DeVos Continues Transformation Into Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan said many not-so-swift things, often revealing his true attitudes about the dismantling and privatization of public education. But one of his truly revealing moments came in 2010 when he famously argued that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." For the many Black teachers who lost their jobs to Teach for America tourists, and the families who have had to navigate a fully privatized but never organized system of charters and private schools, that may sound a bit wrong.

Betsy DeVos came into the office billing herself as a sort of anti-Duncan. The feds would not impose on state control of schools. The department would not be the national school board. Right off the bat in her confirmation hearings, she made it quite clear that she could not imagine a case of discrimination against students that would move her to take any sort of action whatever.

But since the pandemic hit, she has become really comfortable with using the levers of the department to push her own policies for vouchers and defunding public education. Using department rules to rewrite laws passed by Congress and using the federal purse-strings to extort compliance--Betsy DeVos has become increasingly comfortable with those tools, using them just like Duncan did.

But now she's added another Duncan touch-- saying the quiet part out loud. In an interview with Wharton Business Daily, DeVos characterized the coronavirus pandemic as a "good thing." Like Duncan, she's happy to see all the destruction because she's hoping it will let her rebuild her way.

Public schools are too "static," says the woman who has declared they had better all open up in a traditional brick and mortar face-to-face format, or else. Public schools are too "one-size-fits-all," says the woman who has never spent time inside a public school. Public schools can't be "nimble" and "pivot," says the woman who supports giving billions of dollars to charter and private schools that demonstrate an alarming habit of nimbly pivoting from "open" to "closed" when they face any kind of challenge.

P.S. She has also rebranded her Education Freedom tax credit school voucher bill as the School Choice Now Act, which I guess is a nimble pivot from one name to another for a bill that can't get Congress to pay much attention at all. This insistence that everyone else be a nimble pivoteer, while you are ceaselessly beating the same drum and paying zero attention to your critics is another Duncan hallmark.

Trump Demands Patriotic Classrooms

Trump's education agenda is, well, terse. Eleven words, two items. And the second of the two is "Teach American Exceptionalism."

Monday, Trump expanded on that idea, saying that the nation needs to install "patriotic education" in schools. It's his plan for quelling rebellion in cities and countering "lies" about US racism (i.e. the "lie" that it exists). Gotta counter that "left-wing indoctrination" that all those indoctrinaty teachers are up to all the time (in between, you know, collecting lunch money and checking masks and updating web-based assignment materials).

As reported by Politico, here's the Trumpian solution to all our problems:

Children must be taught that America is “an exceptional, free and just nation, worth defending, preserving and protecting,” he said.

“The only path to unity is to rebuild a shared national identity focused on common American values and virtues of which we have plenty,” he said. “This includes restoring patriotic education in our nation's schools, where they are trying to change everything that we have learned.”

"To change everything we've learned" signals that in the spectrum of Trumpian policy ideas, we are in that folder labeled "Grampaw Hates This New-Fangled Thing."

What is American Exceptionalism, Anyway? 

I put a subheading here so that you can skip this history lesson portion of this post if you wish.

I'll also note that "American exceptionalism" is one of those phrases that ignores that "America" is two continents, North and South, containing a large number of nations other than the United States. It is just like American exceptionalism to assume that we are so much more special that we can just appropriate the name of the continent for just our nation.

That is the basic meaning of American exceptionalism-- that the US is special/better, inherently better, stronger, and more moral because of our special background and our special history and our special values, and that gives us a certain authority, moral and otherwise, in the world.

The roots of the idea run deep. The Puritans considered themselves to be God's chosen people, and they wanted to establish a "city on a hill." It fit nicely with the Puritan's problematic dichotomy-- everyone's a sinner and nobody deserves to go to heaven, but on the other hand, I'm one of God's chosen people so that kind of makes me better than you and gives me the right to tell you how to live."

Many authorities credit de Toqueville with the origin of the idea, and Joseph Stalin (yes, that Stalin) with the actual phrase, apparently in response to US communists who
insisted that this country was an exception to the way communist rules usually played out.

