What Do I Fix Next

Every top teacher that I know can tell you what their Worst Thing is.

The good-bad teacher model that's constantly being used as a basis for policy proposals-- it's nuts. In that universe, teachers are good or bad. Put a bad teacher in a classroom, and education withers and dies as students fail to thrive. Put a great teacher (or an "effective teacher") in a classroom, and test scores fly upward and a thousand learning moments bloom. If you're a teacher, you're good or bad, and when you step into a classroom, your fruits reveal your nature.

But "good teacher" is not what you are; it's what you do. And every good teacher knows a list of things she needs to do better.

This is one of those killer Things They Don't Tell You In Ed School. You will not be able to do everything you know you need to. You will see all the things that need to be done-- and you will only be able to do some of them.

The prevailing reformster model of teaching is solid state, a set stasis. Get the teacher put together just so, then come spray on the Kragle and lock it into place.

However, on this planet, teaching is much more like juggling. You're tossing up a couple of balls and an apple and several eggs and a pair of hamsters and maybe a chainsaw, and not always with grace, but always with the knowledge that there are some bowling balls and waffles that you need to pick up and add. Oh, and you are riding a unicycle on a tightrope, carrying laser sharks.

I've really just been looking for an excuse to run a picture of a laser shark on this blog. Today is my birthday, so happy birthday to me. You're welcome.














Like all jobs that fit the juggling metaphor (I wouldn't pretend for a second that teaching is the only line of work that is like this), a key ingredient is reflection.

Think. Look. Listen. Weigh. Check your assumptions. Check your results.

When you don't reflect, it's easy to let things slip or slide. How long has that apple been lying on the floor instead of flying through the air? Am I using my bowling ball grip on a marshmallow? Am, I really not ready to add the ten tennis balls, or am I just slacking? And particularly at the end of the year, have I let my heart harden when it needs to stay open, ready, and willing?

Conditions in the classroom always change, because the school and the rules and the climate and the world and most of all the students always change. Have I made the right adjustments?

And that's the conscious Big Stuff. Any complicated high wire juggling extravaganza requires a million micro-adjustments in every second. That's why data-crunching analysis may have its place, but I also need the mental discipline to be reflective, mindful, present.

This is why I reject the data-driven test-centered model favored by some-- not because I have no interest in data and feedback, but because I'm operating on a baby seal for which I need precise and subtle instruments, and these folks are offering me a blunt ax.

If you ask me, "Are you a good teacher?" I don't really know how to answer. I can tell you if I think I did good work today, or this week, or this year. Oh, this year. The end of the year is brutal, a giant polished wall that reflects back all my miscues and mis-steps and missed opportunities and failures of the previous year. I can start sorting out the stuff that I must do better next year, the broad strokes and the fine touches. I have to figure out what to fix next.

I have been in the classroom for thirty-seven years, and there has never been a year when I didn't have a list if things to do better. I get many more objects in the air with far less wasted effort than I used to, but still-- still there is more to do better. Some of the challenges are brought to me-- shorter class periods, more days lost to testing, class size fluctuations-- and some I bring myself. But dammit-- I am doing the work better, and I will keep doing it better. I just have to figure out what to fix next.

I don't talk about this often because we mostly live in a meat and potatoes world, but in addition to being art and science, teaching is a spiritual pursuit as well-- you have to be in tune with yourself, your students, your surroundings, your content, your community, the ebb and flow of the day, the week, the year. You reflect and you grow, and if you don't keep growing, then you shrink and ossify and fail to do your best work. You reflect and you grow, and because you reflect and grow, you keep asking--

What do I fix next?

edTPA Still Baloney

The National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) decided to take a look at edTPA, the teacher evaluation program of dubious value. CALDER's headline may be welcome to the folks at edTPA, but a quick look under the hood reveals a big bunch of baloney. The paper is informative and useful and pretty thorough, but it's not going to make you feel any better about edTPA.

CALDER is a tentacle of the American Institutes for Research, the folks who brought us the SBA test. The report itself is sponsored by Gates Foundation and "an anonymous foundation," which-- really? Hey there, friend? Have you had any research done on your money-making product? Certainly-- here's some fine research sponsored by anonymous backers. You can totally trust it. CALDER does acknowledge that this is just a working paper, and "working papers have
not undergone final formal review."

What are we talking about?

edTPA is a system meant to up the game of teacher entrance obstacles like the much-unloved PRAXIS exams. Coming up with a teacher gatekeeper task than the PRAXIS is about as hard as coming up with a more pleasant organization that the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, there's no reason to assume that "better" is the same as "good."

