How Much Money In That Edusector?!!

When you're starting to wonder why so many people are interested in education, even though they have no training, experience, or apparent deep interest in education, it's helpful to see some numbers.

Like 2,600,000,000.

Reportsnreports is an international outfit that provides "market research reports to industries, individuals, and organizations to accelerate decision making process." They offer a library of over a half million reports with coverage of at least 30,000 niche markets. They've got reports on negative pressure wound therapy growth and the zirconium dioxide market. And they pay an average salary of $83K. So this is not some guy writing market reports in his garage.

Reportsnreports has released a report on the "Education and Learning Analytics Market." $2.6 billion is how much money they reckoned was in that sector for 2018. And that's peanuts compared to their projection for 2023, when they figure the sector will involved $7.1 billion.

That's $7,100,000,000.

Analytics are expected to grow in connection with the growth of computer-driven personalized [sic] learning, as well as the growing business of simply collecting and connecting data from education, plus the continued use of the Big Standardized Tests. The list of "key players" from the US includes familiar name like Microsoft and Oracle and SAS as well as lesser-known players like Alteryx and Schoology and iSpring.

So any time someone comes into your country or state or town or school to all about how awesome it would be to wire up your students and help them get a super-duper education powered by super-duper analytics, remember-- the people pushing this stuff may be sincere and may think this stuff will help teach students, but they have probably also noticed that there is just a giant mountain of money to be made in the field of education. analytics and they are just trying to cash in and gather a chunk of it.

Whenever someone is pitching the Next Big Thing that will save education , it's always important to follow the money, particularly in the 21st century, because there is just so very much money involved.

School Choice Is School's Choice

The core idea of every version of a school choice program is that students and their families will choose wha schools to attend. The anecdotal evidence has called that into question time after time, suggesting that it is schools that get to choose what students they will or will not accept. This happens not necessarily through direct rejection, but by a hundred little obstacles. An application system that requires savvy and commitment to navigate. Marketing that makes it clear which students are welcomer and which are not. Experiences, like an unending string of disciplinary actions, that encourage parents to look elsewhere.

We now have more evidence that choice systems lead to skimming of students, that school choice really means school's choice.

"Education for All?" comes from Peter Bergman (Columbia University) and Isaac McFarlin (University of Florida), and it shows that schools do engage in some selection, even by putting small bits of what the authors call "friction" in the path.

The design was simple; the experimenters sent out fictitious e-mails (6,452 of them) to various schools requesting information about how to apply to the school. Some emails included indications that the student had a special need, disciplinary issues, or either high or low prior academic achievement. Then the researchers tallied up the responses. Here are some of the results.

The sexy headline result is that schools are less likely to respond to students who might be harder to educate. That includes both public and charter schools.

Some of the details of further interest.

Strong students, with good grades and attendance, didn't draw extra help or responses. There was no indication of that sort of creaming from anyone.

In one respect (which may come as little surprise to those who work in schools), everyone sucks-- the baseline rate of response was 53%. So barely half of these families reaching out for a little help navigating bureaucratic baloney got any sort of help at all. Nearly half got nothing. That result isn't very sexy, but to me it's important and not very admirable.

The overall response rates were pretty similar for public vs. charter schools, with one exception-- students with special needs were far less likely to get a response from charter schools. These are, of course, the students who are more expensive to educate. But in some states (Pennsylvania is one) the state gives charters more money for students with special needs, which means that students with inexpensive special needs that don't require costly therapy or adaptations-- those students can be cash cows for a charter. The study found schools in such states were more likely to respond.

Those results are true for what the study calls "high-value-added' schools, aka "schools with high scores on the Big Standardized Test." Specifically. no excuses charter schools are even less likely to respond when the student has "significant disability."

Other alarming results include the finding of different responses rates based on "implied race of the family" with a hint of bias toward Black families and a stronger bias toward Hispanic-sounding names.

The other implications considered by the authors are not just the implications of bias, but the practical implications for lottery systems of admissions (and studies thereof). The study offers solid evidence that the admissions process is broken. And this time it's not simply anecdotes.

