Reform is a hard-driving reformster that works hard to promote charter schools. Or as they put it on their website, "Since 1993, CER has created opportunities that give families choices, teachers freedom and students more pathways to achieve a great education."

CER joined many ther players at the ASU GSV Summit, which the New York Times calls "the must-attend event for education technjology investors." Co-sponsored by Arizona State University and GSV Capital, the conference started seven years ago " in the desert they braved the desert of San Diego."

CER presented a panel at the summit that is just riveting (in the sense that some portions make you want to drive rivets into your own skull. It does this for almost a full hour, and while I will embed the video at the end of this post, you may still owe me, because I watched the whole damned thing, taking notes, so that you don't have to.

It was not pretty, and it was not fun, but it was at time fascinating and illuminating. I'm just going to walk you through it, and if any time we stumble across an insight to take away, I will just shout it out. Get some popcorn and tighten your seatbelt, because this may take a little while.

Our moderator is Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of the Center. She's never taught a day in her life, but she's delighted to "wreak havoc on the status quo," perhaps not having gotten the memo that reformy stuff now is the status quo.

Allen opens up this panel on innovation and change by observing that charters have barely captured 6% of student population, but at the same time she notes that digital learning "is hip, it's real." Yes, all the cool kids are chartering these days. Probably while listening to the raps.

But now that we're warmed up, let's begin the long, long chartery beguine.

First up, Allen is going to ask a question of Susan Wolford, who's here on behalf of BMO Capital, an investment wing of the Bank of Montreal. So what question can we ask her about innovation in education reform? New pedagogical techniques? New ways to improve educational outcomes for students with certain types of learning challenges?

Allen: What are investors looking for? Are they happy with the state of innovation?

Yup. That's where we're starting. Wolford's main official point is that investors are most interested in what works. But Wolford has another drum she wants to beat today, and she beats it with authentic enthusiasm. "Anything having to do with making money is a dirty word in education which I scratch my head and don't understand since we live in a world that measures success" based on whether people want to buy the thing you want to sell or not.


Does that irk you? Fasten your seatbelt, then, because she will top that many times before we are done. Anyway, she gets back on message with the Investors Want To Invest In What Works, and now she will either reveal a astonishing level or naivete or display a gobsmacking level of cynicism, because she wants us to know that the "what works" thing "should give comfort to people who worry about the moneymaking thing because you can't make money over the long term if you sell what doesn't work" because--wait, really? Because investors only care about making money in the long term, and never just grab a company and try to squeeze money out of it quickly with no regard to long term effects? Because only top quality products survive and prosper in a free market? Well, that's reassuring to people who are emotionally invested in Betamax and ENRON.

Now we'll hear from Ed Fields from Hotchalk, a company working hard for "over a decade" to handle on-line educationny stuff. They made investors happy by pointing out that it would be big business and answering another important question-- "Is there a scale opportunity that would throw off meaningful profits as it served students and institutions at scale." Fields explains that serving students means giving them a "meaningful return on their educational investment" by which he means they get a better job at which they make more money, and he expects the pressure on this to escalate as "consumers" become more "discriminating" and all higher ed is held to these money-making standards.

So education is a commodity, an investment opportunity that only has value in its way to make more money for everyone involved. 

Mind you, Fields says, there's a place for liberal arts. Nut the vast majority of consumers will create pressure to lead to "real return on investment." Yes, education is just like a toaster. A bland, featureless utilitarian toaster. Great.

Next up, it's Johnatan Hage, President and CEO of Charter Schools USA. CSUSA  and Hage have been at this for a while. Hage rode the charter wave back in the nineties in Florida, as a buddy of Jeb Bush, where he made a killing in charter real estate, while displaying the kind of humility that leads a man to name his big yacht "Fishin' 4 Schools."

