As Schools Tackle Coronavirus Pause, Don’t Forget Career And Technical Education Students.

At this juncture, nearly all schools in this country have been shut down, forcing teachers, families, and students to grapple with some form of crisis schooling. The need for teachers to teach and students to learn at a distance has sparked discussion of many issues. How do schools keep contact with students who have little or no access to the internet? How do teachers construct useful materials while holding in place inside their own homes? How do parents adapt to this involuntary version of home schooling?

Some of the biggest discussions, from the local level all the way up to the federal department of education, have centered on the challenge of providing crisis schooling for students with special needs. But there is one other group of students who face unique concerns, and there has been far less discussion about how the coronaviral hiatus will affect them—career and technical education students.

You can't practice this on line

My former district is part of consortium that has run a very good CTE school for many decades, training students in fields including welding, building construction, auto body repair, home health services, and operating heavy equipment. For most of my career, these students passed through my classroom, and I cannot overstate how much they have benefited from these excellent programs.

There is an obvious problem. One cannot practice welding, frame a house, or take a patient’s blood pressure over the internet. While CTE students do a great deal of book work (more, perhaps, than many folks assume), there is a hands-on element that is critical to their education. 

The director of the school told me that the state has made the software education package Edgenuity available to them to cover some of the academic areas. Edgenuity has been around awhile, particularly in the area of credit recovery (making up missed credits), and it is not without controversy stemming from questions about how easily it can be gamed (including access to online answer banks like this and this). The director is also looking for other sources for materials that may help, working with sending schools and the state to “offer a plan that is as rigorous as we can.” But as with many aspects of crisis schooling, the local district is largely left on its own to solve the problems of crisis schooling.

The federal government is offering some long term help. On Tuesday, Education Secretary DeVos offered new deadline flexibility for districts that are hoping to tap into some of the resources promised by the proposed budget increase for CTE. Originally, state CTE plans for 2020-2023 were due by April 15. Under current conditions, that’s a daunting deadline. The states, in turn, are allowed to extend the deadline for local applications by three months. 

That’s helpful for preparing for the coming years, but the roughly 12 million CTE students in the US (particularly seniors) have more immediate concerns about completing their actual training. The state has also canceled the major CTE tests, the National Occupational Competency Testing Institute (NOCTI) and the National Institute of Metalworking Skills (NIMS) tests. While these are tests that students could not prepare for under current conditions, they are also tests that provide industry credentials.

On all levels, officials and educators are looking for creative solutions to the problems posed by the great coronavirus pause of 2020. Here’s hoping that some of that creative thinking is directed at CTE programs, whose students stand to lose an important chunk of their education.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Still Trying To Stump For Common Core

Education Next's spring issue is featuring a little Common Core debate, asking if the Core worked. There are three responses in the actual debate, plus a sort of bonus response in a separate article. I'm sorry to report that many of the same delusions that brought us the Core disruption of education are still firmly in place. Let's take each of these one at a time. Warning-- every one of these guys is going to talk about scores on the Big Standardized Test as if that's a valid measurement of student growth and achievement. It's not, but it's what they're going to use.

Tom Loveless: Common Core Has Not Worked 

Loveless notes that failed education standards "do not flop spectacularly," by which he means there's no good footage of something blowing up. But he's looked at the research, and he has the receipts. And he has one damning item that doesn't usually come up-- effective textbooks are being rejected to make room for texts that are more perfectly aligned with the Core standards. Here's his finish:

In short, the evidence suggests student achievement is, at best, about where it would have been if Common Core had never been adopted, if the billions of dollars spent on implementation had never been spent, if the countless hours of professional development inducing teachers to retool their lessons had never been imposed. When will time be up on the Common Core experiment? How many more years must pass, how much more should Americans spend, and how many more effective curricula must be pushed aside before leaders conclude that Common Core has failed?

Morgan Polikoff: Common Standards Aren't Enough

Polikoff likewise looks at the research and finds the results unimpressive. However, Polikoff has suspects to blame.

For one, it's our old friend implementation, and the classic reformster complaint that people are having trouble with the Core because they aren't doing it right. For instance, studies find that teachers keep using their own professional judgment instead of the Core's, an entirely predictable place for teachers to be a decade later. Teachers will try anything they're directed to try once or twice; they won't keep using things that don't work. Polikoff blames the structures in the system.

