My nephew and his wife are hosting a big soup party today, which I'm pretty sure is a first for me. Kids these days. In the meantime, here an assortment of reading material from the week. Remember-- share the stuff that really speaks to you. That's how bloggers become rich and famous- okay, well, not actually. But it is how media outlets find out they should do education coverage, and it's how people hear about the things that you hear about.
LA Schools Graded F for 4+ Years Mostly Serve Low-Income Students
The indispensable Mercedes Schneider unravels how the Louisiana school grading system tells us what we already knew-- the measuring system favors schools with white, well-off students.
Betsy DeVos Might Outlast Them All
She's not beloved, but she's probably not going anywhere, either. Rebecca Klein at HuffPost explains why.
Khan Academy: A World Class Education For No One
Alex Lochoff bends over backwards to start by saying that he's not saying that Khan Academy is terrible. Then he does a pretty good job of explaining why Khan Academy is terrible.
What's Wrong With Teacher Raises
Adam Laats takes a look at what's wrong with taking Hanushek's Grand Bargain of greater pay for tighter accountability.
Why I Won't Be Voting For Bloomberg
Jan Resseger has a great rundown of Bloomberg's NYC education history, and why it disqualifies him.
Ohio Catholic School Announces Mandatory Random Drug Testing For All Students
Attendance at the school, says the letter sent to parents, is a privilege, not a right.
The Wrong "Scientific" For Education
Paul Thomas looks at some of the recent uses of the S word and explains why they fail to impress.
Should A Cooperating Teacher Be A Big Fat Jerk?
Okay, I rewrote Nancy Flanagan's headline, but the idea is the same. On the topic of making life harder for student teachers.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Saturday, November 16, 2019
FL: Yet Another Bad Plan To Not Increase Teacher Pay
So previously there was the Best and the Brightest program, which awarded teacher bonuses based on student test scores and the teacher's own SAT scores. From high school. It had a variety of problems (above and beyond the basic boneheadedness of the idea) and the new governor, Ron DeSantis found it "confusing."
This newer, betterer plan comes along with the DeSantis First Year bump-- $600 million intended to increase the minimum salary for teachers to $47,500. Average starting pay in Florida is a hair under $38,000, which raises a whole bunch of questions about how, exactly, this is going to play out. Will some Florida teachers start at $47,500 and then stay there for the next ten years of their careers? Does the state and district pay for these increases by cutting from the top of the pay scale? And as with all of these minimum pay proposals, I look forward to negotiations between the state and local school boards over just how much everyone is going to kick in. After all, a local board member can logically conclude that they might as well lowball salaries and let the state pick up the slack. And what happens down the road when the state decides it doesn't want to fund the bonuses any more, and teachers suddenly get a big pay cut? And what kind of dope thinks that offering a big bump for the bottom of the scale will somehow make teachers want to come and stay for years-- oh. Never mind. This is one of those reformster burn and churn we-don't-0want-them-staying-long-enough-to-cause-trouble ideas, isn't it.
But on to the bonus plan.
The short form analysis is, it sucks.
First, it's a bonus. Teachers don't need bonuses. You can't get a house loan based on your bonus. You can't plan a future on a bonus.
Second, it is not, technically speaking, a teacher bonus. It is a building bonus. Here's the Miami Herald explanation, which was as good as any I saw:
The bonus plan is divided into three tiers: Tier 1 is for schools that earn 85% or greater of the total possible points or gain six or more points in their A-F school grading calculation. Tier 2 includes schools gaining three to five points in their school grade and tier 3 schools gained one to two points in their school grade.
Teachers in Tier 1 schools would receive up to $3,700, $1,750 in Tier 2 schools and $500 in Tier 3 schools. Principals would earn $5,000 at Tier 1 schools, $2,500 at Tier 2 schools and $1,250 in Tier 3 schools. Teachers and principals at Title I schools, or schools with a high number of students from low-income families, would get double those amounts.
So, a couple of things jump out.
One is that once again, bonuses are tied to test scores, which would be great if test scores were indicative of anything having to do with academic achievement. Instead, this looks in the face of a nationally decried over-emphasis on high-stakes testing and attaches more stakes to it. It actually offers schools bribe money to make the problem worse.
But on top of that, we know what test scores are actually tied to-- the socio-economic status of students. I suppose the Title I doubling factor is supposed to compensate for that somehow, but that's like an admission that your system is messed up from the start. Yes, growth is a big factor, but that's not really a help, unless your goal was to incentivize schools to identify students whose scores might be shifted enough to make a difference and then test prep the living daylights out of those children.
Just imagine being the principal at a Tier 3 school, trying to recruit great teachers and knowing that they've already looked at your "bonus" history so they are interviewing with you only as a last resort. It's an inequitable system, and that will drive people to move around and--oh.
This is, of course, just the governor's proposal at the moment, so we have yet to see what Florida's crackerjack legislature will do in response. Maybe it will be awesome enough to earn them a bonus.
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Yes, you can still buy swampland in Florida
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But on to the bonus plan.
The short form analysis is, it sucks.
First, it's a bonus. Teachers don't need bonuses. You can't get a house loan based on your bonus. You can't plan a future on a bonus.
Second, it is not, technically speaking, a teacher bonus. It is a building bonus. Here's the Miami Herald explanation, which was as good as any I saw:
The bonus plan is divided into three tiers: Tier 1 is for schools that earn 85% or greater of the total possible points or gain six or more points in their A-F school grading calculation. Tier 2 includes schools gaining three to five points in their school grade and tier 3 schools gained one to two points in their school grade.
Teachers in Tier 1 schools would receive up to $3,700, $1,750 in Tier 2 schools and $500 in Tier 3 schools. Principals would earn $5,000 at Tier 1 schools, $2,500 at Tier 2 schools and $1,250 in Tier 3 schools. Teachers and principals at Title I schools, or schools with a high number of students from low-income families, would get double those amounts.
