AZ: Why Conservatives Should Oppose ESAs

Education Savings Accounts are the uber-vouchers, the last stop on the reformster railroad before we get to the place where schools simply disappear.

ESAs come in a variety of flavors, but here is the basic idea.

With charter schools, you can send your child to any school in the system, and tax dollars are sent to that school to cover the cost of educating your child.

With a voucher system, tax dollars are given to you and you can use them at any school you wish to send your child to.

With ESAs, you get some money, typically via a debit card, and you spend it on educational whatever. Charter school, home school supplies, tutors, books. In most cases, if you spend very little of it, you can hold onto it for college expenses.

We can talk about all the reasons that left-tilted folks don't love this idea, but not today. Because today we're talking about Arizona. Arizona has had an ESA program in place for students with special needs, but the legislature recently moved to expand that to all students, and now a bunch of scrappy activists have managed to get the expanded ESA rule put on a ballot. Arizona voters have a chance to vote ESAs down, right there in heart of Koch Country, in a state where left-tilted folks are fairly rare.

So let's ask, instead, why a conservative, a right-leaning free market voter should defy the state's governor and the Koch interests to vote down ESAs. They may not consider the issue of draining money from public schools a big deal, and they may, in fact, be in favor of school choice. But from the conservative view, there is a critical issue with ESAs.

Accountability.

Charter schools face some degree of accountability, both financially and academically. In theory, at least, there is an authorizing group that is responsible for making sure the charter school is reasonably decent. Even a voucher system allows for some oversight of the schools that are receiving the tax dollars.

But Arizona's ESAs, like most existing and proposed ESAs, give the family a card (Bank of America, in Arizona's case) with a balance on it that they may spend for "educational products and services." So private school tuition, or a tutor, or coaching software, or books, or whatever. Arizona parents have to agree not to spend the money on consumables like paper and pencils, nor is the money to be used for transportation. Advocates complain when I say that ESAs could be used to buy a PlayStation and some educational games-- but what in the law says they couldn't (maybe the "technological devices" provision, but that's awfully broad and vague)? And what in the law provides any sort of oversight to catch any such abuses? Can you imagine the kind of manpower that would be needed to check up on every family with an ESA to make sure they are spending tax dollars responsibly-- it would be expensive and time-consuming and intrusive and it's not going to happen.

The state of Arizona is essentially offering students a cash incentive to drop out of school. Take the few thousand dollars, tell us you're doing something educationy with it, and no questions asked.

Yes, accountability-ish steps have been taken along the way. For instance, according to a report from EdChoice:

For example, in 2013, legislators gave the department the authority to create a 1-800 number for fraud reporting and a website where parents or vendors could report fraud. 

But if the ESA money is spent and used within the home, who is going to see anything? And which citizens will be well-versed enough to know fraud when they see it? Advocates also call for "surprise" audits of families and making sure that only certain vendors and products are "unlocked" for the card, similar to what some states now do with food stamps. Can those locks be circumvented? And where is this staff that is going to audit family ESA spending for thousands of families more than once a year-- the law is capped at 30,000 students, but there are 1.1 million students in the state,
and ESA backers would like to include them all.

In fact, the ESA program already in place has been an accountability mess. The credits can be converted to cash by buying books, then returning them. Some took the ESA-- then returned to public school. Some crafty families parked the money in 529 college savings account so that the state could not get it back. There is even reason to suspect that ESA money was used to get an abortion. 

The kind of abuses possible with this sort of system stagger the imagination, and the money drained out of the larger education ecosystem would be a loss to public, private and charter schools alike. Plus, the end result will be students whose education was inadequate and who cannot contribute to society.

If you're a conservative, you may well like the idea that nobody should get welfare unless they can prove they're working or incapable of working. You don't want to see your tax dollars wasted (and there has already been some pretty spectacular fraud in Arizona). If you are giving somebody money to get an education, would you not also want to see some proof that they are actually getting one? Arizona's legislature is tough on welfare recipients-- but not on ESA recipients, even though an ESA is basically education-flavored welfare.

