Free Marketing Schools

Free market fans envision a story something like this:

Finding themselves in a world where the power of the free market is unleashed, charters, private, and public schools all become transparent, competing with each other to be able to publish the finest student outcomes. Empowered consumers/parents study up on the student outcomes published by each school so that they can weigh the merits of each school and make the best selection for their children.

If this fairy tale ever came to pass, education would be the first sector of the free market to ever function in this fashion. Go turn on your television right now and wait for an advertisement that is a factual, data-based account of the effectiveness of the product. Wait for an advertisement that does not try to imbue the product with a personality or identity, even if products corn flakes and cleaning fluids do not naturally display any personality traits. Okay-- you shouldn't actually wait for any of that, because you will get old and die before you actually succeed.

Let me repeat what is perhaps my most-repeated observation on this blog.

The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Now we have an academic study from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Perceptions of Prestige: A Comparative Analysis of School Online Media Marketing," by Sarah Butler Jessen (Bowdoin College) and Catherine DiMartino (Hofstra University) is a working paper that looks at how marketing plays out in a couple of education markets.

The paper is about setting up a framework for comparing branding and marketing practices, comparing the practices of different types of schools in "choice settings."

Jessen and DiMartino draw on lots of literature studying the use and practices of branding and marketing in the world at large (because, as everyone with eyeballs has noticed, that's what actual free markets are loaded with) as well as education-specific material. Since choice systems have required schools to distinguish themselves in order to win customers, some researchers have already started looking at how that is done. Branding communities, for instance, build a whole culture around a school mascot and school logo.

Researchers have found that shared personal values and life experiences–usually gleaned from personal interactions and word-of-mouth recommendations—attract parents to particular schools rather than the actual academic performance of the school.

In other words, families are inclined to send their children to schools serving families much like their own-- one more reason that choice is likely to make segregation worse rather than better. Jessen and DiMartino also note that "proximity to home and after-school opportunities" are big draws for choosing schools.

Jessen and DiMartino note that research (going all the way back to 2002) shows that choice systems combined with test-driven accountability lead to schools that market precisely toward "better" students who will improve the school's numbers (and market to discourage those who would lower the school's performance profile). The push for slick, glossy marketing also drains resources, or leaves public schools unable to compete in the marketing arms race. The call for marketing also changes the role of the school administration, which now needs to be concerned not just with the usual in-house issues of running a school, but must also worry about marketing and "image management."

But what would that marketing actually look like? Jessen and DiMartino shift here to the world of business.

Research from that world suggests that for "experience" goods (those for which the quality has to be experienced to be believed) advertising and marketing are about finding ways to signal quality. A common and effective way to signal quality is pretty simple-- spend a lot of money on the ads. Make sure they are slick, shiny, and polished. Then make sure that the customer encounters them often. Examples of this principle in action are everywhere. How do consumers "know" that Coke and Pepsi are classier and higher-quality than, say, RC or Faygo? After all, we're talking about carbonated, artificially flavored water-- quality is not really an issue. Yet we see Coke and Pepsi ads constantly, and always featuring high-gloss slick production values, and so somehow we "know" that Coke and Pepsi are the highest-quality carbonated artificially-flavored water out there.

Those kinds of signifiers of quality are definitely "suboptimal information," but even more likely to come into play with education because not only is an experienced good, but the people who actually experience it may not be ready to evaluate it for years afterwards (most teachers have a story about a returning student who says, "Yeah, years and years ago when I had you in class, I hated it. But now I'd just like to thank you, because I finally see the benefit of what you did"). On top of that, the person doing the selection-- the parent-- isn't even the person who is going to experience the good.

All of which means that the parents are susceptible to marketing and branding.

So, now the part where the actual studying was done.

Jessen and DiMartino looked at New York and Boston. They selected urban and suburban schools, divided into CMO (chain) charters, Non-CMO (individual stand-alone mom and pop) charters, public (non-charter) schools of choice, public schools, and private schools. Finding communities that included all five types turned out to be a challenge-- CMO charters were mostly not in the suburbs, and urban areas were short on public schools, and that's worth a bunch of consideration all by itself, but let's move on.

