Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan

Long long ago, when Jeb! Bush still had White House dreams, he cooked up a Floridian reform group, which then scaled up to national status as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has now become ExcelInEd. Headed up by Patty Levesque, the organization  remains a clearinghouse for education disruption ideas pushed by well-heeled, well-connected education amateurs. It is hard to pretend any more that these are serious people who have goals other than breaking up public education so that the private market can profit from the pieces. 

Their website is still chock full of carefully twisted stats (Florida is first in AP test participation!) and same old baloney talking points (US students rank 38th internationally in math on the PISA scores--which is of course right where they've always ranked). The message remains as always that public schools are failing and we must open education to the privateers who want access to all those sweet, sweet tax dollars. (It also includes some celebrity bad quotes).

The group is busy-- they push policy ideas out into the states and have been busy filing briefs in support of ESAs (the newest flavor of education voucher) and just generally supporting the privatization agenda whenever they can. And they put on an annual gathering of privatizers and profiteers called, seriously, EdPalooza.

Recently Levesque was interviewed by Rick Hess. As with his recent exit interview with Betsy DeVos, this is Hess being uncharacteristically soft and fuzzy, allowing his subject to spin her tale without ever questioning or challenging her story. The end result is illuminating only because it gives us an unvarnished picture of the alternate reality that Levesque wants to promote.

Levesque's account of what EIE has done is standard reformy fare-- they're "developed policy solutions" that are "based on research, proven success, creative problem solving and learning from other states." Well, the "creative" part is right, anyway. And the usual claim that they want systems "centered around children and their needs" which sounds so much better than "we want to crack open an educational marketplace where entrepreneurs can make a bunch of money with education-flavored products."

Levesque is ostensibly talking to Hess in conjunction with a new EIE five year plan (though I can't find any such plan on their website), and as the plans are teased out, they turn out to be the same old baloney.

There's the usual empty language about equity-- "We believe that too many children—especially low-income students, students of color, and rural students—do not have access to a high-quality education, but we aren't proposing that we get them that education by fully funding schools in their communities." Instead, Levesque is one more edu-disruptor who thinks Covid smells like another Katrina, a "massive disruption" from which they should "seize the opportunities." So she'll use some of the newest marketing bullshit-- the McKinsey report on the Days of Learning that students have "lost." Here's an explainer of why that's bunk, but the short answer is that McKinsey's days of lost learning are really hypothetical lost points on the Big Standardized Test, computed using numbers that are all made up. But one of the rules of education reformstering is that you have to sell the big scary problem and thereby avoid providing evidence that what you propose is actually a solution.

And don 't miss this sentence at the end of that graph: "We have a responsibility to turn that around and to act quickly." Who is the "we" in this sentence? Is it EIE, because that's a group of educational amateurs who appointed themselves overseers of US education. There isn't a person in a leadership role with a shred of actual education background (okay--there's one who was actually in a classroom). This remains, for me, one of the astonishing features of the ed reform movement. If I walked into my local hospital and announced, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the way you perform brain surgery" or walked into a court and declared, "I have a responsibility to show you how to improve the conducting of trials," I'd be shown the door, not treated as if I were an expert that everyone needed to listen to. 

Anyway.

Levesque's next problem to fix is pandemic-lowered college admissions, so EIE has a goal to "strengthen college and career pathways." Fun phrase. Takes me right back to the days that Jeb! embraced Common Core as a pathway to the White House and the whole thing turned around and bit him in the ass. But she moves right on to a desire to "empower families with the opportunity to find the best fit for their child's educational needs" aka "we are all in on backing education vouchers," which further adds to my sense that the ed disruption crowd is leaving charter schools behind in pursuit of vouchery dreams. She has no argument that vouchers work well, but instead falls back on "because pandemic." Seize the opportunities. Ka-ching.

Other key goals? She's going to rattle some off.

"To close learning gaps" which actually means test score gaps, which nobody has successfully honestly done in the whole modern ed reform era. 

Third grade reading, an idea that highlights some folks inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, not to mention an inability to recognize bad policy when they see it.

High quality teachers in every classroom, which is an odd one to toss out there if you're backing current voucher theory, which requires no teachers or classrooms at all. At any rate, another idea that reformsters have been pushing for decades b ut have no idea how to execute (perhaps because they think "high-quality" means "whose students get high test scores").

