High Quality Instructional Materials

When folks, particularly reformy folks, start talking about high quality instructional materials, I reflexively bristle. Part of it is that HQIM means, for some folks, materials that are aligned with the Common Core (either by name or under the various alias it has adopted). I also associate the term with curriculum-in-a-box, the kind of program that salespeople tout as teacher-proof, just as long as the school content delivery units present the program "with fidelity" aka "like mindless robots whose compliance is required and whose professional judgment is forbidden." 

But the truth is, I need to take a deep breath and return my hackles to their seated unraised position, because there is a conversation about quality materials worth having, albeit a more nuanced and complicated one than the one we're inclined to have (also, I'm pretty sure that "a more nuanced and complicated conversation than the one we're inclined to have" covers a huge number of education issues).

Because I know better.

The best instructional materials I ever had (not made by me) was a literature series by MacMillan-Scribner. A solid selection of literature, and a really great set of both questions for the selection and materials to create a unit test. The whole package was about 80% aligned with what I wanted to accomplish in the class. It saved me untold hours.

On the other hand, in 39 years, I never saw a grammar/usage/writing text that was worth the paper it was printed on. Most were simply dreadful, with explanations that were unclear and exercises that were too brief and often poorly focused. I depended on my own created materials for about 90% of my teaching in those areas. 

On the other other hand, there was my mentee who started her career depending heavily on Google as her teaching assistant, and not in a good way. We had too many conversation like this:

"I found a worksheet about this book/standard/lesson on line"

"Great. Why are you using this particular worksheet? How does it fit in your unit objectives?"

"It's about this book/standard/lesson."

There's still a problem with chirpy articles like this one (from EdReports, whose whole raison d'etre is certifying instructional materials as 100% common core fresh) that presume that if teachers just understood HQIM better, they'd realize that HQIM would make everything awesome. This is not true, either. 

And of course the entire conversation is muddied up by the term High Quality Instructional Material, which means whatever you think it means. So let me tell you what I think a piece of high quality instructional material looks like.

Accurate and Appropriate Content

I shouldn't need to bring this up, but every teacher has been there--you're working your way through new teaching materials and realize that the writers of the book got something wrong. Well, that's if you're lucky and vigilant; otherwise, the mistake will be brought to your attention by a student.

I know I may not be the person to fly the flag, what with my years of cranking out typo-riddled posts on this blog. But textbooks are expensive, and textbook companies are well-paid, so I don't want to open up a book and find a noun called a verb or Stephen Crane called a Romantic writer. I want materials created by somebody who knows the content and knows it well and not someone who is just plugging in stuff for a template (or--and I don't know how much this is an issue in other content areas, but in English it's a pain--is apparently working from an open copy of someone else's textbook and trying to copy it without actually violating copyright laws).

Nor do I want a textbook to include baloney like calling enslaved people immigrants or the USSR a Communist paradise or otherwise attempting to put a particular gloss on the content. 

And since time saving is one of the appeals of HQIM, the prospect of sifting through a haystack like Teachers Pay Teachers for some needle of high quality material seems like a problem. It may be my old-fartiness shining through, but TPT seems like an invitation to Just Grab Something without taking the time to find something good (and in that same time, could I not design something of my own).

Also--material that is grade/age appropriate. This is a hard one, given the wide range of end users. That's just one reason we need--

Flexibility

EdReports likes to say that the think teachers should implement materials with "integrity" rather than "fidelity." I agree at least half with this--no materials that demand to be implemented with fidelity are high quality, because what that actually means is that someone, somewhere, has decided that they know the best way to teach material to students that they haven't even met. The teacher is in the classroom; the book's authors are not. Note: anything with a script is not HQIM.

HQIM are adaptable, so that the teacher can use them to construct a lesson that's best for the class they're facing. EdReports actually cites some research to back this up, suggesting that  “'adaptation with guardrails' can actually help strengthen impacts on student outcomes beyond what is possible through program fidelity alone. In other words, learn the materials by sticking close to what the manufacturer suggests, then as you become familiar, adapt to suit. 

Implicit in all this is that HQIM provide more materials than you can actually use--because you're not going to use all of it. You're going to use the pieces that work best for you and your students, including making adjustment for achievement levels within the class.

