Democracy vs. Money

Perhaps the most striking thing about the many, many elections going on around the country (honest, the Presidency is not the only thing up for a vote) is the huge amount of money being invested in so many of these races.

* In Massachusetts, an extraordinary amount of dark, out-of-state money has been spent to open the market for more charter entrepreneurs to come in and make a buck revitalize education for at least a few select Massachusetts students.

* In Washington state, charteristas have dropped a bundle trying to unseat three incumbent State Supreme Court justices who had the nerve to stand in the way of charter growth.

* In Connecticut, charter groups are dumping a bunch of money into the legislative races.

* In Georgia,an amendment to push an "Opportunity School District," modeled on the failed state turnaround districts of Tennessee and Louisiana, is being driven by Georgia Leads, a deep-pocketed group supported by more dark money. 

* In New York, Zephyr Teachout is up against a pile of money to the point that it makes perfect sense for her to issue a debate challenge to her opponent's billionaire backer rather than the opponent himself.

* In Florida, a solar energy amendment is actually a red herring, backed by millions of dollars from energy corporations and intended to actually shut solar energy down rather than free it-- an ugly enough mess that the bill had to go to court.

What these races, and so many other local and school board and state-level races around the country, have in common is the involvement of folks with lots and lots of money who are hoping that they buy their way past troublesome old democracy and the voters who insist on believing that they should have a voice and a vote. Deceptive ads, media blitzes, imported professional consultants-- money is no object and chipping away at democratic rule is the goal.

Yes, the rich and powerful have always worked deals in smoke-encumbered back rooms. But they have never been free to spend so much, so boldly and baldly slapping down cash on the barrelhead to buy the laws, the representatives, the policies that they want. The mind reels to consider what could have been done for the nation with the money spent on every part of this year's election season.

Whatever the races are in your region, do your homework. Check to see who is really backing the candidate or the proposal. You have the internet-- use it.

It's funny-- education reformsters have long repeated the refrain that we can't improve schools by "throwing money at them," but when it comes to getting their way at voting time, there's no amount of money that is too big to throw at elections.

Don't be bought. Don't be fooled. Find out what the real choices are, and vote accordingly. Make tomorrow count.

Digital Natives Are Lost

I have had this conversation a thousand thousand times with people of my own generation, people who don't actually work with students. They will be going on about their own computer illiteracy and waxing rhapsodic about the super-duper skills of the young generation, the digital natives.

"You don't understand," I'll tell them. "The vast majority of my students don't know jack about modern technology. They know how to operate one or two apps that they use regularly. Beyond that, they are as lost as their own grandparents."

And now there is research to back me up.

At EdWeek, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew report on their own research at Stanford as well as research by folks at Northwestern. 

In the Northwestern study, college students turned out to believe that Google lists links in the order of accuracy and trustworthiness-- good news for all those people making a living optimizing websites for search ranking, and bad news for everyone wishes people would stop using the internet to make themselves stupider.

Stanford's study involved several different tests; the results of all were depressing.

At every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation: middle school students unable to tell the difference between an advertisement and a news story; high school students taking at face value a cooked-up chart from the Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee; college students credulously accepting a .org top-level domain name as if it were a Good Housekeeping seal.

In a particularly alarming exercise, twenty-five Stanford students (as Wineburg and McGrew point out, a super-selective group from a university that rejects 95% of its applicants) could not tell the difference between the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. The first is a legitimate professional organization and the second is a fringe group that ties homosexuality to pedophilia and made the Southern Poverty Law Center hate group list. More than half of the students determined that the hate group was "more reliable" as a source.

None of this surprises me. My students are adept at operating their favorite apps and can managed the backwater sites that are now out of favor (Facebook? Puh-lease!) They can play whatever game is big at the moment (as near as I can tell phone games have about a two-week life). But not only do they not make very good use of the internet as a ready source of information, both factual and craptaculous, it doesn't even occur to them to look things up in the first place. I find this crazy maddening-- my curiosity has been an itch that I couldn't reach for much of my life, and now modern tech means I can carry a long backscratcher with me everywhere. And yet, I am regularly responding to student questions with, "Gee, if only there were a way to quickly access all collected human knowledge." And I teach, minds you, at a one-to-one school-- every single one of my students has access to at least one computer device.

