Joseph Natoli has a piece at Truth-Out that's well worth reading, but for all the explication and coverage of the deliberate destruction of Detroit school "The Great Unwinding of Public Education: Detroit and DeVos" has some keen insights into the underlying pathologies fueling the privatization movement. Here's the line that reached out and whacked me right between the eyes:
We have internalized the mantra that all human endeavors that are placed in the hands of private enterprise succeed, whereas those run by the government not only do poorly but also rob freedom-loving people in the US of their freedom.
Well, yes.
I can feel the tension between the two poles. I know that when it comes to education reform, I'm most easily lumped in with a progressive crowd, but my distrust of government is large and deep. In the long run, centralized power has a bunch of built-in problems. To work, it has to attract people who are pretty good at figuring out (or recognizing) solutions all or most of the time, and that describes basically .02% of the human race-- any kind of government that focuses on finding the One Right Answer for everyone is guaranteed to make a hash of things.
But the pitfalls of government are worse than that. Libertarian comedy writer P. J. O'Rourke describes politics as "the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit." And in the long run, the more power and privilege a government possesses, the more it will attract people who simply want the power and the privilege. We are living through the demonstration of that principle right now, with a Congress that devotes half its workday to working for re-election, a whole raft of elected officials who have no interest in really governing effectively, and a Presidency captured by a dim-witted mass of yawping ego who wants the office for the same reason that he wants shiny things and hot women-- somewhere in the yawning gulf that is where his heart should be, there's a tiny voice that tells him that if he Gets Stuff it will prove he's actually awesome.
And this is doubly scary because over the decades, we have allowed, even encouraged, more power to drift to DC. Each new President gets to play with new toys left lying around by the last one.
In short, I have a great deal of sympathy for the notion that government is very bad at doing very many things, and that often government's ideas about the One Right Answer we should all be choosing do, in fact, strip a little more of our liberty away from us.
But-- and this is a huge but-- that doesn't mean that private enterprise offers any kind of solution.
In fact, one of the ironies of this whole debate is that very often when government is busy stripping us of liberties and freedom, that government is actually serving as a mask for private enterprise.
This is not new. The Boston Tea Party that we so like to sort-of half-remember? Patriots didn't pick the East India Company's shipment of tea at random-- the tax they were protesting had been passed, in large part, to help the East India Company overcome its own financial struggles. The first Tea Party was thrown just as much to fight a corporation as a crown.
The examples are endless, from regulations about asbestos in school passed to benefit asbestos removal companies, all the way up to mobilizing the US Army to crush striking unions. Sometimes we are seeing the result of an ideological alignment, but sometimes it's simple math-- to keep their office, an elected official needs the kind of money that only a friendly, happy corporation can provide.
Are corporations better at getting things done? Sure-- some things. Corporations are good at building things, selling things, and making money from the process. But they have always-- always-- depended on government to maintain the playing field and they have always lobbied for that field to be tilted in a way that benefits them. The very notion of a Free Market is a fiction-- there is no such thing and there never has been. Instead, we have at best a free-ish market maintained by a government and its set of rules, and because those rules are chosen and maintained they are always open to debate, and corporations will always want to debate them, to game whatever system is in place. Because what corporations are best at is looking out for themselves, their own profits, their own power, their own benefits.
That means that the common good, the benefits, safety, freedom and liberty of citizens is never top of the corporate list. We have a fun fiction where we argue that we can make citizens look as if they are top of the list by linking profits to citizen well-being, but the important thing to remember is that even in such situations, the corporation is still looking out for itself, and the best way to do that is to try to get a favorable tilt on the field. Fewer rules to follow. More permission to pick and choose only profitable customers. The profiteers have every reason to stay close-- very close-- to the rule makers, because that relationship is far more profitable than the relationship with citizens.
In fact, the biggest lie in the mantra that Natoli cites is not that private enterprise does better work than the government-- the biggest lie is that there is some big difference between private enterprise and government, that they are not a collection of connected people moving back and forth within many private and public goals, always serving the same corporate power complex.
I don't have an answer to any of this. Well, the answer is to have people in power with some sort of moral and ethical sense and guidance, but I don't know how we get there from here. The answer is also to have a government that actually represents the citizens of the country; not sure how we get there, either. Elected officials are, at least, elected.
Maybe it starts with educating people to scenarios like the one in Detroit, to lifting the curtain so that a few more people every day can see the greedy, grasping, rapacious men behind the curtain, one wearing the mask of government and the other the mask of free enterprise, both liars, both working the levers of power for no cause but their own. Maybe if enough people see that enough times, it will make a difference. I truly don't know.
Monday, December 26, 2016
Sunday, December 25, 2016
ICYMI: Christmas Digestion Edition
Yes, it's Christmas day, but I am a creature of habit, so for those of you who, for whatever reason, have some time on your hands, here's this week's list of read-worthy writing. Have an excellent day!
When It Comes to Charter Schools, Facts Matter
Wendy Lecker's interview with Robert Cotto, Jr. about some of the claims being made by charters in Connecticut (and elsewhere)
Anatomy of a Failure: How a Promising LA Charter Came Apart at the Seams
One more look at how the world of charters really works. Or rather, how it doesn't work at all.
The Complicated History of America's First Union-Backed Charter Effort
The title is a tiny bit misleading, but here, again, a story of exactly how a charter effort comes off the rails.
The Charter School Profiteers
Allie Gross was going to teach in a Detroit charter to make a difference. What she found changed her mind. This piece is from 2014, but it's yet another good look inside the charter machine.
The Movies That Doesn't Exist and the Redditors Who Think It Does
This is not directly related to education at all, but it's still a fascinating look at how we spread and hold onto "facts" that just aren't so.
Protect Public Ed
44 teachers of the year have combined forces to speak up for public education. There isn't much at this site yet, but it's worth paying attention.
China Helps Game SATs
Reuters continues to be teh go-to source for journalism about the SAT. Here's a closer look at how China maintains a thriving cheating industry for the venerable test.
