MA: Boston Schools Remain Opaque

Massachusetts has just a wacky dynamic in the education biz. Their governor is a reformster, their secretary of education is a reformster, and the mayor of Boston is a reformster. Various swarms of reformsters have come to the commonwealth, presumably attracted by tasty clam chowder and the smell of money. And yet the citizens of Massachusetts, many of whom still have vivid memories of when the state was a national leader in school excellence without so much as a dollop of reformy baloney needed.

The dynamic plays out most notably in Boston. Students walk out of school (more than once) and the Powers That Be respond with a combination of mansplaining and suggestions that the students were just tools of Other Nefarious Adults. Just this week, students showed up for a BPS budget meeting and were initially met with patronizing ice breaker exercises. And Mayor Marty Walsh continues to deny his plans to close down school buildings, despite folks having found evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, the education course in Boston is charted by an assortment of "advisory" groups like Boston Leaders for Education, a group that selflessly pushes reform and charters even though it includes guys like Michael Tooke, a venture capitalist and investment banker, plus an assortment of other venture investment guys who I'm sure have no connection to or profit from various Boston charters.

In short, one of the defining features of education politics in Boston is the lack of transparency and the presence of-- and I hesitate to type this because I know my mother, who started her education at Girls Latin School in Boston, is a regular reader, but in the end, there just isn't a better word-- bullshit (sorry, Mom).

Now Quality Education for Every Student (QUEST) has come through again by uncovering more documentation of what Boston's leaders are actually up to. Much of what they've discovered in this batch of e-mails is not new-- just further confirmation of what was already known. They have also re-proven that Freedom Is Not Free-- the city said that QUEST's original FOIA request would cost $3K to process, so QUEST whittled it down to a $300 request.

If there is anyone in the Boston area who does not know that Mayor Walsh and BPS plan to close a few dozen schools, my condolences go out to that person's family, and I hope he or she comes out of the coma soon. The emails contain further proof that the report from McKinsey, the high-priced consulting group and often a favorite tool of reformsters, was to be used as a basis for closing thirty-six or so schools. But somehow Walsh still cannot bring himself to own up to this. He was out of the country when QUEST released their report on the e-mails, but he still has a response:

“While I appreciate the input of the McKinsey report, it is only a starting point for analysis,” Walsh said, “and I have made it clear that I am not comfortable with any proposal that would close schools until we complete our comprehensive facilities master plan.”

This is a favorite weaselly construction in Boston. BPS also replied to the QUEST release with

There are currently no plans to close any school facilities. While Boston Public Schools appreciates the analysis of external partners and organizations, one evaluation report will not determine the future of our schools. After the completion of the BuildBPS facilities master plan, an informed 10-year road-map will be created to align allocated investments in Boston's school facilities with the district's 21st-century educational priorities. We look forward to continued community engagement throughout this process.

I imagine Walsh taking a call from his girlfriend. "Do you want to eat supper with me tonight?" she asks.

"I have made no plans for eating at this time," he replies. "I certainly have no intention of eating until I am experiencing hunger. At that time, I may develop plans for consumption of food-related materials, but at this time I must state categorically that I have no plans to eat, ever."

So, yes, he's going to eat, and yes, he fully intends to close school buildings. What I find fascinating at this point is his utter refusal to just say so, to just fess up to what everybody already knows. Instead, leaders keep throwing around vague pronouncements about right-sizing the district, while the emails reveal conversations about how to "rework the verbiage," a directive from the mayor’s Director of External Relations & Opportunity Gap Initiatives Ramon Soto in an email in which he also notes that he has concerns about "stating ‘sell/lease 30-50 buildings’ as part of a strategy." So not just close down buildings, but sell them off. Just don't tell anybody, because they'll probably be angry. Another directive in the emails reminds officials not to use the word "close" anywhere.

This active avoidance of transparency is habitual. The city continues to insist that Boston Public Schools are getting their biggest pile of money ever, which is kind of like telling a McBurger McAssembler that thanks to a two-cents-an-hour raise, he is now getting the highest wage he's ever earned at Micky D's. The truth, readily available to anyone with eyes, is that BPS's 1.3% increase is peanuts compared to the 4% increase in the full budget. It's also peanuts compared to the increases for other school districts across the state.

