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  • Home
  • ABOUT US
  • Content
    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
    • News
    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
    • Achievement Gap
    • Charter Schools
    • Customization
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    • Microschools
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    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
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    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
    • Patrick J. Wolf
  • Education Facts
    • Research and Reports
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    • Hope Scholarship Program Facts
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Author

Doug Tuthill

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Doug Tuthill

A lifelong educator and former teacher union president, Tuthill has been president of Step Up For Students since August 2008.

Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedMagnet SchoolsParental ChoicePublic School ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionism

Black students need empowerment and support, not white paternalism

Doug Tuthill September 4, 2020
Doug Tuthill

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision and the 1968 conflict between the white New York City teachers union and the Black Ocean Hill-Brownsville community were historic events. Together they helped make well-intentioned white paternalism the primary way public education has related to Black students and their families for the last 50-plus years.

Black families and their children have not been well served by this paternalism. It is time we replace white paternalism with Black empowerment.

The Brown decision did not empower Black families to have more control over how their children are educated. Instead, it further empowered white paternalism. The court told white school boards to stop racially segregating their school buildings in the hope that Black children would benefit from sitting next to white children. Most white school boards delayed as long as possible, but by the late-1960s they were under intense legal pressure to desegregate.

In response to this ongoing legal pressure and the political opposition of white families to forced bussing, districts began implementing magnet programs in the late 1970s and early ’80s to encourage white families to voluntarily desegregate their school buildings. Magnet schools are high-quality, well-funded specialized programs that districts create in Black community schools to attract white students.

Magnet schools are a win-win solution for white families and school districts. Advantaged white children receive even more advantages, and white school boards have numbers showing their school buildings are integrated. The only losers are Black students who seldom benefit from these high-quality programs while being used as statistical props by school districts. 

(Full disclosure: I helped start Florida’s first International Baccalaureate program in 1984, which was a magnet program designed to appease politically influential white families while satisfying a federal desegregation order.)

White liberal families are especially attracted to magnet programs because they enable these families to tell their likeminded friends that their children are enrolled in integrated public schools. What usually goes unsaid is that within these integrated buildings their children are attending elite programs with entrance requirements that often lead to racial and economic segregation.

White paternalism and Black disempowerment were further enhanced by a political confrontation in New York City. In 1968, all New York City schools were controlled by a Central School Board that was uninterested in integrating the school system. As their frustration grew, Ocean Hill- Brownsville families and community leaders decided the best way to meet their children’s needs was to assert greater control over their local schools. The city’s teachers union saw decentralizing control of the city’s schools as an existential threat to their business model, which requires a centralized, command-and-control management system to enable collective bargaining.

The union went on strike for 36 days, crushed the Black community’s struggle for self-determination, and reaffirmed some enduring precedents. Public education would continue to be controlled by white power, Black communities would continue to be disempowered, and white power would make good-faith efforts to educate Black children, provided all aspects of white privilege were protected—particularly relating to teachers unions.  

(Full disclosure: I am the former president of two local teachers unions.)

The disempowerment of Black families and their reliance on white paternalism to meet their children’s learning needs is still the dominant reality in public education today. And it is still the prevailing philosophy of my political party (i.e., Democrats). But there are hopeful signs that enlightened progress may be possible.

Serial and The New York Times recently published a five-episode podcast, titled “Nice White Parents,” that documents the inability of well-intentioned white paternalism to improve the schooling of Black children. In a follow-up piece called “How White Progressives Undermine School Integration,” the Times interviewed progressives about the appropriateness of the current racial and economic power relationships in public education.  

Times reporter Eliza Shapiro introduced these interviews by stating that, “across America, desegregation has never been tried at scale, partly because of resistance from white liberals.” Shapiro also stated the importance of focusing “on empowering Black and Latino parents who have so often been left out of the debate about their own children’s educations.”

Here are some representative quotes from Shapiro’s interviews.

Chana Joffe-Walt, the lead reporter on the Nice White Parents series: “I walked through the history of a school where integration has been invoked over and over again as a virtue, and used as a reason to pursue policies and programs that benefit white parents, that benefit advantaged parents — and that didn’t actually shift power within the school….it is more important to talk about race and power in more explicit terms, and to talk about this history.”

Sonya Douglass Horsford, professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College: “The focus needs to be shifting, for those who are focused on justice, from equity to emancipation. That means for students of color, for immigrant students, for others who have been marginalized in the U.S. school system, to recognize the system that they’re in and to begin to think about ways to liberate themselves from that.”

