USED Pitches Privatization To Wyoming

Mitchell Zais, Deputy Secretary of Education, last week visited Wyoming to stump for school choice. He wrote for the Wyoming Parent his version of the department's sales pitch for Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom vouchery program. Wyoming parents (and taxpayers), this is a bit of a snow job. Let me explain.

He opens by recognizing that humans are individuals, so that he can say this:

So why does American education group students by age, and expect them to learn the same material, on the same schedule, pretty much in the same way?

This guy

The answer is: they don't. In fact, they so much don't that about a decade ago some folks launched an audacious plan to make everyone learn the same stuff (you know-- kind of a common core) on the same schedule and the education establishment hasn't stopped kicking back about it since. Zais knows this-- he opposed the Common Core when he was head education honcho in South Carolina, and if he already thought that everyone in education was operating in lockstep, why would he bother? No, walk into any school and even in the Core era, you'll see differentiation and tracking and a host of ways to accommodate the individual nature of students. Perfect? No-- but then the private schools that he's touting here aren't known for broad ranges of tolerance, either.

Then he launches into that old favorite-- US schools are failing and costs too much. And test scores.

"Costs too much" is an interesting critique from a guy who's background is military. But the rest is the same old baloney.

We do know that American education is not working. Too many students are falling farther and farther behind, despite the fact that taxpayers spend almost $13,000 per year per student. And yet, despite ever-increasing spending that’s near highest in the world, results are, at best, flat. We’re not in the top ten in any international ranking. In fact, we’re 37th in math in the world. We’re outpaced not only by big competitors like China and Russia, but also by countries like Estonia, Finland, and the Netherlands.

We don't know that US education is not working, nor am I sure what he means by students falling "farther and farther" behind (English teacher note-- I think he means "further" unless he's talking about a decline in track and field skills). We're not in the top ten ranking on that one standardized test that is mostly bunk, anyway, but we never have been anywhere but mid-pack. And as always, the missing piece of this argument is the same-- if we get a low PISA score, so what? What connection has anyone made between a nation's score and anything?

Then it's on to the biggest slice of baloney in the promotion of this program-- parent empowerment. The pitch here is that parents know better than any bureaucrat what school fits their child best. That assumes a few things that can't be safely assumed.

First, it assumes that the only stakeholders in school are the parents. They aren't. All taxpayers pay school tax because all of society benefits from having well-educated folks in it. Next, it assumes that parents will be making their choice in a world of clear, plentiful information about the choices, and not a world of noisy not-entirely-accurate marketing for these private businesses. And finally, it assumes that they have a choice. All you have to do is look to Florida, where this same system is already in place, and see how that works. The schools that enter this program are private schools, and they retain their right to discriminate as they wish. So, in Florida, if your child is LGBTQ, you definitely do not have your choice of school.

Then we get to the slick weaselly part of tax credit scholarships:

Our proposal does not rely on any taxpayer funds already allocated to public school students, nor does it create a new federal education program.

Tax credit fans like to brag that no public tax dollars are spent, and this is technically correct, because the government isn't used as a pass-through. Instead, donors pay into a scholarship fund instead of paying their taxes. The government never touched the money, so we can't call it government money with government cooties. However, every dollar given to a scholarship fund is a dollar less that is paid in taxes. The $5 billion that DeVos wants to "inject" into these scholarship brokerage organizations would be a $5 billion hole in the budget. Which means taxpayers either get $5 billion less in government services, or taxes are increased to fill the hole.

So it is true that these programs don't cost public taxpayer dollars, but they do come at taxpayer expense.

And watch Florida as the private donors exert leverage over programs by pulling out or giving more money. Ultimately, someone will decide whether it's okay for private schools in Florida to discriminate against LGBTQ students, and that someone won't be the government or local voters and taxpayers and it certainly won't be parents-- it will be the donors. This is what privatized education looks like-- schools that depend on keeping wealthy patrons happy.

As for the "no federal education program"-- well, only if the program is completely unsupervised (which I suppose is not inconcievable). Somebody on the state or federal level has to check on the scholarship organizations-- the ones that collect donor money and hand out scholarships-- and certify them as legit or not. Since DeVos envisions these funds as usable for homeschooling or transportation or remedial coursework, someone is going to have to manage a list of approved vendors. And it would be nice if there were the occasional audit.

Education Freedom is about giving private schools the freedom to profit at taxpayer expense, no matter how religious or discriminatory they are. It's about the freedom of rich folks to get out of paying taxes and, as a sort of bonus, being the big hands on the levers of education policy. Meanwhile, the public system is starved of more and more resources.

