My school district's board of directors held their regular meeting two days ago and passed a tentative budget for the coming year. I could link you to the newspaper report of the meeting, but it's behind a paywall. So let me just copy out the two important paragraphs:
Now that the tentative budget has been approved, members of the general public have an opportunity to review and/or comment on the spending plan until June 26, which is the day the board is slated to vote on the budget.
Anyone who would like to see a copy of the budget can access one either at the school district's administrative building or online at www.fasd.K12.pa.us.
Just to be clear. For a month, any citizen in the area can look at the proposed budget. They could then attend a board meeting or call a board member or stop a board member when they encounter them out and about in the community, and that citizen could express an opinion about the budget. Any citizen, parent, voter or taxpayer can both see the budget and offer feedback on it. That's a thing that can happen here in our public school district.
This is different from the charter school business world, where budgets are proposed and passed in private and where the people who create those budgets may not even live anywhere nearby at all. It's different from the charter business world, where some charter operators fight hard, all the way to court, to keep their budgets secret, and where state regulations do not require the charter operators to reveal anything at all.
This is just one of the reasons that charter schools are not public schools. Funneling tax dollars to charter schools and private religious schools (as Trump and DeVos propose to do) is shoveling taxpayer money into a black hole. It's the very definition of taxation without representation, a policy that does away with accountability to taxpayers.
That is not how public schools in a democracy work. Push that policy if you like, but at least be honest about it. A school district with closed books and an unaccountable board in charge of those books-- that is not a public school system.
Today you put in an appearance at Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, a group very much in tune with your goals in education. I can see why you and DeVos have always gotten along-- wealthy children of privilege who feel a righteous need to remake your home state according to your own beliefs in competition and battle and a system that sorts people into their proper places.
Reporter Matt Barnum tweeted this quote from you this afternoon:
The simple fact is when you create a marketplace of school choice ...the children do better ... It defies logic to suggest otherwise.
When public schools face increased competition, they get better and kids learn more.
Now, your assertions don't really hold up to any sort of scrutiny (Politifacts ruled your NH line "mostly false") and I've burned many bloggy bytes arguing that. If you like, you can amble through this blog, but I'm not going to wade into that argument here.
No, what I want to do is ask a question, addressing your belief in the power of competition and the marketplace. This is going to sound like a snotty gotcha question, but it's really not. I find that all of us do better at grappling with these kinds of abstract ideas if we look at how they really play out in our own lives, and so I'm going to ask you this--
Do you think that marketplace-style competition for the job of President of the United States created a better outcome?
Do you think competition among the many candidates made each one better, resulting in the very best one being elevated to the White House? Do you think that competition got us the most excellent President that we could ever hope for?
Do you feel that you personally became a better man, a better person, a better candidate, a better politician through your competition with the other GOP candidates, including and especially the eventual winner of the office?
Can you imagine yourself calling the White House to say, "Mr. President, I want to thank you for making me a better person by competing so well with me?"
I suspect that your answer to all of these questions would be something other than "yes," and I would actually agree with you. You might be inclined to explain that all sorts of extraneous factors like a tilted playing field or a hugely imperfect transmission of information to the voters interfered with the "proper" outcome, and I would say to you, how do you imagine that the marketplace of schools would be any different?
I truly am not trying to rub your defeat in your face. But I do want to point out that while your imagined version of competition in the marketplace may work flawlessly to bring about awesome outcomes, the Presidential election that ate years of your life is a far better real-world example of how a competitive marketplace can actually work, particularly when applied to something that is supposed to be a service for the public good and not just a chance for personal profiteering.
See, I believe that the Bush family, in its own way, really does have a heritage of service and a sense of responsibility to the country as a whole. But you got smoked by a scam artist, a huckster who's far more interested in personal profiteering than the good of the community at large. And that is about as perfect a real-life metaphor as we could find for how school choice and competition is working in the real world. Charters and choice are the Trump family of the education world.
