Life in the Immediate Feedback Loop

I was not more than two minutes into the lesson before I realized it just wasn't going to work. It had seemed like a good idea in the planning stage, but now, live and in the classroom, I could see that I was losing my students, that they were zoned out, confused, disengaged, and that I was not connecting them to the material. I would try it again later in the day, but I could already tell the lesson was fatally flawed and it would flop again (it did). I would go back to the drawing board and give it another try.

My only consolation was that every classroom teacher has a similar story.

People in the education thought leader business and thinky tanks and edubureaucracy and ed tech marketeers and manufacturers of edu-programming-- the whole crew of them worry about a programs effectiveness. How will we know if these lessons are any good? How will we know if these materials really work? What kind of extra assessments can we create to find out how well this initiative connected with students? They talk about this kind of thing as if it's deeply mysterious. This is one more reason that all of those folks should spend time in a classroom.

Classroom teachers live inside an instantaneous feedback loop every working day of their lives.

Teachers make a million little education choices every day, and they get feedback on each of those choices right away. Is the lesson boring? Is it confusing? Is the explanation of the material hard to follow? Is the teacher's delivery flat and uninspiring? Is her approach to questioning and interaction bringing the students closer to her? Students will answer all of those questions right away, sometimes indirectly and sometimes clearly and directly ("Hey, Mr. Greene-- I hate this.")

I've always argued that bad teachers are fewer than Reformsters allege, and likely to leave before you get around to throwing them out, because if you do a lousy job in the classroom, the students will punish you for it every day. Every. Day. You may be in denial about your role in the ongoing failure; you may blame it on those damned kids. But you'll still find the job punishing every day, and you'll soon reach the conclusion that you're ready to get out.

Any teacher who is reasonably alert can tell when a lesson is clicking. The students are hopping, excited, engaged. They make that face-- the "I am learning a cool thing" face is unlike any other face humans make. They're energized. You're energized. You feel like you're the cable and a million volts of electricity are flowing right through you.

Likewise, you know when it's not clicking. Even if your relationship with the students is so good that they will humor you out of sheer affection, you can recognize that face, too-- the "You're a great person, but right now this is the pits" face. Or that moment when you are trying to get a discussion started and everything you toss out thuds to the floor like lumps of elephant poop.

You don't need to wait for the end of the semester or the end of the year. And if you bombed, you will likely go home tonight and reconfigure, rewrite, replan, because you really don't want to go through more of that disaster. Heck, the really good teachers can react to their feedback immediately and retool the lesson on the spot.

Teaching a lesson badly comes with its own punishment attached, and that punishment will be doled out immediately-- not in the spring after VAM-soaked test scores come back or during some post-observation scary meeting. Immediately. The classroom is an immediate feedback loop

This is what happened to many if not most of the Common Core aligned teaching materials-- teachers tried them, got their rapid response feedback, and started rewriting the materials. Not just out of a desire to pursue effective pedagogy, but because it sucks to fail in a classroom, because you have to suffer the consequences immediately.

Ed policy folks seriously underestimate the power of the feedback loop, both to motivate teacher behavior and to evaluate how well something in the classroom is working, and so we end up with policies and approaches that are the equivalent of sitting in a windowless room and trying to decide if it's raining outside using every method except asking someone who is standing outside. Want to know if your materials or your program are any good? Give them to a teacher and ask her after about two weeks. Want to find out what is and is not working for a teacher, what she might need help with? Ask her (in an atmosphere that does not make her weaknesses cause for punishment or humiliation).

Are there teachers who are unaffected by the loop? Sure. They blame the students or make themselves numb to the bad feedback, but here's a thing to remember-- they're not going to do any better with feedback from other sources.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of teachers don't need your data because they are collecting mountains of data every day. They don't need your special assessment to measure what's working (or not) in their classroom because they get regular feedback on that subject every day-- from the small humans who are in the classroom watching it all happen.

Of course, this immediate feedback loop can't really be monetized, and the data isn't collected in a form useful for privatizers. But none of that changes the fact that there is a powerful tool being used in schools every single day, and everyone except classroom teachers is ignoring it.

