Content Matters (or "Yet Another Reformster Has an Epiphany")

NAEP report time is just around the corner, and states are positioning themselves to withstand the hits they're about to take. This has led to even more special moments in reformster revelation.

Here's John White in The Hill, explaining why NAEP is not a good reading test. White, you will recall, is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education, arriving there as a Broad-trained TFA-produced reformster (you can see his timeline laid out here) and a big fan of Common Core. In short, he's always been completely unqualified for his job, but has the right friends in the right places. None of that prepared me for what he wrote in the Hill opinion piece.

He opens by setting the stakes high-- "A literate citizenry is a matter of national defense" -- and so, he reasons, we have to change every reading test in America.

Why? Well, he notes that while fourth grade scores have climbed, scores for older students have not. And the problem could be, he thinks, that the tests are not an accurate measure of reading.

As with children, a literate adult can read individual words and can connect them into sentences. But literate adults also have the background knowledge necessary to make sense of the words they encounter. When we read that a player rounded the bases, for example, we know that means more than just running around a baseball field — someone hit a home run. Or when we read there was a meeting at 10 Downing St., we know it wasn’t just tea time in London — something important happened in Great Britain at the home of the prime minister. We comprehend what we read because we have prior knowledge of the subject

Imagine, then, taking a reading test and encountering a passage on the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing much about the Cold War or President Kennedy. Or, try it yourself by reading an academic study on a subject you know nothing about. You may be able to decipher the words, but making sense of the text will be tedious. And good luck with a test of how well you comprehended and retained the knowledge.

On today’s reading tests, students read articles and stories they’ve not encountered before on topics they don’t necessarily know anything about. This may explain why older students struggle more on these tests; there is simply more that older students have to know to be sure they will comprehend an article written for an older audience.

And I know that's a lot of quoting, but this next graph is crucial:

The trouble is that by not requiring knowledge of any specific book or facts, reading tests have contributed to the false impression that reading is mainly about having skills such as being able to summarize, and not about background knowledge. Walk into many English classrooms today and you will see students capably identifying an article’s main idea. But you’re less likely to find students learning the historical context for a novel or discussing the novel’s broader meaning. By not requiring knowledge, tests create no incentive for particular knowledge to be taught.

Emphasis mine. White is absolutely dead on correct here-- the attempt to reduce reading to a set of discrete content-free skills has been misguided and dopey. How did we arrive at such a place? White ignores that question, as well he might, as he's one of the people who worked hard to get us there. The content-starved skill-focused vision of reading was promoted by Common Core and backed up by Common Core testing. That would be the same Common Core that White encouraged Louisiana to embrace. And hey- remember that time that White openly defied the governor who hired him in order to keep the Core and the PARCC test in place? Fun times.

White apparently wants to pretend it's not so, but his Hill piece directly contradicts reformster orthodoxy. It was David Coleman, CCSS ELA architect who told us to boldly teach the Gettysburg Address without any historical context or discussion of the broader meaning. It's the Common Core linked Big Standardized Tests that have accustomed us to the notion that reading is always done in bits and pieces and excerpts, snatches of reading plucked loose from the context of the larger work. In fairness, not all reformsters have bought this idea-- the importance of content for reading is a point on which Robert Pondiscio and I are in complete agreement. But White has been toeing the Common Core content-free reading line all along.

So why the shift? Did something happen to make White realize that the Common Core approach to reading is baloney? That seems unlikely, as witnessed by the fact that his opinion piece nowhere mentions Common Core, nor does it include the words "I was wrong."

No, the more likely cause is the knowledge that NAEP scores are about to punch his state in the face, and as Mercedes Schneider correctly notes, these are not scores he fudge, delay, or hide. Instead, he has to scramble for a way to lessen the impact. When doing the wrong thing is about to bite you in the butt, one strategy is, surprisingly, to start advocating for the right thing.

