Betsy DeVos-- Secretary of Education

According to the Washington Post, according to an associate of DeVos, Betsy DeVos will be Victor Von Trump's choice as Secretary of Education.

It's important to remember that we've known we were never going to get a half-decent Secretary of Education, and that it was always only a question of what form the shafting of American public education would take.

I'm going to hold your hand right over there so it doesn't try any grabbing

So what do we know about DeVos?

* She is an absolutely conventional choice. Once again, if Trump supporters thought that he was going to tap someone outside the box to really shake up the establishment, they will be disappointed. DeVos has long been a supporter of Jeb Bush and his work and is a solid insider among the deep-money GOP crowd. She's a member of the board of Jeb's Foundation for Educational Excellence. She would, in fact, have had a good shot at the position if Jeb! had been elected (Jeb just called her an "outstanding pick" on facebook.)

* She is a big believer in Betterocracy, the form of government in which the people who are just better than everyone else take charge. You can usually spot your betters because they have more money than you do.

* She is a leader of the American Federation for Children, a dark money group that works school privatization. AFC is also a trustee-level member of ALEC, which means when you see ALEC pushing privatization, you will find the DeVos fingerprints on their work.

* The DeVos family tree includes, as you will read countless times, Betsy's father-in-law who made a mint from direct-marketing giant Amway, and brother Eric Prince, who was behind the infamous private security company Blackwater. The DeVos family is a Koch-level supporter of conservative advocacy groups and thinky tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, Focus on the Family, FreedomWorks Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation.

* DeVos was a big backer of Scott Walker, helping to finance his recall fight.

* DeVos has been disastrously powerful in Michigan, where their money helped push the emergency manager law that has allowed the state to suspend democracy for select cities and schools. She helped created the Great Lakes Education Project, which has fought hard for charters and against unions (and most recently suggested that Detroit schools just be shut down). The DeVos disdain for unions (it is so unseemly when the help get uppity) put them in the successful fight to make Michigan a right-to-work (for whatever we tell you to work for) state. The DeVos money is spread liberally throughout the Michigan legislature.

* While it may seem that DeVos is a charterization fan, what she would really like is vouchers, with the prospect of shuffling public tax dollars to private religious schools, new for-profit charters, and pretty much anything except public schools.

* While some choice charter fans call for a robust marketplace balanced with careful oversight to stomp on bad actors, DeVos prefers to let the wisdom of the markets rule and for little or no state or federal oversight be the rule. This has interesting implications for ESSA; the new law includes calls for federal oversight, but if the fed's attitude is, "Yeah, whatever, do what you want," the options available to states will become really large and, in some cases, really scary.

* In keeping with her Station in Life, DeVos has never held down an actual job. She graduated around 1980 with a business and poli sci degree, and a little less than a decade later she and her husband set up an investment management group for her to run. In the meantime, she became active as a political operative and party leader in Michigan.

* It will be no surprise that DeVos has never worked in education, and her children never attended (as near as I can discover) public school. 

* If you can stomach it, here is Dick DeVos explaining how public education can be starved, broken, and replaced with a money-making business.

DeVos's feelings about Common Core are not clear, really. She's a friend of Jeb, but she also runs with the hard right "kill it with" fire Common Core haters. No question that more stories will come tumbling out-- as they do, pay attention to folks in Michigan who have been getting beaten up by this family for decades.

But she would rather privatize public education than help it, she would like to make teachers unions a thing of the past, and she has a deep sense of her own rightness. Chalkbeat also offers the observation that DeVos is used to buying her way into policy victories, and as Secretary she wouldn't be able to just write a check to get everyone to do her will. Or maybe she could. We don't really know if that's not okay in Trumplandia or not.

Well, we knew it wouldn't be pretty. Now we can start to get a sense of just what kind of ugly it's going to be.

Pearson Hurt By Common Core

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal reports that Pearson bet big on Common Core and came up snake eyes or triple lemons or whatever gambling metaphor for losing your prefer.

The Journal article (it's behind a paywall but if you squint real hard, you can read it through the "don't you want to subscribe" haze) says that two factors led to losses for the edu-biz giant-- one self-inflicted, and one market-driven.

