The Complexity of Performance Tasks

It's spring musical season here in NW PA, and I am back in a small way playing in the pit orchestra for a production of Seussical being put as a co-op between my old school and a neighboring high school. This is an annual enterprise I was part of for years. I've been doing school and community theater in a variety of capacities for almost forty years now, and it's still pretty exciting.

There really isn't a much purer version of a performance task than performing arts work. But they're also as reminder of how complex performance tasks really are.

First, there's the actual preparation for the task. Whether we're talking music or theater, there's a wide range that a teacher/director can land on. On one end of the scale, we get very specific preparation for this very specific task. On the other end of the scale, preparing for this task while also noting the larger ideas and principles behind whatever you're doing. For example, you can teach a young actor how to play this one character, or you can teach her about the acting that can be used in this one particular application. You can teach your band how to play "Nobles of the Mystic Shrine" or "Take The A Train," or you can use those pieces to teach them about the stylistic features of playing marches or swing.

It's a challenging choice because sometimes, given the limits of time and aptitude you're working with, you may get a better final product by providing less actual education. You can see this in the world of performance competition, where you will find, for instances, band musicians who can deliver a dynamite precision performance of this year's show-- and nothing else.

But then we get to the performance itself.

A stage musical involves a gazillion moving parts, and every one of those parts effects the other parts.  Folks like to talk about all the magic and mystery of theater, but for magic to happen, a lot of basic nuts-and-bolts mechanics have to be taken care of first. We have to move two set pieces and six actors through this tiny space in two seconds-- how exactly are we going to do that? Where do each of the twenty actors on stage need to stand for this picture to work for the audience? How do we get all the lighting effects we need with just six circuits and ten lighting instruments? Should you pick up the prop with your left hand or right hand? Where is the best place to take a breath on that song, and should you lift your arm ten bars in or wait another six? How do you make that movement now that you're wearing a costume with a giant hat? An awful lot of rehearsal time is spent on things that are neither magical nor fraught with feelings.

And all of these things are interdependent, like a ten million piece game of pick-up sticks. One actor's new line reading changes another actor's reaction. Adjust one thing, and ten others need to be re-adjusted. And that includes adjustments that have to be made on the fly in performance. There are a million relationships, a million strings tied to each other; pull on one, and a thousand others move. And they all need to be as flexible and loose as string, because otherwise when adjustments are needed, things just break instead.

You make choices of necessity and new features present themselves. Like many high school productions, we occasionally switched genders of characters to accommodate the available acting pool. Sometimes that gets really interesting; there's a different vibe to Beauty and the Beast when Belle has a crazy inventor mother instead of a father. And sometimes the available student talent is, well, still developing. Your job as director is to find a way to make that student look good out there (there is a special corner of hell for directors who send their young performers out on stage to embarrass themselves).

Then you toss in the audience, and everything changes yet again. This is particularly tricky with comedies, because after six-to-eight weeks of rehearsal, your cast has forgotten that the show is funny. Holding just the right amount for audience response is yet another factor, and almost impossible to prepare for because every audience is different (and that in part due to the mix of individuals in it).

On any given night, all the factors can line up in unexpected ways. A few years back, our high school production was the Addams Family, and during performance a series of performer choices and reactions combined with a really warm audience to absolutely stop the show. You couldn't make it happen on purpose if you tried, and I've only seen it happen twice in all these years. It was just a perfect pure moment, but only in that moment could it be created. All the priming and preparation and skill and tech and etc etc etc make it possible, but nothing could make it certain.

Year after year I watch these beautiful complex performances unfold and a part of my teacher brain asks, how could you possibly grade the individual students in their performance task? There are so many factors involved, and so many of them are outside of the student's control. Yes, I can point to certain performers and say, "She's really solid" or "He's absolutely awesome." But matching the right performer to the right role is crucial--and it's the director's job. Someone who does a great job as the Cat in the Hat might make a terrible Horton.

So I could sort the students into accomplished, developing, and just getting started, but I wouldn't be confident that I was absolutely right. I could just grade that particular performance, which is more in line with a performance task assessment, but again-- there are a uber-gazillion factors. How would I even start to create a rubric or score guide?

There are a couple of options, and they're problematic.

I could pretend that each of the factors can be assessed in isolation, as if they are unconnected to te rest of the performer or the circumstances and people surrounding her performance. But that's incomplete at best and distorting at worst; after I break performing into all these items, how do I weight them. Should "accurately repeats lines in script" carry the same weight as "moves fluidly on stage" or "conveys emotions convincingly." And how do I even assess things like "conveys emotions convincingly"? And what do I do with a list of 600 different "skills"?

I could simply reduce the assessment to a few measures and throw out the rest, focusing strictly on things that can be objectively measured. Her performance was flat and lifeless, but she said all the lines just as they appear in the script, and she hit her blocking marks and moves with integrity, so she gets a 4 or a proficient (or whatever we're pretending isn't another name for an A).

I am assured by some folks who would know that there are professional psychometric test folks who ably deal with these issues. But my experience at the classroom level is that such instruments are not making to the local school level.

