Meet the New Boss

So now, on to "data," which really means test scores, 

which is bullshit.

Update Update: I should explain that I'm still writing about new LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho because when he was in Miami-Dade he made a ton of decisions ostensibly based on "data" and he's likely to carry on the same way in Los Angeles. The problem is, data is bullshit, but education bosses are not clever enough to understand that or principled enough to do anything about it. It's a failure of imagination and a lack of courage. I wish I was wrong.

Update: When I first started this post about five ten days ago, I had a hard time finding anything on this guy. I mean I was looking through old videos of his speeches. Algorithms! Now there's stuff everywhere and you can look it up for yourself if you want. I recommend the speeches rather than the canned talking points that seem to dominate the more recent reporting.

For me, it has been an education and it has left me with a queasy feeling. Does this guy intend to do it all by himself? Is collaboration part of his skill set? Is he capable of compromise? Does he process new information and revise his position?  Is he ever just wrong?

The first word I think of when I hear him speak is ego. The second two words are enormous and gigantic. Then it comes to me: I remember the last time I watched a guy stand on a stage in front of an adoring crowd and declare, "Only I can fix it."  It did not end well.

Now, the post...

In the Los Angeles Unified School District we have selected a new superintendent who, according to reports, is just crazy about "transformation." Alberto Carvalho, late of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, talks a good and passionate game. But when he talks and says things like "invested in choice and innovation (41:35-42:10)," I see the life of public schools flash before my eyes. Is he serious when he equates district transformation with "the breaking down" and "deconstruction of the school system"? 

I will admit that when I worked in LAUSD, I frequently fantasized about "deconstructing" the system. Frustrated with the bureaucratic bumbling, angry at the arbitrary nature of policies and edicts, some of my most frequent dreams were of asteroids landing directly on district headquarters. But I don't think that's what Carvalho is talking about. 

When he talks about transformation, an outcome his cheerleaders on the school board and at the L.A. Times are eager to support, Carvalho is talking about firing people, pay-for-performance, and school choice, three terrible ideas that rely almost exclusively on what the big brains artfully call "data," by which they invariably mean test scores. (He's also talking about technology and the drive to "merge and migrate toward a digital environment." More on that in another post, but for now suffice to say that anybody who has gone through the last two years and still believes that tech is magic has no place in education.)

As a critical early step in his "transformation" of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Carvalho launched a campaign (33:50) of transfers, non-renewals and firings(18:00) based on "achievement data." What does that look like? Maybe you haul a few people downtown, you know, to make examples of them. You could put their test scores up on a big screen--or better yet, on television during a school board meeting--and demand explanations before publicly firing them. That might give the rest that warm, tingly feeling that goes with wondering if you'll have a job on Monday. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Proud of this purge, Carvalho boasts that he brought in Teach for America replacements to fill the vacancies and City Year for intervention. As if that were a viable solution.  Putting aside the mountains of evidence that experience is a crucial ingredient for effective teaching, in 2019 there were 700 TFA teachers in all of California. There are over 25,000 teachers in LAUSD. It wouldn't even make a dent.

So maybe you squeeze a bunch of district bureaucrats until they go running back to the classroom. News flash: There is a reason these people are not in the classroom. 

In our present environment, this approach doesn't pass the smell test.

It can't work. Not today and not in LAUSD. Just like other districts all across the country, LAUSD is fresh out of teachers. You can't just "bring in" a bunch of newbies to replace the "bad" teachers because nobody's out there. No one is scrambling to get in, battling to be first in line for a job that people hate you for doing and that pays barely enough to pay L.A. rent much less buy an L.A. house. It seems unlikely in the extreme that Carvalho will be able to fire his way to the top. Still, that doesn't mean he won't try. 

I'm not going to waste much time on performance pay. First, it's based on "data," which means test scores, which are bullshit. Second, the whole idea rests on the assumption that teachers are not presently doing the best job they know how to do. It imagines that if we can just sweeten the pot a little, that extra cash will get teachers off their lazy asses. Not only is this trope untrue--most of the teachers I ever worked with were ruining themselves working so hard (often trying to figure out how to teach to the test)--it's completely disingenuous. The hatcheteers don't give a shit about the top 20% of TestScoreProducers. They want to identify and eliminate the bottom 20% (for which there are no replacements). And third, if UTLA is worth its dues, it's never going to happen.*

Where Carvalho is really invested, the transformation theology for which he proselytizes relentlessly, is school choice. Time will tell, but what I've learned so far is alarming. Carvalho, from a news report back in 2012: 

"We are now working in an educational environment that is driven by choice. I believe that is a good thing. We need to actually be engaged in that choice movement. So if you do not ride that wave, you will succumb to it. I choose not to."

