Disagreeing about Education's Purpose

One way of understanding the differences between the many voices of reformsterism and public education support is to dig down to the fundamental differences of vision, the fundamental disagreements about what a school is for.

There are some obvious differences. For instance, some folks think that the purpose of an education is to create a well-rounded, self-actualizing individual who has a deeper understanding of the world and how to make one's way through it as a human being.

We also have folks who think that the purpose of education is to prepare students to get a job and please their future employers. These, unsurprisingly, are folks like the Chamber of Commerce and other representatives of the business community, who are hoping for a fuller pipeline of drones for their jobs. Should workers have a life beyond the workplace? Not their problem. This is not new-- it's been an issue since Andrew Carnegie told his factory workers that A) for the good of the company they must work twelve hours a day, seven days a week and B) they should enrich their lives with rewarding leisure activities and self-education through a local library.

And we have members of the Cult of Testing who believe that the purpose of school is to prepare students to take a Big Standardized Test. They make themselves comfortable with this narrow and cramped definition by telling themselves that the test score is a valid proxy for "student achievement" or other educational goals. They are kidding themselves.

Let's dig past that.

As charters, choice, and vouchers gain more ground in the educational world, some observers note with alarm that all of this takes us closer to a two tier system, where the folks on top get a full, rich education and the folks on the bottom get a narrow, meager, underfunded training to suit their future (possible) employers. But for some, a two-tiered system is exactly the point.

What we have here is a failure to share the same fundamental goal for education.

For some folks, the goal of education is to lift all boats, to bring all students forward, to bring every single one to a better life, to be more successful, and more fully themselves. And that is supposed to happen for every single student. Everyone should rise.

For other folks, education is about sorting the worthy from the unworthy.. It's about making sure that everyone gets what they deserve, and it sets that goal on top of a foundation stone that says not all people are equally deserving. 

The risers and the sorters will both talk about better schools for the non-wealthy and the non-white. But risers believe schools should be made to lift everyone in poor, underserved communities. Sorters believe that the system should allow those who deserve to get ahead to do so, but they assume that not everybody (probably not even the majority) will prove themselves worthy.

Vouchers and charters won't "rescue" everyone-- but that's okay, because not everyone should be rescued. Just as with welfare and health insurance for all, some folks think that the best education should be provided for everyone, and some people believe that the government has no business taking my hard-earned money to provide Nice Things for people who haven't earned it.

Sorters are drawn to a business model because the market also sorts. Do you want a Lexus? You'll have to earn it.

So at the root of the education debates, we find people who have a fundamental disagreement about what government and public education are supposed to do. For some, the role of government is to establish a system that doesn't stop the virtuous and hard-working and clever and, well, just better from getting ahead (of everyone else). Pointing out to them that vouchers and choice create a two-tiered system is like telling someone that their new haircut makes them look really attractive-- you can't be surprised when they react by being pleased.

PA: Vouchers Stopped for Now

Senate Bill 2, the bill that was intended to put Education Savings Accounts (aka vouchers) in Pennsylvania, did not make it out of committee after all.

That's the good news.  By a 6-6 vote, momentarily made suspenseful by some rules shenanigans, the bill has stalled in the Senate Education committee.

PennLive coverage also offers some clarification on one bill point. While the language of the original left the door wide open for any student who had ever spent one semester in pubic school to get a voucher-- er, Education Savings Account (in other words, if your child spent one semester in public school first grade and has been in private school for ten years since, you get a voucher today and the public school loses state money without actually losing a student)-- anyway, the main sponsor of the bill, John DiSanto (R) told PennLive that students currently enrolled in private schools would be ineligible for the vouchers. That clarification would make a tremendous difference in the financial hit to public school districts. It would also, I'd imagine, piss off the parents of current private and home-schooled students and give them a real reason to put their children back in public schools for just one semester.

But there's bad news.

The bill did not stall because opposition to vouchers rose up and smote it. The final tying vote came from Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia, who likes school choice just fine-- but who didn't get a chance to read the bill carefully and figure out exactly what effect it would have on his constituents.

In other words, the support for a bill like SB2 is there in the education committee-- it just failed to completely organize itself this time. So stay vigilant, because this will be back again.

