Chiefs For Change Recruiting Big Brother

What a twisty road it has been for Chiefs for Change.

They were supposed to be part of the big web of education reforminess that would usher Jeb Bush into the White House, and they've been flailing ever since. They've just suggested a cool new way to expand the surveillance state, but before we look at that, let me crib from my own previous work (here and here) to explain how we arrived at our current situation.

CFC was originally spun off of Jeb's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), a group that lobbied hard for Common Core, school A-F ratings, test-based evaluation, and mountains of money thrown at charter schools. FEE started up CFC because they thought that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the group that holds the Common Core copyright and was the figurehead guiding force behind the core's creation-- that group wasn't aggressively reformy enough for the Jebster.

Initially, the group was to be a new nexus of reform, but they were immediately beset by problems. And I'm not counting the naming problem-- did they think that change would never come, or once the change was the status quo, were they going to just disband? I mean, if your brand is that you favor change, does that mean you just keep trying to change the change that you just implemented? Do you ever say, "Well, hell, no-- we don't worked hard to install that policy and we surely don't want to change that!" I'm just saying-- doesn't seem like a very well thought out name.

At any rate, by the time Jeb's 2013 Reformster Convention rolled around (incidentally, the 2016 National Education Summit is scheduled for end of November in DC-- I wonder how that's going to go), the Chiefs were already in rather a mess. Chief Tony Bennett had already had to change jobs because of that whole lying and cheating thing. And Jennifer Berkshire provides a great account of Rahm Emmanuel's speech, a weathervane moment that showed the Winds of Change no longer at CFC's back.

Since those not-so-halcyon days, CFC has decided to implement a little mission creep. In 2015 they dropped their connection to FEE, which was more than financial, but also structural and organizational. They also decided to change their definition of "chief." Previously that had meant a state-level education chief, but they had already developed a problem in that department, in that many of their big names (like Chris Barbic, Kevin Huffman, et al) were no longer actual leaders of state education programs-- six of the seventeen members in 2016 were "formers." And so "chief" was redefined to include superintendents of school systems. 

That expansion continued, and since the group included so many Teach for America products anyway, they cribbed from the TFA playbook to redefine themselves as a group promoting diversity. That has included bringing in chiefs from various charter and privatization advocacy groups. These days CFC includes ten formers (one of whom is listed as "Chief in Residence"), superintendents from Ector County, Wichita and Akron, and the executive director of the Broad Center, the Yale-based version of the old Broad Academy Fake Grad School for Superintendents.

CFC has continued a string of not-very-awesome projects. There was the Student Growth Simulator, which turns out to be a calculator that does subtraction augmented by cool graphics--and the damned thing is still up. Then in 2019 they made a call for an end to "toxic rhetoric" on school choice, which turned out to mean--well...

That is why today we are calling on policymakers across the nation to end the destructive debates over public charter schools. Proposed caps and moratoriums allow policymakers to abdicate their responsibility to thoughtfully regulate new and innovative public school options: like banning cars rather than mandating seatbelts. They are a false solution to a solvable problem.

  

Yeah, not good old fashioned tone policing, but an actual call for people who were saying the wrong thing to just shut up.

So now, CFC has some thoughts about data collection. Specifically, they're in favor of more of it.

They've teamed up with Data Quality Campaign. DQC was set up in 2005 with ten reformster partners:

Achieve, Inc. (www.achieve.org)
Alliance for Excellent Education (www.all4ed.org)
Council of Chief State School Officers (www.ccsso.org)
The Education Trust (www.edtrust.org)
National Center for Educational Accountability (www.nc4ea.org or www.just4kids.org)
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (www.nchems.org)
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (www.nga.org/center)
Schools Interoperability Framework Association (www.sifinfo.org)
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services (www.schoolmatters.com)
State Higher Education Executive Officers (www.sheeo.org)

DQC has always been all about hard-core data mining of students, agitating for, among other things, more holes in FERPA. They continue to push for testing data to be collected.

The "report" that CFC is pushing sounds an alarm:

State and local K–12 leaders need access to actionable information about the postsecondary and workforce outcomes of former students to make decisions that will prepare current students for success.

"K-12 leaders are hungry," says the report, "for a more complete, longer-term understanding of former students' postsecondary and career journeys."