The self-inflicted injury was Pearson's inability to "develop and deliver new digital courses on time." A big part of Pearson's plan was to produce and sell digital Common Core curriculum, but after investing more than $125 million, they are three years behind schedule and have not yet "produced returns." The project has been run by a "academic" with no tech experience who is trying to design an entire curriculum to be run through tablets. It is not going well. Says the Journal, "Her vision sometimes clashed with technological realities." Because, of course, the educational quality and content has to be made to fit the tech, not the other way around. Pearson says it's confident that soon the product will be ready, on market, and making tons of money. Oh, and they've taken the word "Common" out of the name-- it will now be the "Pearson System of Courses."

The market-driven injury was, of course, the huge backlash against the Common Core and the Big Standardized Tests that were supposed to come along with the standards. Pearson bet big on the testing and watched themselves get chased out of many states as parents, teachers, students, and sentient beings with more than a rudimentary brain stem saw the tests and saw that they were not good.

As one of the biggest and most visible profiteering corporations associated with Common Core reforms, Pearson has taken a lot of the heat for the botched Standards-and-Test movement. Back in January, Ian Whittaker, an analyst with Liberian Capital Ltd. said, "The simple fact is that Pearson's brand is politically toxic in the United States." Pearson, which has busily inserted itself into just about every part of the education sector, disagreed. But meanwhile, Pearson's PARCC test has been booted from over half the original PARCC states, so the $2 billion that Pearson had planned to make from PARCC over eight years isn't going to happen.

But as Pearson is wont to believe, numbers don't lie. And the numbers says that Pearson share prices have declined 32% over three years, with a spectacular revenue drop  of 7% in the first half of 2016.

No word from the Journal about how Pearson's long-term plan to digitize everything and eat all the data in the world is coming. But on many other fronts, Pearson is having a rough couple of years. It couldn't happen to a nicer multi-national corporation.

Trump's Naked Normal

People keep reposting the latest Trumpian shenanigans and saying, "This is not normal." On the one hand, I get what they're saying. On the other hand, as I've watched this administration unfold like a pile of maggots bursting out of a rotting deer carcass, it's dawning on me that Trump is actually normal. Fully normal. Nakedly normal.

As Jon Stewart pointed out, we don't really live in a new America. This is the same country that elected Barack Obama, the same country that existed a month ago. There is not much happening that has not happened before-- it's just that now it is naked. From "Christians" who don't remember anything from the Bible except "Abortion is bad" to "Progressives" who think he may work out after all, Trump has exposed a great deal of hypocrisy and base motives previously hidden behind pretty dressing. Trump has somehow ripped off the new clothes and dared anyone to pretend they still see them.

My first clue was back during the campaign. Trump didn't really do anything, say anything, campaign on any point that other GOP candidates had not already done. But where some GOP stalwarts would try to be racist or misogynistic through complicated dogwhistles or clever wink-wink nudge-nudge rhetoric, Donald J. Trump just said, "What the hell. Let's just say it. Those Mexicans are after your job and they look pretty dangerous and rapey. And we'd be better off if we just made all the Muslims go away and stay away. Oh, and let's just keep 'em out with something big and simple-- a big ass wall. And everything will happen the way I say it will because I'll just make it happen that way."

GOP candidates were stymied because nothing they had to offer was an actual contrast to Trump's plans. He was simply trotting out naked what they had tried to imply. And in the process, he just made them seem weak and fuzzy. Where they would either try to diplomatically include all citizens or even tried to respect the nuance of complex issues, Trump just said, "Screw it. If we agree that Hillary is awful, let's just plan to throw her ass in jail. You hate ISIS? I hate ISIS! Let's not make this complicated-- I'll just bomb the shit out of them." Let's not inch down this hill; let's take our foot off the brakes and really lean into hateful lunacy.

The GOP wanted to have their white cake and eat it, too, but Trump just said, "Hell with it. I'm just going to eat all the cake and I'm not going to pretend I care about leaving crumbs for everyone else."

