Terror, Hubris and AI (or Can Artificial Intelligence Fake Being A Self-important Pompous Tool?)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is, if not a hot new product itself, the additive that helps sell a million other products ("New! Improved!! Now with AI!!!"). And the proponents of AI are loaded with big brass cyberballs when it comes to making claims about their product. And all the most terrible and frightening things are happening in China. Come down this terrifying baloney-stuffed rabbit hole with me.

It starts with an absolutely glorious website-- PR Newswire. Newswire is part of Cision, a company that promises to move your pr by connecting using their Influencer Graph built with their Communications Cloud. Super social media PR (pr.cision-- get it?). Anyway, PR Newswire is a website of nothing but press releases, and it's kind of awesome. This news release has been run in many outlets. I'm digressing a bit here, but we need to remember through this whole trip that this is about a company that wants to sell a product.

Tucked in amidst the press releases is some "news provided by Squirrel AI Learning" about the AI Summit held about a month ago in New York, featuring over 350 experts, professors and business executives from the AI field discussing the technology and the commercial applications thereof. Why "squirrel" (there is such a thing as anti-squirrel AI)? Because squirrel is the symbol for "agility, diligence and management." Founded in 2014, Yixue Squirrel AI is headquartered in Shanghai and claims to be "the first K12 EdTech company which specializes in intelligent adaptive education in China" and, just so you know, they're "the market leader." They have opened "over 700 schools and have 3000 teaching staff in more than 100 cities." They have $44 million of investor money, an education lab in New York, and an AI lab in Silicon Valley run jointly with Stanford Research Institute, and they've sponsored some iNACOL stuff as well.

Do some quick math and you'll realize that those figures work out to 4.28 teachers per school. How do they do that? You can guess:

Like the AlphaGo simulated Go master, the AI system simulated human teacher giving the student a personalized learning plan and one-on-one tutoring, with 5 to 10 times higher efficiency than traditional instructions. YiXue Squirrel AI offers the high-quality after-school courses in subjects such as Chinese, Math, English, Physics, and Chemistry. Powered by its proprietary AI-driven adaptive engine and custom-built courseware, YiXue’s “Squirrel AI” platform provides students with a supervised adaptive learning experience that has been proven to improve both student efficacy and engagement across YiXue’s online learning platform and offline learning centers. 

Simulated human teacher? Great.

There's very little about Squirrel on the English-speaking web that the company didn't put there themselves, and little of that dates to before 2018. But what they have to say about themselves is not shy. You can watch founder Derek Haoyang Li deliver his speech at the AI summit in December, in which he says, among other things, that his company's AI tutors outperformed even the best human teachers.

Squirrel's press release conjures up some of the most grandiose language I've seen for pushing new education ideas. You may think the stakes in education AI are just better education for students. Shows what you know:

To some extent, education must keep up with the development of AI technology, so as to ensure the historical status of mankind at the top of civilization.

I've seen education ideas marketed by invoking a nation's need to stay ahead of other nations. This is the first time I'm ever seen someone suggest that our primacy as a species is resting on how quickly we buy their product. Sadly, there is no suggestion about which species might replace mankind at the top of civilization.

Derek Li's keynote address was entitled "How To Give Every Child Adaptive Education." Spoiler Alert: the answer is not "by putting way more than 4.28 human teachers in every school"). After doing a quick "AI so far" bit, we go big once again:

The upcoming AI era, like the industrial revolution, will be one of the epochal events that can change the course of human history.

And then he ticks off the reasons. As is often the case, they say as much about the speaker's understanding (or lack thereof) of education as they say about his ability to oversell AI.

First, AI is "know-it-all." Examples? It can read a lot of books quickly and prepare for a debate on any topic. Which suggests that we're unclear on the difference between reading something and understanding it. But hey-- here's an explanation of education you might not have encountered before. Here's how the "know-it-all factor applies to education:

In terms of education, AI can break down and master all the nanoscale knowledge points, have a good grasp of the countless correlations between knowledge points, and provide "one-on-one tutoring" for thousands of students, which is an almost impossible task for human teachers.

So that's education. A bunch of knowledge points and map that connects them. Basically just building an html encyclopedia. I assume that somewhere in there will be the explanation of the difference between knowledge and wisdom. I mean, I am a big believer in the value of rich content, but that's because you need to know things in order to understand things-- but understanding and applying and using your insight to be more fully yourself, more fully human in the world-- that's the point. Not to just pile up a bunch of nanoscale knowledge points.