Hage is asked what conditions he needs for innovation. He waxes rhapsodic for a moment about how things have changed during his twenty years in the game (it has changed, but it hasn't). Choice only takes place if law allows it. It's no longer controversial (at least, I suppose, at cocktail parties he attends with his friends on yachts) but choice is still not available to the vast majority. Polls show people want to choose, he says, which is kind of a mystery because if the vast majority of people want vouchers and charters and choice, why don't they. I suppose he would say the Damned Teacher Unions but if the DTU is so powerful, why do I not have a yacht?

Hage talks about the need for a business model that works, and then he launches a long extended metaphor about being in a race and building the car as you race and there's no track yet, which is all kinds of tortured and raises the question of why we have to be in a race? And then he revisees his idea and says business models have to come second and having a mission comes first.

Another thing to learn: Reformsters still feel oppressed. Hage says that the great successes are not talked about. All the news focuses on the tiny charter failures instead of the great charter performances. Yes, it's all media bias. If only they could collect several million dollars to fund one or two websites devoted to pushing their own message out there, or create one or twelve think tank advocacy groups to selling policy to legislators. If only.

Allen now brings up the question of risk. Specifically, is there a resistance to "risk in the K-12 space."

So here comes our last panelist, Jim Goenner, President and CEO of the National Charter Schools Institute and the only guy on panel to wear a tie.

Goenner says it's a miracle we've come so far. His vision is actually pretty simple. If you had $120K, could you get your kid a K-12 education? Just buy up the pieces-parts of education to suit the person. And everyone laughs and jokes about how seriously too-much-money that is, and Goenner conjectures for a second about what he'd do with the left-overs, but I'm thinking that $120 is not a hell of a lot for twelve years of education.

But now Wolford is going to jump in. She says some folks dig personalization for private sector, but investors don't have much faith in the public sector. But since charter's get better results at lower cost, she says, she should would "invest in that all day." And having thrown out a bunch of made-up support, she will now once again heap mockery on people who worry about children:

If it weren't that we were offended at the idea of making money off of children (air quotes, for some reason)-- which I always think that's funny because we sell them clothes and candy and all kinds of stuff-- okay, fine (big chuckles all around)-- don't want to hurt the little kids with all the toys--um, what a horror show that would be-- but more importantly, um, I think that, again, investors want to invest in something that actually produces a better outcome than the free alternative, and there are lots of examples, and whether or not it's personalization or not is secondary to am I delivering value for the dollar...

Got it? Treating children as profit centers is natural and normal and only big wussies object. After all, we already treat them as mini-consumerists in training (well, at least the ones that aren't too poor), and there's surely no problem with that. Why not extend it to education as well. Just little widgets buying other widgets. Everything and everybody is a widget and when we rub all the widgets together, money falls out and lands on the deserving few-- the ones who are willing to view children as monetized widgets.

Also, she notes that there is skepticism about personalized learning. I presume she means "as a means of generating ROI."

Allen asks about personalized learning in higher ed, and Fields says it's swell, that you can get a master's in education without commuting to campus. Apparently human interaction is not an important element in such things.

Hage says that CSUSA uses Hotchalk for PD, and they are trying to build a platform. And here comes the pitch for charters:

See, many companies are unable to survive, not because they aren't great, but "the dry desert of trying to sell into the existing system takes time and money." Innovation can only take place in the "fertile ground" of charter schools, which are set to be the innovation laboratories for everyone else. He quotes Reed Hastings (Netflix chieftain and notorious school board pooh-pooher) to say that companies are dying on the vine trying to get through district doors, but charters-- charters are hungry for innovation. For neither the first nor the last time, nobody will consider the possibility that educators resist "innovation" because it's crap, because they know what they're doing, and because experimenting on children is not really our thing. Nope. Reformstrers are still the hack artists who are pissed off that the Louvre won't hang their crayon drawings in the main gallery.

Hage says that districts should look to us to innovate, not hate us. So for a  moment the panel considers the idea of "Innovate, Not Hate" as a slogan. If that is an example of their innovative ideas, I think I can see part of the problem.

