Eli Broad's Bloodless Coup

I don't think there's ever been anything like it.

Well, maybe Teapot Dome, kind of. Back in the early 1920s, the feds had special oil reserves set aside for the Navy. One was near Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and during the administration of Warren G. Harding, some folks engineered the oil reserves at Teapot Dome being handed off to the department of the interior. But since Secretary Albert Bacon Fall had been fully bought by Sinclair Oil, he quickly and quietly turned over what was supposed to be a public national resource to a private company in a secret-ish no-bid process that let the oil go for so little money that it could hardly be called selling it.

Imagine. There was a time when that sort of thing, with public officials bought and corrupted by private interests giving away public resources, was actually shocking.

But now it's 2016, and if Eli Broad wants to just go ahead and take over a public school system, he can just go ahead and do it in plain sight.

This, of course, is not new. Broad long ago decided that education would be better run by people with a business background, not an education one, and so he set up Broad Academy, a-- school? program? thingy?-- that finds the Right People, puts them through some edu-business training, and declares that they are fit to be superintendents because Eli Broad says they are. It is an amazing piece of ballsiness, as if I set up an Officer's Training School in my back yard and started issuing certificates declaring my graduates were First Lieutenants in the US Army. Well, it would be like that if I were really, really rich and well-connected and managed to convince the US Army to let my trained "officers" actually take command. But this is the guy who literally wrote the book about how to shut down a public school system and replace it with privately operated charters.

Broadies have been put in place in districts all around the country. And what we saw in Kansas City, when Broad picked up the phone and told John Covington that he was going to Detroit, is that the Broadies do not work for their local district-- they work for Eli Broad.

But more than spreading his own shadow education system across the country, Broad seems to be interested in simply taking over the Los Angeles school system.

Installing Broadie John Deasy as superintendent seemed like a great step forward, but Deasy just wasn't very good at the job, and his mis-steps and failure and departure became a national news story, as well as helping to fuel the ouster of reformsters from the board.

So Broad has regrouped with a new plan. Last summer, his foundation announced a plan to dramatically increase the number of charter schools in LA and commandeer half of the students in Los Angeles. To help push that, he cobbled together a group named Great Public Schools Now, a collection of reformsters including many not even from LA who just wanted to go ahead and direct education policy in LA, even if nobody ever elected them to do so.

The LAUSD school board was not impressed, and voted 7-0 to oppose the Broad takeover plan. But GPSN was undeterred and this week released the new, improved version of their plan. What's changed? The Broad front group is willing to grab every conceivable type of school. They want to "support" not just charters, but public schools, magnet schools, any kind of school they can get their hands on. The new plan is notable for a complete lack of details, but they are targeting ten particular neighborhoods in LA-- all poor, of course. Announcing that you wanted to take over the schools in wealthy neighborhoods would get you too much pushback from people who actually matter.

As I said-- I'm not sure we've ever seen anything like it. A group of private citizens (most with corporate ties) announce that they are now a board overseeing the use of a major public resource. Not because they were elected to or because they were asked to, but because they want to.

I suppose it's a little like a hostile business takeover, where one company uses superior power and wealth to conquer and absorb another company's assets. But we're talking about a public resource, not a private asset, so it's not quite analogous. Setting up shop in Yosemite and declaring yourself the governor of a new fifty-first state? Maybe walking onto an army base and saying, "I am now the general in charge of this base and these troops. Yes, I have a commission-- I signed it myself."

Broad is attempting a modern Teapot Dome, a combination landgrab, resource theft, and bloodless coup. It is astonishing in its audacious disregard for the public, the poor, elected officials, the rule of law, and the entire institution of democracy, and Broad is not even trying to be sneaky, which may be part of his secret-- when you see somebody breaking into a car in broad daylight on a crowded street, you assume that it must be his car because otherwise why would he break into it right in front of God and everybody?

This is reformsterism at its baldest and worst, disregarding democratic process and treating the non-wealthy and non-white as fodder for grabbing power and money, with barely a vague educational justification in sight. Just "I want to see things done a particular way, and all these various people and organizations are obstacles, so I'm going to clear my path because I want to and I'm rich and I can." Good luck to the folks in LA.

Houston Slams VAM (Plus: All About SAS)

As a Pennsylvanian teacher, I am paying particular attention to the news from Houston, where VAM just suffered another well-deserved loss. I'll get to that in a second, but let me set the stage and tell you a little story of how we arrived here.

