Steven Singer is one of those rare creatures- an edublogger who is actually a working public school teacher. And Garn Press has done us all the favor of publishing a collection of Singer's best work.
I'm a fan of books-by-bloggers. The thing about blogging is that each of us has certain themes and ideas that run through our work. But the act of blogging becomes a sort of thematic pointillism, each big idea being built over weeks and months and even years, like a strange attractor that emerges as a fuzzy, half-perceived shape. But when you take those bits and pieces and rearrange them, suddenly those big ideas pop right out.
Singer has four big topics to address-- racism, school choice, testing and teaching-- and he runs at them with passion and commitment. On the bac cover of the Gadfly on the Wall book, you'll find the blurb I wrote for it:
"In these troubled and troubling times, there is no one who writes more passionately about public education, teachers, and the struggle for justice and equity than Steven Singer."
Singer writes about the attacks of cut budgets and deprofessionalization of teaching and the bad ideas in the ed reform world (including the neoliberal outposts of the Democratic Party). He's willing to look at his own stuff (Chapter 1 is entitled "I am racist") and he does a good job of connecting the dots between policy discussions and the students in his own classroom.
And he is an uncompromising advocate for teachers, our unions, and our public school students. If you are a public school teacher and you want to read a book about education by someone who is unashamedly in your corner, this is the book for you.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Friday, January 12, 2018
Die, Five Paragraph Essay!
It's January, and I am still confronting the junk left in the wake of the dreaded Five Paragraph Essay.
Mind you, I have danced with the Five Paragraph Essay on more than few occasions. Early in my career there were few teachers I my building teaching composition at all, and it seemed like a good place to start. And the Fiver is still an improvement for those students whose preferred format is the Uniblob-- a mass of untethered words and sentences that spreads out across the page with no regard for order or sense.
To my students, I compare the FPE to training wheels-- they may be useful when you're starting out, but leave them on too long and they become a hindrance rather than a help.
The problem with the Fiver is that it leads a student to approach writing exactly backward. Instead of asking "What do I have to say and what's the best way to say it," the student says, "Okay, I have these five paragraph-shaped blanks to fill up-- what can I fill them up with." And that backwardness infects the entire process. As I slogged through my students' last paper (about symbolism and theme in The Awakening), I can see plainly that they did not ask "Have I made my point and buttressed it with solid support and evidence." Instead they have asked, "Does that paragraph look full enough yet? It does. Okay, then on to the next one."
Structure in writing needs to flow from the function. Start talking about an idea, a part of an idea, a step in setting up the discussion of an idea, and then when you're completed that task, start a new paragraph. It's simple.
But for all my decades of teaching, I have had to keep answering versions of the question "How long does this have to be?" (which is itself a version of the question "What's the least I can get away with doing on this assignment?"). The only answer is "Long enough to get the job done."
You don't measure a nutritional value of a meal by measuring how many minutes you spent eating it.You don't turn to your romantic partner and ask, "How many minutes do I have to talk to you in order for this thing to work?" And you don't determine the quality of a piece of writing based on how many pages you filled up with words.
You cannot put structure ahead of function-- unless, of course, the only thing you feel comfortable evaluating is structure. In which case you are not teaching writing at all-- you're teaching Making Marks on Paper. And you are contributing to the students' sense that school is some sort of Kafkaesque exercise in following odd instructions that are unrelated to life on planet Earth. Oh-- and you're also preparing students to do well on the Big Standardized Test, which also does not know how to evaluate good writing. So I guess there's that.
So, die, five paragraph essay. Die painfully or quietly, with a bang or with a whimper, but just die. And let's fill the space left behind with the goal of saying something clearly, effectively, and vigorously, according to the structure that best suits what we have to say.
Mind you, I have danced with the Five Paragraph Essay on more than few occasions. Early in my career there were few teachers I my building teaching composition at all, and it seemed like a good place to start. And the Fiver is still an improvement for those students whose preferred format is the Uniblob-- a mass of untethered words and sentences that spreads out across the page with no regard for order or sense.
The problem with the Fiver is that it leads a student to approach writing exactly backward. Instead of asking "What do I have to say and what's the best way to say it," the student says, "Okay, I have these five paragraph-shaped blanks to fill up-- what can I fill them up with." And that backwardness infects the entire process. As I slogged through my students' last paper (about symbolism and theme in The Awakening), I can see plainly that they did not ask "Have I made my point and buttressed it with solid support and evidence." Instead they have asked, "Does that paragraph look full enough yet? It does. Okay, then on to the next one."
Structure in writing needs to flow from the function. Start talking about an idea, a part of an idea, a step in setting up the discussion of an idea, and then when you're completed that task, start a new paragraph. It's simple.
But for all my decades of teaching, I have had to keep answering versions of the question "How long does this have to be?" (which is itself a version of the question "What's the least I can get away with doing on this assignment?"). The only answer is "Long enough to get the job done."
You don't measure a nutritional value of a meal by measuring how many minutes you spent eating it.You don't turn to your romantic partner and ask, "How many minutes do I have to talk to you in order for this thing to work?" And you don't determine the quality of a piece of writing based on how many pages you filled up with words.
You cannot put structure ahead of function-- unless, of course, the only thing you feel comfortable evaluating is structure. In which case you are not teaching writing at all-- you're teaching Making Marks on Paper. And you are contributing to the students' sense that school is some sort of Kafkaesque exercise in following odd instructions that are unrelated to life on planet Earth. Oh-- and you're also preparing students to do well on the Big Standardized Test, which also does not know how to evaluate good writing. So I guess there's that.
So, die, five paragraph essay. Die painfully or quietly, with a bang or with a whimper, but just die. And let's fill the space left behind with the goal of saying something clearly, effectively, and vigorously, according to the structure that best suits what we have to say.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Can We Be Serious?
Poverty and racism and pedagogy and curriculum and standards and infrastructure and a plethora of threads tied up to the question "Why can't we make our schools better?" But if we dig past all of these, we get to a fairly simple answer.
As a country, we aren't serious about it.
Oh, there are individuals who are serious about education, but as a country, we are not seriously committed to creating a top quality public education system for all young citizens.
If we were serious, we would find a way to take a good, hard look at how we're doing. We would wade into a long complex discussion of the many widely varied outcomes we want to see in our system, and then we would wade into the long, complicated question of how to take the measure of those many aspects, making sure to include the concerns of all stakeholders.