Jessen and DiMartino considered the school web site, the school's YouTube presence, and any activity on social media (Facebook and Twitter). And they threw in some analysis of published mission statements for good measure.

There was big data to be wrung from the school websites. Here's a handy chart from the paper (used with permission):

 The "autonomous web site" 0% for CMO charters comes from the CMO habit of embedding all individual schools in the chain in the mother ship's website. If you're going to maintain the integrity of the brand, can't run the risk of individual schools going off-message.

As a Firefox user, I'm not sure that flash graphics qualify as a Good Thing; nevertheless, you can see the overall pattern. Charter chains do a great deal of well-managed marketing of their brand, much of which has absolutely nothing to do with how good a job they do at providing an actual education to students.

Jessen and DiMartino also break down the language of mission statements, which yields it own interesting data set. CMOs overwhelmingly favor academic language, followed by a bit of character, while the other four school categories include academics, but also used a great deal of language related to character and community (for CMOs, "community" doesn't make the cut at all). Only public schools brought up citizenship.

When it comes to YouTube, CMOs are also smoking everyone else. 91% of CMOs had their own YouTube channel (82% with carefully branded colors), and 73% had channels with professionally created videos. Even private schools were far behind this (50% with channels, 13% with pro videos). Public (non-choice) schools are just sad-- only 11% had a YouTube channel, and nobody had pro videos (presumably nothing but videos from band concerts and football games taken by somebody's mom).

Curiously, while CMOs lead the pack when it comes to Twitter, almost every type of school is catching on Facebook (CMOs, 100% and public non-choice schools, 77%). This perhaps confirms independent research from my classroom, where a very loosely researched study resulted in the finding "Dayum, Mr. Greene. Nobody uses Facebook any more. Facebook is for your mom." It should also be noted that while almost everyone is on Twitter, not everyone knows what to do there, with CMOs way ahead of the pack in followers and in the use of hashtags to mobilize their people.

So what conclusions can we draw?

Jessen and DiMartino note that some high-powered public schools in wealthy communities may not market much because their reputation is plenty effective. And I would add that there's still a non-zero portion of the public school sector that is leery of all forms of social media because of student privacy issues.

Nevertheless, many of the charters, particularly the charter chains, are marketing, and marketing hard. The writers note that Success Academy's YouTube channel has at least 131 videos, most professionally produced. That's not cheap. But then, by looking through old tax forms, the writers also found that Success Academy spent $700,000 on PR firms in just one year, as well as $418,718 to Mission Control Inc., a direct mailing firm that has also worked for NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and the House Majority PAC. Plus printing fliers, buying mailing lists, etc etc etc. And you can bet that none of this is being done by some principal's secretary in the gap between submitting the daily attendance report and checking lunch money lists. What's the takeaway here?

Schools with more money invested in their Web sites, their promotional videos, and their social media outlets stand to be perceived as being of higher quality by parents, students, and investors alike. CMO-run charter schools present a much more professional face in these online media outlets than other schools in the public sector. CMO Web sites are matched for sophistication and polish only by elite private schools, but with very different messaging. Such investment in marketing raises anew fundamental questions about the perception and reality of public education.

Let me add to that. First of all, when Jessen and DiMartino say "more professional face," that doesn't mean the face of a professional educator. It's the face of a professional marketer, an advertising professional.

Second, that's a whole pile of financial resources being spent on marketing instead of being spent on educating students. And while some of those charters may well benefit from the largesse of investors, mostly we're talking about advertising paid for with taxpayer education dollars. The state said, "Hand over some of your money so that we can educate the citizens of tomorrow" and then then charters turned around and spent that money on a professional photographer to take pictures to go in the glossy brochure packed in envelopes and mailed out by a professional direct-mailing firm-- all of it paid for with tax dollars that were earmarked for education.

Third, let's go back to the free market argument for charters. Charters would lead to competition, and while the implication has always been that the competition would be about who could run the best school, develop the best programs, hire the best teachers, and just generally do the best job educating students. Instead, the competition is to see which school can do the best job of marketing, spend the most money on professional advertising services, create the best branded image of their product.

