OH: The Ongoing Fight To End School Takeovers

I have been watching events unfold in Lorain, Ohio, site of both my first job and an absolute clusterfrick of epic proportions It's time for an update.

You can find the complete story so far starting here, but the short form is that Ohio has a bone stupid law known as HB 70, passed using underhanded legislative shenanigans in order to get it run through quickly and without public discussion. The law takes over school districts that score low on state evaluations too many years and installs a mostly-state-appointed board which in turn hires a school tsar. HB 70 strips the powers from both the elected school board and the district superintendent and hands them to the tsar. So far, Lorain, East Cleveland, and Youngstown have been put under the HB thumb. Knowing how the Big Standardized Test effects class and economics, you will be unsurprised that these are three of the poorest districts in the state.

State superintendent DeMaria: Everything's great, right?

In Lorain, it has not gone well. The tsar, David Hardy Jr, is a TFA product with little actual experience, who has brought in other TFAers, also with little real experience, to help run things. Hardy writes pretty speeches about collaboration and relationships, but he doesn't live in Lorain, won't meet with local elected officials, and has adopted a management style that improbably combines Chainsaw Al and the Three Stooges.

There have been lessons to learn from Hardy's reign. For instance, Lorain appears to answer the question "What would happen if you tried out some charter school management techniques not on newby teachers who didn't know any better, but on seasoned veterans who can tell that it's a bunch of baloney?" (Answer: morale plummets and your staff revolts.) Hardy is also a great study in how educational amateurs with a data fixation do not help (in East Cleveland, they're in the process of selecting a tsar, and one candidate already has a 90-day plan; in Lorain, Hardy is still collecting data).

In Hardy's defense, it has to be said that HB 70 is a terrible law that sets the tsar up for failure. Because the state-powered tsar is an all-powerful autocrat who is supposed to fix a district with serious problems, he has to be expert in all areas of school district management, from bus schedules to scope and sequence of all subject areas. He must also be the kind of diplomat who can sell, "Hi! The state sent me to strip all your local control and change everything about your local schools, and if that doesn't work, dismantle it and give it to charter operators. Who would like to cooperate with me?" And yes-- you'll note that the district's failure represents success for the fans of charter expansion. Does this takeover come with extra resources, financial and otherwise, from the state to help turn the district around? Ha! What a cute question. Of course not.

The only good to come out of Lorain's experience is that it has drawn attention to the myriad flaws of HB 70. Affected districts have sued. Ohio's current governor-- the one who wasn't instrumental in ramming HB 70 through-- has expressed sympathy with the need to change things up.

Better not to hope for help coming from the Ohio department of education; the current state superintendent is Paolo DeMaria, a fan of school choice and Common Core whose background is finance and budget-- he has never worked in a school district, but he is part of Jeb Bush's reformy Chiefs for Change (as is Hardy). He has proposed a revamp to the laws, but much of that involves giving more power to his office; he also proposes removing the last power remaining to an elected school board-- the power to levy taxes. A recent exchange of emails between DeMaria and school board president Mark Ballard suggests that DeMaria really doesn't have much of a clue. In fact, he suggested that Ballard is pushing conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, DeMaria's hand picked replacement for the departed head of the Academic Distress Commission (ADC) is Randall Sampson. Sampson ran into some issues immediately, such as the fact that after over two years, Hardy still hasn't had an evaluation. He has gotten cranky with folks like the actual elected mayor of Lorain, a problem that he has solved by blocking people on social media. Sampson's day job is running Liberty Leadership Development LLC, a company that does school turnarounds; he touts years of experience as a teacher and administrator, but his LinkedIn profile shows just one year in a classroom.

So there's not much hope of help there, either. There's just one ray of sunshine on the state level-- actually, three rays.

There are three bills currently kicking around the state legislature.

HB 127 would put a stop to further state takeovers. It would not help the three districts currently under the gun, but it would keep the cancer from spreading.

HB 154 is considerably more aggressive; it would dissolve the current ADCs, repeal HB 70, and create a whole new process for handling struggling school districts.

