What Is A Child Worth

If you are a regular reader, you know how I feel about the idea that education's main or sole aim is to prepare children to be the worker bees of tomorrow, to become a "product" to be consumed by the future corporate overlords.

Snacktime's over, you little slacker. Go get a job!

I've been tracking this baloney since I started blogging. Here's Allan Golston from the Gates Foundation website:

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

Or then-corporate exec Rex Tillerson:

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

Or members of the Florida legislature:

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.

This is all alarming because it is such a narrow, cramped, tiny vision of education, a low bar to clear, an unworthy target at which to aim. All the depth and breadth of human experience, all the joy and heartfelt fulfillment to which humans can aspire, all the glorious discovery of one's best self, all the varied and beautiful experience of being a human in the world-- these folks would have us toss all of that away to better turn children into meat widgets who can serve not their own human aspirations and dreams and goals, but the corporate need for drones to fill jobs so that the rich can get richer.

This is all awful. But something else is rotten in this point of view.

In this view of the world, children are worthless.

In this view, children are lumps of raw material, useless and therefor worthless until they can be molded into job-ready drones. These are people who would look at my new twins and my beautiful grandbabies and say, "Well, they're pretty and all. But they're kind of worthless, aren't they."

These folks are impatient for children to be made into useful tools. "Hey," they bark at the kindergarten teachers. "Stop screwing around with all that playing and start teaching them to read and write-- you know, things that will make them useful to a future employer." Perhaps this is why some hard-right folks complain about child labor laws-- after all, a child who's not working is a child who has no value.

They have even inveigled their language into the language of school and teacher evaluation-- we look for "value added" which means value added to the children in our care who, by implication, lack value now.

It's a stumper of a world view. How exactly do we convince grown-ass human beings that children are valuable (and not just because they have "potential" to someday become useful tools). How can any human with a halfway healthy heart not look at a small child and think, "You are quite enough, a valuable being, deserving of love and protection and care. You are absolutely enough, just as you are, right now." How do you get through to anyone who looks at a child and feels anything but full and unconditional love (or who thinks the way to express that love is to try to convert that "worthless" child into a worthy drone)? And if we can't get to that person, how do we get them to stay the hell away from matters of educational policy?

DeVos to Headline Bush's Charterpalooza

Has it been ten years already?

Jeb Bush's reformsteriffic organization Foundation for Excellence in Education (now in the process of morphing its name to ExcelinEd) just announced its tenth annual national summit. This time it's in Nashville, and the big news is that speakers will include Bush Buddy Betsy DeVos! Squeee!

This annual Big Wet Kiss to privatization has always brought out the shiniest stars in the reformster firmament, and Bush himself will be there (because, really, does he have any place else he needs to be) to provide the keynote kickoff to the "content-rich" agenda on November 30.

The National Summit will focus on reform topics of educational opportunity, innovation and quality in general sessions with nationally renowned speakers, targeted strategy sessions and hands-on workshops featuring policy experts, legislators and educators sharing proven and next generation policy solutions for improving learning for all students.

Why attend? Well, it will be "the education networking event of the year" and a "one-stop shop for the nuts and bolts of education reform" and provide "opportunities to connect with nationally renowned speakers and leaders." Here's a nice summary from the press release:

Each year, the National Summit on Education Reform serves as a strategic convening for leaders who want a timely, comprehensive overview of all elements of transformative education policy. The unique gathering equips them with the knowledge, know-how and a network of experts to champion students in every classroom across America. Last year’s National Summit convened 1,045 education leaders from 47 states, with 94 percent of attendees praising the event as “outstanding” or “above average.”

What other talking treats will appear? Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School professor and "disruptive innovation expert"). Dr. Steve Perry (charter school boss and self-aggrandizing scrapper). Derrell Bradford, Andy Smarick, and Chad Alderman.(reliable thinky tank and advocacy guys). Antwon Wilson (Broadie, DC Public School Chancellor and Guy Who Blew a Giant Hoe in the Budget of His Previous District). Neerav Kingland (Helped hash up New Orleans schools).

Kate Walsh (NCTQ) and Elisa Vilanueva-Beard (CEO of TFA) will be part of an "expert panel" about the teacher shortage led by Daniel Weisberg (CEO of TNTP). Mike Petrilli (Fordham and every article ever written about education) will moderate a panel about "the truth behind private school choice."

Not a public education advocate anywhere in sight. The crowd seems tilted a bit more toward the "free market profiteering" wing of the reform movement than the "social justice" wing. And a whole session about how to use the proper term for your branding so that you can sell your reform.

Media folks, including bloggers, can register to cover the event "from the designated press areas." And you can still join the distinguished list of sponsors, including the Walton Familu, Exxon-Mobile, the College Board, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Amplify, K12, NWEA, Charter Schools USA, and State Farm.

Ten years of this summiting, or roughly the same amount of time Bill Gates said we would have to wait until we knew whether or not "our education stuff worked." Of course, the education stuff hasn't worked and doesn't work, unless of course by "work" you mean "makes it possible for a lot of people to get their hands on a lot of money."  

I could say that it's not normal for a Secretary of Education to attend this celebration of the privatizing and dismantling of public education, but Arne Duncan and Rod Paige have both done Bush's Happy Reformster Retreat. But it certainly underlines how clearly DeVos is not on the side of public education in this country. At least her security detail will be able to relax while she spends the weekend surrounded by friendly faces.