China: You Will Wear Big Brother

If nothing else, China is constantly providing new responses to the comment, "Well, there's no way anybody could actually do that."

What happens when the business mindset comes up against a powerful profit motive? China has provided continuing examples of how business-driven enterprises will sacrifice almost any of their principles when confronted by the opportunity to tap a huge market.

What becomes of all that data that tech companies collect further down the road. If the company tanks, what happens to its store of data which is, after all, one of its corporate assets? We're testing that this very year, as a Chinese giant purchased Edmodo, a company that had acquired-- and continues to acquire-- huge banks of student data.

And when writers raise the alarm about a future in which our identities are banks of data stored on the web and used by corporations or governments to determine our futures, before you can even start to mock them as tin-hat crazies--well, look. China is already doing it, with a system that tracks your every movement, scores your life according to government-set standards, and awards you privileges, or not, based on your life score.

But that surveillance system depends on facial recognition and cameras everywhere a camera can be mounted. How could the surveillance web be made even tighter?

How about wearable surveillance?

And voila- China is there already.

They've been there, in fact, since 2016, when several schools in one province began requiring students to wear "smart uniforms," school uniforms that include two chips that allow authorities to track students every move. The idea is supposed to be marking the attendance of students, indicating when they enter and leave schools and providing that information to the school, parents, and anyone else who might care.

The uniforms are actually a redundant system- student chips are checked against facial recognition systems, so trading uniforms to play hooky is a non-starter. And while officials say that they only track school attendance, the tech is perfectly capable of checking student locations any other time of day. But officials are totally not doing that.

We live in scary times, when the technology that we let loose in schools can accomplish some really awful things. If you read warnings about such things, before you dismiss them, check China first. They may already be real.

Is It A New Year?

I'm not a huge fan of New Year's Eve for some personal reasons (ranging all the way back to a semi-public dumping back in high school), but I also find it a curious practice. It's that thing we humans do-- we make an somewhat arbitrary mark on the surface of the universe and then wear ourselves out investing it with Deep Significance. Is there a strong objective cosmological reason to declare tonight at midnight that we have started a new year? None that I can think of, but we still like to make a big deal of it.

On the one hand, that's fine. It's a thing we do, and it does us good to stop our mad race periodically to reconsider what we've done, what we intend to do, how things are generally going, and how we feel about all of this. We are, most of us, inclined to plunge heedlessly forward, mindless racing on into the uncertain darkness of the future-- it's a good idea to stop, sit, and take a mindful moment to reflect. We do not, after all, have forever to work this stuff out.

It lands oddly for schools, catching us in the middle of the year, neither the beginning nor the end of anything in particular. It's still a good a time as any to think about how we're doing. If activists and supporters of public education want to take this moment to set new goals and evaluate old ones, that seems wise. If reformsters want to take the occasion to evaluate strategies and goals, as many have, I'm fine with that. Honestly, it would help things if they would do it a lot more often.

That's part of the problem. Sometimes when we designate one day for a particular activity, we take that as an excuse to ignore it the rest of the year. Should we want until Black History Month to talk about Black History?  No, that would be stupid (particularly since it would be hard to talk about American history without talking about Black History). Once you've been sweet and kind to your partner on your anniversary, can you just ignore them for the rest of the year? Should people only be nice to you on your birthday? Should students and teachers only make a special effort to be at their best on the first day of school?

No, holidays are great for acknowledging thoughtfully that which we always note the rest of the year.

I take as much comfort as anyone in the idea of cycles, but of course, things don't really repeat. My high school students were in high school for four years, and each year was a completely different animal. In many of my years of teaching, one year resembled another, but they were never the same. I taught for a little over 7000 days, and each one was a little different from every other one. Thanks to my brother (long sibling story) I am ticking off my days of retirement one at a time on Facebook. Today is Day 211-- not a particularly notable number. But the exercise of having to report in on each day makes me pay a little more attention to what is happening, what is new each day. And meanwhile, the earth spins on through the void, rotating, spinning around the sun which is itself spinning through the galaxy that is wheeling through space. Cosmically speaking, we never occupy the same location twice, ever, but continuing spiraling into the void, each moment in a new place.

