Is Testing Accountability Dead Yet?

Today Education Next features a three-headed take on the question, "Is test-based accountability dead?" Three prominent reformy thinkers address the question. Do they come up with any useful answers? Let's see.

 







Why Accountability Matters, and Why It Must Evolve

Morgan Polikoff (USC Rossier) leads us off. Polikoff is a long-time Big Standardized Test supporter and logged some time with the Gates effective teaching project. And he is making a very creative case for the BS Test here.

What positively affects student outcomes, has "overwhelming" support of parents and voters, supports various policies and research, and has been used widely for a decade? "School accountability" is his broad and inclusive answer. But when it comes to test-based accountability specifically, I think he's only batting .500 here.

Does BS Testing work? It's a tricky question only because so much of the research is so bad, boiling down mostly to "ever since we started giving the BS Test for high stakes, students have scored higher on the BS Test." That may be true, but so what? That tautological progression holds whether the BS Test is a good test, a bad test, or a test of how well students can recite the Preamble to the Constitution. Update: Matt Barnum suggests that I'm conflating accountability tests with the NAEP, which has been used in some studies to "measure" effectiveness of other reformy ideas. This steers us back towards places like the Honesty gap, which is a side trip we don't have time for, but my point-- that taking lots of standardized tests makes students better at taking standardized tests-- remains the same.

Polikoff does pull off a masterful piece of data-juggling. You may recall a CREDO study suggesting that students in urban charters lost ground compared to their NCLB public school counterparts. Polikoff flips that around and tells us that NCLB caused public school students gains "equivalent to the gain from spending three or four years in an average urban charter." That is some fancy baloney slicing there, showing once again that anything can be made to look good if you compare it to the right Brand X. Update: Okay, Barnum kindly referred me to the study that Polikoff was referring to, and it does say something more like what he argued in his piece. This time, my snark is misplaced.

Polikoff cites Education Next's poll that that folks agree that schools should be accountable for providing a good education. Sure. This conveniently skips past the question that really matters-- are the BS Tests a good measure of whether or not a school is providing a good education.

So, 0 for 2 so far. His final two points are valid, but irrelevant. He asserts that high stakes testing puts weight behind certain policies and generates data for certain studies. Again, no word on whether any of these policies or studies are actually valid. And we've been doing this test-centered education thing for a while. No argument there. Are we tired of winning yet?

What you might find fun about Polikoff's essay is he's not arguing with those of us in the non-reformy camp.

Despite this track record of modest success, many parties seem poised to throw the policy overboard and use the guise of “parental choice” or “local control” to return us to a time when we had little idea which schools were educating children well and which were not.

What fun times we live in, when reformers scold other reformers. Polikoff also alludes to the idea that people who hate the Common Core only because they associate it with President Obama. And then he addresses some real concerns.

He touches on the issue of test-centered education narrowing and shallowing and hollowing out the curriculum, but that is totes going to get better when PARCC and SBA unveil their new! improved! tests. This has been the promise for years, and it has always been an empty one-- standardized tests, particularly if they are to be administered on a grand scale, will always be severely limited. Polikoff also responds to the notion that BS Tests do not predict "life outcomes," but unfortunately his response is to bring up Raj Chetty again, and Chetty has no real answer to this criticism, no matter how many times testocrats trot him out.

Polikoff acknowledges that the "accountability coalition" has frayed, and he restates his belief that choice must travel hand-in-hand with accountability or we are wasting tax dollars. He sees hope in ESSA's call for broader measures of school quality. And he swears we're really making progress and we can't give up now.

Polikoff's problem remains-- the BS Tests are junk that provide junk data and damage schools in the process. Accountability is a good idea, but the standards-based high-stakes tests that we've been subjected to for the past more-than-ten years are junk, and they do not provide a useful, reliable, or valid measure of school quality-- not even sort of. Nor have they helped-- not even incrementally. They have hurt, and hurt badly, a system that is now geared toward test prep and a narrow, stunted version of what education even means. Accountability matters, but Polikoff is asking all the wrong questions, ultimately getting the way of true accountability rather than supporting it.

Futile Accountability Systems Should Be Abandoned

Jay Greene (no relation) speaks up next. And as usual, he is not entering the conversation gently:

Is test-based accountability “on the wane”? The question is based on a fallacy. For something to be on the wane, it has to exist, and test-based accountability has never truly existed in the United States. Holding people accountable requires that they face significant consequences as a result of their actions.

