The HML Blog

11 surprisingly apt lessons from Machiavelli’s The Prince

11 surprisingly apt lessons from Machiavelli’s The Prince

The 16th-century treatise is known for its detached ruthlessness. But you can still learn a lot from reading it.

By Shane Parrish Source: The Week

Don’t be cruel. And watch out for brown nosers.

British philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell once called The Prince a handbook for gangsters.

The book, a slender political treatise by the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli, was offered to Lorenzo de Medici as a sort of job application. Written in 1513, it was not widely published until 1532, five years after the author’s death. Upon its publication, The Prince became well known as among the controversial of many advice books for rulers. Generally, these advice books framed their instruction around Christian virtue. The Prince did not.

A voracious reader, Machiavelli stripped out the ideals and drew examples from history. He believed that anyone who ignores reality in a misguided attempt to live up to an ideal will quickly destroy himself. He de-emphasized the importance of moral considerations, and focused instead on effectiveness. He believed that the ends justified the means.

Canadian scholar and politician Michael Ignatieff puts it this way: The Prince forces readers to confront, in the starkest terms possible, the most important questions about politics and morality. In the book, what would normally shock us become simple precepts. The book is wickedly simple.

Some of his most objectionable recommendations are put in ways that make them sound eminently reasonable. In order to get a secure hold on new territories, the book advises, “one need merely eliminate the surviving members of the family of their previous rulers.” How innocent-sounding is that “merely.”

Yes, the book can be ruthless. But there are still many surprisingly apt lessons. Here’s what I’ve learned from reading The Prince.

1. Be present
“… if one is on the spot, disorders are seen as they spring up, and one can quickly remedy them; but if one is not at hand, they are heard of only when they are great, and then one can no longer remedy them.”

2. Be careful who you trust
“… he who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.”

3. Learn from the best
“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.”

4. Be picky about who works for you
“The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined the usual way.”

5. Read
“… to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former.”

6. Prepare for the worst
“A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune changes it may find him prepared to resist her blows.”

7. Don’t be cruel
“… every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel.”

8. Don’t steal
“… above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. … he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse.”

9. Appearances matter
“… men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.”

10. Sometimes your enemies are your friends
“I must not fail to warn a prince, who by means of secret favours has acquired a new state, that he must well consider the reasons which induced those to favour him who did so; and if it be not a natural affection towards him, but only discontent with their government, then he will only keep them friendly with great trouble and difficulty, for it will be impossible to satisfy them. And weighing well the reasons for this in those examples which can be taken from ancient and modern affairs, we shall find that it is easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and encouraged him to seize it.”

11. Avoid flatterers
“It is that of flatterers, of whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell you the truth, respect for you abates.”

Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement

reviewed by Brian D. Ray — January 10, 2014

Title: Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement
Author(s): Joseph F. Murphy
Publisher: Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks
ISBN: 145220523X, Pages: 200, Year: 2012
Search for book at Amazon.com

Homeschooling in America gives insights to perhaps the most fascinating and aberrant movement of the past half-century in U.S. educational history. Murphy’s first chapter informs and engages both the newcomer and veteran regarding research-based information on the modern homeschooling movement. He properly gives definitions of homeschooling, provides statistics on the growth of the homeschooling population, and makes introductory comments on the overall state of knowledge about homeschooling. From the beginning of his book, Murphy cautions the reader with his judgment that “there is not an overabundance of solid empirical work on homeschooling,” (p. 3) and “ there is a nearly universal call for more research on homeschooling in the scholarly community, and increasingly for more sophisticated and stronger research designs” (p. 13). With these points in mind, Murphy launches into his very readable and reasonable summary of “the state of knowledge” (p. 12) in Chapters Two through Seven.

Regarding demographics, Murphy reports that homeschool families, on average, are solidly middle class, with that status relying on one wage earner, have parents who tend to be better educated than non-homeschool parents, have a high amount of marital cohesiveness among them, and are larger than the average U.S. family. The homeschool community is becoming somewhat more ethnically and racially diverse, while whites continue to be very overrepresented, and they are “overwhelmingly Christian, usually Protestant . . . tend to be socially and politically conservative, but not withdrawn from issues of the larger community in which they live” (p. 27).

Chapter Three provides a sweeping and fast-paced history of the movement and part way through the author asks, “How did homeschooling go from being on the fringe, and often a hostile venue on the fringe, to the mainstream?” (p. 37). Murphy focuses his answer on how the people involved in homeschooling created a robust, effective, and encouraging network of support groups and associations and worked for “the legalization of a practice that was on the margins of legality [in many states] only 30 years ago” (p. 39). In this chapter, as in all chapters, the author gives a succinct and useful chapter summary.

Murphy’s fourth chapter explores the “environmental conditions that foster homeschooling” and it is here that he weaves in much language and theory from some of his specialties, school improvement and leadership, education policy, and privatization (or not) of education. His sections on the social context related to homeschooling – “before homeschool (1800-1890),” “before homeschool (1890-1970),” and “homeschooling (1970 on)” are pithy and pointedly describe the competing forces of centralization and government control over children’s education versus local and/or parental control over education. Current forces supporting homeschooling are localization (decentralization, localism), more populist conceptions of democracy, “a rebalancing of the control equation in favor of lay citizens while diminishing the power of the state and educational professionals” (p. 69), the ideology of choice, and the rise of democratic professionalism in the political infrastructure of schooling and “the gradual decline of control by elite professionals” (e.g., professional managers, teacher unions).

