USED's Troubled Charter Love

"Honey, you have got to break up."

When a trusted member of your own family sits you down to tell you that you are in a bad relationship, it's only prudent to pay a little attention. And that is where John King's US Department of Education finds itself right now.

"Dude," says the USED's own office of the inspector general. "You have got to get this whole charter school thing under control. It is soaking you for money and you don't even know what the heck is going on."

The audit by USED's inspector general was meant to assess " the current and emerging risk that charter school relationships with charter management organizations (CMOs) and education management organizations pose to the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE), the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), and the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) program objectives and evaluate the effectiveness of OESE, OSERS, and OII internal controls to mitigate the risk." The audit set out to look for internal controls-- any sorts of checks and balances and brakes on the USED-charter relationship. The findings were not good:

We determined that charter school relationships with CMOs posed a significant risk to Department program objectives.

You can read the whole sad jargon-soaked report if you like. The bottom line is that the audit found three major issues:

1) Insufficient controls between charters and charter management organizations, including (but not limited to) "conflict of interest, relate-party transactions and insufficient segregation of duties."  The lack of controls constitutes a risk for fraud, waste and abuse, a risk of losing accountability for federal funds, and a risk that the charter schools are ignoring and violating federal rules, requirements and programs.

2) Insufficient controls within the department, meaning that USED has no useful knowledge or oversight of what charters are up to

3) Insufficient monitoring procedures to allow the department to even know if something hinky is going on.

In even fewer words, the USED does not have rules in place to discourage, spot or stop charter fraud, waste or abuse. 

That is some hard tough love from a office within the education department.

Like many folks in a bad relationships, John King shows some awareness that maybe, somehow, something is wrong. Just this week John King suggested that Michigan wasn't exactly doing a bang-up job with its approach to closing schools and opening charters.

“I worry a lot about the charter sector in Michigan, which has very uneven performance,” King said. “There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters.”

Of course, the fact that King is traveling to Detroit in hopes of asking questions and finding out what's going on might actually help make the inspector general's point-- that the department has no controls in place for keeping tabs on how federal money is being spent and whether or not charters are actually doing anything useful. Though I suppose in the case of Detroit the recently-filed federal civil rights lawsuit about the horrifyingly bad state of affairs in Detroit might have clued him in. Or he could just read the Detroit Free Press for accounts of charter shenanigans.

And yet, like many folks in bad relationships, John King just can't quit charters. Also in recent news, we have the USED handing over $245 million to charter operators.

The lucky winners include Louisiana, where millions upon millions of tax dollars have vanished into the New Orleans charter swamp with no clear accounting for where they went. California is up for a $50 million grant, even though a 2015 study showed one in five charters closing, and a recent ACLU study shows many charters illegally restricting admissions. I suppose it's good that they did not--again-- shovel out some federal money to Ohio charters in the face of reports of widespread fraud and misbehavior. But at the same time, the new stack of money contains a proposed almost-seven million dollars to expand charters in Washington State-- where the charter school law has been declared unconstitutional. What exactly will the seven mill be spent on? Lobbying Olympia for a more charter-friendly-- and legal-- law?

So to recap-- the US Department of Education's own inspector general is telling them that they are in a bad, unsafe, unprotected relationship with the charter sector, that they have insufficient measures to watch for how tax dollars are spent, and they're going to hand over another quarter of a billion dollars anyway.

This, mind you, is the same federal department that has been intent on micro-managing every public school system in the country, and whose favorite funding approach has been to make states and districts fight for money by competing to show excellence and accountability in every program. And yet somehow, this same department ends up in some version of this conversation:

"You cannot hand over your paycheck to Chris McCharter again. You just can't."

"But Chris is so cute, and I'm soooo in love."

"Chris could be spending your money on hookers and drugs. It's happened before and you don't even know."

"I don't care what you say. I'm in lurv!"

It's a sad story, and it makes me long for a different story, a story from an alternate universe where the USED wakes up, stops enabling the Bad Charter Sector that it will never really reform, and falls in love with Public Education instead. Now that would be a story.

The Facts Problem

We've had much discussion about living in a post-fact society, but I'm not sure we really appreciate just how much trouble the whole business of "facts" is in.

