ICYMI: August Already Edition (8/1)

Well, that was quick. But here we are, counting down to a new school year. In the meantime, here's some new reading from the week.

Will fewer Black students come back to school this fall?

Adam Laats in the Washington Post provides some useful historical perspective on this question.

Why school boards are now hot spots for nasty politics

Stephen Sawchuk at Ed Week looking at the spreading network of anti-"crt" politicking groups and money.

Excellence vs. Winning

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at some of the attitudes and ideas that have surfaced as everyone offers an opinion about Simone Biles.

Industry lobbying firm rushed to defend charter schools that think of children as a business

Jeff Bryant has dug into the folks pushing for more charter funding, and there are few surprises there. 

Thank You, Tucker Carlson

John Merrow comes out of retirement to look at Carlson's support for the idea of putting a camera in every classroom in order to catch the evil indoctrinatin' teachers.

Why white journalists need to stop focusing on 'learning loss'

Ray Salazar guest posts at The Grade and lays out why white journalists really need to get off the learning loss train.

Pandemic learning loss reports that sell online programs are harmful for students with disabilities

Nancy Bailey looks at how the ongoing marketing push behind learning loss are bad news for students

Bob Moses and the Enduring Education Injustice

There have been many good pieces written about Bob Moses and his unique legacy; I recommend this one by Jose Luis Vilson is especially worthwhile.

Elites profit from "nonprofit" charter schools

Carol Burris sits for an interview with Jacobin and talks about how nonprofit charter schools actually are quite profitable.

Please Correct the Highlighted Section

Blue Cereal Education talks about the experience of being on the receiving end of standards and requirements and remembering to be empathetic with students.

This will be our last post together

Russ Walsh is hanging up his blogging hat, and his voice will be missed. I wish him well in his continued work in the meat world.

USA Today Offers Ed Tech Baloney

This morning USA Today dropped this thing from freelance writer Matt Alderton, serving on this occasion apparently as a PR flack for tech companies. I'm responding to the piece here so that you can have a handy reply for your aunt when she sends you the article which, unfortunately, will get wide distribution through the platform. 

Alderton starts by citing data about teachers considering leaving the profession, says that Covid is certainly partly to blame, and then pivots to this:

“Part of the problem is that teachers spend a lot of time doing things that ... in their view are not the best and highest use of their time,” says former teacher Jake Bryant, now a partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., where he serves the company’s education practice. “Nobody becomes a third-grade teacher because they love collecting permission slips and filling out attendance sheets. What motivates you to get into the profession is interacting and engaging with students, and helping them learn.”

Okay. First, Jake Bryant is a former teacher like I am a former athlete. I pitched for the playground softball team when I was 16. Bryant taught at a KIPP charter for one year after graduating from Harvard with a degree in social studies and teaching Yokohama. Then he went into the consultant biz; I don't find any proof that he was a Teach for America product, but his career follows the same trajectory of TFA insta-experts in education. Bryant moved on to the Gates Foundation, then landed in McKinsey and Company where he leads "research focused on improving educational outcomes." Aka raise test scores.

Bryant's not wrong when he notes that teaching can involve some annoying clerical work, but this piece will go south rapidly. He cites some McKinsey research claiming that teachers spend 40% of their time on "activities that could be automated," a "report" from January of 2020 (aka The Time Before This Damn Pandemic) that features the usual McKinsey angle which is that we really ought to be able to cut teaching positions and replace them with lower-skilled humans and computers. The areas that technology can "reallocate" teacher time in the areas of preparation, evaluation and feedback, administration, student instruction, and --bizarrely--professional development. The whole "research report" is aimed at promoting personalized [sic] learning, aka computer-directed education. The report actually says "20 to 40" percent of teacher hours could be automated, but Bryant (who co-wrote the report he's referring to) chooses now to go with the 40% figure, which makes sense, because the pandemic has simply accelerated the goals that McKinsey had back When We Were All Maskless.

As always, when dealing with technology "research," it's important to understand that these are not scientific attempts to predict the future; they're marketing attempts to shape it. So when Alderton drops in phrases such as "experts like Bryant," he's just helping power the smoke machine.

