Education Savings Accounts for Dummies

Education Savings Accounts are beginning to crop up all across the country as a new policy tool for education (recently news came that Iowa's GOP was pushing them). If they are turning up in a legislature near you, what do you need to know about them? If you are late to this particular party, here's the "for dummies" version of an ESA explainer:

The Basics

ESAs are vouchers on steroids.

In a voucher system, you might register your child Pat at Flat Earth Academy, after which you or FEA notifies the state that Pat is a student there, and the state shoots your voucher allowance to the school.

But with an ESA, the state gives you an stack of money, perhaps in an actual bank account or maybe on a special debit card, and you go spend that on whatever education thing you like. You could spend it like a voucher to help offset the cost of private school tuition (as with vouchers, nobody is proposing ESAs in amounts that would give poor families a free ride to Snooty Upscale Academy). But you could also spend your ESA money on unbundled education-- a math class from an online vendor, a software based reading program, etc. Maybe you'll spend your ESA on books and a computer for homeschooling.

The specifics vary by implementation and proposal. ESAs are being floated in various legislatures with a variety of different features attached. Think of ESAs as a vehicle that can come with lots of options-- and you want to be paying attention to which options your local version includes. The questions to ask.

Who can contribute?

In some versions, the ESA is "funded" by some version of the per pupil cost in the student's district, and it is just the state that does the funding. But in other versions of ESA, private individuals and even corporations can contribute to the ESA kitty. In the most aggressive versions, this is treated as a tax deduction-- folks can fund an ESA instead of paying their taxes to the state-- this version of the ESA is not only a sneaky way to fund vouchers, but it's also a sneaky way to defund public schools.

Who is really helped?

ESAs are often sold like vouchers-- as a means to give poor students the same choices that wealthy students have. And the problem is the same-- giving students a $3000 ESA will not help them get into a private school with $20,000 annual tuition. It will not help them get into a private school that can reject them for any reason from wrong skin color to wrong academic background to wrong religion.

Is it grandfathered in?

This feature can also be devastating to public schools and local taxpayers. In this version of ESAs, everyone gets an ESA even if they were never enrolled in public schools in the first place.

In other words, if ESA became the law on Monday, on Tuesday hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars would immediately leave the public system and move to private and parochial schools. Public school systems could lose millions of dollars in revenue without actually losing a single student. Even for some ESA fans that's a bridge too far, and some ESA proposals include rules that say the student must have been enrolled in public school at some point. But even then, you can end up with silly rules that basically require students to check in with a public school for six months before cashing out with their ESA.

Is there any oversight at all?

ESAs come with some of the same problems as vouchers-- are tax dollars being used to support a school that teaches that the earth is flat, that the Holocaust never happened, and that slavery was good for black people because they're genetically inferior?

But ESAs up the ante. Can I spend my ESA on single courses? Can I hire a tutor with no actual qualifications? How about a youtube subscription so I can watch Kahn Academy videos more easily? Can I take an "educational" trip to Europe? What if I buy an Xbox so I can play "educational" games? How about buying a car so that I can drive myself to the library? A cruise? Nice clothes so I feel smarter? Are there any limits to how I can spend my ESA? Is there any oversight at all?

This, incidentally, should bother conservatives. ESAs generally come with zero-to-no accountability, meaning that taxpayer dollars are simply collected and handed over to families to do nobody-knows-what with. I don't believe that taxation without accountability is a conservative value.

Does the state shed all educational responsibility?

This is not discussed nearly enough. Pat's family takes the ESA and enrolls Pat in some classes at a charter school, sets up some online studies, and hires a tutor. The charter school goes out of business, the online courses turn out to be frauds, and the tutor skips out after being paid. At this point, does the state just shrug and say, "Look, we gave you your ESA. If you blew it and didn't caveat emptor hard enough, then it sucks to be you. When we gave you the ESA, we had done our part. You're on your own now."

ESAs imply a policy shift-- that the state is no longer responsible for making sure that very child gets a decent education. That's a problem.

Trying to stay caught up

In March of 2015, I wrote a piece suggesting that if we were going to take "the money follows the child" we'd have to accept that the money could be spent on trips or play stations or parties or clothes and food. I was making my point with hilarious hyperbole, but now reality is catching up with me. So I'll quote my own conclusion. Maybe we can just let students have to use or waste on whatever, I said.

