The Height Of A Dead Salmon

A while back someone sent me an article with a striking lead:

The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring, like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking, eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your subject's eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it's a pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch. The "subject" is a mature Atlantic salmon.

And it is dead.

And yet, the fMRI showed brain activity. The experiment was run in 2009 and drew a fair amount of attention at the time, perhaps because it allowed editors to write headlines like "fMRI Gets Slap In The Face With A Dead Fish" and "Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk Of Red Herrings." The paper, which carried the droll title "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" didn't show that dead salmon have thoughts about human social interactions, and it didn't show that fMRI is junk. It showed, as one writer put it, that "bad statistics lead to bad science."

"Guess what I'm thinking right now!"

To understand why the salmon looked alive, there are two things to get. One is that vast amounts of data invariably include bizarre little outliers, and that if you do not correct for the comparison of the huge amounts of data, junk gets into your system. This matters to us because crunching huge amounts of data is how the Artificial Intelligences using "machine learning" to figure out what a student coulda woulda shoulda completed as a competency depend on. When A VAM program decides that a student did better than expected, that expectation is driven by crunching vast amounts of data from supposedly similar students under supposedly similar conditions. This is how outfits like Knewton could claim to being the all-knowing eye in the sky (and then fail at it). The assertion that vast amounts of data insure number-crunching accuracy is not true-- particularly if the data has not been properly massaged. This is how the salmon study authors committed some deliberately bad science.

Second, we have to get what an fMRI does and does not do. Boing-Boing, of all places, caught up with the authors of the study, who pointed out that despite the popular understanding of what the machinery does, it doesn't do that at all:

I'm so tired about hearing about "the brain lighting up". It makes it sound like you see lights in the head or something. That's not how the brain works. It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what fMRI results mean. Those beautiful colorful maps ... they're probability maps. They show the likelihood of activity happening in a given area, not proof of activity. According to our analysis, there's a higher likelihood of this region using more blood because we found more deoxygenated blood in this area. It's also correlational. Here's a time frame and the changes we'd expect, so we see which bits of brain correlate with that.

So, without getting too far into neuroscience, the fMRI does not map brain activity, but uses a proxy based on a correlation stretched over a huge number of data points.

This, I'll argue, is much like what we do with high stakes testing. Policy makers figure that Big Standardized Test scores correlate to educational achievement and therefor make a decent proxy. Except that they mostly correlate with family socio-economic background. The supposedly scientific measure of educational achievement in students is faulty. Using test scores as a proxy for teacher effectiveness is even faultier.

Which is why someone can write a paper like the hilarious "Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale." In this instant classic, researchers used the fabled VAM sauce to check for teacher influence on student height, and sure enough-- some teachers can be scientifically shown to have an effect on the physical growth of their students. Just in case you need one more piece of evidence that the value-added measures being used to evaluate teachers are, in fact, bunk.

There are several larger lessons to remember here:

1) A proxy for the thing you want to measure is not the thing you want to measure. If you don't remember that, you are going to make a mess of things (and even if you do remember, Campbell's Law says you probably will still screw it up).

2) Large amounts of data can say many things. Not all of those things are true. Bad statistics, badly managed, lead to really bad science.

3) When "science" tells you that a dead salmon is having thoughts and your common sense tells you that the salmon is frozen, dead, and thought-free, you should go with common sense. Dead fish tell no tales.

Science, data-- wonderful stuff. But not magic-- especially when misused or tossed around by folks who are no more scientists than they are educators.

ICYMI: Almost A New Decade Edition (12/29)

Yep, soon anything from the 1900s will be "a long time ago." But we can meditate on how experience fades into the dim past some other day. Right now we'll just worry about last week. Here's some of the worthwhile reading; it's a short list because holiday time. Remember to amplify the stuff that speaks to you!

How Ibram X. Kendi's Definition of Antiracism Applies to Schools  

If you don't know Kendi's work yet, you should catch up. Here KQED takes a look at how it applies directly to schools. Start thinking about racism before you get back from vacation.

The Stories We Were Told About Education Technology (2019)

Audrey Watters takes a look at the year in ed tech, employing her gift for blowing away the smoke and cutting through the bullshit. This read is a little depressing, but important.


