More Momwashing For Privatization

The parenting bubble for anti-public ed activism is really expanding. 

Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform has just rolled out the Parent Power Index! It assigns arbitrary values measures three vaguely defined qualities-- choice programs, charter schools, and innovation-- and gives each state a letter grade. There's nothing new being quantified here, just the same old anti-public school, anti-union wine in new parentified wineskins. 

In choicer marketing, "freedom" is out and "parent power" is in.

Maybe it's just an attempt to create some synergy for Betsy DeVos's favorite choice evangelist and American Federation for Children "senior fellow" and his new book about the parent revolution.

But to find someone who's really doubling on momwashing anti-public ed activism, we turn to the American Federation for Children, which is launching a whole new initiative-- Moms on a Mission!

AFC is one more dark money group, probably one of the largest school privatization outfits in the country. It was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin.

They're tied to ALEC, the conservative corporate bill mill. They've had a variety of projects, including Ed Newsfeed, a program for planting fake news stories on local media. They're still running Black Minds Matter, School Choice Boyz and Federacion Para Los Ninos. 

Their leadership is a veritable privatizer who's who. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).

The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Rosemarie Nassif (Center for Catholic Education) and Scott Walker. A staff of 49. We could run through the whole crowd, but you get the idea--there's a lot more to AFC than just Betsy DeVos.

Moms on a Mission doesn't have its own tab yet, but AFC announced their launch on May 11 (Mother's Day).  

Across the nation, school choice is opening wide the doors of opportunity for children, thanks to a powerful force: Moms. Parents are the ones who know and love their children best, and moms are often the front line confronting the obstacles that would otherwise hinder opportunities for their little ones.

There's a brief inspirational video. Also, an introduction to some of the moms.

There's Clarice Jackson, an activist from Nebraska who served as Commissioner of African American  Affairs (2021-2024) under Pete Ricketts and Jim Pillen. She has worked with dyslexia organizations and founded Black Literacy Matters in February of 2022. She has a great story about working as a paraprofessional in school and encountering a young girl struggling to read and write, and coming to realize that with an incarcerated mother and "strapped" grandmother, the girl "lacked the help she needed at home." Jackson eventually adopted the girl, and the story is a compelling example of a school dropping the ball. Of course, it's also the story of realizing that someone would have to step in and take over for the actual parents, who could not manage the job because they were overwhelmed by their own circumstances. Not sure how school choice would have helped.

Tera Myers is the Ohio mother of a child with Downs Syndrome. She spoke at the 2020 GOP convention in praise of Donald Trump. Myers is a member of Mansfield Alliance Church and is a "Mentor Mom" at Berean Baptist Church MOPS Program, or Mothers of Preschoolers. She serves as a state and national parent advocate for Education Freedom, the Trump administration's proposed scholarship program, and is a consultant for Washington D.C.-based American Federation for Children. That last part doesn't appear in the Moms on a Mission website.

Holly Terei makes plenty of appearances on Fox News, perhaps because she's the National Director of Teacher Coalition for No Left Turn In Education, where the Georgia mom hopes to see "teachers and parents working together to push against the progressive woke agenda that has infiltrated America’s public schools." NLTE is yet another culture panic group fed by Tucker Carlson; a Florida chapter head single-handedly made his district the country's leader in book challenges.

Becki Uccello is also an activist parent of a child with special needs, which has made her a frequent voice speaking in favor vouchers in Missouri. The former public school teacher used a voucher from the Herzog Tomorrow Foundation to send her daughter with spina bifida to Catholic school (her son did just fine in public school). Herzog is a foundation aimed at trying "catalyze and accelerate the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish."

So once again, some experienced activists coded as moms, their activist bona fides downplayed or erased. There's a definite emphasis on students with special needs, which is an interesting choice given that so much of the choice school world is not available to those students. At the same time, it makes a certain sense because so many parents of students with special needs are (or at least feel) ill-served by public schools. 

Moms on a Mission is just getting on its feet, so it remains to be seen how it figures in AFC's ongoing work in dismantling public education. But if these moms ("moms just like you!") show up in your neighborhood, they aren't there to give public education a hand. 

