Should A Teacher Be Secretary of Education

This is part of the value of having a clown car full of candidates for a Presidential primary: the contest becomes a primary of ideas, and certain notions gain traction by spreading across the field of candidates. Not that gaining traction means those ideas will ultimately prevail (a widespread notion among the 2016 GOP field was that Donald Trump was unfit to be President), but it's still an intriguing process.

If I were Ed Secretary, I could stand up all day to talk to people

One up-and-coming education policy idea that was first proposed by Elizabeth Warren, but has now garnered wider candidate support, is the notion that a teacher should be the next secretary of education. At last count, four major candidates were supporting some version of the idea. It's an arresting and appealing idea. Betsy DeVos is widely seen as a controversial opponent of public education, and in many education circles, predecessors like Arne Duncan were not much loved, either. Many teachers feel that the folks in D.C. just don't get it, so the idea of someone from the trenches who would, presumably, get it--well, it's an attractive idea. Now we have to ask--is it a good idea?

The devil, as always, is in the details. The idea has been expressed variously as appointing an educator, a public school teacher, or "someone who comes from public schools." That may seem pretty straightforward. It isn't. "Educator" is a loose umbrella term to cover anyone who has held an education-adjacent job: teacher, administrator, education advocacy group member, school bus driver, education-specializing lawyer, or real estate salesman who once opened a charter school. "Public school" is not a clear term, because charter advocates assert that charter schools (privately owned and operated schools fed with public tax dollars) are public schools. Even "teacher" has become a fuzzy term. Teach For America has created a small army of "former teachers" who have only two years of actual classroom experience. Critics have directed lots of attention at TFA's program that claims to prepare college grads for a classroom in just five weeks. Less attention has been paid to how TFA produces "education policy experts" who have only two years of classroom experience. Those TFA grads have moved into a variety of powerful positions, from leaders of large city school systems to heads of entire state public education systems to founders and heads of their own charter schools. And while some TFA grads have emerged from the program as solid career supporters of public education, some remain aligned with the kind of corporate education reform that is unsupportive of public education.

In short, the candidates could appoint someone like controversial former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee and honor the letter of their pledge. But it would not much alter the trajectory set for the department by past secretaries.

In the original Forbes post, I overlooked one important point-- while we associate the USED with K-12 education, they also mess with higher ed a lot, and in particular, the financial side thereof. There is a great deal of college loan baloney to deal with which may legitimately stretch, challenge, or just plain fall outside of a public school teacher's skill set. Of course, a USED secretary could go the "hiring a qualified person to handle that" route. That would be refreshing.

So assuming that the newly appointed secretary was an actual working public school classroom teacher, would that be a good idea?

A classroom teacher would face some significant hurdles. Betsy DeVos lacks experience in running a large, complicated organization, nor has she shown a great deal of aptitude in dealing with members of Congress. A teacher secretary would face similar challenges. Field expertise is not enough; anyone in that job will need either prior understanding or a crash course in how to actually get things done in D.C. Wags will suggest that herding a room of unruly children through math lessons involves a similar skill set, and there's some merit to that. Teachers manage, organize, and lead every day. But it also seems a legitimate concern that a classroom teacher transplanted to D.C. bureaucracy would have a great deal to learn about effectively navigating the halls of power. But similar transitions have been made. Jerry Oleksiak is a thirty-two-year classroom veteran who is now serving as Pennsylvania's secretary of labor and industry. We often assume that lawyers and businessmen can, of course, "do government." Why not teachers?

What most appeals about the idea is the notion of someone in D.C. positioned to say, "Here's how that policy looks in a real classroom, and here's why it's a lousy idea." It's not just that a teacher would have power, but that a teacher would actually be listened to. But that, too, is a devilish detail. A cabinet office does not come with a guarantee of access to a Presidential ear.

Selecting a classroom teacher does not guarantee a particular point of view. Among the millions of classroom veterans, one finds a variety of viewpoints (one in three National Education Association members voted for Donald Trump). It's worth remembering that although previous secretaries include a school administrator and a college professor, the one secretary who taught in a public high school was Rod Paige, who presided over the "Texas Miracle" that turned out to be a mirage, and who once called the NEA a terrorist organization. Coming from a public school background is no guarantee that someone is a public school supporter.

