This is going to be kind of rambly and personal and religious; you've been warned. I've been trying to sort through my thoughts about the use of tax dollars to support private religious schools. I started here, then picked the thread up here. I have problems with the idea of vouchers as a tool for religious freedom, and it has taken me some discussion and thought to zero in on part of my issue.
It's not just separation of church and state. I believe in it, and not just for the state's sake, but for religion's as well. I've oft-quoted (but have trouble finding the original author for) "When you mix religion and politics, you get politics," and we seem to be living through a fairly stark demonstration of that.
But the mixing continues apace. I have some religious conservative friends who have long thought, as does, apparently, Betsy DeVos, that there are certain functions that rightfully belong to the church that have been usurped by the state, and it's high time they were taken back. Schools are on that list. I think that's a huge mistake, both for state and church.
I am trying to side step a larger discussion of religion here. My own relationship with the church is... complicated. I have been a C&E guy, and I've been in leadership positions. My faith in God remains far stronger than my faith in all the tiny little humans who purport to speak for God. And as a teacher of American literature, I talked to students about religion every year while staying carefully neutral (my standard preamble was "I am going to talk about what these people believed. I am not here to tell you whether they were right or wrong-- just what they thought"). I'm rambling a bit now, but my point is that I've spent a lot of time thinking about how personal faith intersects with life and work in a country that was not, sorry, ever set up to be anything like a Christian nation.
I got to discussing this with Neal McCluskey, the CATO education guy with whom I disagree about almost everything, prompting him to write this response, and that helped me spot a big point on which we disagree. Here's part of what he wrote. The set up...
Writes Greene about “Libby folks”—presumably libertarians and not fans of canned fruit—“you have, of course, always been free to send your child to a religious school. What’s new here is the argument that the government should pay for it.” He goes on, “Libbys are saying that citizens should be taxed so that their children can practice their religion,” which doesn’t seem like a very libertarian thing to do.
And the pitch:
I agree. It isn’t. Except for one thing with which Greene never seriously grapples: this is in a status quo in which everyone is taxed to support government schools, schools that, by law, must be secular. In other words, a system in which religious people are inherently second-class citizens.
I agree with the first part, but not the second. For me, "secular" is not the same as "anti-religious." I don't see an issue, and have never seen one in thirty-nine years, with students of faith in a secular classroom--
Unless...
Unless the student (or her parents) believes that their religion should dominate everything else. There is that certain brand of Christian who believes that her belief system should dominate whatever room, whatever endeavor she is involved in. She may insist that it is an excuse to deliberately reject learning (a colleague who was teaching a gifted class about comparative religions in the world was told by a student that there was no point in learning about other religions because they were all wrong), or demand that other students do not say or do or be things that she finds offensive. And of course you can insert a discussion of all the different evolution arguments here.
These are people who have yet to grow in faith and who, frankly, don't know much about the story of their own faith (Fun fact for proponents of the Biblical story of creation: there are two creation stories in Genesis, and they don't match. Seriously.) The history of the Christian church is filled with arguing and fighting and stabbing and killing over doctrinal points we no longer even talk or think about. One of my basic articles of belief is that anyone who thinks they know everything they need to know about a subject is a dope, and that goes quadruple for religion. Every person I've ever known whose faith I respected and admired can tell you right off the top of their head five things they got wrong about their faith when they were younger.
Point is, we're all growing, or should be, and putting yourself in a bubble where nobody will ever say anything you disagree with is an impediment to growth. This weird new interpretation of the First Amendment (I should be able to discriminate as I think my religion requires me to) is not just bad for the country, but it's bad for religion and it's bad for the people who want to practice it.
Also on my list of Things I Believe-- if your idea can't hold up to discussion or opposing views, it's probably not a great idea. If you think simply being exposed to science will forever erode your child's faith in God, then your conception of God is flawed (including your lack of understanding of God's willingness to play the long game).
There is no way to include religion in public education without having the government pick a winner, and that's bad for everyone. And every argument that boils down to "But we really deserve to be the winner" is invalid.
There is one other factor at play here-- the mixture of religion and politics has given us people who think their political or social beliefs are religious. But believing in capitalism as the best system-- that's not religious. Believing that LGBTQ folks shouldn't be seen, heard, or given rights-- that's not religious. Believing in white supremacy is not religious. We have a long history of reading current social beliefs into scripture, like the Southern Baptists who left the main church over their belief that slavery was mandated by God. If you are just trying to impose your political beliefs under the banner of God, well, schools should also be apolitical, and you should go sit down.
But to circle back around to my point (and I do have one), secular is not the antithesis or religious. Technical definition: denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. Secular is the absence of religion, not the rejection of it. A sunrise is secular. A baby's birth is secular. A baseball game is secular. A good jazz solo is secular. Faith (and its confused cousin, religion) is what puts a foundation under all that. The secular stuff is the dry soup mix and faith is the boiling water you add to make soup. Secular is the what and the how; faith is the why. They are not mutually exclusive, but mutually enriching. Someone without any secular education is stuck worshipping Magic Santa ("Yeah, God just waves his magic hand and stuff happened) which is pretty meager stuff. Someone without faith-- well, I don't know. I don't know if I've ever met someone without any faith in a larger something of some kind, though I'm sure it's theoretically possible.I think it would suck.
But because the faith part is personal, and because religion plus politics equals politics, we have a secular government and secular government agencies like schools, because this is not supposed to be the country where we extract tax dollars from Ed to pay for a school that will reject Ed's kid because of their tiny view of God.
It's also the kind of country where you should be able to go set up your own bubble school if you want to, and I totally support that. Just not funding it wit tax dollars either directly or via some clever voucher set up.
And if your beef with "secular" schools is really that you and your religious brethren aren't being given the dominant voice you deserve, well, that's very American, too. It's a big part of what brought the Puritans here, which got us fun things like Salem and hanging Quakers for proselytizing wrongly and banishing people. Our colonial period is filled with examples of how badly things go when the state picks a religious winner, which is probably a chunk of what motivated the founding fathers to bake in religious neutrality.
