Failing Brown v. Board of Education

If you're not regularly exposed to the problem, you might think that finding the ways in which non-white non-wealthy students are shortchanged would require deep and nuanced research. As it turns out, finding the ways in which education fails to serve those students requires no more careful research than finding the nose on the front of your face.

The Journey For Justice Alliance is based in Chicago, but it's an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 24 cities across the country. They are working and organizing for community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. They're the folks behind the #WeChoose movement  (as in "we choose education equity, not the illusion of school choice." Look at their member groups and you'll find honest-to-goodness community grass roots organizations, not just one more astroturf group funded by Gates, Walton, et al. Their director, Jitu Brown, is one of the most powerful speakers for education and equity it has ever been my pleasure to hear.

Last spring they issued a report-- "Failing Brown v. Board"-- that looks at the gap between the schools that serve primarily wealthy white families and those that serve non-wealthy families of color. Their findings are not encouraging.

The fact is, public schools in Black and Latino communities are not “failing.” They have been failed. More accurately, these schools have been sabotaged for years by policy-makers who fail to fully fund them, by ideologues who choose to experiment with them, by “entrepreneurs” who choose to extract public taxpayer dollars from education systems for their own pockets.

The report also rejects the notion that money doesn't matter, or that somehow the children and their families are responsible. And they know what successful, fully-resourced schools look like

They offer a culturally relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum, smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, wrap-around emotional and academic supports, a student-centered school climate and meaningful parent and community engagement. These are the hallmarks of what Journey for Justice calls sustainable community schools. 

J4J performed a fairly simple piece of research-- looking at course offerings in various schools across twelve cities. They acknowledge that such a comparison isn't perfect, that schools may offer courses that are never actually taught, that the course offering list doesn't tell you about the quality of those courses. But the findings are still pretty stark. Take just one specific example:

Here are some of the findings of the report:

In every single pairing, majority white schools offered both more academic subjects and more "enrichment" subjects in the arts than majority Black and/or Brown schools. Majority white schools offered more foreign languages, more high-level math options, more AP courses. The range of offerings in arts, music, dance and theater was far greater in majority white schools.

I would like to expand that paragraph, to layer on more so that it dominated this piece and commanded attention just by its largeness, but the gap between majority white schools and non-wealthy schools for students of color is just so stark that it defies expansion. It's bad. It's wrong. And other research backs up the findings of this report.

Charter fans are going to say, "See? That's why we need to build more charters, so we can get some of those children of color out of there," but why should those children have to sacrifice the other big benefit that majority white schools enjoy-- a school in their own community that they can attend with their neighbors? And why do we need a complicated  web of privatized schools to fix the problem. We know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the fact that politicians and leaders have fixed the problem for each of the affluent majority white schools.

It's like you have twenty kids in a cafeteria, and ten sit down with a steak dinner and the other ten get bowls of cold oatmeal, and when someone complains about it, a bunch of folks pop up to propose some complex system by which one of the oatmeal kids will be sent out to a restaurant across town. No! Just get back out in the kitchen and use the same tools and supplies that you demonstrably already have to make steak dinners for the rest of the kids.

The report quotes NEA president Lily Eskelsen-Garcia saying, in part, "Until you can say every school looks like your best public school, we have not arrived."

Read the report, look at the actions that J4J calls for from federal, state and local authorities, and add your voice. We can do better than this. We must do better than this.

The Fundamental Fallacy of Charter Schools

Before we talk about the quality of education or the importance of freed, when it comes to charter schools, there's a much more fundamental fallacy that we must address first, a fallacy that addresses a premise of virtually every charter program launched in this country.

You cannot run multiple school districts for the same amount of money you used to spend to operate just one.


This really should not come as a surprise to anyone. When was the last time you heard of a business of any sort saying, "The money is getting tight, and we need to tighten our belts. So let's open up some new facilities."

Opening up charter schools can only drive up the total cost of educating students within a system, for several reasons.

Let's imagine a school district that serves 1,000 students. Five charters open up in the district, so that now the public system serves 500 students, and each of the charters enrolls 100. What exactly makes this more expensive?

Duplication of personnel. Let's assume that the six districts employ the same number of teachers that the old single district did. They probably don't, because students don't leave in neat class-sized numbers, so if five out of twenty-five fifth graders leave the public school, it can't cut a fifth grade teaching position, but the charter will still have to hire one for those five new students. But let's assume that the numbers work perfectly, and the exact same number of teachers is employed. Each of the six systems will still need its own superintendent (or CEOs or whatever you want to call your highest muckity-muck), building principals, psychologist, business manager, cafeteria manager-- the list can be as long as you like, down to dean of student activities and administrative assistants all around. The six districts will employ more personnel than one did-- and many of the "extra" hires will be the priciest personnel.

Excess capacity. All six schools will operate without knowing year to year what their enrollment will be. Each of the charters will have an optimum number it needs to survive, and it will want to have more seats than that to fill so that it can function at more-than-subsistence level. The public school will have to be prepared to take any and all returnees; if all five hundred charter students decide to come back to public school tomorrow, the public school has to take them in. Ditto if one or more of the charters closes mid-year. So it won't just be a matter of redistributing the original 1,000 seats-- each school will need to maintain extra capacity, which means the total system will maintain far more than 1,000 seats.

