Bellwether's Learning Landscape

Bellwether Partners, one of the nation's leading reform right-tilted thinky tanks, have created a new report big enough to deserve its own website. The Learning Landscape is an attempt to create a broad overview of the education biz right now, and while there is much to disagree with, it's a bold attempt and an impressive collection of data and stuff.

I've read this so that you don't have to, but be warned-- there are six big honking sections to this, so our journey will not be a brief one. It may not be a bridge too far, but it's definitely long enough to stretch over some Florida swampland.

Before We Start

Content aside, I will say this about the report-- somebody deserves a big bonus and a pat on the back for the layout and structure of this report. It is easily navigated, enormously readable, and actually takes advantage of some of the technological possibilities of a report on the internet instead of just taking a paper report and essentially scanning it into digital form. So kudos to whoever managed that. Now let's look at what the report actually says.

Chapter 1: Student Achievement

The fundamental problem with this chapter is the same old, same old-- we are saying "student achievement" when what we actually mean is "student scores on a narrow standardized test." The report hides the bad assumption behind this kind of language:

In recent decades, national focus has been on the performance of all students against state and federal standards as well as the relative performance of sub-groups of students based on race, gender, income, and other characteristics. Some tension exists among the levels of influence and control exerted by federal, state, and local goals, resulting in fragmented standards and measures of achievement across states. 

Blah blah blah. This boils down to a series of false assumptions-- first, that the standards are a good set of guidelines for what students should achieve, and second, that tests like PARCC or NAEP are a good measure of those standards. There's no reason to believe that either of those assumptions are correct, and so we are left, once again, examining elephant toenail clippings as a proxy for determining the health of the entire jungle.

So let's keep that in mind as we soldier on through this chapter, which presents lots and lots of test data in handy chart form.

The conclusions here are mostly familiar.

Lots of students are reading and mathing below grade level.  This remains unsurprising since "grade level" is generally a normed standard that means "average." It doesn't matter what you're measuring-- there will always be a whole lot of folks who come in below average, because that's how averages work.

US students don't do as well as lots of students in other nations. Bellwether loses points for not bothering to put this in context, which would show that US students have been coming in behind many other nations as long as the comparisons have been made. Bellwether earns some points for noting that when it comes to things like open-ended problem solving, US students don't do quite so poorly as they do on picking out the correct answers on bubble tests. Which skill do you think is more useful to students as individuals and us as a nation-- solving problems or bubbling in the correct answer?

Test scores--I'm sorry, "student achievement" have been steadily improving among all students but there is still a huge gap between poor students (aka "students who attend underfunded and poorly resourced schools while getting less support at home") and well-off students (aka "students who attend well-funded fully resourced schools while supported by families with hefty social capital").

Also, high school graduation rates seem to be up, and there is some variation in student achievement between regions of the country.

This is all old news, though the chapter has the virtue of charts and graphs out the wazoo, plus the use of "sidebars" which are extra background on things like NAEP that can be collapsed or expanded depending on your desire to wander down that side road. So there's data there to play with. I'd just argue that the data, well-laid-out as it is, doesn't really tell us anything useful about anything except test-taking skills.

Chapter 2: Accountability, Standards and Assessment

Here's a place where this report really fulfills its promise of a broad overview. Chapter 2 gives a succinct history of the current accountability movement, starting back with (sigh) A Nation At Risk.

This is a story viewed through a reformy lens. No Child Left Behind's accountability provisions have "shown modest effects on school performance." And the common refrain that NCLB testing programs somehow revealed troubled schools that had previously been hidden under a cloak of invisibility-- that story is here, too. But the report also notes the consequence of curriculum narrowing to meet testing demands, and criticisms of Common Core and testing are listed (though, of course, not treated as accurate parts of the true story).

We have some of the problems that common accompany these sorts of "reports." For instance, the report notes that "teachers consistently rank Common Core-aligned instructional materials as a top priority among supports and resources critical to ensuring successful implementation of the standards." That, however, is based on a piece of  "research" conducted by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation. So, as reliable as research on the effects of tobacco conducted by R.J. Reynolds.

The report notes that, absent any really high quality CCSS materials, teachers are developing it locally. "Teachers are developing their own teaching materials" ranks somewhere below "sun rises in east" as news, and as I've argued before, mostly what we've learned is that it just takes a few strokes of paperwork or clicks on computer to "align" what we were going to do anyway with the Common Core.

But the report looks at the history of waivers and the current status of Common Core and Big Standardized Testing by state, and how those policies affected the disposition of failing schools, as well as considering what ESSA may bring. It's a somewhat tilted history, but in terms of a quick, brief summary of what has happened in this arena over the last thirty-one years, you could do worse.

