OK: Fed Up

Other states may be more hostile to the idea of public education (looking at you, Florida), but when it comes to the Cheap Bastards approach to school management, it's hard to beat Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has occasionally take small steps away from the reformster program. They axed the Common Core (sort of) and actually did away with VAM evaluation for teachers. The former was a feature of Oklahoma's conservative voters (after all, Common Core is totally Obama's plan to turn your children into lesbian socialists who steal your guns), and the latter-- well, in retrospect, it looks like maybe they were just trying to save a buck. Oklahoma's legislature has been mighty creative when it comes to saving a buck; the GOP caucus at one point suggested that all non-English speaking students be turned over to ICE for possible deportation (because it might save them $60 million).

I've been in two teacher strikes, once as a local president. Teachers really don't like to strike, but there comes a point where you're just out of options. Oklahoma's teachers have gone years and years without a raise, and that stagnant wage situation has positioned Oklahoma at the very bottom of the heap when it comes to teacher pay-- a point OK teachers have driven home by sharing their pay stubs. $31,000 -- before taxes-- is not much money to start a life or a family with, and the state legislature has not shown any serious interest in addressing the issue. Instead, they have chopped away at the money spent on schools in general, so that Oklahoma schools are seriously underfunded. You'll be unsurprised to hear that Oklahoma is having trouble filling teaching positions-- last year they issued 1,800 emergency certificates (aka teacher papers for people who aren't actually qualified to be teachers).

Oklahoma teachers face some unusual hurdles. Like several other states (including West Virginia), local school districts don't set the pay scale for their teachers (because competition is bad if it means teachers get paid more, I guess), and the state legislature a few decades back passed a rule saying that taxes can only be raised with a 75% majority.

All of that may explain why local school districts and boards and administrators are actually supporting the statewide strike. The Tulsa superintendent, board president, and PTA chief passed a resolution this week in support of “any steps necessary to improve conditions for our teachers — including a districtwide suspension of classes.”

As is virtually always the case when teachers finally strike, this is not simply about money. It's about respect and the future of education in Oklahoma. You don't recruit teachers with a slogan of "Get paid less than in any nearby state, and work in a school that lacks resources and support for your work." OK is not just bottom of the barrel for teacher pay, but for per-pupil funding as well.

Oklahoma teachers are standing up for the future of public education in Oklahoma.

The legislature is feeling the heat. They managed to raise taxes for the first time in twenty-eight years, despite the worries among legislators that the proposed taxes (including gas, cigarettes, and hotel taxes) would hurt the state's businesses. I guess they were not so worried about what the effect would be of not being able to maintain a functioning public education (new proposed motto-- "Oklahoma- uneducated and we like it that way"?).

But the strike is still on.

Teachers asked for a $10K raise over three years. They got a one-time raise of $6,100. They asked for raises for support staff. They got nothing. They asked for the replacement of millions of dollars lost from school funding. They got nothing.

Teachers strike when they are out of options. Teachers strike when they are facing people who aren't negotiating in good faith. Teachers strike when they believe the future of their schools are in danger. Oklahoma teachers have almost nothing to lose-- they could find better conditions under which to pursue their career in literally any other state. This has to be one of the most frustrating places to be in a teacher strike-- where you are telling the People In Charge "You are killing our schools, killing our communities, killing the future that depends on an educated citizenry. How do you not get that?"

So Monday, spare a thought and a few words of support for Oklahoma teachers, who are walking out, making their own lives more complicated and bothersome than they may want to, because their legislature is determined to strangle education in the Sooner State. Hang in there, Oklahoma teachers. Don't let the cheap bastards grind you down.

Privatization: It's Not Just for Schools!

You may have missed this story amidst the great flurry of Trumpian firings, but it's worth noting because it's a reminder that the corporate assault on public education is, in fact, part of a larger problem.

Hasta la vista, our David

David J. Shulkin, secretary of veteran affairs, was a holdover from the Obama administration (in which he had served as an undersecretary). He was up against a tangled web of bureaucratic challenges, but was managing to make headway while also scoring points with his boss by handing Trump some wins. He looked safe; even Trump noted that "our David" was in no danger of being fired. So what happened?

But in recent months, a group of conservative Trump administration appointees at the White House and the department began to break with the secretary and plot his ouster. At issue was how far and how fast to privatize health care for veterans, a long-sought goal for conservatives like the Koch brothers.