The idea of coming up with something kind of like the process of becoming a board certified teacher is appealing, but edTPA has been roundly criticized (more than once) for reducing the process of learning the art and science of teaching to a series of hoop-jumping paper-shuffling, an expensive exercise that involves being judged via video clips. The whole business is eminently game-able, and there are already companies out there to help you jump hoops. It's also a system that insults college ed departments by assuming a premise that your college ed program, your professors, your co-operating teacher, and basically none of the people who work with you and give you a grade-- none of those people can be trusted to determine whether or not you should be a teacher. Only some bunch of unknown evaluators hired by Pearson (yeah, they're in on this, too) can decide if you should have a career or not

Yeah, whine whine whine-- but is it any good?

As always with education research, we deploy the program first, and then we try to find out if it's any good. So although edTPA has been around for a bit, here comes the CALDER working paper to decide if we just wasted the time and money of as bunch of aspiring teachers. Or as the paper puts it,

Given the rapid policy diffusion of the edTPA, a performance-based, subject-specific assessment of teacher candidates, it is surprising that there is currently no existing large-scale research linking it to outcomes for inservice teachers and their students.

Well, I've read this paper so you don't have to. Let's take it a chapter at a time

1: Background: The Teacher Education Accountability Movement

Hey, remember back in 2009 when Ed Secretary Arne Duncan said that "many if not most" of the nation's teacher education programs were mediocre? This paper does. Man, it's hard to believe that we didn't believe him when he talked about how much he respected teachers.

Want a bigger red flag about this report? Three footnotes in and we're citing the National Council on Teacher Quality, the least serious faux research group in the education field (insert here my reminder that these guys evaluate non-existent programs and evaluate other programs by reading commencement programs). Straight-faced head nod as well to policy initiatives to measure teacher education programs by measuring value added or subsequent employment history.

Fun fact. 600 ed programs in 40 states now use edTPA. Seven states require edTPA for licensure. Okay, not a "fun" fact so much as a discouraging one.

But let's talk about "theories of action" form how edTPA would actually improve the profession.

First, it could be used to weed out the chaff and keep them unable "to participate in the labor market." That, CALDER wryly notes, would require "predictive validity around the cut point adopted." At least I think they were being wry.

Second, it might affect "candidate teaching practices." edTPA's own people suggest as much. This training to the test could be done independently by individual proto-teachers, or enforced by ed programs.

Third, schools could use edTPA scores as deciding factors in hiring.

CALDER notes that these three methods would only improve the teacher pool if edTPA scores have anything on God's green earth to do with how well the candidate can actually teach.

CALDER proposes to go looking for that very same white whale of data revelation. They poked through a bunch of longitudinal data from Washington State, looking for a correlation with employment (did the candidate get a job) and effectiveness (sigh... student test scores.

Insert Rant Here

Student test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness. Student test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness. Student. Test. Scores. Are. Not. A. Measure. Of. Teacher. Effectiveness.

Ask parents what they want from their child's teacher. Ask those parents what they mean when they call someone a "good" teacher. They will not say, "Has students get good scores on the Big Standardized Tests." Ask any parent what they mean when they say, "I want my child to get a good education" and they will not reply, "Well, I want my kid to be good at taking standardized tests." Ask taxpayers what they expect to get for their school tax dollars and they will not say, "I pay taxes so that kids will be good at taking standardized tests."

I will push on through the rest of this paper, but this point alone invalidates any findings presented, because their measure of effective teaching is junk. It's like measuring the health of the rain forest by collecting chimpanzee toe nail clippings. It's like evaluating a restaurant by measuring the color spectrum ranges on its menus.

2. Assessment of Prospective Teachers and the Role of edTPA

CALDER is correct to say that edTPA is different from "traditional question-and-answer licensure tests," though as someone who earned his teacher stripes in 1979, I'm inclined to question just how "traditional" the Q&A tests are.  The paper follows this up with a history of edTPA, and offers a good brief explanation of how it works:

The edTPA relies on the scoring of teacher candidates who are videotaped while teaching three to five lessons from an instructional unit to one class of students, along with assessments of teacher lesson plans, student work samples and evidence of student learning, and reflective commentaries by the candidate.

CALDER also explains what basis we have for imagining this system might work-- some other system:

Claims about the predictive validity of the edTPA are primarily based on small-scale pilot studies of the edTPA’s precursor, the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). Specifically, Newton (2010) finds positive correlations between PACT scores and future value-added for a group of 14 teacher candidates, while Darling-Hammond et al. (2013) use a sample of 52 mathematics teachers and 53 reading teachers and find that a one-standard deviation increase in PACT scores is associated with a .03 standard deviation increase in student achievement in either subject.

So, a tiny sample size on a similar-ish system.

CALDER also considers the question of whether edTPA can be used both to evaluate teacher practice and decide whether or not someone should get a teaching license (and if you find it weird that this conversation about making it harder to become a teacher is going on in the same world where we'll let you become a teacher with just five weeks of Teach for America training, join the club).

