IN: Teacher Sit-in For DeVos Senator

Todd Young was born in 1972 in Lancaster, PA. Today (Thursday) he's an Indiana senator with an office full of grumpy teachers.

Young's family moved him to Indiana, where he graduated from public high school and then went straight into the Navy, from there to the Naval Academy, graduated Cum Laude, got a commission in the Marines. Soccer star, intelligence officer, head recruiter in Chicago/Indiana area. Honorably discharged in 2000. Studied in London. Earned a law degree.

In the meantime, he also worked for the Heritage Foundation, worked for Senator Richard Lugar, and volunteered for Mitch Daniels gubernatorial campaign. He got the bug.

In 2010 he ran as a Republican for Indiana's 9th District with endorsements from luminaries all the way up to Dan Quayle. He defeated an incumbent. He had what was called a mixed record. In 2016, he decided to step up to a Senate seat. He won the GOP primary and trounced Evan Bayh in the general election to take Quayle's former seat (he's also married to Quayle's niece).

This "Marine unafraid to stand for conservative principles" had some help getting elected. The fight with Bayh drew a grand total of $38 million total in "outside money", with $24.3 million of that going to Young.

Young now sits on the Senate HELP committee, the one deciding the fate of Education Secretary-in-waiting Betsy DeVos. Want to guess who helped swell the Young coffers just last year?

Which brings us to today. Teachers have noticed that DeVos gave at least $48,000 to Young last year. Granted, that was a small drop in a $24 million bucket. Of course, it's also a year's salary for lots of teachers. Those teachers have demanded that Young recuse himself, and today they were driving the point home by staging a sit-in in his office.

Young's staff has pointed out that this sort of greasy-palmed cross-pollination of political backer and cabinet hopeful has occurred before, citing Senator Joe Donnelly's receipt of a contribution from Commerce Secretary hopeful Penny Pritzer. On the other hand, Pritzer's contribution was $5,000 in 2013 dollars, and she was a relatively non-controversial candidate who was approved 97-1.

Young's not going to recuse himself, and he's not going to vote against DeVos, either. But the sit-in today is a reminder to Indiana and the nation about how business is conducted these days. My hat is off to those Indiana teachers who made the gesture to help bring attention to just how this process is working.

Edushyster In DeVosland

Jennifer Berkshire often takes the unusual blogging step of doing actual journalism, like the kind where you call people and go places and actually talk to the carbon-based life forms who are involved in What's Going On. That's just part of what makes Edushyster required reading for anybody in the ed debates.

She recently traveled to DeVosland, the Michigan home base and spawning ground for Betsy DeVos, presumptive Secretary of Education, and her clan. Nine days, forty-some interviews, and a couple of exceptional posts were the product, but I wanted to hear more (and to add my vote for her to write a full-on book), so I took a page from her book and talked to her via phone. There are so many more stories to tell.

Berkshire has a keen sense of a particularly worded phrase, and she was struck by Jeb Bush's pledge pledge that DeVos would be a "champion of parents, not institutions" which strikes her a reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." What Thatcher meant was that there are only individuals, families and other groups of humans, but larger social structures aren't real-- particularly the ones that are charged with providing support and service for society's members. When DeVos says that she doesn't stand with institutions, that includes institutions that look out for vulnerable citizens who may not have the power to look out for themselves. You know. Like schools.

Traveling to Michigan is really a must when studying DeVos, because within the state, they've never been particularly sneaky or subtle about what they want; it's almost as if it never occurred to them that someday Betsy might need to talk about civil rights with a straight face. Berkshire says, "For example, the family paw prints are all over various legislative maneuvers intended to disenfranchise African Americans, the beefed up emergency manager law that created the Flint water disaster being just one of these." Berkshire says that several (off-the-record) legislators said that Betsy herself helped push through a measure to end straight ticket voting at election time in order to discourage black voters in Flint and Detroit by making lines longer and slower. A judge struck it down for that very reason.

