New Merit Pay Study Hits The Wrong Target

We're all going to be hearing about a piece of research, a working paper that suggests that teacher merit pay works. Sort of. Depending on what you mean by "works."

Matthew G. Springer, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, has produced a meta-analysis (that's research of the research) entitled "Teacher Merit Pay and Student Test Scores: A Meta-Analysis" in which he concludes that merit pay is connected to increased student test scores. Springer is also the director of the National Center on Performance Incentives,"a national research and development center for state and local policy" housed by Vanderbilt (he's actually had that job longer than his professor position).

During the past several decades, policymakers have grown increasingly interested in innovative compensation plans, including performance-based pay for K-12 educators. Yet, efforts to reform pay have lacked grounding in a scholarly base of knowledge regarding the effectiveness of such plans.

So I'm not sure whether the center's mission is "see if this stuff works" so much as it is "prove this stuff works," which is a somewhat less objective mission. And Springer does some worjk outside of Vanderbilt as well, like his post on the advisory board of Texas Aspires, where he sits with Rick Hess (AEI), Mike Petrilli (Fordham), Erik Haushek (Hoover Institute), Chris Barbic (Reformster-at-Large, now apparently with Arnold Foundation)and other reformy types.

Springer certainly has some ideas about teacher pay:

"The bottom line is the single-salary pay schedule does not allow systems to reward the highest performing teachers," Springer said. "These teachers deserve a six-figure salary, but we'll never get there with a single-salary schedule that would require all teachers of equal experience and degree attainment to get paid the same amount. It's just impossible."

The EdWeek quote would suggest that Springer and I do not agree on what a "high-performing teacher" looks like. Here's the quote from EdWeek that suggests to me that Springer doesn't entirely understand what he's studying:

The findings suggest that merit pay is having a pretty significant impact on student learning.

Only if you believe that Big Standardized Tests actually measure student learning-- a finding that remains unfound, an assumption that remains unproven, and an assertion that remains unsupported. My faith in their understanding of the real nature of BS Tests is further damaged by their reference to "weeks of earning." Researchers' fondness for describing learning in units of years, weeks, or days is great example of how far removed this stuff is from the actual experience of actual live humans in actual classrooms, where learning is not a featureless tofu-like slab from which we slice an equal, qualitatively-identical serving every day. In short, measuring "learning" in days, weeks, or months is absurd. As absurd as applying the same measure to researchers and claiming, for instance, that I can see that Springer's paper represents three more weeks of research than less-accomplished research papers.

Springer et al note some things they don't know in the "for further study" part of the paper.

EdWeek missed one of the big implications in the conclusion:

Teacher recruitment and retention, however, is another theoretically supported pathway through which merit pay can affect student test scores. Our qualitative review of the emerging literature on this pathway suggests that the positive effect reported in our primary studies may partly be the result of lower levels of teacher turnover. 

In other words, burning and churning doesn't help with your test scores. You know what doesn't encourage teachers to stay? Tying their pay (and job security) to the results of bad tests the results of which are more clearly tied to student background than teacher efforts. You know what else encourages teachers to stay? The knowledge that they are looking at a pay structure that at least helps them keep pace with the increases in cost of living, and not a pay structure that will swing about wildly from year to year depending on which students they end up teaching.

Springer also acknowledges a caveat parenthetically which really deserves to be in the headline:

our evidence supports the notion that opportunities to earn pay incentives can lead to improved test scores, perhaps through some increased teacher effort (or, nefariously, gaming of the performance measure system).

Yes, that nefarious gaming of the system, which in fact the remains the best and often only truly effective method of raising BS Test scores. This is a huge caveat, a giant caveat, the equivalent of saying "Our research has proven that this really works-- or that if you offer people money, some will cheat in order to get it." This research might prove something kind of interesting, or it might prove absolutely nothing at all. That deserves more than a parenthetical comment or two.

Springer's research suffers from the same giant, gaping ridiculous hole as the research that he meta-analyzed-- he assumes that his central measure measures what it claims to measure. This is like meta-analysis of a bunch of research from eight-year-olds who all used home made rulers to measure their own feet and "found" that their feet are twice as big as the feet of eight-year-olds in other country. If you don't ever check their home-made rulers for accuracy, you are wasting everyone's time.

At a minimum, this study shows that the toxic testing that is already narrowing and damaging education in this country can be given a extra jolt of destructive power when backed with money. The best this study can hope to say is that incentives encourage teachers to aim more carefully for the wrong target. As one of the EdWeek commenters put it, "Why on earth would you want to reward teachers with cash for getting higher test scores?" What Springer may have proven is not that merit pay works, but that Campbell's Law does.

