KEEP TALKING...

I’ve been working on teacher evaluation for most of my career as a teacher, administrator, and teacher educator; first being evaluated, then doing the evaluation as an assistant principal and subject area coordinator, then helping design a state-wide beginning teacher evaluation initiative. After nearly 40 years in education, all I can say is that the current system is the worst I’ve ever seen.

If the goal of these systems was to get rid of the so-called “bad teachers” that supposedly exist in great numbers in our schools, it has been spectacularly ineffective. Every form of teacher evaluation winds up identifying only between 1-3% of teachers as “ineffective”–yet we continue to spend precious money and time in the vain attempt to purge the system of these “bad teachers”.

Here’s the truth–it’s a colossal waste of time to keep pouring good money after bad in this attempt. Why?

Not because there are zero weak teachers–there are some, though as most will acknowledge, a surprisingly small number.

Because bad teachers self-select, and weed themselves out of the classroom well before any evaluation system “catches” them. Why?

Because the job is too hard to do it without finding any level of satisfaction or fulfillment–and the money isn’t good enough to keep them in the classroom, unlike other jobs where people report low satisfaction, but remain in the job for the financial rewards.

Here’s another truth–we know quite a lot about how to evaluate teachers. And we, quite simply, don’t have the stomach to do it. Why?

Because it requires time, money, and effort. It also requires knowledgeable experts to spend copious amounts of time in teachers’ classrooms, watching them teach, talking about teaching, providing professional development to address the teacher’s reflections on their practice, and targeted feedback on matters of content, pedagogy, and instruction.

I’ve helped design such a system, and even though it wasn’t perfect, it worked better than just about any other approach. It still didn’t “catch” large numbers of bad teachers, though. Why?

Because they just don’t exist.

What this approach to teacher evaluation did do was empower those teachers to “own” their own practice, and to be responsible for their own improvement. It was also a valuable form of professional development for the experienced teachers who served as the “evaluators,” many of whom reported that they learned more about teaching from participating in the process than from other forms of professional development.

You know what isn’t very useful? For non-experts to provide their “feedback” on teacher quality–which in our current environment is most of what we get. All-knowing policy pronouncements from folks who have never attended a public school, never sent their own children to a public school, have no degrees in education, and have never taught anyone anything, but are now–because of how much wealth they have squirreled away, in positions of authority over public education in our country. (Psst…that’s you, Betsy…)

At the risk of sounding rude and condescending, unless it’s about providing evidence of a teacher abusing a child or committing some sort of crime against a child–in which case, as a court-mandate reporter, I’m obligated to go to law enforcement with those claims–I really am not interested in “your thoughts” about how well you think your kid’s teacher is doing. because you don’t know. Why?

Because the teacher one parent thinks is awful, another parent thinks is a hero. It’s why we don’t have the relatives of crime victims serve as the judge and jury for the persons suspected of committing those crimes.

Because they aren’t objective–and they aren’t supposed to be. Parents are supposed to see the world through their kids’ eyes. It’s not their job to evaluate teachers. And unless you are a teacher, or an administrator in your kid’s school, it’s not your job either.

I’ve been teaching since 1980, and get asked to do evaluations of music teachers all the time–and I always say no. Why?

Not because I don’t know what “good teaching” looks like–I do. But that’s just *my* opinion of what good teaching looks–or sounds–like. Because I don’t feel qualified to judge another teacher if I haven’t worked in their context; understand their students, their colleagues and principals, understand their building and district “culture”, who had their job before they did, what are the community’s expectations, what that teacher’s background is, and dozens of other specifics that can’t be captured on the 4-point scale we currently use.

And now, two final notes:

With respect to parents as “consumers”: When you make this comparison it only reveals your misunderstanding of the complexity of teaching and learning. Education is not a business. And it should not be run like one.

My kids have had teachers I thought were great, and ones I didn’t think were so hot. It happens. And when it does, it’s my job to do what I can to help my child keep learning. Not to pretend I know better than them how to do their job–because guess what? I don’t. And neither do you.

With respect to improving parental involvement: You know what teachers want you to do?

• help their kids do their home work
• make sure they practice their instruments
• make sure they get to all school events, concerts, plays, sporting events, etc.
• travel with them
• take them to museums and art galleries
• watch movies
• read to them
• feed them healthy meals
• spoil them with ice cream
• sing to them
• play with them
• let them know that all those tests they are forced to take don’t tell us anything about how much they know, or who they are

Try to support what their teachers do with them for 7-8 hours per day. And tell them that they should respect their teachers–and model that respect by not complaining about them at home in front of their kids.

Since publishing my post on teacher silencing yesterday, my mailbox has been inundated with stories from teachers about being harassed, threatened, and intimidated by school district administrators for posting their opinions about standardized tests, opting out, and other issues of education policy and practice.

One teacher wrote:

I was having a discussion this morning with a colleague and we weren’t sure how to approach this (i.e., teachers advocating for school change as community members that live in the district and pay taxes) without being told our voices didn’t matter because we were employees. Thoughts?

When I asked this teacher who had told her and her colleagues that their voices “didn’t matter,” she replied:

It is the overwhelming umbrella. Nothing verbal, all implied. Teachers are terrified of speaking up because the ones that do have said their evals are getting docked.

This same teacher told me that colleagues in her district feel as though they have “no power,” and have been told that they cannot talk to anyone higher on the administrative “ladder” than their building principals–effectively eliminating any governance role for teachers in school system deliberations on curriculum and policy.

But perhaps the most tragic and heart-wrenching story I’ve heard about the impact of teacher silencing comes from a correspondent that I’ll refer to as “Rachel” (not her real name). Rachel teaches in a small, rural school district in Michigan, and has been working as a teacher for 17 years now. By her own account, Rachel is…

…seriously the absolute most compliant person ever and have never been in trouble in my life. Perfect evals. On every leadership team. Very close to administration…

Rachel is one of those teachers who has devoted herself, personally and professionally, to her career. The kind of teacher who arrives at school early, leaves late, takes her work home with her at night, creates new projects over the weekend–and purchases the materials out of her own pocket, arranges field trips and brings in guest artists and speakers for her students, organizes birthday parties, and wedding showers, and baby showers for her colleagues, hosts student teachers from the local university, serves as a teacher leader in her school district, attends her students’ concerts, and soccer games, and piano recitals, and dance recitals, and graduation ceremonies, pursues professional development opportunities on the weekends, takes graduate classes and workshops over the summer, has little to no idea how much she makes in her yearly salary, and puts her students’ needs above her own.

In short, a teacher.

In addition to her job as a classroom teacher, Rachel had also volunteered to serve as her district’s compliance officer for the state’s review of their status as a PLA (Persistently Low Achieving) school district.

And here’s where things took a very dangerous turn.

I’ll let Rachel tell you what happened…

We were a PLA school (which could be a whole story in itself). We were just heading into MSTEP as the opt out movement was gaining some traction at that point. The problem was, if we didn’t have 95% participation we could get immediately shut down because of being a PLA. As my principal and I were discussing where we stood in readiness for the MSTEP, I said, “Do you think we should say something to staff about the 95% participation? I don’t think they realize how vital it is for our school to hit that because I’m seeing some opt out stuff going around and maybe they don’t know that’s a factor for PLA.”

She said yes, good idea, we need to mention that. The next thing I know, I’m called to her office. She said she had done pretty much what I had – casually mentioned to the superintendent in a list of catch-up items that staff needed to be aware of this–and in response, the superintendent wanted a list of names. I am really close to the principal and superintendent and I understand their being terrified of the school being closed. I think fear of the state was the motivating factor.

I told her no way would I tell her the names of those who had commented in favor of opting out. We went a couple rounds on it and finally she said, “You know, you’re going to get in trouble with the superintendent.” I said I didn’t see how he had any ground to stand on.

A couple hours later I got a letter from the superintendent. He was like, “Why are you refusing a directive?” So he and I had several email exchanges debating the first amendment and the morality of tattling, etc. His interpretation was that I went to an administrator because I had concerns about colleagues not fulfilling their contractual duties and was now hindering an investigation. I didn’t see it that way at all.

Between all the email correspondence, I went to my (union) building representative; she called our union representative, and she called the MEA (Michigan Education Association). I also got in touch with my own lawyer. The MEA said not to give the names to the superintendent.

We had a meeting with my representative, my principal, and the superintendent. None of us had slept. Everyone was crying. Everyone was a disaster. No one wanted lawyers to have to get involved, but I wasn’t giving names. The superintendent and I went back and forth about his claim of insubordination. He said the new law said I could be instantly put on unpaid administrative leave, and he would have to do that…

It’s really scary that it is apparently allowable!!!! I really could have gotten fired for not turning in colleagues!!!! To me that’s the bigger issue. Now the MEA said they would fight it all the way. They were extremely supportive. But I wasn’t physically or emotionally strong enough to be a court case. So I was grateful it worked out. I hope someone stronger is willing to fight it all the way. Because it’s insanity.

Rachel was also insistent that her superintendent not be portrayed as the “bad guy” in this scenario–she places most of the blame on the state’s designation of certain schools as “persistently low achieving”, and the pressures that come with being singled out in this way:

…I really don’t want him (the superintendent) painted in a bad light. Our school was in a very desperate place. We absolutely couldn’t lose test takers or we lost the school. I don’t know what happened from there except I got unfriended by a whole bunch of staff. No one was fired afterward, so I assume no discipline was given out. The superintendent…has tried to apologize and make amends. He’s a good man. It’s the state that is out of control. Absolutely crazy stuff with PLA.

The superintendent’s philosophy on social media (which he had never before ever mentioned to the staff and it was not in our contract or in our technology agreement) is that if you identify that you teach for the district (on your social media profile), you cannot voice an opinion on educational policy or philosophy. Or anything else that would reflect badly on the school. So I removed from my profile all bio info to protect myself. I’m not sure from a legal stance if he is correct.

Now, I’m no lawyer–and I don’t even play one on TV–but after consulting with a couple of my attorney friends and doing a little investigation into this issue, I do not believe that Rachel had violated any laws, nor had her colleagues who had expressed their opinions about opting out of standardized testing. My understanding of the law in this case is that teachers’ speech is protected if they speak out as citizens on “matters of public concern”, and their speech doesn’t disrupt the school–opting out of testing is clearly a matter of public concern, and therefore teachers have the right to share their perspectives on this issue on social media, or in other formats and venues.

However, as shocking as Rachel’s story is, it gets even worse…

Well, all’s well that ends well. Our kids knocked the MSTEP out of the park, we got off the list, the state recognized our efforts, and everyone lived happily ever after. Except me. I had a stroke in the school parking lot the next year and am on medical leave trying to regain the use of the left side of my body. And learning to talk without a stutter. And I absolutely believe the PLA caused it. The stress was absolutely unreal.

Rachel wasn’t the only casualty in this mess:

Some day I’m going to write about the whole process. I know I need to. I had completed a 300+ page report that was due. Took weeks. Two days before the deadline the state changed the report requirements and the entire thing had to be rewritten. This happened constantly. Everything about PLA was how can we trip you up so we can close your school. I’m not exaggerating at all. It was a total nightmare. Our staff developed so many health problems. We worked ALL the time. We had to add hours onto our week per PLA requirement. It worked out to something like 2 extra weeks more than the other buildings with zero added compensation.

This style of accountability borrows a page out of the business approach to managing employees and processes. It’s based on the notion that a manager can influence a worker’s productivity by moving targets and raising goals. It also assumes that workers are not intrinsically motivated to do their best work, or give their best effort. It’s also an inherently autocratic and authoritarian approach to working with other persons.

Interestingly, the research on motivation suggests exactly the opposite is true–that when persons are engaged in critical thinking tasks, attempts to improve productivity by offering incentives actually produce negative results. In other words, when persons are intrinsically motivated in tasks that require higher-order thinking skills, incentives (like merit pay) decrease employee productivity.

So, what’s the solution? Is it wrong to hold schools, and teachers, accountable? If we care about our children, and their learning, shouldn’t we know which schools are doing a good job, and which ones are not?

Let’s start with the obvious–no one wants schools to work better more than teachers. I’ve never met a teacher who wasn’t interested in their students’ learning, and wanted to know how to help them achieve even more. But standardized tests, like Michigan’s M-STEP, are not the answer. You don’t cook a steak better or faster by poking it with more thermometers, and kids don’t learn more by giving them more tests.

Publicly shaming children, teachers, and schools by publishing lists of “Priority Schools,” “Focus Schools,” “PLAs,” and “At-Risk Schools,” and threatening to close schools if they don’t improve their arbitrary rankings isn’t the way to improve the performance of demoralized, beaten down teachers and kids–who are struggling to learn in schools that have had their budgets slashed by state legislatures that don’t seem to value public education.

And instead of continuing to silence teachers with threats and intimidation, let’s try listening to their ideas, inviting them to participate in school governance as partners, and valuing their experience and expertise as professionals. The first step would be for more school leaders–principals, superintendents, and school board members–to find the courage to join teachers in pushing back forcefully against policies that we know are harming children, teachers, and schools. Like the mindless proliferation of standardized testing requirements, the silly rankings of schools based on meaningless measures and metrics, and the invalid and unreliable teacher evaluation systems in place in our schools that evaluate teachers on tests of subjects they don’t teach, and test scores of children they’ve never taught.

Imagine how powerful the voices of teachers could be if joined by their principals, superintendents, and community members who have the best interests of children at heart.

What a chorus that would be.

As anyone watching the corporate education reform movement can attest to, Big Data and metrics have become the coin of the realm to the reform community. Let any conversation between reformers and defenders of public education go on long enough and the reformer will eventually blurt out the magic words: “But…accountability!”

This worldview seems informed by the belief that any problem, no matter how complex or complicated, can be solved by crunching enough numbers. The problem is that when dealing with actual, living human beings, numbers don’t always–or ever–mean what we think they mean.

In honor of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, let’s look at an example from the world of sports. Let’s say we have two hypothetical college hoops teams, the “Reformers” and the “Defenders,” and both teams finish the season with identical records of 20-15. Based on their numerical records, the teams are equal, right?

Not quite. Because the Reformers play in the Big Corporate Conference, or BCC, which has been, historically, one of the most competitive in the country, while the Defenders compete in the Ivory Tower League, or ITL–an organization of universities that strongly values academics, teaching, and scholarship, and sees participation in athletics as just one part of their institutional mission (I know, I know–this kind of conference would never exist in real life–let me dream!). As a result, each of the Reformers‘ victories are given more relative weight, or value, in the complex statistical formula used by the national rankings experts, while the Defenders‘ victories are given less “credit”. So, even though both teams finished the regular season with the same record, the Reformers were ranked in the top 25 and awarded a 6 seed, while the Defenders finished the season unranked and missed the tournament. Sounds fair, right?

Well, not so fast my friend!

It just so happens that this was a “down year” for the BCC, and their advantage over other conferences in the seeding process is based more on historical precedent than current performance. At the same time, the ITL’s teams overachieved as a group, and their “mid major” league was actually the home of some of the country’s best teams this year.

This conflation didn’t seem to matter in the tournament seeding process, however, with the Reformers “earning” a solid ranking–based on the allegedly data-driven selection procedure*–and the Defenders being left out of “The Big Dance”. Some observers openly wondered if the presence of the BCC Commissioner as the chair of the Selection Committee might have been a factor in this predicament.

*A team’s strength of schedule is made up of 3 components.

The 3 components:

AdjEM is the overall strength of schedule of a team

AdjO – Opponent’s average adjusted offensive efficiency

AdjD – Opponent’s average adjusted defensive efficiency

AdjEM for strength of schedule is calculated:

AdjEM of SOS = AdjO – AdjD

But what does it matter? It’s just a game, right? Again, not so fast my friend…

By making the tournament the Reformers also receive a payment of $1 million from the lucrative TV contract their conference signed with the networks, while the Defenders miss out on any financial reward. And if the Reformers get hot and win a few games, their earnings keep increasing, which helps to fuel their recruiting efforts, and allows them to offer their coaches even higher, more attractive salaries–even as the Defenders continue trying to compete with fewer resources.

In other words, the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer. And all based on Big Data and metrics.

Now, how does all of this play out in the world of education reform?

Let’s say you have two schools in your community: the Reformer Charter Academy, and Neighborhood Public School.

The local newspaper publishes an annual “school ratings” feature, and new families moving into the area, encouraged by real estate agents, turn to these ratings when making decisions about where to purchase a home. The ratings are developed using a “Big Data” approach that incorporates multiple data points, including the state’s recently introduced, and heavily scrutinized, “A through F Ratings” system, average student scores on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, and high school graduation rates. This data is then converted to a score on a 100 point scale for each school in the region. Sounds fair, right?

It might be if we were measuring widgets, or soybeans, or water quality. But we’re “measuring” students, teachers, and community members here, and the numbers don’t quite tell the whole story.

For example, applying “A-F” ratings to entire school districts, or even individual schools, is a stunningly clumsy way to characterize something as complicated and nuanced as a school. At any local public high school, for instance, you’re likely to find a rich and diverse array of AP classes designed for college-bound students, remedial classes, special education classes, music, art, and physical education offerings, and industrial arts classes. Trying to derive a single rating that describes this diversity of offerings is a fool’s errand, and bound for failure.

Charter schools, on the other hand, tend to focus on a more narrow view of schooling, and far fewer curricular choices for their students. While this approach may result in a better “A-F” rating, few observers would equate that rating to a better overall educational experience for students.

Charters are also well-known for the phenomenon known as “creaming,” a process by which school officials “target students who are mostly likely to succeed and cause minimal disruption or resource drain at the school.” It’s worth mentioning that these “creamed” students are being targeted and recruited from local public schools–siphoning away students who are more academically capable and less disruptive.

In other words, the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer. And all based on Big Data and metrics.

Underlying the Big Data approach is a myopic focus on standardized test scores as the sole measure of student learning. What this “data point” fails to take into account, however, is the clear relationship between parental income and student test scores. To put it bluntly, the more money one’s parents make, the higher the test score. We can see this relationship in numerous research studies and reports.

Here’s a graph showing the correlation between socioeconomic status and math and reading test scores:

Donald Trump, in a moment of rich irony, appears to have been caught just a bit off guard with just how complex the American health care system really was last week.

“Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” he added. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

Notwithstanding the fact that nearly every American who has been paying attention to the Obamacare/ACA debate (spoiler alert: they are the same thing!) could have let Donald know the situation was a little trickier than he seems to have thought it was, you’ve got to give credit where it’s due–yes, Mr. President; the health care system is both complex and complicated, and a lot of very smart persons have been working on it for a very long time. It took those very smart people quite a while to come up with a policy solution that has reduced the number of uninsured to historic lows, provide coverage for those with preexisting conditions, and extend coverage to children under 27 years of age. And even though I know these words I’m typing will fall on deaf ears, please don’t screw it up by repealing it only to replace it with…a nonexistent “plan” that the members of your own party can’t even seem to find.

Now, in another not-so-surprising bit of irony, it’s looking like Mr. Trump’s new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has also been laboring under the misconception that this education thing is actually pretty simple–and is about to receive a similarly rude awakening.

Ms. DeVos, who as it has been widely reported, never attended a public school, never sent her children to a public school, and has never taught anyone anything, now finds herself in charge of the American education system–which includes nearly 100,000 public schools educating over 50 million children. It should go without saying that such a huuuge system would be, by definition, extremely complicated and complex–and yet by all accounts, Ms. DeVos appears to believe that our nation’s educational system can be described as the somewhat simple interaction of three things: children, parents, and schools.

[The complete and utter lack of any mention of teachers in the rhetoric of Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos has been conspicuous by its absence, especially to the nation’s teachers. Even worse, Ms. Devos’ frequent mentions of the virtues of online learning and virtual schools hint at her preferred vision of the future of education–a world of public school classrooms populated by huge numbers of children monitored by classroom “aides”, and children tethered to laptops and “personal learning devices” in virtual classrooms or being educated via homeschooling. Teachers have been trained to listen for their absence in these sorts of statements, and aren’t being fooled by empty rhetoric and false promises. They know that if you’re not at the table, you’re probably what’s being served for dinner.]

Here is Ms. DeVos’ simple equation for how schools work:

1. Take one poor child, trapped by zip code into attending a “failing public school”

2. Add the freedom of school “choice” that allows parents to send their child to the private or religious school of their choice*. (note: private schools not required to accept all children)

3. Cut in conservative-approved curriculum of revisionist history (slavery was a “side issue” to the Civil War, and Young Earth creationism taught in science classes instead of evolution)

4. Mix with vouchers* (note: offer not constitutional in most states)

5. Bake in Congressional oven controlled by Republicans eager to privatize public school system

6. Remove child when test scores reach pre-determined levels* and learning is complete (note: target scores may be changed without notice, and learning is never complete)

As much as Ms. DeVos might believe that this is the way that education works, any teacher dragging home on a Friday afternoon would have a couple of things to say about what’s wrong–really wrong–with this vision of schooling.

For one, kids come to school with a host of talents, skills, problems, challenges, and issues that contribute–in ways positive and negative–to their ability to learn. Simply plopping them down in a new school, with new classmates, teachers, classes, cafeterias, lockers, gyms, restrooms, etc., just isn’t going to magically improve their academic achievement. In fact, according to recent research from Jennifer Warlick, professor of economics and policy studies at the University of Notre Dame:

Student mobility is creating academic problems for the students who move, but it’s also a problem for those who remain.

While students who change schools, especially frequent movers, can suffer psychologically, socially and academically, another important finding is that academic achievement of the “stable core”—the 30 percent of students who stay in one school—is also negatively affected by the school’s mobility rate.

New students coming into the classroom require more time from the teacher, decreasing teacher availability for the rest of the class, they note; routines are disrupted as the pace of instruction slows to accommodate new students, who may be behind in the curriculum.

The negative correlation between academic achievement and school switching is crucial information, Warlick notes.

Further, for students whose learning is negatively impacted by factors outside the school’s walls a simple “change of scenery” is unlikely to have the desired effect.

In 1966, the Coleman Report concluded that “student background and out-of-school factors are significantly more important” than in-school resources in influencing educational outcomes, and organized these factors into the following categories:

• Student risk factors, such as emotional and/or learning difficulties, English-language proficiency, and racial/ethnic minority background
• Student motivation and desire to do well on tests
• Parents’ attitudes toward education
• Domestic stability and support, including access to books, technology, and other resources
• Access to adequate health care and proper nutrition
• Access and exposure to arts, culture, and travel, which are correlated with families’ socioeconomic backgrounds and poverty levels

It’s Complicated

Stella is 7. She arrives at school most days not having eaten breakfast, and many days the school lunch is the only meal she gets all day. She didn’t have a winter coat when the weather turned cold this Fall–fortunately, the school maintains a supply of spare coats and boots for children like Stella, of which there are many.

Stella’s parents divorced when she was 5–her father died the following year, and her mother is currently serving a prison sentence for substance abuse. After spending a year living with various relatives in the area, Stella now lives with her grandparents, both of whom are retired due to disabilities.

Stella’s attendance at school is spotty, and when she does come to school she often exhibits behavior problems in her classes. Her teacher says that she suffers from “anger problems,” and doesn’t respond well to discipline. Yesterday, she greeted her teacher with smiles and a hug, and seemed excited to be at school–then, just moments later, Stella was taken to the principal’s office for hitting one of her classmates in the hallway.

Stella would benefit greatly from working with a counselor, but the school district was forced to eliminate all counselor and social worker positions the previous year due to a state budget cut. The special education teacher recently recommended Stella for remediation, as she is struggling in both reading and math, but her grandparents have hesitated in agreeing to this plan because they don’t want Stella to be “labeled.” At this point in the year, Stella is in danger of being retained in 2nd grade for another year due to a combination of her poor academic progress and attendance problems.

To think that simply moving a child from one school to another will provide the “silver bullet” that will overcome the effects of poverty, family or home dysfunction, learning challenges, and a myriad other obstacles and issues is a special brand of magical thinking about learning that only a person who has never been a teacher could seriously consider possible.

A person like Betsy DeVos.

The truth is that building and maintaining a public school system responsible for educating over 50 million children is a tremendously complicated operation, and requires experienced oversight and leadership from all involved. To have a Secretary of Education who persists in believing that the solution to all of the problems in American education can be solved by expanding school choice and voucher programs doesn’t help address these problems in a serious way.

If the point of school choice and vouchers is to allow kids from poor schools to attend schools with more resources, how does that address the problem that the “choice” rhetoric acknowledges? It’s like saying that when your roof is leaking, instead of fixing the roof, you just move to a new house.

If we all followed this “policy,” eventually we’d have entire cities with decrepit, run-down homes. And the only folks left behind in the leaking homes would be those who couldn’t afford a new house. Sound familiar?

Welcome to American education under Betsy DeVos.

Betsy DeVos is a big proponent of school "choice".

I will support Ms. DeVos if she can can guarantee that every family has the opportunity to "choose" a school in their neighborhood or community that...

• transports their child to and from school on well-maintained and safe buses driven by qualified, professional drivers
• feeds hungry children a healthy breakfast and lunch
• provides a full array of special needs services *and* opportunities for gifted students
• doesn't use draconian and militaristic behavior management techniques that emphasize control over respect, and that doesn't expel students whose test scores may not help the school achieve "adequate yearly progress"
• offers a rich, comprehensive curriculum that includes music, art, and physical education in addition to the other academic disciplines
• has a faculty of qualified, certified career teachers, supported by high-quality professional development opportunities, and work under appropriate course loads, class sizes, and working conditions
• is led by a certified administrative team that consists of persons with teaching degrees, and classroom teaching experience
• is staffed by registered nurses, certified librarians, social workers, school psychologists, guidance and career counselors
• is governed by an elected school board that is made up of members of the local community
• takes all students, without regard for socio-economic status, academic ability, physical, mental, or behavioral disabilities

If Betsy DeVos can guarantee that privatizing schools, destroying unions, and replacing certified teachers and public schools with "value schools" with computer-delivered classes, virtual "teachers," and online degrees can accomplish all of these goals, then I'll be the first one to support her agenda.

But until that time, in Betsy's own words: “people like you must surely be stopped.'"

Game. Set. Match.

The news that Donald Trump has named Betsy DeVos as his choice for Secretary of Education is just another brick in the wall for Mr. Trump’s plan to turn the US into a giant flea market, selling off the bits and pieces of a once great nation for parts to the highest bidders.

I had to laugh in recent weeks as folks set off alarms at the rumors of Michelle Rhee or Eva Moskowitz being appointed to this position. The truth is Rhee and Moskowitz are mere amateurs at this school privatization scheme. For Pete’s sake, Ms. Moskowitz still spends her days actually stepping foot in to schools in NYC, terrorizing students and teachers. And Rhee, a former Teach for America recruit, whose “go to” classroom management technique was taping the mouths of her reluctant “scholars”, has been in hiding after a disastrous run as Superintendent of DC’s schools, an experiment that ended in failure for all concerned, and threatened to dim the rising star of the corporate reform movement–until recently, when she and her icky hubby reemerged for a photo op at Trump Tower.

Betsy DeVos, on the other hand, is a pro at this game. And unlike Rhee and Moskowitz, who depend on the kindness–and financial backing–of others, Betsy has the financial wherewithall to bankroll her own plans. Like her new boss, Ms. DeVos–allegedly–won’t be beholden to any “special interests” in her efforts to turn our public education system into a Sotheby’s auction.

Rest assured, also, that unlike Ms. Moskowitz, Betsy DeVos hasn’t been spending any of her valuable time in…”schools” lately, and certainly hasn’t been close enough to a real, live student to tape them up–even though I’m sure she approves of Ms. Rhee’s approach to building a safe and welcoming classroom learning environment. No, Ms. DeVos has been busy dreaming up new ways to capitalize on the billions of taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on children, teachers, and schools, and helping her puppet in the Michigan governor’s residence with his plan to destroy the state’s schools.

Remember, Michigan is the state where the Governor poisoned the water in one of its largest cities, and more than 400 days later has still refused to replace a single water pipe. And the state whose lawyers recently claimed–and I swear I’m not making this up–that the state’s children had no “fundamental right to literacy.”

This is Betsy DeVos’ and Rick Snyder’s dream for how a state should govern–that a state and its elected officials have no responsibility to provide clean drinking water or a quality education for its children. It’s a dystopian vision of the future that absolves a state’s leaders and institutions from providing, maintaining, repairing, and supporting its schools, roads, water systems, and infrastructure, or protecting its most vulnerable citizens from the permanent damage caused by a poisoned water supply.

So, if you want to know what our new federal education policy is going to look like under Secretary DeVos, what has happened in Michigan under Gov. Snyder–and bankrolled and supported by the DeVos family–provides perhaps the best example of what to expect…

Snyder’s “skunk works” plan was a furtive, secretive, and unconstitutional effort to turn Michigan’s schools into a virtual bonanza for profiteers. As originally reported by Chad Livengood, here’s what Snyder–and DeVos–were doing:

The education reform advisory team has dubbed itself a “skunk works” project working outside of the government bureaucracy and education establishment with a goal of creating a “value school” that costs $5,000 per child annually to operate, according to meeting minutes and reports obtained by The Detroit News.…Records show the group has strived to remain secretive, even adopting the “skunk works” alias, which dates to defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s secret development of fighter planes during World War II….In January, participants were instructed in a memo to use “alternative” email accounts.

The idea behind the “skunk works” plan was to radically increase the use of technology (i.e., virtual charters, online classes) to dramatically reduce the number of teachers needed, and to decouple tax dollars from schools by providing every student in the state with an “education debit card” that could be used for a wide range of educational experiences (i.e., music lessons, art classes, sports teams).

The ultimate goal here was to create a new “value school” model in the state, delivering schooling at a per-student cost of roughly $5000, over $2000 less than the average reimbursement provided by the state for each child enrolled in a district’s schools–with “edupreneurs” pocketing the balance. For Snyder and DeVos, the purpose of education is not to help develop a more informed and educated citizenry, or to help children to become more fully human by providing a comprehensive, high quality curriculum, including music, art, and physical education in addition to the rest of the disciplines. The purpose of education under Snyder and DeVos is to turn the state’s once excellent system of public schools into an educational WalMart, boasting “low, low prices” in place of quality instruction.

The former President of the Michigan State Board of Education, John Austin, was never invited to participate in these discussions, and expressed his concern with this plan:

The initiative is “very unnerving” given the history of Lansing lawyer Richard McLellan, a work group member, in pursuing vouchers, said John Austin, president of the State Board of Education, who was unaware of the “skunk works” project. A voucher system lets parents use tax dollars to choose between private and public schools — something prohibited by the state Constitution.

“This is disturbing to hear of secret group meetings,” Austin said. “That reflects the ideology and political agenda of the creation of a for-profit and parallel enterprise market for schools. Part of its goal is to take down the education establishment: superintendents, school boards and teachers unions.”

Aside from being a radical redistribution of public resources to private bank accounts, this plan represents a stunningly blatant unconstitutional approach to funding public education. As Livengood points out, vouchers “let parents use tax dollars to choose between private and public schools—something prohibited by the state Constitution.”

In this way, Ms. DeVos is the perfect ideological mate for Mr. Trump: neither seems concerned with allowing petty little things like rules, regulations, or ethics get in the way of them pursuing their agendas. The Constitution only applies to the “little people,” not the billionaire “deciders” who will make the rules in the Trump administration.

Betsy DeVos was the absolute worst possible choice for Secretary of Education, so it’s no surprise that Trump chose her for this cabinet post. Her appointment is much closer to Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist than it is to his choice of Reince Preibus as Chief of Staff. One is a party insider who will make the “trains run on time”: the other is an arsonist who would happily burn the train station to the ground.

Betsy DeVos’ mission is no less than the total destruction of public education. Her apparent support for charters is merely a head fake to the right to distract us from for her ultimate goal of “decoupling” state and federal dollars from supporting schools of any type.

Under Secretary of Education DeVos we will see the emergence of a two-tiered educational system:

One, a system of elite private and religious schools for well-to-do, mostly White parents with the means to afford expensive tuition payments, staffed by qualified, certified teachers, with a rich curriculum based on face-to-face instruction in clean, safe, well-maintained schools…

The other, a parallel system of “fly by night” virtual and online “schools” that open and close seemingly at random, and for-profit charters operated by scam artists like Northern Michigan’s Dr. Steve Ingersoll, with little to no state or federal regulation or oversight, and a bare bones, “back to the basics” curriculum delivered by unqualified and uncertified “teachers”.

I’m guessing that the leadership at Teach for America is practically salivating today.

For the rest of us, welcome to the Hunger Games of public education.

So, what can we do? Stand up. Speak out. Run for your local school board. Demand adequate funding from your community and state. Vote for your local school budget. Support teachers. Volunteer to help at your kid’s school. Attend school board meetings. Go to school concerts and plays. Tell the astro-turf reform groups in your area (I’m looking at you, Great Lakes Education Project and Mackinac Center for Public Policy) that you don’t buy their regressive, populist vision of public education, and that even if you live in a place where you’re lucky to have excellent schools, you believe that ALL kids deserve a great education–and that you are willing, and happy, to pay a bit more in taxes to help make that happen.

Betsy DeVos needs to hear, loudly and clearly, that her cynical, selfish, profit-focused vision of public education isn’t constitutional; it’s predatory.

Her approach is not that of an educational leader; it’s that of a vandal.

Tell her that these are OUR public schools, and we value them and need them. And that we won’t let her, and her new Boss, destroy them.

With all due respect—and, admittedly, it’s not much—to Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence, theatre and the arts are not supposed to be safe. That’s missing the entire point of the arts.

The difference between a summer beach read (think: a Harlequin romance) and a compelling novel (think: Ta-Nehisi Coates's “Between the World and Me”, a beautifully poetic novel in the form of a letter from the author to his son) is enormous.

The difference between a fluffy piece of entertainment (see: Sharknado IV) and one of those movies that sticks with you for years and changes the way you see the world (see: The Shawshank Redemption or Crash or Idiocracy)? We shouldn’t use the word “film” to describe them both.

The difference between a commercial jingle (hear: the insipid Kars for Kids tune that plays endlessly on the radio) and a piece of music that is beautifully crafted and performed (hear: anything by Etienne Charles, or Earl MacDonald, or Bernstein’s West Side Story, or a Frank Sinatra cover from the Great American Songbook, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, or Kendrick Lamar stunning and challenging, or James Taylor singing one of his gems) is like night and day.

The arts are at their best when they are dangerous, and edgy, and challenge us, and make us uncomfortable. A great musical performance, or composition, or improvisation makes us think something new, and feel something different.

We don’t go to Hamilton to feel safe—we go to be challenged, and confronted with our own shortcomings and biases, and to disrupt our previously held assumptions and convictions.

So, Mr. Pence, if you went to Hamilton expecting a nice night out on the town with your daughter and her cousins, you’re doing art wrong. I’ll give you the same advice I tell people when they say they “don’t like jazz,” or modern art: Try it again. And try harder this time. It’s not supposed to be easy.

Mike Pence is every principal or superintendent who has looked a teacher straight in the eye and told them that they were being terminated for low student test scores, even though most of the teacher's students come to school every day hungry and tired.

Mike Pence is every business owner who cuts his employees' hours to avoid paying for their health insurance, and then tells the remaining workers they need to "work even harder."

Mike Pence is every man who has told a woman that her promotion was not going to be granted, but that she was still a highly valued employee, and maybe she should try to "smile more" around the office.

Mike Pence is every minister, pastor, or priest who stands at the pulpit preaching a message of love and tolerance, and then urges his parishioners to vote for anti-LGBT laws, and makes financial contributions from his church or parish to candidates who have long records of anti-LGBT opposition and discrimination.

