When The Treadmills Stopped

We've been cranking the treadmill (or, if you prefer, the hamster wheel) for years. One of the through lines of No Child Left Behind and the imposition of Common Core was that schools had become havens of laziness. Teachers were lazily allowing low expectations to let students languish, lazily, on the curbs of the highway of education.

So part of every solution involved cranking up the treadmill. Turn kindergarten into the new first grade! No, make it the new second grade!! Check to see that eight year olds are on the college track! Get those kids off the playground and back into the classroom for more educating! Test every year, repeatedly, so that we can see results NOW NOW NOW! Make middle school the new high school! Get high school students to take college courses (because if you don't go to college you'll end up broke and in a crappy job living in a tiny apartment eating cat food warmed up on a hot plate so for God's sake get to college now)! Let's get 4 year olds--no, 3 year olds-- into academic settings.

Plus one of the oddest things to bleed through from the business-minded approach to education-- the enterprise must grow from year to year. So we must somehow socially engineer each class of students to be smarter, faster, stronger, more highly achieved than the last. 

So the treadmill has gotten faster and faster and faster. And the effect on our children has been visible and sometimes heartbreaking. They grow up thinking they're on a razor's edge, one wrong move away from some disaster that "proves" how unworthy and weak they are. I wrote about this all the way back in 2015 and it's still a worthwhile, applicable read. Instead of building strength and confidence, the treadmill was grinding it down. 

And then COVID dragged the treadmill to an abrupt halt. 

Not a careful gliding slow-to-stop, but in many places as abrupt as a railroad spike through the drive shaft. People stumbled, fell, smacked their faces off hard surfaces. 

Then the panic-- we've got to get you running again, somehow, even a little. Maybe--I don't know--a virtual treadmill. Just get up and wipe that blood off your face. Walk it off. Maybe we can get you into a private treadmill.

Then many people--both young and not-so-young--slowly realizing "Hey, running like a crazy person on a cranked-up treadmill was hard, and I'm not even sure why I was doing it, and just sitting here resting and running at my own pace in my own direction--that all feels pretty good." Followed by, in the case of many adults, "I quit."

But of course while adults were free to join the Great Resignation, children were not. And pretty soon adults were pleased to announce that the treadmills were up and running again, and children had better Get Back To It. So they've been put back on the treadmill, and the treadmill has been turned back on, and the speed has been ramping up. 

Folks still in the trenches tell me that this last year has been the worst one so far. That's anecdotal. Meanwhile, articles about teen mental health decline and why teens are so sad and college students are not okay and behavior problems are rampant and, incidentally, teachers are having a rough time-- they're all over the place. 

For five minutes there was a dream that while the treadmills were down we could maybe rethink the whole treadmill thing and tweak or even replace the whole approach. It seems pretty clear that those five minutes are up, and we are shoving children (who, in many cases, have been through three or four levels of mess) back up on the treadmills and spitballing ways to get things cranked up again (maybe if we give more standardized tests, we can better figure out how to get the treadmills up to maximum speed). Even as a generation of students consider their bruised and bloody not-yet-healed knees and think, "I don't really want to get back on there."

Not only did we miss the opportunity to be better, but we have failed to learn critical lessons about how easily the treadmills can break down and crash to a damaging halt. 

When the treadmills stopped this time, we failed to do better. Unfortunately, we'll probably have another chance. 

NH: Hillsdale Is Coming To Town

In 2020, the Monadnock Freedom To Learn Coalition was formed in Hancock, NH, apparently for the sole reason of launching a local charter school. So far, they're doing pretty well.

MFTLC's leadership team includes Leo Plante. Plante is an immigrant to the state, having retired from the investment banking business. In 2020 he ran for the legislature, taking the pledge of no new taxes. He has particular taxes in mind.

“Education is kind of my main issue, and education reform is what I desperately want to see in this state,” he said. Taxpayers are being charged too much per student, Plante said, and lawmakers need to find new ways to make the K-12 experience more beneficial and efficient for students.

Plante has made friends with the Free State crowd (you can read more about their approach to public ed here). He claims the "zeal of a convert" and says “This whole ‘Live Free or Die’ motto, to a lot of people, doesn’t mean anything — but to people who are transplants here, it means a lot.” When running for office he promised to push for a charter school in Dublin.

Also on the team is Richard Merkt. Merkt is a former New Jersey pol who served in the legislature, mounted an unsuccessful campaign for governor, and, for his day job, served as legal counsel for various corporations. He retired and moved to New Hampshire, where he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the legislature in 2020 (he came in dead last out of eight candidates). His campaign themes included "lower taxes and smaller government" (also, his favorite book is the Lord of the Rings trilogy). 

