Success Academy: Much Ado About Almost Nothing

Richard Whitmire, a reliable booster for all things charter, is over at The 74, reliable reformy news-ish outlet, to celebrate news from Success Academy:

America’s most controversial — and possibly most successful — charter network leader, Eva Moskowitz, notched a major win Thursday, overseeing her first high school graduation ceremony at Success Academy, the class of 2022.

Class of 2022 is a coy way of referring to the year that these sixteen students will presumably graduate from college.

Yes, I said sixteen.

Anyway, Whitmire addresses the question suggested by that 2022. Will they actually make it to the finish line?

Impossible to say with certainty, of course, but based on my research of low-income, minority students going off to college, the odds of these 16 graduating seniors earning degrees are very high.

Sure. His argument is they've gotten into very selective schools with high graduation rates. He could be right.

But he also wants us to know that this is a huge deal, a big giant triumph for this poor little rich girl struggling against her critics:

Moskowitz is rarely one to resist settling scores with her many critics, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who once famously vowed to staunch her access to unused school buildings, or the union leaders who have thrown every weapon imaginable at her over the past dozen years. She appears to be achieving what they hold is impossible: successfully educating low-income minority children without first solving the ills of poverty. And she’s doing it at scale, not just with these 16 graduates. Her 46 schools enroll 15,500 students.

And that is as close as Whitmire comes to the facts that make this not quite so triumphant. Because Moskowitz isn't doing this at anything remotely resembling scale.

It's swell that her schools enroll 15,500 students. Twelve years ago, she was enrolling just 157 students in two grades. By 2016, those 157 students had become 52 tenth and eleventh graders. And now they have become 16 graduates (Gary Rubinstein breaks down the stunning attrition numbers more exactly here).

Success Academy has two secrets, and neither of them are important new developments in the field of education. Also, neither of them can be scaled up.

First, as indicated above, is the secret power of attrition. Get students to leave-- you might even make a got-to-go list of students that you want to push out. Never fill any empty seats after the first couple of years, so that over time you can whittle student body down to just a few who are able to work the way you want them to.

Second, be well-connected so that movers and shakers in NYC help get you what you need (including lots of contributions at fund-raisers). Use your customers as free muscle in the state capital to help get more political leverage.

Without these secrets of her success, Moskowitz is nothing special. Enroll 15,500 students? Super-- when all 15,500 graduate from your schools, then you'll have done something remarkable. And if you can do it without extra favors and extra money-- just with the same resources that any public school would have-- then you'll have done something extraordinary.

I would not for a second want to diminish what this accomplishment means to those sixteen students. This was a great thing for them, and I hope that the years ahead bring them nothing but continued success.

But do not pretend this accomplishment is magical or scalable or offers any lessons other schools could learn from. Any school with a mountain of extra money, friends in high places, and the ability to teach only the students that suit it-- any school could do the same under those conditions. If government were willing to mobilize these kind of resources for every school and every school, it would be a great thing. But in the meantime, don't tell me that Moskowitz has accomplished something great and special here. It's a great day for those sixteen students, but as a lesson in how to operate a school system, it's a big fat nothingburger.

ICYMI: First Retired Weekend Edition (6/10)

Yes, retirement is slowly sinking in. But in the meantime, here are some pieces from the week worthy of your attention. Remember, if you think it's important, tweet it, share it, even go old school an e-mail it. That's how people's voices get out into the world.

The Fallout of School Takeover Laws

What does the takeover of public schools have to do with taking a knee? Wendy Lecker looks at a new book by Domingo Morel that answers that question.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Paul Thomas looks at some of those things that everybody knows and discovers that everybody might be wrong.

A Why Have Republicans Declared War on Public Education

Lawrence Feinberg is talking about Pennsylvania, but the anti-public ed story is familiar to many other states.

All the State Chiefs of Education in a Nutshell

Nancy Bailey performs a public service and lists every state-level ed honcho, with links to their bios and notes about what educational experience they have-- if any.

We Need an Education Commission to Take a Critical Look at Private Schools

It's becoming increasingly clear that some voucher money is being directed to private schools that are not exactly academically rigorous-- or even scientifically correct. Andre Perry lays out what needs to be done.

