FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid

Florida, land of more stupid education rules than you can shake a dead alligator at, embarked on a new level of stupid last year when it fought to keep some third graders from moving on to fourth grade.

As you may recall, Florida is one of the states with a third grader retention law, declaring that third graders cannot move on unless they pass the Big Standardized Test for reading. This is a dumb law, without a lick of evidence to support it, and several licks to suggest that it's actually counter-productive. However, the legislature, in one of its rare lucid moments, opened the door to local districts substituting a portfolio display of reading skills in place of a BS Test score, and sixty-ish Florida county districts walked through that door into a land of sense and clarity.

A few other districts, however, decided to be dopes about the whole thing.

Mind you, I generally try to be semi-respectful here and remember that the people I disagree with are still human beings with families and lives. But what the hell is there to say about a grown adult who declares that an eight year old child must be held back a year, even if that child got straight A's and demonstrated exemplary reading ability? That grown adult, even if she is a professional superintendent of schools, should be ashamed. She should be ashamed of visiting such abuse on any of her young charges, and she should be ashamed that she has so blatantly announced that she is not really concern3ed about that child's reading skills at all, but is only interested in forcing that child to comply and take the Holy BS Test. (Or at least "participate," which in Florida means breaking the seal and signing their names, which at least some of the plaintiffs did.)

But it just got worse. Initially, the state ed department threw the local districts under the bus, saying, "Well, it's their choice." But by summer's end, the education department lawyers were arguing in court that the grades given by teachers on student report cards didn't really mean anything.

And so about a dozen opt-out students were dragged into the Florida public square to be made an example of. Because nothing makes school superintendents and state lawyers and departments of education feel more validated than putting a beat-down on some third graders.

But just in time for September to roll in, Florida Judge Karen Gievers not only ruled in favor of the opt out kids, but used some pointed-yet-judgely language to point out that the state was acting like a giant asshat.

That should have been the end of things. Properly slapped, education officials should have come to their senses and exclaimed, "Holy smokes! We got so caught up in this we were more concerned in making sure that opt out families obeyed us than finding ways to see if students are really learning." Instead, some local districts decided to keep being jerks to the children, and the case went back into the next level of court on appeal. "Dare to sue us for the right to advance a grade just because you have straight A's," they said. "We will not rest till we can put some hurt on your tiny ten year old frame." I don't want to know what the children are going to learn about being a responsible adult from this whole sorry mess.

And now, the appeal court judges have ruled on the side of stupid.

The purpose of the state test is to “assess whether the student has a reading deficiency and needs additional reading instruction before [and after] being promoted to fourth grade,” they wrote.

“The test can only achieve that laudable purpose if the student meaningfully takes part in the test by attempting to answer all of its questions to the best of the student’s ability. Anything less is a disservice to the student — and the public.”

How? How how how how?And what is "less" about demonstrating the skills in question through the yearlong activities and work as evaluated by the trained professional educator. And do any of these judges have experience or training that would allow them to know whether or not the BS Test can achieve its alleged purpose?

The ruling, which threw out all of the August court decisions, raises so many questions. Since this buttresses the state argument that report cards don't matter, does this mean a child who flunks every class but gets satisfactory scores on the BS Test is legally entitled to advance to the next grade? Does this mean that Florida schools should abandon report cards entirely? Will Florida state troopers be sent into the sixty-ish other counties and force them to ignore portfolios and hold test scofflaws back in third grade? Will families with young children avoid these counties like the plague? Has Florida just found one more clever way to undermine public schools and drive families toward charters?

These districts, the state, and the court had a chance and a choice. They could show that they were most concerned about the child's ability to read, show that they cared, as they claimed, about the need to show reading skills as a foundation for future success-- or they could show that what they most cared about was forcing obedience to the state, forcing opt out families to do as they were told by the government whether it made sense or not. The districts, the state, and the court chose the latter-- a choice all the more obnoxious because there is not a shred of evidence that the test measures reading skills or that third grade retention helps the child succeed in school or life.

Florida, in short, had a chance to show whether it was on the side of education or on the side of stupid. It picked stupid. Shame on the court. Shame on the districts. Shame on the state.

Frontline: Your Large Brotherly Data Service

I recently covered the launching of The Line, a new website helmed by Disgraced LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and dedicated to the proposition that Chiefs for Change should have an avenue to keep pumping out warmed-over education reform baloney.

As soon as I started digging, I realized I already knew about Frontline, the company behind the website. That familiar logo had started popping up on our screens at school this year because Frontline just bought out Aesop, the software service that has been managing our teacher absences.