Chapter 3: School Finance

I know. You don't want to read this chapter because it sounds boring, and you are correct. However, once again the report's authors have collected a lot of data in a smallish place. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? And how have those things changed over the past couple of decades?

This chapters is mostly numbers and charts, and the interest comes from how they're put together. Here's federal school spending charted against the GDP. Here's per-pupil spending broken down by state and by categories of spending, and corrected for different state level of costs. There's even a look at some of the lawsuits related to state education spending.

Yes, they spend a paragraph or two on things like the idea of having the funding follow the student, but that's admittedly an idea that's out there, and they do restrain themselves from outright endorsing it. And yes, the chapter includes the phrase "although charter schools are public schools" (no, they're not). But this chapter is mostly raw information.

Chapter 4: Teacher Effectiveness

Once again, we're in trouble from the very beginning because of how we define terms. Like "student achievement," the idea of  "teacher effectiveness" is linked to terribly inaccurate and useless proxies. Ask a hundred parents what characteristics they look for in a great teacher for their own child, and I'll bet not one of the hundred says, "The most important thing to me is that my kid's teacher helps my kid get a good score on the PARCC."

Traditionally, federal and state policies regarding teacher employment and compensation have been structured primarily around input measures — favoring seniority and advanced credentials. But in the last several years, the conversation has shifted to focus on measuring outcomes and structuring incentives for teachers more prominently around performance. States and districts across the country have made significant changes to the way in which teachers are evaluated and to thinking and practice around how that data is used in personnel decisions regarding compensation, teacher support, tenure, and dismissal. These changes have not been without controversy, particularly related to linking high-stakes decisions for teachers directly to student test scores, and the debate is ongoing.

Well, yes. That is a remarkably understated way to put it, like saying that some folks feel that perhaps Donald Trump has a few potential weaknesses as President and there have been some debates about that. And it is perhaps equally significant that the report also refers to teachers as the "biggest economic driver" in the system. In other words, if you want the money to come rolling out, teachers are the piggy bank you must break.

There are some good charts here looking at the make-up and recent change in the teaching force (Hispanic teacher numbers are increasing, Black numbers are decreasing, and both are far too low). And-- Good lord!-- here's a chart showing that the percentage of teachers with no Bachelor's degree at all was already increasing in 2011-2012.

But now we're back to looking at increases in pay against increases in teacher effectiveness, a comparison that only makes sense if we can measure teacher effectiveness-- which we cannot do. And while the report acknowledges that back in the day, teachers needed real protection from dismissal for trivial reasons, it also suggests that nowadays all that job protection and pay scale stuff is just antiquated.

And now you know we're headed into the weeds because here comes TNTP's infamous The Widget Effect, a glossy piece of baloney that reformsters keep insisting is Really Important, even though it has no more substance or support than the average blog post.

The beef, as always, is that we should hire or fire, give raises or not, based on how effective the teacher is. School superintendents should be like the CEO of a company like Goldman Sachs or ENRON, where executives lose or keep their jobs based strictly on how good their performance is. I am not unsympathetic. As a taxpayer as well as a teacher, I actually agree with the general notion that taxpayers should have some sort of assurance that our money is being well-spent. But we do not have anything remotely resembling a useful instrument for measuring teacher excellence, certainly not the kind of excellence that taxpayers and parents have in mind when they say, "Boy, that teacher is excellent." What we do have is a system that fosters stability for the school and community, gives the teacher the protection needed to stand up to any of their thousand different masters when necessary, and provides the tools needed to get rid of bad teachers (provided administrators are willing to get off their butts and employ them).

But having driven into the weeds, we will now dig a deep hole under the weeds, crawl down into it and pull the weeds in over our heads, because this paper will now try to sell us VAM as a measure of teacher swellitude. I appreciate the paper's efforts to maintain a dispassionate, objective tone (keep thinking I should try that some day), but there is only one objective way to describe VAM, and that is as a failed statistical model designed for agriculture and discredited by every imaginable authority in the teaching and statistics field. You can go here or here, read  and follow the links.

The report also notes that SLOs exist, which is probably the nicest thing that can be said about SLOs. We also mention observation and student surveys, and then move on to showing how various variations on teacher evaluation systems based on test scores have played out in the states.

The report than addresses some Fun Things To Try in the future. Maybe better professional development, since we've all pretty much come to agreement that prevailing model of traveling top down teach-the-teacher consultants isn't working for anybody (well, except the consultants).

And the report likes differentiated payment, which is a new term for merit pay, an approach that keeps requiring new terms to describe it because it doesn't actually work (though it can have the undesirable effect of making teachers competitors and destroying staff cooperation and collegiality). But reformsters like it because it reduces overall staff costs.

