Friday, August 11, 2023

Yes, Engage

Intuitively, you'd think that student engagement was a clear positive. As a teacher, I certainly found it easier to teach a student who was engaged and involved than one who was checked out.

And there is, in fact, a boatload of research that supports what we intuit. But there is also research that suggests no correlation, that engagement does not raise grades or improve understanding. For a certain brand of conservative, engagement is a fuzzy-headed idea, part of that whole misguided approach to engender warm fuzzy feelings in students instead of just teaching them to read and math.

The whole business of trying to promote engagement is a thorny one as well. It can be an unfortunate first cousin of that terrible educational idea--"making the material relevant." If you decide you're going to make the material relevant, you've already lost because your premise is that it's not inherently relevant and only becomes relevant when you perform some teacher trick. So if you're trying to make course content interesting or engaging, you're in trouble. You should know why the material is important for your students; if you don't know why, instead of trying to make up a reason, ask yourself why you're bothering to teach it.

Not everyone has the same version of the engagement challenge. Most (not all) primary students will engage with the dirt; high school students, not so much (there is research that supports the notion that students get less engaged as they move through the system).

Engagement is tricky because it's so relationship-based, so what works for one teacher-student combination may not work for another. Then there is the special form of teacher ju-jitsu involved on getting a student to engage with the content even as they avoid engaging with the teacher, which is a necessary trick to master unless you want to move yourself from teaching to gatekeeping ("Nobody can come to the content except through me"). 

For all of these reasons, some teachers will skip the whole engagement thing. "It's just my job to stand up here and dispense the content, and if students don't get it or even care if they get it, that's not on me." This attitude is encouraged in schools that have gone for scripted programs in a box, as scripts generally don't include "engage students here." The pedagogical approach that assumes that learning can be engineered, a set of responses programmed into students, doesn't particularly care about engagement, either. In fact, since engagement sometimes means pushing back 

But beyond the question of whether or not engagement matters, there's another reason that students should be encouraged, nudged and otherwise convinced to engage.

Because this is their life.

Students and the adults around them can slip into the mistake of thinking that their lives are waiting for them somewhere in the future, that all of this--living as a child, working through school, acquiring skills and knowledge--is just stocking up for some day years from now when their lives will actually begin.

But this, right now, is the student's life. Not all of it, maybe not even the most important part of it, probably not the best parts that will ever be, but not some sort of null sidebar either. 

Do not sleepwalk through your life. Do not check out and figure that somehow, later, further down the road, you'll claim your life and start living it. 

This lesson is not on the Big Standardized Test, but I don't think anybody is too young to hear it, or at least some scaled down version more easily comprehensible for children. Be present. Pay attention. Be engaged, not because it might raise your tests score, but because this is your life, not just something to try to skip to the end of. 

And all of that goes double for teachers. One of the most important ways to convey this to students? Model it. Engage with your life. 


Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Is This Your School Board?

This was passed along to me as a screenshot of a reply on Facebook. I know who the individual is, and this is not my first encounter with their work. But I'm not interested in targeting the individual; what I really want you to look at is the ideas and attitude included.

Here's the reply:

I'd have to disagree with you on this one. So called "educators" that are introducing students to homosexuality are the ones that need arrested.

All of these students that turn homosexual or transgender come from broken homes. They are hurting people. They are looking for hope, but what they are being offered is a life of misery. They are searching for fulfillment that they will never find without Jesus.

Brainwashing teachers need locked up. They take advantage of hurting kids and ruin their lives. Hurting kids need help. True help. 

This is one of those ideas that won't die, the notion that nobody is born LGBTQ, but rather all LGBTQ persons were "recruited," probably as children, and probably because they were already messed up. 

Another post from this person:

Yes, my voting as an elected official is based off my faith in God. The only foundation for truth is in the Bible. Nothing makes sense without God. Education has no value without first establishing a basis of truth--the Bible.

CHRISTIANS, WAKE UP!

