Duncan's Blood Money

Matt Barnum this week reported on an extraordinary private meeting of many of the Big Guns of reformsterdom.It happened back in March; only just now are people talking about it.

Arne Duncan, John King, TFA, DFER, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, KIPP-- the twenty-five gathered folks included all these and more. Barnum reported that Shavar Jeffries (DFER) organized "in part" the meet, which says a bit about his ability to gather folks. DFER apparently still has juice.

The headline from the meeting was Arne Duncan's call for charter operators to refuse funding from the Trump/DeVos department, calling it "blood money."

Which is an odd choice. Blood money is money you get because someone has died, and the funding system for charters beloved by Arne Duncan absolutely depended on getting money by taking it from public schools, even if it killed them. Duncan's USED was, if anything, more pro-charter than DeVos, who much prefers vouchers. And when it comes to public education, the major difference between Duncan and DeVos was that Duncan at least pretended to say the right thing, while DeVos wears her disdain on her sleeve. But Duncan is not suggesting the moratorium because of any loyalty to public education. In fact, now that I think of it, maybe the somebody who has died, the murdered party that Duncan wants to avenge, is the federal education bureaucracy.

Not, says Barnum, that any charters are considering Duncan's idea [Update: at least two of the chains did not take a position at all]. So it's Arne doing what he has often done-- telling other people how they should conduct their business, even though he has no skin in their game.

But what was really intriguing about the account of the meeting was its purpose.

The overarching question at the March discussion, organized in part by Jeffries, was how education reformers should respond to the Trump and DeVos administration, including on issues beyond education.

And that's because...

The left-of-center charter school advocates who held sway in the Obama administration have a complicated relationship with DeVos, who backs charter schools but also private-school vouchers and, as a member of the Trump administration, is viewed skeptically by many. 

In other words, they were wrestling with the problem that some reformsters have struggled with since it Trump won the election-- how to distance themselves from people who are politically linked to the wrong party and the wrong end of the left-right continuum, but whose policies are completely in alignment. As long as these nominal Democrats were led by nominal Democrats in a nominally Democratic administration, they could go ahead and pursue fundamentally conservative education policies. But now DC is occupied by something kind of like conservative Republicans-- and when it comes to education they want all the same things.

This should not be a surprise. Let's go back the DFER founder Whitney Tilson quote about why it's Democrats for Education Reform:  

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

This meeting circled around the distinction we seem to be going with "progressive Democrat" reformsters are doing it for the social justice, but "conservative GOP" reformsters are doing it because they love the free market. I suppose on some level the distinction matters, but the actions they want to pursue-- eroding public education and the teaching profession in order to privatize the entire system-- are identical, and ultimately, if you and another person insist on punching me in the face, I'm not sure I care a whole lot about the difference in your rationales. Particularly when, as I believe is the case in ed reform, behind both punchers is another guy who doesn't care about either rationale-- he's just bet on the fight and he wants to make a buck. 

So it's just swell that Arne Duncan is so outraged at what's going on in his old department, but if he is imagining that there's some sort of huge disconnect and difference between the policies of his department and the policies of DeVos. In my punching analogy, Duncan is the guy who beats you up relentlessly for seven years, and then when some new kid comes in and kicks you, says, "Can you believe what she did! That's outrageous. Are you going to take that?!"

As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, DeVos rode to Washington on a thoroughfare leveled and paved by Democrats. For them to have their little private meetings where they clutch pearls about DeVosian awfulness is either monumental cynicism or stunning delusion. Either way, Duncan better take a look at all those checks he's cashing as a sought-after consultant based on his time in DC dismantling public education, and he'd think a little harder before he starts bemoaning blood money again.
 

Confirmative Action

Here are some hypothetical new college admissions for next fall's freshman class at Wassamatta U::

Jared, George, and Don, who all have lackluster grades and general subpar academic HS performance

Chris, who would never get into WU except for prodigious skills in a sport

Pat, a minority student who is a couple points low on their SAT scores

Which of these students, do you think, represents a problem to be solved?

Apparently according to the Trump administration, it's Pat. The New York Times reports today that the administration is ready to crack down on discrimination-- against white kids. (Here's a link to Slate's coverage of the coverage in case you've used up your free NYT reads.)

This bananas initiative is the natural outcome of the meeting of historical amnesia and that aggrieved  base always alert to the possibility of some excellent non-white person actually getting something that some mediocre white person felt entitled to. I mean, seriously-- we all remember what color a snowflake really is, right?

We've been down this road a variety of times. Remember Becky with the Bad Grades and her lawsuit against affirmative action? And Daniel Golden wrote an entire book about how the Very Rich buy their underachieving children spots in top colleges (Jared Kushner and the Trump children are not anomalies in this regard). To pretend that college admission is some sort of meritocratic system of stack ranking where the top of the stack gets in-- well, that requires us to jump a chasm of disbelief wider than Niagara Falls.

This is (to digress) one more reason it's absurd to talk about students being "on track" for college based on standardized test scores, as if those actually had something to do with being on track for college. It would be more realistic to check students' on trackiness for college by periodically checking their parents' bank accounts and income statements.

