USED: How Teachers Can Be Heard

Maddie Fennell is a Teacher of the Year from Nebraska who hooked up as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the US Department of Education, and she wrote what seems like a perfectly innocuous piece at Ed Week called "Hello from the Other Side" listing a few key lessons from her time there.

Some of the insights are perfectly swell. Don't put education policy on a pedestal, because it's just the product of regular biased humans? I'm all over that one, and have been for some time. When you think you've covered something enough, say it five more times. She's talking about penetrating the bureaucratic fog (specifically with the message that using student test scores to evaluate teachers is harming the profession, so good on her), but I'm pretty sure everyone working in a classroom already knows the joys, usefulness, and special hell of repeating yourself many many times to get the message to sink in. And I have to give a bit of love to someone who writes the understated "Policy writing is not always backed by mountains of expertise."

Bur I do disagree with her on some points.

While I appreciate the insight that "too many decisions are made on a political timeline instead of a realistic one," I don't believe that I don't believe that Common Core would have worked any better "if the federal government and states had only given teachers the time and materials to really understand" it. And while I agree that we should not assume that all USED bureaucrats are evil, dim-witted trolls, I still feel comfortable mixing my "frustration with bureaucracy with the people in it" because bureaucratic muss and baloney is created by the human beings in the system. If a system sucks, it's because people let it (or make it) suck.

But then Fennell landed on a really raw nerve of mine.

There aren't enough career educator voices in government.

I thought I was going to cheer, and she noted that there are lots of great career teachers out there and lots of fine folks at USED who need to hear from teachers. But then, this...

Run an orphanage like a  champion

More career educators need to apply for fellowships, internships, and experiences that put them in dialogue with policymakers. Teacher leaders need to spend time lobbying and meeting with state legislators and policymakers, insisting that educators have a genuine place at the table. I met one teacher who volunteered as a summer intern (something you usually only see students do); she learned a lot about policy and she was a valued voice at the table.

Sigh. I know she means well, but here we are at the same old place. If teachers want to be heard, they have to travel to DC and prove that I'm worth being listened to, which seems sort of reasonable and practical except that, of course, no USED bureaucrats have ever had to prove themselves to me and just in general I have had a belly full of people who want to dictate policy and procedure and pedagogy and all manner of poop to me without ever proving that there's any reason I should be listening to them.

And dammit, why is it that I'm the one who needs to leave my work and my home and my place of business to go where it's convenient for the bureaucrats. Why am I the one who has to drop hat he's doing? Where's the Bureaucrat Ambassador Program where some USED functionary comes and works as a teacher aide in a classroom for a year?  Why is this whole business premised on the notion that teachers must carry their empty bowl of policy and influence up to Mr. Bureaucratic Bumble to ask meekly, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"

Why is the dismissal of teacher voices the default?

Yes, I know that Fennell's advice is practical, that it acknowledges how the world really works. But for a while this afternoon (and not for the first time or the last), the way the world works rather pissed me off.

Petrilli: Mission Accomplished

Remember when we had a terrible, terrible crisis in the number of terribly bad awful really no good schools (filled with stinky, disastrous teachers) and we had to put the reform pedal to the scholastic metal toot de suite! Common Core, teacher evaluations, choice-flavored systems-- we had to have them RIGHT NOW and couldn't afford to wait another second because crisis crisis CRISIS! Remember all that?

Well, good news. Crisis over. All fixed. Mission accomplished. At least that's the word from Mike Petrilli (Fordham) over at the Flypaper blog. 

School failure is no longer the United States’ most pressing educational problem—mediocrity is.

 For sure, we’re used to hearing that, and some of us are used to saying it. Indeed, many schools serving African Americans (and Latinos and low-income students) haven’t been very good. Some are still failing. But the truth is that they have gotten better over the past two decades—a lot better.

What Petrilli is arguing for here is a shift of focus, from focusing on creating excellent schools rather than eliminating bad ones.

Now as always we need to remember that Petrilli is not always in lockstep with his reformy brethren (he's still pretty much alone in pushing out loud the idea that not only should charters be allowed to  cream, but that creaming is really their actual purpose). Nevertheless, cancelling the Terrible Schools Crisis represents a bit of a rhetorical shift.

So what's going on here? Let me offer a couple of possible interpretations of the shift.

It's politics.

Petrilli invokes Trump's special message to black voters-- "Your lives suck terribly"-- and backs away from it. Right now reformsters have a Trump problem; specifically, their problem is that Trump is on their side. Regardless of where you stand on education reforminess, I think we can agree on one thing-- your most beloved ideas sound so much worse coming out of Trump's mouth. I figure we can expect many reformsters to attempt the Trump dance that the GOP has been wiggling its way through for the past several months. In the meantime, Petrilli seems interested in shifting the focus of Presidential discussions of education. Good luck with that.

Admission and redefinition of failure.

