Bad AI Writing Advice

There is so much bad advice for teachers out there concerning how to use AI in the classroom. Some of the worst advice surrounds AI use for writing assignment, and most of that bad advice is rooted in a fundamental misconception of what the purpose of the writing assignment might be.

I have a prime example here. It comes from Dan Sarofian-Butin who is a Full Professor in, and Founding Dean of, the Winston School of Education & Social Policy at Merrimack College, which is itself a pretty snappy little college just a stone's throw from Boston. His CV is a hell of a lot more impressive than mine. Nevertheless, I take considerable exception to his advice about the use of ChatGPT or similar LLMs in student writing assignments.

His piece is entitles "Teachers: It's time to make friends with AI" recently on eSchoolNews (though he has put out other pieces of a similar bent).

He opens by noting that the norm (at least in high schools) is that "AI is the mortal enemy of classroom teachers," while he wants his students "to use AI every day in class and for every assignment." He later describes a gap between "cognitive autonomy" (no AI) versus "cognitive outsourcing" (just have AI write the paper for you). Right off the bat, I feel that he's skipping over a continent's worth of middle ground, but okay. What should we be using our new best friend?

Sarofian-Butin offers an interesting taxonomy of the various degrees of having AI part of the process, noting minor and major amounts of "cognitive offloading." And that's useful because that's the territory where all of these discussions need to happen. Nobody (well, hardly anybody) is seriously arguing to have students just let the AI do it all, and folks who are anti-any-AI-at-all aren't going to be part of the conversation. For everyone else, it's an exercise in line drawing--which parts of the writing process can or should involve an LLM?

Sarofian-Butin has some answers. I don't much like any of them.

Sarofian-Butin thinks AI can be used as "scaffolding," particularly with the business of getting the writing started. He says that students used to come to his office unsure how to start their papers and he would spend 15-20 minutes brainstorming and prodding and pushing. But now...

Today, I teach my students a set of in-class AI prompts, based on a standard model of supporting writing, on how to brainstorm, focus, and develop their ideas. “I didn’t really know where to start,” wrote one student at the end of last semester, “and ChatGPT helped me think about questions, and I was able to start planning what I wanted to do based on the different options.” Another student wrote, “I started off with pretty much no idea and was able to use ChatGPT to find a topic that I’m interested in and I’m working with it to narrow it down.” When I now meet with students, our conversations are so much more productive, as we now have a focus.

Which doesn't sound so much like brainstorming as just generating a list of ideas from which the student can choose. I have had my share of those 15-20 minute sessions with students, and I am having a hard time imagine how one does that in a way that puts the work on the student, that helps them probe their own interests and half-formed ideas aided by what you know of the student and what you can see in their face and voice as they discuss--how do you do all that if you are a computer that has zero perception of the student themself? 

But Sarofian-Butin sees even more involved roles for the AI. Some of his topics are complex. So many variables, so much ambiguity, so many ways to define the issue. They're, you know, hard.

I therefore teach my students another set of AI prompts to help them see what good thinking about such issues looks like. This is formally known as a cognitive apprenticeship: “one needs to deliberately bring the thinking to the surface, to make it visible, whether it’s in reading, writing, problem solving.” AI is so good at doing this by walking students step-by-step through its output.

And now alarm bells are ringing, because AI is NOT so good at walking students through its output because it does not "think about" ideas in any human sense of the word. It cannot "bring the thinking to the surface" because it is literally not thinking at all. And some of the other tasks that Sarofian-Butin assigns to his composer's apprentice--

Seeing AI offer suggestions for a thesis statement or a paper outline in real-time, with explanations, is incredibly helpful. “The outlines,” one student commented, “helped me from getting too stuck on small details and reminded me to think about the big picture.”

He also suggests that AI might help students can find answers to "am I making the right argument" and again, an AI does not know anything about how good your argument is or is not. 

He reports that a student said that they know that ChatGPT is there to use as an assistant rather than a replacement.

