Puerto Rican Crystal Ball

Imagine that we could collect up all the non-white, non-wealthy citizens of this country. Would it give us a better opportunity to make sure those folks were better served? Could we focus our attention social institutions like schools and health care? Would we concentrate on creating a strong and robust infrastructure? Would we provide ample opportunity for local voices to be heard and be important players in democratic self-rule?

Or would we treat those folks like second-class citizens? Would we treat the infrastructure and institutions of that community as important only as chances for investors to make a buck? And would we then demand that the investors' voices be the loudest ones, that local self-rule must take a back seat to making sure that investors have the final say (so that they can make their money, no matter what that means to members of the community)? Would we demand that they make their own needs secondary to the needs of investors and hedge fundies?

Well, if we look at Puerto Rico, we have to conclude that the second paragraph is the accurate one.

Puerto Rico is an instructive example because it is, as President Trump has wisely noted, an island in the ocean. We can't quite perform such perfect examples of non-democratic vulture capitalism to our mainland communities of non-wealthy non-white citizens because they aren't on an island. We can't quite-- but Puerto Rico is a sign that we'd like to.

We'd like to take the black communities of Chicago and cities like Detroit and the poor parts of LA and strip locals of democratic control, impose investor rule, and start strip-mining them for financial benefit, and in many such communities, the rich and the powerful have taken steps to do so. Schools-- public education-- are often a first target because they operate with the most democratic process to be swept away and the greatest pile of money to be swept up.

Put another way, Puerto Rico is an answer to the question, "What would privatizers and profiteers do if we collected the non-white non-wealthy in a single place, stripped them of political power, and removed all obstacles to doing as we wished." The answer is not a good or encouraging one, and it is put into starker relief in the current crisis, which presents us with a follow up question-- "What would we do if the place had been mostly hollowed out of its valuables, and then something Really Bad happened?"

Just a few days ago, Tyler Cowen wrote "Puerto Rico's American Dream Is Dead" for Bloomberg View:

The underlying reality is that the political and economic model for the island just isn’t working any more, and the dream of Puerto Rican economic convergence has been laid to rest once and for all. That in turn says something bad about the rest of this country, namely how quickly we will give up on the possibility of transformational change.

That's the depressing lesson here. Puerto Rico has been our little aspirational laboratory for how non-wealthy non-white folks are supposed to Make It Work in this country, but in fact, it has become a demonstration of how we stack the deck against them, and then stack that stacked deck on top of them to hold them down.

Watch carefully over the next year. We are going to learn something about ourselves as a country, as a people, by how we treat Puerto Rico, now that the island has been crushed by natural disaster. Early indicators are not good. We are slow to respond, reluctant to lift the Jones Act on shipping restrictions for any length of time (because it protects corporate interests), and have offered to give them more debt to pile on top of the already crushing debt.

Puerto Rico makes plain the expectations for non-white non-wealthy citizens-- not only do we expect them to rise by being smart, hard-working, and independent, but we expect them rise by doing all these things while larger powers work to hold them down. It's a stark reality in Puerto Rico, but once you see what it looks like there, it is mighty hard not to see it in the predatory exploitive treatment of non-white non-wealthy citizens on the mainland. We can see the future of many communities and their schools, and it is not a pretty one.

AZ: Teachers Abandon Ship

We revisit Arizona from time to time because it has been quietly throwing its hat into the ring with Florida and North Carolina to compete for the title "Worst State for Education in the US." To quote from previous pieces:

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. Fun fact: Arizona spends less per student on education than pretty much anyone-- including, reportedly, Puerto Rico.

It should come as no surprise that Arizona has something like 1,300 teacher spots to fill.

Lord knows, they've tried many things. I mean, not raising teacher pay or improving teaching conditions or providing more resources for public schools-- that would be crazy talk. Besides, spending more money on public education would mean less money to be gobbled up by the many profiteers cashing in on the charter business. Fun fact: Arizona's legislature has cut $1 billion from K-12 education since 2009.

Arizona has somewhere around 49,000 teaching spots in all. Just under 2,500 of those are filled with Gov. Ducey's super-duper "Anyone Can Teach" program because of course the problem must be that becoming a teacher is too hard.

Arizona is the perfect example of the Fake Teacher Shortage that we all keep talking about. In fact, reports put the number of certified teachers in the state at around 95,000-- far more than the number of spots the state needs to fill. In other words, there was never a need for an alternative teacher certification path or to recruit in the Phillipines. Arizona does not have a teacher shortage-- what Arizona has is a shortage of people willing to work as teachers for low pay, with no support, in schools without sufficient resources. Fun fact: a Costco worker will make $12,000 more in a year than the average Arizona teacher.

