Some Georgian GOP politicians recently had a run-in with school choice politics Betsy DeVos style. Or as the lede at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it:
A national advocacy group promoting school vouchers bombarded conservative Georgia voters with glossy mailers tying Republican state legislators from their districts to Stacey Abrams and other “radical left” figures. It backfired in spectacular fashion.Monday, March 7, 2022
Georgia GOP Meets The Real Betsy DeVos
Sunday, March 6, 2022
ICYMI: Spongebob Edition (3/6)
I'm coming off a week of working as the pit conductor for a local high school production of Spongebob: The Musical, which turns out to be actually a great little show, hilarious and silly and yet with much to say about friendship, science denialism, and how folks react to a crisis. And the music is great. It's not for your average high school--the technical requirements are considerable--but my old friends are talented leaders and they have a well-developed network. It was all a reminder of how rich and complicated the whole business of developing student theater can be, and how it gives some students a fantastic growth experience that helps them bloom and become the talented humans they can be (and none of it is useful for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test).
But that was my adventure. Here's your reading from the week.
New teacher certification exam Will hurt Texas educationSaturday, March 5, 2022
College Board Vs. CRT Panic
4) AP opposes indoctrination. AP students are expected to analyze different perspectives from their own, and no points on an AP Exam are awarded for agreement with a viewpoint. AP students are not required to feel certain ways about themselves or the course content. AP courses instead develop students’ abilities to assess the credibility of sources, draw conclusions, and make up their own minds.
As the AP English Literature course description states: “AP students are not expected or asked to subscribe to any one specific set of cultural or political values, but are expected to have the maturity to analyze perspectives different from their own and to question the meaning, purpose, or effect of such content within the literary work as a whole.
5) AP courses foster an open-minded approach to the histories and cultures of different peoples. The study of different nationalities, cultures, religions, races, and ethnicities is essential within a variety of academic disciplines. AP courses ground such studies in primary sources so that students can evaluate experiences and evidence for themselves.
Friday, March 4, 2022
KY: The Panic Comes For Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton is a national damn treasure, but one Kentucky state senator had the guts, briefly, to express concern about Parton's signature philanthropic effort being a piece of the Great Indoctrinatin' going on in America.
Stephen Meredith was a hospital CEO before being elected to Kentucky's senate in 2017. Wednesday he was in committee discussing SB 164, a bill for creating a state partnership with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you'll find. The Imagination Library puts books in the hands of children 0-5. Once a month, a free book arrives addressed to your child. The Board of Directors has been signed up since birth; the books are wonderfully curated, selected for age appropriateness and an absolute model of blending classic and new and diverse books. It is literally one of the best things a wealthy person has ever done.
But Wednesday, Meredith had some concerns. Noting that the bill had "age appropriate" in the language, he wondered "if that shouldn't include subject appropriate as well"... "given today's environment."
Sigh. Okay, I don't know Meredith, so maybe what he meant to suggest is that they needed to head off crazy-pants CRT/LGBTQ protestors so they wouldn't descend upon the bill. But he did note that he's heard about "inappropriate literature" given to pre-schoolers. And he also notes that "players change over the course of time, and things get shifted," so I guess he's worried that Indoctrinators might somehow take over Parton's program.
Stella Parton, Dolly's sister, was having none of it, and on Thursday morning she was on Twitter calling him out:
I'm outraged this morning that anyone, let alone a GOP Sen. Meredith from the grat state of Ky. Would question my sister Doly or even insinuate something sinister about the "Imagination Library" for children. Appalachian people have been maligned as uneducated and to have a Senator from Appalachia state even think this much less say anything derogatory about this incredible program is an outrage!! I would like to see your IQ score Sen. Meredith along with at least a dozen more of you GOP nimrods. The next you know, you will be trying to burn children's books.
Most new outlets have edited her response down a bit. As you can see, she was pretty pissed. She also accused him of using the phrase "indoctrinate the children," which he didn't. The whole blow-up was enough to make Dolly Parton trend on Twitter Thursday.
Meredith told a news reporter, "I'm disappointed, but you know, that's social media today." In the end, he did vote for the bill.
If nothing else, the flap suggests that there are limits to what folks can say in their pursuit of anti-indoctrinatin'.
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
Learning Loss and the Big Standardized Test
You want to talk about learning loss? Then talk about all the learning lost to high stakes testing. 1/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
Not just the test itself, but the time spent in test prep and just plain learning how to take that kind of test and speak the test manufacturers' language. Plus the pre-test tests (to see how well we're on track for the test) 2/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
People who have not been in the classroom for the last couple of decades have no idea how much education time has been eroded by high stakes testing. 3/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
Want to address learning loss? Never mind tutoring and summer school. In most schools. you could add 6-10 weeks of instruction just by completely scrapping the Big Standardized Test. 4/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
And it wouldn't cost the taxpayers a cent. But it would make test manufacturers and the Data Gods sad. "But we need the data to address the problem," say testocrats. 5/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
It's a Kafkaesque bad office joke--let's make people spend more time drawing up reports on how the job is going so that they spend less and less time actually doing the job. 6/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
Note also that we have the research telling us the data collected doesn't help improve test scores https://t.co/OG4TdXbMRQ 7/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
And test data isn't any good at improving teacher evaluation, either.https://t.co/Fs3pO6Kj2S 8/
— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022
It is amazing to me that twenty-some years on, we are still here. Responders included a huge number of teachers telling stories of the time lost to testing and test prep, plus a much smaller assortment of people saying things like "But how will we know how students are doing" and "If you just teach 'em good, the test scores will take care of themselves."
