Understanding School Reform Circa 2015

Gaius Publius:

First, when a "private" group's chief individuals flow back and forth constantly between government and that group, the group can be said to be "part" of government, or to have "infiltrated" government, or to have been "folded into" government. (Your phrasing will be determined by who you think is the instigator.)

For example, a network of private "security consulting" firms does standing business with the (Pentagon's) NSA, and by some accounts performs 70% of their work. Are those firms part of the NSA or not? Most would say yes, to a great degree. It's certain that the NSA would collapse without them, and many of these firms would collapse without the NSA (though many have other ... ahem, international ... clients, which starts an entirely different discussion).

As another example, the role of mega-lobbying firms as a fourth branch of government was explored here. Same idea.

In the case of the security firms, one might say they have been "folded into" government. In the case of the lobbying firms, one might say they have "infiltrated" government. I hope you notice the difference; both modes of incorporation occur.

Second, consider how in general the "world of money" and the parallel world of "friends of money" — its enablers, adjuncts, consiglieri and retainers — flow in and out of the world of government, of NGOs, of corporate boards, of foundation boards, attends Davos and the modern Yalta (YES) conference, and so on. Now consider how someone like Hillary Clinton — not money per se, though she has a chunk, but certainly a "friend of money" — ticks off most of those boxes (foundation board, corporate board, government, Davos, Yalta, and so on). There are many people like Hillary Clinton; she's just very front-and-center at the moment.

What we're about to see is the infiltration of "friends of money" into key positions in the eurozone, and in particular, the infiltration of friends of money from one huge repository of money and guardian of its perquisites — the megabank Goldman Sachs — into those governmental positions.

We've got privatization -- charters, vouchers -- and the other prong is this infiltration of private moneyed interests into government. I don't think this was the grand plan circa 1998 or something, but it's clearly where we're ending up, and it isn't just an education phenomenon.

Another Innovative Experiment!

Me, commenting:

It would be nice if we could stop saying this type of school is "experimental" or "innovative." We've been doing and undoing the same experiments and innovations in Providence high schools for about 40 years.

What David Coleman has Wrought, Globally

I was speaking this morning to someone who runs Montessori pre-schools in Africa and needs to track achievement of various Montessori tasks/activities. OK. Makes sense. Then she said, "And we're working on tying those to standards. We're using the Common Core from the US." Sure, we can do that.

I'm Sure Blending Learning is Going to Work

Maciej Cegłowski:

Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE

This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.

The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.

If you have spent any time using software, you might recognize this as an appalling idea. Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.

This vision holds that the Web is only a necessary first step to a brighter future. In order to fix the world with software, we have to put software hooks into people's lives. Everything must be instrumented, quantified, and networked. All devices, buildings, objects, and even our bodies must become "smart" and net-accessible.

Then we can get working on optimizing the hell out of life.

Marc Andreessen has this arresting quote, that ‘software is eating the world.’ He is happy about it. The idea is that industry after industry is going to fall at the hands of programmers who automate and rationalize it.

We started with music and publishing. Then retailing. Now we're apparently doing taxis. We're going to move a succession of industries into the cloud, and figure out how to do them better. Whether we have the right to do this, or whether it's a good idea, are academic questions that will be rendered moot by the unstoppable forces of Progress. It's a kind of software Manifest Destiny.

To achieve this vision, we must have software intermediaries in every human interaction, and in our physical environment.

But what if after software eats the world, it turns the world to shit?

Reality Check for Impatient Futurists

Doug Henwood:

Yes, it seems inevitable that someday "the end of work" will arrive, robots and computers will displace almost all workers, and we'll have to figure out what to do with the rest of us. The problem is with getting the timing right. This chart, and the rest of Doug Henwood's post, suggest that we're still not at that point yet.

Of Course I Spoke Too Soon

Elisabeth Harrison:

After eight years leading Central Falls schools, Gallo brings up another point of pride: elementary school test scores have been improving, and a dual language program shows particular promise.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is easy to see that on six of eight NECAP tests, Central Falls elementary scores are lower than they were seven years ago (as far back as RIDE has posted). It just looks like 2012-2013 was an especially low year, even for CF, and thus there is a one year upward trend despite the fact that the long term trend is flat at best.

My Analysis of the SIS Market

Managing an SIS product (from the vendor side) is like providing accounting software in a country where not only are multiple currencies used, and multiple theories about accounting standards co-exist, but the very idea of money is still in dispute. Some sectors of the economy run on fiat money, some pegged to the gold standard, others a currency representing in hours of labor, a few kibbutzes are doctrinaire communist, and a few others are exploring a pseudo-romantic historical fantasy about purely barter-based economies.

This is why even corporations like Apple and Pearson eventually get out of the business. Corporate scale irritation.

Nobody Says Central Falls Achievement has Gone Up

Dan McGowan:

(Lusi) noted that graduation rates increased, dropout rates went down and there were “marked improvements” in reading proficiency levels in fourth and 11th grade during her tenure. While Central Falls, a much smaller district with similar demographics, has garnered significant praise for raising student achievement, Providence students compare favorably to that city at nearly every grade level.

