Back in May of 2015, Shea Glover, a student at the Chicago High School for the Arts in Ukranian Village, created an art project for her class. The project, she said, "evidently turned into a social experiment."
The result became a viral sensation, so you may have seen this before. Even if have (and especially if you haven't), take a look at it now. Go ahead. I'll wait.
At the moment, the video is closing in on ten million views. Numerous videos inspired by this one are out there, as well as an ad campaign from Dove that lifts the idea.
It's simple and striking. Glover tells her subject that they are beautiful, and they become more beautiful. You couldn't ask for a more powerful, clear and simple demonstration of the power of positive expectations.
It stands, of course, in sharp contrast to the gut-wrenching video that surfaced yesterday showing a teacher emotionally abusing a small child at Success Academy, the roughly sixty-gazillionth piece of evidence about SA's emphasis on brow-beating students into either excellence or departure.
There are many folks who don't get it. We see it in "no excuses" and other brutally over-controlling versions of classrooms-- this idea that "high expectations" means rain down shame and an ass-kicking to students who don't meet those expectations. It's ugly and unpleasant and when we see it in its raw naked form as in the SA video, we see just how awful it is. But it's not an anomaly at Success Academies-- or if it is, it's an anomaly so common that many, many people can step forward to say they've seen it, and can, independent of each other, say that it has a name at SA-- "rip and return."
I'm not advocating for a warm, gooey classroom where every student is effusively praised just for holding a pencil and making random marks on paper. Students will make mistakes, often, and we can't pretend they don't, or shouldn't. But mistakes are an opportunity for growth, not a cause for shame. Sometimes that growth is hard, and sometimes the truths that have to be faced are hard and rough; those are the very moments when making things harder, uglier, suckier on purpose is inexcusable. When the paper is wrinkled and the answers on it are wrong, that is the very worst time to rip it and throw it back in a student's face.
It's not just that shaming and browbeating are bad and ugly and lousy ways to treat fellow travelers on the surface of our small spinning globe. The biggest problem is that it just doesn't work.
Imagine that Glover had started filming and then said, "You know, if you would just smile a little, you could be a bit more beautiful." Would those faces have blossomed forth as they do in her film? I doubt it.
When you tell people, directly or indirectly, that they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful, they act as if they are strong and competent and capable and beautiful. When you tell people that they are stupid and they suck, they act as if they are stupid and sucky.
Glover's film ends with the line "There is so much beauty in the world; if you blink, you'll miss it." That's not quite right-- Glover didn't just see the beauty, but she actually added to it. She actually made the world a little bit more beautiful. Charlotte Dial, the SA teacher, made the world a little uglier.
Do you want to make a difference? Do you want to change the world? That's how you do it. You have the power to help every person you encounter become a little more beautiful, or a little more beat down. You have that power by virtue of being alive, and if you are a teacher in a classroom, that power is magnified by virtue of the many small humans in front of you. Use your power for good.
If you are interested in seeing what Glover has been up to, the young filmmaker has her own youtube channel.
Showing posts with label Success Academies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Success Academies. Show all posts
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Friday, April 17, 2015
Explaining Success Academy
In the summer edition of Education Next, Charles Sahm attempts a response to the recent New York Times look at Success Academy. His article, "What Explains Success at Success Academy," is long and thoughtful, but it ultimately fails to answer its own titular question.
Sahm has taken the time to visit actual Success Academies, and he manages to cheerlead for them without calling their critics a big bunch of staus-quo loving doodyheads, so if nothing else, the article proves that reform apologists can peddle their wares while remaining thoughtful, respectful and reasonable. But his explanations for SA aren't really explanations.
To what does Sahm credit Eva Moskowitz's success?
The What: Content Is King
Moskowitz brags of "balanced literacy on steroids" when she talks about their in-house reading program, and as someone who is not directly familiar with either her program or the programs used by New York public schools, I can't judge. But when Sahm credits her with ideas such as "the choice between content and skills is false," I can't help but see Moskowitz as one more educational amateur who thinks she's a genius because she just "discovered" something that working teachers have known since the dawn of time.
