School Reform == Financialization of Government Services

Charlie Stross:

12. A side-effect of (7) is the financialization of government services (2). ...

14. The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

My Take on Six Kindergarten ELA Standards

I've posted my first long-form Common Core piece in a while on Medium:

Much of the concern over the kindergarten standards revolves around the question of whether they are “developmentally appropriate.” I would argue that in addition to this issue, the kindergarten standards are fatally difficult to interpret due to the flawed design of Common Core ELA/Literacy standards as a whole. It is a fundamental premise of the Common Core that we can think of learning in kindergarten as part of a single continuum of skills and tasks stretching backward from college.

In fact, the standards and assessment paradigm designed for secondary school breaks down when applied to six year olds. This is why all high performing countries, the ones we are supposedly trying to compete with, have separate curricular documents for primary and secondary schools, reflecting the goals and demands of each level.

The DEY report cited six examples of kindergarten standards for which “there is no evidence that mastering these standards in kindergarten rather than in first grade brings lasting gains.” Gentry defends each one in turn, and I shall point out how this discussion illuminates flaws in the design of the standards as a whole.

Wait, What's a Standard Again?

Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin:

We know that the CCSS has led to a shift in reading assessments that have been around for a long time. For example, reading experts Fountas and Pinnell used to suggest that ending kindergarten in the A-C of books range was okay. Now, with the CCSS-informed shift, if a student has not progressed past level B by the beginning of first grade, he is designated as requiring “Intensive Intervention.”

One reason even the most cold-blooded, cost/benefit analysis-driven, technocratic discussions of the Common Core are so ungrounded is that not enough attention is paid to the point McLaughlin makes at the end here: that failure to meet a standard should by definition be regarded as something that requires fairly specific, directed intervention. Or... perhaps not?

Recent standards tend to be aspirational in their drive for more "rigor." They delineate things which are demonstrably possible for some students, and perhaps desirable for all. But particularly at the early elementary level, what we don't know is if they are so necessary that a failure to meet the standard indicates a deficit with serious long-term implications. We don't know if we're investing untold millions in "remediating" students unnecessarily, particularly when considering the opportunity cost in not spending money on, say enrichment for the same children (without even getting into the web of related issues like the psychological effects of unnecessarily telling a student they are "behind").

Think of FedWiki as Desktop Application

I'm doing the Thinking Machines FedWiki Happening, trying to wrap my head around the federated wiki concept. At this early point, the first breakthrough is to realize that my mental map of the thing makes more sense if I think of "FedWiki" as an application rather than a webpage. Like, if you want to do FedWiki stuff on other people's sites, you need to start by "launching" your own FedWiki (i.e., navigate to it). Sometimes it saves files locally, like a desktop application.

Basically, it is enough unlike "surfing the web" as we know it that you have to shift your perspective a bit. It is a shift from how regular wikis work but also a shift from how the web in general conventionally works.

It Depends On What You Mean By Accountable

Chad Alderman:

To see how a move away from annual testing would affect subgroup accountability in other cities, I pulled data from Providence, Rhode Island and Richmond, Virginia. The results confirm that a move away from annual testing would leave many subgroups and more than 1 million students functionally “invisible” to state accountability systems.

As a reminder, No Child Left Behind focuses attention on the progress of groups of students within schools. To be confident that the test results aren’t pulled up or down by a few students and to minimize year-to-year variability, states usually imposed minimum group sizes of 30 or 40 students.

Both Rhode Island and Virginia used relatively high group sizes under NCLB-Rhode Island used a group size of 45 and Virginia used 50. As part of the NCLB waiver process, which allowed states to use relative ranking school accountability systems as opposed to more of a relative ranking system and less of a formulaic trigger, both Rhode Island and Virginia lowered their group sizes. Rhode Island lowered its group size all the way down to 20, and Virginia dropped its group size to 30 students. After these changes, both Virginia and Rhode Island estimated that far more students and subgroups would “count” under their new rules. ...

To see the effects in Rhode Island, I applied Rhode Island’s group size of 20 students to the city of Providence. Providence is relatively poor and has a large number of Hispanic students, and even under a grade-span approach where schools were only accountable for the performance of, say, 5th graders, all schools in the district had enough low-income and Hispanic 5th grade students for the groups to count. But only six out of 22 schools would be accountable for black students, only eight would be accountable for English Learners, five for students with disabilities, and only one for white students.

