Thought Leader Duncan Has Another New Job

Arne Duncan continues to build that resume. He was already signed on with Emerson Collective, the philanthropic mish-mash of Steve Jobs widow; in that position, he is poised to work on the youth unemployment problems of Chicago.

Now comes word that Duncan has joined the board of directors for Pluralsign.

If you aren't a tech professional, you may not recognize Pluralsign's name, but they've been in business for a while. Started in 2004 by four partners who each kicked in $5K, the company started out as a classroom training company. They shifted quickly to an on-line video model, simple and neat. You or your company sign up, pay a subscription fee, watch the trainings. The author-presenters who create the training are paid a royalty per view. By 2011, the company was expanding rapidly based pretty much entirely on a training library of highly technical programming and software development training courses.

By 2013, they were ready to seek outside money, and the venture capitalists came a-calling. By 2014, they were telling Business Insider that they had 3,000 courses, 9,900 hours of content, and 600 experts. Observers estimated $85 to $100 million in revenue, and co-founder Aaron Skonnard said that in two years the company had increased its value by a factor of ten, making it worth about a billion dollars.

Look at their front page now and you see more than just software development-- they offer courses in architecture, manufacture and design, and even "creative professional."

Duncan comes on board as part of a quartet of newbies. His new co-board guys include Tim Mauldin (a former CPA and "proven authority in leading web-based companies"), Gary Crittendon (Palo Alto private equity guy), and Brad Rencher (Adobe’s executive vice president and general manager of marketing cloud). This may seem like odd company for the Duncanator, but look at how breathlessly Business Wire (or the Pluralsign press release) describes him:

Having served as the U.S. Secretary of Education from 2009 to 2016, Duncan is one of the most notable and highly-regarded thought leaders of twenty-first century education. One of the longest-serving education secretaries and arguably the most influential, he guided a rapid expansion of the federal role in the nation’s 100,000 public schools and saw 40 states adopt key policies. Aligning with Pluralsight’s mission to democratize professional learning for all, Duncan championed significant education causes to equalize learning opportunities while a member of President Obama’s Cabinet, including Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that preserved 350,000 teachings jobs through $100 billion in stimulus funds.

Arne Duncan-- Highly Regarded Thought Leader. Holy smokes. I mean, holy frickin' smokes. Duncan was not even a particularly apt Thought Sayer, and I can't remember a single time that Duncan stood up to speak and folks from all across the nation fell in behind him, excited by his vision and his leaderliness. Not to be mean, but I'm not sure that Duncan ever proved to be a Thought Haver. Is there a Duncan policy that didn't come from somewhere else? Anything? Test-and-punish, charter schools, data mining, Common Core-- pretty sure that someone else did the thinking on those.

He certainly did expand federal reach, but he did it through the artful use of blackmail (apply for a waiver or face the consequences of being in violation of NCLB). It is true that the stimulus money saved some jobs, but are we going to give Duncan credit for that? How about pissing off Congress so badly that they united in the historic stripping of power from a cabinet-level department? Or the complete bungling of Common Core? Or the demoralization and alienation of public school teachers? I don't want to rehash the whole question of Duncan's legacy again, but this is a spirited rewrite of history indeed.

What exactly is Duncan going to do for Pluralsign? That's not entirely clear:

"The pace at which people need to acquire new knowledge is only going to grow," Duncan says. Pluralsight, which develops online courses for technology professionals, is well positioned to take advantage of that new reality. For Duncan, it's a natural fit. "I’ve talked all the time about cradle to career, this idea of folks being life-long learners," he says. "The idea that learning stops at [age] 22, that’s a death sentence today."

And as a board member, he doesn't really have to do anything. Just, you know, stop by occasionally and lead some thoughts around the office. Maybe bring along a suitcase full of gravitas. Shoot some hoops. Cash his check. As long as they keep him from talking about white suburban moms, maybe he'll be okay. Meanwhile, some perfectly good teachers are out of work, and John King is Secretary of Education. Sometimes I don't understand this world.

Common Core Standards (Still) Don't Cut It

Every few years the ACT folks unleash a big ole survey to find out what's actually going on Out There in the world of school stuff. This year's survey drew at least 2,000 respondents each from elementary and secondary schools, as well as college and workplace respondents. The whole package is eighty-eight pages, and I've read it, and while you don't have to, you might still want to. There are several themes that emerge, but the big one is pretty simple--

Common Core is a bust.

