Noblesse Oblige And the End of Public Education

Maybe you don't usually get around to reading David Dawkins, the Forbes staff member whose beat is billionaires. But back in October he ran an interview that should send a familiar chill through those of us who follow the great education disruption debates.

Dawkins talked to Josef Stadler, the head of Ultra High Net Worst at UBS (the big Swiss bank, about why folks don't trust billionaires these days, and why they probably shouldn't. It's a conversation that echoes much of Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All, but Stadler offers one further observation about the future.

In “the future”—Stadler pauses—“it is likely that those who benefit most—the entrepreneurs—will substitute public institutions when it comes to the big questions of our lifetime. [Only] they have the money. The public side …” by that he means governments, “will no longer have the money” needed.

Stadler predicts a future where the needs of society are met by the generosity of the brightest, best and richest “entrepreneurs” and business “leaders” of the age—the likes of Buffett, Gates, Branson and Soros.

“We’re going to see the return of something that went away at the end of the 19th century,” he pauses, “the reemergence of a benevolent aristocracy, supporting the people because the public is running out of money.”

We have, of course, seen the beginnings of this in education, most notably with Bill Gates attempt to single-handedly fund a redesign of US education. We see it also in the choice movement-- hand public education over to entrepreneurs and under the magical sway of market forces, they will deliver a better version of education with better quality, better choices, and better educated graduates. The trade-off, of course, is that the entrepreneurs and philanthropists get to decide what better looks like. Meanwhile, as Stadler predicts, public education is drained of the money and resources needed to do the job. The end-stage of school choice looks like a city in which there are no public options, and families must depend on the kindness of rich strangers, the noblesse oblige of the wealthy class, to find an education for their children.

They will get the choice that the wealthy class want them to have. Google "cradle to career" and look at the many companies lined up to use a child's data file to match her up with her proper career. "We see you'd like to enroll your child in our private academy? Well, let's take a look at her file and see what would be the best fit." And if your child has special needs? Well, good luck to you.

When the funds of public education have been emptied, there will be nothing left but the choice and charter programs, unregulated and unaccountable, the public forced to accept whatever the monied class wants to offer them.

Charters are the least likely disruption in this oligarchy, because as currently conceived, they still depend on money that flows through government hands. Keep an eye on instruments like tax credit scholarships (like the one proposed by Betsy DeVos as education [sic] freedom [sic] scholarships [sic]), in which the wealthy get to skip paying taxes by contributing to their favorite privately-run education voucher program instead. Or education savings accounts, in which the government has no role except as a pass through, an office that issues an education allowance to each family and says, "Okay, you go spend that on something educationy. Seeya, bye." Or watch for social impact bonds, a method giving private companies big piles of money as a reward for taking over government programs (and cutting corners off them like crazy).

When we talk about privatization, focus often goes to the way that private companies and individuals make money. But privatization is also about putting the control, the decision-making in the hands of private individuals. The aristocracy grabbing the power to decide what they'll let the little people have. This is rigging the system to make yourself a winner and then blowing some philanthropic smoke to keep people from noticing that you're the one keeping them poor, that you're the one who commandeered their school system (and health care and social safety net etc).

This is not an attractive future (unless you're part of the aristocracy). Whatever we can do to avoid it, we should do.

ICYMI: Deer Season Edition (12/1)

Yes, it may be Thanksgiving weekend where you are, but in my neck of the woods, schools are closed tomorrow for the first day of deer season. Don't knock it if you haven't eaten some excellent deer baloney. In the meantime, hre's some reading from the week

School District's Computer Servers Hacked

Sign of the times. This one was in New Jersey. One more reminder of the vulnerability of school data systems.

Betsy DeVos Gives Defrauded Students The Back of Her Hand    

Over at The Hill they've noticed that DeVos is not exactly racing to help students drowning in debt incurred at frauduversities. Fun detail I hadn't previously seen in coverage of this-- when DeVos signed off on claims already approved, she added "with extreme displeasure" below her signature. What a sweetheart.

Teachers Effects On Student Achievement and Height  

This is just awesome. Researchers took a look to see what happened if you used VAM to check on which teachers had the best effect on student height. Turns out VAM is just as valid for that purpose as it is for measuring teacher effect on test scores. A great addition to everyone's VAM is a sham file.