SB 110 is a Lorain-specific fix, addressing the issues the citizens of Lorain are facing.

These bills are not slated for a special late-night speedy approval, so there will be actual discussion and opportunity for input. That means they're better than HB 70 already.

Lorain city schools have sacrificed local control, morale, and stability to become a disproof of concept city for state takeovers. They are more evidence of the major flaws the central premise of state school takeovers-- that somebody in the state capitol knows a special secret to running schools that people who actually work in schools do not. They are also evidence that amateurs from outside the community are generally not the people to turn to for answers.

We'll keep watching to see if the legislature brings relief. In the meantime, if you live in Ohio, it's time to make some phone calls.

Have We Stolen a Generation's Independent Thought?

"Kids these days," the complaint begins. "They cannot think for themselves." The complaint has come across my desk three times this week, voiced by someone in the higher education world complaining about the quality of student arriving in their ivy-covered halls.

It's worth noting that the observation itself has no particular objective, evidence-based support. There's no college student independent thought index we can consult to check for a dip. Just the subjective judgment of some people who work at the college level. So the whole business could simply be the time-honored dismay of an older generation contemplating the younger one.

If we do accept the observation as valid, there are a variety of possible explanations. A study showing that people just stick with their team and don't think about the ideas involved. A political climate in which truth-telling and truth-searching are not currently highly valued. The power of YouTube conspiracy videos. Helicopter parents armed with bazooka-mounted lawnmowers.

But there's another factor to consider, a firmly school-embedded factor that has promoted anti-thought for a generation.

Since the advent of No Child Left Behind, the U.S. has used high stakes standardized tests as accountability measures for schools, districts and teachers. This has led to a twisting of public education, as schools have reassigned their resources to focus on preparing students to do well on standardized math and reading tests. Music, arts, history--even recess--have been placed on the back burner because they are not on the test.

Much has been written about the effects of high stakes testing on education, but we should also pay attention to the nature of the tests themselves. They are, for the most part, standardized multiple-choice tests, and as such, they promote a particular view of the world.

Consider the difference between the two following questioning strategies:

Read this poem. What do you think the author's main idea is? Provide some evidence of how particular words and images are an important part of how the author makes their point. You'll be scored on how well you express and support your idea.

Read this poem. Here are four possible statements that could be the author's main idea, but only one is correct. Pick that one. Here are four quotes from the poem that might be the most important evidence of the author's main idea, but only one choice is correct. Pick that one.

The first strategy encourages the student to explore, to think, and to support her own ideas. Her task is to think and to express her thinking. The second strategy tells the student that the questions have already been settled and that somebody already knows the one correct answer. Her task is to figure out what that somebody believes the answer to be. The second is anti-thought. Even though a question like "what's the most important detail" is what many students would consider an opinion question, successfully answering means setting aside their own opinions, their own thoughts, and trying to predict the opinions and thoughts of the test writers.

The second is, of course, a standardized multiple-choice testing strategy. By focusing on that type of questioning for students' entire academic careers, we hammer home that, rather than a world open for exploration and discovery, the world of math and reading is a world where every question already has a known answer and no exploration or thought is needed. Just learn the kind of compliance that keeps you on the path that has been laid down for you.

Test manufacturers can keep making noises about new generation tests, but as long as we stick to the fundamental formula--we will tell you which answers to choose from, and only one is "correct"--we are still deep in the land of anti-thought, the kind of place where the writer of poems can't even answer standardized test questions about her own works. Every test, every question, pushes on students some fundamentally troubling notions about the nature of knowledge and understanding in the world. They also teach students that independent, open-ended, exploratory thought is neither necessary nor desired to navigate the world.

We are teaching students, literally, not to think, but instead to clear their own thoughts and concentrate on following the path followed by the people who wrote the test questions. We are teaching them that every question has just one right answer, that somebody out there already knows it, and that you go to school to learn to say what those people want you to say.  This is not a new issue in education, but we have ramped it up, systematically injected it into every level of K-12 education, and incentivized it like never before. If it has stifled a generation's desire for independent thought, that is no surprise.

