Teacher Awarded Medal of Honor

James McCloughlan was drafted in August of 1968, right after college graduation, and because of his background in athletics and sports medicine, received advanced medical specialist training. He began his combat tour in Vietnam in March of 1969.

On May 13, his company was sent into a three-sided box, and the enemy proceeded to tear them to shreds. Things rapidly deteriorated to the point that McCloughan's superior ordered medical personnel out. McCloughan refused. In the course of the three day engagement, McCloughan ran across an open field to retrieve a wounded soldier. He took shrapnel while rescuing two other wounded soldiers. When supplies ran low, he sat in an exposed position with a blinking light so that supplies could be dropped to the troops.

In the end, McCloughan was credited with saving ten soldiers. Ten men whose lives would have been cut short. McCloughan was twenty-three years old.

There is, of course, plenty to object to in the Vietnam war, and McCloughan never should have been there in the first place. But once there, at great personal risk, he saved the lives of ten other young men.

And this week he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

But McCloughan did something else with his life. In 1970 he returned from the war, and stepped back into a deferred job that had been waiting for him-- teacher and coach at South Haven High School in his home town of South Haven, Michigan. There he taught through a four-decade career, including coaching wrestling for 22 years and coaching football and baseball for 38 years.

And for his medal ceremony, Donald Trump delivered a speech that didn't suck.

Read the whole story. It's not often we think of teachers as Medal of Honor material.

Pluralism, Democracy, and Silos

CATO Institute, the Very Libertarian thinky tank, has been maintaining an education "battle map." You can see it in all its interactive glory right here. 

The battle map is a plotting of various school-related conflicts around the country. It encompasses controversies as well as kerfluffles that escalate into court. And if you're wondering what the point is, well, that's hinted at here:

This map aggregates a relatively small, but especially painful, subset of such battles: those pitting educational effectiveness, basic rights, moral values, or individual identities against each other. Think creationism versus evolution, or assigned readings containing racial slurs. The conflicts are often intensely personal, and guarantee if one fundamental value wins, another loses.  

Neal McClusky, CATO's education guy (and one of the reformy guys who can have a civil disagreement on twitter), lays out his thinking here in the Washington Examiner, where we get a bettrer explanation of what is emerging as a new school choice talking point: "Pluralism and equality need educational freedom."

McClusky opens by noting that Americans bristle at the idea of discrimination, a word that "connotes exclusion for not just superficial, but also hateful reasons."

But we should not let our immediate, understandable feelings keep us from asking: Might there be acceptable, perhaps even good, reasons that schools would not work with some people?

McClusky offers several reasons for creating different educational silos (which is awkward, but I'm going to try to stay away from the charged word "discrimination"). They mostly boil down to the big one in his title:

First pluralism. Ours is a nation of greatly diverse people — myriad religions, ethnicities, languages, cultures — and we must allow unique communities to educate their children in ways that the political majority, which controls public schools, might not select, and do so without having to sacrifice their education tax dollars. We must enable people to choose schools that share their values, or cultures, or views of history, on a level playing field. If we do not, we doom them to unequal status under the law, and even risk their withering away in a generation or two.

Okay, then.

I don't think we share the same vision of pluralism. And probably not democracy, either.

If I understand what McClusky is suggesting here and elsewhere, it's a sort of benign balkanization. Everyone should get their own corner of the country where things can be just the way they like it, and they can cast out everyone who doesn't see things the same way, and their "values, or cultures, or views of history" can be passed on, unchallenged and unmixed with differing views.

Let me first acknowledge that this is one of those tensions in America that goes back to Day One. The Puritans didn't come to establish a colony based on pluralistic religious freedom-- they came to establish a colony where everyone would worship the way that Puritans were sure was correct. Southern colonists didn't come to establish a land where all men were created equal; they were quite certain that all men were not so created, and they set up a society that was based on that belief. Only oddball places like crazy-quilt New Amsterdam and radical Rhode Island willingly embraced the challenges of letting children of many beliefs play in the same playground. And as the nation expanded, the common response to finding yourself out of agreement with your neighbors was to move away. By and large the problems and solutions of a pluralistic society have been forced upon us.

It's a challenge we have periodically risen to. Colin Woodard's American Nations posits eleven different regional cultures, which could have resulted in eleven different nations-- but didn't. Circumstances forced cooperation upon them, and they battled out joint agreements that did not really satisfy anyone, but which allowed enough cooperation to allow the nation to exist at all. There's a huge debate to be had about the efficacy of all of this (as you may have heard, cooperation flagged a bit in 1860 and has never entirely recovered).