Bad AI writing instruction advice all suffers from the same problem-- it presumes that the only purpose of the writing is to create the final product, an artifact to be handed in. As long as you have a final artifact to deliver to your professor, then the process is of secondary importance. 

No. We can say that we want every player on the football team to log an hour in the weight room three days a week. But that's hard, and the players are reluctant, and they're not sure they can manage it, so they go to the weight room and someone else puts the weights on, and someone else lifts the weights, and another person lowers the weights back down, and then the player fills out his log, and that final product, that log-shaped artifact is perfect and exactly what the coach asked for--except that it's not.

Writing is about making thinking manifest. Many of the problems Sarofian-Bution is address with AI are thinking problems, not writing problems. So what happens when we outsource the thinking parts of writing? 

I'm trying to figure out what a Sarifian-Butin student has actually done. The student selected a topic from an AI-generated list, picked out an AI thesis "example," followed the AI generated outline, made AI-suggested improvements, all while reading AI-generated "explanations" of the AI "process " (that are not actually a real explanation of how a real human might have done it). 

What has the student gotten from this process? What mental muscles did they develop? What critical parts of the writing process did they complete beyond filling in the blanks laid out by someone else? How can one know if they have used the AI as a crutch or had it carry them entirely? How is this superior to, say, watching someone else write an essay while explaining what they are doing? What problem is this solving (beyond a time-sucking parade of wobbly students asking for 15-20 minutes of advice, which is not a student problem)? 

How is any of this better than leaving them to struggle on their own?

Yes, I know-- left to their own devices, they will produce some really terrible essays. Believe me-- I may not match Sarofian-Butin's credentials in any other way, but after 39 years in a high school English classroom, I will bet I've read far more terrible writing than he has. And not once did I think, what this student needs is something that can do all the hard part for him. Did I think some could, would, and did benefit from human-to-human tutoring? Absolutely--but that involves a human being who can read them, hear them, respond to them, draw them out and sense when to back off. 

The thing about those terrible essays is that you don't get students to do better by doing the hard parts for them. They have to struggle and work and you have to coach and cajole and hold hands and kick butts and let them find their own voice and their own way.

This is at the heart of most student endeavors. I was a yearbook advisor for ages, and there is no question that they best way to get a good yearbook is to shove the kids out of the way and do it yourself. What do they get from that? Not a damned thing, but the book would look good. You could have a much more beautiful prom if you let adults do the decorating. 

And you would get much better student writing if you didn't leave it to students. 

But the product is not the point. The struggle, the growth, the learning, the human interaction, the heavy lifting is the point. Trying to reduce student involvement in the process gets a better product, but that can't be the whole point. Everything in education would run so much more smoothly if not for all the children. 

Some Christmas Tunery

Here at the Institute (where the Board of Directors still firmly believe in Santa Claus), we like our seasonal music, both as consumers and as producers, so as is tradition here, I'll share with you a couple of sources of music for the next twenty-four hours or so.

I have long maintained a Christmas play list of Youtube, and every year I rotate some things out and add some new things in. I tend toward videos that aren't already played a zillion times, so we're mostly guaranteed that we won't be hearing the things we have already gotten tired of. So here's this year's edition:

During the Covid shutdown, my extended family collaborated on a Christmas Favorites Spotify list, which I still enjoy. It is exceptionally eclectic.

However folks celebrate at your place, or don't, may the season find you and your loved ones well and enjoying some peace and/or joy. 

It's Here. Replacing Teachers With AI

The interwebs have been buzzing about the new Arizona charter that will have AI in place of human teachers. But whatever you're imagining, the reality is probably different-- and worse.

The first thing to know is that the proposed Arizona charter is not new. The new school is Unbound Academy, but that's just the Arizona version of a group of AI teacher schools already up and running in Texas. They're the Alpha Schools, and they are the brainchild of one more rich person with a burning desire to revolutionize K-12 education. 

