Education Policy

In many of the conversations around changing the current educational system, the rhetoric and approaches borrow heavily from the corporate world. In many cases, processes and strategies that have been used with inconclusive outcomes in corporate America are touted as solutions that will fix the problems that plague education: a short list includes merit pay (which worked really well among hedge fund managers), performance management, corporate-style layoffs as a means to eliminate "underperformers," and streamlining the means to outsource school management to for-profit companies.

Instability creates opportunity, and the current state of public education is nothing if not unstable. As a result, businesses are getting increasingly interested. Where business goes, marketing is not far behind, which invariably nets us a new buzzword: the edupreneur. The narrative around the edupreneur combines the mythology of the entrepeneur as a financial cowboy, an individual with the grit to take chances, bend the rules, and buck authority; with the equally potent mythology of the socially conscious company - a business venture with the ethics to, occasionally, put principles above profits.

I came across an example of this type of edupreneurial venture recently in the form of an interview with the founders of Notehall, a company that serves as a marketplace for students that want to sell their class notes. It's remarkable only because it is such a common example of what passes for an idea in the space where people actually believe the world of education is bereft of any creative or generative thought.

The blog post that contains the interview starts with a video of the company founders on a show called Sharktank (as an aside, I had no idea this show existed, and I'm a little upset to have had my bubble burst). The video is included here for your viewing pleasure:

The actual interview that follows is the standard breathless prattle that most of these things are; basically, PR talking points masquerading as actual conversation. But one line really stands out:

Question: What do you think education entrepreneurs need at this moment in the industry to be successful? Marketing? A good idea? A network?

Response: Mentorship/Network. A good team with an average idea will eventually discover a successful business if the right hands are helping guide them and see opportunities.

In a world where solutions are valued primarily for their ability to enrich a select few, and secondarily for their ability to benefit an undefined many, this philosophy defines what people consider innovative. In other words, a "good" innovation allows a company to find an unexploited niche and profit from it - the quality of the innovation is defined by the size of the profit.

To be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong from profiting from your work. And, if you have an idea, a dream, a vision, or a talent that you want to expand into a company, by all means, follow the dream. But bring your A game. Don't delude yourself that the educational world needs another mediocre idea with glossy marketing copy. If people want that, they can trawl the vendor floor at ISTE. But classrooms deserve better.

However, when a company gets too invested in a single solution - or worse yet, a single technological intervention - to a complex problem, much money can be wasted.

This problem can be compounded in companies heavily funded by venture capital money. An interview in FastCompany between Anya Kamenetz and Phoenix Wang alludes to the financial pressures at play; this quotation is from the second page:

There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there's a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.

At the same time, private and institutional investors are really interested in emerging products, but they're constrained by institutional purchasing. VCs need big exits, so they end up taking less risk.

You generally will not find much argument about the need for learning being a lifelong need. None of us ever reach a point where we can afford to stop learning, growing, or expanding.

However, the needs of people interested in profiting off the process of our learning are completely dissimilar: they want the biggest return possible, over the shortest time period. This cultural disconnect helps explain why the ideas of the business world clash with the ethos of the education world.

And, as the international financial markets still attempt to recover from the greed and excesses of the banking industry, maybe we have it backwards: perhaps education should step in and help protect these poor business folks from their own lack of understanding about the world in which we live.

In reading through the draft of the National Educational Technology Plan, I like the goals.

As one example, this page contains a graphic titled, "Learning no longer has to be one size fits all."

(Just FYI, the un-clickable link to the Creative Commons license in the above graphic is the work of the technology people behind the technology plan. That's not my doing. The image appears to be licensed under a CC-NC-SA license)

Further down the same page, it reads:

Technology also gives students opportunities for taking ownership of their learning. Student-managed electronic learning portfolios can be part of a persistent learning record and help students develop the self-awareness required to set their own learning goals, express their own views of their strengths, weaknesses, and achievements, and take responsibility for them.

This sounds great, but it just doesn't seem to align with the way that the Common Core standards are being forcibly injected into the educational landscape.

The plan also talks about Open Educational Resources. Secretary Duncan mentions OER's in a speech he gave on March 3, 2010 at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting:

Our commitment to Open Educational Resources includes a commitment to you: that they will be fully open, including open to commercial producers of learning materials who want to add value to these resources and sell enhanced, proprietary versions.

We see this step as both an investment in our students and an opportunity for your industry.

