It will be a quickie this week-- I have both of my children home and a grandson's birthday party to attend!
Eva Moskowitz Cannot Help Herself
Daniel Katz provides one of the best overviews of Moskowitz's ongoing meltdown. A study in how privilege, money and power can make you blind to how you're behavior is playing in the real world.
How Twisted Early Childhood Education Has Become
Early childhood ed has arguably been more badly damaged by reformsters than any other segment of the education biz. Sometimes it helps to have someone take a step back, show how far off track we have gotten, and help you realize you're not crazy for thinking we're getting early childhood ed completely wrong at this point.
Competency Based Ed: The Culmination of the Common Core Agenda
A good collection of the many pieces and points of view springing up as CBE becomes the newest topic of the education debates.
Five Perspectives on Student Fragility
At Psychology Today, Peter Gray has been running a series about the increasing fragile nature of our students, including theories about the source. This latest installment is interesting because it includes the many, many reactions from various stakeholders in that discussion.
Are You Being Served?
Nobody combines humor and actual journalism better than Jennifer Berkshire at Edushyster. Here's a look at the facts of which students Boston charter schools are actually serving.
Showing posts with label Edushyster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edushyster. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
Sweden vs. Nevada
Folks who are excited about Nevada's joyful embrace of choice-on-steroids might want to take a look at Sweden.
As my esteemed colleague Edushyster reminds us, the all-choice system experiment has been tried. Sweden has been creating an all-choice, all-privatized system for decades, and it has not gone well.
"It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing." Andreas Schleicher, OECD.
I am going to keep repeating this line until it starts to sink in:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
We have our own free-market education laboratory-- post-secondary education. As you may have heard, the cost of college has expanded like a hamster clamped onto a helium tank. There are a variety of suspects, all instructive.
One theory is that costs are driven up by the amount of money people have to spend. Student aid has been climbing, which has had the same effect on costs that you could expect if you went to a used car lot and announced, "Oh, I though I only had ten grand to spend on a car, but it turns out I actually have fifteen." (Hint: the salesman does not say, "Oh, put that extra five K away-- you won't need it for anything.")
Some analysts blame frills, like Schleicher's "shiny school buildings." Parents who drop their children off at schools far nicer than their own add anecdotal punch to this idea. Why do schools add frills? Because a frill is good, easy marketing, and because not all customers in the marketplace are driven by rational consideration of educational quality.
Other analysts have noted the increase in administrators. More money, more students, more facilities, more marketing = more people in charge.
All of this is predictable by the what I'm going to call the Jobs Effect, from an interview with Steve Jobs in which he observed that past a certain point, improving your product does not make you more money and at that point, the people who make a difference in the bottom line are the bean counters and marketters, and so those are the people who start rising through the ranks to run the business, leading to the point where product quality stops mattering and the company loses its way.
This seems to match what we find in Sweden. As a result of all-choice system, test scores plummet and gaps between the class-- well, Edushyster offers this quote from the Swedish education minister:
Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.
It's kind of amazing-- here's an entire country that has done exactly what charter-choice advocates want to do in this country, and they've been doing it for years, and the results are clearly visible and visibly crappy. Yes, you could argue that Sweden is a different country with a different culture, but that sort of concern certainly hasn't kept reformsters from loving on China and Finland and Estonia.
So let's not call Nevada's choice system an experiment, because it's no more an experiment than saying, "Hmm, I wonder if anything bad will happen if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for the next four decades." No, Nevada's new system is the same sort of willful denial as "I'm sure he'll really leave his wife this time" or "Clicking on the button the five-hundred-and-first time will make all the difference." And when it fails, the entire country of Sweden will be able to say, "We told you so."
As my esteemed colleague Edushyster reminds us, the all-choice system experiment has been tried. Sweden has been creating an all-choice, all-privatized system for decades, and it has not gone well.
"It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul. Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing." Andreas Schleicher, OECD.
I am going to keep repeating this line until it starts to sink in:
The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing.
