Rewarding Failing Schools

One of the problems with the business oriented view of education reveals itself in the use of the word "reward."

As long as the debate has raged, we can find commentators, thinky tanks, and policy makers arguing that giving more resources to struggling schools is "rewarding" them for failure. (Here's an example, and here's another.) For many folks, this seems simple and straightforward, but it's really not.

Imagine two small children. Pat is growing up in a poor home and not receiving the kind of food necessary to thrive. Chris is growing up in a wealthy home and gets all the food and nutrition necessary to do well. Chris is big and strong, well at the top of the charts for growth. Pat is thin and emaciated, near the bottom of the chart for growth.

Let's imagine a government program for distributing food to families of young children. Who would like to argue that Pat should not get any of this food because it would just be rewarding Pat for failing to grow big and strong?

For some folks, it seems impossible to view money as anything other than revenue. In business, money is your reward for doing a good job. That's the whole point.

But (at the risk of repeating myself) public schools are not businesses. They do not generate revenue. They do not produce a profit. And money is not a reward; it's a resource.

This idea hurts some people's heads. Health care and public education have always treated money mainly as a resource, something you spend in order to take care of people. Yes, there have been plenty of money-related arguments in public education, but they are virtually all (including teacher pay arguments) centered on how best to spend that money to best take care of the students in the system.

No, no, no, some folks have been screaming. That's not how you use money. That's not what money is for. It's supposed to reward people. It's supposed to be saved and used to reward people who earn it. God, you education people-- you need to operate more like a business. You need to watch your bottom line. You need to make sure you reward the right things.

But money in public education is not a reward-- it's a resource. It's food. It's the fuel needed to keep the machinery of education running.

Focusing on money as a reward, as revenue, changes the focus of a district. I think it's no coincidence that charters usually spend more money on administration than public schools; in a public school, the main job is to teach students, but in a business, the main job is to oversee a responsible and profitable use of the revenue. And charter schools are not public schools; they're businesses. As I've said a million times, that does not automatically mean that charters are evil, but it does that educating students is not their primary purpose.

Here are some things we shouldn't say:

That patient is losing heart and respiratory function; don't reward him with more blood and oxygen.

That child is starving; don't reward her with more food.

That veteran is failing to cope with PTSD; don't reward him with counseling.

Likewise, it makes no sense to say:

That school is failing; don't reward it with books.

That school is failing; don't reward it with a new roof that doesn't leak.

That schools is failing; don't reward it with more money.

Faced with a starving or sick person, you cannot punish them back to health. Faced with a struggling school, you cannot punish it to a state of greater effectiveness. Money is not a reward; it's a necessary resource for education. It matters. A finite resource that needs to be stewarded carefully and effectively, but a resource and not a reward. We need to make sure we talk about it that way.

Jeb Bush: Frying Reform Baloney for Michigan

The Detroit News just ran a Jeb Bush fluff piece chock full of reformy baloney (reformaloney?) and an embarrassing lack of those fact thingies.

It's helpful to know that the writer is Ingrid Jacques, deputy editorial page editor, and a graduate of Hillsdale College, the noted far-right Libertarian college with close ties to the DeVos family and the Trump administration (you may remember them as the school that Senator Pat Toomey tried to give a big fat tax exemption gift).

There he is, going big with the passion.

The piece was written on the occasion of Bush coming to Michigan to talk at the Detroit Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference, one more group of business whizzes who fancy themselves rightful managers of public education while hanging out with politicians who are really interested in their deep pockets ideas, and the piece opens by evoking the dynamic Jeb we all know and love for whom nobody voted in the last Presidential cycle. What does it take to improve schools?

“The attitude should be big and bold or go home and let someone else try,” says the former Florida governor. “If it ruffles a few feathers or gets people uncomfortable, so be it. There should be a little more passion behind more provocative change. You can argue about how bad things are or you can say things have to get better.  That's where convergence could really be."

Big and bold or go home. Passion. Because that's the Jeb we all met during the GOP primaries. But beyond the disconnect of Jeb! being big, bold and passionate, this is reformaloney. It's not nearly as important to be big and bold as it is to be right, and when it comes to education, Bush has rarely been either. There is nothing big and bold about draining public education funds to feed private business operations, nor is there anything passionate about letting those private edu-businesses suck up taxpayer dollars with little oversight. Big and bold would have been, for instance, saying to Florida voters, "I want to run several parallel school systems, and since that will obviously take more money to do right, I'm going to raise your taxes to fund it."

