The Free Market and Half a Bar

We've just spent several weeks trekking across the country by car, in a trip that eventually covered everything between Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine.

We did it with a pair of five year olds and a lose schedule. We did seat-of-the-pants booking of overnight accommodations. In car entertainment was books, spotify playlists of favorite stuff, select cds (yay, Rabbit Ears) and assorted toys. We stuck to hotels with pools and breakfast, and we did it without screens except for a couple of Octonauts episodes at the end of the day. 

All of which kept us extremely conscious of our level of connectivity. We were always paying attention to phone bars and wifi and hotspotting, and after spending a month sampling connections across the country, I can report this-- it's not good.

It has been twenty years since 3G was introduced in Japan. Home routers--wifi as we know it--has been around since the 90s. 

And yet here we are. On major highways in population centers trying to get more than a single bar of LTE. On a lake in Maine that is not that far from the beaten path--families live there years round--having to step outside when the wind is just right to get more than half a bar to check messages from family. (And that 5G you heard was going to be everywhere? As near as I can tell, it's not anywhere).

All of this experience raises two thoughts.

(Well, three. Because I noticed this trip that even when nothing else could squeak through a half bar of hamster-wheel phone connection, Facebook could, making me think that either Zuck has a super-great system for shoving it out there, or my carrier has quietly agreed to put Facebook in the Special Digital Lane.)

One thought is about ed tech, and all the many ideas pitched on the premise that internet connectivity is as ubiquitous as air and Dollar General. It isn't. Not even close. We should have learned that when we ran up against the technological wall trying to do distance learning during the pandemess, but damned if people aren't still pitching cyber classes and on-line learning as if reliable internet is as easy to find as an unqualified amateur trying to reimagine education. 

The other thought is that this internet inadequacy is one more demonstration that the free market does not magically provide all things to all people. The notion that market forces will get the goods to everyone so efficiently and effectively is an idea that is as deeply held as it is devoid of evidence. "Let free market forces take effect in education," they say, "and a million educated flowers will bloom all across the nation." The free market does not work that way it serves the customers it chooses, and it chooses based on where profit can be made. It doesn't matter how much you want highspeed fiber optic internet in your town-- if someone can't make bank providing it, you're not getting it. 

Turning the free market loose in education just gets some choices for some people in some places. It's not the solution to any problem except maybe, "How can I get my hands on some of those sweet sweet tax dollars." 

PA: Doug Mastriano Wants To Cut This Much From Your School's Budget

Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has some thoughts on many topics, but some of his most alarming thoughts are about education. 

Many have wrestled with the issue of funding public education through real estate taxes. Mastriano has a solution:

Cut all real estate taxes and replace them with--nothing.

There are some issues not making it into the fine print. Mastriano has said that he wants to cut per-pupil funding in half. Since real estate taxes represent more than half the funding for most PA districts, it's not clear how we would get there. Presumably increased state revenue from... somewhere. Mastriano would also like that funding to take the form of vouchers, rather than actual funding for districts, so it's hard to predict exactly how hard local districts would be hit. 

But PSEA has given it a shot. 

Follow this link for a map that will show exactly how much of a hit each local district would take under Mastriano's plan. For instance, my own district would lose about $11 million, roughly 35% of total funding. That puts us in the middle, somewhere between a low of 9% and a high of 67%.

PSEA, being PSEA, projects this into staffing cuts, but presumably districts could also display the "creativity" that Mastriano claims this gutting will unleash by slashing all athletic programs, closing buildings, or axing other facilities. Nor is it a stretch to suppose that some districts will either partially ("Sorry, after 6th grade you're on your own") or completely shut down. 

Mastriano's education plan all by itself should serve as a deal breaker. But I'm afraid that some folks will say, "He's my guy for banning abortion" and vote for a future in which children must be born into a state with no real education system to carry them forward. I'm also afraid that a non-zero number of teachers will vote for him for the same reason, later shaking their heads in astonishment when their jobs are cut. 

PA: The High Markup For Cyberschooling

Cyber charters are expensive as hell in Pennsylvania because we are stubbornly stuck with a system that pays the charter based on the cost-per-pupil of the sending school--not what it actually costs the cyber charter to serve that student. 

This has left Pennsylvania cybers swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck on a big golden bender. For instance, in just two years, the fourteen cyber charters of Pennsylvania spent $35 million dollars of taxpayer money just on marketing. Governor Wolf has been trying to reform the system, but there's a great deal of resistance (backed by a bunch of lobbying money, because cyber charters can afford that). 

During the pandemic, many schools set up their own version of cyber school, and that has created an opportunity to see just how huge the markup is for cyber chartering. Check out this excerpt from an op-ed written by the Kenneth Berlin, superintendent of Wattsburg Area School District:

When the pandemic started, our district contracted an online learning system from K12 Learning Solutions (Stride) to offer our students an online schooling option facilitated by our teachers. Because we use our teachers and equipment, the average cost per student to the district is about $3,000. I want to note that the K12 Learning Solutions platform we purchased is the exact same platform used by Insight PA Cyber Charter School. I also want to point out that if a regular education student enrolls in Insight PA Cyber Charter School, our taxpayers are billed a mandated $13,118 per student. For special education students, the cost rises to $23,587 per student. Given that we can provide the exact same cyber learning experience as the Insight PA Cyber Charter School for just $3,000 per student, I believe that the current cyber school funding scheme is an unjustified waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

Cyber charters in Pennsylvania are insanely overpriced, and it's worth remembering that taxpayers take a double hit; not only do they foot the highly inflated bill for cyber school tuition, but they also get hit by tax increases as their local public school district tries to blunt the impact of cyber tuition.

