(Not) A New Conversation

Phyllis Lockett took to Huffington Post last week to call for a New Conversation, which-- okay, can we stop calling for new conversations? Because they're hardly ever new and often they are barely conversations, and we have had many of these calls and maybe we should just finish one of our old conversations instead of dropping them to start new ones like an easily-distracted party guest.

Lockett is listed as a CEO without indicating "of what,"  a piece of fairly critical information in this context. Lockett used to be CEO of New Schools for Chicago, which used to be Renaissance, a private turnaround charter school investment launch group. As NSFC chief, Lockett was pretty vocal about the awfulness of failing public schools. After NSFC, Lockett has moved on to be CEO of LEAP Innovations. LEAP's mission is to "discover, pilot and scale personalized learning technologies and innovation practices in the classroom." They claim to be a "national hub" for an "ecosystem" of "education innovators, digital entrepreneurs, and thought leaders."

So given that, can we guess what Lockett's "new conversation" is going to look like?

She opens by noting that reform is kind of stale, what with the standards movement and charters being old, and so we need something fresh, because, I guess, we're not so much interested in effectiveness as we are in freshness?

What we really need is a new conversation that begins with what our children want and need and empowers them to pursue their interests. There’s a name for it—personalized learning–and it’s based on the common sense idea that our schools should meet every child where they are and help them get where they want to go.

So, another pitch for personalized learning. Who would have expected that, from a woman who currently earns her living promoting personalized learning. But I support public education and that's where I make my (considerably more modest) living. Maybe she 's just in the field because she really believes it, and she's not just pushing a product. Maybe her argument really is new and not just the same old PL boilerplate. Or maybe by reading her new boilerplate, we can get a sense of what the new sales pitch is going to be. Let's see. Let's move down through her pitch and see if it's made out of valid points.

First, she notes that no two children enter a classroom at the same point, and that teachers have to teach to the middle in their classroom. Half-true-- students do enter at different points, but teachers with a good handle on instructional design can still meet students where those students are.

Next, this:

The personalization of learning allows students to demonstrate competency as soon as they’re ready – and once they do so, let them go on to achieve higher.

Bzzzt. Wrong. The notion that education is simply demonstrating a series of competencies is fundamental to Personalized Learning (I will use capital to distinguish between personalized learning the education idea and Personalized Learning the product for sale), and it is one of PL's fundamental flaws. Demonstrating a series of competencies is not education-- it's training. And it's not even good training, because it breaks down tasks into simple bits and then assumes that a quick assessment task (which may or may not actually reflect the competence it claims to measure) means that competency is now mastered. I earned my "multiply by six" badge last year, so clearly I never need to do any more work on multiplying by six ever again.

Gone are the days when it was enough for students to download information from a textbook into their brains.

Well, those days have been mostly gone for decades, if I understand what she means by "downloading" from a textbook into a brain. Of, course, maybe she just means "reading," in which case, yeah, we still do that. We think there's some utility to it. And all of this begs the question of what, exactly, is different about asking students to download information from a computer screen.

There's a Montessori quote. PL folks like Montessori even though their entire philosophy is anti-Montessori. The quote Pickett uses here is the one about "follow the child, they will show you what they need to do..." but PL's philosophy is "use computer software to tell the child what to do next." It is not child-centered; it is software centered. Do you want to argue that the software is child centered? How can that be-- the software was written by humans, and those humans have never even met the children who are now subject to the software's plans and limitations. There can be no child-centered system that does not take the time to meet the child.

But Pickett will continue on this idea of "let the child lead" which is manifestly not what a PL program does. It lets the software lead.

Of course, students can’t do it alone. They need teachers and mentors to co-design their learning experience so that it covers a range of topics and subject matter. Done well, personalized learning empowers great teachers to make dynamic adjustments based on each student’s skills, curiosity, and goals.

Nope. If the classroom is truly teacher-directed and child-centered, then your PL software is really just a computer bank of resources, which is fine, but don't hand me a hammer and tell me you have now taken a bold new step in architectural design. Pickett is of course being generous here-- many PL advocates believe the teacher's role is basic monitoring, and not anything resembling teaching at all.

Pickett nods to Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) which are a great example of how we can provide everything from a personalized learning experience for students all the way to a series of go-through-motions paperwork for teachers and parents.

Pickett winds up with a one-two punch of "Hey, the world is changing and we must adapt and change, too" leading right into "Shiny pretty future but sometimes the education system doesn't like to buy my product try new things and I hope this will be different."

