ESSA Big Mess

ESSA is caught in the middle of a very bad movie right now. It's the sequel to "How A Bill Becomes A Law," and it has no heroes.

After the bill becomes a law, the work still isn't done. Because to build a bi-partisan agreement, you write the law with statements like "Treatment of mugwumps will be fair." (Perhaps not that vague, but as always, allow me to exaggerate to make a point). So Republicans and Democrats sign the bill, each satisfied that "fair" means what they want it to mean.

"ESSA big mess. Weesa in trouble," says new USED undersecretary.

So now it's a law, but nobody knows what it means exactly. Here on the local level, outside of DC, where live human beings go on about their lives, what does it mean that mugwumps will be treated fairly? When they come to eat at the mugwump diner, should local officials be providing them with a bowl of tomato soup or a cheese sandwich?

In order to actually implement the law, we need some rules. And to get those, we turn to the United States Department of Mugwumpery. USDM develops the actual rules that states have to follow, which adds another layer of shenanigans because as a limb on the executive branch, the USDM has its own ideas about "fair" that it would like to implement.

That, in fact, is the story so far with the Every Student Succeeds Act. In an unprecedented show of bipartisanship, the Senate Education Committee managed to leave out everything there was hard disagreement on and write sufficiently vague or contradictory language for everything else (the law, for instance, recognizes parents' right to opt out of testing, but requires states to have 95% test participation). Since Congress was almost a decade behind in passing a new education law, this was quite an achievement, and it triggered a warm glow of bipartisan comradery.

That lasted about five minutes, or roughly the time it took Arne Duncan to announce that the Education Department lawyers were smart enough to circumvent the new law to do what the administration wanted to get done. This triggered a big fight last April between John King and Lamar Alexander that involved really sexy stuff like supplant vs. supplement and Title I regulations and while everyone probably should have been paying attention, mostly their eyes just glazed over as bureaucrats hammered away at each other.

The USED worked hard through the fall and winter trying to fill in all the regulatory blanks in what may be one of the greatest displays of bureaucratic futility since the Romans tried to sew new uniform's for Nero's fire department. I'm honestly not sure what they were thinking-- "If we adopt these new regulations and just kind of put them under the desk blotter, maybe the Trump administration won't notice they're there"?

This was a ridiculous hope-- Lamar Alexander had been noticing, loudly, every piece of department regulation, most especially the ones about accountability.

The accountability rules were the ones that would determine how states would decide schools were failing and what the states would do about it. The rules for this under Duncan-King were exactly the kind of micro-managing that annoyed pretty much everyone, and the regulations that King passed through in the waning hours of 2016 could best be described as "pretty much the same thing." Repeated and pervasive standardized common corey testing, specific prescriptions for "fixing" those "failing" schools, grading schools a la Florida A-F. King was basically that kid in class who, when Mrs. Congress looked him in the eye and said, "I don't want to hear another peep out of you," waited five minutes and started saying "Meep."

Which brings us to the present. Lamar Alexander pointed forcefully at the rules hidden under the desk blotter and said, "Get that junk out of here." This week featured an assortment of testimonials both in favor of and opposed to the regulations. Conservative voices strongly favored the end of those regulations, finding them too restrictive and not allowing for states to opt out of the whole business. Well, some conservative voices-- other conservative voices said, "Let's keep at least some of them." Other voices said, "Hey, the history of States Rights when it comes to education is not exactly a history fraught with great success." And a smattering of voices said, "Good God-- when Congress changes the rules every six months, it makes it really hard to run actual school systems."

As I said at the top, there are no heroes to root for in this movie. The Obama regulations were far over and above the actual law and simply attempted to extend the same failed, unsupportable policies of the past fifteen years; they needed to go away. The regulations we get in their place will most likely provide the freedom for wholesale abuse, fraud, and social injustice in education, or they may be what Congress wants, rather than DeVos herself.. And we still haven't seen the last card to be played, which is the final chapter of a Bill Becoming a Law-- enforcement. Because if there's one thing the Trump administration understands, it's that a rule is only a rule if someone will actually punish you for breaking it.