But some choice advocates these days seem to be arguing that freedom and democracy mean the ability to do exactly what you choose, only what you choose, and never having to do things you don't want to do. This is freedom as defined by a three-year-old

Nor does the school-choice-is-democracy argument even achieve that freedom, because what it would mean is that taxpayers without children have no say at all in how their school taxes are spent. That's not really going to reduce the number of pins on the battle map. It's just going to subject some folks, depending on what choice oversight their state prefers, to taxation without representation.

In fact, the whole business seems like a big fat new entitlement-- you are entitled to send your child to a private school at public expense, and you are entitled to have a school for your child that presents your child only with your culture and values (and now that I type it out, the whole thing seems kind of snowflakey, too).

McClusky does acknowledge one of the problems of benign balkanization-- the real possibility that some "values, or cultures, or views of history" will be at direct odds with our values as a nation. And this is a fuzzy area for hard-core choicers-- how exactly does a nation manage people whose choice is objectively and demonstrably bad?

There are other problems with this vision. If all citizens are to have equal access to schools that share their values etc, who will be responsible for leveling the playing field? If the folks who want a particular flavor of culture in their school cannot have it, not because of regulation, but because they are too poor to create and support it, whose responsibility is it to level that playing field? And who then decides which requests for assistance in setting up a school for a particular culture is a legit request? Or does is each cultural silo only entitled to the schools that it can afford, and if it's too poor, tough bananas? Because we already have that system in many states (and it is growing in popularity)-- we sort people out according to their ability to provide their own stuff with the people who can provide themselves lots of stuff over in this gated silo and the people who can't provide themselves with much stuff gathered together and then somebody inside the gated silo announces, "Everyone should be free to just take care of their own stuff."

I also anticipate a great deal of difficulty sorting out the silos. The battle map includes lots of sorts of conflicts, so it's not like we can just say, "Okay, all the Catholics go to Catholic school" because when we factor in beliefs about gender and sexuality and curriculum and fund raising and ethnicity, we'll find that silo is still filled with conflicts and battles.

But mostly I just can't see how this is pluralism. First of all, I don't see the value in ending all conflicts-- or rather, sorting people so that the conflicts are not obvious, because if conflicts exist, you don't help anything by just trying to avoid them instead of dealing with them (as a divorced guy, I think you should take my word for this). Just because you can't see the people who disagree with you doesn't mean they've disappeared. What value is there in making conflict appear to go away by sending all the conflicted parties to separate schools? McClusky suggests that these conflicts are all-or-none and so no compromise is ever possible, and I suppose that is theoretically true, though I like to count "You may disagree about everything but you must find a way to live in the same country" as a worthy compromise.

Pluralism-- a variety of viewpoints and cultures and approaches to life-- has largely made us a stronger country. Even aspiring to it has been mostly good for us. And yes-- to make that kind of thing work, individuals have to give up some of their freedom to do only the things they want to do. But who doesn't? You get married-- you give up some freedom. You have children-- you give up some freedom. You get a job-- you give up some freedom. And sometimes, because you're born into a particular community or family or race or creed, people take freedom away from you without you having a say at all. And if you grow up in America, you live in a pluralistic society where no one culture gets to have its way all day every day.

Why would we want students to have an experience that suggests otherwise?

PA: Another Hatchet Man Runs for Governor

The Pennsylvania governor's race is shaping up to be an ugly one for education. On the GOP side we already have a declaration from Scott Wagner. Wagner is one more businessman who figured that gummint couldn't be that hard, and he has quickly established himself as anti-labor, anti-government, anti-public education.

Well, now we get to meet Paul Mango.

Here's the short version of Everything You Need To Know About Paul Mango-- his previous job was working for McKinsey and Company.

No, not this guy

For those of you who don't immediately recognize that name-- McKinsey is one of the international giants of consulting, and they specialize in helping companies squeeze more money out of their assets, both in bad times and good. They have been involved in education reform, and in major cities where movers and shakers are discussing how to gut public education and unleash the free market so some folks can start making some serious charter money, you will often find McKinsey (for example, Boston and Minneapolis).

Mango's background as a hatchet-for-profits guy led to this journalistically responsible but still hilarious piece in Penn Live. Some folks endorsed Mango as a business-minded job creator, so the reporters covering asked the Mango campaign for a single example of a job that Mango had created or retained. The campaign came up blank. They asked again. The campaign came up blank again. For those who know McKinsey, this makes sense-- they are in the business of creating Return On Investment, frequently by doing the opposite of "job creation."