[Update: Be sure to read the comments for Jersey Jazzman's explanation of just how little the numbers in this study tell us.]

PA: Charter Reform Sort of Revisited

Pennsylvania charter law is rather a mess. In April of 2016,  State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued a blistering report, dubbing PA charter law the "worst in the nation." There have been occasional legislative attempts to address the issue, but these bills have often confused "reform" with "give charters more freedom and opportunities to suck up public tax dollars."

Harrisburg has a history of using charter reform as a fig leaf to cover up charter giveaways. Early egregious attempts included a bill that would have taken a swipe at cyberschool funding but also would have made all sorts of folks authorizers of charter schools, making it infinitely easier to launch one in PA. There was an attempt to fix things, sort of,  back in 2015-2016 with proposed HB 530, a bill that public school organizations like the school board association declared a non-starter because it loosened accountability on charters, allowed the state charter appeal board to overrule local districts, and didn't address the out-of-control costs of charters in Pennsylvania. The reasons to oppose the bill were many. The bill passed both the house and senate, but was ultimately a victim of the Great Budget Snafu of 2016 and was last seen disappearing into the rules committee in June of 2016.

Now it's back.

Representative Mike Reese has revamped HB 530 into HB 97. Reese represents District 59 and has an actual BS in Education, though he went on for an MBA.

Here's his version of what HB 97 does. Highlights include:

* Allow an adjustmet in PA's ridiculous cyber-school payment system-- but only for two years.

* Set up a commission to study charter school funding.

* Limit charter school's excess fund balances (money that's just parked in the bank).

* Develop a performance matrix for "monitoring and improving academic quality"

* Charter teacher evaluation systems that "mirror" the public system.

* Create system to allow charter consolidation. The system would (this gets italics) leave initial and renewal approval authority in hands of local school districts.

* Make "more balanced" membership of charter appeal board.

* Give charters first dibs on any unused public school buildings.

And my personal favorite--

* Allow families with multiple cyber-school children to turn down multiple computers, printers and monitors. Because there have been plenty of cyber families complaining about being forced to accept multiple free computers.

So, is this actual improvement or reform?

If we dig into the actual bill (75 pages, so you're welcome), what do we find.

Some items are relatively minor. One item allows charters to put students in dual enrollment arrangements with colleges or universities. But then there are other parts.

The Charter School Funding Advisory Commission is supposed to "examine how charter school entity finances affect opportunities for teachers, parents, pupils and community members to establish and maintain schools that operate independently from existing school district structures" and while I appreciate that this does away with the whole "charters are public schools" baloney, it does skip past the questions of how, why or if charter schools should be pursued at all. The membership of the committee will be four representatives (two from each party, four senators (two from each party), the secretary of education, a wild card chosen by the governor, a business manager from a charter school, a business manager from a cyber charter, a business manager from a rural district, and a business manager from an urban school district. So no actual educators.

The committee is given the tasks of 1) meeting with charter representatives, school district personnel, and other public ed reps, 2) review charter finance laws across the nation, and 3) assess the actual cost of cyber-schooling students.

The committee is to make recommendations about an independent state-level authorization board, because charter folks hate that in most of PA, charters must be authorized by local school districts, which means charter operators must get the district declared FUBAR by the state, or get pro-charter people on board, or find a board that wants to slit its own throat by opening charters. The committee is also supposed to make recommendations about funding, and also, somehow how to use the matrix that we're going to get to for comparing schools. Plus other financial odds and ends.

They are to crank out their report in twelve months.

Entity. The bill widely replaces "charter school" with "charter school entity." Presumably that opens the door for any kind of education-flavored business and releases said business from any requiremet to look like a proper school.

Religious Loophole. Under the bill, it would not be a violation of the non-sectarian  requirement if the charter provides a "discrete and separate entrance" to the school part of an otherwise religious structure-- in other words, if your charter school is in a church, but students can enter through a back door and not the sanctuary. Also, "if the religious objects and symbols within the portion of the facility utilized by the school are covered or removed to the extent reasonably feasible" (emphasis mine) then you are good to go.

Ethics. Charter school officials will have to file a statement of financial interest with the State Ethics Commission.There are all sorts of new paragraphs forbidding various relationships to try to rue out self-dealing. And there are many new rules about who can be a charter trustee. Also, if you're convicted of a felony, fraud, theft, or some sort of moral turpitude, you'll be fired from your administrator job or charter board position. Because somehow we've arrived at a place where that has to be spelled out.