But this is one of the huge dangers of tech in education-- redefining education so that it fits what the software can do. Can AI cope with a thoughtful synthesis of understanding and insight expressed through a long, in-depth piece of writing? It cannot-- and so higher level operations simply disappear from the definition of education.

Second, "it can tell big stories from small things." We're talking about amassing huge amounts of detailed data here, like the way that "Netflix can detect the cognition and preference of every viewer from the data of every frame, and then find the logic of making and reshaping a film from the subtle differences."

I don't have enough space to plumb the depths of why this is a bad idea, but let me just note a few things. The way that food engineering has produced unhealthy food that trips our hardwiring. The way that social media have essentially unleashed psy-ops on users to create a virtual dependence. It may be that software can figure out how to push our buttons, but that's simply a process, and a process that has its own natural tendency to NOT play to the angels of our better nature. Squirrel plugs its own ability to figure out which knowledge points students have or have not mastered, but that completely skips the question of the validity of the whole knowledge points model and the huge HUGE question of who is going to decide what the knowledge points are, how important each one is, how it should be sequenced, how its mastery can be measured-- and whether or not all those questions should be answered by tech companies rather than educators.

Third, it has infinite computing power. Yes, I'm sure that's not hyperbolic PR baloney at all. What he seems to mean is that the computer can do many things very swiftly, and definitely faster than humans. It can play chess, and so it can "know the user profile of each student" in detail by carefully labeling each question. This is certainly a clerical job that computers can do quickly, but we need to be more careful in throwing around words-- a piece of software does not "know" a student any more than an old school filing cabinet filled with folders of student work "knows" those students.

Fourth, it's self-evolving. "Sunshine gathers, and light flows into my dreams," wrote Microsoft's Xiaoice. He calls that "a line of verse" and then says "although it has been criticized by many experts, it's better than 90% of what humans can do" and then I say, "Holy scheikies! Listen, Mr. Hard Data Guy, let me see your criteria for deciding that a line of poetry is "better" and then the methodology that allowed you to know what 90% of humans are capable of writing?! But this is ed tech at its ballsiest-- experts in the field we're disrupting don't know a damn thing; poetry is just some pretty words strung together and our word-stringing software is the bestest. He's not done bragging:

In the field of education, the evolutionary power of Squirrel AI is also amazing. It has skills that human teachers do not have. It can automatically help students make up their knowledge gaps and stimulate students' creativity and imagination.

Software now knows the secret of creativity and imagination. SMH. "Self-evolving" has been a moving target for programmers, but most often it means that it's just collecting more knowledge points and examples, which means it "learns" what is put into it, which is why facial recognition software works better with white guys and a previous Microsoft AI project called Watson didn't express poetry so much as it kept using the word "bullshit" inappropriately. (Can the word "bullshit" be used appropriately? If you are still reading this article, you don't really have to ask.) All the infinite computing power we've added hasn't changed the oldest rule of computing-- Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Okay, take a deep breath. Here's a picture of cute puppies to help sooth you. Because we aren't done-- Squirrel is now going to tout its breakthroughs in "I+ Education."

So what can they do? Let's introduce the section:

At present, auxiliary AI tools, such as pronunciation assessment and emotion recognition, cannot get involved in children's cognitive learning process. What parents are most concerned about is how a product can help their children to learn. AI+ education will eventually return to teaching and learning. Therefore, AI adaptive education is the best application scenario of AI+ education. Squirrel AI Learning has been in the forefront in this field in China.

Huh. I'm considering for the first time the possibility that this press release was written by an AI.

Oh hell-- Knewton is connected to these guys, via Richard Tong, who used to be the Asia Pacific tech director for Knewton. That's not good. Squirrel has also poached from RealizeIT and ALEKS. So that's who they've enlisted so far (spoiler alert: there's a surprise coming). What have they done?

First, super-nano knowledge point splitting. They broke a junior high subject into 30,000 knowledge points. And I'm thinking first, that's all? And I'm thinking second, so much for my question about whether we'd have tech guys making educational decisions.

Second, learning ability and learning method splitting to come up with "definable, measurable and teachable ability" theory. They've come up with 500, like learning by analogy or inference, which is apparently (honestly, this is hard to read) something Squirrel's AI tries to teach. And this-- "They also pay attention to the cultivation and promotion of students' creative ability." Says the guy who thinks "Sunshine gathers, and light flows into my dreams" is better than what 90% of humans could write. 

