Gates and Opportunity Costs

I have had a hard time absorbing the news that Bill Gates blew over a half a billion dollars on his latest experiment on live humans.

Half a billion. $575 million, by most accounts. Not all of that was his own money, and honestly, I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse.

This guy

Gates' big experiment in test-based teacher evaluation was itself evaluated by the Rand folks, who took over 500 pages (so, like, a million dollars a page) to conclude that it probably failed, although maybe not. Because if there's one thing that Gates never, ever does, it's say the words "I was wrong. This didn't work." The closest he comes is some version of "This may not have worked, but if it didn't, it wasn't our fault." And Rand comes through this time as well:

Unfortunately, the evaluation cannot identify the reasons the IP initiative did not achieve its student outcome goals by 2014-2015. It is possible that the reforms are working but we failed to detect their effects because insufficient time has passed for effects to appear. It is also possible that the other schools in the same states we use for comparison purposes adopted similar reforms, limiting our ability to detect effects. However, if the findings of no effect are valid, the results might reflect a lack of successful models on which sites could draw in implementing the levers, problems in making use of teacher-evaluation measures to inform key HR decisions, the influence of state and local context, or insufficient attention to factors other than teacher quality.

So, student test scores didn't go up [insert, for the gazillionth time, my rant about how Big Standardized Test scores are terrible proxies for student achievement] but maybe our ideas were working, just not enough so we could tell yet. Or maybe they are working but everyone else was imitating them so our studied schools didn't stand out from the pack because the pack was already following us, even though there's no evidence we were actually correct. (I will refer you here to my thoughts about "levers").

But weasel-wording aside, by their own measures, by their own standards, the Gates project failed. Which is not really a shocker-- name a single Gates-backed education-game-changing initiative that was a notable success. Fail fail faily fail fail.

For over a half a billion dollars.

When I look at a mess like this, I'm most struck by the opportunity cost.

You know about opportunity cost. When you decide to do A, you give up the chance to do B. Your cost is not just what you paid for A-- it is also the cost of not having done B.

Even when we don't use the words, we know all about opportunity cost in education. We have tightly limited resources, so everything has an opportunity cost. If I decide to spend ten more minutes on dependent clauses, then I will spend ten fewer minutes on something else (goodbye, river-related symbolism in Huck Finn). And of course, every dollar spent in a tight school budget represents an opportunity cost.

There are many ways to think about computing opportunity cost. I like this one: if you're about to spend ten dollars on a super-duper deal, ask yourself what you would do if someone handed you ten dollars.

In this case, we ask-- if someone handed you half a billion dollars to spend on making US schools better, what would you spend it on. Make a list. And then check the list-- is "try to pilot an unproven system of teacher evaluation based on scores from narrow, unproven standardized tests" on your list. Is that the best thing you can think of to spend $575 million education dollars on? Because everything else on your list-- more teachers, more resources for poor schools, better buildings, more materials, broader class offerings, smaller class sizes-- is part of the cost of Bill Gates' little experiment.

And it's not just the money. Ask yourself-- if the school year were suddenly lengthened by forty days, what would you do with the extra time. I'll be you have lots of ideas, and I'll bet the top of the list is not "Give a Big Standardized Test and spend a bunch of days getting ready for it." Everything else on the list-- all the units you could have taught, all the time you could have spent working with students, all the greater depth you could have achieved-- is part of the opportunity cost of the Gates experiment.

And that's before we even get to other costs, like the cost of convincing a bunch of teachers that they're lousy teachers because their students didn't get awesome scores on the BS Tests.

So it's really not enough to say that the Gates experiment was a waste of time and money, because that assumes that we had a bunch of time and money to just throw away. We didn't. We don't. This Gates experiment, just like every other Gates experiment, carried a huge opportunity cost. So many things that we could have done, so much education that we could have accomplished, and we spent all that opportunity on one more pile of Gatesian baloney.

There's opportunity cost in the excuses and weasel-wording that inevitably comes with post-experiment Gatesian summing up. Because there's a chance for Gates to have real insight, to say, "Man, we were just wrong on this, and we were so sure we were right even when people were trying to warn us. So I'm thinking that in the future, I'd better not just barrel ahead fueled by nothing but self-confidence. Maybe before I appoint myself the tsar of education, I should listen to some professionals and be more careful about what I do." But that opportunity is also squandered time after time. Somewhere down the road, we'll find ourselves wasting opportunities yet again.