So while I agree whole-heartedly with everything White said, I don't believe he believes it. His unwillingness to fess up for his own complicity in this mess is also not an encouraging sign. He's just the dog standing next to the broken tree saying, "Hey, somebody broke this. I don't know who it was, but you should really do something about it." He's not entirely wrong, but I'm not going to trust him around trees any time soon.

My News

I've told my family, my boss, my students, my colleagues and anyone who asks. Now it's time to tell you.

I've submitted my letter to the school district; this will be my last year as a classroom teacher.

There is no raging letter railing against the advance of reform in my district. It's true that reform stuff has made its way into my building, that I work with a for some Kool-Aid drinkers, and that some days I step back and realize that the goldfish has barely enough water left. But I read too much from too many corners of the country to imagine that my school is as bad as things can get-- it's not even close. And if it were just that, I'd be inclined to stay and continue making a nuisance of myself (though I will admit that over the years I have underestimated how easily a district can say, "Just ignore him-- he's old and he'll be gone soon.")

Anyway, my work situation doesn't justify one of those blistering "why I'm quitting" letters. It has been a good place to work for most of my career.

Most of it comes down to this:

These guys

My reasons for stepping down are largely personal and financial. There are children and grandchildren and other family scattered about; I'd like to be able to visit and skype more often. There are things that I promised myself I would get around to doing "some day," and I've been reminded lately that at 60, my some days are not an infinite supply. I have writing to do and community work to do and there's a banjo upstairs I've been meaning to restring when I get the time.

I have all the feelings about this. I've always been first and foremost a teacher, one of those guys who everyone figured would teach until he was ancient and crusty, and really, for a large part of my life, I couldn't envision anything else. I didn't talk or think about retirement because I could not imagine what it would look like. Over the past few years that has changed; I was indulging in some romantic fantasizing to imagine I could do this work forever. Plus, I don't want to spend my family's future just because I'm afraid to change my present. But I still feel some guilt about retiring, about leaving the work while there is still work to be done. Intellectually, I know that this was always going to be true, that every teacher leaves the field while the work is still being done. But still, I think of the people who will still be carrying the load that I will no longer be helping to heft. And I'm sorry that there will be one less voice of an actual working teacher in the Conversation About Education, though I suspect some more will emerge soon enough.

I am by no means done with the education world. My wife's career is still mostly ahead of her, and the two guys in the picture have their whole education ahead of them (except for drooling, crawling and pooping-- on those, we have mastery)-- so I will remain fully invested. Running for school board? That sounds like fun. Do you need a speaker? I believe I'll be available. Need someone for a writing gig? I'm all up for that. And it's time to get serious about seeing if I really have a book or two in me. Then I can start fielding the offers from think tanks while I start my consulting firm. Or I can just get that banjo restrung. And this blog will keep right on churning away.

I am the most fortunate, blessed, privileged guy I know. I have had second and third chances I never deserved. I have worked at the best job in the world in a great community, managed to put two kids through college, have never been very wealthy but have never lived in want, and now that job, backed up by the state, gives me options that some people (including teachers in other locales) only dream of. As I have said many times, it does not suck to be me, and not a day goes by that I'm not grateful for my privileges and thoughtful about how to try to pay the universe back.

I'm sure I'll have other things to say as the reality of change sinks in, because as we know, every thought that passes through my brain falls onto this space. In the meantime, I just wanted to pass on the news.

How To Sell Personalized Learning

One thing that modern corporate reformsters have always understood (because they view reform through that business eye) is market research as a tool for honing sales pitches. You may recall several years ago when we turned up a handbook for winning hearts and minds for charterdon.

Well, ExcelInEd and Education Elements have created a marketing handbook for Personalized [sic] Learning.

Sounds Swell. Who Are These Guys?

