ICYMI: Happy Valentines Day Edition (2/14)

Well, Congress rushed through their work so that they could get started on their vacation. Why shouldn't the rest of us. Let's take a look at this week's reading list.

In Disorienting Return To Civility, Joe Biden's DOJ Backs Up Betsy DeVos

A couple of outlets picked up this story this week, but only Time found a clever angle to go with a clever headline.

My HBCU experience has been life-changing

Lets have some positive stories this week, please. A nice first-person story here from Marissa Stubbs at The Undefeated. And she's in Florida, so there is hope.

Update: Dispatch from the Covid trenches

Grumpy Old Teacher, back in the building, checks his classroom ventilation. The results are not encouraging.

School Ratings, Ranking and Wrongdoing  

Have You Heard welcomes Akil Bello from Fairtest to talk about how much baloney can be squeezed into a ratings list (spoiler alert: a lot).

Big Data on learning loss is not the point: Teachers know how to use formative assessments to guide their work with each child

Jan Resseger adds to the stack of excellent essays explaining just how the chickjen littling about learning loss is a bunch of hooey.

$100M for children "learning faster than ever before" in Tennessee?!

Nancy Bailey takes a look at Tennessee's adoption of Reading360, and why it's not good news.

Who really created the Marvel universe?

A new Stan Lee biography is out, and this is one of the better looks at the attempt to unravel the man's complicated, troublesome legacy. No, it's not about education. I like comics and have read them my whole life. Happy Valentines Day.

OpenAI and Stanford researchers call for urgent action to address harms of large language models like GPT-3

Let's grab that barn door and see if we can't get a handle on the loose horse mess that is language mimicking software. Since GPT-s is OpenAI's baby, I'm not sure how much of this is responsible science and how much of it is trying to handicap marketplace imitators, but since these damn things are going to be proposed as teacherbots sooner or later, we should be paying attention to this stuff.

Piano-playing Penn State professor supports students' mental health

From last October in the Collegian. I have mixed feelings about this mechanical engineering prof who closes class with some piano playing, probably related to the mixed feelings about the amount of tuition I sent off to PSU with my daughter years ago, but it's certainly a bit outside tbe box.

How East Stroudsburg schools plan to diversify curriculum, staff and more

A school district in PA makes an attempt and a plan for getting the schools to more properly reflect the diversity of the student body. From the Pocono Record.

Charter schools invaded our neighborhoods without public input

Carl Peterson in Patch for Los Angeles talks to Eastside Padres Contra La Privatization about how charters moved in, public schools were damaged, and local voices were silenced.

Stop Disrespecting Teachers, Please

Arthur Goldtsein is in the New York Daily News detailing the disrespect that NY teachers have been feeling.

To Test or Not To Test

Well, the correct answer is "not," but this Hechinger Report article by Kelly Field does a better job than some of detailing the sides at play here.

Village teacher wins $1 million prize 

Ranjitsinh Disale wanted to be an engineer but ended up taking on a rough rural gig in India. Now he has a million dollar prize. From NPR

Searching for Shelley Duvall

Shelley Duvall is okay. Another not-education story, but a story that's just very human. 

Now they love her

A beautiful reflection on the forever-awesome Karen Lewis

Amid tough school reopening battles, Americans continue to cheer teachers unions

Rebecca Klein and Ariel Edwards-Levy at Huffington Post reporting that, contrary to what you're hearing from some politicians and pundits, teachers are not actually widely hated for single-handedly keeping school buildings closed.

My Battle With Learning Loss

It first hit me in the July after high school graduation--I had lost my learning about Algebra III. A whole semester, mostly gone.

Of course, I told myself, I never really actually "learned" any of that stuff in the first place. So maybe I didn't actually lose that learning. 

But in college, there were other warning signs. I was an English major, so I didn't take science courses, and all of my high school science stuff started to dribble away, leaking slowly out of the brain-tank where learning is stored. And I had actually understood some of that stuff; but soon, there was nothing left but some mental images of Julius Sumner Miller flinging a bucket around, and I'm pretty sure those are stored in the giggles tank, not the learning one.

It may be because so little of college is spent in an actual classroom as compared to K-12, but learning loss was accelerating. And not just in classes like German, where I was not adding any new learning because I was not actually paying attention. And then I graduated.

Well, you know how it is. If you aren't sitting in a classroom located in a school building, you just lose learning, right and left. Plop. Out of your head.

