Among the many attempts to "simplify" the tax code, the GOP included the removal of the ever-popular $250 teacher deduction that allows teachers to claim a tax advantage for some sliver of what they spend on their own classrooms.
There is some disagreement about how much some teachers spend. The $1,000 figure is tossed around a lot, but nobody seems to know what the actual basis for that number is. Others use a more conservative $500. Certainly the amount varies by teacher. I buy class sets of books (used) that I want to teach in my high school classroom; it's not terribly expensive. On the other hand, my wife, the elementary teacher, spends roughly sixty gazillion dollars on her classroom.
This has sparked a fair amount of debate and defense of the teacher deduction, and it may well survive the upcoming ongoing raging tax-related debate.
But the whole business has reminded me of stripping.
Back fifteen-or-so years ago, I was a local teacher union president and we were in the midst of contentious contract negotiations (so contentious they eventually resulted in a strike). And those negotiations introduced me to the negotiating tactic of stripping.
Here's how it works. My side is asking for extended lunch and better parking. The other side proposes that they chop off our arms and our legs. So we negotiate. We agree to lunch that's the same length, and we agree to buy parking permits from the main office, and they agree only to chop off one of our arms. See? It's a negotiation, a compromise. We give up something and -- hey, wait a minute! They actually gave up nothing! Dammit-- I hope they chop off my non-dominant arm so I can still write an angry letter.
That's how stripping works in a negotiation. The other side proposing to strip away things you already have, and you end up giving ground on your side and in return, they let you keep some of what you already had.
That is why, for instance, some states (like Pennsylvania) have been toying with removing state mandates for teacher sick day allowances. Teachers may well end up with the same amount of sick leave, but they'll have to give up something in local contract negotiations to get it.
So look for the moment in the tax debates when the GOP says, "Well, we would like to be nice guys and give that $250 deduction , or maybe half of it, back, but we'll have to get a concession from somewhere else." (Spoiler alert: "somewhere else" will not turn out to be "taxing rich people or corporations").We may well get that $250 back if for no other reason than it's a cheap bargaining chip for the GOP. But if we get it back, it will cost us.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Monday, November 6, 2017
FL: Training Drones
No state in the USA works any harder than Florida to degrade public education. Setting ridiculous third grade reading test requirements, undercutting the teaching profession, stripping resources from public schools to make charters more attractive and profitable (but holding those charters to no real educational standards)-- just type "Florida" into the little search window in the upper left and see how many times I've had to look at Floridian shenanigans.But Florida has looked for an even more efficient way to cut education off at the knees-- check out the proposed revisions for the state constitution:
That's tiny print, so let me spell it out for you:
The purpose of the public education system of Florida is to develop the intellect of the state's citizens, to contribute to the economy, to create an effective workforce, and to prepare students for a job.
Yikes. Not even "prepare students for a career"-- just plunk those meat widgets in a job somewhere so that corporations can benefit and prosper on the backs of useful drones. After all, what else is education good for. Hell, what else is human life good for-- except to help state leaders prosper and to perform useful functions so that companies can boost stock values. Really, it might be best if schools could actually replace all the human parts of students with cyborg equipment, because really, a robot that could just be packed up in a trunk at the end of the shift would be more useful than humans, who will probably want to have actual lives of their own once they clock out of their corporate functions.
Lord knows this is not a new or unique point of view. It was Rex Tillerson (back before he was neutered and given a State Department shock collar) who tried to get schools to understand that they are producing a product for companies to consume. Or Allan Golston of the Gates foundation who called students the "output" of a school system, meant for companies' consumption. And don't forget Florida Chamber of Commerce president Mark Wilson who said the purpose of schools is economic development, "plain and simple."
But none of these biz-whiz geniuses was rewriting a state constitution to codify his belief that public schools are built to crank out compliant worker drones, and that education has no higher purpose-- certainly not to improve the lives of young humans, to help them better become themselves, to help them best understand how they want to be human in the world.
No, if you want the higher qualities that we used to associate with education, you'll need to be wealthy enough to send your kid to private school. Because you can bet that if any of these corporate yahoos, any of these feckless reckless legislators discovered that their own child had been greeted on the first day of school with, "Your only purpose here this year is to learn how to be a better employee for your future bosses," they would yank that kid out of school so fast they'd have to go back later to retrieve the child's shoes.