This is where we are-- the US Department of Education making a concerted effort to undermine the public education system that they are theoretically charged with watching over. Wyoming--and all of us--would be better off without this.

I Shot An Arrow Into The Air

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
                -- "The Arrow and the Song" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rick Hess recently wrote an EdWeek post offering four insights about education policymaking, and as if often the case with Hess, I started to write a reply in the comments section and then it got too long and so here I am. Here's a quick recap of his four ideas--

This might end badly

Media has fostered a funhouse-mirror sense of policy. The journalistic (and internet) tendency to reduce everything to good guys and bad guys has obscured the degree to which many sides are occupied by decent people with honorable intent. Hess perhaps underestimates the degree to which politicians in this age have fed this beast with their scorched earth devotion to winning, no matter what the cost.

Policy is driven by the brokers and bridge-builders. Bomb throwers have their place, observes Hess, but they aren't the ones who Get Stuff Done. It's a fair observation-- Betsy DeVos's general ineffectiveness as a Secretary of Education could well be explained by notting that she is a bomb-thrower in a bridge-builder's job. On the other hand, her boss is the quintessential bomb-thrower, and it hasn't slowed him down much. And there's another huge caveat here-- where are you building those bridges? Because ab bridge between two differing ideas that are both wrong is not a helpful bridge.

Effective change-makers listen more than they talk. Hess's explanation, coming after a few decades of modern ed reform, is worth a full quote:

Academics and single-issue advocates love to show up with recommendation X or the results of study Y and tell policymakers and school system leaders what they really need to do. Frequently, these fervent declarations are unaccompanied by a familiarity with why things currently look like they do or what it would take to follow their advice. It turns out that leaping into complicated, long-running policy discussions is a lousy way to convince people who've spent months or years wrestling with these questions; it seems less helpful than presumptuous.

That's a quick an explanation of why most of modern ned reform has landed with a big, fat thud as you'll find anywhere.

Evidence rarely changes minds, but it still matters. It is true that humans in general are resistant to evidence contrary to what they already believe. But education policy discussions are notable for a really huge amount of bad, specious baloney evidence. Start with anything that equates "scores on a single narrow standardized test" with "student achievement" or "teacher effectiveness." One of the challenges of education is that it involves a whole lot of really important things that are nearly (or completely) impossible to measure. But some folks are so deeply hung up on a need for "data" to do anything that we now have a cottage industry in creating and measuring proxies that don't measure anything worth measuring, no matter how much you massage them or how much verbiage you bury them under.

Which brings me to the point that I find screaming out of all four of these other points.

You know who has the best evidence of how policy actually works out in the classroom? Teachers.

You know who is virtually never involved in policy discussions? Teachers.

This remains one of the most infuriating things about the modern ed reform movement. For the moment, never mind the disrespect implicit in the exclusion of teachers from policy discussions-- it's just an ineffective way to do policy. A bunch of policy experts gather around with a bunch of political policy makers, usually in a comfy lounge paid for by some corporate sponsor or other, and they start shooting arrows over the wall at the schoolhouse on the other side. Then thay have a spirited argument about where the arrow landed-- but they never talk to the people who actually work in that schoolhouse.

It's like engineers who decide to add a feature to the drive train in a car, but never talk to anybody who actually drives the car they remodeled. It's like medical professors who create a new procedure, but never talk to a doctor who has used that procedure.

This is the story of Common Core. A small group of amateurs get together and decided, without talking or listening to actual teachers, that national standards were needed. They cobbled some together without input from actual teachers, and then they got a really rich amateur to help them push it. From conception through implementation, the Common Core machine kept teachers out of the room (and no, getting union leaders to buy in later doesn't count). You know why so many teachers initially dismissed it as The Next Big Thing? Because every Next Big Thing comes with a dozen features that, in the first ten minutes, an actual teacher can look at and go, "Well, that came from someone who was never in a classroom."

But it is the lesson that reformsters have resolutely refused to learn. Every single epiphany about a flaw in the program has been something that teachers had already been screaming for years-- but nobody in these policy discussion was listening. Common Core? We'll just say teachers helped write it and they''ll never know the difference. High stakes testing? Ignore them-- they're just upset that our superior amateur intellects have figured out a way to catch them screwing up. Charter schools? This is a cool idea, only instead of having seasoned teachers run them, let's set them up so that the teachers don't have any say in what goes on. "Teacher"? If everyone's so hung up on that label, let's just come up with a way to give our trusted amateurs that label.

