Dear Hillary. Re: Education

We already know that there is no public education candidate running in this Presidential election. But we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to choose between someone would subject public education  to bad, disruptive, destructive, dismantling policies and someone who would just drop a nuke on public education.

Not that anyone really wants to talk about public education, mind you. Man, remember the old days, when everyone thought that education was going to be a marquee topic in this election cycle? (So sorry, Jeb! Too bad, Campbell.)

So Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post sent out some questions about education. The Trump campaign didn't actually answer ("Go look at our website, you journalistic losers!"). But the Clinton campaign did, and their answers give us an idea of the sorts of things we will need to bombard them and their Secretary of Education about over the next four years (if Trump somehow wins, we will be hunkering down while he bombards us). Here's the short form of the Q & A, with my thoughts about what we need to say in our Dear Hillary letters.

WP: Property tax-based funding of school seems to be Not Very Fair. You want to fix that?

HRC: Before I pretend to answer that, let me toss on the "every child deserves a great education regardless of zip code" boilerplate. Some districts are super-poor because of super-bad funding. But we should fund smarter. Because "invest in our future." I want to fund some very specific things like pre-K and computers. Oh, and she'll look for ways to "encourage" states to fund better.

PAG: Buried in a bunch of generic happy-talk is the fund-smarter-not-harder point, whicvh translates to "no more funding for schools that isn't earmarked by the feds." AKA "we will tell you what you need." This invariably translates into more top-down policy where local control and voices are ignored. Not cool. And I really think we've had enough of the feds "encouraging" states to do what the feds think they should.

WP: Can schools fix poverty by themselves?

HRC:  "...what happens inside our classrooms can’t make up for the investments we’ve failed to make outside our classrooms." Policy is bad. I'll have some programs to work on it.\

PAG: At least on paper, that's a change of pace from fifteen years of "If we get every kid to pass the Big Standardized Test, poverty will just disappear.

WP: Should every student take the BS Test every year?

HRC: That's a controversial issue that I will now sidestep. Agree that too much time is being spent on testing, so I'll say "fewer, fairer tests" are the answer. Let's reduce "unnecessary and duplicative" tests, somehow.

PAG: Brrnnnnt. No. Wrong. It's a yes-or-no question, and the answer is "no.'

WP: Should parents be allowed to opt students out of state-mandated BS Tests?

HRC: "I think we can all agree that just adding more tests will not improve the quality of education our children receive. I also think tests can serve as a valuable tool to see how our children are learning." More with the fewer and fairer, with a side of conversation between parents and schools to do... something.

PAG: Brrrnnnnnnnnnnnt!! Wrong again. This is also a yes-or-no question, and an issue in which the feds have yet to own their role. This is a weasel answer, and the on ly reason  to weasel that simple question is that you know your real answer ("Test 'em al!!") is going to be unpopular.

WP: Four and five year olds are being asked to sit and do academic work. Should play and other child-appropriate activities be re-instated?

HRC: Well, let's just do both. Early literacy and early math are swell, but so is play.

PAG: BBRRRRNNNNTTTT!!! Wrong wrongity wrong. Organized academic work for four year olds is not only unnecessary and unhelpful, but some research suggests it's actually damaging. Also, there are not infinite hours in the day.

WP: Do you support universal pre-K?

HRC: Thank goodness-- an easy one. Way yes. Highquality pre-K for all the four year olds.

PAG: This would be a fine answer except for the previous answer which suggests that Clinton's definition of "high quality pre-school" is seriously defective.

WP: Should teachers be evaluated based on test scores?

HRC: Clinton actually avoids answering this question at all. There's some blather about how hard teachers work and the old "biggest in-school factor" point. Maybe ESSA will help us evaluate teachers real good.

PAG: Sigh. It's a yes-or-no question. Do you wonder why people hate politicians? This is why-- the refusal to answer simple questions simply. Also, the answer is "no."

WP: What's the best way to measure schools, and what do we do with the "failing" ones?

HRC: The measure of success is getting every child college and career ready, even though nobody knows what the hell that means or how to measure it. ESSA will fix it. And failing schools should get more resources.