Bottom line: Pickett is not offering a conversation. There's no "Let's hear from teachers what they think would be a good idea to pursue or not." And there is nothing new. This is just plain old "We have a new product that we would like you to believe will help educate students, so would you give us some money for it, please."

This is what to watch for when a Personalized Learning advocate comes your way-- not a new conversation about education, but an old sales pitch.

NC: Millions More for Vouchers

Just found this in the budget. Looks like the plan is to dramatically increase vouchers for private school over the next decade. pic.twitter.com/mTFUITob0u

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) May 11, 2017

Jeff Jackson is a Democratic senator in North Carolina whose fifteen minutes came in 2015 when he was the only legislator to show up for work on a snow day. 

What he "just found" was not really a secret. Back in February, reporters were noting that the GOP legislature was planning to triple voucher money (NC calls them "opportunity scholarships" as in "the opportunity for people to make a ton of money pretending to educate students") from $45 million to $145 million.

The proposed increase is just one more point of contention between the new Democratic governor and the GOP's straight-out-of-the-19th-century legislature. Debate has highlighted some of the standard pro-voucher arguments that we can all expect to be hearing.

Expect, for instance, to hear about the 2002 Supreme Court ruling on Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the case that found that voucher money going to private religious schools could be okee-dokee. That's good news in North Carolina, where over 90% of voucher money goes to private religious schools.

Expect, also, to hear voucher fans find new and fun ways to wiggle around the accountability issue. North Carolina charters are completely unaccountable to anyone. You'll be glad to now their students do have to take standardized tests kind of like the ones that public school students take-- they just don't have to report the results publicly. Here's an explanation from UNC-Chapel Hill professor Eric Houck on the governor's claim that voucher schools have no accountability:

"Accountability is a big word," Houck said. "If the governor is talking about accountability in the way that the General Assembly has been talking about accountability since the 1980s, he's right. But there are other ways of defining accountability."

So, big words can mean many different things. Right.

While all of that may seem a little fuzzy, one thing is clear-- unless someone derails the GOP budget, voucher schools in North Carolina are about to enter a decades's long Christmas, with an ever-growing gift of taxpayer money coming their way. Public schools? As always, North Carolina's GOP remains committed to making public schools go away as anything but a holding pen for Those People's Children.

OK: "Let's Deport Students"

There's a lot to unpack in the news from Oklahoma's GOP legislators, but let's just skip straight to the most awful. From this special caucus of conservatives, looking for ways to close a budget hole:

The caucus said there are 82,000 non-English speaking students in the state.

“Identify them and then turn them over to ICE to see if they truly are citizens, and do we really have to educate non-citizens?” [Rep. Mike] Ritze asked.

The caucus thinks that could save $60 million.

 

OK: Have you ever noticed that our state looks like a clumsy hatchet?

What the hell? I mean, what the absolute you-have-got-to-be-freaking-kidding-me hell??!! Let's profile possible undocumented immigrants based strictly on what their primary language is??!!

The rest of their proposal only seems less stupid because the target-non-English-speakers sets the stupid bar so very high. But there's still a lot of stupid here.

The 22-member platform caucus has also decided they can save $328 million by eliminating "all non-essential, non-instructional employees in higher education." So... what? All administration? Can the janitors. Make the students cook and serve their own meals? What exactly do they think this third-of-a-billion dollar unnecessary payroll consists of?

They also want to cut the film tax credit, because encouraging the film industry to take its jobs and money elsewhere is smart financing.

Oh, and swag! No more slapping a government logo on pens to hand out to folks who could, you know, provide their own damn logo-less pens. $39 million savings right there.

The caucus asked the new station not to reveal every detail of their plan because they're still negotiating with legislative leadership. If legislative leadership has any molecule of sense at all, they are negotiating by saying things like "Wouldn't you guys like to go sit in the cornet with these little balls? See how shiny they are?"

If Oklahoma keeps their swag, I might suggest some new slogans like "Oklahoma-- striving to be as ignorant and hateful as North Carolina" or just "Oklahoma-- speak English or get the hell out."

SAT Test Preppery

You may recall that one of the awesome parts of David Coleman's shiny new SAT test was going to be how impervious it was to any kind of test prep. Coleman's singular vision (because in Coleman's world, he's the only one with a vision) was a new SAT that would fix inequality in America. Because being able to afford expensive test prep would no longer matter.

Flexibility in viewing tomorrow's self-owned widgets

Well, okay. Maybe it will matter a little.

