The Federal Regs Voucher Workaround

Betsy DeVos is having some trouble making up her mind on whether it's OK for private schools to discriminate. pic.twitter.com/JF97GkrASq

— AJ+ (@ajplus) June 9, 2017

After Betsy DeVos's last round of Congressional obfuscation testimony, many folks are asking the same question as EdWeek-- "When Do Voucher Programs Allow Private Schools To Discriminate Against Students?" As you can see in the clip above, DeVos answered variations on the question with repetitions of one answer:

Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law, period.

I don't have a direct line to DeVos's brain,  so I can't discern for certain what she's thinking, but I do know a way to keep funneling tax dollars to voucher programs and let those voucher schools discriminate in any and all ways they wish to, all without violating the above quote.

In Pennsylvania, we call them Educational Improvement Tax Credits, and they work like this (Beware: oversimplification in the service of clarity dead ahead). My corporation has a tax bill of $1,000 in taxes that would ordinarily go to public education. But instead of sending the taxes to the state capital, I send $900 to Nifty Educational Privatey Organization. I get credit for paying $900 of my taxes, and those dollars go straight to NEPO, a group that distributes "scholarships" to students who want to attend private schools. Meanwhile, the local public school system receives $900 fewer taxpayer dollars.

But notice-- the $900 from GreeneCorps never touched the government's hands, so technically, those are not "government" funds.

In Arizona this dodge is called a "tax credit voucher" program, and it has provided new ways for folks to grift and graft their way to personal riches. The tuition tax credit idea has been around for a while, but like many previously-dead reform ideas, it's enjoying a resurgence. And tuition tax credits can be particularly tasty in states where you can get a rebate from the state for dollars that you contributed to a voucher school program; if you're shameless enough, you can turn a profit.

This all deserves closer examination, but its importance here is simple-- if the feds implement a federal tuition tax credits program, DeVos will able to look at private schools that benefit from the program while engaging in all sorts of discrimination and say, "Well, they aren't taking any federal dollars, so federal laws don't apply." While charters have hitched their wagons to the public school funding mechanism, tuition tax credit voucher programs create a money funnel that bypasses the government (and all its dumb rules and stuff). While charters are designed to attach themselves to a restaurant diner and drain his blood as he eats his meal, tax tuition voucher credit programs just steal the food from the waiter on his way from the kitchen the diner (which may explain why charter fans are often opposed to vouchers).

If such a system were installed by the Trump-DeVos administration, it would exist outside of any federal regulations (and many state ones). All that debate about giving public dollars to religious institutions would be moot-- silly old separation of church and state is no longer a problem. Voucher schools could trample civil rights every day and twice on Saturday while DeVos protested that they didn't receive any federal money and parents were free to choose whatever they wanted to choose. It would be a corporate oligarch's dream, free of any regulation or other government interference. And it would mean that Betsy DeVos spoke something that was truly the letter of the law, even if in her heart she wanted to kill the spirit of the law dead, dead, dead.

Data Overload

The last nine months have brought a shift in my view of data.

Despite my long and vocal opposition to the gathering in data in schools, to the use of standardized tests to generate data that is in turn used for everything from judging students tons of it every day in my classroom-- in fact, one of my criticisms of many reformer data programs is they involve far too little data. On top of that, you need to collect good data (the Big Standardized Tests generate crappy data) and you need to run it through something that produces useful, legitimate analysis (not something like the opaque, crappy VAM models).

But one thing I'd always felt is that you can't have too much data. Now I'm rethinking that position.

Twin pregnancies are considered high risk, and when the twins share one placenta there's a risk of something called Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (if you are pregnant with twins, I recommend the advice of one of our doctors which was "Whatever you do, don't look this up on the internet")-- all of that put together gets you a ticket to a veritable testapalooza. Ultrasound after ultrasound, with measurements and pictures; my wife's uterus was more thoroughly explored than the surface of the moon after the first telescope.