Aside from the fact that "there's nothing we can do about it so we might as well get on board" is a shitty ethos for a leader, it's clearly not an accurate representation of his position. He likes "school choice." He comes across as a true believer, and when he was still in Miami, Carvalho described his kind of school choice as transformational, recreating the district as "a hotbed of ideas and innovation." 

(I have to wonder what innovation even means if you and/or your principal can be fired based on data scores and the judgment of one person?) 

In a 2018 article, the corporate school-reform website The74 reported that then-Miami schools chief had a "sweeping vision for dramatically expanding educational choice," and went on to say this about Carvalho:

"Understand this fact: In Carvalho’s district, the fourth-largest in the country, more than 70 percent of the roughly 400,000 students do not attend their zoned public school. That’s not a typo. These students attend charter schools, take classes over the internet and at local colleges, and even attend private, faith-based schools — all with taxpayer funds or under tax credit scholarship programs." (emphasis mine)

The thing is, school choice is just one more reform in the never-ending search for a magic remedy for the crisis we're constantly told exists in public education. It can "theoretically"  produce some positive outcomes for some students, but creates many of the very inequities and disruptions it purports to address. Oh, and one other thing: The "choice" that parents and students make depends almost exclusively on data derived from scores on state-sponsored standardized tests. And that data is bullshit.

Of course, in this devotion to choice orthodoxy Carvalho has lots of company. Right this minute, the federal government's website continues to pimp "school choice." Powered by the radioactive decay of No Child Left Behind, their guide "Choosing A School For Your Child" urges parents to consider charter, private and religious schools, and it even recommends websites to compare them. First on the list:  www.greatschools.net (which is really .org and may have changed or been a typo in the pub) and which I will not link to because fuck them. 

GreatSchools, which got its seed money from a venture capital fund and has received substantial funding from the Gates and Walton Family Foundations (and free advertising from the Department of Education!), is one of several school ratings websites and one of the most well-known. They claim that their big, overarching "Summary Rating" is "based on four ratings, each of which is designed to show different facets of school success: the Student Progress Rating or Academic Progress Rating, College Readiness Rating, Equity Rating, and Test Score Rating." Sounds solid, right? Probably does to most parents, too. The thing is, every one of those measures is based on the same test scores. In fact, each "rating" is just another way of saying test scores.

More perniciously, even websites like Niche.com that claim to factor in reviews and information from "dozens of public data sources" are running a rigged game. Academics (test scores) count for 60% of the school's overall score, while teachers (teacher quality?) comprise 10%. And I bet you can't guess one of the ways their super duper algorithm determines teacher quality. If you said test scores, give yourself a round of applause. 

And here's a fun thought experiment: Those reviews? All that feedback from students and parents? Imagine the review for a teacher who is forced at the point of a termination letter to spend fifty percent of their time test-prepping, testing, test-analyzing and testing again.

Finally, when parents are surveyed, they list "Quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff" as their highest priority in choosing a school. Remember, these are schools they don't know and their kids haven't been to yet. What are the criteria for evaluating the "quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff"? Well if they're using GreatSchools or any of a number of other ratings sites, it's likely to be--wait for it--test scores. 

The bottom line is that all of these terrible ideas that Carvalho is bringing to LAUSD--school choice, performance pay for teachers, the firings--all of them depend entirely on "data," by which they mean "testing" by which they mean state-sponsored, corporate-controlled assessments.** 

It always comes down to test scores. This is the measurement to end all measurements. That teachers are forced to administer these assessments is akin to digging our own graves.

And The Funniest Joke in the World? The data is bullshit. Next time, some of the why.

*I'm not saying they aren't, but I still haven't heard the union's position on the choice of superintendent. 

**They might also refer to graduation rates. These, it turns out, are much more easily massaged. Stay tuned for a future post on "Mastery Grading."

 

LAUSD shits the bed?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post for some breaking news!

LAUSD Taps Long-time Teacher, Charter School Skeptic as 
New Superintendent!

"I think there's a tendency to reduce human beings to data points, and I'm absolutely convinced there's entirely too much standardized testing in our schools," said the new LAUSD schools chief...

...in the middle of a ridiculous dream I had two nights ago. 

Now I'm not saying Alberto Carvalho is a bad guy. I'm not saying he's a good guy, but that's because I don't know the guy. What I do know is that he's a "reformer" who is very popular with people who want to destroy public education or simply define it out of existence. If public education to you means any building or digital platform that can be accessed by human beings and that awards certificates of completion, then you hate public education, assuming you know enough about it to hate it.

