My Ex-Wife's Mail (or "One More Reason Not To Trust Our Data Overlords")

Look at this cool piece of junk mail I got today!

This came to my address, and offers a lovely necklace that does use the correct birthstones for Peter and Janet, but I probably won't order one, because Janet is my ex-wife.

Getting my previous wife's mail at my current address is not at all unusual. I used to get even alumni fundraising calls from her alma mater (I think we got that stopped after about the third time I left some poor work study undergrad tongue-tied).

I want you to appreciate what an achievement that is. My ex and I divorced over twenty years ago. Since then I have changed address twice, and she has changed address five times-- most recently to Hawaii. She has remarried twice; I have remarried once. Somehow some of her mail arrives at my current home with her current married name. And I know that at least one of her old addresses appears on my credit history report.

I'm not mad about any of this. My ex is a lovely person, a great mother to our children, and someone who deserved a better husband than I was back then. But for her mail to occasionally be sent here, especially as if she were still my wife, is an impressively epic piece of bad record-keeping. It is the kind of thing that an actual human could probably sort out, but the vast network of computers that store and share and track these kinds of data just keep perpetuating. And please note-- as m history suggests, this isn't just a matter of failing to clear out old records (like the mail that comes for my wife under her previous married name), but a cyber-creation of all new, all wrong records in the system.

So when we talk about Big Data and its desire to gobble up and store and use and sell every nit of data generated about our students, I'm appalled at the Big Brothery intrusiveness of it, the omnipresent creepiness of it, the horrifying way that such data records could be used to tack and tail and guide and shove students into a corporate pigeonhole pre-prepared for their adult lives. I'm alarmed at how students are steadily becoming "resources," little meat widgets whose use is to generate data points for the Data Overlords to gobble up, poop out, and sell off.

But I am also mindful of how wantonly sloppy and confidently inaccurate our Data Overlords can be. It's scary to imagine an Orwellian future in which a deathless data file determines a human being's entire life. But it's even scarier to imagine a Kafkaesque future in which that data file includes all sorts of shit the software simply made up. It's bad enough to imagine a high school grad who can't get a job because the computer record shows a streak of anti-authoritarian rebelliousness based on her behavior in fifth grade or because the scores from terrible tests indicate a lack of verbal skills. But it's even worse to imagine a future in which a high school grad can't get a job because of what the digital record says she did on a trip to Paraguay (a place she's never actually been) or the data from a standardized test that she never actually took. Will live humans monitor and check this stuff? Of course not-- the whole point is that it would take too many humans too long to sort and check this much data. And the software will not have the sense to question data that makes no sense.

We already know that we can't trust our Data Overlords to keep our data safe. But can we even trust them to get it right on the first place. "Trust us," they say. "We'll take all the best care of all the personal data." To which I say, dude, you can't even keep track of who I'm married to, a matter of public record that you've had two decades to sort out. Not only can we not trust their motives in storing and crunching all the personal data in the world, but they're not even very good at it.

The Mis-Education of Betsy DeVos

Tim Alberta has published a firm-but-gentle profile of Betsy DeVos. It is perhaps not as brutal as some of her opponents would like it to be, but I've argued since Day One that some folks are opposing a cartoon version of DeVos which is not the real thing-- and it's dangerous not to understand the real thing.

Dammit- you again?!

But on to Alberta's profile.

I'm not going to go line by line or graph by graph-- you really should read the whole thing yourself. But there are some things that really jump out. Here are some of the DeVosian faces that Alberta shows us.

The Bad Manager DeVos

Who could have guessed, the article seems to ask, that DeVos would be so ill-equipped to run a large government department.

Well, me. I would have guessed that. And a few hundred of my colleagues. DeVos never ran a large government organization, never had to deal with people or politicians who were not being "convinced" by the power of her checkbook. It was absolutely predictable (and in fact predicted) that she would not be able to manage the bureaucratic organization of her department or forge support for her programs in Congress.