The public face of the for-profit Alpha schools is MacKenzie Price, a Stanford graduate now living in Austin, Texas. In this glowing profile from Austin Woman, Price tells the origin story of Alpha Schools, starting with her own child in school:

“Very early on, I started noticing frustration around the lack of ability for the traditional model to be able to personalize anything,” she recalls. “About halfway through my daughter’s second grade year, she came home and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.’ She looked at me and she said, ‘School is so boring,’ and I just had this lightbulb moment. They’ve taken this kid who’s tailor-made to wanna be a good student, and they’ve wiped away that passion.”

She launched Alpha, according to her LinkedIn profile, in 2016, and there started creating the model that would later be spun off into its own company, 2 Hour Learning. And that's the model that she now wants to move to other states.

It sure sounds like snake oil. The headline pitch on the website is this--

School is broken, and we're here to fix it. 2 Hour Learning gives students an AI tutor that allows them to: Learn 2X in 2 Hours

As at least one profile notes off-handedly, we're not talking about LLM ChatGPT AI. No, Price is still peddling one of the older models of computer-aided education.  

Price has found a way to use technology as a tool that helps create a personalized learning experience for each student. “The thing that’s really interesting about what technology has enabled is that it does a good job of giving every student the exact level of information they need at exactly the pace they need. We’ve [created]an AI tutor who is basically able to put guide rails along these kids’ educational experience in order to make sure they’re learning efficiently, they’re learning to mastery and they’re not getting frustrated. If they’re frustrated, learning turns off.”

Price is relentlessly media-ready. She has a Youtube channel, a podcast, and appears for interviews and in advertorials-- marketing masquerading as news copy. She touches all the usual talking points--the school model is 100 years old, NAEP scores show dreadful learning loss. She's careful to express admiration for the fabulous job teachers do in an impossible task! 

Salon posted a Price piece that claimed that back when Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the US was "ranked first in the world for academic proficiency," which is absolutely untrue. The ostensible point of the piece is to argue in favor of not ending the department of education, but mostly to argue more money should be going to AI tutoring (Salon identifies her as a podcast host, not the owner of an AI tutoring business). She also says that "attracting and retaining top teachers is the first step to any successful education reform."

Well, not at her company.

The model is simple. Students sit on the computer with their AI tutor for two hours of core subjects in the morning. After that, they move into what seems like the old open school model--they pursue their interests and passions. As Price tells an "interviewer" in one paid advertorial:

Yes, it’s absolutely possible! Not only can they learn in two hours what they would learn all day in a traditional classroom, the payoffs are unbelievable! My students master their core curriculum through personalized learning in two hours. That opens up the rest of their day to focus on life skills and finding where their passions meet purpose. Students love it because it takes them away from the all-day lecture-based classroom model. Instead, my students are following their passions.

 Price believes that one secret of success is motivated students, and she further believes that it's very motivational to tell a student "Just put in two hours on the computer and you can have the rst of the day to follow your muse."

Shiny! 

The school hires some adult "guides" to provide "motivation and emotional support." As the website promises "From 'Limitless Launches' to personalized motivational models, our guides make every student feel valued and motivated." The site also throws around scores on MAP testing as proof for how well the model works.

There are some points that don't come up in the marketing.

One is that the Alpha Schools don't appear to be accredited, a point that comes up in some complaints about the school. 

And if you were worried that this sounds like a cheapo model that is going to be foisted on poor kids, worry no more. Tuition at an Alpha School is $40,000 a year. Remember, Alpha is a for-profit company.

Also really studiously not mentioned in all of the appearing that Price does is her husband and co-founder of the business. 

Andrew Price is the CFO for ESW Capital and also for Trilogy. ESW is an private equity firm for one guy-- Joe Liemandt, who made a huge bundle in the tech world. In 2021, Price's boss was expressing some interesting thoughts about white collar jobs, as quoted in Forbes:

Most jobs are poorly thought out and poorly designed—a mishmash of skills and activities . . . poor job designs are also quickly exposed with a move to remote work

Huh.  

Andrew Price has maintained a low public profile with Alpha Schools. Maybe he's just letting his wife have her own fun hobby business, or maybe the couple has determined that the whole Mom saving schools for her kids origin story plays better than private equity guy decides to try making a buck in the education biz. 

