PA: In Erie, School Shooting Followed By Teacher Walkout

On Tuesday (4/5) at 9:30 AM, the school day at Erie High School was interrupted by a shooting. Several shots were fired within the building, with one person injured. There was, of course, a lockdown (more about that in a moment) and a hefty police response.

The shooting was described as "an isolated, targeted incident." These days, I guess, it's good-ish news if a school shooting is committed by one student with a particular beef with another student, and not some sort of grandiose attempt to terrorize the entire school. Yesterday, the shooter turned himself in.

School was canceled for the rest of the week, and next week is a regularly scheduled spring. The district announced that it will be working on a comprehensive plan to re-open safely. Said Superintendent Brian Polito, "The well being of our students and staff is and always will be our priority, and we will take every measure possible to ensure their safety and security."

Teachers, however, delivered a message today via a letter from their union: they will not be back in the building until safety issues are fixed; they will be teaching remotely. They included a list, and it's kind of mind-boggling.

The shooting prompted a lockdown--but what do you do if there's an active shooter lockdown and your classroom doors don't lock!

Listed concerns from the letter:

*Fully functioning locks on all interior doors to rooms in which a staff person is assigned, to include the ability to lock and unlock the door from within the room.
*Fully functioning locks on all exterior doors to the building.
*Fully functioning communication devices for every staff person (i.e. walkie talkies, phones, PA system, etc.)
*An increase in security and/or police presence in highly visible and well-trafficked areas.
*The installation of fully functioning metal detectors. Until that can be accomplished, all students shall be scanned with handheld electronic devices which detect weapons.
*Clear, established procedures related to discipline and student behavioral interventions which are in writing and distributed to all staff. In addition, these procedures must be consistently applied and consistently enforced by all staff and administrators.
*Written instructions for student removal procedures, distributed to all staff.
*Fully functioning security cameras.
*All EEA members shall have access to the “Behavior” tab in Infinite Campus for every currently enrolled student at the High School.

These are the items on the "we're not coming back till these are done" list. There's a second "and we better get moving on these" list that includes things like staff training for emergency and crisis situations and security blinds. 

Erie has had more than its share of issues; it was just six years ago that the then-superintendent proposed closing the public high schools because they couldn't afford to run it any more. The city's district remains a poster child for charter-induced death spiral. So it's not the hugest surprise that they somehow haven't been able to put locks on classroom doors-- they've been spending money on marketing battles.

I cannot imagine what a huge gut punch it must be to learn that there is an active shooter in your building and at the same time to realize that you don't even have the fundamental things in place to protect your students and yourself. Particularly if you have already spent months and months trying to get those issues corrected. 

In an era in which educators and school personnel are warning of a rise in violence directed at them, it seems like having the ability to lock gunmen out of your room would be a pretty basic piece of infrastructure. Not only should a school be a safe place, but letting things get this bad invites over-correction and treating students like the enemy, which is also very bad news. Meanwhile, schools throughout northwest PA are practicing their lockdown drills this week. Here's hoping that Erie can sort things out by the time spring break is over. 

MI: DeVos and Far Right Team Up To Crush Public Ed (And Voting, And A Few Other Things)

Michigan's right wing has a problem, and she's living in the governor's mansion. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has vetoed many favorite proposals, including bills aimed at tax cuts, limiting voting rights, and vouchering education.

So they've developed a new plan--just do a complete end run around Michigan's elected leaders and get their wish list mandated. Michigan allows something called a citizen initiative, by which citizens can petition for a law and send it straight to the legislature. It takes just 8% of the voters from the last gubernatorial race to send a bill to the legislature where it can be voted up or down, with no option for a veto. 

The Let MI Kids Learn petitions bill themselves as a "scholarship" because "voucher," "taxpayer funding for private schools," and "tax dodge" aren't popular branding. The website for the initiative announces itself as aimed at taking power away from The Evil Union (though Michigan is a Right To Work state, apparently the Evil Union still exerts tool much power). The proposal is thin on details, but it appears to be a combination of a tax credit scholarship (instead of paying your taxes, contribute to your favorite private school) and education savings accounts (get some free money to spend at the educational-flavored product vendor of your choice). 