These aren't just problematic because they provide an incomplete or even inaccurate measure of a complex task; they become problematic because they then drive the task itself. If these shows were all about the grade, actors would be tempted to go through the process with the rubric in hand, focusing on what "counts" and ignoring what doesn't. And because a performance task assessment is inclined to cut out the complex and subjective measures, that rubric ends up pushing a shallow and mediocre version of the task. As I pointed out to my own students over the years, when discussing the performance task of writing, you can make zero mistakes and still produce mediocre work.

Of course, real performance tasks are assessed by audiences in the moment. Last night we opened; the audience laughed, applauded, sat in moved silence, and at the end of the night, as casts do, our actors presented themselves for a public assessment which the audience delivered loudly and enthusiastically (which, like most authentic assessment, does not lend itself well to comparing this performance to other performances of other shows in other places).

The cast was excited and proud, and as always, there has been plenty of personal growth. It's one of the ironies of high school theater-- students learn a lot about themselves by pretending to be someone else. I don't know how you put that on a rubric, either.

Schneider's Indispensable Guide To Research

I call her the indispensable Mercedes Schneider. When I entered the blogosphere, hers was one of the first names I learned, because I kept coming back to her blog to get the information that wasn't anywhere else. I have (I hear) a reputation for cranking out a lot of writing, but Schneider posts almost daily, writes books, and carries a full time teaching load. And her posts are usually the result of actual research (unlike some of us who just hop online and shoot off my mouth). Schneider is prolific, but she also brings hard facts and serious sourcing to her work. If you are not following her blog, you should be.

All of that is why I was excited to see that she has another book out. And while her other books have been detail-packed looks at what's going on with ed reform, this new book, A Practical Guide To Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies is a thorough look at how to go cyberdigging, looking at both the techniques and the tools that can be used to uncover whatever truth is lurking out there. Because she provides plenty of examples and demonstrations of how these tools and techniques have worked for her, Schneider also gives us a sort of greatest hits collection. Remember that time she figured out who the secret donor to Education Post was? Or just how much out-of-state money was sneaking into Massachusetts to support raising the charter cap? Or how the Louisiana ed chief was quietly married to the head of an organization that te ed department deals with?

There's an astonishing amount of information out there that is hidden--but not really hidden all that well. Schneider is an expert in uncovering those nuggets of information that some folks wish would stay hidden.

Schneider gives away her secrets here, and and does so in a clear, concise manner that can be followed and understood, even by someone whose computer skills are limited to turning on the machine. Yes, there are things in here that more experienced netizens already know, but still plenty more to learn. It is a practical guide that lends itself to being used like a handbook or manual; to that end it is short, clear, and well-organized. It is a series of lessons from a top-notch teacher in book form, as well as a chance to peek over her shoulder and watch her work.

And while this is clearly about education reform issues, these techniques and tools would be perfectly useful in a broad assortment of areas.

The book is available now, and you should get a copy or yourself, and a copy for the other activist in your life. The information is practical and useful and, in this day and age, indispensable. I recommend that you buy this.

New Book Argues Christian Right Worships Power

Katherine Stewart is an author and journalist who specializes in issues surrounding te separation of church and state. She has a new book coming out-- The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and a recent interview at Salon captures some of the highlights.

It's always interesting to see what happens when someone whose main beat is not education takes a look at education issues. Stewart has looked at educational issues in the past where they relate to church-state separation, and here she comes again with this statement from the interview:

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for "religious freedom" that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups. But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we're hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public education where activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They've actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it's not just about these culture war issues, it's about public policy, foreign policy, and it's about money.

There's also some stuff about abortion as an issue that reminds me of several things I've read about Prohibition and how that single issue united voters in a bloc that was then deployed against other issues by leaders who basically said, "Since you're with us on this signature issue, follow us on these other issues as well."

Her main thesis is that the current version of the religious right is far more interested in political power than, well, anything. You may or may not buy her arguments, but the book looks to be an interesting discussion-starter.

IN: Child Labor Is Fun

Some legislators in Indiana are boldly taking on one of the great problems of their state-- too many restrictions on child labor.

The bill intends, among other things, to do away with the requirement for student work permits for teens. Because the fact that a teenager is flunking high school should not stand in his way when it comes to serving as a useful meat widget for employers.

Full day of school, full shift of work, then homeworkkkzzzzz

Rep. Randy Lyness (R) is stumping for the bill, which is advancing through the legislature. In civilian life, Lyness is the owner of Randy Lyness Builders, and he thinks that it should be "more attractive" for employers to hire minors, which means, apparently, being able to get plenty of work out of the little buggers. The bill proposes that students be allowed to work forty hours a week during the school year (and, as mentioned above, that the student's performance in school not be a factor). On holidays, students could put in a 48 hour week. Also, it gets rid of mandated rest breaks.

Lyness thinks it would also help to pretty up some of the language involved. So the Bureau if Child Labor would be renamed the Bureau of Youth Employment. Says Lyness, "its term now, child labor, gives it a bad connotation to start with. We want to change it to employment of minors. Sounds a lot better."

This will affect 16-18 year olds in the state. It's a dumb idea. Teens already are on the short end of the stick when it comes to employers who exploit them; a law limiting them to less-than-full-time hours and giving the school veto power over their work permit insured that there were limits to how badly employers could exploit them. It's an employers dream; widgets that are not only inexpensive, but don't push back when you make lousy demands of them.

Here's hoping the bill is stopped short of passage.

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.