That Lever

So I was reading a new piece on the Fordham's blog about the newest hot idea in reformsterland-- high quality curriculum-- and there it was again.

The lever.

As I write in a new Brookings Institution report, The challenges of curriculum materials as a reform lever, there are many reasons why districts flunk this basic test.

The lever turns up fairly often. And as a metaphor for education reform policy, it says quite a lot.

A lever is a tool that one uses to force movement. There's nothing collaborative about a lever. And you don't apply a lever from inside the area you want to affect-- you stand outside the box and bear down. If something breaks and snaps loose, it will go flying away from you. 

Leverage is not about partnership-- it's about using tools to impose your will on an object from a distance. You don't climb in there and see what you can do working with the affected area. You don't get your hands in that dirt. You learn the area just well enough to gauge where you can most effectively apply some force. You just keep your distance and apply force through your lever.

This model also assumes that your problem is that things are stuck, that there is some sort on intractable problem that needs to be busted apart. So stuck that the busting should be none too gentle. And a lever is a machine for magnifying force-- in other words, you use a lever when you want to apply more force than you could on your own. 

This has been the story of the worst of ed reform all along. Don't get directly involved. Don't team up with the people on the ground. Assume that schools are stuck in some intractable mess that only brute force can bust apart. Just stay in DC or New York and figure out how you can best apply force at a distance. 

You don't use a lever to help flowers grow. You don't use a lever to ease troubled waters. And most of all, you don't use a lever to solve human problems. You don't use a lever to feed the hungry or comfort the poor or sooth a crying baby. You don't use a lever to teach children. There's very little about education that calls for the exercise of brute force. You don't use a lever to persuade or to promote understanding. You use it to impose your will on an object with no regard or concern for that object, top down, outside in. 

So, Reformsters, the next time you're looking for a metaphor for imposing a policy, consider something other than levers. In fact, take a moment to consider why a lever seems like a good metaphor, and ask yourself if that doesn't suggest some ways you could change your whole approach. Maybe you could pick a better tool than a crowbar. 

Your Digital Identity

Here. Take a look at this.

Sorry-- I don't have an English language version. But let's go ahead and wander down this particular rabbit hole. It may not seem to have anything to do with education, but this is another slice of the same iceberg that Personalized/Competency-Based/Algorithm-Based/Blockchain-stored education is just a tip of.

A digital identity is more or less what you would guess-- an on-line, digitally created and stored picture of everything anyone could ever want to know about you. It's how you interact with a million billion things, and how a million billion things interact with you. I don't really know what it means to be a thesis driven firm, but you can see why corporations like this one are interested in the whole digital identity biz-- "trillions of dollars in economic value." If they can get this stuff to work and people to go along with it (two large ifs) then some folks are going to get hella rich off the whole mess.

PTB looks like one more company that is either a genius start up or a giant nothingburger with a side of vaporware. What you're looking at above is what you see on their website-- the only additional feature is a link for sending a request for info (and putting yourself on their mailing list). They have a LinkedIn page that contains the same information (though it seems they've tweaked the wording a bit). And the page also takes you to a page for the one and only employee I could find mentioned anywhere-- founder and CFA David Fields. Fields graduate from University of Chicago in 2006 with a BA in Economics. Since then he's been working in the private equity biz.

PTB has already gotten its feet wet by helping launch an Artificial Intelligence company Element Inc (where Fields now sits on the board). Element specializes in biometric identity. Part of the digital identity challenge is to bridge the gap between your meatworld self and digital self with something more reliable than a password. Palm print, fingerprint, facial recognition-- those would be good (bet one of your personal tech devices is already at least offering one of those). And because you can't be a tech startup without a proper creepiness factor, Element's big excitement is reserved for this:

With Global Cloud, a collaboration between Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures, Element is building the world's first infant biometrics platform-- one that runs offline, on any mobile device. Here's how we're working with icddr,b in Bangladesh and Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia to do it. 

Yes, we'll start your digital identity the day that you're born. What a brave new world that will be. PTB is also in the authentication biz via Callsign, another of Fields' connections.

