FL: Advancving the Surveillance State

One of the increasing trends in education is the growth in K-12 of the surveillance state. Of course, it's done with nothing but good intentions--if we collect a whole bunch of data about these children, we should be able to accomplish all sorts of great things.

Back in March, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. The marquee portion of the act was new checks on the purchase of guns along with the notion of arming some people in schools, and those drew most of the attention at the time.

But as Benjamin Herold at Education Week points out, there were some other notable features of the 105-page law.

The law creates an Office of Safe Schools for the Florida Department of Education, and directs that office to "coordinate with the Department of Law Enforcement to provide a centralized integrated data repository and data analytics resource to improve access to timely, complete and accurate information." 

The intent is to merge data from various state agencies and K-12 schools as well--plus data from social media. Advocates point to shooter Nikolas Cruz, whose behavior should have raised alarms--but nobody ever put it all together in time. Mental health agencies, law-enforcement agencies and anyone who read Cruz's social media posts about becoming a "professional school shooter" would have seen trouble brewing, the argument goes. If we had a single integrated data system that collected and collated all of that individually tagged information, maybe we could stop the next Cruz.

If this sounds suspiciously like pre-crime and a twisty world where people are picked up for crimes they haven't actually committed yet--well, that may not be the scariest part.

After all, much of this may have already come to a school near you. Social Sentinel "provides a structured process to mitigate risks pro-actively" and Geo-Listening pitches the "powerful benefits" of a service that "help you better meet the social and emotional needs of your students" that they'll know about because they will "monitor, analyze and report" student social network postings.

The mountain of data that will be amassed about students, covering academics, in-school behavior, social media activity and anything else that can be datafied is unimaginable. And while Florida officials are framing all of this as "Nobody wants to allow another school shooting to happen," the system will collect all the data for all the students, not just the few who might be next year's active shooter. Regardless of the purity of everyone's intentions, that mountain of data is also a mountain of gold, and everyone from unscrupulous hackers to shady operators to companies that just had a brilliant idea about how that data could be made more useful will want to get their hands on it.

Will anybody be safeguarding it? Has Florida written laws about how it can be managed? Is anyone making sure that all of this accumulated data is accurate and free from bias? When someone calls the police on an 8-year-old black girl selling water, will that mark her as a potential threat for the rest of her life?

RealNetworks is offering facial recognition software to schools for free, which means that a child's permanent data record could also include things she did in the hall and record of her movements through the day. Meanwhile, Amazon's Rekognition software mistook 28 Congressmen for wanted criminals (with the bulk of those misidentified being African-American or Latino).

Do we really want to make a permanent data record of every dumb thing a student ever does? Is it good for us as a country to raise an entire generation that is accustomed to living under surveillance at all times? News from TSA this week suggests that government surveillance of citizens who haven't actually done anything wrong is increasingly normal. We should probably start talking about whether we really think that's a good thing.

Originally published at Forbes.      

ICYMI: Return To Running Edition (8/12)

Last night my wife finally returned to running after a couple of years without a race (something about growing a pair of tiny humans) so that was exciting. But here, as on every Sunday, I've got a list of things from the week that deserve your attention. Remember to pass along those that speak to you.

Your Back To School Messages Are Hurting Teachers

Shanna Peeples with a great piece about "inspiring" teachers.

Betsy DeVos McMansion Hell

The brains behind the website McMansion Hell takes a look at the DeVos estate and finds it lacking. This has little to do with education, but it's fun and it also shows how the perception of DeVos has grown in non-education corners.

From Katrina to Maria: Disaster Capitalism's Playbook for School Reform

A good overview of how disaster capitalism approaches school reform. It's not pretty.

A Teacher Novel for the Modern Era

Well, this looks like fun. Gary Rubinstein looks at a novel set in the education world.

Paradoxes in the Pursuit of Efficiency

Can a string quartet play a piece more efficiently today than they could 300 years ago? Larry Cuban on how the pursuit of efficiency can become extremely inefficient.

The Myth of School Choice in North Carolina

A look at how school choice really plays out in a state that has doubled down on hostility to public education.

All Of a Sudden I'm So Good At Math  

Jose Luis Vilson with an in class example of how to pass the mic and let the students glow

Please Don't Warm My Heart

August seems to be prime time for Heartwarming Education Stories. At this point, some are actually annual events, like the all-day It's a Wonderful Life marathons. There will be innumerable stories about nice people who buy a bunch of room supplies for teachers, or that video of the lady who says that parents should be doing back-to-school shopping for teachers.

