LAUSD: More Cyber-shenanigans

Karen Wolfe has continued to pay attention to what Los Angeles schools are up to, a necessary activity as LAUSD is under constant siege by folks who would like to see it dismantled and the parts used to feed the LA charter industry. The extra challenge is that many of those folks are working form inside the district itself.

Another batch of consultants heading for an LAUSD board meeting.

Witness the latest growing mess that Wolfe and others have brought into the light with a series of posts. I'm going to give you the bold strokes, but I strongly recommend that you read about this issue here, here, and here.

LAUSD has some previous experience with tech-driven fiascos. There was the ipad disaster, in which a reality-impaired faith in tech power was yoked to some insider dealing ending up in the waste of huge mounds of taxpayer money. And its district-wide student information system (MiSiS) which turned out to have no actual capabilities other than making vendors rich. People love to sell big expensive computer-driven tech systems to LAUSD because-- well, that's a customer with a lot of money.

So here's LAUSD's latest tech initiative:

Some of these seem innocuous enough. Money for phone and connectedness upgrade? Sure.Enterprise reporting-- wait? LAUSD needs to spend $8 million on a system to get reports out of data systems they already have? What the hell kind of data systems do they use that don't actually generate reports?

Learning management system? Okay, all the kids are getting these nowadays, and none of them are great, but they are largely a fact of life. Except that this one (Schoology) is touted as being a huge success in Uruguay. Fun fact: Fred Baxter was once the ambassador to Uruguay, but he was also an international investment banker before ending up on the board of Alliance, a charter chain in LA (the one fighting against unionization by teachers with the help of millions in dark money donations). Baxter also has had a Family Foundation that is right in there with the Broad Foundation, helping seed the ground for charters in LA through moves like paying for education coverage in the LA Times.Okay, we may be playing a little too much connect-the-dots, but in LA, as with many other hotbeds of charter-choice promotion, it's hard not to feel that there are well-moneyed wheels within other well-connected wheels. And we should note, not for the last time, that an awful lot of this stuff is not being decided in public. Another fun fact: Schoology brags about how it stores district data "on the cloud" and I am reminded that my tech friends frequently remind me that another way to say "on the cloud" is "on somebody else's computer."

But that's not the huge red flag here. The red flag is the Unified Enrollment System.

Charter-choice fans like Unified Enrollment, and while they rarely come out and say exactly why, I can make a couple of educated guesses. On the one hand, it gives charters access to a ton of information in the system. It also helps them sell the idea that charters are just one more part of the public school system instead of private edu-businesses. At the same time, it keeps up the filtering element, by creating a system that is best navigated by motivated parents who can work a system-- the kind of parents who produce children who make charters look good and don't cost a lot of extra money to educate.

What Unified Enrollment does is generate a database of potential students, all the easier for a charter's computer to sort and sift. It is a great tool to have if you believe that "school choice" really means "school's choice."Proponents keep claiming UE is the great mixing bowl, when it fact it works as more of a giant sorting hat.

It's Hufflepuff for you and your kind, kid.

One stop shopping via Unified Enrollment has been pitched to the LAUSD board as a Really Cool Thing that worked super-well in New Orleans. As with most stories that start with "This worked really well in New Orleans," this story, pitched by folks like Silkes Bradford (formerly of Green Dot Charters, now of Oakland Unified School District), is not tightly connected to reality. Here's just one account, in painful but fully sourced detail, of how New Orleans' OneApp served charter operators well and made parents' lives so much more complicated and frustrating. Imitating New Orleans, even without a hurricane, is a bad plan for any educational system.

But Unified Enrollment is on an LA fast track (and reportedly in Oakland as well). Folks may ask silly questions like "What does this have to do with any of the stated objectives of the district, or why they would adopt this when they hadn't adopted any sort of policy about doing it-- how exactly do you decide that a program is the perfect way to hit the mark when you haven't even hung the target on the wall yet?