I don't mean the obvious public signs, like a national Vice-Presidential candidate who simply lies his way through a nationally broadcast debate. I'm not talking about how many of us keep our head buried in the internet bucket, listening to nothing but the echoes of our own voices.

I think our problem is deeper than that.

We've seen, for instance, something now called the replication crisis, the growing discovery that many landmark (and not-so-landmark) studies are simply one-offs, research completed exactly one time and attempts to replicate the results have either not been made, or have been made and turned out to be unsuccessful. Keep digging and you find that many "facts" about what constitutes "normal" for human beings are just plain non-factual.

The institutions that are traditionally the center of fact-discovery, or the kind of research that lets us Know New Things are in trouble, beset by everything from financial to ideological problems. Billionaires like the Koch brothers now hire professors to present the preferred set of "facts" to students. With tenure a thing of the past, professors and scholars will feel more pressure to avoid coming up with "facts" that might make anyone uncomfortable. And the pressure on colleges and universities is to replace coursework with micro-credentials, with simple competency-based tasks which can by their very nature only be defined in terms of what we already "know." You can't create a competency-based performance task built around the creation or discovery of new knowledge. You can only recycle.

At the same time, we are trying to build facts about things we cannot know. We cannot know what is going on in another person's head, in their thoughts, their feelings-- but education reformsters want to quantify that and attach a number to it so that we can kick it around as if it is a fact. Every day brings one more article that tries to bandy about facts about something for which no facts can be generated. Here's just one example from Education Next-- an article trying to consider the facts of what disciplinary techniques produce good results, as if there's a way to know the connection between how an eight-year-old is scolded for punching a classmate and whether or not that child thirty years later will be a good, decent, responsible adult. In education we want to know so many things that cannot be known, and so we insist on making up "facts" as proxies, numbers that we can claim correspond to actual facts. We talk about "student achievement" as if the numbers attached to the idea are facts, when they are just test scores from a single badly-written, narrowly-focused standardized test (perhaps fed through an unproven and unreliable equation).

Meanwhile, our own government has defined down what constitutes a fact. The definition of "evidence" used by the feds and enshrined, among other places, in the Every Student Succeeds Act includes demonstrating a rationale-- in other words, any half-baked argument I've ever made on this blog can be counted as "evidence." The last federal policy paper I looked at said that "research-based" includes any "conclusions or conjectures" from experts in the field, so I guess "facts" stop just short of wild-assed guesses, but not by much. And really-- if conjectures and rationales qualify as research and evidence, then how hard is it to be an "expert" in a field, particularly a field like education where we swim in an ocean of facts that are not actually facts.

Look, education has always been short on facts. Experimenting on children is Bad, so we've mostly held back on that. And studies conducted on a group of sophomores at one particular university aren't exactly broadly helpful.

But we live increasingly in a fact-starved world, a world in which facts are not only beaten and thrown down the stairs until they look like a ball of silly putty run through a blender, but we aren't even all that interested in looking for facts in the first place. And because we are a People of Irony, the fewer facts we use, the more we insist we are data-driven and evidence-based.

Hey, I'm a good old-fashioned "truth is more important than facts" any day. But it's really hard to get to the truth when your facts are not facts, and we are increasingly paying a price as a society for swimming in a giant vat of bovine fecal matter and pretending we're beating Ryan Loche (who may be an ass, but he's a fast ass) in an Olympic pool.

The scariest thing is not that we are ignorant of what the facts are. The scariest thing is that many of us don't even know what a fact is.

NEA's Concern Trolling

The NEA is concerned about bullying.

Specifically, they are concerned about the Trump Effect, which is one more name for one of the plumes of toxic smoke curling up from the dumpster fire that is Herr Donald's Presidential campaign.

There is reason for concern. Herr Donald's campaign has freed many folks from the restraint of what we could call "political correctness" or "general decent treatment of other human beings," and nothing bad ever gets loose in the general population that does not also breathe its toxic breath into the atmosphere of schools.

Anecdotes abound. The high school students who cheered "Build a wall" at their mainly-hispanic opponents. The endless supply of stories about children who are worried that the next President might deport them. There's absolutely no question that Trump's campaign has loosed some slouching beast into the political sphere, and that in turn has dropped a big bucket of ugly into schools across the country.

