Just kidding. At my house, the game will not even be on, and I'm pretty sure life will go on. But here are a few pieces to read today.
The Real Issue with Teacher Pay
The North Carolina 2015 Teacher of the Year has a few things to say about respect for the profession (and if you've been paying attention to North Carolina, you know why)
Alice's Adventures in Public Education
Turns out Lewis Carroll was writing about the future, and here we are.
The Classroom Door Is Always Open
A visit to one of the few old-style schools of choice still operating out there. This is what it should be about.
Reforminess IS the Status Quo
Jersey Jazzman continues his frustrated attempts to ground the education discussion in reality.
Why Aren't Public Schools Too Big To Fail?
Steven Singer wonders why our response to failing schools is to abandon them, rather than attempt a rescue.
Cook for 17 minutes at 350 degrees
Frozen pizza instructions prompt a reflection on teaching skills in the English classroom.
George Orwell's Ed Conference
Morna McDermott looks at the incredible, astonishing education conference coming up, courtesy our good friends at Pearson
Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
NC: TeachStrong Solves The Mystery of Teaching
Remember TeachStrong? It was launched by the folks at CAP to create some tasty PR about fixing teachers, complete with a not-very-impressive list of Ways To Make Teachers Swell. They rounded up most of the usual Faux-Lefty Reformster Suspects, including virulently anti-teacher and anti-teacher-union groups like DFER, and despite all this, the initiative also suckered in NEA and AFT into joining, a decision so...um, let's say "counter-intuitive" that Randi Weingarten had to write a whole post explaining WTF she was thinking. (Plus, I stand by my theory that this group is about covering Hilary Clinton's education flank).
Well, TeacherStrong is up to things. Specifically, they are going to host a moderated discussion in North Carolina on February 17th (roughly a month before the primary election) to discuss "the importance of modernizing and elevating the teaching profession." They will even follow it up with some local educators (including the 2014 Teacher of the Year, and an association president) who will wax poetic about "the impact that TeachStrong's principles would have on their career and the entire teaching profession." Moderators include a director from Project LIFT, a "pubic-private" turnaround biz, and CAP.
TeachStrong's message that we must work to modernize and elevate the teaching profession is especially relevant in North Carolina. The Charlotte area alone had nearly 1,000 teachers resign before the 2015 school year, and the state has experienced a 20 percent drop in enrollment in teacher preparation programs over the last 3 years.
Yes, the exodus of teachers from North Carolina and the reluctance of new recruits to join up-- that is a real puzzler, that is. Regular readers of this space know that I have a few theories. North Carolina has been hammering away at its educational foundation with big heavy hammers. Let's see. They tried to do away with tenure and froze wages for years, then cleverly tried to throttle two birds with one heavy fist by trying to make teachers choose between a (possible) raise and job security. Eventually, they created a new insulting salary schedule. Meanwhile, the state's Lt. Governor required them to rewrite a report about their crappy charters schools so that it was instead about how wonderful their charter schools are. They have cut school budgets, fired aids by the thousands, and installed terrible punitive regulations such as Pass-This-Standardized-Test-or-Fail-Third-Grade rules.
In other words, while TeachStrong is concerned about bringing the teaching profession into the future, in North Carolina, it's going to take some work just to bring the teaching profession into the present.
Anything that would advance the cause of teaching and public education in North Carolina would be welcome, but I'm not so sure that TeachStrong is the outfit to do it. This discussion could theoretically involve a head-on hit at the huge bad moves that North Carolina has made in education, or it could end up being pretty words to use while tap-dancing around the landmines that North Carolina has strewn around the public school landscape. But I'm not encouraged that they discuss the drop in the teacher supply as if it's some sort of mysterious inexplicable random act of nature, rather than the fairly predictable outcome of years of anti-teacher, anti-student, anti-education policies in the state. There are plenty of good, caring, dedicated teachers in North Carolina (I know-- I talk to some of them), and they deserve far better than what the state has been dumping upon them. TeachStrong's panel discussion should start with that.
Well, TeacherStrong is up to things. Specifically, they are going to host a moderated discussion in North Carolina on February 17th (roughly a month before the primary election) to discuss "the importance of modernizing and elevating the teaching profession." They will even follow it up with some local educators (including the 2014 Teacher of the Year, and an association president) who will wax poetic about "the impact that TeachStrong's principles would have on their career and the entire teaching profession." Moderators include a director from Project LIFT, a "pubic-private" turnaround biz, and CAP.
TeachStrong's message that we must work to modernize and elevate the teaching profession is especially relevant in North Carolina. The Charlotte area alone had nearly 1,000 teachers resign before the 2015 school year, and the state has experienced a 20 percent drop in enrollment in teacher preparation programs over the last 3 years.
Yes, the exodus of teachers from North Carolina and the reluctance of new recruits to join up-- that is a real puzzler, that is. Regular readers of this space know that I have a few theories. North Carolina has been hammering away at its educational foundation with big heavy hammers. Let's see. They tried to do away with tenure and froze wages for years, then cleverly tried to throttle two birds with one heavy fist by trying to make teachers choose between a (possible) raise and job security. Eventually, they created a new insulting salary schedule. Meanwhile, the state's Lt. Governor required them to rewrite a report about their crappy charters schools so that it was instead about how wonderful their charter schools are. They have cut school budgets, fired aids by the thousands, and installed terrible punitive regulations such as Pass-This-Standardized-Test-or-Fail-Third-Grade rules.
In other words, while TeachStrong is concerned about bringing the teaching profession into the future, in North Carolina, it's going to take some work just to bring the teaching profession into the present.
Anything that would advance the cause of teaching and public education in North Carolina would be welcome, but I'm not so sure that TeachStrong is the outfit to do it. This discussion could theoretically involve a head-on hit at the huge bad moves that North Carolina has made in education, or it could end up being pretty words to use while tap-dancing around the landmines that North Carolina has strewn around the public school landscape. But I'm not encouraged that they discuss the drop in the teacher supply as if it's some sort of mysterious inexplicable random act of nature, rather than the fairly predictable outcome of years of anti-teacher, anti-student, anti-education policies in the state. There are plenty of good, caring, dedicated teachers in North Carolina (I know-- I talk to some of them), and they deserve far better than what the state has been dumping upon them. TeachStrong's panel discussion should start with that.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
NC: Covering Charter Butts
This week, reporter Ann Doss Helms of the Charlotte Observer and Lynn Bonner of the News & Observer both offered accounts of a striking example of 'how the sausage is made" and how public officials make sure that the sausage carries a nice chartery taste.
Wednesday was the day to present the state department of public instruction's report on charter schools to the State Board of Education. They were supposed to accept the report on Thursday, but Lt. Governor Dan Forest had a problem. Per Bonner:
Lt. Gov. Dan Forest argued that the report, intended for the legislature and full of data on charter school enrollment, demographics and costs, was too negative.
“The report, to me, did not have a lot of positive things to say,” he said.
And just in case you're thinking maybe Forest is just concerned that charters aren't getting the job done and he wants to shape them up and that's what he's responding to...
Once the board issues reports, Forest said, “that is the fuel the media uses for the next year to criticize whatever we’re doing.”
And so Forest sent the report back to the drawing board, even though the deadline for acceptance of the report is January 15. Forest said that he would "run interference" with the legislature if anyone complained about the missed deadline. Helms offered her own analysis:
I was among the reporters present. The brief discussion struck me as an unusually blunt demand to make data more politically palatable.
Will you be surprised to learn that Forest is a big-time fan of the charter industry? His General Counsel and Policy Director, Steven Walker, who sits on NC's Charter School Advisory Board and was presented the Charter School Champion Award last summer from the Charter School Initiative of North Carolina.
What did Forest not like about the report? Well, as it turns out, since the report was submitted to a public meeting, a copy (what I guess we must now consider the rough draft) is online for the reading. Let's take a look! The report has three main sections, and I'm sure Forest is over-reacting. Surely this report will create a rosy picture of charter life in North Carolina!
Current State of Charter Schools in NC
Once the previous cap of 100 charters was removed back in 2011, the charter gold rush has been on, though more charter requests have been denied than approved. Currently there are 187 charters operating in NC.
The report notes that charters can draw from any geographic location, and while they are encouraged to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of their location, "There is no mechanism by which schools can guarantee racial and ethnic balance, however, nor is there an official consequence for not achieving it."