In practical terms, this means that textbook companies will be able to take resources that have been created using public funds, modify them slightly, and voila, the derivative works are no longer freely available. That's a very generous way to subsidize a dying industry. One way of reading this: textbook companies can spend less on developing texts, as they will be able build textbooks using the curriculum and assessments we will pay to get developed as part of Race to the Top/ESEA. Interestingly, as noted earlier in this post, the Department of Education uses the less restrictive Non-Commercial license for its graphics.

So, while the technologist/open source developer/open content advocate in me wants to be excited, the educator in me feels skeptical. The approach to the current Ed policy feels like a series of political calculations, wrapped in the almost obligatory "But think about the children" rhetoric. The actions -- and, more importantly, the funding strategies -- feel misaligned with the stated goals.

In the Executive Summary, it states:

The programs and projects that work must be brought to scale so every school has the opportunity to take advantage of that success.

It's difficult to see how unfunding the National Writing Project -- a program that works, that scales, and supports teachers as they develop resources in their local communities, and has been on the leading edge of technology use -- aligns with this goal.

The rhetoric around education policy has yet to line up with the effects of this policy.

In my first teaching job, I worked as a classroom aide for special needs students in the first through third grade. The students in our class were mainstreamed whenever possible, but they all spent a substantial portion of every day in our class. During the school day, we maintained an academic schedule, and we attempted to give our students a solid grounding in both the academic and social skills they would need to make it as part of a mainstreamed class.

And it was difficult work - it was not atypical for a fight to break out after one student called another student's mom a whore, or for a social exchange to break down into a screaming match over someone not sharing blocks.

But one thing I noticed stuck with me: before a vacation - even something as short as a long weekend - student behavior was more out of control than usual. And when I asked the students about it, they would deny it. But in the days leading up to a vacation, at the end of the day, they would do just about anything not to leave. One student would want to finish their math work; another would take forever to get his coat. Sometimes, a kid would intentionally act out; the time required to actually get in trouble would keep them in school longer.

In this job, I had the good fortune to be mentored by an outside learning specialist, an amazing educator named Jim Keefe. Without his support, I would have drowned; and even on the best of days I still felt largely under water. When I asked Jim about vacations and behavior, he laughed. "Yeah. They hate leaving. School is the most consistent place they know."

And I think about this now as we talk about mass firings of teachers, about school closings becoming a more regular part of the landscape of education, and about federal education funding tied to improvement programs that can lead to public schools being handed over to private companies.

From a certain perspective, closing schools and firing all the teachers and the principal feels right. Hey -- if the kids weren't learning, these teachers must not have been doing their jobs. Get 'em out! Firing people looks decisive, and it appeals to our sense of justice. As Bill Maher says:

...blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers' lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school - canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We're chewing gum and no, we didn't bring enough for everybody.

To state what is hopefully obvious: the school system needs improvement. Data needs to inform the way we teach, the way use curriculum, and the way we create policy. The status quo is not good enough, and even if the status quo was excellent, part of maintaining excellence (in education or really, in any system) is to never stop looking critically at things you consider important.

But as we start to close schools in an effort to improve schools, I remember the kids I taught in my first teaching job, and how they had a hard time gearing up for a long weekend. And I wonder what we know about educational outcomes for students whose academic experience includes surviving a school closure. Do students in these schools get a better education as a result of having their school closed, or their teachers fired? What data is there that looks at rates of college attendance, rates of college completion, average salaries, etc, and compares these students to their peers in other comparable schools? Given that the results of school closure as a means of school improvement appear to be mixed at best, can we say that there is even a correlation between closing low performing schools and improving student educational outcomes?

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference. In this speech, he said:

States and districts have a legal obligation to hold administrators and teachers accountable, demand change and, where necessary, compel it. They have a moral obligation to do the right thing for those children—no matter how painful and unpleasant.

This logic assumes that states and districts actually have the answer, and that the "best" solution has not been achieved simply due to bad execution. You cannot compel something you don't understand.

And, by this same logic of "doing the right thing for the children-no matter how painful and unpleasant," if accountability is our yardstick, why should the firings stop with teachers? If a school is failing, why not fire all of the administrators at the school district? The school board? The mayor? The head of the state Department of Education? The Federal Education Secretary him- or herself?

It is very fashionable to speak about corporate-style management in schools; in general, I don't think it makes much sense, especially given what the corporate world has foisted upon us in recent years, but I recently came across one model that could inform how we approach turning around failing schools. When the FDIC takes over a failed bank, a team of professionals trained in the process of turning around banks descends on the bank. Once on site, they spend weeks or months working through the transition. You can hear about this process from a piece on This American Life (skip to Act Two: Unbreaking the Bank). The story of closing a bank is oddly, almost disconcertingly, emotional. As both our financial system and our educational system lurch away from the precipice, I would like to see our schools treated as humanely as our banks.

