Trump Back DeVos On Soaking Scammed Students

Trump has mostly ignored DeVos and the education department (insert joke about Trump and education here), but he's now decided to jump in, with both feet, right onto the backs of people scammed by for-profit colleges.

This story has been dragging on for-freakin-ever. In 2017, 18 states and DC sued DeVos over her stated intention of ignoring/rewriting the Borrower Defense to Repayment rule from 2016, which was supposed to help out those students who were being crushed by debt they'd incurred so they could attend fraudulent for-profit colleges. While that dragged on, the department "accidentally" kept collecting debt, in some cases attaching paychecks of students. The "accident" was egregious enough that the court found DeVos and the department in contempt and fined them bigly for ignoring the injunction to stop the collecting.

Judge Sallie Kim was pretty cranky when she offered the October ruling (“I’m not sending anyone to jail yet, but it’s good to know I have that ability.” So she was not any happier in December when it turned out that the department had been collecting-- against the injunction-- from not just 16,000 students, but from over 45,000. So, a more-than-double oopsy.

DeVos has been plenty clear in her feelings about debt relief, siding whole-heartedly the corporate interests. She has thoroughly choked off the public service loan forgiveness program as a prelude to proposing to kill it entirely. Called in before the House Education Committee to explain why she was still dragging her feet on loan forgiveness for the scammed students, she offered a very DeVosian quote:

I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.

The very idea of people borrowing money and then being excused from paying it back really, really rubs her the wrong way. She hates it. So she wrote new rules, under which hardly anyone would get loan forgiveness.

And Congress finally said, "Enough."

The House and Senate used the Congressional Review Act to overturn the DeVos rule. The rule was opposed by 85 groups, including nine veterans' groups (veterans, with their tasty GI benefits, are popular targets of predatory for-profits), and so DeVos managed to spark actual bipartisan support for undoing her handiwork.

So a few weeks ago, during the magical hope-nobody's-looking hour of Friday afternoon, Trump unleashed his very first Presidential veto, once again suggesting that he is perhaps not exactly a great friend to US veterans. The House and Senate need a 2/3rds vote to override, and while that is a safe bet in the House, but far less certain in the Senate. Meanwhile, a group of US citizens and veterans who thought they were taking steps to build a better future find themselves in the midst of a pandemic, saddled with debt and a future made more uncertain by His Royal Hairness. Call your Congressperson.

ICYMI: Fathers Day Edition (6/21

I've had my hands full elsewhere, and have been spending refreshingly little time on line, but I still have a few goodies to pass along. Remember, sharing is caring,

What Teachers Want

American Education Research Journal has some research about what it takes to attract and retain teachers. A fun conversation starter.

Looking for the Missing  

NBC News has the story of Detroit teachers who went looking for students who went missing when schools shut down.

Charter Schools Tap Coronarelief

Erica Green at the NYT with a story of how some charter schools are wearing their "business" hats when money is involved.

Netflix billionaire building secret luxury teacher retreat

Reed "Who needs elected school boards" Hastings has another fun eduproject. Rich amateurs messing in education-- what could possibly go wrong?

What Anti-racist teachers do differently

The Atlantic with a cool story about How It's Done

The Beginning of the End for Testing?

Valeria Strauss with some analysis about where we are right now with the whole Big Standardized Test love affair.

Standardized Tests Increase School Segregation  

Steven Singer explains how standardized testing adds to our segregation problems.

Arrested Development: How Police Ended Up In Schools

Have You Heard (the only podcast we actually follow here at the Curmudgucation Institute) takes a look at how we ended up with the halls of school being policed like the streets of a city.

On Comparing Education Spending Across Time   

Nobody explains and clarifies the esoteric issues of school funding better than Mark "Jersey Jazzman" Weber. Here's a guide to the meaning and use of some of those figures folks like to throw around.

Ask Dads How To Reimagine Public Schools   

Nancy Bailey offers a Fathers Day look at what fathers would like to see in the world of reimagined public education.

Strummin' On The Ol Banjo  

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at issues that music teachers face, and how they are really some of the same issues all teachers face.

No, Software Still Can't Grade Student Essays

One of the great white whales of computer-managed education and testing is the dream of robo-scoring, software that can grade a piece of writing as easily and efficiently as software can score multiple choice questions. Robo-grading would be swift, cheap, and consistent. The only problem after all these years is that it still can’t be done.

