Children's Insurance Headed the Wrong Way

From the file of Things That Are Going To Affect Education Indirectly, we get this:

Roughly 276,000 more children were uninsured in 2017 than the year before, bringing the total to more than 3.9 million, according to a report released Thursday by Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families.

We are far short of the disastrous high in numbers of uninsured children back in 2008, but the trend since that fateful year has been one of steady improvement-- until last year.

Children without insurance cannot help but bring their troubles to school. Their adults have to look at very sign of illness or injury and weigh the severity against the lack of insurance, which means that children without insurance will more often go untreated, and, if they're old enough to understand the situation, worried about their own health.

It's a problem for children to come to school sick. It's a problem for children to stay at home sick with an untreated illness, but even mild illness can be a problem if the state or school has strict sick day policies. If a doctor's note is required to get the child back in, an uninsured child's family faces one more tough choice-- can we afford a doctor's appointment just to get a note, do we send the child to school sick so that we don't need a note, or do we keep the sick child home, send her back without a note, and just watch the issues of unexcused or illegal absences just start to snowball?

The screwed-up mess that is health care in this country is certainly not something that schools will have a hand in fixing, but many other issues in society, schools live downhill from all the crap that society's problem generates. The Trump/GOP efforts to squash Obamacare seem likely to make this trend worse. Schools can only watch and hope.

College Board: Help Us Market Our Product

Right down to its name, which sounds like some sort of non-profit official education oversight panel, the College Board has a history of marketing its product while trying not to look like a company whose life depends on its ability to sell a product.

In recent years, the market has tightened up, what with the ACT competing effectively and some schools dropping the SAT as an entrance requirement entirely. Plus the research that keeps confirming that the SAT is not the best way to predict college success. The conventional wisdom of my youth (everybody takes the SAT if they want to go to college, because, you know, you just do) has been steadily eroding.

But the College Board has scored some real coups. They managed to con some states into using the SAT as a graduation exam. This is crazy-pants, as the test was not remotely designed to determine if someone is ready to graduate from high school, but the College Board people aren't going to quibble because ka-ching! The test I magical! It measures anything and everything! Have your students take it to determine their personality and shoe size! Ka-ching! They also hired David Coleman as their chief, fresh off his stint as co-creator of the Common Core, for some reason.

Meanwhile, the College Board has developed an entire "suite" of tests, so that students can just keep taking versions of the SAT all the time. And in perhaps the most impressive coup of all, they have managed to convince many states that the use off their other major product-- the AP test, accompanied why the AP class-- is a measure of school quality. Other corporations are so jealous. Imagine if your state decreed that school rankings should count how many people drive Ford's to school, or that school performance scores could get a bump by serving Tyson chicken products in the cafeteria. Ka-ching!

But none of this means that the marketing minds at the College Board are going to rest. For one, they've completely dropped the bogus line about the "new" SAT and how it was impervious to test prep. Now the College Board markets test prep, some in conjunction with Khan Academy. Some of this is just cross-self-marketing. Organize a practice test. Take the Baby SAT's and they will tell you which AP courses you should be asking your school to offer. Much of the test prep stuff is free, because what they'd really like to do is build brand awareness, like Coke and Pepsi, who give away scoreboards and other equipment emblazoned with their logo just so that people will always think of their brand name. If the College Board can just keep its brands out there, then it increases the odds that people will automatically associate excellent students smartitude with AP and going to college with SAT.

Still, marketeers also need to work at keeping the revenue stream robust, so here's a cool idea that keeps popping up on my tweety feed: SAT School Day! See, historically, mostly, students take the test on a Saturday or a summer day. But if the school would just cancel classes for a day so that every junior could take the SAT in school-- well, the College Board already knows this works. From the College Board's ad copy:

“Our SAT participation increased from 35% on a Saturday to 92% on a school day.”
—Brenda Carter, Advanced Academics High School Coordinator, Fort Worth ISD, Fort Worth, TX

SAT School Day lets schools, districts, and states offer the SAT to juniors and seniors in school, on a weekday, expanding access to a globally recognized college admission test that's accepted at all U.S. colleges.

