Jeb Bush's Education Vision

After his attempt to be the New Coke of GOP Presidential politics, Jeb Bush has retreated to his signature issue-- privatizing education. He's back at the head of his advocacy group the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), and he's even back to cranking out magazine copy about his vision of a better tomorrow for US schools.

The National Review has given Bush a platform with "Saving America's Education System" (though the URL reads, weirdly, "jeb-bush-education-school-reform-future-disruption-technology"), and it presents one more re-vision of unapologetic reformsterism. So now that Bush has gotten the band back together, will he play some of his greatest hits for us? Let's see.

Don't Throw Money

One of our favorites kicks in in the very first sentence, where Bush notes that the school year has now ended and "another $620 billion has been spent." He follows that up immediately with the observation that we spend more money on education than almost any other industrialized nation. But we still have achievement gaps. Also, Bush will throw in the most bogus of bogus statistics, saying that "only 8 percent of high school grads are truly college and career ready."

That's wrong for several reasons. First, the Education Trust report from which he plucks that statistic actually says that "only 8 percent of high school graduates in 2013 completed a full college- and career-prep curriculum." That is a bizarrely demanding definition of college and career ready that would, for just one example, rule out a student who attended a CTE welding program. But then, Education Trust is a Gates-funded, reform-pushing advocacy group, so it's not surprising that they would push a statistic that is so easily debunked (are 92% of college freshmen in remedial courses and/or flunking out because they were unprepared for college?)

Of course, we don't really know, still, what college and career ready look like. We have no proven list of characteristics that certify such readiness. So that's a problem.

But most of all--- why would Bush bring this up? If our students are less ready for college and career, that reflects directly on the Common Core, test-driven reforms that have been forced into schools for the past six years. At this point. we were supposed to see a great rise in college readiness among students who had benefited from years of Common Core-ness. If Bush's "only 8% are ready" statistic were true, it would be an indictment of the reforms that he has tireless pushed down the throats of US education.

Scary Test Scores

Yes, we do poorly on international tests. No, Bush is not going to mention that we have always done poorly. He's going to say the test scores are dangerous because "innovation has created a competitive global economy in which knowledge has become the chief commodity." He will not explain what the tests have to do with innovation or knowledge, nor explain that many of the top testing nations are lousy at innovation (e.g. China).

Also, McKinsey says that all the jobs will be done by computers.

Only Education Has Anything To Do With Poverty

To put it bluntly, a baby born into poverty today, without a quality education, will never be able to secure a good job in his or her lifetime. 

There's half a sentence here that is missing from the end-- "because we will never lift a finger to help that person escape poverty, and we will never do a thing to create better jobs in this country." If you doubt that's the subtext here, look at the next sentence:

Education should be the great equalizer in our society, one that provides the opportunity for every individual to rise

Not economic growth, not innovation, not responsible leaders or business and industry, not opportunities that transcend race and class-- no, only education can fix economic inequality in America. Only education is a factor in US poverty. Nothing else. Damn. Why was this guy even running for President?

Massive Disruption

We must have massive disruption of our education system. Nothing else. Not housing or hiring or welfare or outsourcing or government-- just education needs to be disrupted. Massively.

Vision for Tomorrow

Now Bush shifts into a new hit, which repeats many themes and sounds from his old greatest hits repertoire, but adds a new spin. Here's what Bush sees twenty years away in a newer, kinder, gentler education system.

There are no more assigned schools. Parents of all income levels are able to choose from a robust marketplace of options, including traditional neighborhood schools, magnet schools, charter schools, private schools, and virtual schools. Information on their performance is readily available, and they are held accountable to parents and communities.

Of course, we already know that virtual schools don't work. And he doesn't mention that the traditional public schools will be a dumping ground for all the students who aren't accepted by all the shiny options. And he doesn't discuss funding. If we just have one of each, this is five schools-- will taxpayers be paying more to properly fund all these options, or will we try to run five schools for the price of one, and which ones will end up seriously underfunded (spoiler alert-- the public one). "Held accountable" how, exactly? Because Florida's charter schools are pretty spectacular examples of schools that aren't accountable to anyone.

Bush sees a system that weeds out failure and rewards and replicates success. He does not explain how failure will be defined. That would be important, since in such a system, the definition of success is also the definition of purpose. So if "success" is "gets good test scores," then you have decided that the purpose of schools is to prepare students for the Big Standardized Test. Is that the only purpose you can think of for schools? Because I thought schools were supposed to get everyone great jobs. How will you measure that, exactly?

Vouchers

Jeb loves him some vouchers. In his perfect future, the money will follow the child. I always think this is a bold choice for a nominal conservative politician, since it is literally taxation without representation-- taxpayers who don't have kids get to pay for schools, but they have no voice in what kind of schools they get. And if the money follows the kid, why can't the kid just have a big party?

But I have to take my hat off to somebody who still believes in vouchers. It's the kind of devotion you usually find only in members of the Flat Earth Society, an adherence to a long-debunked belief that doesn't have a speck of evidence to support it.

