"Essential" My Aunt Fanny

At this point, the adjective "Orwellian" has been absolutely beaten to death (with "Kafkaesque" right behind it). But this latest Orwellian bullshit just pokes my last nerve with a sharp stick.

You would think that an "essential" worker would be the one that you want to take the greatest steps to protect and preserve. That person guarding the door while a fire-laced sharknado rages outside? They're absolutely essential, and we'd better make sure they gets whatever they need.

But under pandemic pretzel logic, that "essential" person is the first one who gets thrown out the door.

During the pandemess, "essential" has two important meanings. First, it means that those workers can't refuse to work just because they are, you know, worried about their lives or health. Second, it means that nobody in charge can be held accountable for anything bad that happens to them while they're on the front lines.

When Trump declared meat packers "essential," that wasn't a recognition and reward for their important contribution to society. It was a declaration that Grampa wants his steak and he doesn't want to hear damned excuses, whether you're a worker (I'd rather not get sick and/or die) or a boss (I'd rather not get sued for forcing people into unsafe conditions). There was no "We're going to invest in the resources necessary to protect you while you're out there." Just "get back to work."

In fact, a quick scan of "essential" workers reveals a list of the same folks who are regularly told they should happily work under lousy conditions for low pay.

It has been a stark, ugly look at how our society devalues humans. The steak is valuable and important; the guy who butchers it, not so much. Amazon is essential, but not the workers who make it actually function. Meat widgets are a dime a dozen, but the consumer class does not want to spend another dime on another twelve-pack.

So of course it makes perfect sense that Trump would today declare that teachers are officially "essential."

It sounds like a compliment. It's not, and the tell is that none of these "essential" folks have ever been nor will ever be called essential in any other context. This is not "essential" as in "This work is so important we'd better look at how to offer greater compensation" or "These folks are so essential that we'd better muster all the resources we can beg, borrow or steal to make sure they're as protected as possible" or even "These people are so essential that we'd better ask them what they need and give them whatever they ask for."

Pence wants you to know that his wife is going to back to teach at the tiny exclusive private school where she works. The White House press secretary wants you to know that there's some money and magical guidelines and teachers are just like meat packers. And yes, everyone--well, almost everyone--is wrestling with lots of hard stuff, and many people are working under crappy, scary conditions. Lots of folks are paying some hard dues.

The administration desperately needs to get the economy back to normal, but nobody is going to admit that child care and K-12 education is an essential part of the economy's infrastructure, as surely as roads and telecommunications, because then we'd have to craft policy that reflected that reality.

Are teachers essential? Absolutely. That's why people making school re-opening plans should be listening to them. That's why they should be well paid, and supported, and given the kinds of protections that make sense in light of whatever the local picture might be. And on top of all that, one other thing--

Respect.

"Pandemic essential" seems to be the opposite of that. Not "Mad props for the important work you do" as much as "Shut up and get back in there, because it's inconvenient for me to have you not on the job." Place your bets now on whether the powers that will be are going to let the "essential" designation quietly lapse, or if someone will stand up some post-pandemic day to announce to meat cutters, nurses and teachers that they are not "essential" any more. What a bittersweet day that will be.

MI: Teacher Fired Over Political Tweet. If Only There Was A Way Protect Against Such Injustice.

Be careful what you wish for.

Conservative media made a small summer meal out of the story of Justin Kucera, a 28-year-old social studies teacher/coach at Walled Lake Western High School.

The known facts of the story appear to be this:

On July 6, Kucera retweeted the Trump classic, "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL."  He followed that with “I’m done being silent. @realDonaldTrump is our president … Don’t @ me” Further down the thread, he responded to someone with a "liberals suck, man." That tweet, which Kucera later characterized as a sort of light sarcasm, was later deleted, but the damage, apparently, was done.

The district superintendent offered a bit of a subtweet on July 7, including "We believe in the importance of discourse, but we will not stand for speech or actions from those that represent our District that seek to divide or demean our staff, students, citizens."

Kucera was pulled into a virtual meeting with his administrators, the HR department and his union reps on July 10. They asked him why he tweeted those particular messages, and ultimately gave him the choice of resigning or being fired in a July 15 meeting. He chose not to resign, and the district fired him.

The district has maintained that they did not fire Kucera for boosting Trump, but Kucera has presented his story to many outlets as "I was fired for supporting Trump." Many folks have poked around the tweeterverse to unearth other Walled Lake teachers who have been critical of Trump without repercussions. His termination letter cited "a lack of professional judgment."

