Are Charters a Rural Solution

In a piece that has circulated a bit, Karen Eppley, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Pennsylvania State University suggests that charter schools might be the solution to many rural education problems.

While the article is not as gung-ho about charters as the title suggests (I know-- writers rarely get to pick their own headline), it still misses some critical points.

According to this 2013-2014 report from the Rural School and Community Trust, about a third of our schools are rural, and about one in five students attend a rural school. So this is worth discussing. Eppley wryly notes that Betsy DeVos brought attention to rural education with her observation about bear protection in Wapiti, Wyoming, but her policy goals might have a more far-reaching effect. Fair enough.

Eppley touts her rural bona fides and notes that rural education has been an important part of rural American life. She's got that right-- my own children attended little Utica Elementary, a school that, along with the volunteer fire department hall, served as a community center. On the night that the school held its talent show, art show, and ice cream social, everyone in the village would be there, whether they had a child in the school or not.

Despite the positive impacts of schools on rural communities, 150,000 rural schools have been eliminated through closure or consolidation since 1930. Rural schools are closed primarily in response to budget cuts and low enrollment.

Eppley's correct, though by going back to 1930 she oversells her case. As she should already know, numerous rural schools were eliminated in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Previously, every township in PA had a school district, but the state did some serious arm-twisting to encourage consolidation. My current school district is the result of combining the city school district with several surrounding small districts, including Utica, which originally had its own tiny high school. The 1960s consolidations were not about money or enrollment so much as a policy change about what a school district should look like (and the emergence of dependable transportation options.)

Eppley then moves to a capsule history of the charter school movement, offering her own theory about what is happening right now--

The increasingly charter-friendly environment can be traced to an ideological shift: While public education was once seen as a key to democracy, it is increasingly seen as a tool of efficiency and economic competitiveness. This change has created prime conditions for the school choice movement — and for the creation and expansion of charter schools.

But rural charters are a different animal. Eppley notes that while urban charters are often chain operations (eg KIPP), rural charters are more likely to be community-based mom-and-pop operations, sometimes as a delaying action against the loss of a local school. I have seen this as well-- just up the road a community's elementary school was closed; a community group formed to resurrect it as a charter. The idea here is to resist consolidation and keep those community ties alive and thriving. And so far I'm with her. But I think she's missing a couple of points.

First, while it's true that school closings are often driven by financial issues, budget issues are themselves often driven by charter funding. Charter chains-- with one exception-- are not descending on rural areas because that's not where the money is. But the exception is huge-- in Pennsylvania, cyber charters are draining rural districts of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.

My own district is a fine example. A few years ago, we closed two elementary schools in hopes of saving about $800K. Our cyber charter bill that year? About $800K. The huge loss of public tax dollars to profiteering cyber schools is doubly galling because these cybers can't even do the job. Study after study has concluded that cyber schools fail to educate their students, many of whom return to us in the public schools, or simply never graduate at all.

Eppley correctly notes that rural charters will not unleash the power of free market competition because there is no competition there-- there are few choices for rural schools. And she makes the observation that unlike the case with urban charters, rural charters can actually be a tool for establishing local parental control. For that reason, they are often inefficient and can be dogged by financial problems if for no other reason than they are being run by amateurs.

But then there's this:

Until educational, social and economic policies are implemented with rural communities in mind, rural citizens should continue to work to break down barriers for more socially just rural schools and communities — in the same way that urban citizens have.

Given the amount of research that shows urban charters fostering more segregation, I'm not sure exactly what she's talking about. Nor is it clear what barriers need to broken down in rural schools where, precisely because there are few choices, all students are squooshed together into the same facility.

Eppley does early in the article note the "emerging research suggesting that charter schools may have lower academic performance and negatively affect the finances of the home district." But then she moves on, arriving somehow at the notion that rural schools can be helped by charters. However, the negative effects, particularly the financial ones, are strongly felt in rural areas. One of the great central inefficiencies, the foundational lie of modern charter systems-- that we can somehow fund two or three or more parallel education systems with the same money that barely supported one system-- is magnified in rural settings where money and resources and student populations are already stretched thin.

