Blockchain For Dummies

Whenever we talk about That Thing That's Being Pushed-- the thing that is sort of competency based education and and sort of personalized learning and sort of cradle to career pipeline and sort of Big Brother data mining your entire life-- we inevitably run into the idea of blockchains. If that part leaves you a big befuddled, join the club. I'm going to attempt an easy-to-follow yet reasonably accurate explanation  of what's going on, because I think it's worth understanding. Blockchains are shaping the education conversation just by their very nature-- and they are not politically neutral, either. This may not make you feel any better, but at least you'll understand a little better what's going on when blockchain is discussed.

Blockchains emerged hand in hand with bitcoins, a so-called cryptocurrency, that had been hinted at in SF literature (go read some Neal Stephenson, like the short story "The Great Simoleon Caper" or the absolutely awesome novel Cryptonomicon). It appeared in 2008, created by a pseudonymous computer guy/group Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoins do not physically exist, which is not that crazy an idea when you consider that your paper currency is just a piece of paper, and mostly you handle money electronically, anyway. Bitcoins exist on a ledger, maintained in the cloud on a variety of computers (nodes) but without any central authority. (IOW, there's no bitcoin main server parked somewhere).

At one point this decentralized bookkeeping seemed like crazy talk, but we've been sliding rapidly toward it. The easiest available comparison is a google doc. In the old days, if you and I wanted to collaborate on a document, we'd have to send it back and forth and back and forth, with each send creating a new copy (and a need to keep track of them). Now we'd just create a google doc that we could both work on. There's only ever one copy, and we can both manipulate it at any time.

A bitcoin ledger is like that, with one huge difference. It requires huge and complicated security, a level of encryption (hence "cryptocurrency') that makes my head hurt. Not all the attempts to manage the system worked out at all, causing some early bitcoin "crashes," but one approach has held on. The blocks of bitcoin data were linked through a heavy encryption to earlier versions of the ledger, as well as a series of encryptions that "certified" each transaction. Those blocks of data, connected through a chain-- well, yes, here we are at blockchain.

What these folks believe they have is a hackproof unified ledger that can be updated reliably. Bitcoin fans believed that they now had a system that would keep their currency stable, universal, and unaffected by the slings and arrows of national politics and monetary policy. No government necessary to issue, certify or control currency. The system even generates its own currency through performance of the crypto-problems that maintain the system-- bitcoins are "mined" and not "isssued."

But folks also saw huge potential in blockchain itself. Here, they said, was the ultimate digital strongbox-- permanent, universal, and utterly secure. Transparent and incorruptible. It could handle all kinds of commerce.

And, some blockchain advocates believed, it could store identity information.

Your identity. Your personal information. Your medical records-- all of them. Bloomberg just ran an article pitching blochchain as a substitute for social security numbers. And if it can store that information, incorruptibly and transparently, why not other personal information.

There is a serious Libertarian feel to the blockchain world-- the decentralized dependability means that no centralized authorities of any type are needed, No governments needed for money supply. No central authorities to create and certify information about individuals.

You can see how easily this idea lent itself to the notion of needing no central authority to authorize or create educational certification. Education can be mined, found, certified, tracked and recorded without any central authority needing to intervene. We would never need official schools or certified teachers or even diplomas ever again. Your various trainings would just become bits in the blockchain of your life, and your value, your worth as a future employee or member of society would be right there in your digital permanent record.

Not everyone believes in the power of blockchain. Some folks believe it could become the basis of a whole second internet, a completely new techno-evolutionary jump forward. To which other folks say that blockchain is not the next internet, but the next Linux-- nerdy, obscure and ultimately unable to make the jump to widespread mainstream use.

And there are certainly issues to sort out. An amount of currency is a simple piece of data, a one-dimensional bit to store. To make such a system work for the full broad spectrum of human skills and aptitudes, we'd have to flatten all those qualities to simple, single dimensions. Reducing "pretty decent novelist" or "fine jazz player but not strong in the classical repertoire" or "great teacher of seven year olds but not quite so great with fourteen year olds" or "decent diagnostician of pulmonary system ailments with an excellent bedside manner and a good team player"  to simple data points is a real challenge-- but there are people trying to meet it, to flatten every skill set in the world into little mini-competency badges that will fit the system. And not just the functional skills, but the social-emotional domains as well, so that the full complexity of a human's character and personality can be reduced to data points as well.

Because that's one of the things that's different about CBE this time around-- the tail is wagging the dog. As is too often the case, the system is being designed around what the technology can do, and not being designed about what needs to be done.