That might explain why charters in NC are more white and less Hispanic than public schools. Charters student populations are 57% white, compared to 49% for public schools. Public schools are 16% Hispanic, while charters are 8%. Black population is about the same. This statistic is problematic for all those charter fans who insist that charter opponents are trying to deny Black families a choice for a better life.
But the report digs beyond these raw statistics and finds that, well, things are actually worse. The report finds that individual charters are highly segregated, and that the trend over time has been for fewer and fewer non-white students to make it into charters. Public schools have remained a pretty evenly segregated mix over that same time. They refer here to a working paper by Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University, tracking the growing "segmentation" of charters in NC. That paper is pretty striking read, and it provides this pair of charts to bluntly illustrate the problem:
North Carolina charters have also consistently served fewer economically disadvantaged students. The numbers fluctuate over three years, but the ratio remains consistent-- public school Ed population has been at 50, 61, and 55 percent of student population. In charters, it has been 40, 37, and 36. And once again, it's worse than it looks, because that's an average, and looking closer reveals that a third of NC charters keep their ED student numbers below 20% (and half of those are below 10%).
The news about "exceptional children" is a little more complicated and nuanced, but for the most part, charters are on the same page as public schools.
How do these schools perform? North Carolina is one of those states that now gives its schools grades. The public school grades are distributed in a pretty bell-curvy manner, but charters are more spread out to the A/B and D/F end of the scale than public schools.
Charters do generally perform better than their home LEA, though about a third can't be compared to their home LEA. These data seem incomplete in many ways-- for instance, what about a comparison to the home LEA of the students, rather than that of the building. The data could mean that NC charters are producing amazing results, or that they are creaming top students, or students from more upscale neighborhoods are attending a charter in the poor part of town.
Inadequate charters? There are such things. When the cap was lifted, legislators also created a definition of a crappy charter that included low academic performance (aka "test scores"). In 2012, one charter ran afoul of this. For 2012-2013, the state moved the goalposts so that test results wouldn't count against charters. In 2014-2015, sixteen charters got warning letters for academic suckiness. They could be in trouble. Maybe.
Pre-cap-lifting, 57 charters closed, including 14 that never opened. 35 of those closures were because of financial problems. Since the cap was lifted, 13 charters have closed
Impact of Charter Schools on the Public School System
Charters currently pull $366 million in funding. The report notes that while in theory this is simply money redirected from public schools, since charters also pull in former home or private school students, they are actually adding to the state student population, and since the state doesn't increase school funding proportional to student numbers, this is actually a net loss. In other words, when Pat stops home-schooling or attending Lilywhite Private Academy, Pat's Regular Public High School loses money-- even though Pat never attended RPHS in the first place.
This is actually a financial wrinkle I've not seen brought up often. I'm doubting that charter supporters are happy to see it turn up in this state-level report.
The report brings up the issue of specific economic impact on specific districts-- and then notes that the state stopped asking local districts about this in 2013, because...:? Don't ask, don't tell? What you don't know can't hurt your charter PR?
And then the report actually tries to say some nice things about charters, like how competition might help (though all options aren't really available to all students) and parents might become more engaged as they try to figure out what's going on. No, really. When I first read the paragraph, it seemed sort of favorable to charters. But now-- damn you, close reading!
Best Practices Resulting from Charter School Operations
Oh, charter laboratories of education! What genius educational ideas have you brewed up in North Carolina? And, um, why is this part of the thirty-page report only two pages long?
Back in June of 2015, NC set up standards to rate a charter as "high quality." The standards involved academic, operational and financial domains. And of the 146 charters in operation last year, a whopping nine earned the high quality seal of approval. There's a list. Next year they're going to tweak the standards.
Well, how about EVAAS, NC's preferred junk science measure for effectiveness? Did any charters manage high EVAAS scores with high populations of economically disadvantaged students? There were eight, with two way out in front of everybody (Henderson Collegiate and Maureen Joy Charter). The report does not offer any clues to the secret of their success.
Other Stuff
The remainder of the report is a compendium of updates and structures (here's some services the NC Department of Public Instruction offers charter folks, here's some of the pending legislation, and here's an update on some ongoing stuff, like North Carolina's pilot program to enter the wildly unsuccessful cyber-school business).
Good Luck on That Rewrite
So the department now has its marching orders from the Lt. Governor-- "Go make this thing less sad, and don't make charters look so much like a resegregate NC schools while draining taxpayer dollars."
Forest meanwhile felt some pressure to explain exactly what he meant by, "Go rewrite that report so it doesn't make me sad." In an interview with Pete Kaliner of WWNC, he indicated that he saw the negative view of charters as part of a pattern, that positive news was withheld on purpose.
In the interview Forest said he objects to the way the state report compares demographics and letter grades at charter and district schools. And he said a section that details increased state spending on charter schools and concludes that most of that money would otherwise have gone to school districts is “an opinion piece.”
And if the department is unsure about how they can "fix" the report, Forest knows where they can get help.
Forest said said there should be an opportunity for “charter schools themselves to be able to read it and look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t painting our picture.’ There’s a lot of great positive things going on with charter schools in the state. Let’s tell that story, too.”
Meanwhile, since the original draft is right there on line, we'll be able to compare the final product to see exactly how many coats of whitewash have been applied to the big charter barn. Let's hope they do a good job, because facts and the truth are nice and all, but not when they come at the expense of good charter PR. Carry on, North Carolina.
Wednesday was the day to present the state department of public instruction's report on charter schools to the State Board of Education. They were supposed to accept the report on Thursday, but Lt. Governor Dan Forest had a problem. Per Bonner:
Lt. Gov. Dan Forest argued that the report, intended for the legislature and full of data on charter school enrollment, demographics and costs, was too negative.
“The report, to me, did not have a lot of positive things to say,” he said.
And just in case you're thinking maybe Forest is just concerned that charters aren't getting the job done and he wants to shape them up and that's what he's responding to...
Once the board issues reports, Forest said, “that is the fuel the media uses for the next year to criticize whatever we’re doing.”
And so Forest sent the report back to the drawing board, even though the deadline for acceptance of the report is January 15. Forest said that he would "run interference" with the legislature if anyone complained about the missed deadline. Helms offered her own analysis:
I was among the reporters present. The brief discussion struck me as an unusually blunt demand to make data more politically palatable.
Will you be surprised to learn that Forest is a big-time fan of the charter industry? His General Counsel and Policy Director, Steven Walker, who sits on NC's Charter School Advisory Board and was presented the Charter School Champion Award last summer from the Charter School Initiative of North Carolina.
What did Forest not like about the report? Well, as it turns out, since the report was submitted to a public meeting, a copy (what I guess we must now consider the rough draft) is online for the reading. Let's take a look! The report has three main sections, and I'm sure Forest is over-reacting. Surely this report will create a rosy picture of charter life in North Carolina!
Current State of Charter Schools in NC
Once the previous cap of 100 charters was removed back in 2011, the charter gold rush has been on, though more charter requests have been denied than approved. Currently there are 187 charters operating in NC.
The report notes that charters can draw from any geographic location, and while they are encouraged to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of their location, "There is no mechanism by which schools can guarantee racial and ethnic balance, however, nor is there an official consequence for not achieving it."
That might explain why charters in NC are more white and less Hispanic than public schools. Charters student populations are 57% white, compared to 49% for public schools. Public schools are 16% Hispanic, while charters are 8%. Black population is about the same. This statistic is problematic for all those charter fans who insist that charter opponents are trying to deny Black families a choice for a better life.
But the report digs beyond these raw statistics and finds that, well, things are actually worse. The report finds that individual charters are highly segregated, and that the trend over time has been for fewer and fewer non-white students to make it into charters. Public schools have remained a pretty evenly segregated mix over that same time. They refer here to a working paper by Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University, tracking the growing "segmentation" of charters in NC. That paper is pretty striking read, and it provides this pair of charts to bluntly illustrate the problem:
North Carolina charters have also consistently served fewer economically disadvantaged students. The numbers fluctuate over three years, but the ratio remains consistent-- public school Ed population has been at 50, 61, and 55 percent of student population. In charters, it has been 40, 37, and 36. And once again, it's worse than it looks, because that's an average, and looking closer reveals that a third of NC charters keep their ED student numbers below 20% (and half of those are below 10%).
The news about "exceptional children" is a little more complicated and nuanced, but for the most part, charters are on the same page as public schools.
How do these schools perform? North Carolina is one of those states that now gives its schools grades. The public school grades are distributed in a pretty bell-curvy manner, but charters are more spread out to the A/B and D/F end of the scale than public schools.