SA middle school students have a required reading list of seven texts, supported by a literature class and independent reading time, and while these are fine ideas, I'm waiting for the part where Moskowitz announces a revolutionary writing program where students use "words" arranged in what she likes to call "sentences." And as we'll see, when it comes to middle school reading, SA does have a secret weapon that they are more reluctant to brag about.
Sahm says that his tours revealed a rich and varied learning environment, not a test prep factory, and Moskowitz swears its true--"You cannot ace these Common Core tests with test prep" he quotes her as saying, which is one of the few times in the article that he captures her in a bald-faced lie. Of course you can; any and all standardized tests can be conquered by test prep.
The How: Quality Conversations
Moskowitz credits her teachers, who are now required to go through in-house training. Once again, we are told about innovations that aren't innovations.
T-school is intense. Instructors place teachers on the hot seat, asking them, for example, to precisely identify the main idea in a college-level text. In Mission Possible, Moskowitz notes that a big part of T-school is “understanding the why”—the purpose behind what’s taught and the way Success handles instruction:“You can’t ask people to do something and take it seriously if they don’t know why they are doing it.” In T-school, teachers learn that “a good lesson flows like a quality conversation.”
Seriously? Do I live in a magical land of awesome innovation and I just don't know it, or does Success Academy owe its success to insights on the order of "When breathing, it is best to draw air in and then exhale before inhaling again."
Sahm goes on to note that SA requires large amounts of work from its teachers. 10-12 hour days are a norm (though when I was a beginning teacher, that was my norm as well). Sahm tackles the churn numbers, and after reading on the subject, I'm prepared to say that although the numbers clearly not low, nobody really knows what they are. He also acknowledges that SA has "teacher-proofed" instruction, requiring teachers to work in lockstep across the system. He suggests this is offset with individual time; I would suggest that simply implementing someone else's lesson plan script is not actually teaching, and anybody who actually needs that script to teach does not belong in a classroom.
It is clear that SA puts plenty of money and resources where its mouth is, and that their content delivery specialists are given tools, equipment, and support.
Caveats
Sahm does acknowledge some of the other standard criticisms of SA. For instance, SA serves a smaller percentage of English language learners and students with special needs than the city's public system.
Sahm also notes the backfill issue. From 3rd through 8th grade, SA loses over half of their students, and it does not fill their seats. You can see a breakdown of the numbers at this report from Democracy Builders, which shows us two things-- that attrition helps keep proficient-score percentages up even when raw numbers are plummeting, and that Success Academy is New York's Queen of off-loading students and filling schools with empty seats. (You can get an overview of the report here and here.)
Sahm also raises some objections in order to dismiss them. He notes that "many say" SA is overly secretive and dismisses that by referencing the many tours given of the school. I don't know who the "many" are, but perhaps they are referencing that time Success Academy went to court in order to block the state from auditing their books.
And he seems to like Moskowitz, calling her salary a bargain from a ROI standpoint. "But her hands-on style, along with the fundraising juggernaut she has built (last year, Success raised $22 million in private support), does raise questions about replication and equity." Well, yes.
Why Success Academy Sure Doesn't Look Like an Education Bargain To Me
There really aren't any questions about replicating SA's success. It is neither possible nor desirable.
First, SA has defined "success" as "high test scores." This is not how great schools define success. Head up to Philips Exeter Academy and ask them to explain what makes them a great school. They will not tout test scores. We have no reason to believe that high tests scores mean squat, and certainly not educational success-- particularly when so much attention is spent on doing test prep rather than actually educating.
Furthermore, SA's "success" is based on a special blend of Things Every Decent School Already Knows and Things No Decent School Can or Would Do.
In the first category we find the idea of giving teachers support and resources to use long-known and proven educational techniques. This is not even re-inventing the wheel. This is walking out to the street, pointing at a parked car, and declaring, "Look what I invented! I'm a freaking genius!!"
