Why Ed Tech Can Bite Me

Here's a story, so that I can make a point.

In January, after a month of research, I bought a new desktop computer (I thought that, for a change, I'd replace the old one while it was still merely wonky and not completely dead-- so, about six years old). Transfering files etc from the old computer was its own little adventure, involving some cloud storage, some wrestling with an external hard drive, and many hours of getting things organized. But then one day, the built-in webcam simply ceased to function (actually, the computer couldn't "find" it). Research told me that 1) this was not an uncommon issue and 2) nobody knew a reliable way to fix it. I carved out a couple of multi-hour sessions with various tech support folks, but ultimately ended up restoring the computer to out-of-the-box condition, meaning that once again I had to work through transferring files (I( attempted to save the new computer's files to cloud storage so that the process could be shortened, but it turned out later that it only looked like files had been saved to cloud storage-- or rather, only the files, but none of the contents).  So that process started all over again. Things ran fairly smoothly until two days ago, when the camera disappeared again. Last night, grumpy child in my lap, I attempted another tech support session (this time via chat) with a technician who became a bit irritated with me because after two hours, I couldn't stick around for other conversation about what we would do (he had arrived at the conclusion that the computer would need to be reset again, and I said that was unacceptable). I did get an email indicating that a work order would be sending a ship-to-factory box to a man with my name in some other state. I'm now recognizing that I will have to set aside some portion of my Saturday to further pursue getting the computer to do simple things that I bought it to do.

This is not an atypical experience. I will spare you the long story of my quest for reliable internet connection (almost all local providers get into the house via phone lines, and the phone company informs me that there's an issue with the main line on my street, which is why my internet tends to go out when it rains).

I am not a Luddite or a technophobe. I'm comfortable working with software and dealing with drivers and have even dived into registry to fix a thing or two. And I'm appreciative on a daily basis for the miracles that computer tech makes possible.

But I do get tired of the expectation that keeping these things working should be a part time job, or that when I buy equipment, it will probably function as it's supposed to, but maybe not. And maybe I'll be able to get ahold of someone who can actually help me, or maybe I will have to wade through three-to-ten levels of people who are reading off the exact same troubleshooting guides that I have already tried and they didn't work and that's why I'm calling you in the first place! I have a tablet that "lost" its wifi connection, so I now use a usb wifi connector, but for some reason I can only get to certain websites, so there's one more item on the To Do list for computer maintenance in my home.

We don't tolerate this is any other major equipment in our lives. We drive across bridges and expect them to work 100% of the time. I expect my furnace and refrigerator to work 100% of the time until the day comes (and it could be decades away, not just a year or two) that they finally quit. When I turn on the faucet, I expect water to come out 100% of the time, just as I expect my outlets to yield up electricity 100% of the time.

Yet somehow, we're used to vastly lower expectations for our computer tech. 40 out 0f 50 times, my computer turns straw into gold. 9 out of 50 times it turns straw into straw. And 1 time out of 50 it turns straw into flying turds.

It really does spur me to an unreasonable level of rage. I don't really have the hours in the day to work as my own IT department full time. I don't want to scour the internet for solutions, and I don't want to to carve out three or four hour blocks of time to wrestle with customer service-- particularly when they don't have any answers.

And everything I've said goes double-- triple, or quadruple, even-- for my classroom.

If you want to sell me some ed tech, my first question will be, "Will this work 100% of the time for 100% of my students?" Any answer that is not "yes" is automatically "no." In that case, I'd like an estimate of how many hours I can expect to lose trying to make it work.

I have 178 teaching days in my year, with periods of forty minutes each, which means I have a grand total of 118 hours and 40 minutes to teach my students. That's before we take out assemblies, testing days, and various other class pre-emptors. So I don't have hours and hours to fiddle with your software. I don't have hours and hours to try to make your tablets or laptops work.

