Whom Do We Trust

One of the unending underlying challenges in education is that parents and taxpayers have to trust somebody.

Back In The Day, the default was to trust teachers and administrators. That would be back when the default was to trust authority figures as a whole-- but that pendulum has swung far in the other direction (on behalf of all the Boomers, let me just say, "You're welcome"). Heck, even within the more recent past of my own career, a shift has been visible. In my first job (1979-1980) parent-teacher-student conferences often involved a parent absolutely taking my side, even though they didn't know me from a hole in the ground.

The erosion of trust has been widespread and has resulted from a variety of causes, and many of them have been--and continue to be--legit. Some of it is not an actual erosion at all, but simply finally hearing the voices of people who have never had a reason to trust authority. And some of it is the result of baloney, the kind of thing we see when someone explains that a youtube video deserves far more trust than an actual trained medical doctor. And some of it is the result of deliberate attempts to break down trust.

Education has been hit by a trust problem that really kicked off in 1983 with A Nation At Risk, a work which had as its singular purpose to deliver the message that public education, and the people who work in it, cannot be trusted. "Those folks," it said none-too-subtly, "are no more trustworthy than a hostile foreign power."

For thirty-six years, that drumbeat continued. Teach for America launched with the premise that teachers and the programs that produce them cannot be trusted. Common Core was sold as an antidote to untrustworthy teachers who just randomly pulled up standards for their classes higgledy piggledy. Reformsters boosted High Stakes Testing with the message that parents couldn't trust teachers to accurately report student achievement.  Charter advocates sold their business with the idea that public schools couldn't be trusted with anyone's children. And ed tech continues the pitch by suggesting that teachers can't be trusted to do their jobs.

Though some folks have turned down the volume a bit, one continuing thread running through all of modern ed reform is the notion that public schools and the people who work there simply can't be trusted.

It's not like some schools, administrations, and teachers haven't broken trust with parents and their community. Institutional racism, institutional inertia, just plain bad choices--public schools and the people who work there are capable of all of it. "Look, just trust me to do  my job," doesn't really cut it any more.

And yet, we have to trust somebody.

Reformy organizations like TFA ask us to trust their training, their process, their claim to really know what they're doing. Common Core asked us to trust the people who wrote and pushed the standards. Charter operators ask us to trust their intent and their methods. Rich education dilettantes ask us to trust them to run the whole edubiz.

Some reformy tools are sold as some sort of objective view. Your teacher's test might be biased, so that's why we need a standardized test to tell us the truth. The computer delivering the lesson won't be biased in any way, because, you know, computer magic.

But that's a lie and an illusion. High stakes testing, particularly in states like PA where teachers aren't allowed to see the test items and students must pledge  to keep them secret, asks us to trust the test manufacturers. Every kind of computer based lesson delivery system asks us to trust the people who wrote the software. And in these cases, parents and taxpayers are being asked to trust someone who is far away, separated from the students in both space and time. How many Black and Brown test manufacturers do you suppose the company employs?

In short, I don't care how scientific or evidence-based or expert-created or whatever your educational thing is-- you still have to trust somebody. The dream may be a system that depends on completely scientific objective elements, but that's simply never going to happen. It may look like systems and computers  and the like dispense with those untrustworthy carbon-based life forms, but behind every system, behind every piece of software, lurks a live human being who is no more or less trustworthy than any of the rest of us.

Trusting a whole bunch of teachers who each bring individual issues and perceptions to the table may well seem foolish. Trusting folks who support an institution that has consistently treated you and others like you badly is a bridge too far for most normal humans.

But you have to trust somebody.

You have to trust a politician who swears they're going to wrote policy that will make it better, and then you have to trust the people who will implement it. You have to trust the standardized test makers or the standards writers or the software engineers. But one problem with so many of these folk is that they aren't here to answer your questions or complaints.

You have to trust somebody.

It's almost impossible to operate a system in which the default assumption is that your front line workers can't be trusted. To effectively monitor and micro-manage all those untrustworthy teachers would require an enormous amount of humanpower and technology--a huge expense that requires you to somehow come up with a 100% trustworthy workforce for the task (otherwise, who watches the watchmen?). And while you'll effectively hamstring the people who could have been trusted, the less trustworthy folks will still find a way to gum up the works.

Plus, a school that soaks its employees in a constant soup of distrust cannot avoid slopping that soup all over the students. How effectively can students be taught in an atmosphere of distrust. What lessons do they learn in an institution where everyone is considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise? What kind of human beings does such a school produce?