It's also unclear why they've changed the brand name to Unbounded in Georgia. Alpha Schools, powered by 2 Hour Learning, have branched out to states outside Texas and is trying to break into others as well. It's quite possible that they have to build different sorts of shells around the core business to avoid rules about operating for profit schools. 

These are folks who have combined one old failed education model (algorithm directed worksheet generation as tutoring) with another (open free classroom) with somewhat more successful old business models (deprofessionalize your staff to reduce costs, charge out the wazoo) with education snake oil shtick (schools are failing, but because I love my child, I know how to revolutionize education) with a proven method of cooking the books (enroll wealthy, well-supported kids and you too can gave miraculous results). Here's hoping that Georgia and other states are smart enough not to fall for this. 

ICYMI: Three More Sleeps Edition (12/22)

If your household calendar is tied to the school calendar, your holiday is likely under way. If your calendar is like ours, you are running a tad behind on the various holiday stuff. Every year I think my old geology professor, who was also the cornet player in our college trad jazz band, had the right idea--he and his wife sent out cards every year to celebrate Ground Hog Day. 

At any rate, here is your reading list for the week. 

Trump’s School Improvement Plan: Deport American Students

The 74's Mark Keierleber offers a quick summation of one of Trump's many terrible ideas that would affect schools.

Why It’s Hard to Control What Gets Taught in Public Schools

Dana Goldstein at the New York Times looks at the plans to enforce what is taught in some classes, and why that trick hardly ever works.

Noem proposal would fund Christian ‘segregation academies’

Rick Snedeker argues that the governor of South Dakota is trying to bring back segregation academies with a special new twist.

Schrödinger’s Cat

I was feeling clever about thinking of Trump education policy as a Schrodinger's cat kind of thing, and then found that Greg Samson had already done a far better job of running with the idea. 

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs asks Tom Horne to reverse automatic voucher reimbursement plan

Arizona's governor thinks maybe they should take some simple steps to cut back on the massive fraud that the program keeps fostering. AZ Superintendent Tom Horne says, "How dare you!"

$22 million in WV Hope Scholarship spent on out of state schools, iPads, dance studios and more

Speaking of voucher programs that waste taxpayer dollars, Amelia Ferrell Knisely reports on the new voucher program in West Virginia, already wasting dollars right and left.

The Story of one Mississippi County Shows How Private Schools Are Exacerbating Segregation

ProPublica takes a close look at one district as an example of how segregation via private schools is still a big thing (and not just in the South). An important read.

Write It Down Somewhere (Some Advice for New Teachers)

Some specific and practical advice for people navigating that special hell that is a first year in the classroom. Jose Luis Vilson has been there.

The Amazing Power of Snowpants

Nancy Flanagan reminds us of the importance of what may seem like small things, but which sre really much bigger.

Billionaires’ Love Affair with School Reform with No Accountability (Part 1)

Larry Cuban takes us down memory lane and the many rich guys who have been moved by the claims that US schools are just so broken.

Ohio State Senator Pushes New Version of Punitive Plan to Restructure or Take Over Low-Scoring Schools

Jan Resseger is still trying to keep up with the Ohio legislature's determination to become the Florida of the Midwest, aggressively hostile to the very idea of public education. 

Benchmarking the pedagogical unknown

Ben Riley continues to be a useful source of explanations and unraveling of the world of AI in education. This latest piece includes yet another useful and somewhat mind-twigging explanation of what a Large Language Model actually does.

Why Reading Books in High School Matters

At The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin interviews Rose Horowitch about the drop in students who read whole books, and nailed all the points, including the rise of excerpt teaching for test prep. 

The Supreme Court Argument in ConVal-The State Wants to Make Claremont Mythical and the Court hints at avoiding Judicial Norms.

New Hampshire is one of those states where the court has said they need to shape up their education funding (in a case named for the town where I did much of my growing up), so of course some folks are trying to challenge that whole thing. Andru Volinsky, an education lawyer in those parts, tells the story about the state supreme court.

Will Hegseth Disrupt the nation’s top performing school system?