Goenner introduces the idea that choosing certainty of results aka accountability as your main focus is the enemy of innovation, but Allen wants to redirect-- isn't it bureaucratic expectations that might destroy the "fertile ground"? Goenner says that emphasis on proven models box out new ideas, and I look forward to the first time that one of Goenner's loved ones is in the hospital and Goenner says, "Screw the proven method of treatment for this problem; I want you to try something new and innovative."

I will give him his next point, because you know I love a good comparison. Goenner says that charters are like marriage-- some people implement it poorly, but we still think marriage is a good idea. Well played, sir. Game recognizes game.

Allen asks Wolford if money people know what education people and charter people are talking about? Wolford finds that question interesting and says that some are well-informed. In fact some have been in it so long-- and here Wolford says "another horrible statement is about to come out of my mouth-- they know more than the educators do." And, no, that statement is not so much a horrible statement as it is just stupid and wrong. And she will double down.

More than any other, education is a place where there are good products that never become successful.

Which first contradicts her earlier statement that you can spot success because success = people buy your product, so perhaps what she should be saying is "Companies come up with products that we think are good for ed, and they turn out to be crap that nobody will touch. Maybe we are very bad at figuring out what constitutes a good education product." But that thought is nowhere near her brain.

No, can you guess who is to blame, if not the people who come up with the product? Why, everyone else. Government, administration, parents, children. Investors, Wolford says, hate that idea.

You can have a good thing that doesn't work because there are all these people with a right to an opinion.

Yes, if people would just behave and understand that our ideas our awesome and plunk down their money, things would run so much more smoothly. Remember her first investor question? Does it work? Well, question number two asked by investors is, "Will the people who make decisions allow it to work." Which is kind of like, "Will people who make decisions allow companies to substitute corporate judgment for the professional judgment of educators?"

But boy do these foilks suffer. Wolford notes that companies that deal with the FDA have nothing on ed sector companies.

Now everybody gets a fun question-- what would you tell the next President about education innovation?

Wolford: They should stop thinking of profit as a dirty word. Honestly, at any moment, I expect her to say that Greed Is Good. Innovation takes place because people are rewarded, so innovators should be rewarded for taking risks, not shamed for trying to make money off kids. But if we reward them for taking risks, then there's no risk, is there? I mean, it's only a risk if you can lose. And what I'm hearing in this conversation is that investors and companies are pissed off because they took a risk and it failed and they want their money back, which just is not how risk works. And the Invisible Hand of the Free Markey says, "Oh, you made a product that you couldn't sell. Boo-frickin'-hoo. You lose. The invisible hand says you fail and you go out of business." So I'm not sure exactly what kind of market they want to operate in. But Wolford would like us to know that the current education system sucks and so we need plan B.

Fields: The world is being disrupted by data, which is an interesting idea until he offers Netflix recommendations as an example, which, yes, okay-- my world is disrupted by that data because it does such a lousy job of trying to substitute its programmers' judgment for my own. But he thinks we don't have an adequate standards for evaluating the data stuff.

Audience participation portion. Someone asks if it might not be better to grow ideas in independent schools (meaning, apparently, what we call private schools). Wolford notes that those schools are viewed as separate universe with students who are not representative of all students. In other words, a niche market.

Hage: Takes his shot at the President question, suggesting that Pres should have "healthy tolerance between innovation and risk." He also acknowledges that we're talking about children and public dolars and there have to be rules and protections, including front end rules about money, and back-end rules about measuring success. Failure should not be tolerated or repeated. Also, charters are here to stay, so public schools should make nice and we should all partner up, which seems reasonable except for the part where many states have created a system where any win for a charter must be a loss for public schools.

Allen turns to Wolford again because, I don't know, she's delivering such reliably obnoxious material? Anyway, Allen now asks how soon investors want their money back?

Wolford says that depends. The big three of K-12 (who go unnamed) will wait-- but while she's on the subject

I'm going to defend them because everyone thinks it's a horrible thing that we make money off these poor little children [and she says poor little children in a voice dripping with mockery-- did she play Miss Hannigan in community theater at some point?]

