Marking the new year always strikes me as a bit odd-- we draw an arbitrary line in the chronological sand, then get all excited about examining it. Humans are fun.
In the meantime, this week's list is loaded with some exceptionally good readings. Remember to share the ons that speak to you. Amplifying voices is what the interwebz are all about.
The Surprising Source of the NPE Data
The pushback against NPE's report on charter waste and fraud has been considerable, but here Carol Burris provides a measured and detailed response. And guess where some of the data in question comes from...
The Dangers of Disinformation
Last Sunday I failed to do due diligence on one of the posts and recommended something from an untrustworthy source (the post is no longer on the list). The up side is that it prompted this thoughtful post from Dad Gone Wild.
The Democrats' School Choice Problem
Jennifer Berkshire breaks it down for the Nation in a thoughtful take that spins off the Pittsburgh education forum. It's a good look at some of the political dynamics involved.
The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
This Audrey Watters post is the bomb, and if you somehow haven't read it yet, then stop procrastinating. It's a horrifying stroll down memory lane.
Teachers "Never Broke The Law"
Remember when Matt "Sore Loser" Bevin tried to throw some laws at teachers who walked out? It's one more bad policy that his successor has reversed.
Closing the Minority Teacher Gap
Bill Tucker at the St. Louis Post Dispatch takes another look at this continued problem. There's lots of good stuff here, including this sentence: "Teachers are known for working for less pay and respect, but that is a big ask for a minority student, whose family has been underpaid and not respected." There's also another look at the issue in the Washington Post this week.
Novelist Cormac McCarthy paper writing tips
McCarthy has been helping faculty and students at Santa Fe Institute with editing. Who knew? Here's a distillation of some of his writing advice.
School Grade Cards Gotta Go
The editorial board of the Toledo Blade argues for an end to Ohio's letter grade policy for schools.
Why the Charter School Proposals by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Shouldn’t Be Controversial
Gotham Gazette has this piece from a former charter teacher and a former charter parent (the parent involved in an infamous Success Academy discipline scandal). Clear and compelling.
Lies, Lies, and More Lies
In the Troy Daily News, a former Ohio superintendent has some blistering words for Ohio's ed reform. He may be late to the party, but he is not holding back a bit.
Economists Ate My School
Steven Singer looks at the damage done by imagining that teaching is simply one more transaction .
The Greatest Ed Tech Goof of All Time
Ed historian Adam Laats takes us back to an early example of terrible tech ideas for education, showing once again that hardly any modern innovations are actually innovations.
Montessori schools embrace kid-tracking devices
What would make Montessori schools even better? How about constant student surveillance. This is your hate read for the week.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Friday, January 3, 2020
The Ed Reform Glossary You Need
If that Amazon gift certificate is burning a hole in your pocket, I have a few suggestions. Let's start with this one.
In 2006, education historian Diane Ravitch published EdSpeak, a glossary of education policy jargon to help those folks who found it all, well, jargonny. But the education world has shifted around just a tad since 2006, and it is time for a brand new version of the critical guide to education policy jargon. To help manage the large project, Ravitch brought in a collaborator, Nancy Bailey, which is good news for all of us, because Bailey is a writer with serious chops (to see how well she fits this project, check out "Vocabulary Used To Sell Technology To Teachers and Parents").
This resulting book, Edspeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling, is exceptionally useful as a quick-reference resource. If you are a regular reader of this or other education blogs, you know that there is a forest of acronyms, a Grand Canyon's worth of program names and purposes, and enough different edu-focused organizations to pave a road to the moon and back. This book makes for a quick and easy reference for it all, and more. Chapters are organized by general topic, such as Charter Schools and Choice, English Language Learners, Technology, and Separation of Church and State. There are guides to the various players, both in the chapter on Groups Fighting Corporate "Reform" and School Reform Groups and Terms, or "Money Talks."
The book comes with an on-line supplement--an e-book-- and the promise of online updates to come. It's enlightening to browse the book-- I've already encountered many terms and programs and policies that I had never heard of before (Paideia Program, anyone?)-- but I've also already used it as a substitute for my usual research assistant (Dr. Google) to look up a couple of terms and organizations.
Explanations are short, clear, and to the point, which is half the battle, since eduspeak relies on a cloud of smoke and fuzz to obscure what's really going on. Well, Bailey and Ravitch know what's really going on in debates that have become "highly politicized." This book will be useful to the general reader, but I'd recommend it for every teacher. Keep a copy in your desk drawer and every time a communique comes across your desk that makes you think, "What the heck is this? Who are these people anyway, and what the heck are they talking about?" just pull out your copy and start translating.
Order a copy today, and treat yourself to a better-than-Cliff's-notes guide to education policy. It'll help pass the time before Ravitch's next book comes out in just a couple of weeks.
Michelle Rhee Has Been Robbed
As the various lists of faces, names, moments that defined the education policy debates of the last decade have been tallied up, one name has been, I think, unfairly overlooked-- Michelle Rhee. No, really, bear with me.
The very fact that I don't really need to review her story makes part of my point. Rhee was the previous decade's best-known public face of education reform, culminating in that infamous Time cover of her holding a broom. Rhee was the quintessential reformster, a Teach for America product who had put in her time (including the apparently-hilarious incident in which she duct-taped student mouths shut). After her TFA stint, she started The New Teacher Project, a group that brought the TFA philosophy to older folks who had already had a job or two; TNTP morphed into another reformy thinky tank kibbitzing on topics from teacher evaluation to professional development. They made up something called the opportunity myth, but their big hit has been a position argument called "The Widget Effect" which argued that teachers should be paid, promoted, and fired based on student test scores.
This, somehow, led to a job in 2007 as the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Rhee's big breakout role win which she beat the crap out of teachers and administrators alike. Her triumphs were celebrated, her improvements touted as proof of concept for hard-hitting accountability and firing your way to excellence. Except that it turned out that most of her DC miracle was not so much miracle as good old-fashioned fudging and cheating.
And it came with big costs. George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said no other superintendent had wrecked morale more than Rhee. Interviewed by Marc Fisher in 2009 for the Washington Post, Parker pointed to some other issues as well:
Parker spells out what many older, black teachers told me right after demanding that I not publish their names: "I suppose it's not simply racial -- it could be culture. The chancellor said to me, 'Why do people feel they need [tenure] protection if they're doing their jobs?' And I said, 'A lot of our veteran teachers know better.' As African American teachers, they learned coming up that it didn't matter how good you were: Because you were black, you weren't treated fairly. That is the African American experience. And there could be a lack of understanding of the culture of the workforce."
Mayor Adrian Fenty tied his own political future to Rhee's school leadership, and in the 2010 election, the voters said "No, thank you." Rhee was out of a job, but in a true edu-celebrity move, took to Oprah to announce her next move: the launching of StudentsFirst. And not just a launch, but an audacious goal-- 1 million members would raise $1 billion dollars.
That was 2010, the dawn of the decade.
Rhee entered the decade as the quintessential reformster. She possessed no actual qualifications for the jobs she took on, had never even run a school, let alone a major urban district., She championed every reformy idea beloved at the time, from charters to test-based accountability to gutting teacher job protections and, as was the common back then, the notion that the real problem with schools was all the shitty teachers protected by their shitty unions.
Like many of the big names in education disruption in the oughts, Rhee skated on sheer chutzpah. There was no good reason for her to believe that she knew what the heck she was doing, but she was by-God certain that her outsider "expertise" was right and that all she needed to create success was the unbridled freedom to exert her will.
And in 2010, it was working. The media loved her and, more significantly, treated her like a go-to authority on all educational issues. They fell all over themselves to grab the privilege of printing the next glowing description of the empress's newest clothes. She was more than once packaged as the pro-reform counterpart of Diane Ravitch (though one thing that Rhee carefully and consistently avoided was any sort of head to head debate with actual education experts).
