Raymond J. Ankrum, Sr., is a teacher-blogger who put in some years in the Baltimore school system and who now is working a charter gig. And in a recent post, he asks the question that lots of union critics think, but don't always have the nerve to articulate.
The question often comes from people not working in public education-- why do you need a union or tenure or a lock-step pay grid? Isn't all that stuff for the crappy teachers, to protect them from the consequences of their own crappiness? Wouldn't school districts do their best to hold onto super-duper rock star teachers and pay them super well?
That kind of kibbitzing is typical in every field that draws backseat drivers with no experience or expertise ("Doctor, why don't you just prescribe exactly the right dose of exactly the right drug the first time?"). But it's always a little bit of a surprise to hear it coming from teachers. At the risk of sounding like the aged fart that I am, I can't help notice that teachers who pose this rhetorical comment are most often "less seasoned" or "newly minted" or "young." Not that all young teachers have this issue-- the vast majority know better. But some still want to ask this question, so let me try to answer it.
First of all, the question presumes that the rock star teacher works for a rock star principal and a rock star superintendent. This is a large presumption. The rock star teacher may in fact be working for a complete Lawrence Welk administrator, a school leader who hasn't got a clue.
In fact, since school administrators these days turn over at a faster rate than teachers, chances are the rock star teacher is working for someone who had no hand in hiring her. I don't know that anyone has done the research (or could) but it would be interesting to see how many teachers are working for someone that didn't hire them in the first place. I'm going to bet that the percentage is huge. That means that even if the teacher is a rock star and the administrator is a rock star, the teacher was hired as part of a vision of the school that is no longer in play.
Oh, but excellence is excellence and anybody with half a brain knows a rock star when they see one. Sure. That's why all elections in this country are settled quickly and easily and everyone listens to the same music and watches the same movies and tv shows-- because excellence is something that we all totally agree on.
No, sorry, young rock star, but one person's rock star is another person's "Oh my God how can you listen to that dreck!!" Find me any awesome rock star teacher in the country, and I guarantee you-- no matter how beloved and rock starry and awesome that teacher is, we can find ten people who would say, "Yes, if I had the power, I would totally fire that teacher for being so awful." And sometimes those people pursue, and even acquire, that power.
Nor is excellence an immutable category. A rock star teacher may hit a rough patch for any number of reasons, from a person struggle to illness to existential crisis. Should a school help that flagging rock star through that patch, or just dump the teacher the moment she becomes less shiny? And many ordinary mortals are only rock stars a few days a week-- does that count?
And that's just all the disagreement about what constitutes excellence. That's before we even get to bad actors who want a teacher's hide because that teacher refuses to give Junior an A or let Junior start first string on the tiddlywinks team or because that teacher belongs to the wrong political party or the wrong church.
Or let's take the kind of case where a teacher's very rock starriness puts her on a collision course with administration, the case where the school is pursuing a course that is bad for students or a student, and the rock star tries to advocate for that student and is told to shut up or lose her job.
You, young rock star, may feel as if your professional awesomeness is a mighty shield, so powerful and strong that you don't need the protection of anything else. It may be pretty to think so, but history and reality are not on your side. In fact, your awesomeness and go-to-it-ness almost certainly will put you on a collision course with someone-- a parent, an administrator, a board member, or some other random actor-- and bring you to a moment when you'll want to have someone on your side.
The implication that the only teacher who run into trouble are the ones
who deserve it is just wrong, like suggesting that Those People wouldn't
have been stopped by the police if they hadn't been Up To Something. Sure, there are people who end up in trouble because they Really Screwed Up. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that those people make up 100% of the conflicts. In this respect, people who argue that we don't need a union are like people who argue that we don't need public defenders for the court system.
The irony of the unions-protect-mediocrity argument is that it's actually the absence of a union that encourages mediocrity. When you're a teacher with no job protections and nobody to watch your back-- well, that's the time to keep your head and down and never, ever do anything that might make you stand out or draw attention. Ankrum winds back around to the idea that he wants teachers who give their all and don't just watch the clock (with the implication that such teachers are most likely found in a non-union charter). But I want teachers who can give their all and use every bit of their professional expertise without having to look over their shoulders every five minutes.