Social Impact Bonds Readings

A good list of resources about these critical but not widely understood financial instruments that lurk behind many reformy ideas.

Teaching Machines  

Have You Heard's new episode brings together Jennifer Berkshire, Jack Schneider, and Audrey Watters to talk about the history of teaching machines. Check it out.

How Can Proficiency Vary Between States?

EdSurge this week asked the magical question with Jenny Abamu's, "How Can a Student Be 'Proficient' in One State But Not Another? Here Are the Graphs."

Spoiler Alert: Abamu doesn't give the real answer.

When No Child Left Behind passed back in 2002, Congress enthusiastically proclaimed that 100 percent of American students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. What they didn’t expect was that some states would significantly lower the bar for proficiency to avoid being marked as failing or losing special funding from the federal government.

Not really. First of all, since "proficiency" was going to be measured with normed tests, Congress declared that 100% of students would be above average. The ones that understood that this goal was mathematically impossible figured that when Congress revisited ESEA in 2007, their rewrite would modify that unattainable goal. In other words, pass something that sounds impressive and let someone else fix it later before the chickens come home to roost. But Congress couldn't get its act together in 2007, or 2008, or any other year until it was the teens and the Obama administration found the fact that every single state was violating the law-- well, that just gave the Obama administration leverage for pushing their own programs. In the meantime, anyone with half a brain new that states would game the system, because by 2014 there were only two kinds of school districts-- those that were failing and those that were cheating.

Abamu shares some other history, including the not-often-noted fact that Bill Clinton tried to establish a National Education Standards and Improvement Council that would have federal oversight of all state standards.

She hints that different levels of proficient are because states all wimped out and lowered the bar. And part of her point seems to be that thanks to PARCC and SBA and the Common Core and NAEP, we're closer to having state-to-state aligned standards than ever before. And she runs the old PARCC/SBA comparison to NAEP routine, showing how different state standards map onto the NAEP standards.

But she doesn't really answer the question.

How can students be "proficient" in one state but not another? Because "proficient" doesn't mean anything, and whatever meaning it does have is arbitrarily assigned by a wide variety of people.

The NAEP sets "proficient" as the grade equivalent of an A, but a study of NAEP results found that about 50% of students judged "Basic" attended and graduated from college. And at least nine studies have shown there is no connection between better test scores and outcomes later in life.

In real life, we might judge someone's proficiency in a particular area (say, jazz trombone playing) by first deciding what skills and knowledge we would expect someone who was "proficient" to have (know certain songs, can play in certain keys, knows who Jack Teagarden is and can imitate him). In fact, in the real world, we never talk about being proficient without talking about being proficient AT something. But here is Abamu's article we have yet another testocrat (NCES Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr) talking about a "proficient student." What does that even mean? We never talk about proficient humans, because proficiency is always applied in reference to a certain skill set.

But in the testing world, everything is backward.

First, instead of saying "This is what proficiency will look like" before we design our tasks or set our cut-off scores, we give the students the Big Standardized Test, score the Big Standardized Test, and only then decide where the cut score will be set.

Second, we don't talk much about what the student is proficient AT because we're really only checking one thing-- is the student proficient at taking a single BS Test focused on math and reading. It would give away the whole game to say, "These students have been found to be proficient standardized test takers," because when people think of the very best students, "great at taking standardized tests" is not one of the major criteria.

We've never, ever had a national conversation in the math or reading teaching community on the subject of "a really good reading student would be able to do the following things..." and then design a test that could actually measure those things. The test manufacturers hijacked that entire conversation.

At the end of the piece, Carr asks states to consider "Are your definitions of what is proficient reasonable?" The answer is, no, they aren't, because the state definition of "proficient" is "scored higher than the cut score we set on the BS Test," which is not a definition of proficiency  at all. A definition of proficiency would be "Can solve complex math problems using the quadratic equation" or "Can read a major novel and produce a theme paper about it that is thoughtful and insightful" or "Can play Honeysuckle Rose including the bridge in eight different key." As long as testocrats are setting the definition of proficient, it will never matter which state the student is in.

