DeVos on Fox: Six Minute Baloney Digest (With Homelessness)

Betsy DeVos went on Fox and Friends this week, the softest of soft interview destinations form members of this administration. If you want a quick six-minute sampler of her current talking points, you could do worse, but it you don't think you can take looking at the patented smile d'smarm, here are the highlights- and there are a couple of revealing moments here.

The segment is nominally titled "Combating the Homeless Crisis In Schools," and it starts with some b roll of homeless folks while noting that over 114,000 students in NYC were homeless last school year, which works out to about one in ten. "So what can be done to make sure disadvantaged kids have access to top quality education?"

Well, from "homeless" to "disadvantaged" is a bit of a leap, but it really doesn't matter, because we're never going to talk ab out this issue for the rest of the segment. It's time to introduce DeVos, whose smile is having even more trouble than usual making it all the way up to her eyes. After the intro, we re-present the question as "what more can be done to make sure that everyone gets access to quality educations" (yes, that's how he said it). The homeless have now vanished from the conversation.

DeVos opens by invoking NAEP and citing made-up statistics. Two out of three eighth graders "can't read or do math at the level they should be able to" which is a meaningless statement-- "should be" according to whom-- but shows her backing away from her earlier assertion that these students couldn't read at grade level, which is simply a misstatement of what "proficient" means on NAEP. But she's still talking baloney here.

"And so," she says, as if this next part follows logically, President Trump and this administration is focused on creating more pathways and freedom "for students and their families to find the right fit." She points out that kids learn differently and need different things, so more choices. (At no point in her answer does she make any attempt to connect this to homeless students, who need things like, say, a home.)

Now the left-hand host puckers up and observes that DeVos, being rich as shit, didn't have to take a government job, but gosh, she's always been so passionate about "finding ways to educate the disadvantaged in the United States." He points out she's always been dedicated to charter schools, school choice, vouchers, and so, he asks, are these some of the solutions to that problem. And I want to point out again that we've just sort of lumped homelessness and other "disadvantages" together, like there isn't a wide range of specific social issues with specific causes and effects. Just, you know, all them poor kids. But anyway-- are here favorite policy ideas the answer?

Freedom! Education freedom, and a whole range of choices. It doesn't even have to be a school building-- I guess those homeless kids could just cyberschool on their computers. Empowering families (but not, mind you, empowering them with food and shelter, because empowering is not the same as coddling) is a focus on this administration and probably the biggest fiction out of her mouth is the repeated insistence that Donald Trump really cares about this education stuff. But this is all so she can pivot back to her Education Freedom Tax Dodge Scholarship program, a program that is already DOA in the current budget, but I guess even for wealthy cabinet secretaries, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. Her program would give rocket fuel to current efforts in the states.

Now, Fox lady is going to ask about the Democrats and how the candidates have abandoned school choice (and if you were expecting some grasp of the differences between, say, charter and voucher policies, I'll just remind you which show we're watching). And we get some clips. Sanders saying that too many charter schools do a lousy job. Joe Biden (at the Pittsburgh ed town hall) saying that he'll throw out all DeVos's stuff, which is a curious choice given some of that stuff is leftover Obama/Biden stuff, and Mayor Pete making his meaningless pledge to wipe out for-profit charter schools. Then they bring up Cory Booker "who used to work alongside you" and then abandoned his pro-charter position "especially during your confirmation hearing." Then she asks "why would he do that," effectively canceling out all the previous stated and implied questions.

Ah, but you already know the true villain here. "The Democratic candidates are beholden to the teachers union." And she pivots off that question "But the fact is" there are a million families on wait lists, which may come as a shock to the charters around the country that are closing because of low enrollment. That one million number comes from the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, and you know their estimate has to be accurate. We need more of these schools, because they are providing the kind of "direction" and "opportunity" that students need. No word about providing education. "Results prove out and the demand is there," she says. Which results?
Prove what? Those are just some of the hard-hitting follow-up questions these repotrers have no intention of asking.