PTB also has their hand in on another part of the iceberg with money in Learning Machine, a group that works with the Blockchain side of all this:

Learning Machine makes best-in-class software for organizations around the world looking to issue blockchain-based credentials ("Blockcerts") at scale. The Blockcerts open standard was developed by Learning Machine in partnership with the MIT Media Lab. The use of Learning Machine's software streamlines routine business operations, de-risks official credentialing practices and reduces both fraud and verification costs. Its trusted digital identity solutions also promise to improve access to services, education, capital and dignified employment.

I'm not going to wander down the blockchain rabbit hole right now (here's my earlier attempt at an explainer). You can ask your crazy friend who's always going on about bitcoins to explain it, but the bottom line is that it's supposed to be a utopian incorruptible digital record that removes the need for meatworld authorities. For example, right now the "authority" of your college or university is needed to authenticate your education. But the blockchain would be all the authority anyone needed-- if the blockchain says part of your digital identity is intensive study of Romantic art, then that's it. From there it's a short jump to the abolition of all meatworld authorities like schools and teachers-- everyone just earns badges for various microcompetencies that are paid off in bitcoin and which can be seen by anyone who wants to hire someone with your exact constellation of micro-competencies for a particular job. And the corporate privatizers are peeing themselves with joy, because in a world without formal authorities, suddenly a whole lot of money is available for the taking (and from there we hop over to social impact bonds, where corporations agree to be paid off to handle the functions of government, now easily measurable because see all the above....)

At any rate, when Fields says that we're talking about trillions of dollars of fresh money, he's not kidding.

Fields is out there working the territory. Here he is at a big fancy Blockchain Alternative Investment Conference in London a few weeks ago. And if you think this digital identity stuff sounds crazy pants, you should know that there is an entire annual conference about it in Vegas-- and Fields has been a featured speaker there. That conference is presented by One World Identity, "The nexus of the identity industry" where they are there to help "business leaders, governments, and investors stay ahead of market trends so they can build sustainable, forward-looking identity products and strategies."

You can imagine that this all sounds far-fetched and unlikely, and there's no doubt that a lot of things have to align, including the technical solutions, the implementation solutions, and the getting-people-to-accept-something-even-creepier-than-big-brother solutions. But there is no denying that there is a huge industry out there, jam packed with guys like David Fields who think they are about to become incredibly rich. Pay attention.

ICYM: Welcome July Edition (7/1)

July is here, coming in with flaming balls of fire. But there are still things to read, and here are some of them. Remember to share. You can be the person that amplifies someone's voice.

Bill Gates Failed Experiment

Wendy Lecker takes a look at the news that Gates failed to fix education yet again.

Retaining Baby Teachers      

A look at how -- and how not -- to hold on to those fresh new teachers.

Are Teachers Necessary?      

Steven Singer is not just asking a philosophical question. It's a practical concern of modern ed reform.

The Psalm of Mark Janus (The Freeloader)      

Deadbeat Poet revisits the 23rd Psalm.

iReady-- Great Marketing, Terrible Teaching        

A look at one of the many super-duper education flavored tech products out there.

ISTE, Google, and the Death of Ed Tech    

If you're only going to read one item, it should probably be this one. A look at how ed tech has marched boldly backwards into the Land of Uselessness.

Emails and Vampires [Updated]

There's a scene in many vampire movies. Someone (usually not the hero) is holding a vampire at bay with a cross. The vampire locks eyes with him. "You don't need to do that. You are perfectly safe from me, and I know that cross is just starting to feel heavy. Heavier and heavier. Why don't you just put it down." And the camera closes in on our intrepid human-- will he put the cross down?

The Supreme Court decision in favor of the corporate sponsors of the Janus case came as a surprise to absolutely nobody. The implications of that decision have yet to be worked out. Of course, in the 28 right to work states, the implications are almost non-existent. In the other 22, wellll…… I'm not inclined to view this as a catastrophic death knell for unions. It sure doesn't help, and it's certainly part of a larger campaign to get rid of unions, but it could well be surprisingly good for some unions that had made themselves vulnerable to this sort of thing by letting leadership become entrenched and detached from members.

