Unbundling and Dismantling

One of the beloved dreams of privatizers has been the unbundling of education. Why get all your education in one place? Why not assemble it yourself-- a math class from this tutor, a literature class at the local college campus, other classes from an assortment of vendors. Sometimes it's described as "a la carte," though that really only fits if you are imagining an a la carte meal where you get each dish from a separate restaurant.

At any rate, it looks like Indiana is going to consider legislation to unbundle education.

Indiana is all in on vouchers, but as with many states, the program is not having much penetration in rural and low population areas, because a voucher is useless if there's no place to use it (and nobody is rushing to start private schools where there's not much market to be tapped).

Microschools have been one proffered solution to the issue, but unbundling is another one. No private school to attend in your neighborhood? Just piece together an education together from various vendors.

If you're a voucher fan, this is a way to extend the blessings of choice and the free market to more families. If you are a voucher cynic, it's a way to promote this conversation:

State: We'll give you several thousand dollars to abandon public education!

Family: Yeah? Where would we spend it?

State: Um--look! Unbundling!

There is another, darker aspect to unbundling. Particularly when one considers the wave of laws that have been chipping away at child labor laws across the country. The folks behind the broadening of child labor "opportunities" have a serious overlap with those interested in chipping away at public education. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out on the dead bird app:

That full speech is here.

Yup. When DeVos and her crew talk about finding an education that's the "best fit" for the children, they're talking about an education best suited for that child's Proper Station In Life. Sure, the wealthy Betters have no intention of having their own children listen to educational podcasts during lunchtime at the meat packing plant, but the assumption is that for some children, Those Peoples' Children, that would be an excellent and appropriate option.

Unbundling would be an unregulated free market nightmare for many households required to shop for their child's education piece by piece. I'm not sure whether it would be easier or harder to navigate an education that is fit in around the demands of a job. 

But it would open up the market to lots of folks who would like to make money with an education-flavored product, and it would help further cement in policy the idea that education is not a public good or a service to the community, but just a commodity the purchase of which is strictly the responsibility of the individual parents. Ran out of money before you put together a full program? Turned out your math provider was a fraud? Your kid spent so much time working that she didn't get an actual education? We washed our hands of you when we handed you a voucher; you're on your own. 

ICYMI: Seriously Winter Edition (1/21)

Okay, that's plenty of cold weather. Not that we got the promised blizzard (the one that tricked my old district into calling an unnecessary Flexible Instruction Day) but still, the season is landing with both feet right now. 

But even if the weather outside is frightful, there are still some pieces to read from the week (and share). So here we go.

Time to End Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and The Ultra-Rich

Jake Jacobs reminds us that charter schools provide a sweet, sweet financial deal for investors and a great way to cash in on some tax breaks. Maybe we don't need to be doing that any more. 

A woman hired to investigate racial harassment in a Utah school district says she experienced it herself

NBC News reports on the story of Joscelin Thomas, who was supposed to help a Utah school district deal with its racism issues. Instead, she was on the receiving end of the behavior.

Most Georgians oppose school ‘vouchers,’ support Medicaid expansion

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did some polling and found, once again, that the popular support for vouchers that voucher supporters keep insisting is out there--it's not out there.

“My Research is Better than Your Research” Wars

Nancy Flanagan is always worth a read, but this week's is particularly good. A look at the disconnect between education research and actual teachers.

What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation

Tik Root at the Guardian joins the ongoing cell phone fray.

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Technology author Cory Doctorow takes a look at how badly standardization serves schools (looking at you, Common Core).

Moms for Liberty activists starting taxpayer-funded charter school

This story has been bouncing around the interwebs, but the original reporting is right here at Popular Information, courtesy of Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby. 

Protesters gather as Charleston Co. Board Chair attends Moms for Liberty meeting

And here's the sequel, courtesy of Molly McBride at WCSC, who visited with the protestors who showed up at the board meeting.

'Unjust' survey for Arkansas deaf and blind schools stirs concern over hidden state agenda

Arkansas has schools for the deaf and for the blind, and they haven't been very well cared for, but now the supporters are getting nervous about what the state intends to do next.

As Private School Choice Grows, Critics Push for More Guardrails

Mark Lieberman at Education Week notices the growing complaints about how vouchers are much like dumping taxpayer dollars down a dark, discriminatory hole.