It's a topic worth discussing. Just not like this.

Instead of addressing the issue of bullying and the effects of our bad political discourse on the tiny humans of our nation, NEA has grabbed this issue and ground it up as campaign fodder.

A buttload of money will be spent to make ad buys in many, but not all, states, with a focus on swing states and states considered critical for the Presidential election. And they will, apparently, focus strictly on Herr Donald, concern trolling about how he poses a threat to our nation's youths by amplifying racism and intolerance and just general bullying.

These are the times when I kind of hate my union. This is transparently political, and really dangerously close to using children (and bullied children, at that) as props for political advantage.

Is bullying a tremendous issue that should be addressed regularly and forcefully? Absolutely. Is Donald Trump a terrible excuse for a Presidential candidate? Without a doubt.

But this PR push is not what happens when a bunch of people sit in a room and say, "Bullying is a tremendous issue for our students. What message could we put out that would help push back against it?"  No, this is the kind of push that happens when union leadership says, "What's a message we can put out there for the Clinton campaign that looks somewhat connected to our mission as teachers?"

Yes, I'm probably still a bit cranky about the general shafting that Bernie Sanders got from the Clinton camp. And, yes, I've about had it with my union selecting and promoting candidates who promptly stab us in the back. But I would also like to not have to try to make excuses for my union when civilians see actions that are clearly based on political calculus and not on educational concerns. This is why union activity can be dismissed as simply political leveraging. This is also why the same young teachers who see Clinton as more of the same-old, same-old are inclined to reach the same conclusion about the NEA.

I know that politics matter, and that politics and politicians set any of the rules that govern how my life in the classroom goes. I don't think I'm all that naive. In fact, I suspect I'm less naive than those who think that this campaign will be seen as anything but what it is. I suspect I'm also less naive than the people who think this campaign will give people a lower opinion of Herr Donald, or a higher opinion of teachers and their unions.

The Choices Charters Hate

One of the evergreen arguments in favor of modern charters is that they will be laboratories of innovation. Freed from the constraints of the public school system, charters will whip up brand new educational approaches, pedagogical discoveries that somehow nobody has ever whipped up before. Once they have freed the edu-genii, they will then unleash these cool new ideas on the whole education world, and all schools will work better because the charters were allowed to figure out brilliant new techniques that the public schools could not.

That's how it's sold. But that's not how it works.

First, charters have displayed no special ability to think of brand new educational ideas that nobody has ever thought of before. Longer day, longer year, only teach the kids that are easy to teach-- none of these are new ideas. Pay teachers less and give them no say in how the school is run-- also not new ideas, but also not particularly good ones, either.

But even if charters are whipping up new edu-concepts, that doesn't mean they want to share. The modern charter is born of corporate culture, and one basic principle of corporate culture is that Ford does not send its best ideas over to Chrysler management.

No, in the corporate world many contracts come with strict non-competition clauses. So it should be no surprise to find the same thing going on in the charter world. In fact, it should be no surprise to discover that charters want to straightjacket their teachers as much as possible.

Meet Mike Kowalski.

Mike Kowalski was a teacher for the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School. Like most charters, MVRCS has no union and hires teachers for just a year at a time ("at will" meaning "at the will of the bosses"). They also offer lousy wages, and their teachers have no real power or say in the school. So how do they keep teachers from jumping ship at the first available opportunity to get a real job?

Easy. They require teachers make a contractual commitment in April for the following fall. And if the teachers take another job, the school sues them for breach of contract.

Kowalski signed his contract in April, was offered a job weeks later. His replacement was quickly hired and Kowalski actually trained him.

And the school still demanded that Kowalski pay them over $6,000.

Kowalski ended up talking to a Massachusetts Teachers Association lawyer, who found even more astonishing contents in the MVRCS-- a non-competition clause that forbid Mystic Valley teachers from working for any of the sending districts. In other words, this laboratory of innovation was specifically forbidding its employees from sharing anything they discovered or developed. The Massachusetts notion that charters are meant to "stimulate the development of innovative programs within schools" is not only being ignored, but is being expressly thwarted, specifically forbidden.