Other members of the group include Augusta Petrone, whose husband was a US ambassador to the UN. She was the 1984 chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign in Iowa. They've been involved in several GOP campaigns, and were Honorary New Hampshire Co-Chairs for the Rudy Giuliani campaign in 2007. There's also Fred Ward of Stoddard, who once wrote a letter to the editor complaining about illegal migrants being bused and flown to settle in New Hampshire. 

The chairman of MFTLC is Barry Tanner. Tanner is a CPA whose work has been in the "private equity-backed healthcare services sector" biggest job has been as CEO of Physicians Endoscopy, LLC located in PA. All in all, the group seem like an interesting assortment of folks to decide to get into the education business.

In July of 2021, Tanner submitted an application on behalf of the Coalition for Lionheart Classical Academy, stating the intent to open in 2022 with 148 students K-5 and expanding by 2026-27 to 355 students K-9.

The school, the application states, will provide students "a full and complete liberal arts education that will challenge them to excel both in learning and in character," producing students who are "highly literate" and also "virtuous." They cite E.D.Hirsch. And they planned to collaborate with Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative. They would use Core Knowledge, Literacy Essentials, and Singapore Math, combined with "traditional" teaching methods. Students would receive explicit phonics instruction, explicit English grammar instruction (including sentence diagramming), ability grouping, and the Socratic method. The application covers extensive details of a fairly transparent governance model.

The application (53 pages) is an interesting look at how a classical academy expects to run, but it's a deeper rabbit hole than I want to travel down today.

The application was accepted, and Lionheart Academy acquired a location in Peterborough, and it will be a Barney Charter School Initiative School.

Hillsdale is a Very Religious college located in Betsy DeVos's Michigan; you can find a compact history of the school here. They're an old school and always explicitly Christian, but in recent years they have become increasingly Trumpy and MAGA. The Barney Initiative was their earlier foray into charter schooling.  

The Barney Charter School Initiative, started in 2010 to help 20 charter schools based on classical curriculum. The Barney mission statement used to include the goal "to recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation’s original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West.” They also turn out to use a religious curriculum. Hillsdale also offers materials that can be used to supplement education plus a whole raft or resources for home schoolers.

Literacy Essentials, one of the resources that the charter says it will use, is produced by Hillsdale, which calls it "a comprehensive literacy program for grades K-3 that combines the sound linguistic theory of an Orton-based literacy program with an easy-to-use format and a beautiful style." With phonics. The website also lists The Rigg's Institute program, which emphasizes phonics and learning styles.

One concern with a Hillsdale charter program is the school's emphasis on Christian content, but Lionheart's executive director (and member of MFTLC) Kerry Bedard says the school will not be "using the religious or faith-based aspects of the curriculum. In other interviews, she has explained that the curriculum will call for a “centrality of Western tradition” and “a rich and recurring examination of American traditions.” It will focus on classical education, which has a focus on virtue and moral character. "Maintaining that separation seems... challenging. But New Hampshire, at least for now, prohibits spending public tax dollars on religious schools, so the distinction has to be made.

Lionheart is looking for a solid start, having scored some big bucks from New Hampshire's slice of the federal Charter School Program--reportedly a full $1.5 million. Meanwhile, Bedard has been going to bat for the school in the press, arguing that they are transparent, cheap, and effective. In an interview, she told a reporter, regarding the school's classical curriculum, “It is going back to the way education was done for thousands of years. It’s an education that frees us to be fully human." There will be uniforms, and Latin for third and fourth graders.

The school has received permission to increase its initial enrollment, after holding an enrollment lottery. It has a principal: Elizabeth Wilber, who previously spent a decade as teacher and administrator at the New England Classical Academy in Claremont, NH (coincidentally, the town where I spent my single-digit years). It has hired part of a staff, and its marketing leans heavily on the "tuition-free" aspect of this "entrepreneurial, educational venture." The school's location, a 56,640+ square foot industrial and office site listed at almost $3 million, but apparently sold for $900K--that conversion job is apparently near completion. Soon Lionheart will be New Hampshire's first Hillsdale-connected charter school.

It remains to be seen how much of the school's work, funded with federal and local tax dollars, will be free of Hillsdale's religious influence, and given the Maine charter case before the Supreme Court, it may not matter. If SCOTUS says that charters must be allowed to include religion on the taxpayer's dime, Hillsdale, both in New Hampshire and elsewhere, is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the freedom to indulge in its own brand of indoctrination. Buckle up, New Hampshire. 