Like many districts, a few years ago we shifted our substitute system from the traditional Harried Secretary On The Phone from 5 AM until Two Minutes Before School Starts System to an on-line service that lets teachers enter absences and substitutes pick them up, all on line, like a scholastic match.com. It's a vastly superior system to the Frantic Phone Call system. But, boy-- if one company was doing that for many school districts, wouldn't they collect a ton of data.

Well, yes. Yes they would.

Part of Frontline's pitch is just having all sorts of data at your fingertips to run your school efficiently-- their promotional video shows an administrator walking through the halls of a school carrying a table and looking at numbers on a display that must mean something helpful because data! Their main platform promises that you can manage people without paper, handle recruiting and hiring, watch over absences, do great professional development, and work on your special ed stuff (some of this represents an expansion of Frontline's work-- Aesop is not the only company they've acquired recently-- since January of 2016, Frontline has acquired at least four companies, including some that work tracking special ed data).

Frontline likes a lot of trendy things. Their picture of professional development includes personalized targeted development, which sounds a lot like badges and micro-competencies (log on and do a fifteen minute video-plus-test about Wait Time and voila! you're now better!)

All of this means running everything through the computers, and everything that is run through the computers can be strained for data.

Meet Frontline Learning and Research Institute!

FLRI is headed up by Elizabeth Combs, previously the chief of My Learning Plan. Frontline notes that she "brings a passion for leveraging technology to support educator growth" and, yes, leveraging technology is a great source of passion for so many of us. Other backgrounds represented in the advisory board include human resources, consulting, human capital, consulting, consulting-- oh, and one Teach for America alumnus. FLRI has also entered into a collaboration with Johns Hopkins, a university leading in the field of Renting Out a Respected Name in Academia To Make Your Business Look More Legit.

FLRI offers reports like its end-of-the-year teacher absence and substitute busyness report. Frontline has crunched numbers from 2.7 million employees at 4,900 "educational organizations." The report is not exactly filled with shocking reveals (teacher absences are harder to fill on Fridays and with less lead time; the most common reason for absence is illness). But I find it just a little bit sobering to realize that every time I miss a day, I'm participating in a giant research project that is collecting my data.

There's also a two-part report about professional development, predicated on the idea that the Every Student Succeeds Act gives the "most prescriptive federal definition" of quality PD ever. FLRI determines that the definition centers on PD that is "sustained, intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven and classroom-focused." Based on that definition, it turns out that most PD currently sucks, a finding that is even less surprising than the discovery that it's harder to get subs on a Friday in May. This is even with FLRI's sort-of-silly definitions of these terms-- "sustained" means "meets at least three times" and "intensive" means "takes at least 4.5 hours." The good news is that only 8% of PD activities were "data-driven," which is probably 8% too many until such time as we can come up with some kind of data that deserves to drive anything more important than a miniature clown car (spoiler alert: Big Standardized Tests and their sad siblings like MAP will not provide that data).

So Frontline aspires to be a multi-tasking major player, offering "research" that proves how much you need their products, and the products that you so desperately need. All of it cleverly resting on a giant foundation built on the data-mining performed on the services you're already buying from them. It's a forward-thinking business model in keeping with many tech giants, except that Facebook and Google data-mine you and treat you as the product without getting you to pay for the privilege. 

ICYMI: Endless Winter Edition (3/12)

As always, I encourage you to share and boost the signal of anything you read here. 

It's Testing Season. Ethics, Anyone?

Sarah Lahm highlights just two of the jaw-dropping abuses done in the name of the Big Standardized Test this year (so far).

Out There

Annie Tan with a short, simple, powerful meditation on putting yourself out there.

Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold

Alex Molnar at the Institute for New Economics takes a look at the big picture in the school privatization movement.

Charter Schools Do Not Equal Education Reform

Guest op-ed from David Hornbeck, who was the head of Philly schools when they first got themselves in deep trouble. The lede tells you why you want to read this:

As Philadelphia's Superintendent of Schools, I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.

White Choice

Well, this is kind of depressing. Jennifer Berkshire looks at how segregation academies (private schools started so that white children wouldn't have to go to school with black classmates) are still alive and thriving in the South.

Betsy DeVos' Holy War

So this is where we are now-- Rolling Stone decides to go ahead and cover the Secretary of Education. Much of this will be familiar to those of us who have been studying up on DeVos, but Janet Reitman's piece connects all the dots and lays out the bigger, scarier picture.

