Parents Defending Education Goes Anti-Immigrant

Parents Defending Education is primo astroturf, a group of seasoned political communications professionals with the usual connections and deep pocketed backers, pretending to be a grass roots organization.

PDE has come out opposed to Black Lives Matter At School. They are staunchly against choice if it involves choices on the wrong side of culture panic (like a charter school with an LGBTQ focus). Their website notes:

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas. Through network and coalition building, investigative reporting, litigation, and engagement on local, state, and national policies, we are fighting indoctrination in the classroom -- and for the restoration of a healthy, non-political education for our kids.

Their main shtick is to encourage people to turn in schools doing naughty indoctrinaty, CRT/DEI/SEL/MOUSE things and, in some cases, aim some litigation at them. Central to this culture panic battle is their IndoctriNation map along with the opportunity to submit an Incident Report. 

The "incidents" include schools with Gay Straight Alliance chapters and "restorative practices." Fairfax County is reported for using terms like "marginalized group" and "protected class." Hosting drag performers. DEI hiring. And more recently, any school critical of Israel in current war. You can search under categories like ethnic studies and critical race theory and affinity groups. All aimed at catching districts, schools, or teachers doing naughty stuff.

But two days ago, PDE added a new category and a new incident report.

Influx of migrants strains public schools in Springfield; schools are struggling to teach and provide for migrant students with no previous education

This is not a typical PDE report of administrative leftiness or some teacher getting all LGBTQ-accepting or anti-racist. This is strictly a complaint about immigrant children in Massachusetts. 

In reviewing thousands of documents retrieved by Parents Defending Education via the Freedom of Information Act, there are indicators that show how this mass influx of migrant families has impacted schools in this northeastern state, particularly in the city of Springfield.

Thousands of dollars in local resources have been allocated to accommodate “newcomer students” and their families. This programming has included training sessions for teachers, administrators, and staff, as well as mental health support and translation services (both written and oral), which have included translating school documents in at least 17 different languages. Additional purchased documents include translation dictionaries for at least nine different languages.

Teachers admit there's an influx. Interpreters for at least six different languages were requested to help with parent-teacher conferences (Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Spanish). Talk about buying translation dictionaries. At least 135 migrant students in one city.

PDE does not critique districts' handling of this influx, so one assumes that the panic here is over all those furriners coming into our schools, and costing us money to educate and care for them. Apparently, on top of the usual culture panic, PDE will now add some Foreign Others panic. There's not even an attempt this panic to undocumented immigrants--this is just any immigrants at all! No recognition that, hey, these new folks might have jobs and be paying taxes. Just "These folks don't talk 'murican and that costs us money and aren't you outraged by that?"

Is it really necessary to explain, again, that immigrants have lifted this country up, and that children, who have no say over where their parents take them, deserve an education because they are young humans and the world will be marginally worse if they don't get one? That yes, this is hard, but that's no excuse not to do it?

PDE is now right up there with the Heritage Foundation, which back in February said Supreme Court decision be damned, let's charge undocumented immigrant children tuition to go to school. Even other conservatives knew this was a pretty odious stance.

I suppose this fits with PDE's general stance of championing intolerance and opposing money spent on Other People's Kids, but somehow this seems like stooping even lower. I guess we'll see whether being anti-immigrant is a big new part of their portfolio. 

MA: Charters Hate Compromise

This morning's Boston Post Globe reports that a "Bitter Fight Brewing over Mass. Charter School Expansion" (though it could also have been "Mass Charter Expansion"). And while the battle has not been "brewing" so much as "going on for a while now," the article centers on one question-- can the legislature come up with a compromise on increasing the number of MA charters, or will the whole mess end up as a ballot initiative in the fall?

Massachusetts jumped on the charter bus with real enthusiasm back in 2010 when they saw it as a way to grab some Race To The Trough money (charters had been around for considerably longer, but RTTT really ramped the business up), but of course that money is no longer available, and local districts and taxpayers are noticing what charter school "hosts" everywhere notice-- that funding a new entitlement for students to attend private school at public expense is costly.

The battle is playing out mostly in the Senate-- the charter-reformster industry has already purchased themselves a governor and a House of Representatives in Massachusetts.

Reporter David Scharfenberg suggests that in the past, charter legislation has been an area of compromise, but this time offers a different summation:

“It’s the pure charter play this time,” said Martha “Marty” Walz, a management and public affairs consultant who helped usher the 2010 bill into law as cochairwoman of the Legislature’s education committee.