The superintendent reached out to Kucera, and on July 22 they met. The personnel file obtained by the Detroit News says the superintendent was looking for ways "we may be able to save this relatively new teacher's career" and administer something less than termination. The file also notes that Kucera had a previous instance of "poor judgment." That incident apparently involved Kucera not showing up for class and not telling anyone back in October of 2019. The superintendent offered Kucera a path back to the classroom, but the next day, Kucera said no thanks, saying that the issue would follow him into the classroom. The file also included this piece of info from the superintendent:

When I asked him whether or not he knew that it was the Liberals Suck tweet and not the Trump is President tweet that was the issue, he admitted that he did.

Now, it's important to acknowledge that there may be more to the story. When people call out school districts in public, there are all sorts of confidentiality rules that keep districts from fully responding; it is entirely possible that there are other problems behind this firing.

But on the surface, this tale has been enough to throw conservatives across the country and GOP-ers in Michigan into a state of high dudgeon. Michigan GOP leader Laura Cox called it "incredibly disturbing" if true. There are even fundraising efforts (though not very successful ones). They've reacted to the surface version of this story, and that's where the lesson lies.

Because the Michigan GOP totally asked for this.

A decade ago, they were busily hacking away at public education through ever manner of attack they could devise. That included a package of laws that then-governor and never-a-friend-of-education Rick Snyder that cut teacher tenure off at the knees. For instance, the old job security laws (what we call "tenure" really isn't, but it's the term everyone's used to) required that a district had to show "reasonable and just cause" to fire a teacher with tenure; the new law just requires proof that the firing was not "arbitrary and capricious."

The new batch of laws also made tenure harder to get, and that's where Kucera's troubles seem to lie. A teacher is "on probation" for the first five years of their career, meaning they can be fired for pretty much any reason at all, including Pissing Off The Wrong People or Looking Like A Potential Source of Headaches for Administration.

When tenure battles were all the rage, teachers and their supporters said repeatedly that teachers need job protections so that they don't have to constantly looking over their shoulders and worrying about a hundred little things like political affiliation. "You big wimps are just afraid of accountability," was the reply.

Well, here we are. In too many states, teachers are vulnerable to firing just for artlessly expressing a political opinion--even if they happen to be opinions by the folks who argued that teachers wouldn't be fired just for expressing political opinions. And while conservative outlets large and small whinged about the unfairness of Kucera's firing, somehow not one that I read managed to connect the dots between this unjust firing and the gutting of laws to protect the due process of teachers and the kneecapping of their unions. I'm sorry for what happened to Justin Kucera--here's hoping that he realizes that it was not sucky liberals who are responsible.

For Teachers, This Is All Unfortunately Familiar

It didn’t have to be this way.

I’m not the first person to make that observation, and I won’t be the last. But it bears repeating. Because, for many regular citizens this school reopening-during-a-pandemic business may seem like a brand new adventure, but for educators, this is a new arrangement of a song they’ve heard many times before.

In some alternate universe, political leaders—top folks, like governors and even the President—sit down last winter, or even last spring, and have a long hard talk about schools in the midst of a pandemic.

“Schools are critical,” someone declares. “The workers who keep the economy going need to be freed up to get back on the job. Beyond that, we cannot tolerate on our watch a generation of young people getting a small slice of the education to which they’re entitled.” A resolution is reached. “We will do,” the elected leaders declare,” whatever it takes, come through with whatever resources are needed. We will assemble a blue ribbon panel of scientists and teachers and they will figure out what is needed to get public education safely running again, and we will take their recommendations and make them real.”

In this alternate universe, the secretary of education is pushing and cajoling and shaming and bully pulpiting Congress to authorize the necessary resources. “Not only that,” says the secretary (and some other leaders), “but if we are going to ask public school teachers to be the front line troops in this critical battle, we are going to make damned sure they are taken care of.” Or perhaps in that universe leaders are declaring, “It can’t be done safely. We’d better repurpose billions of dollars for the training, technology and infrastructure needed to pivot US education to distance learning. It’ll be expensive and difficult, but at least it will keep people save and students educated.”

But that’s an alternate universe.

In this universe, it’s the same old same old. Some lofty rhetoric about how critical education is, how heroic teachers are. And that’s it. Thoughts and prayers and grousing about how we already spend way too much on public education. We’ve been here before.

We pass a national mandate requiring schools to provide a free and appropriate education for every student, no matter what obstacles that student may face—but Congress never actually funds the mandate.