You have to trust somebody.

We talk about earning trust, but I'm more inclined to think in terms of growing it. It does have to be nurtured and fed and watered and cared for and if you screw up you can kill it. But like any other plant, you can't grow it from nothing. There has to be a seed.

I have to plant that seed and start to trust someone, so I pick the teachers and other educators in the school. Not blind trust. Not I-will-ignore-the-evidence-of-my-eyes-if-you-say-to trust. There has to be an accountability piece. There also has to be a piece that allows me to speak up when I believe something is wrong. There have to be some checks and balances in the system (starting with this question-- if you have a bunch of untrustworthy employees, who hired them, and why?) There has to be a means for dealing with the misplaced, the racist, the misguided.

But teachers have chosen to be there. They have chosen to get (and continue) training. They have chosen to work through all the daily grinds and nuisances of this particular career. They are there in the trenches, and they have spent the most time right at that magical spot where learning and young human minds meet. Those factors alone mean that teachers deserve, at least provisionally, our trust.

We have to trust someone, and lord knows, sometimes it's hard to find people that can live up to that trust anywhere. Trusting educators, not blindly, but with eyes wide open and paying attention, because trust can never be a substitute for paying attention-- well, trust is scary. And it is a the worst possible way to operate an educational system. The only thing worse than that is every other possible system.

ICYMI: Really Really Summer Now Edition (7/6)

Hot and steamy here, which still makes us better off than some corners of the world. Here's some reading for the day. Remember-- share the stuff that really speaks to you.

The Teaching Machine Imaginary

I do miss Audrey Watters, but here's a new Hack Education post that, in typical Watters fashion, links book editing, the Jetsons, teaching machines, and pigeons.

Education Reformers Still Don't Understand Racism 

Rann Miller over at the Progressive takes a look at what reformsters still don't get.

Did Busing Ever Succeed?

Matt Barnum takes a dive into the research to see if he answer the newly-revived question.

Charter Schools Unleashed Education Hunger Games in California      

Andrea Gabor's background as a business journalist lets her bring a special level of insight to ed reform coverage. Here's the story of the ups and downs of charters in California.

L.A. charter schools’ plans: Take back mayor’s office, sue district, battle teachers union 

Meanwhile, California charters haven't learned much.

Charter Schools Aren't a Radical Solution and Neither Is Blaming Them

Andre Perry with a thoughtful and nuanced look at some of the systemic problems schools face.

Indiana's Catholic schools get millions in public money. Some lawmakers want that to stop.

In Indiana, some folks are finally figuring out how vouchers really work to give tax dollars to private religious schools (including those that actively discriminate against LGBTQ students).

People Who Regulate Charter Schools Also Make Millions From Them

It's this story again. This time we're in Utah for a local TV station's tale of self-dealing and profiteering.

The Facts About Newark Schools-- Update  

Since Cory Booker's Presidential run brought the subject up again, here's Jersey Jazzman with the actual facts about the big money play in Newark.

The Breaststroke  

Jose Vilson reflects on the last year of school.



  

Elizabeth Warren's Better Answer On Testing

Yesterday the NEA did quickie interviews with ten of the Democratic candidates, ranging from the front-runners like Sanders and Warren all the way down to (checks notes)-- some guy named Tim Ryan who is apparently also running.

There were plenty of fine moment and plenty of pandering, and, it has to be noted, plenty of issues that went unaddressed by some candidates because they didn't get asked a question about them. If, like me, you found the streaming experience frustrating, you can watch the whole thing over on YouTube.

The favorite headline for coverage involves all the folks who have jumped on the Make A Teacher Secretary of Education bandwagon. But there were several moments I found more important-- especially this next one.

Elizabeth Warren was handed a question about ending high stakes testing (not even "would you" but "how would you") and she started out by offering her own version of putting someone from public education in the office, then she moved on to this:



"It's about our values," she says as she pivots. She invokes her special needs teacher background (again) and says, "This notion that it's all about testing, that it's all about what somebody far off in the state capitol or far off in the national capitol says here's what constitutes success, and worse yet, here's what constitutes failure-- no, that's not what education is about."

"Education is about what goes on in the classroom," she continues. A teacher sets a goal and a teacher knows when a student has met that goal. "We do not need high stakes testing." That gets big applause, and then Warren adds something that I think is important.