So I'm hoping that you can take a step back, clear your head, and see that your logic is confused-- competition and the marketplace, particularly in matters of public service, does not get us excellence. There is no reason to believe that it will improve schools, and even less reason to believe it will provide good results for students. Of all the conservative fans of this philosophy, your unique personal experience makes you especially positioned to see this. I hope some day you will open your eyes and stop spouting nonsense about the wonders of competition and the marketplace. Feel free to give me a call when you're ready to see the light.
— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) May 23, 2017
Remember that question, because it's going to be part of how this debate is framed-- mean old flat-Earth public education advocates trying to deny poor families their choices. This carefully constructed question gets one things right, and several things wrong, all worth remembering in the days ahead:
Vouchers are about private religious schools.
Where vouchers have been put into effect, the effect has been to funnel all sorts of public money into religious school coffers. Take a look at this piece from Jersey Jazzman's website. It breaks down exactly what schools are receiving voucher money, and in all cases, we're talking overwhelmingly about private religious schools. In Indiana, 97% of vouchers go to religious schools. In Milwaukee, 93% of vouchers go to religious schools. In Louisiana, 93% of vouchers go to religious schools (75% Roman Catholic).
So Petrilli is correct in making this about religious schools-- because vouchers are by and large about private religious schools. But everything else about his question is wrong.
Private Religious Schools Choose
There is no system that would allow poor families to choose religious schools. Well, I take that back-- a system in which government regulation forced religious schools to take any and all students. But I suspect some religious schools would have an issue with that (we'll get back to this).
For right now, private religious schools do the choosing. Whether it's the private parochial school that suggested to my divorced friend that her children might not be a good fit, or the private school that just says "No" with no explanation at all, or the private school that says, "You don't really want to send your child here because we will not make any accommodations for her special needs," it is private religious schools that do the choosing.
And that's before we even get to the question of whether or not that voucher will cover more than a fraction of the cost of the private school.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Vouchers direct public tax dollars to private religious organizations. While the Supremes have conditionally blessed this sort of transaction, there are still problems. Vouchers disenfranchise taxpayers who don't have children (no kids-- no vote on what kind of schools serve your community, but you still pay). And the exclusive nature of private religious schools means that taxpayers with children could end up paying tuition to send a neighbor's kid to a school that would refuse to educate their own child.
And vouchers are not exactly "rescuing" poor children from failing zip codes. In Indiana, a whopping 1% of voucher students are leaving a "failing" school, and more than half have never set foot in a public school to begin with. Poor students in failing public schools make great poster children for voucher programs-- but that's not who's getting served. Some parents are getting a rebate on the private school tuition that they were going to pay anyway.
The New Entitlement
When Bernie Sanders wanted to make college free to everyone, their were howls of outrage over a "new entitlement" funded by taxpayer dollars. I have never quite figured out why similar howls have not greeted voucher programs, which are also a new entitlement for (some) students to attend a private school at taxpayer expense.
Un-hiding the Costs
I would be more willing to consider the above issues if the funding of vouchers were handled honestly. But to do all of the above at the expense of public schools is dishonest and not okay. As most states handle vouchers, the real question is "Why do you have against letting families send their children to religious schools at the cost of educating students in public schools?" If you want vouchers, fund them with something other than money stolen from the public school system.
I would love, just once, to see a voucher proponent get out in front of the taxpayers and say, "We believe that this new entitlement to private religious education is so important that we are proposing a tax increase to fund it." Tell parents-- including poor parents-- "We want to raise your taxes so that the McGotrocks family can more easily pay for sending their child to a school that would reject your child in five seconds flat." If that's the system you want, be open and honest, not only about where the money is coming from, but which families are benefiting.
Show the Courage of Your Convictions
While we're being open and honest, let's talk about all the reasons that smart conservative religious schools should want nothing to do with vouchers.
Just up the road from me is a small religious conservative college named Grove City College. It made the news recently because the college president invited his old friend Mike Pence to speak at commencement. Protesting ensued.