How can we be a whole generation down the road and still be wasting time on the Big Standardized Test as if it were a valuable data-gathering tool that told us Many Useful Things about education? How can the backbone of our educational accountability systems be a bad test that, in its high-stakes threats, brings more damage than help?
Catalyze Challenge: Throwing Money At Edupreneurs
It's another one of those things that helps you realize that some reformsters are operating in just another world entirely.
Meet the Catalyze Challenge. It's a grant competition that "supports innovation in career-connected learning that meaningfully bridge education and career." Its analysis of the need is the same old same old-- "Ourt education system promises economic opportunity for all--but right now, too many students graduate high school and college without the resources, skills, and support to thrive in their careers."
Press about the initiative says it's about how "to help foster new learning models." The idea is to fund "education entrepreneurs" aka education flavored businesses. And if we look at the funders--well, it's a familiar roster.
Sponsoring partners are the Joyce Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Charkes Koch Foundation, and American Student Assistance. Koch has loaned Brennan Brown, their director of Education Partnerships, as an advisor. Brown's previous education experience is teaching at Northwood University for a decade. Northwood is located in Midland, Michigan; they're home to the DeVos Graduate School of Management and annually award the Richard DeVos Young Entrepreneur Award to honor the Amway founder who was "a true friend of Northwood University."
The challenge has two tracks. For Accelerate Award you can score up to half a million dollars; the Ignite Award goes up to $50K. There's a lot of talk about unlocking career success for students, equity, scalability, career identity development, post-high school pathways, and being groundbreaking (at one point the term "moonshot" crops up.
The implementing partners include good old NewVentureFund, a kind of venture philanthropy/lobbying/consulting supposedly-left-tilted outfit, connected to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and considered by some to be a dark money group, and they appear to indulge in plenty of the same sort of faux group and astro-turfy sponsorship we know and love from other sources, and they themselves come under the umbrella of DC-base Arabella Advisors.
But the lead operational group appears to be Common Group, a "social impact consulting firm." They partner with groups including the Charter School Growth Fund, The Walton Foundation, Education Quality Outcomes, Christensen Institute, and, of course, the Charles Koch Foundation. Their team rings all the familiar bells. Alicia Bolton, the Program Manager is a product of the Broad Academy and worked in the Obama/Duncan Ed Department before becoming the Director of Caree Education in DC schools. The Principal, Colleen Miner, spent three years at McKinsey. Senior Advisor Rachel Wexler lists herself on LinkedIn as a "social impact consultant, change agent, and executive coach; she's worked for Penn Foster Education and Pearson. CEO George Vinton started out as a Client Director for Unipart Expert Practices (consulting firm) before getting a Masters in Education at Harvard and starting Common Group in September of 2020, in San Francisco.
There are a thousand rabbit holes to go down here, but the pattern is already there. The usual reformster social engineering philanthropy along with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professional consultants and people who think that someone can be unironically called a Change Agent.
This is the second round of these awards. School districts are allowed to apply, but in fifteen previous winners there are no public schools in sight. There are three initiatives for using digital remote materials to rural schools including the Crowder College initiative to "reshape the narrative about career opportunities in rural America to include a flourishing digital workforce"), a couple of IT programs (one provides BlPOC students a chance to "get real-world experience doing web development and social media marketing for mission-driven organizations), some tech-based interny things, and lots of tech-based distance programs. Lots and lots of computer technology based stuff, much of it connected to a particular geographic area, and some of it looking suspiciously like elevated language wrapped around fairly pedestrian and redundant programs; a couple of these sound suspiciously like "We'll give them some software that lets them look up different careers."
But then, that's the kind of stuff when you have a pile of money driven by people who don't actually know much at all about K-12 education, and/or are most interested in pushing ideas of their own, and who harbor the underlying bias the public education needs to be hit by "break things and move fast" rather than reinforced and supported, that the solution for educational progress must somehow be wrapped in the entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just a sample of what's out there, and probably not the most harmful thing that anyone is pushing, but a couple of million dollars represents a pretty large opportunity cost. After all these years, you'd think they would get better at throwing money around, but the signs are not good.
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
Burnout and Moral Injury
I never had a name for it. But there was a frustration, something like anger and a kick in the gut, that I was being required to do things as a teacher that I knew were bad practice, not just useless in achieving success, but detrimental to my students.
I first encountered the term "moral injury" in writing about the medical field (in an article no longer accessible on line). But I recognized it immediately from the last many years of my teaching career, and I think it's a useful concept to add to the whole "Is it low morale, or burnout, or what?" It has roots in work with soldiers and veterans and is sometimes connected to PTSD.
Here's a useful definition from Psychology Today:
Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty.Teaching is not simply some kind of technical job; it has a strong moral component that requires teachers to bring their values to work. When the job, either on the national or building level, requires them not just to leave those values outside the classroom, but to actively violate them, then you get the kind of massive job dissatisfaction we're seeing these days.