AZ: Fake-Dumping the Core

When Diane Douglas ran for the post of Chief Education Honcho of Arizona, she ran and won on a basic platform-- kill the Common Core. As it turns out, that was kind of a lie.

Douglas was a bit of a dark horse candidate; her previous professional experience was as "a financial expert for many private firms," and her previous educational experience was a whopping two terms on the Peoria Unified School District board. Peoria is a district of 34,000 students, centered in Glendale, Arizona.

Arizona, under Tea Party fave and former Cold Stone Creamery CEO Governor Ducey, set out to replace those dirty rotten Common Core standards. Now, after two years, the new standards have been adopted, confirming what many observers have been claiming all along-- this is the same old pig with lipstick and a nice wig.

Common Core foes in Arizona have been to this rodeo before-- previous Gov. Jan Brewer and former ed boss John Huppenthal had renamed the pig without changing much of anything. Angry conservative Core opponents backed Douglas to get the job really done. And they are now plenty pissed, because the job has been done, and it has been done to them.

"Oh, those whiny conservative anti-Core moms," you are saying. "Are they just complaining over nothing? Have they taken some uninformed clown's word for it that the standards haven't changed at all?" Well, thanks to the magic of the interwebs, we can see for ourselves. The Arizona standards draft is right here, and the CCSS are still camped out at their usual interhome. So you can play this game on your own, if you'd like. Let me just share a few examples gleaned by looking at the Anchor Standards from each. I am going to stick to the ELA stuff because that's my field of expertise. Let's look.

The CCSS anchor standards for reading come under four sub-headings. Those sub-headings are:

Key Ideas and Details
Craft and Structure
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

The sub-headings for the Arizona ELA standards are:

Key Ideas and Details
Craft and Structure
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

In both sets of standards, the reading portion is broken into ten anchor standards. In CCSS, standard R.4, the first under Craft and Structure, says:

Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

In the Arizona standards, the first standard under Craft and Structure is R.4, which says:

Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

There's a lot of this, although-- hey, standard R.1 is different in each set. The CCSS R.1 says;

Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

Meanwhile, the Arizona R.1 says:

Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.

So, you know. Totally different. So maybe the differences were incorporated where the anchor standards are broken down to grade-specific standards. Let me check the grade I teach (11th) and see--oh, look. Arizona also has 11-12 grade standards combined. So anyway, standard RL.11-12.1 says

Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

But in the other set of standards it says:

Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Did I forget to say which is which? It doesn't matter. And we could play this game all day.

There is a red-line version of the standards that highlights exactly what was changed and, man, they must just be hoping that nobody who opposes the Core would bother to read this. Changes include things like changing "closely" to "carefully" (so that people don't get the idea we're pushing "close reading") or taking a two-part substandard and repunctuating it to be two separate substandards.

Dr. Stotsky offered a comment about how context clues are always listed as the first strategy for figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word, so they've moved it to last on the list instead of first. Dr. Abercrombie noted that asking second graders to make connections between "a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in a technical procedure" might be developmentally inappropriate, so the new standards add the phrase "with prompting and support."

Arizona also fiddle-farted around with the glossary of terms, again doing little of consequence other than a fairly large wrangling of "text complexity," based largely on the feedback of Dr. Stotsky, Elizabeth Pope, and Achieve (yes, the Common Core BFFs of Achieve were in on this party). There's a great deal more clarification about text complexity and how to determine it. That qualifies as an actual change. Oh-- and they added the beloved schwa was added to the list of vowel phonemes.

Just looking at the standards makes it clear that this is the laziest snow job ever attempted, and that when Douglas says things like the new standards "reflect the thoughts and recommendations of thousands of Arizona citizens" or claims they were "reviewed by several nationally recognized technical experts including prominent anti-common-core authorities" she is really close to flat out bald-faced lying.

Okay-- the new standards do include standards for cursive writing, which is not a Common Core thing. And it's possible that the math standards are-- no, actually I just looked, and while math is not my field, I can tell when two strings of words are, in fact, the same (they covered that in English teacher school) and there seems to be an awful lot of that going on. There isn't much red in these redline versions either.

Clearly by no stretch of the imagination did Arizona build its own set of standards from the ground up. This is the same old pig with a different shade of lipstick. If Douglas is planning to run for re-election on the slogan, "She Got Us Out of Common Core," she might want to rethink her plan. The only possible argument in favor of this non-rewrite is that it certainly won't be very disruptive-- districts won't need to replace textbooks and teachers won't have to rewrite lesson plans and all can go on as before. just without speaking the dreaded words "Common Core."