We did not do that. We did not even sort of kind of do that.
We said, "Out of the vast and varied ocean of educational concerns, of all the universe of things that we ask a school to do, let's just look at math and reading. And let's try measuring that mall sliver with what we know to be the least effective measure of achievement there is-- the standardized bubble test."
It is not the answer of serious people.
It's like saying, "We'll check to see how solid someone's marriage is by checking in every Sunday afternoon to see if the house is clean and the laundry is put away."
Nor would a people serious about the issues of education give lead seats at the table to folks whose main interest is getting a chance to gather up some of the tax dollars being spent on education. "Good schools would be nice, but what's really important is that businesses and corporations be given a chance to profit from the education biz," is not the position of a country that is serious about making schools better.
If we were serious, we'd have a serious conversation about what we are and are not doing well.
If we were serious, we'd address the problems that are already staring us in the face (like school buildings for non-wealthy, non-white students that have no functioning heat, and school administrations that send students to those buildings anyway).
If we were serious, we would consult and support the trained professionals who work on the front lines. And our goal would not be to deprofessionalize them , or to search for ways to neuter them and their unions as a political force.
If we were serious, we wouldn't insist on doing the work on the cheap.
If we were serious, we wouldn't propose solutions that we know are not solutions, but are just policies that somebody powerful has an investment in. If we were serious about fixing public education, we wouldn't be trying to dismantle it.
If we were serious, our metric for spending would be (as it was in the space race and in times of war) "whatever it takes" and not "the least we can get away with." If we were serious on the local level, our focus would be on doing the best job, and not finding ever new ways to cut and scrimp and chop and whittle away at what the school does.
I do believe that there are people who have a serious interest in improving schools on many sides of the education debates. I believe that there are choice advocates and standards advocates and even market-based education advocates who are serious about wanting to make schools better (though I disagree with them strongly about how to achieve better schools).
But the education debates can become so fruitless and clogged and just plain tiring because they are clogged with people who just aren't serious about creating and maintaining a great system of public education. They want to make money or they want to crush teachers or they want to sell a product or they don't really believe in democracy or public education for everyone at all, and it becomes like trying to have a discussion about the family budget with a bunch of four-year-olds who keep hollering "Spend a zillion dollars on ice cream" or "I want to live in a boat" or just "Nyah nahh nahhhh blh blerg." And then giggling, and then insisting that they are too making a serious suggestion.
The ed debate space is clogged with bullshit arguments made in bad faith and wrapped in extra layers of more polished bullshit, rooted in unreality and devoid of honest attempt to either really understand or really grapple with the complicated issues that arise when a nation sets out to educate all of its children. And that goes for the national policy discussion level and the local school management level, with plenty left over for various state capitals.
This is the frustration that lies beneath all my other frustrations-- this stuff is so damned important. Why do we have to waste time with people who don't want to honestly engage with the importance of it?
As a country, we aren't serious about it.
Oh, there are individuals who are serious about education, but as a country, we are not seriously committed to creating a top quality public education system for all young citizens.
If we were serious, we would find a way to take a good, hard look at how we're doing. We would wade into a long complex discussion of the many widely varied outcomes we want to see in our system, and then we would wade into the long, complicated question of how to take the measure of those many aspects, making sure to include the concerns of all stakeholders.
We did not do that. We did not even sort of kind of do that.
We said, "Out of the vast and varied ocean of educational concerns, of all the universe of things that we ask a school to do, let's just look at math and reading. And let's try measuring that mall sliver with what we know to be the least effective measure of achievement there is-- the standardized bubble test."
It is not the answer of serious people.
It's like saying, "We'll check to see how solid someone's marriage is by checking in every Sunday afternoon to see if the house is clean and the laundry is put away."
Nor would a people serious about the issues of education give lead seats at the table to folks whose main interest is getting a chance to gather up some of the tax dollars being spent on education. "Good schools would be nice, but what's really important is that businesses and corporations be given a chance to profit from the education biz," is not the position of a country that is serious about making schools better.
If we were serious, we'd have a serious conversation about what we are and are not doing well.
If we were serious, we'd address the problems that are already staring us in the face (like school buildings for non-wealthy, non-white students that have no functioning heat, and school administrations that send students to those buildings anyway).
If we were serious, we would consult and support the trained professionals who work on the front lines. And our goal would not be to deprofessionalize them , or to search for ways to neuter them and their unions as a political force.
If we were serious, we wouldn't insist on doing the work on the cheap.
If we were serious, we wouldn't propose solutions that we know are not solutions, but are just policies that somebody powerful has an investment in. If we were serious about fixing public education, we wouldn't be trying to dismantle it.
If we were serious, our metric for spending would be (as it was in the space race and in times of war) "whatever it takes" and not "the least we can get away with." If we were serious on the local level, our focus would be on doing the best job, and not finding ever new ways to cut and scrimp and chop and whittle away at what the school does.
I do believe that there are people who have a serious interest in improving schools on many sides of the education debates. I believe that there are choice advocates and standards advocates and even market-based education advocates who are serious about wanting to make schools better (though I disagree with them strongly about how to achieve better schools).
But the education debates can become so fruitless and clogged and just plain tiring because they are clogged with people who just aren't serious about creating and maintaining a great system of public education. They want to make money or they want to crush teachers or they want to sell a product or they don't really believe in democracy or public education for everyone at all, and it becomes like trying to have a discussion about the family budget with a bunch of four-year-olds who keep hollering "Spend a zillion dollars on ice cream" or "I want to live in a boat" or just "Nyah nahh nahhhh blh blerg." And then giggling, and then insisting that they are too making a serious suggestion.
The ed debate space is clogged with bullshit arguments made in bad faith and wrapped in extra layers of more polished bullshit, rooted in unreality and devoid of honest attempt to either really understand or really grapple with the complicated issues that arise when a nation sets out to educate all of its children. And that goes for the national policy discussion level and the local school management level, with plenty left over for various state capitals.
This is the frustration that lies beneath all my other frustrations-- this stuff is so damned important. Why do we have to waste time with people who don't want to honestly engage with the importance of it?
NY: A Super Slap in the Face
Is there any business, any industry, any large-scale endeavor in this country, that gives less respect to its frontline workers than education?