Expanding access? The biggest block to access is the hefty fee for taking the test. It's hard to know how much of the increase in test-takers is a function of "I just can't get to a testing site on a Saturday" and how much is a function of "I get out of a day of classes just to take the test? Sweet!" Either way, the College Board gets a revenue boost by having the school market its product. And don't forget-- this is double dipping for the College Board which makes money on the front end selling the test and makes money on the back end selling the data it collects.

Look, there's legitimate conversation to be had about how making the test a more visible part of school life fosters a culture of college attendance (and another one to be had about how good an idea that would be). And it's not like the College Board collects the money and gives students pet rocks wrapped in Cheez Whiz in return: there is some bit of utility in the purchase of this product.

But there is something not-quite-okay about enlisting public schools as marketing arms of the College Board. It's clever on the College Board's part, but it's an abdication of responsibility for the school, which has an obligation to think two or three times before allowing its charges to become captive customers. SAT School Day is a great idea-- for the College Board. Absent any other reforms or sources of money, it's not clear that "expanding access" to the SAT expands access to college, but it certainly helps the company move more profit and generate more income, while high school guidance departments market their product at no cost to the company. Ka-ching.

Florida Contemplates Putting Fox In Charge of Hen House

As a legislator in Florida (Motto: Why sell swampland when you can just rob schools), Richard Corcoran was determined to make sure that public tax dollars were directed to enriching private school operators at public school expense.

Sorry about your future, kid

Corcoran pushed the Schools of Hope program, a program that allows charters to prey directly on public schools. And after asking charter operators how exactly they'd like this gift wrapped, he gave them the power to tap into public school tax dollars for building expenses. And he put the whole crappy mess in a legislative package designed to hide the smell of his money-grab. Corcoran has been at the front of the pack opening up Florida to all manner of profiteering with not just charters but vouchers, tax credit scholarships-- you name it and Florida not only has it, but has more of it than any other state. Meanwhile, his wife is a charter school operator.

Corcoran tried running for governor and failed, so he could use a job, and it looks as if he might have one lined up-- state high commissioner of education.

This comes on the heels of the announcement that the House education committee will be headed by Jennifer Sullivan, a woman who is spectacularly unqualified even by Florida standards. The 27-year-old was homeschooled and may or may not have picked up a few credits at a Christian college. That's right-- the head of the House committee that oversees Florida's schools has never actually attended one. And she loves choice.

So why not give Corcoran the top spot? Florida's legislature seems determined to completely dismantle public education, and Corcoran is just the guy for the job. Don't raise taxes, he says-- just redistribute the money we have. Florida continues to be a case study in how you cannot effectively run multiple parallel school systems with the money you used to run just one. But then, Florida has also excelled in "saving" school dollars by just not giving them to schools that serve black students.

It is possible that the beloved-by-racists governor-elect could be convinced to drop the idea of appointing Corcoran, and if I lived in Florida I would certainly make a lot of noise about it. Putting Corcoran in charge of education is worse than putting a fox in charge of the henhouse because the fox will at least stop when he's satisfied his hunger. There's no reason to believe that there are any limits to the appetites of the privatizers and profiteers that roam Florida these days, and Corcoran is not going to do anything except keep them well-supplied with plates and silverware.

ICYMI: Here's December Edition (12/2)

Oh, that month again. Here's some reading from the week. Remember to pass along what speaks to you.

Common Core Creator Slammed Reading Teachers for Having a Research Gap-- How Ironic

Nancy Bailey sounds the irony alert on a critique of teachers and research.

Why New Educators Resent "Reformers".

Let's hear from the newest generation teachers-- the ones who grew up with reformster policies shaping their education.

Algorithms Ate My Homework

A new-to-me blogger talks about machine scoring and standardized testing. And there's a cartoon.

DeVos Sides With For Profit Colleges.    

Jan Resseger takes a look at one of Betsy DeVos's more recent bad decisions.