What could be the best feature of a teacher secretary would be a willingness to listen to other teachers. What has been consistently frustrating about education reform policies coming out of D.C. has been how little policymakers have consulted with actual experts who work in the field. Even when teachers have been involved, they have been carefully vetted and selected to be in tune with administration ideas. The best the next secretary could do, regardless of where she comes from, would be to assemble a broad-based panel of actual public school teachers, consult them regularly, and listen to them. In a world in which real live teachers had better access to those in power than lobbyists do, we could spend less time worrying about what the secretary of education used to do for a living.

Originally (mostly) posted at Forbes

Eight Weeks of Summer: Moving Forward

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

I've been doing the eight week challenge because why not? This is the final prompt, and like any good exercise, it calls for some reflection. Here's prompt #8:

What will you keep from the #8WeekofSummer Blog Challenge moving forward?

I've been trying to answer these from the perspective of my previous non-retired teaching self, but this is a tough one to twist around that way. But let's give it a shot.

I always carried things forward from my summer growth projects, but never as much as I meant to.

One of the benefits of summer vacations for teachers is that it gives you the breathing space you need to reflect on practices. During the school year, virtually all time is caught up in the dailiness of it, and no matter how much you want to carry over your new deep philosophical insights, it only takes a week or two to go from "What's a good pedagogical approach to including more reflection on the idealism of Romantic authors" to "I think if I hurry, I can get my copying done in that five minute break before third period. Also, I think I've figured out where to move those three guys on the seventh period seating chart so that they'll stop having fart contests." Starting the year can move you quickly from envisioning a moving, breathing image of the cosmos to simply feeling like you're trapped in a game of Space Invaders.

The things that always ended up being useful were the things that I fully learned. Not ideas that I carried around separately, still shiny from just having the wrapper pulled off, but things that were fully integrated into the grubby scuffed cabinet of Things I Know.

My own big cabinet has been getting a steady reorganization, as I integrate everything I ever learned about teaching into a different sort of context. I still think about teaching and, obviously, write about it, but without having to leap entirely into the dailiness of it (though I am, in fact, still married to a teacher).

Integrating matters to me because I see every Thing as part of the Big Thing. I'm not a believer that there's any part of human experience, no portion of our existence in the world, that is somehow disconnected and separate from all the rest of it. Life, the universe and everything is one gigantic elephant, and we are all blindly fumbling away at a toe, a leg, part of the tail, but everything is part of that same gigantic beast.

So for me, understanding something is about figuring out its connections to everything else. Also, nothing can be safely ignored because it just doesn't have anything to do with the rest of existence. It's all connected.

This was always hugely useful in the classroom. Analogies were my bread and butter, explaining one concept in terms of something closer to my students' home. And it helped me say "yes" to plenty of things.

I don't imagine that any of us had our world's completely rocked by the Eight Weeks challenge, but any exercise that gives you a chance to put some things together, to open up your brain and poke around a little-- those are always worthwhile.

So moving forward always meant folding together the Grand Ideas I had developed over the summer with the actual students and classes that I was facing in the fall. Little chats over the summer are fun, but figuring out how they connect to the actual work is important work all on its own.

Why Charter Schools Must Waste Money

Back in March, the Network for Public Education, a public education advocacy group, released a study showing that the Department of Education has spent over a billion dollars on charter school waste and fraud. Education Next, a publication that advocates for charter schools, offered a reply to that report. The rebuttal to the rebuttal just appeared in the Washington Post, but there is one portion of the Education Next piece that deserves a closer look.

Charter schools should be held accountable for performance, which requires closing them when they don’t meet standards. Even with the best plans and under the ideal circumstances, opening a charter school is difficult. Charter Schools Program funding is intended to serve as seed capital to encourage innovation, and some experiments will fail. That is expected.

This is part of the premise of corporate education reform--that schools should open and close and rise and fall just like a car dealership or a food truck. For these fans of choice, having schools closed down is a sign that the system is working, not a sign of failure.

There are several problems with this feature.

One is the disruption for students. Being booted out of your school (especially if it happens suddenly, unexpectedly, and in the middle of the school year) is not like discovering that your favorite taco truck isn't at the corner today. Families have to find a new school. Students are wrenched out of familiar surroundings with familiar teachers and school friends. Being the new kid in school is socially isolating. Learning to live by a whole new set of rules is troubling. For a child, having a school close is not some sort of bloodless market adjustment; it's a disruptive and disorienting experience.

Another problem is the sheer waste of taxpayer dollars. In most states, a charter/choice system already rests on a financial fiction--that we can somehow run multiple school systems for the same money that was previously set aside to run just one system. What business has ever said, "Because we need to tighten our belts here at WidgetCorps, our next move will be to open more facilities." Choice depends on the Daylight Savings Time theory of financial resources--if we just shuffle them, maybe somehow there will be more of them.