I don't know what he wants to see converge, but Jacques thinks his message is one the business and politics guys need to hear, because Michigan's education situation is critical. Bush is going to discuss change, which is an odd topic really, because Michigan has been pummeled by educational change thanks to influencers like the DeVos family, and the results have been terrible. But the policies that Bush loves--charters, choice and cutting public schools (and the teachers who work there) off at the knees--have been tried, and they failed.

Jacques presents Bush as an expert on education reform because Florida and FEE (now known as ExcelinEd). But FEE is simply one more astroturf advocacy group financed by the usual reformsters. They have been wrong so often, and they have tried a variety of shadow groups and initiatives, like the time they set up four teachers to tweet happy things about the Common Core. Chiefs for Change, Learn More Go Further. Bush has ties to so many groups that never quite produced the excitement and passion he was looking for. Meanwhile, he made a wretched mess out of Florida, with a charter sector that produces more waste and fraud than education , and more bad policies than I can list here.

Never mind all that. Jacques unpacks her English degree to offer this example of passive voice:

And now Florida is seen as an example of reforms done right, from accountability to school choice.

Is it? By whom is it seen that way? What data would lead us to that conclusion? Never mind. Jacques says that Florida has top performers in reading "and other subjects." That's a big bold claim, without context (top of what? compared  to whom? measuring performance how?) and not entirely reflected in at least some test results.

Bush offered some typical reformaloney-- "You need an attitude that every child can learn" which to be clear is not wrong, but is also not news to anyone who works in education. Bush is like a guy who bursts in to an operating room in a hospital and yells out--"Stop everything! Do you realie you need to use the pointy end of the scalpel?!!"  But Bush did lay out some specifics in his interview with Jacques.

Early literacy efforts.

Bush always stays current on  reformy talking points, so he leads with "teachers aren't taught how to teach reading properly." Then he moves to the wonders of third grade do-or-die retention testing, making the amazing claim that it works. No, it doesn't. And this is not news. It is particularly damaging as practiced in Florida, where it has led to the retention of students who passed other reading assessments, but didn't take the honored test. (Florida is also the state that hounded a dying child to take the test.) Third grader retention is effective in just one way; it helps raise fourth grade scores by keeping struggling low-testing students out of fourth grade.

Accountability and School choice.

Well, they've got one of those, anyway. It's possible that Jeb's a little fuzzy on accountability:

“Align the system to the results you want, and by and large you’ll get better results,” Bush says. “It’s not easy to craft a system where you can measure learning adequately but it’s well worth the effort.”

Align a system around test results and you get a system focused on test results. Perhaps Jeb! is familiar with Goodhart's Law or Campbell's Law and how they explain that measures like a standardized test tend to distort and pervert the processes they are intended to measure. As for the second half of his statement, he's correct that it's not easy to craft an adequate measuring system for learning; that's probably why nobody has accomplished it yet.

Jeb! thinks the A-F school grading system actually accomplishes something other than rewarding wealthy schools and punishing poor ones, and he completely ignores other accountability issues, like keeping charter schools from scamming taxpayers or from hiring unqualified staff or from closing in the middle of the year and just wasting taxpayer money.

Governance

Bush remembers fondly when he stripped Florida voters of the power to elect the state board of education, and suggests that Michigan also go to a governor-appointed board that will properly wield a rubber stamp. I've met Michigan's elected board of education, and Michigan is damned lucky to have them. As always when contemplating GOP-branded reformaloney, I wonder when Republicans decided they were against democracy and local control.

Jacques tells the business community to take note. I would suggest that it's long past time to stop paying attention to what this private citizen with no actual education background has to say about education. Florida is a mess for everyone except privatizers and profiteers and people in school districts that are still fighting off the state, but mostly it's scammage and thievery and driving teachers out and educational malpractice, and Bush takes a huge chunk of blame.

