The Sunday Education Weekly Reader 12.11.11

Welcome to the Sunday Education Weekly Reader for 12.11.11.  Highlighted today:

• Another story comparing education providers to living in the Wild, Wild West to make money , rather than living there to provide better education;
• The tipping over of the education pyramid;
• An analogy on how the Common Core standards are akin to Obamacare and the proposal of one group to stop them.

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Not only are businessmen like Bill Gates and convicted hedge fund managers like Michael Milken setting policies and direction for education, so are social networkers.  From Bloomberg Businessweek:


Reid Hoffman and Matt Cohler, two of Silicon Valley’s social-networking pioneers, are throwing their hats into the education ring.

The entrepreneurs-turned-venture capitalists today led a $15 million investment in Edmodo, a free learning site for teachers and students that claims almost 5 million registered users. The cash pile, from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, gives the management team the runway to hire developers and add products without doing the one thing they prefer not to talk about: making money.

Rob Hutter, the company’s chairman, said the new financing gives the company “several years” to build and expand the product without worrying about generating revenue. He and Borg are looking for developers who are passionate about education and want to build something that they say is helping change education. (emphasis added)

Of course, venture capitalists don’t invest in startups unless they see the opportunity to make several times their money back, and Greylock and Benchmark have been among the most successful firms in that regard. 

Question:  How are these social networkers (investors) helping to "change education"?  The delivery of providing education is what they are changing, not the education itself.  Remember, the education (WHAT students are learning) is controlled by the Federal Government, the NGA and the CCSSO.  These venture capitalists are providing the vehicles to deliver education, not crafting the core of what students are learning.  Remember what Scott Joftus said about education:

“You know we’re in a new era when school turnaround firms in the U.S. are being funded out of the Middle East,” Joftus said. “To me, that says there’s money to be made. I call this period the Wild West in education.” 

There IS money to be made in education reform but is it really "for the kids"?  If investors and developers are delivering educational "reform" that  is faulty and insufficient at is core, it doesn't matter how it's presented.  

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Education Week reports on the "education pyramid".  The pyramid is:

the prevailing model of ed policy decision-making, illustrated in The Mitchell 20 film: a hierarchical pyramid, with decision-making power concentrated at the peak--Congress and the Department of Education-- flowing down through layers and layers of state bureaucracy, district offices and administrators, and ending up on the shoulders of teachers.

 The author envisions what it might be like if that pyramid is turned on its side and the power would flow horizontally so teachers would have more voice (megaphones) in the actual teaching of children.


I would add additional stakeholders to the pyramid.  Parents and taxpayers need admittance into that pyramid and a turn at the megaphone.  Everyone wants a seat at the table but parents and taxpayers seem to never be mentioned as an important stakeholder.  After all, they are the ones paying for the education and they provide the human capital necessary to staff these publicly funded halls of learning.


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Will conservatives finally push back on the educational version of Obamacare? Why haven't more legislators made the connection the educational reforms are as constitutionally egregious as the health care plan?  From Heritage and its reporting on model legislation waiting for adoption by ALEC:


For the past two years, the Obama Education Department has been supporting an effort to implement national education standards and tests. The national standards push, which will affect all public schools, has been underway outside the normal legislative process. At least (to quote Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute) Obamacare went through Congress.


It’s time for state leaders to stand up to strong-arming from Washington, instead of faulting conservative organizations for pushing back on this latest federal overreach. A nationalization of education is underway, and unless conservatives work to fight Washington’s power grab, Obamacare won’t be the only overreach we’ll have to live under.

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Educational quote for the week:


Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.




H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), Outline of History (1920)

Economists Running Classrooms? Is This a Good Idea?

We've raised concerns in this blog about the current plan to change the educational system in Missouri to align with standards not set by the state, but rather by a consortium of states; signing onto underfunded mandates; and the increased privatization of the delivery of educational instruction.

We are supportive of competition in education. There is healthy competition between public institutions, particularly on the university level. What concerns us is the path the privatization is taking in the K-12 sphere on a national level. There is increasing alarm among individuals and groups on both sides of the aisle of the investment in schools from hedge fund and venture capitalist organizations. This is a growing trend in California, Washington state, New York and Chicago, to name a few areas.

