ICYMI: Year in Review Edition (12/31)

Got nothing to do tonight? Ring in the new year with the best of the things you might have missed this year (or just forgotten about). I have slanted this collection toward pieces outside the blogosphere, because you should be reading and sharing my blogroll. Here's a year's worth of in case you missed them...


Good Business Models for Education
We don't talk enough about the fact that reformsters don't just want to schools to be run with business practices, but with bad disproven business practices. Here's Sam Abrams in the LA Times suggesting some better business practices to use.

The Red Queen
Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) spent nine days in Michigan interviewing over forty different people. She came back not only with the definitive DeVos nickname, but how the Education Secretary nominee looks to the people who have lived under her shadow.

How the Pioneers of the MOOC Got It Wrong
about how the launchers of MOOCery screwed up some pretty basic fundamentals


A Visit to the For-Profit Edu-Mall
A comic strip series from Mr. Fitz. Great explainer to share with people who aren't up for reading whole paragraphs.

Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools
At the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at the difficulties we've always had fulfilling the promise of public education (hint: they're related to our problems acepting all citiizens as equal parts of the public).


Betsy DeVos' Holy War

So this is where we are now-- Rolling Stone decides to go ahead and cover the Secretary of Education. Much of this will be familiar to those of us who have been studying up on DeVos, but Janet Reitman's piece connects all the dots and lays out the bigger, scarier picture.


Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold

Alex Molnar at the Institute for New Economics takes a look at the big picture in the school privatization movement.


Rest in Peace, EVAAS Developer William Sanders
At VAMboozled, an obituary for and recap of the developer of EVAAS, one of the widely used VAM models. If you want the incredible story of where this thing came from, here it is (with links, for advanced students). 

The War on Education as Public Good
Wendy Lecker with another great set of insights on the assault on Public Education

What Betsy DeVos Calls Education Transformation Is Actually Public Theft

Jeff Bryant walks us through what DeVos is actually telling us, and what's she's telling us is that she's going to turn education over to privateers.

The Histories of Personalization

Audrey Watters takes a long, detailed look at the history of the school personalization movement and the many ways in which it is not what it's cracked up to be.

Betsy DeVos Doesn't Get It

Jan Ressenger looks at how DeVos's Libertarian beliefs do not serve the public good.


White People Keep Finding New Ways To Segregate Schools

From Mother Jones, a piece that looks at ed reform through a different lens, and shows how creative white folks have been about getting their children away from black and brown students.

The Charter School Free Riding Problem

Jersey Jazzman takes a look at a little-noted phenomenon: how public schools are doing the work of recruiting teachers for charter schools.


Field Guide To Jobs That Don't Exist Yet

That annoying stat about how 65% of the jobs our students will have do not exist yet-- it turns out to be pretty much made up. Here is a beautifully researched explanation of where that little slice of baloney came from.

Internalizing the Myth of Meritocracy
Another hard-hitting Anderson piece in the Atlantic, looking at how the myth of meritocracy becomes damaging to children of color. Because if I believe that the system is fair and rewards excellence, and I'm not being rewarded, I can only conclude one thing...

Three Myths About Reading Levels

Psychology Today takes a shot at those damned reading levels.


A Black Face in a White Space
A graduate talks about his four years as a black student at University of Pennsylvania. Plenty to think about here. 

Reality Check: Trends in School Finance
Bruce Baker looks at that old reformy refrain "We've spent double the money and test results have stayed flat." Is that actually true. (Spoiler alert: no). With charts and explanations that civilians can understand.

Standardized Tests Are So Bad I Can't Answer These Questions About MY Own Poems
here's a reminder about how absurd these tests are. A poet discovers her own poems used on a standardized test-- and that she can't correctly answer the test questions. A classic.

The History and Future of Learning Objects and Intelligent Machines
Nobody is better than Audrey Watters at drawing the lines between the cold, hard specifics of ed tech and the bigger ideas and issues behind them. If you only read one item on the list, make it this one.

Pence: Black Is White
Sheila Kennedy on the Pencian habit of setting truth and reality aside in the pursuit of privatization.

Who Can Say What 20 Years of PA Charter Schools Have Taught Us?

Philly paper takes a look a twenty years of charter not-so-success in Pennsylvania.

Dark Money in Mass
Andrea Gabor with a good summing up of the dark money mess in Mass, where various bad actors tried to secretly support raising the charter cap.

Teachers Are Grown-ups, Not Children
From across the Atlantic, this piece about someone who changed careers and was astonished to discover that teachers are not treated like grown-up professionals. 