To underline this, here comes reports from early in this school year that over 500 teachers had quit by the fourth week of school. AZ Central quotes one of the departees:

"I'm a hard worker with a successful track record of 30+ years of engineering, manufacturing and science research.  I've had stressful assignments at remote locations, deadlines, stopped manufacturing lines, teams to lead that I never before met.  I knew and was prepared to work hard at my newly-chosen profession.  But before TUSD, I never had a job that made me break down in tears."

Arizona has studied its problem more than once. The most recent report came out in April, and it has some fun facts of its own:

* 42% of the teachers hired in 2013 left within three years.
* 74% of AZ superintendents report shortages of teachers
* When you adjust for cost of living, AZ elementary teachers are the lowest paid in the nation. High school teachers come in 48th.

The main reasons teachers are leaving? Retirement, disillusionment, low pay, and feeling a lack of support.

Governor Ducey has now launched a tuition-waiver plan-- teach for four years in an Arizona public school and get your college education paid for. The "teacher academy" program will be piloted with 236 students. 

It's not a terrible idea, but it also doesn't address any of Arizona's real problems-- all of which are self-inflicted. If you are having trouble filling up your water bucket, you might want to look at all the holes you've punched in the bottom of the bucket before you start concentrating on new ways to pour water into it.

Micro-Symposium

If you've been busy with the start of the new school year, you may have missed the Symposium on the Currency of Micro-Credentials earlier this month. Just one more sign of the cool new way to privatize education coming down the pike.

The micro-party was thrown by Digital Promise, and co-hosted by CCSSO and Learning Forward. Digital Promise is an organization that is heavily invested in providing little micro-trainings for fun and profit, serving as a platform for both their own trainings and the offerings of other edu-businesses like the Relay Graduate [sic] School [sic] of Education [sic]. You probably recognize the initials for the Council of Chief State School Officers, since they are one of the fine organizations that gave us the Common Core. Learning Forward is another edubiz conglomerate whose Board of Trustees includes the Senior School Support Strategist from the XQ Institute (Laurene Jobs' pet project).

Micro-credentials, for those of you just becoming acquainted, is the idea of earning a credit or badge or virtual gold star for achieving some sort of mini-competency. Log on and take a one hour webinar on the use of wait time as a classroom strategy, take the quiz at the end, and now you have a micro-credential in wait time. In the wettest dream of micro-credentialists, badges can be earned pretty much anywhere from anybody (here's a particularly full and frightening vision). These digital badges follow you around from cradle to grave, so that employers can come up with a micro-description of the qualifications for their next gig and micro-hire the person with the exact collection of micro-badges they're looking for. At least, that's the idea.

So what cool stuff micro-happened at the symposium?

The gathering had less to do with micro-crede4ntialing students and more with micro-certifying teachers, asking questions like how to do credentialling through collections of micro-credentials. One more ominous session looked at

the mechanisms through which microcredentials can provide educators with access to and progression through new career pathways. Participants will explore what changes or new systems might be required to build meaningful career pathways through micro-credentials and incorporate them into state or district human capital policies.

Teachers will need these new career paths, because micro-credentials do away with any real need for actual teachers. Folks can micro-earn their badges from anyone anywhere at any time. Because that's how we build better human capital (aka meat widgets). And yet, the panel discussion "Insights from the Field" included Ann Coffman, the Senior Program Analyst from NEA.

The gathering was micro-attended by over 100 people (here's the list) including folks from RTI International; the Departments of Education in Delaware, Colorado, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Arkansas; McGraw-Hill, several school systems; Relay GSE, KQED, AIR, ASCD, the NEA, and Apple, as well as the hosting organizations. It tells you something about the intent of the gathering that the spreadsheet heads the column about affiliations "company."

Micro-credentials may seem like a long shot, but in many ways they are a more likely way to privatize education. If you want to get in the ed biz and score some of those sweet public tax dollars, you don't have to develop an entire school-- just position yourself to teach one or two small things. And since folks can gather any credentials in any place at any time, school buildings can be converted to condos, and teachers are completely unnecessary (in fact, some models suggest that once you have earned a credential, you are "qualified" to "teach" it to someone else, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, on into blurry infinity).

