Public Sector Efficiency

So, I was watching a Twitter conversation today involving some political aspirant from Texas, and at this point. I had to jump in (well, not "had to," but I did anyway).

1) This tiresome baloney. What business does "efficiently" is not what government does at all

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

2) because the secret of "efficiency" is to serve only chosen customers and serve them only just well enough

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

3) efficiency loves mediocrity and hates excellence

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

4) and most of all efficiency demands that some "customers" be left behind, unserved

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

5) the private sector does not, will not, can not serve all citizens

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

6) so if you want mediocre schools that only serve some citizens, then the private sector is the one to call

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

7) but if you want pursue excellent education for all, the private sector is not usefull

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

8) has gov achieved excellent education for all? Nope nope nope. But for the private sector it's not even an aspiration

— Peter Greene (@palan57) December 23, 2017

I've made versions of this point before. Efficiency, particularly in business, is all about choosing which customers you will cut loose. On the top end are customers whose ideas of excellent quality are too expensive to meet. That includes students with special needs, who are a small enough part of the market that they can be safely ignored, and children of wealthy parents, who will go procure what they want anyway. On the lower end are poor people, who can't provide sufficient ROI. Bottom line-- private sector efficiency always means abandoning a portion of the market. There is no private sector industry built on providing products and services to all citizens, and those that come close (automotive, restaurant) do it by providing some folks with top quality and providing others with cheap crap.

As I admit at the end, the public school system has not successfully provided educational excellence for everyone, but the private sector doesn't even want to.

The conversation lurched on, and Grisham eventually retreated to the notion that he supports all kinds of schools (and, presumably, the magic fairy dust that makes it possible to run multiple schools with the same money you used to use for a single school). Then he marked himself a faux conservative by falling back on the notion that he would wear liberal disapproval as a badge of honor. Remember when conservatives were defined by actual principles and not simply the ability to anger liberals.

But I digress. Private sector efficiency is great for doing things like creating a hamburger chain, but it is completely unsuited to run a nation's public education system.

PA: Another District Backs Away from Summit

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools were on the list of schools excited to be buying Summit's School in a Box and deploying it. In their case, sixth graders were going to bear the brunt of this edu-product, courtesy of the Zuckerberg-favored techno-based sort-of-personalized learning charter school chain that is diversifying itself into combo charter school and beta tester for Summit's software product.

Some summits are more beautiful than others

Now they are joining the ranks of the schools backing away from their initial decision.

Local coverage of the issue presents us with some good news and some bad news. Here's a sample:

GOOD NEWS: Perfect Terminology

Is there any better terminology for capturing the oxymoronic nature of programs like Summit than "mass customized learning program." A mass produced program scaled up to the mass market, and yet somehow customized. The term was most notably put out there in a book/ed program that actually used it unironically.

Generally, mass customized learning is a digitally framed curriculum for a class in which a teacher introduces content for students and outlines their goals, then the pupils follow online components of their course, mainly at their own pace, with the ability to complete lessons and take tests at their own pace — sometimes repeating tests until they get passing grades.

So, not personalized. Just individually paced, with students having ample opportunity to figure out how to beat the program to master the material.

I've been looking for a term to use to talk about competency based education (that isn't actually about creating competency) and personalized learning (which isn't actually personalized). Mass customized learning program is a good one, and I'm happy to see it cropping up in regular media.

GOOD NEWS: Parents Catching On

Indiana implemented Summit this fall-- "quietly"-- and parents noticed.

After just a month, "parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens."

Well, yes.  That's how a MCLP works.

The board backed away from Summit after a meeting packed with parents who wanted a change. The article suggests that the board is concerned that this is simply a loud minority-- but they are still scaling back.

BAD NEWS: Teachers Defending This Baloney

Sixth-grade teachers Linda Lansberry and Kevin Freeberg stood up for the program. I'm not impressed by their reasoning.

“This is project based learning and it is astounding. I have not one student failing,” Lansberry said. “Every one of my students feels valued."

"Not one student failing" is not a metric I'm impressed by, unless you can show me evidence that the Not Failing is linked to actual learning. Not Failing is an easy mark to hit, particularly in a system where students just sit and take computerized tests until they pass.