Again, I'm not ranting (this time) about the disrespect or devaluing of teaching. I'm ranting talking about an approach to policy-making that is geared for failure. I'm talking about policy discussions being held by all the folks huddled in the back seats, hunched over maps and compasses and when the actual driver of the vehicle starts hollering, "Hey, folks!" because she can see what's in the road ahead, they just shush her until the bus hits a tree or sails off a cliff and then, even then, they decide the flaw in their system was that they didn't hold the map correctly.

And no-- involving a few carefully vetted teacher voices doesn't count-- particularly if you have no intention of actually listening to them. And reformsters-- you have to police yourselves, because while some of you, I believe, are decent human beings interested in bettering the education world, some of you are money-grubbing parasites who want to keep teachers out of the room because teachers will kill their pitch and hurt their ROI.

Education policy discussions are filled with far too many people who have no idea where their arrows land or what they hit. It is one of the most Kafka-esque features of education policy. I pull a lever, and somewhere that I can't see, something happens. But I don't actually go and look, and I don't actually talk to someone who is an eyewitness to that end of the process. It makes no sense.

Media can make a funhouse mirror of policy discussions because so few of those discussions are informed by actual classroom teachers (and journalists mostly don't talk to them, either). Policy may be driven by bridge-builders, but without teacher voices, they'll build those bridges between two bombed-out bomb-thrower citadels. Effective change-makers may listen, but they'd do better if they were listening to teachers. And evidence does matter-- but most of the real evidence about education is collected daily by classroom teachers. Accept no substitutes.

Every thinky tank policy shop political office etc etc etc should have a bank of many, many teachers. Hell, I'd accept it if the bank included lots of retired teachers-- we aren't so busy any more. It would take a while to build this bank, because teacher trust has to be earned. Every panel discussion, every conference, that discusses policies that affect the inside of a classroom should include people who work inside a classroom (and not just ones that are vetted for friendliness). Who knows? It might actually save us more wasteful misguided education fiascos.

ICYMI: Sportsball Sunday Edition (2/2)

Human beings are funny creatures. Today we'll celebrate the prognostication of a giant rodent, invest a gazillion dollars in a sportsball contest, and get all excited because our date-labeling system will cough up a palindrome today (spoiler alert: every date-- every last one-- only comes around once). But in the meantime, there are things to read.

An Open Letter to Preschool Homework   

From McSweeney's, a look at homework for preschoolers with characteristic wit.

Four Things You Need To Know About Education Policymaking   

Rick Hess (AEI) at EdWeek offers four fairly solid observations about how the sausage is made, even if he does skip the one about how policy conversations should be informed by people who can talk about how that policy lands in the classroom.

Why Private Equity Keeps Wrecking Retail Chains 

This would have nothing at all to do with education, if private equity and hedge funds weren't so interested in getting into the charter school biz. But they are, so here's a cautionary tale.  

In Indiana, School Choice Means Segregation  

The Kappan looks at some research showing that Indiana school choice program, which has ended up looking a lot like a white flight program.

Schools Are Killing Curiosity  

From The Guardian, this is a depressing read. About the time a researcher watches a teacher tell a student, "No questions now-- it's time for learning" you know this is a sobering piece of work.

Journalist with education message white America might not want to hear  

Maureen Downey with a look at Nikole Hannah-Jones and the issues of integration.

Don't be fooled. Tax credits for private school are about dismantling public education .  

The education writer at the Lexington Herald-Leader, Linda Blackford, lays out the truth behind tax credit scholarship programs.

Not Burnout, But "Moral Injury" of Doctors  

This WBUR piece is about doctors, but teachers will recognize the issue-- the toll it takes when malpractice is mandated, rules are too restrictive, and resources are too scarce.

Two Decades of Havoc  

Education scholar Yong Zhao synthesizes criticism of PISA, the international assessment regularly used as proof that US schools are failing compared to Estonia, Singapore, etc.

Parent Resistance Thwarts Local Desegregation Efforts  

The AP (here picked up by WTOP) writes about one of the big obstacles to desegregation--  white folks who don't want to let Those People into "their" schools.

More Students Are Homeless Than Ever Before

Laura Camera at US News with some depressing data.

It's GPAs Not Standardized Tests That Predict College Success  

Nick Morrison at Forbes lays out the latest research that shows--again--that high school GPA is a better predictor of college success than the SAT or ACT.

