DeVos Has A Hammer

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been busy lately, making actual somewhat-public appearances and talking about all her favorites subjects. Thursday it was the 87th annual United States Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting, and her remarks included many of her favorite points. But she's not just beating a drum; she's working with a big, heavy hammer. Bang bang bang. Here are some highlights:

Droll understatement: "I was active in local politics and policy" sounds so much humbler than "I used to run the GOP in Michigan" and so much cleaner than flat-out admitting that you're buying influence. Bang.

The 100 year complaint: Everything has changed in the last hundred years but "approaches to education have largely remained the same." Bang.

Meat widgets: There are millions of unfilled jobs in this country. Somehow, she fails to see any connection between this unfilled need and the push to stop immigration. Bang.

Fake statistics: Well, at least she didn't use an actual number. But she still claimed that "majority of the jobs that today's students will do just ten short years from now haven't been invented." This oft-cited factoid is bogus. Bang.

Odd transitions: In discussing the fact that employers say they can't find trained people (could it be that they are trying to fill jobs that didn't exist ten years ago?), DeVos unleashes this transitional gem: "There is a disconnect between education and the economy, just as there is often a disconnect between a child and the school they’re assigned to." Bang.

Is it a disconnect, or just hypocrisy: DeVos says that too many students are "treated like commodities." This is shortly after she suggests that the job of education is to make students useful to employers. Bang.

More neat widgets: DeVos wants to plug Perkins V, just signed into law last summer. We need to have a conversation about this new version of the bill some time, but what she's excited about at the moment is the way it breaks the "giant silos" between educators and employers. Or, as one commenter put it a month ago, "provides some new opportunities for tighter alignment of programs of study to data-driven workforce needs." Or, as I put it now, made it clear that education exists to serve business interests. And it spreads some money around, and the mayors will want to keep their eyes peeled for that. Bang.

Something new: DeVos is anti-silo. Education has too many silos. Not like the rest of the world, which is silo-free. Which I suppose seems true if you're a really rich, well-connected person who has always been able to swoop into any place she wants, including an entire public sector in which you have no experience or expertise. I suppose to that person it must seem like the world has no boundaries. Bang.

Rethinking: DeVos wants everyone to question everything so that nothing limits students from being prepared. She has a list of questions, which are all cagily aimed at one answer-- privatized, computerized, teacherless learning.  Her list of questions does not include, for instance, why should one family get to hold onto more wealth than they can possibly need while poor students have to worry about having enough to eat. Also, she's decided that CTE is good stuff (at least, you know, for certain people) and that there should be partnerships which involve turning schools into training facilities for particular employers. Bang bang.

Quotable nonsense: DeVos always delivers at least one pull-quote-worthy line. For the mayors, I's pick this:

Well, education is the least disrupted “industry” in America. And, let’s not kid ourselves, it is an industry.

Education is not a public good or a trust or a promise to our children or a valuable institution. It's an industry, like manufacturing toasters. Yet another quote that gives a clear insight into why DeVosian policies are so hostile to public education.

One size fits all: It's one of DeVos's go-to criticisms of public education. It's useful to her not because it's true, but because it sets up choice systems as the opposite of public ed. Of course, no school is one size fits all at all, as public schools are not only inclined by nature but required by law to accommodate all kinds of students. Certainly the Common Core movement was a concerted effort to force one-size-fits-all into public ed; the degree to which it failed is a measure of how much public ed is not inclined to be one size fits all. Meanwhile, charter schools only offer one size. They don't claim their one size will fit all-- they just refuse to accommodate those students that it doesn't fit. Not clear to me how that's better. Bang.

Swell anecdote: No DeVosian talk is complete without the story of a student that she recently met (despite her schedule, she is apparently always meeting students) who benefited from exactly the policies that DeVos would like to promote. Pretty sure DeVos needs to get out more. Maybe to actual public schools. Thump.

The governor's speech was vintage DeVos, and this week she also got her hammer out for a talk at the Heritage Foundation. She was there largely talking about the DC Opportunity Scholarship, one of the programs often held up as a proof of concept for choice.

