Children are not our future

There are plenty of warm fuzzy teacher sayings that I could well do without, emphasizing as they do that teachers are too noble to ever want to do things like, say, insist on being paid a decent wage or have control over their working conditions. But there's a child-focused saying that I would like to banish to the Island of Misfit Cliches--

Children are our future. Or, sometimes, children are the future.

The first is worse, carrying with it the notion children belong to us--and not just now, but in perpetuity, as if their adult selves will exist only to take care of the rest of us. "Shut up, kid, and get back to work. Grampa is going to need a new pair of shoes!"

But I object to both for other reasons.

I hear in this cliche the echoes of a notion that children are empty vessels just waiting for Wise Adults to fill them up with knowledge and thoughts and values and all the other stuff that makes a person an actual person. Because, yeah, if they're empty vessels, they're not exactly persons, are they.

The modern version of this is to view them as a sort of empty hard drive, just waiting for programming to be added. I think this is part of the reason that the "science of reading" moniker rubs me the wrong way--the implication that one simply plugs or pours in this scientific programmy stuff, and that will result in every single child being filled up with proper reading stuff.

And, of course, if the child is an empty lot, we needn't look inside to see what's already there--we can just concentrate on what we want to see dumped into the child. We can build the child to order without having to pay attention to anything that might get in the way of the new structure we plan to build. 

The emphasis on the future is also problematic, suggesting that the child's life isn't really going on right now, that their current life is just a staging area for the life to come. And yes--it's absolutely true that their childhood is the time in which we should help them build strong, robust, vibrant structures that will allow them to enjoy their life in years to come. Is that more true for a five year old than a thirty-five year old? 

The idea of potentiality, the collecting of tools for future use--that's all important. But let's not get so focused on that that we forget that these children are living their lives right now. Let's not fall so far into this rhetoric that we start thinking that children will be, you know, real people some day, but not today. 

Plenty of adults act as if children are a mystery, as if nobody can know how to talk to this alien species. There is no mystery. Children are people. People who haven't yet developed some physiological and psychological aspects, people without limited experience in the world, but people all the same. Not future people. People right now, today.

This "children are the future" talk makes it easy to justify the kinds of bad policy we've seen in the last few decades. Sure, let's start sitting them down to study academic subjects earlier and earlier because there's nothing about what's going on in a four-year-old's life right now that could possibly be as important as getting her packed full of employer-desired skills for the future. It's easy to deny childhood when you think that all of a child's Real Life is in the future. 

"Children are the future" is often used as a motivational nudge for funding and/or supporting education and can feel like part of a larger conversation that started with "We don't need to spend money on that--they're just children." It's a conversation one would expect from people who measure a person's worth in their utility (in particular, their utility to employers). It's a hard conversation, because if you don't know that you should care about, look after, cherish and hold close our children, I don't know how to explain it to you. They are bundles of raw humanity, undiluted and unvarnished. That ought to be good enough. 

"Children are our present" doesn't sing like the "future" version, but I think it's truer and important in that it doesn't let us push off our obligation to the young humans among us. They are here, with us, today, and deserve to be cherished and supported and seen and heard and embraced for all they are today. The future will come on its own, soon enough.

 

More Teacher Effectiveness Mirages

 The Fordham Institution has a new report entitled "Teacher Effectiveness and Improvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools." Despite what it claims to study, the report is a neear-perfect demonstration of Campbell's Law in action. 

The study starts with a question that, as used car salesmen put it, assumes the sale:

Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?

We're not going to get bogged down in the details of this study, including this assertion that charter school superiority is a proven thing, because none of them matter when it comes to understanding why this study is fatally flawed.

The fleshed-out version of the question under study is this-- we know that more experienced teachers are generally better at their craft then newbies (an assertion that Fordham didn't make back in the days when they were part of the Let's Get Rid Of Teacher Job Protections crowd), but we also know that charters mostly have newbie teachers, so how is it that charters gets these superior results with fresh-out-the-wrapper staff?

The report was written by Matthew P. Steinberg (George Mason University) and Haisheng Yeng (U of Penn grad student). They worked from a pile of data from the PA department of education from between 2007 and 2017.