Float Free as a Bird

But why have a school at all, says Bush. Why not just get your AP Calculus from this on-line provider, and get your English from some other provider. Watch for the Amazon.com of homeschooling. Let students move through coursework at their own personal speed. Assess student mastery of skills through the year, and never social promote. Yes, we'll have Competency Based Education, but we'll call it something else.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

In fact, speaking of names, we not only won't speak the name of Common Core, but we'll skirt "college and career ready" too.

Students are tested based on standards aligned with college expectations, results are reported transparently, and as a result, our higher-education system saves $1.5 billion annually on remediation courses.

Which college expectations? Harvard? University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople? And what is this "results reported transparently"? Oh, right-- high schools routinely trick colleges into accepting students who aren't really ready. Which would make more sense if we didn't keep finding evidence that high school GPA is the best predictor of college performance.

Teacher Love

We'll have merit based pay (even though it doesn't work) and we will fire all the sucky ones, because we will magically know how to identify bad teachers. And nobody will stop us, ever, because in this future, "excellence isn’t collectively bargained away." So, no collective bargaining, and firing our way to excellence while using merit pay that doesn't work. This is not a great plan.

Evil DC

Bush next moves on to three steps to getting his lovely future made real. These three ideas are also from his greatest hits list.

Get the power out of DC. It's an awful place that's too far away from where real decisions are made. I suppose it's too much to hope that Jeb would actually say something mean about No Child Left Behind, the big intrusive federal program with his brother's signature on it.

Choice Choicey Choicity Choice

Bush would like to rewrite all the laws so that whichever ones make it hard to pull off school choice would go away. Perhaps he has forgotten that one of the rules that has gotten in the way of voucher programs is that pesky Constitution. Embrace technology. Give the kids the money.

Data, Not Politics

Bush imagines that partisan political bickering is somehow in the way of his education reform, which is in some ways the most divorced-from-reality assertion in an essay crowded with bulletins from alternate universes. The fights over education policy are not partisan. Bush's position is not a political one-- it's a financial one. There is no principle at play here except the principle of "Let's do away with public education so that $600 billion of tax dollars can be freely pursued and scooped up by businessmen and other profiteers." I can believe that Bush sincerely believes that unleashing the power of the free mark will create virtuous pressure to create a better education system, but there simply isn't a single shred of evidence to support him.

Hence the irony of his call for decisions driven by data. Because at every turn, Bush steadfastly ignores data when it disagrees with his preferred policies.

Mix Tape

Other than some basic wrap-up, that's the vision. While it's all familiar, I find it striking to get it all in one quick concert, because that underlines just how radical non-Presidential candidate Bush is. This is not remotely incremental or evolutionary. This is a call to blow up public education in the US and replace it with a profit-making system for corporate amateurs who want to play school with our tax dollars.

Ironically, the radical approach isn't even working. The comments section is filled with people calling Bush one more shill for DC and slamming him for lacking the Scott Walker-sized balls to just outlaw teacher unions. Jeb went to the trouble to bring a crate of TNT to the party and he's still not considered tough enough to sit with the cool kids.

Maybe that's why at the end of the article he's not listed as a very expensive failed Presidential candidate or even as the head of FEE, but simply "former governor of Florida."

I give Bush a little credit for sticking to his education guns. I half-expected that after his black hole of a Presidential campaign collapsed, vaporizing enough money to flat a small nation, Bush would go find something else to do, that education was supposed to be his boost to national status, and that status gone, he would dump education as well. But I guess a guy has to eat, and this is his thing. maybe he even believes a lot of the baloney that he dishes out. maybe he could set up an education consulting firm with Arne Duncan , and they could tour together with the same back-up band, performing medleys of both their greatest hits (which are pretty much in the same key in the same style). But what I rally wish he would do is go take up macrame, or find some hobby playing with something that he actually knows something about. Because after years of playing with education as an issue, it's clear that he still doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

An Educated Person

A while back, blogger Starr Sackstein took a whack a two part question-- has the definition of an educated person changed, and should our education delivery system change with it. My gut reaction, my visceral answer, is "Not really, and not really." But I didn't really have anything to back up my gut, so I've been mulling over this for a while. What were my viscera thinking when they passed along this answer.

Part of my reaction is to some embedded assumptions that Sackstein includes in the question. She contemplates the twelve years of education in various disciplines, and then pivots to larger questions:

Upon successful completion of high school, being "educated" meant a student went to a college of his/her choosing to major in a subject area that would yield a respectable job and potentially go on to higher education to ensure relevancy in his/her career path.  

Students in my generation and earlier generations did this dutifully, if being "educated" was a value they or their families' held.

I'm not sure I buy this narrative, particularly if we go back a few generations. High schools only really caught on during the period between 1910 and 1940 (ish). You can find a variety of numbers, but the basic pattern is evident-- in 1910 only about 20% of US teens were enrolled in high school, and only about half of those finished. The Depression kicked the crap out of high school education, with teachers widely unemployed and many school districts simply shutting down. By 1940, high school attendance was still far, far short of 100%.