Why Privatization Is a Disaster for any Democratic Society
Salon looks at privatization in education and other areas

Teaching: If You Aren't Dead Yet, You Aren't Doing It Well Enough
Read this piece from Othamr's Trombone about teaching as an act of self-sacrifice and martyrdom

The Great Tennessee Achievement School District Experiment Finally Comes to an End
Gary Rubinstein revisits the Tennessee ASD, the ASD that launched a bunch of other ASDs, now that it has reached its sell-by date, to ask how it did. (Spoiler alert- not so well)

Florida School Voucher Investigation
How bad is voucher fraud and corruption in Florida? The Orlando Sentinel gives us a three part series that answers the question (and it's not pretty)

We Libertarians Really Were Wrong about School Vouchers

Well, here's a perspective that's different in many ways

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Corporate Education Agenda
A not-very-uplifting episode of the Have You Heard podcast, interviewing Gordon Lafer, author of the One Percent Solution.  Important but grim.

How Do You Keep an Iceberg Fresh?
From I Love You But You're Going To Hell, possibly the most perfectly-named blog out there. Addressing the problem of taking education ideas to scale, with a perfect analogy.

How Ed Reform Ate the Democratic Party
Jennifer Berkshire looks at the sad history of how the Democratic Party decided to stop being the party of public education and instead transformed itself into GOP-lite.

Software Is a Long Con
"Computer systems are poorly built, badly maintained, and often locked in a maze of vendor contracts and outdated spaghetti code that amounts to a death spiral. This is true of nothing else we buy."

Not specifically about education, but given the heavy attempt to turn education into a software product, boy is this about education.


Top Ed Tech Trends Fake News
A 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.

She Breaks Rules While Expecting Students To Follow Them
Lisa Miller reviews the Moskowitz memoir and identifies some of Eva's central problems, like how she is proud of being a rebel, and demands that all of her students never rebel at all. It gets better.

Voucher Schools Can Teach Whatever They Want
HuffPost did some heavy-duty research into what is actually taught at the mostly-religious schools that benefit from vouchers in this country. You may have expected the emphasis on anti-evolution and anti-science, but there's a also a healthy dose of political conservatism (and get them women back in the kitchen). How Betsy DeVos wants your tax dollars to work.

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.

The Health Update

It has been a week.

After I last posted, we were moved to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, where Twin A's bout with RSV proceeded as, I guess, is the usual-- condition worsening until hitting Peak Awful around day 4/5. Our son needed increasing amounts of oxygen support as well as iv fluids to compensate for not being allowed to eat. Our ordinarily bright and cheery child was miserable, lethargic, and sleepy-zombie-ish. Also it turns out he's hard to stick with an iv (and inclined to rip them out if not carefully guarded) and so we were also treated to several rounds of baby-stabbing. We got even less sleep than usual for a few days, which wasn't helpful, either.

CHP is about 90 minutes away from home, so we mostly stayed in the room. Twin B stayed with Aunt and Uncle-- then decided to throw his hat into the ring Thursday by spiking a fever, which turned out to be an ear infection, which is not nothing, but we can deal.

Today, after a couple of days of perking up, Twin A was given his walking papers and we are all back at home.

I'm providing this update because, first, you don't start a story without finishing and, second, I have to acknowledge the huge outpourings of support. Our families helped watch whatever needed to be watched and my mother-in-law the nurse helped interpret and my mother hung a big welcome home banner in our house. But beyond that, all sorts of people we know in Pittsburgh let us know they were available to help, and people-- you reader-type people-- contacted us through comments and messages and emails to offer support. It was kind of amazing and definitely humbling and helpful as well (sooooo many parents have had the RSV experience). 

So we are back at home, attempting to re-establish some routine and holding the babies and generally not leaving the house until it's time to go back to school.

A big thank you to all the people who called and wrote and messaged and just let us know there was a larger community thinking of us. It was and is much appreciated.

Here we are, ready to go

At home at last. The dog is a terrible photobomber.

This Christmas (Dammit, James Taylor)

Sometimes expectations simply have to make way for reality. That seems to be generally true during holiday seasons anyway, but we have had a double helping of way-making this year.

The short version is that Twin A started yesterday acting not much like himself, and things just devolved from there. By the time we were supposed to be sitting down with my in-laws, we were instead checking in to our local ER. From there, it was on to a room where we are waiting out some viral action (rsv) while undergoing respiratory therapy, iv fluids, and oxygen hosery. Twin B is just fine, so there is a bit of parental juggling going on, and a bunch of presents that aren't getting opened today. The low point was probably a bunch of adults holding down a poor, sad six month old child in order to shove a needle into his arm. (I know plenty of parents have been through plenty worse things, but I haven't.) Meanwhile, family is not getting seen, and every awful thing that ever happened to a child is roiling back up. This morning Healthy Twin and I drove through sideways snow along deserted roads to get back to the hospital and as I pulled into the lonely parking lot, James Taylor came on the radio singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," a song I don't even like, but I had to sit in the car and finish bawling before I could head inside. Dammit, James Taylor.

