Bill Gates Is Still Pushing Common Core

Sigh.

You've undoubtedly heard the news over the past couple of days-- the Gates Foundation is going to throw $10 million at teachers to help promote "high-quality" curriculum.

There are several problems with this, and none of them are new.

First, despite the headlines, this money is not actually being thrown directly at teachers.

“We want to identify the content-specific professional development services, products, and models that are working really well for young people, and also study the attributes of those solutions that make them effective so we can share that learning with the field,” said Bob Hughes, the foundation’s director of K-12 education.

This guy, again, still. 

In other words, they are going to throw money at outfits that do professional development so that those PD providers can train teachers better. This is yet another variation of "It's the implementation" that translates roughly as "My grand idea would have worked if teachers understood better how to properly perform my great stuff."

This golden oldie never dies-- just this week I was embroiled in a Twitter thread in which someone explained that a particular practice would work if teachers just understood it properly. Back in 2016, the Gates Foundation was trying to explain what they had learned about their large-scale failures in education, but the only lesson they have ever come up with is "We've learned that the unreasoning resistance, educational ignorance, and poor training of education professionals makes it hard for our brilliant ideas to shine properly."

This, apparently, is more of that.

But wait-- there's more. Buried in that loaded term "high-quality" is an old friend. Because "high-quality" means "certified fresh" at EdReports.com.

EdReports was launched back in 2014 with funding from the Usual CCSS Suspects. It was launched as a sort of antidote to one of the many problems that emerged with adoption of the Common Core. Because there was no central authority on the Core, and, in fact, the guys who wrote it dispersed quickly to lucrative new gigs, there was nobody in place to stop textbook publishers from moving inventory by ordering a case of "Aligned to Common Core" stickers and slapping them on every dusty text sitting in their warehouses.

So EdReports' job was to check resources and determine whether or not they were actually Core-aligned.

They were tough. In the first year, almost every publisher flunked Common Core math. Now they have worked their way through many other areas-- well, math and ELA-- and you can see the results in handy charts. And prominently featured is whether or not that text is properly aligned. EdReports has dutifully scrubbed its site so that it now talks about "college- and career-ready standards" instead of the dreaded "Common Core," but the mission hasn't changed. EdReports will tell you how well a textbook is aligned to the Common Core Standards.

Which means Gates is still-- STILL-- spending money to get the Core into every classroom.

Mind you, this is chump change compared to the $1.7 billion that Gates is spending in his continued effort to singlehandedly force the redesign of American education. But the Gates Foundation keeps saying things like this:

A standards-aligned, high-quality curriculum is an essential feature of a coherent instructional system that can maximize its potential benefit. We hypothesize that such a system may consist of the following elements, as well as others:

Every adult human who ever set foot in a classroom has some "hypotheses" about what makes a good school. Only one of the richest men in the world has the power to try to force his hypotheses on everybody else. And to just keep trying and trying and trying, with a hammer sculpted out of a stack of money.

This continues to be the most recurring annoyance of much ed reform. Bill Gates has no more expertise regarding public education than my garage mechanic, who's a nice guy who was once in my class. But if my guy wants to put his ideas into action in a school, he has to run for school board and convince the taxpayers that he can be trusted with the job. He'd have to cooperate with other board members, and because he's a good guy without an overinflated ego, he would undoubtedly ask the opinions of professional educators. But because Gates and Broad and Walton et al have a giant pile of money, and no special misgivings about their judgment, they just go ahead and flex their money and start shoving their ideas down the system's throat.

Nor does Gates appear to be a quick study. Google "Bill Gates" and "doubles down" and watch the headlines stack up. And here we go again with more of the same. Next time a professional development session rolls around to help you "strengthen" your curriculum, you may want to ask who's paying the bills.

ID: IBE HP VP BS

Idaho Business for Education (IBE) is "a group of nearly 200 business leaders from across the state who are committed to transforming Idaho’s education system."

IBE works with the legislature and key Idaho stakeholders to help set our students up for success in school, work and life, and build the workforce that will lead to a vibrant economy for years to come. Our 2019 initiatives include the School Readiness Act, Career and Technical Education, and more.

They appear to work pretty closely with their elected officials for legislative goals. So, kind of like an Idaho-sized ALEC (although Idaho has had a pretty good relationship with full-sized ALEC). And like ALEC, IBE enjoys special access to legislators. That includes a "legislative academy" that traditionally takes place on the first day of the legislative session. While legislators were waiting to find out what their leadership is lining up for the year, IBE gets to brief them on business's thoughts and priorities.

This year, the bar is set high:

The world’s next industrial revolution presents a “huge opportunity” for Idaho, if the state can modify its school system to match it.

It's those teachers! They're the ones!

I love these unintentional scare quotes. Michael Schmedlen, Hewlett-Packard’s vice president for worldwide education, delivered the message of opportunity, because if we're going to reconfigure the entire education system, maybe we should talk about why.

Following the reform play book, Schmedlen started by telling scary stories.

Nearly two-thirds of today’s students will work in jobs that have not yet been created. Tomorrow’s workers will move much more from job to job. They will work in a competitive, diverse and global workplace. Students will need critical thinking skills, and they will need to learn to collaborate and innovate.

