MI: Who's Paying To Force Vouchers?

Betsy DeVos is feeling her oats these days, with a big push in Michigan to finally install education savings accounts--those neo-vouchers beloved by her crowd. Trouble is, her crowd hasn't been able to convince voters to share the love. But because of an odd quirk in Michigan law, the folks at Let MI Kids Learn have a shot at doing an end run around the voters and the governor. Just 8% of the people who voted in the last gubernatorial race can send the petition to the legislature, where it can be voted up or down and the governor doesn't even have a veto option.

So who is backing this play for neo-voucher ESAs in Michigan? Is it a groundswell of grass roots support? Are the common people rising up to back their beloved benefactress and her pet project (last seen as a failed attempt to offer national Education Freedom Scholarships)? 

Nah. Of course not. 

Let's take a look at the Michigan State Department statement for the April quarter and see who's throwing money at this stuff this year (there's more information to be found looking into previous quarters).

Top of the list-- Oberndorf Enterprises of San Francisco (the one in California, not some San Francisco, Michigan, that you've never heard of). Oberndorf Enterprises is a sort of pass-through outfit through which the Oberndorf's donate to some of their favorite things, including school choice. Wiliam Oberndorf is the current chairman of the board for American Federation for Children, the pro-choice advocacy group he founded with Betsy DeVos.

Oberndorf is in for a cool quarter million.

Also in for $250K is John Kennedy, of Autocam Medical, and Michael Jandernoa of 42 North Partners, two names that often turn up with DeVos political giving.

At least they're actual Michigan residents. But big big bucks are coming from DC via the State Government Leadership Foundation, a conservative money-moving operation which just kicked in $250K and $140K, bringing their grand total so far up way over the half mill mark.

Daniel DeVos kicked in $100,000 (that's Betsy's brother-in-law). 

Tony De Nicola also in for $100K. He's with the New York/San Franciso firm of Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe, though he lives in Florida. Richard Haworth (Mackinac Center board) and David Fischer (car salesman), both of Michigan, each contributed $100,000.

The Michigan Guardians of Democracy kicked in $50. GLEP (Great Lakes Education Project) Education Fund, another DeVos organization, contributed work in the form of staff and facilities,. because what good is financing an organization if you can't just redirect them to work for your own project?

Elsa Prince Broekhuizen gave $25,000; that's Betsy DeVos's mother. Mark Murray gave $10K, Alan Hoekstra $5K. Mighty Michigan did some work for the campaign. 

And now we're down to the grass roots. Five guys gave $100. Two people made $50 contributions. Six people chipped in $25, and one person contributed $20.

So, fourteen grass roots supporters this quarter. If this thing becomes law, it will be because a bunch of rich folks backed it, not because of any upswelling from the Regular Folks. Michigan is in danger of providing a graphic example of Oligarchy. Here's hoping it fails.

FL: Big $tandardized Te$ting Not Going Anywhere

There was a brief flurry of excitement last fall when Governor Ron DeSantis and his education sock puppet Richard Corcoran called for an end to Florida's most recent iteration of the Big Standardized Test, the FSA. 

Some folks were happy to hear the news. Others were looking suspiciously at the fine print. And now that springtime has rolled around, it's clear that the folks who were suspicious were correct. High stakes testing is dead. Long live high stakes testing. Shocking as it may seem, Ron DeSantis was just blowing smoke.

FSA has been replaced with FAST, which effectively replaces one BS Test with three "progress monitoring" tests, the third of which carries exactly the same consequences as the old FSA tests, including third grade reading retention and grading the schools.

As the Florida Education Association said when the new law was signed, "This is not what DeSantis promised, and most importantly, it is not what is best for Florida's students," which strikes me as a statement that could just be reissued pretty much every time DeSantis does anything related to education. 

