Betsy DeVos Enlists Help Of Kellyanne Conway And American Enterprise Institute To Sell $5 Billion School Choice Program

At the beginning of this month, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway sat down with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to make one more pitch for DeVos’s Education Freedom Scholarships. The program seems unlikely to succeed on the federal level.

What Is She Selling?

The EFS are what’s known as a tax credit scholarship. Several states have them, and they work like this: a donor gives money to a scholarship organization, then that program issues a scholarship for a student to attend a school, while the government credits some portion of the donation against the donor’s tax bill. In the case of DeVos’s program, the amount would be 100%. If I donate $100,000 to a scholarship organization, I pay $100,000 less in federal taxes.

What Are The Problems With Her Program?

DeVos has been plugging the program with variations of the following quote from the AEI discussion:

“Our Education Freedom Scholarships proposal…doesn’t grow the government bureaucracy one tiny bit…It doesn’t impose any new requirements on states or on families. It doesn’t take a single dollar from public school students, and it doesn’t spend a single dollar of government money. And it doesn’t entangle schools with federal strings or stifling red tape. In fact, it can’t. And that’s by design.”

None of these statements are accurate. The program would certainly not grow the government in a let’s-add-a-whole-new-bureau way, but it would be a government program requiring, at a bare minimum, someone to handle the paperwork. Families would have to apply for the scholarships, and because they would have to deal with the scholarship organization, there would be red tape. True, it might not be federal red tape, but families will still deal with a middleman. Pennsylvania’s version of this is the Opportunity Scholarship program, and that program includes 190 organizations, all of which had to apply to the state in order to be an officially recognized part of the program; a federal program would also need to establish who may or may not start collecting money from donors and handing it to families. While some are organizations that are essentially an extension of one particular private school, some manage a larger territory, and all presumably have costs that they have to cover. Presumably private schools in the program will provide assistance to new students “shopping” for a scholarship organization, but that shopping will still be part of the process. In short, there will still be plenty of bureaucracy; it just won’t all be federal.

As for the oft-repeated assertion that this will not “spend a single dollar of government money,” that is technically true (if we ignore the administrative costs). Since the scholarship money will never make it to the government coffers, it will never become “government money.” But it is also true that the government would, because of this program, have fewer dollars to spend. The would be $5 billion less in those government coffers, which means either the deficit will get bigger, or some programs will be cut. It may not spend government money, but it will certainly cost the government money.

There is another issue with tax credit scholarships. Wealthy donors can target particular schools, opening the door to a system in which wealthy patrons gain a large voice in how particular schools do or do not survive. It creates a whole new avenue to make private schools even more private.

What Are The Prospects For Education Freedom Scholarships?

Poor. It gets little love on the left because it is one more program that whittles away at public education. On the right, there is opposition because it will create another federal program, despite DeVos’s insistence to the contrary. On Tuesday she argued that the program would not expand the federal role, that there would be no “bureaucratic sponge” blocking the flow of money. If that were true, one might wonder about the wisdom of giving up $5 billion of tax revenue with no oversight or accountability in place, but as noted above, it is unlikely to be true.

As noted by Andrew Ujifusa at EdWeek, neither House nor Senate appropriations bills for 2020 have set a cent aside for this program. That is not a good sign for them.

Does DeVos Have Any Tactics Left?

She just wrapped up a national tour that looked to promote the program in select states. She’s working hard to cement the word “freedom” to her program; on Tuesday her opening remarks included the assertion that this program promised freedom for everybody, including students, parents, teachers, schools and states, and the word “freedom” was used many, many times throughout. On Tuesday some of her rhetoric was sharp, calling teachers unions “bullies” and accusing union leaders of putting themselves ahead of students, but some of the speech was tired. She invoked, again, the 1983 report A Nation At Risk, a report that predicted dire consequences just around the corner (and yet, 36 years later, the nation has not collapsed).

Most ironically, in her opening remarks DeVos levelled her usual critique that U.S. education is not working. “There are many who pay lip service to the sorry state of affairs in American education,” she said, “but offer more and more of the same as a solution; more spending, more regulation, more government. They assure us that this time it will work. This time it will be different.”

But the dominant education policy narrative of the past twenty years has been reform crafted by reform activists. If public education really isn’t working today, if tests scores haven’t climbed, if schools are failing, that is due in large part to the efforts of reformers like DeVos who have spent the past two decades trying to fix public education. In Michigan, the leading activist was Betsy DeVos, who for years pushed for more and more of her ideas about freedom, and the results have been consistently dreadful; charters and choice have grown, but test scores and school effectiveness have not boomed.

