Coronavirus Triggers Ed Tech Free Sample-Palooza. Be careful.

Imagine that you have a great new food product to sell, and you suddenly catch wind of a neighborhood where all the restaurants and grocery stores have been shut down. How quickly could you get on a street corner there with a big tray of free samples?

As schools are shut down across the country, ed tech companies, from old faithfuls to fresh young startups, are rushing to help fill the gap and/or take advantage of the situation.

Broadband providers like Spectrum and Comcast are offering free internet hookups to households with students. Most are offering sixty days free, but those who take advantage should note that in many cases “regular pricing will take effect at the end of the 60-day period if a customer doesn’t cancel or change the service.”

Look! Free cheese sample!

Websites like kidsactivitiesblog.com are running lists of the many websites that are offering free samples to help out with this difficult time. The resource is popular enough that over the last twenty-four hours, it has not always been possible to load the page due to heavy traffic. Other versions of this kind of list are out there.

Meanwhile, just out of sight of the general public, professors and teachers report receiving a wave of e-mails following a basic pattern. You’re going to move to online teaching, and in these difficult times, we’d like to help. They may offer free trials, or special discounts for their services. 

And on the journalism side, I’ve received a variety of pitches from companies who would like to give me the chance to talk to one of their experts about how their product can be especially useful in this widespread shift to online learning. It would make a great article, they assure me.

All of these initiatives are clustered around a fine line, a thin boundary between beneficial private support and profiteering, between good Samaritans and vulture capitalists. 

School closures have created complex and complicated situations. Some districts have expressly forbidden any attempts at running classes online, in part because they know that for some students, internet connectivity is not happening. If social media is any measure, some percentage of parents are panicking about having their children at home as if nobody has ever been through summer vacation before. And do we really want to have students—particularly the youngest ones—spend that much more time in front of a screen?

Some of these organizations and businesses are truly here to help; some of them smell a profitable opportunity to elbow their way into the education space, their own ed tech Katrina.

So before the coronavirus panic spurs you to sign your child up for 263 different online education services, do your due diligence. Check the following.

How free for how long? As with the free internet hookup, check to see if you aren’t going to be automatically subscribed at the regular price once the free period is over. That’s not philanthropy; it’s marketing. Also remember that sometimes the price is not dollars, but data. Do not trade away your privacy for six weeks of a mediocre subscription service.

Be aware that there are resources out there that are completely free. Some are “informal,” like this crowdsourced spreadsheet “150+ Enrichment Activities for Children While Parents Are Working Remotely,” which lets you search by indoor/outdoor, screens/no screens, and group/solo. Others have always been there, but under-noticed, like SAG-AFTRA’s charming Storyline website, with its library of children’s books read by a wide assortment of actors. And Google Arts and Culture will help you tour all these museums without ever asking you to set up an account or share your credit card number.

Is this a company with a product to sell? That does not make them evil, nor does it automatically make their motives suspect. But all the usual rules of being a customer apply. Check claims, particularly claims like “this covers exactly the sort of materials that your child’s teachers want her to learn.”

Is this product any good? Watch out for opportunistic junk. Like the hackers who created the malware-spreading coronavirus map or the folks hoarding sanitizer, there will be people popping up to make a quick buck on junk. Watch also for companies that have rushed to market with products that aren’t ready for prime time. 

Perhaps most importantly, take a deep breath and ask yourself, “Would I think this was a good idea if I weren’t freaking out over having my child at home for weeks because of a global pandemic?” Maybe things will be back to normal soon, or more likely, this is a marathon and not a sprint. Take your time and get it right. 

Originally posted at Forbes.com

More Pandemic Prompted Reformster Baloney

I had put off reading Kevin Huffman's slice of baloney in the Washington Post because I knew it would tax my blood pressure medications. But as disruptors and refornsters and privatizers rush to adjust their various sales pitches and policy arguments to fit the new realities, we have to pay attention.

Huffman's disruptor credentials are solid. He ran Tennessee's education system based on his couple of years in a classroom via Teach for America (motto: "Just because you don't know what you're talking about, that doesn't mean you can't be an education expert"). Huffman pioneered the Achievement School District, a failed model in which the state took over schools with the lowest test scores. Since then he's become part of the City Fund, a group devoted to that wants to use the portfolio model to privatize education.

