Forbes may be the magazine of the business world, but they aren't above the occasional listcicle. Today my feed coughed up the insta-classic "15 Easy Side Hustles You Can Start This Weekend."
Ryan Robinson is the writer, and his intro slide sets it all up:
Not ready to leave your job, but also not ready to start up? Here are some ideas that can help you earn some extra money on the side.
Number one? Remote English Teacher-- you can make upwards of $25 an hour by skyping in to tutor folks in places like Hong Kong.
Number eight. Standardized test tutoring-- folks will pay big money for that.
Number nine. Teaching online courses, particularly if you have marketing or design skills.
What sort of other great hustles are listed with these items? Well, you could become an instagram marketeer, or brew your own beer, or be an online dating consultant, or even start podcasting. These are the sorts of things that rank with the education-related side hustles.
Oh, and number fifteen-- write college essays for students and their families.
Please note-- nobody suggests just pulling some legal advising out of your butt or doing medical care as a side hustle.
Add this to your list of the ten thousand little ways that our culture reminds us that teaching is not a valued profession, but some kind of hustle that anyone can do to scam a little cash now and then.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Mr. Gates Chats with Mr. Bowling
A week back, Bill Gates took to his blog to report on a sit-down with Nate Bowling. He calls it "A Powerful Conversation about Schools, Poverty and Race," and that may be overstating the case a bit, but it's worth a quick look.
Nate Bowling has won an assortment of teaching awards, most recently Washington State Teacher of the Year. He blogs at A Teacher's Evolving Mind, and his self-intro there captures his point of view pretty succinctly:
Effective teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experiences and insights from working with marginalized communities.
If we want to be heard, on our terms, then when must create our own spaces.
I proudly ride with #Educolor
Bowling is on my short list of writers in the edu-sphere with whom I do not always agree, but who I believe are following a path for understanding without any pre-determined conclusion in mind. You can read about my last encounter with his ideas back here.
At the beginning of 2016, Bowling wrote a widely-circulated piece entitled "The Conversation I'm Tired of Not Having" in which he comes down hard on the idea of setting aside questions of education policy until we can honestly grapple with the issues of race and poverty, charging that the powers that be and the folks in the 'burbs are actually pretty happy with The Way Things Are.
Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes--especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”
And he announced that he was done arguing about issues like charter schools and common core. In fact, he would take only one clear focus, in bold letters:
If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening.
Now I would say that on the one hand, issues like charter schools and common core are important precisely because of their effects on the teacher in the classroom, and that many reformy issues are problematic precisely because they change which teachers get to the classroom, which teachers stay in the classroom, and what those teachers are empowered to do in the classroom.
On the other hand, if we kept talking about those issues in terms of the teacher in the classroom and not policy wonkitudary, it would be a more useful conversation.
Bill Gates also read that piece, and he brought it up in his conversation with Bowling, particularly spinning off of this paragraph from Bowling's essay.
Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration. Poor families lack competent and engaged administration (see Chicago, Detroit, etc), the levy money (locally, see Highline), capital budgets (see rural Central, WA), and the political capital wealthier families enjoy.
Ask yourself, would suburban schools ever be allowed to decay like what we saw in Detroit? Nope. What's happening in Detroit could never happen in Auburn Hills; what’s happening in Chicago could never happen in Evanston; what’s happening in South Seattle could never happen in Issaquah or Bellevue. Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids.
Gates hears part of that, and allows that he gets the point. Sort of.
I certainly agree that those of us who live in the suburbs by and large don’t see what’s going on in inner-city schools. It’s like two different worlds. This is one reason why Melinda and I get out and visit different schools around the country as part of our foundation’s education work, which is all about supporting the New Majority.
First of all, Gates does not live in the suburbs. I don't know if he's being self-deprecating, or he's just that out of touch. But this is not suburban living.
Second, Bowling's insight should ring a bell. Back in May of 2015, Gates was sitting about five feet away from Warren Buffet on a CNBC panel chat when Buffet said this:
If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.
In other words, if the wealthy and super-wealthy had skin in the game, public schools would get the support they need. As long as a handful view public education as a work of charitable outreach to help the children of Those People (and the rest stolidly oppose spending their tax dollars on Those People), we'll keep getting what we've got. An occasional drive-by is not quite the same.
In fact, the charter concept that Gates so loves is the exact opposite of what's being called for. First, it "helps" only a small percentage of students at all. Second, with its rhetoric about how the money belongs to the child who should be able to take it wherever, it moves completely away from the notion that we are collectively responsible for making a great education for all children. The charter sale pitch is that rich families get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," and abandon everyone else-- why shouldn't less wealthy students get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," too?
Imagine if Gates had thrown his money and weight behind, say, a call for Washington State to institute a modest income tax with the funds to go to public schools. Imagine a Gates-backed PR campaign as thorough and expensive as his campaigns to sell charter schools, but instead one to sell the idea that the public has a responsibility for ALL public schools-- not just the one in their neighborhood.
Gates refers to improved integration and more equitable funding as "important goals," which is kind of like saying that keeping babies well-fed is a "pretty good thing." And he really just bruishes by these on his way to talking about the importance of teachers. And now he just let's Bowling talk.
Bowling's plea for teacher focus is on point.
“Schools are the building blocks of our democracy,” he [Bowling] told me [Gates]. “If we’re going to create a better society, it has to happen through schools. And if we’re going to build a better society through our schools, it has to happen through better teaching.”
Gates reports that Bowling called for teacher autonomy, incentives to keep good teachers in the classroom, and recognition that the demands of teaching in high-poverty schools are different. That all gets compressed into one paragraph. Gates takes two paragraphs to report Bowling's call for better professional development, based on the belief that all teachers can become better.
All in all, it's an odd conversation to read about and watch (there's a short video clip, too). I am not sure how much of Bowling's message Gates really hears. Oddly enough, though he says that Bowling's "difficult subjects' are ones that "we need to be discussing," we don't really hear him respond to any of what Bowling has to say. The only time we hear Gates' voice is when he notes how he's affected by Bowling's self-designation as a "nerd farmer."
So I'm glad that Bowling's mouth and Gates' ears were in the same room. I'm not sure how much of an impression Bowling made; while it's nice that Gates let a nerd farmer in to see him, maybe what we need is a nerd whisperer.
Nate Bowling has won an assortment of teaching awards, most recently Washington State Teacher of the Year. He blogs at A Teacher's Evolving Mind, and his self-intro there captures his point of view pretty succinctly:
Effective teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experiences and insights from working with marginalized communities.
If we want to be heard, on our terms, then when must create our own spaces.
I proudly ride with #Educolor
Bowling is on my short list of writers in the edu-sphere with whom I do not always agree, but who I believe are following a path for understanding without any pre-determined conclusion in mind. You can read about my last encounter with his ideas back here.
At the beginning of 2016, Bowling wrote a widely-circulated piece entitled "The Conversation I'm Tired of Not Having" in which he comes down hard on the idea of setting aside questions of education policy until we can honestly grapple with the issues of race and poverty, charging that the powers that be and the folks in the 'burbs are actually pretty happy with The Way Things Are.
Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes--especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”
And he announced that he was done arguing about issues like charter schools and common core. In fact, he would take only one clear focus, in bold letters:
If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening.
Now I would say that on the one hand, issues like charter schools and common core are important precisely because of their effects on the teacher in the classroom, and that many reformy issues are problematic precisely because they change which teachers get to the classroom, which teachers stay in the classroom, and what those teachers are empowered to do in the classroom.
On the other hand, if we kept talking about those issues in terms of the teacher in the classroom and not policy wonkitudary, it would be a more useful conversation.
Bill Gates also read that piece, and he brought it up in his conversation with Bowling, particularly spinning off of this paragraph from Bowling's essay.
Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration. Poor families lack competent and engaged administration (see Chicago, Detroit, etc), the levy money (locally, see Highline), capital budgets (see rural Central, WA), and the political capital wealthier families enjoy.
Ask yourself, would suburban schools ever be allowed to decay like what we saw in Detroit? Nope. What's happening in Detroit could never happen in Auburn Hills; what’s happening in Chicago could never happen in Evanston; what’s happening in South Seattle could never happen in Issaquah or Bellevue. Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids.
Gates hears part of that, and allows that he gets the point. Sort of.
