Do Not Make Lessons Relevant

This article is actually from 2014, but it touched a nerve that has been raw since I was a student in the 1970s. The author is talking about the issue of students asking "Why do we need to learn this anyway" and after setting up the problem, he drops this:

The best solution to this problem is to make every lesson relevant to each student. However, given the impossibility of achieving that goal, I offer a few teaching tips that can mostly make that dreaded question about relevance a thing of the past. 

And to make matters worse, the link to this article called it "Three Ways To Make Your Lessons Relevant."

No. No no no no no, and also, no.

The instant you decide you want to "make" your lesson relevant, you've lost, because you have admitted that the lesson is not actually relevant. After all, you don't look at the ocean and say, "We'll have to find a way to make that wet." If your spousal unit says, "I'm looking for ways to make myself like you," that is not a good sign.

Yeah, that's wet.

Your lesson should BE relevant, and you should know why it is relevant. And if your students ask why it's worth their time, you should be able to answer that question.

Put another way-- if you don't have a good reason for teaching the lesson, then why are you teaching the lesson? Note: "Because we always have" and "Because that's just one of those things teachers do" are not good answers. "Because I've been told I have to," is not much better, but in the current day and age, it is sometimes the honest answer.

So any time you find yourself trying to think of a way to make a lesson relevant, take a step back and instead ask yourself why you are teaching that lesson at all. As teachers, we have been given stewardship over a sizeable chunk of our students' lives. The most fundamental responsibility we have is to avoid wasting any of that precious time.

A Teacher Who Changed My Life

Actually, it's not really changing a person's life-- you can't change what hasn't happened yet. But "A Teacher Who Dramatically Affected the Trajectory of My Life" is too long for a headline.

The teacher was my elementary music teacher, Miss Gause, who affected my life in two huge ways.

First, she walked back to where the boys sat in the corner and droned away in monotone, and she harassed us into trying to match pitch. It was not the cool thing to do, but it got me to actually listen to what was going on. In those days, we took a music aptitude test-- a listening test-- in fourth and fifth grade, and that test either earned us a recommendation to start an instrument, or it didn't. In fourth grade, I flunked the test. In fifth grade I passed. The difference was Miss Gause. It is impossible to imagine what my life would have been like if I had not played an instrument. Most of my important friendships, both marriages, everything I've learned and applied about performance, the vast part of my community involvement-- all of those flowed from playing an instrument and being involved in music. If Miss Gause had ignored us and let us drone on, my life would look completely different today.

For the second moment of impact-- well, as shocking as this may be, when I was ten years old, I could be a bit of an asshat. One day I sat in the back of the room and entertained a few people with my hilarious imitation of Miss Gause's directing technique. For that, I received a paddling (it was the mid sixties). None of that affected me a great deal (other than realizing I would have to be a sneakier asshat better person). Here's what made an impression that I still carry with me today. Miss Gause caught me, yelled at me, and paddled me, wit what I remember as a fair amount of fury.

And then the business was done. She never brought it up again, she never threw it in my face, she never started treating me as if I were a Terrible Child, and she even let me have plum jobs like helping host the sixth grade talent show. This was a mind-blowing revelation-- that you could get in trouble for something, pay a penalty, and then continue on with a blank slate. I've tried never to forget that-- once a student screws up, I try to deal with it and then let it go.

I think of that incident more often these days. How would my infraction be handled by a modern school? My misbehavior would be entered into some digital behavior file, to settle in next to the time I got out of line on the way to water fountain and my sassy mouth in first grade and that time I punched my mom in the bladder when I was a fetus. In many schools, there is no over-done-moving on for students because members of the Cult of Data believe that if we can just track every bit of information about every notable (or even non-notable) action performed by the young human, we can better mold them and sculpt them and modify them into the person we think they should be. So we'll just keep accumulating more and more data in our Eternal Permanent Cyber-record as we travel the cradle-to-career pipeline, until we find ourselves facing a potential employer who says, "Well, the software suggests that based one some misbehavior when you were ten, you might be a bad risk for our corporate operations."

