Is this your first time here? Here's a collection of worthwhile reads from last week-- not all of the, but some of them. Give them a read and remember-- writers get read when you pass them on!
The FLCRC Seems Hell Bent on Privatizing Public Education
Florida does this weird thing with their constitution every several years. It's about time for it to happen again, and it doesn't look good for public education.
I Am the Teacher South Carolina Wants To Retain, and I Am Barely Hanging On
One more state having trouble holding on to teachers; one of them wrote a newspaper editorial to explain why
What Really Happened at the School Where Every Senior Got into College
Yet one more example of how miracle schools don't exist, and if sounds too good to be true, it is.
No We Didn't Sign Up for This
If this is a hair whiny for your tastes, I feel you. But it's a good listing of many ways the profession has changed in a short time.
How To Avoid Writing Like an Academic
For those of us who teach writing, a cool little set of instructions.
We Don't Need No Education
The editorial board at Metro Times takes Michigan's anti-public-ed GOP to task.
Bias in VAMS
There's another VAM lawsuit going on (this one in New Mexico) and Audrey Amrein Beardsley is there. In addition to an update, she offers some expert opinion from Michael T Kane.
A Punishing Decade for School Funding
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looks at how school funding has been doing since the crash of 2008. Come for the chart, stay for the analysis.
Are Schools Responsible for Teaching Boys To Respect Girls?
It's the issue of the month, and Nancy Flanagan has something thoughtful to say about it. If you don't save your EdWeek reads to follow her, you should.
Top Ed Tech Trends Fake News
Finally, your long read of the week, but well worth it, putting fake news in the context of our country as a whole and ed tech baloney in particular. From Audrey Watters.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Are Two Tiers the Right Choice?
I have long argued against a two-tiered education system. I may be wrong.
I was thinking about the two tiers last night as I was busy hollering at my elected representatives on twitter and facebook and the phone (I would have dispatched pigeons if I had them). It has long been a political go-to line to talk about the Two America's, usually as part of a promise to bring them together. I don't recall ever seeing such a brazen attempt to take the Two America's and build a bigger wall between them.
We could talk about the specifics of the Republic Tax Bill, but of course nobody really knows all the provisions (except maybe the corporate lobbyists who wrote them) because the bill was rammed through quickly without debate, discussion, or even being read first. But we know the broad outlines-- give more money to the rich. Give some pennies to everyone else, but only for a year or two-- and those pennies will be eaten up by all the other costs that the non-wealthy will bear. We will have a country where for some people $500 is lunch money chump change and for some people $500 is the difference between survival and financial ruin.
We could talk about the proven failure of trickle down economics, the approach that hasn't worked, ever. Nor does it make sense that it would. I don't spend more on my business just because I've got more money-- I expand my business because I think there's enough demand to support it. And demand does not grow because ten rich guys each have a few billion more. Demand grows because a billion poor and middle class people have more money to spend-- and the security to believe they don't have to hold onto it as a safeguard against unexpected disaster. Taking on a trillion or two in debt so that rich people can be richer doesn't help.
But wait-- you say-- aren't the Republicans eternally concerned about our Huge Deficit. How can they add a trillion to that already-huge gap? That, of course, will be Act II of this play. Some day in the not-too-distant future, the GOP will look around and go, "Holy smokes! Look at that huge deficit! We'd better start cutting things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security." Orrin Hatch has already stated that "we don't have money" to re-instate CHIP, the health insurance program for children.
Has the GOP horribly miscalculated, opening itself up to a blue wave in 2018? Maybe, but I'm not feeling very optimistic this morning, so I'm going to say that 1) the donor class will provide huge campaign financing, 2) the Democrats will nominate dopes and 3) the low-information voters who do get some sort of tax benefit in the first year will fail to notice that it disappears completely after the election.
So maybe we do need a two-tiered system of schools in this country. One tier for the wealthy, some nice private schools (complete with vouchers that give yet another kickback of tax dollars to the rich) that prepare them to be future leaders and well-off masters of the universe. And then another tier for those who had the misfortune to be poor and must be prepared to live on the bottom rungs of the ladder, because there is no hope in hell that they will ever get out. Oh, sure, a handful now and then will be found worthy, just to keep the fiction alive that we still have the prospect of upward mobility in this country (and always making sure to include a person or two of color so that it's clear, you know, that we aren't that racist). But mostly they will need the skills and training to survive in America's basement, because if they're born there, they will probably stay there, always living one health problem or bad accident away from financial ruin, never able to afford any education after high school, and condemned to a high school that is either an underfunded public school or a selective and possibly fraudulent charter school, established specifically to help them be more comfortable in their proper place (perhaps delivered through some half-assed software program that maintains their permanent personnel file for the convenience of their corporate overlords). Certainly this is what some people already envision; it's what Betsy DeVos means when she suggests that students should be "allowed" to go to school in a place that's the "best fit," like a snotty rich girl in an 80s comedy looking down her nose at lower class children and saying, "Dear, wouldn't you be happier somewhere with your own kind?"
Maybe asking one public school system to serve both Americas is too much.