So, a couple of things jump out.
One is that once again, bonuses are tied to test scores, which would be great if test scores were indicative of anything having to do with academic achievement. Instead, this looks in the face of a nationally decried over-emphasis on high-stakes testing and attaches more stakes to it. It actually offers schools bribe money to make the problem worse.
But on top of that, we know what test scores are actually tied to-- the socio-economic status of students. I suppose the Title I doubling factor is supposed to compensate for that somehow, but that's like an admission that your system is messed up from the start. Yes, growth is a big factor, but that's not really a help, unless your goal was to incentivize schools to identify students whose scores might be shifted enough to make a difference and then test prep the living daylights out of those children.
Just imagine being the principal at a Tier 3 school, trying to recruit great teachers and knowing that they've already looked at your "bonus" history so they are interviewing with you only as a last resort. It's an inequitable system, and that will drive people to move around and--oh.
This is, of course, just the governor's proposal at the moment, so we have yet to see what Florida's crackerjack legislature will do in response. Maybe it will be awesome enough to earn them a bonus.
Betsy DeVos Accuses FBI Of Ignorance, Blames Public Education (And More)
Never let it be said that Betsy DeVos won't go out of her way to blame US public education for all the ills of the country, real or imagined. In retrospect, it seems like an oversight that she hadn't had a "Kids These Days" moment, but now that omission has been corrected. The young FBI agents are ignorant, and public education is to blame. That's been the headline from this speech, but there's so much more to see.
DeVos was accepting another award, this time from the Independent Women's Forum, an organization founded to provide an alternative to feminism. They actually grew out of the collection of women who formed the "Women for Judge Thomas" committee, a group that got together to defend nominee Clarence Thomas from that scurrilous hussy, Anita Hill. They've been active in opposing various forms of feminism, though they do seem to support the Violence Against Women Act. One of the banners on their website announces that "recognizing progressive privilege is the first step to ending it."
Last week, at their annual awards gala, they handed out three awards. Larry Kudlow was a conservative tv talker picked by Trump to head the National Economic Council. Dana Milbank said Kudlow "may have been more wrong about the economy than anyone alive," but the IWF dubbed him a "Gentleman of Distinction." Kristy Swanson, who was in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, got a Resilience Award.
And Betsy DeVos was given the Women of Valor Award.
So, of course, she spoke.
She opened by referencing one of the founders of the IWF, Barbara Olson, a conservative tv talker who on September 11 was in the plane that slammed into the Pentagon. She was able to talk to her husband before impact, asking "What can I do?" It's a legitimately gut-wrenching story.
"So," said DeVos, "I accept this award on behalf of all women of action."
And here DeVos lays out her general operating philosophy:
We do what matters. We do what's right. And if someone puts something in our way, we find a way around it... or we just plough right through it.
And she illustrates a story with the tale of a mother of a child with Down syndrome who searched for options until she finally helped establish the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program, which is a Ohio school voucher porogram, so "helped establish" is more like "served as a sympathetic spokesperson for."
But DeVos (or her speechwriting intern) knows this audience. "Nothing can stop a mom on a mission," she says, and after reflecting how "as a mom of four and a grandmother of eight" she knows this stuff, she observes that all moms want what's best for their children. "There really is no greater jobn, no greater vocation, no greater calling than to be a parent." This is IWF orthodoxy. Is there some dissonance here? Like, if the "something in our way" is the husband to whom you're supposed to submit, so you still plough right through? Is it okay to skip a few momming duties if you are busy running political operations in your state capital or jetting off to DC to take a high government position? Is it okay to skim over the parts of the Bible where Paul says, "Sit down and shut up, woman. Who let you get the crazy idea you could tell a man what to do?" (I'm paraphrasing.) To be clear-- I don't have a problem with any of these things. I'm just always curious about why women on the religious right don't, either.
But I digress. DeVos is now going to pivot to her favorite points. The state thinks it knows best! The schoolhouse will replace the home! Government "is generally not the solution to any problem. It's generally the problem. Government has never made anything better or cheaper, more effective or more efficient."
Oh, honey. "Never" is a big word, but I'm going to resist the urge to dig out items like building roads and ending slavery and instead focus in another direction. Because DeVos is sort of correct; there is little that government can do better than you-- if you are a mega-rich white person with plenty of political clout and a well-maintained mega-rich white person bubble. Food and transportation and education and even maintaining enough social order so that the peasants don't come burn down your house-- you can provide all of that better than the government can, particularly if you are only going to worry about providing it for yourself. If you think that government is the Little People's way of forcing their Betters to get them things they don't deserve and asking you to help pay, well, then, yes, you are going to sincerely view government as The Problem.
And DeVos sees government as most especially The Problem in education.
So, we are working to dismantle the government social engineering in education.
Her first specific example is Title IX, which has long been a bugaboo of IWF. Well, sort of the example. Because somehow she gets from Title IX to the campus issues related to handling sexual assaults in house, which can include hushing them up. But she doesn't like the process that some campuses use. Also, she finally gets around to what she really doesn't like-- too many things are being called harassment. Also, punishing speech protected by the First Amendment. Okay, at this point, I'm really not sure what the heck her point is. Is she trying to argue that grabbing a woman's butt or repeatedly propositioning her is protected speech? She complains about the University of Michigan's "Bias Response Team," which no longer exists, but the school still employs 76 diversity-related administrators who cost the taxpayers and students more than $10 million!
They focus on every kind of diversity except a diversity of ideas.