Mike Pence is every CEO who has announced that his company would no longer be contributing to employee pension plans even as the company was announcing record profits.

Mike Pence is every town supervisor or mayor who closes his community's schools and health clinics, and then offers a huge tax break to the local basketball, football, or baseball team to build a new stadium.

Mike Pence is every smiling suit who gaslights his employees, constituents, students, wives, children, and voters by trying to convince them that the things they see right in front of their very eyes are not really happening.

Mike Pence is our next Vice-President, and will likely be in charge of our country's domestic and foreign policies for the next 4 years.

The last few days have been incredibly hard for many of us. I’ve been walking around in a fog; nothing about the world makes sense. One of the only things that’s made me feel any better since Tuesday night was spending time with my students, who are uncommonly caring, sensitive, bright, and passionate future music educators. Our conversations have been positive, encouraging, and reaffirming. I feel much more secure in the knowledge that when these folks are in charge in a few years things are going to be much better.

But then I flip on the TV or radio and I hear “his” name, and the words “President-elect,” and all of those dark feelings come flooding back…and I shake my head, and feel that now-familiar knot in my stomach tighten and twist, and I wonder just how we are going to get through the next 4 years.

But you know who might be more worried about Trump taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. than you or me?

Donald J. Trump, that’s who.

Think about it. This is a guy who has never truly held a real job–a job working for a company that he or his father didn’t own. You know, a job with a boss, or supervisors, or colleagues to whom you feel responsible, or customers, or students, that you are supposed to serve. Or suppliers who are expecting a certain level of professionalism or quality, or children who are expecting to be taught math or reading or science, or end users who will hold you accountable if said products or services are substandard, or delivered late, or not at all.

No, Mr. Trump’s professional journey started out at the top, as CEO of the Trump Organization. Staked to a “small loan” of $1 million from his father, Donald never had to worry about developing collegial relationships with his co-workers, climbing his way up the corporate ladder, demonstrating his ability to be a productive team member, angling for that big promotion, or negotiating for a raise.

Donald Trump has never had to worry about an annual performance review from a supervisor determining his yearly salary or raise, or had his sales numbers critiqued by someone from a corporate office located 3 states away. He’s never had an assistant principal conduct a walk-through observation of his worst class with no advance notice, or had his teaching evaluated by a group of 7th graders who don’t like homework, or writing, or math, or school.

Mr. Trump began his career as the boss, fired those with whom he disagreed, or who challenged him, and surrounded himself only with family members and sycophants who stroked his enormous ego and stoked his need for constant praise and adulation. We witnessed the result of this peculiar path in his “performance” on The Apprentice, where he mocked, taunted, teased, and humiliated a rotating cast of D list “celebrities” who, in their eagerness to resuscitate their floundering careers, were willing to grovel and prostitute themselves for Trump’s amusement and approval. It’s where we first saw Mr. Trump’s signature management technique come to light: “YOU’RE FIRED!”

We can now see the results of Trump’s stunted personality and leadership style in the way that he responds to criticism, with barely concealed rage, or scorn, or condescension. His childish antics and tantrums were on full display in this election season’s series of debates, first with the clown car of Republican candidates–where he was able to huff and puff his way to victory–and then in the general election against a well-prepared, intelligent, and experienced opponent–where his infantile antics exposed him for the petulant bully that he is: “WRONG!”, “YOU’RE THE PUPPET!”

Now, for the first time in his 70 years, Donald’s got a real job. A job where he’ll be expected to show up every day, on time and ready to go on Day 1. A job where he’ll be expected to prepare and devote himself to deep and comprehensive study of arcane and detailed policies. A job where his every move and decision will be subject to withering public scrutiny and examination from both his allies and his opponents. A job where his actions will affect millions of persons around the globe, and not just his own “bottom line.” A job where instead of being The Boss, he’s got 320 million bosses.

At his meeting with President Obama at the White House yesterday, you could see this realization starting to dawn in Trump’s eyes. He’s just now beginning to understand what he’s got himself in to. Trump is now making the pivot from campaigning to seeing himself in the job, and the daunting reality of that job is becoming clear.

It’s not about being cheered at rallies, or basking in the adoration of throngs of fervent supporters. It’s about enduring boring meetings discussing the minutiae of policy issues, and negotiating trade pacts with foreign countries. It’s about being ready when the red phone on his desk rings at 3am, and not responding with a Tweet.

Trump is starting to realize that more than half of this nation isn’t going to agree with him on a pretty regular basis, and those disagreements are going to be loud and public. This is going to be tough for a guy who demands unquestioning fealty and obedience–a person whose closest confidantes and employees somewhat creepily refer to him as “Mr. Trump.” He’s not accustomed to anyone questioning him, or having the temerity to challenge him or his decisions–he expects blind allegiance and unconditional loyalty.

The President, for better or worse, is our country’s designated punching bag, and the populace’s prime target for anger, frustration, and fear. Good Presidents understand this dynamic, and grow a thick enough skin to weather the inevitable storms of public fury. Excellent Presidents (see: Obama, B.) absorb the nation’s fears, and respond with calm determination.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how Donald Trump will respond to the inevitable pressures that are coming his way. Perhaps he will grow into the job, and discover untapped reserves of composure and steadiness deep within his being. Perhaps not.

Often, a person’s future behaviors can be predicted based upon their past motivations. So, what do we know about the motivations of the two most recent candidates for President?

He ran to win.

She ran to serve.

Hang on kids…it’s likely to be a bumpy ride.

Most of us would agree that this has been the dirtiest, nastiest presidential campaign in our lifetimes. One candidate has lied, evaded, and avoided continuously, and presents a clear and present danger to our nation, while the other has demonstrated...an inability to manage her email communication very well. Clearly, there are no good choices here. ; )

At the same time, I've noticed a recent spate of seemingly well-intentioned social media posts imploring all of us to respond to this toxic election cycle with increased levels of civility, compassion, and respect. It's hard to find fault with this request, which is right up there with "baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie" when it comes to Americana-hued memes. Who in the world could object to such a reasonable, compassionate request?

Well...me, for one.

While I have all kinds of admiration for many of those who post these requests, and believe they are honorable, thoughtful, and well-meaning individuals who are -- like many of us -- tired and disgusted with the level of rhetoric that has poisoned our national discourse, there is a subtle aroma of "white-washing," tinged with a soupçon of false equivalence unmistakably imbuing these memes. As if we all just started being nicer, or kinder, all of this nastiness would just go away.

Except we aren't talking about policy disagreements, or legitimate differences of opinion on how certain economic goals could best be achieved, or how to approach immigration reform. If that were the case, as has been true in virtually all previous campaigns, then I would be among the first to get in line behind these demands for better behavior and more elevated dialogue.

But it's not the case. For the first time in our memory we are witnessing a political campaign in which notions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamaphobia are not just being hinted at, but are being openly and overtly spoken about, appear as campaign ads, and used to incite and inflame a candidate's supporters. This sort of reprehensible behavior by the nominee of a major American political party is unprecedented, and has been condemned by many Republicans as well as most Democrats and Independents.

The truth is that respect and tolerance are not gifts to be uncritically bestowed upon persons or movements without careful consideration. They are values and virtues to be earned through our words, actions and behaviors. They are hard won, not given away. And they must be deserved, based on one's record over time.

When we are asked to show "tolerance" for a candidate who has bragged about his lack of respect for women and who has admitted to committing acts of sexual assault, what sort of behavior are we truly being asked to tolerate?

When we are asked to show "respect" for party officials like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell who have publicly condemned their party's nominee for his disrespectful and dismissive attitudes and beliefs about women, only to then support, endorse, and vote for this nominee, what sort of dishonesty are we truly being asked to respect?

When we are asked to show "tolerance" for a candidate who has characterized our urban centers as violent wastelands and asked our Black and Hispanic neighbors "what do you have to lose?" by voting for him, what sort of bigotry are we truly being asked to tolerate?

When we are asked to show "respect" for a candidate or party whose platform calls for "reparative or conversion therapy" for LGBT persons -- a medical treatment that has been deemed "unethical" by every major medical association in the country -- what sort of discrimination are we truly being asked to respect?

When we are asked to show "tolerance" for a candidate who has denigrated the military service of a former Presidential candidate from his own party and attacked the Gold Star parents of another military hero, what sort of cruelty are we truly being asked to tolerate?

A Path Forward

Whenever I'm challenged by issues of tolerance and respect, I find myself turning to the work of educator and scholar Sonia Nieto, who offers a conceptual model for understanding diversity in society. Nieto's model includes the following stages:

• tolerance
• acceptance
• respect and affirmation
• solidarity
• critique

In Nieto's model, tolerance is the lowest level of understanding. I would suggest that too many of our political leaders and candidates are not even at this "entry level", let alone our fellow citizens. Our national elections can be opportunities for our large and diverse citizenry to come together in a sort of "Town Square"; a place where persons who hold differing points of view, beliefs, backgrounds, and perspectives can work together in an effort to advance our society. A place to be heard, and, perhaps more importantly, to listen. This is something we don't do enough of as individuals, or in our society in general.

But having these discussions result in more respect and tolerance will require that all stakeholders show respect and tolerance in their words, actions, and behaviors. And this won't be accomplished by simple requests for civility. It will require hard work, difficult discussions, and ... respect and tolerance for all persons.

As a 58 year old, married white man who was raised Christian, I “check off” most of the boxes on the Privilege Worksheet of Life. I’ve never been pulled over by a police officer for no reason; joggers don’t cross to the other side of the street to avoid me; I’m given the benefit of the doubt in virtually every situation in which I find myself. While some of my privileged brethren grew up believing they had “hit a triple,” I’ve always known I was “born on 3rd base”, and have benefitted greatly from my privilege.

Perhaps as a result, I haven’t always felt comfortable when talking about matters of diversity, inclusion, and equity as they effect my chosen profession, education. I understand the inequities in our society, but believe that I have more to learn by listening to those who understand these inequities personally.

But there is one group of persons I do feel comfortable addressing when it comes to these issues. So, consider this a message to my fellow old, straight white guys who are working in the schools.

Hey, guys: It’s not about you.

When discussions about systemic racism, or institutional biases, or societal inequities are happening around you, no one is targeting you individually.

No one is blaming you. They are trying to point out that the very systems that have been so welcoming, and advantageous, and accommodating to you, haven’t always been that way for everyone — especially our friends, relatives, and neighbors who are Black, Hispanic, Latinx, LGBTQ, women, disabled, or Muslim.

They also aren’t suggesting that you haven’t worked hard to get to where you are in life. Of course you have. Having privilege doesn’t mean you aren’t a hard worker. It does mean, however, that those without the privileges you enjoy may have worked just as hard (or even harder), and achieved less. Or been paid less for the same work. Or may not have been admitted to the same schools as you. Or been given the same consideration for a job, or a promotion, or a mortgage. Again, this isn’t your fault. But how you respond to these realities, and how you use the privileges you do have, says a lot about you.

We recently saw the Executive Director of the national association for music educators forced to resign as a result of making some very disturbing and ignorant comments about minority persons at a meeting of professional organizations; a meeting convened specifically to discuss issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts.

Now, in a textbook example of not learning from someone else’s mistakes, the editor of a state music education journal has attempted what can only be seen as an effort to exonerate the executive director with an op-ed published in School Music News. The author suggested a number of “excuses” for why there isn’t more diversity in school music programs. While most of these excuses don’t really merit a response, let me try to reply to some of them with a few thoughts.

“…assimilation into today’s American culture is much different than it was in the 1950s and 1960s”.

No one who has studied multi-cultural education or culturally-relevant pedagogy has seriously suggested that immigrants should “assimilate” into another culture for a long time. We no longer expect immigrants who come to the United States to change their names, to not teach their children to speak their native languages, or to abandon their cultural traditions — and we look back at the time in our country when immigrants were encouraged to do these things with shame. Today, we believe that it is our differences in a pluralistic society that provide the strength and vitality that distinguishes America’s cultural heritage.

Students who require “academic intervention services” and “forced remediation” make it more difficult to form music ensembles that reflect a diverse student population.

To use a student’s need for special education services as an excuse to not diversify our student population in school music programs is reprehensible. Research shows that students who are placed in classrooms with other students with a wide range of abilities learn better, develop better, and have more open-minded attitudes about students with disabilities than their peers who are placed in more “tracked” classrooms.

A “lack of encouragement and support from the home” from families from diverse cultures makes it hard to have diversity in school music programs.

Blaming a lack of school music participation from students from diverse cultural backgrounds on a lack of support from their parents is simply unacceptable. I’ve been teaching since 1980 and have still not met a parent or guardian who didn’t want the best for their child. Placing the blame on parents and families for a lack of diversity in school music programs ignores the responsibility on the part of schools to reach out to all families, and to provide offerings that are of interest and relevant to all students.

“The media’s fixation on highly paid athletes and the attention given to sports and the lack of coverage for the performing arts” makes it difficult to attract a diverse student population for music programs.

Blaming this issue on sports? Come on…this is just intellectually lazy. Again, it evades responsibility for recruiting and supporting a more diverse population into school music programs and for designing classes and other offerings that would appeal to a more diverse group of learners.

Underlying both of these situations seems to be the need to provide excuses for the lack of diversity in our student populations, teaching workforce, and curricular offerings rather than suggesting solutions that proactively address this lack of diversity.

Both the executive director and the editor were correct in their observations that we have some work to do in creating a more inclusive profession in our schools. To do so, we need to adopt policies that are designed to create a more welcoming environment for all members of the school music community, such as:

• Enhancing and expanding music offerings in middle and high schools beyond the traditional band, orchestra and chorus model — including more folk, popular, world and vernacular music-making classes, more technology, and more creative music making (song writing, improvisation, composition, arranging, creating cover tunes) in the school curriculum.
• Making sure that our bands, orchestras and choruses “look like” the population of students in the schools in which they exist. That may mean providing instruments for students who can’t afford to rent them, and subsidizing private lessons.
• Improving access for urban and rural students so that they have the same number and quality of music offerings that their peers in more affluent schools enjoy.
• Providing scholarships for summer study for underrepresented minority students, offering free registration for solo and ensemble events for students from low Socio Economic Status (SES) schools, and working to identify and support minority students who are interested in becoming music teachers.
• Music education associations should examine their lists of “required solo and ensemble music” to make sure that black, Hispanic, Indigenous Peoples, women, and LGBTQ composers are represented on these lists.
• Conference and festival coordinators should be encouraged to invite a diverse roster of guest conductors and clinicians to work with students at regional and all state festivals. These people are often important mentors and role models for our students, and we need to make sure that our students “see” persons who look like them on podiums and in classrooms at these events. It is also important for “majority” students to have the opportunity to work with a more diverse array of guest conductors and clinicians who often bring unique backgrounds and perspectives to their teaching.
• Establishing recruitment programs to identify promising young minority music teachers and encouraging these teachers to pursue leadership positions in their local, state and national music education associations.
• Reducing or eliminating obstacles in our college and university music programs in terms of audition procedures that make it more difficult for minority students to be accepted to these institutions to pursue music degrees.

Our schools and colleges must change their mindsets and finally begin to consider the issues of race, diversity, equity, and inclusion as opportunities for growth and understanding, rather than problems to be solved. Our diversity is a strength, not a weakness.

And an education in music is not a privilege; it’s a right, for every child.

The charter school “debate” is no longer about charter schools vs. public schools (charters are not public schools—that myth has been exploded), or even about “for profit” vs. “not for profit” charters (the evidence here suggests this is really a difference without a distinction).

No, the real issue here is about the true purpose of education, and whether continuing to support two separate but unequal, and inequitable, school systems is doing anything to improve education for all children. By any objective measure, the answer is a resounding “no.”

The charter lobby has attempted, through spending millions of dollars on PR and marketing, to redefine the purpose of education from one about producing well-rounded citizens who are capable of making valuable contributions to our society and leading fulfilling lives, to a business-driven agenda of producing workers for corporate America. The latter “purpose” now drives much of our state and federal education legislation, which is rife with references to “21st Century Skills,” and insuring that high school graduates are stamped as being “college and career-ready”.

This is a radical repurposing of a public goal to meet the needs of private corporations, and is echoed in the mission and “vision” statements of the leading charter school management companies:



Success Academy: “Build exceptional, world-class public schools that prove children from all backgrounds can succeed in college and life; and advocate across the country to change public policies that prevent so many children from having access to opportunity.”

This is less a mission statement than the beginning sentence of a business plan. At Success Academy, children are referred to as “scholars,” and are judged on a one-size-fits-all scale: your value as a student is determined by your test scores, and eventually, your “hirability.” These goals are accomplished through adhering to uncommonly strict and harsh behavior management strategies, and by establishing an authoritarian classroom environment that is focused more on controlling students’ actions than on engaging them as learners.

KIPP: “To create a respected, influential, and national network of public schools that are successful in helping students from educationally underserved communities develop the knowledge, skills, character and habits needed to succeed in college and the competitive world beyond.”

As with Success Academy, the KIPP mission statement begins with a focus on the success of the business model, and only refers to students for their usefulness in helping KIPP meet its organizational goals—emphasizing the competitiveness of the world those children are about to enter. KIPP has also been criticized for manipulating their network schools’ graduation and college matriculation rates, using millions of taxpayer dollars on exorbitant administrator salaries, excessive travel and hospitality expenses, and non-transparency in terms of disclosure requirements.

National Heritage Academies: “National Heritage Academies (NHA) partners with local school boards to build and manage no-cost public charter schools. NHA’s system of schools is designed to eliminate the achievement gap and provide a public school choice to families so that their children are prepared for success in high school, college, and beyond.”

More success, and more empty “college and beyond” rhetoric. Yet, behind the chain’s claims of “valuing diversity,” and “embracing accountability,” NHA has been sued for failing to provide required special education services for their students, and their administrators have “discourage(d) parents from enrolling special-needs children at National Heritage -- and to help place the children in Grand Rapids public schools” instead. At NHA, the welcome sign is apparently only turned on if your child doesn’t need special education services—then it’s time to head back to the good old public schools, where the doors are always open and all children are welcomed.

Charter advocates are currently busy working to increase the number of charter schools in Massachusetts, even though the quality of schools in the state is among the best in the nation. You’d think this crusade must be the result of public opinion, and that parents were coming out in great numbers to demand more school choice and “better options” for their children—but you’d be wrong.

Consider the following exchange between Jennifer Berkshire (aka, Edushyster) and researcher Maurice Cunningham, on the sources of support for charter schools in Massachusetts, as reported by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post:

EduShyster: There’s a well-funded effort underway to paint the campaign to lift the charter cap in Massachusetts as a progressive cause. But what you’ve found in your research is that this is basically a Republican production from top to bottom.

Cunningham: That’s right. There are a handful of wealthy families that are funding this. They largely give to Republicans and they represent the financial industry, basically. They’re out of Bain, they’re out of Baupost, they’re out of High Fields Capital Management. Billionaire Seth Klarman, for example, has been described as the largest GOP donor in New England, and he gives a lot of money to free market, anti-government groups. Then on the campaign level, you have Republican strategist Will Keyser who certainly knows his stuff, and Jim Conroy who certainly knows his stuff. They know how to make something look like a grassroots campaign that really isn’t.

EduShyster: By *make something look like a grassroots campaign that really isn’t,* what you really mean is that this is an entirely community-driven, grassroots campaign, correct?

Cunningham: No. There is no grassroots support behind this campaign whatsoever. What do we look for to measure grassroots support? We look for a campaign’s ability to find people who will essentially volunteer, who feel strongly about an issue and are willing to do the work that a campaign needs done. Two examples: signature collecting and canvassing door to door. Great Schools Massachusetts isn’t able to do either one of those things. When they had to get signatures in 2015, they wound up paying $305,000 to a signature gathering firm. And that’s because they don’t have people who are strong believers who will go out on the street and volunteer and be passionate and do the things that people do when they really care about an issue. Or look at Democrats for Education Reform. When they backed Dan Rizzo in the special Senate election earlier this year, they had to pay for canvassers because they don’t have people who feel strongly enough about the positions they take. The idea that these are community groups is completely manufactured. (emphasis mine)

Recent polls in the state show that voters are against lifting the cap on charters by a 7 point margin, with 11% of the population still undecided. The charter lobby sees Massachusetts as an important “test case” for their plan to privatize the schools—if their strategy works there, it can work anywhere.

But there is scant evidence that lifting these caps and increasing the numbers of charters has a positive impact on student learning. For example, there are only 22 charters in Boston, while Detroit has 94. The 2 cities are roughly the same size, so what’s the difference? In Massachusetts, the state’s tight regulatory statutes governing the opening of new charters have slowed the pace of charter growth, and kept overall school quality high.

In Michigan, on the other hand, the combination of a strong charter lobby and a virtually unregulated charter sector has created what education researcher, David Arsen, calls a “chaotic” situation. Detroit’s school facilities are in a state of critical disrepair; necessary repairs can’t be afforded, and large areas of the city have no schools, while other neighborhoods are flooded with options.

Very few persons in Detroit would point to the explosion of charter schools, over half of which are of the “for-profit” variety, as a good thing for the city’s educational health and vitality. The problems created by competition and choice will not be solved by competition and choice.

But this is an argument that makes no impression on the charter lobby. Their goals are not about kids, schools, and education; they are focused on dollars, cents, and profits.

And that’s not up for debate.

I used to think that anyone who rose to a position of power and prominence in the world of education had to be smart, well-informed, and have significant teaching experience. The last few years of following the education reform debate, however, has disabused me of that notion. It seems as though so many of the people who hold positions of authority and prestige in the education sector (i.e., Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Eva Moskowitz, Bill and Melinda Gates, David Coleman, Peter Cunningham) have had little to no actual experience in education before assuming leadership posts in the field. In fact, if you didn't know better, you'd think that a degree in education, teacher certification, or experience as a teacher were disqualifications for obtaining a leadership role in the profession. [wink wink...]

A stream of recent online conversations with a few well-known reformsters has also revealed an alarming lack of logic and common sense informing the understandings of these "leaders" with respect to what teachers do, how students learn, and how education works. I think of these "disconnects" as education reform paradoxes, and share a few of the more puzzling examples below:

• Traditionally-prepared teachers need more student teaching experience, but TFA recruits are better with less student teaching experience

In a Twitter discussion with one prominent education reform communications guru, who happens to be a big supporter of Teach for America, the following accusation was made: "Most teachers feel unprepared on day one. Why not build more student teaching into the program?"

Almost immediately, an astute reader commented: "advocating for more student teaching, right after you claim a 5wk program [TFA]  is as good as a 5yr one [a traditional teacher preparation degree program]. Which is it?"

The communications guru responded: "both"

Now, you can be a fan of alternative pathways to certification, like TfA and The New Teacher Project. And you can believe that graduates of traditional teacher education programs (who spend 4 to 5 years studying their content area, pedagogy, learning theories, child development, and gaining experience in school classrooms working with actual students and practicing teachers) aren't as "good" as the graduates of elite colleges and universities (who didn't major in education and only get a few weeks of training before entering the classroom.)

But you can't claim that the former group would benefit from more experience in schools, while the latter group would not. Especially when the traditionally-prepared teachers have far more of this kind of experience already, and the alternative route recruits have so little.

Well, you can claim this paradox is true, I suppose...but no one should believe you, and your credibility on this point should be called into question.

• Teachers are heroic saviors that save children’s lives, but they place their own self-interests above the needs of their students

In another Twitter conversation about the amount of difference in student learning attributable to in-school factors like teacher quality (which happens to be less than 10%, with out-of-school factors, like poverty, responsible for the bulk of these differences), the same guru responded with this comment:

"That implies teachers make little to no difference, which is absolutely not true. They save lives. They deserve the credit."

On first blush, this seems like an endorsement of the power of good teaching and the impact that excellent teachers can have on their students' lives. But if we dig just a bit deeper, this comment can be seen as playing into the "teacher as savior" narrative that is so popular in the reform community.

The truth is that teaching is not a "calling," like being a priest or a minister--it's a job, and a difficult one at that. Portraying teachers as "heroes" who "save lives" is a simplistic and disingenuous attempt on the part of the reformers at glorifying what teachers do without recognizing the challenges and difficulties that the reform agenda has created.

It has also been my experience that whenever a reformer waxes poetic about the power of "good" teachers, an attack is coming in the very next breath. And indeed, the guru followed up with this response:

"Teachers succeed despite profession, which does a poor job training, supporting and honoring them. I don't attack 'teachers.'"

Then, the coup de grace, stringing together a series of attacks:

"Most people coming out of ed school are unprepared to teach but you still have a job. We need accountability in higher ed."

"Not instead of, but 4 same reason we have civilian oversight of military. Self-interest must defer to public interest."

A reader responds:

"so there we go, we are back to the attack, the heinous assertion that teachers are self interested"

"the assertion also makes the assumption that teacher best interest and student best interest are in opposition"

The paradox here couldn't be more clear: toss out a faux compliment about how wonderful teachers are while simultaneously denigrating their preparation and readiness to do their jobs and inferring that teachers place their own "self-interest" (reformer code for "teachers union membership") above their interest in meeting their students' needs.

If this is how the reform crowd shows their "support" for teachers, I don't want any part of it.

• The reformers insist that school choice will allow "poor kids to escape failing schools," but the evidence shows that school choice leads to more segregated schools and fewer options for black and Hispanic children

Perhaps the most important foundation of the reformers' creed is their devotion to competition and school choice as the levers that will solve all of the problems of public education. In some places this comes in the form of "schools of choice" initiatives, while in others we see it expressed in renewed calls for vouchers--now marketed under the misnomer, "education savings accounts."

In Michigan, where school choice has been the law of the land for several years, the results of this increased competition in the school sector have been a decidedly mixed bag:

The outcomes we can measure show it’s leading to increased segregation and increased burdens for districts,” said Gary Miron, a researcher and education professor at Western Michigan University who studies school choice data. “If we are talking about choice as a market tool and we apply it as a market tool, there’s going to be winners and losers. Mostly kids are losing and your public schools are being damaged.”

Of course, the reformers don't really care about the education of poor children--they see the lure of school choice and charter schools as the bait for parents frustrated by the systemic defunding of their local public schools, especially in urban centers, and who are desperate for any option that promises a better alternative.

And if there's one thing the charter industry does well, it's marketing their product. Consider the findings of a new study by Catherine DiMartino and Sarah Butler Jessen on the aggressive promotion tactics undertaken by some charter school management corporations:

Certain organizations have great resources and seemingly a greater institutional goal of making marketing a central piece. And there are good reasons for it if you’re, say, a new school of choice, or a charter management organization trying to create some kind of national identity with schools scattered across the country. But it’s completely unregulated at this point and completely inequitable as far as the degree of resources that certain organizations have to to get their message out there. It takes time too. What principal or teacher has the time to keep up a Twitter page? I can’t even keep up my own Twitter page. And then the more formal branding process takes real knowledge. Schools are hiring experts to create marketing campaigns that target a specific population, and help with branded imagery. It’s a whole new world and there’s an industry that has emerged around it.

So, if your goal is to improve the educational experience for students in urban schools, many of whom are Black and Hispanic, why would you pursue an agenda that contributes to increased segregation, while damaging the public schools these children attend, and instead of spending precious resources on classroom instruction, redirecting that money towards glitzy advertising and marketing campaigns? Another paradox of the reform agenda.

• Teachers should be subjected to increased accountability because they are paid by the public but reformers, who support charter schools (which are funded via public tax revenues), aren't accountable to taxpayers and the public

The final paradox focuses on another one of the reformers favorite tropes: the need for accountability for teachers and schools. Never mind that public education is already one of the most accountable institutions in our society, and that teachers welcome and embrace accountability, building it in to their everyday practice in the form of assessment.

The reformers would have us believe that public school students are lazy and uninterested in learning, their teachers are "union thugs" trying to get away with working as little as possible, and our public schools are "money pits" run by corrupt staffers looking to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

Making matters worse, the reformers have only a single tool in their tool box to accomplish this goal: standardized test scores. For the corporate reform crowd, student test scores are the "gold standard," the coin of the realm, the ne plus ultra of accountability measures. These folks have never seen a standardized test they didn't think could unlock the secrets of the universe, and they are just not having any questions about silly notions of "validity," "reliability," or "appropriateness" of these tests.

But there's a different tune being sung when we ask the reformers how they are to be held accountable. Consider the following recent exchange of Twitter messages with a prominent reformer:

MR: "U seem very committed to "accountability", *****. how are U held accountable? Is it public? Do I get to "weigh in"?"

Reformer: "Isn't that what you are doing right now?"

MR: "Really? a Twitter convo is your accountability? then let's get rid of teacher eval and VAM. how silly..."

Later...

Reformer: "Plenty of evidence that 5-yr teacher is better than a 1-yr teacher. Less evidence that 20 is better than 10."

MR: "are you better at your job now than after 5 years of experience, *****? answer honestly...I know I am."

Reformer: "Getting better every day -- but if I wasn't I wouldn't have a job."

MR: "so you're untouchable...got it. good to know. i guess accountability is for the great unwashed, not the ruling classes..."

Reformer: "I was appointed by an elected president. Now I work in the non-profit sector. How do you want to hold me accountable?"

And there you have it. As a political appointee, now safely ensconced in the non-profit sector of the education "business," this high-level corporate reform official enjoys tremendous power, prestige, and protection.

He has the connections and access to play a major role in the development and implementation of public policy, but is insulated from any form of accountability that may result from the effects of his decisions on our children, teachers, and schools.

He has a virtually unlimited war chest with which to work, and a team of paid assistants and bloggers to do his bidding, quickly and forcefully attacking the attempts of anyone emboldened enough to push back against the reform mantra of competition, choice, and accountability.

The enterprise of public education is complicated and complex, and encompasses many issues on which reasonable persons may, and do, disagree.

But is it too much to ask that one's positions on these issues be based on logic, informed thought and study, and a sincere interest in helping children learn?

That shouldn't be a paradox for anyone.

I got into a bit of a Twitter tussle the other day with a self-styled “education policy expert” for a Michigan corporate education reform group. While this person has never taught in a public school, and has little background or experience in education at all, he is now the Education Policy Director for this organization. After exchanging tweets for a few minutes (he had just written a pretty negative critique of one of my blog posts), during which I had challenged his credibility as an education policy writer for the reasons above, he bowed out of the conversation because, he said, it had gotten “personal.”

In my experience, this is a pretty common pattern: A person who works for a well-funded, anti-public education organization, whose full-time job it is to seek out social media articles and blog posts on specific topics (i.e., charter schools, teacher tenure, teacher evaluation systems) and then respond with forceful and negative responses, engages in a back-and-forth about a particular topic or issue. After a number of exchanges, the corporate reformer beats a hasty retreat, usually accompanied by the lobbing of a final “closing argument”, such as, “I don’t know why you keep making policy debates personal”.

Here’s the thing: attacks on public schools and teachers ARE personal. These “debates” may not be personal to these “policy analysts,” whose interest in this dialogue is not related to kids, schools, or learning. But to teachers and parents with children in these schools, being told your schools are “failing,” teachers are “lazy,” and that your schools should be shut down, or funding should be slashed, or that local control should be replaced by “Emergency Managers”…well, it all feels pretty personal to me.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this debate is the uneven playing ground upon which these battles are waged. On one side we have cabals of poorly-paid operatives, working in dark, windowless basements for corporate education reform operations like The 74 and the Education Post. A quick glance at the staff rosters for these groups reveals that they are staffed by dozens of 20-something alums of elite liberal arts schools with no background in education, but who are eager to move up in the world of journalism by writing about whatever they are told to write about in order to advance their careers. There appears to be very little ideological belief shared by these “drones”—they just tap away at their keyboards, typing out comments on targeted blog posts, and suppressing Amazon ratings.

Journalist Lee Fang corroborates the insidiousness of the tactics employed by the “reformers”:

I mean look at what American Majority is doing. They’re going out and they’re organizing folks, they’re hiring, they’ve got something like two dozen people going out and training people to go online, make lots of screen names, mess with liberal websites, go on Amazon and give one star to liberal books… That’s not expensive to do but that’s how people view the world these days and being able to manipulate things…I’m not advocating this strategy, I’m just giving it as an example. You can change public opinion which then changes public policy by doing these sorts of very strategic things that the left just doesn’t do for a whole variety of reasons.

While the reformers are well-funded, well-organized and fully-staffed, public education advocates are represented in this debate by a rag-tag group of teachers and activists, all of whom have other, full-time, jobs. These part-time warriors do battle on their lunch breaks, planning periods, and on the weekends, in between planning lessons, attending workshops, and dropping their kids off at piano lessons and soccer practices. What they may lack in funding and organization is more than made up with passion, experience, and knowledge.

So, it’s abundantly clear that there are two sides to this debate, and that each side comes to this dialogue from very different places:

For them, this is about “school choice”; for us, this is about diverting public tax dollars into private bank accounts.

For them, this is about “disrupting the education sector”; for us, this is about challenging your attempt to privatize one of the most important pillars of our society—our public schools.

For them, this is about power and profits; for us, this is about children and learning.

Here’s what I want the reformers to understand: As much as you may want to make this an antiseptic, de-personalized debate about issues of policy and legislation, for those of us dedicated to the health and vitality of our public education system, this is deeply personal stuff.

And I’m not sorry about that.

Let me begin with an apology: I have intentionally lured you here under false pretenses. What do I mean? I've used that favorite strategy of internet hoaxes and supermarket tabloids, the "click bait headline", to catch your eye, whet your appetite, and influence you to "click" the link, which brought you here.

According to Wikipedia, "click bait headlines" rely on outrageous quotes or eye-catching graphics to provide just enough scanty tidbits of information to generate "click throughs," and encourage readers to forward content via social media. See--it works!

And while I'm fessing up, let me also apologize for including the following outright lies (not "over exaggerations"--I'm looking at you, Mr. Lochte) in the above headline:

AYP, or "Adequate Yearly Progress", is one of those seemingly benign terms that pops up in the educational lexicon every few years. AYP sounds...friendly. Unassuming. Who could argue with a reform initiative based on kids, teachers, or schools making "adequate yearly progress"? What are we, communists? Of course we want our schools to make progress...and insisting it be "adequate" doesn't sound too demanding, does it? I mean, how hard could it be to make "adequate" progress? Cmon...

And yet the truth is much harsher. AYP has become an albatross around the neck of school districts rich and poor. It requires that schools demonstrate inexorable, upward rates of progress, no matter their actual measures of success. While AYP may have been intended to exert pressure on "low performing schools," in practice it has created unreasonable pressures and stresses on all kinds of schools, students, teachers, and administrators, and is the policy lever behind much of the cheating that has characterized the worst of the "accountability era" in American education.

At the core of AYP is the notion of accountability--another seemingly benign concept that has taken on draconian undertones when applied to public education. But the blade of accountability seems to only be targeted on those with the least amount of power in the educational equation: children and teachers. How are education policy decision makers, who dream up increasingly punitive measures, held accountable? How are our political leaders, who pass the legislation recommended by these policy makers, held accountable? 

Why is the idea of Adequate Yearly Progress only aimed at the recipients of these policies, and not on those with the power to create supportive working conditions for teachers, and educationally-sound policies that govern schools and learning?

