ICYMI: Counting Is Hard Edition (11/15)

 Who knew that math would be such a big deal, or that counting would have such deep political issues? Just let me know when he's gone, or at least moved on to his next big grift. In the meantime, lots to read about this week. Remember, the stuff you like you should share. 

What Happens When Ed Tech Forgets   

Audrey Watters has some thoughts about how we keep putting failed ed tech enterprises in the memory hole and letting the architects of these failures carry on with freshly scrubbed reputations. Also, Proctorio sucks.

Merchants of Doubt

Bruce Baker guests to talk about how conservative thinky tank the Hoover Institution helped spread the idea that investing in public education was pointless and fruitless.

Axios Deep Dive on Race and Education in America  

A batch of articles working through different aspects of the topic, with a good side of data. You're probably not going to buy all of this, but there are some good places to start talking here.

These Stanford students are racing to get laptops to kids  

A pair of Stanford students have launched a small business is getting refurbished laptops to students in need. It's a small story, but an encouraging one.

Houston-area high school requiring failing students to return to in-person education   

So here's one more variation on pandemic schooling. Not sure how I feel about this one. 

Why the 1776 Commission is a bad idea   

Diane Ravitch is at The Hill explaining why this Trumpian idea is a bad one. Yes,. I know this version of it is likely dead now, but let's just drive a stake through it to be sure, okay.

Top Biden aid talks to EWA about education stuff  

I've referenced this piece elsewhere, but you may want to read the whole account of what top aid Stef Feldman had to say about the full range of ed policy topics. Currently it's the most direct statement we have about what Biden has in mind.

The truth about returning to school? There's no easy answer.

Many's the time I've objected to what Morgan Polikoff had to say, but his summation of the l;ousy place we're stuck in right now is as good as any I've read. At Hechinger Report.

Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.  

This interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco in Culture Study is pretty powerful stuff. And her suggestion about thinking sociologically is needed at the moment when so many teachers are beating themselves up for not being able to handle the pandemess perfectly.

Teacher Demoralization Isn't the Same as Teacher Burnout   

At EdWeek, Doris Santoro, who wrote a book about this stuff, explains how the current pandemess is keeping teachers from "reaping the moral rewards" they are used to getting from the work. And more. Another useful "Oh, this is what I'm feeling" article.

Teachers forced to MacGyver their own tech solutions

At Hechinger Report, in  an article that will surprise roughly zero teachers, a look at how teachers are having to bridge the tech gaps themselves. 

There's Only One Reason Districts Should Be Doing Teacher Evaluations This Year

Word keeps popping up on line from here and there that some schools are going ahead with teacher evaluations this year, even this fall. 

Which is nuts. Teachers are reeling, scrambling, doing their damnedest to stay upright on constantly shifting ground, trying to maintain some semblance of education in the midst of chaos and uncertainty that is marked by a widespread lack of leadership and direction on all levels. Even in schools that are open for face-to-face, teachers work wondering at what instant things will change. And of course, underneath all the rest, anxiety about the possibility of debilitating illness and death.

But sure-- now is an awesome time to make sure that teachers are checking off all the items on the Madeline Hunter checklist and are keeping their classroom spic and span. The Big Standardized Test, previously almost completely useless for truly measuring teacher performance, will be double-plus-useless this year. The whole standard array of teacher evaluation techniques will be pointless this year, like judging a round of Dancing with the Stars on the deck of a ship knocked to and fro on rough seas in a high wind while seals run back and forth across the dance floor. 

However, there is one method of teacher evaluation that could--even should--be used this year.

It starts with an administrator who says, "I know you're juggling a host of challenges in this most abnormal year. I'd like to stop by and give you a second set of eyeballs to watch what's going on and see if there's anything I can offer that might help you get on top of this mess." It ends with an administrator who says, "I just have some thoughts about some techniques and tools that might help you with what I saw today. I also want to let you know about some things that are working really well." And the final part of the process--that's when the administrator says, "That's what I saw. Now, what can I do to help you?"

An administrator's job is to create the conditions and provide the support necessary for every member of her staff to do their best work. Right now even the most seasoned of educators can use a pair of fresh eyes to help them see what's going well and what's not, and to help provide the resources needed to do better. 