Digital divide. Yeah, that is an actual problem, and most folks see it, but it's an infrastructure problem, like building an interstate highway system, and so nobody wants to talk about seriously because we all know that the one actual solution is a buttload of money.

"Reimagine learning." Curious phrase, since I seriously doubt that the nature of actual learning has changed, ever. What she really seems to mean is how we deliver credits, and so her examples are "flexible paths to mastery, credit for work experience, opportunities for teachers to change their role in education, and allowing students to learn anywhere." So, vouchers, unbundling, and putting teachers out of work. She will double down on this "learn anywhere" thing in the next paragraph. Another way to understand this vision of unbundled free-market anywhere education is this way-- the state hands each parent a stack of money and says, "Your kid's education is now your problem, not ours. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom." What could possibly go wrong? 

Asked about success stories, Levesque cites Mississippi, which is not where I would have gone in her shoes. But she brags that Mississippi got its Fourth Grade NAEP scores up. There is no trick to that- you hold back all the third graders who are going to do poorly on the test. It's like raising the average height of fourth graders by flunking all the short third graders. It is also a meaningless achievement--who cares that your fourth graders do better is all the gains have disappeared by graduation? But Levesque wants EIE to get some credit for all that. 

Levesque also owns Florida's Schools of Hope, a policy that allows charters to open up right across the street from struggling public schools, so that the attacks on the most vulnerable public schools can be more efficiently accelerated. Levesuqe says this policy is "working," which doesn't seem to mean that students are being educated so much as charter profiteers are getting to expand their market. EIE, she says, worked hard to get charter operators a "fast pass" to open, so that public education can be dismantled that much more quickly.

There's some quick stroking of Jeb! Bush, and then on to underlining what we are seeing to be true--that the emphasis on pushing education disruption has now shifted to the state level. Levesque notes that they work with partners across the political spectrum, so, everyone from Republicans who support privatizing to Democrats supporting privatization? Don't get me wrong--I think it is possible to have useful dialogue with some ed reformsters, even find areas of agreement about improving education in the US. But when I think of those kinds of conversations, I don't think of Levesque, Bush, or Excel In Ed. Their goals are pretty clear, and their vision of the future is one in which, if it exists at all, public education is a low-cost warehouse for Those Peoples' children. 

Why We Don't Need The Big Standardized Test In One Quote

This is taken from the reformy Jebucation ExcelInEd website:

If we don't have a strong accountability system, then students from low-income families and students of color will not receive the instruction and resources needed to be successful.

That's Pam Stewart, former education chief of Florida, the testocrat who famously demanded that a dying child take the Big Standardized Test. 

It's an illuminating quote. By "strong accountability system," she of course means high-stakes attached to the Big Standardized Test. Let me make a couple of observations.

1) If you already know that low-income families and students of color are the ones who need instruction and resources, what the heck do you need test results for? Seriously. Stewart is not saying, "Our legislators are poised with a big pile of resources, but they just have no idea where they're needed until we get those test results back!"

2) Florida's history tells us that BS Test results are not used to get instruction and resources to students who need them. BS Test scores are used to target public schools for takeover or to have a charter school open across the street or for resources to be drained so that privatizers can make a buck with an education-flavored product. Florida's history is filled with examples of fairly blatant segregation tolerated by powers that be (and which did not require test scores in order to be visible).

3) And, of course, "strong accountability system" in Florida has never meant accountability for legislators who failed to fully, equitably fund public education. 

2021 is an excellent year to opt out, in Florida and across the country.

ICYMI: Spring Is Here, Apparently Edition (3/21)

 It's nice enough, but I've lived in NW PA too long to be fooled. We'll just see where this leads us. In the meantime, here's your reading for the week. Also, your reminder that you can get a daily dose of edubloggery by checking out (or subscribing to) NPE's Blog of Blogs

Why Black Parents Aren't Joining the Push To Reopen Schools

The short answer is "trust," but you should go ahead and read the long answer from Melinda Anderson at Mother Jones.

Cyberattacks on Schools Soared During the Pandemic

From EdWeek, a report on one of the big pandemic side effects we haven't been talking about

Let me teach like a normal @$$ human

Active shooter drills, pandemics, and teaching like a superhero, from the blog Affective Lving

Top Chicago Charter School Admits Racist Past

Noble charters join  the ranks of "no excuses" charters that are finally admitting that maybe that whole thing was a bad, racist idea.