PAG: One out of three is below basic. But I'll give her some credit for saying we should help failing schools instead of just closing them and turning them over to charter businesses.

WP: I'm going to toss Common Core at you. How do you want to manage this third rail.

HRC: Standards are super, and CCSS was messed up by the implementation. Also, the whole thing was state-led, so federal hands are clean. It's those wacky states.

PAG: I suppose that's pretty mild for someone who probably gets her education briefings from remnants of the Center for American Progress, a group whose love for Common Core is so relentless deranged that I have literally run out of ways to make fun of them.

WP: What's the federal role in education?

HRC: Mostly to make sure that school can be a way out for poor kids in urban and rural poverty spots.

PAG: So we're back to the notion of schools as mainly a social program and not so much an educational one.

WP: Charters are not currently required to be as transparent about finances and other stuff as public schools are. Should they be?

HRC: Almost manages a clear yes for this one, though she has to include a bit about how swell good charters can be, and she's always been a supporter, but boy-- loves that public school. Unprompted, she adds the bit about taking and serving all students that previously made her charterista friends nuts.

PAG: For once, I have no complaints.

WP: Should for-profit businesses be allowed to operate charters?

HRC: I can give an unequivocal no to this because I will continue to pretend not to understand that nominally non-profit charters can be just as lucrative as the profit ones. When we hand out federal largesse to charters in the form of mountains of public tax dollars, we totally rule out for-profits, so you know no businesses are getting rich from that money.

PAG: Nope. The many ways in which non-profit charters can be used to turn a nifty profit have been so widely documented that no sentient being can pretend not to know about them. I'm a little disappointed that the question didn't press the issue a little more directly.

WP: Should states limit the number of charter schools?

HRC: Clinton flat-out doesn't answer this, but instead says we should shut down bad schools and hold charters accountable. Not an answer.

PAG: There is nobody to keep happy with this answer except the millionaire backers of charter businesses. It is exactly the kind of answer that makes it hard to shake the feeling that HRC remains mainly loyal to her big-money Wall Street pals.

WP: Studies show that lots of black children, even pre-schoolers, are disproportionately suspended? Want to comment?

HRC: I have a detailed plan to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Boom.

PAG: In any other year, I would dismiss this as the kind of question that any dummy running for office could figure out and offer a correct answer to. This year we're all learning better.

WP: Vouchers? Should giving public dollars to private schools be a thing?

HRC: No. Private schools don't follow accountability rules when it comes to content, staffing or student treatment, and a voucher system drains precious resources from already-struggling public schools.

PAG: It's a good answer and a good repudiation of voucher systems, but can Clinton explain how it is not also a repudiation of a charter system? This is nuts. For three paragraphs she gives a beat-down of vouchers that could be used, word for word, to oppose charter schools. I start to wonder if Clinton actually understands any of what she's talking about, or whether she is just well-prepped with pre-loaded talking points.

WP: Should colleges and universities be able to factor in race and ethnicity in admissions?

HRC: "I do."

PAG: Look at that. She can give a straight answer to a yes-or-no question when she wants to.

WP: Help pay for college?

HRC: I have been a staunch supporter of free(ish) college ever since Bernie Sanders kicked my ass with the issue.

PAG: Let's take this as a sign of her flexibility and leave it at that.

WP: Should federal loans be for all study areas?

HRC: Sure, but I like the Obama administration's idea of reducing college "quality" to a few really simple metrics, including "how much money do your alumni make," so we'll do more of that.

PAG: The Obama plan leans heavily on the notion that the best college provides vocational training, and metrics that don't really measure what they pretend to measure. They encourage colleges to avoid accepting those damn poor kids who predictably don't go on to make the kind of numbers (or kind of money) that make colleges look good under this ham-brained system.

The questionaire winds up with some personal questions, from which we learn that Clinton had a favorite teacher, hated choir (she can't sing, which is somehow... unsurprising), learned resilience in college, and never cheated because her father would have been disappointed. I will let someone else unpack the world contained in that answer.