Of course, you know which Michigan resident loves this whole thing. Betsy DeVos and her family have donated a big ole ton of money ($400K just last December)  to supporting the initiative, as well as lending her face and voice to the effort. You may recall that Betsy DeVos resigned because she found the Trumpian rhetoric and January 6 insurrection just too much, but she seems to have set aside her aversion to far right misbehavior; according to Kathryn Joyce at Salon, this big initiative finds DeVos allying herself with folks like Stand Up Michigan, a "patriot" group whose protests have drawn the same kind of crowd that plotted to kidnap the governor.

DeVos has been promoting the initiative with familiar half-truths. She has argued that this is a chance "for parents to take control of education in Michigan," but vouchers don't give a parent the ability to enroll their children in schools that won't accept them. These vouchers, like all vouchers, mostly allow the state to say, "Hey, we gave you a small check. Your child's education is now nobody's problem but yours. We wash our hands of you." Nowhere on the website does it talk about protections for parents and students, or oversight and accountability for the businesses that will be hoovering up those sweet, sweet tax dollars. 

Or as Casandra Ulbrich, chairman of the State Board of Education explains

Michigan’s public schools are not for sale. We have an abundance of choice. This isn’t about choice. This is about privatizing education. This is about taking public education dollars and turning them over to private institutions that are not accountable to taxpayers, do not have to report anything to anybody, and can use that money in any way they want.

Ulbrich is part of For MI Kids, For Our Schools, a group mounting a counter-offensive against the attempted dismantling of public education in Michigan. They are attempting to counter the misinformation and just-plain-lying being used to collect signatures for the voucher plan. They are pointing out the lack of accountability in the new system, and the lack of choice for parents who do not have "desirable" student to enroll. 

Just because you have a voucher does not mean you can send your child to the school of your choice, because private schools retain the right to accept or reject as they please. Meanwhile, a voucher system knocks another hole in the public school funding bucket, and in Michigan, that bucket has already taken a beating--thanks, of course, to DeVos money.

DeVos's intentions have never been particularly secret. The government should not be in charge of education; the church should. Unions are just a way for lessers to exert power they don't deserve; lessers (like teachers) should know their place. Schools should not be for elevating everyone, but for sorting people into their proper place (kind of like the free market separates poor lessers from their rich betters), and so everyone should find a school that is the "right fit." DeVos isn't particularly big on democracy and its trappings (those unruly mobs); she's more of a Christianist plutocrat, and as such would prefer an education system that allows folks to make money implementing God's Kingdom, and not a system that takes money from betters in order to fund public schools for lessers. 

In other words, using a weird trick to do an end run around actual democratic institutions is just fine if it helps dismantle just a little more of the public education system. I sure hope that folks in Michigan are paying attention and not getting snookered into further dismantling public schools. And they'd better keep an eye on those other initiatives aimed at voter suppression and (of course) tying the government's hands in case of a health crisis. God luck. 

 

How To Innovate On Assessment (And Why States Won't)

At Bellwether Education Partners, Michelle Croft marks Testing Season by wondering why states have not been using their new-found sort-of-freedom-ish-ness under ESSA to innovate with the Big Standardized Test.

Despite rhetoric over the years about innovations in assessments and computer-based delivery, by and large, students’ testing experience in 2022 will parallel students’ testing experience in 2002. The monolith of one largely multiple-choice assessment at the end of the school year remains. And so does the perennial quest to improve student tests.

It's a fair point. States could be getting clever; they aren't. 

Croft cites a couple of possible explanation for the tepidity of the states. First, states are still staggering under the interruption of the BS Test over the past couple of pandemess years. Second is the challenge of meeting the accountability requirements of ESSA. States have the option of applying for the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority, but the major impediment is that new testing systems would have to be backwards compatible--in other words, people (well, state and federal education bureaucrats) would have to be able to compare new scores to scores under the old system. That right there is pretty much a game ender.

Croft has a couple of ideas about targets that a new system should aim for. One is to improve score reporting so that it can "meaningfully and easily communicate results to educators and families." Another is to try to improve "teacher classroom assessment literacy." 