The governor has tried to sweeten the pot by budgeting more money for the big pile used to re-imburse districts (temporarily) for the money sucked out by charters, but Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg is moving above that, suggesting that legislators look at issues "from financing, to governance, to admission and retention of hard-to-educate populations, like special needs students and English language learners."

The charter industry doesn't much like that idea.

“We have the highest-performing public charter school sector in the nation,” said Mary Jo Meisner, executive vice president of communications at the Boston Foundation, which has been a strong charter advocate. “Opening that up to radical change is a scary thought.”

Continued Meisner, "How are we supposed to have high performing charters if we serve the same students as the public system? Our success depends on being highly selective with our student body and booting students who make us look bad back to the public schools." Ha! Kidding-- the charter industry continues to avoid anything remotely like honesty about these provisions. In fact, the charter industry and #1 Fan Governor Charlie Baker continue to read the own PR so much that they believe they would win a ballot fight (plus they know just how many giant piles of money they threaten to throw at such a ballot question- about $18 million total).

Senator Patricia D. Jehlen is unimpressed. “If a bully comes and asks for your lunch money one day and you give it to him, does that keep him from coming back the next day?”

Fighting tough union leader Barbara Madeloni has different thoughts as well.

“We want to go to the ballot box, that’s what our poll numbers are telling us,” said Barbara Madeloni, president of the union. “I really think the narrative about charter schools is shifting.”

Shift though it may, the signs are clear-- charter schools in Massachusetts have key government positions on their side and they want their giant pile of money, and they want it unencumbered by any sorts of rules that require them to be part of public education's mandate to educate all students. Once again, charters really could be a part of a robust and fully- (and honestly-) funded public education system, but in states like Massachusetts, it seems that what the current charter industry wants is to exist outside public education, in a special bubble where all they have to do is operate some very selective schools and rake in some very large piles of public tax dollars. Here's hoping that the Massachusetts voters set them straight.

MA: Boston's Lying Problem

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is sad. He seems to be sad specifically because he is "taking heat" But I think Walsh may be sad because of all the lying that's going on in Boston.

About a month ago in Esquire, Charles Pierce said that Marty Walsh was going "full Scott Walker" by first defeating an opponent by accusing him of being a education reform "grifter" who was trying to destroy pubic ed. And then, Pierce said, Mayor Walsh dumped Candidate Walsh and worked out a plan to close down 36 of Boston's roughly 120 school buildings, taking the BPS total to 90-- all part of a cozy partnership with charteristas in MA.

Not so, said the mayor's office. The Esquire article was untrue and unsourced-- in other words, Pierce was a lying liar who just made this stuff up.

But Pierce's article linked right back to the blog of Mary Lewis Pierce (no relation) who posted the documents (acquired by QUEST via FOIA)  that showed the driving partnerships behind the mayor's plan.

So somebody is surely lying. Maybe the blogger Pierce is lying about having the documents. Maybe she made them up. Maybe QUEST never filed a FOIA request, or maybe when they did, somebody who sent her the documentation sent her fake documents. Or maybe Marty Walsh was lying about the allegations being untrue and unsourced.

And Walsh was also sad about that number 90. True, he intended to "consolidate" some schools, but "closing" is such an ugly word. And he certainly wasn't going to do whatever it is to 36 schools.

This would fit in with Walsh's unified enrollment plan, where students fill out just one handy application and the school district puts the students in a school of the district's choice, thereby allowing the district to funnel students directly into the charter "partners" of the public system. This is a system favored at the folks at the Boston Compact, a group built on partnership between public and charter schools. What a great idea, since by its very existence, the group legitimizes charter claims to taxpayer education dollars.

The Boston Compact also has ties to the New Schools Venture Fund, a group devoted to funneling public tax dollars to private investor pockets by-- hey, wait. Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah-- the New Schools Venture Fund is the previous employer of Jim Peyser, who explained back then how to take over and gut a public school district by "breaking down the barriers" between public and charter schools. Course that was before he took his new job-- Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts.

The public school advocacy group QUEST insists that Walsh told them privately about his intention to shutter 36 schools. This makes Walsh sad:

“The Mayor has never said, nor does he have a plan to close 36 schools,” mayoral spokeswoman Laura Oggeri said in a statement.  