I certainly agree that those of us who live in the suburbs by and large don’t see what’s going on in inner-city schools. It’s like two different worlds. This is one reason why Melinda and I get out and visit different schools around the country as part of our foundation’s education work, which is all about supporting the New Majority.
First of all, Gates does not live in the suburbs. I don't know if he's being self-deprecating, or he's just that out of touch. But this is not suburban living.
 |
| The Gates suburban home |
Second, Bowling's insight should ring a bell. Back in May of 2015, Gates was sitting about five feet away from Warren Buffet on a CNBC panel chat when Buffet said this:
If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.
In other words, if the wealthy and super-wealthy had skin in the game, public schools would get the support they need. As long as a handful view public education as a work of charitable outreach to help the children of Those People (and the rest stolidly oppose spending their tax dollars on Those People), we'll keep getting what we've got. An occasional drive-by is not quite the same.
In fact, the charter concept that Gates so loves is the exact opposite of what's being called for. First, it "helps" only a small percentage of students at all. Second, with its rhetoric about how the money belongs to the child who should be able to take it wherever, it moves completely away from the notion that we are collectively responsible for making a great education for all children. The charter sale pitch is that rich families get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," and abandon everyone else-- why shouldn't less wealthy students get to say, "I've got mine, Jack," too?
Imagine if Gates had thrown his money and weight behind, say, a call for Washington State to institute a modest income tax with the funds to go to public schools. Imagine a Gates-backed PR campaign as thorough and expensive as his campaigns to sell charter schools, but instead one to sell the idea that the public has a responsibility for ALL public schools-- not just the one in their neighborhood.
Gates refers to improved integration and more equitable funding as "important goals," which is kind of like saying that keeping babies well-fed is a "pretty good thing." And he really just bruishes by these on his way to talking about the importance of teachers. And now he just let's Bowling talk.
Bowling's plea for teacher focus is on point.
“Schools are the building blocks of our democracy,” he [Bowling] told me [Gates]. “If we’re going to create a better society, it has to happen through schools. And if we’re going to build a better society through our schools, it has to happen through better teaching.”
Gates reports that Bowling called for teacher autonomy, incentives to keep good teachers in the classroom, and recognition that the demands of teaching in high-poverty schools are different. That all gets compressed into one paragraph. Gates takes two paragraphs to report Bowling's call for better professional development, based on the belief that all teachers can become better.
All in all, it's an odd conversation to read about and watch (there's a short video clip, too). I am not sure how much of Bowling's message Gates really hears. Oddly enough, though he says that Bowling's "difficult subjects' are ones that "we need to be discussing," we don't really hear him respond to any of what Bowling has to say. The only time we hear Gates' voice is when he notes how he's affected by Bowling's self-designation as a "nerd farmer."
So I'm glad that Bowling's mouth and Gates' ears were in the same room. I'm not sure how much of an impression Bowling made; while it's nice that Gates let a nerd farmer in to see him, maybe what we need is a nerd whisperer.
MI: Boatloads of Money
“People should get a fair return on their investment,” said former state schools Superintendent Tom Watkins, a longtime charter advocate who has argued for higher standards for all schools. “But it has to come after the bottom line of meeting the educational needs of the children. And in a number of cases, people are making a boatload of money, and the kids aren’t getting educated.”
That's from a stunning profile of the charter industry in Michigan that ran last week in the Detroit Free Press. In that must-read piece, Jennifer Dixon gives detailed and sprawling picture of just how bad things are in Michigan.
These days it seems as if there's a wide consensus that for-profit charters are a bad idea (even as folks pretend not to notice that not-for-profits can be just as bad). But in Michigan, for profit charters are still the law of the land, favored and widespread, making Michigan Exhibit A in the story of Why For Profit Charters Have No Business existing.
In Michigan, the authorizers of charters are primarily universities, and I suppose some folks would think that putting institutions of higher learning in charge of the gateways and oversight of charter schools would help keep things honest. But that's not how it's working out.
Consider for instance the case of University YES Academy. Allie Gross at the Detroit Metro Times (the newspaper with the most ill-considered website heading ever-- really, folks? "NEWSHITS"??) has been covering this story and you can catch the full details here and here. The management company running the school was such a mess that the teachers voted to form a union, so the operator of the school dissolved the management company, negating all previous contracts-- and then the same person created a new management company with a new name. The NLRB got involved, and the management company folded their hand and sold the school to another management company, which appears to have bought the school only so that they could close it at the last minute before the beginning of the school year and force the students to go to the company's other school-- thirteen miles away.
This is just one example of charter awesomeness in Michigan-- and some of the players here are supposed to be among the top exemplars.
At the point that the NLRB got involved, the school's authorizer sent a letter saying the school might lose its authorization. But if the authorizer doesn't seem quite up on what the Detroit-based charter is up to, that might be because that authorizer is almost 350 miles away from the school.
That authorizer is Bay Mills Community College, a two-year tribal college with about 430 part-time and full-time students. It offers Associate Degrees in Education and Early Childhood Education; it offers seven education courses, two of which are on-line courses, and one of which is a study skills course for first year college students. But BMCC is the authorizer for a whopping forty-one charter schools in Michigan, a large number of which are in the Detroit area and none of which are near the college because, well, nothing is near the college. However, charter money at this point must be a hefty chuck of BMCC income. Given the size of BMCC's student body and the size of its charter portfolio, I'm wondering if BMCC is an actual college that does some authorizer work on the side, of a charter authorizer that teaches some classes on the side.
That's just one example that happened to come across my desk this week. The Free Press piece has many more, illustrating the degree to which Michigan taxpayers have been fleeced. One billion-with-a-B dollars of taxpayer money has poured into charter coffers-- per year!-- with little or nothing to show for it. Just the subheadings alone in the article tell the story--
Often no consequences for poor performance
State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants
No guidelines for when a charter should be revoked
Taxpayer money can be hidden from public view
Mixed results academically, less spending in the classroom
Loopholes in Michigan law allow insider deals and nepotism
Authorizers, management companies work closely-- too closely?
Alongside many, many tales of charter shenanigans in the story are some hard words from charter supporters.
“The theory of charters was if you remove elected school boards, a centralized bureaucracy and powerful unions, that you would get better student achievement. The evidence so far, in Michigan and around the country, is ... some charters work and some don’t,” said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future Inc., a think tank that financially supports nine schools in Detroit, including eight charter schools
“On average, if there are gains, they’re marginal at best.”
Or this from a representative from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who, after saying that authorizers should never approve schools with boards chosen by the management company, has this to say about the old "So what if they hoover up taxpayer money, as long as they do a good job" argument.
Richmond, whose organization is pro charter, said even if a charter school does deliver academic excellence, that’s no excuse if taxpayers are gouged.
“I can’t think of any other area of public or private enterprise that would agree to be ripped off by someone as long as they were providing a nice product.”
There's no question that Detroit, where democracy has been suspended for the non-wealthy and non-white citizens, gets the worst of it. But Michigan seems to be in the grip of some sort of Anything For A Buck disease that threatens both education and other public services. The purpose of charter schools in Michigan is to give investors a good return on their money; educating students is a minor consideration, far behind making boatloads of money in importance. Here's hoping that more people start asking the big question-- what good is it to have a boatload of money if your ship is sinking?
That's from a stunning profile of the charter industry in Michigan that ran last week in the Detroit Free Press. In that must-read piece, Jennifer Dixon gives detailed and sprawling picture of just how bad things are in Michigan.
These days it seems as if there's a wide consensus that for-profit charters are a bad idea (even as folks pretend not to notice that not-for-profits can be just as bad). But in Michigan, for profit charters are still the law of the land, favored and widespread, making Michigan Exhibit A in the story of Why For Profit Charters Have No Business existing.
In Michigan, the authorizers of charters are primarily universities, and I suppose some folks would think that putting institutions of higher learning in charge of the gateways and oversight of charter schools would help keep things honest. But that's not how it's working out.
Consider for instance the case of University YES Academy. Allie Gross at the Detroit Metro Times (the newspaper with the most ill-considered website heading ever-- really, folks? "NEWSHITS"??) has been covering this story and you can catch the full details here and here. The management company running the school was such a mess that the teachers voted to form a union, so the operator of the school dissolved the management company, negating all previous contracts-- and then the same person created a new management company with a new name. The NLRB got involved, and the management company folded their hand and sold the school to another management company, which appears to have bought the school only so that they could close it at the last minute before the beginning of the school year and force the students to go to the company's other school-- thirteen miles away.
