This school reform industry initiative got some attention last week.
According to the Detroit News, a secret work group that includes top aides to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has been working to come up with a model for so-called “value schools.”
Other records distributed to group members indicate they want to explore using fewer teachers and more instruction through long-distance video conferencing. Each “value school” student would receive a “Michigan Education Card” to pay for their “tuition” — similar to the electronic benefits transfer used to distribute food stamps and cash assistance for the poor. Students could use leftover money on the “EduCard” for high school Advanced Placement courses, music lessons, sport team fees, remedial education or cyber courses, according to an outline of the advisory team’s agenda.
You see, Michigan’s boldest innovators understand that in order to produce the kind of out-of-the-box boldness that their state’s stifled students so desperately need, they must be free of the shackles of oversight, regulation, public reporting requirements and the state constitution, which prohibits exactly the kind of voucher program that operation Skunk Works is clearly intended to be.
Also totally not needed in this bold experiment: teachers and other so-called educational experts who are incapable of outside-of-the-box thinking because they are literally inside of their box-shaped classrooms.
But who will operate the boldly innovative schools of the future with their “fewer teachers and more instruction through long-distance video conferencing”?
Reader: I give you Richard McLellan. Head of the Oxford Foundation, former lawyer on the Citizen’s United case, advancer of liberty and opportunity, devotee of all things voucher-like, McLellan understands that since Michigan’s public and its constitution do not appear ready for a boldly innovative school voucher system, it is best to begin planning for that system away from the public eye.
The teacher they invited quit when he realized the group was working on a privatization plan. Good for him:
The group had one educator, Paul Galbenski, an Oakland Schools business teacher and Michigan’s 2011 Educator of the Year, but he left the group.”It really kind of looked like for me that they were discussing a special kind of school being created outside of the Michigan public school system,” Galbenski said. “That’s when I started questioning my involvement.”
In January, participants were instructed in a memo to use “alternative” email accounts. Records show Behen, Davenport and two other Department of Technology, Management and Budget employees have since used private email addresses to correspond.
Here’s a tip for those public employees in Michigan who stuck around. When someone instructs you not to use your state email account while supposedly conducting public business, your “transparency” and “accountability” radar should be pinging. If it’s not, you should do the right thing, stop play-acting, and go work directly for the private party. Sometimes ethical dilemmas are very simple, although admittedly never easy:
Behen said he and the other four state employees are mostly working after-hours on the project with Friday evening and Saturday meetings “Why are we using private email addresses? Because it’s just easier,” Behen said. “There’s nothing secret or anything about this.”
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has backed off the secret planning group and is now babbling about “efficiency” to put more money “back into schools”, but he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would object to the state joining with think tank lawyers and private interests to craft education policy behind closed doors. I actually understand why he’s looked like a deer in the headlights all week, why he’s confused by the uproar. 80% of Michigan’s charter schools are for-profit entities, already. They’re mostly national chains run by appointed boards. This entire district in Michigan has no traditional public school system left at all. It’s gone, replaced by a national charter chain and an appointed board. Snyder didn’t anticipate the blowback to the Value Voucher Plan because no one has raised any questions about public school privatization initiatives before, as long as privatization is put in under the magic word, “reform.” Snyder probably doesn’t see much difference between this state-level group of reformers and the reformers in Detroit or Muskegon Heights or Flint, and why would he? Private donors, a lack of transparency and appointed (not elected) boards are business as usual in reform circles.
What Snyder didn’t realize is that while it’s (apparently!) A-OK for reform industry leaders to privatize and “reform” schools in places like Detroit or Flint, reformers are not necessarily going to be greeted as liberators in suburban and rural public school districts state-wide. You’ll recall that reform industry leaders and media sold “market-based reform” as a cheap fix for Our Failed and Failing Schools. No one in the reform industry mentioned that they’d be “scaling up” once they got a foot in the door of the K-12 market, and taking their privatization mantra into those public school districts that aren’t failing at all. They probably should have been straight with the public about that.