And it should be noted that taxpayers don't get much bang for their bucks, with cyber charters being found--even by folks in the charter biz--to do a lousy job of educating students. 

Cyber charters do a lousy job at inflated prices, so very inflated that it's almost hard to believe that such a scam could be perpetuated for so long. May it be brought to an end some day soon. One more reason not to vote for Doug Mastriano for governor. 

If you're going to make education cheaper

...there's really only on way to do it--cut personnel costs.

The McDonaldization of US education has taken several forms.

One part is to simplify the task. Instead of big fancy-shmancy talk about actualizing students and helping them to become the best version of themselves ad fully rounded human beings operating in complex and complicated ways in a complex and complicated world, why not redefine the whole process as "Get students ready to score well on a single multiple choice reading and math test" (and keep that test from going to deep by lashing it to some unproven amateur-hour standards branded as a "common core" of education). 

In fact, you can go one better by creating a raft of materials that lay out, sometimes in painfully exacting scripted fashion, exactly what the teacher is supposed to do. That way, you can redefine the job as a relatively simple one that pretty much anyone can do.

And if a "teacher shortage" provides cover for your idea, you can further lower the bar for how to get a job as a "teacher." Drop the need for any kind of college degree, or open it up to anyone with unrelated service in an unrelated field. Argue that anyone can be a teacher, and then create laws to make it so. This redefining of teaching as a fry cook level job will be so popular with the business types that before you know it, ALEC will adopt it as a policy priority. 

Once you've filled classrooms with untrained non-professionals, you can cut pay like a hot knife through cheap margarine. It's really a two-fer--you both erode the power of teachers unions and your Teacher Lite staff cost you less, boosting your profit margin for the education-flavored business that you started to grab some of those sweet sweet tax dollars. And as an added bonus, filling up public schools with a Teacher Lite staff means you can keep taxes low (why hand over your hard-earned money just to educate Those Peoples' children). 

The privatization crowd has been working on this for years, and they won't let up any time soon. De-professionalizing education is cut from the same cloth as replacing trained chefs with fast food workers (currently being replaced by robots and kiosks, because humans are expensive and annoying). Treat education as a "product," and figure out a way to crank out a cheap version for Those People. But one big difference--while a fast food "restaurant" has many material and capital expenses, the primary cost in operating a school is paying personnel. For the privatizing crowd, that means cutting those personnel costs is a critical piece of the operating strategy. And it always will be. One more reason that education should not be treated as a business. 

Fall and Nuts and Bolts

For those folks who bury themselves in matters of policy and politics and educational pontificating and punditry, it's goos to remember that when fall rolls around, the educational world is filled with people who aren't thinking about any of those things.

For parents and teachers, there are a hundred practical concerns. Do I have enough books for each class? Do I have enough seats? Will my lunch and work periods overlap with those of the colleagues I want to see during the day (or will I be eating lunch in my room just to escape Jerky McLoudface this year)? What will be the required pick-up spot for parent pick-up, or, barring that, exactly what time will the bus be at the stop? How are we supposed to pay for lunch this year? Where do I get the proper absence forms?

And that's just the adults. To remember being a young human in school is to remember worrying about the thousands of details that shape your existence for the year, but over which you have no control. Will my locker be someplace convenient or inconvenient, and when during my day will I actually be able to stop there (and, in related concerns, will I have to carry 147 pounds of books during my day? Where will I sit for lunch, and who will be at my table (or whose table will I be at)? Will my classes be easily located, or will I get lost? Will I have to make a daily impossible trek across the school for a class change? Will I be in a class with my friends? Did my folks get me the right supplies? 

Some of these may trace their way back to matters of policy. Certainly right now in Florida and some other states, some folks are wondering what exactly they can and can't say, or just what parts of their authentic selves they can safely reveal (and in many schools, it didn't take a new law to make them wonder) and that just boils down to nuts and bolts decisions about what to wear, how to walk and talk. 

It is the noise of nuts and bolts that drowns out all other sounds in these first few weeks, and those who travel at the level of philosophy and political theory do well to remember that it's not "who cares about that stuff" overshadowing policy "concern" as much as "I've got to find three more folders for third period" and "Do I have enough juice boxes to get through the first week of packing lunches." 

Education, like many other fields, is a world of giant sweeping ideas undergirding a vast array of details and specifics, a world where we look at tectonic plates and the shape and shift of mountains and forests resting on them as well as not just the trees, but the dust on the antennae of the bug on the back of a bird on the branch on the top of an individual tree. Back to school time is a good time to remember the detailed side, and especially to remember that the nuts and bolts and antennae and bugs are the bulk of many people's daily experience, and not just irrelevant, inconvenient picky stuff. 