We could dig deeply into this report, but there's no reason to. All we really have to see is this sentence:

Like other studies, this one uses estimates of teachers’ value-added—that is, their contribution to students’ English language arts (ELA) and math achievement growth— as a proxy for their effectiveness.

So once again, "teacher effectiveness" is being used as a synonym for "scores on a single standardized test of math and reading soaked in the widely-debunked VAM formula." This is bunk. They try to prop it up with this--

Although such estimates cannot capture other valuable aspects of teaching practice and behaviors, research shows that (in addition to learning more math and English language arts) students assigned to teachers with higher value-added scores are more likely to go to college and earn higher salaries later in life.

That assertion about later salaries is cited from Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014, a work that is problematic at best and bunk at worst. Meanwhile, even folks in the ed reform community have caught on to the fact that raising a child's Big Standardized Test score doesn't lead to that child having a better life. 

But using test scores as a proxy for "student achievement" or "teacher effectiveness" is a critical tactic for ed reformsters, because writing a whole paper about how one set of teachers is better at raising test scores isn't very sexy or exciting. "What I really want from a teacher is for her to get my kid to do better on that one standardized test they take every spring, and nothing else matters as much," said no parent ever. Likewise, while there are a million interpretations of "good teacher," very few of them are "teacher whose students get good scores on that one big test." 

Using test scores as a measure of teaching quality and student achievement isn't just a bad, inaccurate measurement--it triggers Goodhart's Law, or its somewhat better known sibling, Campbell's Law. The idea here is that the more you use a quantitative social measure for social decision-making, the more it will tend to disrupt and corrupt the processes it's supposed to be monitoring. If you like a pithier version, take Strathern's restatement of Goodhart--

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Which brings us back to this piece of research. Steinberg and Yang find that CMO-run charters seem to have better-trained teachers, and they posit that hiring practices, training practices, or the charter chain tendency to force all teachers to follow the prescribed procedures--not just curricular, but pedagogical--might be the answer. 

But if we stop using bad proxies and just say plainly what we're talking about, there's little mystery here. The premise of the study is that newbie charter teachers get better test scores than public school teachers. That points to just one thing--more focused test prep. This is easy to enforce with newbie teachers in a restrictive teaching environment because they don't have enough of a well-established professional identity to push back. Meanwhile, teachers in public schools are trying to balance the demand for raising test scores against the demand to actually teach. 

In short, the explanation laid out by this report is that charter schools (at least the ones studied here) train teachers to do test prep instead of training them to actually teach. 

Mike Petrilli suggested on Twitter this morning that I'm being cynical here with my reading of the report, but I think it's far more cynical to keep arguing in 2020 that using a single set of test scores and a long-since-discredited number crunching formula as a measure of true teacher quality. It is possible, as Petrilli says, that some charters are doing a great job of teaching junior teachers to "teach well," but as long as the premise is that "teach well" means "have students who get high scores on the BS Test," we'll never, ever know. 

"Well, then, how do we figure out which teachers are doing a good job," has been the complaint for the past couple of decades, and I agree that this is a tough nut to crack, but that does not mean that we settle on a bad answer. It is hard to cure certain types of cancer, but that does not mean that we should settle for "drink bleach and sacrifice a frog under a full moon" as a cure. We do not, like the proverbial drunk, search for our car keys under a streetlight a hundred feet from where we dropped the keys because the light is better there. 

It has been true since we ushered in test-centric schooling under NCLB--the discussion about teacher quality is worth having, but we cannot have it if we insist on using as "data" something that does not measure teacher quality. 

There are other problems with this particular study. Most notably, since it is based on tests scores, it makes sense to look at the students who are taking those tests and the long-known techniques of cherry picking and push-out used by many charter schools to insure that they have a good crop of quality test-takers. Or we could talk about longer school days, or simply organizing the vast amount of school time around the BS Test. Any of these would explain the charter alleged test edge. This study doesn't address any of that. 

But it doesn't matter. Any study that accepts the premise that BS Test-based VAM scores are a measure of teacher quality is wasting time. 

How Does Education Fix Poverty? Spoiler alert...

 The idea that we can educate poverty away has been a popular one with policymakers and politicians for years now. Here's just one example, from Janet Yellen, former Fed Chair and, possibly, future Treasury Secretary, back in 2017:

Yellen spoke to a conference on community development today, where she says that providing children with the opportunity to learn important skills earlier is essential to ending this generational cycle of poverty.