Is this starting to sound like one of those white folks complaining that not only does their company have to hire black people, but he can't even call the black people the N word without some kind of big flap happening? Because that's what it's sounding like. But DeVos goes on to complain about the colleges and universities that "have teams of speech bullies with the power to punish perpetrators of hurt feelings." Holy smokes. I mean, even Barack Obama has called out cancel culture, but DeVos is my age, so I know the world she grew up in, and she has to have been exposed to the idea that language has power and that power has been used to the detriment of plenty of folks.
But belt up, because I'm posting an Excessive Irony Alert:
Feelings are important, but learning isn't about feelings. It's about thinking. And it's a willingness to engage with any and all ideas—even ones with which you disagree or ones that aren't your own.
Says the woman who never, ever engages with ideas that she disagrees with. But there's a real reason for that, and it is on my list of Top Ten Reasons That Conservative Religious Folks Can Be Terrible In Government Office:
This Administration won't let students be silenced. We stand with their right to speak and with their right to learn truth.
Truth can be pursued, and it can be known. Students of all ages need the freedom to seek it.
There it is. If you believe that there is One Truth, then your idea of intellectual growth and development is shaped by that. Your ideas of how to govern are seriously shaped by the notion that the people you serve can be divided into two groupos: people who are right, and people who are wrong. At most, you might be generous enough to believe that the second group is "people who are on their way to being right but aren't there yet."
This is the secret of what some people try to call out as hypocrisy. It isn't, because the idea of hypocrisy is that there is one rule to follow and you ought to follow it with everybody, not just some people. But, see-- if you think the world can be divided into those who are right and those who are wrong, you can also believe that there are different rules for dealing with each.
But I digress, again.
DeVos is off next to the lotteries, and how sad it is that some parents enter charter school lotteries and don't win. Because then they get stuck in public schools that don't work.
She pulls out statistics, and apparently she paid attention to responses the last time she used these bogus figures because instead of saying that two out of three students can't read "at grade level," she says here two out of three can't read "like they should." That's both more and less accurate, because it doesn't pretend to mean anything. Who decides what "like they should" (or "as they should," if you prefer correct usage) even means? But then she tosses out "two out of three who do not know--let alone understand--our country's history like [sic] they should,"
55% of high school seniors have "what researchers call" a below basic knowledge of American history. She says they don't know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about, nor recognize a photo of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, Betsy-- that's nothing! I know a high-placed government official who can't think of a single time the government accomplished anything well.
And this is where she dropped the headlining Kids These Days. FBI Director Wray supposedly told her that incoming FBI agents "are so young, they don't really know what happened on September 11, 2001." Kids these days!
So many questions. Did Wray blame it on their youth, which would make sense since a 21-year-old would have been two in 2001? But if so, what were schools supposed to do about that? And what does "don't really know what happened" even mean? How people felt and reacted? What the geopolitical causes were? Heck, I can think of highly placed government officials who seem unable to remember which nations were or were not involved in the attacks.
Now it's time to plug her program. It's time to fix America's "antiquated approach to education" with her Education Freedom Scholarship. She bills it here as the "limited government cure for what plagues American education."
It doesn't grow the Federal bureaucracy one tiny bit. It doesn't create a new Federal "Office of School Choice." It doesn't impose any new requirements on states or on families. It doesn't take a single dollar from public school students. It doesn't spend a single dollar of Federal money. And it doesn't entangle schools with Federal strings or stifling red tape.
In fact, it does every one of those things. Someone will have to screen and oversee the various schools and vendors that want to be recipients of these scholarships, as well as screening and overseeing the organizations that turn the contributions into scholarships. It will give families a different set of paperwork hoops to jump through to apply and stay in the program, and it will require states to follow what's happening with the federal-approved dollars. If all of this doesn't require a Federal Office of School Choice, it will require some batch of bureaucrats somewhere to fulfill the same function. All of that equals red tape for schools--and it had better, unless DeVos intends to have the feds stand by as Pure Aryan Academy starts accepting federal scholarship money.
The "not spending federal money" is a cheap dodge. It's not federal money, technically, because the feds never touch it. But if Education Freedom Bux are capped at $5 billion, that means it will leave a $5 billion hole in federal revenue, which means either something gets cut or more revenue is raised somewhere.
So absolutely everything she has said to sell Ed Freedom Bux is wrong, if not simply a lie.
Nor is it efficient or effective. As a commenter pointed out on line, you probably don't solve your historical illiteracy problem by funding schools that teach that humans and dinosaurs lived together shortly after the earth was created 5,000 years ago. Nor will it free up money that DeVos imagines is now soaked up by some "bureaucratic sponge" that stands between students and their education. If anything, an increase in the number of education providers means an increase in the number of administrators, and when administrators are trying to turn a profit for their edu-business (because it is education flavored businesses that DeVos imagines proliferating), they are about the spongiest thing out there.
But hey-- Jeanne Allen at least should be happy:
I like to picture kids with backpacks representing funding for their education following them wherever they go to learn.
That reminds me-- if you have a chance to see Backpacks Full of Cash, do so.
Education—how and where students learn—should be determined by students and their families. Because it's about them. It's about developing their abilities and pursuing their aspirations. It's about their futures, and it's ultimately about ours.
Nope. Students and parents are absolutely stakeholders in education, but so are all the other citizens of this country-- and not "ultimately." DeVos is consistent-- education, like other government-provided amenities-- should be the individual's problem to solve. This is faux freedom-- the freedom to worry about your own education, your own health care, your own wages and working conditions, your freedom to manage your life without any help from anyone. Why does DeVos want your education to be "efficient"? Because then it can cost her less, because ideally she'd like to pay $0.00 to educate your children.
She wraps up with some blessings from God, and we're done. I've skipped a few points along the way, but you get the idea. Hard to believe this is the person responsible for overseeing US education.