Sunshine. Well, this is interesting. The law would require charter's to have at least five nonrelated voting members, and at least one of them should have a child attending the school (unless it's a charter mainly serving adjudicated youth). And that board must comply with the same sunshine act that applies to public school boards.

Further down in the bill we find the stipulation that all charter records must be open to the local school board, and that charters must comply with FERPA. The charter should also form an independent audit committee, which must perform a thorough audit that includes enrollment and accounting for all money that passes in or out. The school's budget and various federal forms should be available "upon request."

Standard Application. Remember how charters don't like having to go to local school boards to get authorization to get their chartery selves allowed? Here's a bit of a solution-- the stae will create a one-size-fits-all application form, so that everyone has to use the same process. The good news here is that the list of what must be on the application is significantly increased by HB 97, including information about who's in charge, the CMO's track record, a clear description of responsibilities and who has them, and a draft contract laying out how the charter's success (or lack thereof) will be judged. Bad news for mom and pop charters.

How long can a charter flounder? The state would now give you five full years to get your act together. More than enough to completely waste half of a child's educational career. Both new and renewal charters would be for five-year spans. If they do well, they can be renewed for ten years. And if the school has not satisfied the academic quality benchmark-- yeah, still can get a five year renewal.

Balancing the charter appeal board. This is the group that can certify or override the decision of the local district. HB 97 would like to "balance" this group by adding more charter people, including switching the parent seat to a parent of a charter student seat. The resulting board would be far more charter-friendly. This would be the group that could tell taxpayers in your district that they are going to help support a charter school even though they and their duly-elected school board rejected it.

Building (Expansion). Most of this section is as promised-- charters get first grab of buildings that public schools can't fill. However, buried in this section is the addition that any charter that doesn't have a student enrollment cap "is permitted to operate its school at more than one location." Get a charter with no cap, and you can expand at will.

This would be a good time to remind you that under PA law, a charter can't be capped unless it agrees to be capped. 

Booze. This is one of those pieces of law where you just know there's a story that goes with it. Anyway, if a charter is caught serving or selling alcohol, it can be fined $1,000 the first time and $5,000 every time after.

Applications. There will be a standard form. Students will be assigned position on waiting list randomly. There's repeated addition of "regional charter school" to this section, as well as a rule tat students within the charter cachment area must get priority.

Pre-K Exemption. If your district doesn't offer Pre-K for four-year-olds, it doesn't have to make payments to a charter that does.

Cyber Reimbursement. The bill adds a bunch of new calculated exemptions to how a district computes the cost of sending a child to cyber-school. What it doesn't do is factor in any sort of numbers related to the actual cost of running a cyber school. Nor does it address the question of why Pennsylvania continues to fund these dens of cyber failure at all, when they have proven to be largely scams and wastes of time and money.

Evaluating educators. HB 97 has a brand spanking new section that says charter teachers must be evaluated using some of the same crappy test-based measures used in public schools. So, welcome to VAM, charter teachers. Is it progress to have charters suffer under the same bad and ineffective measures that hit public schools? I'm not really sure, but there it is in the bill-- you must use test scores and three other things of some sort.

Mergers and Acquisitions. Oh, there are many new rules for how charters may grow. Some of this comes down to some pretty fine tuning-- the bill's authors heard the objections to just letting charters merge and expand willy nilly, so they added the qualifier that the merger or expansion must be renewed/authorized by a local school board-- but the local school board that approved original charter, meaning that one charter-friendly school board could potentially okay a charter expansion into neighboring districts. And there is a whole bunch of information about how a charter can appeal the decision of the local board.

Unassigned fund balance. Charters can only bank 12% to 16% of their total budget, depending on how large that budget is. PA public schools have had rules against UFB for years now, and they easily dodge them by giving the funds they've parked in a bank some sort of designation, as in "That's not an unassigned ten million dollars sitting there-- that's a capital improvement fund waiting patiently for a project we haven't even thought of yet." Charters should have no problem making similar adaptations-- or they could just use the fund balance to pay their people a ton of money.

The Performance Matrix. Here's the part where the legislature, after giving the local school board all sorts of control and voice in these matters, takes it all away. The state will lay out exactly how the charter schools must be evaluated and on what. The On What will include (but not be limited to) student test scores, VAM scores, attendance, attrition rates, graduation rates, school safety, "other" standardized test scores (?!), parent satisfaction, accreditation, plus other stuff, like measures of teacher effectiveness (aka test scores yet again). The performance matrix will also include some sort of academic quality benchmark.

Whatever the state comes up with, nobody is allowed to use anything else. In other words, a charter may not be at all acceptable to the local taxpayers or school board, but if the state paperwork looks good, then that's tough noogies for local taxpayers. The local board must use the performance matrix as its "primary factor" in deciding the fate of the school. Which means that all the power the law puts into local school boards is actually no power at all-- charters will live or die at the pleasure of the state.

How will this matrix be developed? The state department of ed will convene a statewide advisory committee that will include a minimum of seven representatives from charter schools, regional charters, cyber charters, department folks, and school district personnel.

Bottom line:

No doubt more legally adept minds than mine will be looking at this bill that just popped up and is expected to zip trough legislature soon (the fast track is always a sign of super great lawmaking). But here's what I see.

On the one hand, some much-needed accountability and transparency rules for charter schools in Pennsylvania.

On the other hand, the bill falls far short in stopping cyber charters from sucking the money out of public schools and providing no real benefits or service in return.

On the other other hand, the bill wants to look like its resting control of charter decisions with local school districts while actually undercutting all of it by setting the rules in Harrisburg, and making sure that charters have a big say in how those rules are set, which is fine if you think that cigarette companies should help set smoking rules.

This is not a win for public schools, and not a real step forward in charter accountability. Let's hope this bill fails and a better one appears some day.

Corporations versus Human Persons

The story of United Airlines and the Shameful Assault on a Paying Customer has been more thoroughly covered than almost anything this week (congrats, Beloved Leader Trump, on a widespread distraction from your latest screwup). We've had lessons from the airlines in free market delights before, but this is an even more direct and clear example of why the corporate approach is a bad idea for public education.

And that is how you run a No Excuses airline

Note that the United screwup is even worse than is generally reported. Though folks have blamed this on an overbooking of the flight, but actually, the airline wanted to bump four paying customers so that they could fly four of their own employees to Louisville.

This means they absolutely had the option of saying, "We need these employees in Louisville? Well, the seats on the plane are already filled with paying customers, so obviously we'll have to solve this internal transportation problem some other way." But no. They had a clear choice to make between the interests of the company and the care of the customers, and they picked the company. Well, not exactly "picked," because there was no decision so much as an auto-default to choosing in the corporate concerns, a default so strong and obvious to them, that they clearly didn't even reflect on how this should look.

And why should they? Sure, it would be shabby treatment for four customers, but the airlines barely bump one customer out of a thousand, and when you're operating at large scale, the smooth wheels of corporate operation can afford to grind up a tiny number of customers. And the selection process carefully selects those customers for lousy treatment who are the least valuable customers to the company.

That's just part of a larger picture. Airlines have also been quietly deserting many cities and providing fewer choices, because the corporate goal, of course, is not to serve everybody, but to serve the people who are worth serving, the people who fit your business model, the people who can bring you the kind of return you want on your investment. As New York Magazine notes:

For decades, airlines have been cancelling low-volume routes, reducing service quality, raising prices, merging to achieve economies of scale, declaring bankruptcy, and sucking up billions in public subsidies, and the industry still teeters on the brink of insolvency.

The bloodied face of the passenger-- well, former passenger-- is the corporate mindset written in its hugest, starkest form. Customers are there to meet the needs of the corporation, not vice versa. At Deadspin, Albert Berneko argues for the human over the corporate. He quotes the tweeted response of two United staffers-- the man wouldn't deplane. What else were they supposed to do? The answer, of course, is almost anything except summon police to drag him off the plane:

Like any other corporation, its precise reason for existing is to interpose cold, absolute machine reasoning in between the humans who created it and the humans whose money and/or labor the former want; if it had humane or conciliatory answers—ones responsive to or even cognizant of any prerogative short of maximizing its own moneymaking efficiency—to questions like “What should United Airlines do when it f**** up?” it would be a malfunctioning corporation.

If you don't yet see the parallels between the airline industry and the burgeoning charter school industry, here's another excerpt from Eric Levitz's NY Mag piece:

But thanks in no small part to lax antitrust enforcement by President Reagan and his successors, deregulation ultimately turned a public quasi-monopoly into a private one. Or, as Phillip Longman and Lina Khan put it in a 2012 essay for Washington Monthly, Carter’s reforms shifted “control of the airline industry from experts answerable to the public to corporate boardrooms and Wall Street.” [my emphasis]


Now, I don't accept for a second that our public school system is a monopoly, and the trajectory from public good to private corporate interest is different, but the end result is the same-- a corporate concern that must put corporate interests ahead of individual human interests.