And yet Florida remains, for Betsy DeVos and other reformsters, an exemplar, the state that most typifies their imaginary dreamed-of future. We should all be worried about what happens in Florida.
Personalization: You Can't Afford It
We have seen the future, and we can't afford to live in it.
Altschool has just let out word that the tech-powered boutique of personalized education will become one more purveyor of off-the-rack computer-centered education-flavored product. There are many lessons underlined here-- I want to focus on the reminder of why, exactly, we can't have nice things.
Altschool's original vision was ambitious. Hire really good teachers. Keep class sizes small. Back up that teacher with a high-powered array of tech resources, allowing the teacher to perfectly track each student's progress in nearly-real time, then give that teacher unparalleled power to select a perfectly personalized set of materials for every single student. Keep a full IT department right on the site.
What do we dream of when we dream of True Personalized Education? Teacher-directed, with support from a powerful array of resources and facilities.
The problem is, this would be really, really expensive. Really expensive. You have to pay top dollar to lure those super-star teachers, then design your perfect educational ecosystem, then get top-of-the-line tech and hire IT people to keep it running, then buy up the resources needed to meet every possible individual student need or interest that might arrive. Ultimately you have several staff people hired for every single child. Expensive. Altschool was dropping something like $40 million a year.
You can't afford it. Hell, even the rich folks in Silicon Valley couldn't afford it.
So what happens? And how does the Personalized Education dream turn into the "personalized" education nightmare?
There are only a couple of ways to deal with the huge expense of a personalized boutique school.
One is to cut corners.
To be prepared for any individual interest or need, really prepared, you'd need a library of tens of thousands of units, covering tens of thousands of content areas at dozens of different ability levels cross-filed by particular skill or knowledge sets involved. The library would be huge, and would need to be reviewed and updated every year. That would be expensive, and the software needed to search it for the material with just the right qualities for Pat or Chris would have to be pretty heavy duty as well.
So let's, you know, cut that library down to a couple hundred items. Let's just focus on the most common stuff, and if we find some students who aren't a perfect fit, well, if we've got materials that are Close Enough, that should do. And we can reduce some of this coursework to simple sequencing. Take the pre-test, and if you miss numbers 1 and 2, you get Drill Sheet A, and if you miss numbers 3 and 4, you get Drill Sheet B. Simple, easy to manage, fewer materials to store. Cheaper.
And getting the very best teachers to run the classroom-- well, that would be pricey, too. Let's just round up some teachers who are Good Enough. In fact, since really good teachers might start to question all the corners we've cut, let's just grab some warm bodies, train them in how to operate our system, and let it go at that. If we let the classroom be driven by the software system and not the teacher, then it's easier and cheaper to just fill in the meat widget job with a handy warm body.
But if I started this "personalized" program because I thought I could really make school awesome, why would I cut so many corners that I hurt the quality of the school.
Because I need investors.
The other way to take care of the enormous amount of money I need is to get somebody to give me that money. And investors look at my classroom a little differently.
First of all, the corner cutting appeals to them hugely. To them, every dollar I spend on that classroom is one of their dollars. Do we really need three tech guys? Couldn't one handle everything by himself? Couldn't we scale back on the library of units that we're buying every quarter?
And having a highly-qualified and experienced super-teacher in each classroom-- that's great and all, but we can't really monetize that, can we? We can't sell it as a special secret. That proprietary software, on the other hand-- we could sell that to other schools and sell them the computers to run it on. And if we could streamline that whole software program and lesson library a little more, it would be easy to package as one-size-fits-all "personalization" for any classroom in the country. Because the more All our One Size fits, the bigger the potential market for this.
By all means, keep the Original Boutique School going-- when we bring people to see this or we show them videos or we send the master teachers out to talk about it, people will pee themselves with joy and fight to buy our off-the-rack version. We will make a mint.
But investors are not showing up to pump money into a Personalized School just so every schlubb's kid can actually attend there.
And asking those investors to work around a mountain of delicious, valuable student data and leave it alone is like asking someone to come to work every day and work at a desk that sits on a mountain of $100 bills without ever touching one. Theoretically possible, but sooner or later some investor is going to say, "You know, as long as the software is already working with all this student data anyway..." In fact, that's why some of the investors are going to show up in the first place.
This is how it works
This is how "personalized learning" ends up meaning two things-- actual personalized learning in which teachers lead a classroom armed with mighty tools and resources, and faux personalized learning where the classroom is software-directed, education is algorithmically-centered, and data is mined daily and promiscuously.
