When Bill Gates Shows You Who He Is...

This recent article from the New Republic is a bit of a slog if you have not become a student of the various attempts to create covid vaccines, treatments, etc. But it hinges on two factors that matter a great deal in education-- intellectual property and Bill Gates.

It comes, coincidentally, right around the 68th anniversary of Jonas Salk's creation of the polio vaccine, a hugely valuable piece of intellectual property that Salk famously gave away. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Salk said. It seems like an obvious approach, both because Salk's work depended on tons of money contributed by folks and because a public health problem would seem to call for a public solution. 

As Alexander Zaitchik reports it (and I'll now summarize), that was how the covid response story started, almost. Early in 2020, there was talk of open science, pooled resources, no-profit approaches. The world needed a solution, and quickly, and the barriers of intellectual property ownership shouldn't stand in the way. 

That lasted till about April. Gates became involved, touting a public-private "charity" with IP rights and monopoly medicine respected and Gates in charge. Some folks warned that there could be a dual crisis of supply and access. But--

Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda.

“Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

But the Gates set-up hasn't performed well, and Gates himself appears to have shown his usual inability to acknowledge any errors in his own thinking.

In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with the “free market.” “North Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told The New York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing.)

Oh, that quote. They want the vaccine for "zero dollars and right away," as if it is absurd to question the foundational belief that whatever it is that people need, somebody should own the solution (and be making money from it), and those ownership rights outweigh other concerns.

In retrospect, one can see this devotion to IP in the Gates backing of Common Core-- a set of standard that for some reason had to be owned by someone (copyrighted by NGA and CCSSO) as well as inviolate (remember that nobody is "allowed" to modify or change the standards). And of course the underlying idea that Common Core could save US education, but that a whole lot of folks (textbook companies, test manufacturers, tech companies, etc) would rake in a mountain of money doing it. You throw in some charitable giving to provide ground cover by throwing a few bones to some of the people who are too poor to play in the carefully gated market you've created.

I could argue that Common Core failed not just because it was inflicted top down, but because it was presented in such a calcified form, neither suited nor intended for input from anyone else at all, that it could not adapt to actual classroom conditions. Of course, teachers adapted it anyway, creating a bizarre world in which Common Core is both everywhere and nowhere, it's concrete-laden standards still in books and on wall posters, even as teachers have rewritten it into something else.

This is where I tell you, again, to read Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All, which ably dissects the mindset of Gates and his ilk. When we start with the premise that everything has to be part of a market world approach, that there are no public goods--only goods that the market makes available to the public--then it's inevitable that we will fail to improve education in any meaningful way. For many, many reasons, not the least of which is that the poor who are most in need of improved public goods are least able to bid for them in the marketplace, and the largesse of oligarchs will always be both misplaced and insufficient. 

Gates doesn't know education, doesn't understand it, and year after year has shown that he's not learning anything. That could be because his map of the world is simply faulty, because his foundation is that every idea should have an owner, and that owner should retain control over their intellectual property.

It's a particularly weird idea to port into public education, where so much of what teachers known and do is essentially open source. I once had a colleague who guarded her class worksheets jealously and wouldn't share with other teachers,, and in thirty-nine years of teaching, she was the only teacher I ever knew who did that (and raised quite a few eyebrows doing it). You share what works, much of which you know because someone shared it with you, because no decent teacher would say, "I know something that would help your students understand, but I'm not going to share it because it's my own intellectual property." It is hard to conceive of someone whose devotion to IP is so great that he would say, "Well, maybe those poor people don't want to die, but we've got intellectual property rights to think about here." If Bill Gates ever wants to be a force for good in US education, he'll need to come back from whatever planet he's on and at least visit us for a few weeks on this one.

ICYMI: Spring Might Be Here Edition (4/11)

It's not really spring in Northwest PA until it snows one more time. But it certainly is pleasant right now. So that's something. Let's see what we have to read this week

Acceleration Nation

Nancy Flanagan has noticed that acceleration is having a moment, and she has some thoughts about those shenanigans.

Taking the SAT with the Breakout Expert from Operation Varsity Blues

John Warner took the SAT and then talked to Akil Bello about it, and the result is your must-read of the week, filled with insights and revelations about the test. 

Despite pandemic, there's little evidence of rising teacher turnover--yet.

Matt Barnum, the Chalkbeat reporter I trust best, offers a look at what the data are saying about teacher resignation, and there does not appear to be a covid-fueled rush to the exits just yet.

