The New York Times Adds One Plus One And Gets Three

You might have been excited yesterday if you saw a New York Times editorial board headline talking about "The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind" and thought that maybe, for a change, the greyest lady was going to stands up for public education. 

But then you read it.

Sigh.

There is much that they get right. They open by noting that the department has not just failed, but refused to lead, during the pandemic. It's a cruel irony that Covid arrived during the administration of folks who think that government should not do anything, ever, including helping keep its citizens alive. 

They also correctly note that there is a lot of undoing to undo, specifically in the area of civil rights protections where, again, it was DeVos's devout belief that government should not ever be helpful. 

They note a "striking" contract between DeVos and Cordona, offering the understatement "Ms. DeVos had almost no experience in public education and was clearly disinterested in the department's mission."

Then the board barrels boldly into the weeds.

They accept the NWEA's baloney pronouncements on "learning loss" as gospel, and from there it's just a short step to the usual arguments about why we must get back to the Big Standardized Test right away, because how else will anyone know how the students are doing. The board wants to gather data so that "the country" can "allocate educational resources strategically," except that is not what "the country" does ever, and as always, a good way to find out how students are doing is to ask actual teachers.

I am continually amazed at this argument, because what the heck do people think teachers do every fall? Seriously. Do they imagine that teachers just assume that all their new students know X, Y and Z because it's in the curriculum. Do folks imagine that teachers spend the weeks before school poring over BS Test results to learn where their students are? Because, no-- mostly the test results aren't available yet and because teachers are forbidden to see the actual question, all they get is the test manufacturer's "analysis" of the results, which is mostly hugely broad and unhelpful. 

No, in the fall, teachers use a large array of formal and informal assessments to figure out student's individual weaknesses and strengths. Teachers do this daily, and then they keep doing it all year. This remains one of the great, silly fictions of the BS Test--that the results are useful to teachers who would be lost without them. In reality, the BS Test is like a guy who shows up at the office of a general who is commanding thousands of troops on dozens of fronts and this guy--this guy shows up with a pop gun and announces, "I am here to win this war for you." 

The NYT board then swings back out of the weeds by noting that DeVos's affectionate support of predatory for-profit colleges was a bad thing and the new guy should get back to holding career-prep schools accountable for actually prepping people for careers.

The board remains firmly on the wrong side of testing. Let's hope the new secretary doesn't listen to them.

ICYMI: So I Guess This Is A New Year Edition (1/3)

 I'm not sure I've ever felt less enamored of our habit of celebrating the passing of an arbitrary line in the sand that we drew ourselves, but it's not the most terrible human activity, either, so carry on. Also cross your fingers and say a prayer for everyone going back to school tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

The Bloom's Deception  

Greg Ashman challenges some common thoughts about the beloved taxonomy. Are higher orders really more important?

Remember This Year

Audrey Watters does a version of her annual review of the year piece, pulling no punches as always, and reminding us about ed tech amnesia.

An Idiot's Guide To the Philosophy of Education (Part 3)

Othmar's Trombone has been quiet for a while, but this week he popped back up continuing his series of irreverent looks at key philosophers of education, so here you go.

Yes, Virginia

This is a cool little piece about the annually celebrated girl who wrote That Letter and received That Reply. Turns out she grew up to be a teacher.

Pandemic Offers Opportunity to Reduce Standardized Testing  

That Josh Starr, CEO of PDK International, would write this piece is not exactly surprising, but that Education Next, the mouthpiece of the Fordham Institution axis of reformsterdom, would run it suggests that something's in the air right now. Let's hope. Also, add this to your bookmarked lists of good arguments for suspending testing.

The critical story of the "science of reading" and why its narrow plotline is putting our children and schools at risk.

The National Council of Teachers of English offers an excellent critique of the highly-popular-among-people-who-don't-actually-teach science of reading movement.

Penn State Hockey: Gadowsky away from family since July

My nephew is a sports writer specializing in Penn State sports. Here's a different kind of covid piece, about the university's hockey coach, who has sacrificed being with his own family in order to do the coaching job. One more cost of getting sports running so other folks can feel normal.

