Striking, Choice and Unions

No real surprise here. It was only a matter of time (minutes) before someone used the teacher strikes in West Virginia et. al. as an argument for school choice.

Here's Tillie Elvrum at Campbell Brown's The74. Elvrum has been a school choice advocate for a while, serving as the president of PublicSchoolOptions, a group that doesn't just support school choice, but is all in for cyber schooling. They run a Bootcamp for parent advocacy. They are also unusual in the choice arena in that they advocate for the removal of "access barriers" that keep some students from being able to choose charters. That seems linked to Elvrum's own story, which is that her child with special needs got the help he wanted at an on-line school; it's hard to predict how many other charters would have found a way to push him out.

At any rate, she has made it clear why public schools are awful-- that damn teachers union. And she is consistent in her blaming. The strike in West Virginia is not a teacher strike- it's a "teachers union strike." When his son was kept out of school by a strike, "the demands of the union kept him from his most basic need" also described as "when the unions in Pennsylvania walked out on my son." The ugly tug-of-war that happens at these times? That occurs "when unions force teachers to walk out of classrooms."

This is the classic argument-- teachers and the teachers unions are entirely different things, with teachers somehow at the mercy of union decisions that are made by....? I don't know. Evil union officials who all have some secret power over the rank and file?

Elvrum is painting a picture that is not particularly representative of reality. Teachers don't like to strike, and when they do strike, it's because they feel they're out of options. Teachers certainly don't strike because the union says they have to. In fact, if you think teachers meekly follow union orders, check out the number of NEA and AFT members who voted for Donald Trump. I can assure you-- all fifty five counties of WV don't walk out on strike because the union says to-- they walk out because the individual teachers have had it. [That's why it's called a wildcat strike-- because they walked out in spite of the union, not because of it.]

But some reformsters find the Evil Union narrative useful because it supports one of the charter/choice selling points-- come to our school, where there is no evil union and teachers just do as they're told. The Evil Union narrative also goes along with the idea that real rank-and-file teachers feel a special sacred calling to their work and never trouble themselves with vulgar concerns like how much they get paid or whether they have insurance or the conditions in their building. It's the union that puts those thoughts into our teachers' heads. Those nice ladies would be happy to work for a baloney sandwich and a pat on the head if some Evil Union guy wasn't whispering in their ears with indecent suggestions about decent pay.

Like many anti-strike arguments, it allows some folks to pretend that everything is okee-dokee in teacher land and that nothing needs to be addressed, which when you think about it is a really ironic argument for an ed reformster to adopt since it boils down to-- our schools are a terrible mess and don't serve our students well and need to be completely overhauled, except for the parts having to do with teachers, because those parts are perfectly perfect. Lots of reformsters are smarter than that, but those that aren't at being flushed out of the brush by the new wave of strikes. They don't have a lot to contribute to the current conversation, but it is useful to see their argument fully revealed.

Strangled by Bootstraps

This was one of the more depressing poll results to appear recently--

Forty percent of white Americans think black people would be just as well off as white people if they worked harder, according to a new poll from YouGov on Wednesday.

Bootstraps, baby. We just assume everyone has the same boots and the same straps and all differences between outcomes are strictly the result of differences in how hard you yanked on those bootstraps.

It's difficult to know exactly, how hard it would be to track your way back through US history using the bootstrap theory. Despite red lining, black folks would have been able to buy decent housing if they'd just tried harder? If black folks had just tried harder, they wouldn't have been beaten down by Jim Crow laws? If black folks had just tried harder, segregation wouldn't have kept them out of white schools? If black folks had just tried harder, they wouldn't have been lynched? If black folks had tried harder, they wouldn't have been bought and sold as slaves?

Well, that was all in the past, declare the bootstrap enthusiasts. In this country you always get a clean fresh start, and the past doesn't have to hold you back. Which is true, I suppose, if there is nothing in your past or your family's past to hold you back. If your bootstraps are flopping free and not attached to anything. If nobody took your bootstraps away because they were afraid you might get too high and mighty.

Privilege is so often blind to itself; we are a nation of people who were born on third base and grow up thinking we hit a triple. To be fair, this is not simply arrogance and entitlement. There's an element to self-protection in blind privilege-- if I believe that what I have is earned and not luck, the result of merit and not circumstances, then I don't have to live in fear that some morning it will all just disappear as mysteriously as it appeared in the first place.

