FL: District Officials Lose Their Damned Minds

School district officials in Sarasota and Manatee counties have completely lost any sense of what they're supposed to be doing.

There are areas of policy and practice in the education debates where reasonable people can reach different conclusions about what might be best. This is not one of those times. Some Florida school districts have simply and completely lost the thread.

The issue is simple. In Florida, some third graders opted out of the Florida Standards Assessment (Florida's version of the Big Standardized Test). They also opted out of the alternative BS Test, the SAT-10 (a version of the Stanford Achievement Test, and not one more piece of money grubbery from the College Board).

But Florida insists that its students take the BS Test, regardless. And Florida also has one of those sense-defying laws that says third graders who can't pass the reading test must be retained. It's a dumb policy for many reasons, not the least of which is that there isn't a lick of evidence that holding third graders back helps. And cooler heads seem to have prevailed last year when the Florida legislature, in a brief moment of lucidity, decided to suspend the rule and just let the actual local school where education professionals worked with the actual children-- just let those guys make the call.

But not this year. This year a third grader can have great grades, the recommendation of her teacher and principal, and the admiration of her peers-- but if she didn't take the BS Test, she will fail third grade. 

Let me say that again. An eight year old child who had a great year in class, demonstrated the full range of skills, and has a super report card-- that child will be required to repeat third grade because she didn't take the BS Test.

This is what happens when the central values of your education system are A) compliance and B) standardized testing. This is what happens when you completely lose track of the purpose of school.

What possible purpose can be served by this? Are administrators worried that the child might not be able to read? No-- because that is easily investigated by looking at all the child's work from the year.

What possible benefit could there be to the child? Mind you, it's impossible to come up with a benefit in retention for the child who has actually failed the test-- but what possible benefit can there be in flunking a child who can read, her teacher knows she can read, her parents know she can read, she knows she can read-- seriously, what possible benefit can there be for her in retention. How do you even begin to convince yourself that you are thinking of the child's well-being at all when you decide to do this?

This is punishment, not so pure, but painfully simple. Punishment for non-compliance, for failing to knuckle under to the state's testing regime. And in taking this step, the districts show where their priorities lie-- the education of the children is less important than beating compliance into them and their parents, less important than taking the damned BS Test.

Officials in these counties scratch their heads? What can we do? The law is the law. Well, in the immortal words of Mr. Bumble, "the law is an ass." And furthermore, just look across county lines at some other Florida counties that are NOT doing this to their third graders. Go ahead. Peek at their answer. Copy it.

Hell, Superintendent Lori White of the Sarasota schools is retiring in February of 2017-- is this really how she wants to finish up her time there?

[ Update: Meanwhile, in Manatee County, Superintendent Diana Greene has dug in her heels and declared that the state's directive is clear, and maybe those other counties are the ones that need to shape up and stop passing kids willy nilly. Manatee students may use an alternative assessment like a portfolio-- IF they take the BS Test.

Greene may well have read the state correctly. In the same report from the Bradenton Herald, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Cynthia Saunders is quoted as saying, “We cannot promote a child based solely on the teacher’s report card in third grade."

In other words, the state does not require proof that the child can read. The state requires proof that the child took the Big Standardized Test.]


There are times when the tension between test-driven schooling and education centered on the best needs of the children can be fuzzy, blurry, hard for some folks to see the dividing line. This is not one of those times. When you are planning to hold a child back a grade for absolutely no reason except that she didn't take your mandated BS Test, and when you have ample evidence and data about how well she learned and grew this year-- when you have reached that point, you have absolutely lost track of what you're supposed to be doing. You have lost your damned mind.

There is no excuse for holding back a student with good grades. No excuse at all, certainly not that the child wouldn't take your precious test, your crappy test that wouldn't tell you a thing that you can't already better find out from sources you already have. This is deeply and terribly wrong, and I hope the administrations and school boards of the offending counties find themselves buried in a mountain of angry letters, emails and phone calls, as well as a shit storm of deservedly negative publicity. Then I hope they go sit in the corner and think about what they've done and consider whether or not they have a future in education.

  Seriously-- this is what we're talking about. I'm including this visual because it's hard to believe. 













The state has issued a statement, sort of, on the matter. Update is here--

ESSA: Regulatory Baloney

Legislators write and pass laws. But the laws they create are sometimes vague and sometimes contradictory, a weird quilt of intentions and tissue. So it falls to other parts of the government to turn laws into regulations. And that's where we are now with the Every Student Succeeds Act (the latest version of the Big Bunch O'Federal Education Laws, the sequel to No Child Left Behind).

Many eyes (not all eyes, unfortunately-- it would be great if all eyes were paying attention, but eyes have been diverted by the dumpster fires that are our primary season, among other things) have been watching John King and the Department of Education, because it's at this stage of the game that King gets to "interpret" ESSA to suit his own ideas of what it ought to say.

This is what Arne Duncan was talking about last December when he told Politico that the USED lawyers were smarter than the members of Congress, and this is what Lamar Alexander has been talking about in his scorching calls to war against John King's USED. Alexander has been crystal clear-- if King tries to turn himself into America's School Superintendent, Alexander is going to come after the secretary with every garden tool in the Congressional woodshed.