Regular readers know my feelings about high stakes testing, which I would call the single largest, most destructive, most terribly toxic scourge on public education in the last 25 years. At the same time, I absolutely believe in accountability for public schools. But I am in absolute agreement with Croft that the state response to ESSA re:accountability has been--well, she says "tepid" and I would say "crappy." So, without getting into the nitty gritty devil-dwelling details, what requirements do I think a new, revamped system would need to have? What goals should we set out to meet?

Don't throw good money after bad. Suck it up and face the unfortunate truth that the last twenty-some years of BS Test data are junk, and there is absolutely no point in trying to pursue backward compatibility. We don't need the new data to be comparable to the old data, because the old data aren't particularly useful to begin with. Now is the perfect time to cut losses and start over.

Figure out what it's for. One of the fatal weaknesses of BS Testing accountability is that a single test was supposed to be useful for a dozen different purposes. That is not how tests work. Every tool is made for a particular purpose; you cannot use a hammer to hammer nails, drill holes, screw in screws, cut lumber, paint siding, and comb your hair. But the Big Standardized Test was supposed to be a measure for a myriad of purposes, from informing curricular choices to allowing state educrats to compare schools to evaluating teachers to telling parents how their kids were doing. It should not be a radical notion to declare that you intend to settle on the purpose for a tool before you design and built that tool. 

Note: this discussion should also include some "why" questions, e.g. why do we need to track individual students' results over their career? There may be good answers to some of these why's, and knowing them would help better focus the instrument we're designing. 

Also note: the discussion of purpose should stick to real things. Croft works back around to the notion that we need to track students and school achievement so that we can allocate resources and support, an argument people have been making for several decades despite the fact that has never, ever been how it has worked. Low test scores have not gotten schools extra help.

Create assessments that actually assess. Pro tip: whatever purpose you settle on, a multiple choice test will not be the best way to assess it. In fact, an assessment that can be scored by a computer probably isn't it, either, even though so many people seem to really, really want a computer-managed assessment system. 

Don't build it backwards. One of the problems with that insistence on computer assessment is that you immediately put yourself to the business of asking what a computer can assess instead of what you need to assess. That has been one of the major failings of the modern assessment system, which has asked what it can assess quickly, simply, and profitably, rather than what needs to be assessed. It's the old story of the drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post even though they lost the keys a hundred yards away-- "I'm looking here because the light's better." 

None of these things are going to happen, mostly because they are time consuming, because they are costly, and because the people making these decisions will get their advice from test manufacturing companies and not actual educators. Quality assessments that can't be scored by an algorithm are expensive and take time (particularly if you let people see them in order to better interpret the results, requiring the test manufacturer to come up with new materials every year). Croft, in another post, notes that she and her husband found accessing  and interpreting their child's results daunting (and they are trained psychometricians), but test manufacturers have been resistant to transparency both because of proprietary info concerns and because building a better interface would cost more money. 

There are way better ways to assess schools, teachers, students, etc than those we've been using (try Jack Schneider's Beyond Test Scores for an example), and lots of reasons to understand that the Big Standardized Test is a terrible solution (read Daniel Koretz's The Testing Charade for many of them). After twenty-five years of this baloney, we really ought to be better at it. 

Is The Big College Enrollment Dip Bad News?

Looking at reports that the pandemic resulted in many, many missing college students, Mike Petrelli (Fordham Institution) is musing that perhaps this is not bad news.

On top of the pandemic dropouts, we've also got the plummeting number of students signing up for a college education. And while regular readers know that I don't very often agree with Petrilli, in this case I think he may have a valid point or two.

Petrilli notes the correlation between college and positive life outcomes, though it's worth noting that this is a correlation only, and like the fabled correlation between third grade reading levels and high school success, it probably points at some other factor that is behind it all (spoiler alert: socio-economic background). Petrilli delivers a sideways nod to this by noting that the benefits of college more precisely correlate with completing college.

Petrilli crunches some numbers. 65-70 percent of high school grads enroll in college (that's pre-pandemic). 37.8% of college students don't complete a degree within six years.  Equals about 900K persons leaving college without a degree every year. 

