ICYMI: I'm a Grandfather Again Edition (3/15)

Beware the Ides of March, indeed. It's been a busy week and I've been a little behind on my own reading, so the list might be a little short today (and late, too). But my new grandson is beautiful.

Texas Takeover in Shepherd

A school takeover in Texas turns into a big fat mess, and the courts aren't much help.

Adios, John White

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider bids adieu to John White, who is now officially finally not in charge of education in Louisiana.

Please do a bad job of putting your courses online

Rebecca Barrett-Fox offers a perspective on the virus-induced move to online schooling. Maybe there are a few other things that are more important.

The Vicious Attack on Sweetwater Union District

Thomas Ultican has done all the homework on this tale of a California district that has been under continuous attack by privatizers.

Once Again, Teachers Are First Responders  

Nancy Flanagan reflects on how teachers often end up on the front lines when it's crunch time.

Audrey Watters and Ed Tech crisis response

If you aren't a subscriber to Watters' newsletter, you're missing important stuff. Here are some thoughts about what can go wrong with the virus-induced school closings.

Penguin Cam

Edinburgh Zoo has a live penguin cam. When you need a break from all the stress and worry--well, it's penguins!

Ohio's Charter War Fallout

10th period blog notes that Ohio has so many cyber-school students, the transition during the shutdown ought to be easily tapping into that expertise. Why isn't it?

Doubts Raised About Active Shooter Drills  

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes a look at a report questioning the effects of active shooter drills in schools.

Post-Janus Union Busters Not Done Yet

If you are a teacher and you spend time on Facebook, you've probably heard from those folks at My Pay My Say, their chirpy stock photo reminding you that you don't have to pay those nasty union dues.

These initiatives have been popping up ever since the Janus case gave a Supreme Court okee dokee to the idea of freeloaders in a union. Teachers who don't already live in Right To Work states have received a steady stream of postcards inviting them to dump their union; the Facebook initiative is just more of the same.

They look totally legit

In Pennsylvania, we also heard from Free To Teach, yet another union-busting group functioning as a front for the Commonwealth Foundation which is itself part of the State Policy Network, a national network of right-wing advocacy and lobbying groups. Free To Teach currently says its mission is simply sending out mailers.

My Pay My Say is also linked to the State Policy Network through their sponsor-- the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Also, they love them some stock photos, which is curious when you think about it, because surely they could just get some professional photos taken of the millions of teachers who support their work.

According to Sourcewatch, the Mackinac Center is "a right-wing pressure group based in Michigan." They have championed right to work, opposed environmental regulations, and even own a piece of the blame for Flint's water problems. They have long made it a goal to "outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan," and they have lent a cash-filled hand to other similarly-inclined groups around the country.

Their funding is opaque, and they prefer not to reveal the folks who back them. Sourcewatch did some research, and none of it will surprise you. The Waltons, some hide-the-donor foundations, the Kochs, and a chunk of money from various DeVos family members (including Betsy). The Center is not messing around; their 2017 990 form shows them to be an $11 million operation.

Their pitch is the same as always-- don't you want to quit that stupid union? On their website, you can go to the page for your state, click on a few items, and they will take care of everything you need to dump the union. Benefits of dumping said union?

Your take home pay will increase.
Your benefits will remain the same.
Your money will not be spent on politics or programs you don’t support.

You get to keep more money while still taking a free ride on the contract your union negotiated. Your benefits will totally remain the same, until the future contracts when the district will take your badly weakened union to the cleaners. The last point is also important, since a central part of the Janus argument was that all union activities are political, including contract negotiations.

When filing out the form, you get a choice of five reasons that you're ditching the union:

I don't agree with my union's political activity.
Financial cost of membership.
Worries about corruption.
I don't see the benefit.
Other.

I would recommend that folks who want to check any of these take a nice long visit to a right to work state and see how the blissful heaven of a disempowered union looks.

Look, my beefs with the unions over the years were many. But if you think the absence of a union would somehow lead to school districts being more generous to their teachers, I have a bridge over some magic bean-growing swampland to sell you. Do you think the district will pay you better because you're awesome and they know it's the right thing to do? Then you are a dope.

The Mackinac Center was among the groups backing the Janus lawsuit, along with many of the usual wealthy union foes. He was represented by the Liberty Justice Center, another hard-right outfit, and National Right To Work Legal Defense Fund which--well, it's right there in the name. Janus never had to suffer any consequences for the shafting of his union; after the case was over, he landed a job with the Illinois Policy Institute, one of the rightwing groups that funded his lawsuit. Mr. "I Went Into This Work Because I Care About Kids" took a job touring the country as an anti-union speaker. In one odd little coda, the National Review awarded him a newly-created Whittaker Chambers Award, and the Chambers family protested, saying Janus's efforts "run counter to the instincts and experience of Whittaker Chambers." The award, only ever given twice, was scrapped.

