Inside a Proficiency Based Classroom [updated]

Robbie Feinberg took a trip into a Maine classroom for NPR, trying to see what things look like in the state that has shifted to Proficiency-Based Education (aka Competency Based Education, aka some form of Personalized Learning aka in the 90s Outcome Based Education). You know that I have my doubts about this bold new not-so-new idea (see here, here, and here for starters). But the devilish proof is in the details of the pudding, so let's see what Feinberg found.

The piece opens with a "first thing you notice" anecdote. At Oak Hill, Feinberg first notices that there are sticky notes on desks, colored pink, green and blue depending on whether the students are on pace, a little ahead or a little behind. And the students have their seat for the day based on the color of their sticky note. And I'm already thinking, yes, that's cool, and we could spark it up by calling them the bluebirds and the green alligators and the cardinals, because this sure seems familiar to anyone who went to school a several decades ago. Did I mention that the school Feinberg is profiling is a high school, not an elementary school?

Once in their group, they get out a "personal learning plan," which is basically a checklist of the tasks they have to perform (aka the worksheets they have to finish) in order to complete this particular month's worth of stuff. And I'm going to go ahead and jump in here to say, with all due respect to the teachers who are doing this stuff, that this is not personalized learning, because personalized learning is about each student pursuing her own path to achieve her own goals. This is personalized pacing (a fact underlined by the fact that it's marked on a Pace Chart)-- each student is following exactly the same path, just at his or her own speed.

The teacher? The teacher occasionally presents mini-lectures and leads discussions, but mostly he floats around the room and "checks in" with each student as the students slogs her way through the batch of tasks. How does this particular teacher feel about it?

“The reason why I like it is because I get to talk to every single student,” he says. “One-on-one. Which never used to happen 10 years ago. There would be months going by, and I wouldn’t have a conversation with a student. So at least this way, I’m able to talk with every student a little bit at a time each day.”

Yeah, if it never happened ten years ago, and you went months without talking to students, that is totally on you, not the educational system.

In this particular district, the advent of this new system coincided with the merger of three districts, so the schools were already wrestling with a loss of local control. But like the comment about conversations, some of what they are saying about the new system is hard for me to see sense in.

The old system of grading A-F "would have to go," and in its place is a system of grades marks 1-4. Yes, that's quite a game changer there. The school hired consultants to help them deal with the new system, and the school watched a whole bunch of teachers, including, apparently, "really good, popular" ones, head out the door over the shift (the superintendent says he was glad to see them go).

Some of what is mentioned in the article is more that just befuddling-- it's appalling. The school sends out a list of "behind" students to parents, so not only do students get to suffer the public embarrassment of having to sit in the front of the room with the bluebirds, but their behind-ness is published to the world. I can't think of a single educational justification for that action-- not one at all. If you are reading this, Oak Hill administration, you should stop that right now. [Update: Feinberg reached out to me to clarify that the failure notices are sent individually to parents of students who are behind, for their own student. So not quite as horrifying. I will also clarify however, that my "stop it right now" also applies to seating by current progress.]

[Update: Since many have asked-- the article does refer some student reaction. Students note that the teachers roles is basically to tell the to stop talking and get back to work.]

It is possible that Feinberg belongs in the reporter bluebird group*, but the picture that emerges from his story is not of a school that's on the cutting edge of anything educational. Students have a pile of worksheets and other assigned tasks to work through, teachers don't so much teach as try to push them along through the stack, and students are ranked on whether they are ahead, behind, or on pace. Nothing in the article hints at true personalization, and nothing addresses the tricky issues (what happens when the year is over and the bluebirds are still behind by forty or fifty tasks-- what happens to them then, or the next fall?) And all of that is before we even get to the thorny pedagogical questions of whether or not these sort of tasks truly show that a student has mastered a skill or a chunk of knowledge. Can education really be reduced to a checklist of tasks (and that is what Oak Hill is described as having-- the teacher literally stops by the student to check off tasks on a list).

