Rural Life vs. Free Market

I live in a small town and rural county in northwest Pennsylvania. Our population is a little over 50,000. The median value of a home is a little over $80K. Per capita income is a little over $23K, and our official poverty rate is 13.5%. As of 2010, we had about 81 persons per square mile. Our biggest city contains maybe 7,000 people, though our towns are surrounded by stretches of villages, farmland, and boroughs.

My town. My house is an inch or two beyond the right edge

We are not gut-wrenchingly poor. We are not Montana-style sparse. We are not Kentucky hollow rural. We are just on the northern tip of Appalachia, and most residents would deny we live in that region. We have major cities (Pittsburgh, Cleveland) within a couple hours' drive. I'd call us a typical, if not extreme, example of a rural/small town area.

We have one mall. It has a Sears for an anchor store. We have a couple of McDonalds (first one arrived about forty-five years ago), a Wendy's, a Burger King. We have one Wal-Mart. We have no Chipotle, no Red Lobster, no higher-end retail chains. We have one movie theater. We have a couple of regional family restaurants, but no national chains like Perkins or Denny's, and if you want to go out to eat after 10 PM on any night of the week, well, you can't (well, you can get food at a bar or at Sheetz, a regional-- and far superiors-- version of 7-11). There are chunks of the county where FedEx and UPS do not deliver (they just hand the package off to USPS).

We are fortunate for regions of our sort because we do have a hospital. It's a branch of UPMC, and it's here because of a long convoluted story involving lawyers, angry doctors, mergers, and court orders, and while it provides plenty of decent care, like most rural residents, if we want any kind of more advanced treatment or procedures, we have to go to Pittsburgh or Erie. In surrounding counties, hospital health care is always a long drive away.

This is how the free market works. Businesses go where the customers and the money are, and if the local market can't sustain a particular business, the business will either avoid that market or fold after it opens.

The free market does not like rural areas. The people there are too spread out and they don't have all that much money. Some retailers have learned how to work around that. Wal-Mart is the most notable example of a company that has figured out how to make money from spread out rural non-wealthy folks (hint: it doesn't involve providing them with outstanding, excellent products). There are also variations of remainder stores-- businesses that buy up inventory that big retailers couldn't sell and then sell those at discount prices. We have several of those.

Bottom line. When you say that you want rural areas to depend on the free market for goods and services, you're saying that rural areas will just have to make do with less. When we're talking about burgers or clothing or movies or late-night dining, that's not so big a deal. But when we start talking about health care and roads and education, it's not so okay.

In some ways, rural communities can be at a disadvantage compared to high-poverty urban areas. Urban poverty is generally dense-- if the government offers businesses a ten-cent-per-person profit for providing services or goods, the business has a chance to make money by dealing in bulk. Rural communities offer no such opportunity.

The free market says that what you deserve is what you can afford, and when we talk about services that are provided to the community as a whole-- like roads and health care and education-- what rural communities can afford is not much. Every call to privatize such services is a call to rural communities saying, "You deserve less."

Privatizers slip around this point a couple of ways, most notably by erasing the idea of services to a community and replacing it with the idea of commodities sold to individuals. So a school is not an institution that provides a backbone of the community, but just a business that sells education to individual students (and has nothing to do with everyone else).

Rural communities are also ripe for internet-based businesses. Can't get it locally? Just order it on line. That's definitely a blessing in many instances, but it comes at a price. Our local hospital branch is happy to offer distance doctoring, where you can do your consulting with a far-away physician on a screen, which is not exactly a big boon at a moment when you're facing all the fear and uncertainty that comes with illness or injury. Better than nothing? That may be true, but I bet nobody who can actually get a face-to-face flesh-and-blood doctor is saying, "Never mind-- I'd rather just talk to her on a computer screen."

And internet-based businesses suck at customer service. Cyber schools have descended on some rural areas and sucked up buckets of money, seriously damaging the tax base for the local community school. At the same time, they leave students with little human interaction or parents with any recourse when things aren't quite working out. And they leave local taxpayers who aren't actual customers of the business (but whose taxes pay the bills) absolutely no recourse for complaint at all.