Charters do generally perform better than their home LEA, though about a third can't be compared to their home LEA. These data seem incomplete in many ways-- for instance, what about a comparison to the home LEA of the students, rather than that of the building. The data could mean that NC charters are producing amazing results, or that they are creaming top students, or students from more upscale neighborhoods are attending a charter in the poor part of town.
Inadequate charters? There are such things. When the cap was lifted, legislators also created a definition of a crappy charter that included low academic performance (aka "test scores"). In 2012, one charter ran afoul of this. For 2012-2013, the state moved the goalposts so that test results wouldn't count against charters. In 2014-2015, sixteen charters got warning letters for academic suckiness. They could be in trouble. Maybe.
Pre-cap-lifting, 57 charters closed, including 14 that never opened. 35 of those closures were because of financial problems. Since the cap was lifted, 13 charters have closed
Impact of Charter Schools on the Public School System
Charters currently pull $366 million in funding. The report notes that while in theory this is simply money redirected from public schools, since charters also pull in former home or private school students, they are actually adding to the state student population, and since the state doesn't increase school funding proportional to student numbers, this is actually a net loss. In other words, when Pat stops home-schooling or attending Lilywhite Private Academy, Pat's Regular Public High School loses money-- even though Pat never attended RPHS in the first place.
This is actually a financial wrinkle I've not seen brought up often. I'm doubting that charter supporters are happy to see it turn up in this state-level report.
The report brings up the issue of specific economic impact on specific districts-- and then notes that the state stopped asking local districts about this in 2013, because...:? Don't ask, don't tell? What you don't know can't hurt your charter PR?
And then the report actually tries to say some nice things about charters, like how competition might help (though all options aren't really available to all students) and parents might become more engaged as they try to figure out what's going on. No, really. When I first read the paragraph, it seemed sort of favorable to charters. But now-- damn you, close reading!
Best Practices Resulting from Charter School Operations
Oh, charter laboratories of education! What genius educational ideas have you brewed up in North Carolina? And, um, why is this part of the thirty-page report only two pages long?
Back in June of 2015, NC set up standards to rate a charter as "high quality." The standards involved academic, operational and financial domains. And of the 146 charters in operation last year, a whopping nine earned the high quality seal of approval. There's a list. Next year they're going to tweak the standards.
Well, how about EVAAS, NC's preferred junk science measure for effectiveness? Did any charters manage high EVAAS scores with high populations of economically disadvantaged students? There were eight, with two way out in front of everybody (Henderson Collegiate and Maureen Joy Charter). The report does not offer any clues to the secret of their success.
Other Stuff
The remainder of the report is a compendium of updates and structures (here's some services the NC Department of Public Instruction offers charter folks, here's some of the pending legislation, and here's an update on some ongoing stuff, like North Carolina's pilot program to enter the wildly unsuccessful cyber-school business).
Good Luck on That Rewrite
So the department now has its marching orders from the Lt. Governor-- "Go make this thing less sad, and don't make charters look so much like a resegregate NC schools while draining taxpayer dollars."
Forest meanwhile felt some pressure to explain exactly what he meant by, "Go rewrite that report so it doesn't make me sad." In an interview with Pete Kaliner of WWNC, he indicated that he saw the negative view of charters as part of a pattern, that positive news was withheld on purpose.
In the interview Forest said he objects to the way the state report compares demographics and letter grades at charter and district schools. And he said a section that details increased state spending on charter schools and concludes that most of that money would otherwise have gone to school districts is “an opinion piece.”
And if the department is unsure about how they can "fix" the report, Forest knows where they can get help.
Forest said said there should be an opportunity for “charter schools themselves to be able to read it and look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t painting our picture.’ There’s a lot of great positive things going on with charter schools in the state. Let’s tell that story, too.”
Meanwhile, since the original draft is right there on line, we'll be able to compare the final product to see exactly how many coats of whitewash have been applied to the big charter barn. Let's hope they do a good job, because facts and the truth are nice and all, but not when they come at the expense of good charter PR. Carry on, North Carolina.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
ICYMI: This Week's Readings from the Edusphere
Some reading from this week in the edusphere.
13 Years of Dress Rehearsal
Chris Thinnes ran a back-to-school parent's night speech by Rachel Thinnes that is a great reminder that school is not just about students getting ready to live their lives -- their lives are going on right now. She also references Excellent Sheep, which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned.
EdTPA and TFA Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Fred Klonsky spent a chunk of his week fending off feverish defenders of Pearson's teacher certification baloneyfest, EdTPA. Klonsky wrote several good take-downs of the program, but this one put it in the context of another favorite reformster program.
10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster
You'll need a strong stomach for this look back at some of the decades most notable cheerleading for death and destruction in New Orleans. Because who cares how many people have to die, neighborhoods have to be destroyed, and citizens have to be permanently displaced if, when it's all done, privatizers can make some money and test scores go up, a little, in some places, for some people.
Message from Bethlehem Superintendent
The superintendent of Bethlehem Area Schools in PA wrote in the local paper a piece to show that he gets it, and that he regrets "a different world we are now in where a teacher potentially risks a negative evaluation because she is committed to helping her students develop their passions, gifts and talents."
NC Teachers Being 'Voluntarily Exploited'
Brief but powerful profile of three North Carolina teachers and how they make it work. These ladies are inspirational-- wait till you read about how one turns the experience of not being able to buy groceries into a growth experience for her own practice.
13 Years of Dress Rehearsal
Chris Thinnes ran a back-to-school parent's night speech by Rachel Thinnes that is a great reminder that school is not just about students getting ready to live their lives -- their lives are going on right now. She also references Excellent Sheep, which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned.
EdTPA and TFA Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Fred Klonsky spent a chunk of his week fending off feverish defenders of Pearson's teacher certification baloneyfest, EdTPA. Klonsky wrote several good take-downs of the program, but this one put it in the context of another favorite reformster program.
10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster
You'll need a strong stomach for this look back at some of the decades most notable cheerleading for death and destruction in New Orleans. Because who cares how many people have to die, neighborhoods have to be destroyed, and citizens have to be permanently displaced if, when it's all done, privatizers can make some money and test scores go up, a little, in some places, for some people.
Message from Bethlehem Superintendent
The superintendent of Bethlehem Area Schools in PA wrote in the local paper a piece to show that he gets it, and that he regrets "a different world we are now in where a teacher potentially risks a negative evaluation because she is committed to helping her students develop their passions, gifts and talents."
NC Teachers Being 'Voluntarily Exploited'
Brief but powerful profile of three North Carolina teachers and how they make it work. These ladies are inspirational-- wait till you read about how one turns the experience of not being able to buy groceries into a growth experience for her own practice.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
NC Gets a Hint
North Carolina used to be a fairly progressive state, at least as far as the South goes, but an aggressively conservative legislature has been busily rolling that back.
Along with attempts to destroy teaching as a career, North Carolina's legislators decided to adopt one of those ALEC-style anti-abortion laws requiring physicians to give every woman contemplating an abortion a canned speech about the fetal development while showing her a live ultrasound of the fetus (this, of course, required her to get this speech while lying half-naked on an examining table).
That law was immediately appealed by physicians, the ACLU, and other thinking people who don't hate women and their dirty, dirty vaginas. The case has been making its way up the legal food chain, and was just decided, again, in favor of keeping the government out of ladies' private parts.
The decision was handed down by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a judge conservative to have once been on the short list for the seat occupied by John Roberts.
The language of the decision should be of interest to teachers. Slate had the summary today:
The panel concluded that the “state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient.” And that “transforming the physician into the mouthpiece of the state undermines the trust that is necessary for facilitating healthy doctor-patient relationships and, through them, successful treatment outcomes.” The decision reminded us that the “patient seeks in a physician a medical professional with the capacity for independent medical judgment that professional status implies. The rupture of trust comes with replacing what the doctor’s medical judgment would counsel in a communication with what the state wishes told. It subverts the patient’s expectations when the physician is compelled to deliver a state message bearing little connection to the search for professional services that led the patient to the doctor’s door.”
So the reasoning here is that a trained professional should not be compelled to put the government's judgment ahead of her own.
I don't mean to suggest that the kind of physical violation and deliberate shaming involved in Norh Carolina's freakish law is on the same order as reformsters requirements of Common Core and testing-- the anti-abortion law is far worse.