What Do We Do About Increased Student Violence and Misbehavior?

Anecdotally, we know something is happening. We see more stories like this one from Bettendorf, Iowa, about a middle schools that is descending into chaos because students are "out of control." We see more "trending" stories treating student disruption as an oncoming issue. And if you talk to teachers, you hear stories. You hear phrases like "I've never seen it so bad." We even have some attempts to try to collect some hard data on what exactly is happening.

Most every seems to sense, anecdotally, that something is happening, and it's not good. 

But--and I cannot stress this enough--the most useful response to this particular moment is not to automatically reach for the script for our favorite analysis of good guys and bad guys. In the few months, I've seen all of the following proposed as the root the current wave of behavior issues.

* After two+ years of pandemic pause, students have lost much of the skill of Doing School, including the part about functioning socially in a group of other small humans.

* The general atmosphere of hostility toward public schools and the teachers who work there has now percolated down and is manifesting itself in students' disrespectful behavior.

* Too much Restorative Justice.

* Too much Restorative Justice implemented badly. 

* Too little Restorative Justice.

* The pandemic has generated unprecedented trauma in young humans and they are now bringing that trauma to school with them.

* Teachers are big babies who get upset over every little thing kids do.

* Teachers are big fascist whose desire to control students is finally being justly thwarted.

* Parents won't let their children suffer the appropriate consequences of bad behavior and demand that administrators do the same.

* Permissive progressive policies.

* Repressive ed reform policies.

* Administrators are so scared of parents with lawyers that they won't draw any line anywhere.

And of course...

*Blah blah blah blah kids these days.

In most cases, what I'm seeing is people pulling out there pre-existing "This is what's causing trouble in education right now..." and slapping it onto the student behavior issue. That strikes me as a big mistake. Here are the things I believe are useful and true about this issue.

* Most of the problems are both complex and local. Therefor, there will not be a single solution that can be applied on any sort of scale. What works in East Egg this year may not work in West Egg--or in East Egg two years from now.

* Talk to--and listen to-- the students. They may not be loaded with deep insights about the human condition, but they are the ones closest to the problems. 

* Talk to-- and listen to-- staff. They are also right there on the ground where it's all happening.

* School climate is complex. If leaders are not taking deliberate steps to shape it in positive directions, it will drift wherever the winds take it, and in case you haven't noticed, the weather is pretty rough right now.

Maintaining a positive school climate is always a challenge, an attempt to hit a moving target from fifty yards with a feather in a snowstorm. It almost always requires a balance between extremes, and yet it is the extremes that somehow end up dominating too many of these conversations. Maintaining a safe and functional school requires firm, well-maintained boundaries, but keeping students (and staff) crushed under the administrative thumb is not good. 

Mostly what this moment needs is the people in charge to ask, seriously, "What is going on here?" with a willingness to look for the answer and not just confirmation of their favorite policy ideas. This kind of disorder in schools certainly isn't helping hold on to teachers, and it's not good for students at all. Anecdotally, we need school leaders to get a handle on this. 

OK: Wasting Pandemic Relief Funds

Oklahoma is one of several states where the administration thought that federal pandemic relief funds would be perfect to fund their dream of a school voucher program. But things didn't turn out so well.

Governor Kevin Stitt grabbed the $18 million of Governor's Emergency Education Relief Funds and set up some voucher programs with the goal to "just get the money to the families."

Stitt's newly-appointed education chief Ryan Walters (currently running to be elected to the post) had a bright idea-- get the Florida company Class Wallet. That's what the company does-- administers the distribution of money through voucher and neo-voucher programs. Heck--right now they're running a banner on their site trumpeting "Seeking a Solution for Emergency Relief Programs?" So Class Wallet got the job-- without even having to bid. 

Walters was a busy guy (including sending textbook companies letters warning them not to try to sneak any of that CRT stuff into Oklahoma), but he still had time to record a video entitled "How to Launch a Scholarship Program in 4 Weeks with Min Staffing Requirements," which appears on the Class Wallet channel. Yay, marketing.

Turns out Walters might have wanted to spend a week or two more on the project. $10 million went to private school vouchers because of course it did. The remaining $8 million went...well, many places, via ClassWallet's Bridge the Gap program.

Oklahoma Watch ("Impact journalism in the public interest") and The Frontier did some digging and found that GEER funds were used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, electric fireplaces, and outdoor grills. About $191,000 in federal relief funds were used to buy 548 TVs. In all, about a half a million was spent on non-school related goods.