Michigan schools revolt

Michigan has a third grade reading retention rule that is kicking in, and many schools are prepared to circumvent it by any means necessary.

Anti-LGBTQ: Follow the Anti-evolution Road

Adam Laats is a historian who knows about both education and conservative Christianity in the US. The struggle over LGBTQ students in private religious schools reminds him of another time the religious right stood up against the mainstream.

Charter School Funding: Time for lawmakers to fix a flawed system  

The editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette backs the governor on charter funding reform.

Education Reform Has Failed America  

Diane Ravitch hits the central points of her new book in a piece for Time magazine.

OH: More Voucher Nonsense

I've frequently kvetched that a central fallacy at the heart of school choice is the notion that several parallel school system can be run for the cost of one. "Why," I ask, "can't politicians have the cojones to just say they think school choice is so important that they are going to raise peoples' taxes to pay for it?"

Well, the legislature of Ohio (motto "We want to be Florida when we grow up") is coming really close.

You will recall that Ohio school districts are facing an explosion in costs as they enter the next phase of the privatization program. Phase One is familiar to most of us--you start out with vouchers and charters just for the poor families who have to "escape failing public schools." Phase Two is the part where you expand the program so that it covers everybody.

Well, Ohio screwed up its Phase Two. Basically, they expanded the parameters of their privatization so quickly that lots of people noticed. The number of eligible school districts skyrocketed, and that brought attention to a crazy little quirk in their system, as noted by this report from a Cleveland tv station:

We analyzed data from the eight Northeast Ohio school districts that paid more than $1 million in EdChoice vouchers to area private schools during the 2019-2020 school year as part of the program.

Those districts include Akron, Canton, Cleveland Heights-University Heights, Euclid, Garfield Heights, Lorain, Maple Heights, and Parma City Schools.

Out of the 6,319 students who received EdChoice vouchers, we found 4,013, or 63.5%, were never enrolled in the district left footing the bill for their vouchers.

Yep. That means that at the moment this kicks in, the district loses a buttload of money, while its costs are reduced by $0.00. This means that either the local school district cuts programs and services, or it raises taxes to replace the lost revenue, effectively calling on the taxpayers to help fund private school tuition for some students. I wonder how many legislators who helped engineer this are also opposed to plans from Democratic candidates to provide free college tuition at taxpayer expense?

The legislature has been running around frantically trying to-- well, not head this off so much as slow it down just enough to reduce the number of angry phone calls their staff has to take. Nobody seems to be saying "This is a mistake" so much as they'e saying "Doing this so fast that people really notice is a mistake." Someone cranked the heat on the frogs too fast. Meanwhile, this weekend was their last chance to get this fixed before next year's voucher enrollment opens, and they have decided to punt because everyone is getting cranky.

Is this at least going to help some poor folks? Well, the proposal is to up the cap to 300% of poverty level. That's $78,600 for a family of four. So there's that.

And Betsy DeVos has joined the fray, apparently invited by some pro-choice legislators to help out. Actually, behind the scenes legislative arm-twisting is the one part of her job she has experience with, so she may help. Meanwhile, reformsters argue that it's no big deal and it's the public school systems own fault for not keeping these voucher-users enticed to public school, though given the number of vouchers being used at Catholic and other religious schools, I'm not sure how, exactly, the public school was supposed to compete.

It's a big fat mess (here's the meat of the mess in four handy charts), but I want to underline again that part of it is that the Ohio legislature now wants taxpayers to help foot the bill for private school education, for some people, including those who were never ever in a public school to begin with.

Time has run out for a neat fix. Stay tuned to see what ugly mess they end up with. Meanwhile, Florida yesterday showed that they still know how to boil those frogs-- yesterday they expanded the reach of their voucher program while reducing state oversight of it.

FL: Another Voucher Problem (And Not The One You Think)

When the Orlando Sentinel revealed that many Florida private schools-- eighty-some of them!-- were both receiving taxpayer dollars and openly discriminating against LGBTQ students, it was not exactly news. Rebecca Klein had the same story on a national level at Huffington Post back in 2017. Voucher money goes to religious schools, and some religious schools discriminate against LGBTQ students (and teachers).

But sometimes a particular story hits at just the right moment and suddenly draws a huge reaction. That's apparently what happened this time, because the backlash against Florida's tax credit scholarship program has begun (tax credit scholarship programs, you may recall, are the programs that let wealthy donors fund their favorite private school in place of paying their taxes).

Two huge banks-- Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bank-- have indicated that they would no longer contribute to the Florida program (Step Up for Children) funding the vouchers.