We repeatedly “discover” that non-wealthy non-white communities are poorly served by schools that lack adequate resources, but somehow nobody ever musters the will to get those schools the resources they need.

We regular declare a “crisis” in the US’s “failing” schools, and every time teachers cringe because they know whose fault it’s going to turn out to be—teachers. Teachers should be smarter. Teachers should have higher expectations. Teachers are being protected by their evil unions.

School shootings increasingly alarm the public, who once again declare their admiration for heroic teachers. The federal government even puts together a task force, headed up by the secretary of education, to look at what can be done. Her recommendation for protecting students and teachers? Arm teachers.

When Congress does try to direct some relief funding for schools dealing with the pandemic, that same secretary of education does not fight for more support for schools, but instead looks for ways to use those funds to back her preferred non-public school causes. Meanwhile, the administration spent more to “rescue” a single airline than to prop up the entire child care sector.

Meanwhile, the administration’s official position seems to be that there is no problem, and if there is, somehow the local schools will handle it, somehow.

It is true that there are no good solutions for the reopening of schools in the fall. It is also true that there are no cheap, safe solutions for the reopening of schools this fall. But that is a little bit true every fall, and every year teachers are encouraged to get in there and do the best they can anyway.

This is the song every teachers knows. “You do great, important work—but we already spend way too much on you, so don’t expect any more help to appear.” (Of course, it’s not how much you spend, but how you spend it, but that’s another conversation we aren’t having.) And then the next chorus is, “You are such great heroes, and we sure admire your love for the kids—and if you really love them, you won’t demand any more from us.” To listen to the rhetoric, one would conclude that there is nothing more important to this country than educating our children; to watch the actions of politicians and bureaucrats, one would conclude that education is a small after thought and political football.

Reopening schools during a pandemic is new only in the degree of severity. For a teacher, it’s all too familiar. You’re changing the flat tire on a bus loaded with kids, in the rain, and they’re hungry. A big shiny Lexus pulls up next to you, and some politician or bureaucrat lowers the window and hollers, “Boy, that looks tough. I admire your hard work and dedication.” You ask if he could make a phone call for help, or get out and lend a hand, but he doesn’t seem to hear. “Well, hey, good luck to you,” he says, rolling up the window. “I’m sure you’ll make it all work out.”

It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t. Educators would love to hear something other than that old familiar song. But they can’t wait; the flat tire won’t change itself.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Silicon Valley and the Surveillance State

Peter Schwartz is an American futurist, innovator, author, and co-founder of the Global Business Network, a corporate strategy firm. He's done sexy things like consult for futury movies, including WarGames (ew), Minority Report, and Sneakers (an under-appreciated gem). He's written an assortment of books; he also wrote the 2004 climate change report that predicted that England would be a frozen wasteland by, well, right now. (This Peter Schwartz should not be confused with this Peter Schwartz, Ayn Rand-loving writer. )

Schwartz was the subject of an interview in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, reminding us that there's an entire sector of future-looking tech-loving folks who think the advent of the surveillance state is pretty swell.

Schwartz is not in Silicon Valley-- he's a Beverly Hills guy. And not everything he says is alarming. For instance:

Every single time, with no exceptions, that I’ve gotten the future wrong, it’s because there was an inadequate diversity of people in the room. It was not that it couldn’t be seen; it was that we were just talking to ourselves.

Technocrats desperately need to hear that, but the prevailing ethos is the idea of a single visionary CEO without other voices to hold him back. As in Zuckerberg's unwillingness to let go of control of his company or his money, or Reed Hastings' belief that school boards should be scrapped because they just get in the Visionary Leader's way.

But then the interviewer asks how our feelings about surveillance are "evolving," and, well, Schwartz doesn't dig very deep.

There will be times when it’s abused, when data is stolen, when people are harmed by it. But for 99% of the people, 99% of the time, it will mean that you didn’t have to show your ticket to get on BART; it means you didn’t have to check out at the supermarket; it means that when somebody stole your kid’s bike, it will have been seen. Oh, and that unhealthy people will be detected before I get on the airplane.

There's no question that folks hav e shown that they are more than willing to fork over huge amounts of personal data for a smidgen of convenience. Hell, people still insist on giving away tons of data just so they can take a "Which kind of exotic cheese are you" quiz on Facebook. But look at how quickly he skips past the down side, and characterizes it as the occasional bad actor, and not a dystopic system of surveillance and control. But here we arrive at an article of misplaced faith.

We’re now in a global village where the truth is everything can be known about everybody.