BAD NEWS: The Backing Is a Little Wishy Washy

Currently they're Summiting four courses. They might drop back to two, and then make it totally optional next year. They're waiting for a survey conducted by a professional survey group (speaking of wasting money-- there are 220 6th graders. Do you really need to hire someone to survey them) which will return results next moth. And de-Summiting in the middle of year-- putting the canned curriculum back in the box-- will mean some scrambling for teachers, students and parents.

Which underlines another issue of MCLPs. As a teacher, I collect feedback every single day, and I constantly course-correct. A MCLP can't. The people who wrote the program won't even meet the students, let alone collect information from them that could influence how the course unfolds. Changing directions and adapting is part of what a live teacher does; it is not something software can do.

But GOOD NEWS-- extending Summit to fourth and fifth grades is apparently now off the table.

BAD NEWS: Those Damn Tests

Part of the discussion in Indiana is centered around the question of whether Summit works or not (a question that might have been good to ask before signing up). Guess where Indiana may look for those answers.

“Is there any solid evidence that it works?” Caruso asked. “I don’t care how people feel. Is it educating kids? Are their scores and grades up or down? Is it working?”

So, we'll check test scores. Once again, some folks want to reduce "working" in a school program to "good test scores on the Big Standardized Test."

If that's your measure-- if you think a school's quality is measured by how well students do on a single narrowly-focused, poorly-constructed multiple choice test, then you are doing it wrong. 

BAD NEWS: What Nobody Is Discussing

Nowhere in this discussion do I see anyone talking about the data being collected by Summit, nor a discussion of how, where, and to what purpose that data is being stored-- nor who will ultimately have access to it/

If your school district is using software to handle instruction, you must be talking about all of these data issues.

So the conquest of the educational world by Summit is not running as smoothly as they might like, but not as poorly as some of the rest of us might like. The solution as always remains the same-- pay attention, and voice your opinion.

Heartland's Plan for Privatization

The election of Donald J. Trump as president offers the best opportunity in decades to shrink the size and power of government and increase individual liberty. 

So writes the Heartland Institute, a libertarian thinky tank, on a page devoted to all the Trumpian actions they approve of. This outfit was founded in 1984 by David H. Padden, a Chicago investor who had also been a director of the CATO Institute. They've advocated for fracking, stood up for tobacco companies, and advocate tireless for global warming denial. Plenty of related industries have been generous in supporting them, though they like to keep their money dark So, yeah-- they're Those Guys.

So it will come as no surprise that fifteen years ago they were laying out the program by which vouchers could be used to privatize education. Hat tip to Jennifer Berkshire, who turned up this article from Heartland's website for February of 2002. As always, it's interesting to see what some reformsters used to say back when they were just spitballing and not trying to spin.

Also 2002

Joseph Bast, then-CEO of THI, thought that 2002 would be a "turning point in the decades-long battle to restore parental rights and a competitive education industry in the US." This did not turn out to be particularly prescient, but many of his thoughts about the shape of the battle are a bit more disturbing and, fifteen years later, familiar.

Bast hoped that the Cleveland decision by the Supreme Court would open the voucher floodgates, and to some extent, that has been true in Ohio. What he failed to anticipate was that the floodgates were somewhat self-limiting, as many Ohio charter schools turned out to suck, lessening enthusiasm among customers.

But mostly Bast was clear and blunt about the goals of voucher advocates. The second section of the article kicks off under the heading "The Privatization Opportunity.'

Elementary and secondary schooling in the U.S. is the country’s last remaining socialist enterprise. Other major industries have moved from the government sector to the private sector in recent years, including airports, hospitals, ports and harbors, railroads, water works, and even (as Berkowitz noted) the administration of welfare programs. 

 Bast expresses a childlike faith in the magic of the marketplace. "Privatization is so effective it typically costs a private firm half as much as the government to produce a product or service of similar (often superior) quality." It's a cute notion, for which he offers zero evidence. What was clear even in 2002, but what Bast never acknowledges, is that privatization allows private operators to hoover up a big pile of tax dollars that would otherwise have gone to the public sector. But Bast belonged to the Cult of Competition, believing that competing schools would reward schools that please parents, stimulate parent involvement, be more efficient, and penalize failure. None of these things are related to the goal of providing a high quality education for every single child in America, but then, that's not his goal.