The growing popular pushback to school reform industry initiatives, in my opinion and based on my observation over the last two years, coincides with school reform industry iniatives spreading outside urban districts and into suburban and rural districts. The resistance should surprise no one in the reform industry or their parrots in media because they sold deregulation and market-based reform dishonestly.
Maude
The temper of the times is finally changing. Without the government, who would have caught the Boston suspect? Mr. CEO of a major corporation? Mr. Wall Street Guy with his huge bonus?
Mnemosyne
It’s the usual thing, unfortunately — people don’t care what poor people have to deal with until it gets applied to themselves. Sort of like how a lot of white folks didn’t really care about police brutality until it started being applied to them and not just to Those People.
Yutsano
You are really doing yeoman’s work on this Kay. I don’t have children and I never intend to, but I completely understand the importance of a good solid education as the future of this country. Republicans just want that for their wealthy donors and fuck the rest.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s part of it, but to be fair, these were sold as applying to failed and failing schools. That they’ve now settled on “choice” as a rationale was not the original pitch. I could argue that this was bait and switch. If you’re happy with your public school system you could reasonably believe it wouldn’t apply to you.
El Caganer
@Maude: That’s easy – Tea Party patriots Standing Their Ground and exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Kay
@Yutsano:
How could they do it? How could they get into bed with hard Right groups who never supported the whole idea of public education and expect that this was going to turn out well?
Doesn’t that strike you as reckless? Really? They thought billionaires were the absolute best people to run a public education system that they don’t rely and haven’t ever used?
Thanks, reformers! Good job!
Maude
@El Caganer:
With or without the Depends?
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I suspect they did it because they knew that no additional government money was going to be forthcoming in our low-tax craze days, and the billionaires have money. Either they didn’t realize that the billionaires had their own agenda, or they didn’t care as long as they got some of that money.
scav
Seriously, the bright bulbs outside the proverbial box thinkers need an “easier” e-mail system. . . that’s the ticket. And it’s certainly easier having to remember to use one e-mail for part of your task and another for another part (does compartmentalizing things in their mind like that put them back in the proverbial box?) . . . still not getting it. There really is a form of gramatical logic salad that get’s spouted.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne:
Money = virtue.
Handing over education to the billionaires is simply the modern version of having them all run by the clergy of the established religion.
Blessed be the Market, the righteous judge.
Petorado
Moochers and looters the lot of them. Every time there is a pot of public money, folks from private industry come up with ways to “innovate,” “reform,” or “privatize” so that they can stick that money into their own pockets. Public funds sitting there to be used for public benefit are wasted until they are transformed into someone else’s profits, so their thinking goes.
Davis X. Machina
I think most of us have already seen this:
Teacher’s resignation letter: ‘My profession … no longer exists’.
In WaPo, of all places.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, it’s just tough for me to imagine. I’m as impressed by “gifts” as the next person, but seriously. When has “free” money ever meant “free”?
If Bill Gates told them he’d pay their mortgage if he could put up a job chart for their kids on the fridge would they go for it?
“Sure! Take the public schools! Take the senior center and the library while you’re at it. God knows we can’t run them!”
Eljai
So, I guess I can assume then that the “Oxford Foundation” has nothing to do with Oxford University and is funded by a bunch of right-wing anonymous funders.
jl
” When someone instructs you not to use your state email account while supposedly conducting public business, your “transparency” and “accountability” radar should
be pingingrun around with its hair on fire. “Kay
@jl:
I’m not even a public employee and I would be out of there :)
They should probably concentrate first on an online course in ethics for Snyder’s appointees. Review sunshine laws, adjourn.
MattF
So, it turns out that when people have middle-class incomes they’re not only willing to pay taxes for public schools– they prefer to run schools that way. Who woulda thunk it.
rikyrah
Kay,
they used that bullshyt because it was urban areas.
but here’s the thing, even in urban areas, you need to show results.
they aren’t showing results. and we can see that they’re not showing results…
plus, all the scandals that are coming out with this shady ass ‘reformers’
now, when it comes to middle class White folks, since it’s THEIR children…they aren’t gonna let the flim flam gonna pass about their schools.
jl
@Kay:
Thanks for the post, and thanks for being on top of important issues.
