A Moonshot For The Big Standardized Test

In the Washington Post, a new call for an education moon shot as a way to recover from the after-effects of the pandemic learning interruption.

The authors list gives us a hint at where this headed, and it's not the moon. There's Dan Goldhaber, vice-president of AIR (a test manufacturing outfit) and director of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), from which vantage he has pitched research supporting the idea that it would be great to jam a bunch of students in a room with one teacher (and back in the day, he used to argue for VAM, too). There's Thomas Kane, the economist who is somehow a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has carried water for Bill Gates, pushed high stakes testing, and helped Eric Hanushek promote the idea that your Kindergarten experience at age 5 determines your wealth at age 55. Round this out with Andrew McEachin and Emily Morton of NWEA, the test manufacturing company that has been pushing Learning Loss and themselves as the antidote to same. 

Just for the record, this is not the first call for a moonshot. The Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress previously announced a "Moonshot for Kids," an "open competition meant to elicit and highlight breakthrough ideas that could best leverage a major public or private research and development investment of $1 billion or more to improve outcomes for school-age kids" (albeit with an image of a launching spoace shuttle, a vehicle that does not go to the moon). However, that announcement came on March 17, 2019, just days before the coronavirus upended everything. Nevertheless, I fell that the four writers of the WaPo piece at the very least owe Mike Petrelli some sort of royalty payment for the whole "moonshot" thing.

Goldhaber et al open with the Big Pitch:

American students have experienced a historic decline in academic achievement. The only possible response — the only rational response — is a historic collective investment in children and young adults.

Yeah, the reason that sort of investment would be historic is the same reason that unicorns pooping rainbows in the middle of Wall Street would be historic. And then there's this:

The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal plummeting test scores nationwide, setting students back to where they were two decades ago.

This is a classic in a genre that likes to reduce students to an amorphous blob of data-generating abstractions, because here's the thing--if we set the actual live human students who took these tests back "to where they were two decades ago," they would all be unformed, unborn, not yet even twinkles in their parents' eyes. 

Goldhaber et al correctly note that the pandemic exacerbated the gap in test scores between haves and have-nots, and that ought to be a call to action except that, of course, the basic inequity should have been a call to action in the first place, but we've been taking the Big Standardized Tests for a couple of decades thereby attaching a numbered score to the inequity that people already knew was there, and somehow it has never led to states giving those schools more resources or support. "There's a big bear in the neighbors' house," has never prompted the authorities to send help (other than offers like "Well, we could arrange for one member of the family to move to a nice charter house across the street" or "Okay, let's demolish the house with the bear and the people in it"). So I'm not sure why "Okay, there's a bear in the neighbors' house and it's even bigger than we thought" would change anything.

These losses won’t be fixed by few hours of tutoring or a helpful computer program.

Well, they got that right, anyway. And they also score with the observation that the first step is "to more clearly define the task in front of educators and families." And then it goes south.

States need to help everyone see the loss in terms of what it’s going to take to get students back on track. Telling educators that proficiency rates have declined isn’t enough. Explaining that students lost several months or a year of math instruction provides a more solid basis for planning an ambitious recovery agenda.

This is the opposite of clearly defining the task. Because "proficiency rates" is just a snappy term for "test scores." And if your takeaway from all this disruption of school is that our most pressing need is to get test scores back up, then you have lost the plot (or spent too much time in the testing industrial complex). And the reference to months or a year of lost instruction is just to set up the use, again, of one of the more egregious falsehoods pushed by testocrats.

Research suggests that districts might be able to get a year’s worth of additional growth by providing students with three hours of tutoring, with three or fewer students per teacher — each week.

There is no such thing as learning measured in years, months, days or minutes. The time units of learning is a made-up sexy way to talk about--again--drops in test scores. It's a conversion made up to turn slices of standard deviation into units of time. It's a way to distract from the suggestion that of all the things you could worry about when it comes to the education, the thing you should worry most about is their score on the Big Standardized Test. Any time someone starts talking about days, weeks, months of learning, your bullshit detector should start clanging like a Don't Fear The Reaper cowbell.