You may recall that the reformster goal with those terrible, terrible schools was not just to make them better. Many states bought into the magical 5%-- we were going to just keep grabbing the bottom 5% of schools and transform them into super-awesome schools. Tennessee's Achievement School District was going to take the bottom 5% of schools and put them in the top 25%, and Chris Barbic generated some headlines by discovering that it's actually pretty hard to pull that magic trick off.

Reformsters were often critical of incrementalists who wanted to just make schools better-- we were going to see schools transformed into Gardens of Learning, miracles of free-market educationized awesomeness. Now after at least a decade, no such amazing results have been produced.

In other words, when Petrilli says the conversation should shift to the production of excellent schools, he is doing an nifty reverse assume-the-sake slight-of-hand, because for a long time, the conversation was totally about excellent schools, and how reform was going to transform terrible schools into the most very excellent ones. Instead, results have ranged from nothing special to outright failure. Petrilli's "well, now that we've made terrible schools a little better..." is basically a guy picking himself up off a slippery sidewalk while saying, "I totally meant to do that."

Mission creep and market expansion

Privatizing, charterizing, and generally reformifying was always going to be an easier sell for poor, non-white schools. Desperate for help, and lacking in most cases any effective powers of political resistance, those schools could be taken over, closed, charterfied, etc etc etc with little resistance. The problem was always going to be finding a way to expand the reformy market to wealthier, whiter schools, where parents could more effectively resist having their schools taken and their local control stripped away.

There were hopes that testing would provide a sales pitch base, like when all those suburban moms discovered their schools sucked and their children weren't so bright because of the common core Big Standardized Tests. That didn't pan out-- when those moms were confronted with BS Test evidence that what they thought they knew about their own flesh and blood was wrong, they determined that it was the test that was wrong, while reformsters impotently argued, "What are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?"

Having failed to convince suburban communities that their schools were in crisis, reformsters are going to need a new crowbar with which to open that market. So perhaps an all-around betterness argument may work.

Petrilli's love of high achievers

We know that Petrilli has a love of the high-striving achieveniks (see article linked above), and when we're looking at that population, he has a valid point. High Stakes Testing has encouraged schools to separate their students into three groups:

1) Achievement levels so low that there's no hope of getting them to "proficient"
2) Close enough to the line that many, many resources will be focused on dragging them across it
3) Achievement levels so high that there's no need to worry about them

In a test-centered school, groups 1 and 2 get the most attention. Group 3 gets little.

The next president should make it clear that our advanced students deserve our attention too, and states should send clear signals that they matter by holding schools accountable for their progress.

I don't disagree in principle, but there are a couple of problems here. One is that we have no reliable or valid method for measuring that progress. This is further complicated because "high flyers" are not always interested in staying in the little boxes set up to measure their achievement. One of the foundational elements of being a high achiever is that you are guided by your own ideas about what achievement should mean.

Final thought 

This is one of those pieces that reminds me of the huge gap between policy wonks and actual classroom teachers. Because while the focus on excellence does frequently suffer at the policy level, it's pretty much our bread and butter in the classroom. "I want you guys to be super-mediocre," said no decent teacher ever.

What do you mean? I took the test.

My class is wasting our time engaged for two days with a popular "research-based, computer adaptive assessment that helps kids learn."  It is several hours of our lives that we can't have back, and it reminds me once again of the very basic hurdles that these standardized bubble tests have trouble overcoming.

The biggest first hurdle is that the students have to care. The students have to think that it's really, really important that they give their all for these tests. The whole business makes me wonder if any of these test manufacturers have ever met an actual human, but I suspect that the real problem is that they have themselves so convinced that these tests are really important, valuable measures that it just no longer occurs to them that other people don't see reality in the same way (is there a word for when you gaslight yourself?)

But yesterday's first round reminded me of another issue, more subtle, but equally problematic.

So my student Chris (not the actual name) completes the forty-three questions in roughly ten minutes. This strikes me as improbable. SO I ask Cris, "Did you actually read the questions"

"Sure," Chris says.

"And did you read the selections that the questions went with?"

"No," Chris replies, with a subtext of "why would I do something stupid like that?"

I believe at this point I made That Face.

"What do you mean," Chris elaborates. "I took the test."

Chris was not yanking my chain. Chris believes that the task was completed. Chris and the test manufacturers and I do not share the same definition of the task.

This is not uncommon with instruments like a bubble test which reduce complex operations to a simple job. Teachers and students often have some version of the following conversation:

Teacher: Read the selection through carefully, looking for the main ideas and trying to divine the author's purpose. You should also be on the lookout for key words and phrases. See which key details and evidence support your ideas about main ideas and purpose, and if possible, look for ways to both synthesize the different perspectives included in the excerpt and prepare yourself to compare and contrast the approach to the thematic material in this work with other similarly themed works we've read. Ideally you should read the whole selection through twice so that you can catch the deep structural choices and give yourself a better chance to close read for the role of vocabulary and sentence structure to achieve the author's purpose. Do you understand my expectations for this assessment?

