Data is bullshit. Part Two

What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard.

It's testing season in California, as this graph shows:

It's going to be a busy spring! And you can get a picture of the next three years here:

The list at the bottom tells you what these kids, their teachers, and their schools have to go through every year. Shit, the testing window for four of them never closes. And in my school our administration hired test prep consultants to make us develop five extra tests to get kids ready for, you know, the other tests. 

So, once again, in a pandemic (please do whatever it takes to keep yourselves and your families safe) with schools closing and students walking out, the testing abides. Someday we'll find ourselves in whatever comes after a pandemic and we can get back to fighting the Originals for the soul of public education. A preview: Data is bullshit. 

Data is bullshit for several reasons. These tests produce useless snapshots of a student's state of mind on a particular day. They are developed by people who don't know students and certainly have never met yours. The "data" they generate is neither reliable nor valid and arrives too late for immediate action even if they were. Finally, we begin today with how data is used. 

If there is no plan for meaningful analysis of what "data" is produced, and no plan for action based on that analysis even if it took place, which it doesn't, then data is bullshit. 

I've got a lot more to say on why you should not take these tests seriously--and why you should never use them to evaluate your students or your teaching (that job will eagerly be done by the testing fanatics), but I'll just close this installment with the following short excerpt from my book, Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide. 

Data is Bullshit.

My friend Rebecca reminded me recently that data doesn’t have to be bullshit. It’s really about how we use it. And I’ll even admit that not all data is bullshit. For example, as I’m writing this, the Chicago Cubs have averaged four hits and two runs per game over the last seven games, of which they have lost six. That is significant and actionable. I’ve stopped watching them for a while and I feel a lot better.

Data can be useful in schools, too, but it depends on what kind we’re talking about. If we’re talking attendance, we can and do make calls home to find out where a student has been when they have not been on Zoom or in school. Schools are pretty serious about that because their paychecks depend on it. Another example is reading level data which can be useful for teachers as they work to assemble appropriate materials and devise plans to address each student’s specific needs.

On the other hand, if the data comes from a standardized test you are required to give and you don’t get the scores back until after your students have left your class or the class has left that area of study, or if the tests don’t measure what they say they measure, or if they measure something of no value to your students--often because the something is unrelated to your instruction because you know your students and they tragically do not, then data is bullshit. 

 <snip>

As my friend Nick would often say, “Right now, there is a third grader who can’t read.” That’s the data part, if we’re keeping score. “What’s our plan for that student?” Of course there wasn’t one. There isn’t one. Bullshit. Testing is easy. Fixing things is hard.  

If there’s no schoolwide plan to address issues revealed in the data and no time carved out to analyze the data and formulate a set of strategies (maybe during one of the thousand “not this again” PDs), then the school is profoundly unserious about data and is not advancing the interests of students but simply using the testing for some other purpose.

The true purposes of data collection might include “accountability” (rewards and punishments) or advertising (competition for students) or political advancement (see how they turned that district around!) or the support of the testing-industrial complex and its bazillion jobs inside and outside actual schools and school districts.

But in the end, the answer to all the questions is money.

Now those profiteers and hucksters and fanatical true-believers will never stop pretending that theirs is "important work." They will offer to help with analysis and remediation and "standards based instruction," and all it will cost is bags of cash, tons of time, and everything you know about teaching kids.

They will never stop bullying. They will never stop lying because their career advancement, their political futures, their paychecks depend on it. 

That does not mean you have to believe them. 

Next time we'll get into some of the details regarding the tests themselves and share ideas for resistance. I'm sure many of you have developed strategies for minimizing the damage. If you have any good ones, please share. 

Great post from Diane Ravitch's blog on standardized testing. 

impedimenta vocationis, or...

 "Why So Sad?"

It's back to school as Los Angeles Unified joins districts around the country in the post-holiday, in-person student and staff scavenger hunt, aka "Where is Everybody?" Oh Boy. 