3. Data and Analytic Approach

CALDER's data come from the 2,362 Washington state teacher candidates who took edTPA in 2013-2014, the first year after the pilot year for edTPA in Washington. That whittles down to 1,424 teachers who actually landed jobs, which in turn whittled down to 277 grade 4-8 reading or math teachers.

Then they threw in student test scores on math and reading tests from the Measures of Student Progress Tests of 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, plus SBA testing from 2014-2015. They "standardized"  these scores and "connected" them to demographic data. And then, cruncheroonies.

There follows a bunch of math that is far beyond my capabilities, with several equations supposedly providing a mathy mirror of the various theories of action. Plus mathy corrections for students who didn't test in the previous year, and by the way, what about sample selection bias. In particular, might not teachers be hired based on qualities not measured by edTPA but still related to student test scores. Oh, and they hear that VAM might have some issues, too, though they consulted Chetty's work, so once again, I'm unimpressed.

I am not a statistical analysis guy, and I don't play one on tv, but this model is beginning to look like it could be enhanced by twelve-sided dice and a pair of toads sacrificed under a full moon.

4. Results 

On the one hand, for all the reasons listed above, I'm not very excited about the results, whatever they seem to be. But we've come this far, so why not take it home. Here are some of the things they discovered.

Shockingly, it turns out that non-white, non-wealthy students don't do as well on standardizes tests. So there's that.

Passing edTPA correlates to having a teaching job the following year. So.... people who are good at navigating the hoop-jumping and form-filling and resume-building of edTPA are also good at getting a job?

As for screening, edTPA results correlate maybe with better reading test scores for students, but they don't seem to have diddly to do with math scores. Well, actually, we're graphing them against reading value added and math value added scores, and while the math chart looks like a random spray, the reading chart looks like a group of scores that are kind of bell-curved shaped, and which do not rise as edTPA scores rise. There's a dip on the left side, suggesting that teachers with low edTPA scores correlate to students with low value-added reading.

So I'm not really sure what this is meant to show, and that's probably just me, but it sure doesn't scream, "Good edTPA scores produce good student reading VAM.

And there's more about sample bias and selection and size and it's all kind of messy and vague and ends with a sentence that just shouldn't be here:

Despite the fact that licensure tests appear correlated with productivity, the direct evidence of their efficacy as a workforce improvement tool is more mixed.

"Workforce improvement" and "productivity" belong in discussions of the toaster manufacture industry, not in a serious discussion of the teaching profession.

5. Policy Implications 

So teachers who fail the edTPA are less likely to raise student reading test scores. Despite the low sample, the researchers think they're onto something here. They think that edTPA should be used to screen out low performing reading teachers, though it would come at the cost of screening out some candidates who would have been effective teachers. But again-- I find the math suspicious.

With random distribution, 20% of the lowest quartile of edTPA failers would fall in the lowest quartile of student resuilts. But "we find that 46% of reading teachers who fail the edTPA are in the low-performing category." So half of the edTPA failers get low student results-- and half don't. But-- and check my eyeball work here-- it looks like roughly half of all the edTPAers failed to "add any value" to students. Mind you, I think the whole busines of trying to use student VAM to measure teacher effectiveness is absolute bunk-- but even by their own rules, I'm not seeing anything here to write home about.

6. Conclusion

I applaud CALDER's restraint:

Given that this is the first predictive validity study of the edTPA, and given the nuanced findings we describe above, we are hesitant to draw broad conclusions about the extent to which edTPA implementation will improve the quality of the teacher workforce. 

My emphasis because-- really? Forty states and this is the first validity study?

Anyway, they point out (as they did at the top) that all of the theories of action would be more compelling and convincing if anyone knew whether or not edTPA is actually assessing anything real. And the writers suggest a few steps to take moving forward.

Those steps include reweighting and revising the rubrics, comparing edTPA to other evauation methods (eg observations), checking the edTPA impact on minority teacher candidates, and looking at whether or not edTPA varies across different student teaching situations. And underlying all that-- the question of whether all of this is really worth the time and money that it costs.

These are all very worthwhile questions to consider, and I give CALDER credit for bringing them up.

And let me circle back around to my own conclusion. You will not find me pledging undying loyalty to many teacher education programs out there, because there certainly are some terrible ones. And you will not find me sticking up for PRAXIS (I type it in caps because I imagine the sound of a chain-smoking cat coughing up a hairball), which is a terrible way to decide whether someone is fit to be a teacher or not.

But edTPA's long and torturous parentage and history, as well as its insistence on generating revenue and putting candidates' fates in far-off impersonal hands-- well, it's just not a great candidate to assume the Teacher Evaluation Crown. It takes human beings to teach human beings how to teach human beings, not a complicated hoop-jumping paperwork festival. We know how to do this well, but it's not cheap and it's not easy and it won't make anybody rich. We can do the kind of "better" that is actually "good."