Not that Mango is leaning on his private sector hatchet work in his campaign. Mango wants you yo know that he's an American Patriot with a Working Class Background who Served His Country and is now a Good Family Man. Mango coverage always comes with mention that he's a West Point grad who served in the 82nd Airborne. He's also touting the multi-million dollar business he created for McKinsey in Pittsburgh as proof that he's more businessy than Governor Tom Wolf (also a business guy in gummint).

Yeah, this guy.

Mango's announcement tour in May was short on specifics (and press access). His website includes a snappy slogan ("Big Ideas Instead of Big Taxes') and his attack on Wolf includes one pretty snappy idea (calling Wolf "Thomas the Tax Engine"). But while he bothers to single out education as an issue, his video on the subject doesn't have much to say-- if children had crappy life goals, it wouldn't matter that one website (Wallethub) rates our schools low, but we pay a lot of money for them, and they should be better. Mango will fix schools by "spending smarter, being more innovative, and making sure your child gets the education you're paying for" which is pretty weak sauce. At his website, we get slightly more detail:

Paul Mango will ensure every one of our children has the choice and the means to obtain a good education.  Pennsylvania families must be empowered to make choices for their children’s success.

While this toes the usual line, it's pretty wimpy compared to Scott Wagner's full-throated "let's get rid of the unions, gut the public schools, and give everyone a voucher" talk. Wagner's campaign site is even vaguer than Mango's, but he's had a platform as state senator, and he's used it. 

What's more surprising about Mango's launch is the absence of any strong statements about health care. He was, after all, McKinsey's health care expert, with lots of attention to the impact of the ACA and some looks at what the GOP countermeasures could mean. Pittsburgh City Paper outlined just how much expertise he displayed as a business consultant; as a candidate, he's pretty meek and vague. Hell, the guy has an MBA in Healthcare from Harvard.

If Mango wants to make a splash, he's going to have to do more than take a bunch of "I'm totally working class and not a Harvard MBA type" shirtsleeve photos. Particularly if he wants to be heard over the noise of Scott Wagner's blustery Scott Walkeresque Tea Party angriness.

But Pennsylvania education voters only have to remember one thing about Mango-- he's the guy from McKinsey, the company that specializes in dismantling and destroying jobs, including those in education. This is not our guy.

Why Are Entrepreneurs Special

Entrepreneurship has been trampling up and down the fields of education, like some beautiful windswept unicorn.

Read the work of reformsters like Jeanne Allen of the charter-loving Center for Education Reform and you will begin to imagine that the fallow fields of education can only be brought back to life by the magical poop of these silver-maned uni-edu-preneurs, but loathsome teachers and miserable unions and the loathed "status quo" keep trying to harpoon the beautiful unicorn and wrap it up in a net of regulations tied down with straps of resistance. We are a bunch of grubby ponies trying to force those beautiful unicorns to lower themselves, to be haltered and hampered and forced to roam with the rest of our ordinary, ugly herd.

This narrative would lead one to believe that entrepreneurs are somehow imbued with a special quality, a quality that people who merely devoted their entire professional lives to education sorely lack. These entrepreneurs, whether they are launching charter schools or unveiling hot new programs or building up their new models of education, have some sort of secret special awesomeness, a genius that must not be restrained.

Because, you know-- entrepreneurs.

So what is so special about these majestical creatures? If only we could unlock the secret of what makes entrepreneurs, in and out of education, just so entrepreneury.

Well, it turns out researchers have been trying to reverse engineer that special unicorn sauce. There's an older study from back in 2013:

University of California, Berkeley economists Ross Levine and Rona Rubenstein analyzed the shared traits of entrepreneurs in a 2013 paper, and found that most were white, male, and highly educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” Levine tells Quartz.

 Oh. That. Well how about a more recent study.

New research out this week from the National Bureau of Economic Research (paywall) looked at risk-taking in the stock market and found that environmental factors (not genetic) most influenced behavior, pointing to the fact that risk tolerance is conditioned over time (dispelling the myth of an elusive “entrepreneurship gene“).

What environmental factors influence risk-taking? Well, there's the 2012 re-examination of the famous marshmallow experiment (do some children have more ability to defer gratification than others) that concluded that the ability to defer gratification (a pretty simple type of risk taking) is deeply influenced by what history has taught you about how much of a risk you're taking.

