So Melissa McCarthy did a Spicer press briefing last night, and it included an appearance by Betsy DeVos. It was pretty hilarious, and I present it to you here (just in case you've missed it) but I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand, when was the last time that an education issue garnered enough widespread mainstream attention to rate some jokes on a comedy show like SNL? It's heartening to know that the American public is sort of paying attention to education for at least fifteen minutes.
On the other hand, SNL-- as they did with KellyAnne Conway and, for that matter, Trump himself when they let him host-- makes DeVos look soft and harmless, just a vulnerable out-of-her-depths boob, which seriously underplays both her shark-like tendencies and the real, deliberate danger she poses to public education.
At any rate, here we go:
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Saturday, February 4, 2017
NOLA Charters and Bloated Bureaucracy
Remember how the charter school industry was going to be a lean, mean, educatin' machine. That is repeatedly turning out to be not particularly true.
Take this recent study from New Orleans, home of the charter industry's greatest opportunity, the hurricane-fueled chance to set up a chartertastic free-for-all. The ways in which this is failing are legion and oft-reported. For the moment we're just going to focus on this singular failure.
From a report on the study published by The Lens, a NOLA news site:
Overall, New Orleans schools — the vast majority of which are charters — spent $1,358 more per pupil on operating expenses, or 13 percent, than a control group in the 2013-14 school year.
Administrative spending increased $699 per student, or 66 percent, compared to the control group. Meanwhile, instructional spending dropped by $706 per student, or about 10 percent.
In other words, taxpayers are paying for far more administration in their schools than they would have been had the district stayed on centralized, single district.
This is not a shock. If you are having trouble making ends meet with one home, you don't fix the problem by buying a second one. And you can't operate several schools with hte money you previously used to operate just one. And if you like this idea couched in proper econo-talk, try this quote from Christian Buerger of the Education Research Alliance
If you decentralize an entire district, there’s a loss in economies of scale. And the study found that despite claims that charters would cut through all the red tape, they spent far more on red tapery. Charters are also fond of hiring contractors for various tasks, another not-very-cost-effective method of operating.
And that's before we even get to the specific issue of what these new layers of fat, happy administrators are being paid. The examples in charterdom are legion. Eva Moskowitz is paid more to run her NYC charter chain than the head of the entire NYC public school system is paid. Just today this week, we get this story from Los Angeles wherein the head of a small charter chain is paid more than the chief of the entire Los Angeles public school system. In a charter choice system, we routinely take one well-paid school superintendent and add several more even-better-paid school chiefs. With a charter choice system, you get more administrators, and they are often paid more. It's like replacing your Yugo with a fleet of Lexus.
This is neither lean nor mean, but it's attractively profitable if you're thinking of starting your own charter school.
Take this recent study from New Orleans, home of the charter industry's greatest opportunity, the hurricane-fueled chance to set up a chartertastic free-for-all. The ways in which this is failing are legion and oft-reported. For the moment we're just going to focus on this singular failure.
From a report on the study published by The Lens, a NOLA news site:
Overall, New Orleans schools — the vast majority of which are charters — spent $1,358 more per pupil on operating expenses, or 13 percent, than a control group in the 2013-14 school year.
Administrative spending increased $699 per student, or 66 percent, compared to the control group. Meanwhile, instructional spending dropped by $706 per student, or about 10 percent.
In other words, taxpayers are paying for far more administration in their schools than they would have been had the district stayed on centralized, single district.
This is not a shock. If you are having trouble making ends meet with one home, you don't fix the problem by buying a second one. And you can't operate several schools with hte money you previously used to operate just one. And if you like this idea couched in proper econo-talk, try this quote from Christian Buerger of the Education Research Alliance
If you decentralize an entire district, there’s a loss in economies of scale. And the study found that despite claims that charters would cut through all the red tape, they spent far more on red tapery. Charters are also fond of hiring contractors for various tasks, another not-very-cost-effective method of operating.
And that's before we even get to the specific issue of what these new layers of fat, happy administrators are being paid. The examples in charterdom are legion. Eva Moskowitz is paid more to run her NYC charter chain than the head of the entire NYC public school system is paid. Just today this week, we get this story from Los Angeles wherein the head of a small charter chain is paid more than the chief of the entire Los Angeles public school system. In a charter choice system, we routinely take one well-paid school superintendent and add several more even-better-paid school chiefs. With a charter choice system, you get more administrators, and they are often paid more. It's like replacing your Yugo with a fleet of Lexus.
This is neither lean nor mean, but it's attractively profitable if you're thinking of starting your own charter school.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Exhuming inBloom
The folks at Data & Society have decided to take a look at "The Legacy of inBloom,." and mostly what they've revealed is that they haven't learned much of anything from the Data Overlords Disaster that was Gates' failed attempt to create a massive data mine.
Data & Society is "a research institute focused on the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development." In other words, they're a thinky tank focused on data stuff. They're relatively new to the thinky tank biz, founded just two years ago by Danah Boyd, a scholar and Microsoft researcher who specializes in young folks and their social media stuff. D&S got a huge start with two MacArthur grants -- $400K from the Intelligence and Autonomy initiative, and a whopping $875K from the Enabling Connected Learning program. Big bucks have also been kicked in by a host of heavy hitters including Microsoft Research, Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, and, yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This working paper was put together by Monica Bulger, Patrick McCormick, and Mikaela Pitcan. Bulger is an ed researcher, McCormick is a professional consultant, and Pitcan is a social scientist and mental health clinician. And whatever else we can say about the report, I will give them points for writing in mostly plain English rather than corporate edu-research gobbledeegook.
So let's go and make our visit.
Prequel to inBloom
The paper marks the beginning of inBloom in 2011 when Vicki Phillips, working at the time for the Gates Foundation, published a post entitled "Shared tools for teachers? There's an app for that!" This included an announcement about the nine-state consortium Shared Learning Collaborations, which planned to set up a platform that would gather, share, store, crunch and standardize all the education data (including setting standards for all ed software). Phillips was positively giddy.
But as the paper wryly notes, "The enthusiasm of Phillips’ blog post did not end up being an accurate predictor of the project’s future." From Day One, the folks tied to Bill Gates' big vision failed to read the room.
In November of 2011, Gates went on CNN to announce a "crisis in education" (because nobody had ever played that song before) as well as his pitch for one-to-one computing, because children are automatically fascinated by anything on a computer.
inBloom was set to launch in spring of 2013. The paper tried to connect that time with some sort of swelling storm of data issues-- Edward Snowden, the Target hacking. Sure. Perhaps we might also consider that 2013 marked the point at which Common Core and the Big Standardized Testing regimen that came stapled to it first really smacked America in the face-- and all of it backed by Bill Gates.
Maybe-- just maybe-- Americans were jumpy about a self-appointed private citizen trying to use his personal fortune to inflict his personal vision of education on the country. inBloom was the technocratic dream, the backbone and heart of a system in which we would collect everything there was to know about every student, then we could take total control of their education and shape their entire lives to be what we wanted them to be. Even Common Core, which seemed like the flagship of the reformy agenda at the time, could be arguably seen as a system of data tags meant primarily to facilitate collection and sorting of the data, so that we could standardized every student (well, every student without rich parents and access to a private school). Plus the whole thing would be hella profitable and grab big chunks of the billions of dollars of education money. Maybe-- just maybe-- Americans who saw all of this coming found it creepy and bad and just fundamentally counter to the whole spirit of American public education.
