Religious Vouchers

One of the problems that has already been documented with school voucher programs is that they tend to shuttle public tax dollars to private religious schools.

Now, not everyone considers that a problem, exactly. As far as I know, she's never said so out loud, exactly, but given what we know about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, it seems likely that she considers this a feature, not a bug. And Cato, the libertarian thinky tank, has taken to arguing on line that having taxpayers pay to send students to the private religious school is the only way to have religious equality and freedom in this country, a piece of pretzel logic that make my head hurt a little.

Why should we care about using public tax dollars to fund private religious schools?

Well, separation of church and state seems like a good idea. Historically, we have never seen a country run by religious authorities that has worked out well (at least not for anyone not actually in power). Spanish Inquisition. Salem Witch Trials. When a religious group has the opportunity to use the power of the civil government to enforce their religious orthodoxy, it tends to end poorly, with a lot of oppression and mistreatment and even torture and death. It is bad for civil government to be taken over by a church. The separation of church and state is also good for the church; when you mix religion and politics, you get politics, and suddenly the church is far less interested in God than in power plays and money and pleasing Important Humans rather than the Great I Am.

Once schools start becoming seats of state-sponsored religion, we have opened the door to letting the state decide which religions to authorize. Once vouchers can be used for church-run schools, you know it's only a matter of time before the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the local Satanist group is petitioning the state for a cut of the funds. Eventually only one of two things can happen-- either the state will refuse to step in, signaling that anybody can open any fake church and try to score some of that sweet tax cash, leading to a cynical debasing of religion; or, the state can start ruling that certain religious schools may not get tax dollars and voila! we have a state agency ruling on the legitimacy of certain religions. And if you think that this will only affect bizarre religions, let me remind you that some protestants once gave the Catholic Church the cute nickname, "the Whore of Babylon."

While we're clearing that hurdle, we can also wrestle with religious schools that feel their faith requires them to reject Those People or even the children of Those People. Again, does the government step in to extend its reach and rules into private religious institutions, or does it allow public tax dollars to be spent on what would otherwise be illegal discrimination? Either solution is going to be unacceptable to someone.

There is one other issue raised here, and it really cuts to the heart of balancing freedom against responsible citizenship.

The League of Women Voters took a look at where vouchers were going in North Carolina, a state that has been vouchering it up for four years. The answer was "mostly to fundamentalist Christian schools." But then the League's researcher looked at what the schools were doing with that money, and the answer turns out to be "teaching a lot of bunk." For instance, many use the A Beka textbook series:

Students reading A Beka's textbooks learn that God created the world in six days 6,000 years ago, Noah’s Ark is a true story that happened during the Great Flood around 2500 B.C., and the flood’s runoff formed the Grand Canyon. The textbooks are also laced with critical comments from a deeply conservative perspective.

The researcher asked her husband, a former chair of the UNC Asian Studies department, to look at the Asian history portion. He found it riddled with errors and said it was "nonsense." 

This is not a new issue. Texas has long loved some terribly inaccurate and biased textbooks. And the long troubled history of creationism in the classroom is a huge problem, as it often comes with an approach to science that simply doesn't prepare students for any actual science. 

So what do we do with policy initiatives that use public funding to teach students things that are just not so? I know some of my readers lean conservative, but if you want to use my tax dollars to teach children that the earth is flat, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, the evolution is wrong, that black people are an inferior race, that homosexuality can be cured, or any of the various distortions of Us history-- well, I'm not sure how we have that conversation because I can't see any reason to doubt that you are flat out dead wrong. And it's not just a matter of "It's my kid so I'll teach her what I want to" personal freedom, because every student who gets this kind of education is one more misinformed uneducated person released into society, and that damages and diminishes us as a country. When uninformed miseducated hold jobs, or raise children of their own, or vote, bad things happen that cause problems for everybody.

Every opinion about how the world works is not equally valid, and opinions do not become facts just because someone believes them real hard. And as a society, if we fund bad education, that becomes a problem.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/ned-barnett/article212352824.html#storylink=cpy

EdNext and the Beanstalk

In the Fall 2018 issue of Education Next, Daniel Hamlin and Paul Peterson ask the question "Have States Maintained High Expectations for Student Performance?" The correct answer, it turns out, is "Ask a different question."