Huffman doesn't get everything wrong. He notes, for instance, that online education has been largely a failure, a failure notable enough that even the bricks-and-mortar charter crowd have turned on them. Huffman even manages a non-baloney quote from professional economist and education amateur Eric Hanushek, who notes that if companies investing tons of money in online education can't make it work, “it seems unlikely that parents and teachers Googling resources will” do any better.

So while some homeschooling and cyber-schooling fans are declaring that, despite all those frustrated parent memes you see online, the world is about to realize that home and cyber schooling is The Way, other disruptors like Huffman remain committed to other paths.

But next comes the old rhetorical sleight of hand. He talks about the 'summer slide" citing folks like NWEA, the testing company. He's throwing around terms phrases like "lose 20% of their school year gains," but what we're really talking about test scores.

If there has ever been a moment to drop the fiction that "test score" and "student learning" are synonyms, now is the time. (Okay, every single moment has been a moment to do this, but now is especially urgent.)

As the response to the pandemic blows holes in the standard school year, our focus must be bolstering actual education and not test scores. Get out your copy of Koretz's The Testing Charade and remind yourself that the Big Standardized Test does not deserve this kind of attention or regard. It's junk, and it is  wasting valuable time.

Huffman is, I think, correct in joining the chorus who sound the alarm that current conditions will favor the haves and leave the have-nots further behind, and that the impact may last for a while (this point would be better made without his reference to Hanushek and Chetty's baloney research about how having a good teacher makes you richer later in life.) But he doesn't really know what to do about it.

This  frickin' guy

Longer school year next year, or maybe longer school day? More social emotional support? Those are relatively innocuous, but other ideas he touts are less revealing.

At one point he talks about Chiefs for Change, Jeb Bush's reformy group that was supposed to be an education-shaking group of state education chieftains, but which has since had to loosen up its membership requirements and abandon all its early ideas about "success"-- well, the Chiefs are pushing collaboration between pub lic schools and charter schools, coincidentally the sort of thing that Huffman's City Fund is pushing (let public and charter schools collaborate and play by charter rules).

Then there's this howler-

Finally, since states are losing standardized testing this spring, they’ll need to administer tests at the start of the next school year to see what students know after the crisis. Assessments should be informative and not used to measure or rate schools or teachers. Without this, it will be impossible to know the extent of the challenge and where resources should be deployed to deal with it.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. No school "needs" to give these tests. Huffman, who we'll recall has minimal actual teaching experience,  subscribes to the reformster notion that classroom teachers can only assess their students via a formal standardized test. That's dumb. And the effects of taking students who have just gotten back from a seven month disruption and throwing a big standardized test at them--well, that's not good, and not helpful, and just dumb. Students should return to a safe, supportive environment that helps them ease back into the school thing; a BS Test will just get in the way of that. But don't worry-- it is not remotely "impossible" for teachers to assess the extent of the challenge.

But Huffman is running to prop up the test manufacturing industry, which appears to be part of the playbook for disrupters right now. Perhaps that's because even they can see that the time has come for those tests to go. They were canned this year, and next year they will be just as irrelevant, and if we can skip them two years, well, why not forever?

ICYMI: I'm Pretty Sure It's Palm Sunday Edition (4/5)

So here we all are, sitting at home and nervously watching the numbers, while a whole lot of folks pretend that all they have to do is wave their hands and teachers will somehow fix the school part of this. Here's the reading. I've tried to include some things to brighten your day a bit.

Remote Learning Is Turning Out To Be A Burden for Parents

Yeah, a zillion folks have figured this out, but this is the New York Post, the newspaper that is pretty sure any dope can be a teacher.

This is not an experiment

John Warner reminds us that while there is data to be gathered, this is not any kind of experiment.

Can my son get more worksheets before the world ends

McSweeney's is on a roll right now. This is just one of the posts I'll include this week.

Another charter school attempts a hostile takeover

In Los Angeles, a reminder that some parts of business as usual are still going on, like charters trying to push public schools out of public school buildings.

Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose

From Australia. This has nothing to do with education; it's just funny. "My partner took me to the hospital that she works in because she wanted all her colleagues to laugh at me."

Five concerns about the rush to online learning

From Valerie Strauss. A worthwhile list.

We, the Hard-Working, Newly Homeschooling Parents of America, Have Rewritten the Common Core Standards

McSweeney's again. If you're staying in place with children, you will recognize these goals.