Is This The Most Dangerous Member of Trump's Cabinet
The Big Think, a website outside the education community, with a consideration of Betsy DeVos as the most destructive proposed cabinet member
What School Grades Really Say
An editorial from Evansville, Indiana takes a cold hard look at which school grades actually tell us (hint: not how good the schools are)
When It Comes to Charter Schools, Facts Matter
Wendy Lecker's interview with Robert Cotto, Jr. about some of the claims being made by charters in Connecticut (and elsewhere)
Anatomy of a Failure: How a Promising LA Charter Came Apart at the Seams
One more look at how the world of charters really works. Or rather, how it doesn't work at all.
The Complicated History of America's First Union-Backed Charter Effort
The title is a tiny bit misleading, but here, again, a story of exactly how a charter effort comes off the rails.
The Charter School Profiteers
Allie Gross was going to teach in a Detroit charter to make a difference. What she found changed her mind. This piece is from 2014, but it's yet another good look inside the charter machine.
The Movies That Doesn't Exist and the Redditors Who Think It Does
This is not directly related to education at all, but it's still a fascinating look at how we spread and hold onto "facts" that just aren't so.
Protect Public Ed
44 teachers of the year have combined forces to speak up for public education. There isn't much at this site yet, but it's worth paying attention.
China Helps Game SATs
Reuters continues to be teh go-to source for journalism about the SAT. Here's a closer look at how China maintains a thriving cheating industry for the venerable test.
Is This The Most Dangerous Member of Trump's Cabinet
The Big Think, a website outside the education community, with a consideration of Betsy DeVos as the most destructive proposed cabinet member
What School Grades Really Say
An editorial from Evansville, Indiana takes a cold hard look at which school grades actually tell us (hint: not how good the schools are)
For Your Christmas Listening
Here's hoping today is a great day for you and yours. For your listening pleasure, here's an assortment of traditional and not-so-traditional holiday music. May today be an excellent day!
Saturday, December 24, 2016
The Only Subjects That Matter
There's a message that has been delivered loud and clear for the last decade-- only two subjects in school matter. Only reading and math affect a school's rating. Only reading and math scores factor in teacher evaluation. Only reading and math come with state-approved Official Standards. Only reading and math are on the all-important Big Standardized Test, now believed by an entire generation of school children to be the entire purpose of schools.
History? Science? Music? Art? Well, there are still some parents out there who remember these as being part of school, and so there's not full support yet for getting rid of them (kind of like some folks are sure that cursive writing has to be part of school).
This has left other disciplines in a bit of a bind.
On the one hand, it would be a kind of boost to folks who teach history and science and all that other cool stuff if they were part of the whole test-driven school set-up. If history were on the BS Test, schools wouldn't just cut history classes, or only offer history to students who don't need test prep remediation classes.
And yet, what the experience of math and reading shows us is that the bad amateur standards and the horrible tests exert a power warp and twist and distort the subject areas into a dark, sad, stunted dark mirror image of their best selves. I have filled a million miles of blog with the business of explaining and depicting the badness, but the bottom line is that when you design a course of study around the goal of being to measure it with bad multiple choice questions-- well, it's like trying to jam a buffalo into a mason jar-- only, unfortunately, in this case the mason jar is made of some unyielding adamantium substance, and so it is the buffalo that loses the fight.
So one the one hand, science standards have been greeted by sciencey folks because they will get science off the list of Unimportant Subjects. On the other hand, lots of sciencey folks are afraid that the science standards kind of suck. Said the American Society of Physics Teachers of the Next Generation Science Standards (Draft 2), "the wording of many of the NGSS performance expectations is confusing to the point that it is not clear what students are actually supposed to do," and that "the science content of the current form of NGSS contains so many errors that most science teachers and scientists will doubt the credibility of the entire enterprise."
I myself worry a lot about history. I'm an English teacher, but I will argue till your ears are blue that history is the single most important subject of all and the root of all other education. But what to do about that?
Witness Massachusetts, where history is marked for inclusion in the Big Standardized Testing Expansion Pack, a move that has been questioned by Barbara Madeloni (Massachusetts Teacher Association). As the state bureaucrats consider more testing, she stood before them to object
"I cannot believe that you are being asked to add more testing to that regime," she said. "It reflects a profoundly bureaucratic and technocratic view of what it means to learn."
She is absolutely correct. But the editorial writers of mass.live are also correct when they write that history cannot continue to be considered a second-class citizen. The problem is that we've reached the point where they see no way to do that but by testing.
Ideally, such improvement could be implemented without a standardized test. But if there is no test, there will be no incentive within school systems to improve history education, a fact Madeloni omits when decrying the MCAS model.
The problem that the editorial writers overlook is that there could not be a worse subject to examine through a BS Test than history (though there are others that are just as bad). History is the antithesis of a One Right Answer field of study. It's a field in which "answers" look a lot more like conversations, a shifting and dynamic balance between facts and human perception and background and perspectives. This is why so much school history instruction is so bad- to avoid any debate or upset or confusion or controversy, we stick to what is "settled" which is, generally, boring names and dates. There was a guy named Columbus who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and we're going to stop right there before anyone gets bent out of shape.
History's answers are four-dimensional. Standardized test questions are one-dimensional. And so here we go, jamming a buffalo into a mason jar.
So what do we do? If I were a history or science teacher, would I accept promotion to First Class Core Subject and then try to teach my discipline properly as a sort of guerrilla activity while doing my minimum test prep. Thousands of English teachers are faking compliance with the standards-- maybe that could work for other disciplines. Still, the daily pressure of being pushed to commit educational malpractice-- I mean, is getting on the Subject That Matters list worth it?
The fact that we have to even discuss such a twisted choice is one more measure of the damage being done by the era of test-driven management of test-centered schools (and this is without even getting into the bizarrely stupid and terrible local tests being committed by schools in subjects like music and phys ed just so those subjects can haz "data" too). Subject areas are now that at-risk kid in your room who thinks the only attention he can get is negative attention, but maybe that's better than being ignored.
