Elon Musk Has Some Education Thoughts

Elon Musk has some thoughts about education, and because he's Very Rich, Fortune Magazine decided it should share some of those thoughts, despite Musk's utter lack of qualifications to talk about education. 

Reporter Christiaan Hetzner mostly covers business in Europe, so it's not clear how he stumbled into this particular brief piece, which appears to be lifting a piece of a larger conversation into an article. I'd love a new rule that says every time an outlet gives space to a rich guy's musings about areas in which he has no expertise, the outlet also publishes a piece about the musings of some ordinary human on the topic--maybe even an ordinary human who is an expert in the area.

Hetzner launches right in with both feet.

More than a century ago, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Well, Elon Musk is a doer with a lot of children, and he’s reached the conclusion he doesn’t want his kids to learn from some has-been or never-was simply because they landed a job in a local school thanks to a lack of competition.

It's not clear if Hetzner is editorializing or trying to channel Musk's point of view (I think perhaps the latter), but somebody here is really full of it. I'm not going to argue about Musk's doer qualifications, though his ability to profit off the work of others and his interminable botching of twitter leave me unpersuaded of his genius. But this characterization of teachers is some serious bullshit. And things aren't going to get better.

Over his lifetime, teaching fundamentally remained the same experience: an adult standing in front of a chalkboard instructing kids.

Of course, I don't know how they did things in South Africa when little Elon was a young emerald prince, but the "school has never changed" trope is tired and silly and a clear sign that someone knows little about what is happening in education, which has been highly interactive for decades. 

But sure. There is still an adult in a classroom, much as cars are still four wheels, one in each corner. But perhaps that's because Musk appears bothered that the shifts in tech that are "upending the labor force" haven't yet touched teachers. 

Musk calls for compelling, interactive learning experiences. His example is that, rather than teaching a course about screwdrivers and wrenches, have them take apart an engine and in the process learn all about screwdrivers and wrenches. I'm sure that my former students who learned about operating heavy machinery by operating heavy machinery, or learned about welding by welding, etc, would agree. I'd even extend his argument to say that instead of trying to teach students to read by doing exercises and excerpts, we could have them read whole works, even novels. 

But just in case you're not catching who Musk blames, Hartzen notes that Musk says that the system failed students because "the talents of the teaching staff tasked with imparting this knowledge to their students were sophomoric at best."

Then Musk throws in an entertainment analogy. Teachers are like the "troubadours and mummers of yesteryear who traveled from one backwater to the next, offering their meager services to those desperate for their brand of amateur entertainment." Education today is like "vaudeville before there was radio, TV, and movies." Which compresses a variety of different developments, but okay. 

Then along came Hollywood, and a critical mass of the most talented screenwriters, directors, and actors around joined forces to produce compelling and engaging content that can cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, what? We're supposed to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into education? And does this idea still work if we notice that the "content" cranked out by Hollywood is only "compelling and engaging" to some people. 

Finally, Musk throws in a reference that Hertzen calls "bizarre"-- thespians entertaining the locals in Small Town U.S.A. with a "low-budget rendition" of the caped crusader couldn't compete with Christopher Nolan's Batman. 

Are we sure? Are there not people who wouldn't be interested in either? Are there not people who find live performance far more compelling? I may be biased here, but we just spent two weekends playing to packed houses of folks who could have just stayed home and listened to the album or watched the movie. 

Look, some analogies fail because they aren't a good match for what they're analogizing, and some analogies fail because they are wrong to begin with ("this is just like the way a hummingbird lifts tractors out of tar pits"). Musk manages to fail both ways. But, you know, he's rich, so he gets to have his terrible insight elevated by a major magazine. Add that to the list of things that interfere with meaningful education discourse in this country.

Aunt Peg: An Appreciation

Margaret Feldman was born and raised in my small, the daughter of a musical family. Her father led the Baptist Sunday School Orchestra, and by recruiting members for that group brought a great deal of musical talent to the area. Like many folks in this area, her father had struck it rich in the newly burgeoning oil business. In his case, he developed a method of refining oil into a lubricant for watches and founded the Fulcrum Oil Company. It made him a healthy income, as did the jewelry store his father had started years before.

Margaret was a standout athlete at our local high school. After graduation she went on to Vassar. When she graduated, the second world war was heating up in Europe, and she went to work in DC in the office William Donovan at the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor for the CIA. Through her work, she came to know a wide variety of people from many walks of life and parts of the world (including Moe Berg, the baseball player who was also a spy).

