Markets Smart and Free

Unlike many of my friends in the ed debates, I kind of like free market capitalism. Under the right circumstances, it can really get things done. But there are sooooo many reasons to believe that the field of public education is precisely the wrong set of circumstances.

The free market can be uber-excellent at setting a true price for goods and services-- particularly goods. But the market can only do this job well when it is smart. We've seen the market get way smarter in just the last two decades, so we have examples of the effects (and yes, some of what I'm going to talk about comes under the sexier term "asymetric information," but I am not feeling sexy today).

Take used cars. Back in the day, you would go to the Used Car Dealer and do a long and complicated dance. You weren't sure exactly what the car you wanted was worth, but you knew what you could stand to pay. The dealer knew pretty well what the car was worth, but he was not about to tell you. If you were savvy, you might have checked the Kelly Blue Book, but mostly you had to drive from lot to lot to lot to lot, comparing prices and trying to build some sense of what a fair price was, particularly if those lots were priced all over the map.

Now we have internet. On the one hand, it's a bummer because it's extremely unlikely you'll find a surprise bargain wildly out of line with the common going price. On the other hand, you probably won't get hosed, and those days of interminable negotiation while the two parties tried to keep a grip on their own secret info (car price, buyer's budget).

A smart free market sets a value for objects; that value equals "whatever people will pay for it," and thanks to sites like eBay, we know exactly what that amount is. If the last 600 widgets sold on eBay for $10, you are not going to sell yours for $50. The market is too smart for that.

Surviving in a free market has always involved companies trying to make the market dumber in several different ways. The company can make the market dumber by withholding pricing information, like the old used car lot. The health care industry has made the health care market positively brain dead; no customer has any idea what anything costs.

We can also make the market dumber by concealing the nature of the product. "This is magic snake oil," I declare, holding up a jug of water. "These pictures of magic sea monkeys, with cute little faces, totally represent the real thing," declares the ad. "This maple syrup-like product is thick and colored a kind of dark amber," declares well-shot video of a completely synthetic crappy product.

Maple syrup is, in fact, a good example. Marketeers have convinced folks that good maple syrup is thick and rich and gooey, with a sort of dull faux-sweet tone, while actual maple syrup, when heated is thinner than water and cuts through waffles and your enamel with the same sharp, sugary edge. The market has been made dumb about maple syrup.

The free market is exceptionally dumb about education, and reformers have been working hard to make it dumber.

Nobody knows what the actual costs involved in education are (though there are many people who are sure they are Way Too Much). The ed reform debates have further muddied the water, because some reformsters like to characterize the cost of public education as Exorbitantly Expensive, whereas marketing for charters generally refers to them as Free. And unlike a used car or a beanie baby, education can involve a wide range of costs based on location.

Meanwhile, the effect of reformy focus on "outcomes" is to seriously dumb down the market's understanding of the "product" which has been reduced from the nebulous idea of self-actualization and personal growth leading to a better life-- well, we've boiled all of that down to "good score on a Big Standardized Test" which is such ridiculously reductive version of the "product" that it makes the market blindingly ignorant.

And on top of that, there is also a hidden market involved, transactions so unexamined that the market is completely ignorant of what's going on. That's the data market. The product being sold is personal data, and the vendors do not even know they're in the market at all. It's as if we walked onto a used car lot and said, "For a dollar, I'll clean up your trash" and the dealer said sure, fine, and we then drive a Lexus off the lot. The free market can't even function when at least one of the parties doesn't even know they're selling something,

Many of these factors keep the market dumb, and certainly some could be overcome (though, as with ebay and internet used car sites, at considerable cost to profiteers), but probably not the issue of knowing what the "product" is so that it can be valued. Different people get different kinds of education for different purposes, and often the true value of the education is not known for years-- or decades. Reformers try to work around this by suggesting that parents are the true "consumers": of education, but that's just not true. The primary "consumer" of a year of kindergarten is the five year old sitting there, and also her future employers, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens and even future family members. None of the yet have a clue what that year of education looks like as a product, or what its value will be. The free market demands that we put a value on our goods and services right now, today-- and that's just not possible.

The free market can't handle education because it's too stupid about education. That stupidity works out well for people trying to make a buck on education, but like the pre-internet used car market, it works out poorly for the "customers." And it certainly doesn't improve education itself, which the market deliberately fails to understand.

Never Send a Bot

Even as edupreneurs pitch every eduproduct under the edusun as being enhanced with bold new Artificial Intelligence (just like real intelligence but with fewer calories), examples continue to abound that the AI world has a few bugs to work out.

You remember last years when Microsoft set up a chatbot to learn from other posters, who promptly taught it how to be a horrifying roboracist. And just last week I was talking about new human resources tech that tries to read your face, body language, and mind when hiring you. The problem? Soldifying human biases and prejudices into data algorithms. I was afraid it will be turned loose on students eventually, but many readers helpfully pointed out that it is already being used by districts to hire teachers. That, sadly, is not a new thing.