Student: So, you want me to bubble in the right answers for these three questions at the end.

This does not make students unusual examples of the human race. What teacher has not sat through a big high-flying staff meeting about some bold new initiative or state-mandated reform or newly-implemented program and after a few hours of full-blown juice-packed rhetoric said (out loud or to yourself, depending on your bravery), "Yeah, but what do you actually want me to do?"

It is human to translate these kind of full-blown operations down to "Blah blah blah blah blah do Task A." The simpler Task A is, the easier it is to ignore everything in the blah department. And there is nothing simpler than "Click on one of the four options."

You can argue that the students have to read the selection in order to have a better shot at clicking on the "correct" answer, but of course, once again, they first have to care if the answer they click on is correct. On top of that, in the case of crappy standardized tests (with which my juniors have much experience), students have learned that A) you often don't need to read the selection in order to answer the question and B) reading the selection doesn't help them find the correct answer anyway because the question is from crazy alternate universe in which they do not live. And in the cost-benefits analysis of my most struggling students, reading several paragraphs in the hopes that it might give you one more correct click is like plunking down $100 for one ounce of a soup that might not even taste good.

So at the end of the day, many of my students have just defined the task down. Go through forty or so questions, and click on an answer for each one. This supposed to somehow provide me with actionable data.

And at the end of the day, I resent the assessment for more than just the wasted time. I resent it for introducing the idea that sometimes I will ask my students to spend time on pointless things. I promised them at the beginning of the year that I would never purposefully waste their time. Now that promise is suspect.

And sure-- we can argue that as the teacher I'm supposed to do a better job of convincing them that this test is valuable and important and that they need to give it their all because Important Consequences rest on it. That somehow the results of forty-some standardized multiple choice questions will tell me things about them that I could not otherwise figure out for myself. But at the beginning of the year I also promised them I would never lie to them.

Yes, there are life lessons here. Sometimes you are required to perform certain tasks that strike you as pointless because people with more power than you believe that they know better than you what you need. In those situations people can require that you perform a task, but they cannot make you care. They cannot make you do it well. You always get to choose how much commitment you bring to a task.

Most of all, there are lessons here for me as a teacher. One is a reminder about the Rule of Stupid Rules-- if you invest your authority in a silly directive, you weaken your authority in all things. If you require the passengers on your ship wear blue deely-bobbers and sing nursery rhymes whenever they're on deck, you increase the likelihood that they will not pay attention to you when it's time to implement evacuation procedures. And this is also a reminder that we are challenged as teachers to design assessment tasks that cannot be easily defined down so that they don't actually require or measure any of the things we want them to. If a half-assed job actually fulfills the basic requirements of the task, then we have noone to blame but ourselves if a student can say, "What do you mean? I took the test."

Forest and Trees

Like many jobs in the world, particularly those that deal with humans, teaching requires focus on both forests and trees.

A teacher faces questions like these in the classroom:

What body of information do I need to convey to my students in a deep and integrated manner that best fits their pedagogical requirements and will most help them take their place as fully-actualized adults in the world?

What instructional techniques can best be used with this particular set of content-based objectives that also blend with and respect the cultural and personal backgrounds of my students while maintaining a whole child approach that helps achieve my global objectives?

But these questions are also part of the classroom world:

What's the most efficient way to get these test papers passed back?

Do I have enough copies of this worksheet?

Can I get Chris to stop jabbing Pat with a pencil?

You can't have one without the other. Focusing on the broad and deep concerns of education is like loving someone deeply and fully and never doing anything about it but sitting in your room and writing angsty poems. A broad vision without an action plan gets nothing done, achieves nothing for the students. But focus too intently on the nuts and bolts and you end up with a technician who completes tasks efficiently, even though the tasks have no real useful purpose behind them. You need a vision of how to get through the next year, and a plan for how to get through the next forty minutes.

Educational amateurs and neophytes often suffer from this balance problem. Beginning teachers may enter the classroom with Big Dreams about Touching the Future and Shaping Young Minds, but with no idea of how to get twenty-five teenagers to keep watching while the teacher writes on the board (chalk, white or smart). I've also seen new teachers arrive with stacks of unit plans and worksheets, ready to deploy them while moving briskly through the textbook, but with no idea of why they're doing any of it except that it's their idea of what teachers do. Each creates their own problems-- one leads to students who ask "What the heck are we doing?" while the other prompts students to ask "Why the heck are we doing this?" And the teacher has no answer, and the class sinks further and further into the weeds.

The educational amateurs who push the reformy agenda have similar issues.

