The Red Flags In Kamala Harris's Pay Raise Proposal

I was so determined not to get into the 2020 election this early, dammit. But the Kamala Harris teacher pay raise proposal hit my screen this morning, and there I was on twitter. I've addressed the larger concerns with the proposal here, but there are other concerns that are less interesting to the Forbes audience.

When I read the Harris op-ed in the Washington Post, I thought, "Hmmm. Well...."

When one of her campaign people directed me to the write-up on her website, I thought, "Uh-oh."

Some of the language she uses is unfortunately familiar. Here's just the first two sentences:

Every child deserves a world-class education, regardless of their ZIP code. Of all in-school factors that impact their success, there’s nothing more important than our teachers.

This is straight out of the corporate reform playbook. It's the rhetoric that's been used to sell charters and bad teacher evaluation programs.

Things are quiet for a while, and then we get this:

Our plan will include a multi-billion dollar investment in programs that help elevate the teaching profession and support principals and other school leaders. This includes high-quality teacher and principal residencies, early-career induction programs that pair new teachers with mentors and master teachers, career ladder models that allow for advancement opportunities for teacher leaders, and “Grow Your Own” programs that help increase teacher diversity.

Career ladders are another red flag, mostly because under ed reform, instead of building more rungs on the top of the ladder, they dig a hole and put the bottom of the ladder below ground level. 

There is also a neo-liberal style flourish at the end that feels like the same old "education is the cure for poverty and social ills (so we don't need to do anything else)." But maybe by that part I was simply tired and over-concerned.

Oh, and one more problem as spotted by several folks on Twitter-- Arne Duncan thinks this is awesome. 

I don't know much about Harris at this point, and she does say some other things that I rather like, so if someone wants to hop in the comments and reassure me that she's not one more corporate Democrat, I'd appreciate that, because I really want to just take an election nap until at least August. 

Education Scholarship Tax Credits and Undercover Boss: Feeling Good While Fixing Nothing

You remember Undercover Boss. The mostly-reality show shows a high-level executive putting on a disguise and going out into the trenches of the company. There, they'll meet real employees--often employees with touching hard luck stories. At the end of the episode, the boss meets the employees and metes out a sort of justice--"You get a car, you get a college fund for your kid, you get retraining, and you get fired."

The moments in which a struggling employee receives a bonus, or money for medical treatment, a car, or some other much-needed benefit are feel-good TV, as long as you don't think about them too hard. While some bosses on the show gain insights about their whole system and try to address them, too often the insight is more along the lines of, "I just learned that I don't pay my people enough to afford to raise a family, so I'll give a nice bonus to this one worker and leave the rest of my employees to continue struggling."

At the end of the episode, the boss hasn't fixed anything. A couple of employees have won a sort of TV lottery by getting the attention and charity of their boss, but "Let's hope some of these folks get lucky now and then," is not a sustainable plan for a business. Bosses should not be congratulating themselves for little acts of generosity when they should be asking themselves why those acts of generosity are necessary in the first place.

Betsy DeVos is proposing to use similar acts of charity and luck to address educational inequity in this country. Her $5 billion education scholarship tax credit proposal is an incentive program, a nudge for rich folks and corporations to give charitably to some private schools and the few students who attend them. Instead of paying this chunk of money in taxes to the government, pay it to a private school by helping foot some student's tuition; that way, the student will be able to leave an underfunded, undersupported, struggling public school. But this act of generosity will not help that underfunded, undersupported, struggling public school, nor any of the students who weren't lucky enough to win the rich patron lottery to leave that school.

The folk directly involved may feel good, but they've fixed nothing.

Yes, getting that student into a nice private school might be good for that one student (if the family can afford to finance the costs above the "scholarship," and provided the school will accept that student), but it won't do a thing to improve the system. It will not, for instance, address the $23 billion funding gap between majority-white districts and majority-nonwhite districts.

There are plenty of other problems with DeVos's neovoucher proposal. Perhaps most notably, it cuts holes in the wall between religion and government, putting the federal government in the position of spending tax dollars on religious schools, and exposing religious schools to the imposition of the rules and regulations that invariably follow federal money. DeVos's program is also an overreach of the department's power remarkably similar to the Obama-Duncan's department push for Common Core and Race to the Top. In both cases the department's defense is, "We aren't requiring states to participate; we're just waving a huge pile of money and federal pressure at them."

