Why Higher Ed Is Not K-12

There is so much about public education that Betsy DeVos appears not to understand. But judging from her speech at Harvard last night, she is getting more comfortable with her ignorance. Here's one moment I want to focus on.

And doesn’t every school aim to serve the public good? A school that prepares its students to lead successful lives is a benefit to all of us. The definition of public education should be to educate the public. That’s why we should fight less about the word that comes before “school.”

I suspect all of you here at Harvard, a private school, will take your education and contribute to the public good.

When you chose to attend Harvard, did anyone suggest you were against public universities? No, you and your family sat down and figured out which education environment would be the best fit for you. You compared options, and made an informed decision.

No one seems to criticize that choice. No one thinks choice in higher education is wrong. So why is it wrong in elementary, middle, or high school?

I haven't edited anything here-- this exceptional piece of rhetorical whiplash is as it appears in the published version of her prepared remarks.

To summarize-- education should be for the public good, which is why families should be able to choose schools based on their own private interests.

But comparing public K-12 education to higher education is actually a good way to highlight how school choice can be a lousy idea.

Harvard Is Not about Choice

Students do not choose Harvard. Harvard chooses its students.And like almost all colleges and universities, Harvard requires students to maintain a certain level of achievement so that they can stay. "Your family sat down and figured out which education environment would be the best fit-- and then you hoped and waited to see if they would let you in."

Of course, the unspoken subtext here is that if you want to go to Harvard, you have to prove you deserve it, either through your academic achievement, your family connections, or your father's big fat bank account. If you don't deserve to go to Harvard, you'll just have to settle for whatever place you DO deserve. And your deservingness will be determined by admissions offices and the thousand other little cultural hurdles you have to jump.

That's the subtext of DeVos's "best fit" rhetoric-- it's the same subtext as the admissions officer or guidance counselor or apartment complex administrator saying, "Well, wouldn't just be happier in a place where you fit in a little better? You know-- with people more like yourself, with a similar background (and race)."

Higher Education Is Not a Leveller

Public education is still touted as the opportunity to level or escape class boundaries. That's arguable, but higher education makes no such claim. Harvard has no grand interest in erasing class divides in the US, and in fact colleges do a much better job of solidifying those divides than erasing them. Rich, well-connected folks get Harvard; poor folks get Podunk Community College.

Higher Education Doesn't Care About Leftovers

My beef with a privatized business-oriented approach to education remains the same-- business not only allows, but requires, leftovers and rejected customers. Our higher education does not provide a higher education for everyone, nor does it even pretend it wants to. Millions of students do not go to college. A K-12 education system that excluded or ignored millions of students would be a catastrophe.

And yet no cheerleader for choice, least of all Betsy DeVos, has an answer for who will take responsibility for the students who do not make it into a charter-choice system. At best, the suggestion that those leftover students, the ones that no charter wants, will be left behind in the public system (you know-- the one that's not allowed to reject students for no good reason) that is increasingly underfunded and underresourced because the money is all being diverted to charters.

Higher education doesn't have to care about the leftovers because we still accept that not everyone will want to go to college. That marks a substantive different between higher education and the K-12 system. DeVos is correct in saying that public education should educate the public-- all the public, not just the select portions of it.

Quality

Higher education is also instructive about how quality fares in a choice system. Because on the one hand, you have Harvard. And on the other hand, you have schools that are sports programs with a few classes attached. And on the other other hand, you have schools that award diplomas that aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The lack of serious accountability has created a system with wildly varying levels of quality, and DeVos, who has repeatedly stood up against accountability measures, is okay with that. American taxpayers should not be-- not when it comes to K-12 education.

Whose Interests Are at Stake?

In the higher education system, it is primarily the interests of students that are at stake. In K-12, all of society has a stake in the system. Public schools do not exist to serve only parents. The interests of the students, their future employers, their future neighbors and co-workers, their future fellow voters, the community as a whole-- all of these interests are represented. That's why all taxpayers chip in (unlike the higher ed system). That means that all stakeholders get a say, and all public schools should be subjected to a considerably higher level of oversight and accountability than a school ike Harvard.


Why is choice wrong for K-12? Believe it or not, I don't think it has to be wrong. But as currently proposed and practiced, it's wrong because

* There must be accountability for where and how public tax dollars are spent (that includes both issues of quality and issues of violating separation of church and state)

* The system must be fully funded. You cannot run three schools for the money previously spent on one. Don't make it a zero-sum game-- fully fund it.

* Do not leave leftover students behind. Do not push students out because they don't fit your model. If you want choice, make it parents' choice, not the school's choice.