Shulkin handed his opponents ammunition with some ethics screw-ups on a trip to Europe, the kind of grifting that is not exactly unheard of in this administration. But some folks in the administration wanted Shulkin gone. And this week, he was gone-- replaced by a physician who had won Trump's loyalty (for the moment) and who has zero experience in running a huge, complex bureaucracy like the VA.

Yesterday, Shulkin turned up in the pages of the New York Times with an explanation that will seem familiar to followers of the education debates:

I believe differences in philosophy deserve robust debate, and solutions should be determined based on the merits of the arguments. The advocates within the administration for privatizing V.A. health services, however, reject this approach. They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed. That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.

That's one of the big issues in privatizing any government function-- somebody is going to make a bunch of money, and somebody in government will get to decide who the money-maker will be. That doesn't have to involve corruption, but it certainly makes crony capitalism simple to implement.

Shulkin recognizes issues other than neglecting the primary mission of the institution in favor of rewarding one's buddies. There's also the matter of the private sector's ability to get the job done:

Unfortunately, the department has become entangled in a brutal power struggle, with some political appointees choosing to promote their agendas instead of what’s best for veterans. These individuals, who seek to privatize veteran health care as an alternative to government-run V.A. care, unfortunately fail to engage in realistic plans regarding who will care for the more than 9 million veterans who rely on the department for life-sustaining care.

The private sector, already struggling to provide adequate access to care in many communities, is ill-prepared to handle the number and complexity of patients that would come from closing or downsizing V.A. hospitals and clinics, particularly when it involves the mental health needs of people scarred by the horrors of war. Working with community providers to adequately ensure that veterans’ needs are met is a good practice. But privatization leading to the dismantling of the department’s extensive health care system is a terrible idea. The department’s understanding of service-related health problems, its groundbreaking research and its special ability to work with military veterans cannot be easily replicated in the private sector.

What Shulkin misses here is that a privatized system is not interested in taking care of all the patients. The first step in making privatized veteran care profitable is to figure out which of those 9 million veterans you don't want to serve. It would be impossible for the private sector to replicate the VA system (which, in fairness, has not always worked super-well itself), but the private sector won't even try-- it will simply try to grab the parts of the system that can be handled profitably and dump everything else. That's how profitability in the free market works-- by serving only those "customers" who can be served profitably.

All of this is, of course, another version of the push for privatization in education. The biggest difference here is that there's somebody at the federal level who's wiling to call out the privatization scam, instead of a series of cabinet level officials trying to enable the privatization agenda.

NY: Test Prep Vacation

It's that time of year. No, not Easter, and no, not spring break. It's time for the Big Standardized Test.

Schools find many ways to celebrate this special time of year, from testing pep rallies to cute videos to threats and bribes. But nothing is as important as test prep-- constant, relentless, test prep. The challenge, of course, is that testing season is sometimes interrupted by actual holidays, during which students are allowed to escape the long arm of test prep instruction.

What's a school district to do? Well, if the school district is Buffalo Public Schools, the answer is, "Give test prep homework." Here's the letter that the Chief Academic Officer at the Office of Instruction sent home with third through eighth graders:

Yup. That's a thing that happened (h/t Chris Cerrone).

The usual soft-soaping of the BS Test is pretty standard operating procedure-- "opportunity to demonstrate their scholarship" my Aunt Fanny. Let's just flip that around for a second- if we were sitting in a room trying to come up with a great way for students to demonstrate their scholarship, would we agree that taking a standardized multiple choice test would be the best way to do that? Of course not, but propagandists for the BS Testing program aren't really trying any more. But this is SOP, just like the invocation of magical expectations.

What's special here is the next part:

Please support your child at home to complete the sample writing tasks in this packet. You will also find samples to show how each question could possibly be answered.

Or, to summarize, here are some sample answers your child can practice imitating for homework over vacation. Because test prep never sleeps. (Also, why does the first sentence read like a bad translation from Russian?)

We also encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity and return the completed booklet to school following the vacation.

It's not enough that students must sacrifice some of their education at school in order to drill and prep so that they can better serve the school by getting scores that will help the school look good. Now this time-wasting educational malpractice is going to follow the children home, like an ugly flea-bitten mutt. Are some schools offering bribery to get students to spend time with this mangy cur over break? Any school that is should be ashamed of itself.

