Chiefs For Change Would Like You To Shut Up

Chiefs For Change caused a brief flurry of attention by whinging a demand that people talk nicer about their pet projects. It's just one more sad episode for a group that was supposed to be Jeb Bush's Educational Justice League of America. It's been over three years since the last time I noticed they were headed downhill:

That's how you glower!

Pity the Chiefs for Change. They were destined to be part of the superstructure of educational reforminess that would help sweep Jeb! Bush into power, then be poised to cash in on uplift US education once he got into the White House. But now the Jebster's Presidential hopes have gone the way of Betamax tapes and the Zune, and Chiefs for Change is on the last leg of a long, downhill slide.

CFC was originally spun off of Jeb's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), a group that lobbied hard for Common Core, school A-F ratings, test-based evaluation, and mountains of money thrown at charter schools. FEE started up CFC because they thought that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the group that holds the Common Core copyright and was the figurehead guiding force behind the core's creation-- that group wasn't aggressively reformy enough for the Jebster.

Initially, the group was to be a new nexus of reform, but they were immediately beset by problems. And I'm not counting the naming problem-- did they think that change would never come, or once the change was the status quo, were they going to just disband? I mean, if your brand is that you favor change, does that mean you just keep trying to change the change that you just implemented? Do you ever say, "Well, hell, no-- we don't worked hard to install that policy and we surely don't want to change that!" I'm just saying-- doesn't seem like a very well thought out name.

They were having issues like chiefs who were caught misbehaving, and chiefs who were losing jobs, but I underestimated how long this last leg would last, but then, I always underestimate how far you can go by just pumping more and more money into the tank. Back in 2016, they had 17 chiefs, and were already loaded with a bunch of "formers." Now some of the new kids from 2016 have also gone on to become "former." Of the almost-forty chiefs listed, ten are "formers." And that's not counting guys like John Deasy, who has moved from LAUSD to Stockton Schools. But Glorious League of Washed-up Education Reformers (GLOWER) just doesn't have the same ring.

And don't worry about those failed formers, because may have moved on to cushy new gigs. Chris Barbic and Kevin Huffman are now with the City Fund, another uber-reform pusher. Hanna Skandera has been absorbed into the staff of GLOWER.

Chiefs is a reform supergroup, and like all the best supergroups, it's formed out of people who have all played in a lot of other famous bands. Teach for America. Broad Academy. Aspen. Top reform states like Tennessee and Colorado and, of course, Florida.

The original concept was a round table of movers and shakers on the education state level. Then they shifted down to where most of GLOWER's chiefs are district superintendents. A look at their four incoming classes suggests yet another transition is occurring. The next four cohorts still include superintendents and former state secretaries of education. But now we also see Executive Director of Detroit Children's Fund, Chief Talent Officer for Uncommon Schools, Chief Student Support Officer, Chief of Staff, and an Assistant State Superintendent of Assessment, Accountability, Analytics and Early Childhood (Louisiana DoE). There are several charter school officials. The group includes David Hardy, a guy who has been a turnaround CEO in Ohio for two years and has been an absolute disaster. And it is heavy with Teach for America grads.

These Future Chiefs (or perhaps we can say Future Former Chiefs) are part of GLOWER's leadership development program. So Chiefs is starting to look a little more Broad Academy-ish, sitting at the cap of the education reform parallel network of education thinky leaders and policy pacesetters. Because after you've had five weeks of training, you're ready to be a teacher, and after you've been in a classroom two years, you're ready to be in an important education leadership position.

Well, unless you hate having people say mean things about you.

GLOWER has a history of saying some dumb things. Never forget the time they proposed an awesome "web-based tool" that is actually a calculator to do subtraction problems (the damn thing is still there).

This time the Chiefs, like any good supergroup, has pulled out one of the Top Ten Reformy Hits-- the call for a better conversation. This has been a standard all the way back to the days that people started saying Really Mean Things about Common Core (so, 2013-ish). Can't we be more civil? Or, let's start a website that will start a new conversation. In fact, let's try that one again! Or can we at least have one about my product? Occasionally these calls have involved some honest self-evaluation by Reformsters. But mostly these calls for a more civil conversation have been born out of a couple of beliefs:

1) The current conversation is not going our way, and our people are sad.