Richard Buery, president of a charter school network: “In this city, it’s always integration on white people’s terms…Racial oppression is obviously not new, including in schools, which were in so many ways designed to be the instruments of oppression.”

That the New York Times is willing to publish comments questioning the ability of white liberal paternalism to delivery greater equity and excellence in public education is a hopeful sign. But the paternalistic relationship between Black families and public education that the Brown decision and the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike further institutionalized has served white families and teacher unions well and will be difficult to change.  

Replacing systemic white paternalism with the empowering of Black families is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving Black student achievement. We also need to implement the support systems these families need to exercise this empowerment as effectively as possible. This is an area where well-intentioned white liberalism can be helpful. Liberation, empowerment, self-determination, and appropriate support is a formula that will help public education achieve more equity and excellence.

September 4, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is rising from the dead

Doug Tuthill September 2, 2020
Doug Tuthill

As I talk with parents and educators who are struggling to create safe and effective learning options for their students, I’m taken with how many are revisiting the left-wing education reformers of the 1960s. Names like John Holt, Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Freire are coming up so often that it feels like I’m back in graduate school.

It appears the 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is making a comeback.

A student columnist at my high school newspaper in 1971 introduced me to the radical ideas of educator John Holt.  Holt inspired me to make improving public education my life’s work.

After working as an elementary and middle school teacher in the 1950s, Holt concluded that schools undermined children’s natural desires to learn, so he began promoting a form of homeschooling he called unschooling. Holt described the relationship between unschooling and student learning in his two most famous books, “How Children Fail” (1964), and “How Children Learn” (1967).

Unschooling aims to tap into children’s natural curiosity and desire to learn through authentic life experiences. Holt saw schools as artificial environments that undermine children’s natural desires to learn through exploration and play. Some of the current surge in homeschooling and micro-schools reflects Holt’s idea that learning should occur in more natural environments.

A recent New York Times column on educating children during this pandemic referred to the recent growing popularity of Ivan Illich’s concept of deschooling. Like Holt, Illich also felt that schools were artificial environments that stifled children’s innate desires to explore and learn. As the Times columnist observed:

“Deschooling’s core principles — that education should be self-directed rather than compulsory, that human growth and curiosity cannot be quantified and that children learn best in natural environments and mixed-age groups — have gained some recognition in recent years. But the idea of truly communitarian, noncompulsory, family-centered approaches to education were largely limited to the radical fringe of pedagogy. A lot has changed in six months.”

A.S. Neill’s 1960 book, “Summerhill,” is enjoying renewed popularity with families creating learning pods, micro-schools, and homeschool cooperatives. Consistent with Holt and Illich, Neill believed education should be centered on each child’s innate internal motivation to explore and learn. He created the Summerhill School in England to implement his beliefs that schooling should be less coercive and more democratic and child centered. Neill believe that schooling should be customized to fit the child instead of molding the child to fit the school.

Many education reformers today were directly or indirectly influenced by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. His 1968 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” was, and continues to be, must reading for anyone wanting to understand the politics of government-mandated education. While Holt, Illich, and Neill wrote about how the coercive and stressful nature of schooling negatively impacts students, Freire built on this analysis to explain how governments often use schools as instruments of social control and political oppression.

Freire promoted a liberation or critical pedagogy that empowers students and families to take control of their education and use it to attain greater political and economic freedom. While most parents exercising education choice today have not read Freire’s work, their motivations for asserting greater control over their child’s education increasingly reflect Freire’s ideas on the dangers of centralized, command and control public education systems.

Like many education choice advocates, I support the more democratic, child-centered approach to education that Holt, Illich, Neill, Freire, and others were promoting in the 1960s. But scaling up an education system capable of meeting the unique needs of each child is a daunting task, which is why most schools today still employ a one-size-fits-all, assembly line approach to teaching and learning.

This horrific pandemic has given families and micro-communities a unique opportunity to assume more control over how their children are educated. We need to give these families and their communities the support they need to be successful. Perhaps the hopes of the 1960s idealists will be realized and a more natural, child-centered way of educating our children will soon become the new norm.

September 2, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

How should state and local officials regulate parent teachers?