Your new resume

 And for folks whose ideal is Management By Screen, this is a beautiful vision. You don't even have to talk to your human capital, because every meat widget has a digital file that includes everything from the social skills displayed at age 5 to every micro-credential they've ever earned. You can hire and fire without ever having a conversation ever again.

Of course, such a system requires all knowledge and skills to be broken down into small, simple, easily measurable performance tasks that can be easily standardized. And it requires a huge tolerance on the part of meat widgets everywhere for a gigantic digital Big Brother file to follow them about. And it requires our Data Overlords to get way way WAY better at collecting, correcting, and protecting our data. To prove that they've achieved those three goals, the Data Overlords are going to have to show me something more convincing than their data management micro-credentials.

But the micro-participants were not worried about any of this:

The evening ended with an inspiring conversation on teacher engagement between Hashim Pipkin of Digital Promise and Aneka Stewart, literacy specialist at KIPP DC. Stewart discussed her experience earning the Executive Function micro-credential from the Friday Institute at NC State University. She was able to immediately apply what she learned with her students and appreciated both the research that backed up the micro-credential and the ability to work at her own pace. “I would love to have a micro-credential series on executive function so I can keep the issue up front and put [what I learn] into practice,” she said.

There was also gushing over "rich artifacts" backed by "rigorous research" plus "multi-pronged approaches" and the need for a "common language" while "providing value." Also, since assessment is time intensive, what are the proper "correct incentives to support assessment, such as financial compensation or conference attendance." Yes, please-- when I do work, I want to be compensated in conference attendance.

This is high grade digital micro-baloney, but symposiums like this underline how excited corporate types are about the whole business of micro-credentials. Mind you, nothing I read about the symposium indicated that anyone was worrying about the quality of the actual education provided by this micro-delivery system. But the marketing possibilities for vendors is exciting; these folks are line up and ready to cash in-- and not in a micro-way.

The Other Unfunded Mandates

Talk to teachers-- or former teachers-- across the country, and you hear similar complaints. An increase of job responsibilities, without the necessary time or resources to complete them. When we talk about unfunded mandates, we usually mean some program for which the government has said, "You must do this, but we will not give you any money to pay for it." But it is another kind of unfunded mandate when a school says to a teacher, "You are being given new tasks to complete, but we expect you to donate the time to do them on your own."

In addition to your regular teaching duties, and preparing to teach, and grading papers, and recording the grades, we would like you to also administer some pre-testing tests and then crunch the data. We'd like you to create your lesson plans in a new piece of software, and use that software to build scope and sequence for your courses. Create some emotional and social development programs for the students. Call every parent. Keep everything up to date and entered on your school website (using the new software that we expect you to teach yourself).

Before you squawk back, here are two things I know about this.

One is that teachers are not alone. I have nurses in my family, and I have watched how the health care providers solve budget issues by the not-very-clever method of simply reducing the number of staff, which can be done by declaring, "You still-employed people will now do your old job and also somebody else's old job." Many companies also use the technique of cutting employee hours, but not employee responsibilities. "Do what you've always done-- just do it in half the time." So, yeah-- I now that teaching is not the only place suffering from these unfunded mandates.

Another thing I know is that teachers are professionals and not hourly wage workers. When I signed up for an English teacher job, I knew that those essays wouldn't grade themselves, and I wouldn't have six unassigned hours during the school day in which to grade them. Any teacher who thinks she can do the job within the hours of the school day and no more is kidding herself. The out-of-school hours are part of the gig.

But teachers are good team players, and therefor terrific institutional enablers. Administrators add hours to the teaching day like drunks add gin to their glass, and some teachers just keep saying, "Well, that's okay. I'll make sure the kids have a normal Christmas and take the phone calls from your mother."

Teachers suck it up and squeeze in the new duties instead of telling their administrator, "I can do this, but I'll need direction from you on which duties you wold like me to stop performing." They donate the extra hours to the district, and then complain that administrators aren't fixing the problem, but here's the thing-- from the administrator's perspective, there is no problem. The fact that Mrs. Bagshot is sad about all the hours she spent at work is not an administrative problem. It's not an administrative problem until the job doesn't get done and Mrs. Bagshot is telling her boss, "No, I didn't get it done. I ran out of time."

Of course, if Mrs. Bagshot works in a charter school or a state that has "freed" its teachers from the "inflexible" union rules, Mrs. Bagshot will donate the extra hours or else suffer unemployment.

But for the rest of us can draw lines.