This is just one example of charter awesomeness in Michigan-- and some of the players here are supposed to be among the top exemplars.
 |
| Yes, that's Bay Mills CC right up there |
At the point that the NLRB got involved, the school's authorizer sent a letter saying the school might lose its authorization. But if the authorizer doesn't seem quite up on what the Detroit-based charter is up to, that might be because that authorizer is almost 350 miles away from the school.
That authorizer is Bay Mills Community College, a two-year tribal college with about 430 part-time and full-time students. It offers Associate Degrees in Education and Early Childhood Education; it offers seven education courses, two of which are on-line courses, and one of which is a study skills course for first year college students. But BMCC is the authorizer for a whopping forty-one charter schools in Michigan, a large number of which are in the Detroit area and none of which are near the college because, well, nothing is near the college. However, charter money at this point must be a hefty chuck of BMCC income. Given the size of BMCC's student body and the size of its charter portfolio, I'm wondering if BMCC is an actual college that does some authorizer work on the side, of a charter authorizer that teaches some classes on the side.
That's just one example that happened to come across my desk this week. The Free Press piece has many more, illustrating the degree to which Michigan taxpayers have been fleeced. One billion-with-a-B dollars of taxpayer money has poured into charter coffers-- per year!-- with little or nothing to show for it. Just the subheadings alone in the article tell the story--
Often no consequences for poor performance
State law sets no qualifications for charter applicants
No guidelines for when a charter should be revoked
Taxpayer money can be hidden from public view
Mixed results academically, less spending in the classroom
Loopholes in Michigan law allow insider deals and nepotism
Authorizers, management companies work closely-- too closely?
Alongside many, many tales of charter shenanigans in the story are some hard words from charter supporters.
“The theory of charters was if you remove elected school boards, a centralized bureaucracy and powerful unions, that you would get better student achievement. The evidence so far, in Michigan and around the country, is ... some charters work and some don’t,” said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future Inc., a think tank that financially supports nine schools in Detroit, including eight charter schools
“On average, if there are gains, they’re marginal at best.”
Or this from a representative from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who, after saying that authorizers should never approve schools with boards chosen by the management company, has this to say about the old "So what if they hoover up taxpayer money, as long as they do a good job" argument.
Richmond, whose organization is pro charter, said even if a charter school does deliver academic excellence, that’s no excuse if taxpayers are gouged.
“I can’t think of any other area of public or private enterprise that would agree to be ripped off by someone as long as they were providing a nice product.”
There's no question that Detroit, where democracy has been suspended for the non-wealthy and non-white citizens, gets the worst of it. But Michigan seems to be in the grip of some sort of Anything For A Buck disease that threatens both education and other public services. The purpose of charter schools in Michigan is to give investors a good return on their money; educating students is a minor consideration, far behind making boatloads of money in importance. Here's hoping that more people start asking the big question-- what good is it to have a boatload of money if your ship is sinking?
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Cherry-Picking Problem
In US News, we find Anne Osborne and David Osborne playing "So's your old man" with US public schools on the subject of cherry picking. Why complain about charter schools cherry picking, they say, when public schools do it, too? "The Charter School Pot and Kettle" lays out some public school examples, and also tried to make the case that charters don't really cream or skim or cherry pick, which leaves their argument something along the lines of "We don't do that, and anyway, you do it, too."
But as the article has surfaced in the twitterverse and the whole cherry-picking argument has been stirred up again, it's fair to revisit the issue. When you're in the habit of opposing something, it can be easy to kind of forget exactly what it is you were opposed to in the first place, and it's a good exercise to take your premises out and re-examine them from time to time. So let's play that game.
What's wrong with cherry-picking students?
A Creamy Clarification
Osborne and Osborne claim that there's no reason to think that charters push students out. Their support is a 2013 working paper by Ron Zimmer (Vanderbilt) and Cassandra Guarino (Indiana University) about charter pushouts. That paper looks at data from 2001-2006, which was pretty much an entirely different universe when it comes to charter schools. Stacked up against the anecdotal evidence and occasional news stories like Success Academy's Got To Go list, the fifteen year old data is not very convincing. Even the charter-friendly American Enterprise Institute just published a paper concluding that while push-outs and creaming couldn't be decisively proven, there was more than enough smoke to suggest a high probability of fire.
So let's just go ahead and assume that cherry-picking, creaming, skimming, push-outing, homogenizing, and whatever else we want to call the general pattern of controlling the composition of your student population are all part of the same thing, which we're going to call cherry-picking for the moment because we've got to call the whole business something and I am one lazy typist.
Back to the question at hand. What are the arguments against charter cherry-picking? And do they involve anything that a public school system, complete with magnets, is not also guilty of?
Democracy and Public Schools
For some folks, it's fundamental to their understanding of institutions that serve the public that those institutions can't pick and choose who is served. Your local hospital is not supposed to turn you away because you're dressed funny. Your city's public parks are not supposed to be barred to certain parts of the population. And your public school is supposed to take everyone who shows up at its doors.
Yes, there are lots of situations in which the member of the public gets to make some choices. In charterland, the student is supposed to be getting choice. In public school land, families choose where to live and that includes a choice about schools.
It's true in both cases that there are other barriers set up to keep students from particular schools. In the public school world, poor families can't buy homes in rich kid school neighborhoods. Magnet schools deliberately filter out certain students from attending, and while an arts school discriminates based on talent and not race or class, the rich kid who took dance lessons from age two has an advantage.
There are charters out there that are similar to magnet schools in that they are supposed to be organized around a particular focus. But at the end of the day, the public system must accept every student who is entitled by residence to attend (barring some expulsion-worthy level of extreme or illegal misbehavior). Charters not only get to pick and choose, but because they have limited capacity, they will not accept all comers. That is not what we expect from public schools.
The Left Behind
Because virtually all charter school states depend on a fundamentally dishonest funding system for charters, every child left behind in public school is left in a financially weakened institution.
Cherry-picking charter enrollment is picking winners and losers. Under our current system, every "Congratulations, kid. You get to go to this shiny new charter school," is accompanied with ten "Sorry, kids, but we're cutting this program because we can't afford it, and by the way, you're stuck in this public school."
All right-- that's not entirely true. Charter cherry picking is like picking winners and losers only if we're in a situation where the charter is better than the public school. But since that is rarely the case, what cherry picking really gets us is losers and losers, with a whole bunch of money that could have made the public school better spent on vapor.
Those Children
Speaking of picking winners and losers. Charters are often both sold and selected not because of academics, but because of location or peer group. As was rather graphically displayed recently in Pennsylvania, sometimes the pitch for a charter is simply, "Insure your child won't go to school with any of Those Children."
This makes cherry-picking exceptionally ugly-- it means that the charter operators are officially certifying that your child is not one of Those Children. It reinforces a world view in which some people are just better than other people. And the charter application process si somehow linked to deciding which students "deserve" to be "saved."
And because charters are businesses, "better than" generally means "more profitable." Cherry picking reinforces the idea that students with special needs, students from poor families, students from unsupportive home environments, students who are carrying heavy baggage-- those students are all Those Students, the lessers, the students who aren't as good, as worthy.
Do public school systems commit similar misbehavior? Yes, yes, they do. They label a school "the bad school" or shuttle more challenging cases into special programs housed in special buildings. Sometimes we're seeing a real, even successful, program to address a certain set of student needs. Sometimes we're seeing an attempt to just warehouse the problems. That is not okay.
The Charter Cake: For Having and Eating
One person's cherry picking is another person's careful and appropriate sorting. There are many instances in which cherry picking would be okay. But if Osborne and Osborne want to know why charges of cherry picking are so often lobbed against charter schools, this would be it--
You can't cherry-pick your student body AND claim to have an educational solution for all students.
You can't carefully select the top students from an urban setting and then declare that you know how to raise achievement levels for all poor kids. Well, you can-- but you'd be a liar.
You can't carefully pick Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky for your swim team and then claim their success proves you know how to make every child a great swimmer.