And picking a religious winner is where religious vouchers end up. The Satanic Church or the Rastafarians will try to horn in and then some folks will say, "We need rules" and before you know it, we'll have the Federal Bureau of Religious School Certification. Neutrality is the only workable course.
Again, secular schools are not anti-religion unless you think you're religion is too good and right and better to be forced to be on equal footing with all the other religions. Secularism is not a religion. Science is not a religion. Secular schools leave a big blank space where religion goes, leaving families, preachers, or random youtube videos to fill in that space. If your feeling is that you must be allowed to fill in that space with your preferred beliefs, send your child to a school that does it, but don't bill me for it.
That's what I think.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Freedom: You Keep Using That Word...
Freedom is a great thing. I'm a huge fan. But because it has so many positive associations, some folks just can't resist the urge to twist it.
Take the frequent efforts to "free" teachers from their unions. Oppressive unions rob teachers of the freedom to work extra long hours, the freedom to be paid whatever their bosses feel like paying them, the freedom to be fired for any reason at any time. Folks like Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform talk about "the freedom from constraining work rules and contracts" and the idea that teachers should be "entrepreneurs," another word that has been hijacked because "struggling worker in the gig economy who has no safety net, health insurance, or prospects for future security" is too wordy.
Betsy DeVos is also trying to get some mileage out of "freedom" as she tries to sell her school voucher program as "freedom scholarships."
DeVos's choices as Secretary of Education is best understood through this lens: businesses and churches (well, the right ones, anyway) should be free of all government oversight, free to do as they wish. Any rule that requires them to something they don't want to do, or that keeps them from doing something they want to do, should be removed (this puts her in tune with her boss, except that instead of "removed" he leans toward "ignored").
So education "freedom" means that any company that wants to take a shot at scoring some of those sweet, sweet public tax dollars should be able to. And any religious organization (well, not "any," exactly) should be able do the same-- and without having to worry about any rules about discriminating about one group or another. The government should be subservient to business and the church (well, not just any church).
Part of the "freedom" of DeVos's voucher program is the freedom to contribute to the private school of your choice instead of paying your share of taxes to the government. But that's the part that's being sold more quietly.
The loud sell is as freedom for parents, freedom to craft exactly the education that best fits their child ("fits" is one of my fave DeVosian euphemisms, far less unseemly than flat out suggesting that children should get the kind of education appropriate to their proper station in life, because people are always happier when they know their place and stay in it).
Parental freedom is a useful frame, because it lets reformsters turn to people like me and say, "So I guess you don't trust parents to choose well for their children."
But parental "freedom" isn't about trust-- it's about abandoning parents and violating the promise this country made about ensuring each child would get a good, free education. Have we sometimes failed at fulfilling that promise? Sure, and much too often, but the solution to a promises unfulfilled is not to just abandon the promise entirely. The kind of education "freedom" that DeVos is touting is about handing every parent a stack of money and saying, "Okay, you're free. There are some guys over there who might sell you some education, but that's your problem, not ours. Once we hand you some money, we wash our hands of you."
Could some parents navigate a education "environment" (another badly co-opted term) successfully? Certainly. But it won't be simple. Name one segment of the consumer economy that is dominated by honest, fact-based marketing. Name one segment of the consumer economy that is devoted to serving every single person in the country. Education will not be a magical exception. And with education, we're talking about a "product" that may not be seriously evaluated until years later, making it hard to collect consumer data. Some parents will be sorely tested by the work of navigating the marketplace, some will be unwilling to make the effort, and some will be snookered by slick marketing that ranges from misleading to simply lying. And some will find that for whatever reason, no vendors will want their child as a "customer." I have far more belief in the parents than I do in the market into which they'd be dumped, unaided and overmatched. And all of these struggling parents will face a government that says, "I gave you a voucher. I made you free. I did my part. What do you want from me? If you spent your Education Freedom Bucks poorly, that's on you."
There is an ugly underside to DeVos's pitch-- some families will end up as losers in this brave new free marketplace, and that is as it should be. Some people need to learn to run a corporation, and some need to learn how to serve it. Freedom in the marketplace belongs to those with wealth and power (that's how rich folks beat the housing market to get nice homes near the nice school), and vouchers, "freedom" or otherwise, will exacerbate the gap, not erase it.
The "freedom" being discussed is not freedom for the folks on the bottom. It's freedom for the folks on top. Freedom to profit and freedom to hold on to every dollar they touch. But most of all, the freedom not to worry about others. Like the heads of Lyft and Uber, they don't have to worry about their workers' health or future; they just keep figuring out how to get the most money out of those meat widgets. The freedom not to worry about the customers. The freedom not to worry about anything but the bottom line. The freedom to operate in an unregulated marketplace.
Freedom from public education is no more desirable than freedom from fire fighters. But we live in an age where some folks want to give the poor freedom from a social safety net and give retirees freedom from a secure income ("Just play the stock market yourself. What could go wrong?"). We are surrounded by people who see us a nice, plump sheep, and they would like to give us freedom from the fence and the shepherd.
It's not "freedom" to cancel the country's promise and obligation to its children. Yes, the "protection" of the government can be misguided, misplaced and even oppressive. As I said at the outset, I am a big fan of freedom. But to yank a ladder away from people while announcing, "Now you have the freedom to climb the wall on your own," is no gift to people, not even if someone offers to sell them a shiny stepstool or magic beans (while demanding that neighbors help finance the purchase).
Balancing true freedom against a reasonable amount of security is never an easy task, and we've been fiddling with it for centuries, but the DeVosian idea of "freedom" makes a lousy north star, useful only for steering us to a land where liberty is a commodity and you can have all the freedom you can afford-- and no more. We're way too close to that land already; I'd prefer a different direction.