But at the end of the war, her father had passed away, and so she came back home to run Fulcrum, becoming one of the few female CEOs in the country. Along with other women running a company, she was profiled in a Dun and Bradstreet publication in 1959. 

She got her teaching papers and went to work at Franklin High School, the same school she had graduated from years before. She taught English and quickly became department head. She retired in 1970, only because the district at that time had a mandatory retirement age for teachers. Several board members voted not to accept her resignation. 

Aunt Peg (her nickname by this point) stayed involved in the district. She substituted, and even when she was not working, she stopped by. Never married, no children of her own, she watched over those of us following in her footsteps. She dropped copies of the New York Times crossword in some teachers' mailboxes. Her ability to reach out to a vast web of contacts was legendary; she once presented a teacher with a baseball newly signed by a major league player. She held a summer "reading club" for select students from the school, a combination special tutoring and summer school program. When a new teacher arrived in town and made Peg's acquaintance, she lobbied hard for her hiring. That was Merrill, my work sister, about whom I have written before. 

When Peg passed a little more than thirty years ago, many of her former students gathered together, raised funds and created a foundation in her name. That foundation funds an annual essay competition for students in all of the county's high schools. They get a prompt, the essays are submitted, the director of the competition whittles down the stack, and then a group of local high school teachers judge the essays and select a winner. There are scholarship dollars, and a pair of traveling trophies that are engraved with winners' names and which sit at the school of the year's winner. 

For years, Merrill was the director of the competition. Now I do that job. We had the reception for the finalists and winners last night. As we heard each finalist read their essay, I looked around the room and realized that I was the only person there who had met Peg face to face. 

It is hard to estimate the reach of some teachers. I never had Peg in class, other than as a substitute, but I got to know her more as a teacher. Some of the teachers who inspired me were inspired by her, so I guess I was a sort of professional grandchild of hers, and my own students-now-teachers are great-grands and so on. Peg was old school, neither warm nor fuzzy, but fiercely dedicated to literature and writing and what we could learn from them about ourselves. There was never nonsense in her classroom, not even when she was subbing, but there was plenty of humanity, and a demonstration of how wide and deep and rich a life could be, even if it started here in our small town.

When you retire, you become a sort of ghost. You step off that boat careening downstream and you are left behind, out of sight around the bend, so swiftly it can take your breath away. Every year, the competition gives me the chance to remind a few people about who Aunt Peg was, but it's clear that her influence has mostly outlived her name, her memory. 

That, of course, is the gig. Most teachers don't even have a tiny award named after them; they do the work, exert the influence, fire up another set of students, and the effects of their work get passed along, hand to hand, linking an unforeseeable future to an unfathomable past. Happy teacher appreciation week!

VT: An Unqualified Ed Chief, Whether They Want Her Or Not

Vermont had been short an education secretary for about a year when Governor Phil Scott got his heart set on Zoie Saunders, despite Saunders having a less-than-spectacular resume.

Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a Florida for-profit charter chain, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSASUSA 0.0% was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future.  Here's League Education Chair Patricia Hall talking about how CSUSA rakes in the bucks:

Our shining local examples in Hillsborough County are owned by Charter Schools USA. My first glimpse of Winthrop Charter School in Riverview in November of 2011 was during a scheduled visit with then Rep. Rachel Burgin. When told the two story brick building was a charter school, I was mystified. The site on which it was built was purchased from John Sullivan by Ryan Construction Company, Minneapolis, MN. From research done by the League of Women Voters of Florida all school building purchases ultimately owned and managed by for-profit Charter Schools USA are initiated by Ryan Construction. The Winthrop site was sold to Ryan Co. in March, 2011 for $2,206,700. In September, 2011 the completed 50,000 square foot building was sold to Red Apple Development Company, LLC for $9,300,000 titled as are all schools managed by Charter Schools USA. Red Apple Development is the school development arm of Charter Schools USA. We, tax payers of Hillsborough County, have paid $969,000 and $988,380 for the last two years to Charter Schools USA in lease fees!

After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including nonpublic schools.

Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the lead the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But her time as a school-killer for a public system was short, because Vermont was calling.

Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. John Walters at the Vermont Political Observer, a progressive blog that has been all over this, noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:

The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

Objections to Saunders in the job were many, including her lack of any apparent vision for job. Add to the list the fact that she'd never run any organization remotely as large or complicated as a state's education department. 

Saunders moved into the office April 15, but the Senate still got to have a say, and what they said was, "Nope." They voted her down 19-9, a thing which pretty much never happens. 

