How Do We Measure Your Turf?

In which I ponder the various ways in which private money plays in the public sphere, how much we should care about them, and why.

Preface/Warning

This post is probably going to be long and only sort of related to education. It has an audience of roughly two people-- a guy who periodically kicks at my ass on Twitter, and me. He's unlikely to be moved by anything I have to say, and I'm indulging myself by trying to write through what I've found an increasingly interesting issue, emerging as it has in the election cycle. So this might actually have an audience of zero. But one of the functions

What Money Wants, And When Is It Astroturf

Mike Bloomberg managed to lower the bar by offering $2,500 to anyone who wants to get on social media and plug his candidacy. This is a pretty basic level of astroturf, though it lacks the "movement" aspect that you'd get if all those cheap influencers formed "Trolls for Bloomberg." But does it matter? Does it matter that the Russians are now, apparently, intending to back both Trump and Sanders? Does it matter who gets money from Walton, Gates, Broad, Powell Jobs, CZI, or the NEA? Are there left-tilted dark pits spewing out money just as promiscuously as those on the right?

I'd say there are three important distinctions here,.

First, how does the money connect to the fundees. That connection can happen several different ways, but they boil down to two basic approaches-- either the money goes searching for the cause, or the cause goes searching for money.

Folks often imagine that when money goes looking, it hires people to change their mind ("If I give you this stack of money, will you take the position I want you to?"), but that strikes me as less common. That business is crafting and promoting a policy argument is sort of the business thinky tanks. But it's more efficient and effective to find people who already agree with you. In this approach, funders might look for pre-existing groups to back, or they might build the advocacy organization of their dreams from the ground up. And of course, it's most effective to bankroll a candidate for an office who already agrees with you.

When the cause goes looking for backers, they already know what they want to do-- they just need to find someone to help them fund it.

These two approaches aren't mutually exclusive-- David Coleman decided he wanted to find a backer for his Common Core initiative, and once he convinced Bill Gates, Gates proceeded to muster up all the support that money can buy.

People are distrustful of the first approach because it seems less "sincere," and I'm sure I've been guilty of that prejudice myself. One wonders who is really driving the bus-- the advocates or the money source. And that's a hard issue to parse because the funder doesn't necessarily have to make its requirements explicit-- wave enough money around and the recipients will be inclined to try to make the funder happy without being told exactly what to do.

But it is also true that these larger funders are doing what people do-- using money to support the causes that they care about and believe in. The simplest version of this question when we're talking organizations and not candidates is, "Who founded the group, and did they do it before or after the funding appeared?"

Second, there's the question of how many funders. Does the big pile of money come from a whole bunch of people, or just one guy?

This effects how people view the who-drives-the-bus question. If the source of funding is just one very rich guy, then what he wants matters, and what he wants is pretty well focused. We are watching how this matters in political appearances-- Sanders takes nothing but small donations giving him the appearance of responding to a many-voiced crowd, while Bloomberg answers only to himself.  When a million people contribute to one candidate, that suggests a broad grassroots campaign, which we think of as a Good Thing because that means the candidate is responding to the crowd, the public, a broad base, while the candidate who is funded by just a few people is, we fear, ignoring the crowd and just listening to a few rich guys.

That brings us back to the question of motive. Are these few rich guys trying to sway policy to make another buck? Are they trying to dodge taxes? Are they trying to make themselves look benevolent and good while still preserving their power and privilege (Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas is all about that idea)? And if it's dark money, how do we even know what the heck the funders are up to?

In the education debates, there's another option at play. Where the will of the public (or a portion of the public) is not clear, there will always be a push to shape that public opinion, both by influencing opinion and by controlling the narrative about where public opinion is headed. The argument about who is funded how and by whom becomes part of this argument about the narrative. Does Group X really represent a large chunk of public opinion, or has it been artificially inflated to look bigger than it really is?

Third, the size of the pile of money involved. This is where it gets tricky, I think. Because before we even get to the matter of money, we have to recognize that some folks are privileged with louder voices than others of us, and some folks need a little amplification just to reach the point where their voices are just as big and loud as other folks' are on any regular day. If you are someone whose voice is routinely dismissed and ignored, do you pass up the chance to get some amplification for it? Probably not. If you are the gay mayor of a small town with a shot at getting a rich-guy boost to get on the national stage that other Presidential aspirants have lived on for years, do you take that rich-guy boost? You probably do.

In the imaginary perfect free market of ideas, every idea gets tossed out there by folks who believe it, and those that sound good, resonate with the audience, smell like good sense-- they attract attention and repetition and serial adoption. This is standard procedure in education; ideas like six traits writing, long before someone thinks to monetize them, get passed around and shared and spread because teachers find they like them.

The more money being spent to push an idea out there, the further from an organic free market of ideas you will appear to be. The hugely expensive attempt to buy support for Common Core was just one more sign that there's something wrong with the standards. The fact that Gates, with his mountain of money, had trouble getting traction, while critics of the Core were making widespread headway for free-- that tells us something about the actual grassroots support for the Core.