So how does think robots and software are going to "help" teachers.

Streamlining administrative tasks

We turn now to Eric Wang, a senior director at Turnitin. He's here to beat the drum for Gradescope, yet another AI product that claims it can provide assessment and feedback for student papers. No, no, and also, no. We've been over the problems with this many times in the past, but for the moment I'll offer just this objection--what does it do to student engagement to be told, "I'm not actually going to look at this--just run it past the gradebot." Does anybody imagine that wealthy and well-connected parents will not demand that teachers had damned well better actually look at their child's work. 

Say it with me: computer software cannot assess student writing. See here, here, here, and here.

Also, the article brings up Ashok Goel's creation of virtual teaching assistant Jill Watson to handle "basic" questions (like the kind that you could have answered if you logged on and read a website, but okay."

The Power of Personalization

McKinsey's favorite product--computer-directed education. The big win is supposed to be that the computer can "personalize" the "instruction" by using "adaptive learning." He offers Thinkster and Knewton; Knewton once predicted that it would be able to tell you what to eat for breakfast to get a good math score and would "solve the global education crisis," but instead was broken up and sold for parts two years ago, having not actually solved the global education crisis. This piece of Knewton is owned by Wiley, repped here by Matthew Leavy, who used to work for Pearson. Thinkster Math founder/CEO Raj Valli offers "We've married man with machine." Here's his metaphor:

If you tell me to jump in the pool and swim back and forth, I’m never going to be a good swimmer. But if you jump in the pool with me and point out that I’m not kicking my right leg or using my left arm, then you can make me better. That’s the kind of observations our tutors are able to make using our technology.

These are not the only two possible coaching approaches for swimmer, and coaches do not use the second one, and none of this is what he's actually proposing, which is to throw the computer in the pool with the swimmer and have it report back to the coach who is sitting in the office somewhere. 

You do not make education more personal by taking the persons out of it.

Finally, we get Microsoft's new "tool" for assessing reading fluency. Just have the student read into the camera, and the bot will tell the teacher how well the student reads. Anthony Salcito, the Microsoft VP pitching this, is correct in pointing out that doing this kind of assessment can suck up huge amounts of teacher time. That is an excellent argument for smaller classes; it is not an argument for getting young readers to perform for a computer.

Education evolution

In the future, says Alderton, AI "might optimize not only individual curriculums [sic], but also entgire classrooms." And Goel offers this scary picture of the future: "AI could be used for “matchmaking” — pairing students with the teachers and schools that are best suited to them based on their learning style." Whatever learning style means, exactly. 

And from McGraw-Hill, Sean Ryan makes a plug for student grouping based on mastery learning, along with McGraw-Hill's own adaptive personalized [sic} learning software to "create personalized [sic] learning paths for students in kindergarten through college." In one of the great understatements in ed tech marketing, Ryan notes that "That can be hard to embrace because of social components." But with "more education taking place in hybrid and online environments"--in other words, in systems that have already stripped education of social components--why not put an eighth grader in pre-calc if they're ready, says Ryan, as if no schools already do that.

Writes Alderton, "It’s the beginning of a new era wherein learning is a journey instead of a destination. That makes teachers navigators — which is precisely what most of them want to be." Are there teachers who don't know about the whole journey thing (how many years have we been talking about life-long learners?). 

And we end with this:

“Teachers become teachers to help children maximize their potential,” Ryan concludes. “By allowing them to focus more on the social components of learning, technology helps them have the kind of impact they got into the profession to have.”

This seems to play off an assumption embedded in the McKinsey report cited back at the top--that teachers are only really working when they are in front of students. The teachers I know are at least as interested in the academic impact as the "social components," though I can't be 100% certain I know what Alderton means by that. I also know that doing the assessments, the feedback, the breakdown of actual student performance--and not getting a second-hand report on those things--is part of how a teacher gets to better know and serve students.