Then we're on to teacher training and recruitment, because as much time as we talk about finding ways to fire teachers, getting rid of teachers isn't really the problem most districts are facing. It's hard to get excited about firing someone form a teaching position when you can't even fill all the positions you have.

The report asserts that non-traditional teacher programs are just as effective as traditional programs, based on the same junk data that we've been using throughout this section. And now the report loses more credibility by citing a National Council of Teacher Quality report. NCTQ is the group that "evaluates" college programs (including some that don't actually exist) by looking at commencement programs and course catalogs. I can't think of any group in operation right now that less deserves to be taken seriously. But this report is also going to go on to seriously present the notion that we can start with students scores on a single standardized test, track those back to their teachers, and then track back to the teacher's college, thereby evaluating the college ed program. I can't believe anybody ever talks about this idea with a straight face.

And here's edTPA, the program for monetizing teacher licensure that is unproven in any way, shape or form, but which creates one more huge obstacle for non-wealthy students who want to go into teaching (though it has fostered a lucrative edTPA coaching industry).

Also, the report would like districts to recruit nationally (ignoring the value of teachers who are already connected to the community), and get into the messiness of intra-school transfers.

Oh, yeah-- and principals. School leaders are also super-important, and somebody should be building a pipeline to get more superstar administrators out there. The report itself cites the research that principals are turning over rapidly, and that many find the job super-complex, not to mention the difficulty in trying to make a school work when your board and community won't give you the resources to do it. This is one thing that the charter sector has totally figured out; that's why Eva Moskowitz makes more money running a charter system than Carmen Farina makes for running all of NYC schools, even though Moskowitz is working with a bare fraction of the students.

That's pretty much it for this section, highlighting the problem with a report that adopts a dry, academic tone. It can involve presenting things as absolutely reasonable that aren't, or suggest that various alternatives are equivalent that aren't. Some days I would just rather have people wear their biases on their sleeves so we can get right to the point of the discussion.

Chapter 5: Charter Schools

Well, sure. You knew this was coming.

There's once again a good pile of data here, looking at things like comparative laws and cities percentages of charter enrollments and breakdowns of charter students by race, as well as rates of charter increase for some areas.

Then we get into charter results, and again, I'm going to point out that "results" means "scores on narrow standardized tests" and I will argue endlessly that standardized test results mean bupkus in measuring student achievement and school quality. This report notes that "evidence on the quality of charter schools is mixed" which is putting it mildly. They use a lot of CREDO numbers, but of course the challenge here is not determining if Pat in the charter school did better than Chris did in the public school-- it's figuring out if Pat did better in the charter school than Pat would have done in the public school.

There are some interesting sidebars in this chapter, including a look at which city's charters do "better" and a look at why charters fail (based on the super-charter-loving Center for Education Reform report). But what I find most fascinating in this section is how the writers frame the entire charter sector--

The Charter School Bargain: Autonomy for Accountability

The autonomy part I can totally see. Charters have been exercising all sorts of autonomy. The list of rules and regulations and laws and ethical restraints that charters have operated free of would fill several websites. There's no doubt that charters have totally mastered the autonomy part.

But the accountability part? If that was supposed to be the deal, then we taxpayers have been totally screwed. Shall I link, once again, to the court case in which Eva Moskowitz successfully argues that the state auditor of New York has no right to see how she spent taxpayer dollars? Modern charters have actively, aggressively avoided accountability at every turn. And they are certainly not accountable to, say, a board of elected directors.

The Bellwether version of this is the free market contract model-- I open my charter with a contractual promise to achieve certain benchmarks with my students, and if I don't make those numbers, then I must face "credible consequences." The report acknowledges that for various reasons and expenses, persistently low-performing charters are being allowed to stay open.

The current solutions include automatic closure rules aimed at the schools themselves, and accountability laws aimed at the authorizers (the people who grant the charter in the first place). The latter is particularly useful because authorizers in many states make good money granting charters and zero money closing them down. States have tried a little of each. Nobody has any great successes to report back. Though the report doesn't go into this, but the current demand from absolutely everybody-- including charter fans-- that cyber charters be brought to heel may provide a model for how this could actually work. Right now, charters are mostly money factories, and the people reaping the benefits fight hard to keep the factory running.

The chapter includes a handy breakdown of different authorizing approaches-- a good primer if you're a little fuzzy on the issue. Followed by a breakdown of funding and capping practices across states. That's followed by some recommendations and "case studies" looking at particular cities. Massachusetts should raise its cap, NYC should be nicer to charters, and New Orleans did great with its "golden opportunity" of Hurricane Katrina. Didn't know there was anyone left who was willing to keep characterizing a disaster that killed almost 2,000 people and destroyed huge chunks of a city as a "golden opportunity."