The Core and Bad Supervision

Here's another problem we don't discuss often enough.

Education is one of the few fields where supervisors and administrators don't understand what the vast majority of their supervisees do.

Building principals and superintendents usually come up through the teaching ranks. But they come up through a particular discipline.

You could make me a school superintendent tomorrow. You could even train me for the job for a few years. But at the end, I would have only a tangential understanding of what the elementary teachers or the math teachers or the industrial arts teachers in my district do. I mean, teaching is teaching, and I can certainly supervise the process and tell whether they're on the mark or not. But are they teaching the right content? Are they teaching it well? If the science department comes and tells me they want to try this new book series, I won't be in any position to evaluate the quality of those books. And if I've got to oversee the development of a new social studies curriculum-- well, I don't really know enough about what social studies teachers do to be able to tell whether that's on track or not.

The last almost-two-decades of ed reform have put math and reading in the spotlight. The pressure has been on to lift the quality of these programs in schools. And yet all across the country, there are math and English teachers being supervised by administrators who literally have no idea what those teachers do in their classrooms.

Enter the Common Core (or [Your Name Here]) Standards.

Administrator: I don't really know what exactly does, or should, go on in a math or English class.

Standards: Here's a handy checklist of what should be happening.

Administrator: Hey, look! Now I know exactly what math and English teachers can and should do!

The cruel irony here is that the standards were developed by people who also did not understand what math and English teachers actually do. So what we get is a tone-deaf person's ideas about how to lead a symphony orchestra.

Certainly it doesn't have to be that way. I have never worked for a principal or superintendent who was previously an English teacher, and yet plenty of them have educated themselves and consulted experts in the field (aka the people who work right here in the building) in order to build an understanding of what teaching English is about.

But I've heard and read the tales of teachers out there in the world who work for supervisors who are lazy or overwhelmed or just not very good who just grab the standards, wave them in the teacher's face, and say, "This. You're supposed to be doing this." Then they call it a day.

This is one more bad side effect of the standards-- the enabling of bad administrators who practice unthinking Management By Checklist.

Addressing Bias

It may be one of the biggest unaddressed issues in education.

Here comes yet another study that makes another variation on a point we're seeing over and over again-- white teachers have lower expectations of black students, and that has consequences for those students. Add that to the stack with studies like the ones showing that white teachers are less likely to identify black students as gifted.

This particular study appears in Education Next, the Fordham publication, so there's a natural inclination to view it with jaundiced eye, to look for the angle that benefits reformsters. But it's always important for public education advocates to remember that while many reform solutions are fake, many of the problems they address are real. Those include a widespread systemic problem with racism. I don't doubt the accuracy of the findings here.

If you are a teacher of my generation, you know about expectations. It was drilled into us that expectations were super-important, that what our students would do would depend a great deal on what we believed they could do. That belief in expectations has swung into some silly territory (the Duncan administration's belief that the power of expectations would basically erase learning disabilities), but the fundamental principle remains sound-- what we expect has a lot to do with what we get.

Tie the power of expectations to the power of implicit bias, and you have a problem-- particularly in a system in which the ratio of white teachers to non-white students is so completely out of whack.

So we could try to pick apart this study, look at correlation vs. causation, talk about just how big (or not big) an effect is presented here. But I'm not going to. First, I know I have the standard white reflex to being called racist-- my impulse for denial is up and running before my impulse to self-examine can even put its shoes on. Second, regardless of what the research does or doesn't say, I know there's an issue. Hell, most everybody knows there's an issue. So can we talk about what to do?

There have been numerous attempts to address the super-whiteness of the teacher work force, including attempts to open up alternative paths. Teach for America, in one of its rebranding redefining of its mission, decided it would work at getting non-white teachers in the classroom. But much of the research suggests that the problem is not so much recruiting as retention. And that brings us back to the uncomfortable notion that teachers of color do not end up feeling that the school is not a place that welcomes or supports or fits them. So maybe we need to shift the conversation from recruiting teachers of color to supporting and welcoming them.