But Janus and the union busting crowd are not done.

They've been shopping about thirty follow-up cases, suing to have the union give back all the dues it ever collected from them. They appear to be using the same strategy as before-- zip on up through the lower courts with unfavorable rulings so that they can go to the big show, and so Janus has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case.

This case is aimed at literally busting the unions. Janus himself is suing over a whopping $3,000, but of course that's not the point. If the unions can be compelled to refund the back dues collected from every union member who left after Janus, the resulting bill would be crippling. The argument on Janus's side seems to be that the Supreme Court ruling should be retroactive, somehow, while so far lower courts have ruled that unions were following the law as it was before the Supreme Court decided to rewrite it came to a fresher understanding of it.

So at the moment, we wait to see if the Supremes decide to hear this disingenuous bullshit appeal, in which case God only knows what will happen, or they will decline and the previous rulings will stand and the union-busting crowd will probably keep trying with the other 29 cases before hatching their next strategy for stifling those damned unions. Stay tuned, and for heaven's sake, think about the Supreme Court when you go to vote in November.

One final note-- remember that advertisers on Facebook pay based on how many clicks. Every time you click on that stupid ad, you cost the My Pay My Say folks just a little more money. Also, they have a Facebook page, just in case you wanted to share some of your thoughts with them. Just sayin'.

DeVos Wants To Give Teachers PD Vouchers

It's not the dumbest education policy idea to ever come out of DC. Betsy DeVos is continuing to champion idea that she has pushed before-- giving teachers professional development vouchers and letting them go shop for their own professional development experiences.

When floated in 2019, the idea was obviously not about kind thoughts about teachers or even philosophical consistency for the choice-loving secretary. It was a way to chop Title II out of the budget. It's a funny thing, but the words "choice" and "freedom" often end up meaning "We are going to spend way less money on this and just let you find your own way." But it looks as if the department  has found a way to move ahead.

Still, she's not wrong about one thing:

I've spoken with hundreds of teachers as I've traveled across the country and hosted teacher roundtables at the department, and I heard far too often how limited most teachers are in their own professional development. They have little to no say in the courses they take. They have very little freedom to explore subject areas that interest them.

Okay, the "spoken with hundreds of teachers" seems unlikely, but the "teacher PD mostly sucks" part won't get you an argument in most faculty lunch rooms. Particularly since the days that PD became welded to standards and Things That Will Raise Test Scores, leaving teachers of non-tested subjects twisting in the wind on every PD day.

So why not give teachers vouchers and let them shop for PD that they care about, are interested in, might even find useful? Here are the problems with such a system.

$$$$

How big a voucher? Nobody knows at this point, but the current version of the idea involves waaayyyyyyyyyy less money than Title II-- like $200 million to cover all the teachers in the US, which would amount to about $40 per teacher if we tried to hit every Pre-K through 12 teacher. The department is apparently making noises about some sort of PD competition; I'm not even sure how that would work.

Bottom line is that districts now save money by buying PD in bulk. Teacher PDS vouchers would either require teachers to bundle themselves to cover costs, PD vendors to come up with clever ays to make more money from poorer customers, or the government to just spend more on teacher PD.

Shopping

When DeVos was talking to all those teachers, I'll bet very few also said, "I need one more time-sucking non-teaching task to eat up my time." But PD vouchers would require teachers to sit down and plow through the various catalogs and directories and advertising fliers shoved in some corner of their desk, looking for something to spend their voucher on. Yes, this will be one more fun task on which to spend their copious free time.

Read this account from a teacher who went through a similar program. It seemed like a cool idea at first glance, but shopping crushed much of the staff.

The PD That Teachers Actually Want

Ed Week quotes Stephanie Hirsch, former big cheese at Learning Forward. Teachers, she observes, "are not asking for a PD voucher program—they’re asking for time for collaborative learning and problem-solving with their colleagues."

A lot of the best PD is produced in-house, colleague to colleague. How would vouchers factor into that? Would teachers be able to go ahead and set up in-house PD and use the vouchers for pizza?

And speaking of "could teachers" questions, who is going to manage the PD approval process that has to go along with this. Pennsylvania has a system in place for certifying that an even counts for PD hours, but would that satisfy the feds? If the end result of this system is "you must select your PD from the federally-approved list of vendors," it is not going to be much better than the current system.