Reasons Children Have Reading Problems That Corporate Reformers Don't Talk About  

Nancy Bailey takes a look at some of the factors that can affect children's reading, even if they aren't part of the reformster playbook.

Massachusetts Nonprofit Receives $57 Million from Arkansas Waltons  

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks into one more astro-turfy charter-promoting group and finds a big fat pile of Walton money.

The PISA Problem  

The Have You Heard podcast looks at the regular testing chicken littling. And if, like me, you don't really have a chance to listen to podcasts, there's a transcript for us dinosaurs.

Ten Ideas To Save The World In 2020

Looking for ways to have a more positive impact on the planet? Here's some simple starter ideas from a fine blogger who is also my daughter.

  

Dana Goldstein's Common Core Ten Year Tale, Annotated

Dana Goldstein's NYT ten year retrospective of Common Core has been sitting on my desktop since it was published, making me grumpy. It's yet another example of how the stories we are told about modern disruptive education reform are subtly sugared and carefully crafted to avoid discussing some of the larger issues. I don't know-- after all, Goldstein is a published book author and writes for the

Alas, poor standards.

New York Times, and I'm sitting here next to a sleeping baby on the couch, blogging for free, so it's always possible that I don't know what I'm talking about. But there is just so much stuff going on in her piece that I'm just going to quote and respond. For full fairness, you should go read the full piece, but these are all the little moments I experience reading this piece. Some of this is about how Goldstein reports the story, and some of it is just a chance to re-experience the anger of the last decade all over again. Yay, nostalgia.

So let's wade in.

The plan was hatched with high hopes and missionary zeal:

First sentence and already we're passive voicing our way right past a critical CCSS issue--just who decided to push this whole scheme, anyway?

More than 40 states signed on to the plan, known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative, after it was rolled out in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors, education experts and philanthropists.

Actually, many states signed on ahead of the actual roll-out. And "rolled out" is a nice end run around the question of who actually wrote the standards. "Education experts"? That's a bit of a stretch.

American children would read more nonfiction, write better essays and understand key mathematical concepts, instead of just mechanically solving equations.

There would be no discussion about the educational soundness of these goals.Yes, I know-- Goldstein is reporting, in a fairly economical matter, what the vision was. I just wish the CC story included a discussion of where that vision came from (e.g. David Coleman's personal amateur-educator beliefs about what students ought to read).

“We are being outpaced by other nations,” President Barack Obama said in one 2009 speech, in which he praised states that were moving toward the Common Core. “It’s not that their kids are any smarter than ours — it’s that they are being smarter about how to educate their children.”

We are being outpaced on test scores. Again, did that actually matter? Was there any reason to believe that PISA scores relate to anything? One of the unreported stories of Common Core is the bipartisan success in pushing the idea that US schools are failing--with practically no evidence. But she's not going to examine that premise, nor the premise that the Big Standardized Test tells us anything important about the state of US education. Instead, she'll jump-cut to the present to point that BS Test scores are stagnant and we're still not winning internationally at PISA.

The disappointing results have prompted many in the education world to take stock of the Common Core, one of the most ambitious education reform projects in American history. Some see the effort as a failure, while others say it is too soon to judge the program, whose principles are still being rolled out at the classroom level.

This is an odd piece of reporting. In trying to hang her story on the peg of the decade anniversary, Goldstein seems to be ignoring that people have been "taking stock" of the standards pretty much continuously for the decade. Calling it "one of the most ambitious education reform projects" is fair, but it reminds me that there's an interesting story to be written comparing the Core to other education revamps.

The Common Core got caught up in an old-fashioned culture war, one that pitted activists on both the right and left, who came to detest the Core, against an education policy establishment that was sometimes surprised by the fierce resistance to its actions.

I'm not sure what's "old-fashioned" about a culture war that makes allies out of people all across the political spectrum, but calling the CC debates a "culture war" is dismissive of those opponents, suggesting they just had their ideological knickers in a twist rather than voicing legitimate educational objections. I would be tempted to rewrite this as "The educational amateurs behind the Core botched the writing, the roll-out, and the implementation, and consequently suffered a shit-ton of push back."