Proposition 305 will be up for a vote in November. Here's hoping that Arizona voters from across the political spectrum do the right thing and roll back ESAs in Arizona.

Outsourcing the Classroom To Ed Tech

This presentation was part of the Network for Public Ed convention last weekend. The panelists are Leonie Haimson, the super-activist from NY who beat Gates and InBloom; Audrey Watters, the expert on the subject of ed tech history and keen critic of its current manifestations; and me, trying not to be all fanboy about my co-panelists.

You can find a copy of Leonie's slides here, and Audrey's prepared remarks here. My part doesn't have any useful meatworld analog.

The panel looks at where the trends in privatizing-via-computerization are headed, as well as the concerns about data safety and just how good we can expect this stuff to be, anyway. Plus some things to keep in mind if it looks like this technocluster is headed toward you (and it probably is).

Leonie's slides are great, and Audrey says a naughty word while explaining just why the claims of AI-directed education are bunk.

What To Read (2018 Edition)

At the NPE gathering, I received many requests to repost (and update) my list of people worth reading, so here we go. This is in no way all-inclusive; I'm going to miss somebody and every day I find new writers I didn't even know about, which means tomorrow I'll find out about someone I don't know about today. There are also bloggers who are worth reading, but if they've been silent for many months, I may leave them off this list. Caveats offered; here we go.

A Dog With a Bone   
Audrey Hill is a 30+ year English teacher. Sometimes the posts are brief and poetic, while some dig deep into a particular item.

A Teacher's Life For Me    
Michael Soskil was a PA teacher of the year. He has a good eye for the places where Big Ideas and Actual Classrooms intersect.

Accountabaloney
I'm a sucker for a good name, but this Florida blogging duo includes a graphic designer, so it looks good, too. The good fight in Florida is a barometer for reformy messes elsewhere, and these folks have a good eye for malarkey.

Alfie Kohn 
Kohn doesn't post often, but when he does, you don't want to miss it. This is what actual education reform ideas look like.

Annie Tan, An Angry Teacher
This fiery teacher has a big activist streak, and she'll tell you all about what is making her angry at the moment.  

Andrea Gabor
Gabor is a journalist and author (The Capitalist Philosophers, Einstein's Wife and After the Education Wars) who is frequently doing exceptional work looking at charter schools.

Answer Sheet 
Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post is the only big media journalist doing regular, daily coverage of education. Get national news, a public ed perspective, and answers from the kind of people who will ignore bloggers like me, but answer the phone when it says "Someone from the Washington Post is calling."

Automated Teaching Machine
Adam Bessie is a cartoonist who works the education beat. For those of you who like visuals.

Badass Teachers Association 
The activist group, best known through their facebook page, also has a blog featuring an assortment of voices.

The Becoming Radical
Paul Thomas is a college professor comfortable blending references to ed research, race issues, poetry and comic books. A good pair of eyes for seeing beneath the surface of many issues in the ed realm.

Big Education Ape 
One of the best aggregators of edublogging out there. If you only have time to make a couple of stops, BEA will get you up to speed. And as a bonus, you get some fairly hilarious paste-up illustrations.

Blue Cereal Education
Snappy, funny and pointed writing about issues in education. Recently transplanted from Oklahoma to Indiana. "Everything I say is so wise even I can hardly believe it. Feel free to concur."

BustED Pencils
BustED Pencils is a webcast (I've been a guest and it was fun), and it is also the host to regular blogging from Morna McDermott, Peggy Robertson, and others, as well as regular features like What Would Matt Damon's Mom Say. It is unabashedly progressive and activist.

Bob Braun's Ledger 
Long-time New Jersey reporter who has covered politics and education for decades. Regional and national stories with a hard-eyed reporter's view.

Bright Lights Small City
Sarah Lahm covers Minneapolis schools, policy and politics. As with many of the regional bloggers, her writing gives a good look at how the bigger issues play out on a smaller, specific stage.