So, the current system fails because it doesn't punish people hard enough. Greene also notes that it "has distorted the operation of schools to the detriment of educational quality." It is a Soviet-style central planning system that cannot possibly "capture the diverse spectrum of local priorities in our nation." It focuses on math and reading and ignores learning to be good citizens. It has crappy metrics. And schools are figuring out that the punishment for "failing" isn't so great (Greene juxtaposes this with stalled NAEP scores, as if a lack of fear among school personnel has caused growth to stop). Greene also, as he has before, notes that there's no proven or apparent connection between scoring well on the BS Test and doing well at life.

Greene also argues that test-based accountability is politically weak:

Rather, accountability that centers on testing is doomed because it has many political adversaries but no enduring political constituency. Parents have never rallied to demand that their children be tested more, that tests be used to retain students or prevent them from graduating, or that tests be used to determine teacher pay or employment. Educators revile test-based accountability even more. Test-based accountability was initiated by policy elites frustrated over rising education costs and subpar results. But elites cannot sustain such a policy in the face of opposition from educators and families. American politics is shaped by the activity of organized interests, not poll results.

Common Core is the canary in the coal mine, the demonstration of how centralized planning with no political backing is doomed to collapse.

All of this leads Greene to conclude that real accountability can only come from families exercising local control and local choice. Interestingly, though, his argument actually undercuts the typical choice-voucher argument. Choice fans argue that rich and middle class parents get to choose a school they like, but Greene talks about the power of those families "to exercise control over how and what their children are taught." In other words, maybe those families don't so much choose their school as the force their school to shape itself to their preferences. That's an idea I'd like to come back to on another day.

If Parents Push for It, Accountability Can Work

Says Kevin Huffman, a guy who has never made it work anywhere despite having control of an entire state's education system (Tennesee). But he will also lead with the idea that reformsters never had a big enough stick. "Shockingly few public school educators" lost salary or jobs or raises or promotions because of BS Test results. That, I would argue, is because most people on the local level recognized that tying those things to student results on bad standardized tests was A) unfair and B) unlikely to accomplish anything useful.

Huffman will go ahead and claim that BS Test results did predict life outcomes, by which he means early tests predict results on later tests. This is unsurprising, since all test results (and much of later life results as well) correlate most closely with socio-economic background. But Huffman wants to tell us a sad tale about an eighth grader facing a "lifetime of truncated opportunities dictated by weak performance at an incredibly young age." Because the nation is filled with people who are now poor because they did badly on the BS Test back in eighth grade.

Huffman is a long-standing member of the Everything Is The Teacher's Fault club. He joined in with Arne Duncan in claiming that students with special needs could be "fixed' by having teachers with high expectations ("Go on, Chris-- your dyslexia won't be a problem if you just listen to the sound of my expectations and try harder.")

Huffman is also going to chime in on the testing ouroborus-- students who take tests get better at taking tests, and therefor test-based accountability works. And as a leading test cultist, he is going to boldy assert as "fact" that higher scores on a narrowly-focused badly-designed standardized math and reading test prove that students are getting a better education. He's upset that the response to "improved results" in Tennessee and DC has been "a deafening silence," but it doesn't occur to him that the results are an unimpressive mirage. He might ask Chris Barbic, the head of Tennessee's Achievement School District who left the post early because he discovered he couldn't get results.

Huffman poses a question:

If test-based accountability works to improve student results but is unpopular with people who make their living in schools, can we reasonably expect it to find a foothold?

This is the wrong question. Let me suggest a rewrite:

If test-based accountability shows no independently verifiable improvement for students and is largely criticized by the trained professionals and experts in the education field, is there any reason to hold onto it?

 But Huffman is an education amateur who holds tight to what he doesn't know.

We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that some schools, districts, and states are doing better work than their peers. Some are getting better results, and some are driving faster improvements. How do we know this? Because of tests.

Man, I disagree with some of what Greene says and most of what Polikoff says, but this is just dumb. Does Huffman really, truly believe that nobody can tell the difference between a good school and a bad school except by looking at BS Test scores? Oh, and we can use test results to improve schools, somehow, except that of course we've been claiming to do that for over a decade.I guess we didn't threaten and punish teachers enough.

