Associated Press Runs the Charter Industry's Narrative

Sigh. Another day, another undersourced news piece presenting only the charter point of view.

This time it's Christine Armario, writing for the Associated Press. The piece is widely titled "As Charters Grow, Public Schools See Sharp Enrollment Drop," but we can't give Armario credit for that thoughtful distinction, because here she is twitter, responding to former Duncan sidekick Michael Dannenberg's assertion that charter schools are public schools..

@M_Dannenberg1 Yes, charters are public schools. Referring here to district-run public schools - see story.

— Christine Armario (@cearmario) May 31, 2016

Well, no, they're not. When they answer to a publicly elected board. When they give a full, transparent accounting of how they spend tax dollars. When they commit to staying business forever, and not just as long as it makes business sense to stay open. When they take whatever students show up at their door. When they follow all of those rules that public schools follow. When all that is true, we can talk about calling them public schools, but until that day comes, they are private schools being financed with public tax dollars.

I will repeat, as always, that these distinctions do not automatically make charters evil and nefarious-- but they do automatically make them Not Public Schools.

Armario focuses on the draining of students and money from public schools in major systems like LA and Detroit. But her view is not exactly nuanced, and her research is not exactly deep.

For instance, in considering California's charter growth, she might have looked to charter laws that put charters in the driver's seat. A good example would be Mt. Diablo, where the state has imposed a Rocketship Charter on the community despite the charter fraud and local opposition. California charter clout can also be seen in the serious charter pushback against the same report that Armario opens with, in broad simple strokes.

But broad simple strokes are the hallmark of this piece; it looks like Armario's editor called for a quick under-a-thousand-word take (it clocks in at 921 words). So here's Armario's history of charter schools:

Charter schools arrived in the 1990s and began attracting parents searching for an alternative to big-city districts that had strained for years to raise performance among minority and low-income students and those who are learning English.

And here's her analysis of the effects of charter on public schools.

In districts with growing student populations, such as Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida, that growth helps ease potential overcrowding.

But in cities like Los Angeles, where the school-age population has been shrinking, the continued flight from traditional public schools has become a mounting concern. In most states, schools receive funding on a per-pupil basis, and the majority of those dollars follow students when they leave for a charter.

Her summary of the debate? Charter fans say that "it's only fair" that the money follows the students. Public school advocates point out that many public school costs don't change with the loss of students.

And she quotes charter spokeswoman Nina Rees who says that this sort of thing happens since public schools don't meet student needs. But Armario doesn't connect the dots between the draining of public ed resources and public ed's ability to be "competitive." Though she does note that A) that's how charter fans think it should work and B) the research doesn't actually back them up.

Armario also ticks off some of the districts that have experienced big drops in enrollment-- Detroit, Philly, Chicago, Losa Angeles-- without asking the question of how politicians have starved those public districts, thereby making well-supported charters more attractive.

In fact. rather than dig deeper into any of this, Armario gives a rehash of the charter industry's favorite narrative-- public schools are failing, so charters are taking off. 

As for voices she includes in her story-- there's Rees (National Alliance of Public Charter Schools), Ron Zimmer (who has published research sponsored by the charter loving Rand, Gates, and Joyce foundations), and a parent who was happy to get her child out of bad public schools and into a charter. On the other side, Steve Zimmer (LAUSD board president) and Susan Zoller, "a consultant hired by the district's union." There's also a strong showing by "others say." 

Is it glaringly tilted toward the charter side of things? No, but it does present the charter narrative without any critical consideration and the public education side without an explanation. Steve Zimmer's observation that charter proliferation leads to collateral damage is reported, but not explained. Nor does she consider a myriad of other issues, such as charters that move in and cash out, leaving students high and dry, or the question of exactly which students charters prefer to pull from public schools. And she lets the focus rest on the spread and growth of charters, and not the large number of students left in resource-strapped public schools.