It's true that BPS enrollment continues to drop, a foreseeable outcome of ratcheting up the charter pressure. Boston is working from the same old playbook on how to gut public schools and replace them with charters (a book literally written by current MA Secretary of Ed James Peyser back when he was cuing up charters for venture capitalists).

It's understandable that Walsh and his cronies don't want to just come out and say, "We'd like to gut the budget for the public schools so that they can fail and be shut down or sold to the many charters that we'd like to see take over the system. We're going to give public schools the least amount of money we can get away with, and we are going to put them out of business and turn Boston into charter heaven. Because ka-ching. Oh-- and we're going to call the whole thing BuildBPS because we dig irony-- it's kind of like a Peacekeeper Missile. We will build BPS by destroying it." But they're unwillingness to actually speak plainly and honestly leaves them shoveling out bovine fecal matter by the metric ton in a manner that's just insulting, like that kid in class who insists he did not throw that paper wad at you, even though you just watched him do it.

Among the emails QUEST also found a note from the above-mentioned Michael Tooke who wants to ask, basically just how big Walsh's balls are:

Does Boston have the courage to take an immediate and diverse solution to these underperforming institutions, including closure (in concert with a thoughtful and complete facilities plan), redesign as in-district charters, addition of independent charters or insertion of new school leadership with true autonomy?

I don't know if Boston's leaders have the courage to gut public education, but it continues to be clear that they don't have the courage to speak plainly about what they want to do. 

Icahn: A Better Charter?

I've taken a few (hundred) shots at charter schools on this blog, but I've always tried to be clear-- I believe it is possible to do charter schools right, to create a charter school that is not a fraud-running, student-abusing, system-gutting, money-grubbing scam, but which actually serves the needs of students and community and is grounded in actually educating students.

With that in mind, I've been looking at a new piece by Charles Sahm. Sahm is attached to the right-leaning thinky tank the Manhattan Institute, and I've looked (and thrown bricks) at his work before, including a defense of Common Core and an attempt to plug Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy in particular and charters in general.

This time Sahm has written a profile of the Icahn Charter School chain of New York City, a chain that he has apparently been following for a while. Bottom line: this chain of schools is not a typical modern charter school.

The "Icahn" is Carl Icahn, one of the roughest, least-beloved corporate raiders of the eighties and currently a Trump supporter. But Icahn also built a 65-unit housing facility for homeless mothers in the Bronx, Icahn House, operated by his foundation the Children's Rescue Fund. Icahn House convinced Icahn and his wife that breaking the cycle of poverty required education. When Governor Pataki signed the New York charter school law, Icahn was first in line. He got ahold of the Center for Education Innovation (once upon a time part of the Mahatttan Institute), one of New York's first charter pushing groups, and their president, Sy Fliegel, put Icahn in touch with Jeff Litt. And that, for me, is where the story gets interesting.


At that time, Litt had spent thirty-ish years in public education, both as a classroom teacher and as a principal of P.S. 67, which he renamed the Mohegan School and where he implemented a full version of Hirsch's Core Knowledge content rich program while turning over most of his staff-- all, apparently, without much official approval. (He also, apparently, spent some time working for the NYC chancellor). "Rigorous and nurturing" were his main principles, and he pushed for content-rich instruction, and was successful enough to attract the attention of people like Fliegel and the Core Knowledge folks:

“We stopped in a classroom where the music teacher was giving a lesson,” Fliegel recounts. “She played Beethoven’s Funeral March, and asked, ‘Who knows why Beethoven included a funeral march in this symphony?’ A little Puerto Rican girl, a 3rd grader, raised her hand and said, ‘Well, Napoleon had declared himself emperor, so Beethoven may have felt that democracy had died.’ After we picked up Don Hirsch off the floor, he declared Mohegan the national urban-center Core Knowledge model.”

Litt's approach seems to have been what Icahn wanted-- he put Litt in charge of the whole business and let him design a school from the ground up. The deal-- Icahn would take care of the capital side of things by writing a check for the building and facilities. Litt would have to operate the school on the per pupil money redirected to him by charter law, which, by every account I can find, is what he's done.

Litt and Icahn Charter have maintained a low profile. Confession-- I received a copy of Sahm's article a few days ahead of time, so I've had time to dig for dirt on the Icahn Charter chain and, well... there's not a lot there. On Charter School Scandals, there's a mention of a non-bid contract, plus over $6K spent on staff parties (including booze), plus bonuses awarded without any clear explanation of for what. That was back in 2010.