But GCC has been in the news before, as a leader in the vanguard of conservative colleges that don't take any federal money at all. The college pursued the matter all the way to the Supreme Court back in 1984, and it has kept itself federal-dollar-free all along, because it understands one simple rule-- where government dollars go, government strings follow. And what might be a friendly government today could easily turn into a Follow Federal Guidelines Or Else government tomorrow. Why would a private religious school sign up for that, unless it was desperate for money?
If you are going to take taxpayer money, you must expect to be accountable to the taxpayers.
And if there's a lot of money involved, like millions and billions of dollars, with little accountability-- well, we already know what happens. Before you can say "antitheistic cynicism," you will have more fly-by-night folks pretending to be religious educators than you can shake a crucifix at.
So That Question Again...
What do I have against letting poor people choose religious schools?
Nothing, really-- as long as they get to do the choosing and as long it's funded honestly and not by stripping money from public schools and as long as we're honest about creating a new entitlement for any and all students to attend private school at public expense and as long as we're actually talking about poor families and as long as there is real accountability for taxpayer dollars and as long as it's handled in a way that doesn't violate the Constitution and as long as "religious schools" means all religions and as long as private religious schools are sure they actually want to go through with this.
No, it's not the possibility that Betsy DeVos's DeVoucher program may gut public education with the goal of replacing it with privatized school by and for the People Who Matter. Nor is it the policy goal held by some that the whole concept of "school" can be replaced with an array of modules geared to different competencies that can be accessed and completed on line at the time and place of the student's choosing. It's not even the steady clamping shut of the pipeline that provides actual trained professional teachers, without whom a school is difficult to put together.
No, the biggest existential threat strikes at the very foundation of education, the foundation of knowledge itself.
Plenty of bytes have been burned discussing a post-fact society, a culture where truth no longer matters. And that nibbles at the edges of what we're talking about.
This Vox piece by David Roberts (Vox's climate and science reporter) is long and thorough, but here's the key idea. He sets it up by recapping a classic Rush Limbaugh rant from 2009, in which Limbaugh claims that we live in two universe, and one is a universe of lies (he was talking about climate science, but at this point, it could be just about anything):
Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one.
"Epistomology" seems like a scary word, but it's actually pretty simple-- what does it mean to know something, and how does that knowing something happen?
Over the course of human history, we've had many different answers for how we know things. Because the approved priests told us so. By way of divine revelation. Because some currently-dead guys once wrote it down. We don't all know things, because only people with power and money are entitled to know things at all. Or even, we don't, we just make shit up.
But eventually we arrived at some collective standards, some shared agreements that pieces of knowledge would be written down and presented as Known Things once they had been tested and certified. New knowledge would be gleaned by some version of a scientific method, bolstered by some agreed-upon techniques of proof.
It hasn't been perfect, but it has worked pretty well for a while. And we teachers and our schools had our place in that, working at the job of passing on a solid core of widely accepted Truths on to young humans. And public education added the notion that all citizens should be given access, early and often, to the same shared body of knowledge.
But if we submit to tribal epistemology-- if we slide into a world where people are, Daniel Patrick Moynahan notwithstanding, entitled not only to their own opinions, but only to those facts that their tribal leaders certify, then what job is there for public education or teachers?
If the only thing that's true is what my Beloved Leader says is true (and only what he says is true today, because the past carries no weight in such a system), then what is there for a teacher to do except pass on the latest reports from the Truth Bureau? Well, there would be one other task-- to help students erase the sharp edges of their own intellects that want to perk up and say, "Hey, wait a minute---"
Another effect-- and this one you've probably already noticed-- is that when the world runs on tribal epistemology, everything-- everything-- is political.
If Beloved Leader and the tribe say that the sky is green, then making an observation about the color of the sky is a challenge to Beloved Leader, a political act. If Beloved Leader says that we ate soup yesterday, then digging through the trash to find yesterday's lunch scraps is a political act. If Beloved Leader and tribal elders define truth in all matters great and small, then any attempt to search out truth on your own, great or small, is a political act. And teaching, which we've come to see as apolitical, an act where it's "inappropriate" to impose your own political views on your students-- in the land of tribal epistemology, teaching is the most political act of all. Like many teachers, I have always avoided being overtly political in my classroom, and yet that seems increasingly impossible.