So if you're one really rich guy who spent a ton of money to start a group whose whole purpose would be to advocate for your favorite policy idea, that's going to be seen as astroturf.

What's so wrong about that?

If five people sit down to talk, and one has a bullhorn, the give-and-take of their conversation is distorted. If Mike Bloomberg hires several thousand people to say nice things about him, we don't know how deep his support really goes. At this point, many of our national discussions are so distorted that it's no longer possible to make out much of what is really going on

In education reform, a ton of money has been used to amplify the voices of privileged amateurs. If David Coleman  had walked in off the street and into a school district office, announcing, "I'm not actually qualified to do this, but I have some educational standards that I think you should use," that would have been the end of it. If Bill Gates were no richer than an average science teachers, we'd have never heard of the Common Core.

And this was happening in the education space, a space where too many voices were already being ignored or silenced.

But both sides--

One of the standard arguments for reformy infusion of big bucks has been, "We have to fight back against the Evil Unions, who are buying and selling school board members and local officials and the entire Democratic party." or "We need our side's billionaires because the liberal Democrats have George Soros and...:" Actually, Soros seems to be the only big scary Democrat billionaire being cited. But the idea that the Resistance is as heavily and darkly funded as modern ed reform is repeatedly thrown up as a means of dismissing pro-public ed folks. You are not a real public ed supporter until you've been accused of being a union shill.

Here's an example of the both sides argument from Chris Stewart, arguing that "big union" money and money bundled by super-groups like Democracy Alliance is just as problematic as money from Walton and Gates and other "philanthropists progressives love to hate," a phrase that made me realize that I'm not aware of which philanthropists progressives actually love. I spent some time looking at a blown-up version of his diagrams, discovering that there are groups out there that I've never heard of, and groups that are being counted on the wrong side (most notably, the Center for American Progress doesn't remotely qualify as a group that opposes education reform in all its various forms).

There are differences here of type and magnitude. Stewart highlights the Progressive Fellows as writers who are pro-public school and funded by billionaires and/or unions. But I am a Progressive Fellow and the name may sound fancy, but a year's worth of my Progressive money would cover a couple of house payments. The Network for Public Education's funding is laid out here by Mercedes Schneider, and it does come from a union source and some lefty organizations, but in the world of education policy, it is peanuts-- under $700k start-up money compared to the $13 million plus used to launch Education Post. As another measure, I'd stack up the number of people who make a living advocating for education reform compared to the number who make a living advocating for public education. On the public ed side you might count union officials; I can't think of anyone else who's making enough money from advocacy to make a living at it.

Stewart doesn't like that a reporter frames a difference as "teachers working through their unions on behalf of their profession isn’t the same things as the outsized role wealthy pro-charter people play in education policy." But I agree with her. There's zero question that union leadership often becomes disconnected from membership (see: support for Common Core and endorsement of Hillary Clinton). But the money the union spends is not spent on the whim or desire of a single rich guy.

The union is not a monolith, nor is it focused strictly on ed reform. But if we look at their political giving, it peaked at $32 million in 2016 and was last year back down to $12 million, which is still a ton of money. But compare that to the $1 billion that the Waltons have pledged to spend on charters over the next five years, and that's not counting the money they're pumping into advocacy groups. And that's just the Waltons-- the Gates Foundation also drops billions of dollars into ed reform projects, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative is looking to spend a billion a year, Eli Broad spent $100 million to give his amateur superintendent factory an Ivy League sheen, Powell Jobs has spent modest millions on ed reform, and those are just the marquee names in the ed reform biz, before we even get to the millions being spent just on elections. There simply isn't anybody spending that kind of money on the public ed side of the issues-- not the unions, not Schott (with $5 million spent), not NEPC.

Is there a whole lot of money, including union money, floating around in the left-o-sphere. Sure. As I type this, we're watching the next phase of big democrat dollars trying to get things organized so that they can push Sanders out of the lead spot (having already tried to snuff the Warren campaign by cutting off its media oxygen) and elevate a money-friendly candidate. But to the extent that big-money lefties have shown any interest in education policy at all, it has been to side with reformsters, not with public ed.

So, no. I don't think the both sides do it argument holds water for the education debates. Education reform has been fueled by huge amounts of money. And yes that makes a difference, often in very practical ways. I have joked that there must be some kind of law that says every article about ed policy must include a quote from Mike Petrilli, but it's really very simple-- Petrilli is always available to reporters because that's his whole job, while public school advocates are busy doing other things for a living and are not available when a reporter needs a quote to finish off this piece for deadline in a few hours. Advocates also have the time to build relationships, make contacts. Advocates have the financial slack to write pieces for publication far and wide without worrying about any kind of pay for them. Money gives that kind of power.

But can money be dirty?