For the first part of the decade, it kept working. Students First became a powerhouse lobbying group, pushing hard for the end of teacher job protections. She was in 2011's reform agitprop film Waiting for Superman. LinkedIN dubbed her an expert influencer. She spoke out in favor of Common Core and related testing. A breathless and loving bio was published about her in 2011; in 2013 she published a book of her own. She had successfully parleyed her DC job into a national platform.
2014 seemed like peak Rhee. I actually decided to stop mentioning her by name; I felt guilty about increasing her already-prodigious footprint. She seemed unstoppable, and yet by 2014 we knew that the TFA miracle classrooms, the DC miracle, the TNTP boondoggle, the StudentsFirst failures (far short of 1 million or $1 billion). Rhee was the Kim Kardashian of ed reform, the popular spokesmodel who did not have one actual success to her name. She was increasingly dogged by her controversies.
And then, in the fall of 2014, Michelle Rhee simply evaporated from the ed scene. She left Students First (which itself shortly thereafter faded into the 50CAN network of education disruptor advocacy). She joined the board of Miracle-Gro (a decision that was itself not without controversy). She married NBA star Kevin Johnson and settled in Sacremento into the board of St. HOPE charter school (a position she still apparently holds). Her Twitter feed showed to her crawl, and her LinkedIN profile hasn't been updated to show she left Students First. She popped up again when Donald Trump was elected, but nothing came of that. Meanwhile, her husband's fortunes have slumped a bit (Deadspin in particular has been relentless in pushing Johnson controversies).
Rhee started the decade as a major player; she finishes as someone who's barely in the game. At her peak, she exemplified a particular type of education disruptor, as captured by this quick portrait from a Nicholas Lemann review of her autobiography:
But as soon as she becomes head of an organization, and a voice in public debates, and (perhaps most importantly) a regular fund-raiser among the very rich and their foundations, Rhee’s story begins to change into one in which everything wrong with public education is attributable to the malign influence of the teachers’ unions. Rhee is a major self-dramatizer. As naturally appealing to her as is the idea that more order, structure, discipline, and competition is the answer to all problems, even more appealing is the picture of herself as a righteously angry and fearless crusader who has the guts to stand up to entrenched power. She is always the little guy, and whoever she is fighting is always rich, powerful, and elite—and if, as her life progresses, her posse becomes Oprah Winfrey, Theodore Forstmann, and the Gates Foundation lined up against beleaguered school superintendents and presidents of union chapters, the irony of that situation has no tonal effect on her narrative. Again and again she gives us scenes of herself being warned that she cannot do what is plainly the right thing, because it is too risky, too difficult, too threatening to the unions, too likely to bring on horrific and unfair personal attacks—but the way she’s made, there’s nothing she can do but ignore the warnings and plow valiantly ahead.
Rhee typified the brand of hard-charging visionary crusading faux-Democrat CEO school leader, the brand of hubris-empowered reformsterism that believed a bold outsider with a clear vision and no obstacles (like unions and government rules and "experts") could remake schools into perfectly awesome engines of education. Joel Klein, Chris Barbic, the Broad Academy grads, the Chiefs for Change members, David Coleman-- just let them get their hands on the levers of power and get the hell out of their way, and they would show you how their outsider brilliance could fix everything that education professionals had screwed up. They were vocally anti-union and anti-teacher. (Meanwhile, stop picking on them and unfairly criticizing them.)
This was the decade that this brand of reformsterism fell aside to make room for other styles of privatization, from the technocrats to the champions of freedom. Other Reformsters quietly started suggesting that maybe for any reforms to actually work, maybe, just maybe, it would help to stop treating the teachers (who would, after all, have to actually implement this stuff) like the enemy. Reformsters like Eli Broad and Laurene Jobs bankrolled operations like Education Post to beat back those who dared to criticize their vision; it hasn't particularly helped. Attempts to break the teachers union seemed successful at first, but as West Virginia and Chicago and Kentucky and Oklahoma etc etc etc have shown, teachers are actually invested in their work and will fight for it. And most of the visionary CEO eduleaders have gotten their shot-- and failed to do anything spectacular; have, in fact, proven to be nothing more than well-connected, well-financed edu-amateurs who really didn't understand what they were doing. And while some have demonstrated an actual abiding interest in education (Eve Moskowitz turns out to have far more grit than most of her reform peers), some just keep failing upward from one job they can't really do to the next one, and many others have proven to have a short attention span, heading off to seek their fortune in some other field. The visionary CEO model suffers from a variety of problems, but the biggest one is that it just doesn't work, and every attempt to implement it yet again just exposes, again, how badly it fails.
In 2010, Rhee appeared to stand at the forefront of a group of people who, we might have predicted, would in ten years time be the Grand Masters of US Education. Instead they have become as transparent, as weightless, as the Emperor's new clothes in hot noonday sun. They scuttle from job to job like cockroaches escaping from one opened window after another. They are human vaporware. And in DC, folks are still trying to clean up after Rhee's mess.
Ed reform belongs to other people now, people less interested in flash and celebrity (do you think Betsy DeVos really cares if she gets the cover of Time magazine or not). They're worth a discussion another day. The visionary CEO model, the Rhee-style hubris-fueled edu-celebrity just-let-me-break-stuff model hasn't died, but I'd argue that it has lost the punch it had a decade ago, and that's been good news for education in this country. It is one of the stories of education in the last decade, and as its best symbol, Michelle Rhee deserves to be on all those lists. Embattled and attacked, run down just because she is an amateur who didn't know what she was doing, picked on just because she could never point to an actual true success in the field she had decided to elbow her way into, opposed by people just because they had invested their lives in the work that she casually commandeered, Rhee has been robbed one last time of what is rightfully hers-- a spot on those damn end-of-decade lists. May she enjoy her quiet life now, anyway.
The very fact that I don't really need to review her story makes part of my point. Rhee was the previous decade's best-known public face of education reform, culminating in that infamous Time cover of her holding a broom. Rhee was the quintessential reformster, a Teach for America product who had put in her time (including the apparently-hilarious incident in which she duct-taped student mouths shut). After her TFA stint, she started The New Teacher Project, a group that brought the TFA philosophy to older folks who had already had a job or two; TNTP morphed into another reformy thinky tank kibbitzing on topics from teacher evaluation to professional development. They made up something called the opportunity myth, but their big hit has been a position argument called "The Widget Effect" which argued that teachers should be paid, promoted, and fired based on student test scores.
And it came with big costs. George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers Union, said no other superintendent had wrecked morale more than Rhee. Interviewed by Marc Fisher in 2009 for the Washington Post, Parker pointed to some other issues as well:
Parker spells out what many older, black teachers told me right after demanding that I not publish their names: "I suppose it's not simply racial -- it could be culture. The chancellor said to me, 'Why do people feel they need [tenure] protection if they're doing their jobs?' And I said, 'A lot of our veteran teachers know better.' As African American teachers, they learned coming up that it didn't matter how good you were: Because you were black, you weren't treated fairly. That is the African American experience. And there could be a lack of understanding of the culture of the workforce."
Mayor Adrian Fenty tied his own political future to Rhee's school leadership, and in the 2010 election, the voters said "No, thank you." Rhee was out of a job, but in a true edu-celebrity move, took to Oprah to announce her next move: the launching of StudentsFirst. And not just a launch, but an audacious goal-- 1 million members would raise $1 billion dollars.
That was 2010, the dawn of the decade.
Rhee entered the decade as the quintessential reformster. She possessed no actual qualifications for the jobs she took on, had never even run a school, let alone a major urban district., She championed every reformy idea beloved at the time, from charters to test-based accountability to gutting teacher job protections and, as was the common back then, the notion that the real problem with schools was all the shitty teachers protected by their shitty unions.