On some other day, I'll be glad to take a more nuanced look at this issue. But I'm not feeling nuanced today (see above long angry paragraph) and if you are one more ed tech provider anxious to sell me a product that will probably work most of the time for some of the students, probably, with the possible assistance of tech support that may or may not know what to do, then you can stick your software where the internet doesn't reach. Go back to the lab and get your tech to do what it's supposed to do under real world conditions at least 99% of the time, and meanwhile, you can bite me.

Those Unseemly Teacher Strikes

When teachers strike, there are a number of predictable responses, ranging from rock throwing to pearl clutching.

Nothing like a nice, seemly cup of tea

For rock throwers you can expect folks like the Center for Education Reform, which took to their newsletter to explain that teachers have been duped by their unions (who are to blame for low wages because they extract union dues from teachers) and that pensions are also to blame (so teacher pensions should be gutted). Never mind that these have been wildcat strikes. Over pension gutting. There will always be folks who say that teachers just don't deserve to be paid a bunch of money and that public schools should be as cheap as possible.

But when teachers strike, we'll also hear from the people who just find a teacher strike, just, well-- unseemly. Undignified. Inappropriate behavior for educated professionals.

Derrell Bradford, honcho at 50CAN and other reform enterprises, dropped some tweets of this sort:

College educated people striking, imposing hardship on parents and students in purpose to impose political tension...it feels beneath them.

I am for well-compensated educators who are excellent. The strikes feel very line worker to me.

Or take Oklahoma legislator Kevin "Go Ahead and Be Pissed at Me" McDugle:

I'm not voting for another stinking measure when they're acting the way they're acting,

It's just not the right time and place. You're really hurting your own cause through this unseemly behavior. Don't you want to set a better example? I agree that you have a point, but this just isn't the way to make it. All this unrest is just taking attention away from your cause.

This sort of tone-policing concern trolling dismay over the unseemly social movements has been raised against teacher strikes, against Colin Kaepernick and taking a knee, against the freedom riders and lunch counter sitters of the Civil Rights movement, against the suffragettes demanding the vote for women.

Can't you do something less disruptive. Something that's not so unseemly.

The proper response to this complaint is always the same-- what else would you prefer we do?

There's never an answer. Well, there is, but nobody in power want to say it because that answer is "We would like you to just accept things as they are and not complaint about it. Just do as we say, take what we give you, and be happy about it."

See, here's the thing about the criticism that teacher strikes are unseemly and unnecessarily disruptive and not a proper activity for college-educated professionals-- teachers mostly agree with all of it.

I'm willing to bet there has never, ever been a teacher union meeting in which leaders said, "We think they're interested in sitting down and having some good faith negotiations to settle all this" and the members said, "No, no-- we want to strike. Let's strike instead."

Nor do I believe the myth of the outside agitator, popular since the Civil Rights movement when white folks would say, "Well, none of our local Negros would get this uppity on their own-- must be some of them outside agitators what got them stirred up." Union locals invariably put their local interests ahead of the state or national union-- no batch of teachers walk because the NEA tells them to.

Teachers strike because they are out of options. They strike because the other side won't negotiate in good faith. They strike because they feel dismissed and disrespected. They strike because their work conditions have become awful, with no relief in sight. They strike because they feel the future of their profession and their school are in peril. They strike because they can't think of any other way to make things better.

But a strike! Couldn't they get their message across some other way?

Guess what. They've been doing it. In fact, teachers have been engaged in a slow-motion strike for about a decade, walking off the job one or two at a time. But instead of recognizing this as a work stoppage, we've labeled it a "teacher shortage." And instead of responding by asking "How can we fix the job so that it is attractive enough to recruit and retain teachers," states have mostly responded by saying, "How can we lower standards so that we can put any warm body in a classroom."

In other words, we've been in the middle of a not-unseemly work stoppage, and it has yielded zero positive results for teaching.

Look. It's really simple. If you want teachers to pursue other not-unseemly avenues, you have to provide not-unseemly avenues that are not fruitless dead ends, but which lead somewhere productive.