In other words, why don't we have "AYP" for:

• Providing adequate school funding?
• Clean, well-maintained facilities?
• Supportive working conditions?
• Teacher evaluation systems that are fair, make sense, and focused on helping teachers' improve their practice--not punitive systems designed to demoralize and marginalize?
• Salary schedules and teacher contracts that fairly compensate teachers, and provide incentives for pursuing professional development opportunities?
• Adequate support services for all students, including special education, gifted & talented, school nurses, psychologists, and counselors?
• Rich, vibrant curricular programs in music, art, media, and physical education for all students?
• School breakfast and lunch programs, so students aren't hungry all day and can concentrate on their classes?

I'm all for assessing Adequate Yearly Progress in our schools, but maybe it's time to start assessing what really matters. Instead of coming up with educational policies designed to punish our most disadvantaged students, schools, and communities, let's start holding those responsible for establishing these punitive policies accountable for the damage they are doing to public education.

Then we might really start making some progress.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the charter school industry, and it doesn’t look like things are looking up any time soon. In the wake of a devastating segment by John Oliver on the charter school business, and calls from civil rights groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter, the public is finally starting to question the wisdom of funding two parallel school systems when public resources are in such short supply. 

The most recent nail in the coffin of the charter school movement comes in the form of a recent report from the Pennsylvania School Board Association that compares spending priorities and patterns between the state’s charter schools and public schools. Unsurprisingly, the news isn’t good for charters. The study compared spending in 85% of Pennsylvania’s charters against all of the state’s public schools, and the results reveal massive differences in what each sector values.

A new report from the Justice Department recommends the suspension of contracts for private prisons, effective immediately. In explaining the justification for this decision, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates concluded that "the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government."

Teachers and those who have observed the impact of the corporate education reform agenda on public education over the last decade or so may notice some striking similarities between the findings of this Justice Department report and the explosion of the charter school industry in our country. As with the private prison scenario, the explosion of charter schools in the last decade has created parallel school systems--both allegedly public, but fighting for limited resources, and competing on an uneven playing field.

As my friend, Steven Singer, says: "In Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to have 'separate but equal' schools, because when they’re separate, they’re rarely equal. Having two parallel systems of education makes it too easy to provide more resources to some kids and less to others."

Initially proposed in the 1970s as a "laboratory in innovation" for pedagogical practices, and even embraced by AFT President Albert Shanker in 1988, charter schools were intended to function as incubators for innovative teaching techniques, strategies and policies.

Today, the experiment has been co-opted in many states by "for-profit" charter school management companies, such as K12.com, which was supported by the investments of convicted felon Michael Milken. These for-profit networks are characterized by schools staffed with uncertified, lowly-paid, alternatively-prepared short-term faculty, many of whom are ill-equipped to handle the duties of teaching. These teachers are expected to deliver scripted lessons from canned curriculums, and follow a "teach to the test" approach controlled by "no-excuses" behavior management strategies that result in a joyless educational experience marked by high rates of student suspension, especially among students of color. It is little wonder that many of these charter schools, and their hi-tech cousins, so-called "virtual charter schools," are referred to as "drop-out factories."

Consider the following chilling parallels between charters and private prisons:

• Private prisons house 12% of inmates nationally
• Charter schools enroll 6% of students nationally

• Private prisons are not locally managed or controlled
• Charter schools are not locally managed or controlled

• Private prisons do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources as government-managed correctional facilities
• Charter schools do not provide the same level of educational services, programs and resources (i.e., special education, music, art, library, social workers, school psychologists, school nurses) as public schools

• Private prisons are not subject to the same level or degree of regulation and oversight as government correctional facilities
• Charter schools are not subject to the same level or degree of regulation and oversight as public schools

• Privately contracted prisons reported more incidents of inmate contraband, higher rates of assaults and more uses of force than facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons
• Charter schools, like Success Academy and KIPP, have been reported as having more incidents of student suspensions, higher rates of student misbehavior due to draconian behavior policies and expectations, and troubling incidents of teacher abuse (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html?_r=0) than the public schools in their communities

In light of their investigation, the federal Justice Department has now determined that their experiment in the use of private prisons has been a dismal, dangerous failure, and is taking immediate steps to correct the situation. Not surprisingly, the contractors running these prisons are pushing back against the decision: "Scott Marquardt, president of Management and Training Corporation, wrote that comparing Bureau of Prisons facilities to privately operated ones was 'comparing apples and oranges.' He generally disputed the inspector general’s report." 

Mr. Marquardt's comments echo the response from Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz in February of 2016, after allegations of teacher abuse at one of her schools in NYC (captured on video)--rather than taking responsibility for the incident or suggesting possible solutions to make sure similar incidents would not happen again, Ms. Moskowitz defended the teacher and cast aspersions on the motivations of the assistant teacher who had recorded the video of the event: “This video proves utterly nothing but that a teacher in one of our 700 classrooms, on a day more than a year ago, got frustrated and spoke harshly to her students.”

Criminal justice experts are applauding the Justice Department's decision to suspend their use of private prisons. Marc Maurer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, calls the decision a "major milestone in the movement away from mass incarceration...It has been a stain on our democracy to permit profit-making entities to be handed the responsibility of making determinations of individual liberty," said Mauer. "Today's action moves us closer to a moment when government can once again assume this important responsibility."

Teachers, parents, and supporters of public education can only hope that a corresponding statement is in the future for our profession, and that our national "experiment" in diverting public funds to private schools is coming to a similar, and much needed, end.

Over the last few weeks I've had the good fortune to spend time with my favorite group of persons: music teachers. And whenever I get a chance to hang with music folks we have the best conversations--and by that, I mean that I hear some absolutely jaw-dropping, eye-popping stuff about what is actually happening out in their schools with respect to educational policy and practice.

To be clear, in many school districts, things are going swimmingly: music programs are healthy and robust, performing ensembles are full and thriving, and schedules are constructed so as to make students' learning comprehensive and teachers' duties reasonable. But in too many places, decisions are being made that just don't make sense.

For example...

• In one large urban school district, music teacher candidates are being asked to react to math and reading data during their interviews for a music teaching position. The justification from the district was along the lines of, "every teacher in our schools plays a role in producing these test results, so every teacher is required to understand what the data means and how to use it to improve their teaching."
  
  Except that every teacher in the district DOES NOT play a role in those students' test scores in those subjects--music teachers are not responsible for teaching the information on these tests, and should not be expected to teach this information. They weren't prepared to teach these subjects in their undergraduate or graduate degree work, did not take the appropriate course work or pedagogical courses to be qualified to teach these subjects, and should not be using math and reading test data to influence how they teach music.
  
  Further,  not even the math and reading teachers are actually *responsible* for the students' scores in those subjects. The truth is that "less than 7% of the differences in student learning are attributable to in-school factors, such as teacher quality--with more than 90% of the difference being a function of out-of-school factors, like test prep tutors, private music lessons and the resources to purchase instruments, after school sports, and access to travel, concerts, books, and movies."
  
  Finally, even IF all teachers in a school were somehow responsible for these math and reading test scores--which they are NOT--it is absurd to expect persons interviewing for a job in that school, who have never worked in that district, to be able to thoughtfully and meaningfully respond to this data, and to show they would use it to improve their teaching.
  
  Here's the thing: teaching is not acontextual. It occurs in very specific and particular contexts: with particular students, in particular classrooms, in particular schools, in particular communities. What "works" in one setting may not "work" in another--teachers know this. Why the persons establishing interview protocols do not is one of those things that just don't make sense.
  
  
• In another school system, music teachers’ positions are being reduced from full-time to .90--or higher!--based on class assignments and student enrollments. As if a middle school band of 89 members requires “less” teaching than one of 91; or, as if an elementary music teacher who sees 1200 students per week (yes, this is a thing) can justifiably be reduced to .90 FTE (full-time equivalent) when the school enrollment dips down to 1150 students.
  
  Point #1: There is no such thing as a teaching position of .90 FTE. In practical terms, that 10% cut works out to roughly 90 minutes "off" spread out over the course of a 5-day work week. It's not enough time for that teacher to find a second job to make up her lost income, or to pick up some tutoring, or to stay home for a day to offset or reduce the cost of childcare.
  
  In other words, this is a business strategy to take a full-time job and artificially reduce the teaching load by a predetermined percentage in order to save a few dollars in salary, and/or to reduce the employee below a threshold at which they are required to receive a full benefits package. Teachers are not making widgets--they don't "punch out" at the end of their shifts. A 90% FTE music teacher doesn't take home 10% fewer scores to study, or provide 10% less constructive feedback on a student's clarinet solo, or correct 10% fewer mistakes in their beginning orchestra's rehearsal, or stay after school 10% fewer minutes to work with her elementary choir as they prepare for their Spring concert performance. Teaching doesn't work that way; especially music teaching.
  
  The fact that school district leaders would make this kind of financial decision about an employee who has worked in their schools for 10 or more years says more about the ethics of those making the decision than it does about the financial problems facing the district. And as a matter of common human decency, the ethics here should be no different with a 10 year veteran than they are with a brand new hire. Why school district decision makers don't understand this principle is another one of those things that just doesn't make sense.
• In yet another district, teachers have been told that, due to budget constraints, “the designation of ‘highly effective’ is a place we visit, not a place we stay”. In other words, even if you come out ranked in the top group of teachers in your school, and were ranked as "highly effective" in the previous year, you may not receive the same ranking in 2 consecutive years.
  
  Imagine a music teacher telling her 3rd grade class of 42 children that the school only had enough resources for 2 of them to receive “A”s on their report card.
  
  Imagine a band teacher telling the marching band that even if they perform better than every other group at the state festival it won't be possible for them to win the first place trophy because they won it last year.
  
  Good leadership and good policy should be reflections of good practice in the domain--in this case, good policy should reflect good pedagogy. 
  
  In spite of the fact that this is not a sanctioned policy from the state's department of education, and violates every known principle of motivation and management, there is a school district superintendent who thought that this would be a smart thing to say to his or her teachers at the beginning of a school year. How this school leader didn't know the devastating effect his or her words would have on the district's teachers is one of those things that just doesn't make sense.

• Finally, “specials” teachers (an unfortunate term used to specify music, art, and physical education teachers, among others) in one school district have been told by their Superintendent that “it is impossible” for them to receive a rating of “highly effective” because of what they teach. Leaving aside the wisdom or logic of a teacher evaluation system that groups all teachers into 4 subjective categories (i.e., highly effective, effective, minimally effective, ineffective), as though they were heads of lettuce on a conveyor belt, what possible reason could there be for the instructional leader of a public school system to tell his or her employees that teach a particular subject or discipline that their evaluation rating will be limited due to the subject that they teach?
  
  How would it feel to know that no matter how hard you worked, or how well your students sang, or played their instruments, or how much your teaching was valued by your students, their parents, and your community, there was no chance for you to earn the highest rating available for your efforts? What impact could this sort of statement have on employee morale? How would knowing this effect collegiality between "specials" teachers and their colleagues in other areas? How does such a statement make any sense?

Here are a few things that DO make sense:

• Music teachers are teachers. Not "specials" teachers, just teachers.
• The purpose of the music program is not to provide a "break" for the classroom teacher, or to provide "planning time" for other teachers. The purpose of the music program is to provide opportunities for children to make music, explore music, and express themselves with their voices and with instruments.
• The purpose of the music program is not to provide a "break" to students during a long day of academics. Music IS an academic subject in its own right. Music has histories, traditions, theories, symbol systems, and all of the other characteristics that define an academic discipline. The fact that music is also enjoyable, engaging, and fun is just gravy.
• Music teachers should be evaluated based on what they do as teachers--not on how well their students score on tests of math and reading, and not even on how their students do on music tests. The purpose of student assessment is to improve instruction--not to generate teacher evaluations. Teachers' evaluations should not be based on "data" or "scores", but on observations done by expert teachers who have a knowledge of the discipline of music, and experience as music teachers.

So, the next time you see your favorite music teacher, please tell them you value and appreciate what they do. Because music teachers make our schools and communities better, more harmonious places through the power of what they do for our children.

And that should make sense to everyone.

A recent blog post by Morna McDermott at Educationalchemy.com connects the dots between the recent surge in popularity of the new "Gig Economy" and unsavory influences from the usual suspects in the corporate education reform agenda, ALEC and Pearson. McDermott points out the K12 aspects of this connection (i.e., Competency Based Education (CBE) as an "alternative" to actual classroom learning, "self-directed learning", an emphasis on "college and career ready" approaches), reminding us how the reformers are experts at coming up with positive sounding names for dangerous and unethical pedagogical strategies.

McDermott identifies the principles upon which CBE is based:

• "Disenfranchises teachers who are replaced by computers and third party providers (now LEA’s with access to student private data). This erodes a unionized teacher workforce.
• Eliminates collaborative interactive learning activities in favor of individualized one-on-one learning with a computer program
• Course credit will no longer be counted by credit hour but by completion of a series of exercises, tasks or data driven curriculum which provides the student with a “badge of completion” (see Pearson).  The amount of time spent in a classroom experience is no longer a determining factor in evaluating success."

All of these "innovations" are being designed to hurry us all along to an even stronger embrace of the so-called "Gig Economy," which has been characterized by the ascendance of start-ups like Uber and AirBNB--guerilla operations intended to replace taxis and hotels in the new "sharing economy." The seductiveness of the Gig Economy model is clear--workers will be their own bosses, there are no burdensome "regulations" to present challenges to "entrepreneurship" and "creativity," and cumbersome layers of oversight and accountability vanish in the new, "flat hierarchy" of the sharing economy.

Neo-liberal politicians and policy makers are already drooling over the new possibilities the Gig Economy model promises. Instead of school tax revenues going to...you know, schools, "visionaries" like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder are eagerly planning a "new" approach to school funding: education debit cards that will "decouple" funding from the schools and attach it instead to individual students and families to spend as they wish. How exactly would Gov. Snyder's plan work?

Each student would be handed a "Michigan Education Card" to cover the cost of "tuition." The plan envisions a $5,000-per-student cost, a low price tag achieved by (potentially) using fewer teachers and increasing the use of video conferences for distance learning, among other options. Anything left on the card after tuition costs could be used by the students on Advanced Placement fees and other academic expenses.

Unfortunately for the Governor, his "skunk works" project was discovered prematurely, and along with the other "distractions" he's been forced to concern himself with lately--as a result of his own flat-out ineptitude and arrogance (i.e., the poisoning of Flint's water supply, the systemic defunding of Detroit's schools)--his plan has been scuttled--temporarily.

Devotees of the Gig Economy also exist within the higher education sector, as characterized by new "innovations" such as online and virtual programs that offer "badges" instead of credits. Not surprisingly, our friends at Pearson were among the first to sidle up to the trough with this one: "Already badges that represent these credentials are serving an important purpose in fostering trust between solo workers, employers, and project teams because they convey skill transparency and deliver seamless verification of capabilities.” 

Only in Pearson's virtual world is a "badge"--conferred to a person who watched an online video alone, and completed an online quiz with no proctor, which was no doubt scored automatically via computer--somehow considered more "trustworthy" than a credit earned by a student actually participating in a real-world classroom, with other students and an instructor, engaged in regular discussion, with assignments, graded by the same teacher who taught the course.

A similar "advance" was recently announced by a major professional association that is now offering "Professional Development Credits", for free, for reading an article from one of their journals:

You can get FREE professional development credit for reading certain articles in Music Educators Journal starting in June! Simply read an article, successfully complete a short quiz, and receive one hour of professional development credit. These peer-reviewed articles provide a top-notch insight into issues teachers face on a daily basis.

Full disclosure: I served a term as Editor of this journal, and believe that the articles published in this journal, and many others, provide an important professional resource for practicing teachers. That said, awarding a "professional development credit" for reading an article and filling in the blanks on an online quiz is pretty much the definition of an intellectually and educationally bankrupt notion of what learning represents, and devalues to the point of worthlessness what a "credit" means.

So, what happens when schooling looks more like Uber and AirBNB than your local elementary school and state university? When teachers are replaced with uncertified and unqualified "course facilitators," classes are replaced with "online virtual meetings" and "chat sessions," and when high school and college degrees and certifications are replaced by "badges" and "digital credentials"?

Pearson provides this chilling glimpse into the "future" of the Gig Economy, brought to you through their "innovative" approach to structuring learning opportunities:

A decade from now, when solo workers comprise the majority of the American workforce, I think it will be common for all of us to point to digital credentials and badges as a better way to talk about our own expertise and the know-how of others. Trusted digital credentials will strengthen the new economy by removing some of the high-frequency friction and inefficiencies of project work. Digital, verifiable credentials owned by each worker will ease employer uncertainty while forming project teams. And at the same time, badges will help each of us to identify relevant new work projects and navigate toward just-in-time (aka “gig”) learning opportunities.

In this dystopian vision of our educational future, the joy of learning has been swapped out for a notion of education as "college and career ready" training experiences.

Sequential, comprehensive curriculum is replaced by a series of unrelated, disconnected videos and "online modules," with no cohesiveness, content area articulation, or spiral curriculum organization.

And the purpose of education has been subtly but irrevocably perverted, from the passion and beauty of discovery to the administrative checking off of boxes, rewarded by a badge.

The true purpose of education is less "high tech" than it is "high touch." We learn best by developing strong relationship between teachers and learners, and by forming vibrant learning communities in our schools and classrooms. Technology is not evil, and is a useful tool in teaching and learning--but it is just a tool. It can't replace persons, spaces, and relationships.

Learning is too rich, diverse, and meaningful to be reduced to a "badge" or a "digital credential." It is about the memories we make with our peers through the active "doing" of learning.

The goal of the Gig Economy is to replace hotel stays with bunking with strangers.

The goal of education is to create new relationships, and to turn strangers into friends.

I read an excellent piece on the status of American education in The Atlantic recently, and would strongly recommend anyone interested in schools and schooling to click here and take a look at what Jack Schneider has to say about what's really happening in our schools.

On balance, Mr. Schneider offers a very fair and level-headed analysis of American public education, suggesting that the "crisis" in American education has been wildly exaggerated. But the real problem underlying this discussion can be seen in the first 2 paragraphs, in which only 3 persons are identified as “education experts”:

Sal Khan, Campbell Brown, and Michelle Rhee.

To be clear, none of these persons has attended a public school, has a degree in education, has had their children attend a public school, or has ever held teacher certification. And yet they possess the loudest and most strident voices in the education policy arena, dominating conversations on education policy through sheer volume, and absorbing much of the light and heat in the education policy sphere. Aided and abetted by "education publications" like the billionaire-funded Education Post, Brown has become the "moderator du jour" for education reform meetings, conferences, and made-for-TV edu-infomercials.

If the country desired a substantive discussion on health care policy, we wouldn’t turn to “Dr.” Laura, “Dr.” Phil and “Dr." J. 

We would convene task forces of actual physicians and medical researchers, have meaningful discussions on health care policy and practices, and make reasoned, incremental changes in these policies and practices.

But in education, we have allowed edutourists like Rhee and Campbell to be elevated to positions of authority, and technocrats like Khan to be lauded as visionaries, even as the research conducted by actual education experts is ignored, scorned and even repudiated, and replaced with ideas designed to privatize schools, demonize teachers, and profitize children.

Now, even some of these education experts, tempted by the prospect of previously unimaginable wealth and power, have sold out their profession for a shot at cashing in on the corporate reform gravy train. Witness Dr. Deborah Ball’s stepping down as Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan to concentrate on her work on NOTE: National Observational Teaching Examination for ETS, the Educational Testing Service.

As I've written about previously here, and here, and others have written about here, NOTE is a high-stakes student teacher evaluation test that requires pre-service teachers to "instruct" avatars--yes, avatars! And if their "teaching" of these cartoon characters isn't deemed adequate, the student teacher is denied their certification or teaching license, in spite of the fact that the student teacher in question has just completed an accredited, rigorous 4 or 5 year teacher preparation program, regardless of the student teacher's earned GPA or demonstrated capability to teach real, live children in hundreds of hours of field experiences in local school classrooms, or the intern's exhibited knowledge, understanding or competence in their subject area.

(And, just to rub a little salt in the wound: the persons who are remotely-operating the avatars are not teachers themselves--they are unemployed actors who have been trained to manipulate the joy sticks and computer simulations that control the avatars' voices and movements. The designers of the avatar system found that teachers thought too much about their responses to the interns' teaching "moves"--the actors didn't concern themselves with matters like content correctness or developmentally-appropriate responses; they just followed the provided script, and efficiently completed the task at hand.)

As Jack Schneider points out in his article, 

If the educational system had broken at some point, a look backward would reveal an end to progress—a point at which the system stopped working. Yet that isn’t at all the picture that emerges. Instead, one can see that across many generations, the schools have slowly and steadily improved.

The truth, unfortunately, is much less sexy, and doesn't sell nearly as many newspapers or generate as many "clicks".

It's not very exciting to suggest that our schools, even as they have been systematically defunded by federal and state governments, are doing a terrific job of educating the nation's children.

It doesn't create much "buzz" to point out that even in spite of constantly moving targets, fluctuating "cut scores" on standardized tests, and daily changes to state teacher evaluation systems, our teachers are better prepared than they have ever been, are being expected to do more with less, and--amazingly--are doing it.

America's educational system is not "broken", and our schools aren't "failing." Our teachers aren't "lazy," and no, Sec. Duncan: our kids aren't "dumb."

The truth is that the vast majority of American schools are excellent, and our teachers are doing heroic work under the most difficult working conditions we have seen in our lifetimes. Our education system isn't "failing": we have failed our schools.

The solution to getting out of the "manufactured crisis" we now find ourselves in starts with listening to the real education experts in our midst: the classroom teachers who have devoted their professional lives to teaching our children.

And politely telling Mr. Khan, Ms. Brown and Ms. Rhee to mind their own business, and let us do our jobs.

In the wake of the Michael Butera situation with NAFME, there has been a lot of discussion about matters of equity and inclusion. But this will be a missed opportunity if no action is taken. Here are a few ideas--please suggest yours in the comments below...

We need to make sure that our bands, orchestras and choruses "look like" the population of students in the schools in which they exist. That may mean providing instruments for students who can't afford to rent them, subsidizing private lessons, etc.

There are still too many urban and rural students that do not have access to the same number and quality of music offerings that their peers in more affluent schools do--NAFME should make this a "talking point" in their advocacy materials and legislative work, and should be focused on addressing this kind of equity in their strategic planning. 

I'd like to see NAFME, and state MEAs, sponsor scholarships for summer study for underrepresented minority students, provide free registration for solo and ensemble events for students from low SES schools, and encourage TriM chapters to identify and support minority students who are interested in becoming music teachers.

State MEAs should also look at their lists of "required solo and ensemble music" to make sure that black, Hispanic, women and LGBT composers are represented on these lists.

MEA festival coordinators should be encouraged to invite a diverse selection of guest conductors and clinicians to work with students at regional and all state festivals. These persons are often important mentors and role models for our students, and we need to make sure that our students "see" persons who look like them on podiums and in classrooms at these events. It is also important for "majority" students to have the opportunity to work with a more diverse array of guest conductors and clinicians, who often bring unique backgrounds and perspectives to their teaching.

NAFME and state MEAs should establish recruitment programs to identify promising young minority music teachers, and encourage these teachers to pursue leadership positions in their local, state and national music education associations.

There are also plenty of obstacles that need to be addressed in our college and university music programs in terms of audition procedures that make it more difficult for minority students to be accepted to these institutions to pursue music degrees.

This incident provides an opportunity for NAFME to take some serious actions to address the problems we are all aware of in our school music programs, and in higher education. As music teachers, we need to hold NAFME accountable for taking a leadership position in addressing these problems, and making this a priority in their planning moving forward.

Much has been made of that strange tangle of synthetic carpet fibers and dryer lint perched atop Donald Trump's noggin over the course of the Republican presidential primary: Is it real? Is it alive? Is it hair?

But that discussion obfuscates the real story here--what is the relationship between The Donald's mane and his positions on the political issues of the day?

John Kasich just blew his chance at being Vice President by calling Donald Trump a toxic influence on the American political scene. No way to walk that one back, John. You actually told the truth, and for that you will pay. Republican voters don't care about the truth--as we have heard countless times, "they are angry," which apparently justifies violent and divisive rhetoric, and increasingly, actions.

I'd be impressed by Mr. Kasich's attempt at statesmanship if I hadn't watched from across the border as he destroyed Ohio's schools and economy by instituting massive tax cuts that benefit big business and the wealthiest citizens in his state. While he may be trying to recast himself in the role of the "responsible adult in the room" during this primary, remember that Mr. Kasich's policies are not notably different from Mr. Trump's in many ways, and he has a visible track record of the scorched earth left behind in Ohio as a result of those policies.

This is also the same John Kasich who has watched idly from the sidelines for months as Mr. Trump has escalated his irresponsible rhetoric, and as numerous protestors have been brutally beaten at Trump rallies--but now has decided to respond forcefully to last night's riot. The question will be what motivated Mr. Kasich to awaken from his slumber: righteous indignation, or political opportunism, with Ohio's primary looming just around the corner.

We just saw Mr. Kasich attempt the political version of a "Hail Mary." He's trying to capitalize on last night's riot in Chicago to amplify his faux message of maturity and reasonableness in a last ditch effort at winning his home state of Ohio. Kasich's hope is that a victory in Ohio makes him relevant again in the race for the White House--but his quest depends entirely on Mr. Trump continuing to incite violence among his followers. It's a dangerous gamble for everyone concerned, and is a game that will result only in losers.

The news was shocking in its incongruence and rapidity: failed presidential candidate and serial Rubio attacker, Chris Christie, was endorsing failed strip club owner and serial bankruptcy artist, Donald Trump. To careful observers, this was a stunning turn of events from just a few weeks ago, when Mr. Christie had said the following about his new BFF, as reported by the Washington Post:

• Gov. Chris Christie on Monday said Donald Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" in the wake of the San Bernardino terror attack is "ridiculous," deriding it as "the kind of thing that people say when they have no experience and don't know what they're talking about."
• "...there are folks in this race who don't care about what the law says because they're used to being able to just fire people indiscriminately on television," said Christie, referencing Trump's decade-long stint on NBC's reality television competition, "The Apprentice."
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie strongly refuted Donald Trump’s claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered after the 9/11 terror attacks, claiming that it simply “didn’t happen.” “It didn’t happen and the fact is, people can say anything, but the facts are the facts, and that didn’t happen in New Jersey that day and hasn’t happened since,” Christie told reporters on Monday at a campaign stop in New Hampshire.
• Christie...was denying Trump’s ability to command the nation’s military. “We are not electing an entertainer-in-chief. Showmanship is fun, but it’s not the type of leadership that will truly change America,” Christie said on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire. “If we’re going to turn our frustration and anger with the D.C. insiders and the politicians of yesterday and the carnival barkers of today into something that will actually change Americans’ lives, then we must elect someone who has been tested, someone with proven experience.”
• At a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., Mr. Christie expressed disbelief at Mr. Trump’s comment Saturday that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and lose no support in the 2016 campaign. “It’s pretty amazing to say it, isn’t it?” Mr. Christie asked. Briefly slipping into an impression of Mr. Trump — “We’re stupid,” he deadpanned in a throaty baritone — Mr. Christie said he empathized with voters who want to “burn Washington down.” “But who’s going to rebuild it once it gets burned down?” Mr. Christie said. “That’s what you’ve got to think about.” By nominating the wrong candidate, he continued, “We could wind up turning over the White House to Hillary Clinton for four more years.” That prospect, he said, would be “like the eight years we’ve just had, except worse.”

Today’s Lessons…

1. Abusive teaching behavior has been documented multiple times at Eva Moskowitz’s “Success Academy” charter school network. Ms. Moskowitz never denies these abuses happened—she simply attacks the newspaper or journalist who reported the abuses.

2. The PR firm handling Ms. Moskowitz’s damage control here is none other than Mercury LLP—the same spin doctors retained by Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder to handle the damage control for Mr. Snyder’s bungling of the Detroit Public Schools and Flint water poisoning scandals.

3. When caught abusing or poisoning children, hire Mercury LLP. They are the masters at deflecting, obstructing and distracting. Notice how we are only now starting to hear about lead poisoning in other cities and states? This is Mercury’s strategy to make it seem like Flint isn’t the only place this stuff is happening, and Success Academy isn’t the only school where teachers raise their voices.

How about instead of governors and charter school leaders spending millions on slick PR firms to cover their tracks, they spend that money on the children in their charge?  How about spending that money on replacing the lead pipes in Flint, Mr. Governor, instead of on hiring a high-priced PR firm in a lame attempt to salvage your reputation. And how about spending that money on professional development for teachers in Success Academy schools on how to treat their students with respect instead of on retaining a firm that specializes in lobbying and damage control for clients who find themselves in "difficult situations"?

There are three aspects of American life and culture about which I am unapologetically--and nearly equally--passionate: education, politics, and sports.

While I am sure that the 3 areas share many similarities, it's the differences among these arenas that has attracted my enthusiasm. Education, specifically music education, has been my career path for over 30 years, and I'm deeply committed to making sure that everyone has access to music learning and making opportunities throughout their lives. I also appreciate the intricacies of policy and politics, especially as they intersect with education, and have devoted an increasing amount of my professional energies to pursuing more equitable policy development in education and music education in recent years. And I love the excitement and teamwork of sports, whether as a player, coach or fan.

One commonality that binds these three arenas, however, has become increasingly clear over the past several years: the preoccupation with "prediction" over "reflection" in each domain.

As an avid sports radio listener, I was struck with the failure of virtually every "expert" on my daily sports talk radio shows to accurately call the outcome of a recent football playoff game. In the run up to the AFC Championship game, hardly a single prognosticator on ESPN's slate of talk shows chose the Denver Broncos to defeat the New England Patriots, basing their picks on reams and reams of data, "measurables," and statistics. The ages of the quarterbacks, their yards per attempt, defensive ratings and rankings, and head-to-head matches that--allegedly--favored the dominant Pats to win the game were discussed endlessly. These predictions went on for the entire week leading up to the game, with 11 of the 13 "experts" repeating the "accepted" dogma surrounding the matchup, leaving virtually no room for dissenting viewpoints or competing analyses. By the day of the game, it seemed like a waste of time to actually play the game--the outcome was assured. Except that no one told the Broncos they couldn't win the game--which, of course, they did, by a score of 20-18 in a thriller that was decided by a missed 2 point conversion attempt in the final seconds.

Tuning in to the Iowa caucuses the other night provided an eerily similar experience. The vast majority of polls leading up to Monday night showed that Donald Trump's lead in Iowa was substantial and growing, and that he would win convincingly once the votes were tallied in the Republican race. On the Democratic side, the political "experts" were predicting that Hillary Clinton's political "machine" and "strong ground game" would combine to produce a solid victory over the "disorganized" Bernie Sanders, who at one point in the campaign was behind Ms. Clinton by as many as 50 percentage points in the polls. Several million dollars has been spent on these polls, and the results have been bolstered by telephone marketing and door-to-door campaigns. As we have been lectured to by CNN, Fox, and MSNBC ad nauseam throughout the campaign "season," modern political campaigns are "sophisticated, data driven operations" designed by well-paid campaign consultants and professional political "operatives."  And these operations don't come cheap: Jeb Bush alone has raised over $100 million to date--which earned him exactly 1 delegate and less than 3% of the votes in Iowa--and some estimates suggest that between $5-7 billion will be spent on the 2016 campaign when all is said and done.

By Monday night the narrative in each race would be substantially altered, with Ted Cruz earning a solid victory over Mr. Trump for the Republicans, and Sec. Clinton and Sen. Sanders finishing in a virtual dead heat in the Democratic primary. How could so many pundits be so wrong? How could so many polls indicate inaccurate results?

"Political experts pointed to three reasons the polls were off base:

• This is an extremely volatile political climate, driven by an angry electorate whose voting preferences are difficult to gauge;

• Pollsters low-balled turnout among evangelical voters and underestimated Cruz’s get-out-the-vote operation;

• The Iowa caucuses are uniquely tough to predict, with a quirky process and lots of last-minute deciders."

In each case, considerable time, money and resources were expended in predicting the outcomes of events that are extraordinarily complicated, complex, and dependent on human actors, actions and interactions. Try our best, we know that our chances of accurately predicting what team will beat the other, or what candidate will emerge victorious from an 8 person field is not much better than chance. Yet we persist in our belief that "we know better," and that our powers of observation, or intuition, will somehow allow us to divine the results--and we even bet large sums of money on our hunches.

The analogy in education is our seemingly sole focus on lesson plans as the documentation, and evaluation evidence, with respect to teaching. The typical lesson plan includes information on the proposed purpose of the lesson, a pedagogical sequence of steps to accomplish the lesson's goals, and perhaps some assessment strategies to help determine whether the students actually learned what was taught. All of this would be well and good if teaching was a predictable set of actions and responses--but as anyone that has spent a day in a classroom can tell you, it's not.

I often explain lesson planning and teaching to my students like this: The process of lesson planning is like playing tennis against a wall. You hit the ball against the wall, and can accurately predict the return path of the ball. You can practice your forehand, then your backhand, secure in the knowledge that the ball will come off the wall predictably and consistently, stroke after stroke.

Teaching, on the other hand, is like playing tennis against a wily opponent. You hit the ball across the net, expecting a nice, easy return that you can volley back to your opponent--but your opponent has other ideas, and slices the ball down the line, whistling past your outstretched racket for a winner. There's nothing predictable or consistent about playing tennis this way--and there's no do-overs, or practice volleys, either. (Teaching middle school, by the way, is even more challenging--it's like playing tennis against 30 opponents--each armed with a different piece of sporting equipment, and playing by different rules. You hit the ball across the net, one of your opponents grabs the ball out of the air, throws it to another opponent, and then both of them jump over the net to your side, steal the rest of the tennis balls and throw them over the fence and out of the court.)

[Disclaimer: none of this is to diminish the importance of preparation in teaching. Thorough preparation is critically important for effective teaching, and its importance can not be underestimated. Preparing for teaching, however, is a fundamentally different operation than lesson planning. Preparation is about deep knowledge, fluency of pedagogical strategies, and the development of a teaching "vocabulary," or a pedagogical repertoire of "teaching moves" that enables teachers to respond "in the moment," and to improvise in response to learners' unpredictable actions and behaviors. Lesson planning is about the organization and delivery of content, and is informed by the teacher's deep and thorough preparation for instruction.]

If we really want to know about a teacher's effectiveness in the classroom, a better strategy than requiring that lesson plans be written and submitted before the actual teaching episode would be to ask the teacher to submit revised versions of her or his plans *after* the actual lesson was taught and observed. These lesson plans would include updated information about what actually occurred during the lesson, any adjustments made by the teacher to the intended sequence of teaching steps from the original plan, and a detailed reflection of what went well, what didn't go as well as planned, and what the teacher would do differently if she or he could teach the lesson again.

Rather than placing the emphasis on "predicting" how the imagined lesson will go, our focus should be on how the actual lesson went, and to engage teachers in critical reflection of their practice. Our current focus on "predictive" lesson plans is nothing more than an elaborate game we play with our evaluators of forecasting what "might" happen under hypothetical conditions, whereas shifting our focus to a more reflective stance would allow teachers to work in tandem with their administrators in refining their teaching practice by reflective thinking and collaborative inquiry and problem solving.

Lesson plans written before the lesson should be used by the teacher as an organizational guide--providing reminders about material to be covered during the lesson, specific strategies to be used, and repertoire selections--not as evaluative documentation to be used in determining a teacher's rating or ranking.