Alderton could have better served his audience by talking to actual teachers or any of the many critics of all of these education-flavored money-gathering programs instead of serving as an amplifier for the ed tech biz. Or perhaps he could have consulted the folks who would explain how all of these time-consuming elements are just part of why teachers and parents want to see smaller class size and less time-wasting junk like the Big Standardized Test or endless reportage to prove they're doing the job or wasted time trying to log small humans into inadequate websites.

This is a nice puff piece for promoting all the faux-AI computer-centered false-promising historically-failing ideas lurking in the edu-biz world, but for actual education, not so much.

Toxic Toughness

There is something to be said for toughness, for sucking it up and getting the job done, for stepping outside of your comfort zone and braving unknown (or known) challenges. We expect it from certain professions where, like fire fighters, the job is to run toward what everyone else is running away from.

It helps to be tough. Human beings are often driven by fear, and the best way to deal with that is not to deny the fear or live your life by rules that you believe will keep scary things out of your life or to try to convince yourself that you knew the secret of winning every battle. The most useful thing is to be able to look at the scary something and say, "I can handle this. Whatever comes out of this, I'll still be standing." In all those decades of teaching, I often found that part of the gig was to convince students that they were tough enough to handle whatever was in front of them. 

Call it resilience, guts, fortitude--you can even call it grit as long as you don't start citing research about it. But don't pretend that it's some sort of innate quality that can be measured in early childhood, and not, say, some result of background and circumstance.

And always remember that, like virtually every other human quality, it comes with an ugly, toxic twin.

Discussion of toxic toughness has been elicited by the reaction among certain far right comments about Simone Biles. Charles Sykes, over at Politico, collected the worst and tied them up in a big rough bow:

But if the attacks lack a coherent idea, they share an increasingly familiar posture. Despite all the rhetoric about individual freedom, the real fetish on the right is toughness.

Men who show emotion, especially those who cry, are weak. Young women who fail to perform are “quitters.” All that matters is strength, winning and a weird obsession with machismo. Just look at Trump’s rebuke on Wednesday of the “RINOs” he accused of helping Democrats get the infrastructure deal passed: “It is a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb.” Not responsive to constituents or committed to bipartisanship but weak.

And Sykes recognizes the sentiment.

“What is good?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”

What is evil? “Whatever springs from weakness.”

This kind of might worshipping is toxic, tainting both the lives of individuals and the soul of a culture. Nancy Flanagan writes about one example of a teenager pushed by a coach/director to "tough it out" with what turned out to be a badly broken wrist. It's a story familiar to everyone who has been around athletics, where young players are too often asked to sacrifice their own health for winning and some toxic ideal of toughness that pushes through every adversity, no matter the cost. 

Sure, this is one more pendulum that can be swung the wrong way (school athletics do not exist merely to propel one child's dreams of stardom), but students should not be incurring injuries that will pursue them for the rest of their lives in order to chase performance glory that will not. 

But the toxic toughness that Sykes writes about has larger, worse effects, because it lends itself so nicely to a fascist mindset. 

There's an old saw that your freedom to swing your fist ends at the point it meets my face. But in the land of toxic toughness, nothing, not even my face, can be allowed to interfere with your fist's freedom. If there's a problem, it's that my face and I weren't tough enough to withstand your fist. 

In the land of toxic toughness, it's perfectly okay to bulldoze over, smash through, beat down, and otherwise trample other people because whether or not they can withstand it depends on them and whether or not they are tough enough to deal with it (this also applies to psychological assault, gaslighting, stress, etc). Weakness is the most unforgivable personal failing. Not only will I not empathize with the weak, but I dare not, because to do so would mean harboring feelings of weakness myself, even second hand, and that is the uber-failing that I can never allow. Likewise fear--the admission that I might be weaker than a challenge before me--is a contempt-worthy emotion.

Toxic toughness is not healthy for society, and it's certainly not healthy in schools. We do not foster healthy strength by knocking students down and then daring them to get up again, or by sacrificing their health by demanding they display a willingness to push beyond healthy limits. 

