It's Not the Implementation

"You just didn't implement it properly."

This is the all-too-frequent cry of program creators and policy writers after their pet project goes belly up in the great goldfish bowl of education.

It was a popular explanation for the crash of Common Core. More than a few district superintendents have used it to explain why their pet project failed. And publishers like to use it as an explanation for why their materials didn't deliver the promised results.

But was that really the problem? After all, there is no good way to implement a bad idea. Here are some points to consider when conducting the post mortem on your failed program.

1. Bad PR Is A Program Problem

"If we had just gotten the teachers and parents to buy in..." and "People just developed a negative perception that we should have counteracted" are not implementation problems. If your program requires aggressive selling, it's not a good program. If your teachers and parents "developed" the perception that your program is ugly and smells funny, the most likely explanation is that your program is ugly and smells funny. If you think negative reactions are a problem to be managed rather than input to be considered, then your design process is flawed and the materials that come out of it will be flawed as well. Your "bad PR" is a symptom of your failure, not an explanation of it.

This is most striking in a rollout technique used by both local school districts and state legislatures, a technique we could call: "Try to do this is as quickly and quietly as possible and hope nobody notices." Word always gets out, public reaction is lousy, and afterwards leaders shake their heads and say, "Well, if only all that negative perception hadn't sprung up," as if the negative perception is a mysterious act of God. Come on. You knew the idea was a loser; that's why you were trying to sneak it past the taxpayers.

2. Fidelity Is A Bad Sign

Teachers have come to know and loath the phrase "with fidelity" because it means, roughly, "Do exactly as we tell you to and never, ever use your own professional judgment." The need to implement a program with fidelity is not an implementation problem; it is a fundamental flaw in the program.

First of all, any program that proposes to replace the professional judgment of classroom teachers with the judgment of textbook writers or software developers or government bureaucrats is flawed. Any program that denies the value of judgments made by the person who is actually in the room with the students-- that program is flawed.

Second, any program that is so brittle and inflexible that it can only work under certain precise conditions has no business being deployed in a real classroom. Flexibility is central to teaching. Everything teachers do must be able to bend and stretch and tweak and change-- often on a split-second's notice-- to fit the students, the teacher and the unpredictable conditions of the day.

3. Could It Work? Under What Conditions?

Teachers, who implement classroom ideas large and small on a daily basis, ask this question all the time when a planned lesson goes south. Higher grade teachers have an advantage; they get several tries in one day, and if the lesson works in first period, they know it can work. But all teachers have to imagine the conditions under which their idea can work. Then they have to ask the harder question:

Do those conditions realistically exist on this planet?

This is one of the brutal lessons that some teachers have to learn in their first year or two. Yes, that lesson would work beautifully in a classroom filled with students who are electrified by the use of symbolism in Huck Finn and would like nothing better in the whole world than to have a spirited discussion about it. But that's probably not the world you're actually teaching in, so the lesson needs to be redesigned.

Nowadays, many tech companies are developing wonderful tech-dependent programs. These programs will be excellent in any school district that has an extra couple million dollars to spend, every year. Most districts do not live in that world.

4. What And How Are Not Easily Separated

In education, the what and the how are usually inexorably entangled. If your goal is for students to be comfortable discussing the techniques of Elizabethan poetry, is class discussion your what or your how? We are currently seeing a swing in discussions about teaching reading. Common Core pushed us toward a notion that the what and how of reading could be completely separated, and we would just teach the how. Now we're getting back to understanding that the how cannot be disconnected from the what.

When a legislature or an administration tries to implement a program by top-down fiat, that's not just the how. That top-down your-input-isn't-desired aspect is baked into the whole program. It's part of what the program does, what the program is about. Implementation of a program lays the tracks on which the program will run.