This could be a school from fifty or sixty years ago. There's certainly nothing admirable or inspiring here, certainly nothing cutting edge. I have always argued that PBL/CBE/Personalized Learning would end up delivering far less than it promised, but even I didn't imagine it would be this much less. As I said, it may be that Feinberg simply dropped the ball (and, I should note, this article is first in series). Maybe something magical is happening at Oak Hill that he didn't see. But if this piece is an accurate portrayal of what the PBL classrooms of Maine look like, the rest of us should run-- not walk-- in the opposite direction.

Oh, and this is the first article in a series. Stay tuned for more.

*Check the comments for more about Feinberg.

CA: A Silly Proposal

It should be said right up front that this measure has little chance of making it all the way to becoming an actual law, and the only big mystery here is why a local news station would bother to cover it at all. But it's an example, I guess, of just how silly and mouth-frothy some folks get about public education and their desire to do away with it. But this is an unvarnished look at how some folks feel about education issues.

This California ballot initiative is called the California No Taxes on Residents Without Students for Public Schools Initiative. This proposal to amend the state constitution comes courtesy of Lee Olson, chairman of the Committee to End Slavery, headquartered in Huntington Beach, CA. The committee seems to have no online presence, (there is a Lee Olson running a one-employee real estate company in Huntington Beach) but if you're thinking that Huntington Beach seems like an odd home for the fight against slavery, well, you may be thinking of the wrong kind of slavery. (Olson has been down this road, and others like it, before.)

Let's look at the bill. 

The formal title is the "California Tax Relief Act" and it's based on twelve findings  by the committee, each frothier than the last:

1) The NEA says California per-pupil costs are $11,329

2) Ed Week ranked California near the bottom among the fifty states

3) Common Core resulted in colleges flooded with unprepared students. And now it gets good...

4) Government school graduates "have not only been dumbed down they're afflicted with arrested emotional development (AED) requiring universities and colleges to provide safe spaces stocked with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and videos of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma."

5) Parents are taking their children elsewhere

6) These elsewheres are better and cheaper.

7) In particular, the committee recommends the Ron Paul Curriculum which emphasizes liberty and equips students to run businesses "without putting ideological indoctrination ahead of education, unlike government schools."

8) Parents who choose these better alternatives are penalized because they still have to pay for  government schools through taxes and "other schemes, which extract their financial resources at gun point."

9) All California residents are forced to pay for students, "whether or not they are financially responsible for those students." Also at gun point. Can't overemphasize the gun points.

10) The Committee supports parents' right to control the education of their children. "Our Creator never assigned the right and responsibility of a child's education to a government entity; the government has usurped that inviolable right and responsibility at gun point."

11) The Committee condemns the theft of property from Californians "euphemistically called taxation" to pay for government schools, particularly "when their purpose is to create a dumbed down populace easy to control and prepared only to service the (slave) labor needs of the oligarchy that rules over us."

12) "Any registered California voter who votes against this initiative is telling the whole world and their Creator that they support and endorse the theft of their neighbor's financial resources to finance government schools and,therefore, that they reject and are in full, open rebellion against the Creator's command, 'Thou shalt not steal.'"

So the purpose of the bill is to relieve the "unfair and immoral government imposed penalty on loving parents" who have to pay for school twice. At gun point.  Also to relive other CA residents who are being forced to pay for children who are not their responsibility, because why should we have to pay to send Those People's Children to school. At gun point.

That's just what the proposed bill would do-- if you don't have a kid in government school, you don't have to pay taxes.

The proposal would require over 500,000 signatures to make it onto a California ballot, and if you think they won't get at least partway there, you haven't been paying attention to the people opposed to public education and government schools. At gun point. In which case you should read the proposal again, because it may be silly, but it's an unveiled look at an attitude that is not too far removed from the belief system of our Secretary of Education.

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.