 Huffman is Arne Duncan lite, right down to insisting that test opponents are those rich, white suburbanites. Well, Duncan had seven years to make his pitch, and he failed to demonstrate any significant successes ever. Huffman is banging a drum that stopped making any semblance of music ages ago.  

So, Is It Dead ?

Oh, if only. But BS Testing is still enshrined in ESSA and in many state systems. It will continue to be a toxic drag on the school system, providing no useful information and warping the very idea of education.

So it won't go away, and it can't do anything useful or nurturing, and in fact can be destructive and damaging at times. Let's call test-centered accountability one more zombie loose in the education world.

Do I have some ideas about how to do better? I do, but this has dragged on enough for today.

In Praise of One To One

Back in 2010-2011, my school went to one-to-one computing. We put a netbook in the hands of every 9-12 grader.

It is rather unusual for my school district to be out in front of things. We're small, largely rural, and not terribly wealthy. But a combination of factors came together to launch us into one-to-one computing. And I'm here to tell you that I don't regret it a bit. And yet, I don't disagree with writers like Thomas Ultican when he says that one-to-one is Bad News.

Let me tell you what I think we did right, because I recommend that should your district make noises about such a program, you agitate to follow our somewhat aimless lead.

I say "aimless" because one of the very first things our administration did was fail to give us any specific instructions about how we were to use our students' newfound technotools. I am not kidding. That lack of direction was genius, and it was exactly right. Different teachers incorporated different aspects of the technology in different ways. Some classes were converted to digital textbooks (that's a big part of how the expense was sold to our board). Some teachers used a variety of tools. Some found some cool things they could use in their class. Some teachers didn't do a damned thing. We were initially given a tool for monitoring what the students were doing on their screens; it faded quickly, as most of us discovered we could monitor students using a tried and true teacher management technique you may already know as "Looking at them." Also, we had anticipated problems with things like keeping the netbooks charged. It turned out to be no problem.

I'm sure administration became a little frustrated with how slowly some teachers adopted the tech, and many teachers were frustrated that our infrastructure had some hiccups. Actually, it's still hiccuping.

But the minimum planning was genius because, first of all, the little planning that was done all turned out to be Not On Point. And second of all, it let teachers advance comfortably at a speed they could work with.

Many folks were doubtful, and students in the first few years pronounced the experiment a waste of time. This had more to do with expectations than anything else-- because we didn't have the computers out every day for some new round of whizbangery, folks thought they were underused. I disagree-- we don't use textbooks every single day, or paper, or pencils. You use the tools when there's a need. Some complained that the netbooks needed careful handling and treatment. Well, so does paper, but everyone just gets used to it early on and we don't think about it.

But the most critical part of a one-to-one program is not the technology. The computers are just a conduit, a straw through which students can either suck up tasty healthful fruit juice or harsh grain alcohol or battery acid.

Therein lies the problem. One-to-one computing is obviously a great avenue for implementing Competency Based Education, various forms of "personalized" learning and a host of software driven education programs. It's the infrastructure through which these clanking, clattering collections of caliginous junk can enter schools. And that requires due diligence. A door is just a door, and anything can enter through it. Heck, a book can lay out the wonders of history, or it can tell students that African slaves were just "immigrants."

There are unavoidable issues. You may have noticed that I talked about how we used netbooks, a type of computer that has now not been made for years. In any one-to-one setting not supported by incredibly wealthy donors, your tech will become obsolete quickly. That's an expensive curve to stay ahead of.

We have been shifting to chromebooks, which makes sense because Google is ahead of the pack in school-friendly apps and software, but that means dealing with the issue of hooking children up to the data-gobbling maw of Google or some other privacy-rending corporation. It's scary, but then, cars and sex also come with some huge pitfalls, and we decided (mostly) years ago that the solution is to teach students rather than try to hide them in bubble wrap. The internet is not a highway-- it's a giant leech. We need to talk about that and find personal responses to that sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, every day in my classroom is computer lab day. I don't have to plan exactly when and how long, and I'm always able to say, "Good question-- look up the answer right now." My students who have little tech in their lives will not be quite so backward when they hit the workplace. My unofficial research says that students will write more on a computer than with pencil and paper (though paper and pencil still predominate in my classroom). Instead of old school journaling, my students keep blogs.

