DeVos Says We're All In This Together. Ha!

So this just popped up on my feed:

This #BackToSchool season may be different than any other, but we’re all in this together. To all the parents, students and educators rising to meet the challenge in new ways and places, you’ve got this! Let’s make it a great year! pic.twitter.com/1Qo9Cd2HW7

— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) September 8, 2020

So much to unpack.

First, who's this "we"? Because Betsy DeVos has made it clear that in her universe, the failed public "government" schools are not "in it" with her. She has not invited public school teachers, the unions, public school students--all the things that are part of what she derides as "the system"--to be on Team DeVos. Plus, note to Betsy--other parts of the country have been back to school for weeks.

And there's no question that the rest of us aren't in it together. The parents who can pay to send their kids to pod school at a literal country club are not "in it" with the families who have to send students to get on the internet in a Taco Bell parking lot. The parents who can afford to have someone stay home with the kids are not "in it" with the parents who have to scramble for child care or do without critical income. And as local school leaders look for guidance from the state or federal level, they mostly find that they are "in it" alone.

And man does it ring hollow to hear a weak attaboy of "you've got this" from a woman who mostly talks about how the people working in public schools don't got this, how they're all just doing a crappy job in a dead end system. Was she not just weeks ago threatening funding for public schools so that she could force those shiftless do-nothings to get in there and get to work? Has she not been trying to sell the idea (unsuccessfully) that private schools should get a bigger piece of the CARES relief pie than public school students?

So even if we get only this far, I think that's enough to merit a "Bite Me, Betsy" t-shirt.

But let's push on, because there's one more level to this.

The DeVos dream of a fully privatized, all voucher school system (well, maybe with a few public schools for the children of Those People) is that a voucher system is all about NOT being "in it" together.

A voucher system is about giving everyone a chunk of money and sending them scattering in all directions. It's about getting the government off the backs of these noble edu-preneurs so that they can do things their own way, even if that way involves discriminatory malpractice. In the Education Freedom tax credit scholarship version of vouchers that DeVos is still pushing for, it's about fixing things so that you (well, if you're wealthy enough) no longer have to pay taxes to finance an education for Those People's Children.

Vouchers are about turning education into a commodity, with each family navigating the market as best they can. It's about dumping families into a world where they may not be able to "buy" the "product" they want, where the school they pick may simply walk away from them.

Most of all, vouchers are another way to say to families, "We cut you a check. Now you're on your own. Not our problem. Good luck and have a nice life."

In short, the DeVos dream education set-up is the very opposite of being in it together. Somebody please tell whatever intern whipped up this thing that it is spectacularly tone deaf.

Report: Are Charter Schools A Big Risk For Families?

In a new report, the Network for Public Education shows how big a gamble it can be to enroll your child in a charter school. And the odds are not in parents’ favor.

“Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999-2017” is a deep dive into the data surrounding patterns of charter closure and the number of students affected by those closures, especially those in high poverty areas. NPE is a advocacy group co-founded by Diane Ravitch, the Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become an outspoken critic of education reform. The organization's executive director is Carol Burris, a former award-winning New York principal; Burris co-wrote the report with Ryan Pfleger, an education policy researcher.

The researchers worked primarily from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data (CCD) and broke charter schools into 17 cohorts based on the year that they opened. The findings serve as a warning for parents considering the charter option.

Within the first three years, 18% of charters had closed, with many of those closures occurring within the first year. By the end of five years, 25% of charters had closed. By the ten year mark, 40% of charters had closed. Of the 17 cohorts, five had been around for fifteen years; within those, roughly half of all charter schools had closed (anywhere from 47% to 54%). Looked at side by side, the cohort results are fairly steady; the failure rates have not been increasing or decreasing over the years.

Charter advocates have often argued that charter churn is a feature, not a bug, simply a sign that market forces are working and that weaker schools are being sloughed off. But the NPE report notes that these closures represent at least 867,000 students who “found themselves emptying their lockers for the last time—sometimes in the middle of a school year—as their school shutters its door for good.”

The disruption to students and families by the cycle of closing schools is captured by one parent quoted in the report:

For the last three years I have had to place my kids at different schools each year because the schools keep closing. My child was attending MCPA, that school closed. He then went to Medard Nelson, that school closed. Now, he is at Coghill and y’all are trying to close that school. I am tired of moving my child every year because y’all are closing schools.

