Why is There a Racial Achievement Gap?

November 16, 2018November 16, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, Healthcare, immigration, Learning, NAACP, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Toxic Testing Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, charter schools, Dinesh D’Souza, Eugenics, high stakes testing, history, Politics, prejudice, racial achievement gap, racism, school vouchers, standardized testing, test-based accountability, The Bell Curve, The End of Racism

Sometimes the most racist aspects of a society are right there in front of you, but no one seems to notice.

Take the racial achievement gap.

It’s a term used to describe the fact that black and Latino students don’t do as well academically as white students.

Why does it even exist?

Why do students of color in the United States achieve less than their white peers?

They have worse grades, lower test scores, meager graduation rates and fewer achieve advanced degrees.

As of 2018, they had the lowest mean score of any racial group on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

And it’s been like that for more than half a century.

In 1964, a Department of Education report found that the average black high school senior scored below 87% of white seniors (in the 13 percentile). Fifty years later, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that black seniors had narrowed the gap until they were merely behind 81% of white seniors (scoring in the 19^th percentile).

So what does that mean?

It’s a question that has haunted our education system for more than a century.

And the various answers that have been offered to explain it often reveal more about our society than they do about black and Latino children.

CLAIM 1: People of color are just genetically inferior

I know. This sounds glaringly racist.

And it is.

Yet this was the favorite answer for the achievement gap at the start of the 20^th Century (More on that later).

However, it has been espoused as recently as 1995 by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve where the authors attributed relative black failure and low socio-economic status to biological inadequacy.

Murray and Herrnstein sparked such an intense academic debate at the time that the American Psychological Association (APA) convened a Task Force on Intelligence. Instead of soundly disproving this theory, the resulting APA report could come to no definite conclusion: “At this time, no one knows what is responsible for the differential,” the authors wrote.

Today the idea that people of color are genetically inferior has been soundly defeated.

There is simply no evidence that racial characteristics are strongly correlated with intelligence.

If it were true, for example, you’d expect to see the same achievement gap from native born Africans immigrating to this country as those who are born in the US. But that is not the case. In fact, we see just the opposite effect – a sizable percentage of African immigrants earn some of the best grades, have some of the highest test scores, and disproportionately graduate from high school and achieve advanced degrees.

This is something that distinguishes foreign-born Africans – especially those from Sub-Saharan Africa – even from other immigrants. African immigrants sit near the top of the scale of so-called model minorities.

If the problem was mere genes, this wouldn’t be so.

CLAIM 2: America’s people of color are culturally inferior

You’d think it would be obvious how racist such a claim is, but it is an increasingly popular explanation of the achievement gap.

In The End of Racism, popular conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza blamed the racial accomplishment gap on black cultural defects. “[T]he old discrimination” has declined and been replaced by “rational discrimination” based “on accurate group generalizations,” wrote D’Souza.

In other words, it’s not genes, but pathological community values that keep many people of color at the bottom. Black and brown students would do better in school if their culture fostered hard work, determination, grit and valued learning. They’d learn more if their parents weren’t always in jail or having innumerable children to increase their food stamp benefits.

From a purely ideological standpoint, this is textbook racism – the belief that some racially defined groups are in some sense better or worse than others.

It’s the minstrel show as case study. It boils down the attributes of 40 million people to mere stereotypes and pretends that they’re real.

The truth is most people of color don’t fit the corny clichés. In the real world, most black folks do not commit crime, only about 6 percent of unmarried black women give birth each year, and most black people are not recipients of welfare benefits. Indeed, fewer than 200,000 black adults in the entire US currently receive cash welfare benefits from the government. That’s out of about 30 million black adults in all. So these are not cultural norms.

Furthermore, black crime rates, out-of-wedlock birthrates, and welfare dependence have gone down in recent years, while white rates have increased.

Such claims show more about those making them than the people the claims are supposed to be about. When a black person struggles, the cause is assumed to be a deeply ingrained cultural attribute. When the same happens to white people, it’s an anomaly.

For instance, in the 80’s and 90’s the media blamed black culture and black communities for the crack epidemic. But today those same talking heads excuse the mostly white and rural opioid crisis as an aberration. No one seems to claim that it is because the white family is breaking down or white culture is in decline.

Black families are disproportionately poor and thus suffer higher rates of everything that comes with it.

But this is not an artifact of their culture anymore than it is for poor whites.

CLAIM 3: People of color experience higher rates of poverty and thus struggle more academically.

Finally we have a claim based in fact and not racial stereotypes!

When we look at test scores, like those on the NAEP, we see that state racial achievement gaps are strongly correlated with state racial socioeconomic disparities.

Poor people achieve worse academic outcomes than wealthier people. And this is true across race and ethnicity.

It just makes sense. Living in poverty means less access to healthcare, neonatal care, pre-kindergarten, and fewer books in the home. It often means fewer educated family members to serve as a model. And it often means suffering from malnutrition and psychological trauma. Impoverished parents usually have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and thus have less time to help with homework or see to their children. All of this has a direct impact on education.

The fact that a larger percentage of people of color are poor, helps explain the disparity of achievement between races.

The fact that achievement gaps tend to be largest in places where racial socioeconomic disparities are largest, supports this theory. Moreover, in neighborhoods with greater socioeconomic equality, the racial achievement gap is likewise smaller or nonexistent.

Achievement gaps are strongly correlated with racial gaps in income, poverty rates, unemployment rates, and educational attainment.

However, poverty, alone, does not explain away the problem.

Even when racial disparities are few and far between (typically in states with small black and/or Hispanic populations), the gap can persist.

We shouldn’t discount poverty. It goes a long way to explaining the problem. It just doesn’t go all the way.

CLAIM 4: Racist policies and bias widen the achievement gap

There are numerous factors that can adversely affect achievement for children of color above and beyond poverty. These include the availability and quality of early childhood education, the quality of public schools, patterns of residential and school segregation, and state educational and social policies.

For example, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board, school segregation is still a problem. In fact, in many parts of the country, they are actually more segregated today than they were at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

According to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, from 2000 to 2014, school segregation has more than doubled nationwide. That’s twice the number of schools comprised almost entirely of students living in high poverty and/or students of color.

The number went from 7,009 to 15,089 schools. And that’s just the worst offenders – schools with more than three quarters of students from only one race or class. Throughout the country there are thousands more schools not as extreme but still serving mostly poor and/or minority students, and thus receiving fewer resources, more teacher layoffs, dealing with larger classes and crumbling infrastructure.

Even where segregation isn’t a problem, racist policies can creep into the academic culture.

A report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that black students in K-12 schools are far more likely to be disciplined — whether through suspension or referral to law enforcement — than their racial counterparts.

A 2014 study found that people generally view black boys as older and less innocent starting at the age of 10. Another study released in 2017 produced similar results, finding that Americans overall view black girls as less innocent and more mature for their age, from ages 5 to 14.

These have real world consequences for children’s academic development. If even well-meaning (and mostly white) teachers are more likely to see children of color as potential trouble makers, that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And kids who are in trouble often have more difficulty making the grade.

Finally, there is the influence of charter and voucher schools, many of which target their enrollment at students of color.

These are schools that are (at least in part) publicly funded but privately managed. They are not required to have nearly the same transparency as traditional public schools, don’t have to be democratically controlled and can often be run for a profit.

They can cut services to students on a whim and if students struggle, they can give them the boot forcing them to try to catch up at the local public school.

These practices are so worrying that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Black Lives Matter have both called for a moratorium on all new charter schools. Journey for Justice has gone even further with a call for more community schools.

Bias and policies like these can have a big impact on students, but we haven’t even discussed the largest culprit.

CLAIM 5: The standardized testing industry is essentially biased

We’ve talked a lot about why there’s a racial achievement gap.

We haven’t talked that much about if.

You have to admit, it’s counterintuitive to think that there should be academic hierarchies based on race. One race is better than others at school? Really? Isn’t that, itself, a racist assumption?

If there is no evidence for genetic or social differences along racial lines, can we explain everything else by way of socioeconomics and racist policies?

Perhaps. But even more so, we need to question the mechanism that started this whole debate in the first place – standardized testing.

That is the primary mechanism used to determine if there is a racial achievement gap at all.

If that mechanism is biased, so is the result.

This is particularly troubling for an industry that was built on the eugenicist premises with which we started this article.

Standardized testing, as we know it, originates from the work of Francis Galton – Charles Darwin’s cousin and an English statistician. In 1869, he wrote in Hereditary Genius that “[t]he average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” Galton nearly invented the western eugenics movement, but couldn’t find a method to test his theories.

Enter France’s Alfred Binet and Thodore Simon. In 1905 they developed an IQ test that 11 years later was revised by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman for use in America.

In his book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman wrote that these “experimental” tests will show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.”

For Terman, the achievement gap wasn’t a problem. It was a feature he was actively trying to prove, and he thought he had done so with his experiments on 1.7 million U.S. servicemen in World War I.

His deeply biased work convinced a generation of scholars. Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham presented the results as evidence of genetic racial hierarchy in A Study of American Intelligence – merely three years before he used these same ideas to craft the SAT test in 1926.

Though that same SAT test has been revised since Brigham’s time, the fundamental principals behind it remain the same. Along with the PSAT, it was taken by more than 6.7 million students in the 2015-16 school year.