Is the union, particularly in large urban settings, its own sort of monstrous bureaucratic institutional mess? Sure. The union grows into a mirror of the district that houses it, and we end up with a complicated struggle. But to imagine that rock star teachers are so protected by their rock star powers that no unions are ever needed is reckless, foolish, and in some cases, seriously egotistical. Every rock star may not call upon the union (though many will), but the mere fact of the union's existence and the work rules that it supports will make it more possible for the rock star to be a rock star. To imagine otherwise is to be a carousel pony imagining that if you could just get unhooked from the carousel and get this big pole out of your back, you would breeze right past all these other mediocre ponies. Once it happens, you suddenly realize how much you needed the pole to stay upright and moving forward.
At this point, there is nobody-- absolutely nobody-- who can match the Center for American Progress in senseless devotion to the Common Core State [sic] Standards. CAP, the left-tilted thinky tank founded by Hillary Clinton's campaign chief John Podesta, has remained absolutely unflinching in their support of the standards, no matter how little sense they are making.
For instance, yesterday we get this piece from Melissa Lazarin, a CAP policy advisor with no actual background in education. Her piece is entitled "Reading, Writing, and the Common Core State Standards" and does not include the sub-heading "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others." She then goes on to demonstrate a lack of understanding about English language instruction.
She opens with the uncredited (but credible) data point that more high school students read The Fault In Our Stars and Divergent than read MacBeth or Hamlet. Yes, that could well be true.
Lazarin is bothered because the popular teen lit books do not have complex texts. In fact, she's worried that the lack of complexity in their reading and writing will make them unprepared for college. And she goes on to demonstrate how thoroughly she misunderstands the nature of reading and reading instruction:
Three of the top five most commonly assigned titles in grades 9 through 12 are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, and Of Mice and Men. All three books, while classics, are not particularly challenging in terms of sentence structure and complexity.
Yes, so? This is the great reading fallacy of the standards-- the notion that reading is somehow a series of discrete tasks, skills that can exist independent of any content, and that in fact content is irrelevant, even unnecessary. This is nonsense,like trying to learn a language without learning the meaning of any words in that language.
But but but, she says. Text complexity!
An ACT report finds that “performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not.”
Text complexity is not independent of content. It's not simply mechanics. If you don't know anything about dinosaurs at all, any book about dinosaurs is hard to read. And if you are able to work your way through a complex text about quantum physics, it is in large part because you know something about quantum physics. To suggest that the Crucible is an easy book because it has simple sentences is just bizarre. Anything by Hemmingway has simple sentences and easy vocabulary, but that does not make The Sun Also Rises a fourth grade text.
Here's another angle. Lazarin is concerned that high school students aren't getting sufficient exposure to the level of complex texts they will deal with in college. But I can spend years putting a student through the most complex texts in the canon of classic novels, and that will not make that students any more prepared for a text about advanced calculus-- only a study of calculus, no matter how complex the text, will do that.
Lazarin then wastes our time talking about NAEP proficiency levels, failing to note that "proficiency" on NAEP means "super-duper" and not "just good enough." And that one study showed a full 50% of the NAEP students rated "basic" still graduated college with four-year degrees. And she throws in the US rankings on the international PISA tests, skipping over the historic context showing that we have always ranked low on such tests.
Lazarin will now follow this up with some groundless claims about the standards.
Under the new standards, students are getting regular practice with complex and grade-level appropriate texts, using more informational texts, and practicing more evidence-based writing.
It's an odd claim, given that its the Common Core text requirement that has led to less MacBeth andHamlet in the classroom. And students are not so much getting grade-level appropriate texts as they are being subjected to a new definition of what grade-level appropriate means, a definition now divorced from content and centered only on sentence structure and vocabulary. Which is nuts ("Mommy, why won't Brett let Jake be her boyfriend?"). The reference to writing here is one of the few in the whole piece, so we're just going to let that rest for another day.
But CAP has some thoughtful recommendations for teachers everywhere, because if there's anything we teachers need, it's suggestions from thinky tank whiz-bangers with no classroom experience.
Push ahead with the Common Core standards and aligned assessments.
Lazarin insists that hints of improvement are emerging. Lazarin is kidding herself. She also claims there are more robust tests. This is also simply not true. However, what she needs to understand about the assessments is this-- I could best prepare my students for the standards-based assessments by dropping all instruction of any texts at all and simply having them read short excerpts from newspaper articles and answering some multiple choice questions every day. That would get me much better test scores. Of course, it would also require me to stomp on my own soul and discard every thought I ever had about why I wanted to be an English teacher. But it would get me better test results.
There is nothing that would better improve the current state of education than to drop the aligned assessments into a black hole somewhere.
Strengthen training supports for prospective and current teachers, including teachers of other subjects.