"I think this goes to the fundamental question of respect for our teachers. Too many folks seem to have gotten the idea that teaching is kind of like, y'know, working on an assembly line, and we'll just test your widgets to see if they're coming out all right, you must be a good teacher, and if they don't meet the standards set somewhere else, you must not be. No, that is not what teaching is all about."

She winds up with some nice words about teaching and focusing on children and that's not testing and teachers need to be front and center.

The Warren record on testing has been spotty and a little scary-- in 2015, she came down on the side of needing testing in order to know if schools are doing a good job with their widgets or not.

This clip doesn't get into the more concrete ways in which high stakes testing has damaged US education (narrowing and refocusing the curriculum, etc), and that's not a knockcause Warren was racing the clock. But it does show an appreciation for one of the underlying features of testing-- the foundational idea that teachers can be neither trusted nor believed, and therefor we must have tests, because somehow those are more reliable and trustworthy.

Like many of the candidates (cough*cough*Biden*cough) she would be well-served by talking about what she used to believe and how she has come to understand that she got parts wrong. And I still worry about some of the company she keeps. However, it's July, and my Christmas shopping is more urgent than my need to pick a Dem candidate.

But here she has nailed a policy idea that has been missing from all the platforms. Modern charters, as currently implemented and regulated, are a problem. Getting people to drive policy who aren't rank-but-rich amateurs would be great. But nothing in the last twenty years of education has done more far-reaching and pervasive damage than high stakes testing. If the candidates want a bandwagon to jump on, I recommend this one.

Eight Weeks of Summer: Learning Conditions

This post is week 4 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

I'm continuing this challenge, answering the questions from the viewpoint of my old non-retired self. Here's this week's prompt:

What are optimal conditions in which to learn, for you, and for students?

For me, it's mostly a matter of opportunity and independence. Probably the biggest single thing I learned in college was how to teach myself, and I was born just in time for the biggest explosion of self-education resources in the history of the world. But that's as an adult, and the biggest advantage that adults have is that we rarely have to learn anything we don't want to learn.

I've always said-- I could probably learn conversational Chinese, but the time and effort involved, compared to the actual benefits, is such that I choose not to. But I'm an adult, so I can make that choice and nobody thinks worse of me. However, if a teenager made that same calculation and choice about my English class, then we might call him lazy or worse. Not that I think teens are necessarily good judges of what they do or don't need to learn for life; just that adults have a type of freedom when it comes to learning that students generally do not.

As a student, what I most needed was a safe space, security. If I spent the whole class time worrying about how other students or the teacher might react if I said X, if I had to carefully watch every single word that came out of my mouth, then it was hard to have much mental energy left to spend on paying attention to the actual lesson.

Students need to be able to work on the content-- what are adjectives, what is Hamlet's motivation, what's the best introduction to craft for an essay-- without that content mastery somehow becoming evidence about whether or not they have the right to take up space on the planet. In the quest for leverage, schools too often escalate the stakes so that school is about judging who the student is as a human being instead of letting her figure that out while feeding her brain.

I often describe education as the process of learning how to be more completely yourself, and how to be fully human in the world. That's a process that requires a broad, open playing field and an atmosphere that assures students that they are okay, and that they are going to be okay. Plus a useful balancing of the tension between order and chaos, freedom and authority.

That also means a setting that handles fundamentals-- physical safety, solid resources, food, shelter.

Plus, a teacher with expertise in the content area. It will require some combination of sage and guide, but that teacher must know the content, know the material, know what the heck she's talking about.

CAP & Fordham Shoot The Moon

When the Moonshot For Kids competition first crossed my screen, I took a moment to consider it as a topic for commentary, then moved on. But then this tweet popped up today:

What is education’s version of the self-driving car?

Let @edprogress and @educationgadfly know your innovative idea to improve student outcomes through a #MoonshotForKids and you could win $10,000 https://t.co/evwibCFhrl

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) July 5, 2019

Well, now.

There's a lot to unpack here.

First of all, the partnership. The Center for American Progress is theoretically a left-tilted thinky tank, a place where many Clinton staffers were parked in stasis awaiting the ascension of Hillary to the White House. But they have been relentless in their advocacy for corporate ed reform, to the point that I literally ran out of ways to title blog posts some variation of  "CAP tries pushing Common Core and Testing again" (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for just a few examples).