Like many of the big names in education disruption in the oughts, Rhee skated on sheer chutzpah. There was no good reason for her to believe that she knew what the heck she was doing, but she was by-God certain that her outsider "expertise" was right and that all she needed to create success was the unbridled freedom to exert her will.
And in 2010, it was working. The media loved her and, more significantly, treated her like a go-to authority on all educational issues. They fell all over themselves to grab the privilege of printing the next glowing description of the empress's newest clothes. She was more than once packaged as the pro-reform counterpart of Diane Ravitch (though one thing that Rhee carefully and consistently avoided was any sort of head to head debate with actual education experts).
For the first part of the decade, it kept working. Students First became a powerhouse lobbying group, pushing hard for the end of teacher job protections. She was in 2011's reform agitprop film Waiting for Superman. LinkedIN dubbed her an expert influencer. She spoke out in favor of Common Core and related testing. A breathless and loving bio was published about her in 2011; in 2013 she published a book of her own. She had successfully parleyed her DC job into a national platform.
2014 seemed like peak Rhee. I actually decided to stop mentioning her by name; I felt guilty about increasing her already-prodigious footprint. She seemed unstoppable, and yet by 2014 we knew that the TFA miracle classrooms, the DC miracle, the TNTP boondoggle, the StudentsFirst failures (far short of 1 million or $1 billion). Rhee was the Kim Kardashian of ed reform, the popular spokesmodel who did not have one actual success to her name. She was increasingly dogged by her controversies.
And then, in the fall of 2014, Michelle Rhee simply evaporated from the ed scene. She left Students First (which itself shortly thereafter faded into the 50CAN network of education disruptor advocacy). She joined the board of Miracle-Gro (a decision that was itself not without controversy). She married NBA star Kevin Johnson and settled in Sacremento into the board of St. HOPE charter school (a position she still apparently holds). Her Twitter feed showed to her crawl, and her LinkedIN profile hasn't been updated to show she left Students First. She popped up again when Donald Trump was elected, but nothing came of that. Meanwhile, her husband's fortunes have slumped a bit (Deadspin in particular has been relentless in pushing Johnson controversies).
Rhee started the decade as a major player; she finishes as someone who's barely in the game. At her peak, she exemplified a particular type of education disruptor, as captured by this quick portrait from a Nicholas Lemann review of her autobiography:
But as soon as she becomes head of an organization, and a voice in public debates, and (perhaps most importantly) a regular fund-raiser among the very rich and their foundations, Rhee’s story begins to change into one in which everything wrong with public education is attributable to the malign influence of the teachers’ unions. Rhee is a major self-dramatizer. As naturally appealing to her as is the idea that more order, structure, discipline, and competition is the answer to all problems, even more appealing is the picture of herself as a righteously angry and fearless crusader who has the guts to stand up to entrenched power. She is always the little guy, and whoever she is fighting is always rich, powerful, and elite—and if, as her life progresses, her posse becomes Oprah Winfrey, Theodore Forstmann, and the Gates Foundation lined up against beleaguered school superintendents and presidents of union chapters, the irony of that situation has no tonal effect on her narrative. Again and again she gives us scenes of herself being warned that she cannot do what is plainly the right thing, because it is too risky, too difficult, too threatening to the unions, too likely to bring on horrific and unfair personal attacks—but the way she’s made, there’s nothing she can do but ignore the warnings and plow valiantly ahead.
Rhee typified the brand of hard-charging visionary crusading faux-Democrat CEO school leader, the brand of hubris-empowered reformsterism that believed a bold outsider with a clear vision and no obstacles (like unions and government rules and "experts") could remake schools into perfectly awesome engines of education. Joel Klein, Chris Barbic, the Broad Academy grads, the Chiefs for Change members, David Coleman-- just let them get their hands on the levers of power and get the hell out of their way, and they would show you how their outsider brilliance could fix everything that education professionals had screwed up. They were vocally anti-union and anti-teacher. (Meanwhile, stop picking on them and unfairly criticizing them.)
This was the decade that this brand of reformsterism fell aside to make room for other styles of privatization, from the technocrats to the champions of freedom. Other Reformsters quietly started suggesting that maybe for any reforms to actually work, maybe, just maybe, it would help to stop treating the teachers (who would, after all, have to actually implement this stuff) like the enemy. Reformsters like Eli Broad and Laurene Jobs bankrolled operations like Education Post to beat back those who dared to criticize their vision; it hasn't particularly helped. Attempts to break the teachers union seemed successful at first, but as West Virginia and Chicago and Kentucky and Oklahoma etc etc etc have shown, teachers are actually invested in their work and will fight for it. And most of the visionary CEO eduleaders have gotten their shot-- and failed to do anything spectacular; have, in fact, proven to be nothing more than well-connected, well-financed edu-amateurs who really didn't understand what they were doing. And while some have demonstrated an actual abiding interest in education (Eve Moskowitz turns out to have far more grit than most of her reform peers), some just keep failing upward from one job they can't really do to the next one, and many others have proven to have a short attention span, heading off to seek their fortune in some other field. The visionary CEO model suffers from a variety of problems, but the biggest one is that it just doesn't work, and every attempt to implement it yet again just exposes, again, how badly it fails.
In 2010, Rhee appeared to stand at the forefront of a group of people who, we might have predicted, would in ten years time be the Grand Masters of US Education. Instead they have become as transparent, as weightless, as the Emperor's new clothes in hot noonday sun. They scuttle from job to job like cockroaches escaping from one opened window after another. They are human vaporware. And in DC, folks are still trying to clean up after Rhee's mess.
Ed reform belongs to other people now, people less interested in flash and celebrity (do you think Betsy DeVos really cares if she gets the cover of Time magazine or not). They're worth a discussion another day. The visionary CEO model, the Rhee-style hubris-fueled edu-celebrity just-let-me-break-stuff model hasn't died, but I'd argue that it has lost the punch it had a decade ago, and that's been good news for education in this country. It is one of the stories of education in the last decade, and as its best symbol, Michelle Rhee deserves to be on all those lists. Embattled and attacked, run down just because she is an amateur who didn't know what she was doing, picked on just because she could never point to an actual true success in the field she had decided to elbow her way into, opposed by people just because they had invested their lives in the work that she casually commandeered, Rhee has been robbed one last time of what is rightfully hers-- a spot on those damn end-of-decade lists. May she enjoy her quiet life now, anyway.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought
Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report showing that the federal government has lost a billion dollars to charter school waste and fraud. But the organization had not stopped sifting through the data. Their follow-up report, “Still Asleep At The Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in as Pileup of Fraud ands Waste,” reveals that the situation is even worse than shown in the first report, while laying out more state by state details. Particularly striking—the vast amount of money that has been wasted on ghost schools that never served.
NPE is a group co-founded by Diane Ravitch, the Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become an outspoken critic of education reform, and by Anthony Cody, activist and author of The Educator and the Oligarch. The organization's executive director is Carol Burris, a former award-winning New York principal. Burris was the primary author of this report. (NPE gets no money from Bill Gates of the Waltons.)
Some new findings in this follow-up report:
The original report underestimated the number of charters that had taken federal grant funds and then either closed or never opened at all. That report found 1,000 such charters; the number now appears to be closer to 1,800. That means the failure rate is close to 37% nationally. Michigan gave grants of at least $100,000 to 72 schools that never opened at all; California gave grants to 61 unopened schools. Those two states alone account for over $16 million dollars spent without educating a single child. A grand total of 537 schools never actually opened; tax dollars spent on literally nothing.
Between 1995 and 2005, the Department of Education did not require states to give any accounting of where the money went.