This is what we've done. We have not reduced the Subjects That Matter list to two-- reading and math. We have reduced it to one-- the only subject that matters is testing, a subject that has little or nothing to do with education. If you are having trouble jamming a buffalo into a mason jar, you need to spend less time considering technique and more time questioning whether you're engaged in a futile and ultimately stupid endeavor.
We can talk about lots of different threats to public education right now, and some may be noisier or flashier, but if I were to become emperor of the education world, the first thing I would do is banish the Big Standardized Test completely. There's no single act that could do more to radically improve education in this country.
History? Science? Music? Art? Well, there are still some parents out there who remember these as being part of school, and so there's not full support yet for getting rid of them (kind of like some folks are sure that cursive writing has to be part of school).
This has left other disciplines in a bit of a bind.
On the one hand, it would be a kind of boost to folks who teach history and science and all that other cool stuff if they were part of the whole test-driven school set-up. If history were on the BS Test, schools wouldn't just cut history classes, or only offer history to students who don't need test prep remediation classes.
 |
| Don't even think about it. |
So one the one hand, science standards have been greeted by sciencey folks because they will get science off the list of Unimportant Subjects. On the other hand, lots of sciencey folks are afraid that the science standards kind of suck. Said the American Society of Physics Teachers of the Next Generation Science Standards (Draft 2), "the wording of many of the NGSS performance expectations is confusing to the point that it is not clear what students are actually supposed to do," and that "the science content of the current form of NGSS contains so many errors that most science teachers and scientists will doubt the credibility of the entire enterprise."
I myself worry a lot about history. I'm an English teacher, but I will argue till your ears are blue that history is the single most important subject of all and the root of all other education. But what to do about that?
Witness Massachusetts, where history is marked for inclusion in the Big Standardized Testing Expansion Pack, a move that has been questioned by Barbara Madeloni (Massachusetts Teacher Association). As the state bureaucrats consider more testing, she stood before them to object
"I cannot believe that you are being asked to add more testing to that regime," she said. "It reflects a profoundly bureaucratic and technocratic view of what it means to learn."
She is absolutely correct. But the editorial writers of mass.live are also correct when they write that history cannot continue to be considered a second-class citizen. The problem is that we've reached the point where they see no way to do that but by testing.
Ideally, such improvement could be implemented without a standardized test. But if there is no test, there will be no incentive within school systems to improve history education, a fact Madeloni omits when decrying the MCAS model.
The problem that the editorial writers overlook is that there could not be a worse subject to examine through a BS Test than history (though there are others that are just as bad). History is the antithesis of a One Right Answer field of study. It's a field in which "answers" look a lot more like conversations, a shifting and dynamic balance between facts and human perception and background and perspectives. This is why so much school history instruction is so bad- to avoid any debate or upset or confusion or controversy, we stick to what is "settled" which is, generally, boring names and dates. There was a guy named Columbus who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and we're going to stop right there before anyone gets bent out of shape.
History's answers are four-dimensional. Standardized test questions are one-dimensional. And so here we go, jamming a buffalo into a mason jar.
So what do we do? If I were a history or science teacher, would I accept promotion to First Class Core Subject and then try to teach my discipline properly as a sort of guerrilla activity while doing my minimum test prep. Thousands of English teachers are faking compliance with the standards-- maybe that could work for other disciplines. Still, the daily pressure of being pushed to commit educational malpractice-- I mean, is getting on the Subject That Matters list worth it?
The fact that we have to even discuss such a twisted choice is one more measure of the damage being done by the era of test-driven management of test-centered schools (and this is without even getting into the bizarrely stupid and terrible local tests being committed by schools in subjects like music and phys ed just so those subjects can haz "data" too). Subject areas are now that at-risk kid in your room who thinks the only attention he can get is negative attention, but maybe that's better than being ignored.
This is what we've done. We have not reduced the Subjects That Matter list to two-- reading and math. We have reduced it to one-- the only subject that matters is testing, a subject that has little or nothing to do with education. If you are having trouble jamming a buffalo into a mason jar, you need to spend less time considering technique and more time questioning whether you're engaged in a futile and ultimately stupid endeavor.
We can talk about lots of different threats to public education right now, and some may be noisier or flashier, but if I were to become emperor of the education world, the first thing I would do is banish the Big Standardized Test completely. There's no single act that could do more to radically improve education in this country.
Friday, December 23, 2016
12 Reasons To Evaluate Teachers
Like giving students standardized tests, evaluating teacher is one of those things that the vast majority of people believe that you do because, well, of course you do. Reasons. You know. Federal policy has required it, and required it with fairly specific provisions, for the past few administrations. Reformsterism focused for quite some time on collecting teacher data in order to fix education. Meanwhile, plenty of principals will tell you that doing the teacher evaluation paperwork and observations and whatever is a big fat pain in their ass and they already know plenty about the people in their building and can they please get back to work on something useful now and they've already got twelve meetings today and no time, really, to go sit and listen to Mrs. McTeachalot run through a lesson about prepositions when they already know damn well how good a job Mrs. Teachalot does.
Recently both Fordham and Bellwether thinky tanks released reports on teacher evaluations. Bellwether focused more on teacher eval as a method of steering professional development, while Fordham focused on the old reformster question, "If we're evaluating teachers, why aren't we firing more of them?" There's a conversation between the two groups of researchers here at Bellwether that is semi-interesting, and reading it got me thinking again about the actual point of evaluating teachers.
Teacher evaluation has a variety of historic and theoretical purposes.
1) Identify bad teachers so you can fire them.
