Holy crap. Let's take a moment to wax nostalgic about last weekend, those happy times when a story like the First Lady talking about how we should [expletive] Christmas would have gotten at least fifteen minutes of attention instead of being completely wiped out by a raging news cycle. Those happy times when the national news seen was merely a dumpster fire and not a dumpster fire dragged across a wasted landscape by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The best we can say is that there was a lot of worthwhile writing that appeared, and here's some of it--
How The School Choice Debate Is Failing Our Public Schools
I am not always a Samantha Bee/Full Frontal fan; on a bad day she just feels like the Lefty version of Ann Coulter. But she does a really nice job of covering the school choice issue in less than seven and a half minutes. Worth watching and sharing with your non-education policy friends.
Epic Owes Oklahoma $8.9 Million
Tulsa World has the story of Epic schools, one more charter business that managed to rip off the state by making off with millions and millions of dollars.
Significant Lack of Equity in K-12 Education
Michigan Civil Rights Commission took a hard look at equity in Michigan schools, and it found many, many problems. Covered here by Michigan Live
New Jersey Spent 35 Years and $100 Billion Trying To Fix School Inequity
Speaking of states that have failed to straighten equity issues out, here's Politico taking a look at New Jersey. And wonder of wonders, rather than talking to Mike Petrilli, they talked to Bruce Baker (School Finance 101) instead.
Public Schools and School Libraries: The Hubs of Democracy Face Crises
Nancy Bailey takes a look at how the current crisis is eroding some pretty important institutions
Battling for the Soul of Black Girls
Erica Green (along with Eliza Shapiro and Mark Walker) has put together a serious and moving look at the problems growing for what is ":arguably the most at-risk student group" in the country. This is a hell of a piece.
How the SAT Failed America
And speaking of in-depth reporting, here's Susan Adams at Forbes covering both the broad swath and important details of the College Board's business woes under David Coleman (who, shockingly, does not come off looking good, once again).
The Wealth Gap
Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat explains how measuring income rather than wealth leaves many families in financial straits unseen.
Student Absences and Juvenile Justice
Yes, I know you may not read the reformy Bellwhether blog often, but this piece about how the involvement of juvenile justice system in student lives tends to make things worse--well, this is some research worth knowing about. One more piece of the school-to-prison pipeline
In Internet Dead Zones, Rural Schools Struggle With Distance Learning \
True that. This is NPR reporting about an issue that some of us are far too familiar with.
The Rich and The Rest
Nothing about this Have You Heard podcast will likely surprise you, but still listen/read as Jennifer and Jack explain just how the rich and the rest of us do not have the same priorities when it comes to public education.
My Way
Grumpy Old Teacher gives a picture of a real teacher dealing with the real issues of this miserable pandemess in the classroom.
Weird Al Yankovic: We're All Doomed
Just in case you missed it-- Weird Al + Autotuned Candidates = verion of this week's debate that is actually tolerable.
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Saturday, October 3, 2020
DeVos Awards Another $131 Mill From Failed Federal Charter Fund
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Friday that the department will pump yet another $131 million into the charter school industry (you may have missed the news; a few other things have happened in the last 48 hours).
The grants go to 19 different organizations, primarily charter school "developers." Amounts range from a tiny $299,988 to Acadia Academy in Maine up to $18 mill to Florida's department of education and $23 mill to the Texas ed department. There are a couple of state-level agencies, and a couple of charter-financing groups. Most intriguing [digression alert] is the $592K award to the ALL FOOTBALL CLUB LANCASTER LIONS CORPORATION. I don't know why they're in all caps, but then, I'm not sure why they're in the running for one of these grants. The AFC Lancaster Lions are an "American professional development soccer team" based in Lancaster PA. The corporation was formed in 2014. The organization was founded by Brian Ombiji, a pro "soccer player-turned-CEO" who came here from Kenya. He wants to start a "sports-infused charter school" for grades five through eight.
In addition to the typical core subjects, the school would offer courses related to print and broadcast journalism, fitness and nutrition, scouting, analytics and other sports-centered topics.
“The coronavirus pandemic has made it clearer than ever before that students need the freedom to choose where, when and how they learn,” said Secretary DeVos. “All too many students, particularly the most vulnerable, have fallen further behind because the one-size-fits-all system couldn’t transition and adapt to meet their needs. A bright spot has been high-quality charter schools, many of which pivoted quickly and kept learning going. These grants will help to ensure these high-quality options are available to even more students in the future.”