Doug Tuthill August 20, 2020
Doug Tuthill

Stephanie Conner uses a Florida education savings account for students with special needs to provide a combination of educational services — therapy, homeschool, private school — for her son Eli, foreground. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

State and local officials in Florida are discussing how to best regulate parents who are facilitating learning pods, homeschooling cooperatives and micro-schools that satisfy Florida’s mandatory school attendance law. For the last 175 years, the distinction between parents and public-school teachers was clear. But COVID-19 has muddied the waters.

In the last six months, public and private schooling has merged with homeschooling, with parents doing much of the teaching. As schools open this fall, parents will continue to be the primary schoolteacher for millions of K-12 students. How should state and local governments regulate these parent teachers?

Let’s start with the unprecedented unbundling of education services. Instead of getting all their services from a single provider — their assigned neighborhood school — parents are increasingly accessing education services from multiple providers. The unbundling of childcare from academic instruction is the best example. For the first time in at least 150 years, most students will not receive their childcare services from their academic instructional provider this fall. Many parents are providing childcare at home while their students receive online instruction. Other parents are paying Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, municipal community centers and other parents to provide childcare.

Many of these childcare providers are also providing education support services, such as in-person tutoring that complements online instruction. This is especially true when the online instruction is asynchronous. These latter situations provide state and local regulators with interesting challenges, because these childcare providers are also teaching.

Florida state law regulating private school employees serving scholarship students requires “each employee and contracted personnel with direct student contact, upon employment or engagement to provide services, to undergo a state and national background screening … An ‘employee or contracted personnel with direct student contact’ means any employee or contracted personnel who has unsupervised access to a scholarship student for whom the private school is responsible.”

This background check requirement makes sense for any childcare provider who is supervising children from multiple families. A parent who is leading a 10-student homeschool cooperative or micro-school should be required to pass a background screening.

Private school teachers are not required to have a state teaching certificate. This also seems appropriate for homeschool cooperative and micro-school parent teachers.

Whether a homeschool cooperative or a micro-school is receiving public funding should have no impact on how the parent teachers are regulated. All instruction that is satisfying a state’s mandatory attendance laws should be held to a same standard — background checks but no certification requirements.

We will never go back to the pre-pandemic public education system. Diversity, flexibility, and customization will be much bigger components of schooling moving forward. We need to quickly and thoughtfully adjust our policy infrastructure to support this new normal.

August 20, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCommon GroundCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

The evolving public education market

Doug Tuthill August 6, 2020
Doug Tuthill

An education savings account ensures that Anna Ragusa of North Carolina can continue to receive needed therapies during social distancing.

Public education has historically been a poorly managed, underperforming market. The pandemic is driving changes that could, over time, lead to market improvements that will benefit families, students, educators and the public.

In effective and efficient markets, consumers control their purchasing power, monopolies do not exist, the barriers to entry and exit are appropriate (i.e., not too high or too  low), information needed to make good decisions is available to suppliers and customers, and the public good is well served.

None of these features exist in public education today. About 90 percent of public education services are controlled by a single supplier – government. This market domination constitutes a monopoly. Almost all purchasing power is controlled by government.

When families have no control over their public education dollars, new suppliers are discouraged from entering the market. That’s because most families cannot afford to pay both school district taxes and the cost of education services from non-government suppliers. This barrier to entry is why there has been so little supplier diversity and innovation in K-12 education over the last 170 years. Giving families control over their education dollars would unleash demand and create a market that would attract more suppliers.

While the availability of information in public education has gotten better over the last 25 years, families and schools still lack the quality and quantity of information they need to make good decisions. These market flaws are causing taxpayers to get a poor return on their investments in public education.

Some of these market deficiencies are starting to be addressed as families respond to the pandemic by asserting more control over their children’s education. Affluent families are using their own funds to create and access alternative schooling models, including micro-schools, homeschooling cooperatives and pandemic pods. And a few governors are using federal stimulus dollars to fund scholarships so low-income families may have these same opportunities.

 If this trend continues and more families gain greater control over their public education dollars, the barriers to entry for new, more diverse suppliers will be lowered and the creativity and innovation we are starting to see will increase. Using Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) to give families more flexibility over how they spend their public education funds will also open the market to providers such as tutors, counselors and therapists.

 In healthy markets, more desirable supply attracts more consumers, which then attracts even more desirable supply, which then attracts even more consumers. This type of virtuous market cycle is emerging in a few communities and could start to erode the government’s monopoly on supply and further the development of a healthy public education market.