I will now unleash some scary racist shit

Just this week, we've had more news on the rogue AI front. One story centers on researchers who claim their bot can figure out whether you're gay or not. Well-- if you're white, and signed up for a dating service, and not something other than straight or gay, or-- you know what? It's possible these researchers are full of it, which would be fine except it doesn't matter whether or not their software can actually do this or not-- it only matters if they can convince someone it does, and that someone hires them and puts their AI to work. That would be some bad news.

But when it comes to AI amokitude, nobody beats Facebook, a multimillion-dollar corporation that has access to best computer wizards that money can buy-- and yet cannot successfully wrestle with any of the implications of letting Artificial Intelligence drive the bus. Remember when they decided that AI could curate the news and they'd just fire the trending team humans? That just worked super, and started us down the road to a system that could be gamed by the Russians throughout our last election. Well, "gamed" is too strong a word since all they did was just give Facebook money in exchange for pushing their baloney.

And now it turns out that Facebook will let you sell ads for just about anything, as when journalists this week discovered that the House That Zuck Built will gladly sell you ad space targeted toward people who want to burn Jews. 

All of this because a common embed  in these AIs seems to be the Silicon Valley ethic of neoliberal libertarianism, a sort of technocratic motto of "If you can do it, nobody should make you stop to ask if you should do it."

We have been worried about Skynet, about AIs becoming so smart that they would try to grab all the power and kill the humans. But what we keep forgetting is that AI is software and software enshrines the ethics and culture of the people who create it. Armed robot conquest of the Earth is what you get if your AI software was originally written by Stalin or Hitler or the IT guy from the Military-Industrial Complex. What we're ending up with is the software from somebody's marketing department. When the singularity comes, it will stand on the corner minding its own business and accepting payoffs from any human who wants to punch some other human. It will be a worldwide net of bots-driven entrepreneurs who most value non-interference with other entrepreneurs. If they send someone back to kill John Conner as a child it will be because adult John Conner was a legislator who successfully launched regulations on bot-driven industries.

In other words, the danger will not be that AI will value evil, but that it will be ethically and morally deaf.

If you want 6to read a far more intelligent look at edtech's many failed promises and cultural gaps and ethical impairments, I cannot recommend this Audrey Watters piece enough. I'm just going to focus on one particular question--

What happens when you put an AI in charge of a student's education, if it's the kind of AI that doesn't know that racist spewing is bad and opening up a market for Jew-haters is wrong? What if it's the kind of AI that doesn't know or care that it's being used to mislead an entire nation?

Back in the Day, most teacher contracts included morals clauses (many, many still do) and teachers could lose their jobs for flagrant display of moral and ethical lapses. Yes, such clauses are often subject to twists and biases and lies, but ask yourself-- if a live human showed the kind of ethical blindness that AI regularly does, would you want that live human teaching your child? If you followed a person down the street who drove over a puppy without stopping (because it's somebody else's job to keep the puppy out of the street) and who stopped to put up posters advertising a racist rally (because someone paid them to) and who walked past a child who was bedraggled and weeping (because that kid is not their problem) and who eventually walked into a school classroom, what would you think?

Look, I am no Luddite. I use edtech. I teach at a 1-to-1 school and I like it. I am hugely appreciative of the many things that modern tech tools make possible. But they are tools, and like any other tool they have to be used 1) for only the purposes they are actually good at and 2) by human beings exercising their own human judgment.

These stories are the same story, time after time after time and the moral is always the same-- never send a bot to do a live person's job. I see nothing in the current world of AI to suggest that this is not doubly true for schools.

Teachers in the Statehouse

Something extraordinary has happened this month in Pennsylvania. Jerry Oleksiak, one of 2016's scariest people and friend of this blog, has stepped down from his position as head of PSEA, the state teachers union. And he did it for the most unusual of reasons-- Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf selected Oleksiak to serve as his secretary of labor and industry.

Oleksiak was a classroom teacher for 32 years, teaching special education in the Upper Merion school district of PA. He's been a union official for several years. And now he's the Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry.

We've certainly seen teachers move up into elected office. Oklahoma just elected a retired teacher to fill the scandal-stained spot of a GOP lawmaker, and many other OK teachers are running for office. Oh, no, wait-- that was the special election back in July. The special election that just happened is this one, in which a teacher won with 60% of the vote.

But even I was surprised to see a governor of a state reach down and select a teacher for appointment.

I mean, I shouldn't be. Lord knows we've seen an unending parade of people with no education background appointed to state level positions. But it's true-- even I reflexively assume that when folks want someone to come run  an arm of government, they don't call on teachers. "This part of our state government is a mess. We'd better get a teacher to come in here and fix it," said pretty much nobody ever.

