How Not To Improve Schools

The report is in from the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences-- "School Improvement Grants: Implementation and Effectiveness." It is our last lesson in school reform from the Obama-Duncan-King education department, and although that version of the department is being bulldozed under even as I type, there are still important lessons to be learned here.

The full report is over 400 pages long, and if you want to read the whole thing, be my guest. But I don't think there are any devils lurking in these details. Because the fourth-of-five findings pretty much tells the story:

Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG -funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment. 

The Obama administration spent $3 billion dollars on school improvement grants (actually $7 billion by the time you factor it all in), and it did not produce any measurable improvements, at all.

Some folks are going to jump straight from there to their favorite conclusion-- throwing more money at schools doesn't do any good. But that's the wrong conclusion, for two reasons.

First, this results of the study are inconclusive because they checked only for Big Standardized Test scores, graduation rate, and college enrollment. For the sixty gazzilionth time, let me point out that these are narrow, twisted, not-very-good measures of education. I would argue, for instance, that if the three billion had been used to add music and art teachers to every single school in America, education would have been vastly improved-- but that improvement would not show up in a study like this. Likewise more guidance counselors, more welding instructors or field trips would improve education, but not in ways that would show up in these metrics.

Second-- and this is probably the more important lesson-- is the question of how SIG money was spent. Because the feds did not at any point say, "You know, you are the experts there on the ground who best know what your school needs to be better, so we are going to trust your judgment." No, as the report aptly sums up, the money was not just tied to strings, but wrapped up in strings, bound in strings, woven into a menacing macrame of strings:

SIG allowed grantees to implement one of four school intervention models (transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure). These models promoted the use of many improvement practices in four main areas: (1) adopting comprehensive instructional reform strategies, (2) developing and increasing teacher and principal effectiveness, (3) increasing learning time and creating community-oriented schools, and (4) having operational flexibility and receiving support.

SIG was like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison, and it didn't matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there are no babies in the family.  USED used SIG to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.

The moral of the story is not that money doesn't make a difference. The moral of the story is that when bureaucrats in DC dictate exactly how money must be spent-- and they are wrong about their theory of action and wrong about the strategies that should be used by each school and wrong about how to measure the effectiveness of those strategies-- then the money is probably wasted. We'll see soon enough if anyone left at the Department of Education can identify that lesson.

What Do You Want?

In teacher school, we're taught that effective classroom management involves focusing on what you want the students to do, not what you don't want them to do.

In other words, "stop twiddling your thumbs" is less effective than "please read the story." I always think of Larry Shreckengost, my high school driver's ed teacher who told us to look at where we wanted to go, not at what we wanted to avoid hitting. It's true-- stare at that telephone pole you don't want to hit, and you will find yourself driving straight toward it.

It is easy to get sucked up in no. It is easy to give over head space and voice to all the things that you don't want to see happen. But that inevitably is too much of the wrong thing and not enough of the right thing. A classroom that is dominated by don't becomes a negative space, a room where everyone's attention is given to the Wrong Stuff and they walk out ignorant of the right stuff.

Writing instruction is a perfect example. If writing instruction is all about a huge list of things that your students are not supposed to do, your students will create consistently mediocre-to-bad writing. Good writing is not about avoiding doing what's wrong-- it's about embracing what works, what is right.

The GOP has painted themselves into this exact corner, most notably with the issue of Obamacare. They have been against many things; now they have to figure out what they are for, and it's turning out to be a bit of a stumper. Liberals and progressives would be wise not to spend the next four years stuck in that same swampy trap.

None of this is meant to suggest that if we just jump on our unicorns and dance off positively and hopefully into the rainbow sky, everything will be fluffy bunnies and ice cream cones. Sometimes moving toward a destination, a goal-- sometimes that means getting past a large dark mass of powerful obstacles. But it doesn't work to sit down and just whinge away about how those obstacles shouldn't be there. Worse, sit there too long and when the obstacles are swept away, you can't even remember where you were going.