Charter School Watchdog 
Longstanding clearing house for news of charter school shenanigans.

Children Are More Than Test Scores 
Jesse "the Walking Man" Turner's blog. Personal, heartfelt education activism.

Chicago Public Fools
Julie Vassilatos blogs in and about Chicago, but watches national stories as well.

Cloaking Inequality
Julian Vasquez Heilig has been a visible and vocal part of the pro-public ed movement, covering a wide range of national topics.

Dad Gone Wild
A father in Tennessee who has educated himself in the issues and done some activist work as well. Another regional blogger with national lessons for all of us to learn.

DCulberhouse
Generally Really Big Picture thoughts about transformation, leadership, and how it relates to organizations like schools.

Deustch29 
I don't call her the indispensable Mercedes Schneider for nothing. Schneider blogs almost daily, generally on topics for which she has done research and digging-- she comes up with the facts about the reformsters and their organizations that nobody else had discovered.

Diane Ravitch's Blog
The chances that you read me and don't know about Ravitch are zero-to-none. But this list would look odd without her on it. This blog is like the pro-public education town square where everyone passes through at some point.

Disappointed Idealist
A British blog focusing on education and politics.

Eclectablog
The primo source for progressive coverage of all things Michigan. And they've now got Mitchell Robinson blogging about education for them. Essential regional read if you want to understand the state that spawned DeVos.\

Ed in the Apple
A teacher in NYC focusing on "the intersection of education and politics."

Education in the Age of Globalization
The website of Yong Zhao, an international writer and thinker about education. The best man to put China's educational "achievements" in perspective.

Education Opportunity Network
One of the places to find the work of education writer Jeff Bryant. Always well-sourced and thorough, a grown-up voice for public education.

Educolor
Educolor is a movement, a network, a hashtag, and a voice for equity in education. This is a place where you can start to get activated.

Filling the Pail
The website of Greg Ashman, a teacher in Australia.

Finding Common Ground

One of the family of EdWeek blogs. Peter DeWitt is a former principal and a bridge-builder who is almost always entirely reasonable and thoughtful when discussing issues of policy or managing a school.

Fourth Generation Teacher
Claudia Swisher is yet another Oklahoma blogger and advocate who provides a good look at what advocacy looks like on the ground out west.

Fred Klonsky
Progressive union-loving activist with a clear direct tell-it-like-it-is style, writing in Chicago.

Gadfly on the Wall
Steven Singer blogs about national issues from a fiery progressive perspective. You won't find anyone more passionate about the issues.

Gary Rubinstein
Former TFA-er who keeps the pressure on that organization as well as other reformsters in New York and across the country. A prodigious debunker of miracle schools.

Gene Glass
A senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and co-author of 50 Myths & Lies that Threaten America's Public Schools. Smart man with a wide grasp of the actual research behind policy debates.

Grumpy Old Teacher   
"Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away."

Hack Education
Nobody knows and understands the past and present of ed tech better than Audrey Watters. She's a really smart lady and a very snappy writer.  

Have You Heard
The website for the podcast by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Berkshire is one of the best interviewers around, and Schneider is a great education history scholar. Together they talk to some of the most interesting and compelling folks in the education debates.

I Love You But You're Going To Hell
Not only my favorite blog title, but a great blog for unpacking religious conservatives for everyone else, respectfully yet clearly. Also, school stuff.

Jan Resseger
She's a strong and insightful voice in the push for a progressive public education system.

Jersey Jazzman
There's no better place for plain-language explanations of the wonky data behind policy debates. I've learned a ton reading this blog.

The Jose Vilson
A consistently decent, human, humane, and personal perspective on teaching and race. Pretty sure this is one of the major teaching voices of a generation.

Keystone State Education Coalition 
A great roundup of links to news and commentary regarding Pennsylvania education.

Living in Dialogue
Anthony Cody, a co-founder of the Network for Public Education, has long been one of the steady progressive blogging voices in education. This site continues his own blogging work along with contributions from other strong voices for public education.