Evil L.A. Teacher Unions

The Center for Education Reform is a charter promotion group, perhaps one of the most cynical and self-serving of the reformster groups. Search their website for information or ideas about education-- the actual pedagogy and instruction in a classroom-- and you will find nothing, because the Center has no actual interest in education.

Check out their board of directors-- you will find a combination of money managers and charter school operators. That is where the Center's interest lies-- in getting more money into more charters.

And what stands in the way of these corporate interests making a better, bigger buck? Well, those damn unions, of course. The Center may not have any section devoted to actually educating children, but they have a whole tab devoted to those damn unions, and here's What They Believe:

We believe that the special interests that draw funds from the tax dollars funding public education, and that have become an intransient [sic-- pretty sure they mean "intransigent," though "intransient" as in "won't move away to some other place" might suit them as well] force in political and policy circles, have outlived the usefulness of the associations they once had and have become obstacles to programs and activities that can best and most judiciously serve children. Such groups—from teachers unions, to the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., “The Blob”)—should be free to organize but without access to the dollars that are spent to fund schools and should be free to recruit but not mandate members, but they should not have a public stream of money that permits the dues of members to subsidize their defense of the status quo.

The Center is currently excited with itself because it placed a quote in a Wall Street Journal article. The piece (behind a paywall) discusses the desire of some charter teachers to unionize. Or, as the Center headlined it in their regular email, "Teachers at Successful Los Angeles Charter School Organization Being Manipulated by Union Leaders."

The charter in question is the Alliance charter, a chain run by rich folks like a former mayor of LA and the owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Alliance is a big gun in the LA charter scene, and seventy of its 500-person teacher workforce started pushing for a union last spring.

"We believe that when teachers have a respected voice in policymaking it leads to school sustainability and teacher retention," said Elana Goldbaum, who teaches history at Gertz-Ressler High School, a member of the Alliance group. "We have a lot of talent and we want to see that stay. We want to see our teachers be a part of the decision-making and we want to advocate for our students and ourselves."

The union movement has sparked controversy, with the LA union claiming interference on the part of charter management and Alliance saying the teachers feel harassed by the union. The struggle escalated at the end of October when the California Public Employment Relations Board sued Alliance for engaging in anti-union activity.

All of this, somehow, is the evil union pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor, hapless teachers.

Look, the big unions are no angels, and the big-city unions are probably the least angelic of all. But you know that teachers need some kind of union when the charters are letting loose with baloney like this, the quote from the WSJ of which the Center is so proud:

“It’s not surprising that teachers that work at charter schools would not want to join a union,” said Alison Zgainer, executive vice president of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter organization in Washington, D.C. “They want more autonomy in the classroom, and being part of a union you lose that autonomy.”

I guess Zgainer is referring to "autonomy" as defined by charter operators-- the autonomy to be told you must work long hours over a long week. The autonomy to have instruction strictly dictated. The autonomy to be paid as little as the charter wants to pay you. The autonomy to be fired any time the charter feels like it. The autonomy to be trained in "no excuse" techniques that are just as prescriptive of teacher behavior as they are of student behavior. That autonomy.

The autonomy that business-driven charters care about is the autonomy of management. Their dream is the same dream as that of the 19th century robber barons who fought unions tooth and nail. It's a dream where a CEO sits in his office and runs his company with complete freedom to hire and fire, raise and lower salaries, and change the work hours (or any other terms of employment) at will. It's a dream of a business where the CEO is a visionary free to seek his vision (and profit from it) without having anyone ever say "no" to him.

That's the autonomy that folks like the Center for Education Reform are interested in.

In the CEO-centered vision of school, unions are bad. Unions are evil obstacles that dare to make rules by which the CEO must abide (they are often aided by Big Government, which also dares to interfere with the CEO). I think these folks believe in the myth of the Hero Teacher because it echoes the myth of the Hero CEO-- a bold genius who makes the world a better place by pushing aside all obstacles, including the people who don't recognize his genius, until he arrives at the mountain top, loved and praised by all the Little People who are grateful that he saved them. Compromise and collaboration are for the weak, and unions are just weaklings who want to drag down the Hero CEO because they are jealous of his awesomeness and afraid that their undeserved power will be stripped from them by his deserving might.

In this topsy-turvy world, unions must be crushed not just because they set up rules to thwart the Hero CEO, but because they are holding captive all the teachers who really want to give themselves body and soul to the Hero CEO's genius vision, but the union won't let them. Damn you, evil unions.