Investors Warned Off Pearson

Today The Daily Telegraph, in its Questor business section, warned investors to stay away from Pearson stock.

Writer James Ashton notes that one need not "monitor Donald Trump’s late-night Twitter feed" to get some sense of his opinion about education, specifically that Herr Trump does not think that education needs a giant injection of money. And that's not good news for the publishing behemoth (not like the announcement of No Child Left Behind, which Ashton, in one of my favorite British journalism lines ever, says had then-head of Pearson Dame Marjorie Scardino "coak-a-hoop").

Pearson depends on the US for 63% of its sales, and that slipped by 9% in the first nine months of 2016. Ashton attributes Pearson's problems to several factors.

An education boom (is that what it looks like we're having from over there!?) generally goes with a downturn in education spending. 

And despite Michael Barber's thoughts about the digital ocean and the many plans he has for draining, bottling and selling that ocean, Ashton had this pointed observation:

For all talk of digital enlightenment, Pearson is still in the dead trees business, with print accounting for about a third of its activities.

Analysts think that the book-buying business is giving way, particularly on college campuses, to the book-renting business (if you want to get a sense of what's happening, just run a search on "renting college textbooks"-- there's a bunch of folks making a mint not selling books). 

Analysts like Morgan Stanley are calling on Pearson to cut costs, and they've been going at it, with the ironic result that some holdings they dumped (like Financial Times) are actually doing better now. But Pearson Honcho John Fallon must still "tighten the portfolio."

Pearson stock has been hovering around 9-ish for months now, having plummeted back in October of 2015 over a call that education earnings would not produce nearly as well as originally expected. Pearson's stock took a 16% dive then, rebounded just a bit, and then bumped down some more in October of 2016.

Here's a snapshot from right now. You can check your local ticker to dig out the details.

Bottom line: Questor says avoid. Pearson has some issues, and analysts don't see it bouncing back any time soon.

Unmoored (tl;dr)

The signs are everywhere. Herr trump says he doesn't need to divest business interest or release taxes because the public doesn't care and isn't interested, and the counter-argument is to cite statistics that yes, the public does care.That's swell-- but isn't the point that we have rules and laws and even Presidents are supposed to follow them?

Our discourse about ourselves as a country has come unmoored, detached from any side of dock or shore or anchor; we're blown about by the winds of personal impulse, tied to nothing but our similarly unmoored tribes.

The continuing Russian hacking-blackmail-influence dustup finally broke my brain. If you are anti-Russian, but pro-CIA and do believe that the hack actually happened, that means you belong to... which tribe, again? Can you guess which tribe would be saying things like "You can't trust the agencies that told us about WMDs" or "We should embrace friendship with Russia" or "It's unpatriotic to dis the FBI"? I'm not sure I can anymore, and many people have lost their bearings trying to keep up-- and that's before we even get to the business of sorting out which facts your side believes are facts today.

That's because most sides of the argument (and I'm not even sure how many there are any more) have stopped trying to understand what is actually happening and, as with most hot topics in the US today, have dug in on whatever side they are on. There are no rules, no guiding principles, no ties to anything except whatever the people running your particular movement have decided is your position.

This is (one of) my problems with Movements-- too often things descend into an argument about which people are pure enough, right enough, aligned enough, to deserve our loyalty or fealty. The Reformsters have had their ongoing sturm and drang about maintaining the coalition between left and right. On the public school side, there are frequent arguments about whether or not certain figures desrve the respect they have, or should be cast out into the darkness because they haven't taken the right position on A or X.

I have never understood these arguments, these quests for purity. First of all, you know who sees the world exactly the same way I do? Nobody. Second, you know who in this world I give my unquestioning fealty and allegiance, whose word I will absolutely accept and follow, no questions asked? Nobody. You know who I expect to follow me without question and agree with whatever I have to say without debate? Also nobody. You see the pattern.

Let me talk about some things I believe.

You cannot use other human beings as your moral compass. That includes yourself. Your moral compass comes from your principles, your values, your beliefs, your understanding, your vantage point, your empathy and apprehension and comprehension, and all of these things must be tuned and retuned and examined on a daily basis. You make your decisions based on your principles, your compass, and not on how you feel about other people who are arguing for A or B or Q or X.