The Under-coached DeVos

In retrospect, DeVos tells me, she blames the transition team for its handling of her confirmation. “I think I was undercoached,” she says. “The transition group was very circumspect about how much information they gave me about then-current policy and … it was in their view a balance between being prepared for a confirmation hearing and not having well-formed opinions on what should or shouldn’t change, so as not to get caught in a confirmation hearing making commitments that then I wouldn’t want to or be able to keep. And in hindsight, I wish I had a whole lot more information.”

Sure, maybe. And I've never been nominated for a cabinet position. But if I were up for some huge job, I'm pretty sure I would crack open the internet and educate myself. Is she really suggesting that because Trump's team didn't prep her, she was helpless to study up for the job? In a field where she'd been working as a philanthro-lobbyist for three decades? Hell, to get a sense of what would come up in her hearings, all she would need to do was have a secretary round up all the pieces written by people who had been opposing her all this time.

No. While I can believe that the Trump team fumbled this, I can't believe that a grown-ass woman facing a huge job interview-- hell, a huge job-- wouldn't take the initiative to educate herself. Only spectacular ignorance ("How hard could it be?") or arrogance ("I already know everything I need to know") or deference ("I'll just do what the man in charge tells me to") or laziness ("I'll get ready for the hearings after I stream all the seasons of Friends") would explain it.

And she laments that she couldn't go do interviews on friendly morning shows-- but what would a woman, who by her own account was grievously underprepared-- what would that woman have to say?

The Mystified DeVos

DeVos is clearly bothered by the perception that she’s out to abolish public education in America, mentioning multiple times that it’s the biggest misconception about her. “I mean, nothing could be further from the truth,” she says. “Public schools are great. "

She can't be serious. Does she not remember when she declared that public schools are a "dead end." Does she really not see how easy it might be to interpret her actions in Michigan as a full frontal assault on public education? Unless she acknowledges those things, it's impossible to take her new-found love and respect for (at least a few) public schools seriously. It is one thing when your abusive spouse says, "I'm sorry for all the times I hit you and I'll never do it again." It's another thing entirely when they say, "But I would never hit you. I never did. You can totally trust me."

DeVos has spent thirty-some years making her antipathy form the public school system exceedingly clear. She has been hanging out with folks like Jeb Bush who have been clear about their desire to replace public schools with charters. She cannot be surprised that more than a few people noticed.

The Kingdom Gains DeVos

I have a test for Betsy DeVos profiles-- if there is no mention of Jesus or the Church or Christian faith in it, I know it's incomplete. Check just this partial list of articles-- I don't believe it's possible to really understand what DeVos has in mind without considering her faith . Alberta fails to include this aspect.

The Impatient DeVos

Alberta nicely dovetails the story of DeVos's mugging with the story of advocates trying to bar her from a school with the observation that patience is a thing she does not have. It's an aspect that isn't always highlighted, but always seems part of the picture-- DeVos expects to get her way, and being thwarted makes her angry and even less inclined to find middle ground than she already is.

This is a woman who's not troubled by doubt. Note that none of her poor performance at her hearing was her fault. And that performance included the revelation that she could not think of a single lesson that  she had learned from her work in Michigan or the trajectory of Detroit schools. Even my students know that at a job interview, you confess to some mistake or shortcoming-- I don't think DeVos ever has. It's a trait she shares with her boss-- she's certain she's right, and she has little patience for people who won't bend to her rightness.

The Disempowered DeVos

Alberta drives home the point that the USED secretary wields little power and controls a tiny part of school funding, so, really, between that and her inability to manage her department or forge alliances in Congress, there really isn't much she can get done. Fair enough. I hope he's right.

Bonus: Thanks a lot, Jeb

Alberta confirms that it's Jeb Bush who picked up the phone and started this ugly boulder rolling down the hill. It's worth remembering that there are many ways we could have ended up with this woman as USED secretary, and a Trump Presidency is only one of them.