People, in general, want to be heard. If they can't be heard when they speak, they'll keep raising their voices. If someone is screaming at you, it's probably because you refused to listen to them when they were talking to you. I cannot say this enough-- teachers don't want to strike and they don't like to strike, but they will strike if you make it clear to them that you intend to do them harm, and that you won't listen to them any other way. If there are no not-unseemly options, unseemly is what you get.

Duncan Revises Again: Courage and Betsy DeVos

Lately, a wave of apostasy has swept through Reformsylvania, and reformsters have stepped up to say that ed reform kind of, well, failed. Yesterday, just in time for April Fools Day, former secretary of education Arne Duncan (and current thinky tank fixture) took to the pages of the Washington Post to try his hand at some non-reality-based history and argue that ed reform has been a resounding success.

How has he managed this feat? Well, there are several tricks.

This damn guy

First, move the goalposts. All the way back to 1971. Fourth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP are up since then!! Why focus on fourth grade scores? Maybe because 17-year-old scores haven't really moved much at all. And of course, reform hasn't been in place since 1971-- and most of that growth happened before modern ed reform ever took hold-- you know, prior to those days when Secretary Duncan was explaining that American schools actually sucked? And all of this assumes that a single standardized math a reading score is a good proxy for the quality of the entire educational system.

Duncan has an explanation for those flat 12th grade scores-- because the graduation rate is up, more weak students are taking the NAEP, and so keeping the scores flat is a win. Yay? Anyway, graduation rates are up, so that's more proof of ed reform success, except that, of course, whether those diplomas actually mean anything other than districts have learned how to game the system with credit recovery and other baloney-- well, never mind. There's probably some real gain there, and that's not a bad thing. The numbers are up, so woohoo.

Duncan asserts that progress happened because "we confronted hard truths, raised the bar and tried new things." I guess this depends on how one defines "we," as most of the "new things" attempted under Obama-Duncan were just leftovers from the Bush administration. Duncan has tried to blame the issues of ed reform on many things. This time, our key word is "courage."

Beginning in 2002, federal law required annual assessments tied to transparency. The law forced educators to acknowledge achievement gaps, even if they didn’t always have the courage or capacity to address them.

Ah, yes. One of the legacies of Obama-Duncan ed reform-- relentless blaming of teachers for everything. Now it turns out we weren't courageous enough.

But this notion that test-based accountability "revealed" achievement gaps is baloney. Educators knew where the gaps were. We've4 always known where the gaps were. We've screamed about the gaps. I don't believe any teacher in this country picked up test results and said, "I'll be damned! I had no idea these non-white, non-wealthy students were having trouble keeping up!" At best, test-based accountability was a tool to convince policy makers who would listen to data spreadsheets before they would listen to teachers. And even then, policy makers didn't look at the data and say, "Well, we'd better help these schools out." Instead, all the way up to Duncan's office, they responded with, "Well, let's target this school for closure or conversion or a growth opportunity for some charter operators."

This, it turns out, is another thing Arne "Katrina's Destruction of NOLA Public Ed Is a Great Thing" Duncan counts as success- three million students in charter school. He cites Boston as a win (again, debateable) but ignores the widespread fraud, corruption and failure that charters have been prone to nationally. (And he insists on talking about "years of learning" as a way to measure this.)

And then there's this, as Duncan discusses the "successes."

Again, it did not happen by standing still. It happened because of common-sense changes such as increased learning time, more early learning, a deeper focus on the quality of principals and teachers, and a bright light on the data. Whether you call it reform, improvement or plain old hard work, it is making a difference for kids.

This is like having someone make you go on a tofu and grease diet and then declaring that your health gains are the result of eating off clean plates. Duncan's list is notable for all the reform ideas it doesn't mention, like Common Core and charter schools and test-centered schooling. Of the three things it does mention, increased learning time and more early learning are not ideas reformsters get to take credit for. Deeper focus on quality of teachers and principals never happened-- we just started using test scores to try to threaten and punish folks. Bright light on the data? Also no-- just an unhealthy focus on test scores.