But beyond all the other issues of education scholarship tax credits is something more fundamental. In this country, you're not supposed to have to depend on the kindness of strangers or the generosity of wealthy patrons to get a decent education. The DeVos proposal gets the mission wrong, suggesting that offering a good private education for a lucky few is an acceptable substitute to guaranteeing a good free public education for all. She needs to stop trying to find ways to steer federal money to a private system for the few and start finding ways to strengthen the public system for everyone.

Originally posted at Forbes

I Will Not Like The Democratic Nominee

And you probably won't, either.

The Trump Presidency is going to be the gift that keeps on giving, and we'd all better start adjusting now. 2016 was a disorienting mess, a confluence of so many surreal elements that we could all be a little fuzzy-headed. But 2020 will be time for cold, hard reality, and Democrats and public education voters had better start adjusting now so we don't get sidetracked by any Jill Stein-like nonsense.

Those were the days.

The field is filling up, and shockingly, not a single candidate is perfect. We've got corporate Democrats and we've got huge ego Democrats and we've got really getting too old for this shit Democrats (okay, just one). They've either got a weak background in government, or they have a background in government that includes doing something dumb and/or crappy.

Most of all, as has now been noticed by many folks, none of them are talking about education.

Bernie has caught on a bit since his last rodeo. Harris has offered a unique pander-- federally-backed teacher pay. Details haven't arrives yet, but it strikes me as a terrible idea because A) teachers should not have to negotiate with the mass of political bozoidosity in DC for their pay and B) I can't imagine any possible way to guard against local districts simply using the federal money to supplant rather than supplement their local money (this is, in fact, exactly what the state of Pennsylvania did with the Obama stimulus money).

When it came to education issues, Democratic candidates and leaders were caught flatfooted in 2016. Now they've had time to study up a bit, but I don't think any of them (except maybe Bernie) has gotten past the simple calculus--

Support for public education and the people who work there is where the votes are; support for the privatizers and charter boosters and corporate reformsters is where the money is.  (Here's a reminder of what a hrd time some folks had threading that needle.)

The solution in 2016 was to pick safe education issues-- pre-K education, affordable college, be nice to teachers, good schools for everyone. I'm not sure that's going to cut it this time. Public school and privatizers have had a few high-profile showdowns; they were billed as teacher strikes, but if you (and Harris) think those were just about pay, you weren't paying attention. They were also about charters and support for public education, and the Democratic candidates will have a harder time hiding from the conflict this time, though Lord knows so far they are trying.

Incidentally, the most interesting punch thrown in this round of public vs. privatizers is the study from Rick Hess and Jay Greene asserting that education reform is hugely a Democrat's game now. This doesn't make a lot of sense if one looks at, you know, reality-- but it makes perfect sense if one is a conservative corporate ed reform backer looking for a way to send a message to Democratic candidates that they had better support ed reform when they run.

Anyway. If we were going to have a great supporter of public education in the field, we'd know it by now. It's not going to happen, and if it does appear to happen that just means that someone has decided to adopt education as a tactical move, which means we can count on them as an ally exactly as long as it serves their purposes.

Yeah, I get grumpy just thinking about 2020, sulky knowing that the Dems have absolutely no reason to try to court my vote because the alternative is so wretched.

But here's what I hope the Dems figure out. The atmosphere, the toxic attitudes, the ugly machinery that spit up Trump will spit up something else once he's out of there, and chances are that the next one will not be so transparently dumb and self-dealing. By the time that happens, the Dems had better get their act together.

In the meantime, I will vote for Somebody Not Trump in 2020. I don't know who it's going to be, and, God help us all, I don't know if they're going to win. I'll vote for them, but I probably won't like it. I don't need the next year and a half to know that so much as I need the time to just get used to the idea so I can stop whining and get on with it.

OK: Bogus School Efficiency Report

EPIC charter schools are boasting about the results of a new efficiency study of Oklahoma schools, and there are so many layers of deep-fried baloney here it takes a minute or two to dig through them. But when charter boosters start talking about "accountability" and "transparency," this is the kind of bullshit that makes their claims less than believable.

The very top layer is the least important, but it's worth noting because this is exactly the kind of foolishness that gives journalism a bad name. The Oklahoman is a legitimate news organization out of Oklahoma City; they run a website which also powers another site called newsOK. That site includes BrandInsight which connects "local experts and business leaders with the NewsOK audience" which means that it runs puffy marketing dressed up to look like a news item. It's there that we find a piece ostensibly about the Oklahoma schools efficiency report, with a note at the very bottom that this was sponsored by EPIC.

Sommers takes a rest.

