NWEA Offers More Testing Baloney

When a system doesn't work, you have a couple of choices-- you can address the problems that are causing failure, or you can insist that the original system is super-duper and start imposing new rules to try to work around the flaws in your original system. Like the latch that doesn't work properly, but instead of fixing the latch, you just teach everybody to lift and push the door to the side to get it to open.

The problem is particularly acute when your entire business is based on a failed model.

Absolutely not looking at latest MAP test

So here we are with another great piece of "research and thought leadership" from NWEA, the folks who bring you the delightful MAP test. You may be a state where the MAP is attached to your Big Standardized Testing machinery, or you might be like my old district where the MAP is used as a pre-test/practice as part of the test prep programming. Education thought leaders like the tests because they come in a fully packaged online latchkey operation. Log on the kids, let them take the "adaptive" test, watch the software spit out some numbers and charts which look really cool, even if gthey don't contain much actually useful information.

But I have to give credit to NSWEA for one thing-- they seem to grasp the most fundamental problem with these tests-- students have to actually give a rat's rear end about the test:

The best assessments are only effective and reliable if students are engaged and trying their best. But we know that’s not always the case.

That's the first paragraph in "What happens when test takers disengage?" and it may be the last thing that the article gets right.

Erin Ryan is the author; she's a senior content writer at NWEA who was previously a writer for Priorities USA, Upworthy, and Hallmark Cards. After graduating from University of Wisconsin with a degree in  Journalism and Mass Communications, followed by an MS in educational leadership, she did put in one year as a teacher in Duval County Schools.

Ryan points ouit that sometimes, students zip through a test, just marking answers without reading the questions. She says this is called "rapid guessing," though for many years my students called it "playing some ACDC." This leads to "unreliable results," though I think "meaningless bullshit" is perhaps more descriptive. She warns that these results don't tell you the full picture of the student capabilities and "maybe even land them in programs for interventions they do not need" and so, you shouldn't use these kinds of tests to make those judgements, and should probably scrap them in favor of testing instruments that actually yield useful results.

Ha. Just kidding. We're going to consider everything except the possibility that the very design of MAP testing-- multiple choice on a computer screen about dull and random reading mini-excerpts-- make it a test that actively disengages students and therefor a poor choice for any school trying to collect useful data.

The techno-delivery of the test, Ryan argues, makes it easy to catch the disengaged students and do something about it. Except that in this respect, she's going to offer some terrible advice. She also makes the claim that research into test taking behavior, "working hand in hand with technology," makes it possible to keep students more focused on a test. Also nope.

NWEA has been claiming that it can read students' minds for years, using pause time on questions to gaze into the student's soul. For a while now, MAP administrators have received litle notices on the home screen that tattle on "disengaged" students (just in case teachers couldn't notice a studentn ripping through twenty questions in two minutes, or failed to use their power of "looking" to see students who are bored and disengaged).

But NWEA has moved beyond that. They previously introduced Slow Down Sloth, a cartoon sloth that would pop up and encourage a student to slow down. It's a nice consolation  to those of us who feel sad that young folks will never get to meet Microsoft's Clippy. Now NWEA has auto-pause, which penalizes a racing student by freezing their test. This strikes me as an intriguing way to train students in how to figuyre out just how quickly the software will let them zip through the test.

But key is proctor intervention, and here's where we vreally run into trouble. Ryan drags NWEA researcher Steven Wise into this. Speaking about proctors:

“They think they are not allowed to intervene,” Steve says. “But that’s exactly what we want them to do. If a student is disengaged, you should do something about it.”

Here's the thing. They think they are not allowed to intervene because in many states, such intervention is absolutely against the rules. Pennsylvania teachers have to comply with a whole set of "test administration ethics" that are absolutely clear that a proctor cannot interact with students beyond reading the instructions script. Yes, if you're just using NWEA testing as a test prep tool, those rules don't technically apply, but why do test prep under different conditions than the "real" test? So this kind of advice...?

Maybe a student is struggling with a test because they’re not feeling well, are anxious, or are having trouble understanding the questions. Whatever the reason, when a proctor and student can talk when disengagement has occurred, instead of after, there’s an opportunity to save a testing event that might otherwise go to waste.

Nope. That sort of thing is absolutely verbotten, in part because, in its own way, it can invalidate a test almost as badly as playing ACDC.

Bottom line? NWEA has a product problem; the MAP is test is intrinsically disengaging, and is often used in settings (such as my old school) where it has no connection to the actual course and has less-than-zero stakes for students. It's multiple choice, which makes it easy for software to score, but a lousy measure of any complexity or depth of student understanding. Those are also the least engaging type of question, requiring no student response beyond "just pick a letter." The end result is a test that provides very little information. In the years that I gave the test, I never once found a student result that surprised me by telling me something I didn't already know (my personal number crunching also told me that it was a lousy predictor of Big Standardized Test performance).

