Do Interim Tests Help?

You know the drill. We have to take the Big Standardized Tests in the spring, so in the fall and winter, maybe multiple times, we're going to take the pre-test, or practice test, or interim test, or testing test test.

The plan is that this will get the students ready for the BS Test (because it is such an artificial, inauthentic task that it doesn't resemble any other activity except taking similar inauthentic pre-test practice interim testy test tests). Even more importantly, in some schools, it will let us target the students based on how likely they are to make us look bad come test time.

Procedures vary by school, but a popular approach is to sort students into three categories: Don't Have To Worry About Them, Hopeless, and Maybe If We Really Hammer These Kids We Can Get Them To Squeak Through. The first two groups get little or no attention, and the third group gets "extra attention" which may take the form of anything form extra drill in math and language class all the way up to being pulled out of non-test classes so that their whole day can be devoted to test prep.

There is a cottage industry in pre-test practice interim testing tests. My district used to use the 4sight tests, until we noticed that their ability to predict BS Test results was only slightly better than reading the bumps on a dancing toad under a full moon. These days we're dabbling in NWEA voodoo, so we'll see.

Well, maybe we'll see. After a decade of interim testing, plenty of teachers have an opinion about how well it actually works. Now there's a piece of research that looks at the usefulness of interim testing. 

The verdict? At best, it doesn't make BS Test scores drop. At best.

As always, the research comes with lots of caveats. The study covers about 30,000 students at 70 different schools in Indiana. Two interim testing programs were studied. The study used data from 2010-2011. The write-up includes sentences like "Two-level models were used to capture the nesting in the data."

Nevertheless, the answer to the question "Do pre-test practice interime testing testy test testicles help" is, according to this paper, "No, not at all." Specifically, in the case of the 3-8 grade students, the students with interim testing did no better than the students without. In the case of K-2 students, the students who were interimly tested actually did worse than those who were left alone to play and learn and all the other things that students can do in school when they're not wasting time on test-based test prep for their big test (which as K-2 students, they shouldn't be taking in the first place, but of course we have to get them taking those tests early on so that when the BS Tests start really counting in third grade, the entire process has been normalized-- in other words, the K-2 tests are basically pre-test practice interim tests for the 3-8 tests).

I'm not going to hold this small piece of research up as a final word on the subject, but it is a data point, and the data point says what many of us in the classroom already believed-- the pre-test practice interim testing test is a waste of time and money.

Intangible Greatness

You may have heard by now the satisfying news that the Supreme Court spanked Abbie Fisher in a decision that provides, as Salon put it, "A massive blow to mediocre white people coasting on their racial privilege." Fisher (and her lawyer, notorious affirmative action combatant Edward Blum) argued that as a mediocre white person, she should automatically get preference over a mediocre black person (I'm paraphrasing). Oh, and that the 14th Amendment should get lost.

The Supremes said not so much, and conservative Anthony Kennedy was the guy who helped them do it. You'll be reading about that decision all over the place-- but I want to focus on one excerpt from Kennedy's decision:

A university is in large part defined by those intangible qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness. Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.


Emphasis mine. Damn straight, Justice Kennedy. And not just a university, but the individual human beings who make it up. In fact, all individual human beings. "I owe my success and my achievements in life, my whole rewarding existence, my greatness, to a set of qualities that are easily measured and quantified objectively," said nobody, ever. I am sure there will be many days to come on which I disagree with Justice Kennedy, but today is not that day.

Can we just plaster this up some place that it will be visible on the day that the court hears a case involving the use of narrow Big Standardized Tests of math and English to judge teachers, schools and students? Can we make a big meme and plaster it all around the intertoobz? Can we remind reformsters every chance we get about the intangible qualities that make for greatness, but evade objective measurement? And can I have a poster of this in my classroom, to remind myself and my students that greatness, achievement, happiness, and a rich and rewarding life are built out of qualities that defy measurement even as they are the foundation of every worthy and wonderful life that a human being has ever lived?

Attacking the Public in Public Education

Many parts of the attack on US public education have not been subtle or hard to detect. The refrain "our schools are failing" has been so steadily repeated for the past few decades that it is now accepted uncritically, independent of any evidence other than "Hey, I keep hearing people say it, so I guess it must be true." Now we hear it just tossed off as an aside, an assumption-- well, of course, public schools aren't any good.