The whole thing leaves her looking at least a little sympathetic, but there are real things to be learned, and it would be better if supporters of public education could focus on who she really is and not the crazy cartoon version. Let's save the outrage for something a little more important than her bad Halloween costume ideas, because the many faces of DeVos may not include super-powers, but they are still a threat to public education in this country, and it wouold be a mistake to dismiss her as just an incompetent, unqualified rube. She may not know much about education, and she may not have any idea what she doesn't know, but she's in a position to do some real harm, so the rst of us had better pay attention to all of the faces that are really her.

OH: Another Charter Closes Midyear

One of the things that you get with a pubic school that you do not get with a charter schools is a promise, a long term commitment to stay in place and keep your doors open. Folks in the Mahoning Valley (near Youngstown, Ohio and Sharon, Pennsylvania) were reminded of that as yet another charter school closed its doors with the year well under way.

Mahoning Valley Opportunity Center always faced a challenge. It was started as a school for students who were in academic distress, and just a year ago it was in the news because of a student assault on a teacher. The school is sponsored by the Youngstown School District, a sponsor which earned a "poor" rating and became part of the list of Ohio naughty sponsors that faced a possible closing this fall.

The high school handled just 84 students. 71 of those students were non-white and reportedly 0% were free or reduced lunch students. And while these students were at risk, boy, was MVOC unsuccessful with them. The school was academically ranked 694th in the state; its graduation rate ranked 702nd.So, not doing great.

Staff and faculty, speaking without disclosing identities, told local news that they had felt something was up since the beginning of the year, that the school had been long mismanaged, and that Superintendent David Macali had other plans for the school.

So two nights ago, the operators of the school voted to shut it down, and yesterday morning, at least one student was at the front door, wondering what she was supposed to do now. Of course, part of "empowering" families is that the state and the charter school get to wash their hands of any responsibilities for these students. Did your charter school close? Well, the state of Ohio has empowered you to go solve the problem yourself. Congratulations.

The stated reason was money. It no longer made business sense to keep MVOC open, and since charter schools are ultimately businesses, it is business-based decisions that rule the day. Not student based, not community based, and not education based. Charter schools are businesses, and businesses close when it suits them. Food trucks do not factor in how badly the community needs a place to eat-- only whether they can profit by serving that community. One more reason that modern charters are a bad fit for education.

PA: Teacher Tenure, Seniority on Chopping Block

Here we go again.

Reformsters and their PA GOP friends have been trying to do away with teacher job protections in Pennsylvania for years now, but this year, they took a new approach-- burying the attacks on teacher seniority and tenure in a big bill strapped onto PA's ever-disastrous budget shenanigans.

The budget appears to be just about settled, albeit quietly, so as not to draw attention to how long it had been unsettled (long story short-- this year, for variety's sake, instead of failing to pass a budget, the legislature passed a budget and then a group of House GOP representatives blocked any attempts to fund it). The omnibus education bill has been detached from the budget, but it is still sitting on Governor Wolf's desk, a Frankensteinian heap, a clinking clanking clattering collection of caliginous junk.

I thought that sounded familiar

House Bill 178 featuress a whole bunch o'stuff, including but not limited to:

* A bunch of procedural rules for how ESSA plan review shall be handled, mostly aimed at making sure that the legislature has ample opportunity to get their grubby amateur hands on the plan. So that'll be a big help.

* A requirement for all new school board members to get a training from the Ed department

* Training programs for charter school trustees, too

* Districts under financial watch will have a state overseer to serve as their czar

* Districts may now claim "economic reasons" as a cause for cutting staff (this is added to a list of causes that includes cutting programs, reduced enrollment, or school consolidation). Such cuts may NOT be based on how much a particular teacher is paid, and if a superintendent gets caught violating that rule, he'll get a letter in his permanent file. So, you know, really heavy consequences for that one.

* Districts must suspend an equal percentage of administrators. This seems... tricky. If a district has 100 teachers and 5 administrators and they cut 5 teachers, does that mean they must chop off one principal's arms? Fortunately, the Secretary of Education can waive this requirement if the district's operations are "already sufficiently streamlined" aka "any time he feels like it."