Berkshire also notes that Michigan is essentially a one-party state. The DeVos clan doesn't really deal with Democrats at all, but focuses a lot of attention on keeping their own party in line. There's a long list of people who "have been taken to the woodshed," and the clan often brings a great deal of firepower to even small betrayals (which suggests one reason that DeVos might be a good fit for a Trump administration). DeVos demands that legislators show more loyalty to the family than to the voters.

Some folks in Michigan say that DeVos can be flexible when it suits her. Race to the Top was initially viewed with suspicion until, some claim, Betsy figured out that it could be used to break Detroit City Schools. While the knock on DeVos is that she is anti-accountability, some Michigan folks say she can embrace accountability quite well when it lets her blow shit up.

Consider specifically the story of the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a fun Michigan version of the state takeover district dodge. Berkshire tells the tale:

The EAA was initially created in an effort to win Race to the Top money, and DeVos and her allies were meh about it because it was really a Broad thing. But within three months, they’re pushing hard to expand the EAA statewide, even though there wasn’t yet any data. If you go back and look at the debate over expanding the EAA, you can almost feel the DeVos’ realization that they’ve been handed a gift with this thing that will enable them to go after their favorite targets--teachers unions, school boards, public school buildings. And by 2014, even when it was a measurable, disastrous failure, they were threatening to primary anyone who voted against expanding the EAA.

There are other side stories in the Mitten State. There's the story of how Detroit was on its way to being a portfolio district, with a whole alphabet soup of reformy groups carving up the spoils before Betsy blew the whole thing up and sent many reformy groups packing. There's a good reason that "progressive" reformsters are not lining up to back her.

Scan the Mitten state landscape and you’ll notice something interesting: there are virtually no #edreform groups. Where are they all? Michigan DFER is dead. Excellent Schools Detroit has withered away. Even Ed Trust, one of the last group’s standing, has come out against DeVos. In my interview with Gary Naeyaert, Betsy’s right-hand man at GLEP, he even accused the Waltons of “cutting and running”!

There's also the fascinating story of how the clan busted the union, but other groups have risen up to become equally annoying. Surprisingly, many Charter Management Organizations, which have historically depending on TFA as their classroom fillers no longer want to work with Teach for America because TFAers have gotten themselves a reputation for being troublemakers (aka keep trying to start unions, the little ingrates).

There's the infamous University of Michigan study of charter success in Michigan that is now three years overdue. Instead, the DeVos charter crowd keeps plugging the same old CREDO study. Where are the newer numbers? Nobody seems to know-- it's almost as if someone doesn't want that information to get out.

Berkshire also has some good stories about charter pluggers in Michigan, who have to go through some real contortions because Michigan is such a charter disaster. There is the story (recounted in her blog here) of the charter fans who, when asked to name a shining star, a prime example of great Michigan charters in action, actually named the charter run by an optometrist who was sent to jail for running his fraudulent charter school. That's their shining star.

If DeVos is confirmed (and while I will keep calling, and you should too, a confirmation is hugely likely), there will be some small upsides. Berkshire notes that defenders of public ed will no longer have to struggle to show the connection between charters, choice, and the privatization of pieces of a dismantled public ed system. Kind of like all those House episodes where he deliberately makes the disease worse so that it's easier to see and diagnose. Sending DeVos to DC may also earn Michigan a breather.

And if DeVos is confirmed, all of Berkshire's material will become hugely relevant and she can write the full account of DeVos's Michigan.

Local Control

States are increasingly telling cities what laws they may or may not pass. The most famous example may be North Carolina's HB-2, the notorious law that restricted bathroom access- but also, like laws passed in Alabama and other states, forbid cities to pass laws raising the minimum wage.

State legislatures are taking action to undo the choices of voters. North Carolina's legislature decided they were unhappy about the election for governor, so they stripped power from the office. And just this week, South Dakota's legislature is moving to throw out the law passed by the voters which would establish a host of ethics rules and oversight.

Throughout the nation, government is in the hands of the very rich, who since the advent of Citizens United have unbridled freedom to shop for the legislators who will provide the desired results. When the DeVos family couldn't convince the electorate to pass a voucher law or elect Dick DeVos governor, the billionaire family decided that it was time to just do an end run around the voters. If democratic local voter control won't provide the results you want, just circumvent it.