The ideals of the eugenicists lost popularity after World War II, but they were by no means finished. Famed physicist William Shockley and educational psychologist Arthur Jensen carried these concepts into the 1960s before they were revived again in The Bell Curve in the ‘90s.

These are not just bugs in the system. They are what the system was meant to prove in the first place.

Our worship of the data has made us all unwitting accomplices of an ideal that is prejudiced in its axioms.

By defining academic success or failure primarily as success or failure on standardized tests, we’ve effectively barred generations of children of color from the benefits of an education. And in using these same tests for “accountability” purposes to reward or punish their schools by granting or denying resources, high stakes testing has become the academic gatekeeper. Biased assessments have been used to grant real world opportunity.

How many opportunities have been denied because of them? How many black and brown children have been denied entry to college, professions, graduate schools, jobs, places at the highest ranked schools?

How many young black and brown children have been convinced of their own ignorance because of a test score of dubious quality?

CONCLUSIONS

So we return to the question with which we began this article:

Why is there a racial achievement gap?

The answer is NOT because of genetic or cultural deficiencies in children of color.

The gap stems from a combination of disproportionate levels of poverty among black and brown people, racist bias and policies embedded in our public school system and – more than anything else – reliance on a flawed assessment system.

If we want to really close the achievement gap, we must do several things. First, we must continually discredit and criticize the genetic and social critique of racial minorities at the heart of the conservative movement.

Next, we must create a more just and equitable education system. This means fairly funding our schools. We must increase integration. We must halt the spread of charter and voucher schools. We need to make sure all our teachers and principals have cultural sensitivity training and increase the numbers of teachers of color in our school system.

And we must get rid of our system of standardized testing.

It’s a tall order, but that’s the only way to close an even more pressing gap – the gap between our reality and our ideals.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges

November 12, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Campbell Brown, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Democrat, Diane Ravitch, Donald Trump, Education, Learning, Local Control, Network for Public Education, Obama, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Campbell Brown, Carol Burris, Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Cyber Charter Schools, Diane Ravich, education, John King, Learning Policy Institute, Linda Darling-Hammond, Network for Public Education, Peter Cunningham, public schools, School Choice, schools, Sell Out, Stanford, teachers, think tank

Linda Darling-Hammond is one of my education heroes.

Perhaps that’s why her recent article in the Washington Post hurts so much.

In it, she and her think tank buddies slam education advocates Diane Ravitch and Carrol Burris for worrying about who governs schools – as if governance had nothing to do with quality education for children.

I’d expect something like that from Bill Gates.

Or Campbell Brown.

Or Peter Cunningham.

But not Hammond!

She’s not a know-nothing privatization flunky. She’s not a billionaire who thinks hording a bunch of money makes him an authority on every kind of human endeavor.

She’s a bona fide expert on teacher preparation and equity.

She founded the Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, where she is professor emeritus.

And she was the head of Barrack Obama’s education policy working group in 2008 when he was running for President.

In fact, she was the reasons many educators thought Obama was going to be a breath of fresh air for our schools and students. Everyone thought she was a lock for Education Secretary should Hope and Change win the day. But when he won, he threw her aside for people like Arne Duncan and John King who favored school privatization and high stakes standardized testing.

These days she spends most of her time as founder and president of the California-based Learning Policy Institute.

It’s a “nonprofit” think tank whose self-described mission is “to conduct independent, high-quality research to improve education policy and practice.”

The Learning Policy Institute published a report called “The Tapestry of American Public Education: How Can We Create a System of Schools Worth Choosing for All?”

The report basically conflates all types of choice within the public school system.

On the one hand, it’s refreshing to have policy analysts admit that there ARE alternatives within the public school system above and beyond charter and voucher schools.

On the other, it’s frustrating that they can’t see any fundamental differences between those that are publicly managed and those outsourced to private equity boards and appointed corporate officers.

Hammond and her colleagues Peter Cookson, Bob Rothman and Patrick Shields talk about magnet and theme schools.

They talk about open enrollment schools – where districts in 25 states allow students who live outside their borders to apply.

They talk about math and science academies, schools focusing on careers in health sciences and the arts, schools centered on community service and social justice, international schools focused on global issues and world languages, and schools designed for new English language learners.

They talk about schools organized around pedagogical models like Montessori, Waldorf and International Baccalaureate programs.

And these are all options within the public school system, itself.

In fact, the report notes that the overwhelming majority of parents – three quarters – select their neighborhood public school as their first choice.

However, Hammond and co. refuse to draw any distinction between these fully public schools and charter schools.

Unlike the other educational institutions mentioned above, charter schools are publicly funded but privately run.

They take our tax dollars and give them to private equity managers and corporate appointees to make all the decisions.

Though Hammond admits this model often runs into problems, she refuses to dismiss it based on the few instances where it seems to be working.

Despite concerns from education advocates, fiscal watchdogs and civil rights warrior across the country, Hammond and co. just can’t get up the nerve to take a stand.

The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have called for a moratorium on all new charter schools in the country. Journey for Justice has requested a focus on community schools over privatization. But Hammond – a once great advocate for equity – can’t get up the moral courage to stand with these real agents of school reform.

She stands with the corporate school reformers – the agents of privatization and profit.

“School choice is a means that can lead to different ends depending on how it is designed and managed…” write Hammond and her colleagues.

In other words, if charters result in greater quality and access for all students, they are preferable to traditional public schools.

However, she admits that charters usually fail, that many provide worse academic outcomes than traditional public schools serving similar students.

She notes that 33% of all charters opened in 2000 were closed 10 years later. Moreover, by year 13, that number jumped to 40%. When it comes to stability, charter schools are often much worse than traditional public schools.

And virtual charter schools – most of which are for-profit – are even worse. They “…have strong negative effects on achievement almost everywhere and graduate fewer than half as many of their students as public schools generally.”

However, after noting these negatives, Hammond and co. go on to provide wiggle room for privatization. They discuss how state governments can do better making sure charter schools don’t go off the rails. They can provide more transparency and accountability. They can outlaw for-profit charters and put caps on the number of charters allowed in given districts and states, set rules on staffing and curriculum – all the kinds of measures already required at traditional public schools.

But the crux of their objection is here:

“In a recent commentary in this column, authors Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris erroneously asserted that our report aims to promote unbridled alternatives to publicly funded and publicly operated school districts. Quite the opposite is true.”

In other words, they continue to lump privatized schools like charters in with fully public schools.

They refuse to make the essential distinction between how a school is governed and what it does. So long as it is funded with public tax dollars, it is a public school.

That’s like refusing to admit there is any difference in the manner in which states are governed. Both democracies and tyrannies are funded by the people living in those societies. It does not then follow that both types of government are essentially the same.

But they go on:

“The report aims to help states and districts consider how to manage the broad tapestry of choices available in public schools in ways that create quality schools with equitable access and integrative outcomes.”

Most tellingly, the authors admonish us to, “Focus on educational opportunities for children, not governance structures for adults” (Emphasis mine).

The way a school is governed is not FOR ADULTS. It is FOR CHILDREN. That is how we do all the other things Hammond and co. suggest.

“Work to ensure equity and access for all.”

That doesn’t just happen. You have to MAKE it happen through laws and regulations. That’s called governance.

“Create transparency at every stage about outcomes, opportunities and resources.”

That’s governance. That’s bureaucracy. It’s hierarchy. It’s one system overlooking another system with a series of checks and balances.

“Build a system of schools that meets all students’ needs.”

Again, that doesn’t just happen. We have to write rules and systems to make it happen.

Allowing private individuals to make decisions on behalf of private organizations for their own benefit is not going to achieve any of these goals.

And even in the few cases where charter schools don’t give all the decisions to unelected boards or voluntarily agree to transparency, the charter laws still allow them to do this. They could change at any time.

It’s like building a school on a cliff. It may be fine today, but one day it will inevitably fall.

I wrote about this in detail in my article “The Best Charter School Cannot Hold a Candle to the Worst Public School.”

It’s sad that Hammond refuses to understand this.

I say “refuse” because there’s no way she doesn’t get it. This is a conscious – perhaps political – decision on her part.

Consider how it stacks up against some of the most salient points she written previously.

For instance:

“A democratic education means that we educate people in a way that ensures they can think independently, that they can use information, knowledge, and technology, among other things, to draw their own conclusions.”

Now that’s a Linda Darling-Hammond who knows the manner in which something (a state) is governed matters. It’s not just funding. It’s democratic principles – principles that are absent at privatized schools.

“Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers.”

This Linda Darling-Hammond is a fighter for teacher autonomy – a practice you’ll find increasingly constrained at privatized schools. In fact, charter schools are infamous for scripted education, endless test prep and everything Hammond used to rail against.

“In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”

I wonder what this Linda Darling-Hammond would say to the present variety. Privatized schools are most often test prep factories. They do none of what Hammond used to advocate for. But today she’s emphatically arguing for exactly the kind of school she used to criticize.

“If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.”

Isn’t this how they routinely teach at charter schools? Memorize this. Practice it only in relation to how it will appear on the standardized test. And somehow real life, authentic learning will follow.

“Students learn as much for a teacher as from a teacher.”

Too true, Linda Darling-Hammond. How much learning do you think there is at privatized schools with much higher turnover rates, schools that transform teachers into glorified Walmart greeters? How many interpersonal relationships at privatized institutions replacing teachers with iPads?

“Life doesn’t come with four choices.”