Florida law caps the amount of time students can spend on testing at 5% of the year. This is a silly law; it's a great idea to keep actual hours wasted on testing to a minimum (particularly since the more hours you have students spend staring at the test, the more prone testing will be to generate meaningless results), but the real drain on classroom time is test prep. Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours spent getting students ready for the test--and why wouldn't schools do that when their rankings depend on the results? And don't even open your mouth to tell me "Well, if teachers just cover the standards well the test results will take care of themselves," because you might as well say, "I am a dope who does not understand how teaching, testing or students function." 

So is this transition about anything other than making a meaningless grand gesture to generate good PR with parents? I think so.

Plenty of attention has been paid to how DeSantis manages to attack and undermine public education, and I think that keeps us from fully appreciating how well he monetizes it. 

As Bob Schaeffer of FairTest points out, this the fifth time in about two decades that Florida has revamped its testing.  The much-ballyhooed rejection of math textbooks has shifted the market in Florida in favor of a publisher with former ties to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Likewise. DeSantis's demand for purge of Common Core from Florida's ed standards instantly created a market for new textbooks. (Meanwhile, Florida's results still kind of suck)

FCAT. Common Core. FSA. BEST. Every time Florida revamps standards and/or tests, school districts have to drop a ton of money, and taxpayers get to shoot some more funding to textbook company, software developer, or test manufacturer. How many millions of dollars have Florida taxpayers poured into these overhauls?

Every time Florida switches tests or standards, they help somebody augment their revenue stream. The new shift in testing is not at all what he promised taxpayers, but I'll bet it makes some other folks mighty happy. 

Actors vs. Show Stealers

This is one of those stories that isn't about education--at least not yet.

In the UK, Equity, the actors trade union, is launching a campaign to "stop AI stealing the show." 

They note a whole host of techy-created problems:

Performers are having their image, voice or likeness reproduced without their consent. Or pay.

Contractors are keeping performers in the dark about what, exactly, their rights are in an AI contract. 

There's a whole world of issues beyond the now ever-present use of deepfake and AI technology to create performances by dead actors in big time movies. 

Equity presents some stories like this one:

In the last six months, my voice has been used in huge marketing campaigns by global companies. I don't receive a penny, even though I believe my contract does not allow for third party advertising.

In 2018, I was hired to do a text-for-speech job for a translation app. But in 2020 these recordings were used for the first ever English test-to-speech voice on TikTok, who was not my client.

I used to joke with my students that after I died, I would have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics and be installed on a track in a classroom while recordings of my lessons played. That's no longer a joke--it's an absolutely digitally achievable possibility. The equity complaints remind us that while we're used to seeing dead performers revived on film, techs could do the same thing for the living.

Stories like this remind me of all the times that administrators ask teachers to produce curriculum and lesson plans that are exacting enough that anybody--or anything--could implement them. Can a computer reproduce your classroom performance? And if somebody decided to try to do it, would you have any protections against it? 

I'm Not Going To Defend SEL

Social and Emotional Learning is the new target of the GOP attempt to set multiple education brushfires in hopes of stampeding voters towards a Republican victory (as well as one more way for the authoritarian crowd to hammer home their central point of "Trust nobody except Beloved Leader"). The attacks range from overblown to intellectually dishonest to giant piles of bovine fecal matter to the odious, evil charges that the teaching profession is simply a haven for groomers. 

And there is irony in these attacks from the right, because SEL is just the latest packaging of what we used to call "soft skills," and some of the greatest push for getting these into schools has come from the business community ("Hey schools! Fix my meat widgets so they communicate and cooperate better!!")

All that said, I'm not going to be the one to defend SEL in the classroom.

Perhaps I should say "formal SEL instruction." SEL has always been in the classroom and always will be, because it's impossible for an adult teacher to lead a roomful of young humans through learning and education and all the bumps and interactions that come by putting so many human beings in one room--well, you can't navigate any of that without including SEL. "Don't interrupt" and "keep your hands to yourself" and every group project ever are part SEL. Everything a teacher imparts, directly or indirectly, about how to work with, talk to, and get along with other humans is SEL. 95% of all the "this teacher changed my life" stories are about SEL and not actual subject content. So it is impossible to remove SEL from a classroom.