Airlines desert unprofitable cities. Charter schools ignore unprofitable communities. Airlines push out customers who get in their way. Charter schools do the same. And neither feel a mandate to make sure that every citizen is well-served. Both ultimately are more concerned about keeping the corporate machine running smoothly than about what must be done to the cogs and wheels to keep that smoothness gliding on without interruption.

Also important to note-- the rise of airline "unregulated competition" has resulted in a business that is dominated by four (very mutually supportive) companies. The Free Market does not like competition, and it never has. It likes sorting out winners and losers, and it likes giving winners the kind of market control that Free Market acolytes abhor in governments.

Is it possible that corporations can avoid being soulless and human-hostile? Sure, it's possible. But a corporation must by its very nature put its own financial success and corporate control high on the list of priorities. Is it possible that a government-run institution can become stiff and dry and soul-crushing in its own special way? Sure. But public schools are built around a simple goal, a promise to every single student in the country, and to every citizen of the country itself, to do right by every single student. But as Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic:

Companies in concentrated industries, like the airlines, have legal cover to break the most basic promise to consumers without legally breaking their contracts.

Corporate privatization has in its very dna the strands that lead us to some poor, bloodied man being carried off a plane on a stretcher. Privatizing schools leads us toward that path, demanding compliance and dealing only with those whom it deems worthy of being allowed to serve the corporation. There are places for the corporate approach in our society, but the schoolhouse is not one of them.

Trump Education Sad Argle Bargle

So, Donald Trump held a town hall, if your idea of a town is a place where only CEOs live. It included some Presidential word chunks on the subject of education, and happened all the way back on last Tuesday and yet somehow I missed it (almost as if I'm not actually a CEO) but Valerie Strauss was right on top of things for the Washington Post.

As one might expect, the entire conversation was a fact-free zone. It included some fact-free questioning from Catherine Engelbert, the head honcho at Deloitte, a consulting/accounting company you're probably not important enough to know about. But to be clear, this is a consulting firm that does not actually do anything, but describes itself with language like this:

Clients count on Deloitte to help them transform uncertainty into possibility and rapid change into lasting progress. Our people know how to anticipate, collaborate, and innovate, and create opportunity from even the unforeseen obstacle.

Englebert walked straight out of Lehigh University with her BS in Accounting and into a partnership at the multinational company. So when she talks about the “disconnect between what employers need and what are our students coming into the workforce are prepared to deliver,” you know that she backs that up with all the first-hand knowledge of a multinational bean counting consultant. Englebert throws in some statistics-- NYC schools graduate 70%, and only 37% are assessed as college and career ready. The first number may have some basis in reality, but the second has none. That's okay-- it fits in with the Trump narrative that public schools are a festering black pit of carnage and fail. His response--

Why are the numbers so horrific in terms of education and what happens when somebody goes through school and then they can’t read?

Well, sometimes they become famous and get tv shows and even become President. Even Englebert didn't allege that we are graduating a bunch of illiterate folks, and she tries to add that NYC has done some great things and couldn't we throw some more money at public-private partnerships, but Trump plays her off and notes that public education in cities is "rough," because all cities are hell-holes of despair and non-whiteness.

Other highlights from our Commander in Chief?

Charter schools are another thing people are talking about, a lot, and some of the charter schools in New York have been amazing. They’ve done incredibly well. People can’t get in, you can’t get in. It’s been, I don’t call it an experiment any more. It’s far beyond an experiment. If you look at so many elements of education and it is so sad to see what is coming, what’s happening in the country. … The cities. It’s a very rough situation.

Yes, people are talking about charters, just like they've been buzzing about that Frederick Douglass fella. I will agree that charters are no longer merely experimental-- we've established pretty clearly that under most of the operating circumstances in this country, they are failing to produce any kind of real success.

But education? Sad. Many elements are sad. I would be impressed if Trump could name a single element of education, but not holding my breath.

Also, he's going to do something about Common Core. Or he's already doing it. That part is unclear, although given the current laws on education, I think it's safe to say that he is doing everything he can about Common Core, which is nothing. He seems to think that Common Core is about school districts being controlled from DC, where there are bureaucrats, he says, who may be very nice but are making lots of money and don't give a hoot about your local community. It is unclear whether he is describing how things used to be or how they are currently operating under Trump; one more indication that he still thinks he's a candidate and that government's problems are not actually his responsibility. It is also unclear whether he knows that he has stacked his education department with a heaping helping of Jeb Bush-issue, Common Core lovers.