A couple of years ago, Utica's elementary school joined the other two in being closed down by my district. In  less than a decade, we have gone from six elementary schools to three, partly due to declining enrollment, and in a larger part due to financial pressures. Now small communities have been hollowed out a bit more, and we are still struggling to stay ahead of the financial squeeze. It is hard to imagine how having to stretch taxpayer dollars to run a few more schools in the district would be helpful in any way, particularly when sending tax dollars to charter operators is one of the reasons we're under this pressure in the first place. There's a reason that financially strapped school districts close schools rather than open more-- you don't save money by paying for more schools. Charter schools are not a solution-- they are a huge part of the problem.

Personalization and the Outliers

Henry Ford was an early proponent of personalization. "Any customer can have a car pained any color that he wants," said Ford in 1909, "so long as it is black."

There have always been limits to personalization. I like to wear hats, but my head is some sort of extra-large melon, so while hat manufacturers may offer choices to fit the personal size preferences of many customers, I'm an outlier. Many times I'm just SOL on a particular hat.

Imagine that all your potential customers are like a big bell curve. Aim too narrow, meeting the personal preferences of the fat part at the peak, and you will not capture as much of the market as you'd like. Or if you're up for it, imagine a line plot-- the sweet spot is in covering the cluster at the center while ignoring the outliers who are off in their own little corner. You can predict what the majority of your customers probably want-- to be sure of hitting the outliers, you would have to cover the entire charter, including areas that were completely empty. Spread out to offer every option that every customer on the diagram wants, and on the thin ends you'll be losing money. Burger King could offer pineapple and bananas as burger toppings, and somebody might even order it, but they would never sell enough to cover the cost of stocking those ingredients. Maybe nobody would ever choose banana at all, and BK would be out the money. They could advertise they were offering perfectly personalized burgers, but they'd be losing money to do it.

Personalization as a marketing strategy has to aim for the sweet spot where you are hitting maximum customers for minimum. You can only do that by recognizing that some customers have personal preferences that it will cost you too much to meet, and so those outliers must be cut loose. The only choice they get is "Buy what we offer, or do without."

Any system, any product that is going to marketed to any kind of scale, is going to have this built-in limitation.

And that includes personalized education.

Putting together banks of questions and drills and instructional activities is expensive for companies-- remember how aggressively the major test manufacturers guard their question, because it would be prohibitively expensive to have to replace a set of 50 or 70 questions. So creating the giant bank of possible modules for personalized learning programs would presumably be hugely expensive. Therefor, the module manufacturers will need to control costs and maximize return by ignoring the outliers.

There's no money to be made in creating a module bank that meets every conceivable educational need that could appear, particularly if we are talking about a program meant to serve hundreds of thousands of students.

Likewise, the artificial intelligence that is allegedly sorting out the students based on their performance cannot afford to be too precise in its sorting. If it analyzes student achievement and ability based on dozens of factors, then it will need to sort the students into hundreds of separate "bins," each with its own set of instructional modules, each of which will in turn sort students into another hundred separate bins. This system would be complicated and, more importantly, expensive as hell.

Instead, it would be easier and cheaper to collect only a couple of data points and sort the students into a half-dozen large bins that encompass a broad spectrum of students. Details of their personal educational needs will be discarded, and outliers will just be jammed into whatever bin they come "close enough" to matching.

In short, a profitable system will be no more personalized than giving all students a ten-question pre-test, then sorting-- students who get an A or B move on to Worksheet #1, students who get a C move on to Worksheet #2, and Ds and Fs move on to Worksheet #3.

And this is before we even start to work in other factors like the student's interests (a critical factor in choosing reading assignments) or the style of exercise they work best with (picture-based? long story problems? puzzles?).

To be marketable, personalized education systems have to promise that they will provide an educational program perfectly suited to each and every child. But to be manageable and profitable, they have to provide a system that discards outliers among students and just jams them in with everyone else.

You know what's good at personalized learning for outliers? Carbon based life-forms animated with non-artificial intelligence, with professional training and experience in the education of young humans. Collect a bunch of those, give them several individual small humans to instruct, and you can have all the personalized instruction you want-- and it won't even create a permanent data file. Best of all-- these carbon-based life forms can even provide personalized instruction for the outliers.