Yes, but the schools today’s Linda Darling-Hammond are advocating for will boil learning down to just that – A,B,C or D.

“We can’t fire our way to Finland.”

Yet today’s Linda Darling-Hammond is fighting for schools that work teachers to the bone for less pay and benefits and then fire them at the slightest pretense.

In short, I’m sick of this new Linda Darling-Hammond. And I miss the old Linda Darling-Hammond.

Perhaps she’s learned a political lesson from the Obama administration.

If she wants a place at the neoliberal table, it’s not enough to actually know stuff and have the respect of the people in her profession.

She needs to support the corporate policies of the day. She needs to give the moneymen what they want – and that’s school privatization.

This new approach allows her to have her cake and eat it, too.

She can criticize all the evils of actual charter schools while pretending that there is some middle ground that allows both the monied interests and the students to BOTH get what they want.

It’s shrewd political gamesmanship perhaps.

But it’s bad for children, parents and teachers.

Grit is Sh!t – It’s Just an Excuse to do Nothing for Struggling Students

November 8, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, G.E.R.M., Grit, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers academic tenacity, Angela Duckworth, blame the victim, bootstraps, Carol Dweck, education, Grit, growth mindset, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), PISA, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, test-based accountability

Let’s say you’re out in public and you see a crying child alone in the street.

What would you do?

Would you run up to her and help? Or would you just shrug, mutter some derisive comment about the brat and walk on?

Our public school policymakers want us to do the later. In fact, they have a whole pedagogical justification for ignoring the needs of children.

It’s called “academic tenacity,” a “growth mindset” or “grit.”

And it goes something like this:

That child isn’t learning? If she just worked harder, she would.

It’s the political equivalent of “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” applied to the classroom.

And it’s super helpful for politicians reluctant to allocate tax dollars to actually help kids succeed.

The idea and the euphemisms used to describe it were coined by Carol Dweck as early as 1999. It was subsequently popularized by seventh-grade math teacher and psychologist Angela Duckworth.

In the early 2000s, Duckworth realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating successful students from those who struggled. There was also the tendency to overcome adversity or not.

Hey, Angela. Darwin called. He wants his Theory of Natural Selection back.

You know Survival of the Fittest was never meant to be prescriptive. As human beings, we’re supposed to be better than mere animals that typically leave the pack’s sick and injured behind to get eaten by predators.

But whatever.

The term “grit,” is defined as a “passion and perseverance for long-term goals,” according to Frontiers in Psychology. And it’s become one of the buzziest of buzzwords in academia.

So much so, that as you’re reading this, standardized test manufacturers are working to develop an assessment to find it in students.

The agencies that administer the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are close to including character assessments as a measure of student performance.

Oh goody!

They foresee a brave new world where multiple-choice tests will determine not just the entire scope of human knowledge but character as well!

But what no one wants to admit is that grit is… well… shit.

It’s just an excuse for a society that refuses to help those most in need.

In our world, there are haves and have-nots. But if we stop there, we ignore how and why this situation came to be.

Who places kids into segregated schools? WE DO.

Who allocates funding based largely on parental income? US.

We set kids up to succeed or fail before they even enter the school system with an economy that rewards the already rich and punishes generational poverty.

Yet when anyone suggests offering help to even the playing field – to make things more fair – a plethora of policy wonks wag their fingers and say, “No way! They did it to themselves.”

It’s typical “blame the victim” pathology to say that some kids get all the love, time and resources they need while others can do without — they just need more “grit” and a “growth mindset.”

Life’s tough. Get over it.

That’s easy for YOU to say! Because it’s the have’s who make the rules, it’s the people at the top who are telling the people at the bottom they’re to blame for their own suffering.

So you forget all the ways society has helped you and yours. YOU deserve all the credit for your successes.

But for those people over there, let’s forget all the ways society has refused to help and instead blame THEM for not overcoming the obstacles (we put) in their path.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying effort counts for nothing. But it’s part of a complicated matrix of nature and nurture.

Our environments shape us, but we have some control over what we do with what we’re given.

Yet as a society, we can’t simply ignore our responsibilities toward others and throw it all on the individual.

Good teachers know how to get the best out of their students. We know that most kids – if given a safe, encouraging environment – can succeed.

The key often is to scaffold that success. Give them something to do that they can actually master. Then give them something slightly more challenging.

You teach them that they have the ability to succeed and success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – and not the opposite.

However, the teacher – and even the school, itself – can only do so much.

As a society, we need to change the environment in which these kids grow up.

We need to fully fund our public schools to meet the needs of all students. That means more funding, services and opportunities for the underserved than for those who already have the best of everything and don’t need to rely as heavily on the school system for support.

We need wraparound services, counseling, tutoring, after school programs, community schools, jobs programs, continuing education for adults and other services to help heal the trauma of growing up poor in America.

But leaving it all to this magical thing called “grit” is just ignoring our responsibilities to our fellow human beings.

When you see someone suffering, you need to help them – not comfort yourself with excuses for ignoring them.

Pennsylvania’s Keystone Exam – the Monster We Refuse to Let Die

October 22, 2018October 22, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, ESSA, Keystone Exams, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers Andrew Dinniman, annual testing, diploma, Governor Tom Wolf, graduation, Graduation Requirement, Harrisburg, high stakes testing, Keystone Exams, laws, legislature, Minotaur, Myths, Pennsylvania, Politics, PSSA, standardized testing, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability

Let’s say there was a monster loose in Pennsylvania and you caught it.

Its days of wandering loose causing chaos and destruction were over.

But what would you do with such a beast now?

Would you kill it outright? Stop it from ever hurting anyone ever again?

Or would you simply neutralize it – place it perhaps in the center of a labyrinth, continue feeding it, and in fact create a whole religion based on worshipping it?

In the keystone state, we have just such a creature, and we’re going with the second option – the maze, nourishment and a cult.

The monster is, of course, the Keystone Exams. And like the Minotaur of ancient myth, we’re building a bureaucratic prison in which to house it.

Sure, we’ve spent billions of dollars on these unnecessary, badly written and biased graduation assessments.

And, heck, it would just make more sense to stop doing something that isn’t working, wastes money and causes legitimate problems for students.

But this is Pennsylvania! We’re not going to admit we made a mistake. Better to bury it under red tape and pretend like this is what we meant all along. Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to see…

When lawmakers originally came up with this plan… correction: when testing companies bribed federal lawmakers to force state lawmakers to enact this cockamamey plan – it was supposed to function as a graduation requirement.

Pass these tests or no diploma for you.

However, somehow Harrisburg politicians couldn’t get up the nerve to actually bar tens of thousands of worthy students from graduating when they had already proven they deserved it by passing 12 years of grade school.

So after kicking the can down the road for more than 6 years, they came up with this solution. Make it a graduation requirement, but include a whole truckload of other options that could count instead.

In short, we’re creating endless corridors of paperwork, placing the tests in the center and going on with our day.

The good news: if students can make it through the labyrinth, they never need to take or pass the Keystone Exams!

The bad news: we’re still paying millions of dollars to support these tests and we’re still forcing our teachers to make all instruction about them.

And that’s what we in the Commonwealth call a “victory.”

Yippee!

The bill to circumvent the Keystone Exams by providing multiple means of getting a diploma was passed by the state house and senate. Gov. Tom Wolf is expected to sign it into law this week.

If he does, students will still be given the Keystone Exams (unless opted out) and could demonstrate they’re worthy of a diploma by passing them. But students will have many additional ways to prove they’re worthy of a cap and gown, such as:

Show proficiency on the SAT, PSAT or ACT;
Pass an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam;
Complete a dual-enrollment program;
Complete an apprenticeship program;
Get accepted to an accredited four-year nonprofit institution of higher education;
Complete a service-learning project;
Secure a letter of full-time employment;
Achieve an acceptable score on a WorkKeys assessment, an exam administered by the ACT which assesses workplace skills including math, reading comprehension and applied technology.

To sweeten the pot even further, this won’t even go into effect until the 2021-22 school year.

So in four years, high school seniors will be racing to submit their letters of college admission, or letters of employment or SAT scores or whatever to prove they actually deserve that diploma.

But that will not be the end of it.

Just because victims thrown into the labyrinth have an easy path to avoiding the monster doesn’t mean the monster won’t affect them.

Teaching evaluations are still based on test scores. Schools evaluations are still based on test scores.

This continues the tremendous state pressure for local districts to make instruction all about testing.

Kids don’t have to pass the test, but their everyday classroom experiences will still be largely determined by these test.

Heck, many districts will probably “voluntarily” decide to make passing the test a graduation requirement just to force their students to take them seriously.

So anyone who’s out celebrating that the Keystone Exams are dead is premature.

State Sen. Andy Dinniman, at least, understands this.

“Remember, the Keystones have been delayed and the graduation requirement associated with them has been stopped, but they will still be required in Pennsylvania schools for federal accountability,” he said in statement.

“Meanwhile, we know they are expensive, redundant and unnecessary and I will continue to work to end them once and for all.”

Dinniman, a Democrat, is minority chair of the Senate Education Committee.

It’s a problem all too typical in the state.

Most lawmakers are too timid to take any type of real stand. They’d rather support some half-measure so they can claim to be in favor of either or both sides of an argument.

For instance, consider the time it takes to finish the tests.

Parents, teachers and students have complained about how these assessments waste academic time that could be better used to teach the necessary skills needed to pass.