In short, the obstacles aren't the thing. The goal is the thing.

What do you want?

Do you want a world with equity and justice, a wold where people are treated with respect and decency no matter who they are? Then work toward that.

Do you want a world where the arts, the vital expressions of what it means to be human, to be in the world-- do you want a world where those things are supported and valued? Then work toward that.

Do you want world where education is important, and institutions work to provide excellent and appropriate educations for every single student? Then work toward that.

Do you want a world where government, both elected and appointed, deals with citizens honestly, openly and responsibly? Then work toward that.

Do you want a world where we stand up for each other, have each other's backs, defends each other's rights relentlessly? Then work toward that.

Do you want a world where everyone gets to lead a decent life and find their best selves, regardles off background or circumstances? Then work toward that.

Do you want a world where we all strive to be our best selves and are guided by our highest values? Do you want a world where love and honor and decency and kindness are the values by which we live? Do you want a world where we elevate leaders who elevate us all?

Then work toward that. Lift up what-- and who-- you care about. Honor what you think is honorable.Talk and listen and read and write to strengthen and tune and grow your vision of the world you want to see, and then work toward that.

At times it may be hard to see, hard to even imagine. Keep working. Know what you want to say yes to, and say yes to that. Work toward that. 

School Accountability Diet

One of the best things the feds ever created was the nutritional information panel for food.

When I go shopping, I can quickly and easily access information about the food I buy. There's how much fat in these power bars??!! Look-- twinkies have far fewer calories than I imagined!

The panels are a model of transparency, because the information is there for me to do with as I will. Years ago I didn't care at all about dietary fiber; nowadays, it's something I can stand to pay attention to. Protein was never a big deal, but since my wife is currently constructing a pair of twins, we pay attention to how much protein there is in the food we bring home. And we can shift our attention as new information becomes available-- different types of fat or cholesterol used to be non-issues, but now informed consumers know there are distinctions that matter.

Think of how much better this system works than one in which food was rated or ranked. If the feds slapped on labels that said "These bagels get a B+" or "These frozen waffles are the 215th-ranked food in this grocery store." I would have virtually no information on which to base my judgment, with the whole complex issue of the many characteristics of food and how it balances against what I need and want in my diet-- that would all be reduced to a piece of data so narrow and limited and opaque as to be meaningless, useless for me in making a decision.

This is how I know that many reformsters who advocate for school grades and rankings "so that parents can make an informed choice" are lying-- they are neither supporting parents nor choice.

To support a grade or ranking, rather than a simple transparent data system like the nutritional information labels, you would have to believe one of the following

1) Parents aren't capable of understanding and processing the information, so we'll have to process it and evaluate it for them.

2) Parents will make the "wrong" choice, so we must stack and sum up the data in a way that pushes parents toward the choices that we want them to choose. We must decide what decision they should make.

3) It has nothing to do with the parents. We want a basis on which to attack and close certain schools, and that's what the ranks and grades are for.

If the food system worked like this, government bureaucrats could rate Pop Tarts an A because they have bright colors and lots of sugar, or C because they don't have very much actual fruit or F because  the bureaucratic system is operated by people who have stock in the Toaster Strudle corporation.

Choice advocates love to talk about letting parents vote with their feet, but in fact rating and ranking are all about making sure that the Powers That Be get to pick the winners and losers. It's about creating the illusion of choice without the real, complete, transparent information to make a real choice. It's no coincidence that A-F systems are particularly popular in states where policy leaders are intent on dismantling public ed and replacing it with a profitable charter system.

One of the biggest problems with school choice in this country is that choice fans are, for the most part, not really trying to create a choice system. If they were, we would be collecting all sorts of data about schools and putting it out there for parents to decide, based on whatever criteria they think is important, like a giant nutritional content label. But that's not what we're doing-- choice advocates are keeping the definition of "good" and "bad" schools gripped tightly and secretly in their own hands, making sure that they retain the right to pick winners and losers (and there is no free-floating information that might contradict charter/choice school marketing).