The department says they want to fix the current "scattershot" approach to PD. This proposal would seem to do the opposite of fixing that.

Giving teachers control of their own PD, as if they were actual grown smart professionals, is a great idea. This doesn't seem like the best way to do it.

DeVos Actually Sparks Bipartisan Action In Senate

You may recall that Betsy DeVos really, really, really hates the idea of forgiving the loans that students took out to attend what turned out to be fraudulent predatory not-so-good for-profit universities, to the point that when she had to sign off on loan forgiveness paperwork left over from the previous administration, she felt compelled to add "with extreme displeasure" to her signature.

Either the department had some real problems executing the requirements of the rules requiring loan forgiveness, or they implemented an impressive federal-level program of institutional foot-dragging and deliberate "gosh, we'll get right on that" bullshit. I'm pretty sure I have a good idea which one Judge Sallie "I'm not sending anyone to jail yet, but it's good to know I have the power" Kim was thinking as she fined DeVos and the department.

All of that was just a warm-up for the main event, in which DeVos rewrote the rules of loan forgiveness. Her sales pitch was "It will save the taxpayers $11 billion," but that was because she rewrote the rules so that almost nobody was going to be forgiven. Economist Doug Webber was one of many to point out that it was mathematically impossible for many of the affected students to ever get full reimbursement. DeVos called the formula "scientifically robust," but since she'd already testified that she didn't think all of These People should get forgiveness, it was clear what she was robustly pursuing. Students had to prove that the school was deliberately lying, and they had to prove that they had been harmed. Meaning you had to prove that you wouldn't have been poor anyway, because if you were going to be poor anyway, then being bilked by the school hadn't really hurt you.

It was all part and parcel of the DeVosian favoritism for businesses over, well, anybody who doesn't own a business. But this saga has yielded one extraordinary not-awful moment-- a bipartisan agreement by the current US Senate.

No kidding. The Democrats in the Senate determined to undo the DeVos rules, and ten GOP senators actually joined in. They even used one of those funky obscure senate rules to do it, thereby pleasing the many, many, many groups opposed to DeVos's rule. Trump could still veto the thing, but as always, it's not clear that he really follows much of what's going on in the DeVos department. Also, I understand that he has a few other issues on his plate right now.

Administration Matters

This tweet turned up the other day.

I interviewed a teacher who is leaving the profession in June. I asked her why she was quitting.

Her response:
“I was told to teach to the test...that if it’s not a test-taking skill, don’t teach it. I didn’t become a teacher to help kids become better test-takers.”#EdChat

— Fixing Education (@FixingEducation) March 9, 2020

I wish the teacher hadn't slipped into passive voice. I wish she had said, "Principal Testy McScoresuck told me to teach to the test." Because administrators like this need to be outed. They need to be held up before the world as people helping to facilitate the creeping educational malpractice rooted in high stakes testing.

A manager's job-- and not just the management of a school, but any manager-- is to create the system, environment and supports that get his people to do their very best work. When it rains, it's the manager's job to hold an umbrella over his people. When the wind starts blowing tree limbs across the landscape, it's the manager's job to stand before the storm and bat the debris away. And when the Folks at the Top start sending down stupid directives, it's a manager's job to protect his people the best he possibly can.

NCLB, Race to the Top, Common Core, the high stakes Big Standardized Tests-- each of these bad policies is bad for many reason, but the biggest one is this: instead of helping teachers do their jobs, these policies interfere with teachers doing their jobs, even mandate doing their jobs badly. In each case a bunch of educational amateurs pushed their way into schools and said, "You're doing it all wrong from now on, you have to do it like this," like medically untrained non-doctors barging into a surgical procedure to say, "Stop using that sterile scalpel and use this rusty shovel instead."

That was bad. But it is base betrayal when, in that situation, management turns to its trained, professional workers and says, "Well, you heard the man. Pick up that rusty shovel."

NCLB and its "every student will be above average by 2014" was bullshit, and everyone in education knew it was bullshit, that by 2013 every school would be either failing or cheating, but too many school administrators didn't say, "You just do your job. I'm going to spend an hour of every day calling our legislators and explaining what bullshit this is." Instead too many said, "Look, here are some test practice books. We'll give some practice tests, identify the students who are close enough to drag over the line, keep our heads down, and maybe they'll fix the rules by the time it becomes hopeless." In other words, "You heard the man. Pick up the rusty shovel and at least pretend to use it."