PA: Let's Arm Teachers?

Apparently it's education crazy season in Harrisburg, with one ill-advised ed bill after another. But fear not-- at least one PA legislator wants some of us to start packing heat in school.

Senate Bill 383 intends to amend the school code, with the intent of "providing for protection and defense of pupils.

Sponsor Donald C White, who was an insurance salesman back before his 2001 election, explains the reasoning here:

In the aftermath of a number of tragic school shootings, the debate continues across the country on how we can better protect our children. While most of this discussion surrounds whether or not more gun control measures are needed, I believe we must look at all options when it comes to improving the safety and security of our children, teachers and school staff....

My bill would allow school personnel to have access to firearms in school safety zones if they receive authorization from the school board of directors, are licensed to carry a concealed firearm and have met certain training requirements in the use and handling of firearms (as outlined in my proposal)...

As we weigh our options, I believe we need to consider providing school employees with more choices than just locking a door, hiding in a closet or diving in front of bullets to protect students. With the legal authority, licensing and proper training, I believe allowing school administrators, teachers or other staff to carry firearms on the school premises is an option worth exploring. 

No. No, it's not. Here's why I don't think it's an idea worth considering.

1) The window of opportunity is tiny. 

From start to finish, active shooter events are short, short things. Chances are mighty slim that a teacher will have a chance to do a thing. An FBI study of active shooter incidents found the vast majority were over in less than five minutes.

2) Shooting in high stress situations is hard.

Military personnel and police train with their firearms a lot. A lot. Because when you are all of a sudden in a life or death situation and you have to pull out your gun and use it, there are many problems. Your hands are shaking. Your perceptions are flooded in adrenaline. You have to make a split-second critical decision when you were teaching verbs thirty seconds ago. Shooting a gun at a target when you have time to prep and aim and think is plenty hard enough. Under "combat" conditions, it's infinitely harder, unless you are a highly-trained individual.

Using a gun requires a professional. Amateurs with guns are bad news.

3) Collateral damage.

You may think that picking off the shooter while children are running past you in screaming chaos will be just like picking off bad guy bosses in Call of Duty, in which case you are exactly the person I don't want to be packing in my building. You're an amateur with a gun. There's one shooter and a hundred children; I figure the odds that a child is going to be hit by friendly fire are somewhere between "unacceptable" and "horrifying."

4) Confusion on the scene.

Let's say that law enforcement manages to arrive before the scene has played out. They walk in the door and see four people wielding guns. What do you think they should do at that moment? Last summer in Dallas, when a sniper was picking off police officers, a crowd full of Rambo wannabe's just created more confusion for law enforcement. If you were a shooter, you could not concoct a better scenario to give yourself cover than to have a bunch of civilians with guns running around while police were trying to find you.

5) Guns in schools. Where there are also children.

Here's a fun story. A third grade teacher at a private school in Chambersburg,, PA went to the bathroom, took off her holstered and loaded sidearm to do her business, and left it there on top of the toilet tank in the same restroom that the students used. For at least three hours. It was, in fact, children who brought the event to the authorities' attention.

There are so many nightmare scenarios that come from trying to keep a firearm secure in a building filled with children-- particularly when the firearm is being kept secure by someone whose main business every day is a hundred things other than keeping a firearm secure.

For the vast majority of schools, an active shooter event is something that will never, ever happen. But we're going to start putting firearms inside those buildings, watched over and operated by sort-of-kind-of-trained amateurs? Reasonable people can disagree about gun control (though unreasonable people often dominate the conversation), but this is just a bad idea. This is not how to make my students safer.

If you're in Pennsylvania, contact your Senator and tell him to vote no on SB 383.

EdTech To Teachers: Who Needs You?

If you want to see a fully-refined expression of edtech disdain for actual teachers, check out this article by Dr. Karen Beerer, "Greatest Lesson: Teacher Buy-in Is Overrated."