ExcelInEd is the newest name for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that carried the standard for Jeb! Bush's reform ideas and was supposed to be his education brain trust for his ride to the White House (oops).  FEE/EIE theoretically occupies the rightward nexus of ed reform, but they play very nicely with outfits like EducationPost, which theoretically occupies the leftward nexus of ed reform. They also get along just fine with the DeVos USED. At various times they have promoted specious arguments for testing, tried to use aging demographics to sell choice, jumped on the honesty gap train to nowhere, held a regular reformster-palooza gatheration, and tried to harness fake-ish social media presences to tout the whole reformy package. They are a one stop shop for reformster baloney, sliced to whatever thickness you prefer. And they're funded by all the usual reformster crowd (Walton, Gates, Broad, etc). 

Yes, this again

Education Elements is a consulting firm that helps schools convert to Personalized [sic] Learning models. They are "partnered" with a variety of PL manufacturers, including i-Ready, Achieve3000, and PowerSchool, and they promise the whole Competency-Based Education glossary of buzzwords.

EE's COO is Amy Jenkins, whose corporate bio says she "started out as a middle school teacher in Oakland, California." No, not really. She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in Political Science and Government, and then spent two years in Teach for America before going to Harvard Business School for an MBA. From there she went on to SCORES, the New Schools Venture Fund, and Monitor, before landing at Education Elements.

Jenkins co-authors this marketing study with Karla Phillips. Phillips has been the Policy Director of Personalized Learning for FEE for the last three years and change. Before that, she worked on education policy in Arizona, including three years as education policy advisor for Governor Jan Brewer (Brewer pushed letter grades for schools, merit pay for teachers, and big piles of money for charters).

All of this deserves some deep diving of its own, but we have other fish to skin today.

Just note this: EIE and its web of friends are excellent evidence that ed reform isn't always all that concerned with left and right except as variant forms of a sales pitch. EIE's partnership with EE is evidence that reformsters are moving seamlessly into the next round of the corporate privatization of public education.

Communicating Personalized Learning to Families and Stakeholders: Terminology, Tools and Tips for Success

This is the big ole report we're looking at, a handy guide for how to most effectively market Personalized [sic] Learning. In its introduction, it promises to share some "messaging testing results."

It opens by noting that one of the problems of PL is that nobody has actually defined what the hell it is. I'll give them points for noting "in this case, we cannot even rely on the famous quote by Justice Potter Stewart about knowing it when you see it, because we can't even agree on that."

So one of the questions they asked in the survey is what responders thought PL means, and that landed somewhere in the neighborhood of "Instruction is tailored to students." So we'll go with that.

Now then-- what recommendations do Jenkins and Philips have to share?

The case for change

Jenkins and Phillips want us to know that even though this looks like the latest in a long, long, long, LONG, series of silver bullets that promises to magically fix education, this time, it's totally different:

Personalized learning is also not just another initiative. It is not about buying software or devices; it is not a prepackaged plan or a scripted program. It is not something that will start and stop. Instead, it reflects progress, growing out of what we are discovering about human learning, about how to integrate new tools that become available and about the new knowledge and types of skills our children will need to be successful in the modern world.

That paragraph is your first lesson in marketing PL, which in many many cases (e.g. Summit) is exactly about buying software and devices to run a prepackaged program. But you can't market it like that. Instead, you must use all the fancy, high-sounding stuff. Because it will be hard to convince people to throw out school as they know it so it can be replaced by devices used to run prepackaged software-centered algorithm-directed school.

Jenkins and Phillips do offer one wise insight. "Based on survey results, it appears personalized learning advocates have tried to offer a narrative that we wanted to tell rather than a message the public, especially families, wants to hear."

There is good news for those of us who are tired of the "schools haven't changed in 100 years" line-- it doesn't sell product. "History lessons on the stagnation of education in America make for great conversations and debates at conferences, but remember: Families don't typically have that luxury of time for academic discourse on the history of long-term trends in education."