Noted in multiple surveys of teachers, their most pressing need is professional learning regarding how to best differentiate instruction for students at various achievement levels, students with disabilities, and ELLs.
None of which has anything to do with the standards. Lazarin also notes that people who studied to teach subjects other than language arts feel ill-prepared to teach language arts. Go figure.
Ensure that teachers have access to and are using high-quality curricular materials and tools aligned to the Common Core.
Yeah, that's been a problem since day one. And it's getting to be a bigger problem in the sense that teachers, having played the Common Core game for a couple of years, have been steadily going back to using their own professional judgment.
The Common Core ELA standards offer educators a roadmap to arm students with the core knowledge and literacy skills they need to be prepared for college and the workplace.
CAP contains about the only people who can say things like this with a straight face. Seven years in and there still isn't a shred of evidence that Common Core can actually do any of those things. CAP really needs to understand that if they are going to make a case for the Core, they will need more than advertising copy and PR puffery endlessly repeated.
And here's the thing about books like Faulty Stars and Divergent-- students read them because they want to. And there is nothing- nothing-- that gets students to read and progress and grow and learn like finding things to read that they are interested in. And reading leads to more reading. Better reading. Certainly more and better reading than forcing a child to look at page after page of stuff they hate. Standards are not the secret to better reading. Getting students about reading something-- anything-- is the secret.
This is the 2,000th post on this blog, which coincidentally goes up just two days after the three year birthday of this blog.
I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagine that many moments in which somebody thought it worth the bother to read what's here, and it has been humbling to have so many people reach out to say that something here has made an impression.
And as always, I consider the readership of this blog to be a measure of how many people really care about the world of US education. As of today, these are the top ten posts on the blog:
Three years ago I was just starting to understand what the heck was happening, and I was able to educate myself thanks to the work of bloggers who came before me, and over the last three years I've seen other bloggers step up to help get the word out.
It's a great time to be a writer, a time in which the power of the word has been amplified again, a time in which an English teacher from a small town (and with a budget of $0.00) can reach out to a national audience about topics that really matter.
I started this first to organize and collect my thoughts, then progressively to vent my frustrations and amazement at the crazy things that are happening to one of America's most important public institutions. I never imagined that I would end up reaching out to so many people, and the lesson there, for all of us, is that we need to do what we can to get the word out and to keep getting the word out. Thanks for reading. Now I have to go get started on #2,001.
The folks at the American Enterprise Institute have released a study comparing charter schools to public schools. "Difference on Balance: National Comparisons of Charter and Traditional Public Schools" announces in its title that AEI continues to support the modern charter school industry (charter schools are not public schools in any meaningful way except their willingness to accept public tax dollars).
That said, a quick scan of the end notes shows a broad assortment of articles and even some studies not from the usual suspects. So this could be interesting. We should never pretend that AEI is anything but a huge fan of charter schools as a tool in the invisible hand of free market economics, but AEI is also, on the whole, one of the more intellectually rigorous thinky tanks in the biz. They may be working to sell reformster PR, but at least its not flimsy thin baloney PR, and after you've read a hundred or so of these things, you start to appreciate people who at least do a little homework and don't just base their "research" on five "reports" from their own organization.
At any rate, let's take a look at this thirty-two page paper. Once again (I believe this is the closest thing I have to a bloggy slogan) I've read it so that you don't have to. Here we go.
Our Author
The paper is by Nat Malkus, a senior research analyst with AEI. From 2009 to 2015 he worked with American Institutes for Research, the outfit that sounds like a research organization but is in the test manufacturing business. He graduated in 1997 from Covenant College, a liberal arts Christian college in Tennessee, with a degree in historical studies and later earned a Ph.D. in educational policy and leadership from the University of Maryland. His AEI bio lists four years as a teacher. In a US News piece about the release of his report, Malkus lays out the root of the issue-- there's a huge debate about how charters compare to public schools, and rather than suggest that one side is honest and decent and the other side is composed of delude liars, he suggests there's a different problem. His theory-- people are looking at different chunks of evidence. Many studies have carefully matched charters to comparable traditional public schools in limited areas, but even the broadest of these don't generalize across the nation. Other evidence
attains a larger scope by matching all charters with all traditional
public schools, but doesn't account for the fact that the latter serve
students everywhere, while charters exist in select locations.
Methodology
So we're going to start in the back of the report, looking at the methodology, because that's the whole show here. Again, from his US News summation: I attempt to bridge the tradeoffs in scope and rigor by comparing
student populations in charters across the nation to the public schools
that neighbor them. Specifically, I match all brick and mortar charter
schools to the nearest 5 traditional public schools of the same grade
level in the same jurisdiction.