"Vouldn't you rather exercise your First Amendment rights?"

Supporters of the lawsuit call it a win for freedom of speech. But as with many freedoms, exercising freedom of speech is not free. If you're a billionaire, you get to exercise your speech via advocacy groups that you finance and research reports that you pay for and news stories that you plant or create and sectors that you commandeer via "philanthropy" and just the fact that powerful people will take your phone calls. If you're working stiff, you get to exercise your freedom of speech by writing letters that may or may not be read or making phone calls that may or may not be answered or, hey, you could always start a blog. Or you could join together with three million other working stiffs and collective enjoy the same kind of money and clout that one of the one percenters enjoy. It is, admittedly, a tough trade off, because three million people (or even a hundred local people) put together won't always (or even ever) agree on a message, and sometimes the leadership doesn't help very much, but on the other hand, trying to negotiate a contract for yourself, by yourself-- well, it's a tough choice, but I know what lots of folks on the other side of the table want you to pick.

Hence the e-mails that started flying roughly 6.3 seconds after the Janus decision was issued.

The U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that all government workers – teachers, state workers, local public employees, police, firefighters and more – now have a real choice when it comes to their unions. The case is Janus vs. AFSCME and, put simply, the court determined that no public employee can be fired for not paying money to a union.

Whether it’s disagreements about politics, concerns about a lack of local representation, problems with union spending, or something else – you now have the right to stop paying for activities you don’t support. 

This followed by a link to your state's version of the MyPayMySay website, which gives you a chance to fill out a form which yields a pdf you can hand to your union to drop out. They will also store your information "in order to help public employees exercise their rights when it comes to union dues, fees and representation. It may be used to contact or follow up with you."

Some teachers received this email, with the smiling face of teacher Susie Stockphoto in her room, 10-nowhere.

Regardless of your state, you got a paragraph or two of someone's personal "why I don't want to support the union" strory.

These emails are coming from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a group from Michigan that has been heavily involved in rolling back teacher rights, with ties to ALEC, the Koch Brothers and, of course, the DeVos family.

They are landing all over the country, mostly by way of teachers' professional emails. This is particularly ironic in states like Michigan, where Mackinac-backed legislation makes it against the rules for teachers to use school emails to discuss union business. In most states the professional email addresses are public information, so a simple FOIA request would have yielded them, though in many cases a bot or an unpaid intern could have scraped them from school websites where they are all publicly listed. On the other hand, such a request might be illegal under privacy laws in some states. One does wonder why some spam filters are not catching them.

This, of course, will not be the last of it. The Freedom Foundation (Koch Brothers, etc) has announced a plan to spend the summer going teacher door to teacher door to get people to leave the union.

And, wow-- it sure is inspiring to see the one percenters so deeply concerned about teacher freedom of speech. I mean, to devote all this time and money just because they want to make sure that every teacher has a chance to exercise her rights. It's inspiring. Just like all those other times they were out there in the schools making sure that teachers were free to express their opinions and stand up for students and advocate for better education without fear of losing their jobs and-- oh, no, wait. They DeVos's and Koch's were the ones agitating for the end of job protections so that teachers could be fired at any time, including for speaking up and exercising their First Amendment rights. In fact, the number of times that groups like Mackinac have been out there standing up for teachers' rights, First Amendment and otherwise, would be, by my rough count, zero. None.

It's almost as if this whole thing isn't about teachers' First Amendment right at all.

It's almost as if this was just a ploy to bust up the unions and make sure that teachers had even less voice in the world of education. It's almost as if this was a way to drain funds from the Democratic Party.

Which takes us back the vampire. He isn't gently crooning things like "That cross must be so heavy. Don't you want to just put it down?" because he's so concerned with the man's weary arms. In most of the versions of this scene, what happens next is this-- the man puts the cross down, giving up his last bit of protection. The vampire leaps forward, rips open the mans throat, drinks his blood, and leaves the victim dead and the vampire refreshed.