The survey backed up the usual finding-- people think their own school is great, but everyone else's is more suspect. Further, the survey indicated that 42% strongly agreed that US schools in general are "inadequate," but only 28% strongly agreed with "outdated."

Bottom line: the March of Time sales pitch is not a winner.

Parent Priorities

Parents were shown some copy about what personalized learning could promise, then asked if that changed their mind and which words turned the trick. So, kind of like telling a five year old, "If you eat broccoli, you get a pony, and x-box and a bicycle. Now, will you eat the broccoli? And if so, which promise changed your mind?"

The results demonstrate that families know exactly what their students need for the future: knowledge and skills.

Well, not a huge shocker, particularly as we don't know what other outcomes were pitched.

Also not shocking-- studies have found that families respond poorly tp phrases like "one-size-fits-all" or "cookie cutter." This, incidentally, is the part where folks with a high level of paranoid conspiracy belief might suggest that Common Core was implemented simply to advance the narrative that schools are one-size-fits-all, thereby setting the stage for the Pl revolution.

Messages To Push

Jenkins and Phillips offer some specifics about what messaging will help with marketing personalized [sic] learning programs.

Focus on the future. Talk about how PL will get the students the knowledge and skills they will need to handle college and career in the big, scary world of tomorrow.

Benefits to family. Push how PL will give more detailed and deeper understanding of how your child is progressing. It will help with parent-teacher collaboration. It will free up time for more student-student and student-teacher interaction.

Benefits to students. "Students are encouraged to play a greater role-- and be more invested-- in their learning." Instruction will be tailored to students' interests and therefor will be more engaging. And they can learn at their own pace, solidly mastering each unit.

Benefits to teachers. Flexibility and tools to meet the needs of each child.

Most of this is, of course, baloney. Students will get the skills and knowledge that they must have-- but they will mostly study things that interest them. Teachers will be free to interact more with students and parents, but because software is looking at all the student "work," teachers will have far less sense of how the student is doing (no, reading a data dashboard is not the same thing). Students will acquire deep and complex skills and knowledge-- but only the parts that can be reduced to a computer-monitored checklist of easily-assessed performance tasks.

Co-opt Teachers

In a big sidebar, Jenkins and Phillips remind us that parents mostly trust teachers, so you need to get your teachers involved in making the sales pitch. Presumably their contribution should not include things like "Yes, this system is great because now I don't really have anything to do at all" or "Teacher? Actually, I used to work at an ad agency, but when they told me that anyone with any college degree could be hired as a classroom progress monitor, I jumped right on that."

Things Not To Say

No marketing report would be complete without advice on hat language to avoid. Jenkiins and Phillips highlight several no-nos.

For instance, whereas parents like the idea of student grades based on mastery and teachers having the flexibility to help all students, parents were not fans of change the classroom design and school schedule, nor did they like the idea that attendance, participation and extra credit would no longer help a student's grade.

Parents don't like the idea of standardized testing, so finding out the PL means test after test, day after day, does not play well in the market.

Turns out that civilians don't know what the heck "student agency, voice and choice" actually means. The report recommends that messagers stick with "have input." But don't be too strong about it-- parents are also generally not fans of a school in which students just kind of do whatever, whenever.

Technology can scare everyone away, from parents who want their children to interact with other human students and teachers. Teachers are not keen on losing their jobs to computers. Jenkins and Phillips call these ideas "misunderstandings," but in fact many PL promoters have been exceedingly clear that these concerns are absolutely on point.

Jenkins and Phillips advise that "technology should be presented as a tool that can help enable personalized learning, especially at scale, but it cannot and will not ever replace teachers." They argue to present it this way-- they do not argue that this is actually true. This is the heart of the PL bait and switch-- personalized learning conjures up pictures of classrooms with high teacher-student ratios and super-tech equipment that enhances the teacher's work in crafting a custom program for each child. But that dream is a flying Lexus-- technically, maybe, possible, but far too expensive. So instead, what you actually get is a software, computers, algorithm-selected teaching, teachers who aren't really teachers any more, and school leaders who think this is a way to put 100 students in a single classroom (which is what the oxymoronic "personalized learning at scale" means).

