Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Grading Betsy DeVos

It seems relatively easy to be cast into uncertainty in regards to any and all American political machinations as of late but I plan on focusing specifically on the problems with our current Secretary of Education Betsy, both real and imagined.  This confusion is especially true as quite a few 'politicians' would have trouble understanding that proceeding sentence (it has too many syllables perhaps?) and label the author an elitist simply based on vocabulary, sentence structure and the fact that there were no glaring typos - something the current administration is laughably bad at avoiding.  More likely it would simply be ignored as it was not a simple bullet point list, which, unlikely as it might be, could be appreciated by Henry David Thoreau ("Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify."*) Or even worse it wouldn't be read at all beyond the title and it would be roundly criticized, mischaracterized, argued using straw men, then ignored once the next problem arises in, judging by current tempo, about twenty minutes.

*"Please don't associate my name with those cretins.  Also, did you not read any of my works about civil disobedience you idiot?", what I imagine Thoreau might say to this inference.  After, of course, the whole "Oh my god I’m not dead anymore and what the fuck is a cell phone and did someone build a parking lot on my fucking pond?  I swear to crap this country sucks now."  Guess all that time transcending or whatever didn’t stop him speaking like a longshoreman when angry.

Besides the fast and loose method of dealing with the truth, the terrifying manner in which we find ourselves concerning the fourth estate, we are at a cultural war between rational thought and anti-intellectualism.  Thrust in the middle of this fiasco is an entirely pleasant woman who simply wants to change our education system in the manner she thinks will help children.

Her complete lack of experience, her lack of knowledge beyond the narrow scope of causes she champions is entirely glossed over in an era when being an actual expert is derided.  She lacks knowledge concerning; education; differentiation and special needs (IDEA); guns in schools (wait, what if the bears have guns, how do we deal with them then?); classroom experience; the laws around education; and countless (boxless if we are using common core math) other important topics that should concern someone running the department.

Millions of citizens have emailed and multiple thousands have called senators over the hearing for DeVos.  Phone lines have been overloaded with calls.  This is both amazing and disheartening.  Amazing in that people who opposed to a bad choice took time out of their day to fight politically, something the nation has been sorely lacking for time due to what I can only assume is long standing apathy from consistent failure and painful realities of being an American in the modern age of obstructionism and partisan politics.  Disheartening in that only two senators dissented in the face of this unprecedented outpouring of concern.

When we look at the amount of push back concerning DeVos it is curious in comparison to other nominations for executive departments.  People who have, in their recent past, been actively opposed, in legal battle with, or defy the modis operandi of the very department they are nominated to helm.  It is placing wolves as shepherds.  These departments are meant to help and defend American’s against predatory practices.  The EPA is meant to protect us against businesses and individuals who would circumvent laws and morality to pollute our environment doing us irreparable harm.  Placing a proponent of dirty energy who sued (by sued I mean sued thirteen times) the very agency he is now beholden to uphold in charge of this agency is exceptionally damaging.  By the way he sued the EPA thirteen times.  Now, it could be argued that bringing law suits against the agency does not mean he finds the EPA to be bad institution he simply wants to take legal action as is his right and without looking into his lawsuits and simply claiming the number as evidence is sloppy.  I’ll just leave this here for arguments sake.  While job creation is important dirty energy is not creating jobs at the same pace as green energy.  It’s being phased out.  It’s a last gasp and it is terribly important that those giants of industry, as they crumble, don’t crash around us and threaten to further damage our environment.

But this follows a trend of nominations.  The first Secretary of Labor nomination was Andrew Puzder, who ultimately, thank goodness, decided to walk away from the nomination.  Nominating a man in charge of fast food chains to look out for workers’ rights is to turn a blind eye to the predatory behavior of the franchise models and the exploitation of the unskilled minimum wage workers.  Predatory also aptly applies to Steven Mnuchin who has already been confirmed as Secretary of Labor. A man whose company “[used] potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes.”  80,000 illegal foreclosures.  Do we really want a man who illegally helped removed a small city’s population from their homes in this position?

It only seems logical to assume there is glaringly evil – and I mean glaringly mustache twirling, dastardly kind of evil - trend to nominate people who essentially hate the safeguards their agency in is charge of enforcing and creating.  This is beyond fucking terrifying.  Remember Flint Michigan still doesn’t have clean water.  Good luck having that fixed any time soon.  Imagine not having water for a few days, this has been going on since April.. April 2014…  twenty fucking fourteen!  DAPL is still fighting on sovereign Native American soil to place an unwanted oil pipeline through their territory.  Oil pipelines have a long, storied history of their contents someone how seeping into the ground and groundwater through breakages or seepages.
Here’s a few entirely unrelated links…

Pipeline Spill
Oil spill undiscosed
Does big oil care
Oil and gas well inspections


Unlike many of the nomination Betsy does not seem evil.  She seems quaint in comparison.  While some of the other nominees do have the experience and knowledge that Betsy lacks they combine that knowledge with hauntingly awful ideology.  But there are some trends that appear.  One trend seems to be with these nominations to highlight those who are not simply unfit but antagonistic to the very core of the department.  Also these individuals, who work for the executive branch of the government, are advocating having the federal government less involved in state affairs.  What does this have to do with Betsy DeVos?  It all boils down to school choice.