Yet we think nothing of saying let's get an economist or a banker or (God help us) a business person.

The reaction to Oleksiak's appointment, even among teachers, is a measure of the profession's lowered esteem (and self-esteem). Why would teachers be represented in capitols so much less than, say, lawyers and doctors? Why is it that "appointing a teacher" usually means some kind of cute mascot job like the Teacher Ambassadors of the USED which are a nice idea and no, wait, they are not, because it's the education department and teachers should not be invited to come hang out as honorary advisers-- they should be tagged to come run the place. And not just that department, but lots of other departments across government.

Teachers have management training with the most challenging of co-workers. We handle money, work with budgets, find creative ways to fund things (sure, it's all with the decimal point a little further to the left than in government, but still). We collaborate and compromise, and most of all, we have a broad background of knowledge across many fields combined with an intimate knowledge of how policies play out for real people on the ground. There really is no reason for anyone, including teachers, to think of government work as somehow out of our league. Certainly teachers, like other folks, may look at government work and find that it's far less appealing than their regular day job. But that's no reason not to ask, to just automatically rule teachers out.

The teachers of Oklahoma have finally gotten so sick of their legislature that they are mounting a multipronged attempt to simply take it over. God bless them. And God bless Jerry Oleksiak, for reminding us that there's no reason a governor couldn't pick up the phone and say, "I want to come serve in my cabinet."

The Well

The well had always stood in the center of the community, broad at the top and drawing from a deep spring of cool clear water that had nourished the people for generations. Any member of the public could stop by at any time and a steward of the well would draw up a cup of cool, clear water.

It wasn't magical or perfect. Occasionally leaves and branches fell into the wide mouth of the well, and the stonework, though solid and strong, needed to be regularly repaired and improved. The community didn't really want to invest a great deal in the well-- it had always been there and so they assumed it would always be there-- so the well was always in a perilous state, the stewards just barely keeping up with the repairs and improvements needed. There were other problems as well; some members of the community were allowed to draw water up with sharp, clear buckets of the best and newest materials, while other members were forced to draw water up with crusty old wooden buckets, leaky and sometimes caked with dirt and grime. There were ongoing arguments about how to address this injustice, but often those who drank from the new, clean cups often claimed that the wooden buckets were good enough for Those Kinds of People. The well had always suffered from problems of fairness and equity.

Salesmen came to town, with wagons packed full of bottled water. But the market for their wares was not great-- why buy something that's stale and packaged in wasted plastic when the public well is already right there? But the salesmen looked at the water from the well. "This isn't very blue," they said. "All the best water is blue."

So the salesmen became creative. Some offered a special deal-- if you brought them one of the wooden buckets, you could have a "free" case of bottled water. This was actually quite helpful for a few of the families, but when other families went to the well, they discovered that even the lousy buckets they had cursed in the past were gone.

Other salesmen became aggressive, and simply started dumping poison into the well.

Now the well was deep and the water was drawn from a large and powerful wellspring, but many citizens became alarmed when they discovered what was being dumped in there. "This will just give  bring the water up to standards," the salesmen claimed, "And everyone knows the best water is blue, so we are just testing it for blueness, and adding more blue coloring when necessary." But more and more members of the community said the water was starting to taste bad.

So other salesmen sold home filtering systems and other salesmen sold little pills you could drop in the water and other salesmen went to community council meetings and yelled, "Why not just let everyone take the buckets for drawing water and go get whatever they want wherever they want to?" And, of course, the salesmen sold lots of bottled water, even after it was the plastic leaked toxins into the water and even after it was discovered that a lot of the bottled water was taken straight out of the old well. There were those salesmen who got their water from a fancy purification factory and packaged it in a gold wrapper, but it turned out they would only sell their water to a select few.

Meanwhile, the elders who maintained the old well were under attack. Salesmen would strut past the well, waving golden chalices filled with water that they had paid to have carefully scrubbed clean, saying loudly, "Well, why can't the well stewards do this? You should let us manage the well."

And even the people who defended the well had to admit that the longer this dragged on, the more polluted and dirtied the well itself became. New salesman came to town with tricky devices that dispensed a sort of synthetic flavored goop. "Buy one of these," they said. "You can have any flavor you want. It's practically like water." But it wasn't much like water at all, and the salesmen always took the villagers' money first and then told them they were out of all the other flavors.

Some of the stewards were fired because their water didn't come up blue enough, and others finally quit after months of having salesmen drive by throwing stones at them. Some were replaced by strangers from out of town who didn't even know how to hold a cup. Bit by bit, generations of knowledge about how to take care of the well were lost. The people who had suffered under the dirty wooden buckets now had no access to real water at all. And the well was becoming polluted and run down.