And they are not entirely wrong. My old school used to send out follow-up surveys to try to keep tabs on graduates. Heck, every time a former student visited I asked them about the good and bad of how I'd prepared them (or not) for their life. There is no doubt that having information about the trajectory of students' lives after graduation would be helpful for schools-- though fresh data from recent grads doesn't necessarily capture the long-term payoff of education, and longer-term data that is decades old might not be all that actionable.

However, it's one thing to ask for this kind of data, and quite another thing to just take it.

The list of data that CFC/DQC wants to have is large: industry data, apprenticeship data, post-secondary enrollment, completion and course data (both in and out of state), financial aid data, veteran/military data, wage data, much of it disaggregated by demographic details and by institutions. CFC says that "leaders want" this data student level, longitudinal, de-identified, in context, timely, easy to use, and "paired with support for analysis and use." 

Currently, they say, "the data is not easy to find or use." So they propose a "cross-agency data governing body"-- a state office of data overlordship. A big statewide data infrastructure. User-friendly data tools, sort of like Big Brother with a convenient dashboard. Oh, and funding for all of it.

This is a huge data grab, reminiscent of the old cradle to career pipeline which also required constant data collection and crunching. Beside being a hugely intrusive extension of the surveillance state, it's also the information age equivalent of a land grab, an attempt to swoop up and take possession of a valuable before anyone catches on ("We'll be happy to take that ugly black goo seeping out of the land off your hands! It'll make things better for you, we promise!")

These attempts to launch vast, intrusive data-mining operations are not new, and they aren't likely to stop any time soon. I don't know how much juice CFC has left to actually accomplish large projects like this these days. But it's worth staying alert for any time that Big Data waves its tentacles again. And no matter how much Chiefs for Change is hard up for members, they should not be recruiting Big Brother.

TN: Moms For Liberty Lose--On A Technicality

Tennessee has one of the more punitive gag laws of the recent spate. It comes with the prospect of financial penalties for the school district and punishment for teachers all the way up to firing and loss of license. The state's law lists fourteen forbidden concepts. It was arguably an easy win for education conservatives who need to distract the public from all manner of education shenanigans, from a persistent failure to fund schools (even though the money is just sitting there) to a tendency to give away the store to privatizers and sweetheart deals with chums.

But once the law was passed, Tennessee's edition of the Moms For Liberty jumped in to provide the first court test by filing an 11-page complaint against the Wit and Wisdom book series. 

The complaint centers on four particular anchor texts, including "Martin Luther King Jr and the March on Washington, " "Ruby Bridges Goes To School : My True Story," "The Story of Ruby Bridges," and "Separate is Never Equal." It objects to the use of certain images and argues that certain themes, like "white people are4 bad" are prevalent. 

Lots of folks have picked out specific examples from the list of complaints, like the use of an actual photograph of children being firehosed, or Bridge's description of the white mob screaming at her and the signs they held. And looking at the various examples, I'm struck that mostly they are simply depictions of things that happened. If your desire is to have history taught strictly as facts, then these details they object to are doing just that. White folks held up those signs. That's a thing that happened.

I'm willing to buy an argument that elementary school is not a place for sophisticated explanations of systemic racism and discussions of the same texts that are brought up in college CRT courses. Despite the insistent dichotomization of this issue, there's a full continuum of possible positions from, on one end, requiring little white kids to admitted they are privileged oppressors and, on the other end, insisting that racism ended in 1865 and the only way to deal with the issue is pretend it doesn't exist. The M4L complaint seems to hew closer to the latter end. I don't often cite Eduwonk (Bellwether), but Andy Rotherham has been reading the books. The Bridges text includes this quote:

“Some people did not want a black child to go to the white school”

I guess you could argue that if you’re one of those people this might make you feel bad except it, you know, happened. It’s literally a recitation of the history of what happened to Ruby Bridges (and by extension to other kids in other communities). If you want to argue that you shouldn’t be telling little kids they’re complicit in white supremacy you will get a lot of support across racial lines. If you want to argue that you shouldn’t tell kids that not long ago schools were segregated, here’s why, here’s what changed, then you’re living in the past.

He also notes a quote that M4L doesn't mention. Bridges finishes her account “Now black children and white children can go to the same schools. I like to visit schools. I tell my story to children. I tell children that black people and white people can be friends. And most important I tell children to be kind to each other."