We have our own free-market education laboratory-- post-secondary education. As you may have heard, the cost of college has expanded like a hamster clamped onto a helium tank. There are a variety of suspects, all instructive.
One theory is that costs are driven up by the amount of money people have to spend. Student aid has been climbing, which has had the same effect on costs that you could expect if you went to a used car lot and announced, "Oh, I though I only had ten grand to spend on a car, but it turns out I actually have fifteen." (Hint: the salesman does not say, "Oh, put that extra five K away-- you won't need it for anything.")
Some analysts blame frills, like Schleicher's "shiny school buildings." Parents who drop their children off at schools far nicer than their own add anecdotal punch to this idea. Why do schools add frills? Because a frill is good, easy marketing, and because not all customers in the marketplace are driven by rational consideration of educational quality.
Other analysts have noted the increase in administrators. More money, more students, more facilities, more marketing = more people in charge.
All of this is predictable by the what I'm going to call the Jobs Effect, from an interview with Steve Jobs in which he observed that past a certain point, improving your product does not make you more money and at that point, the people who make a difference in the bottom line are the bean counters and marketters, and so those are the people who start rising through the ranks to run the business, leading to the point where product quality stops mattering and the company loses its way.
This seems to match what we find in Sweden. As a result of all-choice system, test scores plummet and gaps between the class-- well, Edushyster offers this quote from the Swedish education minister:
Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.
It's kind of amazing-- here's an entire country that has done exactly what charter-choice advocates want to do in this country, and they've been doing it for years, and the results are clearly visible and visibly crappy. Yes, you could argue that Sweden is a different country with a different culture, but that sort of concern certainly hasn't kept reformsters from loving on China and Finland and Estonia.
So let's not call Nevada's choice system an experiment, because it's no more an experiment than saying, "Hmm, I wonder if anything bad will happen if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for the next four decades." No, Nevada's new system is the same sort of willful denial as "I'm sure he'll really leave his wife this time" or "Clicking on the button the five-hundred-and-first time will make all the difference." And when it fails, the entire country of Sweden will be able to say, "We told you so."
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Which Choosey Choosers Choose the Choices?
I respect reform advocate Andy Smarick for his willingness to consider some of the problems that come with the reformster movement in education. Yes, he steadfastly advocates for choice and charters, and yes, I think he's wrong about many things. But he wrote a long series of posts about the inherent tension between conservative values and conservative support for reformy stuff (here's my response to one of them), and he was a practitioner of respectful and reasonable dialogue before reformsters decided that it would be a good PR move.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
So I was all eyes when Smarick connected with Edushyster for an interview. It's right here, and you should read it.
Democracy vs. School Choice
Smarick and 'Shyster (which sounds like an excellent vaudeville act) get directly to one of the great tensions in the choice movement-- the tension between democracy and choice.
The reformster theory is that school choice ought to be democracy on steroids, a free market where every customer gets a direct vote on What School Looks Like and any entrepreneur can enter that race.
In practice, that seems to be very much what does not happen. Every place that people have been given the chance to "vote with their feet," they have lost all other voice in the process. (Not to mention that when a city moves to a "vote with their feet system," non-parent taxpayers end up with no vote at all-- not feet, not ballots, not anything.) This is not playing well. As Edushyster puts it
In recent elections, voters in both Chicago and Philadelphia basically shouted that they want more say over their schools. Is it just me, or does it seem like if you give voters a vote over whether they want an actual vote vs. the vote with their feet kind of vote, they always seem to vote for the *vote vote*?
Edushyster also throws in Camden and Newark as examples of how choice has led to disempowered and denocracy-free cities. And Smarick... agrees.
I totally agree with you. State takeovers of urban districts are sometimes necessary but they absolutely have to be temporary. It has to be a way to decentralize power to give parents more choices. It can’t be something that exists in perpetuity because then what you get are disempowered communities that are even more disempowered. And that’s no way to have these cities thrive in the way we want them to.