Research Center's Leadership Professional Development Program Had No Impact. Why?

In a shocking development, yet another set of PD stuff turns out to be largely useless (I know-- I'm shocked, to). Peter DeWitt at EdWeek asks what the problem might be.

Vouchers Explode In Ohio

Stephen Dyer at 10th Period takes a look at how Ohio charter vampires are upping their blood intake to even more dangerous levels.

i-Ready Sells 50-Year-Old Education Failure  

Thomas Ultican has a thoroughly researched look at all the reasons i-Ready is a snare and a delusion. A great read (and not just because he included me).

Kindergarten Teachers Speak Ot For Children's Happiness

Peter Gray at Psychology Today reminding us, again, that pushing academics on the littles is not doing anybody any good.

Ed Tech Agitprop  

Audrey Watters is freakin' awesome. Here's the text of a recent speech she delivered about the stories that ed tech pushers use to sell their junk. A must read.

When the Teachers Are Avatars and the Students Are Data  

Wrench in the Gears traveled to Seattle to speak about some of the threats hiding behind the tech revolution in education.

Trust Issues for Billionaires

David Dawkins at Forbes identifies one of the many longterm problems that come with the rise of our philanthropist kings.

Murmuration: Emma Bloomberg's Obscure Nonprofit    

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has been digging again, and she's found another project messing with education being funded by Michael Bloomberg's daughter.

TX: Bigotry In The Classroom

This is a troubling story, for several reasons.

Georgia Clark was an English teacher in the Fort Worth Independent School District, a district with over 80% Hispanic student population. Clark sent a message to Donald Trump, asking him to do something about all the illegal [sic] immigrant students. Her request included charming lines like "anything you can do to remove the illegals from Fort Worth would be greatly appreciated" and a request for "help reporting illegals in the Fort Worth public school system" and even a complaint that "the Mexicans refuse to honor our flag."

But it turns out that Clark is a little fuzzy on how to work the electric tweeter machine, and posted her various complaints as regular tweet and not direct messages, and that's where her latest troubles began. So her request for protection so that she could make her requests anonymously was, well, not so useful.

FWISD had reportedly already had Clark on their radar for not-entirely-supportive language used with students; she was apparently almost fired in 2013. This blew up in the community, and the district made the obvious call-- they put her on leave immediately, then fired her.

Clark didn't want to go, so she appealed the firing, and last week, Texas Education Agency commissioner Mike Morath ordered that she be reinstated, with back pay.

The FWISD board is appealing, and took a symbolic revote just to be clear that they really mean it, and again unanimously canned Clark. The board says that they believe the state's ruling is based on a procedural technicality, but the conclusion of the state's report also says  

Clark’s Twitters were a private citizen’s free speech about a matter of public concern and was privileged and does not establish good cause for termination.

Free speech? Yes, freedom of speech has to protect odious opinions, or it's not really freedom. And yes, we want the freedom of teacher speech to be absolutely protected. But this a whole other level.

She hasn't just expressed an ugly opinion. She has taken action against her own students. She has made her own classroom an actively unsafe place. This is not just an exercise of free speech any more than if she started whacking her students with a two-by-four. It is impossible to imagine how students could ever feel safe in her classroom again-- this is a woman who asked the President of the United States to come drag some of her students out of her classroom and throw them out of the country. Georgia Clark should never work in a school again. It's shocking that Mike Morath doesn't get that.

After all, there are fifth grade girls in Utah who figured it out. In more encouraging news this week, three girls left a classroom to get an administrator to remove a substitute teacher who had decided to launch an endless rant against a student who dared to say he was thankful that his two dads were going to adopt him. The teacher was shown the door immediately (still reportedly trying to expand on her anti-gay rant). The boy never should have had to go through the experience, but at least the people around him knew how to react.

Look. Different teachers bring different values into the classroom, ranging from the mildly edgy to the horrifically indefensible. But if your primary value is not the safety and nurturing of those students, over and above whatever other beliefs you have, you don't belong in the class. And if your beliefs are so antithetical to valuing all human beings, then you don't belong in the classroom. Texas got this one wrong.

Ed Tech Giant Powerschool Keeps Eating the World

If you want to be a tech giant, you can try to grow organically within your company, or you can just look for companies that are already doing what you want to do, and buy them. Some are better than the strategy than others-- Facebook absorbed Instagram well enough, but Google seems to kill everything it touches.