So Gov. Wolf cut the Keystone Exams and Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test by a total of almost 2 hours a year.

However, at the same time, his administration suggests students take a series of additional pretests that are supposed to predict success on the PSSA or Keystone Exams – tests such as the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) assessment.

If schools follow the state’s instructions and give students this exam in reading, math and science 3 to 5 times a year, that’s an additional 50-90 minutes per test. That comes to 22.5 hours of additional testing!

So 22.5 hours minus 2 hours equals… NOT A REDUCATION IN TESTING!

But it gives lawmakers plausible deniability.

They can claim to be cutting testing while actually suggesting we increase it.

And we see the same sort of thing here.

Lawmakers can claim to be reducing the power of the Keystone Exams while still enshrining it as the driving force behind all instruction in the state.

What we need are leaders and not politicians.

We need people willing to take a stand and do what’s right even if that puts them at odds with the moneyed special interests.

That takes more than polls and market analysis.

It takes moral courage.

But there’s no test for that.

Five Reasons to Vote NO on the Allegheny County Children’s Fund

October 18, 2018October 18, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Election, Labor, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, Schools, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Unions, voting Allegheny County, Allies for Children, charter schools, Children's Fund, education, Election, Great Public Schools-Pittsburgh, Local Control, nonprofit, Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network, philanthrocapitalist, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, public schools, referendum, school board, Taxation, Vote, voting

You can’t raise taxes without a plan of how to spend the money.

But that’s exactly what voters in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are being asked to approve this Nov. 6.

Come election day, all voters in Allegheny County will be confronted with what’s been called the Children’s Fund, a referendum asking for a voluntary 5% property tax hike that allegedly would go to pay for early learning, after-school programs and healthy meals for kids.

But there are no details about who will provide these services, who will be responsible for the money, exactly what else the money might be used for or almost anything substantive about it.

It’s just a check with “For Kids” scrawled in the Memo and everything else left blank.

The plan is highly controversial drawing criticism from across the Mon Valley including school directors, education advocates and even progressive groups like the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network (PIIN).

Here are the top five reasons you should vote NO on the referendum:

1) It Raises Taxes Without Stipulating Where the Money Goes

Here’s what we do know.

The Children’s Fund would be financed by 0.25 mills of property tax — $25 on each $100,000 of assessed value, beginning Jan. 1.

That’s expected to generate roughly $18 million a year that would begin to be distributed in 2020.

If approved, it would change the county Home Rule Charter to establish the fund as part of county government. It would create a new office under the supervision of the county manager.

A Citizens’ Advisory Commission would “review and advise” the work of the new office, according to the proposed charter amendment.

However, County Council and County Executive Rich Fitzgerald would have to do the work of actually creating all this stuff. They’d have to pass an ordinance establishing how this all works, what powers the advisory commission has, etc. They would have to determine whether the money goes to existing programs or new ones. They’d have to set up audits of the money every five years, conduct a study to recommend goals and a focus for how the funding is spent.

That’s an awful lot left undecided.

It makes no sense for voters to hand over the money BEFORE we figure all this other stuff out.

It’s not at all how good government works.

You’re supposed to define a problem or need and then come up with a plan to meet that need. You prepare a budget that justifies raising taxes and then you vote on it.

This is exactly the opposite. We’re getting the money before the plan of how to spend it.

That’s a recipe for fraud and financial mismanagement.

2) It’s Unclear Who Would Be In Charge of the Money

Who would be accountable for this money?

We know who gets to decide this – County Council and the Chief Executive. But we don’t know who they will pick or what powers they’ll delegate to these people. Nor do we know what kind of oversight there will be or what kind of regulations will exist for how it can be spent.

This is a blind statement of trust.

It’s like saying – “Here’s $18 million. Go buy us something nice.”

What if they mismanage the money? And what would that even mean for money with so few strings attached? And how would we know? How transparent would this process be?

It’s kind of hard to approve such a plan with so many variables up in the air.

**3) The Campaign was Not Grass Roots**

To hear supporters talk, you’d think this was a bottom up crusade created by, organized by and conducted by everyday citizens from our communities.

It wasn’t.

Sure, volunteers for the Children’s Fund went door-to-door to collect more than 40,000 signatures from voters last summer.

But they weren’t all volunteers.

Financial documents show that the whole initiative has been funded by various nonprofit organizations that could, themselves, become beneficiaries of this same fund.

According to the Children’s Fund’s own campaign finance report, as of June there were three nonprofit corporations who donated $427,000 to the campaign: the Human Services Center of Turtle Creek gave $160,000, Pressley Ridge Foundation gave $150,000, and Allies for Children gave a donation of $45,000 and another for $72,000.

That’s like McDonalds spending a hundred thousand dollars to fix up the school cafeterias so it could land a multi-million dollar annual contract!

It’s a huge conflict of interest.

At very least, it’s purposefully misleading.

Many of those “volunteers” gathering signatures weren’t working for free. They were part of the $100,000 spent by the campaign to hire Vote Goal Organizing for paid signature collectors.

That doesn’t look like charity. It looks like philanthrocapitalism – when corporations try to disguise grabs for power and profit as philanthropy.

Corporations – even so-called nonprofit corporations – rarely do things out of sheer goodness. They’re acting in the best interest of the company.

I see no reason to think this “Children’s Fund” is any different.

4) It Works Around Instead of With Local Government

Though almost everyone agrees with the stated goals of the Children’s Fund, many organizations and government officials complained that they were not consulted and made a part of the process.

Two Pittsburgh Public School directors went on record in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about a lack of communication.

“First and foremost, we have not had any conversations with the organizers of the referendum,” board president Regina Holley said. “There are lots of ifs and whats that have not been answered.”

Kevin Carter, another city school director added, “In my role as a school board member, they didn’t talk to us about this at all.”

“When you leave your largest school district in the region out of this conversation, are you doing this around children?” he asked, citing that the district serves 25,000 students daily.

This has been a common thread among officials. No one wants to say they’re against collecting money that’s ostensibly for the benefit of children, but it’s hard to manage the money if you’re not part of the process.

And it’s not just protocol. Many are worried that this lack of communication may be emblematic of how the fund will be run. If organizers aren’t willing to work with local governments to get the job done, how will they know what each community needs? How will they meet those needs? Is that even what the fund will really be about?

Richard Livingston, Clairton school board president, noted concern that the money collected might not be spent evenly throughout the county. For all he knows, it could just be spent in the city or in select areas.

Indeed, this is not the best way to start any endeavor funded by all, for the benefit of all children.

5) It’s Redundant

While it’s true that the county could use more funding to meet the needs of students, numerous organizations already exist that attempt to provide these services.

There are a plethora of Pre-K, after school tutoring and meal services in the Mon Valley. In fact, much of this is done at the county’s various neighborhood schools.

If organizers were only concerned with meeting these needs, why form an office within county government that would have an appointed advisory commission? Why not just increase the funding at the local schools and/or organizations already doing this work?

In fact, this is exactly the reason the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network is against the initiative.

According to the organization’s statement:

“At PIIN, we believe that the faith community is a sacred partner with our public schools, and we have long been supportive of both the community schools model and increasing state funding to provide an excellent, high-quality education to every child in our region. We believe in funding for early childhood learning, after school programs, and nutritious meals. However, we cannot support a ballot initiative that creates an unnecessary entity, with an unknown advisory board, and an unclear process for directing our tax dollars.

This is why we are urging our membership to reject the Allegheny County Children’s Fund Initiative at the polls this November.”

Another related organization, Great Public Schools-Pittsburgh, also released a statement with “several specific concerns” about the potential fund. These include how the money would be distributed, which organizations would benefit from it, and questions about its redundancy.

Several pre-K programs already exist but are not fully funded, the organization noted. Why don’t we just fund them?

The group is a coalition of the Education Rights Network, One Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, PIIN, and the Service Employees International Union.

The group’s statement noted concerns but fell short of urging an outright NO vote.

The bottom line is that many people are concerned about inadequate funding for children’s programs.

But this “Children’s Fund” is not a solution to that problem.

This is the creation of another bureaucracy that can take our tax dollars and do almost whatever it wants with them.

There is no guarantee it will help kids.

In fact, it looks a lot more like a power and money grab by corporate interests, many of whom would prefer to privatize our school system.

This November, when you go to the polls, do the right thing for our kids.

Vote NO on the Allegheny County Children’s Fund.

Want to Make a Difference? Canvass for Local Candidates You Believe In

October 15, 2018October 15, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corbett, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Feminism, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Republican, Schools, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, union busting, Unions, voting Allegheny County, Betsy Monroe, blue wave, Bob Casey, campaign, canvassing, Connor Lamb, Democracy, Democrat, Democrats, education, fatherhood, Lindsey Williams, parenting, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, political action, schools, Students, Tom Wolf, Vote, voter turnout

Knock! Knock! Knock!

I stood there on the porch staring at my own knuckles in disbelief.

My 9-year-old daughter was looking up at me with a look like “What did you just do?”

But there was no time to say anything.

The door was opening.

An older gentleman stood in the entryway looking like he had just been stirred from sleep.

“Hello! Is this…” I began and Pam, who was standing next to me filled in the name.

“Yes,” he grumbled.

I introduced the three of us and told the man that we were canvassing his neighborhood for two local candidates running for state legislature.

And then I stopped because I wasn’t sure what to say next.