And if you don't think people aren't working hard to make this all real, look at The Ledger, which imagines this system in place a decade from now. Every person a "teacher" and no schools in sight. Plus, the very act of being educated turned into a transaction. And your whole value reduced to a set of digits.

See. I told you it wouldn't make you feel any better.

How Parents Choose

The ideal version of how school choice is supposed to work, the happy picture portrayed by charter-choice advocates, is that parents will search their available options, consider the salient characteristics of academic achievement, and select the best-performing schools. Charters that perform poorly will, the theory goes, be driven out of business because their lousy test scores will make them an undesirable "product" that will not be able to grab enough "customers."

The high-performing schools will rise to the top of the marketplace, and the duds will descend and drop.

It's a nice picture, but now we have research that suggests it's just a dream.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has published the working paper "Do Parents Value School Effectiveness," by researchers Atila Abdulkadiroglu (MIT), Parag A. Pathak (MIT), Jonathan Schellenberg (UC Berkeley), and Christopher R. Walters (UC at Berkeley).

We could draw this out, but the researchers are pretty clear about their findings.

We find no relationship between preferences and school effectiveness after controlling for peer quality. 
 

Is this the table with the high PARCC scores?

The study looked at New York City high school assignments, so it may or may not be representative of how things work in other locales. But how it works in NYC is that parents want to send their students to the schools with the smart kids. Or to put it another, non-researchy way, everyone wants to sit at the cool table in the cafeteria, regardless of what food is being served there or how convenient it is to the lunch line.

Not a shocker. Marketers have long understood that you can sell a product by emphasizing all sorts of traits other than the products actual level of quality. Take, for example, earbuds, which are all virtually the same product, but are marketed a variety of ways including the more expensive brands that are used by the cool artists.

I'll also take this as a good sign that parents are by and large smart enough not to be fooled by the notion that test scores on the Big Standardized Test are somehow a useful proxy for actual school quality. Parents, it turns out, are not saying, "Which school has the highest BS Test results-- that's where I want my child to go!" Nice to know the market may be smarter than that.

Betsy DeVos Is Not a Dope (With Betsy DeVos Reader)

From the grizzly bear jokes of her confirmation hearing, to late night television lampoons, to satire from the Onion and Borowitz, DeVos has become an easy mark. Everyone's in on the joke. Do the budget numbers not add up? It's that  wacky Betsy DeVos having trouble with math.

I've said this before-- it's a huge mistake to think Betsy DeVos is a dope. She is something else ay more dangerous. I've been reading her word and a ton of words about her for a year (and you can, too-- I've included an exhaustive reading list at the end of this piece), and while any game of armchair psycho-analysis has to come with huge caveats (like "I could be completely full of bovine fecal matter"), DeVos seems very much of a type that I've known my whole life, and it makes her both familiar and scary.

Betsy and I are of the same era, just eight months age difference between us, graduating high school in 1975. Our cohort includes Scott Adams, Brad Bird, Laura Branigan, Berke Breathed, LeVar Burton, Steve Buscemi, Dan Castellaneta, Andrew Dice Clay, Katie Couric, Bill Cowher, Daniel Day- Lewis, Michael Clarke Duncan, Bill Engvall, Stephen Fry, Nick Hornby, Jon Lovitz, Kelly McGillis, Donny Osmond, Kevin Pollack, Ray Romano, Michael W. Smith, Eddie Van Halen, Sid Vicious, Vanna White, Hans Zimmer, and, yes, Osama bin Laden. We are theoretically Baby Boomers, but we are the tail end of the generation. The US pulled out of Vietnam just in time to let us ignore the draft. And our older brethren, the Woodstock and protest march crowd looked a little silly to us; many of us suspected that they were kind of full of shit. Ideals were nice and all, but they seemed to have passed us a world that had scrambled old rules while not giving us much guidance. We were the guys having discussions in our college dorm rooms about whether or not it was okay to hold a door for a woman, and if it were okay for a woman to yell at us if we did. We were more cynical than idealistic; consequently, I have always known people my own age who wanted to rewind right past all of that to a God-sanctioned rule-bounded age of moral certainty. It felt as if we were living in age of painted cardboard, and so some of us longed for an age of steely solid certainty. I knew young women  who were probably young Betsy's, like the student who, offered a gifted class course of study of comparative religion, replied, "Why would we study those other religions? They're all wrong."