You can't carefully select your student body and then announce that you have miraculous out-performed all the public schools who are serving the full range of students in your area.
I have some respect for the charter fans who are up front about this stuff, people like Mike Petrilli who are direct about saying that the charter mission is to get the better students, the strivers, away from the crappy low-achievers. But if that's what you're doing in your charter, do not turn around and tell me that you've discovered the secret of elevating low-achieving students. Do not tell me that you are an example of how to handle the kind of students that you don't even let in the door of your school.
If your charter is cherry picking, then we can add cherry picking to the list (with more money, smaller classes, and more instruction time) of pedagogical ideas that charters have discovered in much the same way that Columbus discovered America.
But as the article has surfaced in the twitterverse and the whole cherry-picking argument has been stirred up again, it's fair to revisit the issue. When you're in the habit of opposing something, it can be easy to kind of forget exactly what it is you were opposed to in the first place, and it's a good exercise to take your premises out and re-examine them from time to time. So let's play that game.
What's wrong with cherry-picking students?
A Creamy Clarification
Osborne and Osborne claim that there's no reason to think that charters push students out. Their support is a 2013 working paper by Ron Zimmer (Vanderbilt) and Cassandra Guarino (Indiana University) about charter pushouts. That paper looks at data from 2001-2006, which was pretty much an entirely different universe when it comes to charter schools. Stacked up against the anecdotal evidence and occasional news stories like Success Academy's Got To Go list, the fifteen year old data is not very convincing. Even the charter-friendly American Enterprise Institute just published a paper concluding that while push-outs and creaming couldn't be decisively proven, there was more than enough smoke to suggest a high probability of fire.
So let's just go ahead and assume that cherry-picking, creaming, skimming, push-outing, homogenizing, and whatever else we want to call the general pattern of controlling the composition of your student population are all part of the same thing, which we're going to call cherry-picking for the moment because we've got to call the whole business something and I am one lazy typist.
Back to the question at hand. What are the arguments against charter cherry-picking? And do they involve anything that a public school system, complete with magnets, is not also guilty of?
Democracy and Public Schools
For some folks, it's fundamental to their understanding of institutions that serve the public that those institutions can't pick and choose who is served. Your local hospital is not supposed to turn you away because you're dressed funny. Your city's public parks are not supposed to be barred to certain parts of the population. And your public school is supposed to take everyone who shows up at its doors.
Yes, there are lots of situations in which the member of the public gets to make some choices. In charterland, the student is supposed to be getting choice. In public school land, families choose where to live and that includes a choice about schools.
It's true in both cases that there are other barriers set up to keep students from particular schools. In the public school world, poor families can't buy homes in rich kid school neighborhoods. Magnet schools deliberately filter out certain students from attending, and while an arts school discriminates based on talent and not race or class, the rich kid who took dance lessons from age two has an advantage.
There are charters out there that are similar to magnet schools in that they are supposed to be organized around a particular focus. But at the end of the day, the public system must accept every student who is entitled by residence to attend (barring some expulsion-worthy level of extreme or illegal misbehavior). Charters not only get to pick and choose, but because they have limited capacity, they will not accept all comers. That is not what we expect from public schools.
The Left Behind
Because virtually all charter school states depend on a fundamentally dishonest funding system for charters, every child left behind in public school is left in a financially weakened institution.
Cherry-picking charter enrollment is picking winners and losers. Under our current system, every "Congratulations, kid. You get to go to this shiny new charter school," is accompanied with ten "Sorry, kids, but we're cutting this program because we can't afford it, and by the way, you're stuck in this public school."
All right-- that's not entirely true. Charter cherry picking is like picking winners and losers only if we're in a situation where the charter is better than the public school. But since that is rarely the case, what cherry picking really gets us is losers and losers, with a whole bunch of money that could have made the public school better spent on vapor.
Those Children
Speaking of picking winners and losers. Charters are often both sold and selected not because of academics, but because of location or peer group. As was rather graphically displayed recently in Pennsylvania, sometimes the pitch for a charter is simply, "Insure your child won't go to school with any of Those Children."
This makes cherry-picking exceptionally ugly-- it means that the charter operators are officially certifying that your child is not one of Those Children. It reinforces a world view in which some people are just better than other people. And the charter application process si somehow linked to deciding which students "deserve" to be "saved."
And because charters are businesses, "better than" generally means "more profitable." Cherry picking reinforces the idea that students with special needs, students from poor families, students from unsupportive home environments, students who are carrying heavy baggage-- those students are all Those Students, the lessers, the students who aren't as good, as worthy.
Do public school systems commit similar misbehavior? Yes, yes, they do. They label a school "the bad school" or shuttle more challenging cases into special programs housed in special buildings. Sometimes we're seeing a real, even successful, program to address a certain set of student needs. Sometimes we're seeing an attempt to just warehouse the problems. That is not okay.
The Charter Cake: For Having and Eating
One person's cherry picking is another person's careful and appropriate sorting. There are many instances in which cherry picking would be okay. But if Osborne and Osborne want to know why charges of cherry picking are so often lobbed against charter schools, this would be it--
You can't cherry-pick your student body AND claim to have an educational solution for all students.
You can't carefully select the top students from an urban setting and then declare that you know how to raise achievement levels for all poor kids. Well, you can-- but you'd be a liar.
You can't carefully pick Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky for your swim team and then claim their success proves you know how to make every child a great swimmer.
You can't carefully select your student body and then announce that you have miraculous out-performed all the public schools who are serving the full range of students in your area.
I have some respect for the charter fans who are up front about this stuff, people like Mike Petrilli who are direct about saying that the charter mission is to get the better students, the strivers, away from the crappy low-achievers. But if that's what you're doing in your charter, do not turn around and tell me that you've discovered the secret of elevating low-achieving students. Do not tell me that you are an example of how to handle the kind of students that you don't even let in the door of your school.
If your charter is cherry picking, then we can add cherry picking to the list (with more money, smaller classes, and more instruction time) of pedagogical ideas that charters have discovered in much the same way that Columbus discovered America.
ICYMI: End of August Edition
Apparently this week it's mostly (though not all) about charters and the corrupting power of money. As always, I'll remind you that if you like any of these pieces, share them, post them, and pass them along. That's how people learn what's happening.
School Takeovers Leave Parents without a Voice in Education
A Michigan news station takes a look at how ed reform systematically strips parents (and community members) of voice in schools and communities.
Who Profits from a Broken School Narrative?
From SF Public School Mom comes a quick, clear look at who has reason to keep insisting that schools are in big trouble.
Stop Close Reading
This is actually an old post, but it is a sharp pushback against the close reading craze.
The Sick Consequences of Competition in Education
What happens when charter schools are actually real estate scams, and why we need to stop treating charter scandals as outliers.
How the Charter School Lobby Is Changing the Democratic Party
From Harold Meyerson at the LA Times-- how big charter money is messing with the Democratic Party
StudentsMatter Is Millions in Debt from the Vergara Lawsuit Yet It Keeps on Suing
The indispensable Mercedes Schneider digs into the records and comes up with the money trail for the astroturf group behind the Vergara lawsuit (and a few others as well).
Bill Gates Has Spent $440 Million To Push Charter Schools
From a year ago, but somehow appropriate in this week's list. Mostly just a list of all the places Gates has spent money to push charter schools.
Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix
As the title might suggest, this is not necessarily a sexy or entertaining read, nor is it always easy going. But it's a pretty thorough look at how the Competency Based Education and computerized personalized learning may fit into the context of the surveillance state.
Why Black Men Quit Teaching
From today's NYT, an op-ed from Christopher Emdin about how not to get more black men in the classroom.
School Takeovers Leave Parents without a Voice in Education
A Michigan news station takes a look at how ed reform systematically strips parents (and community members) of voice in schools and communities.
Who Profits from a Broken School Narrative?
From SF Public School Mom comes a quick, clear look at who has reason to keep insisting that schools are in big trouble.
Stop Close Reading
This is actually an old post, but it is a sharp pushback against the close reading craze.
The Sick Consequences of Competition in Education
What happens when charter schools are actually real estate scams, and why we need to stop treating charter scandals as outliers.