For-profit charters have never been allowed to receive monies from this grant program, but plenty of for-profit charter management companies have had their schools apply successfully. It’s a reminder that “for profit” and “non-profit” are, when it comes to charter schools, a distinction without a difference. Hot Stuff Podunk Academy may well be a non-profit school, but if it is wholly operated by Hot Stuff Academies Charter management Company, a for profit company that handles the operation of the charter, the academy is still generating profits.
The report provides a state-by-state breakdown for some of these numbers, both raw numbers and percentages. Some states have made modest attempts at charter launches, with little success. Hawaii has launched 19; 10 of those have failed. Delaware has seen 14 attempts; 8 of those are defunct. Washington state had 6; of those, only 2 are still open (one charter abruptly closed in October, months after opening).
Larger scale is no promise of better results. New York lost 23 out of 233 charters, but Florida has seen a full third of its 503 charters close. California had a similar rate, with 298 failed charters out of 802. Ohio lost 120 out of 293, and in Tennessee, 59 out of 121— just shy of 50% charter failure rate. Betsy DeVos’s home state of Michigan has a failure rate of 44%— 112 out of 257 closed, costing federal taxpayers about $22 million.
The report also includes many stories that provide striking illustrations of just how the money is wasted. While some charter operators are simply in over their heads, others are clearly far more interested in profit than education.
In Michigan, almost $110,000 was drawn to develop the Harris Academy. $72,957 of that went to a property leasing company whose sole director was Patricia Lewis. Lewis was also a project leader for the academy. Lewis had worked the same deal in Georgia with a charter school that was denied renewal due to financial irregularities and probable cheating on the state test. The Harris Academy never opened.
Consultant Lorilyn Coggins operated two consulting companies that made money from four different ghost schools. She was not the only consultant making good money from charter schools that never actually opened.
The report also provides several examples of how a non-profit charter is simply a pass through for a for profit corporation. For example, the White Hat Management company was an Ohio-based for profit charter management organization that operated sixteen Life Skills charter schools in five different states. Some of those charters paid 97% of their income to White Hat, which also operated a real estate company that leased buildings to schools. Thirteen of the Life Skills charters have ceased operations.
The report also drills down in two charter-heavy (Arizona and Ohio) to see why charters fail. In both states, enrollment was the primary cause (despite the fabled charter waiting list we often hear about) followed by mismanagement/fraud, then financial issues and academic concerns. The study also found a surprising number of charters that closed because the operator simply abandoned them. Stories also illustrate the shock and surprise that occurs when charters simply and suddenly close up shop mid year.
Among the report’s conclusion is this:
We have concluded that the practice of allowing unauthorized schools to receive funds, which has been in effect since 2001, has become a magnet for grifters, consultants and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash in.
It’s worth remembering that the report only covers the grants dispersed by the feds; this doesn’t tell us anything about how much state or philanthropist money took the school bus ride to nowhere.
Charter supporters are going to say that when charter schools close, that’s just the free market doing its magic to thin out the charter herd to leave us with stronger, better charter schools. Even if this burn and churn is a feature and not a bug, it’s a very expensive feature, costing not just a billion dollars in taxpayer money, but in the human cost of families who are disrupted and displaced by charters that leave them high and dry. As one parent of a student at the hastily-closed Detroit Delta Prep Academy is quoted in the report, “I entrusted her education to a group of people—they're making me feel like I failed her, like I didn’t do enough research.”
It’s not just research that’s needed; the time is long past for charters to be subject to tighter regulation and accountability with bigger teeth. After twenty-five years of costly waste and fraud, it’s long past time for taxpayers’ dollars and children to get more protection from the operators who have entered the charter school business simply to fleece the public.
Originally posted at Forbes.com
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
I Have One Good New Years Story
New Year's Eve is not one of my favorite holidays, and some of them have been downright unpleasant, but I have one good story. It involves the Olympic torch.
Back on New Year's Day of 2002, the Olympic flame was on its way to Salt Lake City, and on its long circuitous route out West, the flame passed through Erie, Pennsylvania, which is just up the road from me. On New Years Eve I packed it in early and was in the car early the next day to take my turn at carrying the torch.
My leg didn't come until a little after noon, but torchbearers had an early call for training. We had received much of our info in packets well ahead of time, along with our official torchbearing outfits, which were comfy and warm and remarkably free of any commercial elements (and one of our requirements was to keep them that way). I did in fact have a corporate sponsor (Coke and Chevrolet split the torch run; I was a Coke guy).
The operation was run by twenty-somethings who had taken time off from work to run this cross-country operation; our host was a guy named Steve who had left a job he'd been at for four years and was going back to school when he finished with the Olympics. He was being paid in a free tour of the country, and he seemed pretty happy about it.
The actual business of torching was a well-oiled machine. Those of us on a particular leg were loaded on a bus which traveled at the front of a procession. We were dropped off at our spot. A handler popped a little gas capsule into the top of the torch. Then we waited. The runner zipped up, we passed the flame to the new torch, and then I took off. The actual leg was about a quarter mile, which doesn't seem like much (and I was in running shape back then) but running with one arm holding up a torch is a little tricky. The torch itself was made of relatively light-weight aluminum, but still holding it up for a quarter mile of running is a challenge.
A runner runs with you, just to make sure (the pre-run info packet includes instructions that you my not alter the route). There's a photography truck in front of you, camera guys hanging off the back (you can buy a professional picture of yourself making the run) and there are other vehicles behind you, but you and the crowd still have a clear view of each other. My ex-wife and her husband brought our kids to watch, and some other friends were there. I ran in a residential area and the crowd was not spectacular, but the whole scene was still amazing. At one point a woman in the small crowd hollered, "What's your name," and it took me a second to figure out how to respond.
Before you know it, you're coming up on the next runner. You light their torch, then you climb onto the bus that has been traveling behind you, collecting up the runners to take them back to the staging area. There were twenty or so of us on the out-of-Erie leg, including a local anchorperson, a retired school teacher who had lost part of her leg when hit by a car, a hockey coach who dedicated her run to two teen team members who had died in the last year, a college sophomore who had won Olympic medals in swimming, and a guy who was on his way to complete marathons on all seven continents by running one in Antarctica. From my region there was just one other guy-- Cootie Harris, a local legend in both jazz and martial arts, who would have been 78 at the time.
I was running for regular classroom teachers; I was there because a student had nominated me for the experience. He and some other students were also there to watch and shoot video. From the moment I got to Erie in the early AM, folks asked to get a picture withe me in my get-up. Some would ask who I was or what I did; I was probably the least famous runner there, but I could still answer, with pride, "I'm a teacher." The whole day was pretty humbling, but I was proud to be there for my students, my community, and everyday classroom teachers. I still have my torch (Coke bought all of their runners their torches to keep). Over the years my students would occasionally ask, "Did you really...?" and I'd take it to school to show them, to remind them that there is often more to your teachers than meets the eye.
It's a powerful symbol, passing the flame. It's not a thing, but a process, an elemental symbol for spirit that can be passed and spread and grown. It can't be captured and frozen in place. It has to move and breathe. It has to be fed. It was a good reminder of the power and energy of education, the importance of the work of teaching. It was a good day to spend New Year's Day, a nice refresher before going back to the classroom after vacation. After all these years, it's still the only good New Years story I have. Have a great 2020, and whatever your flame is, keep it burning.
 |
| This was the route. I wasn't kidding with "circuitous." |
My leg didn't come until a little after noon, but torchbearers had an early call for training. We had received much of our info in packets well ahead of time, along with our official torchbearing outfits, which were comfy and warm and remarkably free of any commercial elements (and one of our requirements was to keep them that way). I did in fact have a corporate sponsor (Coke and Chevrolet split the torch run; I was a Coke guy).
