Black Ariel, The Classroom, and the Expansion of the Ordinary

The current wave of freakouts over non-white fantasy fiction characters has broader lessons for all of us, if we're only willing to learn them. Yikes-- Black elves in Middle Earth! Oh nos! A Black Ariel in live action Little Mermaid! 

There was a great post on LinkedIN from Bonnie Dilber, an HR professional. She writes, in part, regarding the overlap between those freaking out over Black fantasy characters and those who do the hiring at companies:

If someone has been so strongly influenced by a movie made in the 1980s that they can't support a Black woman playing a mermaid, than how are they looking past seeing white people as directors, VPs, and Chiefs day in and day out to envision a Black person in the role?

Part of working towards equity is recognizing the archetypes we've developed for what a "leader" or "doctor" or "politician" or "fancy singing fish" look like so we can check those biases and make sure that we don't miss out on people who check every single box except "looks like what I pictured when I thought of this title."

In the language of those objecting to everything from Black elves to a same-sex couple on Peppa Pig--particularly ordinary folks on social media or in my supermarket--there's the idea that these characters represent a change. They're angry that somebody deliberately chose to create these characters, which just brushes up against an important truth--

Every character design represents a series of deliberate choices, but for some folks, that deliberate choice is about editing or altering, because every character in a story should be set the automatic default of white and straight. 

In other words, in some folks' thinking, a white straight character does not represent any sort of deliberate choice, but every non-white non-straight character results from a deliberate choice to alter, edit, even replace that straight white default. 

This same thinking is reflected in laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, that include an injunction against teaching anything about gender roles. Folks feel strongly about this. Here's Dave Rubin on Youtube telling us that if he found out a teacher talked to his six-year-old about gender or sexuality, "I might kill that person."

Except, of course, everyone talks to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality all the time. Every kids' book (and I have read roughly sixty gazillion of them with the Board of Directors) that shows a Dad coming home from work and a Mom who cooks and cleans at handles the nurturing of the children. Every children's book that shows a male Dad and a female Mom. Heck, every adult who thinks it's cute to talk about a six-year-old's boyfriend or girlfriend. All of that is talking to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality. Just not, you know, anything other than the default. The ordinary. The regular.

The right is cranky not exactly because there are Black elves and Black mermaids and lesbian polar bears, but because these all push aside some ideas about what is normal, natural, regular, default, ordinary. These all challenge the idea that white and straight (and male) are not a choice, but an effortless way of being that just is. That while every other choice about a character or a person's way of being has to make a case for itself, being white and straight (and male) isn't supposed to need to. 

There's a lot of complaint about the notion that woke folks are being driven by superficial skin-deep distinctions, itself a telling image, as if all this other non-white non-straight stuff is a skin slapped over the proper ordinary default. "I don't see color" ends up meaning "I see everyone as sharing the same ordinary normal default identity as mine." And as Adam Serwer notes in his Atlantic piece

It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified?

In the classroom, some of this argument should be familiar, going all the way back to when folks first starting picking apart the canon on the theory that maybe there were things worth teaching that weren't the product of dead white guys from England and America (who, if they were not straight, at least didn't say so but pretended to the normal ordinary regular default identity). 

Choosing what to teach and choosing how to envision futures for our students are all exercises that bump up against this new challenge.

Checking our assumptions shouldn't be an unexpected challenge in teaching. It's part of the teacher's journey in one form or another. Forty years ago I had to realize that no, it's not okay to assume that students and parents share the same last name. You can't default to the assumption that all your female students like boys. And no, you can't make assumptions about students' most likely future based on what you see when you look at them. We can't, as Dilber says, disqualify someone because they check every box except "looks like what I imagine when I think of that role."

So yes-- the idea that elves and Jedi Knights are made up characters, but they aren't realistic if the elves are Black or the knights are female is kind of nuts. The notion that LGBTQ people are not an ordinary part of the world is--well, that takes us right into Flat Earther territory. But before we use all our energy making fun of these people, best we use some of it to examine whatever assumptions about "ordinary" we're carrying around.