Third, well... "they initiated the correlation probability of uncorrelated knowledge points. Squirrel AI builds correlations between knowledge points and uses information theory to test and teach students efficiently." I'm pretty sure he's just making shit up now.

Fourth, they came up with the "concept of map reconstruction based on mistakes." Squirrel AI will personalize learning plans for students "on the basis of finding the real reason for making mistakes," which is a hugely impressive feat of mind reading. I can believe they could handle figuring out which step in a math problem a student flubbed. I'm less confident they could, say, spot the source of flawed reasoning in an analysis of wheel imagery in MacBeth. And I'd be really curious, when it comes to writing or the humanities, how the software distinguished between "mistakes" and the "creative ability" they're careful to cultivate.

Fifth, they initiated a versus model. Somehow, by using Bayes' theorem, they "simulate learning and competition between students and teachers." Only simulate? And Bayes' theorem is about calculating probabilities-- is this supposed to be about beating the odds.

With these technologies, Squirrel AI can accurately locate the knowledge points of each student and continuously push the knowledge points most suitable to their intellectual development and learning ability according to each student's knowledge point mastery in the process of dynamic learning, so as to establish a personalized learning path for each student and enable them to learn the most knowledge points in the shortest time, putting an end to the "cramming model" and "excessive assignments tactic" in traditional education.

Maybe I'm not fully grasping the awesome here, but I'd swear that basically Squirrel has broken down education into a big list of competencies, and the computer keeps track of which ones the student hasn't checked off yet, and gives the student material to help fill in the blanks on the big list. Am I missing something?

Li saved a big announcement for late in the speech-- just in case you doubted Squirrel's clout, they have just hired Tom Mitchell, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, as their Chief AI Officer. So while you're processing the rest of this, you might also want to think about how thoroughly China is grabbing the reins on this emerging tech biz. Mitchell will lead a bunch of teams conducting "basic AI research in the field of intelligent adaptive education, as well as the development and application of related products." Because products.

To sum up its own awesomeness, Squirrel ends with

In addition, Squirrel AI Learning not only has mastered the world's most advanced technology, but also has greatly expanded its online + offline education retail business model nationwide. Online, Squirrel AI Learning gets traffic. Students receive one-on-one tutoring online. Different from other education enterprises, 70% courses of Squirrel AI Learning are taught and lectured by AI teachers. Human teachers are responsible for the remaining 30% of teaching for monitoring and emotional help. Offline, Squirrel AI Learning opens physical learning centers in the form of franchised chain centers, cooperative schools and self-run centers in various places. 

They've mastered the world's most advanced technology. Nothing left to work on their, because it is mastered, baby. And in case you missed this before, let me point it out again-- "70% courses...are taught and lectured by AI teachers." Also, the retail of this business is going great.

Scared yet?

In fact, Squirrel AI Learning's new education retail business model is also a reform of the traditional education model. On the one hand, Squirrel AI Learning not only has changed the traditional model of teaching by teachers, replacing it with teaching by AI, but also has realized intelligent management of students' learning. In the past, every student's data was opaque. Now through the Internet and AI, all students' learning process data and teaching data are collected, to provide better quality services for students. Transparent data management has changed the traditional offline education model.

No schools. No teachers. Just a highly lucrative batch of software and a mountain of Big Data on each child. And they are working on "testing brain wave patterns." Says Derek Li, man-god standing astride the great computerized colossus that can do everything and rule us all, next, "Squirrel AI will become a super AI teaching robot integrating personalized learning, dynamic learning objective management, human-computer dialogue, emotion and brain wave monitoring, to provide every student with high quality education and teaching services."

Let's hope that this misguided dystopic vision is just as bullshitty as it sounds. These are people who think a large hard drive stuffed with data points has been educated and that poetry has nothing to do with human experience and that education should be chopped down to fit the limitations of computers software. And these are people without an ounce of humility, absolutely confident that they are correct to commandeer and re-create an entire sector of human endeavor can make a buck. They have failed to answer two critical questions-- what can they do, really, and should they actually attempt to do it.

After the Education Wars: The Best and Worst of Reform

Andrea Gabor is a business journalist by trade, and it's our great good fortune that she followed the thread of business-style reform into the world of education. Her recent book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is an invaluable addition to the literature of ed reform-- not the faux reform that has been foisted on us for the past decades, but actual improvement of schools and education. With a journalist's keen eye for detail and gift for story-telling, Gabor delivers compact, fair and gripping tales of education reform in four cities, showing both what worked and what didn't. The book combines thorough research with sharp insight and-- well, there are plenty of books about ed reform that are "interesting if you're into that sort of thing." Gabor's book is just plain interesting and hugely readable. If you're afraid this review is too long to read, let me cut to the chase-- read this book.