So what did we learn? HRC belongs to the Cult of the Test, doesn't display real understanding of charterdom, isn't up on the research about premature academics, and still doesn't understand the whole Common Core thing. There are Grand Canyon sized gaps in her understanding of the whole landscape of educational issues and the debates thereof. She talks kind of like a person whose education about education has come primarily from rich reformsters, and not so much like someone who has regular contact with regular teachers. She is totally welcome to come hang out with me for a day or two. Have your people call my... well, me. I have no idea if Clinton is educable, is willfully ignorant of the issues, or has a full understanding but just prefers the dark side. But I suggest the rest of us gear up for the work of trying to help her "evolve." Of course, if Trumpm wins, no evolving will be going on for a while. Good luck to all of us.

The NAACP: Ignorant Dupes?

They probably had their press releases ready. Despite the full-court lobbying, the charter fans had to have an idea which way the wind was blowing. And so when the NAACP announced the official, full-throated adoption of the call for a charter moratorium, charter fans were ready to explain why it should be ignored.

As always, nobody leapt in with less nuance or modulation than Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform. In an email subject-lined "NAACP Caves To Union Pressure," Allen made it clear that the NAACP has been pressured, duped, and kept in the dark about The Truth.

This is yet another case of a group being intimidated by unions, and being misinformed about how opportunities for poor children, in particular, and minorities, are best served by the kinds of choices that charter schools offer.

This theme runs through most of the charter-flavored responses to the NAACP resolution. Take Jondre Pryor, a KIPP principal who once met an actual NAACP person thereby allowing him to see just how ignorant the NAACP is of What Is Really Going On.

I came to understand the NAACP’s position a little better when I attended a panel on education with several of my KIPP colleagues and when I talked one-on-one with several delegates. It became clear that misinformation was the basis for their opposition. They had heard stories about a few bad charter schools, and they were using that to judge all 6,800 schools in the movement. 

As Jim Horn has pointed out, one of the stories they might have heard was the story of Pryor's own school, where angry parents withdrew students over allegations of mistreatment and the Atlanta newspaper running a photo of KIPP students sitting on the floor, working toward the magic day when they would be judged compliant enough to "earn" a desk.

The NAACP resolution is actually pretty restrained. The NAACP hasn't rejected charters (they specifically state they aren't doing this because of charter opposition), or called for a roll back. They've called for four issues to be settled before the charter train gets rolling again:

1) Charters should be subject to the same transparency and accountability as public schools

2) Public funds should not be diverted to charters at the expense of public schools

3) Charter schools should stop suspending and ejecting students that a public school is obligated to serve

4) Cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.

These are four odd things for charter fans to object to. For #1, calls to hold bad charters accountable are now a staple of charter fans (see for instance this call from charter supporters for cybers to get their act together). Keeping charters accountable and closing the bad ones is a basic part of the sale pitch. Numbers 2 and 3 are regularly denied. Just check out the #YesOn2 folks in Massachusetts claiming that more charters will mean more money for all schools. Every time a story breaks about charters pushing out students, the response is not justification, but denial. Faced with the Got To Go list, Eva Moskowitz mostly claimed that her charters do no such thing. As for Number 4, with the exception of that wacky Mike Petrilli, this is once again a thing that charter fans claim they don't do.

In short, it's not entirely clear why the charter PR muscle isn't behind a push to say, "We think the NAACP's concerns are legitimate, and that's why we already mostly don't do these things, except for a few bad actors that we want to see closed, too." Why, really, are they freaking out?

If I had to guess (and, of course, I do), I'd say the freak-outery is that this is a PR set-back. The charter movement depends a lot on the ability of the rich white guys pushing charters to be able to gesture at some Actual Black Persons who support charters and agree that charters are the best thing that white folks have ever done for them. This whole holleration is not about policy or politics, but instead centers on their bastard child, PR optics.

It may be simpler than that. Many of the charter backers are in it to make money. A moratorium on launching new charters would hurt their bottom line, and they are simply businessmen who have hit an obstacle to expanding their business revenue. It's PR perhaps with a side of money-grubbing.

But charter fans do have options here. They could, instead of arguing that the NAACP can be dismissed because they are now ignorant dupes, actually listen to what they're saying.