But Goldhaber et al are going to suggest that a summer school session might yield an academic quarters worth of learning. Or maybe give students an extra period of algebra. Which are exactly the kind of solutions you come up with if you start with the premise that nothing is more important than raising those test scores. And not, say, deciding that your band and chorus need extra periods to help build the ensemble skills that have suffered from the long break. 

The writers also discuss the issues of staffing; in short, the school is probably going to have to staff all this stuff by mobilizing "local undergraduate students, parents, and other community members to provide tutoring." And be up front about the sacrifices necessary

Schools and education leaders should also be frank about what this effort requires from families. Expanding learning opportunities, such as after-school programs or Saturday academies, will require students and families to sacrifice time they might ordinarily spend on extracurriculars, family responsibilities, or even vacations. Year-round school will require broader adjustments to family routines — though it might be a benefit for parents scrambling for summer child care.

To get consensus (aka buy in) from parents, the school will have to be "crystal clear about where individual children stand." And I would love to sit in on the meeting in which Principal McData explains to Mr. and Mrs. Parentsalot that little Sam and Pat should have summer vacation taken away from them until they get that score on the annual test back up, because policy leaders are unhappy with the data. 

The writers also try to sell the idea that parents are largely deluded in thinking that their children are up to speed, which does not "line up with what we know about where students are academically today." But that's just another cover for "test score." (Reformsters really need to decide whether parents are the ones who know their children best or parents don't have a damn clue.) 

Look. This piece touts the value of transparency, but it also uses a trick known as the used car lot world as "assume the sale." That's when the salesman starts talking as if your decision to buy the car is already a done deal, and you're just haggling over details.

In this case, testocrats start the conversation on the premise that, hey, we all agree that nothing is more important than getting those annual test scores on a single badly-designed math and reading test. We skip right over the long long list of educational items that suffered during the pandemic and just quietly move test scores to the top of the list without any discussion about what priorities should be. For that matter, we also skip over the discussion that had already been raging for a few decades before COVID, the discussion about whether tests tests are valid, whether they're a good proxy for educational achievement at all, whther test scores tell teachers anything they don't already know, whether they are serving as a massive example of Campbell's Law as they warp education all out of shape, whether education would not be better off if we scrapped the whole BS Test business.

Testocrats are nervous. During the pandemic, testing was suspended, and parents and teachers did not collapse, wailing, "How shall I ever know how these children are doing??" Not a teacher in the country said, "Man, I wish test prep and administration was sucking up more of my time." 

I won't pretend to know how many testocrats have been swimming too long in their own koolaid and how many are just cynically opportunistic. Either way, they need a moonshot not to rescue children, but to rescue their own industry. In the meantime, schools and parents should be having a conversation about what students need without jumping to the assumption that nothing could be more important than getting those test scores back up.

CT: Darien Gets It

 It's a small local story, but I want to highlight it because it shows that some school districts can figure it out.

Darien Public Schools are located in Darien, Connecticut. According to Niche, they're a top-rated district with A and A+ rating for everything except diversity (C-). The district serves a little under 5,000 students, and was singled out by the state for excellence in managing its way through the pandemic. Darien is a costal town on Long Island Sound with a median household income of $232,523, a preponderance of Republicans, and low taxes. Median home price is $2.2 million. Both film versions of the Stepford Wives filmed in Darien.

But in 2021, more than 70 teachers left the district (double their pre-pandemic rate). Only five of those were retirees. The board and the teachers union agreed--some sort of action had to be taken. What to do?

Darien didn't lower the bar by deciding to hire any warm body that could stand up in a classroom. They didn't shrug and say, "Well, just jam more kids into the classrooms we still have teachers for." No, they did something radical:

This week, the school board approved a three-year contract with Darien educators that will cost the district a total of $6 million but gives teachers the biggest increase in salaries in more than a decade and the highest starting salary among districts of comparable size and affluence.

That's right. They got competitive. They recognized that the high cost of housing in the district means it's an expensive place to teach, even if the expense is measured in many hours of commuting. They extended maternity leave, to twelve weeks plus five days.  