Anyway. How did we become so unmoored that we talk about the laws governing the highest office in the land as if they are just a matter of debate and preference? How are we so unmoored that facts no longer matter? How did we become so unmoored that a whole raftful of Americans now have the political position, "I don't care what he says. Whatever he says, even if it's contradicted by established fact, even if it's exactly what I decried in someone else not so long ago, I agree with it." How did we get to a place where we no longer believe in the rule of law or the lawfulness of rules?

I blame my generation (okay, it's possible that this business goes all the way back to Thoreau, but I'll stick to proximate causes). As long as we've been able to shoot off our mouths, we Boomers have been guided by the idea that you must Do The Right Thing even if it means breaking the rules, and we  meant to be guided by principle, but we too often slid into believing that if we were good and righteous people, well, then, whatever we wanted to do must be okay. I've always been struck how Bill Clinton and Junior Bush both operated without shame, even when caught misbehaving, certain that they were good and righteous people and therefor they couldn't be screwing up. No Nixonian hiding behind the Office ("If the President does it, it's not illegal").

This has become Normal. watch any tv show from NCIS to Grey's Anatomy and watch people in positions of power and authority just shred rules like tissue paper. I've always maintained that Americans were largely unalarmed by finding out that the government collected and sifted through phone records because they watch it done all the time on shows like NCIS-- but, you know, it's good guys violating your rights, so it's okay.

This self-guided dismissal of the rules (I don't need to follow the rules as long as I follow my conscience") has, ironically, led to an explosion of rules. Because, personally, I don't need a lot of rules because i am guided by my conscience-- but Those People over there? I'm pretty sure they're going to screw things up unless we slap some stronger rules on them. And instead of building those rules on principles, we build them on personal preferences, like a harbor tie-off that is just  a free-floating buoy that is not tied to anything itself.

That explosion of Unprincipled Rules for Those People in turn feeds the decay of rule-following, because when someone slaps you with a stupid rule, you're just that much more inclined to dismiss not only the importance of following that rule, but of following any and all rules. So, more rules, and more rule ignoring.

But trying to live by trotting out your principles and values and then analyzing the situation for every single situation-- well, that gets tiring, and lots of folks are in situations where having to choose is hard because no choices look good (like, say, the last election cycle). So instead of tying their ship to something stable and solid and anchored in the earth's crust, they just look for someone to hook onto, so they can just follow along and not have to navigate for themselves any more. And the more everything else in the harbor looks like the chaos of a million unmoored crafts, the more appealing it is to tie off to someone who declares, "Follow me. Let me steer you. I will keep you safe and on course." And that just leads to a bunch of arguments about which such boat is the best one for everyone to hook up to, instead of talking about how we should all just find our own moorings.

For teachers this has been particularly challenging. We are by nature fans of rules. We like them. We expect our students to follow them, and we are inclined to follow them ourselves. But the rules have been turning ugly and capricious for a while, rules that are unmoored and unattached to any principles of education, any facts about educating humans. We've been coming to understand that we must either navigate for ourselves or hook our craft to a loose buoy that will drag us right over the falls.

Rules that are not anchored in principle are just expressions of personal power. And that challenges one of the foundations of our society. We were a country built on rules anchored to principles, explicitly rejecting the idea of rules based on personal power, and now we are beginning to realize that we have been inching toward autocracy for a while, and we're, maybe, just about there.

As a classroom teacher, I deal with this by making sure that I'm operating out of principle, and that I examine all of my assumptions and ideas regularly, including what input I gather by reading, listening, paying attention.

As a person, I've been doing this work for years, not because I'm some sort of highly-principled virtuous person, but because I'm not. I've done stupid things, hurtful things, terrible things, and I would rather not do any more, and I have learned the hard way that autopilot is not my friend.

There are people I trust a great deal, people whose judgment I value and whose point of view I consider worth examining. Not all of these people would agree with each other, and there isn't one of them whose judgment I would follow blindly (though a few come pretty close-- hi, honey!) I don't think I will ever reach a point in my life when I can say, "All right then-- I know everything I need to know about that." I work hard to be keep myself connected to principles and values that I can trust, and I like to think that my moral compass is pretty well-tuned, even as I am fully aware that every person who ever did a terrible thing was sure their compass pointed to true north.

In some ways, I see all of this as the central huge challenge of teaching today-- how do we help bring students up to be able to find their way in a society that has become unmoored. "Just follow the rules" or "Just do the right thing" or "Always trust the authorities" were once standard childhood advice; now they seem ridiculous. How do we help young humans find their way when we can barely find our own? How do we help young humans find a way without telling them which way they are supposed to find?