Rural schools are branching out beyond straight-up cyber school to "course choice," a means of saying, "Why sure, we offer Chinese language studies here" and then plunking the student down in front of software driven cyber school. My own school offered Chinese language courses at one point. A few students tried them and found them boring, lacking any human touch, isolating, and boring. Internet-based course choice in many cases seems to be nothing more than a computerized version of handing a student a textbook and saying, "Go teach yourself this subject."

Better than nothing? Probably. But when your argument for a business is "We're better than nothing!" you're not exactly raising the flag for excellence.

Abandoning rural areas to a free market education system is deciding that rural communities deserve less, should get less, will have to settle for something whose greatest virtue is "Better than nothing." As with much of ed reform, it would be easier to have a conversation about all of this if folks would say, "Look, we don't want to spend money on Those Children in Those Communities. We think they should just settle for less because that's what their socio-economic level entitles them to." That would be hard to defend, but at least it would be honest.

How To Sell Personalized Learning

Competency based education, one of the major flavors of personalized learning, has a great number of problems. It's beloved by our Silicon Valley tech overlords, but it has a lousy history (if you a4e of a certain age, you may recall Outcome Based Education, CBE's older failed sibling).

CBE reduces education to a series of simple standardized tasks, the complexity and depth of rigorous intellectual study reduced to a checklist of items to be tagged "done." Tech overlords love it because the whole business can be reduced to software running on computers (with little or no dependency on actual meat-based teachers). Actual live students, however, aren't that impressed. Turns out sitting in a cubicle and running through exercises on a screen is not all that compelling. And that's before we get to the Big Brothery issues of a system that records and attempts to analyze every last student key stroke. If you want to dig at greater length, you can read at Emily Talmage's Save Maine Schools.

Talmage has spent time on CBE because CBE has been spending time on Maine. Proponents, investors and other folks hoping to make it big with CBE have been using Maine as a testing ground to work out the bugs.

And one of the bugs remains how to get people to actually want CBE/PL.

Here's one version of the marketing pitch, courtesy of Sen. Brian Langley, R-Ellsworth, chair of the Legislature’s Education Committee and Rep. Brian Hubbell, D-Bar Harbor, also on the Education Committee. It ran in the Bangor Daily News today [correction- I misread the BDN masthead-- this piece actually ran in February of 2016], but it's a pitch we can expect to hear many times. As often is the reform case, it involves connecting things that have nothing to do with each other.

We start with a statement of the challenge:

Maine’s future depends on educating students who can think for themselves, write and speak clearly, and work together to solve complex problems...We can no longer treat students like widgets moving through an assembly line as though they simply are amalgams of common academic content. Today’s students demand and deserve more customization.

What's the solution?

...we need better mapping of student achievement and clearly understood benchmarks — not just for schools but also for students, parents and our communities.

The Ed Committee plans to propose "broader credentials" and a "more meaningful transcript." As a side benefit, this system will also provide a more detailed accounting of what the school has taught, so accountability. And the new records will accommodate micro-credentials while allowing for students to meet academic requirements outside of school.

Under this model, student transcripts will show employers and college admission offices the subjects students have mastered. Schools will be required to give all students the opportunity via different pathways to become proficient in all subject areas described in state standards, not just the ones required for graduation.

Additionally, "schools also will certify each student’s college and career readiness by objective measures." Those objective measures will apparently be delivered by a squad of yeti riding on winged unicorns, because no such objective measures exist.

But Langley and Hubbell, or whoever wrote this for them, are aiming at transcripts instead of diplomas, a detailed inventory of micro-credentials, badges, and other competencies gathered from any place. Schools don't really factor into this system. What these guys are proposing is to end public school as we know it and replace it with a batch of online software and a detailed data portrait of untested and unsubstantiated standardized results that will follow students around forever. The article is loaded with gobbledeegook that sounds fancy--

More detailed credentials will allow students to distinguish themselves through their individual achievements. Transcripts benchmarked against learning results will allow students, parents, colleges and employers to understand with more certainty each student’s knowledge, skills and preparation for postsecondary education and careers.