OH: Takeover Battle Comes To Senate

Our story so far: The Ohio House has passed a bill scrapping Ohio's disastrous takeover bill, HB 70. The new language was incorporated into the budget (HB 166) and, having cleared the House, must go to the Senate, where education committee chair Peggy Lehner is not particularly sympathetic to public education. So Lehner and a committee of various "interested parties" put together their own proposal for offering "relief" from HB 70. It's another version of a state takeover, packed with $20 million in pork for "consultants."

Wednesday, May 29, was the Senate's day to hold a hearing about the issue, and all the players came out of the woodwork, some offering audacious and amazing words for or against the bill, with particular emphasis on Lorain, Ohio, a city and school system that has caused all sorts of problems by refusing to roll over and play dead.

Mark Ballard, hearing MVP

But we have lots of testimony to look at, all of which paints a picture of a direct head-to-head clash between pub lic education and those who would like to privatize it.  In fact, before we wade into this, let's start with some of the testimony from Lorain School Board President Mark Ballard, because this may win the Quote of the Day award:

A new law is being crafted, in secret, AGAIN - because you admit the last two laws were ineffective - all while Lorain is dealing with the negative consequences of those bills.

Now, if this new bill is approved, we will be required to collaborate with our CEO, even though he doesn’t believe in collaboration and refuses to meet with us.

And our end goal is to create a plan that is exactly...the... same...as what we already had in place before you gave us a CEO?

Please remember this: If the state of Ohio thinks it can continue to experiment with it’s poor children because our communities are somehow too disengaged to fight for them, you are very mistaken.

We are the International City. And fighting for the right to have the same opportunities as middle class white people is something we have been doing all of our lives.

Chad Aldis (formerly with the Waltons and before that a staffer in the Florida legislature) showed up for the Fordham Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank advocacy group that has gone to bat for most reformy ideas. They also run a charter authorizing business in Ohio.

There are several reasons why this body should reject the House’s changes. First, although jettisoning the ADC model rather than improving it would be politically popular, it would come at the expense of students. The districts currently under ADC control have consistently weak academic growth, low college completion rates, and few students reaching proficiency in basic subjects. Some of the districts have been performing poorly for ten years or more. Their schools are producing graduates who aren’t prepared for college or the workplace—and families, communities, and local businesses are paying the price.

This is a standard reformy tactic-- emphasize the severity of the problem rather than provide evidence that your preferred solution is actually a solution .

Dayton, Ohio, is one of the larger communities that will soon fall under HB 70 if the law isn't changed. This, as much as the failures of the model in Lorain, Youngstown, and East Cleveland, is driving the opposition to HB 70-- the very real possibility that more "important" Ohio cities with actual clout will soon be hit by state takeover. The superintendent was at the hearing to get out and front, calling results of HB 70 so far very debatable and arguing that Dayton is already solving problems themselves and meddling from the state will not help, thank you very much.

Becky Higgins, president of the Ohio Education Association  was there to argue the solution isn't solving anything:

As my colleagues and our fellow OEA members in Youngstown and Lorain have experienced, the current state takeover law provides no citizen oversight through elected school boards, no voice for classroom teachers and has been bad for our kids. Our experience in Youngstown and Lorain has demonstrated that the Academic Distress Commission/CEO model does not work. We believe that no more districts should be taken over, and that the districts that have been taken over should be relieved of that burden. That is why the first part of House Bill 154 is so important - repeal.

It is also important to note that state takeovers are based on misleading state report cards that severely penalize students and districts in poverty. After the failed state takeover law is repealed and local control is restored, OEA stands ready to work with state lawmakers to fix Ohio’s broken and misleading report card system.

Jennifer Kluchar, a teacher from Youngstown, pointed out that the advent of urban chartersskims away students in a way that affects the culture of the public schools:

This is the context I need you to imagine: schools where the culture is “we come here to learn” versus schools where the culture is “we come here to be fed and loved, and because there’s no one at home to take care of us”,

Beth Workman of the League of Women Voters showed up to call for better fundng of flagging schools and to challenge the test-based definition of quality:

Quality is a very complex phenomenon, and it deserves a robust definition. Test results, which are most often a reflection of the economic status of the test takers, are a very limited way of gauging quality. And connecting consequences to them, is a very harmful way to force improvement. It doesn’t really work. It encourages a focus on improving test results, which both undermines high quality instruction and negates the validity of the test itself as a fair measure of learning.