Some people remain convinced that you can fire your way to excellence. Other people (like NY Governor Cuomo) are dopes who think that if 50% of your students are failing the Big Standardized Test, 50% of your teachers must suck. This is dumb on so many levels, like assuming that a 20% mortality rate at your hospital means 20% of the staff stinks, or a 10% crime rate in your city means 20% of your police are incompetent. But not only can you not fire your way to excellence, but when you make teacher evaluation a process about delivering punishment and doom, you guarantee that your staff will do everything in their power to game, cheat and otherwise work around the system. The data gathered by such a system is guaranteed crap, not helpful to anyone.
2) Identify bad teachers so you can help them.
Well, there's a thought. It's certainly cheaper than steadily churning, hiring, and training new staff. It does, however, require a real commitment to actually helping people, and it requires a culture of trust and support-- nobody wants to make themselves vulnerable by letting their weakest traits show. That means that you can have #1 or #2 on this list, but under absolutely no circumstances can you have both. This also opens the question-- if you are evaluating in order to pinpoint and assist problem teachers, exactly how often do you need to evaluate, and who really needs to be evaluated?
3) Find out where the teacher can be improved, the better to plan your professional development.
Every teacher worth his or her salt is working on something. Every decent teacher I have ever known can tell you the areas in which she needs work and improvement-- and she can probably tell you right off the top of her head because she thinks about these a lot. One of the classic traits of a less-than-stellar teacher is the insistence that she has everything down to science and there is nothing, really, that she needs to work on. The professional development challenge, of course, is designing something that meets the different needs of 100 different teachers. The other challenge is that state governments, sometimes under federal pressure, have a history of defining what professional development is acceptable. Cue the boring PD vendors and the sessions that don't serve anyone at all. The other evaluation question here is, do we really need evaluations to tell us what PD is needed? Will that really work any better than, you know, just asking?
4) Prove to taxpayers they are getting their money's worth.
A political favorite and a common reason given by reformsters demanding accountability-- the taxpayers must know what kind of teacher bang they are getting for their buck. I'm sympathetic to this point of view-- I'm a taxpayer, too. But we immediately run up against the problem of the vastly different expectations of the various taxpayers when they say, "So, are our teachers any good?" We either end up with a fairly specific accountability system that leaves many taxpayers saying, "Well, I don't really care about that," or more commonly, we lump a bunch of stuff together and answer taxpayers with, "Yeah, sure, they're pretty good" and ignore that "good" means completely different things to everyone in the conversation.
5) To find awesome teachers to give merit bonuses to.
Well, we know that merit pay doesn't work. We also know that, since school districts don't turn a profit, the traditional model of merit pay in which workers share the company's spoils doesn't apply. I someone going to tell taxpayers, "We have so many great teachers this year that we need to raise taxes to provide fair merit bonuses?" Yeah, I didn't think so.
But even beyond all that-- a merit bonus system will twist and warp the school. Because the merit will be based on something easily measurable, and that means some teachers will twist their practice toward that practice, even if it's bad practice. To see what I mean, just imagine a merit system in which a teacher got a bonus for every student in her class who got an A in that class. What do you imagine would happen next? All merit pay systems are either a variation on that approach, or systems based on elements over which the teacher has no control at all and which therefor don't effect anything except how powerless and demoralized teachers feel.
6) Prove to politicians/bureaucrats that current regulations are being followed.
Ah, the culture of compliance. What is Big Standardized Test based accountability except the state and federal governments saying, "You'd better teach that Common Core stuff, and if you don't, we're going to catch you and teach you a lesson."
7) Let teachers know whether or not they are meeting expectations.
One of the uniquely unnerving things about teaching, particularly when you start out, is that nobody ever tells you what exactly you are expected to do. Go in your room, and teach kids some stuff. Some schools are terrifying in their non-directedness. Let me tell you a true, amazing thing-- I have been in my school district as either a student or a teacher since 1969, and not once in those 47 years have we had an actual functional curriculum for the English department. Seriously. And I know we're not alone- plenty of districts have things on paper that are in no way connected to reality.
Nobody hands a teacher a job description. Administrators rarely set teachers down and say, "This is what we expect of you." So teachers acquire official or unofficial mentors, tune in to the school culture, use their own expertise and acquired experience, and listen as administrators and school leaders convey expectations in less formal and structured ways. I know this level of freedom horrifies some people; I think it is one of the strengths and glories of many districts. But could it help teachers to have a more formal expression of how they do or do not meet expectations? Sure.
8) To implement somebody's cool new idea about how to make teaching more awesome.
Oh, good lord! Principal McNerburger went to a conference and now he's all hyped up about freakin' Madeline Hunter.
9) To protect teachers.
God save us from sucky administrators who want to fire Ms. Whipple because he doesn't like the way she wears her hair or Mr. Whinesalot because he's a political activist for the wrong party. God save us from the school board member who's mad that some teacher won't play his kid on first sting or give his kid the lead in the school play or won't agree to go out with him on a date, and so calls up the administration and says, "I want that teacher gone! Fired!! Do iT!!!"
For that matter, God save us from evaluation systems that use shoddy tests and unproven formulas to generate a number that is no more reliable or consistent than rolling dice.
10) To compare teachers to other teachers
Because stack ranking is fun, and finding winners and losers is really helpful? No-- because public education is where bad corporate management ideas go to die. Private industry long ago noticed that stack ranking is just bad for business. To do so in education is exponentially worse, because any system that allows you to compare a tenth grade English teacher in Virginia with a third grade music teacher in Alaska is a deeply, profoundly stupid system.
11) It's paperwork.
Some combination of state and federal meddling has created a new form that must be filled out. There's numbers that have to go in here and checkmarks over there and mostly principals just want to get back to doing their actual jobs, which means that your evaluation form may have been filled out before Principal Swiffboat even set foot in your classroom to "observe" you. But as long as the paperwork looks good, nobody anywhere in the system cares about its relationship to reality.
12) Because, you know. Reasons, and stuff.
This is one of those things that administrators are supposed to do. The administrators doing it may have no actual purpose or point in mind, but they know it's a Thing They're Supposed To Do, so here we go.