American exceptionalism, in general use, is just vague enough to be adaptable. It's nationalism wearing a cool Halloween mask, We're special (better) because of how we're founded, and we're special (better) because of our form of government, and we're special (better) because our history is a tale of virtue triumphing again and again, and our very special (better) nature means that we are born to be a world power, a major leader, and a shining example to al other countries.

Yes, But, Trump?

The very slogan "Make America Great Again" runs counter to American exceptionalism, because exceptionalism is premised on the idea that we are great, always great, burned-into-our-dna great. So we couldn't be un-great and in need of re-greatification. The pitch seems to be that evil lefty Democrat radicals have somehow diluted our greatness with their bad behavior and, particularly, their repeated insistence that we are racist and inequitable, and they've brought in a bunch of Those (not white) People to further spread that evil propaganda, and Those (not white) People who are not really part of our heritage are also putting a cramp in our greatitude.

Is it possible to find lots of lefty rhetoric to back up the notion that the left hates this country? Yes, certainly. Does all of this smell suspiciously like a retreaded version of the 1960s arguments around slogans like "My country, right or wrong"? You know--back in the days when Trump was using his bone spur to avoid putting his life on the line for this great and exceptional nation.

The problem with that argument has always been the lack of any room for nuance or complexity. Has the US grown and prospered in ways that are unique to some special US genius? Of course not. Are there plenty of things to be proud of anyway? Absolutely. Are the areas for vast improvement? Without a doubt. But the American exceptionalist view is that the country is perfect, the best in the world (though "best" remains a fuzzy term), and to so much as suggest that we might be #2 or #7 is considered anti-American. Or worse yet, detrimental to Trump's re-election chances.

So, teachers. 

So calls like Trump's are for teachers to stop bringing up all those Bad Things. Teach the right values, the right history. You're allowed to bring up bad things in our past as long as you explain how we exceptionally fixed the problem ("We used to have slavery, but then we fought the war and that was never a problem again ever"). Teachers are commanded to foircibly yank us back to the fifties when there were no problems because straight white guys got to decide everything and everyone who wasn't a straight white guy just stayed in their proper place.

There are plenty of things to love about this country-- the way we set out a batch of principles and have spent centuries trying to live up to them, the tricky balance of a three-headed republic, our cultural ability to absorb and synthesize, our opportunities to advance (even if they've been shrinking). And we could really, really, really use some civics education, because too many people have too small a grasp of the wheels and levers of our government.

But none of that means we should embark on some sort of North Korean style "education" initiative to forcibly embed some jingoistic version of blind nationalism into each and every young brain. Among our exceptional American values is the idea that demanding unquestioning obedience and idealization of the state is a Bad Thing. We should preserve that value. Patriotism, like any other kind of love, is meaningless when forced and stupid when it's blind.

ME: Pandemic Excuses More Uncertified Teacher Replacements

On August 26, Governor Mills of Maine issued an executive order that any warm body with any kind of college degree (or maybe even without) may be certified as a teacher.

The executive order actually has three parts. One gives instructions on how to count attendance if you want your state subsidy. One gives some loose instruction on facility disinfection. And one expands the eligibility for emergency teacher certification. Because of the "emergency shortages in essential school staff," 

DOE may issue an Emergency Teacher Certificate to an individual how holds a 4-year postsecondary degree or the equivalent in work and/or academic experience as determined by DOE.

Certification may also be issued to any college student enrolled in a teacher prep program. Also, they'll accept teacher certification from any other state. 

These emergency certificates will last only for this school year--at least, that's the deal for the moment. They have to be mentored, and the state isn't waiving criminal background checks. 

Maine has been doing okay-ish on the Covid front, though they just experienced a new outbreak cluster, thanks to a church and a rural wedding that largely ignored state guidelines. But they've still got a shortage of teachers willing to work under current conditions. That situation is not new--only the coronavirus part is. Maine's solution is understandable, but between the race to implement teach ing software and to grab any warm body to stick in a classroom, the pandemic is not exactly a boom for the teaching profession. At least Maine's warm body order has an expiration date.

ICYMI: This Month Can't End Too Soon Edition (8/30)

Sometimes you're just really ready to get to te next chapter, or just the next page. Not an uncommon feeling these days, even though it's not clear that the next chapter will be any less troublesome than this one. We'll see soon enough. In the meantime, here are some readings from the week.