What is the role of teachers and education in a society that does not know how to know, a society led by a man who, as George Will put it, "does not know what it is to know something."
The most useful thing I learned in college (and what many of my professors explicitly copped to teaching) was how to teach myself, how to learn things. But in times of tribal epistemology, the very act of believing that one can construct meaning and understanding using impersonal, objective standards and techniques-- well, that's just crazy radical stuff.
This is the most existential crisis we face. It may not be the most immediate, and I can certainly see many opportunities to turn back the tide. But we are living intermixed with a great tribe of people who think all wisdom is received from Beloved Leader and not by inspection, reflection, logic, reason, or just plain using your brain to consider evidence. Human beings are sloppy enough about this stuff as it is-- we do not need to have the prevailing winds shift against knowing. So, no-- I don't worry that this is going to wipe us out tomorrow, or the next day. But it is still a terrible thing to contemplate-- a world in which a "teacher" has no job but to pass on the tribal "facts" of the day, and squelch all independent inquiry and thought.
It's not that we've been perfect on this issue, but we have at least maintained the means of finding better paths. Maintaining, building, nurturing and supporting such means of finding one's own way to a truer understanding is then most important job of a teacher, and the mission we must defend at all costs
Our old friend Kevin Carey popped up in the New York Times this week, using the death of William Sanders as a case to soft-pedal VAM. The article has some interesting points to make about VAM, and it also unintentionally reveals some of the reasons that Value-Added Measuring of teacher performance is a fool's game.
Carey is the education policy program director for the New America Foundation. NAF bills itself as a non-partisan thinky tank based in DC. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is chair of the NAF board. Their over-a-million-dollar funders include the Gates Foundation and the US State Department. So their objectivity in these matters is suspect. In the past Carey has turned up trying to support Common Core, attacking public education, using shoddy research to slam higher ed, and helping spread PR for Mark Zuckerberg's AltSchool.
Carey apparently met Sanders and talked to the inventor of the Value Added Measure (specifically, the one known these days as VAAS-- the one that a Houston court just threw out). That provides a fascinatingly specific tale of what started Sanders, who had a doctorate in statistics and quantitative genetics, on the path to evaluating teacher performance:
“In 1945, the United States government set off an atomic bomb.”
That’s how Mr. Sanders began telling me the story of his life, when we met several years ago....
Nuclear weapons tests had released clouds of radiation that had drifted with the weather. Sometime later, farm animals downwind began to die. Did the first event, a mushroom cloud, cause the second event, dead sheep? Or did one merely follow the other coincidentally? Solving this problem required expertise in both statistical probability and livestock biology. Oak Ridge hired Bill Sanders.
So, VAM is tied to nukes. Somehow that seems right.
Another fun factoid: Lamar Alexander was offered the VAM idea when he was governor of Tennessee, but he passed. I would love to hear the story of how he decided not to use Sander's idea.
How easy is it to take shots at Sanders for trying to evaluate teachers based on his work with radioactive cows? Pretty easy-- but it really is striking how little he seemed to grasp the complexity of the whole teaching-learning thing:
To fairly evaluate teachers, Mr. Sanders argued, the state needed to calculate an expected growth trajectory for each student in each subject, based on past test performance, then compare those predictions with their actual growth. Outside-of-school factors like talent, wealth and home life were thus baked into each student’s expected growth. Teachers whose students’ scores consistently grew more than expected were achieving unusually high levels of “value-added.” Those, Mr. Sanders declared, were the best teachers.
It's that simple! The test scores the students produced in previous years make this year's score completely predictable, and any difference must be because of the teacher because no other factor could possible account for a deviation from the predicted student path. Seriously? Sanders had children of his own, so he's definitely met young humans. And yet this overly-simplistic model of human growth and behavior (students just keep progressing along this fully-predictable line unless some teacher disrupts that path) is the mechanical inhuman heart of his system.
