I'm pretty sure that before this summer is over, I will miss one of these Sunday reading lists, because the three week old twins in my house exert some sort of time warping field. But today I'm on it. Here are some things to read from the past week. And remember-- if you like it, pass it on.
Um, Teacher Retention Is Not Just a DCPS Problem
Despite the fact that they are reportedly more awesome than ever, DC public schools are having some trouble holding onto staff. Go figure. A look at why schools might be having such problems.
Why Teachers Suck..
Yes, you know it's going to be the reverse, but a nice addition to the Clever Attateacher files
Is School Choice Just Expanding Privilege
That is the question. Does school choice cut into support for students who needed the most in the first place?
When a Community Loses Its Schools
Closing schools comes with a number of prices, including costs to the community at large.
Intersection of Philanthropy and Dark Money
There are many, many, many dollars being thrown behind ed reform. Exactly where are they coming from?
The Structure of Educational Reform
You'll probably disagree with a lot of this (I certainly do). But Andy Smarick remains the refomster most likely to take a thoughtful look at the tension between the goals of reform and traditional conservatism.
Charter Schools Do Bad Stuff Because They Can
Jeff Bryant gives a well-sourced overview of charter misbehavior.
Things That Principals Know About Great Teachers
Another piece cheering on the real qualities of actual teachers. At a minimum, food for thought.
White People Keep Finding New Ways To Segregate Schools
From Mother Jones, a piece that looks at ed reform through a different lens, and shows how creative white folks have been about getting their children away from black and brown students.
Newpoint Charges As Bad As We Reported
A careful look at one Florida charter scam. It's worth studying, because this model can be pulled off in many states.
ECOT Continues Tax Funded Ad Blitz Despite Layoff Announcement
Ohio's premiere cyber school is in trouble. The state wants its money back because ECOT's been lying about enrollment. ECOT is laying off hundreds of workers. But somehow they can still spend taxpayer dollars on advertising.
Putting the "i" in School
The latest Have You Heard podcast from Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider looks at personalized learning
Well-Funded Non-Profits Pave the Way to Privatization
Over at Living in Dialogue, John Thompson has been taking a look at the book The Givers, a tough look at what modern philanthropy is doing to our society.
The Fart-Free Classroom
A look at the practical reality of negotiating with 160 different persons in your classroom, every day.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Making Cybereducation Creepier
Do you think that cyber-education is just kind of creepy, with students sitting alone in the glow of a computer screen, navigating hundreds of little standardized quizlets and activities, their every keystroke and answer compiled in an undying data file that will follow those students around forever.
Do you find it hard to imagine how it could be worse? Well, a company called LCA Learning has found a way. They've come up with a program called Nestor which adds a whole new feature to online learning-- while you're watching the course, the course is watching you:
The idea, according to LCA founder Marcel Saucet, is to use the data that Nestor collects to improve the performance of both students and professors. The software uses students’ webcams to analyze eye movements and facial expressions and determine whether students are paying attention to a video lecture. It then formulates quizzes based on the content covered during moments of inattentiveness. Professors would also be able to identify moments when students’ attention waned, which could help to improve their teaching, Saucet says.
First, the software will not "formulate" quizzes-- it will pull quiz questions out of a bank of questions according to an algorithm. Let's just stop talking about algorithms tied to question banks as if they're artificial intelligence. They aren't any kind of intelligence.
But lets think about the rest of this picture. You have to keep your face in place, and mimic whatever the computer thinks an "interested" face looks like (and as anyone who has taught for more than two years can tell you, if you think students can't learn to fake an "interested" face, you are dreaming). Feedback to professors will encourage them to make certain parts of their lectures more "interesting," though I can imagine a quick solution would be to insert random explosions in the lecture.
This software has the potential to collect a whole new data set about each student, a super-creepy data set. And it can also help professors realize that they are no longer experts presenting information about a topic, but video producers trying to create an entertaining info-clip.
Here's a quick video clip of how this is supposed to work:
Notice that in the "good" example, the robot arm of the computer still rules the student-- it's just nicer about it.
And notice the five great benefits listed at the end:
* Students are more attentive
* Fewer physical classrooms
* Personalized coach for thousands of students
* Machine learning can use data from social networks
* Can register missing students from class
Only the last is legit. The magical attentiveness feature is the kind of thing technocrats envision because they don't spend enough time in the meat world. Fewer physical classrooms (and fewer meat teachers) is only a bonus if you're intent on making a healthy profit on all this. If you are coaching a thousand students, it's not personalized. You cannot have personalized education without persons.