But we are talking about the same principles here. The state wants to compel teachers to say, "This is the most important stuff to learn, because the government says so." The state wants to compel teachers and schools to say to students, "You are a loser and a failure, because the state says so." And where teachers are too quietly or cheerfully compliant, parents wonder if they can trust that teacher. Is the teacher looking out for the interests of the child, or expressing the interests of the state? Legislation that compels teachers to withhold their own best judgment and replace it with the judgment of the government is not only corrosive to education, but corrosive to the trust and relationship between school and community, teacher and family.
The judge was not speaking about education, but there is something for education leaders to learn from this ruling.
Along with attempts to destroy teaching as a career, North Carolina's legislators decided to adopt one of those ALEC-style anti-abortion laws requiring physicians to give every woman contemplating an abortion a canned speech about the fetal development while showing her a live ultrasound of the fetus (this, of course, required her to get this speech while lying half-naked on an examining table).
That law was immediately appealed by physicians, the ACLU, and other thinking people who don't hate women and their dirty, dirty vaginas. The case has been making its way up the legal food chain, and was just decided, again, in favor of keeping the government out of ladies' private parts.
The decision was handed down by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a judge conservative to have once been on the short list for the seat occupied by John Roberts.
The language of the decision should be of interest to teachers. Slate had the summary today:
The panel concluded that the “state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient.” And that “transforming the physician into the mouthpiece of the state undermines the trust that is necessary for facilitating healthy doctor-patient relationships and, through them, successful treatment outcomes.” The decision reminded us that the “patient seeks in a physician a medical professional with the capacity for independent medical judgment that professional status implies. The rupture of trust comes with replacing what the doctor’s medical judgment would counsel in a communication with what the state wishes told. It subverts the patient’s expectations when the physician is compelled to deliver a state message bearing little connection to the search for professional services that led the patient to the doctor’s door.”
So the reasoning here is that a trained professional should not be compelled to put the government's judgment ahead of her own.
I don't mean to suggest that the kind of physical violation and deliberate shaming involved in Norh Carolina's freakish law is on the same order as reformsters requirements of Common Core and testing-- the anti-abortion law is far worse.
But we are talking about the same principles here. The state wants to compel teachers to say, "This is the most important stuff to learn, because the government says so." The state wants to compel teachers and schools to say to students, "You are a loser and a failure, because the state says so." And where teachers are too quietly or cheerfully compliant, parents wonder if they can trust that teacher. Is the teacher looking out for the interests of the child, or expressing the interests of the state? Legislation that compels teachers to withhold their own best judgment and replace it with the judgment of the government is not only corrosive to education, but corrosive to the trust and relationship between school and community, teacher and family.
The judge was not speaking about education, but there is something for education leaders to learn from this ruling.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Profiting from Non-Profits
There are days when it seems like the news in education is just the same news, over and over and over again.
People believe in the magic of certain words, like "non-profit." For whatever reason, when people hear the word "non-profit" they think of some philanthropic exercise in austerity and sacrifice. When the term is applied to schools, they think of teachers and administrators plugging away tirelessly, plowing every spare cent back into the work of the school.
Here comes Marian Wang in ProPublica to explain how Not True that is.
Let me start with the usual disclaimers. Not all charter schools are a blight on American public education, and not all non-profits are scams.
But the unregulated world of charters, infused with cash and boosted by politicians who are some combination of paid-for and clueless has given rise to an endless parade of charters created as money grabbing mechanisms. There's plenty of reason, for instance, to believe that Gulen charters are simply a fund-raising operation for their secretive owner-founder. Just last week, the Indy Star ran an piece about a charter high school being set up as basically a recruiting wing of a for-profit college currently under investigation for being one more predatory school (they had better watch out, or the feds might punish them by forcing them to accept a bunch of financial and political aid). You can go to high school and get college credits-- that only count at the for-profit college. I hear that heroine dealers also offer free samples.
Wang's piece is well worth the read-- she describes the practice of "sweeps," arrangement by which a non-profit school turns over as much as 95 or 100 percent of its revenue to a for-profit management company.
While relationships between charter schools and management companies have started to come under scrutiny, sweeps contracts have received little attention. Schools have agreed to such setups with both nonprofit and for-profit management companies, but it's not clear how often. Nobody appears to be keeping track.
There are so many things wrong with this sort of thing, not the least of which is the complete absence of accountability.
Take the case of Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, another National Heritage Academies school. In 2012, state auditors tried to track the $10 million in public funding given to the school, only to conclude they were " unable to determine ... the extent to which the $10 million of annual public funding provided to the school was actually used to benefit its students." From what auditors could tell, the school was paying above-market rent for its building, which in turn is owned by a subsidiary of National Heritage Academies. They also had concerns about equipment charges.
This is not news. It's only been a few months since Wang wrote about Baker Mitchell, a North Carolina charter operator who sets up these sorts of management contracts with himself.
But in all these cases, the private company enjoys a shield from prying eyes. Once public funds enter this black hole, they could be doing anything from footing the bills for some other enterprise entirely to financing a second house in the Hamptons for the CEO. As Casandra Ulbrich, VP of the Michigan State Board of Education told Wang, "I can't FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] National Heritage Academies."
The practice of using non-profit charters as pass-throughs is too common to be surprising any more. It's a new sort of money laundering, in which any sniff of public interest is stripped from the money, and they become untraceable nuggets of wealth.
One thing is absolutely certain-- every dollar that is spent on actually educating students is a dollar that the management company doesn't get to put in its own pocket. Students are a Good Thing to these charters because students generate revenue, but they are also a problem because educating students drains revenue.
Bottom line-- even if you weren't bothered by the total lack of transparency and accountability, there's still another issue. In a profitable charter arrangement (whatever it's called) the interests of the students are in direct opposition to the interests of the operators. That makes this scam a bad deal for taxpayers, students, the community and everybody else who isn't making a buck from faux non-profit charterdom.
People believe in the magic of certain words, like "non-profit." For whatever reason, when people hear the word "non-profit" they think of some philanthropic exercise in austerity and sacrifice. When the term is applied to schools, they think of teachers and administrators plugging away tirelessly, plowing every spare cent back into the work of the school.
Here comes Marian Wang in ProPublica to explain how Not True that is.
Let me start with the usual disclaimers. Not all charter schools are a blight on American public education, and not all non-profits are scams.
But the unregulated world of charters, infused with cash and boosted by politicians who are some combination of paid-for and clueless has given rise to an endless parade of charters created as money grabbing mechanisms. There's plenty of reason, for instance, to believe that Gulen charters are simply a fund-raising operation for their secretive owner-founder. Just last week, the Indy Star ran an piece about a charter high school being set up as basically a recruiting wing of a for-profit college currently under investigation for being one more predatory school (they had better watch out, or the feds might punish them by forcing them to accept a bunch of financial and political aid). You can go to high school and get college credits-- that only count at the for-profit college. I hear that heroine dealers also offer free samples.
Wang's piece is well worth the read-- she describes the practice of "sweeps," arrangement by which a non-profit school turns over as much as 95 or 100 percent of its revenue to a for-profit management company.
While relationships between charter schools and management companies have started to come under scrutiny, sweeps contracts have received little attention. Schools have agreed to such setups with both nonprofit and for-profit management companies, but it's not clear how often. Nobody appears to be keeping track.
There are so many things wrong with this sort of thing, not the least of which is the complete absence of accountability.
Take the case of Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, another National Heritage Academies school. In 2012, state auditors tried to track the $10 million in public funding given to the school, only to conclude they were " unable to determine ... the extent to which the $10 million of annual public funding provided to the school was actually used to benefit its students." From what auditors could tell, the school was paying above-market rent for its building, which in turn is owned by a subsidiary of National Heritage Academies. They also had concerns about equipment charges.
This is not news. It's only been a few months since Wang wrote about Baker Mitchell, a North Carolina charter operator who sets up these sorts of management contracts with himself.
But in all these cases, the private company enjoys a shield from prying eyes. Once public funds enter this black hole, they could be doing anything from footing the bills for some other enterprise entirely to financing a second house in the Hamptons for the CEO. As Casandra Ulbrich, VP of the Michigan State Board of Education told Wang, "I can't FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] National Heritage Academies."
The practice of using non-profit charters as pass-throughs is too common to be surprising any more. It's a new sort of money laundering, in which any sniff of public interest is stripped from the money, and they become untraceable nuggets of wealth.
One thing is absolutely certain-- every dollar that is spent on actually educating students is a dollar that the management company doesn't get to put in its own pocket. Students are a Good Thing to these charters because students generate revenue, but they are also a problem because educating students drains revenue.
