5 Causes of Ed Reform Fails

Robyn Schulman is a Forbes contributor covering "the intersection of education and entrepreneurship." She the senior editor of thought-leadership for 51talk, "a leading education startup in China." So she's not necessarily the kind of person I'd be inclined to pay attention to. But her new Forbes piece is a worthwhile read.

The Top 5 Reasons EdTech Startups Fail And How To Avoid Them lists five problems that most classroom teachers will recognize. Only they aren't confined to ed tech start-ups. Or even ed tech, which is just one brand of ed reform-- and ed reform shares many of these fatal flaws.

1) Lack of understanding the education ecosystem.

Just because you went to school back in the day does not mean you know how schools and education  work today. This leads ed tech folks to develop programs that don't actually fit the needs of people in the field. In the ed reform biz, this leads to repeated calls to reform practices that stopped being the norm decades ago. Teachers have not been told to make their students do rote memorization for years, and most of us are entirely familiar with computers.

If you don't know what our challenges and problems are, there's no way you can help us deal; with them.

2)  Edtech startups lack critical teacher input and transparency.

Indeed. You would think that people who want to influence the world of education would talk to the people who devote their entire professional lives to the classroom. But no-- some folk remain convinced that not only do they not need to talk to teachers, but they should actively avoid it. Many an edtech promoter has taken the position that their program would work great if not for those damn teachers. The ed reform movement has mellowed a bit since the days when teachers were painted as the source of everything wrong with education-- but they still mostly don't trust us and virtually never listen to us. That manifests in a real lack of transparency-- if we don't let teachers see what we're doing, they can't tell us mean, hard truths about our ideas.

That means that people with bright ideas repeatedly trip over obstacles that we could easily have warned them about, had they just asked. Test-based accountability leads to a narrowing of the curriculum??!! What a surprise!

3) Approaching educators and administrators in an arrogant tone

Yeah, all week, every day. Time has actually softened this one a bit, as some of us on either side have found ways to talk to each other. But mostly edtech folks come to pitch their ware like we teachers are idiots who don't know anything about our jobs, and ed reformers have far too often takenm exactly the same tone.

They get to thinking they don't need our help or even willing cooperation. That turns out to be wrong every time.

4)  Harassing teachers and administrators

What she means is that edtech entrepreneurs make the mistake of cold calling and emailing teachers instead of building relationships. This has always been a critical shortcoming of the ed reform movement; they have never taken an interest in building relationships with the education world, but have focused on slamming home their agenda through brute force and political power.

Then they are shocked and surprised (and deeply offended by tone) when the people they've tried to roll over stand up and fight back.

5)  Lack of understanding the bottom line

Edtech folks, Shulman suggests, get focused on their own kind of bottom line and forget that teachers and educators have a different bottom line--  "The bottom line for teachers, parents and schools: the product must benefit students, promote growth, and be safe."

Ed reformers have learned to adopt this kind of language, but their bottom line remains different from that of those who devote our lives to public education. We have some disagreements in the ed debates because we disagree about methods, but in many cases we have different goals. Ed reformers have a different bottom line, and that creates its own set of priorities. Whether those can co-exist peacefully with the bottom line of public education is one of the great unanswered questions (and frankly, I believe in many cases the answer is "no"). But this difference in bottom line is what underlies all the problems already listed.

These aren't the only five mistakes made by edtech entrepreneurs and ed reformers, but they make a pretty good list.

DeVos Doctrine Reaches Out To Charter Fans

The rise of Betsy DeVos opened up some schisms in the education reformster world, including, notably, voucher fans versus charter fans. Charter fans have been distrustful, even openly resistant to DeVos and whatever agenda she is drifting toward. Charter schools and voucher schools are natural competitors, with vouchers having a distinct edge with the private religious school market. But I think it may be more important that they compete in different ways.

To grossly oversimplify, the charter model is to attach itself to the public school system, coopting the public system's financial systems but redirecting public monies to private schools. The voucher model is to keep the public funding from ever entering the public system at all. Charters want to slip the money out of the bank, but vouchers want to grab the armored cars delivering it. Charters flirt with the lottery winner so he'll buy them a nice dinner, and vouchers mug him before he ever gets to the restaurant. Charters fake their family ties so they can wrangle an invite to Thanksgiving

So it represents a significant shift that DeVos has delivered a speech loaded with a giant olive branch to charter supporters.

DeVos was speaking to the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools. We'll be looking at the official copy of her prepared remarks. She opens with a nice clear warm hug:

It's great to be here with so many pioneers and champions who are fighting to give our nation's families more quality options in their children's education.