But as the Education Next piece states, it's worse than that. The premise is not just that we can run multiple systems with the taxpayer money used to run one; additionally, we assume that we are going to take some of the money and just throw it away. The NPE report found that not only do some charter schools close soon after opening but that some charter schools never even open in the first place.

Imagine if a public school district proposed a tax increase and when the taxpayers asked what the money would be used for, the district said, "We plan to lose all of it. That's just part of our process."

One of the critical differences between charter schools and public schools is that charters can walk away, at any time. Education Next focuses on charters that fail and are shut down by their authorizers. They don't say anything about the many charters that shut down for business reasons. A public school must honor the community's commitment to provide a decent education for every student. Do public schools always meet that commitment well? No, but they don't get the option of saying, "Well, it's too hard, and we can't make any money doing it, so we're just going to quit. See ya!"

Public schools and charter schools both experience failure. But a critical difference is that for public schools, failure is a bug, a problem to be fixed. As Education Next argues, for charter schools, failure is a feature, and wasting taxpayer money is just part of the plan.

Originally posted at Forbes

Mayor Pete Doesn't Get It (And If He Does, That's Even Worse)

In 2016, Hillary Clinton staked out what was supposed to be the safe territory on the charter school issue-- to be against for-profit charters, but in favor of non-profits. That qualified as enough of a break with the corporate Democrat orthodoxy that DFER felt the need to reassure wealthy donors that the Clinton's could be counted on to betray unions.

But a position that depends on distinguishing non-profits from for-profits at best shows some cynical poli-gamesmanship, and at worst reveals a lack of understanding of the issues. In 2016, a candidate might be excused for ignorance, but there's been plenty of education on the subject since, and no excuses left for candidates.

That's why it's a bit discouraging to find high-profile candidates like Mayor Pete Buttigieg resorting to this dodge.

The signs up until this point have not been good. Buttigieg has some time with McKinsey on his resume, and that consulting giant … well...McKinsey is one of the biggest management consulting firms in the world, and long intertwined with the education reform movement; Sir Michael Barber was a partner there before he went to run Pearson, and David Coleman worked as a consultant at McKinsey before he spearheaded the Common Core. McKinsey has also plucked some employees from the world of Eli Broad-- a McKinsey manager was in the first class of the Broad Academy. McKinsey actually pre-dated Broad in the practice of embedding their own people in the Los Angeles school district. They're fans of data-driven analytics baloney, and they are generally a good example of what Anand Giridharadas is talking about in Winner Take All-- the ways rich folks try to fix problems without actually inconveniencing themselves while still managing to profit from the "solution."

Reed "Elected School Boards Should Be Abolished" Hastings held a great fund raiser for Mayor Pete. And as she reported this morning (take a second to read this-- I'll wait), when Diane Ravitch reached sat down with the campaign to try to share a more balanced view of ed reform, she found herself facing a bunch of folks who came up through the corporate reform movement and who think that charter schools are just fine, thank you very much.

Buttigieg is one of the Democratic hopefuls who does not identify education as an issue on his website, nor does it crop up under other issues such as his Douglass Plan for investment and empowerment of Black America.

Buttigieg has said he opposes vouchers. He might also mentioned the use of public tax dollars for private schools that discriminate in ways that would be unlawful in a public school (Rebecca Klein at HuffPost correctly notes that the Indiana Catholic high school that Buttigieg graduated would not hire him today because he's gay). But he focused on economic reasons:

Unfortunately, these voucher programs tend to come at the expense of quality public education. They take dollars out of our public schools at the time when we know the schools don’t have enough resources going into them to begin with.

But the big disconnect here is that this exact reason applies to charter schools, whether they are for-profit or non-profit.

After all, at this point for-profit charter schools are legal almost nowhere in the country (that "only for-profits are bad" talking point has been useful at many levels of politics). But what is still legal in most states is having your non-profit charter school operated by a for-profit charter management organization. If you imagine that by only supporting non-profit charters you are somehow preventing the spectacle of corporate owners trying to make more money by short-changing students, you have a fertile imagination. The shell and shadow companies are where the real money is made, including the profits from renting the real estate and providing services like cleaning and cafeteria.

That non-profit charter, feeding all its incoming public tax dollars to private for-profit companies, is still governed by a simple principle-- every additional dollar spent on the students is one dollar less to go into a company bank account.