Trump's school choice executive order

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains why we don't have to give that EO another thought.

The President's executive order is vaporware

Here's a guest post on the reformy Jay Greene's blog, also explaining why we don't have to give that EO another thought. 

Amplify and iReady Claim Kindergarten and First Grade Reading Loss. Guess why.

Is it any wonder that much of the chicken littling about learning loss is coming from folks who hope to make a bundle "fixing" it? Nancy Bailey breaks down some of the baloney being sliced up.

St. Louis Public Education Theft Continues

Thomas Ultican looks in detail at the steady dismantling of St. Louis schools and where the situation stands currently.

Why the academic achievement gap is a racist idea.

This piece from Ibram X. Kendi ran back in 2016, but it poped up again this week and it is well worth a reread.

And finally, this tweet just made me laugh this week. If you don't get it, I can't help you.

I can finally cross this off my "to-do" list.#BetterLateThanNever pic.twitter.com/3rmfEiA3tv

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) December 28, 2020

Why Students Should Learn To Use Tech Tools

Because some day you might be involved in a national-level effort to overthrow the results of an election, and you might have to file a legal document like this one...

I really wanted to save this somewhere so that I could pull it out as an example some day, because this is just a special kind of awesome. 

Another Round Of Teacher Bashing

Remember back in the spring (approximately ten years ago in 2020 time), when teachers were hailed as heroes for their tenacity and adaptability? Actually, if you're teacher, what you probably remember is hearing that for what often comes next. And sure enough, here we are.

The attitude bubbles up in lots of outlets, sometimes snide and subvocalized, and sometimes right up in your face. A perfect example of the in-your-faciness would be this piece from the very right-tilted Foundation for Economic Education. FEE never met a union that it liked, and the subheading of this article perfectly summarizes the unfortunately-not-unpopular idea they're selling about unions and teachers:

Their willingness to put children last and fight to keep schools closed has proven once and for all that teachers’ unions do not, in fact, have kids’ best interests at heart.

The argument is composed of just a few simple parts.

First, the assertion that it's settled science ("one of the first things we learned" says FEE) that Covid doesn't kill kids and that kids don't transmit it. But there's nothing settled about that science. Here's the CDC in August of this year:

Children are at risk for severe COVID-19. Public health authorities and clinicians should continue to track pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infections. Reinforcement of prevention efforts is essential in congregate settings that serve children, including childcare centers and schools.

As with everything else about the virus, there's a wide range of data out there. The science seems to land on something along the lines of "You can re-open school buildings, if we take proper precautions, including masking, distancing, good ventilation, and regular testing, and all of that only if community spread is largely under control." Teachers recognize this unfortunate construction from other sentences like "You can properly support all students with special needs, if Congress fully funds the IDEA that requires you to do so." Conditional "if" clauses have a tendency to vanish in education, and so all sorts of folks have shortened. "You can get back into the building if we give you the necessary support and resources" to "You can get back into the building." 

But the second part of FEE's argument (and that of many others) is that it's strictly teacher unions that are holding up the opening of buildings. Never mind that many non-union charter and private school buildings are closed, that school buildings are closed in states where unions have been effectively neutered, that school buildings are closed in other countries, and that many districts have closed buildings without even talking to their teachers or unions. Somehow, it's those damned teachers and their unions.

FEE uses New York City schools as their prime example, and I'm not diving down that hole because, in general, New York City schools and the New York City union are not examples of anything except themselves. The district is large and lots of media and policy folks live there, and so we hear a lot about them as if they represent national trends. FEE is also headed in its usual direction, which is to plug charter schools and they do so with vigor and the usual rack of charter fallacies.

They also skip one of the other usual features, which is to point out all the other professions that are also facing the pandemic, which is true enough, though one might well ask why so many people are being required to choose between their livelihoods and their health. Our whole response has been very US style; as with universal health care and gun violence, we insist that what we're doing is the best that could possibly be done while the rest of the world just goes ahead and does better. 

But I digress.

The level of bash, of demeaning insult, in this "selfish teachers close our schools" argument is huge. Because there are only a couple of possible explanations for the picture critics like FEE paint:

Teachers are stupid people who don't understand the settled science.