Questions about the AFT and NEA's "Learning after Covid"

Nancy Bailey has looked at what the unions are touting for post-pandemic programs, and she has some concerns.

Note to MATH advocate Andrew Yang-- 2+2=4

At NYC Educator, a look at Andrew Yang's recent pronouncements on education and teaching in NY which are, well, not good.

Education Reinventers

Gary Rubinstein looks at the history of reformy rebranding as ell as debunking the latest miracle school.

How the stimulus will affect schools, explained

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat offers a clear explainer of where all that money is going to go (or not)

Outdated research and ideas about teacher quality render report useless

NPEC takes a look at the National Council on Teacher Quality's 2020 teacher prep review, and it is once again a document not to be taken seriously.

One of the fairest school funding models in the nation might be about to fail

We don't usually hear about Wyoming because their schools have been exceptionally well and fairly funded for decades. Now that may be about to end. From the Hechinger Report.

An encouraging consensus on character education

Conservative Andy Smarick at reformy Education Next has some interesting thoughts about c haracter education.

There has to be an accounting

Turns out that maybe AT&T has been bilking the E-rate progam that provides affordable internet for schools. Oopsies.

How children read differently from books vs. screens

From the New York Times, more research about how children really interact with screens.

Rules for Rural Philanthropy

Juliet Squire is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a reliably reformy part of the Fordham-AEI axis. She has traveled the Phillips Exeter-Yale-AEI career trajectory with a stop in the New Jersey Department of Education before landing at Bellwether, where she makes observations about education  that I pretty much always disagree with. 

But she also just released an article for AEI about philanthropy in rural communities, and speaking as someone who has lived his life in a rural community that periodically is afflicted by someone trying to do philanthropy to it, she's made some good observations here.

One of her three "key points" is really on the mark:

Place-based philanthropy is hard to do right. It requires philanthropies to shift their mindset from that of a benefactor to that of a partner committed to learning and working alongside local leaders.

This is fundamental. Do-gooders who sail into town with attitude of, "I'm here to bestow my wisdom and largesse on this bundle of hicks," are doomed to well-deserved failure. Squire goes on to offer five somewhat jargon-choked lessons on how to get it right, and they're worth discussing.

Place-based philanthropy requires local capacity and sometimes building that capacity from the ground up. 

Philanthropists like to "partner" with locals already doing good works (or at least they should), but rural communities don't necessarily have a lot of Good Deed Doers working regularly. Squire's picture is unnecessarily bleak ("In some rural places, significant declines in the population or the economy have hollowed out civil society"), and she suggests that philanthropists may have to "build capacity" from scratch, which requires the philanthropy to more directly engage (or at least it should). Squire suggests starting with concrete actions like building playground equipment, so that the locals can see you're for real.

Place-based philanthropy requires local leadership and philanthropies willing to embrace humility.

This point is dead on. Local leaders know the territory, the challenges, the history, the hopes, the dreams. Philanthropists coming from outside have to earn local leader trust and they have to actually trust local leaders to make the right choices. Trust local leaders and get out of the way. Modern fauxlanthropy too often resembles a business venture that hires people to help the Big Rich Guy implement his preferred programs (looking at you, Bill Gates).

There is something about rural communities that makes this worse. Perhaps the notion in some big city types that they need to step in and show the rubes how to get it done. In recent decades, this has been exacerbated by the rise of Tech Bros who have a tendency to believe they smartest people in the room, even on subjects about which they don't know jack. "I'm a young gazillionaire, so I must be an omni-expert." 

These deep-pocketed Dunning-Kruger exemplars inevitably screw it up. Let me tell you  story from my own town. A guy bought the hotel (yes, there's just one) and declared he would turn it into a local culture center, starting with a big high school arts festival. He approached all four of the local high school choirs about appearing, selling it by telling each director that the other three had already signed up. Only someone who didn't know how small towns worked would have used such a dumb lie with four people who knew each other personally and saw each other regularly.  The unfortunate thing is that when these wealthy dopes crash and burn, they can walk away easily, and the locals have to clean up the mess (again, looking at you, Mr. Gates). 