ICYMI: My Wife's Birthday Weekend Edition (9/16)

It's my wife's birthday weekend, so the Board of Directors and I have been busy celebrating. But I still have a few things you need to read from the last week. Remember-- you can amplify voices that need to be heard, just by passing them along via  the book of face, twitter, or even old-fashioned e-mail.

A Measure of This Teacher

Jose Luis Vilson never writes anything not worth reading at least twice. Catch his latest piece about evaluation, among other things.

Is Reading Plus Worth It

Hey, look! It's an actual student perspective on an education program and policy. It confirms what you already suspected about Reading Plus.

Whose Opinions Matter Most   

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at whose voice gets to be heard in education.

Meet the Test Before the Test

Steven Singer accurately  and painfully captures just one aspect of test prep in Pennsylvania (and a few other states as well) where students take tests in preparation for taking tests.

Wealthy People Are Destroying Public Schools, One Donation At A Time

Jeff Bryant on the latest wave of educational fauxlanthropy, and why it's nothing to be pleased about.

Discriminatory School Discipline Policy Is A Crisis

School discipline is targeting black and brown students, and things are not getting better.

My Pay My Say   

Another response to the ongoing post-Janus attempts to bust unions.

Montessori Inc  

A deep dive look behind the curtain of the Bezos pre-k story.

WTF, Bezos

Yes, all the hot takes on this news are written, but sometimes you just have to do your part to swell the crowd of people who are pointing out that something is stupid.

Jeff Bezos (and his wife) starting pre-K schools is stupid. Let me count the ways (in no particular order).

This damn guy

It's a stupid small pledge on his part. Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime), but it's chump change to Bezos. As this piece points out, it's about 1% of his wealth. It's considerably less than some of his fellow billionaire dabblers have donated. This is the exact opposite of a "we'll spend whatever it takes to do this right" pledge.

His concept is stupid, as witnessed by the oft-quoted "the child will be the customer." This is, in its own way, as stupid as the many rich amateur education "experts" who insist that the child is the product. In our current hyper-commercial environment, as exemplified by the cutthroat capitalism of Amazon.com, the customer is a business's adversary, the mark from whom pennies must be shaken loose by any means necessary, in return for which, the vendor will provide the absolute minimum they can get away with. How is this a good model for schools? A business has no relationship with a customer (though it may serve the business well to dupe the customer into thinking there's a relationship there). The interactions are purely transactional-- you give me some money, I give you whatever goods or services the money was supposed to pay for. The rest of the customer's life and concerns are immaterial. How is this a good model for schools? Schools should help create educated citizens, help students become their best selves, create the public for a country; none of this is the same as creating customers. And customers, it should be noted, have to earn the right to be served by showing that they can plunk down the money.

The stupid keeps getting deeper because we already know about Bezos's treatment of people with whom he has a transactional relationship-- he screws them mercilessly. Amazon workers are notoriously poorly treated so that Bezos can make more money. Bezos has made cities dance and scrape and bow for the privilege of having him gift them with another amazon hq. A school should take care of the students it serves. When has Jeff Bezos ever taken care of anybody?

It's stupid because of the blinding hypocrisy. I know this has been said, but it deserves endless repetition-- Bezos wants to give money to the homeless, even as his corporation helped kill a tax bill in Seattle designed to help the homeless. But this isn't just hypocrisy-- it's a blatant example of modern fauxlanthropic privatization. It's about doing an end run around democratic-style government and insisting on commandeering the project yourself, in the same way that avoiding taxes is not just greedy, but is the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he's going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.

It's stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there's a mechanism in place for that; it's called "paying your taxes." If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there's a mechanism in place for that; it's called "running for school board." The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.

It's stupid because the poor Montessori people are once again having their "brand" co-opted by somebody who doesn't even get it. Bezos's schools will apparently be sort of Montessori-flavored, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

It's stupid because it is soaked in tech-giant arrogance. Note that Bezos says nothing along the lines of, "I will bring in the top education experts to don this right." Experts, shmexperts. Bezos will just "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession." In other words, running a school or a giant internet-based mail order business is pretty much the same thing, so I already know everything I need to know. Even if Amazon weren't built on a mountain of worker abuse aimed at working the customers over, this would still be an arrogant, stupid thing to say.