Magic? Or just tasty?

Hamlin and Peterson note that ESSA gave states license to dump the Common Core, either in its actual form or under whatever assumed name they hid it behind. For accountability hawks, this raises the concern  that we'll have a Race to the Bottom, as states make it easier for schools to clear the performance bar (yes, for the six millionth time, this blurs the barely-existing line between the standards and the tests used to account for them). Will the political expediency of being able to say, "All our kids are Proficient (as we currently define it)!" be too much for politicians to resist?

So, has the starting gun been fired on a race to the bottom? Have the bars for reaching academic proficiency fallen as many states have loosened their commitment to Common Core? And, is there any evidence that the states that have raised their proficiency bars since 2009 have seen greater growth in student learning?

In a nutshell, the answers to these three questions are no, no, and, so far, none.

So nobody has loosened up requirements to-- hey, wait a minute. Did they just say that raising proficiency bars hasn't actually increased student learning?

Even though states have raised their standards, they have not found a way to translate these new benchmarks into higher levels of student test performance. We find no correlation at all between a lift in state standards and a rise in student performance, which is the central objective of higher proficiency bars.

Yup. Higher standards have not moved the bar. I see three issues with what they've written here.

1) "Greater growth in learning" is yet one more reformy phrase that suggests that student learning or student achievement is subject to quantitative measurement. Measuring learning is like checking to see how full a glass of water is. The assumption is necessary because it makes learning easy to measure-- just hold a ruler up to it and you know how much of the learning the child has packed into their head.

But does that really work. Has a student who has learned to play bassoon achieved "more" than a student who has learned how to identify different types of rock, or a student who has learned the major causes of The Great European War, or a student who has learned how to cook a soufflé? Reformers have gotten us talking about quantity of learning when most of the differences that matter are qualitative rather than quantitative. From that foundational error, many of the problems of reform follow.

2) Student test performance still is unproven as a measure of anything except a student's ability to take a test, or their socio-economic background. Student test scores are only slightly more useful than collecting student show sizes. It's bad data, and it does not measure the things that reformsters say they want to measure.

3) Raising student test scores should not be the "central objective" of any piece of education policy ever. I give them points here for honesty. The line used to be that by making students smarter, test scores would go up. Here Hamlin and Peterson drop even the pretense that test scores are proxies for anything else. This is exactly what any student of Campbell's Law would have predicted-- we have gone from trying to move the thing that is supposed to be measured to simply trying to move the measurement itself (read Daniel Koretz's The Testing Charade for an in-depth examination of this point).

We are now only one third of the way through the article, and yet the next sentence is not "Therefor, there really is no purpose in continuing to fret about how high state standards are, because they have nothing to do with student achievement." But instead, the next sentence is "While higher proficiency standards may still serve to boost academic performance, our evidence suggests that day has not yet arrived." And sure, I understand the reluctance to abandon a favorite theory, but at some point you have to stop saying, "Well, we've now planted 267 magic beans in the yard and nothing has happened-- yet. But tomorrow could be the day; keep that beanstalk ladder ready."

Hamlin and Peterson next recap the post-2002 history of state standards and the raising thereof (or not). They also refer to Common Core as "content standards," which -- well, I would call at least the ELA portion of the Core anti-content standards, but we can save that discussion for another day.

They also spend some time talking about how states have been closing a gap in "proficiency" measurement between the Big Standardized Test and NAEP. We should apparently be excited that more states have results that align with their NAEP results (they give states letter grades based on their gap), but they don't explain why we should care. And given the results covered earlier, it would seem that we shouldn't care at all.

That's underlined by a graph that turns up further down the page.

So despite all the fun number crunching, they come up with this conclusion:

Even so, the primary driving force behind raising the bar for academic proficiency is to increase academic achievement, and it appears that education leaders have not figured out how to translate high expectations into greater student learning.