The operation was run by twenty-somethings who had taken time off from work to run this cross-country operation; our host was a guy named Steve who had left a job he'd been at for four years and was going back to school when he finished with the Olympics. He was being paid in a free tour of the country, and he seemed pretty happy about it.
The actual business of torching was a well-oiled machine. Those of us on a particular leg were loaded on a bus which traveled at the front of a procession. We were dropped off at our spot. A handler popped a little gas capsule into the top of the torch. Then we waited. The runner zipped up, we passed the flame to the new torch, and then I took off. The actual leg was about a quarter mile, which doesn't seem like much (and I was in running shape back then) but running with one arm holding up a torch is a little tricky. The torch itself was made of relatively light-weight aluminum, but still holding it up for a quarter mile of running is a challenge.
A runner runs with you, just to make sure (the pre-run info packet includes instructions that you my not alter the route). There's a photography truck in front of you, camera guys hanging off the back (you can buy a professional picture of yourself making the run) and there are other vehicles behind you, but you and the crowd still have a clear view of each other. My ex-wife and her husband brought our kids to watch, and some other friends were there. I ran in a residential area and the crowd was not spectacular, but the whole scene was still amazing. At one point a woman in the small crowd hollered, "What's your name," and it took me a second to figure out how to respond.
Before you know it, you're coming up on the next runner. You light their torch, then you climb onto the bus that has been traveling behind you, collecting up the runners to take them back to the staging area. There were twenty or so of us on the out-of-Erie leg, including a local anchorperson, a retired school teacher who had lost part of her leg when hit by a car, a hockey coach who dedicated her run to two teen team members who had died in the last year, a college sophomore who had won Olympic medals in swimming, and a guy who was on his way to complete marathons on all seven continents by running one in Antarctica. From my region there was just one other guy-- Cootie Harris, a local legend in both jazz and martial arts, who would have been 78 at the time.
It's a powerful symbol, passing the flame. It's not a thing, but a process, an elemental symbol for spirit that can be passed and spread and grown. It can't be captured and frozen in place. It has to move and breathe. It has to be fed. It was a good reminder of the power and energy of education, the importance of the work of teaching. It was a good day to spend New Year's Day, a nice refresher before going back to the classroom after vacation. After all these years, it's still the only good New Years story I have. Have a great 2020, and whatever your flame is, keep it burning.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
OH: Ohio Excels and the Hostile Takeover of Education
Ohio is one of many states in which business leaders have appointed themselves education overseers. The most recent version of this phenomenon is Ohio Excels, a lobbying group that believes that Ohio's education system owes them better meat widgets for job fodder. "improving the quality of education will give students a better chance to succeed and will help Ohio businesses grow and innovate, fueling a robust state economy."
Their board includes a few heads of city-level "partnerships" or "committees," a method by which some CEO types form up a group and declare themselves civic leaders. There are some foundations like the Farmer Foundation and the Peters Foundation, an ed reformster "philanthropic" group. The Ohio Business Roundtable is here, represented by GOP Congressman-turned-business advocate Pat Tibiri. They also get funding from the usuals-- Gates, Walton. They belong to the PIE network with a long list of very reformy groups. You will be unsurprised to learn that their ideas for improving education include advocating for school choice.
If you pay any attention at all to Ohio education policy politics, you know the name Lisa Gray. Gray is the president of Ohio Excels since October of last year (the group actually "launched" in March) This newest job comes after a career in consulting and working with a list of clients that includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Achieve, Inc., Philanthropy Ohio, Battelle for Kids, Ohio Business Roundtable, and Teach for America.
Gray appears to be well-connected; her name often pops up in discussions of what's going on in the legislature re: education. She often turns up on op-ed pages with guest views, or calls for "partnership," and Ohio Excels, despite being fresh and new, seems to have a seat reserved ta the proverbial table. When a committee looked for input on whether or not to keep Ohio's lousy school letter grade system, Ohio Excels was one of eight groups consulted (and one of the only two, with the Fordham Institute, to recommend that the system stay in place). Ed committee chair Peggy Lehner has allegedly told constituents that she trusts Gray on education issues and consults with her almost every day. And that's how lobbyists give bang for the buck- by having nothing to do all day but pitch to and connect with legislators.
Ohio Excels scored big this summer when it managed, somehow, to write new graduation requirements for Ohio high school students. Ohio has been stalled for a few years with graduation requirements they didn't dare implement for fear of failing too many students. The Ohio Education Association points out that actual teachers have been trying to talk to legislators about this for years, but somehow Ohio Excels was able to swoop right in and hand over a plan and the legislature "gobbled it up."
The story is told in more detail in this gushing profile in ColumbusCEO. Plans were under way to scale the graduation requirements back to something realistic when, as Pat Tibiri put it, someone invited a skunk to the picnic.
“We threw a wrench into this at the very last minute,” says Tiberi during a recent interview around the conference table in his Capitol Square suite. “Can you imagine how pissed off they were? We came at it really late and upset what everyone thought was going to happen.”
You get a sense of the level of respect Ohio Excels has for the education community. The implication of the Ohio Excels proposal, despite Gray's claim that the business community wasn't trying to dictate policy, was that schools and professional educators couldn't be trusted to determine if a student was ready to graduate. OE's proposal basically stripped the graduation plan of all elements, like a capstone project, that would have involved teacher-managed alternatives to the test-heavy requirements. Peggy Lehner's summation of the outcome pretty well captures the significance of what came next.
While business groups always have found a receptive ear with Ohio GOP lawmakers, state Sen. Peggy Lehner, longtime chair of that chamber’s Education Committee, said choosing the Ohio Excels plan represents a new emphasis on listening to job creators over educators on key education policy questions.
“There’s no question that there was a tremendous amount of deference paid toward the workforce,” says the Republican lawmaker from Kettering. “We are really looking toward businesses to find out what they demand from students when they are coming out of high school. Choosing sides with the business community really represents a shift from the tradition of education policy being handled through educators and the school system.”
Gray's May appearance underlines that this is yet another example of business attempting to redefine education as simple job-training to make meat widgets that better serve the needs of business. This baloney never goes away, from the a Gates Foundation guy declaring that "businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools" to then-corporate guy Rex Tillerson mansplaining "I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer."
Yes, students' needs are not being met if they graduate unfit for any kind of job, but their needs are also not served if they graduate with no education except job prep for corporate employers. And you can bet that no rich white parents are telling their children's schools, "Just get 'em ready to be employable at some simple job."
Businesses are stakeholders in education, but so are parents, children, future neighbors and fellow voters. Businesses deserve a voice in the direction of public ed, but not the only voice, and when they start trying to re-engineer education around their needs and not the needs of students and the community at large, then business needs to sit down and shut up. The fact that you have successfully run a business does not mean you know jack or squat about education.
Education at its best is about helping children become more fully human, more fully their best selves. It is preparation for life, not just job training. Ohio has already done plenty to advance the privatization of public education; the least they can do is protect it from a hostile takeover.
Their board includes a few heads of city-level "partnerships" or "committees," a method by which some CEO types form up a group and declare themselves civic leaders. There are some foundations like the Farmer Foundation and the Peters Foundation, an ed reformster "philanthropic" group. The Ohio Business Roundtable is here, represented by GOP Congressman-turned-business advocate Pat Tibiri. They also get funding from the usuals-- Gates, Walton. They belong to the PIE network with a long list of very reformy groups. You will be unsurprised to learn that their ideas for improving education include advocating for school choice.
Gray appears to be well-connected; her name often pops up in discussions of what's going on in the legislature re: education. She often turns up on op-ed pages with guest views, or calls for "partnership," and Ohio Excels, despite being fresh and new, seems to have a seat reserved ta the proverbial table. When a committee looked for input on whether or not to keep Ohio's lousy school letter grade system, Ohio Excels was one of eight groups consulted (and one of the only two, with the Fordham Institute, to recommend that the system stay in place). Ed committee chair Peggy Lehner has allegedly told constituents that she trusts Gray on education issues and consults with her almost every day. And that's how lobbyists give bang for the buck- by having nothing to do all day but pitch to and connect with legislators.
