What Does A High-Quality School Look Like

We are not going to identify high quality schools by focusing on scored from the Big Standardized Test. In fact, by treating those scores as the single defining feature of a HQS, we encourage school leadership to move in the wrong direction. 

So what are the defining features of a high quality school? 

Reflects Local Values

Long, long ago, I spitballed a school evaluation system that started with massive data collection about what the taxpayers of the district most valued. I still think that's a good idea. The story of the last twenty-five years is the story of state and federal government pushing their own ideas down on local districts, and I'm not sure that has improved a thing.

A high quality school would be very much of its community, reflecting local values, tradition, and style. 

Now, this comes with a huge caveat, because there are communities whose values arguably include "Keep Those People's Children away from mine." The HQS represents its entire community, so that includes issues as well. I'm not comfortable with the federal and state government telling a local district what and how to teach, but I'm perfectly okay with them telling the local district who to teach, and that they may not try to deprive Certain Students out of a complete quality education. So--

Quality Education For All

This means the rich kids, the poor kids, the kids of every race, the LGBTQ kids, the kids with special needs. It means that the school is a safe and welcoming environment for all students, physically and emotionally. It also means the students with various different goals and talents and inclinations. Because a HQS would provide

Multiple Paths For Students To Succeed

Test-centered schooling accentuated the worst tendency of traditional public education, which is to treat education as if it's a single race on a single track to a single finish line. In fact, students are headed in a thousand different directions, racing, strolling and stumbling toward a thousand thousand different life destinations. 

A HQS would reflect that, allowing students to pursue excellence in every direction from welding to nursing, music to accounting. A HQS embraces the idea that student achievement looks like a million different things, and it celebrates, supports, and encourages all of them. It is also structured so that students can switch and mix and match easily. Students graduate from the system with a sense of confidence and direction about their own future, whatever that might be.

A Culture of Attainable Excellence

In a HQS, students, teachers, and administrators believe that excellence and achievement are attainable, and the school culture is centered around the pursuit of that excellence (which is definitely not the same as attempting to stifle non-excellence), and the recognition that excellence is always a moving target.

That also goes with a culture that supports the idea that more learning leads to more life choices. 

Education

My HQS doesn't have a single "how." The teacher part of my brain is, when it comes to the classroom, far more pragmatic than ideological. What works today? Let's do that. 

My frequent definition-- helping students identify and build the best version of themselves, grasping what it means to be fully human in the world. I realize that may sound warm and fuzzy, but it's not-- you get there by learning a ton of rich content and creating a vast library of skills. How? It depends--we're talking about building a personal relationship with the world, and like any relationship, it's shaped by the person involved.

I Have Deliberately Skipped The How

I'm not sure I've said much radical here. The root of most education debate has been either "Okay, how do we create this" and "That sounds expensive--could we come up with a cheaper version."

I'm not going to address the "how" because I don't think all HQS look the same, and there are multiple pathways to get there. And we'll disagree about that--I don't think you ever get there with a classical academy, with its insistence that there is one set of always-right answers and "being educated" means learning that list. Nor do I think market forces (part of the Twitter thread that sparked this post in the first place) will ever get us HQS for more than a select few. I also have thoughts about how such a school should be managed and funded, but those are other long posts. 

This is the long rambling post I promised Mike Petrilli, who asked the question. Here you go, Mike. There's more in my two part post about how to do education choice (Part I and Part II). Maybe some day you can invite me to DC to sit on a Fordham panel. Thinking about what a high quality school would look like is always worthwhile--perhaps more worthwhile than all the "how" conversations that continue to rage.

TX: Greg Abbott Wants Teachers To Dress Regular

Correspondent Steve Monacelli of the Texas Observer turned up a clip of Texas Governor Greg Abbott at the Young Conservatives of Texas convention in Dallas, splaining how folks ought to dress. 

In Lewisville, Texas… just a month ago, they had a high school teacher, who is a man, who would go to school dressed as a woman in a dress, high heels and makeup. Now, what do you think is going through their minds of the students that are in that classroom? Are they focusing on the subject that that person's trying to teach? I don't know. What I do know are these two things. One is this person--a man, dressing as a woman--in a public high school in the state of Texas--he's trying to normalize the concept. "This type of behavior is okay." This type of behavior is NOT okay! And this is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.

Now, as with many moments of culture panic, this one has some factual issues. As Wayne Carter reported for Channel 5, what actually happened was that students encouraged a popular chemistry teacher to dress up for a spirit day. Students laughed, life went on. But then someone put a picture of the teacher on line, and all culture panic hell broke loose. The school district did a policy review and determined that no dress-up day rules had been broken, but so many folks decided to release a barrage of hateful and threatening comments that the teacher resigned. 