The non-compete clause makes perfect sense if you think that a charter school is a private business run on proprietary secrets. This is one more reason that these modern charters are in no way, shape or form public schools.

This also highlights the hypocrisy behind the charter choice arguments. Choice is great-- when it's the choice they like. The free market is great-- as long as it's serving them. But when it comes to staff, charters like Mystic Valley have taken steps to avoid any kind of market forces to come into play. Rather than compete for teachers by offering attractive employment terms, Mystic Valley tries to make sure that their teachers have no choice at all, to force them to stay by coercion and extortion.

In the corporate charter world, teachers should be easily-replaced widgets who get no choice in their working conditions, no choice in whether to stay or go, no choice in who they can talk to professionally.

Duncan Scolds Education Schools

When former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan isn't busy joining another board of some education-flavored enterprise (his latest is Revolution Foods, an over-hyped cafeteria supply company), he still finds time to offer uninformed opinions about education itself.

Pay me to have an opinion about school lunch? Retirement is awesome.

Take for instance his open letter today at Brookings, in which Duncan castigates the nation's collegiate teacher preparation programs.

He opens with his trademark blame-disguised-as-praise:

Schools of education are providing one of the most important services in America today, training our future teachers who will prepare our children to succeed in work and in life. No other responsibility is more directly linked to our future.

Really? Economic policy, business growth, policies addressing poverty, maintenance of infrastructure, global diplomacy-- nothing at all more directly influences the future of our nation than how well colleges prepare future teachers?  Okay then. Let's address the Most Critical Issue Facing Our Nation with a look at the hard facts.

Nah. On second thought, says Arne, let's just pull out a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group devoted to proving that college ed programs stink, and proving it by using the laziest research methods ever. In fact, Duncan goes back to a NCTQ report from November of 2014, the delightful "Easy A" report. I've already discussed this as the most rigor-free half-baked research to ever be taken seriously. Research so lazy that it "evaluated" non-existent programs. Research so lazy that it literally consisted of reading commencement programs and course catalogs.

Duncan also cites the Deans for Impact, a group that includes Mayme Hostetter, a "dean" of the Relay Graduate [sic] School [sic] of Education [sic], the group created by charter operators as a way to grow their own "teachers" without having to actually do any of the real work. Relay was just rejected by the state of Pennsylvania, based on their lack of pretty much all characteristic features of an actual graduate school of education like qualified education professors and (no kidding) a library of actual education resources.

Duncan also shares the shocking news that he has talked to many teachers who did not feel ready to teach on Day One. Here's a quick pro tip-- if you feel absolutely ready to teach on Day One-- any Day One, including Day One of your thirtieth year-- you do not understand the situation and you are probably not safe to let loose in a classroom.

Nevertheless, I will give Duncan some slack here. I have been pretty critical of some teacher prep programs myself, and it is true that there is room for improvement. That's the education biz-- there is always room for improvement. But first you have to understand what needs to improve and how teaching actually works, and after all these years, there's little evidence that Duncan gets it.

As usual with a Duncan missive on education, there is grinding cognitive dissonance folded in with the soaring rhetoric. Duncan wants education programs to know that there is no room for lowering expectations, that lowering expectations does a disservice to teaching candidates, students, and presumably, given his opening, the fate of civilization as we know it.

He wants to see teachers held to high standards, "like engineering, business and medical students," which I suppose is his special way of saying that teachers are super-important, but they all suck.

We've heard versions of this from Duncan before, and as always I am waiting for the part of the message that would logically follow.

I am waiting for the part where Duncan condemns Teach for America for its super-short teacher training program. I am waiting for the part where Duncan condemns states that now allow anybody with any sort of degree to work in a classroom. I am waiting for the part where he condemns states and school districts try to fight the teacher shortage by lowering the job requirements to "stays upright, mostly."

I am waiting, of course, in vain. Citizen Duncan, like Secretary Duncan, reserves his scolding for the traditional public school system and the people who spend their lives working there. The shadow education system, the parallel system set up in the land of free market forces and private profit-- that system remains above reproach, immune to criticism, the recipients of no public letters except those filled with praise.