Imagine a major convention of hospital managers and administrators, convened to discuss the critical issues in health care, the new advances in medical treatment, and during planning the organizers scratch their heads and say, "Who should deliver the major speech about current medical issues? Certainly not a doctor. Do you think we can get that guy who sells the crystals with the little copper pieces? I think he was on Dr. Oz last week--- can we get him?? Or maybe Jenny McCarthy to talk about vaccinations?"
And yet. Here comes a conference for all the top district administrators in New York State at the beginning or March. Keynote Kickoff speaker on Sunday afternoon is Glenn Singleton, founder and head honcho at Pacific Educational Group, an consulting group that was originally focused on transforming K-12 education but has since broadened its focus. Their "courageous conversations" program for dealing with systemic racism is apparently the spine of the superintendents' gathering.
But Monday, here comes another keynote address, this time by David Coleman.
Yes, that David Coleman. David "Father of Common Core" Coleman. David "Don't Know Much About Teaching Literature" Coleman. David "I Don't Know How To Teach Writing, Either" Coleman. David "I'm a Genius" Coleman. David "I Messed Up the College Board" Coleman. David "I'm an Educational Amateur and That's Why I'm Awesome" Coleman. And, of course, David "Nobody Gives a Shit What You Think" Coleman.
Why, oh why, did the superintendents of New York State think that this is the guy who needs to be invited to speak?
It is, I suppose, par for the course. Journalists rarely talk to teachers. Thinky tanks and consultants rarely talk to teachers. Policies are routinely implemented by politicians without speaking to teachers (and when teachers do speak, they're carefully pre-selected so that they won't say anything disagreeable or upsetting). And of course, sometimes teachers who try to speak just get beaten up and arrested for daring to act above their Proper Station.
I like to imagine a world where journalists have a file of teachers that they call before they get that apparently mandatory Mike Petrilli quote for an article about education. A world in which politicians declare, "We can't take any action on this education bill until we hear from lots and lots of teachers about what they think the bill would do."
Heck, imagine a world where a superintendent's conference works like this-- the parent organization says, "Every one of you supers bring one teacher from your district who really does a great job, and then we will all sit and listen to them and learn what we can do better."
But no-- I'm in this universe, where somehow David Frickin' Coleman qualifies as an educational expert to whom an entire state's worth of superintendents should listen raptly. He's never taught, and is in fact proud of his lack of qualifications. He's presided over one of the most high-profile failures in education policy of the last century. He's abandoned that failure so he can go take a cushy job selling bad assessments after "redesigning" them based on his zero expertise. Meanwhile, thousands of experienced classroom experts will continue to be ignored. Thanks a big fat lot, New York Council of School Superintendents.
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| This freakin' guy |
Imagine a major convention of hospital managers and administrators, convened to discuss the critical issues in health care, the new advances in medical treatment, and during planning the organizers scratch their heads and say, "Who should deliver the major speech about current medical issues? Certainly not a doctor. Do you think we can get that guy who sells the crystals with the little copper pieces? I think he was on Dr. Oz last week--- can we get him?? Or maybe Jenny McCarthy to talk about vaccinations?"
And yet. Here comes a conference for all the top district administrators in New York State at the beginning or March. Keynote Kickoff speaker on Sunday afternoon is Glenn Singleton, founder and head honcho at Pacific Educational Group, an consulting group that was originally focused on transforming K-12 education but has since broadened its focus. Their "courageous conversations" program for dealing with systemic racism is apparently the spine of the superintendents' gathering.
But Monday, here comes another keynote address, this time by David Coleman.
Yes, that David Coleman. David "Father of Common Core" Coleman. David "Don't Know Much About Teaching Literature" Coleman. David "I Don't Know How To Teach Writing, Either" Coleman. David "I'm a Genius" Coleman. David "I Messed Up the College Board" Coleman. David "I'm an Educational Amateur and That's Why I'm Awesome" Coleman. And, of course, David "Nobody Gives a Shit What You Think" Coleman.
Why, oh why, did the superintendents of New York State think that this is the guy who needs to be invited to speak?
It is, I suppose, par for the course. Journalists rarely talk to teachers. Thinky tanks and consultants rarely talk to teachers. Policies are routinely implemented by politicians without speaking to teachers (and when teachers do speak, they're carefully pre-selected so that they won't say anything disagreeable or upsetting). And of course, sometimes teachers who try to speak just get beaten up and arrested for daring to act above their Proper Station.
I like to imagine a world where journalists have a file of teachers that they call before they get that apparently mandatory Mike Petrilli quote for an article about education. A world in which politicians declare, "We can't take any action on this education bill until we hear from lots and lots of teachers about what they think the bill would do."
Heck, imagine a world where a superintendent's conference works like this-- the parent organization says, "Every one of you supers bring one teacher from your district who really does a great job, and then we will all sit and listen to them and learn what we can do better."
But no-- I'm in this universe, where somehow David Frickin' Coleman qualifies as an educational expert to whom an entire state's worth of superintendents should listen raptly. He's never taught, and is in fact proud of his lack of qualifications. He's presided over one of the most high-profile failures in education policy of the last century. He's abandoned that failure so he can go take a cushy job selling bad assessments after "redesigning" them based on his zero expertise. Meanwhile, thousands of experienced classroom experts will continue to be ignored. Thanks a big fat lot, New York Council of School Superintendents.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Charter Schools and Rural Districts
For the moment, Mr. Trump has turned attention toward rural areas, and Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform has taken the opportunity to beat her same old reform drum:
The clip is worth a look because it acknowledges some of the extra-thorny problems of charters in a rural setting. They start by noting that rural charter are a tiny sliver, and not for the last time I'm going to wish that they talked about cyber-charters specifically because in some states (including mine) cybers are the big charter players in rural areas. But rural charters are, generally, a tiny sliver both of the public ed and the charter school pictures.
Right off the bat, Squire acknowledges that it's hard to do rural charters well. (Charter schools are largely a big city thing.) For one, in some states it's a regulatory thing. For another, what Squire refers to as "economies of scale" and what I would call "lack of market opportunity." There are a million school age students in New York City; there aren't even a million human residents of any age in the entire state of Wyoming. Recruiting enough students to make your break-even point is harder in a rural area. Recruiting and retaining rural teachers is a challenge for public schools; charters, which generally have business plan based on "pay teachers less" have the same problem. The charter biz also depends a great deal on contributions from rich folks, and again the rural landscape is at a disadvantage.