5. Is This Really A Good Program?

Yes, it's theoretically possible to have a bad implementation of a good program. But every version of that I can remember seeing had one key feature-- a person in charge of implementation who misunderstood the program being implemented. So yes, it was an implementation problem in the sense that the wrong person was doing the implementation in the first place. (This is, of course, an excellent way to kill a program-- put the wrong person in charge of it.) The very definition of a good education program is that it is robust and flexible enough to pass through many, many different (though not necessarily hostile) hands, but someone with no gift for organizing or leadership can botch an implementation. You can also kill a program by denying it the requirements it needs to survive (say, cramming thirty-five students into the classroom). Bad implementation of good programs can happen.

It could be a clarity issue-- it's just hard to understand how the program is supposed to work. But if it's difficult for people who interpret and explain things for a living to interpret and explain your program, your program has a problem with clarity. That's a program problem, not an implementation bug.

But let's be honest-- saying "It's the implementation" is mostly a way to shift blame. "I did my design work and writing perfectly; it's all those other jerks who are messing things up." The teacher equivalent of this sentiment is to say, "I taught it perfectly, but those kids just wouldn't get it." In both cases, if you find this sentiment coming out of your mouth, you should step back, take a deep breath, and go take a good hard look in the mirror.

Originally posted at Forbes.

Not Quite Seven Reasons To Ditch Teachers Unions

The Foundation for Economic Education may be the oldest libertarian thinky tank in the US, and they are a missionary group, set "to make the ideas of liberty familiar, credible, and compelling to the rising generation." So it comes as no surprise to find them running an article entitled "7 Reasons To Say Goodbye to the Teachers Union."

Author Daniel Buck is a bit of a mystery on line, but he lays claim to a masters in education and a teaching job in someplace that's urban/diverse; probably 9th grade English, judging from all the Romeo and Juliet tweets. And writes/edits for a site called "The Lone Conservative." From reading his tweets, I learned that he would pay to keep the union rep out of the lounge and once shook Scott Walker's hand and thanked Walker "for all he's doing to improve education in Wisconsin." He dresses up for school, appears to take a serious and conscientious approach to the work, and he's in his second year of actual teaching. If I worked next door to him, I think we'd get along and I'd probably like him. But this thing he wrote...

Preliminary disclaimers

I should say right up front that I am not knee jerk booster of the union. I've been a local president, and I've been on the phone telling my state president what he's messing up. A scan of this blog will find more than a few criticisms of the teachers unions. I know some reasons that the teachers union has, at times, made me want to ditch it.

Detach me from this carousel, and I will win the Kentucky Derby

Also, I'm aware that some folks may see this post as punching down at some teacher newbie for some not-very-well-informed opinions, but Buck appears to have his big boy pants on, and I'm not going to call him names-- but when something like this gets put into the world, that requires a response also to be put into the world.

At various times in my career, I considered reasons to ditch the union. Let's see if Buck actually came up with seven.

The wind-up

There's a pull quote about supporting teachers, not unions. Buck says, sure, unions did swell things in the past, but we no longer have troops stationed in Cold War locations like Germany (little comfort to my brother-in-law who's being deployed to watch Russians from Poland in a few months). But just so we're clear-- Buck is arguing that teacher unions should be dissolved.

Here are his seven reasons.

They are advocacy groups as much as unions.

What he appears to mean is that they are a liberal advocacy group, NEA has committed to things like being for Black Lives Matter and against Confederate monuments. The unions give most of their money to Democratic candidates.

This is half a valid point-- the unions contain a huge number of conservative and GOP members whose interests are not necessarily reflected in support for Hillary. I have always chafed a bit at some non-education issues that the union takes a position on-- and they've taken some bad stands on education issues as well (Common Core, anyone). And don't even get me started on the boneheaded early-in endorsement of Clinton.

At the same time. Politics shapes how teachers do or don't get to do their jobs. It hasn't always been true, but for the past twenty-some years, some of the biggest obstacles to being able to just do the work have been created by politicians (Common Core, anyone). If teachers don't collectively advocate for the politics most likely to create better conditions in schools, who will. And if you teach children of color and you can't see why advocating for the removal of statues raised to honor those who fought to keep Blacks as chattel-- well, you need to get some more schooling yourself. Buck also lists arming teachers as an issue that NEA should be leaving alone. Nope. That's not a conservative-liberal issue, that's a stupid-not stupid issue. If I were still in a classroom, you can be damn sure I'd expect the union to do its best to keep guns out of my building.