Why care? Because the charter free marketeer stated dream is that parents will sit down with clear, useful data to drive their decisions about where to send their children. But what we keep finding in reality is that parents have to sort through a lot of marketing foofery masquerading as facts. We keep getting rhetoric about empowering families when what happens is that charter businesses are hoping that they can drive families into their arms.

Unfortunately, some news outlets have picked up the story and run it as if it's legit news. It's not. If you're in Oklahoma, here's why you can safely ignore the findings.

A copy of the report is living on the Oklahoma Public [sic] Charter School Association website; we'll just skip to the executive summary.

The entire measure efficiency rests on a thing called the Kalmus Ratio, which never appears without a little copyright symbol beside it. So, not just baloney, but proprietary baloney. The formula for the Kalkmus Ratio is dollars expended divided by student success points. Want to take a wild guess and what student success points are based on? The report is clear:

This report defines student success as passage of state academic tests.    

SMH. On top of the usual malarky about saying "student success" when we mean "student test scores," the report adds another layer of faux data fluffernuttery by assigning each test category a number. So ever advanced test result equals 1.2, proficient equals 1.0, limited is 0.3, and unsatisfactory is 0.0.

But wait, you may ask, does the Kalmus Ratio allow for factors like poverty? sure it does-- the report notes that each "student in poverty increases the value of success by .25." After that, it becomes less clear somehow:

This is the same percentage adjustment provided schools for students in poverty. The adjustment increases the number of student success points a school district earns. For example, a district with 100 proficient students would typically earn 100 student success points. If the district poverty rate is 50%, those same 100 proficient students would earn 150 student success points.

Something seems wrong with the math here, but I was an English teacher. If you want to examine the theoretical and evidence-based underpinnings of this factoring for poverty, well, the report says, "The adjustment accounts for the challenge," so there you have it. Does the Kalmus Ratio factor anything else in, or add factors for growth. No. No, it does not.

There are other layers of foolishness here. The report argues that the Kalmus Ratio is better than cost-per-pupil because schools can cut cost-per-pupil by getting rid of staff and programs "irrespective of impact on student achievement [aka test scores]." But clearly the way to increase Kalmus Ratio efficiency scores would be to cut every teacher and program not involved in prepping for the test. You could raise your Kalmus ratio by cutting all sorts of enrichment programs, which may, in fact, tell us something about the results of the study.

At this point you might be thinking that the Kalmus Ratio must have come off the back of a cereal box, or from Bob's Friendly Consulting Firm. But no-- looking for the factory that created this slab of baloney takes us to a guy who was almost head of education for the state of Ohio.

The company involved is CF Educational Solutions. "Student success is our passion," they declare. They are all about future ready graduates and technology and continuous improvement and focusing on student results.

We must singularly define educator success in terms of real intellectual, emotional, and physical change within the student. Every activity we undertake must answer the question, “What good for whom?”

Okay, so they're not poets. CFES was co-founded by Robert Sommers and Rob Sommers, a father and son team. According to LinkedIn, the son's background is in sales, and he did his co-founding in October of 2018. According to LinkedIn, Dad did his co-founding in January of 2018.

Robert Sommers (dad, mid-60-ish) has a long and checkered education history. Sommers worked for years in the Ohio Department of Ed, then moved to Butler Tech, a career and technical school, as CEO. He spent one year as CEO of Cornerstone Charter Schools in Detroit, then became director of 21st Century education for Governor John Kasich in Ohio. Somewhere in there Sommers took on the job of expanding Arizona's Carpe Diem charter chain into other states; the students-sitting-in-cubicles-working-on-computers didn't do well. Sommers somehow ended up in Oklahoma, where Governor Mary Fallin put him in charge of education (we're up to 2013 now). CompetencyWorks was delighted, given his ties to several reformster groups, but he left the job within a year; he noted that aging relatives scuttled his plans to relocate to OK. In 2016, he was up for the education chief job in Ohio, but by then the past had started to pile up. One news organization reported that his Carpe Diem school in Ohio was a low performer. And Plunderbund brought up the story of his truth-impairment during his Kasich days. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said that even though he pledged to sell his financial interest in Carpe Diem if he got the job, he was perhaps far too cozy with the charter school industry to become the guy who brought Ohio's sprawling charter mess under control. He did not get the job.

And so CF Educational Solutions was born, landing work in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Georgia and Oklahoma. They were sometimes greeted with less-than-open arms, in particular questioning the wisdom of hiring a charter guy to run strategic planning for a public system.

The Kalmus Ratio? It would appear that this is the brainchild of Sommers himself, who was using it all the way back in his Butler Tech days (it appears in 2004, already copyrighted). I've found no examples of its use by anyone but Sommers; that copyright might not be entirely necessary.