How the Charter School Lobby Is Changing the Democratic Party
From Harold Meyerson at the LA Times-- how big charter money is messing with the Democratic Party
StudentsMatter Is Millions in Debt from the Vergara Lawsuit Yet It Keeps on Suing
The indispensable Mercedes Schneider digs into the records and comes up with the money trail for the astroturf group behind the Vergara lawsuit (and a few others as well).
Bill Gates Has Spent $440 Million To Push Charter Schools
From a year ago, but somehow appropriate in this week's list. Mostly just a list of all the places Gates has spent money to push charter schools.
Personalized Learning, Surveillance and Counterinsurgency within the State-Finance Matrix
As the title might suggest, this is not necessarily a sexy or entertaining read, nor is it always easy going. But it's a pretty thorough look at how the Competency Based Education and computerized personalized learning may fit into the context of the surveillance state.
Why Black Men Quit Teaching
From today's NYT, an op-ed from Christopher Emdin about how not to get more black men in the classroom.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Repackaging Reformsterism for States
If you've never heard of the National Conference of State Legislatures before, don't worry. Now that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has thrown some as-yet-unspecified amount of edu-policy power back to the states, I'm sure we'll be getting to know lots of swell state-level groups.
NCLS decided a couple of years back to take a look-see at education, and that has come to fruition in a new report, "No Time To Lose: How To Build a World Class Education System State By State." After eighteen months of meeting and chewing, this report is what has popped out. Let's take a look, shall we?
Off To a Bad Start
The names on the marquee are not necessarily the same old reformsters, but from the very first sentence used to announce the report, the rhetoric is recognizably reformy.
The bad news is most state education systems are falling dangerously behind the world in a number of international comparisons and on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress, leaving the United States overwhelmingly underprepared to succeed in the 21st century economy.
You know, I'm the last person to claim that our education system is without blemish or sin, but as soon as someone starts trying to paint state education systems as a dangerous international crisis, I suspect shenanigans (though I do like the turn of phrase in "overwhelmingly underprepared"). The intro then goes on to say that the US education system was "the best educated in the world" a half century ago, and now I know that this report is a baloneyfest.
When it comes to this sort of thing, you're doing one of two things-- you're either honestly trying to find some answers, or you are dishonestly spinning the information to support the answers you've already chosen. Within the first two sentences, NCSL has signaled that this report is not going to be entirely honest. First, they've tried to scare me, and whenever someone tries to scare you, it means they're trying to herd you in a particular direction. Not the mark of an honest argument. Next, if you're going to try to convince me that our Big Standardized Results have dropped to the pits from an earlier pinnacle, you'd better bring some data to back that up, because everything I've ever seen shows that the US has lagged behind other nations on international tests for as long as those tests have existed (and that the characterization of the lag is not entirely accurate, either).
But the entire genesis of this "study" was a general freakout over PISA results in 2014. The idea was to do some research and talk to all these countries that are so much more awesomer than the US.
In this intro, NCSL shows that it has just learned tons from the failed reformism of the past decade-plus. No, just kidding. They dispose of the entire history in one sentence, chalking all that failure up to "silver bullet strategies and piecemeal approaches."
So the buildup is not encouraging. But the report is only 28 pages. Let's go ahead and take a look. Maybe it performs better on a granular level.
Hey, Who Concocted This Thing, Anyway
A bipartisan group of 28 veteran legislators and legislative staff, along with several partners from the private sector
Yikes. And not to belabor the obvious, but here's one more confabulation about education without an educator at the table (though in fairness, some education experts were "consulted" who almost fit the description of an education expert). Honestly, is there any other policy area-- any at all-- in which experienced professional practitioners in the field are routinely ignored?
Ditto Intro
Here's the executive summary again, same as it was in the promo. The sentence designed to Create a Sense of High Urgency is now a big-fonted pullout quote. BE AFRAID!!
Actual Data ?
Oh, did you think the report was going to provide some data to back up its panic-stricken insistence that the US is in an education death-spiral? You were incorrect. NCSL is just rolling right on with the chicken littling of this alleged crisis with nothing more than scary quotes and vague threats. Did I mention that they worked on this damn thing for eighteen months? The report says that "we can not ignore the fact" that the US is falling behind [insert the rest from above sentence]. But "we cannot ignore the fact" is an ocean away from actually establishing that what you're calling a fact, is, in fact, a fact.
At one point the writers throw in an "according to recent reports" to assert that the US workforce is not as educated as others. Which reports? They don't say. I mean, I suppose they looked at the reports eighteen months ago when they first started and they just kind of forgot what actual report they're talking about.
The report is going to throw some numbers at us in a few pages. But for right now, just breathe in the scent of fear and failure.
What Can States Do Now
But let's just leap ahead, pretending that we actually know we have a crisis on our hands. NCSL offers up a list of handy things that states can do right now.
First, the state can "build an inclusive team" of all sorts of stakeholders-- hey, look! Teachers make the list this time. And here comes some really practical advice about building consensus in this large and diverse group-- just don't bother. Getting an actual 100% consensus is hard, so instead, settle for like 70%. So build an inclusive group, but don't try to include everybody in what the group actually concludes. They think this advice is so good that they include it as another big-fonted pullquote.
Next, study and learn from top performers. Take trips. Steal ideas. As always, "top performers" means "people with high test scores." The report advises
Reconsider much of what you think you know; abandon many ideas to which you have long been committed; and embrace new ideas...
None of this applies to questioning things like judging education performance based on scores from a narrow standardized test, nor does it include questioning whether or not there's any link between getting those test scores and being successful as a country. Not even the asserting that the US is "falling behind" the world. None of those things that we think we know should ever be reconsidered or questioned, ever.
Create a shared statewide vision. Well, presumably the vision only has to be shared by 70% of the people involved.
Benchmark progress. You know that international benchmarking that the Common Core supposed did, but didn't, for any number or reasons including that it's not really possible because hardly anybody in the world thinks that's how you improve an education system.
Get started on one piece. Pick some part of your big vision and implement it, and when you do that successfully, tell everyone how awesome that was and build momentum for doing another piece. Did we skip the part where your vision should be made out of parts that can function independently? Does "do what you can and do it quickly" sound suspiciously like the famous last words of Common Core promoters?
Work through messiness. It will be messy. Just keep plugging. I actually don't disagree with this as a general approach to life.
Invest the time. Not, apparently, the money. Just the time. This will just happen in a lot of different ways in different states, so time.
Oh, Now We've Got Facts
Did we mention the PISA? Look here's a charter that pretty much shows we've been doing poorly on this since it started in 2000. We must do better, because if too many nations surpass us in all-important standardized test taking, we will have no hope of being the best standardized test takers in the world. Are there any other benefits to doing well on the PISA?
NCSL also trots out the PIACC, a test from the PISA people given to adults to test adult competencies. Seriously? How does anybody pay the slightest attention to this. How can such a test measure anything except whether or not the adult population is so compliant that they will actually bother to try on a Big Standardized Test even though they are fully grown adult humans. Honestly, sometimes I think these people have never met actual humans. Anyway, that test says that millennials are terrible.
And what attack of test-based chicken littling would be complete without the NAEP results. I'm not going to bother with these yet again. You can type "NAEP" into that little box at the top left and find what I have to say.
Also, the report asserts, international comparisons are valid. Because....? Um. Because they say so, I guess. Other countries also have poor people and immigrants. Therefore all comparisons between nations are valid.
What Reform Did Wrong
NCSL says we should face facts about what reformsters have done so far in their quest for a "silver bullet." That would be the "piecemeal" thing from before, where states did silly things like "increasing teacher pay without demanding better preparation" and-- insert sound of needle being dragged across surface of vinyl record (yes, that's a thing, you impudent whippersnapper) because exactly where did that happen, again? Which state is famous for having jacked up teacher pay and then getting hit with terrible teachers because of it? In what corner of the country are either parts of that proposition true?
They throw in a couple of true things (e.g. increased early childhood support with doing anything for K-12), but they are so far in the weeds that they also toss this out as an example of Reform Problems That Have Happened:
Using test scores in teacher evaluations without ensuring that all teachers are receiving job-embedded, high-quality, on-going learning
Not quite. Let me fix that for you:
Using test scores in teacher evaluations without ensuring that tests were valid or reliable or that the instruments for using test scores to score teachers were themselves reliable or valid
Also missing from this section-- an explanation of how "piecemeal" was bad, but the recommended "implement one thing by itself quickly" is a good idea.
