A Good Teacher Is Not Like A Candle

I just hate this kind of thing.

First of all, is there any other profession that has to put up with this. Substitute "lawyer" or "plumber" or even "doctor" for "teacher" in this meme, and it just sounds dumb. "Nurse," maybe. (Hmm. What do nursing and teaching have in common as professions. Could it be that they're not commonly associated with testosterone?) We don't expect any other professionals to consume themselves in order to do their jobs.

Second of all, notice the use of "it." For the simile to really track, "it" should be "she," but as soon as we put it that way, the ickiness of the analogy becomes more obvious. Really? Do parents say, "I expect my child's teacher to consume herself in order to educate my child?"

If we walk into our child's classroom in March and find a teacher who is exhausted, worn down, barely functioning, do we think, "Excellent. This is going just as it should." Do we expect a teacher to somehow become a new, fresh candle every fall and be a burned-out stub every May, or do we expect this self-immolation to occur over the length of the teacher's career? If so, is the expectation that the burned-out husk of a self-consumed teacher should just die promptly after retirement, having been fully self-consumed?

This is a close relative of the hero teacher myth, and it shares the notion that someone becomes a teacher out of some outsized level of nobility and self-sacrifice. And there are all sorts of problems with this baloney.

One is that, of course, someone who is teaching out of noble impulses of heroic self-sacrifice couldn't possibly be worried about making a living wage or having decent benefits. It's people who buy this sort of baloney who get all pearl-clutchy over teachers who want a decent contract, as if the desire to be able to support a family is sullying their noble calling, distracting from their "personal mission." This model becomes an excuse to take and take and take from teachers-- their money, their time, because, hey, you want to give your all to the kids, right?

More importantly, this is the kind of crap that saddles young teachers with a huge pile of guilt. Six years ago I wrote a piece that is still the most-read piece I've ever written. Here's part of what I said:

The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:

There is never enough.

There is never enough time. There are never enough resources. There is never enough you.

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual's instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

You know all this, but you can also do the math. 110 papers about the view of death in American Romantic writing times 15 minutes to respond with thoughtful written comments equals-- wait! what?! That CAN'T be right! Plus quizzes to assess where we are in the grammar unit in order to design a new remedial unit before we craft the final test on that unit (five minutes each to grade). And that was before Ethel made that comment about Poe that offered us a perfect chance to talk about the gothic influences. And I know that if my students are really going to get good at writing, they should be composing something at least once a week. And if I am going to prepare my students for life in the real world, I need to have one of my own to be credible.

If you are going to take any control of your professional life, you have to make some hard, conscious decisions. What is it that I know I should be doing that I am not going to do?

The blazing candle of self-immolation encourages young teachers to think, "I'm so bad at this. Last night I could have stayed up till three grading papers, but I fell asleep on the couch instead. And I never should have told my husband that I'd go on a day trip with him and the kids this weekend-- that's time I could be getting planning done. Maybe if I go in Monday at 4 AM and get a head start, I can fix this..."

Teachers either grow out of this mode of thinking, or they leave teaching.

This is no way to model being a responsible adult for the children in your classroom (many of whom may know no other adults that aren't family). This is no way to do your job well. This is no way to live your life. Yes, teaching a job that requires you to employ everything you have, everything you know, every tool in your ever-expanding tool box. But it most definitely does not require you to consume yourself-- in fact, it requires you to NOT consume yourself. You exercise and work out and give your sweat and blood to get stronger, not to destroy your physical self. You study and read and discuss and ponder to become smarter and, God willing, wiser, not to break down your mental faculties.

For heaven's sake, don't be a candle. Be, I don't know, a tree. Grow stronger and taller and as you do, provide the shade that helps a garden grow by you. Or be a river that swells and flows and feeds into other waterways. Or be a bird that collects twigs and branches to build a strong, nurturing nest. Or be a sack of cement that becomes a part of a strong foundation, or become a tube of toothpaste, or a diesel engine, or a waffle.

Or you could, you know, be a human. Just a regular human being using the skills and knowledge that you have acquired (and continue to acquire) to help young humans better understand the universe around them and their own best selves and how to be fully human in the world. Do that. Do that while accepting and embracing the limits of your own humanity even as you stretch against them so that you, too, can also grow into your best self while being more fully human in the world-- the whole world and not just the world inside the walls of your classroom.

Do that. Because you are person and not a frickin' candle.