Jeb! Still Doesn't Understand

Jeb Bush sat down with Matt Barnum for an interview that ran at Campbell Brown's pro-reform website, the 74, And in the course of the interview. Bush showed that he doesn't understand education any better than he ever did. (He also discussed the Presidential election, though he didn't explain how his oppo guys did such a lousy job fending off Donald "Dumpster Fire" Trump.)

So what are the things that Jeb! still doesn't understand?

Jeb doesn't understand the true value of the Big Standardized Test (or lack thereof).



Bush still has an almost-childlike belief in the uber-importance of BS Testing. Early in the interview, he actually said this:

Rising student achievement is the only thing that matters; everything else is an input.

And later:

The delivery system is not relevant. That’s an input. The outcomes are what matters.

So not only do we not need public schools, but we don't need any type of school at all. Bush touts the awesomeness of "virtual" schools, but come on-- "student achievement" as always just means "BS Test scores," so if the results of a badly-written narrow test of just reading and math are all that matters, then we might as well hook students up to some test prep software and just let them plug away until they output a sufficiently high test score.

The students and their humanity don't matter. Other subject areas don't matter. The schools and the communities they serve don't matter. Just get those test score up. That's all that matters.

Jeb doesn't understand the value of schools to a community. 

Jeb wants to see any schools that "don't work" just shut down. Charter, public, cyber-- any schools that "don't work" should just be put out of business right away. Of course, what on earth "don't work" actually means is a mystery (I suppose it means "get low test scores") but the notion that you can just close down a school and not deliver a serious blow to the students, families and communities involved is just--well, it's the kind of thing that would make sense to a prep school bro.

Jeb doesn't understand the calls for charter accountability.

Jeb thinks that the folks criticizing charter and cyber schools, both for-profit and non-profit, are just a bunch of hypocrites, and that public schools should face accountability, too.

This is an odd sort of complaint, since the most common complaint about charter accountability is that they don't face the same level of accountability as public schools. They don't answer to elected boards, they don't have to follow the same rules for employment or even student treatment, and they have vigorously resisted any real transparency in how they spend taxpayer money.

I do not know of a single charter critic who has called for any rules for charters that public schools do not already follow.

Jeb doesn't know that cyber charters are a failed experiment.

Barnum: Now that many studies show that cyber charters are widely sucking hugely--

Bush: Not all of them. There might be one non-sucky one. So shut up. Just check the test scores.

Jeb doesn't know where Common Core came from. Still.

Bush still wants to argue that Common Core wasn't a federal program. Their involvement was indirect, Jab says. Like indirectly financing the creation and indirectly financing the tests that would give the Core teeth and indirectly blackmailing states into adopting them by leveraging the threat of NCLB penalties. Kind of like Trump pushed Bush out of the Presidential race by indirectly taking all the votes.

Jeb doesn't know how life in cities on this planet goes.

This is Jeb describing how he thinks, if we could start from scratch, we'd fix a whole lot of issues like segregation:

Here’s the accountability that we’re going to have. We’re going to make sure that we have rising student achievement, and when it doesn’t happen, we call it out. Moms and dads will know how schools are working, that they have a menu from which they can choose private option, public option, a hybrid, a competency-based model, a magnet school, schools that focus on a thematic kind of learning — whatever it is, if you’d have a menu, and you choose, I don’t think you’d have the same segregation. I’m almost positive.

Where to begin? I'm not sure this matches the vision of anybody on any side of the school debates. Nor does it seem that Bush understands any of the forces that create segregation, nor how market-based reform has itself emerged as a huge driver of segregation, nor how free-market ed reform no more promotes a discussion of the true merits of schools any more than the free market promotes a discussion of the relative nutritional and dietary benefits of McDonald's versus Burger King.

He's actually pretty sure that reforms in Florida have fixed things, which leads me to believe that Bush hasn't actually visited Florida in a while. Googling turns up multiple examples of studies over the past few years showing how segregation-- and re-segregation-- is alive and thriving in Florida (here's one, and here's another one).