So while it may seem odd to the casual observer to see CAP teaming up with Fordham, which is a notably right-tilted thinky tank, the two organizations, despite any apparent political tilts, are full-on fans of corporate ed reform. Their partnership here is just a reminder that when it comes to education, some progressives are just free market conservatives in sheep's clothing.

But this idea.

What's education's version of the self-driving car?

Do you mean something that's promoted relentlessly but is still far off in the future? Or do you mean a program that faces major obstacles that tech-cheerleaders just sort of gloss over?

Perhaps you meant a tech-based solution that strips all participants of power and agency and gives it instead to a bunch of programmers? Or did you mean a new tech initiative that promises to make a bunch of people rich?

Or do you mean something that can fail with really catastrophic results?

It's a holiday weekend, so maybe that tweet comes from some CAP intern who just didn't think things through. But "self-driving car" is an analogy that I would pick were I trying to argue against most ed reform ideas. Except-- no, there it is in Mike Petrilli's pitch.

They should have stuck with the moon shot analogy. But let's look past the wrapping, the overall idea of search for "the rationale, potential, and possible design of a sizable new investment in basic and applied research and development that leads to innovation on behalf of America’s children" and see if the actual goals are worthwhile.

They're looking for an idea that would help achieve one of the following goals:

* Cut in half the number of fourth graders reading “below basic”
* Double the number of eighth graders who can write an effective persuasive essay
* Shrink by 30 percent the average time a student spends in English-language-learner status
* Double the amount of high-quality feedback the average middle schooler receives on their academic work
* Ensure that every student receives high-quality college and career advising by ninth grade
* Double the number of students from low-income families and students of color who graduate from high school with remediation-free scores on the SAT, ACT, or similar exams
* Double the number of young women who major in STEM fields

Cut number of below basic fourth graders? Many states have already figured this one out-- just give third graders a test that they must pass to get into fourth grade. Then your fourth grade classes are only populated with pre-proven reading test takers. Boom-- mission accomplished.

Double eighth graders who can write an effective persuasive essay? Also easy. Just dumb down your definition of "effective persuasive essay," (which you'll have to do anyway in order to assess on your standardized writing test) until it's just a paint-by-numbers template, then teach and drill the template. You won't teach anyone to write, but you'll get those test scores up.

Magically make ELL students learn English faster. Sure. Or I suppose we could change the criteria for ELL status.

Double high quality feedback? Well, again, we need a helpful definition of "high quality feedback." At any rate, this one is easy peasy-- smaller class sizes, more work time for teachers during the day. Or did you want a solution that wouldn't cost schools money?

High quality college and career advising by ninth grade. Again, those words. "High quality." Again, an easy solution-- hire more counselors (of course, you'll have to find a deep pool of people who can cope with the challenge of talking to a young person about college and career-- "Chris, please put down the blocks so we can talk about how you can best be useful to employers in the future.")

Raise SAT and ACT scores for non-white non-wealthy kids. I suppose discussing why we should just scrap these tests entirely is not the direction these corporate types want to go.

Double the number of women who major in STEM. That seems pointless unless we somehow address the fact that women are driven out of STEM employment in huge numbers.

These goals are all about changing numbers; they are an open invitation to apply Goodhart's or Campbell's Laws, in which focus on a measurement leads to that measurement being rendered useless. This is about coming up with ways to make better numbers. Yes, one way to improve numbers can be (though not always) to improve the underlying reality those numbers are supposed to represent. But those techniques are hard to scale, expensive and not easy to devise. There are always simpler methods.

If you want a piece of this action, the group is open to submissions of 500 words until the end of the month. But remember-- this is not about coming up with a self-driving car. It's about coming up with a marketing package that makes it look like a self-driving car has been perfected. It's about doing a good job of using modern CGI to fake your presence on the moon without all the hard work, expense and challenge of actually getting a rocket up there.

When The Wall Of Separation Comes Down

As noted earlier this week, the Supreme Court has decided to hear a case that could blow a hole in the wall separating religion from public schools. Lots of folks are salivating at the prospect, from hard-core libertarians to the Dominionist folks who think the church should take back the school system.

So let me say again what I have said many times before-- if the wall separating church and state comes down, people of faith will rue the day.