There's no use in an evaluation centered on giving teachers a rank or rating, but something that helps a teacher dial their work in a little better is useful at this point. There is no other reason to be doing teacher evaluations this year. Kudos to all the administrators who are getting this right.

Charter Fans Dislike This Part of Biden's Plan

 The charter advocacy Twitterverse is unhappy about this part of the Biden plan, as described here by Biden staffer Stef Feldman talking to the Education Writers Association:

And we’ll require every charter school, including online schools, to be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools. That means things like regular public board meetings and meeting all the same civil rights, employment, health, labor, safety and educator requirements that public schools must.

In Twitterland yesterday, that quote prompted some conversations like this one

Why? Is it to make sure that charter schools are made better? Or is it a way to hamstring them with pointless regulation, so they are too paralyzed to work effectively? https://t.co/0WG05cEy4v

— laura mckenna (@laura11D) November 12, 2020

Yes, Laura. And more. This is the standard union line that the NEA and AFT have been using since charters began. It goes like this:

"We like charters...
As long as they are like all other public schools.
Controlled by us (who control school boards)."

States - Game on! https://t.co/5ThUD2E7UY

— Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) November 12, 2020

But one has to ask (and one did, but Twitter being Twitter I haven't heard an answer yet)-- exactly how does having an elected board "hamstring" a charter school? How does a requirement for transparency and accountability "paralyze" a charter school?

The mantra for charter schools has been the idea of trading autonomy for accountability. Did charter fans really mean to say "accountability, but only in the ways we choose to the people we choose?" 

After all, a major criticism of public schools in the modern reform era is that they are not held accountable enough, hence the need for state standards backed up by Big Standardized Tests, the results of which are supposed to be used in a very public way to hold the schools accountable. When teachers push back against measures like the BS Tests and VAM as inaccurate, invalid, and unfair, reformsters charge that teachers just don't want to be held accountable. 

So what is the issue here? Part of it likely comes down ownership. Public schools are owned by the public, therefor it makes sense for members of the taxpaying public be elected as stewards of this public resource. Charter schools are privately owned and operated, but publicly financed. If I put a swimming pool in my own back yard, I'm not keen on the idea of the neighborhood electing a board to run it. But if I am collecting money from my neighbors to pay the costs of owning and operating the pool, now the issue becomes fuzzier. 

Some public education supporters are going to be quick to call out charter supporters as anti-democracy, and that's not wrong, exactly, but I don't think it's an ideological thing so much as a business thing. The ideal model of charter operation remains the business run by the visionary CEO, a model we've loved in this country since the days of Carnegie and Frick. One brilliant leader, unfettered by government regulations or union rules, a Gulliver-sized master unrestrained by any Lilliputian army--that's the dream. Elected boards just get in the way.

Critics will, as Allen perpetually does, claim that school boards aren't really democratic because they are controlled by the teachers union. In big cities, both unions are well-heeled charter fans are spending tons of money (witness the incredibly expensive LAUSD election that just wrapped up), and the rich folks often win. Yet teachers unions do not regularly call for the abolition of elected boards. Union "control" of elected school boards is grossly over-diagnosed, and in much of the country is not remotely an issue. But for the visionary CEO, a board that listens to the teachers or their union at all is listening too much.

The other part of the charter argument is that they have huge accountability due to market forces. No oversight or accountability of a traditional sort is required, they argue, because families can vote with their feet. This hasn't worked, and isn't going to work any time soon. Charter schools only need to capture a small sliver of the market, which means that if a few families vote with their feet, the sensible thing for the charter to do is not to sit down and have a soul-searching discussion about their direction, but instead to start sifting through the tens of thousands of potential families to replace the leavers. And the beauty of schools is that thousands of new "customers" enter the "market" every year. So go ask someone like Eva Moskowitz how many times she has reconsidered her approach to Success Academy because an angry parent threatened to pull their child out. On top of all that, the cost of pulling your child out of a school mid-year is considerably greater than, say, changing which food truck you buy lunch from, so parents face another barrier to that foot voting. 

Do public schools always get the accountability piece right? Nope. But the presence of the legal requirement means that parents have some leverage. Parents of charter school students in many states have no leverage at all, with charters even winning court cases to "protect" their private business information. 

