When Is A School Not A School? When It’s A Profit Center

Privatization  \pri·vat·i·za·tion \prī-və-tə-zā-shən\ n: The process by which a public good is dismantled and sold for private gain. See also: commodification. 

OK, so that’s not the definition you’ll currently see in your Webster’s, but if the education reformers have their way it soon will be. No matter what direction the so called reform comes from and no matter what level it’s aimed at, all the solutions to what ails education in America today have one thing in common: taking money from public institutions and putting it in private pockets.

Giving up on public schools altogether? Let’s open some privately owned ones—funded with taxpayer’s money of course. Want more accountability? Need more tests. Someone has to produce those tests and score them of course, and for that they’ll want to be paid—handsomely. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to buy some programs linked to those tests so you can prepare students to take them. And don’t forget to buy the latest textbooks that coordinate with the new curriculum.

And the latest iteration: Want to know if a new teacher should be licensed? Don’t ask the university that trained him or her, pay us to decide.

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous. Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

And for those of you who may be naive enough to assume that because Stanford University is involved the resulting process will have a degree of educational validity—fuhgeddaboudit. I’ve been invited to participate those types of “partnerships” and mostly teachers are brought in for cover, and their input, while effusively appreciated, is largely ignored. I was part of the team that created the original state writing assessment here in Michigan. We put together an instrument that we felt reflected best practice in the field. When we weren’t being told our suggestions were too expensive we were being told what we were attempting to measure couldn’t be measured, which brings up an interesting subtext to all this and that is the rather unexamined premise that if it can be measured it has value, along with a coda, if it can’t be measured it doesn’t have value. Might be worth looking into a little more thoroughly, but that’s a post for another time. As for the high stakes writing test here in Michigan, within about five years, almost all of the recommendations we did manage to get through the process had been abandoned.

Want more proof?

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators.

That’s right teachers, your career has a market value of $75. Puts all those years taking classes, doing internships and student teaching in perspective doesn’t it, knowing that after all that somewhere a person will be paid less than $100 to decide if you're qualified to teach or not.

It is an essential aspect of the commodification of education that teachers be devalued. After all, in order for "educational entrepreneurs" to sell their products a need has to be created--that's just Marketing 101. Since teachers are such an visible part of the process it's only logical that this need be created by convincing the customer that teachers are ineffective, inefficient and may actually be destructive--as least as far as they take money from the kids by wanting things like salaries and benefits. It is also important that the fix for this need come from outside the schools, that's why teacher training has to be attacked as well. After all, if we supported teachers, and the training of teachers, there would be no reason to buy teacher proof curricula; no reason to buy tests from outside vendors, or  software programs that take the place of classroom instruction.

On a more fundamental level, this switch from the democratic values that created public education to the priorities of the market economy means the long term goal of education in creating skilled, literate citizens capable of maintaining and improving our democracy has been replaced by the short term, myopic goal of improving the quarterly balance sheet.

In a larger sense, capitalism has become cannibalistic and is devouring the very body that created it, or perhaps it is more accurate to say what used to be a symbiotic relationship between our economic and political structures has become parasitic and what Franklin Roosevelt called the "real safeguard of democracy" (education) is being slowly bled away.

Get Better Teachers With One Weird Trick

When I was younger I was a sucker for those short cut programs you see advertised all over the place. Learn Chinese in three weeks! Lose ten pounds a week with this five minute workout! Earn thousands from home with this three step plan! Of course the only thing I really learned was I was going to lose some weight in my wallet and someone else was doing all the earning.

Eventually I figured out that if I wanted to take on a complicated task it meant investing real effort, paying attention to my results over a long period of time, perhaps the rest of my life, and adjusting my plan based on my changing goals. In other words, it had to become a part of the way I did things, not just something I paid attention to for a few weeks out of the year.

I mention this because when I look at the latest efforts of our educational betters to identify and measure teacher effectiveness I see the same sort of short cut thinking that used to drain my bank account. Need to determine if teachers are any good? Just give them this test before they graduate. No wait, give their students this test, then use it to evaluate the teachers. Want better schools? Give teachers the educational version of piecework. Hey, it works for manufacturing. The thinking that underlies these programs is the same as those that promise to reduce belly fat with “one weird trick” and that is, if we can just find that one test, or that one measure we can apply it to all teachers everywhere and forever, then all our problems will be solved.

I should mention here that I never learned Chinese, I could stand to lose a few pounds, and I’m not rich.

The National Education Writers Association has an interesting compilation of what current research in the measures du jour say about teacher effectiveness and they aren’t exactly what you might call a slam dunk. Value added your cup of tea?

Value-added models appear to pick up some differences in teacher quality, but they can be influenced by a number of factors, such as the statistical controls selected. They may also be affected by the characteristics of schools and peers. The impact of unmeasured factors in schools, such as principals and choice of curriculum, is less clear.

Not a rousing vote of confidence. What about testing for “content mastery,” or programs that provide “board certification?”

Characteristics such as board certification and content knowledge in math sometimes are linked with student achievement. Still, these factors don’t explain much of the differences in teacher effectiveness overall.