On the one hand we have visionaries who offer broad vague ideas, like we will lift up teachers so that they will raise expectations of students, who will rise and succeed, emerging from school well-educated and primed to succeed while also closing the achievement gap. All of which is pretty, but completely avoids the question of how, exactly, this will work. You are face to face in a classroom with a student who doesn't understand what the first paragraph of "Call of the Wild" says-- exactly how will you Higher Expect him into understanding. And you're doing it in a room with thirty other students, some of which haven't eaten in twenty-four hours, and the walls in the room are crumbling, and you don't have enough copies of the book, so you're looking at a projection of it on the stained and peeling wall in a neighborhood historically riven by all the stress that comes with being on the wrong side of poverty and systemic racism. What exactly will you do in the next fifteen minutes? Visionaries don't have an answer. They just want you to keep your eyes on those higher expectations and big dreams etc etc etc. and when anyone brings up the "How do we spend the next forty minutes" question, visionaries level the accusation that folks lack vision and keep making excuses.

On the other hand, we have the technicians. These reformsters are excited because technology answers all the questions about how to manage tests and practice and worksheets and all the record-keeping. They know exactly what you're going to do for the next forty minutes-- have students log on to their program and pull up the next module of materials that have been selected by the AI and answer questions as the software process those answers so that you can see the data crunched on the monitor on your desk. Technicians are so excited about the efficiency and elegance of this system that they forget to ask if any of it actually is a good way to serve the educational needs of the students. They are so excited about the pipeline they've built that they never stop to consider that the solid, unyielding shape of that pipeline completely dictates what can pass through that pipeline, allowing curricular and pedagogical decisions to simply happen as a side-effect of the technical delivery system.

Visionaries build gorgeous golden imaginary productions without any means of transporting them into the world. Technicians build efficient systems for delivering things that don't do anyone any good.

Teaming them up is not enough. They will fight. They will argue, and they will ultimately produce something that includes the worst of both worlds.

No, an actual teacher has to have both a vision and an understanding of how to make it real. A teacher must always balance a broad, deep view, and a detailed, granular one. A teacher must see forests and trees, as well as leaves and bark and full-scale ecosystems. When we tell reformsters that they should talk to actual classroom teachers, it's invariably a reaction to their lack of a full scale of sight, their childlike belief that if you just concentrate really hard on the forest, the trees will take care of themselves-- or vice versa.

Teaching is by no means the only profession where this sort of many-scales issue exists. In most professions, part of the training and the wisdom of experience is based on learning to see forests and trees and how they fit together. But in every other profession, it is widely understood that it takes a professional to see All That. It is in teaching that powerful amateurs continue to believe that since they once camped in a forest or they have this one tree they know really well, that makes them knowledgeable to act like a professional educator (and in some cases, qualified to wave a giant chainsaw around with abandon).

Like any metaphor, this one this limitations, and not everyone fits inside. But we'll wait for another day to discuss the people who want to clear cut the forest and replace the trees with condos.

TN: (Not) Mrs. Jobs' Mall Charter [Update]

You may recall that last fall we were talking about Laurene Powell Jobs' (Wharton Business School, Goldman Sachs) entry into the world of Rich Amateurs Fixing Schools-- the XQ project, a grant competition to design America's next super-school.

Well, the super-schools are here. Almost here. And Memphis, Tennessee gets one of them. (Well-- almost*)

Among the charter schools approved by the Shelby County School Board this fall (though they also shot down three, including the infamous Green Dot), is Crosstown High, one of Jobs' new super-schools.

Not your father's mall

The charter is particularly unique for its setting, which is in a multi-million dollar real estate development. Crosstown Concourse (set in the abandoned Sears & Roebuck distribution warehouse) is going to be huge, and it embraces a mission that virtually floats on a cloud of overheated developer prose:

This is not just a building limited to the physical – the steel, the stone, and the tangible. This is a million square feet of opportunity, built on history and powered by renewal. It's a place to collaborate because our lives are lived better when we discover together. We believe in the search for intersections, designing paths of unexpected connections that lead to experiences filled with creative force. This is not just a building; this is a beautiful passage of people, who together... are Crosstown Concourse.

XTH's website describes the development as

a vibrant, “vertical urban village” that houses organizations focused on healthcare, wellness, education, the arts, technology, and economic development. Retail, restaurants, and residential apartments will also be part of the $200 million, 1.1 million square-foot redevelopment.

So basically, a really big mall. Or maybe a mall-shaped neighborhood. The development already has some founding member, including Teacher Town, which

seeks to promote Memphis as the place where the best teachers in America work to improve student achievement. The non-profit organization focuses particular attention on retaining, developing, and recruiting talented teachers to serve "priority schools," meaning those that rank in the bottom five percent in Tennessee in terms of student achievement.

So somewhere in here there's distant linkage to the Achievement School District lurking about. The Teacher Town initiative dates back a few years, another of those projects that Chris Barbic undertook before finally realizing that the ASD was not actually going to achieve any of its stated goals.  