The other Captain Obvious innovation is money. I imagine teachers who struggle away in schools without books, heat, light, cleaning and a host of other facilities watching someone like Moskowitz explain that having a clean, well-supplied, well-financed school really helps and thinking, "No shit, Sherlock." It's all the more galling because the bright shiny halls of SA come at the cost of those dim-lit under-funded under-resourced public schools. Moskowitz is like the bully who comes and steals the food off your plate at lunch every day and then on Friday makes fun of you-- "What's wrong with you. You look hungry and weak."
The No Backfills Allowed rule is not so much an innovation as a complete redefining of what a school is and does. It can't be replicated (would we just tell any family that moved with a child older than third grade that their children will never be able to go to school again?) and there's no reason it should be.
In fact, that 56% attrition rate is really just a 56% failure rate; those are students that SA failed to serve, failed to grow, failed to educate-- both the ones who left and the ones who were never allowed to come bask in the shiny glory of SA. There is nothing successful or spectacular about a 56% failure rate.
The SA model is unreplicable, though I'm sure all of us in public ed agree that if we had large resources, constant support, and the power to admit only the students we chose to our classroom, we would all look pretty freakin' awesome-- we just wouldn't be honoring the mission of US public education.
But the SA model is also unsustainable. It has to eat through teachers at a steady rate, adding to the background buzz that teaching is a dull, punishing field that nobody needs enter. It eats through children, creating an ever-enlarging pool of unsatisfied former customers who slowly erode the chirpy PR. And it eats through resources, resources that have to be taken from the public system (both buildings and money) and from well-heeled backers who have to be cozied up to. But a system like SA that has to feed off the public system also slowly destroys the public system. A vampire can only drain the same poor victim so many times before it destroys its own food supply.
One of my measures of a charter school's worth is whether or not it has anything to teach us in public schools. Success Academy offers no educational lessons to anybody; there's nothing new to learn there, nothing that can be replicated, nothing that will still be standing in twenty years.
(Update - I have an inexcusable tendency to misspell Moskowitz's last name. I have fixed it-- at least in this post.)
Sahm has taken the time to visit actual Success Academies, and he manages to cheerlead for them without calling their critics a big bunch of staus-quo loving doodyheads, so if nothing else, the article proves that reform apologists can peddle their wares while remaining thoughtful, respectful and reasonable. But his explanations for SA aren't really explanations.
To what does Sahm credit Eva Moskowitz's success?
The What: Content Is King
Moskowitz brags of "balanced literacy on steroids" when she talks about their in-house reading program, and as someone who is not directly familiar with either her program or the programs used by New York public schools, I can't judge. But when Sahm credits her with ideas such as "the choice between content and skills is false," I can't help but see Moskowitz as one more educational amateur who thinks she's a genius because she just "discovered" something that working teachers have known since the dawn of time.
SA middle school students have a required reading list of seven texts, supported by a literature class and independent reading time, and while these are fine ideas, I'm waiting for the part where Moskowitz announces a revolutionary writing program where students use "words" arranged in what she likes to call "sentences." And as we'll see, when it comes to middle school reading, SA does have a secret weapon that they are more reluctant to brag about.
Sahm says that his tours revealed a rich and varied learning environment, not a test prep factory, and Moskowitz swears its true--"You cannot ace these Common Core tests with test prep" he quotes her as saying, which is one of the few times in the article that he captures her in a bald-faced lie. Of course you can; any and all standardized tests can be conquered by test prep.
The How: Quality Conversations
Moskowitz credits her teachers, who are now required to go through in-house training. Once again, we are told about innovations that aren't innovations.
T-school is intense. Instructors place teachers on the hot seat, asking them, for example, to precisely identify the main idea in a college-level text. In Mission Possible, Moskowitz notes that a big part of T-school is “understanding the why”—the purpose behind what’s taught and the way Success handles instruction:“You can’t ask people to do something and take it seriously if they don’t know why they are doing it.” In T-school, teachers learn that “a good lesson flows like a quality conversation.”