This is not a bad thing. We sometimes frame history by the edges, the people who expand what is possible. But we can also frame it as the less edgy business of expanding what is ordinary. There will always be struggle there, people who fight like hell to hold onto the notion that only they are ordinary. But expanding the ordinary is how we widen the boundaries of the tribe and extend our embrace of what it means to be fully human in the world. 

Dear Teachers: AI is probably writing papers for your class

Have you really looked at your Microsoft Word tools lately? Because, yikes. We'll get to that in a moment.

We've been following the question for an algorithm that can write essays or add copy or other fun stuff. There have been advances, but also problems (like AI that "decided" to write Really Naughty Things). And the gibberish. Or the uncanny valley. Or the bloviating nothingness. 

But the search goes on because if writing were one more job that could be handled by computers instead of those annoying and wanna-be-paid-a-living-wage carbon-based life forms, well that would make some entrepreneurs very happy. And the flip side--an algorithm that could read and grade student papers would close that final gap in the search for a fully automated teacher-free classroom. 

But as Aki Peritz, writing for Slate, reminds us, there's another group of folks who welcome cyber-writing, and that's students themselves. 

Got an assignment? Feed an opening sentence into an algorithmic text generator like Sudowriter, and you'll get back a mediocre, somewhat hollow essay to hand in. In fact, Peritz argues, some of the awkwardness of the program actually echoes the awkwardness of as student writer. And it is, of course, untraceable by conventional plagiarism checking methods, because it's not actually plagiarized. It's just having a bot do your work for you. Bringing us just one step closer to a future in which an algorithm generates a page of text that is then graded by another algorithm, while students and teachers just sit awkwardly in a classroom doing nothing.

There are teacher solutions for this kind of cheating. Have the students write the essay in class. Better yet, listen to the old dictum that if an assignment is easy to cheat on, that's the assignment's fault and you need to redesign it. 

But there's an arguably more annoying AI out there, and one that's far more likely to be in use by your students.

I haven't paid any attention to my Microsoft Word menus in ages except when I need to find a way to do something I didn't already know how to do. But David Lee Finkle, creator of the teacher comic strip Mr. Fitz, tipped me off to this feature in one of his recent strips.

Microsoft Word's editor will now grade your work. Okay, it calls it "editor score," but it's given as a percentage in a style every student will recognize as a score. Up in the upper right corner of the screen, you see [editor], and it will spit out a score along with some advice.

The "advice" is a compendium of the same old mediocre algorithmic editing suggestions that Word has always offered. I ran some of my newspaper columns through the editor and got advice like "replace 'expertise' with 'ability' so that it's easier to understand" (except, of course, that's a fairly significant change in meaning. Chakaris (as in George) is flagged as a misspelled word--maybe I meant "Chakari's"? The phrase "it's telling that we describe..." throws it and it suggests "it's saying..." instead, which is just wrong. The program has lots of thoughts about commas. And it hates my tendency to coin my own words. 

The editor also checks for clarity, conciseness, and formality, and will let you set it for formal, professional, or casual. And there's a special setting for resumes. 

I ran this post (so far) through it, and got some suggestions for clarity and conciseness, including old standards such as getting rid of a passive voice and contractions. But as a piece of casual writing, I scored a 98%. 

I am imagining students running their essays through this and following all the advice so that their work is scrubbed clean of personal voice and yet with some additional weakness and inexactitude of language. As Mr. Fitz's student says, "You think I should stop writing to please the computer and write like a human being with flaws and all. To retain my humanity against our computer overlords."

But mostly I am imagining students saying, "What do you mean I got an 87 on this essay??!! My computer says it's a 93!" 

Okay. So language processing algorithms are here, and so widely distributed that they are unavoidably part of the education landscape. But they're tools (and not great ones), not crutches. Students have to learn that the algorithms can't actually "read" or "write" as we understand the terms, that the algorithms have some serious limitations, and that these uncivilized beasts must still be kept on a leash that's firmly in the hand of the writer. Or, you could just turn the algorithms loose into the wild, or lock them in a cage, and carry on without them. 