Take the frequent efforts to "free" teachers from their unions. Oppressive unions rob teachers of the freedom to work extra long hours, the freedom to be paid whatever their bosses feel like paying them, the freedom to be fired for any reason at any time. Folks like Jeanne Allen at the Center for Education Reform talk about "the freedom from constraining work rules and contracts" and the idea that teachers should be "entrepreneurs," another word that has been hijacked because "struggling worker in the gig economy who has no safety net, health insurance, or prospects for future security" is too wordy.
Betsy DeVos is also trying to get some mileage out of "freedom" as she tries to sell her school voucher program as "freedom scholarships."
So education "freedom" means that any company that wants to take a shot at scoring some of those sweet, sweet public tax dollars should be able to. And any religious organization (well, not "any," exactly) should be able do the same-- and without having to worry about any rules about discriminating about one group or another. The government should be subservient to business and the church (well, not just any church).
Part of the "freedom" of DeVos's voucher program is the freedom to contribute to the private school of your choice instead of paying your share of taxes to the government. But that's the part that's being sold more quietly.
The loud sell is as freedom for parents, freedom to craft exactly the education that best fits their child ("fits" is one of my fave DeVosian euphemisms, far less unseemly than flat out suggesting that children should get the kind of education appropriate to their proper station in life, because people are always happier when they know their place and stay in it).
Parental freedom is a useful frame, because it lets reformsters turn to people like me and say, "So I guess you don't trust parents to choose well for their children."
But parental "freedom" isn't about trust-- it's about abandoning parents and violating the promise this country made about ensuring each child would get a good, free education. Have we sometimes failed at fulfilling that promise? Sure, and much too often, but the solution to a promises unfulfilled is not to just abandon the promise entirely. The kind of education "freedom" that DeVos is touting is about handing every parent a stack of money and saying, "Okay, you're free. There are some guys over there who might sell you some education, but that's your problem, not ours. Once we hand you some money, we wash our hands of you."
Could some parents navigate a education "environment" (another badly co-opted term) successfully? Certainly. But it won't be simple. Name one segment of the consumer economy that is dominated by honest, fact-based marketing. Name one segment of the consumer economy that is devoted to serving every single person in the country. Education will not be a magical exception. And with education, we're talking about a "product" that may not be seriously evaluated until years later, making it hard to collect consumer data. Some parents will be sorely tested by the work of navigating the marketplace, some will be unwilling to make the effort, and some will be snookered by slick marketing that ranges from misleading to simply lying. And some will find that for whatever reason, no vendors will want their child as a "customer." I have far more belief in the parents than I do in the market into which they'd be dumped, unaided and overmatched. And all of these struggling parents will face a government that says, "I gave you a voucher. I made you free. I did my part. What do you want from me? If you spent your Education Freedom Bucks poorly, that's on you."
There is an ugly underside to DeVos's pitch-- some families will end up as losers in this brave new free marketplace, and that is as it should be. Some people need to learn to run a corporation, and some need to learn how to serve it. Freedom in the marketplace belongs to those with wealth and power (that's how rich folks beat the housing market to get nice homes near the nice school), and vouchers, "freedom" or otherwise, will exacerbate the gap, not erase it.
The "freedom" being discussed is not freedom for the folks on the bottom. It's freedom for the folks on top. Freedom to profit and freedom to hold on to every dollar they touch. But most of all, the freedom not to worry about others. Like the heads of Lyft and Uber, they don't have to worry about their workers' health or future; they just keep figuring out how to get the most money out of those meat widgets. The freedom not to worry about the customers. The freedom not to worry about anything but the bottom line. The freedom to operate in an unregulated marketplace.
Freedom from public education is no more desirable than freedom from fire fighters. But we live in an age where some folks want to give the poor freedom from a social safety net and give retirees freedom from a secure income ("Just play the stock market yourself. What could go wrong?"). We are surrounded by people who see us a nice, plump sheep, and they would like to give us freedom from the fence and the shepherd.
It's not "freedom" to cancel the country's promise and obligation to its children. Yes, the "protection" of the government can be misguided, misplaced and even oppressive. As I said at the outset, I am a big fan of freedom. But to yank a ladder away from people while announcing, "Now you have the freedom to climb the wall on your own," is no gift to people, not even if someone offers to sell them a shiny stepstool or magic beans (while demanding that neighbors help finance the purchase).
Balancing true freedom against a reasonable amount of security is never an easy task, and we've been fiddling with it for centuries, but the DeVosian idea of "freedom" makes a lousy north star, useful only for steering us to a land where liberty is a commodity and you can have all the freedom you can afford-- and no more. We're way too close to that land already; I'd prefer a different direction.
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
AI Pokes Another Hole In Standardized Testing
The stories were supposed to capture a new step forward in artificial intelligence. A “Breakthrough for A.I. Technology: Passing an 8th-Grade Science Test,” said the New York Times. “AI Aristo takes science test, emerges multiple-choice superstar,” said TechXPlore. Both stories were talking about Aristo (indicating a child version of Aristotle), a project of Paul Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where the headline read, “How to tutor AI from an ‘F’ to an ‘A.’”
The occasion for all this excitement is Aristo’s conquest of a big standardized test, answering a convincing 80% of questions correctly on the 12th grade science test and 90% on the 8th grade test. Four years ago, none of the programs that attempted this feat were successful at all.
We see these occasional steps forward greeted with a certain amount of hyperbole (last year the New York Post announced that computers were “beating humans” at reading comprehension), or the time the BBC announced that an AI “had the IQ of a four-year-old child,” but the field still has a very long way to go. And as it tries to get there, it tells us something about the education tasks set for humans.
Wired perhaps best captured the issue in a story headlined “AI Can Pass Standardized Tests—But It Would Fail Preschool.” AI’s still can’t answer open-ended questions, and Aristo was designed strictly to deal with multiple choice, and only within certain parameters. Aristo has problems with questions involving diagrams, charts, or hypotheticals. The program, as Melanie Mitchell at Wired puts it, lacks common sense. Multiple choice questions tend to come with certain cues and “giveaways,” enough that Mitchell found she could just about pass the test with googling, making Aristo marginally “smarter” than a search engine.