After a few years of declaring that your Jedi test prep mind powers won't work on the SAT, the College Board (which is totally a for-profit business and not some sort of service-oriented board of college representatives) has announced that test prep from their business partners at Khan Academy totally works! Totally! As proven by their own in-house self-produced research.

Just a couple of thoughts.

1) In house self-produced research conducted by a business to show how well its product works is... dubious? How about some tobacco institute research showing that smoking is healthy. Also, why did the College Board only "study" the results of their own business partner without looking at any other test prep vendors.

2) Correlation and causation, for the love of God! College Board's research shows a correlation between high scores and using Khan. That's it. Was Khan just part of other strategies employed by the kinds of students who are so desperate to shine on the SAT that they do all the things, and are likely to score well anyway because they are smart, committed, and from the right background.

Here-- look at some of these charts of spurious correlations while I calm down. Meet you in the next paragraph.

Bob Schaeffer (Fairtest) in an email to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post pretty well captures the dissonance of this moment in SAT history:

The College Board’s admission that SAT coaching can boost scores significantly once again demonstrates the hypocrisy of the testing industry. After six decades of aggressively claiming that SAT prep courses do not have a  major impact, the College Board has suddenly reversed its position. Of course, the program they now assert can make a big difference is the only one the College Board partners with. Not surprisingly, they did not study the offerings from any test-prep firm, many of which advertise even larger score gains.

But the College Board has apparently pushed back by reaching out to other media outlets. Today, Famous Pretend Smart Guy Thomas Friedman let fly an eruption of smartitude in the New York Times ostensibly about owning your own future, talking about how we must all be limber and adaptable and flexible in the future, because it's nobody's fault but ours if we're not ready for the future, which somehow led him to this non-sequitor:

Some are up for that: some not; and many want to but don't know how, which is why the College Board has reshaped the PSAT and SAT exams to encourage lifelong learning.

1) You might think that Friedman goobered up by adding "exam" when the T in SAT already means test, but as it turns out, as of 1997, SAT doesn't stand for anything. Make of that whatever you metaphorically wish.

2) How in the name of anything does the SAT encourage lifelong learning?

Here's how Coleman explained the officially sanctioned test preppery to Friedman:

Students who took advantage of their PSAT results to launch their own free personalized improvement practice through Khan Academy advanced dramatically: 20 hours of practice was associated with an average 115-point increase from the PSAT to the SAT-- double the average gain among students who did not... Our aim is to transform the SAT into an invitation for students to own their future."

The language suggests that Friedman concocted the whole piece just so he could plug Coleman's Cash Cow. Because you may own your own future, but the College Board would like you to pay them for a chunk of it. And "own your own future" sounds uncomfortably like the current rhetoric that says, "Your health care, education, safety, housing and general well being are your own problem, so don't come crying to anyone else when they take a bad turn."

Understand-- I am a huge fan of internet-enhanced intelligence. The moment a question pops into my brain, I have pulled up a search and tracked down the answer. But I cannot imagine that living my whole professional or personal life on a foundation of reactive intelligence, of "flexibility" that is really just a tech-enhanced response specific to whatever problem I have been posed-- that can't be good. Particularly when the problem is a standardized test with a shallow measure of isolated tasks. "Own your own future" makes a nice piece of PR fluffery, but it hardly seems like a real description of what the SAT can do. Particularly not if just twenty minutes with a canned prep program, a piece of software that literally teaches to the test, is the secret to doing well.

HUD, Carson and Choice

Slate's Henry Grabar has a great piece today about Ben Carson and his clueless already-disproven theories about low-income housing. The piece is worth a full read on its own, and it has nothing to do with education-- except that it is yet another lesson in how a market actually works, with huge implications for the kind of choice system that Betsy DeVos and Beloved Leader have in mind. So I'm going to give you the quick-and-dirty synopsis of the article, and then I'll make the education connection.

The compassionate thing would be NOT to feed the 5000. Go forth and let my people know they're on their own.

Carson has taken to saying that public housing should not be comfortable. Literally. As was reported in the New York Times:

Compassion, Mr. Carson explained in an interview, means not giving people “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say: ‘I’ll just stay here. They will take care of me.’ ” 

This, Grabar points out, is ironic because it was the philosophy behind "the nation’s mid-century public housing debacle." Poorly constructed, often segregated, badly managed, and rapidly deteriorating was made unappealing enough that only people who had no other conceivable choice would pick them.