Jill Biden's Almost Great Stump Speech For Teaching

FLOTUS was in Tennessee, of all places, to kick off an "education tour." meant to make hay out of the Biden administration's relief package for schools. At the University of Tennessee, she followed the mayor, Secretary Cardona, and Teacher of the Year Melissa Collins (who is a compelling presence). There's also an emphasis on recruiting and retaining teachers, and she had some good, moving things to say, but I can't let this quote pass without response.

“Teaching isn’t what we do, it’s who we are” - @FLOTUS @WXII pic.twitter.com/hFAuXUuASF

— WXII Maria DeBone (@WXIIMaria) September 12, 2022

This quote's heart is in the right place. It got a big chunk of applause. But here's what's wrong with the sentiment, because it's part of what has gotten the profession in trouble already.

"Teaching is who we are," plays to the myth that people are born teachers, and that myth has several unfortunate, damaging side effects.

First and foremost, it contributes to the notion that teaching is not a profession that people can either choose or not choose. It contributes to the mindset that figures it doesn't matter what we do to teachers and their working conditions because it's not like they could choose to do something else or find another line of work or just choose not to be teachers, because, hey, teaching is who they are. 

If teaching isn't a job folks choose to do, but is simply a calling (which Dr. Biden labeled it at least thrice) or an identity one is born into, then we don't have to talk about how to make the profession more attractive in order to recruit and retain people. 

We can talk about a "teacher shortage" as if we're talking about a shortage of green beans, as if the magic teacher tree for some reason just didn't bear enough fruit this year. And that in turn means we can start talking about "solutions" that address everything except the real issues at hand (like creating cockamamie rules to let any warm body pretend to be a teacher because the teacher tree didn't yield enough fruit). 

If I want to really stretch a point, I can even argue that this quote is a little dehumanizing, erasing the whole "we are people who" choose to do this job. And while it's not at all the most important piece of all this, I'll also point out that if teaching is your whole identity, retirement will be a bitch. 

FLOTUS frames it all as people wanting to teach but being stopped by obstacles--low pay, student loans, class sizes, and safety concerns. If we want to bring bright talented people into the field, she says, "if we want educators to be able to do what they do best, we have to give them the support that they deserve." And then she introduced the Three R's For Teachers-- Recruit, Respect and Retain. And then she pivots to stumping for her husband (opening schools, vaccinating teachers, loan forgiveness, more counselors, encouraging states to raise pay, yay). She just knew he would have to be an education President; she does not offer a connection between this and the years he spent in the public-education-thrashing Obama administration. 

She also refers to teaching as "this profession" and talks about "the work," which strikes me as a better framework. And she really brings it all home toward the end:

Become a teacher. And when you do, and when you do--and I hope all of you do who want to join this profession-- you'll find a vocation that brings you joy and meaning. You'll know that someone out there is a better thinker because of you, that someone is kind of sitting a little bit taller because you gave him the confidence. Someone is working a little harder because you pushed her to try. Someone is braver because you helped him find his courage. And you'll know this, too-- that your President and his administration are working every day so that you have the support, respect and pay you deserve. So join us. Become a teacher. And we will change the world, one student at a time.

Well, she was on a roll for a minute, anyway. 

I'll repeat that Tennessee, with its ardent embrace of Larry "Teachers are the dumbest" Arnn and its long string of amateur-hour grifters as secretary of education, is an odd choice. The gang appear drawn there by a proposed Grow Your Own program, which is currently nothing more than a pretty idea, but as unrealized ideas go, I suppose it's prettier than North Carolina's crappy proposed merit pay program. And it's certainly nicer to have someone from DC saying pretty things about teachers instead of calling them names and suggesting they all stink (like Betsy DeVos under Trump/Pence and Arne Duncan under Obama/Biden). 