We could talk about the details all day, but the bottom line, the essence is this--  I use the computers for purposes I choose in ways I determine. That makes them another tool in my arsenal, and I am happy to have all the tools I can get my hands on, as long as I'm using them and they're not using me. Sure, the technical glitches and regular malfunctions are an annoying pain in the butt-- so are broken pencils and students who don't bring their books to class.

One to one computing can be your friend-- if you can stay in the drivers seat and if you can keep them from being an entry point for Bad Programs. As with most other tools, it can build or destroy. Stay vigilant.

The Broken Promises of Tech

So, here's how I've been spending my evening.

I had a whole batch of photos that I wanted to upload, but after investing a chunk of time this morning and this evening, that whole project crashed into a bunch of disconnected bits floating off into the cyber-ether.

I took the somewhat passive-aggressive step of tweeting my displeasure with my provider (Verizon DSL-- don't tell me to switch to someone better because first, there's nobody all that better and second, even if there is, there is nobody better in my rather rural area). As usual (this is not my first disgruntled cyber-rodeo) that grumpy tweet flushed out a corporate bot who wrangled me up the line until I was chatting with what appeared to be a live human.

My problem, according to me-- speed tests on my end show upload speeds that graph like badly battered comb, and upload speeds are so low that the test just times out. Hence my inability to upload my pictures.

My problem, according to the tech-- I'm trying to use my wireless internet connection wirelessly. Other devices or objects or neighbors or bursts of cosmic rays could cause the wifi to weaken as it drags its way the ten feet across the room. Verizon can really only guarantee the wireless speeds that I purchase for devices that are actually wired to the router.

Of course, like most folks, I have the wifi so that multiple magical technobricks can operate in my home. But tonight my wife is at chorus rehearsal and there are currently two devices trying to eat internet. I could wire up some things like my main desktop, but the home office would become some sort of frightening Faraday Cage. It's not the solution I want. It's not the solution I pay for. It's not the solution I was promised.

But this is often how tech promises go. "This will do awesome things," the tech engineers declare, "At least, it does awesome things in our lab with brand new tech and controlled conditions and a support group of twelve highly trained computer whizzes."

I am no Luddite. In fact, the post I was going to write tonight was in defense of one-to-one computing. But I also believe that the only reliable thing about tech is that it will reliably promise more than it can actually deliver in the real world.

That effect is magnified in school settings-- I'm pretty sure that all those dollar signs dancing in their heads make it hard for tech bosses to see how things will actually play out in the real world, where users are piled on top of each other like cordwood, spread around buildings that are built like bunkers (if you ever need me for an emergency, do not try to call or text me by cell while I'm working-- I'm pretty sure no radiation of any sort can penetrate my school).

I recognize that these complaints are 50% whining, the noises that children make because the miracle is not happening fast enough, miraculously enough. I recognize that I'm complaining that I can't perform my magic trick with as little effort as I had hoped.

But I also know we live in an age in which many tech types are promising even greater magic for schools, that we will soon (soon!!!) be able to plunk children in front of screens and those screens will spit out educational programs perfectly tailored to those children, while magically educating each child perfectly and personally, while miraculously collecting tons of data about those children, while also miraculously keeping that data totes secure and safe. Whether these promises should be kept is one discussion worth having, but whether they can be kept is perhaps a better one, because tech makes promises it can't keep, and we end up with things like wireless internet that really works better if you don't use it wirelessly.

ICYMI: Babymoon Edition (3/26)

My wife and I are in DC, contemplating the cherry blossoms and coming creative disruption of our lives by two currently-fetal offspring. But I've still collected some reading for you, set to auto-post at the usual Sunday AM time. Read, enjoy and share.

In the Name of Love

A little push back from a Christian about "Christian" legislators

In the America First Budget, Schools Come Last

Andre Perry with an on-point critique of the Trump budget

Are You a Big Fat Idiot

I am happy to welcome back one of my favorite blog titles-- "I Love You But You're Going To Hell," a blog that focuses on interpreting conservative Christian thought for those not of that tribe (and which treats both sides with fairness). It's not always education-related, but this time it has something to say about the teaching of science.

Words That Hurt Our Public Schools, And Ones That Help

We're doubling up on Jeff Bryant this week. First up, a look at how rhetoric shapes the education debates.

