Can Scott Wagner Buy PA?

We'll be talking about Scott Wagner often in the months ahead, because he's running for Governor of Pennsylvania, and it would really be better for the Commonwealth if he did not succeed.

There are many things to know about Scott Wagner. People like to note that he has explained global warming-- it's either that the earth is moving closer to the sun, or possibly all those humans giving off body heat. He's a wealthy business man who has launched several businesses, but it's the trash biz that really made him wealthy. He's anti-union, and pretty sure that poor people are poor because they're lazy.

This frickin' guy

He recently made it clear that he would not be releasing his financials. His reason is simple-- he doesn't want his employees to know how much he makes because they might get the crazy idea that they should be paid more.

Wagner is a Cinderella story of sorts-- he made it to the PA Senate by beating both the GOP and Democratic candidate with write in votes. Granted, the voter turnout no more than 17%, but the GOP went from trying to box him out of the race to embracing him as a powerful new voice, and he quickly acquired clout in Harrisburg.

Some folks attribute that to a "no-nonsense style" with pronouncements like:

I'm gonna be sitting in the back of the room with a baseball bat. And leadership is gonna start doing things for [sic] Pennsylvania needs done.

Comments like that strike me as all-nonsense, but Wagner is one more millionaire who sells his common touch. It's part of his package, along with his multiple marriages and rocky personal history that his opponents have tried-- and failed-- to use against him (e.g. Wagner once had a protection abuse order brought against him by a daughter for choking her-- they are now tight and she works on his campaign).

But Wagner has another not-so-common touch feature-- he throws around a lot of money.

Wagner may seem like a political novice, but he was in the game well before he ran for Senator. The York Daily Record (his home town paper) figured in 2016 that since 2007, Wagner had spent more than $3.2 million dollars on political races. The 49th state Senate race in Erie County resulted in a seat flipped from Democratic to Republican; Wagner was the single largest contributor with a whopping $595,250 spent on the race. And he has spent aggressively on primary races, to make sure that the Right Kind of Republican is elected.

Wagner has spent more than $100,000 on several causes, including individual campaigns and to several PACs, including one that he's set up on his own and another that aims specifically to end teacher pensions in PA (you'll be unshocked to know that Wagner also opposes teacher tenure and other job protections). He hates taxes, and he wants Pennsylvania to be organized around what businesses want, and he has thrown a lot of money at campaigns for those causes.

At the same time, Wagner has become more pragmatic. Where he once railed against lobbying firms-- particularly those that served as PR firms for the campaigns of officials they would later lobby-- he now employs exactly that kind of firm. If you want to take over the state government, you have to be willing to pay up. Wagner promised he would throw seven figures worth of his money at the campaign, and there's no reason to doubt him.

Wagner is as clear an anti-labor, pro-rich guy candidate as you're going to find. He's a fan of Trump and Scott Walker. He hates unions, particularly the teacher union, and would like to gut them from every possible angle. He's a very rich guy who thinks that his money should give him the power to reshape the state to suit his own preferences. If you care about teachers or public education, it is not too early to start working to support Governor Tom Wolf.

Where Are The Russian Ed Bots?

So it turns out that the Russian bots haven't just been messing with us politically; according to research from George Washington University, the Russian bots have been busy trying to sow discord among US citizens on the subject of vaccinations.

If you've never wandered into the middle of a bot attack, well, all you really need to do is log in to Twitter and shoot your mouth off to someone with a high profile about a hot political topic. I don't know for certain that I've been a guest at a bot party, but once, after I posted about the need to abolish ICE in a conversation, my feed was flooded with aggressively attacking tweeters about half of whom had only been on Twitter for a day or two.

As our understanding of Russian bot farms grows, it becomes obvious that they are playing both sides of any topic that Americans like to argue about. Some folks argue that the Russians wanted to elect Trump President. I don't know if that's true; I suspect they mostly just wanted to make the election as divisive as possible. So it makes sense that they would also try to aggravate other contentious issues, because social media have made us cranky (I once received Very Cranky comments for making fun of Flat Earthers). Every one of us has had that kid in class-- he doesn't care what side wins, but he's going to jab folks into arguing just so he can spread chaos and keep class from happening.