Litt won the Brooke Russell Astor Award for unheralded public service in 2014. In 2015, Reason (Free Minds and Free Markets) profiled him with this lead:

The Icahn Charter School network in the South Bronx has been quietly registering extraordinary test results for years, while nurturing its students in an atmosphere of "unconditional love," as its emotive leader, Jeff Litt, puts it.

The Reason profile sets up a dichotomy between Litt and Eva Moskowitz, calling Litt's charter's an example of old school chartering, with Moskowitz representing the new breed. That's probably not an unfair distinction-- Litt opened Icahn Charter's first doors in September of 2001, at the end of the Clinton Presidency. Likewise, Sahm says that Icahn Charters are outliers to the charter movement, sharing some characteristics like a longer day, but differing from modern charters in many significant ways.

Yes, the schools were bankrolled by a corporate guy, in fact, one of the most notorious corporate raiders ever. But he hired an actual experienced educator to run them-- and then let him do it. And this was an educator who already had a vision of what his perfect school would look like.

Yes, the schools do well on the Big Standardized Test-- in fact, the only charters they don't beat are the Success Academy Test Prep Academies Charter Schools. But that doesn't seem to be the be-all and end-all of their system.

Yes, their teaching staff is non-union-- but turnover up until last year is reportedly pretty good. Sahm shared with me that Icahn's numbers show 7-10% attrition from 2012-2014. Even at a possible high of 15% in 2015, that still beats Success Academy's reported rates as high as 50%. Sahm quotes Litt as saying that  “teaching should be a real profession, not something you dabble in for a year or two.” Icahn teachers get their certification before they start teaching there (and who knew that the day would come that this sentence was one that would actually need to be typed).

Yes, their success is undoubtedly due in part to the usual self-selecting charter factor. But Icahn doesn't use the lock-out non-backfill policy popular with some charters and will accept students who have not been indoctrinated into their charter system since the primary grades.

Class sizes are capped at eighteen, making them some of the smallest classes in the City. The chain itself only handles 2,100 students. Nobody associated with the Icahn charter chain seems to spend much time plugging it or trying to attract press coverage. And in the limited press coverage that I could find, I didn't find any dreams of scaling up or presenting themselves as a proof-of-concept for the charter industry. Honestly, it's almost as if they were more interested in educating children than in jump-starting someone's political career or generating increasing return on investment.

Their form of educating children is certainly open for discussion. Content rich education works directly against the Common Core grain, particularly in English studies. The Core wants you to treat reading and writing as a set of context-free skills; the content rich approach is all about a context of knowledge and background and actual information. (Not everyone shares my belief that these approaches are largely incompatible.) Core Knowledge also gets into the question of what chunks of knowledge are really necessary for all humans, and that's a huge argument all by itself. But here's the thing about the Core Knowledge approach-- we can have a discussion about its usefulness in a school without having to use terms like "educational malpractice" or "abuse," which is more than we can say for schools centered around no excuses and test prep.

There are other bits that give me pause. Among their list of "philosophies" we find "On-going student assessment to ensure individualized instruction," which sets off my Competency Based Education sensors. I suppose it could also be harmless, personalized instruction run by live human educators, but it could also be a sign of the computerized CBE monster. And while Sahm has been hanging about the schools for a while now, there still is always the possibility that Icahn just showed him their best face. And, finally, it's a charter, which means under current NY law it's draining public school resources.

Still, even if it's partly illusion and press tour, I have to admit-- real or not, this is a picture of the kind of charter that I could be somewhat less bothered by. Created by a career teacher, based on his vision of education and rooted in his experience, focused more on education than profit or notoriety or scaling up, without claims to having discovered a magical secret of education. Not financed with galas and a stream of investors. Small class size. It's the first portrait of a charter in a long time to make me think I'd like to get a closer look. Feel free to disabuse me of any such notions in the comments section, but at a minimum, it could mean that right in Eva Moskowitz's back yard is an example of how a charter can do just fine without all of her special brand of malpractice. 

The Left and Right of Ed Reform

Robert Pondiscio triggered a reformy tempest almost two weeks ago when he wrote that the Left was in danger of pushing conservatives out of the ed reform movement. The reformy blogoverse and twitterverse have not shut up about it since, with responses ranging from the sympathetic to... well, less so (Best title: "Audacity of Nope"). A large portion of the education post stable has taken a shot at the issue, and so have many of standard-bearers on the right-leaning side of the ed reform tracks. I had a response of my own (written before I realized this was going to be A Thing), but I am not going to try to digest the whole sprawling conversation here. You can read your way around the internet if you've missed this.