God only knows why Bezos is doing this. You can say he just wants to improve his image by doing something For The Children, but does Bezos even have to care about what his image is? Perhaps he's just decided that on top of Amazon and the Washington Post he'd like to own some schools.

I saw someone suggest that at least our leading Very Rich Guy was putting his money in a good place. To which I say, no. Education does not need one more self-important rich guy mucking around and playing with children's lives because it makes him feel all warm inside. If there's a huge fire in an apartment building, the fire department does not need a sidewalk clogged with a bunch of amateurs with their homemade fire fighting modified super-soakers. You don't get top elbow your way into an operating room in the middle of critical surgery hollering, "Out of my way. I'm really rich and I have some ideas about how to do this surgery that I came up with while fishing on my yacht." If you want to be helpful, ask the people who are doing the work what they need. Pay your taxes. Do your part to make your corner of the world more equitable and just. Take good care of the people who work for you. And stop imagining that because you once went to a school and you've run a successful business, you are somehow qualified to be in charge of education.

The Twisty Path of Top-Down Policy

From Outcome Based Education (remember the 90s?) to Common Core to ESSA to a hundred policy initiatives on the state level, the story is usually the same: Policymakers create a policy for K-12 education, it rolls out into the real world, and before too long those same policymakers are declaring, "That's not what we meant at all." Explanations generally include "You're doing it wrong" or "Maybe we should have put a bigger PR push behind it" or "The teachers union thwarted us." Common Core fans still claim that all Common Core problems are because of trouble with the implementation.

Somehow policymakers never land on another possibility-- that the policy they created was lousy. But good or bad, education policy follows a twisty path from the Halls of Power where it's created to Actual Classrooms where teachers have to live with it. Here are all the twists that can lead to trouble.

Good luck with this

It begins with the policy generators, who might be legislators, or they might be thinky tank lobby policy wonkists who have an idea they want to push. The important detail is that the policy starts with just a handful of people who actually understand it. But the policy's first obstacle is a larger group of legislators, some of whom have absolutely no idea what we're talking about, and worse yet, some who don't even know what they don't know, but have some thoughts about how the policy could be tweaked. Let's say for our example that the group doesn't fiddle too much, and we end up with a simple policy:



Students will learn about how to produce excellence in widgets.

"Excellence" is one of those words that legislators use to get past the fact that they can't agree on what an excellent widget is. But to implement the policy, teachers will have to know what the expectation is, so the Department of Education next has to "interpret" what the regulation means.
(John King and Lamar Alexander had some spirited disagreements about ESSA on just this point).

If we're talking about federal regulations, they'll pass through both federal and state departments of education. Reports, notes, letters, and other guidance tools will be issued by state bureaucrats who have some ideas about what widget excellence should look like and some other ideas about what the policy goals really are here.

Meanwhile, school districts are scrambling to figure out what, exactly, the new policy will mean to them. This creates a cottage industry of consultants. Those will usually include university professors, each of whom has their own ideas about widget excellence and who will therefor staple some of those ideas onto the policy. "This new widget policy provides the perfect opportunity for schools to implement the two-flange widget approach that my hopefully-soon-to-be-published research will detail." There will also be a flood of consultants from the textbook and ed tech industries, who have been sitting back at the corporate offices trying to answer the question, "How do we make a case that the product which we already have ready for market will be an excellent tool for meeting the new widget standards?" (This would be the part where, during the Common Core walkup, textbook publishers slapped "Common Core Ready" stickers on their materials.)

School district superintendents start to wade through these materials, but those administrators will come in several different varieties including 1) hates the new widget rules, 2) has always felt passionate about widgets, and 3) resigned to having to make the state happy somehow. The superintendent may be interested in minimum compliance requirements, or how to game the paperwork (just look like they're complying), or tossing a few ideas of their own into the mix. They will hand the policy off to building principals, who come in the same varieties.