Fifteen years ago, I had students who could design a website from scratch, writing their own code and design work. No longer. This is not an abnormal progression. Early adopters of new-fangled automobiles had to be prepared for and capable of doing their own mechanical work to keep the vehicle functioning. Within a generation or two, being a gearhead had become a pastime for a select few. Fast forward to today, when some automotive systems cannot be worked on except with specialized training and tools. Making technology more accessible and usable (and therefor marketable) means freeing the user from any need to do maintenance and repair.

But instead of a communication or transportation system, we're now doing this with an information system, and we have a problem that parallels a mistake found in some education programs. Some policy makers and edubiz folks are trying to push a model of reading that treats it as a group of discrete skills, decoding tricks that are independent of what the words actually say. But reading cannot be separated from content; how well you can read is inextricably tied to what you know. And how well you can research and filter the research you find is inextricably tied to what you know.

There are skills we can teach. The EdWeek piece says that good fact-checkers do three things that help:

1) When facing an unfamiliar site, leave it and find out from other sources if it's reliable or worthwhile. Far better than going ahead and reading the site itself.

2) Same idea-- don't depend on the site's own "about," because no site has a page in which it explains why it's actually full of baloney. Not on purpose.

3) Ignore the search engine ordering results.

And that's before we even get to effective search methods. The majority of my students make truly bizarre use of Dr. Google with a grab-bag of random search terms and no awareness that there are tools for narrowing the search.

But beyond those (and other) simple check techniques, you have to actually Know Something. If you want to know if the painting in your attic is worth a million dollars or a buck and a half, you have to talk to someone who actually knows the difference. Talking about 21st Century Skills as if they aren't tied directly to knowledge is bunk.

Meanwhile, folks who think "Let the students go on the net and educate themselves" is a plan must be unfamiliar with both students and the internet. Just as lots of natural-born citizens of the USA could not pass the citizenship test if their lives depended on it, many digital natives have never tried to explore, understand, or make sense of the tech landscape into which they've been born. We really need to do better-- I'd suggest we get at it before the next election rolls around.

ICYMI: Almost Election Day (11/6)

Good lord, this ugly mess is almost over and we can move on to the ugly aftermath. In the meantime, here are some things to read. Don't forget to share the ones you like-- remember, only good content can drive out bad content.

What Google Learned from Its Quest To Build the Perfect Team

This is one of the most important things for me, personally and professionally, that I've read in a while. It has nothing directly to do with education, and everything to do with education. Here's what we know about a perfect team

Why I Chose To Teach

Short, raw, honest piece from a teacher in Philly about how and why he got where he is.

How Arts Education Teaches Kids To Learn From Failure

Before you can do good work, you have to do bad work. This is a pretty awesome piece.

Rewarding Failure

EdWeek presents a whole suite of articles about cyber charters, and it's brutal. As bad as you may think cybers are, it turns out things are even worse.

Value-Added for Kindergarten Teachers in Ecuador

Vamboozled with two major pieces of info-- the kind of VAM that you do with littles is really, truly awful crap, and reformsters are busy (like so many other business folks) exporting their lousy practices to places that don't have the rules in place to keep them out.

Charter Schools' Big Lie

A guest op-ed by Dan Gleason explains just how badly Massachusetts charters suck the money right out of the public school system.

Charter Lobby Chases Cut of Public Funds

Wendy Lecker takes a look at some of the players and some of the games they play in the attempt to grab public tax dollars for the charter business

Families for Excellent Trains

Jennifer Berkshire is always worth reading, but she's particularly on point this time with a look at how privatization in Massachusetts and Arne Duncan's small balls are connected to DFER and burning trains.

How Leading Charter Funders Are Upping the Ante in Their Bid To Blow the Bay State's Charter Cap

Andrea Gabor lays out the charter-run, dark-money-funded assault on the charter cap in Massachusetts.

Thoughts on Question 2 and Charter School Expansion

When it comes to explaining complicated statistical stuff, nobody does it better than Mark Weber at Jersey Jazzman. Here's what lies behind some of the numbers thrown around in the Mass debate over the charter cap. And, yes, I know I'm on that issue a lot this week, but it's important-- if Massachusetts gets taken down by the charteristas, we're all in trouble.

Finally, here are some puppies. Lord knows we can all use some puppies this week.

The Revolving Door

Meet Elizabeth Grant.