For the Heritage crowd, DeVos threw in the big two-part idea that (part one) the majority of people want choice. Her basis for that claim is a poll run by-- surprise-- the American Federation for Children, the pro-choice advocacy group funded by the DeVos family. The poll was a phone survey of 1,200 likely 2020 voters; how those voters were selected isn't covered. John Schilling, the president of AFT, calls for "policymakers to listen to these voters," which-- well, the policymakers will have to implement these voucher policies because no voters have ever actually voted for a voucher law (vouchers just died-- again-- in Texas). The only way vouchers become law is when lawmakers create and pass the laws, voters be damned.

But DeVos has her own explanation for why school choice isn't more successful-- the damned teachers union is "the only thing" standing in the way because they have a "personal vested financial interest." I don't think DeVos is stupid, so I'll attribute this line to working her highly conservative audience, because the opposition to choice has come in many forms in many places-- including conservatives who don't want to see choice turn into another government power grab. School boards, superintendents, the NAACP, a whole host of other organizations, and actual voters, when it comes time to put a choice law up to a vote, have also stood in the way of school choice many times.

Even if the "survey" were accurate, even if people did say they want choice, that does not mean they want DeVos's idea of choice. "I want my child to be able to choose a good school" is not the same as "I want to see the public school stripped and destabilized and ultimately replaced by a privatized network of education-flavored businesses that may not even accept my child if she applies to attend them."

This is a long con we don't talk about often enough, and it's embedded in every DeVos speech-- the notion that educational choice can only happen via privatization, that the public school system can only be improved by dismantling its democratic systems and replacing them with private ownership. But "privatization" is a hard sell, while "choice" sounds just divine.

DeVos has a hammer, a big expensive hammer built to smash public education into small pieces (but not so small they can't be sold for parts). Every speech, she gets out that same hammer, maybe puts some new tape on the handle, shines up the head, but it's always that one hammer, beating away, over and over. Bang bang bang.

Classroom Practice Ideas For Reformsters

So while I was working on my last post, I came across this post by Robert Pondiscio that makes a good companion piece.

It's a post you might well miss; if you're a regular reader here, you may not check the Fordham Think-Tank Reform Advocacy Blog often. But Pondiscio and I really disagree about some things and really agree about some others, so I pay attention. I give Pondisc io credit for kicking off the 2018 year of reformy navel gazing with the observation that reformers had “overplayed our hand, overstated our expertise, and outspent our moral authority by a considerable margin.'

In this post, he's also responding to Mike Petrilli's new interest in evidence-based practices, and offered five suggestions designed to keep the "golden age of educational practice" from "blowing up on the launch pad." Let's look at the five pieces of advice:

1. Ask the right questions.

“What works?” is the wrong question. “The right question is ‘Under what conditions does this work?’” observes Dylan Wiliam.

That's an excellent start. My own suggestion is instead of politicians and thinks tank guys asking each other, "How can we make these damn teachers do the right stuff," turn to teachers and ask, "How can we help you do your jobs?"

2. Understand and accept trade-offs.

Quality research, says Pondiscio via Dan Willingham, "tells you what’s likely to happen if you pull a lever. It’s silent on whether it’s a good idea, or if the trade-offs are worth it."

Reformsters were surprised and baffled by the consequences of test-based accountability. Arne Duncan kept bemoaning the way test prep dominated many schools without ever understanding that his policies helped create the problem. One of the most critical question that people (especially journalist people) don't ask when some school announces miraculous test scores is "What did you sacrifice to get them." And don't get classroom teachers started on the endless directives to add One More Thing to their day, as if they have some vast bank of unused time they can tap into.

Teachers are operating at capacity; in some cases, beyond capacity. You cannot add anything without losing something. Yet more than once I've seen a principal get angry because, after receiving a new directive, a teacher asked, "So what do you want me to stop doing," as if that were some sort of impertinent sass and not a legitimate concern. And you don't have to get into deep or complex practices to see this issue in action. How many teachers have been told, "Between classes, be outside your door, monitoring the hall. Also, between classes, make sure you are monitoring your classroom."

