Schools Are Not Charities

The U.S. public education system is not a charity. It is a civic institution, the most important, many argue, in the country, and it educates the vast majority of America’s children — the well-off ones and middle-class ones and those who are so poor that they turn up in class with flea collars around their ankles (as one superintendent told me).
                                                                 -- Valerie Strauss, The Answer Sheetr

Strauss was writing about the Laurene Jobs infomercial for her education reform initiative, and in truth, Strauss caught a note that I missed-- the the XQstravaganza was not so much a Bass-o-matic pitch as it was a compressed Jerry Lewis Labor Day telethon. It did portray public education (well, at least education for the poor) as a charity. It smacked a little bit of revival temprance meeting ("Look at this fallen, run-soaked, debased creature! Can no one spare a dollar to save this wretch?" (And, by the way, what in the ever-loving hell was Randi Weingarten doing sitting there giving tacit approval to the portrayal of public school and public school teachers as miserable wretches?)

Strauss is exactly right-- public education is a civic institution, a civic duty, a civic obligation.

Why do some folks so badly want to portray it as a charity?

It's a bit reminiscent of the Tale of the Hero Teacher-- "Look at her folks, slaving away for the love of these children, sacrificing all her own time and money, and with no thought of reward for herself, because Real Hero Teachers don't care how much they get paid or even if they're paid at all! They're totally cheap! No salary too small. Let's have a round of applause (and nothing else) for that hero teacher!"

So why do some like painting education as charity?

Charity is optional for the giver. Only give what you feel you can afford when you feel you can afford it. Charitable giving makes you feel good precisely because you didn't have to do it. And you can give what you feel like giving (pro tip-- for disasters like Harvey and Irma, send money, not shit that volunteers have to that may or may not be any use). You could send money, but you could also volunteer to put on a show or, you know, send thoughts and prayers. If you have better things to spend your money on, well then, the charity will just have to wait. Shouldn't be a problem because...

Charity is optional for the receiver. Sure, the thinking goes, it would be nice if they had a little more money to work with, but if that money doesn't come in, they'll scrape by somehow. You know how resourceful those poor folks are.

Too much charity is bad. Wouldn't want to make people dependent. Besides, this kind of support isn't really sustainable, so we'd better not overdo it.

Charity has to be earned. Of course, we only give charity to people who show they deserve it by displaying proper character or proper goals or proper deference with their betters who have the money. Or they can deserve it by having a really sad story. Undercover Boss is infuriating because in every episode we hear a sad story about someone who can barely support their struggling family/sick child/aging parent on the shitty wages and benefits that the company pays, so in almost every episode, the boss makes things better for that one employee, not asking if perhaps his company's shitty wages and benefits might be hard on Every Other Employee!

Charter schools are frequently pitched as charities, and charteristas like that favorite reformster chorus "Well, we saved that one kid from terrible public schools" while steadfastly refusing to talk about the 600 students still in that "terrible public school" or the obligation, as members of the civic body, to help that public school. Because...

I gave at the office. Charity allows you to pretend that you've fulfilled any obligation you had to deal with the issue. Send the check in, then check out. Cash and dash. Drive-by do-gooding.

Charity is not for rich people. Rich folks don't run their fire departments or local government or police departments on charity because they expect those civic services to be by-god there when they want them. Charities at there worst (and there are some mighty fine charities out there) help reinforce the social order-- "You People will get nice things when we say you can get them."

In fact, charitable giving is hardly for rich people any more. They're doing Philanthropy, which these days looks an awful lot like Pay A Group To Push/Adopt Your Policy Ideas, which is not so much Charitable Giving as it is just plain Hiring People To Work For You.

Treating schools for poor kids (because, really, are we talking about any others) as charities let's people glide by the whole idea that they have any kind of obligation to educate all children, including Those Peoples' Children in That Part of Town. It allows a bunch of people to say, "Well, since I've given some support to a miracle school filled with hero teachers, my work is done. And I feel great about it."