Grant has not done anything in particular to attract my attention. I'm not going to call her out for saying something dopey or take her to task for pushing a particular bad policy. I tripped over Grant while running down some info for a recent piece, and she stuck me as a particularly strong example of the Great Revolving Door at work. Based on her own LinkedIN page, here's Grant's career trajectory.

Grant graduated from the University of Utah in 1985 with a BA in History.

Teacher. From Utah, she went to teach high school and middle school history as well as special ed in public and private schools located in Salt Lake City, Baltimore and Boston. This took her from 1986 through 1994, so eight years. With that many different gigs, she could not have been in one particular teaching job long.

Administrator. Worked as assistant principal, principal and dean of students at both public and private schools in Great Salt Lake area from 1991 to 2001. That would be ten years-- but it overlaps with the years she lists for teaching experience, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Again, there would have to have been multiple different jobs to fit all this in ten years.

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, consultant. Fourth-wealthiest grant maker in the US. Frequent contributor to reformy causes. She worked here for one year-- 2003-2004.

SRI International, consultant. Outfit that hangs super-tight with Rocketship Academy chain. Research and world-changing. Like Hewlett, located in Menlo Park. As with Hewlett, she worked here one year-- 2004-2005.

US Department of Health and Human Services. Grant takes a shot at government work as an education specialist at the Office of Head Start. Less than a year in 2006.

The Lewin Group, Senior Associate. A health and human services consulting group that, according to Sourcewatch, was purchased in 2007 by the health insurance giant, UnitedHealth Group. Grant worked for them for one year-- 2006-2007.

Senator Patty Murray, education fellow. You will remember Murray most recently as the ranking Democrat on the Senate education comittee, and as such, one of the co-architects of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Grant worked out of Murray's office for four months, from November of 2007 until February of 2008.

American Youth Policy Forum, consultant. Only three months in 2008, but Grant worked for this out fit that calls itself a "nonprofit, nonpartisan professional development organization, provides learning opportunities for policy leaders, practitioners and researchers working on youth and education issues at the national, state, and local levels." So, lobbyists? Funded by Hewlett, Gates, GE and many of the other usual suspects.

Jobs for the Future, senior policy analyst. JFF has a wide reach, with funding from Kellog, Hewlett, Gates et. al, as well as funding from the US Department of Education. According to EWA, these guys develop policy solutions with an eye on college and career readiness, especially on post-high school level. Grant was with them for a year-- 2009-2010.

US Department of Education, Chief of Staff / Senior Policy Advisor, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Grant spent three whole years back in government work. Her profile also says that she worked "as a senior policy advisor working on ESEA flexibility, secondary school initiatives, and state technical assistance." 2010-2013.

American Institutes for Research, vice president, education. We have, of course, encountered AIR many times before-- they're the folks who have played AVIS to Pearson's HERTZ all these years, bringing us fine testing products like the SBA. When they landed Grant, they billed her as a former USED policy analyst. Grant worked for them for two years-- 2013-2015.

Jobs for the Future, senior vice president. Grant most recently returned to JFF, where she's now a senior vice-president who is "leading the Building Educational Pathways for Youth and Postsecondary State Policy portfolios."

And that's her professional story so far.

I am not suggesting that Grant is up to anything nefarious. As far as I know, she's a decent person with good motives who is very capable at her job. I'm admittedly unimpressed by her peripatetic life as a teacher at the beginning of her career, but it's not the life for everyone and there could be other factors involved.

But this is the revolving door in action. Sometimes she works for the government, sometimes she works for private industry, and sometimes she works in the mottled thinky tank world that is somewhere in between. I actually came across her while looking at the report on Race To The Top, a report that was produced by some sort of collaboration between public and private folks. This is how we get government by people who slide in and out of public and private worlds, who live in a small village where employers change regularly, but the folks in the village always stick together (and spoiler alert-- the rest of us are not residents of that village). This is how we get people creating policy with one eye on the government and one eye on the private interests that benefit from policy choices. This is how we get people who find it bizarre that anyone (say, a teacher) would want to work at the same job for their entire career.

I don't think people like Elizabeth grant are inherently evil or ill-intentioned. but I do think they live on a completely different planet from the rest of us, cooled by the breeze of an endlessly spinning revolving door.

Did Race To The Top Work?