This focus on prediction over reflection is why our current teacher evaluation system is so irrevocably broken:

• It's why the use of VAM (Value Added Measures) can not contribute valid or reliable data to a teacher's effectiveness rating--because VAM is a predictive model based on comparing a set of actual student test scores against a hypothetical group of scores.
• It's why relationships between teachers and administrators are currently more about accountability than the improvement of teaching.
• It's why so many veteran teachers are leaving the classroom--because edTPA, NOTE, and teacher evaluation systems are designed to "catch bad teachers," not to help teachers improve their practice and continuously grow as practitioners.
• It's why enrollment in teacher preparation programs is on the decline, and fewer young persons want to enter the profession--because they see teachers devalued and treated like educational "drones," rather than as self-actualized professionals dedicated to a career in the classroom.

If we want the results in education to be better than those in sports and politics, it may be time to shift our focus from predicting outcomes to reflecting on our practice. One is a game of chance; the other is guaranteed to succeed.

I know which approach I'm betting on.

While children and teachers in Detroit are forced to attend schools where black mold and mushrooms grow, and windows need to be propped open in the winter because the boilers can’t be regulated, Gov. Snyder enjoys his recently renovated $2 million condo in swanky downtown Ann Arbor.

While nearly 9000 children in Flint must undergo mandatory blood tests that will likely reveal permanent brain damage caused by lead leached from water pipes, Gov. Snyder enjoys a daily chauffeured limousine ride to Lansing every day, eschewing his taxpayer-provided and maintained mansion in Lansing.

While Flint’s 100,000 citizens must rely on bottled water and try to avoid ingesting any tap water while they bathe or brush their teeth, Gov. Snyder deflects responsibility for his incompetence by blaming civil servants who were following his orders.

While Michigan’s citizens watch the national media mock our state for man-made disasters and epic displays of governmental mismanagement, Gov. Snyder hires a PR firm to spin his negative press clippings.

Mr. Snyder—if you have a shred of decency remaining, and care about this state, do the right thing: resign. Now. Spare us all the indignity of you pretending to “fix” the problems you have created through a pathetic blend of arrogance and ignorance.

Please, just go away.

“Once you’ve decided that people are incapable of responsibly exercising their right to vote—you know, the kind of thing they used to say to keep women and black people from the polls back in the day—it’s not a huge step to deciding that they don’t possess the skills necessary to understand when their own water is poisoning them.”

This is exactly what Great Lakes Education Project (#GLEP-MI) executive director, Gary Naeyaert, did yesterday at a public policy forum on Detroit’s schools. Mr. Naeyaert spent 10 of his 12 minutes blaming Detroit’s citizens for the problems with the city’s schools today—based on his reporting of adult illiteracy rates in the city, and a litany of offenses committed by Detroit residents back to the 1970s—the other minute was spent whining that he didn’t have enough time to trot out all of his PowerPoint slides full of insults about Detroit.

This is not dissimilar from the action's of Michigan's governor, Rick Snyder, in the nearly year since news broke about the Flint water poisoning crisis. Gov. Snyder has managed the rare feat of simultaneously "apologizing" for the lead poisoning of Flint's children while heaping scorn and derision on everyone from Michigan Department of Environmental Quality staffers, to Democratic presidential candidates, to the very doctors and scientists whose research finally broke the story of the magnitude of the poisoning. I didn't think it was possible to "take responsibility" for something at the same time you were insinuating someone else was to blame for that incident, but Mr. Snyder has proved me wrong.

But back to Detroit...It was clear at yesterday's forum that Mr. Naeyaert, and the wealthy Michigan conservative leaders that bankroll GLEP, have already decided that Detroit’s residents are incapable of responsibly governing their city or their schools, and deserve whatever Gov. Snyder’s parade of Emergency Managers decide is their fate...

Crumbling schools? Check.

Black mold and mushrooms growing on classroom floors and walls? Check.

Schools with no working furnace in winter, forcing teachers and children to wear their winter coats in the classroom? Check.

Running up astronomical debt and deficits through wanton EM mismanagement? Check.

My friend and fellow blogger, Nancy Flanagan, has collected and shared more horror stories from the front lines of Detroit's teaching force, recently republished here by Diane Ravitch. Both Nancy and Diane refer to these teachers as heroes, putting their careers and even their own personal health on the line to call attention to the conditions in which they and their students have been forced to exist. And rather than acknowledge the sacrifices these teachers have made for their students, Mr. Naeyaert continued to place even more blame on the victims, incorrectly identifying the "causes" for the sickouts to suit his political agenda.

Mr. Naeyaert spoke nary a word about the Governor’s decisions to strip local control for the schools away from Detroit, the disbanding of the elected school board, or the disastrous working and learning conditions in Detroit’s schools that have necessitated the recent sick outs in the city.

According to Mr. Naeyaert’s view of Detroit, it’s simply a matter of “those people” not being capable of making their own decisions. There was not a moment of his talk in which he mentioned children, learning, teaching or

For Mr. Naeyaert and GLEP, the only thing left is to determine how to divvy up the spoils. His answer? Use the recent sick outs as an excuse to totally dissolve the Detroit Public Schools.

My answer? You don't get to call your organization an "education project" when your goal is to dissolve public education.

[A quick update on my experiences with the National Observational Teaching Exam, or NOTE, a new product from the Educational Testing Service, intended as a competitor to Pearson's edTPA...I've written about NOTE previously, but recently attended a presentation on the exam from ETS personnel, and thought it might be worth sharing some observations--no pun intended.]

I was invited to attend an informational session on NOTE, the National Observational Teaching Exam, yesterday. Full disclosure: I have serious reservations as to the wisdom of building a high-stakes teacher evaluation exam around the notion of student teachers "teaching" avatars in a virtual reality environment as a reasonable simulation of classroom teaching--and expressed these reservations to my colleagues before the meeting--but attempted to enter the session with an open mind. This proved harder than expected...

After some introductory remarks from the ETS employee sent to brief us on NOTE, we saw a video demonstration of the exam. A few details:

• the exam is being offered only for elementary ELA and math; other grade levels and subject areas may be released later
• modules consist of relatively short (7-12 minutes) "on demand" teaching episodes (more on this later)
• the exam is designed as a "high leverage" teacher entrance exam--pass and you receive licensure; fail and you may retake the exam--at $400+ per attempt per student
• the system can generate no more than 5 avatars at a time, so teaching episodes are limited to "classes" of 5 students or less
• emphasis is placed on student teachers being able to "elicit correct responses" from the simulated students (more on this as well)
• the avatars are controlled by "interactors," who are located at a remote site and interact with teacher candidates in real time via video hookups
• interactors control the avatars via headsets and joysticks; each interactor operates up to 5 avatars per episode, using voice modulation software to mimic the voices of children

After the demonstration there was an opportunity for some Q&A. The presenter had mentioned that one of the challenges involved in their work on the exam was the "tension" between authenticity and standardization. She also mentioned that the interactors were not teachers, but rather, actors who were recruited from the DisneyWorld theme park near their Orlando offices. These actors were given scripts from ETS, and told to try to elicit "at least 2 from a possible list of 5 right answers" for each teaching prompt.

I asked the presenter how this tension was influenced by lessons or subjects that didn't place a high priority on eliciting "right answers," but instead sought to promote divergent thinking skills, problem solving, and critical thinking that might value multiple "appropriate responses" to a given prompt. She didn't seem to have considered this possibility, which generated a healthy discussion around the room about the views of teaching and learning that provided the philosophical foundation for the NOTE. I mentioned that as a music teacher educator, my students were often engaged in helping their students form their own interpretations and critical judgments about music, their performance, or the performances of others--or were engaged in teaching creative tasks such as composing and improvising; acts and actions that are not all about "right answers." Some of my colleagues in other teaching areas agreed that getting students to provide "right answers" was a pretty simplistic approach to teaching, and that they believed this approach might prove to be somewhat limiting in the NOTE. There was not really a satisfactory answer provided to this question, so we moved on.

A few people expressed concern that the NOTE consisted of a series of very short teaching episodes, and didn't provide a rich, contextual overview of a teacher candidate's work over time. The presenter responded by suggesting that portfolio exams like edTPA were easier to "cheat on," as students could redo sections until they were happy with them, and have multiple attempts at portfolio components over time. She told us that the "on demand" nature of NOTE made it harder for students to "cheat" like this, and suggested that this factor increased the validity of the exam as a high stakes measure of teaching competence.

Leaving aside the notion that teaching avatars can hardly be considered a valid teaching practice under most conditions, I question the thinking behind an evaluation model that privileges "snapshots" and "one shot exams" over "movies" of a student's practice as a teacher over the course of a semester. The goal of assessment is not to "catch" test takers in tricks and traps--it should be to allow participants to show their work, their thinking, and their ability to think reflectively about their practice as teachers. The NOTE approach to evaluation seems more focused on accountability measures than on helping teacher candidates improve their teaching practice.

Finally, as the Q&A was drawing to a close, I raised my hand to share one last observation. "I think that it's interesting, in a tragic way," I said, "that the very skills that you seem to value in the actors that you hire to control the avatars--the ability to think on one's feet, to respond in an improvisatory way to unpredictable actions by the avatars, and the ability to tolerate ambiguity in the responses from teacher candidates--are exactly the skills that are found in music, art, drama and the fine and performing arts...subjects that are being cut from school curricula across the country. And this curriculum narrowing is a direct result of the obsession with standardized testing, regressive measurement and high-stakes exams that your NOTE test represents."

There was a stunned silence in the room. After a moment, she replied:

"I never thought of that before."

"I think about it every day," I said.

As a native New Yorker, I listened to Ted Cruz's tirade about "New York Values" at the Republican debate the other night with great interest. In the spirit of helpfulness, here are some “New York values” that Ted Cruz may want to consider adopting….

• As a New Yorker, I value transparency, and if I’d been given two $1 million “loans” through Goldman Sachs, my wife’s Wall St employer, for my presidential campaign, I would not have “forgotten” to disclose these loans as required by federal campaign regulations. 
• As a New Yorker, I value where I came from, and acknowledge where I was born—Kenmore, NY…which is in America. And growing up on Grand Island, in the Niagara River between Buffalo, NY and Niagara Falls, ONT, I’ve probably spent more time in Canada than the Canadian-born Cruz, who clearly absorbed none of the traits inherent among his fellow Canadians—kindness, thoughtfulness, modesty and an appealing sense of humility.
• As a New Yorker, I value the importance of relationships, and was taught to try to get along with my friends, school classmates, and colleagues—this appears to be a lesson lost on Mr. Cruz, who has virtually no long time friends willing to vouch for his character and is universally despised by the members of his own party.
• As a New Yorker, I value the contributions made by immigrants to my state and the country, and honor their traditions and cultures—unlike Mr. Cruz, who comes from an immigrant father, and is himself an immigrant to this country, and has waffled with regard to his stance on immigration issues.
• As a New Yorker, I value the truth, and know that it is easier to tell the truth than to weave a web of lies—The Daily Beast reports that, “Cruz’s Politifact track record for publicly asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they’ve looked at.”
• As a New Yorker, I value compassion, and understand that showing understanding for others is what good persons do—“In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years. Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years. Some justices were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let Haley out of prison, after six years.”
• As a New Yorker, I value honesty, and was taught not to be a hypocrite—Ted Cruz is an originalist when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, until it comes to the matter of his own citizenship--then he's a "living Constitutionalist." Put another way, Mr. Cruz is willing to alter his moral and ethical beliefs when it suits him, and when doing so provides him a personal or strategic advantage. Which makes him a moral relativist, a trait that should disqualify him with his evangelical core. It's also telling that virtually all of Mr. Cruz's childhood friends, college friends, colleagues in the Senate and even his former teachers can't stand him, and won't support his bid for the presidency, or consider running with him if he gets the nomination.

That speaks volumes.

I realize that Mr. Cruz believes that he is the smartest person in any room in which he finds himself, but he’s evidently not smart enough to understand that he is running for President of all citizens, not just the ones that agree with his positions on the issues.

Intentionally insulting all New Yorkers—and Americans—who disagree with him on same sex marriage (which happens to be the law of the land), women’s access to affordable health care (ditto), and a whole host of other issues seems a curious way to generate support for one’s candidacy. It may help during the primary season, when candidates run to extreme positions to appeal to the fringe voters in their party, but it’s no way to govern a country.

Mr. Cruz’s smarmy faux “apology” says a lot more about his character, or lack of same, than it does about “New York values.”

And as a New Yorker, I’d like to see him try this act in my home state.

Keep talking, Ted.

I had an interesting "discussion" on Twitter recently with Peter Cunningham, the Executive Director of Education Post--the investment banker, hedge fund manager-bankrolled communications mouthpiece of the corporate education reform industry. Nearly 2 years ago, Peter received $12 million in seed money to provide a "voice" for the poor billionaires who weren't getting a fair shake from the "Main Stream Media" in the public debate around education issues...even though it's the same Main Stream Media that has helped promote the corporate reform agenda, through NBC's "Education Nation" events, and countless puff pieces masquerading as "journalism," such as the treacly attempt at "advocacy journalism" from failed TV news reader, Campbell Brown, over at The Seventy Four. But Peter doesn't quite see it that way.

Here are a few excerpts from our exchange on Twitter, which started when I responded to a series of tweets he was engaged in with other posters...

1. Peter Cunningham ‏@PCunningham57  2h2 hours ago

   @teachin1100 @xianb8 Please don't misunderstand me. You deserve your pension and your pay. Talking about union politicians, not teachers.

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2. Mitchell Robinson ‏@mrobmsu  2h2 hours ago

   @PCunningham57 @teachin1100 @xianb8 You can't destroy unions w/o destroying teachers, Pete.

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This exchange is a great example of how Mr. Cunnningham sets up straw men (all those "union politicians" pulling down the big bucks) as a way to provide cover for his relentless and well-funded attacks on teachers unions--attacks that have done a tremendous amount of damage to teachers' working conditions, and by extension, have damaged student learning in many schools across the country.

Mr. Cunningham's response...

User Actions

 Following 

Peter Cunningham‏@PCunningham57

@mrobmsu @teachin1100 @xianb8 Not interested in destroying unions. Just want them to be partners for kids, which will strengthen them.

12:58 PM - 26 Dec 2015

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Reply to @PCunningham57 @teachin1100 @xianb8 

 Who's in these photos?

Again, Mr. Cunningham conjures up a string of really awful sounding things that unions have done...except that he's just making stuff up. "Restrictive work rules" are things like weekends, which didn't exist for most workers until unions demanded them. And if teachers are undermining accountability they must be doing a pretty poor job of it--we live in a time of unbelievable obsession with standardized testing, and teacher evaluation systems based on test scores of subjects that most teachers don't even teach--and from students they don't even know. As for raising the specter of teachers striking...with teacher salaries up only 3% since 1990, and ever more restrictive labor regulations limiting teachers' rights to negotiate, what's surprising is how few teacher strikes we've been seeing. But that doesn't stop Mr. Cunningham from playing the scare tactic here.

Because the limitations of Twitter present some barriers to a truly substantive discussion, I'm attaching the rest of my reply to Mr. Cunningham below, in the form of a holiday letter...

Dear Peter,

Thanks for the lively exchange of tweets earlier today. I wanted to respond a in a little more fulsome way, and invite you to let me know what you think via email or in the comments below. I really am interested in how a former undersecretary of education has come to the point that he is so determined to attack teacher tenure, teacher unions and "restrictive work rules" for teachers--especially during a time when public schools have been systematically defunded, forced to jump through hoops (Race to the Top) in order to get what remains of federal funding for education, like some kind of bizarre Hunger Games ritual for kids and teachers, and as curriculums have been narrowed to the point where only middle class and wealthier communities have schools that offer subjects like music, art, and physical education--much less recess time, school nurses or psychologists, or guidance counselors.

From my vantage point, it seems like folks that are truly interested in children, teachers, schools and education should be working hard to make sure that all kids had access to these things, regardless of their family's socio economic status or the community in which they reside--but I see now from your tweets that my concern about these things has been misplaced.

Naively, I thought that someone who had worked in the federal Department of Education would be working to make sure schools and children had the necessary resources to be "successful." I now understand that what we really need are more tests, no unions, and fewer job protections. I'm still not sure how those things will help kids learn, but I guess I just need to be more trusting.

Speaking of kids, I was also thankful to be set straight by you about what is really good for kids (i.e., "Just want them [unions] to be partners for kids, which will strengthen them."). Since I've only been teaching since 1980, and only hold bachelor's, masters and doctoral degrees in education, I--naively--thought that I was dedicated to the welfare of students. I had no idea that unions were so interested in "partnering with kids," but I probably was too busy teaching to notice all that kid-partnering being done behind the scenes. Thanks for the heads up!

On a related note, I also had no idea that unions were supposed to be focused on kids. I thought that since unions were designed to protect and advocate for workers' rights, they were supposed to be about being attentive to teachers' needs--but I now see the light. I do wonder why the auto workers' unions haven't been so keen on partnering up with drivers, but I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason. Right?

However, I do have one tiny, nagging question for you...when did the folks at the Broad Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Walton (Walmart) Family Foundation (and an "anonymous donor"! ooh, that sounds downright mysterious!), and your colleagues in the corporate reform arena like Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and Campbell Brown become so selflessly dedicated to the education of children? Again, perhaps I've been naive, but I've always trusted teachers--persons that have dedicated their lives to educating, nurturing and encouraging children--more than big business foundations and fast-track route to teaching programs like Teach for America to have the concerns of children at heart, but it looks like I'm wrong again...

Finally, thanks for alerting me to all those teachers who are working 5-6 hour days! Truth be told, I'm married to a teacher, and she's NEVER home after only 5 or 6 hours, so I guess I better start looking a bit more carefully into how she's spending all of that "discretionary time"! (My guess is she's getting her nails done, sipping mai tai's in a Tiki bar somewhere, and watching movies until she gets home 8-9 hours after she leaves the house in the morning. I have to admit, her little ruse of pretending to write lesson plans every single night until it's time to go to bed has thrown up a pretty convincing smokescreen. But thanks to you, Mr. C., the jig is up!)

I have to admit that I'm still a tad stymied by all of those public school teachers attending professional development sessions on Saturdays and Sundays, or going to graduate school at night and during the summers to get their masters degrees, or spending their own money on tissues, markers and other classroom supplies. Why are they seemingly so committed to their students, schools and jobs that they spend copies amounts of their own time and money improving their teaching skills and knowledge, when they and their unions are simultaneously working so hard to shorten work days and get rid of workplace rules, as you claim? It's almost as though teachers were dedicated professionals, committed to continuously improving their craft, and not greedy, lazy thugs who, in an ideal world, would be replaced by eager, young college grads with no teaching degrees or experience. As if!

So, Mr. Cunningham, thanks again for all that you and Education Post do to "honor teachers for the work they do every day as professionals", and shining the bright reformer spotlight on the serious problems in public education today--by attacking unions, working to eliminate teacher tenure and job protections, and supporting the proliferation of for-profit charter schools (under the guise of "school choice") that under-perform and siphon money away from public schools. I'm still not sure how this agenda is going to improve schooling and education, but if we can't trust the Broad and Walton Foundations to do what's in the best interests of teachers and kids, who can we trust?

Happy Holidays!
Mitch

Inspired by my fellow music educator and blogger, Jersey Jazzman, and to offer a break from my typical posts about the horrors of education reform, here's a playlist of some of my favorite seasonal tunes. And because the holidays are about indulging--in great music and great food!--each selection is accompanied by one of my favorite recipes. So snuggle up around the fireplace and pour a drink...or 6...

Let's start with an oldie-but-goodie from my favorite crooner, Frank Sinatra: Mistletoe & Holly. There's just something so nostalgic and comforting about this tune. For me, it brings back memories of my childhood when we listened to Christmas albums collected from the local gas station that were given out when you filled up your tank...and to accompany this tasty, jazzy appetizer, a 1960s-era throwback--shrimp cocktail, with a chipotle-infused cocktail sauce to bring it into the 21st Century.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has attracted a lot of attention recently for making a bold statement about closing schools that were performing "below average," saying: "I wouldn’t keep any school open that wasn’t doing a better-than-average job." US News & World Report rushed to Sec. Clinton's defense, claiming her words were "taken out of context." You can read the article and make up your own mind, but I think all of this commentary is missing the larger point around Ms. Clinton's remarks.

Sec. Clinton, in suggesting that the solution to poorly performing students is simply closing schools, is merely following what has become a common trope in the corporate education reform community--the notion that "the problems" in education can be solved simply by, variously, "getting rid of the bad teachers", converting public schools to charter schools, raising standards, or increasing the amount of standardized testing for students. Much of this rhetoric chooses to ignore the role that the corporate reform agenda itself has played in contributing to "the problems" in education, but that's an issue for another post.

Whenever I hear public officials and education policy decision makers suggest that closing schools is a legitimate strategy, I know that person is not serious about actually improving educational outcomes. The decision to close a school is not made to improve student learning, or to increase the effectiveness of teachers. Put simply, closing a school is a business decision. School closings are a strategy lifted from the "creative destruction" school of thought championed by economists like Joseph Schumpeter, and vulture capitalists such as Mitt Romney. The goal is to maximize financial resources, sell off existing assets, and provide an attractive return to one's investors.

For these reasons, we tend to see more school closings in the charter school sector, especially for-profit charters--some for financial mismanagement, others for low enrollment, and still others for...more nefarious reasons. Now, while I'm no fan of for-profit charters, I still don't believe that closing these schools makes any sense as an educational strategy.

When a school is closed, it creates more problems than when your local auto dealer or bank branch closes. While you may have to find a different place to buy a new car or cash your checks, closing a school disrupts an entire community.

Closing a school fractures families, scatters colleagues, and damages neighborhoods. Schools are not just places that children go during the day when their parents go to work--they are complicated, complex ecological and social systems that provide spaces for learning communities to develop and flourish. Schools are places where children go to feel safe, and to feel valued. Schools are places full of music, movement, art, critical thinking, food, lively discussions and play.

Closing a school is like ripping apart a family.

Are there schools that struggle? Of course. Just as there are car dealers and banks that struggle. How ironic is it, then, that many of the same hedge fund managers and venture capitalists that came to the rescue of the car companies and big banks that "struggled" in 2008 are the major investors in the charter industry now? The difference now is that these investors have the resources to send their own children to private schools, which have largely escaped the ravages of the "reforms" these investors have wrought upon the public schools. It's a scorched earth policy, leaving nothing behind but shareholder profits.

And here is the core of the difference between education and business. When schools and students struggle, our solution must be educative, not punitive.

When children struggle in public school, we teach them more, and we teach them harder. We don't punish them for what they don't know.

We stay after school, or come in early, and we try new strategies in an attempt to reach them in different ways. We don't close the classroom door.

We call home, and talk to their parents to try to find out if there is something happening at home that's getting in the way of their learning. We don't suspend them from school.

Closing a school is punitive...and miseducative. There is nothing educative about closing a school. And we should reject any education policy that advocates school closings as a viable educational strategy.

It all started with the ridiculously named, "No Child Left Behind."

NCLB then morphed into the equally ludicrously labeled, "Every Child Succeeds Act."

In the meantime we've seen "No Excuses" charter schools, "zero tolerance" behavior policies, and a leading Presidential candidate say, with a straight face, that she "wouldn't keep any school open that wasn't doing a better-than-average job," seemingly unaware that such a policy--in addition to being impossible to monitor and enforce, and mathematically improbable if not impossible--is not within her purview if she were to become POTUS.

The national rhetoric around education reform has become indistinguishable from our current dialogue around politics and entertainment, which is dominated by the obscene and the grotesque, while serious and reasoned discussion on substantive issues is ignored and even scorned.

Leaving aside for the moment that it is not the President's job to determine which schools get closed and which remain open, that--although it sounds sweet and kind and warm--it's pretty naive to make it a goal of education policy to guarantee that "no child gets left behind," and that a policy recommendation that stipulates "every child will succeed" is a bit short on both definitions (what do we mean by "succeed"?) and details (how will student success be measured, by whom, under what conditions, what resources will this policy goal require, etc.), let's consider a few serious policy recommendations that would be worthy of our collective consideration and discussion.

• The "No School or Teacher Left Behind" Act: This initiative establishes new state and federal funding policies that guarantee the end of so-called "unfunded mandates." In other words, no longer will state and federal politicians be able to pass new laws concerning student testing, curriculum changes, or teacher evaluation without simultaneously providing all necessary resources for implanting, supporting and maintaining such laws. Additionally, no education-related laws may be passed without significant input from practicing teachers--and this means real input; not faux "grassroots" efforts made up of "blue ribbon panels" consisting of folks with no education degrees, teacher certification, or actual classroom teaching experience.
• The "Every School Budget Succeeds" Act: This new policy guarantees that all public schools receive adequate funding, and that government budgets include the necessary funds to bring all school buildings and facilities into compliance with state and federal regulations on workplace safety. As a part of the ESBS Act, all public schools must offer a rich and diverse curriculum for all learners, including music and art, physical education, library, school nurses, and time for recess. 
• The "No Excuses for Charter Schools" Act: The NECS Act is a rider inserted into the ESBS Act that prohibits the use of any state or federal monies for the support of charter schools or private/religious schools, and mandates that all monies that had previously been earmarked for charter school support be returned to the public schools in those jurisdictions.
• The "Zero Tolerance for Charter School Operators" Act: This new law would establish serious fines and punishments for charter school operators who embezzle funds, abruptly close schools when teachers show an interest in forming a union, falsify data, use their schools as fronts for money-laundering, and employ untested and miseducative pedagogical and behavior strategies (such as draconian suspension policies). All funds remitted for these fines would be returned, by law, to the public schools in those jurisdictions, and must be matched, dollar for dollar, by the charter authorizer in each incident.
• The "Better Than Average" Act: This new federal law is not an education policy per se--it applies to political candidates, and requires that any candidate for elected office who is found to have lied more than the average of all candidates in their race must immediately resign from that campaign, and turn over all remaining contributions to the public schools in the candidate's home town and state.

Rather than making a series of empty, unfilled promises, these policies would actually improve teachers' working conditions, students' learning conditions, and school funding; would protect public schools from inequities of funding caused by the proliferation of charter schools; and would "encourage" the decision makers who currently establish public education policy to play within the rules, or forfeit the thing they are really most concerned about: those sweet, sweet campaign contributions. 

Policy making is not about coming up with fanciful names for unrealistic policy goals that over-promise and under-deliver. It's about developing serious, considered and thoughtful recommendations for improving the conditions under which we work and live.

It's time to get serious about education policy. Let's make sure the candidates from both parties understand that we won't accept more empty promises and unfunded mandates.

And let's make sure they also remember the most important thing: We vote.

A recent article from MLive on the state's efforts to "improve" teacher evaluation practices manages to get nearly everything wrong, with the only saving grace being the contributions of a brilliant music teacher, Mandy Mikita Scott. But first, let's go over what the article got wrong:

• Venessa Keesler, deputy superintendent of accountability services at MDE, said measuring student growth is a "challenging science," but student growth percentiles represent at "powerful and good" way to tackle the topic. "When you don't have a pre-and-post-test, this is a good way to understand how much a student has progressed," she said. Under the new law, 25 percent of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student growth through 2017-18. In 2018-19, the percentage will grow to 40 percent. State standardized tests, where possible, will be used to determine half that growth. In Michigan, state standardized tests – most of which focus on reading and math – touch a minority of teachers. One study estimated that 33 percent of teachers teach in grades and subjects covered by state standardized tests.
  
  What Dr. Keesler doesn't seem to understand is that the student growth percentiles she is referring to are nothing more than another name for Value Added Measures, or VAM--a statistical method for predicting students' academic growth that has been completely and totally debunked, with statements from nearly every leading professional organization in education and statistics against their use in making high stakes decisions about teacher effectiveness (i.e., exactly what MDE is recommending they be used for in teachers' evaluations). The science here is more than challenging--it's deeply flawed, invalid and unreliable, and its usefulness in terms of determining teacher effectiveness is based largely on one, now suspect study conducted by a researcher who has been discredited for "masking evidence of bias" in his research agenda.
  
  Dr. Keesler also glosses over the fact that these measures of student growth only apply to math and reading, subjects that account for less than a third of the classes being taught in the schools. If the idea of evaluating, for example, music and art teachers by using math and reading test scores doesn't make any sense to you, there's an (awful) explanation: "'The idea is that all teachers weave elements of reading and writing into their curriculum. The approach fosters a sense of teamwork, shared goals and the feeling that "we're all in this together,' said Erich Harmsen, a member of GRPS' human resources department who focuses on teacher evaluations." 
  
  While I'm all for teamwork, this "explanation" is, to be polite, simply a load of hooey. If Mr. Harmsen truly believed in what I'll call the "transitive property" of teaching and learning, then we would expect to see math and reading teachers be evaluated using the results of student learning in music and art. Because what's good for the goose...right?
  
  The truth is, as any teacher knows, for evaluation to be considered valid, the measures must be related to the actual content that is taught in the teacher's class--you can't just wave some magical "we're all in this together" wand over the test scores that miraculously converts stuff taught in band class to wonderful, delicious math data. It just doesn't work that way, and schools that persist in insisting that it does are now getting sued for their ignorance.
  
• Dr. Keesler goes on to say: "So much of the local data is actually unreliable and totally unfair to educators," she said. "It's not helpful in terms of improvement. What many other states have done is that they've actually put collaborative efforts together to develop new data sources for non-tested subjects." A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that local assessments can vary among "teachers at the same grade, in the same school, teaching the same subjects." The study, which examined teacher evaluations in 13 districts across the state, said this diversity in assessment makes it nearly impossible to apply a uniform standard for judging teachers' success in promoting students' academic growth.
  
  What's missing from this "analysis" is any sort of justification for why "applying uniform standards for judging teachers' success" is important, necessary, or even meaningful.
  
  Teachers work with children, and these children are not standardized.
  
  Teachers work in schools, and these schools exist in communities that are not standardized.
  
  And teachers work with other teachers, custodians, secretaries, administrators, school board members, and other adults--none of which are standardized.
  
  So why should teacher evaluations systems in schools in communities as diverse as the Upper Peninsula and downtown Detroit evaluate their teachers using the same system? And why is the finding that "local assessments can vary among 'teachers at the same grade, in the same school, teaching the same subjects'" a bad thing?
  
  The thing that we should be valuing in these children, schools and communities is their diversity--the characteristics, talents and interests that make them gloriously different from one another. A school in Escanaba shouldn't look like a school in Kalamazoo, and the curriculum in each school should be tailored to the community in which it resides. The only parties that benefit from "standardizing" education are the Michigan Department of Education and the testing companies that produce these tests, because standardizing makes their jobs easier. Standardizing teaching and learning doesn't help students, teachers or schools, so why are we spending so much time and money in a futile attempt to make Pearson and ETS's jobs easier?

• Sandi Jacobs, senior vice president for state and district policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said state oversight is important. A new report by her organization says "states have a responsibility to make sure measures are meaningful by providing strong examples, requiring oversight and holding principals and districts accountable for the quality of performance indicators."
  
  Sometimes it's not about what is said so much as who is saying it. In this case, Ms. Jacobs' employer, the misleadingly-named National Center for Teacher Quality, is an organization that has appointed itself to judge the quality of teacher education programs nationally, while holding exactly zero authority, credibility or expertise to do so. The NCTQ's "methods" for evaluating these programs consist largely of cruising websites and printed materials--they conduct no site visits, interview no faculty or students, and never leave their cozy offices to engage in the messy and complicated work that is true "program evaluation." The NCTQ was created by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and is funded by generous grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which explains the group's obsession with "data-driven decision making," and their uncritical acceptance of the belief that any test score is a useful and valid piece of information when it comes to defunding and destroying the institutions that have traditionally prepared our nation's teachers.
  
  The NCTQ has a long history of unsavory practices, including the unauthorized use of federal funds to plant positive stories about NCLB in the media--a direct violation of federal policy, for which the NCTQ was cited. In a fascinating twist of fate, the recipient of nearly $250,000 of those funds was a media personality, Armstrong Williams, who is now the chief campaign consultant for the Presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson. So, the next time someone suggests to you that the education reformers are political "progressives," keep this little nugget in mind.
  

The article concludes with a much-needed breath of fresh air from Mandy Mikita Scott, a choral music teacher in the Rockford Public Schools:

With all the debate over how to measure student growth, it's easy for educators like Rockford Public Schools Choir Director Mandy Scott to be skeptical.

Scott said she believes teachers should have a say in how student growth is measured, and she's hopeful that evaluation methods will be fine-tuned to greater reflect the heart of what she's teaching.

Currently, Scott quizzes her students on music theory, once at the start of the semester and again at the end. If her students' scores improve, they've shown growth. She says the system works, but she envisions a different approach. It would be interesting, she said, to record her students and see how their singing changes over the course of the year, but that's hard to put on a "spreadsheet."

Ms. Scott cuts through the jargon and misdirection of the current rhetoric on teacher evaluation to get directly to the heart of the matter. The assessment strategies she is using are appropriate and related to the content that she's teaching. She isn't evaluating her students on their reading ability by administering a music theory test--she's using those music theory tests to understand what her students know about music theory.

What a concept.

She intuitively understands that while recording her students' singing test scores on a "spreadsheet" might be "interesting," the real value in administering these assessments is to know more about how her students' singing has changed "over the course of the year." And that converting a person's singing to a number is a reductionist act that fundamentally changes the nature of that evaluation.

Ms. Scott concludes by saying the following: "At the moment, it doesn't feel like it's really touching the heart of what I'm doing," she said. "I feel like having a number on a page makes it very difficult. If it could be something like submit these recordings and let us take a listen to what we're doing, that could be kind of exciting."

And here is the true brilliance of Ms. Scott's commentary. Perhaps if we listened to the real experts on evaluation--teachers--instead of the self-appointed (NCTQ) and state-appointed (MDE) "experts", we could get back to "the heart of what we are doing" in our schools: encouraging our children to find their voices as scholars, musicians, artists, scientists, mathematicians, geographers, athletes, and citizens; allowing students to find and nurture their talents, interests and passions by offering a rich, diverse curriculum that values and privileges more than just math and reading; and helping our children to become more fully human, rather than simply "career and college ready."

Thank you to Mandy Mikita Scott, and all teachers who are committed to encouraging, helping and nurturing our children so they can find and follow their interests and passions, and who understand that learning is about much more than "numbers on a page."

In an attempt to address the rampant lying and truth bending at the debates, here's a modest proposal:

1. Every time one of the candidates says something that is factually wrong, or intentionally misleading, a flashing light should be activated in front of their podium. 
2. At the same time, the news crawl at the bottom of the screen should scroll by with the correct information, while the candidate is speaking.
3. The moderator should point out each correction before each commercial break, with the time used to do so taken from the appropriate candidate(s) allotment. 
4. Finally, each lie told should result in a penalty of 3 minutes of reduced speaking for the lying candidate.

With the millions of dollars in advertising revenue the networks make on these debates, there is no excuse for not implementing such a system immediately. The networks could employ a team of fact checkers from a spectrum of news organizations with access to the appropriate news sources and databases of information required to check the veracity of the candidates' statements in real time. 

It is simply unacceptable for persons who are running for the office of the President to stand on the stage and flat out lie to the public and not be held accountable for what they say.

If you agree with these new rules, please sign the petition linked here, and share widely on your social media networks!

Well, well, well. So now Kevin Huffman (aka the ex-Mr. Michelle Rhee), former Commissioner of Education in Tennessee, has finally decided that for-profit charter schools are a bad idea. Welcome to reality, Mr. Huffman. You may have reached this conclusion years ago if you had a degree in education (BA in English from Swarthmore; law degree from NYU) , or had ever taught anyone anything (and no--I don't count your stint with TFA as teaching experience, Kevin).

