Kurtz and the Angry Saviors

In the past, this was the time of year in which I taught Heart of Darkness. As my teaching year has been shortened by testing and other demands on time, I've cut bits and pieces of my curriculum, so Kurtz and Marlowe are gone.

It's a work that sticks with me. It's a problematic work, a work that calls out racism even as it is itself terribly racist. But it also opens up larger questions, like the question of how evil gets into the world. Conrad only half answers that question, by suggesting that darkness and evil are part of the world's primordial soup, always barely held back by a thin veneer of civilization.

But Conrad never really offers a solution to one of the great mysteries at the work's core-- how did Kurtz, who entered Africa as an "emisarry of light," a gifted man of possibility, intent on uplift-- how did that man become the dark, twisted, murderous soul that Marlowe encounters? How is it that Kurtz comes to rage against the people he came to save? Conrad has Marlowe muse that somehow the darkness spoke to Kurtz, entered him through some weak spot, all of which has a nice metaphysical ring to it, but doesn't really explain anything. William Golding would later try to add to Conrad's work with his Lord of the Flies (and makes sure we get the reference by having Ralph weep for the "darkness of men's hearts" at the end), but I have a theory of my own.

There is something that happens when a person sets out to "save" other people, especially when the savior believes that he is inherently superior, that the folks who need saving are defective, broken, less than. Because they are broken in his eyes, he doesn't try to know them, to understand them, to so much as listen to them-- even though he approaches them with nothing but love and good intentions.

Imagine that a group of monkeys discover a lake filled with fish. "Brothers and sisters," they declare, "These poor fish know nothing about climbing trees, know nothing about fetching and eating bananas, know nothing about the joy of picking bugs out of each others' fur. We must go to them. We must help them. We must show them a better way to live."

Bet it's been at least a week since you've seen this cartoon

There are giraffes in the same area that mock this idea. "The fish are our inferiors, and they must always remain our inferiors, and we should take steps to make sure that none of them ever rise above their station." But the monkeys disagree. "We can give them the chance to rise just as far as we monkeys," they say.Because monkeys assume that since climbing trees is what they do, it must be what everyone who matters does. Only by climbing trees can one succeed in life,

So the monkeys raise up a group of missionaries to travel to the lake, to save the fish.

Some begin the careful and heartfelt work of taking the fish out of the lake and trying to teach them to climb trees. Some get the clever idea of growing trees in the lake itself.

Over time, very few fish learn to climb trees. But other things happen.

One is that some monkeys offer to "help." "Brothers and sisters," they say. "Your work would probably be easier if the lake were not quite so wet. To help with your important and uplifting work, we will gladly undertake the removal of water from the lake." And those monkeys, spouting endless pieties, go on to make a ton of money selling lake water. But they are not the worst.

The monkey missionaries, utterly convinced of their own superiority and righteousness, become increasingly frustrated. Because almost none of the fish learn to climb.

Says one group of monkeys, "Well, they're lazy. They just don't have the grit and ambition to climb trees. They need stronger discipline, tighter structure. It's the only way their kind will ever get ahead."

Inevitably, a day comes when some fish dare to speak up, perhaps even criticize the tree climbing policy, and the monkeys who had previously been so vocal about helping and uplifting fish get hurt-- and angry. "How dare they. Where's their gratitude? Where are the thanks for the benefits we've allowed them to have?" It does not occur to the monkeys that, implicit in their complaint, is the notion that they assume the fish are less than, that the fish deserve no voice in their own lives. That they are in fact just as species-ist as the gorillas.

And the monkeys get angrier and angrier. "These fish aren't just lazy. They are deliberately resisting us, deliberately refusing to climb the trees as we have so lovingly explained they ought to. We've told them and told them and showed them and given them all the help in the world and the GOD DAMN MOTHER-EFFING FISH STAY IN THE DAMNED LAKE ALL DAY!!" And then the monkeys pick the fish up and fling them at the trees, hollering all the time.

This metaphor is flawed in that we are all the same human species, doing this to each other. Golding's expansion of Conrad's point omits the racial factors of Heart of Darkness-- the boys are all from the same culture and class. But Goldings is right-- the source of this evil is in us.