Teachers are stupid and also lazy people who went into teaching hoping they would have to never actually work and the pandemic shut-downs are their idea of a gift from God, and they want to stretch out this paid vacation for as long as possible.

Teachers are big fat liars who are pretending not to understand the settled science so they can milk the taxpayers while providing nothing in return.

Teachers should be martyrs who want to give up their entire lives for their students, and if they don't want to do that (or, incidentally, want to be well-paid for it), they're lousy teachers and terrible human beings.

Note that all of these include the assumption that distance learning is a big fat vacation. Also, people who chose teaching as their life's work don't actually want to teach. Also, as FEE makes explicit, teachers do not have students' interests at heart. They don't care about the kids at all (which adds to the assumption of their stupidity, because if you don't care about children, teaching seems like a pretty dumb career choice, but hey--maybe you became a teacher because you couldn't manage a real job). 

There are just so many, many layers of insult and bashing here. And trying to pass it off as "Well, we're just targeting the unions; I'm sure individual teachers are delightful" doesn't cut it. 

Of course, there is an alternative explanation for how teachers and their unions have been behaving during the pandemic.

It's possible that teachers, like other citizens, are unsure about what is true about the virus and what is not. And it is possible that in that context, teachers (like other citizens) have concerns about ending up struggling with severe illness, permanently disabled, or dead. It is possible that they've noticed things like the high transmission danger of doing things like sitting down together for an unmasked meal, spending extended periods of time in close proximity, and being cooped up together in a place with poor ventilation--all regular features of a teacher's day. It's possible that they know that pandemic distance learning is a dreadful model that requires twice the work with half the results (it's even likely that they knew this before all the kibitzers chimed in). 

And given the number of teachers in the country, it's possible that the teaching corps includes te same range of opinions as the general public--everything from "this is an overblown fake" to "I'm still bleaching all my packages." Which means that union leaders are hard-pressed to represent all of their local members.

"Schools should be fully open in person right now and the only thing keeping buildings closed are those damned selfish teaches" may be a statement that comes out of frustration, or it may just be another chance to hammer home the same old anti-union message. But it's not an accurate reflection of reality, and it's more teacher bashing, because there's no reading of this statement that isn't insulting. Worse than that, it gets in the way of a useful conversation about how to achieve what everyone--including and especially teachers and their unions--wants, which is to get the buildings open and the students back in them--safely--as soon as is safely possible. 

Schools And Social Capital

I'm in the middle of reading Robert Putnam's new book (The Upswing) which has gotten me to thinking about his previous work, Our Kids. What has struck me in particular about the latter is his writing about social capital and the children of this country.

The definition of social capital is, in general, a little fuzzy. Putnam's, as put forth in Bowling Alone, another of his books well worth reading, is that it refers to "connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them." My own shorthand is to think of it as the ability to say, in any situation, "I know a guy."

Your child has expressed an interested in playing piano, and you have an old friend who plays, so you call up to ask about lessons. Your child says they'd like to know more about how the hospital works, and you know an administrator up there that you did some work for once. Your child is in trouble over some light theft, but you went to school with a guy in the prosecutors office, so maybe you make a call, or maybe you don't even have to because he says, "I know this kid's family. Let's go easy."

For someone with lots of social capital, there is always slack to be cut and always a large network of support on which one can depend. It is what we think about when we look back to a past where if you were a resident of tight community, a member of a squad, a part of the team, then somebody always had your back. To burn up all your social capital on foolish or untrustworthy or selfish behavior was to become a loner, a person who was flying solo through life, vulnerable to any bumps or disruptions along the way. 

Viewed through this lens, a lot of our formal education systems look like systems for creating and sharing social capital. Attending an ivy league college may provide you with an actual education, but it also provides you with a ton of social capital, connections to people who are both old schoolmates and occupants of positions of power. It also connects you to people who you never met because they passed through those ivy-covered halls decades before you did, but your association with the university carries enough capital to get them to open doors. You can earn extra social capital by belonging to certain organizations, certain clubs, certain civic groups. Greek organizations are explicitly about creating brother- or sister-hood that provides social capital you can carry through the rest of your life.