And since the super-white nature of the teacher pool is not going to dramatically reverse any time in the immediate future, maybe we need to put an addendum on the discussion of teacher expectations, so that it's not just "Your expectations affect your student's achievement" but also "You probably have some implicit biases that have an effect on your expectations for your students-- particularly students of color."

This should be part of every teacher's training. Every. Teacher.

At a minimum, we need to build mindfulness into the system. One of my greatest privileges as a white guy is that I don't have to think about race unless I choose to (or unless something like a protest pushes it into my face). But I should. It should be on my mind every time I'm in front of students. It's not that difficult-- as a teacher, I'm on alert for several different classroom factors all the time, while I'm doing my job. I should also be alert to my own biases, especially the ones that I'm not always conscious of. And every one of my new colleagues should be getting that kind of training, just as they get classroom management training and test-scoring training and, God help us, aligning instruction to the damn standards training.

We can do better. And we should.

Lazy Reporting

Kids are doing short tutorials under teacher supervision. If you don't like it, tell admin. your preference or change schools.

— Bridgett Ellison (@BridgettNews6) October 23, 2017

The above came in response to criticism of the use of ipads in a pre-K classroom. It did not come from a teacher or administrator-- it came from the reporter who covered the story. 

The story itself is a puff piece about the injection of ipads into some pre-K classrooms in (where else) Florida, Orange County.

It runs under the heading "Getting Results in Our Schools," a spot sponsored by Crayola Experience, a "family attraction" with four locations around the country. Crayola took plenty of flack years ago for becoming Common Core partners.

The spot devotes less than two whole minutes to looking at the idea of putting ipads in the hands of four year olds, and not a second of that is remotely critical.

Rationale? Well, you know how Kids These Days are already so tech savvy (there's an idea that needs examination) and you know they'll all be using computers some day, so let's get some computers in front of the littlest littles.

These are recycled ipads. Everything on them, reports Ellison, is "curriculum based." The story emphasizes that this is reinforcement, and "not a replacement" for pen and paper or chalk and chalkboard. What the story doesn't do is question why we are trying to stuff four-year-olds full of academic instruction.

"The curriculum doesn't change, we want our 4-year-olds learning their alphabet, to be learning sounds, learning sight words, quite frankly, we want them to start reading as early as possible," Superintendent Barbara Jenkins said.

Quite frankly, what the hell for? There are so many layers of unquestioned bad educational practice here. Academic instruction for pre-K? Not a good idea. Try play instead. Screen time for small children? The research is admittedly mixed, but some authorities recommend as little as 30 minutes per week.

Ellison simply reports that the school thinks that students will get instruction in ways that will be more "fun" because of the computers, which is such a digital non-native thing to say.

Is it the most terrible story ever run? No, but it thoughtlessly amplifies a whole assortment of dangerous assumptions. It's glorified PR work, the kind of thing that can be done by just running a news release from the people you're covering, with no attempt to locate or give voice to other views. And when presented with those views, Ellison fluffed off all responsibility. Have another view or conflicting information? Not her problem. Call your administration or withdraw your child, but don't suggest that she do an actual reporters job.

I kind of get it. Ellison's is certainly not the only reporter guilty of this lazy reportage. School stories were, once upon a time, easy lay-ups, like covering an apple pie factory or pictures of smiling babies. That is no longer the case, and responsible reporters can't just fluff their way through any more. Education is a tough field, filled with lots of bad, unproven, and damaging ideas. Especially in Florida.

PA: Urgent! Vouchers Are Back

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Education Committee will be once again considering a bill to promote vouchers across the state of Pennsylvania, and to pay for them by stripping money from public schools. If you're in Pennsylvania, drop what you're doing and call your Senator today.

SB 2, Education Savings Accounts for Students in Underperforming Schools, sets up vouchers with  no oversight and an extremely broad criterion for how the vouchers can be spent. According to the official summary, voucher money may be spent on

1) Tuition and fees at a participating private school; 
2) Payment for a licensed or accredited tutor; 
3) Fees for nationally norm-referenced tests and similar exams; 
4) Industry certifications; 
5) Curriculum and textbooks; and 
6) Services to special education students such as occupational, speech, and behavioral therapies.