Spoiler alert: this is not a possibility that this paper is really going to explore.
inBloom's Story
The decision was that inBloom would be centralized, open source and nationally scaled. You might think that at the moment that someone said, "Let's create a computer program that monitors and collects data from all children all across the country and stores the data in one place," that somebody might have invoked 1984 and said, "Well, if that's not an actual bad idea, at the very least it''s likely to be hugely unpopular." But that smart person was not in the room.
Nor was there a smart person in the room when the run-up was put together, composed of pieces like a McKinsey report chicken littling about a plummeting education sky, or attempts to create panic by citing international tests cores, or whingig about NAEP scores, or concocting fantastic claims like a loss of trillions of dollars to the US economy, or declaring that Khan Academy's library of edu-videos was achieving great things, or Rocketship learning, and just generally as the paper puts it, many edutech evangelists felt "like their time had come."
Teachers may remember this period of the early 2010's as that time that a bunch of eduamateurs started running around telling teachers to shut up and stop sucking while the amateurs pushed a bunch of dumb ideas and nobody would listen to education professionals about any of it. Oh, them was the days.
The paper also backtracks to talk about some earlier attempts at the same thing, and how they failed, and how nobody learned anything from any of them, because they just wanted to get funding and disrupt the hell out of something.
But finally, Race to the Top and the Consortium of States (which really sounds like a Game of Thrones thing) created "an uneasy alliance." The alliance was uneasy because even though RttT told states, "Go set up something just like what the CoS is doing,"
the nature of complex government procurement entangling federal, state, and local agencies, competing priorities, and layers of public sector oversight and accountability often chafed against inBloom’s preferred methodologies of software development.
In other words, as would repeatedly happen in reformsterland, the technocrats and software guys want to just do what they want to do, without having to answer to governments and regulations and customers (stupid, stupid end users).
The idea (the report doesn't really say whose idea it was) was that inBloom should have a fast, big, shock and awe unveiling, unburdened by all that planning and testing and slowly rolling it out as you're sure it's done right. You may recall this similar attitude of "We need this RIGHT NOW more than we need it right" was also a hallmark of the Common Core rollout.
This led to any number of problems, from how the program actually worked (or didn't) to the floating about of wildly different cost estimates to schools.
Changing Perspectives of Data
Sigh. Just in case it isn't clear, we will be blaming the death of inBloom on everything except fatal flaws in the concept itself.
So now we're going to hear about circumstances in society at large which contributed to an atmosphere in which people had a hard time seeing how a giant data-sucking monstrosity was actually a good thing.
That crazy wikileaks, followed up by that wacky Edward Snowden gave everyone a "crash course" in both how much data the government was collecting and how bad they were at protecting it. The paper quotes Aimee Guidera of Data Quality Campaign, one of the advocacy groups pushing for Big Data to get full access to the public trough:
the issue is inBloom and education data collection became nuclear and it became synonymous with Big Brother, Edward Snowden, Target, making teachers into robots, putting teachers out of business, social engineering, lack of parent control. They were all fearful words, and once that genie was out of the bottle, you couldn’t bring the conversation back.
This is typical of the argument being pushed here, that inBloom folks just lost a war of PR in which words are just strategic weapons that have no meaning or connection to reality. In other words, their argument is that victims of the Johnstown flood would have been fine if they had not been exposed to press reports that said they were under water and drowning. inBloom became synonymous with Big Brother in the same way that being shot "becomes" synonymous with having a hole in your body. There was no "becoming." The advocates of inBloom wound up wearing that shoe because it was hteir shoe and it fit perfectly.
Meanwhile, all sorts of companies were regularly hacked and lost information. People somehow got the idea that corporations wanted to privatize many things while saying "screw the public." The Great Recession left folks with the idea that Wall Street was a bunch of out-of-touch money-sucking scumbags and that our elected officials were more concerned with taking care of Wall Street than Main Street. And the paper quotes a superintendent who was shocked-- shocked-- to discover that many people did not adore Bill Gates. I mean, here was this mega-rich guy volunteering without even being asked or elected or anything, coming to just remake a whole sector of society to suit himself, and lots of people weren't even grateful! Imagine!
The paper notes that inBloom's folks didn't always help. It cites Gates SXSW speech about inBloom in which he invoked Luke Skywalker and Yoda.
And simultaneous to all of this was the news that many citizens thought that the whole education reform scam, to which inBloom was solidly attached, was actually a big pile of baloney.
The Opposition Emerges
Into this contentious mess stepped folks like Leonie Haimson, who thought that letting a private corporation act like Big Brother was the worst of several worlds.
Once again, the paper does not address the validity of Haimson's criticisms, though it does report them. But it treats them as a political strategy, rather than a substantive critique of things that were true about inBloom. Speaking of Haimson and Diane Ravitch:
the arguments they picked, the targets they chose, and the support that they mobilized in response to inBloom honed in on the changing public data atmosphere.
Right. Their arguments were arguments that they picked, not a reaction to Bad Things That Were True about inBloom. Those arguments only found support because of the public data atmosphere, not because they were Bad Things That Were True. They report the Haimson sent to a town hall about the issue:
Parents, do you know your child’s confidential, personal school records are going to be shared with a corporation called inBloom Inc?
This highly sensitive information will be stored on a data cloud and disclosed to for-profit corporations to help them develop and market their “learning products”
The data will include your child’s names, address, photo, email, test scores, grades, economic and racial status, and detailed disciplinary, health and special education records.
The report presents this as if it were clever marketing that capitalized on public fears; it slides right by the point that everything Haimson said was true. The report also notes that inBloom reps were "absent" from the town hall meeting. That sounds sort of bland and neutral, but Haimson (I reached out to her for this piece) characterizes their non-attendance as "refused to attend," which was their pattern for many other gatherings about inBloom as well-- including "gatherings" to testify at NYC and NY hearings about the program.
The report suggests that inBloom, the NY State Ed Department, and other fans were slow or incomplete or 'reluctant" to communicate the awesomeness of inBloom to the public, but in fact Haimson reports e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the Gates Foundation forbid the NYSED to communicate anything to anybody without having the Gates folks vet it first.
In short, the report suggests that inBloom's advocates were a little slow or a little incomplete in their reading of and reaction to the growing opposition, as if they were well-meaning but too good-hearted to sense how much trouble they were in, when in fact, it seems more accurate to say that inBloom's supporters were aggressively opaque and completely in tune with the tone of those reformy years, which was "Shut up and do as your told, right now, because this will be super awesome and you guys aren't allowed to ruin it for us!"
The report does include one classy flourish-- comparing inBloom opponents to anti-vaxxers. Of course, vaccinations are a scientifically-established solution to a proven problem, while inBloom was an unproven, untested solution to an imaginary problem. No, if there were any anti-vaxxers in the room, it was the inBloom supporters.
But this report is stuck in the Battle of PR story. Take this--
Ultimately, there were never adequate assurances as to the safety of these data practices. In addition, inBloom representatives had difficulty in articulating what the concrete value would be for individual
students. With public doubts about safety, and no clear success case to show...
Quick-- What do you think comes next? Could it be "inBloom had to realize their plan was seriously flawed"? Or "inBloom needed to consider the truth and validity of the criticisms leveled against them"?
Nope:
With public doubts about safety, and no clear success case to show, proponents of inBloom lost control of the narrative.
So even as we gather to consider what wrong with inBloom, we start with the premise that, really, there was nothing actually wrong with inBloom. Nope-- the whole business was just a PR battle in which inBloom supporters were outmanuevered, caught unawares because they were just too goodhearted and naively certain of their wonderful plan.