XTH (which is partnering with Christian Brothers University, a Catholic-run university in Memphis) has set its sights high, saying it has set out to answer three questions:

What are the essentials for a thriving community? How do you repair a city fractured by injustice and inequality? And what does it mean to reimagine education for a changing world?

And boy have the designers of this school laid on the rhetorical flourishes. Here's more about the goals:

STRUCTURALLY, this will manifest in our adoption of a longer school year and day as learning bleeds out of the traditional academic calendar and into every facet of a student’s life. However, increased time “in school” will not feel burdensome, as there will be greater flexibility in how time is utilized by both teachers and young people, and in active and sustained partnerships with our fellow Concourse tenants, whose workplaces will provide rich and real-world learning opportunities for our students. 

CULTURALLY, this will manifest in our commitment to recruit a student body that is reflective of our city, and that allows us to embody the mantra of the entire Concourse: Better Together. 

PEDAGOGICALLY this will manifest in our adoption of competency-based progressions for students in each subject area, and in our commitment to have all students demonstrate mastery of higher-order thinking skills via project-based and portfolio assessments of their learning.

They are also big on personalized learning plans and project-based stuff. There's not a lot of beef here, and XTH (which opens in August 2018) is still looking to fill key administrative positions. I had a brief twitter-exchange with one of the designers (at WONDER, By Design-- a "multidisciplinary design studio that is unapologetically curious about the future of learning"-- which is great because you know how most of us are really apologetic about our interest in learning) and there was some talk about opening young minds, but not much specific. 

[Update: I missed this at first, but operators of XTH have apparently been pretty open-optiony about how exactly their governance model will work. Maybe straight-up charter. Maybe a contract model, which is a version that allows more control over who gets to be a student. Still got some time to decide, I guess. ]

So who knows how this super-school is actually going to work. Maybe they're just going to build a really cool space, plug in some computers, and license some nifty competency-based-education computer software. 

In many ways this appears to be just one more high-vision amateur charter school, but I am curious about one unique aspect of it.

What happens if your charter school's fate is directly tied to the fate of a commercial development? Granted, the charter is itself a commercial development, so sticking it in a mall makes a certain kind of sense. Bu what happens to the charter school if your ambitious mall plans fall flat? What do you do if your charter school ends up as a lonely storefront in a big empty building? What do the charter operators do if the developers fail to really launch this ambitious development plan?

There have certainly been charters that rented space in malls before, but this is part of the whole development package from the ground up. This is charter schooling as real estate development, which raises all sorts of questions about educational ethics and the proper role of a school, but it also raises questions about viability and sustainability. The developers of XTH don't appear to be ready to answer questions about their instructional programs or curriculum, but I wonder if they have answers about how to navigate their symbiotic relationship with a new not-yet-fully-developed mall. Mrs. Jobs will be cutting them a big fat check, but I don't know that that will be enough.  

*UPDATE: Man, some days it just doesn't pay to write posts at 4 AM. XTH's press was so positive that I missed that they were only finalists for some Jobs money-- and news came yesterday that they did not in fact win. They're calling that a positive and moving forward with their many awesome ideas, but the money is going to have to come from somewhere else.

Hess: The Reform Agenda

Man, it is always so hard to get your hands on a copy of an agenda. For instance, we've been hearing about gay agenda for years, and yet nobody seems to have an actual copy of the thing.

But last week over at the National Review, Rick Hess (AEI), one of my favorite writers that I generally disagree with, laid out the reform agenda (actually a reprint from conservative forum). And I'm not just reading between the lines here-- the article is entitled "An Agenda for K-12 School Reform." Hess comes from the free market wing of reformsterdom, and this article is a perfect chance to take inventory of what they're after these days-- and for me to reflect on why I disagree with their goals.

He opens with some simple premises. Some American schools do some things well, and while many Americans have a low opinion of schools in general, they think their own kid's school is largely okee dokee. Also, we spend hella money on education and spending any more would be a Bad Idea. And Hess also rattles off the Three Big Mistakes of modern post-2000 reformsterism. 1) Reformsterism became all about reducing "racial achievement gaps," leaving high achievers and the middle class out of the discussion. 2) Because "liberal reformers" wouldn't embrace vouchers or the crushing of collective bargaining, they used a top-down regulation-heavy approach. 3) Reformers threw their weight behind federal arm-twisting to achieve ends instead of local control.

I'm not sure I agree with Hess's version of events so far (liberal reformers? and the lack of voucher embrace might have been related to how they kept getting ruled illegal), but that's outside of our focus today. Let's go ahead and look at that reformster wish list. What is it, exactly, that Hess thinks they want?

Expand the choice continuum 

Hess claims first that choice programs have been a "godsend" for some poor families. That's debatable, and it is certainly debatable that they have been a godsend for the students who are still in the public schools whose resources are being drained by choicers.