Unless of course you'd like to suggest that the taxpayers who handed over that money and the community that collected it have an interest in making sure that it's spent well and responsibly in a way that serves the community's greater good. In which case we can go back to discussing how those needs of the stakeholders--ALL the stakeholders-- are best served by an all-inclusive community-based taxpayer-controlled educational system, and stop saying silly things like, "The money belongs to the student."

ESAs are a terrible idea unless your goal is to further cripple public education, to subsidize the wealthy (with tax dollars collected from everyone else), or to dump the taxpayer's dollars into a deep, dark hole. But they are one of the current ed reform legislative policy darlings, so keep your eyes peeled, ask the right questions, and oppose them when they roll into your state capital.

What Test-Driven Schools Won't Do

The Network for Public Education has released the latest of its series of videos in support of public education. This particular video features Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle teacher and activist. 

It's a short but stark reminder that corporate test-driven schools push out the needs of students by silencing the people best positioned to respond to those needs within the school setting-- teachers. He sets the stage with a stark story from early in his career to contrast with a system that requires "teaching to the test rather than teaching to the student" and turn schools into "assembly line production."

It's good to be reminded. There have been so many issues raised in the education debates, and so much of the focus these days is on issues like the growth of charter schools and the increasing reliance on computers to deliver an education-flavored product that this issue can fade into the background. But it has been a problem since the first days of No Child Left Behind-- a devaluing of the teacher role and a focus on "teacher-proof" teaching with just one goal-- to raise scores on a single standardized test.

The result, as Hagopian points out, is schools where "some company somewhere has more say over what's happening in the classroom than the educator standing before the students." But by sacrificing teacher autonomy and the freedom for educators to use their best professional judgment, we ultimately make schools less responsive to the students. Test-centered schools are upside down schools, where the students exist to provide data and test results for some corporate agenda, rather than rightly occupying center stage in the school.

The video is just two minutes long. Watch it. It is worth your time.

CAP Still Plugging Takeovers and Turnarounds

The Center for American Progress was, under John Podesta, a holding tank for Clinton politicians and bureaucrats who were biding their time, cooking up policy advocacy, while waiting for Hillary to take her rightful place in DC. As you may have heard, that didn't quite work out.

CAP often took point for the Democratic support of ed reform policies, and like DFER, they were often indistinguishable from conservative GOP ed reform groups. They were particularly relentless in their love of the Common Core (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, to name a few). But now that nobody's going to land a government job any time soon, nd CAP is run by Neera Tanden and its board is chaired by....really?-- lobbyist and tax dodger Tom Daschle, they've been a bit more quiet about the Core. Are there other reform items they'd like to plug?

Well, they've joined the cottage industry of ESSA plan backseat drivers, and in a recent post, argued for a particular strategy for fixing schools. Which one? Here's a clue-- it's a strategy that has already been tested and failed.

A previous report by the Center for American Progress identified the ability for districts and states to intervene in low-performing schools as a critical school turnaround policy. States should initially provide flexibility for districts to replace staff, reallocate resources, or make changes to instructional time. If schools continue to struggle, states have the authority to take more rigorous action under ESSA. One approach states are considering is to implement alternative governance structures that change the turnaround agents or systems responsible for school operations and leading the path forward.

That "report " was not any sort of research- or evidence-based paper, but was the result of a "conversation" involving several federal, state , and local leaders "with expertise in school turnaround" gathered to talk about how best to do it. So this belief in state intervention was not a result of evidence, but the premise of a discussion among people who are professionally invested in this approach.

And what example do folks who support takeovers and turnarounds like to cite? Of course, it's New Orleans. Do we really have to get into all the ways that the privatization of the New Orleans school system is less than a resounding success? Or let's discus the Tennessee experiment in a recovery school district, in which the state promised to turn the bottom five percent into the top schools in the state, and they utterly failed. As in, the guy charged with making it happened gave up and admitted that it was way harder than he thought it would be, failed.