But I'm not sure we've fully grasped the range of issues gumming up the teacher pipeline (or at least we have chosen not to express said grasping in words). I like a pep rally for the profession as much as the next person, especially these days, but when it veers toward the ditch, my nerves, long made twitchy by pretty words untethered to any useful, practical policy--well, I get a little pain.

Bottom line. Some swell parts, some terrible parts, some choices clearly made in order to stump for Biden policies (which echoes the "don't tell me what you need, just listen while I tell you what I want to do for you" pitch that teachers know so well from dozens of edu-wares salespersons). This was the kickoff for the tour; maybe things will pick up down the road. 

Study: Broad Academy Grads Help Privatize Public Schools

The Broad Academy has been around since 2002. Founded by Eli Broad, it's a demonstration of how the sheer force of will, when backed by a mountain of money, can cause qualifications to materialize out of nothing. The Broad Foundation ("entrepreneurship for the public good") set the Academy up with none of the features of a legitimate education leadership graduate program, and yet Broad grads kept getting hired to plum positions around the country. And now a new study shows what, exactly, all these faux graduates accomplished.

Give Eli Broad credit-- his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture-- building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA. He was a scrapper; Broad called himself a "sore winner."

Broad believed that education was in trouble, but he did not believe schools had an education problem. He believed they had a management problem--specifically, a management problem caused by not having enough managers who treated schools like businesses. The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work. 

Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.” And Broad maintained some control over his stable of faux supers. In one notable example, John Covington quit his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad did not particularly believe that public schools could be reformed, with his vision of privatization becoming ever more explicit (leading to the 2015 plan to simply take over LAUSD schools). The Broad Academy offered an actual manual for how to close schools in order to trim budgets. The process was simple enough, and many folks will recognize it:

1) Starve school by shutting off resources
2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

Anecdotally, the record for Broad Faux Supers is not great. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled (and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure, and he's been bouncing from failure to failure ever since..

But now a trio of researchers takes us beyond the anecdotal record. Thomas Dee (Stanford), Susanna Loeb (Brown) and Ying Shi (Syracuse) have produced "Public Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents." 

The paper starts with some history of Broad Academy, and places it in the framework of venture philanthropy, the sort of philanthropy that doesn't just write a check, but stays engaged and demands to see data-defined results. The we start breaking down information about the Broad supers.

The Academy members themselves. They are way more diverse than the general pool of superintendents, so that's a good thing. Slightly more than half of academy participants and about two-thirds of the Broad-trained superintendents have some teaching experience. This is way lower than actual school superintendents, and probably even lower because I will bet you dollars to donuts that the bulk of that "teaching experience" is a couple of years as a Teach for America tourist passing through a classroom so that they can stamp "teacher" on their CV like an exotic country stamped on a passport. On the other hand, one in five Broadies has experience in the military.

Broadies started at an average age of 48, and their average tenure was a whopping 3.8 years, with more than half moving on to another super job. Fun fact: Broadies tended to be hired by districts that have shorter-than-average superintendent tenures. Over time, the placement of Broadies moved from large public districts to Charter Management Organizations; from 2013 to 2015, one third of the cohort took jobs with CMOs or EMOs. 

But what did these Broadies, with their intensive business management style training, actually accomplish?

The answer is, mostly nothing special. This is not surprising; less-than-four-years is not enough time to move the needle on much of anything in a school district, no matter how awesome your management skills may be. Broadies were found to have little effect on enrollment, spending and student completion. The last is, again, unsurprising--you're there for a small fraction of the students' academic career, so what affect are you going to have, particularly if you're just one more body speeding through the district's revolving door. 

But one effect the study did find-- "they initiated a trend toward increased charter school enrollment." So if the purpose of the Broadies was to nudge schools towards privatization, they apparently did that. 

Near the end of his life, Broad was able to arrange for the Academy to finally get a cloak of legitimacy by having the program housed by Yale (accompanied by a whopping $100 million contribution). The Broad Center is not, of course, anywhere near Yale's education department, but is instead parked in the School Of Management.