Stanford: Opportunity And Testing Baloney

Look, it's not that I want everyone to stop any discussion of Big Standardized Test scores at all forever (okay, I might, but I recognize that I'm a radical in this issue and I also recognize that reasonable people may disagree with me). But what I really want everyone to stop pretending that the BS Test scores are an acceptable proxy for other factors.

But here comes a new "data tool" from Stanford, and watch how EdWeek opens its piece about the new tool:

An interactive data tool from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University creates the first database that attempts to measure the performance of every elementary and middle school in the country.

The data set not only provides academic achievement for schools, districts, and states around the country, but it also allows those entities to be compared to one another, even though they don't all use the same state tests.

No.

No no no no no NO no no no hell no. The tool does not measure the performance of every school in the country, and it does not provide academic achievement either. It allows folks to compare the math and reading scores on the BS Tests across state lines. That's it. That's all. It's a clever method of comparing apples to oranges, but that's all. Academic achievement? It covers two academic areas, and not very well at that.

(And while I'm ranting, let me also point out that schools do not perform. Students, teachers, staff, other human beings-- they perform. Schools sit there. If we start talking about performing schools, before you know it we start spouting dumb things like "low-achieving schools have a large number of low-scoring students" as if that's an analysis and not a definition.)

But maybe this is a press and reporting problem. What does the tool claim to actually do?

We’re measuring educational opportunity in every community in America.

The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University has built the first national database of academic performance.

That's not promising.

The tool actually provides three "measures of educational opportunity" and those are 1) average test scores, 2) learning rates, and 3) trends in test scores. And the explanations are-- are we sure this thing came from Stanford?

You may, for instance, wonder what the heck average test scores have to do with educational opportunity. Here is the short explanation on the front page of the website:

The educational opportunities available in a community, both in and out of school, are reflected in students’ average test scores. They are influenced by opportunities to learn at home, in neighborhoods, in child-care, preschool, and after-school programs, from peers and friends, and at school.

"Are reflected" is weasel language, meaning "probably has some sort of connection to." It might be useful if the project looked at what provides, for instance, opportunities to learn at home. But we're just going to go with "every single thing in the  child's environment has some effect on her test scores, probably."

Learning rates are, of course, growth scores, which the report says "are a better indicator of school quality than average test scores." The notion that student growth is at least as important as raw scores is not new, but I'm going to once again get on my high horse about this indicating school quality. That is only true if you think the mission of a school is to get students to do well on a poorly designed standardized test of reading and math. Is that the sum total of school quality? Nothing else you an to consider, like other non-math and non-reading programs, or safe environment, or caring teachers, or even good facilities?

And trends in test scores?

Tracking average test scores over time shows growth or decline in educational opportunity. These trends reflect shifts in school quality as well changes in family and community characteristics.

And this goes back to my point above-- if you change the population of a school, you change the "school performance" because "school performance" is really "student test scores."

These explanations of how these three methods of massaging test score data tells us anything about educational opportunity or academic achievement or school effectiveness-- they may seem perfunctory and thin, but that's all we get. We are just meant to accept the notion that a score on  a standardized math and reading score gives us both a full picture of how well a school is doing and as a measure of the educational opportunities available to students. Just how magical are these Big Standardized Tests supposed to be?

All of that said, there is a ton of data here available in interactive map graphic form. That data is just about standardized test scores, but there are still some interesting things to see. For instance, Florida absolutely sucks in student growth of scores, which is ironic considering Florida's huge BS Test fetish. Arkansas is also pretty lousy, as are Kansas, North Carolina, Alabama, and Wisconsin. They also thought to run average test scores against SES for districts and lo and behold, there's the same result that we've confirmed over and over-- the direct correlation between poverty and test scores.

Is some of that test data stuff worth discussing? Maybe, but not if we're going to insist that those scores are somehow proxies for much larger, broader concepts like school effectiveness or for nebulous concepts like educational opportunity. If we are going to have useful, meaningful discussions about education we have got to--  GOT TO-- stop pretending that we have data that tells us things that it absolutely does not tell us.

RAND Plays Corporate Reformy Buzzword Bingo

RAND Corporation, with its vision to be "the world's most trusted source for policy ideas and analysis." regularly contributes to the total thinky tank output of material that wants to be viewed as "a report" or "research" or "a study" or "a paper," but is more like an op-ed or blog post that has put on a tie and juiced up its vocabulary.