Duncan is sad that there aren't more charter schools. Hardly anybody is getting teacher evaluation right. And while studies say that the Obama-Duncan school turnaround programs failed, Duncan has one study (a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research) that says "the boldest interventions get the best results."*

So, you know, reform was awesome, and did some stuff that was, you know, swell. Why is everyone suddenly picking on it?

Duncan blames politics.

Both ends of the political spectrum resist accountability. Some blame poverty and demand more money while abdicating responsibility for results. Others seem more concerned with process and limiting the federal role than with actual student outcomes.

Nope. This old bullshit about how folks in education just want more money and use poverty as an excuse for poor results is still just bullshit. Nobody makes that argument. Duncan's argument that we can use the power of expectations to overcome everything is just not reality based. And while it is true that some on the right believe that we should offer choice for its own sake without regard for how it turns out, how exactly is that different from Obama-Duncan policy? Exactly when and where and how did Duncan come down hard in favor of charter oversight and accountability? Duncan can continue to pretend that Betsy DeVos represents some radical departure from his policy on charters and choice, but it's simply not so. Duncan helped create this mess, and making an innocent face while saying, "Hey, gee, somebody knocked over your public schools while you were out. I don't know how it happened" won't absolve him of blame.

Duncan has tried a variety of history rewrites for his administration (only politicians hated Common Core! charter school magic unleashed! ESSA was not a reaction against his work! CCSS should have been rolled out faster!) But all of his reflections stumble over the same problem-- Duncan simply refuses to acknowledge the damage that his policies have done to public education. Here he is acting puzzled again--

Some have taken the original idea of school choice — as laboratories of innovation that would help all schools improve — and used it to defund education, weaken unions and allow public dollars to fund private schools without accountability.

No, Arne! Not "some." Not some faceless mysterious group of folks. You. You and the people that you empowered and encouraged and cheered on and backed with your policies. You did that.

You further enabled that by rolling out Common Core, which was not a secret Commie plot to make everyone stupid and gay, but which was also not a well-crafted set of standards created by educators, but instead a half-assed bunch of baloney created by amateurs. And that all happened without even having an evidence-based discussion of whether or not national standards are even useful for creating better education.

Not only that, but you and yours used the standards to push the idea that America's teachers (and their unions) didn't know what the hell they were doing, and that they had no particular expertise. That, in fact, education is something above and beyond the ability to teachers to understand and implement, and that "experts" were needed to make the standards work. You treated teachers and their unions as an obstacle rather than the front line troops of education. You had the opportunity to listen to the experts in public education and talk about how the feds could help with very real problems and challenges; instead, you belittled public schools and dismissed the teachers who work there.

And you elevated test-centered accountability, one of the most destructive forces unleashed on public education. By tying threats and punishment to the Big Standardized Test, you encouraged schools to narrow curriculum, cut programs, and center the entire school around test results. Test-centered accountability has turned schools upside down-- now they do exist to serve students, but instead students exist to serve the school by generating data to make the school look good enough to avoid punishment. The stress on students and teachers, and the many educational experiences lost to this scourge are unfathomable.

You failed so spectacularly that you prompted a rare bi-partisan repudiation of your policies in the ESSA. And you set the stage for a Betsy DeVos, who could convincingly argue that the federal government has proven itself incompetent to involve itself in education. Your policies have made public education itself look bad. You and yours managed to diminish one of the most fundamental institutions of this country.

Ed Reformers who have called out the failures of reform mostly fall back on one simple observation-- these reforms have been the status quo for over a decade. If charters were going to revolutionize education, it would have happened by now. If the Common Core (or whatever a state is calling them) were going to make education greater, they would have done it by now. If test-centered accountability was going to vastly improve public education, we'd see it by now. If treating education professionals like cheap hired help was going to energize teaching, it would have happened by now.

But it hasn't happened. None of it has happened.

You're reduced to saying that some fourth grade scores are up, graduation rates may be up, and plenty of entrepreneurs are making money running charter schools.

