Watching the Gatekeepers

This time it was Steven Singer, who published a blog post taking a characteristically fiery stance against privatization of schools. Steven was tossed into Facebook jail for, maybe, a week. Why is not exactly clear. Sure, he took a stance against privatizing education in the House of Zuckerberg (which currently employs Campbell Brown to help them sort this stuff out). But it's not like it's the first time he's taken such a stance (hell, it hasn't been that long since he depicted Trump as a pile of poop). And it's not like he's the only person to do so-- so why now, and why this post?

Singer's plight brought up the story about the Network for Public Education's attempt to place an advertisement buy on Facebook to counter "School Choice Week." NPE was apparently permanently barred from such activity. Why, exactly? Nobody really knows.

And these things happen. You may recall a while back that many bloggers posted various quotes and summaries of PARCC test questions. I could link you to my own post, except that blogger, my blogging platform, took it down. Ditto for most of the other posts on the subject. Blogger is owned and operated by Google. Why, exactly? Copyright infringement, except that many of us described the questions in only the broadest terms.

If you frequent Alternet, you've been greeted by a panel that points out that Google's new attempt to clean up their algorithmic news act seems to have aimed the big broom primarily at progressive sites-- like Alternet, which has seen a precipitous drop in traffic.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic points out that Facebook and Google fail us in times of trouble-- supposedly because most of the critical decisions are made by algorithms and not human beings, with the caveat that algorithms are the product of human beings and literally codify whatever biases those human beings bring to the software-writing table. And if you want to have some extra credit fun, just Google "Is Facebook too big..." and watch the articles pile up from over a decade's worth of concern.

There are several lessons to be learned here, but probably the most important one is that social media are not values-free wide-open unbiased platforms. They are not a public utility. They are private businesses unlike any we have ever seen, and as such make decisions based on business concerns. It would be a mistake to assume that they will always be there, always willing to push our own particular viewpoint. That also means that advocates of a cause should think really really hard about demanding that so-and-so be banned from the platform, because once we accept and promote the idea that these platforms be available only to people with acceptable points of view, we run the risk of someday being found unacceptable. So it works kind of like, you know, freedom of speech-- everybody gets it, or nobody gets it.

The other important lesson is have a Plan B, and be well networked. When word spread through the community that Singer's piece had been squelched, umpty gazzilion people posted it in his stead. If he were a solo artist, laboring in unheralded obscurity, his piece would simply have vanished. So it's important that we have each others' backs.

And pay attention. Always pay attention. The gatekeepers of social media may appear to be benign and without prejudice, but that's just an illusion favored by today's business model. Best we all keep an eye out to see what tomorrow's business model brings.

ICYMI: Applefest Edition (10/8)

The first weekend in October is Applefest-- the major festival in my town (we take a day off from school for it). But I still have some reading for you.


Teaching: If You Aren't Dead Yet, You Aren't Doing It Well Enough

If you don't read anything else this week, read this piece from Othamr's Trombone about teaching as an act of self-sacrifice and martyrdom

Education Reform Is a Right Wing Movement

Jersey Jazzman remind us where the ed reform movement's roots really lie

Recommended Reading

A good collection of books about writing, teaching, and teaching writing.

Betsy DeVos's Vision

Jennifer Berkshire at Alternet with a widely reprinted that looks at the DeVosian long game-- what is she really up to?

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

Another good look at what really drives DeVos.

Fordham Institute: Teachers, Don't Get Sick

John Thompson's response to the Fordham sick days study

For Profit Schools Get State Dollars for Dropouts Who Rarely Drop In

Pro Publica has been doing some bang-up work on charter schools. Here's a at the practice taking money for ghost students.

Arts Integration Is a Sucker's Game

Jay Greene is a reformster who will sometimes call his colleagues out. Here he takes aim on STEAM

Jeanne Allen: Reactionary Right Wing

Allen and her Center for Education Reform work tirelessly to support charter schools. But now she's butt-hurt that a new documentary portrays her as a tireless supporter of charter schools.

Why Privatization Is a Disaster for any Democratic Society

Salon looks at privatization in education and other areas

Looking Behind the Curtain of School Choice Again

In Chicago, one more look at how choice really works (and how you can tell it's a sham)

Revolting Tech

It has been a typical couple of days with tech.

I spent a bunch of time on the phone with various offices of a major telecommunications company (rhymes with "Shmerizon") in an effort to upgrade our wireless plan, but this, it turns out, requires an actual phone call which in turn involves being passed around to various departments, each one of which requires a new explanation of what you're trying to do and why. This is all because we were using a Shmerizon feature that allowed us get just one bill for all of our services, but because our wireless is sharing a bill with "another company", there were extra steps. So apparently this large corporation is really several corporations, or one corporation whose internal communication is so bad that it might as well be several separate companies.

Which seems not uncommon, as meanwhile I am trying to settle issues with my tablet from Shmicroshmoft which has strange glitches that keep it from working well with other Shmicroshmoft products, for some reason that nobody knows. This particular issue I solve on my own, pretty much by randomly switching some settings and stumbling across something that neither the message boards.

Both of these take a while because on my home computer, I must deal with a browser that balloons up to huge KB use until it has to be restarted, which is also slow because the Shmerizon DSL into my home is a terribly noisy line that repeated attempts by the  company to fix have, in five years, been unsuccessful. It is especially bad when it rains, to the point that you can't have a conversation on the land line. There are no other reliable internet providers locally,

That's actually why we need the improved wireless plan-- for when we anchor our household wi-fi on the phones. This trick does not work at school, where signal is bad that the phone is basically unusable (and has to be either plugged in or turned off to avoid draining all power). I can take care of some prep work at school, provided I have what I need unblocked. And because our school has gone Google, the sites and services that are Google uncompatable are a no-go at school, too.