While we know this is not the current trend in Missouri, we are concerned we will follow the same trajectory. I'm not the only one who questions the action of turning over failing schools or opening charters for the idea of competition without thinking through the ramifications of this action. Educator Historian Diane Ravitch from the Washington Post Answer Sheet and "The Pitfalls of Putting Economists in Charge of Education":

It is astonishing to realize the extent to which education debates are now framed and dominated by economists, not by educators or sociologists or cognitive psychologists or anyone else who actually spends time in classrooms. My bookshelves are chock full of books that analyze the teaching of reading, science, history, and other subjects; books that examine the lives of children; books that discuss the art and craft of teaching; books about the history of educational philosophy and practice; books about how children learn.

Think back when you were in school. Did you ever think a banker or an investment manager would be the best person to manage a school? Probably not, because those individuals didn't know education theories; they were trained in the financial sector to learn how to invest and make the best turn on said investments. Ravitch continues:

Now such considerations seem antique. Now we are in an age of data-based decision-making, where economists rule. They tell us that nothing matters but performance, and performance can be quantified, and those who do the quantification need never enter a classroom or think about how children learn.

There are many references in new educational reform to rate teacher effectiveness based on "value-added assessment". These assessments will be heavily based on student performance. Ravitch questions the teacher assessment process:

So the issue of our day is: How do we measure teacher effectiveness? Most of the studies by economists warn that there is a significant margin of error in "value-added assessment" (VAA) or "value-added modeling" (VAM). The basic idea of VAA is that teacher quality can be measured by the test-score gains of their students. Proponents of VAA see it as the best way to identify teachers who should get merit pay and teachers who should be fired. Critics say that the method is too flawed to use for high-stakes purposes such as these.

Last July, the U.S. Department of Education published a study by Mathematica Policy Research, which estimated that even with three years of data, there was an error rate of 25 percent. A few months ago, I signed onto a statement by a group of testing experts, which cautioned that such strategies were likely to misidentify which teachers were effective and which were ineffective, to promote teaching narrowly to the test, and to cause a narrowing of the curriculum.

Ravitch continues with her argument and details how the Gates studies promoting the effectiveness of this teacher assessment is questionable. She concludes with this:

If we step back a bit, don't you think there is a certain kind of madness in thinking that economists who never set foot in a classroom can create a statistical measure to tell us how best to educate children? It seems some will never be satisfied until they have a technical process to override the judgments of those who work in schools and are in daily contact with teachers and children. I don't know of any other nation in the world that is so devoted to this effort to turn education into a statistical problem that can be solved by a computer. It is not likely to end well.

I happen to fall in the Ravitch camp vs the Arne Duncan and Gates group. I know many legislators are for much of the Duncan style reform, but like Ravitch, I don't think education is a "statistical problem that can be solved by a computer". The good teachers will leave when they are rated "ineffective" because they have a class of low performing children who are unable or unmotivated to learn and perform badly on testing. It may have less to do with the teacher and more to do with the child's temperament, IQ or family situation. In that scenario, is it the teacher's fault the child can't and/or won't learn? The statistical model doesn't take into consideration those types of variables.

We have an important educational decisions in Missouri. Do we believe education should be the status quo it has been the last 20, 30, 40 years? No. Federal spending has increased 180% and test scores have flatlined. Do we believe we should turn schools over to private financiers who have no educational experience? Ravitch has her reservations about them; Gates sings their praises. What is a parent to think about all this?

If you think this is true competition, I would ask you what competition really means. Does competition of a product mean the selling of a same product in different packaging, or does competition mean some unique feature sets a product apart from another that makes you want to purchase one over another? If the uniqueness is innovation in education, I'm on board. If the product includes the same mandated content, then maybe it's not true competition.

Charter schools can be viable options. They need to have the legal protections of local control of ownership and board positions so they are not co-opted by financiers who have no community connection. They should operate autonomously as charters were intended to operate. Thinking about autonomy, teachers in all educational settings should be given the freedom to teach, rather than parrot pre-conceived lessons and tests. Bad teachers should be shown the door, but perhaps should be done in a manner that measures effectiveness in many ways, not just from test scores from unwilling and/or incapable students.

What is our hope for Missouri children? We hope our children are seen less as human capital in which to invest and more as individuals whom we have been charged to educate.

We'll talk about our concerns about the enormous ties of charters to billionaires, both Democrat and Republican, in another post and hopefully you will begin to understand our growing concern of educational changes wrought without due and careful diligence.