Mr. Huffman’s realization that for-profit charters are bad reminds me of Dick Cheney coming out against Donald Trump’s racist comments the other day.

Or, Arne Duncan's (supposed) mea culpa on the negative impact of standardized testing on America's schools, teachers and children.

Or, the ESSA's apparent recapitulation on federal control of education, and the decision to turn back more authority on education to the states.

With each of these examples, it’s a case of "too little, too late." In each case, (i.e., Huffman, Cheney, Duncan, ESSA), the persons involved helped to create the conditions that make the very things they are now against—for-profit charters, racist Presidential candidates, our obsession with tests, and attacks on local control of education , respectively)—possible in the first place.

Mr. Huffman's relentless attacks on public education, and his 10+ years of work for his previous employer (Teach for America) cleared the way for an explosion of charter schools across the country, many of the "for-profit" variety--including the Tennessee Virtual Academy. Here's what Mr. Huffman has to say...now...about the TVA:

This past summer, the state released the school results from the 2014-15 school year. The Tennessee Virtual Academy earned a Level 1 in growth for the fourth year in a row. It clocked in at #1312 out of 1368 elementary and middle schools in the state. It is no longer the most improved lousy school in Tennessee. It is just plain lousy. It is, over a four-year time, arguably the worst school in Tennessee.

K12 Inc. lives on in Tennessee. The Tennessee Virtual Academy opened its online doors again in August. State officials tell me that they aren’t thinking about other legal steps. After all, if and when the school fails again this year, they will close it down.

I will believe it when I see it.

Like most education reformers, Mr. Huffman's solution to the problem of TVA is simple: close it. The reformers rarely consider the implications or fall out from the decision to close a school--a place in which families come together, and relationships form between and among students and teachers. Closing a school is like ripping a family apart--but Mr. Huffman is proudly data-driven, and doesn't waste his time worrying about the "collateral damage" caused to the person that actually work in these schools. It's all bottom line to him--test scores over all.

And what to make of Sec. Duncan's supposed U-turn on the merits of standardized testing? To quote Lee Corso, "Not so fast my friend..."

Peter Greene, the voice behind the brilliant blog at Curmudgication, caution us not to be too quick in celebrating this supposed recapitulation from the Obama administration on testing:

The fact that the administration noticed, again, that there's an issue here is nice. But all they're doing is laying down a barrage of protective PR cover. This is, once again, worse than nothing because it not only doesn't really address the problem, but it encourages everyone to throw a victory party, put down their angry signs, and go home. Don't go to the party, and don't put down your signs.

In the same vein, some analysts warn that the early enthusiasm for the ESSA's return of local control may not be quite what it seems, and that there are other, potentially more damaging Eater eggs buried in the legislation, specifically with respect to teacher education programs. Kenneth Zeichner, professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, wrote a scathing analysis of ESSA's potential for gutting teacher preparation as we know it, here. It is well worth reading the entire article, but the excerpt below provides a bit of a synopsis--which is chilling:

In October 2013, I criticized a bill called the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act, known as the GREAT Act. It was initiated in March 2011 in conversations between leaders of the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF); Norm Atkins, founder of the Relay Graduate School of Education; Tim Knowles of the University of Chicago; and several members of Congress.

The purpose of this bill was to provide public funds for promoting the growth of entrepreneurial teacher education programs such as the ones seeded by New Schools Venture Fund (for example, Relay, MATCH Teacher Residency and Urban Teachers) that are mostly run by non-profits. At the time, the CEO of NSVF was Ted Mitchell, who is now the U.S. under secretary of education.

In June 2011, NSVF circulated a letter seeking endorsements for the bill. Among those who signed the letter were organizations in favor of greater deregulation and market competition in teacher education. Some have been financially supported by NSVF (Teach For America, TNTP, MATCH, Relay, etc.). Other backers included individuals and advocacy groups such as Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform. While this bill was introduced in the 112th Congress, it was not enacted.

On May 23, 2013, the GREAT Act was introduced into Congress and was included in Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization proposals in both chambers. It was eventually included in the final reauthorization bill passed by the House, but not in the final bill passed by the Senate. It was included, however, in the final compromise bill now before Congress which the House passed this week and the Senate is primed to approve this coming week. The teacher preparation academies that would be created under the legislation will be required to prepare teachers to serve in “high-needs” schools.

I argued then, as I do here, that the provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act that relate to teacher preparation academies have been primarily written to support entrepreneurial programs like those funded by venture philanthropists. These include fast-track teacher education programs such as Teach For America, Relay [Graduate School] and TNTP [The New Teacher Project], which place individuals in classrooms as teachers of record before they complete certification requirements. Typically these classrooms are in schools that serve students in high-poverty communities. Although there have been some changes in the language in since 2011, the provisions still serve to reduce standards for teachers prepared through the academies and will widen inequities rather than reduce them.

All of these apparent retreats and changes in position must be treated with abundant caution, and a healthy dose of informed skepticism--because as history has taught us, when big piles of money and unbridled power are involved, persons rarely change their goals or tactics.

So, here is my unsolicited advice for Messrs. Huffman, Cheney, and Duncan: Thanks for finally realizing that your "contributions" to education and politics might have caused some unexpected and negative consequences--like the manufactured "crisis" in public education, the rise of a neo-fascist candidate for the highest office in the land, and a rewrite of federal education policy that trashes teacher education programs in exchange for a faux-return of control to the states.

In other words: You broke it, you own it, guys.

Click here to listen to my radio interview with fellow education activist Denisha Jones on the Education Town Hall: BUS (Badass Teachers Association, United Opt Out, Save our Schools):

Death Knell for “Ed Reform”?

Mitchell Robinson, of Michigan State University, and Denisha Jones, of Howard University — both active in the Badass Teachers Association — discuss the disappointment of teachers and teacher educators, nationwide, as unions and others jump on the “teachers are the problem” bandwagon of #TeachStrong.

Jones explains how the new effort fails to include many experienced schools of education, possibly in recognition of the fact that previous attempts to privatize and control schools have been thwarted by teachers and teacher educators.

Robinson also argues, however, that recent changes of tack for ed reformers, including Gates Foundation teacher prep funding, suggest reformers’ frustration because, “they have not done one thing” and are consequently failing. Robinson suggest this flurry of activity may signal, perhaps, a death knell for combative and unsuccessful strategies. 

A recent column by Stephen Mucher, Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College, has attracted a lot of attention from those concerned about the health and vitality of public education. And for good reason. Mr. Mucher mentions the recent history of campus protests across the country, which he says he has noticed on his visits to some of the nation's most elite universities ("M.I.T. to U.S.C., Appalachian State to Cal State, Michigan to Berkeley, Amherst to Occidental") in his attempts to recruit what he refers to as "brilliant, dedicated, inspired young people who are ready and willing to serve" to Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching program. His conclusion is that these students are still engaged, politically aware, and want to make a difference in our nation's future ("until recently, many flocked to Teach For America"), but "they do not want to become teachers."

Why?

Without offering any actual evidence, Mr. Mucher suggests that prospective teachers have been scared off from applying to his program by much of the agenda of the corporate reform movement: increasing accountability demands placed on teachers, using student test scores to determine teachers' effectiveness ratings, and "the way teachers are blamed for much broader social problems." Now, no one who has spent any time in a classroom over the past several years would disagree that these are all real problems, and have combined to create a profession that feels under attack and held to unrealistic expectations even as states and the federal government continue a systematic disinvestment in public education. However, I would suggest that at least part of Mr. Mucher's failure to find what he is looking for may be because he is he is basing his search strategy on a faulty premise--and perhaps more importantly, because he's looking in the wrong places.

Better Rhetoric

A careful reading of Mr. Mucher's essay reveals an emphasis on the same, tired old reformer rhetoric: that teachers are "the problem" in public education ("But finding candidates to fill this role, especially good candidates, may be more difficult than policymakers are willing to admit"), and that these problems can be solved only if we can improve the quality of the teaching workforce ("America’s public schools need better teachers"). In an effort to bolster his assertions, Mr. Mucher nods to a recent survey suggesting that the teacher shortage is a significant problem, and identifying a set of principles designed to attract more young persons to the profession. [Curiously, these principles are eerily similar to the ones released earlier this week by the #TeachStrong initiative: "Better pre-service preparation, scholarships, loan forgiveness, higher salaries, professional mentorship, in-service training, and more time for collaborative work."]

With all due respect to Mr. Mulcher, it's time to put a stop to this lazy rhetoric, and stop blaming teachers for the problems that have been caused by the very reform agenda that forms the underpinning for his essay. Teachers are not the problem--teachers are the solution.

The "problems" in public education won't be solved by promoting the rhetoric that simply luring the "best and brightest" students from America's most elite colleges and universities to teaching will somehow fix the systemic defunding and privatization of our schools and the de-professionalization of the teaching profession. If anything, this strategy has contributed to the destabilization of the teaching force through programs such as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project--both of which, ironically enough, are partners for the #TeachStrong initiative.

Public education will only be "fixed" by admitting that whatever problems do exist in the schools have only been worsened by the damages done by the corporate reformers. Is there a "teacher shortage" in certain areas and in specific subject areas? Of course. But this shortage has been a "manufactured" one, and won't be solved simply by increasing the numbers of new entrants to the profession. We must first address the root causes of the shortage--poor working conditions, inadequate compensation structures, a lack of administrative and community support for teachers and schools, and invalid and unreliable teacher evaluation systems that are driving the most talented and experienced teachers out of the classroom.

Looking for Teachers in All the Wrong Places...

If Mr. Mulcher is really interested in finding more and "better" teachers I would also suggest that, instead of copying the approach of Teach for America and other alternative route to certification programs, he start by looking for young people who actually want to be career teachers--not just those with the highest GPAs or the gaudiest resumes.

I also find it curious that while the principles mentioned by Mr. Mulcher in his essay for improving the quality of the teaching force include recommendations for "better inservice preparation...in-service training, and more time for collaborative work," the marketing materials for the Bard MAT Program, which is designed to be completed in 14-24 months, appear to emphasize brevity and convenience more heavily than depth or breadth of content or experience. The irony here is remarkable.

The students I have the privilege of working with at Michigan State University are not only proficient in the skills, knowledge and dispositions needed for success as early career teachers, they are aware of the "big picture" surrounding public education, and are committed to making a difference. These students are deeply committed to becoming not just teachers, but to becoming teacher leaders. They recognize the inequities that currently exist in too many schools and communities, and are excited to enter a profession that desperately needs their energy and passion. My students understand that they are entering a profession that requires significant preparation, and have dedicated themselves to a comprehensive and thorough course of study that includes theory, practice and authentic field experiences over an extended period of time. 

While Mr. Mulcher seems alarmed at the recent protests on college campuses, I see these protests as signs that today's students are increasingly aware of the inequities that exist in our society, and are ready to do something about these problems. Where Mr. Mulcher sees college activism as a sign that students are less interested in joining the teaching force, I see these events as indications that college students are ready to join those of us who have committed our professional lives to making a difference in our public schools and communities.

It is our job to stand up to the reform agenda, and make public education a place that is again worthy of the passion, dedication and spirit of our newest colleagues. We need them, and they need us. 

Careful readers have noticed a flurry of reformster activity over the past week or so, highlighted by two big announcements. First was the rollout of #TeachStrong, an education improvement scheme allegedly dedicated "to modernizing and elevating the teaching profession," and involving a murderer's row of reformer groups, like Teach for America, the Relay Graduate School of Education and the National Center for Teacher Quality. Never mind that none of these groups are actually interested in either modernizing or elevating anything, and are instead working to hasten the privatization of public education, and turning P-12 schools and college teacher education programs into profit centers. [As an aside, why is it that when the reformers name a new group they simply throw a bunch of words together that sound like they are good, but infuse them with the exact opposite of what those words mean (i.e., TFA is not about teaching for the good of America in any way; the RGS bears absolutely no resemblance to a real graduate school; and, the NCTQ wouldn't recognize a quality teacher preparation program if it actually set foot on a college campus--which it doesn't actually do in its attempts to evaluate teacher prep programs. So there's that...).]

Announcement #2 came today with the unveiling of a massive, $34 million grant bonanza from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is designed to...stop me if you've heard this one before..."improve teacher-preparation programs’ overall effectiveness." This one looks for all the world like a college-targeted follow up to Mr. Gates' failed efforts to improve teacher quality, which has taken over a decade and billions of dollars. You've got to hand it to Bill and Melinda--they are persistent. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their reforms have not moved the needle on teacher quality, test scores, class size, small schools or student learning, they just don't give up.

This new project involves a rather motley crew of organizations, including TeacherSquared (which includes a slew of what are charitably referred to as "nontraditional preparation programs," such as our old friends from the Relay Graduate School of Education), a consortium of 6 Southern universities, the Massachusetts Department of Education, and the National Center for Teacher Residencies.

But perhaps the most curious partner in the Gates-funded consortium is TeachingWorks, a think-tank out of the University of Michigan, led by Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Dean of the UM School of Education. TeachingWorks has been brought on board to serve "as a clearinghouse for the other grantees to share best practices, provide technical support to each center, and supply teacher performance assessments." It's the last part of that description that provides the clue as to what this flurry of activity may really be all about.

As I wrote about here, TeachingWorks has been partnering with ETS (the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ) on the development of NOTE, a new competitor to edTPA, the high-stakes student teacher evaluation system from Pearson, Inc. NOTE is noteworthy (get it?) for its use of avatars and a virtual reality setting to provide an up-or-out "teacher performance assessment" for student teachers. Go back and read that last sentence again...I'll wait...yup, you read that correctly. ETS is creating a high-stakes student teacher test that they will sell to teacher preparation programs and students that makes teacher candidates pretend to teach avatars--fake students--in order to be judged worthy of becoming teachers.

Cue background music...Narrator's voice: "If only we could develop a system of preparing future teachers that involved prospective educators, under the supervision of actual master teachers, as they taught real, live children in real schools. And if only we could provide these young teachers with support and guidance during their internships in the schools by having college personnel observe them on a regular basis, and holding weekly student teacher seminars back on campus to help them process and make sense of their practice as novice teachers...well, wouldn't that be a really great way to help welcome our newest colleagues to the profession in a nurturing, realistic and supportive fashion? Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?"

Connecting the dots here, it's becoming clear that the real goal behind all of these grants, projects and initiatives is to establish a "college to classroom" pipeline controlled, designed and delivered entirely by the reform industry...

• from teacher preparation program admission (TeachStrong's Recruitment principle)
  
• to teacher preparation programs (TeachStrong's Teacher Prep principle)
• to teacher candidate performance assessments and licensure requirements (ETS and TeachingWorks' NOTE and TeachStrong's Licensure principle)
  
• to compensation and reward structures (TeachStrong's More Pay principle)
• to new teacher mentoring and induction (TeachStrong's New Teacher Support principle)
• to tenure provisions (TeachStrong's Meaningful Tenure principle)
• to professional development delivery systems (TeachStrong's Professional Development principle)
  
• to graduate school programs (Relay Graduate School's involvement in both initiatives is telling)
  
• to "teacher leader" ladders (TeachStrong's Career Pathways principle).
  

We are finally seeing Mr. Gates' "end game" fully fleshed out here. Not content to tinker with education as his personal plaything any longer, Mr. Gates has now turned his foundation's full attention to how his immense wealth and power can be used to take total control over the entire enterprise of education in our country. And based on the most current policy research being done on the impact of philanthropy in education reform, we can expect that the results will not be pretty:

The pendulum of philanthropic strategy may have moved too far in response to the Annenberg Challenge. Where funders saw too much adaptation to local circumstances with Annenberg, they have responded with an overemphasis on national models and replicating a common strategy across multiple districts. Where funders saw too much geographic dispersion of resources with Annenberg, they have responded with significant coordinated investments in certain districts where Blacks and Latinos find themselves disempowered by outside interests. Where funders saw too many attempts to cooperate and collaborate with traditional school districts, they have responded with a strate- gy that financially weakens some urban districts, and may be damaging the educational services provided to children who remain in traditional public schools.

A new course correction by foundations should take seriously three major lessons of the recent period of national replication strategies and charter school expansion. First, schools are not only a service to be provided—they are community institutions. Whether charter organizations or local school boards operate them, schools are not fast food franchises that can open and close when market pressures changes, without causing substantial dis- ruptions to children, families, and neighborhoods...

Second, power matters, particularly when decision makers and funders are disconnected from the people impacted by racial, ethnic, and class divisions. When power and resources are so starkly off-balance between outside funders and local residents, funders need to check their hubris at the door—they do not have all the answers, and they do not really know the experiences of students, teachers, and parents in the district. Hiring consultants to conduct listening tours is not the answer to bridging this gap. Listening is not the same as empowering, and funders should seriously consider how they could reduce the power gap between themselves and the communities they seek to support.

Third, the public sector is faltering in many urban areas—cities and school districts face long-term structural challenges to match revenues with expenditures. Education remains an overwhelmingly public sector enterprise—the vast majority of students are served by traditional public schools, alongside the growing ranks of public charter schools. The bottom line for students in all schools is that more funds need to reach students more effectively; addressing this challenge in public school districts may help a larger share of students in the long run.

Sarah Reckhow, "Beyond Blueprints: Questioning the Replication Model in Education Philanthropy", Symposium: The New Philanthropy: What Do We Know Now? Society, December 2015, Volume 52, Issue 6, pp. 552-558.

We have now glimpsed what Bill Gates' envisions as the future of teacher preparation in our nation. It's up to all of us to respond, clearly and forcefully.

I received the following story from a teacher who wanted to share the ridiculous things that are going on with her/his evaluation process, but was worried about retribution from her/his administration. Sadly, these kinds of stories are becoming all too common as the pressures of the accountability era exert tremendous stress on all involved, as I've shared previously here. And the illogic and inconsistencies of our current evaluation systems for teachers are creating situations that truly defy credibility.

It's time to call this kind of behavior what it is: bullying. Plain and simple.

And it's beyond time to put a stop to these invalid, unreliable, and unprofessional methods of evaluating our practice as teachers, and let teachers teach.

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Within a week after my observation, I was summoned to my post-evaluation conference.  

During that meeting I was told that I was being moved from Track II (reserved for effective teachers) to Track III (reserved for teachers deemed to be ineffective and in need of help).

What happened on the day of my observation?  It was a glorious day of teaching and learning.

Students were actively engaged the entire class period.

What did students learn?  A lesson they will remember for the rest of their lives that was directly connected to the curriculum.

What did I do that was so wrong?

I dared to teach.

I used travel-sized tubes of toothpaste to teach students that their words matter so they need to think before they speak.

I tied it to curriculum through the use of reflective questions in which students citied claims and had to write clear statements to support said claims.

I tied it to curriculum by discussing with students the central idea or theme of the activity.

This is a lesson I have done with students almost yearly for over ten years. Call it a signature lesson that students write to me and say, “I’ll never forget that day in your class when we did the toothpaste activity.”

I had all of the wallpaper in my classroom. I had the behavioral expectations posted. I had my Seven Habits posters in multiple places. I had I CAN statements from the curriculum posted and made multiple references to them.

Because I dared to teach that lesson, I was accused of not teaching the curriculum. I was dressed down for daring to say, “The most important thing I have to teach you as your English teacher has nothing to do with nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs or even reading and writing. The most important thing I have to teach you is that your words have power and that they matter, so think before you speak.”

The powers that be didn’t want to hear when I told them that I did directly relate the lesson to the curriculum. I was informed that these are the days of accountability and that they just didn’t see the connection. Never mind that my students did.

Because I used toothpaste to teach a lesson, one of the observers thought he was in a science classroom. I had to inform the observer that I was teaching English in a classroom that had had multiple purposes over the year and that last year it had been used as a science classroom. I wonder if the science tables and chairs had him confused.

Because I dared to give students permission to use the word “stupid” in their answers on their reflection paper (I wrote as part of the directions, “You can tell me that this is the most stupid thing you have ever done in your entire academic career as long as you back it up”), I was accused of using in appropriate language with students. 

Because of what I dared to teach at the end of the class session, that saying “Sorry” doesn’t put everything back the way it was before, I was accused of stalling and inventing something at the end of my lesson to take the class to the end of the class period. While it is true that I added the last part of the lesson on, I deliberately planned to do so when I considered the lesson for this year’s students, and I taught the last part of the lesson in every class.

Because I dared to take class time to answer in detail students’ questions about the next day’s special activity, I was accused of stealing instructional time from students.  Never mind that some students were still finishing up their reflections. Never mind that students asked. Never mind that this would be my students’ first time participating in the activity and I thought providing information ahead of time would alleviate some confusion on the day of.

I was informed that I was being moved to Track III so that the administrator could determine my goals for the year. I went into the evaluation process in good faith. I had all of the required paperwork completed. I had identified my strengths and my weaknesses. I had identified goals I want to work on, goals related to increasing student test scores, improving my use of assessment, and increasing regular parent contact. I understood that goals were supposed to be determined collaboratively between teacher and administrator. I found out that is true only for some people.

Because I entered into the evaluation process in good faith and because I dared to teach the lesson I did, I am now considered to be inferior to my peers. After twenty-five years of teaching and thirty years of effective or highly effective job evaluations in the district, I am where I am. I have to submit detailed lesson plans every Monday before 8:00 AM. I now have to show in my lesson plans that which is assumed that my peers do. I have to detail everything I do, the time I attach to each activity, the standards each lesson addresses (no more than two I CAN statements for each class for each day--I have three preps a day, well, actually four because one of my classes requires a very different delivery of the same content than my other classes), where each lesson fits on what is called a depth of knowledge wheel to prove that I am taking students to higher level thinking responses, and my instructional strategies for each activity. 

I have to do all of this until I am told that I can stop. Who knows when that will be?

Because of this, I am afraid to ask questions to clarify exactly why I am in this situation and how I get out of it and when.  I fear retribution. I no longer trust a system that has been a part of my career for thirty years. 

Yet, if my career survives this, I will dare to go into the evaluation process in good faith next year and I will dare to teach the same lesson again.

I will cross my fingers and dare."

It's becoming clear that recent events in the education reform movement, like the bungled rollout of the #TeachStrong initiative, are actually the first vestiges of the death knells of the reform agenda.

For those unaware of TeachStrong, its an initiative that brings together the two national teachers unions (i.e., NEA and AFT) with over 40 of the leading organizations from the corporate reform movement, including Teach for America, the National Center for Teacher Quality, Education Post, and the CCSSO--the good folks who helped spawn the Common Core. (For a comprehensive review of TeachStrong's 9 Step Plan, please read Peter Green's excellent essay here.) 

If you think this sounds like an unlikely alliance, then you are seeing the issue more clearly than the leaders of the 2 unions, who are either denying that a partnership actually exists (Lily Eskelen: "These are not the Droids you are looking for."), or trying to unionsplain it all away as "just good policy" (introducing Randi Weingarten: your new Secretary of Education).

It has also become increasingly clear that the reformers' efforts have had no positive impact on anything other than their investors' bank accounts, and now some of the big online vendors are starting to go down the tubes. Savvy political pundits are even speculating that conservatives are so concerned with losing power that they are considering the unthinkable--aligning with their sworn enemy, Hillary Rodham Clinton. We truly do live in interesting times.

The public is also wising up to the hijinks being perpetrated by K12.com, Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academies, and countless charter schools across the country and the reformers are scrambling by throwing out a flurry of "new" initiatives, each one nuttier than the other.

• Evaluating student teachers with avatars
  
• Evaluating music and art teachers with math and reading test scores
  
• Evaluating teachers by test scores of students they've never met
  
• Virtual charters run by religious fanatics using public dollars
  
• Teachers unions aligning with groups dedicated to destroying education
• States approving bills to allow uncertified persons to teach in our schools, even as legislators claim to be "raising standards" for the teaching profession
• State curricula endorsing young earth creationism and whitewashing slavery and the Holocaust from textbooks

And much, much more.

These are the acts of desperate people. They know their window for gaining control of public education is closing, and are responding by coming up with ridiculous, outlandish ideas in an attempt to attract attention from the public and the media. Their actions are not unlike the lunacy of Trump and Carson in the Presidential campaign. Walls and pyramids, anyone?

Although it looks pretty dark out there for students and teachers, now is the time for those of us in the resistance to redouble our efforts. Our opponents are scared, and we have them on the run; and rightfully so--because they know they are on the wrong side of history.

Stand up and speak out!

Gov. Bobby Jindal, a participant in the Republican "undercard" debate last night, joined the list of conservative pundits in demanding that every person in the nation, regardless of their income or employment status, must be required to pay some taxes--"even $1!"--on the premise that everyone should have some "skin in the game."

The term "skin in the game" refers to a person or group having incurred some level of monetary risk by being invested in a particular project or task. Some sources point to Warren Buffet as the originator of the term, while others attribute the term to Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice", in which the money lender Shylock demands that Antonio wager a pound of his own flesh as collateral in the event that his friend defaults on the loan Shylock has provided. In any event, the term has decidedly unsavory connotations, and says as much about the user as it does about the target of the phrase.

Now, aside from the fact that every person already pays "some taxes," in the form of Social Security, payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc., and that imposing additional tax burdens on the poor while simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy is a particularly Dickensian financial strategy that would raise no appreciable revenues, let's also consider the analogy itself: "skin in the game."

The issue of taxes is not a "game"--it's how we raise the financial resources to pay for the necessary social services and infrastructures at the local, state and national levels that we depend on as citizens. Roads, bridges, police and fire departments, schools, hospitals--these are not pieces in some political game of Monopoly--each of these things represents real persons and institutions that contribute in important ways to the fabric of our society. To casually throw out this kind of analogy is not only ignorant, it's offensive. And it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how our economy--and human decency--works. It also illustrates a callousness of thinking about the working poor, or the unemployed, that should give us pause as we consider the kind of person we want in elected office in this country.

Perhaps more to the point, exactly what risk is Mr. Jindal at by virtue of his decision to run for President? What "skin" does Mr. Jindal have in this game?

To date, the governor of Louisiana's campaign has raised nearly $10 million, which puts him at the bottom of the list of Presidential contenders, but in the top 5% of Americans in terms of wealth. When added to Mr. Jindal's previous personal net worth of between $4-11 million, the race for the Presidency has allowed the governor to roughly double his own wealth. In fact, with the advent of Citizens United, current campaign finance laws eliminate nearly all of the risk involved with running a political campaign, and have turned running for office into fund raising operations as much as candidacies for public service.

If Mr. Jindal and his friends are really serious about everyone having some "skin in the game," here's a suggestion: let's require that any candidate for President who currently holds an elected office must resign from that position before declaring their candidacy. There's not much risk involved in seeking a job while knowing that you already have a job to return to if unsuccessful, right Bobby? If we want these candidates to walk the walk they've been talking, then let's remove their "soft place to land" by demanding candidates resign their office before running for President.

And while we're at it, let's establish a requirement that all funds raised by candidates' campaigns through PACs, Super PACs, and any other fund raising groups affiliated with their campaigns must be donated to charity, after settling any legitimate campaign expenses. That would really weed out the candidates who are using the race for the White House as a way to build their "brand" (I'm looking at you, Mr. Trump and Dr. Carson) from those who are serious contenders for the office.

Perhaps then we'd see a real, substantive campaign for the Presidency--not a reality show masquerading as political theatre.

Just when you think the masters of the universe who run the corporate reform movement can't be even more clueless, you catch wind of the newest effort to turn education into a profit-generating endeavor--this time, a hare-brained scheme to evaluate student teachers, by...and I swear I'm not making this up...observing them as they pretend to teach...wait for it...a fake "classroom" of avatars, in a virtual reality environment.

Avatars.

Avatars!

AVATARS!!!!!

Don't believe it? Neither did I until I took a look at the new "National Observational Teaching Exam," or NOTE, brought to you by the Educational Testing Service (ETS)--the same company that brings us the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), the SAT, the PRAXIS tests, the AP Exams, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

NOTE works like this: a teacher candidate (student teacher) "teaches" a sample lesson for 6-7 minutes using a "virtual class" populated by 5-6 "avatar students," and receives feedback from an artificial intelligence program. The NOTE system is a combination of video production and "advanced technology" developed by the US Military, according to Mark Atkinson, the CEO of the tech firm Mursion, Inc., which is responsible for the creation of the avatars and virtual reality environment used in NOTE.

ETS describes NOTE as a program that promises to "measure a teaching candidate’s readiness to teach in ways that are representative of real-life teaching experiences." The operative word here is "representative," as the teacher candidates are not assessed by observing their work in an actual classroom, with real live children...

"Because a teacher's interaction with students is an integral part of certain high-leverage teaching practices, ETS and TeachingWorks are designing and prototyping virtual classrooms with interactive avatar students. In partnership with Mursion™, which provides a mixed-reality teaching environment with simulated students, the avatars are produced by trained, calibrated human "interactors" using standardized protocols. The use of virtual classrooms not only supports greater standardization of instructional contexts and settings for candidates, but also eliminates disruption to classroom activities, curriculum and student learning that occurs in schools."

Let's play a new game: Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

Here's how we play--I will present a series of brief passages from current news stories, and you guess which ones are reports from stories on ISIS and which are from reports on the horrible treatment of children and teachers in American schools. Let's get started!

Our first category is "Humiliation & Degradation"...

The men described an array of exacting restrictions imposed by the militants. Local residents were told down to tiny details what to wear — the cuffs of men’s trousers had to be rolled up over the ankle, for instance — and precisely how to position their hands and fingers when praying. Disobedience or carelessness in following the rules provoked suspicion, or even beatings.

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

Success Academy's code of misconduct is six pages long with 65 infractions ranging from minor or Level 1 violations such as slouching or failing to be in "Ready to Succeed" position, to middle or Level 2 misconduct like forgetting to bring a pencil or pen to school, to more serious Level 3 infractions like play fighting or repeated littering. The most serious Level 4 infractions include continued violation of the lesser misbehaviors, bullying, and "blatant and repeated disrespect for school code." In-house and home suspension from school starts with Level 2 infractions. Penalties for "scholars" accused of Level 3 or Level 4 infractions include immediate expulsion from school. Principals have discretion when meting out punishment. "A scholar's prior conduct and his or her disciplinary history may be factors in determining the appropriate consequence for an infraction." It is not clear how many times a student has to forget his or her pencil to be suspended from school.

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

Next up..."Physical Abuse & Torture"...

They said that new prisoners were subject to a methodical program of abuse — electrically shocked, beaten with hoses, smothered with plastic bags until they lost consciousness — even without any interrogation questions. Food was meager: pieces of bread pushed through cell doors. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/world/middleeast/freed-prisoners-of-isis-tell-of-beatings-and-torture.html?emc=edit_th_20151028&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=58352001&_r=0)

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

The FBI has been asked to investigate an incident at a South Carolina high school Monday in which a police officer appeared to body slam a female student and drag her across a classroom. The confrontation, captured on cellphone video at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C., has drawn intense criticism on social media, from the school district's Black Parents Association — the student is African-American — and the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, which called the deputy's actions "egregious." "There is no justification whatsoever for treating a child like this," the ACLU said in a statement.

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

Finally, "Overcrowding & Inhumane Working and Living Conditions"...

Prisoners were kept in their cells day and night, and the rooms were jammed: Mr. Jibouri’s cell held 39 detainees, he said.

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

Last February, administrators began what they thought would be a worthwhile teaching experiment: combining three classes of kindergartners into one “hub” and instructing nearly 100 youngsters together for a good part of the day. Kids are tracked into smaller groups — determined by ability — for math and reading lessons as well as for homeroom, according to this story in the Detroit Free Press. Why would school authorities decide to buck overwhelming evidence that young children learn better in small classes? The newspaper said that EAA authorities contend the system allows the three teachers to give more individual attention to students, though it’s not exactly clear how they they are able to do that. 

Is it ISIS or corporate education reform?

It's well beyond time that we stop the obsession with testing and measuring our students, teachers and schools, and start thinking more about how we are treating our children and our friends and neighbors who have dedicated their lives as teachers to nurturing and teaching our children.

The Great Lakes Education Project is a Michigan advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the charter school agenda in the state. GLEP's official mission statement says the following: "Because a zip code shouldn’t determine the education outcomes for children, GLEP believes we must expand choice, improve quality and increase accountability.  We support Governor Snyder’s “any time, any place, any way, at any pace” approach to education." But it's worth noting that Michigan leads the nation in "for-profit" charter schools, with nearly 80% of the state's charters being of the "for-profit" variety, making GLEP not so much an educational organization as a PR firm for charter school authorizers.

Recently, GLEP announced their "Got Literacy?" campaign, the goal of which seems to be to embarrass and humiliate selected Michigan schools for "failures" in their literacy efforts. Here's how the campaign works: GLEP rolls out an ad with a photo of a Michigan school sign or billboard, each of which contains a supposedly obvious or embarrassing spelling or grammar error--like the one above ("Welcome Back. Hope You Had a Good Brake." Get it? Ha ha ha. That dumb school made a dumb spelling mistake--therefore schools in Michigan are bad at literacy...). 

As it turns out, the sign in this GLEP ad is not from Michigan, and has nothing to do with the supposed “literacy crisis” in Michigan’s schools. The billboard is from Prescott High School in Arizona, the photo was taken in 2007, and was the result of a student prank--not an error made by school personnel, as inferred in the GLEP story. School officials have asked other web sites to remove the photo as it is not a fair representation of the school, and "Its sole purpose is to shame PHS." Let's hope that GLEP follows suit, removes the photo from their ad, and apologizes to the folks at Prescott High School. It would be the right thing to do.

A recent blog post from Sam Chaltain suggested that what he terms "the battle of the edu-tribes" is finally nearing an end, and both sides of the reform debate (Mr. Chaltain calls them the "practitioners and the policy makers") have aligned around a particular vision of the future of schooling. Others, like my friend and fellow blogger, Nancy Flanagan, are not quite so sure that the conflict has been resolved, and question the perhaps "sanitized" version of events described by Mr. Chaltain.

Whether the war is actually coming to an end or not, it's useful for those on the front lines to know who they are actually fighting, and who is standing beside them in their daily struggles. It's become clear to me through many recent engagements with those on "the other side" of these debates that the "combatants" on each side share certain important characteristics that inform their beliefs, ideologies and loyalties.

The Deformers and the Guardians

Mr. Chaltain's descriptors for the two sides in the war on education are revealing, in that he sees a clear distinction between those who actually teach (the "practitioners"), and those who establish and enforce the rules and policies that govern that practice (the "policy makers"). Perhaps unintentionally, his labels also highlight a major flaw in our current education enterprise: public education policy is being written and administrated largely by persons who have not themselves attended public schools, have no degrees or certification in education, have never taught, and have spent little time in public schools. Whatever meager educational background that the members of what I term the Deformer "edu-tribe" may have is often accrued through alternative routes to the classroom (i.e., Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, the Michigan Teacher Corps), and their educational credentials are often received via online programs that require little or no actual teaching experience, residencies or interactions with other teachers or professors with actual teaching experience.

Many of the "foot soldiers" in the Deformer army wind up in high-level positions in state departments of education, policy think-tanks, on school boards and as leaders of high-profile charter school networks. They reach these positions of power and authority with shockingly little experience in classrooms, or working with children, but exert out-sized influence on the shape and nature of public education. These members of the Deformer "advance force" parrot a regressive agenda of union-busting, tenure-smashing, and teacher-demonizing, paired with an obsessive devotion to standardized testing, "data driven decision making", charter school expansion, and privatization as the "answers" to the "crisis in public education"--while remaining seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was their policies that manufactured the crisis they claim to be addressing, and which are paying off so handsomely for the investors who fund their charter schools and pay their generous salaries.