The Merrow Report
John Merrow was a top reporter for decades. He's retired, but he hasn't stopped finding and commenting on some of the important stories in education.

Mitchell Robinson
Heads music education for Michigan State University, as well as being a long-time policy wonk. Great lively writing about national issues. You'll also find him at Eclectablog.

Momma Bears
If you're going to talk about public education activism in Tennessee, you have to talk about the Momma Bears, digging deep and laying bare the tools of the reformsters.

Mother Crusader
New Jersey mom who became a powerhouse public education advocate.

Mr. Anderson Reads and Writes
Reading, writing and policy, digging deep for details, from a classroom teacher.

My Two Cents
Mary J. Holden was an English who left the classroom and became an education activist-- then she went back to the classroom. Located in Nashville, she's busy in one of the flagship states of reforminess, so there's lots for us to learn from her.

Nancy Bailey's Education Website
Former special ed teacher with a Ph.D. in educational leadership, Bailey tackles national issues with both fists. Smart as hell.

NYC Public School Parents 
Leonie Haimson and Class Size Matters are among the heroes in the defense of public education. They thwarted a big data incursion into NY, and they continue to have a sharp eye on what threatens public education in this country. 

Othmar's Trombone
Politics, reform and English teaching in the UK.

Politics K-12
Alyson Klein and Andrew Ujifusa cover the political side of education at EdWeek and are a reliable source of what's happening in the halls of power.

The Progressive-- Public School Shakedown
The Progressive magazine is about the only news magazine with an actual commitment to public education, and that is shown through this ongoing project featuring eleven outstanding national writers (plus me).

Russ on Reading
Russ Walsh focuses on reading instruction, but sees the connections to larger education issues. Incidentally, Walsh has published the definitive layperson's guide to what's going on in ed reform.

Save Maine Schools

Emily Talmage is based in Maine, but she has been one of the voices out front in spotting and opposing the personalized competency based computerized learning trend.

School Finance 101
Bruce Baker manages to make sense out of the twisted labyrinth that is school financing. More interesting and important than you may imagine. Sometimes he shouts.

Schooling in the Ownership Society
A blog focusing on the moves to privatize public education with corporate reform.

Schools Matter
A roster of writers that includes Doug Martin, who wrote the book on Indiana Ed Corruption, and Jim Horn, who takes no prisoners and makes no compromises, but he knows his stuff. An aggressively anti-reform site.

Seattle Education
Another regional blog with a national take on ed reform, filtered through the unique perspective that comes from living in the shadow of Bill Gates' money.

Susan Ohanian
Ohanian had started to figure out what the hell was going wrong long before some of us had even started to wake up. Do not be put off by the design of her site, which can be... well, challenging. Trust me that it's worth it to dig in.

Teacher in a Strange Land
Nancy Flanagan has moved out of the EdWeek gated community, so there's no longer any excuse for missing any of her great posts. She's not as obviously combative, sparkly or full of fireworks as some blogs on this list, but she is smart and funny and honest and always worth the read.

Teacher TomTom teaches at a pre-school co-op in Seattle, and his perspective (and that of his students) is always a welcome breath of cool air.

Truth in American Education
An anti-common core, conservatively angled website with a variety of contributors.

Tultican
Thomas Tultican keeps an eye on national stories and the bloggers who cover them.

What Is Common Core
These ladies in Utah are from the conservative wing of The Resistance; they pay close attention and do their homework, and they've been doing it for over four years, making them oldsters in this game.

Wrench in the Gears
A blog focused on the multinational machine driving the data mining of society. You may at times feel as if you fell down the rabbit hole, but this woman has done her homework.

VAMboozled
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is one of the top experts on Value Added Measures and their general use and abuse. An excellent source for your VAM-related concerns.

The Other Side
That link will take you to a post I wrote about reading Reformsters, which I think is generally a good exercise.