By the time Common Core, Race to the Top waivers and waiver lite rolled around to ramp up the high stakes on the back end and attach amateur-hour standards on the front end, many administrators were already broken. Instead of "Oh, hey, wait a minute," they responded with "Well, maybe this will blow over" or "Nothing we can do about it but bend to the state" or "Get in there and teach to the test."

The argument has been that the federal and state authorities have mandated all of this, and in some states where test results have been used as a method of targeting public schools for destruction, the emphasis on the Big Standardized Test has been hard to avoid. In most states, the BS Test score has become part of every public school's profile, and it's hard to resist the urge to do something about going out in public with that big black eye.

I get all of that. I get the tremendous pressure that some administrators must feel to teach to the test. But it's still wrong. And when the rain starts, the role of a good manager is not to stand to one side and say, "Why the hell are you getting so wet, anyway?"

Administrators have offered a wide variety of responses over the years from the naive (Just teach the standards and the test scores will take care of themselves) to the heroic (Just do your job, and I'll manage whatever flak comes at us). And the same policy approach in a building can come with a variety of faces from sympathetic (I know this sucks, and I'm sorry) to abusive (Get your damn numbers up or I will be assigning you lunch monitor duty forever, you miserable slacker). Sometimes, of course, there are two or three faces involved in the same building.

Bottom line: when education policy is dictated from the top down, it often arrives at the classroom door wearing the face of the building administrator, and the amount of damage done by the bad policies of the last two decades has been affected, for better or worse, by district administrators.

DeVosian Priorities and Public Service

There's nothing new to see here, but it's still worth noting what DeVos tells us about her priorities.

From a recent interview with a conservative Christian podcast-- let me just set these side by side:

"I was fortunate enough to be born into a family that raised me to make my faith my own," she said. "I had exposure from my first memories to weekly church services."

"I'm grateful to have had that foundation."

"I'm for their parents to have the kind of opportunity to make the choices that I was able to make for my kids"

Note that DeVos is not waxing nostalgic for the days when her parents made her aware of the different faiths out there, leaving her to choose the one she liked best. No, she is grateful for a foundation built in what she believes is the only correct choice.

I've made this argument before; people don't really want choice. What they want is to have what they want. DeVos is not different. If her own church had been the only church in town when her kids were growing up, I don't believe for a second that she would have fought to get other houses of worship opened up so that she could have choices.

It's extremely human (maybe even necessarily so) to think some things are better than others. Pressed for an explanation for the $4.7 billion cut to education in the proposed budget, DeVos answered:

The administration has priorities, and we had to make difficult decisions around the entirety of the budget.

Unfortunately, the Senator whose question she was answering/not answering chose to reply with am zinger instead of probing for a more specific description of what priorities DeVos considered more important than the programs that she wanted to cut back, and why. Or why, given the Trump administration's to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than they had, she didn't just tack that $4.7 billion onto the already-massive budget deficit.

But she gave some answers at another point in the hearings that clarify. Another proposed cut in the budget is the end of the college loan forgiveness program for people entering public service. Yes, it would just plain save the government money, but there are more philosophical reasons:

The administration feels that incentivizing one type of work and one type of job over another is not called for. And we have a demand in our over 7 million jobs going unfilled today, and favoring one type of pursuit over another type of pursuit philosophically doesn’t line up with where we are.

In other words, we'd rather not encourage people to go into public service, because we don't feel public service is more important (or maybe even as important) as serving as a needed meat widget for private industry. In fact, since the government should be really tiny and cost next to nothing, it would be best if nobody worked for it, because really, these "public service" jobs are just government jobs, many of the used to fuel those damn public sector unions (like the twice-damned teachers union, which we really need to finish breaking one way or another, and, yes, that's DeVos brother Erik Prince hiring spies to infiltrate the teachers union and the DeVos-funded Mackinack Center trying to convince teachers to quit the union). If we can convince just one person to become a cog in the corporate machine instead  becoming a teacher or a firefighter, well, then, that's been a good day's work.

As a free market devotee, DeVos is perhaps more inclined to think that the public should serve itself. Certainly, as she has told us in many was at this point, her priority is not to have the public served by a government that has the scale and resources to get the job done. She has told us that public education is a "dead end" by which she means a monopoly or "closed system," by which she means private operators are being denied the chance to make money doing it. She has told us that government "sucks." In other words, she's been quite clear, despite the occasional attempt to be more diplomatic, that public schools are not a choice that needs to be on the table. Not a priority.