Houston and Reformsters

The Houston Independent School District has always been out in front of education reformsterism. It was Houston where Superintendent Rod Paige performed the "Texas Miracle" of  raising test scores even for non-wealthy, non-white students. The Texas Miracle became part of the justification for the test-driven baloney of No Child Left Behind, and Rod Paige was whisked to Washington to employ his miracle-inducing powers as George Bush's Secretary of Education.

Only, there was no Texas Miracle. Houston was not an example of how test-centered accountability could create excellence; instead, it was an example of Campbell's Law, of how using bad measure as proxy for a complex social behavior just leads to increasing corruption (aka gaming, spinning and cheating) of that measure. Houston schools had pushed low-scoring students out the door, or held them back a year and then leapfrogged them over the testing grade.

Fast forward a few years, and we find HISD signing on with SAS to use their nifty Value-Added instrument called EVAAS.

The SAS Story

SAS has been in the analytics for a while ("Giving you the power to know since 1976"). Founder James H. Goodnight was born in 1943 in North Carolina. He earned a Masters in statistics; that combined with some programming background landed him a job with a company that built communication stations for the Apollo program. It was also, apparently, a really crappy company with something like a 50% turnover rate. That apparently stuck with him.

He next went to work as a professor at North Carolina State University, where he and some other faculty created Statistical Analysis Software for analyzing agricultural data, a project funded mainly by the USDA. Once the first SAS was done and had acquired 100 customers, Goodnight et al left academia and started the company. William Sanders, often credited as the developer of EVAAS (which sometimes trades its first letter for the state of adoption, so TVAAS in Tennessee, PVAAS in Pennsylvania) was also a North Carolina University researcher, who was also employed by SAS. While SAS works with analytics for many fields, EVAAS is their prize value-added education product.

Goodnight has done okay. The man owns two thirds of the company and is now worth $8.5 billion-with-a-B. But give him credit, apparently remembering his first crappy job, Goodnight has made SAS one of the world's best places to work--  in fact, it is SAS that influenced the more famously fun-to-work culture of Google.

Now, I know I'm already digressing, but the irony here is too rich to avoid. SAS has established its great workplace reputation by focusing on four core leadership values:

* Value People Above All Else
* To Give Is To Get
* Trust Above All Things
* Ensure Employees Understand the Significance of Their Work

As I said-- fraught with irony. Because one of SAS's many famous products is now regularly used to help create workplaces that are hostile to all of these core ideas. Value people? No, with value-added, what we literally value is data and test scores. Not people at all. The give-get thing? That is rejected by reformsters who explicitly argue that we must look only at outcomes (what we get) and ignore inputs (what we give). The whole basis for using VAM systems is that teachers and schools cannot be trusted to tell the truth about how students are learning and how teachers are teaching. And the use of VAM attempts to strip teaching of all significance except the job of getting students to score better on standardized tests.

Somehow Goodnight has built a little world where people live and work among dancing rainbows and fluffy fairy dust clouds, and they spend their days manufacturing big black rainclouds to send out into the rest of the world.

Back To Houston

No school system in the country embraced VAM with more ardent fervor than the Houston district (largest district in Texas and among the top ten largest in the US). In 2007, the district created a teacher evaluation program called Accelerating Student Progress: Increasing Results and Expectations (ASPIRE)and it contracted with SAS to provide the VAMmy sauce in which this program was to be soaked. By 2007, SAS was not the only company milking this particular market, but they were arguably the most wide-spread and most successful. Their EVAAS system must have seemed like just the thing for HISD.

You can read the whole sad story in painful detail in this piece of serious research published in the Education Policy Analysis Archives in 2012 by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and Clarin Collins (both of Arizona State University). As Gene Glass notes, this was not the first time that HISD had tried implementing some sort of test-based incentive pay for teachers-- Glass has conducted even earlier research looking at such systems, again paying special attention to Houston. Way back in the 1980s Glass had delineated the problems inherent in teacher evaluation systems based on student scores. Those include that such a system "elevates tests themselves to the level of curriculum goals, obscuring the distinction between learning and performing on tests" as well as being a system that was developed mainly to show the public that leaders are taking education real serious and holding high standards.

As Amrein-Beardsley and Collins showed (and they showed this, mind you, not just with EVAAS in general, but with Houston in particular), the value-added scores were only slightly less random than rolling ten-sided dice in a washing machine mounted on the back of a agitated elephant. The EVAAS scores proved to be inconsistent and unpredictable. Knowing a teacher's score from last year did not give you the lightest hint of what this year's score might be. And that paper was published in 2012.

