Koch Education Wing Continues Rebranding

Remember when Charles Koch wrote that he had done an oopsie by being so partisan and dividing the country? That was back in late 2020, and it was followed by the rise of a new Koch Brand--Stand Together--which in turn spawned a new substack about fixing education called "Learning Everywhere." It turns out that the Koch metamorphosis was not done yet.

"Learning Everywhere" was co-hosted by Lisa Snell, director of K-12 education policy for Stand Together, aka the Charles Koch Institute. Previously she spent 23 years as Director of Education at the Reason Foundation. Her co-host is Adam Peshek, who is part of the same Kochtopus, having arrived Jeb Bush's ExcelinEd (formerly FEE). Peshek also works at Yes, Every Kid, a rebranding of some standard reform ideas.

The substack started out playing the reformy hits (did you know schools are built on the factory model? well, they weren't, but did you think so anyway? Snell and Peshek would like you to think so).

So, Charles Koch Institute is now Stand Together Trust, an organization that now has a hip young vibe. Check out the website-- "We help you tackle the roots of America's biggest problems" in bold print over dynamic videos. Hugging! Clapping! Black people! "Everyone is tired of all the fighting over problems with very little focus on real solutions."

Among the issues they want to address is education, and their dynamic new solutions are...well, the same old ones. They insist that education is currently one-size-fits-all (news to teachers in public schools), and they have the same old right-tilted complaints-- we spent more money but test scores didn't go up! Families give education a C (but we're not going to point out that they give far higher grades to the local schools they know). Individualized education is where it's at. 

There's a video in which Sal Khan, promoter of an educational program that involves students sitting and passively watching a video, complains that education involves students sitting passively while listening to a teacher. Other "leaders" they bring up are Diane Tavenner, head of Summit Schools (a school-in-a-box not-great tech product). There are lots of pictures of exciting active learning, all of which could have come from a public school. Aaron Frumin, founder of unCommon Construction, who talks about how frustrated he became "as a teacher" which he was for the two whole years he spent with Teach for America. His program uses students as laborers to build houses, an innovative program pretty much like the one the vocational technical school in my county has had for sixty years. Here's Todd Rose "By any measure, the system doesn't work." Rose was a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and founder of the Center for Individual Opportunity and he runs the think tank Populace. And he has a Story, in which he dropped out of high school ("The system failed me.") There's some more talk about believing in students (which, again, is not unheard of in public schools). "Success doesn't have to mean one thing. We need our education system to have a much broader view of success."

That's the pitch. Well, actually, the pitch is use your money to invest in these people doing this stuff. But also, we got 11 major education bills passed in 8 states in 2021, and somehow we don't talk about what those bills did, like pushing privatization of education or gagging of teachers. There are case studies of success, like Cadence Learning, one more cyber-school venture, this one launched by Chris Cerf, Ian Rowe and Steven Wilson--all god privatization champions.

Meanwhile, the known recipients of ST grants are not so much education revolutionaries as the same old Koch style conservative crews. Americans for Prosperity, Bill of Rights Institute, Bellwether Education, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Vela Education Fund. 

The substack has now transformed into a new title-- Permissionless Education. That term has cropped up several places lately, and it really captures the Libertarian mindset of not wanting to have to ask for anyone's permission to do anything ever, a mindset I can recognize immediately because I live with a pair of four-year-old toddlers. 

The announcement of all these name changes on the substack comes with a listing of the priorities, which they assure us remain the same.

Individualized education, one not aimed toward students who "parrot back what they have been told or read" (because one weird recurring theme in reformsters is a desire to reform the schools of the 1960s).

Normalizing unconventional models. Specifically, privately owned and operated ones that involve no government oversight, tax dollars, or responsibility for people who can't pay their own way.

Ending residential assignment. You might think this means "find ways to get kids from poor neighborhoods into the schools that rich kids go to," but that does not seem to be the case.

Modernizing education funding. Vouchers. Just say the word, team. Vouchers. Because vouchers' most important characteristic is that in exchange for cutting parents a small check, the state washes their hands of any responsibility to provide people with an education, which in turn gets rich people out of having to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children. 

There's been a lot of rebranding going on and plenty of tweaking of the message, but at root, this all feels very familiar. Privatize. Shrink government. Let people sink or swim in a free market, just as God intended. But the logo is pretty, and the graphics are great. 