This issue is a great example of something thinky tank guys and politicians easily ignore because they aren't in a classroom. But every single choice in a classroom comes with an opportunity cost, something that won't be happening because the teacher is doing Thing X instead. Any discussion of classroom practices must include a discussion of the costs-- all the costs.

3. Kill education myths.

This advice is rather broad. Pondiscio brings up learning styles and other pseudo-science. But myths are hard to stifle. Take "charter schools do a better job than public schools" or "vouchers and cyber schools will work"-- very hard to stifle. But I support stamping out edu-baloney, even though we might disagree about which myths qualify, exactly.

4. Learn the lessons cognitive science.

Here we hit an area where Pondiscio and I agree-- the "skills" movement labeled many things (e.g, critical thinking) as skills that can be taught, leaned and honed in a vacuum. That's just not so. From reading to creativity, content knowledge is what makes it possible. You can't think critically about something if you're ignorant of that something. Your reading skill rests on your content knowledge; you can't decode your way to understanding a word you've never heard of in a context you don't understand. Even creativity-- you can't discover creative new ways to look at something if you don't know anything about that something. You can phrase this in fancy language and say that cognitive skills are domain specific, but the idea stays the same.

5. Stop demanding bad practice through policy.

Really, stop demanding any practice through policy, because I don't care what it is-- for some teacher with some student on some day, the policy will be bad.

This was my raging frustration through the second half of my career-- the constant demands coming from state and federal government that I commit educational malpractice. The number of times that I had to look at a particular hill and decide whether I should fight on it, die on it, sneak around it, or just live to fight another day-- there was nothing more tiring about the work than those kinds of decisions, made on a daily basis, and all the worse because these decisions were forced on me by politicians and thinky tank hot shots and rich guys who wanted to dabble in education, but not by actual educators who had a clue about my work.

Common Core, test-centered accountability, test prep-- and at the high school level the damage being done isn't as severe as what's happening on the elementary level. I could not have been angrier if I had been a surgeon told by my bosses, "Stop using scalpels and operate with this rusty shovel instead."

Guys like Bill Gates, thinky tanks like Fordham, dabblers like David Coleman, politicians like--well, all of them-- if your ideas for good classroom practices are, in fact, good, then put them out there in the field. Let the marketplace of ideas get a look at them. If teachers like them, if they work, they will spread on their own. But mandating them is a bad idea because--

First, no practice is a good practice 100% of the time and

Second, as the last twenty years show, you guys mostly don't know what the hell you're talking about.  What possessed you to appoint yourselves the Grand High Poohbahs of education, I do not know, but just stop it. Stop operating on the assumption that you Know Things that actual teachers in the field do not, and so you must go ahead and force every teacher to do things your way. We haven't even begun to unpack all the damage you've already done, so just stop. You've been consistently wrong, and yet, like some energizer bunny that thinks it's a cordon bleu chef, you won't stop making a mess in the kitchen. Stop. If you want your say, sure, go ahead, this is America. Work with teachers. Try to be helpful. But stop trying to turn your every idea into a law, rule or regulation.

Let me just catch my breath here. 

I give four of Pondiscio's ideas a gold star for being useful going forward. And if reformy leaders want to shift gears from trying to break schools to trying to help teachers do the work-- well, I'm suspicious, but I'm always willing to listen. I appreciate what Pondiscio has written here; I just hope his colleagues listen to him.

The Trouble With Evidence

So now some voices are calling for an emphasis on evidence-based practices in classrooms, and I don't disagree. Evidence-based is certainly better than intuition-based or wild-guess-based or some-guy-from-the-textbook-company-told-us-to-do-this based. But before we get all excited about jumping on this bus, I think we need to think about our evidence bricks before we start trying to build an entire house on top of them.

There are three things to remember. The mot important is this:

Not all evidence is created equal.

Your Uncle Floyd is sure that global warming is a hoax, and his evidence is that it's currently five degrees outside. The Flat Earth Society has tons of evidence that the world is not round at all. Youtube is crammed with videos showing the evidence that 9/11 was faked, that the moon landing was staged, and that the Illuminati are running a huge world-altering conspiracy via the recording industry. Every one of those folks is certain that their idea is evidence-based, and yet their evidence is  junk.