I expect teachers unions to advocate for issues that affect public education, and that means politics.

They have more money in politics than just about everyone.

Buck notes that unions contribute more to politics than other individuals, which is true if you compare the union to one person at a time, but of course that's not how it works. Look at this report from the (not union affiliated) Network for Public Education for examples of how billionaires, working together, outspend everyone.

Now, truthfully, if this were a few decades ago, I'd be sympathetic to this point. I'd be troubled that the unions were throwing this much money into political campaigns. But now we live in a post-Citizens United world, a SuperPAC world, a world in which rich folks can exert as much financial pressure on the political world as they like-- hell, with dark money tools, they can do it anonymously.

So why shouldn't teachers fight back? After all-- union political contributions are not teacher dues, They are contributions collected voluntarily and specifically for political purposes. Why shouldn't unions be free to pass the hat to collect the contributions of teachers, contributions that carry far more weight bundled than individually. The Kochs and Waltons and the rest can do whatever they like when it comes to wielding political influence? Why should teachers be limited?

Mind you, in my universe, everyone would be limited. Contribution limits, and no dark money ever. But until that happens, we play by the rules we have.

Their policy ideals won't cut it.

Here Buck offers a salad of old talking points. Unions want more money for school, but we already spend too much without a return-- except of course "return" here means "higher test scores" and just from his Twitter feed I know that Buck knows better  than to think that test scores measure what matters.

He also resurrects whinging about "hard to fire" and strict pay scales. It's old and tired. He's correct to note that a lot of money is spent badly by districts and states, but there are better solutions than taking the money away, and anyway, what does this have to do with unions? They advocate for this stuff? So what. Every contract was negotiated by two sides. If your contract truly makes it impossible to fire a teacher, it's because your board did a lousy job. Otherwise, it's only hard to get rid of terrible teachers if you have administrators reluctant to do their jobs.

They block meaningful reform

Unions block the reforms that will structurally change a broken system and in return, promise increased funding, which will, in turn, be drained away by the broken system. Namely, they oppose school choice, merit-based pay, standardized tests, and the Praxis, an entrance exam for teachers.

This echoes the worst, looniest anti-union rhetoric in which the whole public school system is just a scam perpetuated by the union in order to make the union rich. From this premise, we get the notion that opposition to reform is not based on a professional judgment that such reforms are bad for education-- it's all just to keep the money flowing. All the "teachers are swell it's the union that's bad" rhetoric in the world can't mask how insulting this is to actual teachers. Yep-- they're all just corrupt money-grubbers who want to keep children deprived of real education.

The four issues that Buck mentions are all issues that can be debated by reasonable people-- but not if you assume that only evil, selfish, or stupid people would oppose you. In fact, all four policies have ben shown to have terrible flaws, and more thoughtful reformsters are willing to discuss some of those issues. But if you assume that all opposition is just corruption speaking, you'll never get a step closer to improving your ideas.

They breed a culture of entitlement

Again, the "I like teachers" slip is showing. Naughty bad teachers just keep adding because the union protects them.

The unions tell us that we, the teachers, deserve our jobs and better pay regardless of the success of our students, but in reality, we deserve more money and respect only if we do our job well. To suggest anything else is a disservice to the profession.

I don't know that I've ever heard the union say that. Part of this is about job protections, in which case the union says that a teacher get deserves to be fired for a reason, not an administrative whim. Buck need only imagine some left-wing administrator who's out to get rid of him because of his conservative views to understand why a union and job protections are useful here. We don't have enough time to get into the pay question, other than to point out that the insurmountable obstacle to merit pay is the lack of any sort of reliable way to measure teacher merit (spoiler alert-- it's not test scores).

They bargain for mediocre benefits.