If you don't trust local expertise, you are going to screw it up. Period.

Place-based philanthropy requires acknowledging the interconnectedness of community challenges and a readiness to invest across multiple domains

Everything is tied to everything else. I would argue that this is not true only in rural communities, but that the size of urban "Gordian knots" allows folks to pretend that issues can be handled separately. Squire notes that in rural communities, you can't disentangle school quality from economic development, and I want to ask if there's any place that's not true. But her observation that rural communities can be more "nimble" essentially because it's easy to get all the major players at the table makes sense. 

Place-based philanthropy requires patience, a willingness to play the long game, and early planning for how to sustain initiatives as philanthropic dollars phase out

Drive-by do-gooding is not super-helpful anywhere. The idea is that the money guys swoop in, set something up, and that gives itv the momentum to keep going. The lazy way to do this is what my brother (who served on the school board for a while) calls "grant crack." That's when the Widget Foundation gives you a two year grant to set up a widgetry program, in the hopes that at the end of two years, you'll find widgetry so delightful that you'll start funding the program yourself. Except that in two years you'll be just as broke as you are now. 

If you want your widgetry program to take route, you (and your investment) are going to have to stick around for a while to make sure that the program really works and is being led by people who are invested, capable, and knowledgable about widgetry. It's not just that it's needed to help the program find its feet; it's that when you dump-and-run, we take that as a sign you weren't really interested in us and you can't really be trusted.

Place-based philanthropy requires setting aside preconceived notions of what it looks like to achieve impact and scale

Or, more simply, you can't insist on your own definition of success. In particular, don't show up with your own set of pre-developed metrics for how to measure what is accomplished, because you don't know the people or the community and your pre-created metrics are bunk. See the above point about trusting local leaders. 

Squire nods to another problem--the creation of turnkey programs. I've always been mystified about this-- people who play in the big leagues of policy and philanthropy would rarely claim, "Well, this is how it worked in New York City, so it should work exactly the same way in LA and Chicago." That would be dumb, because each city has its own history, values, pace, style and ways of getting things done. Yet somehow, many folks assume that small towns and rural communities are interchangeable, popped out of some cookie cutter community design. One size does not fit all.

My extra two cents

These are five not-too-bad points, and I can't let them pass without noting that A) mostly they are true for any community  and B) so many education reform programs have violated these lessons. Common Core, the charterization of NOLA, test-centered schools, etc etc etc--they have violated these lessons over and over again. 

I don't really know what the audience for Squire's piece will be; I can think of some people who should read and reflect on it, but I'm not holding my breath. 

As a side note, one other story. A tech bro has just bought several major buildings in the neighboring town in my county. He has had some meetings with the locals, where the themes of his rambling presentations have included things like he doesn't much like collaboration, that he hopes to make money out of this, and that he hopes to revitalize the city--but, the implication is, on his terms. We'll just see how this plays out.

An Evaluation That Teachers Can Use

A post from Jay Wamsted at Education Post (yes, that Education Post--I've said it before and I'll say it again--it's important to read from all over the edu-web) got me thinking about the sources of feedback that teachers can tap. He tells a story about a missed moment in which someone offered him feedback on his teaching that he didn't want to hear, and how he regrets that missed opportunity.

Which I get. I suspect most teachers who have been doing the work more than five years get it. Because the system so rarely gives us feedback we can use, teachers hunker down into a cycle of reflection and self-evaluation, and that is a great and beautiful thing, but it has its drawbacks. Teachers can fall into a despair spiral ("I should have handled that differently today and I also didn't get that student what they needed and I'm a week behind on papers and oh my god did I just choose the wrong profession??")

Teachers can also get into a place where outside feedback hits like a bucket of cold water and our back goes up and our claws come out. That's what happened to Wamsted. It happened to me, a bit differently. It was very early in my career. I was teaching ninth graders, and at the beginning of a unit doing a preliminary check what knowledge they had to bring to the table. And at some point, students said, "Mr. Greene, we don't know any of that stuff. They never taught us that in middle school."

Except, here's the thing--I had just switched teaching positions that year. I had been one of their middle school teachers. I knew damn well what I had taught them, and it had included the stuff they claimed to have never heard of before. My first impulse was to blame those damned kids. Heck, my second impulse was to blame those damned kids. But eventually I had to wrestle with the fact that I had apparently completely biffed that part of their middle school education.