The Homeschooling movement sees an opportunity  

Jeff Bryant at Citizen Truth (though, weirdly, someone else's name is on the byline). A good thorough look at some of the forces being marshalled during the pandemic.

Learning from home is hard enough. Try doing it where wifi is illegal.

Really interesting piece from Mother Jones. Turns out that in West Virginia where the big radio telescope is aimed at the universe, there's a whole area where wifi and cell phones are banned. If you think your school is having trouble transitioning...

15,000 high school students are AWOL

How's distance learning going in LAUSD? Well, could be a little better. From the LA Times.

Day 12: We should not be requiring parents to teach their children from home

Susie Johnson, Not Your Average Mom, offers a solid articulation of one point of view about the whole home school-ish thing.

DeVos weighs waivers for special ed.  

It's the big fear. The New York Times looks at the possibility that DeVos will just scrap special ed requirements.

North Lenoir student treks three miles to school for wifi.  

You know there are stories like this all over the country. A reminder, once again, that not every home is internet-ready.

Hula Dancing, Singing and a Teacher's Impact  

I've missed Russ Walsh in the blogosphere, but he has returned recently, and here's a nice little piece to remind us about the long term impact of a teacher's work.

Get Your Shift Together

The interwebs have been drowning in hot takes, thinky pieces and unsolicited teacher advice for the business of shifting education from the classroom to the web. This is hands down the smartest, best quick advice on the subject I've seen.

If I was designing my class to be an online course, it would look nothing like I'm doing now. You don't just "shift" a class to online instruction, it needs to be built that way from the beginning.

— S Muskopf (@musko101) April 4, 2020

A shift in medium must always lead to a shift in content.

Consider film. Initially used to simply record a performance presented as if on a stage, directors quickly learned that film opened up a whole new vocabulary, and negated some of the old. Audio recordings started out essentially as recordings of live performances, but by the time of Les Paul and the Beatles, artists had figured out how to record things that couldn't be reproduced on stage. On a very fundamental level, the new medium was about the same thing as the old one--drama, acting, music--but it also opened the door for new things.

Sometimes the shift is a small change of form within the medium. I'm still watching the evolution of video story-telling. When you sit down and watch an entire "season" of Stranger Things, that's not like watching a series in weekly episodes, and it's not like watching a movie. I think we're living through the invention of the screen equivalent of a novel.

There are also shifts of medium that turn out to be dead ends. Film strips were going to revolutionize story telling (and education) except that they mostly didn't. They destroyed most of the old vocabulary, but did not provide any new vocabulary that was particularly helpful. Ditto for quadrophonic stereo and 3D television. E-books are still thrashing around, but mostly they seem to have destroyed a bunch of old vocabulary and offer nothing new except being compact. Include on the dead end list the early versions of tele-learning. Point a camera, hook up a microphone, do it again on the other end, try to make the phone call, hope that what comes across is intelligible.

Online instruction is still trying to prove itself; mostly it adds some new tools to a pre-existing classroom, but obliterates so much of the old teaching vocabulary--particularly all the parts related to a personal human touch-- while providing very little new in return. It tells us something that the cyberschools, who have theoretically working on the problem for years, appear to have largely failed to crack the code. I'm not convinced, but maybe in a decade I'll be cyber-eating my e-words.

In the meantime, the vocabulary is so different that it requires any class to be redesigned from the bottom up. Trying to just shift by doing what you always do, but doing it over a computer, is like trying to translate a English language speech for a Japanese audience by just doing the same speech slower and louder.

Hardly anybody is getting enough time to do this properly, to get their shift together. But it will be helpful to be clear about what is happening-- not homeschooling, not distance learning, not online school, but a quick-baked crisis school that represents the best you can do under unprecedented rough conditions.

Privilege and the Pandemic

The pandemic-powered slide into crisis schooling is highlighting many aspects of how our public education system works (or doesn't). In particular, the push for some version of distance learning is underlining the huge gap between haves and have-nots.

We see the gap on the district level, between districts that can quickly muster the hardware and resources to maintain "continuity of instruction" (which sounds so much fancier than just "keep doing the work") and districts that have to really struggle for solutions. Various businesses are hoping to "help meet the needs" of districts and make some bucks doing it, presumably focusing on those districts that offer the best promise of long-term ROI.

