FL: Bullying By Mask

 Florida (state motto: Death to public education!) has been leaping to capitalize on the current COVID disaster, as witnessed by this extremely on-point headline: 

Florida Will Pay for Parents to Move Kids Into New Schools if They Experience ‘COVID-19 Harassment’

That's a very apt way to characterize a voucher program--the state will pay you to pull your kid out of public schools. 

You may have been wondering how Florida made the leap to a voucher for covid harassment, but the fact is, they were already halfway there. Florida already has the Hope Scholarship, a voucher program that allows students to get a voucher if they allege bullying. Note that under this program, the state will pay you to leave your school based on the allegation alone--there doesn't need to be proof that it actually happened or that the school failed to remedy the situation. 

So all that this new policy really did was just expand Florida's definition of bullying to include “any threatening, discriminatory, insulting, or dehumanizing verbal, written or physical conduct an individual student suffers in relation to, or as a result of, school districts protocols for COVID-19, including masking requirement, the separation or isolation of students, or COVID-19 testing requirements.” So, basically, anything at all having to do with the pandemic.

Of course, private schools are not subject to Ron DeSantis's mandate that public schools may not have a mask mandate, and so some private schools are going ahead and mandating masks (and some are waffling and, supposedly on Twitter, legislators are offering to find masked schools for parents who are searching). But then, some private schools in Florida are maintaining their right to bully and discriminate against LGBTQ students. So once the state pays you to pull your kid out of public school, you may or may not be able to find a more agreeable option (and you may or may not have enough money to do it, as vouchers don't necessarily cover costs). 

This may all seem kind of hypocritical or nonsensical, but you just have to remember--all education policy in Florida is aimed at getting kids out of public schools and into private, profitable schools. Everything else can be tweaked to meet that single policy goal.

Raging Against Reality, Crisis, and Education's Kobyashi Maru

So here comes yet more panicky news from NWEA, hollering that Learning Loss is consuming New Jersey. It is, in many ways, baloney. First, everyone keeps ignoring the loss of standardized test prep and practice that is a factor in test results, and second, the Learning Loss here is reported based on what NWEA imagines the scores on last years test would have been had students taken them. 

I'm a little tired of pointing out the many, many, many problems with the continued chicken littling about Learning Loss, pushed most often by people who intend to make money by selling a solution. 

We are being subjected to a constant crisis narrative, and as well chronicled in this post at Your Contractual Obligations, certain folks have been trying to drive education in a particular direction for decades, using a tale of impending doom soaked in deficit language. The great Pandemic Learning Loss tale is the same story, with one critical difference. 

All previous crises, from the handwringing of Why Johnny Can't Read to the imminent national collapse of A Nation at Risk, have depended on a manufactured problem. NCLB and RttT made the crisis manufacture process more efficient, by requiring test scores that could be then used as "data" that "proved" what dire straits the country was in. 

What's new this time is that there is some basis in objective reality.

There's no reason not to believe that students mostly learned less last year than in a "normal" year. When people squawk about Learning Loss, they're not making up an issue out of thin air. As education crises go, that's kind of a first.

However.

Dealing with that reality is turning out to be a challenge that the world of policy and edu-business is ill-equipped to face.

First, we don't know exactly what the problem is. Edu-pundits keep calling for data and measurement, but we don't have an instrument to do that. We've wasted the past couple of decades developing Big Standardized Tests that serve no real purpose except as a tool for policy makers--not educators. A bad measure of some math and reading multiple choice questions is not going to give us a full picture of where students are educationally (and it never has). We've been using a foot-long wooden ruler to measure clouds, and now that we'd really, really like to get an accurate cloud measurement, all we have at hand is a crappy useless box of rulers.

Teachers know--or will know, after a few first fall weeks--what specific students need. Some parents know. But none of this helps bureaucrats and politicians set global policy and objectives.

So we don't know on a large scale level what, exactly, students are missing. And we have a batch of bad solutions for filling the gap.

Accelerate. Sure, teachers will all just somehow teach a lot more, faster, because they've always been able to do that--they just chose not to. 

Tutoring. The idea of tutoring is sound enough, but the number of people required to tutor 55 million students (give or take a few million) is daunting. Not to mention training and paying them.

Teacher differentiation. Best shot we've got, since teachers do it already. But every week filling up last year's gaps is a week less spent on this year's usual material. Meaning that even in a best case scenario, the pandemic pause will ripple on through the coming years. Remember--this year's high school seniors haven't had a "normal" year since they were freshmen.

Do some big outside the box thing. Now is a good time to question some of our assumptions about what public education needs to look like. Just don't imagine that you are coming up with some cool idea that will Totally Fix Everything.

There's a lot of raging and anger about this, and it just like the raging about masks and vaccinations and the prospect of more pandemic disruption in the fall, in that they all boil down to simple gut-level cry of "I don't want things to be the way they are!!! I want to do something to make them Not This Way!!"

It's education's Kobyashi Maru. In Star Trek, a training exercise in which all options are bad to serve as a test not of how trainees can come up with wins in a no-win scenario, but to see how they would deal with it. We can't make the gappage not be there, and there is no simple program that will suddenly reset education and students to the place they would be in some imaginary non-covid alternate universe. Some of us are not dealing with it well; instead, they're getting kind of ragey.