The USED is trumpeting its move away from the narrow definition of school achievement based on a single Big Standardized Test, with a new "holistic" approach that allows for four factors:

the proposed regulations build on the statutory language by ensuring the use of multiple measures of school success based on academic outcomes, student progress, and school quality, reinforcing that all students deserve a well-rounded education that prepares them to succeed in college and careers. 

 So it's in that context that USED released the draft version of the accountability rules under ESSA. And King is proving to be just as politically adept and  responsive to outside voices as he was a Education Chieftain in New York, which is to say "Not At All." There are, as we always knew there would be, many things not to like about the regulations. Here are some of the bad ideas that are enshrined in the proposed regulations.

Stack Ranking of Schools

Schools must be given a "summative rating," which is such a made-up baloney term; I just googled it and got only 209 returns, most of which had to do with financial services, and Google Ngram returns zero instances of the term. 

The meaning is clear enough from the context. "Summative rating" means "grade." Every school has to be given a grade, and that grade has to be used to stack rank schools, because states must show the feds that they have a plan for dealing with the bottom-ranking schools. The regulations once again target the magical "bottom 5%," an arbitrary number that has never, ever been explained, but is just the go-to number for targeting the bottom of the stack. And of course, since we're stack ranking, there will always be a bottom 5%. If every school in the state is cranking out magna cum laude college graduates and 100% of the state's students are getting straight A's while acing the SAT and, in short, every single school is awesome, there will still be a bottom 5%.

Stack ranking guarantees that there will be losers, no matter what.

The 95% Rule and Opt Out 

Congress sent a severely mixed message in ESSA by forcefully recognizing parents' right to opt their children out of taking the Big Standardized Test and by forcefully demanding that states have 95% participation in BS Testing.

King and the USED have resolved that conflict by simply ignoring the parental right portion.

The regulations say that "robust actions" must be taken against schools that don't get 95% participation. "Robust actions" is itself a little slice of meaningless word salad (should the superintendent stand outside the offending school, rip off his shirt, flex his muscles, and grunt strenuously?) but USED turns it into a multiple choice question, saying that the government-approved robust actions include lowering the school's grade, giving them the lowest score for academic strength, moving the school straight onto the naughty (needs improvement) list, or anything state-approved that would punish the school good and make its rate go up.

No word on whether or not this would include low participation because the test manufacturer completely botched their job.

This set of regulations and punishments are a tell about King's priorities. Look at that second option-- if your school's BS Test participation is too low, you could be given the lowest score for academic achievement. But if academic achievement is being measured with instruments other than the BS Test, you would still have that data. If academic achievement is going to be one more massaging of the BS Test scores, well,  A) that's stupid and B) you have no idea what the rating should be, so why default to lowest possible?

In other words, we either know perfectly well what the academic achievement is, or we have no idea at all. But USED doesn't care. Or at least knowing the actual academic achievement is not as important to them as punishing non-compliance with test-taking.

At the end of the day, King's USED is more interested in making students take the test than in actually knowing how the students are doing.

Datapallooza 

ESSA comes loaded with lots of data reporting. Transparency! We are totally about transparency, and that's why the complete text including all questions and answers from the BS Tests will be released every year to students and parents. Ha! Just kidding. That stuff will still stay under lock and key. Transparency is okay for schools, but not valuable corporate interests (even though both are being paid with tax dollars).

Anyway, the USED has all sorts of things that must be reported now that "Ensures that families and stakeholders have clear, robust, and consistent information needed to engage meaningfully in their education systems."

School report cards must be made public before the end of each calendar year (also known as "roughly half way through the school year," so I'm not sure what help this is providing). The report card has to include financial recording, too, as well as post-secondary enrollment numbers. That sounds relatively innocuous, but I'm imagining a nineteen year old who gets a call or email from his old high school saying, "We want you to tell us what you're up to now" and who thinks-- correctly-- you are no longer the boss of me, and I don't have to tell you jack. Or who just writes down "clown school."

Is Anyone Excited

The Obama Administration has approached education oversight as a civil rights issue, and so they have depended on civil rights groups to give them backing and cover. Those groups are lukewarm in their response; roughly, "This stuff could be okay, probably, if anyone can figure out how to enforce it.

Congress is not excited. Alexander observed that Congress discussed some items for the law, decided not to include those items, and now the department has just gone ahead and put them back in. John Kline of the House Education and the Workforce Committee was equally unimpressed:

“I am deeply concerned that the department is trying to take us back to the days when Washington dictated national policy,” he said. “If this proposal results in a rule that does not reflect the letter and intent of the law, then we will use every available tool to ensure this bipartisan law is implemented as Congress intended.”

For the rest of us, ESSA continues to look pretty much like it has always looked-- probably marginally better than NCLB and RTTT-Waiverpallooza, but that's not saying a lot, is it? Probably better to be stabbed with a clean, sharp knife that a rusty shovel, but could we please see some other options? The school grades are maybe better than NCLB's pass-fail for schools. Multiple measures will be better than just BS Test scores, but the test scores are still in the mix, and they are still crap. There's a whole bunch of noise about shuffling subgroups about; I'm sure that's going to be awesome.