Armario's coverage of charters in the past has also been light-touched. Here's a 2012 piece about how charters enroll fewer students with disabilities, with not a single mention of charges that charters enroll fewer SWD on purpose. ("Gosh," says Nina Rees in that piece, "it must just be that those parents don't choose charters.")

I expect more from an AP reporter whose beat includes education and charters. There's a worthwhile conversation to be had about charter schools in this country, but we can't have it if people are not getting the full, accurate view of what is actually happening. This was 921 words that did not help advance that conversation.

TheThird Way (To Make a Bundle in Education)

What is the Third Way? Well, whatever it is, it launches tomorrow (May 31) in Boston with featured guest appearances by Secretary of Education John King and Massachusetts Secretary of Education James Peyser (formerly honcho of New Schools Venture Fund). So maybe we'd better dig a little and see if we can figure out exactly what we're talking about.

The event is touted as The Emerging Third Way: Blazing an Optimistic Path Ahead in K-12 Education, and the blurb on the registration site starts with this little history lesson:

Since 1635, Massachusetts has been known for its district public schools- the “first way”. Since 1993, Massachusetts’ charter schools have led the nation in pioneering a “second way”. It is time to recognize a Third Way – an emerging set of strategies that combine school-level autonomies and energetic innovation with a commitment to universal service and local voice. The Third Way does not obviate the need and demand for either of the other ways but it does hold out a promising path for cooperative change that could raise student success, especially among disadvantaged students, on a large scale.

I'm just going to skip over the first part of the history lesson because arguing about whether or not Massachusett's charter schools have been nation-leading pioneers since 1993 is like getting in argument about whether or not a trio of alopeciac yeti infiltrated the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes during the eighties. It makes a damn good story, but not a very good evidence-based paper. So there goes our Common Core based writing score.

But can we close read a path to understanding the Third Way? Well, "emerging set of strategies" means roughly "we're still working on punching up the rough draft." Next, "autonomies and energetic innovation" are supposed to be the virtues of charter schools, while "universal service and local voice" are concerns of the public ed supporting crowd. So, can we keep the freedom from oversight and regulation for charters but still make sure that all students are still served and some sort of local control continues (I skipped over "innovation" because charter school innovation is tucked away in the dressing room of one of those yetis).

Furthermore, the Third Way doesn't throw out either public schools or charters, but it does-- and this is important-- connect back to student achievement for poor kids on a large scale. That part of the pitch is straight out of the Charter School Messaging Notebook, an honest-to-god real marketing guide ordered up by the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools to help charter operators choose the right language for marketing. The advice is very specific. talk about partnerships. Talk about student achievement, particularly for poor kids.

I will confess that talk of charter "partnership" always rubs me the wrong way. Imagine you're a surgeon with all the training and experience that goes with that. In the middle of an important operation, a guy walks into the operating theater, elbows you to one side, grabs some scalpels, and inserts himself directly in your light. "Excuse me," you say (or something similar). "What the hell are you doing here? Are you a visiting surgeon? Are you supposed to be in here?"

"Well," he replies. "I'm actually not a surgeon at all. I'm a banker. But I have a lot of important friends, and I care very much about health and surgery. Also, I'm getting half your fee for this operation. What are you getting so angry about. I really think you and I ought to co-operate."

But maybe I'm excessively and unnecessarily touchy here. Let's dig a little more and maybe I'll see I'm all worked up about nothing.

Turns out that The Third Way is the brainchild of one outfit-- Empower Schools.

We've run across these guys before in Massachusetts, where they commandeered  three school districts, with both mixed efforts and mixed results. Other reformy outfits think they're just awesome. Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) has visited, and found a district that was eschewing some techniques from the charter reformster playbook, but instead followed public ed rules (like, say, backfilling)-- while still leaning hard into old favorites like test-centered schools. Berkshire also found a district hemorrhaging teachers and leaders-- specifically the local, home-grown type, opening ES to the criticism of being one more group of educational carpetbaggers. As she quoted one departing teacher, "When you’re emotionally invested in the future of a place, you have a different measure of what success means."

