NY: Tireless Charter Servant

In 1986, John Flanagan was a 25-year-old second year law student when his father died of a heart attack and NY GOP leaders recruited him to take over the family business. Then in 2015, Senate Leader Dean Skelos was nabbed for Naughty Behavior, and Flanagan was moving up in the world again.

Not great news for education in New York.

Flanagan is a legislator who has bobbed and weaved on the Common Core.  

This damn guy

To make parents more comfortable with what is happening in their children’s classrooms and by extension their kids as well, Senate Republicans will pass legislation to improve the provisions that were enacted in the state budget to ensure that tests are age-appropriate for children and the curriculum is consistent with higher learning standards, among other things,

In other words, he promised to try to do things with the stuff and spray lots of smoke and mirrors at the Core. But nothing that means anything. I'm sure they didn't use that kind of vague non-promise in rehab.        

He was a vocal supporter of Betsy DeVos as candidate for secretary of education.

Her support for an all-of-the-above approach to K-12 education – from charter schools, to public, private and online education – defines the school choice movement that has helped countless children across many of our states. By advancing these innovative solutions from the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos will put children first and empower not only states to lead the way in making critical education decisions, but also empower parents to choose what type of education is best for their children.

It will comes as no surprise that Flanagan has been a great charter booster. He's been vocal in criticism of NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio for not being nice enough to charters. He's been involved in Albany rallies for charter schools.

But now he's created some new leverage.

He has proposed a bill to address New York's broken (and kind of stupid) teacher evaluation system. And he'll finally back some relief for teachers-- if he can have a higher cap for charters. Fixing the teacher evaluation system is really important-- if he can have more charters.

In some ways, Flanagan's proposal is oddly honest. It tacitly admits that Flanagan is a dealmaker, that he has no interest in any of the ideas or principles-- just what he can trade for. No need to talk to Flanagan about the merits of any of this-- just tell him what points he can make on any given deal. Flanagan's play also tacitly admits that charter and teacher interests are innately opposed to each other, that charter schools are bad for teachers and it's reasonable to expect teachers to oppose them..

Is there any reason to tie better teacher evaluations to charter caps? No more than tying teacher evals to dog registration costs or global warming studies or the cost of seats for a Yankees game? No, none at all. If Flanagan wanted to propose a fix for teacher evaluations, he could just propose it. But Flanagan doesn't want to fix teacher evaluations-- he just wants to make a deal so that more charters can bloom  in New York. This is no way to run a state.

In Praise of Vagueness

This video (passed along by an administrator to staff) has some valid points, but on the whole, it represents a point of view that I think is hugely over-valued by some folks in education these day-- the view of education as a hyper-engineered all-on-the-same-page objective-dominated process. The speaker is Mike Mattos (who I sometimes find inspirational and sometimes-- well, sometimes he invokes Marzano's name like he's someone we should pay attention to) and the topic is getting "insanely specific about learning outcomes and learning objectives." I'm not a fan.


You probably know some of the hallmarks of this general approach--
  * every teacher in the department or grade level must agree on exactly the same outcomes and objectives and maybe even use the same assessments
  * post the objectives on the wall and drill the students in them
  * translate the objectives into clear, precise language so everyone is working toward exactly the same goal
  * decide what essential parts of the course every single student must master
  * set an agreed-upon measure of what proficient looks like

Before I launch into my counter-point, let me acknowledge two things:

I am opposed to national or state standards. I recognize that in this I am a bit out there, and I recognize that reasonable people can believe that state and federal standards would be a good idea. I just don't agree.

However, I am not an advocate of completely unstructured wandering classrooms. You should know why you're teaching what you're teaching; you should have goals and objectives in teaching that material. So, no-- I'm not lobbying for the Classroom of Do As You Please.

Also, feel free to insert "in my opinion" in front of all the following.

That said...

The kind of laser-sharp focus advocated by some educational folks gives me the creeps.

Sitting a department down to say, "We're going to figure out how we can all teach exactly the same things for exactly the same purposes aimed at exactly the same outcomes," diminishes the professionalism of the people in the room and does not serve the education of their students.

Laser-sharp focus on a single objective is a bad idea, a stultifying limiting idea. I say this not just as an education viewpoint, but a life viewpoint. People who focus on one single objective are the people who throw away gold because they were focused, laser-like, on digging up diamonds. Yes, some of them find diamond mines, but mostly they barrel through a lot of other human beings and riches of another kind because of their laser-like focus.

Laser-like focus also encourages you to view every deviation from the path as a crisis, a sign of impending disaster, instead of an opportunity. Laser-like focus fosters high-strung panic instead of sparkling improvisation.

To take that kind of focus into a classroom means to define a set single acceptable path to a single acceptable success, which means that some students in your classroom will inevitably be seen as disruptive non-compliant path-jumpers. If you are going to post the approved outcomes on your wall, you might as well also put up a poster of all the things that won't be valued or pursued in your classroom, and let your problem students know where they stand from day one.

It's no exaggeration to say that my life has not turned out anything like what I imagined at various points in my past, but it is also no exaggeration to say that, on the whole, if I had been free to design my life with laser-like precision, I would not have done as well as I have. The same is true for my life in the classroom. Students have surprised me; students will always surprise you. What you have to decide is whether you will treat those surprises as beautiful fire that illuminates and delights, or whether you will treat those surprises as disastrous fire that must be stomped out and extinguished.

I'm not an advocate for anarchy. To play a good jazz solo, it helps to have set known chords underneath. To teach a good unit, you need to know the territory well enough to know where the best views are for most people.

But for me, the prospect of a journey in which every step, every stop, every move is predetermined with laser-like precision is a boring, dull, soul-sucking prospect. Yes, I will set out with a direction and a purpose, but those are always subject to revision and they are always kind of, well, vague. More pudding-shaped than laser-like. And if during my career, you had dragged me into a meeting in which we were directed to develop a unified, all-on-the-same page laser-like focused set of outcomes and objectives, I would have been a pain in the ass every step of the way, and when it was done, I would have put up the poster on the inside of the cupboard door and the very first time something interesting came up in class that was not on the outcomes list, I would never have said, "Sorry, but it's Tuesday and we have to focus on reviewing the objectives for tomorrows common formative assessment."

Yes, different teachers may teach different things. So what? Different students will learn different things, care about different things, grow up to become different types of people in different types of jobs. I'm not saying dump reading lessons for macramé projects. I'm just saying that vagueness is not so bad. In fact, if you study the shapes of chaos and chaos theory, you find that vagueness is kind of beautiful.

A laser works taking all the different paths of light and forcing them into one, single, one-colored directed beam. But of course that's not how light usually works. Usually it bends and bounces and spreads and warps and filters in a million different ways and directions, giving us colors, shading, and everything pleasing to the eye. Sure, the laser has some useful functions in the world. But it is not how the world works. You keep your laser-like focus. I will continue to stay vague.

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.