But he finds the new reformster push for "quality curriculum" promising, likes the dream of teacher improvement "at scale," and credits the Core for preparing the path for a national curriculum market (which is as it was designed to do). Polikoff looks into the future and sees schools that are awful and in disarray, and he would like to "clean the policy clutter." He advocates for states requiring that schools choose from a short list of approved texts, making me wonder if a state like, say, Texas, where the state approves just one text, get superior results. He asks if the country really needs 10,000 school districts? He's not advocating a federal takeover, mind you, but the states really ought to look into the issue.

Local control is important? Students are different? Polikoof pooh-poohs both ideas, and he points to Success Academy and KIPP, where teachers are expected to comply with the school-approved program. But that's a lousy example-- Success Academy is quite brutal in blocking and pushing out students and families that don't comply with their model. They pick their one size, and instead of insisting that it fits all, they only teach the students that it does fit.

Ultimately Polikoff concludes that standards have done all they can do (which, you may recall, is hardly anything) and it's time to change the system to one that, as I understand his point, is even more standardized, compliance-centered, and one-size-fits-ally than the Core tried to make it. There are so many reasons this is a lousy idea, but one of the biggest problems with a soul-crushing compliance-centered, professional-silencing system is that it has to be run by people who know what the One True Answer Is, and who are always right. I'm betting zero dollars on that.

Mike Petrilli: Stay the Course on National Standards

No surprises here. Petrilli agrees that "there's little evidence such progress has happened at scale" but he adds one word-- yet. Because if we just stay the course...

Petrilli offers what I'd call a slightly altered and therefor incorrect explanation of the Core, calling it "essentially lists of what students should know and be able to do" as they move through school, except I'd argue there is no "what they should know" in the Core-- just "skills" they are to demonstrate. The content hollowness of the Core has always been one of its major flaws. He also attaches the whole "college and career readiness" thing-- "The Common Core itself was explicit that young people who met its expectations would indeed be ready for what comes after high school." It did like to make that promise, but what was always missing was a shred of evidence that the standards "would indeed be ready." And one of the things that hasn't happened in the last decade is that colleges have not been sending up flares saying, "Wow! These incoming freshpersons are so very ready!!" As for the "career" part? That was always a late addition, recognizing that it was bad optics to leave those folks out-- but the Core has never pretended to be connected to career and work world stuff at all.

In Petrilli's alternate universe history, the Core "led to higher-quality and more rigorous asessments." But it didn't, and even reformsters have come to recognize that the Core-aligned Big Standardized Tests were junk. The reformster argument is that the combo of standards and testing forced schools to raise their standards. Nope-- it caused schools to focus a whole lot of time and effort on test prep, st first chasing the notion that meeting the standards would cause test scores to go up, and when that didn't happen, shifting to straight-on test practice and test prep.

Petrilli also sees the road forward as pushing top-down approved curriculum materials, with coaching for teachers, and then maybe we'll see the NAEP scores go up-- whatever that would mean.Kepp on the Common Core initiaitve, but add some curricular steering as well. Remember ten years ago when disruptors kept saying, "No! No! The Core is not dictating curriculum! You can still do that part-- these are just standards and guidelines to help you with that." Well, they take it back.

Bonus Round: Michael W. Kirst: In California, Common Core Has Not Failed


Tom Loveless made Kirst, a former California State Board of Education member, sad. He's in another parallel universe, and from there he wants to dispatch three rebuttals to the mean things Loveless wrote.

First, the NAEP is a lousy measure of student progress, but the SBA is awesome. He is half right. His description of the SBA is, well, optimistic.

California uses the Smarter Balanced computer adaptive assessment that includes extended responses where students must defend their answers and complete an hour-long performance exam that requires evaluating evidence and solving a problem.

Well, it uses some standardized test format stuff to pretend to do those things. It's true that some writing items are scored locally, but we're still talking a narrow test with limited range, highly coachable and unlikely to tell us anything about critical thinking or any subject matter that isn't math or ELA. Arguing that it's better than NAEP is like debating whether you'd rather be mugged with a knife or a club.