This week they cranked out a new one entitled "Reimagining the Workforce Development and Employment System for the 21st Century and Beyond." Its scope is fuzzy and wide, like a wooly mammoth that has overindulged in pizza and beer, and while it doesn't lay all the blame there, it does take some shots at K-12 education, and in doing so manages to tick off plenty of the boxes on the Reformster Talking Points Bingo Card.

Authors with no actual background in education? Check, check, and check. (For bonus points, two of the three are economists.)

Bloodless gobbledeegook? By the truckload. For instance, the authors note that during childhood "people make decisions about schooling and other aspects of human capital acquisition." Yes, I often think back fondly to when I sat down with my children to discuss their human capital acquisition. Them was the days.

21st century skills? Yep. Employers are "struggling to find workers with 21st century skills that go beyond routine cognitive skills and stock academic knowledge to capture competencies in such areas as information synthesis, creativity, problem-solving, communication and teamwork." Wait-- those are 21st century skills? Really? Communication?? Because it makes me wonder how humanity survived all the previous centuries. On the other hand, I know feel like my colleagues, my college teacher program, and I were all forward-looking savants, given the fact that we were talking about all these things well before Y2K was a bug in a shortsighted programmer's eye.

Schools haven't changed in the last [fill in your favorite time frame here]? Yep. What the reportish thing calls "the current approach" is characterized as "a linear pipeline from kindergarten through 12th grade education to possibly college and then a job" and it hasn't changed, despite "technological change, globalization, and important demographic changes."

Half-baked ideas they read about somewhere? Sure. Hey, isn't gamification a thing? Wouldn't schools better if they did that?

Pitch for personalized learning that goes on forever? Yep. The need to keep training throughout "lifecourse" is necessary because employers need workers to acquire new skills, though not necessarily through any fancy college-type stuff. Quick micro-credentials (yes, check that box off, too) that you can shop for yourself online-- that's the ticket.

Because many jobs of the future don't exist yet. Sigh. Matt Barnum has made a side job out of tracking these kinds of bogus claims, which used to hover around 65% but have been inching up into the 80s. Bottom line: nobody has any idea how many of which jobs will or won't exist in the future.

Education is really expensive! Our current funding model makes us sad, and we would like a new one where if we have to chip in money, at least we get a return (like owning part of the student's work life once they finish-- seriously, they're called "income-sharing agreements"). Also, computers really ought to make the process cheaper. And we like vouchers and other things that at least let somebody profit from all this money we're spending on meat widget development.

Talking about the K-12 education system as if its only purpose is to provide properly-machined meat widgets for corporate overlords? That's kind of the whole point of the reportish thing. This view of education goes hand in hand with the view that education is simple training-- you acquire some skills, some bits of knowledge, and you are trained to do something in particular. But now corporations can't find the selection of meat widgets that they want-- we need a new system.

Data and evidence-based practices? Yes, the system should run on data, using practices that "support monitoring system outputs and outcomes..." And of course all remedies that the data leads to should be scaled up. And information should flow freely (by which we mean information about our company and our meat widgets-- don't be publishing the CEO's home address and phone number).

System thinking? Sure. The reportish thing wants to point in the direction of a system, a technocratic solution that will push meat widgets through a pipeline like toasters through a toaster assembly robot. It's that same old cradle to career pipeline that is supposed to do things like ensure "timely and appropriate matching and rematching of skilled workers with jobs to which they are well suited over their time in the labor market." Phrases like "The framework articulates the overriding goals of the system..." make it seem as if there are no actual humans making these decisions-- it's just The System. Which brings us to...

Most notable is the degree to which this reportish thing and its recommendations are dedicated to absolving business itself from any responsibility whatsoever for helping deal with the issues of the 21st century workforce. For instance, this explanation of the "increased risk on some workers" notes that in today's economy "with the apparent growth of nontraditional work arrangements, such as freelance and contract employment, certain workers are less likely to access the features associated with traditional wage and salary jobs, such as well-defined career ladders and access to fringe benefits to buffer the risks associated with health care needs, accidents, injuries, disabilities, and the business cycle." You or I might think that the next logical thought is "Maybe corporations and businesses should try to do less screwing of their workforce so that people who don't have the good fortune to be born into wealth can have a better shot at a better life. But no:

This places more of the onus on workers to anticipate changes in job requirements, take on the risk associated with poor health or saving for retirement, and bear the cost of job training or retraining.