But they will wait. Family outfits (that includes Hage) will wait forever. Venture capitalists and private equity folks would like their money in 3-5 years.

Goenner: wants his shot at the Pres question now. We learned as children not put all our eggs in one basket, so make more than one bet. Which, well-- I'd rather not talk about education as if it were gambling. I suppose that makes sense if you think of education as a financial investment rather than a public good with a mission to educate all children. These guys really do have a completely different idea about what education is for.

Wrapping it up.

Hage notes that he's now a chair of something at CER. Frankly, even though I worked on this in shifts, I was having trouble tracking on the home stretch. Kind of like all the people who gave up on reading all the way through many paragraphs ago. Congratulations to those of you who are still here, particularly those of you who are not my mom.

So, anyway, Hage trows his road metaphor around again, but he wants us to know that lobbying legislators and being part of the policy discussion is important, because a while ago we hated government interference, but we like government interference when it tilts the playing field in our favor.

And Fields wants to say, again, that while we have crash test standards for cars, we have nothing similar for education, so we can't judge what works. Because crashing a car and educating a human being should be similar. It's true that measuring educational quality is a yet-unsolved problem, but it doesn't seem that any of these folks has said, "You know, we should go easy here since we're dealing with so many unmeasurables."

But we end instead with a straight-up plug for CER as marketing partners-- "If you have a new product," Allen announces, "come see us and we'll hook you up." Because at the end of the day, and the end of this panel, education is just a business and schools are just revenue centers and children are just money generating widgets.

Improvement?

If I seem a little thin in on-line presence, it's because I've been spending a lot of time with this guy and his mother.

He is, at 18 months, a Man of Adventure. He knows many exciting activities, such as Putting One Thing Inside of Another Thing, or Stomping Vigorously Upon the Ground. He knows the word "dog" and is involved in an extensive survey of just how many dogs there are in the world, which also involves working out which survey items are dogs, and which are not. In the photo above, you can gauge his mastery of Spoon Technique as applied to Ice Cream. This is part of his extensive study on What Can Be Safely and Enjoyably Eaten. 

While outdoors he devotes his time to Running Studies, by which I don't mean the management of studies, but the study of actual running. A popular game-- Walking Up To The Top of the Hill, followed by the sequel, Running to the Bottom of the Hill ("Hill" here defined as "Stretch of mildly tilted ground"). This dovetails with another one of his spirited experiments on the question of When Is It a Good Time To Applaud and Cheer? (The complete answer has not yet been compiled, but it clearly includes "after you have made it to the top of the hill" and "after you have run down.")

 I have pretty good memories of when his uncle and his mother were also small. They also knew many fun games that included Rocking, Running, Chasing, Locating Whatever Three Gram Piece of Dirt Is Situated Anywhere At All Nearby Even If You Swear You'd Just Cleaned Everything, and their personal favorite, I Will Be Affectionate Whether You Like It Or Not.

We are also excited in these parts because this future physician and her not-entirely-tattooed older brother will be relocating to the region.

 My niece and nephew have displayed extensive gifts for Making Ridiculous Faces and Telling Important Stories in both English and Gibberish (a language in which my grandson is also fluent.)


Everybody should have Tiny Humans around all the time (Okay, maybe not everybody-- but almost everybody). They are mostly cheerful, great singers if you are not particular about, say, tonal centers and tunes. And their capacity for exploration is exhausting delightful, an endless reminder that things like grass and snow and trees and bugs (and definitely dogs) are interesting if you haven't been walking past them for decades. If, like me, you work with teenagers, whose capacity to be bored by things is seemingly endless, it is a small kick in the head to spend a lot of time around Tiny Humans who are never bored by anything.

But my purpose here is not to test your ability to be bored. I just want to ask a question.

Who looks at these small children and thinks, "You know, we could do better. We could improve on this."