Beerer is VP of Professional Development for Discovery Education. She's held that job since 2012-- before that she was Asst. Super at Boyertown School District  for seven years, and before that an "educator" at Quakertown Community School District for twenty years (that apparently breaks down to stints as principal and teacher). She was hired by Discovery to handle things like their Common Core Academies. Presumably their mission statement was not "Learn from professional development or don't-- we couldn't care less."

And yet, here she is to explain how implementing ed tech can be done via a big bus that just drives over your professional staff.

The stock photo for the piece is a woman at a desk, eyes closed, hand to forehead. One must assume it's a superintendent thinking, "OMFG those damn teachers." The subhead notes that while collaboration is nice and all, waiting for teacher buy-in can be "paralyzing to innovation." And we are off and running.

Almost immediately, Beerer hedges her bets and adds a "sometimes" because, she says, there is a time and place for it.

She notes that teachers have a right to feel innovation fatigue as fads like Madeline Hunter come and go (but she would like you to know, parenthetically, that she still loves Hunter-- are you getting a picture of Beerer now?). But as she travels the country as a sales rep with a fancy title VP of Learning and Development for Discovery Education, she gets a lot of pushback on the transition from actual books to digital content, from "we're not ready" to "we can't afford it" to "students don't need any more tech in their lives." Apparently she hasn't talked to anyone who says things like "your digital content isn't very good" or "we're already using another product."

Never mind. Here are three reasons that administrators should ignore those pesky teachers when it comes to launching technological innovation.

1. The Real World Isn’t Dependent on Teacher Buy-In

The teachers may have legit concerns, but hey-- teachers don't live in the real world, and the real world is totally digital. So get with it, students. There's no need to get teachers into that "real world"-- just send students on ahead with no guidance at all. What could possibly go wrong?

2. Students Are Ready, Whether or Not Teachers Are Ready

No matter our concerns, we need to recognize that our students are ready—they want to engage with textbooks that are replete with immersive and interactive experiences. 

I wish. As I've noted in the past, I'm a fairly tech forward teacher. As a literature teacher, it's easy for me to assign almost any text simply by pushing out the link to it. And do you know what the majority of my students do first when they get such an assignment? That's right-- they print it out, so they can read it on paper and not on a screen.  

My students are ready to use instagram and snapchat and whatever game is cool this week. Expecting them to be inspired by a screen and software is like expecting students of my generation to be inspired by a pencil. Yes, some are, but mostly they take their tech tools for granted and are no more inspired by them than they are inspired by air.

This is a typical arc of technology. When automobiles first arrived, everyone who owned one was a well-versed mechanic who could work on every part and function. But growing the market requires reducing the amount of tech knowledge required, and now the vast majority of car-owners can't do anything more than change a tire. Fifteen years ago, I always had students around who could code. Today, I have none.

Part of my job is to show them what they can do with the tech, to try to light a spark, to give them a push, even if it''s just toward doing a presentation with slides that aren't totally boring. I don't just have to buy in-- I have to sell, too.

3. Digital will be Used By Students Daily and the Classroom Won’t Change That

Beerer says she hears worries about the impact of technology, and I get that such feelings are out there. I'm more worried about the impact of tech's capacity for data mining and surveillance all the flippin' time, and the great lengths that tech companies go to smother those concerns instead of having serious conversations about them. And-- surprise-- Beerer isn't going to address that here.

But her actual point is not clear. Students are going to get sucked in anyway, so just go ahead and buy in, Gramps?

In fact all three seem a little bit like arguments for why teachers should buy in and not why their buy-in just isn't necessary. But she is now going to outline briefly how to just go ahead and do it anyway.

Enhance the instructional experience by integrating digital strategies and content with “traditional” teaching strategies.

Add a dollop of digital to whatever you're doing. Here's a super example: "ask students to write a five-paragraph essay, and then have them summarize their work Twitter-style in 140 characters or less." Because....? Does this have any value other than incorporating the digital element for the digital element's sake? She says this will be a catalyst for increasing student engagement, but if that's the case, she's already in trouble because my students think that Twitter is for people my age. And although Beerer was an elementary teacher, she doesn't address whether she thinks this is a great strategy for second graders.