What Top Performers Get Right
Now for the portion where we find out what characteristics of these great countries we should emulate.
#1 Students arrive at school ready to learn, and extra support is provided for struggling students.
Not bad, though I would argue that schools should be student-ready, not the other way around.
#2 World-class teaching profession in world-class instructional, where every student has access to highly effective teacher.
Man, I hate that "access" thing. For instance, at work I don't want a chance to get good pay-- I want good pay. NCSL says we get better teachers by selective recruitment, rigorous training and licensure, thorough induction, a career ladder, professional work environment, good leadership, and high pay. And some of that is worth having (I'm not going to travel all the way down this side track right now), but it's like saying our country would be better with less racism and corruption. Yes, it would. But saying so isn't really a plan, is it.
#3 A good vocational education system
Yes, absolutely. We have had this in my county for almost fifty years. I am always shocked to discover places that don't have it, though of course we're still passing through a period of insisting that everyone should want to go to a four year college.
#4 Individual reforms are connected and aligned as parts of a clearly planned and carefully designed comprehensive system.
Ah, yes. A centrally planned system. Maybe we can revisit it every five years. Central planning has always worked out well in the countries that tried it before. Should be a slam dunk this time, too.
Exemplars
Next, we take a look at three of the ten countries that were studied. You might be able to predict the list of ten, but just in case you're new to this game, they are Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Poland, Singapore, Taiwan, Ontario, and Alberta (CA). The three that get special attention are Finland, Singapore and Ontario.
I am not even going to bother reading this part. Because, as it turns out, the United States is not Finland, Singapore or Ontario. For that matter, Montana is not New Hampshire and Iowa is not Alabama. And to pretend that you can adopt parts of another culture piecemeal is the kind of thing that these folks have talked about for so long that they've stopped noticing it's bananas.
Heck, several of those countries do not use alphabetic languages, but logographic instead. Maybe the key to creating world class education is to lose the alphabet. Maybe our learners would do better in a country with single-payer health care. Maybe our learners would do better in a cooler climate.
Don't get me wrong-- there are always things we can learn from other people and places, no matter how different. The notion that the current state of a nation's education system (or any other aspect of that nation's culture) somehow exists in an independent current state that is not deeply tied to the history and past of the country and culture is a puzzling piece of historical illiteracy. The idea that we can just lift an aspect of the culture into our own with no regard for either that country's background nor our own is just bizarre, like thinking we can transplant an oak branch onto a grapevine by just picking a branch off the oak tree and placing in the vine.
Much of these sorts of papers and their suggestions, whether looking at the large picture of educational systems of specifics like uplifting the teaching profession, consist of saying, "Well, we'll just make our culture work differently when it comes to this." Which is no more helpful than telling a person whose only tool is a screwdriver, "Well, just drive those nails in with a hammer."
And About Those Systems, Anyway
This whole paper is soaked in one other long-standing bad reform feature. It focuses entirely on educational systems, and looks at those systems as they serve the state.
That's a two-pronged fail. Systems thinking inevitably ends up valuing the system over the humans operating within it. Students, teachers and parents have to brought into line so that they don't interfere with the smooth operation of the system. Systems and human beings clash (as phone and cable companies, the DMV, and phone menus constantly remind us), and in the education system, we must always come down on the side of the tiny humans in that system. They system must regularly lose, and systems don't take that well.
As that implies, the system certainly can't be primarily there to serve the state by turning out good little meat widgets that improve employment statistics and international standings. The system has to serve the students, first and foremost. And yet in twenty-eight pages, there's nothing that really addresses making sure that a school system meets the needs of students or their families or the communities in which all of those reside.
And by making the education system a servant of the state, the report also slides past the question of what the state's responsibility to the schools should be. How does all this play out in a state like New Jersey, where the legislature does not even give the financial support to schools called for by its own laws?
And (we're almost done, I swear) the whole entire unappealing structure is built on the same old foundation of sand, the notion that there is some meaningful link between the BS Tests and the strength and success of a nation, a link that is often presumed and never proven.
This report is slick and empty (and you may want to flip to the end to see if your favorite legislator was in on it), but after being out for several weeks, it doesn't seem to have made much of a splash, which is just as well. Better if it just sinks away quietly, even if it is eventually followed by more of the same.
NCLS decided a couple of years back to take a look-see at education, and that has come to fruition in a new report, "No Time To Lose: How To Build a World Class Education System State By State." After eighteen months of meeting and chewing, this report is what has popped out. Let's take a look, shall we?
Off To a Bad Start
The names on the marquee are not necessarily the same old reformsters, but from the very first sentence used to announce the report, the rhetoric is recognizably reformy.
The bad news is most state education systems are falling dangerously behind the world in a number of international comparisons and on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress, leaving the United States overwhelmingly underprepared to succeed in the 21st century economy.
You know, I'm the last person to claim that our education system is without blemish or sin, but as soon as someone starts trying to paint state education systems as a dangerous international crisis, I suspect shenanigans (though I do like the turn of phrase in "overwhelmingly underprepared"). The intro then goes on to say that the US education system was "the best educated in the world" a half century ago, and now I know that this report is a baloneyfest.
 |
| Damn you, Estonia, our eternal international rival. |
When it comes to this sort of thing, you're doing one of two things-- you're either honestly trying to find some answers, or you are dishonestly spinning the information to support the answers you've already chosen. Within the first two sentences, NCSL has signaled that this report is not going to be entirely honest. First, they've tried to scare me, and whenever someone tries to scare you, it means they're trying to herd you in a particular direction. Not the mark of an honest argument. Next, if you're going to try to convince me that our Big Standardized Results have dropped to the pits from an earlier pinnacle, you'd better bring some data to back that up, because everything I've ever seen shows that the US has lagged behind other nations on international tests for as long as those tests have existed (and that the characterization of the lag is not entirely accurate, either).
But the entire genesis of this "study" was a general freakout over PISA results in 2014. The idea was to do some research and talk to all these countries that are so much more awesomer than the US.
In this intro, NCSL shows that it has just learned tons from the failed reformism of the past decade-plus. No, just kidding. They dispose of the entire history in one sentence, chalking all that failure up to "silver bullet strategies and piecemeal approaches."
So the buildup is not encouraging. But the report is only 28 pages. Let's go ahead and take a look. Maybe it performs better on a granular level.
Hey, Who Concocted This Thing, Anyway
A bipartisan group of 28 veteran legislators and legislative staff, along with several partners from the private sector
Yikes. And not to belabor the obvious, but here's one more confabulation about education without an educator at the table (though in fairness, some education experts were "consulted" who almost fit the description of an education expert). Honestly, is there any other policy area-- any at all-- in which experienced professional practitioners in the field are routinely ignored?
Ditto Intro
Here's the executive summary again, same as it was in the promo. The sentence designed to Create a Sense of High Urgency is now a big-fonted pullout quote. BE AFRAID!!
Actual Data ?
Oh, did you think the report was going to provide some data to back up its panic-stricken insistence that the US is in an education death-spiral? You were incorrect. NCSL is just rolling right on with the chicken littling of this alleged crisis with nothing more than scary quotes and vague threats. Did I mention that they worked on this damn thing for eighteen months? The report says that "we can not ignore the fact" that the US is falling behind [insert the rest from above sentence]. But "we cannot ignore the fact" is an ocean away from actually establishing that what you're calling a fact, is, in fact, a fact.
At one point the writers throw in an "according to recent reports" to assert that the US workforce is not as educated as others. Which reports? They don't say. I mean, I suppose they looked at the reports eighteen months ago when they first started and they just kind of forgot what actual report they're talking about.
The report is going to throw some numbers at us in a few pages. But for right now, just breathe in the scent of fear and failure.
What Can States Do Now
But let's just leap ahead, pretending that we actually know we have a crisis on our hands. NCSL offers up a list of handy things that states can do right now.
First, the state can "build an inclusive team" of all sorts of stakeholders-- hey, look! Teachers make the list this time. And here comes some really practical advice about building consensus in this large and diverse group-- just don't bother. Getting an actual 100% consensus is hard, so instead, settle for like 70%. So build an inclusive group, but don't try to include everybody in what the group actually concludes. They think this advice is so good that they include it as another big-fonted pullquote.