But I'm writing about it today, because reading all of these responses has revived one of the questions that has puzzled me about ed reform for quite a while.

When we look at the ed reform coalition of the Left and the Right, how are we supposed to tell the two sides apart?

Exactly what policies or principles are different when one compares lefty reformsters to righty reformsters?

There was never any real difference on Common Core support, other than folks on the right abandoned it a little faster than folks on the left, and both have been stalwart in supporting the Big Standardized Test. Even the differences one might have expected to find are not there. One might expect that conservatives might be more inclined to defend the traditional institutions of public education or to stick up for local control instead of state-level or mayoral take-overs, that didn't happen. It's happening now (here's Rick Hess just today), but it sure wasn't happening when reformsters were railing about defenders of the status quo. One might expect that lefties would hew close to traditional lefty allies like teacher unions, but we find nominal Democrats like Whitney Tilson (DFER) and Andy Cuomo ranting about how the evil unions must be crushed.

If we look at reformy politicians, are there real policy differences between the education policies of Rahm Emmanuel and Chris Christie, between Marty Walsh and Nathan Deal? Certainly, when it comes to education policy, there were no substantial difference between the goals of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Pondiscio's original piece distinguished between the practicality of righties and the social justice concerns of lefties, but I'm not sure that really holds up-- at least not in terms of how both groups present themselves. Both left and right reformsters have advocated for charters as a means to correct inequity and reduce poverty, with those goals tied back to standards and testing. So maybe the distinction can be expressed by these two different visions:

Righties: Using tests to identify which schools are not meeting standards, we will have government provide better education in those areas by sending education tax dollars to competitive, privately operated charters that are free from regulation and tasked to close the achievement gap.

Lefties: Using tests to identify which schools are not meeting standards, we will have government provide better education in those areas by sending education tax dollars to competitive, privately operated charters that are free from regulation and tasked to close the achievement gap.

There may be some actual differences about the role of the US Department of Education in all of this-- do we get to charter school heaven with more government involvement, or less? But if the destination in mind is pretty much the same, how much do the disagreements about how to get there matter?

Is there an article or opinion piece that could run on Education Post (the advocacy outfit run by Obama administration alum Peter Cunningham) that could not also run on Education Next (run by the right-tilting Fordham Institute)? If Jeb Bush had miraculously become President, is there any reason that Arne Duncan or John King could not have been his Secretary of Education? Has Bill Gates spent his ed reformy billions exclusively on left- or right-tilted groups?

To read some of the reactions to Pondiscio's piece, one might conclude that the major difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives are exclusively white guys and liberals are exclusively everyone else-- in other words, to tell conservatives and liberals apart, we just have to see them to check for breasts and melanin. That seems far too reductive and unfair to both groups.

Some disagreement seems to center around issues of racism and economic inequity and whether government should fix these things by instituting programs or just, well, dying. It has seemed all along like left and right reformsters agreed on these things ("If you don't support charters, it's because you're a racist who doesn't believe that black kids can achieve great things," came pretty easily out of reformster mouths all across the spectrum). So maybe there was a list of things that people on the reformy left and right were pretending to believe, and we're about to see more space open up between them as they stop being polite and start getting real. In fact, this exchange just happened:

@travispillow But @rickhess99 was also a reformer until the going got tough. Then he raised concerns & backed away as did many conservatives

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) June 8, 2016

I was a reformer long before you were, my friend. It's just that what you have in mind isn't my vision of reform. https://t.co/l6W2nri3sW

— Frederick M. Hess (@rickhess99) June 8, 2016

That could make for interesting times. As I suggested before, I think a fair number of reformsters have no educational or political convictions at all-- they'll just lean whatever way the wind is blowing the money. There's also a good sized chunk of reformsterdom that are neo-liberals, who aren't really left or right.

So perhaps we're about to see a big fat game of musical chairs at the Legendary Table and a continuing, ever-louder discussion of who, exactly, deserves a seat at that table. And to all the people who are afraid that they might end up under-represented or barred from the table or sitting near the table but not at it, or that the table might end up crowded with a bunch of people who neither understand nor represent their point of view, I think I can speak for most US public school teachers when I say, "Welcome to the last decade of our lives."

