Technology is great, except when it isn't. All I can say is, the next time I need to replace or upgrade equipment, I think I may finally be ready to convert to a Mac.
Meanwhile, here's some reading for the week.
Palantir Predictive Policing Tool
If you want to take a look at how frighteningly Big Brothery data mining can become, take a look at this predictive system for high-tech profiling and pre-policing (a la Minority Report) that is already here.
Why Hardening Schools Hasn't Stopped School Shootings
Some folks keep talking as if school security still looks like 1965, when in fact, schools have ben "hardening" since Columbine. Here's a look at why it hasn't helped.
Proficiency-Based Education Is Failing Maine Students
Not from an education blogger, but from a mainstream outlet. Maine has ben set up to be an experimental proof of concept for PBE (or CBE or whatever you want to call it this week). It's not working.
Six Things My Students Have Taught Me
It's a good list.
New Report on California Charter Waste
Jan Ressenger with a quick look at a new report on just how bad the charter picture is in California.
WV Teacher Strike
This story just keeps going, as the state legislature decided they would go ahead and trim the deal that the governor made. Keep watching this state.
What's Behind the NY End Run around Teacher Certification?
A deeper look at SUNY's attempt to lower standards for charter teachers.
Sunday, March 4, 2018
That Whole Racism Thing
While the education debates rage, those of us backing public education need to remember, even in the midst of out enthusiasm for public education, that as an institution, we have some issues with racism.
Exhibit A: Racist principal in the Bronx. This twenty-six year veteran thought February was called "Don't Teach Black History Month." This principal allegedly instructed an English teacher not to teach a unit about the Harlem Renaissance, which is not just a critical chapter in Black history, but a critical chapter in the history of American arts and music.
Seriously. This is like telling an English teacher to skip stuff about that Shakespeare guy. I don't know how you even talk about American lit without covering it. I don't know how you talk about American music without talking about it. It's like trying to teach 19th century lit without bringing up anyone who knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, except that of course those guys were white.
The teacher involved said she was told not to teach it because she's not a social studies teacher, which is the kind of thing you expect from dim freshmen ("This is English class, not math class-- why do we gotta use numbers?" David Coleman's dopey theories aside, you can't study literature without studying the context in which it existed.
It's one more example of how it's impossible be racist in the education field without being just plain bad at your job and damaged in your understanding of what education means. Racist instruction is always bad instruction, not just because it's immoral and wrong, but because it's dumb and seriously limited in understanding.
Exhibit B: Huffpost uncovered a 25-year-old whit supremacist teaching in Florida. Oh, Florida. The teacher runs (ran) a supremacist podcast, and bragged about lying to her boss about her attempts to spread her vile crap to her students. And then there's this chilling exchange:
Exhibit A: Racist principal in the Bronx. This twenty-six year veteran thought February was called "Don't Teach Black History Month." This principal allegedly instructed an English teacher not to teach a unit about the Harlem Renaissance, which is not just a critical chapter in Black history, but a critical chapter in the history of American arts and music.
Seriously. This is like telling an English teacher to skip stuff about that Shakespeare guy. I don't know how you even talk about American lit without covering it. I don't know how you talk about American music without talking about it. It's like trying to teach 19th century lit without bringing up anyone who knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, except that of course those guys were white.
The teacher involved said she was told not to teach it because she's not a social studies teacher, which is the kind of thing you expect from dim freshmen ("This is English class, not math class-- why do we gotta use numbers?" David Coleman's dopey theories aside, you can't study literature without studying the context in which it existed.
It's one more example of how it's impossible be racist in the education field without being just plain bad at your job and damaged in your understanding of what education means. Racist instruction is always bad instruction, not just because it's immoral and wrong, but because it's dumb and seriously limited in understanding.
Exhibit B: Huffpost uncovered a 25-year-old whit supremacist teaching in Florida. Oh, Florida. The teacher runs (ran) a supremacist podcast, and bragged about lying to her boss about her attempts to spread her vile crap to her students. And then there's this chilling exchange:
Volitich also agreed with her guest’s assertion that more white supremacists need to infiltrate public schools and become teachers. “They don’t have to be vocal about their views, but get in there!” her guest said. “Be more covert and just start taking over those places.”
“Right,” Volitich said. “I’m absolutely one of them.”
Dayanna Volitich is the young woman's name, and I guess we're fortunate that she's one more person who doesn't really understand how the internet works. Local media have picked up the story and the district that hired her in 2016 is now looking at exactly how its ethics rules could be applied here. Volitich deserves to have her teaching career ended, though it would not surprise me if she ended up in a Florida charter school with fewer rules about who can teach.
We are a country that has a problem with racism, so it would be astonishing if our school system did not reflect that problem. But those of us who advocate for public education need to remember that we have some housecleaning of our own to do, and that it's not always a mystery why families of color want an alternative for their children. We have an obligation to watch out for problematic colleagues-- even the ones who try to be sneaky about it. Meanwhile, fans of choice and voucher systems need to remember that in many states, Volitich would be untouchable in a private school, and we wouldn't even be having a conversation about her.
Dayanna Volitich is the young woman's name, and I guess we're fortunate that she's one more person who doesn't really understand how the internet works. Local media have picked up the story and the district that hired her in 2016 is now looking at exactly how its ethics rules could be applied here. Volitich deserves to have her teaching career ended, though it would not surprise me if she ended up in a Florida charter school with fewer rules about who can teach.
We are a country that has a problem with racism, so it would be astonishing if our school system did not reflect that problem. But those of us who advocate for public education need to remember that we have some housecleaning of our own to do, and that it's not always a mystery why families of color want an alternative for their children. We have an obligation to watch out for problematic colleagues-- even the ones who try to be sneaky about it. Meanwhile, fans of choice and voucher systems need to remember that in many states, Volitich would be untouchable in a private school, and we wouldn't even be having a conversation about her.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Faux Personalized Teacher Training
Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has a new profile of a new (sort of) program for personalizing (not exactly) teacher training following the competency-based (allegedly) model.
We can see some of the fundamental problems right off the bat. Barnum opens with a scene from the program. Proto-teachers are being given a scenario-- you hear someone in your classroom slam Black Lives Matter protests, and you're worried about damage to your classroom culture.
“What are you going to do in the exact moment? What do you do in the next month to make sure your classroom is a safe environment?”
Asking those questions is Rupal Jain of the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, a soon-to-launch graduate school of education with a new approach to teaching teachers. The Academy’s goal is not just to challenge them with scenarios like that one, but to ensure they master them, with prospective teachers moving at their own pace and graduating when they demonstrate more than 40 specific skills.
Sigh.
So let's unpack some of the assumptions here.
First, we assume that this situation can be "mastered," as if there is one correct way to handle this hypothetical scenario. Except that, of course, there isn't. Because we have to factor in the personality and style of the teacher, then the personal characteristics of the students in the classroom (both the dissers and the listeners), then we have to factor in what outside factors are in play (recent news? community events?) and then we have to factor in the relationship between the teacher and those students.
You can't "master" these scenarios, any more than you can "master" being married or "master" parenthood. For one thing, every situation is different. For another, the ground continuously shifts under your feet as you and your students get older. This sort of thing absolutely falls under one of my own Rules For Life, which is that you must always keep growing and learning, and if you aren't going forward, you're going backwards-- there is no standing still. If a teacher were to tell me, "Well, I've completely mastered that aspect of my classroom practice," I would immediately conclude that I was talking to someone who isn't a very great teacher.
So, no-- you aren't going to teach anybody to "master" this scenario, or any other one.