Many of these issues are exacerbated by the age of my equipment, but I can't afford to upgrade every six months to keep everything high grade and current. My home desktop is practically a dinosaur at five years old, which may be one more reason I need to reboot the modem almost daily to keep the connection working.

And I am not a Luddite or a digital dope. But this kind of constant maintenance and nursing and workarounds is part of my daily tech routine.

So tell me again how ed tech is going to revolutionize schools.

Bowling: Critics and Choice

I've followed Nate Bowling for a while. I admire his willingness to stay true to principles and avoid simply throwing his lot in with one faction or another.

On his website, the Washington state educator neatly sums up one of the central challenges of the current ed reform landscape:

Teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experience and insights from working with marginalized communities.

Bowling is a founding member of Teachers United (recipient of many Gates $$), flies the #educolor flag (a mark of one of the most valuable networks of educators of color, including many strong public ed advocates), and won the Milken Educator Award (from the foundation set up by former junk bond king, convicted felon, and current reformster Michael Milken ). Yes, he's in a video accepting a big check from Milken while Sen. Patty Murray looks on proudly (well, as evangelist D. L. Moody supposedly said upon being challenged about accepting the "devil's money" from a reprobate, "The devil's had it long enough. It's time to give it to God.") And while he may talk about charters, he has turned down lots of charter job offers to stay teaching in a public school.

He's talked to Bill Gates, and he and I once had a bloggy back-and-forth (here's the end, with all the links).

Last week he posted Stop Berating Black and Brown Parents Over Charters (and Give Your Twitter Fingers a Rest)  and while it feels a little like a sub-tweet aimed at particular individuals, it has what I consider some useful advice that we haven't visited in a while.

Bowling starts with this point:

If there's one lesson that I have learned over the last few years, it’s that you're never going to convince a black or brown mother to change her mind about where to send her child by demonizing her choices, calling her a “neo-liberal,” or labeling her a “tool of privatizers.” 

 My first impulse is to say that folks in the pro-public school camp don't say things like that, but then I think about and, well, yes, some do. But some of us have developed a more complicated stance. Both Mark "Jersey Jazzman" Weber and I have said on numerous occasions that we can imagine charters as valuable additions to education-- but not the way folks are trying to do them currently.

And there is a tension that Bowling nails exactly. I think charters are a huge policy problem, and the current rules under which they operate are somewhere between hugely misguided and underhandedly destructive. I will gladly stand in front of legislators all day and argue that at a minimum, the rules governing charters must be radically changed. At the same time, I wouldn't stand in front of a parent for even sixty seconds and tell them that they must send their child to public school in order to support the "good guys." Parents know their kids and the situation on the ground, and so there is a real tension about what we should collectively pursue as matters of policy and what parents should pursue as matters of care for their children.

Charter-choice advocates are, of course, well aware of this tension and they are very careful to frame the issue so that we are only talking about parents and not about policy. Let's talk about letting parents have a choice, they say, and let's not talk about a charter system that stacks the deck heavily against parents and the community in favor of the operators. Current charter-choice advocates are too often in the role of spokespeople for the 1920s meat packing industry. "Let's not talk about all that ugly stuff in Upton Sinclair's novel, about the rotten meat and the inhumane conditions and the unsafe products. Let's just focus on making sure that the customers get to go to the supermarket and choose."

This is one reason Betsy DeVos keeps her focus on parent choice, to the point of arguing that the institutions of education don't even exist-- because as long as she  makes the issue parental choice, she can ignore all the systemic issues of bad standards and screwed up testing and systemic inequity and all the rest.

But Bowling is absolutely correct that we do not resolve this tension by demonizing black and brown parents. And he provides a list of suggestions that we might want to consider instead.

You must address their motivations and concerns. 

Why are folks choosing charters? Yes, in some cases they are choosing charters because the charters are using marketing to push attractive lies-- but that doesn't change the question we should be asking, which is why, exactly, are those lies effective. And can we take a look at the log in our own eye and address that as well. If we want to make public education more effective, we have to move past "Wow, No Excuses schools are pretty racist" to "So why do some parents fine them less racist than the local public school?"

Work to improve the experience of students of color in traditional public schools.

Bowling correctly observes that a good way to combat charters is to make public schools too attractive to leave.

In some respects, this is easier said than done. Choices are being made-- financial choices, curriculum and standards choices-- at high levels that tie our public school hands and force us to serve less-than-stellar educational material to our students.

But let's face it-- it doesn't cost a penny to put a less racist staff in place. Nor is it costly to do the self-examination and self-policing needed to create a more nurturing environment for students of color.

You can be right on the issue and still be wrong.

Here’s the deal, friends. You’re right about neo-liberalism and the decaying of public goods, but ain’t nobody trying to hear that from you when it comes to their child’s well-being. We all know there are awful schools and school systems out there in desperate need of transformation.

Bowling is talking again about the tension between larger policy issues, the business of operating and improving the institution of public education, and the needs of parents to make sure their child is getting the best shake possible. Yes, it's true that, as currently structured, when a child leaves a public school for a charter school, she makes things worse for the students who are left behind-- but would we really counsel someone to stay in a burning building because there are other people trapped in their, too.

Obviously the macro-issues and the personal issues are linked, but it's a mistake to believe that only the macro issues matter. Charter and choice folks create plenty of opposition for themselves by the way they conduct their business; public school supporters should not make that same mistake.We cannot denigrate parents for making the best choice they think they see; we must go after the system and the charters who make bad choices look good.

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.