Advice for Superintendents

This is for the superintendents out there who are concerned about the bad teachers on their staff, the superintendents who are afraid that they are either awash in a sea of incompetence or watching the rising tide or terror that comes from a few bad apples spreading their blasting blight through the district barrel. For those of you who are worried that you have some teachers who just aren't doing the job, here's some simple advice.

Fire them.

Seriously, I feel some days that superintendents have simply forgotten that they have some powers with their job, that they feel helpless in the face of terrible, terrible teaching. So to those of you in these dire straits, I want to remind you what you can do.

You can fire them.

You do remember that, right? You have the power to fire incompetent teachers.

Yes, yes, I know. It would be hard. You would have to fill out papers, and probably have meetings and somebody might even object and make you explain yourself. You might have to actually prove that the teacher really is incompetent and not merely annoying or irritating or refusing to play a board member's kid on first string.

But you can do that, right? Provide proof that the teacher is actually incompetent? You went to superintendent school and took Filling Out Superintendent Paperwork 101?

Hell, in some states, it's not even that hard any more. Just stack the offending teacher's classes so that the test scores will come back just the way you want them. Boom! You have your "proof" that the teacher sucks.

Document. Collect information. Observe. Hell, even attempt remediation if you like. And then.

Fire them.

I repeat this because to hear some superintendents talk, you would think they were expressly forbidden to fire anybody ever. They need their state to pass new laws, to scrap tenure or seniority or both because, somehow, they believe they have no power to fire bad teachers. So I want to remind you-- you totally have that power. Hell, I've watched some of you use it. So if there are bad teachers in your district,

Fire them.

Now, maybe what you really mean is that you want to be able to fire them easily. Just a wave of your hand and some teacher that has been a pain in your butt will just vanish. Maybe you imagined that being a superintendent would look more like being the CEO of some major corporation and you could just snap your fingers and people who irritate you would vanish without so much as a peep and you wouldn't have to explain anything to anyone. Well, that's not your job. You answer to elected officials and you spend tax dollars and the public is entitled to know why you do things and whether or not you are pursuing the best interests of the public or whether you just axed Mrs. DeWhipsnot because you'll be damned if you'll have One of Those on your staff.

I know it sucks. Hell, I was hoping that being a teacher would be more like being a rich, famous rock star. Looks like we both missed out.

But if you want to get rid of a bad teacher, senior or not, just do your homework. Collect the paperwork. Build your case. Do your homework. Do your job. And then, once you've done your job, well, then-

Fire them.

Yes, I know in some districts (particularly the big urban ones) the hoops you have to jump through are considerable. I blame your board which negotiated a bad contract in the first place. But this is your job. This is why you get the big bucks. And really-- are you saying that you should be able to fire a bad teacher without being able to substantiate the charge that she's a bad teacher? You should be able to fire her just because you want to and you say so? Think back to some of the people you worked for early in your career. Heck, think about some of the building principals who work for you right now. Does the "because I say so" approach really sound like a good idea?

And yes, you could just rank your teachers and always furlough the bottom of the stack every time the state cuts your budget. I suppose it's easier than actually pressuring the state to fully fund your school. But how will you ever recruit and build a staff? Yes, young teachers will initially think, "This is great. I won't have to worry about losing my job in the first few years that I'm least senior." But eventually it will dawn on them that they will have to worry about their jobs in that same youngest teacher way for the rest of their entire careers-- particularly when we're using a teacher ranking system no more reliable than the roll of the dice.

So sure, we could come up with some new set of laws that would upend the profession and incite thunderdome amongst the staff and make life really easy for the poor, beleaguered superintendent.

Or, when you determine in your considered professional superintendenty opinion that a teacher is incompetent, you could collect the data, do your job and then--

You could fire them.And if you didn't want to do the work to fire them, you could stop whining about it.

What's the Alexander vs. King Fight About?

There's a big battle continuing between Lamar Alexander and John King, and like many spats, it's about more than what it's about.

So what is it about?

The fancy terms here are "comparability" and "supplement-not-supplant."

Title I moneys are given to districts that have a big bunch o'poor students. But the rules say that a district (or state) can't use Title I funds to weasel of their own obligations. In other words, they can't say, "Look! We just got a million dollars of federal money for East Bogsweat High School. We'll just go ahead and cut our own spending on EBHS by a million bucks!"

Here's how the conversation is supposed to work:

State/local school bosses: We spent just as much on Gotrox High as we did on Trackside High. But Trackside High has more students with extra challenges. That makes Trackside extra expensive. Can we get a hand here?