Second, someone has apparently achieved the magical trick of narrowing the entire rich, complicated teaching profession to a list of (more than) forty specific skills. This belongs on a shelf next to some magazine article entitled "Twelve tricks to being the perfect wife" or "Become a perfect parent in just ten days." It's ridiculous. If someone walked into a teaching job interview and said, "You should hire me. I'm a great teacher, because I have mastered these forty-two skills," my thought would be that nobody should hire this person for a teaching job, ever, because the only person who could say something like that would be a person who does not understand the teaching profession. At all.
But we're only three paragraphs into the article. I've never known Barnum to completely miss the mark when he covers a subject, but hey-- maybe subsequent paragraphs will reveal that he just made these folks look worse than they really are to spice up the opening.
The future of education will “move away from focusing on what you’re being taught to what you’ve actually learned,” said Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College and the head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the organization behind the Academy. “We thought, let’s create an institution that does it and can model it.”
That's good competency-based education boilerplate, and I don't want to take a long side trip on why that's concerning. The short explanation for why CBE is a problem here-- Levine's goal can be read as "Let's just focus on the things that we can test." Now I'll ask you-- as you think back on the important educational experiences and lessons of your life, are the majority of those memories related to the tests you took?
The Academy is getting big bucks from the Chan Zuckerberg Sort-of-philanthropic-but-not-really Initiative. It will focus on science and math teachers, and it will get help from MIT. And if you want another giant red flag to plant in the Academy's front yard, consider this:
It’s unclear if it will work: “Competency-based” teacher education has a thin track record, and though research has been done on the teaching fellowships the Woodrow Wilson Foundation has run for the last decade, the foundation has not released it. But the Academy has the funding, prestige, and handle on the zeitgeist to suggest that its approach will influence teacher education in the years ahead.
Imagine this. Your friend runs into the house with a great new product. "This will totally help your plants grow," your friend yells. "I'll show you." And your friend goes into the next room where the plants are, and you hear some noises, and then your friend comes out, shuts the door, and tells you, "You know what? Don't look in there." Do you deduce that the product worked? No, neither do I.
But hey-- who cares if your idea works, as long as you have money and prestige and the zeitgeist on your side.
So this really isn't looking good so far, but Barnum is still writing, so let's see if anything starts to look better.
What is the Academy?
Well, it's a project going back to 2015 as a partnership between Woodrow Wilson (the foundation, not the dead President) and MIT. It raised $22 million from Chan Zuckerberg, the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Foundation, among others, with their eyeballs on another ten mill. And they've grabbed up ten "design fellows," recent college grads to work out how this program should work.
Alex Trunnell, one of the fellows, recognizes there's no one right way to set up a classroom, so the Academy is setting up a teaching "gym" for practice, with 3d software for designing space and a simulation program from Mursion, a company that promises "customized training simulations for any workplace." Also, the fellows work in after-school programs.
So, unless I've missed something, we've got a program to train people how to be teachers, piloted by people who have never been teachers. Augmented with software written by other non-teachers.
I learned, in part, classroom management by sitting in class with Dr. Robert Schall. While we presented our prepared lessons, Dr. Schall "simulated" the behavior of Bobby, a realistically uninterested student. Those session were invaluable because, as someone who had worked for years in a classroom, Dr. Schall had a good grasp of exactly what that kind of behavior looked like. He was not computerized, but he was in 3D.
One of the features that has emerged as a defining quality of education reform is an absolute ignorance of decades of work by millions of professionals in the field they want to revolutionize. What better exemplifies that than a teacher preparation program that does not involve or consult actual teachers?
The Model's Challenges
To work, the Academy will need to successfully assess the skills it expects prospective teachers to master. That’s a tall order, particularly before teachers actually have their own classrooms.
Indeed, that is the second of two huge hurdles (we'll get back to the first in a second). How will they meet this challenge? The short answer is, they don't know. Or as Pam Grossman of the University of Pennsylvania puts it regarding "context-specific" skills like developing strong relationships with students, "We don't have assessments yet that really assess the quality of those kinds of practices."
The third hurdle is money. The program wants to charge about $25K for an open-ended (you just stay in the program until you've checked off the forty-odd items) program that may or may not make a real teacher out of you.
The first hurdle? Barnum didn't ask a critical question here-- where did the list of forty-some specific skills come from, and what basis is there for believing that the list is correct? This should be the biggest, reddest flag of all....
Particularly because Woodrow Wilson has been pursing away at teaching for a while, and there is zero evidence that any of their attempts to "transform teacher education while preparing future leaders in the teaching profession" have actually yielded useful results. Levine says they have research results and they are totally going to release those some day, but it's worth remembering that the foundation has an ideological axe to grind.
The dream?
The dream is that the program will be hugely successful and then it will become a resource center and the approach will scale up and spread like educational kudzu. They don't want to compete-- they want to become partners with all the other programs whose expertise they're ignoring as they build their new program.
As Barnum notes, Levine makes an odd poster person for this approach, as he has not been a fan of all those future partners (his paper about teacher prep includes chapter titles like "The Pursuit of Irrelevance" "Low Admission Standards," and "Insufficient Quality Control.") But he insists that he's totally not that guy, and wants to be a helpful bud to all the teacher prep programs that he has previously ignored and/or dissed.
I'm thinking we're worrying about the cart when the horse hasn't even been born yet. The program is up and running, missing only a justification for their approach, an effective way to deliver it, and a valid means of measuring its success. They don't know if they're doing the right thing, how they're going to accomplish it, or how they'll know they've accomplished it, and their are red flags waving brightly around all three of those issues. Outside of that, though, they're right on track for some prestigious zeitgeist funding.
We can see some of the fundamental problems right off the bat. Barnum opens with a scene from the program. Proto-teachers are being given a scenario-- you hear someone in your classroom slam Black Lives Matter protests, and you're worried about damage to your classroom culture.
“What are you going to do in the exact moment? What do you do in the next month to make sure your classroom is a safe environment?”
Asking those questions is Rupal Jain of the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, a soon-to-launch graduate school of education with a new approach to teaching teachers. The Academy’s goal is not just to challenge them with scenarios like that one, but to ensure they master them, with prospective teachers moving at their own pace and graduating when they demonstrate more than 40 specific skills.
Sigh.
So let's unpack some of the assumptions here.
First, we assume that this situation can be "mastered," as if there is one correct way to handle this hypothetical scenario. Except that, of course, there isn't. Because we have to factor in the personality and style of the teacher, then the personal characteristics of the students in the classroom (both the dissers and the listeners), then we have to factor in what outside factors are in play (recent news? community events?) and then we have to factor in the relationship between the teacher and those students.
So, no-- you aren't going to teach anybody to "master" this scenario, or any other one.
Second, someone has apparently achieved the magical trick of narrowing the entire rich, complicated teaching profession to a list of (more than) forty specific skills. This belongs on a shelf next to some magazine article entitled "Twelve tricks to being the perfect wife" or "Become a perfect parent in just ten days." It's ridiculous. If someone walked into a teaching job interview and said, "You should hire me. I'm a great teacher, because I have mastered these forty-two skills," my thought would be that nobody should hire this person for a teaching job, ever, because the only person who could say something like that would be a person who does not understand the teaching profession. At all.
But we're only three paragraphs into the article. I've never known Barnum to completely miss the mark when he covers a subject, but hey-- maybe subsequent paragraphs will reveal that he just made these folks look worse than they really are to spice up the opening.
The future of education will “move away from focusing on what you’re being taught to what you’ve actually learned,” said Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College and the head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the organization behind the Academy. “We thought, let’s create an institution that does it and can model it.”