Let the content support differentiation.

Digital resources make it easy to differentiate, like assigning reading by lexile levels (if you think lexiles aren't junk which-- spoiler alert-- I do). She says digital resources can help "scale" our "good instructional practices" somehow. Digital magic?

Use technology to teach students how to learn.

Because there's like Siri and virtual reality and new apps and those new apps might help them learn, somehow.  So, you know, explore that.

Hey, wait a minute

Yeah, those are not actual ways to implement digital resources so much as they are the broad outlines of pitches that a sales rep would use to push digital products out to the superintendents and business managers and IT directors who will never actually use them.

And here's how she brings it home.

The key is for all teachers who have not yet begun making the digital transition to get started on making that shift today.

And

Even if you don’t fully buy-in, as one of my colleagues says, at least “be” in.

In other words, district leaders, buy this stuff, stick it in the classroom and tell your teachers, "Use the damn stuff. I don't care if you have any use for it-- use it anyway. Explore and let the digital inspiration sweep you away because, God help me, I let that woman from the company convince me to drop a couple hundred thou on this stuff and now it's up to you to find a way to make it work."

I like tech, and some of her thinking mirrors some of the reasons I use it. But the utter disregard for teachers here is staggering. The notion that teachers don't need to be active or willing participants in the programs used in their classrooms is the same sort of teacher contempt that got us winning ideas like Common Core. It is one more version of the corporate sales mindset that gives us "teacher proof" programs in a box with a promise that it doesn't matter who you hire-- just hand them this and students will do super great.

Part of our function is as gatekeepers, charged with making sure that our students aren't bombarded with a lot of damn fool nonsense. Our gatekeeping capabilities have been sorely tested for the past decade and, sadly, many colleges and pretend teacher programs are cranking out grads who have been deliberately led to believe that gatekeeping is not their job at all, that there are somewhere wiser minds who will take care of that.

This is one of the great drivers of teacher de-professionalization. The desire for sales and the desire to circumvent teacher professional judgment. Never mind what they think. What do they know? Their buy-in and cooperation and professional agreement that this program or tool has value-- completely unnecessary. Ignore them and buy today!

Why the Attack on Sarah Chambers Matters

Every day, from all over the country, we hear stories of teachers whose jobs are, for one reason or another, are on the line. Sometimes we hang back, correctly assuming that we don't have the whole story, that there are local issues that we don't know about. But sometimes these local stories deserve all the attention we can give them because they are an early warning of kinds of problems we could all face. So that's why I think you should keep reading when I tell you--

Sarah Chambers is under attack.

Chambers is a special ed teacher in the Chicago Public School system, serving students at the Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy for the last eight years. She has been rated "distinguished" by six different principals. And as recent events have shown, she is much-beloved by her students and their parents, not because she's all warm and fluffy, but because she is a fierce advocate for those students.

CPS just suspended Chambers, and has served notice that they want to take her job.

Here's why we should all care.

Testing before teachers.

According to Chambers, the stated reason for her suspension was that she was accused of encouraging students to opt out of taking the PARCC (a charge that she denies).

Let that sink in-- of all the possible kinds of professional misconduct that a teacher could be guilty of, the one that the district was willing to move quickly and forcefully on was not a matter that touched on student rights or mistreatment, not even allegations of pedagogical misconduct. No, the thing that would cause CPS to spring into action, the one line they absolutely won't tolerate being crossed is failing to support the Big Standardized Test.

Mind you, Chambers has been on CPS radar over testing before. In her chapter of More Than a Score
(which you can read here, but you should really get a copy of the book), Chambers talks about how the school's teachers organized a successful boycott of the old Illinois Standards Achievement Test. The full staff voted not to administer the test at all, and CPR pushed back with threats of disciplinatry action, firing, and even stripping of licenses. Some of this was aimed at Chambers herself:

The interrogators tried to scare teachers into naming other teachers leading the opt-out movement. They asked one of my colleagues, “Was this led by a Ms. Lambers [meaning Ms. Chambers, my name]?” They used this strategy to get teachers to correct the absurd name they created, and say that “Ms. Chambers” led the campaign. 