2) The problems we're having selling our programs are strictly PR issues, and have nothing to do with the substance of what we're trying to push. We need some breathing space to roll out our new pitch.

3) We have completely forgotten all the things we did and said to piss people off in the first place.

The Chiefs are out of the Common Core business and now spend most of their energy pushing school choice, so the recent backpedaling of formerly reliable Democratic choice allies has made them sad. And really, they're not entirely wrong when they attribute some of this to "the cynical nature of today’s presidential politics." (Raise your hand if you think any of Cory Booker's education positions have ever been motivated by deep, sincere thoughts about education.)

Their call for an "end to toxic rhetoric" is pretty straightforward. It is not a call for a better conversation that recognizes there are intelligent humans of good will on all sides. No, their argument is that they are right about school choice and therefor they should get their way without mean people saying things that keep GLOWER from getting its way. They oppose "attempts to undermine, misrepresent and politicize sound school choice policies and practices." They do not acknowledge that all school choice policies have been promoted through political means, or the kind of extra-political means in which political power is used to circumvent the political process ("Hey, declare mayoral control so that we can get all these other elected officials out of our way.") Nor do they acknowledge that undermining and misrepresenting public education has been in the school choice playbook since Day One ("But we must have school choice to rescue students from the terrible public schools and the terrible teachers that are in them!") We could get into a whole discussion of the many many many ways that choice and charters have failed, or the real costs to public schools and those students left in them. But no-- after making their case:

That is why today we are calling on policymakers across the nation to end the destructive debates over public charter schools. Proposed caps and moratoriums allow policymakers to abdicate their responsibility to thoughtfully regulate new and innovative public school options: like banning cars rather than mandating seatbelts. They are a false solution to a solvable problem.

So, it's not even tone policing. It's not "you'd do better if you didn't use such harsh language." It's "You people are wrong so you should just shut up and let us have our way." No room to debate or disagree. And no willingness to consider the possibility that, as with their previous failed support for the Common Core, the public has finally figured out that their great idea is not so great. After all-- a cynical politician may be a lousy leader, but he still makes a great weathervane.

They admit that some choice systems haven't worked out, with no accountability, lack of oversight, and increased segregation. How that is supposed to come to light if critics of choice never speak up is not clear-- perhaps we're just to assume that the chiefs have all the bugs worked out and we can trust them. And they do note some of the contributing factors like redlining and the separation of high-income neighborhoods from poorer neighborhoods. But they aren't interested in fixing those issues.

In fact, chiefs stick with the old "opportunity" dodge. The argument that we should provide every child with the opportunity to attend a great school. Well, no. We should provide every child with a great school. Talking about "opportunity" and "access" is a dodge. If we put out food for twelve people, it's meaningless to argue that we gave a thousand people the opportunity to eat.

This is the problem with so much of modern ed reform-- solutions that don't actually solve anything. School choice is the daylight savings time of education policy; you can move the clock around and change your measurement of time, but the sunlight in a day only lasts as long as it lasts. If you have a small blanket for a big bed, you can get a bigger blanket, or you can have long frustrating conversations about who gets to be covered by the blanket. And if the conversation gets really frustrating, you can accuse the people who disagree with you of being toxic, and demand that they shut up while you charge the folks in the bed to have you cover them with a scrap of blanket.

ICYMI: My Wife's Birthday Edition (9/15)

Happy birthday to one of the best people ever to walk on the face of the earth! But you can have cake and read some worthwhile education  pieces as well. So here you go--

AI in Education Hype

John Warner takes a look at one more technological product in search of a problem to "solve."

Effects of the Flipped Classroom

An Annenberg working paper suggests that there are no big benefits to flipping, and that it may even make some gaps between students worse.

America's Newest Outsourced Job

Vice might be a little late catching on to this trend, but they offer a nice piece from reporters who "embedded" with some Filipino teachers hired by Chicago schools.