Jeb doesn't know what political correctness is

I just don’t think we have the luxury of being politically correct right now. There’s a thousand kinds of alternatives that ought to exist, but the monopoly and the politics and the bureaucracy stifle the kind of innovation that occurs each and every day in every aspect of our life that is unregulated

I don't even know how to parse this, how political correctness (generally defined as "I don't feel like I'm allowed to express my racist thoughts, wah") is an impediment to the spread of free market education, unless Bush is referring to ideas like "Disenfranchising black and brown people so that some folks can make a buck by pretending to educate them" which is, I guess, an example of political correctness?

Jeb doesn't know what he said a few paragraphs ago

Remember a few paragraphs ago when Bush said that a free market education system would naturally de-segregate everyone? He's had a new thought-- desegregation helped raise black student achievement because they were then "accessing information that they never had before"so if we just hook every student up to their own Personalized Education computer, they'll all get great test scores and we will have achieved the results of de-segregation without actually having to de-segregate anything. So, problem solved! What, did you think there were benefits to de-segregation other than higher test scores? I'm sure they weren't important.

Jeb doesn't know how money functions in the education world

Barnum brings up the recent study published in Education Next that suggests that if you give schools more money, test scores go up. Bush is pretty sure that can't be right.

I don’t know what the research was that you just said, but if you’re spending $25,000 a student in Newark and you’re getting worse results for like-kind students than you do spending $8,000 in an urban core Florida public school, I can’t imagine that the research wouldn’t suggest that by itself that money is the answer. 

Because Newark and Florida are pretty much exactly the same. I get the impression reading Bush that his vision of America is a place that is as homogeneous as a slab of tofu, with some sprinkles of food coloring, but no actual differences of substance that mean anything. I will also note that he gets all the way through this interview without ever mentioning poverty or any sorts of cultural differences that might effect how education works. No, it's just a delivery system for getting high test scores out of students.

Barnum asks a pretty cool follow-up; if New Jersey funding goes down as it would under Christie's hare-brained proposal, does Bush think test scores will go down? Bush dodges the question. Well, no, actually he swats it down like an errant squash ball.

I don’t think it’s relevant in the overall objective. If you created an open system that I envision, you would have rising student achievement at far less because the scalability of success would become natural.

Which leads me to...

Jeb doesn't know we've tried all his pet ideas and they have failed

Bush remains convinced that all his good stuff has been thwarted by... well, you know who.

A successful school that is spending $8,000 a student, in the system we have today, all across this country, with 13,000-plus government-run, unionized, politicized monopolies, doesn’t take kindly to that success; it doesn’t say, Let me try to steal the ideas that created that success. In fact, those successful schools many times are marginalized. 

That's it. All the successful market-based schools getting great test scores for mere peanuts-- they've been marginalized and are hiding in some dark corner, huddled up with the Loch Ness Monster and a brace of Yeti, bemoaning their socially outcast state. Or maybe in that other corner with failed Presidential candidates listening to Mom tell them, "That's all right. They just don't like you because you are so smart and awesome and better than they are."

Jeb doesn't know that his old state is busy abusing nine-year-olds

Bush makes the point that money needs to be spent on reform programs, not schools. What works? "Funding your programs first rather than funding the beast," because public schools are just slavering evil union-soaked monopolies that live to suck the blood of small children, I guess. But then he offers an extraordinary example:


If you want to eliminate social promotion in third grade, you gotta have interventions, so that in second and first and kindergarten and pre-K and in third grade, so that there’s a strategy to make sure that kids aren’t held back. 

Um. That's not quite what they're trying these days in the Sunshine State, where a bunch of third graders had to go to court to be promoted to fourth grade because even though their grades are solid, they didn't take the state's beloved test. So apparently you also need to feed the lawyers, because another tool of fighting social or even academic promotion is the courts.

Jeb just doesn't know so many things

Bush is pretty sure that merit rewards for schools that get high scores out of students is just awesome, and he proudly references the $150 school recognition bonuses to teachers, which of course explains why so many teachers in Florida are driving brand new Lexuses (Lexi?). And here's another thing he apparently actually said

If you want to pay good teachers, great teachers, more, it’s going to work better than not paying them.

Well, I can't argue with that. This is undoubtedly the sort of educational insight that Harvard hired Bush to impart. 

Bush also seems certain that research would show that spending money over the last fifty years has gotten us a worse result. Because in Bush's tofu America, nothing else of significance has changed over the last fifty years. Oh, and the research that exists says he's wrong, too.