The destabilizing effects of charter churn are further exacerbated in the poorest cities. The report finds that in cities like Detroit, Tucson and Milwaukee, the rate of charter closure is highest in the areas where poverty is highest. Students and families that need stability from their schools are instead repeatedly subjected to a cycle of starting over with a new school, new teachers, new procedures, new rules. Research suggests that when students move from school to school, it negatively affects their chances of success.

The report also finds that the states with a large charter sector have the large rates of failure. At the five and ten year marks, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida show the top failure rates, with Ohio close behind.

Beyond the human cost of these failures, there’s the high financial cost. A previous NPE report shows that the federal government has spent at least one billion taxpayer dollars on charters that closed quickly or never even opened at all.

Charter supporters may argue that this is all just the market working itself out, but that’s hardly a comfort to parents who must go through shopping, application, enrollment and adjustment to the new school yet again. As the report acknowledges, there are charter schools doing some excellent work out there, but for parents, enrolling a child in a charter school—particularly a new one—is a bit of a risk. It’s one thing to see market forces work in a sector such as restaurants, where new businesses come and go and very few go the distance; if you discover that your new favorite eatery has suddenly closed, it’s a minor inconvenience. It’s another things to see such instability in a sector that is supposed to provide stability and education for our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

The report is available at the NPE website.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Bulletins From The Trailing Edge Of The Pandemic

If it can work anywhere, it can work here.

I live in a county in NW PA, with relatively small population (50K or so). And our schools are all open.

We have been subject to the same rules as the rest of the state, and like pretty much everything in PA, the folks in charge have made their rules based on Pittsburgh, Philly and Harrisburg. This is Trump country, so plenty of folks are anti-maskers, but we haven't had any of those ugly assaults. I think we benefit from one aspect of small town life-- when you meet that minimum wage worker at the door of the business, you probably already know them. Makes it marginally harder to be a jerk to them.

But mostly we've done well. We have a big branch here of UPMC (the "non-profit" health monolith that is slowly eating the entire state). Since anyone started counting, our total number of positive Covid cases has not yet hit 70, and we've had only one death. We've had many sets of days in a row with no new positives. By the figuring of the state, we are a "green" county, which means restrictions are minimal, but most local businesses remain cautious. And this is the kind of area where it's not unusual to go, say, grocery shopping and encounter only a handful of other people.

So yes. Schools are open. We have four separate districts in the county (more than necessary, but that's a discussion for another day). All are open five out of five, full days. One has switched the high school to block scheduling. All require masks, and various bits of tweaking have been applied to traffic patterns in the buildings. There are barriers, cleaners, new arrangements for lunch and recess.

A non-zero number of families are staying home and selecting from an assortment of distance learning options, but it's nothing remotely close to a majority. There may have been a few early retirements, but nothing remotely approaching a "wave," nor are local unions contemplating sick outs or strikes. Parents are encouraged to drive their kids to school, but the buses are still running. Within districts, administrators who have done a lousy job of building trust and collaboration are suffering for it; those who have done a good job are benefiting from it. Schools may or may not have solid ideas about what to do if anything goes south. Nobody has made any special effort to recruit substitute teachers, and the pay is pretty lousy for the area, so that's going to be a problem sooner or later.

A return to 100% distance learning will be a real struggle here; there are so many places where there is little or no reliable internet coverage (my old high school sits in a 1/2 bar of 3G zone) and families within the district are spread out. Okay, maybe not so much "real struggle" as "certain failure."

But mostly, school is under way (last Tuesday was the first day) and mostly, students and teachers are adjusting. School sports are happening, with a spectator limit of 250 people. My wife is a teacher in a local elementary, and I have many friends from my pre-retirement years still working. I'm holding my breath. I know that other semi-isolated rural areas have experienced sudden spikes of covid, and I have my doubts about how well-prepared anyone here is to deal with an eruption.

So I have no actual point today. Think of this as a first chapter of whatever story is going to emerge through the year, depending on what happens in the pages we haven't turned over yet I'm praying that it's a boring story.

ICYMI: Labor Day Weekend Edition (9/6)

While you're enjoying your socially distant cookouts and celebrations this weekend, take a moment to thank the labor movement that made things like weekends possible. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

This Teacher Turned Remote Learning Into A Road Trip  

There are many cool parts to this story (including the part where her administration greenlights it, because administrators who say yes to things are a real treat). 3000 miles on the road for this Texas history teacher, remote teaching a la Carmen Sandiego.

Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy  

Audrey Watters is doing guest spots in classes, and here's one of her most recent, touching on algorithms, the British grading scandal, racist AI, and other ed tech shenanigans. Always, always worth the read (and you should be subscribing).