Chapter 6: Philanthropy in Education

This is fascinating. Or maybe horrifying. But if you want to see where philanthropic dollars are going, and whose dollars they are, much of that is broken down in this chapter. Here's just a few tidbits.

Of the money "donated" to the K-12 edu-world, the top 25 donors gave 71% of the grants. Tops in that group is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with $210 million. That's 11.9% of the total given-- more than one dollar in every ten dropped into K-12 ed came from the Gates. The Waltons follow with $134 million. In the next tier we find W.K.Kellogg with $54 million and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation with $59 million.

The report also lists some receivers. The top grantees of 2012? Teach for America leads the pack with grants of $57 million. I'm stuck trying to figure out what they could have spent all that money on. Lobbyists? Ball caps with their logos? Recruitment beer parties with really good beer? Super-duper stationary? That's just so much money for a group that offers bare bones training and collects finders fees from the districts that hire their temps.

Anyway, that's a pretty fun list, too, even if it's back in 2012. Oh, look! There's inBloom getting $14.8 million in grant money. Too bad, guys!

So what can philanthropists shop for? Well, they can try to influence existing institutions, but they might be better off funding new, different, betterer institutions. Or they could fund new governance models. Or they could try to influence the public policy debate. Philanthropists have, of course, done all of this, including using charters, TFA, and other outfits like Broad Academy and Relay Graduate School of Education to create an alternate shadow education system for this country. And one need look no further than Bill Gates selling policy makers on Common Core to see philanthropists exercising their public policy debate muscles.

What can be gleaned from available research and data is that patterns of giving have shifted in recent decades to include more efforts to fund disruptive or innovative approaches, signaling a belief among funders that problems in K-12 education are not solely an issue of a lack of resources but also of a need to use existing resources differently. Increased reliance on data and “results-driven” philanthropic investment that create proof points for promising practices are hallmarks of some of the most prominent philanthropic efforts of late, as well as increased investment in research and advocacy efforts that can build knowledge, capacity, and political will to replicate proven models. Whether the application of “venture philanthropy” principles will have large-scale impact on public education as a whole remains to be seen, but what is clear is that funders can be strategic by clearly defining measurable objectives, building in accountability into grantmaking, and considering ways to scale impact (i.e., through research and advocacy) and sustainability.

Yes, that all sounds familiar. Well summarized, Bellwether.

Bottom Line

This report is jam packed with data and largely free of hectoring. It's not necessarily good at distinguishing between reformster reality and everyone else's version of Planet Earth, but in terms of painting a board picture of what has happened and what is happening, it does a fair job. You just have to filter out the reformster bias. And some of this data is pretty interesting to peruse. Now, it may or may not all be accurate (see comments), but it still tells a story.

It actually reads a little bit like prospectus aimed at those very philanthropists, or maybe new baby wannabe philanthropists. That may be because the report was made "with support from" the Robertson Foundation, a private philanthropy outfit that makes "large, transformative grants" that targets "high impact grants" in environment, medical care and, of course, education, founded by hedge fund master of the universe Julian Robertson. But if you are interested in seeing what the education landscape looks like through a reformer lens, this makes a good one stop shop. And if you're a new philanthropist with money to burn, before you think too much about this, I have a bridge to sell you.

Gaiman: Why We Read

Courtesy of Maria Popova's indispensable website Brain Pickings comes a look into one of author Neil Gaiman's awesomely uplifting essays, this one originally delivered at The Reading Agency, an English charity devoted to developing young readers (you can find the full essay in  The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction ).

The riches of this essay are considerable. On the business of making sure that children are reading the "right" book:

There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time. You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the twenty- first-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant.

Another critical function of reading that Gaiman underlines. is the ability of reading to foster empathy, that most critical of human abilities.

When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Gaiman also supports the ability of reading as a means of envisioning other worlds-- and therefor becoming dissatisfied with this one, with building visions of the world we would like to inhabit.

But I take the most inspiration and resolve from Gaiman's list of obligations. I am posting this here for you to see, Reader, but also so that I can come back to it again and again for myself.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers — and especially writers for children, but all writers — have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were — to understand that truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading.

There's more, and I encourage you to go read it. It's reminder of what our obligations are as teachers, about the enormous power of reading in general and reading fiction in particular, a reminder (if we need one) that reading is such a vaster, richer, more human experience than the cramped narrow supposed-skill-based version that is currently pushed on us in education. The powers that be want us to make students study a small rock when what we owe them is a look at the Grand Canyon.

More Moskowitz Baloney

Eva Moskowitz was given some space by her buddies at the New York Post to run one more advertisement for her Success Academies, this time featuring a twisty interpretation of recently released test scores.