I also noticed this:
‘ But who will operate the boldly innovative schools of the future with their “fewer teachers and more instruction through long-distance video conferencing”? ‘
The idea that somehow automating learning with tech will do magic, and eliminate the need for pesky humans is not limited to private corporation grifters. I know some scheme to computerise and distance-learning-ize (and revenue-ize U of California brand name) was shut down recently. Problem was that all the bigshots in UC administration thought they could just whip out some “innovative educational product” slap U of California on it, with NO faculty input, and PROFIT! Thank goodness the faculty squaked and it got shut down.
Now, when teachers protest these innovations, the usual response is to label teachers as Luddites. But in my experience, the problem is that unless you make a hell of a fuss, what will happen, invariably, is that people who do not know the subject matter, have never taught or have not taught in years, or who are in administration because… well they got kicked out of the classroom because they couldn’t communicate how to tie shoelaces, run off with some sketchy entrepreneurs and cook up some random mess.
But, as commenters above have noted, there has always been a tradition of contempt for teaching in the US, and I think it is worse now than it was in the ‘good old days.
I love using computers, for example, independent study with some guided computer exercises or learning modules. Frees up class time for a lot of more interesting and productive stuff than lecturing. But, damn, it seems hard to get funds for actual teachers, even ones with very good records for ‘value added’ to do that. But you get a bunch of functionally innumerate people all named Dean, and some sketchy corporate characters, who for all sorts of reasons, cannot be all that forthcoming about how their stuff works or what is evidence that it does, and, boy, they can find funds. Plenty of funds. I seen it several settings, in public and private educational organizations.
Edit: CA Gubinaror Jerry Brown is pushing some statewide effort, and he is swearing up and down that teachers will be involved, content and methods developement, and validation of new tools will be transparent. We will see. I am skeptical, but what can a mere lesser person like myself do about.
Eff it, am just a teacher, if I were really smart I would be out MAKING LOTS OF CASH ANY WAY I CAN!
Kay
@rikyrah:
Well, but they have a big advantage over public schools. They advertise. Heavily.
I’d be pissed if my public school money was going to advertising, but it’s another area where no one seems to notice or care.
Kay
@rikyrah:
This is the advertising division of the industry.
maurinsky
I am currently taking online classes, but even so, the teacher makes a HUGE difference. I have one teacher this term who uses different areas to give different types of assignments. So, you have an essay to write, he uses the announcement page to give that to you. But if you want the topic for the essay, he might not put it there, he might instead put it in the course content folder for the week. If there’s a discussion topic, you better be smart enough to go check out the discussion board, which most of the time is used to talk about issues raised with our weekly essay, but every now and again he slips an assignment in there. It is more work to keep up with where he puts the work than it is to actually do the work. I hate him!
That’s only marginally OT, but online learning is not for everyone, nor are all topics well served by online learning.
RepubAnon
@scav: Yeah, an “easier” e-mail system free of the burdensome regulations that allow for transparency in decision-making (thus discouraging fraud and cronyism). Much healthier to make those decisions out of the public eye, where the appropriate marketing phrases can be cooked up to put the scheme over on the rubes.
MattF
But now all the hard work that the committee put into stringing together those good, meaningful messaging words… “value”,”efficiency”,”market-based”,”reform”… it’s all just going to waste! It’s almost as though people care about how their children are educated!
Mnemosyne
@jl:
The whole “distance learning” thing always reminds me of this sequence from Real Genius, except that they got it backwards.
(Edited for coding fail.)
El Caganer
@Maude: Oh, they’re fully strapped – Kevlar Depends and up-armored Hoverounds.
jl
@maurinsky: I think there are two big problem with overly automated online learning, besides the administrative problems you mention.
One is that to go beyond routine rote learning of basic material and problem solving techniques, you need to get a little bit inside the heads of students are having trouble. You need to find out what is going on with them. What is is? Poor motivation to learn? Stereotype bias? Anxiety? Some very basic misconception that is holding them up? What? That cannot be automated.