Bottom line-- even if you weren't bothered by the total lack of transparency and accountability, there's still another issue. In a profitable charter arrangement (whatever it's called) the interests of the students are in direct opposition to the interests of the operators. That makes this scam a bad deal for taxpayers, students, the community and everybody else who isn't making a buck from faux non-profit charterdom.
Friday, October 31, 2014
NC Program To Drive Out Teachers Is Working
The News Observer reports that the number of teachers leaving teaching in North Carolina has grown, and analysts suggest that it's only going to get worse.
"What a surprise," said nobody who was paying attention. The Tar Heel State has been doing its level best to let teachers know that their kind aren't welcome around these parts. The North Carolina legislature has tried to erase tenure, tried to give teachers a choice between job security or getting a raise ever (maybe-- because they didn't actually have a way to fund the hypothetical raise). And, of course, every year north Carolina teachers take a real-dollar pay cut-- unless they just started out and get the almost-adequate beginning teacher raise that the GOP pushed through.
On top of that, North Carolina has followed Florida in implementing the kinds of kid-unfriendly programs that can make classrooms extra-miserable, patterned on classics like Florida's "Just Read, Dammit!" program that tells eight year olds they're ignorant failures who must repeat third grade if they don't get a sufficient score on a badly designed standardized reading test.
Few states in the country can hope to match North Carolina in creating an environment that is openly hostile to anyone who hopes to build a lifetime teaching career there. Under current conditions, it's just not possible.
And so, teachers have decided to get the hell out.
North Carolina's political dimbulbs continue to ignore this. Thanks to a lower retirement rate last year, the full turnover rate took a slight dip downward. But the number of teachers leaving teaching in general and leaving teaching in North Carolina in particular continues to grow. And as one analyst points out, these figures are probably low anyway because they only cover through March and don't include everyone who made a decision to bail over the summer.
Wake County, the state's largest system, continues to lead the pack, with teacher attrition numbers that have at least doubled over the last few years. But Dallas Woodhouse, head of political group Carolina Rising that backs GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis, thinks things are going great.
Teachers leaving the state is an issue, Woodhouse said. but Republicans are dealing with it. The economy has to improve for teacher salaries to improve, “and we’re seeing that now,” he said.
Of course, North Carolina loves its charter schools. Reports suggest as many as 170 opening next year, and why not. NC pols fight hard to preserve charters rights to operate with little or no oversight, even on something as simple as revealing what they pay staff. The special blend of rules has worked well for businessmen like Baker Mitchell, a gifted and well-connected charter profiteer.
For a flourishing charter picture, nothing could be better than a teacher shortage, because teacher-job-filler is cheap and agreeable. North Carolina is becoming a great place to be a TFA temp and the charter operator who hires her. For actual professional teachers, it's sadly true that nothing could be finer than to exit Carolina.
"What a surprise," said nobody who was paying attention. The Tar Heel State has been doing its level best to let teachers know that their kind aren't welcome around these parts. The North Carolina legislature has tried to erase tenure, tried to give teachers a choice between job security or getting a raise ever (maybe-- because they didn't actually have a way to fund the hypothetical raise). And, of course, every year north Carolina teachers take a real-dollar pay cut-- unless they just started out and get the almost-adequate beginning teacher raise that the GOP pushed through.
On top of that, North Carolina has followed Florida in implementing the kinds of kid-unfriendly programs that can make classrooms extra-miserable, patterned on classics like Florida's "Just Read, Dammit!" program that tells eight year olds they're ignorant failures who must repeat third grade if they don't get a sufficient score on a badly designed standardized reading test.
Few states in the country can hope to match North Carolina in creating an environment that is openly hostile to anyone who hopes to build a lifetime teaching career there. Under current conditions, it's just not possible.
And so, teachers have decided to get the hell out.
North Carolina's political dimbulbs continue to ignore this. Thanks to a lower retirement rate last year, the full turnover rate took a slight dip downward. But the number of teachers leaving teaching in general and leaving teaching in North Carolina in particular continues to grow. And as one analyst points out, these figures are probably low anyway because they only cover through March and don't include everyone who made a decision to bail over the summer.
Wake County, the state's largest system, continues to lead the pack, with teacher attrition numbers that have at least doubled over the last few years. But Dallas Woodhouse, head of political group Carolina Rising that backs GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis, thinks things are going great.
Teachers leaving the state is an issue, Woodhouse said. but Republicans are dealing with it. The economy has to improve for teacher salaries to improve, “and we’re seeing that now,” he said.
Of course, North Carolina loves its charter schools. Reports suggest as many as 170 opening next year, and why not. NC pols fight hard to preserve charters rights to operate with little or no oversight, even on something as simple as revealing what they pay staff. The special blend of rules has worked well for businessmen like Baker Mitchell, a gifted and well-connected charter profiteer.
For a flourishing charter picture, nothing could be better than a teacher shortage, because teacher-job-filler is cheap and agreeable. North Carolina is becoming a great place to be a TFA temp and the charter operator who hires her. For actual professional teachers, it's sadly true that nothing could be finer than to exit Carolina.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
The Public Charter School Test
If you glance through the blog, you might conclude I hate charter schools. But like many critics of the current charter wave, I don't object to the idea of charters at all. Once upon a time, charters were actually a pretty good addition to the public education landscape.
The potential is still there. But to unlock it, charteristas will have to make true the mantra they keep repeating, that charter schools are public schools.
Charter schools, the modern version as represented by K12 and Success Academies, are not public schools at all. If they really want to earn the "public" label, they need to meet these four requirements.
Transparent Finances
As a taxpayer, I can walk into my local school district office and ask to see everything there is to see about the district finances. As a taxpayer, I'm entitled to a full accounting of how my money has been spent. To be a true public entity, you can't just take public funds-- you must give a public accounting of them as well.
That also means oversight. The modern charter is all too often tied up in all too shady financial dealings. Baker Mitchell of North Carolina is only the most recent example of a charter operator who uses a non-profit charter to funnel money to his own private firms. It is Modern Charter 101 -- set up charter school, hire yourself, your family, your friends to do everything from managing the school to washing the floors. And rent the building and equipment from yourself. K12 routinely uses public tax dollars to mount advertising campaigns.
A true public school is always strapped for cash, and taxpayers are always keenly aware of where that money comes from. When negotiating contracts, spending money on big ticket items, even deciding to outsource janitorial services, our school board members are subject to plenty of input, feedback and general kibbitzing from the people who will pay for all those things.
Meanwhile, modern charters have famously gone to court to keep state auditors from getting a look at their books. That is not how a public institution behaves. If you're a public school, your finances must be completely transparent.
Accountability to the Voters
Boy, do I ever get charter operators frustration on this count. My ultimate bosses are a group of educational amateurs who have to win election to stay in charge of me. It's a screwy way to run a business-- what other enterprise requires professional experts to work at the beck and call of people whose only qualification is that they managed to garner a bunch of votes? Oh, wait. I remember an example-- the entire local, state and federal government of the entire country. Because we're a democracy.
Reed Hastings famously articulated the modern charter operator position-- elected school boards are a nuisance. They're unstable and change their composition and therefor their collective mind. What schools need is a single CEO, a kinderfuhrer who can swiftly and boldly make decisions without having to explain himself to people, particularly voting people who can remove him from power if they don't like his answers.
This is not how public institutions are supposed to work in a democratic society. Yes, as some folks periodically rediscover, democracy is terribly messy and inefficient. But the alternative is efficient long-term mediocrity or short term excellence (followed by crashing and burning). Neither is an appropriate goal for a stable society, and neither is appropriate for running a school system meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their income or social status.
If the voters of your school district do not have a say in how the school is run, you are not a public school. It does not count if your tsar or board of tsars is appointed by a state-level elected official. If there is no way for local voters to change the school's management through local means, it is not a public school.
And yes-- that means that there are places like Philadelphia and Newark where the schools are no longer public schools in anything but name. Leaving the name alone-- that's how you steal an entire public school system from the public it is supposed to serve.
Play by the Rules
The charter movement, even the traditional one, has been all about getting around bad rules. This has never made a lot of sense to me, this business of government saying, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we need a different kind of school as an alternative." Why not say, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we are now going to rescind some of those rules. Because, dumb."
The "we need charters to escape dumb rules" argument is like filling up your own car with Long John Silver's wrappers and empty coffee cups and one day saying, "Well, damn. This car's a mess. Guess I have to buy a new car." If you've made a mess of things, clean up the mess!
