Here's some reading from the week. Share what you like. Remember, everyone can be an amplifier.
Why Would School Choice Improve Outcomes
Frederik DeBoer offers a spirited and snappy takedown of choice, including, among other many fine lines, this one: There’s no secret book titled “Actually Good Pedagogy” that only charter schools get to buy.
Education Is an End In Itself, Not a Preparation for the Workplace
If you somehow missed this when it was flying around sparking all sorts of conversations, here it is.
You're Not Going To Believe
Not about education exactly, except it totally is. The Oatmeal, one of the internet's finest internet comics, takes on the Backfire Effect and looks at how we resist certain types of information.
The Broken Promises of New York City Schools
How New York's attempt to use choice to open up top schools for students in poor neighborhoods has just not done the job.
Can We Trust Policymakers To Make Good Decisions for Schools
Nancy Flanagan looks at policymakers' sad track record on delivering on good policy ideas.
Big News From Houston
There were not one, but two big decisions this week in Texas courts. Together they seriously cut support out from under the whole notion of using student test scores to evaluate teachers. Read the above link to Vamboozled first, then read about the second decision.
School Choice-- Addressing Safety
Russ Walsh looks at the newest issue coming to the fore of choice-charter discussions-- safety.
Corporate Education Reform
Jacobin magazine holds up Dwight Evans as one more example of why Democrats are not necessarily any more trustworthy than the GOP when it comes to school reform
Where Have All the Black Teachers Gone
Jennifer Berkshire, Jack Schneider, and guest Terrenda White talk about the answer to this important question in the latest edition of the podcast Have You Heard.
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Saturday, May 6, 2017
PA: Meet Scott Wagner
If you don't know Scott Wagner yet, you soon will. Wagner has mounted a loud, burly campaign for governor in Pennsylvania. And it is not good news for either educators nor other working folks.
Wagner's political career started recently and fairly spectacularly. After PA Senator Mike Waugh resigned, Wagner threw his hat in the ring and was boxed out by the GOP establishment in PA. So Wagner went up against the GOP nominee and the Democratic nominee in a special election to fill the seat. And he beat them both, as a write-in. Not just beat them, but clobbered them with very nearly more votes than the two other candidates combined (with only 17% of the electorate voting-- the first lesson of the current political silly season in America is that people really need to get off their asses and vote).
Wagner is 60-ish, a successful businessman who runs both a garbage and a trucking company. He did not get to be a millionaire by being shy or humble; he announces himself not by expressing hope or intention to become governor, but declaring he will be the next governor of Pennsylvania.
Wagner has opinions about many things. He believes, for instance, that one likely cause of global warming is that the earth is getting closer to the sun every year. He also allows for the possibility that all these human bodies on the planet are giving off enough heat to raise the global temperature.
Wagner believes that the government in Harrisburg is disconnected from the real world, and in fact Wagner's frequent invocation of the "real world" is one the recognizable traits of the businessman-turned-legislator. The only real world, of course, is the one he lives in, where strong, rich men should not have to deal with government regulations or workers unions. Here he is explaining why the minimum raise is just fine and what we need are lazy people to pull up their pants and take the jobs they're offered.
Wagner has some thoughts about how to fix schools in Pennsylvania, based on some fairly simple understandings of the situation. Short answer: it's all the union's fault.
Every time your property taxes go up it is not because the cost to educate a student has increased. It is because the cost of health benefits have gone up, pension costs have increased, or union-negotiated salary increases have gone into effect. None of these things benefit students.
It's this kind of pronouncement that suggests that Wagner is either a dope or a liar. Pennsylvania pension costs have in fact ballooned, primarily because our legislature made bad plans and bad investments that were upended by the crash of 2008. And if you don't see the connection between what you pay teachers and what teachers you have in a position to benefit students, well-- you have a problem.
Wagner does see some sort of connection. Sign him up for merit pay:
There are teachers that will exceed expectations while teaching a classroom of 100 of the toughest-to-teach students. There are also teachers that would struggle to teach just one student at a time. I want the first teacher to make a small fortune, and I want the second teacher to find a new career that is better suited for him or her.
Sign him up also for ending tenure and seniority, creating "contract transparency," as well as establishing an Achievement School District (even though the OG ASD had a head start on all the rest and is still failing).
The "Fix Pennsylvania's Education System" portion of his campaign page uses politely coded language.