Not only is this a real question, but the Department of Education, hand in hand with Mathematica Policy Research and American Institutes for Research, just released a 267-page answer of sorts. Race to the Top: Implementation and Relationship to Student Outcomes is a monstrous creature, and while this is usually the part where I say I've read it so you don't have to, I must confess that I've only kind of skimmed it. But what better way to spend a Saturday morning than reviewing this spirited inquiry into whether or not a multi-billion-dollar government program was successful in hitting the wrong target (aka getting higher scores on a narrow, poorly-designed standardized reading and math tests).

Before We Begin

So let's check a couple of our pre-reading biases before we walk through this door. I've already shown you one of mine-- my belief that Big Standardized Test scores are not a useful, effective or accurate measure of student achievement or school effectiveness, so this is all much ado about not so much nothing as the wrong thing.

We should also note the players involved. The USED, through its subsidiary group, the Institute of Educational Sciences, is setting out to answer a highly loaded question: "Did we just waste almost a decade and a giant mountain of taxpayer money on a program that we created and backed, or were we right all along?" The department has set out to answer a question, and they have a huge stake in the answer.

So that's why they used independent research groups to help, right? Wellll..... Mathematica has been around for years, and works in many fields researching policy and programs; they have been a go-to group for reformsters with policies to peddle. AIR sounds like a policy research group, but in fact they are in the test manufacture business, managing the SBA (the BS Test that isn't PARCC). Both have gotten their share of Gates money, and AIR in particular has a vested interest in test-based policies.

So nobody working on this report is exactly free from bias or vested interestedness.

Oh, and as we'll repeatedly see, most of the findings here are over three years old. So that's super helpful, too.

Defining "Success" for RTTT and the Executive Summary

The study set out to examine six elements, and we want to be sure to look at that list because they constitute the definition of "success" for Race to the Top.

1) Improving state capacity to support school improvement efforts
2) Adopting college and career-ready standards
3) Building state data systems that measure student growth and inform instruction
4) Recruiting, retaining, rewarding and developing swell teachers and principals
5) Turning around low-performing schools
6) Encouraging conditions in which charter schools can succeed

Numbers two through five are recognizable as the four conditions that were extorted out of states in order to get their waivers and escape the penalties of No Child Left Behind. Number one is just a call to actually support the other items with more than prayers and best wishes. Six is-- well, that's a blunt as  the feds get about saying that they want to replace public schools with charters as a matter of policy.

The study breaks states into several groups. "Early RTT states" means states that got in the gravy train for rounds one or two; "late RTT states" are those that didn't jump on till round three. "Other states" or "non-RTT states" are those that, well, didn't get RTT grant money. Grant-getters were compared to not-grant-getters, and I'm going to keep my eyes peeled to note if, at some point in the meatier parts of the paper, we look at the notion that non-RTT states were still scrambling for waivers under threat of NCLB penalties, waivers that had requirements remarkably similar to RTT grant requirements. Frankly, this data set seems ripe for a study about whether the feds get more better compliance with bribery or with threats, but I'm not sure we're going to go there. We're still in the roman numeral pages.

The answer appears to be that there's not much difference between bribery and threats."When we examined changes over time in states' use of RTT-promoted practices, we found no significant differences between RTT and other states."

And right up front, the study lets us know some of the hardest truth it has to deliver. Well, hard of you're a RTT-loving reformster. For some of us, the truth may not be so much "hard" as "obvious years ago."

The relationship between RTT and student outcomes was not clear. Trends in student outcomes could be interpreted as providing evidence of a positive effect of RTT, a negative effect of RTT, or no effect of RTT.

Bottom line: the folks who created the study-- who were, as I noted above, motivated to find "success"-- didn't find that the Race to the Top accomplished much of anything. Again, from the executive summary:

In sum, it is not clear whether the RTT grants influenced the policies and practices used by states or whether they improved student outcomes. RTT states differed from other states prior to receiving the grants, and other changes taking place at the same time as RTT reforms may also have affected student outcomes. Therefore, differences between RTT states and other states may be due to these other factors and not to RTT. Furthermore, readers should use caution when interpreting the results because the findings are based on self-reported use of policies and practices. 

Hmm. Well, that doesn't bode well for the upcoming 200 pages.

Fun Side Note

To determine whether or not RTTT stuff influence "student achievement," the study relied on test results on the NAEP.