This year we've had coverage of LeBron James' contribution to public education via single-handedly propping up a public school, a story that has culminated in widespread coverage of a petition to have James replace Betsy DeVos (which...no. I love James, and there is a certain ironic hilarity in replacing one of the whitest women in America with a famous black millionaire, but just once I'd like to see a non-amateur in education fill that post). And in the most recent viral sensation, the CEO of a hair care products company bought a car for a local teacher. All very heartwarming.

I don't want my heart to be warmed any more.

It's not that I don't appreciate the value of these stories, particularly to the people involved. It's great that poor woman finally has a car. It's awesome that an NBA giant has decided to help out a struggling public school. And if someone decided to foot the bill for my wife's classroom supplies, we would be grateful for the windfall for the family.

But these are what I think of as Undercover Boss stories. You remember Undercover Boss. It was a heartwarming show on which the head of a company went out and mixed with their underlings, discovering in the process that the company had systemic problems with working conditions and paying a living wage, and the Big Boss would respond to the discovery of these problems by fixing them for one person. Every once in a while a CEO would see the bigger picture, but mostly the message on these episodes was along the lines of, "Well, apparently I don't pay anyone in my company a living wage and my working conditions are terrible, so I think I'll fix that problem for one or two people and everyone will just have to suck it up."

Acts of charity belong in response to an unavoidable natural catastrophe, not the entirely predictable results of human-created policy. Lovable Mrs. McTeachalot shouldn't be receiving help from strangers to buy her teaching supplies because her school should be providing them in the first place. Doctors and nurses do not have to go shopping for bandaids and blood pressure cuffs to stock up their own offices. No business executive or government functionary buys office furniture out of his own pocket. Why do we accept that any teacher who wants a fully supplied classroom will, of course, be responsible for filling the gaps herself.

Why should we have to wait for a wealthy celebrity to pick up the slack for a public school that has not been properly funded? When was the last time you saw an ad from an army company saying, "We're still looking for a helpful philanthropist to buy us the supplies and equipment we need to do our jobs well." And when did you last see a Go Fund Me for a physician saying, "Please help me afford a car so I can get to work."

No. Every one of these heartwarming stories is the story of some group of politicians and policy makers who failed to properly fund the educational system.

Yes, throwing that one starfish back makes a difference to that starfish. But if your beach is covered with stranded sea creatures, you need to start looking at larger issues and not just tossing back the odd starfish.

The only heartwarming story I want to read is the heartwarming story of a state legislature that declares that it will make sure every single public school is fully funded. Or the heartwarming story of a school district that declares it's going to raise teacher pay a huge amount, because teachers deserve it. Or the heartwarming story of many levels of government coming together to make sure that a pile of money is devoted to each classroom, and the schools in the poorest neighborhoods will be buried under the kind of cash usually reserved for professional sports stars.

But, please-- no more stories of the "Well, after we decided to cut off the water line into the pasture, so that a couple hundred head of cattle were going without any fluid, one nice man climbed the fence and gave one single cow a glass of water." That's not a heartwarming story-- it's the story of the mistreatment of the livestock.

No school should ever need a celebrity's help. No nice people with cash should ever encounter a teacher shopping for classroom supplies. And it should never occur to anyone that a teacher might need a decent car. Thank you, nice people, for helping out teachers or schools in need. Now can we focus some energy on fixing the system so that schools and teachers never need to depend on the kindness of strangers ever again.

About Your Child's Data...

We probably don't talk about it enough, but ever since we started in with the modern era of ed reform, we've been watching data collection push its way into more and more of the education system. Oh, it's just for the good of the children-- by collecting All The Data, we can learn exactly where the child's strengths and weaknesses lie and maybe even personalize an educational program for that child! Heck, Knewton (a division of Pearson) once bragged that it would be able to tell you what Pat should have for breakfast on the day of a big math test.

By an odd coincidence, the standards movement plays right into this. We don't tag Item # on the test with Standard CC.12.X.b just because that shows we're aligned to the standards-- those standards also make handy data tags so that we can record and organize and crunch all that sweet data. And folks would like to do the same for social and emotional qualities, so that we're collecting data not just on how well Pat does math, but how emotionally stable, hard-working, and good Pat is.

That is a ton of data, data that could be used for a wide variety of purposes. Children get a permanent record that follows them straight into hiring offices ("I see here that in elementary school you had a real problem with defiance to authority"). The Great Sorting can be kicked into overdrive, with children's data "scores" used to properly place them  in society (see China). Social Impact Bonds actually provide a financial instrument that allows folks to monetize student achievement and data. And the whole Cambridge Analytica flap shows us how data can be used to nudge an entire country in one direction or another.