So Happy Easter and a Joyous Spring Break, and a reminder that this is also the season (especially in New York) for opting out of BS Testing. It's your right as a parent, and it's one of the few possible ways that state governments will finally stop wasting school, teacher, parent and student time on testing and test prepping.

The Testing Thermostat

Here's another analogy to help understand why test-centered accountability doesn't work well.

All the heat in my house is run by a single thermostat. My house has three stories and a basement. The thermostat is on the first floor. The furnace runs into two out of four rooms on the second floor. There are no furnace runs to the third floor (a converted attic space).

The thermostat is supposed to turn the furnace off and on based on the temperature in the house. But it only measures the temperature in one room. In a second-floor bedroom, the temperature may be uncomfortably cold, but the thermostat doesn't measure that. In the attic room, a space heater4 may have the room super-warm, but the thermometer doesn't know that. The thermostat is by the front door-- if that door opens and cold air comes pouring in, the thermostat thinks the whole house is cold.

In short, the thermostat is an inaccurate measure of the temperature in my home because it only measures the temp in one place.

It's true that the thermostat is crudely accurate-ish. If the thermostat thinks the house is at 30 degrees, it's probably safe to conclude that the whole house is cold-- although, it could also mean that the front door has blown open. If the thermostat says the house temperature is 90, it's probably safe to assume that the furnace doesn't need to kick on (and the odds are that the house isn't on fire).

The temperature at that single location isn't a completely useless proxy for the temperature at other locations in the house, if we do a lot of correcting and seat-of-pants compensation for the ways in which the system is built to fail. If we start insisting that the temperature reported by the thermostat is the exact same temperature in every other part of the house, we're in trouble.

We're in even more trouble is we start using the thermostat read-out as a proxy for other things entirely, like how comfortable a room is, or how bright the light is in a room, or how nice the room smells, or how loud the room is. It takes a Grand Canyon sized leap to figure that the reported temperature in one location can be used to determine other factors in other parts of the house.

Likewise, we will fail if we try to use the thermostat read-out to evaluate the efficiency of the power generating and delivery capabilities of our electric company, or evaluate the contractor who built the house (in my case, almost a hundred years ago), or evaluate the health and well-being of the people who live in the house-- or to jump from there to judging the effectiveness of the doctor who treats the people who live in the house, or the medical school that trained that doctor.

At the end of the day, the thermostat really only measures one thing-- the temperature right there, in the place where the thermostat is mounted. To use it to measure any other part of the house, or any other aspect of any other part of the house, or any aspect of the people who live in the other parts of the house-- well, that just means we're moving further and further out on a shaky limb of the Huge Inaccuracy Tree.

In this way, the thermostat is much like the Big Standardized Test-- really only good at measuring one small thing, and not a reliable proxy for anything else. Try this analogy the next time someone asks you why it doesn't make sense to use a single BS Test to measure students, schools, teachers, and the full range of educational activity.

It's not a perfect analogy. It doesn't, for instance, address the example of a thermostat that sets off a bomb instead of starting the furnace. Nor does it address the superstitious belief that the more often you look at a thermostat, the warmer your house becomes. But it's hard to come up with an analogy that captures all the ways in which test-centered accountability is a mess. This will do for a starter.

DeVos: Title I Money To Fund New Charters

The official heading for Title I is "Improving the Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged" and so Title I money has been distributed from the feds as a way to equalize educational opportunity for students in poor schools, with each state generally taking its own approach. This has involved some fairly opaque distribution methods and not everyone is convinced that the money actually does anyone any good.

But now, Betsy DeVos has added a new wrinkle to Title I distribution.

Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) picked up the wrinkle, tucked away in the nether regions of the Texas plan for ESSA. (Because being employed full time at a thinky tank gives you the time necessary to study the wrinkly nether regions of education plans).

You may recall the School Improvement Grants that existed under the Obama-Duncan USED. They handed out money under very specific guidelines with the intent of improving struggling schools, and they were notable in that they pretty much utterly failed. I argue that they failed because they came with strict federal rules about how the money could be used; Betsy DeVos argues they failed because the feds shouldn't give anyone money.

Whatever the case, ESSA replaced SIG with a 7% set-aside, in which the state must take 7% of its Title I money and put it in a lock-box, to be used to fix sad schools. So, can you predict what Texas proposed that DeVos and Petrilli would both be interested in?