Smarick asks, rhetorically, why even try to start a rural charter, and Squire says some things I not only agree with, but would actively applaud.
First, folks often make the mistake of assuming that an urban policy can be translated to a rural setting. And that is exactly right. Everyone gets that a person who was Rotary Club President in Podunk is not automatically ready to be a mover and shaker in New York City, but every couple of years in my small town somebody turns up who thinks that because he was kind of a big deal in some urban center, he can just waltz in here and Make Things Happen.
Charters, Squire says, are an example of a policy that might not translate well to rural settings. "There really are limits to choice and competition in communities that are small..." she says. Few students means a limited number of options that can be supported. Start pulling students from the public system, and you can have a large financial impact on that district-- which is exactly what is happening to districts like mine thanks to cyber-charters.
Says Smarick, "Couldn't someone reasonably say, 'Yeah, chartering might be great for some number of kids. But essentially what you're doing is undermining every other public school and the district and you're doing way more harm than good." Which has been one of my main arguments against charters all along, and I'm surprised to hear it come out of Smarick's mouth. Next he asks, "Why even bother?"
This prompts yet another surprising admission. Squire says that the data shows very mixed outcomes for rural charters-- in other words, many are terrible. "In no way are rural charter schools always a good idea, and in some cases they are probably a very bad idea." And as glad as I am to hear that admission, I'll note that we're really talking about Big Standardized Test results, and I categorically reject BS Test results as a measure of how well a school is doing. But Smarick underlines by this preferred reform metric, rural charters do not outperform other schools, which he notes is different than the urban setting, where some charters do outperform other schools.
As it turns out, I think I can explain that. It goes back to the pool of student customers in which charters can fish. An urban charter can, with care, fill seats with students from the top of the city-wide bell curve, but in a rural setting, that top of the bell curve describes a vanishingly small number of actual students, making it difficult to fill your rural charter with the cream of the regional crop.
Squire and Smarick now discuss some successful rural examples. The first matches exactly my own local experience-- a community loses a school because the public district shuts it down for financial reasons (ironically, this can include losing too much money to cyber-charters) and so the members of that community start up a charter as a way of keeping their own community school. Squire cites a Colorado school founded this way, but there's another right up the road from me. They also discuss some Oregon charters that formed to, basically, circumvent state ed laws in favor of local autonomy for things like hiring and firing ands collective bargaining practices.
Smarick acknowledges that while charters are conquering the urban world (e.g. New Orleans and DC, and those have worked out super great), rural resistance has made sense-- but maybe it has been overdone and there are ways to bust into that rural market (I am paraphrasing prodigiously here). How could we do that?
Squires says that first, states could rewrite laws to lift restrictions on rural chartering. She also pushes the idea of "investing in the capacity of authorizers" to be able to tell when a rural charter makes sense. At this point, Smarick asks what an authorizer is, which makes me wonder who the intended audience is for this video, because he certainly knows and Squire certainly knows and anyone who's been looking at charter issues for more than fifteen minutes knows. Is this video a pitch to casual conservatives, or a laid-back prospectus for those philanthropists who aren't throwing money at rural charters? But Squire not only explains it, but offers up the DC authorizers are paragons of charter viability measurement. And they argue that the rules for determining the financial viability of a rural charter would have to be different, somehow. Philanthropists must also understand that the rules for rural charter success are different, and invest accordingly.
And that's a wrap. It's a reasonably frank and nuanced "conversation,' but it does miss a couple of significant points.
First, they've ignored cyber charters, the internet failure factories that have been preying on rural districts for years in some states. Because they can pick up students here and there without having to really scale, cybers can drain students from even the smallest districts, and in many cases, the financial results are devastating. Pennsylvania is a particularly rough case-- cybers get paid based on the sending district's cost per pupil and not their actual expenses, which makes them as good as printing money. Meanwhile, as is the case across the nation, the cyber schools do a uniformly terrible job.
Second, rural schools are tied up in the identity of the community. That's why my county includes four districts when their should be just two-- because even though everyone recognizes the sense of it, nobody wants to give up their district identity. The biggest question about a merger is not "How will we best merge differing pedagogical and curricular priorities" but rather "What would the sports team mascot be?" Squire alludes to this briefly, but we're talking about a fairly hefty barrier to charter implementation. This identity feature is, in fact, why the Colorado communities started charters to keep their schools.
Third, while I appreciate that they've admitted some of the problems, like the huge charter financial damage to public schools, I want to go back and talk about why they think these are not also problems in urban systems? Erie, PA, is getting hammered by state underfunding and charter incursions, and they are no rural school system. If the "doing more harm than good" argument is reasonable in some rural settings, why is it not also reasonable in urban settings?
Fourth, they've not acknowledged the folks on their own right flank. Implicit in this conversation is the idea that charters and public schools would exist side-by-side in a larger choice system. But for some charter-choice fans that is not enough; they want to see the public system dismantled entirely and replaced with charters alone. How do they fit into this discussion.
Fifth, and final, and maybe most important, yet unaddressed by this conversation-- why do rural communities need charter schools? It's nice to talk about obstacles and overcoming those and when we can or can't expect charters to take root in rural areas, but all of that skips what should be our first question-- why bother looking at any of this? Other than the "need" of entrepreneurs to push into another market space, what actual need is there for rural charters? What unmet need do they meet? What problem do they solve?
Choice? Nope. First, rural schools are adept at providing multiple choices under one roof. Students can switch their career goals without having to withdraw and register elsewhere. And the real estate barriers that exist in urban environments are less of an issue here-- I could choose to live in the cachment area of several different districts without any real difference in what I'd spend on real estate.
If I'm in a rural area, I have no trouble looking around and thinking, "For all the many reasons discussed above, I see no reason to even think about bringing charters into this community."
In fact, rather than looking at charters and asking, "Are there ways to overcome these barriers and problems so that urban charter solutions can be brought to rural areas," I'm more inclined to think, "These rural issues with charter schools are not only a good reason not to bother with charters, but are also suggestive of the reasons that modern business-model charters don't belong in urban areas, either."
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That's a lot or argle-bargle that seems to boil down to "more charters and cyber schools will make everything magically better." But the idea of charter schools in rural areas is problematic at best, despite CER's deep love for corporate reform and privatized education.
There are more thoughtful takes on the rural charter idea among reformsters, as witnessed by this thirteen minute "conversation" between Andy Smarick (AEI, Bellwether, Fordham, etc)) and Juliet Squire (Bellwether).