Walters had been plenty enthusiastic about privatizing the operation of the voucher program:

“We didn’t have the government agency personnel with the background experience to do this and, quite frankly, we felt like there could be a more efficient way to do this outside our government agencies,” Walters said.

But ClassWallet has been clear that they have no intention of seeing the undercarriage of this particular bus. 

“As a software contractor, ClassWallet had neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance,” company spokesman Henry Feintuch said in a statement.

As the Norman Transcript Editorial Board reports:

While $8 million of the money was meant to fund education resources for individual students, Walters did not set any limits or guidelines on how families could use the money — when ClassWallet asked for his thoughts on limitations, Walters gave “blanket approval” to any item a family wanted to purchase through approved vendors.

And while Governor Stitt wouldn't agree to an interview with Oklahoma Watch, his spokeswoman Carly Atchison did offer this in a written statement:

During the COVID pandemic, Governor Stitt had a duty to get federal relief funds to students and families in Oklahoma as quickly as possible and he accomplished just that.

Well, yes. He could also have dumped the money in piles in various school parking lots. That would have been quick, too. 

And he wasn't all that successful. The program shut down a day early "after federal investigators and attorneys for the state discovered the company was operating on an expired contract with almost no government supervision" and Oklahoma returned $2.9 million unspent relief dollars to the feds. 

Oklahoma Watch's full report deserves your attention, and reporters Jennifer Palmer, Clifton Adcock, and Reese Gorman your support and thanks.

Meanwhile, Democrats have called for Walters to resign, which isn't happening. He still has Stitt's support. Says Atchison, "Secretary Walters is doing a great job fighting for parents’ right to be in charge of their child’s education and advocating for funding students, not government-controlled systems." Bridge the Gap was supposed to be a proof of concept demonstration of the awesomeness of vouchers, and it certainly was a program without any government controls in place. But if the dream is a voucher system that lets families spend taxpayer dollars to buy a class Pac-man console, maybe Stitt and Walters should dream a little better. 

ICYMI: Covid's Still A Thing Edition (5/15)

It has been a week at the institute. My grown son passed out while driving himself to work and tried to take out a telephone pole with his car; he's fine (the car, not so much) but the ensuing ER testing revealed that he's covid-positive. My daughter-in-law, too. So be careful out there, folks. Meanwhile, the Chief Marital Officer is in Kansas City for a family event, so it's party time for me and the board of directors. 

But we've still got some readings for you from the week. 

Four New Teachers

EdWeek presents interviews with four fresh-out-the-rapper teachers, and it's encouraging for a change.

Homeschooling and the Christian Right

MSNBC's Anthea Butler takes a look at the religious right's battle with public education, all the way up through Kirk Cameron's latest shot.

This Year

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reflects on the last school year. Because, damn.

Middle School is becoming the new High School and it's ridiculous

Melissa Fenton is a middle school mom blogging at Grown and Flown, and she's like to point out that middle school has gotten a little nuts.

Now this is how you recruit

In Chalkbeat, a story about how four teachers ended up working for their old principal.

Black teachers speak on mass exodus from schools

From Defender, a look at how Black teachers are doing right now.

Public school needs to be better at transparency

Steven Singer points out that while much of the transparency assault on schools is not well-intentioned, schools could do a lot to help their cause.

Is teaching in charter schools different?

Larry Cuban looks at a study that discovers (surprise) that charter instruction is just recycling old public school pedagogy.

Ed Tech's false promises

This story is from India, but it's still a good look at what happens when education becomes a commodity and the ed tech sector is just one more sales group.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I looked at a report on teachers of color in PA-- specifically, how manny districts don't employ any.

The Domestic Supply of Meat Widgets

In the midst of the general alarm and dismay over the leaked SCOTUS reversal of Roe, attention has been rightly drawn to one particularly alarming footnote in which Justice Alito quotes a CDC reference to the "domestic supply of infants." As Dahlia Lithwick argues, this has echoes of chattel slavery, but that's not the only thing it has echoes of.

Back in 2013, I highlighted one sentence from the Gates Foundation website. Written by Allen Golston, it was part of a piece intended to whip up business support for Common Core, and it was strikingly bad:

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

That is a spectacular amount of wrong to pack into a single sentence. Businesses do not "consume" the live humans who come out of our education system, and those humans are not the "output" of schools. But this view of schools--that they are factories whose purpose is to manufacture meat widgets for corporate use--just keeps cropping up. 

Here's Rex Tillerson (also stumping for the Core) back in 2014, being quoted in a Fortune article by Peter Elkind.

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.”

