Enough Secret Sauce Coverage

It's 2024, and we're still getting education "secret sauce" stories.

Here's one from New Jersey, where Joe Malinconico provides this puff piece for Paterson's College Achieve Charter School, for which the headline says "Here's the 'secret sauce' this Paterson charter school used to boost its test scores." Malinconico has the credentials of a hard-hitting investigative reporter, but this piece is strictly unexamined PR for the school.

College Achieves is a charter chain with some presence in Paterson. Niche finds it be a middlin' school, but perhaps they don't know about the secret sauce. The chain was founded by Gemar Mills, a Paterson native famous for being a young principal leading Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

So what secret sauce does Malinconico find?

Well, there's a staff PD meeting every Friday for two hours. Since Niche says that half the staff has 3 or fewer years of experience, that could be helpful, depending on how they spend the time. They also get ten days of PD in August.

The sauce, as always, involves a very narrow definition of success, aka the scores on the Big Standardized Test went up. Malinconico did not ask any questions about how much test prep that required, nor what was eliminated in order to make room for it.

But Malinconico's education background may be a bit thin, as witnessed by this line:

The summer training focuses on preparing educators for handling classrooms in which students break down in small groups for something called differentiated instruction, essentially tailoring assignments to pupils’ various academic levels.

A quick google might have told Malinconico that differentiated instruction is neither new nor secret.

What else? Well, some classrooms get a second teacher to focus on students in need of extra help. And they've increased ELA instruction from two to three hours. 

Parents touted the high expectations, including the classrooms named for various colleges.

Malinconico did note that while the Paterson district has 16% of students with disabilities and 29.3% with English language difficulties, the charter student population shows 5% and 10.6% respectively. Charter advocates shrug and say, "Open enrollment." 

Malinconico might have looked at other features of CAPS, like the "astonishing" taxpayer-funded salaries they pay their executives, or the sweet deal in which they lease their own facilities from a related third party (taxpayers fund that, too). But no--this puff piece is just about their secret sauce.

So the secret sauce? More hours on tested subjects. More teacher supports. Fewer students who are harder to teach.

I don't fault the school--it's doing what it should do, which is use the best tools it can lay its hands on to help its students achieve. 

But we are well past the point where anyone should be providing this kind of superficial credulous coverage. It's a school. There are no silver bullets, no secret sauce, no miracle formula, and every single person on the planet, including journalists, should know better. Educating students is long hard steady work with lots of grind and very little flash. And no miracles.

Good AI Is Not Good Teaching

I would not have expected to share anything from Dan Meyer, but this is worth a look.

Meyer is one of those guys. He bills himself as a math teacher, a job he did for six years back in the 00s. Mostly he's been a consultant and thought leading ed talking head guy. These days he's working for Amplify, that abomination of an ed tech company that was Joel Klein's big project after he was done screwing with NYC schools. 

So, yeah, Meyer is one of those guys.

But I'll listen to anybody and consider the message, not just the source, and I think Meyer just said some things worth listening to. At the ASU+GSV gathering to celebrate the AI Revolution in Education, Meyer stood before an audience of ed tech fans and explained why AI is not going to revolutionize teaching (and while he's doing it, manages to take a swipe at the "silver bullet" thinking of previous ed tech revolutions.)

I keep passing along these sorts of pieces because my sense is that a lot of teachers have a bad feeling about AI in education, but can't quite articulate what the problem is, and this is another presentation that helps fill that gap.

Meyer, for instance, talks about how teaching is about inviting and developing student thinking, and AI cannot do either of those things. He also provides an interesting model built on the first mile and the last mile, which explains why AI-assisted teaching may seem to create more work than it saves. And he explains how context is important to teaching, and teachers can consider that context while AI cannot. 

Meyer can be a bit floppy in the mouth, and I don't think it's too cynical to assume that Amplify is pre-disposed to see AI as a malevolent business threat, but the talk is only 19 minutes and I think they're are 19 minutes well spent. 