In addition to attacking the reputation and quality of public schools, we've also heard an unending explicit and implicit attacks on the reputation of our nation's teachers. They're dummies with low SAT scores. They have the worst preparation of any college students. We'd be better off giving an ivy league grad five weeks of training and plunking them in a classroom.

All of these are an attack on the "education" part of "public education," a steady drip, drip, drip that tells us that the system that is supposed to educate is not doing a very good job of educating.

But there has been another steady attack, more subtle but increasingly successful, on the "public" part pf "public education."

The reformster refrain that the money should follow the student is one such attack-- it cuts the public out of the system, removing the voice of any taxpayer who doesn't have a child in school. The whole argument that choice-voucher systems should put all decision-making in the hands of parents makes a foundational assumption that education is not a public good, maintained by the public in the public space in order to deliver benefits to the public. Instead, it re-imagines education as a consumer good, created by a vendor and then handed off to the student while money changes hands. Where education might once have been viewed like air or water or other shared public resources, we're now encouraged to see it like a pizza or a toaster.

We can now start to see some of the side-effects of this view. When a public school is closed these days, it's not necessarily seen as a blow to the community, like the loss of a park or the pollution of a water supply. Instead, it's treated like a store closing, as if we just lost the Taco Bell on the corner, or the local K-Mart was closed up. It's a business decision made by someone who doesn't answer to the community, really pretty much out  of our hands, right?

More troubling, it gets us to a place where the community no longer feels the obligation, the assumption, that it has a responsibility to provide schools.

And so we can see a major school system like that of Erie, Pennsylvania, considering that maybe they should just stop offering high schools at all. Or the governor of New Jersey can suggest that we just spend the identical bare minimum on all students, and if that means that poor kids don't get any real schooling at all. Granted, that move was so outrageous that even longtime Christie apologist Tom Moran condemned it, but still-- to even suggest that we don't really need to bother making sure that we as a community, a state, a nation are getting the job done.

Which is another part of the assault. We don't need to make sure we're providing a public education because those charter schools will do it (maybe, for a while, for some students).

As with all things in public education, this has not happened in a vacuum. As a nation, we have moved steadily away from community responsibility for the public space. We don't want to live next to Those People, and we don't want to pay for their health care or their food or their housing. Politically, we are increasingly united by a belief that some people shouldn't count and torn apart by disagreements about who exactly the not-really-American don't-really-count people are. We want to privatize profit and move risk into the public sector.

Simply put, we don't want to take responsibility for any people except Our Own. You get what you can get, and if you can't get much, well, you should have thought of that before you decided to be poor (or not white).

So it should be no surprise that the most damaging attack on public education has been on the very idea of an education provided by the public for every member of the public, the better to maintain and improve the public space we all share and care for the public resource for which we share responsibility. We have instead been encouraged to think of education as a new couch or a bag of cheese doodles, a commodity that you get access to (or not) depending on the deal that you work out on your own.

Charterista Faux Teacher Programs Make ESSA Demands of Feds

The damndest things turn up on Twitter some days. Take this document. 

Entitled "Joint Statement Calling for Transparency of Outcomes to Improve Teacher Preparation and Better Serve Students and Districts," this is a fairly transparent demand by several "alternative path" teaching programs that new regulations give them a better advantage in the Brave New ESSA World.

Urban Teachers—along with Aspire Public Schools, Blue Engine, Boston Teacher Residency, Match Teacher Residency, National Center for Teacher Residencies, Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach For America and TNTP—join together to request the Department of Education and Congress create clear guidance for state education agencies as they attempt to act on this opportunity and improve the quality of teacher preparation at the state-level.

And by "improve" of course they mean "make more profitable for folks like us." Specifically, these folks would like the feds to "provide states with specific guidance around developing systems where all teacher preparation programs are accountable for collecting and publicly sharing outcomes data on the success of their programs, participants, and graduates."

Yes, it's one of the Top Ten Dumbest Reform Ideas Ever, back for another round of zombie policy debate. The same VAM-soaked high stakes test scores that has been debunked by everyone from principals to statisticians to teachers, the same sort of system that was called arbitrary and capricious by a New York judge, the same sort of system just thrown out by Houston-- let's use that not just to judge teachers, but to judge the colleges from which those teachers graduated.

Why would we do something so glaringly dumb? The signatores of the letter say that consumers need information.