Carter spoke to students ("He's never brought his sexuality or any of his political ideas into his teaching. He's always teaching chemistry. It's always chemistry") and parents of the school (We're conservative, but this is silly and hurting students). 

So you can file this specific incident in the file right next to the periodic panic over supposed school litter boxes for student furries aka "Things That Upset Certain People But Did Not Actually Happen."

Also, at least some of Abbott's motivation here is pretty clear, as he pivoted directly from "This Terrible Thing Happened" right over to "Parents ought to have school vouchers so that they can get their kids away from this sort of Terrible Thing That Didn't Actually Happen."

But. All that aside, we've still got a governor arguing that behavior that doesn't conform to his particular idea of gendered behavior should be outlawed and stomped on. Kind of takes me back to all those years when women weren't supposed to wear pants, or smoke cigarettes. Author Kate Chopin walking around in pants a century ago scandalizing Louisiana bluebloods. Boys wearing earrings!!Dogs and cats living together! 

There are, in fact, Christian discussion groups out there still debating the lady pants thing, and often coming to the entirely reasonable conclusion that different cultures at different times have different ideas about what male and female clothing should look like. Meanwhile, we've had a whole court case over whether or not a charter school can forbid girls to wear pants (it can't, and the Supremes aren't willing to chime in).

I can't even imagine how Abbott would draw up the Texas Code of Heteronormative Behavior for Teachers. And would the penalties be a kind of sliding scale, or would a shiny earing or bit of rouge receive the same punishment as a flowing sequined ball gown? Are skinny jeans allowed? Would Texas Rangers drag the offending teacher out in cuffs so that any non-conforming students can fully get the message that Their Kind are NOT okay or welcome in Greg Abbott's Texas? Will Texas be outlawing any and all behavior that looks kind of LGBTQ-ish, or will this just be for teachers? Is Abbott's dismay go beyond regular LGBTQ stuff and extend to all non-conforming behavior, like funny hats or ugly sweaters? 

I'm leery of the word "normal," which always has lots of heavy lifting to do. But I do like the word "ordinary," as in, LGBTQ people are an ordinary part of the human experience, as are people who fall outside of whatever standards of behavior are considered Properly Conforming. Should teachers refrain from choices that might cause distraction in the classroom? Sure. But that's a far cry from tagging all non-conforming teachers for harassment and firing and whatever else Abbott meant by saying he wanted to end that type of behavior. 

ICYMI: Opening Weekend Edition (4/28)

We've opened our community theater production of Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it is going wonderfully, with some excellent audiences and great performances, while my shoulders are holding out through the prolonged arm flapping every evening. It just feels great to help create a performance and put it out into the world, live and in person. Hope you have something equally delightful in your corner of the world. 

Let's see what there is to read this week.

Teachers Aren’t ‘Silicon Valley’s Lackeys’

This Jack Bouchard piece is well worth using up one of your free EdWeek views. He makes some point that go beyond just the question of what place AI has in education. 

When a child, frustrated at the opacity of a Toni Morrison novel, wants to know when she will ever use this, I reply, “You might never! And that’s OK, because you’re a human being and you have more important things to be than just useful.”

Ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun

Speaking of special uses of AI, here's a bizarre story from Baltimore.

Florida Republicans eye control of more county school boards in November election

More of the same old same old anticipated in Florida this year.

University of Memphis plans to launch new K-12 district this fall

Laura Testino reports for Chalkbeat on a new sort of school district about to hit Tennessee.

Recommendations for Books You Should Not Read Because You Do Not Care

Maurice Cunningham has some reading suggestions for those interested in the world of dark money and its influence.

No Matter What You Call Them, Private School Vouchers Are Bad for New Jersey

School finance expert and music teacher Marl Weber lays out the explanation of why the new proposal for New Jersey school vouchers would be a bad idea.

DeSantis said public schools were religious when US began. Is he right?

Short answer: no. But the Tampa Bay Times reporter Jeffrey Solochek talked to a lot of smart people about DeSantis's version of US education history to get a longer answer.

A Brief History of Automatons That Were Actually People

Brian Contreras at Scientific American looks at fauxtomation, the process by which companies use actual humans to fake AI.

The Return of the Tradteacher

You're on line, so you've probably heard about tradwives. Nancy Flanagan talks about the affection for tradteachers.

A trans teacher asked students about pronouns. Then the education commissioner found out.