Bast had some clever (if not reality-based) ideas about how vouchers would satisfy many reformy constituencies. For instance, by setting voucher amounts below current per-students spending levels, vouchers would lessen the taxpayer cost. Because, I guess, the private schools would accept the low voucher amount. Because when I tell the dealer that I can't afford a Porsche, he just says, "Well, then, I'll just lower the price to what you would like to pay." Because that's how free market competition works.

Bast thought that vouchers would end the standards debate. Voucher schools would just give a standards based test and report the results to the community, Actual charter and voucher schools figured out really quickly that they liked the idea of not being held responsible for such test results. So he missed that call.

His big vision?

Pilot voucher programs for the urban poor will lead the way to statewide universal voucher plans. Soon, most government schools will be converted into private schools or simply close their doors. Eventually, middle- and upper-income families will not longer expect or need tax-financed assistance to pay for the education of their children, leading to further steps toward complete privatization. Vouchers could remain to help the truly needy.

 Use the poor to get vouchers started. Shut down public education entirely.  Let the wealthy go back to their exclusive top-tier schools, and set up some cheap ones for everyone else. Boom. No public education, and no forcing taxpayers to pay a bunch of money to educate Those People;s children.

Worried about government money being followed by government regulations? Not a problem-- since we're subsidizing parents and not schools, the new private school system can operate under whatever rules it likes, as long as it keeps enough parents happy to keep making money. Just make parents happy. Racist parents. Flat Earth parents. Parents who don't want their children to go to school with Those Kinds of Students. Bast, like most voucher fans (including Betsy DeVos) gives no thought to what happens to parents of expensive to educate students-- you know, the ones you can't make any money enrolling in your private school.

Super-libertarians who object to vouchers as a new entitlement. But vouchers are fair because they will be "relieving parents of an unjust financial burden." IE paying to educate other peoples' children. Bast frames education as a service to parents. It is not clear whether he thinks non-parental taxpayers have any obligation to pay for any school at all, but then, in Bast's world, education will only cost $1.98 anyway.

He does raise one "worry" that seems odd from our vantage point, saying that some conservatives are worried that a growing secular education market might squeeze religious schools and homeschoolers. We now know that's crazy talk, since vouchers can be handled in a way that allows religious and even home schoolers to cash in as well. But Bast's justification is one more statement of the voucher movement's priority:

While we can respect their beliefs, the fate of individual schools or schools of a particular type ought to be of less concern than the rights of parents and the education of children. Schools, after, all, exist for the sake of children and not vice versa. 

Quality of education and the provision of education for all young future citizens is not a priority-- all that matters is that parents get a choice. And his supporting choice is a false one. Schools do not exist merely to serve students, but to serve the country and society as a whole. But Heartland, in fine Ayn Randian tradition, doesn't believe in any obligation to society as a whole. As long as you're getting yours, why should you have to help anyone else get theirs?

Bast believed that we were at a tipping point, with vast support for vouchers poised to make them reality. As it turns out, his enthusiasm was overstated, a fact that he came to understand himself. Here he is quoted on the subject in a New York Times piece from just one year ago:

Complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being. Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now...

And the NYT actually cut that quote short-- the rest of the sentence is

and would put us on the path to further privatization.

That quote goes back almost a decade. The folks at Heartland are patient, and they have something now that they haven't had for fifteen years-- a Secretary of Education who has supported their group financially, and who is deeply in tune with their goals.

If you take nothing else from this piece, remember this-- for many of the most ardent voucher supporters, school vouchers are not a destination, but just a stop-gap, something that will have to do until they can finally move on their real goal-- the complete dismantling of public education in this country, replaced with a loose system of unaccountable, unregulated private schools. That fully privatized system, not a voucher system, is the goal. Keep your eye on the ball.


 

Chan Zuckerberg's Personalized Edu-focus

Jim Shelton would like to put in a plug for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in education. Shelton has been a deputy secretary for USED in addition to logging time at the New Schools Venture fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, so he seems like a natural choice to head up the Chan Zuckerberg Adventure in Rich Educational Dilettantism.

Shelton's essay over on Medium is a fine example of how this particular brand of personalized (sic) education is being sold. Personalizing education will make the world more equitable and just, apparently. We'll get back to his pitch in a minute.