These articles are all considering the development, design, and pursuit of artificial intelligence, but I would rather look at what all this says about the standardized tests themselves.
Despite the Post headline, no piece of software actually “comprehends” reading, and Aristo is not ready to be a cybernetic scientist. Or as Mitchell puts it, in a quote I would have mounted on my classroom wall, “We must keep in mind that a high score on a particular data set does not always mean that a machine has actually learned the task its human programmers intended.”
In that quote, we could as easily replace “machine” with “student” and “human programmers” with “teachers.”
What these AI experiments keep proving over and over is that students do not have to possess any knowledge or understanding of the subject matter to be trained to succeed on the tests. The high stakes test that have been the foundation of the education accountability movement clearly do not measure what they purport to measure, as demonstrated by computer software that has zero “academic achievement” and yet scores well on the test.
If actual academic knowledge and understanding is not a prerequisite for a good score on the test, then what does the big standardized test actually measure? And is there anything be gained by pushing–and measuring–students to be more like software that doesn’t know much except how to figure out the correct answer on a multiple choice test?
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Why You Can Ignore That Hot New DFER Poll
Yesterday the Democrats for Education Reform dropped a hot new pile of steaming poll results, and some media outlets, like US News, jumped right on it. The take was that Democrat voters are hollering for charters and choice, and the candidates are acting foolishly by running in the other direction.
Here's why you (and the candidates) don't need to be excitedly about any of this.
First, it's DFER. DFER was founded by some hedge funders who hoped to steer the Democratic party in a more free-marketty direction when it came to education. Their Democrat bona fides are suspect enough that some state Dems have actually demanded they un-D-ify themselves. DFER has had a bit of a tactical problem ever since Trump moved into the White House and brought Betsy DeVos along for the ride, namely that when DFER's favorite policies come out of DeVos's mouth, they're much harder to sell. Consequently, DFER has been trying hard to make the case that Good Democrats believe in charters and choice and Practical Democrats must at least act like they support these things if they want to get elected. So this is more of that.
Second, the polling company Benenson is not a polling company like Gallup is a polling company. Says their site, "We help leaders connect with, persuade and activate the audiences you need to win." They are a high-powered PR consulting firm, ready to help you anywhere "from the political war room to the corporate board room."
The poll questions are tilted (we'll get back to that), but the big clue to what's really going on here is in their own write-up of the results. Here's how one item is presented:
Message tested: “It’s time to not only start making real investments in our public schools, but fix the way we fund them so every student gets their fair share of resources, not just those in wealthy neighborhoods. Every child deserves a chance for a great education, no matter where they live, and to make that possible, we need to start funding schools fairly.”
Message tested.
This is a survey about messaging. This is not a "what do people actually think" survey, but a "what version of our message is most likely to sell" survey.
So, of course, the various tested messages are hugely biased. This isn't even a push poll (those polls that pretend to ask question but are meant to push certain ideas into the electorate ("Would you vote for John McCain if you heard he fathered an illegitimate black child?"). This is just plain old test marketing.
So yes. The example above is a good sample-- who, exactly, would respond "No, I don't want students to get their fair share of resources"? Or this one--
Politicians have failed our public schools and our children for decades by refusing to pay teachers what they deserve. We need to raise salaries for all teachers and use extra pay and incentives to diversify teaching and recruit great teachers in hard-to-staff subjects and high-need schools. Because a great education for our kids starts with great teachers in every classroom.
That polled strongly-- probably more strongly than if it had been phrased "We need to lower the base salary for all teachers and provide bonuses only for those teachers who teach students with high test scores."
The marquee result that was boosted by US News and others was
Expand access to more choices and options within the public-school system, including magnet schools, career academies, and public charter schools.
Again, a real winner that tested better than, say, "Give public taxpayer dollars to private companies that will not serve all students and which will be run by private individuals and not elected school boards." Also note that the survey question completely skips the question of whether or not charter schools are public schools or not (they aren't).
It must have been even tougher to come up with a way to sell testing, which pretty much everyone is fed up with, but Benenson gave respondents a choice between these two options:
Require each state to measure student achievement through statewide assessments with a consistent set of benchmarks and standards, so that we can make apples-to-apples comparisons to understand which schools are succeeding and which need help.
Allow each school district in a state to set its own benchmarks, standards, and tests, instead of statewide assessments that measure every student's achievement based on a consistent set of standards.
That's not a choice that will tell us anything about how the public really feels about high stakes testing, nor does it reflect reality.
We could keep playing this game with the whole survey, but you get the idea. It's the equivalent of asking a child "Would you rather have a pretty pony or this rotting rat carcass?" It's market testing blue packaging and green packaging without asking any questions about the product in the package.
Most of all, this is a "poll" aimed at a very small audience--the Democratic candidates and their campaigns. The message is simple-- adopt our policies and you will totally be a winner. It completely avoids the complexity and costs of some issues (charters) and the settled toxicity of others (testing) in the hope that somebody with political power will be willing to be BFFs with DFER again. Here's hoping the candidates have the sense to ignore this big pile of baloney.
Here's why you (and the candidates) don't need to be excitedly about any of this.
Second, the polling company Benenson is not a polling company like Gallup is a polling company. Says their site, "We help leaders connect with, persuade and activate the audiences you need to win." They are a high-powered PR consulting firm, ready to help you anywhere "from the political war room to the corporate board room."
The poll questions are tilted (we'll get back to that), but the big clue to what's really going on here is in their own write-up of the results. Here's how one item is presented:
Message tested: “It’s time to not only start making real investments in our public schools, but fix the way we fund them so every student gets their fair share of resources, not just those in wealthy neighborhoods. Every child deserves a chance for a great education, no matter where they live, and to make that possible, we need to start funding schools fairly.”
Message tested.
This is a survey about messaging. This is not a "what do people actually think" survey, but a "what version of our message is most likely to sell" survey.