The Gates Team Wants To Swing For The Education Fences. Maybe There’s A Better Way For Them To Play.

It says something about Bill Gates that after using the expression “swing for the fences” in the title of his foundation’s annual letter, he also feels the need to explain it:

That’s a phrase many Americans will recognize from baseball. When you swing for the fences, you’re putting every ounce of strength into hitting the ball as far as possible. You know that your bat might miss the ball entirely—but that if you succeed in making contact, the rewards can be huge.

It also explains why, after twenty years, Bill and Melinda Gates have yet to get near the fences on education. 

The Gates legacy in education includes several expensive whiffs. There was the small schools initiative, on which he spent $2 billion, and then there was the initiative for improving teachers, which was less expensive, but no more successful. And then there’s the Common Core standards, behind which Gates threw an immeasurable amount of money and influence. All created far more disruption and expense than anything resembling success.

All of these were, in fact, swing for the fences initiatives—attempts to hit a home run that ultimately stirred the air over home plate.

Educators have watched the Gates’ take multiple times at bat and wondered if they have learned anything yet, but the annual letter from the foundation namesakes rarely offers any hope. And perhaps the swing for the fences mentality is a good model of the problem. Take this observation from Melinda Gates about achieving success with their education initiatives:

The fact that progress has been harder to achieve than we hoped is no reason to give up, though. Just the opposite.

In other words, I keep going to the plate, swinging with all my might, and missing. My solution is not talk to a hitting coach or take a step back and look at what I’m doing; the solution is to just keep doing it, only harder.

Melinda Gates bemoans the fact that there is disagreement on what works and what doesn’t in education, and that’s partly correct. There are plenty of things we know don’t work, but there is also a very wide range of things that may or may not work for any given teacher with any given student on any given day. Education is messy work, and if your intent is to neaten it up and standardize it so that everybody is doing everything the same way, you are doomed to disappointment. You have to watch the pitcher, know the situation in the game, and keep your eye on the ball so that you can make a split-second decision based on all the elements of that actual moment. There is no standardized swing that will get you a home run with every pitch.

But when Bill Gates takes over the letter’s narrative, we are back in familiar territory. He revisits the Common Core and as has become his wont, he admits it was a failure, sort of.

We bet big on a set of standards called the Common Core. Nearly every state adopted them within two years of their release. But it quickly became clear that adoption alone wasn’t enough—something we should’ve anticipated.

It’s not that the standards were flawed, or that the very idea of imposing a national set of top-down standards was flawed. They just didn’t swing hard enough. So they created a market guide so that schools could pick the correct instructional materials. And they looked for ways to better “support” teachers (”support,” teachers learn in many professional development sessions, is a euphemism for “correct” or “re-educate”). And now they are shifting to a new version of scaling up.

The old version of scaling up is to take a solution from one spot and take it to market everywhere. Now the Gates wants to push locally adapted solutions “tailored to the specific needs of teachers and students in the places we’re trying to reach,” to network schools so that they can share, so that they can have “opportunities to learn from each other.” This would sound more hopeful if it were not teamed up with statements like 

...many teachers didn’t have access to the resources they needed to meet the new expectations. So, we looked for ways to provide more training and help them adjust their practice.

This suggests that the focus is still on trying to fix teachers rather than help them, on trying to impose expectations from above, just using a more customized imposition to help develop more localized compliance. 

In other words, the Gates Foundation still dreams of fundamentally transforming the entire US education system—swinging for the fences. And that desire to completely transform the system (a system in which they have no real expertise) remains the most fundamental flaw in their approach.

Every kid who picks up a bat dreams of that moment—a mighty swing, the hefty crack that kicks back up your arms, the triumphant trip around the diamond. Watch the littlest players step up to the plate, maybe even close their eyes and swing with all their might. And miss. And miss, and miss, and miss, and miss. “Look,” says a coach. “Just ease up. Keep your eye on the ball, get the bat out there, and just meet it.”

The power of your swing means nothing if you don’t meet the ball where it is. Here’s my suggestion for Bill and Melinda Gates. Take a year off from education (a gap year, if you will). Spend it traveling the country, talking to teachers—and not just ones that have been carefully vetted. If you aren’t hearing from critics, then the gap year is failing. Don’t pitch your ideas; instead, just keep asking one question: “What can we do to help you?” That’s it. Just keep asking and listening for a year. Then instead of swinging blindly for the fences, you can meet the ball where it is. Maybe you’re destined to only hit a double or a single, but those win games, too—certainly more than big expensive strike-outs

Originally posted at Forbes.com