Who looks at a small child running up and down a hill over and over again and thinks, "What this kid really needs is to sit at a desk and do some worksheet and computer exercises so that we can produce some measurable instructional outcomes." Who does that?

Yes, yes. My children grew up in a quaint, safe small town free from any crushing grip of poverty, with parents who read to them every night and could afford a rich-ish environment for them to explore. All of the children in these photos have reasonably well-paid professionals for parents, so they grew up with enough food, toys, books, conversation, support, time to play, the works. What about the kids growing up far from that?

They absolutely deserve those things, too. Those things. Not the chance to sit at a desk and study academic material in order to achieve certain measurable instructional outcomes. Not that. But a chance to be surrounded by books, to explore, to play and play and play. To have enough to eat. To be safe. To climb up a hill and run back down it, over and over and over and over and over again. To explore the world on their own terms. 

Children are wired to explore, to learn, to examine, to study-- and to do it all in such an energetic, engaged and joyous way that adults insist on calling it play. Who the hell thinks they can improve on that?

Better Schools Dialogue Part IV: Money and Technology

Continuing an ongoing discussion of a model for better schools between Dimitri Mehlhorn and me. Here are links Part I, Part II, and Part III. This time it's my turn to reply.

Dear Dmitri:

I appreciate your willingness to engage and to some into a space that is not very aligned with your view in the education debates. I also appreciate your willingness to engage with the folks in the comments section (though I find the idea of calling them my "followers" kind of hilarious).

I'm going to respond to your three questions, but I'm going to lead off with a question of my own, raised by your answers.

Exactly what kind of school are we talking about?

I don't mean to be flip. It's just that I feel like I'm getting the picture in little puzzle pieces that don't seem to fit together, like a Rocketship Academy Montessori school or a vegetarian steak. I'm wondering if it wouldn't help us to lay out a more on-the-ground look at what the Better School would look like. Because I'm having a hard time quite getting your vision to come into focus. I'll try this exercise myself at the end of the post, but let me first respond to your question-and-answer headings.

Are these school desirable? (And wither technology)

Well-paid teachers, healthy food, outdoor activities, classes grouped across age levels, Montessori stuff, students teaching each other, personalization-- pretty much all items for which the devil (or the angel or anything else) are in the details. These could be great things, and these could be horrible things. Personalization (which you acknowledge as a fuzzy thing) can currently mean anything from a teacher developing and delivering students-specific content and instruction all the way to chaining a student to a computer for eight hours a day.

This tension between the general and the specific is at the heart, I believe, of much of the education debate. We've reached the point where teachers are suspicious even of something so seemingly good newsy as "Let's pay teachers more" because it turns out that reformsters usually mean "Let's pay a handful of teacher more, but only some. And maybe they should handle quadruple the workload because they're so awesome."

So when it comes to tech, details are everything. It's true that tech is only a tool, but tools shape their own ends. A screwdriver is only a tool, but you can't use it to drive nails. I am a big fan of computer tech, particularly as a research tool. It also allows for some great creation tools and some excellent presentation tools. But I have yet to see a software package that can teach. At best, it can provide adept and speedy "drill and kill" style instruction-- basically a battery of automated worksheet. But there's a reason that we've moved away from drill and kill teaching. It's soulkilling and not terribly effective (okay, that's two reasons). Anything more complicated than that seems beyond the instructional capabilities of software. If you ytell me someone has cracked the code, I'll gladly look-- but I won't believe it till I see it.

Are these schools possible? (Money and technology)

Let's take technology first. I'm aware of the vast, massive change that you describe. Hell, when I was in college, I learned to program in BASIC on punch cards that had to be carried to the computer guy who ran them through the room-sized computer on campus. But, as my professor's repeatedly told us, computers are stupid and can only do what they're told to do. Consequently, the critical question about any technological fix remains the question of who is writing the program.

