Why Directing Community Theater Is Like Teaching

Readers of this blog generally get a dose of whatever is on my mind, and what's on my mind at the moment is theater. I'm coming down to the wire on one more community theater production; The Music Man opens one week from tomorrow (by all means, feel free to stop by). I've been doing this and school theater for thirty-some years, and yes, it's an awful lot like teaching. Once we get the obvious out of the way-- it's all showbiz. Let me count the other ways.

You Work With What You Get

Big time Broadway directors have it easy. If you decide you want to cast someone who's  5'3" with blue eyes and blond hair with a cleft chin and a baritone voice, plus juggling and tap skills-- for the  chorus--  you can have your pick of twenty such guys. In the community theater world, you tend to get what you get, and your challenge is to figure out how you  make a show out of that. Not that I don't get plenty of great performers, and not that I haven't had the opportunity to pick and choose from several prospects for a part. But there's a tricky line to tread; on the one hand, you have to have a vision going into auditions, but on the other hand, you cant hold so tightly to it that you can't get the show cast at all.

It's like a classroom. You can curse your fate every day that you don't have a room full of enthusiastic readers with a good grasp of writing basics, or you can just accept that your students are who they are. You may have your favorite Ron Swanson quote, and at my house, we do, too. There's an episode  in which Ron is telling a story about a getting shot in the foot with a nail gun. Leslie's exclaims, "You only have nine toes?!" And Ron replies, "I have the toes I have." That's pretty much it.

Adaptability Is Not Only Necessary But Rewarding

Broadways shows are mostly written for lots of men. Community (and high school) theater tends to be testosterone-deprived. But (see previous point) you adapt. You look for characters who could be gender swapped, and you do what you have to do. Funny thing about that-- sometimes it makes no difference at all (the patriarch in Brigadoon and the wine dancers in Kiss Me Kate work just fine as women). But sometimes it opens up all sorts of cool new subtexts. If Belle (Beauty and the Beast) has a daffy mom instead of a daffy dad, it creates some whole new undercurrents. Or cast a female Laertes and watch what happens to how Hamlet plays out.

Point being that sometimes you have to adapt for your limitations, and it actually causes you to land on some rich and powerful things that you might otherwise have missed. If you insist that the text or the plan is absolutely sacred, you will miss some exciting moments. Ditto for the classroom. You can stick hard and fast to the plan, even the Big Plan that was hatched before you even met the students, or you can grab the teachable moments and adapt the plan to better fit the students who are there in front of you.

Different Performers Require Different Directions

Some actors like to know exactly what you want them to do. How to stand, how to gesture, when to move. Others like a more global direction-- "Your character is really angry, but also frustrated and a little sad, so show us that when you play this scene." Some want to the director to work closely with them, and some just want to do their thing without someone breathing down their neck all the time. And every single one prefers a differently mixed cocktail of praise and criticism. As a director, you have your own particular way of delivering all of these things. Plus factoring in the material you're working on.

One size does not fit all.

Collaboration Matters

I have one directing partner with whom I've worked about a dozen times; we split up music and stage directing a bunch of different ways, but I always do better work when teamed up with her. On top of that, a director depends on a whole team for costuming, sets, lighting, orchestra, the whole works. Being familiar with how those jobs works helps keep a director from asking for stupid things; being open to listening to the people doing those jobs helps the director grab some great new ideas.

Collaboration is harder for most teachers, but if you seek out collaborators within your department and building, it will benefit your class.

The Hidden Nuts And Bolts Matter

It's not enough just to have a set-- you have to be able to get it on and off stage and stow it while the rest of the show is happening. So much of staging a show is not Grand Artistic Vision, but engineering. Where do we hang this costume for a quick change? Which dressers are going to handle which zippers on that gown? How do we make that prop work?

If we get it right, nobody really notices the effort it took. The best technical work is invisible even while you're looking right at it. This is also true for teaching. This is why so many people who went to school still don't know a damn thing about how a classroom works-- they never saw the technical parts.

Be Prepared, But Don't Set It In Concrete

Study the script. The study it some more. Figure out your production design, your set, the whole works. When the production starts work, you are supposed to be the expert, the person who knows more about this particular production than anybody.