The Fall of inBloom
Nine member of the consortium were joined in 2013 by the Council of Chief State School Officers themselves, cementing inBloom as a BFF of the Common Core Complex. But those nine states included Colorado, where inBloom failed an audit, and Louisiana, where big questions came up about individualized student data, with social security numbers, stored on servers and not terribly secure. Georgia declared it would keep its own data, thank you. The coalition was shrinking down to New York, and continuing to shoot itself in the foot with pricey videos about how awesome it would be when students stared at screens and teachers stared at screens and everything there was to know about students could be shown on a data dashboard.
It took just seven months in 2013 for the consortium to completely blow apart.
But again, the report finds that none of these issues were part of inBloom. Instead, they share the insights of a senior inBloom tech who says that inBloom wanted to be a quick, agile techy start-up and it made the mistake of partnering with states, who are lumbering dinosaurs.
So New York became the last stand, in part because it had made the strongest bet on inBloom's future. But a large network of parents was ready, aided by, well, pretty much everyone who wasn't an employee or bought-in bureaucrat. The report suspects that our old enemy-- Implementation!-- was the problem. Quoting Pleasantvill superintendent Mary Fox Alter:
The Common Core in New York involved a teacher evaluation system, Common Core curriculum materials that were being built as the plane flew in the sky and a data dashboard system that was supposed to track all of this, and new tests that were data dark to us. So the implementation plan for all of this in New York contained those four elements. The data dashboard was one of the four, the other three were fatally flawed.
See? It was those other poorly implemented ideas that dragged poor, innocent inBloom to its death.
Postmortem
So what killed inBloom?
One theory. Gates spent lots of money but failed to build any parent or community trust. That's not wrong, though it skips the question of whether such trust could have been earned for inBloom. Does a hungry wolf trying to sneak up on sheep have a perception, communication and trust problem, or does it have a sheep are too smart to let themselves get eaten problem? But we love that communication theory:
Sharren Bates reflects that “inBloom did not have a privacy problem, inBloom did not have a parent problem. InBloom had an advocacy and perception problem.”
Another version of the communicationexcuse theory was that the whole thing was too rooted in dataland, championed by data people who forget to talk with the civilians. They were just such visionaries that they couldn't or wouldn't explain their advanced vision in terms that ordinary mortals could understand. Sure. That's it. We're just not bright enough here on this planet.
Could Things Have Turned out Differently? AKA, What Have We Learned?
There was a lack of consistent leadership. A visionary champion for the program might have helped.
But the "key takeaway" is that more community buy-in was needed. Which is a nicer way of saying "the public just didn't understand us well enough, and if we could get them to be less dumb, we'd be set." They kept asking what the hell inBloom actually did, and we didn't really answer them. And we were snotty. So maybe if we could have remembered to talk less, smile more.
In other words, the answer to "what have we learned," is "Nothing. Nothing at all."
The paper still wants to find the right way to impose inBloom on the public. What PR campaign can we use to get them on board? How can we talk them into seeing that we're right?
No listening. No acknowledging that misgivings about the program could be valid. We've done everything right-- we just have to find a way to make people see that. We're going to impose this program, but we have to impose it in a way that it sticks.
The problem of course is the imposing. The not listening. The not taking into account that parents didn't want it, teachers didn't want it, administrators didn't want it. Like a creepy guy who won't believe that "no" means "no," these folks remain convinced that they just need to try harder, be pushier in the right way.
And believe me-- this is not going away. last weekend my wife attended a conference where a session about community building turned out to be about finding ways to get community buy in so that parents would inflict reading software on their 0-4 year olds.
But if you're not convinced that these guys have learned nothing, check out their final chapter:
Icarus also Flew: the Legacy of inBloom
They didn't really fail:
The story of inBloom is not one of straightforward failure, but rather of shooting for the sun and being scorched during the journey.
They were the victims of outside forces. Nobody could have foreseen that inBloom would flop:
It is unlikely that any team could have anticipated the combined historic and social factors around data use that surfaced during inBloom’s development and launch.
They dreamed too big, carried too much greatness:
Undoubtedly, these were fatal missteps for the inBloom initiative. Yet, as David Graber argued in 2012, society needs visionaries to progress and grow. We need the risk takers who attempt to build flying cars or cure polio or land on the moon.
Yes, trying to collect all the student data and use it to enrich a private corporation in a Big Brotherly enterprise is totally like curing polio. Fun fact: the polio vaccine was developed with public resources and Jonas Salk never patented it, and so never got rich from it, letting the vaccine belong to the public. Is that the arrangement inBloom wanted to propose?
There's more, but you've really got the drift of their gist-- it turns out that inBloom was just too perfect and beautiful for the world it came into, misunderstood and unloved, ahead of its time.
Of course, there's another possibility-- folks understood inBloom and Bill Gates just fine, understood the overreaching grab for students' data, understood the danger of such data in one set of private corporate hands, understood that nobody could keep that kind of data safe, understood that there were no benefits in any of the data-driven school models except for the companies that would run them, understood that inBloom was a massive, sneaky, dishonest, expensive grab for power, one more limb of the grasping, privatizing octopus that has been ed reform.
People saw it, they understood it, and they rejected it. If after all this time Gates and his crew don't understand why, then they are among the dumbest smart people in the world.
Data & Society is "a research institute focused on the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development." In other words, they're a thinky tank focused on data stuff. They're relatively new to the thinky tank biz, founded just two years ago by Danah Boyd, a scholar and Microsoft researcher who specializes in young folks and their social media stuff. D&S got a huge start with two MacArthur grants -- $400K from the Intelligence and Autonomy initiative, and a whopping $875K from the Enabling Connected Learning program. Big bucks have also been kicked in by a host of heavy hitters including Microsoft Research, Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, and, yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This working paper was put together by Monica Bulger, Patrick McCormick, and Mikaela Pitcan. Bulger is an ed researcher, McCormick is a professional consultant, and Pitcan is a social scientist and mental health clinician. And whatever else we can say about the report, I will give them points for writing in mostly plain English rather than corporate edu-research gobbledeegook.
So let's go and make our visit.
Prequel to inBloom
The paper marks the beginning of inBloom in 2011 when Vicki Phillips, working at the time for the Gates Foundation, published a post entitled "Shared tools for teachers? There's an app for that!" This included an announcement about the nine-state consortium Shared Learning Collaborations, which planned to set up a platform that would gather, share, store, crunch and standardize all the education data (including setting standards for all ed software). Phillips was positively giddy.
But as the paper wryly notes, "The enthusiasm of Phillips’ blog post did not end up being an accurate predictor of the project’s future." From Day One, the folks tied to Bill Gates' big vision failed to read the room.
In November of 2011, Gates went on CNN to announce a "crisis in education" (because nobody had ever played that song before) as well as his pitch for one-to-one computing, because children are automatically fascinated by anything on a computer.
inBloom was set to launch in spring of 2013. The paper tried to connect that time with some sort of swelling storm of data issues-- Edward Snowden, the Target hacking. Sure. Perhaps we might also consider that 2013 marked the point at which Common Core and the Big Standardized Testing regimen that came stapled to it first really smacked America in the face-- and all of it backed by Bill Gates.