Not news, I know. But still always comforting to see further confirmation. Let's break this report down section by section and see what we've got.








Introduction

We're going to skip over this. The ACT folks would like you to know all the clever things they do to develop their test, and that's swell, but since we're just learning what a mess David Coleman's SAT is, the ACT can look like the top of the test biz just by saying, "We actually check to see if our test items are any good, and when people ask us how we came up with the test, we don't just make shit up." So let's call this a gimme and move on for now.

English Language Arts 

First, turns out that everybody thinks you should be able to do lots of different types of writing for different audiences and purposes. Respondents emphasized the importance of audience for writing: 

College instructors agreed that entering students must be able to “write for specific audiences other than the instructor,” while supervisors rated “tailoring communications to enhance understanding” and “reconciling gaps in understanding” as important to an employee’s success. 

Apparently nobody said that students need to be able to write for audiences of minimum-wage test-scorers or essay-scoring software packages.

Respondents in MS, HS and College were asked to choose between four writing tasks-- generating sound ideas for writing, critically analyzing source texts, using language conventions proficiently, and clearly summarizing other authors' ideas. Middle school teachers ranked the four about even. High school teachers leaned heavily toward the Common Core-beloved analysis of source texts. College instructors, however, were not very interested in that, but were hugely interested in the generating sound ideas portion. So, huge miss-match between what CCSS says we're supposed to lean on and what colleges value. 

And given that Big Standardized Tests give next-to-zero attention  to generating ideas, they, too, are pushing us in exactly the wrong direction.

Everyone agrees that reading skills are super-important, but colleges say that entering freshmen do not have those skills. So the huge whomping emphasis that K-12 has been putting on teaching students how to score well on standardized reading tests has not translated into reading awesomeness. It's almost as if focusing on inauthentic tasks doesn't help with developing authentic skills!

Mathematics

In this section, we see a completely different way in which the Core Standards (or, depending on your state, the Faux Core Fake Rename Standards) are failing.


First, teachers have had a few years to try teaching the Core Standards way and decide, "Well, this is junk." The result, as found by the ACT survey, is that teachers have gone back to doing what they know works. Specifically, ACT asked about some of the K-4 math standards that the Core cut out (to make more room for that depth of study that CCSS was going to usher in) and found that in three cases, 87% of teachers are teaching those standards anyway. I reported this finding to the elementary math teacher that lives in this house with me, and her response was, "Well, duh." Act drily notes "One reason that early elementary school teachers may be teaching these topics is that they recognize the importance of the topics to mathematical competence." Meanwhile, only about half of MS and HS math teacher say that CCSS standards are aligned with college expectations.

Elementary teachers put a lot of emphasis on doing math without calculators. MS and HS teachers do not. College and workplace folks don't think using technology to do mathy things is all that important.

Everybody thinks that being able to explain your work is important. And by everybody, I mean roughly 3/4 of MS and HS math teachers, and about half of college instructors.

STEM education needs work. Among other issues, high school teachers disagree with college instructors and bosses in the workplace about exactly what skills are needed for STEM.

Science

Elementary teachers don't spend much time on science. Huh. Who knew? Oh, that's right-- everybody knew. Because science is not math or reading (aka Not on the BS Test), it-- along with history and gym and art and music-- gets cut so that we have more time for test prep.

Even where science is happening, engineering is getting short shrift.

College instructors report that the students have science skills, but are not ready to succeed in the course. Hard to pin this one down, but the survey suggests that the problem is in skills like study skills and critical thinking. Hold that thought.

Not everyone knows the NGSS, but lots of folks think the standards will affect their course.

Workforce

Here's where we find out what actual workplace folks think about some of these education issues. This group included, apparently, not just suits in the big offices, but actual supervisors.

First off, the workplace respondents put a huge value on "non-cognitive" skills, the soft stuff. Acting honestly, sustaining effort, getting along with others, and maintaining composure were all highly ranked by around 90% of the workplace responders.

When it comes to tech use, employers value basic skills (can you use e-mail) but also value ethical use of information. The majority also report that face-to-face communication is more important than written stuff. Of all the various communication skills, the top rated were

Conveying a knowledgeable demeanor when presenting information
Presenting information in a logical and organized manner
Summarizing information for efficient communication
Conveying a confident demeanor while presenting information
Tailoring communications to enhance understanding
Reconciling gaps in understanding

Again, let's notice that some of these are soft skills (look like you know what you're doing).