But these questions are being treated as an irritant, as decisions already seem to be coming from inside the district offices.

LAUSD's CEO of Project Management and Digital Innovation, Diane Pappas tried to reassure the BOC by explaining that they had been meeting privately in individual board members’ offices and had gotten their buy-in.

Pappas was brought in on this job to clean up the MiSIS mess, a job she was uniquely qualified to do because of her thirteen years as LAUSD chief legal counsel? Also, she writes children's books. (And she might have run Greystone Investment Group from 1985 to 1995, but that's another dark rabbit hole.)

Point is, she wants everyone to understand that it's okay for the board to go ahead with this stuff because they've all been lobbied privately, out of sight of the public that elected them, so it's totally cool.

As Wolfe has brought out, the sales force for these technological innovations in money-making are already planted within the district. A Broad fellow and a Walton charter leader are somehow also staff within the LAUSD. Not super-visible staff, mind you, but apparently still plenty influential. Ani Bagdasarian Packard is a Harvard Graduate School of Education product, who did some consulting and then signed up with Broad (Broad, you will recall, has already announced his intention to eat LAUSD's lunch and turn the district at least 50% charter), who placed her with the LAUSD (and if you don't think that's how he works, consider this example of the Broad Academy's job placement program). Jodie Newbery taught in New York City under the Joel Klein regime, then worked her way around the charter circuit with the New York Center for Charter School Excellence, and the California Charter Schools Association, where she worked on the Walton Family Grant-- her job was "to develop high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles." From there she went to work in LAUSD as a program and policy advisor, portfolio development. Both were hires during the Deasy era.

While the Unified Enrollment is being pitched as a public-school-only project, that seems to be a foot-in-the-door program, with a group already formed to lobby for charter school inclusion. PEAPS-LA wants to make sure that every child in LA has a choice of schools, or that every school has a choice of children. Pretty sure it's one of those two.

It's a huge pile of taxpayer dollars to be spent on a this program designed to achieve goals that the district doesn't have, promoted by people the taxpayers didn't elect, and discussed in meetings the public doesn't get to see. Again, I recommend you pay attention to Wolfe's writing (here, here and here, for starters). I know it must be tiresome to be a fan of public schools in Los Angeles, where the public system is under constant, unrelenting attack. But this, in fact, another such attack, and believers in the promise of American public education are going to need to meet this challenge, too.

ESAs and the Vibrant Marketplace

Nat Malkus (American Enterprise Institute) is in US News touting Education Savings Accounts in an article that the page editor has entitled "Building an Education Marketplace" but the url names "The Perils and Promise of Education Savings Accounts for School Choice." The latter is less poetic, but more accurate. But if you want to see what one of the long games being played in education reform is, this lays it out pretty well.

Scrooge McDuck's Education Savings Account

We've met Malkus before. Last summer he scribed a piece about charters vs. public schools, and I looked into his background. From 2009 to 2015, this senior K-12 researcher at AEI worked with American Institutes for Research, the outfit that sounds like a research organization but is in the test manufacturing business. He graduated in 1997 from Covenant College, a liberal arts Christian college in Tennessee, with a degree in historical studies and later earned a Ph.D. in educational policy and leadership from the University of Maryland. His AEI bio lists four years as a teacher.

Noting that we have choice fans in DC and that the Supremes could be on the verge of declaring the Blaine Amendments, which cement the separation of church and state, to be unconstitutional, Malkus recaps the recent history of ESAs, which mostly means Arizona, though Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi and Nevada are all giving it a shot.

Malkus has been studying up on this stuff because he has a book coming out, and he's pretty frank about some of the virtues of ESAs--

ESAs circumvent Blaine Amendments because the state does not transfer the funds to schools or education service providers; parents do.