But folks working in the government housing biz realized almost immediately that holding onto higher-income tenants added "to fiscal and social stability." Modern government housing is supposed to be comfortable, because that's how you get a mix of incomes and "socioeconomic integration." Planners now value stability, so getting the tenants to move out is not the goal, Steady churn, it turns out, is not very helpful. Not housing that chases people away, but housing that builds a stable community. And this evolution has involved not just government policy, but the subsidies and investments from non-government actors.

Meanwhile, the costs of living in private housing have climbed steadily for years. The idea of chasing government housing tenants out into public housing doesn't work because in some cities, there is no readily available affordable housing.

Government housing, in short, runs up against the same problem as health care and education-- you can open it to the market, but the market hates losers. The market does not want to provide choices to poor people because it's really hard to make money from poor people. To make money from poor people, you have to provide minimal services-- the bare uncomfortable minimum. The result is not satisfactory for anybody. So when we apply these ideas to health care or education, what we get are a bunch of non-wealthy folks who are blocked out of the market because they have access, but not the financial resources to exercise that access.

If only there were a way to have someone like, say, the government, provide the service to all citizens at a level of quality beyond what the poor could finance for themselves, in part by creating a system that didn't have to make sure that there was enough money left over to create profit. If only there were system that provided education, housing and health care by some principal other than, "If you're poor, you deserve bupkus. If you don't like it, then stop being poor."

If only.

DeVos: Boldly Trampling Public Education

Today Secretary of Privatization Education Betsy DeVos delivered some remarks at the annual  Arizona State University + Global Silicon Valley Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's a fun gathering of technocrats with all sorts of profitable forward-thinking solutions to education's challenges (as they put it, a can't miss ,if you're an educator, innovator or an investor.) Whatever else we can say about DeVos, despite the occasional moments when she pretends to sort of support public education, she stays pretty consistently on message. Let's take a look at how she slammed public schools what she had to say today.

She opened with a clear statement of her idea of government's role by pointing out that really, she should be listening to the captains of technocracy gathered there, and she wants them to know her door is always open to them (any similar invitations ever offered to public school teachers?). But since she's at the mike, she has a few thoughts.

Washington has been in the drivers' seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts.

And then she lays out three parts of the problem that we must acknowledge.

1) The system is based on the Prussian model implemented in the early 1800s.

I'm not one to rush to unqualified defense of the system, but I can't help noticing that computers are based on a numbering system from around the 6th or 7th century. For that matter, we have a government based on a model implemented in the late 1700s. Granted, DeVos's boss thinks that model is terrible, but "based on an old model" is only a useful criticism if you are heavily invested in selling a new system.

2. The system assigns your child to a school based solely upon the street on which you live.

Let's say instead that the system promises you a school in your community. Let's say the system promises that you won't have to send your child far from home just to get a decent education.

3. Our students have fallen behind our peers on the global stage

Sigh. PISA scores. She is not going to mention that we have always done poorly. She is not going to mention that nobody has ever shown any connection between a nation's PISA scores and anything at all. She will, of course, mention that we have spent oodles of money on public ed (money that could have ben showered upon you fine entrepreneurs).

DeVos reaches her conclusion:

The facts show our system is antiquated, unjust, and fails to serve students.

Well, no. No they don't. At least not "facts" as we used to understand them, but then, that word is based on an antiquated language and entered English was back in the 16th century, so it's long overdue for modernization. But then, the notion that US public education sucks is not DeVos's conclusion, but her premise.

Next she'll try what is shaping up to be one of her favorite rhetorical devices-- comparing public education to something it doesn't really compare to. See we've spent tons of money on ed reform, and yet while Blockbuster was being clobbered by Netflix, while phones became pocket computers, and yes-- while taxis were replaced by Ubers, public education has not been wiped out by someone with a better business plan.

This is a curious stance for a woman  who has been married for four decades and a devoted follower of Jesus her entire life. Why has she not disrupted her marriage with a better, more modern spouse? And why is she still worshipping in a church established centuries ago, set up to honor and worship a God who is (at least) around for two millennia? Is it really hard for a conservative to grasp the concept that some institutions represent some values, commitments and structures that are worth preserving?

But no--

We can no longer accept this education malaise. The time for simply tinkering around the edges is over.

We already have failed a generation or more of kids, and every year we're failing another graduating class.

Great horny toads, woman! I am not going to claim that we are an awesome tower of pedagogical perfection, but "failed a generation"??!! Exactly what evidence can we see of that? Because I thought we failed them way more when we, say, allowed a bunch of corporate greedheads to tank the economy a decade ago.