Many staff members ultimately folded under the pressure, but Chambers had clearly made a name for herself in some offices.

Silencing Teacher Voices

Is this really all about protecting the sacred test? Doubtful. What seems far more likely is that CPS has decided to silence a strong and committed activist. Here's what fellow Chicago teacher-acitivist Michelle Gunderson thinks is behind the whole business:

Fear.

Fear of the truth Sarah tells. Fear of the power of her leadership. And fear of the crumbling of the neo-liberal design for schools: underfund the schools, watch them starve, and blame the failure of the schools on the children, teachers, and the communities. Once our schools are deemed unfit they are ripe for privatization by our mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and his friends. Sarah’s work interrupts these plans.

Chambers had been part of a bunch of noise that thwarted a CPS to cut programs at Saucedo. She has been absolutely fierce in speaking out for her students, whose special needs make them special targets. Remember, we're talking Chicago, home of Arne Duncan and his idea that all students with special needs require nothing more but teachers with high expectations.

Gunderson lays out just a few of the other times that Chambers has been a leader in resisting decisions that were bad for students, bad for schools. CPS has been slashing support and programs like Michael Myers on speed, and Chambers has repeatedly stepped up and spoken out. And Chicago where, remember, the school system is run out of the mayor's office, is particularly sensitive to uppity educators-- only a brain tumor kept union president Karen Lewis from handing Rahm Emanuel a huge political thwacking, and principal Troy LaRaviere had to be run out of his job before he drew too large a crowd.

And Chicago stands as an example for the rest of us, out there consistently in the forefront of standing up for student rights, for equity, for quality education, and for the rights of teachers.

Even if you are not a big unionist, you must recognize that teachers must be free to speak out and stand up for students, and that means that we have to be free to disagree, strongly, when the folks in charge make decisions we believe are wrong. If we can't speak up without losing our jobs, or the fear of losing our jobs, how are we to do our jobs in the first place? Teachers have to be a voice in an effective education system. Sometimes a union is an important part of establishing and protecting that voice, sometimes not-- but the notion that a teacher should lose her job for disagreeing with her bosses, even if her bosses include major political figures with national aspirations.

P.S. Tenure

I can't talk about this story without noting it's the umpty-millionth example of why we need tenure. Without any sort of job protections, Chambers could have been quietly fired over Easter and it would have all been done before anyone could even draw a complaining breath.

Bottom Line?

You may not have ever used the advice, but you've surely heard it-- if you have a class that's exceptionally unruly, pick out one of the worst kids and make an example of him. Stomp on him so thoroughly that the rest of the class will be afraid to breathe.

That sure looks like what we've got here. Pick out a teacher who's more vocal, more uppity, more annoying, and squash her both to end her particular irritations, and as a message to all her little friends to think twice before they step out of place and start messing with the big boys.

I could have reached out to Chambers like a real journalist, but first, I'm pretty sure she's got her hands full at the moment and second, I don't need to know about her background or her educational philosophy or whether or not I find her likeable to know that what CPS is trying to do to her is wrong. It's wrong. The official cover reason for trying to can her is wrong, and the unofficial apparent reason for wanting to can her is wrong-- especially because there seems to be widespread agreement that she is good at her job, who has been called a "tireless advocate for children.".

Chambers' hearing has not yet been scheduled. Meanwhile, Saucedo already has two openings in special ed. There is still plenty of time to make noise. The point of this business is to make teachers be silent. Don't be silent.

There's a petition here you can sign. You can spread the word (I recommend this piece by Gunderson). And pay attention, because this case is a message to us all.

ICYMI: Easter Edition

It's easter Sunday and I'm a huge fan. But just in case you have some time to pass today, here's an assortment of worthwhile reads from the week.

A Tale of Two Schools

Mitchell Robinson takes us to two schools, only twenty miles apart, that illustrate some of the inequity in education today.

Apparently Diversity Is Still Nor Innovative for Edtech...

At Educolor's blog, a look at the problem with diversity (or lack thereof) in the edtech world

Hidden Money

Yes, I know-- I'm sending you to an article from CAP. But this is an interesting look at how parent contributions skew school finances even more.

