The State of the Core

Maybe you thought we were done talking about Common Core, or maybe you just hoped we were. But here comes Maria Danilova of the Associated Press checking to see how our old buddy is doing (and talking to the Usual Suspects while she does so). But Danilova gives us a pundit's eye view of the Core's current status, and while that has value, the real story of how the Core is doing can only be seen at ground level, where teachers work. You remember teachers. Those education professionals that nobody ever talks to when it's time to write a think piece about what's going on in education.

So let's take a look.

First, it's important to remember what the lofty goals of the Core were. Every state was going to adopt them, and nobody was going to mess with them except-- maybe-- to add no more than 15% to the standards. Every school in the country would be on the same page; a student would be able to move from Iowa to Florida mid-year and never miss a step. Every student in America would take one of two standards-anchored tests, meaning that every student, school, and teacher in the country could be compared directly, thereby identifying all the outposts of genius and pockets of fail, and pieces of genius would be used to fill the gaps in failureland. Within a few years, the entire US education system would be homogenized, standardized, and uplifted.

That was the goal, though Core fans will now pretend they never heard any such thing.

That goal hasn't been achieved, and it's not going to be achieved,

Every assessment of the Core has to include that simple fact-- the Core architects failed to achieve their major goals. Any discussion of the State of the Core is really a discussion of whether or not they won some consolation prizes.

So how is the battered and unloved Core doing these days? Danilova says it's actually alive and kicking, and offers a new entry in the genre of "Quick and Simplified Histories of the Common Core"

Launched in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs, Common Core sought to bring scholastic standards to the same high level nationwide. The standards quickly became controversial when the Obama administration offered states federal dollars to nudge them to adopt it. States’ rights activists cried foul, saying the effort undermined local control. Meanwhile, some teachers criticized the standards as confusing and out of synch with students’ needs, while others feared that non-fiction would crowd out the works of Shakespeare.

That's more accurate than some, though it overlooks the Bill Gates bankrolling of the Core and the fact that the standards were written by a handful of education amateurs. I do like "nudge," though, as a replacement for the old "voluntary adoption by states" baloney.

But is the Core alive and kicking? Well......

National Standards

Danilova points out that pretty much everyone who installed the standards still has them. This is true. Many states staged some elaborate theater so that they could lie to their conservative voters about getting rid of the Core, but despite some name changes, what states still have is an edited version of the Common Core standards.

This works because many of the people who complained about the Core had objections not entirely based on reality. In other words, if you were afraid that Common Core was going to turn your child into a lesbian communist vegan, well, look-- that transformation hasn't happened, so they must have gotten rid of Common Core. Hardly anyone else has been fooled.

This raises the important question, "So what?" One of the many unproven foundations of the Core is the idea that state or national standards have any effect on anything.

Effects

Danilova uses the understatement "Measuring the direct impact of Common Core is difficult." One might even say, impossible. She cites the Brookings study that suggested an initial burst of educational achievement which then tapered off, but there's a problem with virtually all studies of CCSS impact-- they depend on results of the Big Standardized Common Core Tests. That means all you're ever really proving is "We adopted a set of standards designed to teach to this test, and once we started teaching to that test, students got better results on that test."

This is the testing worm Ouroborus eating its own tail. Do better test results prove anything at all, other than the test prep is working? Does the test prep improve anything other than preparation for the test? There are still no serious answers to either of those questions, which leads me to believe that the answer to both is "No" or even "Hell, no."

Half-Baked

Mike Petrilli, who by law must be quoted in every article about education policy, says that the core  is "a much better recipe for student achievement, but the cake is still being baked, so we don’t yet know if it’s going to taste as good as we hope." While I appreciate the opportunity to call the Common Core "half-baked," in fact, the Core is fully baked, crisped, put a fork in it, it's done.

But Danilova says the Core is used widely. This is right-but-not-right. Here's why the Core is already in its mature form, and that form is a sort of shambling zombie.

Start by gutting half

The very first thing that happened to the Common Core was the Common Core tests. The standards said, "Here are all the things that matter." The tests said, "Half of those things don't matter. Just toss them out."