Is The Pipeline Poisoned?

In his book The Testing Charade, Daniel Koretz talks at one point about the discovery that many young teachers are emerging from their training believing that test prep and good teaching are essentially synonymous.

I've seen it, and so have other veteran teachers. Certainly it's not all young teachers, but it's too many of them who have grown up soaked in the reformy doctrine. What do I teach? Well, whatever lines up with the standards that are on the test. Which literature do I teach? It doesn't matter-- just find some stuff that comes with practice tests that are like the Big Standardized Test.

And "just find" is another symptom of the test-and-punish era of the BS Tests. The testing approach, rooted in multiple choice bubble test style, drives home the notion that for every question that is asked, the answer is already out there. You don't construct or invent an answer or an array of answers-- there's just one answer, somebody already knows it, and you just have to find it. Apply that approach to the question "What should I teach and how should I teach it?" and you get a classroom teacher working with Teaching Assistant Dr. Google.

That's bad news. If you are teaching something because it's on the test or because you found some material that looked fine, you are going to teach it poorly. If you're giving a test not because you designed an instrument that measures the goals you had in mind when you designed the unit and the points that emerged as you taught it, but because it's a good-looking test you found on the internet, your test will not make sense to your students (and if it's at all subjective, you won't know how to grade it).

You could be easily replaced by a computer program, and you deserve to be. But your students deserve much better.

When these sorts of young teachers land in a school run by an administrator who is focused only on data and test scores, that school is swimming in a toxic stew.

We know that the teacher pipeline is drying up. That's bad enough. What we don't know is how much of the remaining pipeline is poisoned, how much of the remaining teacher pipeline is turning out people who think that a good teacher is one who delivers effective test prep. For a decade, I've half-joked that nobody goes into teaching dreaming of helping a student do well on a standardized test-- I am no longer confident that this is true.

This is, after all, the generation that has grown up in a world where schools and teachers are measured by BS Test scores. There's no doubt in my mind that the resistance is everywhere, both in K-12 and on some college campuses. But nowadays it's not enough just to be a source of cool, clear water. Steps need to be taken to clean up the poison.

That means pushing back on programs like this one that claims it's awesome because its graduates raise test scores in their classrooms. That means having hard conversations with new teachers. I've been there with a former mentee. "How should I score this?" she asked. "Well, what was the objective-- the point-- of your unit?" I responded. She didn't know-- and she was not happy that I asked, just as she couldn't understand why getting all of her classroom materials by googling wasn't a great idea (not until her students started cheating like crazy by googling the same tests).

If we're not careful, the very meaning of the verb "to teach" will be completely shifted until it no longer refers to guiding, coaching, helping ignite a flame, sharing mastery of material, passing on and adding to the collective understanding, helping understand how the world works, encouraging students to find their best selves, grasping what it means to be fully human in the world. None of that-- it will just mean "get students ready for the test."

Speak up. Mind the pipeline. Guard the future.

The Tragic Sadness of Reformsters

So last week Alexander Russo posted his annual "Worst Education Journalism" awards. Matt Barnum and Valerie Strauss received a pair of undeserved anti-kudos from Russo, and a lot of people popped up on the interwebs to stick up for them, so it may have ended up as a net positive. But then Peter Cook had to pile on.

Who is Peter Cook? Cook likes to bill himself as a former teacher. Can you guess what his teaching experience is? Yes, in 2002, right after he graduated from Washington and Lee University with a BA in European History, he put in two years with Teach for America. A few years later he put in a year teaching math at a KIPP charter. The rest of his career has been as a consultanty expert with groups like The New Teacher Project. Most recently he has worked as the "Engagement Manager" with Mass Insight Education, and he's been particularly active in New Orleans where he serves on the DFER Lousianna board. So yes-- he's an other one of the instant experts in education working hard to get those public tax dollars into private pockets. Currently he runs a website that pushes hard on reform topics, and it's on that website that he decided to take shots at Valerie Strauss.

Full disclosure: While I have never met Strauss, we have emailed back and forth a few times and she periodically chooses to run some of my stuff.