Luckily Pam jumped in and told him what our candidates stood for – education, healthcare and working families.

“Are these Democrats?” he groused. “I’m done with them. After what they did to that judge, I’m done.”

“You mean Kavanaugh?” I said.

He nodded.

My mouth opened to say something but what do you say?

Brett Kavanaugh was accused by multiple women of sexual assault but was saved from a thorough FBI investigation by his buddy, Donald Trump. He cried, whined and spouted partisan conspiracy theories yet still was confirmed to a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Really, what was this guy’s problem? Did he think we shouldn’t investigate Supreme Court Justices when credible accusers hurl accusation of abuse? Did he think Kavanaugh’s chief accuser – Dr. Christine Blasey Ford – made the whole thing up so that she could have her reputation forever tied to an attempted rape and her family displaced from their home and forced into hiding because of constant death threats? Did he think we should give privileged white guys lifetime judicial appointments based on what? Political affiliation? Skin tone?

Pam tried to bring up a few other topics – about how Republicans in our state of Pennsylvania are actively working to cut this man’s healthcare, calling this man’s generation “the greediest generation” and other topics.

But it did no good. Fox News had gotten there first.

So we handed him our campaign literature, thanked him and went on our way.

Sometimes that’s the best you can do.

And it’s not nothing.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m assuming you’re a lot like me.

You see the madness of our modern age and wonder what the heck went wrong?

A reality TV show clown is President of the United States of America. And all over this country, the conservative clown car is spitting out candidates for major office.

Even here in the keystone state, we have Scott Wagner running for Governor on the leftover promises of our previous GOP Governor – slashing education funding, firing teachers and lower taxes for the wealthy.

Meanwhile, the world is falling apart. The U.N. just released a major report finding that we have about a dozen years to make significant changes to our energy consumption or else global climate change will be irreversible. Yet our leaders complain there’s nothing they can do!

It’s enough to make one lose hope in the future.

As a father and a public school teacher, I can’t afford that despair.

There needs to be at least the slimmest glimmer of the possibility of a new day.

And I’m here to tell you, friends, it’s out there.

It starts with you.

If you want real progressive change, you have to go out there and make it – one day at a time.

We can turn back the tide of self-destruction. We can beat back the politics of bread and circuses. We can take back this country and build a better future.

But it will take more than one day.

It will take all of us, doing incremental good, every day we can.

So my suggestion is to make a commitment to voting this Nov. 6.

I know our electoral system is a mess. I know many people are being purged from the rolls and our districts are gerrymandered and the entire system is set up against us.

But if all of us try to vote, we can still win.

Find a candidate you can support and go out there and campaign for him or her.

I know there are a lot of phonies running for office. There are an awful lot of fake progressives who will talk nicely to your face and then sell you out to corporations and the wealthy at their first opportunity.

Just know that they’re not all like that.

Find yourself someone you can trust – probably someone new to the game coming on the scene to change things.

In the Pittsburgh area I found Lindsey Williams.

thumbnail_IMG_8273 — Lindsey Williams and Me

She’s an amazing lady with real conviction running for State Senate in the 38th District – that’s most of Northern Allegheny County from Franklin Park eastward, as well as Highland Park and sections of East Liberty in Pittsburgh.

Her number one priority is the same as mine – education.

That should come as no surprise from a candidate who’s also the communications director for the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

But Williams actually lives her values.

Before coming to Pittsburgh, she was fired for union organizing at the National Whistleblowers Center. Ironically, she was working there to tell the story of people who were retaliated against for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse, and found herself a target for attempting to organize a staff union. She eventually won the resulting case with the National Labor Relations Board.

When her campaign literature says she “won’t back down” fighting for working families. That’s what it means.

And her priorities – education, healthcare and labor – aren’t pie in the sky promises. She has a fiscally responsible plan to support them by creating a severance tax on natural-gas drilling and closing a loophole that allows businesses headquartered in other states to avoid state taxes. She wants to keep taxes low for homeowners while making sure the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share.

Perhaps that’s why a conservative dark money organization aligned with her Republican challenger, Jeremy Shaffer, has created knockoff campaign signs that look just like Williams with the word “Socialist” emblazoned on them.

It’s a desperation tactic.

Shaffer is down in the polls. The district – once a Republican stronghold – went to Hillary Clinton in the last election.

Even Shaffer, a Ross Township supervisor, is a throwback – he’s a far right extremist who primaried incumbent state Sen. Randy Vulakovich (R-Shaler) in May.

And his platform is nothing but tax cuts for the rich and school privatization for the rest of us. In effect, he’s a mini-Trump come to bring the circus to town.

So not only is Williams a candidate I can believe in, her race really matters to the overall state picture. If the Democrats only pick up her seat in November and don’t lose any others, we’ll crush the GOP’s veto-proof majority!

But I didn’t come out this weekend just for Williams.

I also was there to canvass for Betsy Monroe, a Fox Chapel medical professional at Highmark running for State House in the same North Hills area.

She was inspired to get into politics after Trump’s election and the subsequent 2017 Women’s March.

She noticed that state Rep. Hal English (R-Hampton) had run unopposed in the last two elections, so she decided to run against him, herself.

Monroe was particularly angered by English’s vote to criminalize abortions after 20 weeks for all women in the Commonwealth. (The bill was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf back before the GOP had a veto proof majority.) She thought it was unfair for lawmakers to decide what adult women can do with their own bodies.

However, there was one other woman I was there to support – my own daughter.

For someone in elementary school, she is incredibly interested in politics. I caught her on Saturday literally writing political stump speeches for her stuffed animals. Let me tell you, Eeyore the donkey from the Hundred Acre Wood has some mighty progressive views on women’s rights!

I wanted my little one to see real women in politics, fighting to make a difference.

The news is always so grim. I wanted her to see that there are people out there fighting for the good.

And you know what? It helped me, too.

At this point I need to pause and give a huge “Thank You” to two people – Pamela Harbin and Jodi Hirsch.

Jodi is an amazing organizer who put together the event in the first place.

I wanted to get more involved in the election and Jodi knew exactly how I could do that and which candidates I’d be most interested in.

Pam is a local activist I’ve known for years. I fought with her side-by-side against the statewide education budget cuts, charter schools, standardized testing and a host of Corporations Gone Wild shenanigans.

I was new to this whole canvassing thing, so she agreed to go with my daughter and me to show us the ropes.

I couldn’t have done it without her.

Thankfully, not every door we knocked on went like the grumpy gentlemen described above.

Frankly, most people weren’t home or didn’t answer the door.

Some people – especially young folks – proudly responded that they don’t vote or have no idea what’s going on.

Others were energized by what was happening and were looking forward to going to the polls and being heard.

“You know I’ll be there!” said one gentleman. “I’m straight Dem. Right on down the line. I’ve had enough of this Trump crap.”

But more people than I’d expected took pride in their nonpartisanship.

They wouldn’t commit to anything – just took our literature, heard us out and said they’d decide at the polls.

I always wondered what an undecided voter looked like. I saw a lot of them this weekend.

But that’s why we were there – to help nudge the uncommitted.

Hopefully on Nov. 6 they’ll think of Pam, my daughter and me.

Maybe even the Fox News fan who thought Kavanaugh got a raw deal will have his resolved softened.

Maybe he’ll think of my daughter’s chubby cheeks and innocent eyes as he considers voting for people who’d gladly steal her future for the prospect of more tax cuts for the rich.

Then again, maybe not. But who knows?

We tried.

If you live in Pennsylvania and want to get involved, click HERE.

College Remediation is Less About Bad Students Than Academic Elitism

October 5, 2018October 5, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Budget, college, college admissions, developmental psychology, education, educators, Elitism, Higher Learning, Post-Secondary, Profit, Psychology, Remediation, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep

Ah, college.

The school on a hill.

The marble columns, wood paneled studies and ivy encrusted gardens.

It’s never really been a place for everybody. But in rhapsodizing the college experience, our lawmakers have pushed for universities to enroll an increasing number of students. The demand for free or reduced tuition – especially for low-income students – has meant more kids putting on a letterman jersey and giving it the ol’ college try.

Teenagers who wouldn’t dream of higher education in previous decades are going for it today.

And the result has been a greater proportion of incoming college freshman taking remedial courses before they can even begin the normal post-secondary track.

According to a 2017 report by the Hechinger Report, more than half a million students at two- and four-year colleges in 44 states had to take such courses.

This costs up to an estimated $7 billion a year.

So, as usual in our country, we’re looking for someone to blame. And look! Here’s our favorite scapegoat – the public school system!

The gripe goes like this: Incoming college freshman wouldn’t need remediation if the public schools had bothered to teach them correctly!

However, the argument ignores several important factors and jumps to a completely unearned conclusion.

1) Public schools don’t decide who is accepted at colleges. College admissions departments do.

If people in higher learning think all these teenagers don’t belong in college, don’t accept them. Period.

But that would mean fewer students, less tuition and forgoing the lucrative revenue stream provided by – surprise! – these same remediation courses!

We pretend that colleges are special places where honor and scholarship rule the day. It isn’t necessarily so.

They are run by people, and like anywhere else, those people can be ethical and egalitarian or petty and materialistic.

Colleges aren’t immune to small mindedness or the economic realities facing institutions of learning everywhere.

Like most schools, they’re starved for funding.