* Some noise about reporting the economic factors and also making sure that staff cuts won't hurt academics, mostly providing the legislature plausible deniability ("We told them not to cut important stuff! Just, you know, teachers.")

* Staff cut for financial reasons MUST BE cut in descending order of recent evaluations. So anyone with two consecutive "unsatisfactory" ratings goes first. This will not help much, as the number of unsatisfactory teachers in PA tends to hover around 200. After that, the district works its way up the evaluation scale. For the time being, teachers are clumped by rating and not precisely ranked by their actual rating. I presume that will come later.

* Presuming they won't get jobs elsewhere, they will be called back in reverse of the order they were laid off.

* No contract can negotiate anything that contradicts these rules.

* I'm not positive, but I think section 1216 would now say that a teacher candidate can't be denied a diploma if they flunk the PRAXIS or similar test.

* No lunch shaming.

* Opioid abuse instruction.

* A bunch of measures to beef up agricultural education.

* The ability for charter schools to manage themselves as chains rather than a series of independent schools owned and operated by the same company.

* And once again kicks the can down the road on using the Keystone exam as a graduation requirement. This keeps happening (the requirement was supposed to kick in last year) because legislators keep being alarmed by how many students would be denied diplomas they have otherwise earned because of this Big Standardized Test. They don't seem to understand that this will never change; somebody needs to go to Harrisburg and explain norm-based assessment to them.

Somebody also needs to read the legislature in on the recent Houston court decision about EVAAS, the OG of VAM systems and the identical twin to the VAM system used in PA (PVAAS). In that decision, the court ruled that using the VAM system as a means of terminating teachers was nuts and indefensible. The system for suspending teachers in this bill are not quite as severe as Houston's, but if this bill becomes law, I expect we'll be in court soon enough.

If you are in Pennsylvania, please join me in tweeting, emailing and calling the governor to encourage him not to sign this thick slice of baloney. This is not what education in Pennsylvania needs. It remains to be seen exactly which internal organs the legislature lacks.

Competence vs. Content

From No Child Left Behind to Common Core to Race to the Top (both Original and Waiver-lite, ed reform has had a terrible problem with content.

By defining reading as nothing more than a set of decoding skills that exist in some content-free vacuum, these reforms have devalued the content and knowledge aspects of reading and writing. This has led to absurdities like suggesting that Of Mice and Men is a novel for elementary students and David Coleman's terrible teaching instructions. But knowledge of content-- and the role that content knowledge plays in reading-- have been banished from the English classroom.

Some defenders have tried hard to argue that rich content is written into the Core et al, but I think they are like folks looking at a car with no wheels saying, "Well, clearly we are meant to add wheels, because otherwise this obviously won't work." But while they think they see content at the heart of the standards, I think they just see a content-shaped hole.

What I know is this-- if I were willing to sacrifice students' education, I could prepare them for the Big Standardized Test by using no text except the daily newspaper and single pages ripped out of random books.

Now that competency-based pseudo-personalized algorithm-driven computer-based education is tomorrow's flavor du jour, we need to recognize that its content problems are even worse.

In PLCBE, everything needs to be reduced to "skills" that can be :measured" by "assessments" on the computer. You have probably encountered some rudimentary CBE in your workplace-- the HR department sends out an e-mail with a link to a "training" that involves letting some training slideshow play on your computer screen, followed by some multiple choice questions that you would have to be seriously cognitively impaired to screw up ("When a co-worker is injured and bleeding you should A) run away screaming, B) taste the blood to see if it tastes diseased, C) post pictures on Instagram or D) put on rubber gloves and call the company nurse"). Miss too many questions, and you're redirected to re-watch sections of the slides before you re-take the test. Get at least nine out of ten and congratulations-- you're a certified bloodborne pathogens expert.