I don't have an ending for this story. It's possible that in the end, the salesmen buy the well, fill it with cement, and sell nothing but their various products. Maybe some stewards keep part of the well alive and functioning, or maybe they strike out and build a new well. Maybe the people of the community wake up and throw the salesmen out and take back the well, clean it up, and restore it better than before. I don't honestly know. All I know for sure is that these are hard days to be a thirty citizen.

The Hostile Takeover of Teacher Training

When it comes to bogus reformy crap, it is hard to beat Education Reform Now, a group of self-described progressives which serves as a mirror organization for Democrats for Education Reform, proving that you can throw the words "progressive" and "democrat" around all you want and nobody will stop you.

ERN is not a fan of public education. They want charter schools, and they'd like to eliminate teacher job protections. (With DFER, they also present the annually hilariously horrifying Camp Philos.) So when they release a "report" about how to fix teacher certification, I get that shudder of someone walking over my profession's grave.

"New Colleges of Education-- A Path for Going from Concept To Reality" is sixteen pages of existential teacher terror from David Bergeron and Michael Dannenberg. Bergeron was at the Department of Education from 2009 to 2013 under Arne Duncan, and then he graduated to the Center for American Progress, the thinky tank that was supposed to cough up the working cogs of the Hillary Clinton administration. Sorry, guys. Dannenberg was with the New America Foundation, the USED (also under Duncan), and the Education Trust before joining ERN. So we've met the first requirement for one of these education policy papers in that it involves nobody with actual education experience-- just lots of government/advocacy/lobbying/thinky tank time.

The Cover

Maybe I've had it up on my screen too long, but I love this stock photo so much, and I'm going to waste a moment of all our time to look at it. You can skip ahead if you like-- I won't be offended.

Never mind our blurry teacher who is apparently telling a hilarious joke. It's the three kids behind him. Blond Girl is looking directly into the camera with a smile that says, "I am going to raise my hand like a boss, and then blow this popsicle stand because this whole scene is just ridiculous, amiright? Also, I double dare you to tell anyone what I did just before you snapped this pic" Next to her, another child points into the corner of their eye with an expression that says, "Do you see any speck of give-a-shit in here at all?" And our last child is thoughtfully alarmed. Blond Girl is clearly the star. We will hear more from her some day.

Okay, we can move on now.

The Premise and the Problem

Teachers unions and progressives can agree, the paper says, that schools are underfunded and teacher education sucks, thereby suggesting that progressives and unions are natural enemies, which may come as news to some folks, but there you have it. Starting from those two points, they y go on to suggest that underfunding and crappy prep mean that the most needy students at under-resourced schools will have "a string" of bad teachers. And "teacher quality is the number one in-school influence on student achievement" (and student achievement will now and for the next sixteen pages mean nothing more that "test scores on a single narrow bad Big Standardized Tests") so let's not address anything in the world except teacher quality.

They will even go on to throw in the bogus "a bad teacher will reduce lifetime earnings by a quarter million dollars" baloney. 

All of this is the same old crap, a replay of Reform's Greatest Hits. But here comes a new twist:

Because political leaders have not wanted the U.S. Department of Education to determine which higher education programs, including teacher preparation programs, are of sufficient quality to warrant taxpayer support, the task of teacher preparation program quality control has been outsourced in large part to accrediting agencies. 

The weak link is not (just) crappy teacher prep programs or gummint unwillingness to spank those programs-- it's the accrediting agencies that certify these programs in the first place. They have too many rea$on$ to like the programs they are accrediting. Boo!

The Solution (Part I)

So what do we do about these lousy accreditors like the  Council for the Accreditation of Education Preparation (CAEP), child of NCATE? Or the equally-inadequate TEAC?

In our view, for teacher preparation accreditation to be effective, dependence on schools of education as guardians of teacher preparation quality must end. Because the current teacher education accreditor has shown it cannot and will not reform itself, a new type of accreditor, not dependent on schools of education and their personnel, but instead on the employers of graduates from schools of education and teacher preparation programs, should be created. State and local superintendents of schools and charter school leaders in particular should band together to form an accreditor focused on the learning gains of elementary and secondary school students taught by the graduates of teacher preparation programs seeking accreditation and the assessments of employers of whether the graduates of teacher preparation programs are adequately prepared for classroom service.

And, they add, they're pretty sure this can be done cheaply!

Let's Sneak Up On This Again

The paper backs up for a look at the history of these august organizations that have been "consecrated" (a word that crops up, oddly, more than once) to certify programs that certify teachers. The paper suggests that these agencies have leaders who have serious doubts about how well these agencies work. And they tell the story of CAEP tried to make things better by recommending, that the evaluation of teacher prep programs include a sort of feedback loop that rests on student BS Test results.

Which is what we're really yearning for here-- a system in which college teacher prep programs are judged on how well the students of the graduates of those programs do on the BS Test. In other words, Pat takes the PARCC. Pat's teacher Mrs. Sneezely gets an evaluation based on Pat's PARCC score, and so does Mrs. Sneezely's alma mater.