The thing is, you can't pick more than one or two of these; they are almost all completely mutually exclusive. Yet, on the state and federal world, as filtered through the thinky tank policy wonk lens, the goal is to do some combination of most of these.
And some of these require major overhauls. If you want, as the Bellwether discussion suggests at one point, a system that meets teacher needs for professional development and growth, you need to pretty much scrap everything we're currently doing and start from scratch. People who think that we can look at BS Test results and thereby identify teacher professional development needs are clearly smoking something. That is like looking at an elephant's toenail clippings and deciding sort of fertlizer nutrients are needed for all the rice fields of Asia.
Honestly, I don't think we will ever have a good teacher evaluation system in this country. It would require everyone to be on the same page about the purpose of schools, the role of teachers, and the outcomes we want to see in all those areas, and I don't think that level of agreement is either possible or even desirable.
I think the best we can hope for is a system that isn't toxic and bad and damaging to public education, which is pretty much the kind of system that NCLB, RTTT, and Waiverpalooza gave us. I expect something simpler from Trump-DeVos, in which anyone who is identified as a trained, experienced teacher is automatically rated "Awful" or "Sad" in a late-night tweet. For what it's worth, I have a whole system for serious teacher evaluation ready to go as soon as someone is ready to help me launch my consulting business. But in the meantime, I think we're going to be stuck with one of the above.
Recently both Fordham and Bellwether thinky tanks released reports on teacher evaluations. Bellwether focused more on teacher eval as a method of steering professional development, while Fordham focused on the old reformster question, "If we're evaluating teachers, why aren't we firing more of them?" There's a conversation between the two groups of researchers here at Bellwether that is semi-interesting, and reading it got me thinking again about the actual point of evaluating teachers.
Teacher evaluation has a variety of historic and theoretical purposes.
1) Identify bad teachers so you can fire them.
Some people remain convinced that you can fire your way to excellence. Other people (like NY Governor Cuomo) are dopes who think that if 50% of your students are failing the Big Standardized Test, 50% of your teachers must suck. This is dumb on so many levels, like assuming that a 20% mortality rate at your hospital means 20% of the staff stinks, or a 10% crime rate in your city means 20% of your police are incompetent. But not only can you not fire your way to excellence, but when you make teacher evaluation a process about delivering punishment and doom, you guarantee that your staff will do everything in their power to game, cheat and otherwise work around the system. The data gathered by such a system is guaranteed crap, not helpful to anyone.
2) Identify bad teachers so you can help them.
Well, there's a thought. It's certainly cheaper than steadily churning, hiring, and training new staff. It does, however, require a real commitment to actually helping people, and it requires a culture of trust and support-- nobody wants to make themselves vulnerable by letting their weakest traits show. That means that you can have #1 or #2 on this list, but under absolutely no circumstances can you have both. This also opens the question-- if you are evaluating in order to pinpoint and assist problem teachers, exactly how often do you need to evaluate, and who really needs to be evaluated?
3) Find out where the teacher can be improved, the better to plan your professional development.
Every teacher worth his or her salt is working on something. Every decent teacher I have ever known can tell you the areas in which she needs work and improvement-- and she can probably tell you right off the top of her head because she thinks about these a lot. One of the classic traits of a less-than-stellar teacher is the insistence that she has everything down to science and there is nothing, really, that she needs to work on. The professional development challenge, of course, is designing something that meets the different needs of 100 different teachers. The other challenge is that state governments, sometimes under federal pressure, have a history of defining what professional development is acceptable. Cue the boring PD vendors and the sessions that don't serve anyone at all. The other evaluation question here is, do we really need evaluations to tell us what PD is needed? Will that really work any better than, you know, just asking?
4) Prove to taxpayers they are getting their money's worth.
A political favorite and a common reason given by reformsters demanding accountability-- the taxpayers must know what kind of teacher bang they are getting for their buck. I'm sympathetic to this point of view-- I'm a taxpayer, too. But we immediately run up against the problem of the vastly different expectations of the various taxpayers when they say, "So, are our teachers any good?" We either end up with a fairly specific accountability system that leaves many taxpayers saying, "Well, I don't really care about that," or more commonly, we lump a bunch of stuff together and answer taxpayers with, "Yeah, sure, they're pretty good" and ignore that "good" means completely different things to everyone in the conversation.
5) To find awesome teachers to give merit bonuses to.
Well, we know that merit pay doesn't work. We also know that, since school districts don't turn a profit, the traditional model of merit pay in which workers share the company's spoils doesn't apply. I someone going to tell taxpayers, "We have so many great teachers this year that we need to raise taxes to provide fair merit bonuses?" Yeah, I didn't think so.
But even beyond all that-- a merit bonus system will twist and warp the school. Because the merit will be based on something easily measurable, and that means some teachers will twist their practice toward that practice, even if it's bad practice. To see what I mean, just imagine a merit system in which a teacher got a bonus for every student in her class who got an A in that class. What do you imagine would happen next? All merit pay systems are either a variation on that approach, or systems based on elements over which the teacher has no control at all and which therefor don't effect anything except how powerless and demoralized teachers feel.
6) Prove to politicians/bureaucrats that current regulations are being followed.
Ah, the culture of compliance. What is Big Standardized Test based accountability except the state and federal governments saying, "You'd better teach that Common Core stuff, and if you don't, we're going to catch you and teach you a lesson."
7) Let teachers know whether or not they are meeting expectations.
One of the uniquely unnerving things about teaching, particularly when you start out, is that nobody ever tells you what exactly you are expected to do. Go in your room, and teach kids some stuff. Some schools are terrifying in their non-directedness. Let me tell you a true, amazing thing-- I have been in my school district as either a student or a teacher since 1969, and not once in those 47 years have we had an actual functional curriculum for the English department. Seriously. And I know we're not alone- plenty of districts have things on paper that are in no way connected to reality.