Some evidence is junk because it has been stripped of context and sense. Some is junk because it has been unmoored from any contradictory evidence that might give it nuance and accuracy. Some is junk because it has been mislabeled and misrepresented.

One of the huge problems in education evidence-based anything is that when we follow the trail, we find that the evidence is just the same old set of test scores from a single bad standardized test. Test scores have been used as evidence of student learning, of teacher quality, of school achievement. Test scores have been used as evidence of the efficacy of one particular practice, an influence somehow separated from all others, as if we were arguing that the beans Chris ate at lunch three Tuesdays ago are the cause for Chris's growth spurt. And don't even get me started on the absurd notion that a teacher's college training can be evaluated by looking at student test scores.

Certainly test scores are evidence of something, but not much that's useful. Don't tell me that Practice A improves student learning if all you really mean is that Practice A appears to make test scores go up. The purpose of education is not to get students to do well on a standardized test.

Educational evidence has one other quality problem-- experimental design doesn't allow for real control groups. For the most part, educational researchers cannot say, "We know your child is supposed to be getting an education right now, but we'd like to use her as a lab rat instead." Arguably there are huge exceptions (looking at you, Bill Gates and Common Core), but mostly educational research has to go on during the mess of regular life, with a gazillion variables in play at every moment. Yes, medical research has similar problems, but in medical research, the outcomes are more clear and easily measurable (you either have cancer, or you don't).

Bottom line: much of the evidence in evidence-based educational stuff is weak. At one point everyone was sure the evidence for "learning styles" was pretty strong. Turns out it wasn't, according to some folks. Yet teachers largely use it still, as if they see evidence it works. Apparently the evidence is not strong enough to settle the battle.

And all of this is before we even get to the whole mountain of "evidence" that is produced by companies that have a product to sell, so they go shopping for evidence that will help sell it.

This helps explain why teachers are mostly likely to trust evidence that they collect themselves,  the evidence of their own eyes and ears, invoking a million data points gathered on a daily basis. This evidence is not foolproof either, but they know where it came from and how it was collected.

After we work our way through all that data collection, we still have to interpret it.

We just came out of a harrowing weekend of national weekend over an incident in DC involving some Catholic school teens, some indigenous peoples, and the Black Israelites. We've all had the same opportunity to watch and examine the exact same evidence, and we have arrived at wildly different conclusions about what the evidence actually shows. Not only do we reach different conclusions, but we are mostly really, really certain of our conclusions. And that's just the people making good-faith efforts to interpret the data; once we throw in the people trying to push a particular agenda, matters get even worse.

My point is this-- anyone who thinks that we'll be able to just say "Well, here's the evidence..." and that just settles everything is dreaming. All evidence is not created equal, and not all interpretations of evidence are created equal.

Newton is no longer king.

I get the desire, I really do. You want to be able to say, "Push down this lever, and X happens. Pull on this rope and the force is exerted through a pulley and the object on the end of the rope moves this much in this direction ." But levers and pulleys are simple machines in a Newtonian universe. Education is not a simple machine, and we don't live in Newton's universe any more.

We left Newton behind about a century ago, but the memos haven't gotten around to everyone yet. Blame that Einstein guy. Things that we thought of as absolutes like, ay, time and space-- well, it turns out how they kind of depend on where you are and how you're moving and even that can only be measured relative to something else. And then we get to chaos theory and information theory (one of the most influential reads of my life was Peter Gleick's Chaos) and the science that tells us how complex systems work, and the short version is that complex systems do not work like simple machines. Push down the "lever" in a complex system and you will probably get a different result every time, depending on any number of tiny uncontrollable variables. Not wildly variable, but not straight line predictable, either (we'll talk about strange attractors some time).

Students and teachers in a classroom are a complex machine indeed. Every teacher already gets this-- nothing will work for every student, and what was a great lesson with last year's class may bomb this year.