Hegseth is a terrible choice for the Department of Defense for so many reasons. But the DoD is notable for having an outstanding school system which owes much of its success to actual functioning equity programs. Well, somebody is surely going to want to put a stop to that. Sue Kingery Woltanski with the story.

In online drone panic, conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream

Not an education story, exactly... and yet. Tatum Hunter at the Washington Post lays out the great drone panic, an event that tells us a lot about how people insist on maintaining their own ignorance and do everything except trying to find reputable information about something that's freaking them out.

At Forbes.com this week, I took a shot at predicting six major education stories of the new year. 

You can find me at Bluesky as @palan57.bsky.social, and of course there's the regular newsletter with all my stuff in your email for free. 

Federal Anti-Commie Education Bill

 Yep, someone has proposed (and 33 shining lights co-sponsored) a bill to root out that damned commie education from our classrooms.

HR 5349 was proposed by Rep Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican. Salazar was the daughter of two Cuban exiles who rose to prominence as a reporter for Univision and Telemundo. In 2018 she was beaten by former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala. In the 2020 rematch, endorsed by Trump, Salazar won. But she went on to be one of the few GOP reps who voted to create the January 6 commission. She has been fairly moderate, as GOP reps go.

But this bill-- the "Crucial Communism Teaching Act."

It's short and sweet. Its purpose? To help prepare school students to be "civically responsible and knowledgeable adults." And to ensure that high school students know that "communism has led to the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide, to ensure that they understand the "dangers of communism and similar political ideologies," and to ensure that they "understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism."

To do that, the bill says that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (yes, that's a thing-- an educational, research and human rights nonprofit organization" authorized by a unanimous act of Congress under Clinton in 1993)-- the VCMF is to develop a civic curriculum that should discuss communism and totalitarianism and explain that these "conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States." 

That curriculum should be updated to keep abreast of changing communist and totalitarian regimes. Particularly China. 

Also, the VCMF should develop some oral history resources gathering "Portraits in Patriotism" from "diverse individuals" (that may kill the bill right there) who "demonstrate civic-minded qualities, are victims of above mentioned political ideologies, and can point out how these contrast with the USA.

I suppose the good news here is that there's no mandate to actually use these materials, just a directive for VCMF to "engage" with state and local education folks to "assist" with high schools using the stuff. VCMF actually already has a whole bunch of Communism Is Bad education materials. 

It could be worse. It's not a mandate to use Prager U materials, after all. And to be clear, I'm not personally a big fan of communism, though in my reading of history, nations that "turn communist" usually keep being awful in ways that they were awful before anyone pretended to be a communist. 

In fact, now that I think of it, some study of what creeping totalitarianism wouldn't hurt Americans (in or out of high school) right about now. 

But teachers recognize this same old dodge. "We want students to know and agree with This Particular Thing," say some bunch of leaders somewhere. "How can we do that? I know! We'll get teachers to teach it to them. Because there's lots of room in the day to slip in one more slab of curricular materials. Also, students always believe what teachers say. Also, legislating curriculum always works out well."

Congress may very well pass this. Teachers will either ignore it or not as they are so inclined, and politicians will be proud of themselves for battling the scourge of communism and for once against standing up for only the correct sort of indoctrination in our schools. 

PA: Why Commonwealth Charter Academy Is Bad News

The following post is addressed directly to my friends and neighbors in Venango County.

You may have heard over the last month that Commonwealth Charter Academy is planning to put up a building near Home Depot, and more recently, Cranberry Area School District officials expressing some concern over that development. Their concern is well-placed; CCA is bad news.

What is Commonwealth Charter Academy?

A charter school is a school that is privately owned and operated but which is funded by taxpayer dollars. CCA is a cyber charter (sometimes called a virtual charter) which means there is no actually school building; students attend school by logging on to their computer and getting their instruction on line.

With over 20,000 students, CCA is the largest cyber-school in Pennsylvania, the state with the largest number of cyber-students in the nation.

