Hopeless

Obama has infuriated lots of progressives for a whole lot of reasons, and of course teachers' frustration with the clown he installed to run the Education Dept and his NCLB II policies grows daily.  So the question one asks oneself is whether one would actually sit out the next election or even pull the lever for some profoundly disturbed Republican who would actually be worse?

No, probably not.  Despite the disappointment, one has to admit that BO has done a decent thing or two,  which is probably more than one will be able to say for any conceivable Republican opponent.  So one will stifle one's sighs and desultorily slunk off to the polls and vote the Democratic party line.

But that scenario does not bode well for the Democrats.  BO and the Democrats rode into power  on a wave of popular enthusiasm.  As far as I can tell, that enthusiasm has pretty much fizzled out.  People gave lots of money and worked hard to put BO & co into office.  Most of that energy came from the progressive wing.  They won't get fooled again.  I know for sure I won't give them another dime, and I'll be talking trash about them at every turn.  That sentiment seems to be fairly widespread, and if it is, it's curtains for Barack -- even if he still gets our forlorn vote.

Ravitch rocks

Amen.

Why I'm at peace with the latest crop of teacher evaluation schemes

Despite their appearance to the contrary, I don't think the deformers are quite so stupid to base everything on standardized test scores. Most people without Joel Klein's bloated ego would have hung their heads in shame long ago if they were met with the same hoots of derision (not to mention the devastating dissection from academics) that annually accompany the release of NYC’s school report cards. As is well-known to every neophyte psychometrician, year-to-year changes in test scores – and even on a decent test – are almost completely noise. The unsteady bobbing on NYCs school progress rankings are a crystal clear empirical demonstration of that to anyone without ideological pinhole vision. With teachers, the randomness in year-to-year changes would be even starker. And I think at some level in their reptilean brains, the deformers are aware of this, and they know that coming up with a teacher rating scheme demonstrably even stupider than Joel Klein’s school rating scheme would not bode well for them.

This puts the deformers in a bit of a pickle, because their goal is really to do the whole evaluation thingy as cheaply as possible. They really don’t care if it’s done well or accurately; they just want a new deform accomplishment they can brag about in their bios and in conversations with other deformy types. Unfortunately, however, because any scheme they come up with would be such a big deal, it might come under lots of scrutiny (at least, they hope it's a big deal and comes under scrutiny, as long as it's the friendly type of scrutiny they get from other deformy types), so it must have at least the ambience of reasonability and thoughtfulness.

Besides 100% on changes in test scores, the other option is administrative fiat, the principal-as-CEO shtick. But this, of course, has the potential to go very badly wrong as well, because – though many might be shocked to hear it – not every school principal is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Empowering them too much could lead to serious blowback.

So deformers are backed into a corner of having to make an appearance of doing what they really don’t want to do, namely, conducting a real evaluation that takes multiple factors into account. And so you now hear about how many states are yammering about instituting annual multifactor evaluations to get their paws on RttT money. Which is where things start to get really humorous.

Evaluating teachers is now part of principals’ job description. But everybody knows that principals are overwhelmed with administrivia and discipline, and many are not really instructional leaders anyway. So they do their drive-bys and assigned their ratings, and the deformers hate it because the principals do not rate enough teachers badly – which would require documentation and paperwork that principals don’t have time for. So who is going to do all the newfangled annual multifactor evaluations, and where is the money to pay for them going to come from? How are states going to pay for these new armies of "experts" roaming around doing annual reviews? And for what? To ding a few hundred more teachers per year? My guess is that they'll end up paying a full year's admin salary for every incompetent they flush out of the woodwork. We'll see how long that lasts.

Three years, max, before the next governor or state ed head comes in a pulls the plug on such "an outrageous and ill-conceived waste of taxpayers' dollars." 

Arne "BubbleBoy" Duncan

NY Times. May 3, 2010:

Mr. Duncan says he encounters no public opposition.
“Zero,” he said. “And as hard as we’re pushing everybody else to change, we’re pushing the department to change even more. There’s just an outpouring of support for the common-sense changes and the unprecedented investments we’re making.”

Politico.  May 14, 2010.  Headline: President Obama's school plan riles lawmakers

Philanthrogovernment

Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic's literary editor, is a serious thinker.  He writes the "Washington Diarist" column on the last page of each issue, and it is always weighty and thought-provoking. It was from him that I first grasped the lightweightness of Obamism in international affairs.

This week he takes on philanthrogovernment, aka Bloombergism.  Worth the price of the issue (non-subscribers can't get the piece online).  Short summary here.

He begins with the article in the NY Times last winter about hedge fund operators getting involved in funding charter schools.   Initially it gives him a warm fuzzy feeling, then his blood starts to run a bit cold.  He catches a whiff of the hubris of these operators, of their data-driveness, and it worrries him.

From there he seques into a discussion of philanthrocapitalism, of the ability of wealthy philanthropists to address public problems governments have trouble with.  Bloombergism, he dubs this phenomenon, after New York mayor and bazillionaire Michael  Bloomberg.  All well and good, but, he notes, concerns rise when philanthropy creeps over the line and begins to subvert the democratic process -- as it manifestly has in New York, and especially in the operation of its public education system.

And then:

The signature contribution of the philanthrocapitalist to the American political tradition is the idea that social problems have market solutions. In the midst of our present troubles, however, there is much evidence to justify a new look at the grip of American business upon the American policy imagination. Isn’t it now ruefully clear that it all depends? In her exhilarating and deeply humane new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch exposes some of the fallacies of the business paradigm, and insists (in a valiant chapter called “The Billionaire Boys’ Club”) that “there is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people,” who “represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.” To whom, really, are they accountable?

It's great to see someone like Wieseltier paying attention to this.  Buy or get a copy of the magazine and read it for yourself.

Ssh! Don't let Arne see this!

Sometimes the education deformers are so stupid you think they are deliberately parodying themselves.  Case in point, Forrest Hinton's modest proposal at the Quick and the Ed.  After spelling out  why none of Duncan's 4 school improvement (sic) turnaround options will work well for rural schools (of course, there's no reason to think they'd have much success with urban schools, either, but Hinton slides past that), he offers a 5th option: replace staff with machines.

Yeah, that'll work.

My question is: why limit this wonderful new option to rural schools?  Why not be really bold and start replacing ALL teachers who don't show a test score bump with machines now?

What a wondeful idea!  I think I'll go start a consultancy called BellBanger or BongWeather Associates, line up my Gates Foundation funding and start pushing it now.

Mark my words.  In a week's time, Dunc is going to announce it as a 5th school improvement option.  You heard it here first.