Righthand guy apparently checks his phone to get the quote from Congresswoman Fredrica Wilson who accused DeVos of being out to destroy public education-- he actually corrects himself to say "government run schools" instead of public. You may recall that Wilson hurt the seceretary's feelings with this accusation, and DeVos now takes this opportunity to, well, not rebut the Congresswoman at all.

The reality is that I care deeply about every single child, no matter where they are, no matter where they attend school, and this President and this administration cares deeply about the future and the opportunity that every child has to become everything that they can be. That's why we are not satisfied, we will not rest until we make the kinds of changes and reduce the kinds of empowerment and opportunities that all families need, that currently the wealthy, the powerful and the well-connected have, but those who don't have those means are stuck in too many cases in schools and situations that simply are not working for them, and we're not going to stand for that.

DeVos looks a little pissed as she delivers this non-answer, which could easily mean, "Yes, I intend to destroy public education and I have my reasons." Yes, I think she bobbled a word in the middle, but this is pretty vintage DeVos, particularly in the context because, hey, remember when this interview was about homeless students. I bet they find themselves in a situation that isn't really working for them, and I bet the solution is not to hand them a school voucher.

But now for a change of pace. Righthand guy says he still hears a lot about Common Core, and gee that math homework is hard, and what are you guys doing about it?

"Well, just as President Trump campaigned on to end Common Core, Common Core has been ended."

Nope. I'm as quick as anyone to say that the Core has failed, but ended? Nope. But DeVos is goin g to take (and share with Trump) credit for removing the Core from federal law. She's also, in Trumpian fashion, going to take credit for passing ESSA (December 2015). Getting rid of federal laws about Common Core is on par with the feds taking credit for ending polar bear attacks in Palm Springs. She's going to shoehorn a plug for CTE in here as well.

They thank her, she thanks them, and we're back to the panel on the couch. Rightbhand guy says he comes from a state that still has Common Core, and righthand guy says he has trouble doing math homework (center lady just has trouble doing math at all--ha-ha funny ladies and their weak thinky parts). Then righthand guy goes off about "experiential reading" and "there's no phonics" and dang--we ran out of time before we could get back to those homeless students.

DeVos: Remote Work Bad, Remote School Good

Betsy DeVos has long been a fan of cyber-schooling. Her husband was an investor in K-12, the cyber-charter behemoth, way back at beginning of the millennium (we can start saying that now, right?) Back when she was still running the American Federation for Children, she had this to say

Families want and deserve access to all educational options, including charter schools, private schools and virtual schools. States are well ahead of Congress on this and their efforts should be encouraged and supported. Twenty-three states plus DC have 48 publicly funded private school choice programs; 43 states have charter school laws; and virtual schools are growing across the country. Greater innovation and choice will contribute to better K-12 educational outcomes for our children.

AFC often spoke out in favor of cyber charters, and DeVos has continued to advocate as Secretary, even as the dismal results rolled in.

DeVos has been an unwavering supporter of remote schooling. But her support for remote work stops at the doors to the Department of Education.

One of the Trumpian initiatives (under the general banner of "Grampaw Says That Back In Has They Didn't Need That Stuff") has been to clamp down on remote working. Per the Washington Post:

President Trump’s government is scaling it back at multiple agencies on the theory that a fanny in the seat prevents the kind of slacking off that can happen when no one’s watching.

The initiative is government-wide, and so includes the Department of Education, where DeVos fully supports the notion that remote work is bad. Despite a survey suggesting the desired results weren't happening, DeVos decided to stay the course, because she believes that remote work is damaging to collaboration, communication and productivity.

Is there some cognitive dissonance evident here? Not necessarily. It would be in keeping with the DeVosian approach to believe that all public employees (aka those slackers who have been insulated from God's own free market private enterprise system) are probably lazy public teat-suckers who need to be kept under the hammer. This would include government workers and public school teachers. Also, there would be some hypocrisy involved if DeVos were advocating for cyber schools because she thought they actually did a good job. But the language quoted above is typical of DeVos on the subject-- she almost never argues that cyber-schools should exist because they educate children so very well. She just wants that choice to be available.