So why is college completion at such a low rate? Petrilli notes that the problem might be that many students were never prepared to succeed in the first place, and he uncharacteristically doesn't blame this on terrible public schools (this time). Makes me nostalgic for the days when reformsters would point at college remediation courses as proof that K-12 schools needed to be more Common Corey. Instead, he says this:

To put it succinctly, many young people don’t do well in college because they aren’t very good students in an academic setting, they haven’t done very well in school, and they don’t like it all that much. Which may make us wonder why we encouraged them to go to college in the first place.

He's not wrong. Today's young adults have been subjected to a lifelong barrage of pressure that they should head off to college. These are the same folks who were once the eight year olds that Arne Duncan wanted to be able to tell they were on track for college, back when the feds believed that success was defined as "everyone enrolls in college."

I taught 11th graders of all levels for decades, and I could see how this played out. Many of my students aimed determinedly at blue collar work, the jobs, as Mike Rowe, that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. But the "get into college" bug was everywhere, and I lost count of the number of times I delivered a sermonette entitled "After you get in, they'll expect you to be able to Do Stuff." Along with another one entitled "If you don't like school stuff, college is probably not going to excite you." For my students in the career and technical ed track, I started each year by explaining that this course was aimed at workplace skills and language use tailored for students who would, in two years time, be out on their own in the "real world." It was not, I explained to the walls of my classroom, not going to cover college-specific academics, because a welder doesn't have a pressing need to know how to create an MLA-compliant term paper.

Nevertheless, I would repeatedly hear some version of, "I'm definitely going to college, but I don't want to take the college prep class because it's too much work and/or too hard and/or not what my friends are taking."

I often imagined this conversation between colleges and high schools.

College: Why did you send us this student? They aren't ready to be here at all!

High school: Did you look at the transcript we sent you, or the letters? They were an indifferent student who took our non-college-prep courses. We told you they weren't ready. You accepted them anyway.

College: Well, their check cleared. And we make extra $$ by making them take remediation courses. This is all your fault. You guys suck.

This behavior by colleges only fed the problem. We could tell students they needed the college prep classes to get ready for college, but they already knew a dozen students from last year's senior class who had done poorly in non-college classes and they had been accepted.

So Petrilli argues that maybe the students who aren't in college are the ones who wouldn't have succeeded there.

He also argues that it's may be a positive sign that we're getting over our college fixation, and that the pendulum is swinging back toward a healthy respect for career and technical education, and as someone who taught in a district where CTE was always a strong feature, I would applaud such a shift.

And third, he holds out the hope that this all might create pressure on colleges to shape up, and stop admitting students who will only be tuition paying members for a few years before they drift off, leaving nothing but their money behind and-- yeah, he's dreaming on this one.

The factor that Petrilli does not mention is that a college education has become a cost-inefficient prospect that involves tremendous debt without a commensurate return. One need look no further than teaching, which has become really expensive to get into, but which doesn't pay much better than it did a decade ago. And it just keeps getting more expensive, leaving students gambling a ton of debt on what they've been told is the key to getting into the middle class. I shouldered the bulk of the debt for my two older children's college education, and didn't finish paying it off until after I'd retired; I cannot imagine what they would have gone through trying to manage that kind of debt in their twenties and early thirties. It's nuts. College would be an elites-only luxury, except that college as we have it can't afford to chase that small a market, so instead we keep increasing the ways that students can wrack up debt. There was a time when I worried that I would be cut off and not allowed to accrue any more college debt for my children and boy, what a naive dope I was. They would have let me sink myself as deep into debt as long as I was willing to keep digging, and I was a grown-ass adult. What chance do young people have?

So the big dip could be a good thing, or at least a healthy thing, unless you think there's some sort of international college diploma-counting competition for world supremacy (and not, say, a How Cheaply Can Your Labor Force Sell Themselves competition), or unless you think it's not healthy for a country to get higher education only to the upper classes. Because if that was the case, then it would be bad news. Here's hoping that someone in the halls of ivy figures it out.