That's good competency-based education boilerplate, and I don't want to take a long side trip on why that's concerning. The short explanation for why CBE is a problem here-- Levine's goal can be read as "Let's just focus on the things that we can test." Now I'll ask you-- as you think back on the important educational experiences and lessons of your life, are the majority of those memories related to the tests you took?
The Academy is getting big bucks from the Chan Zuckerberg Sort-of-philanthropic-but-not-really Initiative. It will focus on science and math teachers, and it will get help from MIT. And if you want another giant red flag to plant in the Academy's front yard, consider this:
It’s unclear if it will work: “Competency-based” teacher education has a thin track record, and though research has been done on the teaching fellowships the Woodrow Wilson Foundation has run for the last decade, the foundation has not released it. But the Academy has the funding, prestige, and handle on the zeitgeist to suggest that its approach will influence teacher education in the years ahead.
Imagine this. Your friend runs into the house with a great new product. "This will totally help your plants grow," your friend yells. "I'll show you." And your friend goes into the next room where the plants are, and you hear some noises, and then your friend comes out, shuts the door, and tells you, "You know what? Don't look in there." Do you deduce that the product worked? No, neither do I.
But hey-- who cares if your idea works, as long as you have money and prestige and the zeitgeist on your side.
So this really isn't looking good so far, but Barnum is still writing, so let's see if anything starts to look better.
What is the Academy?
Well, it's a project going back to 2015 as a partnership between Woodrow Wilson (the foundation, not the dead President) and MIT. It raised $22 million from Chan Zuckerberg, the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Foundation, among others, with their eyeballs on another ten mill. And they've grabbed up ten "design fellows," recent college grads to work out how this program should work.
Alex Trunnell, one of the fellows, recognizes there's no one right way to set up a classroom, so the Academy is setting up a teaching "gym" for practice, with 3d software for designing space and a simulation program from Mursion, a company that promises "customized training simulations for any workplace." Also, the fellows work in after-school programs.
So, unless I've missed something, we've got a program to train people how to be teachers, piloted by people who have never been teachers. Augmented with software written by other non-teachers.
I learned, in part, classroom management by sitting in class with Dr. Robert Schall. While we presented our prepared lessons, Dr. Schall "simulated" the behavior of Bobby, a realistically uninterested student. Those session were invaluable because, as someone who had worked for years in a classroom, Dr. Schall had a good grasp of exactly what that kind of behavior looked like. He was not computerized, but he was in 3D.
One of the features that has emerged as a defining quality of education reform is an absolute ignorance of decades of work by millions of professionals in the field they want to revolutionize. What better exemplifies that than a teacher preparation program that does not involve or consult actual teachers?
The Model's Challenges
To work, the Academy will need to successfully assess the skills it expects prospective teachers to master. That’s a tall order, particularly before teachers actually have their own classrooms.
Indeed, that is the second of two huge hurdles (we'll get back to the first in a second). How will they meet this challenge? The short answer is, they don't know. Or as Pam Grossman of the University of Pennsylvania puts it regarding "context-specific" skills like developing strong relationships with students, "We don't have assessments yet that really assess the quality of those kinds of practices."
The third hurdle is money. The program wants to charge about $25K for an open-ended (you just stay in the program until you've checked off the forty-odd items) program that may or may not make a real teacher out of you.
The first hurdle? Barnum didn't ask a critical question here-- where did the list of forty-some specific skills come from, and what basis is there for believing that the list is correct? This should be the biggest, reddest flag of all....
Particularly because Woodrow Wilson has been pursing away at teaching for a while, and there is zero evidence that any of their attempts to "transform teacher education while preparing future leaders in the teaching profession" have actually yielded useful results. Levine says they have research results and they are totally going to release those some day, but it's worth remembering that the foundation has an ideological axe to grind.
The dream?
The dream is that the program will be hugely successful and then it will become a resource center and the approach will scale up and spread like educational kudzu. They don't want to compete-- they want to become partners with all the other programs whose expertise they're ignoring as they build their new program.
As Barnum notes, Levine makes an odd poster person for this approach, as he has not been a fan of all those future partners (his paper about teacher prep includes chapter titles like "The Pursuit of Irrelevance" "Low Admission Standards," and "Insufficient Quality Control.") But he insists that he's totally not that guy, and wants to be a helpful bud to all the teacher prep programs that he has previously ignored and/or dissed.
I'm thinking we're worrying about the cart when the horse hasn't even been born yet. The program is up and running, missing only a justification for their approach, an effective way to deliver it, and a valid means of measuring its success. They don't know if they're doing the right thing, how they're going to accomplish it, or how they'll know they've accomplished it, and their are red flags waving brightly around all three of those issues. Outside of that, though, they're right on track for some prestigious zeitgeist funding.
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Bad Management and Flaming Possums
For Throwback Thursday, here's a piece that I ran in my local newspaper column almost a decade ago. It's still one of the most popular items I ever ran, and it even prompted some fans to create some art to go with it. It's not about education-- except that some of you will absolutely recognize the management problem described here.
One great workplace mystery: why do some people get punished for good work while people who do lousy work are rewarded for their slackness?
Ordinarily, it’s smart to make the most use of your best people. If Pat can build ten types of widgets quickly and Chris can only do two kinds at a moderate tempo, then the smart response to a new complicated rush widget order is to give it to Pat.
But in this scenario, Chris is less spectacular, but still competent. It’s when a weak manager and an incompetent worker enter the picture that the backwards rewards system kicks in.
One major rule of bad management is “Avoid problems.” Bad managers don’t know how to fix problems or deal with crises, so their management style is based on ignoring, waiting, hiding, or sweeping under carpets.
When Mr. Dimbulb [that could be Principal Dimbulb or Superintendent Dimbulb for education purposes] considers his workers, he’s not thinking “How do I get the best work out of this person?” He’s thinking, “How can I get this person to create the fewest problems for me?”
For Mr. Dimbulb, the best workers are the ones who solve their own problems, or at least won’t pass them back up to the front office. If Mr. Dimbulb needs to hand a flaming dead possum to someone, he’ll hand it to the person least likely to squirt it with kerosene and throw it back.
So the best, most responsible workers get the flaming dead possums.
Pat may get tired and frustrated. Pat may go home thinking, “Can’t Dimbulb see that I’m killing myself putting out these dead possums? Can’t he see I’m staying late and starting early and wearing myself out? Can’t he see there’s a problem?”
The answer is, no, he can’t, because those problems aren’t Mr. Dimbulb’s problems. All he knows, all he needs to know, is that there is no flaming dead possum on his desk. And as long as he can make them go away by handing them off to Pat, Pat will be the flaming dead possum specialist.
But for Mr. Dimbulb, Chris is a challenge. If Dimbulb hands Chris so much as a slightly stuporous hamster, he’ll get yelping from Chris, calls from the customer and Chris’s supervisor, and complaints from all quarters about Chris’s mishandling of the little dysfunctional rodent. Not only will he not get rid of the hamster, but Chris will manage to turn it into an angry water buffalo.
From Dimbulb’s standpoint, the best job to give Chris is an assignment along the lines of “Go sit in the shady corner and take a nap.”
So for doing good work, Pat gets dumped on, and for being incompetent, Chris gets a cushy job that demands little.
A better manager than Mr. Dimbulb would follow a simple two-step process.
Step One: Help Chris Improve and Become Competent.
Step Two: If Step One Fails, Fire Chris. [Do not tell me this can't be done to teachers. It absolutely can. It just requires administrators to do their damn jobs.]