Schools, teachers and students were not to be judged by how well they followed the standards, but by how well they do on the BS Tests, and the BS Tests do not even pretend to assess things like cooperation, speaking and listening. The BS Tests do pretend to assess things like writing, research and critical thinking, but the pretense is transparent and obvious and nobody can seriously believe that the test assesses these things. So we're left prepping students to answer multiple choice questions on the "anchors" aka "the only standards that actually count."

Alignment is paperwork

School districts have gone through the exercise of aligning their curriculum to the standards, and what that means is completing a bunch of paperwork. You take your scope and sequence for the things you were going to teach anyway, and you search through the list of standards to find the ones that you can pin to your pre-existing plans. Voila! Alignment!!

Alignment is creative

Here's the thing about the standards-- nobody is minding the store. As soon as they finished writing the standards up, David Coleman, Jason Zimba and the rest were out the door, off to lucrative consulting gigs and running ed-flavored corporations. Incidentally, this is, for me, one of the major indictments of the Core-- the guys who wrote it weren't even interested in sticking around to make sure it was carried through properly.

So now, anybody can call anything Common Core. Book publishers slap "Common Core" on any old text. Any classroom teacher can say, "Yes, this unit is totally Common Core aligned," and there's nobody in a position of authority to say, "Hey, wait a minute." I've lost track of the number of Core cheerleaders who have declared that the Core is awesome because now they can do a unit about singing waffles on Mars and their singing waffle unit doesn't have a damn thing to do with the Core. Core apologists routinely praise the Core for elements it does not possess, sometimes because they are just deluded and sometimes because they have correctly reasoned that if the Core doesn't imply/require X, then the Core is stupid. And yet, dig through the Core, and X rarely marks any spot on the list of standards.

That includes "rigor," an ill-defined term that is not a feature of the Common Core State [sic] Standards. In fact, the best way to prepare my students for the reading test is not rigorous at all, but to simply practice reading random short excerpts of various readings followed by some BS Test style bubble test questions. No deep, critical or creative thinking needed. No tie for reflection or development of more complex ideas allowed. The Core's rigor is a mirage, and artifact of wishful thinking and pixie dust. We could ramp up "rigor" in schools more easily if the amateur-hour standards and the narrow bubble tests were not in our way.

I have asked all along for any Core-loving teacher to tell me about one unit, one teaching idea, that they couldn't do before the Core, or that they would have to stop doing if the Core were outlawed. Nobody has ever had an answer for that. The Core can be anything you want it to be, as long as you don't pay too much attention to what it actually says. The article itself presents a prime example, as a teacher argues that reading more non-fiction instead of fairy tales is better because it's more real. That is both A) baloney and B) not supported by the standards.

The Core had been assimilated

The basic proposition that the Core offered to every classroom teacher was this-- substitute these standards for your own professional judgment. That's why the Core had to be pushed out with the Big Lie that they had come from education professionals (even as Coleman was bragging that they were the result of amateurs and that's why they were awesome).

And teachers are good soldiers. So when our bosses said "Do this," we said, "Okay, we'll give it a shot." We like to do what we're Supposed To, and we generally trust that these things come down from people who at least sort of know what they're doing.

But teachers also work in our own little research lab. We try out an approach, regardless of the source, and we get immediate feedback. So when elementary teachers got new Common Core textbooks that said, "Don't teach math facts (e.g. times table)." Teachers scratched their heads, tried it, determined it didn't work, and started doing what good teachers always do-- adapting materials to fit the situation in the classroom. Those instructional shifts we were all going to be doing? Not so much.

Zombies can bite

Comon Core is an undead zombie at this point, but like a zombie, it can do real damage.  Common Core fans with other pushers of test-centered schooling can take the blame for the destruction of Kindergarten and the unjustifiable insistence on making five year olds sit at a desk for long periods of time to learn academic subjects. This damage to the littles is one of the lasting effects of the Core movement, and every person who helped push for it should be ashamed.

It is that test-centered schooling that is the most egregious, unsupportable, destructive legacy of Common Core. There is no rigor and no standards-- just desperate attempts to game the numbers.

In schools where administrators don't have the guts to value actual education over the pursuit of test scores, the poison has spread wide. Test-centered schooling doesn't just narrow the education being delivered (If it's not on the test, just give it a rest) but has also narrowed the actual delivery of education. Across the country, school administrators are using "diagnostic tests" to target students who are close enough to the line to be dragged over it. Top kids can be left alone. Bottom kids can be abandoned. Close-to-the-line kids get an extra battery of test prep in hopes that the school's numbers can be improved-- and they give up other parts of their education to make room.