And that might have been true on a technicality, but Walsh has since doubled down on his denial, saying, that although the meeting happened, “There was absolutely no talk about shrinking schools or closing schools — none at all." In fact, there's a whole list of things that have never happened. He has never had discussions with anybody about co-locations. The Boston Compact is sure it has no interest in or plan to increase charter market share in Boston.

So what are we to do with all these lying liars who lie. I mean, that has to be what we have in Boston, right? It's strictly he-said, she-said, and somebody has to be lying. So either the parents and QUEST are just making things up because, I don't know-- they're bored? They want to make Walsh sad? They are looking for some made-up cause so that they can give up their spare time to raise a commotion about nothing, because reasons? Or Walsh is keeping secrets and  lying because he's betrayed a bunch of constituents in order to work for big-money interests and further a privatization agenda that is widely opposed and he'd rather not have to defend it. I don't know-- which one of these scenarios seems most plausible?

Of course, I suppose it's also possible that Walsh is just sadly confused. After all, he insists that it's just a small group of parents who are raising a fuss, and the vast silent majority think this is a great idea. Does that sound familiar, too? Perhaps it's because you remember when Walsh insisted that the Bostonian opposition to hosting the Olympics was just "ten people on twitter." That turned out to be false. It also turned out that the failure to build public support was related to a failure to be transparent, open and honest with the public, as well as the discovery that the whole thing was a get-rich-quick scheme for some connected insiders.

So maybe Boston doesn't have a problem with liars. Maybe it just has a problem with officials who can neither recognize nor learn from the truth.So maybe Boston has a truth problem, which is different from a lying problem in the same way that school closures are different from consolidating takeover merger closings.

[Correction: I originally attributed the FOIA request to Pierce (the blogger), but the request was filed by QUEST. Also, somehow in the editing process a reference to a long-out-of-date article popped back in. This is what I get for writing through lunch period.]

MA: How To Gut a School District

Back in April of 2014, Jim Peyser was managing director of the NewSchools Venture Fund, a group set up to support "venture philanthropy" in the charter school world with grant-funneling, consulting, lobbying, etc. Think of them as bag men and enforcers for hedge funders interested in making a charter school buck or two.

That would make Jim Peyser an ordinary charter-pushing well-connected money man, but that was Peyser in April of 2014. But two days before Christmas of 2014, Santa brought Peyser a gift of the job of Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts. Not since the fox was hired to stand guard over the henhouse has a job been so cleverly filled, but Governor Charlie Baker loves him some charters and has thrown open the gate to every kind of charter shilling under the sun.

But the case of Peyser is unique, because as NewSchools Venture Honcho, Peyser laid out his ideas about how the path forward for gutting redesigning school districts. Take for instance the piece he published in that long-ago April, "Redesigning School Districts: The Way Forward."

He opens by quoting an imaginary friend who bemoans the fact that although charters are swell, they only serve a few students, and in order to "close the achievement gap at scale," the "real work" of fixing school districts must be done.

These friends and allies believe charters have successfully proven that it’s possible to create high-performing public schools in high-need neighborhoods, but now charters need to step aside so that their practices and systems can be taken to scale by enlightened district leaders.

Peyser wants to point out two problems with that view. You will perhaps be surprised to learn that neither of the problems are that charters have not actually successfully proven anything. Okay-- they've proven that with an infusion of resources and a carefully chosen student population, you can test prep your way to higher test scores. But we've known that since before charter schools were a twinkle in a hedge funder's eye.

No, Peyser thinks there are two other things wrong with that.

First, it is based on the Great Man theory of reform, the belief that a really awesome superintendent or principal can Fix Everything. But Peyser says that fans don't reckon with the bump-and-run employment pattern of urban superintendents. In the very next sentence he indicts the "this-too-shall-pass" attitude of "tenured teachers" (though if superintendents leave every three years, this too, whatever it is, really will pass) and "entrenched administrators." See what he did there? Problem administrators are stuck in the mud, but problem teachers have evil job protections.

Second, Peyser lays out what he calls the "twin obstacles to effective and sustainable change: politics and collective bargaining." Those really are the bugbears of the corporate approach to school operation, and they really are twins, because both of them interfere with the leader's ability to do whatever the hell he wants without having to get anybody's approval. "Applying sound management practices" to a big ole school district is hard enough when leadership has the unfettered freedom to Do As He Will. "Doing so in an environment where change must be negotiated with powerful unions and ultimate control rests with an ever-changing cast of politicians and school board members, is next to impossible."