Your suggestion is that people just lack the bravery: "Our efforts to improve school have worked well where people have led with courage." But the only place courage has helped is in those schools where leaders have had the courage to stand against ed reform policies, to reject the BS Test, to stand up for students.

I'm sitting here steaming, kind of surprised that Duncan can still make me angry in ways that Betsy DeVos cannot. But DeVos has never pretended to be anything but what she is-- a rich lady who believes that public education should be abolished and that people should stay in their proper place. Duncan maintains an infuriating tendency to douse the building in kerosene, light a match, and as the flames leap high, shout, "See how much better this is! I don't understand how people can complain about this." And while there's no question that DeVos wants to destroy public education, Duncan set the stage for her-- and he won't own it.

Here's my own version of current history. Many people are saying that ed reform policies failed because they are using their eyes and ears to see that ed reform policies failed. I get that Duncan would want to protect his legacy, particularly during this administration-- if Obama had discovered a cure for cancer, Trump would make burn it and bury the ashes. But his refusal to face reality was a liability when he was in office, and it's not serving him well now. If Arne Duncan wants to talk about courage, then he needs to start by confronting the truth about the damage caused by policies that he pursued. Until he can do that, he needs to just go sit in his think tank.





*Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

 Using data from California, this study leverages these two discontinuous eligibility rules to identify the effects of SIG-funded whole-school reforms. The results based on these “fuzzy” regression-discontinuity designs indicate that there were significant improvements in the test-based performance of schools on the “lowest-achieving” margin but not among schools on the “lack of progress” margin. Complementary panel-based estimates suggest that these improvements were largely concentrated among schools adopting the federal “turnaround” model, which compels more dramatic staff turnover.

ICYMI: Happy Easter Edition (4/1)

I can't bring myself to do any April Fooling. There are already too many lies in the world; giving life to some more "just for fun" seems wrong. So here are some Not Fake pieces from this week.

Race Not Just Poverty Shapes Who Graduates in America

If you've suspected that it's not simply socio-economic status that explains all our various gaps, then you will want to read this.

Slow Learners in the Age of Hyperlearning

Nancy Bailey sticks up for the slow learners of the world.

What Happened to the Wonder of Learning

Psychology Today takes yet another look at how primary education is off the rails

I Tried To Befriend Nikolas Cruz

A Parkland student speaks up with a powerful refuting of the Walk Up Not Out movement

Testing Corporations Rake in Cash While Teachers Sell Plasma To Survive

Stephen Singer did some research about the company that manages testing in Pennsylvania. Turns out it's a pretty lucrative place to work.

Something-Preneur

Nancy Flanagan on preneurship.

Who Survives Success

How many students actually make it through Success Academies? Not very many.

PA: Charter Fraud Finally Headed to Jail

Nick Trombetta is finally going to be sentenced.

This guy

Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2013, just as the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (the guy who called PA charter laws the worst in the nation) found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. The state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).

The feds, however, were another matter. They caught Trombetta stuffing his own pockets with $8 million of taxpayer money. Trombetta fought the charges, but in 2016 finally fessed up. Since then, his sentencing has been repeatedly postponed, but is now scheduled for his sentencing for tax fraud and conspiracy in July. The conspiracy part is because Trombetta had some partners in this web of fraud who helped him cook the books.

PA Cyber would like everyone to know that they are among the wronged parties here, and that they are like a whole new land of upright swellness ever since Trombetta et al were ousted.

Of course, like all PA cyber charters, they have failed to meet the standard for Big Standardized Test scoring, and the state of Pennsylvania is no more ready to ferret out charter misbehavior than they were back when the feds had to step in and stop Trombetta.


Or as former state legislator and thorn in PA Cyber's side Karen Beyer said back in 2013:

I figured that justice would ultimately be served, that they would be found out — how he had defrauded the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. We still have cybercharter schools that are unregulated. This plea should stand as a warning to the Legislature that they have got to do something about regulating these schools.

Spoiler alert: they still haven't. Will things get any better in PA? Who knows. But Nick Trombetta will have up to five years to figure out his next business enterprise.