* Students before profits. No for-profits choices. And stringent rules on not-for-profits, most of whom are currently just for-profits with good money-laundering systems.

* Total transparency and complete local control.

None of these are features of the system that brought those students to Harvard. That's why choice in higher education, while not always very successful, is less objectionable than choice for K-12.

Why Schools Are Not Food Trucks

Betsy DeVos's continued search for an analogy by which to illustrate her view of schools regularly reveals how uch she doesn't understand about public education.

Last night at Harvard, DeVos unleashed this one:

Near the Department of Education, there aren’t many restaurants. But you know what — food trucks started lining the streets to provide options. Some are better than others, and some are even local restaurants that have added food trucks to their businesses to better meet customer’s needs.

Now, if you visit one of those food trucks instead of a restaurant, do you hate restaurants? Or are you trying to put grocery stores out of business?

No. You are simply making the right choice for you based on your individual needs at that time

Just as in how you eat, education is not a binary choice.Being for equal access and opportunity – being for choice – is not being against anything.

As always, DeVos chooses an analogy that paints education as a commercial transaction in which the customer buys some goods. That's fatally flawed, but let's move on for now. DeVos likes to focus on the customer's point of view, while ignoring all the other factors that will, in fact, affect both the "customer" and the vendor.

The food trucks on the mall in DC are involved in a zero sum game. There is only so much space on the streets where food trucks deploy, and it is all occupied, which means that if anybody wants to park a new food truck there, an old one will have to be removed. Space on those streets is a finite resource. To give it to one truck is to take it away from another.

DeVos likes to characterize these sorts of balancing acts as emotionally charged moments-- here she points out that food truck patrons don't "hate" restaurants. Hatred is beside the point. This, too, is a zero sum game; if I spend money at a food truck, that is money I cannot spend elsewhere.If everyone eats at food trucks, restaurants will go out of business. DeVos does not have to hate public schools in order to choke off their resources and let them be run into the ground (in fact, I get the impression that her feelings are somewhere between disdain and indifference).

Note that DeVos continues to drift further and further away from any interest in accountability for quality-- in this analogy we pick the choice that tastes good, and if it happens to be unhealthy or toxic or laced with fried dog meat, none of that matters. Taste is not a bad guide for matters of food, but with schools, what "tastes good" today is not necessarily what will best serve the student, the family, the community and the nation over the coming decades. "Tastes good this moment" and "provides a solid education for a lifetime" are two entirely different metrics

Like every other commercial enterprise, the food trucks of DC are not geared to handle all customers. There are many reasons that comparing schools to businesses is a huge fail, but this is one of the hugest-- there is no business sector in this country built on the idea of serving every single person in the country. Each food truck operates on the idea that some people will eat there and other people won't, and as long as enough people eat there, the food truck is good. But if there are people who don't eat at any of the food trucks, some people who don't eat at all-- well, that is not the food truck operators problem.

And as a customer, you can't get whatever you want-- you can only get what the trucks are serving.

The modern charter industry is a business model, and just like any other business model, it is built on serving some customers. Making sure that every student in America gets a good education is not the goal, the purpose or even the concern of the charter industry. But it has to be the concern of a public school system.

Schools are not businesses. Students are not customers. And education is not a side of fries.

Trumpifying High School Sports

So this just popped up on my twitter feed:

And it has begun.

High schools are now following Trump’s order.

Will kick off any players who don’t stand during the National Anthem. pic.twitter.com/lfNWyW7z5f

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) September 28, 2017

The letter is from the principal of Parkway High School in Louisiana (Home of the Panthers) and it says in fairly clear terms that all school athletes will stand for the national anthem or face disciplinary action, and if they still fail to comply, then the school will kick those sons of bitches off the team.

It is hard to know how far and how fast this will spread, but I suspect that somewhere at an ACLU office, someone cut lunch short to start drafting the lawsuit that this school is going to lose.

After all-- we've already got the 1943 Supreme Court decision that makes it clear that a school may not require students to stand for the pledge of allegiance.

Schools frequently get confused about whether their role is to force compliance or to recognize that students are live human citizens of the United States of America. First Amendment freedoms still apply even if you are under 18, and no, our soldiers did not fight and die so that all Americans could be forced to salute a flag or stand for an anthem whether they wanted to or not. No, the hallmark of freedom is not allowing people only to have the freedom to do what you think they ought to do. Forcing everyone to stand for the flag and the anthem is the hallmark of totalitarianism. It's not okay.

Being rich and/or powerful doesn't mean you get to "fire" everyone you disagree with. And that goes double for students.

Here's hoping that Parkway, and any schools that choose the same path, go down to a quick and definitive defeat.

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?