Without the presence of concrete outcome measures, local education agencies and potential teacher candidates are hard-pressed to compare the quality of teacher preparation programs. Thus, it is a gamble for aspiring educators to select a teacher training program and a gamble for principals when hiring teachers for their schools

Yes, because everyone in the universe is dumb as a rock-- except reformsters. Just as parents and teachers will have no idea how students are doing until they see Big Standardized Test results, nobody has any idea which teaching programs are any good. Except that, of course, virtually every program for teaching (or anything else, for that matter) has a well-developed and well-known reputation among professionals in the field.

As for the "gamble" of hiring-- are these folks really suggesting that administrators can sit and interview teacher applicants, watch them teach sample lessons, and look at their work, decide that thecandidate looks really good and turn out to be wrong because they didn't have hard data about the college program. "My recommendation for the history job? Well, I don't know. She seems smart and capable, her sample lesson was engaging and exciting, and she has a kick-ass portfolio of great ideas. She seems knowledgeable and the exact sort of personality that would fit with our staff here. But I don't have any hard data about her college ed program, so I guess I'm just shooting blindly in the dark. You wanna just flip a coin?"

What sample metrics should we use for this collection of hard data that will be so much more useful than human judgment?

Sample metrics include teacher retention and attrition, principal satisfaction surveys, teacher evaluations, teacher performance on state exams and student achievement gains. 

Because whether a teacher keeps a job or stays in teaching or not is totally the fault of the college program. I don't know why we're collecting principal satisfaction data, since principals are apparently as dumb as rocks. But boy, let's just grab all that BS Test data-- in fact, let's double it up by counting it both in teacher evaluations and by itself.

Oh, but I do have to correct myself. Teacher retention can be controlled by the teacher program if the program is, like the Match system, a program that prepares faux teachers made to order for the charter system that runs the teacher prep program, or like TFA, "prepares teachers" for jobs that it has been contracted to fill. So that's a win for these guys. Remember-- select the right data, and you can always make yourself look better.

The signatores also tout the advantage of data-driven improvements to programs, because that's good for the "customer" (a word that turns up plenty in this three page letter). And of course it will also let states decide which programs to "support." Ka-ching.

Finally, this is just the first of a series of letters to the feds telling them what the people in charge of the nation's shadow network of privatized faux teacher trainers. So there's that to look forward to.

Look, it's not just that this is a terrible terrible terrible TERRIBLE system for evaluating teacher programs, or that it's a bald-faced attempt to grab money and power for this collection of education-flavored private businesses. These days, I suppose it's just good business practice to lobby the feds to write the rules that help you keep raking it in. It's that this proposal (and the other proposals like it which, sadly, often com from the USED) is about defining down what teaching even is.

It is one more back door attempt to redefine teaching as a job with just one purpose-- get kids to score high on a narrow set of Big Standardized Tests. Ask a hundred people what they mean by "good teacher." Write down the enormous list of traits you get from "knowledgeable" to "empathetic" to "uplifts children" to "creative" and on and on and on and, now that you've got that whole list, cross out every single item on it except "has students who get good test scores."

It's the fast foodifying of education. If I redefine "beautifully cooked meal" as "two pre-made patties cooked according to instructions, dressed with prescribed condiments, and slapped on the pre-made buns" then suddenly anyone can be a "great chef" (well, almost anyone-- actual great chefs may have trouble adjusting). These are organizations that specialize in cranking out what non-teachers think teachers should be, and their thinking is neither deep nor complicated, because one of the things a teachers should be is easy to train and easy to replace.

When excellence is hard to define and difficult to achieve, just redefine excellence so that it is low bar shallow narrow mediocrity-- voila! Excellence is now easily within your grasp. Not only that, but the people who keep pursuing actual old school excellence will either knuckle under or be cast aside (silly status quo embracers). Ka-ching!

But first, be sure to write a letter to the appropriate government agency so that they can help you with your redefinition.

PA: A Curious Online Learning Bill

I'm not honestly sure what to make of this one, but this bill has actually passed in the PA House, so we should probably pay a little bit of attention. It deals with online learning, so that demands attention as well.

House Bill 1915 doesn't even have a snappy name, but its purpose is to establish the Online Course Clearinghouse.