The Calculus of Departure: Parent Motivations for Homeschooling” (Chapter Five) is a solid overview of the research and Murphy lays out a clear and parsimonious framework for understanding why parents choose homeschooling rather than institutional state or private schooling. The framework includes basic reasons most readers have probably already considered, such as those related to religion, family, school academics, and school social elements, but Murphy also includes the very important variable of parental control (rather than state or private institutional control) over a child’s rearing and, finally, the insight that there are things pushing families away from public schools and pulling them toward homeschooling

Chapter Six provides fascinating glimpses into the very wide diversity and rich array of how parents and children and local homeschool communities act out “homeschooling” on a daily and yearly basis. He allows the reader to see, in adequate detail, that curriculum materials, pedagogical approaches, social experiences, and daily educational and family practices are myriad and diverse across home-educating families.

For those who want to focus on whether homeschooling is “better,” “worse,” or “no different” for children and youth compared to institutional public or private schooling, Chapter Seven will be a key passage. Murphy addresses “the impact of homeschooling” (p. 121) on schools and school systems, on families, and on students, in terms of their academic achievement, social development, and relative success beyond secondary education. Regarding academic achievement, “… we know more than some analysts suggest we do,” “… we know a lot less than advocates of homeschooling would have us believe” (p. 140), there is a growing body of evidence that reveals homeschool students are performing above average on standardized tests, and “… there is a fair amount of suggestive evidence that homeschooling can tamp down the effects found in public schools of family socioeconomic variables” (p. 140).

Regarding the social development of the home educated, Murphy addresses (cf., Medlin, 2013) several hypotheses that critics of homeschooling especially promote. For example, they postulate that the home educated will be socially isolated and therefore have poor social skills; research, however, clearly shows these children are not socially isolated. Second, some hypothesize the homeschooled will have weaker self-concepts (variously defined and measured), but research shows that “home-based education appears at least as capable of nurturing self-concept as conventional schools” (p. 146). “They are generally a happy group… score about the same as conventionally schooled peers on measures of social acceptance ,” and “[overall], they demonstrate appropriate prosocial behavior and social responsibility” (p. 147). Further, research, although very limited in the number of studies to date, indicates that the long-term effects of homeschooling on its “graduates” (p. 148) are adequately positive.

Joseph Murphy’s creativity, systematic thinking, and ability to synthesize come through in his final chapter, “Hunches: Explanations for Positive Effects.” Again, he cautions the reader that the designs of research projects thus far notably limit what can be said about causation and “how [italics in original] homeschooling impacts student learning” (p. 154). Murphy then presents his instincts about the positive effects, and he gives a succinct and useful-to-researchers “logic model” of the “influence of homeschooling on student learning” in Figure 8.1 (p. 155).

“If there is a beginning point in the logic of action for homeschooling’s impact, it is most likely parental involvement” (p. 155) that is part of the warp and woof of homeschooling but cannot be to the same high level with institutional schooling. Second, Murphy points out, the high amounts of one-to-one instruction that homeschool students receive is good for their academic and social development and it is possible “that extensive one-to-one engagement is more important than pedagogical technique,” and might trump the educational expertise that certified teachers and professional systems might have (p. 156). He posits that the more efficient use of time and more customization in homeschooling have positive effects. Murphy mentions that a “variety of reviewers also suggest that homeschooling promotes academic and social learning by providing structures that encourage good instructional practices to flourish” (p. 158). Further, parent-led home-based education provides a safe and nourishing climate. “On the one hand, this means the development of a climate that is safe and orderly, a nonthreatening culture in which the academic work of school can unfold,” and it is also here that there “is the elimination of the negative peer culture sometimes seen in conventional schools” and instead “a supportive culture that grows from committed families and loving parents” (p. 159). Finally, the author discusses the personalization of homeschooling. Murphy deduces from research that “a positive learning environment is made possible by the nurturing relationships that seem to be more easily forged in homeschools” and homeschools “need not develop the institutional scaffolding and impersonality that define conventional schools” (p. 160). He nails down this concept with the following: “The key here is the development in homeschools of a highly personalized climate in which the child is known, cared for, and respected more deeply than is possible in models of collective schooling” (p. 160).

Murphy does several things well in his book that should be considered the best to date on the overall state of the homeschooling movement and theory explaining the effects of homeschooling. He does a fine job of covering nearly all the research to date on homeschooling, is generous in giving credit where it is due regarding the research done, is calm in his tone of reporting research and findings that might irritate or please historical critics or advocates of home-based education, and wraps up his book with an even-keeled, judicious, and enlightening proposed “logic of action for homeschooling’s impact” (p. 155). His theory is complementary to but an improved conceptual advancement over my (Ray, 1997, p. 85-102; 2000, p. 91-100) circumspect explanations of the positive impact of homeschooling on children, youth, and society.