I say this as someone on the Support Public Ed side of the debate, where many of us really blew it in the early stages by suggesting that support for charters among parents of color was only happening because they had been misinformed and duped. But they weren't. They were responding to what looked like the best available solution to the problem of underfunded, under-resourced, just generally crappy poor schools.

The lesson for some of us? It's a mistake to dismiss someone's concerns just because you disagree with their method of addressing those concerns. If someone comes running out of a building wearing a tin hat and shouting, "I'm wearing this tine hat because the building is on fire," discussing the anti-fire efficacy of tin hats is useful, but denying the flames shooting out of windows is not.

So if charter fans were smart, they would look at things like the NAACP resolution and say, "Well, we clearly have some problems that need to be addressed, because these folks are certainly responding to something that they see going on." They could look at this as something more than a lost skirmish in a PR battle, but an opportunity to gather some actual information.

Or Allen and her posse can keep trying to write off the NAACP as a group of ignorant dupes, blame it all on the teachers' union, and keep wondering why, even though they've thrown away their tin hats, everything feels so very warm.

ICYMI: Goodies for the week (10/16)

Here's some reading for the day. remember to share the stuff you like; only you can prevent good writing from vanishing into the white noise of the interwebs.

Before We Create Opportunity School Districts..

A Georgia teacher talks about what Opportunity District threats look like on the ground, and what would be a better way to serve the students.

Independent Reading: A Research Based Defense 

This practice has been around forever. When I first started teaching it was Middle School Sustained Silent Reading, shortened to MSSR by the school and called Misssery by the students. But look-- we've finally got some research to back it up.

The Nine Types of People Ruining Your School Email

A fun article. You should send it to everyone on your staff.

California's Charter Mess

Third in a series of four pieces by Carol Burris showing just how big a mess California's charter biz has become

VAM-based Chaos in Florida

How just one district is being upended and trashed by Florida's mandatory VAM-based baloney.

Fed-up Philly Teachers Jumping Ship

Philadelphia continues to find ways to drive teachers away-- and it's working.

The Battle of Hastings: What's Behind the Netflix CEO's Fight To Charterize Public Schools

A more in-depth look at Reed Hastings and his goal of doing away with public education

Pruning Teacher Education

John Merrow takes a look at the USED's new rules for evaluating and shutting down teacher education programs.

To Write or Not To Write

I consider this a question on the order of  "To eat or not to eat," but somehow there are teachers of writing in the world who don't write themselves. This essay answers that problem.

What My Students Have Led Me To Believe 

Finally, from Emily Kaplan, a great way to kick off the week.

There Are More Important Things

This is Homecoming week at my high school; Thursday parade, Friday game, and tonight, the Big Dance. It's a big deal. I've been the Student Council adviser in charge of all this stuff for years and years now, and I never cease to be amazed at how worked up some students get about it. After all, it is the first Big Dance of the year, and for our freshpersons, the first Big dance of their entire high school career. Feelings run high. It's not really the Homecoming dance until some freshperson is crying in the lobby.

But watching the teenaged angst in bloom, it occurs to me once again that one of our more treasured debates in education is a little overwrought and misplaced itself.

Teenaged angst is so fraught because students are still trying to work out the sense of perspective. Did my friend's unkind comment to me just now really signal the End of the World, or does it just feel like it, or is there even any difference between the two things? When that other person just touched my hand, did that mean a little? A lot? Everything? Is anybody else's heart beating as hard as mine right this second? This will all be better in five or ten years? I'll look back on this fondly in five or ten years!? Are you freaking kidding me, Old Person?? Five or ten years is practically forever!

The scale of personal stakes gets even tougher for students who are dealing with more adult-style issues-- family troubles, children of their own, scraping enough money together for things like food and heat. Abuse. Neglect. Abuse and neglect that do not jump out like an obvious after-school special, so it's hard for anyone to know, to judge.

In the education debates, we love to debate the importance of poverty. Reformsters like to accuse folks of using poverty as an excuse for poor student achievement. They accuse pro-public-edsters of claiming that poor kids can't achieve anything. Meanwhile, reformsters make the argument that if we just boost student achievement, those students will lift right up out of poverty. We can't fail to push students to achieve just because they're poor, say the reformsters. We can't pretend that poverty doesn't have a profound effect on how students learn, say the rest of us.