Edushyster bores in (well, not really "bores." Edushyster is the smartest, sharpest Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the edublogger world and I'm pretty sure she could get the toughest interview subject to just give her his car). If choice is so great, why don't citizens get to choose their choices? Why don't the citizens and families get to decide what choices they get to choose from? And again... Smarick agrees.
You’re right. I think this is a failure that I and lots of other people who have done this work are guilty of. We’ve had this urgency about changing things and have done too little to go into these places and have long conversations about, say, what does a new school board look like?
The School Governance Question
In the interview, Smarick raises an issue that I've watched him wrestle with a few times, and his wrestling has led me to do some mulling of my own-- how do you manage governance of a schoo;l system?
The school board model has the virtue of being good old direct democracy. But I suspect that it has upper and lower limits. When we get to the huge urban systems, is a board member who is representing a million voters any more responsive to the customers than a guy who's unelected CEO of a unaccountable charter corporation? On the other end of the scale, we have my small district where, in an not-unusual state of affairs, we have three people running for five empty seats this fall. If you imagine that's not going to end well for us, all I can say is that your imagination is on the mark. And all of that is before we get to the issue of a highly technical and complex operation being run by a bunch of elected amateurs. Sadly, that is still better than having a school system run by unelected amateurs, but it's still not optimal.
We just assumed that democratic control meant that a city had a single school board and that that school board owns all public schools in the district, makes decisions about all of the contracts, makes decisions about all of the principals, makes decisions about where kids go to school based on these residential zones. That is one form of democratic control. What I’m saying is that we could have a different set of rules that govern these boards so that you don’t give one board all of that authority. I don’t think you can have the kind of elected school board we’ve had for 100 years and simultaneously have community and parental empowerment.
It's an interesting idea, but almost impossible to conceive of working combined with a non-geographical school system.
Why the free market is always going to break Andy Smarick's heart
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of reading about school reform, it's that free market fans have some romantic and idealistic notions about the free market. In fact, it may be that what defines the different camps of the edu-debates is what part of the picture we are idealistic about (and therefor prone to overlook the problems of).
Smarick doesn't care for the way that Choice Systems seems to descend into Not Much Actual Choice Systems:
...if it’s wrong for the government to tell you where you have to go to school based on where you live, it’s no better if you have a system of choice—and I’m using air quotes here—but there are in fact no choices because all of the schools look the same. Choice is only choice if there are options.
But in a free market, this sort of leveling effect is an absolutely predictable outcome. When your edupreneur and his hedge fund backers set up a charter school, they are not saying, "What quirky specialized school can we create in order to insure a broad range of choices in the total system?" The total system and its range of choices is not their problem. Their problem is drawing in enough customers to make the enterprise worth their wild. And so they, like most of the other edupreneurs in the market, will chase the larger, more financially sustainable, section of the market.
The clearest parallel is the cable tv system. We were going to have thousands of channels, a broad and awesome world of choice. Bravo, Art & Entertainment, Music Television, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, two comedy channels-- we were going to have amazing choices and slowly but surely, as they chased the better parts of the market, they all deserted their original mission and became fun-house mirror versions of each other.
The free market does not love variety. Occasionally an outlier will strike it rich-- and what happens next? Everyone else rushes to imitate.
Smarick is also not a fan of unending government interference with the education market, but this, too, is inevitable. And not (just) because government has trouble keeping its grubby hands off anything.
When you let free market forces loose near society's most vulnerable citizens, bad things inevitably happen. The free market needs the freedom to experiment, but nobody is very enthusiastic about using school children as guinea pigs (and besides, some choice players have not played very nicely) and so there will be calls for government oversight. Plus, because in so many states it was the charter fans who brought the government into the game in order to get political access to the market-- well, you know that once government gets out in the game, it's nearly impossible to get it out. PLUS! When free markets mature, the power players inevitably "team up" with government to make sure the system favors them and not any new interlopers (see examples from Standard Oil to Microsoft).
Short answer-- no free market school system is ever going to be left alone to blossom and bloom on its own.