So is there something special happening in (checks watch) eight hours? Not exactly. But is it worth us to take stock, to recap, to reconsider, to set out new goals and standards for ourselves moving forward, to take another thoughtful look at the adventures now receding into the past? Absolutely.

What have we gotten done in the classroom. What milestones have we passed. Those are worth thinking about, as well as remembering that as much as we are sometimes inclined to think of some students (particularly the obnoxious ones) as set in annoying stone, each student comes back each day a little changed, a little different. Everybody grows, always. There's no question about whether they grow-- just how that growth is going to go.

You can't dip your toe into the same river twice, and you never walk int the same classroom twice.

My best wishes to all my colleagues who are returning to the classroom shortly. I hope the breather has served you well. It will be a new day tomorrow. It's always a new day tomorrow.

Venture Capital And Fake Teaching Careers

Here's just one example of how the machine works.

Earlier this month at Forbes, Jessica Pliska (who writes about careers) started with this chirpy lead.

Access and opportunity aren’t words often associated with venture capital. Aaron Walker, CEO of Camelback Ventures, is looking to change that. Here, we chat about what shaped his vision for the future of venture capital, the management lessons he took from his time as a classroom teacher and how the San Antonio Spurs influences his leadership.

Walker's Big Vision explanation of his new venture capital company and how it is meant to promote diversity in the financial world sounds like this:

Camelback is designed to erase this phenomenon in the venture capital space, and explicitly elevate the genius of entrepreneurs of color in social impact. Too often, the entrepreneurial space around social impact generates “solutions” pointed at communities of color without solving for the lack of opportunities in those same communities for them to lead, innovate and build.

And later in the interview, this...

The role Camelback has played to kickstart schools, edtech companies and nonprofits hellbent on strengthening communities and solving urgent issues is deeply rewarding. Brandon Anderson, a Fellow in this year’s cohort, developed Raheem AI, a community reporting system powered by Facebook Messenger that shares data with cities to increase police transparency and show when and where policing works. Then there’s Camelback alum Nicole Cardoza, whose nonprofit Yoga Foster supports teachers with resources for their classroom to create sustainable yoga programs that empower students – and teachers – to better process external pressures.

Camelback Ventures is, as near as one can tell (honestly-- do any of these investment guys speak plain English), interested in social impact investing

Our vision is that, in twenty years, Camelback will have contributed to a nation of livable communities where everyone has the opportunity for a quality education and a good life. The way we see ourselves building this future is through our mission as an accelerator that identifies, develops, and promotes early-stage underrepresented entrepreneurs with the aim to increase individual and community education, and generational wealth.

Their flagship effort is their education fellowships.

This intensive program is our core and flagship offering, working to support early stage education and social impact entrepreneurs. We focus on coaching, capital, connections, community, and curriculum.

Camelback is headquartered in New Orleans, and as part of its entrepreneurial support work, it helps launch schools and back school founders. It also makes a lot of noise about teaching leadership.

So how can a bunch of venture capital guys be talking about education and starting schools? That takes us to Walker's background, as highlighted right up front in Pliska's interview. Pliska asks about his big formative experience, and he responds

Teaching gave me a new perspective on how I grew up because it showed me, unfortunately, how much a zip code can still dictate educational access. In Jersey, I went to a great school with peers with country club memberships, but know this was because my parents made the decision to move us to a neighborhood with access to a better school district – a privilege not shared by many of my former students and relatives. Teaching gave me clarity into just how crucial a role a quality education plays, and how fortunate I was to have received the great education I did. This not only influenced my teaching, but cemented my commitment to social impact and educational opportunity.

So Pliska drills down to ask about key lessons from his "time in the classroom."