This little paired text exercise just reminds us that when DeVos says "parents should have choices" what she means is "business people should be free to tap this market any way they want to." They may be making a buck by marketing junk, but that's their God-given right.

Should Tax Dollars Pay For This Discrimination

From Kentucky comes the story of a fifteen-year old student expelled for wearing a rainbow t-shirt. Seriously.

Kayla Kenney used to be a student at Whitefield Academy, where the mission is "to serve Christian families by providing a Christ-centered, Biblically-based education marked by academic excellence and spiritual vitality." Part of their vision is "to produce powerful and effective student leaders." The name, incidentally, is from George Whitefield, an 18th century preacher credited with helping to found Methodism and evangelism-- so not a subtle whiteness thing, just a subtle "refusing to be dragged into the 21st Century" thing.

The school's language suggests that this is part of an ongoing issue with Kenney, because, I guess, she often wears rainbows? Who knows. It doesn't really matter; Whitefield is a private school and they can eject any student they wish for any reason they wish. This story is spreading rapidly, but I'm not sure there's much to see here.

Except.

Except that this is Kentucky, where the fans of school choice have been pushing oh-so-hard for charters and vouchers in all their various forms. Like this old op-ed in which the head of EdChoice Kentucy tries to argue that scholarship tax credits don't cost the taxpayers a cent because they aren't really vouchers. This is some first rate bluegrass bullshit (and the type preferred by Secretary DeVos). To review-- a tax credit scholarship program means works like this. The state tells Bobby McGotrox that instead of paying his taxes, he can give money to a private school. This means that the state does not get the benefit of McGotrox tax dollars, which means whatever amount the state allows, the state is missing that much money from its own budget. This is some clever sleight of hand, but the end result is exactly precisely the same as spending tax dollars on vouchers for private schools.

Private schools just like Whitefield Academy.

This is what voucher programs get you-- taxpayers who literally have to foot the bill for schools that would reject or eject that same taxpayer's own children.

This is not choice. It is privatization. It is using the power of the government and the money of the taxpayers to support schools that behave in immoral and not-really-legal ways. It's not okay.

More Proof The Big Standardized Tests Mean Diddly-Squat

Chad Aldeman (Bellwether Education Partners) wants us to take heart. He's over at The 74 (Campbell Brown's House of Reform Advocacy) arguing that although reformsters are writing off the last ten years as a "lost decade" there was actually some good news-- while "educational achievement" (by which Aldeman actually means "standardized test scores") remained stagnant, college attainment has been on the rise.

Well, that's a puzzler. Adelman suggests that you might explain the incongruity by claiming that colleges and high schools just lowered their standards. But he thinks the attainment rates deserve attention.

One reason is that it’s much easier to gauge attainment than achievement. Measuring attainment is as simple as asking adults what their highest level of education is, whereas measuring achievement involves a complex process of defining what people at various ages should know and be able to do, developing a tool to measure those skills, sampling the given population and then translating the sample results into larger estimates.

Well, yes. That second thing, the measuring achievement is hard, so hard I would argue (as I have for forever) that we can't actually do it, but in the education disruptor's desire to have such a tool, we've just rushed a couple of bad proxies to market and continued to pretend that they measure what they don't.

We already know that the NAEP is not actually a "gold standard" for measuring educational achievement. And the PARCC, SBA, and all their sad cousins/replacements have never, ever made a convincing case that they can measure educational achievement. And soaking all this crappy data in a vat of VAM sauce doesn't make it any better. And even reformsters have accepted that changing Big Standardized Test scores does not have any connection to changing future life outcomes.

Aldeman goes on to parse and pick at the data a little more, but the main conclusion here is obvious. The proxy-of-choice for education achievement is supposed to tell us, among other things, how many students are how ready for college. And yet while that proxy has been screaming that students are no more ready for college than they were a decade ago, many more students are successfully completing college.