And if we're talking about college education, while it's stylistically appropriate for Sackstein to use "his/her," in 1947 barely half a million women went to college. In 1970, roughly a third of all women went to college (and there's no way to count how many matriculated, as many of my peers did, in order to get their MRS degree).

If you want to plow through 115 pages of somewhat depressing charts, check out this statistical breakdown of education from the census bureau (1993). Here's one-- in 1991, of the entire over-25 male population of the country, only 36% had completed four or more years of high school. For women? 41%.

So the idea that graduating form high school and going on to college is just this thing that everybody does and has done for generations just isn't so.

Nor am I comfortable with Sackstein's implication that the goal of education is a job. Even if that is the goal, lots of good solid middle-class jobs in this country required no college education. I graduated from high school in 1975 with plenty of folks who took a job on assembly floor of the local factory and made a fine living doing it. Contrast that with the many college graduates of today who are well-educated and unemployed.

I remain unconvinced that the point of a good education is to get a job. And that brings us back to the main question-- what does it mean to be an educated person, and how has that changed?

I do think that some aspects of Being Educated have changed over the long span. In particular, the scope of education has changed dramatically. If we go back a couple hundred years, we get to a time when an educated man (because, of course, an educated woman was just not a thing) like Thomas Jefferson could know a huge portion of everything there was to know. Even a self-educated man like Ben Franklin could learn most of All There Was To Learn.

That is no longer possible. An educated person can know a little bit about a lot of things, or a lot about a few things, but in the 21st Century, even our most well-educated citizens have giant gaping areas of ignorance, because we are humans limited in time and space and the amount of stuff there is to know is just too huge.

So one thing that has changed for an educated person is How To Retrieve Information You Don't Have. If you don't know something, how do you get that information? I belong to the last generation to be familiar with the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.

Yup-- if you are of a Certain Age, you used to see these rows of ick-green binders in your nightmares. If you are under, say, forty-five years old, you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.





Not only has the process of information retrieval changed, but so has the emphasis. Back in my day, boys and girls, you would just search and search for a single source about your topic. I wrote a paper about Louis Raemaekers and every time i could find anything about him at all, it was a cause for celebration. But right now sitting here I can google him and get 76,300 returns. In the old days, the focus was finding, but today it is filtering. Any dope can find tens of thousands of sources about a topic, but an educated person has to be able to do two things-- ask the right question to narrow down the results, and sort out the useful returns from the internet crap.

Does that qualify as a fundamental change in what it means to be an educated person? I'm not sure. Sackstein asked her PLN to come up with some ideas of what an educated person is, and I disagree with lots of those, too.

Some of them, like Peter Huerta, a senior at WJPS, describe (disapprovingly) a system that is not about producing an educated person, but a trained one. If I teach you to have one approved response to one particular situation, that's not educating you-- that's training you. Are there far too many schools that are more interested in training than education? You betcha-- particularly because education reform has put all of the focus on training and nothing (except lip service) on actual education.

Any system that says that there is only one correct way to respond to X or do Y is not an educational system. It's a training system. Training has its uses, particularly if you are working with dogs or dolphins. But a trained person is not an educated person.

There's also the notion that an educated person is familiar with a particular body of stuff, an approved canon. This is a more classic definition of an educated person, and it has some validity, though you can be familiar with a whole body of great work and still be a dope. An educated person needs the raw materials, but an educated person also needs the mental tools to understand, apply, and draw conclusions about that stuff. This was what Emerson was railing about in his essay Self-Reliance-- that people were too caught up in just reading and parroting old dead guys and not actually thinking for themselves. Emerson's point was that you stand at a particular point in time and space and history that nobody else occupies, and therefor it is up to you in that moment to draw on your personal resources and understanding to decide what you should do.

So, educated person needs some tools, but also the mental muscles to put those tools to use, based on an understanding both of the tools and of the situation.

@pambradley offered "Knowing what questions to ask and how to find the answers" and I think that's definitely part of it.

@misswerner said  "being a righteous digital citizen and being a productive agent of change" and I'm thinking good heavens, no. Maybe the word "productive" is the safety here, but the internet is clogged with evidence that no education whatsoever is required to be a righteous digital warrior trying to create some change.

Problem solver. Independent critical thinker. Learner. Proficient in making sense of new experience. Able to see patterns. All good items for an Educated Person list, but are they new?

I'm not convinced that anything fundamental to being an educated person has really changed. Know a bunch of stuff. Understand how that stuff fits into larger patterns and pictures. Know what you don't know, and know how to find out the things that you need to find out. Have good skills for assimilating new information and experience, placing it all in a sensible context of what you already understand. Be an independent thinker and learner.

I don't see anything on that list that hasn't always been there.

New technology and tools make it possible to hit the items on that list in new and different ways. But the goals in using those tools seems, to me, to be the same goals we always had.