What Does A High-Quality School Look Like

We are not going to identify high quality schools by focusing on scored from the Big Standardized Test. In fact, by treating those scores as the single defining feature of a HQS, we encourage school leadership to move in the wrong direction. 

So what are the defining features of a high quality school? 

Reflects Local Values

Long, long ago, I spitballed a school evaluation system that started with massive data collection about what the taxpayers of the district most valued. I still think that's a good idea. The story of the last twenty-five years is the story of state and federal government pushing their own ideas down on local districts, and I'm not sure that has improved a thing.

A high quality school would be very much of its community, reflecting local values, tradition, and style. 

Now, this comes with a huge caveat, because there are communities whose values arguably include "Keep Those People's Children away from mine." The HQS represents its entire community, so that includes issues as well. I'm not comfortable with the federal and state government telling a local district what and how to teach, but I'm perfectly okay with them telling the local district who to teach, and that they may not try to deprive Certain Students out of a complete quality education. So--

Quality Education For All

This means the rich kids, the poor kids, the kids of every race, the LGBTQ kids, the kids with special needs. It means that the school is a safe and welcoming environment for all students, physically and emotionally. It also means the students with various different goals and talents and inclinations. Because a HQS would provide

Multiple Paths For Students To Succeed

Test-centered schooling accentuated the worst tendency of traditional public education, which is to treat education as if it's a single race on a single track to a single finish line. In fact, students are headed in a thousand different directions, racing, strolling and stumbling toward a thousand thousand different life destinations. 

A HQS would reflect that, allowing students to pursue excellence in every direction from welding to nursing, music to accounting. A HQS embraces the idea that student achievement looks like a million different things, and it celebrates, supports, and encourages all of them. It is also structured so that students can switch and mix and match easily. Students graduate from the system with a sense of confidence and direction about their own future, whatever that might be.

A Culture of Attainable Excellence

In a HQS, students, teachers, and administrators believe that excellence and achievement are attainable, and the school culture is centered around the pursuit of that excellence (which is definitely not the same as attempting to stifle non-excellence), and the recognition that excellence is always a moving target.

That also goes with a culture that supports the idea that more learning leads to more life choices. 

Education

My HQS doesn't have a single "how." The teacher part of my brain is, when it comes to the classroom, far more pragmatic than ideological. What works today? Let's do that. 

My frequent definition-- helping students identify and build the best version of themselves, grasping what it means to be fully human in the world. I realize that may sound warm and fuzzy, but it's not-- you get there by learning a ton of rich content and creating a vast library of skills. How? It depends--we're talking about building a personal relationship with the world, and like any relationship, it's shaped by the person involved.

I Have Deliberately Skipped The How

I'm not sure I've said much radical here. The root of most education debate has been either "Okay, how do we create this" and "That sounds expensive--could we come up with a cheaper version."

I'm not going to address the "how" because I don't think all HQS look the same, and there are multiple pathways to get there. And we'll disagree about that--I don't think you ever get there with a classical academy, with its insistence that there is one set of always-right answers and "being educated" means learning that list. Nor do I think market forces (part of the Twitter thread that sparked this post in the first place) will ever get us HQS for more than a select few. I also have thoughts about how such a school should be managed and funded, but those are other long posts. 

This is the long rambling post I promised Mike Petrilli, who asked the question. Here you go, Mike. There's more in my two part post about how to do education choice (Part I and Part II). Maybe some day you can invite me to DC to sit on a Fordham panel. Thinking about what a high quality school would look like is always worthwhile--perhaps more worthwhile than all the "how" conversations that continue to rage.

TX: Greg Abbott Wants Teachers To Dress Regular

Correspondent Steve Monacelli of the Texas Observer turned up a clip of Texas Governor Greg Abbott at the Young Conservatives of Texas convention in Dallas, splaining how folks ought to dress. 

In Lewisville, Texas… just a month ago, they had a high school teacher, who is a man, who would go to school dressed as a woman in a dress, high heels and makeup. Now, what do you think is going through their minds of the students that are in that classroom? Are they focusing on the subject that that person's trying to teach? I don't know. What I do know are these two things. One is this person--a man, dressing as a woman--in a public high school in the state of Texas--he's trying to normalize the concept. "This type of behavior is okay." This type of behavior is NOT okay! And this is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.