In the meantime, ESSA sits there, uninterpreted and unclear, a stunning example of how badly top-down rules can go wrong-- if the people at the top can't get their act together and figure out what they want the rules to mean, all you get is top-down confusion and paralysis. States, districts and schools have no way of knowing which sets of bad federal rules we'll have to cope with, but in the meantime we have to keep doing our day to day work. Best of luck to us all.

Testing Bribes

One of the biggest challenges connected with the Big Standardized Test is also one of the most important-- getting students to actually care.

State and district officials all across the country have largely failed-- and they know it.

Why, yes, I am very excited about the PARCC test.

This is less of a challenge with the littles. A primary teacher can tell her students, "I need you to put your dead possum on your head while poking yourself in the bellybutton with a red crayon," and those children will knock themselves out racing to grab the best piece of roadkill like it is the Most Important Thing Ever. When you're eight, hardly anything in the world makes sense, so you just trust the adults you love and do your best to make them proud of you.

Even so, the word has gotten out that the BS Test is a waste of everyone's time, and the parent-driven opt out movement has spread the word that you don't actually have to suffer through this baloney.

And by the time students arrive at the high school level, they have caught on to the con. They know there's nothing of any importance to them riding on this aimless exercise in baloney bubbling.

All of this is why, throughout the modern reform era, we have seen a cottage industry in testing pep rallies and testing pep videos and chirpy songs with new lyrics about how [insert your school here] is just the most awesome school that is going to be so awesome with its awesome results on the awesome test. You can watch them by the hundreds on youtube, each one a well-scrubbed American version of a Hitler youth meeting or a Chinese Communist political rally-- just instead of honoring our Beloved Leader, we bow down to the BS Test instead.

This year, the winner of the test-prep excess award is Eva Moskowitz, whose Success Academy has rented Radio City Music Hall for the annual "Slam the Exam So We Can Generate Good Numbers for Our Marketing Rally." RCMH has reportedly cut Moskowitz a deal on the price but it's still worth noting that, as with SA's school bus lobbying trips to the state capital, these are your tax dollars at work. Congratulations, New Yorkers.

Meanwhile, schools and districts around the country are rolling out this year's batch of "incentives," including parties that you can only attend if you have been in school for all the testing days. Peggy Robertson reports these kinds of shenanigans from Colorado, where incentives and punishments are tied to the test even though it is clearly against the law to do so. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post reports a New Jersey district that offered bonus points and gift cards for participation in the test-a-palooza (parents forced the school to drop it).

There could not be a more bald-faced admission that the Big Standardized Test is a waste of everyone's time. Bribery is the last resort of people who can't come up with any conceivable convincing reason that anyone should comply with their demands. You don't bribe people to do something when they can already see a perfectly good reason to do it.

In fact, you don't bribe people when you know there's a good reason for participating. We don't (usually) offer bribes to students to come to school and get an education because we understand that such a move devalues the education. It would be an admission that there is no benefit to students in attending and learning. We also understand that while we could bribe them to show up, that would not in any way guarantee that they would actually try once they got here. So the test-related bribery not only acknowledges that the BS Tests are a waste of time, but it guarantees that the test results don't even represent the real effort of the students.

It's almost as if some folks are so interested in selling the product that they don't even care if the people who buy it actually get any use out of it.

All of this also underlines one other thing-- how remarkable it is that the opt out movement flourishes even though nobody is offering families bribes to skip the test.

But the very worst of this whole mess? The very worst will be that for many students, even students who don't care about the BS Test and will not be compelled, pepped, cajoled or otherwise brought to love the test-- even those students will absorb the lesson that the BS Test is the be-all and end-all of school, that school is at its very heart a pointless exercise having nothing to do with actual education, but focused only on this mindless pointless exercise. And that crushing of faith and interest in education itself is the very worst side-effect of all.