The cross may be ugly, prickly, imperfect, even a distressing mess. But at that moment, it's all the guy has got. Teachers, no matter what mess your local union is in, this is not the time to listen to the vampire's gentle plea.

[Updates: First, I can confirm that the emails are hitting Pennsylvania, too, as confirmed by one in my wife's school email spam box that arrived yesterday.

Second, My Pay My Say has its very own Facebook page, so if you wanted to share some thoughts with them about their campaign, that would be a place to do it.]

What They Remember

Of all the retirement gifts I've received, by far the most moving has been a book put together by my daughter, my niece, and my wife. Through the magic of the interwebs, they were able to collect a whole bunch of personal messages from former students into a book. I won't lie-- it's pretty awesome, and mighty humbling.

It has also turned out to be one more opportunity to reflect on one of the big questions of teaching-- what is it that we do, exactly, that makes a difference for our students. What is it that they remember? We all wonder about it-- I just happen to have some answers right at my fingertips.

Some of it really is content-related on a fairly micro scale.

One day in Honors English, Mr. Greene said people only use hyphens when they don't know what to do. Now, every time I use a hyphen, I beat my chest and scream "I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO!" Then I get shushed by the Starbucks girl.

I'd like to thank Mr. Greene for all he's done; however, he is the reason I put semi-colons in text messages now...and I take a lot of shit for that.

Sometimes it is larger scale content material.

One time PAG pulled me aside and said in my writing I was like a chef at a burger joint-- bored and putting things no one had ordered, like sparklers, on their burgers for my own entertainment. "Just give me the burger," he said, "no sparklers." I later wrote tweets for a living.

Sometimes it falls into the larger life lesson category.

From a list of "Things I learned in PAG's class"

Don't make excuses or apologize for your work; own what you've done, and if you're embarrassed by it then do it better.

You can't protest The Man by asking his permission to do so.

Much of it is extremely personal. Most years I gave personal gifts to each graduating senior on yearbook staff; one year it was beanie baby spirit animals, and one woman told me the story of how she carried that spirit animal through the next decade as a reminder of the kind of strength she has inside her. There are several stories like that in the book.

And I don't have to tell you (but I will) that not a single former student wrote to thank me with fond memories of those life-changing Big Standardized Tests, or how moved they were by how we dealt with Common Core standard 11.2-d/15b. I have notes from writers who thank me for helping them get started and teachers who thank me for being an example, even some who thank me for helping them figure out how to be a better human being, but none from someone explaining how taking the PSSAs really altered their life trajectory. Because none of that baloney makes anyone's "Top Ten Things About My Education That Really Mattered."

What is striking is how specific it all is. Some students remember broad themes and ideas of my class, but even then, they remember them attached to a very specific memory. They can quote me to me. They can remember not just specific works we read, but specific assignments or questions we dealt with regarding those works.

What's also striking is how many of those specifics remembered by my students are not remembered by me. That sparkler hamburger story? I remember how that young woman used to write, and the hamburger sparkler thing certainly sounds like me-- but I don't remember saying it. A student I taught about thirty years ago remembers being struck by my statement that every person is worth knowing. Again, I agree with that-- it sounds like something I would say. But I don't remember saying it.

It all confirms what I've always believed to be true-- that very specific moments in our classrooms often have powerful effects on our students, but we will never know ahead of time which moments will be the important ones. We may think that this particular moment that we plan and prepare and set up and lay a foundation for and think, "Boy, this is just going to be powerful" and instead, ten or twenty years later, it turns out that some unplanned moment that we just tossed off the hip stuck with students long after our carefully sculpted teaching moment is long forgotten.

What's a teacher to do? I don't know THE answer, but I know MY answer--

Build a strong foundation. Not in your class-- in yourself. Know why you're there. Know what you believe. Know what truths are important to you about your content, about your material, about the lives of the young humans you're dealing with. Carry all of that into the classroom with you every day. Make it the foundation of every carefully planned teaching moment you try to create, but if you have a clear strong foundation, know that when you are flailing into those unplanned moments, those off-the-cuff comments, or those moments when a student comes to you for help and you don't have time to plan anything out-- in all of those moments, your core belief and understanding comes through.