That is certainly competition, but it is certainly not competition that will get us better schools.

Other Suns and the Illusion of History

It was impossible to drive across the country without thinking of Isabel Wilkerson's masterpiece The Warmth of Other Suns, a stunning telling of the story of the Great Migration.



Wilkerson weaves numerous threads together (including those of her own life) and shifts effortlessly between close focus and the larger picture, but the book revolves around the stories of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Starling, and Pershing Foster, as each of them makes their own personal journeys. The Great Migration was an unprecedented shift of population in this country and, as Wilkerson says, "it was the first big step the nation's servant class ever took without asking."

I won't try to capture the entire book, but I will share some of what hit me when reading it.

Some were simple factoids. The first Jim Crow law? Passed in Massachusetts.

Some of it echoes our present. Foster's parents were educators, and the picture of black schooling in the South is brutal. For instance, on the matter of financing schools:

"The money allocated to the colored children is spent on the education of the white children," a local school superintendent in Louisiana said bluntly. "We have twice as many colored children of school age as we have white, and we use their money. Colored children are mighty profitable to us."

And perhaps most striking and effective because of Wilkerson's thoroughness, is the ordinary everydayness of the racism these people lived through.

Travel always makes me think of the book because of Foster's story. At one point, this educated physician sets out to drive cross country, heading out West to create a new life, and the simple business of trying to find a place to eat or a hotel in which to stay is an insurmountable challenge. It's such a simple thing for a man to drive up to a hotel or motel and get a vacant room, but it's a simple comfort that is denied him. When my wife and I traveled, one of the things we could take for granted was the ability to get a room or some food wherever they presented themselves. I think of Dr. Foster, turned away from room after room, and I am angry that such crap happens, ever happened at all.

Foster's story also quietly rebukes the notion of meritocracy. Foster does everything that is supposed to get ahead. He gets an education, he does good work, and he is still defined and limited by both individuals and the system because he is black.

The book pierces one of the great illusions of history. Often we look back and it seems that, well, that thing happened Way Back Then, but this is now, and somewhere in between there was a break, a jump, a change, and now we live in Other Times, cut free and disconnected from those earlier days.

But to really study history, we see this is not true at all. The Great Migration did not end until 1970, and the lives of these people did not end until decades after that, and yet the roots of their stories are in the slave days of America. Ida Mae Gladney came to Chicago eighty years ago, and yet was forced to settle in the same neighborhoods where black Americans are still held down today.

Perhaps my generation is more prone to say, "Well, you know, this country once had terrible racial problems, but now we're pretty much past all that." But Wilkerson patiently takes us essentially year by year from slave days to the present, checking each year, noting "Well, that break didn't happen this year. How about this year? No? Well, let's check the next one." Until the conclusion becomes inescapable. The break never happened, and racism and racial injustice stretch through US history in a long, unbroken line.

There is no big break in the road that leads us to the world where a major television commentator explains that the slaves who built the White House were really quite happy and fortunate. Or a world in which an entire schooling philosophy is built on, "What poor children of color need is an environment of strict discipline in which they learn to be obedient and compliant. That's the only thing that will work for Those Children." It's an illusion to imagine that there is some sort of gulf, some sort of tectonic plate shift that separates our present reality from our not-so-distant past, and a mistake to believe that the past can be ignored or dismissed, that it does not contain clues to the nature of our present and a better path toward our future.

Looking for Mr. or Ms. Change Agent

Over at the Fordham, Mike Petrilli has been slowly unspooling a series of posts looking at how reform goals might be pursued through means other than policy and politics. In his latest, he considers the leadership development approach to school reform.

Petrilli expresses mixed feelings about the argument. On the one hand, he recognizes that great leaders have value. On the other hand, he's not sure that leaders can make a difference in the vast dry dead desert of public schools, and wouldn't we all be better off just putting our energy into helping leaders grow in the lush gardens that are charter schools?