He is all in for school choice so that parents can have "their hard-earned tax dollars follow their child," which convenient overlooks the fact that school choice also means that their neighbor's hard-earned tax dollars will also follow the child, but nobody gets an accounting of where the tax dollars go. Wagner does anticipate this by calling for an accountability system that will be applied to all schools receiving public tax dollars so that all can be compared, except that no such system exists. I'm also wondering-- if Education Tax Credits are in the mix, does their use of private tax-exempt contributions to third party players mean that all the laundering makes them not-public dollars, thereby exempting all those schools from Wagner's system?
We must ensure that are our teachers are given an environment in which they can thrive. This means ensuring that good teachers are rewarded and given opportunities to grow, and that teachers that fail to meet the high standard that the vocation requires are removed from the system.
That means getting rid of unions and job security and regular pay scales.
And Wagner knows the basic playbook-- cut money for school districts, and then call them bad names for suffering from low funding. Wagner called the Erie schools "disgusting," even though he had helped slash their funding in the first place.
Wagner is, in fact, promising to be a governor in the Scott Walker mold. Wagner actually got to introduce Walker two summers ago at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference.
"Nobody has been attacked more for defending our fiscal conservative principles than Governor Walker,” he continued. “Public-sector unions and liberal special interests have tried to derail his agenda time-and-time again, and each time Governor Walker has won and delivered for taxpayers.”
This being attacked business is part of the Wagner brand. Like Walker and Trump, Wagner sells himself by the people voters can piss off by voting for him. This creates a bit of a challenge for groups that want to oppose him, because his base is going to eat that stuff up. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf already has a PAC up and running, and it is already taking shots at Wagner. All that does is give Wagner another chance to use the phrase "the governor and his union allies." Wagner's temper tantrum/borderline assault on an opposition photographer earned him a viral video looking tough and some Fox news coverage talking smack at George Soros.
His message is, at this point, a familiar one-- elect me and you will really stick it to Those People. My fear is that we'll get a Walker and Trump rerun. Wagner will do something outrageous, his opponents will holler, "Look! See that! Surely that disqualifies him!" and his supporters will just cheer, both for whatever he did AND for his opposition's freak out.
Wagner is bad news for Pennsylvania and really bad news for public education. The road to the governor's election is still a long one, but defenders of public education in Pennsylvania cannot afford to fall asleep at the wheel.
 |
| "PSEA-- I intend to kick your ass!" |
Wagner's political career started recently and fairly spectacularly. After PA Senator Mike Waugh resigned, Wagner threw his hat in the ring and was boxed out by the GOP establishment in PA. So Wagner went up against the GOP nominee and the Democratic nominee in a special election to fill the seat. And he beat them both, as a write-in. Not just beat them, but clobbered them with very nearly more votes than the two other candidates combined (with only 17% of the electorate voting-- the first lesson of the current political silly season in America is that people really need to get off their asses and vote).
Wagner is 60-ish, a successful businessman who runs both a garbage and a trucking company. He did not get to be a millionaire by being shy or humble; he announces himself not by expressing hope or intention to become governor, but declaring he will be the next governor of Pennsylvania.
Wagner has opinions about many things. He believes, for instance, that one likely cause of global warming is that the earth is getting closer to the sun every year. He also allows for the possibility that all these human bodies on the planet are giving off enough heat to raise the global temperature.
Wagner believes that the government in Harrisburg is disconnected from the real world, and in fact Wagner's frequent invocation of the "real world" is one the recognizable traits of the businessman-turned-legislator. The only real world, of course, is the one he lives in, where strong, rich men should not have to deal with government regulations or workers unions. Here he is explaining why the minimum raise is just fine and what we need are lazy people to pull up their pants and take the jobs they're offered.
Wagner has some thoughts about how to fix schools in Pennsylvania, based on some fairly simple understandings of the situation. Short answer: it's all the union's fault.
Every time your property taxes go up it is not because the cost to educate a student has increased. It is because the cost of health benefits have gone up, pension costs have increased, or union-negotiated salary increases have gone into effect. None of these things benefit students.
It's this kind of pronouncement that suggests that Wagner is either a dope or a liar. Pennsylvania pension costs have in fact ballooned, primarily because our legislature made bad plans and bad investments that were upended by the crash of 2008. And if you don't see the connection between what you pay teachers and what teachers you have in a position to benefit students, well-- you have a problem.