NWEA's response to all these problems is not to go back to drawing board or question the foundational assumptions behind their product. Instead it's to offer these little help articles and webinars in order to get customers to plug the holes in their product. It's like an auto manufacturer saying, "We've screwed up the engineering of the airbags in these cars, and we'd like to give you some instructions about how to sit kind of side-saddly in the front seat so that the airbags kind of work."

Sending teachers instructions on how to tweak a faulty product so that it's marginally less faulty is not the solution here. NWEA needs to do better.

Civics and History in the Classroom

The teaching of US history has always been... well, not a hot topic, exactly, but always one that is simmering on a back burner. From the occasional reaction to one brand of civic illiteracy or another (no, that's not an actual power of the President) to the eternal complaint that schools are teaching students to hate America, the civic conversation is always drawn back to the question of how the US story is taught.

Right now, Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) is rolling out a new book featuring a gaggle of conservative folks opining on the subject. That, unfortunately, has given the NY Post the chance to run the "Public schools are teaching our children to hate America" line again. But there are also more thoughtful takes like this hefty one from Eliot Cohen, who also contributed to Petrilli's book.

The blurb from Petrilli's book suggests that after A Nation At Risk, conservative's great ideas like school choice and rigorous standards were on the rise, but then, disaster-- "Today, these gains are in retreat, ceding ground to progressive nostrums that do little to boost the skills and knowledge of young people."

Well, no. For one thing, the "rigorous" Common Core standards weren't particularly rigorous at all. And for another-- well, Petrilli himself hits this point in an amazing quote he gave to the Post:

“Today we talk as if it’s all about college and career readiness,” education scholar Michael J. Petrilli told The Post. “But going back to the 1780s, the argument in favor of having public education at all has been first and foremost to develop democratic citizens.”

Well, yes. "College and career readiness," the current polite euphemism for the much-unloved-especially-by-lots-of-conservatives Common Core Standards, have come to dominate education and have led to things like reducing history and civics to make room for more test prep intensive reading and math studies, and they do so because guys like Mike Petrilli and his thinky tank have burned massive piles of money and exerted mountains of influence trying to make it so. And if that's not enough, there's this one, from the same article:

“We just don’t teach our young kids anything,” Petrilli said. “Teaching ‘reading comprehension’ with no content is as boring as it sounds, and as ineffective as it sounds.”

The Post writer explicitly lays the blame for all this on Common Core, but he never does get around to noticing whether or not Petrilli was one of the leading cheerleaders for Team Core.

Meanwhile, with the new book, Petrilli et al are pushing the idea that education is about character, job preparation and learning civic pride. Cohen makes a similar point in a much less book-blurby manner. This has been jump-started, perhaps, by the 1619 Project, which has made a lot of conservative white folks sad by centering slavery and black folks in the retelling of the story of the US. But before that it was Howard Zinn etc. A lot of folks (not all of them white) think schools should inculcate pride and patriotism.

I was one course shy of being a history minor. I taught the US literature sequence for most of my career, which means lots of US history as well. There are some real challenges in teaching history, and I'm not sure these guys recognize any of them. Let me walk you through my list.

The Level of Interest

Near the very end of his article, Cohen writes, "There is no more natural subject of fascination than history, particularly the history of one’s own country, and particularly if that country is the United States."

Nope. What my students told me, frequently unasked, year after year, decade after decade, was that no class was a bigger waste of their time than history. As someone who had to teach history to them and provide a context for everything we read, I fought against that attitude my entire career. "It happened before I was born, so who cares," is a widespread attitude (and one that many people never grow out of).

This, as I told them every year, is nuts. Human beings are hardwired to do history. My example to them-- You went to a party Friday night and while you were there Chris and Pat had this huge fight and maybe broke up. So how does everyone spend the next week, starting roughly fifteen seconds after they leave the party? They talk to each other and try to decide what the fight was about and how exactly it happened and what exactly they said to each other and if they really broke up and what this will mean to everyone who knows them going forward and what things can be most or least blamed for the fight happening in the first place-- plus, depending on whether you're friends with Chris or Pat and what parts of their relationship you've seen with your own eyes and whose second-hand versions you've heard, you may have different answers to all these questions and the debates over those answers may rage away for the rest of the year, resulting in multiple versions of what "really" happened (and can any such thing really be knowable, anyway)?

And that, boys and girls, is doing history. And human beings absolutely can't not do that.

Writing and reading about history was an integral part of my class (my honors students were required to do a paper about local history from primary sources). Did I convert anyone? I wouldn't want to bet my farm on it. The best I could do was try to sell the notion that things that had happened in the past were, in a way, still happening to all of us now, so maybe we should care about understanding a bit better. But there is a big obstacle to creating interest in history--

Ignorance

It's a Catch-22-- warehousing facts is the most boring part of history, but you can't have an intelligent discussion if you don't know that World War I is not the one with Hitler or that the Confederacy did, in fact, secede over slavery. Americans are so historically illiterate it is sometimes staggering. And what we don't know isn't as bad as the stuff we're sure we know that just isn't true, like the Civil War settled the problem of slavery, so we don't have to think about that stuff any more.