We have reviewed this matter carefully and have decided to no longer support Step Up for Students. All of us at Wells Fargo highly value diversity and inclusion, and we oppose discrimination of any kind.

We have communicated with program officials that we will not be contributing again until more inclusive policies have been adopted by all participating schools to protect the sexual orientation of all our students.

This may seem like great news. I'm not so sure. Here's why.

First, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third are both based out of state-- Wells Fargo in San Francisco and Fifth Third in Cincinnati. So you've got major school funding coming from entities that are not particularly local.

Second, and more importantly, this is uncomfortable news about how exactly is in charge here. It's great that these patrons are flexing their funding muscles in a good cause, but what if they weren't? What if they were tying funding to demands that the schools be less inclusive?

This whole business is a reminder that tax credit scholarship programs put schools at the mercy of their wealthy patrons, and even if the private voucher-accepting school were locally owned and operated, now they face the prospect of having their purse strings held by some corporate mucky-mucks on the other side of the country.

And the business about how voucher programs "empower" parents and students because now they can exert market pressure by "voting with their feet" turns out to be high grade baloney, because the feet that matter most are the ones attached to the people who write the big checks. Folks running private schools who get their school into a program like this will rue the day. I imagine some in Florida are ruing it right now. The purse strings are held by folks who aren't accountable to parents, voters, taxpayers or anything but their own business interests, which may or may not align with education.

And lest we forget, this is the same program that Betsy DeVos wants to operate on a national scale as Education Freedom. It does not empower parents; it empowers rich folks who want to avoid taxes and who want to have a big fat say in how certain schools are run.

MI: Whitmer Stands Up For Reading Sense (GLEP Opposes)

Of all the pieces of bad, dumb, abusive policy that have come out of the ed reformster movement, one of the worst is third grade reading retention. Michigan has it, and their governor wants to get rid of it. Guess who wants to stand up for it.

Lansing in winter; much like April in Paris

How did this damn fool policy get spread across the country? Somebody half-looked at some  research and said, "Hey, there's a correlation between how well a student reads in third grade and their later success, so let's just flunk all third graders who don't pass the Big Standardized Reading Test." This is bad policy for oh so many reasons. Let me count the ways:

* It confuses correlation with causation. It's like saying "We notice that students who have larger than size 5 shoes at age 8 are taller by age 12, so let's hold everyone who has smaller shoe sizes in third grade until they get big enough. That way they'll be taller when they're age 12." No, actually, it's worse than that, because the low reading level and the lack of future success are probably both related to something else entirely and that something else is what schools should be addressing.

* It assumes that for some reason a bunch of eight year olds are slacking off and that what would really motivate them is a big-ass threat to say goodbye to all their friends and repeat third grade.

* Also, nothing really motivates a child like having to be repeatedly labeled a failure.

* Also, children have no real interest in reading, which has no intrinsic appeal, so we'd better come up with some exterior motivator.

* It assumes that for some reason teachers are slacking, so maybe if we threaten their students, they'll Teach Better.

* It leads to the kind of foolishness that we've seen (of course) in Florida, where third graders who are excellent readers, but who didn't comply with the testing regimen, were flunked.

* And finally-- and I cannot type this hard enough-- IT DOES NOT WORK!

* Seriously. The evidence just keeps piling up. And piling up. From state to state. Study after study. It is true, again, that students who struggle with reading in third grade continue to struggle with school, but there is not an iota of evidence that retaining them helps, and plenty that it does not-- even does harm.

Third grade reading retention has one effect that some folks like. If you start holding back third graders who can't pass a reading test (like Mississippi did) then you'll probably find that your fourth graders passing rate for a BS Test like NAEP will improve (like Mississippi's did).

Michigan is in the process of phasing reading retention in after passing a law to punish eight year olds implement the policy in 2016. But Michigan is also in the process of installing a governor who is not a giant tool, and she indicated way back in March of last year that she wanted to see that "destructive" law go away.

“That doesn’t fix the problem,” she said. “A child who can’t read isn’t going to get better because you told him he was bad. Parents aren’t going to get more engaged” in that scenario.

This made the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP) sad. GLEP is an advocacy/lobbying group set up by Betsy DeVos to push for charters, choice, A-F grades, etc-- all the things she loves. So it's not surprising that they oppose the non-reformy Gov. Whitmer, including by misrepresenting her proposal, indicating that she wants to "eliminate reading intervention" despite her call to triple the number of literacy coaches in the state.