So, of course, the various tested messages are hugely biased. This isn't even a push poll (those polls that pretend to ask question but are meant to push certain ideas into the electorate ("Would you vote for John McCain if you heard he fathered an illegitimate black child?"). This is just plain old test marketing.
So yes. The example above is a good sample-- who, exactly, would respond "No, I don't want students to get their fair share of resources"? Or this one--
Politicians have failed our public schools and our children for decades by refusing to pay teachers what they deserve. We need to raise salaries for all teachers and use extra pay and incentives to diversify teaching and recruit great teachers in hard-to-staff subjects and high-need schools. Because a great education for our kids starts with great teachers in every classroom.
That polled strongly-- probably more strongly than if it had been phrased "We need to lower the base salary for all teachers and provide bonuses only for those teachers who teach students with high test scores."
The marquee result that was boosted by US News and others was
Expand access to more choices and options within the public-school system, including magnet schools, career academies, and public charter schools.
Again, a real winner that tested better than, say, "Give public taxpayer dollars to private companies that will not serve all students and which will be run by private individuals and not elected school boards." Also note that the survey question completely skips the question of whether or not charter schools are public schools or not (they aren't).
It must have been even tougher to come up with a way to sell testing, which pretty much everyone is fed up with, but Benenson gave respondents a choice between these two options:
Require each state to measure student achievement through statewide assessments with a consistent set of benchmarks and standards, so that we can make apples-to-apples comparisons to understand which schools are succeeding and which need help.
Allow each school district in a state to set its own benchmarks, standards, and tests, instead of statewide assessments that measure every student's achievement based on a consistent set of standards.
That's not a choice that will tell us anything about how the public really feels about high stakes testing, nor does it reflect reality.
We could keep playing this game with the whole survey, but you get the idea. It's the equivalent of asking a child "Would you rather have a pretty pony or this rotting rat carcass?" It's market testing blue packaging and green packaging without asking any questions about the product in the package.
Most of all, this is a "poll" aimed at a very small audience--the Democratic candidates and their campaigns. The message is simple-- adopt our policies and you will totally be a winner. It completely avoids the complexity and costs of some issues (charters) and the settled toxicity of others (testing) in the hope that somebody with political power will be willing to be BFFs with DFER again. Here's hoping the candidates have the sense to ignore this big pile of baloney.
Monday, October 7, 2019
What The Heck Is A Chief Innovation Officer? (And Does Your District Need A Proactive Change Agent Visionary Leader To Transform Your Human Capital With Capacity-Building Systems?)
My college job was in the private sector, working in the education and communication department of an industrial manufacturing company. In ways that my college education could never hope to, my time there drove home how there are plenty of folks making a good living using language to obscure rather than reveal, the there's a whole art of using language to try to convey importance and weight while cloaking the actual content of those words with smoke and mirrors. On the one hand, it's appalling, like watching someone use the Mona Lisa to scrub the grime off their car. On the other hand, it's its own kind of hilarious language, a linguistic emperor's new clothes. We entertained ourselves by cranking out faux bulletins in corporate argle bargle; I actually have a bound collection of our best work.
I am reminded of all that when I read some of the corporate baloney unleashed on education (not that education doesn't have its own ridiculous jargon). Take, for instance, the new-ish corporate ed reform job of Chief Innovation Officer. Right off the bat, we know this is corporate-style baloney, because of the desire to signal this is a Real Important Job by making it C-level with a Chief in front. The whole trend of turning school administration jobs into "chief" jobs is about "translating" education-speak into corporate-speak.
The Center for Digital Education offered its own balonified exercise in explaining CIOs in 2013; you know from the very first paragraph it's going to be richly foolish:
Chief innovation officers are slowly popping up in school districts around the country. Some say they fill a gap in leadership that's preventing education from moving forward.
First-- "slowly popping up"?? I'm trying to imagine slow-popping popcorn, or a jack-in-the-box that emerges like an arthritic octogenarian. Nope. If you're going to pop up, you can't do it slowly. Second- "some say"?? Some what? Some corporate guys who want to remake education in their own image.
It turns out that "around the country" meant "in at last four school districts" in 2013. The article features plenty of unfounded assertions, like "Right now, probably 70% of school districts need a complete makeover." Don't expect any support or elaboration for that. The article interviews a new CIO who's supposed to provide "visionary leadership" and who says an "exciting piece" of his job is "to empower people and build capacity in a way that inspires." But the article also notes that the CIO job description is varied from place to place; in Detroit, the job is simply "to better prepare students for college." What that has to do with innovation is not clear.
Not that the corporate world where the term originated knows either. The term supposedly comes from a 1998 book, Fourth Generatio R&D, and wikipedia says it's for the person most reposnible for managing change, who comes up with new ideas and who recognizes them when other people bring them up. Inc offers its own explanation which involves championing innovation and driving new growth. Back in 2009, Forbes was sure that you needed one for your company. LinkedIN shows close to 200 openings at the various times I looked.
Education has always been where corporate fads go to die (before Outcome Based Education, there was Management By Objectives), but modern ed reform, with its belief that education needs to be run like a business, has accelerated that process. So as we saw above, CIOs were a coming thing in 2013. In 2016, edWeb was explaining why schools needed a CIO in the same graceless language
Education is experiencing an extraordinary transformation that requires Innovative Leadership to implement major change initiatives and redesign numerous systems within a school district. A strong movement driven by Future Ready Schools is charging toward a personalized learning environment to prepare students for college, career, and life readiness that links the learning in the classroom to a real world setting.
It just sounds so smart, you know. Major change initiatives. Redesign numerous systems. Charging toward a personalized learning environment. It has the solid ring of corporate argle bargle-- you almost know what it means, close enough that you assume that with some specialized training you'd have a better idea what exactly they mean. That's a more charitable assumption than figuring that they are keeping the language vague and grand because they themselves don't know exactly what they mean, but they still want to make the sale. It's like moving a product by giving it a fancy designation, like JSB-400; it makes it sound hard-edged and sciency, even if you just made the whole thing up. Corporate reform wants to sell itself as hard-nosed scientific management, and so we get this language to hide the fact that they are just as vaguely fuzzy-headed as those bleeding heart humanists who want to call teaching an art.