I came up with a tool, which is why Wamsted caught my attention, because he's thinking about the same idea. I started doing annual anonymous student end-of-course evaluations.

It was one page. Some portions were just simple circle-the-number rating responses. Some were open-ended. I asked questions about the course content--too hard, too easy, useful, not useful? What should there be more or less of? I asked questions about my own classroom presence- do you think the teacher knows what he's talking about? Cares? Wastes your time? Is fair? I asked them to rate both the difficulty and usefulness of specific units from the year. I invited them to write anything they wanted to on the back.

I learned from these, every year. It was not always easy to read, but it helped me to tweak and modify both the course content and my own performance in the classroom. I didn't always come across the way I thought I did. I didn't always make the point of the content clear.And I could argue that what I did should have been good enough to get The Point across, but if it didn't, well, then, it wasn't, really. One effect I didn't think about until I was poring through the responses--the evaluations absolutely hammered home to me, as a writing teacher, that numbers and rubrics are great, but nothing sticks with people like written out sentence-form responses. Also, the process of creating the form was useful (though as one more form of reflection and self-evaluation).

The students were never jerks about this process. In all those years, no student ever just hammered me just to strike back; at most a few just didn't fill it out. But they took it seriously. I know the expectation/fear is that students who did poorly or hated the class or hated you will make a mockery of the process, but that didn't happen. I suspect that this has to do with the type of relationship and trust you've built with your class, and if they do abuse the process, that is in itself feedback.

And I still kept my head about some feedback--I reserved the right to decide the student was wrong ("You should sing more often," suggested on student. That student was wrong.) As with any other feedback in life, what others see and say has to be weighed about what you know yourself.

But I realized, looking back, that those sheafs of papers that sat in my desk drawer where  could pull them out and look from year to year to year--those were the most useful evaluations I ever had. I had the standard formal battery of observations along with the assorted paperwork and folderol that went with them, and they were never unpleasant, but they were never much help, either. I even had administrators in some years who would do the smart unofficial style--roam the hall, pop a head in to watch (I know that bugs the heck out of some people but I never minded a principal just popping in), keep an ear to the ground. It's was supportive and bolstering and made me feel that I was doing okay, and that's not nothing. But it wasn't feedback that helped me grow.

So I encourage Mr. Wamsted and others to take the student course evaluation plunge. It won 't tell you everything, and it won't always be exactly what you need to hear, but I don't think you'll ever regret it.

School Choice Dinner Party

Pairagraph is a website set up around the idea of conversations, or debates, around a particular question. The website organizers invite a pair of people to address the question in turn for a total of four posts of no more than 500 words each. It's a fun little concept that has, so far, been applied to a broad range of topics.

I was recently invited to join in one of these pairings around the question "Is school choice essential to educational justice." My counterpart was Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation (North Carolina’s Most Trusted and Influential Source of Common Sense). I had the second and fourth positions in the debate. 

Here's what I posted for my first response.

Imagine that you have a dining room with three tables set up. At one is a great feast, with the finest meats and vegetables, beautifully cooked. At another is a good, solid, if not spectacular, spread of hearty, wholesome food. At the third is bread and water. 

Folks are assigned to one of the three tables to eat, but the assignment seems unfair, so one of the people enters the dining room and sets up a fourth table. This person takes a few chairs and some food from each of the other tables for their Table #4, and announces, "We will now have choice."

But there is the same number of chairs, the same amount of food, and the same range of quality. The same number of diners will eat bread and water. 

Mr. Stoops has made an excellent case against the current methods used to distribute and finance education in this country. What he hasn't done is explained why school choice would improve the full picture for all students.

School choice is a broad category that includes many different policy ideas, but what they all have in common is that they shuffle the plates and the diners without actually improving the overall system. In fact, many choice methods are detrimental because they are based on the premise that the same number of dollars that can barely finance one school system can somehow adequately finance several parallel systems. 

Nor does choice address the underlying cause of much educational inequity, which, as Mr. Stoops suggests, is that many folks do not want to pay for a top quality education for Those People's children. In fact, school choice is too often easily adapted to suit the aims of racism and inequity; after Brown v. Board of Education made desegregation the law of the land, private schools (segregation academies) were formed in many states so that white parents could still make sure their children avoided Black students in the public schools (and taxpayers could cut spending for those same public schools).