There is one other small mystery-- who hired CFES to write the Oklahoma schools efficiency report? I'm going to assume that the fact that OPCSA is web-hosting the copy is a huge hint.

You can read the full report if you like (it's only 27 pages long), but I'm not sure how you build a strong study on a foundation of bunk. But this is how hustlers keep hustling and how bad policy gets fed by bad research. Granted, in the mess that is Oklahoma education policy, this is small potatoes, but it's important to remember how the baloney gets made.

ICYMI: My Brother's Birthday Edition (3/24)

It's my brother's birthday today. I'll have to tell you my brother's story someday-- it's an object lesson in how predicting a child's future when they are still in school is, in fact, a fool's game. In the meantime, here is your weekly batch o'reading.

If More Teachers Were Men  

Another way of looking at the issues surrounding teacher policy as the result of teachers being mostly women and teacher policy writers being mostly sexist. One of those "you may not agree with everything  but it's something to think about" articles.

Can We Recommend Teaching As A Career

One more Floridian voice contemplating the wretched mess that is Florida education policy

Ohio Charters Need a 22% Raise? Really?

As Ohio charters shift from "We can do more with less" to "We need more money," a blogger looks at some of the numbers behind that request.

New York's Testing System Is Broken

As Black and Brown students are once again shut out of NYC's top high schools, Jose Luis Vilson takes a look at how messes up the system is.

Parents Are Part of the Problem

Looking at the issues of academic anxiety for teens, and how parents are making it all worse.

Here's What Betsy DeVos Has To Say About Indiana's Failing Virtual Schools  

Almost everyone agrees that Indiana's cyber schools are a mess crying out for serious intervention. Guess who thinks they're just swell.

Arts Should Be Core Education, Not Optional Add-ons

From Commonwealth magazine, an argument for arts education .

Trump Is Trying To Change the Meaning Of Instructor, and It's Not Good 

From Forbes (and not by me), this looks at another troubling trend on the federal level.

How Do We Know It Won't Work?   

A look at the historical record on public-private funding of schools.

Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers 

If we're going to worry about accountability, Steven Singer has some thoughts for an oft-overlooked group.

Blaming Teachers Easier Than Addressing Poverty  

Somebody should point out how wrong Eric Hanushek is at least once a month. Here's this month's entry.

Campbell Brown's Union Busting Organization Is Dead   

And here with the autopsy is the indispensable Mercedes Schneider.

Atlanta Votes To End Democratic Control Of Schools

Thomas Ultican looks at how Atlanta's board decided to go portfolio.

John Engler and Me

How much of a freakin' jerk is Michigan's education-busting former governor. Nancy Flanagan has a story. Spoiler alert: it will not make you like him more.

Reasons That Children Have Reading Problems That Reformers Don't Talk About   

What! You mean it's not just that teachers don't know how to do their jobs properly?? Nancy Bailey takes a look.

A Lifelong Teacher

Public education lost a dear friend and tough advocate with the recent passing of Phyllis Bush. Here's a beautiful tribute from the Journal Gazette

Goodhart's Law And The BS Test

When discussing the problems of test-based accountability, we've long used Campbell's Law as the go-to framer of the related problems. For the absolute top of the field, get a copy of The Testing Charade by Danielk Koretz. Campbell's law is not very pithy, but it illuminates beautifully:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Campbell was a social scientist, and though he died before the modern age of test-driven education really kicked into gear, he was still clear on the problems with the Big Standardized Test:

Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)

That's pretty well it. The Big Standardized Tests (and this can be applied to the SAT and ACT as well) don't really tell us what they claim to tell us, and they've warped the whole process of education as well, from months of education sacrificed for test prep to students forced to drop other classes so that they can take "extra" test related classes to the sorting of students into categories-- we don't have to worry about them, these students are hopeless, and these students are close enough to the line that we will invest time and money in pushing them over it.

But as apt as Campbell's Law is, it involves a lot of discussing and explaining, and it doesn't fit easily on a t-shirt. So if you really want to make a short, pithy statement, may I suggest the slightly less well known Goodhart's Law as restated by Marilyn Strathern. Goodheart was an economist and critic of Margaret Thatcher's policies, which led him to this observation circa 1975:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

In 1997, Strathern, an anthropologist, translated that from economistese into punchy English:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

There we go.