The report uses 2011-2012data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Malkus looked for public schools that could be compared to the charters based on shared enrollment. Where the charters were authorized by the local school district, only schools within that district were compared on the theory that only those students were eligible to attend the charter. Where charters could draw from outside any district boundaries, Malkus made his selections based on distance and grade level. Public schools were compared to other public schools on the same basis. Malkus also defined "local" as "within 30 miles."
Malkus started with a pool of 5,700 charter schools from 2011-2012. 890 were eliminated because they were special-purpose schools or just too tiny.
Malkus does make some questionable choices. For instance, 580 charters were found to have either missing or 0% Free and Reduced Lunch enrollment. Malkus takes this as a sign that these schools do not participate in the program, and tosses the 580 schools out of the study. However, given that one of the criticisms of charters is that some enroll few-or-none FRPL students, that seems like a lot of data to toss out.
Oh, and he threw out all the cyber schools. Would that we all could do the same.
Ultimately there were 3,670 charters that had fully matching sets of data and five public schools that fell locally. I didn't see anything about what he did with any of those charters that had folded since 2012.
And here's an important part to understand-- he compares comparisons. In other words, he looks at how Gotrox Charter High compares to the public schools in the area, but he also looks Regular Public High compares to other public schools, which lets him compare GCH to RPH.
So Let's Get To It
Malkus opens by noting that there's a huge debate involving two different pictures of who charters serve and that both sides are over-simplifying. Of course, it's only nice to make an equivalency if it's true. I'd suggest (and I'm sure some charter supporters would agree) that it's equally possible that one side is over-simplifying and the other side is right.
But let's see what Malkus found. Let's see this data-based description and comparison of charter and public school student populations.
Black Student Enrollment
Malkus finds that fewer than half of the charters have a black student enrollment that matches their local public schools; public schools match other public schools more closely. About a third of charters had more black students; about a fifth had fewer.
60% of the public schools had similar black enrollment which means-- well, I'm not sure. Only 10% of public schools had substantially more or fewer black students than the surrounding public schools, which would seem to suggest that segregation by housing is not a huge thing, and that would seem to be... counter-intuitive? Wrong?
Hispanic Enrollment
Wow. 42% of the charters enroll fewer, or substantially fewer Hispanic students. White Enrollment
Once again, charters do not match their surrounding schools. Only about a third of all charters have the same white enrollment as surrounding public schools. The rest are evenly split between way more and way fewer white students. Special Ed Enrollment
Here the public schools show the greatest similarity-- a full 71% have the same enrollment level, while fewer than half of charters have a similar enrollment level. It will come as no surprise at all that 35% of charters enroll fewer students with special needs. And Malkus does not get into the distinctions between levels of special needs; there's a big difference between a charter enrolling a student with a mild learning disability and one with profound (and expensive)issues.
Limited English Proficiency
The same pattern. 46% of charters match their local public schools. Again, Malkus's model does not allow for different levels of proficiency or the lack thereof. Distribution of Poverty
Hmm. Only 16% of charter schools have similar levels of poverty to comparable public schools, with the rest evenly distributed between more and fewer students of poverty. But-- for public schools, only 31% have a similar level of poverty enrollment compared to schools around them (again, half and half for the differences).
It's pretty stark-- the numbers here suggest that it is economics more than anything else that leads to the sorting of our students into different schools, whether those schools are public or charter.
However-- and this is important-- we need to remember that FRPL numbers hide three different levels of poverty, and that the differences between those levels are not insignificant. Check out this piece from Jersey Jazzman for further explaining. Bottom line: the data in this section are incomplete.
Student Proficiency
Only 22% of charters have student proficiency levels similar to the local public schools. 44% of the charters have higher proficiency rates than public schools, suggesting that creaming and skimming are actually things. And because "student proficiency" actually means "student test scores," test prep may have a roll here as well. As always, I'd be happy to talk about actual student achievement, but as long as we're just talking about test scores, it's a waste of everyone's time.
Suspension Rates
The charter numbers here are not super-surprising-- slightly over half of the charters have similar suspension rates to public schools, with 17% having higher rates. Malkus notes that a full 29% of charters show lower suspension rates, but given that charters have more made-to-order student bodies, a lower suspension rate ought to be more common than it is.