Not every district has the kinds of resources that Darien has, but every district has the ability to compete with comparable districts. Every district has the ability to look at the down side of teaching in their schools and ask themselves, "What would make our district more attractive." Every district can work to use its strengths to offset its drawbacks.

Or they could just shrug and say, "Well, there's a teacher shortage. Nothing we can do about it." Darien's approach seems more useful.

Welcome Back, Honesty Gap

We have heard about the Honesty Gap before, way back in the spring of 2015. Achieve.org was one of the first to make some noise about it (Achieve, you may recall, was instrumental in launching Common Core), but in short order everyone was going on about it, from Jeb Bush's FEE to the Center for American Progress, Educators for Excellence, Students First--all the reformster biggies. The Honesty Gap even got its own website, which is still running today (it's owned by the Collaborative for Student Success, a CCSS promotion group that is tied directly to The Hunt Institute, which is in turn "an affiliate center" of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lists the usual suspects as collaborators-- Gates Foundation, Achieve, NEA, The Broad Foundation, et al.)

That's one dishonest looking thermometer

So what is The Honesty Gap? It's pretty simple--it's the observation that in many states, the proficiency rate on the NAEP doesn't match the proficiency rate on the state's Big Standardized Test. It dovetailed nicely with a theory espoused by everyone from Arne Duncan to Betsy DeVos, which was that public schools were lying about how well their students were doing, presumably to hide their own wretched failiness. 

In 2015, when the Honesty Gap was having a moment, Rianna Saslow was a high school freshman at The Galloway School, a private school in Atlanta, founded in 1969. (Current tuition for grades 9-12 is $31,150.) Saslow went on to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and graduated with a BA in Political Science and a second one in Educational Equity just about six months ago. Then she went to work as a policy analyst at Education Reform Now, the 501(c)(3) arm of Democrats [sic] For Education Reform, a reformy outfit started by hedge funder Whitney Tilson to get Democrats on board with the reformster biz. To get a sense of how ERN plays, they just hosted their 12th annual Take 'Em To School Poker Tournament, where you could grab a single seat for $2,500 or a whole table for $100,000 (cocktail ticket for $250).

It's Ms. Saslow who is going to reintroduce us to the Honesty Gap, and I bring her story up for a couple of reasons.

1) A reminder that for some people, these reformy ideas really did first appear a lifetime ago. I may remember a time when the dismantling of public education was not a major narrative; folks like Ms. Saslow do not.

2) A reminder that none of this stuff dies, no matter how much it deserves to. It just keeps coming back. Therefor so must the refutations.

Saslow's piece appears at The 74, which is always a mixed bag. Some of their education journalism is top notch; their opinion section is reliably tilted in the direction of the education disruptors, defunders, and dismantlers. The piece provides a bit of an echo of The 74's earlier coverage of the Virginia report that brought up the Honesty Gap for the usual purpose--to discredit public schools. 

Like too many models of the 3D crowd, this is not an honest attempt to understand a problem in education in order to find a solution. But let's take a look at Saslow's piece and see what issues are hidden there.

Saslow starts by holding up the NAEP as a "highly respected and objective set of assessments that consistently holds students to a high level of rigor and acts as a neutral referee in comparing students to one another." Wellllll.....folks have taken issue with the NAEP for as long as it has existed. One NCES study found that about half of the students rated Basic actually went on to complete a Bachelor's Degree or higher; in other words, despite what the test said, they were college ready. 

Saslow suggests that it's a shortcoming that NAEP offers no individual school ratings, but that's not what it's designed for. This is a recurring problem with Big Standardized Tests, this notion that if a yardstick is good for measuring the length of a shoe, it can also measure the length of an interstate highway, or the relative humidity, or atomic weight, or how ugly that pig is. Instruments are only good at measuring what they're designed to measure.

Saslow moves on to the complaint that is the heart of the Honesty Gap. States give their own BS Tests:

But, by and large, states set a bar for academic proficiency that is lower than that for the NAEP.