We are all sixty-or-so now, which means we are well-settled into our missions in life. It's easy to forget this about the well-preserved Betsy (we are, most of us, well preserved-- we're practical that way), but this is not a woman who's looking for a direction in her life, but a woman ready to take her life's work to its next level, maybe even its culmination.

She's not a politician, and she never has been. Politicians above all else respect and support the whole political game, the structures and traditions of what P. J. O'Rourke calls "unearned power." Politicians may scrap and fight over the chess board, but they honor an unspoken agreement to never flip over the table.

But DeVos is not a politician. She  (like many of her Trumpian fellow travelers) doesn't value the board and the table-- in fact, she believes they are actually part of the problem. Tell her that her actions threaten to tear apart the foundation of traditional order and she will simply smile that self-satisfied supremely smug smile and say, "Good."

Mind you, she is not a chaos muppet like her President. rump is prime boomer, like Bush II and Clinton secure in the boomer notion that if I want to do it, and I'm a righteous person, then whatever I want to do must be okay. Only with Trump, narcissism replaces "righteous person" with "only real person that exists." In many ways, Trump is the boomer id on very bad drugs. But that's an essay for another day.

And that's not the Class of '75. We have goals and we remain suspicious of our older brethren's unmoored moral compass. So DeVos is not a chaos muppet. She is Ernie, not Bert. She answers to a higher power, and she works in pursuit of a more important moral order.

An evangelical friend explained to me once that society started to go (literally) to hell when the church lost control of the major institutions. If we are going to fix our society, the church has to take those institutions back, and schools would be a great place to start. Talk to a lot of religious right and you were hear echoes of an idea that there was a Better Time in the past when Jesus's people ran the schools and the government and health care and plenty else. (Do not try to pin them down about when that time was, or try to argue that history shows no such place-- the books and the history and the so-called learning have all been infiltrated by the Godless hedonists who have written the church out of its rightful place in American history.)

DeVos has (just keep inserting disclaimers about my suppositions and best armchair interpretations) a clear idea of how the world is supposed to work, and what has gone wrong.

Here's how the world is supposed to work.

God has created means for sorting out people in a way that reflects His justice. People who make good health choices end up healthy. People who make proper relationship choices end up with families that please Him. People who choose well in life and honor Him will be rewarded with wealth and prosperity. People who end up holding the shitty end of the stick are only getting the just punishment they deserve, and if it stings, that because the pain is supposed to spur them to better life choices.

Here is how the world got screwed up.

Opportunistic Godless humanists sold the lie that our government was not supposed to be Christian, but some sort of Godless humanist state. Then, they bought votes by giving money to the poor and the sick and the rest of the Lower Classes. This act is a violation of God's law, a heretical attempt to thwart God's law with human action. Imagine that you were trying to discipline your child for some sort of serious misbehavior, and just as you had grounded that child for a month and encouraged them to think about what they've done, someone else busted in and gave your child a pony. That's what social programs look like to these folks.

So many modern institutions have been overrun by this Godless approach. God gives the rich and powerful dominion over parts of his world, and These People get in the way. Corporate leaders should be free to use their superior judgment to run their companies without interference from unions (a group of lower class laborers who don't know their place) or government regulations (produced by selfish money-grubbing people who relish the power they don't deserve to have). Capitalism is God's way of sorting out the Good from the Poor (that famous invisible hand is His). Communism is "godless" precisely because it interferes with God's will.

And God is not racist. Is it really racist to note that white folks have always stood at the forefront of a better society, of a world that more effectively brings kingdom gains? It's not that they don't believe in equality-- they do. But "equality" means that everyone has the opportunity to rise (or sink) to their appropriate level. Black and brown people can rise to higher levels-- they just have to prove they deserve it. And if that's harder for Their Kind-- well, that's not our fault is it. Society is suffering from attempts to give minorities unearned elevations (as exemplified by having the White House captured by a man who had no right to be there at all). DeVos has been consistently unable to imagine when the government should step in to protect the rights of minorities; she cannot shake the idea that such protection is a violation, that people who have lived good and righteous lives and made good choices should have nothing to fear.

So what is to be done?

God must be put back in charge, through the work of his most trusted servants. Unions should be crushed. Government powers should be made subordinate to the powers exercised by righteous servants of God. The church must take back the schools, which means that the public schools must be cut down, killed off. Like black and brown and poor folks, public schools should have the chance to rise if they do things the Right Way. But in the meantime, government must stop taking money away from the deserving people who earned it just to throw it away on Those People. Instead, if we could just harness the power of public tax dollars and direct them to private, Christian schools.