Measurements indicated a difference in size of 21%, and protocol called for anything over 20% to trigger a new series of tests, even though none of our doctors thought any of these tests would discover anything important. One wonky heart measurement triggered a trip to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh (where we took the grape elevator to the Hippo Ward) for some super-ultrasound; he confirmed what everyone already said, which is that there was nothing to care about. We had our regular doctors at home and a specialist in Erie watching over us. And all of our doctors agreed on one thing-- if you use all of the equipment available to modern medicine to gather tons and tons of data, you will manage to capture little human variations that will alarm you a lot and actually mean very little.

Part of the problem is that the protocols aren't really complex enough. It's like a protocol that says that if your shoes are wet you need to be checked out for wound but actually it' only a major concern if your shoes keep getting wet even when you dry them off and they're actually wet with blood and there's a piece of rebar protruding from your torso. But you stepped in a puddle and now policy says you need to see the surgeon. And yes-- I would rather be safe than sorry and will go to crazy extremes to do so, but reflecting on the past nine months of constant test and peek and prod that 1) we have spent an awful lot of extra time worrying about things it wouldn't have occurred to us to worry about and 2) I can't imagine how someone who was uninsured or under-insured would have ever dealt with this.

So the extra data, because it lacked context and lacked complexity and because our doctors weren't entirely free to follow their own judgment, didn't really make things better, and may even have made things marginally worse in terms of worry and expense.

The kind of data we get from Big Standardized Tests and other standardized tools has a similar problem-- it's incomplete, lacking context, and is cut off from teacher's professional judgement (in many cases e aren't even allowed to view the instrument that generated the data. But when some of us scofflaws go ahead and peek anyway, what we see is that a question really hinged on a student knowing one or two vocabulary words (let's say the test manufacturer fave, "plethora"). So a student who doesn't know "plethora" misses a question that is interpreted as "student is below basic at understanding words through context clues" which in turn becomes "student is not ready for college or a career." Because the student didn't know what "plethora" means.

I have always believed that more data is better, but more bad data is just more bad data, and more data that's not thoughtfully collected can just add a bunch of noise, and the noise causes confusion and worry and expense and responses to problems that aren't even there.

The Long Run

Raising tiny humans is nuts. It is nuclear space brain science jumping-over-the-Grand-Canyon-on-a-tricycle nuts. And yet I am hopeful.

I come at that hopefulness from a not-entirely-usual perspective. I am, aa of yesterday, the father of two new twin boys, and my wife and I are contemplating the tremendous challenge we have been set. These tiny humans are fraught with all sorts of possibility and promise and potential and somehow we area supposed to unlock all of that without making a hash of things.  It's scary.

I'm not whether I have it better or worse than my wife. These are her first kids, but I have been the clown at this rodeo before. My children from my previous marriage are now thirty-something, married, and working on (or about to work on) the parenting thing themselves. I can remember when they were as tiny as the twins are today,  But I can also remember the things that I regret, the moments that were serious missteps as a father, the ways large and small that I have failed them over the years. The good news-- despite my shortcomings, they have grown up to become two of the best people I know. How did that happen, exactly? I have no idea.

So I am in the unique position of having a good view of the rough drafts of two future grown humans, and the final product of two others. And I could not claim to have any more than the slightest idea of the exact road from Point A to Point R.

All parents contemplate the long and twisty road. Is there anything more hilarious to a parent than listening some not-yet-a-parent talk about what their child absolutely will or will not do when that child is in the world. It's hilarious because every parent knows that there is no simple cause and effect-- if you want a child to develop Quality A, you simply pull Lever 4. Raising a child involve a million hard-to-read details and factors and moments of unexpected surprise and grace Sitting here in the hospital room, we have no way of knowing what the twins will be like in ten years; heck, we aren't sure how we're going to spend next Wednesday.

These are the kinds of things I think about every time I hear an educational whiz wonk declare that to get kids with Quality A, you just press Buttons 3, 5, and 11. Fat  chance. I would love to raise these two boys to be as great as their older brother and sister, but I can't do what I did before, and I wouldn't want to if I could.