The "I learn more than the students" or "student-directed" classroom makes me nuts. If you aren't the leader and expert in your classroom, then why are you there? Why are the taxpayers paying you? It would be nuts for a director to aay, "Oh, I just let the actors direct themselves." Collaborate, sure. Accept input definitely. Being the leader doesn't mean that you function like a totalitarian monster, but somebody has to drive the bus.

Beaten People Don't Do Their Best

You get the best performance out of people when they feel confident. In an ideal situation, they are confident because they are doing an undeniably great job. But in the amateur theater world, not always. The thing is, people who have been beaten down do not do their best work. So your only hope of getting a great performance out of people is to support them and build them up. To the extent possible, find out what they need and give it to them.

This principle works with directors and actors, administrators with teachers, teachers with students, and basically humans with other humans they have responsibility for or authority over. It doesn't mean to avoid all criticism or never mention something that's wrong, but you do those things with the end in mind of building the person up. Yes, I know there are times when it's really hard. Then you go home and scream into a pillow.

Dream Big and Enjoy What You Get      

Community theater is like July and September. You start out with big dreams, big goals,  big visions of what you have in mind. Then reality hits you like a bathtub full of cold water. It can be discouraging. But the gig is not to bend everyone else to your will and vision; it's to lead the creation of something good out of the pieces parts you've got. It's a tricky dance-- you need to be driven by your vision and fight for all the very best parts, but you can't ignore reality, and you must always remember that you are working with live human beings. One of your most necessary skills is to know how to push as hard as possible without pushing so hard that you break things.

Yes,  there will be people asking why your production didn't use the same grand effect as the Broadway version (our theater doesn't have enough fly space to accommodate a full-sized helicopter). And there are plenty of people these days who demand that you teach kindergartners how to write short novels and sophomores how to create genetically modified life forms-- and of course get them all good grades on the Big Standardized Test, which can be the equivalent of spending your entire set budget on buying every cast member a really nice pair of shoes.

Try not to get distracted. You may well not end up exactly where you envisioned at the start, but with luck and skill and effort and good partners and carefully applied expertise, you can end up someplace great and wonderful and rewarding.

PA: Zombie Board Says Charter Free To Do Whatever The Heck It Wants

In education, as in most things, Philadelphia is its own little state-within-the-state. The public system has a long and messy history, including a state takeover. The district is often used as Exhibit A for pro-choice legislators ("But we must give the poor children of Philadelphia a way to escape their terrible school system even as we refuse to adequately fund that system!") and is consequently the most charter-heavy city in the commonwealth.

In Pennsylvania, the local school district has oversight of charter schools within its boundaries. But like several states, there is also a state-level review board to which charters can appeal, and that board has told Philadelphia that at least one charter is free to go on ahead and do as it pleases.

The charter in question is Franklin Towne Charter. The charter has attracted attention in the past for a variety of reasons.

There's the time a fired principal filed a whistle blower suit, charging that he's been terminated because he pointed out that some Franklin Towne practices such as non-serving ESL students, serious nepotism, and billing the Philly school district for a non-existent all-day kindergarten program. Also, that they had lied to him in his initial interview in order to cover up their high principal turnover rate (it was only later that he learned that the Chief Academic Officer who helped interview him had been removed from the principalship because of outcry over shoplifting and excessive use of force against students). After a pattern of retaliation developed against him, he took it to the board president who allegedly replied, "You know we cannot move forward with you as principal."

Franklin Towne's CEO also pulled the old "rent the building from yourself" dodge, a great way to rake in those public taxpayer dollars (Franklin Towne was not the only charter to pull this stunt). You can (and they apparently did) make even more money by mortgaging the building to the hilt-- essentially extracting the equity value, converting it to cash, and sticking the cash in your pocket.

The charters are managed by OmniVest, a properties management company that handles more than fifteen charter schools and, I kid you not, JiffyLube. OmniVest offers education management, financial services, and real estate development. But when it comes to education, they can do it all:

Specializing in school management, OmniVest can assist you in realizing your ultimate dreams of operating an efficiently run, high quality blue ribbon school. Opening and operating a school, whether it is public, private or a charter school, can sometimes be extremely overwhelming based on all of the current educational and financial demands as well as in-depth compliance issues. As an independent, education-based company, OmniVest Properties Management specializes in the planning, design, development, construction, financing, and management of schools, and we have hands-on experience in the development and operations of over 150 private and public schools in 17 states, coast to coast.