And what a week it has been. Herr Trump has declared that maybe he should send the feds into Chicago to clean things up. Government agencies, paid for with taxpayer dollars, have been forbidden to speak to those taxpayers. And we're getting a wall, courtesy of an executive order (that curious method by which Presidents get to pretend that they're actually the legislative branch and make laws).

And while Trump's declaration to launch an inquiry into election fraud may be related to a frail and tender ego, it may also make a handy first step toward extending the tools of voter suppression that have been steadily encroaching on voters over the past few years.

Charter schools and choice-- the good, the bad, and the ugly-- are perhaps best understood in the context of the larger erosion of democracy in our country.

There's no reason that charter schools have to be part of this problem. Charter schools can be run by and responsive to local taxpayers and voters. Just up the road from me is a community that lost their local school because the district felt enrollment had dropped too far; the community restarted their school as a charter school, owned, operated and controlled by a local board.

Charter schools do not have to mean the end of local control.

And yet, in the modern charter era, they almost always do. From Philly to Detroit to New Orleans, a signature feature of charter-choice systems is to do away with the local control of an elected board. Replace it with properly connected board members, or run it out of a corporate office-- sometimes far, far away. Hold meetings in the dark. Make decisions in seclusion. Keep the financial operations under wraps.

Charteristas have not been shy about it. Reed Hastings, head of Netflix and well-muscled charter supporter, famously outlined how bad elected school boards are for the business plan, and how they should be done away with. To the investors and businessmen, it is only common sense-- you do not let the help dictate how your business will be run and you do not let the customers see anything you don't want them to see. And those "customers" will damn well settle for the choices that you decide to give them, that you think they deserve, that make business sense for you.

There was a time when faux Democrats provided protective cover for this, and neo-liberals were fre market wolves in progressive sheeps' clothing. But that camouflage coalition is starting to show signs of strain, and it becomes increasingly obvious that this is a variant strain of Republicanism. I find that hard to face-- I come from a long line of Republicans, and there are strains of the classic version that I still resonate to. The less government, the better. Let people get together with their own neighbors to deal with their own stuff.

But this is one of the mysteries that we live with. How did the party of small government, local control, and no federal overreach-- how did they become the party of disenfranchisement, the party of government intrusion that works to disempower city governments and disenfranchise citizens. How did the party of Lincoln become the party that aims those attempts to disempower and disenfranchise mostly at citizens who are not wealthy and not white. How did the Grand Old Party end up providing a haven for a bunch of money-hungry power-grabbing racist sumbitches?

At any rate, school choice week is a frighteningly perfect time to reflect on how the worst of the modern charter movement is just a small part of a bigger movement, a sea change in which huge chunks of our elected government no longer holds the democratic process as a valuable or important part of our national life. If you want to pitch charter schools to me, your warm-up needs to be an explanation of how that charter will be a reflection of and responsive to local control, and if you can't do that, give me a good explanation of why democracy and local control are no longer an important part of our national character.

Reformster Jason Botel Added To USED

.@JasonBotel coming on as senior White House adviser for edu. Will work with acting secretary to lead new ED team: https://t.co/DPr9i1QLf8

— Caitlin Emma (@caitlinzemma) January 25, 2017

Jason Botel comes with the full reformy pedigree. He graduated from U of Penn in 1997 with a degree in English and went straight to work as a Teach for America recruit in Baltimore. He spent three whole years in the classroom, then went on to launch a Baltimore franchise of the KIPP school brand. He served as principal (on LinkedIN he calls it a "public school principal" job) while also serving as the KIPP Baltimore executive director.

In that capacity he went head-to-head with the teachers union, arguing that they shouldn't actually be paid for extra days and hours spent teaching. Presumably if you went to work for KIPP you just accepted that you would do more work for less pay than your professional peers in public schools.