Sigh. This is like one more iteration of the "It's the implementation that's screwing everything up" talking point. The high standards movement has always suffered from one other seriously flawed premise-- the notion that teachers and students could do better, but are just holding out on policy leaders, and they need to be prodded so that educational greatness can be achieved. This is both insulting and untrue. It is long past time for reformsters to look-- really look-- at their own data and finally conclude that their magic beans are never going to yield giant beanstalks.

Progressives and the DeVosian Embrace

In yesterday's New York Times, Conor P. Williams tackles one of the thorny problems of current reformsterism-- how do you hold onto some of your favorite charter school narratives now that the odious Trump and troublesome Betsy DeVos have planted their flag in your territory.

It's a good question, one that alleged Progressives have had to wrestle with ever since the last election stripped them of the cover of a nominally progressive President. But Williams' answer is lacking.

This guy. Yes, he has kind of a Kirk Cameron thing going on.

That's not surprising. Williams is a youthful PhD serving as senior researcher in New America's Education Policy Program. New America is a thinky tank with ties to Google, and they like school choice. Wiliams' PhD is in government from Georgetown, he writes for folks like the 74 and the Daily Beast. His bio usually touts his years teaching first grade in Brooklyn; you will be unsurprised to learn that he put in two years with Teach for America at Achievement First's charter school in Brooklyn. He has a specific interest in dual language learners, which is probably part of what led him to Hiawatha Leadership Academy, the school that he features in his NYT piece.

Williams shows his bias right off the bat, saying that Hiawatha runs "some of Minnesota's best public schools for serving such students." The link takes you to a six-year-old article, and as usual, "best" doesn't mean anything except "high score on the Big Standardized Test." And Hiawatha does not operate public schools-- it runs a charter school chain, and charter schools are not public schools. Calling charters "public" schools continues to be a way to obscure the problems of a privatized education system while giving charters the gloss of public school values which they do not possess. If "financed by public tax dollars" is the definition of "public," then Erik Prince operated a public security company and most defense contractors are public corporations. Charter schools are not public schools; their leadership is not publicly elected, their finances are not publicly transparent, and they do not take every child that shows up on their doorstep (which is one way they are able to achieve outstanding test results).

Williams point is that lefties should love Hiawatha because it's helping low-income children of color succeed. But there's the whole charter thing:

Progressives have long been open to research suggesting that well-regulated charter schools can extend educational opportunities to historically underserved children. But many also worry that charters foster segregation, siphon funding from traditional public schools and cater to policymakers’ obsession with standardized tests.

Williams' phrasing signals that he knows the research is pretty weak sauce. And he is correct to note one of the problems with the charter savior narrative-- what is the cost? Doers "saving" mean that we sacrifice a full education so that poor kids can be hammered with test prep every day? And do we "save" ten children by stripping necessary resources from 100 others?

And the new big problem, notes Williams, is that the embrace of Betsy DeVos, who loves choice and charters (although I'd argue that she loves charters only insofar as they help prepare the ground for vouchers) makes it hard to support charters and be a progressive.

Now let me take a side trip here. I'm not very concerned about political labels. I loathe the proicess by which we say, "Your position on cheese doodles shows that you're a mugwump, therefor you must be against water polo, because that is the mugwump position." Believe what you believe, support what you support, and ignore the labels-- that's what I'd prefer. But the story of school reform in general and charters in particular is the story of a conservative policy trying to masquerade as a bipartisan movement. Folks love to connect charters to Albert Shanker, the teacher labor leader, because it gives charters a lefty shine-- but Shanker's idea of charters was something else entirely, and when he saw what was happening, he turned his back on the whole thing. Charters couldn't really get going until neoliberals pretending to be progressives showed up, providing cover for privatization of public education by wrapping it in lefty language (and yes, some people did and do believe what they were saying, I know). As Wiliams puts it, "during the Obama administration, tensions over charter schools among progressives were manageable." The advent of Trump and DeVos just screwed up that whole game.

Williams tries to recast this as a personality thing-- Trump and DeVos are so "disliked" that some liberals "automatically reject" their ideas. What he doesn't is address is any of the substance of the arguments against (or for) charter schools and the privatization of American education.