But there are people who desperately long for teaching to be a simple machine in Newton's world. I've been following reading debates for weeks and there are people in that space who are just so thoroughly sure that since Science tells us how the brain works re: reading, all we have to do is put the same Science-based method of teaching reading in the hands of every teacher, then every student will learn to read. It's so simple! Why can't we do that? Hell, Mike Petrilli floated for five minutes the notion of suing teacher prep schools that didn't.

The standard response to this is that teaching isn't a science. But I'll go one better-- it is science that tells us that such a simple Newtonian machine approach will not work. The dream some evidence-based folks have that we'll just use science to determine the best practices via evidence, and then just implement that stuff-- they are misunderstanding both teaching and science.

The federal definition of evidence-based is dumb.

The ESSA includes support for evidence-based practices, and it offers definitions of different levels of evidence-basededness that are.... well, not encouraging.

Strong Evidence means there's a least one good research paper that suggests the intervention will improve student outcomes (which, of course, actually means "raise test scores") or a related outcome (which means whatever you want it to). There should be no legit research that contradicts the findings, it should have a large sample, and the sample should overlap the populations and settings involved. In other words, research about rural third graders in Estonia does not count if you're looking for an intervention to use with American urban teens.

Moderate Evidence is one good "quasi-experimental study" and then all the other stuff applies. Not really clear what a quasi-experimental study is, but the department still considers moderate evidence good enough.

Promising Evidence requires a correlation study because (and this really explains a lot) even the federal government doesn't know the difference between correlation and causation. I just smacked my forehead so hard my glasses flew off.

Demonstrates a Rationale, like Promising Evidence, somehow doesn't appear on the No This Doesn't Count list. All this means is you can make an argument for the practice.

All four of these are enshrined in ESSA  as "evidence-based," even though a layperson might conclude that at least two of them are sort of the opposite of evidence-based.

So do we throw out the whole evidence based thing?

Nope. Having evidence for a practice is smart, and it's mostly what teachers do. I don't think I've ever met a teacher who said, "Well, this didn't work for anybody last year, so I'm going to do it again this year." No, teachers watch to see how something works, and then, like any scientist, accept, reject or modify their hypothesis/practice. This, I'd argue, is how so many classroom teachers ended up modifying the baloney that was handed to them under Common Core.

Teachers are perfectly happy to borrow practices that they have reason to trust. The most powerful message implicit in a site like "Teachers Pay Teachers" is "I use this and it works for me." Government agencies and policy wonks who want to help disseminate best evidence-based practices can be useful, provided they're clear about what their evidence really is.

But evidence-based should not be elevated to the status of Next Silver Bullet That Will Fix Everything, and government definitely absolutely positively should not get involved in picking winners and losers and then mandating which will be used. In the dead-on words of Dylan Wiliam, "Everything works somewhere and nothing works everywhere."

Nor should we get trapped in the evidentiary Russian doll set, where we need evidence of the evidence really being evidence by collecting more evidence about the evidence ad infinitum. At some point, someone has to make a call about whether to use the practice or not, and that someone should be the classroom teacher. At that point, that teacher can begin collecting the evidence that really matters.

My Support for Charter Schools

In the last few weeks, I've been tagged once again as someone who will never support charter schools no matter what. This is not accurate, and School Choice Week seems like the perfect time to once again explain when I do, in fact, support charter schools (here I am talking about one that I think is just fine). These are the characteristics that need to be in place.

Financial Honesty

Virtually all of the major charter/choice systems set up in this country are founded on a huge lie-- that a community can run multiple school district with the same amount of money it used to spend on just one district. That is simply never going to be true.

Charter fans object to the assertion that charters drain resources from public schools. "We don't say that a neighboring district drains resources from your local district," is the new argument. But in fact, we say that all the time. In Pennsylvania, we bitch non-stop about how Philly and the Burgh drain money from everyone else. And, with our 550 school districts, we've had a fifty-year conversation about how much better it would be for taxpayers if some of those districts merged.

Multiple, redundant school systems are financially inefficient. Of necessity, they increase the amount of total excess capacity that taxpayers are paying for. They duplicate pricey items like administrators, and they frequently remove resources from the public school without removing a matching level of cost. Opening charters financially destabilizes public schools.