Physical plant. Renting or building a school is pricey, and every one of those five charters needs a place to be. Charter advocates in many states have been working on this one with some success, giving charters the right to siphon off some public tax dollars for charter building use. That almost acknowledges the truth-- that you can't add five new buildings to a school system at zero cost to that system.

New costs. Charter schools often spend truckloads of money on advertising and marketing. In fact, public schools are sometimes driven to start advertising in order to compete. Nowhere in the old public system finances was there a budget category for advertising. It's a whole new cost to the system.

Some charter advocates will argue that none of this matters because we're talking free market competition. You don't make this argument against Burger King just because they want to build next door to McDonalds. But fast food restaurants draw money from thousands of different customers, which offsets the amount of total money the "food industry" is spending. Schools draw money from one source-- the taxpayers. If the schools in the area start spending more money, there's only one source with which to offset the extra costs.

Some of the increased costs are hidden. The charters may refuse to provide transportation, and so that extra cost is absorbed by the parents. Some charters require parental participation in "volunteer" work at the school. Some draw contributions from generous charter backers; heck sometimes even the feds like to chip in a bit. Some charters try to even things out by paying their staff peanuts. Stale, tiny peanuts. Sometimes the extra cost becomes the fatal blow to a charter school that was run by someone who just didn't understand the funding side of education. But most often the extra cost is absorbed by the public school in the form of slashed programs, cut faculty, and loss of resources for students.

None of this makes a charter-choice system necessarily evil or wrong, but it does make most of them fundamentally dishonest. That may be because nobody wants to go to the taxpayers and say, "We have a great idea for a way to provide robust choice and options for our students, but in order to do it, we're going to have to raise your property taxes a whole bunch." That would be an honest approach, but probably not a successful one. So the fundamental fallacy remains.

Originally posted at Forbes

Jobs' XQ Institute Plugs Competency Based Education

Laurene Powell Jobs is one of the major players in the reformster world. Steve Jobs's widow is the fourth richest woman in the world, and she has been a player in the world of education  venture philanthropy for a while, logging time with NewSchools Venture Fund (We raise contributions from donors and use it to find, fund and support teams of educators and education entrepreneurs who are reimagining public education). She founded the Emerson Collective, a Palo Alto-based do-gooding group (one of their major charitable actions was to give Arne Duncan a job after he left the USED). Emerson also bought controlling interest in The Atlantic. And it turns out that Emerson was also a mystery backer of Education Post, the war room rapid response PR operation for ed reform.

This woman deserves the same attention we give Gates, Broad, Walton, et al

Emerson also launched the XQ Institute, which launched the Super school project, complete with an all-network star-studded variety show PR blitz. But we're going to let that sit for the moment while we contemplate another XQ product.

The "report," "Show What You Know: A Landscape Analysis of Competency-Based Education" is one more sign that A) Reformsters are betting on CBE as the Next Big Thing and B) they don't really know what they're talking about and C) they are crafting some careful PR to push this business. It was commissioned by XQ and produced by Getting Smart, a website/organization under CEO Tom Vander Ark, a guy who has been pushing ed tech and privatization since even before his days at the Gates Foundation.

Who else is here? Russlynn Ali, a co-founder and CEO of XQ, manager of education fund at Emerson, former assistant secretary for civil rights at USED under Duncan, chief of staff to president of LAUSD board, vice-president of Education Trust, and assistant director of policy and research at Broad Foundation.

All told, there's a lot of privatizing reformster love in this room.

So what do we find in the report?

Ali's Foreword

Ali is going to lay out the foundation for the arguments to follow, and she ticks off all the usual items. Education has been doing things one way for 125 years (marked up, I guess, from the usual 100). Seat time is the old way, and the rules that go with it are getting in the way of awesome new reform things. Let's have "learning-based milestones," and let's call it "competency based education." Oh, but the rules, and the course divisions, and the grade-levels-- they all just bum reformers out. So we asked Getting Smart, a group really dedicate to promoting CBE and ed tech, to give us an objective view of the lay of the land. No prescriptions here, no sir. Just trying to provoke some thoughts and spark some discussion.

What did Getting Smart do to reap this harvest of information? They talked to fifty educators and read forty publications. Check the appendix and you will find that the people and publications were all folks who are heavily invested in reform ideas and ed tech promotion. So it will be no shock to discover that what Getting Smart "found" is that enthusiasm is high for CBE among people and corporations that are positioning themselves to profit from CBE. The "shift to competency-based education is occurring rapidly, right now" and there are still opportunities to "help make it happen faster, better, and more equitably." Hurry-- you can still get in on the ground floor of this investment opportunity.

Are there any reasons for caution? Sure. Increasing capacity might put a big burden on teachers. The detailed feedback will be a real burden. Hmmmm… if only there were tools that could help. Also, CBE has to be specifically focused on equity because the current system fails in that area, and yes, we've seen the research showing that non-wealthy noon-white students are actually doing worse in CBE-type models.