Let me repeat that. When the USED and a team of researchers, looking at the efficacy of a major education policy program over the past many years, wanted to know if US students were learning more, achieving more, and testing better, they skipped right over the PARCC and the SBA and the various other BS Tests currently being used for all manner of accountability and went straight to the NAEP.

Tell me again why all students need to take the BS Tests every year?

Also, the study would like us to remember that any differences that occurred in test results could have come from influences other than Race to the Top.

The Most and the Least (Troubling)

Across all states (RTT and non), the most widely and commonly adopted practice was the creation of the big data systems for tracking all the student data. So your state, RTT or Non, may not have gotten all the rest of these things taken care of, but when it comes to data mining and general Big Brothering, they were on point. Feel better yet?

The widest non-adoption was the RTT policies regarding teacher and principal preparation. In general adoption of the fed's clever ideas was low, bottoming out with the idea of evaluating teacher and principal prep programs and giving the "good" ones more money-- this policy was adopted by absolutely nobody. I'm wondering if states mostly left the teacher pipeline alone because they knew it was falling apart and they didn't want to bust it entirely. In some cases states did not so much beef up teacher prep as they simply abandoned it, implementing programs where humans who have qualifications like "certificate from another state" or "any college degree at all" or "a pulse accompanied by respiratory activity" could be put directly into a classroom.

History Lesson

No study like this is complete without a history lesson, and this study delivers a few pages of RTTT history. It was part of the giant American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, with a whopping $4.35 billion-with-a-B dollars were spent to try to get states to adopt policies that suits in DC believed would make education more better, though their beliefs were based pretty much on "This seems like a good idea to me."

There are charts showing who got what when for how many districts. My own state of Pennsylvania landed a whopping $41 million; the chart doesn't show how many local districts signed off on the application because in Round Three state education departments were allowed to gloss over just how many of their local districts had told them to go pound sand over this whole "We'll give you a million dollar grant to help you implement a ten million dollar program" business.

Also, there have been some RTTT studies attempted before. They found that implementing all this stuff was difficult. So there's that.

How We Did It

We also get a whole section about how data was collected and crunched. For a massive study of this depth and breadth, the methods are kind of.... well, tame? Unimpressive?

Data came from three places. The NAEP results. The Common Core of Data which is different from that other Common Core you may have heard about. The CCD is just all the public info about schools and ed departments etc. And then, to get each state's particular specific, the researchers called up representatives from state education agencies. So, some test scores, some public data, and phone interviews with "somebody" in the state office.

Those phone interviews were conducted in 2012-2013, aka right after Round Three states had gotten their money. Hence the separating of RTT schools into two groups-- those who had had a while to get things running and those that were still on their way back from depositing the check at the bank.

There's also an explanation here of how they tried to connect test results to program implementation and basically gave up because they were getting noise and junk for results.

Now for some more specific results.

State Capacity for Edureformy Stuff

This really breaks down into three aspects (which break down into ten, because government work, sigh), three "success factors." The third one was significantly raising achievement and closing the achievement gap, and "no state interview questions aligned to the third subtopic, so it was excluded from the analysis" which, wait-- what? We didn't ask about this, so we didn't include it in the study??

The other two were articulating the state's reform agenda, and building state ability to scale up and implement reformy stuff. The study found that, as of spring 2013, there was no difference between RTT states and non-RTT states. So, as of three and a half years ago. Well. That's sure helpful.

The biggest area of difference was when it came to strategies for turning around failing schools and for spreading practices by super-duper schools. RTT states did this more than non-RTT schools. No comments on whether any of those strategies actually did anybody any good.

Oddly enough, all types of states were pretty tightly aligned on one feature-- allowing for very little input from all stakeholders in defining priorities. No, that's not me being snarky-- that's an actual finding of the study.

Standards and Assessments

RTT states used more standards and assessment practices than non-RTT states. Virtually all states were on the Common Core bus, but it turns out that non-RTT states were less likely to have spent a bunch of money helping school districts with the implementation.

Data Systems

No significant differences here. All states adopted these practices. The only distinguishing feature was that RTT states were more likely to be doing data collection with early childhood programs as well. Interesting, and creepy.

Teacher and Principal Certification and Evaluation Practices

RTT states were doing more of these practices, including "high-quality pathways" to the jobs as well as using test results as part of the evaluation process. Again, the assumption that these are actually a good idea is not addressed.