Last week, at their annual awards gala, they handed out three awards. Larry Kudlow was a conservative tv talker picked by Trump to head the National Economic Council. Dana Milbank said Kudlow "may have been more wrong about the economy than anyone alive," but the IWF dubbed him a "Gentleman of Distinction." Kristy Swanson, who was in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, got a Resilience Award.
And Betsy DeVos was given the Women of Valor Award.
So, of course, she spoke.
She opened by referencing one of the founders of the IWF, Barbara Olson, a conservative tv talker who on September 11 was in the plane that slammed into the Pentagon. She was able to talk to her husband before impact, asking "What can I do?" It's a legitimately gut-wrenching story.
"So," said DeVos, "I accept this award on behalf of all women of action."
And here DeVos lays out her general operating philosophy:
We do what matters. We do what's right. And if someone puts something in our way, we find a way around it... or we just plough right through it.
And she illustrates a story with the tale of a mother of a child with Down syndrome who searched for options until she finally helped establish the Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship Program, which is a Ohio school voucher porogram, so "helped establish" is more like "served as a sympathetic spokesperson for."
But DeVos (or her speechwriting intern) knows this audience. "Nothing can stop a mom on a mission," she says, and after reflecting how "as a mom of four and a grandmother of eight" she knows this stuff, she observes that all moms want what's best for their children. "There really is no greater jobn, no greater vocation, no greater calling than to be a parent." This is IWF orthodoxy. Is there some dissonance here? Like, if the "something in our way" is the husband to whom you're supposed to submit, so you still plough right through? Is it okay to skip a few momming duties if you are busy running political operations in your state capital or jetting off to DC to take a high government position? Is it okay to skim over the parts of the Bible where Paul says, "Sit down and shut up, woman. Who let you get the crazy idea you could tell a man what to do?" (I'm paraphrasing.) To be clear-- I don't have a problem with any of these things. I'm just always curious about why women on the religious right don't, either.
But I digress. DeVos is now going to pivot to her favorite points. The state thinks it knows best! The schoolhouse will replace the home! Government "is generally not the solution to any problem. It's generally the problem. Government has never made anything better or cheaper, more effective or more efficient."
Oh, honey. "Never" is a big word, but I'm going to resist the urge to dig out items like building roads and ending slavery and instead focus in another direction. Because DeVos is sort of correct; there is little that government can do better than you-- if you are a mega-rich white person with plenty of political clout and a well-maintained mega-rich white person bubble. Food and transportation and education and even maintaining enough social order so that the peasants don't come burn down your house-- you can provide all of that better than the government can, particularly if you are only going to worry about providing it for yourself. If you think that government is the Little People's way of forcing their Betters to get them things they don't deserve and asking you to help pay, well, then, yes, you are going to sincerely view government as The Problem.
And DeVos sees government as most especially The Problem in education.
So, we are working to dismantle the government social engineering in education.
Her first specific example is Title IX, which has long been a bugaboo of IWF. Well, sort of the example. Because somehow she gets from Title IX to the campus issues related to handling sexual assaults in house, which can include hushing them up. But she doesn't like the process that some campuses use. Also, she finally gets around to what she really doesn't like-- too many things are being called harassment. Also, punishing speech protected by the First Amendment. Okay, at this point, I'm really not sure what the heck her point is. Is she trying to argue that grabbing a woman's butt or repeatedly propositioning her is protected speech? She complains about the University of Michigan's "Bias Response Team," which no longer exists, but the school still employs 76 diversity-related administrators who cost the taxpayers and students more than $10 million!
They focus on every kind of diversity except a diversity of ideas.
Is this starting to sound like one of those white folks complaining that not only does their company have to hire black people, but he can't even call the black people the N word without some kind of big flap happening? Because that's what it's sounding like. But DeVos goes on to complain about the colleges and universities that "have teams of speech bullies with the power to punish perpetrators of hurt feelings." Holy smokes. I mean, even Barack Obama has called out cancel culture, but DeVos is my age, so I know the world she grew up in, and she has to have been exposed to the idea that language has power and that power has been used to the detriment of plenty of folks.
But belt up, because I'm posting an Excessive Irony Alert:
Feelings are important, but learning isn't about feelings. It's about thinking. And it's a willingness to engage with any and all ideas—even ones with which you disagree or ones that aren't your own.
Says the woman who never, ever engages with ideas that she disagrees with. But there's a real reason for that, and it is on my list of Top Ten Reasons That Conservative Religious Folks Can Be Terrible In Government Office:
This Administration won't let students be silenced. We stand with their right to speak and with their right to learn truth.
Truth can be pursued, and it can be known. Students of all ages need the freedom to seek it.
There it is. If you believe that there is One Truth, then your idea of intellectual growth and development is shaped by that. Your ideas of how to govern are seriously shaped by the notion that the people you serve can be divided into two groupos: people who are right, and people who are wrong. At most, you might be generous enough to believe that the second group is "people who are on their way to being right but aren't there yet."
This is the secret of what some people try to call out as hypocrisy. It isn't, because the idea of hypocrisy is that there is one rule to follow and you ought to follow it with everybody, not just some people. But, see-- if you think the world can be divided into those who are right and those who are wrong, you can also believe that there are different rules for dealing with each.
But I digress, again.
DeVos is off next to the lotteries, and how sad it is that some parents enter charter school lotteries and don't win. Because then they get stuck in public schools that don't work.
She pulls out statistics, and apparently she paid attention to responses the last time she used these bogus figures because instead of saying that two out of three students can't read "at grade level," she says here two out of three can't read "like they should." That's both more and less accurate, because it doesn't pretend to mean anything. Who decides what "like they should" (or "as they should," if you prefer correct usage) even means? But then she tosses out "two out of three who do not know--let alone understand--our country's history like [sic] they should,"
55% of high school seniors have "what researchers call" a below basic knowledge of American history. She says they don't know what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about, nor recognize a photo of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, Betsy-- that's nothing! I know a high-placed government official who can't think of a single time the government accomplished anything well.