What we think of as mental toughness looks a lot like social and emotional intelligence and mindfulness, an awareness of who you are, how you feel, what's going on in the people around you, and what your own true limits are. I vote for more of that and fewer demands that young people burn themselves out because adults are entertained by the flame.

Contactless Education

The push for contactless life continues. I can order food from a restaurant or a grocery store and have it delivered quietly to my porch, as if it descended magically from the sky. I can go sit and a sit-down restaurant and barely have to interact with my server at all, and of course my local fast food places have all completed their redesigns to look like large boxy food vending machines, where I can get my food without having to come close to touching a human. I can check myself into my flight, my hotel room, my rental whatever. And of course I can shop at a big box store and not deal with a single carbon-based life form. 

All of this trend is familiar to folks in the education world, where educational entrepreneurs have been pushing contactless education for years. Sign up for a cyber school, or a school with computer-delivered education courtesy of Summit or Rocketship or Edgenuity or any of the folks boasting that their software can deliver super-duper education and all you need in the room with you is a "guide" or "mentor" or "coach."

All of this is a bad idea. And Bonnie Kristian at the week laid it out in a piece perfectly titled "Most contactless service is awful. You can tell because the rich don't do it." Contactless service, she notes, is everywhere.

And that sucks. Most contactless service is awful, and industry blathering about convenience and customer preference shouldn't convince you otherwise. It's bad, you know it's bad, and if you need outside verification, here it is: Rich people won't go contactless.

Good, human service is the hallmark of a luxury experience. All the other stuff also matters, but when you pay a lot of money for a meal or hotel stay or shopping trip, the service is a central feature, and it cannot be replaced by a chatbot or a vending machine. Imagine you are a multi-millionaire, vacationing in extravagance. Maybe you're staying in one of those overwater bungalows in the Maldives or at the Hôtel Ritz Paris or in the presidential suite of some palatial old pile where the nightly price isn't listed on the website because if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

You will not do your own check-in on an iPad in the lobby, standing there with your greasy plane hair and your bags splayed out around you, punching a smudgy touch screen like a rube. You will not "speak" with a chatbot. You will not order your lobster thermidor from a vending machine eight doors down the hall. In fact, in the best hotels, you'll get more human service, not less. The fanciest suites come with a dedicated concierge, a human one, with human knowledge of the surrounding area and its amenities that a bot with access to Google Maps will never, ever replicate.

Bill Gates, she notes, is not messing with a QR code menu. He's also not sending his kids to a school where they stare at computer screens all day while a single human "guide" floats somewhere in the back of the room. The rich want human contact--and a lot of it. We can have the class size debate all day, but in the meantime, the McGotbux family is not sending young Pat to sit in a classroom with 35 other students (a Harkness table seats only twelve).

Contactless education, like contactless everything else, is for the Lessers, not the Betters. When it shows up in your neighborhood, resist it with all your might.

Can We Close The Billionaire Learning Gap?

Imagine you had a student in your class, for some reason, for ten, fifteen, even twenty years. Imagine that you gave that student multiple opportunities to learn some central concepts for your course. And yet, somehow, these students remained absolutely impervious to the learning. What would you do?

It's only a slightly hypothetical situation.

Let's talk about the billionaire learning gap. Let's talk about certain really rich people who have an apparently uncontrollable urge to fiddle with education and yet remain rank amateurs who still haven't learned things about education that the average third-year teacher already knows.

We have to talk about this because here they come again. The Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Walton Family Foundation have announced that they are ponying up $200 million for yet another education initiative. 

The initiative is called Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF--and can we talk for just a second about how there is already an AERDF and are you kidding me that nobody bothered to google the name before they picked it). Motto: "Tackling intractable teaching and learning challenges that disproportionately affect Black, Latino, and students of all races experiencing poverty." Their mission, in part:

AERDF staff works with teachers, students, education leaders, researchers, and developers to identify problems and opportunities that can be tackled through Inclusive R&D programs. This exploration will help identify Program Directors who can build on existing evidence and learning science to design multi-year Inclusive R&D programs to translate fundamental insights into more useful practices, approaches and tools.