Pennsylvania and cyber charters

One might imagine that a school that has no physical building, that has no expenses like transportation and books, and which can assign hundreds of students to a single teacher would be able to operate for less money than a bricks-and-mortar school, thereby saving taxpayers money, and in some states that is true (sort of).

But Pennsylvania funds cyber charters differently than any other state in the nation. In any state, when a student switches from public school to a charter school, their public school is required to send the per-pupil cost to the charter. In all other cyber states, the formula is different for cyber charters than physical charters. But not in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania school districts pay the full brick and mortar charter per pupil amount to cyber schools. One study from California found the cyber charters would be profitable if they charged as little as $5,000 per student. In 2022, the superintendent of Wattsburg schools said they were providing cyber school at a cost of about $3,000. Our local districts pay about $13K per student. 

And the smaller the district, the bigger the hit. Forest, because it spreads its costs over fewer students pays cyber charters over $22K per student. Yes, because of the way the law works, students from different districts are charged wildly different amounts to attend exact same school. 

Local taxpayers take a double hit. In theory, when a district loses a student, they lose the expenses associated with that student. In practice, the district carries "stranded costs." Cranberry sends 42 students to cyber-school, spread over K-12. Can they cut teaching positions, bus routes, building maintenance, or administrators for that small number of students? No--but last year they lost $676,425 of taxpayer dollars, which means they either cut services or get more taxpayer dollars to make up the difference.

(There is also a crazy wrinkle with special ed funding. If you want more info, here's the link)

Just how wealthy is CCA?

Cyber charters are hitting Pennsylvania taxpayers with a huge mark-up for services. What are they doing with all that money?

CCA HQ-- What does your district's main office look like

A report from Education Voters of Pennsylvania shows that in 2022, the largest four cyber charters in the state had net assets and fund balances of $485.5 million. (Unlike public school districts, charter schools do not have a legal limit on how much unreserved fund balance they can sit on,) The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School Association estimates the current price tag for all cybers in PA is $1.4 billion. 

CCA was founded in 2003 (right after PA passed its charter school law) and owned by a group of investors. It was owned for a while by Pearson, the education book publisher that wanted to get into digital education. Nowadays, CCA is its own thing. 

Cyber charters spend a great deal of money on marketing. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, CCA spent almost $19 million on marketing and advertising. That includes not just the ubiquitous online advertising, but items like a Jerold the Bookworm float in Philly's Thanksgiving parade, sponsorship of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton hockey team, and gift cards that families can use at places like Dave and Busters and Kennywood. 

CCA has amassed a huge real estate empire. In the past six years, CCA has paid a total of $88.7 million for properties; those properties have an assessed value of $43.1 million, according to the Ed Voters report. 

In 2020, CCA purchased a redeveloped office complex that used to be the Macy’s at The Waterfront near Pittsburgh. CCA had previously leased the first floor of the complex (about 70,000 square feet); now they own the whole building, while the same company they previously leased from manages it for them.

That same month, they spent $15 million on a the former headquarters of Ricoh in the Greater Philly area. Back in 2016, CCA bought the former PA State Employees Credit Union headquarters in Harrisburg for $5 million to replace several leased offices. 

In Johnstown, CCA purchased an office building and several nearby vacant lots. In Moosic, CCA purchased the former Cigna building for $17,788,381 (the previous owners had the assessed value dropped to under $300K). In Dubois, CCA is planning to build an office complex on the vacant lot they purchased. In Erie, CCA bought the former Erie Business Center. In West Manchester, CCA spent $4.4 million on a building with an assessed value of $314K.

All of this is paid for with taxpayer dollars--specifically taxpayer dollars that would have been used to fund local public schools. If a Venango County School District was buying up buildings, stockpiling hundreds of millions of dollars, sponsoring a minor league team, and handing out gift cards to parents, what do you suppose taxpayers would say about that. But county taxpayers are funding exactly those things--just for cyber charters instead of local schools.

If CCA is doing a good job, who cares about this other stuff.

It is important to note that for some students, cyber charters are an absolute life-saver, and it would be a mistake to outlaw them entirely. 

However, the results for cybers are, overall, lousy. 