Also, while I'm tossing up links, if you're interested in living green and mom stuff, let me recommend Sunshine Guerrilla, my daughter's blog. She's got a great big heart and writes awfully well.

Are Expectations Free?

It was a tweet by Jose Luis Vilson that drew my attention to the quote:

“It doesn’t cost one penny more to have higher expectations for kids, to actually believe that kids–low-income kids, kids of color, English-language learners–can succeed,” he says. 

The speaker is TNTP CEO Dan Weisberg, speaking about TNTP's latest "report." I've addressed that report elsewhere, but this particular idea is worth a closer look because it has been so persistent. Arne Duncan was a big believer in the magic of expectations, and Reformsters have often touted its powers-- perhaps precisely because it is a "reform" they can have for free.

But are expectations free?

I suppose expectations themselves are free, just as wishes and dreams are free. But creating the conditions and providing the tools that allow those expectations to be met-- that's not so free. And without support, some expectations are just cruel.

I mean, I can expect someone who is confined to a wheelchair to live a full and active life-- but somebody needs to provide that person with the actual wheelchair as well as appropriate physical therapy. Stephen Hawking's super-cool chair, computer interface, and voice synthesizer were not free.

And when we talk about education, there's a problem with free if by "expectation" we mean that a teacher should expect a child who is hungry, who lives with poverty every day, who lacks support for education at home, who lives with fear and instability in her world-- well, if we're just supposed to "expect" that child to handle school as if she lived a comfortable, stable, well-fed existence, that's just wrong.

It is also wrong to "expect" that students who go to school where there are not enough books, not enough desks, not enough supplies, but plenty of mold and decaying corners of the building-- to expect those students to approach school as if it were well-supported, well-funded, shiny and clean. Too often this business about the soft bigotry of low expectations is another way to say, "No, we're not going to fully fund this school, nor are we going to address the systemic racism and poverty that surrounds it-- just get in there an expect harder."

There is, of course, a solid core of truth to this talk about expectations. Every decent teacher understands that expectations are important in a classroom, that if you approach students with an attitude of "Well, these are just the dumb kids, so let's not expect much, try much, or do much" you are failing those students.

But. But but but.

A good teacher masters the art of calibrating expectations. Expect too little, and the student coasts and learns too little. But expect too much, and expect it too inflexibly, and you will break the student, push the student past the point of frustration so that she simply gives up, dejected and demoralized. This careful calibration has to be teamed up with a teacher's sense for what support will look like-- what ratio of hand-holding to ass-kicking does each student need. And of course both of these factors need to be recalculated every day. (This is also the kind of learning personalization that I don't imagine a computer program ever providing, ever.)

But isn't all that free? Can't a teacher throw in the whole calibration of expectations and support at no extra charge?

Yes, and no. Because what we're talking about is a teacher's relationship with her students, and that is directly affected by the number of students in that classroom, which means, ultimately, that it's a budget item. If you want a culture of high expectations in your school, you will need to spend enough money to have small class size.

It's hard to believe that guys like Weisberg and Duncan don't know they're spouting baloney. First off, they never add the corollary "If colleges and universities would just raise their expectations, it wouldn't matter how well-prepared students were coming out of high school."

Second, anyone who looks at a wealthy, well-funded, well-supported, shiny school full of high achievers will find a district clearly motivated by the idea, "We expect lots of great things from our kids, and therefor we are going to spare no expense to give them every possible tool to help them accomplish those things." Nobody ever won a school board election in those well-heeled districts by saying, "Let's just cut all our taxes, cut back on buildings, slash all the extra programs, and just tell teachers to expect harder."

No, expectations always travel hand in hand with the tools and conditions needed to make those expectations manifest in the actual world. High expectations don't mean a teacher who tosses a math book to her students on Day One and says, "There's your book. I expect you to learn what's in it. See you in 180 days." High expectations mean a teacher who says, "I expect great things from you, and I am going to help you achieve those things with every tool at my disposal."