Also, standards!!

With support from four governors and a dozen legislatures, Maine has led the nation in implementing learning standards, which encompass a core of knowledge and skills essential to prepare our students for college, citizenship and fulfilling careers.

But it's for a good purpose!

Requiring schools transparently to report on these credentials will allow Maine to ensure equity of opportunity. Without a big-picture perspective of what is going on in education, we can’t know what’s working and where we need to improve.

That's the sales pitch, and it's remarkable how much this pitch hasn't really changed since the first days of Common Core-- We will set some super-duper standards, and then we will deliver lots of standardized measuring instruments which will collect lots and lots of data, which will make students smarter and schools better. We will get a really good set of scales and we will measure that pig every five minutes every day and that will make the pig grow big and fat-- or tall, or whatever way we want the pig to grow this week. And it will all be managed by computer, so you know it will be awesome.

There are only a few problems with this plan. We don't know exactly how to measure college and career readiness. It's not possible to reduce complex thinking, writing, problem solving, or any other higher order operations to a simple series of standardized tasks and measures. We don't have a set of agreed-upon or proven standards on which we can base such a system. We have no answers for the kinds of privacy concerns created by putting a ten-year-old in front of a computer program and making the results follow that child around forever. We don't know how to truly personalize a standardized system. And then there's the question of who will profit from selling and running all these privatized school-replacing pieces.

Those are just for starters. This is the same old pig with a new shade of lipstick, which is unsurprising-- if you thought a pig could make you a gazillion dollars, you'd be happy to invest some up front money in many shades of lipstick. Shame on Langley and Hubbell and whoever wrote this piece of advertising copy for them.

Finn Backs Accountability-- Hard

The Great Divide in the reform world continues to be right along the lines of accountability, with DeVos and her DeVotees being pretty much against it in any meaningful sense. Just let the marketplace sort it out, they say, and Jeanne Allen, of the Center for Education Reform (a hard core charter-backing group), put together a whole book to help argue the point.

It can happen

Several folks have taken a shot at reviewing that tome. I'm not one of them (because I have two week old twins at my house), but here's a good look at parts of the work by Mercedes Schneider. And here's a review by Chester Finn, head honcho emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a reliable backer of education reform, and a guy I generally disagree with (just search his name on this blog).

So let me mark this occasion on which I not only agree with part of what Finn has written, but would gladly written it myself. Finn first sums up the notion that "the market will provide all the quality control that’s necessary. Quality is in the eye of the beholder, i.e., the parent—and the school operator. The heck with school outcomes." And then he unloads this paragraph:

This is idiocy. It’s also entirely unrealistic in the ESSA era. It arises from the view—long since dismissed by every respectable economist—that education is a private good and the public has no interest in an educated citizenry. Once you conclude that education is also a public good—one whose results bear powerfully on our prosperity, our safety, our culture, our governance, and our civic life—you have to recognize that voters and taxpayers have a compelling interest in whether kids are learning what they should, at least in schools that call themselves “public.”

Mind you, Checker is still a charter fan, and he still imagines that modern Big Standardized Tests are not terrible. But at least he's figured out that unregulated charters aren't really working:

Are these folks really prepared to just hand out charters after a cursory screening? And just trust unproven people with our taxpayer dollars and our kids—after all that we've seen in Ohio and elsewhere, despite all that we know about greedy and sometimes criminal behavior in the charter space, despite mounting evidence of for-profit operators opting for shareholders over schoolchildren?

Granted, all of this was just about as surprising as the rising of the sun, but still, he's seeing it.