I wrote for Ed Week for a while; Nancy Flanagan and Anthony Cody did so for years. Although Ed Week is propped up with some of that filthy Gates money, none of us have stories to tell about being pushed in a particular direction. Chalkbeat is also supposedly rife with such money, but Matt Barnum and others do some good, fair reporting. Even the 74 can feature some decent journalism on its hard news side, even as its advocacy side peddles baloney. I don't believe that taking money from That Side automatically turns you into a compromised instrument of evil.

I'm not nearly as interested in the dirt as I am in the strings. But I was part of a crowd hollering for NEA and AFT leadership to stop taking money from Gates, and I'd do it again. When the money is big enough, the rich don't have to explicitly attach strings; the recipients will do that themselves,

So what is the point on calling out astroturf?

The main point, of course, is to dismiss and discredit the viewpoint being presented. That's lazy and sloppy, and I'm going to be more careful about my own writing in that respect. Stewart quotes Neal McClusky (CATO) making a valuable point-- arguing about the funding trail of a group shouldn't distract us from talking about whatever point or argument is being made.

But if the point being made is "We are a group of individuals who have come together and risen up organically and we represent the views of millions of people," then the funding trail becomes germane, especially if the funding trail reveals that it's really a small group with a big funder. This is often the whole point of an astro-turfed, push-poll informed, tested-message fueled group-- to create the idea that there is a groundswell of a support for a particular view, an opinion that Real Democrats or Real Black Folks or Real parents really have, and therefor smart politicians should get in front of this particular wave, when in fact there is no wave at al.

Beyond that, noting a funding source can be useful in figuring out what the group really supports, or doesn't. If it's Walton funded, I know it's not going to be union-friendly. Many groups and organizations hide their intent behind a lot of smoke and mirrors; following the money to discover who is funding the enterprise is one way to cut through the smoke and get a sense of what's really going on.

And yet, this has to be balanced or one runs the risk of falling off the deep end (and it is fair to ay that both sides have deep ends to fall off into) and start seeing tangled depths conspiracy that aren't really there.

It's worth remembering that media operations need money to function above a certain level. Sure, I operate, as do most of the bloggers on the public ed side, on a budget of $0.00. If I were to travel to do research and interviews, I'd be spending my own money. If I were to start licensing stock photos instead of scrounging, that would cost money. If I wanted to hire another person to report or just proofread and edit my stuff, that would be another expense. I'd have to come up with some source for the money. Legitimate news outlets are struggling, advocacy groups are struggling, everybody who isn't rich is struggling. So when someone goes shopping for funding to help push out their message, I can't pretend I don't get that, even if I think their message is wrong. But it's impossible not to wonder whether they are legit or just a well-financed sock puppet. Time usually tells (remember Jeb Bush's Learn More Go Further four twitter teachers who advocated for Common Core and then abruptly fell silent). Patience is probably more useful than vitriol.

Are you done yet?

Mostly. It's a hard balance. On the one hand, the constant injection of money into debates about education distorts the conversation and gives some points of view weight they don't deserve. If all the money funding all the Common Core advocacy groups had vanished in 2010, the Core wouldn't have survived ten minutes.

But on the other hand, there are all sorts of people who don't have access to a platform and whose voices are routinely ignored and dismissed. Is it wrong for them to grab some support when they get the chance to elevate their voices? It's unfortunate that sincere voices with a platform are at least for a while hard to distinguish from opportunists grabbing a ride on the gravy train. I think Chris Stewart is far better paid than I will ever be, but I also believe that he believes every single word he says.

But on the other hand, if you assume that the only possible explanation for my advocacy is that somebody is paying me to make my point, that tells me more about you than it does about me.

But on the other hand, if you are deploying your own vast wealth to steer the national discussion about education (or anything else) in the direction you would prefer and if you are, in fact, trying to use the noise your money makes to drown out the sound of democracy, then you are one of the big problems facing this country, and you should knock it off.

So for me, I can't ignore where the funding comes from, but I need to remember that the money trail is not the final word. It's just a piece of information that opens up some bigger answers.

MO: Arresting Librarians

If you haven't already, read this piece from Nancy Bailey that makes two points with crystal clarity and detailed support:

* school librarians are an essential part of teaching reading in school (scientifically or otherwise)

* school librarian jobs are being shed in many major cities at an alarming and distressing thoroughness.

School librarians are essential, and they are a popular target for the budgetary ax. For charters and private schools, they're an easy extra to leave out, and for public schools, they have become a popular corner to cut. Seriously, read that piece, because I have to show you something else working against librarians.

Those winter nights can get cold in Missouri

It's not just things like the law in Florida (motto: "If you want an education for your kids, that's not our problem") that allows parents to challenge any books or materials in a school. At last, a means to stop the school from assigning that smutty Romeo and Juliet. Or anything that the school librarian has  stocked on whatever shelves she has left.