And then, in the guise of telling her own story, she gets straight to the point:

Defenders of the status quo like to paint me as a "voucher-only proponent", but the truth is I've long-supported public charter schools as a quality option for students. ...Whatever your own journey looks like, we're here because we came to the same conclusion that, as a nation, we are simply not doing a good enough job educating our kids.

"Defenders of the status quo" is reformster boilerplate, appropriate for DeVos, who like many others is determined to tear schools away from a model that hasn't actually existed for decades. But the DeVos doctrine is clear-- public school sucks, and parents should decide where the money goes.

Not that she has anything against "great teachers," who she also paints as victims of the old system (and asks those in the audience to stand and be recognized).

But she has two cautionary tales to tell, about the inadequacy of "assigned" schools. "Assigned" seems poised to replace "government" as the critical adjective favored by reformsters. It's an effective way of conveying that public education is an indignity inflicted on children, and not a way for communities to work together to educate their children.

But DeVos must still rail against the educational system of 1962:

How can we be ok with an education structure that is so inflexible and so unaccommodating? Education is foundational to everything else in life, yet the process of acquiring it is based on a family's income or neighborhood.

This conflates two issues. The first is the notion that the educational structure is inflexible and unaccommodating. Not as true as she thinks it is, but if it is, why not demand a system that is flexible and accommodating rather than demand a choice system that provides a range of schools that are inflexible and unaccommodating in many different ways? And second, if we feel that school funding is too closely tied to neighborhood income, then why not cut those ties? Why not demand a system that fully funds each school?

But DeVos is here to praise charters, not to bury them. After a quick recap of charter history in which she suggests that charters were spearheaded by parents looking for choices and not Freedman-following free marketeers looking for access to that sweet sweet public money.

She wants us to know that "charter schools are here to stay" but that they aren't exactly the right fit for every child. "For many children, neither a traditional nor a charter public [sic] school works for them." Just so her audience knows that while she loves charters, voucher schools are still part of her picture.

Then she says the one smart thing in the whole speech:

Charters are not the one cure-all to the ills that beset education. Let's be honest: there's no such thing as a cure-all in education.

This is a clear rejection of another old reformster theory of action-- find a great school with great teachers and just scale it up for everyone everywhere. It has always been a dumb idea, and I'll give DeVos a gold star for recognizing that. Then I will take five stars away for this next piece:

I suggest we focus less on what word comes before "school"—whether it be traditional, charter, virtual, magnet, home, parochial, private or any approach yet to be developed—and focus instead on the individuals they are intended to serve. We need to get away from our orientation around buildings or systems or schools and shift our focus to individual students.

This is the subtle but hugely important heart of the DeVos doctrine-- the dismissal and destruction of institutions. It is what makes her a perfect fit for the Trump administration. Institutions can be hidebound, stiff and rut-bound, but they also serve as advocates for people who are not rich and powerful. If a public education system is broken down and replaced with a disconnected unregulated mass of education-flavored businesses, then parents and communities will have no real power to fight the system. If democratically-elected school boards are replaced by private corporate boards answerable to nobody, taxpayers and  community members have no voice in education at all. The death of institutions means the ascension of the rich and powerful. Without institutions, might makes right.

DeVos can say that we are focused on individual students, but if those students are lied to by profiteers, abused and cast aside by powerful private interests, and given only the choices that the powerful want to offer them, what does that focus mean? It means that profiteers have managed to base their system on the weakest, most vulnerable elements of the educational system.

I don't know how DeVos arrived at this doctrine-- I can guess, but I would only be guessing. Perhaps, having never held a job outside the family business, and having been fabulously wealthy her whole life, she simply finds the idea of being accountable foreign and disturbing, like landing in a country where the natives eat dog. Perhaps her conservative religious faith tells her that God doles out power and wealth to those who deserve it, and to thwart those so chosen is to interfere with the will of God Himself. Maybe she believes that government is an unnecessary evil, and she dreams of a country in which the church (the correct church) holds dominion over society (and outsiders to that faith have no voice).

Or maybe she's just tired of spending money on Those People. Or maybe her understanding of the purposes and processes of education are just narrow, shallow, and ignorant. That would explain trotting out, yet again, the idea that we spend a lot of money on education  but don't have the best PISA scores in the world.

DeVos holds up Florida as an example of robust choice and its awesome results. Including Pitbull's school. Florida, land charter scam artists and blatantly racist school policy and slavish devotion to the Big Standardized Test and public schools deliberately gutted in order to make choice look good. Florida is the DeVosian model. It may not do much for actual education, but at least people are free to make money.