In addition to the typical core subjects, the school would offer courses related to print and broadcast journalism, fitness and nutrition, scouting, analytics and other sports-centered topics.
His founding board includes Faith Wangunyu, a Kenyan emigree who started the Princeton Preparatory charter schools in Georgia. Also on the board, Dean Kline, co-founder of Penn Ventures Fund, a venture capital outfit. As of August of 2020, the school didn't have a location nailed down. But now they apparently have a nice pile of money to go shopping with.
It would not be a shock if AFCLL Academy Charter School crashed and burned or even experienced failure to lift off, because that is the not-uncommon historic pattern of such grants. DeVos is doling out tax dollars from the Charter Schools Program (CSP) fund. You may recall that this is the program that has, over its lifetime, lost over a billion dollars to waste and fraud. Like really a lot of waste and fraud and the charter school equivalent of vaporware--schools that never even open.
But DeVos is kind of stuck in her covid talking point loop.
Well, no. Charter schools haven't been any better at pivoting than anyone else. Heck, the shining sun that is Success Academy has announced it will be doing distance learning till at least January. But then, Succes Academy is more one-size-fits-all than any public school; like too many charters, it has its one size and it accepts only the students who fit.
The DeVos covid argument highlights one of the fallacies of market-based education. Because it's true that many parents want a choice--they want to be able to choose a school that's open for regular face-to-face learning without any impediments like masking and PPE and weird social distancing rules, and they would also like that school to be completely free of the virus and their children and their family at no medical risk, and while that is a super-appealing choice, no matter how much families want it--the market is not going to provide it.
The market provides what it wants to provide, not what the customers want it to provide. And the charter (and voucher) school market don't have to provide what everybody wants--they just have to please enough people to fill their schools, which means all you families with difficult or expensive students to educate can just go away.
But hey-- let's dump another $131 million into charter school prop-ups and profiteers. It's not like public schools have any special pressing extra needs at the moment.
Friday, October 2, 2020
Covid Slide Panic Is Still Baloney
Back in April, NWEA (the MAP test folks) issued a "report" about what we've taken to calling the Covid Slide, which is sadly not a cool new line dance, but is instead an important tool for people in education-flavored businesses who want to try to panic school districts and bureaucrats. Now Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) yesterday threw their weight behind this piece of scholastic chicken littling.
Let me remind you why you can still afford to be unimpressed.
First, even if you do not have first hand experience with NWEA's MAP test (I do--it's a lousy computer-delivered multiple choice test), you should always remember that one of their attempts to make some edu-bucks centers around their program that they promised can read minds by measuring how long it takes students to pick a multiple choice answer.
Second, you know that this "report" is baloney because it leans on that great imaginary measure, the "days of learning." Students during the pandemic will "lose" X number of days of learning. "Days of learning" is actually a measure that CREDO made up themselves, based on some "research" in a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann. And if "days of learning" seems like a bizarro world way to measure of education (Which days? Days in September? Days in March? Tuesdays? Instructional days, or testing days, or that day we spent the afternoon in a boring assembly? And how does one measure the amount of learning in a day, anyway?)-- well, here's the technical explanation from that paper:
To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman (2012) that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.” Therefore, assuming an average school year includes 180 days of schooling, each day of schooling represents approximately 0.0013 standard deviations of student growth.
"In the absence of any actual assessments, these results serve as scientifically grounded estimates of what happened to students since March. It will take extended broad-based support from all corners to address the current deficits and the ripples they cause into the future," said Dr. Margaret Raymond, Director of CREDO at Stanford University.
The analysis emboldens policymakers and educators to employ diagnostic and progress assessments to inform how well efforts work and to help students and communities recover and move forward.
Let me remind you why you can still afford to be unimpressed.
Second, you know that this "report" is baloney because it leans on that great imaginary measure, the "days of learning." Students during the pandemic will "lose" X number of days of learning. "Days of learning" is actually a measure that CREDO made up themselves, based on some "research" in a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann. And if "days of learning" seems like a bizarro world way to measure of education (Which days? Days in September? Days in March? Tuesdays? Instructional days, or testing days, or that day we spent the afternoon in a boring assembly? And how does one measure the amount of learning in a day, anyway?)-- well, here's the technical explanation from that paper:
To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman (2012) that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.” Therefore, assuming an average school year includes 180 days of schooling, each day of schooling represents approximately 0.0013 standard deviations of student growth.