Their Conclusion

Although standards are developed to help ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college and career in English language arts and mathematics, some results of the ACT National Curriculum Survey suggest that some state standards may not reflect college readiness in some aspects.

The ACT is treading lightly-- heck, they helped write the Core Standards-- but remove the softening language, and the message is simple. What we're telling K-12 educators are the important parts of getting college and career ready are not actually what the folks who do college and career say we need. Boy, if only somebody had thought to ask those folks back in 2009 when the Core standards were being written.

They also conclude that there's a lot of calculator use going on, that we really need to talk about what is actually needed for STEM, and that the math standards are a tweaked-on-the-ground mess. And then there's this finding about science, which I find kind of awesome:

Science educators believe that science achievement is best assessed using science assessments.

Finally, the workplace apparently values a specific set of skills, including some stuff that we're not even talking about at all.

My Conclusion

Add this to my ever growing stack of assertions that when reformsters talk about college and career readiness, they are just pulling stuff out of their butt. We don't know that much about what it takes to be college and career ready, and a survey like this one can't give us the entire picture, but it sure can tell us that many of the things being pushed as CACR necessities are, in fact, not.

The Common Core have wasted billions of dollars and years of our time. They are cobbled-together baloney from a gang of hubris-infused amateurs, and the only good news at this point is that they have been beaten around so badly that the name doesn't really mean anything anymore. The bad news is that the name still exists, along with its barely-disguised twin "college and career ready" and while both now mean so many different things that they mean almost nothing, still a great deal of harm is being done in their name.

The most encouraging data in this survey? The 87% of teachers who looked at the standards, looked at the standards-aligned(ish) books and materials, looked at their students, and said, "Screw it. I'm going to do what in my professional opinion is most educationally sound for my students." In that direction lies the salvation of US public education.

Chester Finn's Charter Market Worries

Chester Finn, honcho emeritus of the right-tilted Fordham Institute, was back on the Fordham blog this week to continue his charter school series with a look at what he thinks are three "market malfunctions in the charter sector." Man, I just love the word "sector"- it sounds so clean and neat, not like marketplace or business. Honey, I'm going to get a tub of popcorn in the snack sector. Last night I was forcibly relieved of some financial instruments by an armed member of the mugging sector. Girl, do not get all up in my sector.

But I digress.

Finn was actually called out almost immediately on twitter by a fellow conservative who pointed out that Finn's "market" malfunctions are really "government regulation" malfunctions, which was doubly ironic. Ironic the first time for a conservative calling out another conservative for mistaking regulations for market forces, and then ironic again because what conservatives like to call the free market is really just a market that is government-regulated in a particular manner that some folks like to label "free market." We like to have these discussions as if the choice is between having a government with its hands on the scale and a free market where the government takes its hands off the scale. But a free market is Somalia. A free market is Neanderthals clubbing each other for a piece of rat. The government always has its hands on the scales.

But I digress.

Here are Finn's three malfunctions. Well, first, part of his wind-up to the pitch:

In general, the charter marketplace—where it’s had the freedom and capacity to grow in response to demand—has done pretty well at responding to families’ non-educational priorities, such as safety, convenience, and a welcoming atmosphere. It’s also given rise to an array of fairly diverse schools that align with the varied educational tastes of an ever more diverse society.

I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true at all, though Finn probably knows more charter sector specifics than I do. But here's that "free market" falsehood again. For instance, in New York City, the "free market" has been rigged so that the public school system has to bear the expenses incurred by the charter sector. The public system has to pay the rent for charter school locations. Charter "freedom and capacity to grow" has always come at the expense of public schools; it's like saying that Burger King needs the freedom and capacity to grow by being able to bill McDonald's for its supplies. Or that I need the freedom and capacity to grow by being allowed to take my neighbor's car and raid their kitchen for my food. Likewise, charters have been able to meet non-educational priorities by getting government to lower the bar. In Detroit and Chicago, the continued and deliberate starvation of public schools has the effect of making parents happy to find a school that isn't collapsing. Hell, Detroit has worked it so that a charter could be successfully launched just by advertising bottled water and heat in the winter.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah-- the three malfunctions.

First, too few or too many schools.