ES lists as its three missions, inform leaders, advance policy, and catalyze change. So, lobbying and advocacy?

But looking at the list of players at Empower Schools gives you a pretty good sense of what type of group we're dealing with. Let's take a look:

Chris Gabrieli (CEO & Co-founder) Started out as head of medical software company, now partner emeritus of Bessemer Venture Partners. Chairman of Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.

Brett Alessi (Co-founder and Managing Partner) Previously with Massachusetts 2020, a reformy group focused on after-school programming (they call it "expanded learning time). Also worked with Educational Pioneers, a sort of Broad Academy approach to developing school leaders. It appears that he actually taught at some point, at "public and private" schools.

Sarah Toce (Director of Policy) Worked for Wisconsin Charter Schools Association where "she helped develop a strategy for new charter school legislation, provided technical assistance and managed advocacy and communications for WI’s 200+ public charter schools." So, PR and lobbying for charters.

Matt Matera (Program Director) An Education Pioneers alum. He was Teach for America material, and he taught at a charter school where he now serves on the board. And he was also "the Director of Human Capital Investments at New Schools for New Orleans and the Director of Innovation and Talent for Lawrence Public Schools in Massachusetts." B.A. in English and J.D. from Yale.

Kate Anderson (Director of Empowerment Zones) First of all, awesome title. She was previously at the New Profit Inc venture philanthropy firm. Before that, teacher and curriculum developer in a charter school. B.A. in biology and Asian studies from Williams.

Rae Williams (Strategy and Operations Manager) She was a performance management associate consultant for Mendelsohn, Gittleman & Associates, LLC (MGA)

Sarah Robb (Program manager) She comes from TNTP, infamous purveyors of "The Widget Effect" and straight out of the reformster stable. She taught biology in Chicago, at a charter school, as a TFA product.

Empower Schools also partners with other organizations, including Teach for America, TNTP, Relay/GSE and some charter management outfits. They have gotten Gates Foundation money; here's a 2014 grant of over $600K  "to support a set of pilot activities designed to increase the number of high-quality school seats in Massachusetts by leveraging flexibilities with Common Core instruction." And they also get money from the Boston Foundation, a group that never tires of pushing charter schools. 


And Empower Schools is part of Boston:Forward, an astro-turfy coalition of charter schools, charter chains, and charter advocates whose motto is "The Fast Track to Great Schools for Boston."

So I'm wondering-- as all these thought leaders and policy advocates and high-powered groups sat around the table developing this vision of how public and charter schools could come together for a Third Way, exactly who was representing the needs, the concerns, or the point of view of public schools? Is it just me, or do public school voices seem as hard to locate in this crowd as alopeciac dancing yeti?

Because this certainly looks like a gathering of wolves deciding how best the sheep can co-operate with them. This certainly looks like a convocation of foxes deciding on the best security system for the hen house. "Does anyone object if we just leave this opening without a guard, an alarm, or a door? Nobody? Good. Then I think we've found a co-operative solution to our issues."

Yes, they're inviting alleged officials of the public school sector to their party, but given John King's record in New York and Jim Peyser's previous work writing (literally) the book on how to gut public schools, I'm not comforted. This is an old charter trick, borrowed from generations of salesmen-- assume the sale. Start the discussion with the assumption that, of course, charters are important, never going away, and have equal standing with the public schools, so obviously we must learn to work together, as long as by "together" you mean "according to the terms dictated by charter advocates."

As always, I will observe that I am not opposed to charters in principle, and can in fact imagine conditions under which I welcome and applaud them.