And second, application of concepts in an open ended situation. How will you apply the knowledge in the real world ( and the nature of ‘real world’ applications depends on the subject matter ). That’s where there is a need for real relevant ‘out of the box’ thinking in education. You can’t automate that either.
greennotGreen
The thing is, some students would do pretty well with automated learning…but some students wouldn’t. Now, you could wait until the end of the quarter to find out from the test that the kid isn’t getting it, or you could have a TEACHER on hand who can see right away that automation isn’t cutting it with that kid. ‘Course, who cares about that one kid? It’s all about the bottom line.
BTW, there was some flak recently about Arne Duncan (IIRC) saying that education provided a great return on investment, but I don’t fault him for his word choice. In a Star Trek universe, education for the sake of personal enrichment is a sufficient argument for investment of resources, but in the non-Gene Roddenberry universe, we have limited resources, and it’s reasonable to make the argument that investing money in education is a wise choice from a financial perspective as well as personal enrichment.
greennotGreen
@Mnemosyne: I loved that movie! I’m going to have to Netflix it soon.
I was working full time and going to school full time when that movie came out – I could *so* relate. And I never left the ivory tower. And I work with lasers!
jl
@greennotGreen: RE Duncan’s comment on ROI, the devil is in how you measure ROI. I think, or at least hope, Duncan, for all of his major faults, has a more reasonable and broader view than the educational ‘reform’ grifters. There are better things to watch out for, wrt Duncan, than every time he utters some buzzword.
What I think folks do not understand is that once you get a public private corporation involved, there is one and only one definition of ROI that matters, both economically and legally.
In cases where the corporation sells a product or service, and there are objective ways to measure whether the corporation delivered what it promised, mechanisms exist to discipline non-performance and malfeasance.
But those mechanisms work well in cases where the gains, losses and remedies are fungible. Kids’ intellectual and emotional development, which are real losses in an poor educational organization, are not fungible.
And when the measurement of corporate performance can be gamed and manipulated by the corporation, then there is a high probability of things not going well.
And besides social engineering propaganda about ‘our failing schools’ , gaming and manipulating how to measure learning is one of the educational entrepreneur/grifter industry’s major activities.
Kay
@greennotGreen:
I’ve had this argument before here, but I disagree. I follow Duncan fairly closely. He relies on the market reform jargon constantly
Whatever elite Academy of Learning he attended should issue a refund. He speaks in slogans. He also credits his narrow version of “reform” for gains that were slowly being achieved before Bush left Texas and before Duncan left Chicago.
Spaghetti Lee
Jeez, what a bunch of crooks. If concerned parents really were begging for Superman to come save them, you’d think Superman wouldn’t need closed door meetings, secondary e-mail accounts, and so forth.
rikyrah
All the urban folks warned them….but they didn’t listen
rikyrah
@Kay:
I despise Duncan. Period.
Gin & Tonic
@jl: But how *do* you measure learning? Or how do you measure teacher’s performance? In most other professions, knowledge-based jobs, whatever you call them, where widgets-per-hour is not a way of measuring productivity, there are nevertheless some agreed-upon metrics or, at the very least, some method for employer and employee to agree on what should be measured and how. In my one involvement with public school administration/governance in this area (anecdata, I know) the teachers were unable to agree on *anything*. Well, sorry, just as there are good and poor dentists or engineers, there are good and poor teachers. Everyone knows who they are. How do we discern in a fair and objective manner?
Parents are extremely sensitive to this because there are no do-overs. If your child wastes second grade because the teacher is ineffective, you never get that back.
Kay
@rikyrah:
He uses stats selectively. The reason it’s wrong to do that is he is taking credit for work he didn’t do.
You know who did the work? Teachers and students. In those failed and failing public schools.