Maybe Old Teachers Don't Suck

A repeated refrain among some reformsters is that we need to get rid of tenure, job protections, and seniority rules for teachers because the system is clogged with washed-up uncaring has-beens and when budgets are slashed and staffing is cut, it's the hot young rock stars of education that are thrown out on the street (oddly enough, their concern over this issue never translates into calls to knock it off with the budget slashing, but that's another conversation).

But what if older teachers didn't suck?

This month the Learning Policy Institute released a new research brief, Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? The report is a meta-analysis, a study of studies that looks at thirty studies over the last thirty years. And it turns out that maybe older teachers don't suck.

I'm going to start with my usual caveat-- many of these studies use student scores on the Big Standardized Test as a proxy for student achievement or teacher effectiveness or general swellness of the school, and it needs to be said that this is crap. The BS Tests are not a measure of student achievement; they are a measure of student ability to take BS Tests. We'll be able to accomplish a lot more in the world of teacher training, development, and effectiveness when we start talking about the real marks of excellent teaching instead of this standardized test baloney. But test scores are the measure reformsters have chosen, and I'm provisionally willing to use reformster tools to disprove reformster policy ideas, because if they can't win on their own court with their own ball and their own rules, that's just further proof that they should get out of the game.

That said, here are what study authors Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky found.

1) Teacher experience raises student "achievement" throughout the teacher's career. The gains are steepest in the first few years of the teaching career, but they keep on happening through the next several decades.

2) As teachers gain experience, students do better on other measures of achievement. This one surprised me-- the more years of experience a teacher has, the fewer days her students miss school. Teacher experience is also positively correlated with student discipline, student time spent on homework, and student time spent reading for pleasure.

I'm wondering if some of this is correlation-- are experienced teachers less likely to be assigned less well-behaved students? But it also makes sense-- experience in particular lets teachers learn how to handle classroom management without making boneheaded mistakes that make things worse ("If I hear one more peep out of any of you..."). Experience also teaches teachers how to assign homework that isn't a waste of everyone's time.

3) Teachers make the greatest gains in effectiveness when they work in a collegial environment. In other words, you do better teaching when you are connected to a supportive team of colleagues. I would file this finding under Too Dumb To Need Mentioning, except that there are a bunch of folks who would like to turn schools into teach thunderdome where teachers compete with each other for raises, bonuses, and job security. So for those folks, here's some actual research to show how dumb it is to install a system built on competition instead of cooperation.

4) More experienced teachers help everybody. Research indicates that teachers are more effective when they work with more experienced teachers. In other words, experienced teachers don't just do a better job for their own students, but elevate the game for the other teachers in the building.

There are several important implications here. Last year, in discussing two other big studies that revealed similar findings, Stephen Sawchuk homed in on one of the most important implications-- the picture of "teacher quality as a mutable characteristic that can be developed, rather than a static one that's formed in the first few years on the job." We need to stop talking about good teachers and bad teachers as if various teachers are forever locked into a solid-state permanent status as one of the other; instead, let's look at teaching as an action and talk about how to do it most effectively.

The LPI study offers three recommendations.

First, increase job stability. No kidding. Here's a thought-- since teachers do their best work as they accumulate more experience, why not come up with a system that encourages teachers to stick around. Like, a system that offered tangibles like higher pay for longevity and intangibles like job security that favors the more experienced teachers. Incentivize sticking around. Just a thought.

Second, create a collegial atmosphere. Create a system where teachers are encouraged to cooperate, not a system that incentivizes non-cooperation. The calls to make it easier to fire old teachers, the systems for making pay and job security based on "beating" the other teachers in your school-- these are exactly wrong.

Third, look at longevity in high needs schools. If teachers do their best work after years in the classroom, then schools that have nothing but beginning teachers who are steadily churned in and out (as they complete their two year stint with TFA or move on to other schools) are schools that are not getting the top quality in staff. Staffing your turnaround charter with nothing but newbies and led by operators with no actual classroom experience-- that's not just an educational issue or an economic issue, but an equity issue as well. Staffing your most challenging district school with your youngest teachers and offering them no incentives to stay there for the long haul (from pay to resources to a capable principal) is, once again, an equity issue.