Meanwhile, you can get a CIO certificate to prove, I guess, that you are a visionary change agent of environmental disruption. And higher education is being scolded for having only 25% penetration of CIOs.
To really capture the baloney-fest, here comes Bellwether Partners with an interview with two CIOs-- Margo Roen (Education First) and David Saenz (Forth Worth ISD).
Roen's view of the job is more entrepreneurial-- grab data, look for "gaps," fill gaps through "internal capacity building or external partnerships," and then "formalize these strategic partnerships through performance contracts that clearly lay out expectations, autonomies, and supports for partners." So, figure out what test prep you need and hire some companies to provide it. Saenz is more managerial-- the CIO handles "change management" with various projects and communications with "internal and external partners," plus knowing how all the parts of a school district works. So, pretty much a superintendent.
Roen notes that there is still "not one prototype for the role" which is charming but really, what other job could get away with that. Certainly nobody's response to "We need more evaluation and accountability for teachers" is not "Well, there really isn't one prototype for the role." Roen believes innovation "can help create new solutions and more equitable systems, and use a more focused process to surface innovation needs." So, figuring out what problems ned to be solved and solving them-- is that really innovation, or just basic management?
Saenz gets to describe a typical week, and it's mostly meetings, but wow, what meetings. His typical week is "centered around meeting with a wide range of stakeholders to help foster collaborative decision-making as we address gaps in our district." He facilitates the work of the Office of Innovation, including the Innovation Action Team, a "cross-functioning team" with all sorts of key officials (including the "human capital office.")
Saenz also talks about the supports in place, like a "district culture" that enables CIOs "to push the limits of their district's capacity and form new schemas for how we manage our schools." He also lapses into plain English long enough to say that a lot of this is about charter school authorizing. Which for some of you will come as no surprise at all, because "innovation" these days is a euphemism for "privatization."
Which brings us to the last question in the interview-- why would a superintendent want a CIO. The argle bargle answer is that they are too busy with the daily problems and putting out fres that they lose the big picture. In other words, reformsters have found that getting their agenda fulfilled sometimes takes a back seat to actually running the district, so if the district could have someone working on privatizing full time, that would be a big help. Or, if you prefer, someone "who who is solely focused on the big picture, who shepherds forward an annual cycle of proactive evaluation and planning, and wakes up and goes to sleep every day thinking about the range of options and quality in the district."
All of this noise is generated in service to two obscure two things: 1) nobody pushing this stuff can offer a specific, concrete explanation of what it is and 2) it's about privatizing and profiteering.
It also reminds us of a point that is perhaps not made often enough (my hat is tipped here to Andrea Gabor, who addresses this really well in her book After the Education Wars) -- that we have a problem not just with reformsters who want to use business methods to manage education, but with reformnsters who want to use lousy business methods to manage education.
For teachers, the important point is to believe your own eyes and ears. You know language, and you know baloney when you see it. When it looks like someone is trying to fake you out with a bunch of baloney, they probably are. In this case, they definitely are. If you think you can see the emperor's bare ass, it's because you can. Do not be intimidated by what a friend of mine use to call Big Wig Lingo.
And for the people pushing this stuff. Take a step back, really looking at what you're saying, and ask yourself if anyone should take this kind of billowy jargon seriously (spoiler alert: the answer is no). If you really have something to say, you'll do better in plain English.
The Center for Digital Education offered its own balonified exercise in explaining CIOs in 2013; you know from the very first paragraph it's going to be richly foolish:
Chief innovation officers are slowly popping up in school districts around the country. Some say they fill a gap in leadership that's preventing education from moving forward.
First-- "slowly popping up"?? I'm trying to imagine slow-popping popcorn, or a jack-in-the-box that emerges like an arthritic octogenarian. Nope. If you're going to pop up, you can't do it slowly. Second- "some say"?? Some what? Some corporate guys who want to remake education in their own image.
It turns out that "around the country" meant "in at last four school districts" in 2013. The article features plenty of unfounded assertions, like "Right now, probably 70% of school districts need a complete makeover." Don't expect any support or elaboration for that. The article interviews a new CIO who's supposed to provide "visionary leadership" and who says an "exciting piece" of his job is "to empower people and build capacity in a way that inspires." But the article also notes that the CIO job description is varied from place to place; in Detroit, the job is simply "to better prepare students for college." What that has to do with innovation is not clear.
Not that the corporate world where the term originated knows either. The term supposedly comes from a 1998 book, Fourth Generatio R&D, and wikipedia says it's for the person most reposnible for managing change, who comes up with new ideas and who recognizes them when other people bring them up. Inc offers its own explanation which involves championing innovation and driving new growth. Back in 2009, Forbes was sure that you needed one for your company. LinkedIN shows close to 200 openings at the various times I looked.
Education has always been where corporate fads go to die (before Outcome Based Education, there was Management By Objectives), but modern ed reform, with its belief that education needs to be run like a business, has accelerated that process. So as we saw above, CIOs were a coming thing in 2013. In 2016, edWeb was explaining why schools needed a CIO in the same graceless language
Education is experiencing an extraordinary transformation that requires Innovative Leadership to implement major change initiatives and redesign numerous systems within a school district. A strong movement driven by Future Ready Schools is charging toward a personalized learning environment to prepare students for college, career, and life readiness that links the learning in the classroom to a real world setting.
It just sounds so smart, you know. Major change initiatives. Redesign numerous systems. Charging toward a personalized learning environment. It has the solid ring of corporate argle bargle-- you almost know what it means, close enough that you assume that with some specialized training you'd have a better idea what exactly they mean. That's a more charitable assumption than figuring that they are keeping the language vague and grand because they themselves don't know exactly what they mean, but they still want to make the sale. It's like moving a product by giving it a fancy designation, like JSB-400; it makes it sound hard-edged and sciency, even if you just made the whole thing up. Corporate reform wants to sell itself as hard-nosed scientific management, and so we get this language to hide the fact that they are just as vaguely fuzzy-headed as those bleeding heart humanists who want to call teaching an art.