One last great moment from the interview
Edushyster: This feels to me to be a major contradiction at the heart of the Smarick vision. That on the one hand, parents are going to be empowered to choose their own choices, but on the other hand, all of the choices will be part of an accountability system that rewards a single definition of success. Am I wrong?
Smarick: That’s where you and I will probably agree and I disagree with a lot of reform folks. I think that we have systems that focus on a narrow set of metrics, inevitably we get schools that respond just to those metrics.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Get the New Orleans Story Out
I have even more interest in the New Orleans Recovery School District than ever, because while nobody was looking, the idea of such a school district seems to have skulked its way into Pennsylvania.
New Orleans is a reformster's dream, a school district where all of that messy democratically-controlled local public school system could be swept away, clearing the ground for edupreneurs to start sweeping up some of that sweet, sweet money.
The idea has spread. I've probably spent the most space here on Tennessee's Achievement School District. The idea of these districts is to set up a system in which local control and democratically-elected boards can be completely circumvented and some bureaucratic-corporate entity gets to decide which eduprofiteer gets to cash in. These kind of districts are truly the privatizers' dream, a happy land where students and families are simply conduits for generating tax-based revenue without regard for community, democracy, educational quality-- well, anything at all except those sweet, sweet piles of cash.
Not every location has been so fortunate as to be hit by a deadly and destructive hurricane, so in every place that's not New Orleans, crafting a narrative of public school disaster has taken a little longer. It takes a while to slowly starve a school district into submission or to generate the kind of BS Test scores that allow little boys to cry out about public school wolves. But reformster efforts to create disaster have begun to pay off.
In the meantime, reformsters have also done their best to sell a narrative of NOLA success. The RSD is awesome! Everyone is happy! Student scores are way up! It has been both horrifying and depressing to see how thoroughly this narrative has been adopted, leaving people like Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish to get out the story of what is really happening down there. This is a critical talking point-- New Orleans is the test of every reformster idea and they must sell it as a crown jewel in order to keep moving their programs forward. What Americans come to believe about the New Orleans Recovery School District is going to shape what comes next in the struggle for public education in this country.
That's why I'm asking for help for a friend. Reformsters are spending millions upon millions of dollars promoting and pushing the narrative of the Miracle Revival of New Orleans Schools, while the truth has to depend on people working for $0.00 in their free time to get the word out.
Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) proposes to travel to New Orleans and get the stories that aren't being told by speaking to the actual live human citizens who are living through this privatized democracy-free school system. Unlike the reformster crowd, Berkshire does not have zillionaire backers, or even pedestrian millionaire backers. If you care about this stuff, if you think that voices speaking up for democracy and public education and quality education and students above profits-- if you believe all that stuff matters, this is a critical point at which you can chip in.
The Beacon is a site for crowdsourcing journalism projects. It gives anyone with worthy work to do a way to meet the expenses of doing that work without having to make a deal with the corporate devil to do it.
We are spread out and with limited resources. But if, for instance, each of the people who follows this blog on Facebook kicked in ten bucks, Berkshire would more than meet her target. I've pledged. Heck, my mom has pledged. You should do the same. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, this is a concrete way to help the cause of public education in this country at the critical juncture of a very important story-- a story that is unlikely to be covered well by much of the regular media.
This is your chance to help. Follow the link, make a pledge, help the real story of New Orleans get out. This matters.
New Orleans is a reformster's dream, a school district where all of that messy democratically-controlled local public school system could be swept away, clearing the ground for edupreneurs to start sweeping up some of that sweet, sweet money.
The idea has spread. I've probably spent the most space here on Tennessee's Achievement School District. The idea of these districts is to set up a system in which local control and democratically-elected boards can be completely circumvented and some bureaucratic-corporate entity gets to decide which eduprofiteer gets to cash in. These kind of districts are truly the privatizers' dream, a happy land where students and families are simply conduits for generating tax-based revenue without regard for community, democracy, educational quality-- well, anything at all except those sweet, sweet piles of cash.