Second, Kirst wants you to know that some SBA scores went up. In third and fourth grade. Which is swell, but if those gains are lost in later grades, what exactly are we getting excited about?

Third, Kirst wants you to know that California didn't really have ten years because it took them a while to get up to speed, what with new standards and the great recession of 2008, etc. And he has surveys that say that teachers are getting in the Core swing of things. And more better aligned materials.

Works

The problem in all four instances is the definition of "works," which is "gets better scores on that one Big Standardized Test we give every year." Does getting a higher score mean they'll do better at college or in a job? Nobody knows, but there's no evidence that it might. Do students who get a thorough Core soaking go on to lead healthier, happier, more productive lives? Does it make them smarter? Are they better citizens who would, for instance, not drink bleach just because a powerful adult tells them to?

Common Core failed for a variety of reasons. Top-down implementation--especially when the people who designed the damn thing don't even stick around to help with or oversee the implementation-- is doomed to failure. The Core was assembled and promoted by amateurs, and has no research base-- including any research on whether or not universal standards improve education. The Core has been rewritten "in the field" a gazillion times, to the point that nobody who talks about the Core is talking about the same thing as anyone else. The Core wanted to be a one size fits all answer to a question it couldn't even answer--

The Core was used as a way to avoid the big question instead of answering it. What are schools supposed to do? Instead of talking about that, Core promoters just skipped right over it to say, "Well, school is supposed to teach these standards so that they can be measured by these tests." The Core boxed out 80% of the school curriculum and did a lousy job with the math and English is tried to address, and it set the stage for a bunch of bad actors to try some other forms of disruption on the school system, like "score " public schools so they could be labeled failing, and milk students for data that would ostensibly measure their worth as future meat widgets.

The Common Core was a failure by every measure, and those places where folks are saying, "Look, we're doing it and it's great" are simply animating the Core's dead skin with their own locally produced ideas. At this point nobody is doing exactly what David Coleman and Bill Gates wanted them to, which is great. But it would be even greater if we could stop pretending that it was ever anything except a waste of money and time.

Remotely Teaching Humanity

It is one of the more arresting headlines I've seen in a while. Atop a new blog at Inside Higher Ed, we find this question:

Can remote teaching make us more human?

Well, now.

Short answer.

No.

Slightly less short answer.

I suppose that anything can make us more human if we use the experience to reflect on our humanity.

Long answer.

The authors, Caroline Levander and Peter Decherney, are a pair of humanities professors "turned online learning leaders," so at least this isn't just a pair of ed tech company execs pushing their wares. But I'm not sure they make their case here. And their opening paragraph doesn't build my confidence:

Is online teaching a wasteland of impersonal interaction, dehumanizing rote learning and impoverished communication? Or is it education’s holy grail, equalizing opportunity and access, opening up classrooms to the masses, and now ensuring that the world can continue to be educated while a pandemic closes public spaces, including schools and universities?

The answer, of course, is neither. It's not a wasteland, but with the digital divide yawning widely and wildly, it is certainly not "equalizing opportunity and access."

After noting the obvious exodus to online education, they offer some historical perspective, mentioning correspondence courses, radio course and television courses. I'm not entirely sure why, unless the point is that we've tried this kind of stuff before, and it has never really caught hold and lasted. But I don't think that's where they're going.

They wrap up the survey with early online universities, MOOCs, and "celebrity professors teaching blockbuster courses to throngs of passive learners." Their point here is that while this "broadcast-style teaching" has been going on, research and technology has been creating "a mature field of online learning that fosters interactive, engaged pedagogy." Presumably this field is going to be the subject of this ongoing blog; I look forward to reading because I'm going to need convincing. But moving on...

They note that universities have been moving to offer all their courses remotely in short time, with everyone curious about the technical aids available. And now we arrive at their central point:

The biggest revelations, however, have been about the human not the technical dimension of teaching. While teaching is physically remote, we are learning that it can be much more personal than on-campus teaching. Remote teaching requires us to become more aware of the human condition of our students.

I'm cringing a little now. Levander and Decherney acknowledge that the business of coming to college allows students to leave their home situations behind, but still-- are you telling me that ordinarily college professors are truly that oblivious to the "human conditions of their students"? Because if they are, they're doing it wrong.