But I watch all the sturm and drang of this week and wonder once again if we're not just overthinking this.

When you're young, and especially when you're young and poor, there are just more important things.

When you are worried if you will be safe at home tonight, if you will be screamed at or hit for reasons you can't even predict, unlocking the secrets of participial phrases just doesn't seem like the most important thing in your life.

When you are tired because there was no heat in your home last night, and tense because you know there won't be any heat again tonight, gaining a deeper understanding of quadratic equations is just not the most important thing in your life.

When you know your single parents is hurting and struggling to provide enough for you, and you're hungry because there isn't much food in the house and there still won't be tonight, coming up with the right answer for the Big Standardized Test is not the most important thing in your life.

And if you are a young person with a child of your own, worrying about how to provide for that child and care for that child, making sure that you use the right formula for constructing open response answers on yor BS Test is just not remotely the most important thing in your life.

The ongoing debate about the roll of poverty in student achievement often assumes a framework not in evidence-- that poverty is some sort of obstacle standing between students and their academic achievement on a Big Standardized Test. We spend a lot of time arguing about what kind of obstacle poverty constitutes, and not nearly enough time examining our assumption that pumping out those student achievement numbers is any sort of priority or important factor in the lives of the students.

We spend a lot of time agreeing and asserting that school is a super-important factor that will Make All the Difference and therefor is of Utmost Importance, and if we're not careful, we kind of forget to check with students to see if they got the memo. It would be easy to see why they might not have-- there's plenty of evidence that their future trajectory has more to do with their family's class and not educational achievement, and that translates into their vision of the future being defined by what they see around them. Plus, there's that whole future thing ("This education biz will pay off maybe in ten years or so? Are you freaking kidding me, old person?")

But mostly they are kids, with lives. We have this weird tendency to forget that children still have lives of their own, even if they are children. Occasionally we take a super-toxic approach to the issue (What is the no excuses approach except a demand that students suppress, ignore and otherwise drop all concern in their own actual lives).

They are small people with lives, concerns, priorities, fears, issues, struggles and questions about how to sort it all out. These are all important to the students in our classrooms. One of the worst things I can do in my classroom is demand that in order to be heard, seen, or cared about, students must drop their own list of life concerns and substitute the list that I thrust in their faces. But some of us (even the best of us on bad days) get really pissy about this business. The child is lazy. The child is obstinate. The child is oppositional defiant. The child is an ass.

No.

There are just more important things.

Almost every teacher has a story, though we don't like to tell them and when we do, they are tinged with regret. My very first year in a classroom, I had a student who would put his head down every other day, sometimes full on asleep. How disrespectful! What a jerk! I kept him after class, prepared to read him the riot act, to mount a towering explanation of how missing even a period of my scintilating instruction was a loss to him, to his future. And then he explained (and someone else later confirmed for me) that he was working two jobs so that he could afford a lawyer so that he could fight his ex to retain partial custody of their child and it was killing him but (and this where his eyes welled up) that child was so very important to him and he wanted to be sure that he was in a position to help her have a good life. But he promised the next day he would try to pay better attention while I was explaining a five-paragraph essay. Yeah, at that point somebody was feeling like a jerk, all right.

There are more important things.

Look, I love my job, and I do my job as well as I can because I believe it's hugely important. But sometimes, there are more important things. One of the privileges of wealth is that most of those things are well taken care of by other folks. One of the problems of poverty is that issues other folks don't even think about (It's cold out. Do I have a coat today?) can swallow up a whole day's worth of worry. And our time spent trying to sort out pedagogy and policy and instruction and curriculum and standards is all well-spent. But I have to think that some days, it all boils down to the simple fact that students are human beings who have more important things to worry about than what answer to click on in a Big Standardized Test that won't solve a single problem in their lives.