Sorry to be so grim. I'm sure I'll rally. But this morning it feels as if the ed reform debates are simply the tail on a larger dog that is busily devouring some of the basic ideals that have previously driven this country. It feels as if somehow we've just lost the whole American plot, and the drive to bust up public education and sell off the pieces is just one more symptom.
I was thinking about the two tiers last night as I was busy hollering at my elected representatives on twitter and facebook and the phone (I would have dispatched pigeons if I had them). It has long been a political go-to line to talk about the Two America's, usually as part of a promise to bring them together. I don't recall ever seeing such a brazen attempt to take the Two America's and build a bigger wall between them.
We could talk about the specifics of the Republic Tax Bill, but of course nobody really knows all the provisions (except maybe the corporate lobbyists who wrote them) because the bill was rammed through quickly without debate, discussion, or even being read first. But we know the broad outlines-- give more money to the rich. Give some pennies to everyone else, but only for a year or two-- and those pennies will be eaten up by all the other costs that the non-wealthy will bear. We will have a country where for some people $500 is lunch money chump change and for some people $500 is the difference between survival and financial ruin.
We could talk about the proven failure of trickle down economics, the approach that hasn't worked, ever. Nor does it make sense that it would. I don't spend more on my business just because I've got more money-- I expand my business because I think there's enough demand to support it. And demand does not grow because ten rich guys each have a few billion more. Demand grows because a billion poor and middle class people have more money to spend-- and the security to believe they don't have to hold onto it as a safeguard against unexpected disaster. Taking on a trillion or two in debt so that rich people can be richer doesn't help.
But wait-- you say-- aren't the Republicans eternally concerned about our Huge Deficit. How can they add a trillion to that already-huge gap? That, of course, will be Act II of this play. Some day in the not-too-distant future, the GOP will look around and go, "Holy smokes! Look at that huge deficit! We'd better start cutting things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security." Orrin Hatch has already stated that "we don't have money" to re-instate CHIP, the health insurance program for children.
Has the GOP horribly miscalculated, opening itself up to a blue wave in 2018? Maybe, but I'm not feeling very optimistic this morning, so I'm going to say that 1) the donor class will provide huge campaign financing, 2) the Democrats will nominate dopes and 3) the low-information voters who do get some sort of tax benefit in the first year will fail to notice that it disappears completely after the election.
So maybe we do need a two-tiered system of schools in this country. One tier for the wealthy, some nice private schools (complete with vouchers that give yet another kickback of tax dollars to the rich) that prepare them to be future leaders and well-off masters of the universe. And then another tier for those who had the misfortune to be poor and must be prepared to live on the bottom rungs of the ladder, because there is no hope in hell that they will ever get out. Oh, sure, a handful now and then will be found worthy, just to keep the fiction alive that we still have the prospect of upward mobility in this country (and always making sure to include a person or two of color so that it's clear, you know, that we aren't that racist). But mostly they will need the skills and training to survive in America's basement, because if they're born there, they will probably stay there, always living one health problem or bad accident away from financial ruin, never able to afford any education after high school, and condemned to a high school that is either an underfunded public school or a selective and possibly fraudulent charter school, established specifically to help them be more comfortable in their proper place (perhaps delivered through some half-assed software program that maintains their permanent personnel file for the convenience of their corporate overlords). Certainly this is what some people already envision; it's what Betsy DeVos means when she suggests that students should be "allowed" to go to school in a place that's the "best fit," like a snotty rich girl in an 80s comedy looking down her nose at lower class children and saying, "Dear, wouldn't you be happier somewhere with your own kind?"
Maybe asking one public school system to serve both Americas is too much.
Sorry to be so grim. I'm sure I'll rally. But this morning it feels as if the ed reform debates are simply the tail on a larger dog that is busily devouring some of the basic ideals that have previously driven this country. It feels as if somehow we've just lost the whole American plot, and the drive to bust up public education and sell off the pieces is just one more symptom.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Keeping Up Appearances
Sometimes in this country we are far less concerned with actually doing a thing than we are with looking as if we're doing a thing.
Airport security is a prominent example. Year after year, security experts remind us that airport security sucks, that it is just an elaborate piece of theater. It doesn't actually make us safer, but it puts on a show. It certainly looks like we're making the skies safer-- unless, of course, you understand what you're looking at.
The Keeping Up Appearances approach is handy when really getting serious about a problem would be difficult and expensive. KUA is all about going through some motions that will reassure folks without actually having to expend the work and money it would take to really deal with an issue.
Ed Reform has been a great example of the Keeping Up Appearances approach. At every critical juncture, when we could be asking "How can we best deal with this issue," policy leaders, bureaucrats, and politicians have instead asked "How can we look as if we're dealing with this issue?"
Coming up with national education standards would be a huge and difficult undertaking, requiring a lot of eyes and ears and tons of brainpower, as well as collecting and sifting through a mountain of research that exists and creating another mountain of research that doesn't exist. And that's before we even get to creating a structure by which a robust, resilient and constantly-revising set of standards can be kept up-to-date while responding to ongoing feedback.
But, hey-- that would be hard, and expensive. So let's just have a few self-appointed, high-self-esteem guys throw something together on the fly. We'll call in some political favors, get some rich backers, and push the Common Core out there. They aren't real national educational standards, but they make it look like we've got them. Close enough.