Students typically average about two years in cyber charters. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University (a group that supports charter schools in general) found that cybers have an “overwhelmingly negative impact” and that a year at a cyber charter left students a half year behind in English, and a full year behind in math. The Thomas Fordham Institute, a group that promotes charter schools, issued a report highly critical of Ohio cyber charters. Pennsylvania’s cyber charters have not outperformed other schools in the state — not public schools, not brick and mortar charter schools, not even high poverty schools. 

The report “The PA Disconnect in Cyber Charter Oversight and Funding” from the PA Charter Performance Center of Children First shows our oversight compares poorly to that of other states. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania charters may go years without a state audit. In 2019, Maddie Hanna at the Philadelphia Inquirer found that many cybers were operating years after their charter had expired. The cyber charter graduation rate is about 65%. 

When it comes to proficiency scores on the PSSA and Keystone exams, cyber charters have never met the state averages. The wrinkle there is that cyber students aren't required to take those tests. Only about 20% of CCA students took the test (despite CCA's many field offices). But if the state only counted the CCA students who tested, the proficiency rate would still be below state average. 

Cyber schools will argue that they are dealing mostly with students who have trouble with the whole school thing. That may or may not be true, but even if it is, if their business model is to deal with those challenging students, after over twenty years, shouldn't they be better at it?

It's not hard to see where some problems originate. Cyber teachers are asked to handle hundreds and hundreds of students at a time. Student attendance is a matter of occasional log-ins to the computer platform. Their CEO, Thomas Longenecker, is a business guy; his second-in-command is a lawyer. Longenecker makes a $268,000 salary. 

So why is this still going on?

There has been little real revision of the charter law passed in 2002. There have been proposals to bring our charter funding in line with what other states do; most recently, Governor Tom Wolf proposed that cyber charters be reimbursed at a flat rate of $8,000. In 2019, a lawmaker proposed a bill saying that if a district had its own inhouse cyber school (as many do, including our local districts), the district didn't have to pay for an outside charter. 

But cyber charters have money to spend lobbying, and any time someone proposes a funding system more in line with what other states do, cyber charter advocates complain that it will be a hardship and limit student choices. And so simple reforms, reforms that would require the same accountability for charter schools as for public schools, and which would create some sensible funding policies--none of them gets adopted.

Meanwhile, more than 450 of Pennsylvania's 500 school boards-- boards representing a full political spectrum--have passed resolutions calling for funding reform, and that includes Venango County districts. Legislators have continued to ignore them.

Local consequences

This year, Oil City has 84 cyber charter students, and that costs the taxpayers of the district $1.4 million dollars. Franklin has 106 cyber students, costing taxpayers of the district more than $2.1 million. Cranberry has a modest 42 cyber students, costing over $626,000. 

You can argue that the school district should try to hold onto those students or win them back, but experience and the data tell us that many of those students will be back--and they will be academically behind when they return. 

So Venango County taxpayers are sending millions of dollars to companies that do a poor job of providing education, but make enough money to hand out gift cards and buy up millions of dollars' worth of real estate. 

Cranberry Superintendent Bill Vonada told his board, "They are in our community to take our students and teachers." That's not exactly true-- what CCA is here to take is local taxpayer money. 

What can be done?

Cyber charters are approved or not approved in Harrisburg; local taxpayers have no say. Regulations are also set in Harrisburg. So if anything is going to be done, it will need to be done by legislators who have, for twenty years, refused to take any action. School boards have been begging for action for years to no avail. There's not much left to do except for taxpayers to call or write their elected representatives

What's the ask? 

Accountability and oversight. Ed Voters of Pennsylvania had to drag CCA to court to get it to honor Right To Know requests that any taxpayer-funded school should honor. Cyber charters can never be as transparent as public schools, because they have no elected board and you will never be able to attend meetings by their operators. But at least they can approach a public school's level of transparency.