And nowhere in their discussion of The System that they recommend, do I see anything that suggests that a push for more moral or ethical business leadership might help with some of this. The closest the thing comes is some emphasis on making sure that The System enhances equity, by which it means providing an opportunity for people of all races and backgrounds to become meat widgets that are pleasing to the employers. No, we need a system to help meat widgets better meet the needs of corporate overlords, whose needs are not to be questioned. Hey, they're just responding to market forces and the economy as they must-- it's only the Lessers and future meat widgets who have to make actual personal choices for which they bear responsibility.

It's a discouraging read, but since it advocates for vouchers and choice, it will be lapped up by Certain People. There really isn't anything new here, but an outfit like RAND can put the old wine in fancy new skins. Well, maybe not wine. More like koolaid.

NH: Failing To Learn From Charter History

I have a soft spot in my heart for New Hampshire. I was born there, and much of my family lived there. My grandmother was a legislator for ages, and many of my relatives are still in the state.

So it's a bummer to see the state fall into reformy mistakes.

Earlier this year, the state announced that they were going to grab some of that free federal money to embark n a five-year mission to seek new charter schools and boldly repeat mistakes where many have gone before. The state intends to double the number of charter schools by adding about 27 new charters to the 28 current one.

Also, this iconic scene no longer exists.

The state is getting $46 million in federal taxpayer money specifically to help with charter start-up costs. It's an interesting stance for a heavily GOP state; consider the website for Live Free And Start "an initiative of the NH Tech Alliance, is working to make New Hampshire an even better place for innovative businesses to start, grow and succeed." They have lots of ideas about how to fund you new business; none of them are "hit the federal government for some bucks." The federal grant program is certainly not the only government grant program for starting a business, but it's an odd thing for free-market sink-or-swim conservatives to support.

What makes it even worse to support is the amount of money in this business tart-up fund that has been flushed away. I'll refer you, once again, to the report from the Network for Public Education that lays out how many many many many millions of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted on charter schools that closed quickly or, in the worst cases, never even opened. I suppose the state can take the  position that the money being wasted on't be theirs. But coverage raises the usual  question of just how much free market dynamics really truly play into charter schools. Here's one charter operator making an observation:

“It is impossible to start a charter school if you don’t have those federal start-up funds," she said. "At the end of the day, you need to find a space for your school, you need to populate it with furniture and materials, you maybe need to do a renovations on the space, and when you sign a lease, you have to put money down on that lease.”

How is this different from any other business? If you don't have enough money to open a business, the market says you either borrow the money or you go home, because if you don't have enough money to open the business, you don't open the business.

NH has an additional problem; the state department of education has one person responsible for overseeing the charter school sector. That does not seem destined for success. But the DOE is a big fan of charters, though they don't offer much compelling support. Here's DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, a venture capitalist who got the job as part of some political horse trading and who likes a variety of privatizing ideas. Edelblut has no background in education other than profiting from it, so he's reduced to reform boilerplate when lauding the grant:

New Hampshire charter schools have not only provided excellent educations for Granite State students, but provided a model for innovation and education improvement for the nation. Every kid deserves an educational environment in which they can thrive. Charter schools provide a valuable alternative for students who need one.

Oh, baloney. Name one "innovation" that has come out of a New Hampshire charter and spread through the education world. Explain what kind of alternative these schools provide other than an alternative method of shuttling public tax dollars to private businesses.

And as history tells us, many of these mighty engines of imaginary innovation will suck up tax dollars and then fail to ever educate a single person. Not sure the Granite State will really benefit from that.

Ohio Has A Chance To Fix A Terrible School Takeover Law. It's Going To Blow It.

It looked like Ohio was going to get better, but the legislature is poised to screw it all up.

It has been hard to keep up with the news out of Lorain, Ohio, a school district that is being run through the wringer under Ohio's terrible, awful, no good, really bad school takeover law (HB 70). Lorain's CEO (a district takeover czar created by HB 70), David Hardy, Jr., is yet another guy who believes that his two years as a TFA temp in a classroom qualifies him to be an education policy expert and, under HB 70, run every single aspect of a school district-- well, at worst, he is someone who has vastly over-estimated his capabilities and, at best, is a manager who does not play well with others.