Ohio Excels scored big this summer when it managed, somehow, to write new graduation requirements for Ohio high school students. Ohio has been stalled for a few years with graduation requirements they didn't dare implement for fear of failing too many students. The Ohio Education Association points out that actual teachers have been trying to talk to legislators about this for years, but somehow Ohio Excels was able to swoop right in and hand over a plan and the legislature "gobbled it up."
The story is told in more detail in this gushing profile in ColumbusCEO. Plans were under way to scale the graduation requirements back to something realistic when, as Pat Tibiri put it, someone invited a skunk to the picnic.
“We threw a wrench into this at the very last minute,” says Tiberi during a recent interview around the conference table in his Capitol Square suite. “Can you imagine how pissed off they were? We came at it really late and upset what everyone thought was going to happen.”
You get a sense of the level of respect Ohio Excels has for the education community. The implication of the Ohio Excels proposal, despite Gray's claim that the business community wasn't trying to dictate policy, was that schools and professional educators couldn't be trusted to determine if a student was ready to graduate. OE's proposal basically stripped the graduation plan of all elements, like a capstone project, that would have involved teacher-managed alternatives to the test-heavy requirements. Peggy Lehner's summation of the outcome pretty well captures the significance of what came next.
While business groups always have found a receptive ear with Ohio GOP lawmakers, state Sen. Peggy Lehner, longtime chair of that chamber’s Education Committee, said choosing the Ohio Excels plan represents a new emphasis on listening to job creators over educators on key education policy questions.
“There’s no question that there was a tremendous amount of deference paid toward the workforce,” says the Republican lawmaker from Kettering. “We are really looking toward businesses to find out what they demand from students when they are coming out of high school. Choosing sides with the business community really represents a shift from the tradition of education policy being handled through educators and the school system.”
Gray's May appearance underlines that this is yet another example of business attempting to redefine education as simple job-training to make meat widgets that better serve the needs of business. This baloney never goes away, from the a Gates Foundation guy declaring that "businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools" to then-corporate guy Rex Tillerson mansplaining "I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer."
Yes, students' needs are not being met if they graduate unfit for any kind of job, but their needs are also not served if they graduate with no education except job prep for corporate employers. And you can bet that no rich white parents are telling their children's schools, "Just get 'em ready to be employable at some simple job."
Businesses are stakeholders in education, but so are parents, children, future neighbors and fellow voters. Businesses deserve a voice in the direction of public ed, but not the only voice, and when they start trying to re-engineer education around their needs and not the needs of students and the community at large, then business needs to sit down and shut up. The fact that you have successfully run a business does not mean you know jack or squat about education.
Education at its best is about helping children become more fully human, more fully their best selves. It is preparation for life, not just job training. Ohio has already done plenty to advance the privatization of public education; the least they can do is protect it from a hostile takeover.
The Ground Level Ed Reform Decade Retrospective
Yeah, it's time for everyone to do decade lists (including "Ten Reasons The New Decade Doesn't Start For Another Year") from the list of education faces that Alexander Russo is doing on Twitter to this absolutely-the-only-list-you-need-to-read from Audrey Watters, "The 100 Worst Ed Tech Debacles of the Decade."
I'm not going to try to sum up the decade in education. Or rather, I'm going to sum up my decade. Because while most of these lists will take a look-from-the-stratosphere view, balancing policies and historical nuance etc blah blah blah, I want to talk about what it all looked like on the ground. We can talk about the decade in policy all day, but from the perspective of a classroom teacher, it was ten years of worsening train wreck. So this is my story. It matters not because it happened to me, but because it's one example of what happened to many many classroom teachers.
By 2009, there was a feeling in the air, a sensed that the earth under our teacher feet was becoming wobbly.
First and foremost, there was No Child Left Behind and the testing regimen attached to it. For the first several years the growth requirement (average yearly progress) was almost attainable, but by decade's end we were looking at targeted gains that were insanely high, culminating in 2014, when all students were supposed to be proficient on the test. There was no question that we were all going to fail-- was this what our leaders wanted?
In 2009 I sat through a state workshop about PVAAS, the value-added model that was being implemented to judge us as teachers. I described it at the time for my local newspaper audience:
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
I also noted the change in tone. When the state had first started claiming that all we had to do was teach the standards and test scores would rise and we'd be fine--in other words, when we had first been told that the state was essentially using the Big Standardized Test to dictate local curriculum-- there had been an attitude of cooperation, an attempt to sweet talk us into buying in. 2009 was different. The message was, "This is going to happen, and we don't give a shit if classroom teachers like it or not."
That was the sea change of the decade's opening. There had always been people and politicians who disrespected the value of teachers and teacher insights. But now it was coming from the state department of education, from the people who were supposedly caretakers of the system (as with many trends ten years ago, we had no idea how much worse it would get). For years, we could at least speak up and say, "This seems like a bad idea," and education leaders would try to convince us it wasn't, as if our feelings about the issue mattered. No more. Now we could try to speak up, but the response was, "Don't care what you think. This is what's happening."
And that was how the decade started. The pressure to do test prep was huge, from the state and from the district administration. "Look at those anchor standards," we were told. "Anchor standards" is the fancy term for "the standards that are going to be on the test." The ones you're supposed to teach to.
The new President, we thought, could be good news. He seems like a decent guy, a smart guy, a person who respects and values teachers. This NCLB train is clearly headed for a cliff-- I'll bet he's going to save it.
As the decade opened, I heard that state standards were on a sort of hold, that nationally there was a new set of standards rolling out. Pennsylvania adopted the Common Core standards in July of 2010, leading to some confusion-- would the state test be based on the new standards or the old ones? Were the standards any good (because the old ones were Not Great)? I heard at first that they would be great because they were written by teachers and based on research, but when I actually laid eyes on them, that seemed... hard to believe. Later we would sort-of-but-not-really change them again.
And as the Obama administration rolled out policy, I began to realize that this was not going to be the guy to help us, that he was, in fact, going to take some of the worst parts of NCLB and keep them, boost them. Keep high stakes testing, but now judge individual teachers and not just schools. States were encouraged to fight for some additional funding, which they could do by handing over control of their state department of education to the feds. But then all states were encouraged to do the same for free to escape the penalties of NCLB, which Congress seemed completely incapable of fixing, as if-- and this seemed to be a recurring theme in the early 10s-- as if they actually wanted public schools to fail.
We said it over and over-- when we peeked at test questions and saw how bad they were, when we asked for actionable results from last year's tests, when we looked at the kind of crappy materials the state sent us, when we saw the unattainable goals-- do they actually want us to fail??
And the more I dug into things, the more troubling they seemed. Most of what we had been told about the Common Core standards turned out to be a lie. Everywhere there were new groups with "student" and "education" in their names, important rich guys like Bill Gates, the guys in DC that we had voted for, all agreeing that we teachers in public schools, we who were devoting our lives to education and who, mostly, had far more training and experience than any of them-- we were stinking up the joint. Public education was failing, and it was our fault.
"We don't trust you. We don't believe you or believe in you. We are trying to fix the system that you broke." They said.
"Is this over that test? That crappy bad test?? Is that what this is about??" We asked incredulously.
"Never mind," they said. "We're not talking to you. You've done enough already. We think you're going to need some motivation, like threats or maybe free market competition to get you to stop slacking and screwing up. Don't like it? Big deal-- we can get some of this teacher-proof curriculum in a box, or hire one of those five-week wonders from Teach for America. Your job, even though you suck at it, is not so hard."