I worry for my former district. Then again, I've been worried for a while. But if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the friend of my enemy is my enemy. When I saw Nick "a charter for you! and a charter for you!" Melvoin pumping this guy on the local morning news shows, I knew there was trouble in purgatory. 

Like the Republicans who run for office on a platform of hating government, Carvalho could turn out to be a guy who hates the "public" part of public school but wants to be the boss of it anyway. Because? The guy is 57 years old. In three years he will be a billion dollar asset for the privatization zealots and that's a nice retirement.

(I wonder why he didn't take that New York job? Maybe our school board is more philosophically compatible? More aligned with his priorities?)

Again, I don't know the guy and if I hadn't worked in LAUSD for twenty-five years, I might be persuaded to hope for the best. 

The L.A. School Report had this to say about Carvalho:

"An advocate of school choice, nontraditional schools and known champion of undocumented student rights, Carvalho, 57, has run Miami’s schools for more than a decade."

and

"In his 13 year tenure as superintendent, he’s pushed for the expansion of charter and magnet schools throughout Miami and encouraged families to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools."

and

"The 'privatization' of the district, and its hefty payouts to expand school security, have garnered national scrutiny for years over concerns that they’ve siphoned funds from existing, traditional schools."

Of course, "school choice" has routinely been code for racism, white flight and resegregation. It has crippled the public system in L.A., and I can't see how supporting the use of "publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools" solves a single one of the myriad problems the district is facing.

But maybe Mr. Carvalho has a different idea. Maybe he doesn't really intend to divert public money to private companies. Maybe he hates segregation and loves students--all of them. And maybe he even likes and respects teachers. 

On the other hand, he is quite popular with the bunch over at Education Next, and that is alarming. According to the progressive nonprofit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy, Education Next is "a propaganda outlet for corporate education reform  policies such as charter schools, school vouchers, and merit pay." It opposes teacher unions and "attempts to increase or equalize funding for schools." Think of it as the love-child of the Hoover Institution and Harvard University's School of Drunken Government.

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education has made its choice and it's a done deal. As I suggested in a previous post, I wish the union--come on UTLA, get your shit together!--had weighed in forcefully and publicly regarding the sort of superintendent we supported and had chosen a candidate to advocate for. I mean, it's not like we didn't know what a shitty superintendent can do to the district. 

What the hell did we strike for if not a seat at the table? The membership deserves to know where we stand. If no one listens and we lose, at least we'll all know that we fought for something. It's important. There will be another strike one day. 

As for the new guy, I guess time will tell. I hope he's great; I have a lot of friends and former students still out there, in the arena every day. I'm worried and I want to be wrong. But still, the friend of my enemy...

Always hopeful. Seldom optimistic. Maybe this time we'll win. 

 

Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime

As we fight against the forces of evil, one of our allies presumably ought to be the press who are ostensibly dedicated to reporting the truth. Unfortunately the Murrow Myth is just that, and all too often the scribes are simply transcribers more interested in keeping their heads down than their eyes open. And this goes centuple for their corporate bosses and the organs they command.

Eric Boehlert posts some of the best work on this issue in his Press Run newsletter, where he is routinely writing about the failure of the media to report honestly and courageously on the madness afflicting our nation. If you haven't seen it, please stop over there and take a look.

As for me, I was particularly appalled with a story in Thursday's (Nov.2) New York Times titled "Schools in Bind As Bitter Feuds Cripple Board," (Now "While Politics Consume School Board Meetings, a Very Different Crisis Festers" online - subscription required) and written by Times national correspondent Campbell Robertson. I don't know Robertson but I know the Times as a fearful, hedging, have-it-both-ways publication that offers just enough honesty on the op-ed page to satisfy the progressives who stop by mainly for the Arts Section, while covering up the truth with disingenuous "Both Sides" reporting. That's what I expect from the Times, and it never disappoints.  Every once in a while I get mad enough to write them a letter which, unsurprisingly, is not published. It's been a week, so I offer it here.

Re: Schools in Bind as Bitter Feuds Cripple Board

To the Editor,

For god’s sake, please call it what it is.

The New York Times continues to politely look the other way to avoid describing our present circumstances. When parents and agents of chaos attack schools and the people who work in them, when they confront school boards with, according to the Times' reporting, cries of "supposed Jewish ties to organized crime," this is not a disagreement among good-faith actors over policy. This is crazy. 