My second clue was his approach to education and the scramble he touched off in reformster land. Supposedly progressive reformsters have promoted charters "for the kids" and to bring about social justice. Supposedly conservative reformsters have promoted charters because the magical free market makes things work better. Trump has simply ripped the covers off all pretenses. "There's a bunch of money locked up in the government monopoly," he says. "Let's crack open that market so that companies have a chance to make some money." And now reformsters are finding ways to decide that the previously-odious Trump is maybe not so bad after all. They can have everything they want (except, maybe, Common Core) as long as they're willing to give up the pleasant fiction that the charter revolution has any principles behind it other than "I would like some of that mountain of money for myself."

Once you start to realize that Trump is about the status quo-- not in new clothes, but in no clothes at all-- it seems kind of obvious.

Someone (I've lost the link) argued that Trump's fascism has swept aside neo-liberalism. Nonsense. Fascism and neo-liberalism get along just fine. Trump is neo-lib all the way. Health care? Let people deal with it with their own personal health care account. Pensions? Same thing. Plenty of money in both for entrepreneurs interested in managing all that money. That infrastructure plan turns out not to be a revival of FDR's New Deal, but a scam for funneling all public works projects through private investors so that they can feast on tax dollars. And schools, of course. Trump is ramping up to privatize everything, to turn every government into a generator of profits for the private companies that will take them over. Is that hard on poor people? So what? Who cares? Trump is leaning into the same neo-liberalism beloved by Bush and Obama-- he just isn't bothering to pretend that it's anything but a business maneuver.

Even in the little things, Trump is more naked than new. Should we be outraged that he will use the office of the President to enhance his private industry. I suppose so, but I have a hard time getting worked up over this one-- for decades our government folks, elected and appointed, have conducted their work with an eye on their own profit and advancement. They've just tried to be smooth and discrete about it, but Citizens United simply ramped it up-- all of our representatives are busy enhancing their own financial standing, and they're open to being hired by God-knows-who, with payday coming every year there's an election to get ready for. As in many things, Trump hasn't said "Let's change the game" so much as he's said, "If we're going to do this, let's really DO it."

Ditto for racism and misogyny. These are not new things, either in DC or the rest of the country. It's just that Trump, unlike Nixon or LBJ, is not trying to pretend that these aren't a huge part of how many folks operate in this country. Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon weren't born yesterday; they just kept their heads down and we all got to pretend that such ugly, ignorant, racist jackasses weren't part of the US political landscape.

Favoring whiteness, maleness and Christianity over other parts of the American tapestry? Check, check, and check-- it's just usually we're more...subtle....about it.

Certainly his rogues gallery of appointments doesn't mark anything new or different. It's shaping up to be yet more guys who represent the same old monied and power interests, but who lack the grace or cleverness to conceal their venality.

His one unique quality might be his extraordinarily thin skin and a mouth that can move quickly, unconnected as it is to any anchoring brain or thoughtfulness. Still, I don't know-- is it better to squawk anger on twitter, or to command the FBI to start keeping an enemies file on everyone you would otherwise squawk at. Exactly how much love has our government thrown at the First Amendment in the last several decades.

Don't get me wrong. Trump is an indefensible asshat, a lazy con artist and a spirited liar, no more fit for the Presidency than a rabid sewer rat.

But I am coming to believe more and more that his difference is one of finesse, not substance. We are used to having our politicians piss on us and tell us it's raining. Donald Trump just pisses on us and declares, "This is the best piss ever. A great piss. A huge piss."

It remains to be seen how quickly the realization will spread among his followers that they have gotten the same old same old, just without a pretty bow. It may be ugly, or they may forgive him. Certainly the "hold your nose and vote" crowd are already sick of seeing Trumplandia in all its naked glory. I'm not prepared to make any prediction yet, other than his faithful are not going to get what they wanted (and that, too, is nothing new-- check with the evangelicals that Bush II used and discarded, or the progressives who lost all faith in Obama). We'll see how it all plays out.