You can find Zuckerberg talking about his goals in this Facebook post. He talks about what he's learned since his daughter's birth, though oddly enough, he doesn't mention learning anything in his attempt to fix education in New Jersey by throwing money at it, or at least at various hucksters who claimed to know the Secret of Fixing Education! No, Zuck has learned something else:

The most important lesson we've learned is to focus on problems we have some unique ability to help solve.

This, unfortunately, does not seem to mean "focus on areas in which we actually have knowledge and expertise."

Zuckerberg wants us to know that the CZI is shaped by two aspects-- "a truly long term approach and a technology mindset."  I am not sure this is good news for those of us who work in education.

A lot of today's debates pit district schools against charter schools, or reformers against unions. But over the long term, we need to build tools to empower every teacher at every school to provide personalized instruction and mentorship to every student. Instead of engaging in zero-sum debates, we think we'll help more by building tools to help all teachers everywhere.

So there it is. Computers for everyone. Software for everyone. Mentors for everyone.  Because Zuck believes in the "magic of technology" and its ability to "help social change scale faster." There are teachers and schools doing swell new things, and everybody should be like them.

You know the example he's going to cite-- Summit, which " has helped encode their teaching philosophy in tools that will be used in more than 300 district, charter, and private schools this fall." This is an accurate statement of what is wrong with his idea of "personalized" learning-- it's not personalized at all. When advocates for personalized learning complain that it's not at all about sticking a student in front of some computer software and where did anybody get the idea that's what personalized learning is about-- well, the answer is right here. Zuckerberg has made absolutely clear that he thinks personalized learning is about computer software. And his quote also implicitly acknowledges one other thing-- that software is fully soaked in whatever biases or "philosophies" its creators bring to the table. Final point-- those 300 schools will no longer need actual teachers. Just somebody to make sure the students are paying attention to their software and not woolgathering.

How do you sell what is essentially one more version of Rocketship Academy and other failed "let's chain this student to a computer" models? Well-- you link it to the idea of personalization, even if you have to say nonsense to do it.

Zuckerberg and Shelton both like to hit on one old piece of research. Here's Shelton:

In 1980, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago began separate studies that called into question the common wisdom of the education world. Working in different schools and different grades, they asked: what kind of progress might students make if they were each given highly favorable conditions in which to learn? Their proxy for such conditions was simple: skilled tutors who aided the students based on their individual needs.

“As the … results began to emerge, we were astonished,” both by the impact and the consistency of the results, wrote their professor, Benjamin Bloom. Nearly every student with the tutoring — 98 percent — out-learned a comparison class, and 90 percent reached levels of achievement that only the top 20 percent of the non-tutored students did.

What does this have to do with a software program?  Here's how Shelton crafts the pivot:

The study proved that the large majority of students had the capacity to learn much more if the experience was well designed and tailored to their needs. 

No, not really. The study proved that students do better if they are motivated and have a tutor.  

This is a leap. A study showed that students do better with human tutors, so software-based "personlization" will work is like saying that a study shows that since vegetable and fruit consumption helps keep children healthy, every child should grow up in a room with a picture of apples on the wall. But the entire pitch for CZI-style personalization depends on conflating entirely different things.

What if our challenges educating children have been the result of our inability or unwillingness to provide the conditions for their success — not the limits of students’ supposed “innate” talent?

Sure. But what evidence is there that a program like Summit-in-a-box provides those conditions?

It is a compelling fact that when teachers have the opportunity to design learning experiences that truly fit students’ needs, extraordinary things are possible...

Playing fast and loose with the definition of "fact" here, but I agree with the sentiment. But this does not describe a program like Summit-in-a-box, which comes pre-encoded with the teaching philosophy of someone who isn't even going to meet the students who will use it.

Shelton leans heavily on the idea that children of privilege are the ones who get this kind of education. He does not mention at all the other obstacles that children of privilege don't face. His implication-- if we provide "the kind of focus on individual needs and support that define privilege and make it available to all " then, well, we've fixed the whole equity problem.

That vision embraces the role of social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose. Indeed, such a sense of purpose is not just inherently vital, but also foundational to academic and professional success.

Well, beyond the scariness of data mining the character qualities, there's a whole other discussion to be had about a sense of purpose and how wealth and poverty affect such a sense. But he wants to get us back to the sales pitch. 