And at every level, many people will look at what has been handed to them and think, "That can't be right" and "fix" the flaws they see in the policy. This process is tough on good policy, but it absolutely chews up policies that were no good in the first place.

After all these levels of pass the policy games, we finally arrive at the classroom teacher. The teacher is exposed to some professional development, which will provide a view of the policy from the perspective of one of the bureaucrats, professors, or vendors mentioned above. The more professional development sessions the teacher attends, the less certain she will be about what the policy requires, because no two presenters will say exactly the same thing.

But eventually, the teacher will take the policy into the classroom. She'll use a book published by a company with one set of ideas about widget excellence to try to implement the bureaucrat's or professor's ideas in a manner that is satisfactory to both of her immediate superiors. She may think, "I'll be a good soldier and do as I'm told" or she may think, "What I was told never did make sense, so I'll just interpret it as best I can," or, after a few lessons, she may think, "This is not working for these students at all-- I'm going to scrap all of this and design my own approach."

You can think of policy implementation as a giant Plinko board with a million slots at the bottom. The policymakers can drop the chip, and not only will it not go exactly where they want, but if they drop a hundred chips at once, they will all end up in a different place. Education policy isn't just a game of telephone-- it's a game of telephone in which each player whispers to ten other players, until a million people have completely different messages.

This is what some folks are talking about when they demand vociferously that policies and materials be implanted "with fidelity," which means roughly "do what I tell you and stop thinking for yourself." But the critical problem is that actual classroom teachers are not involved until the final step. If government insists on a top-down model of education policy, they are never going to get what they think they're asking for.

Originally posted at Forbes

How To Buy a School System

For many Reformsters, education is just too valuable to be left to democratically-elected citizens.

When Washington state voters rejected charter schools three times, charter backer Nick Hanauer put a call out to his billionaires, and a great wave of money washed the 2012 charter bill over the finish line-- because when the voters have spoken, it's important to get enough money to speak louder. Reed Hastings (Netflix) famously believes that democratically-elected school boards need to be pushed aside, and has said that part of "the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits."

We're at a place where a small group of Very Rich Individuals are intent on commandeering many parts of society-- including education.

In Newark, charter advocates tried to buy a mayoral election so that charter-friendly policies would stay in place.

In Los Angeles, charter advocates threw money at school board elections and packed half the seats of the board with their own buddies.

In New York, hedge fundies spent huge dollars to earn the charter loyalty of the governor.

Even tiny Perth Amboy saw huge outside spending on a local board race.

Occasionally the curtain is pulled back. Families for Excellent Schools joined other rich funders in a losing battle to advance the charter cause in Massachusetts. Then, in an additional defeat, the group was forced to pay a huge fine and in the process had to reveal its donors.

Often these stories are revealed one small piece at a time, or stretched over the interminable length of a modern political campaign. But now the Network for Public Education has done the homework, gathered the information, completed the research, and released a report that tells the stories of elections swamped in billionaires' money. The new report, "Hijacked by Billionaires," is available on line at the excellent cost of Free.

At over 100 pages, the report is rich with well-sourced details, including nine case studies, each showing what happens when Reformsters decide they'd rather just spend money to take control of schools systems.

There's a lot to chew on. There's a list of the billionaires who appear in more than three of the nine stories, and just scanning that list creates a picture of people who are dropping millions of dollars into political races-- school board races!-- hundreds of miles away. Reed Hastings has spent over nine and a half million dollars just to disrupt and attempt to control the outcome of elections. There are eighteen entries on the list, including full families like the Walton and the Bloomberg family (yes, of course Bill Gates is on the list). The sheer volume of money involved is staggering.

Each of the nine stories is striking in its own way. Remember when Shaver Jeffries, now head of DFER, ran for mayor of Newark against Ras Baraka? There was sooooooooo much money spent on that race to back Jeffries, much of it raised by Whitney Tilson and DFER.

The contributions are laid out in charts-- sometimes very long charts-- along with well-researched tales of the campaigns themselves. There's a lot to take in, and the report is a little depressing to read all in one sitting. But it is well worth seeing what's behind these rich folks who like to complain about union influence in elections, or how badly picked on they are by independent bloggers. This is just one more tentacle of the privatization octopus, and as distasteful as it is to see, we can't afford to look away. Read this report.