Getting Smart thinks the old system is "stuck" on things like conventional definitions ("ninth grader") and compartmentalizing "how and when teachers interact with students" and we want you to know right up front that we are not considering the possibility that any of the system is "stuck" because certain aspects are time-tested and known to work. We will start with the assumption that the old system needs to be scrapped. Here we go.

Just Some Things To Clear Up

Right off the bat, though the report hews to the current Unspoken Law of CBE (Don't portray it as a algorithm-run computer-delivered education product), the report has to admit that the "leading advocate for CBE is the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). Their definition is "an advancement on demonstrated mastery with well-defined competencies that empower students."

The report argues that everything-- the basic architecture of school-- will have to be changed (see how we just skipped the whole argument about why CBE would be better)  and that instead of taking a generation to do it, we can speed things up by setting a goal of near-full adoption within ten years, focusing on college- and Career-ready outcomes, accelerating the achievement of previously underserved learners--

Yeah, I'm going to jump in here to note that the report is filled with all sorts of off-hand tossed-in jaw droppers. So mark that-- to get CBE running sooner, just get all the slower learners to learn faster. Easy peasy.

-- and aligning with "quality learning goals." XQ just happens to have some.

The report throws in some definitions of various terms, noting that CBE, Proficiency-bsed Learning and Mastery-based learning are used as synonyms. They also get into definitions of personalized learning, blended learning, deeper learning, and student-centered learning. All of them are pretty close in meaning, and not a single definition mentions technology or computers. Way to stick to the script, team!

Chapter 1: The Rationale

Here comes the evidence for making the transition.

The corporate training world has shifted to this model to "improve job readiness." Note: we will not discuss whether or not the goal of education should be job readiness. Also, Sal Khan, the video-ed king, says all students should master 100% of skills at a high level before moving on. Note: we do not discuss what high level, the value of talking about skills rather than knowledge, or what the system should do with students who fail to meet that high level or that high percent.

Learning science knows things. Here are some quotes and links. They lead us to Insights."It is no longer enough to simply develop skills and obtain knowledge; to achieve full potential, students will need to apply learning and transfer it to new contexts, which no doubt requires deeper learning and tapping into problem-solving, critical thinking, and self-management skills ." Seriously-- does the report think this is a new idea?

Equity is important. This is evidence for making that transition?

Agency is really important. We know this because there was a conference and people, like Michelle Weise of the reform Christen Institute, said so. Somehow, knowing exactly what they have been told they're capable of increases agency.

XQ learning (that's what we're going to call this now?) should be deep and rigorous because it will aim for students to be holders of foundational knowledge, masters of all fundamental literacies, original thinkers for an uncertain world, generous collaborators for tough problems, and learners for life. Not for the last time I am reading this report wondering what exactly these people think is going on in schools, because an awful lot of this is about reinventing the wheel, but, you know, a really shiny, sparkly wheel-- and look, we've invented spokes and tire treads!

The report then doubles back to underline that CBE fits the way the work world now works. Never mind that fancy shmancy liberal arts education. You need to be able to list the useful specific skills that somebody would want to pay for.

Chapter 2: Issues and Priorities

The chapter starts with the unsubstantiated header that CBE is more complex than our current time-based system. Is that so? Just take their word for it. Only smart people can see how complex and deep the emperors\'s new education system really is.

Actual useful question posed next: should we require students to demonstrate competence via "consistently applied external validations of narrow measures of knowledge and skill" (aka standardized quizzes) or use authentic assessments with teacher judgment? The report chooses both.

"CBE provides a great opportunity for gap-closing equity." Somehow. They do admit that it could open up new equity chasms based on students who move much more slowly through the material. But they have nine design principles straight from iNACOL and Competency Works that ought to fix the whole problem. They keep coming back to their mantra-- if CBE is designed with equity in mind, then everything will be okay.

The report defines six obstacles to creating CBE; let me list them and add what they've overlooked.

1) Defining Competencies

The Common Core are swell, but we still don't have aligned assessments for most of them. Nor will you ever, because the standards are so vague that it can't seriously be done. Here's one plucked mostly at random:

Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama 

Exactly how would you definitively determine that a student has mastered that standard? Does it matter if the story is Green Eggs and Ham or Grapes of Wrath? Does it matter whether the analysis is insightful or superficial or regurgitated boilerplate?

This is the "lack of well-defined competencies" that is a huge problem. The report notes a lack of definition of work-ready skills and, well, no kidding. Years of talking about college- and career-ready skills and we still don't have anything remotely resembling an authoritative list of what skills are required to be ready for any and all careers and/or colleges. We don't have it, and we'll never have it because the very idea of such a list is ridiculous. Therefor CBE will never have a legitimate definitive list of well-defined competencies.

Also, lack of equity has to be addressed. How do you set up a list of competencies that addresses "previously underserved students."

2) Transition challenges

This means the transition from the old system to the new one. This subsection, like most of the chapter, would benefit from insights and observations about CBE's recent crash-and-burn in Maine, but the writers lacked either the time or the guts to go there. Too bad. Looking at a place where the transition failed would probably give you some clues about what has to be handled. But instead the report offers these possible pressure points for a transition.

From grades to rubrics is a problem, both for people who are assessing and for parents, who want an answer to "How's my kid doing?"

