DeVos Has No Plan

It's a brief three and a half minute interview on Fox's "The Daily Briefing," but in just a few quick questions, Dana Perino pushes Betsy DeVos to show that during this pandemic, families with concerns about school are on their own.

The spot opens with a quick clip from an Alabama infectious disease expert explaining that you kids "pose an even bigger risk than college students." Dr. Michael Saag warns  of a "silent epidemic" within K-12 arena. Saag says we knew what was going on in colleges because we are testing and quarantining, "but in K through 12 we're not doing that."

Now here comes DeVos.

Perino asks: Do you have concerns as well about the younger kids that are going back to school?

I'm going to transcribe DeVos's non-answer in its entirety so that you don't think I cherry-picked my way around her actual answer to the question. Spoiler alert: if you've heard DeVos say anything in the past four months, this will all seem familiar, because "sticking to message": is one of her special skills:

Well, Dana, we know that parents across the country want their kids to be back in school and continuing to learn, and we know more than ever parents want and need to have choices and options for how that works and how that looks depending on their children. We know there is no perfect option, but there are lots of good options, and I've had the chance to visit a number of schools and districts where they've been, uh, leaning into this and really addressing the problems and the issues and providing choices and options for families.

Perino, who mostly maintains an old-school journalist deadpan throughout, responds: "So your level of concern right now is low."

DeVos drops her standard semi-smirk with a quick expression of "Oh, shit, that wasn't the message I wanted to get across," and leaps back in. But of course that is exactly what she's saying, and has been saying--there's no reason for parents to worry. I wish there had been time to ask her what she thought those "good" options might be, or what exactly she thinks people are "leaning in to" or what she thinks the "problems and issues" are, if not the threat of a deadly and debilitating disease possibly jumping through entire student populations. But she's moving on.

...[stammer]...It obviously depends on the geography, but in most places across the country, it is, uh, it is an imperative that kids be able to contin-- get back to school and learn. {Now she's back on her game, smile in place]. That for many kids in person is the right answer. But we also know that some families may be concerned about it.

Eyes down, Perino isn't really listening to this additional non-answer, but is cuing up her next question, which she actually interrupts DeVos to deliver. DeVos tried to get oput another "more than anything parents need choices" but Perino pushes ahead.

Perino brings up the issue of attendance, citing a New York Times report that attendance for online options is abysmal, and that online school fails to engage students. "Do you think that that gets better," she asks, "or is the only way to solve that is to get kids back in school?" Which is handing DeVos a softball on a silver platter, but DeVos can't quite get her bat around to it.

Well, again, I think having-- giving parents and families different choices and options to do what's best for their particular children is the answer now, and we're seeing lots of families creating their own solutions, but we know that there are lots through learning pods, through homeschooling, through microschools, through of a multitude of creative solutions, but we know that there are a lot of families that don't have resources to access those kinds of options, so now more than ever we do need to allow for and provide for parents to have those resources to make the best choice for each of their kids--

You'll notice that she isn't saying anything that she couldn't say and hasn't said in a world with no coronavirus. It is really unclear whether she thinks the "problem" is that there's a lethal disease loose in the country, or that there's just been a disruption of normal school activity by various regulators. It's not clear whether she thinks schools have been closed by the virus, or by state and local officials. But her resort to choice suggests she thinks it's the latter, that parents just need the choice to send students to one of those schools that isn't doing anything about the virus. Or maybe she just thinks better private options are free from all diseases. However you parse it, it's clear she's focused firmly on promoting choice and not addressing any disease-related issues directly.

Now she did admit that not everyone has the resources to do some of these cool option thingies, so Perino moves to the next obvious question:

"What is the department doing to help them?"

You already know the real answer, but here's how DeVos fills the time.

To help the kids--we are-- we are continuing to provide support and uh, uh, as much flexibility around the funds that the federal government has appropriated, and there's still lots of CARES act funds that have gone unspent that could be used for technology upgrades [and training, chimes in Perino]for new technologies, for, um, you know, for testing and and uh for uh cleaning supplies-- Whatever the need is-- for teacher professional development, whatever the need is, there are resources there to be drawn from. But again, it's just an imperative that kids--all kids have the opportunity to be learning full time in an environment that works them.

And we're done.

There are so many things that DeVos could have said in an interview like this, like "We know that the disease is very scary, and as we learn more about it we are taking aggressive steps to protect students and staff so that parents can feel more secure" or "We are mobilizing all sorts of resources so that if schools decide to do distance learning, we'll back them up with technology and training, and if schools decide to open, we'll back them up with the latest guidance and with PPE and supplies to help them out" or even anything that starts with "I have a plan, and here's how it goes..."