A manager can skip step one in certain extreme cases (Chris is late every single day, Chris blows up workplace, Chris shoots colleagues). But generally the first smart move is to see if Chris can be salvaged or turned into something productive. It is, after all, a manager’s job to figure out how to get the best work out of his people.
Mr. Dimbulb will not choose this option. He is pretty sure it would be hard. At the very least it would require him to take on a problem, and this is where his fundamental weakness as a manager lies. You can only solve a problem if A) you acknowledge it exists and B) acknowledge that it’s your problem. And Dimbulb’s first priority is to make sure that he doesn’t have any problems.
And since none of the problems are his, he never solves any of them. He just keeps passing them on to the employees who, as far as he knows, make the problems go away. And he gets angry at the people who keep bringing him more problems.
Under this system, competent employees face a tough decision. They can keep enabling their incompetent boss, like the alcoholic’s wife who keeps telling the kids, “Daddy missed Christmas because the space aliens got him.”
Or they can step back and let the next flaming dead possum burn the place down, thereby running the risk of either getting themselves fired or letting the workplace self-destruct. Option #3 is to send articles like this one to Mr. Dimbulb, but this never helps, because the Dimbulbs of the world will never recognize themselves in this column.
One great workplace mystery: why do some people get punished for good work while people who do lousy work are rewarded for their slackness?
Ordinarily, it’s smart to make the most use of your best people. If Pat can build ten types of widgets quickly and Chris can only do two kinds at a moderate tempo, then the smart response to a new complicated rush widget order is to give it to Pat.
But in this scenario, Chris is less spectacular, but still competent. It’s when a weak manager and an incompetent worker enter the picture that the backwards rewards system kicks in.
One major rule of bad management is “Avoid problems.” Bad managers don’t know how to fix problems or deal with crises, so their management style is based on ignoring, waiting, hiding, or sweeping under carpets.
When Mr. Dimbulb [that could be Principal Dimbulb or Superintendent Dimbulb for education purposes] considers his workers, he’s not thinking “How do I get the best work out of this person?” He’s thinking, “How can I get this person to create the fewest problems for me?”
For Mr. Dimbulb, the best workers are the ones who solve their own problems, or at least won’t pass them back up to the front office. If Mr. Dimbulb needs to hand a flaming dead possum to someone, he’ll hand it to the person least likely to squirt it with kerosene and throw it back.
So the best, most responsible workers get the flaming dead possums.
Pat may get tired and frustrated. Pat may go home thinking, “Can’t Dimbulb see that I’m killing myself putting out these dead possums? Can’t he see I’m staying late and starting early and wearing myself out? Can’t he see there’s a problem?”
The answer is, no, he can’t, because those problems aren’t Mr. Dimbulb’s problems. All he knows, all he needs to know, is that there is no flaming dead possum on his desk. And as long as he can make them go away by handing them off to Pat, Pat will be the flaming dead possum specialist.
But for Mr. Dimbulb, Chris is a challenge. If Dimbulb hands Chris so much as a slightly stuporous hamster, he’ll get yelping from Chris, calls from the customer and Chris’s supervisor, and complaints from all quarters about Chris’s mishandling of the little dysfunctional rodent. Not only will he not get rid of the hamster, but Chris will manage to turn it into an angry water buffalo.
From Dimbulb’s standpoint, the best job to give Chris is an assignment along the lines of “Go sit in the shady corner and take a nap.”
So for doing good work, Pat gets dumped on, and for being incompetent, Chris gets a cushy job that demands little.
A better manager than Mr. Dimbulb would follow a simple two-step process.
Step One: Help Chris Improve and Become Competent.
Step Two: If Step One Fails, Fire Chris. [Do not tell me this can't be done to teachers. It absolutely can. It just requires administrators to do their damn jobs.]
A manager can skip step one in certain extreme cases (Chris is late every single day, Chris blows up workplace, Chris shoots colleagues). But generally the first smart move is to see if Chris can be salvaged or turned into something productive. It is, after all, a manager’s job to figure out how to get the best work out of his people.
Mr. Dimbulb will not choose this option. He is pretty sure it would be hard. At the very least it would require him to take on a problem, and this is where his fundamental weakness as a manager lies. You can only solve a problem if A) you acknowledge it exists and B) acknowledge that it’s your problem. And Dimbulb’s first priority is to make sure that he doesn’t have any problems.
And since none of the problems are his, he never solves any of them. He just keeps passing them on to the employees who, as far as he knows, make the problems go away. And he gets angry at the people who keep bringing him more problems.
Under this system, competent employees face a tough decision. They can keep enabling their incompetent boss, like the alcoholic’s wife who keeps telling the kids, “Daddy missed Christmas because the space aliens got him.”
Or they can step back and let the next flaming dead possum burn the place down, thereby running the risk of either getting themselves fired or letting the workplace self-destruct. Option #3 is to send articles like this one to Mr. Dimbulb, but this never helps, because the Dimbulbs of the world will never recognize themselves in this column.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
What Jonathan Chait Doesn't Know
Jonathan Chait has waded again into the education policy field, and despite the confidence with which he speaks, "Obama Has To Save His Forgotten Education Legacy" is a dazzling display of bold, sparkling wrong, welding revisionist history onto a hard shell of incorrectness that is used to cover gaping holes where facts, or at least interpretations grounded in the reality of our own earth, ought to be.
In short, this piece has a lot of wrong in it.
Let's look at all the things that Chait doesn't know.
1) Chait doesn't know how Race to the Top happened.
On February 17, 2009, Barack Obama signed one of the most sweeping federal education reforms in American history.
It wasn't.
In fact, it owed most of its substance to No Child Left Behind, the bi-partisan train wreck implemented under the George W. Bush administration.
Chait notes that RttT was a grant program, modestly sized and hidden within the stimulus package. What he doesn't note is how much of it was simply an extension of NCLB. In fact, the RttT grants were no more influential than the waivers offered to states that followed the RttT requirements, and those waivers were attractive only because every single state was in imminent (if not current) violation of the law under the still-operational NCLB.
NCLB, as we all recall, required 100% of students in 100% of schools in 100% of districts to be pull above average scores on the federally-mandated Big Standardized Test. I occasionally exaggerate for effect; this is not one of those times. Congress had passed a functionally innumerate and literally impossible law on the theory that they would fix it later, before the bill was due. They didn't. So the Obama/Duncan offer was simple-- run your schools the way we tell you to, or be found in violation of federal education law. Most of the states caved.
So NCLB was the stick with which RttT was sold. RttT did one good thing-- it took away the impossible 100% goal. But in all other ways, it assumed that the problem with NCLB was that it was too loose. So the feds would tell states what BS Tests they had to give, they would make the penalties for those tests more punishing, and they would reduce the state/district autonomy over their education standards and plans (howdy, Common Core).
The result was “a marked surge” in school reform, rooted in studying data and spreading best practices.
Also incorrect. The result was a huge emphasis on test results over everything else, with the BS Testing tail wagging the educational dog. Curriculum was narrowed, students were sorted out according to how much their test scores would help or hurt a school. There were no new "best practices" to spread, except for practices intended to increase BS Test scores-- and those practices usually came at the cost of actual educational best practices.
So maybe RttT was "most sweeping" in the sense that it picked up the sledgehammer of NCLB and swung it around the China Shop of education with greater vigor and gusto. But that's nothing to brag about.
2) Chait doesn't know that people talked about it.
Chait seems unaware that RttT was used to push the Common Core. I cannot imagine what rock he hid under to have missed the considerable discussion about that bit of educational awesomeness.
Another reason is that, since the policy split both parties, nobody had an incentive to talk about it.