ICYMI: Can It Be April Already Edition (4/3)

Every Sunday I offer up a compendium of notable readings from the previous week, because there's just so much out there and just in case you missed something, here it is. You can make sure you don't miss this weekly digest or any other scintillating posts by subscribing via the little box over in the right column (I have no idea where it is on your phone). There's also a Facebook page where you can catch all the writing I send out into the world.

So here's some reading for this week. Remember that if you think something is valuable and worthwhile, you can amplify by sharing the post through whatever avenues you use. 

Shares in education publisher Pearson slump

Let's start the week with a little schadenfreude for everyone's favorite education profiteers. Reported by The Guardian.

Union says Urban Pathways charter school teachers being cut over organization efforts

Some charter operators don't care for teachers unions very much, and this one in Pittsburgh has decided to take the not-very-clever approach of firing teachers who try to talk union. 

CRT debate repeats past battles about state history textbooks

Rebecca Griesbach at Hechinger becomes one more writer to notice and lay out how the CRT panic certainly looks like plenty of other previous panics over education.

Relay Graduate School forced onto DC Black community

Thomas Ultican always does his homework. This time, he's looking at how several top-notch educators lost their jobs for standing up to a plan to inflict no excuses training (from a fake graduate school) on teachers in Black neighborhoods of DC.

The politics of calling for no politics: 2022 edition (South Carolina)

Paul Thomas looks at how CRT panic is playing out in SC, and the truth behind calls for "no politics"

The lesson in Republican embrace of "Classical Education."

Annie Abrams at The New Republic (warning--limit to number of free articles) looks at the charters pushed by outfits like Hillsdale College and asks if there are any useful lessons in this regressive approach. Maybe. 

Girl pressured by teacher to write out Pledge of Allegiance is awarded $90K

Well, there was certainly no commie indoctrinatin' going on at this Texas high school. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Why teachers are afraid to teach history

Rachel Cohen with an excellent, even-handed, well-sourced story about how the various anti-CRT gag laws are playing out on the ground. In teh New Republic (warning--free story limit applies).

We all know teachers are underpaid, but who imagined it was this bad?

Emily Tate, writing for Mother Jones, talked to a lot of teachers. She also had access to an eye-opening data set from the NEA, and it's worth reading this article just to get a peek at that. 

Teacher fired for giving LGBTQ pride bracelets to students

Yet another reminder that your state doesn't have to have a Florida-style gag law for teachers-- they can go ahead and squelch teacher expression about "controversial" issues. This is an Ohio district that forbids political and religious topics.

The censorship story I can't tell you

Kelly Jensen at Bookriot has a story from Alaska, where conservatives are looking to cleanse the Anchorage public library.

The fight for Black lives needs to happen in schools

Wenimo Okoya writing for Hechinger talks about the issues of suicide by Black youths--and what schools can do to help. 

Get those kids a dome

Andy Spears with this infuriating Tennessee tale. No money for schools, but half a billion for a stadium.

Admit it: testing our kids has been a failure

Fred Smith at The Daily News (warning--they want your email address to read) points out what teachers already know-- the Big Standardized Test needs to go.

Education reformers are waging a war on play

Nora de la Cour at the Jacobin magazine has a well-detailed look at how ed reform has been bad news for play, and that means bad news for children.

NPR: School choice in Oklahoma

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider did an interview for an NPR show spotlighting school choice. The links to give it a listen are here.

A broad, vague, nuts law in Indiana

An op-ed from the South Bend Tribune highlights how an Indiana law allows charters to waltz in and take public real estate for $1.

The end of Mr. Fitz

This week, David Lee Finkle ended his long-running teacher comic strip Mr. Fitz. So this is the perfect time to hunker down and scroll through the archives and take a look at this great slice of education cartooning.

Uh Oh. Don't Say Gay Compliance Angers Moms For Liberty

Well, I (among others) told you so. The letter has been tearing around the internet and, apparently, Florida, and yesterday, Moms For Liberty grabbed a high handful of dudgeon and sputtered onto the Tweeter machine:

The letter writer is, of course, absolutely correct. This is exactly what the backers of the "Don't Say Gay" law asked for, and then asked for again when they insisted repeatedly that it was mean and misleading to call it a "Don't Say Gay" law. 