Finn is concerned that charter school development is not keeping up with demand. While he throws out an "estimate" that a million students are waiting to get into charters, and hell, I can "estimate" that only a dozen students are waiting to get into charters, I'm not really interested in how great the demand for charters is. Because the demand for charters is really just a demand for good schools. Why, oh why, do policy leaders and educrats not look at these supposedly huge waiting lists and say, "Well, that's a million people who aren't happy with their public school, so what are we going to do to fix those public schools??"

We make a big fuss over how testing can identify failing schools that need help (though we never send them any), but don't waiting-to-get-out numbers also pinpoint schools that need help and resources and better stuff? Why are we not making use of that data? Man-- it's almost as if we are only interested in finding ways to boost the charter business sector, and not in actually improving education.

At any rate, we can stop talking about demand for charters as if it's a meaningful piece of data. Or at least we could start discussing the ways in which that demand is manufactured. Demand for charters is manufactured by gutting and undercutting and under-resourcing public schools, as well as creating new ways to "prove" that public schools are failing (like Big Standardized Tests).

When we talk about demand, absolutely nothing that we're talking about is a natural market force. It is all subject to manufacture and manipulation. It's not any more real than Santa Claus.

Second, weak consumer information. 

I don't disagree entirely. All schools could be more transparent, though charter schools are by far the worst when it comes to providing transparent and accurate information.

But that's because the marketplace does not run on strong consumer information. name me a single product of any sort whose marketing strategy is based on strong consumer information. In fact, huge sectors of the marketplace have fought-- and fought hard-- to NOT have strong consumer information (nutritional listings on food, anyone?)

The marketplace does not run on transparency and full, open information. It runs on companies keeping tight and careful control of exactly what information consumers have access to. What strong consumer information is involved in knowing that Frosted Flakes are grrrreat, or that Coke is "the real thing"? Right now I see a steady stream of ads for a cyber-charter that definitely wants me to know that their school brings families together and makes children happy, but is definitely not making sure that I know studies have shown that cyber-charters are terrible.

The free market hates strong consumer information just like vampires (non-sparkly ones) hate sunlight. Finn's complaint really makes no sense.

Third, distracted suppliers.

Many charters are strapped for funds. They feel overregulated by their states, heckled by their authorizers, and politically stressed, so the people running them often struggle to keep their heads above water (which includes keeping enrollments up). They have little energy or resources to expend on becoming more rigorous or investing in stronger curricula and more experienced instructors.

 

On behalf of public schools all across the country, let me just say-- well, I can't decide. Smallest violin in the world playing "My heart bleeds for you"? Waaaaaaa? Would you like some cheese with that whine? No shit, Sherlock?

I mean, seriously. This is like complaining that running a hospital is hard because all these sick people keep coming in. Or it sucks to be a judge because you spend all your time listening to this legal stuff. There are two things that Finn really needs to understand here:

1) Every single sentence of this paragraph describes life in public schools since pretty much forever (just substitute "taxpayers" for 'authorizers").

2) The modern charter school sector has made every one of these things worse for public schools.

This is the gig. These are the limitations that come with providing education in a country that, when push comes to shove, doesn't really value public education quite as much as it likes to say it does. If you find the problems listed in that paragraph just too much to battle against, then you are in the wrong sector, and you need to get into some other sector, because in this sector, the education sector, the job has always been to do more than you can with less than you need. The belief among some reformsters that the free market would somehow change that would be cute if it hadn't been so destructive.

The SAT-- Worse Than You Think

Folks have been questioning the accuracy, validity and usefulness of the SAT for decades, and the chorus of criticism only increased when College Board, the test manufacturing company responsible for the SAT, brought in Common Core architect David Coleman to take over. Coleman's fast and ugly rewrite of the venerable test was intended to bring it in line with the K-12 standards of Common Core. Coleman, whose ego has always seemed to be Grand Canyon sized, had finished redefining education for K-12 students-- now he was going to fix college, too. And, the College Board hoped, he was also going to recapture a share of the market dominated by the ACT. In fact, a plan to grab huge market share by getting states to use the SAT as their federally-mandated Big Standardized Test-- or even an exit exam.

New vocab. New math. New batteries of tests, and a PSAT set up to work as a marketing tool for AP courses (another College Board product). A flubbed delivery on PSAT scores, and then an awkward mess surrounding the spring rollout of the SAT-- so awkward that SAT prep professionals recommended sitting out the first round of the test.

It looked like a shaky product was even shakier. You never want to see them make the sausage, but apparently SAT sausage is being made with even worse parts of unspeakable animals than we suspected.

