Making the Team

I only recently encountered this article from back in February, but it has really stuck with me. It has nothing at all to do directly with education, but it has everything to do with education. Charles Duhigg's "What Google Learned from Its Quest To Build the Perfect Team" was part of a package of articles about "reimagining the office," but there is of course a whole world of teams, including the team made up of teachers and the students in their classrooms. Yeah, maybe Google is the Evil Empire, but that doesn't mean Googlers can't find useful knowledge. So what did Google learn, and what does it mean to us as teachers?

Google for many years pursued super-groups by using what may seem like common sense-- put the best workers together and you get the best work group. Duhigg also notes that managers tried various types of group folk wisdom-- groups should socialize outside of work, introverts should be teamed with introverts. But as Google set out to figure out what made the best groups the best, researchers realized that many commonly accepted pieces of wisdom had never actually been tested.

Project Aristotle launched in 2012, a group project about group projects. The team examined all sorts of features, from male-female balance to shred hobbies to shared college background. No piece of data seemed to hold a clue. Said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Eventually, the researchers shifted their focus from the "who" of group composition to the "how" of group interaction, and that was the key. Norms, the unofficial (or semi-official) rules by which the group operated looked like the most important piece. But how to narrow down the search?

Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?

Eventually the researchers narrowed their focus on two behaviors-- good groups allowed for an balanced amount of sharing and input from all members, and good groups showed emotional sensitivity, what we might call emotional intelligence, to have a sense of how all group members were feeling. And those in turn led to the key:

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. 

Groups do well when they establish a psychologically safe environment. And that leads us to this killer paragraph in the article:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

As I said-- nothing in this article addresses education, yet the concept of psychological safety is absolutely what we need to establish in a classroom. It allows our students to connect their own humanity to the work of learning, which is one of the most critical connections to make. What purpose could there possibly be in teaching a child that Learning Stuff is a thing you do in school, not in any way connected to who you are and how you live your life.

This also, for me, puts a face and a name on what's so deeply wrong with No Excuses schools, which are all about establishing the exact opposite of a psychologically safe space. Students are instead required to live on High Alert at all times, understanding that they must bring absolutely none of their personality and inner life into the classroom, that they must learn to always wear a mask, and that they are in a space that is most decidedly unsafe.

Or grit, which denies our responsibility to establish a psychologically safe space for our students, instead demanding that they develop the "grit" and "resilience" needed to operate in a deliberately unsafe space.

This article also underlines the foolishness of imagining that there is a single set formula by which classrooms can be operated. In one portion, Duhigg tells the story of a manager who, struggling to get his team to connect, tells a highly personal story about his own health issue, even though there was nothing in the protocol that told him to take that step.

But you can no more script a perfect foolproof way to manage a group of human workers or human students, no, no more than you can hand out a foolproof script to a hundred people, telling them that if they follow the script, they can have a happy marriage.

Yes, there is sad irony here. Google spent a ton of time and money to learn that the best way for humans to work together as a team is for them to act like humans with each other. Well, the best kind of humans-- the supportive, open, messy, honest, listening real kind.

There is no difference between those work groups and a classroom. We have to see the humans, listen to the humans, be open to the humans, love the humans that are in those classrooms with us. Insisting that they strip off their true authentic selves at the door and wear a fake mask-- insisting in fact that the fashioning and wearing of the big fake mask is what education is all about-- that's just wrong. And not just morally or ethically wrong, but it-gets-lousy-results wrong.

And of course now, more than ever, our students need to have a safe place. They need to know that our classroom is a safe place to be who they are, even if it feels like the whole rest of the country is not safe for them.

This is how we make a team. By sitting down as real live humans together, open and listening to each other. And you know it's true, because Google says so.

Teaching in Trump's America

And let's face it-- we had to face the prospect of a Trumpified America whether he won tonight or not. Now it's just that much more real, more powerful.

And I still have to go to school and teach in it (especially now that my retirement fund is worth about $1.50).

I teach 11th grade English, which means it's my job to teach about American literature and the culture that it reflects. This has always been a challenge, because our history and our culture has never been black or white or even grey-- it's more like a mottled black and white mess, a cascading Jenga mess of yin and yang, a beautiful warm rich loaf of bread with a dead rat baked into one end. Here are our forefathers-- on the one hand, they did these awesome things, and on the other hand, they did these other terrible things.

But this has always been the story for me-- as a nation, we have set out ideals and principles that we can't live up to, at least not yet, but we still try to move in that direction, and over time, we get closer and closer. The arc of the universe, and all that.

I don't know how to talk about this with my students. Hell, I don't know how to talk about the country with my students. I'm not puzzling over a pedagogical choice. It's that my image of us as a nation, my concept of who we are, which has been teetering on the edge for about two years of this endless shitstorm, has finally overbalanced and fallen onto the floor, pieces slamming in every direction.

I want to be able to tell my black students, my brown students, my gay students, my female students that I'm sorry, that this giant F you delivered directly at them is not what this country is, except that, of course, we just elected this guy, and apparently this is what this country is. I've watched the gleeful raised fist, the angry yell, the happy anticipation of telling Those Damned  [fill in the blank with your favorite Other] that they can go straight to hell and we are just going to stick it to them now, you betcha. As I contemplate tomorrow's work day, I have to wonder things like how my coworker who is spending the night at a "Build That Fucking Wall!" party will interact with our co-worker whose husband, the father of her child, whose wedding we all attended, is Hispanic.