The old "if they just gave me the money, I'd be much better at investing it than the state." The pension situation varies from state to state. As a retiree, I can tell you that my pension is pretty good. For nearly forty years, I've considered it one of the compensations for my job, including the fact that I didn't have o become a part time portfolio manager. Buck is sad that the retirement benefits he's offered don't allow him to invest more, but of course he can invest more if he wants to. I benefit from a fixed benefits plan (a rapidly vanishing animal, I know). I wonder what the effects would be of a do-it-yourself fund in a year like 2008 if a district was up to its ears in top-dollar teachers, none of whom would consider retirement because they couldn't afford it.

We can bargain for ourselves.

Oh, honey.

Buck has a story to tell about how a fellow teacher was falsely accused of hitting a student, and the principal "under convoluted district rules" wanted to fire him. That teacher walked into the office with test scores and student testimonials and student projects-- oh, and video records that showed his innocence. This, somehow, is proof that teachers can negotiate for themselves. I'm unimpressed. There was no negotiation here, no "convoluted" rules-- assaulting a student is a pretty straightforward offense-- and no part of the defense that mattered except the proof of the facts of the case.

But I'd ask Buck, once again, to consider how this would have gone if the teacher in question was one the administration didn't like, or if the administration had a friend's child he wanted to give a job, or a touchy liberal who wanted an excuse to get rid of a pesky conservative staffer. How well would "negotiating for yourself" go then?

Self-negotiation has one other major problem. Districts are going to have a finite pile of money for personnel, which means teachers will be negotiating against each other in a zero-sum game. What does that school look like, where supporting another teacher means taking money out of your own pocket? And while this might still look like a good idea to Buck now, I invite him to imagine being thirty-five with a family talking to an administrator who says, "Why should I give you a raise when I can hire this twenty-four year old for less than I pay you now?"

That's before we even get to issues like a coach not playing a school board member's kid enough, or a single teacher who turns down date requests from the wrong people, or a teacher who belongs to the wrong church or wrong political party, or a teacher who tries to stand up for a mistreated student and is told to stop rocking the boat.

The history of teacher pay is not the history of People In Charge saying, "Let's give them a raise and better working conditions. It'll cost us money, but it's the right thing to do." It isn't even the history of People In Charge acknowledging market forces. We're several years into a widely observed teacher "shortage" and still nobody wants to acknowledge that the Free Market tells us what to do-- make the job more attractive. If entire states won't budge in order to close staffing gaps of hundreds or thousands of teachers, what makes Buck imagine a world where an administrator says, "Well, Mr. Buck, we certainly want you to be happy, so here's a big fat raise."

Is that seven, yet?

As I said, I totally get the frustration, I really do. Union leadership is often slow to act and can do a really lousy job of listening to membership. Every time the firing process has to be defended because some yahoo with a teaching certificate did something stupid, I cringe. I rail away every time some union person uses "unity" to mean "shut up and agree."And there is nothing like the crappy feeling that comes when you see the new contract terms and realize that things important to you did not make the cut this time.

But the unfortunate reality is that an individual teacher has virtually no power over work and pay conditions, and the People In Charge have no reason to want to give her any. As it is, unions don't have all that much power and are regularly getting more of it stripped away. You will notice that in a state like, say, Wisconsin, the stripping of union power is not followed by the state and school districts saying, "Phew-- at last we can give you all the money and job security that the union stood in the way of."

Teachers need some level of protection to make it possible for them to be teachers; right now, the best way for them to get that is via unions. Yes, that's inconvenient for some folks who would like teachers to shut up, sit down, know their place, and accept what the People In Charge feel like giving them. That's why folks like FEE are always happy to find teachers like Buck to make their case for them. It's so much simpler when you can get obstacles to power to just unilaterally surrender.

So, not quite seven reasons to ditch the union. And I'm not even going to get into all the ways that non-union members benefit from the union they disdain. In the meantime, Daniel, hit me up on Twitter at @palan57. We can cyber hang out and talk about how to do cool R&J video projects, and I promise not to hassle you for being a free rider.

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.