This is one other reason I don't believe in scripting-- because a teacher reading a script has no foundation in anything, and that will show through in every single unscripted moment. Worse, if the teacher's foundation is something like "these kids are dopes who can barely learn a simple thing" that will bleed through as well.

You won't mean for it to happen, but it will happen. In some specific, unplanned, unprepared moment, what you believe as your foundation will come through in a really clear, really specific way, and at least one student will see it-- really, really see it-- and that specific moment will stay with them for years, even decades.

So if you want a piece of advice from the back end of a career, here's one piece. Know why you're in the classroom, and be there for good reasons. Know what matters. Know your purpose, and the purpose of your materials. Know your materials. Know your content. And as quickly as you can make it happen, know your students.

No amount of superficial technique, no amount of technique focused tech, no amount of pre-planned material-- none of that can compensate for a hollow person standing in front of a classroom.

Yes, when you're young and you're starting out, you don't know all of these things. That's okay. No amount of teacher training could have fixed that. Your job for the first few years is to figure it out. (This is, incidentally, one more reason that someone who is only there for two years and fully plans to leave at the end of the two years-- that person is no more a teacher than someone who put on a parachute but never jumped out of the plane is a skydiver).

That is one of the beauties of teaching-- a staggering long progression of tiny, specific moments built on a foundation giant, broad ideas. It's like traveling across the Badlands of South Dakota on foot, or hiking through the Grand Canyon-- don't watch just your steps or just the awesome view, because both matter. Every step is critical and needs your attention, but if you never look up and around, you'll get lost and you'll miss the whole point. And you may never know which particular step each of your fellow travelers will remember-- so you make every step count.

And sometimes, if you're lucky, at the end of the journey, they give you a book.

Education Deserts

Two weeks ago, a hearing by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce tipped its hand with its title-- "The Power of Charter Schools: Promoting Opportunity for America's Students." It featured a parade of charter school advocates, with one exception. Somehow, Jonathon Phillip Clark made it into the room.

PS 138 used to be right over there

Clark is a father of seven, assistant director of a Detroit nonprofit that provides mentoring and tutoring and a board member of 482Forward, a group that advocates for high-quality education for all Detroit children. Clark's testimony highlights many of the  problems of charter schools in Michigan and elsewhere—broken promises, unstable leadership, unelected governing bodies hundreds of miles away from the people they serve. He underlined the practical problems as well, like driving back and forth across the city to get children to and from their separate schools.

Clark later in his testimony calls this an education desert, a predictable result of a free-market approach to schools.

We already know about food deserts, described by the CDC as "areas that lack access to affordable fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and other foods that make up the full range of a healthy diet." Food deserts tend to be areas where it does not make business sense to serve the local (usually poor) population.

The free market is not evil, but it is practical. No matter what sector we're talking about, there are always some customers who are unprofitable to serve. You may want new Chipotle or Lexus dealership in your town, but if nobody can build a business case for the operation, then your town will remain a Chipotle and Lexus desert.

This is why the government provides some goods and services. If the markets were responsible for roads, only some people would get roads. If the markets were responsible for providing military protection, only some people would be protected.

We have an area where the private sector competes with the government—mail delivery. Private mail and parcel services compete with the U.S. Postal Service—but only up to a point. When it's time to deliver a package to some place out in the boonies, where delivery costs too much to be truly profitable, the private delivery companies hand the packages off to the USPS which then finishes the job for them

In many urban areas, we have inched toward that model. Some charter schools work with the students who can be profitably taken on as customers, while others work at the fringes, going out of business as they discover they didn't have a business model that worked. Meanwhile, some students who will never be attractive customers to private operators (too many special needs, special problems, special burdens) are left in the public school.

But when legislators are backing charters, it makes business sense to keep public schools underfunded and undersupported so that they can't be serious competition. And when that formula is miscalculated (just enough, but no more than that), then the public schools also collapse, and suddenly we have an education desert—an area where there are no easily available education options for residents.