Yes, states and the NAEP folks define "proficiency" differently. This has been an endless source of honest and deliberate confusion, as folks keep making up their own definition of NAEP proficiency, rather than using the NAEP's own explanation. Proficient does not mean "on grade level," or even "sort of above average," but instead is roughly equivalent to a classroom A. States do not necessarily define proficiency in the same way. This is not a complicated issue. If I define "tall" as "over six feet" and you define it as "over 5 and a half feet," we will get different numbers when we analyze a group for the number of tall people. It's kind of a silly problem to have; even sillier since the NAEP folks could have solved it long ago by giving up their singular definitions of the terms involved.

Saslow rolls out some examples of how state levels of proficiency are usually higher than NAEP levels, and then she is going to drag classroom teachers into this as well by noting that classroom grades run higher, which she supports with data from ACT, a company whose whole sales pitch rests on the notion that only the scores from their product can be trusted to give a true assessment of student skills and knowledge. This is like depending on the auto industry to give you figures on the health benefits of riding a bicycle, but she's not going to mention that built in conflict.

There's a really fundamental problem--okay, two--in the whole Honesty Gap model. 

Let's say I want to know what the temperature is in my living room. I use three different devices to get the temperature. If they give me different answers, the most obvious explanation is that one or more of those instruments is faulty. Learning is even more subjective and difficult to measure than temperature--when all these measures fail to match perfectly, the most obvious and likely explanation is that the measures are themselves defective. 

And I certainly wouldn't accuse my mismatching temperature devices of being liars. By labeling the mismatch between instruments as an "honesty gap," we introduce the idea that the mismatch is being deliberately created by folks who are lying. The implications is that somewhere in all this there are some naughty liars (and they probably work for the public school system).

Those two factors lead me to suspect that people who talk about an Honesty Gap are not making a serious effort to solve any problems.

There are other bumps in Saslow's road. She repeats that same mistake of equating "proficient" with "on grade level." It isn't, but she uses that mistaken use in a mistaken survey to raise the old picture of families that have been misled about their children's knowledge (in 3D land, parents know their children best except when they don't have any idea what their children really know).

If families are provided with overly optimistic data, how can leaders expect their support when looking to implement robust policies and practices to improve public education?

By suggesting policies that might actually help. For instance, we could stop the practice of using low tests scores to target public schools for charterization or closure instead of actual increased support.

Closing the honesty gap requires commitment at all levels of leadership. State policymakers must ensure that their assessments are academically rigorous, and they must set benchmarks that reflect true grade-level proficiency.

Except that, in terms of NAEP scores, "grade-level proficiency" is a self-contradictory term, because "proficiency" means "well above grade level." I know, I know. I'm repeating myself. I'll stop when they do.

On the district level, administrators must ensure that instructors have access to standards-aligned, high-quality instructional materials. And within the classroom, teachers must provide consistent and reliable grades that allow students, families and school leaders to monitor progress before higher-stakes exams take place.

In other words, organize the entire school around the Big Standardized Test. Schools have already done too much of that. It is backwards and upside down and not the way to do education well (and, I'll bet, not how they do things at the Galloway School, where they don't take the Georgia state assessment). 

Saslow also points out that the private sector offers some "helpful tools for accurately gauging student achievement and post-pandemic unfinished learning." I have my doubts about the "accurately" part, just as I have doubts about the process of having a problem assessed by people who want to sell you solutions to the problem.

The Honesty Gap remains a tool for marketing and pushing the old narrative that public schools are in Big Trouble, but it is itself a dishonest and sloppy argument that provides little real assistance in dealing with the actual challenges facing public education these days. 

Heritage Foundation: School Choice Is Wokeness Antidote

Well, Jay Greene said he was going to do it. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars."

Greene argued that the culture wars were an opportunity that choicers "should not squander." Heritage had some data that showed an overlap between the anti-woke crowd and the anti-public school crowd, and Greene argued that it was time to put that to work. Not a shock; Chris Rufo was arguing last spring that the road to choice was through sowing distrust in public education. But while Rufo likes to play Crusading Journalist and Firebrand, Greene has positioned himself as more of a rational academic (with citations and stuff). 