WeWork: More Education Dilettantery

There's a new batch of rich dilettantes ready to put their disruptive fix on education. It's WeWork, and if you don't know who that is, it may be because you are over thirty and work in a school.

Neumann's IMDB picture

WeWork  is many things, not the least of which is a huge real estate empire (10 million square feet of office space). Stories about the "unicorn" company talk a lot about "communal" offices, the company repeatedly billed as "a company providing community, shared workspace and services to freelances, small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs." A New York Times article described the corporate goal as "to over5take any conceivable venue for entrepreneurial-minded up-and-comers who are drawn to a clubby sense of community and the turnkey ease (if impersonal feel) of communal spaces."  But it's not just that they have the space-- it's that they have a vision for how to use that space super-efficiently:

In the future, you’re going to love going to the office. Everything you need to do your job effectively will present itself without effort. You won’t have your own desk, because your employer will know you only use it for 63 percent of the day. But you won’t mind sharing it, because said employer will make sure you have a private room with green leafy plants, soundproof walls, and warm light between 2 and 2:20 p.m. so you can call your daughter. At 3:30 p.m., when you need a conference room for the product managers’ meeting, you won’t even have to book it. It’ll just be there. And everyone attending remotely will already be invited.

Now you're thinking, "But to do that, the company would have to know..." Everything. Correct. Co-founders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey want to collect every piece of data possible about how people use offices, how they work, how work itself works. In other words, while the surface business is real estate and dreams, the core that supports it all is data collection on an epic scale. Not for nothing are they also called "the first physical social network."

All this matters because the young titans are branching out. They've already launched WeLive, extending their concept to living space. Now they would like a shot at education with WeGrow. 

Taking point on this seems to be Adam Neumann's wife, Rebekkah Paltrow Neumann. This filmmaker-actress-entrepreneur went to Cornell and majored in Business and Buddhism. She was accepted into the Smith Barney Sales and Trading program, but left to pursue her acting and film career, which now includes launching WeWork Studios. And she's Gwyneth Paltyrow's first cousin. And she's WeWork's branding officer.

So what kind of school would these folks like to launch. Well, Rebekah Neumann has dropped some hints.

“In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” said WeWork co-founder Rebekah Neumann, the company’s chief brand office...

WeGrow is already up and piloting, and Bloomberg took a look at some of what is going on there. The school has seven students and two teachers, and hopes for sixty-five students next fall. . The school likes project-based learning, but this may not be exactly the kind of project-based learning you're used to thinking of:

The kids have already gotten lessons from the Neumanns’ employees in creating a brand and using effective sales techniques, and from Adam Neumann on supply and demand. Mentorships with WeWork customer-entrepreneurs are available. “Basically, anything they might want to learn, we have people in the field that can teach it,” Rebekah Neumann said. When one of their students, an eight-year-old girl named Nia, made T-shirts to sell at the farm stand the kids run, “we noticed she has a strong aptitude and passion for design,” Neumann said. She is securing an apprenticeship with fashion designers who rent space from WeWork.

Yes, apparently it turns out that you are never too young to learn to think, "This is interesting and all, but how can I make a quick buck from it?" We've all been arguing about whether five year olds should be playing or learning academic materials-- turns out we'e over looked another possibility, which is learning how to monetize the world around you.

Neumann's own vision for life is, well....

In her own family, she said, “there are no lines” between work and life or home and office. “My kids are in the office. I’m doing what I love, he’s doing what he loves, they are observing that, and they are doing what they love.”

This is in keeping with the WeWork vision, which is rolling out of bed straight into your workspace. I love my job. I love it a lot. I still go home and do things that are not my job. But I don't find this boundaryless existence as troublesome as some of her other thoughts:

Neumann argues it’s conventional education that is “squashing out the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that’s intrinsic to all young children.” Then, after college, she said, “somehow we’re asking them to be disruptive and recover that spirit.”

You know who really likes "disruption"? Rich people who are so well-insulated by their wealth that they never have to worry about "disruption" actually inconveniencing them or forcing them to change their lives in ways they wouldn't like. Rich people who know that no matter how bad the disruptions get, they will stay safe and dry (and wealthy) through it all. That's who loves disruption.

 Neumann does seem to have consulted an actual educator-- Lois Weiswasser. And WeGrow has dreams of sliding scale tuition so that even the Little People can let their toddlers learn how to be Captains of Industry, though at this point nobody seems to know how to pay for this highly expensive model for school (the Neumanns might want to give Max Ventilla a call). In the meantime, let's not forget that WeWork's whole model involves collecting a huge amount of data, because these are people who believe the naive notion that if you know everything, you can predict and prepare for anything.

Once again, if these people weren't rich-- if a failed actress with no education background at all said, "I think I'd like to start a school"-- we wouldn't be talking about this at all. But wealth gives you the chance to run any experiment you can afford to finance. It seems early to make a prediction, but I'm calling it anyway-- WeGrow is not the school of the future. Let's just hope it creates minimal disruption along the way. 

[Update PS: Here's a more detailed look at what life inside a WeWork office is like.]

$250 for Stripping

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.

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 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.