Fans of computer-driven Competency Based Education and other adaptive teaching programs have repeatedly hung our hopes on an Artificial Intelligence that can analyze and respond to student work, but what they're talking about is a simulation of intelligence. The critical bridge that computer folks haven't built yet, and don't appear to have even come up with a conceptual design for, is the question of how to give a program values or morality. At a minimum, once we start talking about adding value judgments to programming, we have to talk about whose values. Average folks and decades of pop culture present the idea of computer intelligence as devoid of human emotion and bias, but all software has the biases of its writers built in. Here's Will Oremus, senior tech writer at Slate, earlier this week on the big Facebook news bias flap:

But algorithms aren’t magic. They’re built by humans, they’re maintained and updated and overseen by humans, and they’re flawed like humans. Most importantly, they’re built to serve human ambitions, which are inherently subjective.

I would disagree with him only slightly. Algorithms are stripped of some human judgment-- the judgment that let's humans say, "Okay, this is a good time for me to ignore my usual rule about what I'm dealing with." A computer program is not like a human so wise and smart that she's been elevated above emotion and all bias-- it's like a human whose extremely fast and extremely inflexible.

And extremely stupid. Despite year upon year of trying, nobody has yet developed writing-evaluation software that doesn't totally fail-- it "works" only as long as the humans doing the writing agree to keep to the software's narrow and specific parameters. Beyond that, as Les Perelman has repeatedly shown, the software is supremely easy to fool.

Now for the money.

I'm going to walk back my claim that every district in the country has made every decent cut they can think of, because some districts in the country (especially some of the huge ones) are being run by dopes. This is not strictly an educational problem; I have a theory that many of the US's economic woes can be traced directly to widespread Management By Dopes in the private sector. But that's another discussion.

Instead, I'm going to bring up one of my pet theories that I lack the resources to really test, which is there is an optimal size for school district, and it's probably larger than mine and definitely smaller that systems like New York and Chicago. And when a school system is way over or under the optimal size, financial problems occur. Small districts face questions like "Can we afford to run a drama or biochemistry program for just six students?" Big districts, on the other hand, end up with whole sections of the district that is underrepresented and isolated and it becomes easy to at worst screw over and at best ignore the voices from the non-wealthy, non-white neighborhoods. This is one of the places where I sincerely don't understand some of the proposed solutions from your side of the table-- how many schools and school programs in poor New York City neighborhoods could be improved and built up with the half-million bucks going to Eva Moskowitz?

I think optimal size has to do with political scale. Your district becomes too big at the point where your elected board can too easily ignore one whole chunk of stakeholders. Once the district becomes too big then, yes-- money is being spent on the wrong things, generally under a formula of "My Children need more education stuff but Those People over there can handle some more cuts."

All that said, I know many many many many districts, and I teach in one of them, where budgets are cut to the bone. Some of this is due to bad choices on the state level-- in Pennsylvania we suffer from A) bad legislative decisions about the pension fund and B) terrible policy decisions that allow cyber-schools to suck the blood out of local school districts.

On top of that, like many district, we're just not very wealthy. Technology to cover approximately 900 students does not come cheap, and it requires new capital investment annually, as well as a healthy investment in maintenance. There is no big stack of money lying around that we could just tap into-- every new expenditure means another cut somewhere else, and all of those cuts come at a real and painful costs.

The comparisons to private industry don't particularly move me, because there is no private industry that serves the same kind of customer base (everyone, whether they want to be a customer or not) or has little or no control over their own revenue stream or has to answer to absolutely everyone. I have nothing against the free(ish) market-- I just don't think it can help education in any useful way.

How can we get these desirable schools? (Who makes the calls)

I'm glad to see you assert your belief in local control; that may be a point we can chalk up as agreement. A locally-elected school board can be an ugly, miserable mess (lord knows I've had some things to say about my own over the years), but if we are going to pretend to be a democracy and our schools are going to be public institutions, I do not see any other possible path. So let's move on to the question of which voices might be heard:

Just as pedagogical and curricular expertise requires time in classrooms, expertise in radical bureaucratic reform requires time running large bureaucracies (especially school systems) and/or observing massive disruption (especially from the point of view of places like Silicon Valley).