Look- if your local weather man gets the forecast wrong for ten straight years, you do not scratch your head and wonder what's gone wrong with the weather. You must conclude that whatever he's using as a tool for prognostication is busted. If your yardstick tells you that your child has not grown in ten years, and yet your household budget, your clothes shopping, and your actual eyeballs tell you that your child has grown three feet in ten years, you don't assume that your child is perpetrating an amazing illusion-- you throw out the yardstick.

The Big Standardized Tests that generate the scores that folks keep trying to pass off as a perfect proxy for student achievement? They do not work. They do not tell us what folks claim they tell us. How much more evidence do we need before we stop pretending that we know how to measure educational achievement?

ICYMI: Unexpected Spring Edition (1/12)

It is unseasonably warm here, even as some parts of the country deal with a fresh helping of winter. Either way, we've got things to read. Remember-- if the piece strikes you as an important one, go to the original location for the post or article and share it through your social media. It's all about the amplification.

Putting a Price Tag on Public Schools  

Wendy Lecker doesn't write enough, so this piece from the Stamford Advocate is a welcome look at the legacy and future of Eli Broad's do-it-yourself superintendent school.

3D TV Tells You Everything You Need To Know About This Decade's Tech  

This Wired piece isn't about education, except that it is. Tag line: "You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas." Tech that's all about what you want to make, while steadfastly ignoring what the users actually want.

Bad Tech-- Pearson Wants Teacher's Jobs  

Alan Singer at the Daily Kos about the problems with AI replacements for actual humans.

Laziness Does Not Exist  

Yup. A psychology professor explains why not.

Bernie Sanders: End High Stakes Testing  

This was the week that Sanders plugged that one hole in his education platform And USA Today let him write an op-ed to do it.

Hoboken NJ Charter Schools  

Nobody is better than Jersey Jazzman for breaking down actual facts and data and rendering it all intelligible. This look at Hoboken tells us a lot about much of the charter universe.

Top Reads of 2019  

I can resist a good reading list, and Nancy Flanagan has an excellent one.

John White Resigns  

And the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is here to tell him goodbye, and good riddance.

Pressuring Parents To Teach Their Kindergartners To Read  

Nancy Bailey and another disturbing trend among parents of the littles.

Mike Feinberg's New Home

Feinberg was booted from KIPP over allegations of harassment and abuse, but that didn't end his career in the ed reform biz. Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has the story.

Bugs In Teachers Ears? What We Should Be Doing Instead.  

Yes, Nancy Flanagan again. When EdWeek trotted out bug-in-ear coaching again, lots of shade was thrown, but Flanagan is smart enough to take it a step further and ask what the answer to ear-bugging should be.

Homeowners Fed Up

Up in Wisconsin, Up North News reports that taxpayers are getting tired of paying for two school systems, only one of which has any accountability.

The Rural Conundrum  

Coincidentally, Jennifer Berkshire was just in rural Wisconsin, where even the red parts are still voting to raise their own taxes for schools. What's going on?

NH: No, Again, To Federal Charter Money

A month ago, the Granite State's Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee said, "No, thanks" to an offer of $46 million from the feds to be used in doubling the number of New Hampshire charter schools from 28 to 55. The money was to come from the federal Charter School Program, a grant program that has come under fire due to a recent pair of studies showing massive waste and fraud by recipients of CSP money. The legislature was concerned that doubling the number of charter schools would harm public schools and existing charters.

But that, it turns out, was not the end of it.

This frickin' guy.

Frank Edelblut is currently the grand poohbah of education in NH. He was previously a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term state representative. He took a swing at the governor's office, but was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu; he then supported Sununu who, upon becoming governor, appointed Edelblut to the education post based on God-only-knows-what. Edelblut has no education background, pushed vouchers as a representative, and homeschooled all his kids.

But Friday (1/10) Edelblut brought the $46 million back to the table for the committee with what I suppose he thought was a sweetener-- a quote from Democrat Maggie Hassan, former governor and current senator for New Hampshire. Hassan had supported a similar grant in 2016, writing:

An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.