We cannot afford real Personalized Learning. Okay, if we can afford trillion dollar wars without end, we could afford real Personalized Learning. But as a country, we want education cheap (particular education for children who are not our own). So real Personalized Learning remains one of those things we know how to do, but we won't do it because we don't want to. So we'll cut corners and hustle for some ROI and just generally try to look like we're doing Personalized Learning when we're really doing something else entirely.
Altschool has just let out word that the tech-powered boutique of personalized education will become one more purveyor of off-the-rack computer-centered education-flavored product. There are many lessons underlined here-- I want to focus on the reminder of why, exactly, we can't have nice things.
Altschool's original vision was ambitious. Hire really good teachers. Keep class sizes small. Back up that teacher with a high-powered array of tech resources, allowing the teacher to perfectly track each student's progress in nearly-real time, then give that teacher unparalleled power to select a perfectly personalized set of materials for every single student. Keep a full IT department right on the site.
What do we dream of when we dream of True Personalized Education? Teacher-directed, with support from a powerful array of resources and facilities.
The problem is, this would be really, really expensive. Really expensive. You have to pay top dollar to lure those super-star teachers, then design your perfect educational ecosystem, then get top-of-the-line tech and hire IT people to keep it running, then buy up the resources needed to meet every possible individual student need or interest that might arrive. Ultimately you have several staff people hired for every single child. Expensive. Altschool was dropping something like $40 million a year.
You can't afford it. Hell, even the rich folks in Silicon Valley couldn't afford it.
So what happens? And how does the Personalized Education dream turn into the "personalized" education nightmare?
There are only a couple of ways to deal with the huge expense of a personalized boutique school.
One is to cut corners.
To be prepared for any individual interest or need, really prepared, you'd need a library of tens of thousands of units, covering tens of thousands of content areas at dozens of different ability levels cross-filed by particular skill or knowledge sets involved. The library would be huge, and would need to be reviewed and updated every year. That would be expensive, and the software needed to search it for the material with just the right qualities for Pat or Chris would have to be pretty heavy duty as well.
So let's, you know, cut that library down to a couple hundred items. Let's just focus on the most common stuff, and if we find some students who aren't a perfect fit, well, if we've got materials that are Close Enough, that should do. And we can reduce some of this coursework to simple sequencing. Take the pre-test, and if you miss numbers 1 and 2, you get Drill Sheet A, and if you miss numbers 3 and 4, you get Drill Sheet B. Simple, easy to manage, fewer materials to store. Cheaper.
And getting the very best teachers to run the classroom-- well, that would be pricey, too. Let's just round up some teachers who are Good Enough. In fact, since really good teachers might start to question all the corners we've cut, let's just grab some warm bodies, train them in how to operate our system, and let it go at that. If we let the classroom be driven by the software system and not the teacher, then it's easier and cheaper to just fill in the meat widget job with a handy warm body.
But if I started this "personalized" program because I thought I could really make school awesome, why would I cut so many corners that I hurt the quality of the school.
Because I need investors.
The other way to take care of the enormous amount of money I need is to get somebody to give me that money. And investors look at my classroom a little differently.
First of all, the corner cutting appeals to them hugely. To them, every dollar I spend on that classroom is one of their dollars. Do we really need three tech guys? Couldn't one handle everything by himself? Couldn't we scale back on the library of units that we're buying every quarter?
And having a highly-qualified and experienced super-teacher in each classroom-- that's great and all, but we can't really monetize that, can we? We can't sell it as a special secret. That proprietary software, on the other hand-- we could sell that to other schools and sell them the computers to run it on. And if we could streamline that whole software program and lesson library a little more, it would be easy to package as one-size-fits-all "personalization" for any classroom in the country. Because the more All our One Size fits, the bigger the potential market for this.
By all means, keep the Original Boutique School going-- when we bring people to see this or we show them videos or we send the master teachers out to talk about it, people will pee themselves with joy and fight to buy our off-the-rack version. We will make a mint.
But investors are not showing up to pump money into a Personalized School just so every schlubb's kid can actually attend there.
And asking those investors to work around a mountain of delicious, valuable student data and leave it alone is like asking someone to come to work every day and work at a desk that sits on a mountain of $100 bills without ever touching one. Theoretically possible, but sooner or later some investor is going to say, "You know, as long as the software is already working with all this student data anyway..." In fact, that's why some of the investors are going to show up in the first place.