Feds: Sure. Here's some Title I money to cover that extra cost''

Here's another example of how the conversation is supposed to work:

State/local school bosses: We are going to spend way less of our own money on Trackside than on Gotrox, because the students at Trackside are brown and poor and icky. Why don't you go ahead and cover the rest of the cost of their education, because we don't want to spend our money on it.

Feds: No! Also, shame on you.

The current argument is about how to measure spending. If we figure in buildings and resources and programs and materials, it's not too, too hard to decide if spending at Gotrox and Trackside is comparable or not. But when we start figuring in the money spent on teachers, computing somparable spending becomes complicated.

There are many examples of how this could go wrong, but let's take a simple and striking one. Let's say that Gotrox and Trackside have their payroll spending pretty well evened out. Then at the end of the year, five Very Senior Teachers at Gotrox retire and are replaced with five brand-new hires. Trackside is now $150K behind Gotrox in spending. The district's only real response is to move around some teachers to balance out spending, so Trackside loses some of its teachers to an involuntary transfer to Gotrox, which evens things out until the next big batch of retirements.

But King and friends would argue that if districts don't have to count payroll expenses, we can continue the practice of assigning Trackside the least experienced, least accomplished teachers, and under-supporting schools to turn them into failure factories.

That seems complicated 

I agree. And this is shaping up to be one of those policy debates in which everyone spouts disingenuous nonsense in which they pretend not to see one or the other of the problems laid out in the examples above. Oh, you don't want to shuffle teachers around like chess pieces-- you must be a Foe of Equity! What, you think that some schools are chronically and deliberately underfunded-- you must be a Foe of Equity! Yes, the baloney quotient is further exacerbated in that many sides are trying to claim the same high ground.

So is the fight really about who deserves the high ground? Nope.

So what are we really fighting about?

The issue is a difficult one, and one of the many contentious areas over which the Congressional shepherds of ESSA struggled and eventually found compromise. But this particular detail is beside the main point.

ESSA negotiations were tricky and complicated, but members of both parties were united by one big policy priority. As Alexander has said,

The reason we were able to achieve such unusual unanimity and consensus is that people had gotten tired of the Department of Education telling them so much of what they ought to be doing.

ESSA was built to spank the Department of Education. It was meant to rein in what Congress in particular saw as the biggest sin of the Duncan-Obama USED-- the writing of law by a agency of the executive branch. Regardless of how you feel about the content of Race to the Top and Waiverpallooza, the groundshattering feature of those policies was that they were essentially laws written by USED-- not Congress-- and the means by which USED started micro-managing every school district in the country.

"We will give you a pile of money and let you break the law as written in NCLB," said the USED to the states. "All you have you have to do is turn over control of your department of education to us."

Mind you, that probably didn't happen because Arne Duncan was power-hungry. NCLB was an oncoming train wreck, and Congress resolutely refused to do anything about it. And the Obama-Duncan USED had some ideas, but they couldn't sell them to anybody in the legislative branch. So they just did a work-around, and while I think their work-around sucked with the sucking suckness of a billion black holes, I will give them credit for being at least partly motivated by a desire to avoid the whole train wreck thing.

But that meant that when the education law rewrite finally happened, Congress was highly motivated to strip the USED of the power to write its own rules. And ESSA does that in fairly explicit language, taking the time and space to list lots of things that the department is specifically NOT allowed to do.

The desire to do that was great enough to motivate Congresspersons to accept compromises they didn't like just so that they could stop USED from being America's School Board.

Here's what Alexander believes that Congress did about comparability:

The law specifically says that school districts shall not include teacher pay when they measure spending for purposes of comparability.

This committee has debated several times whether or not teacher pay should be excluded. Senator Bennet felt very strongly about his proposal to address this, and I felt strongly about mine.
Ultimately the United States Congress made two decisions about this issue, as reflected in the law we passed:

First, we chose not to change the comparability language in law, so the law still says teacher pay shall not be included:

Second, we added a requirement that school districts report publicly the amount they are spending on each student, including teacher salaries, so that parents and teachers know how much money is being spent and can make their own decisions about what to do with it, rather than the federal government mandating it be used in comparability calculations.

The law that the president signed in December didn’t do one thing to change the law that teacher salaries not be included.

That's the compromise that Congress worked out. And John King looked at that and said, "Nah, doesn't work for me." And he has proceeded to try to overwrite the law that Congress passed.

This is why Alexander is pissed. If anything, this is worse than Waiverpallooza, because back then, the USED was making up laws to fill a void that Congress left through inaction. But this time, Congress has a law. Congress made the call. And USED is saying, "NO, we're just going to pretend that the law says what we think it should say."