It began to sink in. The newly-required aligned texts. The computer-based practice testing. The test prep materials. The education-flavored businesses designed to make a buck from ed solutions, from charter schools to consulting groups. The data collection. All of those narratives were based on one premise-- that public schools were failing and that some combination of solutions and alternatives were needed.
Added to that shock was the feeling of isolation. Who was on the side of public schools? Not politicians-- not from either party. Not wealthy and powerful people. Not even our damned unions, which cheerfully endorsed Common Core and implicitly accepted the premise that public schools were failing.
Our own local administration? Mostly what I heard was, "Yes, this is junk and yes, this test doesn't measure important things, but, hey, that's how the game is played now." Occasionally a chirpy, "Oh, if we just align to the standards and teach to them, everything will work out" It didn't. We started getting students from the middle school who had had three periods of reading and no social studies or science. My last boss believed that spread-sheeted testing data could tell her more than her actual staff.
We learned to game the system. We learned how to beat some aspects of the tests, and we invested in drill-and-kill workbooks to practice answering multiple choice questions in response to short articles or excerpts. We used pre-tests to separate students into three groups-- those who will pass the test on their own, those who are essentially hopeless, and those we might be able to drag across the finish line through sheer brute force. (We also studied the correlation between practice test scores and Big Standardized Test scores, and the correlation was weak, but we kept doing it anyway).
Every year, I was required to commit one more act of educational malpractice, and every year, I had to figure out how to meet my students needs and my own standards for excellence with less time. My growth as a teacher had always been about, "How can I get more done with the resources I have?" By the mid-teens, I was asking, "How can I minimize the loss of time and resources this year."
I had become the staff crank. I sent out mass emails headed "COF" for "cranky old fart" outlining some of what I was learning. When I felt like too much of a noodge, I shifted that writing to a blog, and the more I wrote, the more I dug, and the more I dug, the angrier I became. You can go back to the early months of this blog (2013) and see that I was barely scratching the surface, but I was just so pissed. This was the work I loved, the work I had built my whole adult life around, and here were all these powerful and important people just dumping all over it and most of them didn't even know what the hell they were talking about-- it was just a perfect storm of powerful people who wanted to launch their own pet projects and public education was just some obstacle they wanted to clear out of their path. Yes, these people had always been around (I knew about A Nation At Risk from the beginning of my career) but now they had gotten really serious about it. Now they could really taste blood.
Most of the people I worked with were, honestly, just trying to get through their day. Like many school systems, we had plenty of day-to-day issues of our own, and by focusing on the local, you can find the chance to keep doing good work.
But I knew there were other angry teachers out there. NEA ran a piece on their website about the awesomeness of the Core and the usually empty comments filled to overflowing with nothing but negative comments. I found Diane Ravitch's blog-- I knew about the Bush era woman who had dared to change her mind about ed reform-- and that in turn opened a whole world of writers to me, and in turn a whole lot of information.
I had never believed that public education was perfect, but I could not understand why so many people in power seemed bent on destroying it. After a decade, I have a better idea why, a better sense of how complicated some of this mess is, of how many different lines cross in the public school house. In many ways, becoming a student of ed reform prepared me for a Trump presidency, because it made me really confront the degree to which many of my fellow citizens do not share values that I had somehow assumed were fundamental to being a citizen of this country.
The 2016 election was discouraging-- nobody was running as a supporter of public education, and the ultimate result was a Secretary of Education whose best feature is her ineffectiveness in selling virulantly anti-public-ed policies, but it's not like she represents a sharp break with the past.
I, of course, finished the decade by retiring. That decision, like much of the decade, was complicated. I can't say that in the absence of ed reform and the relentless drumbeat of teacher criticism and dismissal I would have stayed longer, but I can say that many of the things I miss about teaching I had already missed for a few years before I left.
What the end-of-decade lists are going to miss is how, for teachers in the classroom, the decade was a barrage of attacks from every direction, much of it hidden behind layers of baloney ("Teachers are the most important part of school" turned out not to be an appreciation, but the first half "and therefor everything that goes wrong in a school is the teachers' fault"). Our judgment was repeatedly ignored and overruled by people who didn't know us or our work. We were repeatedly blamed for everything wrong in education, and cynically saddled with tasks designed to "prove" our incompetence. It sucked.
It's by missing all of that that folks could be surprised by the troubles that states are having filling teaching jobs or uprisings like Red4Ed. Classroom teachers took a beating this decade; it is no surprise that the decade ends with them trying to get back on their feet.
I was frequently discouraged, but also discovered that I value the work even more than I thought I did, that I was willing to step further beyond my good boy team player self than I thought I could. Who knew that so many of us could make our voices so loud.
The lesson of the decade, I guess, is that you stand up for what matters. It is also that you study hard and talk to folks, because if your model is that there are two sides and one is wise and pure and the other is evil and stupid, your model is faulty (which is not to say that evil and stupid don't come into play sometimes).
The other lesson? Well, I don't know if it's a lesson so much as a re-affirmation. Inside the classroom, where the rubber meets the road and the teacher mets the students, is still the best work in the world. I had the best job in the world, and all the storm that raged outside those four walls didn't change that. That hasn't changed a bit. What has, sadly, changed, is how much harder it is to stay safely within those walls. Teaching is no longer for the meek, but it is still hugely important and rewarding work and the public education system is still one of the most important institutions we have.
I'm not going to try to sum up the decade in education. Or rather, I'm going to sum up my decade. Because while most of these lists will take a look-from-the-stratosphere view, balancing policies and historical nuance etc blah blah blah, I want to talk about what it all looked like on the ground. We can talk about the decade in policy all day, but from the perspective of a classroom teacher, it was ten years of worsening train wreck. So this is my story. It matters not because it happened to me, but because it's one example of what happened to many many classroom teachers.
By 2009, there was a feeling in the air, a sensed that the earth under our teacher feet was becoming wobbly.
First and foremost, there was No Child Left Behind and the testing regimen attached to it. For the first several years the growth requirement (average yearly progress) was almost attainable, but by decade's end we were looking at targeted gains that were insanely high, culminating in 2014, when all students were supposed to be proficient on the test. There was no question that we were all going to fail-- was this what our leaders wanted?
In 2009 I sat through a state workshop about PVAAS, the value-added model that was being implemented to judge us as teachers. I described it at the time for my local newspaper audience:
PVAAS uses a thousand points of data to project the test results for students. This is a highly complex model that three well-paid consultants could not clearly explain to seven college-educated adults, but there were lots of bars and graphs, so you know it’s really good. I searched for a comparison and first tried “sophisticated guess;” the consultant quickly corrected me—“sophisticated prediction.” I tried again—was it like a weather report, developed by comparing thousands of instances of similar conditions to predict the probability of what will happen next? Yes, I was told. That was exactly right. This makes me feel much better about PVAAS, because weather reports are the height of perfect prediction.
I also noted the change in tone. When the state had first started claiming that all we had to do was teach the standards and test scores would rise and we'd be fine--in other words, when we had first been told that the state was essentially using the Big Standardized Test to dictate local curriculum-- there had been an attitude of cooperation, an attempt to sweet talk us into buying in. 2009 was different. The message was, "This is going to happen, and we don't give a shit if classroom teachers like it or not."
That was the sea change of the decade's opening. There had always been people and politicians who disrespected the value of teachers and teacher insights. But now it was coming from the state department of education, from the people who were supposedly caretakers of the system (as with many trends ten years ago, we had no idea how much worse it would get). For years, we could at least speak up and say, "This seems like a bad idea," and education leaders would try to convince us it wasn't, as if our feelings about the issue mattered. No more. Now we could try to speak up, but the response was, "Don't care what you think. This is what's happening."