The bill was put out there by Rep. Jason Ortitay (R) who indicated that its purpose was "to establish a central repository of online courses accessible to public schools, nonpublic schools, home education programs, and the general public." It was presented back in March, and if we take a trip through the text, we find that it's about, well, setting up a clearinghouse of online courses. The PA Department of Ed is supposed to set it up, and companies or whoever that produce the courses will pay up to $75 to "apply" to have their course listed (there's also a fine of up to $1000 if they turn out to have lied about the course's swellness).

There will be an online catalog of available courses, and you'll be able to buy the course for your school district or charter or home school or whatever through the site. Oh, and it will have reviews and ratings of the courses, just like Amazon. By 2021, the department is required to produce a report showing how many students used how many of the online courses. School systems can still make their own courses or find and purchase them on their own, and nothing in the bill should be construed to mean that students must take these courses.

Oh, and the courses should mostly be focused on stuff related to Keystone exams (our PA version of the Big Standardized Test, which currently inspires so little confidence that legislators recently postponed-- again-- the year in which Keystones will become graduation requirements).

The bill's main sponsor was Rep. Jason Ortitay, who is currently in his second year as a legislator. Before that he was a businessman (President of Jason's Cheesecake Company). Ortitay won an upset victory over Democrat Jesse White. White lost either because A) he got caught using sock puppets on line to attack constituents or B) because he crossed the Marcellus Shale industry, which has reportedly been investing heavily in southwestern PA politics. White himself was an upstart back in 2006 when he rode the statewide wave of anger about that time our wacky legislators voted themselves a pay raise in the middle of the night.
In Pennsylvania, we're not nearly at good as voting people as we are at voting them out.

So why is Ortitay, a legislative non-entity whose life experience is selling cheesecake-- why is this guy making a move to create something so useless?

I mean, would the state need to set up a special listing of textbooks? If you are an actual vendor of online courses, why do you need this? Why do you need the state to be a go-between when its far more effective to send your people out there to sell directly to school systems? What are the chances that a school district will say, "We need to find some online coursework for our school. Let's ask the bureaucrats in Harrisburg which ones they think are acceptable." More than anything else this reminds me of the states online "library" of lesson plans, a patchwork cobble-job consulted by pretty much zero actual teachers in the state because we all know far better places to find teaching materials. This seems like a service that literally nobody, vendor or customer, will use.

But Ortitay proposed this thing and GOP representatives lined up behind it and democrats lined up against it, and so far I can't find anybody who knows why anyone cares or anyone should.

Ortitay's language in plugging the bill doesn't sound exactly like a cheesecake king:

The demand for customized, digital learning opportunities has also intensified in K-12 education, and many schools, including those in Pennsylvania, have become more innovative and forward-thinking in delivering instruction to students so that they can be competitive in college and careers in the 21st Century.   I believe that the online course clearinghouse created by this legislation will provide an additional tool to our educators and schools to help meet this goal by leveraging existing technology to provide students with the opportunity to pursue coursework which is best-suited to their individual needs, and which might not otherwise be available.

He also says that the bill will further innovation by "allowing, but not requiring, schools to utilize courses made available through a school entity, the clearinghouse, or any other source." Which-- again, scratching my head here? Were PA schools not allowed to offer cyber course before? Because I'm pretty sure we've been doing it for at least a decade.

So, a lot of buzzwords and baloney, but nothing of substance to raise the blood pressure of people on any side of the public education debates. However, if anybody is looking for an example of government waste (of time, money, attention, and legislative hemhawing), I think we've got a candidate right here. This smells like a big nothing sandwich.

Twenty Two Years & Lost Possibilities

Our local newspaper runs a "22 years ago today" item most days, a quick snapshot of what people were up to 22, 44 and 66 years ago. This morning I picked up the paper and saw a name I think about every year.

The student was in my class, long long ago. He was what we like to call an "at risk" student, which is such a professional term to use, when the human reality of at risk students is not so clinical. He was a student who could have gone either way-- having the ability and potential to make a stable and happy life for himself, but in circumstances that could easily push him in other directions. Watching an at risk student is like watching a dancer walking along the edge of a knife in a stiff wind, to one side fields of clover and to the other side, a long plunge into darkness.

I won't tell you that this student had the heartwarming charm of a television-ready at risk kid. He was not easy to like, abrasive and with a hair-trigger, not inclined to be kind to his peers. But not stupid, and able to make connections to people that he considered worth his time. I don't remember having to drag and carry him through my class. I didn't particularly build a strong connection with him, but he was never as completely openly defiant for me as he was in other classes. Win, I guess? He had the tools.