This election has stripped us all of so much. While I am generally perceived as liberal or progressive, the fact is that I come from a conservative background and there are many conservative principles that matter to me-- yet I saw the GOP leaders abandon virtually every principle they ever pretended to have. I have been churched most of my life-- heck, spent many years as a church choir director-- and I have been astonished to see Christians jettison beliefs that they have supposedly-- but apparently falsely-- held for ages, just so they can-- I don't know. Win? And the Democrats, my own adopted party (you can't vote in primaries as an independent here) have continued to prove that they get stupider and stupider every time, dropping their principles and constituents so that they, too, can get their hands on big piles of money. I hope that this will finally be enough of a shock to wake them the hell up.

How can it be that there are so few people of principle in American public life? What the hell is wrong with us as a nation?

At long last, does anybody have any shame at all?

Apparently not. Every base undisciplined racist impulse that ever sat beneath the surface of this country is now free and loose, with state governments like the asshats in North Carolina bragging about how they kept black people from voting to all the small-time bigots and fools who now feel free to indulge their worst selves. My nephew's girlfriend, my niece and nephew, and a whole bunch of other people who aren't white can expect to be harassed even more often.

Jesus? Screw him-- better to slap down Those People and put them in their place. Love is for people like me, not Those People, and kindness is only for people that I approve of. That's what He said, right? What better way to re-establish America as a Christian nation than to elect the least Christian man to ever run for office (including that old Jewish guy).

Democracy? Don't need it-- just a Fearless Leader on whose words we can just hang today (and forget tomorrow). Let's face it-- some people just don't deserve to have a say. People with not-quite-white skin. People with vaginas.

Facts? Expertise? Understanding? That's for Those People. Just go with whatever feels good right now.

Yeah, yeah-- I know. I get it. The Democrats utterly failed to present an alternative to Herr Trump. The USA is rife with grievances that are routinely and completely ignored by the Powers That Be. And the USA is also rife with people who don't do their homework and settle for whatever ragesoaked molotov cocktail is tossed into the parlor. Both parties and the thugs who hang on the political scrim, hoping for a slice of fame and fortune-- they've been trying for years to play the game of steering the herd by stampeding it with a steady diet of fear and panic, and they've done a great job. Well, a great job with the panic and fear. Not so great with the steering.

I also get that plenty of reasonably thoughtful and generally decent people held their nose and voted for Der Fuhrer. To you folks, all I can say is that I hope you speak up. I hope you get out your megaphone and holler, "I voted for you because you are the lesser of two evils, but you'd better start being a lot less evil, and soon." I was prepared to be a complete pain in the ass to my candidate if she was elected; I hope you are prepared to do the same. I can live with "lesser of two evil" votes, but you don't get to say, "Well, I made my decision strictly on policy, and I didn't pay any attention to that other stuff" any more than you get to walk past a mugging and say, "Well, that's not my problem."

Trump will be a disappointment to his followers and an embarrassment to the country. Fine. We've been there before. But he's also dangerous and a source of encouragement to dangerous people. This will be the ugliest bully pulpit ever. My America was never perfect when it came to being inclusive, loving, welcoming, supportive, and built on community, but at least it held onto those as ideals. I do not know how to wrap my head around an America that is so open about hatred, aggressive about exclusion, violently and deliberately unkind.

Maybe that's first step. Maybe we get all of our ugliest impulses out in public and are thereby forced to confront them, deal with them. Maybe. I fear there will be a lot of violence, a lot of destruction, a lot of death before we get there.

In the meantime, how I do I do my job in this version of America, where might makes right and abuse is a virtue, where folks have really, truly lost sight of what Jesus had to say, who are not even trying to understand then intent of the framers and founders.

In a weird way, I suppose the last fifteen years have been a sort of warmup, a sort of dress rehearsal of that new show, "How To Keep Teaching When A Top-Down Prescriptive Bureaucracy Is Trying To Force You To Commit Malpractice." We're teachers, and many of us already know how to defy authority. Maybe we were getting ready for this.

And of course for some folks, literally nothing has changed at all. There is no new ugliness-- just the same old ugliness without a pretty mask or snappy suit. Just ugly and vicious like always, but now naked of any pretense. We can probably learn some lessons from those folks.

To my Trump-voting friends and associates, I'm not mad-- well, yeah, actually, I am pretty pissed at you right this moment, but it will probably pass. But please-- when it turns out he's lied to you about, well, everything, do not expect me to sympathize. Over the next four years I will have ample opportunity to say I told you so, and it's unlikely that I'll hold my tongue. But at the moment, my anger does not run as deep as my heartbreak (which, as I said, has been grinding away for the last two years) and loss and confusion, because I just don't know what country I live in any more. I don't know what this country stands for. I don't know what we value as a nation or a culture.

I don't know how to teach my students about us. I don't know how to prepare them to go out into this new, uglier America.

The next days are going to be awful, ugly, just plain bad. Keep your heads down, brothers and sisters. Watch out for each other, and cast an eye toward the future. I don't know who we are any more, but we have to be better than this.

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.