Student$Fir$tNY Bankrolls GOP

StudentsFirstNY launched back in 2012, an Empire State spin-off of the StudentsFirst orgnization launched by former DC chancellor, She Who Will Not Be Named. She was always nominally a Democrat (check out this awesomely non-prescient article from 2012 that says she's taking over the Democratic Party), but the NY branch of StudentsFirst was formed by Jenny Sedlis, who worked with Eva Moskowitz (theoretically a Democrat) to build Success Academy, with an assist from Joel Klein (also theoretically a Democrat) for the express purpose of backing Mayor Mike Bloomberg (originally Democrat, elected as mayor as Republican, but later switched to Independent because when you're really rich, you just form your own party).

StudentsFirstNY has thrown lots of its weight behind busting the union more rigorous and punishing teacher evaluations and flexing its political muscles, as well as pursuing the Moskowitzian ideal of a world in which charter school operators don't ever have to answer to anyone about anything but can just sit on their giant pile of money, untroubled by the little people. Because the children really want to see folks get rich from education.

All of that appears to be continuing in the present election cycle, in which StudentsFirstNY has decided that what the children of NY really want is more Republicans in the legislature (who knew the children were so interested in party politics). The children of New York also wish that Bill DeBlasio wasn't mayor, and StudentsFirstNY has been working hard to speak up for all those children, putting together lots of tv spots about how DeBlasio is after your money and no Democrats should be sent to Albany to help him. So supporting GOP candidates by attacking Democrats. Because these are the things that children really worry about.

The Wall Street Journal reports that StudentsFirstNY has teamed up with the high-rolling Real Estate Board of NY, because children really want a more robust, free-wheeling and profitable real estate market. They have also hired Bradley Tusk ("Mayor Bloomberg's Secret Weapon") whose profession seems to be exerting power and making money. Because children want to be secure in the knowledge that hedge fund guys can afford as many nice cars as they want.

DeBlasio's office is aware.

A spokesman for Mr. de Blasio’s campaign said: “When Bradley Tusk says he wants to team up with hedge funds and real-estate developers to defeat Democrats and stop progressive ideas, believe him.” 

Meanwhile, WSJ reports that Democrats shooting for the state capital prefer that DeBlasio just go sit quietly in the corner. I'm sure none of this has to do with New York Governor (theoretically not the mayor) Andrew Cuomo (theoretically a Democrat, but the evidence is pretty thin). In the meantime, StudentsFirstNY appears to be dropping all pretense of being even sort of concerned about actual education issues, but is simply one more batch of folks with big bank accounts trying to game the NY political system so that they can get even more money and power.

Trying to work this stuff out by paying attention to actual party labels is rather a challenge these days. I would love to see someone make sense of it. Not for me, mind you. It's just that the children are asking.

Embracing Education Productivity?

Rick Hess recently posted a piece that makes a couple of discussion-worthy points while neatly sliding right past a couple of other ones.

In "Why You Should Learn to Love Educational Productivity," Hess argues for an embrace of "productivity," but I'm not sure that word means exactly what he thinks it means.

We get to the "productivity" issue by sliding past a different one. Hess opens by noting that there have been many attacks on charter schooling lately, and he expresses not-so-much surprise:

At one level, this isn't shocking. Education has long been rife with suspicion of ideas that seem too "businesslike." The very term "productivity" can set teeth on edge. 

But here Hess makes two large leaps. First, we leap from charter opposition to ideas that seem too businesslike. But charter opposition is based on far more than any opposition to a businesslike approach to school. For instance, my objections to modern charters include the destruction of democratic and transparent process as well as the charter refusal to serve all students instead of just a chosen few. Second, Hess leaps from "businesslike" to "productivity." But many folks object to a businesslike approach to school because it usually values dollars over students.

So the whole opening of this piece is rather a cheat. However, I'm just going to pretend that Hess wrote, "I'd like to talk about productivity in education now," and move forward.

Hess argues that we should not resist "productivity" because it's just an attempt to make best use of resources. "... productivity itself simply means being able to do more good for more kids." I'll just note here that he didn't use "efficient," most likely because efficiency is directly opposed to excellence. But now Hess's point gets interesting.