Our Stories Are Complicated, Just Like Humans

The nation's story is filled with tensions between contradictory ideas and impulses. It's not just the classic obvious "all men are created equal but we're going to own slaves, too" stuff. The Puritans believed that the trappings of earthly success were bad, but they also believed success was proof that you were among God's chosen. Their faith was backward and repressive, but it made them tough enough to survive unimaginable hardship. They came here to establish religious freedom, except not really because they executed people who believed differently. And that's just one tiny slice.

But as a culture, we aren't keen on human complexity these days. The urge to cast everyone as either 100% hero or villain is amuck, and so counter to actual humanity that it can never be satisfied. Cohen notes the need to populate patriotism with heroes and bemoans the tendency of modern historians to focus on the feet of clay. But even that framing misses the point. People are not all one thing or another with perhaps a foot or an eye or a spleen that is something else. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, and we're only just beginning to really grasp how vile his treatment of one such slave was. Thomas Jefferson was a sneaky, underhanded, manipulative politician. Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the most brilliant, enduring political documents in the history of the world. All of these things can be true at once.

Humans are a mess, and what they look like depends on where you stand. Everyone is a villain in someone else's story, and a hero in some other person's. For important historical figures, this is magnified a thousand-fold. Cohen and Petrilli both acknowledge as much by nodding toward Hamilton, a work (both the biography and the show) that captures that messiness. Sort of. Because the show invites us to avoid any judgment because we just like the guy so much. And "how likable was this guy" may not be the best historical question.

The Audience

What these conservatives would really like to do is tell the stories, acknowledge the flaws, and find the country inspirational and patriotism-worthy anyway. We did some awful things to some folks, but we kept trying to get better and we're still admirable. Which makes more sense if you are not talking to the actual family members of the people we did awful things to. But in most classrooms, we are in fact addressing those folks, and I don't know a good way to say, for instance, "Yeah, we bought and sold your ancestors as slaves, and then stripped them of freedom with Jim Crow laws, but that's not as important as the progress we've made." Particularly when that framing suggests that you black students are not really part of the "we" that is this country.

It's a tough sell to get folks all patrioted up for a "we" they were never part of, that they were in fact excluded from. There's something to be said for the idea that the country set out some ideals that it has had a hard time living up to, but the story is of a country that has tried to do a better job of living up to those ideals.

And if you're going to try to sell American exceptionalism, the idea that this has always been a city on a hill and just better because it just is--well, that's a tough sell in the face of a lot of misbehavior. And it's a super-tough sell to tell someone, "You are so blessed to have had ancestors who had the chance to be oppressed here in this city on a hill."

So the answers...?

As I cycled through the various isms of US history, I always told my students the same thing-- "I'm not here to tell you these folks or right and I'm not here to tell you they're wrong. I just want you to understand how they saw the world and how they thought humans were supposed to live in it. I want you to see why someone might look at the world this way." And I stayed as true to that as I could for thirty-some years (and when I couldn't I said, "Look, I have my own definite ideas about this, but that's how I think about it.")

In the last few years, this was more of a challenge. Students were more comfortable being outwardly prejudiced, more confident about a fact-free point of view. My commitment to letting them find their own way, to making them feel safe to be who they were in my classroom more frequently came up against my desire to say, "Do you hear the stupid baloney coming out of your mouth?"

Like many teachers, I feel the urge to laugh whenever someone talks about how schools indoctrinate students. Please. I can't get that kid in fifth period to stop smacking the kid in front of him on the head. By the time they got to me in high school, their beliefs about big things like country were already shaped. The best I could ever do was get them to look at other ways of looking, to imagine what other beliefs are possible and, sometimes, to plug in some actual historical perspective in place of unexamined empty containers of other people's ideas.

But teach them to love the US? Heck if I know how to do that. I suppose simply repeating, over and over, that Team USA is the Best might make a dent. But I'm not sure that it's a teacher's job to make students love something. They can make it possible to love something, because the best way to fall in love with something is to know it. Propaganda is about arranging it so that people only know certain parts, and that makes them more inclined to tilt one way or the other. But if we're going to lay out a complete picture, we have to let go of a particular desired outcome. What I told students for decades was, in essence, that I wanted them to understand the thing I was showing them, but how they felt about it was going to be up to them.

If you believe the USA is truly a lovable country, deserving of patriotic devotion, then that has to be enough. Lay it all out and leave students to make up their own minds. If you are arguing that the presentation must emphasize this or highlight that, your desire to have the presentation tilted betrays your lack of belief in the ability of this country to inspire the emotions you are hoping for.

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.