Any honest attempt to open charters needs to be honest about the finances involved. There needs to be an honest discussion of how much more this will cost the taxpayers, whether that extra cost is to be made up by philanthropists supporting the charters or by the public school cutting programs. A really honest approach to opening charters would be to talk to the taxpayers and say, "We can have charters, but we will need to raise your taxes this much to do it. How many people want to go ahead with this?" And then live with the results.

If a charter can be honest about the finances involved, I can support that.

Local Control

Many charter advocates have been very clear about their desire to replace voters public control of schools with private control. That's why we call it privatizing.

There is no reason that a charter needs to be controlled by a board of businessmen-- particularly one located far outside the community-- nor is there any reason for community assets to be owned privately. A charter should be controlled and owned by the taxpayers of the community in which it is located.

This also means the end of Charter Management Organizations. A charter is not locally owned and controlled if the local board turns around and hires a CMO to run the school for them-- we are once again sending decision-making power out of the community control. Not okay.

Transparency

Charters have on numerous occasions gone to court to protect their right to keep their financial records secret. That's not okay. It is not okay to take a bunch of taxpayer money and, when asked what you actually did with it, reply, "None of your business." As with any public school district, a charter's budget and financials and other records should be available for review by any taxpayer and published in any newspapers.

Put an over way, charters should not have complete internal control over their own press. If the only things people know about the school are the things the school includes in its own press releases, that's a problem. Public schools exist in fish bowl. So should charters. There really isn't any good argument for why it should be otherwise.

Student and Teacher Rights

Students and teachers in charter schools should be protected by the same rules and regulations as folks in public schools.

Student Population

This is a hard one. If a charter really is offering a unique approach to education (which, mostly, they aren't), it's conceivable that the student population attracted by that approach might not reflect the population of the community at large. But for the most part, the charter population should be consistent with the community. Not a 10% Black school population in a 50% Black community. Not a 1% students with special need population when the public school population is 10%.

The problem with this trait is that it's hard to provide oversight or regulation. Simply through its advertising, a charter can show which students can expect to "fit in." Charters can decline to provide certain programs, but it's still the parents' decision not to send their child to that school. And the hundred little bumps and nudges that can be exerted through school discipline and other levers to get a student to go away are sometimes hard to see and stop.

But we can still see the numbers, and when a school's numbers are out of whack with the surrounding community, that's a potential problem. If we're going to have school choice, then parents-- not the charter schools-- get to choose. Charters do not get the power to say no.

My charter support.

The funny thing about these requirements is that even though they all seem very contrary to current charter school practices, there's no reason in the world that a charter school can't be run under these rules. We've just been steadily fed a line that "charter" must mean "corporate edu-flavored private business." Some charter boosters would look at some of these items and say, "Well, we can't run a charter under those rules," and I would ask, "Why not? Why would any of these interfere with the idea of a school run with creative structuring and exemption from some of the traditional bureaucracy?"

Of course, even under my modest set of rules, charter schools are less efficient and more expensive than simply providing a top-quality public school in every community. It's always possible that the US could undergo a massive shift, and the public and their elected politicians would make education a Department of Defense style commitment to spare no expense in creating a rich, varied and bountiful education system. Until then, if we want to have charters and choice, this is how we should do it. Happy School Choice Week.

FL: Guns in Schools Not Going So Well

After the murder of seventeen people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High in Florida, the state legislature of the gun-happy sunshine state finally considered putting some common sense restrictions   on guns and ammo in the state. No, just fake newsing you-- what they did was decide they'd better arm more people in schools, because the only solution to a bad guy with a gun is a gunfight in a building filled with children.

That was back last spring. Recently the Tampa Bay Times took a look at how the business of putting a "guardians" in schools was going. The short answer is "not well."

Brevard County was looking for two dozen new employees to be armed guardians. They had six months to find and train these people. Community pushback slowed down the process. They didn't make the deadline.

They weren't alone. Levy County went looking for guardians and couldn't even find people to apply at first. Their superintendent would not give the paper any numbers on applicants since then, saying "You don't want the bad guys to know whether you've got 100 or one." Sure. Okeechobee decided to join in the program, but the sheriff's office won't start training until this month. And the sheriff is not optimistic about the six-to-ten volunteers: "Out of that, I doubt we'll have that high rate of a success rate." Lafayette schools also began the year without their guardians, with a few finishing up their training this month.