Raging at people because they will not create/implement any such magical fix won't help. It especially won't help if one's version of raging is to try to spur people to action by trying to raise the panic level ("An entire generation of students is falling behind and they will all end up jobless and eating dog food off a hot plate while living in a van down by the river!!") Nor does it help to get personally angry at people because you've convinced yourself that they could Fix All This but they just won't, perhaps for nefarious reasons. 

The pandemic pause happened. The interruption of "normal" schooling happened. Most students missed out on some stuff. Nothing is going to change any of that.

There will not be a single Big Fix for this, which is actually true of every education issue ever, though people tend to forget it. The good news is that humans are actually pretty resilient. It's also useful to remember that the whole list of standards that students Have To Meet by a certain grade are relatively recent, and many students have already met the standards for their age from a generation ago; your state standards were not lowered on stone tablets from a burning bush, but were made up by some guys just a decade or two ago. And some benchmarks, like "read by third grade = later success," are matters of correlation, not causation. Many of the factors that drive markers, like high scores on the Big Standardized Test, are not school-related at all, which is one reason why all of this mess will probably hit poor students harder than wealthy ones. 

No single Big Fix. Just steady dogged work to help our nation's young humans, student by student, to get back in educational gear. And it won't help any of them if folks insist on freaking out.

James T. Kirk dealt with the Kobyashi Maru by cheating. We don't have that option. We can, instead, suck it, take a deep breath, hunker down, and do the painstaking work. And that will still be true whenever the pandemic pause finally ends. 

Should School Board Elections Be More Partisan

 Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director for the Fordham Institute, this morning wants to make the case for partisan school board elections.

Lots of states have non- or bi-partisan school board elections. Ohio doesn't note a party affiliation. In Pennsylvania, candidates can cross file and run in both R and D primaries, and so are listed as both parties on the final ballot. Churchill notes that this fall districts are pre-occupied with things like masking and "critical race theory" (in other words, things actually not directly related to actual education) and school board are, for sure, currently heating up. 

Churchill notes that a "small body of research" shows that, lacking partisan labels, voters choose based on an assortment of bad reasons, and it's certainly true that an awful lot of US citizens do a crappy job of fulfilling their civic election duty. I'm just not convinced that adding an R or D label to school board elections doesn't just add one more bad reason to choose a candidate.

Is there a Democrat or Republican approach to education? Neither party has ever shown itself to be particularly interested in or knowledgeable about public education. "When leading our local school district, I will follow my party's line," is a terrible pledge for candidates from any party. Nor does party affiliation reveal a particular bent. A Democrat could be a public education supporter, or a corporate education reformster with privatization on their mind. A Republican could be a traditional GOP supporter of public education (as long as it doesn't get too spendy) or a raving Trumper intent on keeping masks and Black Person Stuff out of schools. 

Churchill asks

Are nonpartisan elections really insulating public schools from divisive politics? Or is it naïve to think that school boards are apolitical governing bodies? If indeed there are ideological differences about how to run schools and educate children, shouldn’t the electorate get a hint about where candidates are likely to stand?

Yes, yes, and yes. But this is a non-sequitor set of questions--knowing party affiliation doesn't tell us what the person's ideological stances are.

In fact, it's entirely possible to develop a whole system of ideas and beliefs about how children learn and how schools should work without actually having to reference political ideologies at all. Really.

Churchill is frustrated that in the last school board elections he didn't have any idea where the candidates stood, and he wants more transparent elections, and that's all good--but slapping an R or D on the ballot doesn't get us there. 

In fact, there's nothing but down side to forcing school board candidates to declare allegiance to a particular political party. For instance, do we really need to have school board candidates take a hard stance on whether or not Trump won the 2020 election just to get past a school board primary? US politics are soaked in a deeply toxic brine right now, and we'll never keep that out of the world of public education (because everything that soaks the larger society soaks schools, too), but there's no reason to make it easier for that toxic brine to penetrate school board elections.

Reformsters often assert that teachers unions are too involved in these elections and end up controlling the school boards. I'd love to read about those cities where the board is in thrall to the teachers and therefor teachers get everything they ever want. And supposedly in the big cities, school board membership comes with all sorts of power and perks and wealth and fame, though I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone who launched a major political career with school board membership. (I'll look for it in the comments.)

School boards are local institutions, and they deal with local issues in ways that national politics don't necessarily apply to. Should East Egg elementary school get a new roof? Are we all pissed off about last season's football coaching? Is the absentee make-up work policy fair? People who think, write, talk, and live national policy often forget one thing about local school districts--on the local level, people, school districts, and school boards can go days, weeks, months at a time without thinking about a single national education policy issue, no matter how hard thinky tanks and bloggers and federal bureaucrats are yammering about them. Knowing where you might stand on national ed policy issues does not tell whether or not you support expanding local AP options, or whether there should be an elementary choir program, or whether or not it was a damned shame that the principals were re-assigned last year.