Next, study and learn from top performers. Take trips. Steal ideas. As always, "top performers" means "people with high test scores." The report advises
Reconsider much of what you think you know; abandon many ideas to which you have long been committed; and embrace new ideas...
None of this applies to questioning things like judging education performance based on scores from a narrow standardized test, nor does it include questioning whether or not there's any link between getting those test scores and being successful as a country. Not even the asserting that the US is "falling behind" the world. None of those things that we think we know should ever be reconsidered or questioned, ever.
Create a shared statewide vision. Well, presumably the vision only has to be shared by 70% of the people involved.
Benchmark progress. You know that international benchmarking that the Common Core supposed did, but didn't, for any number or reasons including that it's not really possible because hardly anybody in the world thinks that's how you improve an education system.
Get started on one piece. Pick some part of your big vision and implement it, and when you do that successfully, tell everyone how awesome that was and build momentum for doing another piece. Did we skip the part where your vision should be made out of parts that can function independently? Does "do what you can and do it quickly" sound suspiciously like the famous last words of Common Core promoters?
Work through messiness. It will be messy. Just keep plugging. I actually don't disagree with this as a general approach to life.
Invest the time. Not, apparently, the money. Just the time. This will just happen in a lot of different ways in different states, so time.
Oh, Now We've Got Facts
Did we mention the PISA? Look here's a charter that pretty much shows we've been doing poorly on this since it started in 2000. We must do better, because if too many nations surpass us in all-important standardized test taking, we will have no hope of being the best standardized test takers in the world. Are there any other benefits to doing well on the PISA?
NCSL also trots out the PIACC, a test from the PISA people given to adults to test adult competencies. Seriously? How does anybody pay the slightest attention to this. How can such a test measure anything except whether or not the adult population is so compliant that they will actually bother to try on a Big Standardized Test even though they are fully grown adult humans. Honestly, sometimes I think these people have never met actual humans. Anyway, that test says that millennials are terrible.
And what attack of test-based chicken littling would be complete without the NAEP results. I'm not going to bother with these yet again. You can type "NAEP" into that little box at the top left and find what I have to say.
Also, the report asserts, international comparisons are valid. Because....? Um. Because they say so, I guess. Other countries also have poor people and immigrants. Therefore all comparisons between nations are valid.
What Reform Did Wrong
NCSL says we should face facts about what reformsters have done so far in their quest for a "silver bullet." That would be the "piecemeal" thing from before, where states did silly things like "increasing teacher pay without demanding better preparation" and-- insert sound of needle being dragged across surface of vinyl record (yes, that's a thing, you impudent whippersnapper) because exactly where did that happen, again? Which state is famous for having jacked up teacher pay and then getting hit with terrible teachers because of it? In what corner of the country are either parts of that proposition true?
They throw in a couple of true things (e.g. increased early childhood support with doing anything for K-12), but they are so far in the weeds that they also toss this out as an example of Reform Problems That Have Happened:
Using test scores in teacher evaluations without ensuring that all teachers are receiving job-embedded, high-quality, on-going learning
Not quite. Let me fix that for you:
Using test scores in teacher evaluations without ensuring that tests were valid or reliable or that the instruments for using test scores to score teachers were themselves reliable or valid
Also missing from this section-- an explanation of how "piecemeal" was bad, but the recommended "implement one thing by itself quickly" is a good idea.
What Top Performers Get Right
Now for the portion where we find out what characteristics of these great countries we should emulate.
#1 Students arrive at school ready to learn, and extra support is provided for struggling students.
Not bad, though I would argue that schools should be student-ready, not the other way around.
#2 World-class teaching profession in world-class instructional, where every student has access to highly effective teacher.
Man, I hate that "access" thing. For instance, at work I don't want a chance to get good pay-- I want good pay. NCSL says we get better teachers by selective recruitment, rigorous training and licensure, thorough induction, a career ladder, professional work environment, good leadership, and high pay. And some of that is worth having (I'm not going to travel all the way down this side track right now), but it's like saying our country would be better with less racism and corruption. Yes, it would. But saying so isn't really a plan, is it.
#3 A good vocational education system
Yes, absolutely. We have had this in my county for almost fifty years. I am always shocked to discover places that don't have it, though of course we're still passing through a period of insisting that everyone should want to go to a four year college.
#4 Individual reforms are connected and aligned as parts of a clearly planned and carefully designed comprehensive system.
Ah, yes. A centrally planned system. Maybe we can revisit it every five years. Central planning has always worked out well in the countries that tried it before. Should be a slam dunk this time, too.
Exemplars
Next, we take a look at three of the ten countries that were studied. You might be able to predict the list of ten, but just in case you're new to this game, they are Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Poland, Singapore, Taiwan, Ontario, and Alberta (CA). The three that get special attention are Finland, Singapore and Ontario.
I am not even going to bother reading this part. Because, as it turns out, the United States is not Finland, Singapore or Ontario. For that matter, Montana is not New Hampshire and Iowa is not Alabama. And to pretend that you can adopt parts of another culture piecemeal is the kind of thing that these folks have talked about for so long that they've stopped noticing it's bananas.
Heck, several of those countries do not use alphabetic languages, but logographic instead. Maybe the key to creating world class education is to lose the alphabet. Maybe our learners would do better in a country with single-payer health care. Maybe our learners would do better in a cooler climate.
Don't get me wrong-- there are always things we can learn from other people and places, no matter how different. The notion that the current state of a nation's education system (or any other aspect of that nation's culture) somehow exists in an independent current state that is not deeply tied to the history and past of the country and culture is a puzzling piece of historical illiteracy. The idea that we can just lift an aspect of the culture into our own with no regard for either that country's background nor our own is just bizarre, like thinking we can transplant an oak branch onto a grapevine by just picking a branch off the oak tree and placing in the vine.
Much of these sorts of papers and their suggestions, whether looking at the large picture of educational systems of specifics like uplifting the teaching profession, consist of saying, "Well, we'll just make our culture work differently when it comes to this." Which is no more helpful than telling a person whose only tool is a screwdriver, "Well, just drive those nails in with a hammer."
And About Those Systems, Anyway
This whole paper is soaked in one other long-standing bad reform feature. It focuses entirely on educational systems, and looks at those systems as they serve the state.
That's a two-pronged fail. Systems thinking inevitably ends up valuing the system over the humans operating within it. Students, teachers and parents have to brought into line so that they don't interfere with the smooth operation of the system. Systems and human beings clash (as phone and cable companies, the DMV, and phone menus constantly remind us), and in the education system, we must always come down on the side of the tiny humans in that system. They system must regularly lose, and systems don't take that well.
As that implies, the system certainly can't be primarily there to serve the state by turning out good little meat widgets that improve employment statistics and international standings. The system has to serve the students, first and foremost. And yet in twenty-eight pages, there's nothing that really addresses making sure that a school system meets the needs of students or their families or the communities in which all of those reside.
And by making the education system a servant of the state, the report also slides past the question of what the state's responsibility to the schools should be. How does all this play out in a state like New Jersey, where the legislature does not even give the financial support to schools called for by its own laws?
And (we're almost done, I swear) the whole entire unappealing structure is built on the same old foundation of sand, the notion that there is some meaningful link between the BS Tests and the strength and success of a nation, a link that is often presumed and never proven.
This report is slick and empty (and you may want to flip to the end to see if your favorite legislator was in on it), but after being out for several weeks, it doesn't seem to have made much of a splash, which is just as well. Better if it just sinks away quietly, even if it is eventually followed by more of the same.
FL: Children and Opt Out Win
When last we cast our gaze at the sunshine state, its deep love of testing had gotten it dragged into court. Florida's indefensible third-grade retention rule says that a student can't move on to fourth grade without passing that test, and while some districts saw an alternate path in portfolios and other alternative assessments, other districts collided with opt out families.
If the child has not taken the Big Standardized Test, they declared, that child must sit in third grade until the test has been taken-- even if that child has a straight A report card.
The suit has brought some Very Special Moments to the spotlight. For instance, we've had a chance to be reminded of Florida's minimum participation rule, which says that to meet the letter of the law, the child must "participate" in the test by breaking the seal and sign their name.