Well, if that seems bad, meet Missouri's own House Bill 2044. It's a bill for funding libraries, but it has a little addition that wats to be called "Personal Oversight of Public Libraries Act." POOPLA will set up an elected censorship board to make sure minors don't have access to any smutty books (I'm paraphrasing here.) POOPLA (I'll warn you right now-- I'm never going to get tired of calling this bill POOPLA) will hold public hearings at which, presumably, members of the public will come to read out the dirty parts of books they want to see banned. POOPLA contains some penalties as well-- big, fat ones:

Any public library personnel who willfully neglects or refuses to perform any duty imposed on a public library under this section, or who willfully violates any provision of this section, is guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars or by imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed one year.

That's right. Under POOPLA, let a fifteen year old take out Lady Chatterly's Lover, go to the county hoosegow for a year, and/or a $500 fine.

POOPLA appears to be aimed at public libraries only, though if your school and town are like mine, the public library is an important student resource.

Some of the criteria for POOPLA censorship is pretty straightforward, as in "nudity, sexuality, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse." But some of it is pretty vague and problematic, targeting works lacking "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Can't wait to hear about a POOPLA board hearing about the political value of a work.

Unsurprisingly, some folks in the librarian world are not big POOPLA fans.

If you've been following Freaking Out Over Library Activities news, you may have guessed why this is coming up now, but bill sponsor Ben Baker laid it out in an interview-- it's those damn drag queen story time events. Also, liberals are hypocrites. And he gets death threats from all over, which is unquestionably a major overreaction to the bill and generally a bad way to conduct yourself as a human being.

Baker says that most of criticism comes from people who haven't read the bill. I've read the bill (you can, too-- it's not long), and I still think it's a terrible idea. Here's hoping the Missouri legislature has enough sense not to make a law out of it.

Free Market Winners and Losers

One of the foundational arguments of modern ed reform is that free market forces would make education work better, that having to compete would make public and private schools work harder, smarter, better and create a rising tide of educational awesomeness that would lift all boats.

This is unlikely for a variety of reasons, but the biggest problem with the free market when it comes to public education is that by its very competitive nature, it picks winners and losers. And that's actually a couple of problems.

First, it picks winners and losers among the providers. A study by the Network for Public Education has found a staggering amount of federal money spent on charters that fail, or even pre-fail by collapsing before they even open. For free market fans, that's a feature, not a bug. In their conception of the education market, schools come and go as those that sink to the bottom are pushed out of business, to be replaced by potentially superior new competitors.  Some are sincere in this deep belief in the markets, and some are simply opportunists; when a reformster complains about the "closed system" or "education monopoly," what they mean is not a system that denies students choice, but a system that denies entrepreneurs the a chance to get in there and hustle for a piece of that mountain of sweet, sweet tax dollars.

The problem with the model of churning and burning our way to excellence is not just that the constant churn, the repeated tossing of students out to the curb with a hearty "Good luck finding your next school" is disruptive and destabilizing for students. That's bad, but then there's the whole "fail" thing. Because when a widget business fails, that just means it can't sell enough widgets to cover costs, or its widgets are low quality, or another widget business has better marketing materials.

But there are no widgets in schools. The way a school fails is by failing to serve students well. Reformsters know this--it's at the heart of their argument that students must be rescued from failing schools. And yet after "rescuing" these students, the next free market solution is to send the students to other schools, some of which we fully expect to fail some of those students. You can't have a failing school without stealing student educations. This is like arguing that this building over here has faulty fire extinguishers, so we've got to get the students out of the burning building-- but then we're going to put them in these other buildings, some of which have no fire extinguishers at all, and we're going to sort out which are which by setting fire to all of them. This is not an improvement.

Worse, reformsters often argue to prolong the failure. In Pennsylvania, we continue to support cyber-schooling even though we have ample data that cybers are failing all but a small group of students.

It's unquestionably bad practice and immoral to look at a school that is failing and do nothing to fix it. But how much worse is it to set up a system that deliberately posits that some of these schools must fail. The market is good at picking winners and losers, and that's fine for widget companies, but in schools it can only mean that some students will be literally set up to fail. When the market picks winners and losers among education providers, it is also setting up students to be losers as well.

But then, that's part of te issue anyway. Because the free market doesn't just pick winners and losers among businesses; it picks winners and losers among customers as well.

Customers do not get all the possible choices. They get the choices that businesses believe they can--or that they choose to--offer.

I live in an area that has taken many steps toward becoming another US retail desert. Sears, JC Penneys, Bon Ton, K-Mart have all pulled out of the area-- for general shopping, we've got Wal-Mart and Dollar General. There might be a new retailer moving into the old K-Mart, but most of our major employers have downsized or moved out, and our population is not Montana thin, but not particularly dense, either (abut 50K in the county). In other words, if you're looking to launch a retail business, particularly one with more upscale offerings, you are probably not looking at us.

Nobody operates a business out of a noble desire to make sure that people get to have a particular range of choices-- and charter schools are businesses. And the charter and voucher world is peppered with schools that are happy to be free of government regulation precisely because that means they don't have to offer choices to certain customers. "We don't have to make expensive adaptations for  students with that  particular special need? Super! We don't have to accept Those People if we don't want to? Awesome!"