Well, that flap was last March. Now it's back. Whitmer was expected to call for an initiative that would provide students and families with ways to circumvent the law as well as get additional assistance. The Bridge offers one insightful sentence about reactions:

Whitmer’s actions will likely be popular among education leaders, who in general oppose the law, but struck a sour note for one Michigan business leader and longtime proponent of K-12 reform.

Two things to note. Apparently The Bridge doesn't have any education leaders that it can call and ask for comment. Second, yes, educators will think this is a good idea, and amateurs who don't know what they're talking about will not. Speaking of which, GLEP has some thoughts, again, via Executive Director Beth DeShone:

Michigan’s 3rd grade reading law provides students with the resources and supports they need to read at grade level before they leave the 3rd grade, and the governor’s aggressive attempts to undermine the law will cost many the chance at a brighter future.

And so on, in a similar combative vein, heavy on rhetoric that stops just short of saying that Whitmer hates children, but which includes zero evidence that the third grade retention policy does any good (Whitmer, for her part, has frequently brought up things like "science" and "evidence.")

I've never fully understood why some reformsters love this policy so much. Because they sincerely don't comprehend why it's a b ad policy? Because of the fourth grade test results bump? Because it lets some folks make a lot of money off of testing and remediation? Because it creates another data point that can be used to argue that schools and teachers are big failing failures? Or because the reformsters are largely conservatives, and what passes for conservatives these days includes a lot of people who seem haunted that Some People are getting Good Stuff they don't deserve while escaping Bad Stuff they should have to suffer through (looking at you, Secretary DeVos), and somehow that idea extends all the way down to eight year olds?

I don't know. There are ed reform policies that I disagree with, but which I recognize can seem reasonable and right from a certain point of view, and while I think they're wrong, I don't think you have to be evil or stupid to support them. Third grade retention is not one of those policies. It's absolutely indefensible. Governor Whitmer is absolutely right to focus on helping children learn to read instead of punishing eight year olds for failing a BS Reading Test. That's what makes sense-- do as much as you can to help, which includes not hammering an eight year old with threats and punishment. Throw all your resources into helping them, and zero into punishing them. That doesn't seem so hard to grasp, GLEP.

McKinsey's New Baloney Sales Pitch For Computerized Classroom

McKinsey is the 800 pound gorilla of consulting, a behemoth with their own set of values about how to drag everything into MarketWorld (I recommend Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All for a closer look at how that world looks). They have occasionally dipped their toes into the world of education because, hey, there's a lot of money in that pool. One notable adventure was their plan for re-structuring the Boston school system, which was mostly about cutting all manner of expenses, like, you know, food for the students. They also like to make the occasional bad argument for heavy duty data analytics.

Of course, the Hot New market in education is computerizing the classroom. It's got everything-- more opportunities to sell both hardware and software as well as cutting back the money spent on those classroom meat widgets with their expensive teaching degrees. The main thrust of the computerized classroom has been Personalized [sic] Learning (powered by super-duper AI), but Jill Barshay at Hechinger Report captures in one neat, understated paragraph why that is not living up to entrepreneurial expectations:

For much of the previous decade, advocates of education technology imagined a classroom where computer algorithms would differentiate instruction for each student, delivering just the right lessons at the right time, like a personal tutor. The evidence that students learn better this way has not been strong and, instead, we’re reading reports that technology use at school sometimes hurts student achievement.

God bless Barshay for writing "computer algorithm" instead of Artificial Intelligence.

But you see the problem-- it's going to be hard to market this stuff if it doesn't really work. What's a corporate entity to do? Can a multinational consulting firm offer some advice?

Well, the answer's simple. Change the sales pitch.

And so here comes a new McKinsey report, "How artificial intelligence will impact K-12 teachers." Yes, the computerized classroom isn't about using algorithms to throw learning at students any more-- now, it will be about computers saving teachers time and trouble so that they can have more time to teach the young humans.

We'll dig in to this in a moment, but first, keep in mind that these kinds of things always want to masquerade as a prediction of the future when they are actually a sales pitch. Any time some ed tech concern tells you, "this is what we see in the future," just imagine a used car salesman oozily intoning, "Yes, I can see you sailing down the road in this little beauty."

McKinsey has several points to make in this seven-page sales pitch. It's brief, but I've read it so that you don't have to. Let's break it down.

McKinsey Totally Feels Your Teacher Pain

The opening line of the pitch is aimed right at your teacher heart:

The teaching profession is under siege.