Russo's criticism of Strauss (again, because he's made the complaint before) is that she's an aggregator who steals other peoples' bylines. I'm not sure that's valid-- Strauss's column on the Washington Post website is often a spot for straight reportage, but it's also the only place in the mainstream media world that you'll find pro-public education voices amplified. But that was beside the point, because Cook decided he wanted come at her with an old favorite narrative- The Story of the Sad, Unheard Reformsters. Russo touched on the issue of balance, and that's where Cook wants to go:

That last point is really the crux of the problem with Strauss’ output at the Washington Post: it is completely one-sided. Instead of presenting readers with views from both sides of the education debate, Strauss turns to the same anti-charter/testing/accountability folks again and again to share their views.

Strauss runs stories by Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, and the National Education Policy Center, and Fairtest. Where can someone turn to hear the voices of the folks in the ed reform camp?

We've heard this before. Eli Broad and his crew needed to unload millions of dollars to finance EducationPost because how else would they get their story out there? The 74 was going to be Campbell Brown's avenue for telling what she thought were the important stories of education (spoiler alert: the ones where public school teachers are awful). There are advocacy groups like Jeb Bush's FEE that spend a ton of money promoting their views, even launching faux-authentic social media campaigns. I'm not sure it's humanly possible to track all the different ways that Bill Gates spent money trying to flood the world with "positive news" about Common Core and his various other pet education projects. And that's before we get to pro-reform thinky tanks like American Enterprise Institute and the Fordham Institute where there are guys employed to do nothing at all except promote the reform point of view (Mike Petrilli alone has been quoted in roughly eighty gazillion education pieces).

Meanwhile, the pro-public ed forces are mostly unpaid volunteers, blogging during lunch breaks or later at night after they're done grading papers.

There may well be a David and Goliath scenario in the education debates, but the Goliath here is not the pro public ed folks.

"But but but-- teachers unions," is the usual reply, and sometimes I'm amazed at the incredible magical powers that NEA and AFT have. But then I remember that NEA and AFT are among the groups that took Gates money and promoted the Common Core, as well as pushing the mostly-reform Hillary Clinton as a candidate. As a force standing against the ed reform movement, the big unions have often been underwhelming.

No, the people who complain that ed reform voices aren't sufficiently heard belong to the same species as folks who think whites are the most oppressed ethnic group and the Christmas is under attack. As long as they still have millions to spend, ed reform folks are in no danger of having their voices silenced.

Two other things need to be said. First, that some ed reformers are perfectly okay with the pro public ed voices that are heard and are willing to engage in discussions that involve spirited debate rather than an attempt to silence opponents under a pile of money.

Second, is that the criticism of Strauss that I just spent a bunch of space opposing-- well, it doesn't really hold much water to begin with. Cook says that Strauss has run a piece from Carol Burris twenty whole times in the last seventeen months. But Strauss generally posts several times a day, so we're talking (as a conservative estimate, because I'm not going to go count) about twenty posts out of a thousand. If you look at Strauss's column, mostly what she publishes in news. She reports what the Ed Department says and does. She reports on school systems around the country. Cook is upset that she gives too much time to anti-reform "propaganda," and he wants equal time for pro-reform propaganda, but really, that area is already covered (including the Washington Post's own editorial board, which has happily pushed the reformster line on many occasions). Nor does she silence the voices of reform-- she just doesn't follow the practice of running their press releases uncritically.

Cook has his own website (which, who knows, he may just finance out of his own pocket) where he rails against Strauss regularly. It is certainly his right to put that out there, just as it's the right of the Flat Earth Society to rail against the oppressiveness of those over-amplified roundies. But Cook's a smart guy; surely he can think of a better way to spend his time.

Chaos Birthday Twins

The twins are one year old today.

That's not unexpected. I have two older children; I remember vividly that they age on a fairly regular schedule. But twins have provided other unexpected excitement.