Not to pile onto Central Falls, but nobody praises that district for raising student achievement, because it is basically flat at the high school level since before the Great Firing, and the decline in scores across grade levels for grades 3-8 is truly disturbing, to those who bother to look.

Happy Solstice/Father's Day/Go Skateboarding Day from Garrett

Frequent commentator and former Wimp Factor 14 and Kafka Romance Dissolver rhythm section mate Garrett made me a collage:

Bridge of Allan Primary Gets a Positive Evaluation

Shona ES Taylor, HM Inspector:

How well do children learn and achieve?

We found children in the nursery class and school learn and achieve well. There is a very happy atmosphere throughout the school and almost all children demonstrate a sense of teamwork and belonging. They are very proud of their school and the success they experience in learning. In the nursery class, children show that they can persevere in tasks. They like to solve problems and relax with their friends at snack time. Children would benefit, as learners, if the structure of the session was reviewed to allow them more time to explore their interests in depth. There is further scope for staff to have deeper conversations with children about their learning. At the primary stages, children explained to us how they were improving their skills in evaluating their own work. They are beginning to identify more effectively what they do well and how they can improve. Through the many attractive displays of work and information boards, children illustrate how well they achieve. Four Green flags from Eco-Schools Scotland and a very recent ‘Green Machine’ award demonstrate children’s commitment to sustainability. A Rights Respecting School award, class charters and contributions to a number of charities outline children’s determination to be responsible citizens within their community. Children are proud of the many talents within the school and their contributions in music, drama and artwork.

The nursery and primary school my daughters attended in Scotland got their inspection report recently. It's positive overall. There's a second report which has ratings in specific categories, which is somewhat more of a "report card" format, where the scores are mostly "good" with a few "very good" (there's one more level above that). Since I can't figure out how to get back to that one, it seems they mostly want parents to see the narrative version.

Anyhow, nothing remarkable here. The inspector's view of the school maps very closely to my somewhat cursory observations of the school over the year, there's probably nothing here that surprises anyone. Which is exactly how such things should work the vast majority of the time. Evaluating a school is not some dark art, and it should almost never about surprising anyone with the revelation that a school that appears to be good is actually bad, or vice versa.

Handwringing about how, HOW!?!? would we possibly evaluate a school without primarily looking at test scores (and graduation rates) is just ignorant and uninformed. To be sure, it isn't easy or simple, there's got to be a well-designed formal process, but it isn't unknown territory.

Some Post-Reform Education Theses

The last 15 years have destroyed the intellectual foundation of American education

My favorite example is the argument in favor of teaching science and history for the purpose of improving "literacy." We don't have any working definitions of the core academic disciplines. Or a working definition of a "discipline" or its role in education. The basic definition of education has been hijacked as "college and career readiness," etc., etc. After Vietnam, the US military went back to Clausewitz to try to figure its role out again from first principles. We need to start over with Dewey.

Half-assed technocrats don't cut it.

Educational administrators are always going to tend toward technocracy, but right now we have a generation of terrible, uninterested, uneducated, ideological technocrats. It is the worst case scenario.

The international educational status quo is a decent starting point.

Every system has its strengths and weaknesses, but we don't have to act like we're solving a novel problem, as we have been, even as people go on and on about "international benchmarking."

Be realistic about where we are actually putting in real effort today.

For example, the current conversation about the difficulty of building social capital in low-income neighborhoods. This isn't something we're trying to do and failing. We are barely trying at all. We're not even adequately funding the existing public institutions (libraries, community centers, parks and rec., etc.) in low-income neighborhoods. Why don't we try that first before starting the handwringing?

Fund schools from general funds, not grants, especially private ones.

Some districts will waste their money. Get over it.

The ed-tech market does not work.

Actually the whole educational publishing market doesn't work either.

Enough with the standardized tests.

Professional teachers can evaluate their students. It is their job. They do it all over the world.

AP is a product, not a proxy for quality.

Increased AP enrollment just means the school is moving more product.

It is easy to mislead people about what "we" believed and did just a few years ago.

The memory hole is voracious.

Education can't be the most important problem in the world -- that we can only attempt to fix without spending more money.

Well, it is ok to give money to consultants, charter administration, and real estate scams.

Things People in My Household Cried About Today

• Worried about taking her math benchmark test.
• Upset about losing her kindergarten homework.
• Stressed about completing her SLO's when her classes are full of students who arrived in the country during the school year.

Oh, the Honesty Gap

One of the formative anecdotes in ed reform, experienced personally or second-hand, is the story of a student who is informed by a guidance counselor or other advisor in school that he or she is just "not college material" or shouldn't apply to a top-tier college, or some variation on that theme. Often this is freighted with racism, sexism, class bias or for that matter, just local politics and relationships, and to be clear, these can be very hurtful experiences.