Now all that's missing is for a parent to exercise the right, baked right into the law, to take some school to court for making their child use a bathroom based on gender, or for using books that include mothers and fathers. 

Or someone may be trolling the Don't Say Gay folks and this is just a goof from the social medias, That doesn't really change the accuracy of the letter or the outrage of some people reading it. I agree that I will eat my hat if a teacher actually sent or will send it.

Meanwhile, to fight back against this outrage against which it is now time to "take a stand," folks like the Moms for Liberty will have to decide if they want to defend the law by saying out loud that it is supposed to be a Don't Say Gay law and not apply to any heterosexual stuff. Grab some popcorn and stay tuned.

Moms For Liberty's Big Takeover Plans

Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms For Liberty and experienced Florida rabble rouser, appeared on Steve Bannon's show to share some of her thoughts about ongoing culture battles, and at one point she laid out her plans for what comes next:

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?

JUSTICE: Absolutely. We're going to take over the school boards, but that's not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they're going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system. Right now, parents have no recourse within any public education district.

The "no recourse" talking point sits awkwardly next to a description of the recourse (democratic elections) that Justice (who was defeated when she ran for re-election to her own school board seat) plans to take, but sure. Parents will take over school boards, fire everybody, and hire The Right Sort to replace them. And while some training is needed for school board members, the main thing is to run, because

But what my message today is – get out and run for school board. It's a part-time job. It's not a full-time job. Anyone can do it. You do not need to have a background in education and we need more people.

Justice was on Bannon's show War Room: Pandemic, because angling for political victories and advocacy spins is just like what folks are going on in Ukraine these days. She talked about the heroism of Ron DeSantis, and of course parental rights:

Parental rights are rights that every parent has, and the government does not give them to you, and they cannot take them away. Every parent has the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, their medical care. That includes mental health, by the way, their education and their values, education, their morals, their religious and character training. All of these things lie within the responsibility of the parent. We, as parents, are happy to own those responsibilities within our rights.

It underlines the way in which the parental rights movement at its most extreme seems to have nothing at all to do with a children's rights movement. I'm a parent, and I absolutely get the rights and responsibilities that parents have to protect and guide their children, but there's a line past which it all starts to become creepy, as if you own this child and will engineer the tiny human to turn out to be exactly what you choose them to be, and much of the parental rights activist rhetoric lives close to that line. "I have total ownership and control of my child" is exactly how you get to the notion of "My child didn't turn out exactly the way I demanded they turn out, so somebody else must have messed with their head." Parental rights are a real thing, and parental responsibilities are a very real thing, but children are actual human beings and not lumps of clay to be crafted by other adult humans.

Justice and Bannon are sad that folks are lying about Florida's bill, which is just a parental rights and anti-grooming bill and not-- they interrupt themselves before they can say what it is. But Justice says she doesn't see the big deal "We said no sexual orientation instruction or gender identity instruction in grades K through three" and many of her fans and Bannon think is should be K through twelve. Yes, why is everyone so upset that supporters of the bill equate teachers, LGBTQ persons, and pedophiles? (Also, implying that Disney only opposes the law because they are interested in sexualizing children.) As with all talk in support of the law, Justice and Bannon skip past the part where any parent can decide for themselves what constitutes "instruction" about sexual orientation or gender identity, so teachers now have to watch out for any lesson that could lead to Pat talking about having two Mommies at home. Though it would be entertaining if the first parent lawsuit under the bill is some parent arguing that boys and girls restrooms are a means of instructing about gender identity. Maybe fans of the law should just wait until we see how the court challenge turns out.

Justice throws around some numbers about public school failure, which serve mostly as a good example of why school board members and other people who want to talk about education policy should know something about it (she cites 29.8% of Kentucky third graders reading on grade level, but she appears to be talking about proficiency, which is above grade level). This, somehow, is related to talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in first grade.

Justice could be on the show because she was in DC to talk to some GOP House members. She can't imagine why Dems don't want to talk to her (I'm not sure, but one possible explanation that comes to mind is that she didn't call their offices to make an appointment). Which brings us back to the point at the top-- Moms For Liberty wants to talk about how to take over the states (because states rights are at the heart of all this stuff).