So Finn and I still disagree on a big pile of stuff, including what accountability should look like. But at least he supports the increasingly-unpopular idea of actually holding schools accountable for how they use taxpayer dollars instead of chiming in with "The money belongs to the students so just shut up.". But if Allen's goal was to wrap the charter movement in a big re-unitey kum-bah-yah-- well, that's not happening today.

Digital Native Naivete

The cliché is a fifty-year-old asking some ten year old student for help in making the computer work. Having trouble making working with your device or your software? Just grab one of those digital natives to handle it for you!

Well, not so fast. Here's Jenny Abamu at Edsurge saying what I've been arguing for over a decade-- our digital natives are hugely naïve about technology.

With the adoption of any new technology, there's a curve. In the 1910s, if you owned an automobile, you were also a reasonably savvy mechanic who knew how to work on his own machine. But in the century since, cars have become advanced in a way that has led to fewer and fewer car owners who could actually repair their own vehicle.

It's a simple fact of marketing-- early adopters may be willing to know the nuts and bolts of the tech, but to expand my market, I have to be able to say to non-savvy buyer, "Don't worry-- the tech will take care of everything for you." I have to make the tech user-friendly, and the friendlier it is, the less my customers need to know. The goal is to move from a product that only an aficionado can handle to a product that any dope can use. We are well into Any Dope territory with computer tech (spoiler alert: Linux is not the PC wave of the future).

Fifteen to twenty years ago, I could count on a few students in each class who could code. I used student helpers to build the school website from scratch. But nowadays I have to explain to my students how to save a photo the like on line, or how to use a Google doc. And students at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference echo that:

“Something you can do to prep your students for college is to have one day where you host a workshop on using Google Docs,” suggested Alejandra Cervantes, a junior at UCLA, in response to a question from an educator about the best way to support high school students heading to college. “Something simple like that can be pretty instrumental in helping them succeed in classes in the future.”

And yes-- that quote and the article its from raise its own set of issues. Because Google is working hard to inject themselves into the ed world, and they're not doing it just to be great humanitarians, so pieces like the Edsurge piece are meant to keep banging the drum that your student must know how to use Brand X Software or she'll fail at life.

And yet there is all this cool stuff to use, and my students don't have a clue. They know Snapchat, Instagram, a little twitter, and whatever the hot app of the week is (developers who think they can come up with an educational app that students will use enthusiastically for a year, starting months from now-- those developers have a naivete problem of their own). There are pieces of software that let them collaborate on projects-- they don't know how to use any of them. There are tools for including art and images and videos in one project and they don't know how to use any of them. And why do we keep reading stories about somebody who lost a job or a college spot because they posted something stupid on line? Because the vast majority of my students have no idea how the interwebs actually work.

In some cases it is tunnel vision-- they just use what they use, which is what they picked up from friends or the pre-loaded software on their device. In many cases, it's lack of access. A Pew Research Report from 2015 says that 17.5% of households with children have no internet access. That does not seem out of line with my own student population (though virtually all of my students have their own smartphones).

I have beaten my head against this cyberwall for years. I was hugely excited about the possibilities of web-based projects in which students could take 15 or 20 different works of literature and show a web of relationships between them-- far more complex stuff than could be managed in a traditional paper. But when I gave them the assignment, what I got was a traditional linear paper with each paragraph on its own page, linked so that the reader could go forward or back a paragraph.

I am not a thoughtless technophile, and I never implement tech just to do it. If it's not useful, I don't care. Where it is useful (I have replaced the traditional English teacher keep-em-writing practice of a paper journal with mandatory blogging for my students), I embrace it. But I have had to train and explore and learn myself first, because my digital natives are like people who have grown up in a big metropolitan city but only know their way around their own two-block neighborhood and don't even know the actual names of the streets there.

If you want to get your students into the technofuture, you are going to have to lead them there, just like you have to with Shakespeare and critical realism and new vocabulary words. That's the implication of this kind of article for teachers. The implications for people who think giving standardized tests on over-the-net software-- well, that's another discussion (spoiler alert: it's a bad idea).