 The unbundling of education services will also accelerate the improvement of a better public education market. Government has historically used its monopoly to force parents to access all their education services from a single provider (e.g., the neighborhood public school). While the unbundling of these services has been occurring slowly over the last three decades as families increasingly use programs such as virtual schools and dual enrollment, the pandemic is encouraging suppliers to accelerate this unbundling.

 Some private schools are offering childcare services for families who want to access a virtual instructional program but need out-of-home childcare. Some school districts are providing breakfast and lunch programs for low-income families who are homeschooling. And some community organizations are providing extracurricular activities, such as theatre and sports programs, that are no longer available at some neighborhood schools.

 We have almost two centuries of data showing that a dysfunctional public education market is not capable of delivering systemwide excellence and equity. The work required to develop the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient public education market is daunting. But this horrific pandemic has provided us an historic opportunity we should not let pass.

August 6, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

Is it time for Blueprint 2030?

Doug Tuthill July 28, 2020
Doug Tuthill

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law in 1999 the A+ Plan for education calling for greater school and teacher accountability eight years after his predecessor signed the Education Reform and Accountability Act.

In 1991, the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Lawton Chiles signed, Blueprint 2000: The Education Reform and Accountability Act. The purpose of Blueprint 2000 was to restructure how Florida’s public education system was managed.

In the late 1980s, Florida was a national leader in experimenting with teacher empowerment and site-based decision making (SBDM). The SBDM movement sought to transfer more decision-making power to schools in exchange for these schools being held more accountable for results. Blueprint 2000 was designed to create a state policy infrastructure that would institutionalize SBDM across all of Florida’s public schools.

Legislative and executive branch leaders, all of whom were Democrats, thought Florida’s public schools were underperforming because they were being micromanaged. Blueprint 2000 was going to change that.

I was one of four teacher union representatives on the state commission appointed in 1991 to develop the Blueprint 2000 implementation plan. In collaboration with the Florida Department of Education and thousands of educators, parents, business leaders, and other citizens, we created new state curriculum standards, a new state assessment system called the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), established School Advisory Councils (SACs) at every public school, and required schools to implement annual School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We failed to reach consensus on how best to hold public schools accountable for results, a failure Jeb Bush fixed when he became governor in 1998.

Next spring will be Blueprint 2000’s 30-year anniversary. Florida’s public education system has made great improvements using the education reform and accountability infrastructure that sprang from Blueprint 2000. But that infrastructure has aged. Florida’s public education system needs a new blueprint. It is time for Blueprint 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing educators and parents to innovate at a pace never before seen in public education. In the period of a month last spring, every district, private, and charter school campus closed and every student became a homeschool student. When school begins this fall, families will choose from a variety of instructional models, including on-campus, virtual, hybrid (i.e., a combination of on-campus and virtual) and homeschooling. In coming years, families will have access to even more choices.  

State government has waived a variety of state laws and regulations to allow schools and families to adjust to this new normal. But these waivers are temporary solutions. Our state leaders need to start developing a new public education infrastructure, and Blueprint 2000 provides an approach they could consider emulating.

Similar to what the Florida Legislature did in 1991, the 2021 legislature could pass legislation establishing a commission to develop recommendations for creating a new public education infrastructure. This new infrastructure should be designed to support a more diverse and flexible public education system, one capable of meeting the unique needs of each student.  

The largest task for this commission would be improving Florida’s antiquated public education funding system. This funding system is hostile to systemic innovation and the flexibility needed to meet each student’s needs.

The state has created flexible spending accounts for some students with unique abilities/special needs. About 16,000 families will use this spending flexibility this fall to customize their child’s education. Providing all families with access to flexible public education funds is necessary if all children are to benefit from a customized education program.

We also need to reinvent our state assessment and assessment data systems.  As students increasingly receive publicly-funded instruction from multiple providers (tutors, virtual school, college via dual enrollment and assigned neighborhood school) we will need to assess the progress students are making with each provider, aggregate their achievement data, and properly share students’ data with those providers.

We also will need to institutionalize better processes for helping families and students pick the most appropriate providers. Well over 10,000 providers are eligible to serve the 16,000 unique abilities/special needs students using flexible spending accounts, often called Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Deciding which of these 10,000 providers is the best fit for a specific learning need is a daunting task.

A Blueprint 2030 commission will have a huge job helping state government, school districts, schools and other education providers create the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient post-pandemic public education system. We are never going back to the pre-pandemic education system.

Planning for the future should begin soon.