This person is a school board member, and their misinformation and personal version of religion do indeed inform their choices as a board member. And if you're thinking this sounds like your conservative grandfather, well, this is a young person. 








This person is running for re-election in the fall, and they're doing so with a full slate of like-minded candidates, ready to ban some books and clamp down on any teachers who so much as suggest that LGBTQ persons exist (as anything other than twisted and damaged wretches).

Is this person running in your district? If you don't know, you should. Folks of this christianist bent are running all over the country, some with a pleasant mask to cover their radical tilt and some letting their anti-freak flag fly. But elections have consequences, and so does voting on the assumption that school board candidates are uniformly bland and unlikely to have any sort of major effect on what happens in your local schools. 

Is this person running in your district? If you don't know, you should find out before you vote. This is not a season to sleep through one more election.

UT: State Board Member Attacks Teachers

It was, the Utah State Board of Education concluded, within a board member's rights to make statements as an individual, even if she exercised her First Amendment Rights by saying something really troubling and false. And so, this time, Natalie Cline doesn't even get a slap on the wrist.

What did Cline say this time? In a July 4 Facebook post, Cline wrote:

Schools are not only complicit in the grooming of children for sex trafficking, but they are aiding and abetting this evil practice by giving kids easy access to explicit, unnatural, and twisted sexual content and brainwashing them into queer, gender bending ideologies.

That's a lot. But the state board stopped short of actually censuring her for either that post or an incident in which she allegedly made some comments about an employee that she found insufficiently female. Cline had jumped the gun and declared herself cleared of all charges based on a preliminary report, but the final finding was mild. She's got a First Amendment Right to say things, it said, but it would be nice if those things were both civil and accurate.

The Utah Education Association issued a release saying it "vehemently opposed" her remarks, as well they should be. 

We are deeply troubled by USBE's failure to find her toxic words in violation of its standards and its unwillingness to take action or censure Cline.

"I am horrified that an elected official entrusted with overseeing education policy in our state would blatantly disregard teachers' tireless efforts and intentionally create an environment of mistrust and hostility detrimental to the educational process," President Renee Pinkney said.

Cline was elected to the state board in 2020, and if nothing else, you can't say she wasn't up front about what she saw as the major issues for education in Utah. Here are some of the answers Candidate Cline offered the website Ballotpedia in response to their standard questions.

What are three key messages of her campaign?

* I will fight for - TRUE Local Control of Curriculum, Assessments, and Spending; Strong Supports for Educators; Parental Voice and Choice in their Children's Education; & Parents and Teachers Deciding Together what is BEST for the Child

* I will fight to - Protect the Innocence of Youth, their Mental Health, and Data Privacy

* I will fight to - Restore Freedom in Education! NO... Anti-American Curriculum, Political Indoctrination, or Sexualized Lesson Plans

What areas of public policy is she passionate about? Take a deep breath...

I am concerned about the increasingly politicized nature of our schools and the rapid advancement of programs and curriculum created by special interest groups to sexualize our children, confuse them about their gender, and indoctrinate them in Anti-American revisionist history and Karl Marx's Critical Race Theory that assumes all white people are inherently racist. Children are not inherently racist or sexual. To teach them otherwise is abusive and harmful to their mental health. I am also passionate about protecting children from an increasingly technology-driven school experience. This too is harmful to the mental health of many of our children. Technology is useful in its proper place, but can often get in the way of curriculum that builds character and understanding in our students. Deep learning comes from a study of classical literature, history from original source documents, and traditional math, science, and the arts. It's time to get back to the basics. To do this we must return decision making power to those closest to the child - the parents and teachers. We must send more money to the local districts and let them choose their standards, curriculum, and assessments. We must provide the help, support, and training our teachers need!
We must return to teaching the principles of freedom that made our country great and restore within our students a love for America!