But if the bots are everywhere, where is education's share?

Where are our Russian ed bots?

I know plenty of cranky posters from all sides of the debate, but I have ample evidence that they are real people. I've actually met some of them. I've seen them on videos. And they manage rants far longer than 280 characters.

I'm not sure they're always clearly labeled.

So why aren't the education debates being goosed by the Russians? Why aren't we a sufficiently agitating wedge issue?

There are a couple of answers, all a little depressing.

One is that they're here, and we just haven't noticed. I'll bet they were humming for a while back in the crazy Common Core debate days. I guess I'm going to start paying closer attention.

Another possibility is the educational debates are so arcane and wonky that bots just can't handle them.

Yet another possibility is that the Russians themselves have decided that education just isn't a very big issue. They've looked and all they see is a handful of people who really, really care about this stuff, while the vast majority of the US population continues to not bother with education all that much. This is sadly possible. Education is no longer a "topic" in news media, and folks who have tried to launch super-influential websites (like Campbell Brown) or Presidential campaigns (like Jeb Bush) based on education issues have been disappointed and largely ignored. Yes, Betsy DeVos is widely known and belittled, but mostly all anyone has absorbed is the idea that she's rich and dumb; vanishing few mainstream critiques of DeVos include any intelligent observations about her actual education policies.

We all kind of know this. Whatever side of the education debates you're on, you know that huge numbers of people aren't that concerned, that to even have the conversation you're going to have to explain all sorts of things because they haven't been paying attention to education for the last decade. It becomes really striking when an education story actually flares up, and suddenly people are noticing state-wide teacher strikes.

The explanation that I'll cling to is that most education issues can't be easily reduced to snappy tweet and dumb memes. "We're just too smart for those dumb bot farms" is better for the self-esteem. But the vaccination story is a reminder that any debate in the US is susceptible to being blown up by folks who just want to watch the world-- or at least one hemisphere of it-- burn. It's a reminder that in any online debate, it's best to think before you engage. Not every comment deserves a response.

Running Them In

After a baby-induced sabbatical, my wife has returned to running. Her first post-baby 5K was a couple of weekends ago, taking us back to a world we've spent lots of time in. And yes, she ran pushing the twins, because she's that adorable.

Many of the same old faces were there. We don't live in a huge area, and if you run the 5K circuit, you see many of the same runners race after race (you also, if you're the guy who waits supportively for his spouse, see many of the same supportive faces race after race). I ran years ago, but plantars facitis sucks, so I stopped.

My wife and the Board of Directors get ready to roll.

There's one runner I've watched for years who I find fascinating and inspirational. He usually finished toward the front of the race, though he doesn't win often. But as soon as he crosses the finish line, he circles around and goes back up the course. He'll meet other runners as they approach the final stretch, and he'll run with them (he's not the only person to do this, but he's the one I see always doing it). He may shout encouragement at them, he may cheer for them, he may just run silently beside them. But he runs them the rest of the way in.

Over and over and over, until I swear he has essentially run the whole race twice, he runs out, looks for someone who can use a hand, and runs them in. And he seems to be able to gauge what sort of coaching do they need-- support? a little kick in the butt? silence? chatter? a boost to come in strong, or just enough support to make it across the line?

I'm always moved by this display. Running is a tough sport, but every race is a reminder in many ways that competition doesn't have to be cutthroat. And in the average 5K, you'll see everything from people who train relentlessly and seriously to people who are just giving it a try. This guy runs with all of them.

It's not a perfect analogy for teaching, but it still strikes a chord-- reaching out to help people who are trying to meet their own personal goals, whether it's to beat their own personal best or just to finish. There's no judginess at these events; spectators and finished runners don't stand on the final stretch and holler "Loser!" or "Sad!" or "You need a remedial running class" at people who are struggling to some in at the back of the pack. The assumption is that everyone is just trying to do the best they can, and that making the attempt is deserving of support and a cheer. It's not that the race doesn't separate folks into winners and losers-- it absolutely does-- but it doesn't make winning and losing indicative of anything else. Maybe you ran the 5K in more time than another person did; that doesn't mean anything about your worth as a human being or your right to take up space on the planet or how deserving you are of help or support or love. I can't imagine that the races would better or faster if the runners and the crowd were harsh, cruel, trying to threaten runners with dire consequences if they didn't hit the mark.