I know, objectively, that more information can be helpful in understnding our students and helping them, but the growth of creepy stalkerish Big Brother programs, complete with software that promises to analyze the student's personality-- well, that feels like something else. Something intrusive and disturbing and ultimately not very helpful to the student at all. Because I still remember the lesson-- deal with it, and then let it go and let the student start fresh

Now, I have one other major point to make about Miss Gause, and I hope she can forgive me for this--

She was not a particularly great teacher.

I think the gig was hard on her, the students kind of a pain in the butt. She did not make a lifelong career out of teaching, and she did not win awards and honors and accolades for her pedagogical genius. I suspect that under many systems of teacher evaluation, she might not have shone as the brightest star.

And yet, she is one of the most influential figures in my life. If circumstances had taken her in a different direction and I had never met her, I would literally be a whole different person.Would either of us have been helped by a high-stakes test-based accountability system or a heavy-duty Data Overlords program? It's hard to believe so.

IL: DeVos Can't Stick To Script

Illinois has just joined the ranks of the education voucher states in the US after a protracted mess of shenanigans and skullduggery.

Mostly what the legislature and Governor Rauner did was use an artful combo of bribery and hostage-taking to leverage a big, fat pay day for voucher schools. If folks wanted to free up funding for schools (handy, now that the school year started), they would have to give up the voucher dollars. As protective cover, they were given a new funding system and a couple of pieces of gold for public schools.

The depressing news here is that Illinois once again shows that public schools cannot look to either party to defend public education. Democrats took the deal and voted for Voucher Christmas. Some folks called them out, but most of the press about the bill has stuck to the script-- this is an awesome win for public schools and don't pay any attention to that voucher program (which is, you know, not exactly really a voucher program). It's a compromise, a bipartisan happy day.

Except that one voucher fan didn't get the memo on how the bill was supposed to be properly spun-- Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:

Real change and innovation in education will not come from Washington—it will come from states where parents and students demand more education options and have their voices heard. I commend Gov. Rauner and Superintendent Smith for their leadership in making Illinois the 18th state to adopt a tax credit scholarship program. By expanding choices for families and focusing funding on individual students, this program will help thousands of Illinois children succeed.

Oh, no, Secretary! You forgot to call this a compromise. You forgot to say that these "savings accounts" aren't really back door vouchers! You forgot to say what a great funding victory this was for public schools! You forgot to pretend that this bill helped ALL schools through its awesome compromisiness. You could have called it a victory on many sides... on many sides.


Part of the deal in Illinois was supposed to be that voucher fans (of all parties) would refrain from doing a victorious happy dance, that they would avoid saying out loud "We are one step closer to replacing public schools." But no-- there's DeVos, down in the end zone, doing her victory dance and spiking the ball and hollering, "In your FACE, public schools!!" Next time someone better make sure she gets the memo.

Who's College Ready?

Gail Mellow (LaGuardia Community College) turned up in the New York Times this week to challenge the classic picture of a college student.

For many of us, "college student" conjures up images of a fresh-faced nineteen year old, enjoying the chance to live independently, study hard, and maybe indulge in the sowing of some untamed oats. The modern reformy "college and career ready" picture is similar-- 18-year-olds walk across the stage, grab their diplomas, and walk straight into a college dorm. But Mellow's gathered data create a different picture. Here are some stats:

40% of US college students attend a community college.

0.4% of US college students attend "one of the ivies."

Over half of all undergrads live at home, mostly to make things more affordable.

40% of college students work thirty or more hours per week.

25% work full time while also attending college full time.

25% of all undergrads are older than twenty-five.

25% of undergrads are single parents.

Between 2011 and 2015, 20% of two-year college students lived in food-insecure households.

Now, Mellow has a dog in this fight, and he works his way around to the notion that government should give more funds to community colleges (like, you know, his).  But the broad idea of his point remains--

We don't really know what a "typical" college student looks like.