What Statistics Can and Can't Tell Us About Ourselves  

The average person has one breast and one testicle. The limits of Big Data (and the AI systems that depend on it) and why it is lousy at personalization. From the New Yorker.

Should Grades Be Based On Classwork?

Alfie Kohn appears at EdWeek to look at some questions that are, in fact, the wrong questions to ask.

AI In Education Hype

John Warner at Inside Higher Ed takes a look at another alleged AI breakthrough and explains why it's no breakthrough at all.

 If You Want To Fill the Teacher Bucket, Fix the Holes  

Dad Gone Wild weighs in on the great teacher shortage debate.

Where Did 3,000 Students Go?

Hey look! Turns out that UPSTART, the completely wrongheaded online preschool program launched in Utah, is having some trouble keeping accurate counts of its students, thereby costing the state an extra million dollars.

The College Board Book and The College Board's Many Failures (and Obfuscations Thereof)

Chalkbeat has one of the better reviews of Paul Tough's book showing how the College Board is a sneaky mess.

Want To Do Business in Silicon Valley? Better Act Nice.

Jason Palmer is a money guy who had the nerve to say out loud that the Zuckerberg-backed AltSchool was going to be the big failure it turned out to be. Nellie Bowles at the NYT tells the story of the price he paid for his candor.

What The New Reading Wars Get Wrong  

At EdWeek, a good explanation of why this round of the long-running reading wars is, once again, not worth our time.    

Play vs. Reading

A great Nancy Bailey take on the flawed thinking behind some reading advocacy.

Embracing Public Schools as the Very Definition of the Common Good

A great Jan Resseger piece reminding us why public schools matter.  

When School Safety Becomes School Surveillance

NPR takes a look at the issue that is continuing to make life miserable for some innocent students.

Turning A Profit Through Nonprofit Charters

Nonprofit Quarterly offers yet another explanation of how the profit vs. nonprofit distinction is a distinction without a difference.

Opinion: Ralph Abraham and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad education reform ideas

Come for the rollicking first sentence, and stay for the fact that this critique of LA ed policy is written by a 19-year-old college student.

The Cruel Assertion That Your Five-Year-Old is Falling Behind

Nobody stands up for the littles like Teacher Tom

NJ Teachers: A Failure To Achieve Diversity

Part of a Jersey Jazzman series looking at the state of teaching in the state of New Jersey. As always, real research presented in real language.  

The World of Competitive Rock Skipping

Nothing at all to do with education, but a plug for my small town and one of our many events. This year a freelance journalist did a WaPo story about the event. I'm a judge every year; in the photo I'm the fat guy in the Hawaiian short on the left.

DeVos Saying The Quiet Parts Out Loud

Betsy DeVos will be kicking off her "Back To School" tour next week. And it will start by announcing loudly and clearly what her preferred goal for education is. No reading between the lines will be necessary.

The announcement notes that she will head to Milwaukee, "home of the first-ever education freedom program that allowed parents, no matter their income, to select the school that was the best fit for their child."

On Monday, September 16, 2019, Secretary DeVos will visit St. Marcus Lutheran School, a school that serves 900 students, nearly all of whom benefit from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. While there, she will tour the school, host a roundtable focused on the importance of education freedom with parents, students and educators, and deliver keynote remarks.

And what sort  of school is St. Marcus Lutheran School? The website lays it out. No excuses. Discipline and love. Relentless high expectations. Oh, and this part--

St. Marcus School is driven by its mission to disciple children for Christ, now and for all eternity, and to train them in excellence for their roles in their family, church, community, workplace and country.

Still unclear? This should help:

Our core values are Christ First, Biblical Discipleship, Sacrificial Love, and Radical Expectations.

Years ago, before she knew she's have a gummint job or that she'd have to start being more,  um, diplomatic, DeVos and the Mr. were quite clear about their goals-- advance God's kingdom. Talk to a hard right Christian folks, and you will hear about how the church needs to "take back the schools." And vouchers for folks like DeVos are not about choice or freedom or liberty nearly as much as they are about steering tax dollars into the support of churches.