But in Goldstein's version, none of the problems of the Common Core were created by the folks pushing it. Her next quotes come from Amy Wilkins, a senior vp of the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools (which reminds me that the whole issue of how CCSS were a tool to help push privatization and choice will also get short shrift here), who correctly notes that "there is so much space between the people who cook up these policies and the classroom" but doesn't note that they could try to do what they falsely claimed they had done-- involve people who work in the classroom. And then she offers this lousy comment:

We underestimated how difficult it is to change a big, entrenched system.

This construction is not uncommon among reformsters; it's an elegant way to blame the education system for the reformsters' failure. "It's not that our idea was lousy, or that we did a lousy job of putting it out there," it says. "It's that Those People are thicker and slower than we realized." It's not that we built a plane that couldn't fly; it's that the air and gravity refused to cooperate.

Rocky Start

Next, Goldstein rolls back the clock to capture the "rocky start" of the Common Core, placing the roots as a response to No Child Left Behind. "The law was largely seen as a disappointment," she says, once again hiding the Deciders behind passive voice. Then she offers this paragraph, one of the least reality-based in the whole article:

In response, in 2009, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a coalition of state superintendents, formed a working group of consultants, educators and experts tasked with drafting shared national standards in English and math.

Consultants? Sure. Educators? By whose definition? Experts? In what, exactly? In place of that paragraph, please insert Lyndsey Layton's important story of how David Coleman got Bill Gates to make this all happen. And never forget that David Coleman bragged about how "unqualified" he and his crew were. There were no teachers or education experts given a strong hand in this process, and that was on purpose-- these plucky outsiders were going to show all those "experts" how to fix America's stinky schools.

Goldstein says that after 2010, the standards started hitting "both logistical and political roadblocks." Well, yes. Almost as if in their amateur haste, the architects had not bothered to look at the landscape before they put the car in gear. Goldstein focuses on a young Kentucky teacher who notes that publishers didn't have materials ready in time, so there was a rush to write-it-yourself (difficult because nobody knew exactly how the standards were supposed to work). Then there's this:

In the early years of the rollout, Ms. Wilkerson recalled, there was so much pressure for students to do well on the math and reading tests associated with the standards that science and social studies lessons were sometimes canceled to make more room for the tested subjects.

"In the early years"? Actually, in all the years. But then, high stakes testing had been a feature of education since NCLB, and the "disappointment" that some reformers felt over that was that different were testing different stuff. Part of the whole point of Common Core was to answer the question, "How do we get all these states to test the same stuff?" Somehow Goldstein skips over SBA and PARCC, tests intended to be nation al high stakes Common Core-linked tests. But she does note the opt-out movement as part of the pushback.

She notes that folks on the right were not happy about it, in no small part because it was associated with Obama, who didn't create it, but did push it (Goldstein also skips over the way NCLB's insane requirements became the leverage with which states were pushed into Core compliance).

She moves into a recap of conservative social media pushback, with angry parents posting all the latest terrible Common Core homework (she pictures them "sitting at kitchen tables and squinting at" their kids' homework). And of all the critics of Common Core aligned pedagogy, she goes with Louis C. K. which--okay, that represented a sort of pop culture moment for rejecting the Core.

And in a short quote from Lindsey M. Burke at the Heritage Foundation, she hints at one of the side-effects of the whole mess-- Core backers had used political means to get their educational program in place, and opponents soon realized that it would take political action to get rid of it.

A Retreat

By the mid-2010s, the Common Core had a public relations problem.

Well, yes. I suppose you could say that cholera and fascism have PR problems-- but dismissing something as a PR problem is a simple way to dismiss all objections and critiques as matters of taste and optics, not substantial issues of substance. Core fans have repeated blamed messaging and implementation as a way to avoid any suggestion that the standards themselves have some problems.

But mostly, as Goldstein correctly notes, using Kentucky as an example, states dealt with the issue cosmetically, by rebranding the standards and not really changing anything. Her Kentucky teacher (who, like virtually every single person interviewed for this story, thinks the Core is dandy) says that's a good thing because the Core's priorities are good (more non-fiction is good college prep!) and other things are getting better:

The issue of lost time for history and science has gotten better, she said, as educators become more aware of research showing that rich social studies and science lessons build background knowledge that improves reading comprehension.