Houston Gets Antsy

Using EVAAS for incentive/merit/bonus was old news in Texas when in 2010, HISD decided to use it for firing purposes. The board voted 7-0 to take that plunge, with 1,000 angry teachers in the room. The Texas Tribune noted that EVAAS was a proprietary mystery and nobody could or would say how it worked. But the HISD teachers learned a hard lesson in political activity-- five of the board members who voted to VAM them had been opposed by the union, although two of the five had not even had opponents on the ballot.

In 2011, there was further debate about the use of VAM scores in formal evaluations, with HISD proposing a whopping 50% of teacher eval to be vammified. The debate was still chock full of VAM-loving baloney:

"Reasonable people can disagree on how much high stakes should be placed on the information," said Rob Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nope. Reasonable people wouldn't use VAM information to decide much of anything.

But the push back would come, even if it took a few years. A group of HISD teachers, with the support of their union, is taking HISD to court over their scores. Along with Sheri Lederman's successful (though very specific) lawsuit against VAM in NY, this could mark a front along which value-added baloney may be successfully pushed back.

But There's Another Reason VAM Is In Trouble

EVAAS is in trouble in Houston for the simplest of reasons-- it doesn't work.

Last week, when it was time to renew the EVAAS contract (and thereby renew the multi-million dollar federal grant that comes with it), Amrein-Beardsley reports part of the conversation went like this:

“If not now, then when?” the board member asked. “I remember talking about this last year, and the year before. We all agree that it needs to be changed, but we just keep doing the same thing.” A member of the community said to the board: “VAM hasn’t moved the needle. It hasn’t done what you need it to do. But it has been very expensive to this district.” He then listed the other things on which HISD could spend (and could have spent) its annual $680K EVAAS estimate costs.

HISD has been doing the EVAAS thing for years, and it hasn't made a dent in the all-important test scores.

And so, the HISD vote ended in a tie, which means the EVAAS was not renewed, which means SAS is out half a million in revenue and the district will have to come up with some new way to evaluate teachers.

Why Do I Care?

As mentioned earlier, EVAAS is TVAAS in Tennessee and PVAAS in Pennsylvania, where it is a senseless piece of junk. It makes SAS a lot of money, but it does not provide anything of use for classroom teachers (nor can it be explained in any satisfactory manner). It should go away, and it should go away today.

Don't ask me "Well, what should we do instead." First of all, this post is already too long. Second of all, when you object to someone trying to treat your sprained ankle by hitting you in the head with a hammer, they don't get to say, "Well, I'm going to keep doing this till you come up with a better idea." If you want to propose something as a treatment, the burden of proof is on you and your particular brand of snake oil-- not on your patient.

EVAAS does not help educate students, does not help teachers improve in their craft, does not help taxpayers and administrators determine who's doing a good job. All it does is help James Goodnight remain one of the richest guys in America.

PA: School Funding Emerges from Time Warp

Pennsylvania now has a formula for distributing education dollars to school districts.

You will notice that I didn't say "new formula." That's because, contrary to what rational human beings might assume, Pennsylvania hasn't had a formula for decades. Well, that's not exactly true. The formula has been Y times some-percent-usually-less-than-two of Y, with Y equalling "whatever you got last year." And this process, called "hold harmless" in PA, has been in place since around 1991. We fiddled with it a bit from 2008-2010, but it's only sort of an oversimplification to say that the foundation of our funding system has been 1991 enrollment figures.

That means if your enrollment has been increasing, your state funding has not increased to match it. Of course, it also means if enrollment has been dropping, your state funding hasn't dropped with it.

And it needs to be noted that since Pennsylvania ranks 44th in the percentage of state funding for public ed (36% overall), state funding is not critical for all districts. Districts that are able simply make up that difference locally. Districts that are not able just become increasingly poor and financially distressed. On top of that, add a mismanaged pension system that now has huge balloon payments come due, a charter reimbursement system that rips the guts out of public school funding, and an unregulated charter system that lets those charter claws reach the guts of even small rural districts. Also, a few years ago we totally used that stimulus money to replace the regular education budget funds, which meant that the end of stimulus funds left a huge hole in school funding. Oh, and last year when we couldn't settle a budget for nine months (ten, really, by the time we were done with the details)-- that didn't exactly help, either. Fun fact: back in 1971, the state was providing about 54% of public school funding. We've been in free fall ever since.

The effect is that the 36% figure is grossly misleading. A poor district like Reading gets 72% of its funding from the state; a rich district like New Hope-Solebury gets about 15%. That's not because Reading is getting so much more state money; that's because Reading is only able to kick in a small amount of local money.

The effect is also that we have major school finance crises in PA. This is how you get a district where teachers work for free or a district that considers closing down all its high schools or a district that is handed over to a bunch of political appointees to run.