"Split" seems an odd word. United might be a better one.
3) Chait doesn't know how teachers unions reacted.
Teachers’ unions hated the entire premise of the reforms, which spurred states to adopt policies that gave more money to the most effective teachers and allowed schools to replace the least effective ones.
Wrong again. Teachers union leadership mostly like RttT just fine. Actual teachers, on the other hand, hated it a lot. This had nothing to do with giving more money to the most effective teachers, a policy that was implemented practically nowhere. Teachers hated it because suddenly our classroom practices were tied to a set of amateur-hour, top-down inflicted standards, and our reputations and, in some cases, careers were tied to the result of a single narrowly-aimed, poorly-designed standardized test.
Chait notes that the unions didn't want a public split with a beloved President, and he is correct hen he suggests that many teachers held out the vain hope that somehow Obama didn't know or understand what terrible policy his buddy Arne Duncan was inflicting on education. It is also true, however, that union leadership had to be pushed-- hard-- by members to even issue the milquetoast critiques of Duncan that they finally coughed up.
As long as Obama occupied the White House, though, teachers’ unions had to hold back from a full-scale assault on his education policies, and Obama had no need for a high-profile public defense.
Not wrong, but it was more than Obama-- lots of pseudo-left groups like DFER provided cover for a raft of conservative ed reform policies.
4) Chait hasn't heard of neo-liberalism.
The Obama administration is no longer the public face of liberal education reform. Instead, its opponents are attempting to attach that policy to Donald Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Chait makes it sound as if this is some sort of trick to "attempt," when in fact it's like attaching the idea of wetness to water. But the real problem here is that Chait is trying to attach the idea of ed reform to some sort of Democrat versus Republican struggle, and while it is true that the parties have made various attempts to leverage ed policy for political points (e.g. "Common Core will turn your daughters into lesbian socialists" or "Only charters can save poor children from poverty"), ed reform has found a coalition standing shoulder to shoulder since the days the both parties signed off in No Child Left Behind.
What ed allies like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush have in common is a dedication to the idea that public spaces like public schools should be carved up, sold of, and left to the private sector to run. You can call it neoliberalism or corporate power grabbing or whatever you like, but the arc of ed reform follows the idea that if we have the right tools, we can prove that public schools are failing and open up that giant mountain of education money to private entrepreneurs, while simultaneously launching a massive program of data mining that will make some folks rich even as it makes the Lesser Classes more useful tools for their Betters.
But none of that matters here because...
5) Chait doesn't know what the "sides" are.
Chait posits that there are three "broad approaches" to education policy. They are...
A) The "left wing" which supports neighborhood-based public schools, "opposes any methods to measure or differentiate the performance of teachers or schools," and argues instead for "alternatives to school reform" like increased anti-poverty spending and getting middle-class parents to enroll in high-poverty schools.
I literally cannot think of a single person who fits this description. In particular, I do not know anyone who opposes any attempt to measure the performance of teachers or schools. I know lots of people who oppose bad attempts to measure performance using tools that cannot actually do that job, but that's a different problem. The "alternatives to school reform" line is particularly clever, since school reform itself is touted as a means to erase poverty, so one might say that the opposing position is less about alternatives to ed reform and more about saying, "The best way to fight poverty would be to spend money actually fighting poverty.
B) Conservative education policy which "believes market competition holds the key to improvement." They like vouchers "to send low-income students to private schools" and want to open charters "with as little regulation as possible" and let the Invisible Hand sort them out.
This is a bit incomplete. Conservatives like the theory that competition breeds excellence-- and so did Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, which I'm pretty sure is not where he's going with this. Voucher fans like to sell vouchers as a poor-kids-go-to-private-schools measure, but mostly what vouchers do is funnel public tax dollars to selective religious schools.
C) The liberal position "sits between the two." Which is why Chait had to pretend that the Left Wing education stance is a thing-- so that he can seem to be championing the reasonable middle. Liberal wingers, apparently, believe in charters, and believe that schools need "more ability to reward excellent teachers and fire low-performing ones." Because teacher contracts make it "virtually impossible" to fire bad teachers. So, so far, liberal reformsters are exactly like conservative reformsters.
But wait! Liberal reformsters also believe that the market is not enough, and that strong oversight boards are needed to keep charters in line. He's going to cite Massachusetts as an example of charter awesomeness here, as well as proof that left-wingers oppose charters even when those charters are awesome. He does not explain where the gazillion people who voted against Massachusetts charter expansion came from, nor does he place the failed dark money astro-turf support group that backed the expansion-- where do they fit here?
Chait has other fish to fry. He wants you to know that his guys-- the liberals-- spoke out against Betsy DeVosian reform in Michigan, and that his side does pay attention to things like the research that says voucher schools do poorly. Because he really, really, really wants there to be some space between Obama and Trump on education reform policy. He wants you to know that the left and the right keep trying to make this a two-sided debate, but his team is totally all by itself in the middle. Also, he wants you to know that only his liberal buddies pay attention to facts and research-- everyone else is just a raving loon.
6) Chait doesn't know what planet he's on.
It's at this point that I can barely track his reasoning.
The left (as defined by Chait) is out to drive Democrats away from liberal reform (as made up and defined by Chait) by treating it as identical to the conservative agenda. But they aren't the same, because even though they both favor charters and both distrust teachers and both think the market should drive school and teacher behavior and both think we should pay (and fire) teachers on merit they are different because.... because.... Wait. Why are they different again? Liberals don't like vouchers?
Never mind, Chait considers this point already made, somehow, so he's moved on. DeVos doesn't count because she's an inadequate failure (Best line: "You can’t do much to alter primary education without some money to spend and a lot of cleverness. Obama had both. Trump and DeVos have neither.") But see, that's okay with the GOP because they just want to shrink the federal government, and so do the unions because the feds are "the only force powerful enough to upset tenure arrangements unions have decided to prioritize" and now I feel like I'm reading one of those articles where a Trumper talks about how the President has increased our prestige abroad and moral authority at home and all I can think is what are you even talking about-- I don't even know where to start. Chait is no help-- his link to support the idea that the GOP and unions are forging "low-key alliances" is a short piece (by himself) that offers as evidence that one time that Diane Ravitch used the word "local" seven times in an article. And he backs that up with an article Ravitch wrote in 2010.
7) Chait doesn't know what his problem is
So the real threat to real education reform is the alliance between the left-wing (as defined by Chait) alliance with the GOP, which in turn has led to the left-wingers attacking liberal reform "as crypto-allies of the GOP." Left-wingers are a wily bunch; I really hope I meet one some day.
But they might succeed because, as Chait posited at the top, nobody knows anything about ed reform, and into their ignorance will swoop the wily left-wingers to paint lovely liberal reform with an ugly Trump brush. And it might work, because to people with eyes and ears, it looks kind of true. Go figure.
But there is a solution!
8) Chait does not know what Barack Obama is capable of
There is, however, one person who has the power to change that: Barack Obama. The former president has nearly universal support among his own party, and he has the platform to command attention to issues he wants to highlight. The people who want to dismantle Obama’s education legacy can only exploit Obama’s absence from the public stage if Obama stays absent from the public stage. If instead Obama decides to speak out for his agenda, and to create room for Democrats to sustain his agenda, he’ll have enormous leverage to do so. Obama could make the case to teachers that they would be better served by unions that prioritize higher pay rather than job security for the least competent members. And he can can explain that progressives should support an active federal role in education, not local control that has perpetrated mediocrity and segregation.
We have now entered the magical thinking portion of our program.