"Moving from a culture of success vs. failure to a culture of revision." Nope. Here's another thing that CBE advocates consistently try to skim past-- CBE is a pass/fail system. You get multiple attempts to pass, but at the end of the day, it's a pass/fail system, and that's the culture change you have to deal with. A culture that says "This is the minimum you have to do to move on. Doing more won't help you in any way, but you have to do this minimum sooner or later." They do acknowledge part of the issue as "pressure to retain privilege," as in, high-achieving students and their parents get upset when they realize this system doesn't care if you are a high achiever. You get the exact same payoff as someone who just barely squeaked by.

On the other end of the scale, we find what they call a problem of "limited supports." For low achievers, the fact that they must clear each competency bar can be demoralizing and leave them stuck in place for a whole lot of time. Imagine you are ten and you have been working on the same module for a month. You will need a buttload of support for that kid.

This is the problem with CBE that is not addressed in the previous point-- if you set the bar too low, the system is boring, but if you set the bar too high, a large number of students will never clear it. That's why the mantra of CBE, all the way back to the days it was called Outcome Based Education, is "all can learn all." Because if we admit there are some competencies that some students can never meet, then we have a huge bug in the system.

Also, we need to have teacher preparation, because when implementation of flawed models go poorly, it's always the teachers' fault.

3) Tools and Resources

What's the problem with CBE tools and resources? We don't have them. We don't have learning management systems that can handle it, and we don't have the curriculum materials to implement it, either.

4) Technical Challenges

We don't have any kind of common record-keeping model for this system. We don't really know how it will work, so we don't know how to record the results. In our heart, we really see this as a system in which competencies are acquired from a variety of programs and educational opportunities (students can learn anywhere), but we don't know how that turns into a shared and interoperable record.  And we don't have a way to combine formative assessments but could possibly use data tagging and-- holy schneikies! I actually called this one back in 2014-- Common Core can perhaps best be understood as a set of data tags to use in digitizing all students school data.

Bottom line, CBE generates a ton of data which in turn creates a need for a system that can handle it all. And although they said they'd consider both standardized assessments and authentic assessments scored by teachers, note that the teacher one makes this whole data managing thing way harder. The most obvious (if not necessarily best) solution to technical challenges will always be to make everyone take the same standardized assessments.

5) Reporting

"What the hell is this? Where is my kid's report card? How am I supposed to know how she's doing? And how am I supposed to put this gobbledeegook with her college application?"

Also, the NCAA likes things the old way, too.

6) Accountability

The fed regulations support grade-level grouping and seat time. Also, nobody has done CBE well enough to provide a useful example of how it could work, yet. Again, this would have been a good time to talk about Maine.

Design Choices

So what do these obstacles mean in terms of choices to make in designing a CBE system?

Short answer: They don't know how to do it, but, boy howdy, it will be hard.

Getting the standards and goals right is necessary, and hard. Assessing and tracking "sub-skills" is hard and requires designers to deal with the fact that, as the report admits via quote, fragmenting skills into mini skills gets you parts that are way less than the whole. Rich standards become a checklist. Maybe subskills in clusters of micro-- oh, good lord. They have no idea. Also, the quote Michael Fullan saying that the work should be irresistibly engaging" and "elegantly efficient."

There's a skill map here, and the assertion that the next generation of schools will promote deeper understanding in a context of broader aims. Well, that sounds mighty fine. Once again the report seems to elevate these future schools by depicting education as droning lecture. Also, my car is a great car if you compare it to a donkey-drawn wagon.

A chart shows that learning processes should be more multiple dimensions-- an interesting challenge when we're breaking everything down into mini-competencies. And again with the mythical traditional school. "Traditional schools rely on finals, or end-of-course exams." Really? Says who? Reformsters saddled public schools with a single Big Standardized Test at the end of the year, but I literally have never encountered in all these years as teacher or student a single teacher anywhere who relies on a final at the end of the year.

And here's a moment when they almost admit this is an algorithm-controlled computer-centered system-- Traditional schools depend on teacher judgment nut next-generation models "combine automated formative assessments with teacher observations."

Then there's a whole sidebar on standards-based grading, another part of CBE that is unpopular and hard to pull off (hint-- we're back to the pass-fail problem again).

Chapter 3: What's Out There Now

Model schools, learning tools, student supports, teacher development, and policy are the five areas in which they've seen things happening.

The model schools are all barely-begun babies. Skip. The learning tools don't fully exist yet, and school experience with other digital tools has not exactly made them excited about one more computer program coming at them. Tools they list include Summit and AltSchool, two charter groups that shifted to a software-dispersing business model. They also include Power School, a program I'm familiar with from years of taking roll on it, and if that's their idea of a next-generation tool, they're in more trouble than I thought.

They ask some good questions in this chapter (What is the actual work students do? What is the quality of the curriculum?) but they don't really have answers for them (Instructional materials ought to be aligned, as soon as someone creates them. We really need some good curriculum.) Khan academy. NWEA. There are a lot of deeply mediocre resources name-checked in this chapter.

The policy part boils down to "We need to get the rules changed to fit our way of doing things even though our way isn't really agreed-upon, established, or proven to actually work."