The 100th Day

I have been counting my days of retirement on Facebook.

I started innocently enough, marking Day One and Day Two. My brother thought this was entertaining and challenged me to keep it up. The posts have been short and sweet (one day I made my first smoothie) and I've embraced it as part of my social media chill-the-eff-out regimen (I'm not allowed to post in the morning until I post a music video, which keeps me from spending the night brooding about how I want to tell someone off first thing when I wake up-- then at the end of the day, I have to post some simple statement about my day. It helps keep my relationship with social media marginally more healthy). Oddly enough, folks seem to like them.

When I hit ninety days of retirement, someone commented that they were looking forward to what I would do for 100. I was not, because I had already figured out that Day 100 of my retirement would be today, September 11.

The confluence of these two things brings a couple of thoughts to mind.

One is the different special days that we humans like to observe. We love making up special occasions. We just sailed past the first day of school. We like to make up holidays, or make up dates to observe holidays and pretend things like Jesus was born on December 25th. We get excited about particular birthdays that end in 0, and we freak the hell out over changing into a new decade, century or millennium.

Most of what sets these days off is completely made up. "It's the first day of your fiftieth year," someone will say. "You should make the most of it, because this day only comes once." Well, yeah. The third Tuesday of your second month of being married only comes once. The 133rd day of this year's school year only comes once. Every day only comes once.

There are days that have weight and significance because do our human best to staple weight and significance to them. And there are days that carry weight and significance because history freights them with it.

And even the weight of history fades, lessens, erodes with time. None of the students in school this year have any memory of the attack on the towers. To them it's just one more piece of history, albeit one that they may have connections to through other humans. The Challenger explosion. John F. Kennedy's assassination. The Vietnam war. Korea. World War II. When we live through these moments, we imagine that the weight will never come off those days. But we're humans. We pass and our memories pass with us, and the ability to understand and grasp and really feel history is a rare one. We're fortunate to be born in a literate age, when the weight of days can be transferred to paper, to screen, raising the possibility of other humans not yet born will be able to feel the weight of these days across the years.

This is, in part, why it is such an awful thing to be cavalier with the truth, to just make shit up for no reason other than to acquire power or erase evil or just because it gives you a little thrill of power. There are few things more immoral than a lie, and to lie for the record, to deny the weight of days is to lie to a million fellow humans not yet born.

Writing matters. Honesty matters. The truth, as best as we can grasp it in our clumsy human hands, matters.

We give days weight they may not have truly earned because playing with the heft of days is a human pursuit, a way of practicing and building mental muscle for the days that really matter. And because it's important not to give our attention only to those days weighed down with huge and almost unbearable cargo. But it's also good to know the difference.

So this is Day 100 of my retirement, a day that has no more real significance than Day 67 or Day 109, except that we like round numbers. It arrives on the anniversary of a day so weighted down that in just seventeen years we have, many of us, mostly forgotten what it really felt like when it arrived, just as a growing number of us have no idea at all and never did. Every day comes only once, and then it fades like a call across a vast valley or a speck in a hall of mirrors. That is why we should pay attention, do better than yesterday, and not just screw around, purposefully trying not to see what is in front of us, deliberately twisting reality to suit some other purpose, as if there were any higher purpose than being true and present.

This day, every day, will come just come once. Try not to screw it up.

Stop Calling It Philanthropy

Last week, Matt Barnum and Sarah Darville ran a piece about "Chan Zuckerberg's $300 million push to reshape schools." The piece qualifies as newsy because they had an actual number for how much Mark Zuckerberg and his wife had pumped through their initiative (CZI); Barnum and Darville were almost able to report on where about a third of that money went.

"Yeah, I don't know much about education, either."

This comes on the heels of the Gates announcement of a "new direction" fueled by a new pile of money. This new push comes packaged differently for different markets. In California it was about some major non-profit grants, while in other markets the emphasis was on lifting up poor schools,
and other coverage focused on a "local school" emphasis. This is of course roughly the forty-third time Gates has set out to redesign US education.