Conversely, a lack of social capital can be an impediment. You may have the job title, but if you didn't amass the capital on the way there, you may find yourself without admission to the "club." 

Not all groups come with the same social capital benefits. A Yale education gives you some hefty social capital; graduating from East Podunk Community College does not. In my little corner of the world, the high school you graduated from counts for your social capital account, but it's a very localized currency. Your high school mascot is good for a little help locally, but won't mean much in any other direction (at the same time, don't come into my small town waving around big city connections and expect anyone to perform an extra finger lift for you). And all of us are born into groups that come with varying degrees of social capital--rich families have more than poor, and I wonder if inborn social capital isn't another way to see white privilege. Social capital can also be built by creating a group where trust is enhanced because the members all share certain values.

There's a lot to chew on with the concept, but it makes me wonder what schools would look like if, instead of just centering on academic-based meritocratic striving, we also focused on building a strong bank of social capital. What if, in addition to prepping students to climb a ladder of success, we also primed them to build a web of success?

What could that look like?

Could we create social webs in the school that pushed students outside of their smaller tribes and lift up those students who are able to work across the school's cliquish boundaries? Can we design schools so that students know more of, and feel more connected to, their fellow students?

Can we boost mentoring programs, emphasizing not just the passing along of advice, but the building of connections. Can we draw back alumni whose success has given them a ton of social capital so that they can share their connections with students (many Hall of Fame type programs are an attempt to do this). It's a big ask, because we need more than just a one-day inspirational speech; we need the students to be able to say not just "I heard a guy talk" but "I know a guy." 

Can we commit to building an atmosphere of trust (an important part of social capital)? It can be done (take a look at Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars), but it takes a deliberate top-down approach. 

Look at Teach for America--they built a model on collecting best-and-brightest ivy leaguers aka young folks flush with tons of social capital, and squeezed them together, in the process creating an organization also loaded with social capital-- a network that has allowed them to spread like educational kudzu. Imagine if every TFA temp had spent 5-10 years in the classroom and had spent a bunch of their social capital on their students. 

Teachers do get that opportunity to build and share social capital of a sort. Our students grow up and go out into the world and Do Things, and if we have connected with them as students, that turns us into people Who Know A Guy, like (hopefully) less extreme versions of Professor Slughorn. 

Schools are the second place that students have a chance to learn about building, maintaining, and using social capital (family is the first). Schools and teachers can help, simply by being more deliberate and mindful about that aspect of student growth. It is one of the processes that has been derailed by pandemicized distance learning, and in some communities, it will take some deliberate work to get things back on track. Of course, in wealthy, well-connected communities loaded with social capital, that social wealth is what has made the pandemic slightly more tolerable. 

Building social capital is not always a positive process (in particular, you can probably think of groups that build trust within the group by peddling the idea that nobody outside the group can be trusted). But when we start the process of rebuilding schools, a deliberate approach to social capital strikes me as a useful feature to include.

Trump Issues School Vouchers Via Executive Order

Monday the White House (if Donald Trump wrote this thing, then I'm the Queen of Rumania) issued an executive order "expanding educational opportunity school choice" to create "Emergency Learning Scholarships for Students."

It instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services (that would be Alex Azar) to use funds from the Community Services Block Grant program top provide "emergency learning scholarships" (the EO doesn't use the V word). These vouchers may be used for 

1) tuition and fees for private or parochial school (if you can find one that the voucher will actually cover tuition for, and the school is doing face-to-face, and they're willing to accept your child halfway through the year)

2) homeschool, microschool, or learning pod costs (curious to know how many disadvantaged students have managed to get into learning pods, like, say, this one at a country club)

3) special education and related services, including therapies

4) tutoring or remedial education

Note that the EO doesn't offer any instructions about oversight. So if you want to hire your out-of-work high school dropout brother-in-law as your child's tutor, that'll be fine.

The argument in favor of this is that January 20th is coming and the administration wants their damn vouchers now, dammit. Okay, not really. The argument for this is

1) We totally identified effective measures for resuming face-to-face and we gave you $13 billion whole dollars to do it (never mind the part where we tried to divert a bunch of that to private schools)

2) Continued distance learning is bad. Here are a few statistics we found. 