Hillbilly Elitist

Nancy Flanagan takes a look a Vance's widely-touted book, and she's not entirely impressed.

What the Dickens Is Going On

John Merrow takes us inside the mess that is the current ed department, and finds a silver lining stuffed inside a neglected closet.

The Big Lie Behind Trump's Education Budget

Jeff Bryant with another well-sourced breakdown of where exactly the problems lie in Trumps edu-budget.

Are School Leaders Becoming Too Enabled?

Peter DeWitt takes an insightful look at school leadership and using the right drivers to empower, not enable.

Privatizing Recess: Micromanaging Children's Play for Profit

Nancy Bailey looks at one of those scourges that will not die-- the professional recess managers

"We Teach English" Revisited

Paul Thomas looks at Lou LaBrant and the parts of teaching English that never change.

If You Teach and Noone Learns, Do You Really Teach

Jose Luis Vilson Reflects on parent-teacher conferences and the lenses through which we view our classrooms

How Not To Teach Writing

Imagine how crazy it would be.

An English teacher stands in front of a class and explains, "For every thought you have about the prompt, there is only one correct sentence that can use to express that thought. I'll be grading your essays based on how many of the correct sentences you use."

Nobody teaches writing that way. Nobody says, "Okay, if you have an insight about Jake's injury in The Sun Also Rises, there is on correct sentence for expressing that thought" or "On today's essay about parenting, I'll be looking for seven particular correct sentences that should be used to express these thoughts."

Certainly nobody approaches the use of words in real life in this way. Nobody says, "No, you can't be serious about this job because you didn't even try to say the right sentence," or "No, if you really loved me, you would have said the correct sentence for expressing it."

No, the entire history of human expression, human literature, human song-- it's about finding new and interesting and surprising ways to say what we have to say. It's about finding ways to express a thought that are perfectly suited to that particular person and time and place and circumstances. We are moved, touched, excited, and enlightened by those who can string words together in completely different and yet completely appropriate ways.

Certainly some of these verbal inventions are better than others. Shakespeare's plays are echoes and imitations of other versions of the same stories, and yet four centuries later his Hamlet and his Romero and Juliet endure because, although he was saying what many other playwrights were saying, he said it better. We admire (at least we should) Shakespeare not just for what he did with the language, but for his rip-roaring robust rearrangement of the language, his willingness to take his tools and hammer them into new shapes that served his needs perfectly. Shakespeare did not get to be Shakespeare by imitating everyone else. He found his own way, and found things that were so much better.

But there is a huge difference between "better" and "the one right way." Shrimp salad with a light dressing is better-- healthier-- than a thick steak with french fries. But it does not follow that I should eat shrimp salad for every single meal. We should not all be wearing exactly the same clothes, driving in exactly the same car, and living in houses with exactly the same floor plans while we listen to bands that sound the same play identical recordings of just a few songs.

This is all obvious-- as obvious as not teaching students to write by demanding they spit out the One Correct Sentence for whatever thought they're having.

And yet  much of writing instruction and assessment assumes a One Correct Sentence model. Error-centered instruction, where we focus instruction on all the mistakes we're supposed to root out and avoid, seems to assume that if we slice away all the Bad Things, we'll be left with the perfect sentence for our thought, and not just some sad, filleted dishrag of a sentence.

And standardized testing at times comes so very close to sending exactly the wrong message-- there's one correct answer and there's one correct sentence for expressing that answer. Just select it.

This is why, frankly, so many teachers either avoid teaching writing or just do it badly-- it cannot be reduced to a formula and it does not involve a single correct answer for each problem, so it's hard to teach and hard to assess. Even the giants of literature cannot agree on what would be a good way to express a particular thought. Mark Twain loathed James Fenimore Cooper's classic American novels, Faulkner thought Twain a hack, and some of the greatest literary insults have been delivered author-on-author:

On Jack Kerouac: “His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.” — Norman Mailer

On Mark Twain: “[A] hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.” — William Faulkner

On Hemmingway: “I read him for the first time in the early Forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.” — Vladimir Nabokov

On Jane Austen: “I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

More than necessary to make my point, but as a genre, author-on-author insults are kind of fun.

