Houston: Court Throws Out VAM

A while back, some Houston teachers backed by AFT took EVAAS (the Texas version of Value Added Measure) to court. It did not go well for reformsters.

Ding dong, indeed.

EVAAS is the VAM of choice in Houston. This is the system developed by William Sanders, an agricultural statistician who thought that a statistical model for modeling genetic and reproductive trends among cattle could be used to figure out how much value teachers were adding to students. The result was a system that nobody could really explain to anybody, but which spread like kudzu across the educational landscape because science! numbers! The explanation of the secret VAM sauce looks like this:

But I prefer this one, which is more accurate:

Experts came to testify, and laid out twelve major findings about the VAAS system:

1) Large-scale standardized tests have never been validated for this use.

2) When tested against another VAM system, EVAAS produced wildly different results.

3) EVAAS scores are highly volatile from one year to the next.

4) EVAAS overstates the precision of teachers' estimated impacts on growth 

5) Teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) and “highly mobile” students are substantially less likely to demonstrate added value

6) The number of students each teacher teaches (i.e., class size) also biases teachers’ value-added scores.

7) Ceiling effects are certainly an issue.

8) There are major validity issues with “artificial conflation.” (This is the phenomenon in which administrators feel forced to make their observation scores "align" with VAAS scores.)

9) Teaching-to-the-test is of perpetual concern. 

10) HISD is not adequately monitoring the EVAAS system. HISD was not even allowed to see or test the secret VAM sauce.

11) EVAAS lacks transparency.

12) Related, teachers lack opportunities to verify their own scores. 

US Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith agreed, saying that "high stakes employment decisions based on secret algorithms (are)incompatible with... due process" and the proper remedy was to overturn the policy. The Houston Federation of Teachers was pleased:

HFT President Zeph Capo: “With this decision, Houston should wipe clean the record of every teacher who was negatively evaluated. From here on, teacher evaluation systems should be developed with educators to ensure that they are fair, transparent and help inform instruction, not be used as a punitive tool.” 

What happens next? Well, personally, I hope my union here in Pennsylvania, where we use PVAAS (which is EVAAS with less E and more P), will call up that bunch of experts and march them into some state court to repeat the Houston performance.

Do teachers and schools need some form of accountability to parents, students, and the taxpayers who foot the bill? Absolutely. But that form of accountability needs to be real, and not some high-tone version of bouncing dice of a horny toad's back under a full moon. Let's get rid of this bogus (but highly profitable) tool and replace it with something useful. VAM is a big fat fake; not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he's not even the emperor.

Update: More details available here.

LeBron Opens Non-Charter School, Confuses Charter Fans

LeBron James is one of those millionaire sports stars who actually tries to do some good. In his home town of Akron, he has set up the LeBron James Family Foundation, a group that has been hugely active in the community.

In 2011, recognizing that real change would require a lifelong commitment rooted in research and executed with care, LeBron began to tackle the high school dropout rate in Akron and launched the I PROMISE Initiative. It’s more than a program, it’s a long-term commitment to the youth in this community. 

The foundation has done a great deal of good work, including an initiative to help the children and the families of the children who are behind by third grade, which is an admirable initiative and certainly far more useful than, say, passing a law that those children must stay in third grade until they can pass a standardized test. 

Now James is going to take a next step-- starting an I PROMISE school. And he's going to do it in conjunction with the Akron Public School system, the same system that he and his foundation have been working with all along.

That's right-- not a charter school.

This leaves Jamie Davies O'Leary... bemused. O'Leary is the Senior Ohio Policy Analyst for the Fordham Institute (which operates some charter schools in Ohio). O'Leary has also worked for the Ohio Council of Community Schools, one of the longest running charter school authorizers in Ohio, mostly as a communications (PR) person.

O'Leary lays down the James education history, and then starts into the bemused part.  Most folks at first assumed James was starting a charter, she reports. We'll have to take her word for it, but her reasoning, though incomplete, is impeccable:

That’s an understandable mistake, as celebrities and stars of all stripes have gotten in chartering in recent years, from Andre Agassi to P. Diddy to Pitbull and beyond. And why not, given that in most places, the charter model comes with huge advantages for philanthropists wanting to make a difference, among them the freedom from district red tape and teacher union contracts.

She doesn't mention that charters also have the huge advantage of bringing solid ROI and sheltering taxes, an excellent reason for edu-amateurs to invest some of their money in charters.

James' school plan sure sounds chartery to her. But "while the school won’t have the autonomy that most charter schools have, it also won’t be forced to navigate Ohio’s increasingly challenged charter landscape."