Sarah Gibson at New Hampshire Public Radio has the story of that time the state education commissioner decided to go after one trans teacher.

How Book Bans, Threats to Honest Teaching of History, and “Don’t Say Gay” Bills Harm Our Children and Undermine Education for Citizenship

Jan Resseger looks at some of the damage done by culture panic in this country.

Plans to put libraries in most Michigan schools get support from educators and parents

What a whacky idea! Hannah Dellinger reports for Chalkbeat.

Louisiana: Lunch Breaks in Question for Teen Workers

News about this bill was in last week's list, but this week the indispensable Mercedes Schneider has more information about who's pushing the bill. Prepare to be unsurprised.

Over at Forbes.com I wrote about the practice of pep rallies for the Big Standardized Test. 

As always, you are invited to sign up for my substack. It's free, and it puts all my stuff in your email inbox, where you can do with it as you will. 

ACT Will Be For Profit (And Join The Ghost of Pearson)

ACT, the runner-up in the college prep testing races, will be acquired by private equity firm Nexus Capital Management. 

This "partnership" will transform the company into a for-profit entity. The press release heralding this change is larded with all sorts of argle bargle heralding--well, see for yourself:

“Our partnership with Nexus Capital Management uniquely positions ACT to meet a watershed moment in our nation, as the demand for talent is growing and becoming more diverse. The need to prepare learners for success after high school for both college and work has never been higher, nor has the need to ensure that every learner has access to equitable college and career planning resources, guidance, and insights,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said. “Partnering in this way will complement and amplify ACT’s proven platform of education and work readiness solutions to support the needs of students, educators, and employers alike. We will accelerate our plans to meet the needs of our stakeholders as they navigate an evolving and complex system to develop the essential skills critical for success in a rapidly changing world of work.”

“This partnership will create more pathways to degrees, credentials, and skills acquisition for people at any stage of their lives,” said Daniel A. Domenech, chairman of ACT’s board of directors and former executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. “The time is right to move into the next phase of ACT’s long-term growth strategy alongside a partner with significant industry expertise, giving ACT the scale and capital necessary to deliver on its promise of education and workplace success.”

This is a fine example of the kind of writing that ChatGPT could take over-- lots of word things that don't say much of anything.

As for the "significant industry experience" that Nexus brings to the table--well, let's take a look at some of ACT's new portfolio-mates. The Los Angeles firm also owns chucks of FTD, Dollar Shave Club, Lamps Plus, Sugarbear, TOMS, MediaLab, a chemical company, and some others. 

Including Savvas Learning Company, formerly known as Pearson U.S. K12 Education. 

Yes, back in 2019, after a year of shopping for a buyer, Pearson sold off its U.S. curriculum and instructional materials business to Nexus Capital for $250 million. It was a hell of a deal for {Pearson, which got 20% of the take from the business going forward, and will get 20% of net sales price should Nexus ever sell the business. "We can't make this business work, but if you do, you have to give us 20% of your success," is a heck of a deal, and may explain why it took a year to find someone to take it.

Nexus changed the company's name and its CEO Bethlam Forsa declared a new tradition of innovation that would include “new digital technologies, diverse classrooms, broad social trends, and new research-based teaching and learning practices that are transforming education as we know it.” Savvas now provides "next-generation learning solutions for students" along with "adaptive technology that delivers personalized instruction," "high-quality instructional materials," and, of course, "The Science of Reading." If nothing else, Savvas is in touch with current buzzwords.

So that's the other edu-business in the Nexus family-- the ghost of Pearson's U.S. aspiration. Will Nexus force some kind of partnership for vertical integration? Who knows. Personally, I'd rather see a partnership like getting a nice spray of flowers and some comfortable shoes when you sign up to take the test. But I expect they'll first have to solve the problem of how ACT can keep doing what it's doing and somehow end up with extra "profit" money. 

ACT says the costs of taking the test won't go up. Sure. ACT will be "unified" with its own subsidiary Encoura, so maybe initial profits will be generated by unifying some people right out of a job. 

Meanwhile, I can't wait to see the first SAT ads declaring "We're still a non-profit company. We're not trying to make money. Just trying to fund our leaders exorbitant salaries." 

 

PA: Let's Digitize The Big Standardized Test

Pennsylvania has lagged behind many other states when it comes to moving the Big Standardized Tests on line. I suspect this is related to a small disaster in our state's testing history.