Maybe-- just maybe-- Americans were jumpy about a self-appointed private citizen trying to use his personal fortune to inflict his personal vision of education on the country. inBloom was the technocratic dream, the backbone and heart of a system in which we would collect everything there was to know about every student, then we could take total control of their education and shape their entire lives to be what we wanted them to be. Even Common Core, which seemed like the flagship of the reformy agenda at the time, could be arguably seen as a system of data tags meant primarily to facilitate collection and sorting of the data, so that we could standardized every student (well, every student without rich parents and access to a private school). Plus the whole thing would be hella profitable and grab big chunks of the billions of dollars of education money. Maybe-- just maybe-- Americans who saw all of this coming found it creepy and bad and just fundamentally counter to the whole spirit of American public education.
Spoiler alert: this is not a possibility that this paper is really going to explore.
inBloom's Story
The decision was that inBloom would be centralized, open source and nationally scaled. You might think that at the moment that someone said, "Let's create a computer program that monitors and collects data from all children all across the country and stores the data in one place," that somebody might have invoked 1984 and said, "Well, if that's not an actual bad idea, at the very least it''s likely to be hugely unpopular." But that smart person was not in the room.
Nor was there a smart person in the room when the run-up was put together, composed of pieces like a McKinsey report chicken littling about a plummeting education sky, or attempts to create panic by citing international tests cores, or whingig about NAEP scores, or concocting fantastic claims like a loss of trillions of dollars to the US economy, or declaring that Khan Academy's library of edu-videos was achieving great things, or Rocketship learning, and just generally as the paper puts it, many edutech evangelists felt "like their time had come."
Teachers may remember this period of the early 2010's as that time that a bunch of eduamateurs started running around telling teachers to shut up and stop sucking while the amateurs pushed a bunch of dumb ideas and nobody would listen to education professionals about any of it. Oh, them was the days.
The paper also backtracks to talk about some earlier attempts at the same thing, and how they failed, and how nobody learned anything from any of them, because they just wanted to get funding and disrupt the hell out of something.
But finally, Race to the Top and the Consortium of States (which really sounds like a Game of Thrones thing) created "an uneasy alliance." The alliance was uneasy because even though RttT told states, "Go set up something just like what the CoS is doing,"
the nature of complex government procurement entangling federal, state, and local agencies, competing priorities, and layers of public sector oversight and accountability often chafed against inBloom’s preferred methodologies of software development.
In other words, as would repeatedly happen in reformsterland, the technocrats and software guys want to just do what they want to do, without having to answer to governments and regulations and customers (stupid, stupid end users).
The idea (the report doesn't really say whose idea it was) was that inBloom should have a fast, big, shock and awe unveiling, unburdened by all that planning and testing and slowly rolling it out as you're sure it's done right. You may recall this similar attitude of "We need this RIGHT NOW more than we need it right" was also a hallmark of the Common Core rollout.
This led to any number of problems, from how the program actually worked (or didn't) to the floating about of wildly different cost estimates to schools.
Changing Perspectives of Data
Sigh. Just in case it isn't clear, we will be blaming the death of inBloom on everything except fatal flaws in the concept itself.
So now we're going to hear about circumstances in society at large which contributed to an atmosphere in which people had a hard time seeing how a giant data-sucking monstrosity was actually a good thing.
That crazy wikileaks, followed up by that wacky Edward Snowden gave everyone a "crash course" in both how much data the government was collecting and how bad they were at protecting it. The paper quotes Aimee Guidera of Data Quality Campaign, one of the advocacy groups pushing for Big Data to get full access to the public trough:
the issue is inBloom and education data collection became nuclear and it became synonymous with Big Brother, Edward Snowden, Target, making teachers into robots, putting teachers out of business, social engineering, lack of parent control. They were all fearful words, and once that genie was out of the bottle, you couldn’t bring the conversation back.
This is typical of the argument being pushed here, that inBloom folks just lost a war of PR in which words are just strategic weapons that have no meaning or connection to reality. In other words, their argument is that victims of the Johnstown flood would have been fine if they had not been exposed to press reports that said they were under water and drowning. inBloom became synonymous with Big Brother in the same way that being shot "becomes" synonymous with having a hole in your body. There was no "becoming." The advocates of inBloom wound up wearing that shoe because it was hteir shoe and it fit perfectly.
Meanwhile, all sorts of companies were regularly hacked and lost information. People somehow got the idea that corporations wanted to privatize many things while saying "screw the public." The Great Recession left folks with the idea that Wall Street was a bunch of out-of-touch money-sucking scumbags and that our elected officials were more concerned with taking care of Wall Street than Main Street. And the paper quotes a superintendent who was shocked-- shocked-- to discover that many people did not adore Bill Gates. I mean, here was this mega-rich guy volunteering without even being asked or elected or anything, coming to just remake a whole sector of society to suit himself, and lots of people weren't even grateful! Imagine!
The paper notes that inBloom's folks didn't always help. It cites Gates SXSW speech about inBloom in which he invoked Luke Skywalker and Yoda.
And simultaneous to all of this was the news that many citizens thought that the whole education reform scam, to which inBloom was solidly attached, was actually a big pile of baloney.
The Opposition Emerges
Into this contentious mess stepped folks like Leonie Haimson, who thought that letting a private corporation act like Big Brother was the worst of several worlds.
Once again, the paper does not address the validity of Haimson's criticisms, though it does report them. But it treats them as a political strategy, rather than a substantive critique of things that were true about inBloom. Speaking of Haimson and Diane Ravitch:
the arguments they picked, the targets they chose, and the support that they mobilized in response to inBloom honed in on the changing public data atmosphere.
Right. Their arguments were arguments that they picked, not a reaction to Bad Things That Were True about inBloom. Those arguments only found support because of the public data atmosphere, not because they were Bad Things That Were True. They report the Haimson sent to a town hall about the issue:
Parents, do you know your child’s confidential, personal school records are going to be shared with a corporation called inBloom Inc?
This highly sensitive information will be stored on a data cloud and disclosed to for-profit corporations to help them develop and market their “learning products”
The data will include your child’s names, address, photo, email, test scores, grades, economic and racial status, and detailed disciplinary, health and special education records.
The report presents this as if it were clever marketing that capitalized on public fears; it slides right by the point that everything Haimson said was true. The report also notes that inBloom reps were "absent" from the town hall meeting. That sounds sort of bland and neutral, but Haimson (I reached out to her for this piece) characterizes their non-attendance as "refused to attend," which was their pattern for many other gatherings about inBloom as well-- including "gatherings" to testify at NYC and NY hearings about the program.
The report suggests that inBloom, the NY State Ed Department, and other fans were slow or incomplete or 'reluctant" to communicate the awesomeness of inBloom to the public, but in fact Haimson reports e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that the Gates Foundation forbid the NYSED to communicate anything to anybody without having the Gates folks vet it first.
In short, the report suggests that inBloom's advocates were a little slow or a little incomplete in their reading of and reaction to the growing opposition, as if they were well-meaning but too good-hearted to sense how much trouble they were in, when in fact, it seems more accurate to say that inBloom's supporters were aggressively opaque and completely in tune with the tone of those reformy years, which was "Shut up and do as your told, right now, because this will be super awesome and you guys aren't allowed to ruin it for us!"
The report does include one classy flourish-- comparing inBloom opponents to anti-vaxxers. Of course, vaccinations are a scientifically-established solution to a proven problem, while inBloom was an unproven, untested solution to an imaginary problem. No, if there were any anti-vaxxers in the room, it was the inBloom supporters.
But this report is stuck in the Battle of PR story. Take this--
Ultimately, there were never adequate assurances as to the safety of these data practices. In addition, inBloom representatives had difficulty in articulating what the concrete value would be for individual
students. With public doubts about safety, and no clear success case to show...