And this is where she dropped the headlining Kids These Days. FBI Director Wray supposedly told her that incoming FBI agents "are so young, they don't really know what happened on September 11, 2001." Kids these days!
So many questions. Did Wray blame it on their youth, which would make sense since a 21-year-old would have been two in 2001? But if so, what were schools supposed to do about that? And what does "don't really know what happened" even mean? How people felt and reacted? What the geopolitical causes were? Heck, I can think of highly placed government officials who seem unable to remember which nations were or were not involved in the attacks.
Now it's time to plug her program. It's time to fix America's "antiquated approach to education" with her Education Freedom Scholarship. She bills it here as the "limited government cure for what plagues American education."
It doesn't grow the Federal bureaucracy one tiny bit. It doesn't create a new Federal "Office of School Choice." It doesn't impose any new requirements on states or on families. It doesn't take a single dollar from public school students. It doesn't spend a single dollar of Federal money. And it doesn't entangle schools with Federal strings or stifling red tape.
In fact, it does every one of those things. Someone will have to screen and oversee the various schools and vendors that want to be recipients of these scholarships, as well as screening and overseeing the organizations that turn the contributions into scholarships. It will give families a different set of paperwork hoops to jump through to apply and stay in the program, and it will require states to follow what's happening with the federal-approved dollars. If all of this doesn't require a Federal Office of School Choice, it will require some batch of bureaucrats somewhere to fulfill the same function. All of that equals red tape for schools--and it had better, unless DeVos intends to have the feds stand by as Pure Aryan Academy starts accepting federal scholarship money.
The "not spending federal money" is a cheap dodge. It's not federal money, technically, because the feds never touch it. But if Education Freedom Bux are capped at $5 billion, that means it will leave a $5 billion hole in federal revenue, which means either something gets cut or more revenue is raised somewhere.
So absolutely everything she has said to sell Ed Freedom Bux is wrong, if not simply a lie.
Nor is it efficient or effective. As a commenter pointed out on line, you probably don't solve your historical illiteracy problem by funding schools that teach that humans and dinosaurs lived together shortly after the earth was created 5,000 years ago. Nor will it free up money that DeVos imagines is now soaked up by some "bureaucratic sponge" that stands between students and their education. If anything, an increase in the number of education providers means an increase in the number of administrators, and when administrators are trying to turn a profit for their edu-business (because it is education flavored businesses that DeVos imagines proliferating), they are about the spongiest thing out there.
But hey-- Jeanne Allen at least should be happy:
I like to picture kids with backpacks representing funding for their education following them wherever they go to learn.
That reminds me-- if you have a chance to see Backpacks Full of Cash, do so.
Education—how and where students learn—should be determined by students and their families. Because it's about them. It's about developing their abilities and pursuing their aspirations. It's about their futures, and it's ultimately about ours.
Nope. Students and parents are absolutely stakeholders in education, but so are all the other citizens of this country-- and not "ultimately." DeVos is consistent-- education, like other government-provided amenities-- should be the individual's problem to solve. This is faux freedom-- the freedom to worry about your own education, your own health care, your own wages and working conditions, your freedom to manage your life without any help from anyone. Why does DeVos want your education to be "efficient"? Because then it can cost her less, because ideally she'd like to pay $0.00 to educate your children.
She wraps up with some blessings from God, and we're done. I've skipped a few points along the way, but you get the idea. Hard to believe this is the person responsible for overseeing US education.
Friday, November 15, 2019
OH: Outlawing Facts
The Ohio House of Representatives is ready to help students take a bold step forward into the post-fact world. Wednesday they passed (and when I say "they," I mean the solid vote-as-a-bloc GOP) HB 164.
It's called the "Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019" and it sets out to accomplish a few things:
It removes the limits on exercising expression of student religious beliefs. The old, struck-out language said the board of education could limit said expression to lunch period or other noninstructional time. That's the piddly stuff.
Under the new language, "religious expression" (the stuff no longer limited to non-instructional time) includes prayer, gatherings (clubs, prayer groups, etc), distribution of written materials, and, well, anything religious, actually, including wearing religious gear or "expression of a religious viewpoint" (as long as it's not obscene or indecent or vulgar). Cue the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster and the local Satanic Temple; if a student offers a prayer to Satan in the middle of English class and some Christians in the class find that indecent and vulgar, can it be suppressed? Congratulations to the first batch of lawyers and judges that are going to have to sort this out. Double congratulations to whatever government body ends up being responsible for determining which religions are state-certified to be protected under this law.
Students hall have access to school facilities before, during and after school that school hours to the same extent that secular activities may do so. Place your bets now on how many schools will simply ban all before and after school activities in order to sidestep this.
And here's the one that's been drawing headlines (because it is the most spectacularly boneheaded part of this exercise). Let me quote the meat. No school officials shall
prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student's work.
The bill's sponsor, Timothy Ginter, insists that the bill does not say what it says.
“Under House Bill 164, a Christian or Jewish student would not be able to say my religious texts teach me that the world is 6,000 years old, so I don't have to answer this question. They're still going to be tested in the class and they cannot ignore the class material,” said Ginter.
Ginter has held a variety of jobs, including machinist and marketing guy for an IT company, but for thirty-nine years, he's been an ordained minister.
There are two problems with his insistence that the bill doesn't mean what it says. First, courts often interpret laws based on what they say and not what some legislator claims they meant to say. Second, if Ginter's reading of his own bill is correct, the bill is simply unnecessary.
Critics have already stated that the bill says what it says. The ACLU's chief Ohio lobbyist told Cleveland.com: “Under HB 164, the answer is ‘no,’ as this legislation clearly states the instructor 'shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.”