It's also really hard to tell exactly how well students are doing, or how effective schools and teachers are. It would require several more mountains of research into what real success looks like both in the short and long run, and that in turn would lead us to new, complex and creative measures of those most important factors that we have identified. It would take a whole organization just to collect, analyze, and interpret the data. It would be super-hard and hella expensive.
So instead, let's just make every kid take a standardized test. It won't really measure anything worth measuring, but it sure looks as if we're gathering honest-to-goodness data about student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Close enough.
Even school choice. I mean, we could set up a full, robust network of schools in a community, with each school offering different strengths and programs. We'd have to allow for extensive training and research into effective approaches, and the real expense would be staggering, with multiple facilities instead of one, and a surplus of seats. With students spread over several different entities, the oversight requirements just to keep students from falling through the cracks, let alone making sure that the various choice schools are delivering on their promises-- well, that would be a fairly huge extra department as well. The entire system could be impressive and exciting, but it would involve the costs of running several schools where we used to only fund one-- the taxpayer bill would be enormous, but if people were really serious about choice and variety and a superior education for every single child in America, political leaders would be able to lead a call for much higher taxes to make this dream real.
Or, we could just let anybody open any old kind of charter school, provide zero oversight, and let everyone fight over funding that is a fraction of what's needed. And just scrap that whole "make sure every child gets an outstanding education (and not just an opportunity)" business. Close enough.
High quality full education? Eh, just get some reading and math in there. In fact, just stick to the stuff that employers ask for. Attacking the problems of poverty? Just make some noises about how education will fix everything, somehow. Systemic racism? Just, you know, act real concerned occasionally. Trying to fix the teacher "shortage"? Have a committee issue some findings.
We could list dozens of ways in which policy leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats try to half-ass their way to looking as if they are addressing an issue in education. If you have been in the classroom for more than five years, you already have a list of all the times our "leaders" announced their latest plan to "fix" something about schools by way of some not-really-serious program whose real objective is to keep up appearances, to look as if we are actually working on the issues. The people really working on solutions-- those are the ones standing by the "leaders'" elbows saying, "Well, you know, that part where I get to make a bunch of money pretending to address this issue-- I like that part. Keep that part."
Meanwhile, teachers are in actual classrooms addressing actual issues with actual students, where authentic solutions are required. I can't help a student by trying to look as if I care about him. I can't teach a unit by trying to look as if we're studying it while I try to look as if I know what I'm talking about. I won't come up with evaluations for the students by looking as if I went over their work.
This lack of seriousness has always been a feature of public education. If it seems worse right now, that is perhaps because the White House is occupied by a guy who's mostly trying to look as if he's a President, surrounding himself with people who look as if they would be good for their jobs. Education has always been plagued by half-assed smoke and mirrors; now it's just a national problem for all sectors as well.
Airport security is a prominent example. Year after year, security experts remind us that airport security sucks, that it is just an elaborate piece of theater. It doesn't actually make us safer, but it puts on a show. It certainly looks like we're making the skies safer-- unless, of course, you understand what you're looking at.
The Keeping Up Appearances approach is handy when really getting serious about a problem would be difficult and expensive. KUA is all about going through some motions that will reassure folks without actually having to expend the work and money it would take to really deal with an issue.
Ed Reform has been a great example of the Keeping Up Appearances approach. At every critical juncture, when we could be asking "How can we best deal with this issue," policy leaders, bureaucrats, and politicians have instead asked "How can we look as if we're dealing with this issue?"
Coming up with national education standards would be a huge and difficult undertaking, requiring a lot of eyes and ears and tons of brainpower, as well as collecting and sifting through a mountain of research that exists and creating another mountain of research that doesn't exist. And that's before we even get to creating a structure by which a robust, resilient and constantly-revising set of standards can be kept up-to-date while responding to ongoing feedback.
But, hey-- that would be hard, and expensive. So let's just have a few self-appointed, high-self-esteem guys throw something together on the fly. We'll call in some political favors, get some rich backers, and push the Common Core out there. They aren't real national educational standards, but they make it look like we've got them. Close enough.
It's also really hard to tell exactly how well students are doing, or how effective schools and teachers are. It would require several more mountains of research into what real success looks like both in the short and long run, and that in turn would lead us to new, complex and creative measures of those most important factors that we have identified. It would take a whole organization just to collect, analyze, and interpret the data. It would be super-hard and hella expensive.
So instead, let's just make every kid take a standardized test. It won't really measure anything worth measuring, but it sure looks as if we're gathering honest-to-goodness data about student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Close enough.
Even school choice. I mean, we could set up a full, robust network of schools in a community, with each school offering different strengths and programs. We'd have to allow for extensive training and research into effective approaches, and the real expense would be staggering, with multiple facilities instead of one, and a surplus of seats. With students spread over several different entities, the oversight requirements just to keep students from falling through the cracks, let alone making sure that the various choice schools are delivering on their promises-- well, that would be a fairly huge extra department as well. The entire system could be impressive and exciting, but it would involve the costs of running several schools where we used to only fund one-- the taxpayer bill would be enormous, but if people were really serious about choice and variety and a superior education for every single child in America, political leaders would be able to lead a call for much higher taxes to make this dream real.