Biden's proposal is not a radically earth-shattering one. Many states already have similar requirements; in PA, if you want to set up a charter school, you need authorization from the local public school board, aka the elected representatives of the taxpayers who will have to finance your charter school. Is there anything unreasonable or unfair about that? The requirements vary from state to state, but note that Biden's rep said "same standards of transparency and accountability as public schools." If that requirement is a real, serious problem for charter schools, why should public schools be hit with it? And if it's not a hardship for public schools, then why shouldn't charter schools meet the same standards?

For eons, the argument has been made that since public schools use taxpayer dollars, the taxpayers are entitled to know how that money is spent, and I have never disagreed. It doesn't seem radical to extend that same level of accountability to charter schools. This is one thing that the Biden education plan absolutely gets right. If charter fans don't like it, they'll need to explain why the taxpayers shouldn't be able to demand accountability from them. 

 

Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

I just read a piece that doesn't necessarily say anything new, but puts it all in a useful frame. Let me show you the first paragraph:

There’s no such thing as a “good school” in the abstract. Every school serves a particular community, in a particular time and place, with its own needs and desires. A good school in rural Montana might not be a good school in Midtown Manhattan, just as a good school in 1920 might not be a good school today. This doesn’t mean that we can’t define school quality. It does, however, mean that we can’t define quality without first considering the needs of a school’s time and place.

This is from the Phi Delta Kappan, a publication I don't always trust (hell, they give a platform to William Bennett), written by Jon Valant, a fellow at the Brooking Institution, a place that often demonstrates why economists should stay the heck away from education policy. "Good schools for a troubled democracy" has the hallmark of Brookings writings, a sort of odd atonality tied to the sensation that perhaps within Brookings they never actually read any of the mountains of prose about education policy. 

Valant's thesis is that "the school system we have today in the United States--and our conception of a good school--is mismatched to the needs of our time." This will make more sense if you don't think of yourself as included in "we" and "our." His basic framing of modern education history is what makes this piece worthwhile. 

Valant focuses on the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the infamous Reagan era hit job on public education. While Valant notes that the report did mention the needs for education to create better citizens, "the rhetoric of economic ruin and international competition drowned out the message." 

According to the logic of the times, the nation’s most pressing need — and, consequently, the most urgent task for our public schools — was to strengthen the workforce.

Valant isn't going to get into a discussion of whether the report's analysis was correct or not. He just wants to point to how this formulation affected our ideas about which schools were good or not. Standards and test-based accountability would be the policy solutions that "had an elegance to their logic and at least the appearance of rigor." The system was "fueled by numbers," and before long, "those numbers begat more numbers." Valant muses on how the school rating systems "rely heavily on students' test scores" and his musings are those of a man who is unaware that there's a cottage industry of folks who have already examined, dissected, and written about said system. Well, that's not entirely fair--he cites Daniel Koretz at one point and refers to another issue as "well known." But there's a certain freshness to his approach, and it still gets us to the conclusion we already know--

A good system of measurement and evaluation can be a powerful tool for school improvement. However, we built a bad one, which is worse than having no system at all.

And he wants to make a point that brings us back to the question of good schools:

Our test-based accountability system limits what we, as a nation, believe schools can and should do. The machinery of standardized testing is so impressive, having such a powerful aura of objective truth, that it can trick us into believing that schools are only capable of teaching that which we can readily measure. Let’s call it the wrongheaded idea that “what isn’t measurable isn’t doable.” Testing whether students know how to multiply fractions is easy. Testing whether students are assembling the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that will allow them to listen and respond carefully to each other’s ideas, or to identify and reject propaganda 15 years after they graduate, is hard. That can give the impression that the former is teachable and the latter is not. But that’s not the case. We just aren’t as good at measuring some types of learning as others — and that’s OK. If we fail to appreciate this point, we risk thinking too narrowly about schools’ capabilities.

Well, yes. He's skipping some other critical issues here, like, for instance, the possibility that some folks intend to deliberately narrow our ideas about school's capabilities, the better to monetize and McDonald-ize the whole business. 

He has a particular destination in mind. The Nation At Risk/NCLB framing of school has reduced the idea of Good Schools to narrow vocational prep, a producer of firewood to fuel the engines of the economy. We've dumped all the things that are hard to measure, and that's bad news because that very stuff is what we should be teaching now.