In other words, "days of learning" is really just one more way to whomp on student Big Standardized Test scores with some fancy maths.
Third, NWEA's "report" didn't measure a damn thing. They guessed. They looked at some results from their own testing product, the above-mentioned MAP, tried to squeeze out some results about how much scores slip over the summer, and then they just, well, guessed. They hid that guesswork behind some fancy argle bargle like this:
To provide preliminary estimates of the potential impacts of the extended pause of academic instruction during the coronavirus crisis, we leverage research on summer loss and use a national sample of over five million students in grades 3–8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments in 2017–2018.
Third, NWEA's "report" didn't measure a damn thing. They guessed. They looked at some results from their own testing product, the above-mentioned MAP, tried to squeeze out some results about how much scores slip over the summer, and then they just, well, guessed. They hid that guesswork behind some fancy argle bargle like this:
To provide preliminary estimates of the potential impacts of the extended pause of academic instruction during the coronavirus crisis, we leverage research on summer loss and use a national sample of over five million students in grades 3–8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments in 2017–2018.
Some ed writers at the time called this an analysis of "student acheivement and growth data." It wasn't. It was a guess. And really, who can blame them--we were and are in unprecedented times, so guessing was all anyone could do. The problems come when you start trying to dress your guesses up in hard science, and pile that on top of the continued fallacy that student scores on a narrow two-subject multiple choice test are somehow a good proxy for "student achievement."
CREDO's endorsement of this non-research doesn't help. From them we get this kind of thing:
"Scientifically grounded estimates" certainly sounds better than "wild ass guess by someone in a lab coat."
Fourth, while I totally get the general panic over covid downtime, the truth is, nobody is "behind" because the imaginary line that students must cross by a certain moment or else, apparently, Very Bad Things will happen-- that's an imaginary line. You can tell it's imaginary because we move it whenever it suits us for policy reason, like a decade or so ago when we suddenly decided that kindergartners who couldn't read, write and compute were doomed to a life of eating cat food off a hot plate while living in a van down by the river. Remember-- we are not talking about education; we are talking about test scores, and there is every reason to believe that raising those test scores has zero effect on a child's life prospects.
Likewise, the repeated reference to learning "loss"-- what does that even mean? How does learning get "lost," and how do you measure the lostedness? Is it like the time I lost my car keys? Yes, I know there are things I learned in Algebra II that I can no longer call up in my brain, but is that "loss" exactly, or just a natural mental process, like the way I lost my knowledge about what I had for lunch on September 3. Now tell me how you measure any of that with a straight face.
Likewise, the repeated reference to learning "loss"-- what does that even mean? How does learning get "lost," and how do you measure the lostedness? Is it like the time I lost my car keys? Yes, I know there are things I learned in Algebra II that I can no longer call up in my brain, but is that "loss" exactly, or just a natural mental process, like the way I lost my knowledge about what I had for lunch on September 3. Now tell me how you measure any of that with a straight face.
So why has CREDO decided to throw its weight behind this baloney? Well, the testing industry is in a bit of a stir right now. The BS Test was canceled last spring, and nobody is very excited about bringing it back this year, either. So the testing industry and their reformy friends are trying to sell the notion that students and schools and teachers are adrift right now, and the only way anyone will know how students are doing is to break out the industry's products and start generating some revenue data. Here's a line from the CREDO release:
The analysis emboldens policymakers and educators to employ diagnostic and progress assessments to inform how well efforts work and to help students and communities recover and move forward.
In other words, this NWEA "report" should help sell some tests.
Look, there is no question at all that taking a six month break from school has thrown a spanner into the scholastic gears. But as I keep saying-- figuring out where students are, exactly, is what classroom teachers do every single fall. Yes, teachers expect this year's results to fall a little bit outside the usual parameters, but this is the gig--find out where students are, meet them there, bring them forward.
The fact that students' relationship with teachers and school has been strained and is still being strained is all the more reason NOT to start in with the testing right now. But no-- a teacher on Twitter today posted that thanks to having to force students to take the MAP, she got to see a student cry on Zoom.