And don't forget-- here's Politico boosting again the Laurene Jobs XQ school reinvention competition, because if you wave enough money at some people, they'll let you experiment on them.

It's good to cover all this stuff, but I have a request-- can we please stop calling it philanthropy.

Let's say I'm a rich guy, and by some bizarre quirk of fate, I'm living next to a lower-middle class family. They have a couple of kids, a beat-up old car, both work, and clearly struggle to make ends meet. I can see through the window that their meals are meager, their clothes are worn, and their furniture is a little beat up. Let me propose two scenarios.

In Scenario 1, I visit the family. I say, "Here's a wheelbarrow full of money. Make yourselves a better life. I'll be over on Saturdays to mow your lawn and make sure that everyone's doing okay."

In Scenario 2, I visit the family. I say, "Hi. I can see you could use some help, so here's my offer. I see you could use some help with your food budget. As it happens, I have it in my head that a diet entirely of squid and scallops would be really healthy for people, so I'll pay for all your food if you'll eat nothing but squid and scallops. I can see that your car is on its last legs-- I'll give you $50K to spend on a car if you buy it off the lot at a dealership a buddy of mine owns. Also, you look a little run down. I've designed an exercise program-- no, I don't have any medical or health care background-- and I'll give you guys a couple of hundred a week as long as you keep doing these exercises. And I'll double that if you spend an afternoon or two every week passing out fliers and telling people who awesome the program is. Also, I have some thoughts about fireplaces, so I'llk give you a few thousand dollars to build a fire in the middle of your hardwood living room floor, because that should be interesting. Oh, and one more thing-- the Mrs. is very attractive, but she wears such frumpy clothes. I have some much more attractive stuff designed that I would like to see her in. I'll cover your clothing budget if she'll wear my clothes and pose on the back porch every morning."

Scenario 1 is philanthropy. Scenario 2 is something else. Something intrusive and creepy.

Modern fauxlanthropy is not about helping people; it's about buying control, about hiring people to promote your own program and ideas. It's about doing an end run around the entire democratic process, even creating positions that never existed, like Curriculum Director of the United States, and then using sheer force of money to appoint yourself to that position. It's about buying compliance.

It is privatization. It is about taking a section of the public sector and buying control of it so that you can run it as if it was your own personal possession.

Yes, philanthropy has always been at least a little bit about using money to impose your values on others. Andrew Carnegie paid for over 2500 libraries, and that certainly reflected his values, but he didn't dictate what books could be included, nor did he create fake civic groups to promote them, and he didn't personally try to manage them. Philanthropic money has always come with some strings attached ("I'll buy the university a new science hall if you put my name on it"). But what we're seeing nowadays is different.

Gates is not saying, "Find people who are doing good work in education and fund them." He's saying "Find people who are doing the work I want to see done. In fact, encourage people to form new groups to do the work I want to see done, and fund them." That's not philanthropy-- that's just hiring someone to work for you.

It is somehow not so obvious because most of these projects do not directly profit the fauxlanthropists involved, but they are still essentially business transactions. Hire some people to promote Common Core. Find a school system that will let us pay them to implement our will in place of their judgment. Find a school system that is willing to accept money in return for letting us use their students as lab rats.

How is this any different than hiring somebody to paint the house or mow the lawn or do the accounting for us? The difference is supposed to be that the work fauxlanthropists are hiring for will somehow benefit society rather than benefitting themselves. But modern philanthropists don't do their homework well enough to know whether they'll doing any good or not (e.g Bill Gates and "we'll have to wait ten years to see if this stuff works"). And of course they do benefit-- they get to feel like philosopher kings and queens without having to do any of the hard parts. And they get to avoid the part where someone of lower stature says, "Your ideas are bad and destructive and dangerous." It lets them have control without responsibility or consequences for their bad choices.

So let's find something else to call this. I don't really like "fauxlanthropy" because there is real money involved, and "paying to impose their personal will on society" is a little wordy. For the time being I'll go with "allegedly benign privatization," but the floor is still open for suggestions. As long as we stop calling it philanthropy.