Now, I'm going to pause for a moment, because Valant has just kind of glossed over a major issue here, by accepting as a given that the narrow, test-centered, meat widget-producing education that reformnsters have been trying to implement for the past 37 years was, at that particular time, a legitimate definition of Good Schools. Whereas a few million folks, many of them actual education professionals, have been arguing vociferously that this was never, ever a good model. 

His description of the shift, while in some ways accurate, has some gappage:

As David Labaree (1997, 2018) has described, Americans have, over the long term, changed how they’ve thought about education. The country built its public school system to mold virtuous citizens, but our focus has shifted toward preparing students to be capable workers. Now, he argues, we tend to see education as a private good (benefiting the individual student) more than a public good (benefiting the community at large). We think of schools as existing mainly to provide credentials, which young people rely upon as they attempt to outcompete each other for a limited number of desirable college and career opportunities.

This isn't wrong, but it describes the shift as something that just kind of happened, rather than a shift that has been aggressively pushed by billionaires and politicians, privatizers and profiteers. Some folks do think of schools in this new, narrow way--but let's not pretend it occurred through some natural societal shift. This view has been sold, and sold hard, and it should be noted, sold hard by wealthy, powerful people who would never for one second accept that narrow definition for their own children. 

Valant notes that parents say they expect good schools to develop things like strong moral character. But, he goes on to note, they evaluate schools based on student test scores. He believes that we've accepted the notion that good schools are distinguished by their ability to provide academic preparation for college and career (and here he skips over the question of whether test scores even measure that meagre goal-- spoiler alert: they do not). 

His point, however, is that beyond all of this, these narrow skills are not what we need. We are enmeshed in the problems of democracy, propaganda, conspiracy baloney and 70 million people who can live through four years of a Trump presidency and not notice anything terribly wrong. Valant writes a hell of a paragraph here:

The most severe threats we face as a country, now and in the foreseeable future, aren’t about workforce training. They aren’t threats that can be neutralized with better literacy and numeracy, or even by helping more students make a successful transition to college (though those things may help). The problem isn’t that we’re unprepared for our 21st-century economy; it’s that we’re unprepared for our 21st-century democracy.

Valant wants you to know that this is not your father's political landscape or your mother's society. There's a whole batch of 21st Century skills that we need, and he lists some examples, but he's not here to lay out the full picture of exactly what a modern Good School would look like. Mostly he just wants to make the argument that Good Schools should "serve democratic and social goals, not just economic goals."

Valant says little that hasn't been said before, and often, but he says it well. This is one of those articles that is good for sharing with your friend who doesn't really pay much attention to that education stuff but gets the sense that some people are upset about something. It cuts a great many corners and has some massive gaps, but what's there is true. We had schools that tried to teach the whole child and create better citizens. Some folks decided to redefine schools as "college and career" vocational prep test-centered operations. We need to change the idea of Good Schools back again. It's worth your time to read the whole thing.

 

Anti-Union Activists Want To "Speak Out For Teachers"

 Among the folks pushing the narrative that schools are shut down because of the Evil Teachers Unions, we find this sparkly website--  Speak Out For Teachers. Here's their pitch:

Are you one of the millions of teachers eager to return to safe, in-person learning — only to find a teachers’ union is fighting to keep schools closed and students at home? Share your story below. It might even air on national television!

"It's time to speak out for teachers," they declare, as they invite you to hear some teacher stories they have already collected. There are three so far.

One is Catherine Barrett from Phoenix, who a few years back was part of #RedforEd until she became a GOP political operative for Doug Ducey, attacking the #REdforEd movement. She also turned up as chair of a group pushing a Classroom Code of Ethics in Arizona, proposed gag rule for teachers in the wake of #RedforEd; that proposal turned out not be an Arizona thing, but an anti-teacher move cooked up by activist David Horowitz and pushed out across the country. 

Another is Bruce Aster. Aster was a legislative assistant in DC before becoming a teacher, and he has never been a union fan. His profile is listed on For Kids and Country, the website of anti-union activist Rebecca Friedrichs. They have more in common than a hard-right anti-union stance; when Friedrichs' SCOTUS case stalled because of Justice Scalia's death, Aster agreed to be one of the faces of a new lawsuit against the California union over the issue of fair share fees. 