Murphy will certainly annoy some (and please others) with his worldview and angle on interpreting educational/schooling history in Chapter Four on the “environmental conditions that foster homeschooling.” He points out that during the mid to late 1800s, “the key governance [over schools and education] issues were forged on the anvil of control” (pp. 55-56). One group pressed for more state schooling and more centralized control of it to implement the public school to mold citizens, give them the right knowledge, create productive workers, and create social harmony, and by 1970 public schooling was governed by a corporate bureaucratic model in a managerial state led by experts. The expansion of the “liberal democratic state brought activist government that assumed ever-expanding responsibility for social life” and “also diminished the influence of parents” (pp. 59-60). Murphy contends that homeschooling can be seen “as part of an ongoing debate about who should control the education of America’s children, government or parents” (p. 60). On this, Murphy is very correct, as many authors have explained. Murphy rightly posits that the homeschooling movement is against the liberal democratic state in that it is against “government domination of schooling and against the dominant role played by professional educators in the production known as schooling” (p. 60). Knowing the homeschool movement as intimately as I do, I think Murphy should have added to his preceding sentence “and against the production of knowledge and values that are transmitted to children and youth in places called school, whether state-controlled/public or private.”

I am not familiar with Joseph Murphy’s scholarship and writings but his conceptual framework seems to appear rather clearly in this same chapter. He talks about factors that account for discontent with the public sector and help “… fuel privatization initiatives such as homeschooling” (p. 61). He explains that some (he?) hold that (a) “the growth of the public sector contained the seeds of its own destruction” (p. 62), (b) “many of our social problems are in reality cratogenic—that is, created by the state” (p. 63), (c) perhaps public production (e.g., of education/schooling) is so inherently inefficient that it is worse than market failures it is supposed to correct, and (d) public employees (e.g., school teachers) are such direct beneficiaries of government spending that “they are likely to use the power of the ballot box to promote the objective of government growth” (p. 65) rather than the good of those they serve (e.g., students). One of Murphy’s points is that thinking in favor of less bureaucracy (and more grassroots), less of experts (and more of laypersons) being in charge, and less of state control (and more of parents) over individual and family life encourage and bolster the homeschooling movement. Regardless of whether the reader shares Murphy’s worldview or conceptual framework about society, economics, and schooling, he is correct about the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers thinking this way.

Homeschooling in America provides perhaps the most equable and yet insightful and engaging cohesive impression of the rising homeschooling movement (cf., Ray, 2013) proffered over the past decade. Joseph Murphy gives both an in-depth summary and evaluation of the research base on home education and offers a creative, yet reserved, theory that explains “the positive influence of homeschools on the academic and social learning of youngsters” (pp. 153-154). Every academic who studies or follows homeschooling in any nation will benefit from this treatise, and any layperson who is curious about or has an interest in parent-led home-based education will enjoy this book.

References

Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284-297.

Ray, B. D. (1997). Strengths of their own. Salem, OR: National Home Education Research Institute.

Ray, B. D. (2000). Home Schooling: The ameliorator of negative influences on learning? Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1&2), 71-106

Ray, B. D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 324-341.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: January 10, 2014
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 17378, Date Accessed: 1/18/2014 6:30:26 PM

David Berliner Invites You to Try a Thought Experiment

David Berliner has designed a provocative thought experiment.

He offers you State A and State B.

He describes salient differences between them.

Can you predict which state has high-performing schools and which state has low-performing schools?

Let’s do a thought experiment. I will slowly parcel out data about two different states. Eventually, when you are nearly 100% certain of your choice, I want you to choose between them by identifying the state in which an average child is likely to be achieving better in school. But you have to be nearly 100% certain that you can make that choice.

To check the accuracy of your choice I will use the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as the measure of school achievement. It is considered by experts to be the best indicator we have to determine how children in our nation are doing in reading and mathematics, and both states take this test.

Let’s start. In State A the percent of three and four-year-old children attending a state associated prekindergarten is 8.8% while in State B the percent is 1.7%. With these data think about where students might be doing better in 4th and 8th grade, the grades NAEP evaluates student progress in all our states. I imagine that most people will hold onto this information about preschool for a while and not yet want to choose one state over the other. A cautious person might rightly say it is too soon to make such a prediction based on a difference of this size, on a variable that has modest, though real effects on later school success.

So let me add more information to consider. In State A the percent of children living in poverty is 14% while in State B the percent is 24%. Got a prediction yet? See a trend? How about this related statistic: In State A the percent of households with food insecurity is 11.4% while in State B the percent is 14.9%. I also can inform you also that in State A the percent of people without health insurance is 3.8% while in State B the percent is 17.7%. Are you getting the picture? Are you ready to pick one state over another in terms of the likelihood that one state has its average student scoring higher on the NAEP achievement tests than the other?

If you still say that this is not enough data to make yourself almost 100% sure of your pick, let me add more to help you. In State A the per capita personal income is $54,687 while in state B the per capita personal income is $35,979. Since per capita personal income in the country is now at about $42,693, we see that state A is considerably above the national average and State B is considerably below the national average. Still not ready to choose a state where kids might be doing better in school?

Alright, if you are still cautious in expressing your opinions, here is some more to think about. In State A the per capita spending on education is $2,764 while in State B the per capita spending on education is $2,095, about 25% less. Enough? Ready to choose now?

Maybe you should also examine some statistics related to the expenditure data, namely, that the pupil/teacher ratio (not the class sizes) in State A is 14.5 to one, while in State B it is 19.8 to one.

As you might now suspect, class size differences also occur in the two states. At the elementary and the secondary level, respectively, the class sizes for State A average 18.7 and 20.6. For State B those class sizes at elementary and secondary are 23.5 and 25.6, respectively. State B, therefore, averages at least 20% higher in the number of students per classroom. Ready now to pick the higher achieving state with near 100% certainty? If not, maybe a little more data will make you as sure as I am of my prediction.