Paul Pastorak

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at reformster Paul Pastorak. It's a long read, but it not only serves as a warning to Puerto Rico, but yet another case study of how these guys network and just keep falling upward.
 
Cultivating Kindness In An Unkind World.

An interesting classroom experiment, and some thoughts on kindness and narcissism.

Can We Get School Accountability Policy Right

Deven Carlson says no, and he gives two reasons why not.

A Glossary for the Next Big Thing

I'm a big Nancy Bailey fan, and her post today inspired me. She writes about the language used to sell ed tech solutions as the profit-based and data-gathering wings of reformerdom race toward the Next Big Thing-- Personalized Competency Based Proficiency Mastery Mass Customized Algorithm Driven Learning Education Stuff.

As with any sales job, part of the trick is to use terms that have meanings and associations elsewhere and appropriate them for your product, hoping that this will lead the customers to assume your products has certain qualities without you ever having to actually make that claim. In the ed reform biz, the classic example is calling charter schools "public." This leads the citizenry to assume that charter schools have certain qualities (certified teachers, proven ed programs, a commitment to stay open no matter what, open to any student who wants to attend, requirement to follow the same laws that public schools do, etc) without charter fans ever having to claim that charters have those qualities (which would be a stretching of the truth.

"Personalized" as it's currently used is a similar dodge, being used to sell a system that is nothing like what people imagine when they hear the words "personalized education."

Bailey provided an excellent list, but I wanted to take it a step further and provide a chart to help you remember what all of those terms mean when used by promoters of the Next Big Thing. Yes, these words have other meanings in other contexts-- that's precisely the point. But those meanings are not what are intended here.

Common Core Testing And The Fracturing Of Literature

The Common Core Standards do not require reading complete long works of literature. Even by the time we arrive at the 11th and 12th grade set of standards for reading literature, the standards only refer to "stories, dramas, and poems."

There are, throughout the standards, references to Shakespeare and "foundational works" or literature. But the standards do not suggest that students should, at some point in their academic career, read an entire book. Appendix A provides highly technical explanations of how to consider text complexity and quality, but somehow avoids discussing the value of reading an entire novel. Appendix B provides "exemplars," of reading selections, but the exemplars from novels are all short passages.

This interest in passages and excerpts dovetails nicely with the standardized testing now associated with the Common Core Standards (or whatever name your state has given to them). The PARCC, the SBA, and other big standardized tests cannot, by their nature, ask students to read and reflect on entire complex works of literature. Instead, we find short poems, short articles, and passages excerpted from longer works.

Both the standards and the tests are focused on "skills," with the idea that the business of reading a play or a story or any piece of text is not for the value of that text, but for the reading skills that one acquires and practices in the reading. The standards suggest that students should have some knowledge about some texts, but that's not the focus (and it won't be on the test).

All of this has had an effect on how teachers teach literature. One of the more subtle effects of test-centered teaching is the rise of the excerpt. We don't need to read all of Hamlet or Grapes of Wrath or Huckleberry Finn; we just need to read some select excerpts from them. Just tear a couple of pages out of the text and throw the rest of the book away. There are, in fact, businesses like the website CommonLit, a website that offers an entire library of short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels, along with lessons, testing materials that tie to plenty of pretty data charts and analytics. If you have any doubts about what motivates teachers to use a service like this (and many, many do), consider one satisfied customer's statement about the need that CommonLit met:

We’ve been asked to combine short fiction and nonfiction texts with our curriculum and align them to questions that match our state test for years.

This is test prep. And one thing that test prep doesn't need is long chunks of reading. Test passages will tend to be about one page long, and so the year's work in reading becomes focused on reacting to short passages (primarily through responding to multiple choice questions). Excerpts are consumed cut free from their context in the larger work, and they are read and consumed quickly; there can be no time to read the whole work, reflect on it, even discuss it with other interested readers. Read the few paragraphs, answer the questions, move on to the next passage.