Supporting the efforts of the Deformer army are legions of well-educated, poorly-paid "deputy directors," "social media managers," and "communications interns," all of whom have been tasked with patrolling the blogosphere for anything even remotely critical of the Deformer agenda. None of these staff support personnel ever taught or hold education degrees--their sole purpose is to vigorously refute any posts or articles that are deemed "negative" or contrary to the Deformers' mission--which is to destabilize schools, demonize teachers, and privatize public education.

Many of these support staff work for outfits like the Education Post, a billionaire-funded anti-education website created purely for "pushing back" against critics of the Deformer agenda. The leader of the Education Post, Peter Cunningham, is in many ways the poster child for the Deformer cause. Mr. Cunningham holds a BA in philosophy from Duke and a masters in journalism from Columbia; he has no degrees in education, has never worked as a teacher, and yet ascended to the position of Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan (who also never taught--see the pattern here?).

On the other side of the debate are what I refer to as the Guardians of public education. The members of this army largely consist of teachers, retired teachers, and teacher educators, most of whom have significant experience as classroom teachers, multiple degrees in education, and a career commitment to children, schools and education. Few Guardians entered the profession by alternative routes, instead earning their credentials in traditional colleges and universities, under the tutelage of professors who had themselves been classroom teachers before moving to higher education. Many of these activists earn graduate degrees in their chosen field--even as states now refuse to pay for additional degrees--and seek out weekend and summer professional development opportunities at their own expense in order to remain certified.

The activism practiced by these Guardians is not their sole focus as professionals--rather, these teachers blog at night after lessons have been planned, and kids put to bed, or on rare quiet weekend mornings and afternoons when a few minutes can be stolen from other tasks and responsibilities. And the conflict in which they are engaged is a non-linear war--they are  fighting not just the Deformers, but also their support staff in their underground bunkers, typing away on banks of sleek laptops as they push back against kindergarten teachers furiously hammering out their frustrated rants on the ridiculousness of testing 6 year olds, or 3rd grade teachers pointing out the illogic of retaining 8 year olds who struggle with reading.

While the Deformers are funded by the usual suspects in the education reform business (Broad, Walton, Gates), the Guardians are led by a 77 year old education history professor, Dr. Diane Ravitch. Like Mr. Cunningham, Dr. Ravitch was a former assistant secretary of education, but has now turned her professional energies towards leading the resistance to the Deformer agenda. Her self-published blog has now attracted over 24 million "hits," and has become a highly-respected and influential voice in the education debates.

The members of the Guardians come from the ranks of practicing and retired teachers, teacher educators and other professors, and parents concerned about the quality of education their children are receiving as a result of the Deformers' efforts. These writers and activists don't receive a penny for their efforts, in stark opposition to the Deformers' forces, who are stunningly well-compensated for their work. Instead, these bloggers often toil away in anonymity, providing a voice for the thousands of teachers that have been silenced for speaking out against the reform agenda.

Among the leading voices in the education debate for the Guardians are:

• Diane Ravitch
• Edushyster, Jennifer Berkshire
• Steven Singer
• Jersey Jazzman, Mark Weber
• The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss
• Anthony Cody
• Teacher in a Strange Land, Nancy Flanagan
• Vamboozled, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley
• Curmudgication, Peter Greene
• Cloaking Inequity, Julian Vasquez Heilig
• deutsch29, Mercedes Schneider

Despite Mr. Chaltains' claims, it appears that the education wars are far from over. The promise of billions of dollars in potential profits has proven too intoxicating to resist, and the Deformers are well-funded, emboldened, and buoyed by recent successes. The only thing standing in their way is a plucky band of part-time, volunteer activists who are committed to an agenda that includes:

• every child having access to a rich curriculum, including music, art, physical education, and libraries
• teachers not being rated and ranked by high-stakes evaluations based on student test scores
• all schools being adequately funded, with well-maintained facilities and equipment for all programs
• the elimination of for-profit charter schools, and ensuring that all charters that receive public funding are held accountable and governed by the same rules and regulations that pertain to all other public schools
• the forceful defeat of efforts to privatize the public schools 

Until that time, the Guardians will be around to defend and support our children, our teachers and our public schools.

Imagine that your town established a private fire or police department, funded with your tax dollars, and staffed by young inexperienced college grads with no previous experience in fire fighting or law enforcement.

Imagine that these parallel organizations were given prime locations in existing facilities (built and paid for with public monies), displacing the professionals that had served your community for many years.

Imagine that these "new" fire and police forces could pick and choose which calls for their assistance they would respond to, choosing only the easiest and least dangerous cases and referring the difficult calls to the "old" departments--who were now understaffed and under-resourced. And that the "new" departments' artificially high success rates would be trumpeted by the media as evidence of their effectiveness.

Imagine that these "new" employees only spent a year or two in their jobs as fire fighters and police officers, and then moved directly into positions as fire and police department chiefs and town mayors, promoting their former colleagues into positions on their town councils, and enacting changes to town guidelines and ordinances that promoted the "new" departments while continuing to siphon off resources that had previously been dedicated to supporting the "old" departments.

Imagine that as the "new" fire and police departments became more prevalent in your community, the numbers of damaging fires and crime rates showed a steady increase, but your mayor and town council ignored the evidence and passed laws lifting the "caps" on the number of "new" fire and police departments could be established.

Imagine that these "new" departments were clustered primarily in urban centers, while the fire and police departments in the suburbs remained well-funded and staffed by experienced, well-trained professionals.

Imagine that the leaders of these "new" fire and police departments paid themselves inordinately high salaries, became wealthy and powerful, and their investors received strong returns on their initial investments.

Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be if we did this to our schools?

I had a fun little Twitter chat recently with Peter Cunningham, executive director of Education Post, the billionaire funded anti-public education website devoted to fighting back against the critics of the corporate reform of education movement. Because billionaires evidently need to be defended against public school teachers and parents who are concerned about hedge fund managers bent on destroying their kids' schools and turning teaching into an entry-level gig. But, I digress...

Pete had just tweeted a snarky put down of students protesting budget cuts in the Chicago Public Schools, and I asked him why he was always criticizing teachers and students, and why he never used his bully pulpit to critique any charter school operators--like Steve Ingersoll, who used his charter school as a personal ATM, committing fraud and embezzlement along the way--given that they are doing a lot more damage than teachers and kids.

It's worth mentioning here that Pete's goal for Education Post was to "raise the bar" for the conversation surrounding education reform; indeed, the website's tag line is "better conversation. better education". According to Mr. Cunningham, "At some level, it feels as if it’s people . . . just screaming at each other from across the aisle,” Cunningham said. “We can have differences of opinion about these policies, but they should be based on facts, not fear. An honest, open conversation is possible among people of good will. We want to elevate those voices that are not being heard and counter the voices that are misleading, either willfully or not.”

Given Mr. Cunningham's approach to elevating the dialogue about ed reform, one might expect to see a balanced, thoughtful collection of stories being curated on the website, expressing a broad range of opinions and staking out positions along a wide spectrum of beliefs and philosophical stances with respect to the complicated, confusing arena that is modern day education reform.

As it turns out, not so much.

After our Twitter conversation, I wandered over to Education Post to see what Pete and his plucky band of hedge fund funded "reporters" were sharing in their effort to support and encourage a "better conversation." Here's what I found...

• a piece on how Race To The Top was "genius" (a reminder: RTTT was the ed reform initiative that pitted the states against one another in a Hunger Games-styled competition that has resulted in no winners and lots of losers...)
• another piece criticizing the Chicago Public Schools (boy, does Mr. Cunningham hate the Chicago Public Schools--I'm guessing it's the "Public" part of their name that does it...)
• an Arne Duncan puff piece (Mr. Cunningham was Mr. Duncan's Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach in the Department of Education--neither man ever taught...)
• a human interest piece featuring...wait for it: a charter school! (Mr. Cunningham and the Education Post love charter schools.)
• a puff piece on DC charters (did I mention that Peter and the Post really love charters?)
• a piece criticizing parents who choose to opt out their children from standardized tests (because the only thing that the Ed Post loves more than charters are tests--in fact, the Education Post loves tests so much they should probably marry one...)
• a piece promoting the National Assessment of Educational Progress, because tests. (Boy, do these folks love their tests...)
• a piece on how school choice should be for everyone...except for those nasty parents who "choose" to opt their kids out of tests, because that kind of choice isn't good for anyone!
• a piece promoting The New Teacher Project, because these TNTP "teachers" appear to be the first persons to discover this new thing called "student centered learning", which teachers in the public schools have been, you know, doing now for decades. (This is a common theme on the Education Post--breathless reporting of allegedly new teaching strategies that actual teachers use in their classrooms every day...)
• another Arne Duncan puff piece, which somehow also manages to slam Hillary Clinton--which is odd given the supposed liberal political leanings of Mr. Cunningham, who did serve in the Obama administration (psst: the Democrats for Education Reform are neither Democrats, or for Education Reform--they are hedge fundies who want to destroy the public schools and make billions of dollars in the process--and Mr. Cunningham works with (for?) these folks...)

The verdict? Far from being an outlet that is designed to promote "better conversation," the Ed Post is nothing more than a corporate-funded mouthpiece for the reform community, and the site only runs stories designed to reinforce and advance the reform agenda. The headlines for these pieces reads like a cheat-sheet of Michelle Rhee's talking points: anti-teachers and unions, anti-public school, pro-Teach for America and The New Teacher Project, pro-testing, pro-school choice, pro-charter schools.

If Mr. Cunningham is really serious about a "better conversation," then he should start asking some actual teachers and parents of public school students what they think about this agenda. A conversation with only one voice is a monologue, not a conversation.

Like many education reform initiatives (i.e., charter schools, merit pay), Teach for America was created out of what were once noble intentions: to provide bright, young teachers to fill vacancies in some of our nation's most difficult to staff classrooms. What began as a fledgling start-up, sprung from the ambitions outlined in founder Wendy Kopp's undergrad thesis from Princeton University, has now become "a political powerhouse, with net assets totaling $419 million, and is the darling of the most elite members of the corporate reformer set, such as Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee and Kevin Huffman.

But TFA's mission has now been perverted as a result of the convergence of factors such as a struggling economy, an emboldened corporate education reform movement led by hedge fund managers and investment bankers looking to turn a quick profit, and blistering attacks on teachers and schools from both sides of the political aisle.

From Publics to Charters

When TFA began, Ms. Kopp's goal was to send her recruits into the public schools, believing an infusion of "energetic but inexperienced" novices would provide a jolt to the central nervous system of what she considered a public school system on life support. "But since the recession, with education funding across the country drying up, teacher layoffs have become more of an issue than teacher shortages. Between 2008 and 2013, 324,000 teaching positions in local school districts were eliminated, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities." With teaching positions now at a premium, TFA's practice of charging schools a $5000 "finder's fee" for each recruit hired was now less attractive to schools choosing from hundreds of applicants for each vacancy. And yet, TFA continued to grow, expanding its recruiting quotas and administrative offices in Washington and New York City.

With the supply of public school teaching positions drying up, the organization needed to look for a fresh source of placements for their growing corps of eager young recruits. No longer content to focus on public schools, the organization began to hitch its wagon to the proliferation of charter schools on the education landscape. "According to internal documents and federal grant performance reports, TFA’s growth also increasingly hinges on fueling the country’s thriving charter movement. The organization’s data show that one-third of its recruits now teach in charters (up from 13 percent in 2007), which are mostly nonunionized, privately run, and can receive millions in private support on top of public funds. TFA has funneled a growing constituency of brand-new recruits into charters in large urban districts that have recently laid off hundreds of experienced teachers, including Philadelphia (where 99 percent of corps members teach in charters), Detroit (69 percent) and Chicago (53 percent)."

From Preparing Teachers to Preparing "Leaders"

TFA needed a way to provide more bang for the buck for the substantial investments they were receiving from the ed reform foundation cabal. To do so, they shifted their focus from preparing school teachers to preparing school leaders. In a stunningly prescient moment, founder Wendy Kopp said the following: “We’re a leadership development organization, not a teaching organization,” she said. “I think if you don’t understand that, of course it’s easy to tear the whole thing apart.” Pouncing on the "churn" of district- and state-level administrative positions (only 51% of school superintendents surveyed in 2010 expected to remain in their positions for 5 years, and over 60% reported having been in their current positions for only 1-5 years), Teach for America in 2007 spun off a subsidiary, Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) designed to propel more of the organization's 32,000 alumni into positions in state departments of education, policy think tanks, legislative offices and lobbying groups. 

The results have been extremely promising. For an organization responsible for only 0.5 percent of the nation’s nearly 3.5 million teachers, TFA's influence on local and state education policy has become enormous. TFA alums are encouraged to run for seats on local school boards and for state legislative offices. Jameson Brewer, a TFA alum and co-editor of Teach For America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out, shares the following incident:

"I was pulled into the district office towards the end of my second year (before I published my first critical piece on TFA - of course) and I was asked to consider running for the school board of Atlanta - LEE would help me, fund me, and take care of everything...all I had to do was say yes.  I was also offered a spot in the principal pipeline initiative.  I, of course, turned both down.  I've had conversations with LEE reps since then and we go through this symbolic tango about me telling them I'm interested but would run as an anti-TFA candidate while I test how far they are willing to go with that because according to their bylaws, they can't be partisan...though, they obviously keep dropping the push to have me run because of that prospective platform."

With an assist from LEE, the organization has nearly doubled its investment recently with respect to its lobbying efforts, spending almost $2 million since 2010 on attacking unions, weakening teacher tenure, supporting more and earlier standardized testing, reducing certification requirements, and encouraging the use of VAM in teacher evaluation systems.

Additionally, TFA has made it a priority, through LEE, to help place their alums in prestigious positions in Washington, where they exert an outsize influence on the nation's education policy. "More than 70 alumni currently hold public office, including two state senators. Within the federal government, their ranks include two assistants to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as education policy advisers and associates in the offices of Senators Harry Reid and Al Franken and Representative George Miller." TFA corps members have become the zebra mussels of education reform, establishing bulkheads in the halls of power from the state house to the White House.

What Does it Mean to "Stay in Education"?

Under increasing criticism from teachers, unions, and even its own alumni, TFA proudly reports that "63 percent of its alumni stay in education"--but the organization's definition of "education" may require a little unpacking.

The typical term of service for TFA corps members is between 2-3 years, although TFA's own data indicates that "just 30 percent remain in the classroom — and the attrition increases significantly after the fifth year."

So, while 2nd year TFA corps members are readying their exit strategy from urban classrooms, editing their resumes for law school and Capitol Hill internship applications, and leaving their students in the wake of a mass exodus of novice teachers on an annual basis, committed, dedicated career teachers are writing lesson plans, scrounging for classroom supplies, paying for materials for their students out of their own pockets, and staying after school to help students prepare their all-county solos, gymnastics routines, and lines for the school play.

Staying in education means making a commitment to working with students, families and communities to help children become who they want to be, to find their voices as writers, singers and scientists, and to expand access to a full and complete education for every child. 

Staying in education does NOT mean temping in classrooms as resume fodder, or using teaching as a "stepping stone" for prestigious positions in policy think tanks and congressional offices, or putting in a year in the classroom before writing policy that will cripple public education for decades.

In 2014, TFA published its "5 Commitments" for improvement, a nod to the chorus of criticism coming primarily from TFA alums. The first item on the list is this:

#1. Being better listeners to both our friends and critics.

If TFA is serious about this promise, then I would ask them to listen to this request:

Use your power as an education policy stakeholder to support schools and teachers, instead of attacking and demeaning them. Your words carry great influence with the decision makers in Washington and our state capitals. Be a positive force for students, teachers and schools.

Show that you understand that teachers' working conditions equal students' learning conditions, and demonstrate that you respect and value career teachers. Stop the attacks on teachers unions, and the promotion of the "testocracy".

Recognize that your recruits, as bright as they may be, are woefully unprepared to take responsibility for classrooms in our nation's schools with a paltry 5 weeks of "training," and consider reframing corps members' commitments as "internships" in which they support the work of certified, qualified master teachers. Encourage your recruits to pursue teacher certification and graduate degrees in education, and to become fully-fledged members of the profession, rather than "edutourists" using their classroom experience as a ticket to Wall Street or Washington, DC.

If TFA really is willing to listen, perhaps their corps members will make "staying in education" mean something again.

I was out for my morning run today, and as I came around a bend in the road could see two little girls waiting for their bus off in the distance. Oblivious to their surroundings, they were left to their own devices. They could do whatever they wanted to do, with no adults to interfere or give direction.

So what did they do?

They held hands and danced.

They chanted a rhyme.

They sang a song.

And they laughed.

They did these things not because they were bored, or because they didn't know what else to do. They danced and sang because this is how children make sense of their world, and their relationships.

When school boards and administrators take art, music, library, physical education and recess out of the school day, they leave behind an impoverished education for the children for whom they are responsible. 

Every child deserves to be taught these disciplines by a certified, qualified teacher, with adequate supplies, materials and facilities.

The arts are not a frill, a "special", or a "break" for classroom teachers' planning time. They are a critical, integral component of a full and rich educational experience for every child, and a necessary part of the curriculum.

Just ask those two little girls.

So much silliness, so little time. Where to start?

New York's new commissioner of education, MaryEllen Elia, made some curious remarks in an interview with Politico recently, revealing a troubling level of unawareness with respect to the Common Core State Standards, education, schools, learning and children. Let's take a look at what she said...

1. “We’ll make necessary adjustments, but we cannot go backwards,” she said. “Our students need the skills and knowledge the higher standards demand to be successful after they graduate from high school. Change is always difficult, and change takes time, but this change is necessary.”

No.

Teaching to the test and the resultant narrowing of the curriculum is the very definition of "going backwards." If we want to "move forward" then we should let teachers teach and students learn, and stop the incessant testing. This naive belief that "going back to basics" will somehow propel our schools into the future is a dangerous bet that we are playing with our children's futures as the kitty. There is nothing remotely "progressive" about more tests, more retentions, and more punishment. This is not the kind of change that improves anything but the profit margins of the testing companies and charter management groups that stand to cash in from this agenda.

More thermometers don't make the meat cook faster or better.

Standards, in and of themselves, have nothing to do with helping students to be successful. Student success has everything to do with the supports that children receive at home and in their communities, and to how effective we are as a society in addressing the ravages of child poverty that have exploded in too many of our communities in the last 20 years. It is a cruel joke that even as increasing numbers of American children are living below the poverty line, American politicians and corporate reformers float the lie that "higher standards," "more rigorous expectations," and "No Excuses" are the silver bullets that will "fix" our students and schools.

2. “The United States used to lead the world educationally, but we’ve fallen to the middle of the pack. Our students are lagging behind, and the global economy is growing more competitive every day.”

No. No.

American students are not lagging behind. "When results are controlled for the influences of poverty, nearly every international test of student learning shows that American students score at the top of the rankings. For example, when test scores for U..S students on the 2009 Program for International Assessment (PISA) exams were disaggregated by poverty levels, American children from middle– and upper–socioeconomic status families performed

as well or better than students from the top three nations in the rankings: Canada, Finland, and South Korea (Walker 2013a)."

The truth is that US students in suburban schools score at the very top of the PISA tests that these faulty comparisons are inevitably based on. The problem here is poverty, not schools, teachers or students--we know that, and yet ignore addressing poverty in favor of making illogical, ill-advised changes to the curriculum, and insisting on more and more tests, as though that will change anything.

But the larger issue here is the fact that a state commissioner of education is uncritically accepting the myth of "failing schools" and buying in to the corporate reformers' belief that the purpose of education is to make America "globally competitive." 

That's not the goal of education; that's the goal of business. That's not an education goal; that's an economic goal. Since when did the failures of America's business sector become the fault of 3rd grade reading in Michigan or the supposed lack of attention to STEM subjects in American schools? If Ms. Elia is that concerned with the global economy, perhaps she should seek a position in commerce, and leave education to the teachers in NY's classrooms.

3. Elia has partly attributed the rapidly growing testing opt-out movement to a lack of publicly available information on the Common Core. In her effort to reduce the number of students refusing to take the state standardized tests, she has said that parents and the public need to become more involved in the process, because many don’t know what the Common Core is.

No. No. No.

When 68% of citizens in your state believe that they are "very or somewhat familiar with the standards," and huge numbers of parents in your state are opting their children out of state and national tests, your response should not be to attribute their opposition to your agenda to ignorance and a lack of parental involvement. That's not just tone deaf--that's insulting. And ignorant.

Parents and teachers in New York have demonstrated that this agenda of obsessive testing and standards disconnected to practice are not conducive to learning, and last year's 20% opt out rate is likely to be obliterated this year as more and more New Yorkers join the movement to push back against the reform agenda.

It's time for leaders like Ms. Elia to wake up and recognize who they work for: the children, teachers and parents of New York State--not Pearson, the Gates Foundation, and Arne Duncan.

Education is a public trust, and leaders like Ms. Elia need to understand that it is their responsibility to establish that trust. Stop the silliness, support your schools, and get to work.

One of my favorite comedians is the brilliant Ron White, and one of my favorite "bits" of his is one that has to do with his bitingly funny critique of "storm watchers"--that intrepid breed of daredevils that speeds around the countryside following tornados and hurricanes, disregarding their own safety and well-being for the (dubious) thrill of getting "up close and personal" to extremely dangerous winds and weather systems.

White wonders what these folks are doing when they risk life and limb to careen around in beat-up pick-up trucks in search of dangerous storms, and if they realize the power of the winds they are playing with. The punch-line to the joke goes like this:

"It's not *that* the wind blows; it's *what* the wind blows."

White's point here is that the real danger inherent in a powerful storm is not the wind itself, but the objects that the wind can pick up and blow around with reckless abandon, like cars, trees, and other heavy things. But even relatively innocuous objects, like a sheet of plywood, when propelled with sufficient force, can become instruments of destruction--as evidenced in the photo below of a board of plywood impaling a tree courtesy of Hurricane Andrew...

Recently, the Entertainment Industry Foundation, the 4 major networks and DonorsChoose.org, a crowd funding website that targets schools and teachers, announced "Think It Up," a nationally-televised "edu-telethon" to be aired live on Friday, Sep. 11 by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox at 8pm. According to the EIF, the purpose of this strongly STEM-slanted program is to "invite public middle and high school students to work with their teachers to develop projects that draw on their passions and help pursue their educational goals...In collaboration with DonorsChoose.org, the student-powered, teacher-led projects will be crowdfunded by citizen donors beginning September 2015. The projects will entail rigorous skill development that prepares American youth for post-high school life, helping pave the way for career success, regardless of the path." 

Careful readers will notice a few "trigger words" here ("educational goals," "rigor," "career success") that suggest a strong corporate reform agenda may be lurking beneath the surface of this telethon. Indeed, major funders of DonorsChoose.org include the Gates Foundation (the major financial support behind the development and implementation of the Common Core and a host of other education reform initiatives), the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (a strong supporter of charter schools in the Pacific Northwest), and the Morgridge Family Foundation (a supporter of KIPP).

So, what's the problem? Isn't it a good thing when foundations show their support for education and student learning? What's so wrong with "crowd-sourcing" funds for educational projects and materials during a time of declining school budgets and shrinking resources? Why turn down offers of "assistance" when money is so desperately needed for public education?

Here's the problem: Every time that a foundation "steps up" to make a donation to a public school, the school district is then relieved of its social, legal, moral and ethical responsibilities to provide materials and equipment necessary for the education of our children. Public support for education has long been a given in our country, and we generally have not questioned the need to adequately support our public institutions.

However, in education, we are now seeing public education subverted in many communities on a daily basis, from community programs that send uncertified "teaching artists" into schools that have eliminated their music and art programs, to TeachersPayTeachers.com, a website that provides a portal for teachers to use their own personal resources to purchase teaching materials from other teachers, to increasingly onerous "pay to play" requirements for participation in athletics, music and other school programs. For example, some California high schools have been investigated by the ACLU after charging participation fees ranging from $500 to play in marching band to nearly $1700 for cheerleading fees.

In each instance, these actions serve to redirect sources of school support from public revenues (i.e., tax support) to private donations (from parents and fellow teachers). This shift mirrors the trend in higher education nationally, where public funding for universities has decreased from roughly 70% in 1990 to less than 30% in 2014. According to a report from Demos, "The decreasing affordability of higher education is eroding the last relatively secure path into the middle class, as more students take on larger amounts of debt to finance their higher educations, or forego it altogether. With $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt and climbing, student loan debt is now substantial enough to affect our overall economy as indebted graduates find it harder to buy a home or a car. Not surprisingly, the corporate reform agenda would appear to be propelling K-12 education down a similar path.

So, while I know this “made for TV special” is going to make folks feel all warm and fuzzy as they watch school projects get funded via DonorsChoose donations, it worries me that we seem to be sliding down a slippery slope to a time in which the public doesn't even question the premise of education being funded by telethons instead of our tax dollars.

Let's be clear here: Education is a public trust, not a charity. It deserves to be funded adequately and appropriately, not by bake sales, paper drives and telethons.

Let’s also stop forcing students, teachers and schools to beg for funding by performing like trained seals on TV specials, as though education was some sort of televised Hunger Games, and start supporting our schools adequately, and without making teachers and kids grovel.

"Think It Up" is a spectacle that just illuminates what we as a society value, and what we don’t—and that reflection in the mirror isn't pretty.

Another academic year is upon us, and students, parents and teachers are approaching the beginning of another school year in the "accountability era" with a mix of excitement, anticipation and apprehension. As we ready ourselves for another year in our classrooms, what do we see around us?

• We have schools that have already been open for weeks, others about to begin, and still others that won't begin classes for several weeks...
• We have small rural schoolhouses with children in mixed-grade groupings, sprawling suburban schools with Ivy League-worthy campuses and facilities, and historic urban schools in our nation's biggest cities...
• We have schools with students who have a plethora of learning styles, gifts and challenges, schools with students who speak languages from across the globe, and schools that reflect the richness and diversity of the communities that they represent...
• We have public schools, private schools, magnet schools, charter schools, independent schools, religious schools, home schools, online and virtual schools, and "schools of choice"...
• We have schools that offer a traditional curriculum, schools that provide a veritable buffet of AP classes and other advanced offerings, schools with IB curricula, and school consortia that offer vocational education in various areas of interest...
• We have schools that operate on quarters, semesters, trimesters, year-round and other even more arcane scheduling options...
• We have schools organized into districts, by counties, and into "corporations;" schools in which the teachers are members of unions, and schools in states where unions do not exist...

There is nothing about these schools--or our students--that is standardized. Schools are not fast-food franchises, engineered for consistency and similarity of "customer experience." The differences in our schools, and among our students, are to be savored, treasured and celebrated, not targeted as "issues", or "problems" to be solved, or "variables" to be accounted for in the construction of a standardized exam. The diversity in our schools is not a "bug", it's a feature.

The goal in education is not for every 4th grade student in the US to be learning the same thing at the same time--"If it's October 17, it must be time to sing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider!"

The goal is for each student to become more fully human, to develop her or his individual strengths, talents and skills in the ways that make sense for each child, and to instill an unquenchable thirst for learning, exploring and questioning the world around them.

Education is not simply about constructing efficient delivery systems for the transfer of information--books and computers can do that. Education is about the building of relationships--between students and teachers, and among learners themselves. And schools, in all of their messy, noisy, confusing chaos, do this spectacularly well.

And yet we keep hearing the same mantra from non-educators that the only way to "keep the schools and teachers accountable" is to leave no child untested. Every reform initiative seemingly ups the ante yet again with more tests, longer tests and harder tests, as if inserting more thermometers will somehow cook the meat better and faster.

The reformers are fond of lecturing us that "the only way we will know how our children are doing in school" is to gather copious amounts of "data" through the administration of an endless array of "end of course," final, summative, high-stakes, rigorous, standardized tests. These reformers seem oblivious to the fact that teachers and parents already know a lot about our students and children:

• we go to parent nights
• we attend open houses
• we go to concerts, plays and science fairs
• we drop them off and pick them up from soccer games, piano lessons, dance classes, art galleries, and museums
• we communicate with their teachers, by email, phone and face-to-face
• we volunteer in their classrooms, marching band parent groups, chorus and orchestra booster clubs, and athletic support groups
• we chaperone trips with their elementary classes, music ensembles and sports teams, riding buses for hours and hanging out in muddy zoos and nature centers, cold, rainy stadiums, and drafty auditoriums

And, as parents and teachers, we talk to our children and one another. We ask questions about our children and their work in school; are they paying attention? behaving appropriately? doing their best? "getting it"? A standardized test tells us none of those things--it only provides a snapshot of the movie of our children's lives as learners.

So, as we begin another school year, let's keep the focus on the differences in our schools, and among our children, and resist the reformers' urging to standardize their experiences, their learning, and their evaluation. Rather than trying to nationalize our standards, let's work to individualize our standards--with nuance, "feel", and the understanding that each child has a unique background, understandings and abilities. And let's celebrate the uniqueness of each and every one of our children, teachers, schools and communities.

Standardize that.

The typical reform agenda goes something like this: 

• demoralize the teachers
• defund the unions
• dismantle the schools
• privatize public education
  

We see evidence of this approach in places like New Orleans with its "Recovery School District," and Detroit, where Gov. Snyder's Frankenstein-like "Education Achievement Authority" continues to deprive the students and citizens of local control of their schools. The reformers' tactics are brutal and unforgiving: create a public perception that the schools are failing, the teachers are lazy, the unions are greedy, and the only solutions are to close schools, expand choice, provide vouchers and valorize charters.

However, one of the more subtle, yet damaging, weapons in the reformers' playbook is simultaneously less visible to the uninformed eye and more insidious in its ability to accomplish the reformers' ultimate goal: the destabilization of public education by an intentional, purposeful strategy of near-constant turnover and turmoil in the leadership and teaching force in the schools.

The business world has a name for this practice: creative destruction. It's a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter, and "refers to the incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones." Also referred to as "churn," this business-centered approach to school reform considers students and teachers as "raw materials," and schools as "factories." The goal is maximizing profits, and significant "collateral damage" (i.e., school closings, teacher terminations, student expulsions) is not only acceptable, but expected, in the single-minded pursuit of the reformers' goals.

"Creative destruction" comes in numerous forms in public education, from the year-to-year involuntary reassignment of teachers from one grade level to another, to the practice of having elementary teachers with "all subjects" certifications teach subjects (i.e., music, art, PE) they are unqualified to teach, to moving principals back and forth between schools as though they are pawns in a game of administrative Pong.

An especially egregious example of this sort of intentional destabilization can be seen in the Detroit Public Schools, which has been under state control for most of the previous 15 years  (1999-2005, 2009-2016). Under the Snyder administration, Detroit's schools have suffered from a systematic defunding of facilities and equipment, sub-standard working conditions, safety concerns, drastic curriculum narrowing, and poor teacher morale as a result of the state's takeover. Recent estimates are that fewer than 30% of Detroit's children have access to school music classes, and only 40% have an art teacher. In 2014, Renaissance High School, long considered a bastion of high quality arts programming in the city, suffered devastating cuts to its music program, signaling a troubling trend in priorities from Detroit's educational leaders.

The destructive impact of "churn" in the DPS may be most visible when looking at the district's recent history of administrative leadership.

DPS Emergency Managers

• Robert Bobb, 2009-11
  
• Roy Roberts, 2011-13
  
• Jack Martin, 2013-15
  
• Darnell Earley, 2015

EAA Chancellors

• John Covington, 2011
  
• Victoria Conforme, 2014
  

Its hard to understand how a school system can make any sort of sustained progress with a veritable revolving door of administrative transition occurring in the central offices--and this is certainly the case in Detroit: "Under emergency managers Robert Bobb, Roy Roberts and Martin, DPS has shed tens of thousands of students, closed dozens of schools and struggled with persistent deficits...Last fall's (2014) preliminary enrollment was 47,238, less than half of the 96,000 students attending DPS when Bobb was appointed."

It's beyond time to declare Gov. Snyder's approach to education reform in Detroit a resounding failure. The state has had 15 years to "fix" the problems they created through a massive disinvestment of public education in Michigan, and Detroit's children and teachers have paid the price as a seemingly endless parade of highly paid "experts" have failed to turn the ship around.

It's time to turn back control of Detroit's schools to the elected school board (which has been meeting, in exile) and citizens of Detroit, and put an end to this failed experiment in "creative destruction." Fifteen years of "emergency management" have done nothing but damage the futures of a generation of Detroit's youth.

Stop the "churn," Mr. Snyder. Give Detroit's schools back to Detroit.

Retired neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, was asked one of the few questions on race at the first GOP Presidential debate last Thursday, and his answer provided a fascinating microcosm of our society's frustrating and challenging understanding--or misunderstanding--of how race impacts the daily lives of so many of our fellow citizens.

Fox News' Megan Kelly asked Dr. Carson what he would do to help race relations in the U.S. if he was elected president. He responded by saying, "I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don’t I talk about race that often,” he said. “I said it’s because I’m a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And I said, you see, when I take someone into the operating room, I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn’t make them who they are. The hair doesn't make them who they are. And it's time for us to move beyond that."

Dr. Carson is absolutely right when he says, "...I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are." The essence of who we are, biologically, is not determined by our hair, or eye color, or skin color.

But the issue of "who we are" is far more complicated than just biology. It's determined by how and what we think, by how we treat one another, and by what we believe as human beings. It's determined not by what we are made of, but what we do with what we are, and how we live our lives.

The trouble with Dr. Carson's response is that while surgeons may have this sort of privileged glimpse into "who we are" when they have a patient on the operating table, there are far more instances in which the color of one's skin makes a significant difference in how one is treated. A partial list might include:

• law enforcement, including "stop & frisk" violations (After being arrested, African-Americans are 33% more likely than whites to be detained while facing a felony trial in New York)
• police violence against unarmed black men (Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people)
• random traffic stops (85% of people subject to vehicle stops by Ferguson police were African-American; 90% of those who received citations were black; and 93% of people arrested were black. This while 67% of the Ferguson population is black)
• college admissions offices (Black and Hispanic students are dramatically underrepresented in highly selective colleges, even after controlling for family income. The probability of enrolling in a highly selective college is five times greater for white students than black students. Even after controlling for income, white students are two to three times as likely as black students to gain admission to highly selective colleges. These racial disparities appear to have grown in the last 30 years)
  
• high school graduation rates (Black students had a 69 percent graduation rate and Hispanic students had a 73 percent rate, while 86 percent of white students and 88 percent of Asian students earned high school diplomas)
• incarceration rates (an African American male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of going to jail in his lifetime, while a Latino male has a 17% chance, and a white male only has a 6% chance)
• real estate agents (almost 40 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, many real estate agencies across the country still engage in blatant racial, ethnic and religious discrimination at "egregiously high rates")
• security guards in stores (Former security guards of CVS, a major American drugstore chain, say they were fired from their jobs after complaining about being ordered to racially profile minority shoppers at three New York City stores)
• landlords (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that more than two million instances of housing discrimination occur each year, but fewer than one percent are reported)
• loan officers (researchers found that black borrowers are 25 to 35 percent less likely to receive funding than a white borrower with similar credit)
• sentencing guidelines (African Americans receive 10% longer sentences than whites through the federal system for the same crimes; African-Americans are 21% more likely than whites to receive mandatory minimum sentences and 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants)

Unfortunately for Dr. Carson, even brain surgeons are not immune to noticing the color of one's skin when making determinations about medical treatments. According to a study by researchers in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, "There are significant racial and ethnic disparities" in how patients are treated in emergency rooms when admitted for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), with minority patients being more likely to receive treatment from a resident rather than a specialist, and less likely to be referred for follow up care after being discharged from the hospital.