Education leaders from NEA President Dennis "Wrong About So Many Things" Van Roekel to Teach for America's Wendy "This Should Be Easy To Game" Kopp thought this sounded swell. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education thought this idea was dumb. CAEP fired the Executive Director who took them down this dumb road and shifted the agency's attention back toward not-dumb things.

But that's not satisfactory. "Since CAEP cannot or will not reform itself," the writers suggest some sort of coup. Administrators and charter operators should form their own accreditation agency that will include test scores in program evaluations (and if that happens to favor charter in house faux techer prep programs that focus strictly on test prep strategies, well, then, so be it).

But how could such a thing be done? Turns out the writers have some ideas.

Three Ways To Take Over

The "report" will offer three approaches to a take over of the accreditation system, only one of which they really mean to propose. Let's take a look.

Method One: Whole New Agency

You'd have to form the agency, staff it, talk to colleges of education, develop your standards, figure out how to measure against them, and then start accrediting places. This would be time consuming and expensive. The writers, based on who-knows-what, estimate 4 years and $12 million.

Method Two: New Agency with Help

Find an agency that already does college accreditation in a general sort of way and convince them to start a teacher prep accreditation division while also convincing them to do it your way (though the writers don't seem to anticipate any problem with that part). The writers throw the dice and come up with 2 years and $5 million to do this one.

Boy, those just seem so long and expensive. Is there an option that would be swifter and cheaper?

Method Three: Hostile Takeover

This is really quite extraordinary.

The writers note that several federally-approved accreditation agencies are in financial trouble. The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) has been playing close to the financial edge for several years. The Distance Education Accrediting Commission has been slowly bleeding out funds. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges has also been financially stressed. And these guys have collected some figures.

If a group composed of school districts, states, and teachers came together with sufficient resources, perhaps backed by philanthropy, to retire the outstanding debts or otherwise improve the financial health of one of these financially challenged non-profit organizations – likely just a couple of hundred thousand dollars – that operate a U.S. Department of Education approved accrediting commission, it could obtain sufficient seats on the organization’s board to take control.

Once the board was subdued and couped, the bylaws and charter could be rewritten, and the agency could be rebuilt to suit the new owners. Then this repurposed agency could draft the necessary standards-- hell, they could use the ones that ousted CAEP leaders came up with (that shortcut could be applied in all three methods, but the writers only mention it here for their recommended approach).

But really-- what a perfect neo-liberal reformy solution to a problem. If something stands in your way, just buy it, and bend it to your will. 

Enter the Golden Era

Once the New Reformster Accreditation Board was open for business, reformsters could put their stamp of approval on any number of bogus "Schools of Educaytion." In fact, the paper notes happily, ESSA opens wide the door for all manner of "alternative providers of teacher preparation" as long as they can have their results validated by a USED-recognized authority, which-- hey , we just made one of those a few paragraphs ago!! Yes, there's some pesky law from 1965, but the Secretary can waive (aka "ignore") that if she's a mind to.

The writers characterize the old system as the fox guarding the henhouse; they would like to replace the old foix with their own brand new reformy charter-loving test-driven fox. They are also fond of the same language used by choicesters to attack the public ed system-- the current teacher prep system is a "cartel" that needs to be broken up, because these new guys want to cash in, too, and it's not fair that they have to play by rules that they don't like. Let a hundred sad versions of Relay GSE bloom. Let charter operators crank out fake teachers from "fully accreditated" fake teacher factories.

And most of all, let's base the entire structure of BS Test scores, one more terrible idea that refuses to die.

It is the last building block in the grand design for a parallel school system, where schools are staffed by substandard teachers trained in only test prep, and therefor providing a substandard education, cranked out by substandard teacher prep programs set up to prove to a substandard accreditation board that they meet the substandard standards.

Look, I am one of the last people to defend the current system of teacher prep. My solution is simple-- replace every single person in the accrediting agency with a classroom teacher. My solution is certainly not to stage a coup to impose a ridiculous standard by which college programs are judged by second-hand results on a third-rate test.

In the end, I can't decide if these guys are cynical, arrogant, greedy, or dumb. I mean, it takes some balls to say, "The whole foundation of the teaching profession is wrong. We should rip it out and replace with our own unverified untested unproven results-- by force if necessary." It takes some serious greed to say, "If we just gutted and upended the system, we could redirect so many public tax dollars to private corporate pockets." It takes huge cynicism to think either, or both, and just not care about the consequences. At this point, it just takes plain old boneheadedness to think that PARCC and its ilk can be used as a measure of educational success. But then, I'm cranky today. These guys have been around several blocks, have done respectable work in other areas. I'm honestly confused-- how do people end up pushing such terrible ideas?