And if we don't know what a college student looks like, then how can we know when somebody is ready to be one?

Does "college ready" include "on good terms with your parents so you'll have a place to live"? Doe it mean "not pregnant"? Is some version of a gap year so normal now that a college ready student is one with a gap year plan? And should we be making all future college students sit down and take a course about how to negotiate a loan? (The answer is "yes.")

There's definitely nothing here to suggest that what students need to be more college ready is a greater ability to take a Big Standardized Test, nor do any of these issues seem to line up with the Common Core [Insert Your New Name Here] Standards. It continues to be impossible to make students "college ready" when we still have no idea what that term actually means.

Back To School Bloviating

Flipping through twitter this morning, and lo and behold, my governor Tom Wolf has offered some advice for the start of school:

Hey PA students — start the school year off right with my #BackToSchoolTips. pic.twitter.com/GKwjUMt1ZZ

— Governor Tom Wolf (@GovernorTomWolf) August 30, 2017

In case you can't see it, the advice is:

1) Get plenty of sleep.

2) Eat a good breakfast.

3) Be nice.

And he encourages Pennsylvania to have a good school year.

It's easy to just slide by this little slice of conventional, almost cliche advice, but this is where I am-- I have come to really appreciate a politician who sticks to what he knows. As a father and practicing human being, Wolf hits on three good pieces of advice that we have reason to believe he actually knows something about.

Compare this to some of the other back-to-school gubernatorial messages of the past. Like Pat McCrory of North Carolina spouting his support for teachers and his pledge to give them a raise (both, as it turns out, rather counter-factual).

Here's Gov. Steve Bullock exhorting students to "make Montana proud," and telling them to pay attention and do their homework because "it pays off." So remember kids-- there's no intrinsic rewards to education and it's not about you, anyway. Louisiana teachers got a cheery greeting from First Lady Donna Edwards that said she knows they're working hard and spending their own money, and thank you, and we've totally got your back. Five years ago Scott Walker and the Missus talked about their support for teachers and students, and how it was great that teachers were helping "get the skills they need for a career or to move on to college," because lots of these messages are just one more chance to plug the same old policy ideas.

Some messages are personal and heartfelt. Michigan's Lt. Governor Brian Calley, father of a child with autism, last year offered an encouragement to students to make friends and reach out to those who are sometimes left out.

But mostly the back-to-school format is employed as it was used by former Delaware Governor Jack Markell in 2015. It's just an opening clause. "As we welcome students back to school, I am optimistic about the year ahead... blah blah blah launch again into plugging my school reform ideas."

In fact, given the number of reformy officials who vow that they are implementing their ideas For The Children, it's remarkable how hard it is to find instances of those same officials actually addressing children, encouraging children or generally using children as anything other than a hook on which to hang their policy talking points. That is perhaps a step better than Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump, neither of whom had anything of substance to offer about the start of the school year. President's Obama and Bush I addressed school children directly during their terms (both offered remarks loosely connected to the idea of personal responsibility, and both took grief from the opposing party because, of course, politicians couldn't just say, "Gee, Mr. President, thanks for taking a direct interest in our nation's youths!")

Despite all the noise about For The Children and the please to stop politicizing education, it is remarkable how few politicians are able to put those two simple principles to work at an obvious time like back-to-school season. Talk is cheap, actions are louder, and yes, this is not That Big a Deal, but I add it to the list of actions and inactions that tell me that for all their talk, few elected officials really give a rat's posterior about education as anything other than a political game piece, a source of money for hungry corporate interests, and a nice touch for their brand.

So it's not a huge deal, but Tom Wolf's "Eat and sleep well, and be nice" struck me as a fresh, pleasant message for the children of Pennsylvania.

Free Market Segregation

The free market will never provide solutions for segregation.

Segregation is part of a functioning free market. Not (necessarily) racial segregation, but business requires sorting out the customers.