The thing is, where voucher systems are implemented, it's working.  In Milwaukee, where it's mnot  working quite as well as in some other voucher hot spots like Indiana, 9 out of every 10 voucher students is attending a Christian school.

So Wisconsin taxpayers, including the atheists, the Muslims, the ones who believe that the separation of church and state is a good thing-- they get to contribute tax dollars to a school where Jesus is a cornerstone of the curriculum while public schools go begging. These religious schools answer, of course, to their church authority and do not answer to the public at all.

At worst, it's a gross violation of the basic principle of keeping a wall between the church and the government. At best, it's a massive rewrite-without-discussion of the fundamental mission of public education.

Either way, it's one more clear indication that the top federal education official in this country does not believe that preserving, protecting and strengthening public education is her mission. That dead end can be shut down and its functions taken over by the church. And she's going to kick off her Back To School tour by saying so.

Dammit, Chan-Zuckerberg! Not Elmo, Too! (And Not Philanthropy, Either.)

If you haven't been paying particularly close attention, you may have missed the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative slowly inserting its hyper-wealthy proboscis into a hundred different corners of modern life, using its not-quite-philanthropy LLC model to follow in the Gatesian footprints of wealthy technocrats who want to appoint themselves the unelected heads of oh-so-many sectors.

One of those sectors is, of course, education. Their latest bold new initiative is being trumpeted in People, where it is getting exactly the fluffy uncritical reception one might expect, which is too bad, because there's plenty to be critical of.

The tech mogul, 35, and pediatrician’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is working in conjunction with The Primary School and Sesame Workshop to help fund a “new curriculum” that aims to “integrate social emotional learning into early childhood literacy lessons,” according to a press release.

The Primary School is out in Palo Alto, "expanding the boundaries of traditional education." It is the elementary school that Chan co-founded in 2016 to bring together issues in education and pediatrics. They have all sorts of business style leadership positions like "director of talent" and "director of strategic initiatives" and the teaching staff seems to be made of a few "lead teachers" and a whole lot of "associate teachers." Their CEO comes from the NewSchool Venture Fund and Aspire. Their "director of innovation and learning" spent two whole years in Teach for America. The school's principal once founded a charter school and stayed with it for five years. Of the lead teachers a little more than half have actual teaching backgrounds, while the rest are TFA or other "non-traditional" approaches to the field. I admittedly didn't check every single one, but a spot check of the associate teachers turned up zero with actual teaching backgrounds.

In short, it's very new, very reform, very Palo Alto-y, and yet, wonder of wonders, the folks at the Sesame Workshop, "the global nonprofit behind Sesame Street and so much more" and who have been at this for fifty years (longer, I'm betting, than virtually every staff person at The Primary School has been alive)-- those folks feel an urge to team up with The Primary School.

According to the press release, this teamwork has been going on for two years. So, from when The Primary School was barely barely started.

There is a video, in which Chan and a few Primary School folks co-star with Elmo, who is very excited about this chance to inject SEL into early childhood literacy, which opens up the possibility for a turducken of bad education policy, particularly in a school in which almost nobody is a seasoned education practical expert.

The best part of the video is Chan saying things like “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is proud to support a collaboration between The Primary School and Sesame Workshop,” as if the Primary School were not a school that she personally started and leads as the board chair (The People article somehow fails to bring up Chan's connection to the school).

I suppose that sounds better than, "We have so much money that I decided I could go ahead and start a school, and then I could hire one of the most high-profile early childhood ed organizations in the world to help work on my school." That is the ultimate in not-philanthropy-at-all. It's as if I announced that the Curmudgucation Institute was proud to announce that it was financing a partnership between Bob's Housepainting Service and My House. Or a collaboration between the Exxon Corporation and My Car.

And of course there's more-- by the end of 2020, they'll have the curriculum digitized and available to other schools around the country.

There was plenty written about the mercenary impulses of Sesame Street written when they were bought by HBO, but you can check out the promotional video and watch another piece of childhood die, as Elmo cheerleads for another wealthy self-appointed education leader.Lord only knows what CZI will get their hands on next.

Does Social And Emotional Learning Belong In The Classroom?