KY: Making Teaching a Dead End Profession

The first thing Kentucky teachers need us to understand is that they do not get Social Security benefits.

This is true of teachers in fourteen other states. And it means that those teachers depend entirely on their state pension system. If your state is flush with cash (hey, California), that's not a problem. But if you are in Kentucky, yet another state that has screwed up its pension fund big time and earning the title of most poorly-funded pension in the country, then you are in a bad place.

Kentucky set up a retirement fund for its teachers back in 1938 and converted it to the current system in 1940. But nowadays, the legislature is eying pension cuts as a way to save a buck or two.

It's not popular to consider, say, cutting cost of living increases for pensioners. Without increases, inflation slowly but surely reduces the buying power of the pension dollar. And with opposition strong, the proposal to cut pensions was declared "dead" just over a week ago.

But then the Kentucky GOP decided to break out some tools from the Legislator's Bag of Weasel Tricks.

Thursday afternoon, the legislators took a bill about sewage and gave it a 291-page amendment that imposed a variety of changes to teacher pensions. That bill went up for a vote hours later after little discussion and non realistic time in which to examine it. It also went up for a vote without the legally-required study of financial impact. The GOP hailed it as a "compromise" and the governor praised them for not kicking the pension can down the road, which I guess is technically true, as they had instead kicked it into a sewage ditch.

Under the bill, new teachers will be forced into a cash-balance plan, which is less risky than a 401K hybrid plan, but also less likely to yield a great deal of security. The bill also appears to give the legislature the power to change some aspects of the pension unilaterally. Retirement age for Kentucky teachers is now 65, but then, if they want to retire with anything at all like financial security, retirement age for Kentucky teachers is closer to Whenever They Finally Die.

The cost-of-living cut was removed from the bill, but that was supposed to be the source of the big savings. Without the financial impact study, it's not really clear if this bill will even help Kentucky's pension problem. But at least legislators can brag, "We passed something!" And  two-tiered system is always good for weakening the union.

But as we have been learning across the country in the past few weeks, there is a limit to how far you can push teachers.

Kentucky teachers suddenly experienced a massive wave of illness on Friday morning, forcing many school districts to close for the day. And across the country, old hands in the union world are getting to explain to the youngsters what a Wildcat Strike is.

And I get to keep making the same point-- when you back teachers into a corner, show them no respect, indicate that you have no intention of pursuing good-faith negotiations, and threaten the future of their profession, you get a strike.

So add Kentucky teachers to the list of teachers who need our support in the days ahead. And stay tuned for the next state that finally pushes its teachers too far.

Ad Hominemming It Up

To say that the Parkland teens have been experiencing some pushback would be putting it mildly. They've been subject to slurs and lies that I will not dignify by repeating here. But the reaction to teenagers who have speaking up ever since seventeen of their classmates and teachers were gunned down in their school-- well, why are conservatives so triggered by these students?

Paul Waldman has a good answer in the Washington Post this week. In "Why conservatives are so mad about the Parkland students," Waldman looks at the complaints of Rich Lowry at the National Review (Lowry is the guy who used to dream about gutting the social safety net over college kegs with Paul Ryan). Lowry complains that "it is practically forbidden in the media to dissent from anything they say," but Waldman calls baloney on that argument-- dissent on matters of policy and gun control has been constant and unrelenting and has not drawn cries of "how dare you disagree with these young men and women." Laura Ingraham is not in trouble because she dared to say that teachers should armed or that background checks are an unreasonable restraint of second amendment rights. Conservatives have not been stymied in their pro-gun arguments.

Here’s the real difficulty the Parkland students present. It’s not that they’re passionate and surprisingly articulate for their age, though they are. It’s not that they’ve widened the conversation on guns by refusing to accept things the adults have taken as given for years, such as the idea that the NRA is simply too powerful to bother opposing, though they have. It’s that they’re too sympathetic. And when a spokesperson is sympathetic, when you attack them personally, you look like a jerk.