Imagination Is Not Extra

 Imagination is a neglected quality, an attribute virtually never included on the list of educational must-haves, and yet, I would (and now will) argue that it is a central quality, a trait that every classroom should actively foster. So many folks tend to file imagination with creativity and the arts and fairy dust and unicorn farts and the whole universe of touchy-feely artsy-fartsy stuff and while I (and often have) argued for the value of the whole artsy-fartsy universe of stuff, we don't have to go there for imagination, which is supremely and critically practical.

Jack London (a decidedly non-artsy-fartsy writer) makes the case in his short story "To Build A Fire," which you may vaguely remember from high school English as the story about the guy who steps in a puddle and dies in the Yukon on a Really Cold Day. 

London carefully avoids any great drama; there's no blizzard to fight through, no mountain to climb, no abominable snowman to chase our protagonist. It's just really, really cold. London lays out the unnamed character's many mistakes. He goes out in the first place, when an old-timer tells him it's a bad idea. When he steps in the water, he builds his fire under a tree and subsequently shakes loose snow that puts it out. 

Readers might be tempted to diagnose the character's trouble as "lack of common sense" or "not very bright," but London takes a whole paragraph to explain.

The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings. Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 degrees of frost. Such facts told him that it was cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature. Nor did he think about man’s general weakness, able to live only within narrow limits of heat and cold. From there, it did not lead him to thoughts of heaven and the meaning of a man’s life. 50 degrees below zero meant a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear coverings, warm moccasins, and thick socks. 50 degrees below zero was to him nothing more than 50 degrees below zero. That it should be more important than that was a thought that never entered his head.

Imagination is often mistaken for common sense or wisdom. It is imagination we turn to when we have to solve the life problem, "If I do X and Y, what is the likely outcome." Evert exasperated parent or teacher who ever confronted a young human who had just run afoul of undesirable consequences and exclaimed, "Well, what did you think was going to happen," is essentially asking "Did you not have the power to imagine that this undesirable outcome was going to happen next?"

The science tells us this is not a failure of character-- human beings have to reach around age 16 to develop the part of the brain that lets us project ourselves into the future and answer questions like "If I drive around this curve at 150 miles an hour, will the results be really cool or really regrettable?" And I'll bet all of us know at least one person we'd hold up as an example of someone whose brain is apparently still short that particular lobe. 

That's just one reason I would (and now will) argue that imaginative play and exercise among younger humans is not a frivolous extra, but a critical life skill. 

To get good at foreseeing and fine tuning one's own future, you need practice making shit up. Please someone do the research showing the connection between children who have imaginary friends and imaginary castles and imaginary adventures and successful adulting. 

The other critical foundation for imagination is content knowledge. We tend to think of imagination and hard cold reality as some sort of polar opposites, but in fact the better your understanding of how the world and the people in it work, the better your imaginings hold together. 

Imagination is a critical life capability, not because a rich fantasy life is so rewarding and all, but because one of the things that makes us human is the ability to cast forward, to make decisions based on what we imagine the results will be. Part of the proof is to look around and see how many people are bad at it, how many people go through life with some repeated version of "Well, if I pet this chihuahua, an anvil will come screaming out of the sky and squash me flat." Or people who don't even try and just go with, "Well, my Trusted Authority Figure says if I read that book, angry honey badgers will jump up and rip my face off, so I'm just going to skip that book." Or entire nations that sink into despair because people cannot imagine a path into the future that does not suck.

So by all means-- more imagination in schools. More practice fabricating a possible future or present and casting ourselves into it. More fantasy. More pretending. More coulda and woulda to help us figure out our shoulda in time to do something about it. Imagination is not (and will not be) extra.

ICYMI: August Is A Month Of Sunday Nights Edition (8/7)

The Institute staff is currently hunkered down on a lake straddling the New Hampshire/Maine border, a field office established by my grandfather, a NH general contractor, seventy-some years ago. There's not much signal here, but I can still do a little work to collect the week's readings for you.

Carnegie Medal for Dolly Parton

Let's start with something cool-- the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy went to Dolly Parton, who, as we've said before, demonstrates what real philanthropy is supposed to look like.

Pearson Plans To Sell Textbooks As NFTs

Well, this is an interesting new twist.  Especially if you're still trying to understand NFTs. But whatever is going on, it definitely involves Pearson trying to make more money. Story from the Guardian.

Laptops are still spying on students

From Wired, more news about how the surveillance state has not slowed down, and students are still at risk.

Epic founders pour money into politics

You've heard that the founders of Epic charters have been charged with all sorts of shenanigans. This piece from NonDoc details how much of the stolen taxpayer money was used to grease some politicians.

Georgia professor shoots and kills incoming freshman

Yes, arming teachers is an awesome idea. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has one more story of guns gone wrong.

How the Green Bay Packers helped Justice Alito explain religious liberty law

Deseret looks at a recent Alito speech and its implications re: his general disinterest in the separation of church and state.

Memo regarding new state teacher qualifications

Brittany Fonte at McSweeney's with a darkly hilarious take on Florida's new non-requirements for teaching certifications.