The whole premise of a state takeover is that somebody in the state capital somehow knows more about how to make a school work than the people who work there (or, in most cases, can hire some guy who knows because he graduated from an ivy league school and spent two years in a classroom once). The takeover model still holds onto a premise that many reformsters, to their credit, have moved past:  that trained professional educators who have devoted their adult lives to working in schools-- those people are the whole problem. It's insulting, it's stupid, and it's a great way to let some folks off the hook, like, say, the policy makers who consistently underfund some schools.

Most importantly, at this point, there isn't a lick of evidence that it works.

We have the results of the School Improvement Grants used by the Obama administration to "fix" schools, and the results were that SIG didn't accomplish anything (other than, I suppose, keeping a bunch of consultants well-paid). SIG also did damage because it allowed the current administration and their ilk to say, "See? Throwing money at schools doesn't help." But the real lesson of SIG, which came with very specific Fix Your School instructions attached, was that when the state or federal government try to tell a local school district exactly how things should be fixed, instead of listening to the people who live and work there, nothing gets better. That same fundamental flaw is part of the DNA of the takeover/turnaround approach.

But CAP is excited about ESSA because some states have included this model in their plan. So, yay.

They acknowledge limitations to the approach, including pushback from district and community members, noting that Georgia voted down the attempt at a recovery school district (call and "opportunity" district in an attempt to avoid the damage done to the brand). The state just went ahead and created a turnaround chief anyway, and CAP doesn't ask why pushback occurred. CAP's advice is to engage the community and get buy-in from stakeholders, but they don't really suggest how (pro tip: it involves listening).

CAP also says that it is "critical that states set the right parameters for measuring student progress" which would be a great thing to say if it were followed by the observation that the Big Standardized Test results soaked in VAM sauce are a lousy measure of school effectiveness, but they don't. Instead they just mean, "make sure everyone understands what the cut score is," which is actually better than the old favorite "bottom five percent" measure (a boon to charter developers, since there will always be a bottom five percent).

CAP does NOT note the problem with takeover/turnarounds that involve silencing local voice entirely and removing the duly-elected school board from power to be replaced, in some cases, by charter operators who are unaccountable to local stakeholders.

But CAP is happy about this trend because they think this "lever for change" is "promising." I think CAP continues to kid itself. Here's the last sentence of the article:

States that use this authority must do so strategically and with clear guidelines to work with the communities they serve, as well as capitalize on lessons learned from other states doing similar work.

The link is to a lousy new paper from Chiefs for Change, another part of the reform axis, which is unfortunate, because the lessons learned about state takeover of "failing" (aka "schools with low scores on a single poorly-written, narrowly focused standardized test") is that it rarely works, and often does more harm than good. But never let it be said that the folks at CAP let the little people who actually work in education distract them from the big picture of grand reform ideas.

Another Flawed Study Praises Charters

"Study Finds Link Between 'No Excuses' Policies and Success" trumpets the headline at Education Dive, a site that.... well, here's their mission:

Our mission is to provide busy professionals like you with a bird's-eye-view of the education industry in 60 seconds.

So take that for what it's worth. We know that press coverage of research is often faulty, so let's go to the actual paper and see what we have here. Is this the long-dreamed-of proof that No Excuse charters do it better?

"Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap" was published in The Future of Children, a Princeton-Brookings publication. The author is Sarah Cohodes, an assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University whose specialty is exactly this sort of achievement gap stuff. Her article was reviewed and critiqued by Lisa Barrow at the Federal reserve Bank of Chicago because when you want an extra set of eyes on an education article, of course you call a banker. Her specialty is apparently education, because economists are all education experts, somehow. But I digress.

Cohodes opens with a quick recap of charter history, then lays out the problem with measuring charter effects-- selection bias because charter students have chosen the charter. But good news-- the selection bias problem is completely solved by charter school lotteries. Except (she acknowledges) not everybody chooses to enter the lottery. And the lottery only applies when schools are over-subscribed. But maybe we can find comparable groups of non-charter students to compare charter students to. Which is hard. Cohodes seems to conclude this kind of research is really hard to design well. So she used some lottery studies and some observational studies in her research. And, having scanned the research, she drops this right in this intro section:

The best estimates find that attending a charter school has no impact compared to attending a traditional public school.