Well, everything except actually educating. OmniVest was founded by B. Robin Eglin, who also runs a construction company and whose name  turns up a lot in stories about Philly charter shenanigans. His educational background is cashing on other charters like People for People and before that, Nobel Learning Communities-- a charter management company that was hauled into court by the justice department for refusing to educate students with disabilities-- and we could play this game all day, but you get the idea. These are not dedicated educators-- these are profiteers.

The problem most closely related to tFranklin Towne's latest flap is hinted at by their website; if you click on the link, you'll see that the crowd of happy students looks awfully white.

White students account for only 14% of the School District of Philadelphia's enrollment base, but make up nearly two-thirds of Franklin Towne’s student body, according to district data.

Now Franklin Towne wants to open a new middle school, and the Philly school wanted to set some requirements for that, particularly when it comes to the school's enrollment system. That doesn't seem out of line as, to the casual observer, it does seem that something's a bit skewed. It is of course illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in obvious ways. Of course, you can use marketing to signal  which students can expect to feel welcome (go back and look at all those white kids again). Lotteries seem like a "fair" technique, but lotteries come with an assortment of hoops to jump through, which serve as a sort of filter. Franklin Towne adds to that filtration system by doing something unusual-- when they have a spot open up, rather than pulling out the waiting list, they hold another lottery-- so if you want to get your kid in, you have to really be paying attention.

The problem of inadequate special education and blinding whiteness is not a new one in Philly charters, but this time it caught the attention of the Education Law Center of Philadelphia, which caught the attention of the Philly School Board which took the unusual step of denying an approval for Franklin Towne to add a middle school to its elementary and high school offerings unless the charter took a few actions, including giving priority to students in the neighborhood. But the charter fought back, taking its appeal to the state charter board.

The story highlights one other problem with PA charters. While the governor has been talking a tough game, he has not repopulated the state charter board. There should be six members; there are five and they were all appointed by previous governor Tom Corbett, and they are serving past their assigned term. If Governor Wolf wants to do something about charter oversight, he might want to look at that.

In the end, zombie charter board waved Franklin Towne on through, free to keep being just as white  as they want to be, along with the rest of their shenanigans. Charter fans like to say that bad charters get shut down, but some days it sure doesn't look that way. Meanwhile, Philly taxpayers will have to pay for one more charter school, even though their school board said no.

OH: Meaningless School Grades And Money

Over at Cleveland.com, Rich Exner has done yeoman's work taking Ohio's school ratings and connecting them with census information from the US Census Bureaus 2017 American Communities Survey.

Ohio is another one of those states that believes it can reduce the entire issue of a school's quality to a single letter grade. This is a dumb idea, and there is no state that has ever implemented it in which it did not prove to be a dumb idea. It has been decades since we concluded that reducing student performance to a single letter grade was a dumb idea. How could it not be a dumb idea when applied to an entire complex system that is a school? If we asked a hundred parents what a B means foir a school grade, we would get over a hundred answers because many of those parents would say, "Hmm, well, it could refer to the general academic atmosphere of the school, or maybe how involved students are, or the level of enrichment offered, or, hell, I don't know."

Because giving a school a single letter grade is a dumb idea. Can a school suck in some areas and be awesome in others? Of course it can.

So if this is such a dumb idea, why does it keep cropping up? Well, its advocates have never made a coherent case for the practice (and many reformsters are judiciously silent on the practice), but we can make some educated guesses.

For one, a letter grade makes a nice way to hide the fact that you are grading an entire school based on a single standardized test of reading and math. If you just published the school's average or aggregate score, the public would shrug and say, "Okay, that's one piece of data and I'm not even sure I much care." So we have to dress that score up with a name or designation or, hey, a grade, to make it seem like that single test score is somehow indicative of bigger things, or even to give the impression that the score has been enhanced by all sorts of other measures.