And now a whistle blower has stepped forward to add to the story, and what we're learning is that as bad as things seemed with the SAT, they were actually much worse.

The name we're all getting to know is Manuel Alfaro. He started out his college career at Williams College, where he co-authored a paper with Jason Zimba, the architect of the math side of the Common Core. Alfaro says they were classmates and friends, but says that the call twenty years later to come work for David Coleman came "out of the blue."

In between Alfaro worked for publishers McGraw Hill and Riverside Publishing. He then spent seven years with American Institutes for Research, another big name in standardized testing. He went to work for David Coleman and the College Board in May of 2013, less than a year after Coleman took over the venerable test maker.Alfaro lasted about a year and ten months.

What he found at the College Board apparently troubled him. In an open letter to his colleagues, he outlines the steps he tried to take:

Over the last year, I’ve explored many different options that would allow me to provide students and their families the critical information they need to make informed decisions about the SAT. At the same time, I was always seeking the option that would have minimal impact on your lives.

I gave David Coleman several opportunities to be a decent human being. Using HR and others, he built a protective barrier around himself that I was unable to penetrate. Being unable to reach him, I was left with my current option as the best choice.

Alfaro elsewhere has this to say about himself:

The College Board will tell you that I am a disgruntled employee. This statement would not be entirely wrong, but it would not be entirely correct either. I am a disillusioned idealist, shocked by the reality I encountered at the College Board.

And so for the last month or so, Alfaro has been blogging on LinkedIN, outlining some of what he saw on the inside that bothered him so much. Mercedes Schneider took a look at his output yesterday, and you can find the up to date list of his posts here.

But here are some of the strikingly awful revelations that he shares. From one of his first posts:

My first assignment with the College Board was to review a draft of the test specifications for the redesigned SAT. The document had been created by two of David Coleman’s cronies, two authors of the Common Core. This document is now known as the “research-based, empirical backbone” of the SAT Suite of Assessments. Back then, it was a subset of standards taken straight from the high school and middle school Common Core. My instructions were to rubberstamp the selection of standards and to rewrite the standard descriptions to make them unrecognizable, so that no one could tell they were Common Core.

So the College Board's story of all sorts of research-based alignment between their "backbone" and the CCSS is baloney-- they just used the standard high school sophomore trick of copying material and changing the language so that it wasn't obvious.

The software system for managing the test content? I suppose we all imagined some sort of complex tagging and tracking system for balancing and managing sophisticated testing strategies for each test item, but Alfaro says no-- just a bunch of files and folders and an excel spreadsheet for banking the test items.

Alfaro says that experimental items are spread throughout the test with no particular regard for difficulty. But that could be because, as he also shockingly maintains, many test items are never reviewed before they make it onto the test in the first place. These items are not reviewed or rewritten until they've already made it onto the test. 

Alfaro says that the work group that performs that review and revision had many concerns, some of which they attempted to raise fairly forcefully. The College Board's own internal review group was concerned about:

Item quality: Their biggest concern was the large number of items that were mathematically flawed; items that did not have correct answers; and items that did not have accurate or realistic contexts. Some members even went as far as stating that they had never seen so many seriously flawed items.

Development Schedule: They felt they didn't have enough time to address all of the item issues.

Development Process: They felt the overall process was inadequate to the task.

So, too many terrible items, not enough time to fix them, and a flawed process for creating a decent test. outside of that, everything right on track.

The short form of Alfaro's story-- the College Board has knowingly lied about using best practices in developing the "revamped" SAT, and in the process of selling the SAT as a state-wide and/or graduation exam, will be lying some more. And it would appear that even this stripped down, cut corners approach isn't letting the College Board get tests written fast enough, for as Schneider found poking around Reddit, the same form of the SAT was given in March and in June.

Alfaro is still out there and still writing. He says that the story has "more plot twists than the Da Vinci Code." It seems certain that those plot twists are not good news for the College Board. Go read some more about the full extent of Coleman's fraud. Stay tuned, and pass the word.

[Update: Alfaro has a White House petition started to demand investigation. Maybe a long shot, but why not sign on and maybe put some more pressure on Coleman's College Board.]

Back to the Children's Table

Do you remember?

It was going to be our year. Education-- the issue, the American institution, the highly contested battleground of policy, politics, and pedagogy-- was going to be on the front burner. Presidential politics would be the Big Event, and education was going to be seated at the Big Table.