Goodhart is a broader version of Campbell, while Campbell serves as a good explainer of how Goodhart can be true. But for civilians who are just catching on, Goodhart is brief and clear. This law, incidentally, is a fave in the data sciences world, whereas Campbell was more popular with social scientists. So all those data-driven decisions fans may well have already heard of it.

If you are measuring the output of your nail factory, that's useful. But when you start making a particular output a target, that's when you get a factory that produces only tiny nails because that's easier to do. If you measure how many customers your phone bank people talk to each day, that's useful. When you give them a target of so many customers per day to talk to, that's when you get customer service in brusque, one word, unhelpful but quick burst. And (one of my faves) if you measure how many shoes your soviet shoe factory makes, that's useful. But if you make that quantity a target, that's when you get a factory that turns out only left shoes, because that's more efficient.

When you use a standardized test to measure how students are doing, that might be useful for telling you at least a little about how well your class or your school are doing. When you require a school to hit certain targets, that's when you get-- well, you already know what we get. And you test scores no longer tell you anything useful.

So make a note. Goodhart's law is short, clear and will fit on a t-shirt. The kind of t-shirt you could wear to your next data driven decision making in-service, or your next test prep professional development session. It ma be time for me to go into the t-shirt business.

Stop Talking About Student Achievement

If I told you that my student had achieved great things in school this year, what would you imagine I meant?

Maybe she started reading longer books with heavier vocabulary and deeper themes. Maybe she not only read them, but spent time thinking about the ideas they contained. Maybe she improved her technical facility and musicality when playing her flute. Maybe she conducted an impressively complex and ambitious physics experiment. Maybe she created a beautiful and useful website. Maybe she progressed to more complex problems in algebra. Maybe she completed some impressive in-depth research on a particular historical period. Maybe she passed welding certification tests. Or maybe she packed away some chunks of learning that won't really come to life for her until years from now.

But we have a problem in current education policy discussions; when we say "student achievement," we usually don't mean any of those things.

One of the great central challenges of education in general and teaching in particular is that we cannot read minds. We cannot see inside a student's head and see what has taken root and what has taken flight.

So part of the gentle art of teaching involves the creation and deployment of performance tasks designed to get us at least a peek inside the student brain to see if they have in fact mastered what we tried to get them to master. It is an ever-evolving challenge, made complex by the many types of students and the many levels of learning, further complicated by the fact that the best assessment is never as accurate as it was the first time you used it (unless you believe that students never talk to each other).

Some pieces of learning are easy to measure (does the student know her times table) and some are much more challenging (does the student have nuanced insights into the psychological aspects of Hamlet).

So to measure student achievement, we depend on various proxies. Once we start doing that, we are in danger or mistaking the proxy, the symbol, for the actual thing. If we're using high-quality assessments for low-complexity learning, there's not much danger of inaccuracy in confusing the two; if Pat scored 100% on the times table quiz, it's probably safe to say that Pat really knows the times tables.

But if the assessment is not high-quality, and the learning is high-complexity, we can jump to unsupported conclusions. If Chris scored 80% on a five-question multiple-choice quiz about Hamlet, we cannot safely say that Chris has a solid grip on the deeper nuances of the play.

And that, unfortunately, is where we are at the moment. Since the launch of No Child Left Behind, we have gotten in the habit of using a single multiple-choice test of reading and math as a proxy for student achievement.

The tests, like the PARCC, SBA and other newer assessments, have a host of problems of their own. For instance, studies keep finding issues with inappropriate reading levels on passages. There have been incidents like the infamous talking pineapple questions, and the poet who discovered she could not correctly answer test questions about her own poems.

But there's an even bigger issue, and that's the continued unquestioning use of these test scores as a proxy for the larger picture of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. It's a mistake repeated by countless education journalists, researchers and policy wonks. It's a quick and easy shorthand, but it's inaccurate and misleading.

We should just stop. Instead of saying, "Strategy X was found to have a positive affect on student achievement," we should say "Strategy X helped raise test scores." Instead of saying, "Technique Z led to improved reading by third graders," we should say, "Technique Z led to improved reading test scores for third graders."

It's not that we shouldn't discuss standardized test results, but we should stop pretending that they represent some larger truth. We should call them by their name -- not "student achievement" or "effective instruction" or "high-quality school" but simply "scores on the standardized test." By using lazy substitution, we end up like a tourist sitting beside the Grand Canyon looking at a handful of pebbles and imagining that those pebbles tell us everything we need to know about the vast beautiful vista that we are not bothering to see.

After all, if I told you that my child achieved great things in school this year, your first thought would not be, "Oh, good test scores!" Let's use words to mean what they actually mean.

Originally posted at Forbes