The race is hard. You ran the best you could. Good for you.

And at the end, we cheer you on, maybe even run you in so that you cross that line with someone by your side, because runners run against each other, but they run with each other, too. They work to make the mark, to overcome the obstacle together, all the way to the end. School, I think, ought to feel more like that.

IL: Another Voucher Program Launched

This fall, Illinois is launching a hot new neo-voucher program. The Invest in Kids program is a tax credit shell game that allows the state to funnel public tax dollars to private religious schools. This was Governor Bruce Rauner's idea of how to fix Illinois's school funding, which is a little like fixing your house by moving into an apartment. Rauner is not a friend of public education.

The program is somewhere between the standard voucher set-up and the upper-voucher system of an Education Savings Account. In Illinois, people can contribute money toward a school "scholarship," which counts as a 75% tax credit for the donor. If I owe the state $1,236 dollars in taxes and I give $1,200 to a "scholarship" fund, I now owe the state $336 in taxes. Under this system, the money is never in the state's hands, so the program is safe from that whole church-state separation thing. The state, however, does end up with less money, so public schools still come up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop on this deal.

The whole business has been controversial (it took three roll call votes to pass the measure). But while voucher schemes have been regularly struck down, tax credit systems (Illinois actually already has one for school supplies) have held up well in court under multiple challenges. Studies so far show that voucher systems (whatever they're called) actually provide poorer results, but as usual that's using test scores as the measure, so honestly, we don't really know, and many Reformsters have shifted from "vouchers will get better results" to "freedom is the most important thing." And controversial or not, at $75 million it appears to be the biggest launch of such a program (Florida's tax credit voucher dodge is now huge, but it started at a modest $50 million.)

Last week WBEZ took a look at the private school scholarships and discovered "12 Things We Should Have Known..." as a way to see exactly where Illinois has now landed. Some of these are "should have knowns" in the sense that, yes, if you had been paying attention, you would have known this before now. For instance, there's really no excuse for only now realizing that tax credits are a way to get around the law against state-funded religious schools. The law has also been pretty clear that these "scholarships" are not just for poor kids-- a family of four at 300% of the poverty level ($75,300) are eligible for up to $12,973 (that's a very hefty sum compared to most voucher and neo-voucher programs. But some of these details show how Illinois is growing this beast.

For one thing, the cap on how big a credit taxpayers can take is huge. Huge! Illinois taxpayers can get up to a cool million in tax credits.

As has been the case elsewhere, some number of voucher-- I mean, "scholarship" recipients were enrolled in private school anyway. In other words, some of the money drained from public schools had absolutely no corresponding reduction in enrollment or expenses. But it's hard to know exactly how many because...

The organizations granting these scholarships are allowed to operate with zero transparency. There's some basic info they must report (which is good-- the last time an expansion of this sort of thing was proposed in Pennsylvania, nobody had any oversight over any part of the whole business), but donors remain secret, and even basic information about students like where they live is also hidden. In Illinois, even charter schools are subject to FOIA-- but scholarship organizations are not.

24% of the money in the program came from eight donors. 73% of the money will be funneled through a single organization (Empower Illinois). It's only fair that Empower Illinois has the majority of the business, because they wrote the law in the first place, having gathered up some clout partnering with the Catholic Church, which, of course, gets a huge windfall out of this whole system. What does Empower Illinois get out of this? Well, they get to keep 5% of all donations. WBEZ says the group has taken in $30.8 million on contributions, which means a $1.5 million payday for them.  Ka-ching.

Interesting detail-- the donor can designate the school for the "scholarship." That means that a family might have their eye on one particular school, but there may be limited scholarship money for that particular school. That also means that as the owner/operator of a particular private school, you could use this system to pump up your own school's finances while giving yourself a tasty tax break. Or, if you were a staunch Catholic, you could pump up your favorite parochial school (while tax breaking yourself). At any rate, Catholic schools are enjoying a big windfall thanks to these "scholarships." But I'm wondering which rich people would earmark their scholarship money for schools serving the kind of poor neighborhoods they would never set foot in.