We've also seen the Florida Department of Education display their general gutlessness by initially throwing the districts under the bus, saying, gosh, Tallahassee had no idea why the local districts were being so mean (leading at least one superintendent to say some barely diplomatic things about the state's lack of useful leadership).
But once the state got involved, they decided to go all in by asserting that report cards are meaningless and do not reflect the students' learning. Lord knows I've written a ton about how the state of Florida manages to make life miserable for students, parents, and teachers, but I am still looking forward to seeing exactly how the state's new Report Cards Are Meaningless Junk policy plays out this year.
That's our story so far. Now for the update, which is good news.
Judge Karen Gievers upheld the Participation Rule and delivered a public spanking to the districts, saying that the children had, by signing their names, participated in the test and must be given the opportunity to complete portfolios or be promoted based on their grades.
But Gievers did more than offer relief to the students in the suit.
She said students who are reading at a sufficient level, despite not answering questions on the test, were harmed by being forced to repeat third grade and the districts should have considered the portfolio option.
There are some details to dig through in the Judge's order, in part because each county was in a slightly different situation. For instance, Orange County apparently decided to single out one child for non-test-taking retention while allowing other non-testers to take the portfolio option, a choice that is not only transparently unfair, but just plain stupid to carry all the way to court. Meanwhile, Hernando County doesn't allow the portfolio option at all, which Gievers notes is "illegal." Several of the Hernando have already removed themselves from that district, rendering any kind of injunction "moot." The Hernando district is "ORDERED" (I love court document punctuation and capitalization rules) to knock it off already with the illegal failure to provide other options for third graders who fail the Big Standardized Test.
The Sarasota case is passed over because Sarasota schools folded their hand and promoted the child as soon as they found themselves in court. Broward and Seminole found themselves in trouble because they, like a couple of the other districts, never told parents the children were "deficient" until around the last day of school. Which is illegal. One of these children is a honors kid, ranking ahead of her classmates, but not till the last day did the district inform the folks that the child would be retained for "non-compliance" with the BS Test.
The State Department was also in court, and it gets its own paragraphs in the judge's order.
First, the judge found that the state told Hernando County schools that it was perfectly okay to pursue their illegal plan for offering no portfolio option to students. The state has also "improperly ignored" the law's requirement to provide options for students who fail the test, and it has improperly ignored the required notices of deficiency and remediation. In other words, the state has let districts get away with the baloney wherein a school tells a nine-year-old child on the last day of school, "Oh, by the way, you are not going on to fourth grade. Too bad for you." Turns out that is illegal.
Most notably, Judge Gievers clarifies the previously fuzzy rule that the department has been unwilling to observe-- by breaking the seal and being present, a student participates in the BS Test to the full extent required by law.
In other words, this ruling anchors Florida Opt Out procedure solidly in the law.
The Judge goes on to say it is ORDERED that the state stop "disseminating misinformation" about the portfolio option, and the state is ORDERED to require districts to follow the lawful deficiency and remediation procedures.
There's more legally background stuff, but this is a huge win for the Florida Opt Out movement. It doesn't just say that what the districts and state did was wrong and unconscionable-- it clarifies that it was flat out illegal. And it establishes that promoting a child based on a report card is an acceptable-- and it tells us something about where we are with education reform that it takes a judge's ruling to establish such a thing.
Of course, we're not done with this yet. The state will appeal, because God forbid they let this little nine-year-old scofflaws slip through their fingers. But if they have a leg to stand on, I can't see where it is. Not that they won't try. This is Pam Stewart and the Florida Department of Education-- if they can pursue a ten year old boy on his death bed, the optics of yanking a bunch of fourth graders out of class to throw them back in a third grade classroom won't deter them. But on a planet with even a remote simulation of justice, the state will continue to lose this fight.
Meanwhile, the school boards and superintendents will go home and, with any luck, have to explain to the public how they could pursue policies so stupid, hurtful, damaging and transparently illegal. The fight's not over, but Friday was a good day for students, parents and teachers in Florida.
If the child has not taken the Big Standardized Test, they declared, that child must sit in third grade until the test has been taken-- even if that child has a straight A report card.
The suit has brought some Very Special Moments to the spotlight. For instance, we've had a chance to be reminded of Florida's minimum participation rule, which says that to meet the letter of the law, the child must "participate" in the test by breaking the seal and sign their name.
We've also seen the Florida Department of Education display their general gutlessness by initially throwing the districts under the bus, saying, gosh, Tallahassee had no idea why the local districts were being so mean (leading at least one superintendent to say some barely diplomatic things about the state's lack of useful leadership).
But once the state got involved, they decided to go all in by asserting that report cards are meaningless and do not reflect the students' learning. Lord knows I've written a ton about how the state of Florida manages to make life miserable for students, parents, and teachers, but I am still looking forward to seeing exactly how the state's new Report Cards Are Meaningless Junk policy plays out this year.
That's our story so far. Now for the update, which is good news.
 | |
| Judge Karen Gievers is a friend of education this week |
Judge Karen Gievers upheld the Participation Rule and delivered a public spanking to the districts, saying that the children had, by signing their names, participated in the test and must be given the opportunity to complete portfolios or be promoted based on their grades.
But Gievers did more than offer relief to the students in the suit.
She said students who are reading at a sufficient level, despite not answering questions on the test, were harmed by being forced to repeat third grade and the districts should have considered the portfolio option.
There are some details to dig through in the Judge's order, in part because each county was in a slightly different situation. For instance, Orange County apparently decided to single out one child for non-test-taking retention while allowing other non-testers to take the portfolio option, a choice that is not only transparently unfair, but just plain stupid to carry all the way to court. Meanwhile, Hernando County doesn't allow the portfolio option at all, which Gievers notes is "illegal." Several of the Hernando have already removed themselves from that district, rendering any kind of injunction "moot." The Hernando district is "ORDERED" (I love court document punctuation and capitalization rules) to knock it off already with the illegal failure to provide other options for third graders who fail the Big Standardized Test.
The Sarasota case is passed over because Sarasota schools folded their hand and promoted the child as soon as they found themselves in court. Broward and Seminole found themselves in trouble because they, like a couple of the other districts, never told parents the children were "deficient" until around the last day of school. Which is illegal. One of these children is a honors kid, ranking ahead of her classmates, but not till the last day did the district inform the folks that the child would be retained for "non-compliance" with the BS Test.
The State Department was also in court, and it gets its own paragraphs in the judge's order.
First, the judge found that the state told Hernando County schools that it was perfectly okay to pursue their illegal plan for offering no portfolio option to students. The state has also "improperly ignored" the law's requirement to provide options for students who fail the test, and it has improperly ignored the required notices of deficiency and remediation. In other words, the state has let districts get away with the baloney wherein a school tells a nine-year-old child on the last day of school, "Oh, by the way, you are not going on to fourth grade. Too bad for you." Turns out that is illegal.
Most notably, Judge Gievers clarifies the previously fuzzy rule that the department has been unwilling to observe-- by breaking the seal and being present, a student participates in the BS Test to the full extent required by law.
In other words, this ruling anchors Florida Opt Out procedure solidly in the law.
The Judge goes on to say it is ORDERED that the state stop "disseminating misinformation" about the portfolio option, and the state is ORDERED to require districts to follow the lawful deficiency and remediation procedures.
There's more legally background stuff, but this is a huge win for the Florida Opt Out movement. It doesn't just say that what the districts and state did was wrong and unconscionable-- it clarifies that it was flat out illegal. And it establishes that promoting a child based on a report card is an acceptable-- and it tells us something about where we are with education reform that it takes a judge's ruling to establish such a thing.
Of course, we're not done with this yet. The state will appeal, because God forbid they let this little nine-year-old scofflaws slip through their fingers. But if they have a leg to stand on, I can't see where it is. Not that they won't try. This is Pam Stewart and the Florida Department of Education-- if they can pursue a ten year old boy on his death bed, the optics of yanking a bunch of fourth graders out of class to throw them back in a third grade classroom won't deter them. But on a planet with even a remote simulation of justice, the state will continue to lose this fight.
Meanwhile, the school boards and superintendents will go home and, with any luck, have to explain to the public how they could pursue policies so stupid, hurtful, damaging and transparently illegal. The fight's not over, but Friday was a good day for students, parents and teachers in Florida.
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