But the fourth bullet is perhaps the creepiest-- your cybereducation program will also sweep up the rest of your online activity. Big Brother is always watching.
This is all even creepier when you look at LCA Learning itself. Here's how they describe themselves:
Our specialties are Street Marketing ™ and Alternative Marketing, Innovation, Brand Psychoanalysis, Active Web Listening and Experiential Marketing.
Or this self-description::
LCA Learning is an academic laboratory on "New Concepts of Marketing" in partnership with the University of San Diego, California
And on their home page, under the heading of "Shades of Learning," they list Street Marketing, Stealth Marketing, Facebook& Twitter, Undercover Marketing, and Ambush Marketing.
The company's creator is Marcel Saucet, whose background is in marketing and business. You can reach him in Paris, San Diego, or Dubai. Meanwhile, the website includes some subheadings that turn out to be bad links, and another spot where you can "get more informations"
A few news outlets(Engadget, Digital Trends) have picked up the story about Nestor, running more or less the same info (from, one would assume, the same press release), hung on the hook that Nestor is being used in two courses in Paris.
But as near as I can tell, nobody has yet run the explanation of how a marketing company suddenly is a champion of artificial intelligence-driven education. The most likely explanation seems to be that it's a great piece of stealth marketing and a great way to extend Big Brother's cyber-arm and add a marketing spin to whatever online courses you're trying to peddle (LCA has a big list). What's remarkable at this point is how few people seem to be asking LCA, "Exactly what is your expertise in education, and why should we buy education software from a marketing company?" Or other useful questions like, "How much data will this program hoover up and offer for people who want more informations about their future customers in order to more effectively stealth market whatever they have tom sell.
Do you find it hard to imagine how it could be worse? Well, a company called LCA Learning has found a way. They've come up with a program called Nestor which adds a whole new feature to online learning-- while you're watching the course, the course is watching you:
The idea, according to LCA founder Marcel Saucet, is to use the data that Nestor collects to improve the performance of both students and professors. The software uses students’ webcams to analyze eye movements and facial expressions and determine whether students are paying attention to a video lecture. It then formulates quizzes based on the content covered during moments of inattentiveness. Professors would also be able to identify moments when students’ attention waned, which could help to improve their teaching, Saucet says.
First, the software will not "formulate" quizzes-- it will pull quiz questions out of a bank of questions according to an algorithm. Let's just stop talking about algorithms tied to question banks as if they're artificial intelligence. They aren't any kind of intelligence.
But lets think about the rest of this picture. You have to keep your face in place, and mimic whatever the computer thinks an "interested" face looks like (and as anyone who has taught for more than two years can tell you, if you think students can't learn to fake an "interested" face, you are dreaming). Feedback to professors will encourage them to make certain parts of their lectures more "interesting," though I can imagine a quick solution would be to insert random explosions in the lecture.
This software has the potential to collect a whole new data set about each student, a super-creepy data set. And it can also help professors realize that they are no longer experts presenting information about a topic, but video producers trying to create an entertaining info-clip.
Here's a quick video clip of how this is supposed to work:
Notice that in the "good" example, the robot arm of the computer still rules the student-- it's just nicer about it.
And notice the five great benefits listed at the end:
* Students are more attentive
* Fewer physical classrooms
* Personalized coach for thousands of students
* Machine learning can use data from social networks
* Can register missing students from class
Only the last is legit. The magical attentiveness feature is the kind of thing technocrats envision because they don't spend enough time in the meat world. Fewer physical classrooms (and fewer meat teachers) is only a bonus if you're intent on making a healthy profit on all this. If you are coaching a thousand students, it's not personalized. You cannot have personalized education without persons.
But the fourth bullet is perhaps the creepiest-- your cybereducation program will also sweep up the rest of your online activity. Big Brother is always watching.
This is all even creepier when you look at LCA Learning itself. Here's how they describe themselves:
Our specialties are Street Marketing ™ and Alternative Marketing, Innovation, Brand Psychoanalysis, Active Web Listening and Experiential Marketing.