Not every location has been so fortunate as to be hit by a deadly and destructive hurricane, so in every place that's not New Orleans, crafting a narrative of public school disaster has taken a little longer. It takes a while to slowly starve a school district into submission or to generate the kind of BS Test scores that allow little boys to cry out about public school wolves. But reformster efforts to create disaster have begun to pay off.
In the meantime, reformsters have also done their best to sell a narrative of NOLA success. The RSD is awesome! Everyone is happy! Student scores are way up! It has been both horrifying and depressing to see how thoroughly this narrative has been adopted, leaving people like Mercedes Schneider and Crazy Crawfish to get out the story of what is really happening down there. This is a critical talking point-- New Orleans is the test of every reformster idea and they must sell it as a crown jewel in order to keep moving their programs forward. What Americans come to believe about the New Orleans Recovery School District is going to shape what comes next in the struggle for public education in this country.
That's why I'm asking for help for a friend. Reformsters are spending millions upon millions of dollars promoting and pushing the narrative of the Miracle Revival of New Orleans Schools, while the truth has to depend on people working for $0.00 in their free time to get the word out.
Jennifer Berkshire (Edushyster) proposes to travel to New Orleans and get the stories that aren't being told by speaking to the actual live human citizens who are living through this privatized democracy-free school system. Unlike the reformster crowd, Berkshire does not have zillionaire backers, or even pedestrian millionaire backers. If you care about this stuff, if you think that voices speaking up for democracy and public education and quality education and students above profits-- if you believe all that stuff matters, this is a critical point at which you can chip in.
The Beacon is a site for crowdsourcing journalism projects. It gives anyone with worthy work to do a way to meet the expenses of doing that work without having to make a deal with the corporate devil to do it.
We are spread out and with limited resources. But if, for instance, each of the people who follows this blog on Facebook kicked in ten bucks, Berkshire would more than meet her target. I've pledged. Heck, my mom has pledged. You should do the same. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, this is a concrete way to help the cause of public education in this country at the critical juncture of a very important story-- a story that is unlikely to be covered well by much of the regular media.
This is your chance to help. Follow the link, make a pledge, help the real story of New Orleans get out. This matters.
Friday, May 1, 2015
Edushyster: Peter Cunningham's Woes
I have now met Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire, and I totally get it. I don't believe there is a human being on the planet who, upon sitting down with her, would not want to answer every question just to prolong the conversation and once you're talking, well, lying to the woman would be like kicking a puppy.
So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.
She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).
I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.
There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says
There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side.
Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with.
In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed.
It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.
But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?
I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.
"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult.
Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.
Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.
But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.
Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.
So it makes perfect sense that just about anybody would be willing to talk to her, even if she is on the Pro-Public Education side of the fence.
She's just put up an interview with Peter Cunningham, the former Arne Duncan wordifier who now runs Education Post, a pro-reformster political war room style rapid response operation (I knew I'd moved up in the blogging world when they took the time to spank me personally).
I don't imagine there are people who read this blog who do not also read Edushyster, but I'm going to keep linking/exhorting you to head over and check out this interview while I note a few of my own responses here.
There are a couple of eyebrow-raisers in the interview that really underline the differences between the reformsters and the pro-public ed side of these debates. In particular, Cunningham notes that many reformsters feel isolated and under attack. When explaining how Broad approached him about starting EP, Cunningham says
There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side.
Organized?! Organized!!?? It is possible that Broad et al have simply misdiagnosed their problem. Because I'm pretty sure that the pro-public ed advocate world, at least the part of it that I've seen, is not organized at all. But we believe what we are writing, so much so that the vast majority of us do it for free in our spare time (I am eating a bag lunch at my desk as I type this), and we pass on the things we read that we agree with.
In fact, it occurs to me that contrary to what one might expect, we are the people using the Free Market version of distributing ideas-- we create, we put it out there, we let it sink or swim in the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, the reformsters try to mount some sort of Central Planning approach, where they pay people to come up with ideas, pay people to promote those ideas, pay people to write about those ideas, and try to buy the marketplace so that their products can be prominently displayed.