Actual Support

Here's what teachers are used to getting: a PD session from some company rep who spent a couple of years in the classroom, then checked out for this sweeter gig. This person will suggest that you don't know what you're doing and will blow off any practical questions you want to ask.

Here's what teachers need, particularly with materials that are computer based: A person they can call who can actually answer questions and provide support other than reading from the same manual that the teacher already looked at on line. 

The Why

There is nothing more critical in a classroom than the why. The teacher has to know why they're covering the material, and it has to be a good reason and not "because someone told me to" or "it will be on the Big Standardized Test" or any of the other reasons that students hear, correctly, as "Blah blah blah no good reason." 

For HQIM, this becomes another aspect of flexibility. Instructional Materials cannot supply the why (pro tip: "Because it's in the book" is not a useful why) for the teacher, but they can be clear about what sorts of why the particular materials address. When a teacher goes to the materials bank, they need be able to search beyond "something about Hamlet." They should be dipping into the library looking for "exploring the themes of Hamlet" or "reviewing character relations in Hamlet" or "examining the plot sequence in Hamlet" and the teacher should be able to look for these specifics without having to read through every single piece of material to figure out what it's about.

A well-done teachers' guide can even help develop the why of a unit by suggesting possible ideas to explore.

A bad set of materials hides its why. The worst grammar/usage text I ever had offered terrible grammar exercises, and it was only after I was several chapters in before I realized that the exercises were all organized exceptions to or quirks in the grammar concepts, trying to test the students' grasp of the concepts with examples from the fringes--without ever giving students a chance to practice the basic core of the idea. 

Teacher enhancing, not teacher proof

No brand of instructional material can make a great teacher out of a lousy one, but administrative demands to follow a program with fidelity can make a mediocre teacher out of a good one (or a former teacher out of a good one). 

I know there are sales reps out there whose pitch, implicit or explicit, is "Buy our stuff and you will have a complete curriculum and a whole staff of teachers on the same page." And I have worked for a couple of administrators who totally bought that pitch. 

There are two problems. First of all, good teachers will be hamstrung, and lousy teachers will still be lousy (how to unlousify them is a whole other post). HQIM should save teachers time and trouble, not micro-managing them.

Second of all, imagine this--the company goes out of business and all of their materials suddenly vanish. If leaders in your district are suddenly saying, "Oh no! Now we have no curriculum!" then you never did, because teaching materials are not a curriculum. They should be used to implement your curriculum and enhance your teachers' work. It's like putting seatbelts in your school buses, strapping all your students in, and announcing that your focus is safety as you send a driverless bus careening down the road. 

Create your curriculum. Then select your books etc based on how well they fit your district's plan. Which means--yes--that some high quality instructional materials may conceivably be an excellent fit for one district and not so much for another. (Which takes us back to the old "Wait a minute--we can't have a whole bunch of different curricula higgledy piggledy all over the place," and that really is a post for another day).

NH: Don't Worry, Be Happy

Teachers and parents have heard plenty about self care over the past two years. Now New Hampshire's leaders have decided to make a big fat "fix yourself" PR campaign out of it.

The whole self-care message depends a great deal on context. Self care is a good thing, a practice that everyone should follow in dealing with the stresses and pressures of life.

But when the message comes from the people who have power over that stress and pressure, it takes on a whole new meaning. That meaning is roughly, "You had better take care of your own interests and health because I'm not going to doing a damn thing about it." It comes perilously close to telling a person who's angry at your misbehavior to calm down and stop being so hysterical.

Sometimes it's part cluelessness and part deliberate obtuseness. I'm thinking here of Andrew Carnegie who told his employees that they should take the time to read and enrich their leisure time, even as he was also telling them that they would be required to work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Or Arne Duncan doubling down on the stakes for high-stakes testing, then admonishing schools that they were putting way too much emphasis on the high stakes test.

So here comes New Hampshire's Department of Education with its new 603 Moment campaign. The campaign was launched at a New Hampshire Fisher Cats ball game, where Governor Chris Sununu offered some chirpy encouragement:

"Just like the #HomeHikeChallenge from the last two years, our #603Moment initiative seeks to help New Hampshire kids, parents, and families refocus and appreciate the little things in life," Sununu said. "Let's channel these 603 Moments into positive change and renew important discussions on the importance of social and emotional health not just in our schools, but also in our communities."