Which Came First--the Practice or the Policy

Nancy Flanagan is on point as always: The "product" in American schools used to be good citizens. Then good workers. Now, the product is test scores and being admitted to college

The List of Test-Optional Colleges and Universities Keeps Growing

Valerie Strauss with a look at how post-secondary schools keep dropping the venerable ACT and SAT-- and how the test companies are fighting back.

Erie Pennsylvania Schools Are a Canary in the Coal Mine

Jeff Bryant with some great reporting on the struggle of Erie's school system, and what it means for the death of public education.

Compliance Does Not Equal Motivation

Bill Ferriter on the difference between what a student is able to do and what the student is willing to do.

PA: Are We Future Ready?

Pennsylvania is using its newfound ESSA-empowered freedom to create a new dashboard for measuring school awesomeness-- Future Ready PA. Many folks in Harrisburg are very excited about it and are touting it as a relief from the standardized tests that are "failing" PA students. Let's grab our flux capacitor and our supply of illegal plutonium!

Is Future Ready PA all that and a bag of Snyder's chips? Well, I've looked at it before and, spoiler alert-- no. But it's time revisit this mess in more detail. Let's look at a breakdown of the pieces parts courtesy of the state's own power point slides from its webinar presentation about FRPA. I'm going to skip some of the boring history stuff and cut straight to what's there on the dashboard.

  














FRPA has three main components. Let's take each one at a time, and see how the state will free us form the shackles of standardized testing.

The first component has three pieces, and two of them are already well-known to us-- the test scores themselves, whipped together with PVAAS. I'm not going to launch into a long discourse on the folly that is PVAAS other than to note that it was developed by a man whose specialty were agricultural genetics, has been pretty heavily debunked, and appears to be a bunch of gobbledeegook. I find it hard to believe that eight years later, we're still holding on to it.

But we do have one new measure here-- we're going to apply PVAAS to the population of students with disabilities. This is a bold promise, especially if you understand that what PVAAS claims to do is statistically strip out the effects of certain characteristics, IOW, here's what your poor student Chris would get on the test were Chris not poor. To apply this to students with disabilities means the PVAAS folks (the company SAS), must think they can strip out the effects of a particular disability, as in, here's the score Chris would get were Chris not dyslexic, or blind, or challenged with a particular learning disability. I can only assume that the secrets of such statistical legerdemain were delivered by Yetis riding on the backs of rainbow-colored unicorns.

Next up are the "on-track" measures, because "on-track" sounds more friendly than pass-fail benchmarks.

The third grade reading and seventh grade math indicators are two of the less-awful features of FRPA because the local school district gets to A) choose the instrument used to measure and B) choose whether or not to have the results included in their FRPA index. So while your local district may have just picked up one more standardized test to pay for and grade, at least there's a little bit of local control. Also, you only have to count students who have actually been there all year-- so take that, cyber charter students who were dumped back into public school at the last minute.

English Language Proficiency seems to be aimed at ELL students via the ACCESS test-- so one more standardized test score in the mix. Super.

Attendance is an oldie but a goody; however, the state is considering switching to absenteeism. IOW, switching from measuring how many students were there to measuring how many students were NOT there.

And then there's closing the achievement gap. Always a challenge, this. Because if you have a race and some people are ahead because they're faster and others are behind because they're slower, you have to figure out a way to make the slower racers go faster than the fastest racers in order to catch up and close the gap. Even if your behind folks are behind because the leaders got a head start, the gap can still only be closed if the people coming up from behind are faster than your leaders. I suppose you could also close the gap by handicapping the leaders, but that seems contrary to the spirit of the whole education thing. Let's see if the slide about this point offers any help:

Okay, so that's a no. We'll have a couple of measures and some specific groups that we'll be checking in on over some specific time.

Under College and Career Measures, we have some new items, starting with the new Career Standards Benchmark. The good news about the CSB is that it will be easy to hit with a simple display of paperwork and targeted hoop jumping. The bad news is that it's pretty pointless.