Now, as with many moments of culture panic, this one has some factual issues. As Wayne Carter reported for Channel 5, what actually happened was that students encouraged a popular chemistry teacher to dress up for a spirit day. Students laughed, life went on. But then someone put a picture of the teacher on line, and all culture panic hell broke loose. The school district did a policy review and determined that no dress-up day rules had been broken, but so many folks decided to release a barrage of hateful and threatening comments that the teacher resigned. 

Carter spoke to students ("He's never brought his sexuality or any of his political ideas into his teaching. He's always teaching chemistry. It's always chemistry") and parents of the school (We're conservative, but this is silly and hurting students). 

So you can file this specific incident in the file right next to the periodic panic over supposed school litter boxes for student furries aka "Things That Upset Certain People But Did Not Actually Happen."

Also, at least some of Abbott's motivation here is pretty clear, as he pivoted directly from "This Terrible Thing Happened" right over to "Parents ought to have school vouchers so that they can get their kids away from this sort of Terrible Thing That Didn't Actually Happen."

But. All that aside, we've still got a governor arguing that behavior that doesn't conform to his particular idea of gendered behavior should be outlawed and stomped on. Kind of takes me back to all those years when women weren't supposed to wear pants, or smoke cigarettes. Author Kate Chopin walking around in pants a century ago scandalizing Louisiana bluebloods. Boys wearing earrings!!Dogs and cats living together! 

There are, in fact, Christian discussion groups out there still debating the lady pants thing, and often coming to the entirely reasonable conclusion that different cultures at different times have different ideas about what male and female clothing should look like. Meanwhile, we've had a whole court case over whether or not a charter school can forbid girls to wear pants (it can't, and the Supremes aren't willing to chime in).

I can't even imagine how Abbott would draw up the Texas Code of Heteronormative Behavior for Teachers. And would the penalties be a kind of sliding scale, or would a shiny earing or bit of rouge receive the same punishment as a flowing sequined ball gown? Are skinny jeans allowed? Would Texas Rangers drag the offending teacher out in cuffs so that any non-conforming students can fully get the message that Their Kind are NOT okay or welcome in Greg Abbott's Texas? Will Texas be outlawing any and all behavior that looks kind of LGBTQ-ish, or will this just be for teachers? Is Abbott's dismay go beyond regular LGBTQ stuff and extend to all non-conforming behavior, like funny hats or ugly sweaters? 

I'm leery of the word "normal," which always has lots of heavy lifting to do. But I do like the word "ordinary," as in, LGBTQ people are an ordinary part of the human experience, as are people who fall outside of whatever standards of behavior are considered Properly Conforming. Should teachers refrain from choices that might cause distraction in the classroom? Sure. But that's a far cry from tagging all non-conforming teachers for harassment and firing and whatever else Abbott meant by saying he wanted to end that type of behavior. 

ICYMI: Opening Weekend Edition (4/28)

We've opened our community theater production of Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it is going wonderfully, with some excellent audiences and great performances, while my shoulders are holding out through the prolonged arm flapping every evening. It just feels great to help create a performance and put it out into the world, live and in person. Hope you have something equally delightful in your corner of the world. 

Let's see what there is to read this week.

Teachers Aren’t ‘Silicon Valley’s Lackeys’

This Jack Bouchard piece is well worth using up one of your free EdWeek views. He makes some point that go beyond just the question of what place AI has in education. 

When a child, frustrated at the opacity of a Toni Morrison novel, wants to know when she will ever use this, I reply, “You might never! And that’s OK, because you’re a human being and you have more important things to be than just useful.”

Ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun

Speaking of special uses of AI, here's a bizarre story from Baltimore.

Florida Republicans eye control of more county school boards in November election

More of the same old same old anticipated in Florida this year.

University of Memphis plans to launch new K-12 district this fall

Laura Testino reports for Chalkbeat on a new sort of school district about to hit Tennessee.