But formal SEL is another thing.

As soon as we try to formalize SEL instruction, we run into all sorts of problems. Are we doing it to help people get a better job and better grades or to be a better human being? And if it's the latter, as it should be, who the heck is going to define what a better human being looks like? And is there just one definition? And if not (as is true), then exactly what sort of assessment are we going to use to measure the "effectiveness" of the program or the social and emotional learnedness of the students? And can you promise me that you aren't going to record all that data to build some sort of digital social and emotional swellness file on each student? Also, will the program require every teacher to have a trained counselor level of expertise? Every single one of these questions ought to stop the march toward formalized SEL instruction dead in its tracks. But it hasn't-not any of the times SEL, under various monikers has come trundling down the tracks.

We've been through this over and over and over again. If you were teaching in the 90s. you probably remember Outcome Based Education, which joined a desire to reduce all education outcomes to observable behaviors (you can thank OBE for "the student will be able to...") along with an intent to include "non-cognitive objectives" in the program. 

That agitated all manner of social conservatives, from Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh to the original Mom for Liberty, Phyllis Schafly rose up against objectives focused on things like self-esteem and "environmentally sound decisions." They saw overreach and an attempt to instill certain values in students, and they weren't having it. The backlash stomped OBE dead as any kind of widespread, adopted education policy.

Our current educational focus on standardized measurement and data generation makes this the worst possible era in which to attempt formal SEL instruction; there is no such things as a standardized version of a good human. Broad strokes (Treat others with respect, don't be an asshat) are great, but their application looks different on different human beings, and any attempt to measure these human social and emotional qualities with a standardized test is just silly (and probably will result in an assessment easily gamed by everyone who can see what answer they're "supposed" to give). 

At the same time, programs that aim to teach cooperation, tolerance and general getting along are always going to rub some people the wrong way. CASEL, the super-duper clearing house of all things SEL, has plenty of student goals like "fewer conduct problems" and "positive social behavior" which seem superficially unobjectionable, but when taken together seem kind of heavy on compliance. Tolerance seems great, but aren't there some things that shouldn't be tolerated? An awful lot of people would say yes, whether their Intolerable Thing is LGBTQ Stuff or Nazis. 

Formal SEL instruction can't help itself--it wants to codify and clean up the general messiness of human interactions, and some people will always squawk when it's their particular mess that gets ruled out of bounds. And right now, nobody has their squawkbox more warmed up than the CRT panic anti-LGBTQ crowd. 

SEL is a complicated topic for an era that hates nuance and complexity. Most of the current complaints about SEL are bunk, but they were entirely predictable because we've been here before, but that doesn't mean that there aren't reasons to be highly dubious about formal SEL instruction, but that doesn't mean that SEL isn't a crucial and important part of education, but that doesn't mean it can (or should) be easily standardized, codified or measured, but that doesn't mean teachers shouldn't be doing it. How do you do that? It's complicated. I wrote this five years ago:

How do you take SEL "content" and separate it from everything else, when your character is first and foremost the "How" of conducting all the other business in your life? How can you possibly split your life up so that "be ethical" is over here and "conduct daily business" is over there? Trying to develop character separate from conducting all the business is like trying to develop a Southern accent separate from speaking. It's like trying to practice swimming far from any water.

You don't get rid of bullying by running bullying programs one hour a week. You get rid of bullying by running a school that never tolerates-- or models-- bullying ever. If for one hour a week you talk about how bullying is bad, but the rest of the week you run a classroom where it's understood that some people deserve to be punished or hurt or made to feel small, your bullying program is a huge waste of time.

If you spend an hour a week talking about how to be a decent person, and the rest of the week behaving like a lousy person, you're wasting that hour. And if you spend the week being decent people, what do you need that hour of class for?

And, I would add now, you don't model character for young humans by engaging in lying and slander to score political points. If 2022 is, as some activists are promising, the year that SEL takes over for CRT as the object of panic du jour, good luck to us all. But just because you call out the throwing of poo, that doesn't mean you have to support the thing the poo's being thrown at.