Note that "seeks to help" apparently means "offer suggestions for things you can contribute to this PR campaign just in case you don't know what little things you appreciate." Frank Edelblut, homeschooling businessman-turned-politician and New Hampshire's spectacularly unqualified Education Commissioner, offered some help, pointing out that a special moment could occur "on a walk or a lunch break, or perhaps it is a peaceful reflection while visiting a favorite place, or just a few deep breaths while in the midst of chaos."

Look. I want to be clear that I am an absolute believer in self care and in cherishing all the small, beautiful moments that come along in life. Life is rich and beautiful if you take the trouble to see it. We should all absolutely cherish the good moments in our lives.

But this is not that.

This is the kind of campaign that makes me really, really want to see the meeting that spawned this. 

Did a bunch of suits at the ed department gather round and say, "You know, I think of all the problems facing our families, the big one is that the little people just don't stop appreciate that they can take deep breaths when everything is turning to poop around them." Or was it more along the lines of "What's something we could come up with that would distract people from the lousy couple of years we've had?" 

Or was it more like a boss saying, "I need some ideas for something--anything--that we could do other than actually implement better, more supportive, more human policies for teachers, parents and students." And then after some puzzled silence, somebody piped up with, "I hear all the youths are using that social media stuff. Maybe we could start some kind of happy social media thing on the interwebs." 

I also wonder if the term "toxic positivity" passed through anyone's mind. 

NH's leaders have been unrelenting in their attacks on public education. Repeated voucher-based attacks that ultimately resulted in hiding an unpopular voucher bill in the budget. Helping Betsy DeVos and Club for Growth launch a privatizing tour. Charter promotion from everyone between Christian nationalist Hillsdale College to hapless amateurs. Welcoming in privatizing micro-school business Prenda. Joining the teacher gag law parade. Encouraging their buddies to chop local school budgets to the bone. All while the news keeps telling us that US teachers are being pushed to the brink.

So maybe--just maybe-- the governor or the state and the head of the state's education department could come up with something more helpful than "Tell us about that one time you took a nice walk during your lunch break." Maybe they could craft some policies that are supportive of public education and the people who work there and the students who learn there. Maybe they could stop strip-mining public education for money to hand to education-flavored businesses. Maybe they could come up with something more useful than a hashtag.

Speaking of which, the hashtag #603Moment is not exactly burning up on the tweeter machine. There are a few staged student pics, some links to promo articles about the initiative, and then some tweets like these:

my #603moment is when Commissioner Edelblut continuously makes it known he doesn’t care about NH students or families like he thinks he does. Shameful to even have you as a representation of education in this state.

If you ever needed an example of #gaslighting or #toxicpositivity, #603moment has you covered.

My #603moment is when Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut continues to work against teachers and students for his own benefit

And, responding to Sununu's promotional post

The day you leave office #603moment.

You can play along-- just use the hashtag #603Moment. And remember to smile smile smile.

ICYMI: Wrapping Up The Year Edition (6/5)

This week our local school districts will wrap up the year, so it's all graduations and packing up rooms and the rest of those things I no longer do. I always feel extra retired this time of year, for better or worse. But one thing I know for sure--every teacher I know (including the CMO (Chief Marital Officer) here at the Institute is really very ready for a break from what has turned out to be a very hard year. So three cheers for that. Meanwhile, here's your reading list for the week.

It's okay not to have the words

Jose Luis Vilson reflects on the same ugly mess we've all been thinking about it, with his usual high level of thoughtfulness.

Reigniting passion for teaching after a difficult year

Trevor Muir is one of those edu-celebrities, but this is a pretty good piece about using the summer to recharge. 

Teachers need more resources--not revolvers

Some straight talk about Texas and their program for turning teachers into marshals (spoiler alert: it's not going all that well).

FCMAT-- California's Unaccountable Political Player

Thomas Ultican with a tale of how a body created to ease school district crises turned into a juggernaut, and not the good kind.

Neither truth nor consequences

TC Weber continues to track the shenanigans of edu-grifters in Tennessee. Next up-- a bureaucratic bus tour!