Are we sure George is the "dumb" one?

It's kind of amazing that Jeb! has made education his policy specialty for years, because he shows an oversimplified nuance-free evidence-deficient view of education that usually is best mastered by dilettantes who diligently avoid any sort of educated input. It has to be hard to be involved in a an area for so long and yet absorb so little real understanding. It's almost as if he entered the education world already committed to free-market business-friendly money-making policies and made sure to ignore any information that would get in the way of his already-chosen policies.

Bush believes devoutly in the BS Test and in the power of the marketplace. Reality and the world of facts have nothing else to offer him; he'll continue to sit comfortably in the warm embrace of his tofu throne.

No Digital Leadership for the Future (and No Research Base, Either)

"Future-Ready Schools" is emerging as the umbrella buzzword for the cluster of edu-biz opportunities emerging around the world of personalized learning, competency-based education, and the computer-driven school. There's a lot to learn about this area, and none of it is encouraging for fans of public education or the general idea of having children taught by human beings.

You can read a lot about Future Ready Schools here at a website that exists at a staggering nexus of private and government organizations, and we'll dip back into this slimy ocean many times in the weeks ahead. But today we're narrowing the focus.

On the Future Ready Framework page, we find the claim that the framework is research based. The phrase links to a report from the feds that makes two things clear:

1) The future for personalized learning is disturbing.

2) Anything can be "research-based" if you define "research" broadly enough.

We have seen #2 in action before-- the government definition of evidence-based as found in the Every Student Succeeds Act is less stringent than the standard used by the Weekly World News.

So what is research-based, exactly?

But the Characteristics of Future Ready Leadership paper from the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology says it provides a rubric! So you know this is hard data in action here. Research based! Really!! And here are the things that count as evidence according to the department:

Experimental research-- this is the empirical research that uses "an experimental or quasi-experimental approach" to test a theory of action of "explore connections" between inputs and outcomes. So there's no need to distinguish between correlation and causation, and no mention of review or replication of this experimental research.

Descriptive research-- for this one, all you need do is observe, give a survey, or conduct an interview with someone about a program. Fact checkers are unnecessary.

Grey literature-- now we just throw caution to the wind. Any white paper or report from a "reputable source" is fair game. It need not be connected to reality in any measurable way.

Professional standards-- standards put together by any leading organization in the field.

Expert opinion-- "conclusions or conjectures" from any expert in the field.

So if you imagined that "research-based" meant "based in research, like the kind conducted by trained scientists under controlled conditions with solid experimental designs and peer review," you were kidding yourself. A think tank paper based on unicorn breath and fairy tears, a glowing description of a program created under the control of that programs PR department, or just a wild-ass guess from someone who's managed to gain a rep as an "expert" -- that's all perfectly good for building a research base (suddenly the career of Raj Chetty makes more sense).

Does the USED meet this high standard?

The paper we're looking at has a nine-page bibliography. And it makes full use of the very broad definition of "research" delineated above, and embrace so wide that anything that came back on a google search for "education stuff" would count as research.

Here's "The digital learning imperative" from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a full-out reformy group led by former governor Bob Wise. This papers is a good example of the "report as advocate's PR argument" school of reporting. Not really research at all, but a finely woven tale that spins out "Let me tell you why I think you should agree with my policy ideas, based on the thoughts in my head and not really anything else."

Here's a piece on digital backpacks written in 2007, whene all discussion of digital backpacks was purely theoretical and speculative. Or a page on blended professional development that is mostly a presentation of the reasoning arguing in favor of it, with an overview of how it worked in one place (though not a consideration of how well it worked). And another speculative piece about the imagined future of elearning, again from 2007.

And that's just in the As. Cruising through the list of sources we find a piece by iNACOL, the group invested in promoting on-line edubusiness. An article advocating for flipped learning from the Flipped Learning Network. A straight-up advertisement from Digital Promise for their micro-credentials program.

Are there some legit sources as well. Sure. But by this definition of "research," a study about the effects of smoking could go ahead and cite promotional materials from R J Reynolds about the benefits of smoking.

So what are we pushing here?

So all of this sort-of-faux-research is being harnessed in the service of what, exactly? And can we see that leadership rubric now?