In the canned fruit aisle at the grocery store. Plop! There goes a whole semester of Spanish. Taking communion at the rail of the First United Methodist Church. Plop! No more tenth grade English vocabulary. Just out for a nice walk on a sunny day. Plop! The entire plot of Hamlet, gone. The instant you step outside of school, you just start losing learning left and right.

I've heard the "experts," talking about how learning involves relationships and lattices and frameworks and bunching interacting with experts and this whole big complex batch of brain science stuff. I've heard professional educators explain why mediocre multiple choice tests are a lousy way of measuring how much learning is in a person's brain. I've read stuff by people arguing that you can't measure learning by the day or the inch or the pound (it might have been me, but, you know--plop). But at this point in my life, I understand that they were all wrong and the test manufacturers and politicians and newspaper editors were right-learning is just slapping a bunch of sticky notes onto the big board in your brain, and if you're not in school to have someone repeatedly bearing down on those stickies with a meaty thumb, they'll just let go and float away. 

So now, in my sixties, I'm like that guy Charlie in Flowers for Something-or-other (Plop!) who just keeps getting dumber and dumber because learning loss is an unavoidable natural process that clearly happens to everyone when they are not in school. At this point I'm just hoping to hold onto basic speech functions and my ability to dress myself, but who knows. I used to know how to diagram sentences, but yesterday I bent over to tie my shoes and --plop! Gone. 

I can't imagine how bad things are getting during this pandemic with students not in school to get sticky notes pushed back onto their brain boards, all those little pads of knowledge and skill just slipping down and away. Or maybe it's like their brains are buckets with holes in them and if schools aren't constantly pouring stuff into the bucket, it's just emptying out. Or maybe it's like learning can only be measured by a series of dumb tasks and if students aren't constantly drilling the dumb task, the dumb task part of their brains shrivels. I don't know. I suppose somebody could argue that that whole model of education shows a deep lack of understanding of what learning is and how it works, but it won't be me, because while I might once have understood all that rigmarole, now, well--plop.

School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

Coming up with the right name for a policy initiative is a critical step in framing a conversation and controlling the narrative. The classic example is the abortion debate, in which one side is "pro-choice" and the other is "pro-life," carefully selected terms that frame each side as champions of an undeniable good. Just watch supporters of "defund the police" get caught in an endless loop of "no, no, what we really mean is..." to understand how important this branding can be.

"School choice" is branding, and relatively new branding at that. You can watch it take off on the Google Ngram viewer to see how often the phrase has been used:

It starts its steep rise in the mnid-80s (Reagan, Nation at Risk), peaks in 2001, hits a trough again in 2013, and has been bouncing back since. 

But what is "school choice" the brand name for? I mean, if we were serious--really serious--about school choice, we would come up with a system that allowed families to choose any school in the state, and we would take the regulatory steps to make sure that every one of those schools met the requirements of a quality school that was part of the public good of public education. We would provide several freelt available different choices within each community, all part of the public education system, and we would tax people out the wazoo to finance the excess capacity needed to allow choice (otherwise family choices would be limited by available spots in a school). And we would, of course, allow for the choice of a private (religious) school or homeschooling, just as we always have.

We've been pummeled by the modern definition of school choice so much that we've forgotten that nothing about the idea of school choice says it must involve privately owned and operated businesses funded with public tax dollars. 

In other words, folks didn't start with the idea of "school choice" and then try to figure out how that would work. They started with an idea about what they wanted to do and then decided to brand it "school choice." 

So what did they want to do? They wanted to open up the education market do that private businesses could score more public tax dollars. 

Consider, for instance, how some reformsters like to call public education a monopoly. This has never made sense to me--public education is many thousands of locally owned and operated systems, many on the order of a mom and pop business. They are not centrally controlled, and families can move between them, admittedly by the cumbersome and restrictive method of moving. For the education "consumer," the system doesn't resemble a monopoly at all; it's not like having to use Microsoft software no matter what or the old, inescapable phone company monopoly.

But public education does look like a monopoly if you are a business trying to get into the market. You want to score some of those sweet public taxpayer dollars, and you're told that only a local government can operate a school and the only way to get some of that vast pile of money is through official government channels. To you, this feels like a monopoly. 

"School choice" is a brand, a fig leaf for covering the real initiative, which is to open the education market. When certain reformsters start talking about school choice, a good way to understand what they're really talking about is to substitute the words "open market."