In homes, the gap is even more severe. It seems particularly stark when one looks at all the perky advice about organizing your home school experience, laying out ideas that I'm sure are super-great if you are in a household where parents aren't trying to work from home, or aren't suddenly unemployed and uninsured, or aren't single parents trying to meet all the schooling obligations just laid on your multiple kids, aren't spending most of your days wracked with fear and uncertainty about how you're going to make it through all of this, or aren't still going out to work every day so that everyone else can have health care or food or some other essential service while you wonder how to get someone to watch your kids during the day as you also wonder if this is the day someone sneezes on you and kills you.

Social media is loaded with parent shaming, often parent on parent, about how "COVID is not a vacation from education" and you should be getting those kids logged on and distance learning away. Does that prospect strike you as somewhere between "stressful" and "nearly impossible" (imagine one parent and three students who all have to work from home on one computer with a lousy wifi connection)? There are also plenty of posts giving advice on how to adjust your attitude so that you can stop whining and just breeze through this.

In short, the current mess is not just highlighting the gap, but highlighting how oblivious some people are to it.

But as schools are forced shut, it's clear-- some students will get some sort of education at home, and some others will not. Schools are better positioned to serve some students than others, and some families are better positioned to keep the ball rolling than others.

Here's the thing-- that has always been true.

Yet districts have been wrestling with how to handle the gap? Do we just leave some students behind because we don't know how to bring them along, as Betsy DeVos seems to suggest? Do we just cancel the year? And if we do, who does that hurt (spoiler alert-- not the privileged families who can keep educating their own children)?

But when the COVID shutdown is over, all of these questions should still remain. In fact, we should be asking where the line is, the line that we just crossed where on the other side we know there is huge inequity in the system but it's an acceptable level. What is that acceptable level of a privilege gap?

It's an uncomfortable question, and yet when we have to put the wheels back on the education system, we may well have to ask it out loud. We can claim that it just sort of evolved to the pre-pandemic point we have reached, but when we go to prop things back up, folks will have to make a conscious decision, may have to actually say out loud what they think is "enough" for the children of "those people."

In the meantime, while crisis schooling, we'll have to be aware of things like the meme that points out that if you're giving grades during the shutdown, you're actually grading privilege. Which, again, will be useful to remember when schools re-open.

There are layers to this. Take the classic class project. Pat comes in with a giant diorama made out of fresh new poster board and legos with a nice paint job and some cool accessories that Pat's mom ordered on line; Chris comes in with a battered old shoe box with details drawn in with a ball point pen. As soon as you start to grade on "quality" or even "effort," you're grading privilege. And even if you are conscious of that, you can never be conscious enough. Because Pat knows that Pat's mom will run to the store for whatever Pat needs, the sky is the limit in the conception stage. Meanwhile, Chris never even gets to "what would be cool for this project" because Chris is stuck on "what can I do with the little bit of stuff I have to work with?" Privilege doesn't just give you a leg up on the task at hand; it broadens your sense of what is possible.

If only we could apply that broad sense of possibility to the big challenge of US education-- providing a quality education to every student, despite whatever obstacles they may face.

I don't know that many districts are going to resolve the issue before this school year limps across whatever arbitrary finish line the powers that be settle on for this year. But even if the summer somehow brings an end to the pandemic and schools can open again in the fall, the issue will not have gone away.

Of Pandemics And Teacher Motivation

Remember that time that schools were shut down because of a pandemic, and all the teachers said, "Yippee! Extra vacation! I am out of here" and all jumped in their Porches and drove to their beach homes?

Yeah, neither do I.

Here's what I'll remember. Teacher after teacher, from the ones in my Twitter feeds to the ones in my email to the ones that I know personally, sharing how miserable and worried they are, how they can't sleep for worrying about their students. Teacher after teacher frustrated about a lack of clear direction and leadership-- can we work? how can we work? what resources are we going to be given, or do we just have to hunt down the right tech ourselves?

And the scrambling. I'll never forget that when our governor finally closed schools, he announced it after 3:00 on a Friday afternoon, leaving many teachers no time to say "see you soon" to students or to grab materials from their rooms (this morning, my wife was finally allowed back into her classroom for twenty minutes, to grab whatever she could). The scrambling mixed in with the waiting for communication from bosses, political leaders, or a chance to connect with colleagues.

The scrambling was everywhere, with some teachers expected to convert to some sort of crisis schooling model in twenty-four hours. The varied and bizarre obstacles (like these teachers who work where wi-fi and cellphones are illegal).