At any rate, Harrisburg has now developed a formula. It came up with the formula by surveying eighty public school districts and fourteen charters (because "Disproportionate Representation of and Care for Charters" is our middle name), then running the data through a bunch of politicians. It factors in poverty in a couple of ways, as well as English Language Learners, as well as actual enrollment numbers and the strength of the local tax base. Here's a graphic for more detail.

The legislature specifically avoided the question "How much money would it take to get School District X up to proficiency levels?" for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that everyone in Harrisburg knows the answer is "More than the legislature wants to spend." Also, our GOP-run legislature would rather eat ground glass soaked in kerosene and sprinkled over raw ground badger spleens than raise taxes.







The result of the formula is a sort of student number, measuring the district need in Regular Student Units. So, for instance (and I'm just making up numbers here) a single student who is an English language learner in a very poor district with concentrated poverty and no tax base might end up counting as four or five RSUs. The formula doesn't measure individual students, but you get the idea. 1,000 actual live students might be counted by the formula as 3,500 RSUs. The state is going to divide the money up by number of students-- but some students count more than other. So rather than divide the pie up by number of actual students, the state will award support ton districts based on their RSU number.

So does this make things better or worse?

As always, the answer is "It depends."

First, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference, yet, because this formula is being used only for the "extra" or "additional" or "bonus" or "Good heavens they actually increased school funding" money. All of the money that would have been distributed under the old hold harmless system? That's still going exactly where it would have gone. That's not necessarily a bad thing-- one of the problematic challenges of creating a school budget in Pennsylvania is that the local district has to pass its budget before they know how much money they're getting from the state. Under the old system, the district could make a decent ballpark estimate. Instituting a system that said "Your state subsidy will be somewhere between $100 million and $1.99" would have precipitated a statewide wave of school administration nervous breakdowns.

Second, some districts aren't going to look very needy under the new formula, and they won't benefit much, if at all.

But third, some districts' need now stands out in pretty stark clarity. This piece from regular PA edu-newshound Kevin McCorry features a map that shows you just how far behind each individual district is. The formula describes the "burden" on a district, the district's number of  RSUs, and what it has shown is that seventy-four districts face the same burden as if they had twice as many students, and ten districts are carrying quadruple the burden.

For instance, York PA is one of our more spectacularly burdened districts. Their actual student enrollment number is 7,737. But the formula says their RSU enrollment is 52,449. In wealthy districts like Lower Merion, the RSU number is actually lower than actual student enrollment.

PA school funding is in a terrible hole, and we aren't going to dig our way out of it overnight. This formula, sparingly applied to a relatively small pile of money, is not a bad start. This will not be easy-- expect the usual complaints about how rich districts don't get their own tax dollars back, but must instead send those dollars off to subsidize Those Students in That Icky Poor City. And as always, our legislators must grapple with the fact that no matter how you slice a single rhubarb pie, it will not comfortably feed ten thousand people. The biggest part of the solution for school funding in Pennsylvania remains that there needs to be just plain more of it.

Still, this is one step toward fixing one of the nation's most inequitable funding systems. We'll see if it helps, or starts a trend, or lays some groundwork. Of course, first we have to pass the next budget.

TeachLivE: Robot School in the Uncanny Valley

A few days ago, I quoted Thomas Kane's bizarre observation about teacher training:

Surgeons start on cadavers, not on live patients.

I observed that it would be hard for teachers to start working with cadavers, but a couple of regular commenters reminded me that, in fact, there are teachers out there working on not-exactly-live students. Ladies and gentlemen, it's TeachLivE



This particular example comes from Pace University School of Education (a reasonably reputable school), but TeachLivE is actually a product of the University of Central Florida. TeachLivE bills itself as " a mixed-reality teaching environment supporting teacher practice in classroom management, pedagogy and content" and I have to take my hat off to the word "mixed-reality" because it seems so useful when discussing education reform.

But UCF was creating this Classroom of the Living Dead all the way back in 2008. Today they boast a presence in 85 different programs.

How does it work, exactly? Well, EdSurge actually did a review of the program, and that yields a few interesting details (though the undated review is from 2013 when TeachLivE was in 37 programs). The program is, of course, a simulation. It was not browser based and required a Kinect cable to "read" the teacher (that's the mixed in the mixed reality-- the students are fake but the teacher is real). Programs would contact the TLE folks two weeks ahead of time with what they wanted to practice with the cyber-students, and the a "custom" simulation was prepared. Students can be programed for varying levels of non-cooperation.

Teachers get back a report on the sorts of things you would expect a computer program to be good at recording-- wait time, teacher talk vs student talk. Plus a rating of just how well the teacher kept the students under control.