From KIPP Botel moved on to become executive director of MarylandCAN, one of the network of fifty(ish) CANs that serve as lobbyists and financiers for the reformster movement, bolstered by all the big names like Gates and Walton. His job there was to be a soldier in the ongoing fight of charteristas trying desperately to get Maryland to unloose its restrictions and rules for charters (because, as we've all heard, the deal with charters is that they are all about accountability).

Botel has kept a relatively low profile on the large stage (at least according to Dr. Google). I'm sure more info is coming and we will learn more about him the days ahead (or the comments below), but as Betsy DeVos stumbles toward the Department of Education Secretary's office, the rest of the department is slowly filling up with tried-and-true reformster types like Hannah Skandera, whose checkered past includes Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, and Botel himself.

In fact, it's becoming increasingly clear that Trumps USED will be jam packed with conventional reformsters (led by the most extreme version of their crowd). It's also clear that we really need to retire the "reform" moniker, because the fans of corporate privatization and dismantling public education are now the status quo, the establishment, the swamp. This is a USED that either Jeb or Hillary would have been comfortable with. Stay tuned for more additions to the department roster.

Competition vs. Quality

It is an oft-stated truism-- competition creates excellence.

If you are running a race, you will run faster and harder to beat people who are also running fast. If you are playing football, you will train to be better than the team facing you on the field. It seems sensible.

There are some problems with this model just on its face. The people in the front of the pack, the winners, will get stronger perhaps, but the race will also separate out some losers, who will either have to either accept losing as their lot in life. Or they'll figure out ways to cheat. After all, if the definition of winning too narrow, like "being first to cross the finish line"-- well, there are plenty of ways to accomplish that without having to run the whole race faster than anyone else.

If we really believe that every student in America should get to attend a school that's a winner, then a competition that only a few can win seems like a poor model.

Competition may deliver excellence for a few, but it will not deliver excellence for everyone.

But there are other issues. If we make the reward for winning something important like, say, your food, then by losing, racers lose the very thing they need to compete. Competition will make them weak and hungry, the very opposite of breeding excellence.

But competition often does not breed excellence at all-- in fact, it can create the opposite effect.

Consider a market competition this way-- that vendors are competing for the chance to sell their wares. When prime customers are scare, competition favors those who lower their standards-- not those who raise them.

Colleges, for instance. As reformsters often point out while decrying the proliferation of remedial college coursework, colleges have responding to shrinking pol of college prospects by lowering their standards. They have competed for customers by admitting folks who would not have been considered customers at all in an earlier day, and since a college's customers are also part of their process and "product," they've competed by running away from excellence.

Wal-Mart did not conquer the retail world by pursuing excellence. "I want the very best product on the market, so let's go to Wal-Mart," said no consumer ever. Getting the greatest number of customers means lowering the bar as much as possible, both for the products on sale and the customers welcomed through the door.

The very term "exclusive" is associated with high quality. Clubs bill themselves as "exclusive" because everyone hears "selective" and "the best." Private schools and charter schools have long understood that "excellence" is achieved by being careful about who gets in your front door. Other charters have understood that "success" (as in "enriching the bottom line") can be achieved by lowering the bar as you open the front door.

In a system with too few resources, competition eats excellence and spits it out. In a city education ecosystem that contains many charter schools, where there are 200,000 seats for 100,000 students, competition for customers will be fierce, and schools will compete with whatever strength they have. If they can't compete for the academically oriented crowd, they will compete for the folks who want a convenient school or an easy school or a school without Those People in it. They will compete by using creative advertising that ignores the truth. They will worry more and more about getting people in the door and less and less about what is waiting for them inside. And while Wal-Mart can't afford to disappoint customers into never coming back, a school doesn't have repeat customers-- its customer base is always aging out every couple of years.

"Competition creates excellence" only seems true to people used to being in the front of the pack and setting the rules. For everyone else, competition is a reason to game the system, change the rules, move the finish line, or just lower the standards.

The goal of public education is excellence for everyone, but competition produces excellence for only a few, and sometimes not even that. It's a lousy metaphorical framework for education. Better, say, to talk about a garden on which we focus the full resources of the community to plant and water and tend living things to grow and mature without worrying about which one is tallest, sweetest or most vibrantly colored, or how we could best deprive one flower of water so that another can win a greenery contest. Education is not a race, and competition will not improve it.