So here's the bottom line-- when someone feels the urge to bring up the "research" about the Covid Slide, do ask them exactly what that research was, how it was done, and how anyone can determine exactly how many "days of learning" students have lost. Because it is a nothingburger, a new wrapper for the same old test score baloney, and the wrapper is made out of guesswork, not any kind of scientific measurement.
Thursday, October 1, 2020
No, The Next Debate Moderator Should Not Be A Teacher
Within ten minutes, the comments started, and they haven’t stopped since.
This is why kindergarten teachers should be paid a million dollars. Next time, pick a middle school teacher—they know how to handle this. It was like watching squabbling children. Referring to Trump as “President Manbaby.”
The comparisons are unfair to teachers and children both, and while I know we’ve all got a few things on our minds, it’s worth taking a moment to think about why the comparisons are unfair.
There are teacher skills that apply here. For instance, when chaos envelopes a classroom seemingly involving every student there, a good teacher knows who the instigator was. That’s where you direct your energy for rebuilding focus—at the source of the disorder.
But there's a picture of teaching implicit in all these jokes that is inaccurate and really kind of insulting--that a teacher's job is to stand in a room and sternly, even forcefully, crushing students into compliance. That's not the job, and hasn't been for quite a while. Yes, teachers have to learn how to exercise some sort of authority, but in this century, that involves earning trust and building relationships. In short, some of these japes imply an idea of teaching as the exercise of some sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial control over others. That's a bad picture of teaching and it's not particularly useful on the debate stage, either.
What I really object to is the comparison, both direct and implied, of these geriatric candidates as children.
Because children are, mostly, trying to do the right thing. They are trying to find a way to be themselves in a world they are still trying to make sense. They start out with little control over the storms that rage inside them. One of the basic SEL roles of teachers is to provide external moderation while slowly helping students learning how to provide their own internal moderation. Even my most challenging late teen students (I'm thinking here, for example, of the student who entered my class and threatened to beat the crap out of me) were looking for a way to do the right thing and be their best selves.
Sure, not all teacher get this (hell, a third of union members voted for Trump--another reason a teacher might be a bad choice for the next debate's moderator).
So to call Trump President Manbaby is an insult to babies, because he's a grown-ass man who knows what he's doing, and who is perfectly capable of doing better, but just doesn't want to. He's not a child, and he's not acting like a child--he's acting like a man who has made toxic choices his whole life because he has rejected other ways of being in the world.
Put another way, I have never taught a student who did not, on some level, want to get their shit together. Trump is certain that he has his shit together, that he he, in fact, is the only guy in the room who does. Donald Trump is 74 years old.
The "put a teacher in charge" meme is, I suspect, a way of saying "I want Trump to face the strongest authority figure I can think of," which, for most folks, is the teachers we knew when we were kids (our parents, too, except then we grew up and discovered they were human beings, and that mostly didn't happen with our teachers).
But Trump has long since figured out what Thomas Jefferson and a few other guys figured out, and what most classrooms full of students instinctively understand--other people only have as much authority over you as you give them, or they can take by force. He's not a child, and there's no rule or authority figure he can't ignore. But in the meantime, it demeans children and teachers to drag them figuratively into this dumpster debate.
DeVos Wants To Revisit Failed Merit Pay
Seriously.
Yesterday's announcement of education department grants came packed in a lot of air-stuffed puffery from some alternate universe where we're expected to believe that these programs announced by Betsy DeVos "build on her commitment to elevating the teaching profession and empowering teachers." Because if there's anybody who's known for having teachers' backs, it's the DeVosinator.
"Great teachers deserve to be treated as the professionals they are," announced the woman who called the public schools (where most great teachers work) a "dead end" and who has suggested that during the pandemic public school teachers have just been slacking off.
One grant program (Supporting Effective Educator Development, aka SEED) is supposed to "increase the number of highly effective educators." The by far largest grant in that program ($5.2 million) is going to Teach for America, a group that knows less about preparing highly effective educators than just about any other outfit in the country, so this grant will be money well spent.
Awards were also announced for the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) is a tinier grant (only $7.3 million for the whole thing) that is supposed to support "innovative preparation models" that have the effect of A) improving student achievement, aka raising standardized test scores, B) elevating the quality of the teacher workforce, aka improving on all you crappy old teachers and C) recruiting highly qualified individuals for the teacher workforce, aka the old TNTP model of getting people into teaching as a second career on the theory that if you are a great nuclear physicist, you'll be a great physics teacher which, well, no.