Meanwhile, you can get a CIO certificate to prove, I guess, that you are a visionary change agent of environmental disruption. And higher education is being scolded for having only 25% penetration of CIOs.
To really capture the baloney-fest, here comes Bellwether Partners with an interview with two CIOs-- Margo Roen (Education First) and David Saenz (Forth Worth ISD).
Roen's view of the job is more entrepreneurial-- grab data, look for "gaps," fill gaps through "internal capacity building or external partnerships," and then "formalize these strategic partnerships through performance contracts that clearly lay out expectations, autonomies, and supports for partners." So, figure out what test prep you need and hire some companies to provide it. Saenz is more managerial-- the CIO handles "change management" with various projects and communications with "internal and external partners," plus knowing how all the parts of a school district works. So, pretty much a superintendent.
Roen notes that there is still "not one prototype for the role" which is charming but really, what other job could get away with that. Certainly nobody's response to "We need more evaluation and accountability for teachers" is not "Well, there really isn't one prototype for the role." Roen believes innovation "can help create new solutions and more equitable systems, and use a more focused process to surface innovation needs." So, figuring out what problems ned to be solved and solving them-- is that really innovation, or just basic management?
Saenz gets to describe a typical week, and it's mostly meetings, but wow, what meetings. His typical week is "centered around meeting with a wide range of stakeholders to help foster collaborative decision-making as we address gaps in our district." He facilitates the work of the Office of Innovation, including the Innovation Action Team, a "cross-functioning team" with all sorts of key officials (including the "human capital office.")
Saenz also talks about the supports in place, like a "district culture" that enables CIOs "to push the limits of their district's capacity and form new schemas for how we manage our schools." He also lapses into plain English long enough to say that a lot of this is about charter school authorizing. Which for some of you will come as no surprise at all, because "innovation" these days is a euphemism for "privatization."
Which brings us to the last question in the interview-- why would a superintendent want a CIO. The argle bargle answer is that they are too busy with the daily problems and putting out fres that they lose the big picture. In other words, reformsters have found that getting their agenda fulfilled sometimes takes a back seat to actually running the district, so if the district could have someone working on privatizing full time, that would be a big help. Or, if you prefer, someone "who who is solely focused on the big picture, who shepherds forward an annual cycle of proactive evaluation and planning, and wakes up and goes to sleep every day thinking about the range of options and quality in the district."
All of this noise is generated in service to two obscure two things: 1) nobody pushing this stuff can offer a specific, concrete explanation of what it is and 2) it's about privatizing and profiteering.
It also reminds us of a point that is perhaps not made often enough (my hat is tipped here to Andrea Gabor, who addresses this really well in her book After the Education Wars) -- that we have a problem not just with reformsters who want to use business methods to manage education, but with reformnsters who want to use lousy business methods to manage education.
For teachers, the important point is to believe your own eyes and ears. You know language, and you know baloney when you see it. When it looks like someone is trying to fake you out with a bunch of baloney, they probably are. In this case, they definitely are. If you think you can see the emperor's bare ass, it's because you can. Do not be intimidated by what a friend of mine use to call Big Wig Lingo.
And for the people pushing this stuff. Take a step back, really looking at what you're saying, and ask yourself if anyone should take this kind of billowy jargon seriously (spoiler alert: the answer is no). If you really have something to say, you'll do better in plain English.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
ICYMI: Applefest Weekend Edition (10/6)
Applefest is a thing in my small town, like the most giant tchotchke/food/car/etc festival a small town could hope to put on. So for three days we have walked till we dropped, only instead of dropping I'm going to sit here and pass along some worthwhile reading from the last week.
The Unmet Promises of a New Orleans Charter School
From The Nation, one more example of how charters in NOLA never quite lived up to the hyped promises that were made.
I Think My Bladder Changed
From Yahoo Lifestyle's series of interviews with teachers who left the field. Short, but utterly recognizable.
Let's Review Matt Bevin's Plan To Undermine Public Education In Kentucky
The Lexington Herald Leader is not having it with Kentucky's pro-privatization governor, and here is the whole breakdown of his program (recogizable from plenty of other states, unfortunately)
Craziness: How Mongomery's First Charter School Has Devolved Into Chaos In Less Than Six Weeks
Not enough supplies or teachers and a principal who has already been pushed to an angry resignation by the board. LEAD is a mess under a loader who asserts that charters don't have to follow laws. The Alabama Reporter has the whole wretched story. Oh, and as a bonus, there's a Gulen tie, too.
Teachers Won't Embrace Research Until It Embraces Them
The Right To Read project looks at how the "reading science" crew treat teachers, and how that seems unlikely to engender teacher loyalty or acceptance.
What's Wrong With Assigning Books--And Kids--Reading Levels
Reporters at the Washington Post books section provide yet another reminder that Lexile scores are not vert reliable or trustworth. Some concrete examples, including the one showing that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a higher Lexile score than The Grapes of Wrath or The Sound and the Fury.
Black Male Teachers Have Positive Effects On Students of All Races
Nice little op-ed from a former Black male teacher.
Inside the Koch's Vision for Public Education
Have You Heard interviews the author of Kochland about what exactly the Kochs want to see in public education (spoiler alert: less of it).
It's Not A Flashdrive
If you are a teacher, the odds are good that there's at least one student vaping in your classroom, right in front of you. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has collected some of the info you need to catch up on this newer trend.
The Unmet Promises of a New Orleans Charter School
From The Nation, one more example of how charters in NOLA never quite lived up to the hyped promises that were made.
I Think My Bladder Changed
From Yahoo Lifestyle's series of interviews with teachers who left the field. Short, but utterly recognizable.