Cline, a registered nurse, said that she has been fighting for "family-friendly policies at the international and local level for the past decade," and if so, she hasn't left much of a digital footprint beyond Higher Ground, a sort of organization/website that sounds the alarm that "the public school system is out of control" and has become a "cultural tsunami." 

Cline's Facebook page is loaded with Kim Ells and Chris Rufo and a variety of hard right influencers, and Higher Ground is more of the same. SEL, DEI and whole child mental health are all about indoctrinating children. Comprehensive sex ed is part of a plan to erase sexual inhibitions and boundaries so that evil adults can prey on children. Standardization is about socially engineering children (don't think for a moment that these folks have forgotten the evils of Common Core). There's the outsourcing of decisions to "experts" (I think I agree with her a bit on the scare quotes, since so many edu-experts are not actual experts at all). 

And this is interesting-- the group opposes "exploiting children for socioeconomic agendas," which includes the "college and career readiness" umbrella as well as school choice.

Yes, Cline and folks in her orbit turn out to be an example of how this far right ideology does not always get along with school choice.

If the government funds it, they reason, the government controls it. "Parents give the government access to their children at home and in private school settings in exchange for state-sourced school choice money," says the site, but there are always "strings attached."  Vouchers, charters, home school funding, etc are "only the illusion of choice" because the government controls what it pays for. The "educational-industrial complex" has grown and been co-opted, so "the window for truly free market solutions has been effectively sealed." We're supposed to depend on God, not the government.

Your children are worth infinitely more than the government is willing to pay you to have access to them.

If all this sounds like the belief system of a person who would be a bad fit for the state's education board, well. Cline's latest dustup is certainly not her only one. Within her first eight months in office, the board (which has 15 members in all) issued statements condemning her various comments, which have been anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black Lives Matter. The Utah Pride Center, Equality Utah, the Black Lives Matter chapter for the state, and the NAACP branch for Salt Lake City had all spoken out against Cline’s remarks within her first month in office. In a particularly nasty incident, she accused a teacher, by name and without evidence, of promoting communism; the teacher's district denied the allegation, but of course the teacher was subjected to a barrage of online attacks. There was a petition calling for her removal, but unless she does something like knock over a bank, nobody really has the power tyoi do that. Elections matter.

Nothing seems to have chastened Cline or slowed her roll. Her Facebook page is still loaded with far right material, including the usual celebration of standing out because you are a put-upon minority fighting for what is right. "You were born to stand out." "Do what is right, let the consequence follow. God will protect you in doing what's right." "If they succeed in silencing me, they succeed in silencing you!" Posts offering "more PROOF of GROOMING/INDOCTRINATION." 

There's just a lot. Like someone who found a copy of "Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea" (great books-- the twins love them) in which the pronoun "themself" is used instead of "himself" (our copy, fwiw, has "himself"). "This," Cline explains, "is about grooming children into radical gender-bending ideology. It is the science of indoctrination posing as a literacy program to improve reading." That's why she voted against the Kids Read Now $4.5 million grant to send books directly to kids' homes (part of Science of Reading initiative). 

Utah doesn't have any Moms for Liberty chapters, and Cline and her supporters don't seem all that interested in the kind of political game playing that M4L is busy with. This all seems much more over on the religious Q-anon end of the spectrum.

After he launched critical race theory panic, Chris Rufo said his next move would be to get folks stirred up over LGBTQ issues, so he's probably pleased with Cline's trajectory in Utah. She seems entirely sincere, but this level of fear and concern has to be exhausting. How tiring can it be to believe that most of the country is against you, that there is a vast conspiracy bent on consuming children, that there is a groomer around every corner (and how ignorant to believe that LGBTQ persons only exist because they were "recruited" as children). How hard is the work of collecting and creating proof, of casting educators and schools as evil menaces. How dispiriting to worship a God so tiny that He has to be defended from things like pronouns in children's books. 