Betsy DeVos’ hand-picked candidate for Wisconsin state school superintendent loses

At Salon, Sarah Burris has the story of Betsy DeVos's first big after-office defeat. Good news for Wisconsin.

Big spending raises concerns in KC school board races

Meanwhile, the Kansas City Star reports that there's a lot of high roller interest in the school board. Ruh-roh.

What the narrative on school reopenings has missed

Andy Smarick (Bellwether) offers what turns out to be a pretty balanced look at what the data really reveal about who's for what. (Spoiler alert: the closed school buildings may not simply be the result of an evil teachers union plot).

The origin of Nicaraguan Sign Language tells us a lot about language creation

Okay, this is probably of most interest to language study nerds, but it's pretty cool. Carol Zall has the story at Public Radio.

The Fed’s education constitutional amendment would turn schools over to economists and lawyers

In the Minnesota Reformer, Will Stancil explains how a constitutional amendment that promises good things for education is actually very bad news.

Failure to disrupt--again

Have You Heard's podcast talks to MIT's Justin Reich, who talks about how ed tech's golden opportunity to deliver the goods vanished right up the goose's butt. 

NH: Another Lesson In Charter School Failure

Stephanie Alicea has been around education for a while. She was the Community Service Coordinator at Merrimack Valley High School in Penacook, NH from 2003 to 2007. In 2010 she went back finished a BA in Psychology and went right into a MEd program at New England College. She taught health and phys ed at various high schools. 

In 2016, her son Samuel, a Black football player at Merimack HS, took a knee at a football game. Alicea's teammates were supportive, but the larger community kicked back hard--years later, Alicea talked about a BB gun shooting at his grandmother's car. So Stephanie Alicea pulled her son from the public school and enrolled him in private Tilton. She said she borrowed money from her mother and took five jobs to help pay for the move. And in 2017, when the New Hampshire senate made an attempt to push education savings accounts, Alicea was one of the spokepeople there to support the voucher proposal.

That was early in 2017. By the fall of that year, she was proposing a charter school of her own. Capital City Charter School would be a service learning charter, she told the State Board of education when looking for authorization. The Board expressed concerns--the application looked a little thin on things like variety of board members and some board members were concerned that the financials were not strong enough. "It just feels like it needs more infrastructure," said board member Bill Duncan. It seems obvious that very little in Alicea's background suggested she was ready to start and operate an entire school. The head of the NH Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools said he thought the board was just looking at an outdated application. 

In the fall of 2018, Capital City was launched in Concord in the Steeplegate Mall in the old Bon-Ton (a department store chain that went belly up in 2018). Frank Edelblut, New Hampshire's hugely unqualified education commissioner, took a tour and said, "I love the location, the facility and how it's laid out, the open concept, the fluidity."

Problems emerged almost immediately. The board's acting chair is Caroletta Alicea, a three-term Democratic NH state representative and Stephanie Alicea's mother. State and federal financial audits were not submitted. The school's charter allowed for up to 330 students, but only about four dozen enrolled. 

And the school's financial records were loaded with problems. Caroletta Alicea received a $14,550 repayment of a loan, though the school could not say what the money was spent on. The school later sent out a note saying that rumors of financial troubles were not true. 

In February, the school surrendered its charter just ahead of a state hearing about the school's finances. In the wake of that decision, the state canceled its hearing but the NH Attorney General has launched an investigation. And just this week, the school filed for bankruptcy. 

Capital City owes money to everybody. They owe rent to Steeplegate ($84K), the Small Business Administration (($81K), the IRS ($9K), the security company ($26K), Unitil utility company ($8K), Easter Heat Pump Mechanical ($8K), a couple of dispute resolution companies, a CPA, the city water and fire departments, and Comcast. 

Capital City took $223,000 from the first round of federal grants, but auditors found that only $66,000 of that was spent on "allowable activity." 

Stephanie Alicea was supposed to be paid a total of $47,500. Instead, the school paid her over $89,000. Money was spent on all manner of expenses--food, Ubers, plane tickets, fitness memberships, iTunes downloads, Best Buy purchases, many payments that were not properly documented, contracted amounts that didn't match the final payments, cash withdrawals with no paper trail. 