Is it too hokey to say that love, empathy, kindness, and unselfishness are a help? I don't think so, though clearly those are not values in ascendance in Trumpistan. I don't know if we ever get back to a place where our ships are safely moored, anchored to something solid and true. Maybe the best we can hope for are reliable compasses, and if that's true, then I think we could find worse metaphorical compass points than love, empathy, kindness and unselfishness. That's my hope, anyway.

More Baloney in Support of DeVos

This week, it's often looking as if the postponement of Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing was so that she could round up a few more supporters.

So here comes former Michigan Governor John Engler, the guy who helped start the process of busting up public education in Michigan.

Engler opens with a nifty observation:

America doesn't need any more fights around education.

Yeah, I'm looking better every day, amiright?

By which I can only assume that he means, "Y'all need to shut up, sit down, and do as your told. Fall in line and stop stirring up trouble." What other reason can the need for less fighting lead one to conclude that a good choice for Educhief is someone who has dealt with disagreement by threatening and stomping on those who disagree with her? But then, Engler's current job as president of the Business Roundtable gives him a particular perspective on these issues:

 
Business leaders are intently focused on promoting creative approaches that will raise the performance of our K-12 students — making them and the entire U.S. economy more competitive for decades to come. 

Baloney. Business leaders have often been spectacularly dim about the purpose of public education (spoiler alert: it is not to manufacture a deep pool of meat widgets to serve corporate needs or desires).

Thankfully, as a businesswoman and entrepreneur, Ms. DeVos has been singularly focused on accountability and results — exactly what our education system needs.

When has Betsy DeVos ever been a businesswoman? Her father was a businessman. Her brother was an entrepreneur. Her father-in-law was a businessman, of sorts. But what business has Betsy ever run? Entrepreneur? What new business has she ever started? What new business idea  did she launch? DeVos is a billionaire heiress who married a billionaire heir, and together they have leveraged their fortune into political clout by setting up lobbying groups and buying (and threatening) legislators. (For a detailed and disturbing account of all of this, read this hot-off-the-internet piece from Jennifer Berkshire, and see what a family of rich folk can do to turn an entire state into a one-party fiefdom.)

Engler has other slabs of baloney to share. The false assertion that Detroit's charters have been successful. The odd notion that DeVos, who spent millions defeating accountability measures, is somehow an accountability hawk. And Engler is going to repeat that DeVos is out to serve all students without providing any actual evidence.

Jeb! Bush wants to speak up for her as well. Unsurprising, because they are also old reformy buddies, fans both of privatizing schools for fun and profit as well as trying to crush teachers unions the better to cripple the Democratic party in their state.

Bush wants us to know that DeVos is a "champion of families, not instistutions." He feels that DeVos is a victim of two "false narratives" about school choice.

Bush says that one falsehood is that charters are hostile to pubic schools, but that's not so. Which is... fanciful indeed. Rather "the choice movement seeks flexibility for putting children m the right learning environment, embracing all high-quality providers." So our new marketing slogan is that charters provide flexibility, not a "rescue" from the "failing public schools"? Bush may want to clue some of his chartery brethren in to this so they can stop reading from the old marketing script.

The other alleged falsehood is that charters weaken public school, but hey-- in Florida, public schools have gotten way more awesome since charters started opening up-- an absolutely insupportable assertion since any number of factors could explain the 'improvement" in Florida schools. And really-- why talk about Florida when we can talk about Michigan, the state where DeVos mostly got her way and disaster ensued?

But if you don't believe Jeb, well, here's his mom. Yes, Barbara Bush has also come out in support of DeVos.

Bush is a big fan of literacy, and she wants to toss out that old correlation about third grade reading and later success, only like most everyone who trots that out, she doesn't get the difference between correlation and causation, so she's going to praise DeVos for Michigan's stupid third grade reading retention law which says that students can't advance to fourth grade until they pass the Big Standardized reading test.

Betsy DeVos has helped pass reforms to drive gains in literacy.  

Sure. Call it that. I call it bullying eight year olds. Also note that we're applauding a private citizen for getting legislation through a state government, as if that's a good thing. And Grandma Bush tosses out this old chestnut:

I also believe Mrs. DeVos has the right priorities on important issues such as school choice, early childhood development and accountability in education. I have worked with Mrs. DeVos’ advocacy organizations for years and I know that her commitment to children runs deep. She believes passionately that children should have access to high performing schools regardless of their race, income or zip code. That is why she has fought valiantly to give parents of at-risk children the right to send their kids to charter and private schools when the public school system is letting them down.