“This research underscores the value of starting young to develop basic work habits and skills,” she said. “These habits and skills help prepare people for work, help them enter the labor market sooner, meet with more success over time and be in a position to develop the more specialized skills and obtain the academic credentials that are strongly correlated with higher and steadier earnings.”

You can find this kind of idea echoed at the international level or when plugging particular edu-programs-- education ends the "cycle of poverty" or "lifts the economy."

Now, I am not an economists (though there are so many economists that pretend to be education experts that it would serve them right if I got in their lane), so I may be missing something here. Feel free to sort me out in the comments.

But it seems to me that two things are being conflated here. One is that education can help an individual escape poverty. That one makes sense-- Pat gets an education and can quit that job at the widget factory assembly line and get a better one designing widgets or VP of widget marketing.

But the second idea--that education can end poverty as a whole--seems more problematic. Pat leaves the widget assembly line job, which pays minimum wage with no benefits and only provides 29 weeks of work per year. When Pat had the job, Pat was among the working poor. But when Pat leaves the job, the poverty-creating job, is still there and will be filled by someone else, who will still be a member of the working poor. So Pat's life improves, but the total poverty that exists remains the same.

I am stumped on how the education-ending-poverty thing works. If everyone in the country has a masters degree, does McDonalds start paying its burger flippers $20/hour? Would Walmart suddenly start paying big money and benefits because every single stocker has a degree? Will companies that used to hire 10 people with masters degree now hire 20 just because they're so plentiful, so that the available jobs for highly educated people will grow? 

None of that seems likely. Businesses are not replacing humans with computers because they just can't find humans who are well-educated enough. Businesses did not outsource jobs to other countries because the people there are so much better-educated. And businesses, as we have seen demonstrated with stimulus funding, companies don't hire more people just because they have some spare money lying around. Businesses outsource and cybersource because it saves them money. The level of education for the people they're avoiding paying doesn't change that.

Maybe the idea is that if everyone had more education, we'd suddenly be awash in entrepreneurs creating start-up businesses left and right. This seems... unlikely. Or maybe better-educated people would be more productive and that boost in productivity would lead to--oh, never mind...

(Okay, here's a differing view of that infamous chart, which is a long read and at the end, doesn't make things look much better for US workers).

My cynical non-economist view is this-- "education will fix poverty" is an excellent way to absolve all the other players. Politicians and policymakers don't have to address the problems of poverty because, hey, if the schools would just do their jobs, poverty would be fixed. Business leaders don't have to behave like responsible members of society instead of oligarchs because, somehow, it's not their fault that their business is built on the backs of underpaid, ill-used fellow citizens. It is yet another more subtle way to blame the poor for being poor, as if the Captains of Industry are looking down at the meat widgets saying, "Look, if you had more education, I'd pay you more to do that job." 

Does all this mean we should not do our best to give every student the maximum educational tools so that they can lift themselves just as far and high as they can? Absolutely not--the gig is to give every student all the tools, all the knowledge, all the power that education can give a person. We should fight poverty, and arm students to fight it. But schools can't do it all themselves; lifting individuals out of the tar pit of poverty doesn't clean up the pit itself. 

And when people start using "poverty" and "education" in the same declarative sentence, be clear on what they are talking about--helping individuals rise, or cleaning up fundamental injustices in society because society's leaders don't want to do the job. Escape poverty, or fight it? The first job may belong to schools, but the second belongs to everyone. 

Schools, Supposedly, Have Caused the Fall of US Religion

The Christian Church has been suffering a steady and rapid decline for a few decades now, a trend noted by many social scientists, and a source of struggle within many churches that are looking for ways to fill newly-emptied pews. You can look at many data sets on the subject. The folks at Pew Research find that there's a stark generational factor; in the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer cohort, those who call themselves Christian are a vast majority (84% and 76% respectively), but only half of Millennials describe themselves as Christian. 

It's a complicated phenomenon, and carries a little existential weight in a country that many folks like to think of as a Christian nation. 

So what's the answer? 