Students brought in to testify about the need mentioned things like not being included in the school yearbook. As a former yearbook adviser, I'll answer that one-- yearbooks generally stick to activities actually sponsored by the school (I'm betting the yearbook also did not include the 4-H clubs that students belong to). The rights of religious freedom are well-protected; these days, it seems legislators are far more concerned about protecting religious privilege.
This reduces local control, extends the reach of religions into school, and would absolutely end up with a court case abut whether or not Chris can be given a lower score for refusing to answer questions about evolution. Worse, a whole lot of school administrators would greet the adoption of this law by scouring their curriculum to look for everything that could possibly end up in court and figure out ways to avoid it. Mark my words-- some principal or superintendent is going to respond by saying, "Let's just not teach evolution at all, just to stay safe." Congratulations to the science-loving family that drags him into court anyway for cutting out critical units.
The many possible consequences of this bill are a kaleidoscope of awful. It's not just the refusal to do science homework. If the student comes from a religion that believes women should be subservient, can he refuse to have a female teacher, or exercise his religion by ignoring, talking over, and generally harassing female classmates. Is a literature student allowed to go far outside the text to read it through their own lens and then demand an A?
But mostly, how do we run a school in which the religious answer on homework or a test is "correct," even when it isn't? Who keeps the running list of which religious beliefs are to be considered correct, or will students just be free to make them up as they go, like God-sponsored Calvinball. And who will be able to provide oversight for the believers who follow anything not-Christian? If I take my oral exam in tongues, will that do? And the rest of the bill is no small thing, either. Exactly how far can my exercise of my religion go during instructional time? Silent prayers? Loud prayers? Bursting into song? Berating my gay classmates?
This is a dumb law. Declaring the religion must supercede facts is dumb, bad news for both religion and facts. This is a dumb law. It's the kind of law folks pass when they've spent too much time thinking about how to score points back home with the Jesusians and too little time thinking about how the law will actually play out. Here's hoping the Ohio senate smashes it flat.
It's called the "Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019" and it sets out to accomplish a few things:
It removes the limits on exercising expression of student religious beliefs. The old, struck-out language said the board of education could limit said expression to lunch period or other noninstructional time. That's the piddly stuff.
Students hall have access to school facilities before, during and after school that school hours to the same extent that secular activities may do so. Place your bets now on how many schools will simply ban all before and after school activities in order to sidestep this.
And here's the one that's been drawing headlines (because it is the most spectacularly boneheaded part of this exercise). Let me quote the meat. No school officials shall
prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student's work.
The bill's sponsor, Timothy Ginter, insists that the bill does not say what it says.
“Under House Bill 164, a Christian or Jewish student would not be able to say my religious texts teach me that the world is 6,000 years old, so I don't have to answer this question. They're still going to be tested in the class and they cannot ignore the class material,” said Ginter.
Ginter has held a variety of jobs, including machinist and marketing guy for an IT company, but for thirty-nine years, he's been an ordained minister.
There are two problems with his insistence that the bill doesn't mean what it says. First, courts often interpret laws based on what they say and not what some legislator claims they meant to say. Second, if Ginter's reading of his own bill is correct, the bill is simply unnecessary.
Critics have already stated that the bill says what it says. The ACLU's chief Ohio lobbyist told Cleveland.com: “Under HB 164, the answer is ‘no,’ as this legislation clearly states the instructor 'shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.”
Students brought in to testify about the need mentioned things like not being included in the school yearbook. As a former yearbook adviser, I'll answer that one-- yearbooks generally stick to activities actually sponsored by the school (I'm betting the yearbook also did not include the 4-H clubs that students belong to). The rights of religious freedom are well-protected; these days, it seems legislators are far more concerned about protecting religious privilege.
This reduces local control, extends the reach of religions into school, and would absolutely end up with a court case abut whether or not Chris can be given a lower score for refusing to answer questions about evolution. Worse, a whole lot of school administrators would greet the adoption of this law by scouring their curriculum to look for everything that could possibly end up in court and figure out ways to avoid it. Mark my words-- some principal or superintendent is going to respond by saying, "Let's just not teach evolution at all, just to stay safe." Congratulations to the science-loving family that drags him into court anyway for cutting out critical units.
The many possible consequences of this bill are a kaleidoscope of awful. It's not just the refusal to do science homework. If the student comes from a religion that believes women should be subservient, can he refuse to have a female teacher, or exercise his religion by ignoring, talking over, and generally harassing female classmates. Is a literature student allowed to go far outside the text to read it through their own lens and then demand an A?
But mostly, how do we run a school in which the religious answer on homework or a test is "correct," even when it isn't? Who keeps the running list of which religious beliefs are to be considered correct, or will students just be free to make them up as they go, like God-sponsored Calvinball. And who will be able to provide oversight for the believers who follow anything not-Christian? If I take my oral exam in tongues, will that do? And the rest of the bill is no small thing, either. Exactly how far can my exercise of my religion go during instructional time? Silent prayers? Loud prayers? Bursting into song? Berating my gay classmates?
This is a dumb law. Declaring the religion must supercede facts is dumb, bad news for both religion and facts. This is a dumb law. It's the kind of law folks pass when they've spent too much time thinking about how to score points back home with the Jesusians and too little time thinking about how the law will actually play out. Here's hoping the Ohio senate smashes it flat.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
NAEP Board Gets DeVosian Additions
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos just announced six new appointees (and one returnee) to the National Assessment Governing Board. These are the folks that oversee the National Assessment of Educational Progress aka NAEP aka the nation's report card aka that big standardized test that everyone tries to use to prove a point every year.
So who did we get?
Returnee Alberto Carvalho, plus Frank Edelblut, Eric Hanushek, Reginald McGregor, Martin West, Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, and Carey Wright.