But that's not what's happening here. There's no plan, beyond "let the parents sort it all out." Maybe we're just seeing the limits of the Federal Hands Off philosophy. Or what we're seeing is what lies at the heart of the voucher philosophy-- we want to give you some money and after that, you're on your own. After we shoot you some funds, we wash our hands of you. We want to make sure you have choices, but we will not take any steps to make sure that those choices are any good. That's your problem.

But as far as schooling during the time of coronavirus, DeVos has made it clear yet again-- parents, students and teachers are on their own.

(You can watch the video here. It's almost worth it just for DeVos's library of facial expressions and Perino's eye snaps)

DC: Lessons About Charter Schools

DC schools have a history of being messy. There's the entire checkered history of Michelle Rhee, followed by the entire checkered history of the people either trying to build on or clean up after Michelle Rhee. I'm reminding you of this as context for the revelations that are about to be unintentionally provided about the DC charter sector.

You can get a taste of the mess in the public schools from two pieces of testimonial from Richard Phelps, who came on as Director of Assessment just as Rhee was edging toward the door in 2010.Part One looks at how Phelps worked hard to poll over 500 staff members to come up with concrete improvements for the testing system, which boiled down to a ton of work that was summarily rejected by four central office staff, including Rhee. He was supposed to get the staff to buy in to the crappy existing system, not make it better. The Ed Reform Club. he concluded, was there to exploit DC for its own benefit. Part Two looks at the cheating scandals, most specifically the scandal that never became a story--DCPS's technique of using the test blueprint to teach to the test. In the end, he concludes, despite their rhetoric, school leaders Rhee, Henderson and McGoldrick had no interest in making their system more transparent or acountable.

So in a way, I guess it's not surprising that the charter sector that has blossomed in DC is also filled with the same Ed Reform Club problems. And this comes from looking at a piece, not by a DC charter critic, but by one of their big cheerleaders, who can't help saying some of the quiet parts out loud.

Scott Pearson became the executive director of the Public Charter School Board (DC's authorizer of charters) shortly after Richard Phelps hit town. Previously he'd been in the Obama Ed Department as Deputy of the Office of Innovation and Improvement. He was a charter high school co-founder (Leadership Public Schools in the SF bay area). And before that, of courser, he has zero education background. Acquisitions and strategic planning at AOL, and before that, consultant work at Bain and Company. He's occasionally been involved some regulatory debate, and he did get his picture taken with a student one time. Pearson recently stepped down from that position, and so has written one of those "what we learned" articles.

After the usual self-congratulatory lines about how competition and innovation have raised all boats and the charter sector has obvious benefits, Pearson offers five "key takeaways" from his years in the trench.

1. Remove valid reasons some people hate charter schools.

Pearson says he saw that "scandals, underperformance, and behavior inconsistent with being a public school" had been corrosive to public support. The "behavior inconsistent" thing is a puzzler, since that is supposed to be one of the Good Things about charters. But the important part to note here is that these issues are not education problems--they're PR and marketing problems. His concern is not that these charters have been shafting students and families, but that they've been eroding public support for his market sector.

The fixes he claims are to close one in three charters for underperformance. The worst charters in DC used to be terrible, but now they are "average." He says the NAEP shows the DC charter sector improving faster than any other state or district, which is not that hard if you start out in the basement. They cracked down on charter admissions so that charters actually took all comers, and they closed two schools that were "enriching their founders."

But they didn't go any further "out of a respect for school autonomy and our belief in the power of competition." So no requirement to backfill (which helps charters game their stats) and no ban on suspensions or expulsions (which means their crackdown on admissions didn't mean squat, because charters could still get rid of students they didn't want) and no ban on opening charters, say, right across the street from a public school.

It does not seem to occur to him that competition isn't all that powerful if they had to step in to close one out of three charters for underperforming. Nor does he reflect at any point on how these moves affected students. Instead, his summative question is "Did our efforts quiet all the naysayers?" This was about improving marketing, not providing better education for students.

2. Remove the existential angst.

Mostly this means he reassured folks that his goal was not killing the public system and replacing it with charters. He wrote an op-ed. Through various measures, "we kept our market share below 50%." Because the best way to discuss families and students is to call them market share. Besides, he notes, DCPS under Rhee and Henderson "was turning around, embracing core ed reform principles." Members of the Ed Reform Club don't get in the way of fellow members' market share.