The Unexpected Benefit of ESSA

There is one interesting new feature of ESSA-- an open, contentious split between the department and Congress. Under Race to the Top/Waiverpalooza, Congress just kind of sat on its hands doing nothing because it couldn't get its act together and was not, for a while, sure how it collectively felt about the whole mess. When the Obama administration wadded up NCLB and wiped their nose with it, there wasn't much to say-- they could only get away with that because Congress hadn't done its job and the alternative was to deal with the mess of every single state in the nation standing in violation of what was technically still the law.

But things are different now.

Congress did their job. Maybe not great, but they did it, and they did it with a level of bi-partisanship that we haven't seen in quite a while. That, and they actually took power away from a federal department-- another unprecedented feat.

They were pretty proud of their work. Lamar Alexander is no choir boy or education hero, but he's made it quite clear that he'll be damned if he's going to stand by when the administration tries to wad up ESSA and blow their noses on it. All the signs point to a protracted battle about what the law is actually going to say and what kind of maneuvers might be used to interfere with it.

In other words, Mom and Dad are having a big fight over curfew and room cleaning and which chores we do or don't have to do. And as every kid knows, when Mom and Dad are wrapped up in fights about house rules, there's no telling what golden opportunities you'll have to do what you want. For those of us who can find some brave and tough champions for education on the state level, these could be interesting times.

A Bad Child?

I don't remember the first person to ask me, but I remember how I felt when I heard the question, asked of my then fresh-out-the-package daughter.

Is she a good baby?

I was stumped. She's a baby. I'm pretty sure that her moral and ethical sense are somewhat limited at the moment, that she doesn't really know much about the world or her proper relationship with it. Good? Bad? She's a baby.

Of course, what the question meant (and still means, because now I hear it asked about my grandson) is does she go to sleep easily? Does she cry much? Does she stick to a regular schedule? Does she let you sleep at night?

In other words (literally), "is she good" meant roughly "does she behave in a way that is convenient for you?"

This is crazy talk. The child is hungry when she's hungry-- are we suggesting that she should have the decency to just suck it up until a decent hour of the morning? Do we think she should stop crying, stop using the only expression she has for "I feel really bad," out of consideration for our adult feelings? 

I was sensitive to the idea because in those early days of my career I was teaching in middle school and I was wrestling with the uncomfortable realization that what some of my colleagues meant by "Good student" was not "a student who displays curiosity, insight, creativity, hard work, and interest in learning." What they meant was, "A student who behaves in the ways that are most convenient for us." In those days, we were institutionally fuzzy about the difference between "excellence" and "compliance."

This is how we label a child and set that child on track for failure, conflict and all the worst things that we can throw at them. We label that child "bad" and what we mean is "that child is non-compliant and won't behave in ways that are most convenient for those of us who have the power." And that word "bad" just keeps meaning that through elementary school, high school, and on after, when we declare that the neighborhood that the now-grown child lives is a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood where too many people are non-compliant, too many people behave in ways that are inconvenient and undesirable for the folks in power.

This is the worst conceivable definition of "bad"-- "inconvenient for me and the exercise of my power over this person."

There was a time when teachers received plenty of sensitivity training, where we were told to respond to bad children by asking what it was, exactly, that made them so bad.

I would suggest, instead, that we ask ourselves why we are trotting out the B word.

A rational human being does not respond to a crying infant with, "How dare you do this to me! You shape up right now or else!" Instead, you ask, "Why is this child crying? What is she trying to tell me?"

I am not sure there is ever a reason to stop asking that question.

Now, I'm not saying that some of the actions don't need to be dealt with. If a student picks up a desk and tries to throw it at other students, that action is destructive and injurious and needs to be stopped.

But after the danger and damage have been dealt with, there is still time to ask the question why. What is the person trying to communicate? What's the message that's being lost in translation? What is it we're not hearing?

"Bad" gets in the way of that process. "Bad" is the conversation-ender. There's no explanation, nothing to understand, because the person is just bad.

And there are certainly times when "bad" is the right word, where we are dealing with a person whose choices, actions, inclinations, values are violations of moral and ethical standards. But before we deploy the B word, we should be certain that it really applies. When we use the B word, do we mean that this is a person who is actually and demonstrably evil, or do we just mean that this person insists on behaving in ways that are inconvenient and annoying to those of us with power.

One lesson of Teacher 101 is "It's not personal." Though a student's action may feel like a bold statement of, "I hate you, teacher, and you suck," it probably isn't (even if the student actually says, "I hate you, teacher, and you suck). What I'm proposing is just an extension of that.

A student's action might be non-compliant. It might be inconvenient for us as the power in the room. But unless we're prepared to argue that compliance to authority is a higher moral virtue, we had better think for a second or twelve before we call that student "bad." If our message is that Good People are the ones who always kneel to the dominant power or culture, we need a new set of definitions, and perhaps a new approach to the "good" and "bad" people in our classrooms.