It's the reformster-heavy kind of group you would expect from DeVos. If the Curmudgucation Institute had a graphics department, they would totally be working on some sort of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs art.
Hanushek is an economist specializing in linking children's earnings to teacher effectiveness (I mean, what else could it be, right?) and who just recently mused that teacher pay should be linked to measures of teacher effectiveness, even though we don't have any.
Whitehurst is, for me, a mixed bag. A Brookings guy (boo) who once did a pretty good job of trying to get DeVos to say non-dumb things about choice (yay), but whose name is also on a "report" that argues we should test more (boo) and that when it comes to teacher evaluation, administrator observations should be more like VAM (booooo).
West is a professor at Harvard's uber-reformy GSE and editor-in-chief of Education Next, the Harvard GSE publication that carries work from the Fordham-AEI-Bellwether axis of reformsterdom. He's a Massachusetts state ed board member, too.
Wright is the chief state school officer for Mississippi, a state that is pretty awful when it comes to education, but they got their NAEP scores to go up, so she's an expert now. She's a Broadie, too.
McGregor is a "business representative" whose day job is the manager of engineering employee development and STEM outreach in the Research & Technology Strategy Group at Rolls-Royce Corporation in Indianapolis and he serves on a school board.
Edelblut is the real clunker here. Businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term state representative, then he ran for governor, lost in the primary and threw his weght behind Chris Sununu, who rewarded him with the education commissioner job. Edelblut has no actual education background; he didn't even serve on an education committee during his single term, and his kids are homeschooled. As commissioner, he has backed all manner of choice and vouchers and has happily signed up for as many DeVosian Freedom Bucks as he can get.
Oh, and Carvalho is the superintendent in Miami-Dade. You know DeVos isn't going to let a Florida guy go.
I have no idea how much mischief this crew can actually wreak, but it's not a group that I'm excited about having close to any educational policy activity. Add it to your list of reasons for not taking NAEP results so very seriously.
So who did we get?
Returnee Alberto Carvalho, plus Frank Edelblut, Eric Hanushek, Reginald McGregor, Martin West, Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, and Carey Wright.
Hanushek is an economist specializing in linking children's earnings to teacher effectiveness (I mean, what else could it be, right?) and who just recently mused that teacher pay should be linked to measures of teacher effectiveness, even though we don't have any.
Whitehurst is, for me, a mixed bag. A Brookings guy (boo) who once did a pretty good job of trying to get DeVos to say non-dumb things about choice (yay), but whose name is also on a "report" that argues we should test more (boo) and that when it comes to teacher evaluation, administrator observations should be more like VAM (booooo).
West is a professor at Harvard's uber-reformy GSE and editor-in-chief of Education Next, the Harvard GSE publication that carries work from the Fordham-AEI-Bellwether axis of reformsterdom. He's a Massachusetts state ed board member, too.
Wright is the chief state school officer for Mississippi, a state that is pretty awful when it comes to education, but they got their NAEP scores to go up, so she's an expert now. She's a Broadie, too.
McGregor is a "business representative" whose day job is the manager of engineering employee development and STEM outreach in the Research & Technology Strategy Group at Rolls-Royce Corporation in Indianapolis and he serves on a school board.
Edelblut is the real clunker here. Businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term state representative, then he ran for governor, lost in the primary and threw his weght behind Chris Sununu, who rewarded him with the education commissioner job. Edelblut has no actual education background; he didn't even serve on an education committee during his single term, and his kids are homeschooled. As commissioner, he has backed all manner of choice and vouchers and has happily signed up for as many DeVosian Freedom Bucks as he can get.
Oh, and Carvalho is the superintendent in Miami-Dade. You know DeVos isn't going to let a Florida guy go.
I have no idea how much mischief this crew can actually wreak, but it's not a group that I'm excited about having close to any educational policy activity. Add it to your list of reasons for not taking NAEP results so very seriously.
Pearson In Your Pants
Pearson, the edu-product giant that hopes to eat the world, just announced a new product.
It's part of the overall Pearson vision-- and nobody does large-scale vision like Pearson. They see everything happening in a "digital ocean." They have ideas about an "assessment renaissance" so huge that it took me five posts to write about it (here's the shorter version). And just this summer, they announced their intention to go "digital first." That is, not exactly phasing out textbooks entirely, but focusing on the digital; instead of offering digitized versions of print textbooks, they'll now work the other way around. Fun fact: "62% of Pearson revenue now comes from digital or digitally enabled products and services that make lifelong education possible."
So this week's announcement is in tune with all of that.
Meet Aida Calculus. It's an app you can put on your phone, only that makes it sound too pedestrian, like one more version of Candy Crush. Hey, Pearson! Can we have some overly florid martket-speak here?
Aida is a first in the education industry and an important milestone in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for learning. It's the only education app that uses multiple AI techniques from deep learning and reinforcement learning, customized for the purpose of tutoring students. The use of similar advanced AI algorithms is only seen in major consumer apps. Pearson is the first to apply that level of innovation in the education space.
Pearson CEO John Fallon boasts that "it's the first step we're making in redesigning education for the talent economy." It has thirty (30!!) "explainer videos." The Aida brand (which will be rolling out other edu-apps) takes its name from a combination of AI and Ada Lovelace (a 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron and just a hell of an interesting woman).
It can look at your homework, check your answers, offer tips. It uses AI that is the most AI-y AI that ever AI-ed in a piece of educational software. There's nothing AI-ier.
You can use the app for free for the rest of 2019, and if you want to try it and let me know how swell it is, I'd be glad to hear about it. I am in no position to try out a calculus app (my math education ground to a tortured halt somewhere around late-stage trigonometry).