In State A the percent of those who are 25 years of age or older with bachelors degrees is 38.7% while in State B that percent is 26.4%. Furthermore, the two states have just about the same size population. But State A has 370 public libraries and State B has 89.
Let me try to tip the data scales for what I imagine are only a few people who are reluctant to make a prediction. The percent of teachers with Master degrees is 62% in State A and 41.6% in State B. And, the average public school teacher salary in the time period 2010-2012 was $72,000 in State A and $46,358 in State B. Moreover, during the time period from the academic year 1999-2000 to the academic year 2011-2012 the percent change in average teacher salaries in the public schools was +15% in State A. Over that same time period, in State B public school teacher salaries dropped -1.8%.

I will assume by now we almost all have reached the opinion that children in state A are far more likely to perform better on the NAEP tests than will children in State B. Everything we know about the ways we structure the societies we live in, and how those structures affect school achievement, suggests that State A will have higher achieving students. In addition, I will further assume that if you don’t think that State A is more likely to have higher performing students than State B you are a really difficult and very peculiar person. You should seek help!

So, for the majority of us, it should come as no surprise that in the 2013 data set on the 4th-grade NAEP mathematics test State A was the highest performing state in the nation (tied with two others). And it had 16 percent of its children scoring at the Advanced level—the highest level of mathematics achievement. State B’s score was behind 32 other states, and it had only 7% of its students scoring at the Advanced level. The two states were even further apart on the 8th grade mathematics test, with State A the highest scoring state in the nation, by far, and with State B lagging behind 35 other states.

Similarly, it now should come as no surprise that State A was number 1 in the nation in the 4th grade reading test, although tied with 2 others. State A also had 14% of its students scoring at the advanced level, the highest rate in the nation. Students in State B scored behind 44 other states and only 5% of its students scored at the Advanced level. The 8th grade reading data was the same: State A walloped State B!

States A and B really exist. State B is my home state of Arizona, which obviously cares not to have its children achieve as well as do those in state A. It’s poor achievement is by design. Proof of that is not hard to find. We just learned that 6000 phone calls reporting child abuse to the state were uninvestigated. Ignored and buried! Such callous disregard for the safety of our children can only occur in an environment that fosters, and then condones a lack of concern for the children of the Arizona, perhaps because they are often poor and often minorities. Arizona, given the data we have, apparently does not choose to take care of its children. The agency with the express directive of ensuring the welfare of children may need 350 more investigators of child abuse. But the governor and the majority of our legislature is currently against increased funding for that agency.

State A, where kids do a lot better, is Massachusetts. It is generally a progressive state in politics. To me, Massachusetts, with all its warts, resembles Northern European countries like Sweden, Finland, and Denmark more than it does states like Alabama, Mississippi or Arizona. According to UNESCO data and epidemiological studies, it is the progressive societies like those in Northern Europe and Massachusetts that care much better for their children. On average, in comparisons with other wealthy nations, the U. S. turns out not to take good care of its children. With few exceptions, our politicians appear less likely to kiss our babies and more likely to hang out with individuals and corporations that won’t pay the taxes needed to care for our children, thereby ensuring that our schools will not function well.

But enough political commentary: Here is the most important part of this thought experiment for those who care about education. Every one of you who predicted that Massachusetts would outperform Arizona did so without knowing anything about the unions’ roles in the two states, the curriculum used by the schools, the quality of the instruction, the quality of the leadership of the schools, and so forth. You made your prediction about achievement without recourse to any of the variables the anti-public school forces love to shout about –incompetent teachers, a dumbed down curriculum, coddling of students, not enough discipline, not enough homework, and so forth. From a few variables about life in two different states, you were able to predict differences in student achievement test scores quite accurately.

I believe it is time for the President, the Secretary of Education, and many in the press to get off the backs of educators and focus their anger on those who will not support societies in which families and children can flourish. Massachusetts still has many problems to face and overcome—but they are nowhere as severe as those in my home state and a dozen other states that will not support programs for neighborhoods, families, and children to thrive.

This little thought experiment also suggests also that a caution for Massachusetts is in order. It seems to me that despite all their bragging about their fine performance on international tests and NAEP tests, it’s not likely that Massachusetts’ teachers, or their curriculum, or their assessments are the basis of their outstanding achievements in reading and mathematics. It is much more likely that Massachusetts is a high performing state because it has chosen to take better care of its citizens than do those of us living in other states. The roots of high achievement on standardized tests is less likely to be found in the classrooms of Massachusetts and more likely to be discovered in its neighborhoods and families, a reflection of the prevailing economic health of the community served by the schools of that state.

ALEC’s Extensive Plans for Education Restructuring in Your State

by Mercedes Schneider

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (established 1973) offers corporate America the opportunity to shape legislation that serves its profit-garnering interests and to do so in statehouses around the country.

To accomplish this controlling of the legislative process, ALEC provides forums (conferences that double as posh vacations for legislators and their families) in which both companies and legislators meet in order to write and vote on “model” legislation. The agreed-upon “model” legislation is then advanced in statehouses nationwide, carried home with legislators like a corporate-financed virus, with ALEC providing abundant reminders and “talking points” (a short list of statements that offer the appearance of having detailed knowledge of an issue) for legislators to help ensure passage of bills designed to fill those corporate-sponsor coffers.