Or this self-description::
LCA Learning is an academic laboratory on "New Concepts of Marketing" in partnership with the University of San Diego, California
And on their home page, under the heading of "Shades of Learning," they list Street Marketing, Stealth Marketing, Facebook& Twitter, Undercover Marketing, and Ambush Marketing.
The company's creator is Marcel Saucet, whose background is in marketing and business. You can reach him in Paris, San Diego, or Dubai. Meanwhile, the website includes some subheadings that turn out to be bad links, and another spot where you can "get more informations"
A few news outlets(Engadget, Digital Trends) have picked up the story about Nestor, running more or less the same info (from, one would assume, the same press release), hung on the hook that Nestor is being used in two courses in Paris.
But as near as I can tell, nobody has yet run the explanation of how a marketing company suddenly is a champion of artificial intelligence-driven education. The most likely explanation seems to be that it's a great piece of stealth marketing and a great way to extend Big Brother's cyber-arm and add a marketing spin to whatever online courses you're trying to peddle (LCA has a big list). What's remarkable at this point is how few people seem to be asking LCA, "Exactly what is your expertise in education, and why should we buy education software from a marketing company?" Or other useful questions like, "How much data will this program hoover up and offer for people who want more informations about their future customers in order to more effectively stealth market whatever they have tom sell.
Friday, June 23, 2017
What Choice Won't Do
When it comes to the advocates of school choice, there are many points with which I disagree. I disagree with many of their assessments of the public school situation ("a dead end for which we spend more money than God and get results lower than dirt"). I disagree with many of their policy goals (why exactly should parents-- and no other taxpayers-- have a say about how tax dollars are spent).
These are disagreements about policy and systems that can be debated and argued (when people on both sides of the discussion are speaking in good faith). But what I find frustrating in the choice debates is the pro-choice arguments that simply aren't so.
There are some things that school choice simply won't do.
Choice Will Not Save Money
Multiple duplicate school systems must cost more than one single system. When businesses want to save money, they consolidate operations. They don't open more branches and raise their costs.
School Choice Will Not Unleash Competition That Will Spur Excellence
This will not (and has not) happen. For one thing, it's a zero-sum system in which losing means having less of what's needed to compete. It's a race in which the laggards must take off their shoes and give them to the leaders. But the very nature of the competition is problematic anyway.
It's Greene's Law of the Free Market: The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Betamax was better than VHS, but VHS made better marketing choices. McDonald's does not dominate its market by producing top-notch gourmet food. Pepsi and Coke do not dominate their market by producing artificially flavored carbonated water that is significantly superior to other artificially flavored carbonated water.
Sure, product quality can be useful as a marketing tool. But it is often expensive, and more companies than we can count have decided they would rather save some money on production and get the product sold with marketing. And in a world jam packed with shiny spinny marketing, even quality is not enough to break through. On the other hand, a huge number of mediocre products that have ridden to success on the back of fancy, expensive marketing.
School choice will unleash marketing, schools promising any number of things they can't deliver. Worse, the drive to market affects the product. If, for instance, we push out all the students who aren't high-achieving, we'll be able to promote ourselves as a school where 100% of the seniors go to college (because everyone who isn't likely to go to college doesn't get to be a senior).
Schools in a free market choice system will not be asking, "How can we become better schools?" They will be asking "How can we convince more students to enroll here?" There will be many answers to that question, from flashier marketing to celebrity spokesperson to-- well, every sort of marketing approach used to sell breakfast cereal or beer. And as long as school attendance is mandatory, there will also be a market for people who choose schools for entirely non-educational reasons. We've already seen this, from basketball academies that minimize academics so students can shoot hoops all day, to the segregation academies where families can keep their children away from black kids.
Choice Will Not Put The Power in Parents' Hands
Choice advocates talk about how choice gives all the power to parents. It does not.
Parents, like any other customers in a free market system, will get exactly the choices that businesses choose to give them. Businesses get to choose the location at which they open. Businesses get to chose their pricing structure. In the case of education-flavored businesses, they get to choose what the requirements of admission are. And charter school businesses routinely set limits on when a student may enroll-- only at particular grade levels and almost never during the school year.
So to start, the only choices available will be the ones that businesses choose for the parents of a community. And choice schools will be highly motivated to choose which students they prefer to take on (see also above marketing section). The schools get to choose-- not the parents. This will work great if your child is a highly desirable recruit, not so much if your child belongs to the other 98%.