All children should NOT have "access" to high performing schools. Every passenger on the Titanic had "access" to a lifeboat, but only a few got to ride in one (or on a door). All children should have a good school. All children should be in a good school. Why the hell is the formulation always, "We think this school si failing, and that's unfair to the students in it, so we're going to rescue 5% of those children and do nothing to help the rest, including doing nothing to improve the school we're leaving them in." How is that a solution??!!

There are no, says Ma Bush, quick easy one-size-fits all solutions to school issues (except, I guess, charters and choice, which fix everything magically). But DeVos will send stacks of money out to the states where magical advances will be made, somehow. And then dear, sweet, steely-eyed, grey-haired Ma Bush let's go with this line--

I believe Mrs. DeVos is an educator at heart. 

No. No, she is not. Not at all. Do you know how I know? Because people who are educators at heart go out and become actual educators! They get the training and then they become actual teachers, in actual schools. That's what people who are educators at heart do. But hey-- if I tell you that I'm really a doctor at heart, will you let me operate on you or become surgeon general?

Bush wraps up with some vague nonsense about the "powerful forces resistant to change" and go back and read Berkshire's piece again if you want to see what powerful forces resistant to change  look like,  because mostly they look like unelected billionaires who buy up all the machineryu of government and stomp on anyone who tries to change the path that those plutocrats laid out for the entire state.

I suppose over the next few days we'll get more of this. It's odd because, truthfully, I don't think there's much chance that DeVos won't be confirmed. Mind you, she is spectacularly unqualified in every conceivable way, from her lack of organizational and administrative experience to her complete ignorance of public education to her spirited embrace of an armful of failed and foolish policies. Really, nobody deserves to be Secretary of Education less than Betsy DeVos. But this is Trumpistan, and the Senate hardly ever chases away cabinet nominees, and Being Unqualified is the new black, so I expect she'll be accepted. I just don't want it to be cheap or easy.

So by all means, DeVos supporters-- keep popping up to say foolish things, because a DeVos USED will cost US education tremendously for the foreseeable future, and you might as well be on the record when the bill comes due.

Petrilli: Reconsider Vouchers

It's kind of curious. So many people are suddenly talking about vouchers again, and the only real reason that we are is because we're looking at the possibility of a Secretary of Education who just loves them and we're all trying to figure out what could come of that (Spoiler alert: nothing good). Wise researchers like Jersey Jazzman are reminding us where the voucher money ends up (Spoiler alert: in religious schools) and even some charter fans are expressing reservations.

Into this conversation leaps (strolls? glides? saunters? scampers?) Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) to say, "Hey, maybe you need to take another look at cool, modern voucher systems!" Okay, what he actually says is "Vouchers have changed. Maybe your position should change, too" at the Flypaper, Fordham's blog.

Petrilli starts by roping in a reference to his earlier piece in which he argued that reformsters are still one big happy family, and can they please not get all split apart all over the place just because Herr Trump has nominated the DeVonator to USED? Because if you haven't noticed, reformsters are kind of worried about holding their coalition together in the Age of Trump.

We all support giving parents the power to choose schools other than those assigned to children by their local district; the question is how wide their range of choices should be.

Which is one of those reformy statements that triggers me to ask why nobody ever talks about the choices available in a public school. Anyway, he plays the Not Really Splitting Apart card so that he can point out that, hey, everybody wants to give parents choices-- there's just a little disagreement about what the mechanism should be, and before you go throwing out the vouchers with the bathwater, Petrilli wants you to know that nowadays we aren't talking about the kind of vouchers systems that were all the rage one or two years ago.

Vouchers, he admits, have a reputation for coming with no actual oversight or accountability, and, well, yeah, he admits that was pretty much true in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee. But nowadays, in places like Louisiana and Indiana now just ooze accountability out of their very pores, to the point that they are held almost as accountable as charter schools-- which is of course the point Petrilli has to make here for those charter fans who fear that voucher schools will undercut them by not having to follow any rules at all. Because the free market jungle is awesome unless you are the prey and not the predator. Petrilli's point is not, "Yes, voucher schools will be made awesome" so much as it is "Don't worry charter fans-- voucher schools will have to play by the same rules you do without any special advantages."