The list goes on and on. The Florida Chamber of Commerce. Every person suggesting that colleges should be evaluated on how much their grads make aka how much corporations are willing to spend to get the skills that meat widgets acquired in their higher education. Earlier this very month, Virginia's Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera (a choice-loving reformster who used to run the Data Quality Campaign, a reformy data mining operation) said that her top goal is preparing students for jobs.

"Preparing students for jobs" absolutely, positively belongs on a list of educational goals, but when it's your main goal, that means you think education is there to serve the needs of business. Your measure of curriculum value is "Will somebody pay you for having this skill or piece of knowledge?" It's the same philosophy underlying value-added measures, the whole idea of which is to measure the value added to students as if they are pieces of sheet metal. Value to whom, exactly? To future employers, of course. 

And don't forget the kinds of proposals that occasionally surface in which Grand Widget Inc says it wants the local school to create a program that will produce 100 Widget Alignment Specialists per year; mind you, they only plant to hire 15, but they want a pool to choose from. Those other 85 students who have been trained for a singular job they won't get? Tough luck for them. Not Grand Widget Inc's problem.

For certain folks in this country, there has always been a pre-occupation with treating labor as a commodity, with an emphasis on finding a cheap source ("cheap" including the idea that you don't have to spend a lot of money training it). They view schools (at least certain public schools, the kind that Those Peoples' Children attend) as a source of human capital, meat widgets that can provide the labor they're looking for. 

There's a whole sub-genre of ed reforms that they find appealing. Cradle to career data tracking, including SEL info (like, how compliant with authority is this student)--maybe put it on that blockchain thingy. With micro-credentials! So that corporate bosses can just plug in the specifications for the meat widgets they want, and the System will spit out the candidates. 

Given all this, why wouldn't they also view gestation and birth as one more step in the supply chain of meat widgets, the initial creation of human capital. Lithwick's argument is that the 14th Amendment was written specifically to protect the humanity of a family against the demands of those who would view such families as a supply of meat widgets and who wanted to ignore the humanity of the people involved so that they could be treated strictly as a source of labor.

It is an attitude that has always and forever bumped up against the idea of public education's promise to serve the students, rather than the businesses that wish to "consume" them. It's a thin, cramped, meager view of education. Instead of helping students become their best selves, and figure out what it means to be fully human in the world, this is just meat widget training. 

Shmoozing with the reformster big-wigs

Whitney Tilson is a representative of a certain type of reformster.

Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.

Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.

Well, he's not just a backer of Democrats for Education Reform--he's a founder who made a certain tactical decision to put the D in DFER.  Leonie Haimson has a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

In public, Tilson has liked to portray himself and his very rich friends as scrappy underdogs, fighting against Entrenched Powers, characterizing this group of exceptionally wealthy and well-connected folks as "outmanned, outspent, and outgunned," which sounds inspirational albeit unrelated to any reality I'm familiar with. 

If you subscribe to Tilson's chatty newsletter, you get a window into how all this works for a globe-trotting wealthy hedge fundie. Most recently Tilson updated us on his trip to the Robin Hood gala, an annual event at which rich folks in NYC come give some money to a foundation run by hedge fundie John Paul Tudor, a charter school-loving supporter of outfits like the Relay Faux Graduate School of Education. In Tilson's account, you get a feel for how interconnected all these folks are:

I ran into many ed reform warriors including Robin Hood co-founder David Saltzman, his roommate at Brown eons ago, Norman Atkins (co-founder of North Star Academy in Newark and the Relay Graduate School of Education), Emily Kim (whose Zeta schools are expanding from five to eight this fall), and Brett Peiser, the CEO of Uncommon Schools.

I also chatted with Mike Bloomberg and thanked him for his incredible long-term support of charter schools.

Susan and I were seated at the CNN table, where I ran into an old friend, Marcus Mabry, who played an important role in the launch of Teach for America.

In the fall of 1989 and a team of six of us, led by Wendy Kopp, including Dan Oscar and Kim Smith, were recruiting campus representatives who, the next spring, would help us recruit the 500 inaugural corps members.

But nobody had ever heard of Teach for America, so we needed a high-profile article in a major publication, so I called Marcus, who had been my sister’s Resident Advisor at Stanford. He was at Newsweek and, long story short, wrote a full-page article that came out in the fall of 1989 that helped put TFA on the map.

Just all good ol' buds. I regret to inform you that John Legend is also a long-time Robin Hood board member and Whitney Tilson BFF..

I'm not saying this is inherently evil and naughty. I am saying that some days there seems to be a high degree of insular clubbiness among certain sectors of the education amateur reform world.