Duval County has other sorts of problems. Parents, along with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the League of Women Voters sued the district in November to keep the "safety assistants" out of schools. It could not have helped the district's cause that one safety assistant was arrested in October for pawning his gun-- twice.

And he has not been the only problem child. A guardian in Hillsborough was showing her chemical spray to students and peppered four of them (she resigned immediately). In Manatee County, a guardian was fired when the Bradenten Herald took a look at his Facebook page and found a variety of posts about various conspiracy theories and apparent advocacy for violence.

Florida schools have the option of hiring actual trained law enforcement personnel. If they go the guardian route, they get a person with a gun who can't make arrests, but whose only function is to hang out at school and wait to have a gun battle with some active shooter. Who volunteers for that job? Because I'm betting you get some less-than-stellar law enforcement washout Rambo wannabes.

There are some districts that have had no issues so far, which basically means that so far nobody has been shot. No studies yet on what it does to the atmosphere of a school for students to know that some of their teachers are packing, or to know that the stranger hanging around the building is just there to shoot somebody, should it seem like a good idea.

But Florida is the state where all bad ideas go to spread their wings and fly. The best we can hope for here is that no serious permanent damage is done by this lousy idea.

Arne Duncan Keeps Trying To Explain Education

Arne Duncan's signature achievement as secretary of education was getting a divided Congress to come together in order to finally pass a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Previously known as No Child Left Behind, the new version of the act (Every Student Succeeds Act) was notable for how it spanked the secretary and his department and focused on returning authority to the states.

Duncan used NCLB as leverage to enforce his own education policies. By 2014, every school in the country had to have 100% of its students scoring above average on the big standardized test (PARCC, SBA, etc) or they were in violation. Duncan offered waivers to the law-- if states agreed to his other policy ideas. Those included the implementation of standards that didn't have to be Common Core, but states that chose Common Core were guaranteed approval.

Duncan's heavy use of the federal hand set the stage for the anti-federal portions of ESSA and, arguably, the advent of someone like Betsy DeVos. Duncan is, by all accounts, a nice guy, but it would be hard to characterize his tenure in office as a success.

Yet Duncan does not go away. He has made many attempts in print to retcon his years at USED, while continuing to insist that his policies would have worked if everyone had just been braver and bolder. Duncan has yet to derive any new insights from his experience, but he keeps advocating for his old favorites.

And so we find him in EdSurge, talking about six things he learned from his years in education.

We must invest in high-quality early education.

Here, he's not wrong. But there is huge room for debate about what "high-quality" means, because so far, early education has suffered terribly from the pushing of developmentally inappropriate academics. Making kindergarten the new first grade has been problematic. Extending that principle downward to 4-year-olds is a bad idea. Maybe Duncan has something else in mind, but if so, he should say so.

Poverty is not destiny.

Duncan has remained adamant--some children can succeed despite coming from a background of poverty, therefor all children of poverty should be able to succeed. And if they're not succeeding, it's because teachers aren't expecting enough from them. He admits that a child who lives in poverty "has a lot to wrestle with," but Duncan has never been willing to discuss how those problems might be mitigated to help the child succeed. For him, poverty remains an excuse that teachers use.

Equal is not equitable.

Duncan says we should not give all students the same resources, but the resources that they need. The problem here has always been who will decide what students need. When Hurricane Katrina leveled the New Orleans school system, Duncan thought that was a great thing, because the city had not been "serious" about its schools. The implication was that what New Orleans needed was some gifted outsiders to come to town and straighten the locals out, including telling them what they needed. This has not worked. But the myth of rescue by outsiders was a dominant tale of the Duncan administration, from Teach for America, with its trained-for-five-week teacher temps, to charter takeovers and makeovers that imposed strict no-excuses on poor black students that rich white families would never have tolerated.

Teachers matter deeply.