The truth is that we can collect a great deal of data and factoids about anyone, but that's not everything. This is like believing that if you know your spouse's height, weight, shoe size, favorite color, previous addresses, well, you know everything you can (or need to) know. This is exactly like believing that if you have collected a bunch of standardized test scores from a student, you know that student.

If we could just collect all the observable, quantifiable data, we would know everything about everything. So let us collect it all. Because it's going to happen anyway.

That's the Silicon Valley ethic, and it's wrong on several levels.

First, collecting all the data doesn't make one all-knowing. I'm not just talking about the whole "difference between knowledge and wisdom" thing, or pointing at romantic odes to human complexity and depth (though those things are true, too). Read up on Information Theory and Chaos science-- complex systems define specific, linear predictability. It doesn't matter how many facts you collect--you still can't predict exactly what comes next.

Second, get your paws off our data. Better yet, if you want it, pay for it. If we're imagining our favorite futures, I'd like to imagine one in which customers don't pay for the privilege of being data mined. It's not just that data mining is invasive and obnoxious--the current practitioners are still really bad at it. Feeding that bad data into systems yields bad results.

Third, it's not inevitable. Tech folks--especially ed tech folks--invariably present sales pitches in the guise of future predictions. They are wrong, a lot, in part because they are the techno version of the used car salesman saying, "I can just see you driving this baby out of here." No. You hope to see that, but right now, it's just a sales pitch.

The surveillance state won't be a happy utopia occasionally interrupted by the blip of isolated bad actors. The big use of data is to help mold and direct the behavior of the masses, and the two big motivators for that kind of nudging are 1) the desire to make money and 2) te desire to acquire political power, and we've already seen both in action.

The surveillance state will continue to come after schools, because how else do you gather All The Data except by starting early? Schools are easily seduced partners because too often some folks in charge (and some, sadly, in the classroom) are attracted to the idea that they could get so much more done if they had more data, more control (this is true for public, charter, and private schools). One of the decisions that educational institutions must make, late as it is in the game, is whether they want to help the data miners or become protectors of student data.

They should be protectors. When buying a program, they should require that everything collected will stay within the district's system, to be easily scrubbed when the students leave or graduate. When subscribing to an online service, they should demand ironclad assurances that student data will not be shared (not even with "trusted partners") or kept after the student graduates. Schools are where the foundation of the surveillance state will be laid; schools should be actively and deliberately making sure that foundation doesn't get built.

Country Club Pod School

So you run a string of private tony country clubs, offering "unique access to sports, fitness, luxury hospitality and family-friendly amenities across multiple clubs," and the pandemic has not been very helpful for your business. But you've got all this space. What can you do to get the money stream flowing again?

Open a school, of course.

Let me introduce you to the Bay Club, an organization offering 24 clubs across 9 campuses, including Portland, Marin, San Francisco, East Bay, Santa Clara, San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Peninsula campus. They all sound pretty swanky, but as a sample, here's the Peninsula Campus description:

The Peninsula Campus is designed as an ultimate escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. With two premier properties and endless amenities and services, the Peninsula Campus offers a state-of-the-art tennis facility, as well as year-round fitness, aquatics, and family programming. With over thirteen acres between two Bay Club locations, there are plenty of ways for you and your family to play.

On that particular campus, you can join the Redwood Shores club at various levels of swankitude, from individual dues as low as $280/month up to $950/month (on the low end, there is also a $1,000 "initiation fee") with assorted benefits for each level. Fees vary a little bit by location and club, but you get the idea.

So what do you do with, say, 180,000 square feet of empty gym space? You open it up to the hot new world of pod learning.

So the Bay Club now offers the Distance Learning POD Program.

Our on-site Distance Learning PODS feature monitored online learning, extracurricular programs and world-class sports and fitness activities for grades K-12. A turnkey solution for parents and school districts!

The Bay Club has "teamed up with" aka "contracted" KinderCare Education, an outfit that specializes in pre-K care and after-school programming. Also, some "top West Coast universities" are in the mix.

The KinderCare piece is tied to the offerings that cover age 0 through grade 5. The K-5 piece promises to focus on "developing the whole child" through a "rich, nurturing curriculum." The students will get support with remote learning as well as enrichment. For grades 6-12, the promises are more modest-- in addition to "monitoring online learning," they'll get some "athletic and sports clinics led by our fitness professionals." Plus socializing with other students.

For the littles, the cost is $375 /week for non-members, $337.50 for members, and $300 if you have a family membership. The middle and high school programs run $275, $247.50, and $220 a week.