Quick-- What do you think comes next? Could it be "inBloom had to realize their plan was seriously flawed"? Or "inBloom needed to consider the truth and validity of the criticisms leveled against them"?
Nope:
With public doubts about safety, and no clear success case to show, proponents of inBloom lost control of the narrative.
So even as we gather to consider what wrong with inBloom, we start with the premise that, really, there was nothing actually wrong with inBloom. Nope-- the whole business was just a PR battle in which inBloom supporters were outmanuevered, caught unawares because they were just too goodhearted and naively certain of their wonderful plan.
The Fall of inBloom
Nine member of the consortium were joined in 2013 by the Council of Chief State School Officers themselves, cementing inBloom as a BFF of the Common Core Complex. But those nine states included Colorado, where inBloom failed an audit, and Louisiana, where big questions came up about individualized student data, with social security numbers, stored on servers and not terribly secure. Georgia declared it would keep its own data, thank you. The coalition was shrinking down to New York, and continuing to shoot itself in the foot with pricey videos about how awesome it would be when students stared at screens and teachers stared at screens and everything there was to know about students could be shown on a data dashboard.
It took just seven months in 2013 for the consortium to completely blow apart.
But again, the report finds that none of these issues were part of inBloom. Instead, they share the insights of a senior inBloom tech who says that inBloom wanted to be a quick, agile techy start-up and it made the mistake of partnering with states, who are lumbering dinosaurs.
So New York became the last stand, in part because it had made the strongest bet on inBloom's future. But a large network of parents was ready, aided by, well, pretty much everyone who wasn't an employee or bought-in bureaucrat. The report suspects that our old enemy-- Implementation!-- was the problem. Quoting Pleasantvill superintendent Mary Fox Alter:
The Common Core in New York involved a teacher evaluation system, Common Core curriculum materials that were being built as the plane flew in the sky and a data dashboard system that was supposed to track all of this, and new tests that were data dark to us. So the implementation plan for all of this in New York contained those four elements. The data dashboard was one of the four, the other three were fatally flawed.
See? It was those other poorly implemented ideas that dragged poor, innocent inBloom to its death.
Postmortem
So what killed inBloom?
One theory. Gates spent lots of money but failed to build any parent or community trust. That's not wrong, though it skips the question of whether such trust could have been earned for inBloom. Does a hungry wolf trying to sneak up on sheep have a perception, communication and trust problem, or does it have a sheep are too smart to let themselves get eaten problem? But we love that communication theory:
Sharren Bates reflects that “inBloom did not have a privacy problem, inBloom did not have a parent problem. InBloom had an advocacy and perception problem.”
Another version of the communication
Could Things Have Turned out Differently? AKA, What Have We Learned?
There was a lack of consistent leadership. A visionary champion for the program might have helped.
But the "key takeaway" is that more community buy-in was needed. Which is a nicer way of saying "the public just didn't understand us well enough, and if we could get them to be less dumb, we'd be set." They kept asking what the hell inBloom actually did, and we didn't really answer them. And we were snotty. So maybe if we could have remembered to talk less, smile more.
In other words, the answer to "what have we learned," is "Nothing. Nothing at all."
The paper still wants to find the right way to impose inBloom on the public. What PR campaign can we use to get them on board? How can we talk them into seeing that we're right?
No listening. No acknowledging that misgivings about the program could be valid. We've done everything right-- we just have to find a way to make people see that. We're going to impose this program, but we have to impose it in a way that it sticks.
The problem of course is the imposing. The not listening. The not taking into account that parents didn't want it, teachers didn't want it, administrators didn't want it. Like a creepy guy who won't believe that "no" means "no," these folks remain convinced that they just need to try harder, be pushier in the right way.
And believe me-- this is not going away. last weekend my wife attended a conference where a session about community building turned out to be about finding ways to get community buy in so that parents would inflict reading software on their 0-4 year olds.
But if you're not convinced that these guys have learned nothing, check out their final chapter:
Icarus also Flew: the Legacy of inBloom
They didn't really fail:
The story of inBloom is not one of straightforward failure, but rather of shooting for the sun and being scorched during the journey.
They were the victims of outside forces. Nobody could have foreseen that inBloom would flop:
It is unlikely that any team could have anticipated the combined historic and social factors around data use that surfaced during inBloom’s development and launch.
They dreamed too big, carried too much greatness:
Undoubtedly, these were fatal missteps for the inBloom initiative. Yet, as David Graber argued in 2012, society needs visionaries to progress and grow. We need the risk takers who attempt to build flying cars or cure polio or land on the moon.
Yes, trying to collect all the student data and use it to enrich a private corporation in a Big Brotherly enterprise is totally like curing polio. Fun fact: the polio vaccine was developed with public resources and Jonas Salk never patented it, and so never got rich from it, letting the vaccine belong to the public. Is that the arrangement inBloom wanted to propose?
There's more, but you've really got the drift of their gist-- it turns out that inBloom was just too perfect and beautiful for the world it came into, misunderstood and unloved, ahead of its time.
Of course, there's another possibility-- folks understood inBloom and Bill Gates just fine, understood the overreaching grab for students' data, understood the danger of such data in one set of private corporate hands, understood that nobody could keep that kind of data safe, understood that there were no benefits in any of the data-driven school models except for the companies that would run them, understood that inBloom was a massive, sneaky, dishonest, expensive grab for power, one more limb of the grasping, privatizing octopus that has been ed reform.
People saw it, they understood it, and they rejected it. If after all this time Gates and his crew don't understand why, then they are among the dumbest smart people in the world.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Active Shooter
So today we had early dismissal so that we could spend the afternoon running active shooter drills.
Loads of local law enforcement and other agencies participated in the drill. We had fifty-ish hand picked students to play the part of student victims. We had several previous PDs to go over how to handle ourselves. And we had two live "bad guys" with blank-firing guns to make it all nice and realistic.
We ran four drills. Because my room is far off in one wing of the building, I missed most of the excitement. I did not even hear the gunfire or the screams, and would not have known what was happening had the office not provided announcements (as part of the drill) like "Shots fired in the science wing." That was for three of the drills.
We were not of course told what simulations would be run. I don't know if it would have helped. Probably not. But Scenario #3 turned out to be a lunch shift. My lunch shift.
The shooters prepped the students and put them at ease. Selected some to stand against the wall and be shot dead, a couple of others to be wounded. Administrators, observers, local press stood along the walls to watch.
My usual post is on the wall with the entrance doors. The shooter fired first outside, in the hall. The shots were loud-- we knew they were coming and the students still shrieked in surprise and alarm. The shooter entered and began. My colleagues at the other end yelled for the students to go toward them, to get out. I had to walk the length of the cafeteria to get to an exit, the shooter to my right, executing the four pre-selected victims. Students dove under tables, huddled against the wall. I waved them up, toward the exit. We go out, went around the building to the safe zone.
I don't know if I saw all the students. I don't know if I got them all out. I'm pretty sure I didn't, and even with preparation and the fact that it wasn't real, the choice between shooing them out and lagging back to make sure they were all up and moving while the gun was still shooting- BAM BAM BAM BAM-- was a little bit beyond my processing powers in that moment.
I won't lie. I was shaken. I'm still shaken. We debriefed at the end of the day and the law enforcement folks said we did well. Maybe that's true. All I know is that tonight instead of thinking through how to cover the reading in my classes tomorrow, I'm replaying and wondering how many pretend students I got pretend killed today. Maybe I would do better if the real thing happened, having been through this training. But right now, having this business take up space in my head is, well, troubling.