Nobody hands a teacher a job description. Administrators rarely set teachers down and say, "This is what we expect of you." So teachers acquire official or unofficial mentors, tune in to the school culture, use their own expertise and acquired experience, and listen as administrators and school leaders convey expectations in less formal and structured ways. I know this level of freedom horrifies some people; I think it is one of the strengths and glories of many districts. But could it help teachers to have a more formal expression of how they do or do not meet expectations? Sure.
8) To implement somebody's cool new idea about how to make teaching more awesome.
Oh, good lord! Principal McNerburger went to a conference and now he's all hyped up about freakin' Madeline Hunter.
9) To protect teachers.
God save us from sucky administrators who want to fire Ms. Whipple because he doesn't like the way she wears her hair or Mr. Whinesalot because he's a political activist for the wrong party. God save us from the school board member who's mad that some teacher won't play his kid on first sting or give his kid the lead in the school play or won't agree to go out with him on a date, and so calls up the administration and says, "I want that teacher gone! Fired!! Do iT!!!"
For that matter, God save us from evaluation systems that use shoddy tests and unproven formulas to generate a number that is no more reliable or consistent than rolling dice.
10) To compare teachers to other teachers
Because stack ranking is fun, and finding winners and losers is really helpful? No-- because public education is where bad corporate management ideas go to die. Private industry long ago noticed that stack ranking is just bad for business. To do so in education is exponentially worse, because any system that allows you to compare a tenth grade English teacher in Virginia with a third grade music teacher in Alaska is a deeply, profoundly stupid system.
11) It's paperwork.
Some combination of state and federal meddling has created a new form that must be filled out. There's numbers that have to go in here and checkmarks over there and mostly principals just want to get back to doing their actual jobs, which means that your evaluation form may have been filled out before Principal Swiffboat even set foot in your classroom to "observe" you. But as long as the paperwork looks good, nobody anywhere in the system cares about its relationship to reality.
12) Because, you know. Reasons, and stuff.
This is one of those things that administrators are supposed to do. The administrators doing it may have no actual purpose or point in mind, but they know it's a Thing They're Supposed To Do, so here we go.
The thing is, you can't pick more than one or two of these; they are almost all completely mutually exclusive. Yet, on the state and federal world, as filtered through the thinky tank policy wonk lens, the goal is to do some combination of most of these.
And some of these require major overhauls. If you want, as the Bellwether discussion suggests at one point, a system that meets teacher needs for professional development and growth, you need to pretty much scrap everything we're currently doing and start from scratch. People who think that we can look at BS Test results and thereby identify teacher professional development needs are clearly smoking something. That is like looking at an elephant's toenail clippings and deciding sort of fertlizer nutrients are needed for all the rice fields of Asia.
Honestly, I don't think we will ever have a good teacher evaluation system in this country. It would require everyone to be on the same page about the purpose of schools, the role of teachers, and the outcomes we want to see in all those areas, and I don't think that level of agreement is either possible or even desirable.
I think the best we can hope for is a system that isn't toxic and bad and damaging to public education, which is pretty much the kind of system that NCLB, RTTT, and Waiverpalooza gave us. I expect something simpler from Trump-DeVos, in which anyone who is identified as a trained, experienced teacher is automatically rated "Awful" or "Sad" in a late-night tweet. For what it's worth, I have a whole system for serious teacher evaluation ready to go as soon as someone is ready to help me launch my consulting business. But in the meantime, I think we're going to be stuck with one of the above.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
DeVos's Inconvenient Truths
Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post turned up a 2015 speech from billionaire heiress and Education Secretary Designee Betsy DeVos in which Devos lays out her six "inconvenient truths," the guiding principles by which her vision of American education is powered. Ed Patru, a self-identified spokesperson for Friends of Betsy DeVos (so I guess that's a thing-- damn), indicates that the speech is a fair measure of DeVos's animating philosophy, so we'd probably better take a look at these six pillars of super-duper governance that's headed our way like a over-loaded semi with a brick on the gas pedal.
Inconvenient Truth No. 1-- Our education system in America is antiquated and it is quite frankly embarrassing.
DeVos compares public education system to the Model T, and talks about how Detroit totally innovated to do a better job of producing automobiles, so I'm a little confused-- she wants to send American children to Mexico and Canada to be educated under less safe conditions by underpaid workers?
This is what I call Reformster Timewarp Syndrome, in which reformsters criticize public schools based on the assumption that these schools are exactly the way they were fifty years ago (when some reformsters attended them as students). This is like criticizing the military for still fighting on horseback.
Is there room for improvement, growth and new creativity in public schools? Absolutely. And there's no question that like many institutions, public education is at root conservative. But on this point of antiquation and embarrassment, DeVos is just spouting vague, baseless baloney.
Inconvenient Truth No. 2-- American education has been losing ground to other countries for at least half a century.
DeVos says the facts here are "unarguable," and follows up that piercing argument with "it's really a waste of our time to even slog through this, it's just plain true and everybody knows it."
This would be the part where I draw attention to the fact that DeVos has never been in a leadership position where she had to use any method of argument beyond "let me just sign this check." Her assertion is completely arguable, it's not just plain true, and everybody does not know it-- and if she wants to convince anyone, she;'ll have to do way better than that.
She tosses out PISA scores which are a fine example of what we don't know and aren't measuring. Like most test score cultists, she skips over the obvious check-- is there a correlation between PISA scores and economic health, political success, or general world domination. Have the high test scores of Estonia led them to global importance? No? Then why, exactly, should we care.
For those who think Trumplandia will be a clear break from the Duncan-Obama past, she also drops this winner. After pointing out that lots of poor children are failing, she goes on to note that "we have too many children in middle class suburban areas that we think are doing well... but that are actually seriously underperforming." Why-- that's exactly what Duncan said! Maybe he can get a job in the DeVos department!
Inconvenient Truth No. 3-- We are stuck in a partisan rut. The political parties are dead enders when it comes to education revolution.