PA: Islamophobes, Real Estate, and Scam Artists

I'll tell you right up front that this story raises more questions than it answers, but many of them are questions about just what comes through the door when you invite privatization in, and others are questions about how people react when they discover what an open door actually means.

The New Castle Youth Development Center was set up in about 1967 as a facility for dealing with "felonious youth." It was on almost 150 acres in rural Shenango Township, and it didn't attract a lot of attention (except for that time, back in the 1987-1988 season when its high school won the Western PA basketball championship).

In 2013, the state announced that the facility was closing. There were reasons given, but the math was pretty obvious. 210 employees. 100 beds. $19.4 million annual budget. 31 youths being held there. The end came quickly and local folks kicked, but the state-- which owned the facility-- was unmoved.

The state's intent was to sell the facility, but like many starry-eyed investment-minded homeowners, the state didn't read the market for fifty-year-old juvenile justice facilities in the middle of nowhere very well. They set an asking price of four million. Absolutely nobody bid. The property sat there, presumably getting no more attractive, the state's aspirations decreasing. A local coalition looked at buying the place with an eye to some sort of private-public partnership develop thing. That didn't happen, either.

Finally, this year, three bids came in. The top bid was $400,000, and the state said, "Sold!!"

And then local folks found out who the buyers were.

The top bid came from Hira Educational Services of North America, a New Jersey educational consulting group. That specializes in consulting work with Islamic schools. They look like a typical private school consulting group, the kind of group that has sprung up all over to help amateur hour school launchers navigate all the paperwork and finances of running an actual school.

Since the establishment of HESNA, over 200+ Islamic institutions and organizations throughout the United States have received counsel in the areas of strategic planning, board development, capital campaigns, recruitment searches, and executive coaching.

Reaction to the news has been... well, let's go with "not always representing the most egalitarian inclusive spirit of American diversity." Looking through the comments sections of local newspaper articles about this news is not for the faint-hearted; "horrible racist blather" covers much of it. Local authorities, like the county commissioners, were concerned that they knew nothing about their new neighbors-- including what those neighbors intend to do with the property. The story has also sent ripples out into the national wing-nut blogosphere (for example, this offensive racist post from a site called the Powdered Wig society; the Daily Caller has also picked up the story).

At this point in the story, we can stop to say, "I told you so." It was fairly predictable that the same folks who call for choice and vouchers and freedom from "government schools" (like, say, the Daily Caller) and who want to see tax dollars support religious schools were going to be shocked and upset when it turned out that "religious school" didn't automatically mean "Christian school." So, yeah-- if you want your tax dollars to "follow the child," some of your tax dollars are going to follow the child straight into an Islamic school, or a Buddhist school, or a satanic school, or (I'm just waiting) a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster school. Bottom line-- intolerant racist folk are not going to like some of the side effects of a choice policy.

But the story isn't quite that simple, because like many of these school consulting groups, HESNA looks kind of hinky.

For a group that has helped "200+" institutions, HESNA has a very tiny online footprint. Their LinkedIn page says nothing. Bizpedia indicates HESNA was founded in 2011. Asif Kunwar is listed as the founder and president of HESNA, but he's also left few footprints on line (though there is an Asif Kunwar who was a student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2010-2011). And the New Castle News learned that while Kunwar didn't sign the HESNA bid, one of the other two bids was a personal bid submitted under his name. The News also tried to track phone numbers for the group and found contradictory messes.The name is not helpful-- HIRA turns up in the name of many organizations, likely as a reference to the Cave of Hira, where Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed.

The website. Well. Links don't really go where you'd expect them to-- like subheadings that all lead to the same page. The subscription link for their e-newsletter is dead, is the link for viewing the latest edition of that newsletter. The facebook and twitter links just loop back to the HENSA page. Misspelled words. On one screen they declare "We arrange the occassionals events for the students to perform and watch show." They have a whole slide about "discriminition." A vision that doesn't seem tightly connected to reality--

To become top educational services consultant in North America.