As Teachers Livestream Classes, Privacy Issues Arrive   

From Sarah Schwartz at EdWeek. And no, she's not talking about those evil teachers who are worried that distance learning will lay bare their terrible indoctrination plans.

Teachers shot during training sue Sheriff's department   

Remember the teachers who were shot with non-lethal but really painful and scary bullets during an active shooter drill? They've decided to take it to court.

Money for nothing  

This op-ed from the York Daily Record looks at how PA cyber schools are hoovering up all the aid, because profiting from a crisis is fun, even if it screws over public schools.

Masks are optional; spaghetti straps are banned.  

From The Lily. These girls called their school on the whole "we can't require students to wear masks but female skin will be outlawed with the full force of school rules" baloney.

Another loss for Betsy DeVos; a win for students.

Another editorial about DeVos's recent court losses, which aren't news at this point, but this piece from the Los Angeles Times editorial board is still worth a read.

A perk for some neighborhoods: first dibs on top schools

From the New York Times, a look at yet another system that keeps NYC schools among the most segregated in the country.

Education Malpractice?  

At Dad Gone Wild, another example of how some professional education disruptors manage to cash in creatively.

Black Families Don't Need "Fixing"; They Need Better School Financing  

Andre Perry at EdWeek with the dismaying facts and figures of just how much we underfund Black schools and education. 

Frog and Toad Tentatively Go Outside After Months of Self-Quarantining

From McSweeneys, a gentle spin on two favorite characters on a new adventure.

Brookings Makes A Bad Pro-Charter Argument

Mona Vakilifathi graduated from the4 University of California, San Diego, with a BS in political science and government back in 2009, and she's been working policy jobs ever since. Over at Brookings, she has some thoughts about Democrats, charter schools, and ed policy, and while she seems to mean well, she has missed a few spots here and there. I've read it so you don't have to.

Let me get the answers from you!

She opens by repeating the reformster narrative that charters divide Democrats along racial lines, citing the "research" from DFER showing that Black voters want charter schools. The poll (from May of 2019) is another one of DFER's attempts to push the narrative in a pro-charter direction. That poll was particularly riddled with questionable technique and spin. And most of the Black Democrats want charters "data" has come from people trying to push charters. So her premise is problematic.

She also offers a quick history of recent "evolving politics"by citing Trump and DeVos as charter supporters, however, DeVos and Trump have left charter schools behind, throwing their weight behind voucher programs like the DeVosian Education Freedom voucher program. This may be because DeVos has always preferred the idea of tax dollars going to private (religious) schools, and Trump's use of vouchers as a way to draw Catholic support.

And she brings up the old "Albert Shanker liked charters" line, skipping the "and then he realized they were turning out to be awful" part. But her definition of charter schools simply identifies them as schools with "greater policy discretion." There's a great deal of complexity, including the reformster belief that charters can unleash the magical power of market forces, that she skips, other than offering this line from the Vast Understatement Hall of Fame: "As the charter school movement evolved over time, charter school advocates prioritized charter school growth with little attention to how charter schools might benefit traditional public schools..." That's a feature, not a bug, in the market forces conception of charters. Vikilifathi is talking Shanker when she should be talking Friedman.

She notes that charters don't seem to do much better than public schools when it comes to student achievement, by which she means scores on a narrow ill-designed two-subject Big Standardized Test. I'll just go ahead and fix that for her from here on in.

She specifically identifies Democratic opposition to the Charter Schools Program, but a desire to rein in that program is not necessarily about opposition to charters, given that the CSP has thrown at least a billion dollars of taxpayer money into a pit of waste and fraud. Vakilifathi has some ideas about how the CSP can be put to better use.

She pulls this nugget from the body of research-- that charter schools manage higher test scores  than public schools in urban communities. She sails past some of the obvious explanations-- creaming, pushing out low-scoring students, self-selecting for involved families, intensive test prep, longer school hours, and whittling down cohorts without backfilling empty seats (for examples of all these in action, see Robert Pondiscio's How the Other Half Learns  about Success Academy).

Vakilifathi seems to believe that charter schools might know some magical secret to learning, and her policy suggestions are built around that assumption. She proposes that the CSP be amended to do the following.