Linnaeus
When one looks at Snyder as a politician, it’s becoming clearer and clearer how weak a governor he actually is. His viability as a candidate for governor (besides a divided GOP field and having lots of money) was predicated on being more moderate and being effective in a no-nonsense businesslike fashion. We’re seeing now that the real drivers behind policy in the Snyder administration are the business/think tank complex (headed by folks like Dick DeVos) and their radical supporters in the state legislature. Snyder is just an instrument for them, and when he does try something outside of their preferred policies, e.g., the recent road improvement package, they rebuff him with no consequences at all.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Gin & Tonic:
We already have infallible standardized tests for that. Infallible, do you hear? The problem is that there’s no enforcement. Under my plan, if a school fails to meet its goals the Superintendent of Schools for that district and the principle of the failing school are publicly flogged, and half of the teachers are fired via random drawing. Scores will go up – or else.
Kay
@Linnaeus:
Republicans have a real dilemma on their hands.
While they may succeed in tanking the national economy therefore “winning!” at the federal level, they also hold 26 states. If the economy doesn’t get better, their governors are vulnerable because they all came in on “jobs”
Obama isn’t up for re-election, their governors are.
Davis X. Machina
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Remember when we basically eliminated home fires? We bought a shit-ton of smoke detectors, fired all the firemen, and sold the firehouses to be converted into condos.
The way you solve a problem is to measure it very, very carefully. And nothing else.
Lurking Canadian
As sure as day follows night, the balances on these school stamp cards would not keep up with the actual costs of school, thus ensuring that parents who actually want an educational experience for their kids (all the “optional” stuff listed at the end) will have to pay for it out of pocket.
We are witnessing the slow-motion foundation of an aristocracy.
Davis X. Machina
@Lurking Canadian:
The whole point of a treehouse is the ability to pull up the ladder. Qua house, a treehouse is small, lacking in amenities, and doesn’t come with parking. The ladder, ah, the ladder though, redeems all those deficiencies.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
They could do it for two reasons. For most of the core Republican voters – evangelists, conspiracy and gun nuts, basically the Tea Party – they do not like the public school system. They distrust it. It exposes their children to the outside world, and they only have to look around to see all the children who’ve abandoned their parents’ way to become… I don’t know, gay, atheists, or just reasonable people who care about the weak and vulnerable. Not part of their parents’ community, basically. This is a historical tradition. It’s why the Pilgrims moved to America, actually. It was the only place so far away that their children wouldn’t grow up and, oh, speak Dutch.
The second reason is loosely tied to the first reason, but is simpler and sadder. This has become a liberal-vs-conservative issue. If we’re for it, they are against it because we MUST be wrong about everything.
Kay
@Lurking Canadian:
I don’t know. Don’t write us off just yet.
There’s some amusing stuff out there. Big “choice” advocate, GOP lawmaker in FL, found out they were loosening regs on charters to allow one into his suburban, lily-white district which has good public schools.
He sounded like a union thug! They’ll pull money from “our” schools, they’re not “proven performers”. The free market is good enough for those other kids. HE wants to keep his public school system.
jl
@Gin & Tonic:
” Well, sorry, just as there are good and poor dentists ”
And how do you measure the performance of a dentist or a doctor. I don’t see any good objective way, here in the U.S. or anywhere else.
But doctors and dentists tend to have good training, and there are standards of care that require minimum level of resources and a range of techniques appropriate to different cases.
I think teaching is similar. There are fancy statistical measures of ‘value added’ that take into account history of the students, environmental factors like class size. But they are easily gamed for one purpose or another, so few trust them, and I can’t say I blame them. I mean, as a stats guy, I can see the places where one might be tempted to put in gimmicks.
So what do you do if you can’t measure the output well?
One approach is to ensure good input. Pay teachers well, make teaching an attractive profession so that good people go into it and stay, provide adequate resources. Have good national and state curriculum development programs with teacher, parental and student participation. I think places like Japan (at least for primary) and Finland, Japan and New Zealand have done it.
You look at teacher pay in most relevant terms for standard of living, ratio of GDP per capita, US is at bottom of high income developed countries, and most of those with worse pay are social welfare states.
So, teaching in the US: low pay, low status, no social support. It sucks.
So, yeah, measuring output in education is hard. The US can look at how other countries that do better have done it. Or the US can pretend education can be run like output is easy to meausre, and be a miserably failed loser. Or just throw up its hands and whine, and be a loser.