Back in the day, PowerSchool was a simple little program for taking care of classroom clerical work. Of the e-gradebooks I was forced to use in my career, it was the last and the most usable. Not everyone loves it (though I suspect in some cases it's the local district IT department's choice of options that deserves the blame), and while I'm no technophobe, I never stopped using a paper gradebook and copying it into PowerSchool.

Pearson bought it. Then Pearson sold it to a private investment firm, which is not always good news. But on the user end, we didn't notice much difference.

That was about four years ago, and PowerSchool has developed Aspirations. Now they have finalized the purchase of Schoology, a learning management system that boasts a presence in over 60,000 schools. I have no idea if they're any good or not, though their website does boast one of my favorite Ambiguous Endorsements-- "We put Schoology in front of our teachers and their mouths dropped."

This is the ninth acquisition for PowerSchool since 2015. The goal is a "Unified Classroom" suite, and as described in EdSurge, it's not good news. The goal is "toconnect assessment, enrollment, gradebook, professional learning and special education data services to its flagship student information system, which already houses a variety of data including attendance, discipline, health, roster and schedules."

Nor does CEO Hardeep Gulati's description of the goal of a unified data ecosystem sound any better:

“Having all the information together in one place,” says Gulati, “offers educators a better way to create a personalized learning experience in PowerSchool.” He adds: “Schools should have one seamless way to travel between their student information system, learning management systems and assessment tools through common data sharing experiences and capabilities.” 

There are many reasons not to be excited here. The most obvious is the huge potential for data mining. In a state like Florida that has committed to establishing a full-on surveillance state for students, a program like this would be just what the doctor ordered to better keep its creepy eyes on every student. I expect that one side effect of all this disruptive innovation will be a new sales pitch for pricy private schools-- "Send your child to our swanky private school where we won't keep 24/7 digital records of her every move."

It's also worth remembering that all of this digitized data will be in the hands of a company owned by private investment firms. Data, particularly massive data kept on a whole new generation from childhood, is the new oil. Try to imagine a corporate boardroom where they look at this vast reserve of valuable data they have their hands on, and they just say, "Yes, we could get rich by monetizing this asset, but it would be wrong, so we won't." And even if the current owners managed to hang onto their scruples, what about the guys who eventually buy them out.

Beyond the big global ethical privacy and data concerns, there's one other to keep in mind-- the bigger a learning management system gets, the less use it is to a classroom teacher.

I was a Moodle guy; it was a hugely useful tool for me, with features I really liked and other features I could ignore and a very responsive support system that let me ask for what I wanted. No LMS I ever encountered made me happier as a classroom teacher. The problem--well, part of the problem-- is that when you add a "feature" to an LMS, you are adding a "way this particular function has to be done.": An LMS is particularly helpful when it lets you do something you couldn't otherwise do at all; Moodle let me run online threaded class discussion, a new way to extend student discussion. It was something that I couldn't already do.

But when an LMS moves into areas such as giving tests and record keeping, it is now telling me how to do things that I already do. Feature creep keeps going, and pretty soon the teacher is locked into whole methods of test giving, test grading, record-keeping etc etc etc. There is tell-tale language that often crops up. Schoology, for instance, talks about how great it is for administrators. And I'm sure, in terms of uniform record keeping and accessing and spread sheeting, it's lovely (particularly if you are an administrator who dreams of management by screen. But one size fits all LMS is not great for classroom teachers, Particularly--and this is another part of the problem--if the LMS was designed by computer guys and not actual teachers. And no, you don't get credit for using one or two teachers as consultants, because teachers are different. My management system in my classroom would have given some of my colleagues fits.

So it is not good news that PowerSchool is working on micromanagement and data mining in order to make things easier for the bosses. Big brother just keeps getting bigger, but mostly what that does is make a world in which the people who actually do the work just look smaller and smaller.

CO: READ Didn't Work. Quick, Call A Consultant!

In 2012, Colorado joined the list of states whose legislators don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Colorado passed the READ Act, "born out of convincing research by a variety of sources...that shows students who cannot read by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school."