The free market always chooses winners and losers from among the customer base. That has always been the point of some government intervention. If the free market were in charge of mail delivery, some parts of the country would never get any mail at all, and LGBTQ customers would have far fewer choices than everyone else. In some parts of the country, the free market didn't want to offer black folks any choices at all. In all cases, the government was instrumental in forcing the free market to rethink its ideas about who should be a loser.

But, free marketeers will argue, those gaps in the market will attract clever entrepreneurs who will find clever ways to make a buck serving underserved populations. Nope. Some populations are just too poor. The free market doesn't necessarily have anything against poor people--they just don't have very much money. That's why the free market reformsters do like the idea of having the customers pay the bill with taxpayer money; otherwise school choice would be really unprofitable.

The loosely/un-regulated education market likes picking losers. The big insight from the widespread use of vouchers in private religious schools that openly discriminate is not just tax dollars paying for discrimination, but the clear sign that the free market education will pick winners and losers, and customers will get the choices that vendors want to offer them. If you're an LGBTQ student, there are few-to-none choices available for you. Schools choose.

The free market, because it picks winners and losers, will never be an engine of equity. Free market reformsters like to talk about how poor folks should have the same kinds of choices that are available to rich folks, but a free market system will never, ever, ever make that happen. In a free market, rich folks will always have more choices than everyone else, and maybe that's not a bad thing (we can argus that another day), but the bottom line is that no free market choice system is going to leapfrog poor folks past rich folks, because rich folks can always pull out the checkbook and say, "I'll have some of that, too, with a little extra on the side." The free market does not say, "Yes, we could sell you that, but it would be inequitable, so we won't." And free market educational choice system will have inequity hard-wired into its core.

Because that's what a free market does. It sorts. Rich folks, you get these choices over here. Poor folks, you get these choices over here. And by basing the "buying power" of families on the money spent at their community school, reformsters keep that rich-poor inequity intact. In a free market education choice system, poor folks will get their choice of whatever edu-business operators feel like offering them.

ICYMI: Making Up My Mind Edition (3/1)

I've held onto the privilege of not having to make up my mind about the Dem race, but more and more I find myself gravitating to Elizabeth Warren. Not perfect, but none of them are. I like her combination of policy, plan and temperament. And the whole smartness thing. Anyway. I figured you were just dying to know. Here's some reading from the week.

The Myths of Learning Styles  

From the Atlantic, a reminder that learning styles are bunk.

Budget Turmoil at Philly's Second Largest Charter School   

One more example of how charters manage to go off the rails, and avoid transparency while they're doing it.

Who's Behind America's Superintendents and School Transformation

Nancy Bailey takes a look at what's going on when the nation's school administrators get together. It is not encouraging.

We Need To Change the Law on Cyber Charter Schools

At PennLive, an op-ed arguing for PA's cyber charter policy makeover.

Michael Bloomberg's Disastrous Public Education Legacy

Plenty of New Yorkers have stepped forward to talk about what a disaster Mayor Bloomberg was. Leonie Haimson takes a particularly thorough look at how he trashed public education.

Democrats Are Asking the Wrong Questions To Protect Charter School Students

Adam Laats in the Washington Post providing another useful history lesson about clever education ideas.

Public oversight of Michigan charter school inadequate, report says

A Michigan-based research group has  issued a "scathing" report showing that Michigan's charters are seriously unmoored from necessary oversight and accountability.

Kids Don't Need To Stay 'On Track' To Succeed  

Madeline Levine in the Atlantic reminding us that success is not a straight line from A to B.

A Primer on Voucher Misinformation  

A look at the talking points for voucher fans in Ohio (and elsewhere), with a calm clear explanation of why these points don't hold water.

Public Education: A Love Story    

Finally, Nancy Flanagan with a personal reflection for Public Schools Week. Your must-read of the week.

What Ever Happened To AltSchool?

You remember AltSchool, the miraculous Silicon Valley technoschool that was going to Change the Game. We've checked in on them from time to time, and it's time to see what has happened since the Altschool ship ran aground on the shores of reality a while ago.

After two years of tinkering and tweaking, AltSchool burst on the scene with a flurry of PR in 2015. Founded by Max Ventilla, formerly of Google, and Bharat Mediratta, also a Googlite, it was going to bring technology and personalization to new heights. Like a wired-up free school, it would let students and teachers just sort of amble through the forest of education. Teachers would capture moments of demonstrated learning on video, students would do work on modules on computer, and it would all be crunched in a back room full of IT whizzes who would churn out personalized learning stuff for the students. The school set up some branch schools, lab schools, hither and yon. All the big names wanted to invest-- Zuckerberg, Powell Jobs, etc.