Wagner does see some sort of connection. Sign him up for merit pay:
There are teachers that will exceed expectations while teaching a classroom of 100 of the toughest-to-teach students. There are also teachers that would struggle to teach just one student at a time. I want the first teacher to make a small fortune, and I want the second teacher to find a new career that is better suited for him or her.
Sign him up also for ending tenure and seniority, creating "contract transparency," as well as establishing an Achievement School District (even though the OG ASD had a head start on all the rest and is still failing).
The "Fix Pennsylvania's Education System" portion of his campaign page uses politely coded language.
He is all in for school choice so that parents can have "their hard-earned tax dollars follow their child," which convenient overlooks the fact that school choice also means that their neighbor's hard-earned tax dollars will also follow the child, but nobody gets an accounting of where the tax dollars go. Wagner does anticipate this by calling for an accountability system that will be applied to all schools receiving public tax dollars so that all can be compared, except that no such system exists. I'm also wondering-- if Education Tax Credits are in the mix, does their use of private tax-exempt contributions to third party players mean that all the laundering makes them not-public dollars, thereby exempting all those schools from Wagner's system?
We must ensure that are our teachers are given an environment in which they can thrive. This means ensuring that good teachers are rewarded and given opportunities to grow, and that teachers that fail to meet the high standard that the vocation requires are removed from the system.
That means getting rid of unions and job security and regular pay scales.
And Wagner knows the basic playbook-- cut money for school districts, and then call them bad names for suffering from low funding. Wagner called the Erie schools "disgusting," even though he had helped slash their funding in the first place.
Wagner is, in fact, promising to be a governor in the Scott Walker mold. Wagner actually got to introduce Walker two summers ago at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference.
"Nobody has been attacked more for defending our fiscal conservative principles than Governor Walker,” he continued. “Public-sector unions and liberal special interests have tried to derail his agenda time-and-time again, and each time Governor Walker has won and delivered for taxpayers.”
This being attacked business is part of the Wagner brand. Like Walker and Trump, Wagner sells himself by the people voters can piss off by voting for him. This creates a bit of a challenge for groups that want to oppose him, because his base is going to eat that stuff up. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf already has a PAC up and running, and it is already taking shots at Wagner. All that does is give Wagner another chance to use the phrase "the governor and his union allies." Wagner's temper tantrum/borderline assault on an opposition photographer earned him a viral video looking tough and some Fox news coverage talking smack at George Soros.
His message is, at this point, a familiar one-- elect me and you will really stick it to Those People. My fear is that we'll get a Walker and Trump rerun. Wagner will do something outrageous, his opponents will holler, "Look! See that! Surely that disqualifies him!" and his supporters will just cheer, both for whatever he did AND for his opposition's freak out.
Wagner is bad news for Pennsylvania and really bad news for public education. The road to the governor's election is still a long one, but defenders of public education in Pennsylvania cannot afford to fall asleep at the wheel.
Charters and the Front Line
Here's one of the things that really bugs me about the charter school industry.
Public schools are on the front lines of multiple battles, and have been for decades, or possibly forever. Public schools work against ignorance and disinterest. They struggle with the issues of disintegrating families and families that appear whole but are dysfunctional. Public schools struggle against the parts of their local culture that don't support education (Who needs all that book learnin' anyway).
And while supporters of public ed are often accused to claiming that public schools are perfect and peachy, we are largely aware that they are no such thing. Institutional inertia, consistent underfunding, bad management, steady resistance from the very people who are supposed to be allies and leaders-- all of these create a myriad of problems in the public system.
Calling it a war zone is an overstatement, but it's my metaphor of the day. Public schools are France in 1916, a struggling, difficult battle that seems almost surreal in its endless confusion and waste.
But if public schools are fighting on the front lines of 1916, then charter schools are comfy barracks set up in Canada, far away from the front.
Now, I totally why parents would want their children stationed in Canada, safe and sound and securely distant from the fighting in Europe. I understand why, as a parent, one would want to see one's child as far away as possible from the worst struggling, the biggest dangers, the worst privations. I don't fault the parents who are able to choose Canada and do so.
Why I do object to is the charter schools, sitting Canada with barracks full of select troops, far away from the fighting, making announcements along the lines of "We have discovered how to end conflict" or "Hooray! We have managed to end the war!"