That raises the question of where, exactly, to draw those lines. Because in some cases, failure to donate free time to the district creates more problems for us or the students than we really want to see. It's decision that everyone has to make on their own; you're the one who has to live with your choice. For me, it boils down to this-- my job, the job I signed up for, is to use my expertise and knowledge to help students learn how to be better at reading, writing, speaking and listening. On the bigger scale, my work is to help them discover and grow toward the best version of themselves, to help them better envision what it means to be fully human, how to be in the world. So anything that helps me do my job is worth my time. And anything that doesn't, isn't.

I can't tell anyone else where to draw their lines. But if we want to be respected as professionals, we need to be careful about giving away our time for free. After all, how can we expect someone else  to value our time if we don't seem to?

Shock Treatment

Yikes!

This story is from back in May, but it's still alarming right now. Philip Perry at Big Think reports that DARPA is financing research on ways to "educate" you by jamming some electricity into your brain.

DARPA announced this new initiative back in March of 2016. Targeted Neoplasticity Training (TNT) would involve delivering some "mild electric shocks" to a specific nerve "in order to facilitate learning." The idea is to hook up to the peripheral nerves ( the same network used to promote healing and operate robot prosthetics) and use electric impulses to stimulate the growth of neuronal connections inside the brain, releasing the neurochemicals "responsible for reorganizing the brain in response to new experiences."

DARPA is handing out $50 million to eight teams that will be working on this.

Yes, there's some research that sort of kinda backs this up, like this paper about Vagus nerve stimulation helping verbal memory and fighting off Alzheimers and battling depression and treating epilepsy.

Of course, we've also learned that plain old exercise helps grow brain cells, too. But that's not as cool as Matrix-style plug-and-play humans who can learn martial arts by jamming a wire into the port in the back of their neck.

Back in April, Xiaoqin Wang, a biomedical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins announced that he expected to start zapping some live humans within a few months, so this stuff may already be going on. There are many questions left to be answered-- is it better to zap before or after the learning takes place? How big a zap? And does this work any better than coffee or sleep?

Certainly this would be a game-changer for schools, and even the advent of computer-based personalized learning would be altered as hardware designers would have to figure out how best to wire up the students. USB ports? And would teachers get control of the system? "Pat, you just can't seem to grasp adverb clauses, so I'm going to up your voltage."  A brave new world, indeed.

McKinsey Non-Research PISA Thing

From the first sentence, I could tell how much I was going to hate this:

By applying advanced analytics and machine learning, we have identified factors that play a critical role in student achievement. 

This is a new mini "report" from McKinsey, one of the world's top management consulting companies, a group that has occasionally dipped its claws into the education biz.

The report-- "How To Improve Student Educational Outcomes: New Insight from Data Analytics"-- is one more example of using data to get the desired results from carbon-based life forms. The corporation has been applying analytics internationally across five different geo-political groupings, and they crunched numbers from the PISA (both the test and the survey that goes with it). They offer findings in two areas:

Mindset

Well, look. Vindication for Ben Carson:

Our conclusion: after controlling for all other factors, student mindsets are twice as predictive of students’ PISA scores than even their home environment and demographics.

Yup. According to McKinsey, grit and growth mindset are all you need to overcome difficult circumstances at home. The report does not explain how researchers assessed a students' "calibrated motivational mindset," but they are sure it's super-important. Sure, they admit, being rich and not poor can be helpful. And they also note that research on the mindset-outcomes link is "both nascent and predominantly US-based."

But the lesson is clear-- poor kids need to stop whining and start calibrating their motivation.

Teachers

The report casually notes that there are two "dominant" types of teaching-- teacher directed and inquiry driven (so I guess, thankfully, we're going to skip over "student stuck in front of a computer).

The data suggests that the sage on the stage gets better test scores than the guide on the side, until you "dig deeper" and then see there is a "sweet spot" of combining the two. As with the first finding, the writers offer absolutely no details on how they were able to figure this out from PISA test and survey results.

This combo holds more true in top-scoring systems. On the developing end of the scale, inquiry-based isn't much help. The authors conclude that students must have to gain enough knowledge via teacher-directed instruction in order for inquiry-based to work.

Even a survey as large and rigorous as the PISA assessment provides only some of the answers. Nevertheless, we believe that our findings provide useful insights to guide policy makers as they make their way to their ultimate destination—improving the education and thus the lives of students all over the world.

And that's our generic conclusion.