That's what this fight is about. Whatever you think of the issues of comparability and supplement-not-supplant, Congress has made a ruling, written a law, and now that law is, well, the law. If you think government departments and agencies should just go ahead and rewrite, ignore, or wildly re-interpret the laws Congress passes, we have another issue.

King's argument is, basically, that his way to count the money is the right thing to do. That's a noble thought, but if he wants to write the laws, he should probably go try to get himself elected to Congress. In the meantime, expect this battle to drag on and to be not so much about equity and civil rights as it will be about who gets to b the boss of whom.

PA: Erie and The End of Public School

While functional states may be basically all alike, when it comes to education, dysfunctional states are all dysfunctional in their own way.

In Pennsylvania, we have focused on developing one of the most dysfunctional funding systems in the country. We have a huge gap between rich and poor schools. We have a charter system that allows charter schools to bleed public school systems dry (in one spectacular case, a district actually got negative subsidy from the state because their charter bill is so huge).

On top of that, the legislature messed up the pension system so badly that districts are now making massive balloon payments on their pension obligations.

And the cherry on top of this is our state government's inability to do the whole budget thing. Last year's budget was a full ten months late and several dollars short, leaving districts both to do their own budget decisions in the dark while also holding up any payment from the state at all and triggering massive cash flow problems. Everybody lost, but nobody in Harrisburg learned a damn thing, so we're already right on track to create an equally ugly mess for next year.

How bad is it, really?

Here's how bad. Erie, Pennsylvania-- not exactly a teeming metropolis, but not exactly a one horse town, either-- is considering closing all of its high schools. Yes, at a meeting this afternoon, the leaders of the Erie School District will meet to decide if it might be more doable to just send all of Erie's teenagers to neighboring school districts.

The district is looking at a $4.3 million gap, and like many districts in PA, it has no possible response except to cut, "including eliminating sports, extracurricular activities, art and music programs, district libraries, and the district's police department." Plus cutting various administrative positions out the wazoo.

PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has taken a look at Erie finances and determined that the crappy state funding formula and the loss of money to charters are a huge part of the problem. DePasquale has actually been saying this a great deal, all over the state, because from Erie to Philadelphia,  bad funding and a terrible charter law are guttting school finance.

It is, of course, the same death spiral visible across the country. If Erie does hang in there, how well can the public schools compete with the charters if the public schools must cut all sorts of services? This is one of the most baloney-stuffed parts of the Free Market Competition Mantra-- competition will spur Erie schools to become greater and more competitive by stripping them of the resources they need just to function. Is that how it's supposed to work?

No, this is how charter eat public schools from the inside out, like free market tapeworms. The more the eat, the weaker public schools become, and the weaker public schools become, the more charters can attack them and eat more.

Erie Superintendent Jay Badams has been trying his damndest to be heard in Harrisburg, and he's been known to fling some rhetoric before (back in February, he was predicting that Erie schools would go bankrupt), so it's possible that he's hyperbolizing a tad for effect, in the vain hope of getting someone in our dysfunctional state capital to a) pay attention and b) care.

But even if he's leaning on the panic button, he's not making this stuff up. Particularly in the long term, closing down the high schools and farming out the students qualifies as a viable solution. It also qualifies as a breakdown of the public education system. If the schools shut down (a process that would take over a year), what happens to the students? While there would be public and charter schools that could, maybe, take those students, there's no guarantee that there would be enough capacity to absorb those students and more importantly, none of those schools would have an obligation to absorb the Erie students (and Erie's only remaining obligation would be to pay tuition-- it would actually be to their benefit if a student is not placed anywhere). Whether the student is expensive to teach or a behavior problem or can't get transportation or the receiving schools are just out of desks and don't want to hurt their own programs through overcrowding, there will be students that nobody takes responsibility for.

The charter and finances induced death spiral, the disaster capitalism approach to gutting public schools, puts us that much closer to a world where we could meet grown adults who say, "Yeah, I wanted to finish high school, but I couldn't find a place that would take me." Instead of drop-outs, we will have push-outs, students who didn't just fall through the cracks, but who were deliberately pushed through them.

The bulldozing of public schools in order to make room for the free market presumes that the free market has the chops to absorb what the public system turns loose. What if we burn down the public school to make room for a shiny charter, and all we end up with is a vacant lot? The biggest danger of a botched conversion to a charter choice system is not that we'd end up with a bad charter choice system, but that a city could end up with no system at all.

A War for Education

Those of us who write about education often play the what if game, trying to envision one cool ideal or another, and it's usually a policy tweak here or a structure kluge there.

But you know what would be cool? If we treated public education like war.

When we decide as a country that war is necessary, we do not screw around. We decided to fight World War II and in six years we spent almost 300 billion dollars-- and that's 300 1940 dollars. We spent over a full whopping third of our GDP. We scraped together every cent from under every couch cushion in the country.