Originally posted at Forbes

ICYMI: Post-Easter Chill Edition (4/28)

In my neck of the woods, we figure that spring can't arrive until there has been a post-Easter snow. We appear to be working on tht today. So while we sip our hot chocolate of shivery bitterness, here are some current readings to absorb and-- please-- share!

Choice As A Substitute For Adequacy 

Did states deal with the Great Recession by expanding choice to cover their cuts to public education? School Finance 101 takes a look.

The X-odus Files

Tim Slekar has long believed (as do I) that there is no teacher shortage, but rather a nationwide slow-motion one-at-a-time walkout. And he's started collecting the stories as evidence.

School Districts Are Going Into Debt To Keep Up With Technology  

Cash-strapped districts are financing their tech programs with debt (which just makes the tech even more expensive). The Hechinger Report digs in  .

Tony Soprano Visits Tennessee Legislators

A look at the GOP assault on education and voting rights and oh, boy, is Tennessee a fun place right now.

For all the Talk About School Competition in Camden, Families Really Haven’t Had a Choice 

When choice turns out to be not choice at all.

Success Academy Podcast IV- Got To Go

Gary Rubinstein is listening his way through a podcast about Success Academy. It's not exactly hard hitting, but he finds some content worth talking about.

A Flippity-Do-Da Day In Tennessee

Momma Bears look at how Governor Lee slimed his way to passage of his assorted bills. This is not how it was described by Schoolhouse Rock.

How Is School Choice "Freedom" When Students Lose School Libraries and Librarians 

Nancy Bailey looks at one of the casualties of the school choice movement.

The Problem With Education Research Fixated on "What Works"  

 Rick Hess makes his contribution to the research wars, and it' a good one. Really.

An Ambitious Plan To Combat Segregation Just Made Things Worse

Dana Goldstein in the NYT looks at the San Francisco plan to desegregate and how it only made matters worse.

Who Should Pay For Public Education  

Nancy Flanagan answers the question, "So if philanthropists want to spend their money on education, what's the problem?"

Let Us March On 'Til Victory Is Won

Jose Luis Vilson is a poet of connections. Here we find Beyonce, testing season, and school spaces.

Charter Lessons From Democracy Prep

I was as unimpressed as anyone when education privatization fan Campbell Brown launched the 74 site as a platform for the same old "Charters schools rule, public schools drool" song and dance. But since that launch, and particularly since Brown stepped away from the site, the straight journalism side of the operation has done some commendable work (though the propaganda side is still frying up its same old baloney).

You can ignore the site, but then you're going to miss pieces of reporting like this piece about Democracy Prep. It is detailed, thorough, and pretty unflinching about some of the chartery problems that DP has created for itself.

DP, launched in NYC, is now spread across the country, and the story by Kevin Mahnken highlights how portions of that expansion have not gone so well. When DP took over "flagging" Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, the transition was shocking to the students and parents, who had to weather a shift to an entirely new school culture.

The problem with DP culture clashing with community culture is a particularly striking in a school that centers its brand on civic involvement. DP requires its seniors to do a Change the World project in which they study and come up with a plan to address a real community issue. But the issues in Las Vegas all stem from DP simply coming in with a plan to run a school implemented and overseen by people far, far away, and with little apparent regard for what the school's previous culture had been like. Here's DPAC Executive Director (because principals are passe, I guess) Adam Johnson analyzing what went wrong:

Johnson said he was prepared to see faculty members leave; atop the annoyance of having to reapply, teachers were being asked to work a longer day and answer to a new, unfamiliar boss. But he said he “never expected” the flight of families from his newborn school in the middle of its first year.

The shift in culture, particularly around school discipline — Democracy Prep operates on a demerit system in which students can routinely be dinged for infractions like tardiness and uniform violations — likely alienated students, he said.