 And Scott went ahead and put her in office anyway.

Roughly fifteen minutes after the Senate rejected her, Scott appointed Saunders the interim Secretary of Education, a thing that does not require any Senate approval and which he presumably doesn't have to move on from any time soon, particularly given she has announced her 100 day plan. Scott did not appear moved to appoint an interim during the year since Dan French resigned the post.

Scott characterized the vote as a "partisan political hit job," even though three Democrats voted with the GOP senators to approve. He characterized attacks on Saunders as "unfair," "hurtful," and "false."

Scott kept spinning in the aftermath, claiming that it was false to say that she only had three months 4experience in public education, even though she clearly only has three months of experience in the public education sector. As John Walters reported, Scott also tried to pin the defeat on "outside groups." Walters pointed out that Scott has previously said he favors "CEO experience more than public school experience," though Saunders doesn't have that, either. 

Ethan Weinstein at vtdigger reported that Saunders was unfazed by her interimness. 

“I’ve never been one for a title,” she said, nodding to her “interim” moniker. “I’m really about being engaged and doing the work.”

In an interview with Vermont Public on April 18, Saunders was not particularly impressive, After she brought up Vermont's funding system, she was asked how she would change it, and her answer was argle bargle about just learning and it wouldn't just be her decision and she's really good at developing shared visions with diverse stakeholder groups. Data driven. Collaborative. Absolutely unwilling to say what she thinks a good answer would be.

In that same interview, she was asked about charters and choice, including vouchers to religious schools. "Do you think there should be any limits on the amount of public funding that goes to private schools in Vermont?" First, she wants to make the "charter schools are public schools" point. Sure. Then a long non-answer-- she thinks the feds say you have to include religious schools and she knows that Vermont has been trying to take care of the discrimination-by-schools piece of that, but on and on saying nothing, certainly nothing about what she thinks is right or should be policy.

She did directly say that she's not interested in bringing charter schools to the state of Vermont. So that's a clear statement. But then she's asked about closing smaller schools, and that triggers more corporate speak about student outcomes and local control and not an actual answer to the question. Asked for her view about Ron DeSantis anti-DEI policies, she does manage to work in diversity and inclusion and support for all students in her answer. 

She comes across as a sort of corporate tool who is either trying to avoid expressing her vision or simply doesn't have one. Is that better or worse than having a Ryan Walters type who has a strong and toxic vision that he's willing to spew regularly?  

 Many folks around the whole approval flap report a lot of vitriol and nastiness around this whole business. On the one hand, that's a shame. On the other hand, when you nominate for the post of education chief people who are clearly unqualified and who are also closely associated with anti-public ed interests, it's going to rile folks up. At this point, we've seen that movie several times, and it always ends badly. Good luck, Vermont.  

ICYMI: May Mart Edition (5/5)

The first weekend in May in my small town is a big festival of growing things, with both parks filled with vendors selling plant and plant-related stuff. My own interactions with plants are limited to A) appreciating them and B) killing them. But this is still a cool thing. And it takes some of the sting off the sadness of the closing of our theater production today. 

But this week it's a large reading list, so enjoy and share and I hope it's pretty where you are.

Remember Betsy? Michigan education leaders blast Trump for ‘abandoning’ public schools

From The 'Gander, Kyle Kaminski interviews some education leaders who point out the obvious--if you care about public education, Trump is probably not your guy. Includes an appearance by Friend of the Institute Mitch Robinson.

Does ‘Grading for Equity’ Result in Lower Standards?

At EdWeek, Risk Hess interviews Joe Feldman, who proceeds to gently explain how a recent Fordham critique of equitable grading was pretty much wrong. 

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

Yes, the US News rankings are junk. Jan Resseger explains.

Pennsylvania Taxpayers Are Funding Discriminatory Religious Schools

Catherine Caruso covers a report that I reported on as while back, but she does it in The New Republic, so hooray for more people getting the message about Pennsylvania's crazy discriminatory voucher program.

NC school voucher dollars are funding Christian Nationalist indoctrination

It's not just PA. Justin Parmenter has been running down all of the religious indoctrination and discrimination being funded by taxpayers in North Carolina, and it's a lot.

The Making of Michele Morrow

Speaking of North Carolina, they've got a woman running for state superintendent who is Ryan Walters-level right wing. Carli Brosseau at The Assembly has produced the best deep dive into Michele Morrow seen so far.