Softening the Market

Okay, they call this part "tools to create consensus." They link here to a variety of marketing resources for winning over parents, including several Education Elements articles stressing that personalized learning need not be digital at all. And I agree that is absolutely true-- the best way to do personalized learning is with one good teacher in a class of about ten students. I would be encouraged a bit by these articles, maybe, if it weren't for the list of EE partners that are all under the heading "These EdTech providers make our shortlist; check them out." This is an entire consulting business that exists to get ed tech providers of PL into schools.

They include a graphic about the four "core" elements of PL: flexible content and tools, targeted instruction, student reflection and ownership, and data-driven decisions. Each one of those points directly at software-provided solutions. "Sure," they'll say, "You can do all of this without this special software and these tech devices-- but look at how much easier the software makes it!!"

Be Prepared

Jenkins and Phillips note that everyone is super-interested in PL, but everyone is also familiar with how school usually works, so they will have lots of questions about how things are supposed to work. You should be prepared with answers for those questions. The paper lists a bunch of probable questions, and many of them are pretty good ones. Will it hurt students socially to get ahead or behind everyone else? What exactly will "mastery" mean? How will this affect discussion nd classroom interaction?

Jenkins and Phillips don't offer any answers to these very good questions, other than A) your answers should be based on your specific plan and B) you should avoid saying things that will "fuel opposition." Avoid saying anything that "could lead families to believe" that it will be really expensive to do right, that teachers will be overworked, that the curriculum will be dumbed down so that it doesn't look like many students are falling behind, or that it only works for top students.

Those things may be true. Just don't let families get the impression that they're true.

Final Tips

To wrap up, these folks whose whole business is to push personalized [sic] learning tell us that they have data showing that personalized [sic] learning works. My local car dealer has data showing why his band is the best. Cigarette companies have data showing that tobacco is not hazardous to your health. Any company with a product to sell should have data supporting that product; any customer with money to spend should ignore that data.

But here are some last marketing tips, divided up by role. District leaders should have a clear vision for PL, and express it in plain English. School leaders should talk about PL whenever possible. There's "tremendous momentum" behind this train, so you should climb on board. Teachers should hang signs in their classrooms and talk about PL during parent conferences. "Help your students understand why things are different." I'm assuming they aren't asking me to say, "Things are different in public schools because a bunch of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers and tech gurus started looking for ways to get a piece of the giant mountain of money spent on public education, so they teamed up with some well-meaning amateurs who mistook their own ignorance for genius and grabbed the power to rewrite the education system." No, that's probably not the correct answer.

There are some curious omissions-- nothing in the paper addresses concerns about hoe tech-based PL is a giant data-sucking privacy-destroying profit-generating violation of personal security. And there are so many questions raised here without even a hint of an answer. Maybe they just didn't consider that their brief, but are ed reformsters really going to make this same mistake again? Your marketing and promotion are pretty tightly connected to what your product actually is and actually does-- and yet this paper doesn't address the on-the-ground reality of PL except to acknowledge that nobody can agree on what it is. Which would seem to be a pretty big marketing problem. Buy our thing, because it does stuff, in some way!

Personalized [sic] Learning faces the same problem as many of modern reform's greatest hits-- you can market and PR and arm twist all day, but eventually people are going to deal directly with the product, and all the PR in the world will not help. PL fans should spend less time pondering their marketing and more time pondering their actual product. And in this respect, they are indeed just one more initiative, one more sales pitch, one more resource-sucking idea

FL: Shady Charter Avoids Closure

It has been a year and a half since I wrote about Eagle Arts Academy in Palm Beach, and I really thought this scammy operation would be shut down by now. But no-- Florida makes sure that charters just keep on helping themselves to taxpayer money.