Lots of folks thought so. Jeb! Bush had spent ages first fine-tuning his education organization as a Florida-based group, and then scaled it up so that he would have a national profile built around his aggressive and forward-thinking reform of public education. He mounted all sorts of clever PR pushes like Learn More Go Further to help push his education cred into the public eye. He even stepped down from running the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which in retrospect is kind of cute-- like a candidate for governor who resigns from his job as watchman at the junkyard because he doesn't want to look like he's getting an unethical advantage. Jeb! was ready to ride the Big Education Wave right to the White House.

Campbell Brown thought it was our year. Her website/advocacy group/hobby business The 74 Million was poised to ride the wave-- education was going to leading the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue and Brown was going to be there waiting for it, staking out the eduterritory so that she could set the proper agenda. She was going to be a king-maker; everyone who wanted to be President would have to talk about education, and everyone who wanted to talk about education would have to talk to her.

And if we're being hones, we can't fault Brown or Bush for what now looks like childlike faith. At one point or another, we all thought that education was set to be a defining issue. And then, poof, it was gone.

On news sites, "education" was no longer a heading-- or if it was still there, it was buried deep. Politicians who thought that Common Core was a guaranteed boffo baby-kissing moment were shocked and horrified to discover that the crowd was rebelling. At first they pushed back (it's just the tin hat crowd) but it became evident that the game was up. Looking back, the Common Core Kerfluffle may have been one of the first clear signs that the GOP was seriously out of touch with their own people. Meanwhile, union leadership kept discovering that they, too, were out of step with membership on issues like Common Core and Arne Duncan (remember when members were all "let's tar and feather him" and leadership was all "oh, give him a break. just give him a stern look and a hug").

So as the great clown car of primary season, politicians started avoiding education as a topic. Brown tried to hold her education candidate summits and got less than half of the GOP candidates and none of the dems to show up, and when she tried to gin up outrage over the no-shows, the crowd yawned.

But in on respect, she wasn't wrong. Nobody was talking about education any more, and when they did, they stuck to the safe stuff-- more pre-K for the babies and cheaper college for the big kids.

And then. Arne Duncan went away, taking his fifty foot lightning rod and foot-sized mouth with him. Congress managed to actually do their job and pass a new version of the ESEA, erasing No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top/waiverpallooza, and while it was a welcome eight-year-overdue exercise of actual lawmaking, it was also vague and fuzzy and ended a lot of things while leaving the door open for a lot of other things, and the passage of it let a lot of hot air out of a lot of balloons. Suddenly, a lot of peoples' favorite eduproblems to bitch about were off the table.

As the field got narrower, the talk about education became less and less. Trump said he would use federal power to cancel Common Core, because he's an idiot. Clinton said as little as possible, but since her campaign is run by the same guy who used to run the Center for American Progress, we don't need tea leaves to know where she stands; she stands exactly where Obama stood and where Bush stood before him. Sanders occasionally spoke about education, and if we squinted we could convince ourselves that his stated intent to take on the forces of Wall Street and Big Money would put him on a path to oppose privatization of education.

But Sanders is out of it. I just looked at a House GOP roadmap for a brighter tomorrow, and it has nothing of substance to say about education. The GOP's goals look pretty much like the Democratic ideal-- the only difference is whether the states or the feds should drive the bus. But either way, the bus still runs to Test-Driven Public Edville and downtown Charter Town, both located in the heart of Privatizania.

This has been clear, obvious, painfully obvious for months now, but I can't deny the truth any longer. The grown up table is getting set, and there is no seat there for education. Decisions will be made about education, and they will by and large suck for the health of US public education, but they won't be the subject of robust public debate. Nobody is going to bleed or bruise on that hill, let alone fight and die there.

No, for education it is back to the kiddie table off in the corner, where we'll sit with pressing issues like Uruguay's debt, choosing a National Peach Pit Day, and the price of tea in China. The only discussion of public education will be the discussion that those of us who care can force. No matter what happens next, there's no denying the hard truth-- we had better buckle up, hunker down, and gather our strength, because the next four years are going to be dry and ugly. At the children's table, they only serve leftovers.

TX: Yet Another Testing Screw-up

The Texas version of the Big Standardized Test is called the STAAR, which could stand for Some Tests Are Always Ridiculous or maybe Should Throw Away Any Results or even Stupid Tests' Asses Are Raggedy.