Or, we could just let anybody open any old kind of charter school, provide zero oversight, and let everyone fight over funding that is a fraction of what's needed. And just scrap that whole "make sure every child gets an outstanding education (and not just an opportunity)" business. Close enough.
High quality full education? Eh, just get some reading and math in there. In fact, just stick to the stuff that employers ask for. Attacking the problems of poverty? Just make some noises about how education will fix everything, somehow. Systemic racism? Just, you know, act real concerned occasionally. Trying to fix the teacher "shortage"? Have a committee issue some findings.
We could list dozens of ways in which policy leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats try to half-ass their way to looking as if they are addressing an issue in education. If you have been in the classroom for more than five years, you already have a list of all the times our "leaders" announced their latest plan to "fix" something about schools by way of some not-really-serious program whose real objective is to keep up appearances, to look as if we are actually working on the issues. The people really working on solutions-- those are the ones standing by the "leaders'" elbows saying, "Well, you know, that part where I get to make a bunch of money pretending to address this issue-- I like that part. Keep that part."
Meanwhile, teachers are in actual classrooms addressing actual issues with actual students, where authentic solutions are required. I can't help a student by trying to look as if I care about him. I can't teach a unit by trying to look as if we're studying it while I try to look as if I know what I'm talking about. I won't come up with evaluations for the students by looking as if I went over their work.
This lack of seriousness has always been a feature of public education. If it seems worse right now, that is perhaps because the White House is occupied by a guy who's mostly trying to look as if he's a President, surrounding himself with people who look as if they would be good for their jobs. Education has always been plagued by half-assed smoke and mirrors; now it's just a national problem for all sectors as well.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Killing Higher Ed
I will say this for the current GOP regime-- where there have been few features that can distinguish their ed policies of their Democratic predecessors, they are managing to find and underline one. Obama-Duncan-et. al paid lip service to the goal of a college education and made the college entry rate one of the centerpieces of their programs.
But the GOP is making itself equally clear that college sucks, that it is an institution that they neither respect nor love. Some data suggests this attitude is a recent development, though as with many ugly attitudes abroad these days, it could be that the anti-college feelings have always been there, but now feel a new-found freedom to tromp around in the light of day.
But the anti-college crowd is not just tromping around-- they have begun tromping on the institution itself, with policies designed to kill higher education as we know it.
Today's Wall Street Journal covers the House GOP's higher education package (I know-- paywall-- but if we use WSJ coverage, we can be assured that no liberal bias is tainting the report).
The proposal ordinarily would face a long year of hearings and revisions, but these days, God only knows. But we need to pay attention, because the bill is ugly. Ugly.
This, it should be noted, is over and above the assault on college that is folded into the tax "plan." That collection of baloney takes away interest deductions for student loans, obliterates a tax credit, and counts graduate school tuition waivers as income (which will mean that people with actual incomes of around $15K will end up paying taxes on "incomes" of around $50K). All of these will make college more expensive.
The proposed bill is called The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform Act (PROSPER), and it will also put higher education out of the reach of many students. However it does more than that-- it also changes the fundamental nature of higher education into something that really isn't higher education at all.
Student loans would be capped, so that students and their families would be limited in the amount of money they can borrow. So for many students, that would be enough for a "game over." The bill also rolls back loan forgiveness for those who spend a decade in the public sector, and loan repayments would no longer be adjusted to fit income levels. Working at a minimum wage job while trying to make your $600/month loan payments? Sucks to be you, college grad.
These changes favor people who are trying to use college as a profit center and students as their cash cows, so it fits that the bill also is a big fat wet kiss to for-profit colleges. The Obama administration had started to crack down on these predators (though they were none too quick about it). While Betsy DeVos's USED has been rolling back those rules, this bill goes a step further and prohibits USEDs of the future from implementing "gainful employment" rules. Those were the rules that said if you were advertising your predatory college by promising jobs and nobody who graduated from your predatory college was actually getting jobs, the feds were going to stop handing you money. Various other rules will also be scrapped, like rules against giving student recruiters incentive pay for every sucker they managed to con into attending these predatory schools. The reasoning seems to be that a bunch of rules unfairly affect for-profit schools, when the for-profits ought to get the same breaks as everyone else, because how are those folks supposed to rake in the money if they have to follow rules and stuff.
The help for the for-profits underlines the change in the very purpose of higher education under the bill. Here's education opponent Virginia Foxx:
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce which drafted the proposal, lamented that so much of higher education was considered “irrelevant” by employers. She hopes to better harness technology by pushing accreditors to lean on schools to accept more creative alternatives to higher education.
Or as the WSJ itself puts it:
The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.
That's it. The purpose of colleges and universities is to provide companies with the trained meat widgets they require to make money. Anything else you thought was an important part of higher education-- inquiry, study, growth, expanding the horizon of human understanding-- that stuff is all crap. The only measure of "education" that matters is "does somebody want to pay you money to do that."