July 28, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionFeatured

Facts are the best vaccine for excessive negativity

Doug Tuthill July 8, 2020
Doug Tuthill

Let’s start with a quiz.

1.       In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

A.      20 percent         B. 40 percent     C. 60 percent

2.       In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has

A.      almost doubled       B. almost halved       C. remained about the same      

3.       The life expectancy in the world today is

A.      60 years              B. 70 years         C. 50 years

4.       How many of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease?

A.      20 percent         B. 50 percent     C. 80 percent

5.       What percentage of the world’s population have some access to electricity?

A.      80 percent         B. 55 percent     C. 20 percent

6.       Today there are 2 billion children in the world. How many will there be in 2100?

A.      2 billion              B. 4 billion          C. 3 billion

These quiz items come from a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Bill Gates calls Factfulness, “one of the most important books I’ve ever read.”

Rosling was an extraordinary man. He was a doctor who traveled the world treating people in developing countries and educating people in developed countries about the developing world. He was particularly passionate about dispelling negative myths about the lack of progress in developing countries and replacing those myths with facts.  

Evolution has hardwired humans to be highly attentive to negative information. Survival has required heightened awareness to threats. Media outlets intuitively understand this, which is why news on TV, radio, and newspapers historically has been overwhelmingly negative. Negativity sells, which is why if it bleeds, it leads.

My colleague, Ron Matus, has highlighted the impact of negativity bias on how Florida’s media covers public education. Ron has repeatedly cited examples (here, here, here, here, and here) of Florida’s media not reporting positive information about how well our public education system is performing. 

One of the downsides of our attraction to negative information is that it often causes us to base our decisions on misinformation. For example, we may be less supportive of public education funding if we are convinced the system is performing poorly, or we may be more supportive of greater restrictions on immigration from a developing country if we exaggerate the amount of that country’s poverty, violence and illiteracy.

Throughout his book, Rosling identifies cognitive habits that contribute to our embracing of negative myths. These habits of mind are manifestations of three well-documented cognitive biases: negativity bias, confirmation bias and availability bias.

Negativity bias refers to our tendency to be more attuned to and affected by negative information and events. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our existing beliefs and ignore evidence that does not. And availability bias is our tendency to assume that information that is readily available to us is more reflective of general conditions than actually is the case. Availability bias is why people think traveling by plane is more dangerous than traveling by car immediately after a high-profile plane crash.

These three biases work in tandem to make negative thinking predominate in humans. We are more attracted to negative beliefs (negativity bias). We seek out information to confirm these negative beliefs (confirmation bias), and then we exaggerate the prevalence of these negative beliefs (availability bias).

This is the pattern Matus has documented in his reporting on how Florida’s media cover our public education system. Florida’s education reporters are attracted to information they think confirms their negative biases. They then report this confirming negative information while excluding contrary facts. This results in many people having an inaccurate, and overly negative, opinion of Florida’s public education system.

Rosling hopes that by increasing global awareness about how believing and promoting inaccurate negative information distorts our perceptions and undermines our decision making, people will be less susceptible to the detrimental effects of negative myths. He worries that too much negative thinking encourages a sense of hopelessness that undermines motivation.

According to every objective measure, this is a golden age for Florida’s public education system. We still have huge unmet challenges, most notably in addressing a large achievement gap that is correlated with racial, ethnic and economic class differences. But we have much progress to celebrate and to inspire us to keep going.

If we can effectively manage our negativity bias, our greatest successes still lie ahead.

 Here are the quiz answers: 1 C; 2 B; 3 B; 4 C; 5 A; 6 A. How much influenced did negativity bias have on your answer?

July 8, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedSchool ChoiceUnionism

Are teacher unions putting profits before people?

Doug Tuthill January 7, 2020
Doug Tuthill

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the for-profit business practices of Florida’s teacher unions and their for-profit business partners.

The Journal reported recently that teacher union leaders are pushing teachers to purchase retirement investments from union-owned, for-profit companies that charge unusually high management fees. These higher fees are increasing the unions’ profits at the expense of teachers’ retirement funds.

The Journal writes: “The setup is one of an array of similar deals in which unions and other groups get income from endorsements of investment products and services — often at the expense of teachers … The ties help explain why many local-government workers continue to pay relatively high retirement-plan costs, while fees in corporate-based retirement plans are often lower and have been falling for years.”