There are more thoughtful takes on the rural charter idea among reformsters, as witnessed by this thirteen minute "conversation" between Andy Smarick (AEI, Bellwether, Fordham, etc)) and Juliet Squire (Bellwether).
The clip is worth a look because it acknowledges some of the extra-thorny problems of charters in a rural setting. They start by noting that rural charter are a tiny sliver, and not for the last time I'm going to wish that they talked about cyber-charters specifically because in some states (including mine) cybers are the big charter players in rural areas. But rural charters are, generally, a tiny sliver both of the public ed and the charter school pictures.
Right off the bat, Squire acknowledges that it's hard to do rural charters well. (Charter schools are largely a big city thing.) For one, in some states it's a regulatory thing. For another, what Squire refers to as "economies of scale" and what I would call "lack of market opportunity." There are a million school age students in New York City; there aren't even a million human residents of any age in the entire state of Wyoming. Recruiting enough students to make your break-even point is harder in a rural area. Recruiting and retaining rural teachers is a challenge for public schools; charters, which generally have business plan based on "pay teachers less" have the same problem. The charter biz also depends a great deal on contributions from rich folks, and again the rural landscape is at a disadvantage.
Smarick asks, rhetorically, why even try to start a rural charter, and Squire says some things I not only agree with, but would actively applaud.
First, folks often make the mistake of assuming that an urban policy can be translated to a rural setting. And that is exactly right. Everyone gets that a person who was Rotary Club President in Podunk is not automatically ready to be a mover and shaker in New York City, but every couple of years in my small town somebody turns up who thinks that because he was kind of a big deal in some urban center, he can just waltz in here and Make Things Happen.
Charters, Squire says, are an example of a policy that might not translate well to rural settings. "There really are limits to choice and competition in communities that are small..." she says. Few students means a limited number of options that can be supported. Start pulling students from the public system, and you can have a large financial impact on that district-- which is exactly what is happening to districts like mine thanks to cyber-charters.
Says Smarick, "Couldn't someone reasonably say, 'Yeah, chartering might be great for some number of kids. But essentially what you're doing is undermining every other public school and the district and you're doing way more harm than good." Which has been one of my main arguments against charters all along, and I'm surprised to hear it come out of Smarick's mouth. Next he asks, "Why even bother?"
This prompts yet another surprising admission. Squire says that the data shows very mixed outcomes for rural charters-- in other words, many are terrible. "In no way are rural charter schools always a good idea, and in some cases they are probably a very bad idea." And as glad as I am to hear that admission, I'll note that we're really talking about Big Standardized Test results, and I categorically reject BS Test results as a measure of how well a school is doing. But Smarick underlines by this preferred reform metric, rural charters do not outperform other schools, which he notes is different than the urban setting, where some charters do outperform other schools.
As it turns out, I think I can explain that. It goes back to the pool of student customers in which charters can fish. An urban charter can, with care, fill seats with students from the top of the city-wide bell curve, but in a rural setting, that top of the bell curve describes a vanishingly small number of actual students, making it difficult to fill your rural charter with the cream of the regional crop.
Squire and Smarick now discuss some successful rural examples. The first matches exactly my own local experience-- a community loses a school because the public district shuts it down for financial reasons (ironically, this can include losing too much money to cyber-charters) and so the members of that community start up a charter as a way of keeping their own community school. Squire cites a Colorado school founded this way, but there's another right up the road from me. They also discuss some Oregon charters that formed to, basically, circumvent state ed laws in favor of local autonomy for things like hiring and firing ands collective bargaining practices.
Smarick acknowledges that while charters are conquering the urban world (e.g. New Orleans and DC, and those have worked out super great), rural resistance has made sense-- but maybe it has been overdone and there are ways to bust into that rural market (I am paraphrasing prodigiously here). How could we do that?
Squires says that first, states could rewrite laws to lift restrictions on rural chartering. She also pushes the idea of "investing in the capacity of authorizers" to be able to tell when a rural charter makes sense. At this point, Smarick asks what an authorizer is, which makes me wonder who the intended audience is for this video, because he certainly knows and Squire certainly knows and anyone who's been looking at charter issues for more than fifteen minutes knows. Is this video a pitch to casual conservatives, or a laid-back prospectus for those philanthropists who aren't throwing money at rural charters? But Squire not only explains it, but offers up the DC authorizers are paragons of charter viability measurement. And they argue that the rules for determining the financial viability of a rural charter would have to be different, somehow. Philanthropists must also understand that the rules for rural charter success are different, and invest accordingly.
And that's a wrap. It's a reasonably frank and nuanced "conversation,' but it does miss a couple of significant points.
First, they've ignored cyber charters, the internet failure factories that have been preying on rural districts for years in some states. Because they can pick up students here and there without having to really scale, cybers can drain students from even the smallest districts, and in many cases, the financial results are devastating. Pennsylvania is a particularly rough case-- cybers get paid based on the sending district's cost per pupil and not their actual expenses, which makes them as good as printing money. Meanwhile, as is the case across the nation, the cyber schools do a uniformly terrible job.
Second, rural schools are tied up in the identity of the community. That's why my county includes four districts when their should be just two-- because even though everyone recognizes the sense of it, nobody wants to give up their district identity. The biggest question about a merger is not "How will we best merge differing pedagogical and curricular priorities" but rather "What would the sports team mascot be?" Squire alludes to this briefly, but we're talking about a fairly hefty barrier to charter implementation. This identity feature is, in fact, why the Colorado communities started charters to keep their schools.
Third, while I appreciate that they've admitted some of the problems, like the huge charter financial damage to public schools, I want to go back and talk about why they think these are not also problems in urban systems? Erie, PA, is getting hammered by state underfunding and charter incursions, and they are no rural school system. If the "doing more harm than good" argument is reasonable in some rural settings, why is it not also reasonable in urban settings?
Fourth, they've not acknowledged the folks on their own right flank. Implicit in this conversation is the idea that charters and public schools would exist side-by-side in a larger choice system. But for some charter-choice fans that is not enough; they want to see the public system dismantled entirely and replaced with charters alone. How do they fit into this discussion.
Fifth, and final, and maybe most important, yet unaddressed by this conversation-- why do rural communities need charter schools? It's nice to talk about obstacles and overcoming those and when we can or can't expect charters to take root in rural areas, but all of that skips what should be our first question-- why bother looking at any of this? Other than the "need" of entrepreneurs to push into another market space, what actual need is there for rural charters? What unmet need do they meet? What problem do they solve?