But Carey's piece also shows how simple innumeracy has driven the adoption of Sander's work. Sanders tried out his model and found it distributed teacher performance over a "normal" bell curve (kind of like the student achievement fits on a bell curve-- almost as if the teacher bell curve is just an echo of the student one, and not a measurement of something else entirely). Here's how Carey describes the reaction to that curve: Reformers also looked at the right-hand side of the bell curve, where the effective teachers were, and thought, “What if we could have a lot more of those?”
Sigh. It's a frickin' bell curve. You can't make the right hand side bigger or the left hand side smaller. You can't, in short, have a system in which all the teachers are above average. Carey offers the more recent picture of Sanders as a guy who hung back from the argu8ments about policy, but if we look at this friendly profile of Sanders from 2000, we see that in the early days he was a busy eVAMgelist, hitting the road and preaching the Word of Data. That was just before he left the university to join SAS, a data-crunching company that has made a bundle by selling VAAS as a useful product. Presenting Sanders as a kindly old farmer with a PhD glides past the fact that he was employed by a company that made its living selling people on this giant slab of data baloney.
Carey reaches for a valedictory conclusion:
While the use of value-added ratings to hire, fire and pay teachers may have been limited by political pressure, the importance of the value-added bell curve itself continues to grow — less like a sudden explosion than a chime whose resonance gains in power over time.
Oh, let's tell the truth. VAM systems have also been limited by the fact that they're junk, taking bad data from test scores, massaging them through an opaque and improbable mathematical model to arrive at conclusions that are volatile and inconsistent and which a myriad educators have looked at and responded, "Well, this can't possible be right."
You'll never find me arguing against any accountability; taxpayers (and I am one) have the right to know how their money is spent. But Sander's work ultimately wasted a lot of time and money and produced a system about as effective as checking toad warts under a full moon-- worse, because it looked all number and sciencey and so lots of suckers believed in it. Carey can be the apologist crafting it all into a charming and earnest tale, but the bottom line is that VAM has done plenty of damage, and we'd all be better off if Sanders had stuck to his radioactive cows.
Yesterday was my birthday, but I wouldn't forget to give you your Sunday reading list. Remember-- if you like it, pass it on. A Tour of Stock Photo Academy
The British blog Othmar's Trombone takes us on a tour of Stock Photo Academy, and it's just so special. This is your fun and games reading assignment for the week.
At NPR, Anya Kamenetz lays out how choice systems fail to serve students with special needs, who end up with neither a guarantee of good education or even any choice at all.
Jersey Jazzman offers a two-part explanation of why the widely read University of Arkansas study of charter funding is just plain wrong. This link will take you to Part II, and from there you can hop to Part I. As always, hard data presented in plain English.
Today I turn sixty, so it's time for one of those posts. These are the rules. Mind you, they are not a sign of any particular wisdom or smartitude on my part-- I have learned about these rules in the same way a somewhat dim cow learns about an electric fence.
About 59 years ago. My typing skills have not improved
1. Don't be a dick.
There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection and hurt in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. 2. Do better.
You are not necessarily going to be great. But you can always be better. You can always do a better job today than you did yesterday. Make better choices. Do better. You can always do better.
3. Tell the truth.
Words matter. Do not use them as tools with which to attack the world or attempt to pry prizes out of your fellow humans (see Rule #1). Say what you understand to be true. Life is too short to put your name to a lie. This does not mean that every word out of your mouth is some sort of Pronouncement from God. Nor does it mean you must be unkind. But you simply can't speak words that you know to be untrue.
4. Seek to understand.
Do not seek comfort or confirmation. Do not simply look for ways to prove what you already believe. Seek to understand, and always be open to the possibility that what you knew to be true yesterday must be rewritten today in the light of new, better understanding. Ignoring evidence you don't like because you want to protect your cherished beliefs is not good.
5. Listen and pay attention.
Shut up, listen, watch, and pay attention. How else will you seek understanding? Watch carefully. Really see. Really hear. People in particular, even the ones who lie, will tell you who they are if you just pay attention. Your life is happening right now, and the idea of Special Moments just tricks us into ignoring a million other moments that are just as important.