First, Obama never made a compelling case for his education program in the first place. Second, his legacy is not his legacy, but a legacy that belongs to a whole lot of people, including Jeb and George Bush. Third, many teachers still have a funny ache in the middle of their backs, right where he stabbed us.
And nobody-- nobody-- can make a good case for merit pay based on bad metrics like student scores on bad standardized tests (which is what, in Chait's statement, "higher pay" really means-- along with no job security).
Finally, while Chait may be contemptuous of what local control "perpetrates," the feds have had well over a decade to make their case for the reforms they anted to push, and they have failed. The Common Core did not make schools better. Using standardized tests as a proxy for educational achievement, and attaching those tests to punishments and rewards and more punishments did not make schools better. Unleashing charters and the power of competition did not make schools better. Disenfrachising local elected school boards did not make schools better. They had their chance. They failed. Better PR and a more charismatic spokesman will not change that.
9) Chait does not know that people have already been talking about all of this
For about two years, reformsters have been talking about how things break down within their movement, what worked and what didn't, what alliances have been formed and which ones have been tested. Honestly, they've been pretty thoughtful about it, and considerably more reality-based than Chait is here. The next time he gets an urge to write a piece like this, he should try talking to or reading the work of other reformsters. I think they could help him out here.
In short, this piece has a lot of wrong in it.
Let's look at all the things that Chait doesn't know.
1) Chait doesn't know how Race to the Top happened.
On February 17, 2009, Barack Obama signed one of the most sweeping federal education reforms in American history.
It wasn't.
In fact, it owed most of its substance to No Child Left Behind, the bi-partisan train wreck implemented under the George W. Bush administration.
NCLB, as we all recall, required 100% of students in 100% of schools in 100% of districts to be pull above average scores on the federally-mandated Big Standardized Test. I occasionally exaggerate for effect; this is not one of those times. Congress had passed a functionally innumerate and literally impossible law on the theory that they would fix it later, before the bill was due. They didn't. So the Obama/Duncan offer was simple-- run your schools the way we tell you to, or be found in violation of federal education law. Most of the states caved.
So NCLB was the stick with which RttT was sold. RttT did one good thing-- it took away the impossible 100% goal. But in all other ways, it assumed that the problem with NCLB was that it was too loose. So the feds would tell states what BS Tests they had to give, they would make the penalties for those tests more punishing, and they would reduce the state/district autonomy over their education standards and plans (howdy, Common Core).
The result was “a marked surge” in school reform, rooted in studying data and spreading best practices.
Also incorrect. The result was a huge emphasis on test results over everything else, with the BS Testing tail wagging the educational dog. Curriculum was narrowed, students were sorted out according to how much their test scores would help or hurt a school. There were no new "best practices" to spread, except for practices intended to increase BS Test scores-- and those practices usually came at the cost of actual educational best practices.
So maybe RttT was "most sweeping" in the sense that it picked up the sledgehammer of NCLB and swung it around the China Shop of education with greater vigor and gusto. But that's nothing to brag about.
2) Chait doesn't know that people talked about it.
Chait seems unaware that RttT was used to push the Common Core. I cannot imagine what rock he hid under to have missed the considerable discussion about that bit of educational awesomeness.
Another reason is that, since the policy split both parties, nobody had an incentive to talk about it.
"Split" seems an odd word. United might be a better one.
3) Chait doesn't know how teachers unions reacted.
Teachers’ unions hated the entire premise of the reforms, which spurred states to adopt policies that gave more money to the most effective teachers and allowed schools to replace the least effective ones.
Wrong again. Teachers union leadership mostly like RttT just fine. Actual teachers, on the other hand, hated it a lot. This had nothing to do with giving more money to the most effective teachers, a policy that was implemented practically nowhere. Teachers hated it because suddenly our classroom practices were tied to a set of amateur-hour, top-down inflicted standards, and our reputations and, in some cases, careers were tied to the result of a single narrowly-aimed, poorly-designed standardized test.
Chait notes that the unions didn't want a public split with a beloved President, and he is correct hen he suggests that many teachers held out the vain hope that somehow Obama didn't know or understand what terrible policy his buddy Arne Duncan was inflicting on education. It is also true, however, that union leadership had to be pushed-- hard-- by members to even issue the milquetoast critiques of Duncan that they finally coughed up.
As long as Obama occupied the White House, though, teachers’ unions had to hold back from a full-scale assault on his education policies, and Obama had no need for a high-profile public defense.
Not wrong, but it was more than Obama-- lots of pseudo-left groups like DFER provided cover for a raft of conservative ed reform policies.
4) Chait hasn't heard of neo-liberalism.
The Obama administration is no longer the public face of liberal education reform. Instead, its opponents are attempting to attach that policy to Donald Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Chait makes it sound as if this is some sort of trick to "attempt," when in fact it's like attaching the idea of wetness to water. But the real problem here is that Chait is trying to attach the idea of ed reform to some sort of Democrat versus Republican struggle, and while it is true that the parties have made various attempts to leverage ed policy for political points (e.g. "Common Core will turn your daughters into lesbian socialists" or "Only charters can save poor children from poverty"), ed reform has found a coalition standing shoulder to shoulder since the days the both parties signed off in No Child Left Behind.
What ed allies like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush have in common is a dedication to the idea that public spaces like public schools should be carved up, sold of, and left to the private sector to run. You can call it neoliberalism or corporate power grabbing or whatever you like, but the arc of ed reform follows the idea that if we have the right tools, we can prove that public schools are failing and open up that giant mountain of education money to private entrepreneurs, while simultaneously launching a massive program of data mining that will make some folks rich even as it makes the Lesser Classes more useful tools for their Betters.
But none of that matters here because...
5) Chait doesn't know what the "sides" are.
Chait posits that there are three "broad approaches" to education policy. They are...
A) The "left wing" which supports neighborhood-based public schools, "opposes any methods to measure or differentiate the performance of teachers or schools," and argues instead for "alternatives to school reform" like increased anti-poverty spending and getting middle-class parents to enroll in high-poverty schools.
I literally cannot think of a single person who fits this description. In particular, I do not know anyone who opposes any attempt to measure the performance of teachers or schools. I know lots of people who oppose bad attempts to measure performance using tools that cannot actually do that job, but that's a different problem. The "alternatives to school reform" line is particularly clever, since school reform itself is touted as a means to erase poverty, so one might say that the opposing position is less about alternatives to ed reform and more about saying, "The best way to fight poverty would be to spend money actually fighting poverty.
B) Conservative education policy which "believes market competition holds the key to improvement." They like vouchers "to send low-income students to private schools" and want to open charters "with as little regulation as possible" and let the Invisible Hand sort them out.
This is a bit incomplete. Conservatives like the theory that competition breeds excellence-- and so did Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, which I'm pretty sure is not where he's going with this. Voucher fans like to sell vouchers as a poor-kids-go-to-private-schools measure, but mostly what vouchers do is funnel public tax dollars to selective religious schools.
C) The liberal position "sits between the two." Which is why Chait had to pretend that the Left Wing education stance is a thing-- so that he can seem to be championing the reasonable middle. Liberal wingers, apparently, believe in charters, and believe that schools need "more ability to reward excellent teachers and fire low-performing ones." Because teacher contracts make it "virtually impossible" to fire bad teachers. So, so far, liberal reformsters are exactly like conservative reformsters.
But wait! Liberal reformsters also believe that the market is not enough, and that strong oversight boards are needed to keep charters in line. He's going to cite Massachusetts as an example of charter awesomeness here, as well as proof that left-wingers oppose charters even when those charters are awesome. He does not explain where the gazillion people who voted against Massachusetts charter expansion came from, nor does he place the failed dark money astro-turf support group that backed the expansion-- where do they fit here?