Why not look at what other countries have solved the problem and adopt the variety of techniques that would work best here?
Linnaeus
@Lurking Canadian:
Yep – that’s one of the hallmarks of the drive to neofeudalism: establishment of an aristocracy, this one founded upon wealth (particularly corporate wealth) rather than membership in a hereditary military class.
jl
@Davis X. Machina:
” The way you solve a problem is to measure it very, very carefully. And nothing else. ”
I disagree with that. As an example, the quality of healthcare is very difficult to measure by way of looking at individual cases and trying to measure input and output and averaging. But there is a lot of indirect evidence that some countries do very much better than others, and practically every high income developed country does better than the U.S. Edit: I think education is the same way.
I don’t think the quality of some processes can be measured in the same way one would do statistical industrial quality control. Healthcare and education are two of them. And the result is we do horribly crummy at the former, and kind of OK, but nearly as well as we could at the latter.
Edit: And BTW, I am lucky enough to be a handsomely paid teacher who won some awards and my ex-students tell me that fancier places they go to later are kind of micky mouse BS after they get my larnin’ . So, I have no personal stake in what I say here., I just think its true.
Linnaeus
@jl:
Right. Countries like Finland have also looked beyond the issue of education in of itself and addressed the social context in which education takes place and that’s why broad social welfare programs make a difference.
In the United States, we seem to be offloading onto the education sector problems that it’s not designed to address and at the same time cutting the resources that they would need to deal with those issue in even a limited fashion. “Better education” has become the catch-all answer for solving everything on the cheap.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. It’s terrifying the extent to which their outlook has become so tribal that I can’t think of any single thing that they can’t be persuaded to support simply by saying “the liberals are against it.”
West of the Rockies
Another “education reformer” I would love to see face public scorn and riducle is Michelle Rhee, who has been handing out awards to some complete knuckleheads.
Gin & Tonic
@jl:
In hospital settings, at least, do you have any familiarity with morbidity and mortality reviews? All aspects of cases and their care are reviewed between practitioners and management on a regular basis, and criticism can be brutal. Not necessarily saying that’s the model that should be followed, but there’s one measure for you, that takes into account the relative difficulties of cases and looks at their outcomes. On the teaching side, let’s say, just as one example, you have 20 kids taking AP Calc one year. Nobody scores above a 2. Are there any consequences? Is there any systematic review, comparing the backgrounds and achievements of the kids from algebra on up, and looking at the teacher’s methods? Who decides who gets to teach AP Calc next year and on what basis?
The various snarky comments aside, I get really tired of “you can’t measure outcomes.” Why not? If the standardized tests aren’t it, then what is? I’d think the practicioners would want this as much as management does/should.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
Nah, it’s not that slow motion.
There’s an argument to be made that all systems eventually devolve into aristocracy/oligarchy as a fairly small number of people at the top collude to amass as much wealth and power as possible and then keep it in the family. As someone else put it, build a tree house and pull up the ladder.
Feudalism and the aristocrats. Communism and the Inner Party apparatchiks. Capitalism and our 1%ers… etc.
Kay
@West of the Rockies:
That’s because she has no clue about any of these states she’s parachuting into.
She doesn’t know which state legislators are Right wing nuts because she’s a NATIONAL celebrity.
StudentsFirst advocates the same set of “reforms” in each and every state, which should give the dopes in media that this has nothing whatever to do with “data” because state public school systems vary so widely.
jl
@Gin & Tonic:
Are you making an analogy between morbidity and mortality reviews and standardized tests? If so I don’t agree.
A morbidity and mortality review, like a parent teacher conference or departmental review are not standardized statistical procedures.
Attempting to run an overall quality score regression for, say, two hundred hospitals, using observable, measurable input and outputs is like standardized educational testing. Doing benchmarking stats for efficiency reviews. And I can tell you, from personal observation, those things raise as much controversy and fuss in healthcare as they do in education.
” The various snarky comments aside, I get really tired of “you can’t measure outcomes.” Why not? If the standardized tests aren’t it, then what is? I’d think the practicioners would want this as much as management does/should.”