6. Be grateful.
You are the recipient of all sorts of bounty that you didn't earn. Call it the grace of God or good fortune, but be grateful for the gifts you have been given. You did not make yourself. Nobody owes you anything, but you owe God/the Universe/fate everything. I have been hugely fortunate/blessed/privileged; I would have to be some sort of huge dope to grab all that life has given me and say, "This is mine. I made this. It's all because I'm so richly deserving." I've been given gifts, and the only rational response I can think of is to be grateful.
7. Mind the 5%
95% of life is silly foolishness that humans just made up and then pretended had some Great Significance. Only about 5% really matters, has real value. Don't spend energy, worry, fret, concern, time, stress on the other 95%. The trick is that every person has a different idea of what constitutes the 5%.
8. Take care of the people around you.
"What difference can one person make" is a dumb question. It is impossible for any individual human to avoid making a difference. Every day you make a difference either for good or bad. People cross your path. You either makes their lives a little better or you don't. Choose to make them better. The opportunity to make the world a better place is right in front of your face every day; it just happens to look like other people (including the annoying ones).
9. Commit.
If you're going to do it, do it. Commitment lives on in the days when love and passion are too tired to get off the couch. Also, commitment is like food. You don't eat on Monday and then say, "Well, that takes care of that. I don't need to think about eating for another week or so. " Commitment must be renewed regularly.
10. Shut up and do the work
While I recognize there are successful people who ignore this rule, this is my list, so these are my rules. And my rule is: Stop talking about how hard you're working or what a great job you're doing or what tremendous obstacles you're overcoming. In short, stop delivering variations on, "Hey, look at me do this work! Look at me!" Note, however, there is a difference between "Hey, lookit me do this work" and "Hey, look at this important work that needs to be done." Ask the ego check question-- if you could don the work under the condition that nobody would ever know that you did it, would you still sign up? If the answer isn't "yes," as yourself why not.
11. Assume good intent.
Do not assume that everyone who disagrees with you is either evil or stupid. They may well be either, or both-- but make them prove it. People mostly see themselves as following a set of rules that makes sense to them. If you can understand their set of rules, you can understand why they do what they do. Doesn't mean you'll like it any better, but you may have a basis for trying to talk to them about it. And as a bare minimum, you will see yourself operating in a world where people are trying to do the right thing, rather than a hostile universe filled with senseless evil idiots. It's a happier, more hopeful way to see the world. But yeah-- there are still evil dopes in the world. 12. Don't waste time on people who are not serious.
Some people are just not serious people. They don't use words seriously. They don't have a serious understanding of other people or their actions or the consequences of those actions. They can be silly or careless or mean, but whatever batch of words they are tossing together, they are not serious about them. They are not guided by principle or empathy or anything substantial. Note: do not mistake grimness for seriousness and do not mistake joy and fun for the absence of seriousness.
13. Don't forget the point.
Whatever it is you're doing, don't lose sight of the point. Don't lose sight of the objective. It's basic Drivers Ed 101. If you look a foot in front of the car, you'll wander all over the road. If you stare right at the tree you want to miss, you will drive right into it. Where you look is where you go. Keep your eye on the goal. Remember your purpose.
14. Nobody sucks all the time forever
People grow up. People learn things. People have a day in which their peculiar batch of quirks is just what the day needs. Nobody can be safely written off and ignored completely. Corollary: nobody can be unquestioningly trusted and uncritically accepted all the time. People are a mixed mess of stuff. Trying to sort folks into good guys and bad guys is a fool's game.
15. Say "yes."
Doors will appear on your path. Open them even if they are not exactly what you were expecting or looking for. Don't simply fight or flee everything that surprises or challenges you (but don't be a dope about it, either). Most of what I've screwed up in life came from reacting in fear-- not sensible evaluation of potential problems, but just visceral fear. Most of what is good about my life has come from saying "yes." And most of that is not at all what I would have expected or planned for.