And she spends several pages recapping lots of studies of charter effects. She's a pretty good explainer-- if you ordinarily dread research papery stuff and meta-studies even more so, this is pretty penetrable for the layperson. Her critiques of some of these bits of research are pretty gentle, but I am not going to wade into those case by case here.

Instead, let's go to the headline material. Essentially, she finds that No Excuses charters set up in neighborhood served by very struggling public schools show a big gain in test scores. But here I will get into specifics, because she cites in particular the KIPP schools and the charters of Boston. Yet Boston charters have been found to come up very short in sending students on to complete college.

The No Excuses practices that Cohodes zeros in on are " intensive teacher observation and training, data-driven instruction, increased instructional time, intensive tutoring, and a culture of high expectations." Not being able to narrow the list down is a problem-- if I tell you that my athletic program gets great results by having athletes exercise for two hours daily, drink high protein shakes, breathe air regularly, and sacrifice toads under a full moon, it will be easy to follow my "research" to some unwarranted conclusions. Cohodes' list is likewise a hugely mixed bag.

Longer school day and school year is obvious. More time in school = getting more schooling done. A culture of high expectations is meaningless argle bargle. And the teacher training and "data-driven" instruction boils down to the same old news-- if you spend a lot of time on test prep, your test results get better.

Cohodes also notes that the worse the "fallback" school results, the greater the charter "improvement." In other words, the lower you set the baseline, the more your results will surpass it.

She doubles back to look at how charters relate to the surrounding public schools, again kicking the tires on the research to test reliability.

She notes that there are two ways for lottery charters to cream the best students from the community. One is to manipulate the lottery, which she doesn't think happens (for what it's worth, neither do I, mostly because it's not necessary). The second is to push out the students the school doesn't want. But she is missing two more-- make the lottery system prohibitively challenging, so that only the most motivated families can navigate it. And advertising allows charters to send a clear message about which students are welcome at their school.  And nobody works those creaming tricks like No Excuses schools, with their highly regimented and oppressive treatment of students.

Cohodes acknowledges many of the problems with the research she is using, but ultimately she says things like this:

If we wished to use charter schools to reduce US achievement gaps, one obvious way to spread charter school success would be to replicate the most successful schools.

Um, no. If we wished to use charter schools to reduce US achievement gaps, we might first want to determine whether or not they could actually do that job. And then there's this:

With strong interest in charter schools among policymakers and with school lotteries available to form the basis of high-quality research, charter schools are a relatively well-studied educational reform.

I'm not sure we've yet established that lotteries do, in fact, form the basis of high quality research.

And the criticism that I found myself leveling at very page finally surfaces here:

Given that the overall distribution of charter school effects is very similar to that of traditional public schools, expanding charter schools without regard to their effectiveness at increasing test scores would do little to narrow achievement gaps in the United States. But expanding successful, urban, high-quality charter schools—or using some of their practices in traditional schools—may be a way to do so.

Emphasis mine. If you think that closing the achievement gap is nothing but raising test scores, you are wasting my time. It's almost two decades into this reform swamp, and still I don't believe there's a person anywhere sayin, "I was able to escape poverty because I got a high PARCC score." Using the Big Standardized Test score as a proxy for student achievement is still an unproven slice of baloney, the policy equivalent of the drunk who looks for his car keys under the lights, not because he lost them there, but because it's easier to look there.

It's really not that hard to raise test scores-- just devote every moment of the day to intensive test preparation. What's hard is to raise test scores while pretending that you're really doing something else.

Let’s consider a thought experiment in which further expansion focuses on high-quality charters. What would happen to the achievement gap in the United States if all of those new charter schools were opened in urban areas serving low-income children, had no excuses policies, and had large impacts on test scores like Boston, New York, Denver, and KIPP charters?

Yes, I want to say, and let's consider a thought experiment in which pigs fly out of my butt. However, she continues

Expanding charters in this way certainly could transform the educational trajectories of the students who attend. But if we consider the US achievement gap as a whole, it would have a negligible effect.