As you know, across the country teachers and staff are sick and sick of the madness, and intelligent parents are reluctant to send their kids into the maw of the beast while equally intelligent students are refusing to offer themselves up as sacrifices to the ideological and economic deities reigning over The Greatest Country In The World. (Caution Nitwit Crossing: I am not referring to the deranged California anti-vaxxers pulling their kids out of school so they can march with them holding up dopey signs while they hack up talking points --"show me the science!" and "my child's body something something"--about shit they are too stupid to even want to understand).

Chicago Teachers are fighting the Good Fight. At some schools, thirty percent of the staff is out sick. Kids are walking out in New York. But across The GCITW, bazillions of people who spend a lot of time yakking about public schools without bothering to spend any time in them have thoughts. "Children need to be in school!" they declare, not knowing what that will look like but at least it'll be quiet around the house. And don't get me started on childcare! The howling intensifies--"schools must be open! in person! for the children!"--in spite of...well...anything. 

Chin Up, teachers! This is actually good news! Oh yeah. It's what we call a teachable moment. Here's a nugget, fresh from the "Every challenge is an opportunity" cliché dispenser.

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.

Translated from the original Nietzsche and hammered into a paraphrase celebrating toughness and resilience, it goes something like "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." 

Only it's not true. Not true at all.

What doesn't kill you can leave you smashed and broken, exhausted, discouraged and depressed. If you are a teacher these days (or any other kind of human), you are running hard on a treadmill going faster than you are and you're ready to break. You might be thinking, "I'm working as hard as I know how to work and all I hear is how terrible teachers are. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I just can't take it."

Maybe you can't. There are a million reasons someone might want to leave the profession, but people saying mean things about you isn't a very good one. Nor is the fact that you don't get everything you want. Nor the fact that your bosses are idiots and make you do stuff you don't want to do while taking away every good thing. If a middle schooler can survive that nonsense, you can too. You did. You can survive this, too. 

But it is hard. I did it for twenty-five years and I understand. I certainly get that it was a lot easier "back then." Even though I retired barely a year ago, in that one year teachers have been dropped physically into the middle of a virus superstorm armed only with sham promises of new "safety protocols" and masks and hand sanitizer they bought themselves. You've had to endure the anti-vax, anti-mask maniacs and dodge the mountains of CRT bullshit. You've had to withstand the hostility of the ignorant and the ignoble who blame you for wanting to save the lives of your school families and your own.

And you've had to do all that while the usual suspects--venal climbers in the Principal's Suite, brain-dead district lackeys, the anti-public school crusaders in the Privatizer Brigade--have continued to damage students, undermine your work, and destroy the institution you have dedicated some or a lot of your life to sustaining. Well, at least that hasn't changed. 

We will eventually find a way to manage COVID and stay reasonably safe. The maniacs will find something else to rant about, and maybe it won't be schools. And the CRT thing? What CRT thing? It served its immediate purpose in Virginia and went on break. Even when they inevitably resurrect it for political ammunition, teaching the truth about racism will always be something worth fighting for.

COVID sucks in the extreme and there's nothing you or anybody can do except everything they tell us to do to keep ourselves and our friends and families safe. But the people who are making your life miserable are knowable and beatable. Some are just bad bosses in the way that bosses all over the known universe are bad, and you will find a way to impede them, ignore them or fool them in order to do what you know is right. 

However, the Big Project to Destroy Public Schooling that has been grinding forward for decades is kicking into high gear, and these enemies are not going to give up or forget about the multi-billion dollar reservoir of public funds they are itching to get their hands on. In fact, the pandemic offers the perfect opportunity to further ravage a system under stress and slice off another chunk.

Some of these weasels are plutocrats looking to cash in. Some hate public schools for providing opportunity across class lines. Some of the haters are still seething over the elimination of state-sponsored prayer in schools. And some are permanently appalled by integrated classrooms. All of them, though, are salivating over the big juicy pie of public money they've dedicated their entire so-called lives to getting a piece of.  

These demolition and excavation experts have already had considerable success. The Supreme Court will soon decide how much more. That part is familiar to anybody in the education biz anytime in the last two decades. It's also infuriating and exhausting. And heartbreaking. 