On Tuesday, DeVos was once again pushing for her old brand of education freedom, assuring her audience that if she could just implement more of the same on a federal level, this time it would work. This time it would be different.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

NC: When Charters Become Orphans

The TeamCFA website promises that the foundation exists "to promote the academic growth and success of each student in each TeamCFA school as well as the growth of the entire network. Each school in the TeamCFA network receives long term, meaningful partnership and oversight from the TeamCFA Foundation, with specific regard to academics, business, and governance through the Affiliate Agreement." But apparently "long term" does not mean what you think t means, because organization's leaders have bailed on the North Carolina charters that they helped birth.

So long. Good luck.

TeamCFA is itself the offspring of John Bryan, a retired businessman in his mid-80s who wanted to spread some free market libertarian love. He's not a fan of unions and repeats the old talking point about how spending money on education helps.He has contributed to plenty of conservative groups, but for some reason (people keep asking, but I've never seen a real answer) has particularly fixated on North Carolina, where he threw a lot of money at passage of the Innovative School District law, another version of Tennessee's failed Achievement School District, a system in which the state takes over schools with low test scores and tries to turn them around (or gives them to charter management groups to fix). The North Carolina just skips straight to the "give them to a CMO" part, but as one writer noted, it's a sweet deal.

TeamCFA had its own chain of charters which it helped launch with big six-figure "forgivable loans."

Now, the leadership at TeamCFA has bailed.

Some changes were not unexpected. In 2017, Bryan announced that he was retiring, and TeamCFA would need to find another money tree. TeamCFA fiddled with its business model, but they had reportedly depended on Bryan for almost all of their funding. Takes a lot of fiddling to plug that hole. Some its charters struck out on their own and others have been pondering their fate, but meanwhile, TeamCFA appears to have almost entirely evaporated (and not everyone is sad).

The News&Observer reports that C. Bradley Miller, "a member of TeamCFA's board of directors," says they are totally not closing and they keep on "supporting schools." But according to the
TeamCFA website, Miller can more accurately called "half of TeamCFA's board." There are no coming events. There is no contact information. And the directory is empty.

The group has five "pending" schools. Of the five, only Community Public Charter, with dedication of moral character, Core Values and Core Knowledge, seems up and running as expected. TeamCFA's Bonnie Cone Classical Academy was supposed to open this fall; that doesn't seem to have happened. Ditto Abraham Lincoln Preparatory School. Ditto Alexander Hamilton Community School. Carolina Charter Academy is up and running-- but has a header on its home page saying that enrollment for next year won't start till January, and "staff have no other information to provide." What's happening in the seventeen schools already under the TeamCFA banner is a varied work m in progress.

So here we are again, confronting the whimsical comings and goings of charter schools, which may close for business reasons or may be forced to suffer the whims of an octogenarian millionaire. This s a new wrinkle, where the people doing the work in the charter are themselves abandoned by their erstwhile backers. This is one of the fundamental disagreements between fans of modern corporate charters and advocates for public education-- to corporate charter fans, all this coming and going, opening and closing, is a feature, not a bug. But while business churn may make sense in the business world, stability matters in education. Families benefit from knowing that the school will still be there in the fall; students benefit from having a stable community in a familiar setting.

Do public schools ever close. Sure, though not remotely as often as charters. And there's one more important difference. When a public school closes, the district still has the responsibility of making sure those students are provided with an education. When a charter closes, its operators simply wash their hands of any responsibility for former students. Lock the doors, wave goodbye, nwish them good luck.

"We have to find a new school because our wealthy patron decided to stop funding our old one," shouldn't be a sentence that anyone has to say, ever.

NYC: Testing Is Still Not Teaching

People say dumb things when they're trying to defend bad policy decisions.

Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat reports that New York City schools are going to hit third and sixth graders at 76 schools labeled "low performing" by the state with three more tests per year. This is part of a plan to start testing the crap out of students doing formative assessments four times a year. Chancellor Richard Carranza's justification is that the tests are "to help the education department understand whether students are mastering material across the system in 'real time,' allowing officials to direct extra help to schools where students are struggling."

This is a dumb idea. Really dumb. You know what makes students struggle, in "real time"? Having their school year interrupted every other month by days of testing. Having their school year shortened by several weeks that are spent testing instead.