It is increasingly possible for students to graduate from high school without ever having read an entire novel, an entire play. Their knowledge of the body of literature is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature. Their experience of literature has been fractured and shrunk into pieces small enough to fit on a screen. Their experience of what "reading" is has been shrunk as well, leaving them with the idea that reading is about ploughing through a short, disjointed piece of a piece of writing in order to correctly guess the answers about it that someone else believes are correct (based on the assumption that there is only one correct reading of each passage).

After years and years of this, there is no evidence that any of this creates better readers. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does add to the number of students who learn to hate reading in school. Have there always been teachers who made literature into a painful chore? Sure. But the modern education reforms have only made the problems worse.

There are plenty of schools that resist this trend and that continue to teach entire works of literature in a deep and reflective way. Not all teachers are given that choice by their administrators. The broader solution to this issue (as it is the solution to many current issues in education) is to do away with test-driven schooling. Make the tests no-stakes tests, or simply do away with them, and stop using them to drive curricular changes that are poor educational practices.

Originally posted at Forbes   

Don't Call Me A Reformer

Robin Lake doesn't want to be called an "education reformer" any more, and in a piece at The 74 she tries to make her case in a piece that's a mix of valid points and weak disingenuity. After making her plea, she gets down to the why:

This might seem odd coming from someone who leads an organization that for 25 years has studied the need for systemic reform of American public education. But I’m done talking about reformers. I want to engage with real ideas and real people, not labels and groupthink.

Don't call her a reformer

Well, yes. It seems super-odd coming who has been working for and running the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), an organization that has served as a research wing of the reform movement. And let's not just skip over the fact that members of the ed reform movement picked that name for themselves. They're the ones who worked tirelessly to brand their movement "education reform," a term that paints them as the white hats coming to save the day, and not, say, people trying to figure out how to neutralize the teachers unions, or people trying to bust open the $600 billion piggy bank of public ed, or people trying to impose their own unelected will on an important American institution. Lord knows, those of us who have opposed them have been trying to find things to call them other than reformers--privatizers, colonizers, rephormers, reformsters, reformists. We've tried hard not to cede the framing of the education debates as saviory reformifiers versus the awful rest of us.

However, buried in here, Lake has a couple of valid points.

Here’s why. I have no idea what the term means anymore. Who is not a reformer?

True that. One of the implicitly insulting parts of the "reformer" narrative has been that only they are really interested in making schools better, and the people who have actually dedicated their entire careers to working in schools somehow have no desire to make things better. So Lake asks a good question, just before she nods to the same old false dichotomy:

Are nonreformers people who believe that we can get dramatically different results by standing pat, doing things largely the same way, without any structural or policy changes in public education? If so, I have little to discuss with them.

Yes, one other part of the "reformer" narrative has always been that education is in crisis and that something radical must be done right away. They've been claiming this since at least 1983 (A Nation At Risk), to the point that they hardly bother to substantiate it any more. Are there problems that need to be addressed? Absolutely. But just as she says that she doesn't know what reformer means, in the next breath she suggests that it means, in part, someone who wants to blow up the system in order to create dramatic change.

But to imply that they are some monolithic group of reformers is ridiculous and plays into the desired stand-patter narrative that the demand for structural changes is driven by some elite, out-of-touch, anti-teacher group.

Well, she's right when she says that reformsters aren't a monolithic group, and then she immediately ruins it by suggesting that reform resisters are, in fact, a monolithic group.

It took me a couple of years to start seeing the many different threads bound together in the ed reform movement, all of whom fall across a broad range, from venal to well-meaning, from those motivated by social justice concerns to those who see reform as a way to pursue racist ed policies, from those who are sincerely interested in student education to those who are cynical liars, from those who can be taken seriously to those who can't be taken seriously at all, from those who reasonably well-informed to those who are pridefully ignorant. And as she goes on to note, different folks within the movement have different priorities.

Lake breaks reform down into standards and charter movements, and breaks those down further, and I agree with her analysis. But she is answering her own question. Why do people view the whole range of reformists as a unified whole? Because they formed a coalition in order to present themselves as a unified whole. In doing so, they linked their brand to some problematic actors, and when some of the most problematic rose to power two years ago, it blew holes in the coalition.