The importance of collaboration and leadership. Every breakthrough with a student happened through the collaboration of a team. The times we were at our best as a school were the times we were working together. Teaching also dispelled the myth of the respected “lone hero,” and how good leadership, whether in a school building or firm, helps a team function together because of the organizational culture they’ve built.

Raise your hand if you can guess what Walker's teaching experience actually entailed.

Yup. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a degree in foreign affairs (and a one-year internship with Sorenson, a research/pr firm), Walker headed to the Greater Philly Area to put in two whole years with Teach for America as a 9th grade English teacher. He got 100% of hist students to pass the 9th grade reading exam in 2005. Then he was off to law school at University of Pennsylvania. Then off to NYC where he worked as an attorney, a portfolio director at the Fund for Public Schools investment fund, founded Teacher Capital Management recruiting firm. Then he founded Expertly, a "marketplace" where "schools, foundations, and education organizations find and engage experts for their insights." He stuck with each of those startups for a year, then in 2013 launched Camelback.

Look, Camelback may very well be doing good and important work. And Walker may well be an outstanding human being who is putting his God-given talents and privileged background to excellent use.

But here we have the TFA template again. Teach for a couple of years, knowing through most of your second year that you've been accepted to law school and you'll go start your real career soon. Despite your brief and shallow investments in teaching and the school that hired you, spend the rest of your career talking about yourself as a teacher and your "career" as a growth experience for you. The classroom is a way station, and the students are resume fodder that you won't even stick with long enough to see them graduate. "Every breakthrough with a student happened through the collaboration of a team" because it takes a team to keep a raw recruit out of the weeds, but after you had just about learned to run without training wheels, you were out the door, using "time in the classroom" as a top-notch virtue signifier ("Oh, I might juggled investment funds now, but I was a teacher").

I'm sure it had to be good for Walker's students to see a Black man in the front of the classroom. I don't know how much of that good was offset by seeing a Black man who got out of Dodge as quickly as possible.

I don't want to attack a stranger who, as I said, may be doing great work now. But even after all these decades of TFA, this kind of thing burns my toast-- investment guys who never for five minutes intended to pursue teaching as a career, just passng through quickly enough to shine up those grad school applications, mindless of the strain that just passing through puts on the school and the students, treating teaching like a summer job and not a valuable calling, but for years and years after proudly calling themselves "teacher" and reflecting on their "time in the classroom" like some tourist who rode through France on a tier bus and now talks about their deep insights into French culture. And after years and years of being in business, TFA has placed this kind of baloney all over the place. Do what you want to do with your life, but stop using and discarding schools and teaching so that you can tout your fake teaching career.

A Call for Hong Kong Reform

Philip Yeung was educated at Oxford and the University of Toronto, but he has made his living in China. He's been an academic consultant, a senior communications manager, and currently is with English for Emergencies (my new favorite company name) where he does ghostwriting. He's also an opinion writer for the South China Morning Post, which is where we find him today. Here's a message for everyone who thinks we should chase Hong Kong to get those sweet, sweet PISA scores and win the international test competition.

I'm going to quote some large chunks of this. See if anything sounds familiar at all...

Hong Kong public education is in crisis. The numbers don’t lie. A recent survey by the Hong Kong Psychological Society found 52.2 per cent of teachers showing symptoms of depression, plagued by hopelessness, fatigue and sleeplessness.

A similar percentage of secondary school students are similarly afflicted. Unlike suicides, which have the power to shock, depression is invisible; it spares the government public embarrassment. But how is such a mutant system able to manufacture so much misery to those who live by it? 

Grim. One might imagine similar problems leading to, say, the largest one-year loss of teachers in a few decades. But what can lead to such problems?

Blame it squarely on bureaucrats who know little, and care even less, about education. Teachers were first turned into report-writing clerks, spending much of their time on drafting reports to the Education Bureau, where they sat unread. Then they are yoked to a system that exists to endlessly over-test our kids.

Teachers, dictated to by desk-bound bureaucrats, mutate into drill sergeants. In a culture that reveres teachers, respect is in surprisingly short supply.