But here is the important part: Your heart is much stronger than you realize. That's how you ended up a teacher. You're smart and tough and you absolutely can survive this. Don't give up, is what I'm saying.

Of course I'm saying it from retirement. I don't carry a roster anymore, and I'm here writing about it, not there going through it. That's a fair criticism and I acknowledge it. But teachers have been dropped in the shit up to the eyeballs for as long as there have been clueless dilettantes and rapacious grifters cashing in, and I swam through it for twenty-five years. When I left, I left in my time, on my terms, when I had done what I set out to do. Don't let them force you out before your time. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

How? How do you not just say screw it and hit the snooze button? Get up tomorrow and find an easier job that pays more and where nobody hates you for being good at it. How do you carry on? 

I don't know for sure how you can, but I know that it can be done. I know that stubbornness helps. A bit of flexibility when necessary. I know you should never underestimate the value of outrage and pure, unalloyed anger. I  always felt I got strength and the energy to sustain my career from looking directly into the faces of those who are rooting for us to fail and making it harder for us to succeed. And saying--at least to myself and my friends--Fuck Those Bastards. 

In that spirit, I think Diane Ravitch has it about right when she asks:

Who is responsible for the widespread teaching exodus? Who demoralized America’s teachers, the professionals who work tirelessly for low wages in oftentimes poor working conditions? Who smeared and discouraged an entire profession, one of the noblest of professions? 

and goes on to assemble a rogues' gallery of culprits. She continues and puts a lot more meat on the bone in a follow-up post:

Last week, I posted my thoughts on “Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers?” I sought to identify the people and organizations that spread the lie that America’s public schools were “broken” and that public school teachers were the cause. The critics slandered teachers repeatedly, claiming that teachers were dragging down student test scores. They said that today’s teachers were not bright enough; they said teachers had low SAT scores; and they were no longer “the best and the brightest.”

The “corporate reform” movement (the disruption movement) was driven in large part by the “reformers'” belief that public schools were obsolete and their teachers were the bottom of the barrel. So the “reformers” promoted school choice, especially charter schools, and Teach for America, to provide the labor supply for charter schools. TFA promised to bring smart college graduates for at least two years to staff public schools and charter schools, replacing the public school teachers whom TFA believed had low expectations. TFA would have high expectations, and these newcomers with their high SAT scores would turn around the nation’s schools. The “reformers” also promoted the spurious, ineffective and harmful idea that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, although this method repeatedly, consistently showed that those who taught affluent children were excellent, while those who taught children with special needs or limited-English proficiency or high poverty were unsatisfactory. “Value-added” methodology ranked teachers by the income and background of their students’ families, not by the teachers’ effectiveness.

All of these claims were propaganda that was skillfully utilized by people who wanted to privatize the funding of public education, eliminate unions, and crush the teaching profession.

More villains follow, largely taken from suggestions made by readers of her excellent blog. In additional posts, Ravitch discusses the new private bounty hunters and the old "voucher vultures." And please do read through the comments, made by not-robots, many of whom are or were actual teachers instead of politically motivated bloviators looking for a consulting job. 

If you're wondering why teaching--even in a pandemic--is so much more difficult than it has to be, which is to say, more difficult than the practically impossible job it already is even under the best circumstances, you can start with these lists. Look your enemies in the face and learn their names. You may find that some you've known forever, but some you may have thought were your allies. They are not. Our enemies are mere mortals engaged in an immoral project. Identifying our enemies and calling them by their names gave me strength. And giant reservoirs of anger. Which kept me going for decades. It may help you.

It's hard, but in Chicago and New York and New Haven and Philadelphia and Fort Worth and Des Moines and Los Angeles and Oakland and a million other places around the country--in every other place around the country--students and parents and teachers and staff are fighting for their schools and figuring it out in real time. You are not alone.

No one is alone.

Fuck the New York Times. Double Fuck the Wall Street Journal.

I read the news today, and Oh Boy.

Schools are opening again at the end of Winter Break and Omicron is kicking ass with nine hundred thousand new COVID cases a day, and kids and teachers and staff are sick and scared, but according to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the problem is...?