I've known folks like Cline, and I imagine that she gets her energy from envisioning a story in which she is a beleaguered crusader for all that is Good and True, so righteous that she strikes fear into the large dark army arrayed against her. That's a perch from which it can seem perfectly okay to slander the entire school system, but it has to be exhausting, and I'm not sure what good it does the children of Utah. Cline is next up for election in 2024. This kind of over-the-top attack on schools is just wrong; let's hope voters put a stop to it. 

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Is Education Reform Evolving?

Has the education reformster movement evolved over the past forty-ish years? In a recent piece for Education Next, Rick Hess argues that there has been a major shift in the "school improvement" world. I'm not convinced. But Hess is someone I think of as worth taking seriously, so I'm going to go ahead and take a closer look at what he sees, and why I see something else.

Hess's idea is pretty simple: Back in 1983, the focus of education reform was on tweaking the traditional system. A Nation At Risk, says Hess, "was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse." Nowadays, the focus is on burning down and replacing the public education system via vouchers etc. 

The upshot is that, 40 years on, we’ve exited one era of school improvement defined by the attempt to bolster the “one best system” and entered one notable for attempts to dismantle it.

I don't think so. While the history of modern reformsterism is admittedly complicated, featuring alliances that involve both reformsters using others and others using reformsters, I think there's a pretty clear through line that has always been there.

We can go back to the days before A Nation At Risk and talk about the granddaddy of burn-it-all-down reform, Milton Friedman, who was pretty clear--for a really long time--about A) liking vouchers and B) why he did:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

In 1955, Friedman's idea was perfectly positioned for segregationists looking for a way to circumvent Brown v. Board (for a good look at this, read Steve Suitts slim but thorough Overturning Brown). I don't want to argue whether Friedman was a segregationist or not; it's enough that he never explained who the nation could end both public education and segregation. 

But beyond the world of people who didn't like public ed because it spent their tax dollars on or set their children next to Those People's Children, folks mostly liked their public schools. So for people who wanted to take back public schools for God, people who wanted to break open an untapped multi-billion dollar market, and people who shared Friedman's dream of an end to public education and the taxation that supported it, there was one major obstacle-- the public belief that public schools are not only good, but a necessary good for society. 

A Nation At Risk was the first major shot at removing that obstacle. As Anya Kamanetz, who did some digging into the report, reported on the 35th anniversary:

But what I learned in talking to two of the original authors of “A Nation At Risk” was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation’s schools.

Cherry-picked data. Repeatedly debunked conclusions. Produced under a President who had already called for the end of the Department of Education. And a prediction of imminent doom that has never actually come true in forty years. And nothing concrete that would actually point to actionable steps for improvement. While the public was waggling its eyebrows at striking pull quotes like the whole "if another country did this to us it would be an act of war" or the mellifluous "rising tide of mediocrity," actual educators in actual schools were looking at all this and asking, "And you would like us to do.... what, exactly?"

But ANAR launched a modern reformster movement. Kamenetz quotes Mike Petrilli of the very reformy Fordham Institute calling ANAR a "touchstone" and pointing out that it's in the Fordham mission statement

The question here, looking at Hess's thesis, is this: was that movement aimed at improving public schools?

I accept that, at every turn in those years (I started teaching in the fall of 1980), there were people who meant well. I believe that there are free market true fans who believe with all their hearts that free market forces and competition would truly improve public education. I believe that there are standards and data cultists who believe that measuring and testing and data crunching would lead us to better schools. I think they are absolutely wrong, but let's skip that for a minute.

But I also have no doubt that, for a huge chunk of the reformster crew, ANAR marks the beginning of a long, patient attempt to move the Overton Window on education, that window through which one views which policies are politically viable. In the 90s, CATO was still singing the Friedman song-- abolish the whole thing. But the window wasn't there yet.

Every wave of ed reform has been used to turn the baseless assertion that "American public education is failing" into conventional wisdom, a thing that people repeat and accept without any critical consideration. And every tap of that "failing American schools" hammer has moved the Overton Window closer to the point where the dissolution of public schools, once an unthinkable "solution," has become more and more thinkable.