So on to Sackstein's second question-- should we be doing education differently? Again, yes and no. New tools, new techniques, but to the same fundamental end as ever. In fact, I think keeping the eye on the fundamental end part-- it's how we keep the technological tail from wagging the educational dog. The proper response to a structural change, a technological program, is not to ask "Is this new and cool" but "Will this help turn our students into educated people?" That is certainly the question that forms the basis for my rejection of test-driven school, Common Core standards, scripted classrooms, and computer-based "personalized" learning, as well as many other New Improved Ideas that have been pitched over the decades.

Public education has always lived with a huge tension between educating and training, with the division often blatantly sexist, racist and classist. She doesn't need an education; we just need to train her to cook and sew. There's no point on wasting education on Those Children-- just train them to be good manual laborers.

And, frankly, educating people is far harder than training them. In training, there's one correct answer and you're right or you're wrong. Education is about seeing all the possibilities. Training is about forcing students to look at just one. To the extent that we confuse training with education, we do need to change the education system into, well, an education system. But that's not a new thing-- we've needed to do that all along.

Such a Short Time

I started the day yesterday playing with the town band that I belong to. We play for folks running a local half-marathon that's held in memory of a local state policeman who was killed a few years ago responding to a domestic violence call. A man had finally taken his spousal abuse one step further and killed the woman. When the trooper responded to the call, he was shot down as he approached the house. Now, every year there's a race held in his memory. As the runners come close to the turn around point, we're there playing an assortment of marches and polkas. It's not a lot, but it adds a little something to the event.

Later in the day, my wife and I attended the wedding of a pair of close friends. The ceremony was at a chapel in the woods, where the bride's parents had said their own vows thirty years ago. As with the best weddings, there was a wide assortment of friends and family there, sharing and eating and being together to celebrate the joining together of two lives. The whole business was held on several acres of country campground, next to a creek, with several ponds and surrounded all around with trees, forest, hills. The couple came together through acting in local theater, so those of us who are their theater friends have known them since the days they first became a couple, watched them do that dance.

It's the kind of day that gives you a chance to just marvel at the web of connections that tie people together, the way people come together and apart, share experience both through circumstance and by choice. To look around and marvel at the people who are there, and the people who aren't.

My son, his fiance, and their dog had come up. They spent some time visiting with his mother, who was in town visiting my ex-father-in-law, who is feeling his age these days. He sent word to me that I should slow down and work less. I was up late spending some time with son, fiance and dog, and then, because I am apparently no longer able to sleep in ever, I was up at the usual time this morning.

Ordinarily I would spend the time writing, but the house was full of people, including two dogs who are still negotiating their relationship, so I took my dog (who wakes up the instant I set foot on the steps, and took him on a walk down through the back yard and a block or so upriver to a park, where we just sat. I have bragged about where i live before, and I will do so again, now, with pictures.

 Walking down to the river; this is my backyard

 Heading upriver

 Hanging out in the park

Walking back home









We're close to the center of town, so as I sat on the bench, I could hear the courthouse strike the hour and hear church carillons play hymns as services started. I look at the water, looking for the places where islands and sand bars have grown or shrunk since last year, because I kayak on these waters along the same followed by Native Americans hundreds of years ago. Where I'm sitting is close to where both the French and the British built forts to support their colonial ambitions; as I tell my students, the very peaceful and safe place that we now occupy was once a sort of war zone, a dangerous place to live, in fact a place where many people died violent, ugly deaths. That was long ago. Now it's just grass. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, and the dog was glad for some quiet.

I was thinking about the previous day's events, about how my own family has taken on a widely different configuration from what I once imagined it would, and took out my phone to look at pictures from the wedding.

It was at that point that I began to learn about the events of Orlando last night, about the terrible toll in human life taken by one screwed-up sonofabitch with a single powerful tool aimed at people who just wanted to enjoy their own safe place, people for whom, because of their status in our society, safe places are too few and too far between. Like most Americans, I was immediately sad about the events and weary about the inevitable arc of the day-- some people would say moving things, some would say stupid things, and some would be at a loss for words. At this point, the Facebook postings are rote-- the Onion article, the Fred Rogers quote, the offers of prayer, the angry reminders that prayer should be a spark for actual action, not a substitute for it. The story will dominate the news cycle until our goldfish attention spans move on.

But the words that most struck me today were those of the mother, Christine Leinonen, waiting for news of her son. "We’re on this Earth for such a short time," she said. "Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence." Reminiscent of Vonnegut's, "God damn it, you've got to be kind.” But really more to the point.

The biggest challenge, the greatest puzzle, the hugest task we each face in our own particular lives is to solve the mystery of how to be fully human in this world, how to be fully ourselves. It is a damned big challenge, like trying to juggle a group of fretful lions while riding a unicycle atop the surface of a planet that keeps shifting and drifting and tilting beneath our wheel, and surrounded by others trying to master the same feat-- some happy about it, and some deeply angry. 

Our responses as humans to that challenge have been many and varied. Some believe they sense a deeper intelligence, a gentler or angrier hand behind all of the struggle. Some think we're all teammates trying to meet the challenge together, while others believe it's a contest, a competition that only some will win. And when some hit the ground, hard, it runs across the surface with a tilt and shake that we all feel.