Some shady baloney going on here

I'm not going to go through all the shenanigans of the past many months, but one episode gives you a flavor of the atmosphere in Lorain. The district treasurer tried to resign for a new job. The board did not accept his resignation, but Hardy did, and proceeded to attempt to replace the treasurer with his own pick. The board filed a restraining order against Hardy, who in turn threatened that the district staff would not be paid, a threat that seems to have been based in nothing more than Hardy's tendency to get pissy when people get in his way (kind of like the time he "fired" some union reps).

But meanwhile, even as Hardy has been working overtime to show all the ways that HB 70 is a bad law, legislators were working to change it. And they were doing pretty well-- the House passed a bill that was actually incorporated into then budget. And it was right about then that the champions of privatization in Ohio decided they should get back in the game. There are some business and reform folks who have exceptional access to legislators in Ohio, and they have a lot to say about hw education laws are written. Their  fingerprints are all over this mess.

The used-to-be-a-reform-of-the-reform bill is HB 154, and it has been through a whole raft of changes. Since HB 70 was passed in less than a day with no real discussion, it's only fitting that the last version of Sub HB 154, which is actually a complete swap of the original bill for a new bill under the same number, should be coming down to the wire as a well.

I will walk you through some details in a moment, but the bottom line is this-- the latest version of the bill is a cynical piece of baloney, a thin pretense that is the kind of thing that legislators produce when they don't have the guts to vote down a popular bill. The substitute version of HB 154 reforms nothing, fixes nothings, changes nothing-- it just renames a few things in a piece of underhanded bullshit.

Here are some of the details. (I'm working from a pdf copy shared by someone on the legislative mailing list).

The original HB 70 put "failing" districts under the control of an Academic Distress Commission. Sub HB 154 puts failing school districts under the control of a "school transformation board." That board is stacked with folks selected by the governor and the state ed chancellor, just like the ADC. There's one spot reserved for local union seat; good luck with that. Three members (the governor's picks) must have "experience and expertise in education policy or school improvement," because this law is loaded with opportunities for all sorts of education consultants and edubusinesses to cash in on a school district's problems.

Other earlier versions of the reform-the-reform bills included various amounts of relief for the three districts under state meddling control (Lorain, Youngstown, East Cleveland); Sub HB 154 states that any district that has an ADC now gets a School Transformation Board.

This next part you just need to see to believe:

Yep. They just went through, crossed out "chief executive officer" and wrote in "director."

The job remains the same as it was under HB  70-- everything, from bus schedules to teacher assignments to cafeteria set-up. The job requires someone of super-human capabilities and vast knowledge of all the workings of a school system, from philosophical underpinnings to the nuts and bolts. The CEO director has all the powers of a superintendent and the school board, plus nifty powers under worst case scenarios in which he can also unilaterally rewrite contracts, close schools, and hand schools off to charter operators.

It's nuts. There can't be a dozen humans alive who could handle it. But then, the new bill also leans heavily on the idea of hiring lots and lots of consultants to make everything work.

The new bill does allow the superintendent to be selected for the czar job. It also requires the czar to make quarterly reports to the board, which is probably a nod to the fact that Hardy refused to talk to the elected school because they aren't the boss of him. The bill also adds a procedure by which the board can protest and ask for another option. Good luck with that.

Folks, Sub HB 154 is HB 70, with some names crossed out and a couple of minor changes here and there.

And hold onto your hat-- the Senate Ed Committee was supposed to be getting another amendment at a hearing set for today, but now rescheduled for some other. I told you it was hard to stay in front of this story. If you're in Ohio, pay attention and contact your senator, repeatedly.

The College Board Tweaked The SAT Adversity Score. But It's Not Fixed-- Or Gone.

Since David Coleman took the helm at the College Board, its flagship product--the ubiquitous SAT, one-time queen of college entrance exams--has been the victim of a series of unforced errors. The roll-out and walk-back of the "adversity score" is only the latest--and recent reports of that score's death may be greatly exaggerated.

The company ran into some glitches in its rush to get a new, Common Core-aligned test to market. Coleman expressed a desire for the test to be a great leveler, a test that would recognize and elevate intellectual prowess wherever it was found. The SAT has long been criticized as being loaded with cultural bias, and the College Board's own data seems to support that assertion. The other knock on the test was that it could be beaten with the help of test prep and coaching (a criticism bolstered by an entire SAT test prep industry). And the College Board has been confirming that these criticisms are valid.