And even if the non-profit is good and pure and truly non-profit at every level, you have not changed the fact that it is draining resources from the public school where the majority of students study. You are still working from the same flawed premise-- that you can somehow run multiple school systems for the same money that, by Buttigieg's own admission, wasn't enough in the first place.

The Buttigieg campaign seems unlikely to improve in this area. They told Ravitch that they plan to reach out to John King, Jim Shelton and Randi Weingarten, and, well... King, you will recall succeeded Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. He founded the no-excuses Roxbury Prep, which the Buttigieg campaign thinks is an awesome school. In New York he was Commissioner of Education and pushed the crap out of Common Core and testing, and got so much push back at public meetings that he stopped attending until his bosses made him. Shelton had a leadership role at the Gates Foundation, worked for Arne Duncan in charge of innovation grants for Race to the Top, then ran the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

In other words, Buttigieg would likely be a repeat of the Bush-Obama education program. He's said some salty things about Betsy DeVos, but beyond his dislike of vouchers, it's not clear just how different his education policy would be from hers.

It would be interesting to see what, exactly, his campaign believes is the critical difference between a school accepting a voucher and a non-profit charter school. Because depending on the state you're in, there's not a large enough space between the two to drive a bicycle, let alone a campaign van.

As I've said before, I don't expect to like the Democratic candidate for 2020, and I doubt that my distaste will affect my vote in the general election. But I still have to point out corporate reform baloney when I see it sliced, and it appears that the Buttigieg campaign is slicing it up nice and thick. There are several reasons to like Mayor Pete, but it doesn't look like education policy will be one of them.

ICYMI: Post Jet Lag Edition (7/28)

All righty. We are slowly getting back into the swing of things (two year olds do not seem to respond to jet lag well). So my reach might not be quite as far as usual, but I've still got some things for you to look at this week.

This supreme court case made school district lines a tool for desegregation.

A critical piece of history about how school district lines were set up to be a tool for-- or against--desegregation.

Learning To Read  

A reminder from Nancy Flanagan that reading teachers are not the only people who teach reading.

I'm a black teacher who works for a black principal. It's a game changer.

Well, here's a perspective that we see much too rarely. An interesting and worthwhile perspective piece.

Reforming California's dysfunctional charter school law.

Thomas Ultican looks at the continuing struggle to fix California's charter school mess.

State Takeovers vs. Organic Local Turnarounds  

State takeover of school districts are a hot business again, and Jan Resseger has a look at the good, the bad, and the alternative that actually works a lot better for everyone-- except for corporate profiteers.  

What Is Really Happening in Camden  

Nobody does a better job of explaining complicated research in plain human language than Jersey Jazzman, and his series on the attempted reform of Camden schools is invaluable as a look at what really happens in such places, and how Reformsters spin it.

Teachers are miserable because they're being held at gunpoint for meaningless data.

Just in case you think this is just a US problem, here's a piece from back in April from the UK. Much of this will seem sadly familiar.

FL: Next Surveillance State Deadline Approaching

In the wake of the murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, the great state of Florida decided to make a giant leap forward in establishing a surveillance state, proposing a data base that would collect giant massive tanker cars full of data from every public sources imaginable as well as social media. It will provide a one-stop shop for singling out every troubled child in the state. What could possibly go wrong?

We should soon find out. Governor DeSantis set a ready-to-go date of August 1, 2019.

Well, we're supposed to find out. An EdWeek investigation back in May revealed that the system is hitting some speed bumps-- which is probably just as well. From the EdWeek piece:

Don't mind me. I'm just here to help.

“It was never a good idea to try to implement a database this big, in this time frame,” said Amelia Vance, the director of education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington think tank that has been closely tracking Florida’s response to the Parkland shooting. "The lack of forethought and consideration for what this will mean for individual children is really troubling."

And what this will mean is, in fact, very troubling. EdWeek also obtained a list of some of the data bases that are supposed to be part of this well-bronzed cyber-big-brother, this Big Tan Eye. Some of the data that various departments have available to share:

* Law Enforcement has a criminal information sharing platform that includes reports, tips, and "other information that needs to be verified before law enforcement agencies can rely upon it."

* The state child welfare department has records for 9 million people, including foster care and protective services reports.

* The department of children and families has 5.6 million records covering substance abuse and mental health issues, plus demographics and service data.

* Juvenile Justice has, of course, lots to share.

* The state department of education has basically every individual student record from class schedules to disciplinary records.

* And yes, social media posts.