Still, ed tech companies keep making claims that they have finally cracked the code. One of the people at the forefront of debunking these claims is Les Perelman. Perelman was, among other things, the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT before he retired in 2012. He has long been a critic of standardized writing testing; he has demonstrated his ability to predict the score for an essay by looking at the essay from across the room (spoiler alert: it’s all about the length of the essay). In 2007, he gamed the SAT essay portion with an essay about how “American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success.”

He’s been a particularly staunch critic of robo-grading, debunking studies and defending the very nature of writing itself. In 2017, at the invitation of the nation’s teachers union, Perelman highlighted the problems with a plan to robo-grade Australia’s already-faulty national writing exam. This has annoyed some proponents of robo-grading (said one writer whose study Perelman debunked, “I’ll never read anything Les Perelman ever writes”). But perhaps nothing that Perelman has done has more thoroughly embarrassed robo-graders than his creation of BABEL.

All robo-grading software starts out with one fundamental limitation—computers cannot read or understand meaning in the sense that human beings do. So software is reduced to counting and weighing proxies for the more complex behaviors involved in writing. In other words, the computer cannot tell if your sentence effectively communicates a complex idea, but it can tell if the sentence is long and includes big, unusual words.

To highlight this feature of robo-graders, Perelman, along with Louis Sobel, Damien Jiang and Milo Beckman, created BABEL (Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator), a program that can generate a full-blown essay of glorious nonsense. Given the key word “privacy,” the program generated an essay made of sentences like this:

Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness.

The whole essay was good for a 5.4 out of 6 from one robo-grading product. 

BABEL was created in 2014, and it has been embarrassing robo-graders ever since. Meanwhile, vendors keep claiming to have cracked the code; four years ago, the College Board, Khan Academy and Turnitin teamed up to offerautomatic scoring of your practice essay for the SAT.

Mostly these software companies have learned little. Some keep pointing to research that claims that humans and robo-scorers get similar results when scoring essays—which is true, when one uses scorers trained to follow the same algorithm as the software rather than expert readers. And then there’sthis curious piece of research from the Educational Testing Service and CUNY. The opening line of the abstract notes that “it is important for developers of automated scoring systems to ensure that their systems are as fair and valid as possible.” The phrase “as possible” is carrying a lot of weight, but the intent seems good. But that’s not what the research turns out to be about. Instead, the researchers set out to see if they could catch BABEL-generated essays. In other words, rather than try to do our jobs better, let’s try to catch the people highlighting our failure. The researchers reported that they could, in fact, catch the BABEL essays with software; of course, one could also catch the nonsense essays with expert human readers.

Partially in response, the current issue of The Journal of Writing Assessment presents more of Perelman’s work with BABEL, focusing specifically on e-rater, the robo-scoring software used by ETS. BABEL was originally set up to generate 500-word essays. This time, because e-rater likes length as an important quality of writing, longer essays were created by taking two short essays generated by the same prompt words and just shuffling the sentences together. The findings were similar to earlier BABEL research.

The software did not care about argument or meaning. It did not notice some egregious grammatical mistakes. Length of essays matters, along with length and number of paragraphs (which ETS calls “discourse elements” for some reason). It favored the liberal use of long and infrequently used words. All of this leans directly again the tradition of lean and focused writing. It favors bad writing. And it still gives high scores to BABEL’s nonsense. 

The ultimate argument about Perelman’s work with BABEL is that his submission are “bad faith writing.” That may be, but the use of robo-scoring is bad faith assessment. What does it even mean to tell a student, “You must make a good faith attempt to communicate ideas and arguments to a piece of software that will not understand any of them.” 

ETS claims that the primary emphasis is on “your critical thinking and analytical writing skills,” yet e-rater, which does not in any way measure either, provides half the final score; how can this be called good faith assessment? 

Robo-scorers are still beloved by the testing industry because they are cheap and quick and allow the test manufacturers to market their product as one that measures more high level skills than simply picking a multiple choice answer. But the great white whale, the software that can actually do the job, still eludes them, leaving students to deal with scraps of pressed whitefish.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

AEI And The Commodification Of Education

The American Enterprise Institute comes from that part of the ed reform spectrum devoted to free market approaches. But a new report from AEI really pushes the boundaries of treating education as a commodity like a house or a piece of jewelry. Really.