Well, second question first-- no, we cannot. Despite promises to the contrary, there is no rubric. There are charts which list "dimensions" for each of the four leadership qualities along with initials indicating which "type" of "research" is being referenced along with an "exemplary" column which-- seriously, we're going to label a column with an adjective. I guess this is supposed to represent the very best version of the dimension, skipping other columns like "good enough," and "not so great," thereby creating the impression that this is a rubric of some sort. It's not. It's a bad, lazy chart being used to dress up non-research.

So let's look at each of the four qualities needed for Futury Leadership.

Collaborative Leadership

Here's the definition of collaborative leadership that we are offered:

Commitment to demonstrating strong leadership aptitude, developing the vision, securing the ongoing funding, building the district-wide leadership team, and garnering the broad-based support needed to ensure a successful digital learning transition for students and teachers.

Do government copywriters go to a special school in which the meanings of words are sucked out of their heads? What part of that definition looks remotely like collaboration? This is sales and marketing-- grow your vision, sell your vision, get backers for your vision, convince underlings to buy into your vision. There's no collaboration here. None.

As we break it down into dimensions, some collaborative moments emerge in which district leaders are supposed to do things like seek "input in decision making" and convene "a team of diverse stakeholders." And then there's the "Culture of Trust and Innovation" in which everyone is supposed to be linked all the time, but somehow also feel free to take risks and operate independently. Big brother is watching, so just follow your muse bravely while you follow the strategic plan for implementing the vision. Gollow the exact same plan in our own way. Let's all be independent together.

Personalized Student Learning 

This is central to the Future Ready School, and the hub around which everything else turns, and this shows a complete lack of awareness of any of the weaknesses and problems of the approach. (You can read some of my research-based writing on the subject here).

The rigorous and relevant learning outcomes should be "defined in terms of competencies," which means they will be neither rigorous nor relevant, but limited to the sorts of hoops best suited to cyber-jumping. The "integrated assessments" should be set up to collect data on an ongoing basis-- all computerized testing, all the time. Students are on a pathway that is part student-chosen, part teacher-chosen, and part software-chosen. There will be all sorts of "high-quality content and tools aligned with outcomes." Meaning that everything is ultimately driven by what the computer is capable of assessing on a large scale across all students.

Oh, and teachers get new roles as "educational designers, coaches and facilitators, guiding students through their personalized learning experiences. Which is not so much "new" roles as just "frewer" roles.

Robust Infrastructure

Equitable access to next-generation bandwidth, wireless, hardware, and devices, managed by support personnel for reliable use-- both inside and outside of school.

Of all the pipe dreams of the CBE/Personalized Learning "revolution," this is the most pipely dreamiest.

While some supporters of CBE get excited about this part because they can just imagine all the money to be made here, but it's not very clear where all that money is going to come from. But this quality calls for specific high speed internet connections and a piece of equipment in every pot, with nifty software to boot. I cannot even begin to imagine the price to actually do this-- and to do it in such a speedy manner that schools have "next-generation" equipment all the time (aka all new hard- and soft-ware every six months).

Personalized Professional Learning

Yeah, let's just plug all teachers in to computers to earn their micro-credentials by passing ridiculous assessments on line. That's dopey enough, but the dimension that renders all the rest of this into sheer nonsense is the one that declares that the only professional development that matters is the one that raises student scores.

There are other dimensions to suggest that we can do this on the cheap by having teachers train and coach each other, and that would actually be a fine thing if we were thinking about actually improving teaching and not just raising test scores. But since teachers' jobs will now be just to coach students through their computerized programs, I guess better teaching is beside the point anyway.

But just like the students, teachers will be plugged in all day, every day, and the professional development will just sort of seep into our pores.

This is dreadful stuff

The future-ready classroom is a deeply unappealing place to actual teachers. Lord knows there's lots of technology that could be-- and is-- useful, but the future-ready classroom is neither student centered nor teacher centered, but software centered and data driven, which means everything will be designed around the needs of the software designers and hardware vendors. Students and teachers will just have to adapt, and education itself will be twisted into a mass of unenlightened hoop-jumpery. Feel free to quote my argument here as research-based.