How to be fully human in the world, fully ourselves, is the hugest puzzle and we have such a short time to solve it, even in part. I've had fifty-nine years to work on it, and I've wasted a lot of that being a fool. But I feel pretty certain of a few things:

1) One of our jobs in this world is to look out for each other.
2) Anyone who says the solution is simple is either a fool or they're trying to sell you something.
3) Education is about giving young humans the tools to find their own answer to the puzzle, which makes it among the most important, most complicated business on earth. 

This is what is behind pretty much everything I've ever had to say on this space. In a world where our most enduring and moving and beautiful moments are the ones where we celebrate how we are connected, how we come together to draw strength from each other as we find our way in the world, and where the most horrifying and terrible moments come out of the times when we fail to make those connections and fail to support each other in the most fundamental ways-- in that world, do not tell me that the most important thing I can do for a student is to help him or her get a better score on a crappy reading test. This is the note of incredulity that I often feel compelled to strike-- you can't be thinking about anything important when you say that, because if you were focused on Main Thing, you would know how ridiculous you just sounded.

It is so easy to lose the thread, to be so focused on how our left foot is resting on the pedal of the unicycle, that we lose the bigger picture, the Main Thing. We get so distracted by such petty shit. We take so many things Very Seriously that just don't deserve it. And we all need to take a moment to regain our focus. Walk your dog. Hug your kid. Feel what you have to feel. Instead of trying to make someone smaller, try to make someone bigger, in touch with their own strength and best nature. That's part of looking out for each other-- helping each other remember the Main Thing, focus on the Important Stuff, help each other be more fully human, more fully ourselves in the world.

Because we will only be in the world for such a short time-- some of us much too short, and with too little warning of the end of our days. We are here such a short time-- not enough time to get it perfect, not for most of us, but more than enough time to always get it better. We can do better than this. 

Such a short time. Each day has to count.

The Economist Gets Everything Wrong

One of the peculiar side features of the reformster movement has been the elevation of economists to expert status on the subject of education. This makes precisely as much sense as the White House calling me to hear my advice on How To Fix the Economy, and yet it keeps happening-- almost as if reformsters are more interested in the economic benefits of ed reform than any educational ones.

So when The Economist (the magazine) decides to explain how to get Great Teachers, we can rest assured that we'll be treated to an inexpert amateur-hour collection of thoughts about teaching that are just as valid and accurate as Justin Bieber's thoughts on third world monetary policy. And the magazine does not disappoint.

"Teaching the Teachers" apparently cobbles together the work of several amateur, but offers no specific writing credit (or discredit).

It starts with an anecdote, as we watch Jimmy Cavanaugh working a classroom. Cavanaugh "seems like a born teacher. He is warm but firm. His voice is strong. Correct answers make him smile." But this isn't the result of his "pep."

Mr Cavanagh is the product of a new way of training teachers. Rather than spending their time musing on the meaning of education, he and his peers have been drilled in the craft of the classroom. Their dozens of honed techniques cover everything from discipline to making sure all children are thinking hard. Not a second is wasted. North Star teachers may seem naturals. They are anything but.

Just two paragraphs in, and we have already established a high level of dumb. We have a false dichotomy-- proto-teachers can study the philosophy and principles of education, or they can study the craft. But not both? And there isn't a clear and necessary connection between, on the one hand, knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it and, on the other hand, actually doing it? And understanding what you're doing and why can be dismissed as "musing"? And traditionally trained teachers apparently do waste all sorts of seconds? And nobody ever thought of teaching teachers the craft thing before? Nobody learns classroom discipline in teacher school? And please-- do show me the technique for making sure that all students ar thinking hard. Telepathy?

But what, you may ask, is the source of this brilliant new method of teaching teachers?

Why, it's the Relay Graduate School of Education-- a teacher farm system set up by three charter school operators with barely a couple of years of actual teacher experience or training between the three of them. But the economist is, like my chocolate lab waiting to chase a tennis ball, just about to pee itself with excitement.

Along with similar institutions around the world, Relay is applying lessons from cognitive science, medical education and sports training to the business of supplying better teachers. Like doctors on the wards of teaching hospitals, its students often train at excellent institutions, learning from experienced high-calibre peers. Their technique is calibrated, practised, coached and relentlessly assessed like that of a top-flight athlete. 

Which "similar institutions" around the world? Where else can we find teachers being "trained" by amateurs in the education field? Like doctors in a teaching hospital? No, no no, no no no NO no no. Relay is like a bunch of people who always liked watching ER, so they figure they'll just start training brain surgeons in their garage because really, how hard can it be and besides, the whole medical field is clogged up with so-called experts who think they're just sooooo smart and we know we could do surgery just as well as they can without all their stupid rules and regulations and "training." Plus, we have some rich powerful friends who will cover our backs while we launch this con. That is the kind of doctors in teaching hospitals that Relay GSE resembles. "Experienced high-calibre peers" my ass.

But that is to set up the central baloney-fed fake conceit of this article-- that teaching is not a natural born gift, but a finely honed craft. There is no such thing as a natural-born teacher-- any person can become an awesome teacher just through careful craft training.