The report is entitled "An Appraisal Market for K-12 Education" and it's authored by Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, who also pops up at The Heartland Institute,  and is part of the "team" at EdChoice (what used to be the Friedman Foundation), and Education Next, and Fox Business, and even ALEC, where we find her pushing education savings accounts (aka super-vouchers). She earned a BA in political science from Hollins University (2005) and a Master of Teaching from the University of Virginia in 2008, at which point she went to work for the Heritage Foundation. So you've good a pretty good idea where she's coming from.

The "paper" (honestly, it has just one "source" in the "endnotes," and dressed up with a snappy stock photo, it would easily pass for a "blog post") is part of a series the Frederick Hess is putting together  for "sketching a new conservative education agenda." Let me just cast a vote to say that Burke's notion should not be part of anybody's new education agenda.

Burke starts out with a problematic analogy-- "Think about the last time you bought or sold a pricey item. Chances are you had the item appraised by an independent appraisal firm to provide peace of mind to both buyer and seller." Her specific examples-- houses and jewelry and antiques and cars and boats.

Basically, any costly expense with a high potential for information asymmetry has an associated appraisal market.

You can see where she's headed. Education is expensive. "Families," she argues, "should be able to easily acquire real-time, external audits of their child's learning."

This has always been a missing piece of the free-market education crowd-- parents should be able to go shopping in an education "marketplace," their selection aided by clear data about the relative quality of their choices. Burke is offering a variation on that theme-- let parents have money to hire an appraiser in the as-yet-non-existent marketplace of education quality appraisers.

There are several problems here.

Education is not a commodity, not a thing that that can be weighed and measured for value like a truckload of pork shoulders or sheets of plywood. Education is a process, a relationship, a human quality that takes on different values in different contexts. It mostly exists inside the heads of the students, and as such is largely immeasurable. Appraising an education is like appraising a human being--only barely doable in a narrow context like a specific job. In fact, because an education becomes part of who a person is, it's very much like appraising a human being, which means very subjective and ethically suspect.

Education is not a car or a house. Often its value or effectiveness is net revealed until years after the fact. The closest analogy she hits is antiques--if you were talking about an appraiser who could look at a brand new object and predict what its value will be in 100 years.

Information asymmetry is, of course, a feature of a free market, on purpose. Almost nobody who is in the selling biz takes the position of, "We have far more information about what we are selling than you do, so we're going to make it all transparent for you." If you're selling, you are doing your best to hide information behind a shiny curtain of marketing. (Hence my saying that the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.)

The shape of "learning" is huge and multidimensional and we can't even agree on which parts are most important. We have suffered through two decades of a bad solution to the problem, the policies that have said "We have no idea how to fully measure an education, so we'll just measure something and pretend that it tells us everything." Policy makers couldn't wrap their heads around the size and depth and dimension of an entire continental ecosystem, so they collected elephant toe clippings and weighed them, pretending that this produced useful data.

Burke wants to separate the appraisal of education from the providers of education, but education has already suffered from entirely too many amateurs tromping around. This is not a problem unique to education; the people who understand a sector best are often the people who work in it.

But Burke argues that appraisers are necessary for parents to hold providers accountable, which in the free market argument means "to vote with their feet." This notion that foot-based voting will have any effect on anything is simply not supported by reality. The notion that free-market choiciness is more effective than actual democratic processes or the ability to call officials on the phone is hard to make an argument for. Virtually every free-market business hopes for, plans for, structures for getting some people to vote with their feet. Every business plan separates the population into groups-- people they hope to serve and people they hope not to serve. Read Robert Pondiscio's How The Other Half Learns to see Eva Moskowitz aggressively encourage some families to vote with their feet; many families decide that Success Academy is not for them, and not one of them causes Moskowitz to worry, "Maybe I'd better look at how I'd operating my schools."

The shift to free-market education that Burke and other free-marketeers argue for would require a whole discussion about changing the mission of public education to no longer involve a promise (however imperfectly kept) to educate every single child in the country.

Burke faults the Big Standardized Test for working accountability vertically, up to the state and federal bureaucrats. I'm more concerned that the BS Test substitutes a stunted, meagre view of what a good education should, and then doesn't even measure that well. But Burke's examples of companies that soft of kind of get at the job includes those that use their own cramped measures (Kaplan) or those that use the same BS Test results she faults (Great Schools).