Betsy DeVos is doing a "terrific" job and has one of the "toughest jobs of any of our secretaries," which would explain why taxpayers are paying millions of dollars for DeVos body guards. She's also got a "tremendous track record," a statement for which I have supplied the subject and the verb because Trump begins just dropping out nouns with superlatives stapled to them, rather than actual sentences, but anyway-- doing what? As USED Secretary? Previously? I mean, we've all been looking over her track record pretty closely and I'm not sure where the word "tremendous" applies, though she does have tremendous amount of money, so maybe that's it.

Oh, and in other tremendous news, Trump reports that Ivanka and some other administration officials are "totally in love" with education issues and what the hell does that even mean? What does it mean to be in love with an issue? "Oh, I just feel so warm and fuzzy when I think about income inequality, but when I look at systemic racism, I want to take it home and cuddle it all night long." It's almost as if he sees issues not as problems to be solved that affect the real lives of real people, but as a sort reality show challenge, a game that gives you the opportunity to show how awesome you are. "Oh, yeah-- I am in love with the rope climb because I always have the fastest time."

As an education commenting guy, I have read many, many, many extrusions of education argle bargle. Arne Duncan could spout sentence-ish gibberish like nobody's business. But Trump, who has only a couple of main education themes to hit -- schools are awful, charters are wonderful, and Common Core, whatever it is, must go, somehow-- can fracture partially-formed empty sentence husks with a special kind of flair and wild carelessness, like a driver who pushes a car past the edge of a cliff because the law of gravity won't be enforced for him.

Trump also says "I think we are going to have a great four years," and I'm not sure what great is supposed to mean, but I am pretty sure that "we" does not include those of us working in public education.

Will Investors Love Fake Teachers?

Well, this was, of course, inevitable. We've heard a lot about CGI students as a training (and evaluation) technique for teachers, a freakish notion in which teachers or neo-teachers square off against cyber-puppets in an uncanny valley showdown.

And we've also hear endlessly about artificial intelligence being used to craft a personalized education program, somehow.

I'm from the future and I'm here to teach you stuff

So why not extend both ideas. Alex Salkever is here with the pitch, not in an education site, but at MarketWatch, a site for investors searching for the Next Big Thing. Salkever is VP of marketing/communications at Mozilla, and the co-author of The Driver in the Driverless Car. On LinkedIN he says that he helps "companies grow by building communities and creating memorable content."

And he thinks avatars are the teachers of the not-too-distant future.

Do avatar teachers seem too far afield? Let me ask another question: Does your child use artificial intelligence to learn? More parents will be answering yes in the coming years.  

It's easy peasy. "AI covers everything from smarter automated robotic reservations systems for airlines to tiny food delivery robots rolling through Washington, D.C. to virtual pharmacists that spot potential for adverse drug reactions based on our past histories and current prescription regimes." And how much harder than that could teaching be? Well, actually, the avatar teacher would have to be "strong AI," and "we aren't at Strong AI yet," but don't worry--

...we already can educate all children much better using today’s technology than with more traditional methods in the classroom. That’s because computers provide reliable feedback, don’t get tired and can guide learning to emphasize areas where reinforcement is needed. 

Sigh. Yes, it's one more technician who's sure he knows how to replace teachers even though he doesn't understand the job. Or hasn't done enough research to know tech-heavy models like Rocketship Academy (motto: just keep your young eyes on those computer screens) have failed to launch. Or that tech-heavy models like virtual schools, aka cyber schools, have been shown to actually be worse than nothing at all.

But while Salkever acknowledges that some of the necessary tech is still emerging, he has one piece that he thinks is key-- virtual reality goggles.

I won't sell you the data-- not even to save the farm

The CGI teacher will be right there in the goggles in 3D! And the goggles will read all manner of physiological feedback from the student. So if you thought Big Data's collection of test scores and personal data seemed scary and excessive, just imagine data miners scooping up your child's every physical reaction to every stimulus provided by the programming. Salkever knows this is hugely Big Brothery, but parenthetically, he hopes "that we will build proper privacy and data control mechanisms to let pupils and parents decide who can see their vital information about learning and biological responses." Yes. Because keeping data secure is something that we've been excellent at so far, and because corporations regular say, "Yes, we could sell that to you, but it would be wrong, so we just won't." And remember-- this is a pitch in a site aimed at investors.

Not creepy enough for you yet?

The world becomes the classroom and the classroom becomes the world. This isn’t to say that the real world goes away. To the contrary. The blending of the two, with our guide to teach us along the way, creates a seamless digital and analog learning space.  

Wow, that's-- wait! What?

Look, there are so many things wrong with Salkever's pitch. Let's just pick a couple.