The authors also suggest that faculty reveal their humanity by fumbling for the mute button or asking for technical help or having the pets, children and wallpaper of their homes appear on camera. And then the finish:

The 21st-century version of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home that we have created this spring appears to be less institutionalized, less curated and less controlled than what came before. It also appears to be more human and more accommodating -- more tailored to the primal rhythms of student and faculty life, to who we really are when push comes to shove. For many, this is a great loss, and for others it is eye-opening. But one thing is clear: we aren’t going back to business as usual any time soon, and education may become more human as a result.

There's a lot to unpack here. First, I'm not sure how accurate this is-- less curated and controlled seems unlikely when you are personally controlling the device through which everything gets into your course. Every video or image or digitized anything will be selected and, well, curated by you, the professor. Nor am I sure what they mean by "more accommodating." Asynchronous instruction online is more accommodating (students can watch at their convenience), but then we're back to the broadcast-based that the authors said this was a contrast to. If we're doing synchronous instruction, then it's no more accommodating than any other class that is scheduled for a specific hour. I suppose you could be accommodating by saying, "I'm going to be in my zoom classroom all day-- just stop by when it works for you," but that seems not very accommodating for professors.

And at the end, I'm still not sure where the "more human" comes from. Because you can see one small piece of the student's home? Because you can see their faces, sort of? This whole post just keeps driving me back to the same question-- just how inhuman and institutionalized does your regular classroom have to be that this seems better? Because an awful lot of the remote teaching experience I'm hearing about from K-12s is more like this post ("Remote teaching isn't even remotely teaching"). Do you never look at your students, check to see their body language, their facial expressions? Do you never have them write anything that involves any of their own personal experience or background? Do you never talk to them? And how hard is it to maintain a steely professorial wall so that none of your own humanity shows?

Maybe it's the difference between K-12 and college educators. K-12 study teaching, and college profs mostly don't. College students are more grown and better at not letting their raw young selves hang out all over the place. Universities are okay with putting a few hundred students in one giant classroom.

Or maybe when Levander and Decherney will, in the weeks ahead, unveil some specifics that help me better get what they're saying. But mostly at this point I'm thinking that all of this human stuff was completely doable when you were in your classroom, and in fact should be more doable for a college professor who is not tied to a classroom for seven straight hours five days a week. It will still be doable when your online courses have gone the way of instruction via radio broadcast.

MI: Court Says Students Have Right To Actual Education

Periodically the courts get involved in the question of what states are actually supposed to provide. Back in 2017 a case went all the way to the Supremes that was designed (no case gets before SCOTUS without being carefully prepared and selected and curated by a bunch of Major Players) to get at the question of how hard a district had to work on that whole IEP thing-- how much education is "enough"? SCOTUS rejected a low bar for students with disabilities, a decision that shored up IDEA (and which may be weighing on some minds as schools try to solve the problems of crisis education at a distance).

But Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District was about IEPs in Colorado. Other cases have been less encouraging.

Way back in 2014, the court of appeals in Michigan ruled that the state's obligation to educate students didn't mean that the state had to, you know, actually educate anybody. As long as they spent some number of dollars on something called education, that was good enough. That suit involved the Highland Park school district, a part of greater Detroit's school system, and in 2012 it was handed over to the Leona Group to operate as a charter. The charter operator's promptly ran up a deficit and were taken to court to answer for doing a lousy job of educating students. It was at that point that the court said, "Nah, as long as they are running a building called a 'school' and offering 'classes' in it, it doesn't matter if they suck." So much for charter school accountability in Michigan. The state supreme court refused to hear the case.

In 2016, some Detroit students tried again, and that started out poorly, with the state (under Governor Rick "Public Ed Should Just Die" Snyder) arguing that Detroit students have no right to basic literacy, and therefor the state has no obligation to provide any such education. The federal district judge bought that argument. That was back in 2016; now the case finally has found its was to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which delivered a narrow win, but a win nonetheless.

From the majority opinion written by Judge Eric Clay:

After employing the reasoning of these Supreme Court cases and applying the Court’s substantive due process framework, we recognize that the Constitution provides a fundamental right to a basic minimum education. In short, without the literacy provided by a basic minimum education, it is impossible to participate in our democracy.