Choice? Nope. First, rural schools are adept at providing multiple choices under one roof. Students can switch their career goals without having to withdraw and register elsewhere. And the real estate barriers that exist in urban environments are less of an issue here-- I could choose to live in the cachment area of several different districts without any real difference in what I'd spend on real estate.
If I'm in a rural area, I have no trouble looking around and thinking, "For all the many reasons discussed above, I see no reason to even think about bringing charters into this community."
In fact, rather than looking at charters and asking, "Are there ways to overcome these barriers and problems so that urban charter solutions can be brought to rural areas," I'm more inclined to think, "These rural issues with charter schools are not only a good reason not to bother with charters, but are also suggestive of the reasons that modern business-model charters don't belong in urban areas, either."
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Shameful Results
Some ed reformsters are fond of pointing at the results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and declaring that these test results constitute a national emergency. OMGZ! We are not at the front of the pack. That test is a project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a collection of the leading industrialized nations whose goal is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.
I'm not very excited about how we rank on the OECD's list of nations taking a narrow standardized test. But I'm definitely ashamed of how we turned up on another of the OECD rankings. Here's the chart form from VOX:
That's right. When it comes to infant mortality, we're the bottom of the heap. Want it expressed as a different number? How about "American children are 70% more likely to die before adulthood."
Now, the rate has been plummeting across the board, which is no small thing. But still...
According to the CDC, the top five causes of infant mortality in this country are
1) Birth defects
2) Preterm birth and low birth rate
3) Sudden infant death syndrome
4) Maternal pregnancy complications
5) Injuries
If we look at 12-19 year olds, the top five causes are
1) Accidents
2) Homicide
3) Suicide
4) Cancer
5) Heart disease
In fact, US teens are 82% more likely to die from gun homicide.
If I look for a pattern through all of these, I see poverty and health care as root problems. Which is why it is doubly shameful that Congress continues to remain inactive on the issue of CHIP-- the program that is meant to provide health insurance for children of working poor parents.
Our inability to deal with growing systemic poverty and the attendant issues of widespread health care gaps is costing us the lives of our children. A far better response is called for than simply declaring, "If we can get these poor kids to score better on the Big Standardized Test, then they'll just magically rise up out of poverty." If people want to talk about doing things For The Children, or worry about our global standing in the OECD, let me suggest that a good place to focus would be on making sure that we do a better job of keeping American children alive in the first place.
I'm not very excited about how we rank on the OECD's list of nations taking a narrow standardized test. But I'm definitely ashamed of how we turned up on another of the OECD rankings. Here's the chart form from VOX:
That's right. When it comes to infant mortality, we're the bottom of the heap. Want it expressed as a different number? How about "American children are 70% more likely to die before adulthood."
Now, the rate has been plummeting across the board, which is no small thing. But still...
According to the CDC, the top five causes of infant mortality in this country are
1) Birth defects
2) Preterm birth and low birth rate
3) Sudden infant death syndrome
4) Maternal pregnancy complications
5) Injuries
If we look at 12-19 year olds, the top five causes are
1) Accidents
2) Homicide
3) Suicide
4) Cancer
5) Heart disease
In fact, US teens are 82% more likely to die from gun homicide.
If I look for a pattern through all of these, I see poverty and health care as root problems. Which is why it is doubly shameful that Congress continues to remain inactive on the issue of CHIP-- the program that is meant to provide health insurance for children of working poor parents.
Our inability to deal with growing systemic poverty and the attendant issues of widespread health care gaps is costing us the lives of our children. A far better response is called for than simply declaring, "If we can get these poor kids to score better on the Big Standardized Test, then they'll just magically rise up out of poverty." If people want to talk about doing things For The Children, or worry about our global standing in the OECD, let me suggest that a good place to focus would be on making sure that we do a better job of keeping American children alive in the first place.
Monday, January 8, 2018
One More Crappy Market Education Argument
Gary Wolfram is a professor at Hillsdale College, a super-conservative, uber-Christianish, Euro-centric college in Michigan, known for its strong resistance to federal anything and special treatment for any non-white non-traditional folks. You recognize its name because this is the college PA Senator Pat Toomey wanted to give a special tax break. Wolfram also hangs out with the Heartland Institute and the Macinac Center; his conservative credentials are not in doubt.
Maybe that's why EdWeek gave him enough space to add to the stack of terrible arguments in favor of making education part of a market economy (he at least did not pretend to talk about a "free" market, as if any market is free of government regulation).
Follow along as Professor Wolfram ticks off all the squares on the Bad Market Argument checklist.
Context-free facts in order to create sense of emergency? Check.
Wolfram tosses out the PISA and NAEP results. We rate low in PISA, he declares, failing to mention that our standing, measured by a single standardized test, has always been middlin'. Those NAEP scores show a lack of proficiency, he opines, failing to mention what 'proficient" means on the NAEP, nor to consider the possible shortcomings of NAEP as a measure of anything.
Not that he's saying all public schools stink. Just the urban ones. Seriously-- he wants us to know that nobody wants to go to public school in Detroit. Not that he's going to talk about what decades of deliberate underfunding, systemic racism, and the stripping of resources to fund charters has done to Detroit (or other urban systems).
What's next? Bad and inappropriate analogy? Here we go--
Consider this sad reality: Our nation produces technology so advanced that I could use the phone in my pocket—which is already three generations old—to take a video of you and email it to someone in London, but at the same time we can’t seem to teach a 4th grader to read in Detroit. Does this make sense? Why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?
Also, since we can put a man on the moon, why can't Taylor Swift find her soulmate? Furthermore, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.
But let's pretend his comparison makes sense, and look at it. First of all, the production of such advanced technology doesn't come from "our nation" at all, but depends on foreign nations and their willingness to exploit labor at shamefully low pay under shamefully horrible conditions. These wonderful phones are not the result of Yankee ingenuity and hard work-- they're the result of international ingenuity and what nearly qualifies as slave labor.
Second of all, the marvelous phone may be available to Wolfram, but it's not available to everyone-- only the people who can afford it. Because the smart phone market is not organized around providing a product for every single person in the country. Rich people get rally good phones, less rich people get less good phones, poor people get crappy phones, and really poor people get no phones at all. Except- and this is worth noting-- for some poor people who have a phone provided for them by the evil socialist government. So what exactly is there in this model that Wolfram thinks education should be following?