And that leads him to a clear, concise statement of how ESAs change the choice game:

ESAs promise more than vouchers because they provide educational choice rather than school choice. Whereas vouchers work like coupons that families can use on tuition at private schools, ESAs provide funds parents can use to customize education for their child. Parents might spend their ESA on private school tuition or on a blend of education services including college courses, tutoring and special education services, to name a few. 

Malkus is excited at the prospect of what vouchers couldn't quite deliver-- "a fully-functioning education marketplace."

I'm not sure that's so exciting for anyone except the vendors who want to cash in on that "vibrant marketplace." Malkus recognizes some key questions, but he overlooks a few more keyer questions along the way. Let's take his questions first.

A key question is whether ESA funding can provide choice for all students. ESAs are state programs and thus only transfer the state's share of per-pupil public school funding to parents, but not funds from local or federal sources.

In other words, ESA funding will not get a poor student with no other resources into a fancy private school, nor allow them to assemble a piece-by-piece education program that would rank with what wealthy families could purchase from top vendors. But that is really only half of this key question, because one thing free and vibrant markets are really lousy at is providing services or goods for ALL customers. The most fundamental task of any responsible vendor of anything is to sort potential customers into two basic piles-- worth the bother, and not worth the bother. My go-to example-- FedEx and other private package delivery services do not compete for customers in isolated rural expensive-to-serve areas-- they just hand the package off to the United States Postal Service.

In short, a fully-functioning free-market education marketplace will not serve all students. Furthermore, vendors will choose which customers they wish to serve, and not vice versa. In a free market, somebody is always left behind, and that would mean a complete change of the philosophy behind American public education. It's absolutely true that some public schools have not always met this particular ideal, but to shift to pure choice means we give up even trying-- unless you want to regulate the choice system in such a way as to insure coverage of everyone, which seems to run counter to the ideal of a vibrant marketplace. And that's my point-- vibrant marketplace and education for everyone are buildings sitting on two entirely different foundations.

Another open question is whether ESA programs will be big enough to build a vibrant marketplace of education services.

No. See above. What Malkus is really questioning whether or not states will allow vendors access to enough students to really build the market, which kind of makes my previous point. 

A final question is how the state will know whether ESAs are working. 

Malkus suggests that parent satisfaction might be one measure, but that's a problem. A system like this would disenfranchise all taxpayers who don't have children, and we lose the whole democratic piece of public education. Choice systems repeatedly go back to the idea that parents are the only real stakeholders in education, and that's simply untrue-- neighbors, employers, other voters, and future customers and clients of today's students are all stakeholders in the educational system, and a choice system like this gives them no say. To his credit, Malkus seems to recognize this as an issue (both in his article and in the twitter conversation we're having even as I'm writing this piece, because the internet is a freakin' magical thing).

But this brings us back to the same old accountability debate. Either you believe that parents should be able to use their ESAs for anything from school tuition to an assortment of online courses to a pile of good books to an educational cruise to some educational games for the child's X-Box or you believe that tax dollars extracted from citizens for the express purpose of educating children should be accounted for and spent in ways that are responsible and in accordance with certain educational standards.

Critics of public education have always been quick to criticize teachers and schools that said, "Hey, we know what we're doing. Trust us," and they have a valid point. But I'm not sure, "Hey, trust the invisible hand. It would never let anything Really bad happen" is any better.

Malkus reports that Arizona has played with some exit exams, but he correctly notes that ultimately "without some mechanism for evaluating participating students' outcomes, determining whether the program is successful may be left in the eye of the beholder."

Malkus is hopeful about "the promise of school choice," and at the end of the day, I am not, particularly because choice these days is not really bothering to promise excellent education any more. The promise of school choice is now that there will be school choice. More varied and detailed and broken-up-into-bits choicier choice, which is really about lots of cool ways that vendors can finally gain access to that sweet sweet mountain of public education tax dollars.