Religion News Service offers ten reasons, including prosperity that distracts people from faith, lack of compelling religious leaders, the end of Sunday as a "protected" church day, and the "wired" world. Many writers point out that US numbers are still higher than European ones. Focus on the Family says it's all okay, because evangelicals are gaining. Ross Douthat at the New York Times kind of agreed, suggesting that it's "lukewarm Christianity" that is declining. Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at Notre Dame, pointed at three historical events driving the precipitous post-90s plunge: the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the political team-up of the GOP and the religious right. Researcher Jean M. Twenge found a sharp drop in religiosity among teens; we might come back to her findings in a moment.

Or maybe we won't bother, because Cameron Hilditch over at the National Review has solved the mystery-- it's those darned public schools. 

We have discussed Hilditch's work before; he's the one who is pissed off that people think of teachers as selfless and calling some schools "public" is just a rhetorical dirty trick. He's a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute, a Belfast native, and an Oxford guy. 

His argument here is built partly on the work of Lyman Stone at the American Enterprise Institute, who cranked out a report about this back in April of 2020, Promise and Peril. I'm guessing a lot of folks missed it because in April of 2020, we were pre-occupied with a few other issues. It's loaded with lots of attempts to find a way to measure how religious folks are.

The title "Why American Children Stopped Believing in God" doesn't telegraph much, but the sub-head does--"The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state." Hilditch is here both to solve the mystery and to torch some straw persons, and he's neither subtle nor witty about which side he's backing:

Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time.

Get it? Conservatives "cite" and progressives "mutter something." And there's this:

Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”

It’s a simple theory, befitting the minds of those who have historically espoused it.

Lord knows I have thrown my share of snark, but the rules of decent snark include 1) an honest attempt to grasp the other person's point and 2) avoiding a devolution into direct insult.

At any rate, Hilditch wants us to understand that religiosity or the lack thereof doesn't particularly correlate to education attainment level, so "enlightenment" doesn't explain it. Here's the answer he finds in Stone:

But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.

 

Or, as he quotes Stone:

Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser degree, government spending on old-age pensions. Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious. It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.

How to explain the linkage? Hilditch is ready to shine a light:

It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.

So there's his argument. Let's take a look at why he's wrong.

First, despite the use of words like "drives" and "affected," what Stone is pointing at is correlation, not causation. We could just as easily look at the data and conclude that a loss in religious identification causes a society to spend more money on a government-run education system. Or we could ask an even better question--what third factor is driving both of these changes. We could even ask--and probably should--if the correlation is an illusion. Let me direct you, once again, to one of my favorite websites, Spurious Correlations, where we learn that the US space program causes suicides and Nic Cage movies cause people to drown in pools. 

Next, Stone himself is not quite as certain that "it's quite simple." He gives secular education its own heading as one possible cause. He talks about the "club goods" theory of religiosity--the idea that get a certain set of services as a member of a club--and how other competing providers would undercut church, and offers examples of how Sunday football and Sunday liquor sales lower church attendance. Also, if you have sources of safety and security in times of trial, you are less likely to turn to the church. (Note that these are similar to items on the Religion News list above).

Stone also looks at his own charts and reaches a valuable conclusion:

The story of the secularization of America is not mostly the story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults. It is the story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.

Stone has a thought about that, but his language, which has been so firm up until this point, now gets very waffly. The source of this secular upbringing "may very well be" in schools. More educational spending by the state "may teach not just math and reading." It "may even alter" parental behavior and the "household environment." So it might maybe be the schools, kind of, via methods that a 60 page paper doesn't take time to explain. Because, really--how exactly would greater government spending on school lead teachers to work harder at inculcating a world view or life orientation. Nor does Stone, who rolls out plenty of charts and graphs and data and research, take the time to explain what exactly "more government spending" means. More total? More per pupil? Nor does he venture a guess at how this school spending would affect parental behavior or the household environment. And that's not the weakest part of his argument:

It is striking that religiosity declines so much between age 12 and 18, before children have left the home. Most likely, instead of a religious school supporting and encouraging religious behavior and instruction, high school becomes a season of secularization.

I spent 39 years working with teens. The notion that anyone in a school, religious or not, is going to indoctrinate them into a particular set of beliefs, religious or not, defies reality. If such a t6hing were possible, every one of my students would have emerged from my class loving reading and writing. Sadly, that did not happen. Anyone who thinks a teenager is likely to say, "You know, that's not what I used to believe, but now that I've heard you say it, I've changed my whole view of the world," has never met a teenager. 