“One school year ago they were in the same building, in the same seats, maybe looking at the same teacher. And now that teacher’s enforcing a whole different set of rules. If you could imagine getting your mind wrapped around [that] as a child, you’d say, ‘You’re telling me I can’t do this? We literally just did this four months ago in your second-period class. Why can’t we do it now?’”

The "new" school also threw new requirements at students like a requirement to learn Korean. The swift turnover of staff left many students without familiar faces and mentors, and threw extra load on the teachers who remained.

Unsurprisingly, it was upperclasspersons who were most rattled by the change-- only seven of the thirty-one seniors who began the year actually graduated. Reading the account, I'm wondering if there really was nobody who thought this through. Almost anyone who's worked in education is familiar with the practice of phasing a new program, growing it up from the lower grades rather than traying to wrench the upper grades into all new practices with little time to adjust and little time to fix problems that might arise. But not only does nobody seem to have thought of any sort of transition plan, but the article observes that "setbacks like those seen at DPAC" are "not uncommon in the charter sector." Well, they should be. It's an amateur hour mistake, and one more example of a time when charters have nothing to teach public schools, but plenty to learn from them.

And DP are supposedly experienced takeover/turnaround operators. But then, it appears that most of their experience was in New York City. They scored some sweet federal grant money, and started to expand. It's that expansion that seems to have created trouble. Then CEO Katie Duffy warned the staff of "serious deficits across our network of schools" which seem to have been partly related to financial management, communication and not managing to fill-- and keep filled-- enough seats. It turns out that DP was not such a hot ticket outside NYC. Duffy is on an extended medical leave.

Mahnken notes that weaknesses revealed by expansion had already been there inside the big apple as well. DP is another "no excuses" charter, and those typically have high attrition. DP Harlem students left because of "higher-than-usual" academic standards, and it becomes hard to backfill seats close to graduation. Harlem's DP had 79 students in its first cohort of freshmen; four years later, only 46 seniors graduated.

In the expansion settings, there have been challenges-- different funding levels, different transportation systems, and the problems of austerity measures implemented.

But DP's most spectacular failure is in DC, where their Anacostia campus will close at the end of June. DP Congress Heights was another turnaround of a failing charter, but the turnaround is failing, and was looking for yet another charter operator to come in and take over-- but nobody wants that job. There's another lesson repeated from the charter sector-- for all the talk about doing it For The Kids, nobody is offering to take over this charter because the kids of this community need their school. Instead, they are looking after their own business interests. The school leaders who "inherited" the mess from DP petitioned the DC charter board for a renewed charter, and they were denied. Again, a lesson from the world of privatized education-- resources are not invested because the public has an interest in having a decent school in that community, but instead the expectation is that some private company must bring the resources to the table, and if no company is willing to do that, the community is SOL.

 The DC school was in trouble from the start. The Executive Director was Sean Reidy who graduated from Loyola with a BS in business administration, did two years with TFA, taught another two years at Harlem DP, went on to get his MBA from Georgetown, and then took over the DC school. (DP, like many charters, likes its TFA recruits, but Mahnken doesn't really address that, though I'd argue that the culture of edu-amateurs is part of the root of DP's problems.)

The leadership culture under Reidy was not good. The staff was not on board, and the rigid "no excuses" program was not a good fit. One teacher notes that holding a hard line on all-black shoes "betrayed both an ignorance of the deep poverty in Southeast Washington and an arbitrary observance of the rules." The current CEO of DP responded to the 74 by noting that the uniform code is "clearly communicated," as if that allows families to say, "Oh, well, we'd better plan to not be poor by the time the school year starts."

The head of DC's charter school board was unimpressed by what he saw on a site visit:

Certainly, if you’re taking on a takeover — stepping in and having to reinvent the school, and to do so with literally hundreds of students in the school — it requires strong leadership and excellent execution. And those things were missing. In particular, what I notice on my visits is the culture: Are teachers and staff feeling well taken care of, building strong relationships with students? That was not happening, and that’s what led, I imagine, to the results that we saw.