No Child Left Behind was premised on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. The standards movement was premised on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. Race to the Top and the Common Core--both based on the notion that schools were failing and had to be fixed. Hess's phrase-- "school improvement"-- was never how the reform movement identified itself.

My colleagues and I watched, first incredulously, then with mounting frustration, realizing that policies like No Child Left Behind's mandate that all students must be scoring above average on the Big Standardized by 2014 were not designed to fix anything, but simply gather more data "proving" that we were failing. There was no help for us in the classroom anywhere in these policies--just threats. Get those scores up, or else. The early part of the millennium saw the activation of so many teachers as they realized that the game had been rigged for them to fail and for public education to pay the price. Meanwhile, all the "or elses" were simply normalizing the idea of public school alternatives. Tap, tap, tap on the Overton Window.

Reformsters made alliance for a while with people interested in social justice, a politically advantageous move in the Obama years, but then an unnecessary one in the Trump era. School choice, tried out in a variety of forms, never really made a convincing case for social justice or equity or better education or more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and while, again, I'll agree that some people sincerely believed that school choice would serve those goals, they also provided cover for the folks who just wanted to keep tapping away at that window.

When COVID hit and school buildings were shut, folks on the far right sensed an opportunity to smack that window with a sledgehammer. Tap, tap, BAM! Now ed reform barely pretends to be interested in choice as anything other than a way to dismantle public education, top privatize not only the business of providing of education, but the responsibility for it, while using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private, mostly Christian schools. 

I'll say it again--all along this path, there have undoubtedly been reformsters who sincerely believed that their particular brilliant idea would fix public schools. At the same time, many were working on the same old voucher idea by tweaking the branding (since vouchers still weren't politically viable). Maybe call them scholarships, or savings accounts? Maybe we don't need vouchers to get rid of public ed--just  sell other alternatives, like computerized algorithm-driven programs. 

Standing here in 2023, it's pretty easy to see a straight line running from Milton Friedman through A Nation at Risk right up to the current Burn It All Down Moment. When Chris Rufo said "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust," he was simply describing the long march toward Friedman's dream. 

There have always been seams in the various reformy alliances. In the Obama years, social justice types chafed at working with "racists" as free marketeers tired of the touchy feely stuff. Charters brought together people who really believed in charters and people who considered them a half-measure until vouchers could be implemented. Right now, I have a read-between-the-lines tension between the experienced grownups of ed reform and the new burn-it-all-down dudebros taking center stage.

The reform movement has never been a homogenous whole, but instead has married together a variety of interests. The balance between those partnerships is sometimes hard to read-- are Christian nationalists using the choice movement, or is the choice movement using Christian nationalists? Only a few of those interests have ever been in the promise of quality education for all students. And the part of the movement that Hess depicts as a new evolution, a new idea about reform, a new emphasis on replacing public education--that has always always been there. It's not a new idea at all; for many folks it has always been the only idea that matters. 








Sunday, August 6, 2023

Stupid Gender Role Rules

Here's how attempting to enforce Don't Say Gay rules, rules that say you can't instruct students about gender roles of sexual identity, ends up--with stupid, stupid rules.

In Iowa, parents are apparently receiving a letter that says, in part:

Recently passed legislation … requires that school districts receive written permission from parents and/or guardians regarding any request by a student to accommodate a gender identity, name or pronoun that is different from what was assigned to the student during the school registration process. This requirement also applies to all nicknames. (i.e. Sam instead of Samuel; Addy instead of Addison, etc.)

This is stupid. Students cannot even name themselves. And nicknames, which often (and frequently) emerge organically from the regular ins and outs of life must now all be cleared with adults via a new level of bureaucracy and paperwork. I cannot even imagine the stupidity of classroom exchanges like

Student: Hey, could you call me Butch instead of Albert?