(An aside: Though mostly corporations and legislators, ALEC members also include corporate trade groups, non-profits, law and lobbying firms, and government groups.)

For a detailed reading on ALEC, see the Common Cause website. It is quite the eye-opener.

ALEC was able to operate under the radar for decades, until Common Cause filed awhistleblower complaint against ALEC with the IRS in April 2012. Seems ALEC forgot to acknowledge more than a decade of lobbying on its tax forms.

Despite the Common Cause filing, the ALEC mission of serving its corporate sponsors via its model legislation continues.

ALEC currently advances model legislation in nine areas via its task forces:

Civil Justice

Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development

Communications and Technology

Education

Energy, Environment, and Agriculture

Health and Human Services

International Relations

Justice Performance Project (formerly Public Safety and Elections)

Tax and Fiscal Policy

Nine task forces. Nine areas in which ALEC exercises undue influence over the American democratic process, turning its wishes into law.

The remainder of this post will focus upon ALEC’s influence upon education in states across the nation via its Education Task Force “model” legislation.

See if these “models” sound familiar in your state.

The Charter Schools Act (pre-2008, likely 1995)

The Charter Schools Act allows groups of citizens to seek charters from the state to create and operate innovative, outcomes-based schools. These schools would be exempt from state laws and regulations that apply to public schools. Schools are funded on a per-pupil rate, the same as public schools. Currently, Minnesota operates the most well-known program. [Emphasis added.]

The charters are to be evaluated using student test scores.

Here’s another sales pitch for charters– in which they are declared as “necessary” for “choice”:

The Next Generation Charter Schools Act (2007)

The State of [state] (ALEC provides a convenient fill-in-the-blank so that legislators might use as little critical thought as possible in advancing ALEC bills) recognizesestablishment of charter schools as necessary to improving the opportunities of all families to choose the public school that meets the needs of their children, and believes that charter schools serve a distinct purpose in supporting innovations and best practices that can be adopted among all public schools. [Emphasis added.]

Charters– often both established by and staffed with individuals having little to no professional teaching credentials and experience– are going to show traditional public schools how to implement “best practices.” Gotta love it.

Moving on. How about “voucher zones”?

The Education Enterprise Zone Act (pre-2008, likely 1995)

The Education Enterprise Zone Act creates and provides for parental choice of schools within an educational enterprise zone (EEZ). All public and private schools within a designated zone. Any elementary or secondary student who is eligible for participation in a free lunch program may attend any school within the zone, provided the school has space and the student meets admission requirements.

The legislation further provides that if the student attends a private school, the state shall issue to the parent a voucher valued in an amount equal to the average amount of per pupil funding allocated to that school system, or the full amount of the private school’s tuition and fees, whichever is less. [Emphasis added.]

Even though the “zone” proposal above is a voucher plan, it seems that ALEC really wanted to sell an individualized voucher plan. The writers of the ALEC bill below go through a lengthy explanation in an effort to convince readers that many traditional public schools are failing students and that vouchers are “an alternative” for the “tax-paying public” to get “a return” they are “entitled to” for the “increasing amount of tax dollars being invested in education.” (No mention is made of ever-increasing responsibility foisted upon schools in conjunction with the “increasing” dollars.)

The ALEC voucher model betrays the misinformed, arrogant viewpoint that public education (i.e., public school teachers) will only educate students if forced.

Here’s another ALEC voucher model bill:

The Family Choice in Education Act (pre-2008, likely 1982)

Modern elementary and secondary education systems have not been able to generate a more informed, more intellectually satisfied student population. …

The Family choice in Education Act does not require additional education outlays. It is funded by that portion of the state budget that currently pays for elementary and secondary education. Since schools would compete among each other for students, the public schools would have an incentive to economize. Schools which are unable to sustain a steady flow of students would either alter theircurriculum and policies or cease to operate altogether. …

…In the past fifteen years, the amount of public monies directed to education almost doubled as a share of GNP, tripled as a share of many state budgets and increased over seven-fold as a measure of constant dollars. …

One alternative to the present system is a tuition voucher plan. This is a system under which families would choose which school, be it public or private, that their child would attend. A voucher plan would not require a change in hiring, testing, curriculum or even enrollment standards set by the schools. The only difference between a voucher system and the current one is that families rather than the government would decide on the choice of a school. …

For public schools, participation in the new system would be mandatory. This means that public schools would compete with one another for the enrollment of students, rather than be guaranteed a regular student population. …

The principal advantage of the Family Choice in Education Act is that it makes public schools responsive to the needs and desires of students. Under the current system, the schools have no such incentive because students are required by law to attend particular schools. The only alternative is the private sector, which charges tuition. Such an arrangement has the effect of insulating public schools from external pressure to restructure their approach to education. [Emphasis added.]

ALEC even has a bill promoting preschool vouchers:

The Smart Start Scholarship Program (2006)

This bill creates a scholarship program that helps children from low- and middle-income families attend the public or private 4-year-old preschool program or 5-year-old kindergarten program of their parents’ choice.

On a positive note: The evaluation of the kiddie voucher program does not involve administering standardized tests to preschoolers. On a negative note: Only the preschool voucher model bill includes a section on the evaluation of the voucher program. The other ALEC voucher bills include no means of evaluating the program– and no means of ensuring the quality of participating private schools.