For another, I can't help noticing that school grade states tend to be states like Ohio and Florida, where there are all sorts of folks chomping at the bit to open some non-public schools and hoover up some of those sweet, sweet tax dollars. Only to drive the market away from the public schools and into the waiting arms of charters and voucher schools, you need a way to point at certain public schools and say loudly, "Look! That school is failing. Faaaaiiiiling!! You had better run away! Run away!!" Letter grades for schools are a great way to do that.

Now, I now that I suggested that these grades are meaningless and tell us nothing, but thanks to Exler's work, we know better. Take a look at this graph and see if you can draw any conclusions here...

Yes, there's a nice direct correlation between wealth and school grades.

There is also the same sort of correlation for the child poverty rate and the education level of parents.

As with other research that we've seen before, what we learn is that demographic data is so predictive of school rating results, we don't even need to give the Big Standardized Test.

This works out well for reform minded folks, because it sounds nicer than saying, "Let us take over education in the poor communities, because Those People don't have the political clout to fight back."

Click on over to the article and look through all of Exner's data. The only one that will surprise you at all is the graph for the grade based on improving at-risk third graders-- that is just kind of a random splotch. All the rest present the same old picture-- the kinds of measures that are used to grade schools favor schools where the students come from wealthier, more educated families.

And it's worth noting that Ohio has been at this for quite a while-- hell, we all have. Which means that if Common Core college and career ready standards and innovative charters and high stakes testing were going to reverse the effects of poverty, we would see it in these charts. So that's one other thing the data tells us-- by the measures that Ohio is using, education reform hasn't helped a bit.

Most importantly, it tells us that gradiung is schools is a useless exercise that provides no helpful or actionable data, but simply provides one more way to target poor communities for reformsters.

Yes, Teachers Are Spending Money On Their Own Classrooms

Like the cost of a romantic date at Valentine's Day or the price of the Twelve Days of Christmas, the amount of money that teachers spend on their own classroom has become a reliable seasonal story. This year the word is that on average teachers spend, depending on your source, somewhere between $400 and $500. But that's not the whole story.

The Economic Policy Institute has crunched the numbers from the National Center for Educational Statistics, including a breakdown by states. The state averages vary (from $664 in California to $327 in North Dakota), though EPI is quick to note that the range says more about variations in state funding and school conditions than about the relative generosity of teachers in different states.

EPI uses relatively old data (2011-2012) to create its picture. The National Teacher and Principal Survey provides data from 2015-2016. A more current look comes from the sixth annual survey of teachers released today by SheerID and Agile Education Marketing. The most notable finding in their survey is not the amount teachers spent, but the sheer number of teachers who spent it--the survey shows that 99% of teachers spent their own money for school-related-purposes. And while the beginning of the school year seems to be prime time for these stories, the survey also notes that teachers do their spending throughout the year.

The SheerID/Agile Education Marketing folks want to make a practical business point--there's a huge market out there, composed of teachers looking for bargains because they are spending for professional purposes with their own private cash, and smart businesses are tapping that market (and they're not just buying student supplies, but materials to make their classroom a more welcoming place, too).

Many of the stories about teacher spending aim to be more warm and fuzzy. This year, there's been extra focus on #ClearTheLists, a hashtag started by a Texas teacher to help connect contributors with teachers who have their own classroom wish lists. That's over and above old standards like DonorsChoose.org and AdoptAClassroom.org that give teachers a chance to be helped by some cyber-philanthropist. "How To Help Teacher" stories turn up in places like the feel-good "Better" tab at NBC.

These stories feed the narrative of heroic teachers making sacrifices for the good of their students. But like tales of successful GoFundMe health care campaigns, they should raise the question of why such stories are necessary in the first place. Surgeons do not crowdsource for scalpels or pay for clean hospital linens out of their own pockets. Lawyers are not expected to bring their own tables and chairs to the courtroom. Why are teachers paying their own money to provide the workspace and materials that their students need?

Such charity and personal spending can have detrimental long term effects as well. This year's charitable gift can become next year's "Great! We don't have to put that item in the budget ever again." When teachers take a voluntary pay cut to make up for the underfunding of their school, there's less motivation for leaders to fix the funding problem.

"Most teachers are spending a bunch of their own money on their classroom" is not good news; it's not really even news at all. Let's work for a back-to-school season in which it is no longer true.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

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.