And so we arrive at his latest-- a report thingy at Heritage entitled "Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education." The piece is co-authored by Ian Kingsbury, who previously worked for cyber school giant Stride (formerly K12) and the Empire Center; these days he's a senior fellow at the Education Freedom Institute ("Protecting and promoting school choice") which is led by defunding crusader Corey DeAngelis, so you know he's approaching this work with an unbiased view. 

That's okay. I read this so you don't have to.

The report has an academic research costume on, but it is something else. And we catch a whiff right in the first lurid paragraph. I'm going to take a minute with this because it gives us a strong sense of where this is all headed.

American K–12 education is currently mired in an unmistakable radical leftward lurch. Whether changing the pronouns of students without informing their parents, eradicating academic standards in the name of “equity,” infusing ahistorical curricula meant to engender contempt for the United States, or lobbying the Department of Justice to label anyone who opposes any of the former “domestic terrorists,” progressive activists are increasingly able to use America’s schools as a tool for advancing their woke agenda.

Every one of those burning clauses comes with a footnote. It's online, so they could come with links instead, but footnotes are more legit and researchy. The closest to a legit source is the last, which takes us to a Wall Street Journal story about Merrick Garland's dumb letter that gave parental rights groups the chance to complain they were being oppressed as terrorists. The 1619 rebuttal is from Naomi Schaeffer Riley, a senior fellow at the right-tilted American Enterprise Institute. Another is from the Empire Center, a project of the Manhattan Institute (current employers of Chris Rufo). And the first two are from the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing faux journalism outfit backed by hedge funder Paul Singer. In other words, not a fact in the bunch--just the kinds of links to other opinions that you would expect in a blog post.

"Blog post masquerading as research report" is exactly where we're headed. There's some more ranting about the state of public schools these days interspersed with questionable assertions such as 

Since parents, on average, demand far less wokeism than schools supply, shifting more power to parents will reverse this leftward lurch of the education system.

That sounds like an assertion that could be tested, and there's a footnote that links to... the Jay Greene post I mentioned at the top, which does include some survey questions handled by Ipsos, a multinational marketing firm, and aimed at producing the desired results. 

Anyway, we work our way around to the central idea--

At the heart of this debate is an empirical claim that can be tested. Does giving parents greater control over choosing their children’s schools actually reduce how woke those chosen schools tend to be? If it does, then expanding school choice offers greater promise given the difficulty of getting a recalcitrant school system to comply with direct bans on woke indoctrination. If, however, parental control over chosen schools makes little or no difference, the skeptics may be right that expanding choice could fail to combat radical ideology in the classroom, even if it helps families in other ways.

Yes, boys and girls--wokeness can be measured empirically, and you will be amazed at how easy it is to do.

There are some more unsubstantiated assertions linked to Things That Are Not Research (did you know that progressives "have enjoyed near monopolistic control of universities for decades"--well, an article in National Affairs says so) before we arrive at the methodology for figuring out just how woke charter schools and public schools are, and it is astonishing. Stay with me now.

They measured how "woke" a charter is by searching the  student handbook for eight terms-- (1) diversity, (2) equity, (3) inclusion, (4) justice, (5) restorative, (6) social-emotional learning, (7) gender identity, and (8) culturally affirming. They did this for the 20 largest charters in each state (and skipped states that didn't have enough to participate). As they searched through each of the several-hundred handbooks, they made sure not to count instances where these words were used for non-woke purposes.

The checked this against the level of charter autonomy in each state on the theory that where there was less autonomy, there would be more wokeness enforced by the state. The get that figure by using the charter sector scores that the Center for Education Reform (Jeanne Allen's rabidly anti-public ed outfit) gave states. 

And to compare these wokeness scores to the public schools and thereby prove their thesis that charters offer a wokeness respite, they... wait a minute. Hold on. No, they didn't gather any data about public schools at all. They're just going to correlate their wokeness index with "regulatory capture."

After that it's just math. The states that scored below average for the CER ratings (aka have more state regulation) also have more instances of those woke words in their student handbook. And vice versa. Also, just to up their game, they searched for handbooks that included all of the eight terms, and the correlation held. They even made a chart.

Or this charter woke-osity chart breaking it down by state. Because charts = science.