Oh, and one other ESA question-- these are always computed based on current cost-per-pupil in a state. In ten years, what will they be? How will the amount of ESAs be adjusted, recomputed, altered, made to not simply shrink with inflation? Who will conduct those negotiations-- because I'm betting that will be part of some state-managed budget battles, and I can imagine a million ways that can end badly.

I appreciate that Malkus is asking some questions and not simply engaging in thoughtless boosterism, but I think the biggest central questions remain unanswered: "How does a choice system exist without eroding fundamental democracy and local control?" or "How does a choice system reconcile the desire for freedom from any constraints with a need for taxpayer accountability? or the biggest one of all being, "How would this system provide a better education for all students?"

Is PISA Data Useless?

Yes, if you're a regular reader, then you know I think it's rather useless anyway.

But in April this story dropped. Folks had begun a mild-tomedium freakout because the East Asian PISA math superpowers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc), the people whose program everyone else was trying to imitate, had seen their scores start to drop. 

But now Andreas Schleicher, the official in charge of Pisa, has said that this fall may not be due to a drop in the performance of these Asian powerhouses. He said he was looking into whether the decline could be explained by the fact that Pisa used computers for the main tests for the first time in 2015.

In other words, data that is clearly presented as “comparable” in the study may not be comparable at all.

Which means the whole longitudinal game of charting PISA scores over time could be ruined, all those nifty charts now meaningless.

There's another implication here as well. The Testocrats have been quietly assuming that taking a Big Standardized Test on a computer is exactly like taking it on paper. But what if that's not true? What if taking a math test involves not only math skills, but test-taking skills. And what if computer test-taking skills are not the same set of skills as pencil-and-paper test-taking skills?

What if the Big Standardized Tests aren't really measuring what they purport to measure at all, and the whole test-centered education model is built on a sham?

A Better PARCC/SBA Test Prep Program

You may recall the old SAT vocabulary lists. Dozens of test prep lists that promised to get you ready for the SAT because their creators had pored through and broken down dozens upon dozens of old SAT tests, and here they were-- the 50 or 100 or 500 words that most commonly appeared on the test.

Of course you remember these lists, because they totally worked. While the SAT allegedly tested reasoning, mostly what all those analogies and other nifty word puzzles tested was your vocabulary, and having a list of the most likely vocabulary on the test ahead of time was a great way to make your studying more direct and efficient. Cheating...? Well, that's quite a philosophical conundrum, isn't it-- if someone creates an artificial obstacle between you and a goal, and the obstacle is not only artificial, but rather unfair and designed mostly to serve their needs at your expense, is "cheating" even really a possibility? If the game is rigged and somebody else is forcing you to play it, do you have an ethical obligation to follow their rules to the letter?

But I digress.

The point is, Amplify is offering just that sort of test prep for the PARCC and SBA.

Amplify, you will recall, was going to be Rupert Murdoch's big shot at hoovering up some of those sweet sweet public education tax dollars. Instead, it limped its way to being bought by Joel Klein and other big whoopdie doo education privateers who had been brought in to run the place. Their most spectacular disaster was the Los Angeles ipad fiasco, but mostly they've been a company of high-rolling education amateurs.

So they've been doing their homework, including poring through and breaking down old PARRC and SBA reading tests.

These new-generation tests have always pretended to be two impossible things. 1) A test that is impervious to test prep, so don't even try, just go about regular educating stuff and we will accurately measure that. 2) A test of reading skills that are somehow divorced from any sort of content knowledge.

The second is a deeply impossible thing-- divorcing reading from content is like divorcing kissing from touching. It can't really be done, and so every reading test is inescapably a test of prior knowledge.

With that in mind, wouldn't it be helpful to know what prior knowledge would be helpful? Sure it would-- and the folks at Amplify know. They even have a nifty graphic:

There's your top ten content areas--  US History, Folk Tales, Human Biology, Historical Fiction, Contemporary Realistic Fiction, Classic Children's Fiction, Immigration, Astronomy and Space, Engineering, Animals & Ecology. But not sports. This is what your K-5 students should be reading about to get ready for the test.