The state and federal government have slashed subsidies to colleges and universities just as they have to public schools. Colleges have to make up the shortfall somewhere.

So they enroll students who don’t meet their own academic standards and then charge them for the privilege of attempting to get up to snuff.

It’s a good deal. You get to blame kids coming in AND reap the rewards.

2) How exactly do we determine that these kids need remediation?

In many schools, they use standardized tests like the SAT or ACT to make this determination. Others give their own pretest to all incoming freshman and assign remediation based on the results.

You’d expect more from institutions of higher learning.

You’d expect them to know how inadequate standardized tests are at assessing student knowledge. After all, most of the mountain of studies that conclude these tests are worthless are conducted at the college level. However, it seems people in admissions don’t always read the scholarly work of their colleagues in the departments of education and psychology.

I remember when I was in college, several classmates were being pressured to take remedial courses but refused. It didn’t stop them from graduating with honors.

3) Let’s say some of this remediation actually is necessary. Why would that be so?

These are high school graduates. What has changed in public schools over the past few decades to increase the need for these additional services at colleges?

It seems to me the answer is three-fold:

1) School budgets have been cut to the bare bone

2) Schools have to fight for limited funding with charter and voucher institutions

3) Standardized testing and Common Core have been dominating the curriculum.

If you cut funding to schools, they won’t be able to prepare students as well.

That’s a pretty simple axiom. I know business-minded number crunchers will extol the virtue of “doing more with less” and other such self-help platitudes, but much of it is nonsense.

You never hear them explain how cutting CEO salaries will mean corporations will run more effectively. It’s only workers and schools that they think deserve tough love and penury.

Look, schools with less funding mean fewer teachers. That means larger class sizes. That means it’s more difficult to learn – especially for students who don’t already come from privileged backgrounds.

None of this is bettered by the addition of charter and voucher schools sucking up the limited money available. We don’t have enough for one school system – yet we’re asking two or more parallel systems to exist on that same amount. And we’re stacking the deck in favor of privatized systems by prioritizing their funding and not holding them to the same accountability and transparency standards as traditional public schools.

It’s like deliberately placing leeches on a runners back and wondering why she’s started going so slowly.

Moreover, it’s ironic that the Common Core revolution was conducted to make students “college and career ready.” It has done just the opposite.

Narrowing the curriculum to weeks and months of test prep has consequences. You can increase students ability to jump through the hoops of your one federally mandated state test. But that doesn’t translate to other assessments. It doesn’t mean they’ll do better on the SAT or other college entrance exams. Nor does it mean they’ll possess the authentic learning we pretend we’re after in the first place.

The bottom line: if we really want to improve student academic outcomes in public schools, we need to fully and equitably fund them. We need to abandon school privatization schemes and fully support public schools. And we need to stop the obsession with standardized assessments, curriculum and – yes – even canned standards, themselves.

That might actually reduce the numbers of students who allegedly need remediation at the college level.

However, there is another aspect that we need to consider that is harder to remedy…

4) Developmental psychology.

Schools – whether they be post-secondary, secondary or primary – are built to meet the needs of human beings. And human beings don’t grow according to a preconceived schedule.

Just because you think someone should be able to do X at a certain age, doesn’t mean they’re developmentally ready to do so.

Speaking from experience, I was a C student in math through high school. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to excel in that subject and earned top marks.

I didn’t have to take any remedial courses, but I was forced to take a quantitative reasoning course as part of my liberal arts majors.

I’m not alone in this. Many people aren’t cognitively ready for certain concepts and skills until later. That doesn’t make them deficient in any way nor does it betray any problems in their schooling.

That’s just how their brains work. We can whine about it or we can accept human nature and do what we can to help students cope.

And this brings me to my final reason behind the college remediation trend – a problem that is more insidious than all the others combined.

5) The elitism behind the whole post-secondary system.

For centuries, higher learning has been seen as a privilege of the wealthy and the upper class. Sure a few exceptional plebians were let into our hallowed halls just to “prove” how egalitarian we were.

But college was never seen as something fit for everyone.

As such, the attitude has always been that students are on their own. Many who enroll will not end up graduating. And that’s seen as perfectly acceptable. It’s part of the design.

It’s the baby sea turtle school of education – thousands of hatchlings but few survive to adulthood.

However, if you really want to make college the right fit for an increasing number of students, you have to get rid of the elitist attitude.

If students come to college and need remediation, stop whining and provide it.

And it shouldn’t incur an extra cost from students, either. This should just be a normal part of the process.

If a patient comes to the emergency room with heart disease, you don’t penalize him because he didn’t eat heart healthy. You do what you can to help him heal. Period.

That’s how colleges and universities need to approach their students.

You know – the way public schools already do.

SOLUTIONS

In summary, it’s not a case of colleges vs. public schools. And anyone who tells you differently probably has a hidden agenda – the standardization and privatization industry, for instance.

We need to support colleges and universities. We need to support public schools. Both need additional funding and political will.

However, colleges need to become more accepting and supportive of the students enrolled there. They need to meet them where they are and provide whatever they need to succeed.

Moreover, public schools need the autonomy and respect routinely given to college professors.

The answer is a transformation of BOTH institutions.

That’s how you make a better school system for everyone.

That or we could just keep grumbling at each other, forever pointing fingers instead of working together to find solutions.

Wagner Spouts Trumpian Lie About Education at Gubernatorial Debate

October 2, 2018October 2, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Corbett, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Media, Obama, Pennsylvania, Pension Reform, Pensions, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Scott Walker, Students, Teachers, union busting, Unions, voting Alex Trebek, Corbett, Debate, Democrats, Donald Trump, education, Election, Governor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania, Republicans, school funding, Scott Wagner, voting

The defining moment of Pennsylvania’s one and only gubernatorial debate wasn’t made by incumbent Tom Wolf or his challenger Scott Wagner.

It was made by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

At least it was made by him seven years ago.

Before voters overwhelmingly choose the Democratic Wolf to replace him, Corbett told a whooper about his administration and education funding – namely that he DIDN’T cut almost $1 billion from the poorest schools in the Commonwealth.

Yes, ten thousand teachers were furloughed. Class sizes ballooned. Children literally died for lack of nurses.

But Corbett wanted us all to believe it wasn’t him or his administration that took that money away.

It was untrue then, and it’s untrue now.

Yet that didn’t stop Wagner from dusting it off before 1,700 people and moderator Alex Trebek at the annual Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry dinner in Hershey:

“Trebek: What you have not mentioned is education suffered immensely about seven years ago when Gov. Corbett knocked off about a billion dollars. And…

Wagner: That’s totally false.

Trebek: Oh, it’s false.

Wagner: That’s totally false. Those were federal stimulus dollars. Gov. Wolf went around and told that. It was a lie. Gov. Corbett … (Clapping)… And the stimulus money came in during Gov. Rendell’s administration. And so Gov. Corbett’s here tonight. People need to know that Gov. Corbett did as much for education as really any governor. (Clapping) And he needs to be remembered for that. He didn’t cut the billion dollars. It was a billion dollars of stimulus money that came in and they were told – the education system – I wasn’t there – Don’t hire teachers, don’t… They did all that. Guess what? Here’s the problem with the system, Alex. The billion dollars. It’s gone. We have nothing to show for it.”

Here’s the crux of the bedtime story he’s telling.

The big bad federal government gave us money, and when that money was spent, we didn’t have it anymore. So what mean ol’ Gov Wolf calls a budget cut was no one’s fault.

The problem is it’s baloney.

The federal government DID give Pennsylvania stimulus dollars for its schools for one-time infrastructure improvements. However, the state legislature reacted by reducing the amount of state money it used to fund schools at the same time forcing districts to use the stimulus for operating costs.

It’s as if someone gives you a couple hundred dollars for your birthday and then your boss stops paying you your salary. That may work this week, but next week you need your paycheck. Otherwise you don’t have money to pay the bills.

Your boss can’t say to you: I’m not cutting your wages. Look I gave you just as much money this week as last week.

That won’t fly. But it’s exactly what Corbett tried to sell voters almost four years ago and they weren’t buying it.

And now Wagner is pulling out the same moldy lie, brushing off the flies and trying to pass it off as the truth.

This is troubling for two reasons.

First, it shows Wagner is as deceitful as his heroes Corbett and Donald Trump.

Second, it shows he’s playing from the same morally bankrupt playbook.

Corbett didn’t stop at saying he never cut the money he cut. He went so far as to say he actually RAISED school funding!

That’s like urinating on someone and telling them it’s raining.

And he did it with dishonest accounting – lumping pension funds for teachers in with classroom funding and pretending they were all the same.

He took a bill that was already due (pension costs) and pretended like that money was paying to run the state’s classrooms.

It wasn’t.

So children throughout the keystone state suffered and some even died.

Apply that to Wagner’s rapidly changing position on education funding.

He has long been an advocate for slashing school budgets. In fact, he was a popular surrogate for Corbett when this whole catastrophe was going down.

But now that his campaign has seen how unpopular that position is, very recently he’s changed his tune.

Suddenly he says we should increase education funding.

And good for him.

However, if he’s using the Corbett playbook, it seems that “increase” really won’t be anything of the sort.

It will just be more creative accounting and fantasy storytelling. He’ll pay for pensions and say he’s increasing school funding. Or maybe he’ll fudge something else from column A and pretend it’s funding column B.

It’s disingenuous, dishonest and Pennsylvanians aren’t going to put up with it.