Dem-ish Reformsters Play Both Sides

You know how it is. New school year starts, lunch time rolls around, and everyone has to decide who they want to sit with for the next year. 

Modern education reform has been fueled in part by folks pretending to be left-tilted Democrats while embracing right-tilted free market corporate-based policies. The sweet smoothie of neo-liberal conservatism has worked for years--it helped sell No Child Left Behind (Look! Bipartisan support For The Children!)  and it worked under the Obama neo-lib administration as well. Really, who cares about political labels and parties and tribes as long as corporate ed reform is still chugging along.

What, really, is the difference between a Democrat-flavored, left-tilted, self-identified progressive education reformster and the crew that just took over the big table in the DC cafeteria?

Remember what Democrats for Education Reform honcho Whitney Tilson had to say about putting the D in DFER:

The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

Then Donald Trump won the election, and a new President means a new year in the cafeteria.

This has presented reformsters with a dilemma. They can have pretty much everything they want, but they have to throw political support to Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump to get it.

Some folks are cool with that. Jeanne Allen and the Center for Education Reform had about five seconds of misgivings last May, and they are now ready to plant a big wet kiss on any part of Trumpian flesh they can get their lips near.

But other reformsters are trying to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, maintaining their reformy credentials while keeping distance between themselves and the least-loved President ever elected along with his Secretary of Education, a woman who has no more time for Democrats than she has for public schools.

So here's Justin Cohen at Chalkbeat, with the super-descriptive headline "I'm an education reformer, and Betsy DeVos is going to kill our coalition. Here’s a game plan." Cohen is a Broadie and member of the board for Students for Education Reform (DFER's little sibling), and his distinction between the wings of reformsterism matches what several others have posited:

The glue of the reform coalition has been an orientation toward results and accountability. DeVos has shown that her real commitment is to an ideological position, dominated by a faith in markets and the economic theories of conservative economists like Milton Friedman...The nomination of DeVos signals that our country’s Republican leadership will abandon the technocratic agenda in favor of an ideological one. 

This reads like a dispatch from an alternate universe. The reform coalition has been steadfast in its determination to ignore results that don't match its determination to charterize, voucherize and privatize education. Reformsters, for instance, still pursue the idea of an Achievement School District even though the pioneer ASD in Tennessee has failed to produce results. And in states like Florida, Ohio, New York and, yes, Michigan reformsters have held the line against accountability at every step.

And if this divide is so strong and clear, where have these progressive results-oriented accountability hawks been as DeVos has torn through the Michigan education system?

Others mark the divide elsewhere. Here's reformy press agent Richard Whitmire at the74 trying to explain the new confusion and identifying it mostly as a charters-vs-vouchers division, with a side order of pendulum fear:

One not-so-private fear is the all-too-real chance of a major pendulum swing. When the Trump era ends, chances are good that politics will swing to the progressive side. At that point, charters will be tainted by Trump, mashed up with vouchers, and will undoubtedly lose their crucial bipartisan support. Especially from any Democracts in the white middle class.

That's a reasonable fear for reformsters. By cross-branding their policy drive, they've been able to swing from Clinton to Bush to Obama without ever having to lose political juice or partisan supporters from either camp. But Trump and DeVos are likely to ruin the brand simply by stamping their names on the policies that reformsters have been pushing all along.

Whitney Tilson himself has figured out another way to split the difference. DFER said they thought no Democrats should work with DeVos, but they have not exactly been blistering in their criticism of her. Now in his latest every-so-often-ly newsletter, Tilson manages to have it both ways.

He's been quiet, he says, while weighing DeVos's testimony and perusing the record, and now he has concluded that he can't support her. However-- he will present an entire essay from "an experienced, smart and trusted friend" who says that they're a Democrat who has worked with DeVos since 2000, and lays out why she would be awesome (visionary, super-duper tough on accountability, works For The Children). Tilson doesn't endorse this argument, mind you-- he just wants everyone to hear it.