But then, there's also the question of how parents will exercise whatever limited choices are available, because the information available to them for making such choices is going to be limited, if not just plain packed with a bunch of noise. Marketing-- choosing a school will be like trying to choose a new car based strictly on car advertisements. It will be in the interests of many choice schools-- particularly the not-so-great ones-- to flood the decision space with inaccurate, misleading, and (depending on their ethics) false information.
Finally, once in a selected choice school, parents may well have no avenue for talking to school management. No monthly board meeting to attend, no local elected board members to call, no central office that has to respond to customer complaints. And schools don't need to keep customers happy, because those customers will be moving on shortly anyway. Who cares if these parents are unhappy-- we were already busy recruiting their replacements anyway?
For high-powered high-information high-clout parents with high-achieving students in wealthy markets, there will be some power in choice. For everyone else, there will not. Not unlike choosing a college-- you can "pick" Harvard, but Harvard will have the final say. There will be big winners, but most customers will be powerless before, during and after the choosing.
There Are Other Goals
There are plenty of bad ideas wrapped up in the school choice movement. There are things we shouldn't want to do, but these are things that choice will not do. There may be reasons to have a serious, honest conversation about choice, but these arguments for choice do not belong in that conversation.
There are some things that school choice simply won't do.
Choice Will Not Save Money
Multiple duplicate school systems must cost more than one single system. When businesses want to save money, they consolidate operations. They don't open more branches and raise their costs.
School Choice Will Not Unleash Competition That Will Spur Excellence
This will not (and has not) happen. For one thing, it's a zero-sum system in which losing means having less of what's needed to compete. It's a race in which the laggards must take off their shoes and give them to the leaders. But the very nature of the competition is problematic anyway.
It's Greene's Law of the Free Market: The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
Betamax was better than VHS, but VHS made better marketing choices. McDonald's does not dominate its market by producing top-notch gourmet food. Pepsi and Coke do not dominate their market by producing artificially flavored carbonated water that is significantly superior to other artificially flavored carbonated water.
Sure, product quality can be useful as a marketing tool. But it is often expensive, and more companies than we can count have decided they would rather save some money on production and get the product sold with marketing. And in a world jam packed with shiny spinny marketing, even quality is not enough to break through. On the other hand, a huge number of mediocre products that have ridden to success on the back of fancy, expensive marketing.
School choice will unleash marketing, schools promising any number of things they can't deliver. Worse, the drive to market affects the product. If, for instance, we push out all the students who aren't high-achieving, we'll be able to promote ourselves as a school where 100% of the seniors go to college (because everyone who isn't likely to go to college doesn't get to be a senior).
Schools in a free market choice system will not be asking, "How can we become better schools?" They will be asking "How can we convince more students to enroll here?" There will be many answers to that question, from flashier marketing to celebrity spokesperson to-- well, every sort of marketing approach used to sell breakfast cereal or beer. And as long as school attendance is mandatory, there will also be a market for people who choose schools for entirely non-educational reasons. We've already seen this, from basketball academies that minimize academics so students can shoot hoops all day, to the segregation academies where families can keep their children away from black kids.
Choice Will Not Put The Power in Parents' Hands
Choice advocates talk about how choice gives all the power to parents. It does not.
Parents, like any other customers in a free market system, will get exactly the choices that businesses choose to give them. Businesses get to choose the location at which they open. Businesses get to chose their pricing structure. In the case of education-flavored businesses, they get to choose what the requirements of admission are. And charter school businesses routinely set limits on when a student may enroll-- only at particular grade levels and almost never during the school year.
So to start, the only choices available will be the ones that businesses choose for the parents of a community. And choice schools will be highly motivated to choose which students they prefer to take on (see also above marketing section). The schools get to choose-- not the parents. This will work great if your child is a highly desirable recruit, not so much if your child belongs to the other 98%.
But then, there's also the question of how parents will exercise whatever limited choices are available, because the information available to them for making such choices is going to be limited, if not just plain packed with a bunch of noise. Marketing-- choosing a school will be like trying to choose a new car based strictly on car advertisements. It will be in the interests of many choice schools-- particularly the not-so-great ones-- to flood the decision space with inaccurate, misleading, and (depending on their ethics) false information.