Businesses compete for customers, but they don't compete for all customers. First of all, they can't, and second of all, not all customers are created equal. Most importantly, this is part of how they stay efficient-- by not wasting marketing dollars on the wrong customers. So Lexus doesn't spend any time worrying about how their marketing plays with minimum wage workers, and McDonald's doesn't worry about how well-regarded they are by gourmands.

Businesses can most efficiently compete for customers by identifying some single features that appeal to a broad group of customers. Call it the cable effect-- after the early explosion of cable channels, what we saw was a rapid rush to the middle. Where there were once highly differentiated channels, we now have a small group of channels mostly doing versions of the same thing. It's hard to make money working a niche market.

It's also hard to be aspirational. You don't make money by giving the people what they ought to want-- you make money by giving them what they actually want. Bravo and A&E were founded on the notion that people ought to want classy highbrow culture. They've long since abandoned that notion, just as MTV had the cold, hard sense to dump its entire original reason for existing in favor of what would help them win a huge swath of audience.

The free market does not run on equal opportunity for all. Its fans get confused on this point, thinking that if a Lexus is available to anyone who can afford it, that's the same as being available to everyone. The free market does not run on principle. There are occasionally folks who declare that even though something is bad for business, they will do it because it's the right thing to do. Mostly, the free market either eats those people or converts them. Remember Google's "don't be evil" motto? Somehow when they went from plucky upstart to corporate giant, that whole thing was shelved. The free market has neither a conscience or a moral compass.

Mind you, I'm not a hard-core anti-marketer. The free market is very good for accomplishing certain sorts of things, and a couple centuries' worth of free market has, I must acknowledge,  helped build me a cushy foundation of privilege.

But the free market has no more moral quality than  hammer or a waffle iron, and when we try to reinterpret our entire culture and society in terms of the free market, when we replace th commons with the marketplace, when we turn all interactions into transactions, then we lose a moral core to our actions and become a hollow people. Government, churches, schools, community-- none of these things is made better by being recast as a business, as a market-based enterprise. You can only have one top priority; if that priority is turning a profit, then that priority is not anything else.

And the market cannot solve our great moral problems. Like segregation and inequity. As long as there are racists in our society, there will be a lucrative market for segregated schools. To expect that the free market can provide solutions to problems of social justice and equity is like expecting the free market to provide every single citizen with a Lexus-- that's simple not what the market is for. It's like trying to perform brain surgery with a chain saw. The chain saw tends more toward ripping up than careful incisions, and the free market tends toward providing any brand of injustice and inequity that can be made profitable. When the free market is made the guiding power behind education, it will favor the rich over the poor, and it will sort children into worthwhile and discards, and it will leave many, many children behind, grossly underserved or not served at all, and the degree to which public schools already do these things is the precisely the degree to which government and public education have already been infected with the free market ethos.

Why DC's Vouchers Are Failing

The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program has been one of the flagship programs in the world of voucherizing education, the only one funded by the federal government-- and its vital signs are not looking good.

2016-2017 applications to the program were up, but the number of students actually using the vouchers is down. In fact, one third of the students who received vouchers didn't use them, more than half of voucher-winners didn't use them for private school, and the total number of voucher students has dropped from 1,638 to 1,154 over the last four years.

What happened to the system that Mike Pence called "a case study in school choice success"? The folks at Future-Ed (a thinky tank at Georgetown U) looked into it and released a study of that very question.

The short answer is that everything that can be, that is likely to be, or is unavoidably bound to be wrong with a voucher program is wrong with the Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is, in fact, a test-case demonstration of why vouchers are a bad idea. Let's dive into the details.

The Politics

For DC, the problem is that the program's purse strings are held by Congress, so it is blown to and fro on the political winds. It started in 2003 under the GOP, was allowed to sputter quietly in 2009 under the Democrats, then resuscitated by the GOP again in 2011.