But those conditions do not include a bunch of people with no actual experience or expertise in public education pushing into a market and claiming a piece of it based on nothing more than political connections, chutzpah, and a desire to make a buck. Jennifer Berkshire will be in attendance, and I look forward to her report (as should we all), but until I hear otherwise, I'm strongly suspecting that the Third Way is just one more layer of PR massaging to better ease the transfer of a whole bunch of public tax dollars to private pockets. And despite what you may have heard, you can put a really nice dress on a hairless yeti, but it won't make her a Rockette.

How To Defeat Trump

People keep trying to crack the code for defeating GOP Presidential candidate and world's worst human, Donald Trump, and they keep failing.

You cannot swing a cat on the internet without reading a "Looook at how much Trump lies and contradicts himself!" posts-- and yet nobody cares.

I think what best captures Trump's imperviousness on matters of truth, consistency, and decency is the slogan on a poster just down my street--

Trump-- Finally, someone with balls.

How do you qualify as someone who has giant brass balls? By showing no regard for the kind of social conventions involved in matters of truth, consistency, and decency. Every time Trump gets "caught" lying or changing his position, his supporters do not react with shock or disappointment-- they give each other high fives because their boy just flashed his giant brass balls again.

That line of attack is never going to work.

But then I was on the interwebs today, minding my own business, and I saw multiple reports of this.

Pundit-for-God-knows-why Bill Kristol let loose the mysterious claim that there will be an impressive independent candidate "with a strong team and a real chance." And then in less than two hours, Trump flipped out with another one of his reactive tantrums, calling Kristol names and squawking about the proper rules to play by.

Now, mind you, Kristol, who has almost never been right about anything, is undoubtedly completely full of it when he makes this claim. But that doesn't matter. Look at Trump-- reacting rather than acting and squawking like the tantrum-throwing toddler he is, not even looking like a grown-up, let alone an actual candidate for President. His followers probably won't care, but it cuts into his usual rhetoric, and it makes him look bad to everyone else. So I'm thinking, here's the campaign strategy for opposing him.

Lie. Lie about him. Lie at him. Throw lies in his general direction like Buddy-the-Elf-powered snowballs.

Kristol isn't intentionally lying--he's just always wrong-- but why not start with the lies? Have the GOP issue a press release that candidates whose last name starts with T will not be allowed at the convention. Pretend to be a repo man and repossess his car on the way to an event. Hire an ugly woman to announce that she gave birth to Trump's ugly child. Heck, hire three hundred of them. Announce that Cleveland will be closed for repairs all summer and fall because global warming has caused the lake to rise all the way to Superior. Announce that Trumps planes will not be allowed to fly because the Air Force has determined that alien spacecraft are attracted by his hair. Photoshop him into pictures showing him naked in a hot tub with Stalin. Hire a Trump impersonator to start issuing press releases as John Miller announcing that Trump's wife is leaving him because he's old and boring and has been impotent for years.

I'm not saying any of this would be ethical or right. But one of the abilities that Trump lacks is the ability to just let stuff slide off his ample back. And as all of his opponents have discovered, it is hard to maintain dignity while trying to defend yourself from stupid lies. To defeat Trump, Republicans, Democrats, and Americans who don't want to be led by President Asshat just need to find someone who will go after Trump with the same disregard for truth, consistency and decency. Not an alternative candidate-- ust a political operative who can squash Trump and then fade back into the shadows while our normal politicians resume their usual normal not-so-Trump-sized disregard for truth, consistency and decency.

Cross your fingers and let the lying begin.

HYH: Student Voices and Lawrence, Mass

The fourth episode of the podcast Have You Heard has been out for a while, and as usual I am way behind because I can read or type under almost any circumstances, but listening is a Whole Other Thing. So here we go, theoretically better late than never.

The episode features Jennifer Berkshire and Aaron French on their first road trip, for which they head to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Berkshire notes that while the ed debates are "all about the kids," it's rare that the kids' voices are actually heard. And Lawrence makes an interesting destination because the state took over the schools about five years ago.

We find our intrepid podcasters in the Boys and Girls Club of Lawrence, surrounded by students who are writing responses to the question, "What is education?"