But life circumstances were on his side. I don't remember where his mother was, and he was briefly homeless after a huge fight with his father. The subject of the fight? His father refused to his newest batch of drugs with the son.

All of us who teach see the kids. At my school, we call them children who would have been better off raised by wolves. The student who was exhausted all winter because the money that should have gone to pay the heating bill for the trailer went to beer instead. The student whose father punished her misbehavior by shaving her head before sending her to school. The student whose mother was in prison because Mom had tried to drive her car over the eight-year-old child. On purpose.

Some of the students facing these kinds of long odds do great. Others who face something as pedestrian as a parent who can't get it together after a divorce end up in the weeds. I suppose you can try to point to "grit" or some such thing, but you might as well explain it with "the breaks" or "good fortune" or "the right boost at the right moment."

Anyway. The student I was talking about was balanced on just such a knife edge. And then, about twenty-two years ago, he got in a fight with a pair of passing motorists on a back road. Nobody knows exactly what they fight was about, but the end result was that my student took a gun and shot the two people in the car dead. The item in today's paper wayback report was about the beginning of his trial when he was eighteen years old. He was convicted and sent to prison.

He was the first time I had a murderer in class. It was a lot to absorb. I thought, really, what the hell am I even doing here? Should I have spent more time on literature aimed at building empathy and impulse control? Or is my contribution just supposed to be that I'm making sure that he will take good, solid reading and writing skills with him to prison?

I just looked at a teacher survey in which teachers overwhelmingly said that making a difference in a child's life is both a great motivator to enter teaching and a great reward of doing the work. But that "making a difference" thing is just such a tricky uncertain thing. I always tell the story of my fifth grade music teacher who confronted the boys in the back of the room and forced us to match pitch and listen and try, and how that moment was so hugely powerful-- because of that I was able to pass the music aptitude test that I had previously failed and because of that I started to learn an instrument and that has made all the difference. In maybe fifteen minutes, that teacher affected the entire trajectory of my life. Huge. And yet, we should also notice this-- it did not particularly affect the trajectory of the rest of the monotone yahoos that I was sitting with.

Teachers are like prospectors, panning through mountains of ordinary day-to-day earth, looking for the little golden nuggets of possibility so that we can try to clean them off, buff them up, help them find what they can be. And yet we live with the knowledge that some nuggets slip past us, unseen, unpolished. Sometimes we find nothing at all.

I'm not sitting here twenty-two years later imagining that if I had come up with just the right lesson, two people would still be alive and a young man wouldn't have gone to prison. Sometimes-- often, even-- the world is just far larger and more powerful than our classrooms. The story of that student is a reminder to me that we are preparing students for a future without any way of knowing what that future will be, a wide world of possibilities cloaked in darkness and equal parts beautiful and terrible. We do the best we can for as many as we can, and that is never, ever enough, because sometimes it is just beyond our power to keep them from rushing toward a dark and consuming future, scattering their possibilities like ashes in the wind.

It is all so big and terrible and awesome and awful, and when somebody says, "Well, just read this lesson script that's aligned to these standards so that you can prepare the student to get a good score on this Big Standardized Test, and if you do all that, the student will grow up to be well-paid and happy. Guaranteed"-- when somebody says all that I just want to look at them and ask, "What the hell are you even talking about?"

We fail. In public education, we fail a lot, and if we want to do the work of public education, we have to search every day for ways to get it even slightly more right than we did yesterday. I have remembered my student every year for the past twenty-two, reminding me that some students carry huge loads, in their pasts, in their presents, and even in their futures. What I find most enraging and frustrating and gobsmacking about modern ed reform is its relentless devotion to solutions that aren't solutions. I don't know what any of us could have done for that student twenty-two years ago, but I feel absolutely certain that aligning his education to a set of bogus standards or offering him a charter school or a personalized instructional computer program or  getting him really ready for a BS Test-- that none of those things would have made a difference, would undoubtedly have made things worse because at least twenty-two years ago I could talk to him like a human being and not a content-delivery specialist with a stack of prescribed lessons to get through.