Oh, and Amplify wants you to know one other thing:

We also found that students who had studied our K-5 Core Knowledge Language Arts^® (CKLA^™) curriculum would have prior knowledge relevant to more than 75% of passages reviewed on summative tests like PARCC and SBAC.

I'm sort of impressed by their honesty. No "CKLA provides for excellent development of language skills that will better prepare your students for college and career by meeting high standards etc etc blah blah blah." Instead, just a plain and simple "Buy our program. It's excellent test prep, because it teaches the content they're likely to be tested on."

It's not quite selling an early peek at the test, so I suppose it's not exactly cheating. It's just not exactly education, either.

Pennsylvania Recap (Call Your Legislator)

I don't usually do this, but it seems like a good moment to pause and gather up some of the more recent news from Pennsylvania, because it's becoming difficult to keep track of all the lousy ideas in Harrisburg right now. If you are in Pennsylvania, here's some food for thought for the next time you contact your elected representative (and that time should come early and often).

School Funding Emerges From Time Warp

Funding formula continues to be an issue. Last summer, we were starting to sort things out, but it remains to be seen if Governor Wolf and the GOP legislature can do a deal.

Testing Stutter Steps

The Keystones are currently paused, but that pause is just about done. Legislators need to be encouraged to push pause for, oh, forever in regards to using the lousy tests as graduation requirements. This should be an easy sell-- remember, the Keystones are norm-referenced ("graded on the curve" for civilians) which means that making them a graduation requirement absolutely guarantees that a bunch of Pennsylvanian students with passing report cards will be denied diplomas if Keystones are a grad requirement. Which legislators would like to have their names on that accomplishment?

Cutting Funding

We keep having stories like this, in which enterprising folks try to get schools taxes rolled back. Pay attention.

Erie May Close All High Schools

This piece is from a year ago, and things haven't gotten any better. Does your legislator really want to see public education ended? If not, what is he going to do about it?

Charter Costs

Before you call your legislator to tell him to keep charters from bleeding districts dry, check and see just how bad it is in your district (and look at how heavily lobbied Harrisburg is).

Future Ready Schools

Pennsylvania's plan for getting in line with ESSA. Take a look. See if you have some thoughts about how this mess could be improved.

Let's Arm Teachers

Some guys in Harrisburg think that what's really missing from schools is guns. This is a dumb idea. Tell your legislator so.

Bad Charter Reform Bill

I wrote about the first version of this bad bill last year, and it is back and still bad. It doesn't fix cyber charter funding and doesn't stop charters from being an unregulated drain on public tax dollars. Tell them to do better.

Remember That You Are Dealing with Really Bad Legislators Like This Guy

Brad Roae is about as anti-public school teacher as you can get. I wrote this piece about him last fall-- before he was re-elected, again. If you have to call him, be prepared for a less-than-warm reception.

Who the Hell Is Scott Wagner

Finally, start reading up on this guy, who wants to be the Scott Walker of PA. He has declared candidacy for Governor, and he would like to see teachers unions shut down, poor people left to starve, and public education replaced with businesses. Wagner is rich and ready and has already been doing the groundwork to help his run at the governor's office. On first glance, you are going to be inclined to dismiss him as a ridiculous cartoon. Don't. Get ready for a fight this fall, and if you're a Republican, educate yourself before the primary in a few weeks.

Did FCC Just Damage School Internet

In the wonky alphabet soup depths of policy, this thing happened in April-- the FCC decided to uncap BDS pricing, because free market competition.

Wires competing for space on free market pole

Business Data Services refers to the kind of bulk internet access sold by providers like Verizon and ATT to business and other institutional buyers. Like small businesses or hospitals or libraries or schools.

And while there is no limit on what providers can charge you for home internet, the BDS sector has always been highly regulated, based on the argument that schools and libraries and mom-and-pop businesses should not be priced out of the market.