So we go to the EdChoice website, formerly the Friedman Foundation for the economist who decried the school monopoly and we find "School choice allows public education funds to follow students to the schools or services that best fit their needs" and read that as "An open market allows public education funds to follow students to the schools or services that best fit their needs."

On the School Choice Week website, we find "School choice means giving parents access to the best K-12 education options for their children" which actually means "An open market means giving parents access to the best K-12 education options for their children"

Betsy DeVos: "School choice is coming" is really "Open markets are coming."

Associated Press: "DeVos and President Donald Trump have repeatedly invoked school choice as the solution to parents’ woes" is really "DeVos and President Donald Trump have repeatedly invoked an open market as the solution to parents’ woes."

Jeanne Allen (of the Center for Education Reform): "a united school choice movement was able to repel the attacks from the guardians of the status quo effectively" is really "a united open market movement was able to repel the attacks from the guardians of the status quo effectively." Allen is the woman who coined the "backpacks full of cash" phrase for describing how open markets would work; note that it emphasizes where the money would go, not the student's mind or education.

Substituting "open markets" for "school choice" doesn't reveal nefarious intent, nor, I suspect, does it even change the statements into that proponents would disagree with. But it says a little more clearly what we are talking about. Choicers may add arguments about supposed benefits to students or the community, but that's an afterthought--the main idea remains to open those markets so that other folks have a chance to make money in the education biz. I'm a big believer that we have better conversations when we talk about what we're really talking about, and in the voucher/charter/ESA/micro-credential/personalized learning/education disruption debate, what we're really talking about is converting from a local government universal system to an open market system. We're talking about ending the promise of a free and appropriate education for every child in the country and replacing it with a promise that anyone who wants to try to make a buck in an education-flavored business will get that chance. 

Yes, yes, yes--there are choice advocates who have a different focus (#NotAllChoicers) and plenty of free market acolytes who sincerely believe that a free market will serve students well (spoiler alert: their sincerity does not make them any less wrong). 

Using the term "school choice" is about muddying the water and framing the discussion. Unleashing the open market is a scary conversation-- will their be safeguards and regulations put in place to protect the "consumers,' or will open market education be like the meat packing industry of 120 years ago? Saying "school choice" over and over allows proponents to skip the hard conversation that the country deserves. 

HI: A Houseless Village

 It started with this tweet:

Children who are houseless (homeless), have the chance to win laptops to help with their distance learning during the pandemic. They need your online votes to help them win. #HawaiiNews https://t.co/yg3maBntZ8

— KHON2 News (@KHONnews) February 6, 2021

Reactions were peak tl;dr, with most people not making it past the tweet. But click past to the story, and then on to the contest itself, and you quickly see there' a lot to this.

I'm no expert on Hawaii. My ex-wife lived there for a few years and my sister-in-law and her husband lived on O'ahu for a while. My wife and I visited for about a week. We stayed in a condo near the beach up near the zoo, and is our habit, we took our rental car on some road trips to see the rest of the place. Which on O'ahu, once you get out of city traffic, doesn't take all that long. It's a place of great contrast. Travel up the west side of the island, and you soon arrive at the tip that looks like the end of the world; exposed to the brunt of the ocean, just past the government space-listening station, the road just ends in a patch of lava. Rough paths and an eerie peaceful quiet, not twenty miles away from a roaring metropolis. On the way there, you go past some rough patches of poverty. We would have driven past the community in this story without knowing it. But as I said--no expert, which is something I share with many folks drive-by commenting on this. It's not just homeless kids. It's a whole community.

That community is Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae (Refuge of Wai'anae), a community of about 250 houseless people, characterized by resident Twinkle Borge as  "Not homeless-- a village without a place."

Hawaii is a tough place to be homeless. On the one hand, the weather is generally on your side, but on the other, local authorities are not. While we were there, an early morning walk would get you free admission to the morning rousting of the homeless along Waikiki. Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae's residents are primarily Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, long underserved and marginalized. Sweeps to clean out the homeless are not uncommon. And then there's stuff like this--some lady offered to buy any homeless people a bus ticket to Wai'anae (and offered a flotation device to anyone who wanted to donate some cash to her effort).

But Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae has been taking steps. With the help of donors, the village has purchased 20 acres of land to be used for affordable housing for the villagers. As part of that new, real location for the village, they have plans for a meeting house that will also be used for the education of the children (about 40 of them, who attend the Wai'anae elementary school), complete with a hotspots and, hopefully, computers (they already have one hotspot). The village has their own incorporated 501-C(3) organization (Dynamic Community Solutions) with a detailed, multi-phase plan for creating a place for themselves, as well as a website (Aloha Lives Here) that answers questions about the group and the plan.