Greene and Kingsbury argue that this analysis "lends credence" regulation is more woke than the free market, and therefor charters are more responsive to parents, all of whom dislike wokeness which we know because we just, you know, do. 

What else can they squeeze out of this "analysis" of the "data"? Charter authorizers and bureaucrats might be more woke than average citizens. Maybe states with so much charter wokeness create a "woke duopoly" in which parents (who, as we know, all hate woke-itude) choose the lesser of two evils. Conservative states with highly regulated charter markets should loosen up in order to drive out excess woke-osity (Alabama, get with it). And just generally, charter schools should be regulated less because they should, and because the woke!

As always, I wonder if it's no longer a conservative value to want accountability from government and know how your tax dollars are spent.

Look. This report is twelve kinds of baloney. Eight key words are a terrible way to grab a wokeness score (though I suppose it helps if, like the authors, you never really try to define the term "woke"). Assertions are not facts or data, and other articles produced by your colleagues in the same camp are not research. And even if, by some miracle, we accepted any of what's asserted here, we'd still be left with a big question--what if every public school has a lower woke score than any of these charter schools.

This is not research. It is not a report. It's a blog post with a snazzy heading. It's an op-ed in search of a newspaper, though I expect it will find its way there in some form, because mostly this is just an argument to reduce regulation and promote charter schools. It's trying to harness the culture war so the opportunity isn't wasted. "Unregulated school choice will rescue your child from woke-ification!! Oooooooooo!!!!" It's the folks who want to defund public education just trying another angle. To try to dress it up as science is intellectually dishonest. It's bad PR, with charts. Everyone deserves better.

TX: Far Right Book Banning In Action

Steve Bannon was one of the Trumpers to start arguing that school boards needed to be targeted, and he soon found a partner in Patriot Mobile, a mobile phone company with a christianist nationalist bent ("America's only Christian conservative wireless provider"). They're headed by Glenn Story, a CPA on a mission, that in recent years has veered more toward Dominionism and the Seven Mountains, which are all about how Christians are supposed to take over the rule of society, both in government and culture (one such group once gave Betsy DeVos an award).

Patriot takes millions of dollars and pumps it into far-right causes, and Story decided that they would like to follow Bannon's lead and grab themselves some school boards in Texas. Bannon and Story put on a little show in August for attenders of CPAC.

“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on Aug. 6. “Tell us about what you did.”

Story turned to the camera and said, “We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.”

“Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!” Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

The districts were in Southlake, Keller, Grapevine, and Mansfield.

Southlake we've visited before. It's in Southlake's Carroll Independent School District that an administrator suggested that a book about the Holocaust should be balanced by a book representing the other side. They leaped right on the book banning rubric bandwagon, and all this after several years of trying, sort of, to address local issues with racism. 

Carroll is also the district where Patriot moved to take advantage of a boneheaded Texas law requiring schools to put up any "In God We Trust" posters that were donated. So Patriot donated a bunch, and so did some other folks who put the text in Arabic and with gay pride colors. 

Keller Independent School District also did their new owners proud by going after a bunch of books, including an Anne Frank adaptation and the Bible. But back then the district was still hewing to the notion that these books included divisive concepts or sexual content.

Now, it seems, the Keller school board isn't even trying to pretend that there's any principle involved here except bigotry and bias.

Joni Shaw Smith, a Moms for Liberty board member, said she was concerned about some of the books on the new acquisition list. Which matters because now the Keller board must approve any and all books purchased. 

The board already had a strict list of limitations on books, but this week they extended it to include "discussion or depiction of gender fluidity" at all. Not a depiction that involves depiction of nudity or sex acts. Just any depiction at all. As Bookriot points out, that forbids any mention of trans persons as well. 

Lots of folks had lots of things to say about this, but the award for most unintentionally hilarious comment comes from another Texas politician who attended the meeting:

“You promised to defend our kids, you promised to put education above indoctrination. … That’s what you’re doing tonight,” said Nate Schatzline, who recently won a seat in the Texas House.

“You have put no political beliefs inside of this,” he added, which drew laughs from some in the audience.

Indeed. 