Is this part of the job now? I suppose it is. Maybe it is. This is certainly not the first occasion to think about it. It's been over a decade since a shooter went to a prom less than an hour away from here. But damn-- all the things you do to get better at the work, at your craft, and then this on top of all that. And now it's not just did I get that concept across, did I reach that student, did I get that planning done, but also, did I get any students killed today. I absolutely cannot imagine how teachers go through the real thing ever deal. I want to find every one of them and give them a huge hug.
I'm springy. I'm resilient and stubborn. I write what bothers me out of my system. I'll be fine tomorrow. But I'm not fine tonight.
Loads of local law enforcement and other agencies participated in the drill. We had fifty-ish hand picked students to play the part of student victims. We had several previous PDs to go over how to handle ourselves. And we had two live "bad guys" with blank-firing guns to make it all nice and realistic.
We ran four drills. Because my room is far off in one wing of the building, I missed most of the excitement. I did not even hear the gunfire or the screams, and would not have known what was happening had the office not provided announcements (as part of the drill) like "Shots fired in the science wing." That was for three of the drills.
We were not of course told what simulations would be run. I don't know if it would have helped. Probably not. But Scenario #3 turned out to be a lunch shift. My lunch shift.
The shooters prepped the students and put them at ease. Selected some to stand against the wall and be shot dead, a couple of others to be wounded. Administrators, observers, local press stood along the walls to watch.
My usual post is on the wall with the entrance doors. The shooter fired first outside, in the hall. The shots were loud-- we knew they were coming and the students still shrieked in surprise and alarm. The shooter entered and began. My colleagues at the other end yelled for the students to go toward them, to get out. I had to walk the length of the cafeteria to get to an exit, the shooter to my right, executing the four pre-selected victims. Students dove under tables, huddled against the wall. I waved them up, toward the exit. We go out, went around the building to the safe zone.
I don't know if I saw all the students. I don't know if I got them all out. I'm pretty sure I didn't, and even with preparation and the fact that it wasn't real, the choice between shooing them out and lagging back to make sure they were all up and moving while the gun was still shooting- BAM BAM BAM BAM-- was a little bit beyond my processing powers in that moment.
I won't lie. I was shaken. I'm still shaken. We debriefed at the end of the day and the law enforcement folks said we did well. Maybe that's true. All I know is that tonight instead of thinking through how to cover the reading in my classes tomorrow, I'm replaying and wondering how many pretend students I got pretend killed today. Maybe I would do better if the real thing happened, having been through this training. But right now, having this business take up space in my head is, well, troubling.
Is this part of the job now? I suppose it is. Maybe it is. This is certainly not the first occasion to think about it. It's been over a decade since a shooter went to a prom less than an hour away from here. But damn-- all the things you do to get better at the work, at your craft, and then this on top of all that. And now it's not just did I get that concept across, did I reach that student, did I get that planning done, but also, did I get any students killed today. I absolutely cannot imagine how teachers go through the real thing ever deal. I want to find every one of them and give them a huge hug.
I'm springy. I'm resilient and stubborn. I write what bothers me out of my system. I'll be fine tomorrow. But I'm not fine tonight.
PA: More Bad School Evaluation
For a while, here in PA we've been rating schools with the SPP (school performance profile) for a few years. It's a fun little batch of number shuffling that pretends to be a broad method of scoring school performance that is actually 90% Big Standardized Test scores. It has been spectacularly non-useful (except that it has provided some teachers of a certain age with whom I work to invoke the Naughty by Nature classic hit).
But now the PA Department of Ed has a New!! Improved!! version of SPP. They have had thirty (count 'em, thirty) "feedback sessions" and they are ready to unveil the Future Ready PA Index.
The FRPI (which does not invoke any great old hits by anyone, but sounds kind of like the air being squeezed out of a balloon) is a "more holistic view of school performance," even as it retains some features of SPP. This is a neat feat because SPP didn't have very many features-- mostly just the "let's use these BS Test scores" feature. But here are some of the cool new holistic things happening.
Emphasizing the weighting of value-added measures, which incentivizes a focus on all learners and is less sensitive to demographic variables.
Great. Doubling down on the VAM measure (in PA we like PVAAS) that uses gobbledeegook math formulas to turn BS Test scores into baloney-filled teacher evaluation scores.
Measuring English language acquisition among ESL students, not simply performance on a test of grade level ELA standards.
It is not immediately clear what, exactly, this would mean, but it seems to mean adding a growth measure to the managing of ESL student BS Test scores. In addition to this tweak, third grade reading and seventh grade math scores would be used to compute on-track growthiness. Also, we'll throw in attendance as an on-track indicator.
And we'll check to see if you're closing the achievement gap, which should be easy because all you have to do is get a kid who runs a ten minute mile to run across the finish line at the same time as one who runs a four-minute mile. It also means we get to berate classroom teachers for failing to get their students to move faster than the leaders of the pack, rather than berating officials who fail to provide those teachers with the resources needed to perform this miracle.
Incentivizing career awareness instruction beginning at the elementary level.
As with many states, Pennsylvania is finding that school evaluation is a great tool for taking control of local school system curriculum and programming. While both bribes and extortion work here, the FRPI seems to lean toward bribes. Implement these programs that we like, and we'll rate you higher. Now, is elementary school career awareness a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it's all in the execution, and as reformster Rick Hess is fond of pointing out, you can force a school to do something, but you can't force the school to do it well.
But under this plan, eighth graders can earn their school valuable bonus points by developing a personal plan for their career. I'm wondering if the bureaucrats involved have met many eighth graders.
Addressing the issue of unequal weighting of content areas in the current SPP.
Well, yeah. When your whole school evaluation is based on math and reading scores, that tends to put huge emphasis on math and reading scores. It's not clear what "addressing" means exactly, as it can be anything from saying "Hey, that's a thing" while doing nothing, to subjecting other content areas to the kind of crappy micro-management-by-test that we math and English types have been enjoying. But the more detailed "webinar" doesn't address the specifics of this, which suggests we're going to go the lip service route.
Increasing the weighting of rigorous course offerings such as AP, IB, and dual enrollment.
This remains one of the genius features of reform. Imagine if your school could get a better rating if all teachers drove Fords. The companies that have convinced government to incentivize buying their particular product, whether it's the AP test or a college course-- well, hats off to those folks. When yu can get the government to do your marketing for you, life is good. Well, good for everyone except schools that are implementing programs that don't actually do anybody any good.
Allowing LEAs to include locally-selected reading assessments (grade 3) and math assessments (grade 7) as additional snapshots of student progress.
This could actually be.... not bad. Yes, it's another door opened for vendors to make a buck, but it does provide local districts with a little flexibility.
Awarding extra credit to schools graduating students with at least one high-value, industry- recognized credential.
Get your welding certificate. Also the school can get credit for students who graduate and then join the armed forces, go to college, or get a job. And they have sixteen months to do it. Who is going to track this, anyway? This seems like a swell idea, but it also encourages the school to sort students into two groups-- students who will probably help us, and students who will probably hurt us. This approach serves students in the latter group poorly.
This is all supposed to launch in fall of 2018, but then, it's also supposed to dovetail nicely with the new rules under ESSA and we suddenly have no idea what the hell those rules might be. I mean, seriously, no idea at all. Schools may be required to teach Russian or scrap IDEA or send all their students to a private school where nobody cares what is taught (or not). Literally anything could happen. I expect a lot of bureaucrats in Harrisburg are waiting to see just how uch smoke their work is going to go up in.