“I think tenure, as currently practiced, protects those few ‘deadwood teachers’ with no incentive to excel in their craft, and the lack of any merit element in pay is a disincentive to excellence,” Aster said in a statement provided by his attorney. “I strongly favor charter schools, vouchers, and more choice for parents about schools.”

Janus got there first, but Aster was part of that crowd.

Speak Out For Teachers is brought to us by the folks at Center for Union Facts, an organization that is heavily anti-union (not just teachers, but unions of all shapes and sizes). Their website doesn't tell you much about who they are. The answer to the FAQ question "So who are you guys, really?" is " The Center for Union Facts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported by foundations, businesses, union members, and the general public. We are dedicated to showing Americans the truth about today's union leadership." So, they aren't saying who they are.

That's okay, because other people have been doing the research.

The CUF is part of the constellation of conservative dark money activist groups run by Richard Berman. Berman has been at this for years; he's been profiled by a variety of outlets, and you can spend a good afternoon studying up on line. He started out in the food and drink industry, opposing minimum wage laws and forming Beverage Retailers Against Drunk Driving, a group created to counter MADD. He's proud of a "win ugly" approach of personal attacks, and promises his donors anonymity by running their money through his many various groups. One of his groups ran a full-page ad in USA Today against teachers and in support of the Vergara lawsuit. Right after Janus, CUF set up a website, promoted by billboards, that referred folks to My Pay My Say, the Mackinac Center's initiative to try to get people to leave the union. You can catch more of his exploits at Sourcewatch, but the bottom line is that this is a guy who fights hard for the bosses and will try just about anything to trash unions. 

This frickin' guy.

So, Speak Out For Teachers is the same old song and dance-- some rich folks trying to convince teachers that the evil unions are misrepresenting teachers, and here are a couple of anti-union teachers to help make the point. 

It's unfortunate that they decided to attach this baloney to an actual serious problem. Whether or not to open schools is a hard scary call, and most of the choices available in most parts of the country are all bad. The science is not clear, the leadership is barely there, and people are looking for the solution that, for them, will suck least. None of this is easy.

These folks can claim all day that it's the evil unions trying to move to virtual school (for some reason, never clearly specified, because "teachers don't want to work" seems stupid and "teachers don't want to die" seems obvious), but in fact there are districts that opened school buildings, and the families stayed away. There is virtual schooling going on in places where the union barely exists, and there are charter schools with no organized labor force at all who have also closed their doors and fired up the internet (Success Academy will now be remote learning through March). But I guess when your main goal is to slam the unions, you just take whatever opening you can get. I have to conclude that Speak Out For Teachers doesn't, and not only can it be ignored, but it should be ignored.

Let The Disappointment With Biden's Ed Department Begin

 Well, that didn't take long.

Back in October, top Biden aid Stef Feldman spoke to Education Writers Association members about ed policy. It was... not encouraging. She didn't make a "firm commitment" about state testing waivers, an odd stance for someone who promised to put an end to high stakes testing. She stood by the "former public school educator" promise, but as many of us have noted, depending on how Biden defines his terms, Michelle Rhee would fit the bill. Blerg. Excuse me-- I gave myself the shivers for a minute there.

A variety of topics came up. Biden wants to re-open schools by using a massive funding wave to get schools what they need to be safe (including FEMA funding), which is okay, but also using argle bargle like "ensuring high-quality learning during the pandemic." He's going to roll back a bunch of Trump-era rollbacks of Obama-era guidance. More Title I. Boost teacher pay. Nice ideas--I'm sure Mitch McConnell will go right along. SEL. HBCUs. MSIs. Maybe get back to supporting civil rights. Excellent. All fine things.

Also, student loan legislation, police on campus (yes, but with training), for-profit colleges must "prove their value (smh), early learning (the low-hanging fruit of ed policy), repairing school buildings, fund it all with taxes on super-wealthy and big corporations. No on school segregation.

But about charter schools. 