I fear that, this time, I have wandered in a circle that doesn't even close. So, an aimless squiggle. But on days like this I feel as if those of us who teach are working on such big things in such a big space with such a huge vast mess of human stuff in front of us, and reformsters insist on offering us little, tiny, grossly inadequate tools, as if they really just don't understand the situation at all. Here's a pair of tweezers; now go break down that beached whale into hamburgers.

Every day possibilities are lost to us, to our students, to their families. I would like to do better. If people aren't going to help us with that work, I wish they would at a minimum, stop interfering. I'm not a young man. I don't have twenty-two more years to work at this.

Live Blogging Ed Reform Marriage Counseling Session

A few weeks ago, Robert Pondiscio wrote what seemed to me to be a fairly well-measured piece about the uneasy and possibly-unraveling collaboration between reformy conservatives and reformy liberals. I even wrote a vaguely thoughtful response. But lots of folks absolutely lost their heads, and the post and various responses to it bounced all over the reformy side of the blogoverse.

That seems to have led to a counseling session, brought to the web by an unprecedented team-up between the right-tilted Fordham Institute and the left-tilted Education Post. Mike Petrilli will be ringmaster in just a few minutes, hosting Derrell Bradford (50CAN), Valentina Korkes (Ed Post), Valley Varro (50CAN), and Lindsay Hill (Raikes Foundation). Because it's summer, and I love a challenge, I am going to attempt my first live-blogging of the event.

I'm really hoping for the moment when everyone says, "You know what? We're all just neo-liberals here. There's no reason we can't get along!" But that's probably not what's going to happen. Let's just see what happens when this kicks off at 4:30 EDT (assuming that I can get all my technology balanced on my desk.)

4:30

Well, the live link for the webcast doesn't seem to be happening yet.

4:34

Still not actually seeing anything, though twitter is abuzz. I always have to remind myself that only in Teacher World do things start exactly to the minute. If this were my class, I would be freaking out about now.

4:37

Well, we have this, so far...

#Edreform has long been heralded as a rare bipartisan success in politics. #EduCommonGround has seen much success @MichaelPetrilli

— Fordham Institute (@educationgadfly) June 20, 2016

4:45

Many people having trouble, then we got a youtube link, then my modem boofed. Now I'm back in media res

Somebody just said that if some Republican  thought this was a fundamentally racist country, they wouldn't be a Republican. Other panelist has story of conservative who says he does believe in systemic racism, and everyone has a good laugh about that

4:46

"There are people in this work as a lever for true equity."

Petrilli "Others of us believe this is a fundamentally just country " and we must give opportunities for all people. Push too far to left and want a revolution, we'll lodse people on the right.

4:48

Bradford: You can't open discussion of racism with "and it's your fault!" It is fundamentally a question of framing and communication

Varro: Policy is blunt object. What brings us together is "what are we doing to make things better for children" and then move on to policy discussoins.

4:50

Varro: To move states, it will take people on right and left

Korkes: Designated progressive, who faces trouble of being called a neo-liberal.

Petrilli wants to know if there are things on center and right who make things difficult for her? She says on twitter that movements are composed of many types of people. But her pressure comes internal. Wanting to make sure that children succeed.

4:52

Bradford talks about peressure he feels as Democrat. "We can disagree on these things. I'm not the lord of the sith" Which is true. He and I had a perfectly good conversation once. He's invested in choice, not because he's neo-liberal or nazi, but because he went to a private school. He can't fix it if someone wants positions to align with party orthodoxy.

Trying to get guy not to hate you is a big deal.

4:54

How does it play out (Petrilli) when we talk about moving too far left because of teacher union politics and all the rest we need everybody.

Varro says can't go too far either way. This should be an apolitical issue, but it's not. Varro says if we've lost people, they're already lost.

Petrili-- we are not the BLM movement; we're the education reform movement.

Varro says broader issue is saving kids lives, whether killing them quickly on street or slowly in classroom but no good outcomes can come from how we're doing school now.

4:57

Contrasts advocacy groups and actually getting policy made groups. Bradford. We thought we could just do policy and that would do it, then we thought we could do heavy advocacy. Neither worked. It's not the advocate's job to build consensus all the time. Politicians should figure policy centers out.

Petrilli tries to explain how he doesn't really buy BLM, and nobody is nodding, but should he be drummed out of ed reform stuff because of it?