The final chorus of this hymn to privatization is to declare that "education is not a zero-sum game." But of course as currently conceived, it is exactly that. Among the issues that DeVos doesn't address is the costliness of running multiple parallel school systems with the same (often inadequate) funds you previously used to run a single system. As long as every taxpayer dollar spent to send a student to a private charter or voucher school is a dollar taken away from the public system, then a zero-sum game is exactly what we have.

And it's what we're meant to have. DeVos believes that competition creates excellence, and competition only creates excellence by sorting the players into winners and losers. Competition is either a zero-sum game or a track meet where everyone gets a gold medal. DeVos and other free market fans absolutely believe that this must be a zero-sum game. But perhaps what DeVos means here is, "There's enough booty to go around for both vouchers and charters."

The DeVos Doctrine presented here includes several of her emerging greatest hits, such as the idea that parents choosing a school is a pure exercise of democracy. It is not. There is nothing democratic about requiring the taxpaying public to foot the bill for your personal private choice.

There is the DeVosian aversion to accountability. She responded to Rick Hess's call not to become "the man" with bureaucratic barriers to "innovation." It is a fair point that magical paperwork doesn't necessarily do any good, but avoiding bureaucracy is an approach that depends on context, and when the context is a Secretary of Education who has been unable to imagine any circumstances under which the government would step in and tell a school, "That is not right. Stop it now!"-- well, excessive oversight certainly hasn't looked like a major threat in this administration.

There's a salute to the entrepreneurial spirit. There's an assurance that the Trump budget mayhave its problems, but there's a huge expansion for charter school funding and an additional billion for school choice-- in other words, plenty of money for everyone. Though how this is different from the Obama/Duncan attempt to influence state education policy with big stacks of bribes money--n well, I don't see how this is different, exactly.

It wouldn't be a DeVos speech without a bad analogy. Previous failures have included Uber and cell phones. What have we got this time?

It's time to put down the permanent marker and straight edge, and instead pick up your brush and palette and paint. Paint in bright, bold colors and continue to add to the colorful collage that was started twenty-six years ago.

So public education is a stale straight line, but charter and voucher schools are pretty and free. You know-- like No Excuses schools, where students must keep their hands folded and speak only when given permission.

And at the core of the DeVos Doctrine, the contradiction.

DeVos argues for opportunities for all students, but the choice system she favors provides only the opportunities that charter school operators offer, schools with no local control, no mechanism for adequate funding, and most of all, no protections for the students she declares to be at the center of educational issues. She calls for charter operators to stand up "for Angie... for Denisha... for Dan... for Sandy." But nowhere has she addressed what happens if Angie is rejected or abused by a school that doesn't want students of her race, or what will happen to Dan if he has special needs that the choice school doesn't care to meet, or what will happen to Sandy if Sandy's school believes that gay students must be straightened out, or to a Muslim student whose only choices are private schools that demand allegiance to Jesus Christ. Nowhere does she address what will happen to students who, rejected, must return to a public system that has been gutted so that charter and voucher schools can  thrive.

All students can have choice in DeVos's world-- but only the choices that our Betters believe should be offer. And those choices will be stripped of democratic control, free from any accountability, and offered at great cost to a foundational democratic institution in our country.

As has been the case with DeVos (as was true with Arne Duncan before her), I don't really know if she's a cynical huckster or if she simply doesn't know enough to understand hat she's really proposing. Maybe she means well. But if nothing else, she seems to lack the interest in reflecting on how her various policies might really play out in the field (again, like Duncan).

But those were not the main issues on the table. DeVos is here to deliver a simple message-- there is room enough, money enough for charter and voucher advocates to sit at the tableside by side, a big beautiful banquet table where all manner of privatizers can gather together to carve up public education.

NEA Whiffs Again

Back in the day, NEA leadership should have picked up a clue that they'd backed the wrong horse when they published this article in 2013. "10 Things You Should Know About the Common Core" included such notable observations as "Most NEA Members Support the Common Core," and while you might get a chuckle out of the rest of the list, the real harbinger is in the long, blistering comments section. The average NEA Today article does not exactly draw large or lively response, but this piece drew 325 rather angry comments asking what, exactly, that author was smoking. NEA was either ignorant of or deliberately trying to rope in the large number of anti-Core members.

The author was Tim Walker, and last week he offered a look at personalized learning, and once again NEA either doesn't get it or is trying to stick it to members.