As President, Biden will ban for-profit charter schools from receiving federal funding

Nope. This is the old Clinton-era fall back designed to make both charter fans and charter opponents happy. Only California and Arizona allow for-profits in the first place. In the second place, there are plenty of ways to make a ton of money from "nonprofit" charters. So this ban is about as useful as declaring that the feds won't fund any charters located on toxic waste dumps--it's a good policy to have, but it doesn't really address the main issues. Feldman goes on to say that Biden says that the feds will stop funding nonprofits "that don't provide results," which is exceptionally vague (Feldman "clarified" that the USED would have to figure that out). He does score a good point by saying that all charters must "be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards," which shows that somebody groks one important issue.

Sanders got the issues better than this, and the "unity" document did as well. This is a step back. 

Today we get a look at the "agency review teams," and the education team is...well, not encouraging.

We already knew that Linda Darling-Hammond, loved by some and mistrusted by others, is heading it up. Here's some of the mix-- folks from the Education Trust, Learning Policy Institute, Alliance for Excellent Education, Teach Plus, and the Century Foundation. Ruthanne Buck, a senior advisor at the department with Duncan and King is here. She's also an old AFT hand, which I note only because there are three AFT staffers in the group; just one from NEA. There's some overlap, too-- Ary Amerikaner is VP of the Education Trust and former Obama USED staffer. The Teach Plus rep is CEO Roberto Rodriguez, another Obama alum (his bio says "From 2009 to 2017, he developed and led President Obama’s education initiatives to build systemic change and improve opportunity and outcomes across the educational continuum.")

If you have been holding your breath, waiting and worrying about whether or not Biden is going to take us back to the days of education under Obama--well, there's not a lot here to set your mind at ease. It is probably best to hold judgment and wait to see what they come up with, who the new secretary will be, what actual policies are going to be supported by the new administration. This week's news is just another reminder that just because Betsy DeVos is on her way out doesn't mean public ed supporters can stop being vigilant. For what it's worth, these people are volunteering to do a difficult job that is even more difficult than usual given the mess being created by President Hissy Fit, and for that, they do deserve some thanks. And it's hugely unlikely that we won't end up in a better place than we are now. In the meantime, you can choose to be either disappointed or hopeful, depending on how you're inclined. Whatever your inclination, keep both eyes open.

Donors Choose Mondays At The Institute

It sucks that Donors Choose exists. For those unfamiliar, it's basically a Go Fund Me for classrooms instead of medical problems.

Like all such charities, it occasionally pops up in the news because some celebrity and/or business decides to sponsor a bunch of projects (like that time with Katy Perry and Staples) and we get a bunch of warm fuzzy stories and I just hate that stuff, because we shouldn't be celebrating the fact that schools are so underfunded that teachers have to depend on charity to help get the job done. 

But here's the thing. We are where we are. I think the custom of tipping food servers is stupid and terrible and should be done away with yesterday. But if I refuse to tip my server because I disagree with the system, I'm just being a jerk. I don't like enabling a system that's failing classroom teachers, but we are where we are, and especially now that I'm comfortably retired, I'm okay involving the institute in small time philanthropy. Donors Choose makes it easy for someone like me who is out in rural small town America to help. And what we've been through in the last month or four years or so has sort of reminded me that it's important to take active steps to make the world marginally better.

And yes, some of what turns up on Donors Choose makes me scratch my head and ask, "Really??" But then, I can still choose.

So here's what I'm going to do. Mondays, I'll be looking at Donors Choose to find a cause that speaks to me, and I will share a link here. I invite you to join me in helping somebody's modest classroom dream come through. Or go ahead and pick one of your own. Or if you know of a local need, help with that (some schools forbid teachers from using these kinds of sites, presumably because they are justifiably embarrassed that their teachers have to go begging). 

This week I'm donating to a third grade classroom in Waukegan, IL. They'd like some actual physical books to read as a class while in distance learning mode. You can follow the link here.

Yes, Donors Change is not the systemic change we're looking for. But while we're still hoping and working for that change to come, it's a way to help. My wife's school has gone now to hybrid schooling, which is one more tremendous drag on her, and I have to sit here at the institute and feel largely helpless to make her work easier. I've been doing this for about a month and in these messy time, it has helped me feel as if I'm doing something concrete in the world. So if this platform can help some actual teachers do their jobs in these miserable times, I'm for that. You're invited to join in.