What she wants to see is an expansion of charter practices expanded to public schools, and she sees ESSA as a policy tool to do it. But what practices? Expanded school time? That would take too much money for policy makers to support. Relentless test prep at the expense of broader education? No thanks. High expectations in the form of heavy regimentation, speak-only-when-spoken-to, treatment? Pretend that student socio-economic background and the opportunity gap are not really factors? That seems just foolishly wrong. Besides the questionable morality of such an approach, a vast number of parents simply wouldn't stand for it. And how would we replace the mission of public education-- to educate all students-- with the mission of No Excuse charters-- to educate only those students who are a "good fit."

But after more nuanced looks at the research, Cohodes arrives decidedly unnuanced, unsupported conclusions like this

Attending an urban, high-quality charter school can have transformative effects on individual students’ lives. Three years attending one of these high performing charter schools produces test-score gains about the size of the black-white test-score gap. The best evidence we have so far suggests that these test-score gains will translate into beneficial effects on outcomes like college-going, teen pregnancy, and incarceration.

The "transformative effect" is not established. Test scores might be raised, but so what? And "the best evidence we have so far" is a weaselly way of saying "we have no good evidence."

After pages of what appear to be thoughtful considerations of the research, complete with acknowledgement of that research's limitations, Cohodes arrives at a finish that reads like most charter fan PR cheerleading. And it's that part that folks like Education Dive will focus on with headlines that define "success" as "raises test scores some."

IA: Arguing Against Diversity

Last week, the Des Moines Register presented an op-ed by homeschooler, conservative-libertarian writer and millennial political activist Joel Kurtinitis. He's also a co-founder of the U.S.Federalist Party, a contributor to various hard-right publications, and a voice in the liberty movement-- so he was backing Ted Cruz in the last election cycle.

Kurtinitis has some thoughts about public education.

As a dedicated advocate of homeschooling, I tend to stay away from public education issues in general. There’s not much nice to say about an education system that has produced — and graduated — 32 million functionally illiterate adults, and has presided over an overall literacy decline for the last 25 years.

This guy

First, the 32 million number comes from the US Department of Education, but it is the number of illiterate adults-- there's no indication that they are all public school graduates. That number could include flunk outs, drop outs, or even some home schooled persons. Second, the literacy decline is hard to pin down because everyone who writes about literacy likes to define it their own way (functional, proficiency, able to read great books).

But his point-- that public schools suck-- is just meant to set up his main complaint. Currently in Iowa there is a bill on the table that is mostly the same old choicer boilerplate-- let's let students at "failing" schools escape their terrible fate. But this one adds a little extra-- under the bill, districts would be free to drop diversity requirements. See, Iowa had previously passed some diversity rules that counted diversity in choice systems, designed to keep five large districts from being re-segregated as white families fled to private schools. What? You thought segregation academies were only a Southern thing?

The plans had to be re-jiggered so that they were based on income rather than race, giving some Iowa schools a mandate to keep diverse student populations. Kurtinitis is not a fan.

It turns out that impoverished school districts around Iowa have shackled their students to an administrative ball and chain that doesn’t allow students to transfer away for — get this — diversity reasons.

As a long-time practitioner of written snark, I salute Kurtinitis's repeated use of the verbal derisive snort. Unfortunately, he can't back that snort up with any sort of solid argument. (Yes, that kind of snark.)

He claims two problems with the diversity requirements. First, "it creates a financial self-interest for the school district that doesn't take the individual needs of the student into consideration at all." His big gotcha proof is an administrator who "confessed" that allowing "financially stable" families (my favorite new euphemism for "wealthy") to head off to private schools (he uses the word "better," which is a whole other set of unfounded assumptions) would be "absolutely devastating."

Aha! shouts Kurtinitis-- schools dare to want money and be upset when they lose money. What he doesn't consider is why. Do schools want money in order to make their administrators and teachers rich? Nope. Do they want money in order to pass on a profit to their operators and backers? No (because they are public schools). Do the want the money to buy every teacher a Lexus? Nope.

Or could it be that schools need the money to meet the individual needs of the students who can't afford to head to a private school? Maybe they need the money to educate those students with decent resources in a well-maintained building.