Core advocates will argue that this is a problem with the test, but saying you want the Common Core standards without the Common Core testing is like asking to have the front end of the puppy but not the end that poops.The Core and the BS Tests were always welded together, and it's really not a surprise-- without an "accountability" element, the architects of this mess would have had to trust schools to actually implement the standards, and the whole point of the standards was that they didn't trust us in the first place. Put another way, without the linked testing (and related penalties), the Common Core would have had to sink or swim on its own merits which would have been much like trying to help a tyrannosaurus swim the Pacific Ocean by taping a tired pool noodle to its toe. Mind you, the linked testing isn't very well linked or very good testing, but here we are.

Winners?

In the end, almost nobody is winning. The folks who dreamed of an entire nation united in a single school district-- they didn't win. The schools and teachers who dreamed of retaining their autonomy and the freedom to exercise their professional judgment-- they didn't win. The technocrats who hoped for neatly organized stacks on stacks on stacks of data-- they didn't win. The winners would be all the people who hoped to profit from the shift, the folks who wanted test-centered schooling to make charters and vouchers look more appealing, and the folks who wanted to de-professionalize teaching so that anybody with a pulse could be handed a program and a classroom. Those folks are winning.

So, yes, Common Core is still shambling about, not alive enough to accomplish its original goals, but not dead enough to keep from doing damage wherever its broken legs carry it. It's a bad walking rorschach test that can be read as anything you like, just before it bites your face. Is "Common Core used widely"? I guess that depends on what you mean by "Common Core" or "used." Is there still continuing debate? Sure. The noise had better keep going on. The standards are dangerous bunk, and you know what happens to the person in a zombie movie who says, "I guess the coast is clear now. Let's go out."

AZ: Leading in Charter Profiteering

Arizona may be associated with dry desert, but it is a lush, fertile playground for reformster baloney and charter profiteeringg.

Arizona has been at this for a while. Bill McCallum, co-author of the Common Core math standards, was a professor at the University of Arizona. When the Core turned out to be conservative kryptonite, Diane Douglass ran as a Core destroyer and then, once she won, promptly slapped a thin layer of lipstick on that pig.

Meanwhile, Arizona has wrestled with a teacher shortage, but not to the point of, say, fixing their basement level pay. Wrestling has been more about things like recruiting teachers from the Philipines. Oh, and Arizona also sits at the back of the pack for per-pupil spending. Meanwhile, Arizona is the home of the legislator who said that teachers are probably working two jobs because they want a fancy boat.  And that's before we get to such atmosphere boosters like considering a teacher gag law and a ban on Mexican-American studies in school.

Open a charter; make a stack of money this tall.

But while Arizona has been doing its best to stomp public schools into the dirt, they really love them some charter schools.

Actually, those two things are closely related. Arizona has been nurturing charters for over twenty years, but Arizona is an open-enrollment state, so no child is "trapped" in a failing school just because of their zip code. So to create market pressure for their extensive choice system, Arizona's leaders set fire to public education and let it burn; parents will feel they have no choice.. It's no wonder that the Network for Public Education gave the state an F.

Why throw so much effort behind the charter industry? Certainly some of the push could be ideological, but Arizona is also the state where the dreams of cracking open the education funding egg and feasting has come true. It turns out that people are using school choice to hoover up giant chunks of public tax money.

The Grand Canyon Institute ("Arizona's Centrist Think Tank") has just released a meta-study of twenty years of Arizona charters. "Following the Money" comes to some fairly appalling conclusions that suggest that Arizona is one of America's pre-eminent charter scam factories and that taxpayers are getting hosed. Here are some of the conclusions reached by this forensic analysis.