What makes the landscape so challenging? In Ohio, the wild west of charter schools? O'Leary says its the "double whammy of recovering from a long-held poor reputation and inhospitable policies for education entrepreneurs." Well, I'm not sure the poor reputation is exactly recovering, but then, why do Ohio charters have a poor reputation? Could it be they've done a craptastic job of educating students and being stewards of the taxpayers' money? And might that also be an explanation for why the state is actually toying with actual accountability and oversight? Challenging landscape, my left buttock. Ohio charters made an untidy soiled bed, and now they are sad about having to lie in it.

But O'Leary also wants to complain that charters get less funding; perhaps she's forgotten how we were all sold the idea that charters would be good for taxpayers because they would do more with less. Or the popular argument that "throwing more money" at schools is no help, anyway.

There's more about how tough charters have it, to which everyone working in public education in schools that have been denigrated and defunded by folks trying to drive traffic to charters-- well, we will just offer you some cheese to go with that whine.

But then O'Leary wraps up with an impressively disingenuous final paragraph:

Best wishes to LeBron in his endeavor, and to his overall partnership in Akron where historical performance data show there is tremendous need. I’m agnostic to school type: if innovation can spring up within traditional public school districts and deliver results for at-risk kids, then more power to them. At the same time, we must remain vigilant against over-regulation and wary of any climate wherein starting up a new charter school is about as likely as making a half-court buzzer beater.

In other words:

Good luck teaming up with Akron Schools, because we hear they really suck. And although I've worked in the charter business my entire career, I have no preference between charter and public schools. If public schools can be innovative and awesome (like we are in charters) then more power to them ("more power to them" joins "well, bless your heart" in the catalog of Ways Polite People Tell You To Go Jump in a Poisonous Lake). Also, "them" makes it clear that, despite my alleged agnosticism, I consider public schools "them" as opposed to "us." Meanwhile, on a completely other topic, let me just repeat that charter regulations are bad and we don't want them.

It's not that confusing. James decided to work within a system already in place, with educational experts who already work in the field, by setting up programs and a school that are designed to help children without any regard for enriching his own bank account. It's totally do-able-- and he did it by throwing money at the public system. I suppose if you thought the idea of improving education was to do it in a way that private individuals profited and took control of the system, then this would be a bit confusing. But if you thought the priority is supposed to be helping students, their families, and their communities-- well, then LeBron James' decisions make a great deal of sense.

Imagine if we took a similar approach in other public school districts, an approach of enriching and building up what we already have instead of creating other unconnected parallel private systems. Imagine that. Why, I bet we could even do it without waiting for a sports star to help out.

The Great Sorting

America has always been a land of contradictory impulses. Religious freedom! But not for those guys. Liberty for all! Except for slaves. Democracy! In which only white guys vote. Come to our country! But not you lot.

Two of our biggest promises have always been in tension, because America has always been the land of the Great Leveling, where all humans are created equal, and the Great Sorting, in which the best among us can rise to the top. The tension between the Great Leveling and the Great Sorting has worked itself out in different ways throughout our history, but I think that cultural whiplash we're feeling these days is a symptom of having fairly swiftly shifted from the ascendency of one to a temporary triumph of the other.

This is about education, but it's not just about education. Education is part of a larger shift in the country, and if for no reason than to clear my own head, I'm going to try to lay out one model of what's going on.

The New Federal Premise

The Obama Era premise was something along the lines of the idea that if we could assemble a bunch of technology and programs and standards and systems, we could make America a more perfect place, with equity and employment as far as the eye can see. That was baloney for a variety of reasons that I've spent a few thousand posts enumerating, but it opened the door to a lot of other folks who saw an opportunity, and while the Systems Guys may have moved on, the people who snuck in the door with them have hunkered down and made themselves right at home. But our foundation for many years now has been a wholehearted adoption of the Great Leveling.

One of the mysteries of the Trump administration is what could possibly be the unifying principle that runs from the Super Jesus Wing of Pence and DeVos to the Racist Nationalist Wing of Bannon to the Corporate Shilling Wing of Kushner as well as tying all of this off to the Power Grabbing GOP Wing of Congress. And all of it somehow tied off to the Narcissistic Infant Wing occupying the White House.

Well, I think the unifying premise, the closest thing to a guiding principle, is this: in this country, some people matter, and some people don't, and we should stop worrying and caring and most especially spending money about those who don't. We have entered rather abruptly another era of the Great Sorting.

The whole some-people-don't-matter thing is not a new principle in DC, but we're more used to seeing it expressed in a paternalistic idea that the Betters have an obligation to look out for the Lessers. That is now out the window. If you want health care or a nice school, well, you should have thought of that before you decided to be poor or non-white or Muslim or out of power or without a penis or less-than-effusive in your praise of the Beloved Leader. Even among believers in the Great Sorting, there's considerable difference of opinion about who the winners and losers should be-- but there is still agreement that a Great Sorting is needed.