In the meantime, here's the task for the rest of us. Maybe the horrible features of Trumplandia seem worse because they're in plain sight; maybe they're worse because air is helping them grow. Maybe it's some combination of the two. But I think maybe we need to start looking at the ways that a Trump administration is not really very different at all from business as usual. The next few years will be a great chance to practice resistance and pushing back against an administration that will be obvious and clumsy at every turn. I hope that we are wise enough to keep those skills handy when Trump's successor returns us to "normal," a land where all of the same bad policies, ugly prejudices, and indefensible abuses keep on thriving-- just back under their pretty clothes. Because if we look at Trump's latest outrage and said, "No other real politician would ever do something so awful," we are kidding ourselves (Exhibit A: Mike Pence). Other politicians might dress it up better and make it prettier.

Trump has no idea what would make America great; the best of us had damned well better remember. There is much that is beautiful and strong and generous and awesome about this country and its people, much in which to take pride. We are, on our best days, a good and great people, varied and rich, decent and given to a kind of gut-level genius for finding ways to rise and advance with a deep voice filled with such glorious variety. We have let our nation's politics become infected with ugliness, venality, and the least admirable impulses we know. Trumplandia will show us all of the worst of us in its raw, naked ugliness. If there is anything good to come out of the next years, let it be that we learn to recognize that ugly naked normal so well that it will never again be able to hide behind nice clothes.

Dear Dan Rather

Dear Dan:

I just noticed your post on Facebook in which you said

Some disasters hit us with a sudden and unexpected fury like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. But some boil beneath the surface wreaking destruction without enough of us paying attention.

If you want to see the hair on the back of my neck stand up in anger ask me about one such disaster - our support for public education. 

Please excuse me as I vent for a moment but If you aren't troubled by the state of public education in America - from kindergarten through college - you should be. If you really believe in making America great you should double down on the best investment in our social compact. I regret to say that Donald Trump, his close advisors, and many in Congress seem to be charting a course in the exact opposite direction. 

I don't understand why public education has become such a polarizing issue. It wasn't that way when I was growing up or even for much of my life. But take my home state of Texas, where a Republican state legislature has set about to willfully and systematically decimate the state"s schools and public universities with cuts and politicized curricula on issues like history and science. 

Now I read today that 70 percent of high school students aren't ready for college. 70 percent! Please check the story below from The Dallas Morning News in which business leaders in low-tax, pro-business Texas say the lack of spending on public schools is a long term recipe for disaster, or as they put it, "not a sustainable model" to keep the economy humming. Shame on anyone who won't listen to reason on this issue. We are living in a world where we need more knowledge of science and math and global cultures but we seem to be losing ground. 

We are creating a workforce that's unskilled, ill-trained and ready to lead this country nowhere. The story from Dallas has some wonderful reporting. 

But there's another aspect to a poor education that is unfortunately reflected more and more in our country, and that is the rise of hate. It was the noted American author and educator Hellen Keller who said "the highest result of education is tolerance." I might add understanding as well. As the recent election has brought into stark relief, we are quickly coming to the point where we have two different Americas. One educated, and one, not so much. And that growing group of under-educated young people is fertile ground for the rise of an enormous and angry underclass, an underclass that is being recruited heavily by hate groups. 

I lay the blame at the doorsteps of state houses across the country. They can't have it both ways. Either pay for a quality education, or be prepared to pay the consequences. We have enough challenges in this country. Why are we creating another one?

(Emphasis all mine) I think I can answer some of your questions.

I'm a public school teacher who's been in the classroom for over 35 years. These past few years, I've devoted a great deal of my time to trying to sort out what exactly is happening to us. What I can tell you is that you are seeing part of the picture-- but only part.

For instance, your "only 70% are ready for college" factoid. As someone who covered the Vietnam War, you should know that all numbers are suspect. This sort of figure has been kicking around for several years now, and as is the case with the article you linked to, that assertion is always based on student scores on standardized tests. The problem? Nobody has ever produced any evidence that a particular test score equals college readiness (and really, how could it? how do you measure college readiness, and is it the same for a future music major at a community college, a physics major at Harvard, and a welding student at a technical school?)

Why declare that our students are failing? Why is education increasingly contentious and polarizing?

Short answer: because the US education sector covers $600 billion worth of activity, and profiteers want a piece of it. Enter disaster capitalism. Because we can't demand a solution if there's no crisis.