The New York Times just ran a piece about how many folks are being priced out of the learning pod phenomenon; this seems like a fine example of that. And not just priced--I'm sure that the well-manicured luxurious grounds of the Bay Club make it clear who exactly is welcome and who is not (plus transportation, meals, etc)-- this is just not available to all parents. Not everybody is in a position to send their child to private POD school in a literal country club.

And while one might imagine that the idea of Betsy DeVos and others to give public school money to parents to fund pandemic ed (another voucher angle), I remind you that for Bay Club students, there's still a public school somewhere providing the actual distance education. Should they have their funding cut while still doing their job?

Under current pandemic mess rules, we're getting a peek of what education looks like without a robust fully functional public ed system operating, and it looks a lot like a world in which the well-to-do get what they want for their kids, and everyone else just has to scramble for scraps. Experts and historians note (you should really check out this podcast on the subject) that pods threaten to become a new sort of opportunity hoarding, a return to the kind of inequitable education that we created public education to get rid of.

The Bay Club is actually owned by KKR & Co, a massive global investment company. This is a teensy weensy sliver of their business; let's hope that nobody up the corporate ladder notices this and decides to move on.

Oh, and if it seems as if I'm over-reacting to call the Bay Club program a school when they don't even make that claim themselves, let me point out that the model of this kind of pod set-up-- students workin away at coursework delivered via screen while some adult is handy to coach and refocus them-- is exactly the same model as a variety of charter and private schools (looking at you, Summit).

ICYMI: Bloggaversary Edition (9/16)

Back on this date in 2014, I put up my first post on this blog. I took me a month or two to figure out what I was doing, but here we are, a few years, about 3750 posts, and over 9 million hits later, still plugging away. Traditional anniversary gifts are either candy or iron, so I will eat some chocolate today in honor of the occasion.

In the meantime, here are some items to read. I'll repeat my standard request-- if it speaks to yu, share it. I have an audience not because I'm some blazing light of wisdom, but because people have over the years boosted my signal, shared my stuff, passed me along. You can do that, too. If you think something is worth reading, pass it on.

Why Bother Testing in 2021  

At Diane Ravitch's blog, David Berliner and Gene Glass lay out the reasons that this would be a good year to just skip the Big Standardized Test.

Why I'm Okay With My Kids "Falling Behind."

At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams lays out why she has bigger things to care about than having her kids catch up to some imaginary bunch of benchmarks.

The Covid Experiment: Facing the Sins of a Nation That Quit Caring About Public Education Long Ago

Nancy Bailey looks at how the current crisis suffers from years of neglecting public education.

Nurse Leverage

When a nurse wrote a piece castigating teachers for not getting back to work, she touched off a firestorm of replies. Here's one of the better ones, from Stone Pooch.

We Got Racism, Right Here In River City

Nancy Flanagan looks at a little outburst of racist baloney that got national attention. It's a reminder of some larger problems that are not going away easily.

Ed Tech Cashes in on the Pandemic

Gayle Greene provides a good overview of how the pandemic is pushing the replacement of live human education with screens, screens, and more screens.

Fewer Students Are Benefiting From Doing Homework  

Unless you want to fork over money for the actual paper, all you get here is the abstract of this 11 year study. It is not exactly news-- technology has made it easier to "generate" answers for homework, making the homework a big waste of time. But now there's apparently researach to back this up.

You Made Me Enforce Useless Dress Codes for Years. Don't Claim Face Masks Go Too Far

At EdWeek, a teacher points out the obvious--administrative complaints that they can't make mask wearing more than a suggestion are just baloney.

Oklahoma County Judge Fines Epic Charter  

Epic charter schools tried to shut up an Oklahoma state senator; now they've been slapped with a half million dollar fine for it.

Success Academy Settles Discrimination Suit  

Gary Rubinstein notes that Success Academy just settled a years-old lawsuit brought by some families over the treatment by the charter school powerhouse.  It's not cheap.

Learning Relationships In The New Normal  

Jose Luis Vilson with some useful insights about what really matters in the return to pandemic schools.

Cake, in the manner of Trump administration guidance for reopening schools   

Laugh and cry as Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post imagines what baking a cake would look like if the Trump administration brought the same clear leadership that they've applied to school reopening.

RI: Foxes In The Governor's Mansion

I haven't paid much attention to Rhode Island (motto: That State Nobody Pays Much Attention To), but we should all take a look, because Rhode Island has become yet another example of the many ways that privatizers and profiteers get their hands into the cookie jar.