But it is already, just five months into 2017, easy to predict the beats of a DeVos speech. How do we fix all this? Well, the solutions above were the product of bold entrepreneurs who acted like jerks, abused customers and workers, and drove their business into the ground who did awesome tech things. So go ahead tech guys, invent the edu-uber!

What does she think is the solution? Parents must have choice. The system must be focused on students and not institutions (because institutions insist on representing the issues of a larger society).

Think of it like your cell phone. AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile may all have great networks, but if you can't get cell phone service in your living room, then your particular provider is failing you, and you should have the option to find a network that does work.

Because is just a commodity or a service. Of course, lots of folks live in a place where they have none of those networks as a choice because businesses only serve the customers that are profitable enough to get their attention. This may just be an area of ignorance typical to the really rich-- I'm betting that DeVos has never been in a situation where a business told her it wasn't worth their bother to serve her, nor has she found herself in a situation where that service was simply priced out of her reach.

But she has a special message for the ed-flavored entrepreneurs of ASU-GSV:

With this Administration, you'll find a partner that wants to empower you and collaborate with you, not dictate to you from on-high.

No, instead we would like to let you dictate from on-high to customers whose interests, concerns and rights we promise not to protect. We are here to help out businesses, not those lowly citizens. We are here to clear the field so that you can plough it.

It may be worth it to hold your nose and read the whole speech, because it is shaping up to be a good capsule of the DeVos manifesto for education. It's an ugly, anti-democracy, ill-informed, anti-public education song, but I'm afraid we'll be listening to it for a while.

Pearson May Quit US K-12

The world's biggest 800 pound corporate education gorilla, Pearson, has announced that they're considering the sale of their US K-12 digital and print curriculum business (the US Learning Services wing of the British-based giant).

We should have taken a virtual trip instead

The move comes at the end of yet another bad period for the previously unstoppable education-flavored mostrosity. The big feature of their latest meeting was supposed to be a showdown over a hefty raise (or "rise" as the Brits call them) in CEO John Fallon's pay, which seemed a bit out of kilter after what has been called a "disastrous" profit warning and the company's worst year on the stock market in fifty years.

How did they end up in such a mess? Last November the Wall Street Journal reported that Pearson had "bet big" on Common Core as well as failing to deliver on its digital teaching materials, despite Fallon's gushing baloney about Pearson's imminent awesomeness as recently as last May. But in January of this year, the word started going out that Pearson was a lousy investment.

The decision to cut loose the US curriculum business is not a small thing. Despite being a UK based biz, Pearson gets a reported 63% of its sales from the US.

Not that the education behemoth is backing quietly away. Last Friday they also announced "it has made a number of strides in its transition to digital products and services," with a particular emphasis on post-secondary initiatives. Their online degree initiative announced a partnership with Duquesne University on top of their ongoing work with University of Nevada-Reno, Regis College, and Maryville University. Pearson proudly touts 300,000 online course starts.

Watch next year for the "next generation" of digital courseware "in development for full commercial launch" next year, including the IBM Watson cognitive tutor, which sounds... alarming. Plus a few other developments signalling that it's college and university students who can expect to feel the sweet, sweet embrace of the Pearson profit-squeezing edu-machine.

Meanwhile, that US K-12 thing-- that's just a "strategic review" because of the "slow pace of digital adoption." What will be getting Pearson's K-12 attention in the US? Their cyber-school division (Connections Education) which is Pearson's "fastest growing" business; no word in the news release on how Pearson plans to address the general crappiness of cyber-schools. Pearson also hopes to build on its leadership in school assessment, so look for that to drive some regulation as states work out their ESSA plans. And they still think that online learning has promise: "This market is still in its infancy but, in time, it will grow as schools finally realize the full digital potential of personalized learning."

So Pearson's dream of a "digital assessment renaissance" have not died. Of course, a year ago, they were announcing peaches and cream and wine and roses and the ensuing year was more skittle and beer and furballs and empty popsicle sticks. And in case you forgot, their Chief Education Advisor Michael Barber announced last November that he would be leaving the company sometime this year. He may or may not have steered policy a great corporate policy a great deal, but he was a master at stringing together pretty words about Pearson's global digital aspirations.

So don't count the ravenous corporate beats out just yet, and in the mean time, note that this is a signal about where corporate education thinks the next big profit centers will be-- Common Core is out, and personalized digitized learning is in. Of course, they were totally wrong about Common Core before; let's hope they're about to be totally wrong again.