That's an interesting, possibly valuable correlation. But to argue, as many states now have, that forcing students to stay in third grade until they can pass a standardized reading test will somehow cause them not to drop out of school (or fail at school or fail at life, as other research has sugested)n is just dumb.

What do I mean about confusing correlation and causation in developing policy? Consider these examples:

Research shows that students who don't reach a certain height by third grade will be short as adults. Therefor, we should keep them in third grade until they reach tat certain height.

Research shows that if students use corrective lenses in third grade, they usually use them as adults. Therefor, no third graders will be allowed to use corrective lenses.

Research shows that students who have beaten up, ill-fitting shoes in third grade often are poor in high school. Therefore, we will buy all third graders a nice pair of shoes, insuring that none of them will be poor when they are in high school.

READ incorporated many of the usual dumb ideas. Like jamming reading, and the formal assessment of reading, down onto kindergartners. We know that academically oriented kindergartern is a bad idea. We absolutely know it. Here's just one paragraph from just one of the many articles that appear weekly, desperately trying to remind the People In Charge about this (in this case, it's Peter Gray in Psychology Today):

The research is clear. Academic training in kindergarten has no long-term benefit. In fact, it may cause long-term harm. It does not reduce the education gap between the rich and the poor, which is the usual reason offered for such training. It slightly increases academic test-scores in first grade, but by third grade the benefit is lost and, according to some of the best studies, by fourth grade those subjected to academic kindergartens are doing worse—academically as well as socially and emotionally—than those who were in play-based kindergartens (for some of the evidence, see here).

READ at least has the sense not to use third grade retention as the default strategy. It leans heavily on giving districts a bunch of money to come up with some kind of intervention strategy, selected from the state menu of strategies.

But it came with heavy support from astro-turf group Stand for Children. And it doesn't appear to have put a lot of thought into the idea of "on grade level," a construction that seems straightforward, but is not. Lots of folks have different ideas about what "reading on grade level means,' and there are a wide variety of tools available for measuring the grade level of a piece of writing, and they all mostly disagree with each other when it comes to any one piece of writing. The functional definition of "on grade level" has huge implications for these sorts of policies. If, for instance, you get "grade level by looking at the bell curve of reading test results for all third graders, and you mark the top of the curve as "on grade level," then voila!! Half of your third graders read below grade level. Or maybe you use a measure that a reading scientist cooked up in a lab, and you don't really know what "on grade level" means.

Nor is reading ability a static state, a set of skills that transfer equally well in all situations. A student who loves baseball may be a great reader of a passage about baseball, and a terrible reader of a passage about economic policy in early Asia. Measures are further warped by the biases of the test designers. But a student who is good at interpreting marks on the page as sounds isn't necessarily a good reader, just as a student who is good at making guesses about the passage based on pictures and hints without actually decoding any of the marks on the page-- well, that child isn't necessarily a good reader either.

All of which is to say that assessing literacy is really, really hard, and virtually every expert has an investment in one particular point of view, including the people whose point of view is "I would like to make a lot of money selling you reading stuff." Colorado's ac t leans toward multiple measures rather than a single test, but there are still just so many problems here.

Not the least of which is that READ seems to be utterly failing.

It's 2019, and Colorado's reading numbers haven't shown any real improvement.

This has led to lots of dumb ideas in response. Take this gobsmacking headline from Chalkbeat Colorado last March:

Seeking better results, Colorado lawmakers want to tell schools how to teach reading

This is straight from the file of crap that other professionals don't have to put up with but teachers get dumped on them all the time. We don't see "Seeking better flight results, lawmakers tell pilots how to fly planes" or even "Seeking more wins, lawmakers tell head coach how to call plays" and certrainly not "Seeking fewer illnesses, lawmakers tell doctors how to practice medicine." Oh, no, wait, sometimes we do see that-- and it looks like these dopes in Ohio mandating a medical procedure that doesn't actually exist. So maybe we aren't the only ones ever, but it's still dumb.

But no-- the state legislature wants to retrain all the reading teachers. And it wants to hire a consultant to spend a few years (and a few million dollars) figuring out why READ tanked. Colorado wants to hire WestEd, a 50-year-old descendant of the federal regional education laboratories established under LBJ. While other of these labs have fallen by the wayside, WestEd has "diversified" its funding (You can get lots of video about them here). They are to audit the money from READ.