Moms for Liberty has created nightmares for schools across the country

The New Republic (paywall alert) takes a look at M4L and determines, among other things, that the group is more about winning elections than anything else.

Susan Ohanian: A passionate spokesperson for teachers

The Charlotte (VT) newspaper decided to write a profile about Susan Ohanian, who has been in the Ranting About Education business for years. 

Brevard teacher's banned book drive raises over $5,000, angers Moms for Liberty

Last time I looked, it was up around $15K. A Bayside High AP English teacher is going to put Naughty Books into the hands of students this summer. 

Signing letter of career intent

We make a lot of fuss over high school athletes signing letters of intent for college. What would it look like if we mad a similar fuss over a kid who decided to become a plumber? Like this.

Betsy DeVos and her school privatization agenda are no match for Michigan parents

Sarah Lahm, writing for Our Schools and published at Alternet, looks at how parents have been getting in the way of DeVos's latest attempt to bring vouchers to Michigan.

Ohio arms teachers

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at Ohio's crazy-pants idea to let teachers carry guns in school with just 24 hours of training. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, over in Forbes, I wrote about Ohio legislators' desire to make teenaged female athletes get a genital inspection to prove their gender, and the money that one PA charter school is handing out to parents. Also, arming teachers is a bad idea.

Also, I think I missed this piece for The Progressive that looked at how school choice actually does the opposite of parent empowerment.

The (Not A) Mystery Of Class Size

The most fundamental issue of education in this country, the issue that underlies virtually all other issues, is that we want to have it and we want it to be good, but we do not want to pay for it. We want a Lexus, but we want it at Yugo prices (and we're pretty sure that Those People could just make do with a bicycle).

No issue captures this better than the issue of class size.

There is plenty of research to underscore the benefits of smaller class sizes, but seriously-- who needs it? It's bad form to pretend that anecdotal evidence is not true data, except in this case we're talking about anecdotes from several million teaching professionals, several million children children, and several million parents. 

Ask parents. Would you rather have your child in a class of fifteen or thirty-five? Then find me even a dozen parents who pick the larger class. Heck, even people in the "Gosh, there's no hard evidence that smaller is better" crowd admit that they still prefer smaller for their own children. Meanwhile, every teacher will tell the same story that I will tell you about my years in the classroom--with fewer students, I could give each student more personal attention. Not only that, but as an English teacher, fewer students meant that I could do more writing assignments as well as provide richer feedback because I was only grading 150 essays over the weekend instead of 300.

I mean, we could play this game all day. Ask any teacher if they are more effective with large or small classes. Ask students how they feel about being one face in a large crowd in class. Ask any high school teacher what the difference is between grading 100, 200, or 300 tests. Ask any parent if they hope that their child will get a really big class next fall. Ask a teacher what size class would more likely entice them to work at a particular district.

And yet, in the wake of a New York legislative requirement to reduce class sizes, here comes stuff like this fat slice of baloney in the New York Times that tries to pretend that class size is a unsolved mystery of the ages:

The bill reignited a half-century-old debate that has pitted teachers and parents who believe smaller class sizes are better for children against city officials, who point to evidence suggesting there are better and more cost-effective ways to improve education.

As Matt Barnum correctly points out, the allegedly more cost-effective policies are not actually identified. The article is entitled "Class Sizes Set to Shrink in New York City Schools, but at What Cost?" as if there is some tragic, fraught price for these smaller class sizes. What cost!! What cost, indeed! 

It should be noted that the "smaller" class sizes in the bill are caps of 20 for K-3, 23 for 4-8, and 25 for high school. That's down from current caps of 25, 32, and 34 respectively--which are insane class sizes. (There's also a limit of 40 for "performing groups" which strikes me as a different sort of problem for schools with big band and choir programs). So we are not talking about a huge reduction in class size here.

But it's all just too too expensive. That's the message over and over again in the article. The schools will have to hire crappy teachers to fill up the gaps. NYC chancellor David Banks warns that this "unfunded mandate" will require program cuts. "And there's no good reason to think it will work," say many policy leaders, who also say, "I personally insist on finding a school with really big classes for my child." Ha! Just kidding. I'm betting not a single one of them ever said any such thing.