Folks are remarkably certain that this kind of data collection doesn't matter. I think often of a teacher at the silicon valley wunderschool, AltSchool. The school collected a prodigious amount of data about each child, but when an interviewer asked a teacher about the problems of that data, how long it would be kept, how carefully it would be protected, she replied "I don't know. I just have trust."

Trust is a big order. For one thing, hackers like big school-sized data vaults as a target for the same reason that Willie Sutton liked banks-- it's where the money is. We've already seen a group make a business out of cracking into school district data vaults and holding data hostage.

And now for those you who just have to trust, more news.

This week the news broke that Facebook would like to talk to your bank. Specifically, Facebook would like to look at your personal bank account, a move that Washington Post calls joining "a growing race among big technology companies seeking private information once regarded as off-limits: users' checking-account balances, recent credit card transactions and other facts of their personal finances and everyday lives."

Facebook of course swears that it won't sell the information to third parties or use it for advertising, and that may even be true for the first week or so. But information is money, and the free market loves money like an addict loves cocaine. Most of the companies that we think of as being in the social media business or the search engine business or the on-line apps business or even the on-line sales business are all, really, in the data business.

This is not a new thing. I worked one summer for a call center that took orders from catalog customers. One of that company's major sources of revenue was selling the contact information of its customers to other catalog customers. As the operator of this little blog, I get regular offers to sell me lists of contact information for people interested in everything from deep-sea fishing to a sports team.

Do not for a minute imagine that we can turn companies loose in the education sector, give them the power to collect mountains of data about the students in that system, and then be certain that everyone will just lock that data up in a sacred hands-off vault. When companies talk about cracking open the $600 billion education sector, they're not just talking about money selling books and tests and school improvement programs and charter schools and other education-flavored businesses-- they are talking about access to a huge ocean twenty-first century oil-- data!

Those of us who are grown adults get to make fewer and fewer decisions every day about how much we want to share with the many-tentacled beast that is our version of Big Brother. Do we have the will and wisdom to make sure today's children get to make their own decisions about their data, or will that freedom be stripped before they even have a chance to think about it?

Before We Evaluate Teachers

Policy hounds have been searching for a tool to accurately and fairly evaluate K-12 teachers for years, and to date, they have been largely unsuccessful. That has left us stalled in versions of the following conversations:

Policy leaders: We are going to evaluate teachers by flipping this magical coin.

Teachers: I really don't want to be evaluated by the flip of a coin, magical or otherwise.

Policy leaders: You teachers! You're all opposed to evaluation and accountability.

This is not a useful conversation.

The root problem with the current state of teacher evaluation is that we never had the necessary conversations about what we think it is for. The old system basically said, "We'll hire someone to be the teachers' boss. If that person is happy with the individual teachers, that'll be just fine." If the boss is okay, that system works okay. But if the boss is not so great, that system works out poorly for someone-- taxpayers, teachers, students, someone.

Contrary to what some claim, teachers are fine with accountability. Teachers aren't very happy about teaching next door to Mrs. McAwful. Yes, teachers' unions defend bad teachers for the same reason defense lawyers defend bad criminals-- because the alternative is a system in which powerful people can hurt others at will. A spirited defense of the accused is how we keep people in power accountable. Nevertheless, teachers are perfectly happy to be held accountable by a system that is fair and accurate and that makes sense. Accountability by student standardized test score is not that system.

Before we can design that system, we have to answer some basic questions.

What is it for? Do we want a system that can weed out the dead wood, or do we want a system that helps us find the truly excellent? Do we want it to target teacher weak spots as part of a plan to help them improve? Are we trying to locate teacher-created gaps in the curriculum and instruction? Are we trying to stack rank our entire staff? To make explicit and clear to teachers what exactly we expect from them? This matters because the top and the bottom require different measures. Stack-ranking is hard, corrosive and not always helpful. How do you compare the high school shop teacher to the first grade teacher? How do you get staff to work together when everyone understands that when your colleague wins, you lose? And "taller than everyone else in the room on Tuesday" does not tell you how tall someone actually is.

Who is it for? Are trying to show local taxpayers that they're getting their money's worth? Are we trying to satisfy state and federal bureaucrats? Is the data to be used in house by the teachers and administration themselves? Will this information be for private use or for public vivisection?