Iowa legislator opening his own private school, to be funded by vouchers he voted for

Yes, really, Help pass a law to help people get rich, then go cash in. Also, put your wife on the board. You'd think it would all be illegal, but no... Ty Rushing covers story for Iowa Starting Line.

Reynolds’ voucher program is about destroying public education

A former Iowa superintendent doesn't think much of Governor Reynolds' plans for public schools in Iowa.

Ohio’s *School Vouchers for All*: Expanded, Expensive, but Not Audited

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider details some of the shenanigans surrounding Ohio's voucher program (a program that is currently being dragged into court).

What Is That New Car Smell?

Florida is the petri dish in which a thousand school choice bacteria bloom. For instance, would you like some of the tax you pay for your new car to go to fund home schoolers? Sue Kingery Woltanski will guide you through this bizarro voucher grift.

A San Diego charter school may shut down its high school by the end of this school year

The San Diego Union-Tribune reminds us that charter schools are routinely unstable. Turns out amateurs have trouble making them work.

A controversial group looks to join school chaplain program under proposed OK legislation

Yet another state decides that allowing faux chaplains into schools might be another way to get Christianity in there, and so another states gets to say Howdy to the Satanic Temple. Welcome to the club, Oklahoma.

Do Schools Really Need To Give Parents Live Updates on Students' Performance?

Lenore Skenazy at Reason, of all places, points out that maybe the ever-available grade portals are doing at least as much harm as good.

Ultra-conservative lawmakers target Louisiana libraries as culture war rages on

Piper Hutchinson at Louisiana Illuminator runs down the many ways that some lawmakers are trying to stomp down libraries.

The PA mother who’s standing up against book bans—and the Dems standing with her

Ashley Adams at The Keystone  looks at one mom fighting for reading rights in Chester County.

NEPC Review: The Reality of Switchers (EdChoice, March 2024)

EdChoice created a "report" claiming to show that vouchers are a money-saver for taxpayers. Voucher scholar Josh Cowen explains why the report is pure bunk and hackery.

A new lost generation: Disengaged, aimless, and adrift

Robert Pondiscio at the Fordham Institute blog attempts to put school absences in a larger context. 

School Wars

Since it was Star Wars Day yesterday, let's go back to that time that Mr. Finkle managed to spoof Star Wars and school testing all at once.

At Forbes.com this week I looked at vouchers and their transparency problem.

Come join me on substack. More subscriptions means a greater reach, and it's free!

Should We Voucherize Title I?

Spoiler alert: no, we should not.

However, not everyone agrees, as witnessed by this "policy brief" (aka "blog post with footnotes and letterhead") from Ray Domanico for the Manhattan Institute, the same right-tilted thinky tank that employs Christopher Rufo, chief promoter of critical race theory panic.

Domanico opens with some history. Title I was born of the civil rights movement post Brown v. Board. And if you're wondering why folks on the corporate right aren't fans, it could be that Title I dramatically increased the federal government's share of education funding. In 1957, the feds kicked in 1.3% of K12 district revenue: in 1977, that was 8.1%. In 2021, the percentage temporarily goosed with Covid funs was all the way to 10%. That translates to billions and billions of dollars.

Next up-- a literature review of anything that helps prove Domanico's assertion that Title I has failed in its goal of improving "academic outcomes for the disadvantaged." This assortment of papers from the Manhattan Institute and other right-tilted advocacy groups finds that Title I wasn't working, and that it was even involving things like Whole Language!

But achievement gaps--aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test as distinguished between the poor and the not poor--were not reduced. Therefore, fail. Because education has no purpose except to improve student scores on the BS Test. In fact, as Domanico correctly points out, Title I became another justification for more emphasis on the BS Tests.

Domanico is also not keen on how the Duncan-Obama administration used threats to Title I funding as leverage to push their policies, and I do not disagree, just as I do not disagree of his story that shows imposing Common Core was a big mistake, and if I could find anything from the Manhattan Institute at the time objecting to Common Core I would gladly link to it, but all I can find are pieces like this one, in which the Institute scolds conservatives for opposing Common Core when it's clearly such a worthwhile thing. In other words, Domanico is both correct and about a decade late.

He winds around to arguing that Title I is a mess because its original intention is lost in current ed policy debates and federal overreach is super-unpopular. Also, it didn't fix the test score gap. 

His proposed solution? "Modernize" Title I funding.

Using federal powers to address social inequity and education for all is a policy that "emerged in a political environment that has expired." Federal involvement in educational equity is so last century. 