It's a longstanding reformster dream. Every so often someone re-proposes the Super Sardinemaster model of teaching, in which a couple hundred students are crammed into a room with a Really Awesome teacher. The logic is that if a teacher is great with 20 students, she'll be equally great with 150. By similar reasoning, we can assume that if Pat is a good spouse for one person, Pat would also be a great spouse for 50 people at the same time.

Maybe the Super Sardinemaster will be "augmented" with technology. But the important part is that you don't have to hire so many teachers, and you can pay the few you hire more money, so everyone's a winner, right? As always, nobody who proposes this also says, "And I'm putting my kid in a program like this the instant it exists."

It's the same old guiding principle-- "I don't want to spend a lot of money educating Those Peoples' Children." And I'm convinced that some folks are doubly reluctant to spend more money on personnel costs, that they'd much rather spend money on programs or buildings than on people. 

Research shmesearch--most of it is really asking if class size affects scores on the Big Standardized Test, and who cares? We know what's best. We know what works. We know that smaller classes are better. It's what we want for our own children, what we want for ourselves. We want maximum human connection in a classroom (see also: a few million people less-than-pleased with distance learning), and that means a group size that facilitates greater humanity, not a class size that obstructs it. 

We know what's best. We know what we want for our own children. We just don't want to pay the cost of providing it for Those People's Children. It is the underlying problem of education in this country, and some of New York's policy leaders are determined to come down on the wrong side of it. 

Trying To Rewrite DeVos History

When Arne Duncan was done being ed secretary, he undertook his own retcon rehab, complete with a book, a tour, and a string of interviews in which he tried to explain what happened, except that he never really understood what happened, nor did he appear to learn anything in hindsight. But he has tried valiantly to rewrite his history in the job.

Betsy DeVos has shown no desire to rewrite her own history, which is on brand, since she has never owed anyone an explanation. So it falls to other folks to try to gaslight reinterpret for us the DeVos years at USED.

The latest attempt comes from Robert Maranto, the current holder of the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. He worked in the Clinton administration, and he writes for the right-tilted American Enterprise Institute, for whom he created this Betsy DeVos reconsideration report, "Outcomes over Image: Examining the Political Legacy of Betsy DeVos."

His basic thesis is that DeVos was "demonized as few prior cabinet secretaries have been, yet her achievements as secretary of education belie her image." And he interviewed a brace of her former education staffers.

We've burned up plenty of internet here at the institute talking about DeVos, who I find a sort of fascinating character. Just type "DeVos" in the search bar up at the top and you can stroll down memory lane. So I'm not going to go too deep here on Maranto's report, but I do think he has a point or two worth talking about. It's not super-long, but I've read it so you don't have to.

Maranto talks about DeVos's "rocky start," and while he oversimplifies things, he has a point. Folks generally vastly underestimated DeVos's smarts. For the general public, her "grizzly bear" comment encapsulated her dopiness, but for educators, her lack of knowledge about basic education stuff (like growth versus achievement on test scores) was taken as a lack of smartitude.

I've always argued that DeVos's poor showing basically every time she had to sit down in front of Congress was because 1) she had no interest in making a good impression on them, 2) she had never held an actual job or any position where she had to answer to other people, 3) as a Christian dominionist-type, she doesn't believe that Congress is particularly important, 4) she was in DC to fill a position in a department that she believed should be abolished and so 5) she never did her homework.

None of that helped an image of a woman lowering herself to be around The Lessers and whose general contempt for public education was well-documented long before she ever showed up on Capitol Hill. Maranto also wants to blame her choice of chief of staff Josh Venable for damaging her relationship with White House staff, Congressional staff, and department staff, and I'm sure he didn't help, but she was perfectly capable of doing the damage all by herself. Maybe someone more savvy would have swapped him out for someone more politically astute, but DeVos has never shown herself to be savvy--you don't have to be politically smooth and capable when you have a checkbook fat enough to use as a bulldozer, plus a conviction that you are Very Right and Above All This.