What are we going to measure, exactly? Any job evaluation is a matter of saying "This is what we're paying you to do." I don't think any taxpaying parent in the country would say, "We are paying teachers to get Junior to bubble in more correct answers on a standardized test," and yet here we are. This is where the "who" part becomes sticky, because bureaucrats aren't big on "Makes students feel positive about themselves" because that's hard to boil down to a data set of deliverables. But if your own child came home from school, crying because the teacher made her feel like a small, useless person, you would not think "No biggie-- that's not what I pay that teacher for, anyway." So what do we want to measure? Imparts content knowledge? Develops skills? Helps student become a better person? Creates a healthy environment? Helps individual student grow as best that student can? Or helps that student grow as measured against some outside metric? We've gone with standardized test scores because they're easy data to crunch-- but that doesn't mean they're useful.

Creating a teacher evaluation system is hard-- really hard. Jason Kamras thought he really cracked the code with IMPACT in the DC schools, but given time and reflection, it seems to have established a culture in which rampant cheating and misbehavior were encouraged. Kamras has been hired as a superintendent for Richmond Public Schools and he has already said that he will not take IMPACT with him. IMPACT is a dud.

What we have in most corners of the country is a system that attempts to do all of these things at once, resting on a standardized test that wasn't designed to help do any of them. And notice-- I have only talked about teacher evaluation. In most states, the same many-dys-functional hydra is also supposed to evaluate the entire school as well. That adds more multiple layers of complexity (for a thoughtful look at one response, pick up Beyond Test Scores by Jack Schneider.)

When you start to contemplate how huge the task is, it is really astonishing how little discussion there has been about how to do it well. And while this debate is raging, there are folks who argue for the CEO model of charter or public school where the Visionary Leader can just hire or fire at will as he sees fit. Which is just like the old evaluation system we wanted to get rid of-- only worse.

Accountability is important, but if we get it wrong, we end up with a system that does more harm than good, which is in fact where we are. To get to a better place will require a lot of conversation between a full range of stakeholders, and ESSA still keeps districts' hands tied more than is healthy. But somehow we have to move beyond the flip of a magical coin.

Originally posted at Forbes.      

Impact for Education Finances Reform

One of the challenging and mysterious things about ed reform can be the question of "How do these guys get their hands on money?" If I'm a gazillionaire who wants to invest some money in some ed reform scheme like a charter school or some other program, who am I gonna call?

Here's one answer. Meet the organization "Impact for Education." The slogan on their front page, in bold white-on-blue type: "Impact for Education engages forward-thinking philanthropists to catalyze systemic change in public education." And other than a list of the "team" and a form for getting on the mailing list, the site offers little else. Like a classy store on Rodeo Drive, it shows off how much space it can use for nothing, because if you're their kind of clientele, you don't need to be sold.

Philanthropy is, of course, not what it used to be. Modern philanthropy looks a lot like investment, and while all the cool corporations are doing it, they are looking for enough of a return (often in terms of shaping the world more to their liking) that we can talk about philanthrocapitalism. Meanwhile, the rising tool of "social impact bonds" literally turns philanthropy into investment banking. It's a fertile field.

So who are the people who run an operation like Impact for Education? There are nine members of the team:

-- Mallory Hutchison, Associate. Previously worked under Governor Janet Napolitano, senior director at Leadership for Educational Equity, a group "dedicated to empowering Teach for America corps members and alumni to grow as leaders in their communities." She moved on to Chief of Staf for Vice Mayor of Phoenix, and "led strategic and corporate partnerships for the StartupsAz Foundation (empowering the next generation of Arizona entrepreneurs).

-- Devansh Pasumarty, Senior Analyst. Worked in consulting developing business strategies for Fortune 100 companies and asset and wealth managers. I give him a bonus point because even though his Columbia BA is in economics, he has a special concentration in Jazz Studies.

-- Deneice McClary, Associate. Previously nine years as operations leader at JP Morgan Chase, then became district program manager of Virtual Learning and Credit Recovery programs for Chicago schools.

-- Erin C. Watts, Associate. Worked for Story Pirates, then moved on to CCS Fundraising where she helped figure out how nonprofits could raise money and develop "operational structures to drive mission impact."

-- Matt Arciniega, Senior Analyst. Founded a charter management organization (Caliber Schools) and did research and strategy work for DFER, 50CAN, KIPP Foundation, and New Sector Alliance.

-- Lauren Givner, Senior Associate. Did a lot of work in NYC mayor's office, including eight years under Bloomberg and with NYC Service. Chief of Staff at America Achieves and Education Prospects.

-- Mike Wang, Partner. Former senior vice-president of Teach for America, as well as Mid-Atlantic region exec director for TFA. Education policy advisor to governor of Louisiana. Worked on expanding charters in Philly. And he founded Leverage Impact, "a mission-driven consulting practice working with philanthropists to deepen their impact."