Ed Debate Political Fault Lines

Even a casual stroll through the Garden of Reformy Delights reveals some flora and fauna that do not ordinarily grow together. Here are some small government types clamoring for education standards imposed on the federal level. There are some nominal liberals complaining about the evils of teacher unions. Support for charter schools runs across the entire political range.

And it's no different in the Greenhouse of Reform Resistance. The push against Common Core united Bible-thumping conservatives with godless heathen liberals. The lawmakers in Oklahoma who just rejected test-and-wonky-math-driven evaluation for teachers were not Democrats standing up for teachers' unions, but Republicans standing up for local control.

The Ed Reform Debates have been marked by wholesale traffic in Strange Bedfellows, and that tends to create some stress and strain within some alliances.

At the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio is concerned that schisms within the reform camp are creating problems for conservatives. Specifically, he sees the "liberal" wing of reform, the social justice warriors, pushing out the conservatives, the fans of unleashing free market forces, a conflict that Pondiscio says he's been seeing unfold at various reformy gatherings.

One veteran conservative education reformer describes himself as “furious and frustrated” by the increasing dominance of social justice warriors in education reform and the marginalization of dissenting views. “It's an existential threat,” he notes. “Any group that only associates with likeminded people is susceptible to becoming extreme, inflexible, self-righteous, and losing its ability to see its own weaknesses.” This opinion was echoed in a series of interviews with other prominent reformers—most right of center, though not all—in the past week. One sign of the dominance of the new orthodoxy: Almost none were willing to be quoted on the record. “I'm involved in too many fights,” says one. “I can't pick another.”

Pondiscio is worried that the collapse of an alliance between social justice liberals and free market conservatives will keep both from achieving their goals, and of course, I'm okay with that. But if I'm honest-- well, it's not like the Pro Public Education side of things is devoid of any disagreement or infighting. There are some pretty fundamental splits over here, such as disagreement about whether Common Core was an aberrant attack on US public education or a symptomatic expression of everything already wrong with US public ed.


But as someone who doesn't parse politics for a living, I want to suggest that there is both more and less to these sorts of divisions than meets the eye. In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I'm a registered Democrat (because PA independents don't get to vote in primaries) with virtually no political heroes (except my grandmother, a lifelong NH legislator) and who comes from a family background of Republicanism.

So what are some of the fault lines running through the education debates?

Tribal Alliances

We're living through the very worst of political tribalism, as both GOP and Democrats jettison every pretense of principle just in hopes of being able to say, "Somebody nominally labeled a member of my party won the Presidency!" With both Trump and Clinton, we are treated to a display of party leaders declaring, "There is no belief that I would not toss in the trash in return for the chance to stand next to a winner."


In many states, education alliances have been built on similar principles. If a Democratic governor comes out for ed reform, GOP legislators must oppose him, because reasons. Ditto GOP backers of reformster policies. Once just one person takes a stand, everyone else has to line up based on their party allegiances and not any particular principles about education.

Follow the Money

The reformster movement draws much of its power from the basic observation, "Hey, that is one huge pile of money over there in public education. We want a piece." The hedge fund industry was not suddenly struck with concern about education; they saw a plum ripe for the plucking, and they got out their hedge fund trimmers. Free market fans say, "Sure, and that pursuit of money is what will fuel a competition for educational excellence," and I think they are full of what my grandmother used to call manookie.


But money is politics-blind. It is amoral. When The Gates spends a gazillion dollars on ed reform advocacy, it doesn't care about the political or philosophical stripes of the recipients-- Gates would have given a pile of money to the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster if he thought that church could help promote Common Core. Whitney Tilson's decision to found Democrats for Education Reform instead of Republicans for Education Reform was, in his own telling, a tactical choice and not connected to any particular political convictions. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a Democrat could argue that the teachers unions should be banished to Outer Slobovia.

So in many cases, we're not talking about convictions or philosophies or deep-held ideas. Just money.

Rhetorical Tool Bags

Civil rights and social justice. Escaping zip codes. Let the students have control of their own school money. Provide all parents with a choice. Freedom. Escape government schools. Stifled by teachers unions. Achievement. Achievement gap.

The list is long. Advocating for a political policy point is about finding the language to frame the issue and control the narrative. You don't get there by asking "What do I actually believe" but by asking "What language will best push people to our side? What will help us sell the policy?"

This is politics as usual. Hire a group to do market studies, and create a manual, as the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools did when they hired the Glover Group to create the Charter School Messaging Notebook. Set up your talking points, hire some guys to help deploy them, rinse and repeat.

What muddies the water is that with every talking point, you will have some combination of people who actually believe the talking point and some who are just cynical operators. The civil rights issue that is at the heart of what troubles Pondiscio is one such tool-- there are plenty of folks who are really and sincerely committed to the civil rights and equity side of the education debates, and there are others who have latched onto the argument as a way to win their true goals. The ultimate effect is people who are saying the same thing, but who have completely different intentions and values behind their words. Which brings us to...