As always, Petrilli has part of a point. Superintendents and principals are fighting an uphill battle these days, though it's certainly worth noting that many of the obstacles were created by reformsters like Petrilli, hamstringing schools with the crappy Common Core State [sic] Standards and bad-test-based accountability. The last decade-plus of ed reform have sidled school leaders with truckloads of crap and foisted on them priorities like "get student test scores up or get fired." So yes-- there are "government" policies in place that subject principals to "the dysfunction of the larger system within which they must work, and the Gordian knot that’s been tied by decades of contradictory, often compromising, laws and regulation"-- and that big mess has been largely grown and built with the assistance of guys like Petrilli, criss-crossing the country to advocate for those same government regulations.

Petrilli also throws shade at "unruly elected school boards," and I wonder once again why reformsters love the rugged chaos of parents choosing their own schools, but hate the rugged chaos of voters choosing their own school board. Choice is good except when it's terrible.

Petrilli nods to Rick Hess's cage-busting while rightly acknowledging that the cages are real and need some work of their own. But he also likes the various faux programs like the Broad Academy, programs premised on the idea that a rich guy knows how best to create educational visionaries (or at least entrepreneurs who can figure out how to score some money in the ed biz).

And there's no question that being a public school administrator has become such a thankless job that attracting people for it has become difficult (Sign up today! None of the power and all of the responsibility!!)

But mostly Petrilli's working his way up to claims about the natural superiority of charters.

I just haven’t seen the kind of drive for continuous improvement in traditional districts that I’ve witnessed in charter networks like KIPP and Achievement First, where the very organizational DNA is obsessed with excellence and continuous improvement, always looking for more effective approaches to teaching and learning. I’ve got to believe that it’s something about the structure of the charter sector—its governance by mission-driven boards instead of local politicians; its ability to recruit and retain educators that share a vision rather than a collective bargaining agreement (and conventional preparation and certification); its sense of urgency driven by accountability to authorizers and funders—that makes the difference. If I were a philanthropist, I’d support leadership development efforts, but mostly for charter schools rather than district ones.

And now we've slipped all the way from consideration of a real systemic issue in education into plain old advertising puffery and bullshit.

Charter schools have the quest for excellence in their very DNA?? Would that be a reference the widespread charter focus on recruiting and retaining only the best, cheapest-to-educate students? Or charters like the Success Academies with their Got To Go lists? Or the chains where teachers must follow the CMO's required playbook or else?

And you've just never, ever seen a public school system that is devoted to excellence and improvement? Because this is the kind of implication that can set off even the most tired BS detector. I will say many uncomplimentary things about charters, but I'd not suggest that every single charter stinks and displays the evils of some charters (like, say, the charters that are managed simply to maximize profit for their operator, or charters that are simply frauds, or even charters that appear to be managed to support a foreign national's political ambitions).

Nor do I buy Petrilli's claim that business management is somehow better than democratic election, that suits in a boardroom are better than local control, than elections, than democracy. Boardroom rule is superior in one respect- it frees the people in the boardroom from having to listen to any voices but their own, from having to consider any needs or concerns except their own.

And while I have no doubt that there are people who really, sincerely believe that an oligarchy is better than democracy, I don't believe anyone with eyes and a brain could believe that charters have a great ability to recruit and retain teachers. Heck, the widespread charter love of Teach For America bodies is witness that much of the charter sector doesn't even want to retain its teaching staff.

That plus the parenthetical denigration of professional educators (you know-- the people who actually chose teaching as a career and spent their college years preparing to do it through those dastardly conventional means) makes this paragraph qualify as one of the most insulting ones Petrilli has ever written. Yes, somehow, the professional concerns of people who have chosen to dedicate their lives to education-- these folks are somehow less compelled to do a good job than functionaries with businessmen looking over their shoulders.

It is that old ugly business bias peeking through once again. You know. Teachers don't understand how the world works, but businessmen do. Teachers don't understand how to get good work out of people, but businessmen know how to wield those carrots and sticks. Teachers don't understand that to get a reward, you should have to impress some corporate overlord; businessmen get it. Teachers are stupid; businessmen are smart.