But Hess's bigger point is that just because middle and upper class families are happy with their schools, that doesn't mean we can't find a way to market profitable education products to them give them the benefits of choice. He's touting the idea of micro-choice, allowing students to make their school choice on a course-by-course basis. He also argues that homeschoolers should be allowed to enjoy school activities, which is a thing that the law already requires in at least Pennsylvania.

Have dollars follow students

After all these years, I still don't understand how this idea fits in a conservative framework, since it disenfranchises every single taxpayer and voter who does not have a child in school. Don't want your tax dollars to support the Sharia Academy or Tree Hugger Prep? If you don't have a child, you don't have any say. I don't see how taxation without representation fits a conservative mindset.

Nor do I see how traditional conservative views embrace the notion that schools are not a public good maintained for the benefit of the entire community, but rather a service provided for families alone. If the money follows the child, then why not hand the child a voucher and let them buy a car, or a tip to Cancun, or a couple of kilos of coke, or whatever they want to do? We know the answer-- because a community pools its resources to create a common good by educating the young so that they can grow up to be productive members of a community.

There's really only one argument for letting the dollars follow the students, and that's that doing so makes it easier for companies with an education-flavored product to market to get a clear shot at getting that money for themselves. Never mind all the things I find wrong with the money-following idea; I remain dubious that any traditional conservative can truly be okay with it.

Hess says there would be three benefits to this. He is wrong all three times. First, he says that weighted funding (students would get different voucher sizes based on need) would make school staffing more flexible. Not sure I see either how, or why such flexibility would be a good thing, unless your goal is a school where it's super-easy to fire people-- but that kind of instability makes your school really unattractive both for "customers" and prospective "employees."

Second, he says it would make educational costs transparent. Again, it's unclear how. Public schools, which must open their books to any taxpayer, are already transparent and charter schools, some of which have gone to court to avoid having to show anybody including the state their books are clearly inclined to fight transparency.

Third, he thinks this would create "healthy market incentives that reward schools for attracting students and families." Not really. It would reward schools that can attract customers, but that's not a healthy market incentive at all, since it rewards a good marketing campaign, not a good educational program.

Promote accountability for costs as well as test scores.

NCLB’s one compelling legacy was pushing states to adopt reporting systems that made it simple to compare basic measures of school performance. Providing this information helps equip parents, voters, and taxpayers to set priorities and make decisions. The problem is that these systems, in addition to focusing almost wholly on reading and math scores, ignore the cost of producing those results.

NCLB promoted a system of looking where the light was good instead of where the things we actually need to see are located. The easily compared measures were, and are, not measures of anything that matters. Figuring out the cost of producing meaningless results is a fool's errand. And while I understand Hess's "bang for the buck" reasoning, we can already see it Not Working in the wild. Parents who send their children to private schools do not seek out a cost-to-test-results report, and parents sending their children off college generally look for the best school they can afford. Selecting a school is not like buying a toaster oven.

Require accountability for more than reading and math.

This point suggests that we are currently requiring accountability for reading and math. We are not. We are offering punishment and rewards for scores on narrow, badly-written standardized tests. But his general point is well taken-- schools need a full range of data, and they need to collect that data without having to worry what punishments it might trigger.

However, Hess will also need to accept that data that is most meaningful to a specific school may not fit the goal of having data that can be compared across and between schools across the country. Data that can be used by people within a school community to improve that school is not the same as data that can be used by people outside that school community to evaluate and compare that school with others.

Overhaul teacher evaluation and pay, but avoid one-size-fits-all rules

The federal government's attempt to commandeer teacher evaluation, including the punishment phase, was not helpful for anybody. Here Hess and I agree.

Feds should get out of teacher evaluation business. Check. Teacher evaluation systems should leave non-problematic schools alone, and should be very gentle with schools that are in the grey area. Check. Charters should get to do whatever the hell they want, personnel-wise. Ummm... I might consider that if they're very transparent about it, and if they agree to stop calling themselves public schools.

Free schools from overgrown employee contracts 

You know there's a problem when Hess cites the union-busting work of Scott Walker. Hess doesn't like that teacher contracts affect the "flexibility" of a school district, which roughly seems to mean affecting management's ability to do whatever strikes their mood. It's an odd position from the author of the Cage-Busting teacher, since the basic complaint here is that teachers are negotiating cages that aren't tight enough. I would guess that his response would be that current contracts that define things like work days and work conditions cage teachers by getting in the way of their own flexibility aims (like working lots of extra hours for free, for instance). We would have to disagree here.

It's also an odd argument from a conservative, as Walker's move was basically one more version of pre-emption in which the state exerts its authority over local matters. What Walker did was make it illegal for locally elected school to negotiate contracts with local teachers. If that's not government intruding on local control, I don't know what is.