This is how it works
This is how "personalized learning" ends up meaning two things-- actual personalized learning in which teachers lead a classroom armed with mighty tools and resources, and faux personalized learning where the classroom is software-directed, education is algorithmically-centered, and data is mined daily and promiscuously.
We cannot afford real Personalized Learning. Okay, if we can afford trillion dollar wars without end, we could afford real Personalized Learning. But as a country, we want education cheap (particular education for children who are not our own). So real Personalized Learning remains one of those things we know how to do, but we won't do it because we don't want to. So we'll cut corners and hustle for some ROI and just generally try to look like we're doing Personalized Learning when we're really doing something else entirely.
Altschool Lowers the Bar
If you're a Project Runway fan, you may remember those episodes where the designers have to create a couture design that could only be seen on a fancy shmancy high fashion runway-- and then have to create a ready-to-wear knockoff that could go into a department store near you.
Well, the wunderkind wunderschool Altschool is apparently going to do the same sort of shift.
We've talked about Altschool before for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that part of their operation has been a high-octane PR wing.In 2015, everyone was talking about the new high-tech personalized school that founder and former Googlite Max Ventilla was calling Montressori 2.0. The idea was epic-- person-to-person personalization backed up by an on-site IT department that could crunch the massive flow of data being gathered by teachers in real time. It reminded me of a highest-tech version of the 1960s open classrooms. And by the time you add up teachers and visiting experts and support staff and tech crew, the student-to-staff ratio was something unheard of in any other school.
Altschool was is the answer to, "If smart, rich, well-connected people could create a school from scratch, what would it look like?" Investors like Mark Zuckerberg lined up for a piece of the action. The challenge, as I saw it in 2016, was how to make Altschool anything other than a pricey boutique.
Well, after five years of operating at a loss ($30K per pupil tuition vs. $40 million annual costs) Ventilla is apparently ready to answer that question with an answer already familiar to folks who follow the world or charter schools. As reported by Bloomberg:
In Silicon Valley fashion, Ventilla broke the news to parents with a touch of misplaced enthusiasm. He wrote an email to families in Palo Alto, California, saying the school there would close at the end of the year due to business “challenges and opportunities,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by Bloomberg. Ventilla said AltSchool will only run classrooms near the main offices in San Francisco and New York. “We know this is tough news that will have a big impact on your family,” Ventilla said. But the moves are needed, he wrote, given AltSchool’s “strategy, path to growth and finances.”
In other words, education considerations come in second to business calculations. So sorry, Palo Alto rich parents.
The other part of this business equation is the Altschool ready-to-wear knockoff product line. Now that Ventilla has some things that sort of work, it's time to sell a version of them to other schools and make some real bank. Bloomberg talked to an anonymous employee who described a company in which the Run A School side battled with the Create Software for Market side-- and the software side won. And now the remaining schools will call themselves "lab" schools, suggesting they are not so much actual schools as development labs for the product line of the business.
Ventilla's vision seemed to be closer to what people think of when they hear "personalized" applied to education. "Ventilla wanted to build physical classrooms with first-rate teachers and complement them with “personalized” learning technology, so educators can tailor lessons for each child." But now it appears that the Altschool brand is headed to market with an attempt to out-Summit Summit education-- a course in a box, where students log on and a human "mentor" stands by to help with wrinkles, should they appear.
Altschools were popular with their parents, but it's possible the business doesn't really understand why:
Although the company touts the magic of its technology, two parents said their children benefited more from the extensive attention of talented teachers and small class sizes. There are multiple instructors per class, and the school places a premium on interdisciplinary projects, like building a model house that can withstand different weather—a task that incorporates current events, science, engineering and budgeting.
In other words, Altschool's execution underscored the importance of a top quality teacher leading the classroom, a full array of tools at her disposal. And somehow, Altschool has taken away the lesson that the important part is the tools.
If nothing else, the Altschool story underlines the yawning gulf between tech-supported personalized education as it would really serve students, and tech-centered personalization that is more focused on marketability. In fact, that gulf is important enough to be looked at in a separate post-- which I'm going to go write now. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for this newest version of off-the-rack, mass-produced, faux personalized education.
Well, the wunderkind wunderschool Altschool is apparently going to do the same sort of shift.