Maine doesn't come up in this chapter.

Chapter 4: Technical Development and Opportunities

Leads off with an ed tech classic-- the list of things that computers are totally going to do in the near future. This is the song of ed tech, the recurring sweet promise by which teachers have been seduced again and again and again and again and again-- something awesome is right around the corner and any day now we will be able to do the most wonderful stuff. Better tests that measure critical thinking have been almost here for over a decade. Software that can assess writing is always just on the verge of being released.

This is no different. Adaptive learning will soon be "nearly as good as one-on-one tutoring." There will be automated feedback, citing the writing feedback systems that are already use (it does not mention that these systems, without exception, are lousy).

And then we turn the page and-- oh joy! Blockchain! The same marvel that brings us bitcoins will make it possible for students to amass credentials any where at any time from anyone, and yet keep those credentials all in their blockchain purse. It will store new kinds of credentials, the kinds of credentials that let entrepreneurs go straight to market without having to be approved by some silly authority.

Chapter 5: Recommendations

First, though CBE models will require time and resources "new school development or high school redesign (directly or through partners) provides a high return and relatively low-risk investment strategy ." There's money to be made here, folks.

Second, a whole lot of curriculum and assessment toolage is required. How about some open source stuff? You know-- where teachers just give away their work for free!

Third, "a coherent approach to exponential technology." This seems to mean that private start-ups are too risky, so a public-private team would be better. You know, where the public part shoulders risk and expense, and the private part makes money. Sweet deal, eh?

Fourth, new approaches to technical and design challenges. Because what we've got isn't cutting it. They suggest design competitions, and it's true that competitions for grants ands prizes are great because you get to have a whole bunch of people work for you, but you only have to pay one of them.

Fifth, keep working on it. Keep advocating and supporting lobbying groups and publishing slick reports.

Call To Action

Big finish. We need to ask three questions-- what do we want students to know, how will we know what they know and are able to do, and what experiences and supports will get them there. CBE answers those questions differently, without grade levels, time tables, and discrete subject areas. Also, don't forget equity. And outcomes, networks, evidence and transcripts.

Basically, we have a sort of a vision of what we'd kind of like to do, but we haven't worked out any of the specifics yet. It's almost as if we are a bunch of educational amateurs who are trying to design schools from scratch without any fundamental knowledge about teaching and learning and schools.

Are You Still Here?

Good for you. You can look at the appendix that shows you all the people they talked to, like Blockchain Research Institute and the College Board and Florida Virtual School and NWEA and IDEA Public [sic] Schools and Microsoft and Relay Graduate School of Education and Udacity and NewsSchool Venture Fund and seriously, there is not a single legitimate non-reform source on the list.

But as you can see, all the various reform constituencies are lined up behind CBE, even though there isn't a single, solitary aspect of CBE that they can point to and say, "We have absolutely worked this part out now." They are still thoroughly enthusiastic about coming to your school and offering your students the chance to be beta testers for a system that doesn't actually exist yet. How can anything possibly go wrong.

Skills vs. Content (Pt. 687,231)

You should know who Jack Ma Yun is. He's the Chinese combination of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (without the rich parents) who has been behind some of the most profitable internet start-ups in China (China Pages, Alibaba).

And like every other sentient being on the planet, he occasionally has some thoughts to share about education:



As you can see here, Jack comes down in the "Students don't need to know anything because they can just Google it camp." We should teach students soft skills, art and sports skills, skills skills skills that computers don't have. I haven't actually disagreed with a millionaire yet this week, so let me go ahead and explain why I think Jack is just plain wrong.

"A teacher should learn all the time." Okay, he's on solid ground there. That's about the last moment.

Ma doubles the usual "school hasn't changed in a century" and says we've been doing the same thing for 200 years-- knowledge based. But "we cannot teach our kids to compete with machines" because the machines are smarter. By which I think he means that machines have more information stored. But he wants to teach things on which computers cannot catch up.

Ma is asked what those skills are that we need to teach. "Values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others-- " these are the things knowledge doesn't teach you. So Ma says teach our kids sports, music, art-- everything we teach should be different from machines.

There's certainly some appeal in what he's saying. But. But but but but. How can you develop and apply values if you don't have any knowledge about the area that you are applying your values to? How do you even develop a value without any knowledge? How, for instance, do you arrive at a personal value about how humans should govern themselves if you don't know anything about the history of human government? How do you believe in things if you don't have knowledge? Yes, faith is a swell thing, but it doesn't develop in a vacuum. If you lack knowledge, you might be inclined to, say, believe anything a narcissistic demagogue tells you without ever realizing that he's lying through his teeth. How do you care for others if you don't know anything about them, their culture, the context in which they operate, how human beings have behaved throughout history? And what does your care mean if you response to "I have a disease that needs immediate treatment" is "I really care about you, so maybe we can google your disease" as if WebMD is as good as an actual doctor. How do you work with a team if you don't know anything? What exactly will you contribute to the team if you have no knowledge base or area of expertise-- will you just volunteer to be the one who types questions into the Google search bar? And finally (I saved this for last because it's the worst) how can you possibly be an independent thinker if you don't personally possess knowledge that you can think about? How can you sort through the sea of knowledge that the computers have and separate the good stuff from the baloney if you don't personally possess the knowledge base with which to evaluate what you find?