Likewise, I don't see the conservative wisdom in saying that the local invisible hand should be clamped down. How is a Walker-like move not similar to government setting the price for certain goods?

Those are all the conservative arguments about Walker-style behavior. We could also get into the sheer oppressiveness of stripping teachers of their right to collectively exert influence on working conditions, but now we're just back to the age-old argument about whether or not the Hired Help should Stay in Their Place or not.

Deregulate and attack bureaucratic creep

By bureaucratic creep, does Hess mean like having states regulate what local authorities can negotiate in their local contracts?

No, he doesn't. He means that people should stop making charter schools follow all those damn rules, which is kind of like insisting that authorities should stop forcing Donald Trump to make sense. Pretty sure the problem is not a problem. But Hess sees problems. "In many states, charter schools are compelled to use the same measurements to evaluate their teachers, enroll students, and discipline students as traditional public schools use." Well, yes. I'll make the same offer I made above-- we can talk about freeing charters from these regulations in the same conversations that charters agree to stop calling themselves public schools and start saying in their marketing that they are private schools funded by public tax dollars.

Hess also wants to see a form of educational bankruptcy, so that when a school is turned over, all previous contracts are null and void. Because education-flavored businesses should have the same freedom to screw over their vendors and employees that private businesses have.

Permit for-profit providers to compete on their merits.

Hess says that liberals have made their opposition to for-profits "a point of pride." I think not. I think a lot of weasely neo-libs have used the for-profit distinction-without-a-difference as a way to come out both for and against charter schools.

But as far as "competing on their merits" goes-- been there, done that, and that's exactly why for-profits are on everyone's hit list now. Hess wants them to compete "on the same footing" as pubic and non-profit charters, but their different footing, their profit-making nature, is one of the "merits" on which they claim the right to compete. Hess allows as they can have "unattractive consequences," and yes, so does cholera. Profit-making has no business in education, at the very least because it puts the interests of the owners and investors in direct competition with the interests of the students and community being served. It's a bad idea, with nothing to recommend it.

And if we've learned anything so far, it's that the very fact that for-profits involve huge piles of money lying around people whose main interest is collecting huge piles of money, the for-profit education business needs more oversight than other varieties. Otherwise it's just a huge invitation to corruption and fraud.

Champion due diligence of the Common Core

What he means is pay closer attention to the possible bad side-effects of the standards movement, which is not a bad idea. Simply scrapping the Common Core (and all its bastard half-siblings) is an even better idea.

Protect privacy and also research

Hess recognizes that we no longer keep student information in manila folders, and that parents are concerned that government and vendors have unprecedented, unlimited access to student data. He calls for student privacy laws to be updated, though the last time that happened, students ended up with less privacy rather than more. And Hess is dead on with this: "Experience suggests that these student results are as likely to be used for political purposes as for serious research."

Nevertheless, Hess believes we are "entering a promising era of educational research" and the scholars studying "important questions about school choice, teacher quality, learning methods, and more" should have access to the data that can help them study those things. He suggests that medical protocols provide a model for balancing research and privacy rights. I'm not sure that deals with an exclusively-minor population, and I'm not sure how we build a firewall between legitimate education research and marketing research. But I agree in principle that it would be nice if all educational debates weren't being held in fact-free zones.

Other random points

Hess then uses a FAQ format to toss out a few other concerns.

Will choice fix all the other things?

Hess calls choice a "necessary but insufficient element" of reform. He's half right. Market dynamics do not work to improve education for a number of reasons. Healthy market competition requires full information for customers, but good marketing requires careful control over what information the customers get, and charters have been aggressive in keeping information under wraps. Remember "pro-market kinda girl" Dr. Margaret Raymond (CREDO) explaining that she's concluded that the market doesn't work in education.

Not only has choice failed to spur any kind of dramatic improvement in education (or even an undramatic one), but it is hugely inefficient, requiring a costly duplication of services and maintenance of considerable excess capacity. And there is no free-market industry of any sort that is built on a model of full and excellent service to every single possible customer; one of the most basic actions of a market is to separate customers into those who are and are not worth serving. At a minimum, a charter choice system requires redefining public schools as the dumping ground for students the charters don't want.

That's because so far, choice charter systems end up meaning choice for the schools, not for the families. Choice will not only not fix all other issues, it will not fix any issues at all.

Do charters hurt public schools?

If you're having trouble maintaining one house, will it help or hurt to buy a second house? Free market fans like to fall back on the idea that public schools are hotbeds of waste and excess and that market forces will spur them to cut the fat, but that assumes a lot of fat. In my region, market competition has led to things like closing neighborhood schools and cramming more students into fewer buildings. Hess also asserts that the competition prods schools to work harder to "attract families, improve instruction and control costs." I'll repeat my old line-- the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. That's not what's called for. Also, the notion that we are not already trying to improve instruction is a little insulting.