Just spitballing here, but there might be reasons to study social studies and science (and art and music) beyond just getting your reading scores to go up. This is part of the legacy of the Core-- the notion that every single thing has to be justified in terms of how it affects reading (and math) scores. And Goldstein makes the point that the Core maintains influence in classrooms.

“It’s a bell that can’t be unrung,” said Sandra Alberti, a senior fellow at Student Achievement Partners, the consulting group founded by three of the lead writers of the Common Core.

Sigh. Yep, that's a headline-- "Representative of Group Promoting a Particular Policy Announces That Said Policy Is Important!"

Still, not everyone agrees that the Common Core was faithfully implemented at the classroom level.

This might be the funniest line in the piece. Of course not everyone agrees, because there's nobody who can authoritatively declare what faithful implementation looks like. And because many teachers are actual professionals who adapt every single thing in their classroom to best fit the students in front of them. "Well, this would work, but it's not properly aligned with the standards, so tough luck, students," said no decent teacher ever. Look, at this point, alignment is a paperwork exercise-- you make your plans based on your best professional judgment, and then you pick out the standards that you can slap onto that lesson.

She tells the story of a Massachusetts charter school teacher who notes that his school met its non-fiction requirements with biographies instead of argument-driven essays and articles. She will once again pass up the opportunity to question what basis exists for that reading requirement.

More Time?

Many of those who developed the Common Core said a key weakness was that the standards were not rolled out with lesson plans, textbooks and widespread teacher-training programs.

That's probably because, at the time, they were all desperately trying to claim that the standards were not a curriculum and weren't trying to micromanage the classrooms of every teacher in this country. It is a measure of how disconnected they remain from actual teaching in actual schools that they now imagine that doing more micromanagement would have made things go better. "What I need is someone to come in and tell me exactly how to do my job," said no teacher ever.

Goldstein actually only follows up with one of the three architects-- Bill McCallum, who is now getting into the curriculum biz after being a bit, well, at sea for a while. The other math guy, Jason Zimba, was, last I knew, working as a consultant for big time districts like New York City. David Coleman is, of course, running the College Board.

“Part of what we’re doing is playing catch-up,” said Allan Golston, president of the United States program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a lead philanthropic backer of the Core. “We did learn about the importance of wider community engagement.”

I wonder what they learned. What a curious lost sort of quote.

Goldstein finally in the last paragraphs talks to someone who is not a Core booster. Jack Schneider, ed profesor and co-host of the education podcast Have You Heard, says

it was “naïve” to expect them to make a big impact on student achievement without broader investments in early childhood education, teacher training and school integration. Ultimately, he added, “I would say that poverty alleviation programs are a better investment than standardized tests.”

And so ends Goldstein's curious ret-con of the Core, covered like a political race with attention to the horse race aspects but no thought for the actual qualities of the horse. She has managed to recap without analysis, while trying to leave the impression that the Core is still alive and kicking and not a shambling zombiefied shadow of its former self, most of its golden aspirations now dust. The Core deserves something more like eulogy and less like hagiography.

VA: Ideas About How To Recruit and Retain Teachers

As squawking about the teacher "shortage" many states have developed methods to either take advantage of the situation ("Now we can finally break the teachers union and public education by letting any warm body stand in front of a classroom because, hey, there's a shortage") or try to figure out a way to actually solve the problem.

In Virginia, a coalition appears to be taking a shot at the latter approach. The Virginia Public Education Coalition is a group of a dozen Virginia organizations encompassing public school professional groups, school boards, principals, superintendents and even the ASCD and PTA. Collectively, they've come up with some ideas about how to attract and retain folks in Virginia teaching positions.

Is their plan a good one? It makes a nifty flyer. And can other states learn from it? Welll…..

The plan ignores some of the bigger reasons to avoid taking a job there. For instance, Virginia is a right-to-work state, meaning that a teacher in Virginia may, if she teaches in one of the areas where the union has been fully neutered, find herself with little or no employment protection or voice in her teaching conditions. If Virginia wants to attract more teachers, they have to recognize "We make sure them unions keep quiet" is not a winner. In 2012 a study was jointly produced by the right-tilted Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now, the "action" wing of Democrats for Education Reform, a group of hedge fundie privatizers masquerading as Democrats. The study ranked the relative strength of each state's teachers union; Virginia was 47th. Proposed slogan for Virginia teacher recruitment program: "Welcome to Virginia, teacher-- you're on your own!"