The next voucher bill (ALEC loves the voucher idea) skirts the issue of handing out voucher cash to parents and instead involves the issuance of voucher “certificates” (coupons) for students to attend “choice” schools. According to the bill, public schools must participate, and private schools can decide if they want to:

Tuition Certificate Act (pre-2008)

… the State educational agency shall initiate and carry out a program in which the parent of each school-age child receives from State (or appropriate local educational agency), on request, a certificate that may be used for educational services at a participating school selected by the child’s parent in accordance with this Act.

The next ALEC bill promotes the power of school boards to outsource services to companies in the name of “efficiency.” However, the ALEC push to outsource is little more than an effort to do what other ALEC model bills (e.g., charters, vouchers) promote: The funneling of public money into private hands.

The School Board Freedom to Contract Act (1999)

The School Board Freedom to Contract Act encourages the establishment of public/private partnerships between school boards and the private sector for outsourcing and delivery of ancillary services under the direction of school boards, when said services/programs can be executed more efficiently and more
cost-effectively by the private sector.

Now for a great idea: Take lower-performing students and put them in an automated education setting. Call it “virtual public school” to make it sound fancy. Be sure to note that virtual public school “may” help students improve academically.

Virtual Public Schools Act (2005)

…“Virtual school” shall mean an independent public school in which the school uses technology in order to deliver a significant portion of instruction to its students via the Internet in a virtual or remote setting. …

Meeting the educational needs of children in our state’s schools is of the greatest importance to the future welfare of [state]…

… Providing a broader range of educational options to parents and utilizing existing resources, along with technology, may help students in our state improve their academic achievement….

…Virtual schools established in this article… Must be recognized as public schools and provided equitable treatment and resources as any other public school in the state. [Emphasis added.]

These “schools in front of a screen” may” work– we don’t know if they will prior to pushing through this legislation in [state]– but be sure they get their share of [state’s] public school fiscal pie.

In 2010, ALEC expanded its virtual learning to include a “clearinghouse” of online courses to be offered across districts. The model bill, entitled Online Learning Clearinghouse Act, includes no details regarding the accountability of the online education vendors. There is, however, a section detailing the payment of fees to the unaccountable virtual vendors.

And in order to further ensure that under-regulated online vendors might have a chance to pocket public school funding, in May 2012, ALEC proposed a model bill, Online Course Choice for Students:

This bill opens up the world of high-quality online course instruction to students. Each year, students in public school grades 7-12 would have the option to enroll in up to two online courses that award college credit or meet standards for core academic courses. The state would create standards and accountability measures to ensure that they are providing students with a course catalog containing only high-quality online course offerings. Funding for each online course is driven by the free-market in an open and competitive process, rather than simply allocating a portion of student funding unrelated to the actual cost to deliver the course. (In other words, vendors are paid per student.) Finally, after completion of each online course,parents and students provide feedback via the web in an open forum to rate the effectiveness of the course. This feedback, combined with test scores, provides a quality indicator ranking that is available to all. [Emphasis added.]

No agency monitors these vendors to guarantee that teaching and learning are actually happening.

Moving on, moving on.

What about student data collection? ALEC is all for it, so long as it happens at the state and not the federal level. Only ALEC wants to promote their version of data collection– one clearly meant to feed into the evaluation of teaches using student test scores.

The Longitudinal Student Growth Act (2006)

The Longitudinal Student Growth Act requires the state department of education to implement a state data management system for collecting and reporting student assessment data and identifies the duties and responsibilities of the state department of education and the school districts in implementing the data management system.The legislation instructs the state board of education to adopt a mixed-effect statistical model to diagnostically calculate students’ annual academic growth over the periods between the administration of the statewide assessments…. The department is required to calculate what constitutes sufficient academic growth for each student for each school year. … The legislation… requires the school district or charter school to adopt a policy for using the information in the [academic growth] report…. [Emphasis added.]

The language of the above ALEC model bill hints at the use of student data for evaluation of schools in the “school accountability report” and “students assigned to specific classrooms and teachers.”

The model bill assumes that student achievement can be accurately predicted using statistical equations.

Again, moving right along….

The following two ALEC models were presented as part of ALEC’s annual conference in San Diego in August 2010:

In keeping with the ALEC goal of defunding public education, ALEC offers this model bill to fiscally penalize public schools whose students complete high school early:

Higher Education Scholarships for High School Pupils Act (2010)

This bill enables a school district to adopt and offer higher education scholarships for high school pupils to any high school pupil who graduates high school early and who achieves a score in the “proficient” range or above on all subjects tested in the statewide assessment. The scholarship would be equivalent to 1/2 of the total per-pupil expenditure for high school pupils in such school district to be used to defray tuition costs at any public or private institution of higher education within or outside of [state].

And now, the ALEC model bill we’ve all been waiting for…

Great Teachers and Leaders Act (2010)

The Great Teachers and Leaders Act reforms the practice of tenure, known as nonprobationary status in some states. Teachers can earn tenure after 3 years of sufficient student academic growth; tenure is revocable following 2 consecutive years of insufficient growth. The council for educator effectiveness will define teacher effectiveness and come up with parameters for an evaluation system that requires 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on student achievement using multiple measures. The Act requires principals to be evaluated annually with 50 percent of the evaluation based on student achievement and their ability to develop teachers in their buildings and increase their effectiveness. [Emphasis added.]