ICYMI: An Actual Nice Weekend Edition (4/24)

 Well, looking out my window this weekend does not stink, so that's a plus. Now let's see what there is on the reading list for the week.

If the Florida rejection of math textbooks did nothing else, it prompted plenty of mockery. Here are three of the top mocks of the week.

Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker with "DeSantis Warns That Math Makes Children Gay"

Carlos Greaves at McSweeney's with "Math Concepts the State of Florida Finds Objectionable"

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post with "DeSantis saves Florida kids from being indoctrinated with math."

Meet the 74's all-new student council. I know-- not everybody loves The 74, but they occasionally score with a solid piece of journalism, and I read everybody (because you should). They've put together this group of teens, and I encourage you to read it for no other reason than to be encouraged that these young humans exist in the world.

Don't trust a charter school network whose objective boils down to profits. Gloria Nolan used to work for the charter school industry. In this op-ed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she explains why she supports the proposed rules changes for federal charter grants.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro speaks up. Speaking of support for the charter rules reforms, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee had a few spicy words on the subject.

Our Erie students can't learn if they don't feel safe and secure. A powerful op-ed from a teacher who was in the building during a school shooting in Erie, PA.

How the Fight Over Critical Race Theory Became a Religious War. David French in the Dispatch says "This is the wrong time to close Christian hearts and minds to challenging debaters about race and justice in the United States."

What's driving the push to restrict schools on LGBTQ issues? Steve Sawchuk at EdWeek looks at six particular aspects of the current push.

The strange land where we find ourselves now. Nancy Flanagan thoughtfully ties together many threads of our current situation.

It's testing time in our schools. Standardized exams are a terrible way to measure student learning. Gina Caneva publishes an op-ed at the Chicago Sun Times that says everything we already know, but need to just keep saying. 

Resisting efficiency in literacy instruction. Paul Thomas blogs about keeping our eyes on the right ball. Efficiency is not it.

FL: More Book Purging Includes-- Everywhere Babies??!! Seriously??!!

Oh, Florida, what a crazy place you are. 

Currently in the news is the Walton County School District, which just pulled over 50 books from its library.

The list, as noted in a district press release, was one that came from an unnamed "outside group" and included books that group "deemed inappropriate." It also notes it received the list "along with many other educational systems."

The list was quickly posted to twitter by Daniel Uhlfelder (who says the list came from a group associated with Moms for Liberty)-- here it is.

Most of these are the usual suspects, a bunch of familiar titles that get some folks heavily agitated. What got the school district and their superintendent plastered all over the interwebs is the inclusion of Everywhere Babies, by Susan Meyers and Marla Frazee. 

This is nuts. We have this book at my house; we read it many many many many times to the twins when they were younger and it was a favorite of theirs. Its inclusion on this list tells us a lot about the people who are hunting down these books and demanding that school district Do Something. 

When I saw the book title on the list, I though about a couple of images that might have triggered some activist's gaydar (it would have to be one of Frazee's images because nothing in the text could offend even the thinnest skinned humans). The book is loaded with images of many types of family combinations, from dads holding kids to more elderly relatives. Could some of these be what excited book opponents? Let's look at possible offenders,.

Are those two exhausted women (though the white-haired person could be a long-haired male) both parents of the child in the crib, or a parent and her friend?

The most likely culprit, this street scene shows what appears to be two men walking with arms around each other (a thing that, as we know, only gay men do). 

The two guys on the right look, to me, like two dads hanging out on the edge of the mall play area, but if your gaydar is on high alert, I suppose they could be read as a gay couple.

Pretty sure the sexual orientation and gender identity of this child is not clear. This picture just entertained the Board of Directors a great deal when they were toddlers.

So, what have we learned here?

Well, first, I'm not particularly excited by particular book removals. This Verbotten list will become a bunch of people's shopping list, and Everywhere Babies is going to explode in sales, which is great, because it's an awesome book. It has been true since Boston banned Huckleberry Finn-- a good, public banning is the best marketing that money can't buy. 