Seriously? Do I live in a magical land of awesome innovation and I just don't know it, or does Success Academy owe its success to insights on the order of "When breathing, it is best to draw air in and then exhale before inhaling again."
Sahm goes on to note that SA requires large amounts of work from its teachers. 10-12 hour days are a norm (though when I was a beginning teacher, that was my norm as well). Sahm tackles the churn numbers, and after reading on the subject, I'm prepared to say that although the numbers clearly not low, nobody really knows what they are. He also acknowledges that SA has "teacher-proofed" instruction, requiring teachers to work in lockstep across the system. He suggests this is offset with individual time; I would suggest that simply implementing someone else's lesson plan script is not actually teaching, and anybody who actually needs that script to teach does not belong in a classroom.
It is clear that SA puts plenty of money and resources where its mouth is, and that their content delivery specialists are given tools, equipment, and support.
Caveats
Sahm does acknowledge some of the other standard criticisms of SA. For instance, SA serves a smaller percentage of English language learners and students with special needs than the city's public system.
Sahm also notes the backfill issue. From 3rd through 8th grade, SA loses over half of their students, and it does not fill their seats. You can see a breakdown of the numbers at this report from Democracy Builders, which shows us two things-- that attrition helps keep proficient-score percentages up even when raw numbers are plummeting, and that Success Academy is New York's Queen of off-loading students and filling schools with empty seats. (You can get an overview of the report here and here.)
Sahm also raises some objections in order to dismiss them. He notes that "many say" SA is overly secretive and dismisses that by referencing the many tours given of the school. I don't know who the "many" are, but perhaps they are referencing that time Success Academy went to court in order to block the state from auditing their books.
And he seems to like Moskowitz, calling her salary a bargain from a ROI standpoint. "But her hands-on style, along with the fundraising juggernaut she has built (last year, Success raised $22 million in private support), does raise questions about replication and equity." Well, yes.
Why Success Academy Sure Doesn't Look Like an Education Bargain To Me
There really aren't any questions about replicating SA's success. It is neither possible nor desirable.
First, SA has defined "success" as "high test scores." This is not how great schools define success. Head up to Philips Exeter Academy and ask them to explain what makes them a great school. They will not tout test scores. We have no reason to believe that high tests scores mean squat, and certainly not educational success-- particularly when so much attention is spent on doing test prep rather than actually educating.
Furthermore, SA's "success" is based on a special blend of Things Every Decent School Already Knows and Things No Decent School Can or Would Do.
In the first category we find the idea of giving teachers support and resources to use long-known and proven educational techniques. This is not even re-inventing the wheel. This is walking out to the street, pointing at a parked car, and declaring, "Look what I invented! I'm a freaking genius!!"
The other Captain Obvious innovation is money. I imagine teachers who struggle away in schools without books, heat, light, cleaning and a host of other facilities watching someone like Moskowitz explain that having a clean, well-supplied, well-financed school really helps and thinking, "No shit, Sherlock." It's all the more galling because the bright shiny halls of SA come at the cost of those dim-lit under-funded under-resourced public schools. Moskowitz is like the bully who comes and steals the food off your plate at lunch every day and then on Friday makes fun of you-- "What's wrong with you. You look hungry and weak."
The No Backfills Allowed rule is not so much an innovation as a complete redefining of what a school is and does. It can't be replicated (would we just tell any family that moved with a child older than third grade that their children will never be able to go to school again?) and there's no reason it should be.
In fact, that 56% attrition rate is really just a 56% failure rate; those are students that SA failed to serve, failed to grow, failed to educate-- both the ones who left and the ones who were never allowed to come bask in the shiny glory of SA. There is nothing successful or spectacular about a 56% failure rate.
The SA model is unreplicable, though I'm sure all of us in public ed agree that if we had large resources, constant support, and the power to admit only the students we chose to our classroom, we would all look pretty freakin' awesome-- we just wouldn't be honoring the mission of US public education.