Chait has other fish to fry. He wants you to know that his guys-- the liberals-- spoke out against Betsy DeVosian reform in Michigan, and that his side does pay attention to things like the research that says voucher schools do poorly. Because he really, really, really wants there to be some space between Obama and Trump on education reform policy. He wants you to know that the left and the right keep trying to make this a two-sided debate, but his team is totally all by itself in the middle. Also, he wants you to know that only his liberal buddies pay attention to facts and research-- everyone else is just a raving loon.
6) Chait doesn't know what planet he's on.
It's at this point that I can barely track his reasoning.
The left (as defined by Chait) is out to drive Democrats away from liberal reform (as made up and defined by Chait) by treating it as identical to the conservative agenda. But they aren't the same, because even though they both favor charters and both distrust teachers and both think the market should drive school and teacher behavior and both think we should pay (and fire) teachers on merit they are different because.... because.... Wait. Why are they different again? Liberals don't like vouchers?
Never mind, Chait considers this point already made, somehow, so he's moved on. DeVos doesn't count because she's an inadequate failure (Best line: "You can’t do much to alter primary education without some money to spend and a lot of cleverness. Obama had both. Trump and DeVos have neither.") But see, that's okay with the GOP because they just want to shrink the federal government, and so do the unions because the feds are "the only force powerful enough to upset tenure arrangements unions have decided to prioritize" and now I feel like I'm reading one of those articles where a Trumper talks about how the President has increased our prestige abroad and moral authority at home and all I can think is what are you even talking about-- I don't even know where to start. Chait is no help-- his link to support the idea that the GOP and unions are forging "low-key alliances" is a short piece (by himself) that offers as evidence that one time that Diane Ravitch used the word "local" seven times in an article. And he backs that up with an article Ravitch wrote in 2010.
7) Chait doesn't know what his problem is
So the real threat to real education reform is the alliance between the left-wing (as defined by Chait) alliance with the GOP, which in turn has led to the left-wingers attacking liberal reform "as crypto-allies of the GOP." Left-wingers are a wily bunch; I really hope I meet one some day.
But they might succeed because, as Chait posited at the top, nobody knows anything about ed reform, and into their ignorance will swoop the wily left-wingers to paint lovely liberal reform with an ugly Trump brush. And it might work, because to people with eyes and ears, it looks kind of true. Go figure.
But there is a solution!
8) Chait does not know what Barack Obama is capable of
There is, however, one person who has the power to change that: Barack Obama. The former president has nearly universal support among his own party, and he has the platform to command attention to issues he wants to highlight. The people who want to dismantle Obama’s education legacy can only exploit Obama’s absence from the public stage if Obama stays absent from the public stage. If instead Obama decides to speak out for his agenda, and to create room for Democrats to sustain his agenda, he’ll have enormous leverage to do so. Obama could make the case to teachers that they would be better served by unions that prioritize higher pay rather than job security for the least competent members. And he can can explain that progressives should support an active federal role in education, not local control that has perpetrated mediocrity and segregation.
We have now entered the magical thinking portion of our program.
First, Obama never made a compelling case for his education program in the first place. Second, his legacy is not his legacy, but a legacy that belongs to a whole lot of people, including Jeb and George Bush. Third, many teachers still have a funny ache in the middle of their backs, right where he stabbed us.
And nobody-- nobody-- can make a good case for merit pay based on bad metrics like student scores on bad standardized tests (which is what, in Chait's statement, "higher pay" really means-- along with no job security).
Finally, while Chait may be contemptuous of what local control "perpetrates," the feds have had well over a decade to make their case for the reforms they anted to push, and they have failed. The Common Core did not make schools better. Using standardized tests as a proxy for educational achievement, and attaching those tests to punishments and rewards and more punishments did not make schools better. Unleashing charters and the power of competition did not make schools better. Disenfrachising local elected school boards did not make schools better. They had their chance. They failed. Better PR and a more charismatic spokesman will not change that.
9) Chait does not know that people have already been talking about all of this
For about two years, reformsters have been talking about how things break down within their movement, what worked and what didn't, what alliances have been formed and which ones have been tested. Honestly, they've been pretty thoughtful about it, and considerably more reality-based than Chait is here. The next time he gets an urge to write a piece like this, he should try talking to or reading the work of other reformsters. I think they could help him out here.
Four Years?
Every year the Fordham Institute holds a Wonkathon, a sort of nerdy policy writing contest with many of the usual reform voices. And every year I write to Mike Petrilli and offer him my own answers to his question for the year. This year he actually took me up on it, but on the off chance that many of you are not regular Fordham readers, here's the piece that is now running over there. Now we'll have to wait nd see if I win. The question this year is, given the diploma scandals now coming to light, do our graduation requirements need to change.
The battery of questions in this year’s Wonkathon prompt is a good one, and they are all deserving of consideration. But I think it overlooks a major consideration: Why four years?
The definition of high school graduation that includes the qualifier “within four years” is now rarely even explicitly expressed, and yet it represents a perverse disincentive in the current system.
Consider this story from early in my own career. I met Pat (not the person’s actual name, of course) in Pat’s freshman year. Pat was taking low-level courses to avoid challenges that were well within Pat’s capabilities, but for a variety of reasons, school wasn’t really Pat’s thing. Pat stumbled through freshman year, and then completely bombed sophomore year and had to repeat most of those courses. Pat turned up in my eleventh grade classroom—now taking higher level, college-bound courses. Pat was a new student. “I was a dope,” Pat told me. “I was wasting my time, but now I’m going to do something with my life.” Pat worked through eleventh grade, continued taking college-prep courses as a senior, graduated, and went on to college, earning a degree in communications.
I would consider Pat one of our great success stories. But it took Pat five years, so to the graduation rate figures, Pat is no different than a student who drops out halfway through high school and never comes back.
Pressure to inflate grades, bogus credit-recovery courses, just plain D.C.-style fraud—these things don’t happen just because school districts are under pressure to graduate students. They happen because districts are under pressure to graduate students Right Now! In Four Years! (The formula has been fiddled with in the last decade, but the four-year deadline remains.)
For all the reform talk these days about personalization and flexibility, policymakers still deny public schools the flexibility to say to a student, “We are going to get you through this. We are going to see you succeed, even if it takes a little bit longer than it does for some of your peers.”
Instead, we have a measuring system that says the instant a student falters or stumbles, there is no benefit to the school in helping that student make it to the finish line a little bit later. A student who has to repeat a year is as bad on paper as a student who walks away and never comes back—but the student who stumbles and stays is far more trouble.
I’ll say without hesitation that the vast majority of schools and teachers work with that stumbling student on the five- (or six-) year plan because it’s the right thing to do, the choice that best fulfills our professional sense of responsibility. But it’s not the choice that our current definition of “graduation rate” rewards. Instead, our current definition rewards getting a diploma in every student’s hand after just four years, no matter what corners must be cut to do so.
Course credits and attendance are more than enough to determine readiness for a diploma. Exit exams, the Big Standardized Test, and credit recovery don’t really add any useful information, and they are all tightly tied to other systems of perverse incentives.
There is no reason for the traditional frame of coursework to be wired to a ticking four-year time-bomb. Removing that four-year deadline would give schools and students some breathing room to get things right instead of worrying about getting it right now.
Should Dems Get Behind Charters
Last week the Voices of San Diego website featured an opinion column by charter high school senior Katie Anderson. The title pretty much cuts to the chase-- "Charter Schools Should Be Part of the California Democratic Party Platform."