Can’t collect all of that student test score data for nothing. And as ALEC members well know based upon their vast experience in the public school classroom, testing more (i.e., ‘multiple measures”) equals learning.

Now, as I read many of these ALEC model bills– particularly the voucher bills– I cannot help but think of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Thus, it is only fitting that ALEC should model an omnibus bill (one huge bill comprised of a number of smaller ALEC model bills) after the supposed Florida Miracle– or grading shell game.

The ALEC, “We Love Jeb” bill is called the A-Plus Literacy Act. It was showcasedin Washington, DC, in December 2010.

Here’s where grading schools using letter grades originates.

Chapters of the A-Plus Literacy Act

(1) School and District Report Cards and Grades.

(2) School Recognition Program to financially reward schools for good/improving Report Card grades.

(3) Opportunity Scholarships to provide alternatives for students in schools with poor Report Card grades.

(4) Scholarships for Children with Disabilities. (ALEC Model Bill: Special Needs Scholarship Program Act)

(5) Tax credit scholarships for low-income students. (ALEC Model Bill: Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act)

(6) Alternative Teacher Certification. (ALEC Model Bill: Alternative Teacher Certification Act)

(7) Ban on Social Promotion based on tracking of basic literacy skills.

(8) School and Teacher bonuses for student Advanced Placement success.

Here is Florida’s proud confession of the utility of letter grades in promoting its test-dependent, privatizing reforms:

People instantly and intuitively understand letter grades, and this system served as the lynchpin for the reforms…

Letter grading of public schools is indispensable to effective public education dismantling.

Except that Jeb Bush’s Florida reform success requires constant changing of the letter grade formula.

The next ALEC bill promoted in December 2010 is the Open Enrollment Act:

The Open Enrollment Act stipulates that a student may attend any public school or program in the state. The legislation allows the parents of the student to apply for attendance in any nonresident school, either within or outside the district of residence. The nonresident school would advise the parent within a reasonable time if the application was accepted. No school district can be obligated to change existing school structures or program guidelines. No school can reject an application except for lack of space, existing eligibility criteria, desegregation plan requirements, expulsion record or late enrollment.

Provisions are made for transportation within the nonresident district and, under some circumstances, within the resident district. [Emphasis added.]

The model bill reads that parents are responsible for transporting their children to the district. This in itself would limit choice to those with more resources.

Let’s do one more, also featured in DC in 2010:

Parent Trigger Act

The Parent Trigger places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level. Parents can, with a simple majority, opt to usher in one of three choice-based options of reform: (1) transforming their school into a charter school, (2) supplying students from that school with a 75 percent per pupil cost voucher, or (3) closing the school.

ALEC offers this supplemental information on Parent Trigger origins:

The Parent Trigger concept is the creation of the Los Angeles Parents Union, a group of self-described progressives led by Ben
Austin, a Democrat whose previous employers include President Bill Clinton, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, and Hollywood director-turned-political-activist Rob Reiner. Austin was also a consultant to Green Dot Charter Schools, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit charter school chain….

Fine print: “Democratic control” ends once the “trigger” is “pulled.”

Fortunately, Parent Trigger is a flop.

Speaking of “flop”– or more like “flip flop”–

Allow me to offer one more word, on ALEC’s reversed position on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). First, a link to ALEC’s 2011 Resolution Opposing the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. ALEC originally opposed the CCSS– even voting and approving its anti-CCSS resolution– and in December 2011, ALEC even featured a Comprehensive Legislative Package Opposing the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Then Jeb stepped in save CCSS from ALEC.

ALEC is fine with CCSS now. As proof, the uber-pro-CCSS Fordham Institute decided to join ALEC’s Education Task Force on July 12, 2013.

The ALEC influence is certainly paying off for its corporate members and others who have decided to join the ALEC crusade of public education destruction. ALEC’s spectrum of model bills will look familiar to public education faculty and parents nationwide. However, ALEC doesn’t like having the light shined on its manipulations.

Friends of American public education, we need to up the wattage.

The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Out Perform Private Schools

Reviewed by Michael Fabricant

Title:
Author(s): Christopher A. Lubienski & Sarah Theule Lubienski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Over the past twenty five years a cascading literature has accumulated regarding the crisis of public education in the US. The crisis is traced to significant racial and international differences in student achievement as measured by testing. Importantly, the racial gap, although evident over the past fifty years, has not galvanized the recent attention of both legislators and business interests. Rather international decline in a period of intensifying economic competition is what has promoted greater policy attention on public education’s deficits. Lagging test scores of American students in science, reading, and math has been described as a national security issue threatening the very economic foundation of society. This framing has, in turn, birthed a public education reform movement whose policy initiatives largely rely on market principles to fix public problems such as education.