Oh, and before we move on, let's look at that last line-- "why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?" The use of "arise" suggests that there is some bygone golden age in which every Detroit fourth grader learned to read well with ease. Professor Wolfram is invited to provide some evidence of when, exactly, that era was.
Back to our checklist. We spend too much money already? Check.
Wolfram wants us to know that we spend a whole $15K on that Detroit student. He provides no context for this. How does it compare to tuition at a good Michigan private school? Other urban schools? How is such a number influenced by issues of poverty and history? Wolfram won't say-- he just wants us to goggle at that $15K price tag. Phones are cheap because of the market, but schools are the result of (shudder) central planning. Wolfram may want to visit one of those Chinese iPhone manufacturing sites.
Invoke Milton Friedman and Albert Shanker? Check.
They both said "education blah blah blah evil socialism." Yawn. Moving on.
Do it for the children? Check.
We must make the transition from central planning to a market economy for the sake of our children, and especially for the children of low-income families.
Yes, because, if there's anything the market loves, it's poor people. Market forces have showered a veritable cornucopia of excellent goods and services upon poor folks, who get to drive Lexuses (Lexi?) and eat Delmonico steaks while relaxing in their mansions, because the market loves to give poor folks nothing but the best. Ah, but it's not the market we have to goose into action, because here comes another old favorite--
Attacking the character and professionalism of teachers.
The present system cannot work, Wolfram assures us, because "the current system does not incentivize teachers and administrators to teach children to read or to do math." Yes, the people who pursued teaching as a career, who went to school to learn how to teach children to read or to do math, somehow have no particular desire to teach children to read or to do math. We pursued a career in teaching children to read or to do math specifically so we could avoid teaching children to read or to do math. We're in it for, I don't know-- the big bucks and the glory?
Either Wolfram has a low opinion of teachers, or a cynical view of human nature in general. If it's the latter, then we face a philosophical problem with writers like Wolfram-- if people only do things to get rewarded, then we must assume that Wolfram writes pieces like this (and he's written many) to get rewarded, and if he's just doing it for the rewards, then why should we assume that any of his argument has a basis in anything other than his desire to be paid? Of course, we could assume that's he's acting primarily out of personal conviction and commitment to set of values, principles and behaviors. But then we'd have to assume teachers might be doing the same thing, and the whole argument would be shot.
How we make the transition is open to debate, but to me, it seems as though the best, most efficient path to success is through charter schools. I was on the board of education in Michigan and supported the development of charter schools in the state. I worked with the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and her husband Dick in attempting to expand school choice both while I was on the state board of education and afterwards. Charter schools introduce market forces so that the revenue follows the child, and students can attend the school of their choice no matter where they live. This way, if schools fail to provide what students need and parents want, the school loses students and revenue. And gradually, as parents increasingly choose charter schools, the idea of competition in the production of education will gain a foothold in the public square and allow the political transition to purely private schools.
Note. While some charter fans may see a future for a public-private hybrid system, Wolfram-- an old buddy of Betsy DeVos-- sees charter and choice systems as a bridge to the real goal-- the eradication of public education. This would be a good point in the argument to point out how awesome Michigan schools are now, thanks to choice, but
1) He can't because they aren't. Heck, he already told us above in this very piece that one result is an urban system that nobody wants to send their children to and
2) He doesn't really care. He will go on to argue that the true purpose of education in a democratic society is to produce education independent of the government. "It is government production of education that is both inefficient and a threat to true democracy." Because one cannot think independently if one is educated in a government school.
First, this will come as news to millions upon millions of Americans who have managed to think independently even though they received a public school education.
Second, we have sailed right past the notion of a well-educated citizenry being necessary to a functional democracy. If a bunch of folks want to independently think that the earth is a flat disk created in seven days and the rightful property of white men only, that's a problem for a functional democracy.
Third, I don't believe he really cares about independent thought. Hillsdale College is infamous for any number of things, and none of them are the fostering of independent thought. Hillsdale has made it repeatedly clear that if you want to have independent thoughts like "Hey, I'm gay" or "Christianity is a bunch of messed-up baloney," Hillsdale will not be there to stand up for your independent thought. What I suspect Wolfram really means is what many theocratic choicers mean-- I don't want to pay the government to teach my kids that evolution is real and women can have jobs and that keeping black folks as slaves was a bad thing. Democracy is bad because it has let too many of the Wrong People have a say. "We need," I once heard a conservative Christianish person say, "to take back our institutions, including the school system." This is not a new American issue; the Puritans came here not just to escape religious oppression, but to create a system in which they were the rightful oppressors instead of the oppressees.
So no, I don't think Wolfram is a champion of independent thought. Just correct independent thought.
It's one of the other major flaws in the market argument-- the argument is commonly made by people who imagine that in an open marketplace, they would emerge as winners. Many of them once thought that about democracy, but then the system was messed up by all these Other People, these Wrong People. It's a failure of imagination that these folks don't envision a market where those same Other People end up commandeering the marketplace.
Wolfram's argument for market-based education is as lousy as many others that came before him. It's sloppy, ill-supported, and barely conceals the notion that we really need an educational system with a different mission, a mission to serve only the deserving few, as one more step in dismantling democracy itself. It's a measure of how far we've come that this is no longer a fringe argument, but an argument published in the pages of EdWeek and embraced by the secretary of education.
 |
| This guy |
Follow along as Professor Wolfram ticks off all the squares on the Bad Market Argument checklist.
Context-free facts in order to create sense of emergency? Check.
Wolfram tosses out the PISA and NAEP results. We rate low in PISA, he declares, failing to mention that our standing, measured by a single standardized test, has always been middlin'. Those NAEP scores show a lack of proficiency, he opines, failing to mention what 'proficient" means on the NAEP, nor to consider the possible shortcomings of NAEP as a measure of anything.
Not that he's saying all public schools stink. Just the urban ones. Seriously-- he wants us to know that nobody wants to go to public school in Detroit. Not that he's going to talk about what decades of deliberate underfunding, systemic racism, and the stripping of resources to fund charters has done to Detroit (or other urban systems).