And since "higher education" is to be redefined as "place to fulfill more advanced employer desires," well, we don't really need those four-year ivy covered hotbeds of liberal quackery at all, do we? Here's Betsy DeVos just two days ago:
Students should be able to pursue their education where, when and how it works for them and their schedules. Financial aid should not be withheld simply because they pursue a nontraditional path. Politicians and bureaucrats should not dictate to students when and how they can learn.
In other words, when it comes to getting a piece of that sweet federal student aid money, why should actual colleges and universities have all the fun. Apprenticeships, for example, ought to count.
There's more. Community colleges will get money to form corporate partnerships (send your child to Exxon Training College) and minority-serving colleges will get tighter accountability rules (because, you know, Those People). And everyone has to prove that they support the freedom of right-wing speakers to appear on campus (because snowflakes).
And because we love the Law of Unintended Consequences, one last point from Foxx:
Under the committee’s proposal, if an institution’s program or repayment system doesn’t set up a student for success, then it cannot be eligible for student aid.
This has one clear consequence-- if colleges want to get paid, they must make sure not to accept any students with less than great prospects. It's just like charters! If you take a potential failure into your school, she'll cost you money-- so screen carefully.
While much of this is a continuation of Obama-Duncan (let the private sector in! judge education based on employability!) the GOP is bringing a heightened level of enthusiasm to this tromping of education.
You begin to see why this is the PROSPER act-- it is designed to help vendors of training services (including for profit predatory colleges) and future employers prosper. Of course, rich families will continue to send their children for an actual higher education, but for the rest of the Lessers-- well, what they really need is training that will help them become useful tools for their future corporate masters.
But the GOP is making itself equally clear that college sucks, that it is an institution that they neither respect nor love. Some data suggests this attitude is a recent development, though as with many ugly attitudes abroad these days, it could be that the anti-college feelings have always been there, but now feel a new-found freedom to tromp around in the light of day.
But the anti-college crowd is not just tromping around-- they have begun tromping on the institution itself, with policies designed to kill higher education as we know it.
Today's Wall Street Journal covers the House GOP's higher education package (I know-- paywall-- but if we use WSJ coverage, we can be assured that no liberal bias is tainting the report).
The proposal ordinarily would face a long year of hearings and revisions, but these days, God only knows. But we need to pay attention, because the bill is ugly. Ugly.
This, it should be noted, is over and above the assault on college that is folded into the tax "plan." That collection of baloney takes away interest deductions for student loans, obliterates a tax credit, and counts graduate school tuition waivers as income (which will mean that people with actual incomes of around $15K will end up paying taxes on "incomes" of around $50K). All of these will make college more expensive.
The proposed bill is called The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform Act (PROSPER), and it will also put higher education out of the reach of many students. However it does more than that-- it also changes the fundamental nature of higher education into something that really isn't higher education at all.
Student loans would be capped, so that students and their families would be limited in the amount of money they can borrow. So for many students, that would be enough for a "game over." The bill also rolls back loan forgiveness for those who spend a decade in the public sector, and loan repayments would no longer be adjusted to fit income levels. Working at a minimum wage job while trying to make your $600/month loan payments? Sucks to be you, college grad.
These changes favor people who are trying to use college as a profit center and students as their cash cows, so it fits that the bill also is a big fat wet kiss to for-profit colleges. The Obama administration had started to crack down on these predators (though they were none too quick about it). While Betsy DeVos's USED has been rolling back those rules, this bill goes a step further and prohibits USEDs of the future from implementing "gainful employment" rules. Those were the rules that said if you were advertising your predatory college by promising jobs and nobody who graduated from your predatory college was actually getting jobs, the feds were going to stop handing you money. Various other rules will also be scrapped, like rules against giving student recruiters incentive pay for every sucker they managed to con into attending these predatory schools. The reasoning seems to be that a bunch of rules unfairly affect for-profit schools, when the for-profits ought to get the same breaks as everyone else, because how are those folks supposed to rake in the money if they have to follow rules and stuff.
The help for the for-profits underlines the change in the very purpose of higher education under the bill. Here's education opponent Virginia Foxx:
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce which drafted the proposal, lamented that so much of higher education was considered “irrelevant” by employers. She hopes to better harness technology by pushing accreditors to lean on schools to accept more creative alternatives to higher education.
Or as the WSJ itself puts it:
The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.
That's it. The purpose of colleges and universities is to provide companies with the trained meat widgets they require to make money. Anything else you thought was an important part of higher education-- inquiry, study, growth, expanding the horizon of human understanding-- that stuff is all crap. The only measure of "education" that matters is "does somebody want to pay you money to do that."
And since "higher education" is to be redefined as "place to fulfill more advanced employer desires," well, we don't really need those four-year ivy covered hotbeds of liberal quackery at all, do we? Here's Betsy DeVos just two days ago:
Students should be able to pursue their education where, when and how it works for them and their schedules. Financial aid should not be withheld simply because they pursue a nontraditional path. Politicians and bureaucrats should not dictate to students when and how they can learn.
In other words, when it comes to getting a piece of that sweet federal student aid money, why should actual colleges and universities have all the fun. Apprenticeships, for example, ought to count.
There's more. Community colleges will get money to form corporate partnerships (send your child to Exxon Training College) and minority-serving colleges will get tighter accountability rules (because, you know, Those People). And everyone has to prove that they support the freedom of right-wing speakers to appear on campus (because snowflakes).
And because we love the Law of Unintended Consequences, one last point from Foxx:
Under the committee’s proposal, if an institution’s program or repayment system doesn’t set up a student for success, then it cannot be eligible for student aid.
This has one clear consequence-- if colleges want to get paid, they must make sure not to accept any students with less than great prospects. It's just like charters! If you take a potential failure into your school, she'll cost you money-- so screen carefully.
While much of this is a continuation of Obama-Duncan (let the private sector in! judge education based on employability!) the GOP is bringing a heightened level of enthusiasm to this tromping of education.
You begin to see why this is the PROSPER act-- it is designed to help vendors of training services (including for profit predatory colleges) and future employers prosper. Of course, rich families will continue to send their children for an actual higher education, but for the rest of the Lessers-- well, what they really need is training that will help them become useful tools for their future corporate masters.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Experience, Expertise, Ed Reform and Existential Dread
Kathleen Porter-Magee offered up an interesting piece at Fordham's Flypaper blog last week, but before we even get into the article itself, let's look at the quote she used to open it, because I would like that quote on a t-shirt, or large poster:
“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”
We valorize teacher “freedom” and “creativity” over things like proven curricula, which are too frequently perceived as a constraint on teacher autonomy.
“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”
—Werner Heisenberg
Hmm. Does this seem like an insight that could have been applied to the world of education reform over the past few decades of policies imposed by non-teacher policy mavens who ignored the advice and insight and expertise of teachers (and then, years later, announced the very problems teachers had warned them about in tones usually reserved for the discovery of fire)?
Is that where this article is going? Is this going to be a reformy acknowledgement that, "Yeah, we should have involved teachers and listened to what they had to say about education before we started trying to remake the whole institution?" Spoiler alert-- no.
So what is it about?
Porter-Magee starts out with a tale of starting out teaching science at a parochial school, where she was given a room and a closet full of books and told, "Have at it." This, she observes, was probably not the best way to get her started in the classroom.
Porter-Magee, we should note, is a fellow at the ever-reformy Fordham, and the superintendent of the Partnership for Inner City Education, a sort of charter-style management organization that runs some Catholic schools in New York City. (At least one former employee is not a fan, but that's a small sample). She has also worked for the Archdiocese of DC, the College Board, and Achievement First.
She refers us to Tom Nichols's new book, The Death of Expertise, from which she pulls this quote:
[W]e cannot function without acknowledging the limits of our
knowledge and trusting the expertise of others. We sometimes resist this
conclusion because it undermines our sense of independence and
autonomy. We want to believe we are capable of making all kinds of
decisions, and we chafe at the person who corrects us or tells us we’re
wrong.
So here's where we're going. In Porter-Magee's model, "proven" curriculum is the expertise, and teachers are the ones who need to learn trust. Some more quotes from her article:
We valorize teacher “freedom” and “creativity” over things like proven curricula, which are too frequently perceived as a constraint on teacher autonomy.
In education we have been conditioned to believe that mandating
curriculum is akin to micromanaging an artist. That’s not only wrong,
it’s dangerous.
So, teachers should suck it up and defer to curriculum that is research based and proven effective.
On the one hand, she absolutely has a point. Having good materials is half of the battle in a classroom, and it gives me an absolute pain in the gut to see some teacher do a quick google search and download their materials from God-knows-where. I have also had the experience of teaching with a bad textbook, and it is far easier to just park such a text in the closet and build all your materials yourself.
On the other hand, there are some real issues with her point.
First, who decides and selects the "effective" materials. She seems to be suggesting that such selections be made by someone other than the classroom teacher, perhaps based on some hard and fast criteria. But "effective" these days too often means "research links it to higher test scores" and that's a problem because A) test scores are a lousy measure of effective education and B) test scores only exist for reading and math.
She's distressed at a RAND study that shows teachers getting materials from Google and Pinterest. But both, as well as the various teacher-to-teacher sites, are excellent places to find materials that are tested, proven and endorsed by other teachers who use them. Porter-Magee stops just sort of saying so, but she seems to be from the camp that believes that teachers lack the expertise to make curriculum and materials choices. I can't dismiss that out of hand-- it has become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy as more ed schools concentrate on training proto-teachers to align to the standards and teach to the test. But for the most part, I believe she's wrong. I am the number one expert on teaching my subject in my classroom. Nobody else knows the content, the students, and my own strengths and weaknesses, as well as how all those things intersect and interplay-- nobody knows that better than I do. Does that mean I ignore other experts and fail to consult other sources of expertise? Of course not-- that's part of how I got to be an expert in the first place.
Freeing me up from curriculum decisions-- don't do me any favors. Like every other teacher on the planet, I will rewrite whatever curriculum you hand me on the fly in the classroom every day as my professional expertise sees fit. The ongoing attempts to teacher-proof classrooms, to create a seamless system in which it doesn't really matter which teacher you get-- these do far more harm than good. Framing them as concern trolling ("We just want to save you from having to do all this hard work") do not make them any more helpful.