1) Prioritize federal funding to charter schools that will innovate, experiment, and identify best practices. In other words, she wants the Obama/Duncan notion of charters as laboratories of learning. She wants charters to commit fiddling with ways to improve test scores for low-income, racial/ethnic minority, or special education students (it might help to first require charters to accept special education students). The charter also has to submit to "rigorous, empirical evaluation of the policy intervention for broader dissemination." In other words, they must break down their secret formula to share.

2) The USED must publicly disseminate the results. Show how they made the secret sauce, and share it with all other schools. Include what they did, how they did it, and the improved test scores that they got out of it.

3) USED must give low-scoring public schools to help them implement the special sauce. The public school announces it wants to try East Egg Charter's special sauce, files out an application, gets a grant. They, too, go under the sciencey microscope to see how well that policy idea raised test scores at the school.

In short:

I argue that charter schools provide a unique opportunity to identify evidence-based best practices to improve low-performing traditional public schools because of charter schools’ rich variation in state regulatory exemptions, charter school practices, charter school accountability policies, and student enrollment. Democrats should consider amending CSP to incentivize charter schools to revert closer to its original intent as laboratories of traditional public schools to improve low-performing traditional public schools and student performance.

So, there are several reasons to be less than excited about this idea.

1) Charters are unlikely to be excited about it. Since the movement is largely premised on the notion of unleashing free market forces--well, in that context, this proposal makes as much sense as telling MacDonald's that they have to show Wendy's how to make fries.

2) Vakilifathi's use of BS Test scores as a measure of achievement disqualifies the whole business right there. The tests are a lousy measure of student achievement and school effectiveness-- which are two entirely different things that Vakilifathi just sort of lumps together. Either way, the Big Standardized Test is not the measure to use, unless you want to re-organize schools around standardized test results instead of education.

3) Vakilifathi makes the unfounded assumption that the methods used "successfully" at East Egg Charter can be transferred whole cloth to West Egg Public High School and work just as well, as if the specific situation of the school is not a major factor is student achievement. Hell, as any classroom teacher can tell you, I can't even transfer the methods I used five years ago into today's classes. Hell, lots of times I couldn't even transfer the methods I used third period into sixth period.

4) There is zero reason to think that the charter world, populated primarily by education amateurs, knows anything that public school systems don't already know. Charter success rests primarily on creaming student population (and the families thereof), pushing out students who won't comply or are too hard to educate, extending school hours, drilling tests like crazy, having teachers work 80 hour weeks, and generally finding ways to keep out students with special needs that they don't want to deal with. None of these ideas represent new approaches that folks in public education haven't thought of.

5) If charters were pioneering super-effective new strategies, we would already know. There is a well-developed grapevine in the public education world. If there were a charter that was accomplishing edu-miracles, teachers all over would be talking about it. Teachers who left that charter would take the secret sauce recipe with them, and pretty soon it would be being shared across the country. After decades of existence, charters do not have a reputation in the education world for being awesome--and there's a reason for that. Puff pieces and PR pushes may work on the general public and provide fine marketing, but that's not what sells other teachers.

Short answer-- if charters knew something really awesome and impressive, public school teachers would already know and already be copying it.

6) Rigorous empirical evaluation only measures certain sorts of data friendly things, and we are talking about a wide variety of human beings in a web of complex relationships. You can only get so far trying to, say, do a rigorous empirical evaluation of why two people are best friends. But it will only scratch the surface (and it will not tell you the secret to making two other people become best friends).

7) We've sort of tried all of this (see Obama/Duncan administration). There's even a whole federal website of "What Works" that supposedly provides evidence about a random assortment of programs and materials. You probably haven't heard about it because not that many folks find it useful.

Vikilifathi's idea seems sensible enough on paper, but it just doesn't translate to the actual world of charter schools these days. We're going to need better ideas than this; however, that's a discussion that may best wait until after November.

The Zero Sum Game

I'm feeling a little dumb at the moment, because a light bulb just went on that should have gone on a while ago.

I was having the same conversation I've had many times. "Charters and vouchers and public schools could absolutely coexist. There's no reason it has to be a zero sum game," said someone.