Finally, no state that instituted a tax credit program like this has ever ended it-- but education could be an election issue in Illinois, where Democratic candidate for governor J. B. Pritzker has said he would put an end to the program. Which means that Pritzker has made an enemy of the Catholic Church, and Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich, who backed this program big time.

Time will tell just how much damage this program will do to public schools and the students who need to get an education there. Or maybe it will just drain enough resources from the public system that developers can get their hands on more upscale apartment real estate conversion material in Chicago.

The City Fund Plans To Conquer The Market

What happens when a bunch of Reformsters decide to get the band back together to see if they can't privatize public ed more successfully this time around? You get The City Fund, a group that has just inadvertently leaked its plans for a hostile takeover of 5% of the US education system.

For a thorough back-ground on this hot new reform group, check out this piece by Thomas Ultican. I'll hit the highlights, and then we'll talk about the big scoop that Matt Barnum tossed out into a giant shitstorm of a new cycle this afternoon.

The City Fund is collecting a giant pot of money to help launch more "educational opportunity for all children." Specifically, they want to boost the portfolio model of ed reform on several cities. It's a bold choice, because not everybody thinks the portfolio model is a great idea, and that includes plenty of people in the reform camp. The portfolio model is basically an approach that throws together public, charter, and even private schools that want to play. All these schools get tossed into one super-district that is under the watchful eye of a centralized quality control system. Periodically the portfolio managers dump the losers and beef up the winners and let some more join the gamer. That's right- "portfolio" here is not borrowed from the world of art so much as the world of investment management.

Reformsters like the model because it replaces the locally elected school board with a Portfolio Manager, and it essentially puts the public schools on equal footing with charter schools. Free market fans think this is a great way to put everyone under the thumb of the invisible hand. But other Reformsters see the portfolio as working pretty much like a school district, which they already don't like. And centralizing all that oversight in a PM runs the risk of getting someone in that job who is not a big charter and choice fan. And, of course, the whole structure depends on the same old crappy test score system to identify good schools and bad schools.

Nevertheless, The City Fund is banking on that model. Who are the players making this bold choice? There are lots of familiar names here.

There's Neerav Kingsland, the Yale Law School grad who oversaw the conversion of New Orleans into a charter district (as you may have heard, there's some debate over just how successful that really was). Since then, he's become an education investment guru for various big money funds.

Kevin Huffman, who went straight from Teach For America to running the school system of Tennessee.

Chris Barbic (also TFA) was brought into Tennessee by Huffman to run the Achievement School District. The promise was that the bottom 5% of schools would become part of the top 25% in just five years. They did not even come close, and Barbic left the job having concluded that "achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment."

David Harris previously led the Mind Trust in Indiana, a charter school incubator. And Ethan  Gray is the head of Education Cities, another choice promoter with affection for the portfolio model.

Kicking in some big bucks are one of Kingsland's current employers, the Arnold Fund. Reed Hastings has also kicked in. The Netflix mogul, like Kingsland, has argued that elected school boards need to be eliminated so that schools can be run more like a business. The Hastings Fund and the omnipresent Gates Foundation have also kicked in. All the sources have not yet been revealed, but City Fund has raised a whopping 200 million. And as of yesterday afternoon, we have a clearer picture of what they have in mind.

While the rest of the country was watching the latest episode of "That Darn President," Matt Barnum was revealing that he'd gotten his hands on a City Fund presentation for investors. You should read the whole thing, but here are the broad strokes.

They want to spread the Denver, DC and New Orleans model. This is problematic; DC and New Orleans are not exactly synonymous with unqualified reformster success.

They reject many reformy standard ideas. "Very little work in education reform," Barnum says is the first line of the presentation.

But most extraordinary is their goal. Remember when Eli Broad announced he was going to take over half the LA school system? City Fund wants to move its charterized system into forty cities over the next ten years, grabbing 30-50% of the students in each city. "Our goal," Barnum quotes the presentation, "is to make the model normal."