1) His fake digital teaching is only good to the extent that it resembles teaching done by real humans. So how is it better? His suggestion is that it doesn't become tired or get bored or ever miss an answer, but human students do all those things, so why is a piece of software that doesn't well-suited to teaching them. We've got research right now that tells us that students learn better when they see someone like them in the classroom. Right now we're drawing the conclusion that this means black students do better when they have even one black teacher; I'm betting we can learn that human students learn better from human teachers.

2) Software is only as smart as the person programming it. Avatar teachers will not be programmed by God, like digital manna downloaded from heaven. They will be programmed by humans. That means the artificial intelligence will not be any smarter about, say, American literature than the person who programs them. And if you think everything that can be possibly known or understood or divined about American literature can be loaded into one program, you are probably not a very good literature student. The possible responses to a chess move are many, but they are finite-- it is possible to program every possible situation into one digital brain. The possible responses to all the works in the American literature canon is infinite. Which brings me to

3) A digital teacher depends on a "fill the pail" model of education. It assumes that teaching is about downloading pieces of information from your brain to the students'. It assumes that there is no discovery, no exploration, and definitely nothing to learn in a classroom that is not already known. In short, digital teachers are the perfect tool for replacing teachers from, say, the late 1800s.

4) The people who are pushing this stuff are largely ignorant of teaching. Salkever allows that there will not be teachers any more-- just "lots of very good coaches (once called teachers) who focus on the creative, motivational and communications aspects that are far harder to translate into the digital realm." In other words, teachers. Because the creative, motivational, and communication aspects are the largest part of the teaching game. Presumably the "coach" would also handle things like breaking up fights and interrupting games like "Who can shoot a spitball closest to the avatar's nose."

I suppose those who believe that education is a simple technical task could really close the loop here and put a digital teacher avatar in a classroom with digital avatar students. It would not involve any actual humans or human relationships at all, nor would it have anything to do with education. But, oh, the investment opportunities.

Soap Box Derby Equity

We have tied to explain the problems of equality and equity and opportunity dozens of ways. Here are two you've probably seen, many times:

I'm going to offer another metaphor today-- the soap box derby.

Let's imagine two racers approaching the starting line. Our two young divers are seated in similarly-built cars, made well enough for the race. The race down the hill begins at the starting line, but before they arrive at that line, anything goes.

Chris's car is carried to the starting line, and there Chris sits, waiting for the flag to be waved, at which point Chris will take off the break and let gravity move the car down the hill.

Meanwhile, Pat is lined up further in back of the starting line. Pat has family there, too, and when the flag waves, Pat's family will push Pat just as hard as they can.

A few seconds later, we see the two cars on the hill. The race has begun. Pat is out in front, going far faster than Chris. But when someone among the spectators complains that the race is not fair, the reply they hear is this:

"It's perfectly fair. Look-- they're in equal cars, on the same hill, each one steering and driving their car depending on nothing but their own skills, reflexes, talents and abilities. If Pat wins, that must be because Pat is a better driver, and Chris would be better off building a skill set and becoming a better driver than worrying about. Because right now, on that hill, they are perfectly equal."

We could make the metaphor more complicated, give Pat and Chris different vehicles to represent various obstacles Chris brings into the race. But here's the thing-- even if Chris has just as good a car, is just as strong and sharp, works just as hard at driving, history is still on Pat's side. Everything that happened before the starting line was crossed makes a huge difference.

Research tells us over and over again that families of origin make a huge difference, that history stacks the deck before a child even crosses the starting line. We also know that how our society functions makes a difference as well (I might expand the metaphor by adding that Chris is stopped by police every ten feet down the hill).

I'm not arguing for inescapable destiny. I'm not saying that children who are born poor or raised poor are doomed, their fate set in stone, nothing we can do about it. There's plenty we can do about it. There are soooo many things that we can do in school to help boost up those racers who didn't get the extra push to start, and we should be doing every single one we can think of, because success is attainable for every child who walks through the school door.

But we can't do anything if we don't understand the situation. And if we are looking at the two racers on the hill, saying, "Well, they're totally equal with the same resources and situation, so I guess Chris just isn't trying hard enough," then we don't understand the situation, and we won't find the solutions we need.

What the Public Sees

While reading my way around the web this weekend, I came across this "Topline Report" of the Phi Delta Kappa annual poll about education issues. I'm way late to sifting through this data, but it's an interesting report, so I'm going to do it anyway. It gathers together the data over the past several decades into some quick-and-dirty charts, and it makes for some interesting reading. The newest results aren't very new (May of 2016), but the trends over the years are illuminating.