The free market is not evil, but no business has ever made it its mission to provide services to every single potential customer in the country. We can't allow the free market to run education without changing our national mission, because no private charter chain will ever appear with a mission to educate every single student in the country. If we let a thousand charter schools bloom, we must be prepared for education deserts to bloom as well.

Originally published at Forbes.com   

Impatient Reformsters

Over at Red State, a site that leans just a bit to the right with articles like "Milennials Get Classes on Basic Adult Skills, Still Act Like Children," (but not "So Get Off My Lawn),  Joe Cunningham is impatient. "It's Past Time We Tackled Education Reform" he insists.

He notes that despite early controversies, Betsy DeVos's education department really hasn't done much and "aside from her rolling back Title IX memoranda for colleges going after sexual assault, there has been little to celebrate." Because the only thing worse than sexual assault is universities trying to do something about sexual assault. Sigh.

But like many DeVos backers, Cunningham is sad. "Frankly, it appears as though the faith we had in DeVos to be a driving force behind education reform was for naught." Dude, I wouldn't say it was so much ":for naught" as it was "based on naught." What gave you that faith? Her complete lack of experience in running any sort of large organization? Or the way that she kept indicating that she thought the department should be doing pretty much nothing?

He notes that Congress hasn't done much about education, either, which is also unsurprising because A) Congress doesn't do much about anything and B) Congress mostly ever discusses education in vague platitudes, and the last twenty years have made even that route a risky one. Better to just not talk about it at all. It is, he notes, "is the topic of conversation that always gets left for when there seems to be nothing else to talk about," which is a pretty good line. Cunningham says he wants to have that conversation; I don't know that he really does.

We should be having the conversations. We should be working to improve the education system, public and private, so that we provide our children with the best possible education we can offer them.

That means we have to talk about private school vouchers, school choice, public school funding, free pre-Kindergarten and college, and every other issue in between.

See, he kind of skipped over the whole conversation about what improving the education system would actually look like. And his "have to" list? We really don't have to talk about vouchers, but we really have to talk about things a little more specific. DeVos supporters thought we would talk more about choice, and as evidence of the alleged popularity of choice, he cites some "research" by American Federation for Children, a dark money group founded by DeVos. Is it some kind of political tautology when a politician creates an advocacy group to push that politician in the direction they already want to go?

Course, he says, it doesn't have to be school choice. It could be any old thing. "What kinds of reform can we push that really only require local and state input or are teacher-centric?" Stem, maybe? That we do somehow?

I can help him out a little on this. He might want to look into a reform program that I like to call "Shut Up, Sit Down, and Let Teachers Do Their Jobs." It's local, it's cheap. and it's very teacher-centric.

But Cunningham is just sort of flailing now. People should care about this stuff. After all, they care about child separation, because children. Well, education, too!

Cunningham identifies himself as a conservative, parent and educator-- I have no idea how true any of those are. But plenty of conservatives saw DeVos as an antidote to a department that was too "proactive," a quality Cunningham says he hopes for. He's also hopeful about the proposed Laborducation merger, even though some conservatives aren't at all. And despite her pledge to be inactive in DC, DeVos has started to show some signs of the same meddling that conservatives hated in Arne Duncan.

Cunningham wants the department to be "more proactive in seeking and implementing good reforms that benefit our students, not just one type of school over another." First, that flies in the face of most charter school programs, which privilege charter schools over public schools. Second, he sounds like some "let's get help from DC" Democrat. Third-- and this is really important-- what exactly does he think could be done from Washington? Because he has one other correct point in his piece-- going back twenty years, we have repeatedly implemented bad, even destructive, education policies because a bunch of amateurs were in DC jumping up and down and yelling, "We have to do something RIGHT NOW!"

We don't need any more impatient reformsters-- not political ones, not business-oriented ones, not philanthro-capitalist ones. The educational system includes millions-- literally millions-- of trained, experienced professionals who have committed their entire lives to making US education better. Betsy DeVos is not one of those people. So sit down, drink some lemonade, and catch your breath. If you let the professionals work, we'll even promise to get off your lawn.