We don't talk about this enough with school choice, but one of the effects of choice systems is to gut local control of finances. Choice puts the purse strings in state capitals, where legislators can make decisions based on political wheeling and dealing and, unlike locally school boards, don't have to look their victims in the face when they decide that, for instance, voucher price tags will just stay static for ten years.

Enrollment (Whose Choice Was It, Again?)

The report notes that voucher use has been declining in DC for ages, and there have always been people who receive vouchers and don't use them:

This isn’t a new problem. Between 2004 and 2009, for instance, 22 percent of D.C. students receiving vouchers never used them. The most common reason cited was that students couldn’t get a spot at a preferred private school, according to a survey conducted by researchers for the U.S. Education Department. Other parents cited a lack of resources at private schools for students with special learning needs or admission to a preferred charter school. Some students simply didn’t want to leave their friends.

Emphasis mine. Once again, the basic promise of school choice-- that parents will get to choose the school they want fro their children-- turns out to be inaccurate. In a choice system, it's the schools that choose which students they will admit.

Nor did voucher students pile into the "high-performing" schools-- only 51 vouchers were used in the top schools. And while vouchers provide $8,653 for elementary students and $12,981 for high schoolers, some of DC's top schools charge in the neighborhood of $40K for tuition.

Transparency (Not)

One recurring note struck in the study is that parents did not have access to information about the quality of the schools involved in the voucher system. That was also a problem for the writers of this report-- the voucher system (Serving Our Children) wouldn't provide information about how many students attended which of the private schools in the study citing "student privacy."

Schools involved in the program are not required to tell anybody anything. The school choice notion that parents will pore through data rich reports to find the high-quality school of their dreams is itself a dream. DC public schools must publish detailed test result data:

By contrast, little information is available for parents about private school performance under D.C.’s voucher program. While Serving Our Children offers a handbook describing each of the schools involved, it does not provide information on performance. By law, private schools in the program must prove only that they are accredited and meet health and building codes, not that they are successfully educating students. The District’s elite private schools, worried about devaluing their brands, made it a requirement of their participation that they would not have to disclose test score information on voucher students—despite the use of taxpayer funding to support the vouchers.

Not only is data not available to the "customers," but voucher schools have made that a requirement. But larger studies have repeatedly shown that voucher-using students don't do better, and often do worse. Meanwhile, the report notes new voucher students opening in store fronts and shopping malls, "some relying on voucher students for more than half of their population." In other words, the K-12 equivalent of predatory for-profit colleges-- but with no information available about their actual success at schooling.

Tax Subsidies for the Not-So-Needy

There is a bit of a complication in that voucher awarding doesn't quite synch up with private school admissions. But look at how one school suggests that be handled:

One admissions officer from an elite private school told us he counsels interested students to apply in the fall and gamble that they will receive a voucher in the spring lottery. If the school really wants the student, it will offer a scholarship—then deduct the amount of the voucher from the scholarship. In such instances, the voucher program is merely subsidizing the financial aid offices of elite schools.

Church and State

As we have seen in many voucher programs, DC's vouchers are primarily a means of funneling public tax dollars to private religious schools. 47% of the vouchers went to Catholic schools; another 21% went to religious schools of other denominations.

Satisfactory Segregation

The report finds that voucher schools do better on graduation rates (it would be surprising if they didn't) and that voucher parents are more satisfied with "safety," which I suspect may translate easily into satisfaction that their children don't have to go to school with Those People's Children any more.

Conclusion

The study is pretty brutal in the end:

Congress has justified its multi-million dollar investment in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program by claiming it gives parents the choice of a high-quality educational experience for their children. But the data on the 13-year-old program suggests there is neither robust demand for the private school choices on offer nor firm evidence of educational improvement for the students receiving vouchers. 

Far from serving as a case study for expanded federal investment in private school choice, D.C.’s experience points to the shortcomings of voucher systems with complicated admissions processes, scant information on school quality, and little access to the best schools.

There it is. Far from being a Proof of Concept system, DC's voucher program is a stark display of everything that can be, and I would argue is likely to be, wrong with a school choice system.