The Search For Computerized Essay Grading Continues

It is the dream that will not die. For some reason, there are still people who think the world would be a better place if student essays could be evaluated by software, because reasons. The problem has remained the same--for decades companies have searched for a software algorithm that can do the job, but other than deciding to call the algorithms "AI," progress has been slim to none.

And yet, the dream will not die. So now we get a competition, mounted by Georgia State University has teamed up with The Learning Agency Lab (a "sister organization" with The Learning Agency).

The Feedback Prize is a coding competition being run through Kaggle, in which competitors are asked to root through a database of just under 26K student argumentative essays that have been previously scored by "experts" as part of state standardized assessments between 2010 and 2020 (which raises a whole other set of issues, but let's skip that for now). The goal is to have your algorithm come close to the human scoring results. Why? Well, they open their case with a sentence that deserves its own award for understatement.

There are currently numerous automated writing feedback tools, but they all have limitations. 

Well, yes. Primarily they are limited because they don't work very well. The contest says the current automated feedback programs is that "many often fail to identify writing structures" like thesis statements of support for claims. Well, yes, because--and I cannot say this hard enough--computer algorithms do not understand anything in the sense that we mean the word. Computer language processing is just weather forecasting--looking at some bank of previous language examples and checking to see if the sample they're examining has superficial characteristics that match what the bank of samples would lead one to expect. But no computer algorithm can, for instance, understand whether or not your supporting evidence provides good, er even accurate, support.

The competition also notes that most current software is proprietary so that A) you don't even know what it's trying to do, or how and B) you can't afford it for your school, particularly if your school is resource-strapped, meaning that poor kids have to depend on regular old humans to grade their writing.

For extra juice, they note that according to NAEP, only a third of students are proficient (without noting that "proficient" on NAEP is a high bar). They do not cite any data showing that automated essay grading helps students write better, because they can't. 

But if you enter this competition, you get access to a large dataset of student writing "in order to test your skills in natural language processing, a fast-growing area of data science."

If successful, you'll make it easier for students to receive feedback on their writing and increase opportunities to improve writing outcomes. Virtual writing tutors and automated writing systems can leverage these algorithms while teachers may use them to reduce grading time. The open-sourced algorithms you come up with will allow any educational organization to better help young writers develop.

902 teams have already entered; you can actually check their current status on a public leader board. There are lots of fun team names like Feedforward, Pomegranate, Zoltan and Fork is all you need. Plus many that are not in English. Poking through the site, you can see how much the writing samples are referred to ad discussed as data rather than writing; many of these folks are conceptualizing the whole process as analyzing data rather than assessing writing, and in fact there don't seem to be any actual writing or teaching experts in sight, which is pretty symptomatic of the whole field of automated essay evaluation. 

Who is in sight?

Well, you'll be unsurprised to find that the competition thanks The Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative for their support. Schmidt Futures, the name you might not recognize here, was founded by Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, to technologize the future.

And if we look at the Learning Agency and the Learning Agency Lab, it's more of the same. The Agency is "part consultancy, part service provider," so a consulting outfit that works to "improve education delivery systems." They tout a team of "former academics, technologists, journalists and teachers." Sure. We'll see.

The outfit was founded by Ulrich Boser in 2017, and they partner with the Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Georgia State University, and the Center for American Progress, where Boser is a senior fellow. He has also been an advisor to the Gates Foundation, Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign, and the Charles Butt Foundation--so a fine list of reform-minded left-leaning outfits. Their team involves former government wonks, non-profit managers, comms people and one woman who used toi teach English at a private K-12 school. The Lab is more of the same; there are more "data scientists" in this outfit than actual teachers.

I'm going out on a limb to predict that this competition, due to wrap up in a couple of months, is not going to revolutionize writing assessment in any way. But the dream won't die, particularly as long as some folks believe that data crunching machines can uplift young humans. 

The Other Pandemic Unmasking

At first glance, I suppose it seems like a reasonable set of solutions. 

Expand the pool of who can be a substitute teacher. Anyone with a college degree. Anyone who already works in the building or district. Anybody with a high school diploma. 

In Oklahoma, police officers can now step in as substitute teachers (in Moore, they've already done so). In New Mexico, the governor has called in the National Guard to fill the teacher gap. 