Finally, once in a selected choice school, parents may well have no avenue for talking to school management. No monthly board meeting to attend, no local elected board members to call, no central office that has to respond to customer complaints. And schools don't need to keep customers happy, because those customers will be moving on shortly anyway. Who cares if these parents are unhappy-- we were already busy recruiting their replacements anyway?
For high-powered high-information high-clout parents with high-achieving students in wealthy markets, there will be some power in choice. For everyone else, there will not. Not unlike choosing a college-- you can "pick" Harvard, but Harvard will have the final say. There will be big winners, but most customers will be powerless before, during and after the choosing.
There Are Other Goals
There are plenty of bad ideas wrapped up in the school choice movement. There are things we shouldn't want to do, but these are things that choice will not do. There may be reasons to have a serious, honest conversation about choice, but these arguments for choice do not belong in that conversation.
Thursday, June 22, 2017
NY: Competition, Shmompetition
Eva Moscowitz has some kind of magical power. Maybe it's money or pheremones or some sort of magical aura, but her record in getting New York leaders to roll over and play fetch for her is impressive.
At the beginning of the month, NY court declared that her Success Academy is not accountable to the taxpayers when it comes to her Pre-K program; the city can not hold her to any sort of performance requirement. That flies directly in the face of the old ideal that a charter works by promising the taxpayer certain results and then is held to those results. Not for Moscowitz-- she remains free to do as she pleases.
Lawmakers in Albany handed her another win. Buried amidst new legislation dealing with mayoral control of schools, there is reportedly this nugget:
The SUNY Charter Institute, the regulations read, “acknowledges that many schools and education corporations it oversees that have demonstrated strong student performance have had difficulty hiring teachers certified in accordance with the requirements of the regulations of the commissioner of education.” SUNY is now planning to create “an alternative teacher certification pathway to charter schools.”
So New York joins the roster of states where anyone with a pulse and a degree can be certified a teacher.
There are many reasons to be annoyed by this. It degrades the teaching profession, codifying that it is a job that literally anybody could do. It thumbs its nose at all the teachers who went to the trouble and expense to get real certification. And it underlines how charter backers often support ideas for charters that they would never accept in the schools attended by their own children.
But I'm also wondering-- what about the competition?
Charters, particularly in markets like NYC, were supposed to spark competition, as each school worked hard to become the very best, to chart new courses to the Land of Excellence. But isn't that supposed to work like a high jump competition? You know-- we keep setting the bar higher and higher and the jumpers improve their skills-- literally up their game-- to meet the new requirements.
This is the opposite. This is "We can't clear the bar at that height, so we'd like the legislature to lower the bar for us." This is "We'll settle for what the leaders of the best schools and the parents who send children to them would never settle for. We will deliberately not live up to that standard."
Competition is allegedly supposed to weed out those who can't cut it. If you can't manage to adequately staff your school, you aren't cutting it.
Lawmakers in Albany handed her another win. Buried amidst new legislation dealing with mayoral control of schools, there is reportedly this nugget:
The SUNY Charter Institute, the regulations read, “acknowledges that many schools and education corporations it oversees that have demonstrated strong student performance have had difficulty hiring teachers certified in accordance with the requirements of the regulations of the commissioner of education.” SUNY is now planning to create “an alternative teacher certification pathway to charter schools.”
So New York joins the roster of states where anyone with a pulse and a degree can be certified a teacher.
There are many reasons to be annoyed by this. It degrades the teaching profession, codifying that it is a job that literally anybody could do. It thumbs its nose at all the teachers who went to the trouble and expense to get real certification. And it underlines how charter backers often support ideas for charters that they would never accept in the schools attended by their own children.
But I'm also wondering-- what about the competition?
Charters, particularly in markets like NYC, were supposed to spark competition, as each school worked hard to become the very best, to chart new courses to the Land of Excellence. But isn't that supposed to work like a high jump competition? You know-- we keep setting the bar higher and higher and the jumpers improve their skills-- literally up their game-- to meet the new requirements.
This is the opposite. This is "We can't clear the bar at that height, so we'd like the legislature to lower the bar for us." This is "We'll settle for what the leaders of the best schools and the parents who send children to them would never settle for. We will deliberately not live up to that standard."
Competition is allegedly supposed to weed out those who can't cut it. If you can't manage to adequately staff your school, you aren't cutting it.
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.
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.
 |
| 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.
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
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.
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.
 |
| It can happen |
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.
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