Honesty

Some participants in the ed debates simply aren't honest about what their goals and values are, mostly because they understand that if they were honest, they would lose. You can't just say, "We really want to make a lot of money by taking over part of the public education system" or "We really want to increase our political clout by making alliances with people that our members find odious" and definitely not "I'm going to push this idea mainly because I've been paid well to do so."

So you find ways to dress it up and thereby establish that one of the Rules of Engagement will be that folks can go ahead and sling bullshit as much as they want, which has the extra consequence of having everyone enter the debates with their bullshit defectors set on "High."

There's a huge level of intellectual dishonesty among many reformsters, who select whatever argument they believe will help them make the sale, though there are certainly conservative reform fans who display a willingness to follow their principles where they lead, rather than trying to create an argument for the outcome they've pre-selected. I read guys like Pondiscio, Andy Smarick, and Rick Hess not because I agree with them, but because they are generally honest and consistent about what they say and how they follow a line of thought.

And about those political labels

This morning I saw someone responding to the article by calling Pondiscio a liberal, which is seriously off the mark. Well, I think it's off the mark. Because labels are hard to sort out these days. We have Democrat and GOP governors who are standing up for exactly the same thing. I would be hard-pressed to find the difference between the "left-leaning" Center for American Progress and the "right-leaning" Fordham Institute when it comes to education policy. What's the difference between a neo-liberal and a free market conservative, again?

I'm far more interested in the principles that guide a person than what label we can slap on that person. As soon as we start labeling, we lose a ton of nuance and we start to group things (and people) together in ways that don't necessarily hold up or make sense. Pondiscio is worried about the liberals throwing the conservatives out of the reform movement, but I have some doubts about how many of those "liberals" and "conservatives" are really, actually either.

Those kinds of alliances make sense for specific goals ("Let's get all the fences painted red") but have a hard time holding together for broader, vaguer objectives ("Let's insure policy is more influenced by neo-syllogistic free market equity concepts").

False Equivalency Disclaimer

While it's possible for all sides (there are definitely more than two) of the education debates to be riven by these fault lines, you will be unsurprised to learn that I think reformsters are far more susceptible.

For one thing, there is far more money in play in pro-reform circles. Carol Burris, head of the Network for Public Education, is literally the only person I can think of who is even sort of making a living as an advocate for public education. Meanwhile, Gates and Walton and the rest have thrown enough money at reformsters to support a small country, and that money is being thrown because even more money is at stake as winnings in the ed policy debate. That kind of money draws a large number of flies, including flies that may or may not care about anything except the money.

Meanwhile, there's no good reason to be an advocate or activist for public education except that you care about the issues involved. I know some reformsters find this hard to believe, hence the occasional claims that somebody is being paid Big Bucks by the unions. But no-- we're just here sticking up for what we believe, in a fairly uncoordinated, disorganized manner. There's no question that the Resistance is not one tight, completely-in-agreement coalition, but there aren't as many of us, and we don't have a lot of power or money riding on the outcome. I'm not in a Movement, and so I don't have to make sure that I'm saying the currently-approved statements or throwing support to people I disagree with just because we are paid by the same backers. If you're an opportunist looking to score power and money, the reform resistance movement is a bad investment.

The reform movement has always stapled together folks who are not naturally allies. Throw in all the rest of these fractures and issues and you're sure to see pieces and parts come flying off the machine from time to time. Heck-- the Common Core Cheerleaders Club has gotten mighty small and lonely and now has to sit in the back instead of taking reformy point. If I were a reformster, I might worry less about the mix of liberals and conservatives and more about the mix of people who are sincerely concerned and people who are just opportunists.

IDEA: The Unfunded Mandate

In a piece of non-news news this week, Senator Chuck Schumer called for full (or at least fuller) federal funding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

IDEA started out in 1975 as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act (EHA) which at a minimum made for a lousy acronym. In 1990 it was retooled as IDEA, which comes with six main "pillars"

• Individualized Education Program (IEP)
• Free Appropriate Public Education
• Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)
• Appropriate Evaluation
• Parent and Teacher Participation
• Procedural Safeguards

These are all admirable and worthy goals. They are also expensive as all get out.

So why is Schumer calling for full funding? Because Congress has never provided close to what they promised. In 1975, Congress committed to funding 40% of the cost of implementing EHA. That didn't happen, and when EHA became IDEA, it happened some more. IDEA is the grand mac daddy of unfunded mandates, a case of the government saying to citizens, "You absolutely must buy a pony. But you'll have to buy it with your own money."

How unfunded is IDEA? Congress currently contributes (by some counts) about 16% of the total cost. All other costs fall on the state and local district.

This massive funding shortfall influences plenty of other policy discussions. It's certainly responsible for some portion of the "education spending has been increasing mightily since the seventies" discussion. And here's Bruce Baker (Rutgers school finance guru) arguing that spending on students with special needs is driving spending gaps between districts ( and is consequently an important unacknowledged part of the current debate between Ed Secretary John King and Senator Lamar Alexander). I'm also wondering if this funding gap is exacerbating the effect of making students with special needs more unattractive to charters-- they each bring their spending gap with them.