When this dumb plan was initially floated out there, the department didn't offer any details about where the tests would come from, who would create them, or what they would focus on. Mike Mulgrew, president of the city's teacher union, does not always say smart things, but he did this time:

How do you use a standardized formative assessment when you don’t have any sort of standardized curriculum?

Well, you can't, but as it turns out, the district didn't even try.

Instead, they're going to use the NWEA MAP test, an assessment in a box. It's normed (sort of) which means it's "graded" on a curve, and it's adaptive, which means it is different for every student who takes it. My old school used the MAP test, and one of my students explained the adaptive feature this way: "Hey, if you blow the first few questions, it just gives you easy stuff to do." The personalized adaptivity also means that you can't just pull up specific questions and check to see how individual students did-- you have to take the test manufacturer's word for it that they have accurately measure how students did on Standard 4.3-q. But it does come with a cool feature that claims to be able to read students thoughts, attitudes and character based on how long they take to click the next multiple choice answer.

And if you like data, I can tell you that I personally checked MAP results over two years against our state Big Standardized Test results, and the MAP was only slightly more predictive than rolling dice.

I have talked to people who found the MAP useful. I'm not one of them. We also gave the test three times a year, hoping to make use of its promise to show growth in students. But here's the thing-- for that to have any hope of working, the students have to care about this parade of multiple choice baloney testing that has zero stakes for them. Otherwise, you just get a measure of how much they feel like humoring the system on that particular day. The tests are supposed to take 45 minutes. For some students they take much longer, and for some students they take about a minute and a half. Even when taken seriously, they yield no information. Not once did I look at MAP and results and think, "I had no idea this student was struggling this standard!" Nothing that came back was ever a surprise.

You would think that this late in the corporate reform game we'd be smarter about tests, but MAPs give you fun graphics and oodles of data that make pretty charts. And then we get this winner for the Dumb Quote contest from David Hay, the education department deputy chief of stafF:

This isn’t a test — this is actually instruction.

No, no it's not. Testing is not teaching, and multiple choice tests delivered by computer are very especially not teaching. How can anybody working in education who hasn't been asleep or on the Pearson payroll actually say this sentence out loud. Yes, Hay went to Harvard Graduate School of Education, but before that he was a principal, and before that he taught for three whole year after getting a BS is in Marketing Education-- oh, hell, he should still know better. No, testing is not teaching.

Okay, in one respect he's correct. In authentic assessment, we want the assessment to match the actual  desired outcome as closely as possible (if you want to assess a student's ability to shoot foul shots, you have her shoot foul shots and not take a quiz on basketball dimensions). These 76 schools are in trouble mostly because of their standardized test scores, and standardized multiple-choice tests are a good authentic measure of-- taking standardized multiple choice tests. So if we pretend that we're doing authentic assessment, the best preparation for taking a standardized multiple-choice tests is to take standardized multiple-choice tests. So it is learning-- learning how to take the test.

But I'll bet dollars to donuts that NYC will adopt one of the common uses of these practice tests-- help break down students into three groups. The no worries, the hopeless, and the on the cusp so maybe if we test prep the hell out of them we can squeeze them onto the upper side of the cut line.

That's not learning, either.

No, more testing is a lousy idea. Trying to argue that it is actually instruction is just dumb. Because this is the worst part of a move like this-- by identifying the struggling schools, you actually target the students who most need help to have their teaching year cut. No sane district leader would say, "These students are having trouble getting the material, so let's give them less instruction time." This is the education version of the corporate "We're going to have daily meetings to figure out why we're not getting more work done."

CT: Another Way To Privatize Education

To read press accounts, one must conclude that Ray and Barbara Dalio are not exactly like other billionaire dabblers in education.

He is a successful hedge fund manager and the richest guy in Connecticut. She immigrated from Spain fifty-ish years ago and worked at the Whitney before settling into the mom-and-kids track. He has announced that capitalism is  not working, and that income gap is a huge national crisis. When she decided she was interested in working on education, she started visiting actual schools. After a start working with charters and Teach for America, she pulled away and started supporting public schools instead through her philanthropies and organizations like Connecticut RISE. Teachers, even union presidents, describe her as humble, a good listener, "truly a partner."

And yet, in some respects, they are exactly like other members of the wealthy philanthropist club. Ray Dalio thinks that the solution to dysfunctional capitalism and the wealth gap is that there "need to be powerful forces from the top of the country to proclaim the income/wealth/opportunity gap to be a national emergency and take on responsibility for reengineering the system so that it works better." In other words, the same old "empower a visionary CEO" model.