Why School Choice Is Not A Thing

The promise, the dream of school choice is a system in which every family can choose from a wide range of schools, selecting the one that best fits their own child. If we would just break the public school "monopoly," the reasoning goes, even poor families would have the same wide range of choices available to upper and middle class families.

This is not a true thing. It is not even an accurate portrayal of what the choice debate is really about.

First, we know that even in a choice system, choices would be limited. Chris may want to go to a school with a strong left-handed underwater basket weaving program, but if Chris is the only student in a few hundred miles who wants such a program, no school is going to emerge to meet that too-small market demand.

The market is going to include many students and families with many desires or preferences for programs and schools, but the market is only going to respond to some of that market. The range of available choices will also be limited.

In a traditional public system, the range of choices is handled under one roof. The public school picks and chooses and offers a variety of options based both on what students sign up for and what the school can afford. This can actual serve a student like Chris well-- the school may still not have enough students to run a left-handed underwater basket weaving program, but there might be broad enough interest in basket weaving or left-handed crafts that Chris can still get some of the education Chris wants.

The public system also has mechanisms in place to allow the market to ask for particular programs. Parents, students and taxpayers can contact their elected board members or administrators either in private as individuals or in pubic at board meetings. They can continue to express support for (or dismay with) current programs within the school, just as students vote with their course registrations for programs to continue or to die. That's how, for instance, a small rural school in Northwest Pennsylvania ended up with a thriving steel drum band. But ultimately the school's choices will be limited by demand and by finances.

This is the sort of choice that is available to wealthy and, sometimes, middle class families-- a school that provides a variety of options and programs under one roof, and which is responsive to the requests or demands of parents, students and taxpayers.

The wealthy and middle class have these choices because their schools have money. Fans of choice often suggest that these families choose a wealthy school, but that's not accurate-- these families carry their wealth with them, making whatever school they choose a wealthy one. That means their schools will suffer less from the financial limits that poor schools deal with.

What choice proponents propose is a system where a different mechanism decides the choices-- private companies, management groups, and investors decide what will be offered. Private companies, management groups and investors will decide which choices will be available to the community, and they'll do it based on their reading of the market and the financial resources they have available. They will not offer an endless unlimited cornucopia of choices. The selection of choices will be limited, because resource and markets are limited.

In fact, a choice system will probably offer a less useful array of choices since they are operated and controlled by people who are not in the community and are generally controlled by opaque management systems (sometimes full states away) who do not offer easy or ready access to parents, students, or taxpayers who want to offer input about the available choices in the system. The choice system can do one thing that a public system can't-- provide options that should not exist in the first place, such as highly segregated all-white schools.

The school choice debate is not a debate about whether or not students and their families will have choices. The debate is about who will decide what those choices are going to be.

Either system will only provide limited choices, options that are constrained by finances and demand. Neither a voucher system nor a public school will get Chris a left-handed underwater basket weaving program (though the public system can likely come closer). The traditional public system will provide choices under one roof, selected and provided by the school leaders in collaboration with staff, parents, community and students in a system that is designed to be large transparent. A choice system will provide the choices chosen by the owners and operators of the choice schools.

You know which system of governance I favor, and there's a lot I could say about why. But for purposes of this discussion, I want to make this point-- the scope and range and variety of choices available are not determined by the governance model, but by the finances. The more money the system has, the more choices it can offer. Want to provide poor students with the same options available to wealthy students? Pump the same kind of money into poor schools that is going into wealthy schools.

Taking money from a single public school and spreading it out over multiple choice school options will not magically turn it into more money, and duplicated costs (like many administrators) will make the money stretch less. It will not provide more choice. It will not provide better choice. What it will do is allow many private operators access to the marketplace where all that sweet, sweet public school tax money flows-- but that will not serve students nor their families nor the communities nor the taxpayers.

It will not expand choice. It will simply give a different group of people the power to decide which choices will be available-- disconnected people, outside people, people with a vested financial interest, people who don't have to listen to anyone in the school or community. This is not the expansion of choice-- it's the expansion of a market.