When the critical mass of Americans (or at least a critical mass of people in power) decide to commit to doing something, they do it. There were no bake sales for the Apollo program or car washes to support the war in Afghanistan. We just did it, price tag be damned. When I contemplate the XQ telethon, I come back to the same old depressing conclusion-- one of the fundamental reasons we don't solve the problems of public education is that we don't really want to. We just want to pretend we're kind of trying while making sure the business is not too expensive. Please don't tax me for the real amount of equitable public education for all-- but I will drop a couple of dollars in the collection plate, and my friend here will do a nice song and dance. Now we've done our part-- please go away and don't bother us about this for a year or so.

ICYMI: Post-Labor Day Edition (9/10)

Holy smokes, but I have a lot for you this week. Good Stuff just kept rolling across my screen, and here's some of the best of it. Remember, sharing is empowering.

Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools and Its Children Lost

The New York Times offers a detailed and depressingly thorough picture of how badly Betsy DeVos's home state, often under her direction, has ed reformed itself into a deep hole.

The War on Public Schools

A rundown on how public education has been run down, form the Atlantic.

The Decline of Play in Preschoolers and the Rise in Sensory Issues.

This point keeps getting made, and I'll keep amplifying anyone who makes it until it sinks into school districts' collective heads. Replacing play with academics is damaging to small children.

The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools

From The Nation-- how the DOJ is involved in allowing white parents to secede from largely black school districts.

The Sad Story of Public Education in St. Louis

St. Louis is one more urban district that has been taken over by privatizers and gutted. It's been going on for a while-- and things aren't getting any better.

Those Who Can't

Spoon Vision with a new take on an old cliche

A Scrappy Parent Takes on Bow Tie Man

Philadelphia public school activist tries to attend a "public" meeting/about further privatizing in Philly. Turns out that "public" is only a figurative term. But boy is this woman feisty.

Fueling the Teacher Shortage

Wendy Lecker looks at how states in general and Connecticut in particular are accelerating the teachers "shortage."

Parents Cite Student Privacy Concerns

Turns out that Mark Zuckerberg's Summit Schools education-in-a-software-box program has some truly nightmarish problems with student privacy

Underachievement School District Superintendent Resigns in Disgrace

Remember the Tennessee Achievement School District, the model for state takeover districts. Remember how it was going to take bottom schools and move them to the top. Remember how its first super, Chris Barbic, left, having realized it couldn't be done? So how have things been going since then? Gary Rubinstein reports on that (spoiler alert: terribly, and yet it's still touted as a model).

Reality Check: Trends in School Finance

This might be the most important post on the list today. Bruce Baker looks at that old reformy refrain "We've spent double the money and test results have stayed flat." Is that actually true. (Spoiler alert: no). With charts and explanations that civilians can understand.

The Real Reason We Can't Fix Our Schools

Short, sweet, and to the point./

Dear Teachers: Don't Be Good Soldiers for the Edtech Industry

Steven Singer with a reminder that sometimes the best soldiers are the ones that defy bad orders.

Seven Times “XQ Super School Live” Denigrated America’s Teachers (And One Time It Praised Them)

And finally, though this makes two appearances in one week for Spoon Vision, this is my favorite of the many excellent pieces written in response to Laurene Jobs' XQ infomercial. I like this because you can use this to explain to your co-worker, family member, or neighbor (or the celebrities who were in the thing-- meet me over on twitter in a few minutes) why, "no, I, was not really excited about that special on Friday night."

More Creepy Tech

So, there's a new piece of software that lets you do a video job interview on your own. Load the app, answer the questions as your own phone records video of your answer. You can even do multiple takes of your answers until you have one you like. And then HireVue's version of anArtifial Intelligence takes over:

Using voice and face recognition software, HireVue lets employers compare a candidate’s word choice, tone, and facial movements with the body language and vocabularies of their best hires. The algorithm can analyze all of these candidates’ responses and rank them, so that recruiters can spend more time looking at the top performing answers.

 Each candidate answers the same questions, so it's a standardized interview, which is supposed to make things better because human beings have biases and make judgments and stuff.

We're only hiring guys named Dave

The app is discussed briefly in this piece entitled "New App Scans Your Face and Tells Companies Whether You're Worth Hiring."