And even when we aren't exactly all on the same page, our leaders find a way-- even an unscrupulous underhanded way. We were so sneak about Vietnam that without even declaring a war, we managed to spend 100-200 billion (depending on who's counting) over eleven years. That's approaching one trillion 2016 dollars.

And back then we were spendthrifts, drunk on cheap oil and prosperity that seemed indefatigable. Fast forward to, say, Iraq. A more frugal nation with a bigger political concern about things lie budget deficits was sold a $100 billion, two year war. We got eight years at maybe over a trillion. Maybe a lot more.

Here are some things that almost nobody said about these wars:

We just can't afford it. Nobody much suggested that wars should be fought with fewer troops or resources because it was just too pricey. Nobody said that we should pull out because we had already spent too much money.

We can't solve the problem by throwing money at it. We didn't hear the argument that we weren't seeing more ground won for each dollar spent, so let's just spend less.

We should provide several different choices of armies to fight the war, so that soldiers and generals could just have a choice  of whom to fight with. The pentagon didn't argue that we should have several privately-owned, tax-dollar financed armies in the field. Granted, there have been private armies out there-- but they haven't been fighting for all of us, have they.

I know this is not a perfect analogy. We have cut corners when it comes to some of the spending needed to fully support our soldiers, and in fact, the weight of fighting a war falls disproportionately on the non-wealthy families of our country. And while we love spending money on tech like drones and bombs, we are slow to address real human costs-- our spending on veterans is not just corner-cutting but corner-lopping-off-entirely.

But still-- when we're playing the wouldn't-it-be-nice fantasy game.... wouldn't it be nice if we approached education like a war? When we talk about "wars" in policy, like the war on crime, or poverty, or drugs, we're not taking about a metaphor of violence so much as a metaphor of commitment.To say we'll make war on something is to say that we'll do whatever it takes.

And if there's one thing our policy leaders never, ever say about education, it's "We'll do whatever it takes, spend whatever it costs, commit whatever resources are called for."

Why not? Sure, there would be waste and excess and $150 #2 pencils, but we tolerate that sort of thing with real war, considering it part of the cost of Getting the Job Done. You can't say it's because resources aren't infinite and we can only afford to spend so much, because that doesn't restrain us one whit when i comes time to throw another hundred billion dollars into Iraq or Afghanistan. No, I suspect the truth is less appealing. We just don't value education and children all that much. Or at least-- and I'm afraid this may really be it-- not ALL children. I mean, for my own kids, I really will spend whatever it takes (check that college debt total) and do whatever I can for my own kids, but Those Peoples' Children? I don't really want to spend a bunch of my money on Those Peoples' Children.

When we go to war, money is no object to protect me-- and since you and I are within the same borders, I guess you get the benefit as well. But in the War for Education, there are many more boundary lines drawn, and if I draw them carefully enough, I can make sure that the army I spend money on fights only for me. You go get your own army; stop trying to mooch off of mine. The biggest problem with this approach-- before you know it, not only are you not fighting a war for education, but you're also fighting a war against Those Peoples' Children.

Pearson CEO Spreads It On Thick

EdWeek's Market Brief, a site that unabashedly focuses its gaze on the giant pile of money attached to the education biz, sat down with Pearson CEO John Fallon to unleash a heaping helping of corporate toolspeak.

Fallon responded to a series of questions from reporters that EdWeek has helpfully organized. So we'll borrow their organizational scheme here.

What is Pearson's biz?

Primarily, Pearson makes giant piles of money. Fallon claims $7 billion annual revenues and "50 percent come from courseware/content, in K-12, higher education, and across the professional space." Thirty percent comes from testing (ten percent of the high stakes variety). The last twenty percent comes from services provided to school and Pearson's own virtual school. So, bigtime education.

Fallon says that a Pearson motto is "content plus assessment, powered by technology, equalizes effective learning at scale." Similar to the sort of thing we all used to write on "why I want to teach" essays back in teacher school. Okay, not that similar, since the Pearson motto doesn't actually mention teaching as part of the plan-- just technology-powered content delivery and assessment. As we have noted before when studying Pearson's Master Plans.

Fallon also said the company’s approach is to “define what we do by the outcome, not by where it happens physically.”

In the Cyber School game

Reporters, apparently in a very diplomatic and polite manner, asked Fallon, "Pearson has bet heavily on cyber-schools through its Connections Academy, among other products. What do you say to customers who are have noticed that cyber-schools are a big poop sandwich?"

Fallon's answer is a Mona Lisa of corporate baloneyspeak.

It’s important to speak in specific rather than general terms…It’s not always the case, but it’s fair to say there’s a disproportionate number of students in virtual schooling who are there because physical schools have failed them in some form or another. So it’s going to be important that we track value-added, or progress-added.