5:00

Hill makes the BLM case, because it's about life. Stripping conversations about race and privilege out of education will not get a good outcome.  Conversations about race, class and privilege get results. Petrilli concern trolls that BLM leads to less effective policing and putting black folks in greater danger, which is such weak sauce and really beneath Petrilli's usual high level of argument construction.

5:01

Petrilli: Cities getting bluer, states getting redder. Creating more tension.

Bradford: (Who is wearing awesome socks.) Also, nobody here supports Trump. But his mystification over Trumpism highlights for him that there are things in this country he doesn't understand.

Maybe we're about to figure out that inside beltway and NYC isn't the whole country. "There's a kid in West Virginia right now who's probably getting screwed and we don't know anything about them."

Bradford: the country is changing and there's a lot of stuff we don't know any more. We can't offer old solutions.

5:05

Are we on edge because of election? Korkes says yes-- I have a hard time with people who think Trump is a solution.

Bradford: Hate Trump, believe in some market things he supports. We of political class have to understand what's going on. We are going to have to work with some of these people. The alternative is to do nothing.

5:07

Petrilli calls Trump a despicable human being, but he knows people who will vote for him. You don't have to support Trump's racism to buy into Trump.

Now we'll look for issues that all support.

5:08

High quality charter schools? All say yes, but Hill has caveat-- less doing to and more doing with.

Bradford: the more prescriptive we are, the less people like it. When we say This is a good school, that doesn't work. We should create the conditions for the school people want.

Petrilli says there are people who have attacked Success Academy, KIPP-- but he says these are schools that are doing Great Things, shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt. If you're going after SA, you're not in reform movement

Korkes and Hill both say, nope. Korkes-- how are they getting the outcomes? Are the families there because they wanted no academies, but because they are there despite that. Not good.

Hill says some networks are changing over because their grads are telling them they have things to fix.

5:12

Petrilli- Maybe we've overdone structure. And Hill again points out that erasing cultural identity might have been an issue, too.

5:13

High standards, tough tests? We all good on that. Hill says "yes, but" again. There are many ways that people show they are good at things. Bradford: Vastly better than nothing.

5:15

Test based accountability? Everyone says yeah.

Bradford: Teacher evaluation is the thing that is killing test based acountability. Bradford is willing to let it go.

There is a big debate in ed reform about teacher evaluation, causing problems but not getting anything

But lifetime tenure is terrible and being able to fire bad teachers is a thing we need (but don't admit we have).

Hill, let's work on teacher biases without shaming teachers. Teacher empathy can be built

5:17

64 people watching now.

Innovation? Blended learning? All in? sure... but Varro isn't sure she's seen proof points for blended. Is innovation code for something else? She'd rather have accountability

5:19

Bradford: Innovation is shorthand for tools in the tool box, and some tools can be used for great or terrible things.

Hill: innovations make it much faster to some schools than others

Petrilli makes joke about we are all in on corporate takeover of schools. Har.

5:21

Funding? Petrilli admits structural racism in funding. Let's make a deal that charters get more money and so do poor schools. Bradford says we can't just give poor schools more money (New Jersey).

5:23

On the messaging sidebar, discussion is that Petrilli is wimping out by not running right at BLM. On screen, still talking about funding stuff. Referencing teacher shortage, and what we don't know about how to keep teachers in classroom.

5:25

Any other issues? Bradford says world peace.

Last question. There will be issues in ed reform, like discipline disparity, about which we will disagree. Petrilli says he's tried to bring this up and taken big heat with ed reform world. How do we have these conversations more respectfully?

Bradford says talking is key. It's hard hate up close. Talk about it.

Korkes: Own the differences between your positions.

Hill: Our education system is not neutral. It was designed to track and sort, and it was never designed for kids of color. It's not broken, it's doing what it was designed to do. But education is a right, and an equitable system that empowers students is important. Get out of office Get into field.

Varro: Look at sub-issues and subtlety and nuance.

Petrilli: If this movement fractured, it would be bad for kids. After all, there wouldn't be 6,000 charters if people hadn't stuck together. And we'd still have crappy standards with easy tests.

And we're out. Okay-- I'm going to throw on some thoughts in response, and we'll call this done. Back in just a few minutes.

There are some useful insights in this conversation. Bradfordwho is no dummy, offers that the more prescriptive reformsters are, the less people buy in. As in the model where reformsters say we must have school choice, but only a choice of the choices that the choice fans choose. "We have decided what a good school for your children would be, and that's the choice we're going to give you (while we make your public school even less appealing by stripping its resources)."