"UNfunded mandate" is a familiar phrase, so familiar that we may forget what it really means. But 16%?!

Sixteen percent.

That's how little help the feds provide in meeting the complex of laws that they created.

So God bless Chuck Schumer for bringing the matter up for what must be about the umpty-gazzillionth time. I'm not optimistic that anything will change, but it's still good to be reminded that the feds ordered us all to go buy ponies and didn't even kick in enough money for hay.

Eva Moskowitz Fights Back

Eva Moskowitz, well-paid queen of the Success Academy charter chain, just won the Savas Award from the Reason Foundation. The award is given in honor of City University of New York Presidential Professor and privatization research pioneer E.S. "Steve" Savas, and it recognizes public-private partnership, though since what we're really honoring is privatization, these are partnerships in the same way that mugging is a criminal-pedestrian partnership.

Apparently one of the prizes that comes with the Savas Award is a very friendly and gentle video interview, and ReasonTV delivered an interview for Moskowitz that is softer than a baby's bottom. I have watched it so that you don't have to and, really, unless you have a tub of blood pressure medicine handy, you probably should not watch this.

The Warm Fuzzy Open

As opposed to a cold open. The piece begins with nice close shots of Success Academy students working hard and studying intensely. The voice-over notes that the halls are quiet and orderly, and it calls the SA schools both successful and controversial.


We toss out a graph that shows just how mightily the school beats other NYC schools on the Big Standardized Test, and you will be not so surprised that these charts are not accompanied by charts showing how Success Academy has a huge attrition rate. The video also does not mention that SA doesn't replace the many students that leave. In other words, SA students may very well get good results on the BS Tests-- but any public school could achieve the same results by pushing out all but its best test-takers.

The voice-over tells us the story of how city councilwoman Moskowitz "sank her political career by speaking out about" how unions were stifling schools (insert stock footage of Randi Weingarten, looking, I guess, amazed at the brave councilwoman calling her on her evil union baloney). So she started a charter, which became a chain, which is "often hailed as a shining example" of what school choice is achieved. Which is a great construction. I myself am often hailed as an educational genius and the inventor of modern rap music. Hey-- you don't know I'm not often hailed as that. You weren't there.

So anyway, Reason Foundation gave her this swell award, and then sat down with her to chat. Here we go!

One of the core ideas of a charter school is that it's partially insulated from politics...?

The interviewer does that sort of vocal lift that turns any string of words into a question. Moskowitz is game.

"Oh. Well," she scoffs. That's probably not reality. There's a cutaway to the interviewer as the next bit starts, a telltale sign of a frankenquote where we cut away from the speaker to cover slicing up the quote, so I think she probably didn't launch into this next part as abruptly as the video makes it seem. But anyway-- the unions have been after her constantly-- the unions keep suing her, the unions blockaded the entrance to her schools, the mayor "threw out" three of her schools. These are all the vicious political crosses that she must bear.

Political adventures that Moskowitz does not mention include closing her schools and busing her students, parents and staff to Albany to lobby on behalf of her charter empire. Nor does she mention that she got Governor Cuomo and the legislature to do an end run around Mayor DeBlasio in order to get her charters what they wanted. She might also have mentioned that she also spent time in court making sure the state could not audit her.

But her basic assertion is true-- it would be silly to pretend that Success Academy is insulated from politics.

Over the past months, SA has been "rocked by a barrage of negative stories" (see, it's the stories that are negative, and not the information that they revealed about SA). Cue the clip of the teacher berating a six year old.

That video was "a low point." It was 'surreptitiously recorded" by a "former" employee. Do we understand yet that this was just an evil hatchet job, and not a concerned teacher's aide finally deciding to record what she saw all too often?

Cut to press conference with outraged Moskowitz refusing to stand by while the NYT uses "selective video" and "gotcha" tactics. I am trying to imagine a context in which the video wouldn't be upsetting, but I'm coming up blank.

"You said that the paper had failed to give Success Academy a fair shake," says the interviewer, who then lobs this across the plate-- "Why would the New York Times not be giving Success Academy a fair shake?"

It's a softball, but Moskowitz goes after it with a chainsaw. Sure, the teacher did those things that are in the video, but it seems like a double standard because in New York City schools "you have teachers engaging in physical abuse of students, teachers engaged in sexual abuse of students, and yet somehow that was not front page New York Times." It's okay to be bad as long as someone out there is worse.

So why was this person making the video in the first place?

Because she was angry at the teacher. But she didn't come forward with the video right away, so she must not have been that concerned about the child.

The video was troubling, but it has forced us to have an honest conversation about what kinds of practices are ineffective. Not all teachers see the guardrails, and now we have an example of what not to do.

So, I guess it's great that the video was released, because otherwise Success Academy would be continuing to use bad practices, or would have all sorts of loose cannon teachers going off in classrooms, or nobody in the charter chain would have been talking about how best to teach children? The video was bad and unfair, but it has saved SA from continuing to suck? Honestly, there's a level of pretzel logic here that is hard to track.

Cut to tearful principal mea culpa for the Got To Go list. That major controversy was last October.