We see technology as the means by which I can apply the benefits of teaching to far more people, and you can help free teachers up to spend more time with students, engaging students, learning from each other. Technology is not a panacea, it’s just a tool, and its primary value is in enhancing the power of teaching to reach more people.

We publish studies that show the value that these programs do add. I think on the whole, the results are pretty good….But we are not complacent or satisfied, and all the time we’re looking to improve the value that is added. If you look at Connections Academy, the schools are incredibly popular with parents…[We measure the extent to which parents recommended our online programs among each other] and it receives an incredibly high rating.

So, yeah, boy, measuring the effectiveness of the program is important, and we're totally working on that, and we're always working on getting better, so when you ask if we're actually accomplishing anything, we can-- say, have you seen these glowing customer reviews?

Common Core alignment

Fallon was asked about the charge that many publishers didn't so much align materials with Common Core as just slap some Common Core stickers on the same old materials. EdReports in particular fingered Pearson materials, among others, as a big ole fail. Fallon's counter-argument is, well, to say, "We’re very confident that our products are aligned to the common core." So there you go! Problem solved. A company assures you that their product totally works-- what else do you need?

Common Core implementation

Pearson has some ideas about a super-duper educational delivery product that would revolutionize everything and fit just great with Common Core. But Fallon believes that kind of total overhaul (or total commandeering) of the education system will take time.

In hindsight, one of the mistakes that were made around the implementation of the common core was to think you could switch from No Child Left Behind, that you could click your fingers and it would happen in one fell swoop. It will take the better part of a generation for the benefits to flow through, because it’s such a fundamental step change.

None of which means that Fallon has anything other than complete confidence. Yes, too-abrupt addition on test-based assessment made teachers cranky, and there wasn't a great understanding of how the data crunching and tracking would work, but Fallon notes that it all happened anyway, so, win! And yes, absolutely every aspect of schools will need to be changed, but that should be swell. He neglects to mention that the implementation is further hampered by the complete lack of proof, support, or data to suggest that any of these changes will be educationally beneficial.

This does leap Pearson into the Cautious Approach lead. Bill Gates said it would take a decade to find out if Common Core was actually working, but Fallon is willing to bet the education of an entire generation on this shot in the experimental dark.

Assessment! Assessment! Assessment!

While the heading focuses on the awesomeness of summative assessment, Fallon is quoted as being excited about the convergence of summative and formative assessment-- the ever-popular all-standardized-testing, all-the-time. This has been on the Pearson radar for a long time; you can start a fuller journey through the Pearson Master Plan for an Assessment Renaissance right here.

Wither High Stakes Testing?

Given the ongoing meltdown of the Big Standardized Test biz, do you ever see Pearson getting out?

Fallon is unmoved. We gave 15 million awesome tests successfully last year (presumably that "successfully" isn't considering whether or not the tests were crap). And we can't go back to bubble tests, because they don't prepare students for the real world. Seriously-- the pick-and-click computer BS Test is totally preparation for real life, if your real life is taking bad standardized tests. Is that a job somewhere?

Soooooo... About That LAUSD Debacle

Asked about the total and expensive debacle of trying to convert the Los Angeles to one-to-one tabletry, Fallon has nothing specific to say. In general, technology is hard and converting to new standards is hard and switching teachers over very quickly is hard, and boy, all these hard things take time.

But about the Pearson Pre-loaded Curriculum?

Lots of people have used it since then without any disastrous complaints at all.

Open Source?

"So," asks someone diplomatically, "are you afraid that the open source movement of Free Stuff will get in the way of your profitable market?"

"Well," says Fallon diplomatically, "there will always be a market for materials that aren't cheap crap you just google off the internet." And then he is correct yet again when he notes that the open source route is "not a free route." You still need software and hardware and to manage the whole big mess. So Pearson is not worried, and I can't say that I blame them.

Pearson's Confidence Game

Pearson's leadership belongs to that special elite group of reformsters. It may be that they are the champion poker-faced con artists, but I'm generally left with the impression that they are just that confident, that they can contemplate redesigning the entire educational system of several nations without ever wondering if maybe, just maybe, they're over-reaching in a way that would be alarming and dangerous in an actual elected government, let alone a multinational corporation that doesn't have to listen to anybody.

How much nerve does it take to say, "Redesign a cultural institution that serves as a foundation of our civilization and has roots going back centuries? Sure-- we can do that. And we will do it with products untested and unproven-- even products that have been shown to be defective-- and we'll gamble the education of an entire generation on it, and we'll do it by just taking over an entire sector just because we want to and certainly not because anyone asked us to."

If it weren't for that whole "gambling the education of an entire generation" part, the hubris would be breath-taking. As it is, the whole business just continues to be alarming.