Barnum lays out their ambitious timeline:

Between 2018 and 2021, it hopes to have success in at least 20 cities, affecting around one million students. Specifically, their goal is for 10 cities to have fully adopted the model, and 10 more to be making progress.

From 2022 on, the group hopes to influence “every major city in America,” growing by a couple of cities each year, the presentation says. (“If I had to rewrite that slide I would say, ‘if evidence and demand follows,’” Kingsland said in an interview. “We really aren’t going to expand if the evidence isn’t there.”) 

How to do it? The City Fund plans to use speakers, blog posts, "partnering" with groups, and lots and lots of money-- as much as $15 to $20 million over the first three years.

The City Fund is a new organization (still without a web site) but they have the players and the money to become a major factor in ed erform in the forty targeted cities. Do you want your city's ed system remade in the image of New Orleans or DC?  Keep your eyes peeled.

Still More Testing for Littles

If you don't spend time in the world of elementary education, you may not be familiar with DIBELS. DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills) were created and marketed as a test of early literacy skills. They were tied to the Reading First initiative, a federal program that was mandated under No Child Left Behind.

To grossly over-simplify, reading instruction is the scene of an eternal war between two schools of thought. On one side, we have the content folks (how well you can read depends on your prior knowledge-- what you know) and on the other side, the mechanics folks (how well you can read depends on how well you can decode the marks on the page, a content-independent skill set). DIBELS, like most of the initiatives from NCLB forward, leans toward the skills side. Its most famous contribution to the skills side is the nonsense word fluency portion of the test, in which small children children are asked to "read" nonsense syllables (e.g. zek, vad, nuf). There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding DIBELS, not the least of which surrounds the notion of giving formal testing to Kindergarten and First Grade students.

Do we need to teach 5- and 6-year-olds that school is a place you go to take tests? Do we need to start subjecting little ones to test anxiety? Do we need to teach small children that reading is something you do in order to pass tests rather than something that can be done for personal enjoyment and enrichment?

But if you've only just caught on to the debate about whether or not kindergarten should be the new first grade (or second grade), you should know that's old news. Because education reformers and test manufacturers have their sights set on pre-school students.

Dynamic Measurement Group, the folks who brought us DIBELS, are rolling out PELI, a pre-school literacy assessment for 3- to 5-year-olds. It will be available this coming year.

DMG notes that PELI "has been specifically designed to be used within an Outcomes-Driven Model of decision-making and is appropriate for use within a Response to Intervention service delivery model." Translated from corporate edspeak, that means basically, "We can use your child's score to decide that they need to get remedial classwork." Did I mention that this is for 3- to 5-year-olds?

DMG notes that PELI assessments are "efficient, engaging, cost-effective, standardized" on a list of descriptors that does not include "proven to be good for children."

DMG is not out there by themselves on this. The pressure to ramp up pre-school academics is building steadily (Do you need a practice test for your child's pre-school admission exam? Here its is.) This despite the lack of any research to suggest that such an emphasis actually works.

What evidence we have says that academic focus for littles is not just damaging, but counterproductive, leading to the opposite of what its proponents want to see. What we see over and over is that free play, not direct instruction, is what helps small children grow healthy, strong, smart, and with their curiosity still intact.

Continued calls for "high quality pre-school" keep leading us to the same issue-- how will we know they are high quality? The answer for far too many policy makers is "Well, give 'em a test!" This stimulates the manufacturers to create such tests, which in turn leads to the marketing of the tests.

The real danger is that young parents (remember, we're talking 3 to 5-year-olds here) will feel they need to take the word of "experts," asking teachers questions like "How was her test score" instead of asking the child "Did you have fun today? Are you happy?"

No shred of evidence suggests that the human race has evolved to the point that small children reach developmental milestones any faster or sooner than they did ten or fifty or a hundred years ago. There's no good reason to let tests like PELI occupy an important spot in the lives of littles.

Originally posted at Forbes   

OK: Some Bad Solutions To Real Problems

Oklahoma is loaded with all sorts of educational problems, or maybe just one problem (their legislature doesn't want to spend any money one education) that creates a hundred symptoms.