HireVue claims to have completed four million interviews already while working with over 600 companies (including Nike, Tiffany, and Honeywell). They also offer an assessments service ( "to identify best-fit talent without the painful experience of traditional assessment.") And they can do "structured video coaching that reveals team readiness in real time." Just the thing for the harried "Talent Acquisition Leader" who just finds it too stressful to exercise some professional judgment. And for applicants. HireVue even offers some youtube interview tips.

This is several types of creepy, though it could certainly cut down on the wear and tear and travel of interviewing. But Monica Torres at Ladders cuts pretty quickly to the problem-- the notion that computer software is somehow free of human biases. Software is written by human beings-- and this software uses the hiring your institution has already done as its baseline. And once again-- this is not artificial intelligence-- it's just a complex algorithm.

In other words, the algorithm is only as objective as the human minds that guide it. So if the employer’s ideal candidate is already biased against certain characteristics, HireVue’s platform would only embed these biases further, potentially making discriminatory practices a part of the process. Human recruiters would need to recognize their own personal biases before they could stop feeding them into HireVue. It’s one more reminder that behind each robot lies a human who engineered it.

None of this is directly linked to education-- yet. But in a world where test manufacturing companies are already promising they can kind of read test-takers' minds and other companies are promising that they can have your on-line course watch your every move and response, this is just one more indication of how far this trend of algorithmic displacement of human judgment can go. And never forget-- whenever the computer is watching it and measuring it, the computer is also storing it. 

Could HireVue be tweaked so that it can match facial movement and body language of students with students that were deemed "successful"? Sure. In fact, it seems entirely possible that HireVue's algorithm about body language and facial expression could also easily track and quietly count skin color or gender characteristics. But it's a computer, so of course it's all facts and data and science-- not just a quick and efficient way to legitimize the bad and biased judgment of the individuals behind the screen. Remember to keep your eyes peeled for this kind of tech, because it already has its eyes peeled for you.

Data Driven Into the Weeds

Having a data-driven school has been all the rage for a while now, because when you express your ideas, thoughts, and biases in numbers, they qualify as "facts," whereas judgment expressed in words obviously lacks data-rich factiness, and so should be ignored. Yes, the fact that I am 100% an English teacher may make me about 62% bitter about the implied valuing of numbers over words; I'd say I'm at about 7 on the 11-point Bitterness Scale, and that's a fact.

Pretty sure the rest of the vehicle is around here somewhere.

Being data-driven (which usually means test-result-driven) is a bad idea for several reason.

Data vs. Standards

Mind you, I am not and never was a fan of nationalized standards like the Common Core [Insert New Name Here] Standards. But at some point lots of folks quietly switched standards-aligned to data-driven curriculum management, and that matters a great deal. Almost an 8 on the 10-point Great Deal scale.

It matters because tests ignore many of the standards, starting with non-starters like the speaking and listening standards. No standardized test will address the cooperative standards, nor can writing or research be measured in any meaningful way on a standardized multiple-choice test. And no-- critical thinking can not be measured on a standardized test any more than creativity can be measured by a multiple choice question.

In other words, the moment we switch from standards-aligned to data-driven, we significantly and dramatically narrow the curriculum to a handful of math and reading standards that can be most easily addressed with a narrow standardized test. The Curriculum Breadth Index moves from a 20 down to a 3.

Remember GIGO

Because the instrument we use for gathering our data is a single standardized test that, in many states, carries no significant stakes for the students, we are essentially trying to gather jello with a pitchfork.

The very first hurdle we have to clear is that students mostly don't care how they do on the test. In some cases, states have tried to clear the first hurdle by installing moronically disproportionate stakes, such as the states where third graders who are A students can still find themselves failing for the year because of a single test. But if you imagine my juniors approach the Big Standardized Test thinking, "Golly, I must try to do my very best because researchers and policy makers are really depending on this data to make informed decisions, and my own school district really needs to do my very, very bestest work so that the data will help the school leaders,"-- well, if that's what you imagine, then you must rank around 98% on the Never Met An Actual Human Teenager scale.