It shouldn't take a brain surgeon to understand that while race may be a "social construct," it is still real, and presents actual, tangible challenges, obstacles, and dangers to millions of Americans each and every day. And we should expect all candidates for the highest office in the land to recognize that they have an obligation to address race as more than a "skin deep" issue.

This has been an...interesting week in the world of politics, at both the state and national levels. Here in Michigan, we witnessed the personal and professional self-destruction of two Tea Party legislators, Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, as the result of an ill-conceived plot to conceal their affair by distributing a fake email "outing" Mr. Courser for having "sex with a male prostitute."

At the national level, we witnessed the first GOP debates, one for the runners-up, and the main event featuring the top 10 candidates, both televised on Fox News. Amidst what can only be described as a jaw dropping parade of misogyny, war mongering and regressive policy beliefs, one candidate stood out from the crowd: The Donald. Fox's Megan Kelly called out Mr. Trump for his history of making sexist, misogynistic comments about women: "You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals...Does that sound like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Kelly concluded by asking how Trump would combat inevitable charges from Hillary Clinton that he is part of the “war on women.” 

Mr. Trump's response was a textbook example of "mansplaining," and a graduate level demonstration of how wealthy, powerful men have been dismissing claims of sexism for centuries. Not content to disrespect Ms. Kelly, her question or the millions of women watching the debate, Mr. Trump then turned to Twitter in the early morning hours after the debate to double-down on his attacks on Ms. Kelly, impugning her professionalism and even re-Tweeting a comment referring to her as a "bimbo." All of this was carried out under cover of one of the favorite defenses of the privileged when held accountable for their words or actions: political correctness run amok. According to Mr. Trump, "I don't have time for political correctness and neither does this country!" 

The backlash against Mr. Trump has been both swift and predictable, with caustic comments from the other Republican candidates about his remarks and an indignant dis-invitation to a RedState event this weekend from conservative king-maker, and former Fox News host, Erick Erickson.

But before we start congratulating ourselves about the societal response to Mr. Trump's behavior, let's be clear here: There are no heroes in the Donald Trump story...

The Donald is a misogynistic, sexist creep. And there is ample evidence to support Ms. Kelly's asking of her question...

...however, Megyn Kelly herself has a long history of insensitive remarks about racial and ethnic minorities, and dismissing violence against black men. None of which means that the criticism of Mr. Trump is not without merit, and that he shouldn't be held accountable for his comments. Except for the fact that...

...Erick Erickson, the person who disinvited Trump from the RedState event for his remarks about Kelly, has a troubling history himself of making extremely disparaging remarks about women--and doesn't appear to recognize the hypocrisy in these inconsistencies.

No heroes.

And while it may seem on the surface as though the self-inflicted problems besetting both Reps. Courser and Gamrat, and Mr. Trump, are unrelated, there is a common thread connecting these incidents. At their core, all of these "controversies" are about narcissism--the act of caring more about oneself than anyone else. Which is also at the root of many of the conservative beliefs on political and social issues that these folks hold:

• Their concerns about women's reproductive health choices are not about what women want for their own bodies and lives--they are about what they themselves believe is right or true.
  
• Their concerns about same-sex marriage are not about what's right for those who want to build a life with the partner of their choice--they are about what they themselves believe others should do when it comes to their sexual orientations.
  
• Their beliefs about public education are not about what is best for children, schools or society--they are about what they themselves believe is the best way to "use" education to advance their own beliefs and to generate profits for themselves and their wealthy benefactors and investors.
  
• Their beliefs about taxes are not about what government should do for society, or for those in need--they are about how they can guarantee that they themselves will pay as little as possible for anything that does not directly benefit their own goals or interests.
  

I could not care less about Mr. Courser and Ms. Gamrat's affair, or Mr. Trump's sexism. These are the concerns and beliefs that disgust me. 

As a self-avowed policy wonk and political junkie (don't judge me!), I forced myself to watch every minute of the two Republican presidential candidate debates last night--both the undercard, or "kids table" debate at 5pm, and the “grown up" show at 9pm...or 8:50pm, or whenever that debacle was actually supposed to air. So, in the interest of promoting democracy, or subverting sanity, here are my 2015 "Ronnies!," named after Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the Republican Party, who was mentioned no less than 1000 times, seemingly, last night by the assembled throngs on the Cleveland stage. Without further ado...

[Note: All information in this post, unless otherwise cited, was drawn from Mercedes Schneider's excellent blog post, Teach for America Seeks Help Promoting Itself on Capitol Hill.]

Recently, Teach for America posted a vacancy for the Director of their Government Affairs operations in Washington, DC. Interestingly, the job announcement includes the following information about the experience required for this position: "At least 7 years of work experience, with at least three years experience on Capitol Hill", and "Salary for this position is competitive and depends on prior experience."

As reported by Mercedes Schneider, the former occupant of this office had been a TFA alum who "started in TFA with two years in the classroom in DC; became a “school operations manager” for five months, then moved on to legislative assistant for 13 months before becoming TFA’s director of government affairs for 27 months."

Clearly, TFA realized that experience in the areas of expertise required to be successful in the job were important considerations in the search process, and made sure that the job description reflected this understanding. Good for them. Just as I prefer that my airline pilot, or surgeon, or barista has extensive experience at flying, operating or drawing a cappuccino before they do these things for me, we should all expect that persons with more experience are capable of better performance at their jobs than those with little or no experience, at least initially...

...which--as I've pointed out previously here, here, and here, makes TFA's business model--of placing young college grads with no coursework in education, or teaching experience, in front of classrooms all across the United States, often in the most challenging teaching and learning settings imaginable--all the more problematic.

So, in the spirit of helping our friends at TFA, an education "non-profit" with assets of nearly half a billion dollars, refocus their values, here are a few questions:

• What does it say about your organization's values when you require 7 years of experience for a lobbying position and require zero years of experience for teachers in charge of classrooms full of young children?
• What does it mean when your organization charges resource-strapped school districts up to $9000 per year in "service fees" for each recruit placed, while private and public universities charge nothing when their graduates get hired for the same positions?
  
• What does it say about your "non-profit" organization's values when your top 3 executives are paid $381,946 (Co-CEO Matt Kramer) $342,134 (Elisa Villanueva Beard), and $176,657 (Wendy Kopp), while you attack public schools, teachers and unions for their "greed"?
• What does it mean when some of the top placement sites for TFA recruits happen to be the same cities and regions being targeted for predatory Achievement School Districts and portfolio school districts, like Nashville, Detroit and New Orleans?

Perhaps its time for TFA to update their mission statement from this:

Our mission is to enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.

 to this:

Our mission is to lobby, pressure and persuade as many as possible of our nation's most powerful political leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational privatization and profit.

Because, based on what your organization actually says and does, this is what you truly value.

"Achievement School Districts" are a recent phenomenon in the corporate education reform movement. These "school districts" are designed to guarantee "rapid improvement in the state’s low performing schools", although specific methods, techniques and strategies to accomplish this goal are rarely mentioned. ASDs have sprung up all across the nation, under various names and guises, from the "Education Achievement Authority" in Detroit, to the "Recovery School District" in New Orleans, to "Achievement School Districts" in Tennessee and Nevada--and Georgia and North Carolina have recently announced plans to form their own ASDs. These experimental school systems usually target the "bottom 5%" of low-performing schools in a state or region for governmental takeover, with the promise of quickly improving student learning.

The one thing all of these experiments have in common is that they've been crashing failures. In spite of incredible amounts of publicity, spin and hoopla, not one of these educational petri dishes has resulted in any appreciable improvement in student learning, accountability, or curricular reform.

• In Tennessee, audits of the ASD uncovered problems in the way that federal dollars were handled and the way payments were being processed. In a perhaps related story, Chris Barbic, the founding superintendent of the TNASD, recently announced his resignation.
  
• In a disturbingly similar development, Detroit's EAA manager, John Covington, resigned from his position after less than 2 years of service amidst heated criticism "for high rates of student and teacher turnover, questionable spending on travel and expenses, problems with special education services and the use of a computer-based curriculum rather than traditional textbooks."
• And in New Orleans, despite Gov. Bobby Jindal's claims of miraculous improvements since the inception of the city's Recovery School District, recent research tells a very different story, with only "6 percent of high school seniors in the Recovery School District (scoring) high enough in English and Math to qualify for admission into a Louisiana four-year college or university straight out of high school. Five of the district’s 16 high schools produced not a single student who met these requirements."

An Achievement School District Primer

How do you know if your state is considering creating an Achievement School District? Well, Achievement School Districts are characterized by several traits, none of which makes even the tiniest amount of sense in terms of helping to improve student learning or teaching quality:

School Funding

• Individual ASD schools are often required to pay a "kickback" or "tax" to the state ASD authority for the "privilege" of being identified as a "low performing school". In Nevada, "ASD schools receive the same state and local per-pupil resources that they would have received as part of their original home district. This includes local, state, and federal funding. As with other charter school sponsors, the ASD will receive a small administrative fee from each school it authorizes." (bold added)  

In other words, in spite of the probability that an ASD school has been chronically underfunded for years, perhaps decades, the state will now take its own cut from whatever local, state and federal funding the school may be receiving for administrative overhead, further decreasing the actual number of dollars that are going to classrooms, teachers and children.

Local Control

• Local control, long recognized as a hallmark of public education, is a dinosaur in ASDs. In Detroit, the locally-elected school board still meets, but has essentially been stripped of all power and authority. The members of the elected school board refer to themselves as being "exiled," and the newly elected state superintendent of schools has called on the governor and state legislators to return control of the Detroit Public Schools to the local school board, saying, "I believe we ought to have a Detroit school district for the Detroit community." Instead, Gov. Rick Snyder has proposed a radical plan to split the city's schools into two districts: one to educate children, and the other devoted to addressing the district's debt problem. 

Transparency

• Even though it is often trumpeted as an integral aspect of effective school governance, very few ASDs follow their own propaganda when it comes to transparency in reporting. Detroit's EAA is an especially notorious offender in this respect, making claims that do not stand even the faintest amounts of scrutiny. According to Wayne State professor of education Thomas Pedroni, the EAA's "internal data directly contradicts their MEAP data. Even Scantron, the maker of the internal assessment, would not stand behind the EAA's growth claims. And Veronica Conforme, the current EAA Chancellor, removed all the dishonest growth claims from their advertising and their website, and told me personally she doesn't give them credence for the purpose the EAA used them for." For more from Dr. Pedroni on the EAA's specious relationship with transparency, see this, and this.
  

Punitive vs. Educative Methods

• Many ASD charters include language regarding the possible consequences if schools do not meet "adequate yearly progress" goals, such as: "Operators of ASD schools that do not demonstrate meaningful improvement will be held accountable pursuant to policies set by the ASD." Indeed, school closings have become a prominent tool in the school reform playbook: 
• • Washington, D.C. closed 23 buildings in 2008. Officials are currently considering another 15 closures.
  • New York City closed more than 140 schools since 2002; leaders recently announced plans to shutter 17 more, beginning in 2013-14.
  • Chicago closed 40-plus buildings in the early 2000s. The district recently released a list of 129 schools to be considered for closure.

This approach follows guidelines first established in the No Child Left Behind legislation, which stipulate draconian changes for any school that fails to meet yearly progress within five years:

These school districts must implement plans to restructure the school. Options for restructuring include:

This thinking represents a sea change in terms of strategy with respect to schooling and education policy. Never in our nation's history have we taken a punitive approach rather than an educative approach when schools or children have struggled with demonstrating expected levels of progress.

When students experience difficulties in learning we respond by providing remediation, extra tutoring, or alternative teaching strategies--we don't kick them out of school. By the same token, when under-funded and under-resourced public schools do not show "adequate yearly progress," our response should be to find out why these schools are struggling, and provide them with the materials and support they need to improve--not for the charter management companies that run these schools to walk away before the end of the school year, forcing families to scramble to get their kids placed into public schools with little notice and no assistance.

Public education is far too important to treat it like a science experiment, with fuzzy methodology and uncertain results. Our children deserve schools that are adequately funded, controlled by locally elected school boards made up of persons with ties to the community and a vested interest in the success of their schools, transparency in reporting of school finances and learning outcomes, and that are founded and administrated with educative goals in mind, not punitive ones.

It's time to demand the return of our schools and our children from Achievement School Districts and the forces of school privatization. Education is not a business, and our children aren't widgets.

It's a common refrain among the reformer Illuminati whenever they experience any push-back against their anti-teacher, anti-union, anti-public education, anti-motherhood-apple-pie-and-hot-dogs agenda. You can bet your bottom privatization dollar that as soon as these edu-tourists hear any reasonable, evidence-based rationale refuting their radical positions on teacher evaluation, tenure or the use of Value-Added Measures, they will inevitably blurt out the one magic incantation they believe will repel all attacks, confident in its power to tug at the heartstrings of any parent/voter: "But, it's all about the kids!"

(Let's leave aside the notion for the moment that this well-funded clique of hedge fund managers, investment bankers and failed morning show hosts suddenly cares about kids after spending their entire adult lives making backroom deals and raiding pension funds. There is obvious power in this spell, which is designed to cut through logic and reason, and appeal directly to the most primal instincts of any parent.)

The truth is that education and schools are not, and should not be, all about the kids. If we truly want our schools to be healthy, highly-functional institutions, then every member of the school community must be treated with honor, dignity and respect. This includes adults as well as children.

It means that every person who works in the school--from teachers to principals, from custodians to secretaries, from bus drivers to cafeteria workers, from nurses to counselors, from students to parents--deserves to work and learn in an environment where they feel trusted and valued.

It means that the working conditions of teachers cannot be separated from the learning conditions of students, and that when one member of the community is devalued there is a devastating ripple effect across the rest of the community.

It also means that as teachers, we need to stop romanticizing our profession. We can start by not referring to teaching as a "calling," as though we are clergy or missionaries. We can also stop using hackneyed phrases such as "Teaching. I'm not in it for the income; I'm in it for the outcomes," or other meme-worthy sayings that imply that teachers don't need to be compensated fairly, or don't require adequate benefit packages, like health care insurance and pensions.

When we talk about our profession in these ways we play right into the reformer's game plan, which is to degrade and dehumanize the teaching force as mere delivery systems for test prep materials and canned curricula. If we don't value ourselves as dedicated, committed, well-educated professionals with deep subject matter expertise and rich pedagogical abilities and understandings, then why be surprised when the reformers suggest that veteran teachers can be replaced with uncertified, unqualified Teach for America recruits bolstered by a mere 5 week summer boot camp's worth of "training"?

The truth is that teaching is not a "calling," or a "mission"--it's a job, and a darned hard one at that. Those who choose this profession do so because they are deeply committed to the education of all children, and they demonstrate this commitment by doing their jobs under often difficult conditions, and while under nearly constant attack from the reformers, the media and the public. Teachers deserve to be treated with respect, paid fairly, and trusted to do their jobs without the threat of invalid and unreliable "accountability measures" imposed by persons who have never set foot in a school classroom. If we as a society really value our children's education as much as we say we do, then we need to treat teachers as equal partners in our children's education, and stop pretending that "it's all about the kids," because "it's" not.

The diversity statement of the University of Chicago Lab School, founded by American progressive educator and philosopher John Dewey, says it best: "Whether parents, faculty, administrators, or staff, members can expect to receive respect and to extend respect to others. Only when our community functions in a healthy manner can we provide a beneficial environment for our students."

And only when we start treating teachers with honor, dignity and respect will we get the schools that our children, and our society, deserve.

[Thanks to the students in MUS863: Seminar in the Sociology of Music Education from the Michigan State University College of Music's Summer Masters Degree Program for the inspiration for this post. Our profession is in excellent hands.]

Much has been made by the corporate reform community about how poorly American students do on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. According to the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development, which administers the exams, "the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 27th. Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading...and 20 in science." Now, if these were "apples to apples" comparisons, we would be well advised to be concerned. But they aren't; and the reformers know it, don't care, and are more than willing to use this misleading data to advance their agenda.

What the reformers don't share--because it would not support their agenda of failing schools, bad teachers, disengaged students, uninvested parents, and greedy unions--is that more American students take these exams than do students in other countries, and that US students from schools with low rates of poverty do extremely well--better than students in most other countries.

(An important caveat here: I don’t think that test scores are a terribly meaningful way to assess what students know and can do, but it’s the data we are used to seeing. The idea that we need standardized test results to tell us what our children know is one of the biggest lies told by the reformers. Teachers know a LOT about our students: we know their strengths and weaknesses, we know about their siblings and families, we know when they are in trouble, and we know what they are thinking and feeling. Only persons who have never taught would believe that we need standardized test scores to let us know how our students are doing. The truth is that these test scores are among the LEAST meaningful things we know about our students, and no amount of hype and reformer drama is going to change that.)

The issue here is that the PISA test scores are usually not disaggregated--that is, the scores are not parsed out by poverty rates, but instead are all lumped together. Many in the corporate reform community are fond of reporting these international scores without sharing the fact that US poverty rates are nearly 30%, while countries like Finland are at 5% or less.

There is a strong correlation (not causation) between SES and test scores (and zip code and test scores, for that matter)--which is not to say that wealthy kids are smarter than poor kids. They aren't. Its just that kids with more financial resources have more opportunities and advantages than their less -advantaged peers. 

It's important to be clear when reporting these stats: US schools are not "failing," and in fact, when we provide our kids and schools with adequate resources they "compete globally" just fine (although that is not our goal as teachers). It's also important to remember that less than 7% of the differences in student learning are attributable to in-school factors, such as teacher quality--with more than 90% of the difference being a function of out-of-school factors, like test prep tutors, private music lessons and the resources to purchase instruments, after school sports, and access to travel, concerts, books, and movies. The reformers like to say that these things don't matter, but teachers know that they do--and we want nothing more than for all of our students to have access to schools with rich and vibrant music and art programs, athletics,  school nurses, librarians, psychologists and counselors, and all of the other advantages their peers in the suburbs enjoy and from which they benefit.

Here's the Truth...

So, the next time that someone tells you that American students are not "competing globally," and that our "failing schools" are a threat to our national defense, our economy, and our very future as a nation, please share these disaggregated stats from the most recent PISA tests. Because when we look at US students from schools with free or reduced lunch rates lower than 10%, here’s how American kids do—for comparison’s sake, Finland’s rankings are also included:

Science literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=556 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 4th in the world

Reading literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=559 [1st in the world]

Finland – ranked 5th in the world

Mathematics literacy

U.S. schools with less than 10% free/reduced – score=540 [5th in the world]

FInland – ranked 11th in the world

Then, do what my students would do, and…<drops the mic>

Education reformers have been very clear about their goals for American schools and students. Authors like C. M. Rubin have called for parents to vote for the presidential candidate "who has the most impactful 21st-century vision for education, because addressing our issues now is essential for the U.S. to maintain its prosperity and global leadership in the next decades." Neera Tanden and Matt James raise the specter of 200 million Chinese college grads by 2030 competing in the global marketplace, and compare education to Olympic medal counts in their analysis of global education trends. But few of these pundits ever ask parents what they want for their children, so as the father of 2 school age boys I'm taking the liberty to share my thoughts on the subject.

Here is what I don't want with respect to my kids' education:

I don't want my children to be "globally competitive"--that's nothing more than Cold War fear mongering. Having recently returned from Shanghai, I can report that the Chinese educators I had the pleasure of working with were very interested in American educational strategies and ideas, and not for reasons of "global competitiveness." They seemed honestly interested in how what we do as teachers was the same or different from their approaches to teaching and learning, wanted to know how US teachers were prepared in colleges and universities, and were eager to share their traditions and ideas with us.

I'm not interested in an educational approach that is targeted on producing "college and career ready" graduates. My boys are 12 and 14. We hope they attend college, choose a major they are passionate about, and find a way to apply their talents and abilities in jobs that they enjoy and that make a strong contribution to their community and society in general. But that's not the purpose of education. Education is not "job training". It's so much more, and limiting the creativity and wonder of learning to college and career readiness is a perversion of the true purpose and value of education. The reformers have a very narrow, impoverished notion of education as nothing more than a banking transaction, in which teachers make deposits and students withdrawals. It's little wonder that their approach to schooling is erasing the joy of learning for students and teachers in far too many of our schools today.

And, I don't want an increasing bevy of tests consuming ever larger swaths of time and energy in my children's education. The truth is that we are measuring the things that are easy to measure, and ignoring the things that really matter--relationships between teachers and students, and among students themselves.

Here's what I do want for my children's education, and for education in general:

I want my children to read for enjoyment, play an instrument and sing, draw, dance, play, think, feel and be kind.

I want schools to be richly diverse, noisy, messy places full of discovery, where instead of worrying about a stifling regimen of tests, children are encouraged to explore, ponder, experiment and create.

I want rich arts programs, nurses, psychologists, counselors and librarians in every school, to make sure that no child comes to or leaves school hungry, and for schools to be places where every child and adult is treated with dignity and respect.

I want my children's teachers to be free to create their own lessons, and work collaboratively with their colleagues in a climate of trust and mutual respect with their administrators, school board members and parents.

I want those teachers to be evaluated based on the work they do in the classroom with their students, not on standardized test scores in subjects they don't teach, from students they've never met.

I want those teachers to be well prepared, and fully certified in their subject area with a semester or more of internship experience before being entrusted with their own classroom.

I want all children to be taught by persons who care about their growth and development as full human beings, not about their test scores.

As a parent, I have a message for the reformers: Stay out of public education and stop obfuscating parents and community members with distracting propaganda like "global competition" and "college and career readiness", which is only designed to further the false rhetoric of "failing schools". The vast majority of public schools are wonderful, and our children's teachers are doing what can only be described as heroic work under very difficult conditions.

And let's stop using "competition" as a solution for the problems that have been caused by..."competition."

John Oliver's recent takedown of standardized testing has met with near-universal praise, and deservedly so. It was a brilliant, thoughtful and bitingly funny analysis of the fatal flaws in the testing business, and was clearly based on extensive research and investigation. There has, however, been one lonely outpost of denial with respect to Mr. Oliver's piece: the intrepid externs at Education Post, and their fearless leader, Peter Cunningham.

Mr. Cunningham is from the long lineage of education leaders who have no degrees in education, have never taught and have zero experience in education outside of decision making and check cashing. By last count, about $12 million of that, as he points out in a recent EduShyster interview:

Cunningham: We hire bloggers and we subsidize bloggers who are already out there and who we want to support or give more lift. I think it’s fine. As you know, I have all this money. I have to spend it.

Mr. Cunningham, using generous donations from the Broad and Walton foundations, among others, has attempted to carve himself a niche as a "reasonable reformer," advocating for a more civil dialogue around the issues he believes are at the core of the reform debate. His agenda is based on 3 "Issues" that form the core of his beliefs about education reform:

1. High Standards for All Students: Is my child learning what is needed to be successful?

Even if our kids are coming home with straight “A”s, how do we really know if they’re learning what they need to succeed in college, in career, and in life?  One teacher’s “A” could be another teacher’s “C”.

We need to have clear and consistent standards for what our kids should be learning.

That is the thinking behind the Common Core — a common set of high learning standards for kids.

As you can see, Mr. Cunningham is a big Common Core booster. He also seems to believe that standardized tests are the only way we will "know if they’re learning what they need to succeed in college, in career, and in life"--which makes sense if you remember that he never taught, so he must not be aware of portfolios, formative assessments, playing checks, demonstrations, essays, poems, term papers, quizzes, drawings, dances, improvisations, compositions, science experiments, interviews, observations, and hundreds of other assessment tools that tell us what students know and can do in rich, meaningful ways.

His essay flagellating Mr. Oliver also uses florid imagery (Oliver throws poor kids under the bus) to defend the Common Core and standardized tests under a cloak of faux-racist indignation, as though more and harder tests will provide the magic solution to lifting poor kids out of poverty. Mr. Cunningham also makes outlandish accusations that exaggerate his importance in the grand scheme of American education:

We know these things because we force the educational bureaucracy to test kids, publish results and take action. Until we demanded real accountability, many states, with a few exceptions, simply ignored these kids.

For a person who has never taught, and holds no elected office, that's a pretty gaudy resume. Mr. Cunningham seems to believe he has the power to "force" schools to test students according to his demands, and to enforce accountability on the unruly masses. To listen to Mr. Cunningham, before he came to the rescue no one in education ever thought to assess students' learning--and in fact, we were simply warehousing children with no thought of their futures. This is beyond arrogant--its delusional; and the fact that wealthy benefactors are subsidizing these beliefs should give us all pause.

The facts are that teachers know how to assess their students, and have been doing so very well for a long time. This recent obsession with standardized tests adds nothing to our arsenal of measurement tools that will help achieve the primary goal of any form of meaningful assessment: to improve instruction. Standardized test results present only a gross measurement of student progress, and usually are returned to teachers far too late to be of any real assistance in adjusting lesson plans or assignments. Those that depend on tests as a useful tool are placing all of their eggs in a torn and broken basket.

2. Taking Responsibility: We have a responsibility to set a high bar for every child, regardless of the challenges the child may face, and provide the teaching and support each child needs to meet those expectations. That’s the promise of public education and the right of every child.

We have a responsibility to set a high bar for every teacher. The teacher has the most direct impact on a child’s success in the classroom.

Accountability means holding everyone with responsibilities to high standards of performance...school districts and states, principals, teachers and parents.
We need tests. They are one way to answer the question: Is my child learning?

We do have a responsibility to every child, but it is not to set an arbitrary "high bar"--its to use authentic, teacher-designed assessment to determine where kids are developmentally, and design a course of study to move them further along in the learning process. Our standards don't need to be the same for every child--in fact, they shouldn't be. Each child is different, with different needs, desires and strengths. Pretending they are all the same is not only naive, but dangerous. If we think it makes sense to differentiate instruction, then why is it smart to standardize assessment?

Mr. Cunningham then goes on to repeat another tired saw of the reformer play book--that teachers are the most important factors with respect in-school learning. What he conveniently leaves out of his rhetoric is that teachers impact only between 1-14% of the differences in student learning--the rest is dependent on out-of-school factors, mostly having to do with SES. Ignoring this fact brings Mr. Cunningham into lock-step with the rest of the "No Excuses" crowd, like Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp--hardly "reasonable reformers."

Mr. Cunningham then returns to his favorite talking point: WE NEED TESTS! Try as I might, I could find no mention of any other form of assessment on the Ed Post web site--so while Mr. Cunningham proclaims that he "gets it" about multiple forms of assessment, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of that anywhere on the site.

3. High-Quality Charter Schools: Public-school choice is an essential part of unlocking that door. Education is not one size fits all; children have different learning styles, and we need to provide all of our families with a range of high-quality public schools and empower them to find the right fit for their child.

High-quality charter schools help empower families.

Across the country, there are thousands of charter schools that are changing the lives of children, particularly in communities that have for decades suffered from a lack of high-quality educational opportunities.

For a "new reformer," Mr. Cunningham's talking points sound awfully familiar: charter schools are the answer! Except when they're not. The research on the success of charter schools is far from conclusive, and most of the evidence points to regular public schools doing a better job in terms of performance, access, and working with kids with special needs. Clearly, charter schools are not "the answer," yet it is all Mr. Cunningham seems able to muster as a solution. Interestingly, Mr. Cunningham never uses the term "charter schools" without tagging on "high quality"--which usually means highly selective (i.e., lottery based admission) and leads to problems with expulsion of special learners (see: Heritage Academies).

School choice is an experiment that we have seen fail time and time again (Milwaukee, New Orleans, Michigan), and yet the reformers continue beating the same old drum. Charters will never serve more than a small, selective fragment of the school population, even as they siphon billions from public school coffers and exacerbate the impact of income inequality on America's youth.

A far better solution is to call a halt to the charter expansion explosion and refocus our energies and attention on supporting and maintaining our system of regular public schools, making sure that all children have access to a great school in their own community. As comedian D. L. Hughly pointed out to neocon Dan Señor on Real Time recently,

Why do I have to leave where I came from to go to a school that is not in my neighborhood?

It says everything about where I am from is horrible.

Why is everything better where I am not?

"School choice" is a false choice. No parent should have to move their child to a "safe" school, or feel that they have to play the lottery to get their son or daughter a quality education. Mr. Cunningham's policies are making it harder for regular public schools to offer quality programs in safe, well-maintained facilities as increasing levels of resources are diverted to charter and private schools under the twin guises of "school choice" and "accountability."

Let's be clear: there is nothing "reasonable" about Mr. Cunningham's agenda of more tests, more accountability for teachers and schools, and more charter schools. Its the same old reformers' mantra, repackaged with a nicer smile, and tepid requests for civility. But the end game is the same: punish students and teachers, use data inappropriately, and turn the public schools into private profit centers.

And Mr. Cunningham has 12 million reasons to be "reasonable."

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder announced his plan to "fix" Detroit's schools today. Here's a cogent analysis of the broad strokes of his plan, according to my brilliant friend, Nancy Osborne:

Take away schools from the Voters. They will have no say. Stick the elected School Board (the Black People) with the debt...even though they had a positive fund balance before Lansing (the White People) appointed a succession of Emergency Managers who financially crashed the district over a 15 year period. In addition, Snyder's plan will create 3 new layers of bureaucracy. Give free busing to charter school parents no matter how far the children live from their for-profit schools. And this is just the broad outline. I'm sure there's plenty of mischief in the details.

In response, hundreds of Detroit's teachers voiced their displeasure, and the resulting shortage of teachers and subs caused many DPS schools to shut down for the day. Here’s the statement from DPS Emergency Manager Darnell Earley: ”Detroit Public Schools' sole focus and goal is the education of the more than 47,000 students whose education it has been entrusted with by their families. That focus and goal should be shared by all DPS employees. While we can agree to disagree on matters of policy, those disagreements should never impact our students and the instructional time they are entitled to as it has today - with 17 schools having been closed due to lack of teachers and other instructional staff. This unplanned turn of events is seriously misguided and directly harms our students - taking away a day in the classroom that students can ill-afford given the school days already missed due to our severe weather this past winter. It is truly unfortunate that so many of those who profess to be dedicated educators have decided to participate in this action given its unjustifiable and unconscionable consequence."

A couple of thoughts...

1. With all due respect to Mr. Earley, there’s a lot more to running a school district than just educating children. Believe me, every teacher wishes it were that simple. As lovely as it sounds, the kids can not ever be the “sole focus”—those entrusted with running our public schools also need to treat all school employees, from teachers to custodians, from secretaries to cafeteria workers, with dignity and respect. Snyder’s plan does none of this, so the teachers have not just the right, but the responsibility to protest.

2. I'd be a lot more inclined to listen to Mr. Earley's diatribe if he had voiced similar concerns when the recent M-STEP tests created massive problems with school schedules and instructional time--but I don't recall him ever making a peep about these interruptions. Methinks thou dost protest too much, Mr. Emergency Manager...

3. Mr. Earley and the governor are not just "agreeing to disagree" with Detroit's teachers and the teacher union--they are actively working to destroy the Detroit Public Schools, crush the teachers union, and de-professionalize teaching as a profession. Expecting DPS teachers to sit politely on the sideline so as not to upset the apple cart while the Governor and his colleagues dismantle public education in Detroit is not only naive--its insulting.

4. Mr. Earley's disingenuous attempt to cast Detroit's teachers as the "bad guys" in this dispute ("It is truly unfortunate that so many of those who profess to be dedicated educators have decided to participate in this action given its unjustifiable and unconscionable consequence") is not only smarmy and laughable, its not how leaders are supposed to behave. When one becomes a teacher, one does not forfeit one's rights as a citizen.

What is truly unfortunate about this whole situation is the complete and utter lack of understanding on the part of the Governor and the Emergency Manager about the value and importance of public education to Michigan's largest city. Instead of robbing public schools to pay his wealthy friends in the charter "industry", its high time for Gov. Snyder to show that he understands that as goes Detroit, so goes Michigan--and that he was elected to be the Governor of all of Michigan's citizens, not just the rich ones.

I spent the day observing two student teachers. Both were teaching instrumental music in middle and high schools, and each was assigned to an experienced, master teacher. But that's where the similarities end...

One of the student teachers was placed in an urban school and the other in a rural school. The differences between these two schools were stark, and illustrative of the disparities in how our society treats children based on their socioeconomic status. 

Upon entering the urban school, I was immediately struck by how quiet it was. The hallways were eerily empty, with none of the typical hallway chatter and vibrancy of excited students making their way from class to class. The corridors were dark and gloomy, with the walls and lockers looking badly beat up and in need of a fresh coat or two of paint. A quick trip to the men's restroom revealed a dirty, broken mirror, no soap, and a single roll of paper towels propped up on the edge of a cracked porcelain sink with a leaky faucet. The restroom, like the halls and classrooms, hadn't been cleaned in a long time.

Less than an hour later I found myself 20 miles away in a bustling school with busy hallways flooded with natural light, brightly painted walls and lockers, and large classrooms with freshly vacuumed, plush carpeting. The restroom was spotlessly clean, and fully stocked with soap dispensers, paper towels and hot air hand dryers.

While the contrasts between these schools could not have been more clear, the students in each building were amazingly similar. Both bands were beautifully behaved, engaged and enthusiastic. Each group of musicians entered their respective band room, got their instruments out of their cases, and began warming up for rehearsal. It was only upon closer examination and discussion that the differences between these two settings became more readily apparent:

1. In the rural school, every child had their own instrument, and kids who played large instruments like the tuba had one school-owned instrument to play at school, and another instrument for home practice; in the urban school, some instruments were shared among multiple students during the day, and no students had school-owned instruments at home.
2. All of the instruments in the rural school were in good playing condition, and when repairs are required there is a school budget and an established repair procedure in place; the teacher in the urban school was busy re-padding a clarinet when I entered the band room, and shared that she spends over $1000 out-of-pocket per year on instrument repairs and equipment replacement--there is virtually no school budget for these things.
3. Most of the students in the rural school's high school band had been playing their instruments since 5th grade, and had lived in that community their entire lives. The 112-piece band played advanced repertoire, had a full instrumentation, and many of the band's alumni went on to participate in music ensembles in college after graduation; the urban school's band program had been decimated by the elimination of the district's elementary music program the previous year, and as a result there were only 15 students in the ensemble. Due to the transient nature of the school's population, students who had been playing their instruments for several years were sitting next to kids who had just started playing two weeks previously, making for a very challenging learning environment for students and teachers alike.

Driving home at the end of the day, I couldn't help but wonder how different things would be if all of these children, both rural and urban, had the same advantages at school--clean, safe and adequate facilities; high-quality instruments in good working condition; vibrant, attractive surroundings conducive to learning.

I wondered what a student from the urban school would think if she spent a day at the rural school, in a bright, spacious and well-maintained environment. Would she feel angry, knowing that her peers in the rural school district had advantages that were denied her?

And I wondered what it says about us as a society that we allow some of our children to spend their school days in squalid conditions that make learning more difficult, while their peers in more affluent communities enjoy advantages that help prepare them for success.

The Secretary of State is supposed to be the nation's top diplomat.

The Attorney General is supposed to be the nation's top lawyer.

The Surgeon General is supposed to be the nation's top physician.

So why is Arne Duncan, the nation's Secretary of Education, behaving more like a schoolyard bully than like the nation's top teacher?