The surprising number for me was in the public school. 79% of public schools have suspension rates similar to schools around them. It's important to remember that suspension rates can be pretty wobbly data; a low suspension rate can mean well-behaved students, a great positive atmosphere, or a spineless administration. But given how many people know the story of The Bad School with all of the Bad Children, it's surprising to me that public schools resemble each other when it comes to suspensions.
Other Data Crunching Games
For even more data fun, Malkus then goes back and crunches each pod of six schools (charter plus five public comparison schools) to see how charters rank out of the six for each trait. The crunching doesn't yield any big insights. We are going to skip it. Discussion
Malkus then moves on to talk about the implications of his results. And by "implications" I mean "implications for continued attempts to market charter schools."
First, Malkus repeats a thread that he's been injecting throughout the report, which can be roughly summarized as "Look at how different charters are!" He means this observation to counter the dueling cartoon depiction of charters that he blames on a loud conversation between charter cheerleaders and charter critics. People have been oversimplifying, and charters are all really different.
Keep the point about differences in mind as Malkus moves on to his next point, which is that the data both confirms and debunks charter myths. Charters really do serve fewer students with special needs, but they really don't suspend students at higher rates. Except for the ones that don't and the that do, because charters are different.
To Malkus's credit, he follows the implications of the low enrollment numbers for students with special needs and language issues. There's no real hard data to prove that charters cream and skim, he says, but you don't have to squint at all to see that this data totally suggests that such skimming and creaming is in fact going on, and it would behoove charters to go take a look at this issue.
The Next Wave of Charterdon
This report, like the recent charter call for spanking cyber-charters, can be seen as the newest wave, the next logical step in the charter movement. Call it the Steady Maturing of the Charter Sector or call it Charterdon's Night of the Long Knives, but at some point, charters were going to have to turn on their own weaker brethren. When everyone was just trying to get things up and running, it was fine to let anything go. If you're just trying to get your foot in the door, it doesn't matter whether your shoes are nicely polished or not.
But at some inevitable point, the market was going to start paying attention to the product and some charters were going to start embarrassing all the other charters. As everyone from the movie industry to comic book publishers has learned at some point, if you don't police your own ranks, Uncle Sugar will show up to do it for you. And as Chi-Chi's learned, if just one part of your operation screws up, everyone in the business suffers.
So it's in the charter market interest to start observing that some charters actually do kind of suck. This report is particularly adept at making the point that charters are many and varied and just because you've heard about one terrible one, that doesn't mean that the charter one town over isn't awesomely better than your public school.
Bottom Line
This is four year old data,
which in the world of modern charters is a lot of years. But it is
certainly worth noting that a charter-loving think tank has now
published research that says, "Yes, some of the criticisms of charter
schools are valid."
AEI has always taken a
patient long-term view of the charter biz, and this report concedes some
ground in order to consolidate a more defensible position. Do not
imagine for a minute that the next line after "Some criticisms of
charters are valid" will be "and so we withdraw our support of them."
The data, though it may have some problems, is worth a look. But don't expect it to change any charter fan's mind. Their premise remains the same-- charters must exist and must go on. Data like this will not change their goals; it will just help them fine tune their pursuit of those goals.
If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect-- boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.
I'm going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I'll warn you right up front-- this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.
The Video
The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan...?
Learning is earning.
Your Ledger account tracks everything you've ever learned in units called edublocks.
An edublock represents, supposedly, one hour of learning in any subject-- which brings us to our first mystery, which is exactly how one breaks down learning into hours.
But you can get edublocks from anyone-- from a formal institution like a school (though as we'll see, there will be precious few schools in the Ledger's world) or from, well, anyone. Literally anyone. But especially also your workplace. That connection matters, because edublocks are tied straight to your employment and your income. But they can also come from informal groups, community gatherings, even apps. Even when you are jamming with your garage band or training puppies, you can be earning edublocks.
Your profile displays all the blocks you've earned. Employers can use this information to offer you a job or a gig that matches your skills.
The Ledger will track the money you make from those gigs and use it to evaluate the edublock sources; ultimately every edublock source will carry a rating that shows which sources led to people earning the most money. Because in the world of the Ledger, money is the ultimate yardstick by which all value is measured. You can even market yourself as a commodity, bartering for free edublocks by offering a share of your future earnings in return. The video does not say anything about what happens if you do not provide a sufficient return on the investment, and I'd rather not imagine how that particular "collection" goes.