We are being swallowed up in a mass delusion, and for the Times to report the story but pretend this is a “feud” or these are “debates about schools” is an attempt to say you’ve done your job without actually doing the job. The "disconnect" you describe isn't between competing priorities, it's between the sane and the insane. Your timidity and your reluctance to call it by its name puts the entire nation at risk.

On behalf of those of us receiving death threats and being harassed, I beg you to do better. The cancer is here, and it is all around us. Not talking about it will not make it go away.

That's it. 

The refusal of the press to honestly report on the the hot war against schools and the people who work in them may be safe for reporters, but it is dangerous for educators. 

Kyle at Kenosha, with fists closed

Note: This post was basically finished before the tragedy in Oxford. One of the difficulties in completing it has been that something new happens every day. I haven't dealt with that incident here as this piece is concerned with adult violence. I'll address student violence in a future post.

I've really been struggling with this post--feeling like I need to say something but not knowing exactly what to say. I'd love to get down to writing about how to run a classroom or handle a shitty colleague or bad principal, or how to make the most of retirement (hint: this isn't it). But there's just too much going on right now that seems so much bigger. I'm sure that's not the way it feels for lots of you still out there slugging it out day after day and I get that. I guess I'll do this one and call it the third installment in my Teachers Under Attack trilogy. Then on to something new.

As I may have mentioned, teachers, along with other education professionals and school board members have become targets of aggression in an attempt to intimidate us with respect to how we do our jobs. "Moms for Liberty" offered a reward to vigilantes for catching us teaching the truth about race and racism in this country. 

Unfortunately, in today's political climate this experience is not unique to educators. Election volunteers are being accosted in their homes. Any number of service workers have been ridiculed and even assaulted for doing a good job. We've got members of Congress killing their political opponents in cartoons and referring to them as terrorists. You know, just in case somebody wants to do something about it.

For teachers this is not unfamiliar ground. We were purged at the beginning of the Cold War when the country was running Red Scared. Sputnik shocked Americans and focused their attention on purported shortcomings in American education as non-educators fashioned comparisons between Russian and U.S. schooling. And of course, Ronald Reagan took the time to pimp the idea that our entire Nation was At Risk (a report built on fear and preconceptions), which was then followed by No Child Left Behind (who could argue with that?) and Race to the Top. Embedded in all this bashing is a devotion to tests and scores (in an upcoming episode of Answer Key: "Data is bullshit." Stay tuned.) and, of course, a hostility toward Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Because, again, that train is never late.

So educators are regularly vilified and scapegoated. What's new? I've been thinking about that and it seems to me that the convergence of some specific elements makes today's world different, harder, and much more dangerous.

First, there is a reflexive othering and demonization of those who disagree with us (fueled by cynically manipulated disinformation). And no, this insanity is not equally distributed, so before your head explodes: BOTH SIDES DON'T. 

Other ingredients in this current toxic brew include the devaluation of expertise (Fuck the elites!), Covid anger, and Second Amendment fanaticism (fetishism?). These elements combine to create a combustible grievance stew that poses a novel threat for all of us. 

So you take a bunch of thugs who are desperate to hold on to the privilege to which they have become so accustomed they don't even see it and you radicalize those desperate thugs by hooking them up to a never-ending shitstream of fearmongering, enemies lists, and victim stroking, all pumped directly into their hardwired Matrix pod brains, and now they are pissed. And they have guns. Use 'em or lose 'em, kids. 

It's the plan. As the great Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic: 

"Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products." 

And the planners know what they are doing. In a magic mixture of cynicism and True Belief, the Right signals its endorsement of violence as a political strategy as it glorifies the Jan.6 insurrectionists and invites killer Kyle Rittenhouse to make the conservative media rounds, even offering him the official endorsement of Republican lawmakers. 

As Serwer puts it:

"The principle that canonizes Rittenhouse as a saint for defending his city from rioters, and the mob that stormed the Capitol as martyrs, is the principle that the slaughter of the right’s enemies is no crime." 

So what does happen next? 

It feels like only a matter of time before a teacher in a classroom enforcing mask regulations or teaching about Jim Crow or redlining, or a school board member speaking in favor of a vaccination mandate gets Rittenhoused. I'm sure that feeling is a factor in schools across the country finding it impossible to hire staff, and not just teachers. This is bigger than you and me, your school, my district. 

May sound a bit gloomy, but I figure we can't win if we don't understand the game. 

In the meantime, of course, things are still happening in classrooms. I talk to my friends who are still battling every day and the challenges they describe are (all too) familiar and still need to be acknowledged and addressed, notwithstanding the elephant in the room. Next time--after one short rant at the New York Times--an excerpt from my book Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide. It's called "Data is bullshit" and I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Until then...