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses

Between the Stone piece and this one in the Atlantic, it seems that journalists are finally ready to wrestle with he big questions-- how do you make "DeVos" plural or possessive? This profile focuses on the odd discontinuity between Betsy, the sweet-as-pie hometown girl making West Michigan a better place, and DeVos, the hard-knuckle, ball-busting political operative.

Inconceivable Conversations

Blue Cereal Education with a great piece about testing, and why not.

Why Can't Teachers Make Decisions on Their Own

And now for something else entirely-- Peter DeWitt provides a more formal framework for discussing how schools are set up to make sure that teachers can't make decisions.

Can You Afford To Become a Teacher?

For the past few years, there's been regular conversation about the sad discovery that many professions are only accessible to the wealthy. If you want to enter the world of Hollywood, Wall Street or many writing gigs, the path is through an unpaid internship which is, you know, unpaid. Other areas may attract the non-wealthy, but there entry-level "jobs" are still unpaid. If you want to break in, you need a second job, supportive and well-heeled parents, or someone willing to foot your bills.
 

But a conversation with an aspiring teacher last week led me to wonder-- is teaching suffering from the same problem?

I'm not just talking about how, once you land a job, you discover that the lay is low and that you are going to have to pump some of that income back into your own classroom. The first financial obstacle, however, appears before you even start your first job. Depending on where you decide you want to teach, getting a job straight out of college may well be possible. But for many proto-teachers, that is not going to happen.

Instead, many teachers have to work their way into a district by substituting. My wife and I both spent years doing day-to-day subbing and covering leaves before finally landing our own job.

But I worked on this path during the early eighties. Subbing in my region paid $50-$60 per day. I was living in a mobile home and paying $75/month for rent, so my sub pay, while unspectacular, was sufficient to support me (along with the help in extra-dire moments from my well-heeled parental units). I could hang in there until I got my big break.

But substitutes in the new millennium face a tougher challenge. In thirty years, our sub pay crept up to $85. We just this year decided to respond to the substitute teacher shortage by raising our pay to $100 a day. This is shockingly close to substitute pay in Philadelphia, a city that's far more expensive to live in (and where there's a substitute teacher shortage).

My wife entered the profession in the new millennium. She also paid her dues in the sub world; it required a second job, a period of moving back in with her parents, and marrying a filthy rich high school English teacher. Without extra resources to fall back on, she would have to give up dreams of teaching (which would have been a shame, because she is damn good at her job).

Substitute teaching is the barely-paid internship of education, and not everyone can afford to hang on for a year or ten of subsistence living. I have no idea of what the actual figures are for people who graduate with teaching certificates who give up on the classroom and pick another profession because they haven't got the financial resources to hang on until they can get work. But my sense, anecdotally, is that it's a not-insignificant number of proto-teachers who are being lost.

Worse yet, this means that teaching is particularly difficult to enter for folks from low-income families who have limited financial resources, which means that staffing classrooms in low-income communities face an extra challenge in coaxing back new teachers who are from the neighborhood or one like it. The corollary is that non-wealthy students are increasingly in danger of being taught by teachers who don't really know what growing poor means.

Are there solutions? Well, there's the old Pay Substitutes Real Money solution, but nobody seems to like that one. Or we could create some sort of entry-level career step-ladder so that a person could work her way into a teaching job by climbing a career ladder that let her actually live. The problem with such solutions is that they involve money, and we're currently pretty deeply committed to not throwing money at schools or people who work in them.

Nevertheless, the profession has a (nother) problem if aspiring teachers don't just need to answer questions like do you have the drive to teach or o you love kids or do you know your stuff or can you handle the students-- we're in trouble if teachers must answer can you afford to become a teacher? It's nothing good for American education if teaching becomes a job only for the privileged few.

Noble Teachers Forming Largest Charter Union

The 800 teachers and staff of Chicago's Noble charter school chain is working to form the largest charter teacher union in the country.

 They would not become the first charter union in the country, or even in Chicago. In fact, the Aspire network of charter schools just averted a strike by their own teachers' union by agreeing to wage increases, shorter workdays, and, apparently, occasionally listening to their staff. Like the proposed Noble union, the Aspire teachers belong to the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS), a group affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

The Noble chain is one of Chicago's most prominent, founded in 1999. Its investors include Governor Bruce Rauner, the billionaire Pritzker family and Chicago Board of Education President Frank Clark. It's marketing literature makes plain where Noble's focus lies:

At Noble, success is the only option. 
 No excuses. We believe that no matter how far behind a student is when they enter ninth grade, they will succeed. No matter what their family’s income or education level is, they will succeed. No matter if their neighborhoods are plagued with violence or their peers are involved in gangs, they will succeed. At Noble, we hold everyone—students, teachers, and leadership—to the highest possible standards and accept no excuses for failure. 