So folks who want a slice of the education pie look for crises. Let's come up with figures that show schools are failing is one of the mildest. It's funny you should mention Hurricane Katrina, because ed reform fans like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan greeted Katrina as a "great thing," because it created a crisis to which privatized education was the proposed solution. And in cities where privatizers are not willing to wait, school spending has been dropped so that public schools can collapse (e.g. Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit). As you've noted, real dollar school funding has dropped in many states, which has added to many school district's woes..

The privatizing of education (like push behind the military-industrial complex, like the infrastructure crisis, like the drive to privatize health care funding and pension accounts) requires a crisis, some parts real and some parts manufactured, followed by a "solution" of bringing in private interests to get rich on public tax dollars.

And so in public education, we are constantly under attack by folks intent on showing that teachers stink, schools are failing, and the only possible solution is to bring in free market solutions. I would not for one moment contend that all is hunky dory in public education, and it is unquestionably less so every year as more crises are manufactured and jump-started by these folks. Of course we are polarized.

The questions citizens and journalists should be asking in every instance are as follows:

1) Is this crisis real? Is someone playing games with numbers? Did government create this crisis through funding or policy choices?

2) Did we consider all possible solutions, or did we just jump straight to "give a bunch of money to private operators to magically fix this"? Because the fact that we have a problem (and we have many in public education) does not automatically mean that the proposed solution is a real solution.

If you'd like further briefing on what is happening in education, I'd be happy to talk to you myself or to direct you to other folks wiser than I who can further explicate this mess. As you have noticed, "let's take taxpayer dollars and give them to some private contractors to work on this" looks to be a popular "solution" under the Trump administration, and it would benefit us all to look a little more closely at that sort of plan. Yours would be a useful voice to add to the discussion.

Sincerely,

Peter Greene

MI: State Tells Students To Get Lost (If you can read this, don't thank Gov. Snyder)

Last September, seven Detroit school children filed suit against the state of Michigan for depriving those children of an actual education. The state's defense is... well, not encouraging.

Let's dispense with the obvious first. While I don't have a lot of background on the case, I'm going to guess that the seven school children didn't save their lunch money and then put in a call to California law firm Public Counsel. Nor do I think these seven precocious urchins said, "Perhaps you could use our situation to establish a heretofore unestablished constitutional right to an education in the US, using our case to break new grounds in jurisprudence. Can we be done in time to watch Spongebob?" One actual fun note though-- while most of the plaintiffs are public school students, one is a student from a now-defunct charter. At any rate, I guess this is how important lawsuits are filed these days.

Here's what one plaintiff, Jamarria Hall, has to say:

I have friends who can’t read, but it’s not because they aren’t smart, it’s because the State has failed them. I feel like Governor Snyder doesn’t care about me or my friends. We stood up for ourselves and wrote letters asking him to fix our school. But he never gave us a response.

And here's what the class action lawsuit has to say:

Decades of State disinvestment in and deliberate indifference to the Detroit schools have denied Plaintiff schoolchildren access to the most basic building block of education: literacy. Literacy is fundamental to participation in public and private life and is the core component in the American tradition of education. But by its actions and inactions, the State of Michigan’s systemic, persistent, and deliberate failure to deliver instruction and tools essential for access to literacy in Plaintiffs’ schools, which serve almost exclusively low-income children of color, deprives students of even a fighting chance.

The lawsuit also contains some plainer language:

Instead of providing students with a meaningful education and literacy, the state simply provides buildings — many in serious disrepair — in which students pass days and then years with no opportunity to learn to read, write or comprehend,

Lawyers on the case include Evan Caminker, former dean of the University of Michigan Law school. Their basic argument, building on Brown v Board of Education is that the students have a constitutional right to an education, specifically, to an education that produces literacy.

Last week the state and Governor Rick Snyder fired back with a sixty-three page motion to dismiss the case. Their arguments are several, each just as appalling as the last:

* "Claims laid out by plaintiffs — including deplorable building conditions, lack of books, classrooms without teachers, insufficient desks, buildings plagued by vermin, unsafe facilities and extreme temperatures — go far beyond mere access to education." Right-- because even if you are in a collapsing building surrounded by rats and without a teacher or books, that doesn't mean you don't have access to education. Somehow? Through the ether maybe?