But the SA model is also unsustainable. It has to eat through teachers at a steady rate, adding to the background buzz that teaching is a dull, punishing field that nobody needs enter. It eats through children, creating an ever-enlarging pool of unsatisfied former customers who slowly erode the chirpy PR. And it eats through resources, resources that have to be taken from the public system (both buildings and money) and from well-heeled backers who have to be cozied up to. But a system like SA that has to feed off the public system also slowly destroys the public system. A vampire can only drain the same poor victim so many times before it destroys its own food supply.
One of my measures of a charter school's worth is whether or not it has anything to teach us in public schools. Success Academy offers no educational lessons to anybody; there's nothing new to learn there, nothing that can be replicated, nothing that will still be standing in twenty years.
(Update - I have an inexcusable tendency to misspell Moskowitz's last name. I have fixed it-- at least in this post.)
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Should We Embrace Charter Districts
First in USA Today, and a few days later, a bit more expansively in the Hechinger Report, Richard Whitmire argues for the embrace of charter growth, particularly since charters are starting to look like school districts.
We'll look at the Hechinger Report version, because it allows Whitmire to lay out his complete argument. It's an impressive compendium of almost every pro-charter argument ever made, and it manages to get very little correct.
More than twenty years ago when charter schools first got launched in Minnesota no one envisioned that one day we would see charter management networks growing to resemble medium-size school districts.
Probably not true. I think plenty of people called this one. More importantly, I think plenty of people interested in the charter business were absolutely banking on it.
Whitmire goes on to applaud the greenlighting of fourteen more Success Academy branches in NY. He cheers that the rapid expansion of the chain doesn't seem to have hurt the quality, and that even students in freshly opened branches have gotten swell test results.
"Regardless of your personal opinion of charter schools versus traditional schools," says Whitmire, "that’s remarkable."
Well, no. It isn't remarkable at all. If Success Academies, say, retained all of a starting class to the point of graduation instead of losing more than half, that would be remarkable. And if that wholly retained batch of eighth graders qualified for one of NYC's top high schools, instead of having to just move into another Success Academy berth, that would be remarkable. But it's not what happened. Raising standardized test scores is not the same thing as providing a quality education-- particularly if you drop the educating to focus on weeks and weeks of preparatory drilling. There is nothing remarkable about creaming a select student population and training them to get better test scores to the detriment of everything else.
Of course, there are larger chains than Success. Others reach greater states of hugification, but Whitmire is thankful that "only the best charter networks were allowed to grow to this size." It begs the question who, exactly, is "allowing" the growth, but okay. All of these large chains are, he claims, able to catch these students up with a year-and-a-half of learning for every year in the classroom. Measuring student learning in years? Not an ounce of support that that is actually a real thing.
Whitmire knows the secrets that allow charter chains to scale up. For instance, there's this:
...their ability to attract some of the nation’s brightest college graduates as teachers. Many of those teachers move on to other careers, but they stay long enough to make a difference.
So, TFA temps make charters better (I am curious-- how long exactly is "long enough to make a difference"?) Sure, they may have little or training, and contribute nothing to the stability of the school. But at least they're cheap, easily replaced, and don't draw a pension. Whitmire has that stability thing covered-- charters are also great because they establish a common classroom culture. In other words, if you have a strong policies and procedures manual, you can plug any warm body into a classroom without making a difference.
Whitmire will trot out the old canard that charter schools are public schools. I've explained what four requirements must be met to earn the name "public" and I don't think the charter chains are meeting any of them (including Success Academy, which went to court to keep their finances secret).
He notes that charters have waiting lists out the whazoo, and cites Success as an example. Interesting choice, given Success's well-documented high-priced recruitment/marketing campaigns.
Whitmire does admit that charter networks don't take as many special education students. He also allows as how charters drain resources from public districts, forcing them to downsize "to meet diminished demand," which is incorrect. Public schools downsize to meet diminished funding, which would be easy if there were, in fact, a diminished demand. But when one kid leaves a classroom a charter, the students left behind still demand a fully resourced classroom.
When a charter kids leaves public school, she takes 100% of her funding with her, but she does not take 100% of the costs that she incurred for the district.