The giants of the writing field cannot agree on with any narrow clarity what constitutes good writing. The closer we get to nailing that elusive beast down in one single, specific spot, the more likely we are to kill it dead. Pinning down writing to one specific answer is like deciding that dogs look best in one pose, so you have yours stuffed and mounted in just like that. What you have is not a loving, living animal, but a dead thing trapped in a sad, inadequate simulation of life.

There is no one right pose for your dog. There is no one right way to write.

What we have are choices. In seeing choices, we are often victims of success, because a well-written sentence or essay or story or even just a phrase leaves the reader feeling, "Well, of course. I can't imagine any other way to say it." But there were and are other ways to say it, and some of them, in other circumstances or in the hands of another writer or even just in place of what we see-- those could have been great choices too.

There are always choices.What we need to teach our students is how to see the choices, and then how to decide which choice best serves her purposes, which choice best fits her own voice, what choice best achieves her goals. Instead of looking for the One Right Answer, she needs to look for Her Right Answer, and we need to help her learn to be comfortable with the fact that there are many Perfectly Good Answers available (and she may need to stop stressing about trying to find the One). She needs to find her own voice, her own path, her own way. And there's just no way to standardized that, nor any value in trying.

 

MS: Paving Way for Vouchers

Mississippi has long been considered America's Armpit of Education.

Educational lists? You name it, they've consistently ranked near the bottom. It qualified as news when Nevada beat them for dead last in EdWeek's Quality Counts list in 2016, because that was their first step up in years(and it can be argued that they didn't so much improve as Nevada just became even worse.)

Sharing another excellent investment opportunity

They've tried any number of dumb ideas, from jumping on the bandwagon for failing third graders who don't pass the Big Standardized Test in reading, to fining schools for not observing the Pledge of Allegiance. Plus the occasional attempt to force teachers to be silent on any education related issues at all.

What they haven't tried is actually funding their school system. Mississippi ranks close to the bottom there as well, with a per pupil outlay in the $7K area. Back in 1997, the legislature attempted to address this by passing the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (because when you're working on education, "adequate" is plenty good enough). MAEP laid out a funding formula that the state then promptly ignored. The legislature has only voted four times to fund schools as the MAEP says they should-- and two of those times they took it back mid-year. Last year some folks tried to add some actual teeth to the law, and the legislature promptly buried the referendum in a flurry of bloviating baloney.

But Mississippi's educational finances were not going to be ignored. Instead, the GOP called upon EdBuild and their CEO, our old friend Rebecca Sibilia.

You may remember her as the woman who gleefully observed that bankrupcy is a great way to blow up a district, which is no problem for kids, but a great opportunity for charter operators. Arielle Dreher, who has been doing a bang-up job covering all this for the Jackson Free Press, does a nice job of recapping the EdBuild story--

EdBuild is in its infancy as a company (it started in 2014), and Sibilia came from an education-policy background, first working in the Washington, D.C., education department and then moving to the nonprofit Students First, run by Michelle Rhee. The former chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools, Rhee was a controversial figure, after firing over 200 teachers in D.C., mainly due to poor performance, she said then.

EdBuild's board of directors includes Derrell Bradford (NYCAN), Angelia Dickens(general counsel for StudentsFirst), Michael Hassi (Exponent Partners), Josh McGee (Manhattan Institute, Arnold Foundation), Henry Moseley (CFO, Washington Convention Center), Hari Sevugan (270 Strategies, former DNC press secretary, and just helped a "national, non-profit education reform group get off the ground), and Stephanie Khunrana (Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation). EdBuild's website hammers away at the notion that "current funding systems are outdated, arbitrary and segregating."

Sibilia's background is soaked in reformy swellness. If that doesn't give you a hint where EdBuild's "study" for educational financing in Mississippi is headed, note also that the quarter-million dollar study was half paid for by the legislature, and the other half with "private funding from unnamed EdBuild donors." Those donors? The Broad, Draper Richards Kaplan, Bill and Melinda Gates, CityBridge, Walton Family, and the Center for American Progress.

Mississippi reached out for help from these giants of education investment because Mississippi is, on the whole, in financial trouble. The GOP and Governor Phil Bryant last year pushed through a huge tax cut, and now state revenues are way down. Go figure.