Without annual test results and under Rhode Island’s old group size of 45, 0 Providence schools would have been accountable for black, white, or students with disabilities.

This all sounds pretty dire, unless you understand that by "invisible" Alderman means "not plugged into the algorithm that spits out a school rating." If you look at publicly reported NECAP scores, you'll see that RI reports groups sizes down to 10 and has for years. The data is not invisible, in fact, it has always been even more visible than the subgroup size Alderman recommends.

Alderman's argument only holds up or is even relevant insofar as you believe "accountability" must be an externally imposed, automated, algorithmic process, as opposed to, say, a system of periodic and ongoing review and inspection by stakeholders at the school, district and state level.

I Don't Even...

Karl Herchenroeder:

On education, Bloomberg said the U.S. should deliver the kind of schooling that will help people become self-sustainable and increase a sense of dignity. If a person has the option of going to Harvard or becoming a plumber, he said he would suggest thinking about the plumbing career.

“The Harvard graduate on average will never catch up to a plumber,” Bloomberg said. “Partially because the first four years — instead of spending $60,000, you make $60,000

Finally My Story Can Be Told

Grinders (2014) "TRAILER" from Nick Genova on Vimeo.

There Are No Parking Spaces in Providence

For years, Providence had an overnight street parking ban for most of the city. Basically every house and apartment had to have off street parking. This is, of course, insane and has been loosened up in recent years.

As a result, the parking situation after heavy snowfall is a little different than in other cities. In the neighborhoods, instead of having to dig your car out of its plowed in parking space and perhaps putting a chair on it to discourage someone from taking your cleared it immediately after you leave for work, everyone digs out their driveway/lot and then nobody touches any of the parking spaces.

Nor has the city plowed them out this year (I think they have occasionally in the past). I'm sure if they did, people would be pissed about having to dig their driveway and possibly sidewalk out again.

But in the meantime, in the vast majority of the city you can't park on the street without leaving your car at least a third of the way out in traffic.

And don't even get me started on the sidewalk situation. Residences around here have actually been doing a lot better, but there's barely any pretense of the city managing to even clear bottleneck sidewalks like overpasses and bridges, and seemingly no enforcement of businesses with very long frontages in key places (used car lots, etc). Is it a violation of the first amendment to fine churches for not shoveling? I mean, when a church across the street from a school only shovels up to their door and leaves 2/3rds unshoveled?

And aaaagh, I wish the parents at our school could appreciate that causing traffic to back up out into the left turn lane of a stroad so that you can watch your child walk all the way across the schoolyard and enter the building is not increasing your or anyone else's safety.

It is Worse than This, Actually

Robert Bruno:

First a clarification. The phrase “right to work” is a misnomer that has little to do with the right of a person to seek and accept gainful employment. Anti-union proponents use “right to work” to refer to an option under federal labor law that allows workers employed by a unionized employer to receive the full benefits of a labor contract without paying for any of the cost to gain those benefits. In fact, no employee anywhere in the country has to join a union and no employer has to sign a labor agreement.

As Tom Geoghegan explains clearly in his new book, it isn't just that workers not paying union dues work under the same contract, but that non-union workers in a "right to work" shop receive the same services from the union, including legal representation.

In Europe, if you decide you aren't going to join the union at a site where there is a union-negotiated contract, your employer will probably give you the same benefits as the union members, for a variety of practical reasons, and no dues go to the union. But the union has no obligation to non-union workers whatsoever. On the other hand, they do have a financial incentive to be responsive to and actively serve the membership. It is hard to deny that the European system results in a stronger labor movement.

Of course, this is mostly an abstract argument. Switching to the European model isn't exactly on the table as a political option in 2015.

Ed Reform's Other Achilles Heel

Without slack labor markets, particularly for those with bachelors degrees but no non-teaching professional training, the whole ed reform edifice falls apart. Everyone leaves teaching, and that's that! For the past, what, seven years, the idea that someone with a BA in English, History or education was generally employable has seemed increasingly fanciful. I'm not betting on a tight labor market, but it is at least conceivable now. TFA is the canary in the coal mine for this phenomenon.