Neither of those things are true. The war is still grinding on-- you have just managed to move yourself, and some select individuals, away from the trouble. You haven't solved anything, don't know any secrets, have nothing to teach anyone about how to win the battle. You've just left other folks to fill the front lines (and on your way out, you've taken with you crucial supplies that the folks on the front line need). Just because you've dug yourself a comfortable hole and filled it with carefully-selected furnishings, that doesn't mean you're actually fighting in the trenches.
Public schools are on the front lines of multiple battles, and have been for decades, or possibly forever. Public schools work against ignorance and disinterest. They struggle with the issues of disintegrating families and families that appear whole but are dysfunctional. Public schools struggle against the parts of their local culture that don't support education (Who needs all that book learnin' anyway).
And while supporters of public ed are often accused to claiming that public schools are perfect and peachy, we are largely aware that they are no such thing. Institutional inertia, consistent underfunding, bad management, steady resistance from the very people who are supposed to be allies and leaders-- all of these create a myriad of problems in the public system.
Calling it a war zone is an overstatement, but it's my metaphor of the day. Public schools are France in 1916, a struggling, difficult battle that seems almost surreal in its endless confusion and waste.
But if public schools are fighting on the front lines of 1916, then charter schools are comfy barracks set up in Canada, far away from the front.
Now, I totally why parents would want their children stationed in Canada, safe and sound and securely distant from the fighting in Europe. I understand why, as a parent, one would want to see one's child as far away as possible from the worst struggling, the biggest dangers, the worst privations. I don't fault the parents who are able to choose Canada and do so.
Why I do object to is the charter schools, sitting Canada with barracks full of select troops, far away from the fighting, making announcements along the lines of "We have discovered how to end conflict" or "Hooray! We have managed to end the war!"
Neither of those things are true. The war is still grinding on-- you have just managed to move yourself, and some select individuals, away from the trouble. You haven't solved anything, don't know any secrets, have nothing to teach anyone about how to win the battle. You've just left other folks to fill the front lines (and on your way out, you've taken with you crucial supplies that the folks on the front line need). Just because you've dug yourself a comfortable hole and filled it with carefully-selected furnishings, that doesn't mean you're actually fighting in the trenches.
Friday, May 5, 2017
AZ: Dear John Allen: Bite Me
Arizona is struggling with a teacher "shortage," which is only a "shortage" if you believe that my inability to buy a Porsche for $14.99 is a sign of an automobile shortage. What Arizona is suffering from-- what many locales are suffering from-- is an unwillingness to make the terms of employment attractive enough to get teachers to work in their system. Arizona's median teacher pay ranks 50th in the US. Average pay is about $41K, with starting salaries averaging about $10,000 less. Come on, people! Basic free market economics here!
And I'll apologize in advance, because while I'm usually a master of nuance and thoughtful opposition, some people and their ideas call for a pithier response.
Some folks have suggested that one sign of the low level of teacher pay in Arizona is the number of teachers who have a second job. But here comes Arizona House GOP Leader John Allen to explain what's really going on:
“They’re making it out as if anybody who has a second job is struggling. That’s not why many people take a second job,” Allen said. “They want to increase their lifestyles. They want to improve themselves. They want to pay for a boat. They want a bigger house. They work hard to provide themselves with a better lifestyle. Not everyone who takes a second job does it because they’re borderline poverty.”
Yessireebob-- Arizona teachers are picking up those extra jobs so they can afford that boat, the summer home in the Hamptons, that second BMW. In no way are they working a second job for non-luxuries like food and clothing for their families. Thank you, John Allen, for clarifying that.
Who is this guy? John Allen has been in Arizona politics, on and off, since 2001. This is actually his third term-- in his third district. He's been a fan of Empowerment Scholarships (yet another way to put lipstick on the school voucher pig) and he was, notably, one of the GOP legislators who sued Republican Governor Jan Brewer in order to roll back the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. Because making health care available to more poor residents of Arizona would be a Bad Thing.
He's been on the English-only side of language debates about education in Arizona (just immerse them furriners in English all the time, and they'll learn to speak Merican right and proper). He's received a regular 82% rating from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch Brothers special political agitation group, and a big fat 100% from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a group that pretends to be a lobbying organization for small business, but has been financed with some big dark money. And he wants you to know that he wrote a bill to use the National Guard to close the border. He's a member of the Scottsdale Bible Church. His profession (most Arizona legislators have one) is a dealer in collector cars. So yes. This guy is a conservative Tea Party used car dealer.