We'll have fifth graders complete some sort of something something. And an eight grader's personal career plan should be a spectacular thing to behold (video game tester is a career, right?). An eleventh grade career portfolio is just a couple of wikipedia clicks away. This is really an old school public school institutional assignment-- the kids can sleepwalk through it while the adults pat themselves on the back for really Accomplishing Something. But hey-- I bet we're all going do great on this measure, even if it has no actual effect on our students.

As always, I salute the salesmanship that the College Board has displayed in getting entire state governments to shill for the products they sell. It's kind of amazing, as if the state government said that schools would get a higher rating if all their teachers drove Fords and their cafeteria sold only Pepsi products.

Buy into the College Board's line of AP products, and earn more points for your school. Force more students to partake, and get even more points. How schools are going to get the percentage of students signing up for AP courses to grow every single year forever is the kind of mystery that only someone who was Below Basic in math could solve. Schools are doomed to lose on that one as they reach market saturation.

I do, however, applaud FRPA for including a CTE component here as an equivalent to AP classes.

Graduation rate-- well, I'm not sure. The slide says that graduation rate counts every student who graduates "in six or fewer years with a regular high school diploma." If we mean "graduates from a 9-12 school," then hurray-- that's a step up from the old standard that said only four year grads counted, meaning that a student who ran into trouble and then righted herself and graduated in five years was counted the same as a drop out. That was wrong. This is better.

Transition to work, military or school. Graduates have sixteen months to get a job, get into post-secondary education, or get in uniform. I'm no hidebound traditionalist, but as always I have to ask if nowadays we consider becoming a stay-at-home parent a failure at life? And how good a job does it have to be-- does part-time fry dunker at Micky D's count?

And funny thing-- the slide show completely skips over a specific slide for "Industry Standards-Based Competency Assessments and/or Industry Recognized Credentials." Which industry? Which standards? If this is meant to include earning, say, welding certification, that's super. If it's meant to open the door for personalized competency-based learning mini-badges etc, then this is very unsuper indeed.


The Future

Pennsylvania's current plan is to submit their ESSA paperwork in September (provided, of course, that the Department of Education still exists then), and then we'll all be getting Future Ready in the fall of 2018.

Will some of the gaping holes in this plan be fixed by then (seriously-- the percentage of AP students has to increase every single year?) but only time will tell. Likewise, only the implementation of this baloney will reveal exactly how a new set of perverse incentives will affect Pennsylvania's schools.

We already know that emphasis on test scores warps schools and curriculum. Harrisburg has postponed using the Keystone Tests as graduation requirements, and Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera hints that we aren't done kicking that can, probably because nobody is ready to be the politician who decided that a huge number of students with passing grades can't graduate because of a really crappy standardized test:

Finally, Pennsylvanians know that the Keystone Exams shouldn’t be the only ticket to a seat at commencement. In 2016 the General Assembly unanimously passed, and Gov. Wolf signed, a law delaying the use of Keystone Exams as graduation requirements until 2019. Part of the law required PDE to investigate and report findings and recommendations on ways Pennsylvania students can demonstrate postsecondary readiness.

Yet, the Keystone sits here in Future Ready PA as a measure of school effectiveness. Will schools continue to emphasize test prep and make Keystone passage a local graduation requirement? Will they jam students into AP courses whether it's a good fit or not?

Future Ready PA maintains two fundamentally flawed foundations of the worst shcool evaluation systems-- First, it maintains a deep dependence on bad standardized testing that emphasizes a narrow piece of the curriculum and Second, it fosters a model of education in which students are not there to be the center of the school's existence-- instead, those students are there to be mined for the data and numbers that the school needs to survive. FRPA is one more evaluation system that fosters upside down schools, schools that are not centered on the needs of the children, but in which the children are there to meet the data needs of the school. This is not the future-- it's the last ten years. We have already seen this future, and it stinks.

What we need is a future in which schools are centered on their students, not fruitless standardized tests. We need a future in which schools are accountable to their community, not the suits in Harrisburg. We need a future in which education is deep and broad and complicated, not a narrow pool where we go fishing for standardized test scores. Future Ready PA is not that future. Power up the DeLorean and try again.