Shelton bats down the criticism that there's no research proof for personalized learning, and I'll give him that one because education "research" is mostly bunk, anyway. But there isn't really any other evidence of any other sort, either. But he's winding up for the pretty part of the pitch.

Personalized learning is totally NOT some sad school in which "a computer screen intermediates or substitutes for a child's relationship with a teacher, and where an academic measure is the only one that matters." 

Our notion of personalized learning, by contrast, is focused on enabling powerful relationships and shared experiences between people — between teachers and students as well as students with their peers, each empowered by learning opportunities with fewer boundaries and much more intensive support. Technology can support great teaching and has the potential to help individualize learning experiences in ways and at a scale that Bloom could not have imagined in the 1980s. But it is still just a tool. The heart and soul of education remains about great practitioners working lovingly and skillfully to create the environments and experiences that truly change lives

And that's all very pretty, but it is simply the wiggly end of a bait and switch routine. Consider what Leonie Haimson found when she visited a Summit charter. It wasn't anything like what  is described in the verdant prose above, but students at screens in a sterile environment where teachers are background players. Consider the uproar Summit's program has created in some quarters. Or consider AltSchool, another Zuckerberg favored Silicon Valley personalized school that has decided to get out of the school biz and into the software biz, even as parents have voiced complaints that it isn't very personalized after all. 

Personalized Education means many things to many people, but the most notable gap in definitions is the gap between what is promised in glowing prose, and what is actually delivered. It's pretty to imagine a school where every child has a personal tutor, a teacher who crafts every lesson to match that student. But nobody is willing to foot that bill, and so what we get is a stripped down version, and that always seems to take us right back to the child-chained-to-computer model which is more cost-effective and gives great ROI.

Personalized Learning cheerleaders like Shelton can talk about how personalized learning will somehow "prepare more students for success and fulfillment," as if a swanky school is the only thing poor children lack. They can make lots of pretty sounds about an idealized personalized learning world, claiming that the promise is so great that research isn't needed. But the rest of us have to always keep our eyes on what is actually delivered, because so far personalized learning has failed to live up to the pretty, pretty hype, and the fact that a really rich guy is paying for that hype doesn't change a thing.

What Common Core Won

I've said often that the Common Core failed in its creators' central goal-- to establish a set of national standards followed "with fidelity" by every school from Maine to Alaska. Every school would follow the exact same set of learning goals so that a child who left Iowa to attend school in Florida could make the switch without missing a step. The standards would be set in cement (remember the rule that a state could only add 15% additional Stuff) and we would all march together in lockstep into a fully-standardized perfect education future.

But the Core was revealed as both political kryptonite and amateur-hour educational junk. It entered the Bad Policy Witness Protection Program and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. Also, states took about five minutes to realize they could go ahead and rewrite, alter and add anything they damn well felt like.

David Coleman's dream of fifty states all yoked to his vision was dead.

But something else was not dead, and is, in regrettable fact, very much alive.

Once upon a time, school districts would plan curriculum, the whole scope and sequence and pedagogical approach as well as the actual content-- they would do all of that by consulting the experts that they had already hired. Maybe a curriculum director if they had one, or some other administrator if they didn't. Certainly an assortment of their actual classroom teachers. Those folks might consult some other reliable sources as well as using their own professional judgment to develop the district's educational plan.

But that was once upon a time.

Now the goal is standards-based curriculum.

Instead of curriculum conversations that begin with "What do we believe a graduate of our school district should know?" we now get conversations that begin with "Let's take a look at the standards." And then schools use them as a checklist. Let's work our way down the list of standards and make sure that we have something written into the curriculum that allows us to check off each one so that we can say it's "covered." And let's be double-certain when it comes to the tested standards.

Here are the questions that are not answered (and sometimes not asked) in attempts to build standards-based curriculum:

Where did these standards come from? Who wrote them, and is there some reason to believe that they know better than our own trained professionals what students in our district should learn? Are the standards based on any sort of research, and is that research valid and trustworthy?

What is not covered by the standards? Are the standards strictly focused on skills while ignoring content (spoiler alert: probably)? Are there areas of our course of study that we, in our considered professional judgment, consider vital, but which the standards do not address? And if there are are, given a finite school year, can we discuss setting aside some of the standards in order to make room for content and material that we consider important?