You Couldn't Sit With Us

Jose Luis Vilson reflects on the noise folks make about teacher professionalism. 

John Eaton, Hero of American Education

Cool history lesson from Thomas Ultican, about a 19th century figure who furthered the cause of public education.

What to Do About the Surge in Student Absenteeism?

Jan Resseger looks at some of the ideas out there, both the good and the not so much. 

Tax dollars are wasted in states with school vouchers

Kentucky's choicers are warming up to try again, and John Schaaf at Florida Phoenix says it's a lousy and costly idea.

Two pieces at Forbes.com this week-- one about a new report looking at the parents' rights movement and the other about the new set of recommendations to fix PA school funding. 

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Dear TC: About School Vouchers

I saw you emerge onto the dead bird app and proceed to get into a couple of school voucher related flaps, and I found myself in the not-unusual position of wanting to say something and being too lazy to boil it down to tweet-sized construction ("Too lazy to tweet about it" would make a good sub-heading for this blog). I'm going to give it a whack here, in part because you are my favorite kind of education writer: not ideologically blinkered. not paid to have a particular opinion, and more interested in light than heat. Also, we only agree some of the time.

My impression is that you see a lot of the debate over vouchers as being tied up with people over-interested in devotion to their particular team, and that's a valid critique of some arguments out there. And I think you often capture nicely the gulf between arguing over good state policy and trying to decide what's best for your own kid. 

Watching you talk about what's wrong with the voucher debates challenges me to go back and rattle around in my own skull to think about what my objections to vouchers are. For what it's worth, here's some of where I land.

In particular, you had a reaction to someone tossing this well-worn graphic up:

Your response was 

And why is this a problem? The idea that children should have to sacrifice a year of their schooling years as some kind of "purity" test is more about serving adults than children.

I agree that there's some no-zero number of parents who are scraping to get their kid into private school. If Tennessee goes the way of Iowa and Florida and sees vouchers followed by tuition increases, the voucher won't really help those parents, but it won't hurt them, either. This is definitely one of those places where the personal and policy perspectives are different animals. Will universal vouchers widen the gap between rich and poor? Almost certainly. But it's not fair to make that an individual parent's issue to solve.

The universal vouchers for students already in school creates a taxpayer problem, because it increases the number of students that the taxpayers pay for. Taxpayers are paying for 100 students at the public school. 10 leave for a private school. 25 already at the private school get a voucher (and why wouldn't they? what sense does it make to turn down free money?) But now taxpayers are paying for 125 students. If that money comes from the school of origin, that school can either cut programs or raise taxes. Universal voucher programs get really expensive, really fast. 

One of my objections to choice in general and vouchers in specific is that policymakers aren't willing to be honest about the cost, but instead lean heavily on the fictions that A) money doesn't matter in education and B) we can run multiple school systems for the same money we're spending now. 

Even if I accept that vouchers are a benefit to families (and there are plenty of reasons to debate that), they are a benefit that is only available to some. Every voucher system in this country holds sacred the providers right to serve only those they want to serve. Families can be rejected or expelled because of religious beliefs, being LGBTQ, or having special needs. In Pennsylvania, we've got a voucher school that reserves the right to reject your kid for any reason AND to refuse to explain why they've done it. Plus, of course, the financial barriers still in place for the priciest privates.

And so somehow we end up with a government benefit that is only available to some people, and that availability is decided on the basis of such criteria. 

That points to what I find most problematic about the voucher movement, which is the implicit attempt to change the whole premise of education in this country. Instead of a shared responsibility and a shared benefit, we get the idea that education is a private, personal commodity. Getting some schooling for your kid is your problem. From there it's a short step to the idea that paying for it is also your own problem and not anyone else's.

Do I think that we'll ever see Milton Friedman's dream of a country in which the government has nothing more to do with education than it does with buying cars? Probably not, but I'm less confident than I was a decade ago. I do think we will see in some states a public system that is shrunk down, if not down to drown-it-in-the-bathtub size, to something small and meagre and basic. And we have right now states working on the DeVos vision of kids who mostly work, pick up a couple of courses on the side, and that's good enough. So probably not the end of public education entirely, but a new multi-tiered system of very separate and very unequal education providers. 