Advocates for school choice often focus on the depth of the problem facing us instead of the efficacy of their proposed solutions. But the question is not if public schools could be more equitable--they absolutely could. The question, however, is if school choice could help better deliver the promise of a free, quality education for every student. After decades of trying choice in various forms, there is little evidence that it can.

Freedom is not the lifeblood of school choice--at least not freedom for students. Voucher programs maintain a private school's right to choose which students it will accept, and charters have developed many ways to cream or push out students. Based on market dynamics, modern school choice does what markets do--pick winners and losers both among providers and customers. This does not make school choice evil, but it does mean that choice is not well positioned to make good on that promise of a good education for every student.

You can read the entire exchange at the site. Fun trivia fact: Stoops attended a university that's right in my neck of the woods; he undoubtedly went to college with former students of mine. 

The Trouble With Data

Yesterday the Atlantic published an exceptionally helpful piece in the Science section by Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal that offers some excellent explanation of why the nation has dropped the data ball for this pandemic. It's a good read from that perspective. But for education folks, there's more.

In the body of the article, Meyer and Madrigal share some observations about data, and the problems with data-driven anything; these points are important, and should be emblazoned on the office door of every data-driven follow-the-science policy maker and administrator in the country.

1. All data are created; data never simply exist.

Before March 2020, the country had no shortage of pandemic-preparation plans. Many stressed the importance of data-driven decision making. Yet these plans largely assumed that detailed and reliable data would simply … exist. They were less concerned with how those data would actually be made.

Here come the data

Data have to come from somewhere. They have to be created, and then they have to be interpreted. Anyone who assumes that the data are good simply because they exist--well, that's a terrible assumption. Every step pf the data-creation chain, from the testing instrument, to scoring, to score conversion, to interpretation of the score--all of that should be questioned and examined and then questioned again.

But in our high stakes testing era, that has not happened (nor is it happening now). When the state says, "22% of your students are below basic in reading non-fiction," that's not a figure that descended from heaven in a burning memo. It's a number that was created, and everyone ought to be asking how it was created. Starting with a faulty instrument, converted from raw score to reported score somehow, then divided by cut scores that are determined after the test has been scored--just a few of the ways this goes wrong.

And right now, when folks are hollering that students have lost 57 days of learning during the pandemic, everyone should be asking how that data was created (spoiler alert: it was totally made up).

2. Data are a photograph, not a window.

This one most people in education get, sort of. The Big Standardized Test "is a snapshot of one particular moment" is a well-worn cliche, even among people who will then go on to argue that for some reason, that snapshot should be weighed as if it were a moment with far more weight than all the other moments that didn't make it into the photo.

3. Data are just another type of information.

There is some great, poster-ready, put-it-on-a-t-shirt stuff in this section.

Data seem to have a preeminent claim on truth. Policy makers boast about data-driven decision making, and vow to “follow the science.” But we’ve spent a year elbow-deep in data. Trust us: Data are really nothing special.

Meyer and Madrigal offer my new favorite definition of data:

Data are just a bunch of qualitative conclusions arranged in a countable way.

And add to that this important note:

Data-driven thinking isn’t necessarily more accurate than other forms of reasoning, and if you do not understand how data are made, their seams and scars, they might even be more likely to mislead you.

Meyer and Madrigal lay out some pandemic examples of when the data contradicted what scientists "knew" through other reasoning, based on their own expertise. In those times of contradiction, it was the data that were wrong. Teachers, of course, are regularly told in so many ways that their own assessments of students mean nothing when set beside the test-based data reports. 

Would you like a nice analogy to wrap all this up?

Data are alluring. Looking at a chart or a spreadsheet, you might feel omniscient, like a sorcerer peering into a crystal ball. But the truth is that you’re much closer to a sanitation worker watching city sewers empty into a wastewater-treatment plant. Sure, you might learn over time which sewers are particularly smelly and which ones reach the plant before the others—but you shouldn’t delude yourself about what’s in the water.

 

Education has been overrun by the Cult of Data, and it's not unusual to feel intimidated by it. But I'll reiterate that I pulled these ideas about data from an article nominally about systemic failures in the federal response to a massive pandemic. Data is not magic, and educators should not bow at the data altar.