When the Common Core wave passed, it had swept away the notion that actual teachers and administrators are experts in education. Instead, the standards-based school district now assumes that nobody in the school system actually knows what should be taught, and that the most they can be trusted with is to "unpack" the standards and create a checklist-certified list of education activities that will meet the standards' demands. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the district doesn't believe that trained education professionals can be trusted with even that much, and should just be handed materials that dictate the teacher's every move, throwing aside their professional judgment and replacing it with the judgment of some bureaucrat or textbook publisher.

Worst of all for the long run, this approach has infected schools of education who prepare their few remaining future teachers to accept this, to envision for themselves a diminished role as content delivery specialists or instructional facilitators or classroom coaches.

Common Core was pitched against a definite enemy-- the teachers who insisted in teaching things in their own classroom just because they thought those things were worth teaching, the teacher who insisted on using her own professional judgment, the teacher who wanted to function as an autonomous individual. Ironically, even though the Common Core did not conquer the nation's school districts as it had hoped, it did manage to deliver a serious defeat to its chosen enemy.  We now understand in (too many) districts that we must adhere to the Standards, which have descended manna-like from some mysterious, magical higher power. They are not to be argued with or contradicted, nor will there be any discussion of the educational wisdom (or lack thereof) behind them. They are to be treated as our compass, our grail, our North Star. Teachers should sit down, shut up, and start aligning.

And that defeat of professional educators, that clampdown on teacher autonomy-- that's the one victory that Common Core State (sic) Standards can claim.

It Makes Business Sense

What's good for General Motors is good for the USA...

That quote is usually attributed to Charles E. Wilson , who served as both head of General Motors and the Secretary of Defense in the 1950s. It's not exactly what he said, but history sometimes edits people's best material.

It's been on my mind lately because I keep hearing "Makes Business Sense" as an ultimate argument in favor of all manner of things. "New Neutrality should be killed because it makes business sense," has been dropped into a couple of conversations. MBS has appeared in discussions of the GOP tax cut. And of course MBS appears in discussions of charters and vouchers and running schools more like a business, so that they will make business sense.

MBS does not appear as an intermediary argument, a structural point that we descend past as we work our way down to foundational ideas. Instead, it is meant as a final clincher, the giant-killer, the point which will brook no further discussion. It is the visible nose of the giant beast that has snaked its way into our national discourse-- the idea that there are no values greater than business values.

I am not enough of a radical to reject business measures and values and sense entirely. I don't imagine a world where money just sort of magically appears and then a wise and benevolent government parcels it out. Business sense has its place. For instance, expecting people to give up all their time and talent for free is a bad deal. If you want your favorite band to keep making music, pay them. If you want your favorite local business to stay open, go there and give them your money in exchange for whatever it is they offer.

In short, MBS is a great way to run a country.

What I object to is making it the guiding ethic of an entire nation.

See, here's my problem.

It makes business sense to let poor people starve to death.

It makes business sense to let poor people die from whatever illnesses they happen to contract.

It makes business sense to understand that some people matter more than other people, and that some other people don't matter at all.

It makes business sense to provide goods or services tiered according to how much particular customers are, or are not, worth your time and bother.

It makes business sense to get rid of the messy noise of democracy and replace with clear, decisive leadership from one all-powerful executive.

It makes business sense to spend some money on maintaining the order and stability of the society within which your business exists-- but no more than the absolute minimum. And if you can get other people to pay those bills, it makes business sense to get them to do it.

It makes business sense to work the market. There is no such thing as a "free" market-- all markets are maintained and regulated by governments, and those regulations determine in whose favor the market will be tilted. There are practical limits to the tilting-- tilt the market too far in the customers' favor and no business will want to provide the goods and services that people need, but tilt it too far in the business's favor and the people will become so impoverished and desperate that the business will have too few people left to serve as customers (and too little stability left to function safely in the country).

But it makes business sense to get government to tilt the market as much in their favor as they possibly can.

Business sense is amoral, as lacking in ethical sense as the laws of physics, with no more moral compass than an actual compass. And that's okay, I think.

But my question is this-- why should business sense become the predominant sense of a civilization?

Why should business sense supersede religious sense, or humanist sense, or a sense of responsibility to fellow humans?