3) Building closures are extra hard on students with special needs, because they cut off not only education but support services. They're not wrong on this one. Of course, another solution would be to give public schools the resources they need to fix this. In fact, that would be the solution that would make sense, since the public system already knows who and where the students are and what they need. Bringing in another batch of service providers means that they should be done with needs assessments right around June.

4) Low-income students are also disproportionately affected. And we have some of those baloneyfied "falling behind" statistics here to throw around. We will ignore the part where families of SOC tend to hang back even when given then chance to go sit in unventilated undermaintained but-hey-they're-opened buildings.

5) If we don't get school buildings open again soon, it will hurt the economy. For this one, we will throw in baloney from that Chetty claim that a bad kindergarten teacher will hurt your lifetime earnings, somehow twisted around to work for months without school. Seriously--I want to see the bogus research behind this one. Also, without someone to watch the kids, some parents can't get back to work.

6) We sprung some HHS money to help with childcare and supplement distance learning, but that's not enough.

7) This pandemic stuff is really hurting private schools out there, too. So we thought using this to shoot some tax dollars their way would help prop them up. Because we are sad when Catholic schools close.

So, basically, a variation on the old "We've already given public schools enough money and if that's not enough, screw 'em, because what we'd really like to do is start some damn vouchers, dammit, and why waste a good crisis. 

Add this to the list of EO's that Biden needs to eliminate on Day One. What a waste of time and baloney. 

Democrats Need A New Theory Of Action

For four years, Democrats have had a fairly simple theory of action when it came to education. Something along the lines of "Good lord, a crazy lady just came into our china shop riding a bull, waving around a flamethrower, and dragging a shark with a head-mounted laser beam; we have to stop her from destroying the place (while pretending that we have a bull and a shark in the back just like hers)." 

Now, of course, that will, thank heavens, no longer fit the circumstances. The Democrats will need a new plan.

Trouble is, the old plan, the one spanning both the Clinton and Obama years, is not a winner. It went, roughly, like this:

The way to fix poverty, racism, injustice, inequity and economic strife is to get a bunch of children to make higher scores on a single narrow standardized test; the best shot at getting this done is to give education amateurs the opportunity to make money doing it.

This was never, ever a good plan. Ever. Let me count the ways.

For one thing, education's ability to fix social injustice is limited. Having a better education will not raise the minimum wage. It will not eradicate poverty. And as we've just spent four years having hammered into us, it will not even be sure to make people better thinkers or cleanse them of racism. It will help some people escape the tar pit, but it will not cleanse the pit itself.

And that, of course, is simply talking about education, and that's not what the Dems theory was about anyway--it was about a mediocre computer-scorable once-a-year test of math and reading. And that was never going to fix a thing. Nobody was going to get a better job because she got a high score on the PARCC. Nobody was ever going to achieve a happier, healthier life just because they'd raised their Big Standardized Test scores by fifty points. Any such score bump was always going to be the result of test prep and test-taker training, and that sort of preparation was always going to come at the expense of real education. Now, a couple of decades on, all the evidence says that test-centric education didn't improve society, schools, or the lives of the young humans who passed through the system.

Democrats must also wrestle with the fact that many of the ideas attached to this theory of action were always conservative ideas, always ideas that didn't belong to traditional Democratic Party stuff at all. Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire talk about a "treaty" between Dems and the GOP, and that's a way to look at how the ed reform movement brought people into each side who weren't natural fits. The conservative market reform side teamed up with folks who believed choice was a matter of social justice, and that truce held until about four years ago, actually before Trump was elected. Meanwhile, in Schneider and Berkshire's telling, Democrats gave up supporting teachers (or at least their unions) while embracing the Thought Leadership of groups like Democrats for Education Reform, a group launched by hedge fund guys who adopted "Democrat" because it seemed like a good way to get the support they needed. Plus (and this seems like it was a thousand years ago) embracing "heroes" like Michelle Rhee, nominally listed as a Democrat, but certainly not acting like one. 