Well, I am tired of it too. I am a statistician, and I would love for there to be a reliable, transparent, stable ‘value added’ regression methodology for improving educational practice and quality of teachers. It would be another place I could swank around as a technical bigshot! But there doesn’t not seem to be one.
What does whether you, or I, are tired of that situation have to do with anything?
I think there are crude measures of overall achievement. How else could we be talking about South Korea, or Finland, or Japan, or New Zealand, or Switzerland, or other places as having excellent primary school systems that don’t leave a lot of their kids behind?
You can trust standardized tests and competitive performance criteria for some things, and they are good for some things and not for others.
Maybe standardized tests and competitive performance criteria are just not good for micromanaging curricula and solving problems at the school level.
I think I have one statistical quality control guru, Deming, who would agree with me on that. If Deming was right about automobiles and lightbulbs, I think he might be right about education too.
West of the Rockies
@Kay: I feel compelled to point out, Kay, that contrary to the evidence in my first post, I actually can spell the word “ridicule”. How stupid do I feel commenting on a post such as this and misspelling a word. Ah, the importance of proofreading, yes?
Narcissus
I don’t mean to be glib, but it doesn’t really surprise me that the people waging economic/class warfare against The Other (i.e. us) don’t also wage economic/class warfare against themselves.
Jebediah
@Mnemosyne:
it may or may not be a triumph of the cinematic arts but I have always been fond of that movie.
Jebediah
@jl:
I spent some time teaching elementary. I can’t imagine effectively teaching students that you don’t know to some extent. Even body language tells you something about how a kid is doing.
Enough with the fucking privatization and gimmicks already, FFS! Let’s try some really radical shit – decently paid teachers, reasonable student/teacher ratio, students who start the day with a healthy breakfast at school if they can’t get it at home. And if we want to get really crazy, let’s give those teachers some flexibility with curriculum and methods, and let’s send high-stakes testing straight to the center of the sun where it belongs.
gene108
@jl:
I’ve only dealt with on-line classes at the collegiate level, where you are taking the on-line classes voluntarily and you don’t expect the same degree of attention as in K-12.
At that level I don’t see the issue of on-line classes.
JR in WV
@jl:
When someone instructs you to use “private” email accounts instead of your official publicly managed email accounts, you should immediately visit a prosecuting attorney, not delay, unless you want to be part of the conspiracy.
These people are part of a conspiracy to steal public monies, and should all ALL be in jail awaiting trial.
JR in WV
@jl:
If you are a teacher, maybe you should use proper grammar in your posts, less you look like the problem and not like the solution.
Really, “I seen it several settings”? Come on, please!
James E. Powell
@Gin & Tonic:
In my one involvement with public school administration/governance in this area (anecdata, I know) the teachers were unable to agree on *anything*.
You are assuming that their agreement is something to be desired. Do you want education or indoctrination? Different teachers, like different people, are what make the world an interesting place.
And, no, teaching is nothing like engineering, or medicine, or any other profession based on well-established applied science.
Mnemosyne
@JR in WV:
Ahem. Lest, not less.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
James E. Powell
@jl:
Why not look at what other countries have solved the problem and adopt the variety of techniques that would work best here?
Has the US ever done anything like that on a major public policy? Isn’t it toxic to any proposed policy to let it be known that other countries, particularly socialist atheist Europe, have tried it and it worked?
jl
@JR in WV:
I’m in a hurry today. I am commenting on a blog. I am not an English teacher. In other words, too bad.
Come on over and do my damn laundry and help me clean the fridge if you are so concerned about it.
James E. Powell
@Gin & Tonic:
So, you want to measure outcomes? First, let’s have a discussion about what outcomes are desired. Not the usual rubbish about how every student will go to college, nor the idealistic descriptions of subject-matter mastery in the various state standards. What do we, the people of the United States, expect all high school graduates to know and to be able to do?
If we tried to have that discussion and tried to keep it anchored to reality, it might get pretty interesting.
RSA
@Eljai:
My thought exactly. From their Web site:
No translation required: the Oxford Foundation aims to lessen the burdens of public education.