So anything from private school tuition to buying books for home schooling to sending a child to massage therapist school.

Money can be carried over from one year to the next, and if there's still some left at graduation time, the money may be used for higher education costs.

The amount placed in each child's Education Savings Account will be the per-pupil amount of state money spent in the district, with corresponding funds subtracted from the district's state subsidy payment (this is all, of course, assuming that the state legislature can get its act together and actually make those payments).  This amount varies wildly by district, but in no district is way up there as Pennsylvania has one of the nation's lowest rates of state support for public schools. That means local districts make up the difference, which means the poorest districts can least afford to lose state money to a voucher bill.  In the meantime, a few thousand dollars will not get your child into a top private school-- but it will let you buy some nice books for homeschooling.

This bill is also a potential windfall for parochial schools. As we've seen in other voucher states like Indiana and Wisconsin, the vast majority of voucher money ends up in private religious schools, supporting students who were never in public school to begin with.

But hey-- it only applies to schools on the Pennsylvania naughty list, right? Have you seen the Pennsylvania naughty list? It is just under 800 schools long. Take a look. In my county, two school districts are on it, including the district where my wife works. If this bill became law today, tomorrow a whole bunch of money would move from those districts' state support to the local Catholic school, the local private Christian school, and local homeschoolers-- even though not a single student changed enrollment.

The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials already has an action alert up, if you want a quick and easy way to send word to Harrisburg. They also note some other features of the bill. For instance, once a child is enrolled, even if the school district of origin improves, or the child moves away entirely, the child keeps the voucher/savings account. And as an extra bonus kick in the teeth, the public school district must provide the student with transportation within  a 10 mile radius.

This bill is bad news, and would have an immediate and damaging effect on school finances across the state. It is an attack on public education. And conservatives really shouldn't be fans, either-- this bill provides zero accountability, and our tax dollars disappear down a black hole where we have no say and no knowledge of how they are spent. A family could decide that it would be educational for Junior to go to Disney World, and your tax dollars would pay for it.

You can check here to see if your senator is on the Senate Education Committee, which will be considering this bill tomorrow. Since the bill is sponsored by committee members, its chances look good and the press will be on for the full senate. The bill's main sponsor is John DiSanto (R), who unseated a Democratic incumbent last fall and who has been announcing his intent to bring vouchers to Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time someone has tried to push a voucher bill, and it won't be the last. But it is time, once again, for defenders of public education to hit the phones. Even if your senator is not among those who will act on the bill tomorrow, chances are good that he'll be looking at it a bit later. Let him know that stripping funds from public schools in order to fund unregulated oversight-free vouchers is not okay.

About That Zip Code

Your education shouldn't be determined by your zip code.

If we've heard that once, we've heard it a zillion times, but almost never does it lead to a discussion of the bigger question behind that statement:

What determines your zip code?

I cannot recommend hard enough that you go listen to (or, if you must, read the available transcript) for a previous episode of the podcast Have You Heard, in which Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider talk to Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Rothstein's point is simple but profound. We tend to assume that people just sorted themselves out into all these neighborhoods and zip codes, that the sorting is the result of "millions of accidental, private decisions" and therefor really hard to fix. But Rothstein argues that segregation was in fact the result of specific government policy (like the federal rules that said Levittown couldn't sell units to black families), and that these policies created a systemic poverty that stretches over generations. In fact, according to Rothstein, government policy created segregation in cities where it had never existed.

I probably need to read Rothstein's book now (because I need one more tome on that stack) because I have questions. In particular, I wonder about the degree to which government policy expressed a hard-to-repress will of the people, like the folks in North Carolina re-segregating themselves by flying to white charter schools. Rothstein says we have to educate everyone about how this happened; I'm not sure how optimistic I am about the results of such a project, just as I'm not sure how we'd approach his idea that good schools must be rooted in neighborhoods that are integrated by class.

Still, it's an intriguing vision-- integrate the communities, and the schools will follow. We hear a lot about how students are trapped in their school because of their zip code, but it might be more useful to talk about what keeps people trapped in that zip code in the first place, or how government can prevent the hollowing out of a neighborhood through gentrification.

Interesting stuff. Go give a listen.