I see this dynamic in many places. Not just in the colonialism of No Excuse charter schools, but in every classroom where a teacher thinks, "Lazy little bastards-- I hope they all fail." Or in the ed reformers who angrily dismiss teachers who won't see how much better the reformsters can make things.

It's the repeated arc of every situation where folks decide they are going to "fix" other folks as a big-hearted generous favor, but they never take the time to actually listen to the people they want to "fix." Of course we are not as different as monkeys and fish, but if we are going to attempt this manner of missionary work, we might as well be. There is no anger like the anger of a thwarted self-proclaimed savior.

[PS. Only now have I discovered that Fishtree is actually a company that is flogging a computer platform for personalized education. So I guess what the monkeys really need is a computer, and then the fish will finally catch on.]

The Maltese Badges

From Malta Today:

Malta is the first country to launch a blockchain initiative which will see it issue notarised blockchain certificates to complement paper certificates for professional and informal education, the government announced today.

Because you had no idea where Malta is, did you.

Malta is teaming up with Learning Machine, a group we've heard about before. Learning Machine has some big ideas about turning out educated people like you manufacture toasters, or "decoupling" education from any sort of institution, and of creating a whole new credentialling system. That blockchain concept they talk about is the same idea behind bitcoins, the digitized currency that was going to totally do away with money.

Here are some of the things that Natalie Smolenski, "Cultural Anthropologist & Dedicated Account Manager at Learning Machine," had to say to explain the high concept here.

Because skills are only meaningful in social context, any given classification of skill is a provisional judgment of pragmatic value within an economy in which such values can be productively leveraged and exchanged. Moreover, because the kind of skill that credentials record is at root a unit of value that has been conferred to a particular individual or entity by another, it can be recorded in any ledger that records transactions of values.

Your value as a meat widget will be determined by how valuable someone else says your skill set is.

Not only will the shift toward a standardized, competency-based credentialing system allow us to address the social question of what constitutes skill with some consistency and reliability, but it will also decouple credentials from any particular institutional arrangement, in particular the over-reliance on university degrees as arbiters of skill.

In this brave new world, we will standardize everything, including what a particular skill is or means, and we'll never need schools again. You just log on, watch some video, take a test. Boom-- badge!

Everyone will have standardized credentials that follow them around digitally, and employers and managers will never actually have to deal with other humans face to face again. We'll just be able to open a file, look at your list of badges, and no exactly what work you are capable of. Human resource departments will be able to shop for the exact employees they want like a meat widget amazon.com, because of course every skill set in human experience can be reduced to a set of simple standardized badges.

It's a scheme that is so insanely at odds with how human beings actually function that you may find it hard to believe that it's popular among a certain class of people (exactly the kind of big, important people who would never agree that their own special skill sets can be reduced to some competency-based standardized badges). Here's one company's version of it called the ledger. Lumina is working on it (in fact, one of the big practical problems of blockchain CBE is going to be a VHS vs. Betamax problem of which company will dominate the field, because this only really works if everyone is in the same system). This is out there, and while I would like to believe that it will collapse under the weight of its own foolish disregard for how human beings live, learn and work, it is exactly the sort of thing that the Captains of Industry would love to forcibly impose on the plebes.

And now they have an entire nation as a proof of concept test. True, a small nation, but still-- a nation has ceded their education system to this corporate scheme. The European Union is watching how Malta manages to place education credentials in the blockchain, for full access and portability. The Netherlands and Estonia are exploring this stuff.  Certificates are expected to be issued by the end of the year.

“Blockchain gives us the opportunity to ensure that every Maltese citizen take ownership of their educational credentials,”said the education ministry, which highlights another aspect of this version of CBE-- idoesn't just privatize education, but it gets government completely out of the education work altogether. Congratulations, citizen-- your education is now your problem, and yours alone.

Three Maltese colleges – the Malta College for Art, Science and Technology (MCAST), the Institute for Tourism Studies (ITS) and the National Commission for Further and Higher Education (NCFHE) –wil be granting certificates based on the new CBE system. I hope everyone at those institutions is polishing their resume, because they will soon be unnecessary.

Of course, this could fail spectacularly and Learning Machine will slink away in ruined disgrace and oh, who am I kidding-- there is too much money to be made here in this wholesale depersonalization of education. Whatever happens, they will spin this as a win. Pay attention-- this is not the end of this.