Nearly all states were reporting on teacher shortage areas. Perhaps that's because following your teacher shortage areas is an actual useful practice.

Also noteworthy-- RTT states were far more likely to be embracing "alternative certification pathways," as well as allowing more to be set up. This is a policy outcome that directly contradicts all the pretty talk about supporting and improving the teaching profession, because you don't support the profession by throwing your weight behind programs that de-professionalize it by suggesting that anybody with some interest and a pulse can be sent into the classroom with minimal training. And all of that goes double for principalships.

RTT states were far out in front on using test scores for evaluation; no word on whether that was primarily through the widely debunked Value-Added measures, or if some other data masseuse was being used. However, hardly anybody was using test results to make compensation or professional advancement decisions.

Oh, and all that baloney about how states were supposed to find the best teachers and shuffle them all around for maximum impact and equitable distribution of teachery swellness? If you think that ridiculous policy idea can't actually be implemented in any way shape or form, it turns out almost all states agree with you.

Turnarounds

RTT states did more of this than non-RTT states. But instead of reading this part of the report, lets pull up any of the reporting about how the School Improvement Grants, intended to fund the turnaround revolution, turned out to be an utter failure. I'm starting to realize that this study has no interest in whether or not any of these policies are actually bunk.

Charter Schools

Early RTT schools did a "better" job of implementing the RTT practices aimed at increasing the reach and market of charters. So, to repeat, the US Department of Education is actively involved in helping charter schools sweep aside public education. This is really not what I want my tax dollars to be doing, thanks. But the report reminds us that the RTT application process favored those states that would let charters grow unhindered and uncapped, free to glom up as much real estate and as many students as they could advertise their way into.

So that's our point-by-point breakdown. Let's now talk about another concern of this study.

English Language Learners-- How Did Race To The Top Work Out For Them?

ELL students were more likely to be targeted by policies in the RTT states, though within the three subgroups, there was no difference between states, even if there were demographic differences applying to ELL population.

Discussion of Findings

Still with me? God bless you. We're about 100 pages into the report and they are now going to "discuss" their findings. Some of this is not so much "discussion" as it is "redundant restatement" of findings. But there are some interesting moments, particularly in the list of Questions Raised By These Findings.

Why did RTT states show more adoption of RTT policies than non-RTT states? I'd be inclined to go with "They were being paid a pile of money to adopt them," but the study suggests that the policies could be the result of differences between the states before the RTT competition. Or maybe states implemented a bunch of this stuff as a way to compete for the RTT money.

Why don't our 2012 and 2013 data match? One of the oddities of the report is that areas where some states seemed more RTT-soaked in 2012 were not the same in 2013. The authors don't know why, though it certainly points at the limit of self-reporting.

Why isn't it possible to find a connection between RTT implementation and student test results? They lean toward two possibilities-- we can't really figure out what the pattern of achievement was before RTT happened, and we can't really separate out all the other possible factors over and above RTT that could have changed test scores in that time period.

The Rest

Then follows about seven pages of end notes, and then we're into the appendices, which is a big lumpy festival of data and graphs and the numbers we squeezed out of the interviews. Dear reader, I love you, but I am not going to dig through these 150-ish pages for you.

My Findings about Their Findings

So what are my takeaways from this piece of something?

1) They spent three years and change turning their data into a report. About what was happening three years ago.

2) They put "relationship to student outcomes" in the title, then noted immediately and repeatedly that they had absolutely nothing to say about Race to the Top's relationship to student outcomes.

3) I was not entirely fair in reducing the question to "did RTTT work?" because that's not exactly what they asked. What they mostly really asked was "Did RTTT get states to implement the policies we wanted them to implement?" At the end of the day, this study carefully dodges the far-more-important question-- are any of the policies linked to RTTT any actual damn good for educating students? What we have here is a report that carefully asks if we hit the target while carefully ignoring whether the target we're looking at was actually the right target.

Put another way, the eleven (eleven!!) members of the study group have spent 200-plus pages talking about Race To The Top as if the point of the program was not to improve education, but just to spur the adoption of certain education policies on the state level.

It's like the feds said, "Go build this apartment building according to these blueprints." And then later, after the construction period was over, the feds sent an inspector and told them, "We don't care who's living in it and if they're happy living in it and if it's a safe and comfortable place to live. Just check to see how closely the builders followed the blueprints."