We've talked about Altschool before for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that part of their operation has been a high-octane PR wing.In 2015, everyone was talking about the new high-tech personalized school that founder and former Googlite Max Ventilla was calling Montressori 2.0. The idea was epic-- person-to-person personalization backed up by an on-site IT department that could crunch the massive flow of data being gathered by teachers in real time. It reminded me of a highest-tech version of the 1960s open classrooms. And by the time you add up teachers and visiting experts and support staff and tech crew, the student-to-staff ratio was something unheard of in any other school.
Altschool was is the answer to, "If smart, rich, well-connected people could create a school from scratch, what would it look like?" Investors like Mark Zuckerberg lined up for a piece of the action. The challenge, as I saw it in 2016, was how to make Altschool anything other than a pricey boutique.
Well, after five years of operating at a loss ($30K per pupil tuition vs. $40 million annual costs) Ventilla is apparently ready to answer that question with an answer already familiar to folks who follow the world or charter schools. As reported by Bloomberg:
In Silicon Valley fashion, Ventilla broke the news to parents with a touch of misplaced enthusiasm. He wrote an email to families in Palo Alto, California, saying the school there would close at the end of the year due to business “challenges and opportunities,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by Bloomberg. Ventilla said AltSchool will only run classrooms near the main offices in San Francisco and New York. “We know this is tough news that will have a big impact on your family,” Ventilla said. But the moves are needed, he wrote, given AltSchool’s “strategy, path to growth and finances.”
In other words, education considerations come in second to business calculations. So sorry, Palo Alto rich parents.
The other part of this business equation is the Altschool ready-to-wear knockoff product line. Now that Ventilla has some things that sort of work, it's time to sell a version of them to other schools and make some real bank. Bloomberg talked to an anonymous employee who described a company in which the Run A School side battled with the Create Software for Market side-- and the software side won. And now the remaining schools will call themselves "lab" schools, suggesting they are not so much actual schools as development labs for the product line of the business.
Ventilla's vision seemed to be closer to what people think of when they hear "personalized" applied to education. "Ventilla wanted to build physical classrooms with first-rate teachers and complement them with “personalized” learning technology, so educators can tailor lessons for each child." But now it appears that the Altschool brand is headed to market with an attempt to out-Summit Summit education-- a course in a box, where students log on and a human "mentor" stands by to help with wrinkles, should they appear.
Altschools were popular with their parents, but it's possible the business doesn't really understand why:
Although the company touts the magic of its technology, two parents said their children benefited more from the extensive attention of talented teachers and small class sizes. There are multiple instructors per class, and the school places a premium on interdisciplinary projects, like building a model house that can withstand different weather—a task that incorporates current events, science, engineering and budgeting.
In other words, Altschool's execution underscored the importance of a top quality teacher leading the classroom, a full array of tools at her disposal. And somehow, Altschool has taken away the lesson that the important part is the tools.
If nothing else, the Altschool story underlines the yawning gulf between tech-supported personalized education as it would really serve students, and tech-centered personalization that is more focused on marketability. In fact, that gulf is important enough to be looked at in a separate post-- which I'm going to go write now. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for this newest version of off-the-rack, mass-produced, faux personalized education.
Sunday, November 5, 2017
ICYMI: Daylight Savings Edition (11/5)
Yes, this is up late. That extra hour screwed me all up. But I would still make it a point to read these offerings and pass along the ones you're most inspired by.
Betsy DeVos doesn't understand how markets really work
There are many things wrong with the DeVosian ideal or free market driven education, but one of the problems is that she doesn't have the "how markets work" piece correct. Here's a good explainer of hat she doesn't understand about the invisible hand.
School Choice in Rural America
Jenny Robinson looks at the particular style of destruction the school choice programs wreak on rural communities
Dark Money pours into school board races
A look at just how bad the movement to buy local school boards has become, at The Answer Sheet
Protecting children's right to childhood
Nobody speaks up for the rights of littles like Teacher Tom.
A brilliant way to teach children
An early childhood expert finds a great model-- just not in the US
I'm 10 and I want girls to raise their hands
A young girl and the Girl Scouts take steps to empower young women
The Mis-education of Eva Moskowitz
Great profile of NYC's top charter queen
What happened to big data?
Slate looks at the decline of big data, including its failure in education.
Siezing the civic education moment
Civics education is needed now more than ever. How do we make it happen?