The only good news I see here is that this is not a plan Betsy DeVos is likely to jump on. It comes from so-called progressives, and it involves more structures and institutions and rules. While I suspect that DeVos sees the same problem ("People have to jump through all these stupid hoops to become a teacher and all these dumb rules to run a teacher prep program"), I suspect her solution is much simpler ("No more rules for anyone! You can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and you can call yourself a teacher training program, and anyone can operate a so-called school and hire anyone they want and we'll shovel money at all of them!")

So call it one more reminder that "progressive" doesn't equal "friend of public ed" as well as a reminder that there are no limits to the huge badness of some reformster ideas.

Betsy DeVos Is Rethinking

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off her Rethinking Schools tour with some talking at the Woods Learning Center in Casper, Wyoming. It was a lot of talking for DeVos, so we're fortunate that the department wrote it all down. But as far as rethinking goes, it appears that there's no "re" going on here unless it's rehearsing and rehashing.

Here are some of the Most Special Moments from her remarks:

Her Job

That's because my job is to work every day to help make all schools better for all students across the country.

Sigh. Then perhaps stop suggesting that public schools suck and should go curl up and die somewhere, dead ends that they are.

Her Exceptional Bad Analogy Skills

Arne Duncan could say the greatest things that sounded good if you ignored their complete disconnection from reality. He also occasionally said exactly what he meant, which created its own set of problems. DeVos's speaking arsenal seems to include bad analogies. She starts this speech off with a doozy.

The great West has always been a symbol of American courage, strength and potential. When settlers—perhaps some of your ancestors—dared to grow families and build communities here, abundant naysayers warned: The air is too dry. The land is too rocky. The resources are too scarce. It can't be done, they said.

How wrong were they, though?

Those early determined settlers of the west had something the cynics didn't: American grit.
They expanded America because they had the courage and audacity to rethink what America was and reimagine what it could be.

Where to begin? First, DeVos apparently never played that pioneering personalized education game, Oregon Trail, or she would know that what those brave pioneers often did was die (particularly from dysentery, apparently). So how wrong were the naysayers? Not entirely wrong-- and the pioneers who succeeded were the ones who listened to the warnings and planned accordingly. "Never mind the salt pork, Betsy! Just pack the grit!" said no wise pioneer ever. "We'll live on grit" sounds about as good as "We'll live on love."

Plus-- and I feel that this is kind of critical miss for someone whose record on People Who Aren't White is not great-- the West was not exactly empty when those determined settlers showed up. In addition to a lot of dying, westward expansion included a lot of killing. It involved a lot of folks (and their government) saying, "Well, you folks may already be here, and you may have forged a successful relationship with the land over the past 100 years, but we want the land you're using, so we're going to take it from you because we're better than you are and we deserve it."

Okay, so maybe this is a good analogy for charter development.

The Same Old Same Old

One of DeVos's major themes has certainly emerged-- school's haven't changed for a long time.

For far too many kids, this year's first day back to school looks and feels a lot like last year's first day back to school. And the year before that. And the generation before that. And the generation before that!

That means your parent's parent's parents!

Most students are starting a new school year that is all too familiar. Desks lined up in rows. Their teacher standing in front of the room, framed by a blackboard. They dive into a curriculum written for the "average" student. They follow the same schedule, the same routine—just waiting to be saved by the bell.

This is quite an insight for someone who has almost never set foot in a public school.

First of all, it's just dumb wrong. Come to my school. Try to find a chalkboard. They're still mostly there-- behind the Smartboards. To repeat the claim that schools have not changed in a century is just historically illiterate. 100 years ago, hardly anybody graduated, minorities (by which I mean groups like Italians) had to start their own separate schools. The sheer volume of things to be taught were vastly smaller. It is the kind of claim that I can't believe anyone actually believes even as it's coming out of their mouths.

Second of all, yes, there are some superficial, institutional features that have stayed fairly static through history, for the same reason that we still drive on the left and men wear pants with zippers in the front-- because time and wide-scale testing have shown that they work.

Someone Has Hired a Speechwriter

It's a mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons, and denies futures.

And that speechwriter has their eye on the Spiro Agnew prize.

Wait Just a Damn Second!

And like those western settlers, anyone who dares to suggest schools ought to do better by their students is warned off: It's too hard. It'll take too long. There's not enough money. It can't be done.

Oh, come on! Those are not the words of public education defenders-- that's reformster talk!! It's reformsters who have said we can't wait for public schools to improve, which is impossible anyway and besides, we can't spend any more money on it. Those four lines are classic reformster justification for charters and vouchers and anything except trying to improve public schools! It's like a Nazi rally where a speaker says, "And our opponents have the balls to claim there's some sort of Jewish conspiracy! What's wrong with those people!!"

Institutions Are Bad

Today, there is a whole industry of naysayers who loudly defend something they like to call the education "system."

What's an education "system"?

There is no such thing! Are you a system? No, you're individual students, parents and teachers.