There are many reasons that a public school advocate would oppose charter and choice systems, but one of the reasons I oppose the particular system that we are seeing implemented from Michigan to Florida is that it's dishonest, it's a lie. It's not really a parental choice system at all, and we can tell that from the label, which is designed in a rating or ranking system, to keep all choice out of the hands of parents and in the hands of the people who run the system.

Trevor Noah Covers DeVos

I'm not always a Trevor Noah fan, and he repeats the egregious characterization of Betsy DeVos as a "businesswoman"-- really? What business, exactly, has she ever run? She's an heiress and the wife of an heir. But otherwise, this is a pretty good mainstream take on DeVos's terrible hearing performance.

MTV's set-up is problematic for embedding, but follow this link for the clip. And now we've got a good youtube link (h/t Jack Covey)

The $1 Salary

So apparently billionaire heiress and presumptive Head of the Department of Things She Knows Nothing About, Betsy DeVos intends to take a salary of a mere $1 when she ascends her education throne. I think that's a lousy idea.

I know it's meant to make her seem magnanimous and willing to take on the office just out of the sweet public servicey goodness of her heart. I suppose there may also be some rich person tax dodge here-- the DeVos family can now claim all school children in the US as their dependents now, or some such accounting trick. Maybe, having never really pulled down a paycheck, DeVos is unsure what to do with it. But mostly I think we're supposed to be impressed that she's not taking our tax dollars to do the job.

Well, I'm not.

First of all, I don't care for the model that says federal leadership jobs are best handed over to the wealthy. It's a kind of backwards method of barring non-wealthy people from powerful leadership positions. It's a model for a benevolent plutocracy. You folks don't need democratically elected representatives-- we rich folks will take care of you and provide what we think is best for you. Now shut up and go back to your homes to await further instructions.

Second, I think it's a fundamental principle that you pay people to do work. It is part of a system of accountability. If you accept a salary, you are accountable to the people who pay you that salary.

The corollary is clear-- if you accept no salary, you are accountable to nobody.

It's true that there are some exceptions. Lawrence Pelletier, the president of my college when I attended, supposedly led the college for $1. And there is a world of volunteers who keep so many organizations (my own retired parents run an antique music museum that you should visit if you're ever in town). Heck, for over forty years I have played in an all-volunteer town band, and as it turns out, nobody is paying me to write or maintain this blog.

Of course, being a volunteer means that we can pursue what we're passionate about, set our own priorities, and do it at the time of our own choosing. We answer to ourselves, follow our own conceptions of how the job should be done, set our own standards, pick our own priorities.

These are not qualities I'm looking for in officials holding major federal offices. I do not someone running the Department of Education (or any other high-level department) answering only to themselves. I do not want them deciding that as long as they are achieving their own personal goals, there's no need to consider anyone else.

I want DeVos to take her damn salary. I know it's a drop in her big billionairess bucket, but I want her to take it anyway.  I want her to be regularly reminded that she works for the American people-- all of the American people and all of their children and all of their schools. I want her reminded that her employment comes with a variety of rules and regulations that she is not free to heed or ignore as the feeling strikes her. I want her reminded that in that office, the American taxpayers and not the DeVos family pay her salary.

"Follow the money" is a thing because when you follow the money, you find out who is really in charge, who is really calling the shots. And if DeVos is only being paid a buck, the money trail may lead to many dark and interesting places, but it will never lead to the American people.

DeVos Song and Dance

I am grateful that work kept me from experiencing the DeVos hearing in one long take, like a thousand fingernails being dragged down a twenty-mile chalkboard. So just as I experienced a disjointed hearing, I will share my disjointed thoughts.

The Reviews Are In

Wait! I'm now famous because why..? And who wants to shoot me...?