It is amazing how quickly some folks have pivoted from "We must insure teacher and educational quality" to "We must get students into a building with the word 'school' in its name no matter what actually happens once we're inside." It turns out that an awful lot of that big talk about educational excellence and quality was insincere posturing and as long as we can get schools open and students stuffed inside with something resembling a probably-responsible adult with a pulse, that's good enough. Oklahoma has been oh so concerned about making sure nobody was in a classroom indoctrinatin' students, but now it turns they mostly just wants someone--anyone--in that classroom so they can keep the building open.

It is the ultimate expression of "anyone can do that job," even, incredibly, dwarfing the old Teach For America line that we can teach an Ivy League grad everything they need to be an awesome teacher in just five weeks. Hell, now we can teach any adult how to be a perfectly adequate teacher in no weeks.

For what other profession would we consider this a solution. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Fleegleman, but Dr. Hergensheimer is not well enough to perform your heart surgery. But don't worry--Sgt. Blinko from the 15th Precinct will handle it." The doctors and nurses are all out sick, so we'll just have the custodians and administrative assistants run the place. The plumber is too ill to fix your clogged sink, but here's a recent high school grad with a piece of wire. The judge is laid up with illness, so we've brought in the kid who delivers the judge's newspaper. In what other profession would we settle for any warm body to step in for the job.

Look, I know that the defining feature of education during the pandemic has been that all available options stink (though with two years to work on it, we should have figured out how to make some, like remote learning, stink much less). I get that all available choices are sub-optimal. And I have respect for those who have struggled to find a path to quality education for students, even when their choices are not the ones I would make.

But at the same time, there's no escaping that when push came to shove, a whole lot of people decided that they were far more worried about making sure school buildings were open than they were about what was going on inside them. Some have revealed that in their list of priorities, teacher safety and teacher quality come in far behind teacher presence and teacher pulse. Education, shmeducation--just get that child car service running again, whatever it takes!

I just want us all to remember this when the day comes for them to start posturing again. Their mask is off, and we can see what's underneath.

The Fallacy In Learning Loss Panic

Back in March of 2021 (roughly a thousand years ago in pandemic time), I made the argument that Learning Loss is educational halitosis; you start with a real thing, dress it up in some faux science, and use the ensuing panic to sell your preferred remedy. 

The tricky thing about Learning Loss panic is that it's not entirely made up--there are certainly some pieces of some sorts of learning that didn't happen when we were all pandemicking around with schools fully closed and half-assed distance learning and all the rest of the pendemess. But as soon as you start claiming that you can measure what has been lost in months or days or liters or cubic centimeters or hectares of learning, you are shoveling fertilizer in hopes of growing an orchard full of money trees. 

But one element of Learning Loss is just plain made up. Let me tell you what it is, and how to respend to people who try to push it on you.

For maximum panic, some folks are claiming that a drop in test scores due to Learning Loss indicates a future loss of earnings for individuals and economic strength for countries (for example, this from one of the leading promoters of test scores = future earnings, Eric Hanushek). All of this is based on a correlation between test score and life outcomes, except that there are problems with using this correlation.

The big one is that it is just a correlation, like noting that kids who wear larger shoes in fourth grade tend to be taller as adults. There is a connection--it's just not cause and effect. Students who come from a wealthier, whiter background tend to do better on tests. Students who come from a wealthier, whiter background tend to do better in life. In fact, let's trot out this old chart:

There has always been a critical piece of proof missing from the test score = life outcomes assertion. Does changing the score change the student's future? In other words, if I make my fourth grader wear larger shoes, will she grow taller as an adult? 

The very reformy Jay Greene, while of the very reformy University of Arkansas Education Reform Department, looked for evidence of that very thing--and found nothing. 

There is no reason to believe that getting Pat to score higher on the Big Standardized Test will earn Pat more money at work and a better life. None. Raising Pat's test score above the score that Pat would have achieved in some other unboosted alternate universe accomplishes nothing except getting Pat a higher score. (Well, unless you impaired the rest of Pat's education to get that score increase). 

By the same token, if Pat gets a lower test score than Pat would have "normally" achieved, there is no reason to believe that Pat will now suffer lower wages and lifetime earnings, an uglier spouse, unhappier children, and a less friendly dog than Pat would otherwise have experienced. The focus should not be on what a score predicts, but what a change in score from the "expected" score predicts.