Biden and Democrats Turn Away from Two Decades of Test-Based Accountability

Jan Resseger takes a long, thoughtful, and optimistic look at the evolution of the Democrats on the whole ed reform biz.

Borrowers Demand Answers About Blanket Denials of Loan Forgiveness   

Remember that federal loan forgiveness program where your college loans are supposed to be forgiven if you were the victim of fraud by a predatory for-profit college? Remember how DeVos simply refused to actually truly implement it, and then the court slammed her for it and told her to get on with it, or else? Here's an update, and it is going about as well as you'd expect.

The Myth of Charter Schools and Local Control   

Carl Peterson takes a close look at a candidate for the LAUSD board who has some thoughts about school management that don't quite match how she helps run a charter school.

Arizona Charter Schools Can Double Dip

Laurie Roberts at the Arizona Republic is pretty steamed about how Arizona charters cashed in on the PPP program, and the state is okay with that.

Pasco's Future Crimes Division  

Not directly tied to education, but more about the creeping surveillance state. From the Tampa Bay Times, a look at a sheriff's program for stopping crime before it happens. Exceptionally creepy and appalling.

Success Academy Delays In-Person Learning Till January  

I included a couple of these just because some folks are trying hard to push the narrative that teachers' unions are the force behind the closing of school buildings. And yet, it seems that some folks who aren't the Evil Union are also shifting to distance.

Cyberattacks persist ; K12 a Florida mess

Miami-Dade schools have a variety of problems. Come to this Miami Herald story for the district screw-ups (still no signed contract with K12) and stay for the reminder that increased online learning means increased exposure to hackers etc.

Idaho Considers Dropping Common Core   

Williamson Evers at the Independent Institute pens a pointed response to one of Mike Petrilli's ubiquitous Common Core cheerleading op-eds. Not in 100% agreement, but he does bring some heat.

Standardized Testing: Indispensable to Those Who Are Not Subjected To It

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider offers a good vivid portrait of the Big Standardized Test. I love a good extended simile.

Will The Pandemic Give DeVos Her $5 Billion Voucher Scheme

Betsy DeVos has been pitching "Education Freedom" as long as she's been in office. It's a tax credit scholarship scheme, which is to say, a voucher program that would blow a $5 billion hole in the federal budget, but would be a real treat for rich folks who A) like private schools better than public ones and B) would rather not pay taxes to the feds.

This frickin' guy

The Education Freedom pitch has landed with a thud every time. But more recently what has been new about it is that, somehow, DeVos got Senator Ted "Least Loved Man In The Senate" Cruz to pitch it. And right this moment, Cruz is doing what he does best-- being an absolute pain in everyone's ass--and he's doing it over DeVos's pet project.

Yesterday, CNN reported that the Senate's new stimulus bill (which has been a the focus of a spectacular display of GOP dysfunction for months) may be hung up over Cruz's insistence that the DeVos Voucher Bill be included in the stimulus package.

CNN's sources say that

Cruz has argued the coronavirus pandemic has showcased the weakness of public school systems and that Republicans should get behind an idea that the party is advocating this election year, including at last month's Republican National Convention.

In other words, "the public schools are weak and undefended right now--let's go in for the kill." And Cruz has a point of sorts in noting that school choice is half of the bullet point action plan of the Trump campaign (the GOP has no platform this year beyond "media bad, always do the opposite of what Dems want, and support Beloved Leader at all costs").

On the other hand, while some GOP plutocrats and thinky folks love vouchers, history says that the voters don't. Yes, there have been various polls run that purport to show broad support for choice, but they depend a great deal on friendly wording of the proposition. IOW, nobody has been out there asking, "Do you support the idea of reducing the funding for your local public school so that a handful of students can attend a private school, one that might reject your own child if you applied."

CNN notes that some GOP candidates are worried about trying to sell this program back home in an election year (particularly candidates like Susan Collins who already have enough trouble this time).

CNN being CNN, the piece also includes statements like this one:

School choice has been a top conservative cause for years but has gained fresh urgency during the pandemic.

Which is so much more polite and CNN-ier than "the folks who oppose government schools are salivating right now because they smell blood."

McConnell needs Cruz's vote, and this program seems to be the quid that Cruz is hanging his pro quo on. Even as his office issues senseless statements like this one:

"Sen. Cruz has been a leading advocate for school choice in the Senate," said Lauren Blair Aronson, a Cruz spokeswoman. "Throughout the pandemic, he has urged his colleagues to focus on solutions that will help get Americans safely back to work and our kids safely back into the classroom, including provisions of his Education Freedom Scholarship and Opportunity Act, which would give families the resources they need to ensure their children have access to a quality education in these uncertain times."