PLCBE requires us to reduce everything to standardized test questions, preferably multiple choice. That means only the most superficial of items can be assessed. Imagine trying to assess a student's grasp of Hamlet with nothing but multiple choice questions, including questions that reduce complex long-debated issues. "Just how mad is Hamlet, really?" is reduced from a complicated and detail-rich debate strung out across hundreds of years and hundreds of actor interpretations is reduced to a true-false question-- with only one "correct" answer.

Reading a text is a complex activity that exists at the intersection of the text, the author's history, the author's intent, the reader's interest, the reader's background knowledge, and the reader's own questions about how to be fully human in the world. PLCBE, like the last twenty years of reading "advances", reduces all of that to one issue-- how skilled is the reader at decoding words, as if that were the sum total of reading.

This completely omits any considerations of creative or critical thinking and expression, and it is the very opposite of "personal." PLCBE fans will claim that computer software exists that can evaluate open-ended essay answers-- they are either kidding themselves or lying. No such software exists. Just as Grammarly will not help you write better-- it will just help you proofread for spelling, punctuation and typing mistakes-- essay-grading software still has no idea whether you are spouting gibberish or not, only if you are spouting gibberish that fits the pattern of written standard English. (For more definitive demonstrations, track down the work of my hero Les Perelman.)

No computerized algorithm-driven competency-based program is going to assign full texts. You won't actually read Hamlet at all-- just a single screen's worth, so maybe you will make sense out of the "too, too solid flesh" soliloquy without any idea of what came before or after. Don't worry-- just decode the words.

The rise of Big Standardized Testing was an attempt to replace the teacher's final exams with one created by the standards-and-skills champions. PLCBE is an attempt to replace the teacher as well. We've been having some spirited debates in English classrooms about the Canon and what belongs in it and how students should understand it and interpret it, but the new computer-driven teacher doesn't care about the canon at all because it has no tools for measuring things like "knowledge" or 'insight" or "understanding" or "ability to wrestle with literature's many paths to understanding society, culture and the human condition."

This is not a liberal vs. conservative thing. I'm not even sure it's a reformer vs. traditional public school thing, because I know plenty of reformers who do not subscribe to the reduce-education-to-a-technical-software-problem school of thought. This is about the dangerously reductive notion that all education can be processed through tiny, limiting, and ultimately inadequate tools, like trying to squeeze a Thanksgiving turkey out of a toothpaste tube.

PLCBE is a bad idea for many reasons-- I just don't want us to forget that one reason is that PLCBE is inadequate to either present or assess the higher order skills involved in reading and writing, and that by its very nature, it is the enemy of rich content in education, and that being the enemy of rich content in education is like being the enemy of protein, vitamins and nutrients in food.

What's the Fuss about Data Mining

If you have trouble getting folks to grasp what Big Data is all about, start them off with this clip:

Yes, every time you take a survey on Facebook, you open up access to your data. The range of reaction emojis help facebook more accurately track your mood and emotional reactions, making their data more detailed. Use gmail? Google reads your emails to better target you.

Now, imagine this same stuff applied to school. Imagine that school is redesigned so that every skill is developed and measured via computer, and so every data point is stored and added to a massive digital dossier on each child. Imagine that the school expands its curriculum to include social and emotional education, also managed by computer, so that the dossier stores information about what sort of person the student is.

The implications go beyond advertising. What would corporations pay to be able to say, "We need to hire ten left-handed white men who are good with simple computations, good reading comprehension skills, and who are very emotionally stable without any tendencies to challenge authority. Oh, and if they could be without any markers for possible major illness, that would be great. Send us a list." And, of course, the government could find ways to use this stuff as well. More efficient education ("Pat, your data so far indicates that you will be entering Sixth Grade for Plumbers next year") and advanced safety for communities ("Station a cop by Pat's apartment every day-- his data shows he's likely to blow up soon").

Over the past decade, we have adjusted to a new normal when it comes to privacy. The trade is not without appeal-- for a little less privacy, we get better service. Facebook doesn't show me ads for feminine hygiene products or recommend news stories from the Far Right. We give up some privacy to get more ready access to things we want. And we give it up in ways that are not obvious, so that we can remain pleasantly unaware of just how much privacy we are sacrificing. Big Brother, it turns out, is pretty warm and fuzzy and comforting.