Critics charge that the state is only paying attention to what is legal rather than what is useful or ethical. In other words, only asking what they can do and not what they should do.

Supporters offer not-very-reassuring notions like "We're just putting together data that is already out there, not collecting new stuff, so this doesn't violate privacy" and of course selling the notion that this will make it possible to find and stop the next shooter before tragedy strikes. It makes me wonder-- if Florida's Big Tan Eye convicts someone of Future Crime, will it finally be okay at that point to make sure that person can't get his hands on a gun? Or will the Second Amendment remains sacrosanct even in this Brave New World.

A coalition of thirty-two education, disability, privacy and civil rights groups sent a letter to the governor earlier this month laying out some of their objections. They note that this is part of an "alarming trend" that includes swell stuff like requiring districts to collect mental health records for all students as a requirement of registration.

There are a host of unintended consequences that can already be predicted. For instance, the Big Tan Eye wants to know who's been bullied, because it thinks that being a victim of bullying makes you more of a potential threat. What do you suppose will happen to reports of bullying once students and their parents understand that the new rule is "Report a bully and it goes on YOUR permanent record, labeling you a potential school shooter'? What other help will students actively avoid because it will become part of their digital record?

There is, of course, the security question. The state is making promises about who will and will not see it, but once it exists, what future legislators will see a good reason to open the data base to even more viewers. And what are the chances of hackery getting at the treasure trove of data?

But the letter also makes another important point-- there isn't a shred of evidence that any of this works. Studies suggest that social media monitoring doesn't help. And the algorithms that will be needed to sort through all the noise cannot be trusted.

Again, from EdWeek coverage:

“It sounds like a fishing expedition for information about Floridians,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a lawyer with the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school.

And so it does. One of the biggest data fishing expeditions ever, with no guarantee that it will not be used for troubling purposes and no promise of checks for accuracy (which is no small thing-- one of the big problems with Big Brother is that he gets many things just plain wrong).

The Big Tan Eye will (should it ever get off the ground) be inaccurate, creepy, overreachy, intrusive, not useful for its alleged purpose, problematic for those students when they eventually become adults (what-- do you think they're going to purge these records once a student turns eighteen), and dangerous. And on top of all that, because of the huge value of large troves of integrated data, it will be lying there essentially like a giant pile of unattended money, just begging to be grabbed one way or another.

While Florida's legislature never met a bad idea they didn't like, this is still a higher level of Bad Idea. Here's hoping that next week, they throw the switch and nothing happens, or they can't find the switch, or the whole thing isn't even ready, because the only hope that Floridians have right now is that their legislatures incompetence will thwart its bad judgment. Otherwise, every child in Florida had better not lie, pout, cry, ask for help, or breathe funny, because the Big Tan Eye will be watching.

Eight Weeks of Summer: Where Are We Now? Deprogramming.

This post is week 7 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

I've been doing the challenge because why not? Mostly I've been answering as my pre-retirement self, but we may mix it up a bit this week. Here's the prompt:

Check-in on where you are in your summer learning journey and your overall professional journey.

When I was still teaching, I was always... somewhere. Every summer I read and I did various projects (because you can't help students learn how to Do Stuff if you have no first hand experience Doing Stuff) and I also operated on the theory that teachers owed their community a certain something in the summer in return for the taxpayer support on which we live. YMMV.

But this week I'm sending you a bulletin from the other side of retirement, because in unlearning some Teacher Things, I've come to better appreciate them. Here are some things I have had to learn.

* Measure out time in increments larger than 30 seconds. It is not necessary to squeeze achievements into every second of the day, particularly when you could be using the time to interact with the other carbon based life forms in your home.

* Eat a meal in more than five minutes.

* Read a book without repeatedly thinking, "I could use this in class for my unit about X."

* Read a book that you couldn't possibly use for class ever.

* Visit an interesting location without grabbing pamphlets for your classroom.

* Moving through your day without a gnawing sense of urgency that there's something you should be grading, reading, planning or reviewing.

* Figuring out what to do with the uncontrollable urge that hits every time you learn something new, which is the urge to pass it on to somebody else.

* Understanding that you might never not be a teacher, and you're going to have to figure out what to do with that.

* Exercise. Because you're not walking ten miles a day any more.

* Face you're unreasonable addiction to office supplies.

* Talk yourself out of running for school board.

* Seriously. You can take fifteen or twenty minutes to eat lunch. Take a breath between bites. Chew your food. Talk to somebody.

* Take your eyes off the clock.