Williams makes a case for Hiawatha, and captures the problems within the school in the Trump era (what does one tell a mostly no-white class of fourth graders when they ask "what does Make America Great Again mean?"). But what he doesn't address is the question of what the real nature of Hiawatha's "success" is, and what it costs (hard to do since they haven't graduated a class yet). Is there anything to learn from Hiawatha, or is the lesson here the same old one-- that with a more selective group of students and a bunch of extra money, you can accomplish more in a school?

Williams also tries to draw some sympathy for charter school teachers.

This puts the country’s many thousands of charter-school teachers in an odd place. Most come to this work to provide underserved children with a better shot at educational success, but now they’re increasingly branded as corporate stooges selling out public education by critics who challenge charter schools’ right to exist. These teachers shouldn’t have to answer for Ms. DeVos’s incompetence or wonder if there’s room for them in the future of progressive education politics.

This strikes me as a bit disingenuous. First, I don't know anybody who calls charter teachers "corporate stooges." In many cases, they are underpaid corporate victims, working without any job protections under lousy conditions for people who treat them like disposable widgets that must follow orders and stay in their place, or else. Second, many charter school teachers are not exactly teachers. Like Williams, they may be TFA temps who already know they're not sticking around for anything close like the five-to-seven years it takes a teacher to get really good. Or they are non-teachers in charters that are allowed to hire under special rules that allow them to put any warm body in the classroom. In other words, many thousands of charter-school teachers are already in an odd place.

And here's a pro tip-- if your plan is to "liberate" students by oppressing the people who work with them, you probably don't qualify as progressive.

Williams wants to argue that just because DeVos now wants to embrace charters, charter fans who came for the progressive argument shouldn't run away. But I'm not sure how many charter supporters were actually progressives, or whether progressives should have run away anyway (and conservatives, too, for that matter). Why isn't he exhorting progressives to throw their weight behind stronger support for public education? Should we be worrying about how well charters actually work instead of how they can best be lined up with one political agenda or another? Or should we start a discussion about the toxic effect of politics on education, with a eye toward getting politicians, amateurs, bureaucrats, dilettantes, and over-funded thinky tanks out of education entirely and hand it back to actual professional educators. There are a lot of questions worth asking hinted at in Williams' piece, but I'm not sure he really gets to any of them.

ICYMI: Graduation Day Edition (6/3)

Today our seniors graduate. Our ceremony, when the weather permits, in the park in the middle of town. I've been stage managing the business for over twenty years, and this was how I wanted to go out-- getting one last set of graduates through. In the meantime, here are some worthwhile things for you to read and share. Don't forget to share. What gives these folks a voice is when you share.

North Carolina's New Charter Bill Is a Warning

Jeff Bryant reports on the North Carolina charter bill, which opens the door to deliberate segregation.

Minneapolis Public Schools Ghosted

Sara Lahm shows what it looks like when a major city decides to phase out its public education system

What and Who Is Fueling the Movement to Privatize Public School

A good primer on what is driving much of school reformy stuff

The Racism of the New Orleans Miracle    

An interview with Ashana Bigard, a N.O. mom, on how things are going.

How Mexican Teachers Unions Are Pushing Candidates to the Left

Imagine a country where the teachers union has a major effect on politics. Well, there is one-- right next door.

Vouchers Still Don't Work    

Yet another study shows voucher students falling behind.

Success Academy Finally Takes the Algebra II Regents-- and Bombs  

The best school in the whole wide world runs into trouble, again.

Asking the Right Question about Personalization  

Rick Hess passes on some more critique of the edu-flavor of the year

Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom

From Brain Pickings. A brief but excellent post to end the week.

Crashing Tests

Yesterday's Dallas News reports that Texas has an even bigger testing screw-up on its hands than previously believed. Education authorities in Texas first believed that a mere 71,000 students were affected by computer crash issues during the high-tech administration of the STAAR test. But as stories have rolled in, it becomes apparent that things were far worse.

Educational Testing Services, a grand old corporate handler of testing, had a miserable time with these tests, with servers throwing students off the test or barring their path. This is the third year ETS has had the contract, despite the less-than-stellar showing in 2016.

Now my autopilot hits a cop car while I eat a donut. Cool!