There's no doubt that a venture capitalist with a school to staff can make school leaders an attractive offer-- I'm thinking here of Carl Icahn and his recruitment of Jeff Litt to run his tax shelter charter school. But the belief in a Beloved Genius Leader as a solution to school problems is just a ramped-up version of the Hero Teacher, and just as destructive.

The best school management, the healthiest, most productive, most student-friendly school management is mostly about getting out of the way. Set the course. Help your staff see the goal. And then do everything you can to get your staff the space to do their thing. A good manager is like a good roof or a good offensive line, making sure that teachers have everything they need to be their best selves in the classroom so that students get the best teaching possible. Ironically, a manager's greatest power is the power to mess things up. There are a million ways that a bad manager can get in the way of her people and keep them from delivering great work. And the history of the last decade-plus of ed reform is the history of policies that demand that administrators get in the way, requiring them to impose false artificial one-size-fits-all, counter-education goals on their staff.

The best public school management balances a hundred hundred factors-- the particular students, their families, the staff, the board, the community, and on top of that, whatever state and federal requirements have been piled on.

It's possible that charters do have an advantage for a simple reason-- cut off from accountability to the community, fewer parents, fewer students (and far fewer challenging students), and under no obligation to keep the students that come to them, charter school administrators generally have far more people they can disregard.

In a public school setting, everyone and everything is supposed to be important (sadly, some public schools still manage to disregard a portion of their mission). But in a charter school setting, the mission, the student body, and the teaching staff can all be narrowed so that only a few people and a few things matter. That's certainly easier to manage, but it's not a public school in a democratic nation. It is easier to create a charter school leader than a public school leader for the same reason it's easier to build a cabinet than it is to build a Victorian mansion.

The trick of coming up with administrative change agents is not mysterious. More resources. More freedom to get the job done. Fewer constraints on exactly what you're supposed to do. Better pay. And way more trust. Like most charter "innovations," it's something we could easily do in public schools if policy makers just got out of the way and provided the necessary resources.

NV: Vouchers Go To Court

Last year, Nevada passed a voucher law that was a big wet kiss to reformsters and everyone else who wants to dismantle public education.

It's about the simplest voucher law we've ever seen. The state of Nevada will pay you $5,100 to take your kid out of public school. You can spend your $5,100 on a charter school, a private school, a religious school, or on supplies to home school (does a new roof for my home school building count, I wonder). Unlike other voucher laws which are specifically aimed at poor students or students with disabilities, this law has no limits-- it's for everybody.

There are any number of problems with this approach. We can talk about the philosophical issues with abandoning the whole idea of public education and switching to a system in which we just give parents a tax-funded check to spend on whatever. We can talk about the practical issues of such a system in Nevada, where Clark County (Las Vegas) has one of the biggest school systems in the country, while Esmerelda County has a total population of 783. We can talk about the challenge of extensive state oversight of how these tax dollars are spent (or the irresponsibility of having no such oversight). We can talk about the legal issues (already visited in other voucher cases) of funneling public tax dollars into private religious schools.

The economics are weak as well. Poor kids get a full $5,700 for their vouchers, which is enough money to get into pretty much none of the private schools available (and of course those schools don't have to accept them even if they can make up the difference). Why is it that voucher  and faux voucher choicey programs, the ones that say "All students deserve the same school choices as rich kids" never propose that taxes be raised so that students can receive the kind of money that really goes with those choices?

Instead, we get the usual weak bromides, like the law's sponsor, Senator Scott Hammond, telling the Washington Post, "Nothing works better than competition." This despite the utter lack of proof that competition in any way improves education.

The Nevada voucher law will now have its day with the state Supreme Court. Well, sort of. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports, "A ruling isn’t expected in either case. Both sides, however, acknowledge that when the Supreme Court holds oral arguments in two lawsuits Friday it’s likely to have a ripple effect throughout the country."

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is on the scene to file amicus briefs, along with the usual cast of characters on both sides. But voucher supporters have extra help-- the state's attorney general is being aided by former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, who is on a half-million dollar retainer. The two cases (one brought by the ACLU, and one by a parent) kicked off yesterday.

So now we wait to see if Nevada can, in fact, pay parents with tax dollars to abandon public education. 