Like all personalized [sic} learning, Aida offers several other implied promises, like someday you won't need a university or K-12 school-- you can just use your education voucher credits to buy apps for your phone that will automatically store your credentials on the blockchain and we'll never need any kind of formal education ever again. So I'm not going to encourage that by downloading it.
Will Aida actually work. Because ed tech folks have a history of overpromising everything all the time, with predictions and promotions that attempt to portray their product as an inevitable next step in human development. Maybe this time the super-duper AI will really deliver. Or not.
Actually, there's another reason I'm not trying out the app. Phone apps are like all those dumb games on Facebook (only worse) because if you're not careful, you are giving them al sorts of access to all the information about you that is stored on that phone. I'm not prepared to trust the folks who believe that the future belongs to those who have taken control of harvesting from the data ocean
(and who have already been hacked). Phone apps are convenient, a world of useful software right there in your pocket, but I'm not quite ready to let Pearson get into my pants just yet.
FTC Cracks Down On Edu-Influencers
One of the small tricks that education marketers have developed is to enlist teachers as brand ambassadors. Teachers are, after all, the voices most often trusted by other teachers, so it's got to be a real boost if you can get Mrs. Teachwell to tout your product on Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest. And the beauty of it is that Mrs. Teachwell may come cheap-- some free product, box of pens, maybe even some actual money.
It's a fuzzy ethical line; do teachers who accept some sort of marketing deal compromise their professional judgment? On the other hand, if you find an edu-product you really like, isn't the fact that you can get a few goodies for plugging just sort of gravy? People are not exactly lined up to give teachers things. Still, it's a pain to be talking to someone who you think is just offering a professional insight and then it turns out they're a paid-ish endorser.
Now the FTC has decide to add its voice to the conversation. EdWeek talked to FTC attorney Michael Ostheimer to get some clarity on the new rule, and it doesn't seem very hard tp grasp.
The connection between an endorser and a brand—whether it’s swag or a trip or getting paid money—that should be disclosed to the endorser’s audience,” said Ostheimer.
Just noting the connection in your profile is not enough. Every time you post about how awesome the Gradeinator 3000 is, you must also post that you are a Gradeinator 3000 Ambassador. The guidelines indicate that you must reveal any "financial, employment, personal, or family relationship." Financial is of course not limited to being handed cash. Some of the guidelines are sensible (the notification has to be plain and clear and in the same language as the rest of the communication) and some of them will be challenging. Liking a tweet or post by Gradeinator 3000 counts as an endorsement, so somehow your "like" will have to include your relationship. If you're doing a live stream that involves the Gradeinator 3000, you need to include your relationship frequently, so that your audience can't possibly miss it. (If you just really like the Gradeinator 3000 and you say nice things about for free, then you're off the hook.)
The rules don't seem to include second-hand benefits. In other words, my school district sent me to Seattle for PLC training, which was a definite benefit, but that was m district's money, not the PLC people's. But what about my SMART board training? The district paid for it, but the company certified me as a trainer, and my trainer status let me earn more hours toward my continuing education requirements, which were necessary for me to keep my job. That trainer status could have allowed me to make some extra side bucks as well, but I didn't. So did I get a financial benefit from the SMART board people or not? Ditto for anyone who has a collection of official Microsoft certifications.
The companies are supposed to get their "ambassadors" or "endorsers" or "influencers" or "good buddies" up to speed on all this, but it seems fair to be skeptical about that happening. If you want a quick primer, there's a nifty video that I'll embed. In the meantime, if you are all excited about the swag you're going to score by pushing the Gradeinator 3000, you might want to pause a moment and study up.
It's a fuzzy ethical line; do teachers who accept some sort of marketing deal compromise their professional judgment? On the other hand, if you find an edu-product you really like, isn't the fact that you can get a few goodies for plugging just sort of gravy? People are not exactly lined up to give teachers things. Still, it's a pain to be talking to someone who you think is just offering a professional insight and then it turns out they're a paid-ish endorser.
Now the FTC has decide to add its voice to the conversation. EdWeek talked to FTC attorney Michael Ostheimer to get some clarity on the new rule, and it doesn't seem very hard tp grasp.
The connection between an endorser and a brand—whether it’s swag or a trip or getting paid money—that should be disclosed to the endorser’s audience,” said Ostheimer.
Just noting the connection in your profile is not enough. Every time you post about how awesome the Gradeinator 3000 is, you must also post that you are a Gradeinator 3000 Ambassador. The guidelines indicate that you must reveal any "financial, employment, personal, or family relationship." Financial is of course not limited to being handed cash. Some of the guidelines are sensible (the notification has to be plain and clear and in the same language as the rest of the communication) and some of them will be challenging. Liking a tweet or post by Gradeinator 3000 counts as an endorsement, so somehow your "like" will have to include your relationship. If you're doing a live stream that involves the Gradeinator 3000, you need to include your relationship frequently, so that your audience can't possibly miss it. (If you just really like the Gradeinator 3000 and you say nice things about for free, then you're off the hook.)
The rules don't seem to include second-hand benefits. In other words, my school district sent me to Seattle for PLC training, which was a definite benefit, but that was m district's money, not the PLC people's. But what about my SMART board training? The district paid for it, but the company certified me as a trainer, and my trainer status let me earn more hours toward my continuing education requirements, which were necessary for me to keep my job. That trainer status could have allowed me to make some extra side bucks as well, but I didn't. So did I get a financial benefit from the SMART board people or not? Ditto for anyone who has a collection of official Microsoft certifications.
The companies are supposed to get their "ambassadors" or "endorsers" or "influencers" or "good buddies" up to speed on all this, but it seems fair to be skeptical about that happening. If you want a quick primer, there's a nifty video that I'll embed. In the meantime, if you are all excited about the swag you're going to score by pushing the Gradeinator 3000, you might want to pause a moment and study up.
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