So they missed some parts. Did they do well with the rest? They talk about three areas, for each of three areas.

FIRST- RECRUITING

Compensation

According to some studies, Virginia has the largest teacher pay gap (gap between teacher pay and pay for other college-educated folks) in the country. Depending on who's counting, Virginia ranks thirty-somethingth in the nation for teacher pay. But the plan calls for more complicated steps than a simple, "Pay teachers more," though it does start with a wordier version of that, a la "establish compensation and benefits" that attract beginners and encourage them to stay. Well, yeah.

Fix the recession-era budget language that caps state funding for support staff, which would both pay support staff more and free up local dollars to spend on teachers.

Reform student loans, including loan forgiveness, and try a few other things to make it less expensive to become a teacher. Fix the busted formula use to calculate "prevailing practice' for teacher salaries. And an interesting idea-- come up with some state-funded supports for student teachers during their semester, like actual pay and housing allotments.

Preparation and Support

Here we run into trouble. "Ensure that the competencies included in the Profile of a Virginia Leader and Profile of a Virginia Educator are reflected in Virginia's educator preparation programs." Those profiles appear to be works in progress, building the structure for a new evaluation system, and it just all looks very jargon-filled and that certainly has its place, but it's no substitute for the kinds of preparation and support that new teachers need, which is more of the "which of these questions should I use top discuss Hamlet and how can I get that discussion to actually happen and what do I do about the kid who is being not quite but close to insubordinate to me face every day?" The challenge of the dailiness of teacher life, particularly new teacher life, is not the challenge of philosophical underpinnings or global standards, but how to deal with the specific classroom actions needed to make some education happen in the next forty minutes. This is why mentoring programs, when done properly, are powerful.

Virginia has a grow-your-own teacher program, which is basically about starting recruitment when students are still in high school and grooming them to return to their old school. It's a process that makes sense because so many teachers end up teaching close to home anyway. The plan says to take a look at the program and see how it's working.

Third and worst, the plan calls to "initiate multiple options for accreditation" of programs. "allowing for options that respond to the teacher shortage and offer opportunities to diversify the teacher pipeline." Yes, Virginia happily welcomes Teach for America temps, and has since 2013. If by "diversify," the proposal means "get more non-white teachers in the classroom," that's on point, but it seems more likely that it means "support more ways to fast-track amateurs into classrooms."

There are plenty of reasons not to like that idea. It's not just that it shuffles a lot of warm, unprepared bodies into classrooms. Those folks, beyond not pulling their own weight, also extract a toll on the system. There's the cost of churn, of being a student in a school in which "teachers" just keep coming and going. If you're saying, "Well, at least we got someone in that classroom for that year," you don't get it-- this is a short-term solution that creates long-term damage to the system at a cost to all the future students who will pass through it. These churning bodies also put extra strain on the rest of the staff who have to pick up after them. And finally, I don't understand why some folks still don't get the fundamental insult of TFA. You're a person who really wanted to be a teacher, went to college for it, went through student teaching, paid your dues, prepped hard and hoped to land a job, and now here comes somebody who just waltzed through five weeks of superficial training and they sit in a classroom just like you, and you ask yourself "Was I just the victim of some huge scam? Why did I bother with any of that?"

Why make it a point to say that you're going to make sure that teacher prep programs reflect all your lovely competencies if you are also going to say that you want to come up with a bunch of ways to circumvent those programs?

Working Conditions

Establish a state "clearinghouse" of available jobs, with a common application. As someone who spent his first summer out of college applying to about seventy different districts, I say, "Bravo!"

They repeat the part about compensation here.

They propose a career ladder that doesn't require teachers to go into administration. This always sounds like a swell idea if 1) it doesn't involve lowering everyone's salary to make room for ladder-climbing "raises" and 2) if you can pry administrations' fingers off of the power needed to make any of these ladder steps actually mean anything.