DeVos notes that there are plenty of nominal conservatives and alleged liberals who are on the choice train, but mostly politicians just won't step up. Republicans don't want poor black kids in their schools, and Democrats are the lackeys of the anti-choice unions. Hey, look! She also resembles Arne Duncan in her willingness to sweepingly insult all sorts of people. Remember how he was pretty ineffective because he couldn't play well with Congress? "Plus ca change..."
Somehow this turns into arguing that in DC, charter-private schools are awesome and the public system sucks, so keep the DC voucher program. Guess that's better than following the rest of her argument's path, which leads to the notion that we should scrap the political parties because the political division that matters in this country is the division between the rich and the not-rich.
Inconvenient Truth No. 4-- Government really sucks.
You know, I'm going to give her a point for pithy phraseology. And as she notes, parties and politics are one thing that she does actually knows. And she reminds me of a question I've always had-- if your main experience of government is using money to bend politicians to your will, just how far does that lower your opinion of and respect for politicians?
But government does things top-down, stifles innovation,likes idea-killing committees, and loves control, says DeVos, when really, noble and awesome entrepreneurs should be free to roam about and do as they wish. It will be interesting to see how she feels about this once the wheel of power is in her hands and she has the power to force everyone to Do The Right Thing in a top-down manner.
See, I don't even disagree that much with many of her criticisms. But she ignores the part where government has a role to stand between citizens and People with Power who want to do harm. She also ignores, as do all free market acolytes, the Great Failing of the Free Market-- it will not serve all customers, and public education MUST serve all customers.
Inconvenient Truth No. 5-- We don't pay teachers enough, and we don't fire enough.
Again, the words of somebody who has never run anything except meetings of a group she created with her own bank account.
But I am willing to bet that every one of you had one or more teachers who made a big difference in your life, who opened your eyes to possibilities and to opportunities. You probably recall them in your mind’s eye right now.
And likewise, I am pretty sure that every one of you had one or more teachers who should not have been teaching. That doesn’t mean they were bad people, or maybe they were, but regardless, they weren’t any good at teaching.
Sure. We could do that for all the people who came out of the same school, and they could make their lists, and the lists would not match. So then what?
Pay teachers more? Sure, but as she acknowledges, lots of folks (she says "Republicans") don't want to do that. Meanwhile, DeVos is the gazillionth person to fail to understand what tenure is and how it works and why it's needed. But even if she had simply worked in the private sector, she would have learned, as most private sector employers have, that you cannot fire your way to excellence.
She also uses this point to repeat that both political parties suck. She is adamant about that. I can see her building that great working relationship with Congress and governors and state legislatures already.
Inconvenient Truth No. 6-- In America we do NOT provide equal educational opportunity to our kids.
Truth that! But as I've complained before, equal opportunity is a crappy goal. All of the passengers on the Titanic had an equal opportunity to get in a lifeboat. What we really need is a commitment to provide a quality education to every student, period, end stop. Not just an opportunity.
But the "opportunity" weasel word is the great escape hatch for the charter-choice movement. We're only going to invest the time and money and attention and resources for a few students-- but all students had the opportunity to get them. This is how you spend the money to educate 100 students and leave 1900 behind-- by saying they all had the opportunity.
Students don't need an opportunity. They need an education.
As currently practiced, charter and choice are not the solution to this problem. The free market will not serve students on whom it cannot turn a decent profit. And trying to run ten schools with the money that used to fund one school is sheer idiocy.
This point is Devos's big finish. She accuses "defenders of the status quo" of hypocrisy which she "can't stomach." She makes the old complaint that public school students, trapped in a zip code, should not be made to wait until the school gets more money and improves, and yet charter schools make students wait all the time-- for improvement, for more money, for a new school because that one just closed because it no longer made business sense to keep it open.
DeVos has, in short, revived some of the reformsters greatest hits. Trapped in zip codes. Urgent-- can't wait! Money doesn't help (well, it doesn't help public schools-- it helps charter-choice schools just fine). I don't know if DeVos is a hypocrite or not. This is one more respect in which she resembles her predecessors Arne Duncan and John "Duncan Lite" White-- it's not always clear whether she is using devious political spin or she just doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. If we don't have the good fortune to see her appointment thwarted, I guess I'll just wait and see which inconvenient truth we are dealing with.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Unavoidable Costs
I have libertarian friends (it's true). And one of them posted this particular meme
Now I don't think either of these statements is accurate on its own; if something is a right, it's a right and there is no "should be," and libertarian "no one has a right to your labor" talk stops the moment money changes hands, thereby buying the right to that labor. But that's beside the point.
Health care and education are what I call unavoidable costs.
All living human beings require health care. There is a cost to providing it, and there is a cost to not providing it.
The costs of providing it are well known and constantly debated in this country, though we have made the issue complicated by insisting that not only should people providing the service be paid, but the insurance company paper-pushing bean counters make some sort of profit because reasons, but the bottom line remains the same-- there are large costs to providing health care. However, not providing health care also comes with costs. There are perhaps uncountable costs in terms of lost productivity due to un- or poorly-treated conditions. There are the unknowable costs of losing a potential leader, scientist, or pillar of the community because they died at age ten from an abcessed tooth. And there is the moral and spiritual cost to a nation that stands by and lets some people die because, for whatever reason, they don't have enough money. There is a moral and spiritual cost to being a nation where families lose members even though the ability to save those people exists.
In short, no matter how we answer question "Who gets health care and how will it be paid for," there is a cost. There is no answer to the question that costs us nothing as a country or a culture. It is an unavoidable cost.
Likewise, there is no way to answer the question of education that doesn't cost us something. Providing a full, quality education to every single citizen would cost a bunch of money. But leaving any sector of the population uneducated is also expensive, in productivity costs, in human costs, in ability to carry their own weight costs. To leave some people un- (or under-) educated costs us all, particularly in our ability to maintain a functioning democatic(ish) form of government.
Providing education comes with a cost. Not providing education comes with a cost. This is the flip side of There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There are no decisions about health care and education that are free.