This will not be followed by an observation that teachers are besieged by things like multinational corporate advisors searching for better ROI. We will, in fact, spend no time on why, exactly, this siegification of the profession is happening. We just want to characterize its form in ways that might set up the later part of the pitch.

Teacher work hours are increasing, with more student needs and "administrative and paperwork burdens. In fact, McKinsey and Microsoft (folks who have always shown a deep concern for  teachers) did some research and decided that teachers are working 50 hour weeks. If you're not paying attention, you might assume they mean US teachers, but in fact the 50 number is an average for the US, Canada, the UK, and Singapore. So there's that.

Here's A Quick Composition Lesson (A Digression)

This is going to be a bit of a digression, but I think it's worth it to see how this technique works, because this is certainly not the only place you'll find it. There's a trick that writers (and artists and film directors and others) use called juxtaposition. By setting a few unrelated items right next to each other, we can suggest a connection without having to explain it, support it, or prove it. Watch what the writers of this pitch do with three simple sentences:

While most teachers report enjoying their work, they do not report enjoying the late nights marking papers, preparing lesson plans, or filling out endless paperwork. Burnout and high attrition rates are testaments to the very real pressures on teachers. In the neediest schools in the United States, for example, teacher turnover tops 16 percent per annum.

What do these three thoughts have to do with each other? Not nearly as much as the writers want you to think. Look at what happens if we separate them.

While most teachers report enjoying their work, they do not report enjoying the late nights marking papers, preparing lesson plans, or filling out endless paperwork. 

Burnout and high attrition rates are testaments to the very real pressures on teachers. 

In the neediest schools in the United States, for example, teacher turnover tops 16 percent per annum.

Try the prediction test. If you saw just one of those sentences--any one--just by itself, hat would you predict the next sentence might be about? We could be talking about the clerical drudgery of teaching, the many issues related to the loss of teachers, or the turnover problems of schools in high poverty communities. Three different topics. But string the three sentences together and suddenly suggesting that if teachers had fewer papers to grade, high-poverty schools would hold onto more of their staff.  And I know I said I'd digress, but not long enough to rebut that silly notion.

So, back to it.

The Broad Strokes

The intro lays out the basic bones of the pitch. After reassuring us that teachers are not going away any time soon--

...our research suggests that, rather than replacing teachers, existing and emerging technologies will help them do their jobs better and more efficiently.

Our current research suggests that 20 to 40 percent of current teacher hours are spent on activities that could be automated using existing technology. 

There are some rumbly things lurking here, like observing that more advanced tech could push the 20-40% number higher "and result in changes to classroom structure and learning modalities, but are unlikely to displace teachers in the foreseeable future," which is kind of weak reassurance. Also, there's this--

One of the Sure Signs of Edu-Baloney  

They support the value of a good education by citing Raj Chetty and his baloney about a good teacher boosting a student's lifetime earnings. This is always a bad sign.

Now for the Nitty Gritty

Here's a charter breaking down the 50 hours that teachers in four completely different countries average in a week.

Preparation 10.5
Evaluation and feedback 6.5
Professional development 3.0
Administration (and "other") 5.0

Student instruction and engagement  16.5
Student behavioral, SEL development 3.5
Student coaching and advisement  4.5

I broke those into two groups because the authors only count the last three as time in direct interaction with students, and they point out that it adds up to 49%-- less than half. They are pretty sure this is a big deal. I've worked for a few boards and administrators who were pretty sure that if a teacher wasn't in front of students, then the time was being wasted, so this 49% hits a raw nerve for me. It's like pointing out that a baseball player only spends a small percentage of his swing actually hitting the ball, so maybe we could cut out the extra effort. Or a theater group spends weeks running through a show, but only does all that singing and dancing in front of an audience for a small percentage of the total nights, so why not cut that fat when they're prancing around the theater in front of empty seats?

If you don't understand the connection between the first set of tasks and the second, then I'm not sure you have anything to tell me about teaching.

Ed Tech Is Here To Help! Deja Vu Ahead.

After they broke down the 50 hours, the researchers evaluated some existing tech and talked to experts and decided which areas could be handed over to automation.

Half, or almost half, of the time for preparation, evaluation and feedback, and administrivia could be automated. Two of the instructional hours could go, and a half an hour of PD could be handled. Now, in keeping with the pitch, the authors call this "reallocatable time" and not, say, "how much of the job could be handed to a computer."