Bradford also offered an intriguing capsule history of modern ed reform. First they figured they could just get policies passed and things would fall into line. Then they got all loud an advocatey to convince people. Neither worked. I think that's actually pretty accurate, though there are still folks trying both. But I found the distinction between the reasonable policy/political side and the shouty advocacy side interesting.

His idea that reformsters should be setting up the conditions under which good choice can thrive is intriguing-- but it will require government regulation to do it, and it flies directly in the face of the beloved idea of doing reform at scale. The big CMOs are not interested in boutique charters-- they want high volume chains, and so far, government has agreed. So it's an interesting and even productive shift, but it's a much bigger shift than he acknowledges here.

Petrilli sort of stands up for Success Academy as a school that's doing great things. It isn't. It's a school that is doing maybe-okay-ish things for a very, very small slice of selected students. This is not public education. It is not replicable. And it's not even particularly impressive; any school in country could show the same "success" if it could pick and choose who gets to stay and never had to backfill.

But everyone here thinks high quality charters are great, without addressing any of the central issues-- how to pay for them, and how a charter system ever takes care of all students, not just the ones that get into charters. Somebody propose a charter system that doesn't treat public schools like the educational equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.

They all profess love for high standards and tough tests, and then immediately take it back by agreeing that lots of people show they are good at things many different ways. Bradford says what we've got is vastly better than nothing, and I believe he's dead wrong on that. I think the current crop of Big Standardized Tests is way worse than nothing-- first, because they waste huge amounts of time and money and second, because they give people the impression that we're getting data that means something when in fact the data that comes from these tests is useless garbage. Petrili makes a reference to Jay Greene's recent post about how research is showing us that raising test scores has nothing to do with improving students' lives. Petrilli dismisses it, but I think it's dead on. BS Tests tell us nothing about student achievement and even less than nothing about student futures.

Test based accountability? Again, they love it, and they're wrong. Test results tell us nothing. Bradford notes that tying the testing to teacher evaluations is killing testing. Well, yes. Because when you use test results for teacher evaluation, you highlight how bad the test result data is.

When they slide into teacher evaluation, Petrilli observes that lifetime tenure is bad and being able to fire bad teachers is good. I have good news for him-- there is no such thing as lifetime for a public school teacher, and you totally can fire bad ones. I'll agree that in some urban settings, the dopes who ran the district at some point let themselves get talked into a contract that made firing really hard, but even then there is a difference between really hard and impossible. Lots of thing in education are hard. Suck it up, buttercup. And outside of those certain urban districts? Firing bad teachers not that hard at all.

Funding? Interesting idea to put more funding into both charters and underfunded public schools. Please web cast the meeting where you convince taxpayers to raise their taxes so that we can pay for some kids to go to a private school and spend more money on those schools for poor (black and brown) kids.

It was an interesting conversation. I had never encountered Hill before, and she had lots of interesting things to say outside of the part where she condemned public education as an unfixable total failure. Also, at the end when she observed they all need to get out of the office and into schools, which, well, yes-- but ed reform since day one has had a critical problem in that they don't talk to any of the millions of adult professionals who are already out in the field. We're called teachers and there are a zillion of us who could tell you lots of things, if the reform movement hadn't dismissed us since day one.

The notion that they're all just neo-libs was addressed and rejected a few times. The big Black Lives Matter elephant in the room was nodded at, but not really addressed (as many on the texting sidebar noted), as was the Other Question--

The Question which Petrilli kept coming back to was some version of "Will you lefties keep harping on things like Black Lives Matter even if it means we conservatives will get pushed out?" I will keep waiting for some left-tilted reformster to answer, "Are you really going to leave because you can't handle a real conversation about racism? Suck it up, buttercup."

Did they save the marriage? I'm not sure-- they talked a lot about talking, but didn't really talk about the things they apparently need to be talking about. I don't think so, but I suppose we'll see in the next hundred blog posts.

As for me-- no more live blogging. My fingers are neither fast nor accurate enough for this. Even if I suck it up, buttercup.

(Update: Also, I somehow decided to type Bradford's name as "Hammond" and then fixed it, but didn't fix it in a way that stuck. So apologies for that. Never again.)