The Great Sorting

We've been acting for a few decades as if the animating principle of this country is to float all boats, an impulse to equalize all citizens, to level the playing field, to create national equity.

But we have not all been singing from the same page of the American hymnal. Some of us are pretty sure that equity is not a good thing, that it is in fact an unnatural thing, and that some people should be sitting lower or higher than others, that society has been suffering from a whole bunch of uppity Lessers who have been climbing over their Betters, insolently grinding their heels into Better faces.

It's not that these folks don't believe in the Great Ladder, the American ideal of social mobility. If you're born poor or black or brown or female, it should still be possible for you to move up in society-- as long as you're the Right Kind of Person.

But the Great Leveling that brought us equal-ish rights and gay marriage and a black President and women in high office and a general infiltration of government by all the wrong sorts of people. And so it's necessary to sort people back into their proper places. And there are several ways to go about that.

Hobbling Government

Government has become the primary avenue for putting power in the hands of the Wrong Sort of People. Worse, as an instrument of the Great Leveling, it has become a means by which money is stolen away from the Right Sort of People and given to other people who simply don't deserve it. So government must be broken. When a bear is gnawing your leg, you don't try to reason with it or train it to be a well-behaved bear-- you just shoot the damned thing. The doctrine of Starve the Beast is about shooting the bear. If that fatally injures it, that's okay. The People Who Matter will be fine, and the people who will not be fine are the ones that don't matter.

The Invisible Hand

To enable the Great Sorting, we must also unleash the invisible hand of the Free Market. The Free Market is nature (and God's) way of sorting the deserving form the undeserving. Those who flinch or try to undo the Hand's work are weak, and working against nature's laws.

Money and power are not the result of some sort of human-built system of cheating and self-serving. Money and power are nature's way of keeping score, and if you have a great deal of both, it is most likely that you deserve them because you are one of the Betters (though it is sign of our broken system that people who are clearly undeserving, like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, somehow end up rich, too).

If you want excellent health care and great schools and a police force that treats you well and access to Nice Things, well, then, be a good person, the kind of person who doesn't deserve to be poor. That's how the world is supposed to work, by sorting out the deserving from the undeserving and rewarding them accordingly. If we just let the invisible hand work, everything will be okay-- and by "okay," we mean "people will get as much or as little as they deserve."

Privatization

Another way to get power away from the corrupted-by-dreams-of-equity government and back into invisible hand  is by privatizing everything. Don't let government run anything that can be run by private companies. This works on several levels.

Privatization puts society's functions under the control of people who have proven their worth by becoming rich and powerful, so it's in tune with the Great Sorting. It also disempowers the government, which gives too much power to the wrong people.

Privatization also works because it directs the reward, the money and power, to the people who deserve it instead of into the black hole of government. And it circumvents democracy, which is a corrupted process because too many of the Wrong People get a vote, often at the direction of evil, unnatural groups like unions and the Democratic Party, whose whole purpose is to make themselves powerful by an unnatural redirection of power and money to people who don't deserve it. Proponents of the Great Sorting rarely say it out loud, but they are pretty sure that democracy is a failed system. But you can't be overtly anti-democracy in America, so we'll just have to settle for finding ways to take the vote away from people who don't deserve it and would use it incorrectly.

Two Americas

People keep pointing out that we have created two Americas-- one for the privileged, and one of for the poor-- to which proponents of the Great Sorting say, quietly, "Well, duh. Everything that's wrong with this country happened because you fools tried to mush the multiple Americas together. Everything worked so much better when everyone stayed in their own place, in their own part of town, on their own side of the tracks."

In Betters America, people can have whatever they can afford, from health care to houses to education. In fact, the battle over Obamacare is highly instructive, because it has stripped bare a model that is not just applied to insurance.

The idea behind the individual mandate is a larger version of the basic idea of insurance-- everyone pays into the pot, and that way there's enough money to cover whatever disasters come up for some people. But that looks pretty clearly like the residents of Betters America paying for the health care of Lessers America, and they don't much like that idea. But that idea is also how we do things like roads, postal delivery, and education. Everyone pays school taxes, and there's enough money in the pot so that even Lessers America can have nice schools. But the Great Sorting supports another idea-- you pay for your own stuff and you get what you can afford, because what you can afford is a pretty good measure of what you deserve, and what your Betters deserve is to not have their money stolen by the government to pay for services for people who haven't earned and don't deserve them.