Duncan writes "teachers are the most important factor in a student's school experience." That's true--but it is true that outside factors exert from four to eight times the influence of a teacher.

Duncan cites Raj Chetty, an economist whose work often referenced as proof that one good teacher "can increase the lifetime earning of an entire class by $250,000." You can follow links to many scholarly debunkings of Chetty, or you can just look at the visible-to-laypersons holes in his findings.

To simplify. Look at what students are making at age 28. Chart the test-based VAM scores of their early teachers (another debunked measure). Assume that the difference in earnings (about $250) will continue in perpetuity. Assume that twenty-eight classmates of the high earner have enjoyed a similar effect. Multiply. Voila.

Or, since we know that high test scores tend to correlate to higher-income families, and so does later job success, we could say that students from wealthy families tend to both get good test scores and grow up to get good jobs.

Duncan is also fond of the notion that class size doesn't matter as much as teacher quality, as if teacher quality isn't affected by class size. A paragraph later Duncan reasserts the importance of the "building meaningful relationships" with students, but he has never seemed to consider how much harder that is to do in a classroom full of thirty or forty or fifty students.

The "job" of our children's generation will be learning.

Another central myth of the Duncan years was that if every student went to college and got a great education, every student would be wealthy, or at least middle class. Poverty would disappear because everyone had a great education. For the many twenty-somethings who are working at minimum wage jobs while their degree gathers dust, this seems like an odd assertion.

But Duncan claims that "the next generation of learners won't go looking for 'jobs'--they will create jobs." Duncan is sure that skills will matter, and that we no longer need rote memorization of facts. I would challenge Duncan to show me a school where rote memorization of facts is still the norm, but I would also challenge him to explain how "habits of mind" and "critical thinking" can be exercised by someone who doesn't have a strong foundation of content knowledge.

He's not wrong that "joy in learning" and being "motivated by the challenge of solving problems" are good and important things. But he's a bit fuzzy on how, exactly, these will cause jobs to appear.

We get to choose when to compete--and when to collaborate.

He never explains who "we" are in this idea. He thinks it was good as USED secretary to cooperate with other countries (he says he learned things that were "invaluable," though he doesn't say what). But as USED secretary he made states compete for support from the feds. He supported charter schools and the notion that competition improved education. The backbone of his major policies was to make everyone compete. And yet here he says "education is something we must collaborate on."

Walking and talking.

Arne Duncan always has talked a good game. He tied the fate of schools and teachers to test results, then complained that schools were putting too much emphasis on tests. He trumpeted the importance of teachers, then promoted policies and standards that robbed teachers of autonomy in the classroom. And although he returns repeatedly to education and his years in office, he never indicates that he now realizes he made policy mistakes. If Arne Duncan is going to keep writing books and think pieces about education, he needs to offer something beyond, "I was right all along."

Originally posted at Forbes

ICYMI: Too Much Snow Edition (1/20)

While you're waiting to dig out (or feeling clever because you live somewhere where you don't have to), here are some pieces from the week for your reading. Remember to share. Only you can amplify writer voices.

These Students Walked Onto Westminster Campus And Into History

Another chapter from the history of integration in the US.

Five Years After Common Core A Mysterious Spike In Failure Rate Among NY High Schools

Huh. What could it be? The Hechinger Report lays out the phenomenon.

League Of Women Voters Calls For Charter Changes 

The usually-quiet League has some feelings about the problems with charter schools-- and they're getting some flack for them.

Summit Learning-- Where's The Research

Summit Learning would rather not let Havard take a look any their actual results-- but they would like to claim that such research has happened.

Cory Booker and Charters

While LA teachers were striking and raising the issue of charter schools, Cory Booker was at a charter school for a rally. Steve Singer takes a look at Booker's privatizing history.

Kids in Disadvantaged Schools Don't Need Tests To Tell Them They're Being Cheated 


Boy, have I missed Jersey Jazzman, but he's back at the blogging biz, strong as ever (only now we have to call him Dr. Jazzman).

Writing As Filling In The Blanks

You may be unaware that the creator of the Mr. Fitz comic strip also blogs, and has some important things to say about the state of test-driven faux writing instruction.