"Provide an administrative framework" that gets school leaders to support effective teaching rather than just monitoring compliance. Yes, well. First the state has to actually mean it, because the compliance mindset starts there and just trickles down. The someone is going to have to fire a bunch of administrators who have compliance mindset so hardwired into their brain that nothing short of a lobotomy will remove it. Good luck with all of these.

NEXT- INDUCTION

Compensation

Yeah, still need more.

Preparation and Support

Update teacher prep programs to reflect all those profiles (including the Profile of a Graduate). Not sure how this helps the induction of a new teacher.

Then there's some noise about looking over the guidelines for mentoring and coaching and make sure it's all "grounded in research" and "evidence-based practice" which would mean a lot more if it weren't coming from a state that has welcomed Teach for America, a program which is neither research- nor evidence-based. Also, if your research and evidence is based on standardized test scores, it's junk and useless (especially to every inductee who isn't teaching reading or math).

Working Conditions

Get experienced teachers to be mentors. Duh. Both mentor and mentee should have reduced teaching load so they have time to do the mentoring thing. Which is absolutely correct, but how does that actually work? Will the district hire a 1/2-day teacher to pick up the slack for a year (and if so, who's mentoring that person). Or will the district absorb the slack by enlarging class sizes, turning mentoring into more work for everybody? Or will the district just take the same old route of assigning mentors based on which teachers have the same prep period as the newby? I mean, this reduced schedule is a good idea. It's the right idea. But it's also an expensive, schedule-snarking idea. I expect many dragged feet.

Improve professional development. Yes, please.

"Establish avenues" for new teachers to develop relationships with others in the school. Again, important and easy to say. Too many teacher first years are shaped by whoever the newby happens to eat lunch with. But hard to do, and therefor hard to get districts to do.

FINALLY- RETENTION

Compensation

Fix that pay scale problem where you hit the middle of the scale and your wages stagnate. And do that magic career ladder thing again. Really, there's nothing mysterious about the compensation piece of all this. Everyone knows exactly what needs to be done; it's just that mostly they don't want to. So we get all these conversations on the theme of, "Can we pay them more without it actually costing the district more money?" The Magic Beans school of improved compensation.

Preparation and Support

Virginia is going to update that evaluation to match the profile things. And the evaluation will suck less, and emphasize growth, and are competency-based--uh-oh. Here comes a multi-item checklist that may or may not have anything to do with actual good teaching.

Make the professional development better, somehow. Use evidence-based stuff. (Is competency-based education or evaluation evidence based? No? Get some more magic beans in here!)

Also, get a teacher and school administrator advisory board to work with the General Assembly, Secretary of Education, and Board of Education. That way the General Assembly, Secretary of Education, and Board of Education can look like they're listening to actual educators without having to budge from their comfy offices and meeting rooms.

Working Conditions  

Reduce emphasis on standardized testing for accountability. Ding ding ding! We have a winner. "Recognize that deep and personalized learning requires that teachers have more autonomy to design their instructional practices." If you could get the legislature to actually understand this, you wouldn't need much of anything else.

Weight admin supervisory time toward newbys. In other words, give the new teachers more help, and leave your veterans alone.

More avenues for professional relationships. This sounds cheesy, but it's not. I taught in a district where for years the philosophy was that any minute a teacher spent anywhere other than in front of students in a classroom was a minute wasted. I barely knew what other people in my department were doing, let alone teachers in other parts of the building. It got in the way of becoming a better teacher, both in my general practice and for those specific students in those years. Teachers need the chance to talk to other teachers.

Let teachers own their own professional development. Help leaders develop cultures based on shared responsibility, vision, values, and culture.

Honestly, there's some real junk in this plan, but this third section of the third section is worth its weight in gold. Now if they can just get someone in positions of power to listen.

For any state interested in approaches other than wishful thinking or warm body snatching or letting their public system collapse, this Virginia plan is a place to start. It gets some things very wrong, but some other things very right.

Just remember, if your state is experiencing something that people are calling a teacher shortage, that is not a failure of teacher prep programs to produce teachers, and it's not a failure of gritless millenials and it's not a failure of education to be sufficiently inspiring-- it's a failure of your state's legislative and educational leaders to make the jobs appealing and rewarding enough to convince people to take them and stay in them. Every useful discussion among such leaders about trouble filing teacher positions has to start with a good long look in the mirror. After that, you can take a look at documents like this one.