Bill Gates can go start a computer company in the garage because the garage is attached to a really nice house and no matter what happens to the computers, his life is still going to be safe and comfortable. And being an entrepreneurial unicorn has its price as well:

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

My point here is not big or complicated. These entrepreneurial are not unicorns who are somehow born to greater abilities and wisdom than the rest of our ordinary herd-- they're just a few more ordinary horses who have the money to buy fake gold-encrusted horns to wear. Entrepreneurs are not wiser or smarter or better, certainly not gifted with a gene that substitutes for experience or training in a field like education. No, they're just richer.And somehow, that isn't enough for me to think their unicorn poop is magical.

PA: Tenure Under Attack Yet Again

Okay, Pennsylvania. Here we go again.

Slipped into the byzantine negotiations surrounding this year's Budget-pallooza, some kind soul has re-inserted a favorite reformster method of doing away with teacher tenure.

This is an idea that reformsters have pitched with varying degrees of success in a multitude of states. The idea is to do away with job protections without actually saying so, instead saying that a school district should be able to fire teachers for "economic reasons" and that firing should be based not on seniority, but on teacher evaluation scores.

Usually this is pitched as a law. In 2014, StudentsFirst was pitching it like crazy. Not surprising as the group (which has apparently let the security certificate on its site expire) is the reform group set up by former DC chancellor, She Who Will Not Be Named*, a group that has worked hard to gut public education and tear down the teaching profession. I don't say that lightly-- I've learned to believe that there are reform-minded people with whom I strongly disagree, but who are reasonably honest and sincere in their pursuit of their goal. She and StudentsFirst are no such group-- intellectually dishonest and self-serving, this is a group that has been devoted to tearing down the profession and public education. And they've done it with the happy cooperation of Democrats as well as GOP folks.

These days, post-She, the group's profile has sagged a bit, but in 2014 they were lobbying hard in Pennsylvania. That year, House Bill 1722 was the result. In 2015, the same idea surfaced in Senate Bill 805, and by 2016, the damn thing was still kicking around, though at that point Governor Tom Wolf was pledged to kill it if it landed on his desk.

But now it's back again.

The idea is pretty simple. If your school district wants to cut teachers, it used to have to justify this with reasons like declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. You know-- reasons related to education. But the new rule would add "economic reasons" to the list. And in Pennsylvania, with the most inequitable funding system in the country, just about every district in the state can claim "economic reasons."

Then you start cutting teachers based on evaluations. Earlier versions of the law organized teachers by their rating-- awesome, great, okay-ish and sucky-- but I'm not sure how the current proposal reads. PA's evaluation system uses numbers that would allow a more exact stack-ranking, though it would be a joke, as we are also a state where teacher evaluation includes a building score (SPP) and THAT score is 90% based on test scores. Teacher scores are soaked in the widely debunked VAM sauce. Here's what I found when the bill surfaced in 2015:

Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:
Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times. 
What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.

The implications of this kind of policy are many and ugly. Teachers who want job security had better fight their way into a schedule that includes the best test-takers, and collegial sharing of techniques and ideas between teachers would be self-defeating-- if your professional peer has a good year and you have a bad one, it could cost you your job.

Supporters of this law repeatedly frame it as a law to protect excellent teachers, as if Pennsylvania has a problem with schools that are laying off genius first-year teachers left and right while hoary old burnouts take up space. But there's no sign that this is true, in particular no evidence that older teachers are lousy, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. As for chasing off great young teachers-- well, the more common problem in the state is that there are no jobs to hire them into in the first place as budgets are slashed and funding is sucked off by charters.

And seriously-- if PA legislators wanted to make sure that bright young teachers weren't scared away from teaching, they might attempt to fix Pennsylvania's broken funding system, boost funding to where it needs to be, and generally insure that no district had "economic reasons" for firing anybody. After all, if we're only firing teachers because of economic reasons, that means the district is then operating with fewer teachers than it should have. How exactly is that a win for anyone? And how does it "protect" young teachers to know that they will never, ever have job security again? Exactly what about that makes the job attractive?

This is union-busting, profession-gutting legislation that can barely even pretend to do what it claims it will do. The ideal for She-style reformsters is a frequently-churned, easily-fired, low-earning teaching staff that never gets comfortable enough to get uppity or to provide support to the union, and this bill is perfect for those goals.

It's an attack against the teaching profession and public education, and it's back-- again-- on the table in Harrisburg, so it's time-- again-- to call your elected representative and voice your opinion. This thing has passed the Senate, but the whole budget business is such a clusterfarpfignugen that it's hard to know when it will make it to the governor. And this is a far more politically adept move than previous attempts-- I'm guessing the Governor won't trash the whole budget just because it includes a part about ending teacher tenure. Call. Call call call.