After giving some money here and some money there to public education in Connecticut, the Dalios decided last spring to up the ante, and offered $100 million to the public ed system. The money, they said, will be matched by the state and other philanthropists and "will be used to benefit students in under-resourced communities with a specific focus on communities where there is both a high poverty rate and a high concentration of young people who are showing signs of disengagement or disconnection from high school." The state teacher union president said, "I usually hate public-private partnerships, but this one looks okee dokee."

It seems swell, and yet.

As the New Haven Independent argued, Dalio, whose company Bridgewater Associates has been the recipient of state largesse, was simply returning public money to the public. CT RISE was itself one more example of philanthropic enthusiasm and money misspent.

And it turned out there were conditions. Big conditions, like the panel overseeing this giant pile of money would be exempt from ethics and disclosure rules. The GOP House Minority leader had a reaction that is too good not to share:

"These corporate board-holders are going to go up to the balcony and sprinkle down dollars on, I guess, the peasants of Connecticut, and we’re supposed to be happy about that?” said Deputy House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford.

But that was in June. Last week it became clear that there would be no balcony, and no windows either. The group, now christened the Partnership for Connecticut, met behind closed doors, locking out the public, the press, and five legislators who would have been bound by the Freedom of Information Act.

The Connecticut Mirror was quick to point out an irony-- that Ray Dalio claimed that one secret of his success was "radical transparency." That came on top of more irony; after meeting behind closed doors (with a taped-over window), chair Erik Clemons announced, "In the spirt of transparency, we had a really great discussion on transparency."

The Dalio foundation does hav a representative on the board as an "advisor," because of course te Dalios want to know how their $100 million is spent. Apparently Connecticut taxpayers aren't so lucky, even if they are putting up their own $100 million for the enterprise.

This is the same old privatization baloney. Because privatization isn't just about getting public money into private pockets; it's about taking control. It's about saying, "Let's you and I partner up, but only if we operate according to my rules and not yours." Let's go in together on buying a car-- we'll each put up half the money, but only I can drive and the car stays in my garage and you don't get to know what I'm doing with it when you're riding in it. That sounds like an equal partnership, right?

Modern philanthropists seem really fuzzy on the meaning of "gift." If I present you with a gift, I don't get to control what you do with it or how you use it. If I give it to you, but I still get to act as if it's mine, that's not a gift. It's barely even a loan.

It's even less than a loan because in the case of these public-private "partnerships," the philanthropists  don't just not-really-give something-- they also get something from the public side, which is the legitimacy and power of government. Dalio gets to have the governor and the rest of state government backing his play, and he still gets to play by his rules-- with public money. The argument over how transparent the proceedings need to be is already raging (open up everything, or just votes), though of course there would be no such argument if we were talking about any government agency busy spending taxpayer dollars. It is the same old story-- democracy and all of its processes are just so damned inconvenient. The goals here may be noble and well-intentioned, but this is still how we replace a republic with an oligarchy, and I'm not excited about that, not even if the oligarchs are nice people and we call it a public-private partnership

Vouchers And Federally-Supported Discrimination

School voucher programs are becoming one of the major fronts in a federal battle to safeguard discrimination by religious organizations.

Some flaps created by private religious schools seem minor, like the pastor at a Catholic school who banned Harry Potter books because he believes the books contain “actual curses and spells.” But earlier this year, the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis touched off a flurry of excitement by requiring Catholics schools in the archdiocese to fire all gay teachers. Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School refused, and was stripped of its Catholic identity. To avoid a similar fate, Cathedral High School terminated a teacher in a decision it called “agonizing.” The teacher settled with the school, but has since sued the archdiocese. 

This might be a matter of Catholic internal business, except that in Indianapolis, as in many areas around the country, the Catholic school system is now funded in part by school vouchers, a system of using public tax dollars for tuition to private schools. Indiana has been aggressive in pursuing school choice policies, particularly under then-Governor Mike Pence, who in his 2013 inaugural addresssaid, “There’s nothing that ails our schools that can’t be fixed by giving parents more choices.” Indiana’s voucher program directs taxpayer dollars primarily to religious schools, and the majority of those are Catholic schools. Cathedral High School participates in both Indiana’s voucher and tax credit scholarship programs. 