Big Brother U & The Surveillance State

If you missed this article at Washington Post about on campus surveillance of students-- well, congratulations on having one less troubling thought in your head over the past week. Because the surveillance is continuing its slow, steady advance. Now technology lets colleges monitor their students 24/7. Yay.

This particular article focuses on a company called SpotterEDU, and they are creepy as hell. The main part of their is a quick, easy technofix for taking attendance. Students are required to download the app (this also means, though the article is so tech forward it doesn't even address these issues, that students are also required to carry an up-to-date cellphone and keep it fully charged at all times) which then "checks in" with Bluetooth beacons in classrooms on campus (or anywhere else the beacons are planted).

Bluetooth beacons were supposed to be the Thing Of The Year in 2016, the tech that was going to put coupons on our phones when we approached a certain product and which would unlock doors as we walked closer. As with virtually every big tech promise of the last twenty years, it hasn't exactly arrived yet. If the function of Bluetooth in my home is any indicator, I'm guessing we have a few bugs to work out yet.

That seems to be the case for some students, who report in the article that they get in fights with the tech about whether or not they were really absent or late to class. yay, computer technology-- usually almost doing of what it's supposed to do, sort of. As the SpotterEDU Terms of Service say, its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”

But a professor in the article notes that this method of techno attendance taking has caused more students to show up to class, which raises an important question. Why did they previously think they didn't have to? Because as a lowly high school teacher, I always assumed that if a student could miss my class a whole without it having any apparent effect on what she was learning, then I'm the one who must be doing something wrong. If I can skip your class 50% of the time and still get a great grade, I'm not the one who's screwing up. But the colleges, and some professors, like this tech because it "nudges" students to be more well-behaved and compliant.

If we were just talking about classroom attendance, this would be bad enough, but the SpotterEDU site touts this as "An automated attendance monitoring and early alerting platform." Because our go-to justification for this kind of oppressive tracking, whether we're talking Florida's police state state or Big Brother University, is that This Is For Your Own Good. This is how we'll catch shooters and thwart suicides. We'll just watch all of you young folks all the time, for your own good. Even though there's still not a shred of evidence that this kind of tracking does any good.

Sadly, Bluetooth-based monitoring isn't remotely this 

obvious. Just a little box on the wall, too boring to make a

good pic for a post.

Who's good is it for, really? Another line from the SpotterEDU site is "decrease friction between those helping students succeed." It's for the People In Charge (who are also, not coincidentally, the ones reserving the right to decide what "succeed" will mean. These are tools for lazy managers, for the boss who keep thinking that his job would be so much easier if the people he's in charge of would behave the way he wants them to and stop exercising so much independent thought.

There are other troubling aspects. Colleges can split the tracked students into sub groups like freshmen or minority students. Where is the data stored, and for how long, and under what sort of security. And always, the usual sort of mission creep-- "We'll collect data to deal with this specific issue" becomes "now that we have this big pile of data, I bet we could sift through it do X" followed by "I see you have a big valuable pile of data sitting there-- can I make you an offer so that I can use it? Strictly for the students's own good, of course..."

At one point, one of the interviewees raises the big question-- who exactly does this serve? What sort of utility do students get from allowing themselves to be tracked, imperfectly, everywhere? How does this help them take their place as educated leaders in an adult world? The answer of course is that it doesn't do any of those things-- it lets a tech company make a sale and some college administrators make their own jobs a bit easier.

Even if you don't have a Washington Post subscription, this is worth using up one of your free reads for. It's alarming and disturbing, not just that this kind of thing exists, but that there are people who think it's a great idea, and that we have an entire generation growing up to think that being tracked 24/7 is perfectly normal and okay.

Merry Christmas

To those of you who celebrate the holiday, best wishes. (For those of you who don't, best wishes). Here's the Curmudgucation Institute's annually curated selection of Christmas music that's not just the same damn thing the radio's been playing for weeks. Enjoy.



I've taken off a couple of days to spend with board of directors and the rest of the institute stakeholders who are in town. I'll be back with the usual education shenanigans shortly.