Clay is a Clinton appointee. Eric Murphy, the Trump appointee to the court and a member of the Federalist Society, argued that the Constitution doesn't give anybody any right to any education. Murphy clerked for Justice Kennedy, and served as the Ohio state solicitor, where he opposed marriage equality and defended a major voter purge. Just in case you're still wondering whether elections matter or not.

Just to be clear-- the decision is saying that the students have standing to pursue the lawsuit. Where the lawsuit itself ultimately lands is yet to be seen. The state itself is still fighting back on the grounds that Detroit schools are no longer state-run, so it's a local problem. So this story isn't over yet. However, to have a federal court state that students actually have a right to an education, however minimal and basic, is certainly better news than we've seen in a while. Stay tuned.

Internet Accessibility, Arne Duncan, and Dreaming Big

Arne Duncan penned an op-ed in the Washington Post this week; the piece is notable because it is not baloney, but addresses one of the issues that the great pandemic pause has brought to the fore-- internet accessibility.

Duncan notes that currently if you don't have internet, you don't have school. And he notes that while internet providers stepped forward with heartwarming offers of free internet for poor families, that turned out to come with a little asterisk about debt and financial suitability. He doesn't it, but this is probably related to the fact that in many cases the "free" internet  was actually a sort of free introductory offer-- 60 or 90 days free if you've sign up for their internet service, and if you forget to cancel in time--voila, you're now a paying-full-price customer. In short, many ISPs have treated this issue like a marketing opportunity and not a chance for do-goodery. Duncan notes that some public pressure in some areas has helped fix this.

But that's only the tip of the internet iceberg. He talks about getting internet to all of Chicago, which is not a simple thing, but is probably easier than the kinds of problems we face in rural areas like mine, where some families will never have internet access of any sort-- wi-fi or phone-- until some major infrastructure is built.

Internet connectivity in my neck of the woods, and other necks like it, has always been wonky. My old high school's most effective barrier against student smartphone use is that signal reception in the school is terrible (the other side of that is that students are constantly looking to charge during the day because signal-seeking phones use up charges quickly). One of the elementary schools in my old district depends on a satellite dish for their internet connection. When my wife had a zoom staff meeting with her school about managing their distance learning program, the principal's connection to the meeting kept failing. Back in the pre-pandemic days, smart teachers knew that on days they've planned an internet-based lesson, they must have a Plan B in case of a not-improbable failure.

It's not just the isolated and less-than-wealthy districts. I am told by a couple of former students who now teach in the area that Fairfax County Schools in Virginia are the fancy-pants rich district that everyone else aspires to be, but the Fairfax head of IT just resigned because their attempt to shift to online learning failed spectacularly not once, but twice.

Duncan brings up the FCC's Keep America Connected Pledge that was signed by 700 companies. Duncan suggests that some FCC funds should be given flexibility so that schools can buy hot spots, extend infrastructure, and generally get more students connected.

That's not a terrible idea, but we can dream bigger. The current situation underlines what many have argued in the past-- internet access should be a public utility. Here's a piece looking at the question that takes us to the question of whether the internet is a right or a privilege, but as that infrastructure starts to crumble under current demands, I'd argue that it's something the country needs to function. Like roads or running water, it's a service to individual humans, but it also keeps the wheels of society turning well enough to make life easier for everyone.

A look at the water in places like Flint, Michigan tells us that public utilities come with issues of their own (though they also tell us about the problems in letting private companies run public utilities). But if we want--if we need--the entire country to be connected, private companies will never do it. It's the same old problem-- there's too little money to be made running fiber optic cable back up into the holler.

One of the oldest and continuing problems with web-ed-tech is that in large chunks of the country, it just doesn't work reliably. And now that most schools really need it to work reliably everywhere, the fact that it doesn't is just becoming more obvious.

Voice Cloning: One More Way Teachers Can Be Replaced

So, Venture Beat is a website touts itself as the leading source for transformative tech news and events that provide deep context to help business leaders make smart decisions and stay on top of breaking news.