As always, I cast a somewhat dubious eyeball at educational research, but the implications here are fairly clear-- it would be useful to stop looking at experienced teachers as big ticket items that are fat that needs to be trimmed from budgets and instead see them as a major driver of excellence within schools. Is every experienced teacher a paragon of educational awesomeness? Of course not. But the research seems clear enough-- teachers generally age like fine wine (or the stinky cheese that my wife likes for some reason), and it would strengthen the educational system to encourage the teacher pool to age long and well.

System

One of the dreams of ed reform has been to come up with a system that is teacher-proof, a program or script or curriculum that works exactly the same way no matter what carbon-based life form you have propped up in front of the classroom.

Systems are particularly appealing as a method of controlling "bad" actors, with "bad" defined as "does not do what I want them to do." This is a false hope, a snare and a delusion. Systems rarely fix bad actors, and frequently hamstring your best people.

You have a troupe of dancers, some of leap and soar and move with grace and beauty, and a few of whom dart around the stage like spastic rhinos. So to get the rhinos slowed down and under control, you put everyone in the company in forty-pound cement shoes. The rhinos are now chastened and restrained, but your best dancers can no longer leap and soar and move with grace and beauty.

You worry that the cooks in your restaurant have too much variety, some producing genius blends of flavor and texture and culinary awesomeness, while others can barely make meatloaf. So you create a menu system with easy instructions that anybody can follow that will always result in a predictably consistent product. Congratulations. You are now McDonalds, and nobody is ever going to go to your restaurant because they are in the mood for excellence.

You want your students to write with structure and organization, so you teach the five paragraph format. In fact, you strictly enforce the five paragraph system so that nobody wanders off the farm or blunders into the weeds. And now all the students who could have been excellent writers of sophisticated essays with varied and content-driven structure will just crank our mediocre five-paragraph essays.

The idea that a system can raise the not-very-good performers up to a level of excellence is an illusion, a lie. Nobody gets to excellence by following a system laid out by someone else and designed to be simple enough that nobody could supposedly mess it up. Such a system might raise the bottom of the barrel barely a hair. But at the top end, your idiot-proof system will require your best people to act more like the idiots the system was designed for.

On top of that, because the problem people are the ones most likely to disregard or mess up the system, your effect on them is likely to be minimal. They may simply not want to follow along, or they may not understand how the system is supposed to work and so when it's time to adjust or adapt, they can't do it well.

If Mr. Dimwittie doesn't know how to teach prepositions, handing him a scripted lesson may make him slightly less terrible, but it will not make him good. On the other hand, handing the script to Mrs. Brightangel, who already had a killer lesson about prepositions and understands them thoroughly-- that will just turn her excellent teaching with mediocre teaching.

Your best hope is that Mrs. Brightangel will be able to use her deep knowledge of content and teaching, her professional expertise and experience, to chop up, augment, replace, and ignore the scripted lesson. She will be the teacher equivalent of a Project Runway contestant (personally, I hope she's Chris March) who has to make a couture gown out of a burlap sack. Your best hope is that Mrs. Brightangel will find a way to do what she knows she needs to do, even if you put her in cement shoes.

In short, education in this country will not be improved by coming up with systems that are teacher-proof.

The solution is to have more teachers that are system-proof.

Remedial Baloney

When arguing about college readiness, reformsters like to point to the number of college freshmen placed in remedial courses are proof that high schools aren't rigorous enough with coursework, aren't honest enough with grades, and aren't standardized enough with curriculum.

There are problems with that. First of all, we keep using the words "college ready" as if we know what that means. We don't. Ready for which college? Ready for which major at that college? You'll for instance see a stat about how very few students get high enough scores in reading and math, as if a student can only be college ready if she has sufficient background to major in both.

But hey-- if colleges say they need to put more and more freshmen in remedial courses, doesn't that mean something. I'd say yes, it does. It means one or more of the following:

1) The college has decided to increase its revenue flow by requiring more students to take more remedial courses that do not count toward graduation (but which must still be paid for). Since remedial coursework can be taught by the lowest rung on the professorial ladder, they're cheap to put on.