Moskowitz totally spanked that guy before the story even leaked, and they responded "incredibly quickly, incredibly swiftly, and incredibly thoughtfully."


But then in January, parents filed a complaint with the USED claiming SA pushed their kids, who had some severe challenges, right out the door. 

Oh, here comes Robert Pondiscio, and I feel bad, because I kind of like Pondiscio, but what he says here is bunk. "Let's just say the worst allegations are true. She is counseling out the hardest to teach, she's creating this poor man's private school. Why is that a bad thing?"

Well, it's a bad thing first of all because it shows that her supposed miraculous success is an easily-replicated lie. Any school that's allowed to dump its worst students can get great results with the ones they choose to keep. It's also a bad thing because that is not how US public school works. The vision for US public school is to educate all students, no matter how challenging. That, of course, is why it would be a poor man's private school. Private. And if we are going to admit that Success Academy is really a private school, then next we must ask why it makes sense to give it public tax dollars-- in particular when those public tax dollars come at the expense of the students who are not chosen, but who are dumped into the public school system.

So that's why it's a bad thing. But he's going to push on with an argument more often made by Mike Petrilli (they're both Fordham Institute guys)-- that charters should be for strivers, and that the strivers deserve a disruption-free school. There's some merit in this argument, but you can't have it both ways-- you can't have a system where you say, "okay, we're going to collect all the students we consider strivers over here and we're going to leave all the disruptors in those schools over there" AND at the same time say, "Well, these striver schools are very successful and if the disruptor schools can't be equally successful, those schools are failing and need to have budgets slashed and resources removed." You can't have both systems at once, and you also can't pretend that a system in which the schools get to choose which strivers they prefer to keep-- you cannot pretend that such a system is any sort of school choice system. It's not.

The interviewer has now dropped all pretense of objectivity and asks Moskowitz the same thing-- why can't you go ahead and cream?

Moskowitz agrees that it's just another version of choosing schools by choosing your upscale apartment, ignoring that these are opposite things. There is a fundamental difference between parental choice and having the choosing done by the school. But she plows on, with the interviewer chiming in with "absolutely" and "you go girl" and "hallelujah" (okay, maybe not all of those), saying that selectivity can be all about income.


The interviewer points out that rich neighborhoods have schools with high scores and "everybody knows" that demographics are a huge factor in BS Test scores. Why can't poor brown kids at SA have a classroom free of disruptors, and I'm not sure, but I think we just suggested that rich kids aren't disruptive, which will come as news to many teachers in this country.

But after all that philosophical discussion, Moskowitz is going to go with "We are following the rules of random lottery," and I think I would have respected her more if she had just taken Pondiscio's line on this instead of pretending that the lottery, with its forms and bureaucratic hoops, doesn't do its own job of filtering. And of course, we've just sort of sidled away from the issue of the Got To Go list and the oft-reported SA practice of pushing some students out.


Interviewer asks "are you working within the confines of that [lottery] rule" nudge nudge wink wink and Moskowitz isn't having it. "Yes, yes we are."

But Interview Man is excited about creaming. Couldn't some of these other methods of selectivity serve your kids? "I mean, it's like one of the pieties of education that every classroom can serve every kid, but actually a really disruptive kid steals time and attention away from the other kids in that class" because, you know, kids are either good or bad and they are good or bad 24/7, and so the bad ones should just be, I don't know, sent to an island somewhere. And I feel Interview Man has some strong emotions around this issue, like he would have gotten that A in algebra, but damn Chris Grumblefoot kept giving him noogies and monopolizing the teachers.

And oh my God, it has come to this-- Moskowitz is actually saying something valid, which is that the anti-disruptor approach can lead to "pernicious effects" where the school is in the business of deciding which kids can and can't succeed. And she says that her mission is not to be a gifted and talented program, but to serve a broad range of students. "Our mission is to be an old-fashioned public school where you serve the community," she says. Which is a really, really great line, but not as great as if it were reflected in the reality of actual Success Academy schools.

More noise about applications and how many SA gets-- but noting that this year, for the first time, application numbers fell. Does that have anything to do with some of the negative press?

Moskowitz thinks not. Different neighborhoods are different. Things have gone up and down. Interview Man pushes-- seeing the video, reading the stories, that wasn't it? That's not her impression. Parents mostly come from other parents, and her parents think SA is swell. Do those parents like the more disciplined, orderly, safer environment than they might get at their district school? Moskowitz redirects-- most of our parents find then schools incredibly joyful.

Cue clip from Slam the Exam pep rally. Kids cheer and get trophies because BS Tests are important.

Illuminating quote-- Moskowitz at pep rally saying "The difference between successful people and less successful people is that they don't shut down-- they power through."

So what's the idea behind the (not at all opt outy) pep rally?

Why should we just have pep rallies for sports. Why not celebrate growth? Which, again, sounds swell except that we're talking about the BS Tests which don't measure much except test taking scores, and which do not benefit the students nearly as much as those scores benefit Success Academy marketing.

Interview Man says that he doesn't get the sense of kids who feel ostracized for doing well in school, and again I can't help wondering if he's working through some issues of his own.