It's all worth paying attention to because in this move, the mask has slipped. This far right crowd may try to get their feet in doors by making noise about the innocence of children and graphic sex and shocking depictions, but here's the endgame for many--to simply erase LGBTQ persons from sight. And not just for their own children, but for all children. It is not Texas's finest hour. I sure miss old fashioned actual conservatives who believed in actual freedom and not the suppression of every piece of human existence with which they disagreed. 

ICYMI: Post Election Blues Edition (11/13)

Well, that was a party. Here's hoping your state was more Michigan and less Florida. Now back to work. Here's some reading from the week.

Initial merit pay vote has troubles

In case you haven't followed my link elsewhere, here's Justin Parmenter's take on the newest development in North Carolina's quest to trash teaching. 

Dozens of youths illegally employed to clean meat plants, Labor Dept. says

From the Washington Post, this appalling story about youths working in highly dangerous jobs, and the employer's efforts to hide it all from the authorities. Surprise--the youths are all Spanish-speaking.

How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax

Also from WaPo, one more story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and how current moral panic can trash just about anything, in spite of facts.

As Teen Loneliness Rates Soar, Schools May Be Making It Worse, Scientists Say

Yes, it's a lot of depressing stuff this week. This is a Newsweek story via MSN, and it gives folks in education an awful lot to think about. 

Denver Archdiocese’s guidance to Catholic schools: Don’t enroll transgender students. Treat gay parents differently.

Not that it's a surprise to anyone, but it's still a bit stunning to see it in print and official. In the Denver Post.

A Science of Reading reader to go with the latest Hanford podcast

Courtesy of Paul Thomas, a useful guide to some actual science.

What I believe Emily Hanford misses

Nancy Bailey asks some questions about what Hanford may or may not really get about reading instruction. 

The Right Wing Mothers Fueling the School Board Wars

From the New Yorker, so mind the paywall if you've already burned your free reads. A great dig into the culture wars and the women who have helped push them. 

The Damage Is Already Being Done

Sue Kingery Woltanski is a school board member in Florida, and she blogs at Accountabaloney. She has fears about the level of disinformation and distrust currently in play (and commenters show up to provide evidence). This is what Florida looks like on the ground right now. 

Oklahoma teacher helms campaign against banned books after being threatened by conservatives

Remember Summer Boismier, the English teacher who got in trouble over sharing the link to the Brooklyn Library's banned books program. The woman who got harassed by a bunch of conservatives (including the dudebro now in charge of Oklahoma education). Here's what she's been up to since then.

Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it

Jill Barshay at Hechinger (via KQED) unpacks some study that shows that--shocker--students aren't all that interested in logging on for extra work from an online tutor. Who would ever have guessed?

Texas politicians rake in millions from far-right Christian megadonors pushing private school vouchers

NBC news with the also-unsurprising story that school voucher supporters are spending a lot of money to rent some politicians.

I'm going to brag on my home town here, recently profiled in this Pittsburgh news outlet. This is where I have lived and worked for most of my life. It's not a bad little place.

At Forbes this week, I took a look at a policy memo by Helen Ladd about some problems inherent in charter schools as currently practiced. 

Jeb Bush Charterpalooza Is Back!

For over ten years, Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), these days going by the nom de reform of ExcelInEd, has sponsored a Grand Gathering of reformsters, an annual Big Wet Kiss to privatization. All the big names are there, and while the budget here at the Curmudgucation Institute does not allow me to attend, it's always interesting to take a look at the schedule to get a sense of where the movement's head is these days.

The National Summit on Education convenes the nation’s leaders in education policy to share what works, what doesn’t and what’s next in education policy. Join us as we host more than 1,000 legislators, state superintendents, policymakers and advocates at the 2022 National Summit on Education in Salt Lake City, Utah, at The Grand America Hotel.

Right off the bat, one notices that this doesn't sounds as chartery or privatizy as it has in years past (like just back in 2017, when Betsy DeVos was the big guest speaker)

So here we go, to the National Summit on Education 2022.