All of this made a perfect soup for feeding neo-liberals. It had the additional effect of seriously muddying the water about what, exactly, Democrats stand for when it comes to public education. The laundry list of ideas now has two problems. One is that they have all been given a long, hard trial, and they've failed. The other, which is perhaps worse from a political gamesmanship standpoint, is that they have Trump/DeVos stink all over them. 

But while Dems and the GOP share the problems with the first half of that statement, it's the Democrats who have to own the second part. The amateur part.

I often complain that the roots of almost all our education woes for the modern reform period come from the empowerment of clueless amateurs, and while it may appear at first glance that both parties are responsible, on closer examination, I'm not so sure.

The GOP position hasn't been that we need more amateurs and fewer professionals--their stance is that education is being run by the wrong profession. Eli Broad has built his whole edu-brand on the assertion that education doesn't have education problems, it has business management problems, and that they will best be solved by management professionals. In some regions, education has been reinterpreted by conservatives as a real estate problem, best solved by real estate professionals. The conservative model calls for education to be properly understood as a business, and as such, run not by elected bozos on a board or by a bunch of teachers, but by visionary CEOs with the power to hire and fire and set the rules and not be tied down by regulations and unions. 

Democrats of the neo-liberal persuasion kind of agree with that last part. And they have taken it a step further by embracing the notion that all it takes to run a school is a vision, with no professional expertise of any sort at all. I blame Democrats for the whole business of putting un-trained Best and Brightest Ivy Leaguers in classrooms, and the letting them turn around and use their brief classroom visit to establish themselves as "experts" capable of running entire district or even state systems. It takes Democrats to decide that a clueless amateur like David Coleman should be given a chance to impose his vision on the entire nation (and it takes right-tilted folks to see that this is a perfect chance to cash in big time). 

Am I over-simplifying? Sure. But you get the idea. Democrats turned their backs on public education and the teaching profession. They decided that virtually every ill in society is caused by teachers with low expectations and lousy standards, and then they jumped on the bandwagon that insisted that somehow all of that could be fixed by making students take a Big Standardized Test and generating a pile of data that could be massaged for any and all purposes (never forget--No Child Left Behind was hailed as a great bi-partisan achievement). 

I would be far more excited about Biden if at any point in the campaign he had said something along the lines of, "Boy, did we get education policy wrong." And I suppose that's a lot to ask. But if Democrats are going to launch a new day in education, they have a lot to turn their backs on, along with a pressing need for a new theory of action.

They need to reject the concept of an entire system built on the flawed foundation of a single standardized test. Operating with flawed data is, in fact, worse than no data at all, and for decades ed policy has been driven by folks looking for their car keys under a lamppost hundreds of feet away from where the keys were dropped because "the light's better over here."

They need to embrace the notion that teachers are, in fact, the pre-eminent experts in the field of education.

They need to accept that while education can be a powerful engine for pulling against the forces of inequity and injustice, but those forces also shape the environment within which schools must work. 

They need to stop listening to amateurs. Success in other fields does not qualify someone to set education policy. Cruising through a classroom for two years does not make someone an education expert. Everyone who ever went to the doctor is not a medical expert, everyone who ever had their car worked on is not a mechanic, and everyone who ever went to school is not an education expert. Doesn't mean they can't add something to the conversation, but they shouldn't be leading it.

They need to grasp that schools are not businesses. And not only are schools not businesses, but their primary function is not to supply businesses with useful worker bees. 

If they want to run multiple parallel education systems with charters and vouchers and all the rest, they need to face up to properly funding it. If they won't do that, then they need to shut up about choicey policies. "We can run three or four school systems for the cost of one" was always a lie, and it's time to stop pretending otherwise. Otherwise school choice is just one more unfunded mandate.

They need to accept that privatized school systems have not come up with anything new, revolutionary, or previously undiscovered about education. But they have come up with some clever new ways to waste and make off with taxpayer money.

Listen to teachers. Listen to parents in the community served by the school. Commit to a search for long term solutions instead of quick fixy silver bullets. And maybe become a force for public education slightly more useful than simply fending off a crazy lady with a flamethrower.