Has Miami-Dade Really Found The Secret Of Cheap Excellence?

From school choice to school finance, Florida is the state education disruptors love to point at, though they tend to point verrrrry carefully at very specific features of the Floridian education landscape. For instance, here's Michael Q. McShane at Education Next running a piece about how Miami-Dade schools have "bucked the staffing surge trend" while still maintaining "student achievement." His thesis is right up front:

The Miami-Dade County Public Schools spends less per student than the only three larger districts in the country and still manages to deliver top-tier student achievement results.

The implication, popular with the conservative wing of reformsters, is that educational excellence is available for bargain prices if we just worked the right levers. But there are three large holes in his Florida argument.

About that staffing surge...

McShane starts by pointing out that Miami educates around 350,000 students, and according to the census folks, they do it for less than $10K a year, far less than other huge districts, even when adjusted for cost of living. This has not a surprise; Florida schools have been trying to shake off the "latest" budget cuts for years (here they are in 2011, and here they are this year). Florida is run by politicians who are openly hostile to public education, and they've been trying to bleed the system dry for years. 

But Miami-Dade, says McShane, is doing it "partly" by providing low-cost education by pushing back against the "staffing surge."

Except here's the thing about the staffing surge. Bring it up on Twitter and Bruce Baker (School Finance 101), a Rutgers University professor specializing in school finance and education policy, may well bring up this chart:

The staff surge is not very surgey. Now, that is a national average, so some parts of the country could be feeling some surge, I suppose. McShane is using numbers from Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University, but he seems to have focused on how much student and staff populations grew or shrank by percentage. By his measure, Miami-Dade is unusual in showing a percentage of growth equal to the percentage growth of student population. 

Now, I'm not an education scholar, but I know this about percentages. If I have a thousand students in school, and next year I get 100 more, my student population has grown by 10%. But If I had two administrators and I hired two more, my administration staff has increased by 100%. Since student populations, particularly in a huge district like Miami-Dade, are way larger than teacher or administrator populations, comparing their growth or shrinkage by percentages is an apples-to-watermelons situation. I'm confident Baker's method of measuring is more useful, and that the "staff surge" issue is not that big a thing. 

About student achievement...

I'm a broken record on this point, but I am just going to stay in my groove until folks examining education start singing a different song. When McShane says "student achievement," he means "student test scores."

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Test scores are not the same as student achievement.

Just do me a favor and keep repeating that infinity times.

But even if we decide we care about test scores...

McShane wants to point at NAEP scores-- well, the Trial Urban District Assessment NAEP scores. But he only wants to point at very particular NAEP scores. Miami 4th grade reading and math scores outperformed  the large-city average for the test. The 8th grade scores were...meh. On par with other large cities. There is also such a thing as regular old NAEP scores and, in some years,12th grade NAEP scores, but McShane doesn't bring any of that up. Can you guess why?

Billy Townsend knows, and he lays out all the gory details in a blog post here. The short answer is that by the time Florida students are finishing their education and ready to go out into the world, all of that 4th grade test-based awesomeness has vanished. Not only vanished, but cratered as Florida's students fall behind the nation as a whole. 

Stanford did a study looking at growth, and Kevin Drum, a political writer for Mother Jones took a look at the results, mapping out districts based on how much students advanced in a year between 3rd and 8th grade. 

You know I'm not a fan of these kinds of test-based statistical shenanigans, but if that's the game these folks want to play, let's take a look. In the map above purple marks the districts with the very least growth between 3rd and 8th grade. As Drum concludes, based on these results, "Florida is an almost insane basket case."

Florida, I will remind you, may hate public education, but they absolutely worship at the altar of the Big Standardized Test. This is the state where sick and dying children have been harrassed with state demands that they take that test. This is the state where they test the littlest of the littles. This is the state where students who have top grades in reading are still held back a grade because they won't take the test. And with all that, they're still not very good at giving the actual test.