That's before we even address the question of whether the test does a good job of measuring what it claims to measure-- and there is no reason to believe that it does. Of course, it's "unethical" for teachers to actually look at the test, but apparently I and many of my colleagues are ethically impaired, so we've peeked. As it turns out, many of the questions are junk. I would talk about some specific examples, but the last time I and other bloggers tried that, we got cranky letters and our hosting platforms put our posts in Time Out. Seriously. I have a post that discusses specific PARCC questions in fairly general ways, but Blogger took it down. So you will have to simply accept my word when I say that in my professional opinion, BS Test questions are about 65% bunk.

For a testing instrument to gather good data, the testing questions have to be good, valid, reliable questions that accurately measure the skill or knowledge area they purport to measure. Then the students have to make a sincere, full-effort honest attempt to do their best.

The tests being used to generate data fail both measures. Letting this data drive your school is like letting your very drunk uncle drive your car.

Inside the Black Box

When I collect my own data for driving my own instruction, I create an instrument based on what I've been teaching, I give it to students, and I look at the results. I look for patterns, like finding many students flubbing the same task, and then I look at the question or task, so that I can figure out exactly what they don't get.

The BS Test is backwards. First, it was designed with no knowledge of or attention to what I taught. So what is required here is not testing what we teach, but teaching to the test.

Except that we all know that teaching to the standardized test is Bad and Wrong, so we have to pretend not to do that. On top of that, we have installed a system that puts the proprietary rights and fiscal interests of test manufacturers ahead of the educational needs of our students, with the end result that teachers are not allowed to look at the test.

So to be data-driven, we must first be data-inventors, trying to figure out what exactly our students did poorly on on the BS Test. We may eventually be given result breakdowns that tell us the student got Score X on Some Number of Questions that were collectively meant to assess This Batch of standards. But as far as a neat, simple "here's the list and text of questions that this student answered incorrectly," no such animal is occurring. This is particularly frustrating in the case of a multiple choice test, since to really track where our students are going wrong, we need to see the wrong answers they selected, which are our only clues to the hitch in their thinking about the standard. In short, we have 32% of the actual information needed to inform instruction.

We are supposed to do teach to the test with our eyes blindfolded and our fingers duct-taped together.

Put Them All Together

Consider all of these factors, and I have to conclude that data-driven instruction is a snare and a delusion. Or, rather, 87% snare and 92% delusion, with a score of 8 on the ten-point Not Really Helping. And I think the weeds measure about 6'7".

 

More DeVosian Democrats

You may not have heard of the Progressive Policy Institute lately, but they'll be coming up more often as their Education Honcho releases his new book. PPI is worth paying attention to, if for no other reason than the organization provides Exhibit #1,635 of Why Teachers Can't Trust Alleged Democrats.

What is PPI? From their own website:

The Progressive Policy Institute is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock.
 
Founded in 1989, PPI started as the intellectual home of the New Democrats and earned a reputation as President Bill Clinton’s “idea mill.” Many of its mold-breaking ideas have been translated into public policy and law and have influenced international efforts to modernize progressive politics.

Today, PPI is developing fresh proposals for stimulating U.S. economic innovation and growth; equipping all Americans with the skills and assets that social mobility in the knowledge economy requires; modernizing an overly bureaucratic and centralized public sector; and, defending liberal democracy in a dangerous world.

In short, a neo-liberal Thinky Tank and advocacy group, masquerading as a bunch of progressives. They claim close ties to the New Democrats in Congress, as well as an assortment of governors and mayors. They like to call themselves centrists. They have staked out positions on a variety of issues, including education.

You can get a sense of where they stand from one of their most recent pieces, an attempted rebuttal of the NEA statement on charter schools. They lead with plenty of inflammatory language-- NEA's research is "shoddy," the "retrograde" report is "fear mongering worthy of a prize." They also repeat time-worn charteristas talking points-- charter schools are really public schools, no students are ever counseled out (which is true-- many are just pushed out), and nobody can prove that charters are adding to segregation. And they make a point by point rebuttal.

1) NEA says only elected school boards should authorize charters. PPI says that elected school boards are "problematic" because they are "captive" to their employees. In other words, the teachers union controls school board elections and the elected board members are just teacher shills. Also, charters are separate but unequal because charters are better.

2) NEA says charters should operate under same labor laws. PPI says that the ability to do whatever the hell you want with staffing-- hire, fire, pay levels all at the will of the operator-- is critical for charters.