The irony for me has always been that I can imagine a system of school choice (see here and here) but the modern reform movement of charters and vouchers strikes me as headed in a completely different direction, making a lot of worthwhile promises that it does not particularly try to deliver on. 

See, this is why I don't tweet more. I reckon you mostly know this stuff, but once I start, I have to work all the way through.

I hope people subscribe to your fine substack and avoid saying silly things to you on the tweeter (charging you with being a Lee shill was an extraordinary reach). Stay safe and warm. 

When There's No Support From The Front Office

The main function of a manager is to create and maintain the conditions that make it easiest for the worker bees to do their very best work. 

That is also true--especially true--of school district administrators. At the heart of so many education issues, you will find administrators.

Take the ongoing flaps over Naughty Books and Controversial Topics. In many communities around the country, complaints large and small are being lodged against teachers and librarians. In some states, laws have been passed. School administrators can send their staffs one of a couple of messages:

1) As long as you are using your best professional judgment, I will have your back. Just get in there and do the work and let me worry about cranky parents.

2) It'd be great if you just don't do or say or read anything remotely controversial, because at the first phone call I am going to fold like a wet paper back full of bricks. 

Don't Say Gay laws are about creating a chilling effect, and that chill starts in the front office. The chilling has been so effective that even in states that have no actual DSG or Anti-Controversy laws, you'll find plenty of administrators who are trying to keep their cold tootsies safe from any angry phone calls. All of this trickles down to the classroom; if you've got to watch your own back and teach at the same time, you'll be more timid, more cautious, less engaging and creative-- or you'll be that teacher who's considered a Problem, because you are constantly fighting to be allowed to do your job.

Or take the ongoing struggles with post-pandemess student behavior. This is not a new issue-- students have presented behavior challenges since before the invention of dirt-- but numerous reports tell us that since 2020, behavior issues have increased.

Support from the front office is critical. Without it, a teacher's hands are tied. It's a frustrating scenario-- you may have one student who consistently acts out, even after you've tried all the available interventions, and who makes it that much harder for the other twenty-some students in the room to get an education. But the office provides no support, no assistance, no relief. You can also have the opposite issue--an administrator whose only technique is to run roughshod over the student, backing them into a corner and trying to dominate them, all of which means that the student who returns to your classroom is just angrier and more disengaged.

Again, there's a trickle-down effect. If you know the office is not an available tool then you have to pick your battles very carefully, which can often mean a steady degrading of the atmosphere in the classroom. 

Can teachers be part of these problems? Of course. If you are sending kids to the office every hour of every day, something is wrong on your end. If you are using your classroom as your own personal soapbox every day, you are asking for angry parent calls. I rarely used the office, but when I needed it, I absolutely needed it. And I learned early on the value of pre-informing my boss if I was about to do something that might prompt a phone call; you can't expect an administrator to defend you from an angry phone call when they have no idea what the parent is talking about. 

But if there's a just-plain-not-up-to-it teacher in the building? Well, I am reminded of the Edward Deming insight-- if there's dead wood in your organization, was it dead when you hired it, or did you kill it? Bad employee problems are also ultimately management failures.

District administrators set a tone and mission for the school. Words don't mean much here; those things are set by the day to day operations. Your mission statement may not say "Our mission is to minimize the number of angry phone calls we get from parents," but your administrative behavior makes it loud and clear. Administrators show through action whether the district is supposed to run on fear or trust, personal responsibility or enforced compliance, focus on education or obsession with test scores. 

School administrator is a miserable job. Great responsibility that comes without great power. In some districts, not even great money; promoting from within is a great idea, but in my old district, a seasoned teacher stepping into an assistant principal job would take a pay cut to work more hours. And administrators themselves have to depend on others for the tools and support they need to do their jobs well.

But it's a critical job in every school in every district. Somehow, in the modern reform era, we haven't talked much about administrators. Who knows why not (hard to assess them via test scores with a straight face, don't have a large union some folks want to depower, fewer targets?) We don't know how many mediocre administrators are out there; certainly many are well-hidden by highly effective teaching staffs that have learned to work around them. And they can get better, like this guy who figured out that maybe he needed to listen to his staff. 