First, the backstory.

This guy.

Eagle Arts Academy is the brainchild and personal money trough of Greg Blount. Blount graduated from the University of South Carolina-Columbia in 1991 with a Bachelor of Applied Media Science, Film Production / Fashion Photography. He then moved to New York City to begin a modeling career, signed to the "then-famous" (actually, it looks like they were the ten-years-earlier-famous) agency ZOLI. After a few years of that he went to work for the Peter Glenn Publishing company, and then bought company. He later branched out into becoming an independent producer and a motivational speaker-- that was right after he declared personal bankruptcy in 2010.

Next stop? Obviously that was to open a charter school in Florida. Blount started that journey in 2011.

Andrew Marra of the Palm Beach Post has been covering this story like a boss, and the story is loaded with special Only In Florida flavor. Blount had managed to pull off two of the more common methods of using a charter school to line your own pockets. First, set up an organization to "support" the school and milk that for money (in this case, EMPPAC, which claims, as one of its success stories, Joel Osteen's niece). Second, if you're a multi-preneur, let all of your various business accounts marinate in the same big bowl. 

Blount hired his own company to produce an arts curriculum, even though Blount had no educational experience or training. He also required students to buy uniforms from his company, which charged  far more than the going price. And he hired a third of his own companies for other consulting work.

And as Jim Pegg, county charter schools monitor for the Palm Beach County School District, told Marra, "Do we like it? No. Is it legal? Yes."

Blount has trouble holding onto staff. He brought in Liz Knowles, an actual educator, to help run the school, but she quickly had enough. Knowles told Marra that the last straw was discovering that Blount had set up a company named after the curriculum they were developing (Artademics). Artademics was paid, but the curriculum didn't appear for months (and there's reason to doubt that it was any good when it appeared). It also turned out that Blount was repaid by the school for a loan that he never gave them -- maybe twice. 

It's not like word didn't get out (check out this parent review on Great Schools).  But apparently Eagle Arts Academy has managed to hang on-- at least until the current crisis.

Last Monday, two principals resigned from the charter. During a board meeting at which folks were discussing what to do about the fact that teachers weren't getting paid. After Blount lied about paying them. Twice. Because the charter barely has any money in the bank. And yet has still been paying money (taxpayer dollars) to Blount's various side businesses. 

There are 60 teachers and staff members at the charter, and they are a bit grumpy at the moment. Jim Pegg, who a year or two ago bemoaned the fact they had no legal recourse for dealing with this charter fraud festival, got to offer this wry observation:

If they don't pay their employees, they are more than likely going to lose their employees.

The charter's five-member board briefly considered getting rid of Blount, but, incredibly, that initiative failed after other board members spoke up in support of Blount as a founder and visionary. This guy must be loaded with twelve kinds of charm.

Both principals walked out of the meeting, along with some staff. The principals later issued a brief note including:

At the end of the day, we felt it was in the best interest of the students, staff and ourselves to make sure everyone had a complete picture before committing to the “hope” that any future funds would be available.  We have both been made aware through published budgets, financial reports and information presented at the Palm Beach County School District Board meeting; that EAA is experiencing a dire financial situation. Neither of us were signers on any of the bank accounts. It is our understanding that payroll has not been met for any employee and we understand that may continue to be the case in the future.  We feel we have no alternative but resign.

Palm Beach County Schools have indicated they will not bail out the charter. They also revealed that lease and vendor payments haven't been paid since September of 2017 (while Blount's company have been getting paid all along). And it appears that enough staff is still working to keep the charter open-- but there's no sign when they will be paid.

Nowhere in any of this do we find the state of Florida stepping up to say, "Hey, now! This is not okay!" Because in Florida, this kind of baloney is okee dokee, and this kind of wasting of taxpayer dollars is somehow not the legislatures problem. We'll see just how much longer Eagle Arts Academy will be allowed to continue.

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.