This debate is not really about school choice, because school choice is not a thing.

8 Reasons To Opt Out

Depending on your state, it is that time again-- time to waste students' school time on the Big Standardized Test. Whether it's the PARCC or the SBA or whatever mutant offspring of the testing industry that your state prefers, it's headed your way like a hungry wildebeast.

Maybe you have opted your child out in the past. Maybe you've thought about it, but ultimately decided not to. Maybe you've even become comfortably numb about test-driven education. Consider opting out this year.

If you want to read more, wider, deeper perspectives on the movement, click on over to United Opt Out. If you want to find out the specific mechanics of opting out in your state, just google "opt out" and your state. For instance, if I look for "opt out Pennsylvania," I find the basic instructions for the steps I must take to opt my children out of testing (since my children are currently Negative 3 Months old, it won't be an issue this year, but I like to be prepared).

If you opt out, you may will get grief and pushback for your choice. Here's why you should do it anyway.

1) No Benefits for Children or Parents

Your child is not allowed to discuss specifics of the test with anyone, so there will be no after-test conversation that would help her glean lessons through reflection. Your child will not get any specific feedback telling her which answers she got right, and which she got wrong. You will not get any feedback on the test except a single blanket score between 4 (super-duper) and 1 (not so great). Once this test is done, you will not know anything about your child that you did not already know.

2) No Benefits for Teachers

In most states, we are not even allowed to lay eyes on the test, and we will receive a single score for your child. All of this is useless. We will learn nothing about your child, and nothing about your child's class (except how well they did on this test). If an administrator or a teacher tells you that the test results will give them valuable information about your child, ask them why they have not already collected that information by other means and if not, what they've been doing for the past eight months.

3) Wasted Time and Resources

What could your student have done with the time spent on preparing for the test, drilling for the test, taking the test? What could your state and local school system have done with the millions of dollars spent on giving the test? Students, parents and schools are paying big in both financial and opportunity costs.

4) Warped View of School and Life

Test-centric schooling leaves our students with the impression that they go to school to learn how to pass the test, and then to take the test. That is a terrible model for learning and for life. Contrary to what test supporters say, life is not all about standardized tests. You will not take a bubble test to get married or to have and raise children. Whatever your career, it will not involve a steady daily diet of test prep and test taking. Show your child that the Big Standardized Test is not the point of school.

5) Don't Negotiate with Hostage Takers

You may hear that your child must take the test because otherwise it will hurt the school or the classroom teacher. This is simply hostage taking. And it's important to remember that every year this continues, schools and teachers continue to pay a price-- in time, in money, in the growth of a pervasive toxic test-driven atmosphere. This argument is a bully who says, "If you don't let me beat this kid up, I will beat him up even more." In any bullying situation, the person to blame is not the victim the person that the bully uses as an excuse to bully. The problem is not that your child isn't taking the test-- the problem is the state that is threatening to punish the school and teachers. Deal with the real problem; don't enable it.

6) Privacy Matters

This is certainly not the only mechanism being deployed to capture, collect and monetize data about your child. In fact, many folks who position themselves as opponents of BS Tests are actually doing so to build a case for other data collecting methods (but we'll talk about Competency Based Education another day). But opting out is certainly one clear and immediate way that you can keep some of your child's data out of the hands of the Big Data miners.

7) The Value of Non-compliance

In this day and age, it is never too early for a child to learn that sometimes people in authority will demand that you comply with dumb actions. Unthinking compliance is unwise. It's good for all citizens to learn to say "no," and the Big Standardized Test is a good practice case for all the reasons listed above. Compliance is not a virtue in and of itself; this is a great chance to practice rebelling just a little.

8) Be a Snowflake

It's true-- your opting out may well not get your state or school district to change policy, may not recapture all the time and money being lost to testing, may not change the course on which we're currently set. But then again-- if you are one among many, it might. Put enough snowflakes together and you get an avalanche that crushes everything in its path.