The brochure also notes that "The Noble Way" is "discipline, data and deliverables."

A Chicago Reporter profile about Noble from a year ago included this characterization of the chain:

Critics often imagine the Noble Network of Charter Schools as a monolith that steals “good” students from neighborhood schools and pushes out the “bad” ones. A place where students walk silently in hallways and teachers are obsessed with test prep.

There is some truth to that stereotype, as higher-achieving students are more likely to choose Noble to start with, while many who can’t handle the strict system of demerits leave.

The profile argues that things are "more complicated." Nobles own figures on retention are not great, but not shocking (and also not easily verified by any outside source.

Noble has run into other issues. In 2013, news reports publicized Noble's "disciplinary fees," a fine assessed against students for infractions like "unkempt appearance and not making eye contact." In the worst cases, students would not only pay fines for infractions, but be assigned a "summer behavioral session" with a corresponding tuition fee. One student's family racked up almost $2,000 in fees for a ninth grade son, just to keep him in the school. Noble has also become a school associated with the "grit" movement, with the attempts to turn joy into a school chore. It's not a pretty picture.

Noble also got in trouble last fall when they used Chicago Pubic School student home addresses for promotional mailers. And like many charter chains, they are hard on their teaching staff-- the school runs a long school day. In their book A Fight for the Soul of Public Education, Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno report that a beginning teacher at Noble in 2012 made roughly half of their public school counterparts. Noble does not have a set pay scale, and teachers who want a raise must ask for one, or hope that they can score a test score bonus based on student results (up to $5,500).

The Noble staff is much whiter than Chicago Public School staff. It's also about 40% Teach for America. Noble's own exit interviews tell them that about 40% of the departing teachers feel they were underpaid. But Noble teachers, while given some autonomy and a generous classroom budget, gave as their Number One reason for leaving "unreasonable job expectations." As one former teacher told the now-departed magazine Chicago Catalyst,

If we expect teachers to be martyrs forever, we’ll never retain talent.

But if a charter is based on demanding a culture of compliance from its students, it seems likely that they will extend that sort of firm, commanding hand to their staff. If your whole school is based on an atmosphere of obedience, of shaping your appearance and behavior to the demands of your superiors-- well, it would be hard to institute that approach only to students, and not also to the teaching staff. If your school's motto is "People got to know their place," it's hard to see how that wouldn't not have a long-term toxic effect on your relationship with your staff.

In a letter calling for the union, organizers wrote

We want a voice in decisions, stability in our schools and, most importantly, the best possible future for our students. Under current local and national conditions, educators labor to remain in their classrooms while our value is diminished, our capacity drained, and our power constrained.

Some teachers are quick to note that they do not see this as an "us versus them" situation, but believe that the chain has some issues that need to be addressed. In a WBEZ report, teachers noted the high staff turn over rate at Noble-- about a third of the staff leaves every year, according to the state. This is not unusual for Illinois charters; for many of them, it is a feature and not a bug, because teachers who leave within a year or two cost far less than teachers who stick around. But some teachers see it as a problem for the students and the school community:

Spanish teacher Christina Verdos-Petrou said she got involved in the union effort after the return of a former student opened her eyes to the impact of teacher turnover.

“I was the only one he recognized,” said Verdos-Petrou, who works at Noble’s Golder College Prep campus in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. “It is truly heartbreaking when I see our students come back and they do not recognize the majority of staff in the building.”

Management, meanwhile, does not want to sacrifice the "flexibility" that comes with an non-union staff. Noble principals are free to pay each teacher whatever the principal thinks that teacher is worth, within the financial limits of the chain. Noble leaders say that they could pay better if they got more money from the public system. But it's hard to see why they need more money from the public system in order to stop demanding that teachers work twelve-to-fourteen hour days. 

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, Noble is a textbook example of how quickly teachers can get beat up and burned out when they have no employment protections, no clearly set job requirements, plus low and uncertain pay. Noble's yet another example of a charter chain that uses "flexibility" as code for "profitable instability that works in management's favor." 

If the teachers and staff can pull this off and manage to unionize the chain, they'll be doing the management of Noble a favor, and doing the students of Noble an even huger favor, but it remains to be seen if Noble management understands that, or whether they put a greater value on the freedom to run their schools without having to answer to anybody. If Noble does become home to the largest charter union in the country, that will send a message to other overworked, underpaid charter teachers who don't know their place. On the other hand, it will help to legitimize charter schools. This is a story worth watching.

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.