...The reading culture, so vital to creative education, predictably fails to take root in this barren teach-to-the-test topsoil.

Too much teaching to the test? Teachers feeling powerless and disrespected? A system worshipping "the wrong god: the god of cookie-cutter tests." How does Yeung think such a problem can be addressed?

Any shake-up, however, must begin at the top; Hong Kong’s chief executive should appoint only educational experts to decision-making positions in the Education Bureau, from the secretary down. Being a parent is an insufficient qualification, as officials always elect to defect from the local system by sending their children, out of harm’s way, to overseas or private schools. With their children out of the system, they have no vested interest in making it work.

Teachers in charge?! Well, that's a shock. The rich and powerful get their kids out so they don't care what happens in the schools? Actually, Warren Buffet made a similar point once, while sitting just feet away from Bill Gates:

If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools.

His point being that the rich and powerful would see to it if they had skin in the game. Yeung feel;s the same:

Why do we continue to have wishy-washy generalists and system-deserters running an education body that mistreats teachers and mutilates the young? If you can appoint financial experts to an economic bureau, why couldn’t you pick specialists for the education portfolio where the stakes are no less high and inter-generational?

Any appointment of future senior education officials should be made conditional upon them keeping their children within the local system. Otherwise, the hypocrisy renders them unfit for office.

Yeung names the schools of education "co-conspirators" for the way they train Hong Kong's teachers, and he has some specific instructions for them before he winds up with his final point:

Finally, don’t forget the iron rule in education: a healthy system begins with happy teachers. It ends with the room to grow and the freedom to teach.

All worth keeping in mind the next time someone holds Hong Kong up as a system we should imitate, although it seems we are already imitating many of their worst qualities.

Elon Musk's Special School

There may be few Very Rich Guys who can top Elon Musk for confidence that is boundless and groundless, so it should come as no surprise that Musk started a school.

Unlike other wealthy meddlers in the education world (and, that matter, unklike Musk when it comes to other enterprises), Musk has kept the not-for-profit school, created in 2014, mostly under wraps. That's because his goal has not been so much to rebuild the world of school as it has been to buy a custom education for his own kids.

Musk has five-- one set of twins and one of triplets, so God bless him and his wife. For much of Ad Astra's existence, the Musk children were more than half of the student body. A few openings were made available for other students at the campus located at Musk's SpaceX headquarters, but basically we're talking the most expensive work-based homeschooling ever.

As one might expect, the studies are non-traditional both in terms of content and organization. Musk pulled his children out of one of Los Angeles's top gifted schools and hired away one of their teachers, Joshua Dahn, to run the school.

Now Corinne Purtill at Quartz has turned up the admissions questionnaire for the school. It's not traditional, either. Applicants should be between 8 and 13, with LA students strongly preferred. The only simple question on the form is to ask if one of the parents works for one of Musk's companies.

Parents have the option to share a student project that shows "commitment, ambition and originality," and then the student must handle one of three problem-solving questions.

In the first, called “Goldilocks,” prospective students are presented with descriptions of 11 fictional planets and asked to identify the best three choices and worst three choices for a new human colony.

In "Eleventh Painting” a lost work by a fictional famous (and dead) painter is discovered during construction in her home town in Mexico. When alive, the artist had stipulated that any sales of her work be used for children’s arts education. Applicants must rank five prospective buyers-- each offers vastly different amounts of money and public access to the work.

In “The Lake,” students are given a description of an environmental catastrophe at a local lake and asked to apportion the amount of blame among six parties involved: scientists, politicians, voters, the media, the polluter, and a shadowy figure known as the “puppetmaster,” who is described as “a wealthy individual who is afraid that new regulations could affect their business empire.”

Applications are due January 1, so if you haven't started working on yours, well, good luck with that. You'll also need good luck with Musk's attention span. Musk apparently funds the school almost single-handedly (to the tune of $450K in 2014 and 2015), and it remains to be seen if he will continue the project after his own kids have aged out.