* This suit constitutes “attempt to destroy the American tradition of democratic control of schools.” This is a particularly hilarious argument from the state of Michigan, where the legislature has come up with a variety of ways to destroy democratic local control of both schools and entire cities. Detroit schools have been run by an "emergency manager" since 2009, though they have currently been upgraded to a "transition manager," but like many various previously-democratic bastions of local control, they have seen the state emergency manage them right out of democracy (yes, it was an emergency manager that brought us the Flint water crisis). Governor Snyder also tried the Education Achievement Authority, Michigan's version of the Achievement School District that failed in Tennessee. It failed in Michigan, too. But it did completely override the local authority of democratically-elected school boards. For the state of Michigan and its governor to paint themselves as champions of democratic local control requires big brass cojones the size of Great Lakes tankers. This is the fox speaking out in favor of better henhouses. It is Grade A baloney.

* But let's get right down to it. Students, says the state of Michigan, have no fundamental right to literacy. I don't even know how you follow that up. We provide schools just as a favor, but we don't expect them to actually do anything? We provide schools because the voters expect us to, but the minute their backs are turned we drop that whole education thing like a hot, smelly rock? How does that work as a state slogan? Michigan: If you want to read this sign, that's not our problem.

* Also, just for extra fun, the state threw in a dash of, "Hey, we don't actually run these schools (except for the ones that we took over), so it's not our fault."

I suppose they could have also thrown in, "Shut up! You didn't provide literacy education!"

But doesn't this just make Michigan look great. Michigan, where non-wealthy non-white folks aren't entitled to an education, to non-toxic drinking water, to much of anything.

Look, there's no question that Michigan and Detroit face some tough financial struggles. But damn-- how can you just keep going to the solution of, "We'll let all the poor people just go pound sand. It's hard to run this city and this state, so we'll stop running or financing the parts that don't really affect us." Not one of the officials responsible for the ugly mess that is Detroit schools would send their own children into these schools, but they will now fight tooth and nail their legislative and bureaucratic right to force Other People's Children into those wretched, squalid schools. How any of these people get out of bed each morning without being crippled by the weight of their own shame is a mystery to me.

 

Real Teacher Accountability

Reformsters repeatedly circle back around to the question of teacher accountability. If we give up evaluation system and test-based data and methods for turning professional development into a beautiful array of mini-competency-badges, they worry, how will we ever hold teachers accountable for doing a good job? How will taxpayers know they're getting their money's worth?

I know one good model for teacher accountability, a model that I can testify works, because it's the one I have worked with for almost forty years. It's simple, effective, and costs the school district nothing.

My school district is a small town/rural combo. We're based in a city of about 6,000 and encompass several contiguous townships. We have just over 1900 students enrolled, of whom a little over 50% are economically disadvantaged, spread over 188 square miles.

I graduated from the same high school I teach in. That was not the plan, exactly-- just how things kind of worked out. And like most (though not all) of my colleagues, I live within the district, a resident of the same town in which I grew up. Right in the city, in fact, across the street from the district's main office.

We have, of course, all the usual trappings of 'accountability," from an idiotic VAM system (PVAAS, in Pennsylvania) to a bad standardized test and an ever-morphing state model for how my principal is supposed to keep an eye on me. None of that is what keeps me honest. I would point to two things that have driven my accountability (beyond the fact that, like most teachers, I'm highly self-motivated to do the best job I can-- in my experience almost no people go into teaching with the intent to half-ass it).

First, teaching is a self-policing line of work because the worse you do, the more miserable you are. Every teacher has been through it-- the day when you are waaayyyyy off your A game, and consequently the day seems to go on for a hundred hours, each hour more unpleasant than the last. There are lots of jobs in which you can sit quietly in your office or cubby or break room and just hide from the consequences of doing a lousy job. But teaching is the equivalent of a job where the supervisor follows you around every minute of the day and, every time you screw something up, whacks you on the head. Do a lousy job in the classroom, and the classroom will punish you immediately and ruthlessly. Do a lousy job day after day, week after week, and your students will make you wish you had never been born. You get good or you get out.