Maranto argues that DeVos had some K-12 successes, and they count if you agree that the department should come as close as it can to exerting no influence and basically not existing. That was good for ESSA proposals, not so great for the Office of Civil Rights and communication indicating what you think laws might mean. But DeVos was adamant that she couldn't imagine any scenario in which the feds should step up and tell states, "Knock it off with that."  And she was faithful to not touching the levers of federal power, until she wasn't anymore. 

Maranto hilariously refers to DeVos's response to COVID as her "greatest and leas noted" success.

DeVos acted quickly to put regulatory flexibilities in place to insure that K-12 schools and colleges could continue to serve students.

I might phrase that a little differently. How about-- when schools across the country were scrambling and looking for guidance through the unprecedented medical crisis and answers and assistance were hard to find, Betsy DeVos waved them off and said, "Not my problem. You go figure it out." Until she decided that she wanted schools physically open and also that relief funds would make a great voucher starter; then she once again decided federal overreach isn't so bad. 

Then it became a political football because MAGA smelled an opportunity. This did not, as DeVos devotee Jim Blew pointed out, "serve children." But DeVos did not help.

Maranto's list of higher ed successes includes characterizing the "closing" of Title IX cases as a win, along with her general rollback of Title IX coverage. She did help get the Perkins act reauthorized. She doubled down on Obama's terrible college scorecard that reduced college quality to the question, "Will this help you make a bunch of money when you get a degree?" Though if it didn't, DeVos was adamant that you should still pay off your student loans.

She took a stand against furriners trying to influence what colleges teach by giving them money; that is only supposed to work for Americans. And Maranto posits DeVos as the greatest supporter of HBCUs in the history of the department. 

The staff that Maranto talked to highlighted two failures. She spent a lot of time pushing vouchers, particularly her Education Freedom Scholarship program, which died a deserved death. The other failure they brought up was her failure to shrink the department, in part by farming out its various functions to other departments, or by closing and/or merging the department with, say, the Department of Labor (because education is about creating more meat widgets). Of course, as Maranto notes, "this initiative might reappear in future Republican administrations."

So does this move the needle? I think not. DeVos was far more smart than people believed and far less effective than her opponents feared. Most of the "successes" that her supporters can point to are conservative successes in the "she stopped doing this" or "she got in the way of that" variety. I do think that the version of DeVos that became cemented in pop culture was both unfair and dangerous, because that version is far more hapless than the real thing, and therefor makes DeVos herself seem like a harmless rich kook, which she is not. She's not done with dismantling and privatizing public education in this country yet, and it would be a mistake to forget that.

Another Chapter In The Corinthian Saga

A decade ago, the Corinthian chain of colleges was the poster child for predatory for-profits, the shambling demonstration of everything that could be wrong with profiteering in the education world. They were also pretty good at gaming the refs and escaping consequences--even profiting from them. And now their heavily besmirchified name has surfaced again.

Corinthian was not so much in the college business as in the business of conning people into becoming conduits for carrying government money into Corinthian bank accounts. They were collecting mountains of grant and loan money and providing their students, who were hoping to educate their way into a better life, with no employment prospects, no useful education, but lots of debt. But the gravy train started to run into trouble. (I was following the story at the time; much of the following is cribbed from my own posts.)

In 2013, then-AG Kamala Harris took Corinthian to court. Here's a description of the suit's claims:

The complaint alleges that CCI intentionally targeted low-income, vulnerable Californians through deceptive and false advertisements and aggressive marketing campaigns that misrepresented job placement rates and school programs. CCI deployed these advertisements through persistent internet, telemarketing and television ad campaigns. The complaint further alleges that Corinthian executives knowingly misrepresented job placement rates to investors and accrediting agencies, which harmed students, investors and taxpayers.

This doubles as a description of Corinthian's business model. Recruiters were paid a bounty for each customer they signed up. They hired their own graduates to get their post-graduation employment numbers up. They were called "the nation's worst private college chain." And as word spread, the financial wheels that had attracted manny investors started to dome off.

In 2014, the Obama administration announced that they were by golly going to crack down on these predatory schools. That was in March. In June, the feds announced their plan to help prop Corinthian up and keep it open. Undersecretary Ted Mitchell (who came to the department carrying strong ties to Pearson, NewSchools Venture Fund, and other investor ties to the private education biz) announced that Corinthian would receive an influx of cash, permission to keep admitting students, and a government overseer to keep an eye on them (powered, I supposed, by the threat of-- I don't know. Stern looks? More cash?). It's possible that the feds were also concerned about the interests of investors, a list which included Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Royce, New York Mellon, and Morgan-Chase. And Corinthian, it later turned out, had plenty of friends in high places. This, apparently, was what Too Big To Fail looked like in the college world.