So I'll agree that there are some public school rules that charters shouldn't play by, because nobody should have to play by them. Important note: I can identify these rules because they interfere with a teacher's ability to provide quality service for students.
But there are other rules charters don't want to have to play by. For instance, "hire licensed personnel" seems to be a popular corner to cut (the Gulen folks seem to trip over this one a bunch). Likewise, modern charters like skirting that nasty union rubbish, which helps with holding onto the option to terminate any "teacher" at any time. This is not about providing superior schooling for students; this is about maintaining a more easily controlled workforce that will be cheap and kept in line.
It goes back to that whole damn democracy thing. Modern charter operators want to be able to rule their company like a Bill Gates or a Leona Helmsley. They do not want to have to govern a public service trust like a Congress or a President, held ultimately accountable to a separate court or electorate (though don't worry-- they're working on that system, too).
Public schools are a trust, a service to the communities that house them and the country that holds them. If you want to be a public school, you have to play by the public school rules. You can certainly set up a private school outside those rules, but that's what it is-- a private school, not a public one.
Serve the Full Population
The same modern charter trick has been documented over and over. Behind every charter school miracle is a charter school that gets rid of students who might hurt their numbers.
They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's another place like that-- the public school.
A public school accepts every student. A public school does not bar a student for being too expensive to educate. A public school does not push out a student who gets lousy test scores. A public school must accept every single student who shows up on their doorstep, barring only those who reach a criminal level of threat to others (and sometimes not even that).
No school that turns students away, pushes students away, counsels students out, or even has the option of considering these actions because there is some other school that must take the student-- no school that does these things can call itself a public school. No school that has a student population substantially different from the student population of the area it serves can rightly call itself a public school.
I was tweet-challenged on this point the other day with the issue of magnet schools. That's a valid point-- a school designed to focus on the performing arts cannot be expected to have the same percentage of tone-deaf, stage-inept non-performers as the rest of its neighborhood. But magnet schools have a very specific, very explicit mission that clearly defines how their population will differ from the larger group. A performing arts school mission does not say "To foster great student arts, plus keeping out any ELL students, too." The careful focus was in fact one of the things that could, and did, and does, make classic charters great.
But another characteristic of modern charters is that they rarely have such a clearly defined mission. And certainly none have a mission that makes explicit upfront, as magnet schools do, exactly which students they plan to include and exclude. As far as I know, no modern charter has a mission statement that reads, "We will give a mediocre education to all poor kids except the ones who are difficult or have developmental problems or who can't hit our numbers."
You can certainly be selective about which students make it into your school (and get to stay there), but if you do, you are a private school. A public school accepts all students.
Public School and Virtue
I am not saying that you must meet all four of these requirements to qualify as a ethically upright and educationally sound school. I can think of several private schools that flunk all four tests (though all have far more accountability measures in place than many modern charters), and they are perfectly good schools. But they are private schools, not public schools.
I can think of some charter schools that pass all four tests. They are classic versions of charter education, and they deserve to be called public schools.
But to call the Success and Imagine and K12 and Hope-on-a-Shingle and all the rest of the hedge-fund backed, politically connected, ROI ROI ROIing their big financial boat modern charters may be many things.
But they are not public schools. Not. Public. Schools.
The potential is still there. But to unlock it, charteristas will have to make true the mantra they keep repeating, that charter schools are public schools.
Charter schools, the modern version as represented by K12 and Success Academies, are not public schools at all. If they really want to earn the "public" label, they need to meet these four requirements.
Transparent Finances
As a taxpayer, I can walk into my local school district office and ask to see everything there is to see about the district finances. As a taxpayer, I'm entitled to a full accounting of how my money has been spent. To be a true public entity, you can't just take public funds-- you must give a public accounting of them as well.
That also means oversight. The modern charter is all too often tied up in all too shady financial dealings. Baker Mitchell of North Carolina is only the most recent example of a charter operator who uses a non-profit charter to funnel money to his own private firms. It is Modern Charter 101 -- set up charter school, hire yourself, your family, your friends to do everything from managing the school to washing the floors. And rent the building and equipment from yourself. K12 routinely uses public tax dollars to mount advertising campaigns.
A true public school is always strapped for cash, and taxpayers are always keenly aware of where that money comes from. When negotiating contracts, spending money on big ticket items, even deciding to outsource janitorial services, our school board members are subject to plenty of input, feedback and general kibbitzing from the people who will pay for all those things.
Meanwhile, modern charters have famously gone to court to keep state auditors from getting a look at their books. That is not how a public institution behaves. If you're a public school, your finances must be completely transparent.
Accountability to the Voters
Boy, do I ever get charter operators frustration on this count. My ultimate bosses are a group of educational amateurs who have to win election to stay in charge of me. It's a screwy way to run a business-- what other enterprise requires professional experts to work at the beck and call of people whose only qualification is that they managed to garner a bunch of votes? Oh, wait. I remember an example-- the entire local, state and federal government of the entire country. Because we're a democracy.
Reed Hastings famously articulated the modern charter operator position-- elected school boards are a nuisance. They're unstable and change their composition and therefor their collective mind. What schools need is a single CEO, a kinderfuhrer who can swiftly and boldly make decisions without having to explain himself to people, particularly voting people who can remove him from power if they don't like his answers.
This is not how public institutions are supposed to work in a democratic society. Yes, as some folks periodically rediscover, democracy is terribly messy and inefficient. But the alternative is efficient long-term mediocrity or short term excellence (followed by crashing and burning). Neither is an appropriate goal for a stable society, and neither is appropriate for running a school system meant to serve all citizens, regardless of their income or social status.
If the voters of your school district do not have a say in how the school is run, you are not a public school. It does not count if your tsar or board of tsars is appointed by a state-level elected official. If there is no way for local voters to change the school's management through local means, it is not a public school.
And yes-- that means that there are places like Philadelphia and Newark where the schools are no longer public schools in anything but name. Leaving the name alone-- that's how you steal an entire public school system from the public it is supposed to serve.
Play by the Rules
The charter movement, even the traditional one, has been all about getting around bad rules. This has never made a lot of sense to me, this business of government saying, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we need a different kind of school as an alternative." Why not say, "We've tied up public schools in so many dumb rules that we are now going to rescind some of those rules. Because, dumb."
The "we need charters to escape dumb rules" argument is like filling up your own car with Long John Silver's wrappers and empty coffee cups and one day saying, "Well, damn. This car's a mess. Guess I have to buy a new car." If you've made a mess of things, clean up the mess!
So I'll agree that there are some public school rules that charters shouldn't play by, because nobody should have to play by them. Important note: I can identify these rules because they interfere with a teacher's ability to provide quality service for students.
But there are other rules charters don't want to have to play by. For instance, "hire licensed personnel" seems to be a popular corner to cut (the Gulen folks seem to trip over this one a bunch). Likewise, modern charters like skirting that nasty union rubbish, which helps with holding onto the option to terminate any "teacher" at any time. This is not about providing superior schooling for students; this is about maintaining a more easily controlled workforce that will be cheap and kept in line.
It goes back to that whole damn democracy thing. Modern charter operators want to be able to rule their company like a Bill Gates or a Leona Helmsley. They do not want to have to govern a public service trust like a Congress or a President, held ultimately accountable to a separate court or electorate (though don't worry-- they're working on that system, too).
Public schools are a trust, a service to the communities that house them and the country that holds them. If you want to be a public school, you have to play by the public school rules. You can certainly set up a private school outside those rules, but that's what it is-- a private school, not a public one.
Serve the Full Population
The same modern charter trick has been documented over and over. Behind every charter school miracle is a charter school that gets rid of students who might hurt their numbers.
They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. But in America, there's another place like that-- the public school.
A public school accepts every student. A public school does not bar a student for being too expensive to educate. A public school does not push out a student who gets lousy test scores. A public school must accept every single student who shows up on their doorstep, barring only those who reach a criminal level of threat to others (and sometimes not even that).
No school that turns students away, pushes students away, counsels students out, or even has the option of considering these actions because there is some other school that must take the student-- no school that does these things can call itself a public school. No school that has a student population substantially different from the student population of the area it serves can rightly call itself a public school.