Skepticism about "productivity" is sometimes coupled with doubts about the value of new technologies. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, producing a Mozart quartet two centuries ago required four musicians, four stringed instruments, and, say, 35 minutes. Producing the same Mozart quartet today, he said, requires the same resources.

Moynihan's analogy, while correct, is ultimately misleading when applied to schooling. In the arts, what has changed over two centuries is that radio, CDs, television, and digital media have profoundly increased the number of people able to hear and appreciate a given performance—at an ever-decreasing cost. 

But in Hess's example, the musicians do not produce any more Mozart than they ever did, nor do they need fewer resources to do so. They use the same resources, the same time, the same effort, and the same equipment; and they create the same amount of product as ever. Their productivity has not changed.

What has changed is the consumers' ability to consume. What we have increased is some thing we don't even have a word for-- consumertivity. We had made it easier for audiences to consume some version of the product. A somewhat debased, lower-quality version of the product but, as Hess correctly notes, a better version of the product than none at all, "a passable version of the experience to millions who would have otherwise never been able to experience the original."

Productivity and consumertivity are two different things that technophiles-- particularly those working the education biz-- frequently get confused.

Increased productivity by definition requires the production of more product. Hess's Mozart quartet does not increase productivity until they play several more pieces-- a feat they cannot accomplish without more resources,  more rehearsal, and more time for creating the actual performance. Only increased consumertivity allows increased customers without having to invest more time and resources in the making process.

Increased consumertivity is the cheap way to reach more customers. Increased productivity costs you more time and resources. In the business world, you make that investment in hopes that it will make itself back--plus profit. But that's not how it works when the "product" is a human service.

So when it comes to increased consumertivity in teaching, we're talking Khan Academy or some piece of software, where the makers only have to produce one product, but an infinite number of consumers can take it in. And we can do that without having the "teacher" or programmer expend any more time or resources. When Hess says this:

In schooling, technologies today offer the promise of extending the impact of the instruction, tutoring, and mentoring of a terrific teacher, so that she can coach, tutor, or instruct hundreds with the same energy she once expended reaching only five or twenty-five. 

I have to disagree. Instruction, tutoring and mentoring are "products" that are the unique result of a specific relationship. And that productivity can't be increased-- and neither can the consumertivity.

Consider a surgeon. We cannot increase the consumertivity of the surgeon's work, because that surgeon can only operate on one patient at a time. There's no way to scale things of technofy the surgery so that an infinite number of patients can have their spleens rotated by the surgeon's single operation. To increase the surgeon's productivity, you'll have to find ways to get more patients under that knife, and that is going to take more time and more resources. A surgeon cannot operate on hundreds of patients with the same resources used for five or twenty-five operations.

Ditto real teaching. You can only increase consumertivity when the arrow moves one way; the Mozart quartet flows toward the audience, but nothing flows the other way (yes, I know that's not strictly true, but let's skip that for the moment). Khan Academy lessons flow only one direction-- nothing flows back to the teacher. When the arrow flows in only one direction, you can make it branch into a thousand arrows.

But in surgery or actual teaching, the arrows flow both ways. The surgeon has to see and hear and watch and respond to the patient; surgery cannot, like a Khan Academy lesson, be performed blind. Likewise, the arrows of teaching flow both ways; you cannot run a class discussion when you cannot see or hear the class.

Every mentoring, coaching or tutoring relationship takes its own time and resources. As anyone who has ever cheated on their spouse can tell you, you cannot run multiple relationships with the same resources used for just one.

What reformsters really want to increase is consumertivity. Increasing consumertivity brings in more customers with little increase in time or resources spent on production. But consumertivity in teaching cannot be increased, unless you are willing to settle for a thin shadow of the real thing-- and why should you want to other than to make operating charter businesses cheaper and more profitable. Great for them; not so much for students.

It's possible that I'm missing part of Hess's point, because he wraps up with this quote from Cathy Davidson (Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn) :

In fact, I believe that if teachers can be replaced by computers, they should be. By that I mean if a teacher offers nothing that [a] child can't get from a computer screen, then your child might as well be learning online. On the other hand, no screen will ever replace a creative, engaged, interactive, relevant, and inspiring teacher, especially one who takes advantage of the precious face-to-face experience of people learning together.