There was a time when private religious schools might have resisted taking government dollars, even indirectly, for fear of having the government push its rules on the institutions. But now we are seeing that the lever can be pushed in the other direction, and it’s the government that may have to bend to the will of private religious institutions.

Just a few weeks ago, the Justice Department filed a statement in the matter of the teacher’s lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Indiana, and the federal government came down on the side of the church. 

“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of religious institutions and people to decide what their beliefs are, to teach their faith, and to associate with others who share their faith,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “The First Amendment rightly protects the free exercise of religion.” 

This fits in the administration's larger policy profile. In hearings held in May of 2017, Betsy DeVos was pressed to give examples of instances when the federal government might step in because federal money was being used by a school discriminating on the basis of race, religion, sexual preference, or gender orientation. Her performance caused Rep. Katherine Clark to declare, “I am shocked that you cannot come up with one example of discrimination that you would stand up for students.” In that same hearing, DeVos also dodged a question about holding schools accountable for IDEA compliance. And since this story first surfaced, we've seen the Attorney General of the United Damn States declaring that schools are ground zero for an assault on Christian values.

Another version of the same issue is headed to Supreme Court with the case of Espinoza v. Montana, a case that is poised to knock down the wall between church and state when it comes to vouchers. It will come on the heels of 2017’s Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. That simple case over paving a church parking lot was important because, as Bloomberg noted at the time:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes.

What we’re seeing across the board is the government working to firmly put the free exercise clause over the establishment clause, including the freedom of taxpayer-funded schools to discriminate in whatever way they see fit, regardless of any government rules and regulations. 

It will be both interesting and frightening to see how far the government is willing to push this issue. Will it similarly stand up for schools that don’t want to hire Black teachers or accept Black students because of religious beliefs? Will it extend this same zealous religious protection to Islamic schools, or schools founded by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? If a school is caught in a conflict between two different religious practices, will the federal government intervene to pick a “winner”? Will taxpayers be required to help fund schools that would not let their own children in the front door? Watch to see just how far the lever will be pushed.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

ICYMI: Why I Write Day Edition (10/20)

I have an easier time understanding why some people write than I do understanding why so many people don't. Doesn't everybody need to? But then-- there are many things I don't fully understand, like why some people hate candy corn. While I'm pondering, here are some pieces of writing from the week for you to read and share.

Murdoch-Funded Anti-Gerrymandering Group Raises Questions  

Not about education, but this Intercept piece is another fine example of how the rich play the astro-turf game to push their policies to protect their interests.

Former Redlined Neighborhoods Have Changed 

Andre Perry and David Harshbarger at Brookings provide a more current picture of what has happened in some historically redlined areas.  

Student Tracking, Secret Scores 

Apparently, at some colleges, Big Brother is looking at your admissions file. Is cyberstalking social media now part of the college application process. Washington Post.

More Loan Mess

Oh look-- the USED didn't just fumble the student loan forgiveness program, but actively thwarted it. The details from NPR.

North Carolina's Abandoned Charter Business

They set up a charter school business chain, and then they decided to move on to other things. What happens to charters when the visionary leaders vote with their feet?

Mapping America’s Teacher Evaluation Plans Under ESSA

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and colleagues have done some useful research about the current shape of teacher evaluation-- and some of the news is good.

Maybe DeVos was a good thing

Thomas Ultican looks at some documentary evidence  of how bad a Clinton ed department might have been.

How Billionaire Charter School Funders Corrupted the School Leadership Pipeline  

Jeff Bryant continues his look at how rich guys like Eli Broad have taken over the business of producing school administrators.

About Schema

EdWeek offers a great explanation of some powerful learning ideas.

The K-12 Takeover  

Andrea Gabor has the must-read of the week over at Harpers, writing about how modern fauxlanthropists have commandeered public education with New Orleans as Exhibit A.

Why Are We Expecting Teens To Have It All Figured Out  

From Grown and Flown, a parent perspective on the kinds of decisions we expect teens to make, and how life is not always a clear straight line.

$1.3 Million Wasn't Enough  

How much did the Waltons spend to buy Louisiana education elections? Merceds Schneider knows.

Hidden Messages Your School Sends To Students

Nancy Flanagan with some thoughts about the subtext of a school.

  

Shame

The most shocking and disturbing thing that I saw on line this week had nothing to do with politics. It was a post by a teacher explaining her school's disciplinary system. As with many systems, students have a color-coded behavior level monitored and adjusted throughout the day. Unlike any school I'd ever heard of before, students at this school receive a colored card for their behavior level that they must wear on a lanyard around their neck all day.