WI: Pre-K Cyberschool Shenanigans

A few Wisconsin legislators have a dumb idea for a law. They'd like to spend $1.5 million on cyberschool-- on line computerized instruction-- for pre-schoolers.

This is just layers and layers of dumb.

First, cyberschools in general have proven to be lousy. Spectacularly lousy-- and that's in a study run by an organization sympathetic to charters.. Students would be better off spending a year playing video games lousy. So bad that even other charter school promoters won't defend them lousy. In short, outside very specific sets of special needs, there is no evidence that cyberschooling works.

Second, while there is still considerable debate, the general consensus is that screen time for littles should be somewhere between very small amounts and none at all.

Third, academic studies are a lousy idea for littles, unlikely to yield real benefits even as they may create real harm.

But education committee chair Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt is either unaware or unconcerned-- well, I don't know how he can be either. The man has an elementary education degree (from Martin Luther College) and taught for some time at Winnebago Lutheran Academy. Now, yes-- MLC has as its purpose the cranking out of witnesses to the Lutheran faith (and playing sports). And yes, WLA is a private religious school that exists to "glorify God" (and play sports). But I've known plenty of Lutherans, and there's nothing about being Lutheran that would preclude knowing that cyberschools and academic instruction for littles is a lousy idea.

The program would be used fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, and would be piloted in a combination of rural and urban districts and would be added on top of the state's existing program for four year olds.

Thiesfeldt has some fairly specific ideas about what the program should provide.

The vendor would be required to show past success in similar endeavors; provide instruction in reading, math and science; design a program to improve a child’s transition to kindergarten; require parental engagement including interaction with a learning coach; evaluate a child’s growth; and provide internet and a computer at no cost to families that do not have them.

Also it would help increase reading scores. Because getting standardized test scores up should totally be the focus of pre-school education.

How did he come up with such a clear picture of what he wanted. Well,  he just happened to see a presentation (aka "sales pitch") from Waterford.org, the outfit that is an industry leader in infliucting cyberschool on preschoolers through their widely adopted UPSTART program. So, to recap, he's seen a pitch from one company that works in this field, and he's written a law tailored exactly to that company. I hope the marketing guy for UPSTART is being paid really well.

UPSTART popped up in Utah a few years back, a state that was investing $0.00 in pre=school education. In Utah they also used the business model of making friends with a legislator,State Senator Howard Stephenson, and his explanation was not inspiring:

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being smart.”

I'm more inclined to go with this alternative theory.

“It’s wishful thinking by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the director of the National ­Institute for Early Education ­Research at Rutgers University. “We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t actually want to spend the money.”

Sadly, UPSTART has been spreading like a weed-- a big, cheap weed. Indiana. Mississippi. They benefit from, again, the cheap, plus the shiny computers, plus periodic outburst of uncritical just-run-the-news-release press. The idea of plunking three and four years olds in front of computers to do academic work has become widespread enough that Defending The Early Years actually took the time to write a report pointing out that putting pre-schoolers in front of computers to learn to read is a terrible idea. 

Waterford's website trumpets "Do you know 2.2 million children do not have access to public-funded early education?" which is a compelling statistic, except that it compels me to agitate for public-funded pre-K for all and not a cheap, unproven, bad idea of a software program. But it's really shiny, and it promises a cheap technosolution; the TED-linked Audacious Project handed Waterford $20 million. Waterford calls their program "Award-winning" and boasts that their DIBELS scores (that's the test in which small children decode nonsense syllables, Exhibit A in "When phonics goes too far"). UPSTART also "improves cognitive outcomes," and, no, sorry, but no, you have no idea whether or not it does any such thing.

Their business model, as we've seen, seems to focus on getting paid with tax dollars, which allows them to market their product as "free"! Oh, and they're "non-profit," so you know-- no, you don't know anything other than there are no stockholders making money here. As multiple non-profits have shown, "Non-profit" and "intensely focused on making money" are not mutually exclusive.

Ah, well. It appears that Wisconsin is poised to join the states that would rather get pre-K cheap than right. Bad news for Wisconsin's children, good news for the UPSTART marketing team. Ka-ching.