But to work for an unsupportive administration is isolating and demoralizing, making it that much harder for a teacher to do her best work. 

Who's Behind The Stripping Of Child Labor Protections?

We know that a trend sweeping the country is the trend of getting rid of child labor protections, lowering age limits, increasing allowable hours, and opening up dangerous workplaces to teen laborers, because it's important to protect children from seeing drag queens, but not from working in a meatpacking plant or working long hours on a school night.

We know that businesses are pushing much of this, even writing bills, but it turns out that there's a big fat dark money lobbying group that is "helping out" in many states.

Meet the Foundation for Government Accountability.

FGA was founded in 2011 by CEO Tarren Bragdon, who himself highlights a quote that gives us a good idea of who he is:

I greatly value the ability to provide for my wife and children and want more Americans to experience the freedom that work brings. I founded FGA to pursue good policy solutions that will free millions from government dependency and open the doors for them to chase their own American Dream.

Bragdon was the youngest guy to be elected to the Maine Legislature (1996-2000), right after he graduated from college. He has a BS in Computer Science (University of Maine) and a Master of Science of Business (Husson University). He was next Director of Health Reform Initiatives then CEO at the Maine Heritage Policy Institute (before it became the Maine Policy Institute), a free market advocacy shop. Bragdon made plenty of connections; he was co-chair of Paul LaPage's transition team Bragdon moved to Naples, Florida when he set up FGA; his LinkedIn page says that he finished with MHPC in May of 2011 and opened up FGA in June.

Bragdon took some of his Maine tricks with him to Florida, like setting up an online database of state employees. He was registered as a lobbyist in Maine and went to Florida to continue that work. He hit the ground running, cranking out a pair of reports backing up Gov. Rick Scott's ill-fated welfare drug test policy. 

But Bragdon had his sights on a profile far beyond Florida's borders. They've been a major player in movements like the drive to throw millions off of food stamps. FGA sold its work requirements for SNAP benefits plan to multiple states. And their lobbying branch, Opportunity Solutions Project, has pushed for other swell ideas, like blocking Medicaid expansion or attaching a work requirement to it. 

FGA has been tied to ALEC and the State Policy Network since Day One. They get money from the Kochtopus, the Bradley Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, and giant whopping piles from DonorsTrust, the "dark money ATM  of the conservative movement."

Goven all that, it's no surprise that FGA has been working hard to make sure that teenagers can chase their own American dream by having the chance to become unprotected meat widgets. 

In March, when Arkansas's legislature scrapped work permits and age verification, the bill's sponsor Rep. Rebecca Burkes said that the legislation "came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability."

In Florida, records reveal that FGA helped write the legislation to roll back child labor laws, along with some handy talking points for the bill's sponsor to use (that bill is being considered in the current session). FGA has been working the Florida legislation for a while.

In Missouri, the FGA helped a legislator draft and revise to loosen child labor restrictions, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post. Ditto for Iowa. 

And FGA has also created a handy white paper that offers all sorts of talking points to help sell these policies, particularly the abolition of working permits. "Streamline the process" of hiring teens. "Empowering teenagers through the power of work." And of course, having noticed which way the wind is blowing, "parents, not schools, should have decision-making power over whether their children get a job." 

Is it reasonable to have conversations in the states about exactly what the restrictions and protections for young adult labor should be? Absolutely. But that's not what is happening here. Bottom line: as always, when similar legislation appears at the same time in numerous states, start looking for the lobbying group working for a bunch of low-profile rich guys who are ordering up a serving of legislation to suit them. 

"Evidence Based" Does Not Mean What You Think It Does

Your district is out there looking for a program for your school, but you want one that will actually work. So you go to a education clearinghouse to sort through what's out there, to look for one that's effective, that is "evidence-based." This turns out to be a challenge.

Sarah Sparks, writing for Education Week, asked the question: "What Does 'Evidence-Based' Mean?" She had a particular reason for asking, and we'll get to that in a second, but first...

The federal government has an actual answer to that question, and as one might expect when it comes to the feds, the definition turns out to be not very useful.