Recommendations for Books You Should Not Read Because You Do Not Care

Maurice Cunningham has some reading suggestions for those interested in the world of dark money and its influence.

No Matter What You Call Them, Private School Vouchers Are Bad for New Jersey

School finance expert and music teacher Marl Weber lays out the explanation of why the new proposal for New Jersey school vouchers would be a bad idea.

DeSantis said public schools were religious when US began. Is he right?

Short answer: no. But the Tampa Bay Times reporter Jeffrey Solochek talked to a lot of smart people about DeSantis's version of US education history to get a longer answer.

A Brief History of Automatons That Were Actually People

Brian Contreras at Scientific American looks at fauxtomation, the process by which companies use actual humans to fake AI.

The Return of the Tradteacher

You're on line, so you've probably heard about tradwives. Nancy Flanagan talks about the affection for tradteachers.

A trans teacher asked students about pronouns. Then the education commissioner found out.

Sarah Gibson at New Hampshire Public Radio has the story of that time the state education commissioner decided to go after one trans teacher.

How Book Bans, Threats to Honest Teaching of History, and “Don’t Say Gay” Bills Harm Our Children and Undermine Education for Citizenship

Jan Resseger looks at some of the damage done by culture panic in this country.

Plans to put libraries in most Michigan schools get support from educators and parents

What a whacky idea! Hannah Dellinger reports for Chalkbeat.

Louisiana: Lunch Breaks in Question for Teen Workers

News about this bill was in last week's list, but this week the indispensable Mercedes Schneider has more information about who's pushing the bill. Prepare to be unsurprised.

Over at Forbes.com I wrote about the practice of pep rallies for the Big Standardized Test. 

As always, you are invited to sign up for my substack. It's free, and it puts all my stuff in your email inbox, where you can do with it as you will. 

ACT Will Be For Profit (And Join The Ghost of Pearson)

ACT, the runner-up in the college prep testing races, will be acquired by private equity firm Nexus Capital Management. 

This "partnership" will transform the company into a for-profit entity. The press release heralding this change is larded with all sorts of argle bargle heralding--well, see for yourself:

“Our partnership with Nexus Capital Management uniquely positions ACT to meet a watershed moment in our nation, as the demand for talent is growing and becoming more diverse. The need to prepare learners for success after high school for both college and work has never been higher, nor has the need to ensure that every learner has access to equitable college and career planning resources, guidance, and insights,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said. “Partnering in this way will complement and amplify ACT’s proven platform of education and work readiness solutions to support the needs of students, educators, and employers alike. We will accelerate our plans to meet the needs of our stakeholders as they navigate an evolving and complex system to develop the essential skills critical for success in a rapidly changing world of work.”

“This partnership will create more pathways to degrees, credentials, and skills acquisition for people at any stage of their lives,” said Daniel A. Domenech, chairman of ACT’s board of directors and former executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. “The time is right to move into the next phase of ACT’s long-term growth strategy alongside a partner with significant industry expertise, giving ACT the scale and capital necessary to deliver on its promise of education and workplace success.”

This is a fine example of the kind of writing that ChatGPT could take over-- lots of word things that don't say much of anything.

As for the "significant industry experience" that Nexus brings to the table--well, let's take a look at some of ACT's new portfolio-mates. The Los Angeles firm also owns chucks of FTD, Dollar Shave Club, Lamps Plus, Sugarbear, TOMS, MediaLab, a chemical company, and some others. 

Including Savvas Learning Company, formerly known as Pearson U.S. K12 Education. 

Yes, back in 2019, after a year of shopping for a buyer, Pearson sold off its U.S. curriculum and instructional materials business to Nexus Capital for $250 million. It was a hell of a deal for {Pearson, which got 20% of the take from the business going forward, and will get 20% of net sales price should Nexus ever sell the business. "We can't make this business work, but if you do, you have to give us 20% of your success," is a heck of a deal, and may explain why it took a year to find someone to take it.