In 2014, the College Board entered into a partnership with Khan Academy to offer free test prep to anyone who wanted it. Rather than designing a test that was immune to test prep (which may, in fact, be impossible), the College Board appeared to be conceding that SAT scores measured, at least in part, how well a student had been coached for the test.

Then came the Environmental Context Dashboard, featuring the Adversity Score. The score was supposed to capture the social and economic background of students through a combination of fifteen dimensions. But though it was supposedly "steeped in research," the genesis of the score remained a proprietary mystery, somehow combining factors from school and community. The result would be a score between 1-100, with a score of more than 50 representing disadvantage and a score under 50 indicating some privilege. Critics attacked the notion of reducing a student's entire background to a single score. They criticized it for being an attack on meritocracy. And most of all, they criticized it for being an admission that the SAT itself is a biased test given on a tilted playing field. Meredith Twombly, vice president of admissions and financial aid, at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, one of the many test-optional colleges in the U.S., had a typical response:

For decades the College Board said the SAT alone is the best unbiased, objective indicator of success and likened it to an equalizer. The creation of the ECD is the SAT proving the point they have been denying.”

Coleman responded initially with variations on this comment:

Since it is identifying strengths in students, it’s showing this resourcefulness that the test alone cannot measure. These students do well, they succeed in college.”

That comes perilously close to admitting that the SAT itself cannot actually predict college success.

Now the College Board has responded to criticism of the ECD and the Adversity Score. The headlines are reporting it as "College Board Drops Plans For SAT Student Adversity Score," but that might oversell the move, which could be described as a tweak and some rebranding.

First, the Environmental Context Dashboard has been given a new name--Landscape.

Next, the College Board has increased the transparency of the product. Students will be able to see their own Landscape information, and the process that generates that information is now somewhat more transparent. There will be a variety of information about the school itself, including information such as how rural or urban the school is, the size of the senior class, number of free-or reduced-lunch students--a batch of information taken from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). There will be information about AP classes and tests (the AP test is another College Board product). Landscape will also show how the student's SAT scores compare to other students in that school.

Finally, Landscape will offer high school and neighborhood average indicators. Six factors--college attendance, household structure, median family income, household stability, education level, and crime--will be "averaged and presented on a 1-100 scale." A higher value on the scale "indicates a higher level of challenge related to educational opportunities and outcomes." The two "values" will be kept separate, rather than combined, as with the Adversity Score. The College Board very carefully avoids the word "score," but it certainly looks like a scaled-down version of the Adversity Score.

In its press release, the College Board emphasizes that Landscape doesn't replace any of the information that students supply as part of a college application. It's just trying to provide admissions offices with a bit more context. Said the College Board's Coleman:

We listened to thoughtful criticism and made Landscape better and more transparent. Landscape provides admissions officers more consistent background information so they can fairly consider every student, no matter where they live and learn."

With the dashboard rebranded and the word "score" banished, the same old question remains--if an SAT score reflects coaching, and additional "context" is required to consider a score fairly, then what good is the SAT in the first place? 

Originally posted at Forbes.com

ALEC Issues A Report Card, But Still Fails

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the corporate Match.com for wealthy mover-shakers and legislators looking for someone to do their homework together. Among their many favorite issues is education, and to that end, ALEC trots out a report card every year rating the states. It is not unlike a sort of businessperson's prospect overview, and it contains a mountain of thinly sliced baloney. Let's take a  look at that mountain, and then consider one surprising thing that came out of this year's report card promo.

The packet was headed up by Scott Kaufman, ALEC’s task force director for Education and Workforce Development, whose background is strictly in opinion writing and not education. But then, you didn't expect any actual education experts to be involved in this, did you? The report card is largely cribbed together from the work of other reform outfits. It gives states a grade based on... well, here are the categories.

State Academic Standards

This is not actually based on the state's academic standards. Seriously. Instead, ALEC turned to the 2017 EducationNext work that rated a state based on how closely its percentage of "proficient students" on the Big Standardized Test matched the percentage on the NAEP. It's similar to work that FEE did to gin up something they called the Honesty Gap (based on the idea that if students did better on the state's test than the NAEP, that showed the state cheating on its test).

There are plenty of unchecked assumptions here. The biggest one is that the test measures how "rigorous" the state standards are and not, say, how great their teachers are or how smart their students are or how good their schools are or, more to the point, how wealthy the test takers are. In short, it assumes the tests don't suck even as it assumes that they measure something they were not designed to measure. It also assumes that NAEP deserves to be considered a benchmark, and there are plenty of reasons to argue about that as well.