The only thing the site gets remotely specific about is E-Rate, a grant program buried about five bureaucratic layers down in the FCC which gets tech stuff to schools and libraries. Your school may well be involved-- the program throws around about $2.5 billion annually. And just in case you're wondering about the criteria for E-Rate, HENSA's got your back: "The eligibility criteria or pre-requisites to acquire E-Rate discounts are well-defined and the recipients of the discount(s) must meet the required conditions." Hope that clears it up for you.

This guy may not have a clue what he's talking about. He may be one of the many groups that have sprung up to cash in by offering "consulting help" to private school entrepreneurs, and going Islamic is just his market niche. On the other hand, the infamous Gulen chain of charters appears to be a giant scam to use US tax dollars to fund a Turkish rebel government in exile. One thing that seems clear-- this is not a seasoned professional who knows his way around the private school world.

So like many groups we've seen spring up to get their hands on some of those sweet, sweet privatized education dollars, what we've got here is probably either some small time amateur bumbling around or some mid-level scam artist. But add a bunch of Islamophobic reaction,  and Pennsylvania may well blow this whole bad real estate deal up into some sort of ugly mess (it may also come to crashing halt when his first check bounces).  This is the awesome power of the private sector and the free market teaming up with state government, religion, real estate deals, and education. It could all be legit, it could be something shady, or it could be twelve types of baloney. Bottom line is that right now, nobody really knows.

ICYMI:Father's Day Edition (6/18)

It's a day for Dads, a holiday that somehow doesn't clog restaurants and bolster the greeting card industry. But in the meantime, here are some readings from the week. Remember to share!

The acquittal in Philando Castile’s killing makes clear that black lives still do not matter

Not strictly about education, but important none the less, particularly for its pointed observations about the second amendment. This acquittal was the worst news of the week.

Help Kids Mind Their Own Business

Eleven handy sayings (and one kind of dumb one) to make the anti-tattling case to your students. No policy implications.

No Clean Hands

A guest poster at Have You Heard makes some powerful points in the whole "Whose fault is Betsy DeVos" debate.

Students Sat in Cubicles; It Wasn't Popular 

Carpe Diem is yet another charter that turns up on reformster lists of charter awesomeness. Turns out it hasn't been so awesome.

Suppressing Free Speech in Schools Does Not Make America Greater

An editorial looking at two student free speech cases. Close to home for us in the yearbook and school newspaper biz

The Church of Choice

Daniel Katz takes a look at Betsy DeVos's belief in the magical powers of choice

Pearson Botches Mississippi Testing [Again]; Mississippi Immediately Severs Contract

While we're arguing about bigger policy issues, implementation is still its own problem. Pearson just blew it in Mississippi

Here's an Idea: Let's Guarantee Each Child an Excellent Education

Steven Singer argues for public, not privatized, education.

Betsy DeVos Doesn't Get It

Jan Ressenger looks at how DeVos's Libertarian beliefs do not serve the public good.

The War on Teachers and the End of Public Education

Nancy Flanagan reads the writing on the wall and issues a call to arms.

Building the Life We Want

Annie Tan doesn't post often, but when she does, she makes it count. Read this to draw power for what's ahead.

PA: Testing Non-Reform

In Pennsylvania, our Big Standardized Test for high school students is the Keystone Exam. Its history is a sad study in BS Testing. Its future is cloudy. Unfortunately, while the Keystones may be on the way out, there's no reason to believe they won't be replaced with something worse.

Back in the (pre-Common Core) day, PA used the PSSA tests to measure student achievement of some sort for reasons of some sort. Our elementary schools still use the PSSA tests on the elementary level. But by the Fall of 2010 we were all being hyped up for the New! Improved! Keystone exams (I'm looking at some of the handouts from the era which were still tucked in a corner of my desk).