Should NCLB testing requirements be scrapped?

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. It does damage and provides zero benefits.

Those are my words. Hess says that "it's good and useful for parents, voters, and policymakers to have regular and comparable information on how students are doing" and that's a conflation of several ideas. Parents just want to know how their kid is doing, not how she's doing compared to some other kid a thousand miles away, and as always, parents can best get that information, full, nuanced and granular, from the teachers. I'm not sure why Hess wants voters to have the information because in his choice charter universe voters have no say anyway. Policymakers may benefit from information, but it's completely different information than the parents want. And none of these people will get useful information from a mass-produced, mass-administered standardized test.

Aren't reform-minded Dems on the same page as conservatives?

Well, not exactly, in part because many "reform-minded democrats" like DFER are actually conservatives to begin with. But Hess says reformy Dems are in some sort of weird wrasslin' match with unions which (like DFER) they kind of hate, and so they focus attention on government-imposed reforms, which are uncool with conservatives, unless they are like Scott Walker's and I think Hess's point here is lost in some kind of fuzz.

Aren't unions really the problem?

Hess says it's like the old GM-- unions are certainly part of the issue, but bad management and bad policy are also to blame. Scapegoating unions misses whole chunks of the problems.

What Hess doesn't address

Responding to poverty and racial segregation.

Hess finishes up with some poll results, but I've gone on long enough. There's a lot to digest with and plenty to disagree with, but it's nice to have someone list reformster goals in one handy location. There's plenty to disagree with here, and it's peppered with some references to an alternate timeline where events somehow happened differently from our planet, but at least it's clear and simple and free of accusations that all opponents are some combination of evil and stupid. If you want a better understanding of where the free-market wing of reformsterdom is coming from, this does the trick. If you want to feel better about where they're coming from, it won't help.

The New Mascot

Consider Pitbull.

The rappish artiste and modern poet ("Face down, booty up, that's the way we like to- what?!") has greeted the new school year with his third charter school. 

Pitbull has tried to make something out of the nickname he was tagged with once-- "Mr. Education"-- but it hasn't really caught on. But it hasn't stuck, perhaps because Pitbull's actual connection with the school is described as "nebulous." The Washington Post once reported that his role was "coming up with different ways to get people involved."

Like Arthur Ashe and Deion Sanders, Pitbull is the new accessory, necessary for the school-as-commercial-enterprise era. We could them a spokespersons or brand ambassadors, but basically they're a whole new kind of school mascot.

"Mr. Matthews, have you cut my check yet?"

School mascots are an odd feature of the school landscape. My own school, around a century ago, had a mascot based on a town motto. See, even longer ago, a state politician had tried to mock our civic pride by calling us "The Nursery of Great Men," but instead of acting mocked, we just picked it up and ran with it. Which is how it ended up that our sports teams, for many years, called themselves the Fighting Nurserymen. Lord knows I have often wished we stuck with that mascot concept, but only slightly less than a century ago, we traded Nurserymen for Knights, a completely conventional mascot that, like most, has nothing in particular to do with our school or our community.

But come to a game and you'll see our student volunteer in a knight costume, exhorting the crowd to get excited (this, it must be said, is an improvement over the attempt a few decades ago to use a mascot mounted on a live horse-- that did not end so well). Our knight does what a mascot is supposed to do-- provide a focal point for spirit, excitement, and investment in the school, as well as providing a literal peg on which to hang the metaphorical identity of the school itself (I keep waiting for some high school to choose as its mascot "Existential Angst," but people seem to prefer something that can provide actual physical embodiment).

Commercial brands have long (though not as long as schools) seen the value in a brand ambassador, a human-ish embodiment of the qualities that the brand wants to be associated with, from a Jolly Green Giant to a handsome cowboy totally not dying from lung cancer to a talking tiger. School mascots benefit from long history (generations of folks have proudly been Franklin Knights) while brand spokespersons benefit from tons of advertising.

Commercial school businesses have tried to grab some combo-- find somebody who is already famous for something and who would like a nice tax write-off, maybe even like to feel as if they're doing something For The Chidren, and put them out there to sell a marketing pitch that boils down to roughly, "Hey look! Our school is associated with a reasonably famous person, whereas that public school just has teachers and books and stuff. Don't you want to come to a school connected to someone famous?!"

There are public schools that have their own sorts of celebrity spokespersons, such as famous-ish alumni or some local version of Mr. Feeney. Some school ventures have tried building their own, from Ron Clark using his students as back-up dancers to the endless press-mongering of a certain former DC schools chief. But if we sink further into the world of free market education, schools are going to have to come up with better (and more costly) marketing plans, complete with celebrity spokesmascots. Will the job be another part of teachers' responsibilities, or will we hire one less teacher so we can afford the marketing plan. What a wonderful new world of free market education. Face down, booty up. What?