She actually starts from an accurate place, noting that the mayor and chancellor are not really entitled to victory laps about the test results because, as State Ed Honcho Elia already noted, this year's test results are not comparable to last year's. It's a different test, taken under different conditions (most notably, a non-time-limit condition for this year's test). The Big Standardized Test in New York was arguably massaged not to improve its ability to collect useful data, but to make it more politically palatable.

After Moskowitz notes that test conditions make "apples-to-apples comparisons with prior years impossible," she then proceeds to make apples-to-oranges to tout the results at Success Academy. In Moskowitz's worldl, it is, literally, only okay for charter schools to make comparisons between this year and last years test results.

Charter scores went up this year by a big chunk. That could mean any number of things, including that charters are getting really good at gaming the test and at identifying the kind of students who will help them do it. It's a good example of how folks can play with statistics. For instance, Moskowitz can say it this way:

The benefits to minority students of receiving a charter-school education are particularly remarkable. An African-American student is more than twice as likely to be proficient in math if he attends a charter school rather than a district school (48.8% vs. 20%), and a Hispanic student is nearly twice as likely (46.9% vs. 24.4%).

But we could also read that data to mean that an African-American student who is proficient in math has twice as much chance to be admitted by a charter school. That data don't show that the charters are good at anything except selecting students. When Moskowoitz takes over a NY neighborhood school and keeps every student there for the duration and then gets these kind of results-- then, and only then, will she have anything to brag about.

She also plays games like imagining what would happen if we called the trend of the last three years a linear progression and extended it forward. So if my ten year old has grown three inches over the past three years, I can reasonably assume that he will be ten feet tall when he's forty, right?

And there's this little irony nugget as Moskowitz bemoans the city's unwillingness to let her have all the charters she wants:

While the administration is thankfully not making any more efforts to evict charter schools from their buildings or force them to pay back-breaking rent, it has settled into a cold war in which charter schools are begrudgingly tolerated and subtly undermined.

Kind of like charters like Success Academy barely tolerate and subtly shove out students who don't help them get good scores.

Moskowitz refers to all of this as "uncomfortable truths," but the uncomfortable truths about the B S Test in New York is that even if you could argue that this test is not junk to begin with, more than one of every five students didn't take it. Whatever results you have from this year and last year (when 20% opted out), those results are meaningless. The feds themselves, in demanding that 95% is the minimum acceptable participation, have underlined that 80% or 78% participation gets you junk data as results.

New York's BS Test is now, for two years running, a tremendous waste of time and money. Folks can try to spin it into marketing gold, but there isn't enough substance there to even scrape together a decent hill of beans.  

Rocketship: Redesigning Children

Rocketship Academy's blog recently ran a piece by one of their teachers that really captures some critical problems with their entire approach to education. Step One, it suggests, is to get children to not behave like children.

Kindergartners Conquering Personalized “Quests” Learn To Love Reading was contributed by Lauren Berry, who has a solid modern charter background-- after graduating from USC with BA in English Language and Literature in 2013, she put in two years with Teach For America at Rocketship Academy, then moved up to Lead Teacher last year before becoming a Model Teacher for Rocketship just last month.

Berry is here primarily to plug eSpark, a computerized individualized personalized instruction program, aka one of the vendors set up to go after the Competency Based Education market. We could talk about what's wrong with that approach, and in particular could address the idea of delivering education via tablet to five year old children. But first let's look at some other problematic assumptions here, visible from her very first paragraph.

Anyone who’s worked to teach kindergarteners how to read knows that it can be a slippery challenge. Their squirmy bodies are full of energy, which can make it difficult for them to sit still through reading instruction, let alone through an entire text that they’re still struggling to understand.

This gives me an instant flashback to the words of Yong Zhao-- we are worried about getting children ready for school when we should be worried about getting school ready for children. Why should getting five year olds ready to "sit through reading instruction" even be a goal?

Berry's description of the program is familiar to anyone who has checked out CBE. The students go one "quests," each one aligned to a particular reading standard, and then completes a performance task at the end, including one in which the student will "prepare a script that introduces themselves, explain the answer on video for me to grade and provide feedback."

Berry thinks this is swell because it cuts her prep time in half, which is undoubtedly a big help when you didn't study education in college and have only been in a classroom for three years. That's not a slam on beginning teachers-- those first few years are rough, and while people who have actually trained to become elementary teachers emerge from college with stacks and stacks of usable materials, TFAers who enter the classroom with next to no resources must have a hell of a time. But of course, part of what she's excited about here is how many steps eSpark has taken toward making her job obsolete-- no human being there in the classroom to design or personalize the instruction, but instead, all of that handled by the software, which is another way of saying that Berry has abdicated all of those decisions and handed them off to whoever is behind the software.