I was tweet-challenged on this point the other day with the issue of magnet schools. That's a valid point-- a school designed to focus on the performing arts cannot be expected to have the same percentage of tone-deaf, stage-inept non-performers as the rest of its neighborhood. But magnet schools have a very specific, very explicit mission that clearly defines how their population will differ from the larger group. A performing arts school mission does not say "To foster great student arts, plus keeping out any ELL students, too." The careful focus was in fact one of the things that could, and did, and does, make classic charters great.
But another characteristic of modern charters is that they rarely have such a clearly defined mission. And certainly none have a mission that makes explicit upfront, as magnet schools do, exactly which students they plan to include and exclude. As far as I know, no modern charter has a mission statement that reads, "We will give a mediocre education to all poor kids except the ones who are difficult or have developmental problems or who can't hit our numbers."
You can certainly be selective about which students make it into your school (and get to stay there), but if you do, you are a private school. A public school accepts all students.
Public School and Virtue
I am not saying that you must meet all four of these requirements to qualify as a ethically upright and educationally sound school. I can think of several private schools that flunk all four tests (though all have far more accountability measures in place than many modern charters), and they are perfectly good schools. But they are private schools, not public schools.
I can think of some charter schools that pass all four tests. They are classic versions of charter education, and they deserve to be called public schools.
But to call the Success and Imagine and K12 and Hope-on-a-Shingle and all the rest of the hedge-fund backed, politically connected, ROI ROI ROIing their big financial boat modern charters may be many things.
But they are not public schools. Not. Public. Schools.
Friday, July 25, 2014
How Much Money Is Tenure Worth?
Economist Allison Schrager is quoted over at Yahoo putting forth the idea that tenure is worth cold hard cash.
Certainly this is not the first time the idea has been introduced. She Who Will Not Be Named tried in DC to introduce a plan to have a non-tenure big-buck track. This failed to get traction, perhaps because it's hard not to see trading tenure for big bucks as being synonymous with trading a an actual career for just one more year of teaching. And in North Carolina (motto "We're the Seventh Circle of Teacher Hell, but We Want To Dig Deeper") the money-for-tenure trade has been offered as well. Of course, the problem there is that the legislature has no idea where the money for the tenure-buyout-bonuses would come. I imagine a sort of reverse Ponzi scheme-- once they get things get going, they can pay this year's tenure-buyout-bonus by firing the teachers who have no tenure because they took the bonus last year. There's no way it can fail.
So it's possible that tenure could have monetary value to teachers, but maybe that the value is currently equal to all the money they expected to make during the rest of their career, because that's what taking one of these tenure-for-cash deals would cost them-- the rest of their careers. DC schools were never going to keep teachers on at $130K a year for thirty years.Take a pay raise, then take a hike.
Kudos to Yahoo for not simply repeating Schrager's Bloomsburgh column (though they didn't link to it, either), but pulling in Alan Singer to point out, politely, that Schrager's idea is fully stuffed with bovine fecal matter.
What we call tenure is, of course (and I say "of course" even though the world is full of people who seem not to know this), a job protection that guarantees due process, so that teachers cannot be fired for disagreeing with a school board member or administrator.
Ultimately, Singer said, from the teachers’ point of view, “freedom and money are not equivalent. Freedom should never be exchanged for money.”
I'm going to agree with Schrager here. I think tenure is a valuable benefit that is worth actual money. But here's where we part ways-- I would argue that tenure has monetary value to the school district.
Tenure helps insure the school district as an entity that a school cannot be trashed by a single disastrous individual. Whether we are talking about a bad principal or a egregious board member, tenure gives the school district a buffer, a way to protect its teachers and thereby protect its mission. Tenure is why parents in districts rarely say, "Well, Bogswallow High used to be a great place, but we had a principal who came in, fired all the best teachers and replaced them with his buddies, and now it sucks." Tenure is why parents rarely say, "Don't bother trying to get anything done about it. Everybody who works at that school is so scared of Board Member McCrazypants that they won't say or do a thing."
Yes, yes, yes, that kind of thing happens right now in some places. That's my point. How much worse would it be if there were no tenure, if teachers could not say, "You can try to make me miserable, but you can't take my job."
Tenure has value to districts in helping them avoid the costs of replacing staff, of recruiting replacements, of dealing with all the internal problems that would come with a staff that does not feel safe to use the full range of their professional skills and judgment. Tenure saves school districts money. It has monetary value to them, and because it costs them nothing to give it to teachers, it is a huge bargain.
Certainly this is not the first time the idea has been introduced. She Who Will Not Be Named tried in DC to introduce a plan to have a non-tenure big-buck track. This failed to get traction, perhaps because it's hard not to see trading tenure for big bucks as being synonymous with trading a an actual career for just one more year of teaching. And in North Carolina (motto "We're the Seventh Circle of Teacher Hell, but We Want To Dig Deeper") the money-for-tenure trade has been offered as well. Of course, the problem there is that the legislature has no idea where the money for the tenure-buyout-bonuses would come. I imagine a sort of reverse Ponzi scheme-- once they get things get going, they can pay this year's tenure-buyout-bonus by firing the teachers who have no tenure because they took the bonus last year. There's no way it can fail.
So it's possible that tenure could have monetary value to teachers, but maybe that the value is currently equal to all the money they expected to make during the rest of their career, because that's what taking one of these tenure-for-cash deals would cost them-- the rest of their careers. DC schools were never going to keep teachers on at $130K a year for thirty years.Take a pay raise, then take a hike.
Kudos to Yahoo for not simply repeating Schrager's Bloomsburgh column (though they didn't link to it, either), but pulling in Alan Singer to point out, politely, that Schrager's idea is fully stuffed with bovine fecal matter.
What we call tenure is, of course (and I say "of course" even though the world is full of people who seem not to know this), a job protection that guarantees due process, so that teachers cannot be fired for disagreeing with a school board member or administrator.
Ultimately, Singer said, from the teachers’ point of view, “freedom and money are not equivalent. Freedom should never be exchanged for money.”
I'm going to agree with Schrager here. I think tenure is a valuable benefit that is worth actual money. But here's where we part ways-- I would argue that tenure has monetary value to the school district.
Tenure helps insure the school district as an entity that a school cannot be trashed by a single disastrous individual. Whether we are talking about a bad principal or a egregious board member, tenure gives the school district a buffer, a way to protect its teachers and thereby protect its mission. Tenure is why parents in districts rarely say, "Well, Bogswallow High used to be a great place, but we had a principal who came in, fired all the best teachers and replaced them with his buddies, and now it sucks." Tenure is why parents rarely say, "Don't bother trying to get anything done about it. Everybody who works at that school is so scared of Board Member McCrazypants that they won't say or do a thing."
Yes, yes, yes, that kind of thing happens right now in some places. That's my point. How much worse would it be if there were no tenure, if teachers could not say, "You can try to make me miserable, but you can't take my job."
Tenure has value to districts in helping them avoid the costs of replacing staff, of recruiting replacements, of dealing with all the internal problems that would come with a staff that does not feel safe to use the full range of their professional skills and judgment. Tenure saves school districts money. It has monetary value to them, and because it costs them nothing to give it to teachers, it is a huge bargain.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Rigorizing Eight Year Olds
One of the most odious policies to emerge from the Reformster swamp is the mandatory retention of all third graders who don't pass the Big Test in reading. And now Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida's program, has popped up to help us all understand just how anti-child this policy is.
She has popped up in North Carolina (motto: Strapping schools to a rocket and shooting them back into the 19th century) where such a program is being definitely considered* (I would say "seriously," but nobody who is serious about educating children would ever consider such a policy). She is responding to an op-ed by Janna Siegel Robertson and Pamela Grundy laying out why the politics-driven Read to Achieve program is an educational mistake; their piece explains (with like, actual facts from experts in the field) why Read to Achieve is a dumb idea. But Bragg (who is also the National Director of Policy for FEE, a prolific generator of anti-public-ed nonsense) questions the rigor of their work, and wanted to make her own point. So what is her point?
Florida's program is called "Just Read, Florida!" and that name really captures the cluelessness of the whole approach. Like many Reformster programs, this one starts with the assumption that these little eight-year-old slackers just aren't being sufficiently threatened and browbeaten. They could read, dammit-- they're just holding out on us! Don't tell me about your problems or your challenges or your background or your use of English as a second language or your cognitive impairments or how your life gets in the way of your school-- Just Read, Dammit! Just do it! Because there is no better pedagogical technique than Insisting Strongly.
Bragg says the proof of her programs success is that the NAEP scores went up. This, too, captures what is so screwed up about this approach. Because remember, Moms and Dads, the school is not here to serve the students by providing them with an education. The students are here to serve the school by cranking out the scores the school needs to make its numbers.