The whole "keep Corinthian open" thing was nuts. The feds position was that Corinthian was selling bogus snake-oil coated crystal treatment for serious maladies, but that students should be given the chance to complete the therapy.

By fall of 2014, the feds were helping to broker a deal in which Corinthian was to be bought up by a company. Specifically, a debt collection company, to Educational Credit Management Corporation, a group specializing in shaking down college students for their loan debts. They have been the subject of more than a few horror stories about overzealous collecting, but they did immediately (as in, December of 2014) set up a new subsidiary named Zenith Education Group to run the schools, and they turned out to be a bunch of pips as well. Putting a debt collection agency in charge of a college doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you understand that the purpose of the "college" is to recruit "students" to use as carriers for transporting loan dollars from lenders to the "college." The feds were pretty proud of themselves for having made sure that investments were secured and nobody had to actually suffer for their mismanagement of the for-profit business.

But by April of 2015, Corinthian was done, shot, outies, kaput. The feds fined them several million (finally) for being Very Naughty. They filed bankruptcy in May. Also by spring of 2015, many students had figured out that they had been had, bilked, cheated, and lied to. It may seem like they were a little slow, but remember-- for well over a year the feds had been saying two things:

1) If we find any lying cheating predatory schools, we will totally shut them down.
2) We think it's worth going the extra mile or ten to keep Corinthian schools open.

Operating under the premise that the federal government was reasonably trustworthy, would those two items not lead you to believe that you would be okay staying at Corinthian and continuing to borrow money to do so?

But no-- a whole bunch of students were left holding the bag, and by "bag" I mean "giant crapload of crushing debt for which they actually received nothing of value." Corinthian students had, in toto, acquired half a billion dollars worth of debt. So a whole bunch of those students decided that they would simply refuse to pay the debt.

That debt strike raised yet more kerfluffle. Here's what I said at the time:

On the one hand, I fully sympathize with folks who say, "When you borrow money, you pay it back. Doesn't get any simpler than that. If you borrow more money than you can pay back, that's just dumb. If you don't pay back your debts, somebody else pays the price. Other people should not pay for your dumb."

On the other hand, it's easy to make dumb choices people are lying to you.

Folks who find themselves in debt for Corinthian educations, but without any marketable skills that would allow them to make money-- those folks got in this mess by driving past a dozen corners where there should have been big bright neon red flags. But there were no flags there, because the gatekeepers had taken the flags down and stuffed them in their back pockets.

Also

Corinthian students have racked up over a half billion dollars in federal loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has already asked the courts to grant relief, and the Department of Justice has reportedly said that the Department of Education has "complete discretion" to make the loans evaporate. Back in February of 2015, a $480 million relief package was announced which would help (about 40%) with the private loans that students took out, but those are separate from the half billion in federal loans.

Then there was an election, and while the Obama administration had not been terribly helpful, Betsy DeVos was not having any of these shenanigans (I mean, student shenanigans--predatory for-profit shenanigans were totally okay). One of her many appearances before Congress to discuss her technique of dragging a Marianas-sized trench with her heels yielded this classic DeVos quote:

I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.

As well as this observation:

Ms. DeVos maintained that it was “probably the case” that Corinthian Colleges deceived students, but she also said she believed that the “prior administration basically forced schools like Corinthian out of business” with onerous financial restrictions. She rebuffed questions about an investigation by career staff, unveiled in January 2017 memos published by NPR on Wednesday, that concluded that Corinthian students deserved full loan forgiveness because they received no educational benefit.

So for four years the Corinthian saga was largely stalled. Until this week, when, on June 1, the Department of Education said it was going to release $5.8 billion in debt, freeing 560,000 borrowers from that particular weight. Mind you, that doesn't get these folks back any of the wasted time, resources, and opportunity that they have lost over the last decade. 