Again, his measure of the effectiveness here is that while it may not have won everyone over, it placated the mayor and kept limiting charter growth off the political radar.

3. The ecosystem is important.

Charter schools have the advantages of "nimbleness, flexibility and freedom from bureaucracy" but have the disadvantage of small scale. In other words, charters are more flexible because they aren't doing all the things a public school is required to do. Pearson likes the DC ecosystem of philanthropists and lots of other services and expertise that a charter can tap into. If you aren't going to stock your own pantry, it's handy to live next door to a bunch of supermarkets and managers who are happy to let you mooch off of them.

4. Context matters.

He starts this section with a whopper-- "Charter schools--open to all--are, in many ways, more 'public' than a system that segregates kids, either through geographic boundaries or exam requirements." Nope-- not if the system doesn't require charters to backfill and lets them expel anyone they feel like expelling.

School segregation in DC is complicated and ever-present, just as it is in the city as a whole. And every large urban system has its own special contexts. What Pearson wants to point out is how chummy everyone is--public schools, charter schools, local government--and his explanation is unintentionally scary:

Perhaps one of the keys to the success of modern education reform in D.C. is that reformers aren’t just charter leaders. They start at the office of the mayor and extend to DCPS and charter leadership. I remember being in a room at one point with the deputy mayor for education, the state superintendent for education, and the chancellor of DCPS. All were Teach for America alumni except me. Many charter leaders used to be DCPS leaders, and many DCPS leaders used to be charter leaders. (Emphasis mine)
An ever-revolving door of education amateurs, all claiming to be education experts and all with no real experience or background. Damn TFA. We were so busy focusing on the baloney of training a teacher in five weeks when more of us should have been paying attention to the part where they created education experts based on two years in the classroom (two years spent by someone who had no intention of staying and so was counting down the days instead of counting up the lessons). So the Ed Reform Club has filled every position of power in DC, thereby encapsulating themselves in a perfect little reformistan bubble of agreement. Spoiler alert: At no point does Pearson conclude that a lesson of DC should be that dissenting voices should be allowed inside the bubble. Just Ed Reform Club members.

5. Crossing the chasm isn't enough.

Pearson shares a theory he's heard from a "prominent national charter school supporter." When charters start out, they're so small they don't attract bad attention, but they become vulnerable when they're too small "to have political clout" but big enough to "have awoken the ire of the education establishment that seeks to kill it." Charters have to get across this chasm so that they are too big to mess with, thanks to the "political bulwark" of "supportive families."

There's a lot to unpack here. First of all, if your exclusive club has captured all of the positions of power in your city, you don't get to talk about other people being the "education establishment." Second of all, if you got outside of your bubble once in a while, you might have a clue or two about why some folks are not fans of your work, and you might even spot some opportunities to improve some things (and not just for a PR boost). Finally, what an image of families-- not as partners, or the people you're there to serve, or even as customers, but as the bricks out of which you build a wall that is supposed to protect you by absorbing attacks against you. Holy shit, dude.

Pearson is wondering why DC charters' market share of 47% isn't better protecting them. Sure, nobody's trying to shut them down, and they're well funded. But "the rise of white progressive politics in the city" plus a re-energized union movement is handing them some fights that they are losing.

Now look at what counts as losing.

"We lost last year when the City Council regulated suspensions and expulsions." So, not being able to discard students at will is a "loss."

"We lost this year when the City Council mandated open charter-school governing -board meetings." It's a "loss" that they can't meet in secret away from any public scrutiny by either taxpayers or parents.

And there are more potential losses "waiting in the wings." Like "limits to growth, teacher representatives on charter boards, efforts to control our spending and our curricula."

Why can't we just hoover up those piles of taxpayer dollars without having to share any power or be accountable to anyone?

Pearson has a theory about why the 47% hasn't protected them. Mainly, it's that on issues that "chip away at our autonomies, our parent bodies aren't with us." They can get parents to protest school closing or funding cuts. But when it comes to things like "restricting suspensions, or mandating minutes of physical education, or specifying the organic content of school breakfast," not so much. Why, it's almost parents are more concerned with services rendered to their children than preserving the precious autonomy of charter school operators. Also, it's almost as if the charter operators make no effort to listen to what parents want.

In fact, Pearson says that the failure to build parent bodies and teaching staff into a political force is because of reasons such as leaders who "are wary of the unintended consequences of having an organized parent or student body." Why, those people might want to be heard. They might want a voice in how the school is run, might want some power and control! Gasp.Pearson does acknowledge that "more than a few have alienated their community" by taking a "my way or the highway" attitude. But somehow he just can't quite connect the dots between that thought and everything else he's said. Again, the problem isn't that such an attitude is a bad way to run a school--it's bad PR, bad marketing. And here he tosses in what I find a fascinating tidbit:

Indeed, it is notable that among our most active charter opponents are 20-somethings who graduated from a D.C. charter in the past decade.

Pearson says "our opponents are getting savvier," which again suggests that opponents of charters are acting out of clever strategies rather than reacting to actual real problems with charter schools. And here he tosses out really crazy idea--

D.C. charters have to get savvier too. That means finding ways to build parent support, even if it ultimately means ceding more voice, and even some control, to members of their community.

First, duh. Second, the fact that this seems like a radical "even if" idea shows you where your problem lies. Third, what the hell is wrong with you that this is something so far removed from what you're inclined to do anyway?

The answer, of course, is that this is the business approach to education, and not even a good business approach that recognizes a need to be responsive and open to the "customers" but instead views business as a marketing challenge and instead of customers, seeks to address a "market" or even, God help us, a "bulwark." This is not the thinking of people who are trying to educate young humans (notice that students and their education barely comes up at all in Pearson's piece), but the thinking of people who are trying to run a successful business. And this is the thinking of people who have Dunning-Kruegered themselves so far from the point of running a school that they don't even know they are saying ridiculous things. 

Add this to my file of evidence that the single biggest problem in education right now is far too many amateurs in charge, and not just amateurs, but amateurs who think their expertise in other areas makes them fit to run a school system. Lord, have mercy.

FL: How To Punish A School Board

Miami Dade County Public Schools have been having some issues lately, and the public has them on the ropes.

They decided to hand their virtual schooling over to K12, the cyber school giant founded by Ron Packard with William Bennett as a public face and funding by junk bond king Michael Milken. It's an odd choice, given that a quick Google reveals the many, many problems with the business, from faking enrollment in California to faking teachers in, well, Florida. They've had a long run of disasters. At one point the NCAA said they wouldn't accept a K12 diploma. They are hugely profitable, and built some exuberance under the Trump regime, which helps them throw a big ton of money into lobbying.

In fact, throwing money into things may be the explanation for how they got the Miami-Dade job in the first place. Turns out that they appear to have made a $1.57 million dollar contribution to the Foundation for New Education Initiatives, a nonprofit to help fund programs for the district, and chaired by Alberto Carvalho, the district superintendent.

So K12 got the job, and failed hard. Hard enough that Wired magazine wrote about their "epic series of tech errors."

The rapid pivot to, and even faster pivot away from, K12 amounts to a case study in how not to deploy a massive new software project. It also illustrates how, in a few intense weeks of summer decisionmaking, a charter-school curriculum written by a for-profit company was chosen and installed, with little scrutiny, across one of the largest districts in the country.

It was every kind of disaster, and so the board voted to scrap it-- at 2 AM after a 13 hour meeting.

Why 13 hours? Because there's a funny rule in Florida--a school board has to allow the public to comment, and they can't take an action until the comments have been heard. 

So as the board wrestles with what comes next, they did what any school board in their position would do-- they announced a special meeting with very little notice and hoped that would help the public shut up a little.

No such luck. The board met to vote last night on a plan for re-opening schools. But first they have to listen to all the public comments left on the district's voicemail. And those should be done playing sometime this morning, because the public left over 18 hours of comments there. There were also 200 or so written comments, but those can just be placed in the record. 

Did the board stay up all night and listen? I'm guessing not. But I'll admit--I find the whole story pretty awesome. In Pennsylvania, boards have all sorts of tools for boxing public comments out, as do many other states. Imagine if your local board couldn't take action until they were done listening to the taxpayers. Heck, imagine if state or federal lawmakers couldn't vote on a bill until they had listened to every public comment. 

The notion of taxpayers being able to hold a school board hostage like this is kind of amazing and beautiful, but probably neither terribly efficient or effective, and I have no trouble imagining how this power could be used for evil. Still, it's nice to see the balance of power flipped, giving taxpayers an immediate and direct way to punish board members for bad decisions. Leave it to Florida to come up with something this spectacular.

Update: That meeting took 29 hours. God bless them. 

Lies Matter (Or, When People Show You Who They Are...)

From Merrick Garland to the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is plenty to rage at, and much cyber-ink has been distance-spilled raging about it. But I was particularly struck by this piece at Slate by Lili Loofbourow.

She talks about some larger issues here, and I think there's a lesson for folks in the education world. She talks here about the effects of McConnell's cavalier dismissal of his own made-up rule from 2016:

He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely wouldn’t be so hellbent on total power that he’d risk destroying the country by breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would. And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland’s nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether (to quote the man himself) “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”

I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.

Naked power grabs are ugly, and infuriating when you're sitting powerlessly on the losing side of the grabbing. But lying is toxic. Take it from someone who poisoned chunks of his own life with lies years ago. Lying is destructive--it ruins trust, trashes relationships, makes it hard to move forward in any useful way. And trust is the foundation of everything, every bit of communication, right down to the foundational trust that when people use words they are making a good faith attempt to convey meaning and not conceal it. If words don't mean anything, we're just grunting hairless apes waving sticks.

Some folks like to get their lawyer on when discussing lies. It's not technically lying because I just spun it a little, because I just left a few details out, because the other party didn't ask the right question. The only reason anyone embarks on such explanations is because they know that "not technically lying" is, in fact, actually lying. If you are manipulating the facts in order to get somebody else to do what you want them to, that's lying. And it's always toxic.

Right now, a whole bunch of elected folks and vapid media farts are showing us who they are. They are showing us that there is no principle more important than grabbing what they want, and that includes principles like "words mean things" or "my word is my bond."

This needs to be noted and remembered for those days when these unprincipled liars start making mouth noises about what principles they think should be involved in decisions about public education. In the world of people who want to dismantle and replace public education, there are people who will say what they mean, and even as I think they are wrong, I can at least respect that they are acting out of principle. But these political mannequins who put principles on and off as easily as changing shirts--they are never, ever to be trusted or taken seriously. Their opponents--and, for that matter, their allies of the moment--forget that at their own peril. 

Will China Help Pay For Trump's History Project

This, believe it or not, is about the deal involving social media sensation, Tik Tok.
At first, the whole Tik Tok business looked like a basic old-fashioned shakedown. "That's a nice little tech biz you have there," said Trump. "Be a shame if anything happened to it." Okay, not really that subtle-- it was more along the lines of "I'm going to ban your business unless you give my buddies a cut."

Tik Tok is not an angelic app without issues; security experts have been saying for a while now that the app is just Chinese spyware with a video feature, collecting data for China. Trump said he would shut down the app unless a piece was sold to a US company. So Oracle, run by Trump buddy Larry Ellison, and Walmart, under CEO and Trump supporter Doug McMillon, have set up a deal to get a piece of Tik Tok action. ByteDance, the company behind the app, would transfer control to a new entity in which ByteDance still held 80%, and Walmart and Oracle had their piece of the action.

Trump gave his blessing, but threw in a surprise announcement--the new company is going to hand over $5 billion to help fund his super-duper patriotic American history project. This was news to some of the partners, but you know what they say--shaken down for a penny, shaken down for a pound.

Trump's grand history project, in which US students will, well, something:

We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students and restore patriotic education to our schools,” he said at the rally. “Patriotic education,” he repeated, describing it as teaching children “to love our country, honor our history and always respect our great American flag.”

The program has zero specifics, and the one concrete example of what the administration has in mind is pretty awful. So it may be that this is nothing more than empty campaign noise for the base; look for Trumpian history to premiere during Infrastructure Week.

But if it really happens, and this deal completes, and the partners fork over the $5 billion, that means that Trump's shiny new patriotic curriculum will be financed in part by China. Given that the Chinese have considerable experience in educating and re-educating citizens to properly appreciate the golden beauty of their history and the gift of their Beloved Leader, there seems like a sort of twisted poetry to that. And Trump's patriotic history could be just one more Trumpian campaign item that was made in China. 

ICYMI: One More Damned Thing After Another (9/20)

 Well, that week sucked. And there's a lot to read, too.

Let's start with something positive. Drum prodigy Nandi Bushell has been youtubing covers for a while, but a few weeks ago she challenged Dave Groh to a drum battle; it went two rounds, and then Groh finally upped the ante by writing her a song. So there's that in the world. Now on to the rest.

On Campus Testing for Distance Learners  
Oh, Florida. They agreed that parents should be able to keep their at-risk kindergartners at home. But test-lovers that they are, they may require those same littles to come in to take the kinder-readiness test. Because Florida... Accountabaloney has the story.

Proceed at Your Own Peril  
Dad Gone Wild checks in to see how things are virtually going, and reflects on how we keep asking everything from teachers.

When the Lights Go Out  
Grumpy Old Teacher provides a vivid picture of what it's like in the pandemic classroom. A nice piece of writing here.

No Way To Treat a Scholar  
Gary Rubinstein looks at one more way that Success Academy games the data and juices up their PR-- welcome to the 5th year high school program.

Selling the Future of Ed Tech  
Damn, but Audrey Watters is the best. Here's a look at some of the wacky ed tech treats that have been predicted for the future over the years. Fun, but deeply thought provoking.

How centrist Democrats paved the way for Betsy DeVos  
Have you heard talks to David Menefee-Libey about this sad bit of history, framing it intriguingly as a treaty between the left and right over charter schools. As always, you can listen to the podcast or read the transcript. Either way, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire deliver a tasty slice of information in an entertaining sandwich.

Framing a new website forced us to consider public education's core principles  
Jan Resseger kind of gives away the game with her title. Friends of education in northern Ohio revamped their website, and it leads to a good reflection on what public education's really all about.

The Mighty Storm
I'm glad that Russ Walsh is back to blogging. Here he starts with the Galveston hurricane disaster of 1900 and works his way over to building reading comprehension.

Take It Easy on the Teachers, OK 
Nancy Flanagan takes through the taxonomy of pandemic school posts, including the ones that blame teachers, and she has some thoughts about those.

The difference between freedom and captivity  
Teacher Tom asks what adult sacred memories of childhood all have in common

Face-mask recognition is here  
Well, National Geographic wants your email to read this unhappy-making piece about facial recognition in general and the fact that your mask will no longer thwart it in particular.

DeVos Versus the IRS  
This is a bit wonky, but important-- it turns out that a revamp of SALT rules gets directly in the path of tax credit scholarship programs by limiting how much money rich folks can launder through this type of voucher program.

NC Judge backs $427 million to improve schools. Will anyone fund it.  
North Carolina has been working hard to bust public education. Here's one more battle on that front. From the News & Observer.

The pandemic and school building issues  
Pandemic responses are highlighting just what a rundown mess many US school buildings are. From Mat Barnum at Chalkbeat.

Betsy DeVos and the separation of church and state  
Nancy Bailey takes a look at the DeVosian view of the separation between church and state when it comes to education in the time of pandemic (Wall? What wall?)

The long history of politicizing history class  
Olivia Waxman at Time puts some historical perspective on Trump's demand that history be taught with a golden patriotic glow. We've been here before.

Ed Department has denied 94% of loan forgiveness applications  
Betsy DeVos can keep this up forever. Despite being scolded by Congress and spanked by the courts, she continues to avoid actually implementing the federal loan forgiveness program for students defrauded by predatory for profits.

I am only one person
Anya Kamanetz (NPR) said on Twitter that she has never had so many interview subjects cry during the interview. A look at how teachers (who are also parents) are coping with pandemic education.

When poorly veiled bigotry masquerades as choice  
Andre Perry at Hechinger Reports looks at how racists have always loved the word "choice"

An open letter to a parent afraid of anti-racist education  
Christina Torres is at EdWeek with a response to a woman upset and cranky about Black Lives Matter at school. I watched this twitter discussion unfold in real time before it was erased by the woman in question, and she was pretty nasty about the whole thing. Torres offers a more measured response.

Taxes on DeVos yacht could pay for school nurses
Katelyn Kivel at The Gander takes a look at just how much tax the family avoids by registering their yachts elsewhere. It's a lot.

The ends do not justify the means
Nobody has explained the problems with the science of reading movement better than Paul Thomas, who takes another swing here.

The epic screw-up of distance learning in Miami  
Wired has a great look at how Miami-Dade schools got themselves into such a mess by picking K12 as their distance education provider of choice. It's a tale of hubris and dumb. All it's missing is one little tidbit that you can find here--K12's large contribution to the superintendent's personal organization.

The 1776 Unites Curriculum Isn't So Great

During Dear Leader's call for more patrio-centric re-education, he referenced and Betsy DeVos praised the 1776 Unites project as an example of the kind of thing he wants to see in schools. So I went to look at it, and, well, it has some problems.

What Is It, And Where Did It Come From?

The "curriculum" has been launched just last week as an "inspirational alternative" to the New York Times 1619 project. The 1776 Unites initiative was launched back in February with somewhat stronger language about the 1619 project. It came from the Woodson Center, the organization founded by Black conservative activist Bob Woodson, who said upon launching that it was intended to counter the "lethal" narrative of 1619.

"This garbage that is coming down from the scholars and writers from 1619 is most hypocritical because they don’t live in communities [that are] suffering," he continued. "They are advocating something they don’t have to pay the penalty for."

So, not a fan. He pulled together an assortment of other Black conservatives, and in February the website was launched:

1776 Unites is a movement to liberate tens of millions of Americans by helping them become agents of their own uplift and transformation, by embracing the true founding values of our country.

The website includes a library of essays, with titles like "The Cult of Victimhood," "Living by the grace of God and the power of applying oneself," "Embrace black patriotism over victimization," "Slavery does not define the black American experience," and "The 1619 Project perpetuates the soft bigotry of low expectations." 

There's an awful lot of bootstrapping rhetoric on the site, the good old-fashioned "if you're poor it's your own damn fault" kind. But I'm in no position to evaluate the group's standing as Black activists or intellectuals; I am, however, comfortable evaluating the usefulness of their educational tools.

What's Offered In The Curriculum? 

Well, not a lot, actually. You need to sign up your name and info to get access to the download page--in fact, you need to submit that info every single time you want to go to the download page--where you will find three lessons. Two are about Black history, focusing on Biddy Mason and Elijah McCoy. The third is about "building character" and the Woodson Principles. The page hints at an intent to grow this effort that is "essential to building a resilient, patriotic population." 

But for right now, you've got just the three lessons.

Lesson One: Biddy Mason

There are several elements here, starting with a Power Point presentation of 18 slides. The images are a curious mix. On the slide about Biddy's early life, one photo is an actual photo of young Biddy, a copyrighted photo that belongs to the UCLA, Library Special Collections folks, but it's used without any acknowledgement or caption (I had to reverse Google it), while the other photo is of a mother with what looks like a newborn baby. That can't possibly be Biddy; a reverse search suggests its a stock photo from Getty Images taken by W. Eugene Smith; it's also uncaptioned and uncredited. This is an issue through the slides--some photos are credited, some are captioned, and several more are not. 

The actual content is thin and context-free. Her 1,700 mile trek to Utah, which ended up in California, is given a couple of sentences. In California, she sued for her freedom and won in 1856. The slide asks if you know what year the rest of the slaves in America were emancipated, and the answers 1863 which--well, no. The Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves in the Southern states free, but did no such favors for the slaves in the border states. And since the proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863, while the Civil War was still raging, it didn't actually do a thing--it couldn't kick in until the North had actually beaten the Southern states in question. 

The rest of Biddy's story, which the slides continue to tell in very broad strokes, focuses on the economics. She worked for wages and invested her money. Her purchase of property in Los Angeles, leading to considerable wealth, is attributed to her wisdom and not to any fortunate timing. The slides tout that she became one of LA's "first prominent citizens and most important landowners...during the 1850s and 1860s," which seems like a kind of loose reading if she only became freed in 1856, and even looser when you learn she bought her first property in 1866 (you don't learn that from this lesson). Her philanthropic work and large fortune ("about $8 million today") are emphasized. Students are asked what causes they would give money to, and what kinds of people "you would like to help in your life?"

Activities and Assignments   

Look up some famous philanthropists (Carnegie, Gates) and find out how they made their money and what they fund. Do some real estate research in your own town and figure out what you'd invest in. Which parts of the country are growing or shrinking, and which would make a good investment right now? If you had a million dollars, how would you invest it? Without using the words, the writer suggests a pair and share. At the end of your life, if there were a memorial to you, what would you want it to say? 

Are you noticing anything about what a$pect of Biddy'$ life is being focu$ed on here? Will it help if I show you the targeted 

Vocabulary List

Profit, Assets, Appreciate/Depreciate, Philanthropy, Investment, Interest/compound interest, Down payment

Critical Thinking and Discussion Questions  

What are some advantages she faced? What are some disadvantages? How about you? "How hard is it to maintain a positive mindset in the face of adversity?" Why do you think Biddy was generous to others, even after her life was filled with hardship? How would her life have been different if she had become discouraged? Note: there are no questions along the lines of "What if her owner had beaten her to death before she got to court" or "What if she had arrived in LAS too late to get in on the growth boom?" or "What if she had ended up in some place that was busting rather than booming?" There's also no attempt to encourage students to dig deeper past the paper thin outline of her life.

Like so many things that try to pass them off as critical thinking exercises, these aren't even close. Here's an important pro tip about critical thinking questions-- if you are trying to direct students toward a specific conclusion or realization, you aren't doing critical thinking. This is why Dear Leader's vision of a curriculum that tells one certain shiny story of America will always be anti-critical thinking.

Lesson Plan 

This isn't a lesson plan. There's a paragraph that manages to sum up the entirety of the actual content of the lesson  in a few sentences. There are some suggestions about when the lesson might be appropriate. Oh, and you can use it for Social and Emotional Learning, too, because it "highlights resilience, grit, determination, self-reliance and other positive inner resources and character traits." 

There's a "lesson prompt"-- "Have you ever wondered what happened to people who were born in slavery but were later freed?" And suggestions that you could use the power point, or watch some videos, and basically you could use the stuff in this packet. This is a lesson plan as conceived by someone who has never written an actual lesson plan ever. What exactly will the teacher do, in which order, following what time frame? Who knows.

Videos

Links to four youtube videos about Biddy Mason. All four, including the one that's only four and a half minutes long, provide far more depth and information than this lesson does. One is just a panel discussion, but all are informative. 

MC Questions

A bank of multiple choice questions to use. They are terrible. How did she win her freedom? Was she born free, moved to a free state, escaped and moved to the North, sued and won her freedom in court, or died as a slave. Some of the answers are ridiculous and could only be used to test if the students were conscious during the power point, and in this particular case, two answers are correct (she could only sue for freedom because she was in a free state). The other four questions are similar, though one is the only one to offer "All of the above," which is, of course, correct. 

Standards and Learning Objectives  

Four and a half pages of standards cribbed from a variety of sources, including CASEL, ASCA, NCSS, Common Core, and AP US History. They have stretched like crazy here. Just a few of the standards this lesson claims to meet--

From AP: 5.3.11.B The women's right movement was both emboldened and divided over the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution.

From NCSS: 8 Science, Technology and Society

From ASCA: A:C1.6 Understand how school success and academic achievement enhance future career and vocational opportunities

CASEL: Stress management

CCSS: A whole lot of speaking and listening, for some reason.

The Learning Objectives list includes the student being able to: explain the difference between a slave state and a free state, define the vocabulary (not use it?), identify at least one financial investment opportunity, explain/interpret a quotation using their own words.

Lesson Two: Elijah McCoy

Worried I'm going to drag you through all that again? Don't worry-- the only thing done for McCoy is his 15 power point slides. Those include one that asks students if they've ever had a job, one that asks "what kinds of things need to be invented right now," and two oddly redundant slides that credit him as the basis for the saying "the real McCoy," a claim that a quick Wikipedia check would tell you is shaky, at best. 

Honestly, I've assigned slide-style presentations about important people over the course of my career; this looks suspiciously like the one done by the student who scanned one source, copied some random photos, and then did his best to squeeze out a few more slides for padding,

The Woodson Principles   

Okay, I was going to take a quick look at this, but the list of ten principles is mis-formatted on the power point slide and another slide asks if students know what a GED is. Woodson's ten principles look like any good unobjectionable corporate training list, but is this a good way to teach them? I think not. Moving on.

So Many Issues   

Fact-checking. Editing. Chopping the heck out of a couple of actually quite exceptional stories. McCoy and Mason really are impressive individuals with extraordinary stories. But these stripped down versions don't begin to do them justice. It's hard to know why--Mason's story is filled with people who stepped up to help her at critical moments, from helping her get her day in court to giving her a place to live when she was freed--have they all been excised to highlight "self-reliance"? 

It's extraordinarily unclear what the target audience is here. The tone and language feels like maybe fourth or fifth grade, but the standards lists high school standards. You are never going to capture high school attention with material this bland and thin. The exercise reminds me of beginning student teachers I would work with who knew they had some stuff they wanted to cover, but had no idea how they should exercise their own leadership and planning to make the lesson happen. "I'll go over some of this and then there will be a discussion, and the students will, you know, learn about all this other stuff that will just come up, somehow." Or maybe it's just the work of another bunch of people who don't have any real idea what teaching involves. Or maybe they were focused on what they wanted to say about the material that they treated the "curriculum" itself as an afterthought. And you can argue about the scholarship behind the 1619 Project, but there's no scholarship going on here at all.

In short, teachers should absolutely be teaching about Biddy Mason and Elijah McCoy. Under no circumstances should they use these materials to do it. And if Dear Leader is counting on 1776 Unites to create his super-patriotic curriculum or beat back the evil lefty forces of the 1619 Project--well, this sample indicates that it's just not going to happen.