Second, you live where you work.

To one side of my house is a home where a guy I went to high school with is raising his three children, who all attend my school. To the other side is a married couple, both halves of which graduated from my school. The garage where I get my car serviced is run by a guy I went to school with, and his chief mechanic is a former student (whose kids attend the school where my wife teaches). My wife and I often eat at a restaurant run by my son-in-law's brother, a graduate of my school. Some of my teaching colleagues are former students; some of their children are my current students. Back when I was a church choir director, my choir included former classmates, former students, and parents of current students. I cannot walk into any business in this town and not encounter someone who is familiar with my work. Ditto for the folks I encounter when I play in town band or work with community theater. I'm not a member of any fraternal organization, but the same thing holds true of membership in those organizations.

I know some teachers would find this sort of thing terrifyingly claustrophobic, and there's no question that at some times it can feel a little fishbowly. But the flip side is that I understand my students a little better, understand their language, their attitudes, their history (and trust me-- there's nothing quite like dealing with a student whose parents you knew when you were all sixteen years old).

I don't mean to suggest that we teachers are subject to rock star caliber scrutiny. But do people in our district know the kind of work that we do and have opinions about specifically who does a good job and who doesn't, every teacher's strengths and weaknesses? You bet they do. Meanwhile, if you're going to teach in a small town setting, you'd better be prepared to answer for your choices at any moment of the day. It's a different sort of transparency, all the better because it doesn't tell the taxpayers what they are supposed to care about. Modern reformster accountability calls for transparency, but it also tells parents, taxpayers and government folks "This is what you want to see."

So what if local folks aren't concerned about the things the state says they're supposed to be concerned about? What if locals say, "Yes, that Mrs. McFuzzyheart has long been everyone's favorite first grade teacher because she is so kind and makes the children feel strong and capable and secure and loved," and the state says, "Yes, but what about the first grade math test scores??!!" Is there any particular reason that the federal or state's preferences should overrule the judgment of the local community? My community, which is pretty static, population-wise, has a pretty good longitudinal view. Folks know what kinds of opportunities their kids grew up to have, and they have a pretty good idea of how much the schools had to do with those outcomes.

But the modern model is distance management. I've had private industry folks tell me about management classes in which they're told that business managers should live at least fifty miles away from their employees, so that they can make purely business decisions without any human distractions. Distance management by data screen is a popular model, and yet it gets you pretty much the exact opposite of real accountability.

I feel far more accountable to my community than to the state bureaucrats because I will have to meet community members on the street, see them in the grocery store, and look them in the eye knowing that they probably know my worst and my best.

Of course, none of this will generate data on spreadsheets or a method of comparing me to teachers across the state. So what? Granted, I am well into Crusty Old Fart stage of my career, but I could not care less about how the state ratings turn out (PVAAS is as accurate and predictable as rolling dice on the back of a horny toad under a full moon, anyway). State tests are an obstacle thrown in my students' path, a useless exercises that has to be gamed every year, but otherwise, who cares? On the other hand, I face the taxpayers who pay my salary, who entrust their children to me, who remember how much of an ass I was or wasn't when they were in my class-- I face those people every day. At this point in my career, I conduct myself primarily so that I can face myself in the mirror (I remember the times when I couldn't, and they suck) but also that I can face every one of them today and tomorrow and the next day.

Should all teachers be of the community and in the community? Probably not-- some fresh outside eyes are good. But bottom line-- the best accountability system is based on relationship. I don't feel accountable to my spouse or children because of some system of threats or punishment, but because our relationship means that I will feel consequences for how I treat them.

And are their challenges in places where the community is fractured or has already turned its back on some of its own members? Certainly. A school reflects its community. A sick, fractured community gets sick, fractured schools. 

But the best accountability system for educators is still a strong relationship with the school community. It may not serve many needs of bureaucrats or policy wonks, but it serves the needs of the school, the community and the students. Build a formal digitized number-spewing accountability system if you must, but if relationships are not at its heart, you'll end up with nothing but empty, useless, meaningless faux data.