What's baffling here is that the legislative response to READ's failure doesn't seem to include anything along the lines of, "Hey, let's go out and talk to the actual classroom teachers who are actually devoting their professional lives to teaching littles to read. Maybe they could tell us what some of the obstacles are, or why READ didn't work. Maybe--and I'm must spitballing here--we could ask them what sort of help they need to get this job done."

I suppose it's not that surprising. Colorado is a state awash in reformy disruption, and where reformy disruption goes, teachers are largely ignored and dismissed.

But still. Imagine your eight year old child is having trouble reading. Who do you call? A legislator? A consultant? Or do you get ahold of the actual teacher who is actually working with your child on a daily basis?  And the beauty of this as a strategy for the state is that all those teachers already work for them, so you wouldn't have to spend $5 million to get to the bottom of READ's failure. Soneone is going to say, "Well, WestEd is probably going to do that as part of its consultimg," and on the one hand I think, boy, I sure hope so but on the other hand I'm thinking, you mean the state of Colorado needs to speak to their teachers for them, because it's so hard for them to do it themselves??

So many bad choices lined up in a row. Here's hoping that WestEd can talk $5.2 million worth of sense to the Colorado legislature.

Be Grateful

It's ironic, with a very American sort of irony, that we have a national holiday about thankfulness and gratitude, because we are kind of lousy at that whole thankfulness and gratitude thing.

We're more attracted to the self-made story, the I-pulled-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps story, the story that in this country, anyone can get ahead with grit, virtue and hard work (and if you haven't gotten ahead, it must be because you did not display any of these things). We're a little less "there but for the grace of God go I" and a little more "I've got mine, Jack." We don't mind the idea of paying it forward, as long as we get to pick someone deserving to pay it forward to.

The board of directors watch their
first Macy's parade. Balloons!

Our lives exist at some intersection of choice and fortune. We start with the cards that life or fortune or God or random accidents deal to us, and then we make choices from where we are and then the deck is shuffled again. It's an abrogation of responsibility to claim that we are just a leaf on the ocean, and it's a denial of reality to claim that no force is stronger in our lives than the force of our own wills. (And even the force of our will is the result of forces we don't control, but nobody else controls how we respond to that and on and on and on.)

Gratitude is, at root, a recognition that not all human beings start out on the same level playing field with the same resources and choices available to them. Gratitude is about looking at your own life and understanding that you didn't make all that (whether "that" is good or bad). Be proud that you did a good thing. Be grateful that you had the ability and opportunity.

The attitude matters because it colors the rest of our lives. The self-made person gets angry at people who fail because it's their own damn fault. They could have tried harder, been smarter. At a bare minimum, they could be satisfied about settling into what is obviously their proper station in life. This is why people like Betsy DeVos are the way they are-- they hold an axiomic belief that in life, people get what they deserve, and trying to mess with that divine distributive justice is to fly in the face of God himself.

Oh, some people will offer a kind of faux gratitude, which comes out basically as "I am grateful that I have received everything that I so richly deserve." This is gloating, not gratitude. Oddly enough, the Puritans got this--their doctrine, at least on paper, was that all any human actually deserved was to burn in hell for eternity, and anything that made your life better than that was strictly a gift from God, who gave it to you not because of who you are or what you've done, but because of who He is. You could do your best to live a good life, but under no circumstances would you be able to stand before God and declare, "You owe me this. You have to give me this." God does not owe you jack, Jack.

The fruit of true gratitude is service, kindness, generosity. True gratitude is recognizing that what you got could just have easily belonged to someone else, that you have somehow been presented with a great big benefit for which you have never been billed, and so you must owe somebody something.

Gratitude, I should also add, is personal. It is not gratitude to point at someone else and say, "Hey, you should be grateful for what you got, and let me tell you what you owe the world." I can talk about my own debt to God, other humans, the universe and everything, but I have no way of knowing what yours might or might not be.

I lead an extraordinarily fortunate and privileged life. I have, mostly, tried to make the most out of it, but I try never to forget how much I owe to other people and to circumstances that have shaped me and presented me with opportunities that I did not necessarily earn. That includes being grateful for your attention, readers, and for the chance to do and stand up for the important work of public education. And I'm grateful for all the other folks who do the same. Have a good day!