It is no coincidence that a Big Wall is one of the potent political images of our time. The Great Sorting is all about separating people and separating the resources that go to them. Walls are going up all over this country.

Freedom Isn't

The Great Sorting comes with its own new definition of freedom. People need to be free to not be able to afford health care. People need to be free to not have job security or union protection. People need to be free to not have a decent school available and willing to take them. And I'm not really free to exercise my religion unless I can discriminate against people who I think deserve it.

All of these freedoms have to do with being free to operate according to the rules of the Great Sorting, which is that winners must win and losers must lose. It is a bizarre new meaning of freedom, but it is consistent. Lessers and losers must be free to get what they truly deserve, which is not much. And Betters must be free to avoid supporting a Leveling system that steals their money in order to violate the natural order of things.

The Education Implications

Viewed through the lens of privatization, lots of ed reform makes sense. Common Core was an attempt to privatize the standards behind public education, and as such served the purpose of helping privatize other portions as well. Test-driven accountability (tied originally to Common Core but now with a life of its own) is a way to privatize the measure of education quality.

And school choice is also about privatizing and sorting.

The tell is that nowhere among choice fans do we find anyone calling for districts to open more public schools within the district (which would, of course, create the system where choice was most easily exercised). Nor do we hear calls for public schools to offer greater varieties of programs. No, choice invariably means "offer more privately run, less regulated options."

"Government schools" are schools that have been ruined, excessively infected with the Great Leveling. "They give participation trophies, and grades have been inflated, and every special snowflake has to be given some feel-good medal," is a complaint that means "Schools don't even sort people into winners and losers any more." The Great Sorting demands winners and losers.

Education has been impervious to privatization for too long, and too much money has been left on the table, tied up in regulations and cemented to the Great Leveling by people like evil unions and Democrats, and those strings need to be cut so that the invisible hand can be free to sort the market into winners and losers-- both the vendors and the consumers. This is not a business proposition-- it is a moral imperative. Choice fans used to try to sell choice by talking about educational benefits, but nowadays they simply argue choice for its own sake.

Parents should be free to choose an education for their child in the same way they are free to choose a car for their family-- free to choose from whatever choices the market and their own resources allow them. More importantly (but less vocally argued), vendors should be free to compete for whatever part of the market they think will be most rewarding. The ones who make the best choices will be rewarded by money-- points-- that attest to their Betterness. Any regulation interferes with a full, natural Great Sorting.

Super Choice and Super Sorting

The choice market has moved beyond simply arguing for privately operated schools. The real forward thinkers see an end to school entirely. Here's your education voucher; maybe a nice plastic debit card, or some sort of edu-credits. Now you can log onto an amazon-like education vending site and select the courses and activities that you want for your child, who can then log on and let the artificial intelligence guide your child through modules on the way to a calculus achievement badge or a basket weaving certification.

This kind of cyber-driven software based education not only provides basic "personalized" or "competency based" education, but because it constantly collects and stores data, it is a fantastic tool for the Great Sorting. We will know how to categorize your child literally before you know it.

Teachers will not really be needed, and those that are employed here and there will more accurately understand their place as Lessers. Teaching will be simple content delivery, a job for a few years and not a lifelong career.

Private schools and higher-quality education will still exist, but only for people who have proven they deserve such things by being able to afford them. And as we are increasingly sorted and separated, there will be increasingly less demand that any of us have to pay for the education (or health care or safety) of Those People. Underfunded public school and a two-year community college are good enough for Those People, and they will both reflect and re-inforce the sorting.

Sorting the Sorters

As Americans, we are all at least a tiny bit mixed. We believe, mostly, that a human being is worth less just because of her parents. We believe, mostly, that people who are lazy and unwilling to get off their ass don't deserve to have everyone else pay their way through life. But it's how much of one or the other that makes a difference. I suspect that this model is also a way to describe the great cultural divide we currently face-- each group sees their vision as a morally correct one, and so Those Guys Over There are not just wrong, but bad.

And it's also worth noting that I have grossly oversimplified things here, that there are good and decent people who support some of the features of the Great Sorting for good and sincere reasons. Working through those details would make this post roughly the length of a book, and it's already too long.

It comes back to the notion that some people matter, and some people don't. The notion that there are winners and losers and trying to interfere with that sorting goes against nature. It's the worldview that makes it okay to mock and abuse people for thinking it's wrong for American babies to die just because their parents are poor. It's the worldview that says, "I've got mine Jack," and I have no obligation to help you, because if you deserved help, you wouldn't need help.

There are lots of mini-arguments to be had about many features of the Great Sorting, but I just wanted to see if I could spin out a coherent big picture view of what's happening. We can argue about the right and wrong of all this another day.

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.