You can get the more detailed explanation in a youtube webinar (which more closely resembles a power-point presentation rendered as a video). You could contemplate that, or you could just stroll down memory lane with this:
But now the PA Department of Ed has a New!! Improved!! version of SPP. They have had thirty (count 'em, thirty) "feedback sessions" and they are ready to unveil the Future Ready PA Index.
The FRPI (which does not invoke any great old hits by anyone, but sounds kind of like the air being squeezed out of a balloon) is a "more holistic view of school performance," even as it retains some features of SPP. This is a neat feat because SPP didn't have very many features-- mostly just the "let's use these BS Test scores" feature. But here are some of the cool new holistic things happening.
Emphasizing the weighting of value-added measures, which incentivizes a focus on all learners and is less sensitive to demographic variables.
Great. Doubling down on the VAM measure (in PA we like PVAAS) that uses gobbledeegook math formulas to turn BS Test scores into baloney-filled teacher evaluation scores.
Measuring English language acquisition among ESL students, not simply performance on a test of grade level ELA standards.
It is not immediately clear what, exactly, this would mean, but it seems to mean adding a growth measure to the managing of ESL student BS Test scores. In addition to this tweak, third grade reading and seventh grade math scores would be used to compute on-track growthiness. Also, we'll throw in attendance as an on-track indicator.
And we'll check to see if you're closing the achievement gap, which should be easy because all you have to do is get a kid who runs a ten minute mile to run across the finish line at the same time as one who runs a four-minute mile. It also means we get to berate classroom teachers for failing to get their students to move faster than the leaders of the pack, rather than berating officials who fail to provide those teachers with the resources needed to perform this miracle.
Incentivizing career awareness instruction beginning at the elementary level.
As with many states, Pennsylvania is finding that school evaluation is a great tool for taking control of local school system curriculum and programming. While both bribes and extortion work here, the FRPI seems to lean toward bribes. Implement these programs that we like, and we'll rate you higher. Now, is elementary school career awareness a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it's all in the execution, and as reformster Rick Hess is fond of pointing out, you can force a school to do something, but you can't force the school to do it well.
But under this plan, eighth graders can earn their school valuable bonus points by developing a personal plan for their career. I'm wondering if the bureaucrats involved have met many eighth graders.
Addressing the issue of unequal weighting of content areas in the current SPP.
Well, yeah. When your whole school evaluation is based on math and reading scores, that tends to put huge emphasis on math and reading scores. It's not clear what "addressing" means exactly, as it can be anything from saying "Hey, that's a thing" while doing nothing, to subjecting other content areas to the kind of crappy micro-management-by-test that we math and English types have been enjoying. But the more detailed "webinar" doesn't address the specifics of this, which suggests we're going to go the lip service route.
Increasing the weighting of rigorous course offerings such as AP, IB, and dual enrollment.
This remains one of the genius features of reform. Imagine if your school could get a better rating if all teachers drove Fords. The companies that have convinced government to incentivize buying their particular product, whether it's the AP test or a college course-- well, hats off to those folks. When yu can get the government to do your marketing for you, life is good. Well, good for everyone except schools that are implementing programs that don't actually do anybody any good.
Allowing LEAs to include locally-selected reading assessments (grade 3) and math assessments (grade 7) as additional snapshots of student progress.
This could actually be.... not bad. Yes, it's another door opened for vendors to make a buck, but it does provide local districts with a little flexibility.
Awarding extra credit to schools graduating students with at least one high-value, industry- recognized credential.
Get your welding certificate. Also the school can get credit for students who graduate and then join the armed forces, go to college, or get a job. And they have sixteen months to do it. Who is going to track this, anyway? This seems like a swell idea, but it also encourages the school to sort students into two groups-- students who will probably help us, and students who will probably hurt us. This approach serves students in the latter group poorly.
This is all supposed to launch in fall of 2018, but then, it's also supposed to dovetail nicely with the new rules under ESSA and we suddenly have no idea what the hell those rules might be. I mean, seriously, no idea at all. Schools may be required to teach Russian or scrap IDEA or send all their students to a private school where nobody cares what is taught (or not). Literally anything could happen. I expect a lot of bureaucrats in Harrisburg are waiting to see just how uch smoke their work is going to go up in.
You can get the more detailed explanation in a youtube webinar (which more closely resembles a power-point presentation rendered as a video). You could contemplate that, or you could just stroll down memory lane with this:
Goldman Sachs Backs Bad Reform
For whatever reason, a video from your friends at Goldman Sachs has been circulating again. First floated out into the interether last June, it highlights "three ways technology will transform the classroom" (and therefor you should invest in this stuff and make a bunch of money).
Our host is Victor Hu. With a JD from Harvard law and an MBA from the Wharton School, Hu is well set to spend over a decade at Goldman Sachs, much of it as "global head of Education Technology and Services Investment Banking, advising, financing and investing in education and knowledge services companies globally." So understand-- this two minute prospectus is not sub-textually "Boy, this is going to make education awesome' but "Boy, this is going to move a lot of merchandise and generate a ton of revenue for somebody."
So what are the three ways that technology will transform the classroom. Well, you may have heard some of this before...
One: Personalized Learning
We all have different learning styles-- nobody is average! Woohoo! "Through technology, we now have the potential to meet learners where they are." Also, through technology, I now have the potential to make a million dollars blogging. Also, my scalp has the potential to grow hair again and my stomach has the potential to be flat again.
Content will no longer have to be presented in a "monolithic or linear format," and also, students will no longer have to take notes with quill pens or come to school on horseback. Glad we now have the potential to solve all those problems. Now content can be "modulized" and presented to the learner on a computer screen at the right time at the right level of difficulty. Because magic.
Two: Data and Analytics
We can use data to measure student competency as well as engagement, and teachers can figure out much earlier that students get bored doing stupid computerized worksheets-- oops! Sorry. I wandered off there. Actually, teachers will figure out a lot sooner when learners are struggling? Really? Do you already know how soon I can tell who's struggling? Because I can often tell that my learners are struggling roughly two seconds after we've started it. Do data analytics include some sort of time machine component?
Anyway, by using "early intervention" teachers will be able to deal with issues surrounding "student potential." Because teachers weren't already doing that.
Three: Competency Based Learning
This one is "exciting." We start with some stock footage of classrooms of earlier days while Hu explains that we've always had a factory model where students have to be in seats for a certain amount of time, and now we have the exciting prospect of replacing that with a factory model that requires students to check off a list of required tasks. Seriously-- there are a lot of things you can reasonably say about CBE, but "not a factory model" is not one of them. CBE reduces education to an assembly line of tasks to be performed by the students. CBE breaks down complex learning into a list of simple tricks to perform in the same way that McDonald's breaks being a gourmet chef into a list of simple tasks to be performed to create a Happy Meal.
Hu says that a competency based model means that people can take as long as they need to learn something, which he says means that nobody gets left behind, which is crazy talk because it means the exact opposite. If I'm driving to Cleveland in a car and you're following, but you decide you want to stop and watch the flowers grow and maybe ride a bicycle for part of the trip and take all the time you need, you will be left behind. I mean, I think the idea of moving at your own speed and arriving in your time is an admirable approach, but it absolutely means that you will be left behind by people who take less time to accomplish the same goals.
Big Finish
Now that we have technology, people can be life long learners. You may remember the touching stories of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who often sat in Independence Hall, dejected and downhearted. "Dammit, Tom," Franklin would say. "If only we had computers, I wouldn't have had to stop learning things when I was sixteen. Someday, someone will invent technology that will let people keep learning long after the graduate from high school. But until then, we're all stuck. Want to go pick up some hot colonial babes?"