Smart people make this mistake all the time-- they have literally forgotten learning things and so assume that a certain baseline amount of knowledge just springs into the human mind fully formed, that it's just "common sense." Hell, a complaint I have heard from elementary teachers is that some Common Core math materials say you're supposed to focus on process and not do things like memorize the times tables-- but then give lessons to understand process that assume that, of course, the students know the times tables.

It's hard to accomplish much of anything, to develop or use any skills, if you don't know stuff. And if Ma's argument is that people need to know stuff, but schools don't need to teach it-- just tell the kids to go look it up-- well, that's been an option since the invention of printing, and yet, somehow, students have still needed live humans to help them through the process of knowing stuff.

This is one of those things that I feel as if I've said a million times, but which I will keep saying as long as it needs to be said--

Skills, even soft skills, do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot have skills without knowledge any more than you can build a house without lumber, any more than you can have waves without some medium through which the waves move, any more than you can learn to sculpt with no material except air. American slaveowners did not keep blacks enslaved by restricting skills-- they restricted knowledge. Life is harder for people who don't Know Things, and the fact that we can now know a lot more things with a lot less looking up effort hasn't changed that. I would say at this point we've collected evidence that people who don't know things have their ignorance actually worsened by technology.

Jack Ma Yun may be crazy rich, but on this point he's simply wrong.

The Real Digital Divide

You remember the digital divide. The rich kids were going to have all the tech, all the screens, all the widgets, and be plugged into the bestest, fastest internet. Poor kids would be straggling, cut off from the wonders of modern tech and trying to catch up. OMGZ, etc.

The assumption underlying this is one that we've allowed to permeate education-- more tech is always better.

But that assumption has been challenged, and according to a piece by Nellie Bowles in the NYT -- wait (looks again) yeah, okay-- style section, the digital divide is not quite what we were expecting.

It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction. 

Bowles is overstating her own case here-- what the article says is that wealthy children use the screen less than the non-wealthy (five hours and forty-two minutes compared to eight hours and seven minutes, per day), almost-six screen hours a day is not exactly rolling back to the stone age.

Her broader observation is worth underlining (hence this post), particularly in education, where the rise of competency-based education (or proficiency-based learning or personalized learning-- I wish we'd agree on name for this whole trend) is definitely aimed at 1) more tech for 2) less wealthy schools. We've long worried about the creation of a two-tier education system; it looks increasingly as if one tier difference will be tech. The wealthy will be taught by humans; the less wealthy will be taught by screens.

As Bowles notes, this is already evident in some disturbing places, like the push for on-line pre-K that already is up and running in Utah (UPSTART), soon to expand to other states, even though we know full well that's exactly the wrong direction to go with the littles. In none of those states can we expect wealthy parents to pull their children from the Montessori Pre-K in order to enroll them ins Stare-At-A-Screen Preschool. Meanwhile, Google has worked mighty hard to make itself an indispensable part of school's infrastructure.

I taught at a Google school. Some of their tools have a level of utility that makes them, if not attractive, at least functional. They're the Radio Shack of app suites-- not anyone's first choice for any of their functions, but workable if you don't have better options. Google Docs is fine enough as long as you don't want to do anything else with it except type it and look at it on a screen (printing can be a nightmare). And Google has a frustrating lack of cross-platform shared capabilities; this blog and Classroom are both Google properties, but there are a million things I can do on this blog that Classroom was incapable of doing. And schools rarely read any of the fine print-- the part that says "It's Free!" is generally all many need to see. Parents are correct to be concerned about privacy and to ask the school pointed questions.

This, beyond the slight difference in screen hours, may be the other important digital divide-- the mindful and informed use of the tech.

I've made this point till I'm blue in the ears (way past my face)-- people of a Certain Age who think that Kids These Days know all about that tech stuff are nuts. The average teen knows as much about ed tech as the average driver knows about how a car works. My students, for the most part, knew how to operate their favorite apps-- and that was about it. Most couldn't run a search to save their lives, nor were their navigational skills any better than those of my mom.

All of my students used screens, and all of my students knew how to operate them to some extent. Only some of my students understood how any of it worked. Only some of my students have parents who talked to them about how the tech worked and how best to use it, or not. Only some of my students understand that they are using products created by businesses, and not magical gifts donated just to brighten their days. That last one is probably the most important one. Hence this quote from the article:

“These companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents,” said Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Kansas City. “We’re all getting duped.”

“Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time,” she said. 

We've been encouraged to think of tech, including ed tech, as free, under our control, gifted to us with no strings attached. We've been encouraged to not only ignore the man behind the curtain, but to not even notice the curtain is there. We've been encouraged to not so much as pause for a second to contemplate the effects of screen time, of socializing via tech, of staring into a blinking screen instead of another human's eyes.

Is there a danger of over-reacting? Sure. When written language appeared, elders complained about how Kids These Days were losing their memory skills and wasting time staring at those little dots. But I'll worry about over-reacting when there are more signs that people are reacting at all. This is why we hear so much about tech people limiting their own children's screen time-- they live behind the curtain and understand better what's back there. It's not that tech is inherently evil or destructive, but a hammer can be converted from useful tool to a dangerous object if you just start flinging it around without any thought to its proper nature.