The first Achilles heel of course is just kids, with parental support, refusing to take the damn tests. I'd note that the whole "opt-out" conversation is still quite moderate. Once you hear "strike" and "sabotage" (And let's be clear, sabotage is real easy here. Kick out the plugs. Tear the test, etc. Answer everything "A.") displacing "opt-out," things will be getting real.

A Success Never Equalled by Educational Technology

Patrick Reusse:

And then the world changed in 1983, when the TRS-80 Model 100 portable was released for sale. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack … the developer and the outlets where you could buy one.

Everyone called it the “Trash 80.’’ They were so reasonably priced that we could buy them ourselves if the newspaper balked. They weighed 3.1 pounds and could run for hours with four AA batteries.

There was no longer a class structure in the press box. The Portabubbles were gone (except for a few holdouts such as Roe). The Silent Writers were sent crashing to a well-earned graveyard.

We all were carrying Trash 80s. The question among the former underclass in the press box went from, “Hey, do you have an extra roll of paper for this piece of bleep?’’ to “Hey, do you have any extra batteries for our little buddy here?’’

Somebody surely is working on a printable Raspberry Pi laptop for schools? Yes? I'm afraid to look, tbh.

Wikipedia, Sigh

Mark Bernstein:

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

The optics are terrible: of the 14 arbitrators in the case, between 11 and 13 are men.

Some All-Nude Zoopraxography While You Wait for Spring Training

Rob Edelman:

Of the 781 images in Animal Locomotion, 16 relate to baseball. Their plate numbers are 273-288. The first is labeled “Base-ball; pitching.” Five are “Base-ball; batting.” One is “Base-ball; batting (low ball).” One is “Base-ball; catching.” Five are “Base-ball; catching and throwing.” One is “Base-ball; throwing.” One is: “Base-ball; running and picking up ball.” The final plate is “Base-ball; error.”

All the models are identified only by three different numbers: 25, 26, and 30. According to the prospectus, the “greater number of [human models] engaged in walking, running, jumping, and other athletic games are students or graduates of The University of Pennsylvania—young men aged from eighteen to twenty-four—each one of whom has a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration.” With this in mind, the most likely “baseball models” are in fact ballplayers. The most noteworthy is Thomas Love Latta (1865-1961), a catcher and captain of the varsity nine. The other two are Robert Edward Glendinning (1867-1936) and Morris Hacker Jr. (1866-1947).

STEM It Up, Kids!

John Skylar:

"I hate science." In six years of graduate school, this has to be the phrase I’ve heard most frequently from my colleagues.

People who have dedicated their lives to science.

People who made a decision when they were about 16 years old to focus on science, who went through four years of undergrad and an average 6 years of graduate school, and 4-10 more years of training.

People who’ve spent every moment since 2000 entirely dedicated to making new facts using the scientific process.

"I hate science." Why this instead of, "I love science?"

Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

You'd think it would be a bit easier to find science teachers among all the people bailing out of academic science careers.

Culinary Incubator

If Providence doesn't have one of these, we totally should:

Dash is 550 sq ft commercial kitchen available for hire on an hourly or monthly basis. Our commissary style kitchen allows food creative's, bakers, chefs, butchers, cart owners, or anyone involved in a food start-up, to prep their wares in a well appointed new kitchen. Dash is also available for cooking classes, recipe development, pop-up and tasting events, or private dinner parties.

In 2015, good food is one of our greatest economic development assets.

Also, tasty!

The Open Source SIS Market

I've been working on, essentially, a 10 year report on SchoolTool's development. This is one of the things which has been deterring me from blogging lately.

Anyhow, I did some retrospective research on the open source SIS "market," over the past decade, and it is somewhat of a cautionary tale for open source advocates.

Through the whole decade, there was a family of PHP open source SIS's in a more or less "complete" form, being used at some schools in America and elsewhere. We took a fairly brief look at the code early on, and it was pretty obviously terrible PHP. Like most early PHP, the code wasn't much more than a bunch of templates turning a database into web pages. If the templates are badly written, there is just not much to redeem the application. My snap judgement was that, if you wanted a good PHP SIS, to do anything other than start over from scratch would be a massive waste of time.