This does not explain all charter supporters (it does not, for instance, reflect the motivations of the social justice warrior school of charter support). But it sure does explain some, even as it is oddly reminiscent of "We'll be greeted as liberators" and the tantrums of any three-year-old. But I hope that the Center for Education Reform has to live impotently with the threat of evil unions for years to come.

Maryland Disappoints Charters

Maryland's Governor Larry Hogan had a dream, a dream of a state where charters could bloom more easily, more plentifully, and more profitably.

And so he was pushing a bill, a bill that would allow Maryland to catch up to other states in the chartery race for riches. The bill would let charters hire and fire staff at will (Maryland's charter teachers are actually employed by the local district). Teachers wouldn't have to be certified. Charters would have more ability to pick and choose students. Charters would get more money per student and also get a shot at construction funding. Perhaps most importantly, charters would finally have a recourse if mean old local school boards turned them down; they would be able to appeal to the State Board of Education to override the decision of local elected officials. So, democracy.

The Democrats are in control of the Maryland legislature, and they correctly identified the bill as union busting and bad for students. Compromise was sought.

The Senate committee later passed along a version of the bill that was either "watered down" or "improved" depending on your point of view.

That was late March. This week the legislature passed the bill. Sort of. Says the AP

Hogan initially tried to get more input for the state board of education on charter school operations. His expansion plan also waived certain teacher certifications and opened the possibility for new collective bargaining agreements.

But Senate and House committees made roughly a dozen amendments that largely reversed those proposals in Hogan’s measure.

You can tell the charteristas are Not Pleased, as witnessed by a statement released by Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that is deeply committed to profitable entrepreneurship via the charter biz.

 “Late last night, The Maryland General Assembly took a step backwards in passing a dramatically revised charter school bill, making it less likely that parents and educators will be able to create and advance innovative public school opportunities for children.

Yes, because only charters can innovate. This would be the perfect moment to list off some of the innovations that have come out of charter schools. Kara? Kara???
 

“The bill removes the State Board’s check and balance authority to review school district actions on charter applications, which by extension removes a Governor’s authority to impact charter school decisions through his or her appointments to the board.

So, the governor won't be able to override the decisions of local elected officials. But if charters are awesometastic, won't local officials line up to have them?

“The bill requires an invasive study by the State Department of Education of all charter school operations, compliance of which will require additional staff and resources. This was clearly an effort by opponents to tie up small, underfunded charter schools with more bureaucracy, not less.

Oh nooosss!!!! Charters will have to be accountable! That is so unfair!! Comply with regulations!! Sooooo unfair!

“The bill further removes authority for charter schools by making every operational feature subject to agreement with school districts, which more often than not deny basic freedoms to charter operators to hire and train their own personnel. It also furthers funding inequality for public school students attending public charter schools.

"Basic freedoms" to hire and fire whoever, whenever!? They won't be able to unilaterally ignore the wishes of the local taxpayers and their elected officials. Lordy, that's awful!

“The bill makes changes in the ability of charter schools to make preferences on who they enroll, which is not a major accomplishment. Nor is the proclaimed victory of advocates over so-called flexibility, which validates authority that already exists for districts and the state to consider requested waivers from various rules and regulations.

>You're not going to let us cherry pick the students? How do you expect us to be awesomely successful?

“I’m appalled that this bill is considered progress when by definition it puts school districts and unions more fully in control of charter creation, operations and outcomes. Mr. Governor, I urge you to grab a cup of coffee - or a beer - and sit down to read this bill for yourself, and you too will be appalled at what the General Assembly has done to your well-intentioned proposal.

“While the Governor’s team has embraced this bill, I urge the Governor to veto this bill and start fresh with the next session.”

In case you missed it, she's appalled. Appalled!! Democracy and rules are stupid, and only stupid public schools should have to follow them. Charters in other states can do whatever they want to in order to generate profit-- why is Maryland being such a stick in the mud? Charter operators have a God-given right to make their own rules so that they can suck up some tax dollars.

Congratulations Maryland. Congrats on having a not-entirely-craven legislature, and for standing up for public in simple ways that apparently escape some of your neighbor states.