Jeb! kicks things off with the first keynote. There's a lunch keynote about 21st century skills, then a first day wrap-up session with Axios explaining how to do better PR. The second breakfast keynote is Emily Hanford (still billed as a journalist and not an advocate) and a Science of Reading panel, followed by an international update on pandemic recovery. I'll save the final big presentation till later.

In between, there's an assortment of breakout sessions to choose from. Those include:

How states are building stronger teacher pipelines.

There are, of course, no teachers involved here. But you can learn secrets of building that pipeline from representatives of Indiana, Florida, and Tennessee (Commissioner Penny Schwinn). Not sure these are the states to listen to on this subject.

How test-based accountability helps students far beyond the classroom.

Lordy. Tom Kane, Aimee Guidera and Eric Hanushek are going to peddle the same old bullshit about how results on the Big Standardized Test correlate to future life outcomes. Prediction: nobody will present any evidence that getting a student to raise her BS Test score will improve her life outcomes.

Power to the Parents.

Derrell Bradford (50CAN) moderates a panel not, as you might have guess/feared, about how to ban books and ga teachers, but about "unbundling," an old reformster favorite in which families shop for education piece by piece. This panel is about the newest school choice options, and there doesn't seem like much to see here.

Designing choice programs for impact and sustainability

Mysteriously, this panel includes a rep from New Hampshire, where the new choice system has not had a chance to prove sustainability and has mostly had the impact of steering tax dollars to families that already had children enrolled in private schools. Arizona, another place where vouchers have mostly given funds to rich folks who were never in public schools in the first place, is also represented. moderated by Shaka Mitchell from Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children

Innovative Learning, in and beyond the classroom

A panel moderated by Adam Peshek, senior fellow at Stand Together (formerly the Charles Koch Institute) with reps from Utah, North Dakota and Idaho on getting credit for learning outside the classroom. 

Oh, and some folks from Tennessee are going to explain their new funding formula, maybe, sort of.

This is all good old reformy stuff. For each of these explicitly reformy topics, there are sessions about fairly pedestrian topics-- retaining high quality teachers, literacy, getting more post-secondary degrees, math success strategies, broadband access, education-to-workforce pathways. All of these topics are being addressed by various reformy types, but their inclusion typifies the lack of any real core to today's disruption movement. Much of the old standards-- charter schools, high stakes testing, states standards--are now part of the status quo, and this sort of gathering may be a bit too tame for the burn-it-all-down-and-give-the-money-to-private-Christian-schools crowd. 

Nevertheless, the closing lunch keynote features "Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, Governor Kevin Stitt and education visionary Sal Khan, founder & CEO of Khan Academy, for an inside look at the education innovations unfolding in Arizona and Oklahoma." Ducey is getting the ExcellInEd's Excellence in Education award for all the hard work he's done to trash public education in Arizona. The award, the program announces in a swell non sequitor, "recognizes the trailblazing contributions of visionaries who are transforming education and elevating student achievement. Prior honorees include Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz and Khan Academy’s Sal Khan." 

It is emblematic of this gathering that it happens on a Thursday and Friday, thereby insuring that it is not attended by people who actually work in education. Sponsors include the Walton Family Foundation, Western Governor's University (an online competency-based college that failed its federal audit), the Bezos Family Foundation, College Board, Donors Choose (bummer), Stand Together, edChoice, plus a host of other reformster groups and a bunch of businesses as well, like Pearson and NWEA and edmentum. What's not in sight is any serious number of actual educators.

But then that's not really the point. The point is to get policy and business joined to crack open the big taxpayer education piggy bank. I can believe that many of these topics are being discussed by people who have a sincere interest in the education aspects of them--but then why not have actual educators there? In the end, Jeb's big gathering is like a bunch of lawyers getting together to discuss the best techniques for appendectomies, or a bunch of teachers sitting down to hash out the best way to run a multinational corporation, or economists talking about anything. Can't wait to hear how it all turns out. And there's still time to register before this kicks off November 16-18 in Salt Lake City, and the participants enjoy "an unparalleled forum for exchanging results-based solutions and strategies that can shape public policy so critical to transforming education. This unique conference serves as a catalyst for accelerating student-centered education solutions across the nation. Join us as we ignite ideas and inspire change." Ka-ching.