Now let's move on to Moskowitz's political aspirations. Because she's evolving in how she sees herself politically.

In 2014, she called herself a liberal because "I think liberals care about the little guy. Liberals care about social justice." I wonder how many little guys you can take care of with a half-million dollar salary.

But at the beginning of the month when she was receiving this award, she had evolved into something else. She had once called herself an FDR liberal who believed in big government, but she didn't like it so much when she met it up close and personal. Which- really? Because I'm thinking that being able to meet the governor and the legislators and get their help in writing laws, setting caps, and raising money to keep Success Academy on top seems to have worked out pretty well for Moskowitz. If she is trying to play the little guy, stomped under the heel of big government, she should stop spending so much time using political insider plays to make big government work for her and tilt the table for her.

Nope- now she rather thinks she's a libertarian. Well, mostly only when it comes to school choice. She doesn't know enough about those other areas. Interview Man is disappointed.

Does she still want to be the mayor of NYC? Yes, she might run in the future, and Interview Man seems to be gently suggesting that if she wants to be mayor, she'll need to know about things other than education policy. So she bounces back and hey, she totally sat on some committees when she was on city council, so, yeah, she knows stuff.

Can we expect 100 schools within the decade?

Yes. She won't promise she'll be leading SA a decade from now, but for the foreseeable future, sure. It's an "enormous project" and it will take "tremendous leadership" to get it done and she has an "incredibly talented team of people"

She does not anticipate moving to other cities-- "there's a lot of lousy schools right here in New York."

Oh, and only now do I see that Interview Man has a name-- Jim Epstein, who has been at Reason since 2010, and before that was an award-winning producer at NYC's PBS station.

So there you have it

Well, there you have some of it. Epstein decided to completely skip over the big flap over John Merrow's story about suspending five year olds at SA and Moskowitz's subsequent publishing of private student data to defend herself. Nor do we get into the steady drip-drip-drip of former SA teachers and their unsettling stories from inside. Nor the question of why exactly Moskowitz is paid a half-million when she oversees only 11,000 or so students. And we never did get to talking about the attrition rate or no-backfill policy at all.

So I guess what we actually have is a nice puff piece in which Moskowitz gets to say her piece without being challenged on any of her policies or practices, and without having to deal with any of those nasty unions, reporters, or government officials who have just made it so hard to be Eva.

Oklahoma Boots VAM

Along with the welcome news that Hawaii has removed student test scores as a required portion of teacher evaluation, we happily note that Oklahoma has also given VAM scores the old heave-ho.

VAM, for those of you who somehow missed this higher math con game, is a technique by which test scores are run through a model which creates a mathematical alternate universe in which students float in vacuums, unaffected by anything. Test scores from this planet are compared to those from the alternate universe to see if teachers Added Value to the students in question (suggesting that the only important value a student has is her ability to score well on a Big Standardized Test). It looks remarkably like made-up baloney, and has been rejected by all sorts of folks, including National Association of Secondary School Principals and the American Statistical Association. Most recently VAM took a beating in NY courts, where a judge called it capricious and arbitrary.

Oklahoma watchers have been cheering on House Bill 2957 for a while. Notice how they sold this. Here's Rep. Michael Rogers,R-Broken Arrow, HB 2957’s House author:

This legislation will return flexibility back to the districts on their evaluations, while developing an individualized professional development program that will help all our teachers and administrators.

"VAM is a lousy way to evaluate teachers" has had limited traction. But "local control" is always a winner, particularly in red states. And that is a major feature of VAMmy systems-- local authorities lose control of the entire process. The principal, parents, students and other teachers can all know that Mrs. Chalkwhacker is a great teacher, but if the magic VAM equation spits out a low score, nobody can save Mrs. Chalkwhacker from that judgment.

So, yes, that's bad and unfair for Mrs. Chalkwhacker , but it is also bad and unfair for her bosses, students, and parents, because they get less say than they should. So it is with most of the teacher evaluation systems rolled out to comply with Race To The Top and Waiverpallooza-- the feds required the states to take control of teacher evaluations away from local districts.

The bill's supporters also sold the bill as relief from what is essentially an unfunded mandate, because the RTTT/Waiver teacher eval systems involved time and expense to implement, all of which had to come out of local pockets.

The bill also reduces time and money pressure by reducing the frequency of evaluation for teachers who rate "superior" or "highly effective." Yes, under a VAM system, it was always possible that those teachers would vary in effectiveness wildly from year to year. But on our planet, teachers who do really good work are not generally in danger of turning into terrible teachers if we take our eyes off them for six or seven months, and administrators probably have better things to do than watching their best teachers as if they're a pack of weeping angels. 

Do two states constitute a serious erosion of the test-driven teacher evaluation movement? Probably not. And it's also true that if we';re sweeping aside the tests in order to make room for Competency Based Education as a means of evaluating teachers, there may be bigger fights down the road.

So rate this development "cautiously optimistic" or maybe "one step in the right direction, but only one." But the first sign of a breaking dam is a few little holes. This may not be the best news this year, but it certainly isn't bad.