One of the reasons I'm not doing an in-depth review of the hearing is that I don't need to-- every major news outlet covered it, in some cases tweeting it in real time. Many major news outlets had one or more stories up by 11:00 last night. This may seem obvious, but what was the last education story that got this kind of blanket coverage? Maybe the Scopes Trial?

And the coverage was pretty honest, ignoring for the most part the shmoozing snoozefest that was the GOP massage of the candidate. NBC went with the headline "Education Pick Betsy DeVos Will Not Rule Out Defunding Public Schools" which is both shocking and true. USA Today says "More Questions Than Answers." This morning, millions of Americans can easily find accounts of the hearings or watch the clips. After all these years, an education story is getting broad play.

Missing the Wait Time

The bizarre choice by Lamar Alexander to protect DeVos by limiting question time didn't just save her from having to answer more questions. It took away all wait time.

Imagine, for instance, if that moment in which DeVos is ignorant of the fundamental argument about proficiency vs. growth-- imagine if Franken had had the time to let her just sit there in stammer-punctuated silence, searching for some string of words. Imagine if her vain hunt for the meaning of IDEA had been allowed to stretch into a long painful twist in the wind.

The GOP senators lived up to every cent the DeVos family spent on them, but none so much as Alexander, who protected DeVos from protracted displays of her ignorance.

Oh, That Smile

Somewhere a bunch of dictionary editors are pasting screen captures from last night in to the entry for "smug." That was the look of a woman who knew that this was just a silly little display of theater that would in no way change the outcome, who was vaguely amused by all these little people who acted so earnest, like what they said or did would actually matter. This was the smile of a woman who didn't lose her cool with the Senate grilling for the same reason you don't get angry when your five-year-old wants to show you a picture of a butterfly that she's drawn.

This was the smile of a woman who knew that absolutely nothing was riding on that hearing.

A River in Egypt

You may have been wondering how DeVos would manage to go mainstream with a portfolio of far-right causes at her back like, say, support for conversion therapy for gays and lesbians. The answer, it turns out, comes straight from the Donald Trump playbook-- when called on something you said and did in the past that is now inconvenient to acknowledge, just lie about it.

DeVos tried to pretend that somehow she'd been funneling giant stacks of money to groups whose mission she doesn't really support, or that she doesn't really give money to, or just argle bargle it wasn't me. It's a bold choice because none of this advocacy work is exactly secretive, nor are the groups shy about lauding her for her support. And Guidestar (if you have an account) tells us that the "clerical error" that made DeVos an officer of her mother's group went on for years and years.

Likewise, we are clearly going to be treated to the History of Detroit Schools from an alternate dimension.

Bears

Best answer ever. It's the kind of inconsequential fumble that launches a million memes and will most certainly be blown out of proportion (and I will probably help). But it's funny. I need to be armed to protect myself from bears in my classroom. How about very large wild dogs? Rabid rabbits? What about if I want to hunt in my classroom for food? Bears.

What Has She Learned?

It hasn't gotten the kind of play that the exchanges with Sanders, Warren or Kaine got, but I think Betsy's response to Michael Bennet was the most telling, the most important, the most scary response of the hearing. Bennet asked what she had learned about schools and charters from the experiences of Detroit. She could not answer.

The closest thing the woman has to educational experience is being the political muscle behind the Detroit Experiment. The DeVos's are perhaps the only people who are in touch with every major player in that charter revolution, and they've been on top of it for decades. She has served as a self-appointed official of the state of Michigan with education at the top of her portfolio. It is the one card she had to play against the "inexperienced" charge-- and she totally blew it. She has learned nothing. From the destruction of a city's school system, the gutting of educational opportunities for Detroit's poor, she has learned nothing. She felt expert enough to call for the dissolution of Detroit Public School system, but she has learned nothing.

This is one of the big problems with zealots and True Believers-- they do not learn and grow because they already Know The Truth, so no new learning is necessary.