Lake is often on the verge of useful insights, but then she returns to whinging about that monolithic resistance:

There has never been a group of reformers with one agenda. But it helps the stand-patters to make people believe there is so they don’t seem like the minority, which I believe they are. It’s always easier to fight against change than for it, but who can look at the data, the inequities in the current education system and what’s been tried in the past, and honestly say stronger accountability, more flexibility for educators, and more options for families are not needed?

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Who created the myth of a group of reformers with one agenda? The reformers did. They stood shoulder to shoulder and said, "Look at this coalition. With this many different types of folks all on the same page, you know we are fighting in a righteous cause." The coalition's illusory unanimity gave them political strength and provided protective cover for the money-makers and opportunists. No "stand-patters" did that. You reform folks did that to yourselves.

And it should come as no surprise that resistance to reformy policies has come from a variety of sources, and not some imaginary standy-patty group. The Core resistance came from people who agree on absolutely nothing else.

And the last part of her mistaken trifecta is the same old reformy dodge. You do not justify your choice of solution by emphasizing the problem. Do we need stronger accountability? For what, to whom. I'd like to see stronger accountability for the politicians who fail to properly fund education. More flexibility for educators? Sure. More options for families? Why? How about we provide each family with an excellent free education in their own community, because I like that solution to the problem of race-driven economic-fueled inequity in this country. I'd like to see a solution to policy leaders and politicians who think public education can be half-assed on the cheap. My point (and I do have one) is that we can debate problems all day, and at the end of the day, we will have done nothing about solutions. Reformers have gotten the diagnosis wrong a lot, but when they do get ir right, they don't do the work of connecting to a solution. (It's almost as if they started with their preferred solution and worked backwards to find a problem to justify it.) Quick example: there are schools that are really struggling to serve non-wealthy non-white students. I absolutely believe that. I don't believe charters, choice, testing, or test-based teacher evaluation help solve that problem at all.

Sigh. But here we go. Lake segues into a call for the reformy flavor of the month-- Personalized [sic] Competency Proficient Mass Customized Algorithm Driven Learning Education. She does a better job than many of describing it in glowing glossy terms. Oh, and as always, change must happen right now. Staying still is not an option, just as it wasn't an option for Common Core or teacher test-based accountability or turnaround/takeovers or charters etc etc etc.&

It occurs to me that Lake could avoid the reform monolith perception by not using the same old used-car-salesman pitches. In fact, as I look around at all the reformy folks who are suddenly fans of Personalized [sic] Competency Blah Blah Blah Learning Tech Product, I'm thinking another way to avoid the perception that "reformers" operate in one unified block would be to NOT all come out in favor of the exact same Next Big Thing at the same time.

Effective change makers are both principled and pragmatic. They cross traditional boundaries and constituencies, recognize that policy ideas have to shift based on evidence, and know that communities, families, and educators need to drive lasting change.

Absolutely. Teachers already knew this; it's how they've made effective change for decades.

That is why I want nothing to do with debates that characterize reform as a set group of people with a set agenda, rather than a continually evolving set of diverse people and groups who come together around shared views of specific ideas and actions that will produce much better results.

I still can't decide how I feel about reform's tendency to "evolve."  I'm glad they move on when things fail-- on the other hand, teachers in classroom end up dealing with the detritus (eg, we're all still stuck with zombie remnants of the damned Common Core). The fact that "is this working" is too often defined in financial or political terms instead of educational ones is not great, either. Nor do I see signs that the evolution includes learning. Makes me wonder-- is this evolution away from the term "reformer" a pragmatic choice because the brand has been damaged by too many losses?

Lake's desire to seek out new types of discussion is fine, but-- Did I mention that this is published at The 74, a website established by reform supporter and teacher union hater Campbell Brown. Ms. Lake, let me invite you to cross some boundaries and publish elsewhere. Drop me a line and we can work something out here.