It is the exact same mistake that they have brought to education reform-- the inability to distinguish between the appearance of success and actual success. If students look like they are succeeding (i.e. scoring high on tests they've been carefully prepped for), then they must be learning. If it looks like everybody is talking about our ideas (i.e. we bought lots of website space and hired cool writers and graphics), then we must be winning hearts and minds.
But what is Cunningham to do to save these poor beleaguered millionaires in their cushy offices (who are probably not eating a bag lunch at their desks as I type this-- isolated and alone in my classroom, I might add)?
I’ve created the ability to swarm, because everyone felt like they were being swarmed. We now have people who will, when asked, lean in on the debate, when people feel like they’re just under siege.
"Lean in" is a great way to put it. I've been "leaned in" upon. It just feels kind of mean, and definitely not like an attempt to create a better conversation. Which is, well, odd , because I've actually had some certainly fine conversations with people on the other side of the edu-fence. It's really not impossible, or even difficult.
Cunningham himself has proven capable of critiquing the reformster party line. But he's been hired to do a job, and he's doing it. Which is perhaps part of the problem.
Mind you, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that I am extra-noble or super-swell because I toil away in unfunded obscurity. There are people (Jennifer is one of them) who do this as their main gig and ought to be getting deservedly rich for it; the fact that I'm not doesn't make me a better person.
But it tells us something about the two sides of the fence that the separate pastures are fertilized with such different-- yeah, let's drop that analogy. It says something that if all the money evaporated from the pro-public ed movement, things wouldn't change much at all. But take away Gates money and Broad money and Walton money, and we wouldn't be having these conversations. Reform has consistently side-stepped both the democratic process and the marketplace of ideas, adopting instead the corporate boss model of, "I'm paying your salary. Do as I say." Since democracy and the market place of ideas started fighting back, reformsters have been trying to adapt. But it's hard. And lonely.
Cunningham notes that by 2012-2013, pro-public ed was "very effectively calling a lot of reform ideas into question." Well, not exactly. They were effectively pointing out that a lot of reform ideas were crap. Marketing and PR do not necessarily beat actual substance. But Cunningham is a man who's been given a giant pile of money to hire swarms and bloggers and a big, shiny website, so he's going to spend it. for at least two more years. Read the edushyster interview.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Legal Assault on Public Ed in Boston
“Boston’s public charter schools are helping students succeed. But to
get into one of the city’s public charter schools, kids literally have
to win the lottery. Kids should not have to be lucky to get an adequate
education,” said Paul Ware, a partner at Goodwin Procter and former
chairman of the firm’s litigation department. “It’s time for action to
ensure that all students in Boston have stronger educational
opportunities.”
That quote might lead one to expect that the next words out of Ware's mouth might be, "So we will going to court to insure that every public school in the Boston has the resources and support necessary for success." But it turns out that March is Opposites Month in Boston, and so what actually happens next is that three big time law firms are going to court to strip more resources from Boston Public Schools.
Paul F. Ware Jr., Michael B. Keating, and William F. Lee, partners at top Boston law firms, are planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of children who want to attend charter schools but allegedly didn't win Boston's charter school lottery. Charter students reportedly make up 4% of total students in Massachusetts; presumably the other 96% will just have to go round up lawyers of their own.
Boston has hit its limit of 34 charter schools. Last summer the legislature declined to add to that. This dance over charter caps is an annual ritual in the pilgrim state, where resistance to charters can become spirited (a quick google turned up two previous charter-related lawsuits, filed in order to keep charters out of communities). Feelings in MA have been rather split among voters when it comes to charters, with no strong groundswell of charter support on which to hang a political hat.
So now, lawyers will be trying the civil rights argument, claiming that those students who are not getting to escape public schools are having their civil rights violated. Civil rights violations affecting the students still in public schools, such as having their schools inadequately funded, or having more of their funding sucked away by charters-- these are apparently not the kind of civil rights violations that concern these lawyers.