If you said god damn teachers and their god damn unions, YOU WIN!

I tweeted out a response calling out the union-busting privatizers and profiteers along with their media boosters, and I thought I'd share that tweet here. Solidarity, Chicago Teachers Union! Stay safe. Stay strong.

 

Here's Josh Marshall on what's happening in New York schools. There are similar stories from around the country. It's not simply a question of open or closed. Does open mean safe? Meaningful? Are promised safety protocols real or CYA lip service?

Politicians and ideologues insist "Schools must be open!" and "Think of the children!" Parents, frustrated and exhausted from these last two years, shout their assent or just nod along, not really knowing what they are signing their kids up for. Many parents whose students are privileged to attend well-funded schools can be confident that their kids will be taken care of. Other parents face the impossible but inescapable decision to gamble the safety of their children against their ability to provide for them.

What a perfect opportunity for the privatizers and profiteers to bash teachers and their unions and impugn the entire notion of public schooling!

These vultures conveniently ignore the fact that their decades-long project of degrading, starving, and slicing up public schools has led directly to the crowded classrooms, staff shortages, and inadequate resourcing we are grappling with in this moment.

Oh, and you know who else ignores it? The New York Times with its faux concern for students obscuring the sideways wink to its anti-union corporate masters and privileged readership. Well, fuck the New York Times.

And while we're at it, double fuck the Wall Street Journal with its hysterical "political scandal of the year" bullshit and its call to use Chicago teachers' concerns over safe school openings as an excuse to institute a voucher program. Yes, double fuck them.

Links deliberately omitted because, of course, fuck them.

The pandemic has magnified a lot of problems with public schooling: insufficient resources (particularly technology), hapless administrations, low staff morale, flagging public confidence and the lack of enlightened political leadership and support. For teachers, these are familiar challenges in an extraordinary time.

But one of the greatest threats schools face, apart from COVID itself, is the investor class with its media allies that are using this emergency as an opportunity to advance their financial interests in the privatization project.

We know this stuff already. I plan to keep going until everyone does. Stay safe. Stay strong.

And by the way, UTLA? Are you there?

Data is bullshit. Part One

Yes. Yes it is. 

Of course, it doesn't have to be. There is lots of useful data in the universe. The Covid infection rate and the number of available hospital beds in your town are important pieces of information. Cholesterol level. Blood pressure. Miles to the gallon. Yards per carry. Odds of getting a heart on the river. Each of these data points has an outcome associated with it that is meaningful and actionable. 

There are data that are related to schooling that are also meaningful. Graduation rates. Attendance. Student-teacher ratio. Number of students qualifying for subsidized lunches. The trouble is that when school reformers talk about data, they are talking about test scores. 

So, as I wrote last time, all of these terrible ideas that incoming superintendent Alberto Carvalho is likely to bring to LAUSD--school choice, performance pay for teachers, the firings--all of them depend entirely on "data," by which he means "testing," by which he means state-sponsored, corporate-controlled assessments. If you are wondering what the hell I'm talking about: 1) You need to pay closer attention, and 2) You obviously don't teach math or English, or now science, or... 

In any case, this approach is unsound because the data are unsound. 

I threw that "are" in there for those of you who insist that data must be plural. However, I'll be using the word as a singular mass noun to represent the scores on these tests, and using it specifically to attack the notion that these scores--this "data"-- is the supreme (or any) expression of what students know, how effective their teachers are, or whether their schools have "failed." This data is a political tool and not meaningful in any educational sense. Teachers should resist the entire enterprise. Some ideas on how to do that later. 

For those of you thinking "Oh my test scores! I could lose my job!" I'm sorry, but you are right to be concerned. For any of you thinking, "My scores! I must be a shitty teacher!" You might be a shitty teacher, but it has nothing to do with your test scores, which are not your test scores. They are your students' scores. 

If you've been thinking that the testing is crazy and pointless and you've been thinking the same thing since No Child Left Behind, take comfort in the fact that you have been right for twenty years. Read on for corroboration and please comment and add your own thoughts. For those of you newer to the madness and thinking "Am I crazy? Or is this insane?" Take comfort in the fact that you are not crazy. It is insane, and you need to give yourself permission to acknowledge that. It's not you, it's the testing. You want proof?