Now, what you could do, Domanico suggests, is turn the Title I money into vouchers, specifically education savings accounts, where you just hand the money to families and wash your hands of any obligation to try to get them a decent education let them spend the money as they think best. The state's could also fund math and reading tutors, or "distance learning for advanced coursework for lower-income students in rural areas." Because that distance learning thing has been super-popular the last few years.

Of this idea:

The best thing that could happen to Title I is for it to be turned into a national scholarship or tax credit program for lower-income families to use for tuition in the school of their choice.

This was Betsy DeVos's Education Freedom plan, though she at least proposed a national tax credit voucher program without gutting Title I at the same time. But Domanico not only wants vouchers and to end federal funding of Title I, but he wants to be clear that, given recent SCOTUS decisions, private religious schools should get some of those sweet taxpayer dollars. In fact, he likes the idea so much that he sort of botches the wording--

Given recent Supreme Court rulings—clarifying that a state need not offer school choice but if it does, it cannot exclude religious schools—Title I funds should flow directly to religious schools chosen by the families of eligible students, ending the practice of funding local school districts to provide services to eligible religious-school students.

 Flow directly to religious schools? I thought the money flowed directly to the families, thereby avoiding charges that we were using taxpayer funds in violation of the First Amendment. Huh.

In conclusion, he really wants vouchers. Also, the feds should stop using Title I funds as policy leverage.

It's an argument that has been repeatedly made, though this is a rare chance to see it all laid out in one blogpost policy brief. It has the usual feature of so many reformster arguments-- let explain the problem to you in great detail, and then propose my solution while skipping the part where I provide an argument for how my solution actually solves anything. 

It also shows how some folks on the right cannot see what is plain to some other folks on the right. If a big problem with Title I is that federal funds come with federal strings and levers attached, then why would those same strings and levers not stay attached when Title I funds are used as vouchers?

As a sort of tag, Domanico suggests that if the feds won't shape up, maybe a state would like to just reject Title I funding. Because that clearly won't negatively affect any of the high-poverty schools that depend on those dollars. Because maybe Title I, which has all the lumbering clumsiness of any federal program, still provides a bit of a lifeline to underfunded schools and the students in them and would be better off expanded rather than gutted. 

PA: Serpents and School Boards and the ILC, Again

Here's one more story of how Pennsylvania's leading right-wing law firm wiggles its serpentine way into local districts. 

Central York School District in Pennsylvania was one of the early poster children for reactionary culture panic board take overs, and they leaped right into book banning--and then leaped back out because a Large Fuss was raised. And then continued to wrangle over book banning, particularly banning that seemed aimed at erasing LGBTQ and non-white voices. 

This was a place that made its banning choices by looking at a list of 300 works recommended by a diversity committee and saying, "Nope" to all of them, including works like Brad Meltzer's I Am Rosa Parks (a children's book). 

In the midst of all this noise were board members Vicki Guth and Veronica Gemma, who back in August of 2020 faced calls for their resignation over comments questioning any need for teaching ab out tolerance and racism. 

Gemma was the president of the board at that time, and when she didn't resign, voters took the old-fashioned route and voted her out of office, hard. Gemma did not quietly; as a lame duck, she tried to mount an investigation into the book ban controversy, taking a slant that would be used later by Ron DeSantis, arguing that some people just meddled with the list to make the board look bad. "It was a collaborative effort to destroy our reputation for political reasons," Gemma said. Because, you know, the banning of diversity texts wouldn't have looked bad on its own.

Gemma found herself a job that seems to fit. She now works as a district office manager for York County state Rep. Joe D'Orsie (R-Mount Wolf). D'Orsie introduced legislation exempting school employees from honoring the pronouns of LGBTQ+ students, similar to a policy drafted by the ILC and passed by the Red Lion Area School Board last year.

But that's not her only new gig. She's also Director of Education for the PA Economic Growth PAC. The PAC is headed by John Davis, who owns a mall in York, along with Kristen Rohrbaugh, a "seasoned brand specialist" and Don Yoder, all of whom contributed a small pile of money to the group. The group stands for "championing freedom, preserving capitalism, demanding transparency, and empowering the people," though as with many right wing groups, those stances come with asterisks.

For instance, that one about transparency.

Here's Gemma talking to Epoch Times about her gig, to combat critical race theory and DEI.

PAEGPAC did a lot of mailing work for campaigns (with Rohrbaugh's company apparently doing the design work), though they did chip in $500 to the 1776 Project PAC, a million-dollar PAC that targeted school board elections.