Self-Dealing

Roughly 77% of all Arizona charter schools engage in some sort of self-dealing that steers tax dollars into the pockets of charter owners, their families, or board members. Non-competitive related-party transactions are a common vehicle for this, particularly when it comes to handling real estate and other assets. The report talks about one example (American Leadership Academy) that appears to be simply a subsidiary of a real estate development company in Utah. Primavera Technical Learning Center paid $12.2 million for software it purchased from a company owned by the school's charter holder. The report points out (just in case a reader is too ethically impaired to get it) that if a superintendent of a public school awarded a no-bid multi-million-dollar contract to a for-profit company that he owned himself, that would be all kinds of wrong and a violation of various laws. However, in Arizona, it's completely legal for a charter operator to self-deal in this manner.

Ignore the ethical shadiness for a moment-- how can that possibly end up with taxpayers getting the most bang for their buck?

High Executive Salaries

Public school superintendents in Arizona make around $130/pupil as a salary. Charters were reluctant to share salary figures for the report, but of those for whom the report had numbers, a handful paid its top person a comparable salary. $200, $300, $600 per pupil payment for administrators in some charters. And on top of that, some charters had more administrators than the public system. If you take the full administrative team and lump it together, Benchmark School Inc pays administrators $952 per pupil. Crown Charter School, Inc, pays $1,885 per pupil in administrative costs. George Gervin Prep Academy pays its top two administrators $3,312 per pupil.

Questionable Profit Distribution

The for-profit charters in Arizona apparently engage in some hinky handling of their profits. 

Reduced Classroom Spending

Well, yes. Those executive salaries and dividends have to take money from somewhere. The study found that where public schools spent about 52% of expenditures on classroom instruction, for charters it was more like 45%.

Academic Underperformance

What do taxpayers get for all their money? Not outstanding school performance. But then, the law doesn't really require them to do well. The report somewhat incredulously quotes one part of the law:

A sponsor, including members, officers and employees of the sponsor, are immune from personal liability for all acts done and actions taken in good faith within the scope of its authority.

In other words, charter operators exist in the Land of Do As You Please as long  they claim they meant well. As the report puts it in one sub-heading, "Delivery or what?" The theory of Arizona's law is that the charter operators will be checked by their sense of responsibility to provide a good education. Really. The report also wryly notes that since parents actually choose charters for many reasons, there was no sudden outflow in 2013 when many charters switched to Alternative School status reporting, a means by which charters could lower their standards and get a better grade.

The report looks hard at charter performance and finds it wanting. It also looks at the theory that the free market competition would drive schools to become more excellent-- well, that's wanting, too. Or maybe just laughable. Bottom line: doing a lousy job of educating students will not hurt your profitability in the AZ charter market.

Reconciling Inconsistent Financials

Lots of charters use creative bookkeeping. In fact, as the re[port looks at some bad examples, some charters just lie.

Arizona's charter sector has consumed a billion taxpayer dollars and in return, it has mostly just provided wealth for people who know how to work the system. And those people don't have to be very clever because the system in Arizona includes few checks or oversight; the only reason we can't say the Arizona system is full of illegal scams is that very few things are against the law. I invite you to peruse all 90 depressing pages of the report. This is what the theft of taxpayer dollars in the name of school choice looks like.

Teachers and Fame

Name ten famous teachers. No? Okay, name five. Yeah, me neither.

Jose Luis Vilson just asked the question-- what does fame mean for education? It's one of the continuing ripples spreading out from the NYT piece about the sponsored, branded teacher. 

I think we'd have to agree that teaching is generally not the pathway to fame and fortune. I mean, there are small fames of a sort. I mean, there's Nicholas Ferroni, named America's Sexiest Teacher by People magazine, which may seem like a frivolous sort of fame, but an awful lot of fame is frivolous and based on no real accomplishment of note.

So that may be one problem with education and fame-- not very many people get famous for doing the kind of work that, in the words of Mike Rowe, makes civilized life possible for the rest of us. Nurses, welders, waitpersons, pilots-- the world is filled with people who keep things moving in powerful ways that go unrecognized because of the dailiness of it.

Educational fame faces an obstacle of scale. You get to be a famous singer by singing (directly and through recordings) for millions of people. You get to be a famous you-tuber by getting millions of hits. No teacher in the course of her career is going to teach millions of students.

I have taught in the same small town for over thirty-five years (at the same high school I graduated from), so I'm known. Any time I walk into a restaurant or grocery store or church or just walk down the street, I will run into people who know me. But we're still talking hundreds of people, and just a localized sort of well-knownness. If this is fame, half the people in my town are famous.