Maybe this is just how government functionaries work. Maybe when you've pushed a program that has shown zero educational benefits and quite a few destructive tendencies, all you can do is evaluate it by just saying, "Well, yes, we sure built that, we did."

Race To The Top (and waiveriffic RTTT Lite) was a disastrous extension of the worst of NCLB policies that brutalized the teaching profession and demanded that states turn schools into test-centric soul-mashing data centers, all while making a tiny toy god out of bad data badly used. The best thing you can say about is that it was so bad, so disastrous, so universally indefensible that it did what no issue in the last ten years could do-- it created bipartisan Congressional will to actually do their job. It is the rotten center of Obama's shameful education legacy. And nobody really needs 267 pages to say so.

Student Suicide

I knew it was a growing issue. I didn't know it was this bad.

Between 2007 and 2014 the suicide rate for children aged 10-14 doubled. Doubled. That's according to the Center for Disease Control. If you want to put that in perspective, the rate of death by auto accident has been dropping steadily since 1999 (the beginning of the charted data), cut by more than half. In 2014, the suicide rate climbed above the death by car accident rate (homicide was lower than both, and steadily dropping). The suicide rate had held steady with a slight dip up until 2007.

I don't know why; I suspect nobody does. More fragile kids? Tougher, more unkind world? Something to do with the internet? If you tell me that Kids These Days need more grit, I swear I will reach through the internet and slap you. Just this week we had the news of an eleven year old girl who had survived freaking cancer committing suicide over bullying. And NPR has been running a series for a month entitled "A Silent Epidemic: The Mental Health Crisis in Our Schools"

There are people paying attention. In Pennsylvania, we have mandatory suicide prevention training for teachers-- all it amounts to is a run-through-it-yourself on-line slide show with a concluding quiz, but it still gets some hard information to us, which is no small thing. Mental health issues and suicide are issues that everyone has "heard something" about, and often that is bunk. And I can tell you that hoping that instincts and folk wisdom will just kick in when the moment comes-- well, that's a bad plan.

I teach in a small town school system that sits at the heart of a rural area. When you look up "All-American classic small town life" in the dictionary, you find a picture of my town. And I've been getting intermittent training about this issue for four decades, since one of our staff members' children took his own life. I've watched an old friend go through the heartbreak with the loss of his son. And not long enough ago that I can easily set it aside, one of my former yearbook editors came home for Christmas break to the family home situated on the river. They found her footprints leading out across the ice to the water; they found her body downriver many weeks later. Her parents are good, successful people. She was smart, capable, loving, goodhearted. My yearbook students, before they leave senior year, paint a block in the wall of the yearbook room. I see her block every day that I go to work.

It is easy for those of us who deal with students to think that all the drama and fraughtitude and angstiness is SOP. Life is tough and hard and has lots of sharp edges that bruise tender shins, but hey, it's always been that way and always will be and these kids will grow out of it, get over it, and be just fine. And for the majority that is still true. But not for all of them. Again, I am not prepared to say whether life has become harder to deal with or if they are less able to deal. But something has changed, and those of us who work with students have to believe that, and act accordingly.

NPR included a list of six myths, six "pointers" for dealing with this stuff as teachers offered by David Jobes, the head of Catholic University's Suicide Prevention Lab. They are kind of standard issue, much like what we get in our "training," but they are worth repeating here. Hell, they're worth repeating everywhere. Here are some things to remember.

1) Be direct. People are often afraid to talk directly about suicide, as if saying it out loud is like calling Betelgeuse. Experts say no-- just come out with it. Jobes suggests something as simple as "Sounds like you're really down, have you thought about taking your life?"

2) Depression and suicide do not go together like love and marriage. The majority of depressed people don't commit suicide. By Jobes's count, maybe half the people who commit suicide are depressed. Other mental health issues can be a factor. Or not.

3) We can prevent suicides. This is hard to think about; nobody wants the deceased student's friends telling themselves it's their fault. It isn't. There can be other signs like increased stress, insomnia, withdrawal. It's tricky, because all the signs can also occur without being signs of suicidal thoughts, however if we look at the full picture, we can sometimes see what's coming. If we pay attention and get involved, we can make a difference because--

4) Suicides do not always take place in an impulsive moment. It takes time for issues to build up that much pressure, and that can be followed by time to plan and prepare and, sometimes, drop hints like crazy about what the student has planned. They fantasize about it, collect information, drop hints to friends, make mention in class writings. They will generally not talk to parents, but to others-- they often indicate what they have in mind.