Whitmire proceeds to sign a song of many charter successes. Except they aren't successes. Tennessee's ASD is a mess. He claims that charter vs. public competition in DC benefits students on both sides. And he spends a whole paragraph touting the miracle of New Orleans, which appears to be only a miracle of PR. Like many hotbeds of charterfication, New Orleans' success has been in getting tax dollars directed to corporate pockets. Educating children? Not so much.
And why is it that no charter advocates want to talk about one place that is really working on implementing the New Orleans model? Where are the songs of praise dedicated to One Newark? Could it be that in New Jersey, charteristas have been freed to Do As They Please, and what they've created is a horrible, horrible mess. (If you want a link, read the collected works of Jersey Jazzman-- this is a mess so large that one blog post can't hold it.)
On the home stretch, Whitmire admits that some charters aren't pulling their weight, and he thinks that the authorizers should be all over their chartery butts.
But the growth of high performing single charters, as well as these larger CMOs such as IDEA, KIPP and Uncommon Schools, should be welcomed, not stonewalled or smeared with conspiracy theories about “privatizing” education.
"Conspiracy theory" is a polite and classy way to dismiss somebody as being crazy wrong. But when the state legislature of New York passes special laws requiring New York City schools to hand over real estate to the private company that runs Success Academy so that they can rake in the money (but not account for it, even as they pay their boss a cool half million) -- well, I'm not sure what that is, if not "privatization." I mean, it might come up short of "privatization" because it is being paid for with "public tax dollars," but other than that "splitting of hairs" I'm not sure what Whitmire is "talking about."
And as a last shot "These charters are successfully educating thousands of students destined to fail in traditional neighborhood schools." I'm impressed that we can tell the destinies of these students in alternate universes. I would like to peek over there and see how many of the students left behind in thanks-to-charters underfunded schools would have been destined to succeed more easily. Nor do I understand why charters, with their special destiny-o-vision, send so many students back to public schools.
But that's the whole compendium. Whitmire has sandwiched in just about every piece of marketing copy ever used for charters, while simultaneously answering none of the legitimate criticisms of the modern charter movement. He also manages to avoid the very question he raises-- why exactly is a larger charter chain better than a single charter? More layers of bureaucracy? A central office far away from your child's actual school? He never did tell us why size matters here.
It's a herculean effort, and a good piece to bookmark if you want access to All the Pro-charter Arguments. But for me, I'm going to hold off on the whole embracing thing, thanks.
It's an impressive compendium
We'll look at the Hechinger Report version, because it allows Whitmire to lay out his complete argument. It's an impressive compendium of almost every pro-charter argument ever made, and it manages to get very little correct.
More than twenty years ago when charter schools first got launched in Minnesota no one envisioned that one day we would see charter management networks growing to resemble medium-size school districts.
Probably not true. I think plenty of people called this one. More importantly, I think plenty of people interested in the charter business were absolutely banking on it.
Whitmire goes on to applaud the greenlighting of fourteen more Success Academy branches in NY. He cheers that the rapid expansion of the chain doesn't seem to have hurt the quality, and that even students in freshly opened branches have gotten swell test results.
"Regardless of your personal opinion of charter schools versus traditional schools," says Whitmire, "that’s remarkable."
Well, no. It isn't remarkable at all. If Success Academies, say, retained all of a starting class to the point of graduation instead of losing more than half, that would be remarkable. And if that wholly retained batch of eighth graders qualified for one of NYC's top high schools, instead of having to just move into another Success Academy berth, that would be remarkable. But it's not what happened. Raising standardized test scores is not the same thing as providing a quality education-- particularly if you drop the educating to focus on weeks and weeks of preparatory drilling. There is nothing remarkable about creaming a select student population and training them to get better test scores to the detriment of everything else.
Of course, there are larger chains than Success. Others reach greater states of hugification, but Whitmire is thankful that "only the best charter networks were allowed to grow to this size." It begs the question who, exactly, is "allowing" the growth, but okay. All of these large chains are, he claims, able to catch these students up with a year-and-a-half of learning for every year in the classroom. Measuring student learning in years? Not an ounce of support that that is actually a real thing.