The Gardener and the Carpenter

Earlier this month, Dr. Alison Gopnick appeared in the Wall Street Journal plugging some thoughts from her soon-to-be-published book The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.

Gopnick's point is about parenting, but it has direct implications for the teaching world as well. Gopnick argues that modern parents have accepted a goal-oriented view of parenting, that parenting is working toward a particular outcome, in this case, creating a particular human being with a certain set of characteristics and skills. This is parenting as carpentry:

Working to achieve a particular outcome is a good model for many crucial human enterprises. It’s the right model for carpenters or writers or businessmen. You can judge whether you are a good carpenter or writer or CEO by the quality of your chairs, your books or your bottom line. In the “parenting” picture, a parent is a kind of carpenter; the goal, however, is not to produce a particular kind of product, like a chair, but a particular kind of person.

Gopnick says that this leads to the idea that certain techniques, certain developed expertise, will allow parents to create that particular human being. That gives u the corollary that some parents are better more expert, or, as we like to say in the ed biz, more "effective" than others, and that this effectiveness can be judged by the outcome. Did you manufacture the good, well-behaved, accomplished tiny human that was your goal? Congratulations-- you're an excellent carpenter parent.

Gopnick has bad news for folks who pursue this model.

The scientific study of development provides very little support for this picture.

It's not that childhood experiences don't have an effect on human development. And it's not that parenting choices don't matter. They just don't matter, says Gopnick, they way you think they do.

Her argument is an evolutionary one, that the need to be nomadic came with a need to be adaptable, which fit well with a longer-than-usual-in-the-animal-kingdom immaturity for humans. It made it possible for humans to raise a varied and flexible group of young'uns, which in turn meant that whatever happened, whatever turned up, there was someone in each generation that was capable of dealing with it. But, she says, "you can't simultaneously learn about a new environment and act on it effectively."

The evolutionary solution to that trade-off is to give each new human being protectors—people who make sure that children have a chance to thrive, learn and imagine before they have to fend for themselves. Those protectors also pass on the knowledge that previous generations have accumulated.

This reminds me of some of the thinking that comes from chaos and information theory-- that there is an order-creating pattern in the world in which first a wide variety of paths emerge, and then a few emerge as successful, and then they blossom into a thousand paths, and then a few emerge, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. There is a human impulse to believe that we can choose the paths that will emerge ahead of time and then not waste time on all those paths that don't thrive. This may seem sensible, but it's not-- it's like saying, "Well, it turned out that only two innings of that ball game really made a difference in the final score, so next time, let's only play those two innings." The universe doesn't work like that (and humans aren't yet pre-cognitives).

So if we aren't to raise children like carpenters, what does Gopnick suggest?

Well, here comes that R word yet again-- relationship. In fact, she even throws in the L word.

Talking about love, especially the love of parents for their children, may sound sentimental and mushy and simple and obvious. But like all human relationships, our love for our children is at once a part of the everyday texture of our lives and enormously complicated, variable and even paradoxical. 

We can work to love better without thinking of love as a kind of work. We might say that we try hard to be a good wife or husband, or that it’s important to us to be a good friend or a better child. 

But I wouldn’t evaluate the success of my marriage by measuring whether my husband’s character had improved in the years since we wed. I wouldn’t evaluate the quality of an old friendship by whether my friend was happier or more successful than when we first met. This, however, is the implicit standard of “parenting”—that your qualities as a parent can be, and even should be, judged by the child you create.

That, of course, is exactly where we have arrived in education reform. Now, teaching is not parenting. But the parallels are obvious.

What does Gopnick suggest as an alternative? Well, the title rather gave that away. It's gardening.

As all gardeners know, nothing works out the way we planned. The greatest pleasures and triumphs, as well as disasters, are unexpected. There is a deeper reason behind this. 

A good garden, like any good ecosystem, is dynamic, variable and resilient...

Unlike a good chair, a good garden is constantly changing, as it adapts to the changing circumstances of the weather and the seasons. And in the long run, that kind of varied, flexible, complex, dynamic system will be more robust and adaptable than the most carefully tended hothouse bloom.