-- Danielle M. Allen, Managing Partner. Worked in Office of School Innovation for DCPS "supporting the district's portfolio of turnaround schools." An Education Pioneers Fellow at NewSchools Venture Fund, then on to Mass Insight Education, an outfit that will come in and totally fix your school.

And finally, President and Founder of Impact for Education, Alex Johnston. Johnston launched this organization after seven years as CEO of ConnCAN (The CAN's are long-time advocates for reform in general and charters in particular-- here he is in that role back in 2009). He's also worked as a school board member in New Haven and as an advisory board member for the Center for Reinventing Public Education.

In short, a business composed entirely of people who have worked the money-making entrepreneurial side of the education biz, with nary an actual educator among them (nope, I'm not counting their brief stint as TFA temps).

Founded in 2012, the business is located in New Haven and claims revenues of under $50K. Johnston's LinkedIn page also suggests that Impact is broadening its mission. In addition to the line offered on their website:

We help our clients to hone their theories of change and effectively execute their chosen strategies. We also design personalized learning experiences and create collaborative opportunities designed to amplify the impact of our clients' giving.

That's a lot to offer, but I suppose when you hear that "personalized learning" is a hot new buzzword you feel comfortable leaping all the way from financial advice to designing curriculum. Johnston has remained an advocate for charter systems. In 2016, contemplating the collapse of the left-right alliance in education reform, Johnston still came down hard for school choice and charters.

It's not yet clear that a passion-filled social movement for transforming education in America actually will arise, but perhaps one of the best chances for this will be around one of the issues that arguably has the greatest potential to unite communities of color and conservatives — school choice. 

Groups like Impact exist as matchmakers between gazillionaires and the Reformsters who would like to spend their money. Having government throw money at public schools is Bad, but having philanthropists throw their money at private education businesses is Awesome! You can see that Impact's actual direct knowledge and expertise when it comes to education is somewhere in the zero-to-none range, but part of the reform movement has been the assertion, implicit or explicit, that business folks, policy wonks, and professional bureaucrats know the Really Important stuff about education; the people actually working in classrooms are just meat widgets whose expertise can be safely ignored. It's too bad-- imagine what a group whose mission was to match up philanthropists with public schools could do.

FL: Slapping Pre-K Into Shape

Florida's approach to education policy has long been marked by a striking level of hostility to both teachers and children. This is the state that tried to force a dying child to take its Big Standardized Test; it's also the state that wanted to force nine year olds to repeat a grade for non-compliance with the testing regimen.

So it should come as no surprise that Florida intends to make life more miserable for four year olds.

What do you mean, I have to repeat being three?

Florida has piloted a new kindergarten readiness test. ostensibly to see which pre-school providers are doing a good job. According to the test, barely half of the Voluntary PreKindergarten (VPK) graduates were prepared.

There are several problems with this test.

One is that the test is given in the fall, as the students begin kindergarten. In other words, three months after then have finished pre-K and have spent the entire summer (1/20th of a five year old's entire life) away from school. Chances that littles have forgotten some of what they learned are excellent.

Another is that the test is given on computer. Yes, a five year old child has to take a test that involves comfortably using a computer mouse or tablet. The state argues that they totally give the children little computer tutorials before the test starts, so it's no biggie. On this point, the state is an idiot.

And the test focuses primarily on literacy, with no attention paid to social and emotional gains. And the test is a single snapshot and not a measure of growth.

These are all valid criticisms and excellent reasons to take the whole business back to the drawing board.

But beyond all of this is one other important point, and I cannot say this hard enough.

If your test tells you that half of kindergarten students are not ready for your kindergarten, the problem is not with the children..

I repeat: The. Problem. Is. Not. With. The. Children.

Florida's test results do not show that around half of kindergarten students are not ready for kindergarten. Florida's test results show that Florida's kindergartens are not properly prepared to teach the children.

Okay-- there is another possibility that the test results actually show that the tests are crap. This is Florida, so that's a very real possibility.

But if we are going to insist that the results are valid, those results are indictment of the kindergarten expectations and not of the children or their pre-schools.

All the pre-school in the world will not alter the speed and stages of human development. All the expectations in the world will not increase the academic capabilities of four year olds. This whole business is foolishness of the rankest kind, a program that can have no good effects and will have the effect of damaging littles either by making them hate school or by convincing them and their parents that they are defective somehow.

Can there be such a thing as a kindergarten readiness assessment that shows if children are ready for the Big K? Yes, there can.

But if that test shows that a vast number of children are not ready, the fault is not in the children. It is not a four year old's job to Get Ready for School. It is the school's job to get ready for that child. Honestly, Florida-- just once, get your act together.