Deasy To Start Newest New Conversation

Oh, those new conversations. Reformsters have been calling for them for years. back in the fall of 2014, new conversations were all the rage. There were plenty of reasons to be doubtful-- the old conversation had been mostly about how teachers had screwed everything up and should just sit down and shut up and listen to their betters. That, and the desire for a new conversation seemed to be linked to the drubbing that Common Core and the attendant testocracy were taking in the public square. "Maybe we should just talk about this," is so commonly spoken by people who are winning.

Then there was Education Post, the twelve-million dollar "war room" PR operation that reformsters like Eli Broad wanted to use to get their message out there, apparently feeling that guys like me blogging for free in our spare time were somehow unfairly silencing the billionaire investors in education. Education Post was going to start a "new conversation," but their logo gave away the game-- all megaphone, no ears.  Education Post has its purpose and its goal and its budget, and Peter Cunningham, who runs the place, is an experienced guy who knows how to do the job he's been hired to do, and that's all well and good, but in its two years of existence, Ed Post has made it clear that actually having a conversation is not its primary purpose. They have their moments, but mostly they are there to push a particular reformy point of view. When Campbell Brown opened up her education website, she was at least honest about her intent to advocate for her point of view.

So whither the New Conversation?

Oddly enough, there are plenty of conversations out there. Individuals on all sides of the ed debates have found ways to interact and talk to each other like civilized human beings, and without having to give up their convictions to do it. It's pretty cool. Folks should give it a try. But that's just individual conversations, not connected to any particular central platform. Will we ever have our new conversation platform?

Fear not-- in just a few months, Dr. John Deasy, formerly the face that launched several million dollars' worth of disasters in the Los Angeles United School District, will be editor-in-chief of The Line, "a print and digital publication for K-12 education leaders."

The Line endeavors to share information and ideas from educators for educators to encourage civil discourse and action around the most challenging issues facing our nation's schools. 

What does Deasy know about being the editor of a journal/newspaper/PR rag? Presumably nothing. But he's got... name recognition? And after all-- once he bombed out of the LAUSD superintendent job, Eli Broad hired him for the Broad Fake Superintendent Academy.

This new publication is a project of the Frontline Research and Learning Institute, which is in turn a division of Frontline Education. Frontline Education is in the software biz, and boasts 7,500 districts as customers. Their focus appears to be less on educating students and more on managing human resources, with software for managing absences and providing "actionable data." (Some day I want to find someone who is selling "inert, inactive data"). They offer advice about hiring and firing and even have a white paper (some day I want people to start issue green papers and purple papers) about the state of the teacher shortage.

Back in may, FRLI was proud to announce that it had added all sorts of "leading national K-12 education voices" to their advisory council, which mostly meant consultants, human resource officers, plus a couple of college professors, because FRLI is also a collaborative project with Johns Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education. This is the second time I've come across Johns Hopkins providing research cover for a private corporation; I guess now that government isn't so big on supporting colleges, hiring a department out to private industry is the next best fundraiser.

Deasy is going to be leading a board of super-duper board of "acclaimed education leaders from across the country," and the list does include some familiar names. Dr. Andres Alonso (Harvard GSE), Dr. Tommy Chang (Boston Superintendent), Tom Boasberg (Denver Superintendent), Charlotte Danielson, Dr. Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Institute), Dr. William Hite (Philadelphia Superintendent), Dr. Vicki Phillips (Long-time reformster, currently between jobs), Andrew Rotherham (Bellwether Partners), and Paul Toner (Exec Dir of MA Teach Plus). The press release claims union leaders and former journalists, but I sure don't see them on the list.

Mostly what I see is a whole bunch of charter-and-privatization fans. This leads me to believe that this will not so much be an attempt to encourage civil discourse as it will be a concerted PR push in favor of privatizing public schools aimed at superintendents and other administrators.

Come March, I suppose we'll see. My money is on something not so much about dialogue and conversation as about PR and marketing for a particular solution. There's nothing wrong with that; this is still America, and probably still will be in March. But direct marketing is not dialogue, and propaganda dressed up as informative articles is still an obstacle to understanding, not a bridge.