Biggest Problems?

The survey allows for three open-ended responses to the question of the biggest problems in schools. In 2016, funding won with 19% which is down 13% from just two years ago. 2009-2014 funding stayed on top with over thirty percent voting for it.

Standards have rarely made the list at all, except for a period from 2004-2009 (No Child Left Behind days) when they hovered around 3%. They reappeared as a problem in 2015 at 7% and were way up to 9% last year.

The chart is also a reminder of some things we used to consider a big deal. 9% considered discipline a problem, but from 1969 until 2010, discipline was never out of double digits, and from 1969 till 1987, it never dropped below 20%. Why are we so much less concerned nowadays? Better behaved children or, as I suspect is the case in many of these answers, does the shift reflect a shift in what is reported by the press and amplified by whoever's trying to stir things up. Violence, drugs, and overcrowding were also seen as huge problems back in the day and now don't register so much. Race was a regular double-digit issue in the 70s but in 2016, it only stood at 2%-- the first time it cracked the list at all since 1996.

How Good Are Which Schools?

PDK gives us the classic question-- how good are schools. Specifically, how good are the nation's schools, your community's schools, and your kids' schools?

Responses here have been remarkably consistent, particularly given the amount of hammering on public education that has been done.

The percent of people willing to give their community schools As or Bs actually peaked in 2009-2015 at close to or above 50%. The percentage has never dropped below 40% since 1974 except for the period between 1977 and 1983 when it fell to the thirties. I blame my brother and sister, who were in high school at the time.

The A-B rate for the nation's schools have hovered around 20% since 1981, though in recent years, the percentage of people saying those schools are failing has inched up from 3-ish to 7-ish. Yeah, schools are okay in our town, but Those People over there need to get their act together.

And my child's school? It's awesome. The percentage of parents giving their child's school and A or B has stayed right around 70%. In a couple of years PDK did it two ways-- just public schools, and all school parents. When you fold in the non-public parents, the approval rating goes up a percent or two, which makes sense.

The implication, as always with this data set, is that direct first-hand experience with a school leads to a higher opinion of the school. Is it significant, do you think, that reformsters most often want to fix terrible schools that they have no first-hand experience with?

Tough Enough?

Responders to the survey could be a bit... conflicted about some things. The same parents who thought their schools were great also thought the schools were doing a mostly-middlin' job on teaching some of the Main Stuff. There are plenty of ways to read this-- I'm gong to go with the conclusion that parents measure a school based on far more than the academics. Which would mean that evaluating schools and providing "consumer" information based on the results of a single math and reading test would not provide parents with anything close to the information they want to make a choice.

53% of parents believe that new standards have made a change to what is taught in their children's classrooms. But they are almost perfectly split on whether those changes are positive or negative.

50% believe the changes include more time spent on standardized testing, and 44% blame the changes for increased homework.

The responders are also almost evenly split on whether or not charter schools should have to meet the same educational standards as other schools. I wish this were paired with a question that asked if the responders think public schools should have to meet the same educational standards they're required to meet now.

Fixing a Bad School

Only 14% said that the solution to a bad public school is to close it down-- and keep in mind that around 80% believe there are bad schools all over the place (just not in their neighborhood). But 62% also believe that the administration and faculty should be replaced.

Communication

About half of the parents responding to various questions about the issue felt that their school heard them and gave them adequate opportunity to voice their opinion. That would indicate room for improvement.

Taxes

53% would support raising property taxes to improve schools, and the majority believe that spending the money on teachers would be the way to go, however almost 50% also believe that the money would not end up where it was supposed to.


Again, I will remind you that these data are a year old as well as being subject to all the vagaries of survey data collection. Most of all it's important to remember that surveys like this don't tell us what's actually happening-- only what folks see or think is happening. Funny that issues we used to hear about all the time, like discipline and race, just kind of disappeared-- not because they became less of an issue, but because the conversation just shifted elsewhere.

It's a reminder that schools can't really afford an approach of "Well, we'll just do our jobs and let people think what they want to." Because there are always a multitude of voices that are willing to speak up and create an impression. It is that very phenomenon that explains why so many people believe that Our Schools Are The Worst Of All Time even when there isn't a single spot of evidence to support that. It has just been repeated, over and over and over and over and over and over, until folks figure that they wouldn't keep hearing it if it weren't true. Meanwhile, supporters of public education have sat mostly silent.

It's the thing that reformsters have always understood far better than public school advocates-- in a war of perception, voices matter and messages matter and hammering it all home matters.