Aint That a Shame
Russ Walsh and the problem of shame as pedagogy
Betsy DeVos doesn't understand how markets really work
There are many things wrong with the DeVosian ideal or free market driven education, but one of the problems is that she doesn't have the "how markets work" piece correct. Here's a good explainer of hat she doesn't understand about the invisible hand.
School Choice in Rural America
Jenny Robinson looks at the particular style of destruction the school choice programs wreak on rural communities
Dark Money pours into school board races
A look at just how bad the movement to buy local school boards has become, at The Answer Sheet
Protecting children's right to childhood
Nobody speaks up for the rights of littles like Teacher Tom.
A brilliant way to teach children
An early childhood expert finds a great model-- just not in the US
I'm 10 and I want girls to raise their hands
A young girl and the Girl Scouts take steps to empower young women
The Mis-education of Eva Moskowitz
Great profile of NYC's top charter queen
What happened to big data?
Slate looks at the decline of big data, including its failure in education.
Siezing the civic education moment
Civics education is needed now more than ever. How do we make it happen?
Aint That a Shame
Russ Walsh and the problem of shame as pedagogy
Saturday, November 4, 2017
NY Times Offers Dumb Endorsement
The New York Times took a swipe at the teaching profession today by endorsing one of the Empire State's dumbest ideas.
Last month SUNY gave its pet charter schools the freedom to hire whatever warm bodies they could get their hands on, based on the theory that-- well, I'm not sure. That hiring real teachers is hard, and expensive? That getting trained educational professionals to take bad direction from well-connected amateurs (lookin' at you, Eva Moskowitz)? That the leaders of charters are just so awesome that their awesomeness will elevate the warm bodies they hire? That teaching isn't a real job and any schlubb off the street can do it? Pick your favorite theory.
In any case, the NYT thinks the warm body idea is awesome sauce.
The NYT fact-checking machinery is legendary. When my old friend got married years ago in NYC and his announcement was going to take up four whole lines of NYT space, the Grey Lady called my friend's mom back in our small town to confirm that she did in fact run the business that the announcement said she ran. So I believe that America's newspaper of record knows how to check it some facts.
And yet this editorial was written when the fact checkers were out to lunch.
The editorial notes that charter schools "made good on their promise to outperform conventional public schools," which is a fact-check fail two-fer. First, it slides in the assertion that charters are public schools, even though NYC's own Ms. Moskowitz went to court to protect her charter's right to function as a private business, freed from state oversight. I NYC charters are public schools, then McDonald's is a public cafeteria. Second, it accepts uncritically the notion that charters have "outperformed" anybody, without asking if such superior performance is real, or simply an illusion created by creaming and skimming students so that charters only keep those students who make them look good.
The Times thinks the warm body rule is "a reasonable attempt to let these schools avoid the weak state teacher education system that has long been criticized for churning out graduates who are unprepared to manage the classroom." Their support for this is a decade-old "report" by Arthur Levine, and even if that report were the gospel truth, that does not shore up the logic of saying, "I'm pretty sure the surgeons at this hospital aren't very good, so the obvious solution is for me to grab some guy off the street to take out my spleen instead."
The Times also commiserates with charter hiring problems.
New York’s high-performing charter schools have long complained that rules requiring them to hire state-certified teachers make it difficult to find high-quality applicants in high-demand specialties like math, science and special education. They tell of sorting through hundreds of candidates to fill a few positions, only to find that the strongest candidates have no interest in working in the low-income communities where charters are typically located.
Oops. There's a typo in that last part-- let me fix it for you: "only to find the strongest candidates have no interest in working for bottom-dollar wages under amateur-hour conditions that demand their obedience and donation of tens of hours of their own time each week." There.
But if you want absolute proof that the Times had no access to fact-checking for this piece, here comes multiple citations of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
If there is a less serious, less believable, less intellectually rigorous in all of the education world that the NCTQ, I do not know who it is. Kate Walsh may be a lovely human being who is nice to her mother and sings in her church choir, but her organization is-- well, I few things astonish me as much as the fact that NCTQ is still taken seriously by anybody at all, ever.
NCTQ has evaluated teacher ed programs that don't exist. Their evaluation technique involves looking at course catelogs. Their study of ed program rigor was just looking through a bunch of commencement programs. When they want to claim their research looks at something that would be rally hard to look at, they just make up proxies that don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Their presence in any article or report is a sure sign that somebody is far more focused on reaching a preferred conclusion than in seriously studying the situation.