The twins are IVF babies. It's a process that involves many needles and many very unsexy activities. Here's a picture of them when they were just an embryo. One single embryo. The process has advanced over the years, and our doctors felt that it was only necessary to introduce a single embryo to my wife's Baby Nurturing Environment. Somewhere at the six-to-eight week mark, we had our appointment to see if the implantation was successful (absolutely nothing about the IVF procedure sounds romantic). The technician looked at the image of my wife's innards and said, "Well we don't see that very often."

That's when we knew we were having twins.

I bring this up to make a point. The twins are identical-- absolutely, biologically, right down to their origins as a single fertilized egg identical.

And yet, here they are. Baby B was a bit larger in utero, and he is still a bit larger today. Baby A was knocked into a hospital stay by RSV, but Baby B seemed to withstand it a bit better. Baby B likes ice cream more than Baby A does, but Baby A has some vegetable preferences that Baby B does not share. They have hit their developmental marks, but almost never at the same time. Baby B was first to crawl; Baby A was first to climb stairs.

In other words, what we have here is two human beings who ought to be completely alike. Nowhere on earth should there be two humans more alike.

And yet, they are not absolutely alike.

What does that say about standardization?

This Is Not Newton's World

In 1961, Edward Lorenz decided that he wanted to examine a section of printouts from his computer-run weather simulation, but rather than print it out from the very beginning, he figured he could just plug in the values from a midpoint and "cheat" his way to a quicker printout. But the "short" printout did not match the original longer sequence. And just like that, Lorenz became one of the modern pioneers of chaos theory.

Most of us are still raised in the comforting vision of a Newtonian universe-- the world is giant, solid machine. Every time you press lever A, you get the same motion from gear B. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Given the right collection of data and the correct formulae, everything in the universe is predictable.

It turns out that all of that is, if not exactly wrong, not entirely correct.

One of the books that changed my life is Chaos by Peter Gleick. From there I wandered into information theory and quantum mechanics (I recommend anything by Brian Greene) and no one of it is easy, because much of it wanders into very mathy swamps. But the world, it turns out, does not look like Newton thought it did. Even the widely known Butterfly Effect (a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and a tornado erupts in Kansas) is often re-interpreted in Newtonian terms-- it just means we need more data and a better formula. No-- what all of these things tell us is that you can have all the data and the best formula and you will never, ever be able to accurately predict the exact behavior of a complex system. At best you can have strange attractors, vague shapes around which your results will cluster. But now we're talking about probabilities, and quantum stuff tells us that probability can be bizarre-- and that how some parts of some systems work is heavily affected by whether we watch or not.

This is not all just wildly theoretical bizarreness used to gird up an incomprehensible sf film. Some of this, for instance, undergirds the creation of believable CGI water and fire and smoke (parts of nature which do not embody Newton's classic shapes, but which absolutely embody chaos).

My basic point is this-- when someone proposes an education policy or classroom practice or curriculum design based on the notion that if we do X to students, we will get students who know Y and behave like Z, I am beyond skeptical because the world literally does not work like that. You might as well say, "We will teach students algebra by feeding them floating cake on the ceiling."

The world does not work that way.

In This World

In this world, one embryo, every once in a while, becomes two children. And those two children, despite starting from exactly the same place, growing in exactly the same woman, being born at almost exactly the same time, living in exactly the same home, eating exactly the same food and living with exactly the same parents, and on and on and on-- do not turn out exactly the same.

Complex systems (eg any system involving live human beings) are not subject to exact predictions and therefor cannot be precisely controlled. I don't mean "it's really hard." I mean it is literally impossible.

If you think that you can implement a curriculum in a classroom and it will predictably lead to the exact student outcomes you're looking for, you are kidding yourself.

If you think you can plunk a bunch of students down in front of a computer program that will get the exact desired student outcomes out of each student, you're an ill-informed, under-read fool.

The world literally does not work that way.

Imposing Views

One of things I'd forgotten in the thirty years since my first fathering go-round is how much people want to impose traits on children. And with twins it is exponentially worse, because people want to define them in terms of each other. Is he the funny one? Is he the more outgoing of the two? Even their interactions are open to interpretation. As they crawl over each other, are the fighting, competing, hugging, or just too unaware of each other's personal space?