But by 2017, it began to look as if Ventilla was not so much educating children as using them as lab rats for market research. Rather than expand the chain of schools, Ventilla proposed to scale them back and to focus energies elsewhere. Here was how Bloomberg reported it:

In Silicon Valley fashion, Ventilla broke the news to parents with a touch of misplaced enthusiasm. He wrote an email to families in Palo Alto, California, saying the school there would close at the end of the year due to business “challenges and opportunities,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by Bloomberg. Ventilla said AltSchool will only run classrooms near the main offices in San Francisco and New York. “We know this is tough news that will have a big impact on your family,” Ventilla said. But the moves are needed, he wrote, given AltSchool’s “strategy, path to growth and finances.”

In other words, AltSchool was not so much a school, as a business venture. Did I mention that Ventilla has no actual background in education?

By 2019, things were looking bleak even for the business. In place of those glowing profiles from 2015, AltSchool now appeared in profiles like the July 2019 Fortune article, "How an Education Startup Wasted Almost $200 Million."

But even as things were circling the drain for Altschool, it was adapting and changing and becoming Altitude Learning. Because nobody in the ed tech universe ever just gives up and goes home.

The announcement noted that the "lab schools" would continue, though at this point "lab school" strikes me as a rather on-the-nose name for a school set up to beta test software. Then there's this--

As R&D focus ends, tech co-founders pass torch to education industry veterans: Ben Kornell and Devin Vodicka

First, I'm sure the parents who paid a big pile of money to send their kids to Altschool may have thoughts about having their children's education called "R&D focus." Second, if my notable achievements included burning through a couple hundred million dollars, I'd be careful about using torch metaphors.

The lab schools were handed over to Higher Ground Education, a company dedicated to "mainstreaming and modernizing Montessori education." It seems like standard technohubris to look at Maria Montessori's work and think, "Yeah, I can improve this." This outfit was founded in 2016. They've brought on Michael Strong, "educational entrepreneur" to handle high school development-- The Academy of Thought And Industry. Really. Their leadership team involves a lot of jobs that make my head hurt, like Director of Compliance, Director of School Success, Talent Specialist, Director of Community-- a "diverse team of educators and entrepreneurs." The "educator" portion of that is not awesome, and of course TFA is represented (and speaking of ouchy job titles, a former Head of Real Estate for KIPP LA), but at least at the coaching and project managing level you find people with actual Montessori training. From their website, it's not clear how that takeover of the lab schools stands.

But we do know a little about the Altitude Learning portion of the new venture.

About the two guys who ended up in charge. Devin Vodicka was the Chief Impact Officer for Altschool--well, sort of. He held that job from May of 2017 till the end, so only after the wheels were starting to come off, so maybe he was brought on to run this spin off business from the start. He was an administrator in Carlsbad Unified School District for ten years; his linkedIn account shows no hint of what he was doing before gaining a principalship in March of 2002. His BA is in History, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992. In 2012 he moved on to Superintendent of Vista USD, won awards, visited the White House. Rick Hess talked to him in February of 2019, and he said the five-year-out vision was "to be in hundreds of schools."

Ben Kornell is the President/CEO, and he's one more TFA education expert. He graduated from Harvard in 2002 with an AB in History and Literature, taught for one year in the Bahamas, then joined TFA. He did put in two years in the classroom after his two year TFA commitment was up. Then a couple of years managing dialysis centers in Denver, then four years with Envision Learning Partners, a reformy consulting charter-managing group, where his job was to help them expand their market; then to Altschool in 2017 as VP of Growth, where he "launched Altschool's partner program to spread our platform and practices."

Altitude uses the term "learner-centered" a lot, breaking it down into items like "foster learner agency" and "personalize learner pathways." In this Education Dive "sponsored content" that Facebook insists on showing me daily, Vodicka gives a clearer picture of what they're up to. I have two major takeaways. First, there's this quote:

As the world continues to evolve and change, our education system must adapt and improve as well. I believe that measuring learning is a key lever for systemic change and that we are long overdue to make meaningful shifts in this critical area of need.

There's more like this, both in the article and on the website. These guys speak fluent corporate baloney, the kind of argle bargle that is meant to obscure meaning rather than clarifying it. Maybe they know how to speak plain, useful English to classroom teachers, but I have found no evidence that they're inclined to. This is the language of c-suiters looking to make a sale to other c-suiters.

Now is the time to think about new and better models of assessment. Competency-based learning is the foundation of a learner-centered approach to assessment.

Yup. Once you cut past the smoke, what you find is another pitch for competency-based learning.

Well, I've been down that road a few times, and like its close sibling Personalized [sic] Learning, it's mostly a way of approaching education that just happens to also be an approach that can be simply and profitably computerized. Like Personalized [sic] Learning, it doesn't have to be awful-- but the folks who are intent on monetizing it and selling it at scale are, once again, educational amateurs with an eye on the bottom line, and so what they keep coming up with is awful. Here's a tip-- if someone approaches your school with one of these programs, ask this question-- "Can we implement your program without a single computer in the building?"