You can have my tech when you pry it from my cold, cramped hands, and I have no doubt that the twins and my grandchildren will become screened sooner or later, but not without plenty of discussion about what it is, what it does, and how best to use it (or not). And that will put them on one side of the real digital divide. It's not a matter of who has the tech; it's about who has actually seen the wizard.

ICYMI: Scary Time of Year Edition (10/28)

Just a few things to catch up on. Remember, sharing is caring.

Documenting Maine's Failure To Implement Proficiency Based Education

Maine tried to turn the whole state into proof of concept for PBL/CBE. Things didn't work out. Here are some of the details.

Maine Went All in on Proficiency Based Learning The Rolled It Back

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat also took a look at Maine's failure. Just in case you want to see the same disaster from a different angle

Putting Public Back Into Public Accountability

An answer to the question, "Well, if we don't grade schools on test scores, how will we know if they're any good?"

Kentucky Pension Crisis

How those wacky hedge fund guys took a state's pension program to the cleaners.

Puerto Rico Recovery

More disaster capitalism on parade.

Georgetown Law Students Objects To Exam Software

So what if your school said that in order to take exams, you had to load some of their software on your own computer.

Hack Education Weekly News

Audrey Watters does a weekly roundup of education news, just in case you don't get enough to do from me.  

A Buttload of YouTube Education Money

YouTube has decided to sink a ton of money into educational videos. Please, may some go to the Honest Trailers people.

PA Keystone Exam: The Monster We Refuse To Let Die

Steven Singer looks at the latest development in Big Standardized Test. 

Here's Hoping That The Myth of the Bad Teacher Is Finally Laid To Rest

Could we have finally reached the end of the search for the fabled Bad Teacher? It's pretty to think so.

How High Schools Shaped American Cities 

Amy Lueck has an interesting look at how schools are tied to community, and how school choice threatens both.

Will the Save Our Schools Movement Propel a Change Election

Ruth Coniff at The Progressive takes a look at what's going on in the resistance and how it might affect the election

DeBlasio School Renewal

In what should come as a surprise to nobody, NYC's Renewal School turnaround plan flopped-- and some students were left to experience the flopping first hand.

Snake Oil, Charter Schools, and Disingenuous Debates  

A local op-ed in the Johnson City Press is a blunt response to charter supporters.

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected  

Nellie Bowles in the NYT says that one group will be taught by humans, and one by screens. Take a wild guess at which is which.

A Teacher's Opinion and the Classroom Door

Twice this week the issue of teachers and their opinions cropped up, first in David Berliner's thoughtful piece at The Answer Sheet and again in Robert Pondiscio's reaction to a math teacher's tweet about the Kavanaugh hearings. Berliner was not wrong in answering student questions about how he would use his vote, and Pondiscio is not wrong to point out that a teacher's First Amendment rights are surprisingly limited inside a classroom.

I've thought about this issue a great deal in my career, my thinking propelled by three factors:

1) I had teachers in high school who spent time trying to tell us what to think, and I hated it.

2) For most of my career, I have taught American literature, and you can't teach about the literature without talking about the culture it's rooted in, and you can't talk about American culture without talking about religion, race and gender.

3) My teaching of writing has always been rooted in getting students to express themselves, and that's hard to do with a classroom policy of "Only some ideas are okay to express."

So as a way of working through all this one more time, let me walk through what that meant in a classroom, and how it was challenged in my last years of teaching.

My students over the decades heard some version of the following many, many times:

Okay. Before we start on these notes and discussion, I'll remind you that I'm not advocating this and I'm not attacking it. My job is not to tell you to agree with these people or to disagree with these people-- but my job is to convey to you as clearly as I can what they believed about how the world works. 

And that was a prelude to laying out Puritan beliefs and Romanticism and Realism. In answer to questions ("How could the Puritans belief that material things didn't matter but that material things were a sign of God's favor?") my answers were prefaced with "I think they would give this as an answer..." And I committed to representing each set of beliefs as true-to-the-originals as I could, making sure I neither highlighted the problems inherent in them nor ignored them. It is not an easy balancing act, and it requires a sincere effort to understand how the world looked from that person's point of view.

I know over the course of the year I challenged and confused some students, who found, for instance, both Romanticism and Critical Realism compelling while I was explaining them. That's okay. For many (if not most) of my eleventh graders, it was a revelation just to grasp that there are different ways of understanding the world and figuring out how to be fully human in it.

The same principles applied in some writing instruction. I assigned essays that dealt with controversial topics, and we kicked them off by arguing about them in class, and to make sure the discussion kept going, I always argued all sides. "What do you think," students would invariably ask, partly because they were curious and mostly because they wanted to know what correct answer they should write about. "You don't need to know," I said.

Pro tip. I never assigned an essay about a topic on which I had a fixed opinion that only one side was defensible and that the other was just plain wrong.