And I agree, sort of. There are some things that can't help being zero sum, like having enough students to run certain programs. But financially, it's absolutely true that we don't have to make it a zero sum game. We don't have to be forced into the ridiculous attempt to finance multiple school systems with the money that isn't sufficient to fully fund just one. That's a choice that politicians make.

There are a couple of reasons we get stuck with a zero sum financial game. One is simple-- there is no politician with the cojones to stand up and say, "We want to set up multiple school systems and we want to raise your taxes to pay for it." The old claim of "my money should follow my child" line is a lie (it's your money--and your neighbors' money, too), but it sounds good and kind of fair. I even think there are people who honestly believe that you should just be able to move some money around and run multiple school systems with little muss and fuss. They're wrong, but I believe they believe in their story.

But there's one more reason to support the zero sum game, and that's that you know it's a zero sum game and you're hoping public education loses.

Again, this is not all the disruptors. This is the far right crowd, the :"government schools are bad" crowd. Talk to your evangelical friends and listen to how they talk about the need to "take back" some institutions, including schools. That's the DeVosian crowd, the let's get Kingdom Gain by putting schools (at least the schools for people who count) back in the hands of the church.

So things like the Education Freedom program are a clever way to end both paying taxes and public schools. Get rid of public schools, and you can also get rid of teacher unions and regulations that tell you that you have to tolerate LGBTQ students and BIPoC students who don't know their place, plus shutting off one of the government avenues for programs that serve poor people.

Again, not all reformsters. But still. I feel a little like I did a decade ago when I thought, "These damned tests-- it's almost as if they want us to fail and--oh, hell! That's it! They do want us to fail."

There will always be an assortment of reasons for disruption advocates to favor the zero sum game for school funding. But one of those reasons is that they do really want to bleed public schools to death. If I've learned anything in the last decade, it's that you cannot underestimate how very much some people hate hate hate the public education system.

Information Sources: Don't Quit Your Day Job

The New York Times just announced another "project" to be embedded within the paper and funded by philanthropic types. It's not a new model; the Gates Foundation has been funding journalism "projects" for a while. This piece by Tim Schwab at the Columbia Journalism Review lays out in depressing detail just how large the Bill Gates Underwritten Journalism Industry actually is (freakin' huge). This kind of funding model reflects how hard times for "journalism" has affected the tilt of what you and I get to read.

Blame the internet, at least in part, because of its prodigious grasping hunger for content. If you want to keep your site in the game, you've got to be rolling out new content several times daily. And that content has to come from somewhere, and there has to be a lot of it, and it has to be cheap.

The old Huffington Post model was a prime example of what can happen next. You may recall that I used to write for HuffPost. So did a lot of other people. It paid exactly $0.00; more accurately, it paid in eyeballs. Sometimes it paid handsomely; this piece may be the most-viewed thing I've ever written.

What we've got is an information ecosystem in which people can't afford to be writers. Nobody who does journalism for a living is making a particularly great living

And what that means, in turn, is that we have an information ecosystem in which many of the producers aren't actually working for the organization under whose masthead they appear. They are either working for someone else, or they're working out of dedication to a cause.

I'm not just talking about the cardboard faux fronts put up by the wealthy, eg Education Post, originally created by Eli Broad, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others of that crowd to imitate an education information website while really devoted to pushing their PR (EdPost has recently morphed into something a little more interesting, but that's a conversation for another day).

I'm talking, for instance, about thinky tank employees who are readily available as a source for any education article, because that's part of their job, and who regularly produce content for other outlets not because they are working for those outlets, but because they are using those outlets to do their real job, which is to push a particular narrative.

Those of us who blog are used to accusations that we're tools of the teachers union, and I think that's partly because that's the model that many folks in the reformy biz are familiar with--you get paid by these folks over here so that you can go write stuff for those guys over there. What has marked much of the resistance to privatization and disruption of education has been a whole lot of folks willing to do the work for no pay but eyeballs, and that has been a powerful force, but at the same time, it has meant that the movement relies on a loose network of people who have lives and day jobs and have to somehow do the work in the margins, while the ed disruption movement has a small army of employees for whom getting the word out and selling the narrative is their day job. And behind them, guys like Gates who are funding a whole lot of writing in other organizations' publications, and making it easer to insure that their narrative is the one that's most readily accessible to readers.