The CEO is Stacey Childress, who's last-and-concurrent gig was CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, where venture capitalism meets opportunities in education-flavored products. Before that, Deputy Director at the Gates Foundation, and before that led the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School for a decade. Before that, worked for ADT as a corporate sales exec. Right after she got her Baylor degree in English Language and Literature she spent a year as a long-term substitute teacher, but otherwise no actual education experience.

You can see some of what she absorbed from the gates.

On Linkedin, explaining AERDF: "Investing in moonshot education R&D programs to push our understanding of what's possible for learning and opportunity."

Speaking to Chalkbeat" The ideas will have "moonshot ambitions."

Nobody believes in those magic moonshots, those shining silver bullets, like the Billionaire Amateur's Club. After years and years of big-spending initiatives, from small schools to improving teachers to the Common Core--not one of which actually worked--in March of 2020 Gates and the then-Missus were talking about "swinging for the fences" and coming up with that big hit that would change the whole game. In all those years, Gates never learned a thing from his failures; the closest he ever came to "I made a mistake" was various versions of "I didn't understand how much the little people would get in my way and thwart my genius ideas." 

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg blew a cool $100 million in Newark, then went on to set up the Chan Zuckerberg initiative which continues to push various forms of cyber-school or education-in-a-box and personalized [sic] learning, while co-opting very Silicon Valley edu-flavored boutique businesses (and Elmo). He reportedly really wants to be Bill Gates when he grows up, and he's on track with his investment in Things That Don't Work. 

I suppose you can argue that the Waltons are successful in that they have been able to back plenty of schools based on the Walmart model. So, a win for them, a win for charter profiteers, but not a win for US public education. 

All have had ample opportunity to learn about education and how it actually works. All have failed. Exhibit A is the Moonshot Mentality, the notion that there is some silver bullet, some clever trick that has been missed, somehow, by the millions of trained experts working in the field but which these amateurs, with their great stacks of money, will somehow spot. Because if you know how to bull and wrangle your way into billions in business, clearly you are the person to unlock the secret of teaching fourteen year olds about the quadratic equation. Also, if you have lived surrounded by shiny white wealth your whole life (and I do mean your whole life because none of these people grew up remotely poor), you are clearly the person who can best understand what is needed to help poor Black and Latino children. And of course the solution is never, ever, to make sure that you are paying a hefty fair share of the taxes needed to funnel resources to the agencies already working on all of these challenges.

And yes, you can argue that at least they aren't spending millions on cocaine and hookers and giant penis rockets, but the fact is that these amateur-hour grandstanding adventures have problematic effects. First, they use up resources that could have been better used elsewhere, and I don't just mean the rich amateurs' money, but other peoples' money and time and human resources all devoted to trying to achieve liftoff for these vanity projects. Second, they have derailed important, useful conversations. Exhibit A: In the late 90s, we were talking a lot about authentic assessment and how to assess students in ways that would really mean something. But then accountability amateurs took over, and by the time Gates was helping force-feed Common Core to the masses, amateurs had shifted us over to "It doesn't matter if it actually measures anything--what matters is that it generates numbers that can be compared across the country."

As an educator, I have to ask-- why can't Billy and Mark learn? Are their personal circumstances interfering? Is it family of origin issues? Do they have special needs that aren't being met? 

And more importantly, how can they possibly work on a system for helping other people learn when they cannot even learn themselves? We need to figure out how to bridge this billionaire learning gap, and soon, before they launch another project.

The Loneliness of Tiny Gods

The Week featured an essay earlier this summer by Damon Linker, "The politics of loneliness is totalitarian." It's an intriguing take that reaches back to the work of Hannah Arendt, a great writer to turn to when contemplating the mid-20th-century turn to totalitarianism in Europe. Here's Linker summarizing Arendt:

In her view, totalitarianism is a novel form of government for which the men and women of modern Europe were prepared by "the fact that loneliness … ha[d] become an everyday experience" for so many. The all-pervasive system of the totalitarian regime promised and, for a time, provided an all-encompassing orientation, meaning, and purpose for the masses that they otherwise lacked and craved in their lives.