The Broad Center at Yale School of Management fosters the ideas, policies, and leadership to help all students – particularly those from underserved communities – to learn and thrive. Our work is bolstered and enriched by the Broad Network, a nationwide community of nearly 900 dedicated and diverse leaders who are alumni of TBC programs.

"Particularly those from underserved communities" makes sense, because wealthy families expect more education from their educational leaders. The Broad Center started its first cohort this year, who will now work for a Yale Masters Degree. 

These thirty education-flavored leaders include about three people with actual public school classroom experience, and a whole lot of Teach for America products who "began their career in teaching" before quickly moving on to leadership roles based on the deep education expertise they acquired from spending two whole years in a classroom. The charter sector is heavily represented (whole lot of KIPPsters in this group). They appear well aligned with the Broad philosophy that the best people to fix public education are those who have little direct knowledge of public education. Eli Broad may be gone, but his vision, now festooned in New Haven ivy, still chugs along.

ICYMI: Welcome My New Granddaughter Edition (9/11)

Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law welcomed their first daughter, my second granddaughter. So all in all, it's a good weekend. In the meantime, I've got a particularly good collection of worthwhile reading for you. And remember--sharing and boosting the stuff that connects with you is important. 

Let Teachers Fix this. They Know How

Cheryl Gibbs Binkley doesn't post at Third Millenium Teacher very often, but when she does, she makes it count. Her point is simple. If you're worried about "learning loss," teachers already know what to do. If ever there was a time to get out of the way and let teachers teach, this is it. 

It's time to stop calling for schools to implement actions that are not going to happen.

While we're on the subject, here's a little quick realism from Larry Ferlazzo

Florida ranked No. 1 for "education freedom" — by right-wing group that wants to privatize it all

Kathryn Joyce reports for Salon on Heritage Foundation's new education freedom report card, and the state that came in first. Great piece. 

It's time to put woke schools myth to bed

In a guest op-ed in The Oklahoman, Dan Vincent argues that the plague of woke schools isn't really a thing. 

Daring to speak about race in a divided school

Thoughtful and even-handed piece in the New York Times by Daniel Bergner, focusing on a small community in Michigan and its wrestling with issues of race. 

With Don't Say Gay Laws and Abortion Bans, Student Surveillance Raises New Risks

The 74 has one of the scarier stories out there. The surveillance state plus restrictive laws equals bad news for students. 

A Texas Eighth Grader Was Pulled From Class And Grilled About His Gender-Identity

Greg Abbott told the state to start treating trans youth cases like cases of child abuse, and they are by God doing it. This is a chilling story of what happened to one 13 year old boy. 

Tennessee school library law's expanded scope puts burden on teachers

All you have to do is just check through every single book in your room for every single thing that some parent might object to. Super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Chalkbeat has the story.

Cyber charters see enrollments rise

Carol Burris guests at Valerie Strauss' Washington Post space, providing more detail and insight on the pandemic explosion in virtual charter biz-- and what that means for educating students and making money.

And To Think I Thought I Had Nothing To Say

Dad Gone Wild, school, funding, and the reformers making a bundle.

As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

Matt Barnum looks at school funding and the problems set to re-emerge as the pandemic aid runs out. Some god breakdowns of the problems of poverty and schools.

A tiny Christian college in Michigan is infiltrating Florida's schools

Yes, it's Hillsdale. And it turns out they've had even more control of Florida schools than you thought. Mary Harris reports at Slate. 

Hackers infiltrate LAUSD in growing trend

One more damn thing to worry about. The nation's second largest school district had to postpone the first day of school because they were hacked. 

A modest proposal for police reform 

From a few months ago, but I only just encountered this cleveland.com piece from Benjamin Helton. What if we used vouchers for other things? 

High school senior wins Boise school district board position

In fact, he beat an incumbent to do it. Kids these days. An encouraging story from KTVB7.

The Grove City class of 1967 had a request for its 55th reunion: One more class with its 99-year-old science teacher, Homer Christie

Heck of a story, from just up the road. In 1960, high school science teacher Homer Christie started teaching a free, optional Saturday morning extra science class. He retired from teaching in 1986, but he kept teaching the class until four years ago--at age 95. Now he'll be a featured part of a class reunion. 