Injecting partisan politics might generate a great deal more heat (especially right now), but it won't generate any more light.

Want more transparency? Do what unions do-- get together, ask the candidates the questions you care about, and publish the answers to your people. Stage public debates or talk sessions. Push candidates to get their message out there--whatever it might be. Require full disclosure of funding sources. If your race is so small that your candidates have tiny budgets, raise a bunch of money and buy each candidate the same amount of media exposure to use as they wish--buy them some transparency. 

And if you're really concerned about this on a national level, then work on the other school board election problem. In small districts in my neck of the woods, it's not uncommon to have too few candidates for the unpaid board seats. I don't know the national figures for this, but I suspect that we are not a unique phenomenon (the Curmudgucation Institute doesn't have the budget to research this, but I invite a think tank to do so). If so, how do we get more people to become involved in helping to run their local district? I'm betting the answer is not to encourage them to link themselves to partisan politics.

NEA and AFT are wrong on vaccinations

Fred Klonsky has said this today, but I'm going to say it, too. 

The national teachers unions (and a few other unions as well) are wrong on vaccinations.

Randi Weingarten has said it should be locally negotiated:

"In order for everyone to feel safe and welcome in their workplaces, vaccinations must be negotiated between employers and workers, not coerced," Weingarten said in a statement.

The NEA says that teachers should be given the option of weekly testing.

It's not clear why, exactly, the unions have taken this position. Certainly there are plenty of members who do not support mandatory vaccinations, but it's not like the nationals have been reluctant to take positions without worrying about internal opposition (for example, Common Core support and endorsing Hillary Clinton and too many years of test-centered accountability). 

The cynical view among the anti-union crowd is that this is an attempt to negotiate... something. 

Meanwhile, it seems entirely likely that it some districts, boards will resist mandatory anything at all. So the national position leaves concerned teachers hanging on their own in those districts.

It's true that some aspects of covid response will have to be worked out on the local level-- the only level at which people really know what's appropriate for that district and building. But some things are true everywhere.

Adults can be vaccinated. Children can not. Teachers already undergo mandatory vaccinations as well as mandatory background checks before they can enter a classroom. There's no reason not have mandatory covid vaccinations for the fall, and a regular covid check to go with it. I'm no fan of mandatory government stuff, but if a public health crisis that leaves children uniquely exposed doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does. 

Fear and Silence in the Classroom

It comes down to administrators.

States have moved from passing vaguely-worded laws about That Race Stuff and on to the penalty phase. I don't know know exactly how well the anti-CRT crowd understands what they're doing, but it doesn't really matter. At this point, it is all about scaring administrators.

Tennessee has emerged as a big player in the Stifle Teachers Olympics, and they've come up with a proposed penalty system for punishing naughty schools that "knowingly violated" the state's vague and poorly defined law by withholding state funds for the district:

First violation during the school year: 2% of annual state funds or $1 million, whichever is less;
Second violation during the school year: 4% of annual state funds or $2 million, whichever is less;
Third violation during the school year: 6% of annual state funds or $3 million, whichever is less;
Fourth violation during the school year: 8% of annual state funds or $4 million, whichever is less;
Fifth violation during the school year: 10% of annual state funds or $5 million, whichever is less.

You may ask, "How can the state enforce such a law?" The answer is, it won't have to. 

Cue the quiet freaking out of administrators, because if there's anything they don't want to deal with, it's budget cuts. 

And Tennessee is already swarming with Moms for Liberty, whose definition of objectionable content is pretty broad. These are the folks who object to a textbook including a book by Ruby Bridges about her experience desegregating schools; it upsets them because it portrays raging white opponents to desegregation (aka "reality") and because the story doesn't end with redemption (aka "reality"). These folks see critical race theory everywhere, and they've already been trying to get local politicians to strong-arm the district considering the text.

In other words, Tennessee school administrators already know that there are scads of activists just waiting to cry "CRT!!" at the first sight of anything they find at all objectionable. 

There will be school administrators who steel their spines and stand up to do their jobs, which are to make it possible for teachers to do their jobs. But that will not be all the administrators.

You may ask, "How can the state enforce such a law?" The answer is, it won't have to. Panicked administrators will stage pre-emptive staff stifling. They will hold beginning of the year professional development on the topic of "For God's Sake, Don't Bring Up Anything That Could Possibly Remotely Be Connected To This." They may demand to see teacher resources and start banning works from the school. They may issue a list of forbidden topics, lists that look a lot like "anything remotely related to race and history." 

Enforcing the anti-CRT laws will be hard, but it won't matter, because teachers are going to be gagged before the first Liberty-Lovin' Mom gets on the phone to turn someone in. The combination of these laws and the many mechanisms being put in place to turn in your local district may result in very few actual penalties, but they create an atmosphere of fear, an atmosphere that stifles teacher speech. And that goes double for right to work states where teachers can lose their jobs just for opening their mouths; district leadership may not disagree with what that teacher wants to say, but they will see teachers who risk an avalanche of phone calls as just too much potential trouble. 

In short, these laws are not really about penalizing some bad teachers; they are about silencing all teachers. 

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.