Texas is not the only state having issues. This year, New York's English test malfunctioned for many students. Tennessee has been trying for years to make the online testing thing work, but they keep failing. Florida had its own share of connectivity issues for years.And let's not forget classics like the Ohio tests that were incorrectly graded. Or the states where the testing computers were under cyberattack. The list of technofails is long.

And I still have fond memories of Pennsylvania's experience in online testing-- the short form is that a few hundred thousand students logged on, and the test immediately ground to a halt. It was almost as if someone on the state level said, "Meh-- that doesn't look like a lot of bandwidth, but let's just wing it." So now we do our testing with pencils.

There is something superstitious about how we treat our tech; we ignore the many many many many many times it lets us down, and we focus on the times when it accomplishes that one thing. But if we're going to attach high stakes to these tests, then they should work every time, not just most of the time, probably.

Tesla has been leading the auto industry in autopilot disasters, leading company spokespersons to unleash this bit of advice:

When using Autopilot, drivers are continuously reminded of their responsibility to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle at all times,

In other words, when using the autopilot, don't use the autopilot.

The dream has been to have all of America's students log on and take the Big Standardized Test, but it keeps not happening. And every technofail sends to students the message that the BS Test is not ready for prime time, that it can't be trusted, that it's a waste of their effort and attention. After all, if you're not ready to handle your part of the job, why should I treat my part of the process with any care or concern.

It's not clear why the BS Test needs to be given on the computer. The test is not complex, and scoring a multiple choice test is not exactly the toughest clerical task you can give a teacher. I suspect that one of the main reasons for BS Testing on the computer is that taking tests on computers is really cool, and the digital natives (the ones who listen to the rap music) will be excited to do it. I'm pretty sure that none of these is true.

Does it make more money for the test manufacturer? Well, they've gotten rid of printing and distribution costs. If it isn't making them a bunch of money, they're doing something wrong.

Do paper and pencil tests have issues, too? Sure. Pencils break. Paper rips. On the other hand, one live teacher hardly ever loses or miscorrects hundreds and thousands of tests.

But does it also make the test easier and more accurate for the students? No reason to think so. But computerizing does make it easier for education "leaders" and bureaucrats to see the numbers and scores (all of which are largely meaningless, but oh well). If the online test offers no more utility or benefit to the students, why use it? I suspect the answer is that the benefits are not for the students at all, but for the people who have decided they will monitor school progress via spreadsheet. The computer tests aren't for children and they aren't for teachers-- they're for administrators and bean counters, for people who want to see education as the state would see it.

And they've been in such a hurry to see those data that they haven't checked to make sure that every test actually works the way it's supposed to.

Betsy DeVos Becomes Arne Duncan

So here's the story. A Secretary of Education becomes frustrated with Congress because the august body of legislators can't get its act together to reauthorize/rewrite a major piece of law that governs an entire sector of education. So the frustrated secretary digs into their bag of tricks and decides, "Hey, by using my control of certain regulations, I can basically implement the rules that Congress won't."

"Oh, now who's a naughty secretary?!"

This, of course, is the Arne Duncan story. Congress wouldn't get off its collective keister to fix up the Elementary and Secondary Education Act known, at the time, as No Child Left Behind (and several other less friendly names). So Duncan leveraged the penalties that states faced under NCLB, held some money hostage, and used his agency's regulatory powers to legislate new rules for ESEA, an act that, ironically, united Congress in a bipartisan desire to spank Duncan and that desire, in turn, led to the reauthorized ESEA/NCLB, now known as ESSA.

Many conservatives, including the DeVosian ones, were pretty angry at Duncan for trying to legislate from a department in the executive branch, but now they face a conundrum.

Because that story is no longer just Arne Duncan's story. It's now the story of Betsy DeVos.

From Erica Green in yesterday's New York Times:

The top Republican on the Senate Education Committee effectively killed on Thursday all hope for a highly anticipated overhaul this year of the law governing the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities, paving the way for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to wield her deregulatory power

Lamar Alexander blames the Democrats. Patty Murry says, no, the Dems want to "reauthoirize the Higher Education Act as soon as possible."