Mark Kenen of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association thinks the suit is swell and that it fits their thirty-year argument that charters should be allowed to flourish.
This argument rests on the assertion that charters have been successful. That's a tough argument to back up. Attempts to provide data and support lead to pieces like this one at Edushyster in which some fairly simple number crunching leads to the conclusion that Boston charters are producing about three male graduates per charter per year.
The worry this time is that the lawsuit will be filed against state secretary of education James A. Peyser who, like his boss Governor Charlie Baker, feels the charter love to his very core. I suppose it's theoretically possible that this is all sock puppet theater, leading quickly to the moment where Peyser and Baker declare themselves forced by the courts to do exactly what they couldn't get permission for from the legislature. In other words, public ed proponents are worried that the defense against this lawsuit might not be very spirited, or even life-like.
It's a troubling argument to repeatedly encounter-- the notion that the state has a moral obligation to allow the rescue of some students in a manner that simultaneously strips other, apparently less-worthy students, of the resources and support needed for their schools. This is lawsuit to demand that the state rob Peter in order to help Paul turn a charter profit.
There are moral and civil rights issues at play here, but they are aligned precisely opposite of where the charter supporters wish to display them. If rich lawyers want to get up in arms about the civil rights of students, my recommendation is that they stand up for all students, even the ones who aren't trying to get into charter schools.
That quote might lead one to expect that the next words out of Ware's mouth might be, "So we will going to court to insure that every public school in the Boston has the resources and support necessary for success." But it turns out that March is Opposites Month in Boston, and so what actually happens next is that three big time law firms are going to court to strip more resources from Boston Public Schools.
Paul F. Ware Jr., Michael B. Keating, and William F. Lee, partners at top Boston law firms, are planning to file a lawsuit on behalf of children who want to attend charter schools but allegedly didn't win Boston's charter school lottery. Charter students reportedly make up 4% of total students in Massachusetts; presumably the other 96% will just have to go round up lawyers of their own.
Boston has hit its limit of 34 charter schools. Last summer the legislature declined to add to that. This dance over charter caps is an annual ritual in the pilgrim state, where resistance to charters can become spirited (a quick google turned up two previous charter-related lawsuits, filed in order to keep charters out of communities). Feelings in MA have been rather split among voters when it comes to charters, with no strong groundswell of charter support on which to hang a political hat.
So now, lawyers will be trying the civil rights argument, claiming that those students who are not getting to escape public schools are having their civil rights violated. Civil rights violations affecting the students still in public schools, such as having their schools inadequately funded, or having more of their funding sucked away by charters-- these are apparently not the kind of civil rights violations that concern these lawyers.
Mark Kenen of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association thinks the suit is swell and that it fits their thirty-year argument that charters should be allowed to flourish.
This argument rests on the assertion that charters have been successful. That's a tough argument to back up. Attempts to provide data and support lead to pieces like this one at Edushyster in which some fairly simple number crunching leads to the conclusion that Boston charters are producing about three male graduates per charter per year.
The worry this time is that the lawsuit will be filed against state secretary of education James A. Peyser who, like his boss Governor Charlie Baker, feels the charter love to his very core. I suppose it's theoretically possible that this is all sock puppet theater, leading quickly to the moment where Peyser and Baker declare themselves forced by the courts to do exactly what they couldn't get permission for from the legislature. In other words, public ed proponents are worried that the defense against this lawsuit might not be very spirited, or even life-like.
It's a troubling argument to repeatedly encounter-- the notion that the state has a moral obligation to allow the rescue of some students in a manner that simultaneously strips other, apparently less-worthy students, of the resources and support needed for their schools. This is lawsuit to demand that the state rob Peter in order to help Paul turn a charter profit.
There are moral and civil rights issues at play here, but they are aligned precisely opposite of where the charter supporters wish to display them. If rich lawyers want to get up in arms about the civil rights of students, my recommendation is that they stand up for all students, even the ones who aren't trying to get into charter schools.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)