By "accountability," Petrilli mostly just means that these schools must administer the same Big Standardized Test as regular old public schools, which may be soothing to accountability hawks, but ought to scare hard-core voucher fans because, as some conservative critics have noted, where government money goes, government strings and rules and regulations follow. (It's an issue we have some history with in my area.)

By "accountability," Petrilli apparently doesn't mean "must conduct all business in public and keep financial records transparent to the public, too." Nor is it apparently related to how the schools treat teachers or students. "Accountability" just means "must give students the BS Tests and be rated by the state."


But maybe, Petrilli continues, you object to vouchers because the private schools can maintain their usual exclusive standards. Well, um, that's right. They don't. In fact, Fordham's own research tells that plenty of private schools won't open themselves up to voucher programs unless they can control their admissions. Many, of course, can also keep the riff-raff out unofficially by virtue of having tuition costs far in excess of the voucher amounts.

Well, so what, says Petrilli. We have some selective admissions schools already and colleges, heck, they selectively admit all the time already. And while he doesn't quite go there, we know that Petrilli believes that charter systems can be a good way to select out the Strivers and rescue them from having to be in school with Those Other Kids. Selectivity in private and charter schools? That's a feature, not a bug.

Petrilli knows some people are squeamish about the whole mixing church and state thing, but he says we might as well be consistent and we let churches house Head Start and use Pell Grants to send students to religious colleges, so what's the big deal? I would note that Head Start does not include a religious training component, even if they're in a church basement. College is a slightly different kettle of fish because it's not mandatory, like K-12 education, but he may have a point about consistency-- I vote we stop using Pell Grants to pay for religious college education. I could lay out all the religious separation arguments, again, for my conservative friends, but it might be simpler to point out that under such a system, your conservative tax dollars could be going to support a school based on Sharia law, or that teaches classes only in Spanish. I believe that if conservatives imagine such a system, they will quickly figure out the problems of mixing church and state all by themselves.

But Petrilli wants you to know that, for instance, Catholic schools are awesome and their students do really well and even stay out of typical teen trouble more than public school kids. Petrilli speculates that Catholic schools put the fear of God into kids; I'm going to speculate that everyone should learn more about the difference between correlation and causation, because the kinds of families that round up extra money to put their kids in a Catholic school might well be the kinds of families that raise kids who are more likely to stay out of trouble. Or maybe it's that Catholic schools can, as Petrilli notes, get rid of any and all students who don't behave.

And that's pretty much Petrilli's argument.

He does miss a few points. For instance, in his discussion of voucher-based systems, he somehow neglects to mention the voucher system of Wisconsin (a voucher mess), nor does he get into the everything but actual vouchering system of Michigan -- the one that can tell us the most about DeVos's ideas and goals with vouchers, choice, unions, and also the one that shows so clearly that DeVos's ideas and goals yield an ugly and dysfunctional mess that not only fails to produce choice schools with any quality, but also drags down the public school at the same time.

Petrilli suggests we spend some time before the rescheduled hearing looking over vouchery stuff. I recomend we spend some time looking at the fruits by which DeVos can be known. Try this article, or this one. Or this. Or this one. And another. And still another. And you can follow it up by reading about how hard DeVos has fought against accountability in Michigan.

Petrilli has mounted a pretty weak argument here-- vouchers are really okay because voucher students in some places have to take tests, the separation of church and state is just silly, and creaming the best students is cool and appropriate. But then, that has been the problems with vouchers all along-- the arguments for them are weak, so weak that the only successful path for installing a voucher system is to buy or rent enough legislators to write it into law. Where voters get a say, they say no. Nor have they changed all that much, ever. So we can look at them again, and again, and again, but, spoiler alert-- they will still look like a bad idea.

Tofu Schools

The repeated claim is that charters and choice are necessary in order for students to have options and to be able to select from many different educational programs, which makes me wonder-- are public schools made out of tofu or some other featureless, uniform substance. When you slice a public school, do you uncover the same bland surface, the same unvaried material, no matter which way you slice? Is it true that the only way to find variety, choice, or selections is to set up charter schools?

I teach in a relatively rural high school, so we're not loaded with resources or money, and yet a student at my school can choose to emphasize music or the arts or attend our vocational technical school to learn welding or home health care. You can take a yearbook class to learn photography and design, or theater, or public speaking, or business technology. If you're interested in 3D printing or working in a basic-but-fun mass media lab, we can hook you up. In my department alone, we have a variety of pedagogical and personal styles; a student who passes through our building is bound to find one teacher in our department that she really clicks with.