This is the kind of baloney that is used to sell investments to people with money, and if it makes little educational sense, that's because the real audience is Amateurs With Money. That remains one of the scourges of the modern reformster movement, all the way back to David Coleman, education amateur, pitching Common Core to Bill Gates, an incredibly wealthy education amateur-- people who want to sell a product not to the actual users of that product, but to the investors.
This is where Goldman Sachs thinks the big money is coming, and that paradoxically attracts big money, which is why these three not very impressive ideas continue to be a threat to the promise of public education.
Our host is Victor Hu. With a JD from Harvard law and an MBA from the Wharton School, Hu is well set to spend over a decade at Goldman Sachs, much of it as "global head of Education Technology and Services Investment Banking, advising, financing and investing in education and knowledge services companies globally." So understand-- this two minute prospectus is not sub-textually "Boy, this is going to make education awesome' but "Boy, this is going to move a lot of merchandise and generate a ton of revenue for somebody."
So what are the three ways that technology will transform the classroom. Well, you may have heard some of this before...
One: Personalized Learning
We all have different learning styles-- nobody is average! Woohoo! "Through technology, we now have the potential to meet learners where they are." Also, through technology, I now have the potential to make a million dollars blogging. Also, my scalp has the potential to grow hair again and my stomach has the potential to be flat again.
Content will no longer have to be presented in a "monolithic or linear format," and also, students will no longer have to take notes with quill pens or come to school on horseback. Glad we now have the potential to solve all those problems. Now content can be "modulized" and presented to the learner on a computer screen at the right time at the right level of difficulty. Because magic.
Two: Data and Analytics
We can use data to measure student competency as well as engagement, and teachers can figure out much earlier that students get bored doing stupid computerized worksheets-- oops! Sorry. I wandered off there. Actually, teachers will figure out a lot sooner when learners are struggling? Really? Do you already know how soon I can tell who's struggling? Because I can often tell that my learners are struggling roughly two seconds after we've started it. Do data analytics include some sort of time machine component?
Anyway, by using "early intervention" teachers will be able to deal with issues surrounding "student potential." Because teachers weren't already doing that.
Three: Competency Based Learning
This one is "exciting." We start with some stock footage of classrooms of earlier days while Hu explains that we've always had a factory model where students have to be in seats for a certain amount of time, and now we have the exciting prospect of replacing that with a factory model that requires students to check off a list of required tasks. Seriously-- there are a lot of things you can reasonably say about CBE, but "not a factory model" is not one of them. CBE reduces education to an assembly line of tasks to be performed by the students. CBE breaks down complex learning into a list of simple tricks to perform in the same way that McDonald's breaks being a gourmet chef into a list of simple tasks to be performed to create a Happy Meal.
Hu says that a competency based model means that people can take as long as they need to learn something, which he says means that nobody gets left behind, which is crazy talk because it means the exact opposite. If I'm driving to Cleveland in a car and you're following, but you decide you want to stop and watch the flowers grow and maybe ride a bicycle for part of the trip and take all the time you need, you will be left behind. I mean, I think the idea of moving at your own speed and arriving in your time is an admirable approach, but it absolutely means that you will be left behind by people who take less time to accomplish the same goals.
Big Finish
Now that we have technology, people can be life long learners. You may remember the touching stories of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who often sat in Independence Hall, dejected and downhearted. "Dammit, Tom," Franklin would say. "If only we had computers, I wouldn't have had to stop learning things when I was sixteen. Someday, someone will invent technology that will let people keep learning long after the graduate from high school. But until then, we're all stuck. Want to go pick up some hot colonial babes?"
This is the kind of baloney that is used to sell investments to people with money, and if it makes little educational sense, that's because the real audience is Amateurs With Money. That remains one of the scourges of the modern reformster movement, all the way back to David Coleman, education amateur, pitching Common Core to Bill Gates, an incredibly wealthy education amateur-- people who want to sell a product not to the actual users of that product, but to the investors.
This is where Goldman Sachs thinks the big money is coming, and that paradoxically attracts big money, which is why these three not very impressive ideas continue to be a threat to the promise of public education.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
DeVos: We're Not Done Yet
The HELP committee approved her, and then two members of that committee who voted "yes" to send her on to the full Senate indicated that they would vote No to her appointment to the USED Secretary post.
So. We're not done yet.
Contact your Senator. If you know they're voting against DeVos, thank them and let them know that you support their choice (because you can be sure they're getting pressure from Important People who think they should change their minds). If you know they're voting for DeVos, keep the pressure on anyway. Let them know that there is a price they're paying for that support. Make them know that the vote is costing them something.
And if you're not sure, contact them anyway. Often. By phone. By fax. Repeatedly.
Congressmen and their staffs are reporting that they've never taken such an electronic hammering. The numbers being reported are staggering-- five figures, six figures.
She may still be approved, but we have already won a victory. We have already made the Trump administration pay a price, made them use some of their juice to make this happen. The roar of opposition has jarred loose many of the people who have been anti-DeVos silently. Good lord-- Eli Broad, charter booster and reformster extraordinaire, came out against DeVos today. If DeVos takes the office, she and Trump and the GOP Senators who put her there will know, despite their bluster, that we are paying attention, watching, looking over their collective shoulders.
A DeVos defeat would be extraordinary, virtually unprecedented. And it could still happen.
So here's the link to FaxZero, the suddenly-famous service that will send up to five free faxes a day without any need for a sign-up or an account-- and they already have Senate fax numbers programmed in and ready to go. And here's the link for emails and phone numbers.
The vote is now expected as early as Friday morning, so send something tonight before you got to bed, tomorrow before you go to work, and any other spare minute you have during the day. If they are going to foist this unqualified menace on us, make them feel like they are climbing up a steep hill in a heavy hailstorm to do it.
Maybe-- just maybe-- we can make some history. But there is no doubt that we can make some noise while we make ourselves felt in Washington.
So. We're not done yet.
Contact your Senator. If you know they're voting against DeVos, thank them and let them know that you support their choice (because you can be sure they're getting pressure from Important People who think they should change their minds). If you know they're voting for DeVos, keep the pressure on anyway. Let them know that there is a price they're paying for that support. Make them know that the vote is costing them something.
And if you're not sure, contact them anyway. Often. By phone. By fax. Repeatedly.
Congressmen and their staffs are reporting that they've never taken such an electronic hammering. The numbers being reported are staggering-- five figures, six figures.
She may still be approved, but we have already won a victory. We have already made the Trump administration pay a price, made them use some of their juice to make this happen. The roar of opposition has jarred loose many of the people who have been anti-DeVos silently. Good lord-- Eli Broad, charter booster and reformster extraordinaire, came out against DeVos today. If DeVos takes the office, she and Trump and the GOP Senators who put her there will know, despite their bluster, that we are paying attention, watching, looking over their collective shoulders.
A DeVos defeat would be extraordinary, virtually unprecedented. And it could still happen.
So here's the link to FaxZero, the suddenly-famous service that will send up to five free faxes a day without any need for a sign-up or an account-- and they already have Senate fax numbers programmed in and ready to go. And here's the link for emails and phone numbers.
The vote is now expected as early as Friday morning, so send something tonight before you got to bed, tomorrow before you go to work, and any other spare minute you have during the day. If they are going to foist this unqualified menace on us, make them feel like they are climbing up a steep hill in a heavy hailstorm to do it.
Maybe-- just maybe-- we can make some history. But there is no doubt that we can make some noise while we make ourselves felt in Washington.
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