In the face of unprecedented opposition to his administration's program of standardized testing, with nearly 200,000 parents in New York State alone opting their children out of standardized tests that they perceive as not only unhelpful, but downright damaging, Sec. Duncan went on the offensive Tuesday, promising that if the states wouldn't force those children to take his tests, then he would:

"'We think most states will do that,' Duncan told an Education Writers Association conference in Chicago, according to Chalkbeat New York. 'If states don’t do that, then we [the federal government] have an obligation to step in.'

Duncan didn’t elaborate on what the federal intervention might look like. It could, however, involve labeling districts with too many opt-outs as “failing,” a status that places restrictions on how schools use federal money. This would in turn pressure state government and school districts to roll back parental opt-out rights.

Duncan went on to say: 'Folks in the civil rights community, folks in the disability community, they want their kids being assessed. They want to know if they are making progress or growth,' Duncan said."

First, everyone should be considered a part of the "civil rights community" and the "disability community," as these communities are made up of those who support civil rights and those with disabilities. The fact that Sec. Duncan is so clearly trying to "divide and conquer" is at best a very clumsy strategy, and at worst an obvious attempt to bully folks into feeling guilty or like bad parents for opting out.

Second, no teacher needs yearly standardized tests to know if their students are "making progress or growth." Just as parents don't need these tests to know if their children are growing. The people that teach and love these children are well aware of what they are learning, what challenges and successes they are encountering, and what strategies will work best to help them continue to grow and learn. Let's not pretend that a once-per-year multiple choice test will somehow magically provide some special sauce that will reveal what kids know and are able to do.

Finally, if this many parents are angry enough to opt their kids out of these tests in the first place, just how ticked off do you think they will be when the Sec. of Education threatens to force their kids to actually take the tests?

And, Mr. Duncan--have you ever really tried to force a child to take a test? I had a tough time getting my then 4 year old to put on his mittens in the morning. Good luck with that.

What Sec. Duncan doesn't seem to know--because he was never a teacher himself--is that the testing movement depends on the goodwill of the teachers and students involved. Without getting "buy-in" from teachers, parents and students there is no way this thing is going to fly. Let's say that Mr. Duncan "succeeds" in getting every child in the nation to actually sit down and take his tests. Does he really think that no child will look at those blank rows of bubbles begging to be drawn on and not start filling them out in the shape of a tree, or just color in every bubble on the sheet? And to think that these tests are supposed to be used to make high stakes decisions on whether teachers keep their jobs or not. No wonder that the American Statistical Association is on record as saying that Value Added Measures, a statistical approach that uses test scores to come up with building-level scores, is an inappropriate and invalid use of standardized tests.

The way to "fix" this problem is not by playing the heavy and threatening to force these tests on unwilling children and teachers. It's to listen to the opinions of those who have legitimate objections to these tests, and implement thoughtful reforms, such as...

• limiting standardized testing to one time in grades 3-6, one time in middle school, and one time toward the end of high school
  
• ensuring that test results will be shared with teachers so they can use them to improve instruction
  
• guaranteeing that test scores will not be used to evaluate teachers--which these tests are incapable of doing with any degree of accuracy
  

So, Mr. Duncan, instead of posturing and threatening punishments, why don't you try doing what a real education leader would do--listen carefully to dissenting opinions, work together with your colleagues in the schools, and develop a better testing model that actually helps teachers teach and helps students learn?

I received the note below from a former student who is now a teacher. For obvious reasons, I won't identify her or where she teaches, but--shockingly--her story is becoming all too common...

"We had a union meeting yesterday where they warned us that the governor is going after the certificates of teachers that opted out their kids (of the state tests). The governor says it breaks our contract agreeing to protect and follow educational laws. Is this legal? Teachers are being targeted and warned to be extremely careful, especially on public media. I was just curious on your thoughts."

This theme of administrators and elected officials threatening teachers if they speak out publicly against tests, the Common Core State Standards, or other education policies seems to be growing stronger and louder recently, with reports of similar stories popping up in New Mexico (http://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/19/audrey-beardsley-the-silencing-of-the-educators-a-dangerous-trend/), Louisiana (http://www.westernjournalism.com/teachers-district-facing-retribution-criticizing-common-core/), New York (http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-teacher-lost-fellowship-revealing-administration-fudged-regents-exam-court-papers-article-1.1990734), Arizona (http://www.azcentral.com/story/ejmontini/2015/03/27/legislature-arizona-school-board-association-sb-1172-free-speech-elections/70556134/), Missouri (http://www.stevenlin83.com/teachersfreepress/this-is-why-teachers-need-tenure-missouri-teacher-suspended-for-speaking-out/), and Michigan (http://stopcommoncoreinmichigan.com/2014/03/teachers-silenced/).

In Rochester, NY, an email from an administrator to the city's principals asked them to keep a list of teachers who might have shared information on testing for possible disciplinary action:

"An email sent from a high-level Rochester City School District official to principals is causing concern among teachers.

Chief of Schools Beverly Burrell-Moore sent the email Monday afternoon to principals she supervises. The email asks them to share names of teachers who have encouraged parents to refuse to allow their children to take state exams. 

"Per your building, please identify teachers who have sent letters or made phone calls to parents encouraging them to opt out their children from the NYS Assessments.  Also, identify teachers who you have evidence as utilizing their classrooms as 'political soap boxes.'  I need this updated  information no later than Tuesday morning for follow-up," the email states. (http://www.rochesterhomepage.net/story/d/story/rcsd-official-give-me-names-of-teachers-encouragin/69585/t4V1RVAqHk-lhmvN3pcetA)

Audrey Amrein Beardsley, a professor of education at Arizona State University, and the author of one of my favorite education blogs on the web, VAMBOOZLED, reports: "New Mexico now requires teachers to sign a contractual document that they are not to 'diminish the significance or importance of the tests” or they could lose their jobs. Teachers are not to speak negatively about the tests or say anything negatively about these tests in their classrooms or in public; if they do they could be found in violation of their contracts.' Beardsley wonders about the legality, and even the constitutionality of this sort of action: 'As per a related announcement released by the ASBA, this “could have a chilling effect on the free speech rights of school and district officials' throughout the state but also (likely) beyond if this continues to catch on. School officials may be held 'liable for a $5,000 civil fine just for sharing information on the positive or negative impacts of proposed legislation to parents or reporters.'”

While there is no doubt that these moves are indeed a "chilling" development in the education "reform" movement, I believe that they also reveal a quickly growing sense of fear and confusion among those in the reform community regarding the viability of their agenda. Indeed, the surprising strength of the "Opt Out" movement in New York, where as many as 200,000 students have reportedly refused to sit for the state's tests, has led to calls demanding the resignation of Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the NYS Board of Regents.

If there is a silver lining to these threats it may be the impending crumbling of the reform agenda under the increased scrutiny from the public, the media and teachers. For far too long, policy "leaders" like Chancellor Tisch, Governors Cuomo, Kasich and Snyder, and Sec. of Education Duncan have responded to criticism of their agenda with either deafening silence or dismissive pandering, such as accusations that "painted parents as confused patsies of a labor action." Now, these feeble rejoinders are being exposed for what they have been all along: weak and arrogant responses to the legitimate demands for accountability from those so negatively impacted by these destructive policies.

These "leaders" are clearly scared, and they have every right to be. Now is the time to step up the pressure, and not let our voices be silenced. We are fighting for our students, our colleagues and our profession.

Let students learn, let teachers teach, and get the politicians out of education.

For Immediate Release: Michigan State College of Music Set to Graduate Another Class of First-Round Draft Picks

April 5, 2015, 1:06pm

SPARTAN MUSIC EDUCATION INTERNS DRAWING ATTENTION FROM LEADING GRAD SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL DISTRICTS ACROSS NATION

"Yet Another Class of Future Teacher-Leaders," Predict Top Music Education Analysts

East Lansing, MI – The Michigan State University College of Music announced today the impending graduation of another class of top recruits, drawing attention from many of the top collegiate music schools and school districts across the United States. Although NASM privacy regulations expressly prohibit identifying individual students, music education chair Mitchell Robinson characterized the class as, "continuing the outstanding tradition of Spartan music educators serving as leaders in K-12 and higher education in colleges and school systems in virtually every state in the nation."

The 2014-15 class of 34 future teacher-leaders that made such a strong contribution to this year's Final Four run includes, by position, elementary music teachers, string teachers, instrumental music teachers and choral music educators. A number of the members of the class of 2015 have also played multiple positions during their internships, "demonstrating versatility and ability on both sides of the line," according to NASM's Mel Kiper, the top music education recruiting analyst in the country.

Two members of the class have indicated their interest in pursuing graduate study upon completion of their student teaching placements, with one student being accepted to the prestigious Eastman School of Music for a doctoral degree in ethnomusicology, and another set to pursue a masters degree in applied music at Florida State University. Several Fall graduates have already secured teaching positions in Texas, Connecticut, Indiana, and Michigan, getting an early start on developing strong professional profiles.

Already looking ahead to next year, the MSU music education faculty is excited to welcome another strong class of 50 prospective music educators from across the country to the Class of 2020. "It looks like yet another very strong group of singers, players, composers, improvisers and thinkers. Go Green!" said Robinson.

A recent Michigan Radio "Next Idea" piece featured the well-respected Dean of the University of Michigan's College of Education, Deborah Ball, and her thoughts on improving teacher education (http://michiganradio.org/post/we-will-pay-our-lack-respect-teachers). The essay starts out nicely, then takes an abrupt turn into very troubling territory:

"Teaching matters. We know that it can make the difference between a child learning to read by third grade, being confident in math, and developing the mindset necessary for success. Yet skillful teaching is not commonplace, and it’s hurting our society."

Let me start by saying that I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Ball's work. Her research on "math knowledge for teaching" is one of the most innovative insights into teacher knowledge that I've come across in the literature, and her reputation in education and research circles is impeccable. She has also taken a leadership role in education reform in our state, and while I have not always agreed with all of the recommendations her work on these efforts has produced, I'm also realistic enough to understand that these sorts of initiatives are difficult operations to manage; a bit like teaching an elephant to dance--you can do it, but its going to take a long time, be very difficult to pull off, and a lot of people are going to get hurt.

That said, I have to say that I'm disappointed in Dean Ball's rhetoric here--she seems to be adopting the reformers' talking point that if we can just "improve the quality of the teaching force," all the problems in education would be solved. I don't know what teachers she is observing, but the teachers I see in the schools today are the best and brightest I've ever seen--and are doing heroic work in spite of the most difficult conditions we've ever faced as a profession: meager resources; dwindling budgetary support; a narrowing of the curriculum leading to cuts to music, art and PE; withering attacks from Rhee, Kopp, Gates and Duncan and friends; an obsession with standardized testing; and much more.

Now, I'm certainly not saying that improvements to teacher education should not be pursued--as reflective teachers and teacher educators, that's what we do--we are constantly on the look-out for ways to improve our practice and strategies that will positively impact student learning.

But its not a lack of "skillful teaching" that is "hurting our society." Its a stunning disregard for addressing the real problems in public education in our state:

• nearly a quarter of Michigan's children are living in poverty, with 59% of the children in Detroit currently struggling below the poverty line (http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2015/02/18/detroit-childhood-poverty-ranking-kids-count-report/23657355/
  
• Michigan's schools have been systematically starved of resources over the past several years, with as much as $1 billion being taken from schools to subsidize the Governor's tax cuts for businesses (http://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/playing-politics-with-education/)
  
• Devastating cuts to school music, art and PE programs have diminished the quality of education, learning and quality of life for many of our state's children (http://michiganradio.org/post/art-music-and-gym-teachers-get-ax-lansing)
  

Focusing on alleged issues of teacher quality only serves to distract us from dealing with the real problems facing our students, teacher, schools and communities. The "problem" isn't a lack of "skillful teaching"--its a lack of public awareness on where we should really be focusing our attention, energies, activism and resources. And the "solution" will not be found by placing the blame on teachers.

Teachers aren't the problem--they are the solution.

We recently received an email from our school district about M-STEP (Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress) Testing dates--for those not in Michigan, this is the new "required" state test for children in grades 3-8 which replaces the MEAP.

For one of our boys, the M-STEP testing schedule was to span 6 different days and include tests on English Language and Mathematics. The thought of our son missing class time for 6 days to sit for standardized tests--the results of which couldn't possibly inform his learning or his teachers' instructional practices, due to the tests being administered in the Spring rather than in the Fall, with the results not being made available until after the close of the school year--was bad enough. But to make matters worse, this "summative" test was not intended to be a long-term solution to the state's testing policies: 

“Our challenge is that this is a one-year interim assessment. I’m not sure how meaningful that will be for us because we can’t compare results,” Grandville Public Schools Superintendent Ron Caniff said about the M-STEP. “This will be a snapshot of how our students measure up to other students (nationwide), but we won’t be able to measure it in terms of how our students are learning and growing – that’s the downside.” (http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2014/11/west_michigan_school_leaders_v.html)

The bottom line was that our child was being pulled out of classes for 6 days, for tests that weren't intended to really measure student learning or growth, or to provide any meaningful feedback for his teachers, and these tests were not likely to be given again in subsequent years. The whole thing seemed like a terrible, awful, really bad idea--but the kicker was the following tag line on the district's email announcement:

"PLEASE DO NOT MAKE APPOINTMENTS FOR YOUR CHILD ON THE DATES ATTACHED. If your child misses these dates, then they will do make up testing and will be pulled from other academic classes. If your child is ill, they should stay home, of course! We understand!"

Before going on, I want to be clear: My wife and I believe that the school district that our children attend is terrific. They have wonderful teachers, a fantastic school music program, excellent academics, and a wide array of student services. The student body is diverse and motivated, and the community is fully engaged in school activities and governance. Our interactions with school personnel have always been great, and we have never regretted our decision to purchase a home in this town--a decision we made based largely on the quality of the school system.

So, the district's message didn't appear to ring true. In private conversations with teachers and administrators within the school system, I had sensed their agreement with our thinking about the explosion of standardized testing and its negative impact on teacher evaluation, school funding, and a host of other issues. These were intelligent, thoughtful, caring persons. Each of them had treated my children as their own--with sensitivity, compassion and care. I was certain that they had the children's learning as their highest priority, but felt compelled to follow the state's (misguided) directives regarding these tests.

After a great deal of thought, we decided to contact the school to tell them we were opting our son out of the M-STEP tests, and asked about the provisions for students who will not be taking these exams. After hitting "send" I was apprehensive--I knew about the pressures the folks at the school were under, and also didn't want to put my son in an awkward position with his friends and teachers at school. Both my wife and I are teachers, and have always approached our "job" as parents of school-aged children with the goal of supporting our kids' teachers fully. Making this request was not an easy decision for either of us.

Two days later we received the following response:

"I contacted the Assistant Superintendent and she told me that we would honor your request for opting (your son) out of testing with a note from you.  (Your son) is already on the testing rosters, but with your note, we will remove him.  

Students are being tested during their academic hours with their homeroom teachers. Per Assistant Superintendent, (your son) will be offered this time to work on any homework he has or to read a book for the time that his peers are testing. He may be given the option of going to the library...

We are required to have 95% participation for testing and any student opting out is a hit on that percentage. However, we understand your request and will honor it with a note sent to the Guidance Office."

Having read and heard about much more hostile responses from schools around the country to similar requests, we were both relieved and encouraged by our school's reply. Not only was our request for our child to opt out greeted with respect, but provisions for our son's attendance on those days when the test was scheduled were provided without argument or hassle. The approach was understanding, positive and student-centered--everything we have come to expect from our school district.

I also believe that this response is an indication of a tipping point of sorts when it comes to the issue of opting out and school testing. More and more, teachers and administrators are understanding the negative impact of these tests on students, teachers and schools, and are joining the fight with parents and other groups advocating for a reduction in the number and uses of these tests.

At the end of the day, I am left feeling optimistic and enormously encouraged by this interaction, and energized to continue the fight against the corporate reformers' obsession with data-mining and high-stakes testing. I can sense the tide turning, and more teachers and school administrators joining in the push back against these reforms. We have reached a Tipping Point, and now is the time to redouble our efforts.

Teach for America "Scenarios"

Scenario 1--the college student wants to be a teacher but goes to a school with no ed degree program, so signs up with TFA: bad decision making.

Scenario 2--the student is not interested in being a teacher, graduates with a degree in another discipline, but decides to do TFA for a couple of years before going back to grad school or entering the work force: in so doing, the student may force an experienced teacher out of the classroom, as happened to hundreds of teachers in Chicago over the last couple of years, especially veteran teachers of color in the city (http://inthesetimes.com/article/15367/teach_for_americas_mission_to_displace_rank_and_file_educators_in_chicago); and, the hiring districts pay a premium of $3000-5000 per TFA recruit on top of paying the new teachers' salaries--creating negative financial consequences for the school and community, not to mention the costs (financial, human resources, etc.) associated with excessive teacher turnover, which is a feature of the TFA business model (http://tn.chalkbeat.org/2013/11/27/teach-for-america-contract-in-memphis-area-approved-despite-concerns/#.VO36BMYfws0; http://prospect.org/article/true-cost-teach-americas-impact-urban-schools).

Scenario 3: the student has a sincere interest in social justice and societal change, and believes that working as a TFA recruit will help them achieve those goals: the recruit's goals are not aligned with the organization's goals, creating tensions that lead to non-productive disruption among the teaching force and in the schools (see: Gary Rubenstein's work, among others).

Scenario 4: the student enters the classroom through TFA, teaches for 2 years, then gets a job in a state education department, or in school administration, or with a policy think tank: this is TFA's real agenda (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/07/17/a-former-teach-for-america-manager-speaks-out/; http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/teach-america-hidden-curriculum; http://www.mitchellrobinson.net/2015/02/02/the-one-in-which-teach-for-america-reveals-their-true-colors/), and we can see how this is working out for us as a profession--our policy agenda is being dictated and guided by persons who have no education degrees, never interned or student taught, and don't have sustained, successful teaching experience in "regular" public schools.

None of these scenarios is good, most of them are really bad, and the proof is right in front of our eyes in the form of destabilized schools and communities, the explosion of for-profit charters, and continued attacks on K-12 and higher education.

Recently, the Lansing School District released a series of TV and radio ads designed to promote their schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pV60aDl44g). Amid a floating stream of expertly produced and edited video of young children bouncing basketballs and playing music instruments, the voiceover claims that the Lansing Schools "offer more educational choices to students than any other school district in the greater Lansing region." This, in spite of the fact that the District decided to slash the offerings for those very children by eliminating all of the 27 elementary art, music and PE positions in the Lansing schools over a year ago, leaving the city's students with only 2 music, art and PE classes per semester, while their peers in neighboring school systems often receive these classes twice per week.

Now, if the superintendent, board of education and teachers union in Lansing had just gotten together and cut the elementary art, music and PE programs and teachers in the schools, that would have been one thing...

• But to hear the former AMPE program now be referred to as the "Innovative Arts & Fitness" Department, as though there is anything "innovative" in firing 27 teachers and depriving thousands of children of a full and complete education...
  

• To read press releases and interviews with district officials touting the current art and music offerings as being better than what was previously in place, because of the presence of "real artists and musicians" in Lansing's schools...
  

• To see that the LSD held a promotional fair at the Lansing Center this past weekend, with radio and media coverage, in an effort to stem the tide of those leaving the District, largely due to the curricular narrowing and impoverished offerings now available at the elementary level...

• And now, for the art and music teachers in Lansing who had their careers taken away to be subjected to thousands of dollars worth of TV and radio ads promoting the "rich and diverse curricular offerings" in the Lansing School District, even as the elementary curriculum has been gutted of art, music and PE, and to know that their former students are only receiving instruction in these subjects 4 TIMES PER YEAR...
  

Let me be clear: I believe that there are many excellent teachers in the Lansing schools, including several outstanding music teachers working in the District's high schools. I've been blown away by what the music students and faculty are doing in Lansing, especially given the difficult conditions under which they are working. These students and teachers deserve nothing but our support, encouragement and respect.

But cuts to music and art programs in any school system are unacceptable ways to manage school finances, and are disproportionately devastating to children in urban communities, whose families may not have the resources to provide them with alternative forms of instruction in the arts. School district leaders are charged with providing the students in their care with a full and comprehensive education, which includes the arts. Eliminating these offerings, at any level, is an abrogation of their duty, and merits a strong and forceful response.

The children in Lansing deserve strong, quality arts programs, delivered by qualified, certified music and art teachers. What is currently being offered as "Innovative" is unacceptable, and the District needs to restore the teaching positions they have eliminated so that Lansing's students get the education that they deserve.

The state of Ohio recently announced a newly re-branded initiative to attract, recruit and train new superintendents for the state's schools (http://www.brightohio.org). Interestingly--or horrifyingly, depending on your point of view--the BRIGHT initiative is based on the "executive MBA" model, and is designed to bring recent college graduates in degree programs other than education into school leadership positions in Ohio's schools. These eager new recruits would be admitted not to an administrative degree program, but to the MBA degree at Ohio State University, "fully paid for by BRIGHT", while being placed in a one year internship in an Ohio school, under the supervision of a "master principal." At the conclusion of the training program, each candidate will complete their "responsibilities as a BRIGHT leader..." by serving "at least two years as the principal of any public school in Ohio."

Now, some people might understandably have a few questions after hearing about the BRIGHT initiative. Like:

• Why would we want school principals who have never taught?
• Why are we designing new school leadership programs when there is no shortage of school administrators?
• Why would an MBA be the best degree for a school principal or superintendent, and not a degree in education, or educational administration, or school leadership?
  
• Why are persons with no teaching experience being placed as administrative interns when teachers who are working on their administrative credentials need these placements?
  
• Why design a new school leadership training program that only requires its graduates to serve as principals for 2 years?
• What Ohio school districts would actually hire these people?

Given that the BRIGHT program is clearly designed as a business model, I wondered how it compared to the way that business leaders are prepared. So, just out of curiosity, I looked into the typical career paths for CEOs--and this is what I found...

"Although some individuals are born leaders, most are made. Becoming a chief executive typically takes years of hard work. Extensive experience in the company's field is desirable and some companies tend to prefer those with degrees from upper-tier schools in business, economics or finance. Finally, those that have worked their way up from a low level within the organization may have an advantage, as they arguably know the company better than any outsider ever could." http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financialcareers/08/ceo-chief-executive-career.asp

If we transfer these characteristics to education, we might surmise that superintendents should have extensive experience in education with significant time in the classroom as a teacher, a degree in education and perhaps additional degrees in one's subject matter area, and should have worked their way up in the school system so that they know and understand the communities in which they work. But the folks at BRIGHT don't seem concerned with following ethical business principles when it comes to their true agenda--destabilizing schools by providing a rotating cast of short term leaders with no background or experience in education.

Now, why would the folks behind BRIGHT ignore the "best practices" from the business world, when they are basing their program on business models? As always, when you are confused about the premises of a new education reform idea, follow the money. And in this case, that means finding out who is paying for this program. The answers can be found under the "Partners" tab on the BRIGHT website:

"BRIGHT is proud to be working closely with the Ohio Department of Education, Ohio Board of Regents, and Adjutant General of Ohio, as well as Ohio's three largest school districts – Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. National partners include New Leaders, Teach for America and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Jones Day provides comprehensive legal services on a pro bono basis."

And now the circle is squared. The BRIGHT program neatly fills in the niche between "Teach for America" (producing unqualified recruits for classrooms) and the Broad Superintendent's Academy (producing unqualified superintendents) by producing unqualified principals for Ohio's schools.

Lately we've been hearing increasingly hysterical claims from "think tanks" (http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/time-end-monopoly-education), pundits (http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/Milton-Friedman-on-Busting-the-School-Monopoly.aspx) and even presidential candidates about how our public schools are “government -run, unionized, politicized monopolies’ that ‘trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system that nobody can escape'" ((http://www.publicschoolshakedown.org/jeb-colludes-with-corporations-to-destroy-government-run-unionized-monopoly-schools). Sounds like scary stuff.

But before we call in the National Guard, let's be clear about one thing: anyone who thinks that our public schools are well organized enough to pull off a monopoly has never spent any significant time inside of a public school. Its not uncommon for the teachers who work in an elementary school to be unaware of what's happening in the middle school in their district, or for the math teachers in a high school to have any idea of what's happening down the hallway in the social studies department--let alone communicate well enough to organize a national education monopoly with consistent rules, regulations and standards.

Years ago when the then-new National Standards in Music had been out for a couple of years, I visited a middle school where we had placed a student teacher. The cooperating teacher was a wonderful musician and teacher, and happened to be a good friend of mine as well. I watched the co-op and his student teacher team-teach a terrific band rehearsal, full of inspirational teaching, artistic conducting and impressive creativity on the part of the students.

As the 3 of us were walking back to his office to debrief, I asked my friend a question: "How is your teaching different now because of the National Standards?" He turned and looked at me with a quizzical look on his face, and responded simply, "What National Standards?" Monopoly? I don't think so.

The simple truth is that public schools are a hot mess. We are disorganized, don't communicate particularly well, and do a terrible job of letting the public know what we do. That's mostly because the public schools are also incredibly active, vital and busy places, full of noise, excitement and creativity, where the adults are less concerned with issuing press releases and conducting feasibility studies than they are in working on projects, rehearsing plays, and helping children become happy, expressive, sensitive and curious human beings.

Now, if Mr. Friedman, the Cato Institute and Gov. Bush really want to see an educational monopoly in action, they need look no further than the multi-national testing conglomerate, Pearson, Inc. 

Pearson, with headquarters in Great Britain, owns the publishing companies Scott Foresman, Penguin, Harcourt and Prentice Hall, setting text book prices, controlling content, and "franchising" the curriculum in thousands of K-12 schools and colleges across the country. Not content with merely controlling textbooks, Pearson also has their tentacles into familiar companies like Adobe, Longman, Wharton, Puffin and Allyn & Bacon, which allows them to exert an outsized influence on the size and scope of the educational enterprise in the US and abroad. Pearson's support for the Common Core State Standards, with generous support from "philanthropic" foundations like the Gates Foundation, practically assures that the tests that they produce will be closely "aligned" with the CCSS, all but guaranteeing that states will enter into agreements with Pearson to be the sole test provider for thousands of students each year. In New York State alone, Pearson's contracts total more than $32 million over the next 5 years.

But it doesn't stop there: Pearson also has the contract to produce, administer and score the edTPA, a new test for student teachers. And the company is the provider of standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Stanford Achievement Test, the Millar Analogy Test, and the G.E.D. Pearson also owns some of the most popular and powerful student data management systems available for schools, like PowerSchool and SASI (http://teacherblog.typepad.com/newteacher/2012/11/on-the-rise-of-pearson-oh-and-following-the-money.html#sthash.JJaLJLM8.dpuf).

Pearson is well on their way to controlling virtually every aspect of American education, from preschool materials (http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/course/Curriculum-in-Early-Childhood/91115347.page), to professional development for teachers (http://www.mypearsonpd.com), to online and virtual learning products and services (http://home.pearsonhighered.com/what-we-do/online-learning.html).

If Mr. Friedman, Gov. Bush and friends are *really* concerned with monopolies, I suggest that they focus their gaze on Pearson, and leave the schools alone so our teachers can teach, and our children can learn.

Recently, we have seen an inexplicable explosion of head-scratching, chin-stroking stories on *alleged* issues, such as whether or not parents should have their children vaccinated, whether evolution is a "thing" or not, and supposedly serious discussions by elected officials about whether or not global climate change is real. [Spoiler Alert: Yes, yes, and yes.]

This rampant streak of what can only be seen as "anti-intellectualism" (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america) isn't simply unsettling; the science on each of these "issues" is settled. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism; the Earth is not 6000 years "young"; and climate scientists have determined without a shadow of a doubt that the planet is warming at an alarming rate, with dire consequences. Its dangerous.

• Children are getting sick and dying because our "herd immunity" is waning due to well-meaning but uninformed parents making the dangerous decision not to immunize their kids.
  
• "Young Earthers" are damaging their children's learning and understandings of the world by teaching them fables in place of science.
• Climate change deniers are now in charge of senate science committees, where their ignorance isn't just shocking; it threatens our very existence.
  

To this list I would add a 4th dangerous decision that poses a threat to our children and our communities: the reckless and irresponsible decisions we see in too many school systems to eliminate music, art and physical education instruction from the curriculum.

In Lansing, MI, the decision to eliminate 47 elementary art, music and PE teachers was cast as a "tough, but responsible decision," and the local media praised the superintendent and school board for their "courage" in making this decision.

Let's be clear: This was not a "tough" decision. It was a bad, and dangerous decision. What's "tough" is being a 2nd grader who loves to draw and going to school without the possibility of art class being the bright spot of your day. What's "tough" is being a 5th grade kid who loves to play the trumpet, and knowing that your school doesn't think that music is important enough to offer as a class. What's "tough" is being in Kindergarten and seeing your cousin in the suburbs learn how to paint, and sing, and dance, while your school day is full of "test prep" and "extra math."

It was a decision that denies thousands of children, many living in crushing poverty, an education that includes making music, making art, and learning how to be physically fit and healthy for a lifetime. We have known that music and the arts were an important component of a child's education in this country since the public schools began. And while parents in more affluent communities may be able to provide their children with private music and art lessons, or pay for them to join a travel soccer or basketball team outside of school, many of the families in Lansing and other urban areas do not have the resources to afford these opportunities--they depend on the public schools to make sure their children have access to the richness of a full and complete education, one that includes music and art.

School leaders are charged with making sure that the children in their schools are provided with the very best education possible--an education that includes ALL of the disciplines and subjects that are a part of a comprehensive, sequential curriculum. And that includes the arts, foreign language, libraries, special education services, and a host of other offerings. These things are not "specials" or "extras"; their absence can't be disguised by referring to them with clever names like "Encore!" or "Innovative Arts and Fitness". There is nothing "innovative" about firing 47 teachers and denying children a full and rich education, especially when its your job to ensure that they get just that.

The inclusion of music and art in the curriculum is not an "issue"--just as with vaccination, or evolution, we *know* the truth. And the truth is that all children deserve to learn about music and art in the public schools. There are not "2 sides" to this question. No parent would willingly choose an education barren of these disciplines--and no school should either.

Perhaps the strongest voice defending public school teachers against the agenda of the corporate reformers is education historian, Diane Ravitch. Dr. Ravitch recently posted a story (http://dianeravitch.net/2015/02/02/tfa-supports-junk-science-to-grade-colleges-of-education-by-student-test-scores/) about Teach for America's public support of the Federal Department of Education's newly proposed regulations on teacher education programs. This is notable for a couple of reasons. One, TFA is--allegedly--a non-profit organization devoted to the preparation of alternatively certified teachers for America's urban schools. And two, TFA is clearly in competition with said teacher education programs, making their public stance on these regulations a fairly obvious conflict of interest.

Now, my own feelings about Teach for America are hardly a secret (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/17/a-professors-encounter-with-two-teach-for-america-recruiters/), but even I was a bit surprised that TFA would tip their hand on their real agenda: destroying traditional teacher education programs, teachers unions, and public schools as we know them.

I guess we should be grateful that TFA was so transparent about their true colors--it makes them much easier to identify as part and parcel of the corporate reform movement, and makes it much harder for them to continue pretending they are an educational organization at all.

I often read stories that quote politicians and ed reform officials who claim that spending money won't help solve the problems facing students, schools and teachers nowadays. Their premise is wrong on several accounts; one, these persons are usually the ones who have created the problems we are all now dealing with, and two, in my experience throwing money at problems usually works pretty well. 

Recently, Sen. Phil Pavlov, the chair of the Michigan Senate Education Committee, trotted out this under-thought, knee-jerk response to school funding in our state, saying:  "What's clear in all of this is that simply spending money is not the answer. According to statewide school report cards available on the Michigan Department of Education website, some of the state's highest-funded school districts have multiple schools on the 2012 achievement gap list, despite receiving over $9,000, $10,000 or even $11,000 per pupil." (http://www.senatorphilpavlov.com/commentary-how-we-are-reinventing-states-outmoded-education-system/)

What Sen. Pavlov fails to mention is that gaining a spot on the state's "achievement gap list" is no measure of any sort of educational or learning issue--its simply an indication that a school's students have not met a predetermined goal, set by the state (not teachers), with respect to standardized test scores in math or reading. In some schools, this may mean that only 97% of the school's students achieved a passing score on an exam, and the state had set a goal of 98%. Really. Both of my children's schools were placed on one of these state lists a few years ago for not achieving "adequate yearly progress," even though they were two of the highest scoring schools in the state on all measures of student learning. So, Sen. Pavlov's measuring tool isn't measuring what he thinks it is, lots of students and teachers are being punished for excelling at what they do, and lots of time and effort is being wasted on things that just don't matter.

Sen. Pavlov's response also ignores the fact that Gov. Snyder, with Pavlov's help, has cut school funding by $2 billion dollars during his time as governor. So suggesting that giving more money to schools won't do any good is a particularly cruel and hurtful approach given the systematic starving of resources and draconian reforms that have been enacted by Pavlov, Snyder and the legislature in recent years.

What I find especially ironic is the fact that the same politicians who claim to believe that "throwing money" at our children's futures is a waste of resources saw no problems with "Citizens United," which eliminated all restrictions on financial contributions to election campaigns. If throwing money at students, teachers and schools won't help education, then how does it help their campaigns?

So, Sen. Pavlov, you may be right that throwing money at the schools won't solve the problems that you helped to create, but your other solutions--expanded school choice, more charter schools with less regulations, invalid and unreliable teacher evaluation systems, increased student testing requirements, destroying our state's teacher unions, etc.--haven't worked so far, so let's try adequately funding our schools and see what happens. Its worth a shot, right?

I just returned from a wonderful time in Peoria where I shared two presentations with the music teachers and music teacher educators at the Illinois Music Educators Association Conference. One session was on strategies for designing partnerships between schools and colleges, and the other  was a talk on the (mis)uses of data in music teacher evaluation. PDFs of both sessions are available for download on the "Clinic and Workshop Materials" page on this site.

I head to Arizona in a few weeks for the Desert Skies Research Symposium to present a keynote address on music teacher evaluation and music education research, and then on to Miami the following week to visit with the music ed students and faculty at Florida International University on Friday, Feb. 27, and talk to the Miami-Dade County music teachers about assessment strategies on Sat., Feb. 28.

But the best part of my visit to Illinois was spending time with former Spartans, Bridget Sweet and Adam Kruse, now members of the music ed faculty at the University of Illinois, along with Janet Barrett and Louis Bergonzi; my "old" friend, Glenn Williams, from Downers Grove; Maud Hickey and Steve Demorest from Northwestern; Rich Cangro from Western Illinois; Scott Edgar from Lake Forest College; and many new friends as well.

It's out! Teachers College Press has released our new book, What Every Principal Needs to Know to Create Equitable and Excellent Schools, edited by George Theoharis and Jeff Brooks.

My chapter is titled, "Music Teaching and Learning in a Time of Reform"--here's a brief excerpt:

Music in the public school curriculum is at a precarious point. Indeed, one author has described the place of school music as teetering at a veritable “tipping point.” Borrowing from Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name, Kratus (2007) identifies the need for “sticky” ideas in music education that will attract new students and new audiences, lest we see the divide between music and “school music” grow even wider and deeper. A 2006 survey by the Center on Education Policy, an independent education policy think tank, found that since the passage of NCLB in 2001, 71% of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math (Dillon, 2006).

This narrowing of the public school curriculum has been accompanied by an increased emphasis on standardized testing, especially in the subject areas of math and reading, in a back-to-basics movement that has threatened to alter the very fabric of American public education. 

For more information, click on the picture of the book cover to go to the Teachers College Press web page about the book.