That includes "sponsored" news like this very special piece from Lovo, a Berkeley-based company whose sub-title is "Love Your Voice" and whose co-founder explains their mission as "Making human voice scalable, ubiquitous, and accessible." That co-founder is Tom (Seung Kun) Lee, who has been COO for Orbis, done digital marketing for LG CNS, and worked for MuleSoft-- and that's all just since 2016. He got his Business Administration and Management degree from U of C, Berkley in 2016; it took him six years but that may be because it appears he took 2013-2015 off to be a Squad Leader in the Republic of Korea Army.

Anyway. Lee is quoted heavily in this advertisement for Voice Cloning which claims that this awesome AI-powered tech is "becoming the new normal."

And just in time, too. The "global elearning  market" was going to hit total market value of $325 billion by 2025, driven by, among other things, "the need  to educate people at low cost." Need? Whose need is that exactly, and is this "need" like "I need to eat food or I will die" or more like "I need a new iPhone because my old one is now six months old." Or maybe "need" like "I need to buy a new vacation home soon--how can I cut my business costs." The article also cites "the proven convenience and effectiveness online learning." That's not a typo, but a quote. Of course, that proven effectiveness has never been proven, but this is an advertisement, not news.

Anyway, the global elearning market was going to blow up, but then Covid-19 happened and now who knows what the projections are? And the "the need to go online collided with the education system, K to college, in a big way. Public school teachers? Unequipped to handle it. Teachers had to become "content creators."

"Educators are not professional podcasters or YouTubers,” says Tom Lee, Co-Founder at LOVO. “They’re not used to recording or speaking into the mic.”

Well, that's not universally true, but Lee is trying to sell something here, so stay with him. You may ask, couldn't teachers just put up power point slides? Well, sure, says Lee, but voice is really important (he quotes Maya Angelou). But scripting and recording whole lessons takes a lot of time, and-- seriously-- he also presents as a "simple fact" that "humans get tired easily when reading a script. Yes, there's a major problem here. We'll get back to that.

But what if a computer could read and record a script in your actual voice!!?? You record a few minutes of your own voice for a sample, and then the voice is cloned and any text can be turned into an audio version with your own voice!!

This is actually being don e in California, somewhere, and on online platforms like Udemy and Udacity. Seriously.

"Digital learning will be the new normal," says Lee, who is trying to make money from it. "Voice cloning isn't just a fad, and it's not going to disappear any time soon," says Lee, whose business plan depends on voice cloning not disappearing any time soon. "This trend is not something you can choose to avoid," says the guy whose income depends on your not avoiding it. "How you address the new normal is the critical part," says the guy whose financial success depends on convincing a bunch of people that this is a new normal and they should respond to it by giving him money.

This is the classic ed tech method-- a sales pitch masquerading as a prediction of the future.

The scary part is that you know there are some Education Leaders out there who are thinking, "Awesome! Once I get Mrs. McTeachalot to record her lessons and write out her scripts, I don't have to employ her ever again. In fact, once I've had her voice cloned, I can get a class created by some underpaid intern but it will still sound just like her!! This gets me one step closer to replacing those damned expensive humans!"

I have no idea whether the cloned voice sounds like the real thing or if it sounds like some sad imitation of a ghost trapped in a tin can. A quick Google shows that Lee is certainly not the only person in the voice cloning biz. The BBB now warns that phone scammers can collect and clone your voice and use it to scam your loved ones, so that's scary. The FTC had a workshop on deepfakery, which includes voice cloning as well. So it's clear that voice cloning is at least the future of criminal activity. I don't know that it's the future of teaching activity.

But I do know one thing-- all across the US, on every normal school day, millions of teachers stand up and deliver lessons without any script. They just talk right out of their highly trained brains. I suppose some might get mic-shy when faced with the prospect of recording and want to write a little something down, but generally speaking, teachers are good at generally speaking. That whole "you need a computer to read the script for you" pre-supposes a script-- and who needs them?

So I'm not sure who actually needs this magical AI-powered software genii-- unless it's that guy who dreams of running an internet school without any meat widget employees. But actual teachers in actual schools--even during the great pandemic pause? No thanks.

Recovery Commission Targets Gutting Of Public School

While Trump has announced a variety of groups he wants to gather together to charter a pandemic recovery for the nation, there's one group that is already on the job-- and their plans for public education suck.