DeVos is ignorant-- and she will stay that way.

Won't Rule Out Defunding Public Schools?

Yeah, we already knew that.

She's Not a Banker

Honestly, there's a very tiny pool of candidates who could answer yes to Warren's "Have you ever overseen a trillion-dollar loan program?" But the fact that DeVos has never dealt with the college loan industry is just one more reminder that this is a woman who has been picked to oversee a part of the country that she has not one piece of experience in. This is not selecting a non-lawyer as a Supreme Court justice-- this is selecting someone who has never seen the inside of a courtroom or ever talked to a lawyer as a Supreme.

I Think She Knows What IDEA Is Just Fine

Folks are talking about how DeVos seemed not to understand what IDEA is, especially the significance that it's a federal law that you can't just "leave up to the states."

I don't think that's what DeVos told us.

I think DeVos told us that she subscribes to this administration's concept of law, which is that it's a set of rules that you may or may not have to actually follow. I think the principle of "It's a federal law but the states can decide whether they're going to follow it or not" is exactly what she meant and exactly what she believes. She knows it's a federal law-- she just doesn't care, or intend to enforce it.

Bad News, Accountability Hawks

The reform coalition that has tried to keep left and right working together for charters and all the rest-- that coalition has been trying to make space around the issue of accountability. To plug that gap, DeVos supporters have insisted that the stories about Betsy's anto-accountability stance for charters is baloney, and she totally wants charter accountability. Well, now there's this:

Kaine: “If confirmed will you insist upon equal accountability in any K-12 school or educational program that receives taxpayer funding whether public, public charter or private?”
DeVos: “I support accountability.”
Kaine: “Equal accountability?”
DeVos: “I support accountability.”
Kaine: “Is that a yes or a no?”
DeVos: “I support accountability.”
Kaine: “Do you not want to answer my question?”
DeVos: “I support accountability.”
Kaine: “Let me ask you this. I think all schools that receive taxpayer funding should be equally accountable. Do you agree?”
DeVos: “Well they don’t, they are not today.”
Kaine: “Well, I think they should. Do you agree with me?
DeVos: “Well no . . . ”
Kaine, interrupting her, said: “You don’t agree with me.”

So that's a hard pass on accountability for charters.

P.S. Screw You, Joe Lieberman

"Best qualification to run education is to know nothing about education" my Aunt Fanny. Yes, and when you are sick or injured, you go looking for someone with no medical experience. And if you need to be defended in court, you look for some guy who's completely ignorant of the law. Remind me to never, ever take this guy seriously again.

Does Your Phone Still Work?

God only knows when the actual vote will be taken, and the handwriting is pretty much on the wall. But that doesn't mean that the DeVos appointment should be a free walk in the park for anyone involved. Call senators. Tell them what a spectacularly lousy choice she is.

And while you're at it, tell your friends and neighbors. Alexander did do us one favor-- by limiting senators to five-minute question periods, he stage-managed a hearing that is available in easy-to-watch short clips. People who would never sit through a four hour video of congressional yammering can totally catch the point from DeVos's five minutes of stammering in front of Sanders or stunned ignorance in front of Franken or bad stonewalling of Kaine. Share.

Meanwhile...

It has been one of those days. Not bad, but about sixteen hours long, and so I have followed the DeVos hearing via occasional peeks at Twitter, and I'll catch up over the hours ahead in short burst so that my blood pressure does not shoot the nails off the ends of my fingers.

But I will confess that as strongly as I believe we should tell our senators repeatedly and loudly about Betsy's severe, extreme, total lack of qualifications for the post, and as strongly as I believe that we should fight her appointment to the office, I also believe that at some point, maybe after the political theater is over or maybe after her ethics paperwork has finally cleared or maybe once the senate thinks we're not paying such close attention-- at some point, Betsy DeVos will become our new Secretary of Education. And we will fight and stomp and kick about her policies and choices and attempts to trash US public education as we did with her predecessors.