Perhaps that’s why Wolf is leading in the polls.

Wagner may have found a way to get his supporters into the debate hall – they certainly clapped loud at his points – but they are a minority among voters.

I wish Trebek had called him out on it.

I wish Gov. Wolf had challenged him.

But time was running short and Wagner still had to complain about a college swimming coach with too high a pension, and he had to whine about mean old Wolf demanding the Marcellus Shale industry pay its fair share of taxes.

There were plenty of other sparks at the debate.

Wagner raged about this and lied about that. He thinks running a state like Pennsylvania is like managing his $75 million garbage hauling company. But if given the chance, it will be our children’s future’s that are left in the trash.

Meanwhile, Gov. Wolf looked like the adult in the room, soberly explaining the improvements he’d overseen in his term in office (a balanced budget, healing some of the Corbett education cuts, etc.) and outlining where we need to go in the future.

Every time Wagner slammed him for taking support from unions, I wished he’d spoken up. But he just let it pass like Casey at Bat looking for a perfect pitch.

“You keep talking trash on unions,” he’d say. “Yeah, many of my supporters are union workers, union teachers, nurses, letter carriers, construction workers. Yes, I’m supported by working people and I support them in turn. Labor is the backbone of this nation and that’s true here in Pennsylvania as it’s true everywhere.”

But, no. He didn’t say that.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Pennsylvania voters have a clear choice here – the sane, sensible Wolf vs. the blowhard and capricious Wagner. But how I wish Wolf had shown more fight!

The only thing the media seemed moved to report, though, were the antics of Trebek.

Twitter squeaky wheels thought the Jeopardy host’s moderation was weird. I’ll admit a tangent into the Catholic church and pedophile priests may not have been necessary. But he made the entire event more watchable and he called out Wagner’s lies more often than not.

The question is: What will voters do in November?

Watch the whole debate HERE.

Here’s a video I made about Corbett’s budget cuts – a story so simple even Wagner and Corbett could understand it:

The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction

September 25, 2018September 29, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Civil Rights, Common Core, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Data Driven Instruction, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Junk science, Learning, Media, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Schools, Standardized Testing, STEM, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing annual testing, Data, Data Driven Instruction, Data Mining, education, education reform, educators, high stakes testing, junk science, public schools, Purpose of Education, schools, standardized testing, teachers, teaching, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability

“On the dangers of being data-driven: Imagine driving from A to B ignoring the road, the weather, the traffic around you… only staring at the gauges on the dashboard.”

– Educator Dan McConnell

“Make your instruction data-driven.”

If you’re a public school teacher, you’ve probably heard this a hundred times.

In the last week.

Principals and administrators use that word – “data-driven” – as if it were inscribed over the front doors of the schoolhouse in stone.

The idea goes like this: All lessons should be based on test scores.

Students take the federally mandated standardized test. Your job is to make sure they get the best possible score. Your class is nothing but a way station between standardized tests.

Pretest your students and then instruct them in such a way that when they take the test again, they’ll get the best possible score.

It’s total nonsense. And it doesn’t take much to see why.

No teacher should ever be data-driven. Every teacher should be student-driven.

You should base your instruction around what’s best for your students – what motivates them, inspires them, gets them ready and interested in learning.

To be sure, you should be data-informed – you should know what their test scores are and that should factor into your lessons in one way or another – but test scores should not be the driving force behind your instruction, especially since standardized test scores are incredibly poor indicators of student knowledge.

No one really believes that the Be All and End All of student knowledge is children’s ability to choose the “correct” answer on a multiple-choice test. No one sits back in awe at Albert Einstein’s test scores – it’s what he was able to do with the knowledge he had. Indeed, his understanding of the universe could not be adequately captured in a simple choice between four possible answers.

As I see it, there are at least six major problems with this dependence on student data at the heart of the data-driven movement.

So without further ado, here is a sextet of major flaws in the theory of data-driven instruction:

The Data is Unscientific

When we talk about student data, we’re talking about statistics. We’re talking about a quantity computed from a sample or a random variable.

As such, it needs to be a measure of something specific, something clearly defined and agreed upon.

For instance, you could measure the brightness of a star or its position in space.

However, when dealing with student knowledge, we leave the hard sciences and enter the realm of psychology. The focus of study is not and cannot be as clearly defined. What, after all, are we measuring when we give a standardized test? What are the units we’re using to measure it?

We find ourselves in the same sticky situation as those trying to measure intelligence. What is this thing we’re trying to quantify and how exactly do we go about quantifying it?

The result is intensely subjective. Sure we throw numbers up there to represent our assumptions, but – make no mistake – these are not the same numbers that measure distances on the globe or the density of an atomic nucleus.

These are approximations made up by human beings to justify deeply subjective assumptions about human nature.

It looks like statistics. It looks like math. But it is neither of these things.

We just get tricked by the numbers. We see them and mistake what we’re seeing for the hard sciences. We fall victim to the cult of numerology. That’s what data-driven instruction really is – the deepest type of mysticism passed off as science.

The idea that high stakes test scores are the best way to assess learning and that instruction should center around them is essentially a faith based initiative.

Before we can go any further, we must understand that.
It Has Never Been Proven Effective

Administrators and principals want teachers to base their instruction around test scores.

Has that ever been proven an effective strategy for teachers planning lessons or the allocation of resources? Can we prove a direct line from data to better instruction to better test scores?

The answer is an unequivocal NO.

In a 2007 study from Gina Schuyler Ikemoto and Julie A. Marsh published in the Yearbook for the National Society for the Study of Education, data driven instruction actually was found to have harmful effects on educator planning and, ultimately, student learning.

Researchers looked at 36 instances of data use in two districts, where 15 teachers used annual tests to target weaknesses in professional development or to schedule double periods of language arts for English language learners. The result was fewer instances of collective, sustained, and deeper inquiry by groups of teachers and administrators using multiple data sources – test scores, district surveys, and interviews – to reallocate funds for reading specialists or start an overhaul of district high schools.

Teachers found the data less useful if it was not timely – standardized test scores are usually a year old by the time they get to educators. Moreover, the data was of less value if it did not come with district support and if instructors did not already buy into its essential worth.

In short, researchers admitted they could not connect student achievement to the 36 instances of basic to complex data-driven decisions in these two districts.

But that’s just one study.

In 2009, the federal government published a report (IES Expert Panel) examining 490 studies where schools used data to make instructional decisions.

Of these studies, the report could only find 64 that used experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Of these it could find only six – yes, six – that met the Institute of Education Sciences standard for making causal claims about data-driven decisions to improve student achievement.

And when examining these six studies, the panel found “low evidence” to support data-driven instruction. They concluded that the theory that data-driven instructional decisions improve student test scores has not been proven in any way, shape or form.
It’s Harmful – The Stereotype Threat and Motivation

Data-driven instruction essentially involves grouping students based on their performance on standardized tests.

You put the low scorers HERE, the students on the bubble who almost reached the next level HERE, and the advanced students HERE. That way you can easily differentiate instruction and help meet their needs.

However, there is a mountain of psychological research showing that this practice is harmful to student learning. Even if you don’t put students with different test scores in different classes, simply informing them that they belong to one group or another has intense cognitive effects.

Simply being told that you are in a group with lower test scores depresses your academic outcomes. This is known as the stereotype threat.

When you focus on test scores and inform students of where they fall on the continuum down to the percentile – of how far below average they are – you can trigger this threat. Simply tracking students in this way can actually make their scores worse.

It can create negative feelings about school, threatening students’ sense of belonging, which is key to academic motivation.

But it’s not just the low scorers who are harmed. Even the so-called “advanced” students can come to depend on their privileged status. They define themselves by their achievement, collecting prizes, virtual badges and stickers. These extrinsic rewards then transform their motivation from being driven by the learning and the satisfaction of their curiosity to depending on what high achievement gets them, researchers have found.

In short, organizing all academics around tests scores is a sure way to lower them.
The Data Doesn’t Capture Important Factors

Data-driven instruction is only as good as the data being used. But no data system can be all inclusive.

When we put blinders on and say only these sorts of factors count, we exclude important information.

For instance, two students do the same long-term project and receive the same grade. However, one student overcame her natural tendency to procrastinate and learned more than in past projects. The other did not put forth his best effort and achieved lower than his usual.

If we only look at the data, both appear the same. However, good teachers can see the difference.

Almost every year I have a few students who are chronically tardy to class. A good teacher finds out why – if this is because they aren’t making the best use of the class interval or if they have a greater distance to travel than other students. However, if we judge solely on the data, we’re supposed to penalize students without considering mitigating factors. That’s being data-driven – a poor way to be a fair teacher.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that student test scores are highly correlated with parental income. Students from wealthier parents score well and those from more impoverished families score badly. That does not mean one group is smarter or even more motivated than the other. Living in poverty comes with its own challenges. Students who have to take care of their siblings at home, for instance, have less time for homework than those who have nothing but free time.

A focus solely on the data ignores these factors. When we’re admonished to focus on the data, we’re actually being told to ignore the totality of our students.
It’s Dehumanizing

No one wants to be reduced to a number or a series of statistics.

It is extremely insulting to insist that the best way for teachers to behave is to treat their students as anything other than human beings.

They are people with unique needs, characteristics, and qualities, and should be treated accordingly.