It's also worth noting that the book also shows lots of loving hetero couples and parents acting parenty--in other words, providing illustrations of sexual orientation and gender identity, which means that this book, like many others, does in fact technically violate Florida's Don't Talk About Sex Or Gender Law (I know that's not as snappy as "Don't Say Gay," but I think it's more accurate). \

This also illustrates how opponents of this stuff aren't just going after "graphic" depictions of sex and gender stuff, because there is nothing graphic in this book. Heck, you have to really want to see LGBTQ couples in this book (for good or for ill) to see them at all. This is not an objection to overt sexual content--it's an objection to even sort of acknowledging that LGBTQ people exist.

I learned from the Washington Post interview with the creators of the book that this is not the first time the book has been targeted, which perhaps explains its presence on this list.

As with all such events, the other major element is a nervous administrator. Superintendent Russell Hughes told local media--well, something...

What is necessary varies. I don’t know if I define the word ‘necessary’ as necessary to those who are opposing, necessary to those who didn’t want to, it was necessary in this moment for me to make that decision and I did it for just a welfare of all involved, including our constituents, our teachers, and our students. I’ll continue to do those things and perhaps add some.

The district press release makes his reasoning a little clearer.

With reports of movements underway across the state coupled with legal implications and the potential undue stress to my District and staff, I am not willing to place any WCSD personnel in the cross hairs of this kind of perilous circumstance. I want to emphasize that NO “book ban” has occurred in Walton County. Any headlines or news stories as such are misinformation, inaccurate, and false!

The Walton County School District is committed to a culture which we proudly call EPIC. I am steadfast in the vision of excellence, choosing to focus on students and academics in these divisive times. Leaders, teachers, administrators, staff, and families in Walton County are focused on end of the year assessments, achievement, and graduations, which have earned the District the #5 ranking in the State of Florida.

So, roughly, "I decided to get these books out of the way so that we could focus on doing out jobs without having to worry about dealing with controversy and citizens using their newly-created power to sue us over any book they object to." So maybe not very brave, but arguably practical.

In other words, the chilling effect of the Don't Say Things We Don't Like law is working just as designed. 

In the meantime, you can order your copy of Everywhere Babies right here (currently on backorder). 

Amazon Has Some EdTech Trend Ideas

This week, EdSurge featured some "sponsored content" (aka advertising made to look like an article). The article was written by Katie Herritage (or at least one of her interns), currently the AWS Global Leader, Worldwide Customer Innovation and Acceleration Program, and is entitled "7 Edtech Trends to Watch in 2022: A Startup Guide for Entrepreneurs." AWS is the sponsor.

AWS is Amazon Web Services, a division of the Amazon empire that provides hosting for corporations and governments and just a whole lot of people while owning like a third of the cloud market. They are the reason that even if you are trying not to give Amazon any of your money, you probably are anyway.

Prediction articles are a staple in the edtech world, and they all have to be read the same way. "This is what's coming next" really means "this is what we hope to make money on soon." These articles are not works of thoughtful research; they are marketing copy. 

But as such, they are a useful guide to what edtech folks are going to try to sell us next. So let's take a look at AWS's seven "trends."

First, before we even get to the trends, know that AWS has the AWS EdStart program, its "edtech virtual startup accelerator, designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics and campus management solutions on the AWS cloud." Super. Because Amazon's attempt to enter the education market have been so super duper in the past (more on that in a bit).

Trend #1: Data is abundant and the key to today's edtech solutions.

Yes, please, more data mining. That has been super for education so far, as test-driven education has continually harvested plenty of data and accomplished absolutely nothing with it. Herritage writes "as the pandemic and shifts to virtual learning are only giving the flood of data more strength and momentum" and hold on a minute-- did AWS somehow miss the widespread dissatisfaction with virtual learning that has been an ongoing theme of the last two years? Also, as always, the edtech visionaries skip over the question of data quality. Harvesting junk data has become a huge industry in edtech, but junk data is junk and no amount of crunching piles of poo will yield diamonds.