3) NEA says that charters on average do no better than public schools. PPI holds its breath and declares that this is just not true, which I suppose is how we argue these things in Trump's America.

4) NEA says competition does not improve public schools. PPI says that the monopolies of public education is bad and competition will make everything great, just you wait and see.

5) NEA says charters are not held accountable  like public schools are. PPI says tat charters are held accountable for their performance, though they don't actually say by whom.Maybe authorizers, whose agenda is straightforward-- if the charter stays open they get a cut if students aren't learning the charter closes.

I'll remind you that all of this is coming from nominal Democrats. Even the Faux Democratic group DFER has tried to distance itself from the DeVos/Trump administration, but there isn't a thing here that Betsy DeVos wouldn't heartily agree with. And you can find PPI hanging out with the Fordham Institue, the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, Bellwether Education Partners, and Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. The list of PPI fellows includes familiar names from many of these groups.

Can't lie-- that is a snappy hat

The voice of PPI on education is David Osborne. Osborne ran the "reinventing government task force" for VP Al Gore back in 1993, then spent a decade at the Public Strategies Group, "a consulting firm that helped public organizations improve their performance." He pops up in newspaper op-ed pages to tout the wonders of charter conversion. Here he is in the Philadelphia Inquirer explaining that Philly ought to imitate New Orleans or DC. Or in the Boston Globe (Massachusetts is his home base) touting a "new paradigm" for public schools which is, essentially, to replace public schools with charter schools.

And he has a new book out this week-- Reinventing Education-- that looks like it's going to be well-promoted.

In this book, Osborne uses compelling stories from cities like New Orleans and lays out the history and possible future of public education. Ultimately, he uses his extensive research to argue that in today's world, we should treat every public school like a charter school and grant them autonomy, accountability, diversity of school designs, and parental choice.

 I have not read the book (and it's not high on my list), but I am curious where he stands on the charter characteristics of non-transparency, non-accountability, and generating profits for private corporations and individuals. Nor do I see any signs of Osborne grappling of what happens to "undesireable" students in a charter world in which no charter has to take a student they don't want (a serious issue in New Orleans).

There's a whole world of charter mis-information here, coupled with the tone of someone who has no interest in a serious conversation about any of the issues that charters raise. That's all just another day at the education debates.

No, what I want you to notice, and remember as this group pops up, is that these are self-labeled progressives, folks with long and strong Democratic ties. The GOP is no friend of public education, but at least they never pretend otherwise. But here's evidence once again that when it comes to education, some Democrats are completely indistinguishable from the GOP.

New Cyber-Incident Map

Doug Levin at EdTech Strategies has compiled an interesting/alarming new resource. It's a map of school-related cyber incidents.

Levin notes that between " January 1, 2016 to August 31, 2017, U.S. K-12 public schools and districts were reported to have experienced at least 202 separate cyber security-related incidents resulting in the disclosure of personal information, the loss of taxpayer dollars, and the loss of instructional time." Plus some involved identity theft and criminal charges. This screenshot gives you an idea-- for the fully interactive map, follow the link.

Way to go, North and South Dakota

While many of us are worried about corporate players with their own nefarious purposes (just what DOES Google intend to do with the giant ocean of data they harvest via their many school-related apps), schools are vulnerable to the same issues as every other wired-up, plugged-in organization-- hackers, cyber-attacks, and sloppy maintenance of security. Since school districts are often in no position to win biding wars for top IT talent, one can argue that educational networks are often staffed by folks who are not necessarily the top talent in the field.

But schools remain a treasure trove of identity information about children, who are excellent targets for identity theft (your eight year old probably won't notice a bunch of faux consumer activity being perpetrated in her name). On top of that, we have the expected level of prankery (one school system's network was hacked in order to make everyone look at a "nude image") and stuff I wouldn't have expected-- I would not have thought anyone would care to launch a denial of service attack against a school, but imagine the consequences if one were launched during on-line testing time.

The map is a quick, handy guide to what's happening out there, and Levin provides links for those who want to contribute to the database. It's one more useful resource for getting a clearer picture of what's happening.