It's a good quick look at the fallacious arguments still circulating in favor of charter schools. Anderson up front announced her intention to register Democrat on her 18th birthday, because the party aligns with so many of her values. Except one. Why, she asks, is the Democratic Party not aligned with her on "the value of charter schools in the public education system."
It's an.... interesting question, because at this point, the Democratic Party's position on charter schools is a bit vague. You may recall that the battle over the Dem platform for the Presidential campaign involved some battling between DFER ("Fake Democrats for Education Reformy Stuff") and actual supporters of public education; the public ed supporters won, but that was in crafting a platform to support a Presidential candidate who was always pretty charter-friendly. The Obama administration was pretty charter friendly. And plenty of prominent Democrats are big charter fans. So does the party itself have an official position?
Sure, they've worked hard to disavow a whole bunch of policies for no real reason except that those reform policies (including charters) are now the official policies of the Trump/DeVos administration, but that disavowal has involved a lot of dancing and twisting and selective amnesia. Democrats now disavow some reform policies because of the current administration, but that involves being shocked-- shocked!!-- that charters are primarily a conservative policy. But they always have been.
Bottom line: I'm not sure that asking the Democratic Party to get behind charter schools isn't much like asking a hungry person to get behind an all-you-can-eat buffet.
But Anderson further muddies the water with standard charter talking points:
Charter schools are public schools of choice that offer a valuable alternative to the traditional, one size-fits-all educational model. They allow families to choose the best path that will offer their children academic success. They are independently managed, and for that independence they offer greater accountability — they must be re-approved every two-to-five years by a local district, county or state education board to operate.
No, charter schools are not public schools, because they are not accountable to representatives of the public, nor do they have to accept any student who shows up at their door, nor are they subject to public oversight. They allow some families to choose-- but even if they allowed all families to choose, that would leave unaddressed the issue of disenfranchised taxpayers, who have no say about how their school tax dollars are spent under a choice system. Trading independence for accountability has always been the sales pitch-- but the accountability simply doesn't happen. Charters keep their financial records a secret, feel free to push religion, discriminate against the Wrong Sort of Student, and in many locations, avoid being shut down even when they are disastrous and obvious failures. And that's before we get to all the frauds and scams that operate under the charter banner.
Aren’t choice and the desire to raise up those in socially and economically disadvantaged populations part of the Democrats’ core values? A charter school education is not a red or blue issue; it is a students’ educational rights issue.
So far, there is little evidence that charters raise up those in socially and economically disadvantaged populations. And because states consistently refuse to fully fund schools, but instead insist that multiple parallel system can be run for the same money previously used to run just one system, we have a zero-sum game where every charter that prospers does so at the cost of a public school. Even if charters did raise up the "socially and economically disadvantaged," the current system insures that for very student who is "rescued" from a public school, there are a dozen students left in that public school who are now facing greater challenges with fewer resources.
Anderson does have one good point:
It’s unfair that children and grandchildren of Democratic school board members and California legislators get access to charter schools while these same elected officials are creating roadblocks that limit more students from having that educational choice. This is elitism and hypocrisy at its worst and really should have no place in the Democratic Party.
I don't know if it's unfair, but it's certainly hypocritical. But if Anderson thinks that elitism and hypocrisy are out of place in today's Democratic Party, it's possible that her charter-school education sheltered her from a few things. Particularly when it comes to charter schools, the Democratic Party is deeply committed to having it both ways, depending on which way the wind is blowing, what money is being wafted on that breeze, and, occasionally, the actual principles of the individual politician. I hope Anderson enjoyed her demonstration at the California convention; now that it's over, I encourage her to study up a little harder on charter school policy.
In the meantime, what the Democratic Party should get behind is transparent, publically owned and operated schools that are fully funded and committed to providing excellent education for all and not merely "access" to a select few."
It's a good quick look at the fallacious arguments still circulating in favor of charter schools. Anderson up front announced her intention to register Democrat on her 18th birthday, because the party aligns with so many of her values. Except one. Why, she asks, is the Democratic Party not aligned with her on "the value of charter schools in the public education system."
It's an.... interesting question, because at this point, the Democratic Party's position on charter schools is a bit vague. You may recall that the battle over the Dem platform for the Presidential campaign involved some battling between DFER ("Fake Democrats for Education Reformy Stuff") and actual supporters of public education; the public ed supporters won, but that was in crafting a platform to support a Presidential candidate who was always pretty charter-friendly. The Obama administration was pretty charter friendly. And plenty of prominent Democrats are big charter fans. So does the party itself have an official position?
Sure, they've worked hard to disavow a whole bunch of policies for no real reason except that those reform policies (including charters) are now the official policies of the Trump/DeVos administration, but that disavowal has involved a lot of dancing and twisting and selective amnesia. Democrats now disavow some reform policies because of the current administration, but that involves being shocked-- shocked!!-- that charters are primarily a conservative policy. But they always have been.
Bottom line: I'm not sure that asking the Democratic Party to get behind charter schools isn't much like asking a hungry person to get behind an all-you-can-eat buffet.
But Anderson further muddies the water with standard charter talking points:
Charter schools are public schools of choice that offer a valuable alternative to the traditional, one size-fits-all educational model. They allow families to choose the best path that will offer their children academic success. They are independently managed, and for that independence they offer greater accountability — they must be re-approved every two-to-five years by a local district, county or state education board to operate.
No, charter schools are not public schools, because they are not accountable to representatives of the public, nor do they have to accept any student who shows up at their door, nor are they subject to public oversight. They allow some families to choose-- but even if they allowed all families to choose, that would leave unaddressed the issue of disenfranchised taxpayers, who have no say about how their school tax dollars are spent under a choice system. Trading independence for accountability has always been the sales pitch-- but the accountability simply doesn't happen. Charters keep their financial records a secret, feel free to push religion, discriminate against the Wrong Sort of Student, and in many locations, avoid being shut down even when they are disastrous and obvious failures. And that's before we get to all the frauds and scams that operate under the charter banner.
Aren’t choice and the desire to raise up those in socially and economically disadvantaged populations part of the Democrats’ core values? A charter school education is not a red or blue issue; it is a students’ educational rights issue.
So far, there is little evidence that charters raise up those in socially and economically disadvantaged populations. And because states consistently refuse to fully fund schools, but instead insist that multiple parallel system can be run for the same money previously used to run just one system, we have a zero-sum game where every charter that prospers does so at the cost of a public school. Even if charters did raise up the "socially and economically disadvantaged," the current system insures that for very student who is "rescued" from a public school, there are a dozen students left in that public school who are now facing greater challenges with fewer resources.
Anderson does have one good point:
It’s unfair that children and grandchildren of Democratic school board members and California legislators get access to charter schools while these same elected officials are creating roadblocks that limit more students from having that educational choice. This is elitism and hypocrisy at its worst and really should have no place in the Democratic Party.
I don't know if it's unfair, but it's certainly hypocritical. But if Anderson thinks that elitism and hypocrisy are out of place in today's Democratic Party, it's possible that her charter-school education sheltered her from a few things. Particularly when it comes to charter schools, the Democratic Party is deeply committed to having it both ways, depending on which way the wind is blowing, what money is being wafted on that breeze, and, occasionally, the actual principles of the individual politician. I hope Anderson enjoyed her demonstration at the California convention; now that it's over, I encourage her to study up a little harder on charter school policy.
In the meantime, what the Democratic Party should get behind is transparent, publically owned and operated schools that are fully funded and committed to providing excellent education for all and not merely "access" to a select few."
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