New Education Era Dawns?

Published 1.26.2017
Education is a topic of long term interest to me, though I've written little for publication. However, starting with today's piece, I intend to add my voice to the conversation. My intent it to focus on education each Thursday. I'm not going to offer a complete run down of my history in education as student or in dealing with the system as a parent on this day, except for the following brief description.

I went to public school from kindergarten through high school, then received three degrees from three different institutions (two private, one state). My husband was similarly educated, but he attended two institutions, not three. We met as graduate students at the institution where we both finished our ultimate degrees. Both our children began their scholastic careers in the public school system, and both finished as homeschooled students, though for very different reasons. I'm sure our homeschooling saga will be a recurrent topic here in future, but the primary focus for today education under Trump and his chosen Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

Confirmation Status

The confirmation committee vote on DeVos has been delayed because she was so late turning in her ethics paperwork. This is merely delaying the inevitable. Democrats don't have the votes to block her approval. DeVos will be confirmed on the 31st. She as late filing her paperwork. Part of the concern is a biofeedback company she’s part of that claims to market a drug that helps kids perform in school. The New York Times reports she’s not divesting her stake in that company.

DeVos supports using biofeedback data on students. So as Sec of Ed she gets access to millions more test subjects for her company.

Ms. DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., are major financial backers of Neurocore, a Michigan company that operates drug-free “brain performance centers” that claim to have worked with 10,000 children and adults to overcome problems with attention deficit disorder, autism, sleeplessness and stress.

I can’t be unbiased here, my son would be one of those she’d put into her laboratory and experiment on.

Neurocore, founded about a decade ago, operates seven of the brain performance centers in Michigan and recently opened two in Florida. It has said it has plans to open as many as seven other centers across the country this year. Ms. DeVos’s financial disclosure shows that she and her husband have an indirect interest in the company through a family partnership.

Biofeedback may or may not help a kid like my son, but only his parents should choose whether or not to turn him into a lab rat. Even George W Bush’s ethics guy thinks it’s inappropriate for the Secretary of Education to own such a company. The company does have plans to move into schools.

A year ago, the company hired Dr. Majid Fotuhi, a physician and neuroscientist trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, as its chief medical officer. He said Neurocore had recently begun analyzing its data and results would be published soon in a scientific journal.

Dr. Fotuhi said that Neurocore had no immediate plans to team up with schools but that he could envision that happening.

Neurocore markets aggressively to parents and makes wild claims, but has no data to back them up.

Not all experts are convinced of the effectiveness of Neurocore’s methods. A 2013 article in The Detroit News questioned the efficacy of diagnostic testing for A.D.H.D. through electroencephalography, citing an article in the American Academy of Pediatrics News that suggested more research was needed.

Again, it might work and be a great thing, but the nation’s kids are not lab rats for billionaires. And exactly none of this will preclude her being the next Secretary of Education.

Committee Questions

Perhaps recognizing the potential for damage, Senators were limited to only five minutes to ask questions. Even still, there were some rough moments. Only the beginning of this piece is about DeVos, but it highlights the skewering that Franken gave her. She was flat footed a number of times, and didn’t seem to know what she was being asked about. The January 18th episode of The Daily Show demonstrated the point precisely.

Here’s the thing about that though— DeVos doesn’t care what current discussions are in education, because her intent it to destroy the current system and replace it with a private school based one. That’s why Kaine’s pointed questioning about “equal accountability” was the better question. Because what reformers like DeVos want to do is load up regulations and accountability measures on public schools, but then funnel tax dollars to private schools without those same regulations and accountability measures.

This for me is where the rubber meets the road. Take public (tax payer) money, and follow ALL the rules that other schools that take tax payer money must. ALL. OF. THEM. That’s how “reformers” can be uncloaked. They don’t want to force private institutions to meet the performance measures that public schools do, they want to give them a privileged position in the system so that public schools are eliminated. Honest “reformers” (and there are a few) admit this openly. It's not only Democrats that fear the demise of public schools, charters don't exist in Alaska.

Growth vs Proficiency?

So what was Franken talking about? What is the growth vs proficiency debate? Proficiency means hitting a benchmark (in other words, accountability and No Child Left Untested) Growth means judging each child on his or her personal progress of improvement in a subject. So a teacher or state would be measuring change from each child's baseline. Here's what DeVos said in reponse:

DeVos’s response ended up being one of the highlights of the night: “I think, if I’m understanding your question correctly around proficiency, I would correlate it to competency and mastery, so each student is measured according to the advancements they are making in each subject area.” But what she defined was growth—not proficiency. “It surprises me that you don’t know that issue,” Franken said.

The furor is over the fact that she didn’t know the difference. Still, the fact that she favors growth is positive. If she does. perhaps she doesn’t because she didn’t know what she was talking about.

The rest of the article shows how data can be useful, if it’s applied in the correct way. I would think teachers would favor growth measures over proficiency because then any progress by a given child adds to their “score” as a teacher. Looking at growth not proficiency favors is better for schools that serve disadvantaged populations. The Obama administration liked data too.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind, generally allows states to come up with their own plans for how to hold schools accountable—whether it be through proficiency or growth or some combination of both. But the law also requires that DeVos sign off on their ESSA plans, most of which have yet to be finalized, but many of which are likely to have have accountability proposals that resemble what they already have in place. (That’s largely because the vast majority of states have long had waivers from the rigid No Child Left Behind law—tailored plans that in part allow them to shift away from proficiency and toward growth.)

Most states use proficiency, not growth to assess student progress.

Reaping what they sowed?

Did Democrats set the table for DeVos?