The aim of school choice is the ability to give parents and children choice in where they can go to school.  It’s intent is to give parents the ability to bring their child to another school be it private, religious, public or charter school.  In effect some politicians (while Republicans are the majority or those who want school choice the idea of supporting charter schools as a viable alternative to public schools is often a democrat’s rally cry) want to move the money bookmarked for each child to the school chosen by the family.  They want schools to compete and the best (the strongest) schools will grow stronger and the worst (the weakest) will be shuttered.  It’s the social Darwinism of education.  While this might be an effective policy in that good schools will get better and bad schools will close the reality is likely very, very different.

Part of the reason why schools are good or bad isn’t necessarily due to policy or the strength of the teachers and administration (I am in no way impugning teachers or policy but at a macro scale there is another metric that is far mightier).  It’s money.  Funding is derived from the state government, the local government and the federal government.  The state accepts federal funds (usually with strings attached which is why most states decided to accept common core as their mandate) and mixes that with funds from sales and income taxes.  At this point all schools are essentially equal.  The districts use property taxes to fund schools.  Higher property taxes correlates to more dollars feeding local schools.  This creates desirable communities for wealthier parents.  These higher performing desirable schools have more money to perpetuate this cycle.  Meanwhile inner city schools have less funding, they can barely keep up with infrastructure.  They start falling behind on items like federally mandated paraprofessionals, cutting arts programs, after school programs, and teachers begin to abandon the system.  It’s the opposite cycle.  Then testing comes into play with how federal and state funds are split.  Higher performing schools get more funds while other schools are penalized.  School in order to get those dollars they need simply to limp along alter how they teach so that they are focusing more on testing and less on holistic education.  The cycle perpetuates.  Parents move to better neighborhoods.

Then the idea of school choice comes in.  The argument is that parents should be free to choose schools and have a larger array of options.  On its face this is a wonderful idea.  Poor families who cannot move to desirable school systems could perhaps move their child out of poorly funded areas and give their child a better chance for success.  One question which immediately comes to mind is what happens to schools in inner cities or poor neighborhoods if all the children simply leave?  Another is the logistical nightmare regarding the sudden influx of millions cramming into better schools.  Obviously, the schools should be able to reject certain students, especially if they aren’t from the district of the parents paying into the system?  So then, if that’s true, not all the students can get in.  Choice is then narrowed and the students are competing for the school not the other way around.  Some students will make it out while other will not.  Yes, you may have choice but necessarily not the ability to get in.  In the end choice means nothing.  Could school choice possible work?  Yes?  Can it work without nitty gritty details, amazing legislative work and careful planning?  Zero boxes… sorry, I mean no chance.

Competition is not always better in this case we develop a zero sum game.  That’s essentially the system we already have.  For one school to benefit (get more funding) the other must get less.  So we can predict the success of school through game theory.  This of course is fucking maddening because it can look like this**:

M_{F}={\frac  {W_{O}+3W_{F}}{W_{O}+3W_{F}+2W_{O}+0W_{F}}}={\frac  {W_{O}+3W_{F}}{3W_{O}+3W_{F}}}

**Okay, maybe that is part game theory called battle of the sexes (postulated by Russel Crowe maybe?) but it still applies, kinda, but more than likely the formula for schools would be way more complicated.

So then we come to a decision are we treating schools like the economy and allow a free unregulated method for competition of funding, prestige, rating, and resources (this being teachers and students which one would assume have different values on their abilities both innate and learned) or do we regulate more tightly.

Is this about kids or is it about money?  Is this just some fucked up economic model to be exploited?  If so we shouldn’t let the administration populated with wall street villains hoist their pick upon us.  That’s damning in it of itself.  Look at the system for incarceration and how bad it became under privatization.  As an aside if group of politician think the best way to run the country is more privatization because the government can’t be trusted to run things correctly why are we letting those same politicians make choices?  Shouldn’t we stop paying them?   This obviously is not a real argument but simply one to highlight to hypocrisy and foolishness of privatization as simply passing along the problem.