Plus the pitching in. A thousand little stories, like the teachers who helped out medical workers with 3D printers.Yesterday my wife went in to school to take her turn handing through car windows to families of students who depend on the school for that kind of support.

There are so many things many teachers still don't know. How will all this be counted? How will students be determined as passing or failing? Has anybody figured out how we're going to take care of those students with exceptionally special needs? Will school open again, and if so, for how long? Contractually, what is going to count as a day of work, and does anybody have the faintest idea of how we'll decide if teachers have fulfilled contractual obligations to the district?

These are not small questions, and yet I've not heard tales of teachers who have sat down stubbornly refusing to lift a finger until they get some answers.

Teachers have done what medical personnel and blue collar workers and a large number of people have done-- they've simply rushed forward to fill the needs they see as best they can.

Know what else I remember?

I remember when a bunch of non-educators started making noises about how we needed to remake the entire education system and drastically overhaul the accountability system because clearly the only way to motivate teachers to do the work was to threaten them with financial punishment or offer financial reward.

I don't want to hear from these people any more. I don't want to hear any more baloney about the already-disproven notion that human beings are motivated strictly by economic incentives. I don't want to hear any more about the only way to whip those damned teachers into shape is to find ways to hold their paychecks hostage. I don't want to hear any more about how the unions exist to protect millions of fat, lazy slackers who thought teaching would be an easy way to live high on the government hog.

Teachers do the work because they want to do the work, because they even feel born to do the work, and will keep trying to do the work even when unprecedented obstacles are thrown in their way. If you think the only reason anyone ever does anything is to get paid, then I am sad for you. But keep your sad hands off education policy. When this storm has passed, sit down, shut up, and let the teachers work.

FL: Path Opens To Killing Public Schools

If there was a state most likely to grab the coronaviral opportunity to gut its public school system, it would have to be Florida, where some of those ducks appear to be lining up.

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) has had its share of rough times. Started by the state in the 90s, spun into a private business (a "publicly-funded non-profit," so a charter school), and then mired in a mess of incompetence and corruption, the entire shooting match had its board replaced by the state, which installed a bunch of politically connected board members, and a half-assed audit was ordered up. Now the Board of Trustees is the Sate Board of Education, headed by evolution-denier Andy Tuck. That was just last year, but apparently everyone is feeling much more confident about FLVS now because, as trumpeted by reformster cheerleading site redefinED, FLVS is "preparing to blast off."

By "blast off" they mean "get a huge infusion of money." FLVS has already been handed some great help from the state legislature, which mandates that all Florida students must take at least one on-line course in order to graduate. That's a great deal for FLVS, which is paid by taxpayers based on the volume of business they do-- and they do just happen to have a model that allows students to enroll fulltime, part time, or whatever. Now they have bigger plans.

FLVS is looking to pump about $4.3 million into "technology upgrades" for the system to give itself a big student capacity boost, from 200K-ish to around 2.7 million. That would be roughly all the K-12 students in Florida. FLVS chief Louis Algaze offers this:

I applaud Governor Ron DeSantis for ensuring students have the ability to continue their education as we work together to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. I am proud of the work our team is doing to provide school districts, charter schools and private schools with solutions and resources to keep Florida students on track with their education as we all navigate these unprecedented times together.

And there's this:

“The most important thing we can do to help children through COVID-19 is to keep them safe, healthy, and give them the best possible education we can during these times,” Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran said. “As the state turns to online learning, it is imperative that we work together to provide resources that support our families, teachers and school leaders.”

I have many questions, but the biggest one is this-- what the hell kind of education program only requires a technology upgrade to give itself a 1,300% capacity increase? That's like suggesting that we can triple the capacity of a school by buying more desks. FLVS says its current teaching staff each serves about 162 students. Perhaps the plan is that the districts that sign up will have their own staff "teach" these courses that they did not design, assuming they can just familiarize themselves with the content, the software, etc, in the next couple of weeks.

Florida's politicians and profiteers never tire of looking for ways to gut the public school system and privatize education. Governor DeSantis was slow to shut down the state until spring breakers had finished rolling in and out (and not for churches-- they can still gather all they want), but the state looks less hesitant about taking advantage of the pandemic to take another whack at busting public schools. Heaven only knows what's coming next.

Annnnnnd as soon as this post went up, folks let me know that Alaska has also jumped on board and that FLVS is being touted as an exemplar in several states. Damn.