There's much to disagree with in Burke's spare two pages, most notably the idea that education is a commodity. But her biggest, most glaring gap is that while she wishes that parents could purchase an independent appraisal of how well a school is doing, she offers no real ideas about what such an instrument could possibly look like. That's always been the missing link in education reform of all stripes. Sure, we can spot most of the schools at the extreme top and bottom--in fact, we can do it without the use of any fancy appraisal instruments. But the vast majority of schools are somewhere in the more complicated middle, serving a wide variety of stakeholders who all have a different set of expectations about what a great school would look like.

In fact, research suggests that parental choice is not even driven by how much students are learning, but by factors like location and extracurricular activities. But this is one of the disconnections in free  market education theory-- fans insist that parents should be trusted with making the choice of schools, but also insist that parents need the help of third-parties-for-hire to make that choice.

Education is not a slab of cheese for sale at the deli. It's not easily measured or weighed, and if the goal is to create accountability, instead of trying to make an accountability bank shot off of parents, why not come up with a system that helps the school identify and improve its problem areas, or if we wanted to be really crazy, a system that holds politicians and bureaucrats accountable for providing schools with full support.

Rebecca Friedrichs Still Hates The Teachers Unions

In 2014, Rebecca Friedrichs, after twenty-some years in the classroom, decided to go ahead and be the face of a lawsuit that would be derailed when Justice Scalia died. The court would eventually get to take their shot at unions with the Janus case. But while Friedrichs may have lost a lawsuit, she did manage to launch a career as a far-right Christianist spokesperson. She has done plenty of work for other folks, while pushing her own group, For Kids and Country.

If you want to catch a full catalog of the many people she objects to, you can catch her latest op-ed in the Washington Times, the right-wing outlet.

Yeah, this lady.

She's casting a wide net here, and she's come up with more old boots than actual fish. She starts by going after the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter. She does the standard nod to black lives while still All Lives Mattering it ("Again, don’t get me wrong. Black lives do matter! Indeed, every human life is sacred.") At the same time, she wants you to know that Black Lives Matter are Very Naughty:

But the organization named Black Lives Matter is not what it claims to be. Like the unions, it’s a Trojan horse of anti-American, anti-family beliefs masquerading as defenders of good.

Friedrichs needs to bring up the union because they are part of this whole anti-American plot. She notes that some historians disputed the project, but not the NEA.

Instead, the NEA coordinated directly with The New York Times, the Pulitzer Center, Southern Poverty Law Center and Black Lives Matter to put 1619 into the hands of educators and activists. Their goal? To assert a false but preferred narrative to advance a political agenda.

Then she connects this to other "pseudo-realities" being pushed onto "our culture." Fluid genders. Hysterical weak environmental claims. Families aren't the center of society, and and children don't respect authority. History is reframed to assault "our Judeo-Christian culture." Friedrichs gets increasingly wound up, calling the project rubbish. "How dare they!"

But her own grasp of history is weak.

The pilgrims sacrificed every earthly possession and their very lives to secure God-ordained liberties for every race, status and creed, guiding our Founders to their “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” They inspired a free constitutional republic based on biblical principles that’s a beacon of hope in a very dark world.

Well, no. There are things to admire about the Pilgrims, but their desire to establish freedom for every race, status and creed is strictly imaginary. Exhibit A: the tendency of the Puritan-led Massachusetts Bay Colony to execute Quakers who came to proselytize. Nor was the republic based on Biblical principals.

But darkness always seeks to destroy light, so now our kids are forced to learn revisionist tales promoting atheism, racial division and ignorance of truth.

The union is part of a coalition aiming to destroy America. Really.

The NEA, The New York Times, their coalition and those they’ve indoctrinated have fallen for the devil’s oldest trick — pride. Fancying themselves “progressives” they’re stuck in the dark ages. Their false history actually subverts the progress we’ve made — creating hatred and divisions where there’s been healing, and ripping open old wounds and ignorance most Americans have overcome. They’re retraumatizing and legitimizing a victimhood mentality, forcing a chip onto the shoulders of black Americans and heaping mountains of undeserved guilt on those of white Americans. It’s dangerous; it’s destructive; and it’s dishonest. It’s also ripping our country apart.

Whoa. So either you can see what's wrong with all that, or I can't hope to explain it to you. B ut "forcing a chip onto the shoulder of black Americans" is a pretty astonishing reframing of US history. Yup-- Black folks would have been perfectly happy with how things were going if te left hadn'g somehow forced them to get all cranky.