I don't want to make this seem more tragic and fraught than it is. Both of my siblings have been through far worse. But it reminds me of a few things.

1) Christmas is just a day.

All holidays are largely arbitrary and created out of unicorn wishes and manticore farts. Christmas in particular (all discussions of the "reality" behind it aside) is such a cobbled mess of random choices and co-opted bits of other belief systems. The cynical conclusion here is that holidays are just imaginary baloney and should be mocked and/or treated as foolish jokes that humans play on themselves. But they also stand as a testament to the tremendous power we have to bring Important Stuff to life, to fill literal nothings with the most weighty somethings.

We should remember to use that power only for good.

2) Can we talk about insurance?

Once again, I wonder what people who don't have insurance can possibly do in these situations. Every Congressman who has failed to get CHIP reauthorized should be ashamed to open a single present today.

3) Children are a big deal.

Every person who thinks that children can be handled like meat widgets whose purpose is to generate actionable data should have to spend a month in a pediatrics ward. Children are small and fragile and helpless and staring directly into our responsibility to care for them should be scarier than floating over the Grand Canyon in a hang glider. "We'll just make them sit down and do academics for an extra hour" or "We'll just hold their advancement to the next grade hostage so the little bastards understand that we mean business" are awful, indefensible thoughts to even come close to.

Also, if you think Those Peoples' children are somehow fundamentally different and less than and not as worthy as, then something is terribly wrong with you.

4) Connection is everything

If you ask me to rattle off the meaning of life in a sentence, I would say that we are put here to watch out for each other, to take care of the people we are in a position to take care of. Connection means everything. Work we do with other humans has to honor that connection to matter. The connection doesn't have to be warm and mushy, but the notion that we can sit behind a desk and manage or handle other human beings in any effective way without a personal human connection-- that's just faulty thinking.

5) The Story

The story that goes with this day (again, I'm not here to argue with you about historical truth)  has several powerful features for me. One is the idea that what you want or expect is not always what you get-- and sometimes what you get is way better. Another is that anyone telling you that he knows exactly what God ants or precisely what God intends-- that person is full of it.


It has taken all day to finish this post. I' m typing onehanded, in bed with my son. Tests, drugs, treatments. They say he'll probably get worse before he gets better, and if he gets too much worse we'll be sent to a larger regional hospital. It's dark outside now. My wife has gone home to be with our other son. My son and daughter have been checking in. This has been a long damned Christmas. Anyone who thinks they know the answers before they've met the problem is a dope. Hold on to the ones you love and try hard to love the rest, too, because we only have a few years together.

I may go quiet for a few days, or I may come here for distraction. I swear I'll get back to education. Merry Christmas and God bless us, every one

Knowing the Picture

My extended family has never, ever celebrated Christmas on December 25th, but we have always done the classic Family Picture Thing. Here's how it looked when I was 10

In 1967 we got all wild and crazy, with each kid holding a beloved object (it is possible that I triggered this requesting family picture status for my trombone. 

Yesterday, we continued the tradition. This is what all the branches of the family look like now:

Like every huge family picture, this looks different depending on who you are. If you know the full cast of characters, from the sportswriter with a new book about hockey, to the woman who just went back to work, to the couple of previous divorcees, to the girlfriend that more beloved than the family member she's dating, to the married childhood sweethearts, to the engineer and the school teacher, to the parents of the brand new baby, you see a whole batch of stories. If you know them, you know what the connections are-- who is married to whom, who are parents, who married into this family. But if you don't these people, it's just a mess of strangers, and rather than seeing their story when you look at them, you might sort by fashion or height or perusal of details, maybe sort them into your own categories (People with Awkward Smiles, People Who Are Married) or invent relationships (the red shirt people).

In other words, if you don't really know these people, you invent ways to pretend that you do, most requiring some externally imposed schema. When we really know people, we know them by their stories. When we don't know people, we create our own nonsense to sort them out.

Test-driven, data-centered ed has become like this. Uninterested in the real stories and relationships involved, they sort and classified based on whatever schema they invent, and these programs often cut away the most interesting parts of the story.

Tomorrow is Christmas, a notably unstandardized holiday on (or near) which people will gather to share stories (in various tones of voice) and tug on the ties that bind. They will rehearse family tales, celebrate family connections, and none of it will happen in ways that are data-driven or suited to meet a single standard, because that is not how live human people work. We run on stories and relationships, and we should be celebrating that during every day of school-- not just trying to see how students measure up on a sliderule that we just created. When you are looking at a gathering of friends and family, what does "proficient" or "value-added" even mean? And if we don't live by those measures on Very Celebrated Days, why arrange ourselves to those bad measures at any other time?

PS: Here's my branch of the family tree: