DeVos and the Problem of the "Right Fit"

Betsy DeVos has been talking about the “right fit” for a while now.

In 2017: “It shouldn’t matter what type of school a student attends, so long as the school is the right fit for that student.”

During Charter Schools Week this year: “... to celebrate the millions of students who have found the right fit for their education...”

In her recent letter to parents: “...we believe families need more options than ever to find the right fit.”

In the rhetoric of school choice, “right fit” has become a replacement for the “rescue from failing schools” and “trapped by their zip code.” 

The “right fit” rhetoric has some advantages for school choice proponents. In particular, it lets them target a much broader “market,” pitching school choice to students whose school is well-rated and generally successful. “It’s a great school,” the pitch goes, “but it still might not be the right fit for your child.” Voila—instant expanded choice customer landscape.

But there are reasons to be extremely wary of this language.

First of all, while DeVos likes to suggest that parents know what the “right fit” for their child will be, it is the private and charter schools that will ultimately decide whether or not the child is the “right fit” for their school. Charter schools have a history of pushing out students who are too difficult (Success Academy charters of NYC famously was caught with a “got to go” list). Charters can also avoid costly students with expensive-to-meet special needs by simply not offering supports for those needs.

Private schools can go even further in determining what students they will or will not accept as the “right fit.” In July, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary DeVos visited Thales Academy in North Carolina, a private school that benefits from North Carolina’s voucher program. Thales does not provide its students with transportation to school or lunch during the day; it also will not supply Individualized Education Programs (IEP) or 504 plan support for students with disabilities. And like every other private school, you may believe that the school will be the right fit for your child, but you will fill out an application and the school will tell you whether or not the child is the right fit for it.

“Right fit” has too often been the language of polite discrimination. “Of course you’re legally allowed to buy a house here, but are you sure this neighborhood is the right fit for your family?” Career and technical education has a troubled history in some areas because it was used as a dumping ground for Those Students. And how many bright young women have been told that they should sign up for home economics instead of organic chemistry because hard science wouldn’t be the “right fit.”

There’s no question that education should be delivered to students where they are. One of the many deep flaws of the Common Core is its insistence on one-size-fits-all standards. Actual personalized education (the kind involving persons rather than software) is hugely valuable (and usually available in public schools, without having to change schools every time you change direction).

But we can observe two different philosophies of public education. One is uplift; public education is there to help every student rise and advance. The other is about sorting. The sorting view is rooted in the idea that society does and should have different levels, and that people are happiest when they accept their proper place in the world. Some people are meant to be worker bees, say sorters, and some are meant to be the queen, and if you try to move them out of their proper place, they’ll just be unhappy. This is why some turn up their nose at social activism—it’s just stirring up a bunch of people to be unhappy with their proper place in life. For sorters, the purpose of education is to help prepare people for that proper place, that place in life that is the right fit.

I’m not suggesting that every single person who talks about the right fit for a student’s education is out to discriminate against some families. But “right fit” easily provides cover for bias and discrimination. In education, the words should always make us just a little bit suspicious, particularly when someone is trying to sell something.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Dear Joe Biden:

If someone has a pipeline to the campaign, please feel to send this along.

Dear VP Biden:

I know that this evening, you have your hands full with the Great Orange Loon in Cleveland. But you've got an education flavored fundraiser tomorrow night, and we really need to talk.

Here's the event:

It might have been of interest to educators, except, of course, the price of admission is, well-- a "champion" ponies up $5,600, and on the bottom end, an "attendee" pays $100. I mean, I was sorely tempted, but as a retired teacher with two toddlers at home, I don't have $100 to spend on something that will probably horrify me anyway.

Because here's the thing.

I really cannot state strongly enough how much actual working classroom teachers don't really like or trust Arne Duncan. Truthfully, they mostly don't know John King all that well--unless they're from New York, in which case they still have a bitter taste in their mouths from his disastrous tenure there.

I'm sure your campaign has a lovely working relationship with union leaders. But the rank and file, the teachers in the trenches, the people who represent millions of actual votes-- they are not so sure.

Your previous boss broke our heart. We thought he was going to reverse the disaster that was No Child Left Behind--instead, he doubled down on the worst parts, like high-stakes testing. And Duncan was a disaster--one more guy who had never taught and who championed the pushed-from-the-top-down fiasco that was Common Core. Duncan's whole premise seemed to be that teachers were slackers who didn't know their jobs and/or lacked the drive to really do their jobs. He was insulting, demeaning, and the champion of too many bad policies, and to this day he has failed to take responsibility for any of it.

He was not a champion for public education or the people who work there. I cannot type those words hard enough.

It is not enough to pledge to put a teacher in the job education secretary's job. Public education has been a political orphan for far too long, spurned by both Democrats and the GOP; from the classroom vantage point, there has been no serious change in the disastrous direction of the department in decades, regardless of administration.

So we really, really want to see something that shows you are actually listening to the people in public education, that you recognize mistakes of the past, that you are prepared to chart a new course. This event signals the exact opposite. This sort of thing will not inspire public school teachers to support you.

Suggestions? Have a town hall with actual public school teachers (and not just ones who have been carefully vetted to be agreeable). Talk to them. Listen to them. Say some version of the words, "This is what we got wrong in the Obama years, and here's the course correction I propose." And leave Arne Duncan to continue pulling down big salaries at various thinky tanks. Because you can talk about kicking Betsy DeVos to the curb, but as long as you embrace the second-worst secretary of education that teachers can remember, the DeVos tough talk isn't going to stir up much enthusiasm.

Feel free to give me a call. Like many other teachers, active and retired, I would love to see you succeed--but I would also love to see public education finally get real, useful support from the federal government, and not just more of the baloney we've had shoveled at us since the Reagan administration commissioned A Nation at Risk to attack American schools. Give us a reason to support you with a slogan more robust than this one:

Sincerely,
Peter Greene







I'll let you know if I hear anything.

AI: Still Not Ready for Prime Time

You may recall that Betsy DeVos sued to say, often, that education should be like hailing a Uber (by which she presumably didn't intend to say "available to only a small portion of the population at large). You may also recall that when the awesomeness of Artificial Intelligence is brought up, sometimes in conjunction with how great an AI computer would be at educating children.

Yes, this much salt

Well, here comes reminder #4,756,339 that this kind of talk should be taken with an acre of salt. This time it's an article in The Information by Amir Efrati, and it starts out like this:

After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber’s effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can’t drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem.

We're talking $2.5 billion-with-a-B dollars spent with nothing usable to show for it. Unfortunate for something that has been deemed for Uber as "key to its path to profitability." Meanwhile, corporations gotta corporate-- a "self-driving" Uber killed a pedestrian in Temp, Arizona back in 2018, and the court has just ruled that while Uber itself is off the hook, the "safety driver" will be charged with negligent homicide. She mad the not-very-bright assumption that the car could do what its backers said it could do.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has absorbed partnered with OpenAI, the folks whose GPT-3 language emulator program is giving everyone except actual English speakers chills of excitement. Not everyone is delighted, but Microsoft seems to think this exclusive license will provide an "incredible opportunity" to expand their Azure platform that will "democratizes AI technology" and pump up their AI At Scale initiative. There's a huge amount of hubris here; not only do they assert that the whole grand vision will start--start--by teaching computers human language, but they apparently believe they know how humans learn language-- it's "by understanding semantic meanings of words and how these words relate to other words to form sentences." 

Who knew? Thinking, ideas, organization, even paragraphs and whole books-- juat a waste of time. All the time I wasted as a teacher, when that's all there is to it. And hey-- Microsoft claims to have already come up with AI that reads a document (well, a Wikipedia article) and answers questions as well as a human-- did it two years ago, in fact. 

And yet, here in the real world, AI still doesn't have any ability with language beyond the superficial areas, because computers--even the "AI" ones-- don't understand anything. They simply respond top surface patterns, which is why there are a dozen on this blog about how badly computers fail at simple read-and-assess tasks for human writing (here's the most recent, which, oddly enough, involves software semi-funded by Bill Gates-- and it sucks).

Ai At Scale repeats a time-honored bit of computer puffery when talking about a shiny future, saying "that future is a lot closer than you might think." That's a lot of wiggly weasel-wording in a short phrase, which remains the AI world's mantrariffic euphemism for "we don't have this figured out yet, but noy, just any day now, or maybe shortly after that, it will be awesome." 

AI is still just a bunch of algorithms backed up with an immense capacity and infinite patience for cracking patterns, and whether it's city traffic or a simple paragraph, it's still not enough. Remember-- friends don't let friends fall for ed tech AI marketing nonsense. 

ICYMI: Hanging In There Edition (9/27)

Well, that was another week. Just keep trying to avoid being crushed by what feels like a physical increase in the air pressure over the entire country. Here's the list. And I'll remind you-- share the stuff that speaks to you. Everyone is an amplifier.

Give Teachers Status and Stacks of Money 

Lee Childs, the author of the Jack Reacher books, has some thoughts about how teachers ought to be treated. They are nice thoughts.

No Teachers, But Making Millions 

A look at Prenda schools, yet another attempt to get rid of those dumb, salary-wanting teachers and cash in big time on providing an education-flavored product.

3rd Grade Reading Laws Are Harmful 

Stefanie Fuhr takes a guest turn at Nancy Bailey's blog to remind us of something that should be repeated daily-- those laws that retain 3rd graders who don't pass the reading test are bad laws, and they are doing bad things.

DeVos Investigated for Hatch Act Violation

Politico has the details on how DeVos got herself in trouble this time.

Jeff Bezos wants to start a school for kids whose families are underpaid by people like Jeff Bezos

Anand Giridharadas says this is a crash course in why generosity is no substitute for justice.

COVID relief-- Congress Dithers   

EdWeek looks at all the relief that still isn't coming, and the growing frustration with same.

GreatSchools Overhauls Ratings  

You mat recall that Chalkbeat ran a story showing how GreatSchools ratings have racism and classism baked in. Now Chalkbeat reports on their attempt to fix that problem. Score one for Matt Barnum.

Bill Gates is still Dabbling on Common Core  

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider says that signs show Gates still hasn't let this drop. C'mon Bill.

How To Ruin a World Class Education System   

Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan are talking about Canada here, but you'll recognize all the issues they bring up.

Endangered Public Schools Need Federal Leadership  

An editorial from the Hechinger Report calls on the feds to get off their butts. Good luck with that.

Teaching Critical Thinking

Can critical thinking be taught? Daniel Willingham has some ideas, and they're thought-provoking on their own.

Demand This: Teach Empathy, Ethics and Evidence   

Arthur Camins at the Daily Koss with a call to focus on what really matters.

I Can't Shield My Daughter From Coronavirus and Edmentum    

Steven Singer shows just how bad the on-line platform really is (spoiler alert: pretty damn bad)

The Business of Education   

An article at the Regulatory Review takes a look at a paper tracing the way business management techniques have bled into education with less-than-optimal results.

CT: Another Edu-phauxlanthropist Fails Hard

It was just last fall that we were all talking about Ray and Barbara Dalio and their big plans for helping education in Connecticut. Now, less than a year later, the dream is dying an ugly public death.

In many ways, the Dalios didn't look like the usual phauxlanthropic edu-dabblers.

He is a successful hedge fund manager and the richest guy in Connecticut. She immigrated from Spain fifty-ish years ago and worked at the Whitney before settling into the mom-and-kids track. He has announced that capitalism is not working, and that income gap is a huge national crisis. When she decided she was interested in working on education, she started visiting actual schools. After a start working with charters and Teach for America, she pulled away and started supporting public schools instead through her philanthropies and organizations like Connecticut RISE. Teachers, even union presidents, describe her as humble, a good listener, "truly a partner."

In the spring of 2019, the Dalios offered up $100 million to the public ed system, to be matched by the state and, maybe, other Rich Folks. It was supposeed to be aimed at students in under-resourced communities. Even the state teacher union president said that public-private partnerships usually stink, but this one smells rosy.

But that rosy aroma faded fast. Dalio, for all his noise about the failures of capitalism, still thinks the solution is a visionary CEO at the top making the rest of the monkeys dance. The New Haven Independent argued, Dalio, whose company Bridgewater Associates has been the recipient of state largesse, was simply returning public money to the public.

And that pile of money came with all sorts of strings attached. The panel overseeing the pile of money was to be exempt from ethics and disclosure rules at Dalio's insistence. The GOP Deputy House minority leader's reaction was pretty on point:

"These corporate board-holders are going to go up to the balcony and sprinkle down dollars on, I guess, the peasants of Connecticut, and we’re supposed to be happy about that?” said Deputy House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford.

Dalio has oft claimed that "radical transparency" was the secret of his success, but the Partnership for Connecticut wasn't going to be playing that game. The group met behind closed doors, locking out the public, the press, and five legislators who would have been bound by the Freedom of Information Act. Ray Dalio was not directly involved, but Barbara sat on the partnership board.

In March, the partnership hired Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey as president and CEO. She came with plenty of edu-reformy credentials, including work as senior director on the Goals 2000 project at USED and a decade at New American Schools, followed by 12 years at Say Yes To Education, Inc. Soon after, the partnership hired her for a hefty $247,500 salary. 

Back in May, there was a flap between Barbara Dalio and the brand new CEO of the partnership to resign after six weeks. Well, "flap" might be too small a word. Schmitt-Carey complained of having been "ambushed" in a phone call that raised a bunch of allegations about her and threatened to go public if she didn't resign. She was placed on paid administrative leave. 

Shortly afterwards, the Dalios pulled out of the partnership, "citing frustrations with partisan politics, news leaks and 'sensationalistic stories.'" As of June 5, the partnership was defunct. But their troubles were not over.

“A good reputation takes decades to build. I owe it to myself, my daughter,and other women to stand up and hold people accountable for their actions, even when there are billionaires involved,” said Schmitt-Carey last week as she filed a $2.5 million defamation lawsuit against Dalio's philanthropic group as well as her old Say Yes organization, plus two individuals who allegedly badmouthed her by spreading old Say Yes stories to her new employers.

The lawsuit alleges that she was not hired to actually decide anything. According to the suit,  “she had been hired to rubberstamp the silver-bullet programs chosen unilaterally by Dalio Philanthropies figureheads Ray and Barbara Dalio — despite those policies' dubious efficacy."

Furthermore, says the suit,  "Mr. Dalio went on to instruct Ms. Schmitt-Carey that her job was not to draw on the experience and knowledge she had accumulated during her long career but to take direction from Ms. Dalio regarding which programs should be implemented. As stated above, Mr. Dalio informed Ms. Schmitt-Carey, 'If my wife wants to distribute 10,000 coats, your job is to figure out how to do that.'" And it goes on to pointy as a "longstanding pattern of devaluing women" at Bridgewater.

Schmitt-Carey accuses Dalio et al of "wrongful acts involve abuses of wealth and power, misuse of a not-for-profit public-private partnership for private purposes, a chronic lack of transparency, a disregard for the reputations of others, and clear breaches of contractual duties."

So, this is going to be ugly. Ruth McCambridge at Non-Profit Quarterly leads her story about the mess with 

NPQ would love to stop writing about failed partnerships between public schools and billionaires, but they keep getting started and running aground as fast as their benefactors pillage the economy.

The whole meltdown comes from letting rich guys "give" money without actually letting go of control of it. McCambridge called this back in April 2019 when she quoted Anand Giridharadas pointing out that "Dalio's personal preferences should have zero influence on how the money is spent" pointing out that "it puts some rich guy and the State of Connecticut on an equal footing to negotiate a plan to enhance the general welfare." McCambridge expanded on that idea:

Placing a rich hedge fund manager in a co-equal position with public governance is anti-democratic and, where the public schools are concerned, doomed to be counter-productive in terms of lived-out notions of equity.

Dalio, like many other modern phauxlanthropists, was not trying to give money away--he was trying to buy something with it, and he expected to be not a co-equal partner with the state, but the leading partner, the boss. Some rich guys buy their wives a car or tennis lessons; Dalio went a little further and bought his wife part of the state's official government function. It's not philanthropy--it's just hire and salary, with the expectation that the hired help will do as they're told. This is not how to fund or improve a state's education system. 

GA: State Super Wood Outmaneuvers DeVos

Richard Woods was elected state superintendent for Georgia in 2014. He's a Republican, but what makes him special among stat education bosses is that prior to his election, he spent twenty-some years as an actual honest-to-God educator. Not some Teach for America insta-expert, but an actual fourteen years in the (rural) classroom (HS social studies) then another decade as an administrator educator. He's even married to a thirty-year veteran teacher. Yes, there's still plenty of charter school foolishness loose in Georgia, and Kemp is still their governor, but when I read what Woods has to say in interviews, I get the impression that he actually remembers what he learned as a teacher. Things like how teachers are the only professionals who have to outfit their own workspace, and what it will take to recruit and retain them.

And testing.

Woods ran, twice, on the idea of radically reducing Georgia's massive testing requirements. He ran literally on "students are more than a score." And he made some real progress. So when the world turned to viral crap last spring, Georgia was first in line to suspend the test, and right there asking the feds for a waiver to excuse them from the Big Standardized Test requirement.

They were already angling for one this year, because it's fairly obvious that 1) this year's results won't mean bupkus and 2) the time spent on test prep could be better spent on life prep. 

But Betsy DeVos has signaled that she's n ot doing that waiver thing again, right after Georgia became the first state to ask for one for 2020-2021. Woods said he was disappointed. Well, actually, he said, "It is disappointing, shows a complete disconnect with the realities of the classroom, and will be a detriment to public education." 

But, he said, nobody needs to worry. He had a workaround.

He announced his plan and it appears on the agenda for the next state board meeting. While Georgia usually counts the Big Standardized Test for 20% of the student grade, Woods proposal is that this year they count for 0.01% of student grades (lawmakers won't allow him to throw it out entirely). From AP coverage:

“Georgia will abide by federal law, but we are not going to layer additional stress and burden onto our students and teachers during this time,” Woods said in a statement Thursday. “In this environment, these tests are not valid or reliable measures of academic progress or achievement, and we are taking all possible steps at the state level to reduce their high-stakes impact.”

It's an elegant solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. The Georgia Education Association applauds  the move favoring "compassion over compliance," and hopes that the Governor likewise suspends teacher evaluations (teacher evaluations based on a test that has zero student consequences are baloney). GeorgiaCAN, the state's arm of the ed reform octopus sticks to the talking point that these tests are creally necessary for finding out where students stand and what they've lost because a once-a-year narrow standardized test is so much better for that than the professional tools and judgment of actual classroom teachers. 

It's a great solution, and one can only hope that it spreads to other states this year, and perhaps in gthe years to come. 

Arne Duncan's New Corporate Edu-biz Job

If there's one thing we know about folks in the education disruption biz, it's that they are remarkably adept at finding work no matter how much failure they pack into their CV.

Yes, it's freakin' hilarious.

And so it is with little surprise that we note that Arne Duncan has picked up a new job as the chairman of the board for FullBloom. This comes on top of his job as a partner of the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs's--well, we need a new name for something that "uses philanthropy, impact investing, and promoting policy solutions to reimagine some of society's most calcified systems and create new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities."

Here's what CEO Jeffrey Cohen has to say about the momentous acquisition:

“Having a thought leader like Arne help guide our decisions through this time of unprecedented educational disruption is vital as we work to ensure both the safety and engagement of our students,” said CEO Jeffrey Cohen. “We are delighted to welcome Arne to the board. This appointment makes us better as an organization because we know he will hold us to the highest standards when it comes to producing results for the children and clients we serve.”

Yes, Duncan is apparently a thought leader now. Who'd have guessed.

So what is FullBloom? It's a sort of edu-biz conglomerate, a company that has grown through acquisition and merger and well. Okay. Back in 1976, Stephen Freeman founded READS as an "educational service business" for private and religious schools. Then READS was acquired by Sylvan Learning Systems, which then became Sylvan Education Solutions, the parent company of both the learning centers and some other edu-businesses as well, Then Sylvan sold off their K-12 businesses to Apollo Management, which then set up Educate Inc. Then in 2004, Educate Inc renamed the Sylvan Educations Solutions part of the business as Catapult Learning. Catapult was sold to private investors in 2008, and a couple years later started buying up other companies in the ed biz (Literacy First, Nonpublic Education Services, Inc, Newton Alliance, etc) and then in 2015 merged with Specialized Education Services, Inc. 

That merger made the resulting company "the nation's largest provider of contracted instructional services." They brought Jeffrey Cohen in to run it. At some point, that conglomerate acquired Little Leaves Behavioral Services. That business, plus SESI and Catapult, appear to now be the businesses operating under the relatively new FullBloom name, which appears to have been launched in March of 2020.

FullBloom is corporate edu-business at its corporatiest. Here's their vision statement:

Our vision: To innovate, scale, and bring together a continuum of evidence-based, early-intervention academic, behavioral, social and emotional services that positively impact outcomes for children while driving down lifecycle education and healthcare costs.

And they have partnerships, too, like the Institute for Scaling Evidence-Based Education, a "public-private partnership" between Catapult and University of Oregon's Center on Teaching and Learning, which appears to be aimed at marketing a product (Enhanced Core Reading Instruction) that the university created. And they've got a big fat contract with the US Department of Defense Education Activity folks. 

Jeffrey Cohen is still the CEO. He previously ran Sylvan for a while, and before that he worked at Sterling Partners, a private equity firm. He was SVP of Operations at Prometric, a testing company. And before that he served in the Clinton administration, including work at the labor department and as a staff attorney at the Office of the Counsel to the President. He got his BA in Economics at Tufts and his lawyering shingle at the University of Maryland. 

Other leadership is cut from similar cloth. The Human Resources Officer has been working HR in the behavioral health industry. The CFO is probably the coolest guy here-- he was the CEO of the School of Rock. Otherwise, working the private equity circuit. The current head of Catapult was COO of Ashford University, an on-line for-profit college, and prior to that, worked in the test prep biz. The head of SESI used to be their CFO, and has a background in corporate accounting. The head of Little Leaves used to run British Schools of America. 

Long story short--nobody in the leadership team is an educator.

Their business is still based on what Stephen Freeman envisioned in 1976-- all those private and religious schools that need to outsource their actual education, instructional and, now, behavioral work can hire this company. They also work with public school systems that want to "increase the reach of their intervention and remediation services."They're based in Camden, NJ, but they are all over the country.

It seems like a fine job for a former secretary of education who didn't have a lot of faith in public school, though I do wonder if he'll suggest that their intervention and special needs programs be expanded to include his belief that all special needs can be addressed by just expecting harder.

It's one more cushy job for a guy who never really understood public education and never really grasped what he was getting wrong when he held the post. But apparently one of the side benefits of his disastrous tenure in office is that he gets cushy job offers for the rest of his life.