The requirement to make schools test-centic, to put bad tests at the center of school's existence is foolish, on the order of demanding that all students wear silly hats. At this stage of the game, there can be no doubt-- there are no benefits to the test and many unnecessary costs. It will not go away easily, because test manufacturers are making a ton of money on this giant time suck. It's time to make your life a source of friction in the machine.

This year, whether it's for the first time or the tenth, opt out.

Choice: The New Argument

The argument in favor of school choice continues to evolve, and post-DeVos, the conservative version is taking on its most honest form to date. It has been peeking its head out here and there for a while, but this week emerges full-blown in a US News piece from Robert Pondiscio (Fordham Institute).

In "Asking the Wrong Questions on School Choice," Pondiscio looks at the argument prompted by news that three major studies have shown that voucher programs show results somewhere between none and negative. Choice fans struck back by arguing the research. Pondiscio's argument is that choice fans have let themselves get sucked into the wrong argument. And in making his case, Pondiscio has flipped a long-standing piece of the school choice debate on its head.

His argument has two parts, two assumptions that he wants to question.

First, he questions the assumption "that district schools have a place of privilege against which all other models must justify themselves." This, as Andy Smarick has suggested in the past, is a rather non-conservative argument for conservatives to make, dismissing as it does a traditional institution.

Second, he questions "that the sole purpose of schooling is to raise test scores." Which, well, yes. I agree. Using the Big Standardized Test scores to measure the effectiveness of schools is baloney. I'm pretty sure I've been saying so for years. Why are the people I've been arguing against on this issue suddenly agreeing with me?

But this is the head-flippy part. "Deciding whether or not to permit parents to choose based on test-based evidence is presumptuous," says Pondiscio, skipping over how we ever arrived at this point in the first place.

We arrived here because, years ago, reformsters said, "Look, we must allow school choice because public schools are failing? Don't believe us? Well, then-- let's make some standardized tests based on a set of standards that are supposedly linked to college and career success-- let's make those tests mandatory for everybody, and we will use those test results to prove that choice is needed."

And so reformsters embraced the BS Test, pushed the BS Test, used the BS Test as a crowbar for prying apart public education. We got such nifty ideas as the Achievement School Districts, where the schools with the bottom 5%  of BS Test results would be turned over to someone with the authority to turn them charter. We have heard repeatedly for years now that choice must be allowed so that we can free poor students from failing school districts, and our whole basis for calling those schools "failing" has been BS Test results. We have heard endless calls to free students from their zip code if that zip code includes a school with low BS Test scores.

BS Test results have been used as the central evidence of success or failure and the need to question the continued existence of public schools. But now we are flipping that script-- BS Test results should not be used to question the existence of charters or choice systems. Choice fans brought their obnoxious, rude friend to the school party, and now they are pointing at him as he tips over the punch bowl and saying, "Well, geeze-- why'd you let that ass in here, because he is totally ruining the party for me!"

Pondiscio writes:

School choice proponents who seek to prove that vouchers, tax credits and scholarships "work" by citing test-score-based research have allowed themselves to be lured into argument that can never be completely won. They have tacitly agreed to a reductive frame and a debate over what evidence is acceptable (test scores) and what it means to "win" (better test scores).

That is incorrect. School choice proponents were not "lured" into this argument-- they started it, set the terms of it, and used it relentlessly as a club with which to beat public schools. They didn't "tacitly agree" to this reductive frame-- they built the frame, varnished it, hung it, and demanded that everyone operate inside it. 

What has changed? Two things, mainly.

One is the continuing schism in the reform movement between social justice reformers and free market reformers, a schism that Pondiscio himself marked almost a year ago. There are several fault lines, including the question of whether choice is best pursued universally for its own sake or directed at improving education for non-wealthy, non-white, and underserved students.