AI: Bad Data, Bad Results

Once upon a time, when you took computer programming courses, you had two things drilled into you:

1) Computers are dumb. Fast and indefatigable, but dumb.

2) Garbage in, garbage out.

The rise of artificial intelligence is supposed to make us forget both of those things. It shouldn't. It especially shouldn't in fields like education which are packed with cyber-non-experts and far too many people who think that computers are magic and AI computers are super-shiny magic. Too many folks in the Education Space get the majority of their current computer "training" from folks who have something to sell.

AI is too often used inappropriately, when all we've really got is a fancy algorithm, but no actual intelligence, artificial or otherwise. We're supposed to get past that with software that can learn, except that we haven't got that sorted out either.

Remember Tay, the Microsoft intelligent chatbot that learned to be a horrifying racist? Tay actually had a younger sister, Zo, who was supposed to be better, but was just arguably worse in different ways. Facial recognition programs still mis-identify black faces.

The pop culture notion, long embedded in all manner of fiction, is that a cold, logical computer would be ruthlessly objective. Instead, what we learn over and over and over and over and over and over again is that a computer is ruthlessly attached to whatever biases are programmed into it.

Wired just published an article about how tweaking the data used to train an AI could be the new version  of sabotage, a way to turn an AI program into a sleeper agent. Imagine cars trained to veer into a ditch if they see a particular sign,

“Current deep-learning systems are very vulnerable to a variety of attacks, and the rush to deploy the technology in the real world is deeply concerning,” says Cristiano Giuffrida, an assistant professor at VU Amsterdam who studies computer security, and who previously discovered a major flaw with Intel chips affecting millions of computers.

It's not just education that suffers from a desire to throw itself at the mercy of this unfinished, unreliable technology. Here's a survey from Accenture finding that "84% of C-suite executives believe they must leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve their growth objectives." And in what is typical for folks chasing the AI mirage, "76% report they struggle with how to scale." They believe they need AI, for some reason, but they have no idea how to do it. So it's not just your superintendent saying, "We're going to implement this new thingy wit the AI that the sales rep tells me will totally transform our learning stuff, somehow, I hope."

Reading faces is just one example. It's not just facial recognition for the implementation of the surveillance state enhanced school security. We've seen multiple companies that claim that they have software that can read student expressions and tell you what the students are thinking and feeling. How? How do you train a very dumb, fast, indefatigable object to read the full range of complex human emotion? It would have to be via training, which would mean reading a bunch of practice faces, which would mean what-- some computer engineer sits in front of a camera while an operator says "Now think a sad thought"--click-- "Good! Now think of a happy thought!"

The Wired piece talks about the danger of deliberately introducing bad data into a system, which in an education setting could mean anything from clever new ways to juke the stats and data, all the way to tweaking software so that it trains certain responses into students.

But an education system wouldn't need to be deliberately attacked. Just keep pouring in the bad data. Personalized [sic] learning programs allegedly driven by AI depend on the data from the various assessments; what is the guarantee or check that assures us that those assessments actually assess what they are meant to assess? Who assesses the assessor? The very fact that the data has to be generated in a form that a computer can process means that the data will be somewhere between "kind of off" and "wildly bad." It's no wonder that, despite the many promises, there is still no software program that can do a decent job of assessing writing. Schools are generating bad data, corrupted data, incomplete data, and data that just doesn't measure what it says it measures-- all at heretofore unheard of rates. Trying to harness this data, particularly for instructional purposes, can only lead to bad results for students. Garbage in, garbage out.

Meanwhile, in the real world, my Facebook account just spent a week using facial recognition tagging software to identify everything from my two-year-old twins to random bits of fabrics as various random friends. And mass-mailing software continues to send the occasional item to my ex-wife at this address. Best recent achievement by my data overlords-- a phone call to my land line at this house from someone who wanted to sell something to my ex-wife's current husband. These are not just cute stories; everyone has them, and they are all reminders that the computerized data-mining AI systems do a lousy job of separating good data from bad, and that all of that bad data goes right into the hopper to help the software make its decisions.

Computers are big, dumb, fast machines, and when you give them junk to operate with, they give you junk back. That hasn't changed in sixty years. The notion that these big dumb brutes can be trusted with the education of young humans is a marketing pipe dream.