The biggest irony here is that many aspects of the Maryland law are actually contrary to what the US Senate is currently considering in the ESEA rewrite. We can only hope that they, and maybe some neighboring states, get a little inspiration from this small victory for public education.

9 Things to Know About School Choice

To help kick off School Choice PR Week, Forbes ran a puff piece about choice entitled "Kicking Off School Choice Week With 9 Things You Need To Know". The piece comes from contributor Maureen Sullivan who in 2009 was elected to the the Hoboken school board arguing "for lower taxes and higher standards" during her "nearly" four year term (Sullivan was elected as a member of the Kids First team, then defected because she found them insufficiently reformy, leading to a great deal of fiscal grandstanding and wrangling in Hoboken)

Her 9 things make a nice compendium of what choice advocates offer as arguments these days. Let's consider them in the order she presents them.

1) Sullivan cites the American Federation for Children poll as proof that Americans want school choice for realsies. As Diane Ravitch pointed out to me when I wrote about that poll, it's interesting that in all the times choice has been on a ballot in the states, it has never won once (update: my mistake-- with huge backing, a charter bill did finally just pass in Washington) . At any rate, looking to AFC for information about school choice is like looking to R. J. Reynolds for information about the effects of smoking.

2) More than 100K students use vouchers to attend private school (according to Center for Education Reform, another school choice booster group). There are a little under 50 million K-12 students in the US, making voucher students about 0.2% of the student population. It's a good number to remember the next time anybody offers students in a voucher program as proof of anything.

3) There are 6,500 charter schools open now. Well, probably, more or less. Hard to say exactly how many have opened or closed this week. According to the National Alliance for Public School Charters, 2.5 million students are enrolled. Sullivan did include one actually interesting factoid here-- half of all charters are in four states (California, Texas, Florida and Arizona).

4) The Center for Education Reform offers grades each state on its charter school swellness. It's a fifty-five-point scale, and twenty-five of those points are based on independent authorizers and number of schools allowed. Fifteen more points for a combination of state and district autonomy, along with "teacher freedom," whatever that is supposed to be. Final fifteen are for funding. The A states are DC, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Arizona.

5) Eight states don't allow charters (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, though Nebraska is likely to change under a new pro-charter governor). It's an interesting list. Do you suppose the lack of any juicy urban profit centers is a factor for these states?

6) Charter schools go out of business. Sigh. I wish this weren't news to people, but as we repeatedly see, it is. The NAPSC reported that 200 2012-13 charters didn't open again the following year. The Center for Ed Reform says that of 6,700 that ever were, 1,036 have closed since 1992. I do not know how to make those figures fit with the figures in item 3.

7) Charter schools are getting better results. This is based on the wishful thinking and fluffy unicorns study released bu CATO studying Texas charters. In fact, there are no conclusive studies showing that charters do it better, and where marginally better results occur (and also when they don't, which is sad for the charter) those results are readily explained by how the charter manages its student body with selective intake and pushing out low performers. There are virtually no examples of charters attempting to educate an entire student population in the same way that a public school system must. So far we've had one all-charter district, and it failed to have any positive effect whatsoever.

8) The US Senate passed a resolution recognizing National School Choice Week, sponsored by Tim Scott (Rep-SC) with ten co-sponsors including Ted Cruz , Rand Paul, and Dianne Feinstein.

9) The two biggest teachers' unions got their asses handed to them by pro-school-choice candidates, achieving victory only over Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, who arguably could have been beaten by my dog. There's a whole host of explanations for those electoral victories, and they do underline how disconnected AFT and NEA leadership are from absolutely anything at all. I suspect the elections mostly show that political fooferawing only moves the needle so far. Scott Walker wasn't going to lose unless someone caught him on video beating a nun to death with a puppy. Tom Corbett wasn't going to win even if someone had a video of Jesus endorsing him.

Sullivan's article is one more example of the long game that charter and choice advocates are playing. Just keep insisting something is true long enough (public schools are failing, vaccines are dangerous, fluoride makes you communist, The Bachelor is a show about finding true love, charter schools are popular and successful) and eventually it enters Conventional Wisdom as, at a minimum, a "valid alternative view." It's not necessary for the things to be true, or even supported by facts-- just keep repeating them uncritically and without argument, and eventually, they stick.