Tilson has concluded "somewhat reluctantly" that he can't endorse her: 

I say “somewhat reluctantly” because I think she is a smart, capable person who genuinely cares about every child in this country receiving a high-quality education, and also because I agree with her on many things, including the importance of parental choice, especially via good charter schools, and on the need to courageously do battle with the forces of the status quo (including playing political hardball, as this NYT article notes), which are so poorly serving so many millions of children.

That is one heck of a non-endorsement. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

Tilson wants his fans to know that he is absolutely not "toeing the unions' line, perish the thought" and manages to lump the unions and Tea Party together. "The unions obviously oppose choice and, like conservative Tea Party Republicans, they oppose strong federal accountability, as they'd like to be left to their own devices locally."

This is perhaps the dividing line that matters most but which is discussed least-- some reformsters would prefer to deal with a federal bureaucracy while others prefer to work with state governments. Is it easier to get tax dollars from the feds, or do you have a better shot at chipping your paydirt off big "block grants" handed to the states? I suppose this depends upon whether your network and contacts are operating in DC or a state capital.

Tilson works his way back around to Cohen's piece, from which he pulls some salient quotes--

Her answers also validated what left-leaning education reformers have suspected for months: DeVos embraces school choice as an education panacea, while grasping little else about federal education policy.  

In other words, because she is such a charter-choice true believer, she doesn't really know anything about anything.

It remains to be seen how reformsters will sort themselves out, and that will undoubtedly depend on what sorts of policy and administrative screw-ups DeVos perpetrates. In the meantime, it's a fascinating dance to watch, like watching middle school students sort themselves into cafeteria tables at the beginning of a new school year.

Foggy College Readiness

Chester "Checker" Finn is concerned. The former head of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and current Maryland State Board of Education VP thinks that our students and families are enveloped in a giant bank of foggy lies, lies about their college readiness and their future prospects and the quality of their K-12 education.

National Affairs includes Finn in their Winter 2017 issue with "The Fog of 'College Readiness'." It's a piece that wants to set off some alarms, but actually has some serious fog problems of its own.

Finn opens by saying that maybe more than half of graduating high school students are not ready for college-- according to "some estimates." This is a problem because the "vast majority" of high school students plan to attend college. This is a very foggy place to start; I teach a Pretty Large Number (to use Finn's style of metrics here) of students who are the future welders, auto mechanics, body repair experts, home health care aids, and heavy equipment operators of America. None of them intend to go to college, and none of them need to (and in my English class, my goal is not to prepare them for college). So to summarize our starting point-- some number of students aren't ready to go to college, and some number of those students actually want to go to college.

So how does Finn think we arrived at this foggily-delineated problem?

The source of this gap between belief and reality is the K-12 education system. Our schools create a fog when it comes to academic preparation for college success. Concerned more with inclusiveness, validation, and graduation than with college preparedness, administrators encourage teachers to, for instance, consider pupil effort in their grading, and push students to take advanced courses for which they have the ambition but not the readiness. 

He devotes a paragraph to Hillary Clinton's free college ideas (leading me to believe that this piece was wrapped up before, say, mid-November) and then notes that while ambition and optimism are swell things, there just comes a point--

But at a certain point, encouragement becomes damaging. 

K-12 schools and colleges and universities should stop lying. It's an interesting position because it points in a direction that Finn never suggests or even hints at-- the conclusion that some students just aren't going to get that special level of success and they should start figuring out how to face the truth that there lives are not going to be all that great or successful. It's the subtext of so much reformsterism-- that some people are just destined for Better Things than other people, and we should stop trying to raise false hope and doomed aspirations for those other people, and we should most especially stop dumping money in a system that raises those false hopes and doomed aspirations. Instead of building Great Hope Academy, we should be offering Know Your Place and Be Happy High School.

But as I said, Finn isn't going to go there, or even admit that such a there is implicit in his argument (of all the reformsters, only Finn's successor at Fordham, Mike Petrilli, is willing to just say that some students are of a better type and therefor need a better type of school, away from the non-strivers).