FL: Endgame In Sight; Heritage Foundation Says Yay

Governor Ron DeSantis just announced his intention for the next step in dismantling public education in Florida; he wants to expand the education savings accounts, the super-vouchers that hand parents a chunk of money on a debit card that they can spend on pretty much anything educational or education-adjacent. 

Not that this is remotely a surprise. Type Florida in the search bar at the top of this blog and look at all the many, many ways Florida's leaders have worked to dismantle public education and sell off the parts, and every step brings them closer to the far right ideal of not just privatizing education, but privatizing it in the setting of an unregulated market, removing government from any involvement in education at all. 

DeSantis made his little speech as part of a victory lap. The Heritage Foundation, a right wing organization with strong ties to every right wing operation you can think of. They've decided to start doing an annual Education Freedom Report Card, organized around the search for a state that has most perfectly realized Milton Friedman's vision of education completely managed by an unregulated free market with government providing zero public education. Friedman also imagined that such a system would be free of discrimination of any sort because, when it came to education and society in general, Friedman was a dope. But his vision has always provided a cover for all sorts of people who want to dismantle public education for all sorts of reasons. "I'm just following the natural laws of economic reality," sounds so much better than, "I don't to pay taxes to fund schools for all those poor kids."

Anyway. The first year of the Heritage Report Card produced a clear winner-- Florida. And the explanation of the report card produces a clear picture of what these folks want in general and what Florida has accomplished in particular. 

We're well into the next phase. Don't call them "reformers" or even "disruptors." Now they're just plain old dismantlers.

The Heritage crew lays out four categories of public ed dismantling.

1) Education choice. This asks how much a centrally accountable public ed system has been replaced with an open market in which parents have to pick and choose an educational program on their own. Arizona, with its universal ESAs, wins the category.

2) Regulatory freedom. How well has the government shredded any kind of accountability measures? No Common Core tests is a winner, but beyond, we're looking for no regulations at all, including the new frontier in unregulated teaching certification. The foundation calls requirements for professional certification "barriers to teaching," much like FDA regulations are barriers to selling whatever kind of cut of whatever kind of meat in whatever kind of state. Accountability is bad.

3) Transparency. This appears to refer to the degree to which anti-education groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have gotten ahold of the levers of power, and how well the state has done at passing various teacher gag laws. 2 and 3 really capture the true spirit of the dismantlers, who argue that private education-flavored options should operate with complete opacity, accountable to nobody, but that the public education system should operate in a fishbowl, the easier to attack it for anything and everything.

4) Return on Investment. This is some top grade bullshit here, literally computing NAEP points per dollar spent, as well as factoring unfunded teacher pension liabilities (because pensions for teachers are bad and show you haven't properly de-powered your unions). 

The Heritage Foundation has embraced the culture war because it's a useful tool for creating distrust in public education. Leading dismantlist Chris Rufo said they would. Jay Greene of the Foundation said they should.  It's a tool; they'll be pro-parent just as long as it's not parents who are pro-public education.

But in the meantime, Florida is the dream. It is approaching the final form of dismantlism.

Defund public education. Undermine it financially, while also sowing distrust and undermining taxpayer support.

End the state's responsibility for providing or overseeing a decent education for every child.

Zero accountability to taxpayers.

Parents just DIY their way through an unregulated marketplace ripe for fraud and failure.

"We gave you a couple thou on a debit card. You're not our problem now. Voucher money ran out? Not our problem. Got bilked by some fraudster? Not our problem. Got left high and dry when some edu-biz closed its doors? Not our problem. Don't have the time or expertise to navigate this mess? We're sure someone has started a business that you can pay to do it for you. Are we certifying that business as qualified and legit? Ha! Now go away."