Bridges story and her journey always seem extra powerful to me because she is only a couple of years older than I am, and she always elicits that jolt you get when you look sideways across your own generation and think, "Holy shit, what a gulf there is between our experiences of the same country at the same time." 

Picking out some of the complaint's worst details does skip part of M4L's point, which is that these units are spread out over a great deal of time. If I understand their complaint, it's not just the quality of the materials, but the relentlessness of them. I don't sympathize. I can ask myself the question, "Would it bother me to have my four-year-olds experience this material?" It would not. I would be far more interested in how this or any material is actually used by the actual teacher in the actual classroom.

At any rate, the M4L complaint failed--but not on the merits. Instead, the state found that their complaint didn't land within the right time frame. Expect to see it refiled.

The Coming Pre-K Religion Battle

State-funded pre-schools are a spotty lot, ranging from well-funded to non-existent. The gaps are filled in by a variety of providers. My own small town is a good example; here you have a choice of a state-subsidized program, a small program run by the YMCA, and a program run by a local church. 

That's not at all unusual. People look for someone they can trust with the care of their littles, and for many that means churches. For churches, a pre-school or daycare makes a perfect "outreach" ministry, and they usually have physical facilities readily available, as well as a pool of people willing to work for volunteer-level wages.

When it comes to pre-school, there wall between church and state is more like a shower curtain, and it's about to be tested.

There are many, many things that the government can screw up with an initiative to create universal pre-K, from measuring results badly to simply trying to turn pre-K into the new first grade. And there really isn't anything in the track record of either party to suggest that screwing up will not be done.

But aside from that, the expansion of pre-K is going to unleash another fight over religion in schools. The current giant pile of money for pre-K and child care comes with a nondiscrimination requirement, and if we've learned anything about religious schools, it's that some of them are certain that discriminating against some people is a critical part of their religious mission. 

So conservative religious groups are already pushing back against the nondiscrimination clauses, because they might have to pass on that federal money if  they prefer to continue "to teach religious content, convene all-boys or all-girls programs, or give preferences in hiring or admissions to people of their religion." Most analysts say that the Build Back Better Act, in which this is buried, would not squelch actual religious instruction.

There are other challenges to small providers in the bill, including a requirement that they have seven years to have lead teachers with at least a bachelor's degree, and a requirement for wage levels. Also, this bill works by having states opt into receiving federal funds, which means that states can also say no. So even if Build Back Better passes the Senate, the fights about pre-K will move to the state level. Expect arguments about religious liberty to be part of that fight.

Charter Scandal Collection Now Available

Years ago there was a charter scandal website that eventually started to gather dust. In more recent years, the Network for Public Education has been collecting those various scandals under the tag #AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal.

Now those various items are collected on the NPE website in a (partially) searchable collection. You can search by state or by category, as well as searching with terms of your own. 

The searchable portion of the collection goes back through 2019; there are more items collected, but not yet indexed on the database. If you suspect there are problems with your local charter folks, or you just want to browse the size and scope of charter issues, this will be a useful tool for you. 

Check it out right here.

A Reminder About The Uselessness Of Test Scores

 As we move through the latest stage of the pandemic in schools, we still get a lot of noise about how we Really Need to get those Big Standardized Test scores collected and crunched, because only then can we address Learning Loss or Pandemic Stumble or general Falling Behind. 

In doing so, we once again make the same old mistake of trying to use Big Standardized Test scores as a measure of future success (at its most extreme in the "students will suffer with years of lost earnings" think pieces).There is no particular reason to believe this is true. 

Let me remind you of this old graph.

In other words, a rich kid who drops out of high school has as much a chance of success as a poor kid who graduates from college. 

There are plenty of theories about why this is so. A Georgetown study concluded that early tests scores are less predictive of future success than socio-economic status. Those researchers point to an idea that echoes the issue of social capital that Robert Putnam explores in Our Kids-- that wealthier families have connections that both help locate opportunities for children (My kid really likes ponies, and I know a guy who runs a stable) as well as providing a safety net. As the Georgetown report puts it

When students from affluent families stumble, they have a softer landing and assistance getting back on track, while those in adverse environments are more likely to land on rocky ground and never recover.