And that was how the decade started. The pressure to do test prep was huge, from the state and from the district administration. "Look at those anchor standards," we were told. "Anchor standards" is the fancy term for "the standards that are going to be on the test." The ones you're supposed to teach to.
The new President, we thought, could be good news. He seems like a decent guy, a smart guy, a person who respects and values teachers. This NCLB train is clearly headed for a cliff-- I'll bet he's going to save it.
As the decade opened, I heard that state standards were on a sort of hold, that nationally there was a new set of standards rolling out. Pennsylvania adopted the Common Core standards in July of 2010, leading to some confusion-- would the state test be based on the new standards or the old ones? Were the standards any good (because the old ones were Not Great)? I heard at first that they would be great because they were written by teachers and based on research, but when I actually laid eyes on them, that seemed... hard to believe. Later we would sort-of-but-not-really change them again.
And as the Obama administration rolled out policy, I began to realize that this was not going to be the guy to help us, that he was, in fact, going to take some of the worst parts of NCLB and keep them, boost them. Keep high stakes testing, but now judge individual teachers and not just schools. States were encouraged to fight for some additional funding, which they could do by handing over control of their state department of education to the feds. But then all states were encouraged to do the same for free to escape the penalties of NCLB, which Congress seemed completely incapable of fixing, as if-- and this seemed to be a recurring theme in the early 10s-- as if they actually wanted public schools to fail.
We said it over and over-- when we peeked at test questions and saw how bad they were, when we asked for actionable results from last year's tests, when we looked at the kind of crappy materials the state sent us, when we saw the unattainable goals-- do they actually want us to fail??
And the more I dug into things, the more troubling they seemed. Most of what we had been told about the Common Core standards turned out to be a lie. Everywhere there were new groups with "student" and "education" in their names, important rich guys like Bill Gates, the guys in DC that we had voted for, all agreeing that we teachers in public schools, we who were devoting our lives to education and who, mostly, had far more training and experience than any of them-- we were stinking up the joint. Public education was failing, and it was our fault.
"We don't trust you. We don't believe you or believe in you. We are trying to fix the system that you broke." They said.
"Is this over that test? That crappy bad test?? Is that what this is about??" We asked incredulously.
"Never mind," they said. "We're not talking to you. You've done enough already. We think you're going to need some motivation, like threats or maybe free market competition to get you to stop slacking and screwing up. Don't like it? Big deal-- we can get some of this teacher-proof curriculum in a box, or hire one of those five-week wonders from Teach for America. Your job, even though you suck at it, is not so hard."
It began to sink in. The newly-required aligned texts. The computer-based practice testing. The test prep materials. The education-flavored businesses designed to make a buck from ed solutions, from charter schools to consulting groups. The data collection. All of those narratives were based on one premise-- that public schools were failing and that some combination of solutions and alternatives were needed.
Added to that shock was the feeling of isolation. Who was on the side of public schools? Not politicians-- not from either party. Not wealthy and powerful people. Not even our damned unions, which cheerfully endorsed Common Core and implicitly accepted the premise that public schools were failing.
Our own local administration? Mostly what I heard was, "Yes, this is junk and yes, this test doesn't measure important things, but, hey, that's how the game is played now." Occasionally a chirpy, "Oh, if we just align to the standards and teach to them, everything will work out" It didn't. We started getting students from the middle school who had had three periods of reading and no social studies or science. My last boss believed that spread-sheeted testing data could tell her more than her actual staff.
We learned to game the system. We learned how to beat some aspects of the tests, and we invested in drill-and-kill workbooks to practice answering multiple choice questions in response to short articles or excerpts. We used pre-tests to separate students into three groups-- those who will pass the test on their own, those who are essentially hopeless, and those we might be able to drag across the finish line through sheer brute force. (We also studied the correlation between practice test scores and Big Standardized Test scores, and the correlation was weak, but we kept doing it anyway).
Every year, I was required to commit one more act of educational malpractice, and every year, I had to figure out how to meet my students needs and my own standards for excellence with less time. My growth as a teacher had always been about, "How can I get more done with the resources I have?" By the mid-teens, I was asking, "How can I minimize the loss of time and resources this year."
I had become the staff crank. I sent out mass emails headed "COF" for "cranky old fart" outlining some of what I was learning. When I felt like too much of a noodge, I shifted that writing to a blog, and the more I wrote, the more I dug, and the more I dug, the angrier I became. You can go back to the early months of this blog (2013) and see that I was barely scratching the surface, but I was just so pissed. This was the work I loved, the work I had built my whole adult life around, and here were all these powerful and important people just dumping all over it and most of them didn't even know what the hell they were talking about-- it was just a perfect storm of powerful people who wanted to launch their own pet projects and public education was just some obstacle they wanted to clear out of their path. Yes, these people had always been around (I knew about A Nation At Risk from the beginning of my career) but now they had gotten really serious about it. Now they could really taste blood.
Most of the people I worked with were, honestly, just trying to get through their day. Like many school systems, we had plenty of day-to-day issues of our own, and by focusing on the local, you can find the chance to keep doing good work.
But I knew there were other angry teachers out there. NEA ran a piece on their website about the awesomeness of the Core and the usually empty comments filled to overflowing with nothing but negative comments. I found Diane Ravitch's blog-- I knew about the Bush era woman who had dared to change her mind about ed reform-- and that in turn opened a whole world of writers to me, and in turn a whole lot of information.
I had never believed that public education was perfect, but I could not understand why so many people in power seemed bent on destroying it. After a decade, I have a better idea why, a better sense of how complicated some of this mess is, of how many different lines cross in the public school house. In many ways, becoming a student of ed reform prepared me for a Trump presidency, because it made me really confront the degree to which many of my fellow citizens do not share values that I had somehow assumed were fundamental to being a citizen of this country.
The 2016 election was discouraging-- nobody was running as a supporter of public education, and the ultimate result was a Secretary of Education whose best feature is her ineffectiveness in selling virulantly anti-public-ed policies, but it's not like she represents a sharp break with the past.
I, of course, finished the decade by retiring. That decision, like much of the decade, was complicated. I can't say that in the absence of ed reform and the relentless drumbeat of teacher criticism and dismissal I would have stayed longer, but I can say that many of the things I miss about teaching I had already missed for a few years before I left.
What the end-of-decade lists are going to miss is how, for teachers in the classroom, the decade was a barrage of attacks from every direction, much of it hidden behind layers of baloney ("Teachers are the most important part of school" turned out not to be an appreciation, but the first half "and therefor everything that goes wrong in a school is the teachers' fault"). Our judgment was repeatedly ignored and overruled by people who didn't know us or our work. We were repeatedly blamed for everything wrong in education, and cynically saddled with tasks designed to "prove" our incompetence. It sucked.
It's by missing all of that that folks could be surprised by the troubles that states are having filling teaching jobs or uprisings like Red4Ed. Classroom teachers took a beating this decade; it is no surprise that the decade ends with them trying to get back on their feet.
I was frequently discouraged, but also discovered that I value the work even more than I thought I did, that I was willing to step further beyond my good boy team player self than I thought I could. Who knew that so many of us could make our voices so loud.
The lesson of the decade, I guess, is that you stand up for what matters. It is also that you study hard and talk to folks, because if your model is that there are two sides and one is wise and pure and the other is evil and stupid, your model is faulty (which is not to say that evil and stupid don't come into play sometimes).
The other lesson? Well, I don't know if it's a lesson so much as a re-affirmation. Inside the classroom, where the rubber meets the road and the teacher mets the students, is still the best work in the world. I had the best job in the world, and all the storm that raged outside those four walls didn't change that. That hasn't changed a bit. What has, sadly, changed, is how much harder it is to stay safely within those walls. Teaching is no longer for the meek, but it is still hugely important and rewarding work and the public education system is still one of the most important institutions we have.
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