Two quotes from Kathryn Joyce's most excellent piece about the report card capture things well. First, from Andrew Spar, who has the thankless task of being president of the Florida Education association:

This amounts, Spar continued, to "the Heritage Foundation celebrating the rankings of how well you underfund public schools, how well you dismantle public schools. I don't think we should celebrate the fact that we're shortchanging kids."

And from Carol Burris, head of the Network for Public Education:

"With this report," added Burris, "the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality."

Florida and Arizona lead in dismantlism--that's how they ended up at the top of the Public Education Hostility Index last year. It is now easier than ever to imagine a future in which some states have an actual public education system, and others do not. 

The Free Market Is Wrong For Education (Part #1,277,652)

You may have noticed lately that the streaming industry is going through meltdown challenging transition. It's a reminder that, particularly in late stage capitalism, the free market is fundamentally incompatible with public education.

Just as cable disrupted broadcast television, streaming has disrupted cable. The less obvious part of the transition was a transition in what the business was actually about. Broadcast television are in the business of collecting eyeballs and then renting those eyeballs out to advertisers. Streaming services are in the business of selling subscriptions to customers. Except that, in this stage of the game, neither is actually in those businesses primarily--all are in the business of "creating" money for shareholders. Specifically, the business of creating ever-increasing piles of money.

But there's a problem--there is a finite number of customers in the pool, and streaming services have about reached that limit, particularly as they have proliferated. You are now an Old Fart if you can sit and regale the youngs of the days when a subscription to Netflix would let you watch pretty much everything.

The most obvious issue at the moment (other than your steadily increasing subscription costs) is the mess at Warner/HBO Max/Discovery, in which the newly combined streaming services are obliterating a ton of material. Not just canceled as in "don't make any more" but canceled as in "we have removed this material entirely from the servers." There are plenty of reasons behind this move, but this sentence pretty well sums it up:

Discovery is cutting shows from its archives and unfinished movies from HBO Max as it prepares to merge it with its sister streaming service Discovery Plus, having promised its shareholders a $3 billion cut in costs.

Meanwhile, as Washington Post reports,

Faced with a plunging stock price and worrisome subscriber loss, Netflix plans to add an advertising-supported model for a lower price and may crack down on password sharing. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus, which can all be subscribed to in a cable-esque bundle, are raising prices after taking a more than $1 billion hit in the fiscal third quarter.

This all makes sense as long as you understand that the business of these services is not what you think it is. It is not to produce and distribute quality viewing experiences, and certainly not to provide for support to the creative people who produce all this content. The business of these businesses is to make money, and if they have to slice off pieces of their supposed primary mission, they'll do that. Sell advertising space? Cut what they pay for content to the bone? Use algorithms and data to determine what is profitable rather than what is quality? They will do all of that because--

1) You've got to keep making not just money, but more money and

2) Once the market is saturated, there's no way to do that except by playing bean counting games, cutting costs, and finding more sources of revenue.

I've repeated my law in the past: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. But that's probably incomplete, because the free market also, eventually, fosters creative corner cutting, even if the corners cut affect the pursuit of what is supposed to be the business's actual mission. 

We've already heard these kinds of noise from reformsters for years. There's a whole range of initiatives that are all really directed at just one question-- isn't there a way to have a "school" without paying so much for teachers? Maybe super-sardinemasters could teach a few hundred kids at a time. Maybe replace teachers with coaches or facilitators-- even call it something fancy, like microschool. Maybe lower the requirements so that any warm body can do the job and we don't have to pay for qualifications. 

And that's before we get to the lowering of expectations. How often are we hearing the message that a school should just teach students reading and math and maybe a little history, but only enough to make them employable.

The worst tendency for the free market is to look for that sweet spot where you spend the least you can get away with without losing too much of your market share, because your real purpose is to get money to shareholders. Is this what anyone wants for the schools their child attends? Do you want to hear from a building principal at orientation, "Rest assured that we have cut every corner in our attempt to provide your child with the bare minimum required."

The free market can, and has, accomplished some great things. But its values are incompatible with a system that promises to provide a full, rich, rounded education for every single student in the country.