Expectations are just a form of faith, and even the Bible tells us that faith without works is dead. Expectations matter, but expectations are only a foundation and no, you can't build the house for free. "Teachers should just expect harder," is just an excuse for politicians and policy wonks to avoid the issue of giving underserved, underfunded schools the resources they need, the kind of resources and funding that politicians and policy wonks would give them if those guys really, truly believed in the success of those students.

Another Sub Service Fails

Professional Education Services Group may be "the leader in Educational Staffing driven by a constant focus on the success of our Educational Partners through innovative, hand-crafted solutions that meet the needs of your local educational community" in almost 5000 schools across the country. But in Michigan, they failed hard.

PESG sent out a letter last night letting about 100 schools know that the company was closing down immediately and would not be getting them subs for today. They are shuttering all Michigan operations.

Is there some sort of explanation? The head of the company had sent out a note to employees, indicating that the company had been seeking capital as well as negotiating with "a competitor" to be bought out. But it was not to be, because reasons:

"The urgency of the shutdown was exacerbated, however, when those negotiations broke down over the weekend due to unforeseen developments outside of our control," he said. "Without operating funds to stay open, therefore, the company is now forced to close immediately. Under the circumstances, we believed our only serious option was to notify you as soon as possible."

Most of the affected districts, including the large Dearborn district, were scrambling to make plans. PESG said 1,500 to 2,000 substitute teachers were affected. Some of these districts still have contracts with PESG, so we may see some court action before the smoke clears.

This, of course, is what you get when you let a business have a piece of the education pie. Does this kind of sudden shut down make sense? Was the company down to its last $150 last week but they figured it would all work out anyway, or is this "immediate" shutdown necessary to protect the business's remaining assets. Who knows. All I know is that a school district would do-- well, exactly what the districts are doing, which is to put their heads together, rig something up, and generally move heaven and earth to make sure the needs of students are met.

Public schools put students first. Businesses put business concerns first. That doesn't make them evil-- just bad partners for schools.

Substitute services have a spotty record. Philadelphia tried privatizing its substitute pool, and the results were ugly. Districts find sub outsourcing attractive, but for substitutes it's a pain-- one more layer of bureaucracy to deal with, and another hand out to cut into your check before it gets to you. Some services can even be insulting-- a local district just handed its sub pool over to a company (rhymes with "smell") and now subs who have already been working for years are told they need to take some special smelly training. I have no figures on how many subs walk out when a new subcontractor walks in, but the number can't be inconsequential. To recruit more people, you need to make the job more attractive-- adding a subcontractor to the sub teacher biz hardly ever makes the job more attractive.

All districts know at least one solution, and some larger districts actually embrace it. You hire full time subs. You put Mrs. McSubteach on full salary, have her report to work every day, and plug her in wherever, and you never have to worry about her being poached for the day by some other district. But that costs money, and districts want a cheap solution.

Privatizing is not that solution. 500 subs cost less than 500 subs plus a corporate payroll for the company that took the work over. You don't make an operation cheaper by adding more mouths to feed.

The substitute recruitment problem cannot be solved by making the job less attractive, and privatizing is not a solution, either, as many schools in Michigan are finding out today.

How To Solve A Shortage

The trucking industry in this country has been experiencing a shortage of drivers. In fact, the shortage has reached historic levels, with the industry down almost 300,000 drivers compared to just three years ago.

Several factors were involved. Regulations how drivers count their hours on duty, with the effect that a single driver can now log fewer actual driving hours. The work is hard and getting harder. The driver pool is aging out. And the pay isn't that great, and as the economy began to rally, other lines of work began to look more attractive.

J. B. Hunt Transport Services, the largest US trucking company, hit on a clever solution.  

They raised pay. In fact, they raised it by 10%.

If you want to express the idea more broadly, we can say that they dramatically improved the working conditions for their job. And it seems to be working.

It's amazing, really. Despite their professed love for the Free Market and the wisdom of the invisible hand, so many leaders seem baffled by "shortages" in their field. And that includes teaching.