Another solution is the probably unpopular but likely empathetic choice of the diverting funding into the failing schools that need more help instead of penalizing them.  If it’s broken simply fix it.  Bring those schools on par with the others in the nation.  Why have these schools compete when they aren’t on a level playing field.  That’s part of the premise of school choice: competition.  The weak fall and the strong survive.  Will this help all kids or will it simply divert funds from public and follow students to parochial and private schools.  Several politicians would like to see the money ear marked per child follow them to the appropriate school.  Troubling here would be that through choice American’s would be funding religious schools, private schools, or charter schools that don’t need to meet the same rigid standards as public schools.

So perhaps instead of figuring out ways to move people away from failing schools – which is the intent of school choice – we fix the failing schools.  But that’s just theory it isn’t like anyone has actually done that.  Well unless you count Finland because Finland totally did that.  They completely changed how they ran schools.

“There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.”***

This lack of competition is decidedly an unamerican cultural trend.  It may very well be something that is helpful to education.  However, don’t think that removing competition means removing work or challenge.  It shouldn’t.  Finland also treats it’s teachers markedly different and enables then to teach in manner they deem most effective.  Imagine that the person who deals with the students directly, who has educated him or herself through countless years of schooling to do just that, is treated with the level of respect they earned through hard work and experience.  The teachers are trusted to do what is best for the children.

Here are two links about Finnish schools:
What Americans keep ignoring about Finland school success
***Why are Finland's schools succesful

Let’s ignore Finland for a moment.  Let’s even ignore school choice which is the only ideology we seem to know about from Betsy DeVos.  Let’s look at her first visit to a school that actually let her arrive.  For some reason schools’ have been hesitant or outright belligerent to Secretary DeVos.  I can only hope there is enough self awareness among Betsy and her cadre to understand that reaction.
She finally visited a school in the D.C. area (Jefferson Academy) and was able to spend the day watching teachers interact with their class.  While Betsy had praise for the school and the teachers it was comingled with sharp criticism in regards to them in what she terms receive mode.

Here is the quote in full:

“I visited a school on Friday and met with some wonderful, genuine, sincere teachers who pour their heart and soul into their classrooms and their students and our conversation was not long enough to draw out of them what is limiting them from being even more success from what they are currently. But I can tell the attitude is more of a ‘receive mode.’ They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child. You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.” ~ Secretary Betsy DeVos

Now it’s entirely possible Secretary DeVos is correct in her assessment.  More likely she is simply wrong as Jefferson Academy is “one of the fastest-improving schools in the city’s public school system.”****  It is also likely that DeVos, who has likely never gone into a classroom and observed before, is simply taking an opportunity to build a support system for her views.  If she states that the teachers here are in support mode and aren’t creating success she is developing a narrative that fits her goals.  That she is creating a narrative without any substance is what truly ties Secretary DeVos to this administration.  Perhaps she’ll mandate curriculum to include alternative facts or false narratives.
But I’m not an educator.  It might seem hypocritical to admonish her for something I have roughly the same amount of experience regarding.

Fortunately Jefferson Academy responded through a series of tweets (see below).  I really do hope that reliance on tweets to get messages, propaganda, and political views across is scoured from the earth sooner rather than later.  However, it’s nice to see the passion and counterargument from the school.

“This is what Sec. DeVos said about our teachers after her visit. Needless to say, we're about to take her to school...

“First, the secretary visited the classroom of Ashley Shepherd and Britany Locher, a dynamic co-teaching team that differentiates for the...

“needs of students ranging from a first grade level to an eighth grade level in reading. They build amazing relationships with students and..

“maintain a positive classroom environment focused on rigorous content, humor, and love. They aren't waiting to be told what to do.

“Then she saw Latisha Trent in action. Ms. Trent has been at Jefferson for 3 years, and each year her students grow MULTIPLE grade levels...

“in Math. EVERY student realizes his or her maximum potential in Ms. Trent's room. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“Then the Sec. met Band teacher Jessica Harris, who has built our Music program from the ground up. Ms. Harris pours her heart into her work.

“Ms. Harris is patient, kind, relentless, and reflective. She is everything you want in a teacher. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“Morgan Markbreiter was there as well. Ms. MB has unleashed the passion of countless students through her Video Game Design course. MB also..

“runs our INCREDIBLE after-school program, which provides FREE tutoring and enrichment to our kids. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“JA teachers are not in a "receive mode." Unless you mean we "receive" students at a 2nd grade level and move them to an 8th grade level.

Here are two links on the visit:
****DeVos criticized teachers at a DC school she visited and they are not having it
Public school fires back after betsy DeVos criticizes it's teachers


If you still believe Secretary DeVos is a good pick you are allowed to have that opinion.  But I hope you remember that not all opinions are created equal.  You certainly have the choice to make this opinion.  But maybe not the ability to make an informed one.  Now go and hug a teacher and tell them everything is going to be okay.  They likely need it.

Ben