The second is exemplified by the three studies noted above-- choice-charter-voucher fans have now had years to test their ideas in the field, and they have no great successes to point to. They were going to take low-performing schools and turn them into oases of educational awesomeness. They didn't. They set up the standard by which they wanted schools to be judged; they couldn't show any particular success based on that standard.

And so we arrive here:

The question is not whether academic outcomes matter, but when they matter. Evidence should be used to influence school choice program and policy designs, not to decide whether or not choice should be permitted in the first place. The desirability of school choice and educational pluralism is a values-driven question, not an evidence-based one.  

A choice system, then, is not a means to an end (like better education or social justice), but an end in itself. Test results are important as a way to fine-tune the system that we've committed to. We should accept it as a premise, then figure out how to make it work for students. A choice system has so much value in and of itself that we should be installing it and figuring out how to make it work later. Having a choice system is of higher value, greater importance, than educational results for students. I don't mean that Pondiscio et al are callous or unconcerned about student results; just that for them, parental choice has a high value. Or as he put it on twitter:

Don't ignore it. But much of the "debate" seems aimed at "does choice work" and "should we allow it" not "how can we make choice work." https://t.co/m4LuGpwsWr

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) March 7, 2017

At this question that Pondiscio and I definitely part ways, because I'm not opposed to a choice system in which students have a selection of robust educational options available. However, I don't believe for a second that we can establish such a system, because there are three concerns we are unable to address:

Parents. Parental choice is not enough. The notion that the education system exists to serve parents is reductive, narrow, and mistaken. The educational system is meant to serve the entire community and the individual student. Don't parents look out for students' interests best? In the majority of cases, sure. But like every teacher, I can tell stories of students who would have been better off raised by wolves (the honor student whose mother was incarcerated for, among other things, trying to run over that child at age eight with a car, on purpose; the student who was often tired because of the parent who spent the money meant for heating bills on beer, so the trailer was always freezing).  Organizing around just parent choice makes it difficult to maintain accountability to all taxpayers.

There is a dark part of this argument that is still largely unspoken-- yes, some parents will make lousy choices, and that's too bad, but some people get the crappy lives that they deserve. It's the same underlying argument that says if poor people want health care, they should stop making bad choices (like iphones). It's an old conservative argument-- some people should suffer the unpleasant consequences of their bad life choices and not be rescued by the government (using my hard-earned tax dollars). But this argument falls apart when we are talking about making a child suffer the consequences for a parent's lousy choices. That's both morally indefensible and a poor way to build a better future for the nation.

Money. There's no reason to believe that we can finance multiple school systems for the price of one. "Cash is tight, so let's open multiple facilities," said no business ever. If we really want to do choice right, it will require politicians who stand up and say, "We're going to spend more tax dollars on education so that all these choices can be available." But in some states, we can't even get folks to fully fund the single public system they've got.

Regulation. Students cannot afford to lose a year or two of education while the market shakes out fraudsters and scammers. Students cannot afford to lose a year or two of education because some educational amateur is better at marketing than actual educating. For the same reason that public schools should be held accountable-- because no child should have one minute of her education wasted-- choice schools should also be held accountable to all students, parents, and taxpayers.

This last one is where the rubber meets the road. Some people believe in choice because that is their personal value. Some people believe it will improve education. And some people don't really care-- they are just frustrated that their business can't get at that sweet, sweet education money because there are too many hoops to jump through and too many rules that get in their way. These choice fans inevitably identify themselves by arguing for few-or-none regulations, because every regulation is one more obstacle to their quest for profit.

There's one other regulatory issue-- a widespread choice system could be put in place without having the slightest effect on social justice and educational equity. Because somebody is going to decide which choices are available in which communities. This is where the reform community is itself having a bit of a stew-- because reformers who want to bring educational equity to non-wealthy non-white students do not have the same priorities as reformers who want to transform the nation's system into a choice-based one-- and both groups have figured out that, particularly under the current administration, they can perhaps be more successful if they don't have to pretend to support the other group's agenda.