Even without a computer, CBE has pitfalls. It's easy in a CBE system to reduce learning to training and rich curriculum to a checklist of rote tasks. But when you take those issues and add the notion that an algorithm will design the checklist on the fly and measure student competency on the screen, it just gets worse.

So that's what has happened to Altschool. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and reformy reformsters gotta pitch their new entrepreneurial education product. And Ventilla, the self-described "serial entrepreneur and product manager with deep experience in finance"? According to his LinkedIn account, he is "enjoying the time between AltSchool and my next project." Mediratta moved on to a job as Chief Technology Officer at Dropbox.

Ventilla says something else about AltSchool on his LinkedIn page. Under AltSchool, the top bullet point is "conceived of a new model of how to open and operate 21st century schools delivering highly personalized education without resorting to screen learning." Nothing there about the process of reducing that lofty goal to a simple "set up a software and consulting firm" or "execute one of the great demonstrations of technohubris in the education space." Who knows what the next chapter will bring.

How Do High Expectations Change A Classroom

Teachers know that expectations matter. They know that having high expectations in a classroom can both support (“I know you can do this”) and spur (“I’m not going to accept your bare minimum effort”) students. The power of teacher expectations is part of every college’s Teacher 101.

But modern education reform has weaponized the term. “The soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by Michael Gerson for use by Bush II, was a powerful phrase that combined a couple of ugly ideas. It suggested that it wasn’t poverty or underfunded crumbling school buildings or a lack of resources that was the major factor in the struggles of some students; it was their teachers’ failure to believe in them (and that was probably because those teachers were at least a little racist). Then under Obama’s ed secretary Arne Duncan, teachers found themselves subject to the hard tyranny of ridiculous expectations. Duncan believed that expectations were magical, going so far as to suggest that all students with special needs really required was to have teachers who expected them to achieve, and their special challenges just wouldn’t matter. 

This has led to some spectacularly bad policy. In a 2014 conference call, Duncan and then-ed head of Tennessee Kevin Huffman explained that all students with special needs required was more expectations and more tests. Two years later Duncan found himself being roasted in a budget hearing because he could not answer a question about what the department was doing to support students with dyslexia (and he knew that “expect harder and test more” was not a good answer). We’ve seen a rash of states with third grade retention rules—third graders who don’t pass a standardized reading test are forced to repeat third grade, on the theory that setting this high expectation will force eight-year-olds and their teachers to stop slacking off. 

Add to that mix the repeated assertion by Duncan and others that schools are systematically lying to students and parents in order to hide their lazy use of lower standards and rigorless expectations. 

For much of the last twenty years, “expectations” have been a cudgel for clobbering teachers, one more reason to let all the rest of society off the hook because it’s the teachers who are failing the students. 

So when the Fordham Institute rolls out a piece of research looking at the E word in the classroom, teachers are not inclined to greet it with joy. Particularly when the write-up begins with the notion that teacher evaluation of students can’t be trusted:

Unfortunately, “grade inflation” is pervasive in U.S. high schools, as evidenced by rising GPAs even as SAT scores and other measures of academic performance have held stable or fallen. The result is that a “good” grade is no longer a clear marker of knowledge and skills.

The study by Seth Gershenson, associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University, makes a pretty basic assertion as its main conclusion—teachers who grade harder end up with students who learn more. There are some other findings as well, including the suggestion that teachers raise standards as they gain years in the classroom.

These are not particularly shocking findings, though the study itself raises some questions. The study was of 8th and 9th grade algebra classes, and it made the too-common use of standardized test scores as proxies for learning. It also gives a great deal of credence to the notion that students are highly motivated by grades. As blogger and retired teacher Nancy Flanagan puts it:

Extrapolating that into a declaration that tougher grading would lead to higher achievement is giving way too much credence to a cranky-pants theory, the one where a kick in the pants is what kids these days really need.

In his writing and in Twitter conversations, Gershenson has expressed awareness of some of the nuances and questions involved in connecting grading to motivation to greater learning. In particular, the dynamic he writes about raises a chicken-and-egg problem—do students get better grades because more has been expected of them, or do teachers have higher expectations of students who demonstrate greater achievement? 

The ed reform view of expectations has always been overly simplistic (and limited—Arne Duncan said we should expect more of students to get them ready for college, but he never said that colleges can make all under-prepared students successful just by expecting more from them). The reform idea is that expectations are like the volume knob on your sound system; just crank the knob higher, and you get more volume/achievement.

Teachers know that classroom expectations are a much trickier balancing act. Expect too little, and you don’t unlock the student’s full potential. Expect too much, and the student simply gives up and becomes even harder to teach. On top of that, choosing how to communicate those expectations also requires careful judgment; sometimes the student needs hand held, and sometimes the students needs a tough-love push. Ed reforms, like those tied to high stakes testing, have always focused on threats and pants-kicking.