I've read this kind of statement a couple of times from DeVos backers, and I keep wondering-- do they serious mean to hint that somehow private schools are impervious to the coronavirus? Or this just to appeal to those who think it's all a fake and want a school that will just keep plowing on and ignore Covid-19?

However you cut it, this bill is bad news for public school (did I mention that it represents a $5 billion cut to federal funding) and would be the ultimate step forward in moving public tax dollars to private and religious schools. But the Senate GOP really wants to get something done so they can stop looking like Covid relief shmucks. This would be an excellent time to get a hold of your Senator's office and say, "No, thanks. But no."

A Seventh Grader Kicks Edgenuity's Dumb Robograding Butt

The story comes to us from Francesca Paris at NPR's Here and Now, and it can serve as our sixty-gazillionth reminder that computer algorithms-- even ones that are marketed as Artificial Intelligence-- cannot grade student work to save their cybernetic lives.

A student in LAUSD's virtual school was dismayed when his first history assignment came back an F. It was short written responses, and the score came back instantly, so his mother figured out that it had been graded by the software and not a human being. But we just saw here a short time ago, computer algorithms can't really read, and they don't understand content--which would seem to be a real drawback when scoring history assignments.

This particular virtual school product is from Edgenuity, one of the more widely used school-in-a-can computer products. Its CEO won recognition at the EdTech Awards last year, and the company is in something like 20,000 schools. But it gets plenty of criticism for being standardized to death. It doesn't appear to have a great deal of bench strength when it comes to questions; users talk about how easy it is to just google answers while taking assessments, and Slate discovered that students can do well by just repeatedly taking tests, which turn out to ask mostly the same questions every time the student tries again.

But the student in this story didn't have to work that hard. Some quick trial and error yielded perfect results.

The question? "How did the location of Constantinople help it grow wealthy and prosperous?

Their answer:

It was between the Aegean and the Black seas, which made it a hub for boats of traders and passengers. It was also right between Europe and Asia Minor, which made it a huge hub for trade, and it was on many trade routes of the time. Profit Diversity Spain Gaul China India Africa

Yes, that's a non-sentence string of words at the end. Like other assessment algorithms, Edgenuity's appears to be looking for a few key terms, maybe signs that there's more than one sentence. But it has no idea what it's "looking" at.

This story, besides providing one more example of how assessment algorithms fail at anything but the simplest tasks, is also a demonstration of the danger of these stupid things. In just twenty-four hours, this program taught this student to answer questions with little attention to coherence or content meaning. Just string together the words the computer wants.

Advocates of computer assessment often point at tales like this and argue, "But the writer wasn't making a good faith effort to answer the question." Well, no-- that's kind of the point. Since the scoring program didn't--and can't--make a good faith effort to read the work, that quickly teaches students that making a good faith effort to write an answer is not the task at hand, that such a task is for suckers, that it is, literally, pointless. Advocates will also point to studies that show robo-graders awarding scores that match scores from human graders; this is accomplished by giving the barely-trained human scorers instructions that require them to score the work with the same stunted dopiness that the algorithm uses.

Edgenuity offered a statement to Paris in which it offered the defense that the algorithms should not "supplant" teacher grading, but "only to provide scoring guidance to teachers." And teachers can override the robo-grader, but then, what's the point of using the robograder in the first place, particularly if its "scoring guidance" is junk?

Robograding for anything beyond simple objective questions continues to be junk. It provides the wrong analysis and teaches the wrong lessons, while training students to placate the algorithm rather than grasp the content. No doubt the shiny over-promising marketing makes this kind of thing appealing to the people in school systems who do the purchasing, but they are one more ed tech product that over-promises and under-delivers. They are junk, but they're profitable junk. They're continued presence in schools is infuriating.

Go read Paris's entire piece. The look up some pictures of puppies or something more soothing.

[For more from this blog on the business of robograding, see here, here, here, here, or even here.]

DeVos Stands Up For Testocracy

Thursday, Betsy DeVos issued a letter clarifying the Department of Education's position on postponing the Big Standardized Test this year, and it closes one of the few remaining gaps between DeVos and Arne Duncan.

In a letter to chief state school officers, DeVos noted that there has been a pandemic. She thanked the school leaders for their efforts to meet the needs of all students (forgetting, perhaps, all the times she has recently claimed that most pubic schools haven't done a damn thing) and notes that some of the crew has been bringing up the issue of testing waivers for this school year.