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been gathering traction as a new education trend over the past few years. Back at the start of 2018, EdWeek was noting "Experts Agree Social-Emotional Learning Matters, and Are Plotting Roadmap of How To Do It." But as we head into the new year, many folks still haven't gotten far beyond the "it matters" stage in their plotting.

I'm here to teach you how to be human.

That's the easy part. We can mostly agree that SEL matters; in fact, we ought to agree that it already happens in classrooms. It's impossible to avoid; where children are around adults, SEL is going on. Asking if SEL should occur in a classroom is like asking if breathing should happen in the room. The real question is whether or not it should occur in a formal, structured, instructed and assessed manner. That is the question that starts all the arguments. We can break down the arguments by asking the same questions we ask about any content we want to bring into the classroom.

Why do we want to teach this?

Some SEL proponents have developed a utilitarian focus. Summarizing the work of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development, EdWeek said "social-emotional learning strategies center on research that has linked the development of skills like building healthy peer relationships and responsible decision making to success inside and outside the classroom." But what happens if we approach what used to be called character education with the idea that it's useful for getting ahead? Doesn't SEL need to be about more than learning to act like a good person in order to get a grade, a job, and a fatter paycheck? Are you even developing good character if your purpose for developing that character is to grab some benefits for yourself?

We can reject that kind of selfish focus for SEL and instead focus on the "whole child," and treat SEL, as Tim Shriver (co-chair of that Aspen Institute) and Frederick Hess (of the American Enterprise Institute) wrote, as "an opportunity to focus on values and student needs that matter deeply to parents and unite Americans across the ideological spectrum—things like integrity, empathy, and responsible decision making." But then we find ourselves with another problem.

What do we want to teach?

If we're going to adopt SEL in order to essentially teach students to be better people, then who will decide what "better" looks like? Is "tolerance" going to be one of the virtues, and if so, does that mean that students must learn to tolerate persons who would not be tolerated by their families (be that married gay folks or strict religious conservatives)? Should students be taught to feel empathy for everyone, from Nazis to sociopaths?

The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) identifies five "competencies" for SEL(self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, relationships skills). That framework is widely used, but "explained" with a wide variety of definitions (one resource says it includes "achieving useful goals"). All of them are heavily loaded with value judgments; how many arguments have you been in your life about whether or not something was a "responsible" decision or not? Who decides if a goal is "useful?"

We have been down this exact road before. In the 90s, Outcome Based Education was going to be a great new thing in education, but before it could gain traction, a bunch of folks noticed that it included an element of teaching values, and a large number of parents were certain that was not a job they wanted the schools to do. OBE never recovered. As two articles in this packet from AEI note, much of what comes under the SEL umbrella used to be considered the providence--indeed, the whole point--of religious and faith-based education.

Wherever SEL is implemented, expect a huge fight over what will actually be taught.

How will we teach it?

How exactly does one design a unit to teach a room full of children to empathize or be self-aware?

Google "SEL Resources" and page after page of links will pop up. Software companies that are plugging their "personalized learning" packages are selling SEL elements to be included, evoking the picture of a child being taught about emotions and character by a computer.

SEL learning occurs in the wild through unplanned, unprepared moments of opportunity. One of my toddler children fell last weekend, requiring an ER visit and stitches. He's fine, but he now understands and uses the word "sad." It was an effective SEL moment, but not one I'd want to deliberately manufacture for other children. Can the teachable moment about human emotions, empathy, or self-awareness be formally constructed?

How will we assess it?

How exactly do we measure these social and emotional qualities? What would be a good test of empathy or self-awareness? Plenty of folks are working on the problem, but their solutions require some hefty suspension of disbelief. NWEA, for instance, scored a grant for their technique of reading students' social-emotional qualities based on how long the student waits to click the answer for an on-line multiple choice test. Software has been field-tested for reading student emotions via facial expressions. Just this May, the news came out that Amazon is working to teach Alexa to read the emotions in your voice.

These kinds of software solutions could be used to assess student social and emotional behavior against a desired outcome. But who decides what the "correct" answer is on such assessments? And how easy will it to be to game such a system? We're talking about assessments that try to read student emotions--will we teach students to feel those emotions, or teach them how to act like they feel those emotions? We don't have a way to truly measure empathy, which means we'll have to judge students on how well they perform the appearance of empathy.