Many observers of life in these United States have noted a fragmenting of society, with notable works like Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. We're losing shared public spaces and fragmenting in ways that make social capital harder to come by. 

Now comes this summer's Survey Center on American Life showing that the rate of friendlessness has grown from 3% to 15% in thirty years. There has been a corresponding drop on the top end, with the percentage of men and women claiming many friends plummeting. 

Arendt makes the case that the friendless look to totalitarianism as a source of greater meaning and purpose. I wonder if we aren't also seeing a growing trend fueled by technology--you have the power to be a small god in your own self-contained world, and so the usual trade-offs of relationships loom larger. 

Every relationship (friendship, romance, what have you) involves a trade-off. You give up a little freedom, a little control over your personal universe, your ability to have things just the way you want them.

We used to get plenty of training for that sacrifice, because we lived in a series of shared spaces. One tv in the house with only a few channels to choose from. Few radio stations within reach that had to be listened to in shared airspace. And, of course, school, where we shared all the space with a succession of people and under the control of various adults. Being a high school senior allowed a brief sense of being the center of the universe, to be swiftly wiped away by entry into the world.

Now, one can grab a laptop and a smartphone and disappear into a personally curated bubble, never needing to give up an ounce of godhood and able to develop relationships of a sort with other like-minded gods.

In this context, I find school choice and public school segregation via gerrymandered districts disturbing trends. There's a reason, I suspect, that school choice has gathered such steam in the last few decades, and part of it I fear is the growing desire to extend our tiny godhood over our children's world so that we can grow children who don't disturb our universe (see also the anti-CRT aka the anti-letting-my-child-learn-things-I-don't-know movement). 

Putnam's most recent work, The Upswing, argues that we've been here before and the pendulum between "me" and "we" is about to swing back, but I can't say that I see many signs of a reverse. Instead, looking through this lens, I see a thousand examples and symptoms of how we are building our own loneliness traps while clutching at power over our steadily shrinking personal universe. It is not healthy for education and schools to be caught up in this trend, but whenever the winds of society blow west, schools always move toward the sunset.

ICYMI: Back From Vacation Edition (7/25)

The Institute staff has returned from the wilds of Maine (well, slightly wilds) and while I'm still getting back in the swing, I've got a handful of things for the reading list this week.

Let schools decide how to spend pandemic windfall

Andrea Gabor at Bloomberg offers an argument for letting decisions about pandemic dollars be made at the local school level and not by bureaucrats in front offices.

The culture war over critical race theory looks like the one waged 50 years ago over sex education

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire put in an appearance at The Answer Sheet (Washington Post)  with a history lesson in how to use school based culture wars for political gain.

Students need to learn about the haters and the helpers of our history

Michele l. Morris with a powerful Washington Post piece about the need to push back against Moms for Liberty and their attempts to make history pretty.

House appropriations prohibits fed funds for...electric shock to students

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has dug through the House Appropriations Committee budget proposal and finds an odd item--then she discovers, sadly, why it's necessary

The moral panic over critical race theory is coming for a North Carolina teacher of the year

Rodney Pierce is a social studies teacher and NC teacher of the year, and he has emerged as a vocal critic of the attempts to stifle teaching of US history. Good article in Mother Jones.

Who's really driving critical race theory legislation/ An investigation.

Sarah Schwartz at Ed Week breaks down the genesis of all these remarkably-similar bills.

The child tax credit, not charter schools, was the reform we needed to help kids succeed

Andre Perry at Hechinger Report about the traps that poor children really need to be released from.

Tucker Carlson goes to school. Your school.

Nancy Flanagan talks about the right-wing push to gin up some fear.

The New Broad Center at Yale

Eli Broad managed to get his fake school leadership school a sheen of legitimacy by having Yale take it on. Thomas Ultican checks in to see how that's going.

Eyeing federal infrastructure windfall, private equity courts public utilities

Another trend in the world of privatizing public stuff. Lee Harris at The American Prospect.

Nobody wants to be a serf anymore.

McSweeney's looks at that mysterious labor shortage problem.