Trend #2: Artificial intelligence and machine learning are powering the latest generation of edtechs.

Mostly there is no such things as artificial intelligence. Just algorithms. Machine learning isn't really learning so much as building an algorithm's ability to recognize patterns. We still have precious little evidence that these provide any useful applications for education. There are some limited applications for doing grunt work; the endorsement here is from a company that makes digital flashcards. 

Trend #3: Game-based learning is transforming how students learn.

This is one of those trends that has been right around the corner since the days (thirty years ago) when my kids were playing with the Zoombinis. There's no question that a game can be the spoonful of sugar that makes boring repetition go down smoothly, but there continue to be limits. For one thing, students aren't stupid--they know when you're trying to trick them into learning stuff. For another, today's hot new game is next month's boring old Over It.

Trend #4: Edtechs are at the forefront of digital transformation in the classroom.

Or, in plainer language, computer software for classrooms is the leading source of computer software for classrooms. Sad clown is sad. Tautologies are tautological. "As education institutions lean into technology," says Herritage, there's an opportunity to sell them more technology. I'd like to believe that school districts are getting smarter about how they buy this stuff, and I'd really like to believe that edtech companies are getting smarter about providing what teachers want and not what edtech companies want to sell. 

Trend #5: Workforce upskilling is being supplemented by edtech solutions.

I sure hope that the marketing whiz who coined "upskill" got a nice4 bonus, because what word, managing to suggest that when your last job gets "outsourced" and you have to get trained for some new meat widget position, it's a step up and not just a further grinding down of human beings by late stage capitalism. This trend says that when your new employer wants to train you in their brand of meat widgetry, they'll do it with a computer. This may be the most accurate prediction on the list.

Trend #6: Edtechs are being called upon to help with student wellbeing.

Translation: schools are going to be implementing social and emotional learning programs, and some of them will want to implement the programs via software on screens. Furthermore, parents are going to get antsy about the data being collected by these programs (as well they should), so you'd better be able to do a god imitation of security protocols. 

Trend #7: Augmented reality and virtual reality are top of mind.

"Top of mind"?! What the heck does that even mean? Herritage insists that "the metaverse...is here" which I guess means that AWS is prepared to back Zuckerberg's play for the metaverse as the Next Big Thing. I admit, the idea of virtual field trips ("Everyone put on your headsets and we'll tour the Globe Theater") is appealing. But since teachers can't even reliably say "Everyone open up your Chromebooks and we'll work on our Google Docs," I have my doubts about just how close the metaverse actually is. 

It's worth noting that these "trends" are aimed at developers and not educators. In other words, the message is not "here are some things you should plan to incorporate in your classroom" but is instead "you could make some money if you started a business doing one of these things." As such, it's unfortunate that none of the advice and trendiness here suggests that entrepreneurs might want to involve actual educators in their plans. But there are certain things that have remained consistent about the edtech industry--one is that they will consistently and repeatedly write checks that their products can't cash, and the other is that they will create products at teachers rather than with them.

Amazon's own record with educators is not great. Way back in 2016 they tried to launch Amazon Inspire, an attempt to create a marketplace of teacher resources that immediately got in trouble because it had zero safeguards against ideas that were not so much "shared" as "stolen." The GM of the project, Rohit Agarwal ("serial entrepreneur") walked away less than a year after launch (nowadays he's co-founder and CEO of DoctorPlan, a medical data platform). Amazon Inspire supposedly snuck back to life in 2018, but right now, the Amazon Education page instead features something called Amazon Ignite that "connects educational content creators with Amazon customers" and allows you to "sell your original teaching resources." You have to ask to join. It's free to join, but Amazon takes a cut of everything you sell.

Are these real trends? Well, someone at Amazon hopes they are, or at least hopes a sufficient number of entrepreneurs hopes they are. Should actual educators pay attention to articles like this? Only if you want to be forewarned about what education-flavored products tech vendors are going to try to sell you. Heck, maybe they'll really happen. After all, have edtech companies ever lied to us before?