We are most definitely built our of tofu.

In fact, I would think that our school, like most public schools, actually provides better access to variety and choice than a so-called choice system, because to switch gears ("I think I'd like to stop playing trumpet and start learning auto body repair!") doesn't require a student to withdraw, then enroll in a whole new school and start over again. Want to switch your emphasis? Go see your guidance counselor. You can keep your friends and your locker and your lunch table-- you just get some different classes.

Sometimes the choices have to do with the community, and sometimes with a singular vision of one individual in the system (just up the road is a school that for years had an awesome steel drum band because they had a teacher who was knowledgeable and interested in steel drum bands). The particular constellation of choices under one roof will vary from roof to roof-- that's what gives a school its distinctive flavor (and one more reason it's a lousy idea to try to make all schools taste like Common Core Test Prep). But you don't have to move out from under that roof to find different choices. 

I would suspect that in the larger urban districts schools become more "specialized" in a number of ways, like specializing in the arts or specializing in technology or specializing in making do with far fewer resources than they ought to have. But I will still bet you that nowhere in this country will you find a public school made of tofu.

Bad Management

I have a theory that one of the major problems in America today is just plain bad management. I have watched it trash companies on the smaller, more local scale here, and periodically we get to watch large American corporations go down in flames.

For instance, consider retail giant Sears. Business Insider has published a blistering look inside the ongoing death spiral of the venerable retail giant. Hayley Peterson's reporting is thorough, brutal, and depressing, and it provides a striking look at how bad management can sink a business because in the case of Sears, the problems are neither complicated nor complex-- one terrible CEO is managing to torch the entire place.

CEO Eddie Lambert is the very model of a modern major management disaster. He has no background in retail, and yet, somehow, he is running a giant retail corporation. What's his actual background? Running hedge funds. Making money from investments. This is one of the precepts of modern management-- anybody can manage any business as long as they have previously managed some other business. And if they have previous experience shuffling investment money, then so much the better.

Lambert has tried a variety of stupid bad management ideas. In 2013, Business Insider took a look at his bright idea to split the company into divisions and pit them against each other, because (as you may have heard) competition fosters excellence. It didn't. It fostered a huge lack of cooperation that in turn led to decisions that were bad for the enterprise as a whole. (You can read more about this special kind of management stupid in action here at Bruce Baker's blog post at the time).

Lambert tries to manage at a great distance, by screen. This is also a bit of modern management brilliance-- keep yourself in an insulated bubble far away from the people you manage, because if you get close and get involved and have to look them in the eye, your human considerations might get in the way of your business calculations.

Lambert is a mean, screaming, punishing SOB. As painted by Peterson, he is a manager who demands that his subordinates tell him what he wants to hear and do not disturb him with information that contradicts his "vision" for the enterprise. Like many of these guys, he believes that he is a visionary and that nothing must be allowed to distract from his vision.

Lambert is wrong. Virtually every one of his genius ideas has failed to improve Sears' situation. That includes selling off valuable parts of the company to get a few bucks now to keep things afloat. But every one of his ideas has wrought more destruction than growth. And because he doesn't know a damn thing about retail, his ideas fail to address the most basic central mission (get customers to come into stores, and then sell them stuff they want), his ideas are useless, even destructive as they sap energy and attention from the main thing.

Lambert has covered his own ass. Peterson explains how Lambert has created a web of funds and loans and investments that insure, no matter what happens to Sears (and all the people who work there), Eddie :Lambert will be fully insulated and not hurting financially. Not hurting at all. "He's moving money from one pocket to the other pocket, and he's protected himself on both sides," said one of the many, many former executives from Sears.

I follow stories like this almost as often as I follow education stories, and the same question always comes to mind-- is THIS what reformsters mean when they insist that schools be run like a business? Because if we are going to talk about running schools like a business, perhaps we should get a bit more specific, because an astonishing, frightening number of American businesses are actually run pretty badly.

I've said for decades that education is where bad management ideas go to die, but the really unfortunate thing is that some of the worst ideas shambling about the management landscape like clumsy, destructive beasts-- some of these cause huge amounts of damage before they can finally collapse. I don't even want to think about happens when they take root in the White House. We must at least continue to do our best to keep them from making a mess out of our schools.