We can find it buried in Title VIII (General Provisions) under Sec. 8101, bottom of page 129, we find a definition:

Evidence-based.--
                    ``(A) In general.--Except as provided in 
                subparagraph (B), the term `evidence-based', when used 
                with respect to a State, local educational agency, or 
                school activity, means an activity, strategy, or 
                intervention that--
                          ``(i) demonstrates a statistically significant 
                      effect on improving student outcomes or other 
                      relevant outcomes based on--
                                    ``(I) strong evidence from at least 
                                1 well-designed and well-implemented 
                                experimental study;
                                    ``(II) moderate evidence from at 
                                least 1 well-designed and well-
                                implemented quasi-experimental study; or
                                    ``(III) promising evidence from at 
                                least 1 well-designed and well-
                                implemented correlational study with 
                                statistical controls for selection bias; 
                                or
                          ``(ii)(I) demonstrates a rationale based on 
                      high-quality research findings or positive 
                      evaluation that such activity, strategy, or 
                      intervention is likely to improve student outcomes 
                      or other relevant outcomes; and
                                    ``(II) includes ongoing efforts to 
                                examine the effects of such activity, 
                                strategy, or intervention.
                    ``(B) Definition for specific activities funded 
                under this act.--When used with respect to interventions 
                or improvement activities or strategies funded under 
                section 1003, the term `evidence-based' means a State, 
                local educational agency, or school activity, strategy, 
                or intervention that meets the requirements of subclause 
                (I), (II), or (III) of subparagraph (A)(i).

To break that down and render it in plain English, there are three definitions that are good for federal funding, and two more that... just exist?

Evidence-based means:

1) Shows a statistically significant effect on student outcomes via strong evidence from at least one well-designed and well-done study. You've got at least one study, and it seems like a decent study, and it gives solid evidence.

2) Shows a statistically significant effect on student outcomes via moderate evidence from at least one well-designed and well-done study. Your decent study shows some meh evidence.

3)  Shows a statistically significant effect on student outcomes via promising evidence from at least one well-designed and well-done study. Your study evidence is not great, but it can be massaged into looking like maybe better things are coming.

It can also mean (ii) something you kind of think probably could work. Maybe a shade better than an educated guess.

So if you were thinking that "evidence-based" means "we have some solid proof that this actually works," well, no. Just one study that provides any sort of results that don't actually clearly disprove your idea--that's close enough for government work.

Which may be why we end up with the study that gave Sparks her question-- a paper from February of 2023 by Mansi Wadhwa, Jingwen Zheng, and Thomas D Cook entitled "How Consistent Are Meanings of “Evidence-Based”? A Comparative Review of 12 Clearinghouses that Rate the Effectiveness of Educational Programs." 

I can't access the paper (well, I could, if I wanted to spend $37.50 to peruse it for 24 hours--one more clue to the Mystery of Why Educators Don't Spend More Time Studying Education Research). But the abstract tells us plenty. The researchers looked at 12 education clearinghouses to see how they measured effectiveness and to see how consistently the measures were applied.

They looked at 1359 programs. Of the programs rated by more than one clearinghouse, only about 30% got similar ratings. In other words, the answer to "Is this program effective," depends pretty much on who you're asking.

As Bill Dagget, founder of the clearinghouse Successful Practices Network, told Sparks:

“If you’re trying to define ‘evidence-based,’ it’s very difficult to incorporate any of the skills that are harder to measure,” like critical thinking, collaboration, or social-emotional development, Dagget said.

Right. You need one good study. And many, many, many, many, many aspects of education are very hard to design decent research for. Particularly when your measure of "success" is nothing more than "did it raise student test scores." 

"Student outcomes" is, as always, doing a lot of work. What outcomes? Test scores? Employment? Deeper understanding and comprehension? Happy life? Spoiler alert: way too many researchers go with "test scores" because that's a simple, easy measure. 

But if we're going to try to find programs that are evidence based--well, what kind of evidence? Evidence of deeper learning? Evidence of long-lasting comprehension? Evidence of improved skills? Or are we just going to go with test scores again because they make nice numbery data? Do we just end up in the educational version of this conversation?

District attorney: You've been on this case for a while. Do you have anything for me?

Detective: You betcha. I have evidence. Boxes full of evidence.

DA: Great! Evidence of what?

Detective: You know! Evidence! A whole bunch! Loads of it!

DA: Of what?! Of what??!!