What's next? Bad and inappropriate analogy? Here we go--
Consider this sad reality: Our nation produces technology so advanced that I could use the phone in my pocket—which is already three generations old—to take a video of you and email it to someone in London, but at the same time we can’t seem to teach a 4th grader to read in Detroit. Does this make sense? Why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?
Also, since we can put a man on the moon, why can't Taylor Swift find her soulmate? Furthermore, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.
But let's pretend his comparison makes sense, and look at it. First of all, the production of such advanced technology doesn't come from "our nation" at all, but depends on foreign nations and their willingness to exploit labor at shamefully low pay under shamefully horrible conditions. These wonderful phones are not the result of Yankee ingenuity and hard work-- they're the result of international ingenuity and what nearly qualifies as slave labor.
Second of all, the marvelous phone may be available to Wolfram, but it's not available to everyone-- only the people who can afford it. Because the smart phone market is not organized around providing a product for every single person in the country. Rich people get rally good phones, less rich people get less good phones, poor people get crappy phones, and really poor people get no phones at all. Except- and this is worth noting-- for some poor people who have a phone provided for them by the evil socialist government. So what exactly is there in this model that Wolfram thinks education should be following?
Oh, and before we move on, let's look at that last line-- "why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?" The use of "arise" suggests that there is some bygone golden age in which every Detroit fourth grader learned to read well with ease. Professor Wolfram is invited to provide some evidence of when, exactly, that era was.
Back to our checklist. We spend too much money already? Check.
Wolfram wants us to know that we spend a whole $15K on that Detroit student. He provides no context for this. How does it compare to tuition at a good Michigan private school? Other urban schools? How is such a number influenced by issues of poverty and history? Wolfram won't say-- he just wants us to goggle at that $15K price tag. Phones are cheap because of the market, but schools are the result of (shudder) central planning. Wolfram may want to visit one of those Chinese iPhone manufacturing sites.
Invoke Milton Friedman and Albert Shanker? Check.
They both said "education blah blah blah evil socialism." Yawn. Moving on.
Do it for the children? Check.
We must make the transition from central planning to a market economy for the sake of our children, and especially for the children of low-income families.
Yes, because, if there's anything the market loves, it's poor people. Market forces have showered a veritable cornucopia of excellent goods and services upon poor folks, who get to drive Lexuses (Lexi?) and eat Delmonico steaks while relaxing in their mansions, because the market loves to give poor folks nothing but the best. Ah, but it's not the market we have to goose into action, because here comes another old favorite--
Attacking the character and professionalism of teachers.
The present system cannot work, Wolfram assures us, because "the current system does not incentivize teachers and administrators to teach children to read or to do math." Yes, the people who pursued teaching as a career, who went to school to learn how to teach children to read or to do math, somehow have no particular desire to teach children to read or to do math. We pursued a career in teaching children to read or to do math specifically so we could avoid teaching children to read or to do math. We're in it for, I don't know-- the big bucks and the glory?
Either Wolfram has a low opinion of teachers, or a cynical view of human nature in general. If it's the latter, then we face a philosophical problem with writers like Wolfram-- if people only do things to get rewarded, then we must assume that Wolfram writes pieces like this (and he's written many) to get rewarded, and if he's just doing it for the rewards, then why should we assume that any of his argument has a basis in anything other than his desire to be paid? Of course, we could assume that's he's acting primarily out of personal conviction and commitment to set of values, principles and behaviors. But then we'd have to assume teachers might be doing the same thing, and the whole argument would be shot.
How we make the transition is open to debate, but to me, it seems as though the best, most efficient path to success is through charter schools. I was on the board of education in Michigan and supported the development of charter schools in the state. I worked with the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and her husband Dick in attempting to expand school choice both while I was on the state board of education and afterwards. Charter schools introduce market forces so that the revenue follows the child, and students can attend the school of their choice no matter where they live. This way, if schools fail to provide what students need and parents want, the school loses students and revenue. And gradually, as parents increasingly choose charter schools, the idea of competition in the production of education will gain a foothold in the public square and allow the political transition to purely private schools.
Note. While some charter fans may see a future for a public-private hybrid system, Wolfram-- an old buddy of Betsy DeVos-- sees charter and choice systems as a bridge to the real goal-- the eradication of public education. This would be a good point in the argument to point out how awesome Michigan schools are now, thanks to choice, but
1) He can't because they aren't. Heck, he already told us above in this very piece that one result is an urban system that nobody wants to send their children to and
2) He doesn't really care. He will go on to argue that the true purpose of education in a democratic society is to produce education independent of the government. "It is government production of education that is both inefficient and a threat to true democracy." Because one cannot think independently if one is educated in a government school.
First, this will come as news to millions upon millions of Americans who have managed to think independently even though they received a public school education.
Second, we have sailed right past the notion of a well-educated citizenry being necessary to a functional democracy. If a bunch of folks want to independently think that the earth is a flat disk created in seven days and the rightful property of white men only, that's a problem for a functional democracy.
Third, I don't believe he really cares about independent thought. Hillsdale College is infamous for any number of things, and none of them are the fostering of independent thought. Hillsdale has made it repeatedly clear that if you want to have independent thoughts like "Hey, I'm gay" or "Christianity is a bunch of messed-up baloney," Hillsdale will not be there to stand up for your independent thought. What I suspect Wolfram really means is what many theocratic choicers mean-- I don't want to pay the government to teach my kids that evolution is real and women can have jobs and that keeping black folks as slaves was a bad thing. Democracy is bad because it has let too many of the Wrong People have a say. "We need," I once heard a conservative Christianish person say, "to take back our institutions, including the school system." This is not a new American issue; the Puritans came here not just to escape religious oppression, but to create a system in which they were the rightful oppressors instead of the oppressees.
So no, I don't think Wolfram is a champion of independent thought. Just correct independent thought.
It's one of the other major flaws in the market argument-- the argument is commonly made by people who imagine that in an open marketplace, they would emerge as winners. Many of them once thought that about democracy, but then the system was messed up by all these Other People, these Wrong People. It's a failure of imagination that these folks don't envision a market where those same Other People end up commandeering the marketplace.
Wolfram's argument for market-based education is as lousy as many others that came before him. It's sloppy, ill-supported, and barely conceals the notion that we really need an educational system with a different mission, a mission to serve only the deserving few, as one more step in dismantling democracy itself. It's a measure of how far we've come that this is no longer a fringe argument, but an argument published in the pages of EdWeek and embraced by the secretary of education.
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