School District Held Hostage [Upodate]

Don't file this under "ed reform" or "pedagogical issues." File this under "so this is the kind of terrible crap school districts have to deal with in the 21st century."

You may be familiar with the name The DarkOverlord. It's a hacker group, or maybe a single hacker, or maybe some Russian teenager in his mother's basement. But it achieved some notoriety last year when it hacked into a server and stole the new season of Orange Is the New Black, along with some other material, and attempted to shake Netflix down for ransom.

This put DarkOverlord in the public eye, but by the time it hit Netflix, it had already been plenty busy, specializing in breaching security at medical businesses. DO is fond of issuing "contracts" with its victims in pseudo-lawyerly language, though it also can run to pretty basic threats and worrying about its press coverage. In one instance, DO e-mailed the child of business executives to tell the child that Mommy and Daddy were about to be ruined.

This fall, the DarkOverlord diversified its portfolio by moving on a new class of victim-- an entire school district.

Columbia Falls and the surrounding Flathead Valley in Montana were hacked, and what followed was a harrowing couple of weeks in September.

The personal information (names, addresses, records-- just think about what a school district stores) mined by the hackers was held hostage, and the district was instructed via a long and ranty ransom note, to pay off DO in bitcoin. But the hacker also proceeded to terrorize the community with emails containing graphic and physical threats to the children of the school district. School leaders called meetings with parents and thirty schools across the region, affecting thousands of students, shut down for three days, with some families waiting longer to be certain it was safe to send their children back. "We are savage creatures," said one communique from the hacker.

If you decide to not entertain us and agree to one of our win-win business propositions, we will escalate our use of force in a tiered process that will involve an ever increasing level of damage and harm for you.

The DarkOverlord is not shy, and contacted both the authorities and the local newspaper, the Flathead Beacon, which provided some excellent coverage. They also provide some of the public exposure the hacker so obviously seeks-- a difficult decision and one that the paper handled well. But some of the excerpts from the interview continued to disturb.

During the course of the conversation, [Beacon reporter Dillon] Tabish tried multiple times to understand who the suspect was, where he or she was from, why the individual was making the threats and why they were targeted at area schools.

The individual said on multiple occasions in various ways that he or she intended to kill people in large numbers. The suspect said they were heavily armed with “extensive training.”

“If you know anything about military weapons … it should scare your region,” the person said.
When asked again why he or she was targeting the Flathead Valley, they responded that they wanted to scare people and harm as many people as possible.

“I wanted the public to exist in a state of fear before I make my move. This will allow the government protecting your children to look poorly in the light of the public,” the suspect said.

The individual later elaborated, “The quaint, small, backwoods region of the US like yours is prime hunting grounds. This incident is the last thing you will expect to happen here.”

Security experts suggest that the school district was not targeted and that the hackers simply sent out ransomware "en masse" to see what opportunities would present themselves.

It’s usually not a purposeful, planned attack. They’re just looking for low-hanging fruit, and if you’re not protected and don’t have the right defense in place, they will go after you.

The consensus also seemed to be that despite the threat of imminent physical attack, DarkOverlord is located overseas and was not actually kill anyone. That seems rational and reasonable, but when the death threats are landing in your in-box, it's hard not to freak out.

Montana U.S. Sen. Steve Daines raised the cyber-terrorism issue with the FBI in DC, referencing the attack just last week. The FBI didn't have much to say about the ongoing investigation, but everyone agrees this level of cyber-terrorism, spreading past corporations into hospitals and schools, is a problem.

This is one of the major arguments against large-scale data mining, as we see again and again and again-- just as criminals would rob banks because "that's where the money is," bad actors are going to go after any large collection of personal data.

Welcome to the 21st century. Hope your school's IT department has a good handle on your cyber-security.

Update: It has happened again. In Johnston, Iowa, school security has been breached and student info has been published online while locals have received threatening text messages.

One common feature-- both school districts use the Infinte Campus platform. We'll see if that turns out to be the doorway through which DO is entering.

The DarkOverlord was behind it again. It looks as if they have a new hobby. Good luck, everyone.

AI- Automated Intelligence

Remember when you could buy lots of food that was fried? But then we sort of collectively decided that "fried" was a synonym for "wildly unhealthy" and marketeers searched for a substitute. Now if you look around, you'll notice that the chicken being pitched to you is often not "fried," but "crispy."

It's a basic rule of marketing-- when you're having trouble moving a product, change the language you're using to describe it.

Once upon a time, automation looked like a cool thing. It was a machine word, a word that called up mighty metal limbs that could tirelessly repeat the same action with relentless accuracy. And it freed up humans, whose judgment was not needed. An automated process would just follow the same steps, do exactly what it was designed to do, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It seemed like a Great Thing.

But over time, the metallic bloom dropped from the tin rose. The very machininess of automation began to remind us how inhuman it all was. The mindless repetition more often conjured up images of tiny humans lost as cogs in the great machinery. If something new, different, outside the rules appeared, automation does not know how to respond and it either chews up the anomaly or chews up itself. Rather than serve humans, automated systems demanded that humans adjust themselves to the machine, because automated systems could not exercise judgment or thought or wisdom or soul. We no longer welcomed the cold, hard, unbending embrace of the machine age; instead we were all inclined to rage against the machine.

Fortunately for systems-loving people, a new age dawned, and as the machine age passed away, machines lost popularity as a positive controlling metaphor. Now we would have computers, and though, in fact, automation had always involve some rudimentary sort of computer-like element, now we focused more on the computer and its unparalleled ability to take the steps it was designed to repeat,and repeat them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Artificial intelligence is a thing, and scientists are developing it, but in the meantime AI is being used as a catch-all marketing term for oh-so-many forms of automation.

But now we don't call it automation. We call it artificial intelligence.

It's still automation.

As Alexis Madrigal reminds us in the Atlantic, "Google and Facebook Failed Us" yet again during the Law Vegas shootings because their news coverage is not handled by human beings, but by automation. They call it artificial intelligence because it sounds better, but its just a set of algorithms, a set of rules, a set of tasks to be performed over and over etc again, and when faced with unique circumstances that do not fit the rules, the automation screws up. For a while, junk news from the very fringes of intelligent thought popped up at the top of the feeds (that's why, for instance, so many people "heard" that the shooter was ISIS).

When Google responds to this by saying the bad results had algorithmically surfaced and they are going to make "algorithmic improvements," they are admitting that their software is a machine, not a brain. They are admitting that news management on the sites is automated-- not selected by any kind of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

Automation.


Want to put your child in an automated classroom? An automated classroom, complete with automated teaching machines, sounded pretty cool at one time. But the inhumanity, the requirement of students to adapt to the system. the system's inability to deal with human variables, an environment that runs on one set of unbending rules-- that does not sound cool.

But a classroom that utilizes software-based artificial intelligence? Well, now, that sounds mighty fine. Modern and smart.

And yet, in all but the rarest of cases, it's simply automation with a different name. A computer may allow for a faster, more complicated set of rules, but it's still just a machine following pre-set rules rules over and over to the twelfth power. We've digitized the metal bars, and we've hidden the tool marks of the men who built the machine, but it's still just a machine, chugging away. It's still the same weak teaching machine idea that has been promised as an educational game changer for decades.

It's still just automation. And your crispy chicken is still fried and unhealthy.

Destroying Pre-K

From Claudio Sanchez on NPR:

Suzanne Bouffard's new book, The Most Important Year, may be just what parents of preschoolers have been waiting for; a guide to what a quality pre-K program should look like.

Oh no.

It's not that we didn't know this was coming. As kindergarten has been retooled to become the New First Grade, or maybe the New  Second Grade, where littles are bolted into desks so that they can get their studies under way and we can confidently say whether or not a six year old is on the path to college and career, it was clear that this toxic stew of inappropriate expectations would trickle down to Pre-K as well.

This guy. Genius. You just wait.

The signs are everywhere. The mommy bogs have been buzzing about this Pre-K newsletter that chastises parents because their three- and four-year-olds are causing problems, so that the first month has been "a really tough first month with tears, attitudes, unwillingness, not listening, not obeying the rules and especially, too much talking and not enough sitting in seats when asked to." Honestly, they've just been acting like a bunch of children.

Also circulating has been this form, supposedly a Kindergarten readiness inventory from Pennsylvania (while many folks have told me it looks right, I haven't been able to confirm the source). There are thirty "indicators" listed, including algebraic thinking, counting, collaborative communication, writing process, text analysis, phonics and printing words. Again, just so we're clear, this is to be ready to enter kindergarten, not a list of exit skills.

So it should come as no surprise that Bouffard's ideas about a good Pre-K are, well, scholastically oriented:

Successful pre-K [programs] teach children to learn to be learners, how to be curious about how things work and find answers to problems.

No.  First of all, if you are trying to teach a four year old how to be curious, you are seriously confused. This is like trying to teach them to breathe, or to be short. Just get out of the way and try to be helpful. Oh, and then she adds this:

Another really important piece of a good program is that it focuses on things like self-control and behavior in the class, how to wait your turn, how to share, how to deal with frustration and how to solve conflicts. 

Yes, when you send a small child to any group thing, you are hoping they will learn how to share, take turns, and generally co-exist with others. But "focus" on "self-control and behavior"?  Are we seriously advocating teaching three and four year olds to properly knuckle under and submit to the system?

Look, I get that small children must learn to behave like reasonably civilized creatures and not wild animals. And later in the interview Bouffard makes some better points about letting children construct their own learning and the dangers of shaming children (and teachers) to improve and even acknowledging that children develop different skills at different rates.

Now that being said, its never too early to expose children to rich language, word games, shapes of letters and the sounds they make. But there's a big difference between exposing children to those things and expecting everybody to meet a certain reading standard at a certain age and testing them on it.

I'm glad she said that. I'm sorry she didn't more explicitly say that expecting to meet a certain standard is wrong and damaging and is a clear sign that a Pre-K is toxic and to be avoided. Instead, she includes a story about helping a little figure out a trick for solving the problem of writing sixes backwards.

When it comes to play versus academics, Bouffard is from the "false dichotomy" school for folks who believe that you can, you know, just guide the play a little to have an academic experience. "Free play is very important and it has its place in and out of school, but we shouldn't be afraid of curricula that tries to teach specific things." Here we disagree. For the littles, play is the only thing that really matters. It is the number one priority. And if it's called "curricula," it most likely doesn't belong in Pre-K.

Sigh. Deep breath.

I've been to Pre-K with my grandson in Seattle, where they have a great network of Pre-K's. He played. Sometimes he played by himself, sometimes with others, sometimes games that the teacher led, sometimes games that obviously had some learning content. That all seemed about right to me-- and my grandson is, in my objective professional opinion, a genius. His language use is very sophisticated and he Knows Stuff. He's an exemplary kid, and that's for basically one simple reason-- my daughter has played with him pretty much every day of his life. Not tried to "teach" him stuff-- just played with him in a rich environment, with lots of love and exploring and play.

I have what may be a unique perspective on early childhood education. My older children are around thirty; my younger twins are about to turn four months. I look at the huge gulf that separates the kindergarten of my older children's generation from the early childhood ed of my twins and grandchildren and all I can think is what insane humans commandeered this part of the education world that is responsible for the care of such vulnerable, precious cargo?

Bouffard does get one this part right:

If a child has been in a supportive and nurturing classroom, then goes into a classroom that's strict and focused on punishing children, that's a rude awakening.

The big take-way here is: Any gains a child makes in a quality preschool program will fade away in a classroom that's not supportive and nurturing.

But I don't think books like Bouffard's will help. At this point, the mania for academia is so strong that even a decent, responsible, play-oriented Pre-K has to mask its program by talking about curriculum and skills. Too much damage is being done to too many littles, and we're going to be paying for it for years. 

A Better Way To Measure School Quality

In every discussion, debate, argument and flame war about using test-centered accountability to evaluate schools, sooner or later, devotees of test-generated data will unleash this one:

Well, if you don't like this system. what do you want to do instead?

Now, I want to note that I reject the premise of that question. If I'm suffering from lung cancer and a garage mechanic comes into my hospital room with a chain saw and says, "We're cutting off your les\gs" and I reply, "Like hell you are," the mechanic does not get to say, "Well, then you'd better propose some other limbs to chop off." Just because the mechanic has some crazy ideas about how to treat me, that does not mean the burden of proof is on me. The burden of proof is on the crazy person with the chainsaw, or, in our case, the well-connected education amateur with a standardized test. If you can't prove you know what you're doing, you don't get to operate, and I don't need an alternative to demand that you and your chainsaw back off.

Not this

That said, it's not a bad idea to develop some means of evaluating schools. I've take a stab at it myself re: teachers. But now we have a better, more complete answer to the question, and it comes in the form of a must-read new book from Jack Schneider.

Schneider (who tweets as @Edu_Historian) is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross. Schneider has written extensively about education, including some ambitious projects such as his long-running edweek blog in which he entered dialogue with a number of education voices, including She Who Shall Not Be Named, former DC ed chief. Currently he co-hosts the podcast Have You Heard with Jennifer Berkshire.




Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality is a look at both the general principles of how to create a better school evaluation system and also at the specific work of creating an actual system for some schools in Massachusetts.

You can tell that the book is serious because the cover is pretty bland and boring, but Schneider's voice as always is clear and conversational, a scholar who knows how stuff, but spends most of his days with non-ivory tower folks.

The basic idea here is as simple as it is on point.

Who's the best actor? We could ask ten people and get ten answers , because "best" is not quantifiably objective. Your choice depends on your personal values-- do you think chiseled good looks matter more than smooth, youthful, charm? What you value most will affect your ranking.

Or let's consider the nutritional panel on a food item at the grocery store. The panel gives us lots of information-- but it doesn't try to rank the foods. You do that yourself, based on what you value most.

It's the state, the bureaucratic level, that wants to come up with a too-simple overly-reductive ranking system that is actually not very informative for parents, students, taxpayers, community members, or even teachers. (Everywhere I look these days, I see echoes of the book Seeing Like a State-- thank you, Andy Smarick.)

In six brief, clear, and thorough chapters, Schneider lays out what we're getting wrong and how we can get it right, as well as the practical aspects of applying this approach in the Somerville, Mass, school district.

Chapter One: Wrong Answer

A great summary of how we got here and why testing doesn't really tell us what  proponents claim it does. In addition to the usual criticisms of the Big Standardized Test, Schneider mentions one that we don't bring up often enough:

While there may be some benefit to the skill of sitting quietly to focus on a test, that skill is separate from one's ability to read, write and compute.

He notes the late-nineteenth century attempt to create a scientific system, but also with the goal of tighter governance. "In other words, it was not enough to have created statewide networks of schools that would be free and open to children. They also wanted to control what was going on inside those schools." Then, as now, a tool was needed to essentially wrest autonomy away from the professional educators in the school.

Tests were, and are, such an instrument. And the tests were also hella profitable, so that "entrepreneurs would not just work to meet demand, but also to manufacture it."

All this was simply setting the stage before A Nation at Risk. Policy elites were looking for a way to put their foots down, and as Schneider puts it, "State-run testing offered a way of solving the problem of teach autonomy."

This chapter alone is a great piece of reading to offer anyone who wonders what the big deal is about the Big Standardized Test.

Chapter Two: Through a Glass Darkly

How do people (parents in particular) currently gauge school quality? Schneider unpacks research to show a variety of ways, from bad ways like the test scores and  the US News badly constructed list of schools, to really bad ways like checking to see how many black kids there are. Or just plain conversations. You can dig through the specifics, but here Schneider makes it clear that the available sources of data range from lousy to irresponsibly bad.

Chapter Three : What Really Matters

In chapter three, Schneider lays out his new framework for school quality. If we all have many ideas about what a good school does, are there commonalities, some areas that we can agree one? Schneider says yes, and in this chapter he lays out the framework for five areas, grouped into two headings. And he gives us a look at how these played out in the

For "Essential Inputs" we have  Teachers and the Teaching Environment, School Culture, and Resources. Under "Key Outcomes" we have Academic Learning,  and Character and Well-Being. There are subheadings for each, and a lot of details to get into in this chapter, but does this not already look better than any school evaluation system you've been subjected to previously. (My only nit here is the absence of any long-term results-- where are the grads in ten or twenty years).

This chapter also includes one of my favorite obvious-but-worth-saying quotes:

As one teacher put it: "Parents still expect us to help their kids grow up. Not just ace [the state standardized test]. But grow up."

There are clear definitions of each category and sub-category here, with banks of questions to ask and have answered. This chapter is the meat of the book, the chapter that you should be sending to your board members and strategic planning committee.