In the end, the school had burned through about three quarters of a million dollars of state and federal taxpayer dollars. New Hampshire's Department of Education says it can't even figure out how or where the $535,000 from the state was spent. It appears that money is simply gone, used up by a school that only lasted two years and served fewer than fifty students.

There has been fallout for the Aliceas. The NH GOP has called on Carolea Alicea to resign, while news organizations have been digging out Stephanie Alicea's court records (domestic violence, stalking, defaulting on a car loan). 

New Hampshire's legislators twice turned down a $46 million charter school grant from the feds, but when the GOP took control of legislature, they accepted that money to expand and replicate charter schools in the Granite State. While the debate about accepting those funds was raging, Edelblut said 
“New Hampshire charter schools have not only provided excellent educations for Granite State students, but provided a model for innovation and education improvement for the nation." 

Governor Chris Sununu backed that charter grant as well, but when asked in March if maybe someone should pay closer attention to how that federal taxpayer money was being spent, he said that background checks were no big deal and the state board or the legislature would need to address the issue.

Stephanie Alicea doesn't seem like a grifter so much as a woman who got in way, way over her head in a system that provided little oversight and virtually no assistance at all other than handing over stacks of money. But it is yet another example (among the many many many logged in reports on the waste of federal charter grant money) of how charters can waste taxpayer money and provide virtually nothing in return. If New Hampshire intends to spend $46 million of US taxpayer money on charter schools, it needs to pay better attention than it did this time. 

Democracy Is A Pain

Kevin Williamson took to the National Review website earlier this week to argue against democracy. 

The proximate cause of Williamson's question--Why not fewer voters?-- is much of the debate about voter suppression in Georgia which, he says, "begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing." (Yeah, I had to look up ceteris paribus, which means "with other conditions remaining the same")

Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?

Williamson goes on to make an attempt to argue his proposal, bringing up the idea of "qualifications." But he can't help bringing in the real heart of his argument:

One argument for encouraging bigger turnout is that if more eligible voters go to the polls then the outcome will more closely reflect what the average American voter wants. That sounds like a wonderful thing . . . if you haven’t met the average American voter.

And there it is. There are Certain People who just shouldn't get a say.

As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out the next day, Williamson's argument is not a new one, having previously been embraced by pro-slavery folks before the civil war and Barry Goldwater's ghostwriter. Only the "better" voters should get to vote. 

And we have been hearing this argument in education for a while. Modern charters are often set to follow the visionary CEO model, where one guy should have unfettered say, not hemmed in by government rules of teacher unions or even teacher contracts. Being rich is supposed to bring freedom, so if I'm so rich, why should I have to listen to these not-rich people who try to exert their will by electing people who try to tell me what to do?? One of the key moments in this story is Reed Hastings, rich guy and charter school investor, back in 2014 telling the California Charter Schools Association that they need to get rid of school boards--

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…

Alleged lefties are not free from this. Union leaders often succumb to the impulse to "steer" members toward the "right" decision (eg the national union support for Common Core and the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton). 

And schools themselves are all-too-often distinctly undemocratic institutions, where administrators impose autocratic rule and everyone from staff through students is supposed to fall in line.

Because democracy is a pain. 

It's messy and annoying, in large part because it codifies our connections to other people. It sets down in rules the fact that we cannot simply divorce ourselves from all the people in the world who we think are unworthy.

Yesterday, Andy Smarick put up a piece at The Dispatch about the narrative of reopening school buildings, and while it provides a good solid dig through some surveys and polls, the bottom line is that despite various attempts to shape a narrative, when it comes to reopening buildings, people are mostly getting what they want. As the comments section makes clear, that's a real pain if you live in a community that mostly doesn't want what you want, or if your heart is set on All Of This being the work of your preferred group of Bad Guys. 

I suspect that everybody at one point or another dreams of being set free from the ties that bind them to other people (like, every four years in November). It's mostly the rich and powerful who can try to make that dream come true, and we periodically suffer through their attempts to do so. And I expect they feel kind of heroic doing it, fighting back against the mob or making the world a better place for all the Little People. But their gaze too often falls upon democratic institutions--like public education. 

Democracy is a pain. Teachers, working for boards filled with elected amateurs, certainly get that. But attempting to break down all collective action, to disperse public education, atomize parents into uncollected singletons, remove the collective obligation to provide an education--these are not good things. Trying to dissolve every collective so that nobody can get together to thwart your wealthy, privileged will--that kind of free-lance autocracy is not good for society (it's not even healthy for the wealthy, privileged people who pursue it).