Berry's praise for eSpark is largely centered on how much easier it makes classroom management. Students are riveted by the quests, and stay focused on other tasks because they want to get back to eSpark time. What she has to say about student achievement is not encouraging:

Since then, every student masters at least one standard each week, which is raising our reading achievement scores and fostering strong, curious readers who are eager to take on greater challenges.

The appropriate number of "achievement scores" for a kindergarten class is zero. The appropriate amount of time for five year olds to spend taking tests measuring their academic achievements is zero hours and zero minutes. If you find the five year olds in your room to be antsy or slippery or having difficulty focusing on academic subjects, that is a clear signal that something is wrong with your classroom-- not your students.

Berry's students were only spending twenty minutes a day on eSpark, but it still raises the issue of screen time for small children. Nor does she address the issue of readiness and how such a program would individualize reading instruction for students who are still six months away from being ready to begin learning to read. And since this was a first-year pilot, she won't know for a while how many grades of this students will tolerate before they find being programmed by the screen just boring and easily gamed.

In short, there's no question here about whether or not such a program is effective or appropriate. Only one more example of the philosophy that says, "Hey, I have a great (and marketable) idea about how to teach kids. If we can't just get kids to match my model, it will be awesome." But that's what we can expect when schools are created to be profit centers-- we forget the question "How can we best meet the needs of these students" and focus instead on "How can we best get these students to meet the needs of our company." 

Milton Friedman's Vision

The Friedman Foundation for Choice in Education has a new name-- EdChoice.

The organization considers the change of their "brand" in the pages of its blog.  Milton and Rose Friedman are both currently dead, but they apparently left a plan for making sure the group outlived them and kept its focus on its mission, not its deceased beneficiaries.  They remain committed to choice, but

We don’t just want more choice, we want better and bigger choice. And using what we already know works, we will usher in a new era of educational choice programs built to serve every student and ensure that all families have the opportunity and access to schooling that meets their needs.

As for their organizational qualities, they are smart and dedicated. They are 100% for all-out "unencumbered" school choice. They are proud to not be "not some stuffy think tank." Beyond that they are going to be lobbying hard for those all-choice policies.

But the end of the Friedman name as a choice-promotion brand seems like a good time to look at Friedman's vision, a vision that has drive much of the charter industry for years.

In 1995, Milton Friedman contributed this op ed to the Washington Post. It now lives on the CATO website, and from the moment it spools out its title, it's clear we're seeing the big plan.

Public Schools: Make Them Private is one big spoiler alert of a title, because that's exactly what Friedman wants to do.

Introduction

Friedman says that our current education system needs to be reformed. And while that is in part because of the "defects" of the system, there are more compelling reasons. Technology and globalization are at the top of the list.

A radical reconstruction of the educational system has the potential of staving off social conflict while at the same time strengthening the growth in living standards made possible by the new technology and the increasingly global market. In my view, such a radical reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. Such a reconstruction cannot come about overnight. It inevitably must be gradual.  

He sees the solution in vouchers, but it was only 1995, and he couldn't see the chartery possibilities of setting up a vast second school system funded with public dollars. In 1995, he's still on vouchers, and idea that hasn't been fully realized yet because of those damned teacher unions.

The Deterioration of Schooling

Friedman asserts that schools are worse in 1995 than they were in 1955. He says this deterioration is "not disputable," and offers exactly zero evidence that it's true. What was so awesome about school in 1955?  The segregation? Only roughly 60% of students graduating from school? Friedman doesn't say, but he does identify the most likely culprits--  centralization and those damned teachers' unions (in fact, the unions are somewhat responsible-- in some unnamed way-- for causing districts to consolidate). Also, federal overreach.

The New Industrial Revolution

The Big Revolution is essentially globalization.

The technological revolution has made it possible for a company located anywhere in the world to use resources located anywhere in the world, to produce a product anywhere in the world, to be sold anywhere in the world. It's impossible to say, "this is an American car" or "this is a Japanese car," and the same goes for many other products. 

Of course, "resources" includes labor and capital. The reserve of cheap labor in particular is being huge-ified by globalization,

Plus, the political revolution adds more cheap labor and second, it discredits the entire idea of central planning. Local planning is best.

Wage Differentials

In poor countries. But in not-poor countries, the above changes have insured that in non-poor countries, the rich will get richer and the poor will get the shaft. Friedman calls this broadening wage gap the recipe for a recipe for social disaster, by which I gather he means the problem of angry peasants brandishing pointy sticks and storming the castle.