So if we could address all those issues, then a choice system might be possible. But it will take more than choice supporters divorcing themselves from the test-centered system that they foisted on all of us to get there. 
              
I'm not sorry that the conversation has arrived at this point-- I feel that if nothing else, it's at least honest. Some choice fans feel that a choice system should be put in place because it's the right thing to do. Which, oddly enough, is how I feel about a public education system based in every community and run by locally-elected taxpayers. I will be interested to see where this new version of the reform argument takes us.

Can Choice Return To Its Roots?

Deborah Meier wrote in Education Week recently wit an interesting question.

"Can school choice return to its progressive roots?" she asked. She goes back to the days in which she became involved in starting charter schools, to get out from under the heavy hand of regulation and red tape and start a school run by educators who would focus on the stuff that really matters, serving students who has been largely ignored by the system. In those early days, school choice could be seen as a progressive cause. And yet, with the growth in the charter movement came misgivings:

It was the proliferation of charters that made me pause and worry about how choice could work against the values I was presumably promoting. Small schools of choice soon became a way of resegregating where integration had begun to be practiced. It also pitted teachers and parents against each other as they were asked to share limited space. And, soon it began to seem as though it was also a way of dividing a community's efforts at improving all their schools. Bus trips to Albany were conducted by competing groups with competing external sponsors—serving however the same community. And, of course, sometimes families were attending schools in districts where they didn't live and in the process, some districts lost valuable parent leaders and activists who solved their personal interests without tackling the larger dilemmas facing their neighbors.

Meier's question is on the surface pretty simple. Can the progressive impulse be put back in the forefront of the charter-choice question? She didn't ask me, but I'm answering anyway.

My answer is "No."

And the reason for my answer is also simple.

Money.

There are two main reasons that money will remain a barrier to progressive school choice paradise.

First, there's been no attempt to actually fund such a system. Instead, every attempt at a charter-choice system has been founded on the premise that we can fund multiple school systems with the same money previously used to fund just one system. That premise is nuts. The result is a zero-sum Battle to the Death cage match between public and charter schools, resulting in some of the issues Meier notes above. Not enough resources, building space, quality teachers, expensive administrators and just plain funding to go around.

The only solution for this problem is a bunch of brave politicians who will stand up and say, "We think that having a choice-based multi-school system is so important that we are going to appropriate a bunch of new tax dollars to fund it." That seems unlikely, particularly in those states where the legislators are unwilling to fully fund the system they already have.

But even if full funding somehow magically happened, that would not solve Problem Number 2. That because Problem Number 2 is also money.

A charter-choice system as currently conceived is about unleashing the free market, and the free market feeds on money. Many states are well along in the transformation of education from a public service sector to a free market profit-seeking sector, and the result is not pretty. A charter school founded and run by local folks and based on progressive values is already quaint, like a Mom and Pop corner grocery store. There's money to be made in the charter biz, and a whole bunch of people who want to make it.

Free market fans will insist (many of them sincerely) that the drive to make money will lead to top notch quality schools for every child in the US. There is not a lick of evidence to support this view, and plenty of evidence that it is wrong. You can find plenty of arguments here from me, but for the moment, let me just toss out one question-- can you name one business sector that has thrived by producing a top-quality product that gets to every single person in the country? In the meantime, the pursuit of money through charters has led to elbowing aside all obstacles, including the local community members and taxpayers whose school it supposed to be, and satisfying some of the less admirable desires if the marketplace, like a school free from Those People.

As long as education is a big beautiful football field with bags of money buried all through it available to anyone who liberates them, people will show up with shovels and backhoes and plastic forks and dig holes until nobody can really play the game the field was meant for in the first place.

Until charter choice systems are fully funded and carefully regulated, they will never return to their roots. But right now too many operators smell too much money for us to go back easily.

Real Performance Based Education

This afternoon the set was struck and the stage swept clean. We've come to the end of this year's spring musical. As always it was one of the highlights of my year, and as always, it reminded me of how inadequate so many of our educational models are.