That Damned Question

There's one kid in every class, the one who asks that damned question.

How many paragraphs do we have to have in this essay? How long does it have to be? How many pages do I have to write for this? How many notes do we have to have in the split journal for that chapter? And on and on.

The specifics don't really matter-- they are all a variation on one simple question:

What the absolute least I can get away with doing for this assignment?

It's a terrible question. For one thing, it has prompted too many teachers to make too many dumb rules ("a paragraph must have three sentences" is a dumb rule, for example). It also makes a statement about the student that they probably shouldn't be making out loud.

Don't ask that question, I would tell my students. For one thing, they knew by October what my answer would be. "Long enough to do a good job," I'd say. Or maybe, "Impress me." More importantly, the question reflects poorly on the person who asks it. If the person you're dating asks, "So what's the absolute least amount of time I can spend with you and still keep this relationship alive," your first thought is not, "Oh, this one is a keeper." If you're in a job interview and the person across the desk asks, "What's the absolute least we can get away with paying you," you are not excited about landing that job.

I hear echoes of That Damned Question every time I read something like the Center for American Progress report decrying that high school requirements are not exactly aligned with exactly what students need exactly to get into college.

Part of the problem with these sorts of reports and policy arguments is that they demand exactitude where it cannot be found, as if "college ready" is a single definable state with set criteria that are exactly the same for every student at every high school considering every major at every college. This is foolishness of a high order, like saying that we have a checklist that will show if someone is ready to get married tomorrow.

Human behavior is loaded with many "fuzzy" qualities. What does it mean to be "mature" or "wise" or "funny." and does it mean exactly the same thing for every single human being?

But it's also a variation on That Damned Question, because intentional or not, the question "am I college ready" sets a minimum bar for college readiness. What's the absolute least this kid has to do, we're asking, to be certified college material?

That's a terrible goal. Shooting for the bare minimum is a terrible goal.

The correct answer is "You're going to need to do as much as you can the very best that you can, and then we'll cross our fingers that it's enough to get into the school you want." (Which, of course, also depends on who else is applying to your school and how much they've accomplished-- truly, the closer you look at the idea of telling students that they've done enough to be college ready , the dumber an idea it appears to be.)

The correct answer is "Pursue your strengths and interests just as hard and far as you can. "

Not, "Okay, well, accomplish A, B and C, and then you can knock it off for the rest of the year."

I know that many Reformsters have a fondness for efficiency, but the thing is, that doesn't apply here. No effort to gather more education is inefficient or wasted. I have never in my life met someone who said, "Yeah, boy, I wish I just hadn't gotten so much education. Learning all that extra stuff has really held me back in life."

Nobody was ever harmed by getting too much education.

There are some things in life for which knowing the bare minimum requirement is foolish. Love. Kindness. Decency. And education.

Do the most, the best, that you can. And don't ever ask That Damned Question.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Frank

It's my Uncle Frank's birthday today. It's ironic that his birthday falls on this national holiday, thereby making it easy to overlook-- ironic because my Uncle Frank never overlooked another human being in his life.

Every teacher has their roster of professional role models; Frank is one of mine. My Uncle Frank taught history for fifty-four years, including a stint in Germany as an Army school teacher, forty-nine of them in the same upstate Connecticut high school.

But he wasn't a model simply based on longevity. A former student (now teacher) recently shared that I handed her the idea that every person is worth knowing. I can think of several people that reinforced that idea for me, and Uncle Frank is definitely one of them.

Frank is a true people person. I remember that every outing with him takes longer than you expect it to because simply stopping to get gas can turn into a fifteen minute conversation with the guy behind the cash register. Is he some old friend that Frank ran into, and they've been catching up? Nope-- my uncle had just met the person for the first time, and now he knows this person's life story. Frank is that guy.

Visiting my aunt and uncle and cousins was always a treat for us growing up. While my household was the loving-but-firm type (my father is an engineer), Frank and Evie were what we imagined having hippies for parents must be like. Eat when you're hungry. Sleep when you're tired. Worry about people, not stuff. My cousins grew up in a much different environment from mine, but they've both turned out to be interesting, excellent men.

My first published piece of writing was a letter to the editor of a comic book (Marvel Team-Up, to be precise). It was not the sort of thing you ran around sharing with the grownups in your world, but you know who was impressed? Uncle Frank.