Let's Review Matt Bevin's Plan To Undermine Public Education In Kentucky
The Lexington Herald Leader is not having it with Kentucky's pro-privatization governor, and here is the whole breakdown of his program (recogizable from plenty of other states, unfortunately)
Craziness: How Mongomery's First Charter School Has Devolved Into Chaos In Less Than Six Weeks
Not enough supplies or teachers and a principal who has already been pushed to an angry resignation by the board. LEAD is a mess under a loader who asserts that charters don't have to follow laws. The Alabama Reporter has the whole wretched story. Oh, and as a bonus, there's a Gulen tie, too.
Teachers Won't Embrace Research Until It Embraces Them
The Right To Read project looks at how the "reading science" crew treat teachers, and how that seems unlikely to engender teacher loyalty or acceptance.
What's Wrong With Assigning Books--And Kids--Reading Levels
Reporters at the Washington Post books section provide yet another reminder that Lexile scores are not vert reliable or trustworth. Some concrete examples, including the one showing that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a higher Lexile score than The Grapes of Wrath or The Sound and the Fury.
Black Male Teachers Have Positive Effects On Students of All Races
Nice little op-ed from a former Black male teacher.
Inside the Koch's Vision for Public Education
Have You Heard interviews the author of Kochland about what exactly the Kochs want to see in public education (spoiler alert: less of it).
It's Not A Flashdrive
If you are a teacher, the odds are good that there's at least one student vaping in your classroom, right in front of you. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has collected some of the info you need to catch up on this newer trend.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
The Next Big Problem With School Shooter Preparedness
We think we're seeing the worst side effects of our national preoccupation with school shooters.
We aren't.
The problems with active shooter drills have already been widely documented. In the best of circumstances, active shooter drills are disturbing, even if they are focused just on the adults in the building. I've been through a drill with shooters using blanks; it's rough. But we've ben seeing stories about drills that went wildly over the top-- execution-style shootings with pellet guns, and drills that are treated as an actual real event.
The trauma experienced by children is widespread and severe. Stories on facebook and twitter and in the supermarket abound. Children who are worried about sneezing or afraid that if they can't learn to stifle tears, they might give their position away to the shooter. The NEA felt the need to create a guide for helping students cope, while a steady stream of articles catalog the fears such drills awaken and the reasons active shooter drills should be stopped.
But from Florida comes news that hints at the next level of trouble sparked by drills and news coverage and the business of building fear into our children:
A ten-year-old girl is facing charges after she brought a steak knife to her elementary school in Florida, according to authorities.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, the girl said she brought the knife to Stanley Switlik Elementary School so she could protect herself if an armed attacker entered the school.
Most of the controversy surrounding these events centers on the district attorney's bizarre decision to level criminal charges against this girl (and the school's bizarre decision not to have her back). And that's all pretty awful, but that's not where I want to focus.
A student thought she needed to bring a weapon to school to protect herself from any scary attacker.
It's not a surprise this happened in Florida. In the "Florida man" state, students are subjected not just to the active shooter drills, but have hard all the discussion surrounding putting armed guards in schools, of arming teachers in their schools. Many of them have heard the insistence that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It should have been obvious. Why would a student not conclude that she needed to take a weapon to school?
This time it was a ten year old with a steak knife. Eventually it will be a sixteen year old with a hand gun. In the worst case scenario, that sixteen year old won't be arrested and charged for acting out of fear-- he'll be shot by some security guard, or, God help him, an armed teacher. Someone who, in a split-second moment of terror will think that student is a threat. And that's just one scenario-- I can't even begin to imagine all the different way things can take a turn for the worse when a frightened student brings a weapon to school.
But I believe it will happen again. We are building a toxic atmosphere of fear, fed by the foolish notion that the only solution for fearful things is even more fearful things. We are busy convincing students that they are in mortal peril and that only weapons can save them. Maybe there's a guard or a teacher or a cop on the way, but how could some students not conclude that the best way to have the most immediate protection is to have a weapon of their own. And there's no way that ends well.
We aren't.
The problems with active shooter drills have already been widely documented. In the best of circumstances, active shooter drills are disturbing, even if they are focused just on the adults in the building. I've been through a drill with shooters using blanks; it's rough. But we've ben seeing stories about drills that went wildly over the top-- execution-style shootings with pellet guns, and drills that are treated as an actual real event.
But from Florida comes news that hints at the next level of trouble sparked by drills and news coverage and the business of building fear into our children:
A ten-year-old girl is facing charges after she brought a steak knife to her elementary school in Florida, according to authorities.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, the girl said she brought the knife to Stanley Switlik Elementary School so she could protect herself if an armed attacker entered the school.
Most of the controversy surrounding these events centers on the district attorney's bizarre decision to level criminal charges against this girl (and the school's bizarre decision not to have her back). And that's all pretty awful, but that's not where I want to focus.
A student thought she needed to bring a weapon to school to protect herself from any scary attacker.
It's not a surprise this happened in Florida. In the "Florida man" state, students are subjected not just to the active shooter drills, but have hard all the discussion surrounding putting armed guards in schools, of arming teachers in their schools. Many of them have heard the insistence that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It should have been obvious. Why would a student not conclude that she needed to take a weapon to school?
This time it was a ten year old with a steak knife. Eventually it will be a sixteen year old with a hand gun. In the worst case scenario, that sixteen year old won't be arrested and charged for acting out of fear-- he'll be shot by some security guard, or, God help him, an armed teacher. Someone who, in a split-second moment of terror will think that student is a threat. And that's just one scenario-- I can't even begin to imagine all the different way things can take a turn for the worse when a frightened student brings a weapon to school.
But I believe it will happen again. We are building a toxic atmosphere of fear, fed by the foolish notion that the only solution for fearful things is even more fearful things. We are busy convincing students that they are in mortal peril and that only weapons can save them. Maybe there's a guard or a teacher or a cop on the way, but how could some students not conclude that the best way to have the most immediate protection is to have a weapon of their own. And there's no way that ends well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)