For discussions of literature, it always came down to evidence. I was in college when I realized there are two types of English teachers-- the ones who think that there's only one way to read each work and their job is to convey that right answer, and the ones who think that the act of reading and building a relationship with the work could lead to many shades of meaning which were all okay as long as you could back it up. And that this didn't mean anything was fair game; you can claim that Hamlet is suffering from PTSD due to alien abduction in a previous life, but you can't make a very good case for it. Every year some smartass would argue that "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" (a poem that serves as a great example of how much difference one word choice can make) is about Santa Claus, and every year I would say, "Make your case," and they would give it a shot, and the rest of the class would pick them apart.

Discussions about non-content issues are thornier. What to do with the student who wants to argue that women should be silent and do as they're told, or that religious people are mentally ill?

I've always believe that truth (not Truth-- I'm not a huge believer in Truth) rises, and that if you pursue it honestly, with openness to where the trail leads, it will finally rise above the rest of the flotsam and jetsam to reveal itself. Not that we can't all push and contrive and argue as a way of helping lift it, but one of the advantages of teaching in the same small place for almost forty years as that you see an awful lot of people who Figure It Out eventually. It helps if you can let go of the notion that you need to get them to figure it out Right This Minute.

And Ponticello (the guy whose tweet started much of the discussion) is correct when he says we need to teach civics, but we are always teaching the soft stuff whether we intend to or not, and so it's important to hold onto our intentionality.

Here's a story. Years ago I was a class advisor, and as a sort of goof, a couple of less-than-stellar students ran for class officers. And as sort of a goof, the students elected them. I had a moment when I was counting votes. My mentor, the person who was supposed to be my extra set of eyes, said, "Look, it's fairly close. This will be disaster. Just fix the results." Turns out that advisors sometimes do that. I was tempted. I didn't do it. Then, to make things worse, the student who was elected president moved out of town and the vice-president less-than-serious student was suddenly in charge of the senior year. "Fix this," the other students said. "Let me out of this," he pleaded. But I made them live with their choices, and nobody died, and somewhere out there are a couple hundred adults who learned years ago that A) voting matters and B) you can rise to an occasion when you have to.

My point (I'm sure I had one) is that in the classroom we often want to sacrifice long term results for short-term comfort. And that includes the desire to straighten out students who believe terrible stupid things. People get where they're going in their own way, in their own time. We can't force them to do otherwise.

Now, there has always been a hole in my approach that has bugged me from time to time, but just flared up something awful over the past two or three years. That would be students who won't engage and insist on holding on to facts that aren't facts.

This is the challenge of the Trump era. A student says that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya. What do you do? How do you respond in a way that respects the student's autonomy as a human being while still dealing with the absolute incorrectness of what they're saying.

"Two plus two is five" was easy, and "No, Hamlet's mother's name is not Ethel" also. I could work my way past "I think the verb in this sentence is 'balcony'," But we now live in an era in which facts have been politicized, and to challenge even the simplest statement about a sentence recorded in a video is to make a political statement. It is hard to find a way forward in conversations like "Someone sent me a bomb. Here it is," and the response, "No they didn't. No it isn't."

If a science teacher teaches evolution, it's a political statement. Hell, the Flat Earth Society is growing, so round earth teaching is political. As many have noted, what do we even do with value judgments like "Bullying is bad."

I still think a teacher should not be foisting their opinions on their students. It's not our job to tell them what to think or what to value. But it is our job to tell our truth-- hell, that's all we do. We cannot keep our opinions out of the classroom-- it's not humanly possible, and even the decision to keep our opinions out of the classroom is a way of injecting our opinions about opinions into the classroom. And we live in a time when other people are thrusting their opinions into our classrooms. The President suggests that immigrants are rapists and criminals, that all immigrants should be run out of the country-- that's an opinion that lands right in our classrooms. When the President suggests that some of the people who want to see some of our students, literally, dead are "very fine people," that is an opinion that lands right in our classrooms. When people decide that it's okay to start flying Confederate flags everywhere, that opinion lands right in our classroom. And this is not about tolerance or coming together to compromise-- there is no "compromise" with people who say, "I think people like you should be thrown out of the country, or just killed." Those opinions all land in our classrooms, along with the ones that say women owe men sex or black folks are stupid and lazy or that white men are the most oppressed group in the country. We can't pretend they aren't there, and we can't pretend that we don't know they're wrong. To stay silent is to become an accomplice to gaslighting.

As open as I was, I had rules. Everyone in the room treats everyone else with respect. No exceptions. No disrespectful actions, no disrespectful language. I had values that I held onto, and I was explicit about almost everything.

And looking back, I guess what I did was model all of that. This is what I believe. This is why I believe it. And when all is said and done, this is my classroom and we're going to live by these beliefs in here. For me, a basic element of respect is that you don't try to force someone to think or feel a particular way, and that is doubly true when you are in a position of power, acting as an agent of the state. You have a job, and your job is to help those young humans become more fully themselves, learning what they think it means to be human in the world. That means you have to show them a complete human, and that means you have to balance between leaving them free to figure things out and telling them what you passionately and deeply believe to be true. If this doesn't seem like a very clear and straightforward set of rules, that's because it's not a very clear-cut uncomplicated feat to pull off. That's why they pay teachers the big bucks.