But Hilditch sees schools as irresistible juggernauts of indoctrination, run by--well, let him say it:

College, career, and popularity become the existential targets toward which the arrow of each student’s soul is aimed by bow-wielding commissars across the country. In a context such as this, secularization becomes ineluctable.

My colleagues and I were just bow-wielding commissars (because, you know, evil socialists), and students were just helpless putty in our hands. And this is important too--how did we jump from the idea that more government spending hurts religion to the idea that it's these "commissars." Did we use the money to hire more commissars? Did we spend it on more commissar training? Where is the connection to taxpayer money here?

Anyway, this brings up another problem with Hilditch's vision. It would require a vast conspiracy among millions of compliant teachers. But the figures say that at least 65% of American adults identify as Christian; would that not suggest that at least 65% of school faculty members also identify as Christian, or does he assume that some mechanism in either policy or conspiracy weeds out all the Christian teachers and keeps them out of public schools? A good-sized chunk of teachers voted for Donald Trump in 2016; is that just a cover, or are teachers really not a very homogenous group? Or is his theory that teachers are all locked in place by government policy? Because that's nuts--the government tried really hard to lock everyone into Common Core, and they failed. Is there a super-secret Secular Core that they've successfully implanted?

His conclusion was there at the start--religious families should get their children out of public school. How will this be financed? He admits it will not be cheap and will require "the establishment of charitable private education co-operatives," which could mean tax credit scholarships or it could mean privately funded schools or it could mean that not everybody will get a part of this.

Whatever the case, Hilditch should direct his attention to the Netherlands. Betsy DeVos is a fan of the Netherlands because after decades and decades of political conflict on the issue, the Netherlands basically went full voucher--they fund public secular schools and private religious schools, so there is no country where it's any easier to get your child out of the public schools and into a private religious school with the faith of your preference. 

But here's the thing. The Netherlands appear in Stone's report in Figure 2-- Religious Affiliation over Time in Different Countries. It shows the drop in religiosity in thirteen different countries. All have had precipitous drops, but no country fell farther, faster, sooner than the Netherlands. 

So maybe it's not actually the public schools causing all this.

I said we'd come back to Jean Twenge. She and her co-authors looked at teen religious convictions in a paper published in PLOS ONE, a journal that involved actual peer review. They found that the drop is real, and that it's not a shift (in other words, "religious like in church" didn't change to "Just spiritual, man.")

The paper offers some "possible explanations" that open with this magical sentence-- "This analysis cannot show causation, only correlation..." because that's how real scientists talk. But the authors lean toward individualism as an explanation. First, real commitment to the church means commitment to a larger organization ahead of your own preferences. You also have to go along with what the group believes, and in general submit to a higher authority. In particular, religion "often focuses on concerns outside the self." All of these, they suggest, run counter to individualism. 

It makes a certain sense, and points at what could be a large irony lurking in the midst of Hilditch's article. The rising love of Ayn Rand among conservatives has always been, well, odd, given that Rand believed that religion is for weak suckers and that selfishness is the greatest virtue. Christianity and Randian objectivism are hugely incompatible, but the post-Reagan conservative world loves it some rugged libertarian-flavored individualism. So it would be a special kind of irony if one of the factors dragging down religion in the US is, in fact, exactly the kinds of philosophy regularly promoted in the pages of the National Review.

In the meantime, opponents of public ed are running out of ills to blame on teachers. Stay tuned for the next installment.

ICYMI: Still Shopping Edition (12/13)

 Trying desperately to shop at small local stores, and it's a real challenge right now. And what has to be ordered comes with the special When Will It Actually Arrive suspense. Happy holidays, one and all. In the meantime, some reading....

San Joaquin Valley in the DPE Crosshairs  

Thomas Ultican peels back the layers on yet another assault on public education, this one out in California. Interesting to see how several groups' interests converge on one goal--dismantling public education.

The next education secretary must know about much more than education

I know I've been heavy on the need to get public education expertise in the department of education under Biden, but at Hechinger, Andre Perry makes a good case for other skill sets that the next secretary will need. 

The canary in the coal mine

Reuters takes a look at teacher layoffs in Schenectady, NY, and asks if this is not an ominous sign for what's ahead for public schools. 