5) We've now got suicides on the books by children as young as five, and it breaks my heart just to type that, but like many problems that are overlooked, one of the issues is that we don't believe what we're seeing even as we are looking directly at. If a small child is setting off signals and you're telling yourself, "Well, it just can't be because it just can't-- not with a kid that young." Well, apparently, tragically, gut-wrenchingly, it can be.

6) Afterwards, your school needs small groups to talk and share, not a big auditorium assembly lecture.

There are many guidelines out there, and plenty of trained professionals, so get help when you need it. This is one of those issues that really shouldn't be part of a teacher's job, but we're the ones who are there, with the students, and that makes it our job. Read up on this stuff. And then just pray that the day never comes in your career that you need to know any of it.

Where the Free Market Fails

Donald Trump has proposed that we just get rid of Obamacare and replace it with free market forces. This is as original as any of his policy ideas (i.e. not at all), but it's still a bad idea because health care is like education in that the freemarket cannot possibly succeed in accomplishing what we claim to want as a society.

I'll explain in a moment, but first, let me insert my usual disclaimer that "free market" is a suspect term to begin with. At this point in human history, all markets are controlled and manipulated to some degree by the government. "Free market" is just a name for a particular type of government control. The last time there was a truly free market, a pair of humans were trading a shiny rock for a pointy stick somewhere near a cave.

Putting that aside, Trump's idea to leave health care "customers" at the mercy of the free market is nuts for the same reason that letting the free market run loose in the education sector is nuts.

Health care operating strictly on free market means that everyone gets the health care they can personally afford, which means the wealthy get great healthcare, middle class citizens (both of them) get mediocre health care, and the poor get no health care at all. People who are already sick, on whom the health care biz can never hope to make money, will also get no healthcare at all.

Because the one area where the free market will always fail is in the area of providing a good or a service to all citizens.

Milton Friedman said, "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." And there's our problem-- because there are some citizens in the country who cannot offer sufficient benefit to a company with something to sell.

It is the fundamental nature of the free market to sort customers into two groups-- those from which my business can benefit, and those from which it can not. Whether I'm making a fast-food burger, a fancy shmancy motorcar, or a pair of stereo speakers, my business plan involves saying, "We can only serve customers who are willing to pay $X.00. Anyone who isn't going to pay that will not be a customer." There is no office in this country where businesspersons are getting together and saying, "Okay, how can we best get this product into the hands of people who cannot meet our minimum price point?" The very closest we get is outfits like the phone companies, where the discussion is along the lines of, "How can we balance losing a little money up front for the promise of bleeding our customers for all the money we can get in the long run." And that's not very close.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "Sorry, but if you can't pay the price of a Lexus, you can't have a Lexus."  That's how the system by and large works.

But there is something wrong with a system that says, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to die" or, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to go to a crappy school."

It is true that there are times-- bad times, disgraceful times-- when our current health care and education systems say exactly that. But there is at least the hope that we and they can do better. But a free market system must mark some people as too poor for the product. It has to. It is absolutely guaranteed that it will.

For a free market system to work, it must figure out which part of the market it can afford to profitably serve. That means it must absolutely also determine which part of the market it is not going to serve.

Imagine if the feds went to Ford Motor Co. and said, "You must get a car sold to every family in America-- and not just a mediocre car, but a good one. Every family."

Or if the feds went to Apple and said, "You must sell every single person in America a new iPhone. You cannot turn down a single customer. Regardless of their financial resources, you must get your current new phone into their hands, without fail."

Or if the feds went to Arby's and said, "You must feed every single American lunch, every single day, no matter what they can afford to pay for, and even if they aren't very excited about eating the food on your menu."

That would be nuts. It would be bad business, and no even semi-smart business leader would tolerate it.

And yet, if you want to talk about free market education or free market health care, that is the gig-- to provide your service to every single American, regardless of what they can afford to pay (or the government can afford to pay on their behalf).

It is the most fundamental part of the mission, and the free market has absolutely no clue about how to do it. On this point, the point of serving every citizen, the free market fails, and for that reason, the free market is uniquely unfit to take on the work of providing health care or education to the country.