Teacher: Not until you bring in your paperwork from home and it clears the office and I'm notified that Butch is allowed.

Not to mention all the ancillary stupid that comes with this, like the divorced shared-custody parents who can't agree on whether a particular nickname is okay or not. 

Update: Florida parents may getting the same dumb letter

In Florida (of course), the Parental Rights In Education Act, also known as the Totally Not A Don't Day Gay Law And Don't You Dare Call It That, appears to have outlawed the AP Psychology course, because it mentions LGBTQ stuff. The state quickly backpedaled--well, actually, let's call it a side-pedal-- and said it's not illegal exactly, but teachers are risking their careers if the state decides they have judged "age and developmentally appropriate" incorrectly. 

And so we have a parental rights law that makes it illegal to say gay, and also denies parents the right to enroll their child in certain courses that say the Forbidden Words. 

But let's go to Mississippi, where the Harrison County school district has decided to crack down on trans students, specifically by requiring them to wear clothes that are "consistent with their biological sex that is stated in the student’s cumulative folder and permanent record the School District."

Mississippi is one of seven states that doesn't need a Don't Say Gay law, because back in the 90s they passed a "No Promo Homo" law, a relic of the gay panic of thirty years ago. Mississippi has gone hard for anti-trans laws. Oddly enough, attempts to ban instruction about gender roles and sexual identity have failed, which is good news for Harrison County, which now has a policy that provides very strict policy about gender roles and sexual identity.

Because, yes, if you read about requirement to wear clothes that conform to "biological sex" and thought, "Well, who decides that," the answer is Harrison County schools, where the new dress code explains specifically what boys and girls are allowed to wear.  

The handbook explains :

The Harrison County School District (the “School District”) does not intend to have policies that overly restrict the dress of the individual students under contemporary standards. It is, however, the School District’s duty and objective to see that students attending the schools in the Harrison County School District are well groomed, particularly as to their physical appearance, and that their choice of dress is conducive to the learning environment, and is not disruptive to the learning environment; enhances learning and good behavior; increases the focus on instruction; creates a sense of school unity and discipline; maintains dignity in school; encourages responsible dress for students; and enhances safety and security at school.

The new additions to the policy are these three items:

1. Boys must wear shorts or pants, and shirts and footwear according to the dress code of the Harrison County School District.

2. Girls must wear dresses or skirts or shorts or pants, and shirts or blouses and footwear according to the dress code of the Harrison County School District.

3. Boys and girls must follow the dress attire consistent with their biological sex that is stated in the student’s cumulative folder and permanent record the School District prepared under the guidelines of the Mississippi Department of Education Manual of Directions.

So, basically, boys can't wear skirts or dresses. 

Why is Harrison County bothering to add these rules? Could be because they wound up in court last May because they wouldn't allow a transgender student to wear a dress and high heels to her graduation. This despite the student's assertion that for four years she had worn dresses to class and been addressed as a female by students and staff. The district superintendent Mitchell King felt the need to track down the students in the district that were, in his opinion, boys who were going to try to wear a dress at graduation and pre-emptively forbid them. The court rules in favor of the district, and then the district got rewriting their rules, because of all the things that threaten education in Mississippi, boy's wearing dresses is clearly the Number One problem.

We could add more stupid rules to the list, like the anti-trans athlete rules that have the effect of allowing parents of losing athletes to harass female athletes who beat their kid ("I don't believe any girl could beat my Susie--I demand you make that fifteen year old runner prove she's really a girl. Make her take a dna test! Pull down her pants! Do something!").

All of these rules whipped up by culture warriors ultimately have the same effect--they make life more difficult for children just trying to live their lives and make their way through school.

If this is supposed to be child-centered and for the good of students, we are way off the mark. I would say that in many cases the warriors are shooting themselves in the foot, but that's not quite right--they are shooting children and parents in the foot. Maybe stop using children as shields and excuses for anti-LGBTQ rule-making. 