Reidy was fired and three executive directors passed through the main office in four years.

But on top of the instability, the problem once again came down to culture-- in this case, not getting the difference between NYC and DC. The spectacularly bad example cite by Mahnken was Black History Month. That month is a big deal in DC; at DP, the focus was on "Funbruary," a month of school spirit activities. Teachers had to insist on more content centered on the people and events African-American culture. You can hear the exasperation in teacher Ethiopia Berta's voice when she's quoted: "Frederick Douglass’s house is literally down the street from our school, and we’re celebrating Funbruary."

Has anyone at Democracy Prep learned anything? Well, the current CEO might have:

Trivers said that the lesson she takes from Democracy Prep’s failure in Washington is to adopt a more deliberative approach in opening new schools. She noted that the network was working to open regional offices to better serve its outlying campuses, but she added that it might be necessary to build in a year of observation, consensus building and leadership development before taking the leap.

But DP has scored $21.8 million in Department of Education grant money specifically to expand, so slowing growth could cost them money. The 2016 application promised a goal of four new schools over five years with an expansion of 11,000 students. So the charter chain faces a choice-- do what's best for the students, or do what's best for the business?

There's a lot more to the piece, and I recommend reading it. It hits Democracy Prep hard on the issue of culture clash, but it doesn't necessarily examine why that problem seems baked into the charter chain.

I can think of several lessons here.

Educational amateurism combined with Big Apple hubris leads to people who don't think they have to learn anything about the culture where they want to set up shop. This is not unique to DP, or even charters, or even education-- it's just extra-ironic because DP is supposed to be all about being informed effective citizens. Of course, public schools that are owned and operated by the people in the community (and not run from an office thousands of miles away), aren't so prone to this problem.

No excuses schools are a lousy idea. I know there are students here and there who thrive in them, but they're still a lousy idea. No wealthy white parents would put their kids in a No Excuses school.

One size does not fit all. Charter folks insist that charters are the solution to OSFA, but their insistence on having everything under one roof reflect be a tightly united philosophical whole has the opposite effect. Public schools have room for many cultures and many philosophies under one roof, which means that students can find a corner of the school that "fits" without having to start over at a whole new school. There's no reason that charters can't operate the same way.

Solve problems; don't walk away from them. This article just gives a peek at the world where charter after charter after charter is taken over, turned around, handed off to some other business. DP moves in, tries their one thing, waits, makes some tiny tweaks, and if it fails, they walk away. Public schools may not always live up to the promise of their commitment, but they don't just walk out the door saying, "Good luck, kid. Hope somebody happens by to help you out."

Education concerns and business concerns don't fit together. Again-- business concerns are not evil or wrong, but they don't match the considerations of education. Good business decisions are not good education decisions.

One of the selling points of charters has always been that they will figure out great new things that the rest of the education world can then pick up and run with. But most of what Democracy Prep needed to know they could have learned from a public school teacher.

Another Free Market Lesson

Even as Florida continues its race to become the first state to completely do away with public education and replace it with a free market free for all, lessons abound in why that's a lousy idea.

This frickin ' guy.

At Tarbell, Simon Davis-Cohen takes us on a trip to Iowa where an ALEC governor privatized Medicaid. Former governor Terry Branstad was a founding member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a special group that brings corporate movers and shakers together with legislators to share the really cool legislative ideas the corporations have come up with. Branstad's bright idea to privatize Medicaid was sold as a cost-cutter and became reality in 2016.

It has gone badly, and how it has gone badly is instructive for folks contemplating privatization of other necessary public institutions.

“In private insurance, denial is the rule, not the exception,” says Glenn Hurst, a doctor who runs a rural health clinic in Western Iowa. Hurst is referring to the tendency of private health insurers to challenge most bills they receive. Tarbell found reports from across Iowa indicate legitimate Medicaid claims are being regularly denied by private insurance companies — wreaking havoc since Medicaid was handed to private managed care organizations (MCOs) in 2016. A few years into privatization, delayed and denied reimbursements to Medicaid providers are hurting Iowans, doctors say.