Chapter Four: But How Do We Get That Kind of Information

Schneider looks at some of the methods for gathering the information that his model calls for. That includes surveys -- yes, he argues, they really work, and he gets into the specifics of designing them to yield useful information.  He also talks about performance assessments, harkening back to the nineties. If you are of a Certain Age, you may recall that education was being swept by a wave of authentic assessment just about the time NCLB came along and put paid to that whole business, elevating the inauthentic assessment of BS Testing. And in all fairness, Schneider recalls one of the big sticking points-- assessment systems like portfolios are time-consuming and expensive?

Intriguingly, Schneider also devotes some space to how parents could create a DIY pilot of these methods.

Chapter Five: An Information Superhighway

Schneider here looks at how to make the information that has been collected available.

Everyone, whatever their level of expertise, has a right to know how the schools are doing.

In this chapter, Schneider focuses pretty specifically on the Somerset experience, but articulates some clear priorities for the system. He talks about how to visualize the performance ranges for each characteristic of the schools, noting that they did not allow users to rank schools by characteristics.

They also did some interesting work on how the system  might change perceptions of schools. The system didn't really move the needle on local school opinions which, in keeping with usual poll results, were pretty positive. But the system did change hearts and minds about those Other Schools-- in fact, those opinions could even be changed by second-hand reporting of results. And word of mouth remains hugely influential for schools with which folks don't have first-hand contact.

Chapter Six: A New Accountability

Finally, Schneider addresses accountability systems and how they can grow out of new school quality measures.

In particular, he lists nine  guidelines for a "fair and effective" accountability system.

1) Empower communities in the improvement of schools.,

2) Create a system of reciprocal accountability. Schools are responsible to perform; government is responsible to support.

3) Use multiple measures to assess and report on school quality.

4) Capture what communities want to know. Man-- this.

5) Establish benchmarks based on high -quality schools. I'm less excited about this.

6) Place greater weight on student growth than on absolute scores.

7) Emphasize support rather than punishment.

8) Capture a reality that members of the school community will be familiar with. In other words, if your evaluation system brings back results that contradict what everyone with first handf knowledge knows, something's wrong with your system.

9) Remain an unfinished poduct

Wrapping up.

There is a lot to chew on in this book But it's pretty exciting to hold the answer to "So how should we measure school quality" in your hand. I recommend you buy ten copies of this book and give nine away to administrators, school board members, and legislators. Yes, the field is currently owned by fifty mediocre-to-crappy ESSA compliant systems. But within a year or three, everyone will notice that those systems are failing, and when the call goes out for something better, this book can already have laid the groundwork.

In short, read this book.

ICYMI: The Sleepless in Pennsylvania Edition (10/1)

Sometimes my wife and I have the twins thing pretty much under control. This week has not been one of those times. Here are some fine things to read, many of which I read at about 2 AM.

Degrees

Alfie Kohn on the speed and degree of transformation. As always, worth the read.

What Everyone Gets Wrong about Kindergarten

One more angle on the ongoing destruction of kindergarten in this country

Dear Parents: Your pre-schoolers Have a Bad Attitude and Keep Squirming- This Must Stop

The mommy blogs picked a letter sent home this week to parents of pre-schoolers. It's not a good look.

Teachers Are Grown-ups, Not Children

From across the Atlantic, this piece about someone who changed careers and was astonished to discover that teachers are not treated like grown-up professionals. 

Education and Economic Mobility 

Apparently Rachel Cohen wasn't getting enough angry e-mail, so she wrote this piece which has stirred some debate, in which she argues that the research says that education is not a major factor in economic mobility.

Selling Education Technology Via the Federal Education Technology Plan

Thomas Ultican looks at the federal role in marketing ed tech.

Public School Inc: When Public Education Turns into Big Business

The Center for Investigative Reporting takes a close look at BASIS, Arizona's big charter success story-- depending on your definition of success.

How To Call Bullshit on Big Data: A Practical Guide

From the New Yorker. Made my week by introducing me to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

Dark Money in Mass

Andrea Gabor with a good summing up of the dark money mess in Mass, where various bad actors tried to secretly support raising the charter cap.

Torture Is Not Education

The Wall Street Journal thinks America needs Chinese education. The Wall Street Journal is wrong.