I have huge misgivings here because having a pile of money is too often mistaken for expertise and for some folks, there seems to be no limit to the ability fall upward. Jack Welch has considerable expertise running a large system and observing massive disruption, but he has nothing to say about running schools that I want to listen to. Corporate management has been transformed in the past few decades by the notion that managing is just managing, and it really doesn't matter what the company actually does. I have watched local and regional companies run into the ground by these bozos, and we've all been watching companies like Carrier screw over workers and communities. We are watching as Captains of Finance suggest that Puerto Rico cut education and health care so that the investors can get paid.

I don't automatically assume boardroom guys are evil. But I do assume that their world, in general, answers to a different set of values than we do in public education. I don't assume that anybody who comes from a business background must be a money-grubbing, bean-counting bastard; I know that many of them are not. But I also don't assume that because they were successful in their industry that they know diddly about getting anything done in mine. Hell, with that kind of reasoning, we could end up with a dimwitted blustering blowhard reality show debt-dodging inheritance based real estate asshat as a viable Presidential candidate.

Now, on the one hand, I believe that everybody in a community is a stakeholder in public education. One of the things that drives me crazy about voucher and choice programs is that they completely disenfranchise every taxpayer who doesn't have a school-age child. No-- every single person who pays a dime into that school system should have a vote in representation and the ability to stand up before that school board and say what they think ought to be happening, and that absolutely includes businessman.

On the other hand, if someone shows up to offer their expertise, I want to know if they actually have some. I don't expect to be treated as a valued consultant in an operating room because I've watched most of the episodes of Greys Anatomy twice (well, until Cristina left, anyway), and I don't expect someone to demand the right to "disrupt" the entire educational system because he made a bunch of money and thinks he has some ideas about school.

There are unquestionably some skill sets that people outside of the education silo can offer that will help schools. But there's a difference between stopping beside the road and telling someone who's struggling with a flat tire, "Can I help you change" and stopping to say, "I'm going to sell you a motorcycle, right now."

[Note: The implication that Mercedes Schneider is a union shill, heavily subsidized by anybody, is puzzling and, as you have to know, without any basis in reality. Schneider is a classroom teacher who, like me, gives up things like sleep and comfy meals to do the work of researching and blogging. I agree that she can super-human at times, but I've met her and she seems exceptionally human to me, smart as hell, and passionate about public education. I don't know why it's so hard for some folks to believe that virtually all of speaking up for public education are doing it for free, but Schneider does not deserve to be tagged with a charge of being a union shill.]

Partnership

I do think that's a key, and it takes some adjustment from everyone. It means understanding that you don't always get your way. It means not insisting that since your paid employees always listen and obey at work, everyone must do so here as well. It means making sure that all constituents are represented and heard. All. And it means uniting your local voice strongly enough to make it heard on the state level.

My school ?

Locally controlled by an elected board that is responsive and responsible to every part of the community. All employees are paid well enough to keep the district competitive with other districts (nobody should be so far behind that they are the School of Last Resort for aspiring teachers).

Well-wired school, probably one-to-one computer system. Nothing is on those netbooks/laptop/tablets/devices that was not approved by classroom teachers. Nothing is used except at the direction and discretion of classroom teachers (no top-down "You must use The Island of Misfit Math Problems" directives). Expectations are high; belief in students is high.

Class sizes are small. Management of the buildings is largely by teachers, though nobody is in the classroom for less than half a day. Teachers largely responsible for hiring decisions. Resources are readily available, and a wide variety of programs are offered. No state mandated standardized testing. Accountability to local stakeholders through a stakeholder-directed system. 

Enrollment absolutely reflective of local community that the school serves. School is neither hugely "better" or notably "worse" that the schools down the road, but it is completely characteristic of its community.