The privatization has costs millions of dollars just in person-hours spent pursuing payment. The move has also been followed by waves of reduced benefit and coverage. The delay and denial of payment puts extra financial pressure on patients, hospitals and doctors.

There are no surprises here. If your business is paid on a scale set by the government, there's only one way to increase your profit margin-- cut services and push out the "customers" who are too expensive to serve.

Davis-Cohen notes other ripple effects. A public county-owned hospital cannot sustain itself with half a million dollars worth of revenue refused and/or held up, and so Black Hawk county sells out and the hospital is snapped up by a Pritok, private company. Davis-Cohen notes, in a paragraph that will sound familiar to students of ed reform:

The impacts of such privatizations are multifold. There is a loss of democratic control, a profit motive is created, and the previous public employees lose their government jobs. The contract between Pritok and Black Hawk reportedly does not require the private company to keep the existing county staff or “meet minimum wage or benefit levels for workers.”

It's not complicated. When you convert a public institution to a private business, that operation, whether hospital or school, retains all the original costs plus the additional cost of putting money in the owners and operators pockets. Something has to be cut, and it's not gong to be the boss's payday, so the money has to come out of staff costs, services, and customers served.

I'll say this a million times if I must-- the free market does not serve all possible customers. The most basic act of any free market business is triage-- figuring which customers it makes business sense to serve and which services it makes business sense to provide. To shift education or health care to a free market model means a fundamental change in the entire purpose of the institutions. The mission of public education is to provide an education to all students. That will never, ever be the mission of a privatized charter and voucher education system. Students will be turned away, and programs will be cut. That's not a bug; it's a feature. It's not evil, and it makes perfect sense in some parts of the free market world. But for education and health care a shift to a free market approach requires a fundamental rewrite of the basic mission, and that's a conversation that free market fans like the vultures in the Florida legislature want to avoid having.

Oh, and the promise that privatized Medicaid would save the state money? It didn't work, and it pushed many costs down to local communities. As for Branstad, he left the state after one year to take a new job as U.S. Ambassador to China.

Is AI A Game-Changer For Education (International Edition)?

Sometimes it's informative to see how some of this stuff is playing out in other settings. A post on Entrepreneur India makes the claim that "Artificial Intelligence Can be a Game-Changer for Education, Here are 5 Reasons Why" and its five arguments are, well, intriguing.

The post is from Vishal Meena from the start-up MadGuy Labs, an Indian on-line test prep company that promises to prep you for the tests for all sorts of government jobs. Meena has a degree in chemical engineering, but he likes doing the start-up thing, and has previously launched companies involved with bikes and with tourism. So he comes directly from the modern tradition of "You don't need any education background to be an education entrepreneur."

Meena also seems to lack a certain level of fluency in English. I bring this up not to make fun or to get all ugly American with people who aren't from around here, but because Artificial Intelligence applications for education have to be fluent in the language. They have to be. If you're going to sell me the eleventy billionth hunk of software that can supposedly assess writing, then it had better be plenty fluent in the language and capable of telling the difference between effective writing and tortured gobbledeegook. If you are an AI entrepreneur who wants to sell to English speaking people, then your AI had better be fluent-- and if you can't even use it to check your own work, then I'm not interested.

So-- the five reasons that AI is going to change the education game. Let's see how many of these seem familiar

1) AI to help in personalized learning.

In a classroom comprising a high number of students, attending every doubt of each student remains no longer feasible. Artificial Intelligence can help in developing personalized learning which can mitigate individual doubts and thus enhance their performances.

This was worth the price of admission for me, because here's a connection that totally makes sense, but which Personalized [sic] Learning fans hardly ever admit. Adding algorithm driven mass customization software to a traditional classroom doesn't make a ton of sense, because your software really can't do a much better job of personalization than the human teacher. But if you're talking about a classroom chock filled to the rafters with students-- well, now the human teacher has no hope of making a personal connection with individual students, and suddenly the algorithmic software looks like a relative improvement.