All of this managed by blockchain, best known for managing the world of bitcoins, which are totally going to change how the world economy works, somehow, someday (but we've encountered them in similar schemes before). But one of the critical features of such a system is that all of these edublocks are part of a public record. This is your cradle to career data backpack, but it's not remotely private. It can't be-- not for the system to work as imagined. When your elementary principal warned you that your misbehavior with the erasers at recess could become a blot on your permanent record that would follow you around forever, she had no idea that she was understating the case.
Now we're going to meet some real imaginary people from 2026 to illustrate how all this plays out.
Here's freelance delivery driver Michael, who opens with "Always learning, always earning, that's my motto." He tries to learn something every month, which is a challenge ("It ain't easy"). However, his advantage is-- well, I'll just quote him because this is a special moment-- "One thing that helps, I love to read. So I listen to a lot of audio books..." which mostly just calls to mind Ray Stanz saying, "Listen. Do you smell something?" Anyway, the audio app awards Michael some edublocks whenever he gets to the end of an audio book. No word on what happens if he just reads a paper one. Michael also belongs to a book group with other drivers, and they take turns teaching and earning blocks, but the big insight he offers is this--
It's more like, Ledger has opened everyone's eyes to the fact that there are teachers everywhere.
With that, we cut to Yolanda, a young woman in the government's Pay It Forward program, in which you pay off your college loans by teaching other people what you've learned. Because when she took her college course, those credits went into the Ledger and she is pre-approved "to teach any subject I passed." Which would seem to suggest that the moment her college professor finished teaching the first class, that professor's job could be eliminated.
Then-- and this is not apropos of anything-- there's a bizarre guitar interlude that sounds like a vinyl disk being played with an off-center hole.
Next we meet Carl, who in 2026 is a "Learning and earning counselor." The video does not suggest if this 54-year-old man took this job after his college professor-ship was eliminated. Carl notes that people have to decide whether they want to go the traditional college route or just build their own program.
That brings us to Alejandra, who is sixteen years old and, by virtue of playing science games on her tablet, has Ledgered her way into becoming a leading scientist in the field of biochemistry. I am not kidding. She got a trophy, and the program now gives her "super-hard" puzzles to solve. But the really awesome thing is that she gets paid for accumulating these edublocks. Because earn while you learn. So the game is like her first biochemistry class, but it is also her job.
Now, Aileen, a human resources director, is here to explain how edublocks empower the gig economy. No more entry level jobs. In fact (though she doesn't say it in so many words) no more jobs. Employers have projects. They whip up a list of skills needed for the project and then they go search the edublock database for people with those edublocks and bring them on for the project. "Of course, relationships are still important. And we still help people grow," she says. "But we don't have to pay them jack and there are no benefits or pension costs, so it's hella cheap for us." Okay, I made up the last part. But in addition to whatever money they get, the workers also earn edublocks, which these folks anticipate will be kind of like part of your pay. So, a way to formalize what folks like web designers and writers have always loved abouyt some gigs-- no real money, but a chance to get "exposure" and "experience."
Next up-- David, an edublock verification designer. See, we'll all be logging into edublock verification sites where we will be given "a task, a chance to demonstrate your proficiency in a real world context." Because nothing is more real world than an artificial task on a computer program. Wonder what the software for welding or setting broken bones will look like. Very real world, I'm sure. David offers a sample list of skills that you could demonstrate, including designing a logo and grading an essay. David says you're even paid for your time, though probably something minimum wagey.
Now we're winding down with big slogans like "Employers are teachers. Jobs are courses. Every gig is a chance to learn something new. Schools and teachers are obsolete for the lower class." Okay, I just added the last one. But I did not make up this next one--
And with one billion people on the Ledger, there are more teachers than ever before.
We're back to Michael, who says that when he's a teacher, he takes it seriously (he does not repeat that it ain't easy) because learning connects everything in his life.
Who the hell are these people?
The video is courtesy of ACT Foundation and the Institute for the Future.
ACT Foundation is an offshoot of the testing folks; their goal is to reach "across organizational boundaries, sectors, and the nation, to develop strategic approaches to support working learners in their journeys toward successful careers and lives." ACT's CEO Marten Roorda is on the board of directors along with Jim Larimore, ACT's Chief Officer for the Advancement of Underserved Learners, Thomas J. Goedken, Treasurer and CFO, ACT, and Ms. Sara R. Netolicky, Secretary and General Counsel, ACT. The Foundation's founding and current executive director is Parminder J. Kassal.