Teaching Is Super-Important

Because this is The Economist, we mean that teaching is super-important in an economic sense, and sure enough, here come our old buddies Eric Hanushek and Thomas Kane to argue that if Chris has an awesome teacher at age 6, Chris will be wealthy at age 66. I've addressed their arguments before, and if you really want to get into, read a real expert like Audrey Amrein-Beardsley at her blog Vamboozled. But to grossly simplify Hanushek and Kane's arguments for laypeople, there are basically two points that their work rests on.

1) People's show size correlates with their height. Therefor, if we want children to grow taller, we should make them wear big shoes.

2) Chris grew five inches between age 13 and age 18. Therefor we can conclude that Chris will be about ten feet tall by age 66.

So, anyway, who is it that says that great teachers are born, not made. The authors point to popular culture and examples like Professor McGonagall. Also, some unnamed survey found that 70% of great teachers were born, not made. Of course, if the authors wanted to really make their point, it would help if they showed this assumption was held by people who are actually involved in preparing and educating teachers. After all, many folks may believe that economists are just nerdy guys hunched over abacuses (abucci?), but as long as actual trainers of economists don't think so, it doesn't really matter, does it?

However, the authors are on the verge of making a useful point, because one influential group that does believe in the Myth of the Hero Teacher is reformsters themselves, who have been insisting for years that god teacher or bad teacher are permanent solid state conditions, and as the article here says, "Such a belief makes finding a good teacher like panning for gold: get rid of all those that don’t cut it; keep the shiny ones." The Myth of the Hero Teacher has, in fact, been a damaging feature of reformsterism, and if the Economist is about to call shenanigans on it, I might--

Well, no. The writers almost denounce trying to fire your way to excellence, but then-- "There is a good deal of sense in this. In cities such as Washington, DC, performance-related pay and (more important) dismissing the worst teachers have boosted test scores."

After some hemming and hawing, we tack back to our original point, now stated in a somewhat more direct manner:

Education-policy wonks have neglected what one of them once called the “black box of the production process” and others might call “the classroom”. Open that black box, and two important truths pop out. A fair chunk of what teachers (and others) believe about teaching is wrong. And ways of teaching better—often much better—can be learned. Grit can become gold.

Got that? Most of what teachers believe about teaching is wrong. Of course, most teachers actually believe that ways of teaching better can be learned. So we have a bit of a paradox here. Or would, except that the Economist clearly believe that teachers are unaware that we can learn more about teaching better. Makes me wonder what they think we do throughout our careers. Just sit and shrug? Pray to fairy godmothers for more magical teaching skills? Imagine that our first year we are teaching as well as we ever will? Just add that to the long list of things that The Economist does not know and gets dreadfully wrong about teaching.

So, How Do I Teach Gooder?? (Please Tell Poor Dopey Me)

Are we going to look at all the research ever on good teaching? Of course not-- just one guy will do. Here comes Rob Coe of Durham University (England) who made himself a report in 2014. Coe went to school to become a math teacher, and then went straight on from those studies to becoming an education professor. He "discovered" that some techniques taught in ed schools don't work ("work" as always appears to mean "raise scores on a narrow math and reading test"), and he discovered six factors involved in Being an Awesome Teacher

1) Motive
2) Getting on well with peers
3) Use time well
4) Foster good behavior, have high expectations
5) High quality instruction
6) Content knowledge

Excuse me a moment. I just smacked my forehead so hard that my eyeballs flew out onto my keyboard. But wait-- just in case you didn't get the last two, The Economist kindly provides a quote from Singapore super-teacher Charles Chew: “I don’t teach physics; I teach my pupils how to learn physics.”

Good lord. This story was supposedly reported from New York, Newark, and Boston, and I have to assume that the reporters could not find an actual real live traditionally trained teacher in any of those cities. How else can you explain presenting six "revelations" about teaching that are known to every single person who ever took an education class, and then wrapping it up by going all the way for a Singaporean version of  a amazingly cliche so trite that I have an actual man purse from umpteen Teacher Appreciation Days at my small, rural school that says on the side "We teach students," because I worked for a man who asked in every job interview "What do you teach?" where the incorrect answer was "math" or "science" and the correct answer was "I teach students." Honestly-- Columbus claiming to have "discovered" a  new world was not a clueless as these folks "discovering" the secrets of good teaching or a arrogant as them thinking that teachers did not already know all of this.

But the article will continue in that same vein:

Teachers like Mr Chew ask probing questions of all students. They assign short writing tasks that get children thinking and allow teachers to check for progress. Their classes are planned—with a clear sense of the goal and how to reach it—and teacher-led but interactive. They anticipate errors, such as the tendency to mix up remainders and decimals. They space out and vary ways in which children practise things, cognitive science having shown that this aids long-term retention.

Probing questions??!! Short writing assignments??!!!! The only new idea in this whole paragraph occurred in the split second that I thought teachers like Chew occasionally spaced out.