The answer, she says, is a big fat "Nope." She expects that the BS Tests will be given. And she offers this:

As you’ll recall, statewide assessments are at the very core of the bipartisan agreement that forged ESSA. They are among the most reliable tools available to help us understand how children are performing in school. The data from assessments can help inform personalized
support to children based on their individual needs and provide transparency about their progress. There is broad and consistent support for assessments because there is general agreement among the public that a student’s achievement should be measured, that parents
deserve to know how their children are performing, and that it should be no secret how a school’s performance as a whole compares to other schools.

There's a lot of baloney in that paragraph. Who is the "us" in "help us understand how children are performing in school"? Because it's certainly not parents, who clearly do not sit around all year ignoring report cards and communication from teachers and direct observation of their own child, saying, "Once that BS Test score comes in, we'll know how the child is doing." DeVos is fond of saying that nobody knows the needs and capabilities of the child better than the parents, but apparently that's not entirely true if the parents depend on the BS Test score to know the child.  Maybe the "us" is bureaucrats and politicians, in which case we ask the question "why do they need to know?"

The tests are NOT the most reliable tool available; in some cases these tests, which may be poorly constructed and narrowly focused on just two subjects, are not even A reliable tool. The tests, given once per year and delivering only broad sketches of information, do NOT provide information useful for personalizing education. There is no "broad and consistent" support for the tests; there is an interest in useful data, but it is a huge leap to decide that the BS Tests provide any such data.

As for the notion that it should be easy to compare school performance--first of all, why should it be easy? Second, is there any reason to think that these tests actually make it easy? Third, how did we jump from measuring student scores to judging the school itself? A test made for one particular purpose cannot be used for anything else that pops into your head (send that memo twice to all the states using the SAT or ACT as their Big Standardized Test).

Then  there's this:

Make no mistake. If we fail to assess students, it will have a lasting effect for years to come. Not only will vulnerable students fall behind, but we will be abandoning the important, bipartisan reforms of the past two decades at a critical moment. Opponents of reform, like labor unions, have already begun to call for the permanent elimination of testing. If they succeed in eliminating assessments, transparency and accountability will soon follow.

Of course. If we stop weighing the pig, it will never gain weight. And because teachers oppose bad accountability, obviously they oppose any accountability at all.

And if all of this sounds familiar, it's because we already had all these conversation when Arne Duncan was secretary.

On Twitter, I somewhat glibly observed that there was no longer any Duncan policy that DeVos has not embraced. She has decided to go ahead and be the US school superintendent. She has gotten comfortable with using the levers in her office to circumvent Congress. And now she has landed hard on one-size-fits-all magical testocracy, which also brings her in line with the other Duncan fave-- Common Core. I mean, what does she imagine most of those BS Tests are kind of sort of aligned to, partly?

Matt Barnum pointed out that in my glibness, I overlooked items like DeVos's wholesale gutting of various protections that the Obama/Duncan administration put in place for students (though I will note that they weren't really any more aggressive about predatory for-profit colleges than she has been). I had lumped that under the heading of "acting like a national superintendent," but on reflection, I see that's cheating.

There is, in fact, one major remaining difference between Duncan and DeVos.

It's the cruelty.

Arne Duncan certainly was [fill in your favorite Duncansian critique here], but he seemed to be widely viewed as a nice guy, and he never aggressively pursued policies that put corporate interests ahead of student interests (not saying he never did it, but he was never aggressively let-them-eat-cakey about it). But from the days that she sat in her Senate approval hearing making it clear that she could not imagine a situation of discrimination or mistreatment that would prompt her to actually use federal powers to protect student interests, she has made it clear that the little people can just go get stuffed. Duncan was often wrong, clueless, misguided, unsupportive of public schools, too tuned in to corporate privatizer interests, and ill-suited to the job-- but he was never flat out mean.

EdWeek has the winning response to DeVos's declaration of Nerts To You States:

Richard Woods, the state superintendent of Georgia schools, swiftly criticized DeVos' letter in a statement released Thursday. "It is disappointing, shows a complete disconnect with the realities of the classroom, and will be a detriment to public education," said Woods, an elected Republican.

The rest of his response is pretty good, too.

A lot of things can still happen before next spring's testing season rolls around, not the least of which could be the department being under new management. Kind of makes one wonder if the Trump/DeVos administration thinks more testing is a winning campaign platform. Let's hope the landscape looks a little different by the time 2021 rears its ugly head.