Money and Control

Even as I was imagining a future in which classrooms are a mass of sponsored product placement, folks were pointing out that such brand-building bribery would be illegal in many states where it is against the law for a teacher to get any money from anywhere.

Consider this recent story from Washington state, where the Evergreen School District has put its foot down and stomped heavily on the neck of crowd-funding contributions to classrooms. Amy Johnson, a third-grade teacher at Evergreen School District's Riverview Elementary School has used Donors Choose, a crowdfunding site, since 2010. 2,000 books. Math manipulatives for everybody. Those are just some of the benefits to Johnson's students. But the district says the state says that teachers must knock it off.

I've read accounts of this sort of ban popping up here and there, and one popular theory about why is the notion that districts and/or states are ashamed that outsiders have to make up for the lousy job they do of financing their schools. But the Evergreen article offers a more practical explanation:

The Washington State Auditor’s Office advised the district that a policy needs to be put in place to ensure that the money is properly handled, and that the items are designated as district property and put in the district inventory.

Money is control, and what school districts don't pay for, school districts can't control. Money that doesn't pass through the district's financial office is suspect, and objects that exist within the four walls of a district school-- well, all those objects must clearly belong to the school district.

On the one hand, I sort of understand this. Sort of. The public school district acts on behalf of taxpayers and the taxpayers are entitled to know how money is spent within the district. And what you don't pay for, you don't have say over. This is why I'm alarmed rather than heartened that some members of the Trump administration without being paid; to me, that's just a way for them to tell the US taxpayers, "We do not work for you."

But because money is power, these money issues often become the proxies for power issues. The school, for example, where the principal tries to control staff activity by keeping just one copy machine where they can't get to it, so the parents collect money and donate a copy machine which the principal then turns down. This happens for no reason other than "nobody is going to tell me how to run my building."

And Evergreen has also tried to shut down teachers personal out-of-pocket spending, offering a kind of sulky petulant explanation:

“We do stock a classroom to the point where teachers can conduct classes and kids have supplies,” [District spokesperson] Spolar said.

So, you know-- what more do you want?

The two versions of a classroom-- the branded sponsorship and the only-what-the-district-gives-you-- represent two sides of the same issue. School districts and states don't want to spend enough money on schools, but they also don't want the kind of power sharing that comes with pursuing other sources of revenue. Little sell-outs come with boundaries that make them acceptable (all Pepsi wants in return for this contribution is a big sign on your scoreboard) or justifiable to most folks (all the army wants in return for their check is a chance to make a pitch at a football game, but hey-- it's the US Army).

There haven't been big fights about teacher contributions because although the vast majority of teachers (I'm betting-- I have no data on this) buy supplies for their own classroom, it rarely occurs to them to act as if they own those supplies).

And sometimes this sort of thing is kept kind of quiet. For instance, a school that has an athletic trainer on staff-- whose salary is paid by a private individual.

But the bottom line is simple. Most schools need more money, and most state legislatures aren't going to give it to them. In fact, through charters and vouchers and various other reformy programs, many legislatures are busy making sure that public schools have less money and fewer resources. (Not important, they say, even as the rich and powerful make sure to send their own children to schools with massive funding and tiny class sizes.) So where will additional funds come from? From staff? From crowd-sourcing? From contributors? All are possible, and yet all require school district administrations to give up complete control of their own operations.

A money gap is a power gap, an invitation for someone to step in and trade one for the other, and districts can be managed by people whose desire to hold onto power is huge (and yes-- I am completely aware that this is exactly the sort of bullshit that makes people more interested in charter/voucher/choice systems).

Solutions? Well, one is for teachers to go tell their administration to get stuffed and keep using whatever resources they can come up with. Or administrations could just treat teachers as if they were fully-grown-up professionals who can be allowed to pursue whatever avenues they can come up with that don't compromise the integrity of the school. Another is for administrations to find ways to incorporate contributions rather than barring the door and grabbing tightly to the reins. The best solution would be for legislatures to fully and adequately fund the schools in their state, even and especially the underfunded schools where Those People's Children attend. We'll see which solution is most likely to occur. In the meantime, Amy Johnson had to take her Donors Choose page down. Her students will have fewer resources this year, but at least Johnson will remember who's boss of her.