Hey-- let's hold up China, the least innovative country on the planet, as an example of great strides forward in the field of soul-crushing test prep. For the debunking of this baloney I recommend Yong Zhao's book about China, or this great presentation from the 2015 NPE conference.

Oh, and here's David Steiner of Johns Hopkins saying that teacher education programs are really, really easy, and TE chimes in to say that ed majors have an easier time than college athletes. Let's throw in a quote from a grad of Sposato GSE,(part of the Match charter empire in Boston, so like Relay, not an actual graduate school) that she wasn't ready for a classroom.

And here's the most bizarre quote of the whole piece. After hearing that school teacher ed programs don't provide the level of clinical practice that they should, Thomas Kane reappears to note that beginning teachers are under-prepared. Skills that are now "haphazardly" provided could be more systematically imparted, says the article, and Kane backs that assertion up by saying (and I swear I am not making this up):

Surgeons start on cadavers, not on live patients.

Good Lord in heaven, what does that even mean? Student teachers practicing on dead students? If not, what would the classroom equivalent of a cadaver be, exactly. I'm not just being a snarky asshat here-- this is central to one of the problems that the article is trying to address, which is that somewhere along the way proto-teachers have to get practice, but nobody really wants their own personal young humans to be used as educational lab rats. So the article uses Kane to underline a real issue which they don't address except to suggest repeatedly that Relay GSE (and Sposato) knows the secret.


But if we're going to talk about long-known, well-established teaching techniques being marketed like they're new and amazing, you know who has to be lurking further down this page. And sure enough, here he is, Doug "Teach Like a Plagiarist Champion" Lemov, who is said to be an influence on these fake graduate schools for fake teacher training. Here's a good recent piece for debunking Lemov, who is making a fine career out of repackaging Things Teachers Already Knew and Things That Are Crap.

The article takes a side trip to the Sposato-Match Charter "partnership" which also seems like a great way to seriously lower your charter school personnel costs by using trainees to carry some of your workload while training pseudo-teachers who are prepped to teach in only one school-- yours.

Oh, and the parade of reformsters just continues. Here's TNTP (TFA's older counterpart and eternal purveyors of faux research papers), presented as experts in recruiting teachers (or at least people who would like to try their hand at teaching for a year or two) and talking about how teachers stop getting better after a couple of years, probably because the majority of teachers just don't understand how much they suck. Seriously, that's the point here. The vast majority of teachers grossly over-estimate how non-sucky they are. Of course, as always, I'll remind you that "suck" here means "has students who don't get great scores on a narrow bad math and reading test," because it's possible that all these deluded teachers are operating under the misapprehension that their job is bigger than test prep.

Parade still not over. Here's Roland Fryer, economist-cum-professor and ed expert who has argued for a two-tiered ed system and more effective punishment of teachers. And let's invoke Singapore and Shanghai some more, though not to point out that you can be a much better teacher if the government only lets the best students into your classroom.

Also, Test-Driven Merit Pay

Invoking Fryer again, the writers point out that teachers ought to be paid based on whether or not they can raise test scores, and that in fact Relay and Sposato won't let somehow have their fake teacher credential until they have demonstrated effective test prep. Do you get the feeling that somewhere after those six traits of great teaching back at the top, we just sort of slid sideways, like badly anchored fondant on a busted birthday cake? That somewhere in this article we stopped pretending that teaching was a big profession with a huge skill set and deeply challenging craft, just threw up our hands and said, "Well, actually, we just need some people who can do test prep with these kids and get those scores up. Screw the rest of it."

But we do have some concerns about programs like Relay.

Mr Steiner notes, though, that it is not yet clear whether these new teachers are “school-proof”: effective in schools that lack the intense culture of feedback and practice of places like Match. 

In other words, they don't know if their faux teachers can function in the real world, or only in the carefully controlled charter school bubble. The writers note that schools are really hostile to innovation; it's not clear if that means that they are hostile to amateur asshats who think they have invented teaching and who are proud to mansplain to the rest of us that they have discovered the wheel. Still, their day could come:

If the new approaches can be made to work at scale, that should change.

Yup. And if pigs had wings, they might be able to fly out of my butt. If roses can grow in carefully controlled hothouses, we should be able to plant rosebushes in Antarctica.


There's a lot to talk about, and I suppose we could get into deeper layers of pedagogy and practice, but when reading articles like this that breathlessly report insights that aren't insights and innovations that aren't innovations, all conveyed by people who are not teaching professionals-- well, put it all together and it's hard to see anything more complex than just a bunch of people with power and money and access who don't really know what the hell they're talking about. All of that reported by a magazine that appears to be uncritically passing along press releases (there's not a single solitary dissenting voice anywhere in this article). But hey-- The Economist and its army of anonymous scribes are welcome to give me a call at any time to talk to me about my ideas on how to fix the Greek economic crisis and how to solve the economic problems of Detroit.

ICYMI: Mega-edu-bloggo-reading

I have a ton of stuff for you this week. Enjoy.