So if they've been drilling testing into students since the students were five years old, why don't they test well as eighth graders? That is a question that answers itself, although I might add, have you met an eighth grader? Florida wants to be a proof of concept state for many things, but one thing it is absolutely proof of concept for is that focusing your entire education system on test taking leads to lousy educating. 

So in the end, we have to conclude that along with the fountain of youth and land deals that can make you rich, cheap educational excellence is another thing that cannot be found in Florida.

CAP: It's the School System's Fault

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is nominally a left-tilted thinky tank, but they have always been solidly on the side of reformsterism, backing charter schools and relentlessly stumping for the Common Core.

They're also fans of the narrow reformster view of education as a mill for churning out meat widgets, and here they are at it again in a post from mid-September (you know, about ten years ago) entitled "Preparing American Students for the Workforce of the Future." It's a pervasive reform idea--that the point of school is as vocational prep (and college is just vocational prep for higher-paying jobs).

And yes-- if schools were cranking out graduates who were completely unemployable, that would be a disservice to those students. But the notion that the years 1 through 18 (or even 22) should be focused simply on making yourself useful to your future employer is such a cramped, meager, joyless, shrunken version of what a human life can be-- Well, I could go on and on, but let's settle for this--no parents with resources to provide their child with more would settle for thirteen (or fourteen or fifteen) years of meat widget training.

But CAP leaps right in with "The United States has failed to prepare all students for college and their careers" and follows up by citing TNTP's Opportunity Myth, one of those non-research "reports" that reformy groups crank out so that other groups can cite them as if they contain actual research. I've discussed it at length elsewhere, so I'm not getting into it here--short form: it's not a good sign.

CAP throws in some chicken littling about the pandemic's effects on the US healthcare, economy and workforce, noting that Black and brown people are worst hit, and they're not wrong. But their call to address "systemic gaps in education" (and again, they're not wrong) focuses on just three areas of gappage.

We'll get to those three areas in a moment, but first, CAP wants to talk about its "new research approach, which aims to be more responsive to community needs and desired solutions." See, CAP is going to "embark" on a "series of community conversations across the country in areas with a high proportion of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations." The conversations will be "a unique way to collect data about the needs and potential solutions" for these communities, except the list of specific questions would seem to indicate that CAP has already decided that what these communities need is more job training.

The conversations will focus on how community members define the future workforce; how they learn about new industries and occupations; how well their schools help students prepare for this future; and how their schools should be held accountable for preparing all students.

CAP goes on to explain that a cross-sectional collaborative approach is necessary because this stuff is too complicated for schools to handle alone, and they devote half a sentence to another benefit for society that they foresee--engaging more actively as citizens. But mostly it's jobs jobs jobs, including a description of what constitutes a "good" job based on a Gallup poll. The list of ten characteristics, but we are still stuck in the allegedly progressive view of supply-side jobs programming, the notion that if everyone gets more education, somehow the supply of jobs will expand to meet them, that the lousy jobs will be magically done by, well, someone, and most of all, we need not look for any levers that might impel businesses to provide better jobs. Somehow, in this formulation, when the manager of Walmart sees that he has twenty-five people with advanced marketing college degrees, he will immediately increase the pay and benefits for the job he's trying to fill. At any rate, all those people you know in lousy jobs? That's the result of them getting insufficient proper education, and is in no way the fault of economic forces or cheap-ass corporate employers.

Anyway.

Here are the three magic bullets that CAP suggests for fixing the meat widget problem.

Early Career Preparation

Schools aren't "exposing" students to careers and industries, and they're not doing it early enough. It's in this section that we find this jaw-dropper:

Most students enroll in high school course pathways that lead to a dead end and leave students ineligible for their desired postsecondary options.