Also, I love that throughout this list, Meena will talk about handling student "doubts" in the classroom, which is not the way we say it in the US, but it's kind of right, isn't it? Teachers are in the business of removing students' doubts about the material and their own understanding of it. I really like the idea of students who raise their hands not to say "I'm confused" or "I can't understand this," but instead, "I have doubts."

2) Adaptive test prep

The software gets you ready for the big test by ramping up the challenge. It's refreshing to encounter someone who doesn't shy away from admitting that what he's working on is computerized test prep.

3) Addressing vernacular need

For students in vernacular learning, real-time translation ensures that the medium is democratized thereby also incorporating maximum students to enjoy the fruits of such technological advancement. It will also significantly reduce the cost of content production.

That's the whole explanation. Vernacular? I don't think so.

4) Automatic doubt solving

Clearing of doubts is fundamental to the process of learning. Artificial Intelligence engine can successfully read the problem statement and suggest a possible solution to the learners.

Again with the doubts. I'm curious how far the solution suggesting would go with an AI. In US AI plugging, we don't hear a lot about the computer providing hints or help.

5) Interactive gamification

Artificial Intelligence is instrumental in devising different tools and techniques which are immensely effective in teaching highly complex concepts in a simple and lucid way. This includes incorporation of sophisticated and useful illustrations, virtual reality and artificial reality tools, which can streamline intelligent concepts into accessible cognitive models.

Is AI good at coming up with different tools and techniques for teaching? Because I would have assumed that it can only use the tools and techniques that were programmed into it, and the programmers can only program the tools and techniques that they know about. This is one of the problems with AI-fueled personalized [sic] learning-- you're putting computer technicians in charge of educational decisions.

6) Automation of grading activities

No, I didn't mess up-- this article about the five ways AI is an education game changer actually lists six ways.

Grading work is tedious (particularly if your classroom is gill-stuffed right up to the rafters), but technology can check the answers for you, at least on items like multiple choice and fill in the blank. Meena assures us that before long, AI will start grading long answers, which is of course the same prediction that technologists have been making for decades now. Still hasn't happened, but any day now.

Bottom line? This Indian version runs right at what US advocates dance around-- the main benefit of algorithm-controlled mass customized computer-delivered education is that it will make it possible to put one teacher in a room with a few hundred students.

Meanwhile, MadGuy Labs has apparently only raised about $150K, so if you still want to get in on this ground floor, I think the opportunity is there.

Using Cultural Competency To Sell Personalized [sic] Learning

Over at EdTechTimes, a site that for a consulting group that clearly is interested in pushing personalized [sic] learning, I found a podcast by Mariel Cariker entitled "Cultural Competency: Finding Ways To Bring Equity Through Personalized Learning." (It is accompanied by a transcript.) The podcast is sponsored by TeachPlus.

Like many of the arguments being used to push PL, it's an odd little mishmash.

A real killer app.

The piece opens by chatting with Nick Donahue, CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. She describes Nellie Mae as "focused on community leadership and engagement," but in the context of this podcast, it might be more appropriate to note that Nellie Mae is hugely invested in pushing personalized [sic} learning via mass standardized algorithm-managed computer delivery systems. Donahue is not a disinterested expert in the field; he's a guy with a product to sell that just happens to be the product that this podcast is "examining."

Donahue offers plenty of the usual rhetoric, including the old suggestion that education hasn't changed in 100 years. He does manage to avoid the word "disrupt," but he still advises "challenging some of the traditional structures and approaches and mindsets that have ruled education for 100 years." He suggests that school leaders approach this as a means of providing freedom for teachers, specifically the freedom and flexibility to "teach" a large group. And then he drops this line:

Flipped learning is headed in the right direction, that would mean when the kids are together with you, let’s do the things that really access the killer app that great teachers are.