People like Hanushek (and the sloppy journalists who depend on him) will say, "Research says that people with low test scores have low lifetime earnings."

The response to this is, "What does research say about how getting a lower-than-predicted test score? Is there research to show that lowering the test score lowers lifetime earnings? How does varying from the expected test score affect the student's future?" The answer is that the research says that it doesn't.

Bottom line: there is zero reason to believe that low pandemic-related test scores are indicative of future financial and economic disaster for individuals and countries.  

Research: Yes, Common Core Was Bad

Did Common Core fail so badly that its failure is visible from another continent? Did it have negative effects on education as a whole? Can fancy research prove what teachers knew a decade ago? Will economists ever get tired of pretending to be education experts? And can researchers get all of this right and still draw the wrong conclusion?

Let's look at a new working paper from the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, written by Benjamin W. Arnold at the Liebniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, and M. Danish Shakeel at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  It's entitled "The Unintended Effects of the Common Core State Standards on Non-Targeted Subjects," and as soon as teachers read that title they can already answer that question, but lets see what these scholars come up with.

The early indicators are a little concerning--among the folks thanked for discussions that "greatly benefited" the paper are Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson, and there is a great deal of baloney in here, like a repetition of the now-much-aged cheese that test scores are "an important predictor of economic outcomes at the individual and societal level." Really? Does Estonia, long eating the world's lunch on the PISA test, have the leading economy on the globe? The authors will also throw in with the notion that the differences in test scores by race (the "achievement gap") "have been shown to account for relevant shares of the racial/ethnic gap in adulthood social and economic outcomes." 

Given all this, you will be unsurprised to discover that the authors leaned heavily on data from Achieve Inc, a group that intended to cash in big on the Common Core revolution. They code states based on whether they adopted the core "permanently" without noting the distinction of states that dis-avowed the Core and replaced it with the exact same standards copied over on a different template. And central to the data set are results from the NAEP, the maybe-not-really gold standard of US testing.

The paper does offer some droll statements like noting "anecdotal evidence that the CCSS presented challenges in teaching and testing to schools" and that "CCSS-based standardized tests were not always suitable." And there is some impressive stats-and-economist gobbledeegook formulae.

Yet, despite all that, the result they arrive at is exactly the one that actual classroom teachers predicted four paragraphs ago. Exposure to the Core resulted in no improvement in reading and math. Exposure to the core lowered student achievement in subjects other than reading and math. That effect was worse for disadvantaged students.

Why? Well, you already know. But using NAEP teacher self-reported info, the researchers gleaned that "the adoption of the CCSS has shifted the instructional focus away from the non-targeted subjects." 

This is not news to anyone who has, for instance, been told by administration that the budget only has funds for things that will be On The Test. It will not be news to anyone who watched schools cut electives and the arts and even recess to make room for more test prep. The Common Core-based test and punish movement turned schools upside down; instead of being there to serve the students need for an education, the CCSS policies sent the message that students are there to serve the school's need for scores on the Big Standardized Test. And of course that hit disadvantaged students the hardest, as school used batteries of practice tests to identify students who needed to dragged across the cut score line by stripping everything from their education but reading and math test prep. 

Millions of teachers have stories. In my own district, the middle school principal pulled students from history and science so they could have double-periods of math and reading every day, which not only gutted their education, but installed a deep hatred for math and reading (and testing). 

Set up a system that judges schools and teachers based on scores from narrow tests focused (poorly) on two subjects, and you send a clear message to schools--your primary job is to get students ready to take a test on these two subjects. The results of that message are predictable, which is why so many of us predicted them and why research keeps revealing those exact results.

And yet, just in case you think reform-minded folks have learned a lesson from all this, I present the opening sentence from the writers' concluding paragraph:

In terms of education policy, our results suggest that the CCSS might have been more beneficial if it had been adopted for all school subjects. 

Yeah, that's it. The problem with Common Core was that there wasn't enough of it! Of course, the authors want to add science and history, but what about arts and phys ed and health and a few other subjects? 

It's almost interesting to contemplate an alternate universe where Coleman and Zimba somehow decided that other subjects mattered and also had some buddies who wanted to whip up some standards for those subjects, and then we'd have to get Big Standardized Tests for all those subjects and new "aligned" materials and a magic formula to combine and balance all the scores and--well, it would have been a might cluster-farfignugen that would have collapsed under its own weight, which in many ways would have been better than what we ended up with. 