The 10 most significant education studies of 2020  

This piece at Edutopia leaves lots of room for debate--are the reading wars over, and is handwriting a key part of learning, and did Fordham really release a study that contradicts some of the ideas behind its beloved Common Core? But it's an interesting conversation piece of a list.

McKinsey and Company use falling behind talk to ramp up school toughness   

Nancy Bailey takes a look at what McKinsey, the 800-pound gorilla of consulting, has to say about the children "falling behind," and what policies they're using the big fear to push.

Visa Ban on Foreign Workers Has Left School With Teacher Shortages

Hey, remember how some school systems were using foreign teachers to fill the spots they couldn't convince US citizens to take? And remember how Trump has been slowly choking off the stream of even legal immigration? Turns out those two things ran into each other. From the Intercept.

Norms, ethics and civility. Plus education.

Nancy Flanagan has an exceptional gift for connecting her own personal experience to larger ideas, and that's on display here. Do we need calls for civility right now--or is something else needed to move past these Trump years?

Schools Are Still Not Like Ubers

Betsy DeVos (who will soon not be a humble servant in the education secretary's office, but will instead be a very rich lady who wants to dismantle public education) likes to compare her vision of education to the same kind of disruption offered by outfits like Uber, a comparison that many folks like to make. I've written before about what a lousy comparison that is, focusing on problems like a business mentality and the problems of automation.

But here's a quick piece by techno-critic Cory Doctorow to remind us that Uber is, at the end, a terrible thing for anybody to want to emulate. Instead, he says, Uber was "a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals."

Doctorow connects Uber to a Saudi plan to diversify and capture monopolies in other sectors as a cushion against future downturns in the oil market. Their plan for Uber was, well...

The S1 – the document that explains how the company plans to be profitable – set two conditions for Uber's profitability.

First, all the public transit in the world had to shut down and be replaced by Uber.

Next, all the drivers had to be replaced by AIs.

Uber recently unloaded its self-driving car division, which, like most self-driving car initiatives, was getting nowhere. (Doctorow reminds us one of my favorite AI auto moments, when developers determined that AI cars would work great as soon as we controlled all human behavior around them.) As he points out, the unloading was not exactly a "sale," because they "invested" $400 mill in the startup taking over the division, which is another way of saying that Uber paid the company to take the AI auto division off their hands.  

Uber survives by being willing to lose money, by breaking the law, and by treating its employees like work-for-hire chattel. I ruled it out as a model for education because it is a business, but it's not even a good business. Even if you pooh-pooh Doctorow's views, Uber is still not a successful business by any definition of the term--it doesn't make money, it doesn't make the world a better place, it doesn't lift up anybody except the few at the top. The New York Times porofile was entitled "How Uber got lost," but it's not clear they were ever on a workable path, ever. Other businesses should not be imitating Uber, and education most certainly should not. 

Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.

Last week the New York Times decided to offer one more glowing portrait of Melinda Gates, unintentionally underlining the work of rich folk critic Anand Giridharadas and explaining, again, that she doesn't get the problem of Gates riches in education.

She opens with an Emerson quote from her valedictory high school graduation speech about success being the knowledge that one person has breathed easier because you have lived. That quote, writes David Gelles, "is still ringing in her ears." 

“That’s been my definition of success since high school,” she said. “So if I have an extra dollar, or a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, or in my case, which is absurd, a billion dollars to plow back into making the world better for other people, that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is such a Giridharadian quote-- note that she gets her vast wealth is absurd, but her thought is that she should "plow back" the money rather than contemplate, critique, and act to change the system that allowed her top extract that much money in the first place. These are our modern philanthropists--they can grasp that they have a shit ton of money, and even consider that they ought to do something useful for it, but they can't question that they deserve to have it in the first place, that it is, in fact, theirs theirs all theirs. Philanthropy is swell, but philanthropy set up so that they control their money and remain the arbiters of what should and should not be done with it.

The interview focuses primarily on the medical stuff, and there are plenty of reasons to question the Gates involvement in the medical world (here's a good piece to start with). 

Asked about disinformation, she views social media as the culprit, and somehow talks about that without sharing any culpability with technology to enable such baloney spreading. She knows that she and Bill have been the target of conspiracy theories, and she just figures that because people are afraid and "looking to point to somebody or some thing or some institution." She's certainly not wrong, but I note that she doesn't include "vast multinational corporation" on the list, nor suggest there's anything they've done to attract this sort of attention. 