This is a standard DeVosianism-- institutions are terrible and individuals must be the focus. Depending on your level of cynicism, you can read this one of several ways:

1) DeVos has been rich and privileged her whole life and has no idea that some people in this world have neither the power, access or resources to get themselves what they deserve.

2) DeVos believes that government institutions interfere with God's righteous sorting of the deserving and the undeserving, so institutions should get out of the way and let people get what they deserve-- and no more.

3) Institutions generally thwart the will of the rich and powerful, like her, and those institutions must be swept away (particularly the ones that support giant unions that in turn support Democrats).

It also allows her to beat the drum for how no one school can meet the unique needs of all students, assuming as is her wont that schools are kind of like tofu, with no variety or variation within them. No, what they need is something more.... personalized.

Students, your parents know you best, and they are in the best position to select the best learning environment for you.

And if that means they are overmatched against corporate interests that serve investor needs first, well, at least there are no nasty institutions stepping in to say things like "You can't just refuse to meet special needs" or "You aren't allowed to push out all the non-white kids" or "It's not okay to require adherence to a particular religion."

I'm From the Government and I'm Here To Help

It's one of my favorite reform myths-- the myth of the downtrodden teacher. Not, mind you, that there aren't plenty of schools trying to strap teachers into straightjackets, but these days that's primarily because of the doctrine of Test-Centered Education. But reformsters are talking about those schools where the mean teachers union won't "let" teachers work an extra twenty hours a week for free or won't allow teachers the chance to enjoy all the benefits of union advocacy without paying for asnay of it.

But DeVos wants teachers to know that she gets them:

Too many feel like their hands are tied when the "system" tells them when to teach, how to teach and what to teach. I believe teachers should be respected as professionals and that they should have the freedom to innovate and the flexibility to meet their students' needs.

Of course, under ESSA "student needs" are still defined as "whatever the student needs to get a decent score on the Big Standardized Test." I truly don't know how the "respected ad professionals" part got in there.

So Wait-- Who Is Being Discussed

Also confusing:

Your teachers and parents certainly know better than so-called "education professionals," who are often staunch defenders of the status quo.

If teachers aren't educational professionals, then who, exactly, are we talking about? I mean, seriously-- I'm confused.

Reagan Because

Ronald Reagan was President in the 80's, when DeVos and I were fresh out of college and starting our grown up lives. Why anyone would bring him up to these kids is beyond me-- not even their parents remember Reagan. Going for the Grampaw support here?

Channeling Trump

But when I thought more about that, it hit me that you live with an unfortunate and unfair reality. Communities like Casper are often overlooked and dismissed.

But you certainly shouldn't be. Your needs are no different than the needs of kids, parents and teachers anywhere else in America. You need access to the best education possible to open as many doors as possible.

You have been unfairly neglected and mistreated by those fancy-pants big city elites. Says a regular old salt-of-the-earth millionaire heiress.

For the Children

Why are we rethinking schools? We're doing it not because DeVos or anyone said to and we're certainly not, you know, doing it as a way to open a lucrative billion-dollar market while privatizing one more vital part of the public sphere. No, we're "doing it for you."

The Purpose of Education (Apparently Many of Us Have Been Wrong on This)

Education should be a journey, a life-long one that encourages you to harness your curiosity into contributions to your family, our country and the world.

See? It's your way to become a useful tool. It's not for you to become your best self, or learn how to be fully human in the world, or to fulfill your on hopes and dreams. It's to contribute to your fanmily, country, world, and corporate overlords. Get an education and make yourself useful.

Some Swell Examples and, Of Course, Prussia, Plus International Comparisons

DeVos cites Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and John Deere as folks who didn't give up and always made stuff better, though they were also, in at least two of the three cases, incredible jerks who were awful to other people.

Also, no reformster rant is complete without a reference to Prussia, because Prussia is no longer a country but we are still following their exact model for education. That exact model. No changes at all. And those international tests-- we never win at those and how would we feel if we never got an Olympic gold medal, because the point of education is to win gold medals in international testing competitions.

DeVos now seems to be fighting the clock to squeeze in every remaining refomster cliché. Let's cite some cool schools that are well-funded and control their admissions and talk about them as if they know something new or are replicable models.

Big Finish

Let's empower lots of people, but mostly parents, but let's not talk about what truly empowering a non-wealthy, non-white parent at a rough place in life-- let's not talk about what true empowerment would look like there, because it would probably look a lot harder than declaring, "Here's your school voucher good luck see ya kay!" Children are the future. Schols must change. Rethink education. Don't get dysentery! Yay!

MA: The Charteristas Behind the Curtain Get Spanked

There is so much to unpack from the most recent news in Massachusetts.