But forty percent! Forty freakin' percent!!

I keep worrying that the exact number translates into teaching staffs. How many teachers are bootstrap enthusiasts?

How many teachers figure that any student who's doing poorly is doing so because they just aren't trying? How many teachers apply that reasoning disproportionately to students of color? How much does this dynamic feed the other dynamic that we know about-- that students of color are disproportionately punished for disciplinary infractions? How many teachers and administrators look at a black kid who has screwed up and think, "This kid is not even trying to do better. Throw the book at 'em."

Sure, everyone can do "better" if they work harder with whatever bootage they have in life. Hard work matters. But then, it has to be the right amount of the right kind of work-- black folks worked hard to make their lives better during the Civil Rights movement, and plenty of white folks got mighty bent out of shape that the black folks were making too much fuss, being too uppity. Working too hard at it. Nor do I hear a lot of bootstrappers praising the Black Lives Matter movement saying, "Good for them-- they really grabbed their bootstraps and started to try to lift up their communities with whatever tools they could grasp." And don't even talk about brown folks walking their bootstraps to the USA to work their way to a better life. Those bootstraps can't be tolerated.

I've done okay for myself in life, but if we have to talk bootstraps-- well, I've had a lot of help. My parents pulled my bootstraps up and my schools pulled them up and some important people who decided to reach down and adjust my footwear a few times. It's a complicated dance; if you are fortunate, blessed, privileged, people open doors for you, but you have to walk through on your own two booted feet. I don't really get people who insist they not only pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but they built the door and hung the frame and installed the hardware using their bootstraps as a kind of swiss army knife toolkit. Nobody does it himself or herself. Nobody. Nobody. Some people get a million dollar loan from their parents, and some have parents whose struggle is passed down to their children. Where some people have huge advantages, some have huge disadvantages. How can we still be debating this.

And that's before we even get to this part-- that advantages are more advantageous for some folks than for others. White children of the rich tend to stay rich; rich children of color do not. Look at some of the children of the rich and tell me that they kept their family's advantage through grit and hard work.

Sigh. Forty percent.

All this time, and we've still got all these white folks thinking that poor white folks are victims of circumstances, but poor black folks got there by being lazy.

There are so many bad ways for this to play out in education. Charter schools founded on the whole idea that what These People need to learn is how to work hard and grab their bootstraps. Public schools with teachers who make judgments about effort and ability based on race. If you're a white person teaching next door to a white person who thinks like this, talk to them about it. If you're a white person who thinks like this, go read some history and smarten yourself up.

Forty percent. Damn.

ICYMI: Endless Winter Edition (4/8)

It's normal to have one last snow storm after Easter, then move on to spring. Apparently that's not what we're doing this year.

At any rate, here's a short batch of items to read from last week. Remember-- if you like it, amplify it by tweeting, sharing and otherwise pushing the voices you value out into the world.

A School Board Member Says Let's Call the State's Bluff 

A notoriously contentious Florida school board members says he's tired of the state's destruction of local school board power; if they want to turn around local schools, let them come in and do the dirty work themselves.

Identifying Effective Teacher Preparation Programs Using VAMS Does Not Work

God bless researchers who take the time and trouble to prove what any twelve-year-old can see what is true-- that using student test scores to evaluate the place where their teachers went to college is a fool's game. VAMboozled has the details.

What A Great Teacher Is Worth

Actually, a slightly different list of what qualities a great teacher must have.

Response to One More Teacher's-Havbe-It-Easy Letter

A NC teacher-of-the-year responds to that same old baloney about how teachers only work 180 days and get summers off, so stop complaining.

Black Student Punishment

We have the data; either black students are collectively more poorly behaved than white ones, or there's some systematic racism going on in school discipline work. (Spoiler alert: it's not that first one).

Okalhoma Governor's Obnoxious Quote

I may have paraphrased a bit. Of all the stupid things politicians have said in reaction to the teacher strikes going on, the "car" thing from Oklahoma's governor is right up there.

The Data Boyz

Another invaluable Have You Heard podcast looking at the rise of the Data Boys in education, and how their ideas of what can and should be measured have made a mess for the rest of us.

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.