Education

Friedman says that education is adding to stratification, so that's bad. There's "enormous room for improvement" says Friedman. Teachers still stand in front of rooms of students, and hardly anybody is taking advantage of computers.

The solution to this barely-stated problem? Privatize most of the schools. This will be good because

A) it will bust the unions (he wants to weaken or destroy "the power of the current educational establishment, who are the great obstacle to the radical changes that must be made")

B) competition will make schools be better because competition is magical that way

Free market magic again; Friedman says we all know how it has spurred innovative great ideas in every industry. Friedman even offers some examples of how great this works, like the way the fax machine undermined the postal service, or the way the phone industry was revolutionized by being broken into competitive units, and how UPS and FedEx revolutionized the delivery industry, and how the Japanese souped up the auto industry.

I realize that Friedman was one of the most influential financial minds of his generation and I'm a high school English teacher, but I have to call bullshit on his examples. Fax machines did not make letter writing better. The phone industry has competed by not really competing, leaving consumers to deal with the same money-grubbing customer-punting industry we had when Ma Bell was the only phone company. UPS and FedEx have revolutionized the mail delivery industry by sorting out customers and only working with those from whom, they can make money, leaving the US Postal Service to do the rest. IOW, FedEx and UPS revolutionized the business by changing the business's goal-- to only serve the customers they considered worth their while, which is a far different mission than making it possible for every single US citizen to send a letter to any other US citizen. The auto industry is an even more curious example, because we had free market competition long before the Japanese horned in; it would have been worth Friedman's while to consider why the auto industry was such a free market failure.

Friedman's vision is for universal vouchers, available to all students and good for all schools (which is far different from several of his previous examples). The chance to grab some of that voucher money will lead to more private schools entering the arena, leading to an explosion of educational awesomeness. And it will all cost the taxpayers less that the current system.

This was and is baloney. If Young Pat is going to have a choice of schools, there will need to be seats for Pat at multiple schools, and we end up with a system with way too much excess capacity. If we craft a system that doesn't have all that excess capacity, then someone will have to figure out how to manage this year's overflow-- who gets into a particular school, and who does not. Once we do that, we no longer have a choice system at all.

Friedman is also prone to throwing in odd assertions like this one: "As in all cases, the innovations in the "luxury" product will soon spread to the basic product." In all what cases? Stroll through Wal-Mart and show me where the luxury has spread. The only thing that has spread is the marketing illusion of some luxury. In other words, give the peasants something shiny and they'll stay happy and away form the pointy sticks.

Oh, and this burgeoning lucrative highly-profitable business would attract all those folks who want to go into education, but are discouraged by the terrible state of the biz.

Friedman's Crystal Ball

It's interesting to see Friedman predict TFA and other faux educator training programs role in the privatized world, as well as his not bothering to distinguish between vouchers, private schools, charters, and all the other landmarks of the education biz.

Friendman's vision certainly has guided lots of folks in the past decade-plus, but he has also been proven wrong about pretty much everything. A choice system isn't cheaper, isn't better, and hasn't provided anything except profits for many of the privatizers. But at least he was absolutely clear about the goal-- turn public education into a private business, one way or another, and let folks make a bundle doing it.

King's No Excuses

Well, of course it was about no excuses for the students. That was pretty much the whole point. It's the kind of setting Those People need. "We don't a care if you're poor or dyslexic or homeless or just plain not very bright. We are going to demand that you succeed." That's what Those Children need, and it's what No Excuses schools have always promised and demanded. So the first part of this quote is baloney, one more attempt to revise history and avoid having to defend the indefensible.

No excuses for educators has certainly part of the landscape, with teachers and principals have been told, from the first days of No Child Left Behind, that no excuses would free them from the punishment that will be meted out for those students who don't get above-average test scores.

Who gets all excuses? Elected officials and education bureaucrats. Does a school have too few resources, old materials, crumbling building problems? Then clearly the school is to blame. The teachers are at fault for not getting their students to pass the Big Standardized Test-- if they had done that, the school would no longer be poor, or something like that.

But the legislators fail to get schools the resources they need (or even actively oppose such a thing)-- those guys get all the excuses they want. Are there stupid laws getting in the school's way? That's not the lawmakers' fault. Is the school chronically underfunded? That's not the legislature's fault. Are schools stuck in a morass of foolish rules and regulations because the feds laid down the law? Is there an expensive mess that erupted from the federal force-feeding of Common Core to each state? Well, you can't blame any of that on the bozos in DC.

King knows this dodge well. When his public meetings turned up a large number of Very Angry New Yorkers at public meetings, King made the excuse that it was just some special interest groups. It was union agitators. In no way was the resistance to his policies the fault of bad policies that agitated ordinary people so badly that they felt compelled to go complain about it.