Gabor is a fan of W. Edwards Deming, the American engineer who helped Japan create their post-war industrial boom but who was long ignored in this country. The story she finds in business-driven ed reform is the story of businessmen who keep learning and applying the wrong lessons, and whose distrust of educators combine with their arrogance about their own expertise result in repeated versions of the same mistakes. They keep returning to a topdown, hierarchal, siloed organization driven with carrot-and-stick incentives "about as successful," says Gabor, "as a Ford Pinto or a Deep Water Horizon drilling operation." But the debates about industrial management in this country were largely won by the Taylorites, who put their faith in sort-of-scientific data and a view of workers as rats in a Skinner box. The Deming systems approach, valuing an atmosphere of trust and empowerment.

This may all seem very esoteric, but it shakes out in some important ways. To oversimplify-- a Taylorite approach says that individuals mess up the system, and you make the system better by rooting out the "bad" individuals, while a Deming approach says that problem individuals are signs of flaws in your system. You can see the Taylorite approach manifest in the long-standing reformer emphasis on finding bad teachers and firing them as a ay to fix schools. My favorite Deming observation is about deadwood in an organization. Deming asked if it was dead when you hired it or did you hire a live tree and then kill it? Either way, it's your system (and management) are to blame.

Gabor uses five big chapters to tell the stories of four big systems; each story is fascinating and instructive in its own way.

New York

I will confess that the ins and outs of NYC schools have always been mysterious to me. So much history, so many players, and so many mistakes. Gabor takes the wayback machine all the way to the 1970s, then picks up the rise of a progressive movement in the city and its connection to the small schools movement, including schools within schools and charters. Gabor brings the various players to life, from Lillian Weber to Deborah Meier to Tony Alvarado-- a growing network of education rebels practicing "creative noncompliance." Gabor doesn't erase anybody's failures or shortcomings; this is a story of human beings doing what they think is right, their strengths also sometimes their weaknesses.

Gabor tells the stories of Central Park East and the Julia Richman complex (the schools that inspired
Bill Gates, but from which he took all the wrong lessons). And then she tells the story of how Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein brought the new brand of corporate ed reform to NYC and the havoc that "disruption" wrought, leading to the "charter school boom and the test score arms race." Again, Gabor balances a huge number of vivid characters and wonky policy ideas rendered in clear strokes. (As a side note, reading this I was once again struck by just how many reformsters got their start working for Klein). By focusing on specific stories, like the rise and fall off Global Tech, she shows how the various reform policies played out.

And while Gabor is fair, she's also pretty blunt. Here she is writing about the impact of federal reform on the state:

Behind Race to the Top was a well-worn set of assumptions that competition, in the form of charter schools and the Common Core would lift all pedagogical boats; that punitive teacher evaluations-- extra funding in exchange for teacher evaluations linked to test scores-- would motivate lazy and recalcitrant teachers to finally do their jobs; that all you need was a good teacher in every classroom and the detrimental effects of poverty, neglect, and social dysfunction could be significantly, if not entirely mitigated.
...
However, New York State's alacrity in adopting both the Common Core and faux-Common Core tests stands out for its sheer hubris and wrong-headedness. 

New York City ends up being the story of how federal, state and local politics managed to mostly overwhelm actual effective reform going on in the city. Fortunately, it's not the only story Gabor has to tell.

Brockton, Massachussetts

Brockton was the state's largest high school, and its poorest. That part it at ground zero for Massachussetts' remarkable Education Reform Act of 1993. This story takes us back to a time before "reform" meant "market-based opportunity for corporate profit" and explains why we hear so often about how Massachussetts had strong schools and better standards than the Common Core.

Gabor gives several reasons that Mass reform worked. First, it grew from string  broad-based leadership and support which in turn produced a clear vision of what reform should look like. Second, it had clear goals and a system for achieving them-- a system that was collaborative and transparent. Third, the whole business was born of a "deliberate, often messy, and deeply democratic process."  Everyone was par of it and "the reforms were not rushed, nor were they imposed from above." (Also, as a side note, charter schools were "virtually irrelevant.")