What will we do with the results?

What we can measure with software we can store with software, so as with all the other current assessments, the question becomes how will the data be stored and who will have access? Will future employers be weeding out prospects whose fourth grade empathy scores were too low? How much privacy is going to be violated, and how badly?

Does SEL Belong?

There is no question that SEL is important in education. Virtually every "How a teacher changed my life story" has a strong SEL element (though there is also ample evidence from business and politics that a lack of empathy, self-awareness, and responsible decision-making need not be an obstacle to success). The real question is whether or not SEL can be incorporated as a structured, formal, assessed element of education, and that question does not yet have a clear affirmative answer.

Originally posted at Forbes.com     

Education and Remembering

It's 9/11, and social media is plastered with a thousand variations on a single theme-- Never Forget.

Well, of course we'll forget.

First of all, we don't can't even articulate a shared version of what it is that we're remembering. That somebody once successfully attacked us? That we subsequently lost our national shit and chewed through a variety of civil liberties in hopes that Benjamin "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" Franklin was wrong and that everything from surveillance to some airport theatrics would be just the thing? That a mass of people dying for no good reason sucks? That people in the world wish us harm? That we are all fragile tiny humans stuck together on a tiny rock spinning into a vast cold void?

I've seen a handful of posts praising the spirit of 9/12, and I get that-- it was nice to set aside a lot of petty bullshit and just try to help each other, to take care of people in the way that I'm pretty sure we should be doing all day every day. I would like to see folks do that all the time. But I also remember that the spirit of 9/12 included a teenage girl getting harassed in a high school parking lot because she was Muslim-looking. Not to mention some serious warmongering and a renewed patriotism that was sometimes inspiring and warm and sometimes scary and jingoistic. I remember that anti-terrorism wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible became an excuse for a lot of bad stuff.

So which part of that should we never forget? I'd say all of it, but that brings us to the second problem.

We're Americans, and we suck at history. It's like we're a nation built on the banks of the River Lethe, that mythic river whose waters brought the end of memory. Collectively, we can forget stuff so fast it will make your head spin. School shootings? We can forget those within a week, tops, but we've been at this forgetting thing for a long time. Lessons from Viet Nam? Some of which were a review for lessons of Korea? McCarthyism? World War I was loaded with valuable lessons, and most of the US slept through all of them. The labor movement? The shift from rural to urban living? And our massive national brainwipe re: the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Death of Reconstruction-- that's some important material and we're still paying the price for forgetting it.

It's not all deliberate. Life and history are complicated and remembering complicated things is hard, so sometimes it's easier to just simplify things in our memory-- just cut out all the complicated or challenging stuff.

Of course, the Civil War/Reconstruction stuff is a good example of how we like to deliberately forget things. The South and its friends launched a long term disinformation campaign so that our collective memory would forget all the real stuff and even remember some made-up stuff instead.

Every piece of history goes through that same meat grinder-- it happens, and folks scramble to write the stories about it, hoping that some number of people who don't entirely forget will remember what they've been coached to remember.

US high school students will tell you that history is the biggest waste of time in all their courses. We are living through one more demonstration of why that's really wrong. As frequently noted, no student currently in school has any memory of 9/11. To them it is as distant as the Tet Offensive or the Kent State shootings-- just one of those long ago events that the old folks get all worked up about.

And sure-- like war and divorce and discrimination and childbirth, these traumatic moments of history are never as vivid and compelling second hand. You did have to be there. And past a certain point, all history is second hand. The Norman Conquest changed everything in the English speaking world, but it's pretty hard to find anyone who gets really worked up about it. All the people who  really cared about it are dust, their feelings vanished into some unknowable space.

Lots of us think of education as simply the transmission of facts, and that is certainly part of it. But facts are just a foundation, and as teachers all across the country are reminded every year on this day, being exposed to facts doesn't necessarily mean that students really feel the impact of those facts. This is one of the roles of good literature and well-written history-- to help the audience feel.