So when you tell me that if I just implement your program and keep performing it year after year, I will keep producing row after row of students with the same skills and the same qualities, I'm going to laugh at you, because what you are proposing is patently ridiculous. What you're proposing is silly and wrong. It's a long road, with many turns and corners, and we never travel the same stretch of it twice. Imaging we can standardize our travel plans reveals a limited understanding of education, and of human beings.

Why Do We Need Professionals

This is my short answer to the question. It's my wife and newborn twin sons, now about twenty-seven hours old, and it has been an adventure every step of the way, which is how it goes with childbirth, a process that can unroll gently like the Miracle of Freaking Life, or like a terrifying rush of nurses and doctors and anesthesiologists into the operating room where they cut the mother's body open and yank children out of it, which is still miraculous, but in a much scarier way.

Anyway, when it's all happening to your wife or your self or your children, your first thought is not, "Boy, what I need is an ivy league graduate with a real interest in obstetrics" or "Right now I really want to disrupt the traditional model of infant delivery" or "If only there was an alternate certification program so that my children could be delivered by someone who had a previous career as a plumber" or "or even "I know my doctor is really good, but what I really want is another bunch of doctors to choose from."

No, at that moment you want a trained and experienced professional who knows what she's doing and who can be trusted to take care of my family.

But the last couple of days have reminded me of another reason that we need professionals, a reason beyond the now well-worn argument that nobody wants to hire folks from the five week Surgery for America program.

In the past several days, my wife has been every kind of naked in front of nurses and doctors. Now just physically naked, but pretty emotionally raw, and in these high-pressure times, we have performed couple dynamics in front of staff that people we know don't ordinarily get to see in our home. One of the basic professional skills of these folks is to know how to deal professionally with naked people and the things they reveal. (And there's the extra dimension here that many of these staff members are former students of mine.)

Teachers have the same need for this brand of professionalism. We know so many things about our students and their families, particularly if we've taught long enough to deal with multiple generations of one tribe. Teachers too easily see too many dark, difficult truths revealed not to deal with them professionally. Like medical folks, we are custodians of privileged information.

So when I see a story like the dope who handed out "prizes" to middle school students for things like "most likely to be a terrorist," my knee jerk reaction is that the alleged adult involved was not an actual teacher. (And in fact that "teacher" turns out to have been a former NFL cheerleader and dance instructor, which doesn't mean she couldn't possibly be a real teacher, but still, her work speaks for itself). And of course there are "teachers" who have done all the traditional training to be professionals and still ended up being terrible stewards of their students' information, secrets and lives-- and they should be moved out of the profession

But my point is that there is more to being trained to become a teacher or a nurse than simply learning a series of procedures. Becoming a professional means learning to live by a professional ethic, and yeah, I know, not everyone lives up to that ethic, but if you never acknowledge or preserve that ethic, you'll end up thinking that someone who's learned how to read the script in a canned teaching program has mastered all there is to know about being a profession al, and you will be putting a whole bunch of students who don't know how to cover up their rougher inner lives and who think they can trust their teachers-- those students will be at risk. We need people who are trained to be professionals and who live up to those professional ethics, and who can therefor be trusted around people who are at their most vulnerable.

Expertise

Do teachers need to be experts in the subjects they teach or ‘just’ experts at teaching? #education #visiblelearning #teaching

— Visible Learning (@VisibleLearning) June 5, 2017

I was not the only person to see this tweet and have the following thought...

One of my college education professors drilled this into me, and my last thirty-some years of teaching have only confirmed it-- half the secret of classroom management is to know what the hell you're talking about. The best leverage for classroom management is neither love nor fear-- it's respect. And the best way to garner respect is to be competent, to display expertise in the content area, to know what the hell you're talking about.