From "teachers are the most important factor in schools" to "teachers can't hide behind student poverty and poor home life," ed reform has made tons of excuses for the mess their policies created. Neither Rod Paige nor Arne Duncan nor John King has ever stood up to say, "Hey, states-- you must fully fund your schools, and we don 't want to hear any excuses."

"No Excuses" has always applied to teachers and students. It has never been applied to policymakers nor legislators nor self-appointed education mavens. Plenty of students have been suspended and disciplined because they had no excuses for their behavior, but so far, no policy makers or legislators have been spanked for making excuses about not properly funding schools. No, all of those folks can have as many excuses as they'd like.

Cyber Schools Slammed by Charters (Again)

The Thomas Fordham Foundation releases a report today looking at cyber charters in Ohio, and the cover of the report signals pretty clearly where we're headed.

Ouchies! Stock Photo Lad is clearly not prepared to sing the joyous praises of his virtual school, and that bored and contemptuous face pretty much sets the tone for the report (presumably he is a cyber charter student, and not someone who has just tried to read the report).

We should note right up front that Fordham has skin in this game; they have several bricks-and-mortar charters of their own in Ohio. And the bricks-and-mortar wing of the charter school industry has been getting pretty rough with their cyber-siblings lately. So, let's see how they made out this time.

The report strikes a pair of notes over and over again-- e-learning can be awesome, but cyber schools, not so much. Right off the bat, in the foreward, we get this:

To be certain, the Internet has opened a new frontier of possibilities for America’s K–12 students. Much less sure, however, is whether these new opportunities are actually improving achievement, especially for the types of students who enroll in virtual schools.

So what did Dr. Ahn find? We can cut to the chase, because although the report is fifty-five pages long, the actual meat is pretty short and sweet.

Dr. Ahn used Ohio education department data from 2009-2013 covering K-12 students. By breaking down the data, the following findings emerged.

* Cyber-schools are largely centered around the urban areas, where (the report notes) there are plenty of perfectly good bricks-and-mortar charters. That's an interesting data point; here in PA, cybers take advantage of areas where there is little brick-and-mortar competition, as well as hammering the urban areas.

* Cybers have far more poor and low-achieving students. Cyber students are more likely to have repeated or failed courses before their cyber-enrollment. Also, fewer gifted students are in cyber-school.

* When students sign up for cyber-math, it is most frequently remedial or low-level math.

* Even when you perform some fancy statistical corrections, cyber students do worse than bricks-and-mortar students. That's in keeping with the CREDO study that showed that cyber school worked about as well as taking a year-long nap. Ahn would also like you to know that BaM charter students did better than public school students. By a little bit. If your only measure is a single standardized test.

None of the findings of this charter marketing cyber school report should be surprising. While cyber schools can be extraordinarily effective for students who face particular challenges, they are also immensely popular as schools of last resort for students who just aren't into the whole school thing. But cyber schooling can require more self-discipline, more self-direction, more initiative than a traditional setting, as well as parents who are involved and supportive (but not so supportive that they "help" the cyber student get the work done).

Dr. Ahn offers four recommendations to the state of Ohio.

First, e-schools are aimed directly at and often used by "challenging student populations." Ahn suggests that cybers really ought to develop a plan for addressing the needs of the students they are most likely to have.

Second, if e-schools can't figure out how to do that, then maybe they should be used more "strategically," to serve the students they are better suited for. In other words, if they can't serve a portion of the market, then maybe those customers should be sent to a different sort of vendor (cough cough bricks and mortar charters cough cough).

Third, move to a more blended model in which cyber students are only online part time and sit in a classroom the rest.

Fourth, "harness the potential of e-schools to better understand how students learn online." So, I don't know-- use cyber charter students as guinea pigs?

Modern charters are busy not just throwing cyber charters under the bus, but are loading up the bus with big slabs of concrete and driving it back and forth over the cyber bodies. There are two main reasons.

First of all, the cybers are making all charters look bad. As this report notes, the cyber results are put in with all charter results and therefor make the charter sector look bad. "We have got to shut them down," say the meat world charters, "because this is why we can't have nice things."

Second, while charters mostly compete with public schools for students, cybers represent a pre-selected group of charter customers who aren't shopping in bricks-and-mortar land, but are also not happy with public schools. Cyber students are perfect target customers that B&M charters can poach without worrying about violating any charter school bro code.

So this report is kind of like having Ford do a report on the safety of Yugos. But there are charts and graphs and conclusions that sort of match what we already know. There are some charts, many words and pages here, many drawn up by the Department of Redundancy Department, but the bottom line is clear enough. Ohio cyber schools aren't doing a very good job, and some folks you should try bricks and mortar charters instead.