One response to this is to encourage every student, I mean scholar, to aim to attend a selective four year college from the day they arrive at school until they graduate.

On the other hand, the current trending reform meme is the "honesty gap:" that states' low academic standards are misleading kids about how well prepared they are for post-secondary education. This point of view holds that students and parents put a lot of stock on standardized test scores, don't have a lot of other data, and believe that a diploma is a de facto statement of college readiness.

The most obvious way one might double check their readiness for post-secondary education is to ask their teachers or indeed guidance counselor. Some of the time, the adult's honest answer is going to be "No, you aren't ready for that."

Some of the time that is going to be an incorrect answer. Then again some of the time the test is going to give the incorrect answer too. Some of the time they're both going to be biased against women/minorities/poor people.

There's no way to plow through this issue as it is being framed; it is a dead-end approach. The only thing that can be done is to back out and start over, beginning with being clear about what we thought a high school diploma meant traditionally and the implications of changing that. Ultimately though, our systems of college application and induction simply are not rational enough to design our primary and secondary schools around.

These are the People Bankrolling School Reform

Wednesday Martin:

And then there were the wife bonuses.

I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.

The Highlight of the Annual Sports Calendar, Tomorrow

Webcast starts 7:00 PM EDT, Saturday, May 16.

Mass Insight's PPSD Central Office Analysis is a Real Nothingburger

Mass Insight:

Dimension 4 essentially calls for some central office staff to serve as stewards of the change process. These staff steward change by continuously referring to and updating the theory of action as needed, communicating frequently with all stakeholders about the theory of action, and serving as strategic resource brokers (Honig et al., 2010, pp. 88-89). These change managers may help district leaders pursue both knowledge (such as experts in specific aspects of central office transformation) and fiscal resources (such as support from local businesses or foundations).

It goes on and on like that for about 35 pages.

The bottom line is that contrary to the mayor and conventional wisdom, the PPSD central office is leaner than similar cities, particularly in professional staff. We are a bit over-staffed clerically in the central office. But in particular Mass Insight would like to see a lot more data analysis, including collecting and analyzing more data on central office performance, so it seems unlikely this bold transformation would result in much more than just fewer clerks and more higher-end wonks and no actual cost savings (which is presumably what people want).

Understanding Civil Rights Advocacy Groups on Testing

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights:

For the civil rights community, data provide the power to advocate for greater equality under the law.

The people who do civil rights advocacy -- lobbying -- believe in the power of advocacy and lobbying to improve civil rights. To do civil rights advocacy they need data. Therefore, they need test scores.

The problem is that they seem limited to meta-success in this area. Their advocacy and lobbying in recent decades has accomplished little in the key areas of funding and desegregation. Their only win is holding onto what they perceive as the necessary tools to continue their advocacy. It is pretty thin gruel.

I also suspect that a lot of people who become civil rights advocates and lobbyists went to schools where it is at least possible to have and hide an in-school racial achievement gap -- that is, primarily white suburban or private schools. Thus they think disaggregating data at the school level seems like a big deal. In the city, the idea that you need data to demonstrate there is a problem with minority achievement that would otherwise be hidden or unknown just misses the point.

Also, there's some money involved.

If Only Education Could Be as Scientific as Medicine

Scott Alexander:

This pattern absolutely jumps out of the data. First- and second- place winners Nardil and Parnate came out in 1960 and 1961, respectively; I can’t find the exact year third-place winner Anafranil came out, but the first reference to its trade name I can find in the literature is from 1967, so I used that. In contrast, last-place winner Viibryd came out in 2011, second-to-last place winner Abilify got its depression indication in 2007, and third-to-last place winner Brintellix is as recent as 2013.

This result is robust to various different methods of analysis, including declaring MAOIs to be an unfair advantage for Team Old and removing all of them, changing which minor tricylics I do and don’t include in the data, and altering whether Deprenyl, a drug that technically came out in 1970 but received a gritty reboot under the name Emsam in 2006, is counted as older or newer.

So if you want to know what medication will make you happiest, at least according to this analysis your best bet isn’t to ask your doctor, check what’s most popular, or even check any individual online rating database. It’s to look at the approval date on the label and choose the one that came out first.

One Trick Klein

Tony Wan:

The watchword within the company is “One Amplify,” Klein’s code name for a reorganization effort aimed at uniting a company that once listed 12 “C-level” executives and three presidents across five divisions. Today, seven chief officers remain—and no presidents.

Good to see Joel Klein takes the same approach to running a business as he does a school district. Always be reorganizing!

"Opt-Out" has been Extremely Polite So Far

King5:

Not a single 11th grade students showed up to take the SBAC test at Nathan Hale High School this week, a Seattle Public Schools spokesperson confirmed.

It is more difficult to keep your 8 year old home for a week, but a lot of people could.

Also, kicking out the power cord, loundly breaking your pencil tips and/or humming "We Shall Overcome" 20 minutes into the test would also work.