Kassal used to work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the area of postsecondary success for poor kids. Before thatshe was a director of workforce solutions in Louisville, a senior associate at Futureworks, and a head of the consulting wing of Lucent. So, no actual background in education. Which, hey, doesn't matter, because everyone in the world is a teacher.
Institute for the Future, based in Palo Alto, is "an independent, non-profit research organization with a more than 45-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want." Their staff includes people from fields in the range of "the social sciences, public policy, technology, and the creative arts."
My Reaction?
Let me repeat. Oh my God. Oh my effing God.
First let's talk about that number-- one billion. US population is currently a tad over 300 million. Primarily-English-speaking people hovers around 400 milllion or more. World population is couple of tads over 7 billion. So who are the one billion? Which multiple nations has ACT targeted for this Brave New World (and how are they jumping across language barriers). Is there a real plan behind One Billion, or did it just sound like a cool number for marketing?
And speaking of that, what is the marketing plan? Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have all worked hard to get the masses of humanity behind their own multifaceted platform for interaction with the digital ocean, and yet people still insist on fishing in that ocean out of different boats. How well will the Ledger work if only some employers and some trainers and some apps and some meat widgets use it? What will happen if a market battle breaks out-- there are other companies out there working on some version of this idea.
Does ACT have a plan for getting not one, but several governments to sign off and join up on the Ledger, so that the program can have access to everything, every last bit of data? Because this whole plan would seem to require that a corporation and governments join together to provide a more user-friendly computer-based surveillance state.
And by user, of course, I mean corporations, because it's future employers who would find this most helpful. Just check the database, select the meat widget that fits your specs, and slap that widget in place.
Who, for instance, is going to write all the lists of all the edublocks that comprise all of the possible sorts of education one can get? I suspect the answer is "employers," because implicit in the ledger is that the only "education" or "skills" that matter are the ones that someone will pay you for. The Ledger gives employers total control over what "education" means in this (and apparently several other) countries.
Who is going to create all the tasks that will measure and certify certain skills? It doesn't actually matter that much, because the bottom line is that all jobs and skill sets will be broken down to the simplest possible set of tasks, a simplification that guarantees that all nuance, complexity, and higher-order thinking will be kicked right out of the system.
Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour's worth of critical thinking?
And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn't really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?
And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of "education"? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?
This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.
In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it's even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.
So, no, this isn't even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, "Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns." Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.
This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, "Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I'm not gonna pay them for that."
Do I think folks like ACT Foundation or Pearson (who also like a version of this model) can actually pull this off? It doesn't matter-- what matters is that this is their North Star, and even though you never get to the North Star, it still shapes the course you set. Worse, while I hope we never arrive in the world of the Ledger, these folks can do a huge amount of damage trying to navigate in that direction.
You may remember her from the last New York gubernatorial primary, when she humiliated Andrew Cuomo and stomped on his Presidential dreams by making him fight for his life in a primary race that was supposed to be a walk. The Vermont-born law professor is energetic, positive, and a strong voice for public education-- among other things. She's an old-school Democrat, by which I mean she's not dependent on the kindness of hedge fund millionaires. (All of which is why it's one of Randi Weingarten's unforgivable offenses to have conducted last minute phone blitzing for the Cuomo campaign).
Teachout is back at it, campaigning for the 19th District Congressional seat in New York. Teachout's main opposition appeared to be a long-shot GOP John Faso who was trying to fend of GOP Andrew Heaney in the primary-- and then the hedge funders started piling on.
John Faso is a long-time NY pol. He has served as minority leader of the NY State Assembly, and made a run at Governor in 2006. He beat Bill Weld in the primary (yes, the same one who is currently Libertarian VP candidate) but lost to Eliot Spitzer in the general election. Faso is a huge fan of charters and one of the cheif architects of New York's charter laws. And hedge fund guys apparently love him a lot. Robert Mercer, hedge fund manager, contributed half a million dollars to Faso's superPAC to get him through the primary election season.
And now Paul Singer has joined in with another $500,000 to try to defeat Teachout. Singer ranks 327 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. He's a hedge fund manager who specializes in "distressed debt acquisition" meaning he is, in fact, a vulture fund manager, looking for good buys in debt that he can then squeeze for big profit (his firm made a killing snatching up Peru's national debt and then squeezing the country to pay up).
So this is what the current version of campaign law gets us-- a contest in which two guys can pony up a million dollars to buy up a political position to represent a place they don't even live. In America, if you're very rich, you can go shopping for political races to tilt your way.
Teachout has been raising money the old-fashioned, Bernie Sanders style method-- from actual small-money citizens donating to her campaign.