Everyone knows teachers go into the profession for the money, so what if we just paid them more to do a better job?

 In the United States, merit pay exclusively focused on rewarding teachers whose students produce gains has not been shown to improve student achievement…

Well, at least we know that it’s teachers who hold the key to student success or failure, right? That’s why we need all these measurements.

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

OK, so if we want an educational system that values teachers who teach kids how to take standardized tests, it certainly looks like we’ve found our measures of “teacher effectiveness.” Trouble is, as Matthew Di Carlo, writing at Shankerblog points out:

"[O]nly about 25-40 percent of the top quintile (top 20%) teachers in one year were in the top quintile the next year, while between 20-30 percent of them ended up in the bottom 40%," of which volatility "a very large proportion was due to nothing more than random error."

“Volatility” and “random error.” To borrow a phrase from Prince Hamlet, “Ay, there’s the rub.” Education is a dynamic, complicated slippery little beastie and just when you think you’ve got a handle on her, she goes tumbling off in a wholly unexpected direction leaving you measuring smoke and thinking you know where the fire is. My own opinion is this is because human beings are dynamic, complicated slippery little beasties and when you factor in the type of human being education deals with, namely kids growing up, maturing and changing, well you’ve got basically a Rubic’s cube of “volatility” to solve before you can have any confidence in your measures.

This is why static, universal, external attempts at measurement have failed and will continue to fail. There are no short cuts. If you want effective teachers, you have to start by paying attention to those teachers. You have to support them by first of all listening to them and inviting them to participate in developing meaningful, flexible, appropriately focused measures. That’s hard work. It takes time, commitment and yes, money. Effort in other words, something we’re always telling students they need to have more of. Well, until they grow up and become teacher effectiveness experts at least.

Correlation Is Not Causation: Breed Specific Laws Are Cop Outs

There are approximately 14 communities around Michigan that ban pit bulls outright and many more that restrict them, or label them "dangerous" or "vicious." Recently Lansing Mayor Virg Benaro announced that residents of his city were "living in fear" of vicious dogs and asked the City Council to draft an ordinance. Apparently, the members of the Council, also residents of Lansing, weren't living in as much fear as the Mayor indicated and they demurred. "Committee Chairwoman Jody Washington said the body was “nowhere near” writing an ordinance and said the committee had no plans to include breed-specific provisions targeting breeds allegedly more prone to violence."

Good. Breed specific legislation follows the same logic as assuming since the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says the Dodge Ram 1500 is rated the most dangerous car made we should pass a law banning pickup trucks, or at least Dodge pickup trucks.

Certainly the safety features built into the truck play a role, just as the size of pit bulls contribute to the fact that where there are incidents, they are more likely to result in serious injury, or even death, meaning we probably wouldn't be having this discussion if drug dealers had opted for Papilons to guard their stash, and rich dilettantes for pit bulls instead of purse dogs as a fashion accessory. Anyway, in the vast majority of cases the person behind the wheel, or on the other end of the leash is a major contributing factor. 

If you or I operate our vehicles negligently and cause someone harm, we don't get to blame the car. Even if we have an accident, the headlines will not read "Ford Focus injures three." No one is "living in fear" of a Toyota Camry.  On the other hand, it is just as certain that when incidents involving pit bulls are reported the headlines will not read "Violation of leash law leads to injury of three," and instead will contain words like the above mentioned "vicious," or "dangerous."

Now, you may think the analogy breaks down at this point because cars are inanimate objects incapable of independent action, whereas dogs are living creatures, but it's not quite that simple. Just as cars are bound by the laws of physics, dogs are bound by the dictates of their environment and training (or lack thereof). Dogs are not moral philosophers, they will act in very consistent, linear patterns around issues like safe and dangerous, food and not food, pain and pleasure. The fact that they are sentient creatures capable of altering their behavior gives us the opportunity to shape those choices into more socially acceptable patterns, but just as a car can't suddenly decide to fly, a pit bull can't suddenly decide to ruminate over the implications of getting out of the yard if the gate is left open.

In short, we're supposed to be the responsible ones here.

Breed specific laws do have two elements which seem to be primary ingredients in a lot of decisions our politicians make these days though, they are cheap and easy. Cheap and easy, but not smart or effective. As the Lansing City Council heard in testimony:

...[S]uch laws don’t work, opponents said at the committee meeting, noting that even the American Bar Association announced its opposition to breed bans and restrictions because taxpayers often foot the bill for genetic testing to determine dog breeds, and the animal's care and housing while the testing is being completed. Instead, the city should focus on better enforcing its own leash laws, they said. A representative from the 54A District Court noted that the Lansing Police Department wrote only two tickets in 2012 for violations of the city’s leash law.

Thankfully, in this case the Council listened, which is encouraging I guess because it shows that, like pit bulls, legislators are trainable. Apparently the residents of Lansing do not need to "live in fear" of their legislators. Well, maybe except for the mayor because he seems to be a dangerously uninformed, but as long as the Council keeps him on a short leash...