This is, of course, baloney. Note that Edelblut did not follow up with, "And here's a list of the successful academic best practices that have been pioneered by our existing charter schools and transferred successfully to our public schools." He couldn't, because if we've learned one thing after two decades of modern charter schools, it's that charter school operators don't know anything about how to educate students that public schools don't already know.

Republicans accused Dems of sticking it to taxpayers and children, but Democrats pointed out that the grant left too many questions unanswered while circumventing both the legislative and budgeting process. NH charters already have empty seats, and one analysis showed a long-term cost to the state of $57 to $104 million.

It would have been fiscally irresponsible for the Fiscal Committee to move forward with this grant, which would have doubled charter schools outside of the legislative process, jeopardized the financial health of New Hampshire’s current traditional and charter public schools, and made an end run around the state budget that would have committed the state of New Hampshire to millions of dollars in unbudgeted education aid years into the future.

The  Dems also cited the NPE reports showing CSP waste. As for Edelblut, he was sure that the committee just didn't understand the grant the first time around. He also wanted to claim that the money could totally be used by public schools, somehow. Is he now satisfied that the committee understands what they have rejected twice? Well, as he told the Union Leader:

Do I look like someone who gives up that easily? We’ll be back.

So watch for New Hampshire's head of public education to continue trying to undermine and defund public education. Speaking of people who just don't understand.

To A Teacher At The End Of A Discouraging Week

It just sucks. You spend the time and effort (and maybe money) to create a lesson that you hope will be engaging and provide your students an exciting, maybe even fun, break from routine. And it bombs. More than once. Not only do your students not appreciate it, but they bitch about it. Sure, these are students who generally bitch and moan about everything (that's partly why you went an extra mile for them), but this still feels like you stayed up late to bake someone a beautiful cake and they just took a bite, spit it out, and threw the rest back in your face.

It feels personal, but it also shoots straight to your core as a professional (because, let's face it, your personal and professional selves are pretty intertwined anyway). Maybe my pedagogical sense is not very strong, you think. Maybe I'm not very good at motivating or connecting with the students. Maybe I just suck at this whole teacher thing.

I was in the classroom for thirty-nine years, and I still remember, way too vividly, those days, or weeks, or, in one case, the better part of an entire year. It just sucks. And nothing anyone can say really makes it any less sucky. Nevertheless, let me offer you a few pieces of hope.

You Don't Always Know

Here's a story. In February of my first year of teaching, one of my students entered my classroom during a period other than his scheduled one, and stood in front of me threatening me with assault. It lasted roughly seven hundred hours, and then he left. I pretty much kept doing what I was doing (handing out papers) and responding very little to him (I later learned the students in that class were split between believing I was scared and believing that I was secretly a kung-fu master and I didn't want to kill the kid). It was not a good moment. I'd been trying to reach the student, and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of getting through. This did not seem like a sign that I was doing all that well.

Then, at the end of the day, he came back, sat down in a desk, and we talked for thirty or forty minutes about what was bothering him. What I came to understand was that I had probably been the recipient of his threats and venting because he actually felt safe with me. He served his suspension and we had a decent rest of the year.

Now, the point of the story is not that threats are okay (they aren't-- and if he had actually thrown a punch at me, this would be a much different story). The point is that sometimes it looks like you're not getting through at all, and yet, you actually are. You just don't know. I can't tell you how many times students later in life would tell me how much they liked my class or even me and all I could think was "But you were an absolute ass to me all day every day." It's a mystery. If you care about them and act like it, somehow they get that, somehow? I don't know. I just know that you're probably reaching more students than you think you are.

It's Not Personal, Because You're Not A Person

Okay, most teachers get this, and it doesn't always make you feel better. But to your students, you're not a real person (the younger they are, the more true this is). Sometimes this is cute, like when they run into you in the grocery store and are shocked to realize that you eat food and do actually leave the school building. But sometimes it means that you are like a door or a sofa or some other object that they punch because they can't strike out against what they'd really like to strike ott against.