But last week, Don Parker, retired chief information officer, public ed volunteer, and student of social science and government at Harvard-- he neglected to mention that he's a big private investor and a twelve-year director of KIPP charter schools in Tulsa, which ,maybe is what he counts as his volunteer work-- had a few thoughts to offer in the Tulsa World.

This guy.

He opens strong-- "Our schools are not working..."-- and it's all downhill from there.

... continuing to call for change that does not address the problem condemns children to disproportionate levels of poverty, incarceration, dependence on public assistance, drug use, teen pregnancy and all kinds of things that are not good for anyone.

Yup. Schools are causing all the problems of society. We need, says Parker, a new direction.

Parker admits that teachers do need to be paid more fairly. But Oklahoma doesn't need more teachers, because technology. You may be able to guess where he's going, but let me walk you through his swell argument.

First, we don't score well on international tests. You probably heard something about this, quite likely because we have never, ever scored well on international test comparisons, in all our years of economic and national success in other areas. It's almost as if international test comparisons don't tell us anything useful about a nation's trajectory. Parker also wants us to know that Oklahoma is at the bottom  of the nation's barrel, and Tulsa is at the bottom of that barrel.

Teaching is heroic. And Oklahoma schools still suck. For some reason those two thoughts share a paragraph. But (next paragraph) Oklahoma can fix everything with tools already at hand.

See, there's "no debate in this country about whether the quality of the teacher matters. It is inarguably the No. 1 determinant of student learning."

Except-- oops-- it's inarguably NOT the No. 1 determinant. Even reform types admit that it is the No. 1 factor in school, but that out-of-school factors are even larger. But Parker is going to pretend he doesn't know that. Instead, he wants to make Oklahoma the national leader in public school performance by being the leader in attracting, retaining, developing and empowering the best teachers."

Can you guess why?

Well, there's another problem. You attract teachers, says Parker, by paying them better than anyone else (not, apparently, by empowering them or listening to them or treating them with respect-- nope, just throw money at them). But "how do we do that in a state with one of the lowest levels of education funding in the country?"

If you thought the answer was "by increasing the funding level since that factor is completely within legislative control," go to the back of the class. The answer is much simpler:

The only way to pay teachers twice what we pay them today with the same level of per-pupil state funding is to have them teach twice as many students. We don’t want more 10th-grade math teachers, for example, we want the best 10th-grade math teacher in the district to teach math to all 10th-grade students.

See, Parker just took a college class via "a robust live streaming infrastructure," so we just do the same with schools. I once ate a steak in a restaurant, so I think I know how my son could cook spaghetti for 100 people at a convention.

Can the best 10th-grade math teacher in all of Tulsa Public Schools be teaching math in three or four different classrooms at the same time? Yes, with the help of some assistants and enabled by technology.

If only I had a robust live streaming infrastructure here on my desktop so that you could all hear the sound of my palm smacking my forehead. Parker, it turns out, is one more guy who doesn't really understand what happens in a school. Parker is one more amateur kibbitzer who doesn't, for instance, understand the importance of connection and relationship in teaching. Never mind the 10th grade math class that falls apart because it requires high school sophomores to behave and respectfully get their lessons from the stranger on the tv. Imagine a first grade class being taught by someone who's not in the room, who can't smile at or hug an individual student.

The more you think about the idea, the dumber it is. How much pay would it take to make a high school English teacher excited about grading 600 essays in a week. How effectively can student construct a classroom discussion between 600 students who aren't even in the same room. How effectively can a teacher create the important human connection with several hundred students over an internet connection?

Distance learning has been around longer than the internet, and there's a reason you don't hear about it happening very often-- because it's effective only in very limited and specific situations. The rest of the time it's like trying to eat a steak through a paper straw. Parker is imagining, I guess, that teaching is just standing there and dispensing knowledge lecture-style, so students just need to be able to see and hear the dispenser. And yet, it is not 1962.

It's the bane of education. Somehow everyone is allowed to declare themselves an expert in the field and offer their advice. Parker's advice is dumb, and the Tulsa World was dumb to publish it. This kind of thing does not help advance the education debates in any meaningful way, particular in a state like Oklahoma.