Yes, teaching is both a skill and an art and to do a good job, you have to know the skill and the art of teaching. But just as you can't have waves without water or air, you cannot have "teaching skills" without content knowledge-- and all the teaching skills in the world will not make up for lacking knowledge. You cannot make an awesome lesson about adding two plus two if you do not know that the result is four. You cannot lead your students through an illuminating and inspiring study of Hamlet if you have never read the play yourself. And just as students can smell fear, they can smell uncertainty and lack of knowledge. I don't mean that you must be infallible in the classroom-- but if you don't know your content well, your students will smell it, and they will wonder why it's important for them to learn something if the teacher doesn't even know it.

Can you be an expert in your field and still fail as a teacher because you don't know how to communicate your knowledge to your students? Sure-- most of us have had that teacher. Can you go too far-- way too far-- in trying to impress upon your students how terribly smart you are? Absolutely-- I once spent a very long semester with a student teacher who did not want to be a teacher so much as he wanted to be the smartest student in the room. But content knowledge is still teh foundation for everything else.

This notion of free-floating skills is a plague on our society. Management types believe that they can manage any company with raw management skills, even if they are completely ignorant of what the company does and the specifics of the industry in which they now work. I have watched the major industries in my neck of the woods brought down by people who didn't know anything about the companies they were managing-- but, hey, that's okay because anyone can manage any company as long as he's a super-duper manager.

It infects our government-- you don't need to know anything about an agency or sector of the economy to head a bureau or even hold a cabinet-level position. And education is an "industry" that shouldn't be run by educators, but by business types who have the kind of management experience necessary.

But you cannot develop skills playing a musical instrument without playing something. You can't learn how to "sport" without putting your hands on the specific object used in that specific sport.

And you can't teach without teaching something. And you can't teach something without knowing about that something. And the more you know, the better you will teach.

"Oh, no-- I just pull something out and the students and I just, you know, explore and discover together," you say. "And it works great." Respectfully, I think you're probably wrong on several counts.

First of all, unless you are a sensory deprived bat just emerging from a cave, you can't pull out anything "blind." You may have never tried that physics inquiry before, but you know about physics. You may never have read that Emerson essay before, but you know who he is and what he believed. And those management problems you have in your classes? Those happen because some of your students don't think you know your material.

Whether you believe that learning is about following a carefully proscribed path, or wandering pathlessly through a vast territory hoping to find a teachable moment or a unique insight, you cannot take your students on that journey unless you know the territory like the back of your hand. That leadership skill is important, but you cannot learn the "how" of teaching without it being attached to the "what" of content. You can't just teach-- you have to teach something, and you can't teach that something unless you know about it.

Content knowledge is the foundation of everything else. You cannot be an expert at teaching without being an expert at subject matter. Yes, even teachers of the littles, who in particular need the security of knowing they are in the hands of a grownup who Knows Things.

So the question is bizarre, like asking "Do you need to cook food really well for a good meal, or is it enough just to have a pretty plate on the table." You cannot be a great cook without food. You cannot be a great musician if you don't play a note. And you cannot be a great teacher without knowledge of your content.

NPE and Charter Schools

The Network for Public Education has issued a clear, concise and pointed statement about charter schools in the US, and it's worth your eyeball time.*

The statement is useful if you have been trying to explain to friends or civilians why, exactly modern charter schools are such a contentious concern. It nails some of the fundamental problems of the charter industry:

We believe that taxpayers bear the responsibility for funding those schools and that funding should be ample and equitable to address the needs of the served community. We also believe that taxpayers have the right to examine how schools use tax dollars to educate children.

Most importantly, we believe that such schools should be accountable to the community they serve, and that community residents have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern the school. Citizens also have the right to insist that schooling be done in a manner that best serves the needs of all children.