Fair funding. A flat fee would make far more sense than the current system. Right now every school in the region pays a different amount to send students to the exact same cyber charter. Cranberry pays $12K per regular student; Forest pays $22K. Oil City pays $28K per special ed student; Forst pays $45K. With flat fee of $8K per regular student and $12K per special ed, taxpayers would save and hold on to $308K in Cranberry, $359K in Forest, $676K in Oil City, and $1.1 million in Franklin. 

Bottom line

CCA was already in Cranberry and the rest of Venango County already. A physical presence just means more opportunity to recruit and market. But local taxpayers should remember that every brick of that building, every chirpy ad they see, every salary for someone working in that building represents taxpayer money that didn't make it to their own local public school. (Not to mention that they have requested to be tax-exempt). 

When you are complaining that your school board doesn't do a good enough job shepherding your tax dollars, that new CCA building should be a reminder that your school board never had a say in what happened to those dollars which were hoovered up by an organization that can afford to build in county after county across the state while your own district has to struggle over how much to spend n playgrounds and has to ask parents to send in boxes of tissue just to make it through the year. 

Map vs. Territory

I was reading in Cybernetic Forests, when I came across this quote from "The Map is Eating the Territory" by Henry Farrell, and it's all very technology/AI/academic stuff, but boy, this quote:

To direct these politics, we need to know more about the underlying political economy. So here is my best stab at one aspect of what has been happening over the last couple of decades. Over this period, we have been seeing the rise of new technologies of summarization - technologies that make it cheap and easy to summarize information (or things that can readily be turned into information). As these technologies get better, the summaries can increasingly substitute for the things they purportedly represent.

Farrell is talking about of technopolitical stuff, but if you think of "new technologies of summarization" as, say, testing instruments used to summarize the whole world of student achievement, well, yes. Bullseye.

Test scores (especially when massaged by some cool math-flavored VAM sauce) are supposed to provide a map of the whole territory of student understand, their whole ability to read and math, We call scores above a certain point "Proficiency," as if the score of any student in that range is actually their street address in the land of reading or mathing skills, when in fact that score is more equivalent to a vague "over there" hand wave. 

But having convinced themselves that the test score is a very specific address on a very detailed map, education leaders start trying to change the map. "If I can get the map to show a different address for this student, then the student will move," goes the reasoning.

We mistake the map for the territory. That gives us the mistaken belief that knowing the map is knowing the territory, a problem that is only exacerbated if we hold onto the belief that the map is flawless. And from there we move on to the fallacy that changing the map is the same as changing the territory.

This map-and-territory idea is a close cousin of Campbell's Law:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Which is itself a close neighbor of Goodhart's Law:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

They circle around the same insight for the test-centric approach to schooling-- the insistence that test data are a perfect representation, a perfect map of the student territory, gets us quickly to trying to manipulate and alter that map. If scores on the Big Standardized Test are a perfect map of student achievement, and we fixate on that map as if it were the territory, then we succumb to the fallacy that changing the scores (the map) will somehow change students' reality (the territory). 

It's not just that we have no real proof that the BS Test score map is a perfect representation of the territory. It's that we have absolutely no proof that changing the map changes the territory. IOW, we have no proof that if we get this roomful of students to score higher than the would have (thereby changing the map), they will be wealthier, happier, more successful than they otherwise would have been (changing the territory). 

I'm going to say that again, because it's important, Yes, we have oodles of proof that a high BS Test score correlates with certain conditions, like having a high-income family and desirable life outcomes. That correlation is solid. What we don't have is evidence that if we take students who were destined for a low BS Test score and get them to somehow get a higher score, those students will then achieve higher life outcomes than otherwise expected.

Once more. We've got guys like Raj Chetty who argue thus: Group A has high scores, and Group B has low scores. Group A will go on to make Big Bucks in life and Group B will make Fewer Bucks. What we don't have is any evidence that if we move someone from Group B to Group A, he will go on to make the Big Bucks.

The map is not the territory. It is a proxy, an attempt to represent the territory through a set of symbolic marks. But those symbolic marks, those summaries, those measures-- they are not the thing. In education, teachers live and work in the territory and not on the map--at least they should, as long as folks who can't tell the difference don't take control of the whole business.