The biggest complaint against retention is the use of test scores in making decisions. But good tests objectively measure real reading skills. A score is not simply a number on a piece of paper but a reflection of actual ability.
Well, that's sort of true. Sometimes a score isn't simply a number on a piece of paper. Sometimes it's a number in a computer. But either way you cut it, it's simply a number. Do good tests objectively measure real reading skills? Here you're just making a definition, and if that's your definition, then no good tests exist, and they never will. (Also-- is that really the biggest complaint against retention. Because as Pamela Grundy points out below in the comments, the biggest complaint might actually be that retention does more harm than good.)
There is no such thing as an objective concept of "real reading skills." A reading test will always--ALWAYS-- measure the biased picture of reading skills promoted by the people who wrote the test. Always. We could break the internet launching into that argument, but if you want to shut me up, just provide an objective picture of Real Reading Skills that all educational experts agree on. I will not be waiting.
Children who enter fourth grade as struggling readers are four times more likely to drop out of school. The vast majority of teenagers who wind up in the juvenile justice system are illiterate. In other words, the most important indicator of whether a child will succeed in life is whether he or she is a strong reader by the end of third grade.
Is there some sort of requirement that all Reformsters must skip Basic Statistics class. Maybe you missed this when it was going around the net, but here are some great charts showing, among other things, that the lower the divorce rate has dropped in Maine, the less margarine has been sold.
Your "most important indicator" is bogus, fake, false, unsupportable. At the very least, the correlation door can swing both ways-- a student unhappy enough with school to eventually drop out is less likely to try at his reading lessons (even if someone shouts, "Just Read, Dammit!" at him). What is most likely is that dropping out, getting in trouble with the law, and failing in school are all related to a separate factor.
But Bragg is STILL not done being ridiculous!
Retention policies are badly needed tough love.
Oh for the love of God. Yes, because all those elementary teachers are in classroom saying, "Yes, reading's okay and all, but I would rather give Pat a cookie and sing Kun-Bay-Yah" because if there's anybody who DOESN'T understand the value of education, it's the people who decided to devote their adult professional lives to education.
Yes, these damn kids just need a kick in the pants. Bunch of slackers!
Children should hit developmental milestones when they are told to. The average height for an eight year old boy is 45 inches. I propose we hold all boys in third grade until they reach that height. If they won't reach that height, let's just use tough love and yell "Just Grow, Dammit!" Because children should grow as they are told to grow, and they should all grow exactly the same way at exactly the same time. And if they won't behave and conform and obey, they must be punished until they will.
Bragg's closing shot is as anticlimactic as it is obnoxious: "This debate obviously will continue. It is important to ensure all relevant information be included. One would hope those in academia would not rely on others to do basic research." This despite the fact that she has not offered any relevant information or basic research.
Look, North Carolina-- this is a bad, bad, dumb idea for which there is no good argument. It assumes that children can be punished into excellence and achievement, and while that is a logical extension of the NC policy towards teachers, there isn't a lick of support to suggest that it creates smarter, healthier, happier grown-ups. And taking education advice from Florida is like taking political advice from Iraq. Just Say No, Florida!
*EDIT: Just to clarify-- yes, NC actually has one of these reprehensible laws in place. As it comes time to actually make third graders suffer the consequences of NC legislative malfeasance, Grundy and Robertson have stepped forward to plead that NC's leaders reconsider before somebody (particularly a third grade somebody) gets hurt. Bragg stepped in to argue staying the course. So the law's in place, but nobody has really thought about what it's going to mean until now. That's where we come in at the beginning of this piece.
She has popped up in North Carolina (motto: Strapping schools to a rocket and shooting them back into the 19th century) where such a program is being definitely considered* (I would say "seriously," but nobody who is serious about educating children would ever consider such a policy). She is responding to an op-ed by Janna Siegel Robertson and Pamela Grundy laying out why the politics-driven Read to Achieve program is an educational mistake; their piece explains (with like, actual facts from experts in the field) why Read to Achieve is a dumb idea. But Bragg (who is also the National Director of Policy for FEE, a prolific generator of anti-public-ed nonsense) questions the rigor of their work, and wanted to make her own point. So what is her point?
Florida's program is called "Just Read, Florida!" and that name really captures the cluelessness of the whole approach. Like many Reformster programs, this one starts with the assumption that these little eight-year-old slackers just aren't being sufficiently threatened and browbeaten. They could read, dammit-- they're just holding out on us! Don't tell me about your problems or your challenges or your background or your use of English as a second language or your cognitive impairments or how your life gets in the way of your school-- Just Read, Dammit! Just do it! Because there is no better pedagogical technique than Insisting Strongly.
Bragg says the proof of her programs success is that the NAEP scores went up. This, too, captures what is so screwed up about this approach. Because remember, Moms and Dads, the school is not here to serve the students by providing them with an education. The students are here to serve the school by cranking out the scores the school needs to make its numbers.
The biggest complaint against retention is the use of test scores in making decisions. But good tests objectively measure real reading skills. A score is not simply a number on a piece of paper but a reflection of actual ability.
Well, that's sort of true. Sometimes a score isn't simply a number on a piece of paper. Sometimes it's a number in a computer. But either way you cut it, it's simply a number. Do good tests objectively measure real reading skills? Here you're just making a definition, and if that's your definition, then no good tests exist, and they never will. (Also-- is that really the biggest complaint against retention. Because as Pamela Grundy points out below in the comments, the biggest complaint might actually be that retention does more harm than good.)
There is no such thing as an objective concept of "real reading skills." A reading test will always--ALWAYS-- measure the biased picture of reading skills promoted by the people who wrote the test. Always. We could break the internet launching into that argument, but if you want to shut me up, just provide an objective picture of Real Reading Skills that all educational experts agree on. I will not be waiting.
Children who enter fourth grade as struggling readers are four times more likely to drop out of school. The vast majority of teenagers who wind up in the juvenile justice system are illiterate. In other words, the most important indicator of whether a child will succeed in life is whether he or she is a strong reader by the end of third grade.
Is there some sort of requirement that all Reformsters must skip Basic Statistics class. Maybe you missed this when it was going around the net, but here are some great charts showing, among other things, that the lower the divorce rate has dropped in Maine, the less margarine has been sold.
Your "most important indicator" is bogus, fake, false, unsupportable. At the very least, the correlation door can swing both ways-- a student unhappy enough with school to eventually drop out is less likely to try at his reading lessons (even if someone shouts, "Just Read, Dammit!" at him). What is most likely is that dropping out, getting in trouble with the law, and failing in school are all related to a separate factor.
But Bragg is STILL not done being ridiculous!
Retention policies are badly needed tough love.
Oh for the love of God. Yes, because all those elementary teachers are in classroom saying, "Yes, reading's okay and all, but I would rather give Pat a cookie and sing Kun-Bay-Yah" because if there's anybody who DOESN'T understand the value of education, it's the people who decided to devote their adult professional lives to education.
Yes, these damn kids just need a kick in the pants. Bunch of slackers!
Children should hit developmental milestones when they are told to. The average height for an eight year old boy is 45 inches. I propose we hold all boys in third grade until they reach that height. If they won't reach that height, let's just use tough love and yell "Just Grow, Dammit!" Because children should grow as they are told to grow, and they should all grow exactly the same way at exactly the same time. And if they won't behave and conform and obey, they must be punished until they will.
Bragg's closing shot is as anticlimactic as it is obnoxious: "This debate obviously will continue. It is important to ensure all relevant information be included. One would hope those in academia would not rely on others to do basic research." This despite the fact that she has not offered any relevant information or basic research.
Look, North Carolina-- this is a bad, bad, dumb idea for which there is no good argument. It assumes that children can be punished into excellence and achievement, and while that is a logical extension of the NC policy towards teachers, there isn't a lick of support to suggest that it creates smarter, healthier, happier grown-ups. And taking education advice from Florida is like taking political advice from Iraq. Just Say No, Florida!
*EDIT: Just to clarify-- yes, NC actually has one of these reprehensible laws in place. As it comes time to actually make third graders suffer the consequences of NC legislative malfeasance, Grundy and Robertson have stepped forward to plead that NC's leaders reconsider before somebody (particularly a third grade somebody) gets hurt. Bragg stepped in to argue staying the course. So the law's in place, but nobody has really thought about what it's going to mean until now. That's where we come in at the beginning of this piece.
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