This Is About Them     

How your students treat you is largely about them. It's about the baggage they carry to school with them, about the families that create a particular atmosphere at home, about the problems that nagged them in the morning before they left for school and the problems that will be waiting for them when they leave the building. This is about whether or not they've learned the basics of respect and kindness. This is about whether or not they have the emotional resources to deal with one more thing in their life, even if that thing is as innocuous as an art project.

Yes, I know. A great teacher is supposed to be able to reach past all of that a perform pedagogical awesomeness, and it's true that the longer you teach, the better-trained your reach. But you're not magic and you're not a superhero and you don't have infinite time or resources, and so you aren't going to be all things for all students on all days. Plus, their main job is to grow up and you can't do that for them.

Play the Long Game

Sometimes education comes in time-release capsules. Another benefit of teaching a long time in a small place-- I've had former students tell me about how they had fond memories of, or had been influenced by, Lesson X. And I have no memory of teaching that lesson, or saying that thing they've always remembered me saying. I can recognize most of them as thins that certainly sound like me, but that's it. And I know that I must have thought that Lesson X was a dud, because if I hadn't, I'd remember it from the many times I used it over many years.

Or there's my former colleague who taught upstream from me. Her students would come to me the next year, often disparaging her class. "Oh, heck-- we didn't learn anything in there," they'd say, but as each unit began, I would quiz them on prior knowledge, and they would already know all this stuff, and I would ask how they knew that and they would scratch their heads and say, "Huh. We learned that last year in Ms. Z's class." She was the greatest stealth teacher I've ever known.

Sometimes teachers are just planting seeds, and the harvest doesn't come until weeks, months, or years and years later. It sucks, because we usually don't get to see the crops come in, but there can be no doubt-- just because your students don't appear to have grasped anything right now doesn't mean that the lesson failed completely and forever.

Some People Are Jerks

Seriously. You know adults who are jerks; do you think they turned into jerks suddenly when they turned 21? The tendency, in my experience, runs the other way-- far more young jerks grow up to be great adults than great children who grow up to be jerks. The odds are excellent that somewhere in your classroom are some young jerks. The odds are good that they will grow out of it, and it would be jerk-like for a teacher to hold it against them or engage them in a contest of jerky wills. Still, that's what you're working with in the here-and-now.

De-jerkification lessons like "other people exist" and "being unkind is uncool" take a long time to take root, and you may never reap the rewards of teaching them (see above). But in the meantime, some of your immature students will act like immature children, and that is natural and normal and the greatest teacher in the history of the world cannot instantly erase nature.

Yes, if you find yourself blaming all your classroom troubles on all your students being jerks, then you are a big part of the problem. But it is okay to recognize that children will sometimes act childishly, and that is both normal and outside your control. Just keep focusing on their better parts.

Avoid the Failure Spiral

Any teacher worth her salt can tell you, right now, five things that she needs to do better. One of the hardest parts of teaching is this-- you know what you should be doing in a perfect world, but you don't have enough time, enough resources, enough you to do all that, and so you have to pick deal with the knowledge of all the ways you're coming up short.

What that means is that if you go deliberately looking for reasons that you are inadequate, you can always find them. Don't let yourself get sucked down that failure and shame spiral. And do not imagine that somewhere in the world, or your building, there are teachers who never have any of these problems. You know which teachers don't think they have anything to work on as teachers? Lousy teachers. That experience of getting to the end of a day and thinking, "I am just never going to get good at this," is absolutely universal.

After 39 years, I still had those days. My secret? Not taking a single day as an indication of my whole career. At the end of a crappy day, I (mostly) said "Well, today I sucked" and not "Well, I guess I'm a total failure as a teacher always and forever." Teachers have successes and failures; don't get into the habit of thinking that your failures mean everything and your successes mean nothing.

Next Week Is Another Week

The students will reset quickly-- a day is a long time to them. You will reflect on what happened, what worked, what didn't. Spend time with people who love you. Do that self-care thing. Next week is another week. You will go back to the classroom better than you left it, and you will continue to grow stronger and better as a teacher. You got this.