Expectations don’t exist in a vacuum. “I expect you to build a beautiful house, and here are all the very best tools and materials you’ll need” is much different from, “I expect you to build a beautiful house, but all we’ve got here is a hammer, a stick and a ball of string.” Blaming teachers for “soft bigotry of low expectations” doesn’t really let society and politicians off the hook for not properly supporting students and the public schools most of them attend.

Meanwhile, teachers practice the fine art of calibrating expectations with some apparent success. For all the concern about grade inflation, research continues to show that the best predictor of college success is not a big standardized test, but high school GPA.

Originally posted at Forbes.com  

6 Things To Know About The Trump-DeVos Education Freedom Plan

As expected, Trump used a chunk of his State of the Union Address to plug a voucher-style program that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been pushing for months under the name “Education Freedom.” The Houston Chronicle reports that Ted Cruz pitched the plan to Trump; Cruz has taken the lead on trying to turn DeVos’s dream into actual legislation. In fact, the Trump budget proposal favors this approach over charter schools.

Say what now?

If you haven’t been following DeVos’s school choice initiative, or if you could use a quick explainer for a friend, here are a few basic takeaways to help follow what the fuss is about.

How Does It Work?

It’s a tax credit scholarship plan, and many states already have one.(Pennsylvania is one of those states. An unsuccessful attempt to expand the program was referenced by Trump in his speech.) Here’s how they work. Corporations or individuals can contribute to the plan instead of paying their taxes. They hand their money to a scholarship organization, which in turn issues scholarships to students. The money can be used to pay for transportation, remedial programs, homeschooling materials, or, most commonly, private school tuition. 

Isn’t This Another Kind Of Voucher? 

Yes, but “voucher” hasn’t worked out well politically for anyone, so Secretary DeVos would be happy if we all called it something else. But this is a voucher; just one that’s managed by a private organization instead of the government.

Who Really Pays For It?

Advocates for the program are fond of saying that it doesn’t spend any taxpayer dollars. This is technically correct; since the donors hand their money to a scholarship organization instead of the government, it never becomes “government money.” 

However, since it is money that’s paid instead of taxes, it leaves a hole in the government’s revenue. DeVos wants a $5 billion program, which means that the government would collect up to $5 billion less in taxes. That means that taxpayers will either get less service from their government, or their taxes will be raised to cover the shortfall (conceivably, at the federal level, the government could just add it to the deficit). 

So while the program doesn’t spend any taxpayer money, it does come with a cost to taxpayers.

Who Benefits From This? 

People who want to direct their tax dollars to support private schools, and the private schools themselves. And in states that have voucher programs, those private schools turn out overwhelmingly to be religious private schools. Tax credit scholarships are a particularly good way to get around that whole “don’t give public tax dollars to private religious schools” issue (though the Supreme Court ruling on Espinoza v. Montana could wipe that issue away). As for education quality, the results of voucher program studies are at best mixed for academics. A just-released study from Harvard adds to the body of research suggesting that school choice programs make the already-bad problem of school segregation even worse. In short, it’s not clear that students themselves would get a big benefit from this, despite DeVosian protestations to the contrary.

Who Is Empowered By It? 

The program is touted as a big chance to offer the same choices to poor families that rich families get, a chance to escape terrible schools. DeVos is fond of saying that it would empower families. But current situations in Florida and Ohio show that it’s not that simple. 

Ohio has a slightly different sort of program called EdChoice. A recent investigation discovered that two thirds of the voucher students from several major cities had never attended public school in the first place; in other words, they were not using vouchers to “escape” anything. They just provide a little financial boost to families that were already sending their kids to private school.

Under this kind of program, private schools remain private, retaining all of their prerogatives. In Florida, investigation has shown that some of the schools receiving voucher money discriminate against and will not admit LGBTQ students. Just because your family has access to a scholarship does not mean that the school has to accept you. No voucher empowers a family to overrule a private school’s admissions office, which is generally free to accept or reject students for reasons of its own. 

Furthermore, the discrimination is being threatened not by parents, legislators, or taxpayers, but by donors. If power rests with the pursestrings, then the power in a tax credit scholarship program rests with the patrons of the system; taxpayers, elected officials, and the families are taken out of the loop.

What About The Red Tape?

DeVos likes to argue that this will not be another government program, and that no new administrative red tape will be required.

But scholarship granting organizations have to be vetted and approved, and providers of other voucher-eligible services must be certified as allowed (or not). Someone has to process and oversee those applications and maintain those lists, as well. It is possible that the scholarship organizations could be given the task of auditing family spending, or that oversight could fall to the government, but it seems necessary; in 2018, Arizona found that parents had spent $700,000 of voucher money on banned items and services, including clothing and cosmetics.

The alternative to red tape to manage the program would be a $5 billion program with no accountability, inviting all manner of fraud and mismanagement. 

Meanwhile, neither the House nor Senate included a cent for the program in the 2020 budget, suggesting that legislator support for the DeVos plan is limited. Whether or not a Trumpian cheer and budget proposal for it will change that in 2021 remains to be seen.

Originally posted at Forbes.com