But meanwhile....

Meanwhile, there are other issues to pay attention to, other tables at which education debates are still raging, other threats to the future of this bedrock democratic institution.

Charter Baloney

There are places in this country where no federal intervention is needed to help charter schools make a hash out of the education system. Michigan has the DeVos family, but Ohio and Florida are also a miserable wild west mess of charterdom, and North Carolina aspires to be just as ineffective and wasteful. Jeanne Allen of the charter-loving Center for Education Reform says that over thirty states have charter-friendly folks in charge. And even if you aren't one of those states, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that your legislature contains at least one lawmaker who is chomping at the bit to liberate some tax dollars for the betterment of charter operations.

As always, I'll note that charters can be a useful and valuable part of an educational ecosphere. But the modern charter operator too often dreams of a system of no oversight, little accountability, and easy access to those sweet, sweet tax dollars.

Life in Trumpistan may well include increased support for charter-style privatization, but it's already going on, and you don't have to cast your eyes all the way to DC to see it happening. Pay attention, and contact your state elected leaders. Often.

High Stakes Testing

A lot of folks just kind of stood down on this one once ESSA was passed, but test-driven accountability and the test-centered schools that it fosters are still with us. In fact, ESSA empowers states to double down on their commitment to this brutal and destructive practice, and many states are led by people who belong to the Cult of the Test.

It's foolish and a little insane because there is nothing in education reform so transparently foolish than the Big Standardized Tests. Parents and taxpayers see them, experience them, and immediately recognize that this instrument could not possibly measure all the things it purports to measure. Kepp spreading the word.

Big Brother's Personalized Data Grab

For many reformsters, everything we're used to railing against in the ed debates is old, old news. The next exciting thing for them is Personalized Competency Based Education Learning-- let's dispense education via computer, and use the process to collect data about each students, to both measure and mold the student into the kind of person the corporation wants them to be, while creating a data backpack for the student that will allow future employers and the government to determine what place the student should take in society.

This policy takes a variety of approaches, some of them rather stealthy, some of them masquerading as anti-reform positions (let's get rid of the Big Standardized Test by replacing it with software that will gather standardized data every day). Watching out for this requires a great deal of attention and alertness.

Threats to the Profession

The teacher pipeline is drying up, and much of what is coming through has been trained to believe their main job is test prep. The growing teacher shortage is being used as one more excuse to let anyone with a pulse become certified to stand in a classroom and teach. This suits some folks because if you deprofessionalize teaching, you can burn and churn cheap content delivery specialists whose main job is to unpack and present the texts or programs or software that has been lovingly sold to the district. At the same time school managers can cut costs. And for some, there's a bonus because the death of teaching as a profession would also be one more way to kill the teachers union, ending them as any sort of political force as well as removing one more management obstacle.

Democracy

If we spend too much time looking just at education, we will miss the larger picture-- that the attempt to gut public education is part of a larger effort to replace democratic processes and institutions across the board. The DeVos family hasn't just tried to kill public education in Michigan-- they've tried to turn Michigan into a one-party state with themselves at the head of that party. The same process has been unfolding in North Carolina. We are swimming in plutocrats and oligarchs and bettercrats who believe that the country should be run by the Better Sort of People and democracy just gives to much power to the rabble who, really, ought to just be happy knowing their collective places.

As large as the DeVos nomination looms, and as infuriating as it is to see in videos That Face that Betsy makes, like she knows if she just sits through one more boring story from the maid, she will get everything she wants (and fire the maid later for boring her), and as scary as it is to contemplate the USED in the hands of someone who openly and actively roots for public education to fail-- as big as all that seems, it is just one piece of the larger picture, of a multi-front debate that continues to rage around us even during the few hours of Betsy smugly being granted safe passage through a political dumb show.

Don't give her a free pass, but save your strength for the bigger struggles ahead.