Limitations? Well, the simulated class can't go above five students. The teacher cannot throw a student out of class, but in one of my favorite techno-glitches, EdSurge reports that when there's a technical errors, a student avatar will ask to go the bathroom and then stay there. There's also the limitation that the avatars look like creepy siblings of Sid from the first Toy Story. And the practical limitations-- one of the best classroom management techniques is proximity. But you can't go stand behind the robo-student on the screen. Cost in 2013 was $20 for 10 minutes.

Biggest limitation? The behavior of the simulations themselves. The basis for the sims is a bit of a mystery-- several sources cited the work of psychologist William Wong-- but I can't find the guy.

Any practice classroom experience is only as good as the fake students in it. Back when I was in teacher school, we would teach practice lessons and my professor Dr. Robert Schall would sit in the back of the room as Bobby. Oh, how we all hated Bobby, but we all learned to appreciate him because Bobby was a pretty accurate version of That Kid in your class. He was an accurate simulation.

But TeachLivE is, let's face it, a big computer game, and that means it reflects the preferences and beliefs of its programmers. If we watch the clip above, we can see that the programmer has one idea about the correct way to handle a middle school girl with a cell phone. Like any video game, the programmer chooses a correct response to a situation, and if you provide the correct response, you get a reward. But if I'm playing Lego Batman, I'm playing in a made-up world that programmers built from scratch. In a simulation like TeachLivE, the simulation is only as good as its faithful representation of the real world.

Now, maybe the University of Central Florida has developed the technology to create a fully realistic artificial intelligence that can faithfully pass for a human child. However, if they had managed the feat of an actual human AI system, I have to believe that they would be doing something with it other than classroom sim games. So I'm going to guess that the students in Uncanny Valley Elementary School have some considerable limits, and that much of the simulation is going to be defined by the programmers' beliefs about how you're supposed to teach students in the classroom and how students should react. In other words, if the programmers believed that a cell phone problem is best solved by telling the student, "Put that away or I will punch your ugly face in," that is what would work in the simulation.

Given that, I would want to hear an awful lot about how the avatar programming is based on a collection of child development experts and experienced classroom teachers. But nowhere in the accounts of TeachLivE do I find any such thing.

"Well," you may say, "That's no big deal. It's just a tool for a little simulated classroom practice. Just the thing to give some practice to a proto-teacher who's not quite ready for prime time, yet."

And I would agree with you. But that's not the end of the TeachLivE story.

By 2012, TeachLivE was attracting plenty of attention, particularly because they are pretty much the only outfit doing this kind of teacher simulation work. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave TeachLivE three $1.5 million grant. And then, as that grant was running out in 2015, TeachLivE went private. UCF entered a "public-private" partnership with a San Francisco startup called Mursion, an outfit that promises "the virtual training platform where professionals practice and master the complex interpersonal skills they need to be effective in high-stakes careers." How does a startup find the money to buy up a well-established cutting edge operation like this? Simple-- they were given $1 million by the New Schools Venture Fund (everyone's favorite education venture capitalist investment group). And in April of this year, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) announced they were partnering with Mursion "to develop leadership institutes that leverage simulations in virtual reality."


And that's not the worst of it. ETS has also boarded the TeachLivE train. The Education Testing Service has teamed up with TeachLivE to create "summative assessments" to be part of the ETS NOTE system, another entry in the teacher licensure wars. Yes, to earn teaching certification, some teachers will have to face a classroom of five creepy-looking computer programs. No word yet on whether or not they will also have to clear at least five missions in Grand Theft Auto.

Is TeachLivE the Worst Thing Ever? No, but it is a display of some of the worst tendencies of the reformster movement. Let's create something that might have a little utility. Then, because we want to scale up and expand the market for the product so that we can generate some revenue, let's double down on a seriously over-simplified and narrowed view of what teaching actually is, and then grossly over-promise what the product can do and start applying it to tasks for which it is not fit. It could be useful, but it's being turned into a menace.

There is some limited usefulness for a quintet of robot children, but making them the gateway guardians for the teaching profession, or a substitute for dealing with real, live humans-- those tasks are beyond their abilities.

And it's not like there aren't real, live human children available in the world. Yes, giving proto-teachers all the responsibility is problematic-- children should not be guinea pigs (well, unless we're exposing them to untested policies, standards, and tests-- then, apparently, it's okay). But there are many situations, manners and modes for proto-teachers to interact with small humans that will provide ample opportunity to learn how tiny humans think, act, behave and react-- exactly the things future teachers need to know and which they cannot learn from robot children.

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.