This year's STAAR season has been a parade of blunders and clusterfahrfegnugen. There were plenty of reasons not to like the test to begin with (here's a good list of just ten such reasons). But once it came time to actually deploy the test, things just got worse.

A "computer glitch" (which sounds so much nicer than "some programmer screw-up at corporate headquarters") caused a whole bunch of student answers to just disappear. Poof!

A collection of Dallas Houston*-area superintendents (representing over one million students) signed a letter to the state listing over 100 (yes, one hundred) problems with the test ranging from questions that had no actual correct answer to thousands of students listed with the wrong school.

Central Texas school districts also reported extensive problems with pretty much every single aspect of the test. Across the state districts reported mislabeled and misdelivered boxes of testing materials, problems with the software for taking the test, misreporting of results, and errors in test correction.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said that the problems were "unacceptable" but that test results would still be used to judge schools. Because reasons.

That was all a couple of months ago, and now it's June and reports of screw-ups are still rolling in. This week reports showed that the testing company simply lost all of the answer sheets from the Eanes school district.

A district staffer "has been informed that ETS has lost all of our boxes of scoreable results for (grades) 3-8!" he wrote. "We did everything right on our end. ETS agrees that they received the boxes. They just don't know what they have done with them." 

ETS would be Educational Testing Services, not exactly newbies in the testing world. ETS won the Texas contract last year after Texas dumped Pearson as their testing company. Only time will tell if they're going to actually hold onto that contract. In the meantime, we have what has become a not-unusual reformster spectacle-- a big, bold, grand idea that nobody knows how to translate into something that actually works.


*I initially put the wrong city here.

The GOP Education Vision

Earlier this week, House Republicans released a... well, a thing. A reporty kind of thing, straight from the House GOP "Task Force" on Poverty, Opportunity and Upward Mobility. There's a website that goes with it, and the language there is pretty blunt and direct:

Our nation is on the wrong path. We can complain about it, but that won't help things. To get America back on track, we have to raise our gaze. We have to be bold. That's what A Better Way is about. It is a full slate of ideas to address some of the biggest challenges of our times. Developed with input from around the country, it looks past this president to what we can achieve in 2017 and beyond...

We can complain about it??!! You're the freakin' US Congress-- there's a hell of a lot more you can do than complain. But I get it-- if you're in the party that somehow just nominated a blustering dumpster fire of a con man for the highest office in the land, I can see how you might be feeling a little helpless right now. Or inclined to just fast-forward to next year. It is perhaps a bit of projection that Paul Ryan and his crew have set a goal of a "confident" America, because the Republican Party of Donald Trump certainly isn't looking very confident right now. Blustery, noisy, overcompensatingly bullyish, all laid over a second level of party members who can't decide whether they want to stand for some sort of principle or whether they would support a wet paper bag filled with dog poop as long as it had "Republican" written on the outside-- all that, but not confident.

But hey. "Biggest challenges of our times." That must include education, right? Well, no. The six areas on the website are the economy, health care, poverty, national security, tax reform, and the Constitution.

Now, the GOP has noticed that many US citizens are "stuck." Let's shift over to the more easily-navigable position paper:

The American Dream is the idea that, no matter who you are or where you come from, if you work hard and give it your all, you will succeed. But for too many people today, that’s simply not true. Thirty-four percent of Americans raised in the bottom fifth of the income scale are still stuck there as adults. In fact, the rates at which people move up the ladder of opportunity have stayed remarkably stable over the past several generations. 

The paper does mention education by name as an area to address, which was what attracted my attention, because our politicians of both parties can agree on two important things--

1) Education is really important.

2) We should definitely not discuss it in any depth or detail, or maybe even at all.

I'm not going to dig down into other areas of the... plan? proposal? PR outline? Short form-- welfare is bad and has made people dependent. Also people who can work should, because the GOP is apparently unaware of the huge number of working poor in this country who have actual jobs and are doing all the right things, but can't make it on our minimum subsistence wages with no benefits.

Anyway, since the GOP is willing to actually talk about education, let's see what they have to say. What are their proposals?

Early Childhood Programs 

The House GOP is unimpressed by Head Start and wants to fund states to be more efficient in providing these essential pre-K services, but wants to measure effectiveness and not use the DC Big Government metric of measuring how many programs we've got going. Pre-K programs have become the Mom and Apple Pie of education-- everyone is for them, nobody opposes them, and nobody really pays attention when you start talking details. Always an easy win.