What we have now is a system that is riddled with confirmative action-- confirming that if you're rich or white or rich and white or athletic or maybe even brilliant, then you can have a spot. We have a long list of reasons that people can cut to the head of the line.

And that's fine. Colleges are mostly trying to put together a student body that makes the school look good, and many colleges embrace the idea of education as an engine of upward mobility and to do that, you have to include some people who are trying to be upwardly mobile and THAT means accepting people who don't necessarily have the kinds of navigating-the-system tools that let them stroll right in.

I tell my drama students that an audition for a role is not simply a competition to find the "best" actor. Directors have ideas about what they want, both for individual roles and for the ensemble as a whole. You may think you're great for the part, but you are never entitled to it.

But affirmative action is more than just a college casting a well-balanced ensemble for their production of This Year's Freshmen. It's an attempt to restore some justice. If you are organizing a marathon, and after the race has started you realize that some bad actors went onto the track and tied some of the runners' legs together, you don't just say, "Oh, well. Just run harder to catch up." You do something to restore fairness to the contest. That does not include saying, "Well, the marathon has been going on for a long time, so that little tied-up thing at the beginning shouldn't matter any more."

From the days of slavery, up through Jim Crow and our own modern era of systemic racism, a whole sector of American citizens have been systematically denied the tools of success. Some of that is hard to fix for a variety of reasons-- simply making poor people rich through an act of Congress is not doable for a number of reasons.

But affirmative action college admissions are the simplest thing in the world, a chance to help equalize opportunity with a simple acceptance letter (in fact, it's too simple, and colleges should be paying more attention to helping folks succeed once they get to campus). It costs pretty much nothing-- and that includes the opportunity for some mediocre white person to take a seat. If we're going to suspend the idea of meritocratic selection for all these other reasons, why not suspend it for a bit of justice as well.

On Track

The reformsters at The74 are providing a platform for the reformsters at Learning Heroes to pitch the same old dreck (I provide the link not because I think you should follow it, but to keep myself honest and allow anyone to check my work who wants to).

Learning Heroes is one more Gates-linked group (via funding and founder Bibb Hubbard, who's a  Gatesian herself). They are particularly devoted to the Cult of the Test, and in fact we did pretty much this exact same song and dance about a year ago.

This time around writer Kate Springer frames the issue as On Track-- 90% of parents say their children are on track in math and reading, but "The real number? Just 1 in 3"

On track? On track??

On track to what? As determined by whom? Based on what evidence?

And really, "track" is problematic as a metaphor, because a track runs from one place to another. The people who assemble these slabs of data-like numbers never look at where the students are coming from, yet that's a piece of information with which parents are intimately familiar. And this "track" data is not a track at all, but a point, a single slice of data from one day of one year. So in a real sense, the conversation between reformy tracking groups and parents is something like this:

Reformsters: Your child is not on track because he's only 5' 4" at age 15 and he is supposed to be 6' when he's 18.

Parents: But he was 4' 10" just last year. He's growing like a weed!

Reformsters: Nonsense. He's stagnant and doomed to failure.

The underlying reformster assumptions here are all false. They assume that there is one single track that all students must travel on, and therefor one track on which their position can be measured. One track for everyone, a track that starts at the same place and ends at the same place. They also assume that they know where that track and they know what the endpoint should be. They talk as if we can know with great certainty that if you are in the Cleveland train station today then you ar right on track to arrive in Boston, even as they assume that they know you should WANT to be in Boston tomorrow. And who gets to do that? Who can best decide when a child is "doing fine" and who has the right to decide what "fine" means? Who are these people so wise that they know the one destination that all students should pursue, and the one track that leads there?

In fact, every single student-- every single live human being-- is on an individual track, a track that starts from where they began their journey, and which ends at the destination of their choosing (including, as well, the many times that they will change their minds about the destination).

Finally, above all the rest of this, this kind of language is an attempt to obscure and give undeserved weight to what we're really talking about-- the student score on a single narrow standardized test.

"Student achievement," "on track," even, as in Springer's piece "how they are doing in school" are all rhetorical smokescreens for "score on a standardized test."

Why can't we talk about what we're really talking about? Because then this conversation would be transparently foolish. "90% of parents thought their children will score above the arbitrary cut score on a single narrow standardized test, but they turned out to be wrong" is not much of a grabber. Because so what? Test scores are a reliable proxy for what, exactly? There's no reason to believe that the answer is anything except "nothing." And if you don't believe me, consider the writing by Jay Greene, an unrelated much more reformy Greene, who has written repeatedly about the disconnect between test scores and life outcomes.

But this misuse of tests as proxy is everywhere in reformdom. Here's DC claiming that their teacher evaluation system weeds out bad apples, when all they've done is prove that if you focus on keeping teachers who are good at test prep, your students will get better test scores.

If reformsters want to talk about test scores, then let's talk about test scores and stop pretending we're talking about bigger, loftier matters of actual substance. But pretending test scores are really indicators of a student's future or measures of student aspirations or the fur depth on an average yeti-- well, that kind of pretending will not help get anyone on track.

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.