How can the answer to, "Well, we could do that, but it would wrong. It would be immoral. It would unnecessarily damage our fellow citizens"-- how can the answer to that be, "Well, it would make good business sense." Why is the right of some people to make money-- more money, and more money still-- why is that right greater than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? At what point did America's major guiding virtue become, "Well, it makes good business sense"?

It has infected everything. Business can bring the economy to its knees, but actually, seriously punishing it didn't make good business sense. And sectors like health care and education must be made over, because they have too long been governed by people who are following some compass other than the good business sense, and so, obviously, without discussion, without evidence, without examining the premise of the argument, we must believe those business senseless folks as wrong. And this isn't over. Social security, medicare, other programs that were once proud expressions of a sense of moral and ethical responsibility to and for our fellow citizens? Those must also be beaten bloody with the club of business sense. There is no part of the commons that has not been marked for having its moral sense stripped so that someone can inject it with business sense and squeeze money out of it. It has even infected some churches; where once they could be counted on for some sort of moral sense, we now find that many have replaced moral sense with business sense-- God wants to reward some people who are worthy and He will do it by making rich those who display proper business sense.

It is the cult of Ayn Rand, whose only moral guide is, "If I can't get something out of it, then screw it."

Incidentally, poor Charles E. Wilson has been misquoted. When he was asked to divest his holdings so he could take a cabinet office, he expressed his surprise that there could be a problem "because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." It's perhaps a not-very-enlightened notion, but compare it to the modern notion which is not that divesture would be bad for the country, but that any official should be able to enrich himself through holding public office because, after all, it's just good business sense.

The free (sic) market and business sense are a lousy way to deliver education and health care, and they are ill-suited for a host of other functions as well, but we currently seem incapable of remembering that there any higher values than providing some people the chance to make a buck. Even education reformsters who have a sincere desire to make education better (and, yes, I do believe such beings exist)often buy into the business sense ethic-- if it makes good business sense, then surely it will make good educational sense as well.

But it's no way to run a country. Good business sense is a lousy moral compass. I don't want to destroy it utterly and remove it from all aspects of life. But I do want to see it subordinate to moral, ethical and democratic values. Yes, I know there are huge differences of opinion about what exactly those are, I don't care. I'd rather have robust arguments about how to best take care of each other, of how best to pay off our debt to God/the universe/what have you then listen to more hollow arguments about whether or not something makes good business sense. That would be good for the USA.

ICYMI: Baby Hangover Edition (12/17)

Baby hangover is what you get when you go to a friends' Christmas party and stay out till 12:30, but your babies still follow their late-night feeding routine. I take no responsibility for any typos this morning.

How the Concept of Effectiveness Has Screwed Nonprofits and the People We Serve

Not about education, except that it's totally about education. How certain business tools of measurement pervert the central mission.

Plain Talk and School Reform

Rick Hess is reformy through and through, but he's always been willing to call out his colleagues when they screw up. This piece would have been welcome about 5-10 years ago, but you'll still agree with chunks of it now, particularly on the subject of who reformsters should be listening to.

Are Private Schools Immoral?

Or, if white progressives actually behaved as if they really believed their rhetoric about diversity and integration, would we still have a segregation problem?

Propoganda Behind Personalized Learning

http://www.longviewoneducation.org/propaganda-behind-personalised-learning/Applying Chomsky and Herman's filters to looking at the74. Less homework-like than it sounds.

Some Arizona Charter Schools Unlawfully Exclude and Deter Students

Yet another piece of evidence that charters do, in fact, cream, skim, and otherwise serve only the students they want to serve.

The Other Tech Bubble

I prefer the other title this piece appears under-- "Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not." This Wired piece doesn't address education directly, but its portrayal of Silicon Valley guys as entitled, arrogant jerks in a toxic culture will be recognizable to everyone who deals with edtech wizards.

Education Reform in Newark-- Facts

Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) and Bruce Baker (School Finance 101) have been crunching the Newark numbers, just in case the narrative of reformy triumph is not entirely accurate.Good thing, too.

Why We Need Hygge Classrooms in America

The meme has been all over, so Nancy Flanagan did some research.

Florida CRC One More Step Toward Centralization

Florida does this weird thing where they get out their constitution every so often and fiddle with it. As is often the case in Florida, we can see some examples of how privatizers grab power.