ADC member teacher Steve Cawthon enumerated some of the problems instituted by the CEO and also observed that some of the progress signs that the CEO pointed to where the result of reforms that the distriuct had begun before the CEO took over.

Several folks testified to the atmosphere of fear that now perm eates Lorain schools, but perhaps most striking was testimony from Alexis Hayden, the union grievance chair, who noted that from a previous average of seven grievances, this year had racked up fifty-two grievances. In one year. And that's not counting the teachers who called, but ultimately decided not to file a grievance because they feared the fallout of doing so.

Kejuana Jefferson, one of the CEO's turnaround principals, showed up to compare herself to Sojourner Truth, heroically standing up against the powerful political forces of Lorain. Jefferson would be the principal hired for the middle school who had neither principal certification nor teaching certification beyond K-3. She's taken to slamming hers staff on social media. But she's sure the takeover in Lorain is working because the TNTP alignment process is going well and  there's some good data.

Henry Patterson, past VP of the ADC in Lorain laid out the five considerations for a turnaround to work: it will take time, be hard, and cost money. Also, it will require a collaborative CEO who works with local folks and an engaged ADC. HB 70 is broken and needs to be replaced with something that considers all five.

David Hardy, Teach for America product and current Lorain CEO, offered, if nothing else, some comments that further suggest that he was a terrible choice for a terrible job. He, however, is certain that HB 70 was right. But he does see progress in Lorain stymied:

The level of opposition to progress is relentless and the willingness by those who see local control as a means to oppress communities dominated by black and brown children is real. The viability of corruption is at a height that resembles the challenges seen in some of the most troubling situations our world has to endure. Thinly veiled threats, whispers of oppression, and attention seeking adults who are emotionally high jacked to testify against the very necessary change they refuse to see is present today and will be present tomorrow. At the same time our voiceless children and marginalized adults rely on others to speak their truth all while being exploited daily by lies and deceit-filled empty promises.

Hardy is not just speaking against the folks in Lorain, but the idea of local control in general:

In communities like Lorain, local control means control that is unaccounted for and the maintenance of more of the same; maintaining financial benefit on the backs of children of color, staining the very democracy that has put them in place with the stench of systemic racial inequities that continue to perpetuate the separation of the haves and have nots.

And Hardy offers an explanation for why he won't attend a school board meeting:

The answer is simple; I refuse to be a part of corruption.

Hardy has some big sweeping ideas, or at least the language to express them, and he certainly delivers a mean speech about the disenfranchisement of the people. Maybe he is a big thinker, but if so, he would not be the first visionary leader who couldn't turn his vision into the daily nuts and bolts needed to run a school district. You can try to whip people up into a state of frenzied excitement, but at some point they are going to turn to you and ask, "Okay, what exactly are we going to do today?"

Moreover, his view that Lorain is a corrupt cesspool of power held by a small cabal of corrupt leaders seems like an obstacle to collaborative success. His impulses seem to run to sudden authoritarian dictates (e.g. his announcement that everyone in some schools would have to reapply for their jobs), a dislike for explaining himself, and subsequent collisions with reality (e.g. his announcement that all those teachers wouldn't have to reapply after all). And while he talks a good game about having monthly town halls to go straight to the people--well, he doesn't live in Lorain.

Yes, being a school leader involves dealing with some people who are obstacles and problematic. It's a political job, and school super-powered CEO is a very political job created by political means. It requires someone who is both uber-knowledgable about all aspects of running schools and somebody who is a gifted politician; Hardy is just an example of what happens when you try to fill the job with someone has neither skill set. Even if he's right, and that he's the good guy stuck in a pit of corruption beset on all sides by villains, this is not how to deal with that successfully. Lorain is just the worst case scenario display of how bad HB 70 is, and Hardy just keeps demonstrating that.

Hardy has his supporters, including the local NAACP, and they showed up to advocate for staying the course. And no Ohio hearing about education would be complete without Lisa Gray of Ohio Excels, another one of those groups formed by business interests who want to shape education policy. Gray has worked with the Gates Foundation, Achieve, Teach for America-- the usual suspects. Gray has been a reformstery advocate for years (here she is in 2013 explaining how awesome the Common Core will be).