How do you know you're dealing with a computer-based technocrat? When they start referring to real live human beings as "apps." I'm sure he figures this is really a compliment because he didn't just call teachers aps, but "killer apps." But, no. No, teachers are actual live humans in no way interchangeable with computer programs.

Next up is O'Sha Williams, and probably the important thing to know about Williams is that she is currently a TeachPlus Policy Fellow (that explains why she, out of a few million teachers, was selected for this podcast), which is coming straight out of her two years as a Teach for America temp in Providence, RI, schools. (And if you want one more example of TFA's hubris, after her two years in the classroom, she served as mentor teacher, showing new teachers the ropes). The TFA stint came right after she graduated from Brown with a BA in Education Studies in 2016.

Williams makes a compelling argument for why it's important "for students to have teachers that look like them and share their experiences." I'm not sure how anyone can argue against this, though sadly, I know there are those that try and those that simply ignore the whole thing. But she reflects on her own experience, talks about the issue of a predominantly white teaching staff for a predominantly Black student body, the importance of a student's life outside the building. Then she gets to personalizing:

Students have a variety of experiences and needs that can’t all be met in one fell swoop. So by having students work on task list that are catered to their experience, their linguistic ability, and their interests. Giving them choice and giving them flexibility in meeting those academic standards allows for students to be more interested in what they’re doing. Like an important historical figure that is in line with their own academic goals or pursuits, or whether they are studying a part of their own culture to present to others.

All of this is fairly obvious. None of it requires a computer. Some of it-- assigning work based on their reading level-- has been strictly verboten for the past few decades. But Williams is careful to not say that an algorithm is handling all of this for her.

Then it's back to Donahue, who offers insights like "Nick says not considering individual students’ needs can cause them harm in the long term." Well, yeah. The rest of his argument is against one-size-fits-all schooling in favor of a more targeted approach, and I'm reminded of how the current wave of Reformsters has been able to use backlash against the previous wave of reform (Common Core et al) to fuel their own movement. The idea of targeting individual students is not particularly new. But where is he going with this:

We’re well into an era of personalization and customization as a society. And so that’s the good news. I think though that in education, we have not quite really faced the distinctions that define racial inequities.

Finally, we go to the MET, a Providence, RI, school founded in 1996 that specializes in a sort of CTE personalized unschooling life-credits hybrid education. It's an intriguing program, and I'm now wondering why PL fans haven't referenced it as often as, say, Chugach, Alaska. I suspect there's a lot to that story, but now is not the time.

Then we're on the home stretch. Donahue says, yes, there's a fear that PL is going to squeeze teachers out of the classroom, and he does remember a time when it was about "teacher-proofing" a program, but now they get that an awesome live human is a necessary part. Whether they get that get that, or just get that it's a necessary piece of marketing PL remains to be seen.  

Equity is making sure that students have the same ability to take for granted their academic environment being for them, and structured for them, and in their favor. And thoughtful, intentional, and curated for their success. And not feeling as though they are in a system that has been structured for them to fail

The whole business is an interesting stance. On the one hand, it flies in the face of the standards movement which says that nothing about a student's background should be allowed to reduce expectations for them. Standardization wants to see everyone fit in that one size. On the other hand, the idea of structuring an academic environment to be supportive of students seems so fundamental that I'm not sure how any edu-movement can claim it. Yes, too many schools fail miserably in this fundamental-- I'm just not sure why the restructuring of a school around the PL model is necessary to correct the issue.

Equity issues have been used to sell everything from charter schools to TFA, but the attempt to link them to personalized [sic] learning seems to still be in the rough draft stage. That's unfortunate, because real personalized learning (the type that involves persons and not computerized algorithms) has some real use for addressing equity issues in this country, provided it's not used to narrow the focus so that we ignore the larger institutional systemic issues. My hope is that the attempt to use equity as a marketing tool for personalized [sic] learning doesn't simply set back real efforts to really fix a real problem. This article/advertisement does not get my hopes up.

By the way-- once a teacher retires, are they still a killer app? A retired app? Any kind of app at all, or just a few loose lines of code? Asking for a friend.