But what they're really talking about is finding a voice, and expressing that voice through writing. "I was angry about a lot of things," says one student, in particular noting "decisions that were made for me" without ever involving her in the process. This is a student-run workshop, even though there are some adults present.

"You don't get many opportunities to experience something bigger than yourself," says one writer in reference to an open-mic night at a local spot, and that really hits me as I listen, because school really ought to provide many of the Bigger Than Yourself opportunities. This is one of the less-often-mentioned aspects of test-driven standards-centered ed reform-- the whole education process has been shrunk down from the business of finding things in the world that are bigger than yourself to a tiny, cramped activity that isn't bigger than anybody.

I'm also struck by how specific this is. Students are largely Dominican immigrants who find themselves in the poorest city in Massachusetts, but they are surprisingly focused on fixing the city, rather than escaping or destroying it. The program addresses turning writers into advocates and activists, and one student talks about pushing back against a system that is set to turn them into robots.

And as an English teacher, I can get really excited about students who see authentic connections between their voice and their writing and their way of being in the world. Even in a classroom that is not dominated by test-centered instruction, it can be hard to get students to see writing as a means of authentic expression and not just some dumb thing the teacher makes you do.

These students surveyed over 600 students in Lawrence about education (imagine that-- surveying students about education) and created results that include a short film (a podcast listener has added a link). But even the description of that film is compelling. You can find it at the bottom of this post-- and it speaks to all of us who work in a classroom, not just reformsters.

This is a great episode, and it's exciting to hear students speak with such strength about finding and using their own voices. I'll make it easy for you to listen-- it's about ten minutes of your time well spent.

HAL Wants To Pick Your Teacher

Are you responsible for hiring teachers in your district? Do you hate all the mess and bother of actually interviewing other carbon based life forms?

Well, meet TeacherMatch.

If  you are a teacher, TeacherMatch will help you find work, and if you are a hiring department, TeacherMatch can perform flat out magic through the power of Predictive Analytics. From the TeacherMatch blog...

Previously, school districts sorted through a stack of resumes and asked scripted questions during the teacher recruitment process. Today, human resource (HR) departments use predictive analytics to improve the quality of hire, because it allows districts to predict which teachers will positively impact student achievement before they enter the classroom.

Sigh. First, any districts that use "scripted" questions during recruitment and hiring deserve to get the worst hires available. If you are responsible for hiring and you're using scripted questions to do it, you are in the wrong job. Go do something else.

Second, any district that is looking for teachers who "will positively impact student achievement" aka "raise test scores" has lost track of their actual function.

Third, anybody who believes that a consulting service can predict how good a teacher will be before that teacher enters a classroom should go buy a bridge that leads directly to a swamp in Florida.

But wait! There's more! TeacherMatch points out that the power of predictive analytics can be used on students so that teachers and school leaders can "make informed decisions."

One thing TeacherMatch is not is shy. Their "about us" page notes that they were founded by four super-duper people who "worked in the K-12 education system" and who developed a system so awesome that "the U.S. Department of Education used it to shape their multi-billion-dollar school improvement program." It's a bold claim, considering the USED School Improvement Grants program turned out to be a seven billion dollar bust.

So who are the great educational minds behind TeacherMatch?

Well, there's Ron Huberman, co-founder and executive chair. Huberman was Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's Chief of Staff. Later, when Arne Duncan went to DC, Daley moved Huberman into the top spot of Chicago schools. His most recent job before that one? Running Chicago's transit authority. His previous experience of any sort in education? None. Never.

Huberman was hired because of his management experience, and he talked like a manager. He brought in a group of upper managers, all completely devoid of education experience, and he tried to kick his teachers into high gear with a power point presentation described as "Orwellian."

"Be sure to get granular about your metrics before you deep dive into those outcomes and be sure you don't avoid those brutal facts' qualitiatives... Got that?"