Ohio Excels proposal for replacing HB 70 is even more reformy. They would like to see a plan that targets schools that are trending downward, snapping them up before they even fail. Businesses and philanthropic groups (like, say, the Gates Foundation) should get to be partners (aka "help drive the bus"), and more mayoral involvement in leadership (aka "mayoral control"). And there should be "final consequences" for schools that don't improve, like state takeover-- though they should be allowed to escape that  y trying things like "partnering" with third-party providers or charter schools.

Gray's testimony helps establish the other extreme in the discussion-- rather than local control, let's just get the process of privatizing schools under way. It would be interesting to hear if Hardy believes that corporate privatization would yield better treatment of Black and Brown students.

Lehner was, by most accounts, not particularly sympathetic to the pro-HB 166 crowd-- apparently at one point, when a Lorain teacher tried to recognize the many students who had made the long trip, she scolded the teacher to turn around and face the senators (and then there's the classy Senator who called the student appearance a "nice show.") It remains to be seen what the Senate will decide to do with the education language now written into the budget the House passed, but if I were an Ohio voter concerned about public education, I'd be calling my Senator daily.

Can Personalized Learning Deliver

A new report published by the National Education Policy Center looks at the current state of K-12 personalized learning and finds that there are many reasons for school districts to think twice about embracing this hot new trend. “Personalized Learning and the Digital Privatization of Curriculum and Teaching” was written by Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar and Christopher M. Saldana of the University of Colorado Boulder, and it lays out several areas of concern. As the model spreads—and concerns spread with it—this report provides a clear view of the objections to modern personalized learning.

A History Lesson 

Imagine a technology “which gives tests and scores—and teaches.”  Or a call for a revolution in which science and technology would “combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education” as well as saving teachers time by freeing them from administering and scoring tests. All of that comes from Sidney L. Pressey, the inventor of the first real teaching machine, patented in 1928. Neither personalized learning nor the problems that come with it are new. In fact, the idea of personalizing learning through some sort of mass customization is almost 100 years old; ironically, one of the common pitches for current techno-privatized education is as an antidote to classrooms that supposedly have not changed in 100 years. 

 B. F. Skinner emerged in the 1950s with an alternative approach to Pressey’s, but as the authors note, the two both claimed that their approach would provide students immediate feedback, allow them to work at their own pace, and provide them more personal attention from teachers. “Both Pressey and Skinner also assumed that a student’s ability to provide the required response to a question demonstrated competency/mastery—and therefore ‘learning.’”

Modern personalized learning has not left any of this behind. 

The Modern Version 

You would assume that personalized learning meant something like “a humane school and classroom environment and open, flexible teaching strategies,” or “increasing students’ agency over their own learning” or “addressing needs of the whole child,” but a different sort of model has been spreading.

Much of the push for this wave, as with several previous education waves, comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2014 funded a group of organizations to develop a “working definition” of personalized learning. The hard and fast definition still eludes experts and marketers, but the Gates definition (which arguably also informed the definition of Chan-Zuckerberg, now emerging as major players in the field) “offers a tech-friendly vision of an individualized, data-heavy, mastery-based education system.” It is based not on research about teaching and learning, but presents itself as “common sense,’ which, the authors points out, obscures several problematic assumptions. 

It assumes that children are, and should be, focused primarily on their own goals, their own objectives—themselves--and not on community connections or goals. It’s about a series of tasks, and not relationships. It assumes that learning involves moving along a linear track ( first learn A, then B, etc) and that complex learning can be broken down and measured as small bits and pieces. First pass a punctuation unit, then a sentence completion unit, then a simple reading unit, and be declared able to write an explicative paper for a work of literature., because computer software can assess the first three, but not the last. 

The modern Gatesian model implies constant assessment, feedback and record-keeping. But that means the “learning” must be doled out in small bites and bits that lend themselves to the kind of assessment and record-keeping that a software can handle.

The Problems 

The authors argue that personalized learning has been essentially taken over by a privatized corporate approach, because personalized learning smells like money. Lots of money. But because these programs value data most of all, “they reflect a restricted, hyper-rational approach to curriculum and pedagogy that limits students’ agency, narrows what they can learn in school, and limits schools’ ability to respond effectively to a diverse student body.” 