I was first informed about the for-profit business ventures of teacher unions when I became a local union president in 1978. I had questions, but I was 22, and my mentors assured me our profits benefited our members and the union. Forty years later I still use a credit card that is managed by a for-profit joint venture involving the National Education Association (NEA), MasterCard, and Bank of America, even though I haven’t been an NEA member since 1997.

Given how critical teacher unions often are of for-profit businesses operating in public education, it’s ironic that these same unions operate a variety of for-profit businesses themselves. But the unions are selective in their criticisms. They only criticize for-profit businesses they perceive as competition, such as the small number of for-profit charter schools that aren’t unionized. For-profit contractors, bus companies, furniture vendors, teacher training providers and hardware and software companies, among others, are fine.

I do not object to teacher unions, or anyone else, operating for-profit businesses in public education. Without profit there would be no credit. Without credit there would be no scalable innovation. And without scalable innovation, we’d all be living in caves.

I also don’t object to teacher unions using their influence with the Democratic Party and the media to maximize their profits, provided it’s done legally and with transparency. All multimillion-dollar corporations, including teacher unions, work the media and lobby government to enact policies that advantage their businesses. I do object to teacher unions promoting their business interests in ways that hurt our most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. While the SEC is investigating the legality of the unions’ business practices, my concern is with the morality of their business practices.

In Florida, teacher unions have used their profits to help fund lobbying and lawsuits to take away education options from our state’s highest-poverty, lowest-performing students. Their goal is to protect their market share and revenue even though these actions hurt disadvantaged children and are inconsistent with the values of most teachers. Instead of attacking our most vulnerable children, teacher unions need a new business model that allows them to find common ground with these children and their families.

The future of public education is customization. Soon every child will have access to a customized education. Teacher unions need a business model that aligns with and supports customization. They will go out of business if they continue insisting that public education can only take place in government-managed schools covered by one-size-fits-all collective bargaining agreements. This 1970s model of public education, and the early 1900s model of industrial unionism that accompanies it, doesn’t work for many children and is going away.

There is a positive role for teacher unions in public education if they will adopt a new unionism that puts people above profits and empowers teachers and families to have more control over how each child is educated.

January 7, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeatured

A memo for Jeb Bush

Doug Tuthill December 12, 2019
Doug Tuthill

In a recent interview with Sal Khan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suggested we need a common term for concepts such as mastery-based learning, personalized learning, competency-based learning, individualized learning and customized learning. 

“We need to come up with a name that everyone uses,” Bush told Khan at a recent education reform conference in San Diego. “When you figure it out, send a memo out to the rest of us.” 

Governor, I recommend we use the term ”customized education.” Here’s why.

All learning is personal. Thirty students sitting quietly in rows taking detailed notes of their teacher’s lecture are engaged in personalized learning. No two students assimilate the teacher’s words in the same way. We all interpret incoming stimuli through the lenses of our previous experience and knowledge. Since no two people have lived identical lives, no two people interpret information, such as a lecture, in identical ways. Consequently, all learning, including how well someone masters a competency, is personal.

When people use terms such as personalized learning, they are really referring to teaching, not learning. While 30 students sitting in rows taking lecture notes are engaged in personalized learning, the teacher is not engaged in personalized instruction. The teacher is using one-size-fits-all group instruction. This group instruction is what reformers want to replace with instruction that is customized to each child’s needs.  

Progressive educators have been advocating for personalized instruction for at least 150 years. Public education adopted one-size-fits-all batch instruction in the late 1800s because it was scalable and personalized instruction was not. Our inability to scale personalized instruction has thwarted us ever since. What’s different today is technology. Technology that did not exist 30 years ago is now enabling entities such as the Khan Academy to make customized education possible for every child globally. 

So why do I prefer customized education over personalized instruction?

Khan Academy does not provide personalized instruction for every child. But it does provide content and tools that make it possible for learners to customize their education.

Education is more than instruction. Many of my most powerful learning experiences have come while doing yard work. I listened to a thought-provoking discussion between Sal Khan and Jeb Bush, thought about their exchange while working in the yard, and then clarified my thoughts by writing this blog post.  This is why the term you are searching for, Governor, should be broad enough to encompass external instruction and self-guided learning activities. And why I prefer customized education.

So why customized education and not personalized education?

The term personalized learning has become so ubiquitous that trying to explain why it is redundant and misleading seems overly complex and onerous. I’d rather reboot, dump the word “personalized,” and go with customized.

Customized education – the future of public education, workforce education, and civic education.

December 12, 2019 0 comment
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