There's more in the NYT editorial. Teachers unions want to stop charters "any way they can." State education authorities are hypocritical because they lowered the bar on the state teacher exam, which, you know, is pretty much exactly the same as doing away with real certification requirements. Like, if you support lower fines for jaywalking, you might as well make murder legal.
And then there's the intellectually sloppy assertion that it is "beyond doubt ... that the state certification process is failing to provide strong teachers in sufficient numbers to fill the demand." No, no it's not. If I can't buy a Porsche for $1.98, it is not beyond doubt that automobiles are being manufactured in insufficient numbers." What's beyond doubt is that charters (like a few gazillion schools in the US) are having trouble finding people who want to work for them under the conditions they're offering. If the New York Times can't find enough good reporters to work for them for $2.50 an hour, the solution is not to just drag anyone off the street who can peck at a keyboard, and the New York Times editorial board damn well knows it.
Today's editorial is sloppy, lazy and just plain wrong. Shame on you, Times editorial board.
In any case, the NYT thinks the warm body idea is awesome sauce.
The NYT fact-checking machinery is legendary. When my old friend got married years ago in NYC and his announcement was going to take up four whole lines of NYT space, the Grey Lady called my friend's mom back in our small town to confirm that she did in fact run the business that the announcement said she ran. So I believe that America's newspaper of record knows how to check it some facts.
And yet this editorial was written when the fact checkers were out to lunch.
The editorial notes that charter schools "made good on their promise to outperform conventional public schools," which is a fact-check fail two-fer. First, it slides in the assertion that charters are public schools, even though NYC's own Ms. Moskowitz went to court to protect her charter's right to function as a private business, freed from state oversight. I NYC charters are public schools, then McDonald's is a public cafeteria. Second, it accepts uncritically the notion that charters have "outperformed" anybody, without asking if such superior performance is real, or simply an illusion created by creaming and skimming students so that charters only keep those students who make them look good.
The Times thinks the warm body rule is "a reasonable attempt to let these schools avoid the weak state teacher education system that has long been criticized for churning out graduates who are unprepared to manage the classroom." Their support for this is a decade-old "report" by Arthur Levine, and even if that report were the gospel truth, that does not shore up the logic of saying, "I'm pretty sure the surgeons at this hospital aren't very good, so the obvious solution is for me to grab some guy off the street to take out my spleen instead."
The Times also commiserates with charter hiring problems.
New York’s high-performing charter schools have long complained that rules requiring them to hire state-certified teachers make it difficult to find high-quality applicants in high-demand specialties like math, science and special education. They tell of sorting through hundreds of candidates to fill a few positions, only to find that the strongest candidates have no interest in working in the low-income communities where charters are typically located.
Oops. There's a typo in that last part-- let me fix it for you: "only to find the strongest candidates have no interest in working for bottom-dollar wages under amateur-hour conditions that demand their obedience and donation of tens of hours of their own time each week." There.
But if you want absolute proof that the Times had no access to fact-checking for this piece, here comes multiple citations of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
If there is a less serious, less believable, less intellectually rigorous in all of the education world that the NCTQ, I do not know who it is. Kate Walsh may be a lovely human being who is nice to her mother and sings in her church choir, but her organization is-- well, I few things astonish me as much as the fact that NCTQ is still taken seriously by anybody at all, ever.
NCTQ has evaluated teacher ed programs that don't exist. Their evaluation technique involves looking at course catelogs. Their study of ed program rigor was just looking through a bunch of commencement programs. When they want to claim their research looks at something that would be rally hard to look at, they just make up proxies that don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Their presence in any article or report is a sure sign that somebody is far more focused on reaching a preferred conclusion than in seriously studying the situation.
There's more in the NYT editorial. Teachers unions want to stop charters "any way they can." State education authorities are hypocritical because they lowered the bar on the state teacher exam, which, you know, is pretty much exactly the same as doing away with real certification requirements. Like, if you support lower fines for jaywalking, you might as well make murder legal.
And then there's the intellectually sloppy assertion that it is "beyond doubt ... that the state certification process is failing to provide strong teachers in sufficient numbers to fill the demand." No, no it's not. If I can't buy a Porsche for $1.98, it is not beyond doubt that automobiles are being manufactured in insufficient numbers." What's beyond doubt is that charters (like a few gazillion schools in the US) are having trouble finding people who want to work for them under the conditions they're offering. If the New York Times can't find enough good reporters to work for them for $2.50 an hour, the solution is not to just drag anyone off the street who can peck at a keyboard, and the New York Times editorial board damn well knows it.