Much of this seems to be because they have Twinkle Borge, who appears to be a force of nature all by herself. Like most of the folks there, Borge did not end up houseless because she lived a blameless, pristine life, but by God, if any of her press is even half-accurate, she has worked her butt off since joining this community. Pu‘uhonua O Wai‘anae has worked hard to operate a just community, a community that gets along with the more conventional community nearby. She and James Pakele, head of Dynamic Community Solutions) are the faces of this evolving tent city and its new future.

It's quite a story, and I wish I were in a position to learn more about it. It's certainly not the story lots of folks imagined when they reacted to that tweet. And while I agree that it would be nice if the sponsoring company (Mobile Beacon) just handed over the computers and the $10K, I'll also admit that framing this whole thing as a competition allows each of the ten groups to leverage some free publicity (like the news story in the tweet, or this post), which is hugely valuable in its own right. 

In the meantime, if you'd like to vote for the group, here's that link. And if you'd like to chip in directly, they have a GoFundMe as well.

This Is Not An Anti-Teacher Gotcha Moment

 So I posted this on Twitter, and drew the response pictured here

Usuals: "Here you go--hospital-grade safety measures!"
Teachers: "But we need to get the vaccine."
Usuals: "Here's your vaccine."
Teachers: "BTW the kids need the vaccine too."
Usuals: "There is no vaccine for kids."
Teachers: "LOL, suckers."

— LiberalAgainstLockdowns (@LLockdowns) February 9, 2021

There's a special group of folks among those who hate teacher unions and the teachers who belong to them. You'll remember these folks from back in the days when we were going to use test-based teacher ratings to fire our way to greatness. Their story of the US public education system is something like this--

The whole system is a sham, a massive con perpetrated by the teachers union, in which they get a whole bunch of people who don't want to teach, don't even want to work, but just want to sit lazily in a comfy sinecure for which privilege they pay a kickback to the union, which is only interested in public education as its big fat fund raiser.

You won't find these people writing in any mainstream outlets, but you sure can meet them on Twitter. And as the battle over re-opening school buildings heats up, they are pointing their fingers with great fervor, because they are sure this is a gotcha moment. "Look!" they want to holler. "See? I told you! Teachers do not actually want to work. This (probably fake) pandemic gave them an excuse to sit at home and get paid for doing nothing, and they don't want it to end! I told you and told you--they're a bunch of lazy slobs attached to the public taxpayer teat. This proves it!!" And like my friend above, they believe that teachers think the taxpayers are suckers for letting them do it.

Thing is, I know lots of teachers, and I can report that since last March, I have not heard a single one say, "Man, I just hope this goes on forever." Not one, and not anything remotely like that. If I've heard anything outside of the mainstream versions of the sides of this debate, it has been teachers who say, quietly, "Even if it's not safe yet, I'm okay going back because it would be such a relief to be done with this distance/hybrid stuff."

Teachers became teachers because they want to teach. Teachers are also varied human beings, many with families and children and health concerns and even business/employment concerns and all the same issues that all the other various human beings are dealing with.  

This time, this pandemic, is an absolutely wrong time for folks to indulge in the tendency to demonize the other side. Everyone is facing a range of options that all suck, and everybody is worried about whichever suckness is currently staring them in the face and why should anybody actually have to explain this? Now would really be a good time to work hard at humaning. There are no gotchas to be got.

PA: A Reminder That Charter Schools Are Businesses

Who do you suppose might have said the following:

During the last few years, we’ve created a complete business ecosystem at The Waterfront. This strategic purchase was the natural next step as we continue to expand our operations.

A: A classroom teacher

B: A building principal

C: A corporate VP in charge of mergers and acquisitions

D: The CEO of a cyber charter school

The answer is D, and the speaker is Thomas Longenecker. Longenecker is the CEO (former COO) and president of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA); he's also an adjunct professor of school finance and school law at Wilkes University, a PA university that specializes in online degrees. Before all that, he was business chief at two different school districts. His LinkedIn profile has a 13-year gap between his college graduation with a BA in business and his first school district job. 