Huberman's big accomplishment at the Chicago Transit Authority was to "fix" the budget and the pension problem, and it was that bean-counting skill that was called for at CPS. His clever trick for dealing with the huge debt the system owed teacher pension funding-- get permission to just not pay it. Then he went on to work in the field that he truly loved-- private equity.

Co-founder Don Fraynd taught at a prep school, became a principal, and eventually ran the CPS turnaround office. Co-founder Sanjeev Arora is an investor-entrepreneur who once worked for McKinsey. The rest of the management team includes data science specialists and PR folks-- but not one person who's ever taught in a public school. TeacherMatch has also research partnered with the University of Chicago and NWEA.

Their product is a battery of on-line tests for candidates and teachers to take, everything from QUEST (for recruiting) to EPI, the predictive analytics tool that will identify the four core factors in teacher success. Those four factors are qualifications, cognitive ability, attitudinal factors, and teaching skills, and TeacherMatch can totally tell if you've Got the Right Stuff by using their super-duper proprietary questionnaire.

How shady is this? This shady.

You know when you're on shaky ground? When the National Council on Teacher Quality has questions about your methodology.

Yes, NCTQ, the group that evaluates teacher preparation programs that don't exist, and that evaluates the rigor of a program based on commencement programs-- those guys. Kate Walsh, head of the least serious "research" group in education, said that it's hard to know if TeacherMatch is bunk or not.

“We don’t know whether their predictive analytics are accurate,” she said. “It might be snake oil or it might be great.”

I'm prepared to make the great-or-snake-oil call, but let's see what Huberman has to say about the origins of this magical tool:

Huberman said the company enlisted the help of researchers who analyzed reams of data on student performance, looking for teachers whose students consistently made large gains on standardized tests and teachers whose students consistently did not make those gains.

Then the company surveyed both kinds of teachers, looking for patterns in the way they answered questions about how they might respond to classroom misbehavior, for example, or how they might teach a certain academic standard. That work became the backbone of the inventory now used in dozens of districts.

So what TeacherMatch has done is reverse-engineer a Value Added Measure system-- only sloppier, lazier and with even less basis in solid data and research. Huberman and his buddies actually found a way to make VAM worse! Though when it came time to pitch this, they whipped up a video that is both full of jargoneque vaguosity, and yet somehow promises more than Huberman's quick explanation. Get out your business bullshit bingo card, and play along:




Note that "teachers matter most" as we repeat the old misrepresented data about teachers being the single largest in school factor. And look--here are some logos of "renowned universities" (and the Gates Foundation). I like the part where they call themselves "a team of dedicated educators," which may be one of the more loose definitions of "educators" I've encountered in a while. And look-- they flipped through decades of research to "extract actionable conclusions" which sounds so much cooler than "to write some multiple choice questions" (any experts on test design in your group, there?) But at least they used "advanced scientific techniques that provide multilevel analyses of nested groups, test causal relationships of abstract variables and measure comparative outcomes" and how in the name of God does this NOT set off everybody's bullshit detectors? I can't even imagine writing this with a straight face.

The EPI is reportedly just a 100 item multiple choice question test. And Huberman does say that you should have other parts of your hiring process. But that's not the question-- the question is, why would you use this at all ever? Although you know who might use this? Other people with no first-hand knowledge of teaching, like charter school operators and Broad-trained superintendents. So maybe there is a market.

The Bad News

There must be a market, because another company just bought TeacherMatch. Here's the lead from the May 24 press release:

PeopleAdmin, the leader in talent management software for education, announced today that it has acquired TeacherMatch, joining forces to offer the industry’s most comprehensive talent management platform and analytical solution for identifying, hiring, and developing educators most effective at driving student achievement.

If you want to learn more about PeopleAdmin, you could attend their big June convention in Austin, a "can't miss industry event for Higher Ed and Government customers, thought leaders, and PeopleAdmin employees."