Gabor tells the striking (and probably not well  enough known) story of how the state crafted a true education reform, including all the messy parts, and sadly, how that reform eventually collided with federally-imposed corporate reform. I'm not sure anything highlights the hollow hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind, Common Core, or Race to the Top than how the feds dealt with a state that had already achieved most of what the reformsters claimed they wanted, and how those reformsters tried to hammer their way into the state anyway.

Leander, Texas

You've probably never heard of Leander, Texas, but you need to. The school district is an absolute model (or "proof of concept," if you prefer corporate reformster-speak) for the Deming continuous improvement doctrine of Trust and Collaboration (and driving fear out of the system). The grown-huge district has an impressive commitment to both qualities, with a firm vision of maintaining student excitement about learning. Imagine a district with entire "Culture Days" devoted simply to maintaining and building a sense of positive mission and shared commitment.

Here in this chapter is How They Did It, Why They Did It, and how well it has worked. I won't say much more than to say that I've heard district leaders speak, and my initial reaction was  "Yeah, sure" and a half hour later I had arrived at "I'd like to work there."

This chapter, more than anything I've read, answers the eternal reformer question, "Well, if you don't like our ideas, what do you want to do instead." This. I want to do this. A systems approach h that drives out fear and thrives on trust and collaboration while centering on students not just as learners, but as human beings. Let's do this.

New Orleans

There's no denying that pre-Katrina New Orleans schools. A city steeped in racism and corruption  (read Empire of Sin for a picture of its amazing history), it had a school system to match. But post-Katrina NOLA is a perfect example of the reformster technique of offering fake solutions to real problems. This has been a pattern over and over-- a heavy emphasis on the problems that need to be solved, with no real discussion or honest evaluation of the proposed "solutions" and certainly no consideration for possible alternative solutions.

The local charter establishment had presented the takeover of the city's schools as a binary choice-- the mismanagement and corruption of the old OPSDB of the pre-Katrina years or the shiny, efficient, technocratic charter schools run by mostly white out-of-towners and funded by white, mostly out-of-town money and muscle.

With that, a silencing of the poor, black residents of the city. The stories of Morris Jeff, MLK, and John McDonough schools show just how hard black residents and neighborhoods had to fight to be heard at all (and how often they fought had and were still ignored). New Orleans continues to be an example of reform at its most nakedly anti-democratic, of a top-down approach that tells the little people to shut up and sit down because their betters know what's best for them, and they probably aren't capable of self-determination anyway. Watch for a repeat performance in Puerto Rico.

Conclusion

Gabor wraps up by talking about "how schools-- and society-- benefit from real democracy." It's an appropriate discussion because, as many have noticed, reformsterism is part of a larger pattern of erasing democracy so that the right people, rich people, privileged people, can run things without being interrupted by all those little people and votes and such foolishness.

I have a ton of things underlined in this chapter- I'll just share a few of them.

K-12 education in the twenty-first century cannot be framed as a battle between preparing young people for a competitive global marketplace, on the one hand, versus a democratic society, on the other. That's a false dichotomy; schools must do both.

But instead of scouring the world for the best educational practices, America embraced testing and the disruptions of the market. For business-minded Americans, tests have all the benefits of an easy-to-digest profit-and-loss statement. When scores go up, education is deemed to be improving; when scores go down, schools are labeled failures. But like quarterly earnings reports, tests have a nasty habit of distorting and manipulating production in order to generate the desired numbers.

...from Bloomberg's New York to New Orleans, the elites who control the education-reform agenda have absorbed a deep distrust of democratic decision making both at the school-board level and in schools themselves.

Gabor shows throughout that while the official ed reform of those elites has been controlling the agenda and grabbing the power, all along, quiet revolutions have produced real reform in a variety of settings, and reformsters have not only failed to learn from those educator-driven democratically-fueled reforms, but they have actively opposed them. Gabor last out her lessons to be learned:

Key ingredients for meaningful reform include local decision making (including teacher voice), equitably funding, strong leadership, a clear and widely supported strategy, and accountability with flexibility.

Schools and school governance must model democratic decision making.

The best schools need protection from "giant vampire squid bureaucracies."

Democratic involvement will be affected by trends in the country at large.

Charter schools should get back to the old notion of teacher-led innovation and away from public school substitution.

Accountability needs to be radically rethought.

Wrapping up.

This is a book you really, really ought to read. It masterfully balances the big picture, the small picture, and the ideas behind them. It shows how schools and school systems can be improved by folks who are actual educators, and it shows how the rising tide of "reform" has actually interfered with real reform. And it's written in as the kind of engaging history that good journalists do best. You should read this book. 

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.