Today's editorial is sloppy, lazy and just plain wrong. Shame on you, Times editorial board.
Friday, November 3, 2017
The 529 Plan
A 529 plan is a special type of savings plan that lets you set money aside for your child's college education while providing some tax advantages.
The plans come in two main types-- pre-paid tuition and college credits. The plans can come with a variety of fees and costs, as well as the risks that come with enrolling your child in a university eighteen years before she graduates from high school. But the money earned in a 529 account is free of state and federal taxes in most cases, as long as you spend it on college stuff.
529 plans are going to enjoy some news coverage because they are a part of the GOP tax proposal. Some of the changes are practical, some are intended to make a point, and some are probably part of a longer game being played here.
The basic proposal is this-- let parents use 529 plans to save for private school tuition for K-12.
The extra ideological wrinkle is this-- let parents start putting money in the account at conception, a slickly subtle way to drive home the point that the fetus is a person (after all, the fetus has a bank account) which can just be added to the steady drip, drip, drip of the anti-abortion crowd. It's rhetorically twisty because it brings the issues of choice and choice face to face. Folks are going to have to be clear about discussing school choice or abortion choice, because folks mostly don't oppose or support both, leaving us to discuss Choice (pick one).
Public education advocates are unhappy with the idea because they see it as promoting private school over public school. But as proposed, it's not going to make private school any more accessible than it ever was. If you can afford to send your kid to private school, this will give you a nice tax break, and if you couldn't afford to send your kid to private school before, well, you still can't.
But that's where the long game comes in.
One of the preferred pitches for school vouchers these days is the Education Savings Account. With ESAs. instead of handing parents an actual voucher, the state would place the money in a special education lockbox. From there, many things can happen depending on the state, but Texas, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire have all toyed with this approach.
What the new K-12 529 plans would do is create everything needed for an ESA/voucher approach except the funding stream from the state. And you can already see choice fans warming up their, "These accounts do not help the non-wealthy families of our state. To make this fair, the state should deposit some money in those 529s, or even allow corporations a deduction if they put money in the 529s of needy-yet-worthy students."
So the GOP proposal, in the short run, doesn't change much. In the long run, it sets the stage for another run at voucher/ESA systems in the states. Keep your eyes peeled.
The plans come in two main types-- pre-paid tuition and college credits. The plans can come with a variety of fees and costs, as well as the risks that come with enrolling your child in a university eighteen years before she graduates from high school. But the money earned in a 529 account is free of state and federal taxes in most cases, as long as you spend it on college stuff.
529 plans are going to enjoy some news coverage because they are a part of the GOP tax proposal. Some of the changes are practical, some are intended to make a point, and some are probably part of a longer game being played here.
The basic proposal is this-- let parents use 529 plans to save for private school tuition for K-12.
The extra ideological wrinkle is this-- let parents start putting money in the account at conception, a slickly subtle way to drive home the point that the fetus is a person (after all, the fetus has a bank account) which can just be added to the steady drip, drip, drip of the anti-abortion crowd. It's rhetorically twisty because it brings the issues of choice and choice face to face. Folks are going to have to be clear about discussing school choice or abortion choice, because folks mostly don't oppose or support both, leaving us to discuss Choice (pick one).
Public education advocates are unhappy with the idea because they see it as promoting private school over public school. But as proposed, it's not going to make private school any more accessible than it ever was. If you can afford to send your kid to private school, this will give you a nice tax break, and if you couldn't afford to send your kid to private school before, well, you still can't.
But that's where the long game comes in.
One of the preferred pitches for school vouchers these days is the Education Savings Account. With ESAs. instead of handing parents an actual voucher, the state would place the money in a special education lockbox. From there, many things can happen depending on the state, but Texas, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire have all toyed with this approach.
What the new K-12 529 plans would do is create everything needed for an ESA/voucher approach except the funding stream from the state. And you can already see choice fans warming up their, "These accounts do not help the non-wealthy families of our state. To make this fair, the state should deposit some money in those 529s, or even allow corporations a deduction if they put money in the 529s of needy-yet-worthy students."
So the GOP proposal, in the short run, doesn't change much. In the long run, it sets the stage for another run at voucher/ESA systems in the states. Keep your eyes peeled.
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