When You Open Schools To Religion...

 There has been a push for a while now to open public schools to religion, and it has been pushed a variety of ways, such as the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

That suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 2001. The Good News Club is a program of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a group founded in 1937 by Jesse Levin Overholtzer with the express purpose of evangelizing children. They claim 109,828 clubs worldwide. In the 90s, a couple decided to establish one of these after-school clubs in Milford, New York, but the school said no based on the stated intent to have  "a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson and memorizing scripture." Deeming the club religious instruction (which it totally was) the district said no, and many lower courts agreed. SCOTUS, however, did not. Justices Thomas, Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy were okey-doke with this (Breyer concurred in part). 

And so US school have to provide use of the facilities to after school religious groups.

And so, here comes the next obvious step.

Meet the After School Satan Clubs. 

Religious counter-protesting has a fine history in this country, with such notable groups as the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster. The Satanic Temple is one such group, with their not very diabolical motto "Empathy. Reason. Advocacy." They've run a number of attention-grabbing activities, including declaring abortion a sacred ritual as a direct challenge to the Texas abortion laws.

After School Satan Clubs ("Educatin' with Satan") also seem to be out to make a point. The club is aimed specifically at schools with Good News Club chapters, and as its mission--

Proselytization is not our goal, and we’re not interested in converting children to Satanism. After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us.

We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors.

Their FAQ include an answer to the question why:

The pre-existing presence of evangelical after school clubs not only established a precedent for which school districts must now accept Satanic groups, but the evangelical after school clubs have created the need for Satanic after school clubs to offer a contrasting balance to student’s extracurricular activities.

They have made their point in a handful of districts, where parents have seen info about After School Satan Club and freaked the hell out. 

One Moline parent, who shared a photo of the club's flyer online, received incredulous responses to her post, including this: "Wait what????? How is this even a thing? Who approved this?"

The word "approval" is exactly on point--breaking down the wall between church and school will inexorably lead us to a world in which folks call for government to approve religions. Historically, this has never ended well. Somehow people keep expecting that religious freedom should only mean freedom for their own religion. But when you break down the wall between church and school, you should not be surprised when the Satanic Temple walks through the gap. 

(Someone popping up to explain that this is a super argument for choice in 3.... 2..... 1...........)

ICYMI: It's That Time Again Edition (1/16)

 By "that time" I mean time to once again see who will win the annual contest to twist some MLK quote into the pretzel form needed to support their particular cause. Turns out, every year, that MLK would have supported virtually everything. Yay. Here's your reading list for the week.

In our alarmingly unequal society, public schools by themselves cannot be the great equalizer

Jan Resseger has a look at another chapter from an upcoming anthology about public education. This one's by Kevin Welner and it's a good one.

Sheriff uses grades and abuse history to label schoolchildren as potential criminals

In Florida, they're using a Minority Report style system to violate privacy in the name of catching future criminals

Florida officials tried to steer education contract to former lawmaker's company

Corruption in Florida? I am shocked. Shocked! The Tampa Bay Times has the story

This vested interest in the children's incompetence

Teacher Tom has a particularly insightful post here about how some grown-ups are not great with kids.

Florida bill would allow cameras and microphones in classroom

CBS news reports. Come for the terrible new ideas, and stay to find out what terrible old ideas are already being used in Florida classrooms.

Stitt's education bro tries desperately to repair image

Oklahoma's ed chief is doing poorly. This week he really put his foot in it, and tried some light damage control.

Kids on the "McDonalds track" are living in a rigged system

Laura Bryce writes an op-ed for the Inquirer about the mess that is PA school funding

Down goes Frayser

Gary Rubinstein has long kept an eye on Tennessee's Achievement School District, the special state takeover turnaround system that has never done anything but fail hard. Here's the latest update on this sad history.

The pastor, the speaker of the house--and a Christian Academy educator

Nancy Flanagan looks at the sad, greasy tale of Lee Chatfield

Indiana SB 167

The latest version of one of those bills that wants to make sure that teachers don't teach anything a certain parent might find uncomfortable. Blue Cereal Education takes three posts to break it down-- I'll let you start with the third and work your way backwards.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes, I looked at the special features of South Carolina's voucher bill.