In any society that values freedom, there will always be tension between my freedoms and yours, tensions between the will of the many and of the few. The solution is neither thunderdome or the hunger games. Democracy is a pain, but "every man for himself" and "I've got mine, Jack" and "Only my kind of people should get a say" are morally and ethically indefensible. 

 

Three G's Would Be Great, Thanks

I get pitches (mostly because I write for Forbes.com), and an enormous number of them are ed tech related. Those folks are really, really sure that their moment has come. I'm just not sure they understand the situation on the ground.

Lately there's been an up-tick in 5G related offerings. VR with 5G! Woo hoo! Sometimes I read these e-mails while sitting in the parking lot of my local major grocery store, where I might have three bars of LTE.

The school where I taught up until retirement was a one-to-one school in a district where one-to-one was being steadily pushed downward through the grades. That was a challenge for one of the elementary schools, which was only able to connect to the district network via complicated arrangement involving a satellite dish. In my old high school, students and staff learned to keep their phones hooked to power (or turned of) because the attempt to connect to a decent signal would empty batteries before the school day was over. I watched many students try to perfect their phone wave or get the phone in just the right position to get just one more bar. 

Thirty years ago my colleagues would step out to the parking lot during breaks so they could grab a quick smoke. Now they pop out to the parking lot to get a decent phone signal.

During the pandemic shut down, lots of ed tech outfits bragged about how they'd licked the digital divide so students could work from home. In my county, teachers were still hand delivering hard copies of assignments to families who did not have access to a reliable internet connection. 

If tech companies really want to do something helpful for the education world, they can stop pushing the newest Shiny Thing and get the old, not-so-shiny stuff to work. For everybody. And lawmakers can start treating internet access as a public utility, just like electricity and sewage. In some parts of the country, we don't need 5G as badly as we need five bars of 3G. 

Charters vs. Vouchers

While charter schools and vouchers are both members of the school choice family, they are cousins who only occasionally get along. And as a public school fan, I have a definite preferred cousin.

It may seem like a thousand years ago, but when Betsy DeVos first turned up as an education secretary candidate, some charter fans actually expressed concerns. DeVos felt the need to reach out to charter fans and offer an olive branch. That's because DeVos, like many fans of a pay-your-own-way voucher system, was content to back charters as a way to crack apart the public education system and get the school choice foot in the door. But now that the time seems ripe (conservative judges, GOP legislatures, Espinoza, etc), many erstwhile charter fans are dumping the poor old girl for their true love. 

There are many reasons that charters and vouchers are natural competitors. 

The obvious area is simple competition for market share. Both private voucher schools and charter schools are after the disaffected don't-want-to-go-to-public-school crowd. Voucher-accepting schools have an advantage in competing for the religious school market because they can be more direct and explicit about their religious content. And the super-voucher education savings account systems are aiming to bust things up even more--you don't even have to a "school," but can just pick various education odds and ends from various marketplace vendors. In the marketplace, charters (with their constant insistence that they are public schools) may appeal to less adventurous folks who want to make some changes without leaving the system, but for folks who are all about the choiciness, a fully-realized pay-your-own-way unbundled voucher system like the ones being pushed now--well, for some folks, they make charters look like Choice Lite. 

Voucherfied systems, particularly those that incorporate tax credit scholarship instruments, bring a different approach to the funding stream that does not serve charters well. Let's say that the funding is an actual stream that leads to an actual pond. Traditionally, that pond was used strictly for thirsty public school systems. The charter approach has been to insist that they be allowed to drink from that pond, too. The voucher approach is to interrupt the stream itself, redirecting it away from the pond and off to a hundred other little locations. 

This is in keeping with fundamental differences about how the two policies view public education. The charter concept is at least meant to supplement or expand the public school system; the voucher concept intends to blow it all up. 

I can imagine a world in which charter schools worked. You could do charter schools with local control, appropriate oversight and accountability, and the necessary funding (in fact, some people do). You could set up charter schools without prioritizing on real estate deals and profit-making management organizations. In fact, one of the mysterious tricks of the modern charter movement is the way proponents have managed to make free market profiteering seem like a necessary integral part of charter policy, when there's no real reason for any such connection. Free market profiteering isn't even necessary to deliver "choice," but it seems that for too many proponents, the free market profiteering part is really more important than the choice part. Some free marketeerrs may sincerely believe that only market money dynamics can deliver choice; I see no reason to believe they're correct, but I believe that's what they believe. The fact is, charter schools as originally conceived and as successfully practiced in some places do not have to have anything to do with privatization and the free market. 