Sigh. It's been over a year since Matt Barnum decisively debunked the whole 65% of tomorrow's jobs haven't been created yet statistic, yet here it is again, still without any foundation.

The rest is interesting from a corporate honcho, because it's so cool and dispassionate and prescriptive ("workers will") while failing to acknowledge, as is usual, why this ugly future is on the way. Imagine if a corporate exec said it this way--

In the future, we will be offer no loyalty or job security to our employees-- we'll just keep giving the job who can do it well enough for the cheapest price, wherever they are in the world this week, and we'll dump those workers next week if we find a cheaper replacement. Workers had better be quick at picking up work requirements, because we don't want to waste time training them, and keeping meat widget costs down is more important to us than hanging on to experienced worker. I read the critical thinking, collaborate, innovate thing off some 21st century skills list thing, but yeah-- you need to be quick on problem solving and getting along because we expect you to cope with all this disruption and instability on your own-- or else we'll replace you with someone can. Meat widget problems are not management problems.

Schmedlen offered other keen insights.

Education should adapt quickly, he said. Schools need to offer highly sought-after skills — which can include traditional disciplines such as math, science and reading. But schools also need to improve their instructional approach and reform assessments.

While communities, states and nations need to change their education systems, Schmedlen cautioned against simply throwing money into technology, without studying the existing education system in detail. “Then you can create a roadmap for reform.”

Schools need to offer highly sought after skills because businesses are too cheap to do training (particularly if they have to do it often). What does the roadmap look like? Who knows.

But Schmedlen's co-presenter, Marcela Escobari, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, is there to add one little hint about what the subject should be:

Escobari couched the challenge in human terms. Too many workers are juggling multiple, part-time jobs to make ends meet — or they are dropping out of the labor market entirely.

“The low-skill jobs are becoming crappier,” said Escobari, to some nervous laughter.

Nervous laughter indeed. Because all the education in the world, even if it's designed by businesses to serve as their vocational training, will not turn crappy jobs into great jobs. IBE members will not be saying, "Well, now that you're so well-trained, we'll pay you better." It's not the K-12 education system's fault that businesses don't want to pay their meat widgets a living wage.

Here's the thing. Where I live, there's a popular welding program offered to our students, and plenty sign up to get that training because they know there are excellent jobs that pay really well available to welders. That's how it works-- you make a job attractive, and people line up to get the training for it. Train a bunch of people and then maybe we'll make the job better is not how it works-- but that is a good argument for shifting all responsibility for economic health from government and business onto education.

PA: How Charters Damage a Public School System

Erie has come a long way since the days that visitors would travel to the beaches just to be appalled by the dead fish on shore, the days when Western Pennsylvanians called it "The Mistake on the Lake." The waterfront is now pristine and beautiful, the city now boasting great theaters, hotels and recreation. But public education is still struggling.

Just two and a half years ago, the previous superintendent of the district was asking his board to consider closing all of Erie's public high schools and just farming the students out to surrounding districts. The move may have been a play for attention, but it grew out of real problems.

Erie suffers severely from issues felt across Pennsylvania. The state is near the bottom of US states in its support for local districts (generally around 36% of school money comes from the state). That means that local districts must supply the bulk of district finances. The ability of local districts to come up with money varies wildly from place to place, which is why Pennsylvania has had the greatest gap between rich and poor districts in the nation. Governor Tom Wolf entered office announcing his intention to fix that, but so far progress has been minimal. In the meantime, Erie is not exactly a rich district, and it has gotten poorer as charter schools (both brick and cyber) have popped up in the area, moving more and more money away from the public schools.

Charter school advocates have long argued that competition will unlock excellence and general awesomeness. The plight of Erie's public schools gives us a hint about how that actually works.

Last month the Erie Times-News ran a piece by Ed Palatella looking at the possible fate of one Erie charter-- the Erie Rise Leadership Academy Charter School. The K-8 school of over 400 students has ranked consistently low in its test scores (last year found only 6.9% of the students scoring proficient or advanced on Pennsylvania's big standardized test). The Erie School District will hold hearings to decide whether or not to pull the plug; that plug-pulling almost certainly would come with court challenges and appeals, so the district has to weigh many factors.

The current superintendent, Brian Polito, is not hostile to charters, but he can't ignore the threat they pose. Last year Erie lost $23.5 million to charter schools, and in the face of financial and enrollment losses, it has closed or consolidated numerous schools. In Pennsylvania, a regular education student is worth around $10,000 to a district while a special education student is worth $20,000 (gaming that difference in funding by enrolling students with low-cost special needs can help a charter bring in a truckload of revenue).

This is the situation that's supposed to fuel competition. But how do Erie schools compete when they are already academically beating the socks off Erie Rise, even as they struggle to get by with limited funds?

That's the issue Polito is trying to address: reducing charter bleed for the district. Polito started in the job just over a year ago and he's been looking for the answers. The district has surveyed the charter families, and they'll use those responses for a campaign slated to start in 2019 that will include a variety of approaches right down to sending district employees to knock on doors.