But her campaign has taken a definite new-style twist. Teachout is calling for a debate. But not against Faso, but against the real opponent in her race;
Of course, Singer is not going to respond. The whole point of being about to pump millions of dollars via superPAC into an election is that it allows rich guys to install their ideas in government without having to go through any of that annoying public election stuff. It allows guys like Singer to buy a guarantee that their voice will be heard loud and clear by the important decision-makers without ever having to talk to the common crowd of taxpayers and voters and the general public. A public debate for the voters is all about democracy, and spending a cool half-million to get your guy elected is all about circumventing democracy.
If you would like to support and old-fashioned non-millionaire candidate as an old-fashioned voter with some old-fashioned small contributions, you can find the Teachout campaign website right here.
For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts.
I'm not sure that anybody has it harder in school than the invisible kids.
Bullied students are a subset of the invisible students. Bullied students are seen-but-not-really. They are seen for the one characteristic for which they are singled out and mistreated, but rarely seen as actual complete fully human beings.
There are also the students who are completely invisible. Unseen, unknown, just passing through the halls of the school. Their presence and their absence make the same impression on the people around them.
There's a sad but fair argument to be made that all of this invisibility is practice for the adult version, for entering the grown-up world where we talk past or at each other and simply reduce other people to just one or two characteristics, treating our fellow humans as if they are cartoon versions of human beings. We reduce the people we disagree with to gnarled caricatures. We reduce the people we don't mind being around to flat masks, one or two simple characteristics that we can quickly reference before we move on. And we reduce people that we don't want to bother with to nothing at all. Not even ignored, because you can only ignore something that you acknowledge is there. Just invisible.
I suspect it's easier for us to slip into that mode in school because we deal with a relatively narrow slice of humanity. I teach teenagers, and while there are some things that have changed over the decades, teenagers remain for the most part pretty teenagery. On top of that, certain physical and personality types recur over the decades. It's not hard to slip into a state of just reacting to a student as That Kid Again.
But boy, do they want to be seen. I mean, really seen. They love it when someone sees who they are, what their strengths are, what their fears are, what they really have going on. And it is a tricky game because one thing about teenagers is that great old deep-seated Bruce Banner-esque fear-- "If anyone knew what I was really like-- I mean, really like-- they would all avoid me like the plague."
You're not always going to see right down to the depths of every student's soul, and that, I am quite certain, is a Really Good Thing for many reasons. But I can be sure to see every kid, every day, even if it's for jst a second.
I can stride through the halls on some Critical Mission (like copies or fetching connecting cables) and breeze right past a hundred students with my head down and not a sound. Or I can take the second to make eye contact, smile, say hi or good morning or glad you're here today or just some quick joke-- and all I'm really saying is "I see you."
I think this is the power of those teachers who stand at their classroom door and greet every student (I admire those teachers, but I am not that organized). It guarantees every student that he or she will be seen.
I mean, just imagine how miserable it would be to getup in the morning and know that you are going to a place where not a single person will see you, not a single person would notice if you weren't there. How soulcrushing must that be. And as teachers, we absolutely have the power to change that.
If we pay attention, we can see who our students are. We can see what they're proud of, what they value, what their quirks and style and sense of humor are about. And once we really see them, we can meet them, and let them know they are valued. And the beauty of it is that it doesn't really take more time than just brushing by. "Good morning" isn't any easier to say than "Hey! That hair looks better pink than blue," but the latter lets the student know they've actually been seen, that their presence on the planet actually made a difference, however small, to someone.
And I'm not talking about anything intrusive. Everybody knows That Person-- the one who tries to pretend to say "I see you," but who is really saying, "Look at me!" Teachers should not be That Person. Students are not there to meet our emotional needs.
But it is easy to sleepwalk through large chunks of life without paying attention. It's easy, but it's not desirable, and it is a particularly bad idea for us as teachers. For some of our students, we may be the only human being who actually sees them today. That's an easy gift for us to give them. Pay attention. See. Life is so much more interesting when you are awake for it, and yes-- that means that not only are you giving students the gift of being seen, but you are modeling for them how to live a life less boring.
Which is why I hammer this into my brain every year. It may be less of an issue for you elementary types-- your kids are high on life and excited about everything. But my teens will, in a just a couple of weeks, begin the process of trying to suck all the energy and color out of the world. That's okay. They are who they are. And I've learned that if I actually open my eyes, look at them, see them for the full rich human beings they are, it turns out they're pretty great.