Against that backdrop, EdBuild and GOP legislators met behind closed doors to rewrite the state's funding formula while pretty much everyone else complained about being left out of the whole process. EdBuild has produced a nifty report  full of fun recommendations, and while we could plow through the whole eighty pages, there are basically only eleven recommendations, and those recommendations boil down to one Big Idea:

Student-centered funding.

Don't fund schools. Base your formula on cost-per-student.Because that makes it way easier to implement a full-on voucher system (and in the long run, I'll predict, it makes it easier to deny budget increases).

There are other details in the recommendations. Recommendation 1 is about giving an extra bump for students who qualify as poor. And while you're doing that, redefine what "poor" means; in Georgia, these kind of shenanigans resulted in many, many people being redefined right out of poverty, even though they had no more money than ever. Recommendation 2 calls for extra support for ELL students, and #3 adds a per-pupil bump for students with special needs, depending on how special their needs are. #4-- same for gifted. #5-- extra money to schools for college-and-career-ready programs, and #6 looks after rural and "sparse" schools.

Recommendation #7 is novel-- fund schools based on enrollment rather than attendance, which strikes me as an idea that would really help charters in general and cyberschools in particular. #8 is to eliminate the 27% rule, a rule that essentially says that the state must shoulder 73% of the funding burden. #9 is about financial transparency.

#10 says, Let's look at all the rules, regulations and accreditation standards that cost money and see if they are "critical to student success"-- presumably so we can get rid of them. Oh, and create a system of "earned autonomy," where schools with good test scores earn a Get Out Of Following the Rules card.

#11 says to phase all this in, and Sibilia agrees, noting that some schools will get more money and some less, so go easy.

One other bizarre feature of this big financial plan is that it includes no dollar amounts or projections at all.

Sibilia said the dollar amount is up to lawmakers, and told the Jackson Free Press that figures used in the 80-page report are "examples only," not base figures for legislators to use.

Will this save the state money? The legislature has kept the grand total for MEAP level, but they've also fully funded the system twice in twenty years. Can you reform a system you've never actually used in the first place? Should you evaluate a new system based on the assumption that it won't be correctly funded when implemented? We have no answers. Would it help you to hear from one more reliable reformy spokesperson?

As a concept, weighted student funding aims for equity, focusing on funding the highest student needs. Dr. Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at Stanford University, analyzes the economics of educational issues. Weighted student funding, Hanushek says is a sensible idea, especially since the goal in most cases is to put money towards school districts that have disadvantaged kids or those that need special education. Weights, however, are the political part of the process, he says.

If we aren't adding any money to the pot, but just shifting the old money around with a new formula, how does that save money or improve education? Well, maybe that's another political question, but I suspect the answer is, "It opens the door to increased and easier voucher/charter/choice programs." Just slap a backpack full of cash on each student and let the mad scramble begin. There's not an ounce of evidence that it will serve the students well, but plenty of evidence that it will help privateers and profiteers open the otherwise closed education market and really expand their own share.

And why target Mississippi for such a program? Well, the one thing that really helps boost a voucher/charter/choice program is a public school system that has been broken down, starved, and beaten into a highly unattractive condition-- Mississippi's public schools are already halfway there. EdBuild is just there to take advantage of that failure, because the collapse of public schools is a great investment opportunity for investors and privatizers, much like the collapse of the weakest antelopes at the watering hole is a great opportunity for lions and hyenas.

Which Choice Would You Choose?

If you were (or are) a parent, which one of the following options would you prefer?

OPTION A

Your neighborhood is served by a single public school.

That school is well-staffed with a range of young and experienced professional educators, well-trained and committed to the needs of their students, and they are well-managed and well-paid so that they stay on as the foundation of a stable school community. The school is a well-maintained facility, clean and safe. It offers a wide variety of quality programs under one roof, with the flexibility for students to explore different educational paths and even change their minds (because young folks sometimes do that), as well as allowing them to enrich one path with samplings from others (in other words, your future biologist won't have to give up band). The school is fully funded and has a full range of up-to-date quality resources.

The school is transparently managed and controlled by an elected board of local community members who meet in public and are available to be contacted by any resident or taxpayer in the district. The management of the school is nimble, flexible, and open to input from all stakeholders.

OPTION B

In this option, your neighborhood is served by many schools, and you have plenty of choices that you may be able to access by using your voucher or some other sort of choice mechanism.

Choice #1: Never mind. This elite private school is out of your price range, even with your state-issued modest voucher.