First, to recap. Last year, charter boosters took a hard run and cracking open the Massachusetts market with Question 2, which called for opening up the charter cap currently in place. All sorts of dark, rich creatures came crawling out of the woodwork, throwing about large piles of money under the names of various astroturf groups, even going so far as to hire the same ad agency that swift-boated John Kerry (allegiance to paycheck over truth is important in the biz). In the end, they lost hard. But it turns out they weren't done with all the losing.

One of the fake groups, the single largest funder of the Question 2 campaign, was Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy. This New York based outfit was just spanked hard by Massachusetts courts, and there were several takeaways from the resulting ruling.



Now That's a Fine

FESA paid the Massachusetts general fund $426,466. That is the largest "civil forfeiture" in state history, totally blowing away the previous record-holder was $185,000 in 2016.

These Guys Were Really Loaded

That total actually represents the cash on hand for FESA and their parent fake group, Families for Excellent Schools, as of August 21, 2017. In other words, the commonwealth settled on a fine of "whatever you've got in your pockets right now-- just empty them out."

These Guys Are a Different Kind of Family

Nobody has ever believed that Families for Excellent Schools was an actual group of regular families gathered together to make a difference. But the settlement required FESA to open up its donor list, and, well... the phrase "capital management" crops up a lot.

Bob Atchison of Adage Capital Management kicked in $200K. Andrew Balson is coyly listed as "unemployed," but theformer capital manager at Bain has since landed on his feet by founding a new partnership; in the meantime, he coughed up $300K. Josh Berkenstein from Bain Capital only managed $1.25 million, but luckily his wife Anita, former occupational therapist, now is a "private philanthropist" came up with another $1.25 mill. Joseph Flaniagan, managing director at Highfields Capital Managment came up with half a million, which was peanuts next to fellow MD Jonathan Jacobson, who was in for over two million. Amos Hostetter, investor and cablevision billionaire, ponied up over two million. Howland Capital Management gave over a million. Seth Klauman, investment manager at the Baupost Group, went for over three and a third million dollars. You begin to see why the "civil forfeiture" of half a million will not exactly register as a serious setback for these guys.

Of course, not everyone was an investor or other sort of capital management guy. There's Johnathan Sackler of Purdue Pharma (the guys who brought us the oxycontin problem) as well as New School Ventures and ConnCAN. And there's Paul Sagan and Mark Nunnelly, both part of Massachusetts state government, each kicking in a half mill (Nunnelly teamed up with his wife, while Saga bizarrely broke his into two donations-- one of $495,500 and another of $500). Sagan is particularly galling, as he's the chairman of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Oh, and Alice Walton, because of course she did.

Fun side note-- FESA also got a $7,432.80 tax refund.

Look at That List Again

These are not people who have worked in education. These are not people who have worked hard to improve the situation of the poor in this country. And yet the argument for charters in Massachusetts has been that 1) they are awesome and 2) how dare you deny the poor this opportunity. These are almost legit arguments sort of if you squint and if all you care about are test scores, and you're cool with charters that keep their test scores high by suspending huge numbers of students, carefully avoiding any challenging students (like the non-English speaking ones),  and chasing out those who don't get great scores.

But look at that list. These are investors. These are part of the same swarm that have been hovering around charters since the day that Rupert Murdoch declared that education was a "$500 billion dollar opportunity" just waiting to be harvested.

Sometimes, Laws Are Cool 

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts could only pursue all of this because they have laws about dark money organizations set up strictly to influence an election. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance (the government body that tackled this mess) offered three findings:

FESA was actually a ballot question committee and was required to organize and disclose its donors.

FESA did not disclose its campaign finance activity in a timely or accurate manner.

FESA provided funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee in a manner intended to disguise the true source of contributions. 

These findings only matter if those actions are against the law. In Massachusetts they are; in other states, not so much.

FESA's "Aw Shucks."

Jeremiah Kittredge, chief executive of Families for Excellent Schools, said: “Though we believe we complied with all laws and regulations during the campaign, we worked closely with OCPF to resolve this matter so we could move forward with our mission of working alongside families desperate for better schools.”

This statement is one part baloney ("Gosh, Mister, we had no idea we were breaking the rules. Gee whiz!") and one part admission of their bogus nature ("We're going to try to work alongside families who want better schools, because as you can plainly see, none of those families are actually inside our group.")

The Rest of the Good News

FESA has now officially ceased to exist. Which is probably no skin off of FESA's nose, since they only existed to push Question 2 in the first place and that swift boat has now sailed. Slightly better-- FES has been banned from playing in the Massachusetts political sandbox for four years. So that's good news.

However

Let's just remember that the entire purpose of this group is to allow Very Rich People to play in other peoples' sandboxes without getting their own feet dirty. If you think these folks can look at that big, delicious pile of Massachusetts money and NOT start thinking about new and creative ways to get at it-- particularly when officials in the state capitol are totally on the profiteers' side-- then I have a bridge to sell, you, and that bridge has a charter school just on the other side.