Kurtinitis ignores that, and waves the old "We spend X dollars on education and that's a lot." In Iowa's case that's $3 billion, a big chunk of the state budget that Iowa is "shoveling" into education while keeping wealthier families 'hostage." Kurtinitis is using a crude version of Betsy DeVos's argument-- education is just a service provided for individual families, and there is no social value in education as a public good, which means I shouldn't have to spend my money to educate Those Peoples' Children. If they wanted a good education (and health care and food and homes), they shouldn't have decided to be poor.

But Kurtinitis doesn't just object to spending money on public education. He doesn't like diversity, either.

I’m not sure when “diversity” became a religious term, but it certainly is now.  That’s why phrases like “diversity is our strength” can be tacked on to the end of interviews as shown above, just like “God be praised.” It’s a moral, worldview-specific term, not one of objective or mathematical truth. And due to its religious nature, challenging the presuppositions of the term results in insult and derision, not in legitimate debate — as I’m sure this article’s comments will bear out.

Having dismissed the term itself, Kurtinitis will now proceed to prove his own point about the lack of substantial debate about the topic:

Let’s assume for a moment that the notion of “white flight” is real (unjust assumptions at best) and every family moving their kids out of an impoverished and struggling school do so for racial reasons (they don’t). Barring transfer still doesn’t do anything to advance diversity. It just forces a largely minority school to hang out with real, honest-to-God racists.

See, he's just worried about those poor black kids being trapped in a school with racists. That don't exist, because white flight isn't real, and they aren't really racists. (Here's a fun article about how racists see Iowa as "fertile ground"). If Kurtinitis had been around in the sixties, I guess he would have told the Little Rock Nine to just stay home because people were going to say man things to them. "Ma'm" says 1955 Kurtinitis to Rosa Parks, "Don't you just want to move to the back of the bus and stay out of trouble."

Beside the point, 2018 Kurtinitis says. Parents  don't care about all that race stuff, anyway. They just care about "the letters on their report cards." And he wants to unload a pithy truth on us:

Scream about diversity all you want, diversity won’t teach you calculus. It won’t help you with reading comprehension.

As it turns out, Kurtinitis is wrong on this count, too. The research is piling up to indicate that there are social and cognitive benefits to both socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (you can start here or here). His further claim that diversity won't help you get a job is also specious-- as the US becomes more and more of a mix of many sorts of folks and white folks become a minority majority, the ability to work with folks of many different backgrounds will absolutely become more and more valuable in the job market. Only if your chosen career is Rich Guy Who Sits in Office and Lives in Gated Community will you be able to avoid the need for familiarity and comfort with diversity.

But Kurtinitis is doubling down

An irreligious look at diversity dogma would insist that sitting in a room with people of different races and ethnicities isn’t a valuable or rare skill,

It may insist, but it would be better served to make an actual argument in favor of its view. I recommend that Kurtinitis not employ any of the following:

* Everyone is much happier when they just stay with their own kind

* Society works better when everyone understands their place and stays in it

* No good can come of mixing the races

* I've got mine, Jack, and I don't care what happens to the rest of you

* European culture created everything that matters, so every other culture should shut up and take notes

Except that, absent the various racist and selfish arguments, I don't know what Kurtinitis has left to argue that there is no value in having folks from different backgrounds in a room together. I'd argue that diversity has value to our society as a whole, as witnessed by America's entire history, which is the story of strength growing out of a diverse and rich stew of many peoples. I'd argue that it has  value to individuals who are able to develop a richer and fuller version of what it means to be human in the world, as well as developing a flexibility and background of experience that enables them to move through the world rather than huddling in their own stagnant corner. I'd argue that education has value not just to individuals, but to society as a whole, a public good that we all have a stake in and therefor should all support.

That's what I'd argue. I have no idea what Kurtinitis could muster in response.

Kochs Build an Edu-monster (or "When Rich People Home School")

The son and daughter-in-law of Super Rich Industrialist Charles Koch have decided to get into the private school business. In Wichita. With a model that seems.... well, both confused and familiar.

You can read about it here in the Miami Herald (for some reason). The school is going to be called "Wonder" and while it is aimed only at 3-11 year olds, it still dreams big-- the motto on its website is "Find a calling. Change the world."

“I’m mostly just a mom that’s passionate about education for her kids,” said Annie Koch, 33, a mother of three children, ages 5, 3 and 3 months.