But I brought this piece up to make one point. Back in 2014, it might have been possible to think, "Well, you know, people who oppose fair share might kind of have a point, and maybe she's just a lady who has a legitimate objection to having to give money to a union she disagrees with, and not some sort of rabid union-hater looking for any excuse to bust unions and their political power." Years later, she's clearly that second, union-hating one. It's nice to give people the benefit of the doubt, but they don't always deserve it. Friedrichs has turned out to be what she always appeared to be-- a shill for the folks who want to get rid of the union because A) unions lead to the help getting uppity and B)  because they tend to support the Democratic party, they are an obstacle to permanent GOP rule.

To Those Of You Worried About The Covid Slide

Dear concerned policy makers, bureaucrats, and edu-wonks:

Ever since NWEA, the testing manufacturer that promised it can read minds by measuring how long it takes students to pick a multiple choice answer, issued their report on the Covid-19 Slide, you have been freaking out a little because they hear you say that distance learning has been disastrous and if we do it again in the fall, we'll produce a generation of students too dumb to come in out of the rain.  Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to members of Congress has been experiencing bovine birth events in response to the report. I just want to make two quick points for you.

First, you don't need to freak out over the study. Because it's not so much a "study" as a rough best guess about how students might do on a single not-great standardized test of math and reading. On the other hand, you can freak out a little bit, because while the report is ludicrous, if you actually talk to teachers and students and families, you'll hear that distance disaster school is not great. But you really don't need to base any of your argument on NWEA's totally made up numbers.

Second. Let's pretend that the numbers aren't made up. Let's pretend that it's true that, due to the slide, students will lose 30% of a year's worth of math and 50% of as year's worth of reading. That would be super double-plus ungood.

Let me remind you of the 2015 study by CREDO, an organization that is pro-charter school, discovering that the average cyber-school student fell behind 180 days in math and 72 days in reading-- in other words, a loss of 100% of a year's worth of math and 40% in reading.

Some of you folks, like this pair of Congressional representatives, think that the numbers from the NWEA study are alarming enough that schools must absolutely get back into their traditional brick and mortar classrooms. I'm just asking-- if the numbers from NWEA are bad enough to require a shutdown of the whole distance crisis learning model, shouldn't the numbers for cyber-schools merit shutting those down as well? If you're concerned that the house is bursting into flames, why share some concern for the garage and barn that have been burning for over a decade?

ICYMI: Summer Vacation Edition (6/14)

Whatever summer vacation means this year, it has finally arrived at my house. Which mostly just means that my wife has shifted from working on things for this year to working on things for next year. Here are some things to read.

Predecessors Try To Fill Void Left By DeVos  

This is a strange little thing. First, that Duncan and Spelling see themselves as somehow way different from DeVos. Also, there's apparently an Old Secretary's Club, and DeVos is very not interested.

Yale Goes Test-Optional

Blame the corona pirates (that's what the Board of Directors calls the current pandemic), but this is the fifth ivy to dump the test for the next class. Susan Adams at Forbes has the story.

If Black Lives Matter, Then Let's Prove It By Fixing Our Schools  

An editorial from the Detroit Free Press points out the obvious-- you don't help launch lives that matter in underfunded, poorly maintained schools.

Teen Girls Organized Nashville's Largest Protest  

Speaking of students undertaking large projects. A great story of teens stepping up. At The Lily.

Teach for America 2020 Trainees To Enter Classroom With Only Tutoring Experience    

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at how TFA is managing to lower the bar even further.

Where's All These Woke White People Come From?   

Michael Harriot at The Root is one of the best writers out there, and this piece is Exhibit A. Thoughtful and nuanced and just a great piece of writing.

Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Are Going To Schools That Push Conversion Therapy  

Rebecca Klein at Huffington Post has an enraging story about some of the private schools that are scooping up taxpayer money. She'd previously shown how some of these schools discriminate against LGBTQ students; now it turns out that's not the worst of it.

University students aren't cogs in a market.   

This story is from Australia, but you'll recognize the issues in the discussion of why students deserve to get more education than simply being loaded wit skills that employers want them to have.  

How Betsy DeVos Is Using the Pandemic To Get What She Wants  

The story has been told in bits and pieces, but Jeff Bryant at Alternet steps back for the full picture of how DeVos is using this crisis to push her own agenda in education.