If you are a teacher of a certain age, you probably recall years ago when the state decided to try the practice test in an online form. I'm not in a position to say exactly what happened, but it certainly seemed like the kind of thing that would happen if a hundred thousand students tried to log on to a system set up to handle about ten. Schools across the state wasted the better part of a day trying to get their students to connect with and complete the online version of the test. 

But Governor Josh Shapiro has announced that we are going to try again. 

Shapiro announced the plan at a middle school in Allegheny County, reported by Kim Lyons at Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The plan is supposed to take two years, which seems ambitious. Shapiro suggests that the on line version will take 30 minutes less time to take, which I'm guessing doesn't include the time trying to get all the students logged in to their school network and then logged in to the test. 

Pennsylvania has the PSSA test for elementary and the Keystone exams for the high schools. The Keystones are the result of an ambitious plan to create end-of-course exams for everything, a plan that never quite came to fruition, thank God. The tests cost something in the neighborhood of $50 million, but that's not counting hours lost or money spent on test prep workbooks and materials that nobody would ever buy if the BS Test wasn't looming over them.

PA Secretary of Education Khalid Mumin offered this bit of bureaucratic bloviation:

While Pennsylvania is among a group of states that take a relatively minimalist approach to statewide standardized testing and administers only the minimum number of assessments required by federal law, we have listened to feedback from the field and the public and have responded with a plan that will benefit schools, educators, and Pennsylvania’s 1.7 million learners.

I'm pretty sure feedback from the field and the public would get us to Shapiro's conclusion, which is that he'd just as soon scrap the tests entirely. This is absolutely the correct choice, but Shapiro notes that it would lose the state $600 million in federal bribery funding. 

So instead Pennsylvania will do the opposite-- Mumin announced that the state would be introducing a new benchmark test to take in addition to BS Tests themselves. Yay.

The online version should cut scoring and turnaround time, though the process of sending scores back to schools still involves the step in which politicians and bureaucrats look at the results and decide what the cut scores will be this year. Since PSSA/Keystone season is right now, PA teachers can still expect to receive "data" about their current students long after they can do anything with it. 

About a third of PA schools already do the on line thing. It's not clear how Shapiro will help bring the rest up to speed, particularly in the case of schools that have connectivity or hardware issues; if everyone's going to take the test online, everyone needs a computer with a working internet connection to do it, not just a single floating class set of laptops with a 20% failure rate on any given day.

Shapiro also says that the plan is to format the questions in "ways students are already familiar with" which assumes a lot about student tech familiarity. Actually, what it means is that schools will be replacing their hard copy test prep notebooks with licenses for on line test prep software that makes sure that students become familiar with the formats.

Yes, the only good answer is still "Get rid of the whole thing." Maybe someday we'll elect people at the federal level who stop demanding it. 

Post #5000

I try not to get all meta around here, but this is post #5000 here at the mother ship of the Curmudgucation Institute, so I'm going to take moment to savor the sheer bulk that we've added to the interwebs.

First post went up on August 16 or 2013. I recommend that you do not go back and look at the early posts from what is best described as the "What exactly the hell do I do with this thing" period of my blogging. It took my a while to hit my stride. 

While this has been the main outlet for my education writing over the years, I've appeared other places as well, including a year at EdWeek, writing for The Progressive, Forbes.com, the Bucks County Beacon, some HuffPost years. I've also been writing a weekly column for the local newspaper about pretty much anything for 26 years. I have occasionally started other related projects, but those have been interrupted by life.

My big debt is to the people who put me out in front of an audience. I have some writerly instincts, but absolutely lack the self-promotion gene. Diane Ravich, Anthony Cody, Nancv Flanagan, Valerie Strauss, Jeff Bryant, a couple of guys who wouldn't necessarily want to be associated directly with me, and a host of other people who shared my stuff and passed it along have amplified the work. And that's before we even get to all the folks who have provided various forms of support all along the way, all the way back to the folks who gently suggested I rethink my original idea that the blog would look cool if it were white text on a black background. 

The single most common question I get is about how I do so much writing. The answer comes in a few parts.

1) There are plenty of people who write as much as I do. Diane Ravich passed the 5000 post mark roughly an hour and a half after she started blogging. Other folks spend lots of time polishing and crafting and that amounts to a huge quantity of writing, even if the end result just one published piece.

2) Low standards. When I started the newspaper column, I learned really quickly that I could not create a shining masterpiece every seven days, and I could either meet deadlines or settle for workable pieces that got the job done even if they weren't necessarily destined for immortality. 

3) Read a lot. An awful lot of what I have written is a means of processing or reacting to what someone else has put out in the world. It is always extra rewarding when someone continues that conversation. 