The change theories of the “new reformers” can in large part be traced to a rejection of public bureaucracy. Public institutions are seen as spawning pathological tendencies undermining competition, innovation, choice, and academic achievement. As well, public institutions are described as primarily, if not exclusively, interested in addressing professional interests rather than student need. This ideological policy frame has unsurprisingly produced structural or market solutions of increased choice/competition, teacher/student accountability, metrics, and privatization. This policy agenda has gained increased traction over the past twenty years, as evidenced by the growing number of charter schools, intensifying focus on testing to measure student, teacher, and school worth, and the accelerating transfer of public education dollars to the marketplace. The historic dilemmas of applying market principles to public issues, including but not limited to a tendency to increase inequality and simplify complex public problems, have largely been ignored as ideological rhetoric and economic incentive rather than evidence driven policy decision-making. Fundamental to the new reformers’ policy agenda is the presumption that private schools will outperform public education. Christopher Lubienski and Sara Theule-Lubienski have waded into this political policy discourse with their important volume, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

Their book is intended to examine the empirical support for the present reform direction. The core question they pose asks, “Are private schools outperforming traditional public schools?” The methodology of the study is reasonably straightforward while being simultaneously rigorous, systematic, and elegant. The authors propose to discern differences in part on the basis of cross-sectional data or snapshot test scores. This cross-sectional approach is bolstered by a longitudinal design element to determine if the test scores of students in private schools rise more rapidly than their counterparts in public settings. The sample for both the cross-sectional and longitudinal research is drawn from secondary data. Two separate datasets underpinned the longitudinal part of the inquiry, The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) and the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) of fourth and eighth graders. The ECLS-K offers a stratified random sample of 21,000 students in both private and public schools entering kindergarten in 1998. Admittedly, the sample is a bit dated. That said, the experiment regarding privatization when the cohort of kindergarten students in the sample entered the fourth grade in 2003 was well underway. Alternatively, the NAEP study sample included 9,791 randomly selected students in 1531 public and private schools. For the cross-sectional study, approximately 190,000 fourth graders and 155,000 eighth graders were randomly selected from the NAEP data set. About 7,500 and 6,000 schools were included in the samples of fourth and eighth graders respectively. The private schools included in the study included Catholic, Christian and charters. This layered and synergistic design has produced a sampling protocol able to capture the snapshot and longitudinal academic experience of students in private and public schools. The careful and imaginative design of this inquiry is especially impressive.

The findings of The Public School Advantage are especially important in this moment of policy consensus regarding a “full speed ahead” approach to privatization. When controlling for student background factors in the fourth grade, an “initial private school advantage was reversed.” Similar findings were discerned for the eighth-grade. The test score difference for fourth and eighth graders ranged between 11 and 21 points. The authors note that a ten to eleven point difference “represents a disparity of about one grade level” (p. 79). The longitudinal results indicate that “math achievement gains of public schools outpaced those of other school types over the course of the study.” Equally important, public school students are a statistically significant 6 points ahead of their Catholic school counterparts by the fifth grade. The authors indicate that the public school advantage is clear. They conclude that “the vaunted private school effect found in past research while it may exist for some students is significantly overshadowed by the public school advantage that is evident in the two most prominent national data sets” (p. 92). The findings of the Lubienski study are confirmed by other research, most notably the CREDO analysis comparing public and charter schools.

The Public School Advantage makes a very special contribution to the public education reform discourse because of its careful methodological rigor and thoughtful interpretation of its findings. It makes a unique and timely contribution to an expansive literature comparing private/charter schooling and traditional public education settings. The evidence is clear that a private school advantage does not exist. Rather, it is largely an ideological illusion. Yet, simultaneous to the emergence of this finding, reform momentum for privatization grows. And so we must acknowledge that another kind of evidence is also growing, empirical findings in the present contested terrain of public education matter less and less in setting policy direction.

We are faced with the dilemma that present reform is not a rational response to the needs of poor, urban communities of color. Rather it is a largely ideological attack on public education that will not be contained by either evidence or reason. To the contrary, advocates for the “new reform” like those who deny climate change will simply offer an alternative logic no matter how devoid of evidence or commitment to a public good. Given the new reformers’ greater access to political, economic and media resources, their narrative and evidence will prevail. And so those who remain committed to traditional forms of public education, the democratic accountability of public institutions, the need to collect objective information to inform policy decision making, and preserving the character of a public good from the degradation of market dynamics must understand that only a corrective power will alter the course of present reform. Those of us committed to a just reform predicated on evidence, strategic investment, and the need to establish clear boundaries between private and public institutions must rethink our relationship to movement politics. A corrective movement power must be built that challenges the present privatization of public education and dismantling of all things public including schools. Some part of the lesson of this important book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools is that, although compelling evidence is necessary to reset policy direction, it is not sufficient. The evidence is an essential tool but the setting of policy direction today, as in the 1960’s and 1930’s, is directed by power blocs driving and/or contesting the reform agenda. Today, evidence that points to the relative effectiveness of public institutions is drowned out by the rhetoric of privatization. To reset policy discourse, new blocs of power must be built to enact an alternate vision, investment, and forms of collaboration for public education. Anything less cedes expansive reform territory to those who would privatize all things public no matter the cost in the long or short term to the larger society. This new social reality is the single most important take away for readers of The Public School Advantage.

Solving these problems could be a key step to boosting innovation

By Laura Devaney in eSchool News.

Education has 99 problems, but the desire to solve those problems isn’t one. But because we can’t cover 99 problems in one story, we’ll focus on seven, which the League of Innovative Schools identified as critical to educational innovation.

While these aren’t the only challenges that education faces today, these seven problems are often identified as roadblocks that prevent schools and districts from embracing innovation.

Problem No. 1: There exist a handful of obstacles that prevent a more competency-based education system

Today’s education system includes ingrained practices, including policy and decades-old methods, that prevent schools from moving to competency-based models.