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission-- doesn't that sound grand? It sounds like a real official government thing, only it isn't, exactly. It's the project of the Heritage Foundation, a right-tilted thinky tank that has been a major policy player in DC since the days of Ronald Reagan. They've successfully pushed a bunch of policies over the decades, with their one fumble coming in health care-- these are the guys who designed what became Romneycare that became Obamacare, thereby transforming a hyper-conservative policy idea into a policy that conservatives vowed to destroy. If you have wondered "Why don't conservatives come up with their own health care plan?" the answer is that they did-- and it's Obamacare. Oh, politics.

This guy.

The Heritage Foundation has joined the Federalist Society in serving as a staffing arm of the Trump administration, and had a whole list of appointee "suggestions" ready when Trump won. Which may explain why some coverage of the NCRC includes phrases like "will work with the White House on ways to have a smooth reopening of the country when it’s time."

The National Coronavirus Recovery Commission (subtitled "Saving Lives and Livelihoods") is composed of seventeen "heavy hitters" including former governor George Allen, retire Cato chief John Allison, some Heritage Foundation people like president Kay James and--

Well, look. It's Kevin Chavous, the big cheese at K12, the 800 pound gorilla of the cyber school world, the one funded by junk bond king Michael Milken and founded by a McKinsey alum (anoter early investor-- Dick DeVos). They've had more than their share of messes (like the time the NCAA decided K12 credits don't count). But the Trump administration has been good times for them. And Chavous used to help run the American Federation for Children, Betsy DeVos's dark money ed reform group, from which he called for the privatization of post-Katrina New Orleans education. Do I need to add that he has no actual education background?

NCRC issued some recommendations yesterday, and much has already spurred discussion (particularly the "get rid of all the rules" parts), but we're just going to look at the education piece, which, given what I've told you so far, should come as no surprise:

States should immediately restructure per-pupil K–12 education funding to provide education savings accounts (ESAs) to families, enabling them to access their child’s share of state per-pupil funding to pay for online courses, online tutors, curriculum, and textbooks so that their children can continue learning. Students are currently unable to enter the K–12 public schools their parents’ taxes support. They should be able to access a portion of those funds for the remainder of the school year in the form of an ESA.

ESAs are super-vouchers, a voucher that let parents spend public tax dollars with little oversight or accountability. It's a bad policy idea for a variety of reasons, but this implementation would be particularly brutal if what they're seriously proposing is to strip public schools of all funding for te remainder of the year. Seriously?? Just finish the year with zero dollars because we're just going to hand out the rest of your operating budget as vouchers?

It also appears that the NCRC has assumed that no schools are actually doing anything right now, that no students in the US have continued learning. Perhaps the craziest juxtaposition here is to put the plug for online resources (you know-- like K12) with the assertion that families deserve money back because their children can't enter the building, as if the building is te most critical part of education.

The one actual lie here is the implication that the parents would just be getting back the money they put in for the schools "their parents' taxes support." But of course all taxpayers support the school, and perhaps the rest of the taxpayers might want their investment to be maintained for the remainder of the year, the staff--who are still working at teaching students--to be paid and the buildings to be maintained.

These guys are either too lazy to pick up a phone and find out what is actually going on in schools, or too greedy to care. But they are not yet done making terrible recommendations:

Additionally, state restrictions on teacher certification should be lifted immediately to free the supply of online teachers and tutors, allowing anyone with a bachelor’s degree to provide K–12 instruction online.

Because if cyber schools are going to cash in, they need access to cheap labor. The recommendations go on to allude to research that "suggests" that teacher certification gets no better results than any shmoe, and of course by results they mean tests scores, because part of the point of the Big Standardized Test is to reduce the aim of teaching, to McDonaldize them job so that any shmoe can do it and employers can pay shmoe-level wages. Ka-ching.

In keeping with the rest of the recommendations, this isn't about helping the country recover so much as it's about turning it into a free market wild west where entrepreneurs can cash in. This is some top grade amateur hour bullshit here. Shut down the schools, give the money to families so that we can pitch our education-flavored goods which, incidentally, are staffed with non-qualified meat widgets, the better for us to cash in. And if a pandemic helps us push the replacement of human-centered professional public ed with private screen-centered amateur run education-flavored businesses? Well, ka-ching, baby.