So where does he go?

It's no secret that possessing a college degree vastly improves one's chances of attaining the "good life." It helps greatly in the quest for a decent job, a living wage, upward mobility (if one's parents had no such degrees), and full participation in American society. Indeed, a society full of college graduates is apt to be not just wealthier but healthier and more stable than one populated by dropouts and people with only K-12 schooling.

Well, no. Finn tried to muster some evidence for this by citing Coming Apart and Our Kids. But I'd argue what Robert Putnam shows in Our Kids is what is supported by other research-- the best predictor of the Good Life is being raised by parents who have the Good Life themselves. A college degree is just one of those things that people on the Good Life track get; it's an effect, not a cause. When Finn envisions a society full of these Better People, he's not envisioning a society full of college grads so much as he's imagining a world where more people are Better People from privileged backgrounds. Although he's also imagining a society in which a lot of people might be cranky about being fast food managers and garbage collectors with college degrees and college debt out the wazoo. College degrees do not make college degree-requiring jobs appear, and they do not make laboring jobs disappear.

Finn rings the bell about disappearing lower-skills work, and that's a fair point. We seem to be slowly figuring out that automation is a much a threat to our workforce as outsourcing. That means we need more college-educated folks, and Finn also wants to ring the bell of college remediation-- which means that those students must not have been prepared to attend. To his credit, Finn lays some blame for this on the college's choice to accept the student in the first place. I would love it if the right-tilted Finn recognized this as an effect of the free market on education-- that if the market shrinks, the business must get fast and loose about whom it accepts as customers, and in this way, competition and free market pressures can actually lead to a worse product, rather than the high quality that free market acolytes believe must be the result of competition.

Anyway, Finn would be okay with the over-acceptance of deficient college freshmen if colleges were any good at remediation, but they aren't. For this moment, at least, Finn and I are in agreement. Finn also notes that remediation is now part of the business model, which matches what I hear from former students.

So where is this terrible honesty gap sneaking in?

Finn names several culprits. Grade inflation, leading to lost of students getting Bs and As. Students getting scores that have incorporated things like hard work. Kids These Days, with their droopy pants and participation trophies.

But Finn is also unhappy with standardized tests, and he argues against norming because that ends up defining "fifth grade level" for readings as "about average for all fifth graders." Finn wants standards-- hard, tough, immovable standards that will give lots of students the failing scores they deserve. It is not clear what Finn thinks the standards should be based on-- who exactly will decide what a fifth grader "should" be able to do. Nor does he mention that the modern emphasis on normed testing and rating and ranking is built into the dna of the reformster movement, which has repeatedly insisted that we need standards in order to compare students, teachers and schools, to sort out the winners and losers.

Oh, and look-- coming out of the fog is this large piece of baloney. Finn believes despite the "furor" raised over the Common Core, "a welcome outcome of the recent round of improvements in state standards is that young people who actually master them will be prepared for college-level academics." So wrong, in so many ways. Do the CCSS math and English standards guarantee that someone is ready to be a biology major or history major or music major? Is there a single solitary piece of evidence that the standards prepare someone to be a math or English major? And we've had the standards for years now-- do we see a corresponding spike in college success? No, to all of that?

Well, Finn can explain the last part. Wimpy states have balked at setting honesty cut scores for tests because they don't want to face the truth that huge swaths of students should be labeled deficient. And the primary and middle school grades sent home form the tests are "cagey" about whether or not students are on track for college. Because surely you can tell whether a ten year old is on track for college or not, and you shouldn't be "cagey" about it.

Finn says that high schools add to the fog with things like lots of AP courses. As with many of his other complaints, Finn skips the part where he and his reformy friends have added to the problem. AP courses (which are a product sold by the College Board, the company that is now headed by David Coleman, architect of the Common Core) are widely added because in some states like mine, offering AP courses helps improve your school performance score.

Finn does note that pressure from all (feds, reformsters, etc) over has pushed schools to increase grad rates some way, any way, and he sees ties to the Go To College rate here. That creates pressure to finagle, which creates students and families who are lied to by "adults in the K-12 system," none of whom will suffer any adverse effects for their duplicity. But teachers who give those As and Bs are like doctors who prescribe opiates.