Charter Schools

This grade is based on the 2018 work of the Center for Education Reform, a group that loves charter schools so very much and hates teachers unions and public schools even more. They gave an A only to DC, Arizona and Indiana. They like a state that has few regulations, lets anyone authorize or open a charter, puts no limitations on charters, and gives charters plenty of money.

Homeschool Regulation Burden

This grade comes from the Home School Legal Defense Association analysis, and what HSLDA likes best is a state with no regulations at all-- not even a requirement to let anyone know you're doing it.

Private School Choice

Is there some form of voucher. This category is basically pass-fail, although they express it as either an A or an F, which kind of messes with the state's overall GPA.

Teacher Quality and Policies

Here they've borrowed the National Council on Teacher Quality report from 2017. I wrote about the 2015 report here, and, well, you get the idea. This is yet another group that decides on their own what quality should look like and then goes out and measures, like a person who carves a yardstick in his basement just based on his own ideas about how long an inch is and how many of them should be in a foot.

Digital Learning

This explanation opens with an odd sentence that starts "In 2016, integration of technology into the classroom..." almost as if someone cut and pasted from an earlier report. Then they talk about using the report from the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), except that FEE is nowadays called  ExcellinEd and the report is from 2014.

You'll note that the work ALEC has borrowed is from all over the place; almost as if they were less interested in getting at what's actually happening and more interested in making a case for privatization and profiteering in education.

But let's play a game-- now that you've seen what's factored in, can you guess what the report claims to be rating states on, education-wise? Well, here's the full title:

Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform.

Notice that none of the six factors that went into state grades had anything at all to do the performance of the state's education system or any progress that has been made. Nothing here considers what is being taught or how well it is being taught or how well students are learning. Nothing here even remotely considers the fundamental classroom business of educating young human beings.

ALEC acknowledges that, even as the officially indicate that they want to change the game.

"Our Education Report Card rollout this year will focus on the non-academic effects of educational choice," says the report. We could talk about the academic affects which are, trust us, awesome. Yuge, even, as indicated in some of what we hear are the very best studies. Very best. But nowadays, we consider academic effects are beside the point:

This success, however, is overshadowing what are arguably the more important results of empowering families with educational freedom: school choice is helping families shape their children into better citizens, and into young adults of whom both they and America can be proud.

In other words, we don't need choice to rescue students from failing schools, and we don't need choice because it is more efficient or less expensive, and we don't even need choice because it would get better educational outcomes. We need choice because we need choice. It empowers family and somehow, some way, turns children into better people. I don't know if that's dogwhistle talk for "it let's us get children away from the evil socialist-infected government school system" or whether it's just baloney flung to justify "We want to privatize education because there is a ton of money to be made."  Neither is really a good look.

One Other Interesting Point

The report contains other factoids, like the dollars-per-student figure for each state, displayed prominently by their NAEP scores, as if we should comparison shop the best price-per-NAEP-point. This is done with no context; for instance, Alaska's cost-per-pupil is high, but then, the cost of everything in Alaska is high. There's a lot of apples to aardvark comparison going on in this report. But that's not the fun thing I promised.

EducationDive's uncritical reporting of the ALEC release included one fun quote from Scott Kaufman, who called the Common Core Standards "dead and buried." On the one hand, it's an odd thing to say, since the standards-- either under the original name or under witness protection style aliases-- are still kicking around most states.

On the other hand, maybe he means what I mean when I say that the Core has had it-- the original dream that it would crack open a national market for education profiteers ("Imagine! Every state can use the exact same textbook!"), then yes, it's dead. If he means that the federales will no longer try to push it, well, as long as you don't acknowledge that "college and career ready" is a sad euphemism for CCS, then yes, it's dead -ish. If, as the rest of the report would suggest, ALEC is mostly interested in growing free-market libertarian don't-steal-my-tax-doillars-to-help-Those-People anti-government education, well, then, the Core has mostly done its work and can sasfely be declared dead.

It's unfortunate that a "report card" like this even exists, though given ALEC's general shyness, I don't think we'll see it touted in the press a great deal. Unfortunately, I suspect the main function is as a motivator for legislators who want to stay on ALEC's good side, a sort of prescription for what ALEC expects its BFFs to advocate for. Look for some of this language coming to a speech from a politician near you.