This whole discussion was part of a debate about SB1042, a bill that would let anyone with “expertise in a content area or subject matter" teach, complete with waiver of the competency test. Basically, superintendents would be free to hire anyone they felt like teaching.
Arizona Capital Times gave Allen a chance to walk back his boat comment, but it appears he wasn't all that interested in doing so.
When our reporter noted that teachers, who often start with salaries in the $30,000 range, probably aren’t taking second jobs to buy boats, Allen replied that many people choose to be teachers knowing the pay situation and that they’ll have to take a second job to make ends meet.
So, teachers knew the pay would suck and they'd need a second job. What are they bitching about? And also, why aren't more teachers coming to work in Arizona? And won't it make it so much more attractive to know that they'll be working side by side with fake teachers who just kind of wandered in off the street, because if there's anything more awesome than doing a hard jobk for peanuts, it's doing your job for peanuts and then doing somebody else's job, too.
I do not teach in Arizona (and I can't imagine I ever will). I don't have family or friends there. So I think I can bring a completely unbiased and disinterested eye to this situation. But as I said-- some positions just call for a clear, direct, graceless response. So believe me-- there's nothing personal when I offer this message, though I think I speak for many Arizona teachers when I say--
Dear John Allen. Bite me.
And I'll apologize in advance, because while I'm usually a master of nuance and thoughtful opposition, some people and their ideas call for a pithier response.
 |
| This guy. Serioously. |
Some folks have suggested that one sign of the low level of teacher pay in Arizona is the number of teachers who have a second job. But here comes Arizona House GOP Leader John Allen to explain what's really going on:
“They’re making it out as if anybody who has a second job is struggling. That’s not why many people take a second job,” Allen said. “They want to increase their lifestyles. They want to improve themselves. They want to pay for a boat. They want a bigger house. They work hard to provide themselves with a better lifestyle. Not everyone who takes a second job does it because they’re borderline poverty.”
Yessireebob-- Arizona teachers are picking up those extra jobs so they can afford that boat, the summer home in the Hamptons, that second BMW. In no way are they working a second job for non-luxuries like food and clothing for their families. Thank you, John Allen, for clarifying that.
Who is this guy? John Allen has been in Arizona politics, on and off, since 2001. This is actually his third term-- in his third district. He's been a fan of Empowerment Scholarships (yet another way to put lipstick on the school voucher pig) and he was, notably, one of the GOP legislators who sued Republican Governor Jan Brewer in order to roll back the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. Because making health care available to more poor residents of Arizona would be a Bad Thing.
He's been on the English-only side of language debates about education in Arizona (just immerse them furriners in English all the time, and they'll learn to speak Merican right and proper). He's received a regular 82% rating from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch Brothers special political agitation group, and a big fat 100% from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a group that pretends to be a lobbying organization for small business, but has been financed with some big dark money. And he wants you to know that he wrote a bill to use the National Guard to close the border. He's a member of the Scottsdale Bible Church. His profession (most Arizona legislators have one) is a dealer in collector cars. So yes. This guy is a conservative Tea Party used car dealer.
This whole discussion was part of a debate about SB1042, a bill that would let anyone with “expertise in a content area or subject matter" teach, complete with waiver of the competency test. Basically, superintendents would be free to hire anyone they felt like teaching.
Arizona Capital Times gave Allen a chance to walk back his boat comment, but it appears he wasn't all that interested in doing so.
When our reporter noted that teachers, who often start with salaries in the $30,000 range, probably aren’t taking second jobs to buy boats, Allen replied that many people choose to be teachers knowing the pay situation and that they’ll have to take a second job to make ends meet.
So, teachers knew the pay would suck and they'd need a second job. What are they bitching about? And also, why aren't more teachers coming to work in Arizona? And won't it make it so much more attractive to know that they'll be working side by side with fake teachers who just kind of wandered in off the street, because if there's anything more awesome than doing a hard jobk for peanuts, it's doing your job for peanuts and then doing somebody else's job, too.
I do not teach in Arizona (and I can't imagine I ever will). I don't have family or friends there. So I think I can bring a completely unbiased and disinterested eye to this situation. But as I said-- some positions just call for a clear, direct, graceless response. So believe me-- there's nothing personal when I offer this message, though I think I speak for many Arizona teachers when I say--
Dear John Allen. Bite me.
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.
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.
 |
| 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.
Thursday, May 4, 2017
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.
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.
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.
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