For those of you who don't know what a keystone is, actually

Keystone plans were ambitious. Pennsylvania would offer "end-of-course assessments designed to assess proficiency in various subject areas." The list was extensive-- Algebra I, Algebra II, Biology, Chemistry, Civics and Government, Geometry, English Composition, Literature, U.S.History, and World History. Note-- these were not just supposed to be Big Standardized Stand-alone Tests, but the actual final exam for these courses.

The graduating class of 2016 was going to take the first four-- Algebra I, Biology, Literature, and English Composition. And those tests were going to account for one third of their final course grade. Other tests were going to be field tested and rolled out in 2011, 2012 and 2015.

Mostly that didn't happen.

It's 2017, and only three of the tests have been completed. The Literature, Biology and Mathy Keystones have been with us for a few years (brought to us by the folks at Data Recognition Corporation, a company already contracted for piles of money and many years,  and SAS, the same group that owns and operates the VAAS flavor of VAM sauce). This is the part where I incriminate myself and say that despite our super-secret pledge as teachers to remains ignorant of the test content-- well, I peeked, anyway. The Literature test is junk. But that's a discussion for another day.

What's important at the moment is that Pennsylvania was going to make those three tests graduation requirements, but it keeps blinking. Perhaps the legislature keeps postponing the use of the Keystones as graduation requirements because these are normed tests, aka tests that are graded on a curve, guaranteeing that some percentage of students must always fail. Legislators seem reluctant to tell a big bunch of PA high school seniors that even though their grades are good, the state says they can't have a diploma.

So the three Keystone exams continue, a graduation requirement now, maybe, in 2019. They are not (yet) a state requirement for graduation, though many school districts use them as a local requirement so that we'll be ready when the state makes up its mind. Oh, and even though the Keystone exam has absolutely no consequences at all for students, the Keystone exam results are still used to evaluate schools and teachers. So that's awesome.

Now Senator Andrew E. Dinniman and Sen. John H. Eichelberger, Jr. have introduced a bill to do something other than kick the can further down the road. Senate Bill 756 proposes to eliminate the Keystone exams entirely. Unfortunately, the bill proposes a few other bad ideas in their place.

After leading with the whole Keystone-destruction thing, the bill says that as far as the federal requirement for a Big Standardized Test goes, just use the SAT or the ACT or the ASVAB or a proper vocational test or the GED. All of these are terrible ideas for an exit exam for high school seniors because none of these were designed for that purpose. "We don't want you to use a hammer to drive those woodscrews-- use this glue gun instead."

Third, the bill says that the test must take less than two instructional days and it must be scored and returned to the school within thirty days. These requirements are dumb. The first is frequently pushed by politicians, some of them well-meaning, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of how tests screw with school. Let's say that the parents of your school football players complain that football season takes up too much of their children's lives; the useful response is not to say, "Okay, all games must be played in at least two hours." The Big Standardized Test is just game day; the test prep season eats far more year and does far more damage than the test. The thirty-day return policy? Nice idea, but it rules out all of the alternative suggestions the bill already made, so that may be a problem.

Fourth--  "accountability results shall be used as part of a comprehensive plan for a multi-faceted, wholistic, and rigorous approach to determine teacher evaluation and school performance" is, I suppose, a nice caveat about the limits of the test, but it imagines a system that doesn't yet exist. The whole multi-faceted wholistic rigorous thing is a lovely idea that nobody has actually designed. So this point boils down to, "Don't worry about being judged by these scores, because we will cover them with the dust of baby unicorn horns."

Fifth-- the bill requires that parents be informed of their rights to opt out of the BS Test, which won't officially exist any more after this bill is passed? Or they can opt out of whatever inappropriate substitute test is being offered? Or is this just the state reprinting the part of the ESSA that already says that parents have opt out rights?

So Pennsylvania struggles with the various practical challenges of implementing a bad policy. Meanwhile, those of us in the classroom continue to go from year to year wondering which version of the policy we'll be dealing with this year as we await our evaluations based largely on the results of tests that mean nothing to the students who take them.