The state has given Erie schools an extra $14 million in state funding to help rescue the district, and with that comes Charles Zogby, a state-appointed financial administrator to oversee district finances. Palatella reports Zogby's response to the plan unveiled at the December 1 board meeting:

“You must fight fire with something,” Zogby told the School Board of focusing on charter schools. “It is not as if any of the charters are blowing the doors out compared to any Erie School District School.”

The CEO of Erie Rise says they will run their own counter-program.

And so Erie is poised to see the same kind of competition that has broken out in other cities where charter schools are crowding the public system--a marketing competition. One may argue that having schools market more aggressively will result in schools that are more responsive to the families who are their "customers," and that may be true but there are several points worth remembering.

First, the marketing will be aimed only at the desirable students, and not the ones who are more difficult or expensive to educate. Second, taxpayers without children will find themselves shut out of the conversation about education in their city. Third, marketing costs money--money that could have been spent educating students. And perhaps importantly, just because a school markets itself well, it does not follow that it is a good school.

Lots of terrible products are well marketed, and lots of great products fail in the marketplace. This is Greene's Law: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.

Erie's public schools have been to the brink of destruction. Next year will be a test of whether or not competition can actually save public education or will simply drive it that much further from its original purpose.

Originally posted at Forbes

Why You Can't Fire Your Way To Excellence

For some reformsters and accountability hawks, the dream remains the same-- find those Bad Teachers, fire them, and replace them with Awesome Teachers. Crack the accountability whip and fire our way to excellence.

We have discussed some of the obvious flaws with this approach. How do you even define a Bad Teacher, and is it a permanent condition or a day-to-day variable? How do you find your Bad Teachers if you are using a crappy invalid system like test-based VAMification? And where is your magical tree that is so ripe with a limitless supply of Awesome Teachers?

There's another reason that this approach won't work. We can start to see it if we ask the question, "Why is the Bad Teacher bad?" But so far that has led to more criticism of teacher preparation programs.

So let me trot out, again, my favorite W. Edwards Deming observation. It's not a quote exactly, because he made the point several ways without ever reducing it to a handy aphorism. But here's the basic idea:

So you're firing the deadwood in your organization. Was it dead when you hired it? Or did you hire a live tree and then kill it?

Was that teacher bad from Day One? Well, then-- who hired her? Who looked at her credentials and leafed through her records and recommendations and interviewed her face to face and maybe even watched her teach a sample lesson and through all that, never once saw the signs that she was a less-than-stellar prospect? And why is that-- do you not know what question to ask and what qualities to check for, or were you incapable of seeing the red flags that were flapping in your face? Why did you get it wrong?

"None of that," your superintendent says. "She was bright and shiny and full of promise when we hired. We totally got it right."

Then what happened? What systems do you have in place to make sure that shiny new people are polished up to fulfill their promise? What supports do you provide? Did she wither into dead wood because she was not nurtured and cared for, or do you actually have toxic elements loose in your school? And f so, how dd they get there, and how are they allowed to persist?

An administration's number one job is to make sure that the district's teachers are working in the conditions that make it possible for them to do their best work. Every bad teacher represents a failure by a principal and a superintendent. That teacher you want to fire is a sign that either your hiring process or your teacher management process is broken.

So what makes you think you can replace that Bad Teacher with someone better?

All you're doing is throwing the dice and hoping that you get lucky-- that you are lucky enough to select someone who either slips through your flawed hiring process, or who can withstand your bad management. Now the quality of your teaching staff is resting on factors like which teachers are in the lounge during Mrs. McNewby's lunch shift. And if you're one of those districts that assigns a state-required mentor based on how the schedule fits and not on who would actually make a good mentor, then you've missed the entire point of mentoring.

And the odds are not in your favor, because the larger national-level system is so broken and toxic that plenty of good people are simply avoiding. What we keep calling a teacher shortage is a symptom of bad policy, bad systems, bad management on a national and state-wide scale.

Firing your way to excellence isn't a management technique-- it's just giving a big bucket of quarters to someone sitting in a casino in front of a slot machine. Most of all, it's carefully avoiding looking at the true source of your trouble-- a broken system and the people who run it.

ICYMI: Still Waiting for Winter Edition (1/6)

Still no snow in my neck of the woods, but still plenty of writing about education to be read. Remember, sharing is caring.

Keep That Same Energy 

Jose Luis Vilson has my favorite kick off the new year piece. Check it out.

Excuse Me While I Teach Your Child

A greatest hits fun and games from McSweeney's

Appellate Division Kills Zombie PARCC

A great breakdown of New Jersey's rejection of the little-loved PARCC exam

How To Help Public School Teachers Love Their Profession Again

From The Hill, of all places. You may agree with all, some, or none, but it's a good conversation starter.

The Year in K-12 Education

A Kansas professor takes a look at what happened to education out in the plains.

It's Time We Started Calling School Choice What It Is

And that's privatization.

What If Schools Focused on Improving Relationships Instead of Test Scores.      

The tale of someone who left the work and then came back to a whole different kind of school, and realized what had been wrong all along.

Five Things Lawmakers Can Do for Education in 2019.     

We're talking about North Carolina here, but the items on the list can apply in many states.

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.