While personalized learning talks a big game about student agency, in fact most models are top-down instruction; the student may choose a speed or even a topic for an exercise, but it’s the software writers who set the major goals, determine the sequence of units, and decides what will prove mastery. Needs and gaps are determined by someone other than the student, who becomes an object to be acted upon by software that is trying to elicit the desired response and behavior from her. Students may be able to move through their list of modules faster, but there’s no support for the notion that learning has anything to do with learning better. 

In fact, personalized learning has a limited idea of what an education actually is. Modern personalized learning envisions a series of discrete skills and scraps of knowledge, acquired in a particular sequence. This ignores everything we know about integrating learning into prior knowledge and the world at large. It stifles creativity and critical thinking; rather than forge paths and develop a personal relationship with a body of knowledge, personalized learning calls on students to just move down a path that has already been laid out with pavement, guardrails, and penalties for daring to wander. 

Nor is that concrete path supported by research. The research base for modern personalized learning is weak, with little clear support for the idea that this approach can work any better than traditional methods. Too often the pitch is simply magical thinking tied to computers (It’s on a computer, so it will be awesome).  

Computer technology often comes with an presumption of unbiased objectivity. But software is written by humans, and it reflects their biases and assumptions, the culture that they breathe, and the culture of the tech world is overwhelmingly white and male. Nor do the venture capitalists who are doing much of the funding of these programs free from cultural biases of their own. 

The Threats 

The authors note one of the central ironies of modern personalized learning; though it claims to be about tailoring instruction for the individual student, it actually requires all students to get their education from a single one-size-fits-all delivery system. That system is not centered on a human teacher; they are reduced to the role of “coach” or “mentor,” with little control over the education process. Where more control is given, the teacher spends more time on the computer, modifying, writing, adding, and otherwise maintaining the program. 

The digitized approach to personalized learning involves collecting vast amounts of data. Even if the company honestly has no intention of ever putting that data to other uses, the fact that such a data bank exists means that it can be stolen. And since most of these programs come from businesses with investors and owners to keep happy, the pressure for monetizing must be huge. One need only look at Summit Learning, one of the most prominent personalized learning platforms: its software was developed with assistance from Facebook engineers, and the Summit Learning Program has been split off into a separate company with a four-person board of directors that includes Priscilla Chan and the CFO of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Summit is free to schools that want to use it, but Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, knows a thing or two about how to get money out of a digital platform people use for free. He is not, however, known for his careful handling of user privacy. If data is the new oil, then digitized learning would bring in a data gusher of epic proportions. Summit wants us to know that it has privacy policies in place, has signed the Student Privacy Pledge, and maintains a Privacy Center on their website that details all the ways they are protecting student privacy.

Personalized learning as currently pitched is not really new, and there are reasons to believe that it cannot deliver on most of its promises. This report lays out in considerable detail why school district leaders should think long and hard before making their students part of this new digitized version of an old revolution that has, for 100 years, failed to launch.

Originally posted on Forbes

Amazon Wants To Read Your Heart

One of the frontiers in creepy computer intelligence is the pursuit of software that can read the details of your face, your breathing, your eyeballs, and out of those details, construct a computer-generated window into your very heart and soul.

Some of the attempts are laughable, like the NWEA feature that presumes to know how engaged and focused your students are based on wait time for answering questions on a computerized standardized test. Some are ambitious, like the project that claims the ability to "read" a whole batch of different emotions as displayed on human faces.

But this is one of those areas where it pays to look outside the education arena, because there are so many different applications for this sort of Big Brothery technocreeping. And when a major player like Amazon decides to join the biz, attention should be paid. Last week, Bloomberg served notice:

Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions.

Bloomberg says it has seen internal memos, and that the wrist-worn gadget is a collaboration between various creepy divisions of Amazon that already work on the Fire phone, the Echo speaker, nd Alexa. The idea is that the device will be able to "discern the wearer's emotional state from the sound of his or her voice." In case, what-- in case you don't know how you feel. I don't mean to belittle that idea; lots of folks have trouble with the fundamental level of Emotional Intelligence, which is being able to identify your own feelings. Still, the picture of someone getting news and saying, "Alexa, how do I feel about that" is a little silly.