CCA was launched in 2003 and has become the biggest cyber charter in PA. Their website leans heavily on the "It's free!" angle. They used to be called Commonwealth Connections Academy until 2016, and the website under that name is still live. Because--the name change coincided with the dropping of Connections Academy LLC as their education  program provider, but Connections Academy remains one of the Pearson cyber school brands still busily working the ed biz. Commonwealth Connections, owned by Pearson, at one point employed a guy named Mickey Revenaugh as a lobbyist; Revenaugh was also the corporate chair of the ALEC education task force. It gets confusing--CCA's 2017 990  shows them contracting with Pearson for $24 million worth of learning management platforms; that's less than half of the $54 million they spent in 2016, but it's not like they completely cut the cord. And previous year's costs for Commonwealth Connections to run CCA were in the $21 million range. 

Tracking personnel is tricky-- Longenecker's LinkedIn profile has him becoming CEO in 2019, but the previous CEO (Maurice Flurie) didn't leave the post till July of 2020. Flurie previously turned up whenever the industry needed a spokesperson or some favorable testimony in Harrisburg. Now he's running the Flurie Solutions Group, a four-year-old outfit that appears to have no website, but in an interview he's described as "a cyber education expert who specializes in aiding school systems, government entities, and private companies to develop plans." 

Why did Flurie bail last year, just as pandemic conditions were painting a rosy future for cyber schools? I don't know-- but the new guy is doing well. The quote that we kicked off this post with is from news about a big real estate deal in Pittsburgh, where CCA has purchased a redeveloped office complex that used to be a Macy's (at the Waterfront, for y'uns who knows your burgh). CCA had previously leased the first floor of the complex (about 70,000 square feet); now they will own the whole building, while the same company they previously leased from will manage it for them. That company--M&J Wilkow (creating value in real estate)--had originally purchased the building from Macy's. "When we purchased the building from Macy's, we knew it would be ideal for business tenants."

This is not the first time CCA has bought up some shiny real estate; last September they spent $15 million on a the former headquarters of Ricoh in the Greater Philly area. Fun side note; in that story we learn that there is such a thing as a "charter school niche broker," in this case Avison Young, a nationwide real estate company. Back in 2016, CCA bought the former PA State Employees Credit Union hq in Harrisburg for $5 million, to replace several leased offices. They had headquartery plans for about 90K square feet the use of the 180,000 square foot building; the rest they planned to lease out. Google says the address is now 1 Innovation Way, and PSECU is one of CCA's tenants.

It's a lot of money. So is the roughly $8 million CCA reported spending on advertising in 2017. We might know more about how CCA is spending PA tax dollars, but there are no 990s on file later than the 2017 year, and the state hasn't audited them since 2012!

Bottom line here is that CCA has an awful lot of taxpayer money to throw around on real estate and advertising and pursuing a expansion of operations. CCA is a business, a very profitable business that actually doesn't do very well on the teaching students part of the business, but does quite well on the making money part. Pennsylvania's cyber charter industry, like California's, is long overdue for reform. Let's hope the newest attempt to institute such reforms is successful.

Donors Chose Monday: Books. Just Books.

Researchers actually took a look at teacher fundraising via Donors Chose and other micro-philanthropy sites. Some of the patterns that emerged are not exactly surprising--the site is used for "triage and not extras," and more prevalent in states where funding of schools is less than optimal. 

As I've said before, Donors Choose shouldn't be a thing. The need it meets shouldn't exist, and stories about how Teacher Pat had a project funded are not feel-good stories--they're a sign that funding for education in this country is a mess. 

That said, we can either ignore the problem because it shouldn't exist, or we can try to pitch in. I am not a fan of enabling bad management, but in retirement I keep looking for ways to support not just the profession, but the people working in it. So I continue with this weekly (or bi-weekly or however often I get back to it) choice to find a Donors Chose  project and support it, and invite you to join me. If not on the featured project, then on one of your own choice, or a contribution to a local classroom. 

This time, I'm contributing to Mrs. Ploss and her first grade classroom at Elk Valley Elementary School in Lake City, PA. Mrs. Ploss is looking for books and Scholastic magazine. I can't think of anything any better than getting reading materials into first graders' hands.

Also, Mrs. Small at Shaver Elementary School in Portland, OR is trying to build a classroom library that reflects the diversity of her students. What can I say? I love the books.

And speaking of books for kids-- I've written about and you've probably heard about the Imagination Library, a project of Dolly Parton. It puts a book a month in the hands of families of littles across the country and internationally as well. It's one of the great modern educational philanthropies, and you can contribute to their work directly--just follow this link.