But the real winner here, with a total price tag of $63.7 million, is the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program. If you like your government programs wrapped in furry argle bargle, then you'll like this one, which is designed
to support local education agencies in developing, enhancing, improving, and/or implementing human capital management systems (HCMS) that include performance-based teacher and/or principal compensation systems (PBCS).
Yesterday's announcement of education department grants came packed in a lot of air-stuffed puffery from some alternate universe where we're expected to believe that these programs announced by Betsy DeVos "build on her commitment to elevating the teaching profession and empowering teachers." Because if there's anybody who's known for having teachers' backs, it's the DeVosinator.
"Great teachers deserve to be treated as the professionals they are," announced the woman who called the public schools (where most great teachers work) a "dead end" and who has suggested that during the pandemic public school teachers have just been slacking off.
Awards were also announced for the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) is a tinier grant (only $7.3 million for the whole thing) that is supposed to support "innovative preparation models" that have the effect of A) improving student achievement, aka raising standardized test scores, B) elevating the quality of the teacher workforce, aka improving on all you crappy old teachers and C) recruiting highly qualified individuals for the teacher workforce, aka the old TNTP model of getting people into teaching as a second career on the theory that if you are a great nuclear physicist, you'll be a great physics teacher which, well, no.
But the real winner here, with a total price tag of $63.7 million, is the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program. If you like your government programs wrapped in furry argle bargle, then you'll like this one, which is designed
to support local education agencies in developing, enhancing, improving, and/or implementing human capital management systems (HCMS) that include performance-based teacher and/or principal compensation systems (PBCS).
Each of the 13 fundees is set to "be concentrated in high-needs schools, and has the goal of increasing overall student achievement and closing the achievement gap..."
Put it all together, and you've got merit pay linked to student test scores.
Here's the thing about teacher merit pay. It doesn't actually work. It has been tried; it doesn't work. Or, if you want to put it another way, there's not a shred of evidence that it does work.
There are plenty of reasons it doesn't work. For one, it makes the insulting assumption that teachers are slacking off and holding out, that when you offer merit pay, a bunch of teacher will suddenly jump up and say, "Yes! I've had the secret of teaching these students in my filing cabinet all along, but I've been waiting for someone to offer me a bonus for using it."
Also, when some teacher performance pay plans emerge, they often avoid saying the real impulse behind them, which is not so much "we want to pay good teachers more" as it is "we want to pay those bad teachers less." So merit pay systems often start with a below-rock-bottom base pay and then gives teachers a chance to claw their way out of that hole.
Teacher merit pay plans almost have to do that because there is a significant difference between public and private sector here. When Widgetcorps has a good year, it ends up with an extra pile of money, and it might decide to share that extra pile of money with its employees--voila! Performance bonus! The pie gets bigger, so everyone gets an extra slice. But in a public school, the pie never gets bigger, so they only way to do merit pay is to carve up the money you have. Well, okay-- the school board could go to the public and say, "Our teachers did such a great job this year that we need to push through a 5 mil tax increase to fund the performance bonuses they've earned." But I don't think that's going to happen.
The biggest problem is, of course, measuring teacher performance quality, which is crazy hard, so in the past few decades we just default to student scores on the Big Standardized Test, which makes a performance based system super-demoralizing for teachers, since it gives them little true control over their own performance rating.
The merit bonuses have gone to a few actual public school systems, including DC public schools, Miami-Dade's school board, Providence public schools, and Toledo's public schools--none of these are districts who have exactly demonstrated a great handle on performance quality. Hell, DC's teacher evaluation system has been an endless shit show. The Insight Education Group Inc, an education consulting group, gets a cool $6.5 million. LEAD, Harmony, and IDEA-- three private charter school companies that like to use "public schools" in their titles-- will get over $10 million between them. Of the 13 groups getting grants, 9 were already riding on this federal gravy train headed straight for Failure Station in downtown We Already Know This Doesn't Workville.
All together, this is $100 million of our tax monies being frittered away. I suggest that you not hold your breath while waiting for DeVos to elevate the teaching profession.
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
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.
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:
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.
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