Despite what conservatives say, no one is going to criticize them when they disagree with the Parkland students on any substantive matter. If Rich Lowry argues that the students are wrong and goes on to explain why the minimum age to buy a rifle should remain at 18, no one will respond, “How dare you disagree with those lovely teenagers?”

No, what conservatives are really mad about is that the tactic of demonizing those they disagree with — which is so common in contemporary political rhetoric (on both the right and left) — has, in this case, been taken away from them.

Yup.

We've reached the point where ad hominem is the first tool we reach for.

It's certainly not a new weapon in the political arsenal. Politicians have been saying horrible personal things about each other since the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The public has enjoyed personal attacks as a sort of entertainment for almost as long. But things seem worse somehow now. The last Presidential election was fought not over who had the worst policies, but who was the worst person, and the resulting widened rift in our society seems bad because it's not a rift about the best ways to govern the republic, but about the best way to be a decent human being in the world, and about the degree to which those perceived values should be ascendant over facts and truth and reality itself.

And it's not like hominem-based arguments are completely pointless. Trump's Presidential failings are directly related to his personal failings; he's an awful President for all the reasons that he's an awful person.

Likewise, Betsy DeVos is unqualified to serve as Secretary of Education for reasons that have to do with who she is as a person; her lack of relevant experience, both in education and in having any sort of regular job, have predictably led to problems functioning in the job. And as with many reformsters, her values and long-term objectives are worth talking about because they shape her policy choices. So it's not irrelevant to say that she's a wealthy fundamentalist Christian heiress with no experience in the workplace or in public schools.

All of this resonates with one of the big questions of our era-- how do we balance consideration of someone's personal failings with valuation of their work? Can a person who has done horrible things also do great things? Can a terrible human being create wonderful art?

Those are hard questions, but ultimately, I think, there's a difference between ad hominemming the art we consume and ad hominemming the leaders we choose (or don't choose). I'm not going to try to address the former here, but I have my own measure for the latter.

First, ad hominem is never acceptable as the beginning and end of an argument. I think this is why I continue to be uncomfortable with the whole "Betsy DeVos is a big dope" thing that keeps floating around. First, I don't believe it's true, but second, I don't think it's helpful. When we argue about personalities instead of policies, we lose the track. You can see that playing out for alleged Progressives in the reformster movement, who must reject DeVos and Trump because they are Bad People on the Wrong Team, but who must also continue to support DeVos's policies, most of which they absolutely agree with. They are having a really hard time dragging that pretzel through the eye of a needle.

But (second) ad hominemming is useful when we're trying to understand where the policies come from, or what their real aim is. Character does matter, and it does reveal what informs the policies and ideas that people push on us. It's important to know, for instance, that a charter school is being pushed by someone who makes his living running hedge funds or dealing in real estate, because if a school has been created to turn a profit rather than educate students, that goal will inform all the choices made by the school.

But the personal has to inform the discussion of policy. If we simply make the personal argument as if that settles the whole matter, we won't talk about the bad policy that we need to talk about. And at worst, we end up like the conservative wing nuts who have descended to making up ad hominem attacks about teenagers rather than having an actual conversation about gun laws in this country.

It is easy in the heat of any tough debate to decide that the end justifies the means, but at the risk of stating what should be obvious, lying is bad. Attacking people as if they aren't actual human beings is bad. Folks who are at long last discovering that they have (or should have) shame at making personal attacks on teenage shooting victims-- well, it shouldn't take young victims of a savage gun attack to help you realize that you're behaving badly. As conservatives used to believe, wrong is wrong, regardless of the circumstances.

Where was I headed with all this? I suppose this is one of those pieces that I have written primarily for myself, as a reminder to keep my eye the ball and not to get sucked into personal attacks, not to fall into the trap of treating those with whom I disagree as less than human, even as I recognize that some folks have ill intent and mean harm to things I hold dear. It's not an easy tightrope to walk, but that's why some folks would rather just live by following their team-- it's easy to excuse everything your team does and condemn everything that the other team does. It's just not a very principled way to be in the world.