Whitmire knows the secrets that allow charter chains to scale up. For instance, there's this:
...their ability to attract some of the nation’s brightest college graduates as teachers. Many of those teachers move on to other careers, but they stay long enough to make a difference.
So, TFA temps make charters better (I am curious-- how long exactly is "long enough to make a difference"?) Sure, they may have little or training, and contribute nothing to the stability of the school. But at least they're cheap, easily replaced, and don't draw a pension. Whitmire has that stability thing covered-- charters are also great because they establish a common classroom culture. In other words, if you have a strong policies and procedures manual, you can plug any warm body into a classroom without making a difference.
Whitmire will trot out the old canard that charter schools are public schools. I've explained what four requirements must be met to earn the name "public" and I don't think the charter chains are meeting any of them (including Success Academy, which went to court to keep their finances secret).
He notes that charters have waiting lists out the whazoo, and cites Success as an example. Interesting choice, given Success's well-documented high-priced recruitment/marketing campaigns.
Whitmire does admit that charter networks don't take as many special education students. He also allows as how charters drain resources from public districts, forcing them to downsize "to meet diminished demand," which is incorrect. Public schools downsize to meet diminished funding, which would be easy if there were, in fact, a diminished demand. But when one kid leaves a classroom a charter, the students left behind still demand a fully resourced classroom.
When a charter kids leaves public school, she takes 100% of her funding with her, but she does not take 100% of the costs that she incurred for the district.
Whitmire proceeds to sign a song of many charter successes. Except they aren't successes. Tennessee's ASD is a mess. He claims that charter vs. public competition in DC benefits students on both sides. And he spends a whole paragraph touting the miracle of New Orleans, which appears to be only a miracle of PR. Like many hotbeds of charterfication, New Orleans' success has been in getting tax dollars directed to corporate pockets. Educating children? Not so much.
And why is it that no charter advocates want to talk about one place that is really working on implementing the New Orleans model? Where are the songs of praise dedicated to One Newark? Could it be that in New Jersey, charteristas have been freed to Do As They Please, and what they've created is a horrible, horrible mess. (If you want a link, read the collected works of Jersey Jazzman-- this is a mess so large that one blog post can't hold it.)
On the home stretch, Whitmire admits that some charters aren't pulling their weight, and he thinks that the authorizers should be all over their chartery butts.
But the growth of high performing single charters, as well as these larger CMOs such as IDEA, KIPP and Uncommon Schools, should be welcomed, not stonewalled or smeared with conspiracy theories about “privatizing” education.
"Conspiracy theory" is a polite and classy way to dismiss somebody as being crazy wrong. But when the state legislature of New York passes special laws requiring New York City schools to hand over real estate to the private company that runs Success Academy so that they can rake in the money (but not account for it, even as they pay their boss a cool half million) -- well, I'm not sure what that is, if not "privatization." I mean, it might come up short of "privatization" because it is being paid for with "public tax dollars," but other than that "splitting of hairs" I'm not sure what Whitmire is "talking about."
And as a last shot "These charters are successfully educating thousands of students destined to fail in traditional neighborhood schools." I'm impressed that we can tell the destinies of these students in alternate universes. I would like to peek over there and see how many of the students left behind in thanks-to-charters underfunded schools would have been destined to succeed more easily. Nor do I understand why charters, with their special destiny-o-vision, send so many students back to public schools.
But that's the whole compendium. Whitmire has sandwiched in just about every piece of marketing copy ever used for charters, while simultaneously answering none of the legitimate criticisms of the modern charter movement. He also manages to avoid the very question he raises-- why exactly is a larger charter chain better than a single charter? More layers of bureaucracy? A central office far away from your child's actual school? He never did tell us why size matters here.
It's a herculean effort, and a good piece to bookmark if you want access to All the Pro-charter Arguments. But for me, I'm going to hold off on the whole embracing thing, thanks.
It's an impressive compendium
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