Education Reform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the NPR story:

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an Op-Ed written by Ok Go member Damian Kulash Jr, he describes how his record company, with the help of YouTube, has made it impossible to embed their new videos in external sites. Since the change, there has been a marked drop in viewings of the Here It Goes Again video:

When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.

(Seriously, take some time and click on the above link to the video. $27.77 for 6 months? Wow)

Leaving aside the incredible shortsightedness of a policy that eliminates free marketing, I was struck by the deadweight that musicians carry with them as part of a record deal. Industry lawyers needed to vet this change in policy, industry PR and Marketing people needed to articulate this new strategy, and these people's salaries are paid by the talent of the musicians "represented" by the label.

(Photo credit: betseyweber, original available here)

Except that, as this situation clearly demonstrates, the business needs of the recording industry often run counter to the creative needs and processes of musicians. The recording industry is bloated with administrative deadweight that contributes little to nothing to the people creating music.

And the more I think about it, the more I see parallels between what is happening with music and what is happening with education.

In education, as in music, there is an Education Industry that has differing goals and interests of the people upon whom they depend for their continued existence. While the goals of the education industry do not need to diverge from the actual needs of students and teachers, in practice the needs of the education industry require that organizations spend money that has little or nothing to do with student performance.

A broad range of companies and organizations lobby Congress about Education (at the national level, as well as at the state and local levels); several of the larger textbook companies spend money for lobbyists. It's almost like they lobby on issues that dovetail with the products they sell, to the point where it's difficult to tell if the product line follows the legal requirements, or the legal requirements follow the product line. But in any case, it's probably easier to tease out the relationship between lobbyist influence and business needs than the relationship that any of this has to making schools a better place.

It's also worth noting the money spent on lobbyists spent by the College Board -- you know, the people that brings us the SAT and Friends, and who create a need for a test-preparation industry that rakes in millions from anxious teens and their parents. These players occupy space in the educational market, and generate an incredible amount of revenue, yet I doubt you will find many people making the argument that learning how to take the SAT brings greater intellectual growth than creating a portfolio. What could happen if the resources poured into test preparation were instead directed towards Arts education, or -- to help counter increased rates of obesity -- Outdoor Education?

The money spent on testing becomes even more questionable when one considers the apparent correlation between family income and student performance on tests.

The existing conference model of professional development provides another example where industry needs have diverged from the needs of teachers and learners. Virtually all of these conferences have a vendor driven model (about the only exception I know of is Educon). For vendors, these conferences are an opportunity to connect with (aka market to) the people they view as their customers. For attendees, however, this means that a portion of their professional development experience is cluttered with sessions devoted to salespeople extolling the virtues of their product in the educational process. There doesn't need to be a disconnect between the needs of companies and their customers, but the vendor-driven model tends to put the product as the focus, as opposed to the needs of the learner. A more authentic approach -- and the approach taken by many classroom teachers -- is to assess what students need, and assemble resources based on that need. However, using technology in response to a need -- rather than buying up technology because vendors offer district-wide rollouts -- doesn't help people make sales quotas, and doesn't convince vendors that their sponsorship dollars are well spent.

The next time you are at a conference, wander onto the vendor floor. Do a quick count of the number of booths, and the number of people at each booth, and what the vendors are giving away. The cost of this marketing is reflected in the cost of products sold to teachers, schools, and districts. Given that schools are increasingly being held accountable for the cost of supplies (how many teachers have had to supply paper for your classroom?), it would be nice to see something that resembles restraint from organizations that profit directly from schools.

The process of reworking how we teach and learn requires more than just changing how the interpersonal exchanges between teacher and student take place; it will also require a critical rethinking of how we assess learning, and a critical rethinking of how we equip ourselves to teach and learn. Many companies make a tidy profit within the current supply chain, and they will not passively go away simply because there are better ways of doing things that renders them obsolete. And in case you're wondering, a teacher's lobby doesn't feel like the answer; the American Federation of Teachers has been pretty active, and they haven't done much. I don't know whether we need to get on or off the treadmill, but we certainly need to get moving. The educator's voice -- the principals and teachers working in schools -- has been largely absent from the conversation. How can the people doing the actual work become more involved in shaping the policy?