But the facts matter, particularly for events in which history starts to fade and those who would shape it to their own ends deliberately try to fuzzy the picture. Who was responsible on 9/11? Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? Iraquis? Iranians? Afghanis? Didn't the Saudis have something to do with it? Chances are, sitting their reading this paragraph, you are realizing you need to look things up to be certain.

This is one of the huge reasons that education matters, because on top of our general American antipathy to knowing the past, there are those who would mess with our knowledge of history in order to control the present. Holocaust deniers want to change how we view Israel and Jewish folks. 9/11 truthers want to uproot our current government. We still can't sort out our issues around race because we are collectively ignorant of how we got to this place. And because we are so untethered to the past, we are a fertile ground for people who are just paranoid dopes (looking at you, anti-vaxxers).

This is also why it matters that we should not, as a country, support education that distorts the record-- no flat earth high school or holocaust denial or claims that Jesus signed the Declaration of Independence or tales of happy slaves who put on a Confederate uniform and fought for the South.

My seventh grade social studies teacher was Mr. Confer, who was maybe a thousand years old and had more energy than all of us put together. He had grown up in an orphanage in the Depression and I don't even remember what all else, but we knew these things because he often digressed from our lesson to tell us tales. At the time, we thought he was doing a terrible job and failing to teach us all the things he was supposed to. It was decades before I realized that he had taught middle schoolers an almost impossible lesson-- that the world was not always the way it is now, and it will not always be the way it is now, and that the world that was was filled with human beings just as real as those of us sitting right here, and that the went through a host of experiences that worked on their hearts and spirits. On days like today, I think about Mr. Confer.

Some people will never ever forget, but as a country we'll forget because that's what we tend to do, and because healing involves a little distance, and because those of us who remember first-hand will slowly, inexorably be replaced by those who don't. This is education in its purest form. We collect all the things we know and that were passed along to us by people who learned, saw, felt them first hand, and we hand them off to a new generation and say, "You were not there, but these are the things we want you to remember." Teachers are there tending the dike that holds back the River Lethe, and while folks are declaring "Never Forget!" and the mass of Americans reply, "Yeah, sure, we'll-- squirrel!" teachers set their jaws, tighten their grips and say, "No, we never will."

Online Pre-K Continues To Spread Like A Big Stupid Plague

So this article pops up on my screen-- the Hechinger Report's Bracey Harris asking "Can 15 minutes a day of online preschool help prepare a child for kindergarten?" I might have suggested a rewrite on the headline, something along the line of  "Why in the name of all that's holy are you putting a four-year-old child in front a screen and subjecting her to kindergarten prep software!"

Stop farting around and get to work kid

Look, I'll warn you right up front-- long time readers of this blog will not find me saying anything here that I have not said before, but 1) I'm pretty sure most of this should be repeated daily until it sinks into certain skulls because 2) this is a terrible idea that stands on the shoulders of other terrible ideas and every time it shows up wrapped in uncritical boosterfluff like this I get the kind of angry that I can best work off by hammering these keys. I am even going to bold things, because dammit, I've got a pair of two-year-olds napping fifteen feet away from me, and this bullshit has got to stop.

Focused on Mississippi, Harris's piece contains most of the classic features of what is unfortunately becoming a genre. For instance, a mis-framing of the problem--

Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.

If most of your state's five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, then it is the kindergarten program that is messed up. It is not a small child's job to get ready for school-- it is the school's job to get ready for that child. It is not the family's job to meet the needs of the school-- it is the school's job to meet the needs of that family. 

This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind and its bastard cousins and children. One of the effects of the accountability movement has been to turn schools upside down, to flip the school student relationship. In the flipped relationship, the school (and the state) need students to be generators of reliably high test scores, and so, in the accountability-flipped school, we do not ask students, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Instead we ask each other, "How can we get these kids to cough up an acceptable score?" And part of that answer has been, consistently, to try to get to them sooner, to start them ASAP, so that we can get them ready for the third grade literacy test that gets them ready for the state-issued reading and math Big Standardized Test and so on and so on. Can't let these little slackers just sit around and play and waste time and stuff-- we need to get them ready so that kindergarten can be the new first or second or third grade so that we can get them more ready sooner even though there isn't a damned bit of evidence that getting more ready sooner has any beneficial long term effect whatsoever but plenty of evidence that it's bad for the children. But hey-- as long as we can squeeze some good scores out of them.