But now The York Dispatch has unearthed emails that show the PAC has been doing more than just sending out mailings.

Meredith Willse, writing for the dispatch, shows how Gemma put together some secret meetings to play matchmaker between York school boards and the right-wing law firm, Independence Law Center, the firm that specializes in crafting anti-LGBTQ, anti-DEI, anti-book policies for districts all across the state. 

In a March 4 email, Gemma invited members from 12 school districts across York County, warning them specifically not to bring more than four members because any more would make the meeting subject to Pennsylvania's sunshine laws. Turns out the PAC's interest in transparency has some exceptions.

Ther secret meeting was on March 15 at an East York warehouse, located in the rear of a strip mall, with catering by Round the Clock Diner. You will be unsurprised that nobody answered Willse's request for a comment.

The email referred to the ILC, a firm that many York County districts have been hiring this spring. And the email makes clear that this is a regular get together: 

We finally nailed down a date that works for most. Keep in mind we will have these meetings every quarter so if you miss this one, we can see you at the next.

In a separate editorial, the York Dispatch Editorial Board does a good job of connecting the dots. They look back to a 2005 meeting with ILC's chief counsel Randall Wenger, who had worked with another firm as counsel in the case that ultimately threw out Dover School Board's attempt to inject creationism into science classes. His take was that the board members had been too clear and transparent about their intent to inject religion into school. 

He told attendees: “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.”

So now ILC and their allies show their commitment to acting like serpents, because lying and sneaking are super-consistent with Christian values. 

Secret meetings seem to be a special technique of, which has also set up secret meetings with board members in my corner of the state. 

At this point, it's best to assume that if your board is making noise about anti-LGBTQ, anti-book policies, ILC is in your neighborhood, slithering and you just need to start turning over rocks to find them. 

It reminds me of a saying that friend used to keep on his fridge. It's about using any means to an end, to the effect that since we rarely fully achieve our ends, we are much more defined by the means we use. If you get really good at being a serpent, don't be surprised at the end of the day when you find you can't shed your skin. 

Enough Secret Sauce Coverage

It's 2024, and we're still getting education "secret sauce" stories.

Here's one from New Jersey, where Joe Malinconico provides this puff piece for Paterson's College Achieve Charter School, for which the headline says "Here's the 'secret sauce' this Paterson charter school used to boost its test scores." Malinconico has the credentials of a hard-hitting investigative reporter, but this piece is strictly unexamined PR for the school.

College Achieves is a charter chain with some presence in Paterson. Niche finds it be a middlin' school, but perhaps they don't know about the secret sauce. The chain was founded by Gemar Mills, a Paterson native famous for being a young principal leading Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

So what secret sauce does Malinconico find?

Well, there's a staff PD meeting every Friday for two hours. Since Niche says that half the staff has 3 or fewer years of experience, that could be helpful, depending on how they spend the time. They also get ten days of PD in August.

The sauce, as always, involves a very narrow definition of success, aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test went up. Malinconico did not ask any questions about how much test prep that required, nor what was eliminated in order to make room for it.

But Malinconico's education background may be a bit thin, as witnessed by this line:

The summer training focuses on preparing educators for handling classrooms in which students break down in small groups for something called differentiated instruction, essentially tailoring assignments to pupils’ various academic levels.

A quick google might have told Malinconico that differentiated instruction is neither new nor secret.

What else? Well, some classrooms get a second teacher to focus on students in need of extra help. And they've increased ELA instruction from two to three hours. 

Parents touted the high expectations, including the classrooms named for various colleges.

Malinconico did note that while the Paterson district has 16% of students with disabilities and 29.3% with English language difficulties, the charter student population shows 5% and 10.6% respectively. Charter advocates shrug and say, "Open enrollment." 

Malinconico might have looked at other features of CAPS, like the "astonishing" taxpayer-funded salaries they pay their executives, or the sweet deal in which they lease their own facilities from a related third party (taxpayers fund that, too). But no--this puff piece is just about their secret sauce.

So the secret sauce? More hours on tested subjects. More teacher supports. Fewer students who are harder to teach.

I don't fault the school--it's doing what it should do, which is use the best tools it can lay its hands on to help its students achieve. 

But we are well past the point where anyone should be providing this kind of superficial credulous coverage. It's a school. There are no silver bullets, no secret sauce, no miracle formula, and every single person on the planet, including journalists, should know better. Educating students is long hard steady work with lots of grind and very little flash. And no miracles.