Virginia Foxx (let's not get me started on Foxx right now) has a nifty version that gives for-profits and religious institutions free rein, but even though the bill has passed the House Education Committee, it will never survive the Senate. The GOP only has a one-vote lead, so a pandering-to-the-base bill won't pass. See? Elections do matter.

Since Congress can't get their act together, DeVos is simply going to go Full Duncan and obtain the results she wants through regulatory power.

She has announced a sweeping regulatory agenda that seeks revisions to key academic measurements in the existing law, as well as changes to eligibility requirements for nontraditional programs like “competency-based education” to obtain more federal financial aid. Competency-based education makes the acquisition of specific skills — not just test-taking and attendance — key graduation requirements.

The department has also proposed to review what defines “regular and substantive interaction” between faculty members and students in programs where students are not physically present in classrooms, and to review the “credit hour,” which is used to measure progress toward completing a college degree. Colleges have complained that the credit-hour rule is too prescriptive.

DeVos will also delay by two years the rule that says online programs need approval from the states in which they enroll students.

All of this is consistent with DeVosian goals of privatizing, monetizizng, and generally de-schoolifying education. So there's no news there. She wants it to be easier to make money selling education-flavored products to post-high school students. People should be able to make a lot of money vending education-flavored products to students, and that means getting the states, the accreditors, and the Ed Department (you know-- all those nosy people who might hold you accountable for selling an education-flavored product that is not actually crap) out of the way.

This is all an extension of what DeVos has been doing and has been saying she will do. What's novel is that she has decided to use Duncan-style tools to get the job done. This has been one of the Big DeVos Questions since day one-- would she hold true to her promise to keep USED's hands off the levers, or would she be unable to resist the temptation to use the power she has to get the results she wants.

Now we know the answer.

Arne Duncan was wrong when he tried to legislate by way of department regulations, and lots of people called him on it. Now let's see if they'll do the same for Betsy.

Space

By the end of the day, I will not have a classroom.

I have one more duty to complete (I'm basically the stage manager of graduation on Sunday), but today is the last regular school day of my career. I'll scrub my classroom of every last trace of me, then hand over the keys and go home.

Of all the retirement moments that I've had to wrap my head around, this is turning out to be one of the tougher ones. Because I'll no longer a classroom, a teacher space of my own.

We probably should talk about space more often in education, because if there's one thing nobody in a school has, it's personal space. Teachers talk about closing the door and doing their jobs, as if that would somehow create a private space, but when a teacher closes the door, she's shut herself in the room with a whole batch of students.

Personal space, often defined by walls or even partitions, is a major status marker in most workplaces. It just doesn't come up often in education because almost nobody has any. Administrators get offices. Guidance counselors and other staff that require privacy for the students they work with get offices. Teachers get a desk. In a classroom, that they share with students. When teachers are forced to carry their stuff from room to room on a cart, that marks them clearly as the bottom of the food chain.

I've often argued, only half-jokingly, that districts could get away with lower pay for teachers if they gave each teacher an office-- even a cubicle-defined space.

Our lack of private and personal space is partly about being accessible to our students. Teachers aren't supposed to be able to say to students, literally or figuratively, "Go away. I'm not available to talk to you right now."

But it's also one more not-very-subtle way that teachers are de-adulated, treated like children, and put in a less-than power position in schools. It's one more signal-- "You are not in control and you don't have the real power here." Teachers try to fight back by bringing in objects, putting up decorations, even window treatments, to mark our territory as our own. But the smartest teacher knows better than to put something she really values in her classroom where it's vulnerable to any errant student or to any of the many, many people who have ready access to the room. Our district once employed a principal who, after teachers had left for the day, enter their rooms and check through the contents of their desks. She wasn't trying to catch anybody misbehaving-- she just wanted them to remember that there was not one inch of space in the room that they could call their own. In some districts, teachers will not be able to work in their rooms over the summer because they won't be allowed to keep their keys-- another way that districts hammer home that teachers are just guests in the building, but the space is not theirs.

It is one of the things that separates teachers from other professionals. Doctors have offices. Lawyers have offices. Teachers do not.

And yet we get attached to the little space we're given, enough that I actually feel a pang that I will no longer have a designated personal space in this building. Time to move "create a home office" up the retirement to-do list.