Frank has a PhD, earned with his work on the education system of the Shakers (the New York Times interviewed him about it once). His students call him Doc. He travels a great deal; while he was still working, he'd bring back photos he's taken and put them up in the halls, a school plastered with proof that there was a big world out there and that one of their teachers could share it with them ("I want them to see the patterns in the world," he said). There are clipping after clipping of students citing him as an important influence in their lives; on ratemyteacher they laud his brains and his commitment. He was always a reliable attender or sporting events, even during the years when my aunt was suffering from declining health.

He has one of the most small town teachery stories I know-- ten years ago he had just finished delivering a talk about local history to a room packed full of former students when he suffered a heart attack. The audience included the police chief, the fire chief and the assistant fire chief; the response to his heart attack was spectacularly rapid.

Frank is famous in the family for his epic letters; the man was born to be a blogger, but his relationship with technology is somewhat fraught. I'll predict that he's only going to see this if a friend or one of my cousins prints it out for him.

Frank is the kind of teacher that everybody wants their kids to have-- passionate, smart, supportive and open-minded. A big heart, embracing all the experience the world has to offer as well as all the people in it. My Uncle Frank was the first person to make me realize that the first step to becoming a good teacher is to become a good person. For me that has been, let's say, an aspirational goal. I knew years ago that I wouldn't live up to his example-- I knew I didn't have fifty years in me, and I'll never match that man's adventurous spirit. But he has always been one of my teaching examples.

I've left out links and identifying details; I'm reluctant to violate his privacy that way. But if you're a former student of his, you know who I mean. I'd love to hear stories.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday, Uncle Frank. May the coming year bring more great adventure.

Ed Tech's Obituary

Mike Crowley (International School of Brussels) was part of the throng at ISTE '18, but what he saw caused him to declare the death of ed tech.

The particular feature that pushed him over the edge was Google Forms Locked Mode. This will only be available on school-managed chromebooks, but it does address one of the basic flaws of Google Forms. Google Forms was a great way to created a computer-operated quiz or test (perfect if you just don't have the time to score a bunch of bubble tests, for some reason), but there was nothing to keep your students from opening another window and browsing the internet for answers.

Now, if your school won't have access to Locked Mode, let me offer you a workaround that some teachers use.

1) Have students put away phones and close up their computers.

2) Hand out the quiz or test on a piece of paper.

As Crowley points out, one must wonder exactly what problem Locked Mode solves:

Prohibiting students from cheating on traditional assessments using expensive tech tools to perform very basic 20th century tasks is the new transformation.

Or as he puts it elsewhere, "New tools. Old thinking."

This is not a new problem in ed tech, and we always get there the same way. Ed tech companies and their fans don't start with the right question, which is "What's the best way to educate students?" Instead, they start with, "Let's assume that we must use this tech for something. What's an easy thing we could use it for? And then, because our backwards thinking has opened up a variety of canned worms, how can we use the tech to close up those cans?" This has been an ed tech problem since the development of mimeograph machines and those little mechanical bubbler test checkers.

The advent of computer driven ed tech has added one other wrinkle, and Crowley points at it here:

If education is to be the target of an industry that has grown increasingly obsessed with standardization, control, automation, and delivery efficiencies, then we must opt out.

Indeed. This is the other problem at the heart of ed tech-- an industry that says, "If we could just get schools to change the way they work, then schools could better meet the needs of our industry."

Our industry wants to make a mint from the data that could be collected via ed tech, but to do that, we need data that is standardized. And to deliver the standardization with fidelity, we need to set up a system that leaves no room for human variation-- ideally, we just automate the whole thing. By clamping down on the humans in the system, we can be more efficient, collect more data, and develop an approach to education that will really help us grow and profit as a company.

Crowley is correct-- this is not really Ed Tech, but just plain Tech with a focus on the education market. I'm with Crowley on this, including his insistence that digital tools still can matter:

I am very much an advocate for learning environments that provide learners with opportunities to do things that will enhance deep learning and provide students with the potential to do real, meaningful work, not simply mimic it. But this approach to learning needs to reside with the individual learner in mind, not with an industrial mindset that is driven by a desire to impose efficiency and control solutions on all. This is what EdTech has increasingly become now and it’s dead to me after ISTE. Let’s imagine what learning can be, not how we can run it to scale with organizational and industry needs driving the agenda.

Exactly. The ed tech tail wags the education dog. Far too much ed tech, from Common Core computerized testing to the new darling, personalized [sic] education, is driven not by what would be good for students, but by what would be good for the tech companies pushing this baloney.

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.