Gelles asks the "does big philanthropy have too much power" question, Here's the first part of her answer:

I think that’s a critique that is well worth listening to and looking at. In our philanthropic work, there isn’t a single thing that we don’t work on in partnership with governments. Because at the end of the day, it is governments that scale things up and that can help the most people. There is a healthy ecosystem that needs to exist between government, philanthropy, the private sector and civil society. And when you get that ecosystem working at its best, no one party in that ecosystem has too much power.

I object here. If your philanthropy can "partner with" a government, as if you're pretty much equals, you have too much power. If you are on an equal scale with government, the private sector, and civil society, you have too much power. And there's another unspoken thought here--modern philanthropists may give up money, but they don't give up power. 

The second half of this answer is where education pops up:

You know, if Bill and I had had more decision-making authority in education, maybe we would’ve gotten farther in the United States. But we haven’t. Some of the things that we piloted or tried got rejected, or didn’t work, and I think there’s a very healthy ecosystem of parents and teachers’ unions and mayors and city councils that make those education decisions. I wish the U.S. school system was better for all kids.

Yikes. I mean, yikes. First of all, it's not "some of the things"-- all of the things that the Gates have tried in education, from small schools to the Common Core, have failed. Yes, they got rejected, in the same way the average person rejects stewed liver covered with toad wart dressing--they were bad. (And lets not forget that sometimes, rather than being rejected, the Gates just walked out on projects in the middle, leaving someone else holding the bag.) And whatever their many problems were, the biggest problem was not that Bill and Melinda Gates didn't have enough power over the system. Note also that her "very healthy ecosystem" includes pretty much everybody. If everyone else had just let the Gates be in charge, it would have been fine! Yikes. After all this time, all this money, and all this failure, she still doesn't understand that when it comes to education, they are amateurs who don't know enough about how education works and who don't bother to talk to actual experts (without checking to make sure they're sympathetic and then handing them a big pile of money first, which tends to blunt the critical faculties --looking at you NEA and AFT). 

She's asked about changing the tax code so that Bill pays more, and she thinks that's a good idea because if you benefit from the system in this country "you have an obligation to give back," and again, that is markedly different from recognizing that you have an obligation to not take so very much in the first place. And she's not done underlining that blind spot. Asked about how she reconciles her enormous privilege with "the acute suffering that so many people are experiencing," she says this:

It’s something I’ve pondered a lot. There’s no explanation how you get to be in this situation of privilege. There’s just none.

Well, yes, there is. Your husband made a bunch of pointed business decisions, and made some financial decisions, and now you're richer than the entire planet. Yes, it took a whole complex network of luck and timing and fortune to tee up your husband's work, but Bill Gates has worked very hard at becoming absurdly wealthy. 

This is the part where that headline about "letting her heart break" comes in. She visits poor people in far away places, hangs out with Mother Theresa, and cries a lot, and then contemplates what the person shares with her and "what I learned and how do I plow that back into the work to try and make the world better." Again with the plowing back.

And look, I get it. She could be spending her days shopping for designer dresses and ordering gold-plated toilets and the Gates Foundation could be spending millions of dollars on garish portraits of Bill to mount in one of his ninety-five country clubs. They could be strikingly evil people shamelessly basking in pools of liquid silver. They could be dumping their money into dopey projects like missions to Mars. I also get that being incredibly wealthy probably has unavoidable effects on how you perceive the world and how your own immediate world treats you. 

Hubris doesn't always come with ugly swagger, and lacking a clue about critical items doesn't always look like bell-gong dopiness. And no matter how rich you are or are not, it's human to want to Do Good Things without making yourself uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. And sometimes carelessness looks poised and pretty.

But boy would I love to read a Gates profile in which either of them said, "You know, we just realized that we just don't know enough about education to be meddling with it. We have a lot of damage that we've done and need to make up for, and we're sincerely sorry about that. We have learned that we don't know the magic solution to making schools better for all students, and so we're going to step back and get out of the way of the serious professionals who have devoted their entire adult lives to that work. We plan to just shut up and listen to them." 

That would be a fun profile, but I'm not holding my breath.