This particular article is plugging UPSTART, an online program that started out in Utah, where it did the double duty of providing some semblance of pre-school at much lower costs than backing actual pre-school would have cost, as well as pushing what money the state did spend into the coffers of a Utah company in the district of the legislator who sponsored the bill adopting UPSTART for the state.

From there it has spread like poison ivy, especially to corporate-reform-friendly states like Ohio and Indiana. It's currently in 532 districts and independent schools. The program itself is essentially Personalized [sic] Learning for very tiny people. From their website

UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.

The program (and the computer that delivers it) are free, courtesy of UPSTART's many partners, which include the New Schools Venture Fund, TED, Comcast, Intel, and Raspberry.

The Hechinger piece is a classic fluff sandwich-- about 2/3rds of the way down, an opposing view is given one sentence before we get back to the happy fluff about this awesome idea. The opposing view that Harris scoots past is a statement issued jointly by Defending the Early Years and the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood that seriously lambasted this practice (and which Hechinger did cover at the time). Harris mentions that "some experts" have misgivings, but makes no attempt to report those concerns in detail or examine their validity. The statement offered plenty of research and reports to back up their objections; here are must a few of the highlights:

"All children should have access to high-quality, fully funded preschool," said Diane Levin, Professor of Early Childhood Education, at Boston University's Wheelock College. "Online ‘preschool’ lacks the concrete, hands-on social, emotional and intellectual educational components that are essential for quality learning in the early years. Further, online preschools are likely to exacerbate already existing inequalities in early education by giving low-income children superficial exposure to rote skills and ideas while more privileged children continue to receive developmentally sound experiences that provide a solid foundation for later academic success.”

“Allowing tech companies to push online preschools will lead to further marginalization of low-income families who already lack access to high-quality affordable child care,” said Dr. Denisha Jones, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Trinity Washington University and DEY Advisory Board member. “If the parents of Silicon Valley won’t put their own children in online preschool, why would we think this is good for other people's children?”

You should read this part, too:

Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.

All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.

Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.

Utah did a study of its own, asserting that UPSTART raised some BS Test scores, and isn't that what you're most hoping for when you hand your tiny human over to the care of a school system? I could spin off into a rant about the BS Tests, but let's leave it that there is no reason to believe that higher tests scores, particularly for elementary students, say anything at all about the child's future-- and even reformsters know it.

I dream of the day when the folks who work at UPSTART suddenly look up and say, "My God! What the hell are we doing?!" Then just shut everything off and walk away, turning out the lights behind them. But of course, as suggested above, they are not the only players in this stupid game. Search for online pre-k and you can find plenty of vendors like ABCmouse, which offers online reading activities and for the love of God-- just get the kid a book! Dolly Parton will send your child one book a month for free, a real actual book that you can hold in your hands and read to your little while she is curled up in your lap! Or there's Time4Learning, which will start your little out with a software program:

The interactions (verbal instructions, interface buttons, graphics, and format) are designed for pre-readers with an early learning level of attention, fine muscle control, and vocabulary. It is designed so that, after the first session, a child could use the program on his or her own with minimal adult supervision

Excellent. I can just tell my four year old to go play on the computer on his own. What an excellent learning experience.

Yes, the argument is going to be that this will reach children who don't have access or finances to go to pre-school, that this can be a resource for isolated families, to which I say this is like saying there are families that don't have access to enough nutritionally rich food, so let's mail them all cases of diet soda and arsenic. Yes, this targets families and children who need something-- but what they need is not this. Nobody needs this.

Modern education reform has spawned plenty of awful things, but plunking three and four year olds in front of a screen-- even for just fifteen minutes a week-- so that they can get ready for kindergarten is one of the worst, most glaring signs that some folks have totally lost their way and that the search for more revenue streams knows no shame.