But of course the implications are much larger, because once the software has detected your emotion, that becomes storable, shareable information. Did this product make the wearer happy? Let's throw ads at her that sell similar items. And how would political candidates be able to buy information about exactly what pushes certain buttons for certain voters.

And since companies are already trying to sell products that measure students' reactions to classroom material, as well as promising to make such mind-reading skills part of the AI that directs personalized [sic] learning, it seems only a matter of time before the attempt is made to fold this is.

Of course, Alexa was supposed to take over the world, but that didn't happen. And voice recognition software remains an area where tech giants still can't quite deliver a reliable version of the product they've promised. And that's before a group of high sophomores set out to see if they can beat the system. Stay tuned.

ICYMI: Memorial Day Weekend Edition (5/26)

In my town, we do the whole parade and program in the park business tomorrow. But for today, here are some pieces to read and share.

Did You See The Numbers? Yes, I Have.  

Is there a battle going on inside the NAACP over charters? Nope. Cloaking Inequality has the story.

We're Already Losing the Next Generation of Florida Teachers

The Orlando Sentinel has noticed that Florida is an education disaster area.

L.A. Charters Suspend Blacks and Disabled Students at Higher Rate

Robin Urevich at Capital and Main looks at some disturbing data about Los Angeles charter schools.

Deck Is Stacked Against Black Teachers in Michigan  

A new study shows that Black teachers in Michigan can expect a worse evaluation than their White peers.

The New Secession  

In Baton Rouge, we get a look at the newest version of white flight-- just split off into your own separate White city.

Coddling Charter Schools  

Greensboro's newspaper calls out the North Carolina legislature for trying to tilt the playing field in favor of charters-- even the bad ones.

Twenty Years Later, the Bush A+ Plan Fails Florida's Students

Sue Legg takes a look at the failing mess that is the legacy of Jeb Bush's plan to crush public education. Spoiler alert: there was no Florida miracle.

Cory Booker Was a Foot Soldier for Betsy DeVos 

Jennifer Berkshire takes us back to the days when Cory Booker was an ambitious young politician working hard to promote the reformy agenda.

Silent Strike   

I don't mean to pick on Florida, but they are an example of everything wrong with the reformy agenda. Here's a closer look at how they are losing teachers at a fast (but not unpredictable) rate.

Charter Schools Are Quietly Gobbling Up My District 

This excellent piece from Steven Singer gives an up close look at how charters can destroy a public school system.

Schools of Opportunity

Hey look! It's some schools that are getting it right!

Shortage Denial Syndrome   

Tim Slekar is trying to convince policy makers that there is a teacher exodus, not a shortage. It's not going well.          

Louisiana's VAM: Quantitative Bungling on Display    

Mercedes Schneider takes a look at just a few of the problems with the Value Added measure.

Stuff Journalists Should Know About Charter Schools

Bernie Sanders put charters back in the news, prompting the news to cover the issue, only the news sometimes doesn't know what it's talking about. Here's a quick but useful primer from Jersey Jazzman.

States' Performance After Implementing A-F Programs

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is back, with a look at research about the effects of those stupid grading schools with A through F programs. Spoiler alert: it does not magically improve education.

PA: Free To Teach? Who Are These Guys?

Once again, it's time for teachers in Pennsylvania to get a nice mass mailed postcard from our friends at Free To Teach, a group dedicated to reminding teachers that they don't have to belong to that stinky union. 

I took a look at these guys back in 2015, but as I look at the two postcards they sent to my home, I think it's time to revisit them. If you're a PA teacher wondering who these guys are, I can answer at least part of that question.

Free To Teach's front man used to be Matt Eason, a phys ed teacher down in the Philly area at Avon Grove schools (he also runs a first aid and CPR training company). His pitch was to call for "paycheck protection" and the death of fair share because he objected to being forced to join a union. He also pushed the usual misleading talking point that dues go to political purposes that he didn't support, an argument that depends on two notions; one, that dues pay for things like political support of candidates (they don't-- that's already illegal) and two, that everything a union does is political. 