*It's been a longstanding policy of this blog not to increase the internet footprint of a woman who is the Kim Kardasian of education

ICYMI: End of July Edition (7/30)

How the heck did that happen? Here's some reading from the week-- and remember, you can amplify the voices of your favorite writers just be tweeting and sharing. So, you know, do that.

Internalizing the Myth of Meritocracy

Another hard-hitting Anderson piece in the Atlantic, looking at how the myth of meritocracy becomes damaging to children of color. Because if I believe that the system is fair and rewards excellence, and I'm not being rewarded, I can only conclude one thing...

Demolishing the Myth of the Grumpy Crusty Veteran

It's true-- veteran teachers might not suck.

The Brave New Word

Somehow I dropped this piece from June, but better late than never. The word is "personalization" and the blog explains why that word is probably bunk.

The Alum-lie

Gary Rubinstein crunches some numbers and uncovers the lies charters tell about their college completion rates.

For Deeper Teacher Learning, Follow the Leader

Now that research has identified seven main qualities of effective professional development, all we have to do is design sessions that include all seven qualities, right? Wrong.

The Charter Effect

While this is specific to Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, it's a very detailed and well-researched look at how charters make enemies as they suck public schools dry.

I Quit

Jennifer Berkshire does some podcasting on her own while her partner is of continent, and this is a powerful look at the growing phenomenon of teachers who quit and what they say on their way out the door.

NJ Charter School Follieshttp: Asbury Park and Patterson Edition

Jersey Jazzman takes a look under the hood to see what's wrong with NJ's charter authorization system.

Why Schools Should Be Wary of Free Ed Tech Products and Start-ups Shouldn't Make Them

Why free ed tech stuff is bad news for everyone-- from Forbes.

Read One Percent Solution

I just finished up Gordon Lafer's book The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. It's a simultaneously clear and depressing look at what's going on across the country, and how groups like ALEC are working to reshape our very notion of how America works, and what Americans should expect. And for those of us in the ed biz, there's a whole chapter looking at the reform movement.



Lafer's goal is to look at the broad span of corporate lobbying and legislative efforts. He sets out to make sense of the large mess, and his approach is fairly simple. Looking at what corporations and legislators and lobbyists and advocates for certain programs say, one can become confused at what the actual goal is. Lafer's technique boils down to looking at what they do. "Right To Work" is sold as a way to protect the rights of workers-- well, what else would we expect people who want to protect the rights of workers to do, and are these powerful groups doing those things (spoiler alert-- no).

In other words, never mind what they say to the public. What do they actually do (an what do they say to each other when they think the public isn't listening).

The conclusions are not cheering. Lafer sees a pattern or dismantling government, destroying unions, and pushing workers to lower and lower tiers of income and security while directing more and more fruits of the economy to that one percent at the top. All while gutting any political platform from which the rest of this can be fought.

The conclusion that may come as the biggest, most depressing revelation-- Lafer sees a systematic attempt to lower American expectations, to just get average Americans to think that life really shouldn't be any better for US citizens. For me, this insight is a bit of a gut punch. Who in the teaching world hasn't heard, come contract time, the mantra that teachers just get paid too much and if some convenience store worker is struggling on minimum wage and meager benefits, well, then, why shouldn't teachers do the same? We hear that argument over and over, instead of arguing that people at the bottom should be better paid, better treated.

Education merits its own full chapter because Lafer sees there an intersection of all the other threads. There's all this public money that ought to be funneled toward corporate bank accounts. There's the country;s biggest unions, constantly (well, often) acting as a thorn in the side of the one percent and a political counterweight to the GOP. There's the belief in a democratically, locally controlled institution instead of a corporately controlled business. There's a whole nation of people who expect certain things from public education, and the desire to adjust those expectations ever downward. Lafer writes

Wall Street looks at education the same way it regards Social Security-- a huge flow of public guaranteed funding that is waiting to be privatized, if only the politics can be worked out.

And there is high stakes testing as an instrument of the whole business:

Thus, what "slum clearance" did for the real estate industry in the 1960s and 1970s, high-stakes testing will do for the charter industry: wipe away large swaths of public schools, enabling private operators to grow not school by school, but twenty or thirty schools at a time.

Corporate America is manufacturing failure as a way both to improve their own power and control even as they convince folks to settle for less.

Lafer backs all of this with relentless and specific research and evidence.

It is not an uplifting read, but it does provide some clarity and it does help help you realize that you aren't just imagining some of what seems to be going wrong around us. Very readable and accessible, and free of demonization or sensationalism. I recommend you read this book.