There are weeks of rehearsal, learning music, learning choreography, working on blocking and lines and the underlying character work that goes with all of that. We have a cast of students in 7-12 grade in very many levels of skill and experience.

Used properly, a portal to a world of learning

That means that in the course of assembling the show, each student learns a different set of lessons that depend a great deal on what roles they receive and what skills they bring to the table, as well as their ambition and adventurousness of spirit.

So this educational experience is extremely personalized, and that means far more than I have twelve lessons to choose from and a computer picks the next one based on how the last one turned out. My lead actor may need to learn about comedic timing, while one of my chorus folks may need to learn about the importance of the chorus in a show. My leading actress may need to learn about how to flesh out a character when the writers haven't given you much to work with. But the list of lessons will be different for every different role and every different cast member.

The lessons also vary with directors. This program is a co-op that allows my school to join in with a school just across town, and I split directing duties with an old friend who heads up the other school's program. We've divided up duties many different ways over the years, and it works because we work well together. Every theater production is a collaboration of some sort, and that collaboration is always shaped by the approaches of the people involved. Some directors have a very specific vision for the actors to bring to life, while others like to leave spaces for the actors to fill in with their own choices. We tend toward the latter, but some actors are more comfortable with the former and all sorts of combinations can get good results (and the requirements of the script itself also make a difference). All of which means that if you showed up with a specific program for exactly how a director should put together a show, I would laugh at you. Here we are with a performance based task that literally comes with a script-- and yet only a fool would claim that the script is all you need to produce a great show.

Likewise, putting on a show is the very definition of a performance-based learning experience. Yet if we were to follow the PBL model currently favored, we would break the show down into a checklist. Does the actor know the lines? Check. Does the actor know the blocking? Check. Can the actor put on her costume? Check. And on and on and even if I have checked off every micro-credential on the list, that is not the same thing as actually performing the show. Nor do we build toward that performance capability by working down the list one separate performance task at a time, because they are all part of a greater whole.

And those tasks would be performed for an evaluator, an assessor of some sort, which is not the ultimate goal. Our show was performed in front of an audience, and because it was a comedy, the audience reaction was a critical part of performance (in fact, on our second night, I saw something I've never seen in school or community theater before-- the show was stopped by audience laughter). Unlike competency-based education, which presumes that competencies can be approached as separate, discrete skills that can be measured through proxies, tasks that aren't the real thing. There is no checklist that would have substituted for dress rehearsal, no assessment more valuable than audience reactions in performance.

And speaking of assessments-- at no point in the eight-week process of preparing the show would a multiple-choice standardized test have been useful.At no point in the process did anyone think, "Hey, we need to do some assessments here to make sure that everyone is on track for a good performance." It would have been a pointless, useless waste of time.

In fact, standardization of any type is useless in this process. I have no idea how many productions of The Addams Family have been put on in community and school theaters at this point, but I will bet you the farm, the rent money, and a full box of donuts that not one of those productions looks exactly like any other. It's true that nobody who saw our production would have mistaken it for Hamlet or Oh Calcutta, but every production exists at the intersection of a specific cast, director, school, community, and stage (ours has no fly gallery, so that affects set design considerably). School theater in particular has to make adjustments for things as simple as language and as substantial as character gender (I can tell you, for instance, that interesting things happen to the subtext of Disney's Beauty and the Beast when Belle's crazy father Maurice is replaced by Belle's crazy mother Marie). It is those specific variations that most often give the special flavor and quality to the local production; the deviations from the standard are a source of excellence, not treatment-demanding flaw.

I love working with students and theater (despite the giant chunks of my life that it demands) because it is an experience that, in an absolutely authentic manner, helps each student grow and learn and discover new greatness in herself. It is an absolutely real learning and growth experience, which is why I'm always struck by how completely it does not match any of the assumptions about real learning made by the forces of ed reform. This is what real learning and growth look like, and they don't resemble the whole standard-driven test-centered punishment-fueled system that has been forced on us for the past fifteen years.