But we really, really, really want to tell the tiny humans who they are. I don't think it's nefarious or ill-intentioned. We want to feel like we really know them, just as we really aspire for them to grow in all the ways we find admirable and desirable. And so we, with hope in our hearts, project onto the tiny humans like crazy.

And because, with a multiple, there is always someone similar handy to compare to, the tendency is amplified.

Many times a day, I correct myself. I stop to watch and listen and find them where they are (I'm talking metaphorically-- the times the crawl under an end table when we're not looking are an entirely different adventure). I have to make myself do it; it's challenging enough that I often wonder how badly I botched it with their older siblings.

The best news about this desire to impose a projection on a tiny human is that it can't really be done. See all of the above-- we can hit a sort of strange attractor and land in the neighborhood of a quality we want to foster in the child, but we can't hit an exact target, and every once in a while we'll have an outlier who lands far away from the mark ("I tried to raise my kid to be a concert pianist, but she grew up to be a pirate instead").

So What Actually Matters?

So is the world so squooshy and chaotic that nothing matters?

Well, no. First of all, even in chaotic systems, we can make certain outcomes more probable-- just not certain. And that means a classroom (a chaotic system if there ever was one) can tend or push nor lean more in one direction than another.

But it cannot function as a standardized factory, a place where each child can be predictably accurately molded into exactly the widget we want it to be.

And one size never fits all, because even the most identical humans in the world are not actually identical. And most humans are far less identical than a pair of twins. So one size does not fit all-- not even when you try to pretend that your one-size-fits-all program is actually "personalized."

Human beings are uniquely qualified to navigate chaotic systems, to read the room, to connect to other humans, to separate the important from the unimportant. Hell, look at how much trouble non-humans are having just navigating a road. Humans trained to navigate a specific chaotic system are the best bet. Humans who are dedicated to trying to stamp out all chaotic elements in a system are doomed to failure-- and to damage the system in the attempt.

I suspect one of the things that matters most is intent, because intent defines the general direction, the strange attractor toward which we drive. Or as my first superintendent said at the end of a story he told many times, "First, you have to love the horse."

So you see and hear your kids. You learn who they are. And you find a way to love them. And then you begin the work, understanding that the precise outcome is not under your control.

And every so often, you have a birthday and celebrate what has happened so far.

Privacy Violation by App

The Berkley Laboratory for Usable and Experimental Security (BLUES) took a look at Android apps and how well, if at all, they comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The findings were not encouraging.

COPPA is federal law, in effect since 2000. It lays out what policies a website operator must have in place when dealing with under-13 users, including how much data it can collect, how long it can keep it, and when a parent has to give permission. COPPA was spruced up a bit in 2012 and now, for instance, operators cannot extort child info as a precondition of continuing to use the site, and operators can only retain personal info for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected (which seems -- well, that 's not really much restraint if the info was collected for naughty purposes, is it). The FTC is responsible for enforcing COPPA.

Any app marketed to children, or one whose operators know that lots of children use the app, must follow COPPA.

BLUES looked at Android apps that were directly aimed at children (listed in the Designed For Families" category in Google Play's store, a designation that developers choose for themselves. They can't choose that category until they indicate that they have privacy protections in place and that no "behavioral advertising" is aimed at children. In other words, no app owner can pretend that they had no idea what they were getting into or what the rules were. BLUES explains this process at even greater length here, an important point since several app companies responded to the findings by claiming they weren't subject to COPPA.

BLUES found that many were in violation because of their use of third-party software development kits (SDK). The research found that 19% of children's apps collected identifiers or other personally identifiable information. Many of these apps share children's information with advertisers, and though Google has tried to arrange things so that the information is not "persistent" (it just keeps changing so it can't be tracked to a particular child) 66% of the apps also transmitted other identifiers that were persistent, rendering Google's fix not a fix at all.

Much of the report is pretty technical, but the bottom line is clear enough-- despite federal law and federal law enforcement, a giant heaping ton of children are not having their privacy protected.

And this is in the world of phone apps. What sort of protection do you suppose is being given to the privacy of the students who use software in school.