These frickin' people

We start with Gina Raimondo, a venture capitalist who decided to get into politics via the office of state treasurer. Her signature move in that office was to "fix" the state pension fund problem by taking an axe to it, in much the same way that you would "fix" the problem of not having enough gas to get to the hospital by deciding to drive to the house on the corner of your block instead. Also, she decided to direct a bunch of those pension funds to hedge funds of her own (generating lots of fees for the Wall Street crowd). Her play was backed by EngageRI, a dark money group that pumped $740K into a pension "reform" campaign; the donors were kept secret, though the WSJ determined that John Arnold had pumped anywhere from $100k to $500K into it. Arnold is not a resident of Rhode Island; he's just a guy who "retired" at age 38 from ENRON and went on to become a major funder of pension attacks in this country. And he has many friends.

From that promising start, she leapt into the governor's mansion in 2014, and stayed there in 2018. She's been a good friend to the charter school industry, as well as the folks on Wall Street, who kicked in big time to help finance her campaign. She ran with Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, a huge charter school fan as well. Raimondo called education the "number one priority" for her second term. That has included the takeover of the schools by state government, as well as draining public education funding in order to grow pet projects like an expansion of charter chains like Achievement First. The takeover of Providence schools is, by many accounts, a last ditch effort to rescue a failing district, but it puts the schools under the control of education commissioner Angelica Infante-Green, a professional bureaucrat, administrator and education disruptor whose only classroom experience is Teach for America and whose edu-boss background includes working in New York State's department under reformster John King. State takeovers have a lousy record and go badly for many reasons (including putting the schools under the control of bureaucrats with no real school experience); in this case, complaints started almost immediately that community voices were being shut out and ignored.

Rhode Island already has a friendly atmosphere for privatization. They passed a law years ago that basically lets any mayor open up charter schools run by "municipal leaders," and charter school enrollment has passed the 10,000 student mark (out of a little under 150K in the state). It's a good setting for a governor who wants to disrupt the hell out of public education. And I almost forgot to mention--she's nominally a Democrat.

But that's just the governor. Let's talk about her husband.

Andy Moffitt is yet another of those people who has collected a wide web of privatizing connections. For starters, he was law-school roommates with Cory Booker (Raimondo later tapped a Booker staffer for her own administration). Moffitt is often portrayed as a "former teacher" in the press; three guesses what his actual teaching background consists of. Yup-- another TFA-hatched education expert.

Moffitt put that expertise as an education guy at McKinsey, the globe-spanning consultant firm that has made a living privatizing all manner of things and helping cities find ways to dismantle their public systems. They've helped fund cyber schooling. They keep pushing the computerized classroom. They beat Eli Broad to the idea of embedding their own people in the LA school district. They tout data analytics. They once hired David Coleman. Read Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All to get a feel for just how inhuman and amoral McKinsey's approach can be.

Moffitt has written a book,  too. Actually, he co-wrote it, teaming up with Michael Barber, the head of Pearson, the media company that aspires to eat all of the education world and most especially the data therein. Barber is also a McKinsey alum; the book is one of the series touting Barber's Big Idea-- Deliverology. Moffitt co-authored Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Education Leaders. Deliverology is a technocratic, arrogant, hubris-infused, data-worshipping nightmare of a management system. I am not going to read the book for you; just the table of contents is enough to convey how little it has to do with actual education and how much it has to do with turning a school into a data-generating algorithm-directed system that values things like "rigor" and "capacity" the human lives of its meat widgets. Pearson and McKinsey share aa deep and abiding love for Big Data. Moffitt now teachers a course about "strategic management" for Harvard's reform-loving Graduate School of Education.

Moffitt was also a board member of Stand for Children Leadership Center around 2011, 2012, which would have been shortly after the legitimate child advocacy group transformed into an astro-turfed, union-busting, Common Core pushing, privatizing, board-seat-buying, advocacy group.

While political opponents of Raimondo occasionally question the First Gentleman's privatizing inclinations and his influence, most of his press coverage is the kind of light-weight puff that first ladies are subject to. That's unfortunate, because he is a scary guy to have such a direct line to a governor who is pretty scary in her own right.

At the moment, Rhode Island's education system and the people who lead it are mired in the same pandemess as the rest of us, but if I were a parent or public school teacher or taxpayer there, I'd be concerned about the future of my public education system. These are the kinds of folks that see dollar sigs and data stacks (that can be turned into more dollar signs) and do huge damage with their imaginary educational expertise. Good luck to you, Rhode Island.