Nexus changed the company's name and its CEO Bethlam Forsa declared a new tradition of innovation that would include “new digital technologies, diverse classrooms, broad social trends, and new research-based teaching and learning practices that are transforming education as we know it.” Savvas now provides "next-generation learning solutions for students" along with "adaptive technology that delivers personalized instruction," "high-quality instructional materials," and, of course, "The Science of Reading." If nothing else, Savvas is in touch with current buzzwords.

So that's the other edu-business in the Nexus family-- the ghost of Pearson's U.S. aspiration. Will Nexus force some kind of partnership for vertical integration? Who knows. Personally, I'd rather see a partnership like getting a nice spray of flowers and some comfortable shoes when you sign up to take the test. But I expect they'll first have to solve the problem of how ACT can keep doing what it's doing and somehow end up with extra "profit" money. 

ACT says the costs of taking the test won't go up. Sure. ACT will be "unified" with its own subsidiary Encoura, so maybe initial profits will be generated by unifying some people right out of a job. 

Meanwhile, I can't wait to see the first SAT ads declaring "We're still a non-profit company. We're not trying to make money. Just trying to fund our leaders exorbitant salaries." 

 

PA: Let's Digitize The Big Standardized Test

Pennsylvania has lagged behind many other states when it comes to moving the Big Standardized Tests on line. I suspect this is related to a small disaster in our state's testing history.

If you are a teacher of a certain age, you probably recall years ago when the state decided to try the practice test in an online form. I'm not in a position to say exactly what happened, but it certainly seemed like the kind of thing that would happen if a hundred thousand students tried to log on to a system set up to handle about ten. Schools across the state wasted the better part of a day trying to get their students to connect with and complete the online version of the test. 

But Governor Josh Shapiro has announced that we are going to try again. 

Shapiro announced the plan at a middle school in Allegheny County, reported by Kim Lyons at Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The plan is supposed to take two years, which seems ambitious. Shapiro suggests that the on line version will take 30 minutes less time to take, which I'm guessing doesn't include the time trying to get all the students logged in to their school network and then logged in to the test. 

Pennsylvania has the PSSA test for elementary and the Keystone exams for the high schools. The Keystones are the result of an ambitious plan to create end-of-course exams for everything, a plan that never quite came to fruition, thank God. The tests cost something in the neighborhood of $50 million, but that's not counting hours lost or money spent on test prep workbooks and materials that nobody would ever buy if the BS Test wasn't looming over them.

PA Secretary of Education Khalid Mumin offered this bit of bureaucratic bloviation:

While Pennsylvania is among a group of states that take a relatively minimalist approach to statewide standardized testing and administers only the minimum number of assessments required by federal law, we have listened to feedback from the field and the public and have responded with a plan that will benefit schools, educators, and Pennsylvania’s 1.7 million learners.

I'm pretty sure feedback from the field and the public would get us to Shapiro's conclusion, which is that he'd just as soon scrap the tests entirely. This is absolutely the correct choice, but Shapiro notes that it would lose the state $600 million in federal bribery funding. 

So instead Pennsylvania will do the opposite-- Mumin announced that the state would be introducing a new benchmark test to take in addition to BS Tests themselves. Yay.

The online version should cut scoring and turnaround time, though the process of sending scores back to schools still involves the step in which politicians and bureaucrats look at the results and decide what the cut scores will be this year. Since PSSA/Keystone season is right now, PA teachers can still expect to receive "data" about their current students long after they can do anything with it. 

About a third of PA schools already do the on line thing. It's not clear how Shapiro will help bring the rest up to speed, particularly in the case of schools that have connectivity or hardware issues; if everyone's going to take the test online, everyone needs a computer with a working internet connection to do it, not just a single floating class set of laptops with a 20% failure rate on any given day.

Shapiro also says that the plan is to format the questions in "ways students are already familiar with" which assumes a lot about student tech familiarity. Actually, what it means is that schools will be replacing their hard copy test prep notebooks with licenses for on line test prep software that makes sure that students become familiar with the formats.

Yes, the only good answer is still "Get rid of the whole thing." Maybe someday we'll elect people at the federal level who stop demanding it.