On page 31-32 of the Texas plan, we find a list of Ways To Improve Schools using that 7% pile of money. These methods include:

Restarting the school in partnership with a high-quality school management organization or converting it to a charter school

Replicating an existing successful school model into an identified school, including as a charter school;

Closing the identified school and consolidating the students into a higher performing or new school, whether charter or district managed;

Creating new schools, whether district or charter, to provide students in identified schools with new and better education options. TEA will ensure these new schools guarantee and prioritize access to students currently attending the identified school(s);

Notice those last two. We're not just talking about converting a public school to a charter school, one of the "turnaround" techniques previously allowed. USED is now saying that Texas can just go ahead and open a new charter school and then shuffle students into it. This plan doesn't call for improving a low-performing school-- it calls for setting up a competitor. As Petrilli notes, not everyone agrees with DeVos's interpretation of the law, but DeVos gets to make the rules right now, and it would seem she likes this rule just fine, which means we may see this idea crop up in other states.

7% of the full federal Title I outlay is $1.1 billion. That's a large pile of money now technically available to launch new charter schools. No doubt lots of folkswill be more than happy to let federal tax dollars underwrite the launching of their education-flavored business. And states like Texas will have one more tool for dismantling public education.

Big Brother Wants To Read Your Face

Imagine if you were presenting in front of a large group, and you could instantly get feedback on how you were doing. Perhaps you could read the body language of your audience or notice the expressions on their faces. Suppose you could check to see if your audience was understanding you, or following you, or happy or sad about what you were saying. Imagine that you-- oh, no, wait. You don't have to imagine that because you are a semi-intelligent functioning human being.

Let me start over.

Imagine you had computer software that could do all that for you.

A month ago, Inside Higher Ed reported on just such a chunk of software.

With sentiment analysis software, set for trial use later this semester in a classroom at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, instructors don’t need to ask. Instead, they can glance at their computer screen at a particular point or stretch of time in the session and observe an aggregate of the emotions students are displaying on their faces: happiness, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, neutrality, sadness and surprise.

Well, that sounds... creepy? Unnecessary? Unlikely to be successful? Could you just mean in to your webcam for a second so I can see how this is going over?

I show the computer my finger and it doesn't know what the hell is happening

Maybe it's all the years I've spent as a hack musician, performing in front of all sorts of crowds, on top of all my years in a classroom, but I'm thinking that if you can't read the room then A) you might very well be a lousy teacher and B) you probably aren't nimble enough to respond to software that reads the room for you.

Python code captures video frames from a high-definition webcam and sends them to the Emotion interface, which determines the emotional state. Then that analysis comes to the Face interface, which returns the results, and draws a bounding box around the faces, along with a label for the given emotion. The Python code also sends the results to the PowerBI platform for visualization and retention.

Right. And just in case you think this could be helpful for someone teaching a huge class of 500, I'll note that right now the software tops out at 42.

There are technical issues, like "training" software to read emotions on human faces. Then there's the huge leap of logic that assumes that Pat's expression of disgust Then there's the well-documented problem of facial recognition software that can't recognize non-white faces. Then there's the problem of storing all that data and using it for other purposes, like evaluating teachers ("Sorry, Professor Bogswaddle, but your class turned up too many 'yuck' faces this semester")

Like many software developers of this ilk, the folks at St. Thomas’s E-Learning and Research Center (STELAR) have done some piloting, which itself raises questions. We're talking here about  Eric Tornoe, associate director of research computing in the information technology services department, team leader on this project:

Tornoe, his assistant and a part-time student employee have served as the software's three main guinea pigs thus far. In the process of "pulling faces" to test different emotions, the team found that surprise and anger were the easiest to perform and detect, while contempt was the trickiest.

The team also road tested the technology with unsuspecting audiences at staff meetings and presentations, according to Tornoe. (A spokesperson for the university said the staff meeting audiences were prepared to see a presentation about sentiment analysis, so they weren't caught entirely off guard.)

I'm worried about a class in which surprise, anger and contempt are prevailing emotions. And there is a huge creepiness factor with trying this out with "unsuspecting" audiences. But then, I'm betting that unsuspecting audiences are the only ones for which this would have a hope in hell at working.