It's a pretty quick, clear explanation of the corporatist view. Get rid of elected officials. Get rid of collective bargaining. Let me run the company the way I think best, based on "sound management practices." These guys really, literally, do not know what the hell they are doing when it comes to schools.

Peyser lists the other problems. The large majority of students are still being educated in the public schools, and "politico-bureaucratic inertia" makes it hard to "right-size a school system that is gradually losing students and resources as charters grow." Yes, those taxpayers can get so grumpy when their neighborhood school is right-sized.

The result is an annual series of budget cuts and a growing chorus of complaint from district employees and parents of district-school students that charter schools are forcing their schools into a downward spiral.

Peyser's feeling about this is not clear. Is he suggesting the death spiral isn't really happening, because that would be a hard point to sell. Does he think people should be happily compliant about the death spiral?

But Peyser does have answers to the Big Picture Issues.

Specifically, district superintendents, state education commissioners, and mayors, in partnership with one another and with charter operators and local and national funders, are developing new systems for breaking down the walls that separate the district and charter sectors, and that reorganize central offices to empower individual schools – both district and charter, alike.  This isn’t a veiled attempt to co-opt and regulate the charter sector, in order to “level the playing field” (i.e., force charters to live with all of the dysfunction that district schools suffer under).  Instead, it is an effort to liberate all schools from the dead-weight of central management, in exchange for a results-based system of accountability.

Note that he wants to rest assured that this not some attempt to co-opt charters, meaning, I guess, suck them back under some office's control. Instead, he would like to free the public schools from their chains of central office management. Yes, when the charter operators come to take over public schools, they will be greeted as liberators.

Practical steps in this liberation?

Well, Peyser likes a universal enrollment system, like the ones in Newark and New Orleans, where students are thrown in a big single lottery and each student waits to be chosen by a charter school "receives a single offer of admission from a school that his or her parents has chosen." He also likes the idea of designating a charter as a default neighborhood school with an opt-out option for parents.

He likes common school report cards, so that parents can make informed choices about the schools that charter operators will assign students to. Some parents will choose schools with high standardized tests scores, and some parents will decide to send their child to a school with low test scores, I guess. Well, no matter. Newark and New Orleans teach us that most won't get an actual choice anyway.

But common school report cards do help set up another favorite Peyser practice-- bringing charters in to take over or replace "failing" schools. The big bonus here is real estate:

In exchange, the charter schools can lease or buy the school building, a precious commodity for any growing charter operator. 

Because the very best school plans make sure to address the needs of charter operators, and students are not nearly as precious as the buildings they occupy. Peyser likes the Tennessee ASD, and he provides this hilariously understated summary of charter real estate grabbing in New York:  

Even when a charter school is not directly replacing a low-performing district school, some districts, like New York, have helped find space for charter operators in underserved communities.

Yes. "Find" space. As in, "While we were looking for a co-location site, we just shoved all these public school kids out of the building and-- voila! We found some space!" 

Peyser also wants to be clear that in his perfect School District of Tomorrow, there are plenty of opportunities for folks to cash in on the remaining public schools as well. All sorts of school functions can be shifted to outside contractors and new funding formulas can help turn any low-scoring public school into a fiduciary funnel for private operators. And don't forget-- freedom from those damn contract restrictions so that school leaders can flex their autonomy and deal with teachers as they wish.

All of this would be one more set of musings from a corporate-style, pubic-school-gutting, hedge-fund-feeding charter promoter if it weren't for the fact that this is the guy now in charge of Massachusetts' public education system. No wonder charter sharks like Families for Excellent Schools are now churning the Massachusetts waters, and Boston's mayor has laid out a plan for gutting Boston Public Schools. The only good thing about Peyser is that he's already laid out exactly what he has in mind. None of it is good, but like a big truckload of manure driving toward you across a field, you can at least see it coming.

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. 

Duncan Stumps Massachusetts

On Monday, Arne Duncan (or somebody in his office) appeared in the Boston Globe pitching some woo-hoo at a couple of his buddies-- school reform, and outgoing Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. A former civil rights lawyer who later moved on to corporate law (Texaco, Coca-Cola), Patrick has been tossed around on the list of possible successors to Eric Holder. But this week Arne was hailing him for fixing education in Massachusetts.

These kinds of puff pieces are interesting because they always include these embedded descriptions of what Duncan thinks education is for.