Choice #2: This Christ-centered private school will gladly accept your child, as long as that child behaves properly, which includes a properly worshipful attitude in daily devotions and Bible readings. And don't worry-- we won't be teaching your child any of that foolish evolution-filled "science" stuff.

Choice #3: Our experts have determined that this is the kind of school People Like You need for their children. Strict, no excuses, speak only when spoken to regimentation. It certainly wouldn't fly over in East Egg, but it's just what the children of You People need to take your proper place in the world.

Choice #3A: If you're in the South, there's also this school, but you can only send your kid here if you're white. Because Those People need to be kept on their own side of town.

Choice #4: We will provide a program much like a regular public school, except we don't have any adaptations for students with special needs or English language learners. You're certainly welcome to send your child with special needs, or who is five years behind in English language acquisition, but understand that we aren't going to do anything special for them.

Choice #5: We decided to launch a special math-centered school. We make room in the budget for super-math stuff by cutting music, art, sports and history. All students attend the same English class which meets every other day in the auditorium. But our math program is definitely more than adequate.

Choice #6: This school was started by some Very Nice People who thought, "How hard can it be to run a school?" It looks like a nice enough place, but none of the teachers have been paid for a month and it will probably close before Easter.

Choice #7: Big National Chain Charter School. The program is already packaged and all our brand-new staff members need to do (it's always brand new because no staff stays here for more than a year or two, which is okay because we don't need to hire actual certified teachers anyway, so they're easy to replace) is open the binder and follow the program. If you would like to talk about changes to the program, feel free to contact our corporate headquarters, which are not actually in your state.

Choice #8: What do you want? Look at our glossy advertisements! We will promise you all sorts of stuff. We will never deliver any of it, but by the time you figure that out it will be too late-- we'll have your money and you'll have to decide how badly you want to disrupt your child's school year in the middle.

Choice #9: Your public school. It still exists, but the other eight schools have drained so much money from it that it is now a sad, limping, underfunded shadow of a real school.

With the exception of Choice #9, none of these schools are managed or operated publicly. You can't attend the meetings, you can't see the books, and you can't contact the board members easily, if at all. You don't get a voice-- the only stakeholders who matter are the people who own and operate the school, and they'll give you the choice they feel like giving you.

THE PUZZLE

Voucher advocates-- particularly the ones who advocate for "parental choice" or "parent rights"-- seem to insist that Option 2 is the better one. Their argument is that Option 1 is a choice that only wealthier families get to exercise by virtue of their ability to buy a house in that school's neighborhood. And they aren't wrong-- linking school funding to the power of the real estate market means that schools in richer neighborhoods get better funding. That is a problem worth addressing.

And yet, Option 2 does not address it. The school in Option 1 is still not available to less wealthy parents. They are presented with only the choices that other choosers choose for them, and in the process, they lose even a limited ability to influence what those choices are going to be. So they lose a shot at improving their public school, and get little-to-nothing in return.

Parent choice advocates might argue that Option 2 is still a better option because choice is such a great value, in and of itself, that providing choice to parents is more important than anything else-- including making sure that the available choices are actually any good.

But I keep coming back to the same idea-- if we want all students to be able to choose the school in Option A, why not do what it takes to transform every public school into Option A? Option A actually offers more choice, more flexibility, but most of all, more of the things that families actually want. Once upon a time reformsters made noises about charters developing great ideas to create great schools, but we already have a plethora of model public schools-- why not use them as a template? Why not muster the sort of "War on Poverty" or "Get To The Moon" or "Endless Battles in Other Countries" willpower we've mustered before and direct it toward making all schools great schools?

If I were a cynic, I might conclude that it's because no private operators can make a bundle under that plan.

Choicers will argue that I've stacked the deck, that these aren't the real options. Real World Option A, they'll say, is one lousy school, and while that may be true in some communities, how is multiple lousy choices better than one lousy choice-- and if you only had so much money, would you rather try to fix up one house or a whole bunch of houses with that money? Real World Option B, they'll say, has more awesomely wonderful choices than I represent here, and you know, there was a time I believed that might be theoretically possible, but reality seems to be stubborn in this regard. It's almost as if running a school is hard, and doubly hard if you're trying to make a business out of it.

But seriously-- what parent would choose Option B over Option A? It's really no choice at all.