Now Gopnick is clearly in teaching territory. And this next paragraph is not even her finish, but it underlines all that has come before:

As individual parents and as a community, our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it is to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to make a particular kind of child but to provide a protected space of love, safety and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish.

It's not perfect-- by creating a space for children to become dynamic, variable and resilient, we are shaping children's minds. But I get her point-- we're not supposed to be creating children with a set of specific one-size-fits-all made-to-order characteristics. This is perhaps more of a balancing act than Gopnick aknowledges-- do I really want to become the parent of a empathy-impaired sociopath (even if he can run for President)? But it's an interesting argument to consider from someone whose gig is child development and not education specifically. Children are not widgets or coffee tables, and modern ed reform seems to have completely lost sight of that fact. The full book may be worth a look.

This Non-Standardized Country

Two weeks, 5800 miles, and about 16 states (it's a stretch to count Colorado). Plus several days with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. I don't usually do photo essays here, but I want to show you just some of what I saw.

 This is home. This is what we're used to seeing.

Here's downtown Cleveland, where a railroad era central building makes a backdrop for a modern monument. Off to our right is the hall where the GOP gathered for their convention.

A herd of buffalo in a beautifully preserved national park that is perversely named after a egomaniacal military bonehead

Prairies and plains that stretched out into infinity, some far flatter than this, some dried out and brown with nothing on them but occasional grazing cattle, others lush and full of growing crops.

 Many small but lively towns. This one is the town that houses the Spam Museum, but we also saw places like Laramie, WY, which you may think of as a frontier town but is growing rapidly, with sections of town that look shiny and new, like the wrapper just came off last week.

Miles of farmland in the shadow of miles of mountains. Montana and Wyoming have fewer people in the state than live in most major American cities, and we drove for miles without seeing a human being. Just fields spotted with cows and the occasionally lonely structure.

In Indiana, there are miles of sand dunes and beaches, well within sight of what's left of the industrial footprint of Gary.

In Ohio, we visited my old neighborhood. That's the house where I had my first teacher apartment on the left. Now the other homes on the street are boarded up. To take this picture, I stood where the front steps of my first school once were. Now it's a vacant lot.

We visited the town of Venango, Nebraska, a tiny town where the population is now under 150 people. On what's left of the main street, many buildings are now empty. The town is almost 150 years old; it no longer has a school, a grocery store, or a gas station.

We drove down the lake shore of Chicago, through the section where high rise buildings have a beautiful view of the lake, and through the section where the road itself cuts off poor neighborhoods from beaches and parks, as well as the section where it passes along empty lots with bare brick remnants of long-gone factories.

The badlands of South Dakota. Like the Grand Canyon, a reminder that we humans are just a blip on the planet's surface.

 An island in the Northwest, where residents must commute by plane, boat or ferry, but which still has a hefty-sized mountain and massive forests.

This unfinished masterpiece, a reminder that ours is not the first nation to stand on this land.

A public park with a pool for children to play and wade in the water. It's a small corner of a big city, but to see the many families gather and enjoy it reminds me how easy it can be to make families' lives just a little bit richer.

Glacier National Park once again reminds us how small we are in the scale of things, as well as providing evidence of the days, eons ago, when giants big enough to carve away chunks of mountain moved across the earth.

Then in Utah, echo canyon, where the earth has been worn away by other forces, creating the canyon where men once fortified themselves to make a stand against the US Army.




What possesses anyone to think, "Yes, I can come up with a Standardized Thing that will work in every single corner of this country!" Why would anyone think that a school could provide every single student in the country with the same experience when all other aspects of their lives, their environment, their life experiences are completely different?

Consider the roads. Yes, they run from one side of the country to the other, and yes, they are made to some basic standards. But wherever roads are built, they bow to the features of the land they run across. Yes, at times humans shape the land to ease the road's passage, but mostly it is the land that shapes the road. Nobody can sit in DC and say exactly what the road must look like as it runs through some far-off county, sight unseen.