The end of the cap allows service providers to charge whatever they think the market can bear (or even employ the time-honored practice of jacking up prices in order to drive away customers you don't want to serve). The cap removal is conditional-- it can only happen in counties where there is competition. Competition in this case is defined as "any other isp provider within a half mile of fifty percent of the buildings being served." Estimates are that about a third of the coountry will consequently stay under the old cap.

Some Democrats are not happy about this move by the FCC:

Many politicians have talked in recent months "about protecting our nation's small businesses -- the backbone of the American economy," said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat. "Yet it is these very businesses -- the mom-and-pop hardware store, the family-owned wireless provider, and the small rural hospital, that just drew the short straw."

Instead of looking out for "millions of little guys," the Republican majority at the FCC has sided with the interests of huge telecom providers, she added. Clyburn predicted "immediate price hikes," especially in rural areas.

"Just where does the buck stop? At the wallets of every American consumer," she said.

Can you guess who thinks this is a good idea?

"Price regulation—that is, the government setting the rates, terms, and conditions for special access services—is seductive," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, said. "Who can possibly resist the promise of forcing prices lower right now? But in reality, price regulation threatens competition and investment."

My emphasis. Yup. Just in case you missed that one in the flurry-ish wave of appointments, Trump put a former Verizon counsel in charge of the FCC. But before you get too mad(der) at Trump, note that one reason you may have missed this appointment is because Pai left Verizon in 2003, went to work at the Department of Justice for a few years, and then started working at the FCC in 2007. In 2011, Obama nominated him for the Republican commissioner spot on the FCC and the Senate approved him unanimously. So while Pai keeps getting "Trump-appointed" appended to his name, all Trump did this time was just continue a bipartisan institutional process that has been going on for a while. Now we have Pai, spearheading the attack on net neutrality and this BPS thing.

Will this ultimately make internet access more expensive for your school? Probably. Then again, the intense free market competition may drive your costs relentlessly down (if you are among the 24% of BDS customers in a two-server market). Because, see, price competition really kicks in when providers are free to charge more. Because... wait-- are we saying that because they weren't free to charge more before, they couldn't compete by charging less? I could swear that's not how the free market is actually supposed to work.

ICYMI: Wrapping Up April Edition (4/30)

Where did that month go? Here are some reads from last week. As always, I ask you to please amplify what speaks to you. "I wish I could write like that person," is what I often hear, and I feel you, but anybody and everybody can tweet, facebook, email and otherwise amplify those voices-- and if you don't push a writer's work out into the world, it doesn't matter if she wrote it. 

Deescalating School Reform Wars

John Thompson has been tireless in trying to build bridges in the school reform debates, and he continues that work with a thoughtful review of Rick Hess's new book.

Eight Questions About School Vouchers

That Betsy DeVos won't be able to answer (or would rather not)

The Untold History of Charter Schools

The "if you're only going to read one post on this list" post for the week. Like me, you probably have absorbed the Albert-Shanker-started-charters story. Rachel Cohen has done some actual research, and we're all a little smarter because of it.

When Anxiety Rules

A recently-minted NY teacher talks about what it's like to go through the EdTPA process (spoiler alert: not good).

Common Enemy

Jennifer Berkshire returns from her trip to Ohio with some serious insights about school reform in Trumplandia.

Quirk in PA Charter Law

Why are students with certain special needs the geese that lay the golden eggs in Pennsylvania's charter law? Here's a good explanation.

School Choice Profits on the Taxpayer's Dime

Carol Burris lays out the facts for Arizona on how their charter industry really works.

Desperately Searching for the Merit Pay Fairy

Jersey Jazzman continues his search for the fabled fairy of magical merit pay (spoiler alert: he fails again).

4th Best High School in New York Doesn't Exist

Yeah, about that US News great schools list...

"I Found a Jewel for You"

Nobody observes the world of littles like Teacher Tom.