Honestly, some of these results might be interesting, and some of them might be bunk. The report refers to a "series of reports" so maybe somewhere out in the world there is a more thorough piece of work. But this is like nothing at all. "We look at some data and we decided some stuff 'cause of that. 'kay?" We are left to imagine how any of these conclusions were reached.

Our guides on this non-journey? Emma Dorn (practice manager in McKinsey's Silicon Valley office), Marc Krawitz (an associate partner in the New Jersey office),  and Mona Mourshed (senior partner in the Washington, DC, office). Dorn is a Harvard Business School grad. Krawitz has a PhD in math from U of Michigan. Mourshed has a PhD in economic development from MIT and did some McKinsey work on Education to Employment. Which means that none of these folks have any education background, but are highly educated and surely know how to show their work in a research paper.

Maybe the other reports, wherever they are, contain more legit explanation of how these various conclusions were teased out. But as it stands, this is a big nothingburger.

ESSA: No Answers in Washington

Betsy DeVos went to talk to all the rich, white Republicans at the Mackinac Island leadership conference last week. “The time of ‘Washington knows best’ is over,”she said, and for non-fans of DeVos, it would be easy to retort, "Yeah, now that you and your boss are there, we're pretty sure Washington doesn't know a damned thing. Har!"

We're pretty sure Betsy doesn't know best, but then neither did John King, and the number of things Arne Duncan didn't know were also legendary. So let's not pretend that there was some golden age when the US Department of Education provided wise and informed leadership to America's schools. Looking for great education leadership for the Secretary of Education is like looking for true love on The Bachelor-- it's not impossible, but as the years and iterations pile up, it looks less and less probable.

This is the background that got us ESSA, the current mish-mosh of laws and regulations governing US education. Congress set out to create a law that deliberately pushed USED out of the room, and the John King's USED set out to interpret the law through regulations that let USED climb back in through the window, and then the whole thing was handed over to an administration whose only clear policy goal seems to be "Make things look as if Barack Obama was never actually President at all."

In the meantime, the law's birth was attended by the usual pack of profiteers, making sure that there was language in there somewhere to give their favorite fat piggies access to the public trough. So personalized [sic] computerized learning and social impact bonds and data-mining young humans and de-professionalizing the teaching profession and charter giveaways all have an open door in there somewhere. And of course ESSA continues the devotion to test-centered schools.

As I wrote in 2015, ESSA solves nothing. But it does change the venue of the debate, and that's not a bad thing. I would much rather deal with my state legislature than try to get a member of Congress to listen to me. I would much rather have bad choices affect one state instead of fifty. I would much rather have the corporate stooges scrambling back and forth between fifty states than let them do one stop shopping for lawmakers in DC.

DeVos has encouraged states to stretch the rules to the breaking point and see if the feds (ie her department) will stop them. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Heaven only knows what this will mean, or which states will have the cojones to try.

But it underlines that there are now at least fifty education debates, and they each have their own issues. Some states are under siege by personalized learning advocates. Some are being pressed hard by charter fans. Some are hard at work dismantling teaching. And almost everyone is staging a different version of Common Core Kabuki Theater.

I was someone post of being discouraged, that they thought a few years ago that we might win this. I don't want to be a bummer, but no-- this fight will never be won. It's a marathon, a race against people who have a lot of money and want to get a lot more. I don't envision a day when they say, "You know what? We just give up."

I hate warfare metaphors, but I'm reduced to one here. We will win battles. We will lose battles. There will always be more battles. I like ESSA because it decreases the chances that one battle will be critical to everything. Eggs and baskets and all that. There will be no answers in Washington.

The shape of the resistance is changing, and it will continue to change. Local concerns will loom larger than national ones, and that in turn will loosen the ties that have bound liberals and conservatives together. We can potentially waste a great deal of time and energy arguing about who is really on which team and who gets to wear which team jersey (and if it makes you feel any better, the reformsters have been caught up in similar debates).

We are still going to need each other, for support, resources, information. But relationships all across the world of the ed debates are changing, and they're going to change more.

I've never much cared for calls for "unity." It always seems to mean "Shut up and agree with me." But I think we each have to remember what we value, work toward that in the ways we do best, and support people where our values coincide (while recognizing that there will rarely be 100% agreement). There is a comfort in Big Movements, because they usually come with Big Leaders, and lots of folks are comfortable finding someone they can just follow all the time. But my sense is that we are moving toward a time of many smaller movements, with many normal human sized leaders, linked together, but fighting more local fights.

Know who you trust. Know what you believe. Pay attention. Stay rested and ready. Every win matters.