Because what do you suppose happens when you tell a bunch of students that software will be monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on their facial expressions to the teacher? What happens when we tell a student, "The computer will be watching you the whole time to see if you understand." I am willing to bet that close-to-zero students respond, "Fine. I'll just carry on and behave as if the computer was not watching my every move."

I remember performing a simple experiment back when I was in high school. We decided that one side of the room would look at the teacher, looking engaged, smiling and nodding, while the other side of the room would act bored and disengaged. After a while, the teacher slowly moved over to work the side of the room that was giving her positive vibes. I can't imagine what fun students could have trying to mess with software. Actually, I can imagine some of it-- fake faces, playing Stump the Software, trying to manipulate the speed or direction of the class.

And that's still better than the other scenario I can imagine, which is the one in which the use of this software gives students blanket permission to be inert lumps. No need to be active and ask questions or join in discussion-- just passively let the software decide what the student is thinking, and she doesn't have to actually communicate anything.

The guys from Stanford working on a similar program suggest that it might be useful for students to see the readouts for the whole class, because... why? For students trying to game the system, that would be a great piece of realtime feedback. But otherwise, do students really need one more way tpo check and see if they're "normal"?

I have a hard time spotting the upside to any of this, other than I suppose it could help instructors who lack skills in dealing with carbon based life forms. But mostly it seems intrusive and creepy and enabling of al sorts of poor behavior. And, as is too often the case with ed tech, it appears to be in the hands of people who really haven't thought through even the most basic implications. Some folks gets it:

George Siemens, executive director of LINK Research Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, applauds the institution for its focus on students' emotions, but he says he doesn't see why technology is necessary to perform a task at which humans are intrinsically more capable.

"I think we’re solving a problem the wrong way," Siemens said. "Student engagement requires greater human involvement, not greater technology involvement."

But other folks-- the folks pioneering this stuff-- don't get a lot of things:

Instructors won’t be able to see individual students’ emotions, either in real time or after the fact -- heading off any immediate complaints that the technology is invasive on a personal level.

Nope. The technology is still invasive on the personal level. Just because the instructor isn't seeing that level of response (other than by, you know, looking and using her human brain) doesn't mean the software isn't collecting it. Still invasive.

Tornoe and his colleagues haven’t yet decided how much students will know about sentiment analysis before they're subjected to it; university administrators have final say over that decision, according to a spokesperson.

Nope. This is not even a question. Failing to tell students that everything down to their facial expressions is being monitored and potentially recorded-- that's just flat out wrong. The fact that Tornoe and his colleagues even think there's a decision to be made shows how far divorced they are from the reality of what they're proposing. This is all kinds of a bad idea.

ICYMI: Happy Teen Spring Edition (3/25)

The reading list may be a little short this week; I've been busy putting on a show. As always, remember to amplify what you think the world needs to hear.

Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Teachers

Yup. Even some people outside the edu-blogosphere have noticed the profession has some problems these days. Andrew Heller lays it out.

Congressional Legislation Seeks To Fund School Vouchers for Military Families Despite Major Opposition from Military Families

Carol Burris takes a look at a sneaky plan under way to use military families as a prop for creating federal vouchers. Make sure you pay attention to this one.

The Facts About NJ Charter Schools Part III: Segregation by English Proficiency

Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) continues to piece out the research he conducted with Julia Sass Rubin, looking at NJ charter schools and how they aren't quite what they're cracked up to be.

Back to the Future in Massachusetts

Andrea Gabor takes a look at the commonwealth's problems with inequitable school funding, how that created one lawsuit, and might be about to give rise to another one.

Gender Bias in NYC Admissions

Leonie Haimson lays out how the admission test process for NYC schools shows gender bias.*

Success Academy: Reinventing High School for the Few Who Remain

Mercedes Schneider crunches some numbers and breaks down some implications of Success Academy's huge attrition rate.

Oklahoma: They Could Be The Next To Strike

Dana Goldstein takes a close look at just how bad things are in Oklahoma, and puts it into the context of teachers standing up for the greater good in austerity states.

We Need Civic On Line Reasoning in Our Schools

Nancy Flanagan looks at one of the great missing pieces in 21st century education.

Thank You For Your Service

I was going to try to round up some of the better pieces about the student march, but I'm just going to crib Jose Vison's work instead. Here are several good recommendations.

* I originally incorrectly connected this piece to NYC charters instead of the public system