I'm just going to liberate a couple of these guys before lunch

This time, the name on the postcard is Keith Williams. Like Eason, Williams was a real life teacher (English, Conewango Valley School District) for twenty-one years before he left in 2018 to become the director of Free To Teach. He's a graduate of Geneva College, and he also ran his own business consulting firm. And like Eason, he was upset that the union wanted them to give them his hard earned money. He even made the trip to Harrisburg in 2014 to argue against fair share and for paycheck protection . The argument here is that it costs the taxpayers big bucks to process deductions of union dues from teacher paychecks. This is a silly argument. Williams' involvement with Free To Teach pre-dates his new job; in 2016 he collaborated with Eason and Jodie Kratz on an op-ed cheering on the Friedrich's union-busting case. 

Free To Teach used to be a project of the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, a far-right advocacy group in Pennsylvania that is part of the State Policy Network and is also tied to ALEC and Koch Brothers money. 

But things have changed since 2015. Specifically, the Janus decision changed things (a case bankrolled largely by members of the State Policy Network), and in 2018, after that decision came down, Williams left teaching for his new job, and Free To Teach became the project of an organization called Americans for Fair Treatment. In 2018, Williams tried to portray the group as a grass roots movement with Williams himself as the only paid staffer (Williams is listed as staff for both AFFT and Free To Teach), setting out to just let teachers know their rights. Yes, they have the same initials as the American Federation of Teachers-- what a remarkable coincidence.

AFFT is out to convince all public workers to exit their respective unions. They've been at it since 2014, when they were a national group based in Oklahoma. In 2016, they filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia school district and teachers union over the practice of release time for union leaders to do union work. That suit was handled by the Fairness Center, a Harrisburg law group that will take the case of anybody "hurt by public sector union officials"-- so, literally a union busting law firm and another SPN member.  The suit was thrown out because the court found that AFFT, as an Oklahoma group, had no standing. That may well have helped give them the push to create or change into what is now technically AFFT-Pennsylvania and the PA-based Free To Teach. In 2018 they were successful in a similar suit against the Reading Education Association.

AFFT is now up to two staffers, including Williams and Rebecca Whalen (logistics and membership coordinator), a 2018 graduate of Lebanon Valley College whose only previous job is for the Commonwealth Foundation. 

In fact, AFFT is a pretty transparent shell for the Commonwealth Foundation. The AFFT board consists of:

Michael J. Reitz: Vice-President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, one of the biggest right-wing thinky tank advocacy groups in the country, pushing right to work and funded generously by the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and, yes, the DeVos family.

Charles Mitchell: currently CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, previously an associate at the Charles Koch Institute

Tim Hoefer: Executive director of Empire Center for Public Policy, a project of the Manhattan Institute, member of SPN and ALEC, and funded by the Bradley Foundation among others

George Coates: Chairman of the Board at the Commonwealth Foundation. 

Your Free To Teach postcard is, in short, the product of the same old network of anti-union far-right folks who have been constantly looking for ways to slap teachers down and put them in their place. A full frontal attack on unions has not been as successful in Pennsylvania as it has been in states like Wisconsin. 

The website is loaded with plenty of reasons you just don't need the union. Liability insurance is "redundant" because the employer's coverage should take care of it (because when it's time for lawyers, you can count on the district to look out for teacher interests). Besides, you'll only need liability insurance if you commit a crime. And the union has to give you a lawyer for free anyway. If these folks can convince enough Pennsylvania teachers to be free riders, unions will weaken, losing both ability to negotiate for better local contracts and less ability to advocate for teachers and public education in Harrisburg (not to mention being hampered in providing that "free" legal representation free riders depend on). That's the goal here.

The good news, so far, is that the post-Janus apocalypse that many unions braced for has not actually happened, and actions by teachers in states like West Virginia have shown that even if you could disempower the union, teachers will find a way to push back if you push them too far. 

When you get the card, you'll see that Williams has provided a handy email address. Feel free to ask him about the time that he angrily gave back the raise that the union negotiated form him, or if, now that he's retired, he's planning on doing without that pension that the union won him (actually, he may be well enough paid that he doesn't need it). But at a minimum, you can safely throw your invitation to union in the trash. 

Because, look-- you will never find me serving as an unconditional cheerleader for PSEA, and local leadership can be a crapshoot. But if a teacher's plan is to depend on their own negotiating prowess to get a personal awesome contract, or they're just going to trust folks like the Kochs and the DeVos family to look out for their best interests--well, that's a bad plan.