This is so fundamental to my opposition to much of ed reform--any time someone tells me that they've got a One Size Fits All solution to anything human, I must believe they are nuts. A standardized test that will work for everyone? A set of educational standards that every school can and should follow? A curriculum outline that can be applied in every school? Are you nuts? Have you gone out into the world and driven around and opened your eyes? This is not a standardized country, and there is no standardized one-size-fits-all approach that will actually work. And your desire to stomp out human variations so that a standardized solution will work-- that is anti-American, anti-human, anti-reality.

Vocabulary and the Assessment Problem

The teaching of vocabulary is a good microcosm of some of the biggest problems of education.

We know how to teach vocabulary badly. It's a process that has been refined and perfected over decades, and even if you don't use it as a teacher, you probably knew it as a student. The basic outline looks something like this:

1) Get list of vocabulary words
2) Go through the motions of some sort of practice activity
3) Cram words* into your brain
4) Take test
5) Forget words completely

* If teacher is prone to matching or multiple choice tests based on the teacher's one and only acceptable version of the word definition, you need only cram enough to recognize the definition when you see it, which requires minimal brain space. Recognition is not full fluency, as witnessed by everyone who still retains enough high school French to understand what they hear, but can no longer speak it.

Nobody on God's green earth believes that this process produces students with larger, more effective vocabularies.

But teachers still do it (and for years I was one of them) because it's quick and efficient and simple and, best of all, it's a system that students can quickly learn to game, which means that we can point to all our test result data and declare, "Look at how successful I am!" Meanwhile, students get good papers to put up on the fridge. It's the oldest bad deal in the annals of education. You help me look like I'm teaching something, and I will help you look like you're learning something.

The heart of the problem lies with the definition of "success."

The definition of successfully teaching vocabulary is that students use the new words correctly in the proper context without any prompting. If I want to teach my students the word "plethora," I'll truly know I've succeeded when students use "plethora" correctly because they've just run across the perfect moment to do so. That's true success.

But of course, that success is hard to measure. I can't follow all of my students around all the time, monitoring every spoken and written conversation they have.

I have a pretty good idea of what success would be, but it's almost impossible to measure, and even harder to measure within a proscribed time frame.

So I start limiting the parameters of success.

Maybe I say that the student has to use the word correctly during my class period, before I have to turn in grades for the grading period. A little more measurable, but these days this is what I more or less do, and it is an absolute bitch in terms of record keeping. And I've changed the task-- now I'm asking them to actively try to come up with a time to use "plethora." And if you believe in standardization, this method is full of holes. Each student will use the word in a completely different context. Some will have the advantage of having heard other student compete the task. Every single student is going through a different assessment.

So to standardize things, I can take several steps. I can create a written assessment that they will all take at the same time, meaning that the time frame and the task are now more tightly constrained. Maybe I do a fill in the blank. Maybe I have matchy matchy words and definitions.

But now I have radically altered the definition of success-- the goal now is for students to make the right response to the word in highly controlled situation. Can you recognize the official definition for "plethora" when you see it? Can you put plethora in the right blank (when you know that one of these blanks must use "plethora")?

I have turned a comprehension and synthesizing goal into a simple recall task and changed a worthy objective (know how to use "plethora" effectively in writing and speaking for the rest of your life) into a dull, simple competency (know how to put "plethora" into the proper blank in a sentence created by someone else, one time, this Friday). And as virtually every sentient being on the planet already knows, being able to do the simple competency has absolutely nothing to do with actually using an increased vocabulary.

By setting out to create an assessment that is standardized, that is constrained by time, and which requires the student to be reactive rather than active, I have completely changed the goal, the point, the purpose, the objective of the teaching. I have turned a valuable educational goal (increase your active, functional vocabulary) into a stupid one (be able to take standardized vocabulary tests).

That problem-- how to assess accurately without changing the whole purpose and point of the teaching-- is one that ed reformsters over the past decade have absolutely and completely failed to acknowledge, let alone solve. No, I take that back-- Common Core is an attempt to redefine education as mastery of a bunch of simple tasks that are already so thoughtless and dull-witted that the standardized test will not have to redefine them. And Competency Based Education is more of exactly the same thing. Reformsters have come up with a plethora of approaches to assessment, and they all stink.