There are all sorts of pieces lost in the fog of Finn's portrayal. One piece is the students and families themselves. In thirty-some years, I have lost track of the students and parents who have chosen less rigorous coursework so that they could get higher grades or have less stressful lives. Give me control of those students' educational choices and they would have been much more prepared for college-- but that's not how the system works. Every year I have at least one or two students in my non-college prep class who want to go to college, but don't want to take college track courses, despite my explaining in no uncertain terms the mistake they're making.

One proposed Finnian solution? Well, colleges could be honest and tell high schools "you can give a diploma to anyone you want, but they can't come to college without evidence that they're ready to do the work here." Finn envisions a two-tier graduation system, with one track for Plain Old Vanilla Diplomas and one for Ready For College certificates. Colleges would be completely upfront about who could and could not gain admittance and which students would be denied the opportunity to pay tuition to the college and again I ask, has Finn ever met the Free Market?


I do think he's on the verge of another realization here, which is that colleges and universities, as engines and markers of the regular old systems of privilege, often make admissions decisions that have nothing to do with academic promise. Can you imagine Yale telling George H. W. Bush, "Sorry, but your son George, with his lackluster high school performance and poor test scores simply isn't Yale material, and he'll have to go somewhere else because, you know, we have standards here. Also, can we count on your generous donation to the alumni fund again this year?"

This is also as good a place as any to note another giant gaping fogbank in Finn's reasoning which has been typical at every step of the College Ready reformster movement. College Ready is not a single, measurable thing. Not even a little. "Ready to major in art history at Harvard" does not look remotely like "ready to major in biology at Penn State" which does not look remotely like "ready to major in Spanish at Outer Dipwillow Community College" which does not look like "ready to major in underwater basket weaving at Bob's For-Profit Online University." When Finn says that colleges should be frank with high schools about what students need to be admitted there, I am imagining a 300-page document from every single college in the country.

If Finn or anyone else wants me to take this College Ready baloney seriously (because I'm sure he's losing sleep worrying about my approval), they should show me a specific list of exact skill and knowledge areas that they believe defines College Ready for all schools for all courses of study. It cannot be done. College Ready is not a thing.

Finn imagines the ripples that would spread if colleges implemented his policy of hard honesty:

If colleges stopped admitting sorely unprepared students — or Washington curbed their access to financial aid — there would be an initial uproar, with cries of discrimination, narrowed opportunity, and fresh barriers to social mobility. A number of colleges would lose enrollment and some — especially community colleges, but also some private colleges, including a number of "historically black" campuses — would shrink. At least a handful would likely close.

Yes, Checker Finn just said that if we tightened college standards, black students would be hit hardest.

Finn imagines that high schools would get a whole lot of pushback from parents who discovered that Junior was not doing well enough to get into college.

But those schools, too, need to be part of the solution, not just by preparing their pupils more effectively but also by advising parents — in those annual test-score reports, of course, but also in teacher conferences, quarterly report cards, and other bulletins — as to the kinds of colleges that their kids are or are not on track for.

Yeah, we could add new staff-- we could call them Know Your Place counselors.

Somewhere in all of this classist mess is the notion that college is not for everyone, which is dead on, because there are plenty of rewarding, well-paid, and absolutely essential jobs that are necessary, as Mike Rowe sayd, "to make civilized life possible for the rest of us." In fact, if folks like Finn want to help with this issue, one thing they could do is stand up for unions and advocate for solid union protection and good union wages, thereby helping folks realize that blue collar jobs are not the jobs people "settle" for because they're not "smart" enough to go to college. That would be a huge help!

But in the meantime, we will float in the fog where the proposed solution to a problem that may not even exist is to assess a quality we don't know how to measure to foster outcomes that we don't know how to create, all in the name of separating out the winners from the losers, the Betters from the Lessers, even though we're so lost in a fog with our non-existent measuring tools that we can't tell our elbows from our ears. Should be a piece of cake.