As with NEA support for the Core, Walker starts the article by implicitly accepting that current schools (you know-- the ones where NEA members work) pretty much suck. Too many students sitting in regimented rows memorizing things and listening to teacher lecture. It's a simplistic and reality-impaired view of what's actually going on in classrooms, and it raises more questions than it addresses (e.g. If the classrooms are too full, why aren't we calling for smaller classrooms? Also, if Common Core was going to fix exactly these problems, why aren't they fixed?) He visits a happy personalizing school at East Pennsboro Area Middle School in Enola, PA.

Best of all, the lifeless classroom setups are gone, and learning spaces have been reconfigured with moveable furniture and walls so that when classroom subjects overlap, teachers can combine lessons. Students rotate through these areas, which fosters a more collaborative learning space.

Because only with personalized learning could you accomplish these things? Somehow?

Walker does give a quick look at the dark side, visiting teacher Paul Barnwell, whose Language Arts class now gets their reading instruction from the canned ReadingPlus program:

His students begin each class period by logging onto the program. They remain there for 20 minutes while Barnwell makes himself available for any questions or troubleshooting. But usually he finds himself—at least during this part of the class—feeling slightly marginalized. On one hand, ReadingPlus seems to be working—some struggling students are catching up to grade level. Still, Barnwell can’t shake the one nagging question that is likely on the minds of many educators minds: What comes next?

Walker's point is that "personalized learning" has a lot of different meanings, but if you think he's going to look at what those different meanings tell us about the huge corporate money-seeking drivers behind the rise of personalized learning-- well, not so much. He notes that PL is a rejection of the notion of fixed seat time, which is a fair characterization, then shifts unannounced to the idea that it is student-directed learning, which is not a fair characterization at all. But Walker quotes the National Education Technology Plan issued in 2010 which says that PL puts “students at the center and empowers them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions.” This manner of framing personalized learning is a bit of a red flag because this "student-centered" (and institution degrading) model is a rhetorical favorite of Betsy DeVos.

Walker lets us know that there are big forces behind personalized learning, Zuckerberg-sized forces, though Walker offers a Zuckerberg quote that is reminiscent of Bill Gates in his Common Core salad days:

“We think personalized learning makes sense,” Zuckerberg told Education Week shortly after the announcement. “ We don’t know for certain that it’s going to work."

And Walker shows us a bad case scenario with Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School, a charter school in Yuma, AZ that uses the corporate cubicle model. But as he does throughout the piece, Walker shows the contrary side only so he can reassure us that things aren't really that bad.

Carpe Diem isn’t a typical model...

And then Walker ends the piece by circling back to the folks at East Pennsboro, using the last third of the article to talk about how awesome their experience has been, putting heavy emphasis on how their model is teacher-led, student-centered, and without so much as mentioning a software vendor benefiting. Nor mentioning any drawbacks or issues.

There's a way to construct an article so that it looks fair and balanced. Let's consider the controversial issue of cheese-straightening. Here's my pitch outline:

1) Open with vignette about successful, happy cheese-straighteners, then after creating the happy picture, note that some have misgivings.

2) Here are some concerns (though they could be nothing). Here's a critic (though his concerns are with little solid basis).

3) Here are some of the powerful drivers behind cheese-straightening (hard to resist).

4) Here's a bad example-- but it's an anomaly.

5) Let's go back to that happy picture and all the magical-- really, just magical-- details that go with it.

Missing from the piece- any substantive and detailed critique of the policy. In this case, Walker doesn't talk about any of the corporate connections to personalized learning or any of ways in which it fits in with and advances the privatization agenda. Walker barely acknowledges the ways in which personalized learning reduces teachers to computer program overseers.

Missing most of all-- the question of whether or not we should even be doing this. It is again reminiscent of NEA's Common Core stance under Dennis Van Roekel, which was "What is the alternative? What do you want?" In other words, "Of course we have to do this. That's a given, because we have terrible problems and this is a solution."

The several moments of Common Core nostalgia fit. I have the same sour feeling reading this piece that I had back when DVR and Tim Walker were telling us that Common Core was super duper. What I want from my union, from my professional association, is someone who will stand up for me, for my professional brethren and sistern and call threats to public education by their name. There are important, serious, even critical conversations to be had about personalized learning, and US teachers ought to be involved in those discussions. This piece, unfortunately, shows NEA trying to postpone and avoid the conversation instead of leading it. Feel free to stop by the website and add to another robust comments section.

ICYMI: Baby baby edition

I'm a little behind on reading and writing this week, but on the plus side, I'm way ahead on babies. Here's some reading from the week behind us. Read and pass it on.