Well, a really wealthy mom. Who had this thought:

You start to realize, ‘Actually, my kids spend more time at school than they spend with me.’

She's partnering with Zach Lahn, whose star began to rise when he was just a college student, and who ended up working for the Koch-backed astro-turf advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, then moving to the Koch's Youth Entrepreneurs program. How did he end up qualified to run a school? He and his wife have kids (ages 4 and 3). Anyway, he says, "We're not inventors. We're just parent catalysts."

So we're talking about one more school launched by amateurs. And like most edu-amateurs, they will borrow from other amateurs, some professionals, and throw in some re-inventing of the wheel. It will be built out of a whole wheelbarrow full of spare parts. The school will include mastery learning (an approach somehow credited to Sal Kahn), some Montessori pre-school, and eventually middle and high school, though they won't have traditional grade levels, either. The floorplan will have flexible seating, with glass walls and open spaces. No traditional grades or report cards or homework- just four to six week theme-based projects culminating in presentations to family and community members. According to their blog, each day will start with a Socratic discussion, followed by setting learning goals for the day. And there's this:

There won’t be any teachers at Wonder, but rather “guides” and “coaches,” Lahn said. The school plans to allow students more say in what, how and at what pace they learn.

And they mean it-- they want graduate students from MIT, not actual teachers.

If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you are old enough to remember the Open Schools movement. It emerged in the sixties, and died by the seventies, and I probably wouldn't remember it except that my aunt started one in Connecticut.

Like the Kochs, she had young children whose education she was concerned about. Unlike the Kochs, she had an education background and not a great deal of wealth (her husband, my uncle, was a history teacher in Connecticut and my professional idol-- he stayed in the classroom for fifty years). And like many other pioneers in the open school movement, she gave it up within a decade.

The idea was that children would learn through discovery and exploration, following their own learning impulses without having their freedom hampered by the strictures of a traditional school system. It's an approach that involves a great amount of idealization of children, and my aunt soon reluctantly concluded that it didn't really work. If you give a small child the freedom to just follow their bliss, their bliss isn't very interested in studying stuff or learning new things.

Open schools mostly died out for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that this is a system that best suits children of privilege. Children who have few of their basic needs met are not primarily thinking, "I wonder what I could learn today."

Of course, Wonder will have one thing my aunt didn't-- and you knew this was coming. When it's time to create those learning mastery skills goals thingies at the start of the day...

This is done using both traditional and proven tech-based learning platforms which utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as virtual and augmented reality to personalize and focus each child’s learning journey.

Bad news, guys-- there are no proven tech-based learning platforms.

“We think that children are not challenged to the fullest extent that they could be right now,” Lahn said. “We want to challenge them to take on new tasks and greater ownership over what they’re doing.”

One of the ongoing and kind of fascinating discussions in education is about the issue of challenge. There's general agreement that students could be challenged more; there's general disagreement on how to make that happen. But history suggests that the best way to address the issue is not to just count on the children to challenge themselves, particularly when we're dealing with young humans whose challenge plate is already heavily loaded. Now, some of the writing about Wonder suggests that it's the computer software that will challenge and engage the students. So maybe instead of an open school, Wonder is just the latest iteration of algorithm-selected mass-produced custom learning, aka the serving of worksheets by computer software.

Koch acknowledges that their model of school might not be for everyone ("People who are really passionate about having a college-prep academy might not be passionate about what we're doing") and she and Lahn both insist this will not be political at all (which may be one more indicator of what they don't understand about education), but Koch also genuflects at the altar of competition --"We want other people doing this. We want competition...because we feel like that would make us better." And the Not Political At All clashes with ideas like starting the day with questions like "Why do civilizations rise and fall? Does the past determine the future?" or the description of the afternoon project work which will be dedicated to "the solving of complex problems, and building innovative market-oriented solutions."

So 3-11 year olds will push themselves in a system withy no accountability measures and a teacher-free environment, and maker spaces and project based learning (but without teachers), and actually they won't push themselves but will be pushed by computer software. The article doesn't mention tech, but I'm struck by Koch's desire to have competition that will make the school better, because it's not clear what exactly the school is going to do. This is not what happens when folks decide to pioneer a new educational model; this is what happens when rich people decide to home school-- they hire some people to do it for them, sort of, based on what they imagine would be cool for their littles.