The department press release leans hard on putting this in the context of Harris's previous actions against Corinthian, which is certainly a better look than the context of Biden's previous actions (doing nothing). But it's a nice next Chapter in a tale that has been both depressing and instructive about the effects of treating schools as investment properties and education as a profit-making commodity.

Can SEL Avoid The Skills Trap

Social and Emotional Learning is having its latest fifteen minutes, and as I've written before, I'm not a big supporter. It's not that I don't believe in SEL; I'm certain that it's not only important but actually unavoidable. But as soon as you start turning it into some sort of area of formal instruction, problems arise.

One such problem is a version of a problem we have in other areas--the notion that certain "skills" can be taught and measured in a vacuum.

But you cannot, for instance, teach critical thinking skills in their own self-contained unit, because critical thinking skills can only function when you are thinking about something, and you can't think critically about something when you don't know anything about that subject. My ability to think critically about certain slices of American literature or traditional jazz is fairly well developed; my ability to think critically about ice fishing or raising baby iguanas is fairly non-existent. To think critically, I must have a handle on the body of knowledge with which my brain is going to interact. 

Reading even more so. We have plenty of evidence, both hard data and anecdotal, that how well you can read something is directly related to how much you know about the topic. Decoding a bunch of symbols into the sound of a word is easier if you, somewhere in the process, you recognize the word. And decoding on its own is simply a technique for "word calling"-- the act of reading a word out loud without having the slightest idea what it actually means. Comprehension is a house built on the foundation of prior knowledge.

Why do some folks keep trying to cast these as free-floating "skills"? I suspect that in the last decade or two, it has been driven by the desire to generate data. If reading and critical thinking are free-floating skills, then we can test for just those skills. That has given us some bizarro testing scenarios in which the test designers try to control for elements that are interwoven with the "skills" for which they want to test.

So to eliminate a child's vocabulary and comprehension from decoding skills, we get the DIBELS assessment that requires children to decode nonsense configurations of letters. To eliminate prior knowledge in reading comprehension and critical thinking tests, we subject children to tests involving topics about which they could not possibly have prior knowledge, like a reading about trade patterns in twelfth century Turkey (I wish I were making that up, but I'm not). 

The "skills" model also runs into trouble because it often reduces the concept of the skill, like assuming that skill of loosening a screw always involves turning it counter-clockwise, when reading comprehension and critical thinking are far more open-ended processes that do not necessarily yield a single possible correct answer. 

The problems of defining these as free-floating skills are many (and it's worth noting that many of us in the education world who disagree about plenty of other things actually agree about this). And it's not hard to see how the "skills" trap would be bad news for SEL as well.

First, social and emotional "skills" do not exist in a vacuum, but in the space between two or more human beings. If reading comprehension is the "how" of interacting with text and critical thinking is the "how" of interacting with ideas, then SEL is the "how" of interacting with other human beings. There's very little you can teach people about how to use a hammer or a saw if you make them learn without touching the tool or allowing the tool to touch anything else.

The notion that you could stop teaching other stuff and spend an hour during the day just "studying" or "practicing" SEL seems absolutely doomed to failure. If what is discussed in those SEL sessions is not modeled in teacher behavior the rest of the day, the SEL time will be wasted. If it is modeled the rest of the day, the SEL time will be unnecessarily redundant. You character--the point of SEL--is how you do All The Stuff; it is very hard to display your character by doing nothing in some meta sessions. Or, to put it in a familiar context, a person does not convince you that they're funny or smart or kind or friendly by telling you they are those things. 

Nor can reducing SEL to a "skills" model make it susceptible to data assessment and collection. Assessing character via test is on par with those job application quizzes that ask questions like, "Is it ever okay to steal from your employer." The results will tell you nothing except how good the test taker is at guessing what they're supposed to say, because SEL is impossible to eliminate from human interactions, and the interaction involved in an assessment has its own special set of conditions and cues. It is impossible to assess character with a multiple choice test.

SEL is susceptible to the same wrongheadedness that has damaged other areas of instructions in schools. As with reading and critical thinking, we know what works-- a mindful approach to growing these "skills" while doing the regular work of the classroom. For SEL, that means play and a space to be human beings in the classroom. Better not to do formal SEL at all than to repeat the same old mistakes.