Instead, over the past decade, a succession of people have tried to redeem this codebase, forking the project in multiple directions, some investing non-trivial amounts of time and money in the process. I haven't followed these projects closely, spent any more time looking at how they work internally or externally. All I know is that none of them have become as popular as they should have. None of them turned into the Moodle of SIS's and seized a dominant position, even though they had every opportunity to. One reason I'm not naming names here is that I don't have any specific argument about quality other than something is wrong because they should have taken over six years ago but didn't.

This is a case of first mover advantage in open source, not just in terms of the application category, but language. Creating a new PHP SIS from scratch with superior architecture to the existing family would not be very hard. Gaining mindshare vs. the existing player is a big hurdle. "I'm going to solve the problems in the package you already know about" is an easier sell than "Move to this thing I've started from scratch, and by the way, I'm just some guy on the internet." Even starting a new SIS on a newer or perhaps more sophisticated language or platform is a clearer sell. This is an area (open source SIS) where the small profit isn't worth a lot of investment, marketing and advertising.

Essentially, there is a serious path dependency in a given product category based on the quality of the first mover. If latecomers are trying to redeem a faulty core instead of building on a solid foundation, the whole sector suffers.

One branch of this tree (at least) has become a successful commercial product.

One big challenger emerged from India: Fedena. It is based on Ruby on Rails and generally was built from scratch using modern web technologies. It might have swept the field except the prospect of making real money overcame whatever the initial rationale for open sourcing the project was, and they forked away and essentially abandoned the open source version two years ago from their ongoing commercial development. So that's that. As SIS's move more and more to cloud hosting, there's even less reason to try to market one as open source.

Shout out to Open Admin for Schools, a Perl-based open source SIS Les Richardson has maintained for schools in Alberta for probably 15 years or so, from which he probably makes some nice side income while saving schools in the region time and money.

Many, many people have written local SIS's and offered them as open source. This is a lovely idea but so far never works. It is just too much time to generalize, complete, package and market (even minimally) the product, particularly if all those tricky steps are seen as a side-light to a project which is probably the side-light of your actual job. They multiply the time involved by whole numbers, not fractions.

Finally, what about SchoolTool? Why didn't we take over 5 years ago, especially with relatively generous and consistent philanthropic backing? Well, I'll go into that more in the full report, and to be sure, I wish we had moved more quickly. But yes, we helped to clog up the market too. There were several years there where we seemed just around the corner from being "done" and having a "complete" SIS product, and with some influential backing, maybe we'd be a bad product to compete with.

Really just got to "complete" a year or two ago. And then growth can be very slow if you're talking school by school. You've only got one buying cycle a year, and people are waiting around to see if it works for other schools around them, so... it takes a while. We're starting to grow in earnest now. Hopefully it is not too late.

Or Maybe They'll Hold Their Breath Until They Turn Blue

Joe Weisenthal:

It's getting harder and harder for employers to fill jobs. In this environment, the balance of power should begin to tip more toward workers.

They could do that, or they could demand that the Fed increase interest rates to slow overall economic growth, so that they don't have to hire people at higher wages. It is the official policy of the nation, after all.

Common Core Carrot

One fundamental problem with Obama-era reform is the premise that one should not be eligible to receive a high school diploma until one proves he or she is ready for college. That was never the presumption before. You would not ask a student who barely squeaked out of high school with a C- GPA and the minimum number of credits where they were going to college, as if they had just punched their ticket to higher education.

On the other hand, I think the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards are decent at determining if a student possesses college level "literacy," that is, as such things go. It seems to me to be a decent template for a new SAT, but woefully inadequate as the basis of a K-12 curriculum.

Having said that, it makes way more sense to say "OK, if you pass this Common Core test you can go to community college for free," than it does to say "You must pass this college-readiness test to graduate from high school at all.

So... we'll see if the Common Core becomes part of the debate on the issue.

Sorry for the Light Posting...

I've been busy.

Bringing in the Connecticut Mob

Elisabeth Harrison:

Governor-Elect Gina Raimondo announced her plan Tuesday to nominate Stefan Pryor for Rhode Island’s newly created Secretary of Commerce post.

The outgoing Education Commissioner in Connecticut, Pryor chose not to seek a second term, a move political observers saw as evidence he had become a liability for Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy, who faced a close battle for re-election.

If anyone had the slightest doubt about the depth of Raimondo's connections to the Connecticut school reform keiretsu, it should be now dispelled. This is wingnut welfare for Democats.