2) The college has decided to increase its revenue flow by loosening its acceptance standards to take students who aren't really prepared to be there. If Pat got Cs in vocational-prep classes in our high school, don't act all surprised that Pat turns out to be ill-equipped for your mid-rigor college. This makes us crazy at the high school level-- we try to tell Pat, "Look, if you want to go to a really good college, these are the classes you need to take and the skills you need to master," and pat just laughs, because Pat knows a student who snoozed to a Barely Passing GPA and was still happily accepted by Wossamatta U. In this way colleges shoot us all in the foot-- part of the challenge of getting maximum challenge to high school students is that some students have always said," Hmm, what's the easiest, lightest courseload I can get away with here." Don't tell us that Pat wasn't ready for your medium-tough college-- we told you Pat wasn't ready and you sent an acceptance letter anyway.

3) High school grads really are less prepared for college than they used to be. Hmmmm. What has changed about public high schools over the past decade that might account for students getting a lousier education than they used to. It's possible that higher remediation rates are simply further proof that the Common Core and test-centered schooling are failures.

4) Colleges lie. All I have here is anecdotal evidence, but I find it compelling the number of times that I've had a former student tell me about their college saying, "You need to take this remedial course" and the students saying, "No, I don't think so" and not taking the course and never having any trouble academically.

Now, in this morning's Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay offers some research to support at least one of my theories.

Barshay writes about the Alaska Study, conducted by the USED and looking at the University of Alaska, which has not atypically huge remediation numbers-- about a half are placed in "developmental" math, and about a third in "developmental" English. The study suggests that if the university scrapped their placement test and just looked at student high school grades, they'd have had better predictors of the students' college performance. Barshay is not unsympathetic to the university's plight:

And it’s easy to sympathize with college administrators who want to use an objective test. After all, students attend different high schools and take different classes. Some are rigorous. Some aren’t. Some teachers give easy A’s. Others are tough graders. Why would it be fair to let the student who took easy classes waltz into a college course, while the student who struggled under a demanding teacher is dispatched to a remedial class? Wouldn’t be better to figure out exactly what students know?

Theoretically, yes. Practically speaking, no. The study found a much higher correlation between high school GPA and college achievement than between placement test results and college grades. The study even found a bunch of examples of  my #4-- students who bypassed the remedial courses they were supposed to take and did just fine.

Michelle Hodara, lead author of the study, has some thoughts about why the placement test system doesn't work. For one thing, it may have been over a year since the students last sat in a math class, "but once they’re immersed in math classes again, it comes back to them, and they don’t really need to repeat an entire year of algebra."

Hodara has another theory that I find intriguing:

Hodara argues that what students know, or “content knowledge,” isn’t the most important thing anyway. She says that GPAs capture important non-cognitive skills that tests don’t. “It’s likely that if you have a high GPA, even if you’re in an ‘easy’ class, you likely showed up and turned your homework in, and did things that are important for college readiness and success,” said Hodara.

I'm not going to get too excited about this single study. It covered just four years' worth of students at just one university, so while it's certainly suggestive, it's also possible that many of the problems it uncovered are problems specific to the University of Alaska. But it joins a body of research reaching similar conclusions (here's a big fat study from 2012 also concluding that screening tests were doing a crappy job and colleges should just check the GPA).

The rate of college remedial class placement certainly means something, and that includes the possibility that the process used by colleges to place students in those courses is just chock-full of baloney and bad data.

Pearson & Irony Overload

Here's an article about a familiar topic in education-- "Why Teachers Are Leaving the Classroom, and the Effort To Get More To Stay." True, the topic has been hit pretty thoroughly, but one more piece on the topic can't hurt and perhaps this particular website reaches a different audience than-- wait. What?

Yes, this article about the teacher shortage is on LearnED, the website covering News About Learning and operated by Pearson. Yes, that Pearson. The All Your Education Business Are Belong To Us Pearson.

So. What does Pearson know about the teacher shortage and how to fix it? Well, strap on your irony impact helmets, boys and girls. This ride is short, but it's designed for maximum psychic whiplash.

The unnamed writer opens with a close-up on Jahana Hayes, National Teacher of the Year, a woman with a story so inspiring that she could give John King a run for his money. Hayes reminds us that while students are the whole point, "recruiting, supporting and retaining culturally competent and diverse educators cannot be overlooked."

Next up-- Dr. Kathy McKnight, Principal Director of Research at Pearson, Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness (not this one, but this one). She's a co-author of a December, 2014, report from Pearson entitled Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative which is seventy-some pages of history and proposals for some alternate universe. Here's one swell pull quote:

One study concluded that the TFA and Teaching Fellows programs represent two examples of program models for recruiting, selecting, training and supporting teachers that can address teacher shortages in secondary math within high-need schools without decreasing student achievement.