When it comes to accounts of disciplinary systems in school, I try to tread lightly, because the context and human touch of implementation matter. But this is patently dumb.

What is it about human beings that makes so many of us believe in the magical power of shame. Shame inflictors tend to share a common narrative-- if we shame this person, that will motivate them to do better. Shame will push them to rise above their shameful failings, somehow.

This is bunk. It is not how human beings work. It is especially not how tiny humans work.

You do not get people to stand up by knocking them down. You do not get people to be bigger by making them feel small. That is not how this work. That is not how any of this works.

People do better because they feel strong enough to do better. When you shame someone, you tell them that they are weak, that they can't stand up, that they have fallen and failed because who they are is just not good enough. Adult humans with a strong sense of self have the power to beat that back, to say, "No, I know who I am, and it's not the person you're describing." But children-- young humans who don't yet have a clear sense of who they are? That's a different matter. That is part of what they come to school to find out-- what their best self is, and how that self can best be in the world. Telling them that some large part of them sucks is just wrong.

I know the impulse. Somebody has done something stupid or wrong or bad, and you are really really pissed about it, and what makes you even more pissed is that they don't seem to feel bad, not at all, not nearly as bad as you think they should feel. And so you launch on in there with shame missiles locked and loaded, determined that this person should feel as bad about what they've done as you think they should. For that moment, you set out to deliberately make another human being feel bad.

And it's not that shame doesn't have any place in human growth. God knows that I have done things in my life that I've felt ashamed of, felt the sting and weight of well-earned much-deserved shame, the kind of shame that all those homilies about shedding your "unearned guilt" can't touch. Figuring how to grow past that, how to embrace and heal the parts of you that did the thing-- it's one of those piece of personal education that isn't really worth the tuition (particularly the tuition that others pay).

But there's a big difference between feeling shame and inflicting shame. Feeling shame, when you've earned it, is a normal part of becoming more fully human. Inflicting shame is just emotional assault (and in the worst of human history, physical assault as well).

We've discussed lunch shaming at length, shaming students for being poor or, sometimes, for being thoughtless or disorganized or just not having their tiny human act together. It didn't help anybody.

We've just been through over a decade of education reformsterism that was built on the foundation of a magical belief in shame. We'll collect all these scores, and we'll publish them far and wide, and that will shame the bad teachers and the bad schools and the bad administrators and then they'll all want to shape up and do better. It didn't help anyone.

And, truth be told, with the exception of some small group of teacher saints, those of us who have stood in a classroom have at least once given in to the impulse to shame a student. And then we felt bad (shame, even) because it didn't help a bit. All it did was maybe convince the student to buckle a little more, and trust us a little less.

So if we give up shaming others, does that mean we let everyone run amuck? Of course not. Let me tell you a story about something that turned out to be a formative experience for me. In sixth grade, during music class, I sat in the back of the room, mocking Miss Gause the music teacher's directing style. I got called on it, and because it was the late 60s, I got paddled. Hard. What stayed with me was not the paddling; what stayed with me was that there was no belittling lecture about how awful I was, no complaining about how my character flaws, and, once the paddling was over, the incident never came up again, ever. I had screwed up, I had experienced a consequence, end of story. But how often do we make the mistake in a classroom-- we don't just want the student to experience consequences, but we want them to fell bad-- and visibly bad at that-- about what they've done.

I could also talk about Dr. Zolbrod, one of my college professors in the English department. The man had many gifts, but the one I always hoped I could somehow emulate was his ability to have me come in his office to talk about a mediocre paper I had written and send me out of there feeling like I could conquer the world (or at least write about conquering the world), despite my lousy grade.

You don't help people be better by shaming them. Yes, there are people who ought to feel shame who don't-- do you think you're going to force them into it? And there are other people who are feeling the full weight of shame, but are trying to keep things together so they can function in the world-- do they need an extra beat-down?

Shaming someone doesn't build character. It may reveal strength of character when someone stands up to shaming, but it's a lousy system for revealing strength, like tying peoples' legs together and tossing them into the deep end of a swimming pool.

And there's one other question to ask ourselves before we attempt to shame someone, to force them to  show us they feel bad, that they have the right attitude-- why do we think this person owes us a display of their personal emotions?

Shaming is a lousy basis for education policy-- at the federal level, the state level, the building level, and the classroom level. It's the tool of a bad manager.