The lead author of the report told CNBC

People with talent often don’t succeed. What we found in this study is that people with talent that come from disadvantaged households don’t do as well as people with very little talent from advantaged households.

The Georgetown report, like most such studies, is using test scores as a proxy for talent or smartitude. So what we're seeing here repeatedly is that tests are a lousy predictor of future earnings, life outcomes, etc. Which means that if we are concerned about those future outcomes for students, we need to look for better predictors.

There is a lot of legitimate concern right now over the fallout from pandemic. But obsessing over BS Test scores and throwing all our energy into trying to lift those scores is not the answer. The scariest part of that Georgetown report is in the last part of the sentence-- "those in adverse environments are more likely to land on rocky ground and never recover." If it's not too late to keep students from landing on rocky ground, we should try to prevent, and for those who have already landed, we should be helping them get back up. Hammering them to prep for the Test so they can Raise Those Scores is not the way. 

Another Curmudgumile Marker

I pause to note this so that I can find the moment later, should I ever choose to. Sometime last week, this blog passed ten million views. That's partly because I have just stayed here, flailing away ta my keyboard for seven plus years. It's also because people really care about this public education stuff, and because they appreciate finding someone who says what they think but maybe can't quite express.

I'm not monetized, so that number of hits (which is certainly only an approximation, given the vagaries of Google) doesn't translate into any particular gains for me. But as a writer, it's nice to have an audience, and I think everyone for being that. 

Mile marker noted. Back to work.

ICYMI: Tryptophan Hangover Edition (11/28)

The week may have been hectic, but people were still writing things and putting them into the world, so it's time to take a look.

Working in the Pencil Graveyard

Notes from the Educational Trenches takes a quick look at the current toll on middle school students. Somehow, things have to get better.

Is It about Learning or The Adult Ned To Control Children

Teacher Tom looks at Johnny Cash and the need for control, and how humans, including young humans, respond to that.

Some US Christian schools feel free to fire gay teachers

Not news, exactly, but well explained in this piece in The Guardian

Was education the issue in Virginia. Board elections say maybe not

The Hill breaks down election results and what it tells us about education as an election issue. Maybe CRT isn't a big winner.

In the 1950s, rather than integrate its public schools, Virginia closed them

A little history lesson from the Guardian, and reminder that race and education have been a source of trouble not so long ago.

SEL is the next big target

The Hartford Courant sees the "activist parents" coming for social and emotional learning.

Texas book ban would cost districts millions

The Texas book ban has a lot of things wrong with it, but don't forget that it would also be expensive as hell for districts to follow. Danika Ellis is the writer who ploughed through Matt Krause's whole list of "questionable" books; now she looks further into the issue.

These people are not educators

Turns out lots of Texans are not on board with elected officials coming up with book banning lists. From Reform Austin.

Tennessee spells out its teacher gag rule

Tennessee has one of the more terrible gag laws; now they've explained in detail just how punitive it is. You don't want this in your state.

The Conservative War on Education That Failed

Friend of the Institute Adam Laats is a historian whose deep knowledge of conservative Christianity and education in the US makes him well-positioned for our current state. This piece in the Atlantic looks back at the century-old attempt to make evolution go away.

Audit finds accountability holes in Utah

Turns out that Utah's system for overseeing charter schools is a little buggy. KUTV lays it out. 

Yes, no or "huh?" in talk of critical race theory

How Yorba-Linda school district grapples with the ongoing vaguely defined and ill-understood controversy/

Parents should not be able to dictate what other parents can read

In the Miami Herald, the American Library Association director for the Office of Intellectual Freedom explains why book bans kind of suck.

What War?

In which TC Weber calls the Tennessee Moms for Liberty chief and reminds us that even people we disagree with are human. (Ironically, you may disagree with some portions of this post.)

UC Is Done with the SAT Experiment

Akil Bello at Forbes with some response for people who think it's a shame that California is dumping standardized testing for college admissions.

WV Private Schools Figuring Out How To Get Their Hands on Voucher Money

It took roughly fifteen seconds for religious schools in WV to figure out how toi really cash in on the state's new school voucher set-up.

Take all the books of the shelf

Alexandra Petri is a national treasure. Here she explains why we should just do away with books entirely (Washington Post)