We keep hearing about a teacher shortage in this country. There is no teacher shortage.

Say it with me-- There. Is. No. Teacher. Shortage.

There is a shortage of states and districts willing to make it worth someone's while to take a teaching job. There's a shortage of states and districts willing to improve the conditions of the job enough to make that job attractive to people. There's a shortage of pay, a shortage of respect, a shortage of support. But there is no teacher shortage, just as there was no actual truck driver shortage. The employers didn't have to wait for an entire generation of fresh drivers to be born and to grow up; they just had to make the job attractive enough to recruit the people that were already there.

It's not rocket science, and people like the Broad-trained ed leaders, who have been brought up on the idea of business solutions to education problems-- it ought to be obvious to them.

If I can't get someone to sell me a Porsche for $1.98, that does not mean there is an automobile shortage. I am not somehow entitled to a cheap car, and employers are not entitled to cheap labor. Figure it out, O wise captains of industry and thought leaders of education.

When Administration Loves Management By Screen

It often seems that public education is where played-out business management fads go to die. Decades ago, when Management By Objectives had become yesterday's business news, it reappeared in schools as Outcomes Based Education. And now that Management By Screen has enjoyed a trip around the industrial park, it is catching on with school administrators across the country.

No Child Left Behind set the stage by requiring a Big Standardized Test and the data that the test would generate. Race to the Top doubled down on data, and Common Core standards allowed the appearance of more granular data, with each standard collecting its own little pile of numbers. The call went out for decisions that were "data-driven," from district decisions based on the numbers all the way to classroom instruction that is supposed to be "data-informed."

Data-loving administrators began to realize that they could go days at a time without ever having to leave their offices.

Schools have been buying up a ton of test-prep tests, multiple choice standardized tests that mimic the Big Standardized Tests from the end of the year. These tests can be taken on line by the students, and so immediate spit out bunches of data in a variety of slick and attractive reports. Principals can pull up graphs and charts and determine which students are a danger to the school's scores and who need to be hammered with extra data-informed instruction ( the principal can also find the students who will score well easily and the students are so hopeless that there's no point in using resources to try to pull them up). They can check that data against test result data. The principal can see, sometimes (though some of these data tools can be a bit obtuse) which standards are a problem; the principal can then fire off an e-mail to Mrs. McTeachtester that her instruction should be informed by more time spent on standard RL.5.2B.

Once the principal is smitten by screen management, other functions of the school can be handled via software-generated reports. Attendance, discipline, lunch-- everything about the students can be reduced to numbers and thrown up on a screen. Managing staff can also be handled via screen. Everyone is familiar with the meeting that should have been a e-mail, but if you work for a MBS devotee, you'll experience e-mails that should have been a face-to-face interaction (it's much harder for your subordinates to disagree with you effectively via e-mail).

MBS presents a variety of problems. Do the numbers mean what you think they mean? The lowered numbers for student discipline could mean that your student body is behaving better, or it could mean that your staff is tired of handling discipline via digitized forms.

MBS is also problematic because schools run on relationships, and MBS doesn't do much to build them. If your students can't identify you because they rarely see you in the halls or the cafeteria, you haven't built much of a relationship. "I don't recognize your face, but I know your scores," doesn't really warm anyone's heart. Nor do you build much of a relationship with people who have devoted their lives to the entire work of teaching when you send the message that only scores are critical. "I don't need to stop by your classroom and see what you're doing-- I can just look up your numbers," is a chilling, dismissive message.

The big irony here is that teachers have always gathered mountains of data, tons of information about their students. But because they don't reduce all that information to numbers and record them in some fancy software, all that information is ignored by data-centered managers. Management By Screen is like management with blinders on, seeing only one small slice of information and mistaking it for the full picture. Some administrators may claim that their data-based management is informed by many other sources of information, but if checking out those data reports is the most important part of their day, they are just kidding themselves and short-changing their schools.

Originally posted at Forbes.