Nor do people in general pay that much attention to the field. When you get to a bookstore, look for the "education" section. Test prep books, make your kid smart books, and maybe two or three shelves of books about the actual work, always including books by people who have no business talking about the field.

Since no teacher is going to achieve fame-scale work in the classroom, and since the students in your actual classroom need every piece of heart and soul you can pour out, being famous would have to be a second job. Most of us don't have time to be famous. To step up onto any sort of national platform, a teacher almost has to take at least one foot out of the classroom. It would be hard, I imagine, to do the job of faming while maintaining your professional balance-- I think some really gifted individuals could do it, but it would take mindful concentration. Many famous-ish teachers are too busy building their brand by making a proprietary package out of what thousands of teachers already know, and their students are just props and lab rats.

Beyond the challenge of achieving fame, for teachers there is always the challenge of accepting recognition. As a profession, we tend to be self-effacing, disinclined to stand in the spotlight. If you have a huge ego, teaching probably didn't call out to you as a way to get that ego fed. And there's a "why me" factor as well-- I consider myself a pretty decent teacher, but there isn't a thing I could be recognized for that thousands of other teachers aren't also doing in their classrooms, and some are doing it far better than I am. I've been recognized for my work once or twice, and everything I have to say on those occasions starts with this-- "There isn't a thing you can say about me that couldn't also be said about uncounted other teachers." Which is why I accept recognition when it comes my way-- because I can point out that the community of teachers, the great collection of those of us who work in a classroom-- we all deserve the recognition.

Fame requires some ego, some self-promotion. Almost nobody becomes famous because they just sat quietly doing their thing and the great fame machine just descended upon them. I know the teacher-bloggers who put each post on super-blast, pushing it out every way they know how. It's something I have a hard time doing; it makes me uncomfortable to self-promote. But on this, they are right and I'm wrong. Certainly the rich amateurs who afflict our profession, the policy wonks and thinky tank wise men-- they're all perfectly comfortable saying, "World, I have Important Things to say, and you should listen to me." We should all be doing that, and when we can't do it for ourselves, we should be amplifying our fellow teachers. It's good for all of us-- when I pick up a teacher-written book, or see that an actual honest-to-God teacher is going to be featured at a conference about education, I feel good about that.

Fame for educators has some pitfalls. Like the brand-minded teacher in the NYT article (who teaches a grand total of ten kids), it can be easy to make a bad trade-- give me recognition and a platform and I'll use it to promote not our work, but your business. If you get a platform, make sure you know what you're using it for.

The worst danger of teacher fame is the teacher fame that comes at the expense of students.

Think about it. Every Hero Teacher movie starts from the same place-- look at these horrible creatures in this classroom. Every tale of teacher awesomeness is marked not by the qualities of the teacher, but by the deficits of the students. The message is not that it takes a special, capable, devoted, excellent person to teach, but that it takes a special, capable, devoted, excellent person to teach those God-awful kids. Don't ever step up to your platform by standing on the necks of students.

Well, this turned out to be rambly. Let me try to circle back around--

Can teachers find fame? Man, I wish they could. There are teachers I know who deserve to be widely known, and who would use their platform for good and to elevate the work and the profession. It seems about as likely as a world-famous jazz tuba player. But I have one last thought--

People within a field don't often become famous at first by being elevated by people outside that field, because those people don't know what a good job looks like. Jazz cats are the first to know a good jazz tuba player when they hear one. Classroom teachers know a good classroom teacher when they encounter one. If you wait for someone from outside to elevate those people, they'll probably elevate the wrong one.

What I'm saying is if we want to see more famous teachers, we should make more people within the profession famous. We should hold each other up for accolades (and I mean, rally-- why are teachers of the year NOT selected by teachers) and attention. We should amplify names and buy the books and pass on the blog links and make the fuss. If we were a little more actively involved with the engines of fame, perhaps we could feel a little better about where they drive folks.

DeVos Simplifies the Issues

It is easy, once you start flying down the rabbit hole of the education debates, to get wrapped up in some complex issues and arguments. If Betsy DeVos has done anything for the ed debates, it is simplifying the privatizer position.