This claim is based on "research" by the Center for American Progress and I'm not going to take a side trip into that mess. Short version: they compared high school course requirements to college admission requirements, and then also compared course requirements to a set of "college and career ready" requirements that they just kind of made up. They did not--as one might expect from research that reaches such a gobsmacking conclusion--come up with any actual numbers of all these students who are stranded out in Dead Endsville. Because you'd think that if "most students" are on that dead end pathway, we'd here about it. Lots of fun to se "progressive" CAP aligning with Betsy DeVos on their assessment of public education's dead endedness. 

They are correct in noting that students in low-income communities may have less opportunity to hear about certain careers, mostly because there isn't a varied pool of employers in the area. From there they jump to the notion of an "imperative" for local employers to "engage" with schools--except, wait--if the problem is that there aren't many varied local employers then who is doing this engaging? Dammit-- this is an actual problem, but that's no solution. Networking, research, using the internet, staying in contact with students who leave the area, or, and humor me here, going to college without any plan beyond majoring in a subject you like and finding out there what you'd like to do with it. 

Holistic preparation for college and careers in the future of work

This is three paragraphs of argle bargle that walks right up to the edge of that baloney stat about how many jobs of the future don't exist yet. But I think this boils down to "the future of work  in many jobs is a big varied changing field, but we want to be able to measure it with some concrete instrument anyway." Try this paragraph and see what you think:

Research and practice have led to consensus on the different dimensions of readiness all students need for college and future careers. These include academic mastery across a range of subjects, technical training either in a specific field or in cross-cutting skills such as computer literacy, and 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and collaboration. Most states include these in their definitions of college, career, and life readiness, and some elements of these definitions are included in states’ school accountability systems. However, what’s missing are specific systems to develop these skills equitably across all students and ways to measure students’ attainment.

This seems a bit more on point

Too many people will be left out of the future of work. They lack opportunity to develop the critical academic, technical, or cross-cutting skills that allow them to participate in this evolving workforce.

So, the future is big and broad and unclear, but we ought to have a solid set-in-concrete one size fits all measurable program to prepare students for this no size fits all immeasurably broad and varied world. Or maybe students are supposed to be prepared for everything, even though they may have their own ideas about what they want to be prepared for--although you'll notice that student dreams, goals, and preferences are ignored throughout this piece. Everybody should study everything, just in case. And "holistic" is a cool word.

Accountability for establishing and maintaining high-quality pathways to good jobs

You know what? Screw you, CAP. How is this the responsibility of schools and not employers? Yes, CAP calls for employers to get in there and consult and "identify what systemic changes" will be needed, but the main point here is that we need an accountability system to hold schools accountable for how well-employed their graduates are. They're supposed to develop a "seamless pathways from education to training and to good jobs of the future," which harkens back to the old cradle-to-career pipeline. But all the responsibility lands on schools

Accountability systems drive administrator and educator behaviors, so the next generation of accountability systems must provide an incentive to drive behaviors that better prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce.

This also comes with an endnote that takes us to another CAP "report." But God save us from a school system driven by this measure. It's true that when you pick your accountability measures you answer the question, "What is the purpose of this school?" There has to be a better educational answer than "To provide employees for businesses."

It's not just that this narrows the horizon for students. Imagine if we use this yardstick for measuring the offerings of public education. Art? Music? History? Any electives that don't teach job-related skills? In CAP's world, none of that stuff is justifiable.

It's the same old baloney. A narrow view of education that privileged parents would never acept for their own children. Accountability for schools, but not for the politicians who manage the economy or the businesses that set the stage for working conditions. 

After rattling off statistics about low and under-employment for Black and Latinx workers, CAP says "The US education and career training systems should produce better outcomes than they are currently producing." What outcomes? Underemployment? Low wages and few benefits? That--that!--is somehow the fault of schools?? If we get a Democratic administration some day, I hope to God that they ignore anything CAP has to say.

ICYMI: Another Week That Lasted Ten Years Edition (10/4)

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.

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.

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. 

“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.”

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.

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 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.

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:

"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.

"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.

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. 

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).

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.