I have always been impressed by Massachusetts’ deep commitment to education. From the founding of America’s first public schools, through the historic Education Reform Act of 1993 and to today, the state has shown a commitment to improving student outcomes, raising academic standards, closing achievement gaps — and to the opportunities for all that a world-class education can create.

So, education is like a manufacturing process with the purpose of creating opportunities for students, like a shirt constructed for them to wear, and not a growth process that allows them to become a fuller more capable more complete more self-sufficient and fulfilled version of themselves. I know, I know-- it's a definition on which reasonable people can disagree. I just find Duncan's language choices revealing.

He goes on to list some fine current stats that show how awesome Massachusetts is. And he lists some of their super-duper achievements

Over the last several years, the state has also introduced new college and career ready academic standards, with a focus on critical thinking, problem solving skills, has brought approximately 5,000 poor children off waiting lists and into high quality early education, and has worked to make college more affordable. 

Oh, poor, unloved Common Core. Nobody will even say your name out loud any more, not even those who were once your most ardent suitors.

It's a glowing piece of puffery, but it took just two days for Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based thinky tank, to pop up in the same pages of the same newspaper call bullshit on Arne.

Who says Common Core advocates don’t like fiction? In his Opinion piece on Jan. 5, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan got one fact right: Massachusetts leads the nation in education. Attributing that progress to Governor Patrick’s leadership is like suggesting that a pinch runner who finds himself on third base hit a triple.

Stergios is here to tell you that all of Massachusetts finest education hours came before Patrick set foot in the governor's office. And he's not afraid to use the "C" name, either.

Since the adoption of Common Core in 2010, sampled national tests show fourth-grade reading scores, the best predictor of future success, falling more significantly in Massachusetts than anywhere else in the country.

During Patrick’s time in office, Massachusetts students’ SAT scores have fallen by 20 points. (Prior to 2007, SAT scores had risen for 13 consecutive years.)  

When Patrick took office, 67 percent of third graders scored advanced or proficient on the state’s third-grade reading tests (again, an important marker); that number is now 57 percent. 

This would be a good place to remind you that Fordham Institute, a thinky tank that takes back seat to nobody in its love and devotion to the Common Core, compared Massachusetts's old standards to CCSS and found that MA's were better. They said, "Massachusetts’s existing standards are clearer, more thorough, and easier to read than the Common Core standards."

So when we say that the Common Core standards are untested, that's no longer strictly true-- they have been tested all across the country for a few years now. And while I don't agree with the reformsters' measures of success, it's worth noting that by those same measures, the Core have failed in Massachusetts. This is the kind of data reformsters believe important, and by that data, the Core isn't cutting it.

Duncan goes on to note, several times, that Massachusetts is leading the nation in education, and that's not exactly true at the moment. It's more like the national standards are dragging Massachusetts down. So Duncan is essentially congratulating Massachusetts for how well they did in spite of his attempts to stop them. MA is leading the nation in the sense that they already know how to win at this standards game better than the reformsters in DC.

But good luck to Governor Patrick in whatever job awaits him in DC.

Great News from MA

ICYMI, it's nice to report some good news--

You may recall that the commonwealth of Massachusetts was considering linking teachers' licensure to evaluations. They were going to up the eval ante by saying that a teacher who received two bad evaluations will be booted-- not just out of a job, but out of the profession.

Well-- that's not happening.

That news broke at the end of October, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association leapt immediately into action. They flooded the commissioner's office with a reported 45,000 emails, spoke at town hall meetings, and made plans for further vocal action.

Yesterday the commissioner announced that the department was "rescinding the draft options that link licensure to educator evaluation." Commissioner Mitchell Chester was remarkably not at all coy about it, either. In the letter and in interview, he's said basically, "Yeah, we got a shitstorm of feedback on this, all negative, so we're backing off." He also oddly noted that he agreed with the negative feedback, so someday we may have to delve into the mystery of how this proposal ever ended up on the table in the first place (did somebody do a cut and paste from their ALEC newsletter without reading carefully?)

When I originally wrote about this, I noted it was worth paying attention to nationally because, if successful, it could be a cancer that might spread.

But now, we can just hope that this kind of vocal, positive, powerful, definitive action by teachers in the face of anti-teacher and anti-education government action spread. The MTA and their leaders are to be applauded for taking an unequivocal stand and not just making a bad deal on this in return for a place at the table.