Let's begin with the emphasis on testing and the elevation of test data generation over other elements of schooling. In case you haven't heard, we're in the middle (if we're lucky) of a fucking pandemic. Schools are under assault while struggling to keep students and staff safe, and people increasingly don't want to work there or go there. Teachers are desperate to reconnect with their students, to support their mental health while helping them engage and focus on their studies. So what do you think would be the most important concern for educators high enough on the food chain to actually decide things? 

If you guessed standardized testing, you win! Libraries are battlefields and there's no staff and schools can't even follow their own safety rules, but the testing abides. The testing obsession among educators who aren't teachers is as stifling as the gun obsession among 2nd Amendment fetishists. The destruction just happens more slowly.

In her excellent The Answer Sheet blog (no relation) at the The Washington Post, education writer Valerie Strauss posted on the subject and includes some very good questions from Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest. It's a good read.

Right now you should be on break, but in a week the lunacy will resume and many of you out there will be trying to open a testing session, trying to get students to finish a session, or wondering why there are sessions at all while we're still in a fucking pandemic. You are asking the right question and very probably using the right words--at least with your friends--to describe the ridiculousness. 

Some of you, however, might actually be listening to the testing fanatics who are leading your so-called Professional Developments (really just test training and ass covering) or pushing you to be sure you catch the "make-up" testers, and you might actually be thinking, "Well, at least it's for a good cause." 

Well just forget it. You (may) have to give the tests in order to keep your job, but unless your idea of a good cause is enriching the testing-industrial complex and their shareholders while destroying the public in public education, there is no reason for any teacher to feel good about giving these tests. Period. 

If you have any doubt about this, consider the following (if you haven't already--like a bazillion times): First, teachers are prevented from seeing the questions from the tests--including the ones their students got right and wrong--and are prevented from seeing the scores in time to shape instruction. And, get this, teachers are definitely prohibited from discussing the assessments with even their own colleagues (sign the affidavit!). So ask yourself: Why would such a discussion--one that might actually do some good if by good you mean helping students and, incidentally, raising test scores--be outlawed? 

Second, imagine a world so gripped by a pandemic that whole school systems had to close down for months. Then they open again and improvise their way through a year of masks/no masks, vax/no vax, and "What happened to all the Covid tests?" Under these circumstances, what could the value of administering these assessments possibly be? Except, of course, to support the narrative of failing schools. In that case, what better time to test? 

(By the way, check the "Nation's Report Card"  if you're up for a little mind tease. It takes some doing, but if I'm reading the long-term trends correctly--and I like to think that I am--it turns out the actual scores on perhaps the least egregious of the Big Tests, the NAEP, have been pretty stable recently and have gone up significantly over time. Hardly a picture of crisis. There is a genuine and serious issue regarding score gaps and equity, but even those gaps have diminished. However, you probably haven't heard how great a job we're doing in schools. That's not the carefully constructed and immensely profitable narrative.)

The truth is the testing exists to enrich the industry and generate data that will elevate certain schools and punish others along with their teachers (aka "hold them accountable"). Which might make some kind of sense if you believe or pretend to believe that teachers are slackers who can and should be shamed and hectored into magically levitating scores, which are in fact controlled by a million variables only one of which is a teacher--or six or seven teachers if you're in high school. And it might make very good sense to you if you're the type of person who cocks their head and looks up at the stars and muses: If only we could get rid of all the bad ones... And oh yes, fuck the teacher unions! 

Or maybe you really believe, or pretend to believe, that scores on a glitchy exam given once a year tell us what we need to know about students and their learning. And if that doesn't work, then we have lots more exams for all the other times of the year! Yes, you might be thinking, "That's totally worth it! Beating up teachers and hijacking instruction is a small price to pay for the higher test scores that will then prove that beating up teachers and hijacking instruction really works! To produce higher test scores!

Except for one thing: Data is bullshit. 

Next up: What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard.

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...