Challenging, yet students are free to set the agenda. Self-pacing, but all units will take place in a 4-6 week time span. No actual teachers, and yet somebody is going to have to design all these projects. Not political, but based on a free market ideology. It's possible that "Wonder" is short for "I wonder what the heck we're going to do here," but it feels more like a way for privileged parents to get their children out of public school, as envisioned by folks who don't know how school works (and whose children aren't old enough to have much of an opinion themselves.) Koch says she feels that the school-ish thingy she's launching "could have a big impact."

I'm betting not. This sounds like a Frankenstein's monster built out of parts of all the failed education ideas of the last fifty years, from open schools to learning machines, to the removal of teachers entirely, to indoctrination of children with right wing political notions. Maybe the school has a better plan than the write-ups suggest. The one thing we can be sure of is that this privileged home schooling project will not run out of money any time soon.

Battling the NFL Shortage

Well, that, of course, was clickbaity, because there is no NFL shortage, no lack of players to put their bodies on the line to play football. And yet we continue to see pieces about how the teacher pipeline is drying up. So, since I'll be ignoring the Super Bowl today, I thought maybe I could be a little sporty in this space and ask the question-- what difference between these two endeavors could explain the differences in staffing issues?

It's not like NFL play is all glamorous. It's physically demanding, often with consequences for the rest of the player's life. There's a ton of travel, and an entire industry devoted to second-guessing your every choice. So it's not like there's no downside.

Still, the pay is pretty good. Fabulously good if you are a top player. Nobody running an NFL tam says, "Look, we're just going to pay this salary, and if the players don't want to stick around, we'll just fill the spots with someone else. If we have to, we'll just drop all the usual requirements and hire some skinny small guys who think they might like to try it even though they never played in college or high school. They probably won't last long, but we can just replace them with some other warm body. I mean, who cares if we are turning over half the team every year."

Nobody in the NFL says that because nobody imagines you can just player-proof a team by coming up with a system so foolproof (developed by guys who never played the game) that you can just plug any warm body into any position and it won't make any difference. No, the NFL recognizes that it takes players with particular gifts, skills, and experience, and if you want them, you'll have to make them an offer they're willing to accept. Professional football teams are not composed of easily-replaced, highly-interchangeable widgets.

Nor can we underestimate the amount of esteem that comes with the job. Sure, there are folks who are unimpressed by professional athletes, and it is definitely concerning that you can be kind of rapey and still be a well-regarded hero. With that much money and attention on the line, there are a host of abuses that can become a problem. But just look at all the support they get-- a massive staff, spare-no-expense facilities, an entire infrastructure devoted to helping them be their very best.

I live in football country. One of my former students became an NFL pro, I work with a guy (substitute teacher and coach) who had a good career in the seventies, and one of our great home town heroes was a successful NFL coach. I always have students who aspire to a sports career, and very little seems to affect that front end interest in the Football Player Pipeline.

The bottom line is that the NFL doesn't have a player shortage because they work hard to make sure they don't. They don't try to devalue the job and players, and they don't lower their standards so that they can get by on the cheap. Yes, the comparison isn't perfect-- the NFL has fewer total slots of to fill, and their treatment of linemen is somewhat crappier than their treatment of a star quarterback. But when I hear someone else bemoaning the teacher shortage [sic], I'm always reminded of enterprises like the NFL where management doesn't try to pretend they want the best, but does whatever they need to do to get the best. This is markedly different from education, where our words indicate we want the best and the brightest, and we want to get them the best possible tools and support to do their job-- but our words say that we really don't care about any of that. Get in your room, settle for the salary we want to give you, stop asking for supplies we won't get you, if you're nice to the office secretary she might do you a single favor some day, and, yeah, maybe we'll get you a complete class set of current textbooks, someday.

When you really want champions, you find a way to attract and support them. Otherwise, you just have to hope that they love the game well enough to devote themselves on their own.

And because I know you've been thinking about it as you read this post, let me leave you with this classic Key and Peele sketch.