On Wednesday, NPR ran a story on the use of "performance management" as a means of teacher evaluation in the Chicago school system.

From the NPR story:

Some urban school systems are turning to the tough tactics businesses and law enforcement use to improve employee performance. The sometimes-contentious approach, known as performance management, has yielded promising results in Houston, New York and some other districts. In Chicago, it's forcing city educators to embrace a cultural revolution in how they go about their work.

And:

Top district officials argue that performance management offers principals a way to tackle tough educational problems that seem insurmountable. And they point to other districts, like Houston, where these methods are working.

The superintendent there, Terry Grier, credits performance management with forcing his principals to use data to pressure their worst teachers to get better or get out.

Unfortunately, Houston ISD did not receive accreditation due to a developing cheating scandal. If a success story fails to receive accreditation, what does failure look like?

How can anyone make the claim that performance review is working in Houston when Houston ISD has yet to receive accreditation due to concerns of widespread cheating? And it's not like Houston is any stranger to allegations of falsifying data under pressure of a top-down mandate.

More importantly, the NPR story ran on March 10th. The news of Houston ISD not receiving accreditation was published on March 5th. Why didn't this get caught as part of routine fact-checking?

If this detail was missed, what other details were overlooked or ignored in pursuit of the narrative that the only thing wrong with schools is those darn teachers, and all that's needed is some common-sense know how from the business world?

I don't know what's more stunning: the lack of fact-checking in a piece put out by a respected, credible national news outlet, or the fact that as the world's economy is still teetering due to widespread malfeasance in the corporate world, we are still trumpeting increased corporatism as the "solution" to our education "problem."

I may be naive, but I believe that we will get a better understanding of how to improve our educational system with a more accurate depiction of the actual problems. Getting basic facts straight is a good place to start.

Saturday's print version of the Oregonian featured a front page article on improving low-performing schools. The article is about average for educational writing; as such, it provides a useful opportunity to examine some of the flaws in educational coverage as practiced by the main stream media.

The Oregonian article stays on the familiar ground of mediocre education coverage by hewing closely to the narrative that Change = Good and No Change = Bad. It's a stretch to call this kind of writing an intentional lie of omission, but the article certainly oversimplifies a complex topic by omitting many details that could be relevant. For example, any of the following details could have created a more complete picture:

• Duncan's reforms -- which are at the core of the current transition/transformation strategy -- didn't work in Chicago (The original article is behind a paywall, but a mobile-formatted version is available here);
• Other reforms promising accountability and measurement have been marred by fraudulent record keeping, including the Houston Miracle that helped inform NCLB;
• Charter schools might not be able to meet the needs of Duncan's proposed school closures and transformations;
• There are already charges of cronyism around the Duncan DOE;
• Closing schools and/or firing large numbers of faculty have an incredibly destructive effect on a community.

It's not like every article needs to include in depth coverage around every detail, but it would be nice if an article even included something that resembled nuance. For example, the Oregonian article reads:

Districts can avoid making the changes if they don't apply for the money. But if they decide not to seek the turnaround funds, they must explain in detail why they lack the capacity to do so.

A couple issues here:

First, calling the money "turnaround funds" misrepresents what is happening. In some cases, the schools will not be turned around, they will be closed, and handed over to charter companies. Journalists should do more than parrot the language of government press releases.

Second, the above quotation says school districts "must must explain in detail why they lack the capacity" to apply for funding. This would have been an excellent place to point out that the changes being advocated here haven't been proven to work, and, as noted above, in Chicago they didn't work. So, district time could be chewed up explaining why they don't want to spend time doing something that hasn't been proven to work. This has nothing to do with a lack of capacity, and more to do with not wanting to waste time on something that might not actually fix anything.

I'm not disputing - at all - that schools and districts can become more effective. The issues around educational reform are complex and nuanced. Unfortunately, the discussions of them are not.

The press could perform a useful function by presenting a more complete picture. For education coverage, this could start by acknowledging that the problems within schools do not have a single solution, and that the best solution to improving schools will likely vary based on the conditions within and around the school. Moreover, improvements will be incremental, and strategies for these improvements will incorporate ideas from a variety of sources.

This is a more difficult story to write, as it doesn't fit into any pre-made narrative. But, it has one tangible benefit: it's a lot closer to the truth.

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Credits: Home Page photo from The Newseum.