Support Research to Advance High Quality Choices

Make sure the above-named pre-K services are being researched and stuff. Head Start gains famously disappear by later years. Maybe we should talk to developmental specialists or something. Also there are too many duplicate programs. Get rid of some of those, because needless duplication of programs is wasteful and bad. And let state and local folks decide how to spend money-- not DC. So, choice.

Support At-Risk Youth

Helping children reject a life of crime and violence requires more than a detention facility; helping children who are in foster care, who are homeless, or who come from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed requires more than a government program...

Cooperation between parents, schools, teachers, etc is needed, because ending up in jail is bad. Also, ESSA improves ed services to incarcerated youths. ESSA also helps promote and support school choice, which is really important in saving students from failing schools. Because remember what we said a bullet point ago about the wastefulness of redundant programs? Well, we think the opposite is true when it comes to charter and choice programs. The more redundant school programs, the better. And that DC voucher program? It is the berries [insert bogus stats here]. This is also spiced up with some individual anecdotes, because the best way to write policy is to base it on what happened to this one person.

So remember-- more charter schools will keep students out of jail. Also, there are a bunch of failing schools in this country, and we don't have a clue about how to help them not fail. Also, if you collect all the best students in one school so that their concentration results in a high graduation rate, you can pretend that you have "raised the graduation rate." Like if you have a field of multicolored flowers, and you collect all the yellow flowers and put them in one bucket, you can point at that bucket and say, "Look, we have made the field more yellow."

Improve Career and Technical Education

Add us to the list of people who are figuring out what professional educators (those teachers we never talk to) already knew-- not everyone needs to go to four-year college. A bachelors degree does not meet the needs of every student, nor the needs of the country for a broad and varied workforce. The education system should pay more attention to what employers claim they need (though how our school system can produce more people who will work for $3/hour is unclear).

But hey-- I'm a fan of CTE (which we've never not had in my area), so I support supporting it. Now if the7y could just figure out that there's no reason for the future welders, roofers, hairdressers and machinists of tomorrow to have to pass the PARCC in order to graduate.

Strengthen America's Higher Education System

The GOP's theory is that college has become too expensive because of federal regulatory excess. Also, there's not enough transparency and parents can't find the information they need to make an informed choice. There are multiple sentences calling for more transparency and less confusion, but none which describe the information that is not readily available. Male-female ratio? Number of fraternities? Square footage of average dorm room? How much the average alumnus makes? Ivy per square foot of brick? It's not clear.

The GOP would also like to see simplified financial aid, which is a challenge because "simple" also means "less flexible in responding to many different individual situations."

Also, more college stuff should just be on line competency-based education stuff. That would make it cheaper! As would getting rid of those onerous federal regulations,though, in a paper filled with many individual anecdotes, the GOP does not offer a single example of an onerous, cost-increasing regulation that colleges deal with. There's a suggestion of reporting requirements as a problem, and a vague part that might be a shot at transexual bathroom directives, but mostly just vagueries about how regulations keep students from learning stuff. Somehow.

Also, there should be "strong accountability and a limited federal role" which-- wait a minute. We are going to enforce rules more strongly but we will be less involved in enforcing them? I understand that this is the opposite of the traditional government approach (We will have a million rules and do a half-assed job of enforcing them) but I still don't see how it works. Stronger accountability, or more federal hands off. One or the other. Don't see how you get both.

Improved Nutrition for Students and Working Families 

School lunch and nutrition programs used to do a great job for America's children, but then Certain People messed it all up with regulations and stuff. We should stop doing that. Be nutritious and flexible. As with many of these programs, the feds should give the states a bunch of money and just let them use it as the think is best.

Annnnnd that is it.

Yup. That's it. That's everything in the House GOP vision for education. In keeping with the trend set by the presumptive Presidential candidates, we will just ignore K-12 education except to say we like charters and choice.

More better Pre-K. Stay out of jail. Eat better food. More charter-choice, somehow. Career and tech ed is good. Cheaper college, somehow.

That is the entire House GOP vision for a Better Way for education. An absolutely non-visionary opposite-of-bold proposal that, even with the choice nods, is not going to be very exciting for anyone on any side of the ed debates. It's one more indicator, if we really needed one, that both those of us who advocate for public education and those who push reform-- we are all of us involved in a subject that almost nobody in DC has the interest, understanding or guts to put on a front burner.