In the meantime, we are left to conclude that TeacherMatch actually is actually making money, which is sad. It's the kind of thing that really shakes my faith in capitalism and the free market, because this is clearly a company that deserves to die.

ICYMI: Goodbye, May!

It's that time of year, so I'm going to start with a non-education recommendation. If it's useful to you or someone you love, pass it on. If not, skip ahead to the education readings for the week.

The 2016 Earth-Friendly and Made in America Wedding Registry

My daughter has extensively researched and researched, looking for resources that are both eco-friendly and are made in the USA, and she recently gathered all her research about wedding-related stuff in one post. If you want to be a more responsible consumer, but can't find the time to look everything up, her blog is loaded with resources and links to help you. 

Charter-Choice-- A Closer Look

God bless Roxana Marachi, who has used scoopit to collect a ton of reading about charters and choice. I probably should have put this last, because it's a whole day's worth of reading all by itself.

Another Brick in the Data Wall

If you are not a regular Nancy Flanagan reader, you should fix that. Teacher in a Strange Land is a reliable source of sensible writing about education (don't be put off by the Education Week address).I love the opening of this one:

"To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail." (Abraham Maslow)
And to the man who has a computer, everything he encounters begins to look like data.

Alice in PARCCland: Does validity study really prove the Common Core is valid? 

Education Next trotted out a "validity study" from last fall, and William Mathis at the National Education Policy Center did a fine take down. I refer you to Valerie Strauss's coverage instead of the original NEPC post, because Strauss also has the response from the researchers.

Does School Choice Help Close the Graduation Gap"

Sabrina Joy Stevens addresses one of the big claims of choice fans. Yet another good piece of work from the Progressive Education Fellows (full disclosure-- I'm one of them, but it's an otherwise very reputable group).

Response to Chait

Perhaps you saw Jonathan Chait's piece this week in which he tried to argue that She Who Will Not Be Named, former education queen on DC, was actually a rousing success. Here the Daily Howler shows how full of it Chait is (with data, too).

Confronting the Parasite Economy

This piece is long, but it's the best thing I've read for explaining why an economy resting on minimum wage working poor people is no good for anyone-- and it does it without resorting to anything except cold, hard, self-interested economics.

3M Dance Party

Yesterday, views on this blog passed the three million mark.

It's kind of amazing and definitely humbling. But mostly what it tells me is that the issues I vent about here are important to a lot of people. As I said a million hits ago, those hits don't mean I'm an important guy-- they mean I'm writing about important stuff.

The fact that I have an audience is a testament to the connectedness of those of us who care about public education. The BATS and Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody and a legion of other people who saw something in what I wrote and passed it along-- that's why there's an audience here. That's why yours truly and the many excellent bloggers over there in the right-hand column have audiences and other websites with budgets of millions of dollars still struggle for traction.

The question I'm most frequently asked is about the output-- how do I put up at least a post a day, every single day? I'm never sure how to answer that, because I don't really have a choice. The news is filled with Stuff Happening every day, and I read a lot, and public education is on my mind all the time. I never sit down and start by thinking, "Hmm, what could I write about today?" It's always, "I've got fifteen things on my mind right now-- how many do I have time to clear off my plate?" I'm not sure this proves anything except that I need a hobby.

My other secret is low standards. Seriously. If I set out to make every post a masterpiece, I'd never get anything done. I have huge respect for people who do create mini-masterpieces with care and craft. I'm just a banger. And people who do the work of actual journalism and research? Worth their weight in gold.

If I knew then what I know now... well, I might have made different platform choices (cough*wordpress*cough). And I still have trouble managing my comments. Lord, I still remember how excited I was to get my first spam. Now I could sculpt a spam army.

Anyway, my thanks to you, loyal readers and casual drive-bys. I am grateful that my writing has ended up being more than just venting into the void. May the day come when I have nothing interesting to write about.

In the meantime, let me share some music with you. We'll call it a dance party.