4) I gotta. As with many lines of work (including teaching), there is an itch that only doing the work scratches. I read about stuff, then think about stuff, and the next natural step for me is to write about stuff.

Google's counter, which is hugely suspect, says that there have been 12.5 million or so reads on this blog, plus however many read the substack version, plus whatever reads come to the other outlets. So some hunk of what I've written has touched a nerve or been useful to folks, and that's as much as I could have hoped for. 

I am fortunate and blessed to have done this as long as I have, and I write this sort of post not too often because this work is not about me, but about the work of public education. It's some of the most human and valuable work we do, helping young humans to become their best selves and to understand what it means to be fully human in the world. It is not easy work, and it exists at the intersection of a thousand thousand concerns and interests and tensions between so many different poles. It is one of our greatest experiments as a country, and it will never be complete, never arrive at a moment when we can collectively say, "Okay, that's it. Just lock everything down right here and don't touch a thing." Which means we will always need to keep talking about it, keep arguing for our vision of it, keep pulling and adjusting and balancing and correcting. And as long as that conversation is going on, I'll be adding my two cents. 

OK: Walters Continues (Unsuccessful) Harassment Of Teacher

Oklahoma's Education Dude-Bro-In-Chief can't seem to smack down former Oklahoma teacher Summer Boismier, but it's not for lack of trying.

If you've forgotten about Summer Boismier, let me refresh your memory before bringing the story up to date.

Back in September of 2022, after Oklahoma had unveiled its own version of a Florida-style reading restriction law, Norma High School English teacher Boismier drew flak for covering some books in her classroom with the message "Books the state doesn't want you to read." Apparently even worse, she posted the QR code for the Brooklyn Public Libraries new eCard for teens program, which allows teens from all over the country to check out books, no matter how repressive or restrictive state or local rules they may live under.

She was suspended by the district, which said that this was about her "personal political statements" and a "political display" in the classroom. Boismier told The Gothamist

I saw this as an opportunity for my kids who were seeing their stories hidden to skirt that directive. Nowhere in my directives did it say we can't put a QR code on a wall.

The suspension was brief, but Boismier decided this was not the kind of atmosphere in which she wanted to work, so she resigned, citing a culture of fear, confusion and uncertainty in schools, fomented by Oklahoma Republicans.   

That wasn't enough to satisfy Walters, at the time campaigning for office. The whole business had been a high-profile brouhaha, so Candidate Walters popped up to put his two cents in via a letter that he posted on Twitter.

Saying that "providing access to banned and pornographic material is unacceptable" and "There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom," Walters called for Boismier's license to be revoked. And he called her out by name.

That, of course, led in true MAGA fashion to a flood of vulgarity and death threats directed at Boismier as reported by KFOR:

“These teachers need to be taken out and shot,” “teachers like this should not only be fired but also should be swinging from a tree,” “If Summer tried this in Afghanistan, they’d cut out her tongue for starters,” are just a minuscule fraction of the threats pouring into Summer Boismier’s inbox.

Boismier was unwilling to put up with all of this. When Walters continued to try to strip her teaching license (even though in December of 2022 she took a job at the Brooklyn Library), Boismier used a quirk of Oklahoma law to demand a trial-like hearing to dispute the department of education decision. At that hearing in June of 2023, Assistant Attorney General Liz Stephens recommended against taking Boismier's license, saying the state failed to prove that Boismier had broken the law. 

Boismier wasn't done. In August of 2023, she filed a defamation lawsuit against Walters. Walters filed a motion to dismiss in January of this year, and U.S. District Court Judge Bernard Jones (Oklahoma's first Black magistrate and elevated to the district court by Donald Trump) denied the motion to dismiss. Walters had alleged that Boismier was a sort of public figure, and that malice on his part couldn't be shown. The judge disagreed, saying her case looks solid enough to proceed. So that lawsuit will continue winding through the court.

Meanwhile, the state board and Walters have continued to move forward to take Boismier's license. As reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman, they decided hold yet another hearing to "finalize the revocation" in March. Only there's a problem with that plan. In March, all of the department's attorneys quit, so they have no lawyers with which to hold a legal-type proceeding. They've postponed action until May. Once again, Walters has shot himself in the foot by just being lousy at his job. 

Of course, at any moment Walters could just say, "Look, trying to punish a former Oklahoma teacher who now lives in New York and works in a library for breaking laws two years ago that the assistant attorney general says she didn't actually break--well, that's a ridiculous and petty waste of department resources, so we're going to drop the whole thing." But somehow I don't think that's what's going to happen.