Detective: Soooooo muuchhhh evidence!

"Evidence-based" as defined by the law is so broad that it could mean almost anything. But then when we start looking closer, it becomes clear that sometimes it means nothing at all. 

Does The New Mean Girls Get High School Right?

Watching tv and movie teachers at work is always a fraught exercise, because so many movies and tv shows get so much so very wrong. So how'd the new Mean Girls do?

The Chief Marital Officer and I went to see the film last weekend. I have never seen the original. I was already familiar with the score of the Broadway version (courtesy of the CMO--we were among the fifteen people who knew it was a musical going in). So I'm going to skip over questions about the quality of the film itself (weirdly uncomfortable with just being a musical) or the performances (all quite fine) or comparisons to the original (no idea). 

We'll just deal with one question--how much effort will actual high school teachers have to muster in order to suspend disbelief while watching this? And there may be spoilers, though how one spoils a twenty year old story, I don't know.

The film captures much of the tense anger of intra-teen battling. If anything, these mean girls are not as brutal as many mean girls I've seen in action. And this is where the musical helps (and could have helped more), by elevating the drama as it seems to the characters themselves. It's all the kind of low-stakes stuff-- potential boyfriends, alliances, seats at cafeteria tables--that looms large to the teens themselves. 

There's a through-the-day montage that introduces the teachers, most of whom are cartoons, but their time is mercifully brief. However, Tina Fey as the math teacher and especially Tim Meadows as the principal do a good job of capturing the resigned exasperation of adults dealing with This Stuff. They aren't clueless, and they aren't as heavily invested in the drama as the students, but they recognize that it's their job to deal with all this.

The film also gets some things right that I'm not sure it means to get right. Janis, one of main character Cady's first friends, is an angry outsider who is just as judgy and mean. She reminds me of a conversation I had with an arts-oriented student that stuck with me for years ("All of those jocks treat us like we're all big wimps. They can't even tell us apart." All of them? "All of them. They're all the same." Never teach high school if you are allergic to irony). She does some awful stuff, and the movie doesn't hold her accountable for any of it. 

There are some odd notes. Are we following Cady on the first day of the year? Is she the only new student in the building? That seems... unlikely.

And for a story focused on the social ins and outs of high school, the film has little or nothing to say about grades. In high school, the distinctions between grade levels matter socially. Seniors and freshmen are a lifetime apart (In any high school, you can find seniors complaining that Freshmen these days are so disrespectful and do things "we never would have done back in my day," just like a bunch of old guys getting the morning coffee at McDonalds and complaining about Kids These Days). And after decades of teaching juniors, I became familiar with the Great Friend Shift, that thing that happens around 10 or 11 grade when folks look around and decide that the people they've been hanging out with since sixth grade actually kind of annoy them.

Cady is definitely a junior (so why is she on the Spring Fling court), but the rest are a bit fuzzy. But if she were hanging out with seniors, that would be noticed. And where are the seniors who are freaking out over next year. Is Regina a junior who somehow dominates seniors? 

The film had me reflecting on how cliques work in a small school (which the school in the film apparently is). Very often, the rulers of the school are not the leaders of a particular clique, but the students who are floaters, who move between several different groups. Most of my students were multitaskers, because in a small school, people running sports and activities are all drawing from the same tiny pool. Confidence is the currency of power in the teen social economy, and the best way to build confidence is to be good at something. Maybe Fey wrote the story in a way that deliberately avoided making Regina a particular type (cheerleader, athlete, etc), but it's hard to believe she could be a queen bee if she doesn't actually do anything at the school. 

These are all quibbles, not noticeable to people whose picture of high school is memory based.

The real missed opportunity of the film is social media. In a story all about social ups and downs and infighting and drama, there is no greater factor in 2024 than social media. These days, teens are cast out and torn down not with snarky comments in the cafeteria, but by brutal social media campaigns. I'm betting every school in this country has regularly dealt with a physical fight in school that started on line. 

I don't want to give the impression that the movie gets more wrong than it gets right. Held up against some other movies set in high schools (looking at you, Twilight), it's practically a damned documentary. And it's a comedy (though it can't decide exactly how cartoonish it is). And it probably won't give a teacher a Nobody Understands My World headache.