ICYMI: August, Somehow Edition (8/6)

It has been a rough few weeks. We at the Institute recommend that you hug your loved ones and make the best use of your time you can. If that includes doing some reading, I have a few pieces for you.

State takeovers of ‘failing’ schools are increasing, but with little evidence they help students

Steven Yoder at Hechinger pulls up some of the data that shows what we already know-- school takeovers are a waste of everyone's time and money.

When One School District Falls: HISD is a Preview for All Schools

Nancy Bailey with a good quick explainer of the takeover of Houston schools, and why they are bad news nationally. 

"Learning? What Learning? We're in the middle of testing." "I was misinformed."

What's the worst PD in the world? Jeff Waid makes his case for the worst PD being the ones all about data.

I Put an LGBTQ+ Book on My Classroom Reading List. Then Someone Filed a Police Report

At EdWeek, Sarah Bonner tells a nightmarish tale of how 20-year teacher was driven, quickly and brutally, out of the classroom. 

Superintendent claims the spoils of the Bucks County culture wars

On the other hand, if you are a superintendent willing to go along with a repressive, anti-reading, anti-public ed board like the one in Bucks County PA, you might get to cash in big time. From the Philadelphia Inquirer, so beware the paywall.


The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with the gazillionth iteration of the same old story--a state is going to hand huge power over education to some guy who has no actual qualifications at all. 

LZ Granderson takes us to Arizona for an interesting angle, looking at how the use of "choice" as cover for certain political interests has screwed the families that could use some actual school choice.

More teachers are quitting their jobs. Educators of color often are more likely to leave

Marc Levy (AP) takes a look at how Pennsylvania schools are failing to hold on to teachers of color, and while there's nothing super new here, it's nice to see AP noticing.

Florida Attempting to Revive the “Happy Slave” Myth as Real History

Steven Singer offers some actual history regarding enslaved folks in this country.

When Did We Take the Wrong Road to Education Reform and Where Has It Taken Us?

Jan Resseger takes a dive into reformy history and its many wrong turns.

Makeover attempt? NC candidate for governor Mark Robinson has pulled out of a conspiracy theorist event. He’s still Mark Robinson.

Mark Robinson has always been bad news, but now that he wants to be North Carolina's governor, he's trying to present a kinder, gentler face. Justin Parmenter wants to remind you why you shouldn't be fooled.

How Oklahoma Became Ground Zero in the War Over Church-State Separation

Samuel Perry for Time. What's going on in Oklahoma education doesn't have much to do with choice, and Secretary Dudebro is right in the middle of it.

Walters claims TPS takes money from China; school board president says no

Speaking of which, here's his latest crazypants baloney in his quest to take over Tulsa schools.

Educating for “College and Career Readiness”? Are We Sure About That? (pt. II)

Keith Benson does a pretty cool dive into the question of what college and career readiness has meant for the past few decades.

The Right-Wing Think Tank That the Charter School Industry Relies On

At The Progressive, NPW director Carol Burris breaks down CREDO, that outfit that is often presented as a Stanford smarty pants department but, on examination, looks a lot more like a right-wing research fabricator for the privatization industry.

I Had a Dream about the First Day of School…

No, not the scary one, where you can't find your classroom and your students are out of control. Nancy Flanagan has a much better dream about that first day.


McSweeney's. I'll give you a taste, but click through to the whole list:

Where the Wild Things Are
Don’t be fooled by shiny medals. This is a horrifying story of lawlessness and open borders. It teaches that it’s okay to cause chaos and become the kingpin of some antifa group of thugs and then get off scot-free with a warm dinner waiting. Not in this lifetime, Max.

Join me on substack, where it's always free and sitting in your email inbox to look at when you're in the mood.


Friday, August 4, 2023

Another Reformster Changes Their Mind Re: Big Standardized Tests

Thomas Arnett of the Christensen Institute used to like the Big Standardized Test just fine. Nowadays... well, let's see what might have changed, because it's an instructive look at reformy ideas.