When one of my students does an amazing job on an assignment or project, my first impulse is not to reduce what they’ve done to a letter grade or a number. I speak my approbation aloud. I write extensive comments on their papers or conference with them about what they’ve done.

Certainly, I have to assign them a grade, but that is merely one thing educators do. To reduce the relationship to that – and only that – is extremely reductive. If all you do is grade the learner, you jeopardize the learning.

Every good teacher knows the importance of relationships. Data-driven instruction asks us to ignore these lessons in favor of a mechanistic approach.

I’m sorry. My students are not widgets and I refuse to treat them as such.

I am so sick of going to conferences or faculty meetings where we focus exclusively on how to get better grades or test scores from our students. We should, instead, focus on how to see the genius that is already there! We should find ways to help students self-actualize, not turn them into what we think they should be.

At this point, someone inevitably says that life isn’t fair. Our students will have to deal with standardized tests and data-driven initiatives when they get older. We have to prepare them for it.

What baloney!

If the real world is unfair, I don’t want my students to adjust to that. I want to make it better for them.

Imagine telling a rape victim that that’s just the way the world is. Imagine telling a person brutalized by the police that the world is unfair and you just have to get used to it.

This is a complete abdication not just of our job as teachers but our position as ethical human beings.

Schools are nothing without students. We should do everything we can to meet their needs. Period.
It’s Contradictory – It’s Not How We Determine Value in Other Areas

Finally, there is an inherent contradiction that all instruction must be justified by data.

We don’t require this same standard for so many aspects of schooling.

Look around any school and ask yourself if everything you see is necessarily based on statistics.

Does the athletic program exist because it increases student test scores? Does each student lunch correlate with optimum grades? Do you have computers and iPads because they have a measureable impact on achievement?

Some administrators and principals DO try to justify these sorts of things by reference to test scores. But it’s a retroactive process.

They are trying to connect data with things they already do. And it’s completely bogus.

They don’t suddenly believe in football because they think it will make the team get advanced scores. They don’t abruptly support technology in the classroom because they think it will make the school achieve adequate yearly progress.

They already have good reasons to think athletics helps students learn. They’ve seen participation in sports help students remain focused and motivated – sometimes by reference to their own lives. Likewise, they’ve seen the value of technology in the classroom. They’ve seen how some students turn on like someone flipped a switch when a lesson has a technological component.

These aren’t necessarily quantifiable. They don’t count as data but they are based on evidence.

We come to education with certain beliefs already in place about what a school should do and others are formed based on the empiricism of being there, day-in, day-out. “Data” rarely comes into the decision making process as anything but a justification after the fact.

And so we can firmly put the insistence on data-driven instruction in the trash bin of bad ideas.

It is unscientific, unproven, harmful, reductive, dehumanizing and contradictory.

The next time you hear an administrator or principal pull out this chestnut, take out one of these counterarguments and roast it on an open fire.

No more data-driven instruction.

Focus instead on student-driven learning.

Don’t let them co-opt you into the cult of numerology. Remain a difference-maker. Remain a teacher.

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FBI Warns EdTech Puts Student Safety at Risk

September 20, 2018September 20, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, computers, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Learning, Local Control, Media, Parents, Politics, privatization, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, STEM, Students, Teachers, Technology, video games corporate, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Danger, Data Mining, ed-tech, edtech, education, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Pandora's Box, Profit, public schools, schools, student privacy, technology, warning

Pandora’s box may not be a heavy wooden chest.

It might just be a laptop or an iPad.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued a warning late last week about the proliferation of educational technologies (EdTech) in schools and the dangers they pose to student safety and privacy.

The devices and applications singled out by US domestic intelligence services all involve software that asks for and saves student input.

This includes classroom management tools like Class Dojo and eBackpack as well as student testing and remediation applications like Classroom Diagnostic Tools and StudyIsland.

The alert cautions schools and parents that the widespread collection of student data involved in these applications could cause safety concerns if the information is compromised or exploited.

It’s just such technologies that have proliferated at a breakneck pace in districts throughout the country while legislation, cybersecurity and even awareness of the danger has lagged behind.

The Bureau is concerned about EdTech services because many are “adaptive, personalized learning experiences” or “administrative platforms for tracking academics, disciplinary issues, student information systems, and classroom management programs.”

The Bureau clarified that use of EdTech applications was not, in itself, the problem. They are a tool, and like any tool, they can be used for good or ill.

Advocates say when used correctly, these systems offer the potential for student collaboration, and for teachers to collect and compare information about students to help design better lessons. On the other hand, critics warn that the problems with most EdTech is essential to the way it operates and that it is designed more for the purposes of student data mining and profitization by corporations than with academic success for children in mind.

In either case, the dangers posed by such devices are indisputable.

The amount and kinds of data being collected about students has not been well publicized or understood. Many school boards, administrators, teachers, parents and students may be using EdTech without a full appreciation of how it often surreptitiously collects data on children.

Analysts listed several types of student particulars being stockpiled:

“personally identifiable information (PII);

biometric data;

academic progress;

behavioral, disciplinary, and medical information;

Web browsing history;

students’ geolocation;

IP addresses used by students; and

classroom activities.”

This is highly sensitive information that could be extremely harmful to students if it fell into the wrong hands.

Pedophiles could use this data to find and abduct children. Criminals could use it to blackmail them. It could even be sold to unscrupulous corporations or exploited by other children to bully and harass classmates.

These concerns are not merely academic. Data breaches have already occurred.

According to the FBI:

“…in late 2017, cyber actors exploited school information technology (IT) systems by hacking into multiple school district servers across the United States. They accessed student contact information, education plans, homework assignments, medical records, and counselor reports, and then used that information to contact, extort, and threaten students with physical violence and release of their personal information. The actors sent text messages to parents and local law enforcement, publicized students’ private information, posted student PII on social media, and stated how the release of such information could help child predators identify new targets.”

Though the Bureau did not mention them by name, it cited two specific cybersecurity failures in 2017 at two large EdTech companies where millions of student’s private information became publicly available.

The FBI seems to be referring to Edmodo and Schoolzilla. Hackers stole 77 million user accounts from Edmodo last year and sold that data to a “dark web” marketplace. Likewise, Schoolzilla stored student information on a publicly accessible server, according to a security researcher, thereby exposing the private information of approximately 1.3 million children.

It was these data breaches that prompted the Department of Education to issue a Cyber Advisory alert in October of 2017 warning that cyber criminals were targeting schools that had inadequate data security. Criminals were trying to gain access to this sensitive material about students to “shame, bully, and threaten children.”

In February, another cybercrime was reported by the Internal Revenue Service. The agency released an “urgent alert” about scammers targeting school districts with W-2 phishing schemes.

Of particular concern to the FBI are school devices connected directly to the Internet. They offer hackers an immediate link to private student information. This is true even if a school device is in the student’s home.

Tablets, laptops or monitoring devices such as cameras or microphones could be exploitable by tech savvy criminals – especially since many EdTech programs allow remote-access capabilities without the user even being aware of what is happening.

Indeed, some EdTech companies collect information on students’ feelings; become student data brokers and use voice-activated speakers in the classroom.

The FBI listed several recommendations for parents and families:

“Research existing student and child privacy protections of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and state laws as they apply to EdTech services.
Discuss with their local districts about what and how EdTech technologies and programs are used in their schools.

Conduct research on parent coalition and information-sharing organizations which are available online for those looking for support and additional resources.

Research school-related cyber breaches which can further inform families of student data vulnerabilities.

Consider credit or identity theft monitoring to check for any fraudulent use of their children’s identity.

Conduct regular Internet searches of children’s information to help identify the exposure and spread of their information on the Internet.”

The warning concluded by asking those who have information about cybercrimes or who have been victimized by data breaches to file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov.

For some, the FBI’s warning highlights the need for greater education funding for cybersecurity.

“While other industries are investing in greater IT security to protect against cyber threats, many schools are facing budget constraints that result in declining resources for IT security programs,” staff members from the Future of Privacy Forum wrote on their blog. “Schools across the country lack funding to provide and maintain adequate security,” they wrote.

Others see the problem as one of antiquated legislation not keeping up with changing technologies.

The FBI memo highlights a need for Congress to update federal student privacy laws, said Rachael Stickland, co-founder and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

At present, these issues are covered haphazardly from state to state, a situation Strickland finds intolerably inadequate.

The main federal law safeguarding student data privacy, The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, should be updated, she said. It must address exactly which ways districts should be allowed to share data with EdTech companies.

“What we need is a comprehensive approach at the federal level to address these outdated federal laws,” she said. “We really need these modernized to address not only the cybersecurity threats but also the potential misuse of this data.”

However, some critics are skeptical of the very use of EdTech in the classroom, at all.

They see the potential dangers being so massive and difficult to guard against that any remedies to fix the problem would be counterproductive.

Instead of spending millions or billions more on cybersecurity measures, we should use any additional funding for more essential budget items like teachers, tutors, nurses and counselors.

The goal is to provide a quality education – not to provide a quality education with increasingly complex technologies. If the former can be done with the latter, that’s fine. But if we have to choose between the two, we should go with proven methods instead of the latest fads.

EdTech corporations are making staggering profits off public schools while almost every other area goes lacking. In the nexus of business and industry, we may be losing sight of what’s best for students.

The question is have we already opened Pandora’s box, and if we haven’t, can we stop ourselves from doing so?

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Corporate Education “Reform”