Porter-Magee says, "We owe it to our teachers to give them the tools they need to succeed" and I don't disagree. But among those tools we will find teacher autonomy and the freedom to use our expert judgment in our classrooms. Porter-Magee has here once again repeated the classic reformer mistake, even as she seemed to understand it-- she has assumed that the experts on education are to be found somewhere other than standing in a classroom.
We are educational experts. Not the only ones, not infallible ones. But any system that ignores our level of expertise is making a mistake that experts should know enough to avoid.
Monday, November 27, 2017
Don't Be Batman
Well, here's a piece of research you might not have expected.
The sexy headline reductive title is the Batman Effect (published almost a year ago), but the idea being tested here was a little broader than "Always Be Batman." From the abstract:
This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered longer than 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective.
While I generally support the idea of Being Batman, there are some hugely troubling implications of this study (and I'm not even counting that Queen of Grit Angela Duckworth is one of the co-authors). One problem is captured by this review of the study at Big Think:
With the onset of early childhood and attending preschool, increased demands are placed on the self-regulatory skills of kids.
This underlines the problem we see with more and more or what passes for early childhood education these days-- we're not worried about whether the school is ready to appropriately handle the students, but instead are busy trying to beat three-, four- and five-year-olds into developmentally inappropriate states to get them "ready" for their early years of education. It is precisely and absolutely backwards. I can't say this hard enough-- if early childhood programs are requiring "increased demands" on the self-regulatory skills of kids, it is the programs that are wrong, not the kids. Full stop.
What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the "problem" that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.
Because you know where else you hear this kind of behavior described? In accounts of victims of intense, repeated trauma. In victims of torture who talk about dealing by just pretending they aren't even there, that someone else is occupying their body while they float away from the horror.
That should not be a description of How To Cope With Preschool.
Nor should the primary lesson of early childhood education be, "You can't really cut it as yourself. You'll need to be somebody else to get ahead in life." I cannot even begin to wrap my head around what a destructive message that is for a small child.
The researchers minimize this effect as just role play. The kids, they say, simply imitated someone they thought had the qualities needed to deal with the task. And hey-- role play is fun. But it's appropriate that Duckworth is in this pack, because we are just talking about other ways to grow grit:
Perseverance can pave the pathway to success. The current research suggests that perseverance can be taught through role play, a skill that is accessible to even very young children.
No. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I play one on tv, but I have to believe that the root of grit or perseverance is the certainty that whatever happens, you'll deal with it. When my high school students are anxious or afraid, it's because when they imagine what's coming, they don't imagine themselves being enough to deal with it. I can't imagine ever telling them, "Well, you probably aren't, but maybe you can pretend to be somebody else." Because the "you probably aren't" part drowns out everything else. The most useful message for them is "You can handle this. You will be okay."
With my high schoolers, we're talking about challenging schoolwork, but we're also talking about real-life challenges that the world has put in their way. In Preschool, it's different.
Let's be clear what the study is suggesting as a process for four year old tiny humans:
1) Set standards and goals that the students are not equipped to meet.
2) Tell the students that they arn't able to handle the challenge, so they'd better pretend to be someone else.
I am thinking the solution to all the problems here lies in Step 1. Let's give small children tasks to perform that are developmentally appropriate. Let's set them up for success, and not for failure. Then when they someday discover on their own that you should, in fact, always be Batman, it will be so that they can have some fun with their friends, and not so that they can survive in school.
The sexy headline reductive title is the Batman Effect (published almost a year ago), but the idea being tested here was a little broader than "Always Be Batman." From the abstract:
This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered longer than 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective.
While I generally support the idea of Being Batman, there are some hugely troubling implications of this study (and I'm not even counting that Queen of Grit Angela Duckworth is one of the co-authors). One problem is captured by this review of the study at Big Think:
With the onset of early childhood and attending preschool, increased demands are placed on the self-regulatory skills of kids.
This underlines the problem we see with more and more or what passes for early childhood education these days-- we're not worried about whether the school is ready to appropriately handle the students, but instead are busy trying to beat three-, four- and five-year-olds into developmentally inappropriate states to get them "ready" for their early years of education. It is precisely and absolutely backwards. I can't say this hard enough-- if early childhood programs are requiring "increased demands" on the self-regulatory skills of kids, it is the programs that are wrong, not the kids. Full stop.
What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the "problem" that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.
Because you know where else you hear this kind of behavior described? In accounts of victims of intense, repeated trauma. In victims of torture who talk about dealing by just pretending they aren't even there, that someone else is occupying their body while they float away from the horror.
That should not be a description of How To Cope With Preschool.
Nor should the primary lesson of early childhood education be, "You can't really cut it as yourself. You'll need to be somebody else to get ahead in life." I cannot even begin to wrap my head around what a destructive message that is for a small child.
The researchers minimize this effect as just role play. The kids, they say, simply imitated someone they thought had the qualities needed to deal with the task. And hey-- role play is fun. But it's appropriate that Duckworth is in this pack, because we are just talking about other ways to grow grit:
Perseverance can pave the pathway to success. The current research suggests that perseverance can be taught through role play, a skill that is accessible to even very young children.
No. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I play one on tv, but I have to believe that the root of grit or perseverance is the certainty that whatever happens, you'll deal with it. When my high school students are anxious or afraid, it's because when they imagine what's coming, they don't imagine themselves being enough to deal with it. I can't imagine ever telling them, "Well, you probably aren't, but maybe you can pretend to be somebody else." Because the "you probably aren't" part drowns out everything else. The most useful message for them is "You can handle this. You will be okay."
With my high schoolers, we're talking about challenging schoolwork, but we're also talking about real-life challenges that the world has put in their way. In Preschool, it's different.
Let's be clear what the study is suggesting as a process for four year old tiny humans:
1) Set standards and goals that the students are not equipped to meet.
2) Tell the students that they arn't able to handle the challenge, so they'd better pretend to be someone else.
I am thinking the solution to all the problems here lies in Step 1. Let's give small children tasks to perform that are developmentally appropriate. Let's set them up for success, and not for failure. Then when they someday discover on their own that you should, in fact, always be Batman, it will be so that they can have some fun with their friends, and not so that they can survive in school.
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Horace Mann and Selfishness
My parents still bring us things when they come back from vacation, and on their last trip, my mother found me a copy of Thoughts Selected from the Writing of Horace Mann. The book is copyrighted 1867 by his then-widow Mary, and it's an interesting read. I'm not going to pretend that the Massachusetts Whig got everything right in creating a progressive (for the time) secular public universal education system, but he certainly put more that into it than some folks almost 200 years later.
Here's the very first excerpt in the book:
If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil and sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstruct its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal. It is worthy, therefore, to be urged forward over the dead obstacles of listlessness and apathy, and against the living hostility of those sordid men who oppose its advancement for no higher reason than that of the silversmiths who trafficked in the shrines of the goddess Diana, and who would have quenched the holy light of Christianity for all mankind rather than forgo their profits upon idol worship.
Let's skip past the 19th century male-centric and Christian-centric language for a moment. There are a couple of insights here that I find noteworthy.
Seeing ignorance as an obstacle to education is pretty obvious; seeing selfishness as an equal-billing obstacle is not. Certainly simple selfishness on the order of "I want schools to produce more workers for my business so I can make more money" has become an obstacle for education. But an unwillingness to see any point of view beyond the ones we already have, the kind of selfishness that says the universe must fit itself to our conception-- that is selfishness of a high order, and an absolute barrier to learning anything. But education can also open us up to understanding that there are other people in the world, and their understanding and experience is often different from our own. I often describe education with the phrase "learning what it means to be fully human in the world," and that, to me, means understanding there is a depth and breadth and complexity to humanity greater than what is contained within our own skin.
And of course in our century we still confront those "sordid men" who obstruct the path of education because they are intent on profiteering instead. And while I might not have laid on the "living hostility" of these persons, it is true that many of them seem awfully angry about teachers unions, money spent, rules that get in the way of commerce, and just generally the whole business of public education. So maybe the hostility shoe fits.
Mann may not have had a perfect crystal ball, but reading him reminds me that many of our current issues are not new ones. It also reminds me that it's nice to read the words of someone from any century who takes public education seriously and doesn't want to reduce it to something narrow and meager like test prep or college-and-career-ready training. Which is a little selfish of me, but I can live with that.
Here's the very first excerpt in the book:
If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil and sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstruct its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal. It is worthy, therefore, to be urged forward over the dead obstacles of listlessness and apathy, and against the living hostility of those sordid men who oppose its advancement for no higher reason than that of the silversmiths who trafficked in the shrines of the goddess Diana, and who would have quenched the holy light of Christianity for all mankind rather than forgo their profits upon idol worship.
Let's skip past the 19th century male-centric and Christian-centric language for a moment. There are a couple of insights here that I find noteworthy.
Seeing ignorance as an obstacle to education is pretty obvious; seeing selfishness as an equal-billing obstacle is not. Certainly simple selfishness on the order of "I want schools to produce more workers for my business so I can make more money" has become an obstacle for education. But an unwillingness to see any point of view beyond the ones we already have, the kind of selfishness that says the universe must fit itself to our conception-- that is selfishness of a high order, and an absolute barrier to learning anything. But education can also open us up to understanding that there are other people in the world, and their understanding and experience is often different from our own. I often describe education with the phrase "learning what it means to be fully human in the world," and that, to me, means understanding there is a depth and breadth and complexity to humanity greater than what is contained within our own skin.
And of course in our century we still confront those "sordid men" who obstruct the path of education because they are intent on profiteering instead. And while I might not have laid on the "living hostility" of these persons, it is true that many of them seem awfully angry about teachers unions, money spent, rules that get in the way of commerce, and just generally the whole business of public education. So maybe the hostility shoe fits.
Mann may not have had a perfect crystal ball, but reading him reminds me that many of our current issues are not new ones. It also reminds me that it's nice to read the words of someone from any century who takes public education seriously and doesn't want to reduce it to something narrow and meager like test prep or college-and-career-ready training. Which is a little selfish of me, but I can live with that.
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