But the record shows that Democrats can’t just blame Republicans for her ascension. It was actually Democrats who helped pave the road for DeVos to take the helm of the Education Department. Democrats have in recent years sounded — and acted — a lot like Republicans in advancing corporate education reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses, not civic institutions

It goes back to “No Child Left Untested” which passed with bipartisan support. That was the beginning of accountability measures— as you can probably guess by my alteration of the law’s name, I could go on a lengthy rant about it and the effects it had on education. DeVos will mean more of the same, and possibly worse— at least for public schools. Charters (which are still public schools) and private schools will likely not be subject to the same tests— they aren't in Michigan which is where DeVos has done most of her activism.

Democrats championed the idea of school choice. No child left untested expired, and the goals were not possible for states to meet. So the law expired, though the effects did not. Then Obama chose Arne Duncan, rather than the teachers union’s choice for Secretary of Education. Duncan’s approach was the corporate reformer model. Obama and Duncan pushed education even further into market-based reforms (more data!)

They used the promise of federal funds to push states to expand charter schools — paying more attention to growth than oversight — and to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, even though assessment experts said it was an unreliable method of evaluation. They also pushed the Common Core State Standards, with the help and influence of people like Bill Gates, a movement initially embraced by members of both parties but that eventually became the object of scorn from all parts of the political spectrum, for a variety of reasons.

Now is not the time to go into the Common Core debacle, but I have strong opinions there too. Parents across the country rebeled against all the testing. We were already out of the system by then.

Obama was more republican than democrat when it came to education. Obama and Democrats pushed charter schools. To say that they are now troubled by someone who will, surely, push charter schools, is a tad… hypocritical? indefensible? ironic?

Data driven or no?

So what was DeVos's record in Michigan? Depends on who is doing the telling. Her main accomplishment is getting charter schools into Detroit, where they now educate over 50% of kids. In Detroit, kids in charter schools are outperforming their public school counterparts, what’s not stated is if charter schools must take all students or if they can be selective. Detroit charter schools still trail other state districts.

Detroit’s public education system, including charters, trails behind other large urban cities academically. The city’s average score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and math is double digits below the average for districts in large cities—lagging behind on average growth and ranking the lowest of 21 individually assessed urban cities.

The teacher unions dislike her because they think she’s neglecting public schools— and she is. DeVos wants to destroy the public school system and replace it with one where unions don’t exist. Charter schools are publicly funded, which means they ought to face the same regs as public schools. However, DeVos doesn’t agree and has blocked efforts to try and increase oversight of the charters. She’s also a big supporter of vouchers, which public schools also think will take money from them.

The Washington Post reprinted a scathing editorial from the Detroit Free Press, which has been covering DeVos for years, and considers her unqualified for the post.

The Detroit Free Press has written a number of articles about DeVos’s education record in Michigan. Here is an important piece looking at what a DeVos Education Department could be expected to do, written by someone who has watched her work for some time. He is Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Free Press, where this first appeared.  He gave me permission to republish it

Per Henderson, What she gave students was school choice, but not school quality. He provides multiple examples of schools failing while administrators raked in the dough. His assessment is that she’s unqualified for the post because she’s a lobbyist, not an educator.

A yearlong Free Press investigation found that 20 years after Michigan’s charter school experiment began, Detroit’s charter schools have shown themselves to be only incrementally stronger, on average, than traditional public schools. They have admirable graduation rates, but test scores that look nearly identical to those of public schools.

The most accurate assessment is that charter schools have simply created a second, privately managed failing system. Yes, there are high-performing outliers —  a little more than 10% of the charter schools perform in the top tier. But in Detroit, the best schools are as likely to be traditional public schools.

Far from being “Data driven” as her proponents like to say, Henderson says the evidence is that she is impervious to data.

DeVos does have supporters, who essentially say those against her are butt hurt union members. Others tout her Michigan record as a success.

Most importantly, Michigan’s charter schools have achieved strong student academic results, as demonstrated in CREDO’s National Charter School Study 2013. As CREDO’s director, Dr. Margaret Raymond, put it:

These findings show that Michigan has set policies and practices for charter schools and their authorizers to produce consistent high quality across the state. The findings are especially welcome for students in communities that face significant education challenges.

My reform choice

I agree with this suggested reform for the next Secretary of Education.

The most lasting and fundamental “reform” that Betsy DeVos and the new administration should champion is the elimination of the rigid, standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum and its replacement with competency-based learning.

Schools need to stop teaching to the average student, which is inevitable if proficiency is the model. My favored model is still the “School of One,” which uses technology and group interaction with a teacher, and which would be amenable to a evaluation by growth model.

The technology exists to personalize learning. Schools have not kept up, and are still teaching as they did generations ago, and it never worked for all kids, and given the different skills needed now, really doesn’t work. Teachers still stand in front of the room and teach to the average level of comprehension of the students assembled in front of them. Beyond the fact that the top and bottom 20% of the class is ill-served by the model (and always has been), not all kids learn in this type of set up. There is a better way, and technology is the key. Next week's topic will be about screen time and learning, so I won't go into that now.

Teaching will need to change as well, and I can state that in my personal experience, most resent that fact. That too is a topic for a future Thursday. So what is the bottom line here? Do I support the choice of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education? I'm agnostic about the choice. Do I think she's qualified? As an educator? No. As an administrator of a huge bureaucracy? Yes, she probably has the requisite skills for that, providing the senior staff at the department doesn't resign en masse as happened at the State Department.

Any real change in the direction of education policy will have to be legislated by Congress. If I was a teacher I'd be concerned, but I'm a parent. We can do better to educate our kids, but we have to do differently to make that happen.

Disclaimer


Related writings:

• Online Schooling - MOOCs

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