I don't entirely disagree, but this, to me, argues against the rest of Hess's article. There are ways to increase teacher productivity by doing things like taking away tasks like hall monitoring and soul-sucking meetings. Heck, hire every teacher a personal secretary. But that doesn't get you the kind of scale Hess is talking about. Either you increase consumertivity by degrading the teaching "product," or you-- well, I can't think of any way to create the kind of superteachers who actually really personally teach hundreds of students at once.

Scaling up remains an ed reform dream, but increased productivity requires money, and increased consumertivity requires a process that can be made easily accessible to many consumers. Neither seems like a good fit for our current educational landscape. This may be one more reason that businesslike approach to schools is just a bad idea.

Fed's Stupid Teacher Prep Program Rules

The feds have released their rules governing teacher preparation programs, and they are just as stupid as they have promised to be all along.

How stupid? Kate Walsh of the impossible-to-take-seriously National Council on Teacher Quality saw the rules and pronounced them even "better" than she had expected, with extra-super-accountability.

The genius portion is the part that links college teacher program ratings to student results on the Big Standardized Test. Chris goes to Wossamotta U's teaching program, then gets a job at Struggling High School, where Chris is assigned the bottom rung on the remedial track. Chris's students do poorly on the BS Test, and therefor Wossamotta U's teacher program is downgraded, perhaps even loses some of its nifty federal grants. But wait-- it gets worse-- imagine that Chris is a shop or history teacher, in one of those states where Chris's VAM score is based on students Chris doesn't have in class taking a test about subject matter that Chris doesn't teach. And now Wossamotta U's teacher program still gets downgraded.

There are a couple of obvious outcomes of a policy like this, the most obvious and damning being that if Wossamotta U's program wants to survive, it has to avoid sending its graduates to low-performing (aka poor and under-resourced) schools. And since teachers most commonly teach somewhere near their community of origin, that means Wossamotta U will definitely consider not accepting students from poor and under-resourced communities.

This is a terrible, terrible, counter-productive, stupid idea, basing the evaluation of a system on bad data that is three or four degrees of separation away from what we're trying to evaluate and completely beyond the control of the program being evaluated.

But let's pretend it isn't. If this is actually genius, then maybe we can apply the same principle of long-distance evaluation in other ways.

Let's evaluate all college programs based on this sort of reasoning. Let's check on how nice a home each graduate lives in, and how attractive their spouses are. After all, if the graduates are living in lousy housing with an ugly partner, or no partner at all, that represents a failure of their college degree.

Let's try this with medicine. If people are well-cared for, then that healthiness should influence their immediate community. So let's evaluate your doctor based on the number of times that an ambulance is called to your neighbor's house.

Or evaluating parenting. If I'm a good parent, then my child will seek out a good partner, who will themselves have a good parents, whose good parenting should apply to all of their children. So my parenting can be effectively judged by looking at the annual income and number of arrest warrants for my child's brother-in-law.

The new federal rule also suggest that we have not yet fully tapped the valuable data generated by a badly-written narrow standardized bubble test taken by bored children who may or may not even try. This data is magical and wondrous, so let's really put it to work.

Hungry children can't do well on a test, so let's use results from the BS Tests to evaluate the school's cafeteria. And children who have had a chaotic ride to school would be distracted and unfocused, so let's use the BS Test to evaluate the bus company for the district. In fact, let's use the test results to evaluate the manufacturer of the buses. And since the children sit in chairs, at desks, we can justly use the test results to evaluate the quality of those tables and chairs-- in fact, let's go ahead and use test results to evaluate the schools of the workers who manufactured and designed the tables and chairs.

Of course, we could also use test results to evaluate the work of officials who set education policy, and if test results fail to go up annually, we could simply fire all those officials, whether they are officially appointed ones like John King or unofficially self-appointed ones like Bill Gates. But that would just be crazy talk. Almost as crazy as doing an actual evaluation of tests themselves. Those holy instruments may be used to evaluate everything in sight, but the sacred magical tests themselves must never be questioned, remaining in place as the twisted foundation of one wobbly edifice after another.