Some Unpopular Thoughts on Teacher Evaluation

Mitchell Robinson with some interesting thoughts about how teacher evaluation ought to work.

Linking Graduation to High Stakes Testing Was a Mistake

An op-ed in the Seattle Times makes a strong case for not making diplomas dependent on the Big Standardized Test (PA legislators please note5).

Picturing Trump As the School Choice Guy

Rick Hess has some fun imagining what might happen if Trump puts his "adroit political skills, powerful rhetorical chops, and 39% approval to work" on school choice with an imaginary Trumpian speech on the policy.

The Histories of Personalization

Audrey Watters takes a long, detailed look at the history of the school personalization movement and the many ways in which it is not what it's cracked up to be.

Nothing Abstract about the Lessons of Play

Wendy Lecker offers a great response to the NYT piece about rigorous pre-school.

New Jersey's Screwd up Charter System

Jersey Jazzman looks at why New Jersey's charter system is fundamentally flawed.

When Philanthropists Rule

John Thompson offers a thoughtful review-in-parts of the Givers, the new book about the new kinmd of philanthropists.

School Readiness Fearmongering

Is your child behind? You don't know, and you don't need to care

You'll Never Be a Writer

This is a line often included in one of those self-reported stories that people feel compelled to share when they discover they are talking to an English teacher. It's not quite as popular as those standards "I Always Hated English Class in High School" or "I Hate To Read" or the super-popular "I Guess I'll Have To Watch My Grammar When I'm Around You." Just today, someone once again summed up her experience by citing what someone, years ago, told her. "You'll Never Be a Writer."

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is different story because, first, it has nothing to do with feelings you had when you were younger, which are perhaps something adult you might want to keep to yourself (nobody of my age need proudly share that classic tale "The Year I Memorized the Shape of Farrah Fawcett's Right Breast in a Red Swimsuit"), nor does the story "You'll Never Be a Writer" include a thinly veiled prediction/criticism of someone's poor social behavior

Yeah, we had a lot to learn

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is a sad story of crushed dreams and truncated aspirations. But it's also wrong. Sometimes it's just meant as conversational filler, so I would hate to be that guy and correct someone who's just trying to make pleasantries (on the other hand, I am an English teacher and it's possible that I take great joy in correcting others at inappropriate moments). But here's the basic drift of what I have to say about this.

Now, YNBAW is sometimes a pronouncement on economic realties. "Writing," folks say,  "is not a real with which you can support a single grown human, let alone a whole family of them." I always assumed that I would write when I grew up, and I always assumed that I would never make enough to support myself, which was fine because I wanted to teach. I didn't care that I would never make serious money (anyone who wants to prove me wrong by giving me a lucrative book deal or syndication gig is welcome to contact me here). "Writing's very nice and all, " many a student and parent have said to me, "but you can't really make a living at it, can you?"

Well, yes and no. Writing the Great American Novel is not terribly lucrative, and creating the next Highly Profitable Property doesn't necessarily require great writing chops (looking at you, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown).

But if your goal is not to become a rich and famous fiction writer, other writing jobs exist. Virtually every specialized field in the world is primarily populated by people who know the field, but cannot communicate effectively about it. I have former students who became technical writers, nature writers, and sports writers. Being able to write is important to the writing life, but having a topic that you are knowledgeable and passionate about-- that's huge, too. When a student says, "Well, I'd really like to be a writer, but I really want to work in the widget industry, too," that student's solution is right in front of her.

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is wrong for other reasons as well, the most notable of which is that we are living in a text-based world. Thanks to the internet, we communicate more than ever via the written (typed) word. In both our work and personal worlds, it's now hugely important to be able to say just what you mean, and equally important to be able to read hat others write critically and carefully.

In the years ahead, you will write reports for your job. You will communicate with friends and family via text. You may very well court and couple with the use of text. If you enter politics, you will have to explain yourself through text. If you are an activist for a cause, some of your communication will be through text. Whatever it is you want to say, and whatever audience you want to say it to, you are likely to write it.

It may not bring fortune or fame. But it remains the best ways to communicate and store ideas and feelings across space and time. Much of human history has been spent searching for ways to record, transmit and store our various languages; digitizing it represents a new step forward in that process, meaning that the composing and arranging of that language has become even more important.

Regardless of what someone told you in some misguided attempt to crush your dreams or slap you upside the head with a cold, fishy slab or reality, they were wrong. Good or bad, inspired or flat, enthusiastic or grudging, because you are alive today, you are a writer. You will always be a  writer. Make the best of it you can, because you will always be a writer. Search for your voice and find your way, because like it or not-

You will always be a writer.

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.