So how is that even supposed to work? Well, the report doesn't get too specific, but it's specific enough to be recognizable. They start with preparation as an example-- software companies will be happy to offer assessment packages that are tied to assignments to meet the ass--oh, hell, they're just pitching mini-algorithm selected personalized instruction here. Let the HAL 3000 write your lesson plans, save five hours.

They note that computers don't seem like a good choice for the human-on-human parts of teaching, and cite PISA scores (sigh) to show that globally students who use screens in the classroom are doing worse than those that don't. They call this a "disconnect" rather than a "failure of concept," and they have an explanation for it. Brace yourself. Here it comes.

Our hypothesis is that implementing technology in the classroom at scale is hard.

Mind blown. Specifically, it's the "integrating effective software" and "training teachers how to adapt to it" part that is hard. So they don't think that "technology in the classroom is not going to save much direct instructional time." And this is important-- it's not going to save time, but they still plan on doing it. The teacher will need to be in the classroom, "but their role will shift from instructor to facilitator and coach."  So, exactly like every other personalized [sic] learning pitch.

Greetings. I'm your new class facilitator.

Computers, they believe, can totally help with evaluation and assessment. Always been great for multiple choice tests (too bad multiple choice tests aren't great for assessment). The writers also serve up the old baloney about computers can handle long-form essay answers (spoiler alert- they can't). And they even claim that writing software can look at trends across many essays and provide targeted feedback, which is probably true if you think that Grammarly and the squiggly red lines in Word are good guides to good writing (fun fact-- Grammarly's Premium service sells you the use of a human proofreader).

And finally, computers can help with administrivia, which, sure, if the software's any good. The report does not say how the computer is saving teachers a half hour on professional development. I'm betting that does not take into account the hours that will be spent on training teachers to use the software.

What Will We Do With All That Time?  

McKinsey has some ideas. None of them include "get laid off as administrators gleefully conclude they can get more done with fewer staff people." There's "improving education through more personalized learning" plus SEL stuff and other teachery things that teachers in their survey said they didn't have enough time for. They could collaborate with each other, or develop those teacher-student relationships that research says are important but somehow that's not what we're arguing should be the centerpiece of the new education vision.

And if you're playing Buzzword Bingo, the writers there will be more time for social-emotional learning and "the development of the 21st-century skills that will be necessary to thrive in an increasingly automated workplace." \

How Do We Do It?

Well, we can use the tech that exists, so that's a relief. But it is "no small task."  It will require commitment "across a broad range of stakeholders," all the way down to the students who have to decide they want more of their education managed by computers.

The report offers four "imperatives" that have to be in place to properly bring on a happily computerized learning for students time savings for teachers.

Target investment: The schools that have had some success with this "have often been able to access more funding." Or to put it another way, this whole set-up is really expensive. So pump in the money and spend smart.

Start with easy solutions: If you do a good job handling administrivia or "simple evaluative tools for formative testing" then that will whet teachers' appetite for "more holistic solutions." In other words, if the stuff works, people are more inclined to welcome it than when it doesn't work.

Share what is working: This isn't going to happen, not because teachers don't like to share, but because every single one of these "solutions" comes from a company with a marketing department. The report calls for "neutral arbiters," but there is no such animal. Teachers and administrators will be on their own to sort through the swamp of marketing claims, many of which will be designed to appeal to the administrator who buys the software and not the teachers who will use it (or not).

Building the capacity of teachers and school leaders to blah blah blah look, this just means win a bunch of hearts and minds and train a bunch of people not only to be able to use the stuff, but to want to use it. It will involve a lot of noise about using things with fidelity and getting tech fully integrated so that everyone can be on the same page. It involves the same kind of PR we're looking at now, designed to convince teachers that whatever is being pitched is inevitable; it's how the future absolutely will be, so just smile and relax. All will be assimilated. It's easier if you don't fight it.

You will notice that not one of the four imperatives is "talk to actual teachers and find out what the hell they would find useful."

So That's The New Skins For the Old Wine

Absolutely nothing in the substance of this pitch has changed. Nothing. Computerize as much as you can, including selection and delivery of instruction, which will be "personalized" by an algorithm that may or may not be any good. Teachers can stick around to be "coaches." It's the same Personalized [sic] Learning business for the computerized classroom that we've been hearing for a while.

All that's changed here is the packaging. Now instead of claiming that this will educate the young humans super well, it's a advance that will aid teachers by freeing up their time to coach and facilitate and data enter and learn how to use software and, in plenty of cases, look for a new job. It still puts a computer at the center of the classroom, and it still delivers a sub-standard education-flavored product.