Education and health care are unavoidable costs. We can talk about rights and privileges, but they still have unavoidable costs. We can talk about delivery and payment systems, free market versus government management versus etc etc etc, but education and health care are still unavoidable costs, and what may seem like reducing the costs is most often just moving the costs around.
And this is a bigger problem than ever because both health care and education have expanded. A few centuries ago, health care was cheap and not very good and people mostly just died young (for which countries and cultures paid a price, but there was no alternative). A few centuries ago, a polymath like Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin could literally learn almost everything there was to know, and laborers who didn't know anything could still pull their own weight in the world. Nowadays, health care options are extensive and expensive and long-lived citizens can use many of them. Meanwhile, education is now an ocean instead of a bucket, and the educational requirements to be even working poor have increased dramatically.
End result-- the unavoidable costs have gotten greater and greater.
So there's a strong political push for some sort of plan that means I don't have to spend a bunch of My Money on Those People (who I believe do not deserve it).
This is not a new thing. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to argue against a world where the poor were left to struggle and die, condemned by a business-oriented government because they were excess population, poor because they were just too lazy and undeserving. In a telling detail usually omitted from modern renderings, the ghost of Jacob Marley invites Scrooge to look out the window, where he sees London teeming with the tortured, chained spirits of uncountable businessmen and politicians who failed to take care of their fellow humans. Ebeneezer Scrooge was never meant to be a single unique miser in need of redemption, but an embodiment of the troubled spirit of his age.
We can try to reduce the cost of health care and education for Those People, and when that leads to other costs (welfare, lost productivity, children in poverty) we can refuse to pay those costs, too, but the costs of health care and education are inescapable, even if we pay them by transforming into a country where the poor can never rise above the class they're born into.
There will be tension between "I think I should get a pony" and "I don't think I should ever help anyone with anything," and between those extremes there will always be plenty of room to debate how much is "enough." But to think all this can be judged against an imaginary setting at which we as a society pay nothing for health care or education...? There is no such situation. The costs are unavoidable, and the most useful conversation we can have is not about how to do away with them, but how to best meet them in a way that reflects costs we can bear to pay.
Now I don't think either of these statements is accurate on its own; if something is a right, it's a right and there is no "should be," and libertarian "no one has a right to your labor" talk stops the moment money changes hands, thereby buying the right to that labor. But that's beside the point.
Health care and education are what I call unavoidable costs.
All living human beings require health care. There is a cost to providing it, and there is a cost to not providing it.
The costs of providing it are well known and constantly debated in this country, though we have made the issue complicated by insisting that not only should people providing the service be paid, but the insurance company paper-pushing bean counters make some sort of profit because reasons, but the bottom line remains the same-- there are large costs to providing health care. However, not providing health care also comes with costs. There are perhaps uncountable costs in terms of lost productivity due to un- or poorly-treated conditions. There are the unknowable costs of losing a potential leader, scientist, or pillar of the community because they died at age ten from an abcessed tooth. And there is the moral and spiritual cost to a nation that stands by and lets some people die because, for whatever reason, they don't have enough money. There is a moral and spiritual cost to being a nation where families lose members even though the ability to save those people exists.
In short, no matter how we answer question "Who gets health care and how will it be paid for," there is a cost. There is no answer to the question that costs us nothing as a country or a culture. It is an unavoidable cost.
Likewise, there is no way to answer the question of education that doesn't cost us something. Providing a full, quality education to every single citizen would cost a bunch of money. But leaving any sector of the population uneducated is also expensive, in productivity costs, in human costs, in ability to carry their own weight costs. To leave some people un- (or under-) educated costs us all, particularly in our ability to maintain a functioning democatic(ish) form of government.
Providing education comes with a cost. Not providing education comes with a cost. This is the flip side of There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There are no decisions about health care and education that are free.
Education and health care are unavoidable costs. We can talk about rights and privileges, but they still have unavoidable costs. We can talk about delivery and payment systems, free market versus government management versus etc etc etc, but education and health care are still unavoidable costs, and what may seem like reducing the costs is most often just moving the costs around.
And this is a bigger problem than ever because both health care and education have expanded. A few centuries ago, health care was cheap and not very good and people mostly just died young (for which countries and cultures paid a price, but there was no alternative). A few centuries ago, a polymath like Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin could literally learn almost everything there was to know, and laborers who didn't know anything could still pull their own weight in the world. Nowadays, health care options are extensive and expensive and long-lived citizens can use many of them. Meanwhile, education is now an ocean instead of a bucket, and the educational requirements to be even working poor have increased dramatically.
End result-- the unavoidable costs have gotten greater and greater.
So there's a strong political push for some sort of plan that means I don't have to spend a bunch of My Money on Those People (who I believe do not deserve it).
This is not a new thing. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to argue against a world where the poor were left to struggle and die, condemned by a business-oriented government because they were excess population, poor because they were just too lazy and undeserving. In a telling detail usually omitted from modern renderings, the ghost of Jacob Marley invites Scrooge to look out the window, where he sees London teeming with the tortured, chained spirits of uncountable businessmen and politicians who failed to take care of their fellow humans. Ebeneezer Scrooge was never meant to be a single unique miser in need of redemption, but an embodiment of the troubled spirit of his age.
We can try to reduce the cost of health care and education for Those People, and when that leads to other costs (welfare, lost productivity, children in poverty) we can refuse to pay those costs, too, but the costs of health care and education are inescapable, even if we pay them by transforming into a country where the poor can never rise above the class they're born into.
There will be tension between "I think I should get a pony" and "I don't think I should ever help anyone with anything," and between those extremes there will always be plenty of room to debate how much is "enough." But to think all this can be judged against an imaginary setting at which we as a society pay nothing for health care or education...? There is no such situation. The costs are unavoidable, and the most useful conversation we can have is not about how to do away with them, but how to best meet them in a way that reflects costs we can bear to pay.
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