The NPE statement addresses in simple, clear, non-hyperventilating language, the fact that charter schools simply are not public schools. This does not make charter schools a Terrible Evil Thing, but it gets at the heart of the great charter bait-and-switch. Charters repeated pitch themselves as free public schools, and the public takes them at their word, only to be shocked later when some charters won't take all students, make operators rich, and engage in all manner of bizarre shenanigan. "Wait! How can they do that-- aren't they a school??" Modern charters have worked hard to be seen as public schools, rather than what they are-- private schools funded with public tax dollars.

The NPE statement does not demand that charters be banished from the surface of the earth, but lays out a series of steps that legislators could take to make charter schools a productive and healthy part of the public education landscape-- so this is not just a slam job.

The statement is short and eminently shareable. Follow the link, share the statement, and help push for the conversation about charters that we should be having in this country.




*I am not a board member of NPE, but I am a member of the orgnization

Treating Teachers The Same Way

Marc Tucker and Chester Finn have been having a bit of a conversation about a new report about teacher empowerment. We may get to that another day, but among Finn's complaints was this old standard, explaining why the reports recommendations can't work:

the teacher unions have demanded and not deviated far from an industrial model in which everyone is treated alike.

This is an oft-repeated complaint among reformsters, most completely codified in TNTP endlessly self-promoted Widget Effect, which argues that "school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts."

I'm at least a tiny bit sympathetic to these complaints. I'm not a very tribal guy, and when any group starts calling for "unity" or "getting on the same page" my hackles levitate, because that almost always means "shut up and do as you're told."

Anyone who thinks that all teachers in a school are treated the same has never spent more than five minutes in an actual school. A school is a web of personal relationships, and every one is different, and so every person is treated differently, which is as it should be. Any decent manager has to know the difference between people who can be trusted with a great deal of slack and people who need to be kept under watch at all times. There are a hundred factors to be considered, but the bottom line is that no human being on the planet treats all other human beings quite the same way in each daily, specific interaction, and schools are no different.

But all of that happens on an "unofficial" basis. It is precisely because humans tend to treat other humans differently that we have formal and official rules.

For example. In any given classroom, there are students that the teacher really likes, and students the teacher doesn't like quite so much. But no parent expects to say to their child, "Well, since you have a teacher who doesn't like you this year, you'd better suck it up and prepare to get lousy grades. Sorry, kiddo, but that's life." No, we expect the teacher to behave like a professional, and that includes treating everyone in the classroom alike.

Likewise, we expect an institution driven by grown-up professionalism to treat all teachers the same, in the sense that management puts aside its personal concerns or reactions. That doesn't mean differentiation can't happen-- but it has to happen on some sort of professional basis.

Treating everyone alike is not limited to schools. For instance, we expect law enforcement and the legal system to treat everyone the same. We get rightfully angry when we see, for instance, people of color or people of wealth treated differently by the system, because the police and the courts are supposed to treat everyone the same. That doesn't mean that the system can't weigh their actions and respond accordingly. But the process of weighing those actions is supposed to work the same way for everyone, the scales of justice always calibrated evenly and not set differently for everyone who passes through the system.

We struggle with this as a society. We complain about defense attorneys and the time and money spent defending bad actors in court. Likewise, a Top Ten union member complaint is seeing dues go to help defend some fellow member who did something really stupid. Why should the obviously guilty get a fair day in court?

The answer is that the alternative is a system in which we say to those in power, "Anytime you're really sure that somebody did something wrong, you can just go ahead and railroad them on through without any hearing." That's a free pass for broad abuse of power. If we don't defend the apparently guilty, we lose the ability to defend the clearly innocent.

I'm a big believer in letting folks have the freedom to employ their own personal judgment. Most of our worst trends in the world of law, medicine and education have been the attempt to strip people on the ground of their power to use their best judgment.

But exercising professional judgment is like painting a picture-- it generally works best if you paint on a blank canvass.

Yes, teachers (and students and defendants and others) should be treated the same-- they should all be treated with the same amount of fairness, the same amount of professionalism, the same amount of justice, the same amount of empowerment. And yes, we often do a terrible job of this, which is precisely why it should be the ideal-- because it's not our natural inclination to do so.