Former SAT Official Blows the Whistle 

Yeah, you probably caught this story this week, but since every single person in the world should see it, I'll put it here just in case. Here's Mercedes Schneider's look at the former College Board official who is blowing the whistle on just how big a sham the new SAT is. 

High Standard

A great, simple, direct statement about what's wrong with the reading standard that some states like New York have chosen to build ELA around.

When Success Leads To Failure

In the Atlantic, Jessica Lahey (the Gift of Failure writer) talks about the negative effects of the pressure to succeed.

Equality of Opportunity

You may or may not agree with this piece, but you'll be better for figuring out why you do or don't. A hard look at why equality of opportunity may not be a good idea for anybody.

When the Neighborhood Gentrifies and the School Doesn't

From Slate and Jessica Huseman, a look at what happened in one gentrified Portland neighborhood that pushed out the residents, but left the school.

Only 2% of Teachers Are Black and Male: Here's How We Might Fix That

One of the largest problems in education today-- a teaching pool that is mostly white and female. Here's what they're doing in Pittsburgh to try to address that issue.

Mr. Lemov Meet Madeline Hunter and Many Others Who Discovered the Same Things and Gave Credit Where Credit Was Due

Well, the title doesn't leave much to wonder about. If you are tired of Mr. Teach Like a Champion, here's a great explanation of why you are right to be annoyed.

The Horror of Charter School Finance

One more explanation of how charter schools are gutting public education

Third Way in Education Not the Answer

One more writer figures out that the Third Way is just the same old way-- the way private interests try to raid the piles of money tied up in public ed


Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City

You probably saw this already-- folks on all sides of the ed debates were passing it around this week. Brings some of the issues in education right down to the human level.

CPS Newly Posted Job Executive Director of Personalized Learning Comes with a Dire Warning

Looks like Chicago is next to jump on the personalized- competency based education bandwagon. That's terrible news for Chicago.

Pat Kelly & Thought Leadering

Thanks to reader Robert D. Skeels. This is just too fun not to pass along.

PA: New Face for Old Pearson Scam

If you are in Pennsylvania, you may have been seeing advertising for Commonwealth Charter Academy. CCA avoids calling itself a cyber-anything, but it is in fact one more cyber charter littering the Pennsylvania landscape. As with many schools pushing the tech solution to education issues, it leans heavily on "personalized learning" and markets itself as a family approach. That seems to be aimed at the idea of cyber-school as a source of family togetherness and not the time-honored practice of having parents complete their children's cyber-homework.

CCA may not be a familiar name because it is a new name. It previously marketed itself as Commonwealth Connections Academy. And while its press release about the name change says that the charter is "a fully independent public cyber charter school governed by a Pennsylvania-based board of directors," that's not quite right. Connections Academy is the cyber school chain owned by Pearson.

The superintendent CEO of CCA is Dr. Maurice Flurie. Flurie has a nice solid PA background, holding degrees from Duquesne, Lock Haven, Shippensburg and-- well, okay-- his original Bachelor's Degree was from the Tennessee Technological University, and it was in Health/Physical Education. He was an Asst to the Superintendent in Lower Dauphin before moving over to Connections. And he is still (since 2000) an adjunct professor at Wilkes University, a PA university that does big business in on-line classes. The "Dr." comes from his Ed. D in Educational Leadership.

Flurie has been among the cyber-school voices whining about Governor Tom Wolf's proposals to end the PA cyber-gravy train (our cybers are paid based on the cost-per-pupil of the sending district and not on what the actual cyber-cost; our cybers have zero oversight and answer to nobody). He has written in support of Wolf's proposed office of Charter and Cyber Schools, an attractive idea for charters because it still keeps them separate from the rules, regulations, and oversight of all other Pennsylvania schools.

All of this might factor into what Flurie calls "the evolution of the public cyber charter school over the past 13 years." Of course, that evolution also includes the 2015 CREDO study showing that cybers are an absolute educational disaster, and moves since then for the rest of the charter industry to distance itself from their embarrassingly incompetent siblings.

But Connections is/was not just any old cyber charter chain. In 2011, the investor group that previously owned the chain sold it to Pearson. Yes, that Pearson. And here's another fun fact. Back in those heady days of cyber-charter profit growth, Mickey Revenaugh, a lobbyist for Connections Academy, was the corporate chair of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

It's understandable that cyber charters would attract big players, particularly in states like PA. It's easier than painting money. You accept Chris as a student. If Chris's sending district works out to $10K per student, you get $10K (you can bump that up if you give Chris a diagnostic test showing that Chris has some sort of mild mild special need). That $10K is yours, and every cent that you don't spend on educating Chris goes in your pocket. And since cyber charters are "free" to the students and their parents, there are no market pressures to lower your fee. Give Chris a "free" $400 computer and the attention of a $40K teacher who's carrying a 200-student workload, and you are now making a ton of money. And the state of PA is not going to ask to see your books. Ka-ching.

So when you see the Commonwealth Charter Academy ads, just remember-- it's your old friends at Pearson (Always Earning), operating out of Baltimore and hoping to make some money while working on some cyber-lab rats for their personalized learning systems.