That's why Choice is paramount. Every parents should be free to choose a school that best fits their child, that puts their child in a place they belong, that is appropriate to their station. Future laborers should learn how to best serve their future employers, who should have a large say in how the schools can best serve their corporate needs. Some schools can best serve Those People by providing them with the discipline and control that they need in order to best serve society.

People should get what they deserve. No less, and no more.

And government should stay out of it-- if you answer to God, you don't need to answer to anyone else.

This is the secret of DeVos's apparent ignorance-- she doesn't know things because she doesn't need to know them. She already knows How the World Works, and after sixty years, she is well-practiced in blocking out the voices of a secular world that is lost, Godless, just plain wrong. DeVos was born into wealth and married into more wealth, and while some of us may look at that and see enormous luck, to DeVos it must seem obvious that she and her family are favored by, chosen by God. Every ornate chandelier and giant yacht is just further proof that they are on the right track, that they are good with God, that they are right. Just as DeVos could not think of any lesson that could be learned from the application of her education policies in Michigan, she is unlikely to think of areas where her understanding is poor and she needs the help of human experts. Experts in the things of this world who are not of the church are no experts at all. God gave her family that money to spend with the understanding that they-- and not some government functionary-- know best how to spend it. (And, incidentally, where others may see failure and chaos in Michigan and Detroit, DeVos sees water finally finding its own level, human capital being sorted into its appropriate bins).

Again, DeVos is not a politician. She is an advocate and a warrior. She has no interest in political give and take, in some sort of compromise that serves all stakeholders, because from her view, some stakeholders don't deserve to be stakeholders and as for US politics-- well, when it can be harnessed as a tool, that's fine, but you don't make deals with the devil. She famously admitted that they were buying influence and she's okay with that, because you can't corrupt a corrupt system, and you don't have to explain yourself to your Lessers-- particularly when they are allied with Satan.

As for managing her bad PR...

Betsy DeVos is not a dope. If you are on her side, tight with God and Jesus, then you already know that, and you know just what she is. If you aren't, then she doesn't really see any reason to explain herself to you. She doesn't need to have a conversation about you to achieve mutual understanding. She has spent a lifetime acquiring the power and position to win this battle for God and the Right and she doesn't need to understand the forces that she plans to trample with brute force (and really-- trying to understand Those People is just opening yourself up to the voice of Satan, and that's always a bad ides-- you know they're wrong and what else do you need to know).

I'll say again-- this is by no means all Christians or even all conservative Christians. I know people who believe much of this and yet can still have plenty of normal conversations with other, non-Christian humans. But of course none of them are incredibly wealthy and powerful, and there's nothing quite like wealth and power to insulate you from any need to interact with people Not Like You.

DeVos does not want to watch the world burn just for giggles. But there is much that she would like to tear down so that God's kingdom, white and happy and orderly, with everyone and everything in their proper places, can be raised up instead. She's almost sixty years old; nobody is going to talk her out of it.

Final disclaimer. I could be completely full of it. But here's a collection of some of the best writing about DeVos. Bookmark it; come back and work your way through it. And understand that Betsy DeVos is not a harmless incompetent ditz.


Religion Dispatches: Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Cjristian Schools Movement

Advancing God's Kingdom: Calvanism, Calvin Colege, and Betsy DeVos

Alternet: The DeVos Family: Meet the Super-Wealthy Right-Wingers Working with the Religious Right To Kill Public Education

New Yorker: Betsy DeVos and the Plan To Break Pubic Schools

Hidden Roots: Betsy DeVos's Educational Policies

Edushyster in DeVosland

Slate: How Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Could Gut Public Education

Alternet: Betsy DeVos's Vision Goes Way Beyond Prinvatizing Education

Jacobin: Education, Privatization, Charters, Public Schools and Betsy DeVos

Progressive: The Long Game of Betsy DeVos

Politico: How Betsy and Dick DeVos Used God and Amway to Take Over Michigan Politics

Washington Post: Betsy DeVos Ties To Reformed Christian Community\

Mother Jones: Betsy DeVos Wants To Use America's Schools To Build God's Kingdom

New York Times: Betsy DeVos and God's Plans for School

Religion News: Faith Facts about Betsy DeVos

Rewire: DeVos Family Promoting Christian Orthodoxy

Betsy DeVos: Religion and Free Market View of Schools

Religion and Profit in the War on Education

Huffington Post: Betsy DeVos and Potters House Christian School

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.