But there are still places where we expect privacy to remain unbroken. If we logged on to Facebook and found our child's reading and behavior problems being discussed by our child's teacher, or if we found our doctor publicly laying out our health issues, we would be outraged-- and rightly so. I have my students write one-draft essays about personal topics-- not, as I tell them, because I want to know about their personal lives, but because it's a topic on which they are already experts. But because the topics are personal, I promise them that I will never show them to anyone.

But if I were requiring them to write those personal essays as, say, a Google doc, I don't think I could make or keep that promise.

Aren't there rules and laws that protect student privacy? Well, there used to be. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was passed in 1974, but in 2008 and 2011, it was re-written by the USED to broaden the lists of people with whom school data could be shared. And they aren't done-- right now, the Data Quality Campaign and a laundry list of reformy researchers is calling for a further expansion of the holes in the FERPA privacy shield. The call, as is often the case, is in the name of research-- which is hugely broad term. "Can I use this data to figure out which students will make the best targets for advertising with a bandwagon approach?" is a research question. This list of four specific areas includes using data across the education and workforce pipeline, a concerning approach indeed. A call for looking at better capacity and security makes a certain amount of sense, now that school districts are recognized by hackers as soft targets. But it takes only a little bit of cynicism and paranoia to see it as a call for more foxes to perform tests on henhouse security.

These are not issues with simple solutions. Well, "nobody ever use any computers for anything ever again" or "take down the internet" are simple solutions-- just not plausible ones. We live in an age of technological miracles, and there is no going back. Nor would I necessarily want to. But I'm not ready to jump heedlessly into the Surveillance Society, either.

We need to make thoughtful choices. I teach at a 1-to-1 school; all of my students have school-issued computers, and I would never go back-- but I also don't make those computers the center of my classroom or instruction. And you're reading my blog that is housed on a Google-owned platform and which I promote over Facebook and Twitter. I'm guessing my digital dossier knows a thing or two about me.

I use technology, and I pay a price for it, and as with any ongoing shopping spree, I work to pay attention to how large the bill is getting. I use tech tools myself, and I use them with my students, and I make sure that they don't use us. (The correct approach is "Here's what I want to teach. Are there any tech tools that would help accomplish that" and never, ever, "Here's a cool tech tool-- how can I build a whole lesson around it.")

But there are levels beyond my control, and when I see things like another FERPA-weakening attack, I am beyond concerned. And if my school district were to jump onto the computer-centered competency-based personalized-learning bandwagon, I would take a vocal stand against it.

This is yet another area of education where you have to pay attention, do your homework, and pay attention some more. The new FERPA push is coming because Congress will be re-introducing the Student Privacy Protection Act, an oxymoronic title for an act that is about reducing privacy protections under FERPA. This peacekeeper missile of privacy is aimed at our children, but it's just arcane and obscure enough that most Americans will sleep right through this whole business. Now would be a good time to renew the effort to wake them up and explain the fuss.

ICYMI: Almost Halloween Edition (10/29)

It's almost that time again. In the meantime, here's some reading to do.

Betsy DeVos Just Gave 12.6 Million Grant to Rocketship Charters 

Why this goes on the list of bad DeVosian ideas

Professsion For America 

A hilarious, and slickly professional-looking website.

How Betsy DeVos Becaeme the Most Hated Cabinet Secretary

Amanda Terkel takes a look at how badly things have gone so far

We Libertarians Really Were Wrong about School Vouchers

Well, here's a perspective that's different in many ways

More Delusional-- White People or  Charter Advocates

Paul Thomas with an interesting take on race and charters

Deep in the Heart of Whiteness

Daniel Katz takes on a similar subject.

How School Closings Undermine Democracy

When Chicago closed 50 schools, it had side-effects for the election process. Another can't-miss podcast from Have You Heard