June provided an example of exactly why rue-age will ensue. The Kenai Peninsula Borough council decided it would try to work its way around the establishment clause since, like many local government bodies around the country, it really wanted to get some prayer into its meetings. But not just any prayer-- so they whipped up a policy saying that only chaplains serving in the military, law enforcement agencies, or representatives of local established religious organizations could offer a pre-meeting prayer. The Alaska Superior Court, because they've read the Constitution and are not dopes, ruled that policy unconstitutional. The board tried to broaden its policy, feeling the heat from an atheist, a member of the Satanic Temple and a representative of the local Jewish community. They were unsuccessful.

And that's how members of the council and the public ended up walking out on their own meeting while Iris Fontana opened the government meeting with a prayer to Satan.

It never fails. Enthusiastic fans of bringing down the wall always seem to imagine that only their own Christian faith will come through the breech. And yet it has been almost fifteen years since the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster became a visible advocate for religious pluralism.

Here's what's going to happen. If you win the right to spend tax dollars on religious institutions (like, say, private schools), sooner or later you are going to be shocked to discover that your own tax dollars are supporting Sharia Law High School or Satan's Own Academy. And that's not going to be the end of it. Where resources are limited (there can only be, for instance, as many meeting opening prayers as there are meetings), some agency will have to pick winners and losers. Worst case scenario-- you get a government agency empowered to screen churches and religions. You can paper over it, as Kenai Peninsula apparently did, by turning it into a lottery (but what does it mean that God apparently let Satan's crew win that drawing).

No matter how you slice it, busting that wall of separation will not just let religion on to the government side-- it will force government onto the religion side. Your church will have to lobby and politic for representation on the Upper Boswash Religious Observance Approval Commission.

And all of that is separate from further issues--like whose faith-based bad science gets taught, or whether or not smaller religious groups are entitled to a certain minimal amount of taxpayer support to keep things equitable.

Not to mention the great encouragement this gives people to fake faith. Many many many local government boards open meetings with prayers; while I'm sure in many cases that has grown out of a sincere faith, I'm betting it's an awful lot of putting on a good Godly faith for the electorate. How many fake Christians does the church want to absorb?

Yes, the wall is probably going to come down, and I'm going to hate that. But before all is said and done, I'm betting lots of people of faith are going to learn to hate it, too.

Big Brother Is Listening (More Ed Tech From The Surveillance State)

We have repeatedly seen examples of ed tech innovations that hinge on surveillance, and not just surveillance, but software to interpret what the surveilled data means.

This results in some huge promises. Here's software that says it will read student facial expressions and eye movements to determine if anyone is learning. Companies are lining up to tell you all about the social and emotional well-being of students. And in one of the finest examples of building mountainous conclusions out of data molehills, NWEA will now tell you how hard students are working and how well they're engaged, based on how long it takes them to bubble in a multiple-choice answer.

ProPublica and Wired decided to take a look at yet another piece of software that claims to be able to read hearts and minds both in schools and in a few other places as well. You will be shocked--shocked!-- to discover that this is yet another piece of tech that has big dreams but little to back them up with.

Sound Intelligence, a Dutch company that hopes to set up shop in Chicago, has some audio analytics it wants to sell you.

Sound Intelligence's patented sound classification solutions make security monitoring systems proactive, enabling early detection of potential incidents, swift intervention, and in many cases, prevention of further escalation.

Yes, in addition to more standard fare like gunshot detection and breaking glass detection, Sound Intelligence offers aggression detection that promises, among other things, to detect  "fear, anger, duress and verbal aggression" including "early warning and intervention to prevent physical aggression." It can also be seamlessly integrated with your video surveillance. Good to know.

To be fair, there is a level of credibility here. Most high school teachers can quickly parse the difference between the sound of students screwing around play fighting and the sound of students who are a few seconds away from throwing down. Can that be translated into software and science?

Well, ProPublica finds the aggression detector "less than reliable." In their trial, it ignored a student screaming and flagged a student coughing. It also flagged a YouTube clip of Gilbert Gottfried. Guessing at Pictionary triggered it, as did students cheering for the arrival of pizza.

The article doesn't really address the other problem with surveillance software-- the storage and use. The company promises that it will record triggering incidents for playback, but where do they store all this, and who has access. Which students will later have trouble getting a job because they were recorded coughing aggressively in fourth grade?

The article is otherwise thorough and worth the read, if for no other reason to remind you that the continuing problem with all these tech surveillance solutions is not just that they are intrusive and Big Brothery, but also that they aren't very good at doing what they say they're going to do. But remember-- not only is Big Brother watching, but he is also listening.