Here's Arnett in December of 2015:

Opponents of standardized testing raise a number of legitimate issues that education leaders and policymakers ought to address. But getting rid of standardized tests would be a major mistake, especially considering the important role these test play in shedding light on achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Instead of retreating from the idea of testing, we need to learn from the flaws of our current assessment system and take advantage of new ideas and technologies. This way, we can ultimately improve how assessments support progress for our students and our schools.

When he wrote that, Arnett, he was just a couple of years into his gig as a Senior Deep Education Thinker at Christensen Institute, "a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank dedicated to improving the world through Disruptive Innovation" founded by Clayton Christensen, the daddy of disruptive innovation.

Christensen has a whole education department, headed by Julia Freelan Fisher, who graduated from Princeton (BA, Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies), then spent a couple of years doing PR for NewSchools Venture fund, the got her law degree from Yale. This somehow qualifies her to lead a team whose goal is "to transform monolithic, factory-model education systems into student-centered designs that educate every student successfully and enable each to realize his or her fullest potential."

Arnett's story is one we've heard from so many reformsters. Graduated from BYU with a BS in economics in 2009, then put in two years with Teach for America in Kansas City. According to his LinkedIn account, he did such awesome things as "Invested students in ambitious academic goals through vision-setting and high-quality instruction. Designed, implemented, and continuously revised student incentive systems to motivate academic achievement. Organized an administered a lunch time program that increased student work completion by approximately 40%" as well as figuring out how to "integrate" Khan Academy into the classroom. Having put in his two years, he headed out for Carnegie Mellon University for his MBA, then on to his Senior Research Fellow job with Christensen. In 2020 he added a post on the board of Compass Charter Schools. 

In short, one more guy who's a business person, not an educator, a guy who argues that education's problem is that it needs a new business model. Arnett has been a big advocate of handing education over to computer-based algorithms. Disruptive innovation, baby.


The piece invokes an impressive cloud of argle bargle, business jargon throwing its back out trying to do all the heavy lifting. (For example: "The value networks that established organizations sit within, and the business models they’ve developed within those value networks, make them systematically unable to pursue disruptive innovations because disruptive innovations run counter to priorities and metrics that pervade and distill from their value networks.") But the piece boils itself down to these two points:

*The metrics used to gauge the quality of conventional schooling can hinder the growth and innovation of microschools, learning centers, and homeschool co-ops.

*To foster new models of schooling, philanthropists, researchers, and policymakers must resist the impulse to impose conventional metrics and instead develop new quality measures that align with the unique aims of these programs.

In other words, remember how reformsters successfully saddled public schools with the Big Standardized Test as a way to provide solid "data" that public schools were "failing" and thereby erode trust in them and create pressure for alternatives? But BS Testing also makes our "alternatives" look bad. Also, it's hard to innovate at a school when you have to worry about BS Test scores all the time--when scores drive your school's function, it kind of gets in the way.

So, Arnett is arguing, let's not hamper reformy education-flavored businesses with the same testing albatross that we hung around the neck of public schools. Sire, we used to say that scores were crucial "data" that the public and policy makers needed, but it turns out the same hammer that busted open the piggy bank of taxpayer education dollars also hurts when you smack our preferred privatized options, so maybe don't.

Arnett is not willing to take his argument one step further-- if the kinds of metrics that have been forced on public schools are bad for alternative types of schools, then maybe they are also bad for public schools and we should just get rid of them for everyone. He doesn't come right out and say that the metrics don't actually provide some sort of absolute objective measure of educational quality. And he does lean on one lie--the notion that the metrics are a result of "value networks" as if it were all the stakeholders in public education that demanded BS testing, and not a bunch of reformsters and thinky tanks like Christensen. 

But it's all there, anyway. Arnett is late to the party, but by all means--let's do away with Big Standardized Test metrics. For everyone.