The report also likes the idea of "neo-differentiated roles" and differentiated pay and new career ladders, as well as performance-based compensation (aka merit pay).

Here's what strikes me as weird(er) about this report-- by December of 2014, Pearson had already released, with honcho Michael Barber's personal seal of approval right on it, the big report on the Assessment Renaissance which, among other things, described how teachers would be reduced to educational flight attendants, there to fluff pillows and check on student comfort while students got all their educational content, testing, and personally crafted curriculum straight from the the Pearson-imbued computers.

So does Pearson have entire right hand divisions working on things that the left hand division will render moot? Is part of Pearson set up as a sort of front for the rest of Pearson, to make it look like they are working hard on, say, how to pump up the teaching profession while in the back room, the real Pearson is working on how to make the teaching profession vanish entirely? It's not an idle question-- either Pearson is spectacularly devious or amazingly disorganized and confused.

But I digress. Back to Dr. McKnight and the teacher shortage.

McKnight starts by noting that there is such a thing, and rattles off some states. Is this a bad thing?

“Experts tell us that on average, it takes four to five years for teachers to feel comfortable in the classroom and to become proficient in their teaching,” says Dr. Kathy McKnight, Principal Director of Research at Pearson. “We’re also seeing 40- to 50-percent of new teachers leaving the profession before they get to that five-year mark.”

Probably ought to pass this news along to all the people who think that the most pressing problem in education is that it's too hard to fire older teachers.

But does McKnight have any idea why teachers are leaving in droves? She does, and I want you to check to make sure that helmet is on tight before you read this next quote that comes, I will remind you, from a Director of Research of Pearson being cited on a Pearson website:

So many teachers feel like they’re not treated as professionals. They feel over-managed, they’re not rewarded for their expertise, and they don’t feel like they have a voice in the education system.

Over-managed? You mean, like entire educational systems and programs designed by a textbook and test manufacturer to be teacher-proof so that any semi-sentient being can unbox the program and just follow the directions? Voiceless, as in being turned into a cog in a machine designed by a large, faceless corporation that is busily consuming the entire ed biz for the benefit of their own bottom line? And never mind how much I'm rewarded for my expertise (because, no, merit pay doesn't work)-- it would be an exciting day if my expertise were consulted or considered rather than ignored by a corporation that sends salespeople out to tell me how to do my job, as if I'm too dull and thick to know how to use a text book or a computer program.

Research from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that a large percent of American teachers, compared to those in other countries, feel like their profession is not valued by the public.

Gee, thanks, nameless Pearson website writer. Does this mean that Pearson will stop sending lobbyists to capital buildings to tell elected representatives that those elected officials need not talk to real teachers when they have access to folks from a huge multinational education corporation? Does that mean I can expect Pearson to take back its support for TFA, with its minimal training and "anybody can be a teacher" ethics?

McKnight has some thoughts about how to retain teachers. These thought harken back to the career ladder idea and boil down to "We can hold onto teachers by making them not-teachers. Curriculum directors, or tech specialists, or do research or work with policy makers."

New generations will also bring new definitions of teaching. Young people who only teach for a few years and leave. Old folks who have finished one career and might want to try teaching. Well, now at least I'm hearing from the Pearson that I recognize. Let's get more short-timers in here so that schools can waste less money on personnel costs. Maybe the psychic whiplash part of the ride is over and-- uh-oh

“I think about my own profession as a researcher,” Kathy says. “I love doing what I do. I feel like it’s valued by my colleagues. I have an expertise that people need. People trust me to do good work. Why would we think teachers wouldn’t want the same?”

Yes, that would be a completely sensible thing to say-- were it not coming from a corporation that has done its best to squash teacher voice and create an educational system in which teachers are an easily replaced appendage, a cog that simply turns in its prescribed tiny circle on command.

People trust you to do good work? That's great. That's how it should be. But as a teacher, I find that the educational-industrial complex, in which Pearson is the 800 pound gorilla, doesn't trust me to do a damned thing, and is mostly busy coming up with ways to make me irrelevant and unnecessary.

I can't decide whether this little limb of Pearson is simply cluelessly wrapped in the comforting embrace of deep-seated cognitive dissonance, or whether they are trying to gaslight the rest of us. Either way, this little piece of Pearson puffery has made irony so tired that it has to go lie down for an all-day nap.