RSA
@James E. Powell:
We do this in my department, though it’s at the university level rather than K-12. I’m currently in charge of our accreditation effort, and here’s what it involves. A national accreditation organization sends out a team to the department on a several-year cycle. The accreditation team has received a self-study report in advance (ours was 132 pages long, for the last cycle), describing our students, program educational objectives, program outcomes, continuous improvement efforts, curriculum, faculty, facilities, and support. The team spends a couple of days talking to faculty and students, looking at course materials, and pretty much going wherever they want. They write a report, and we respond.
To prepare for this, we review, assess, and make suggestions for improvement to our core courses every semester, covering two rounds between accreditation visits. We talk with our industrial advisory council, our graduates, and other constituencies. We track course-level changes and see how and whether they should influence course-level learning outcomes, the overall curriculum, and even the program educational objectives. (All of these buzzwords have definitions, though they evolve over time.)
Every department in my college does this, and the college has an associate dean and a full-time director who oversee the effort; IT and administrative staff are also involved. I expect this can be done in K-12–it might already be done; I don’t know. It does take a fair amount of expensive work.
(For what it’s worth, all this is process. It takes people involved in a specific discipline, I think, to do a good job of figuring out what students should know.)
Lurking Canadian
@James E. Powell: Doesn’t count. Either it doesn’t count because it just hasn’t failed YET but it will any day now, or it doesn’t count because a free market solution would be even better, or it doesn’t count because those countries are (ahem) nationally homogeneous, so they don’t have America’s (ahem) unique problem.
lojasmo
@Yutsano:
Biology aside, we never intended to have kids either. ;)
Mo
This post is an interesting counterpoint to one Ezra Klein did this morning on healthcare: If this was a pill you’d do anything to get it. He writes about the incredibly long and expensive studies done to see if you could cut costs and improve outcomes. Only one of the 16 programs succeeded. They are shutting it down and beginning a new round of experimental programs. Why? What works is hiring experienced nurses and sending them out to visit once a week with seniors who have at least one long term illness and a recent hospitalization. And they don’t stop. The nurses get to know people, see them in their homes, notice when things are going downhill, and are trusted to make recommendations. The other programs all wanted to have call centers reminding people to take their medications, None of them worked. It took another human being getting to know someone, what their fears are, why they aren’t taking the meds.
Education is much the same. We do need tests, but we also need to be able to trust good people to do their jobs and support them. Which is something the “elite” will not allow.
Kay
@Mo:
Thanks so much. That’s EXACTLY what I mean.
Southern Beale
What pisses me off about all the “reform” BS going on right now — and Tennessee has GOBS of it, thanks to that idiot Michelle Rhee, whose ex-husband is our Commissioner of Education — is that the pro-reformers keep spreading the lie that our public education system is “broken,” and “failing,” and all that. And everyone just accepts that talking point without even questioning it.
We have some fucking amazing public schools here. And some amazing public school teachers. And why we haven’t seen any blowback from the unions or parents’ groups or anyone else to challenge that talking point is amazing to me.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
Because they have a huge megaphone, and billions (with a B!) of dollars.
TN has a small but scrappy pro-public school contingent. Didn’t they just beat vouchers?
grape_crush
This pisses me off. I live in Michigan, my kids go to one of the better public school districts in the state – one goes to one of the better high schools in the nation – and Snyder wants to screw all that up just so a few friends of his are looking for a profit-making opportunity.
What an asshole.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Kay:
“Vouchers” is one case where the grifters have hoisted themselves on their own
petardLuntz-word. The common association people have with the word “vouchers” is a little piece of cheap paper with worthless promises printed on it. A “voucher” is something you get handed at the door of the time-sharing condo sales seminar, the one that was marketed to you under false pretenses, so you can use it to redeem your “free prize” at the end of the seminar that turns out to be worth roughly $1.76, and that after wasting 3 hours listening to bullshit so awful it makes you want to stick knitting needles in your ears.“Vouchers” is not a word I would use when trying to market anything, and I’m glad that for once the grifters are stuck with a term that carries its own stink around with it where ever it goes.