Charter fans have layered many arguments into their pitch. Look at those terrible public school test scores-- how else can we spur excellence? Look at the terrible inequity-- how else will we bring social justice to the poor? Look at those terrible teachers and their terrible unions-- how else can we wrest control of schools away from them? Look at how backward they are-- how else can we make schools modern? Only the market can force schools to innovate and protect students and educate the poor. We must fix low standards, special ed, facility issues! Course choices! Ending religious discrimination! Better school lunches! Ipads!

Much of this variegated noise was strategic-- an attack on public education along many fronts. But it was also meant to collect allies, to build a huge coalition of various interests and line them up between privatization of public education. People using labels like conservative, progressive, Republican, Democratic, libertarian, apolitical technocrat-- ignore for the moment the question of how accurately or honestly those labels were used, they were all there in the parade.

And then Trump-DeVos happened. Could you call yourself progressive and support them? Many former allies decided (perhaps a tad hypocritically) that the answer was no. People who are serious and sincere about their ed reform ideas (yes, there are such people) had to consider their position vis-a-vis an administration that is not serious or sincere about anything. The coalition frayed, splintered.

But there is DeVos herself. While she has paid lip service to some coalition talking points, if you listen and read, the through line is pretty clear:

Public schools are a dead end, to be abandoned and cur loose. If a few survive, well, good for them. But the market must reign, and it should reign unhampered by any regulation at all. DeVos has repeatedly indicated that she can not imagine an instance in which USED would step in and say, "If you accept public tax dollars, you must stop doing that." Nor has she indicated any barriers to vendors who wish to enter the market. And there should be no institution, no system. Just parents acting as customers.

Her objective is plain. No more system of public education. Just private ed-flavored businesses. No more taxpayers who imagine that the system they pay for must work for them. Just customers-- and no customer walks into a McDonalds or Macy's and says, "You all work for me."

Progressives who think reform should be an engine of uplift? Conservatives who think tax dollars should be accounted for? Charteristas who believe the deal is trading autonomy for accountability, or that charters should be part of a public system? Yeah, none of you are really at DeVos's table, and trying to pretend that you are just hurts your cause, because DeVos can only barely bothered to pay lip service to your policy ideas.

DeVos has made it simple. There are groups out there that are calling her on it, some that have been seeing this coming for a while now. including the Network for Public Education. Listen to Diane Ravitch of NPE explain how simple it is.

ICYMI: No Particular Edition Edition (9/17)

Here's some readings for the week. I'll say it again-- not everyone has time to write about education, but you've got the five seconds it takes to pass something along on twitter or facebook. Spread the word. Build the audiences.

Pence: Black Is White

Sheila Kennedy on the Pencian habit of setting truth and reality aside in the pursuit of privatization.

Who Can Say What 20 Years of PA Charter Schools Have Taught Us?

Philly paper takes a look a twenty years of charter not-so-success in Pennsylvania.

Big Philanthropy, Small Change

The Have You Heard podcast takes a look at philanthropy in education, and its tendency to make the same dumb, destructive mistakes over and over again.

The History and Future of Learning Objects and Intelligent Machines

Nobody is better than Audrey Watters at drawing the lines between the cold, hard specifics of ed tech and the bigger ideas and issues behind them. If you only read one item on the list, make it this one.

Betsy DeVos Back to School Message Clashes with What Parents Want

Jeff Bryant looks at how DeVos's goals fail to line up with what we know parents want from schools.

Sacrificing on the Altar of Correctness

John Warner looks at one more bad ed tech product, and finds one more set of sacrifices of real education being made at the altar of correctness.

How Meeting the Needs of All Learners Can Perpetuate White Supremacy

Mr. Anders on is one more teacher disappointed by his districts start-of-year non-response to the issues raised by Charlotte.

Questions as Invitations, Not Interrogations

Speaking of the altar of correctness, Russ Walsh with a short but incisive look at the role of questions in either opening a class up or shutting students down.

Robots Replacing Teachers? Laugh at Your Own Risk

Emily Talmadge with a chilling story from California and a school without a sixth grade teacher

Standardized Tests Are So Bad I Can't Answer These Questions About MY Own Poems

This is a re-run, but as we enter the start of the first testing season, here's a reminder about how absurd these tests are. A poet discovers her own poems used on a standardized test-- and that she can't correctly answer the test questions. A classic.

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.