But vouchers are another story. I have tried (I love a good thought experiment), but I cannot imagine a world with a voucher system that is not really a pay-your-own-way, two or three tier system (with the vestiges of public education occupying the lowest tier). Charters have adopted and tacked on free market ideology as a tool and a desired outcome, but vouchers cannot be separated from it, because the whole concept of vouchers is about replacing shared societal responsibility for maintaining a common good with opportunities for folks to make a buck. At the same time, the wealthy will still get the education they want for their children, while being freed of any requirement to help foot the bill for educating Those Peoples' Children. And I am unable to imagine--nor have I seen anyone propose--a voucher system that works otherwise.

Legislators have consistently rejected any kind of oversight for vendors in a voucher system, often including specific language that says the state will not tell vendors what to do; New Hampshire's bill has a whole section entitled "independence of education service providers" including the point that nothing in the law can be used to reduce vendors' "independence or autonomy." There are virtually no quality controls in any of these, nor, as we've seen in Florida, any guardrails for the students themselves. Private schools retain the right to accept or reject students at will, nor will meager voucher amounts allow poor students to afford top-dollar schools. The most striking feature of a voucher system remains the dissolution of a state's responsibility to make sure every child gets a decent education. 

Could vouchers be cleaned up? We'd have to create regulation and oversight for all providers, which would simply drive most providers out of the market. The number one beneficiaries of vouchers are private religious schools, and if they can't operate with their fully religious character, they aren't going to play. Tell them they can't discriminate against LGBTQ students, and they will simply take the next train out of voucherville. Regulating a voucher system would cause it to collapse; not regulating it robs students of the free, quality education they are owed.

Bottom line: voucher and charter systems are not the same, and the shift of so many school choicers to the voucher camp is bad news for US education. 

Can You Fool An AI Emotion Reader

As we have seen numerous times, there are software packages out there that claim the ability to read our emotions. Folks are lined up around the block to use this stuff, but of course one of the applications is supposed to be reading student emotions and therefor better at "personalizing" a lesson. 

Does this sound as if the ed tech world is overpromising stuff that it can't actually deliver? Well, now you have a chance to find out. Some scientists have created a website where you can practice having your own face read by software.

The team involved says the point is to raise awareness. People are still stuck on all the huge problems with facial recognition, but meanwhile, we're being surrounded by software that doesn't just recognize your face (maybe) but also reads it (kind of). Here's the project lead, Dr. Alexa Haggerty, from the awesomely-named University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk:

But Hagerty said many people were not aware how common emotion recognition systems were, noting they were employed in situations ranging from job hiring, to customer insight work, airport security, and even education to see if students are engaged or doing their homework.

Such technology, she said, was in use all over the world, from Europe to the US and China. Taigusys, a company that specialises in emotion recognition systems and whose main office is in Shenzhen, says it has used them in settings ranging from care homes to prisons, while according to reports earlier this year, the Indian city of Lucknow is planning to use the technology to spot distress in women as a result of harassment – a move that has met with criticism, including from digital rights organisations.

The Emotion Recognition Sandbox let's you play with the software through your own computer camera. The site assures us that no personal data is collected and all the images stay on your own device. The site lets you play two games. One is only sort of a game, a sort of quiz that drives home the point that one of the things that software can't do is use context to decipher whether the human just winked or blinked.

But in the other (the Fake Smile Game, you pull up your own camera, and try to "register" all six basic emotions-- happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, and anger. 

I found it surprisingly difficult; I only got four out of six, missing fear and disgust. I later got disgust by accident when I was doing something better described as "trying to look at my keyboard when my bifocals were askew." 

I can't overstate how really bad the software was. It had no filter for sarcasm or obviously (to a human anyway) fake expression. I cannot swear that they didn't purposefully use bad software to make their point, and there's always the possibility that I'm just not British enough for it to work well, but watching that computer try and try, slowly, to decipher my face and not doing it very well, I had to wonder how in the world such a thing could, as some have promised, keep up with an entire classroom and provide a teacher with nuanced useful real-time readings of the emotions of students in the room. 

Go take a look and try your hand. Perhaps your face will work better than mine. At any rate, it's astonishing, and not in a good way.